Some one alert Dan Rather! An unsigned "GOP Memo"... Sounds like another hot memo story! It's all over the Internet and people just
know it's true.
There's a couple key facts that people overlook when forwarding this particular conspiracy story:
1) The White House was FOR the deal... as were a number of GOP senators. Not exactly a united front that you'd expect for what's supposedly a party-wide effort.
2) If if the GOP wanted to run GM out of business, it wouldn't "kill" the UAW. Weaken... yes, kill... no. Even the most rabid GOP Senator wouldn't likely think that that cost/benefit ratio would be worth it.
3) It would be a long, long shot that if GM would have been forced into Chapter 11, that the UAW would be "busted" in the process. At worst a judge would have forced a new contract on the UAW.... but the UAW would still be standing to collect union dues for their political coffers. The Chapter 7 scenario, supposedly to be triggered by a lack of financing, that people in the press kept floating was nothing more than a headline attention grabber, the White House had already signaled a willingness to push for federal loan guarantees like the last time Chrysler was bailed out in 1979.
While there are probably
some Senators that think incorrectly that they can use this issue as a "silver bullet" against the UAW, perhaps the answer lies in something a lot more simpler... that a larger number of GOP Senators have read the opinion polls that show that public support for a general bailout was lacking, they realized that the Wall Street bailout wasn't exactly a legislative thing of beauty, and perhaps there was another way to accomplish the goal of turning GM and Chrysler around that wouldn't tie up nearly as much of the government treasury.
The ironic thing is that the bailout deal announced IS a reorganization bankruptcy without the actual filing or the inclusion of a judge... Here's how the
WaPo's business columnist summarized what was agreed to:
It is also important to be honest about what's going on here, which is nothing less than a bankruptcy restructuring without the bankruptcy filing. Over the next 90 days, General Motors and Chrysler will meet with their unions and committees of their major unsecured creditors to negotiate how much each of them is going to give up so that viable companies can emerge.
During that time, the government has agreed to provide what in bankruptcy is called debtor-in-possession financing -- a bridge loan to keep the companies going while the restructuring is negotiated. The hope is that at the end of the 90 days, a deal is reached among all the parties and it is possible to make it legally binding on all the stakeholders without resorting to the extraordinary powers of the bankruptcy court. If that is not possible, then the negotiated plan will be run quickly through the bankruptcy process as a "pre-packaged" reorganization.
Since October, it's been obvious that this is the way the story has to end. Unfortunately, everyone was too busy posturing in the hope of delaying the pain and gaining a bit of negotiating advantage. The companies denied that they were running out of money. The union said it had made all the concessions it was going to make. The Michigan congressional delegation kept up the fiction about a "bridge loan" to get the companies through their temporary "liquidity" shortage. Southern Republicans harbored dreams of breaking the United Auto Workers union. And the White House couldn't get past worrying over which pot of money the auto loans came from, as if it made any difference.
If they'd all simply faced reality two months ago, it would have saved us a lot of unnecessary drama.
But MSNBC and others will no doubt continue to push the meme that this is all about "The GOP" wanting to destroy the UAW.
