[Vision2020] Romney’s Top Funders/Vultures Made Billions on Auto Bail-Out

[Art Deco]

Whores.

On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 11:53 AM, Nicholas Gier <ngier006 at gmail.com> wrote:

> *Romney’s Top Funders Made Billions on Auto Bail-Out*
>
> By Greg Palast, Nation of Change, Feb. 23, 2012
>
>
> Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney called the federal
> government’s 2009 bail-out of the auto industry, “nothing more than crony
> capitalism, Obama style... a reward for his big donors to his campaign."
> In fact, the biggest rewards ­­– a windfall of more than two billion
> dollars care of U.S. taxpayers ­­­–– went to Romney's two top contributors.
>
>  John Paulson of Paulson & Co and Paul Singer of Elliott International,
> known on Wall Street as “vulture” investors, have each written checks for
> one million dollars to Restore Our Future, the Super PAC supporting
> Romney’s candidacy.
>
>  The two hedge fund operators turned a breathtaking three-thousand percent
> profit on a relatively negligible investment by using hardball tactics
> against the U.S. Treasury and their own employees.
>
>
> Gov. Romney last week asserted that the Obama Administration’s support for
> General Motors was a, “payoff for the auto workers union.” However, union
> workers in GM’s former auto parts division, Delphi, the unit taken over by
> Romney’s funders, did not fair so well.  The speculators eliminated every
> single union job from the parts factories once manned by 25,200 UAW
> members.
>
>
> Under the control of the speculators, Delphi, which had 45 plants in the
> U.S. and Canada, is now reduced to just four factories with only 1,500
> hourly workers, none of them UAW members, despite the union agreeing to cut
> contract wages by two thirds.
>
>
> It wasn’t supposed to be quite so bad.  The Obama Administration and GM
> had arranged for a private equity investor to provide half a billion
> dollars in new capital for Delphi, but that would have cut the pay-out to
> Singer and Paulson.  The speculators blocked the Obama-GM plan, taking the
> entire government bail-out hostage.  Even the Wall Street Journal’s
> Dealmaker column was outraged, accusing Paul Singer of treating the auto
> company, “like a third world country.”
>
>
> But it worked. Singer and Paulson got what they demanded.  Using U.S.
> Treasury funds:
>
> ·         GM agreed to pay off $1.1 billion of Delphi’s debts,
>
> ·         Forgave $2.15 billion owed GM by Delphi (which had been spun
> off as an independent company)
>
> ·         Pumped $1.75 billion into Delphi operations, and
>
> ·         Took over four money-losing plants that the speculators didn’t
> want.
>
>  If those plants had been closed, GM factories would have shut down cold
> for lack of parts. Then there was the big one:  The U.S. government
> agreed to take over $6.2 billion in pension benefits due Delphi workers
> under U.S. labor law.
>
>
>
> Governor Romney, while opposing the bail-out of GM, accused Obama of
> eliminating the pensions of 21,000 non-union employees at Delphi.  In fact,
> it was Romney’s funders who wiped out 100% of the pensions and health care
> accounts of Delphi salaried retirees­­.
>
>
> Paulson and Singer paid an average of about 67 cents a share for Delphi.
> In November, 2011, Paulson sold a chunk of his holdings for $22 a share.
> Paulson’s gain totals a billion and a half dollars ($1,499,499,000), and
> Singer gained nearly a billion ($899,751,000) –– thirty-two times their
> investment.
>
>
> One-hundred percent of this gain for the Paulson and Singer hedge funds is
> accounted for by taxpayer bail-out support.
>
>  But, unlike the government loans and worker concessions given to GM, the
> U.S. Treasury and workers get nothing in return from Delphi.
>
>
> From GM, the U.S. Treasury got warrants for common stock (similar to
> options) that have already produced billions in profit. And Delphi?  It’s
> doing well for Paulson and Singer.  GM and Chrysler, still in business by
> the grace of the U.S. Treasury, remain Delphi’s main customers, buying
> parts now made almost entirely in China and other cheap-labor nations.
>
>
>
> And exactly who are Paulson and Singer? Billionaire John Paulson became
> the first man in history to earn over $3 billion in a single year –– not
> for his hedge fund, but for himself, personally.  At the core of this huge
> payday was a 2007 scheme by which, via Goldman Sachs, he sold “insurance”
> on subprime mortgage loans.  According to a lawsuit filed by the Securities
> Exchange Commission, Goldman defrauded European banks by pretending that
> Paulson was investing in the insurance.  In fact, Paulson was, secretly,
> the beneficiary of the insurance, reaping billions when the mortgage market
> collapsed. Goldman paid half a billion dollars in civil fines for the
> fraud.  While the SEC states that Paulson knowingly participated in the
> scheme, he was not fined and denies he defrauded the banks.
>
>
> Multi-billionaire Singer is known as Wall Street’s toughest “vulture”
> speculator.  Vulture fund financial attacks on the world’s poorest nations
> have been effectively outlawed in much of Europe and excoriated by human
> rights groups, conduct Britain’s former Prime Minister Gordon Brown
> described as, “morally outrageous.”
>
> *
> *
>
> *Greg Palast has been investigating vulture speculator Paul Singer for
> BBC Television Newsnight and Britain’s Guardian for five years.  The
> investigative reporter is author of Vultures’ Picnic:  In Pursuit of
> Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores and the New York
> Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.  For reports on Singer
> and vulture funds, go to www.GregPalast.com and www.VulturesPicnic.org.*
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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