Posted by Joseph Y. Calhoun, III

GM has received somewhere around $50 billion of taxpayer funds and now those funds are seen by GM’s political masters as available to use as they see fit (via Detroit News):

As part of Delphi’s restructuring in bankruptcy court, the Troy-based auto parts maker dumped its pension plan onto the federal Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp.

That usually means a continued pension check, but one that is much smaller. And for Delphi’s salaried workers, that’s what they can expect.

Delphi’s union-represented workers, however, will dodge that bullet. The Obama administration swooped in and, in an extraordinary deal, is forcing General Motors to make the 46,000 union workers and retirees whole. GM used to own Delphi, and relies on the supplier for much of its parts.

“The U.S. government is taking care of a select group of people and tossing the rest of us under the bus,” Peter Beiter, a retired financial manager for a Delphi plant in Rochester, N.Y., told the New York Times.

And it’s doing so with the tax dollars of those like Beiter who aren’t in the favored class of workers. GM is operating with more than $50 billion in government bailout money.

That gives Obama the freedom to force GM to subsidize the pensions of union workers it has no legal obligation to, and who are employed by an entirely different company.

Is there any question that this was forced on GM by their political masters? Surely, GM shareholders wouldn’t have approved of such a deal. Or if they were in bankruptcy where they belong, neither would the bondholders. President Obama has said he doesn’t want to run GM but his actions speak louder than words.