Government Integrity Project

General Motors recently announced that it bought back preferred stock from the UAW Retiree Medical Benefits Trust and the Canadian government. The deal closed in December of 2014 and supposedly will result in a reduction to GM’s fourth quarter earnings to the tune of $800 million. GM had the option to redeem the shares at face value after December 31st of 2014. The timing of the deal brings into question the motivation behind the move and also leads us to reexamine a previous preferred share buyback that occurred in late 2013.

The 2013 deal seemed to have been designed to benefit the UAW rather than the shareholders that GM has an obligation to serve. Reuters reported on the deal in September of 2013 with the following:

General Motors Co (GM.N) said on Monday it would buy back just under half of its preferred shares held by the United Auto Workers

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Sound the trumpets! Here comes the next best, all-new, electric wonder-car from General Motors. The dust had not even cleared from the rollout of the new and improved 2016 Chevy Volt when GM CEO Mary Barra announced the newest Tesla-killer from GM, the Chevy Bolt. Let’s hope that the engineers working on the Bolt put more thought into the design of the vehicle than the GM executives put into naming the car.

Seriously, the Bolt? The name sounds like something out of a Disney animated movie. I wonder if the names Ratchet or Socket were in contention. Whatever the case, the name may be new, but the hype is all too familiar.

Barra has touted the new Bolt as being “a real game changer” for GM, just like the previously-hyped Chevy Volt was. Anyone who has paid attention to the Volt debacle would know that the car has been … Read More ➡

President Obama traveled to Michigan this week to declare the auto bailout a success. Interestingly, he toured a Ford plant. The company did not participate in the bailout.
GM is still trying to shake the Government Motors moniker, and that was certainly the reason for Obama’s nonvisit.

Earlier this week, General Motors Company boasted that sales for December were the strongest in seven years. A review of the facts shows that this is not exactly true. You see, GM Co. has not been in existence for seven years. While GM points to this technicality when trying to weasel out of liability claims from the past, it continues to act as if the company is a stalwart 100 year-old American institution.

GM described December’s sales as follows in its press release, “General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM) dealers in the United States delivered 274,483 vehicles last month for the company’s best December … Read More ➡

The death toll for General Motors’ faulty ignition switch victims continues to rise with the last reported number being 42. There has been speculation that the death count is significantly higher, as safety advocate Clarence Ditlow has written to GM to request an expansion of efforts to uncover victims of accidents resulting from defective GM vehicles.

GM has known about the ignition switch defect for years and failed to recall the deadly vehicles for almost five years after the Obama Administration took over the company in June of 2009. President Obama’s Auto Task Force guided the company through a manipulated bankruptcy process that favored political allies like the UAW over other creditors as new management and board members were appointed by the Administration. We now must question the perceived “success” of the GM bailout and ask if a conventional bankruptcy process could have saved some of the lives that were … Read More ➡

Today, we requested that the House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform undertake an “independent” investigation of the General Motors ignition switch recall delay, in light of newly obtained emails by lawyers suing GM.

Those emails suggest that the Treasury may have timed its final sale of GM shares to precede public knowledge of the ignition switch fiasco. They also cast doubt on GM CEO Mary Barra’s previous account of what she knew and when she knew it.

Here is the text of a letter I sent today to Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), in photo, the incoming Chairman of the Oversight & Government Reform Committee:

At a February 2010 Oversight Committee hearing on the risk from Toyota gas pedals, you asked a remarkably prescient question: “Does the government treat Toyota the same as it does all other automakers?”

Then-Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood was unable to explain why the … Read More ➡

Global warming alarmists have spent time and money that spans decades and has cost billions of dollars, yet all their tactics and messaging haven’t moved the public-concern meter above “who cares?” So-called “climate change” does not even register near the top of environmental problems that most Americans worry about – much less among all policy issues – according to Gallup polling.

That doesn’t mean the fear-mongers have given up, of course, as the latest effort by environmental pressure group Ceres illustrates. The activist group – which exerts its influence via shareholder activism (claiming $10 trillion in assets) in pursuit of their definition of a “sustainable” global economy – last week sent a letter endorsed by 223 companies to President Obama, in support of EPA’s controversial proposed standard for existing power plants to limit carbon dioxide emissions. Some of the largest and most recognized corporations signed on, including Adidas, … Read More ➡