General Motors

General Motors is criticizing Mitt Romney for running an ad that says GM cut 15,000 jobs under the Obama Administration. The Detroit Free Press reported that GM spokesman Greg Martin (speaking about the Romney ad) stated, "No amount of campaign politics at its cynical worst will diminish our record of creating jobs in the U.S. and repatriating profits back to this country."

Leaving aside for a moment the bigger issue of a taxpayer-supported entity improperly inserting itself in an election, lets examine the facts. A look at GM's annual SEC filings gives a clear picture of how many people were employed by the company both before and after the Obama Administration guided the company through a bankruptcy process.

A story that went viral over a week ago showed how (non)-workers at a Michigan electric vehicle battery plant, funded through the stimulus by taxpayers, spent their time playing games, reading magazines, watching movies or helping charities like Habitat for Humanity – that is, when they weren’t ‘off-duty’ on their cyclical furloughs.

According to a report by WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids, the LG Chem factory in Holland, Mich. – blessed with $151 million from a Department of Energy Recovery Act grant and $100 million from Wolverine State taxpayers – had “yet to ship out a single battery.”

There is nothing like having unbiased media coverage of the all-important presidential campaign leading up to next week's election. And the media is nothing like unbiased. We see this playing out again as Mitt Romney is now being accused of misrepresenting a story that Bloomberg.com reported on Chrysler's potential outsourcing of Jeep manufacturing to China. A look at the original comments from the article gives evidence as to how unfair the criticism is and just how right Romney was for pointing out the likely future outsourcing of Jeep manufacturing.

American taxpayers should prepare themselves for another slap in the face, courtesy of the much-ballyhooed Obama auto bailouts. After spending about $85 billion to bail out Chrysler, General Motors and Ally Financial (formerly known as GMAC), taxpayers are being rewarded by Chrysler's parent company, Fiat, announcing that it is preparing to build its Jeep brand vehicles in China. In addition, according to a Bloomberg report, Fiat may end up building all of its vehicles in China, threatening the loss of more manufacturing jobs should the decision be carried out to move Chrysler manufacturing out of America.