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Credit: Vanity Fair

President Barack Obama took an oath to "promote the general Welfare." Venture capitalist Mitt Romney pledged to maximize shareholder value. Unfortunately, candidate Mitt Romney is pretending the two are the same thing. As Romney repeatedly insisted this month, President Obama's rescue of the U.S. auto industry and over one million jobs associated with it is little different than his own Bain Capital days of slashing jobs - and extracting profits.

Romney introduced the new defense of his "vulture capital" past during the December 15 GOP debate in Sioux City, Iowa. There, he took Obama to task for layoffs at General Motors as part of the successful auto bailout Romney opposed:

"In the real world, some things don't make it, and I believe I've learned from my successes and my failures. The President, I'll look at and say: 'Mr. President, how did you do when you were running General Motors as the president, took it over? Gee, you closed down factories. You closed down dealerships. And he'll say: 'Well, I did that to save the business.' Same thing with us, Mr. President. We did our very best to make those businesses succeed. I'm pleased that they did, and I've learned the lessons of how the economy works. This president doesn't know how the economy works. I believe to create jobs, it helps to have created jobs."

Days later, the son of American Motors magnate George Romney repeated the talking point:

"The president has had one experience overseeing an enterprise -- a couple of enterprises, General Motors and Chrysler," Romney told Fox News in an interview that aired Sunday. "What did he do? He closed factories. He laid off people. He didn't do it personally, but his people did. Why did he do that? Because he wanted to save the enterprise, and he wants to make it profitable so it can survive."

No. In 2009, President Obama was trying to save an entire industry, one at the very heart of American manufacturing. In so doing, Obama likely helped save the United States from a second Great Depression.

As McClatchy reported this week:

U.S. and foreign automakers are poised to add nearly 167,000 U.S. jobs by the end of 2015, according to the nonprofit Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. That breaks down to 30,000 hourly and salaried workers at the Big Three U.S. automakers, 17,000 jobs at foreign automakers and about 120,000 auto-supply sector jobs...

Most analysts say the industry's growing stability is sweet vindication for the federal government's $80 billion bailout, which allowed General Motors and Chrysler to reorganize. The Center for Automotive Research estimates that the bailouts saved more than 1.1 million jobs in 2009 and another 314,000 in 2010, while avoiding personal income losses of more than $96 billion.

(The November 2010 CAR analysis is available here.)

And over time, the federal tax revenue from that personal and business income will more than offset any potential losses the government might sustain from its future sales of GM stock. As USA Today noted in June in admitting the success of the Obama administration's bailout of Detroit:

That loss is nothing to sneeze at. It's a heck of a lot better, though, than the $108 billion to $156 billion the government would have lost over three years if it hadn't intervened, according to the Center for Automotive Research, a Detroit-based think tank. Those losses would have come in the form of lower tax receipts and higher spending for pension guarantees, jobless pay and other benefits.

As for Mitt Romney, who famously insisted in November 2008 that Washington should "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt," USA Today rightly pointed out, "On what planet would the automakers have found private lenders willing to provide tens of billions of dollars in needed bankruptcy financing at the height of a financial panic?"

In a nutshell, President Obama's tough actions, including painful layoffs and pay cuts for auto workers, saved American jobs, American taxpayer revenue and perhaps the American economy. But for Mitt Romney and his Bain colleagues, the benefits often went into their pockets alone.

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For all of the shouts and cries from conservatives about "bailouts", GM has just proven the wisdom of Congress' decision to lend Federal funds to keep GM afloat until they could get back on their feet. Today the company paid off their loans from the Canadian and US governments in full, five years early.

The company is paying back the loans “in full, with interest, years ahead of schedule,” Whitacre said in an opinion article in the Wall Street Journal. The two governments hold a majority of the automaker’s equity, he said.

The repayment shows “our plan for building a new GM is working,” Whitacre said. GM is “leaner, stronger” and building new vehicles whose sales have allowed the company to invest more than $1.5 billion at 20 plants in the U.S. and Canada, he said.

The GM loans have been a real talking point for conservatives. In exchange for the loans, the US and Canadian governments took an equity stake in the company as security for the loan. In any other world, this would be the prudent choice, but in our hysterical 24/7 tea and whine culture, that decision led to cries of "Socialism! Socialism!" In conservative-land, it was somehow better to allow one of our core industries to fail, to more or less end any competition between US companies, and throw 2 million people out of work, not to mention the support industries around GM's manufacturing and sales business.

I'd say it was an investment worth making. By getting GM the cash they needed to stay afloat and restructure, they've emerged stronger, more competitive, and poised to compete. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows I'm a huge fan of the Chevy Volt and am still jonesing for the opportunity to take it for a test spin. I gave up my Honda a year ago and walk everywhere right now. I'm not planning to buy another car until I can buy the Volt or something as cool as the Volt.

Cheers, GM, and congratulations! It's good to see you roaring back.

A little over a week ago I delved into a troubling topic: Why are so many civil rights groups and members of the Congressional Black Caucus opposing net neutrality? It seemed strange to me that leaders in communities of color would be echoing discredited telecommunications industry talking points.

For those not familiar with the term "net neutrality," it describes the rules and practices that currently keep the Internet a free and open communication medium. Net neutrality guarantees that blogs, small businesses, and organizations are on a level playing field with the largest corporations. Whether you're GM or an individual, the content you put online is accessible and delivered in the same way, with the same priority, and nothing is blocked. For communities of color, net neutrality is key. It keeps barriers to Internet entrepreneurship low so that anyone with a good idea and some technical savvy can join the 21st century economy.

Predictably, the major players in the broadband industry have been fighting the FCC's efforts to adopt rules that would solidify net neutrality principles into law, because scrapping net neutrality would enable them to make even more money by creating new revenue streams. Ironically, civil rights leaders and CBC members have joined the dominant players. Their stated reasoning: the belief that net neutrality rules could hurt efforts to close the digital divide. The problem is that, as far as I can see, the argument doesn't hold water. It falls apart whether you approach it from the perspective of business, common sense, or history.

My hope in writing my first post was that it might encourage civil rights leaders who have opposed or questioned net neutrality to publicly explain their positions. Given what's at stake, I think its incumbent on leaders opposing or questioning net neutrality to publicly make clear why. Unfortunately, none have done so.

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Ed Schultz held no punches back when he went after Hugh Hewitt's idiotic call for a national boycott of all GM and Chrysler cars because he calls them "socialist companies."

A pair of right-wing radio hosts says there's only one choice for conservatives angry about government involvement in the auto industry: Boycott GM. "Nobody wants to support an Obama company," Rush Limbaugh told his audience Friday, citing a poll showing that 17 percent of Americans backed a boycott of GM.

"Every dollar spent with GM is a dollar spent against free enterprise," conservative talker Hugh Hewitt wrote online last week.

"While it's not surprising that Rush Limbaugh would root for the failure of a national institution for partisan political gain, it is surprising that the other so-called leaders of the Republican party are silently going along with him given how many hard working Americans rely on GM for a living," said DNC spokesman Hari Sevugan.

So far, there is little evidence that the government's involvement is turning off buyers. In bankruptcy for the entire month of May, Chrysler had its best sales month of the year.

Ed hits the Grassley nail on the head. Why are Hugh Hewitt and Rush Limbaugh trying to destroy the American automotive industry? What about the families that need these jobs to survive? Will Hewitt and Limbaugh support all the families this child like boycott could affect?

Schultz is calling for a boycott of the Salem radio network.

Ed: Conservatives, are you out of your mind? Do you know how many Americans have lost their jobs in manufacturing? Do you know how many American families are being affected, their livelihoods are being drilled because of this recession and what do they do, they push back on the American families that are doing the absolute best they can to build a great product...

What do you say we just kick the American worker in the teeth. What do you say we just give all the money to Wall Street. Let's just take their health care, let's take their education, let's take their jobs. Let's just genuflect to the Hugh Hewitts of the world.

We know where Hewitt's heart resides. His love of CEOs and fat cats that prey on the working class to finance their palaces. And the media slobbers over Hewitt every time he writes a mindless book, but we never see a liberal on TV who releases one. Where's Will Bunch, where's Eric Boehlert, where's David Neiwert? All three have excellent books just release, but they are almost no where to be found on cable news. Why the silence of liberals? Anyway, it was good that Ed kicked Hugh in the head today.

The Congressional GOPers (Party of Corporate Pork) are so, so upset when the wrong people are on the losing end in government bailouts. See if you can spot the delicious irony!

Dozens of lawmakers are challenging the authority of President Obama's auto task force, saying its swift restructuring of General Motors and Chrysler is unjust to investors, dealers and others.

In a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner yesterday, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.) said the auto task force is waging a "war on capital" by favoring the United Auto Workers, who are being offered a 39 percent equity stake in the new GM, over bondholders, many of them small investors and retirees, who are being offered 10 percent.

"Choosing sides between equal classes of creditors sets a terrible precedent -- one that could cause serious long term challenges to the financing marketplace by eroding investor confidence at the worst time in our recessionary period," Hensarling wrote in a letter signed by 20 other House members.

Yes, I know there's more to the story. I know Chrysler promised there would be no job losses or closings (which I put right up there with "the check is in the mail). But the absolute cojones of the Republicans, to complain about a protected class - well, I can't let that go without comment.

I can't begin to tell you just how little sympathy I have for the Wall Street bankers who bitch and moan about how impossible it would be to live in NYC on "only" $250K. (My kid manages to live there on considerably less.)

No, my sympathies lie with people like this who worked hard, played by the rules and are now caught in an economic disaster:

As the Obama administration prepares to send Chrysler into bankruptcy court, with General Motors possibly to follow, one of the biggest losers may be the automakers' current and future retirees, a group of nearly 1 million people who could see their pensions and health-care funds slashed by tens of billions of dollars.

The loss could pose political trouble for the Obama administration, which has pressed both automakers since February to ready themselves for bankruptcy as a means of purging their overwhelming debts.

The GM and Chrysler pension plans together cover 928,000 people, and many of them worry that the industry restructuring already underway could slice their benefits.

A group of nonunion retirees is scheduled to meet with the administration's auto task force this morning to try to save their pensions and health benefits. The United Auto Workers is also negotiating over changes to the benefits, but has yet to reach an agreement with the Treasury Department, a source familiar with the matter said.

"We are going to do what we can to help protect their benefits to the degree that we can," said an administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions are private. "It's premature to speculate on what will happen. This is certainly a constituency that we are focused on, but we have not and cannot rule anything out."

With Chrysler facing an end-of-month federal deadline to reach agreements with its bankers and the union, stakeholders have been trading a flurry of offers and counteroffers.

In recent weeks, members of the task force have struggled to devise rescue plans and a legal strategy that might protect those workers if the companies file for bankruptcy. But experts say an outcome is difficult to predict.

"I feel betrayed," said Vicki Prout, 57, a former executive assistant at Chrysler whose 23-year career there included typing speeches for Lee Iacocca when he was chief executive. "They offered these incentives for us to take early retirement, and I took one. Now it looks like my fixed income wasn't so fixed."

She estimated that her monthly payment would be cut in half if the pension is terminated in a bankruptcy. She has started looking for jobs around her home in Troy, Mich., but said there are not many to find.

"I feel like I've been caught in a storm," she said.

And so it begins:

The chairman and chief executive of General Motors, Rick Wagoner, is resigning, just hours before President Obama was expected to unveil his rescue plans for G.M. and the ailing American auto industry, a person close to the decision said Sunday.

Mr. Wagoner was asked to step down as part of G.M.’s restructuring agreement with the Obama administration, according to an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity because a formal announcement has not been made yet. Mr. Wagoner then agreed to resign.The unexpected move by Mr. Wagoner, who has been at the helm of G.M. for eight years, was not confirmed by the company. A statement about Mr. Wagoner’s future will be issued after the president’s comments, which is expected to be Monday morning.