Barofsky: Dealer Closings Were "Arbitrary"

Barofsky was the I.G. of the auto bailout--until he crossed the Regime and was (questionably) fired.

The former auditor who monitored the $700 billion Wall Street and auto bailout fund says the Obama administration squeezed General Motors and Chrysler to shutter more than 2,000 auto dealerships, without considering the jobs that would be forfeited.

Ummmnnnhhh, yah....that was something which many people (myself included) questioned at the time.

...Barofsky — a federal drug and financial fraud prosecutor who was given the TARP assignment under President George W. Bush and stepped down in March 2011 — said the Obama administration didn't take kindly to those who criticized the auto bailout, including his report.

"Either you supported every aspect of every decision made by the Treasury in the auto bailouts or you were a sworn enemy advocating that the government should have let them collapse. Nothing could have been further from the truth," he wrote.

Petty tinpot dictators are the same all over the world, Neil.

On the "dealer cuts" matter:

...Barofsky said the Obama administration "ignored one of the few non-Wall Street sources that it consulted," and officials at the Ann Arbor-based Center for Automotive Research, who "warned that deep cuts could actually do the companies far greater harm than good."

David Cole, chairman emeritus of the center, said Obama's auto task force told GM and Chrysler said they "have to have dealer bodies that look like Toyota and Honda."

...Cole said GM and Chrysler had more dealers in smaller and medium markets, especially in rural areas.
"GM and Chrysler had to close dealers to meet the quota that really didn't make any sense," Cole said Thursday. "The people in Washington did not have knowledge of the auto industry."

There were suspicions that the closures were based on the political leanings of the dealers, too.

And of course, there were the job losses.  While Obozo kvetches about federal, state, and local governments shedding employees, neither the MSM nor Obozo shed a tear over the tens of thousands of people whose jobs disappeared in order to Honda-ize the GM dealer network.

"Just three months before the midterm elections, with unemployment near 9.5 percent, we were essentially going to say [in the IG report] that [Obozo's] team had unnecessarily directed the shutting down of thousands of small businesses across the country, putting up to 100,000 jobs at risk, all based on not a particularly well-researched theory and without giving even the slightest consideration to those who could lose their jobs as a result," Barofsky wrote.

They built the businesses, and Obozo tore 'em down. 

His Plan worked!!