Auto Industry Bailout | featured news

The U.S. government's short stint in the auto business is coming to an end. The Treasury Department said Wednesday that it will sell its remaining stake in General Motors by early 2014, writing the final chapter of a $50 billion bailout that saved the auto giant but stoked a heated national debate about the government's role in private industry.

President Obama ripped Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney on Friday for running a misleading TV ad implying that U.S. auto workers are going to lose their jobs because Chrysler is moving the production of Jeeps for Chinese consumers to China.

...The ad also comes on the heels of Mitt Romney’s mistaken claim in a speech last week that Chrysler was moving Jeep production to China — a statement immediately denied by the auto manufacturer. Yet the story apparently was too good for Romney to give up, because the ad repeats the claim, tweaked slightly to make it more accurate.

Under the bright lights of a high school football field in Defiance, Ohio, Mitt Romney's opposition to the 2009 auto bailout reared its head again as a campaign issue that could help decide the result of this critical swing state.

Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can't Use My Phrase! This is basically what Peter Berg told Romney in a letter, asking the politician to stop using the phrase "Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can't Lose."

When General Motors announced in 2008 that it would shut down its assembly plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, local Representative Paul Ryan leaped into action.

Romney has been consistent on his position that a managed bankruptcy was the best course of action. But he keeps digging a bigger hole for himself when he claims that the path he recommended — which included no public assistance — would have been successful from the start. Both Presidents Bush and Obama rejected that advice, and there is little evidence the industry would have survived without the breathing room provided by public funds.

In seeking support in Michigan, Obama speaks frequently about how the federal bailout of General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group led to GM's resurgence as the world's No. 1 automaker and 32,000 more auto-related jobs in the state since the companies emerged from their 2009 managed bankruptcies. Romney opposed the move, even writing a New York Times opinion piece in 2008 that carried the headline "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt."

Chief executives of AIG, GM and Ally Financial, three companies bailed out by U.S. taxpayers and which remain partly owned by the U.S. Treasury, won't receive overall pay increases this year.

President Barack Obama told more than 1600 current and hourly autoworkers on Tuesday that if Republicans had been in charge they would have left the auto industry "out to dry."