1. There are two published lists of Chrysler dealerships. One includes the 789 dealers which will be closed by June 9. Those dealers who will be able to retain their franchises and acquire the assets of closing dealers in their areas are on the other. Both are in .PDF format.
2. An attorney for closed dealers deposed Chrysler president Jim Press and said that his impression is that the decisions on which Dealers will stay and which will go really wasn’t Chrysler’s, as the company is under considerable pressure from President Obama’s automotive task force.
3. Many of the Chrysler dealers on the closing list were heavy Republican donors. Some are sitting congressmen.
4. Among the dealers which were selected to remain in business are a number of outlets owned and operated by a partnership which includes among the partners former Clinton White House chief of staff Mack McLarty and Robert Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET). Both have strong Democrat ties. McLarty campaigned for Obama, and Johnson has contributed heavily to Democrats, including Obama.
5. The latest finding from the closure list is that there appears to be “an extremely high correlation between dealers closing and congressional districts BHO lost.”
Texas is getting killed and Blue States are sliding by. Florida is also taking major hits and nearly all are in Republican Congressional Districts.
Little West Virginia is getting hammered.
http://www.allpar.com/news/index.php/2009/05/chrysler-dealers-to-be-cut-and-kept/
Now in all fairness, it might be possible that more business owners are Republican than Democrat and as a result, more Republican dealerships would be closed. However, even if we accept the proposition that most car dealers are more likely to be Republican than Democratic donors, there would still be a “disparate impact” from closings on one class of dealers, compared to the other. When the federal courts see a disparate impact on racial groups, the policy or action in question is typically held to be inappropriate.
Race and car dealer closings, of course, aren’t analogous. But the lesson remains that when government makes economic decisions that ought to be left to the private market, it is impossible to avoid disparate impacts. And there is always the question of would the Obama White House be so quick to close hundreds of dealerships if the owners of those dealerships were predominantly Democratic donors?
Second, since neither Chrysler, nor the White House have made public the criteria used to select dealers for elimination – and because a significant number of those being closed were profitable – the only way to resolve the inevitable controversy about political considerations in political decisions is to make the criteria public and allow independent outside observers to assess how those criteria were applied.
Resistance is futile.
No, I don’t think your discriminating at all. I just believe that he put up such a smoke screen during the election that people didn’t see him for what he really is, and once he got in office his true colors came to the surface.
Tin foil is on sale this week at Walmart!
Yes.. Much more than he would like you to believe.
sounds more and more like the ussr every day.
and i wish he would stop with the “czar” title as well.
It is what happens when government involves itself too much in private companies. Everything gets politicized..
He is a Chicago democrat. He is 100% percent patisan. Everyone with a brain and just a touch of honesty knew that. He has no bipartisanship in him AT ALL.
Democrats not only do not care of his dishonesty, they actually prefer it, i think.
You mean is Obama more partisan than the 53% that voted for him thought as deluded by the media?
Most of non-urban America was well aware of his radcally left-wing background- from the most liberal voting record in his short time in the Senate to his cadre of socialist kooks that elevated him to the top of Chicago politics: http://www.fancam.com/2008Election-countymap.jpg
Clearer exemplification was his absolute disregard of law when giving Unions a much larger stake of chrysler than the secured bondholders who had a larger, and senior, lien.
I can’t speak for all the dealerships mentioned, but I know of several closed in the Phila area. I know one of the dealerships thru business and he indicated months ago that his business was on the brink of closing any day. He wasn’t making any sales. He is now on the list as closed.
And, he’s a Republican. I don’t know if he contributed to the 2008 election or not.
No–it’s not discrimination. It’s a legitimate question, though. Here’s why it isn’t discrimination. Assume, for the moment, that the decisions on closings were made on purely business grounds (as they should be, no argument there).
Look at national statistics on income and political demographics. Democrats have higher incomes, on average, than Republicans (never mind why, that’s just the numbers). So–on average heavily Democratic districts have overall higher income–and more discretionary income.
Simple economics: it takes a lot o discretionary spending power to buy cars. Areas with disproportionately higher incomes are therefore the ones where dealerships will do better. The ones that will be closed will be mainly in ares with lower overall income demographics. And tht means Republican districts, more often than not.
Bottom line: on purely business grounds, you would expect the dealerships closing to be mostly Republican.
Nice try, though.Seriously–you raised a legitimate question based on evidence. If the conservatives woud take that approach consistantly–they’d still be in power. A tip: you established a correlation-and backed it up. However, if you are going to argue points based on correlation, you have to be prepared to look at the causal factors behid the correlation. Just establishing a numerical pattern is not enough.
A classic example: Statistically, when consumption of ice cream goes up, so does the rate of burglaries and rape. That same pattern holds nationwide and has for years. Why? Simple: in warm weather people eat more ice cream. AND in warm weather, windows get left open, people are out more, people go on vactation more. Making for more targets of opportunity for thieves and rapists. The ice cream has nothing to do with it , of course.