Right now in Washington, D.C., we are seeing nothing short of the deconstruction of America’s free-market system. To be blunt, the strong arm tactics of the Obama Administration’s Auto Task Force are crushing the dreams of many American business owners – and simultaneously putting our future prosperity in jeopardy.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve spoken with the GM and Chrysler car dealerships from my district that have been targeted for total or partial closure by President Obama’s Auto Task Force. They were given no reason, and really no recourse to challenge their closure. It is as if someone threw a dart at a dartboard to decide which dealerships would be given a pink slip. In fact, we still do not know the formula used to determine which dealers would remain open, and which ones would close.

At one dealership in my district, the owner received an envelope from FedEx with a closure agreement inside, informing them that their highly profitable and nearly century-old business was slated for closure, and that they had twelve days to sign the agreement, or face the consequences.

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(Via Glenn Reynolds) GayPatriot has the right idea here:

Those who want to give people like Barney a say in the running of General Motors (and Chrysler for that matter), that is those who favor Obama’s Auto Plan, can show that they really believe this is the right way to manufacture automobiles by put their money where their mouths are.  When it comes time for them to buy a new car, they should buy a GM (or Chrysler) model.  Heck, why wait?  Show your confidence in this plan by buying one now.

…but he doesn’t take it nearly far enough.  We’ve already established that this administration considers falling in with its policy positions to be ‘patriotic‘: and clearly, supporting the GM/Chrysler takeover is falling in with its policy positions.  Considering that - as usual - the Political Class is wildly divergent from mainstream America when it comes to this issue, it is clearly their patriotic duty to make certain that the GM/Chysler bailout succeeds.  That means selling that hybrid made by a foreign auto company and buying an American car*.  And since it’s a crisis, well, they need to do that right now.  Everything else has to be, so this should be, too.

If they were really loyal, they’d do it.

Moe Lane

PS: Me?  When we had to replace the car a couple months ago we went with a Chrysler PT Cruiser. Which I guess makes me a better American than all those people out there selfishly and bitterly clinging to their hybrids and foreign sedans.

*Hey, it’s better for the environment anyway.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

The closing of Chrysler and GM dealerships is going to be an expensive process for Americans. The taxpayers have already been fleeced of billions of dollars to put Chrysler and GM under the thumb of the federal government, but it will be difficult to estimate the additional costs of closing 789 Chrysler and 1200 GM dealers.

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As we reported yesterday, even some Democrats are beginning to question President Obama and auto his task force. They can’t understand why profitable, top-performing Chrysler dealers are being forced to close their doors. We’ve been asking this and other questions about the Dealergate scandal for weeks, and we’re encouraged to see some House Democrats finally getting curious about how the decisions were made regarding which dealerships would stay and which would go.

Any number of factors could have contributed to open these Democrat’s eyes. For one, this dealer closing business doesn’t pass the smell test, no matter on which side of the aisle a Congressman may be seated. Perhaps the three listened to their Republican colleague Ted Poe, who represents the Second District of Texas. In a recent speech from the floor of the House, Rep. Poe delivered remarks which contained enough red meat to open more than a few pairs of eyes.

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House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer and Reps. Chris Van Hollen and Daniel Maffei, in a letter today to President Barack Obama, expressed their “growing concern” over the closings of GM and Chrysler dealerships. Moreover, the three congressional Democrats say they want to hear a “compelling justification” how closing healthy dealerships will improve the ailing automakers’ fiscal situation. The three were asking their Capitol Hill colleagues to sign their letter today.

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Since we last checked in on the Dealergate fiasco, the new media has been busy doing the work old media reporters should have been doing all along. Obama sycophants on the Left end of the blogosphere continued with their “nothing to see here, folks” defense of their beloved savior-president. And Chrysler dealers on the closed list offered evidence in court that most had sales figures and customer satisfaction ratings above the norm for all MOPAR dealers. But could all this just be trees, and could they be obscuring our view of the forest?

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At The Truth About Cars, Ken Elias posits that though Monday’s announcement of the GM bankruptcy was a bad day for the once dominant U.S. automaker, it was an even worse day for Toyota. His theory is that GM, bolstered with taxpayer dollars and free from creditors’ demands, will come roaring back with bold new products and lower fixed costs, more competitive than ever:

Toyota (or Honda) products have been the default choice. That “Easy Button” is starting to get harder to press for buyers. Yep, Americans will begin to come back to consider Detroit products (at least GM and Ford), and that’s not good for Toyota. And we’ve really never left Detroit for our big pickups and SUVs, while the Japanese are still mostly playing catch up.

Yep, it’s a bad day for Toyota and a great day for America. You can look forward to a new Detroit that will be competitive, if not lead, in cars and trucks for mass market Americans. Count on it

This is pure fantasy. Elias’ equation is missing two critical variables.

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Since our last update of the blogger investigation into the Chrysler dealer closing fiasco now known as Dealergate, another significant benchmark has been met. All of the information from the .pdf list of Chrysler dealers remaining open has been put into spreadsheet format. With both lists now in this form, researchers are finally able to analyze the MOPAR dealer data and find significant patterns buried deep within it.

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Since our update yesterday, it has come to light that the dealerships that dodged (sorry, couldn’t resist) Chrysler’s silver bullet have circled their wagons minivans and are doing their fair share of PR work for the government-controlled reorganization of what was once the country’s third largest automaker.

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Since we last checked in, here are the latest developments in the rope line of strange occurrences Doug Ross has dubbed Dealergate (Some bloggers prefer Mopargate, but many non-motorheads won’t get it. Dealergate it is).

In another of the many pesky coincidences to be found in this story, car czar Steven Rattner, the real head of President Obama’s auto task force, is married to Maureen White, a former fundraising chair for the Democratic National Committee. Need dealer donor data? No problem…

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Is the Obama administration punishing Chrysler dealers for their politics? A preliminary analysis by Doug Ross suggests that could be the case.

There were too many things about the selection of dealerships to be closed that just didn’t add up. Some of the dealers chosen to be terminated were among the more successful outlets in the Chrysler dealership network, and many of them had been loyal Chrysler and Dodge agents who had maintained an excellent working relationship with the Detroit automaker for decades.

Some dealers who got a thumbs down from Obama’s automotive panel told compelling stories about their situations that raised doubts about the process of selecting them for closing. One example, a dealership in Alvin, Texas, had increased its new car sales by 50% in the first four months of 2009, while other MOPAR dealers’ sales were in the tank. Another in Melbourne, Florida, had, at Chrysler’s insistence, totally renovated its facility financed by incurring millions of dollars of debt in the form of a bank mortgage. The are just two of many stories which highlight the incongruities to be found on the list of dealerships not deemed worthy to remain in operation.

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The Washington Times:

Dealers from across the country lobbied desperately on Capitol Hill on Wednesday on the eve of bankrupt Chrysler’s expected announcement that it will close 800 of its 3,200 dealerships. GM is expected to close 2,600, or 40 percent, of its 6,300 dealerships

As part of their plans to get taxpayer-funded bailouts from the Obama Administration, GM and Chrysler both had to promise to sharply reduce the number of dealerships across the country which sell their products. But this is mostly smoke and mirrors. Too many dealerships is not even one of the more serious ailments which afflict the two car makers.

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Personally, I can’t wait to hear how anonymous revelations don’t matter when they’re not advantageous to Democrats not involving endangering American troops through the revelation of national security secrets not suitable for use in an election against a Republican …well, I’m sure the Online Left will find a suitably plausible-sounding rationalization, even if it’s only plausible to them;

New Allegations Of White House Threats Over Chrysler

Creditors to Chrysler describe negotiations with the company and the Obama administration as “a farce,” saying the administration was bent on forcing their hands using hardball tactics and threats.

Conversations with administration officials left them expecting that they would be politically targeted, two participants in the negotiations said.

Although the focus has so been on allegations that the White House threatened Perella Weinberg, sources familiar with the matter say that other firms felt they were threatened as well. None of the sources would agree to speak except on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of political repercussions.

See Ace of Spades HQ, who’s already guessing which pushback will be used against this one; and Ed Morrissey, who’s having fun with the ‘madman theory’ thing. For my part, I’m actually a little surprised. I knew that the current President is woefully inexperienced - and not a little petulant - when it comes to dealing with people who don’t already love him, but surely he must have realized that things like this always come out in the end, yes?

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Maybe it is the upbringing in Indonesia that taught Barack Obama the finer points of running a thugocracy. Or maybe it was from reading Saul Alinsky and growing up surrounded by communists, radicals, and domestic terrorists.

First you hire a bunch of tax cheats, then you confiscate a pile of tax payer dollars to bailout your preferred billionaires and screw shareholders of companies, then begin making demands on company products despite being outside what people will buy in the free market, and lastly turning to the bully pulpit and the press to beat the hell out of dissenters.

Michael Barone warned us the thugocracy was coming.

‘I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors,” Barack Obama told a crowd in Elko, Nev. “I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face.” Actually, Obama supporters are doing a lot more than getting into people’s faces. They seem determined to shut people up.

I just suspected the White House would maintain some level of plausible deniability instead of directly directing the bullying. Jake Tapper makes clear that is not the case.

A leading bankruptcy attorney [Thomas Lauria] representing hedge funds and money managers told ABC News Saturday that Steve Rattner, the leader of the Obama administration’s Auto Industry Task Force, threatened one of the firms, an investment bank, that if it continued to oppose the administration’s Chrysler bankruptcy plan, the White House would use the White House press corps to destroy its reputation.

The White House said the story was false.

Yes, yes, the White House denies the story. But while denying it, the White House was also proving the story true. Barack Obama took to the bully pulpit to heap scorn and derision on the the bankruptcy attorney’s hedge funds and money managers.

President Obama singled out Lauria’s clients for criticism when he announced the Chrysler plan on Thursday.

“While many stakeholders made sacrifices and worked constructively, I have to tell you some did not,” the president said. “In particular, a group of investment firms and hedge funds decided to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout. They were hoping that everybody else would make sacrifices, and they would have to make none.”

Lauria said the president’s assertion that his clients weren’t willing to make any sacrifice is false. The clients were willing to take 50 cents on the dollar from Chrysler for their debt, he said.

A nationally respected bankruptcy attorney who, by the way, is also a huge donor to Democrats, say the White House told him the White House would destroy his clients in the press if they did not adhere to White House demands.

The White House denies that is true.

Then the President of the United States attacks Lauria’s clients in a press conference.

Who do you believe? The businessmen or the thugocracy?

For as long as I can remember, most issues of Forbes magazine have been graced by columns on the automotive industry by long-time (more than 50 years) journalist-of-that-industry Jerry Flint.

Over the years, my only real gripe with Mr. Flint has been his long-running belief that “we” needed to do more to help the Detroit automakers - a viewpoint that I’ve never shared. But aside from that blemish, his columns have always been interesting and insightful, reflecting (literally) a lifetime of experience with the automotive industry.

Despite the storms that have ravaged Detroit over the past three decades, Mr. Flint has always been an optimist who has been able to find some reasonable grounds for hope for Detroit and the “Big Three.”

Until now.

In his latest column, Mr. Flint sadly gives up and throws in the towel on GM.

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In a stunning move, the Obama White House announced today that GM and Chrysler must end their involvement in NASCAR stock car racing at the end of this season to remain eligible to receive additional financial aid from the government.

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