If You Did This, You Might Be In Jail: Was Obama’s bailout of the UAW the ultimate insider trade?

Although this issue was raised once before, it’s never been adequately answered.

However, here’s the bottom line:

In 2007, a year before Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, the United Auto Workers negotiated a trust fund (called a VEBA) with the then-Big Three automakers.

The Big Three paid billions into the VEBA to get retiree health care liabilities off their books–which, at the time, was touted by the UAW to be funded for 80 years.

In 2009, when the newly-inaugurated Obama Administration “structured” the bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler, the UAW was given a percentage of ownership in both car companies in exchange for the money the automakers still owed the UAW’s VEBA.

Once the UAW had been given ownership of GM and Chrysler at lower stock prices, the UAW then sold shares of the “new GM” and is currently negotiating to sell its shares of Chrysler.

Seemingly unrelated, as Barack Obama’s signature health care law was signed into law, union health care plans were promised billions in taxpayer subsidies.

Fast forward to 2013…

Now that ObamaCare is being implemented with its various delays, carve outs and subsidies, the following passage by the National Legal & Policy Center is deserving of more attention:

The Obamacare pork came in the form of a program called the Early Retiree Reinsurance Program or ERRP. $5 billion of taxpayer money was allocated to help pay for healthcare costs to retirees between the age of 55 and 65. Number one on the union-dominated list of recipients was the UAW, which received $387.2 million for its VEBA fund, which was set up to pay UAW retiree health care costs. This amount was still not good enough for the UAW as they penned a letter to Congress in February of 2012 requesting an increase in ERRP funding to $10 billion.

General Motors also got a small piece of the pie ringing the seemingly bottomless taxpayer register for another $19 million. Since new GM does not have much in the line of non-UAW early retiree obligations, I’m not quite sure what the money was needed for. I guess no one is really going to question “only” $19 million when GM usually hits the taxpayer moneybag to the tune of billions of dollars.

So the question remains:

Did the Obama Administration orchestrate the takeover of not one but two private enterprises and literally give those companies’ stocks to one of its primary backers (the UAW) with the full knowledge that ObamaCare would pass a bill to reimburse the UAW through ObamaCare subsidies?

If so, to most, this would be considered the ultimate “insider trading” deal.