Dan

Calabrese

Read Dan's bio and previous columns here

May 11, 2009

Meet Teresa Waller, One of Obama’s Greedy Chrysler Bondholders

To the list of economic concepts President Obama does not understand, we can now add the fact that capital comes from people – real people, the kind he claims to be “fighting for,” whatever that is supposed to mean.

Meet Teresa Waller – real person, grandmother, aspiring retiree and Chrysler bondholder.

Ms. Waller, a Houston, Texas resident, is 58 years old and would like to retire at 62. Her retirement funds were, until recently, in a 401(k) account, but the recent downturn in the market has caused her account to lose 40 percent of its value. So about six months ago, she decided to put the money in bonds, which she expected would be safer. She opened an account with Fidelity, with instructions that they buy low-risk bonds.

“I assumed Fidelity wouldn’t have invested in a car company,” Waller said.

Oops.

When Weller saw news reports that the Obama Administration was trying to force bondholders to give up their contract rights, it got her attention because she also had her money in bonds, but she didn’t realize until she checked that Fidelity had put some of her money in Chrysler bonds as well.

Fortunately, it was not a huge percentage of her portfolio. It was only about $2,000, and Waller is confident she can make it up elsewhere. But if you were four years away from retirement and had already lost 40 percent of your portfolio’s value, you probably wouldn’t be thrilled about kissing away another $2,000 – especially when you’d been told it was safe and you’d have first position to be repaid.

The president insisted that people like Waller give up their money so the United Auto Workers could come out of the deal unscathed.

“It’s illegal to take bondholders’ property and give it to someone else,” Waller said. “Basically, the UAW stole my bond. The UAW put no money up for that company, and they stole my property. I should have been number one in a bankruptcy proceeding, and now I have nothing. I don’t have a pension like the UAW does.”

In spite of her setback, Waller continues to put $100 every two weeks into a college fund for her grandson – although she’s starting to wonder if there’s any point, since Obama talks about making things like college tuition free for everyone. Then again, if Obama’s treatment of Chrysler bondholders is any indication of how he views the keeping of promises, she might want to find a way to make it $200.

We’ve discussed here before that Obama clearly does not understand basic tenets of economics. We’ve seen this in his vow to “reward work rather than rewarding wealth.” We’ve seen it in his bizarre plan to reduce the deficit by quadrupling the deficit.

Obama wanted America to see Chrysler bondholders, who are actually real-life people like Teresa Waller, as greedy Wall Street robber barons. Obama wanted the bondholders to agree to take 29 cents on the dollar, and when they balked, he excoriated them and said they were looking for “an unjustified taxpayer bailout.”

No. They were people who floated money to a company in desperate need of cash to survive. When they did so, they received a promise that they would be in first position to be paid back. This promise was and is legally protected. But because President Obama wanted to give control of the company to the UAW, he strong-armed the bondholders to relinquish their legal rights, even going to so far as to threaten them with ruination at the hands of the White House press corps.

In so doing, Obama empowered union bosses at the expense of common people like Teresa Waller, many of whom are, ironically, also union members.

“If you figure all the people, all the teachers, all the firemen, all the policemen – all these other unionized people who probably had their union funds and their 401(k)s in bonds,” Waller said, “they were stolen from also, and they didn’t even realize it.”

Not only were they stolen from, but they were attacked and threatened by the president of the United States.

Remember all that talk during the campaign, from Obama and Joe Biden, about how they identified with the regular folks who sat around the kitchen table and tried to figure out how to make ends meet? How they were going to change America and fight for those little people?

Yeah. Thanks for the money, suckers.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

This is Column # DC280. Request permission to publish here.