A bankrupt move.

• Position: Comment - General Motors bankruptcy

This isn't socialism--not even close. When Barack Obama drove GM into bankruptcy and announced that the government would own 60 percent of the company, the rightwing screeched about socialism.

But the problem with Obama's plan for GM is that it's not socialist enough. In fact, the government seems intent on not running GM at all, and is letting the company operate in a way that is devastating to workers and to our whole economy.

Obama said he's going to "take a hands-off approach and get out quickly," and that the government would view its stake as merely a "commercial" one.

Obama seems much more interested in keeping GM alive than in keeping workers in their jobs and factories humming. So GM, under government ownership, is accelerating plans to export jobs to Mexico and China.

On the campaign trail and in his first weeks as President, Obama vowed to stop rewarding companies that were exporting jobs. But now that he's in charge of this company, he's rewarding it with $60 billion in taxpayer money.

"Why are we using tax dollars to facilitate the export of whole plants and jobs to a communist dictatorship in China and to an oligarchic, authoritarian regime in Mexico that turned workers into serfs and denied independent unions?" asked Ralph Nader on Democracy Now!

The Obama team "should be responsible owners," Nader added. "You can't have a situation where the government is the majority owner and then say they're not going to have influence on GM."

But that's exactly what is happening.

As a result, workers here are bearing the brunt. On the same day that GM declared bankruptcy, it announced the closure of fourteen more U.S. factories and the cutting of 21,000 domestic jobs, not counting those employed by dealerships and parts suppliers.

"These cutbacks, which are going to ripple through the parts sector, are going to add to unemployment pressures at a time when the economy is still in very unstable condition," says David Moberg, the veteran labor reporter at In These Times . "If you're going to have that much government intervention, more attention needs to be paid to preserving jobs and incomes."

But Obama and his auto team aren't paying any attention to those concerns. Obama put four people in charge of the auto bailout: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, chief economic adviser Larry Summers, hedge fund operator Steve Rattner, and thirty-one-year-old Brian Deese, who had not yet graduated from Yale Law School when he saddled up with Obama.

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