who also owned Chrysler and its financial arm. His name is J. Ezra Merkin. That's him shaking hand with Ariel Sharon with PM Ohlmert in the background after Cerberus bought into Bank Leumi, a large private Israeli bank. In other words, yes. It was a bailout of what remained after a group of vulture global capital bankers who are also major funders of Likud Party in Israel stripped the carcass of much of the US auto industry.

Please also see, http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=5760575&mesg_id=5761237

Here's a blog about it. There may be better sources, but this is pretty much how I remember it.

http://www.bigthreeimplode.com/GMAC-Bank-Federal-Reserve-Approval-12-26-2008.html

a bailout of their "banking" side and as part of the bailout a restructuring (aka cutting wages and benefits to workers)

Thanks to Republicans and Democrats who helped to deregulate Wall Street, along with the rapacious greed of Wall St, the resulting collapse of the system allowed Wall St to eat the autoworkers' lunch in the "restructuring" that occurred afterwards.

Through no fault of their own, workers on the factory floor had their salaries cut and benefits slashed becuase of the Wall St thieves and their handmaidens in D.C.

And certainly the reclassification of GMAC as a bank was simply a ruse to grab "free money" that was being lavished on the banks.

But I sort of see them as two separate acts. Not every company that got money had to go through bankruptcy. Not every bank.

And the bankruptcy would have been staged (I like the word "fakeruptcy&quot in the style of K-Mart's so-called bankruptcy, whether GMAC got its free money or not. The fakeruptcy enabled GM to shrug off any financial obligation to it's owners (shareholders), its workers, its suppliers. In working through the bankruptcy, it gave priority to suppliers, to enable production to resume as the new company. And the unions were in a bad bargaining position, eventually agreeing to a two-tiered wage structure. I'm still not sure this was staged by "Wall Street", since GM stock became valueless in the process.

Smarter people than me can probably unravel this sordid mess.