The conservative advocacy group Let Freedom Ring released a new 30-second ad Monday, featuring the stories of several non-union Delphi salaried retirees who lost their pensions when the Obama administration bailed out General Motors.
Let Freedom Ring executive director Alex Cortes told The Daily Caller the ad will run in Ohio and Pennsylvania through the end of August as part of two separate six-figure ad buys. It follows up on a longer ad the group released earlier this month.
The ad — titled “Side by Side” — focuses on what the organization sees as the Obama administration’s unfair treatment of non-union Delphi retirees. While those workers’ pensions were terminatde and discounted to a fraction of their previous values, unionized employees found their pensions topped up and made whole.
Watch:
“President Obama rightly talks a lot about the importance of fairness, but was it fair for his Administration to terminate the pensions of Delphi’s 20,000 salaried retirees while bailing out the pensions of the union retirees at the very same company?” Let Freedom Ring president Colin Hanna asked in a statement announcing the new ad.
“Is it fair for two hard-working Americans to work side by side for years doing the very same job, and for one to wake up one morning and find out they lost their pension because Obama’s Administration thought they were less politically valuable and the other to wake up and find out they get to keep everything because his Administration considered them to be more politically valuable?”
Emails TheDC obtained and first published on Aug. 7 show senior White House and Treasury officials were behind the termination of pensions for 20,000 non-union Delphi salaried retirees. (RELATED — Emails: Geithner, Treasury drove cutoff of non-union Delphi workers’ pensions)
Those emails show that the Treasury Department was the driving force behind terminating those pensions, a move made in 2009 while the Obama administration implemented its auto bailout plan.
The emails contradict sworn testimony in which several Obama administration figures have consistently claimed that the decision to terminate the pensions came from the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). The PBGC is a federal government agency that handles private-sector pension benefits issues. Its charter calls for independent representation of pension beneficiaries’ interests.