Maybe I have outrage fatigue.

I don’t entirely buy this op-ed:

…With the economy in its present state, this is no time to be saying “government is the problem” – especially if you have nothing further to add and the economy’s troubles are universally understood to be the legacy of a Republican president.
…
The opportunity for well-grounded and politically effective opposition is obvious. The Republican party is blind to it, and strives to worsen its own predicament. If Republicans want to be out of power for years, they are going the right way about it.

Still, it’s closer to my attitude than the piece you linked.

http://www.finemrespice.com/node/56

1. Not surprisingly, the White House has denied threatening creditor Perella Weinberg with press-corps obloquy. IMHO Perella looks worse to its client base by (apparently) caving than it would have by sticking to its guns.

2. Other creditors have not caved to date. Is there an alternative interpretation of Perella’s behavior?

Perella Weinberg Partners, the investment bank founded by Joseph R. Perella, the former vice chairman of Morgan Stanley, has been hired by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to advise it on strategies and transactions to stabilize the banking system.

Just sayin’…

3. Mr. Lauria represented Appaloosa Management, a hedge fund that bought shares of Delphi after that company’s bankruptcy and claimed a voice in the restructuring, but:

But in a twist that Appaloosa calls “a first in the annals of bankruptcy history,” the U.S. Trustee didn’t appoint Appaloosa to the committee, even though it’s Delphi’s largest shareholder (owning 9.3% of the oustanding stock) and singlehandedly led the motion to have a committee appointed…

The U.S. Trustee wouldn’t provide comment on why it didn’t appoint Appaloosa to the committee, but, according to court filings, it appears the reason had something to do with White & Case’s releasing confidential information relating to Delphi, a slip-up the law firm called an “unintended” and “inadvertant” systems error by the clerk’s office.

Unintended and inadvertent. Uh huh.

4. Iirc during the post-9/11 anthrax scare, the government threatened to seize the patent on an anti-anthrax drug if the right price wasn’t forthcoming.

5. Jimmy Carter blathered about oil companies ‘windfall profits’. JFK jawboned steel companies into rescinding a price increase. Truman tried to seize the steel industry.

6. Finally, heeere’s Johnny:

MCCAIN: “Um, I don’t like obscene profits being made anywhere–and I’d be glad to look not just at the windfall profits tax–that’s not what bothers me–but we should look at any incentives that we are giving to people, that or industries or corporations that are distorting the market.”

Consider what McCain, with his self-righteousness and temper, might have done in the current situation. I don’t believe that his erratic behavior when the crisis hit was uncharacteristic.

The issue here is Perella Whineberg’s desire to be paid 50 cents on the dollar for its bonds, rather than 29 cents on the dollar offered by the Treasury. The reason Treasury is involved is because Chrysler can’t obtain private “debtor in possession” financing for its bankruptcy. Treasury is playing that role, and he who provides DIP financing always has a big role in bankruptcy proceedings.

Virtually every bankruptcy features some fighting among creditors over pieces of a pie that, by definition, isn’t big enough to give everyone a full slice. The biggest fights are often between different classes of creditors, and in those fights you will often see “senior” creditors howling over not being paid as much as they think they deserve relative to “junior” creditors.

That was the case here. In addition to Perella Whineberg, two other senior creditors (Oppenheimer and Stairstep) were so-called “holdouts” from a settlement agreed to be scores of other creditors. In bankruptcies, holdouts usually don’t do very well. The judge sometimes tosses them an extra crust of bread, but not always.

As the DIP financing provider, the Treasury wants Chrysler to remain an ongoing entity. Its interest is to produce agreement among the creditors so there won’t be a prolonged court fight that might endanger the entity’s ability to repay the DIP financing. So, it wants to corral the holdouts.

Perella Whineberg was corralled last Friday; it issued a press release to that effect. But it also trotted out its lawyer to claim that the White House had forced it into agreement by threatening to ruin the firm’s reputation. The White House categorically denied that version, something that the blog you quoted never mentioned before abruptly closing its comment section on Sunday morning.

We don’t know what was said by the White House to Perella Whineberg. It’s unlikely that anyone threatened Whineberg with the White House press corps, but it’s not beyond imagining that the White House pointed to President Obama’s statements and told Whineberg that they were only the beginning of what they’d face if the holdouts continued to hold out and jeopardized the ongoing operations of Chrysler. After all, the taxpayers are now on the hook for $4 billion in DIP financing, and it’s the government’s job to protect that investment against greedy graspers like Whineberg.

In any case, the idea that “the rule of law” was ignored is outrageous. The Chrysler bankruptcy, and the recent machinations, is par for the course. Perella Whineberg was trying to get a better deal, and failed. What really sticks out here is Perella Whineberg’s utter lack of class and professionalism. They are the personification of the kind of sore losers and manipulative squirrels that the Republican Party has become.