Free Republic

In almost every state, law students who pass their state bar examination, which allows them to practice law, take an oath to support the U.S. Constitution. But the country's top law schools teach future lawyers and judges the opposite. Many now teach that the U.S. Constitution, the supreme law of the nation since its ratification in 1788, is broken and should be scrapped. At least that's what two members of conservative think tanks believe after reviewing courses at the country's Top 10 law schools, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report in 2022. They examined the teaching at Yale,...

Despite its status as one of the wokest companies in the world, including maintaining an official program to inject critical race theory into the field of programming, tech giant Google is facing a major lawsuit alleging it discriminates against black employees. Even among the far-left tech giants of Silicon Valley, Google has a reputation for wokeness. The company invited Robin DiAngelo to give a talk on “white fragility” years before her presence became commonplace in corporate boardrooms. Its managers gave employees instruction manuals on recognizing “white dominant culture.” It maintains an entire program dedicated to “machine learning fairness,” the new...

The recent protest at Yale Law School and the similar one at UC Hastings Law School earlier this month are part of a growing trend. In the same way that views founded in critical race theory have been adopted in newsrooms and corporate settings, a similar transition is happening within the legal profession and at the nation’s law schools. CRT has gone from being a minority view to being mandatory. Aaron Sibarium, who broke the story about the Yale Law School protest for the Washington Free Beacon has a piece up today at Bari Weiss’ Substack about that transition. Critical...

The current backlash against Critical Race Theory in K–12 schools has been mischaracterized as an attempt to ban teaching about slavery. Actually, the proper teaching of the history of slavery undermines CRT. Few other topics, when deeply understood, reveal the moral and economic evolution of Western civilization more than does the topic of slavery and the West's crushing of it.Students need to know that slavery has been nearly universal. Slavery can be found throughout the world and in every era, including in Africa, well before the Europeans ever attached themselves to this already well established system practiced on members of...

The unprecedented intrusion of the executive branch of the US government into the American auto industry when the Obama Administration orchestrated the General Motors and Chrysler bankruptcy processes is now leading to unprecedented responses. Groups that were clearly discriminated against and had their rights subordinated to politically powerful unions may actually have a winnable case against our own government as lawsuits are being brought against the US Treasury Dept. and others.The Delphi salaried retirees who saw their pension benefits disintegrate after the GM bankruptcy are now suing the US Treasury, the Auto Task Force, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and ex-Auto...

The White House believes it can win back depressed and economically stressed voters by turning President Obama into the storyteller-in-chief again. But consider the real-life horror story of 20,000 white-collar workers at Delphi, a leading auto-parts company spun off from GM a decade ago. As Washington rushed to nationalize the US auto industry with $80 billion in taxpayer "rescue" funds and avoid contested court termination proceedings, the White House auto team schemed to preserve UAW members' costly pension funds by shafting their nonunion counterparts. The nonunion pensioners also lost all of their health and life insurance benefits. The abused workers...

One of the most egregious abuses of the Obama Administration's auto bailouts was the blatant favoritism evidenced in the treatment of Delphi (General Motors' parts supplier) retirees. After the Delphi bankruptcy, UAW retirees had their pensions "topped off" by General Motors, apparently with taxpayer money accessed through TARP. While the UAW retirees maintained their pension benefits, non-union, salaried retirees of Delphi lost theirs. There was no logical reason for one group to have their pensions saved while another group lost theirs, just the facts that the distributions were inequitable and the only difference between the groups was that one belonged...

Emails obtained by The Daily Caller show that the U.S. Treasury Department, led by Timothy Geithner, was the driving force behind terminating the pensions of 20,000 salaried retirees at the Delphi auto parts manufacturing company. The move, made in 2009 while the Obama administration implemented its auto bailout plan, appears to have been made solely because those retirees were not members of labor unions. The internal government emails contradict sworn testimony, in federal court and before Congress, given by several Obama administration figures. They also indicate that the administration misled lawmakers and the courts about the sequence of events surrounding...

A new video advertisement from conservative advocacy group Let Freedom Ring features the stories of several Delphi salaried retirees, who lost their pensions at the hand of the Secretary Tim Geithner’s Department of Treasury. “I would ask President Obama why I had no rights and he had all the rights to take my pension away and never ever look back and say not only did I take it from Mary Miller, but I took it from 20,000 other people and their families,” one Delphi salaried retiree, Mary Miller, says in the ad. “It’s made life pretty rough. I’ve really struggled...

Chutzpah overload in full effect: President Obama's sleazy super-PAC, run by his former White House spokesman Bill Burton, just released an ad accusing GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney of causing the cancer death of a steelworker's wife. It's not just a slanderous and false attack. It's a foolish attempt to camouflage the administration's massive jobs death toll, politicized pension plundering and Big Labor bailout cronyism. And it will backfire big time because the thousands and thousands of true victims of Obama's economic wreckage are speaking up and fighting back. Let's dispense with the "Romney = murderer" meme first. The warped...

My column today contrasts the phony Romney-killed-a-steelworker’s-wife fable from Obama’s sleazy SuperPAC with the actual stories of economic havoc that Obama’s union-pandering administration wrought on thousands of Delphi workers.**snip**Chutzpah overload in full effect: President Obama’s sleazy super-PAC, run by his former White House spokesman Bill Burton, just released an ad accusing GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney of causing the cancer death of a steelworker’s wife.**snip**While Team Obama promotes fables to indict Romney, the incontrovertible stories of the current administration’s economic malpractice are finally getting out. In 2010, I first reported on how Obama’s UAW bailout threw tens of thousands of...

Matthew Boyle of the Daily Caller reports that internal emails show Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was “the driving force” behind terminating the pensions of 20,000 non-union retirees from the Delphi auto parts manufacturing company, as part of the government’s bailout plan for General Motors.  Union workers, on the other hand, “saw their pensions topped off and made whole.” This decision was supposed to be made by the independent Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which is meant to be free of political influence, so it can represent the interests of private-sector pensioners.Instead, the Daily Caller unearthed a string of emails that show...

Republican House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp demanded Wednesday that the U.S. Treasury Department and the Obama administration release records connected to an emerging scandal surrounding autoworker pensions terminated during the auto bailout. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) and the Treasury Department axed pensions in 2009 for 20,000 non-union salaried retirees who worked for Delphi. (Snip) Those emails demonstrate that Geithner and his Treasury Department were the driving force, and contradict sworn testimony in which several Obama administration figures have said that the decision to terminate the pensions came from the PBGC.

DAYTON, Ohio — From the bed of a Ford pickup truck outside a now-dilapidated former Delphi auto parts plant here, Mary Miller called for transparency from President Barack Obama over the “theft of our pensions.” Miller, a self-described “divorced mother of four young adults,” and about 200 Delphi salaried retirees gathered at the shuttered auto plant in Dayton last Thursday morning to ask President Obama to right the wrongs they believe his administration inflicted upon them during the 2009 auto industry bailout. The Obama administration terminated the pensions, health care and life insurance of more than 20,000 Delphi retirees during...

President Barack Obama’s administration is sharing credit for the 2009 auto bailout with the George W. Bush administration, as pieces of the Delphi salaried retirees pension scandal start to come under fire from three different House committees. “Current and former Treasury officials have explained in congressional testimony in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 that the previous administration provided temporary loans to General Motors and Chrysler to avoid uncontrolled liquidations of these companies at a time when our economy and financial system were already severely stressed,” Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs Alastair Fitzpayne wrote in a Sept. 24 letter to House...

Cronyism: Did the Obama administration stiff a group of non-union workers and pay off a political ally in the 2009 auto bailout? Yes, it did, says the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. When the administration turned General Motors into Government Motors in 2009's M&A of the automaker, it made sure that retirees from Delphi Corp. who were members of the United Auto Workers didn't lose a dime from their pensions. The White House, though, was not as generous with the nonunion retirees from GM's parts supplier. Roughly 22,000 Delphi retirees who were salaried employees and not members...

President Obama called for a "new economic patriotism" during last night's presidential debate. Well, hold on to your wallets as this new buzz phrase seems to be a euphemism for "wealth redistribution." Just ask old General Motors bondholders or non-unionized Delphi retirees about how Obama's so-called "shared sacrifices" are more about cronyism than patriotism. President Obama is campaigning on a platform that constantly touts everyone "paying a fair share and having a fair shot." Unfortunately for those that do not belong to a politically-favored class, the Obama Administration gets to determine what is fair. This was evidenced during the GM...

Obama Saved GM?

The lack of transparency from the Obama Administration continues as leaders of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee continue to try and persuade the Treasury Department to hand over documents relating to the Administration's involvement in the termination of non-union Delphi retirees' pension benefits. Non-union Delphi retirees saw their benefits lost while unionized UAW retirees at the company had their benefits "topped off" and preserved with taxpayer dollars funneled through General Motors during the 2009 auto bailout process. Evidence surfaced about a year ago that the Obama Administration played a role, once again, in choosing winners and losers by...

At first glance, David Kane, 63, appears to be solidly middle class. He has a home on a lovely suburban street in Sandusky, Ohio, and a boat docked in the nearby marina. But looks can be deceiving. Kane doesn’t have television or even a functioning wristwatch. He and his wife Dianne live on their boat, a 1976 Trojan Tri-Cabin in need of repair, for part of the year to save on utility costs. He does outdoor maintenance at the marina to pay for the docking fees. After a 35-year career at Delphi, the primary parts supplier for General Motors, Kane...