{"id":496,"date":"2012-05-21T07:12:44","date_gmt":"2012-05-21T11:12:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jparnell.com\/blog\/?p=496"},"modified":"2012-05-21T07:12:44","modified_gmt":"2012-05-21T11:12:44","slug":"more-preferential-treatment-for-gm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/?p=496","title":{"rendered":"More preferential treatment for GM"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Wall Street Journal\u00a0reported something very interesting about GM last week.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/BT-CO-20120516-718162.html\">http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/BT-CO-20120516-718162.html<\/a><\/p>\n<p>GM claims it can\u2019t be sued for punitive damages related to product liability issues&#8211;cars with defects&#8211;before the bailout because the \u201cnew GM\u201d can\u2019t be held responsible for something the \u201cold GM\u201d did. By allowing only compensatory damages, most potential plaintiffs will not find it worthwhile to sue. While punitive damages are often excessive, there is no reason that GM should be exempt from paying them while their rivals are not.<\/p>\n<p>A no-punitive-damages clause was written into Chrysler\u2019s bankruptcy deal. The notion of limiting a restructured company\u2019s liability for past wrongs is often negotiated, but only in traditional bankruptcy proceedings. This was not negotiated in the GM deal. Of course, the proceedings were far from typical, with GM receiving a huge government bailout. Nonetheless, GM&#8217;s legal staff has decided to claim immunity anyway.\u00a0I wonder if anyone will stop them.<\/p>\n<p>The hypocrisy here is blatant. You might recall that GM was granted the privilege of counting &#8220;old GM&#8221; losses against &#8220;new GM&#8221; profits, another scheme that will cost the taxpayers billions. \u00a0I guess the &#8220;old GM&#8221; is ignored when real money is on the line.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Wall Street Journal\u00a0reported something very interesting about GM last week. http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/BT-CO-20120516-718162.html GM claims it can\u2019t be sued for punitive damages related to product liability issues&#8211;cars with defects&#8211;before the bailout because the \u201cnew GM\u201d can\u2019t be held responsible for something the \u201cold GM\u201d did. By allowing only compensatory damages, most potential plaintiffs will not find [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}