Last week, Pres. Obama touted GM’s triumphant turnaround by driving a $41,000 Impala a few feet and claiming that the GM bailout saved a million jobs. Obama is fond of saying he saved jobs because he cannot claim that he created any. ‘It could have been worse’ used to be the slogan for perennial losers, not the US President. Shout Bits has been highly skeptical of the GM bailout, and while Obama tried his best to lipstick this pig, GM continues to be a national disaster that is only made worse by Washington politics.

If intelligent investors are skeptical about reducing a company’s success to a single net income figure, they should laugh at Obama’s GM announcement. GM has yet to release its quarterly earnings report, itself a top level summary, and has only signaled that it expects to announce a profit. GM is a sprawling empire, and an overall profit might say nothing about Obama’s bailout. True, GM has added a few more shifts to its factories and its unit volume is up somewhat, but the same is also true for the companies Obama did not bail out (the ones without UAW contracts). In other words, the media has bought a shadowy hint at recovery as a newsworthy truth.

Obama claimed that had he not violated bankruptcy law by moving the UAW to the front of the money line, GM would no longer exist. Had Obama not illegally used money designed to bail out banks to finance GM’s bankruptcy, a million jobs would now be permanently lost. These are bold claims, even by Washington standards. Obama assumes that had GM failed naturally, that nobody would have stepped in to finance its bankruptcy and that GM would simply cease to exist. Despite all its mismanagement and crippling unions, GM still sold a huge portion of the world’s cars. In some form, its operations had value, and someone would have stepped in to restructure it. Most of those million jobs would have continued with or without Obama.

What Obama should have said is that he saved a million union jobs. Without the Obama bailout, a bankruptcy judge would have been free to terminate all of GM’s union contracts. GM would have been free to move some factories to states with right to work laws. The new GM would have enjoyed the same competitive advantages as other US manufacturers like Honda and Toyota. As of 2007, there were only 8 million private sector union jobs in the US, so letting nearly a million of them go would have been a devastating blow to Democrats. By trampling the law and property rights, Obama saved the unions that fund Democrat politics.

Instead of allowing GM to truly restructure, Obama has bailed out GM so that it can continue its slow decline to another crisis and bailout. GM recently spent $3.5 billion taxpayer dollars to buy AmeriCredit, a sub-prime car loan outfit. Risky financing is part of what led GM to bankruptcy, and the AmeriCredit buy shows that GM plans to resume that course of propping up sales by lending to unqualified buyers. Thanks to unlimited government backing, GM is once again a sub-prime lender that also makes cars.

Just to show who is really in charge of GM – the UAW and the White House – GM’s upcoming IPO was announced not by GM’s CFO, but by the UAW president. Of course the proceeds of the IPO should go to repay the bailout loan or to bolster GM’s underfunded pensions, but that is not how Washington runs a business. Expect the proceeds to be used to restore the miniscule pay cuts the UAW took when GM went begging. The White House owns GM, and the UAW owns the White House.

So, let’s check the reality of Obama’s GM preening. Jobs saved, zero. Companies restored to a sustainable business model, zero. Pensions restructured to avoid future catastrophes, zero. Rescue of union contributions to future Democrat campaigns, mission accomplished.