There’s always a lot of tut-tutting when the White House releases the list of people who attend a state dinner. While a lot of that, for the dinner honoring Hu Jintao tonight, has to do with which members of Congress have blown off invites (John Boehner, Harry Reid, and Mitch McConnell, though McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao will attend with her father), I’m rather interested in who will attend from the auto industry.

KORUS as a whole will contribute to the increasing financialization of our economy at the expense of our manufacturing base. Yet oddly, by leveraging payback for its various bailouts differently, the Administration has elicited cries of support from both the finance and the manufacturing industry.

Or maybe it’s just that unlike the UAW, the banksters have found a way to roll Obama over and over.

UAW President Bob King tells a more revealing story about the union’s curious support for the NAFTA-style Korea Free Trade deal. In an interview with labor reporter Mike Elk for In These Times, King makes the shocking admission that the union endorsed the deal simply to “reward the [Obama] Administration for good behavior” just for including the unions in the discussions.

Yesterday, Ben Smith broke the story that the AFL-CIO had drafted a statement opposing Obama’s NAFTA-Style Korea Free Trade Deal, and it has been sitting on Richard Trumka’s desk since last Thursday (the day before the White House announced the deal). A member of congress, however, is spreading the rumor that the AFL-CIO might sit [...]

At the AFL-CIO’s weekly Monday morning legislative meeting, the UAW tried to sell the deal to their fellow unions in the federation. The unanimous disapproval from all the other unions was summed up in a 10 minute invective by Matt McKinnon, the Political Director of the Machinists, who said the UAW concessions were “worth a lukewarm bucket of spit.”

I asked Ryan Grim if Leo Gerard’s comment that “some people feel they’re smart enough to make decisions based on rumors” was directed at the UAW’s Bob King.

“Definitely,” he said.

In the 14 hours since the White House dumped the news of a NAFTA-style Korea Free Trade agreement on a Friday night, labor unions are deafly silent in opposing this job-killing agreement.

FDL has learned that the UAW, which was bailed out by American taxpayers two short years ago, will endorse the South Korean Free Trade Agreement and act as the liberal “postage stamp” for the deal. UAW President Bob King decided to endorse it despite strong opposition from his staff. This is a terrible, terrible deal for America, at a time when unemployment is soaring and the White House has zero plans for creating jobs — unless you’re in the international bank looting business. Everyone involved should be deeply, deeply ashamed of their participation in this, and we will do everything in our power to organize against its passage.

I come to Steven Rattner’s Overhaul: An Insider’s Account of the Obama Administration’s Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry from a very particular perspective. As a Michigander whose husband still works in the auto industry and whose town has benefited from battery subsidies, I’m a grateful direct beneficiary of the work the Obama Administration did to save the auto industry. But that also means I read this book, which might have been subtitled, “Wall Street gapes at Detroit” from the perspective, “Detroit gapes back at Wall Street.”

Somebody in the White House wouldn’t let Steven Rattner’s claim that Rahm Emanuel had attacked the UAW go unanswered.