Steve let me know that a dealership he liked was targetted in the the 2009 illegal termination of dealership contracts and subsequent dropping of targeted dealerships while manufacturers claimed the right to confiscate the dealership's customer lists and service records.
And by targeted he means MANY of the dropped dealerships were owned by people who contributed to conservative political causes, while not a single liberal donor lost a dealership.
For everyone who wonders what all this is about, in the USA the government in the past couple decades has degenerated from people who serve the public in order to make their country a better place, to people who never have had a real job, and are parasites on the system, with a lifelong affliction of leeching off the government income through roles in local and national politics. Hillary Clinton for example, or her daughter Chelsea, Hillary has been in politics since Watergate, that's a fact. From high school to senior citizen, she has never had a paycheck from a job, only from the public treasury.
So, when people like that who rely on their income and wealth being a result of rich donors and campaign contributors who want to be rewarded quid pro quo, get in places of power and influence, they see to it that their wealthy benefactors stay in business, and they make an example of the people of the opposite political party, and push them out of business, or prevent their future successes.
Currently its all about wealthy business conservatives who are basically greedy, and will destroy anything for more wealth so long as they can keep the government from interfering (strip mining, toxic heavy metal result) and the liberals, who seem to be more concerned with social causes like national medical care, preventing pollution, and better education.
One of these makes incredible amounts of money and tax revenue that the national govt uses to run things, and the other spends it all on things that generate no money, and will make the country better to live in, but much more difficult to rape for greedy businesses.
Only, the conservatives have forgotten how to stop spending govt funds on the military that is over large for its primary function, and the liberals have forgotten how to make it a better place. Both have wasted trillions of dollars, and screwed up what was recently, a very good place to live and work and made the best stuff on the planet. Now the USA is 18 trillion in debt to China, the target of every Islamic mass murderer, and consumes the majority of the planets resources without making much besides billionaires and oil spills.
Jim Marsh Chrysler Jeep in Las Vegas fought to get back his Chrysler franchise: He joined a 2010 lawsuit with five other Chrysler dealers from around the country, and won back the right to reopen after the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio ruled in January 2015 that no state laws prevented the move.
The U.S. Supreme Court in June declined to hear an appeal by Chrysler, now known as Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. On Monday, Marsh said he would build a 30,000-square-foot Jim Marsh Chrysler Jeep dealership on 17 acres west of his Kia showroom, and hire about 3 dozen more people.
Why the fight? Fiat Chrysler reported a 14.6 percent jump in Jeep sales year over year. Meanwhile, sales among dealers of cars and car parts have nearly doubled since the recession.
Statewide car sales are up 89.3 percent from $176 million in November 2008, according to numbers from the state Department of Taxation.
If you want to get some more background on the situation... strap in, here's the well researched info from Steve:
While I'm on the subject of Chrysler—that now non-American company of which Fiat owns a majority interest—all those European Themas and Chrysler 300C sedans are built in Graz, Austria by Magna Steyr.
And they are available there and in Australia with a Mercedes-Benz designed 3.0 L V6 diesel engine, which is not available here.
The Chrysler 300s that we can get here—you know, "Imported from Detroit"—are made in their Brampton factory in Ontario, Canada, and even then some of the engines come from Mexico.
The European Lancia and Chrysler Voyagers are also built in Ontario, Canada, and have a VM Motori of Italy double overhead cam common rail design diesel engine as standard.
Tell me again how much of the Chrysler bailout is helping American workers. No matter what you think of the bailout, in the final analysis it allowed those companies to dump billions of dollars of legally owed debt, renege on contracted labor obligations, cancelled pending lawsuits by car-accident victims and even removed legal responsibility in cases where the victims had actually won damages (Wall Street Journal report).
Given all that, one of the most egregious affronts was the stripping of the property of legal bondholders (much of it held in retirement portfolios), which was then given to union-controlled trust funds without rhyme or reason—or perhaps it was their payoff for not fighting the contract cancellations. Another outrage was the illegal contract terminations and subsequent dropping of targeted dealerships, with GM and Chrysler claiming the right to confiscate the dealership customer lists and service records.
The takeaway is that we the taxpayers (U.S. Treasury) still lost around $14 billion in the whole mess.
http://serviside.blogspot.com/2012/03/even-though-general-motors-bailout.html
Nearly 800 dealers had their contracts voided without due process or hearing of any kind and ordered to turn over their customer lists and service records. One day you are selling cars and the next day you are not.
Not that many of those dealers were marginal - Jim Marsh certainly was not. Others not on the hit list prospered. (This allowed Towbin Dodge here in Las Vegas to become huge, and they are now the #1 Dodge dealer in the whole country.)
A few of the dealers (mainly the truly marginal ones) just folded up and went away. A bunch more sued to have their contracts reinstated, claiming that they had been stripped of them without due process or compensation - buying a dealership costs big money and now they had no dealership and no money. Again, this was all done without the benefit of bankruptcy court - or any court for that matter - just legislative action.
The legislation required that GM and Chrysler do the contract canceling, which left them open to breach-of-contract suits (kind of a Catch-22 for car builders).
After the dealers won the right to reclaim their dealerships in court, the car companies (under government pressure) appealed, but have been losing. Just because Congress passes a law, it doesn't mean it's legal.
The original bailout deal made some pretty big headlines back when, but all of the fine print details and subsequent lawsuits have been vastly under-reported. Why? Because as soon as Congress finished with this, they turned to ramming through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. You know, as in "if you like you doctor, you can keep your doctor" and "your premiums will go down."