The Underground Conservative

Their retirees continue to suck off the Big Three automakers at an exorbitant rate, the benefits package crippling the U.S. auto industry.

In turn, the Big Three and the UAW go hat in hand to Congress asking for a bailout. They’re turned down, only to have President Bush redefine Ford, Chrysler and GM as “financial institutions” and give them $17 billion out of the Trouble Assets Recovery Program funds, money that only punts the inevitable Chapter 13 bankruptcy further down the road.

But the UAW can always points to its ownership of a luxury resort with a top-flight golf course as evidence it’s taking care of its members.

Even as the industry struggles with massive losses, the UAW brass continue to own and operate a $33 million lakeside retreat in Michigan, complete with a $6.4 million designer golf course. And it’s costing them millions each year.

The UAW, known more for its strikes than its slices, hosts seminars and junkets at the Walter and May Reuther Family Education Center in Onaway, Mich., which is nestled on “1,000 heavily forested acres” on Michigan’s Black Lake, according to its Web site.

But the Black Lake club and retreat, which are among the union’s biggest fixed assets, have lost $23 million in the past five years alone, a heavy albatross around the union’s neck as it tries to manage a multibillion-dollar pension plan crisis.

Nice to know some of our tax dollars, already misappropriated from a bad idea (TARP), may very well go toward helping union thugs keep their luxury resort afloat.

By the way, I thought unions were for the little guy. Doesn’t ownership of and membership in a luxury resort smack of elitism and the supposed upper crust of society? Aren’t the UAW and other union thugs across the country constantly playing class envy and class warfare games about how “the rich” made theirs off the backs of the poor and the little guy?

I guess it’s OK when it’s union leadership that’s “the rich.”