WASHINGTON – The Obama administration vetoed attempts by General Motors to abandon its Detroit headquarters, a new book by a former top auto adviser reveals.

The revelation comes in a 320-page memoir by Steven Rattner, who was President Barack Obama’s auto adviser for six months last year, and helped shepherd the $85 billion government bailout and bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler, The Detroit News reported.

“Overhaul: An Insider’s Account of the Obama Administration’s Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry” also discloses Rattner secretly forced out GM Chairman Kent Kresa in June 2009, and offered GM’s top job to Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn.

The book paints a critical portrait of Chrysler Group LLC CEO Sergio Marchionne, other top executives and many in the government.

A draft manuscript was made available to The Detroit News by publisher Houghton Mifflin ahead of its Oct. 14 publication date.

Written with the help of a veteran auto journalist, Jeffrey McCracken, and Sadiq Malik, a former auto task force staffer, Rattner’s memoir offers new evidence that the Obama administration’s influence on the Detroit automakers was larger than previously revealed.

In addition to the government’s role in personnel matters, and in keeping GM in Detroit, the book discloses the White House initially planned for a $100 billion bailout, but the aid package GM, Chrysler and their affiliated finance companies eventually came in at $85 billion.

The administration also considered a $10 billion fund to help auto suppliers — but cut it to $5 billion — and weighed but discarded a plan to provide funding to help suppliers go through bankruptcies.

Before his ouster as GM’s CEO, Fritz Henderson proposed moving GM headquarters from Detroit’s Renaissance Center to the automaker’s Tech Center in Warren, arguing it would save money, and symbolize a commitment by the company’s leadership to be more hands-on managers.

Rattner praised the idea. But a White House aide, Brian Deese, who has been heavily involved in auto policy, denounced it.

“Are you out of your mind?” Rattner quoted Deese as saying. “Think what it would do to Detroit.”

Henderson proposed donating the iconic headquarters on the Detroit River to the city. Detroit received $20 million in tax revenue from GM.

The White House even commissioned an outside analysis of the impact a move would have on Detroit property values, Rattner wrote. The answer: an estimated “double-digit hit on already deflated real estate prices.”

Leaving the RenCen “made a lot of strategic sense,” Rattner wrote. But Michigan native Gene Sperling, a U.S. Treasury Department official, was one of many who fought the idea.

“It’s over for Detroit if you do this,” Sperling yelled in a meeting, Rattner recalled. “Don’t do this to (Detroit Mayor) Dave Bing… He’s a good man trying to do a good thing.”

The request was passed up the chain to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, “and word came down that the move would be a bridge too far,” Rattner wrote.

“Fortunately, this unique intervention into a specific GM matter was never leaked to the press, saving us from having to explain how it comported with our policy of letting GM and Chrysler manage their own affairs.”

In a Detroit News interview earlier this year, Henderson confirmed his interest in moving GM headquarters, but White House involvement has never been publicly reported.

Neither the White House nor GM would comment on Rattner’s account.

“The book is history,” said GM spokesman Greg Martin. “We’re a new company and we have too much work to do and no time for book reviews.”

The Obama Administration initially wanted Nissan-Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn to run GM after Rick Wagoner was ousted in 2009, and repeatedly pressed Fiat to put up cash for a stake in Chrysler, according to an upcoming book about the government bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, reported Automotive News.

Steven Rattner, President Obama’s auto adviser who steered the government’s $85 billion bailout of GM and Chrysler, is about to publish a tell-all account about his six-month stint inside the White House.

The Detroit News, Washington Post and Huffington Post obtained draft copies of the book — “Overhaul: An Insider’s Account of the Obama Administration’s Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry.” It is scheduled to be published Oct. 14.

Rattner joined the White House Auto Team after the initial bailout of GM and Chrysler by the Bush administration. He departed in July 2009, after Chrysler and GM exited bankruptcy.

In the book, he said he offered the top job at GM to Ghosn after Wagoner was dismissed by the White House in March 2009. In 2006, Wagoner turned down a chance to have GM join the Renault-Nissan alliance. Ghosn declined Rattner’s offer, largely because Renault and Nissan were also navigating the industry’s deep downturn and he “felt considerable loyalty to both companies and wanted to see them through the crisis,” Rattner wrote.

Rattner also wooed an unidentified executive from the Midwest to become GM chairman, and flew to the prospects’s home for a meeting before settling on Kent Kresa, who was already on the GM board.

Just a few months afterward, Rattner selected former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre Jr. to join the GM board as chairman.

Among other highlights from the book, drawn from the Detroit News, Washington Post and Huffington Post accounts:

• In one of his first meetings to discuss GM and Chrysler’s predicament after winning the 2008 election, Obama asked “Why can’t they make a Corolla?”
  “We wish we knew,” his advisers replied.
• The White House initially planned for a $100 billion bailout. The aid package GM, Chrysler and their related finance arms eventually secured totaled $85 billion.
• The administration also weighed a $10 billion fund to aid ailing auto suppliers but reduced the package to $5 billion. Government officials also considered a plan to provide funding to steer suppliers through bankruptcy.
• The White House often considered the political consequences of the bailouts. White House adviser David Axelrod once brought fresh polling data to a discussion about the Chrysler rescue, and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel identified congressmen who represented districts where major Chrysler operations were located.
• Emanuel, when reminded that tens of thousands of factory jobs were at stake, once uttered a common profanity expressing disdain for the UAW.
• Democratic Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, dejected about the likelihood GM and Chrysler would have to seek bankruptcy protection, told Obama in a voice barely louder than a whisper: “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
• Obama was alarmed by the decision to allow a forced-out Wagoner to collect $7.1 million of the $22.1 million he was owed in GM pension benefits.

“I could see the president’s jaw muscles tighten,” Rattner says in the book, according to the Detroit News. Obama, a former community organizer, had difficulty with the “notion of writing a check that was about 100 times the annual income of a GM worker to the CEO who had brought the company down.”

Obama, Rattner wrote, “grimaced and reluctantly acquiesced. I found it striking that the president of the United States had spent more time on an issue of executive pay than on the question of whether to dismiss a major CEO in the first place.”

Rattner says Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne clashed with UAW President Ron Gettelfinger over the terms of the Chrysler bailout, and sought to take advantage of Obama’s desire for a quick tie-up between Fiat and Chrysler.

The government, Rattner says, also pressed Fiat to put up money for a 20 percent stake and management control of Chrysler. The request was unsuccessful, and Fiat gained management control and a 20 percent stake in the automaker without putting up any cash.

Marchionne, according to Rattner’s book, told Gettelfinger the union needed to embrace a “culture of poverty” instead of a “culture of entitlement,” by slashing, among other things, retiree health-care benefits.

The comment drew an angry reply from Gettelfinger.

“Why don’t you come and sit with me and tell a 75-year-old widow that she can’t have surgery and that you killed her husband?” he said.

In the book, Rattner, according to the Huffington Post, does emphasize that Obama didn’t seem to prefer the giant auto workers unions, either, stating that “no one in the Obama administration ever asked us to favor labor for political reasons.”

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Treasury Department has acquired a majority stake in another Detroit company, as taxpayers invested an additional $3.8 billion in GMAC, reported The Detroit News.

In all, the government has given GMAC $17.2 billion in bailout money, which included $900 million it gave to GM to invest in GMAC.

The Treasury now owns 56.3 percent of the company, up from the 35.4 percent it claimed before Wednesday’s infusion. Much of the additional money will be used to help GMAC restructure its money-losing mortgage unit, ResCap.

This latest move further increases the government’s influence over the future of the domestic auto industry and brings its total investment to nearly $85 billion.

The Treasury already holds a 61 percent majority stake in General Motors Co. and 10 percent stake in Chrysler Group LLC.

The Obama administration has insisted it has no plans to run any of the companies it owns. But with the additional equity stake, the Treasury will have the right to appoint two more directors to the GMAC board. Four of nine directors will be appointed by Treasury before its annual meeting in April.

ResCap Gets Boost

GMAC said much of the new capital was being used to restructure its money-losing ResCap unit and mortgage business. The government swapped $3 billion of its investment for the increase in its equity in GMAC.

GMAC will recognize a pretax charge of approximately $3.8 billion, with $3.3 billion related to the mortgage write-downs at ResCap and its Ally Bank unit. GMAC moved to sell off some of its ResCap assets, and wrote down the value of its assets. It also used $1.3 billion in cash to boost the capital of Ally Bank.

ResCap will receive approximately $2.7 billion in additional capital. Ally Bank will recognize a $1.3 billion pretax charge and be recapitalized with a $1.3 billion cash infusion from GMAC.

“Following these transactions, GMAC does not expect to incur additional substantial losses from ResCap and will be better positioned to explore strategic alternatives with respect to mortgage operations,” GMAC said.

The government said it was “restructuring its investment in GMAC to protect taxpayers and put GMAC in a position to raise private capital and pay back taxpayers as soon as practicable.”

GM sold a 51 percent stake in GMAC in 2006 in a $14 billion deal to Cerberus Capital Management. It became a bank holding company in 2008 — a requirement for it to win a government bailout.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – According to a report by the National Taxpayers Union, American taxpayers have paid $12,200 for every General Motors vehicle sold through the beginning of 2011, and $7,600 for every Chrysler vehicle sold.

“The Auto Bailout—A Taxpayer Quagmire,” a book written by Thomas Hopkins, professor of economics at Rochester Institute of Technology, analyzes what the government bailout of the auto industry has actually cost American taxpayers. This includes how much each taxpayer has contributed to the auto industry since December 2008 and how much each vehicle is costing the public. It also looks at the impact of the bailout on the domestic business environment and the overall economy.

“Every time someone in your neighborhood drives home in a shiny new Chevy Silverado, remember that it cost American taxpayers more than $12,000,” notes Pete Sepp, vice president for policy and communications for the National Taxpayers Union, a nonprofit citizens group founded in 1969. “Between this and GM’s plan to payback their bailout debt with other taxpayer funds, I wonder if all those Americans without work right now could think of any better ways to spend that money.”

The study found that the average American taxpaying family has invested roughly $800 in the auto bailouts so far. Moreover, government support for General Motors, Chrysler and GMAC—the financing subsidiary that supports sales at both—now stands at $78.9 billion with no clear plan for how the American public will ultimately be reimbursed.

The report is based on a November study released by the Government Accountability Office as well as statements and reports released from the U.S. Treasury.