The headlines declare that General Motors is “recovering.”

Despite continuing to lose money at what historically would have been identified as an astronomical rate, the automaker is losing less money than a year ago.

So Obama administration aides say they are “encouraged” by what the New York Times refers to as “signs of life” on the part of a company that many thought had “problems (that) were too big and numerous to fix.”

Things are going so great, chirps GM’s chief executive, Fritz Henderson, that returning to the days of big bonuses is “an open question.”

But GM’s recovery is a paper improvement, not a real one. The company’s improved position was purchased with an infusion of $50 billion in taxpayer dollars.

Worse yet, GM’s “signs of recovery” have been purchased at immense cost to working Americans. The company has used its massive federal bailout to begin shuttering more than a dozen factories, to lay off tens of thousands of auto workers, to eliminate more than 1,000 car dealerships, and to eliminate tens of thousands of jobs at those facilities across the country.

Even as the bailout was being arranged, GM was busy shuttering plants in communities such as Janesville. Since the bailout, the rate of factory and warehouse closings has accelerated as the company has used federal dollars to padlock facilities in the U.S. and to open plants in Mexico and China.

The raw numbers are staggering. In June, GM announced that 14 plants and three warehouses would be closed, at a cost of up to 20,000 jobs. Around the same time, the company announced that it was pulling the plug on 1,100 dealerships, at the cost of 100,000 additional jobs.

GM has not recovered. It has exited, leaving traditional manufacturing towns across the upper Midwest devastated.

GM is remaking itself as a corporate entity that employs fewer Americans, produces fewer cars in the U.S., and sustains fewer communities -- effectively undermining the core arguments that were made for providing bailout funds.

Instead of building itself back up as a great American manufacturer -- with new approaches and better ideas -- GM has used the federal money to offshore its manufacturing operations and downsize its U.S. distribution network by pulling out of inner cities and small towns.

General Motors and Chrysler are not being “saved” as anything more than investment vehicles for Wall Street speculators.

What needed to be saved -- family-supporting jobs, plants that were bedrock employers for their communities, dealerships with many minority owners and workers – has instead been severely undermined.

It will be suggested that, had the federal government not allocated bailout funds to GM and Chrysler, the two companies would have collapsed altogether, causing more job losses and plant closings. That may be true. But the government did intervene, and we still ended up with massive job losses, too many plant closings and the loss of dealerships that did not need to close.

That’s what’s wrong with the bailout.

Instead of getting bang for its bucks, the federal government has given bucks to corporations that are banging around American workers and communities.

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