Well, I'm kind of mixed on this one. I would be upset about the $1,000 also, but at the same time you are getting the employee discount. That's a deal in itself. As mentioned above, there are many people who didn't get the employee pricing and missed out. I got lucky. Timing is sometimes everything.
Now on the flip side of this, if you were to go bankrupt and have a credit card company on your butt, back before Bush, you would be able to say goodbye to all of that debt no matter what you owed. You still can now, but it takes a lot more effort. That's what's going on here, they are still giving you deals, so working with you, but they aren't able to give you the full deal even though they are bankrupt. Overall that's not to bad of a deal.
Now the credit union is definitely an option. If you don't want to do that, then I say at that point that's your choice and you have no one to blame but yourself. You don't need anything special these days like you have in the past to join a credit union. You can usually open a savings account and throw about $25, more or less depending on the credit union, into it, or pay a member fee, sometimes both, and they'll finance the vehicle for you.
In my opinion, if this is something that you don't want to do because Chrysler promised this to you and it's to inconvenient, or whatever the case may be, then maybe it really isn't the car for you.
Just to give you a heads up though, was just at one of the Camaro grand reveal ordeals they were doing and it sounds that they are going to be just as bad as Dodge dealers. A salesman there said that they will probably be marking up the Camaro's $10k just like the Challengers. And here I thought Chevy wasn't going to bring themselves down to the same level. I guess money talks.