Last Night on TV

So, last night I’m watching the La Lakers take the first game of the Western Conference Finals (online of course) and I get to watch all the commercials on ESPN. Some of you might think that’s a bit odd, but I don’t have access to commercial television; no cable or satellite dish, just my internet connection.

All through the game I saw a lot of different advertising and this one I couldn’t believe. First of all Toyota is advertising their prius and it’s Green Appeal, and then I see this Cadillac Escalade commercial and it hits me that this whole GM bailout is going to fail, sure as shit. How is this any different?

Toyota and Honda are both selling cars that people need in order to meet with the changes coming, frankly gasoline cannot last for ever and these things can get 50 mpg. What does an Escalade get for mileage. I don’t even care. Like I said I don’t even own cable..

It amazes me we even bothered bailing anything out at all, the banks the insurers and the automakers can fold and I don’t think I would miss them at all. It seems to me that they got themselves into this mess, right!?

But, promising the American Government that it would change directions and then going on like “business as usual”, minus the layoffs, factory closures, and dealer closings. Don’t worry we’ll help you stretch out that failure, while we let our factory workers and and sales people find something else to do.

Personally I believe that all that bailout money would have been far more wisely spent on education, because the people running these companies obviously missed out on economics 101…

GM, Chrysler shake up…

It is something you would expect from the conservative right wing, telling Chrysler to get bigger by merging with Fiat. This deal does a few things that I consider contradictory. First it is inviting Fiat to import cars into America, made easy through the Chrysler Auto Dealership McCartel. The thing that boggles me is all this talk about “Too Big to Fail”, but not too big for Fiat.

I am amazed we haven’t seen a public uproar about the de-regulation that has allowed these monopolies to exist. Think about it, if there were say 60 auto companies that all had to compete with each other for our hard earned dollars, do you think there would be a lot more options and more economical automobiles. it is safe to assume the answer would be yes, but we in this generation will never know.

This is the generation of “BIG”. the banks are too big to fail, the auto makers are too big to fail, the insurance companies are too big to fail, which all makes America “Too Big to Fail”. What a rediculas position for a (so called) capitalist society to be stuck in. In a poker game when there are only 10 people holding all the chips, we refer to it as the final table.

The fact is that from the time of Nelson D. Rockafeller and Dale Carnegie, almost every corporation, including Union Pacific through Microsoft have done things that would land most of us in prison for the rest of our lives, but in this country we reward them with trillions in bailout money while we gnaw on our tonges to subdue the pain of our teeth.

I think the bottom line is that monopolies are dangerous to any capitalistic society. It is the precurser to imperialism, especially when they are able to dictate the behaviors of a Nation’s Government that was built on the plateform of a “Democratic Republic”.

re⋅pub⋅lic  /rɪˈpʌblɪk/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [ri-puhb-lik]  –noun

from the latin Res publica, literally meaning “public issue” or “public matter”.

1.	a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them.

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Aid to the Automaker’s Big Three

Here we go again with another multi-billion dollar bailout meant to shore up an industry that can’t adequately calculate its own risk. The part that frazzles me is that GM, in the late 90’s, came out with a plug-in electric car and pulled them from the roads. The company they had partnered up with Ovonic was bought by Texaco and the soon after the project was shelved. At the same time they were sending millions of lobbying dollar to Washington to keep the MPG standards low claiming that everyone wanted an SUV and now they are choking the docks and back lots of every new auto dealership and factory.

GM 1996 Volt

It’s a bit hard to justify wanting to spend a dime on an industry that’s in bed with the oil companies. It was in their best interest to go Green with all the other auto makers, but chose to stay the course and now we going to pay for it. Of course this is at no risk to the American Taxpayer. (a note of general sarcasm in his voice).

Of course the Government is going to give them the money, with some hokie set of political requirements that won’t actually make them worth keeping, but the brownie points for re-election will be secured, and we’re such a dumb country at this point that the general population will eat it up and talk about over coffee like we’re really informed. It’s a bit salty if you ask me.

The truth is that had the Government NOT allowed them to consolidate to such an extreme that there’s a “Big Three” in the first place, this whole problem might have been limited to a smaller sector of the industry. Congress, for the sake of political Kudo’s, calls them “Brands” and simply says they have too many each, when in reality it is a clear case of monopolization.

GM owns Pontiac, Saab, Chevy, Buick, Cadillac, GMC, Hummer, Saturn, and there’s more in the UK and in Germany. This didn’t just happen overnight. It’s been going on for years, while the Government spent time breaking up Ma-Bell, the Railroad Trusts of the 1800’s, and Standard Oil. It similar to the banks and right the banks, who are receiving bailout money, are using it to buy up other banks. Anti-trust needs to be re-examined. It is not just about anti-competition. It is about healthy business practices and consumer choices!

GM: An Example of America Autrocity

In a desperate panic GM spent the last week lobbying Congress to pass some kind of bail out to assist the SUV heavy American Auto Industry. It’s not surprising to see GM leading the way in factory closings, as the glut of high mileage SUV’s and Trucks fill the back lots.

In Oct. GM announced the closure of factories in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan that build SUV’s costing America thousands of jobs. Democrats have insisted that any bailout should require these auto companies to build higher efficiency vehicle if it was to consider bailing them out, and that the money should be used for retooling in the wake of $147 a barrel oil.

The problem that most law makers suggest is a recession that cannot be solved by better consumer products even though the price of oil has fallen to half of the price it peaked at. People are still not going to buy new vehicles right away for home economic reasons, unemployment, and or credit tightening. It’s just bad timing for the auto industry in America.

Ironically GM built an electric car and leased something like 6,000 of them to test the market in the late 90’s. A company called Ovonic built a lithium Ion battery which was capable of pushing the car to over 100 miles per hour and had a range of 200 miles. The project, for some reason, was scraped and these perfectly working vehicles were all smashed. Maybe it had something to do with Texaco buying Ovonic, but who really knows.

Now the same company, who had a chance to move into one of the fastest growing markets in automobiles, wants the America it shelved in order to stay the course, to bail it out… without so much as a plan to change the way it addresses the American consumer markets. It’s not surprising that Congress isn’t responding.

One thing, and I consider this a positive in America, is it’s appetite for change. Too long have the Corporations of this country kept us in a perpetual state of outdated technology. It is a historical fact that the Internal Combustion Engine and its proverbial use of gasoline ran concurrent with the invention of the Hydrogen Fuel Cell. Circa 1839… I sometimes wonder if that was merely because Standard Oil and Nelson D. Rockefeller’s corporate influence.

The fact is that it is an American habit not just to produce a product, but also to destroy any competition. It doesn’t always work though. Thomas Edison led a campaign against Nikola Tesla, after firing him, when Tesla began to expand his Alternating Currency technology, using the argument the AC was dangerous because it was used at the time for capital punishment.

To most Corporations, in this era of Capitalism, the consumer represents an index point on a spread sheet and employees are either assets or liabilities. Competition is like the Archangel of the “In God We Trust” and I think people are past getting tired of it. It makes us look stupid as a society.

We are in the midst of an era of self empowerment. With tools like the internet at our disposal there is no excuse for not investigating our choices, when it comes to purchasing. This power makes up two-thirds of the American Economy and every choice we make either empowers companies like GM or not, and can empower our future and an example we desire for our generations to follow.