AndrewKrause

For those of you not fluent in l33t 5p34k… the translation to the title is “American Cars Suck”.

A few weeks ago, the heads of the Big Three automakers went before Congress, hat in hand, and asked to be included in a bailout strategy for economic recovery. The scene was bad comedy as Congressional thugs chided CEO’s for their excesses. Those excesses included large salaries, golden parachutes and even the very ‘luxury’ corporate jets they arrived in. (Just to be fair, (a) Congressman are paid $169,300, putting them in the top 5% of income earners, (b) get paid as much as two-million dollars in retirement benefits just for serving one term and (c) have access to and frequently use US Air Force passenger jets. Nancy Pelosi recently attempted to pimp this ride from a small executive type jet to a passenger airliner type jet.)

At one point, it was suggested that they could all take advantage of Chapter 13 Bankruptcy protections to restructure, to which GM CEO Rick Wagoner said he didn’t believe people would buy a car from an automaker that had gone bankrupt. Not surprisingly, a survey by Directions Research Inc was released within a week of that statement saying that very same thing. But did anyone ask the question whether those same buyers are GM/Ford/Chrysler buyers?

The trend in auto sales has been that foreign imports are the gainers and the domestic manufacturers are in decline. And in fact, when you break sales demographics down you find that The dominant market share of GM, Ford and Chrysler are due to a combination of government sales (the US government cannot legally buy foreign cars as long as there is a domestic automaker in business - the “Buy American” act) and what Obama might call “bitter clingers” who buy from the big three because they always have (and so did their daddy). Younger buyers eager for more gadgets, value and style have almost uniformally rejected domestic automakers. So this begs the question, do the Big Three automakers really have a clue what American’s want to buy?

I’m here to say that the Big Three is clueless on what drives American consumerism, and that driver is called “Identify Marketing”. If GM advertised the suburban as a gas guzzling, poor handling and expensive to maintain vehicle, you wouldn’t see many on the road. Instead, they showed pictures of affluent soccer moms hauling their kids, their kids friends, their kids sports gear, their groceries and oh yeah - surviving head on collisions with trains. It was safety, convenience and “bling” that made SUV buyers out of skinny suburbanite moms’ and rednecks alike. If the Big Three had been able to make as much on a Festiva as on an Expedition, you had better believe you’d see flashy commercial showing hot babes driving them.

Then there are technical buyers. That’s folks (like me) who could care less what a car looks like; they’re looking at the stats to determine things like “warranty coverage”, “total cost of ownership” and “resale value”. When I went car shopping a few years back, I compared several cars in the $20k - $35k price range. Every American manufacturer fell out of contention after the first few phases of comparison because of reliability problems, short warranty periods and lack of features. I wound up with a Hyundai, and nearly two years on I’m not at all regretful of my decision. A friend purchased the Chevy Malibu and has already had to have major engine service, door hinges replaced and keeps complaining about a ticking noise from the front wheels.

American car manufacturers could continue to sell crappy cars with impugnity if not for one other problem - their managment has negotiated some of the dumbest deals with the Unions. I’m not saying the Unions have screwed up the American auto industry. They’re a big part of the problem, but Toyota operates plants in California which are unionized and their vehicles are top rated. The problem is that GM, Ford and Chrysler basically sold their souls to unions and got nothing in return. GM is the biggest loser in that regard.

This week you can expect the same three CEO’s to go before Congress again. This time, with the Congressman having already scored points with last weeks tongue lashings, you can expect them to walk away with a generous package that’ll buoy the US auto industry for another two years. That may be enough - both GM and Ford have exciting new technologies both here and in the near term which will pull buyers back from foreign sellers. Chrysler is at rock bottom, so they have nowhere to go from here but up. Whether they get bailed out by the US Tax Payer, or by chapter 13, they’ll both be in the same spot in 3 years.

All the same, I’d rather than not do it on my dime.

One of the benefits of listening to NPR is not having to hear about Brittany Spears’s latest crackups. In fact, there’s little or no celebrity gossip. Instead you get to hear things that are actually interesting, and often you get the news before it makes news in the mainstream (or “drive by”) media. The downside is that NPR is unabashedly liberal. It might as well stand for “Nationalist Progressive Radio”, which is why I don’t donate one thin dime during their infomercial format beg drives. Pledge drive. You get the idea.

Tonight while driving my boy home from a Scout Troop meeting, I tuned in to the WHYY syndicated show “Fresh Air“. The last time I listened to Fresh Air, it was a fascinating interview with Jill Bolte Taylor in which she related her experiences as a victim of stroke. What made it fascinating is that she is herself a Neuroanatomist, so as her stroke was happenning she was able to rationalize her experiences, cope and get help. (You can watch her give a lecture on this at the TED Talks website.) Tonight’s fascinating guest is a familiar name from the recent Presidential race - Bill Ayers.

If you read a few blogs back, you know I have no love for Bill Ayers. Listening to the interview, as Ayers leaked stupidity from his mouth like so much oral diarrhea, I was gripped with stunned anger at what a small, petty, unrepentant little man Ayers is and how much attention he gets for being such an unabashed relic of 60’s radicalism. At one point I actually directed a question at the radio; “… how can you not see yourself as a terrorist when you acknowledge that you used unbridled violence in an attempt to effect political change? How can you not see yourself as nothing more than the other side of the same coin as that which you oppose?”

NPR, through shows like Fresh Air, give voice to fringe elements of society that we wouldn’t otherwise get through mainstream forms of media. I listen to NPR because long before anyone knew what South Ossetia was and where, I knew that it was a disputed region between an anterograde Russia and the pro-western independant former Soviet state of Georgia. While most people where talking about the Jonas Brothers and what happened at the MTV Music Awards, I was learning about the genius of Mstislav Rostropovich. The flip side of that benefit is that NPR also gives voice to the radical left, for which it has deep sympathies. Were any radio network - commercial or public - to give that level of voice to equally fringe right wing groups such as Aryan Resistance, there would be calls to strip them of their public funding and indeed their license.

In deference to the headline, the real Bill Ayers need not stand up. Now that the election is over and he cannot hurt his friend and protogé Obama, Ayers is free to remind everyone that he does not have an iota of regret for his actions. But as he emerges further into a nationally visible roll, he is also drawing the ire of true 60’s anti-war activists who decry his methods. You cannot escape the things you’ve done, and if you’re not willing to repent and make amends, then you also cannot outlive them.

In deference to my last post… you might think I’m having to eat crow, but it tastes to me much more like a shit sandwich. Not being one to dwell too deeply on the darkness ahead, I’d like to instead concentrate on something decidedly cooler.

Big mother-effin rockets.

Today is the 41st anniversary of the first flight of the Saturn V rocket. It’s also just two days after the 46th birthday of the Saturn V. Don’t know what the Saturn V is? It’s the big mother-effin rocket that launched American astronauts to the moon, a feat no other nation on this planet has even come close to accomplishing yet. And likely won’t for another decade.

Sensing a little bit of nationalistic chauvanism here? I can’t help it. America kicks ass. We built a rocket that even today is taller than 99% of the worlds high-rise structures. The Saturn V drinks an olympic-sized swimming pool of kerosene rocket fuel every 45 seconds. The Saturn V weighs more than 2,234 SUV’s and can carry 1,500 soccer moms. The F1 engines used on the Saturn 5 generate 1,500,000 lbs of thrust each. There are five of them on the first stage alone. That’s 9,000,000 lbs of thrust. The first stage would burn for 145 seconds, but the #5 engine was shut off early to keep the Saturn V from going too fast at stage-1 separation.

I could go on all day about the Saturn V rocket. It’s a magnificent piece of engineering, a tremendous phallic (yes, I said phallic, I mean how could you not notice) representation of US might and superiority and a legendary vehicle which has not been surpassed in any arena. I could go on, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll cop out and let you watch a really cool video of the Saturn V taking off.