• Detroit Icons - Ending More Than An Era

2009 is a year that will long be remembered by all automobile enthusiasts as the year they killed the American car. After over eight long decades, GM announced the closing of the Pontiac brand. More than an automobile era is closing. For many of us, this is an acknowledgement and confirmation that the transformation in a segment of our social landscape is now permanent.

There were many other closings of venerable marques over the years, such as Plymouth, or more recently Oldsmobile, that hit us as “little deaths.” The current economic devastation spilling bloodshed throughout the auto industry, however, is overwhelming the Detroit based manufacturers. The impact is making some of the dissolution irreversible. The names we grew up with, names that were very much present in the consciousness of our society and had meaning through multiple elements of North American culture, will no longer be components of corporate America. The future of the Big Three is now in serious doubt.

Vehicles such as the 1958 Pontiac Bonneville, the 1956 Ford Crown Victoria, the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado, the 1956 DeSoto Adventurer, the 1955 Chrysler C300, and the 1958 Chevrolet Impala were not simply transportation. They were the artful and complex product of creative teams, led by visionary designers who delivered “glory days” for their employers.

Europeans produced engineering marvels, but Detroit pushed vehicles into the artistic realm. If, for example, you analyze the taillights on vehicles from the ‘50s and ‘60s, their designers made them an integral and unique element of the rear decks. For European manufacturers, on the other hand, taillights were an afterthought. For most of them, it almost appeared as if they had forgotten that taillights were even required and the taillights had been added as the cars rolled off the assembly lines. Not so for the symbols of American knowhow and creativity.

Even the interiors were uniquely stylized, one more exotic than the next. Most importantly, Middle America could afford them. New or used, for a couple of generations, they represented stages and punctuations in one’s life or career. They were icons with vastly differing characteristics and complexions. For millions of us they represented dreams and aspirations, … “one day I’m going to own an Olds 442.” That the day did not always come wasn’t important, but dreaming of that Z28 Camaro, GTO or Barracuda was an enjoyable part of life for young and old.

The emotional component that automobiles of that era provided has not been replicated, and as poor management and careless unions destroyed the fabric of Detroit’s ingenuity, we watched the epoch extinguish itself from within.

The Oldsmobile Toronado, launched in the mid ‘60s when GM held 60% of the U.S. auto market, was a landmark technological wonder. Under one of the longest hoods on the road, the car’s 455 cubic-inch (7.5L) displacement Rocket V8 engines could smoke the enormous front wheels hurling the 5,000lb. vehicle down a quarter mile in under 17 seconds. The ’68 rendition, with hidden headlights and a front end the length of a Concord, is one of the great but underappreciated American automobiles. It punctuated the end of the sixties, and the fading of an automotive era, whose ending after four decades of denial can finally be put to rest in 2009.

We can rest confident and grateful that the tireless efforts of curators, aficionados, enthusiasts as well as hobbyists will continue to resuscitate, restore and preserve the art that has been the American automobile. Dare we dream of a resurgence?

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• Continental Flight 3407 – Casting Blame on Pilots?

North American media has published the pictures of the cockpit crew at the controls of Continental Flight 3407 when it went down in New York on Feb. 12, killing 50 people. Most prominent in the coverage is the 24-year-old co-pilot and her $23 per hour salary, plus the fact that she supposedly had a second job working in a coffee shop. There you have it. Right there. That’s your guilty party.

The media coverage on the young lady, and the blame-throwing, is relentless, … too young, too underpaid, too inexperienced, too tired, living with her parents, and on top of all that, she flew to her co-piloting shift from Seattle in the cockpit of a red-eye flight, and then had the gall to rest or nap illegally in a crew lounge before taking another flight to Newark where she reported for duty. Why else would she not have noticed the alarm indicating a sudden drop in speed? Why else, other than from exhaustion or incompetence would the pilot, reacting too late to the stall with a pull instead of a push on the controls, have conflicted with the plane’s auto-correction system that was attempting to bring the nose down? Boy did they ever mess-up.

Oh, and wait, that’s not all. The pilot failed tests and lied on his application when he was hired by Colgan Air. He probably earned $55,000 per year like other Colgan Pilots. Well, that’s it then. That confirms it. The cockpit crew was to blame for the crash.

Or are they?

Let’s ignore that there was ice on the windshield and on the leading edge of the wings. It was winter, and planes fly in winter. All kinds of planes, including the Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 twin engine turboprop. The severe weather conditions mean that extra measures of caution and diligence are required on the part of all individuals with any responsibility for putting the plane into the air including ground crews, and control towers.

Regardless the weather or technical conditions, ultimate responsibility for who occupies the two seats at the front of the plane rests in the company executives who make the decisions on who fills them. Experience or lack thereof, talented or not, an employer decided that a 24 year old co-pilot and a 47 year of pilot, had enough experience and proficiency to safely transport a plane full of travelers to their destinations.

The media’s unsubtle accusations, as it trumpets a 24 years old, including her picture, who held down two jobs to pay the rent, and who was placed in a situation with which she and her partner in the cockpit were unfamiliar, is unconscionable. We are also understandably surprised that anyone flying a passenger plane would only be paid $23 per hour. Do we not all assume that pilots, particularly those responsible for passengers require wheel barrows to haul their cash home on payday?

The grieving families who lost loved ones on that flight deserve better reporting. Society in general deserves better analysis by the media of a service which has become critical to its daily functioning, but whose financial cutbacks have brought practices of some providers too close to the edge of unsafe, and whose regulators should revisit the application of their rules guiding safe aviation.

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• Obama’s Squandering Of More Than Capital

With a straight face, Obama has announced that just as Americans are tightening their belts, so too he is taking fiscal responsibility seriously. He magniloquently claims he has “charged” the OMB to go through the budget line by line taking action to save Americans tax dollars. He assures that he is taking “aggressive” action, and result? $17 billion in Savings “next year alone.” America is not laughing, and while the MSM is reporting this presentation with languidly deferential support, some of the reporting appears to be betraying some signs of embarrassment with the absurdity of its task.

How can the majority of the MSM not feel queasy when reporting on the Administration’s new aggressive savings claims? After emphatic campaign promises, and consistent affectations since the election that Obama would bring change to Washington’s addictions to spending, a $3.55 trillion dollar budget can only yield $17 billion in cuts?

Evidently the Administration believes that this one half of one percent scrubbing of the budget will be easily “bought” by the public if it is presented with “we can no longer afford to spend as if deficits do not matter and waste is not our problem.” At least that’s how it’s sold to the media since even the NYT and the Washington Post couldn’t find a term in their dictionaries to call this perversion of the truth for what it is, ... a lie.

The MSM must have accepted that Obama’s cutting of a $35 million long-range radio navigation system had taken superhuman effort, and been convinced by Obama's refrained, “we cannot accept business as usual.” Repeated often, with a frown, and earnest conviction, this affirmation apparently becomes convincing. Evidence that it works rests in the fact that a majority (though a shrinking one) of the nation is buying into the brilliant salesmanship committing taxpayers to almost $15 trillion in debt in four years.

Perception is everything, it seems, and the Obama White House has mastered the art of affecting consciousness. It can make absurd statements with seemingly no serious challenges from the Fourth Estate. The repercussions from this complete lack of fiscal acumen will bring an electorate far beyond the change it was seeking after eight years of Bush.

Bush believed it was his right as President to run helter-skelter and without discernment through the corridors of debt. He was clearly apathetic to the consequences. Obama, a little more than a hundred days in office, is making the object of his blame look like a miser.

Obama’s determination to grow government, plus the bailout / stimulus funds he is being manipulated into providing, will bring America’s national debt to a level approximately equal to the nation’s GDP. His supportive Congress will ensure that his programs win the day, however, the nation will become weary of the reality behind the presentation well before the First Term is over, and a popular President will have squandered an opportunity to bring positive change to Washington.

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• Common Sense – Apple Will Not Twitter

Twitter, barely three years old, is being touted as a takeover target by the rumor mill fuelled by every media outlet in North America. The unsubstantiated rumors claim that Apple is planning a $700 million cash buy-out for the still profitless social networking San Francisco company. If this were true, it would suggest that Apple’s senior management has suddenly become careless and dimwitted.

Apple controls a healthy war chest in the neighborhood of $30 billion including receivables, which means it can weather the current economic storm, and continue to invest in the development of new technologies. Having very successfully returned from the brink of disaster, Apple Computer built its cash hoard carefully and diligently. It is not about to blow a major hole in that bank account by acquiring a temporarily fad-sustained-platform that it has the technology and engineering depth to build for itself.

Twitter’s business model has not shown any possibility of sustaining itself over the long term. Publications with influence, such as Businessweek, are suggesting that such an acquisition would keep Twitter out of the hands of Google, Microsoft and Facebook. That’s good business? Isn’t it more likely that Apple would wish that a Google or other, blow a billion on a company with a questionable future? It is more likely that Apple does not care either way. Folding a young corporate infrastructure into a mature stable company is almost never a successful endeavor. It also strains the senior management of the acquisitor beyond its capacities as it bends to the newly transplanted egos intractably flexing their wills against new directives.

Apple’s iPhone/iPod applications will satisfy the needs of all Twitterers until their fleeting affections and mores decide that a new and more useful platform has arrested their insubstantial attention. The media will follow. The rumors that Google was a potential buyer of Twitter only a few weeks ago fizzled into the Silicon Valley ether. Google’s management, it seems, had some common sense.

Through the past decade, Apple has shown an unusually high degree of foresight and has been fastidious in controlling the quality of its offerings. While Apple has stubbornly held onto its own version of the NIH syndrome, it remains one of the most potent engineer magnets in America. Common sense will continue to prevail in Cupertino, and Twitter will continue to deplete the venture capital sustaining its current luster in the media glare, as momentary as it might be. Stories of an Apple acquisition should prove to be little more than wishful media musings about a current fad.

Going all the way back to ’81 when Apple established an alliance of sorts with Logo Computer Systems for the Logo programming language that solidified Apple’s position in the world of education, the hardware manufacturer has a history of establishing effective relationships to solidify its market presence. Spending $700 million on Twitter doesn’t fit that blueprint, and Wall Street very probably does not have the influence on Apple's Board that it did on eBay's when eBay acquired Skype for reasons that strained common sense. Even if Twitter continues its growth trend over the mid term, Apple should stay away.

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• Dilettantes At The Chrysler Gate

As Obama forces his personal views on the automotive landscape, his injection into the Chrysler debacle is evidence of the lengths he appears prepared to reach for morphing the Presidency into a willful bully-pulpit. Even the media is using words like “rogue group,” to describe the Chrysler creditors holding out for better treatment from the government.

Obama complained that the small “group of speculators,” rejected the government’s 33 cents on the dollar offer. Speculators? What a peculiar denigration of bankers who didn’t feed at the government bailout trough. This is a very serious misrepresentation of the reality surrounding the mess that has swirled around the government intervention into corporate America.

The “holdout group,” which included approximately 20 debt holders, claim they are being treated unfairly. No kidding. They have no seat at the negotiating table, and are required to be represented by recipients of taxpayer TARP money. Where is the common sense here? Why would the UAW and TARP fund receivers be more capable of representing the interests of the debt holders than they are themselves? These rogue investors, representing pension and retirement plans and school endowments, as well as teachers union, placed senior secured loans into the Chrysler coffers. Now Obama calls them “speculators,” as if the term is a dirty word that middle America and taxpayers should accept as such. Speculators are exactly what America’s business engines urgently need right now. Why disparage them?

This is simply misrepresentation and obfuscation floating from a White House seemingly unafraid of twisting perception of reality into support for a profoundly ideological agenda. The serious concern rests in the possibility that the government will corrupt the longstanding bankruptcy code that has stood the smooth functioning of the capitalist system very well. The bully pulpit in the hands of an effective salesman might well inflict permanent damage on the open and free corporate landscape which has fuelled America’s growth for over a century.

Those financial institutions who profited handsomely from taxpayer philanthropy which financed their bailout cash, distributed by the current and previous administrations, are understandably very solicitous of Obama’s demands. The White House accusing the holdouts of acting against the national interest, is injecting the government directly into the management and decision making process governing the funds. This is a pretense that the activity of bankruptcy is somehow unnatural and un-American.

Leaders of the rogue funds should continue to act and conduct themselves in line with what they believe are their fiduciary responsibilities on behalf of their investors, regardless what others in fear of the bully-pulpit might do to pacify the domineering harassment from the White House. The bankruptcy proceedings should be allowed to play themselves out legitimately under the rules and laws that have long proven effective and cleansing in corporate America, and the Administration novices should refrain from interference with management of corporate America and speculator fund management. America is a country of laws. Government should abide by them.

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