Auto Industry

So yes we will bail out the auto industry in one way or another.

And not for the right reason.

These companies know full well the distribution of auto related jobs across the country and they that fact works for them.

This is the same reason why weapons systems are so hard to vote down. When a new fighter jet is being made, the companies make sure that hundreds of congressional districts have some small amount of manufacturing supplying parts. They make sure hundreds of congress members have at least some local economic stake, and they use those numbers to their advantage ("Congressman, cancelling the XYZ bomber would eliminate 123 jobs in your district"). Most congressmen would vote to spend billions if it means they cannot be accused of destroying jobs.

Autos are the same way. The biggest point we hear is that it is not so much the direct employees of the big three, but the parts suppliers and ancillary industries.

I think we should bail them out, but the reason should be that we need to use the auto industry as a springboard into the future of reduced dependence on imported oil.

Bail out the companies, with the condition that all R&D going forward is dedicated to producing plug in hybrids exclusively within 10 years. No more cars made in the USA should burn oil as their primary fuel. There is a lot of electrical generating capacity in the US, especially at night, when most hybrids would be recharging.

That is the right reason to bail them out.

Obama

We've had a few weeks to let the election news sink in. How much more can be said about the historic nature of this election? I'll leave it to Oprah to think up something new to say.

I do think it is worth noting that even with the most unpopular president in history, a cratered economy, and 2 wars in progress, that Obama still did not win with a popular vote landslide.

I cannot help but think that Hillary Clinton would have achieved a much higher popular vote.

Craigs List

I do not understand Craig's List. It is the biggest mess I have ever seen, like some teenager's MySpace page.

I just don't understand what is so cool about Craig's list. Seems like most of the postings are spam - the kind "Make Money Fast" junk your email filters are built to kill.

I don't get it.

Sickening

I just read an article that describes how the senior management of AIG, after securing a government bailout, took a spa vaction for themselves at a high end resort.

They spent over $400,000 on their getaway.

Doesn't this piss you off?

Great book

I just finished reading a great book called "A Vietcong Memoir: An Inside Account of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath" by Truong Nhu Tang.

The author was one of the founders of the South Vietnam revolutionary movement, of which the VietCong was the military arm. Truong was never a warrior; he was a member of the Saigon aristocracy, French educated and destined for a great future.

He became politically aware while in France and returned to Vietnam to fight for independence. He operated undercover as a senior member of the NLF, while outwardly serving as a senior executive with the national sugar exporting company.

Eventually he was discovered and imprisoned, ultimately being released in a prisoner exchange, and spent 8 years in the jungle and became a member of the PRG, a government in waiting, allied with the North Vietnamese. He was named Minister of Justice for the government they assumed would take over control once the war was won.

The book describes in detail living in the jungle, the horrors of the B-52 attacks that killed many compatriots, and the political machinations and tension between the southern revolutionaries and the northern communists.

One thing I found very interesting was the description of how aware the PRG officials living in the jungle were of the American political scene and how important the US antiwar movement was to the the NLF and PRG.

Another interesting fact: the Vietcong hiding in the jungle were given forewarning of B-52 attacks, by receiving reports from Russian spy ships in the Pacific that tracked bombers taking off from Guam. They would compute the flight paths, and radio the information to Hanoi, which relayed likely target areas to the VC so they could move away from the target areas. This saved many lives over the years, and it is not clear if the Americans ever realized this was happening.

The book ends quite sadly when it becomes more and more obvious that the northerners never intended to share power with the southerners. Immediately after the war, the southerners were edged aside in favor of rapid socialization. Many people were rounded up and put in reeducation camps. In one very tough event, the author drives his own brother to a prison camp, assuring him it would be only 30 days of reeducation. 9 years later the brother was still imprisoned.

Eventually Truong engineered an escape from the country and has lived in exile in France ever since.

I found this book extraordinarily interesting, opening complex aspects of the war I had never realized.


Link to Amazon

The market

is lurching back and forth, down 777 yesterday, up 300 today.

Very scary for those of us who dream of retiring with our hard-earned 401k money sometime in the next 10 years.

Website work

I did a lot of website work this weekend and sent out our September newsletter (just in time).

We are doing the Michigan Bead show again this coming weekend, last year was pretty good, this year we have a lot more Seed Beads so I hope it will be even better.