Author: KlatooBaradaNikto

During my early years as an engineer in Michigan, I came across W.Edwards Deming attending a seminar he was giving in,of all the places, Petoskey,Michigan.For those who might not recognize the name, Deming was a lowly statistician in the War Department during WWII and implemented several quality methods improving the reliability and quality of many components the war effort needed.

When the war ended, Deming took his ideas and approached the Big Three stating that these ideas on quality would improve production,bring down scrap and empower workers to be their own supervisors.In the mindset prevailing at that time, treating workers as capable of thinking on their own was a no-no and Deming was summarily chucked out of the corporate suites of GM,Ford and Chrysler.

Disappointed,but retaining faith in his own methods,Deming took his ideas to Japan where he was welcomed by two unknown little companies called Toyota Motor and Honda Motor.He told them at that time,if you adopt my techniques of statistical quality control,you will not merely cut costs and improve quality, you will overwhelm the American car industry to the point they will be screaming for help.

I recalled his words today, as GM and Ford are laying off thousans of workers,both blue and white collar, with no prospect of ever coming back.

It is the last throes of an  automotive Empire that has been reduced to a mere shadow of its self by the arrogance of its managers and shareholders.It is reminiscent of another arrogant American administration that is fighting to maintain its hegemonic impulses while barely keeping itself together as disarray reigns.

W.Edwards Deming is no more but his wisdom and his humility would have served the auto industry well.He was truly a prophet without honor in the land of his birth.By the time he was welcomed into the boardrooms of Detroit,mainly as a result of the impact the Japanese auto companies were making in the marketplace, it was too late.

Deming:The right man at the right time but at the wrong place.History plays cruel tricks.

As GM groans under the loss of its markets and houses like Goldman Sachs predict its demise,it would be well to remember that GM’s nemesis, Toyota, is predicting the demise of the oil age and has prepared a detailed plan to Move Beyond Oil.

As someone who knows a thing or two about our auto industry, there are a couple of immutable facts that serve to distinguish our auto industry from its formidable Japanese competitors.

One,our industry is totally risk averse.The army of Harvard B-Scool graduates and their many accountants and lawyers who run GM,Ford and Chrysler will tell you, technology is risky and they are not about to commit the corporation to a risk over the long term.
Many GM engineers have gotten this message and avoid all possible talk of technical improvements in the presence of their bosses or colleagues.

The second point to note about our auto industry is that when a problem can be solved by money manipulations rather than technology, they will always adopt the former.

In some ways one can say that the Harvard B-school has caused the death of our auto industry.Its most illustrious product,Rick Wagoner,who is the current Chairman of GM, ascended to the throne after the board toppled an engineeer Robert Stempel during a financial crisis brought on by their risk aversion.Stempel, to his credit, wanted to take GM in a direction where Toyota is at the present time by building innovative cars that guzzle less fuel.Stempel was also interested in developing battery or gasoline/battery hybrids that were vetoed by the board as too risky.

In many ways, the death of GM by accountants and business school ignoramuses is a metaphor for the decline of the US economy as the economy moved from a technology based producer of tangible goods to one that now manipulates paper or electrons for the benefit of money managers.In some sense one can say that the money managers have been given the key to the equity that has been built up by the sweat of millions of people over many generations.That has resulted in looting on a vast scale, and as the store declines, the rats of Big Finance blame the engineers as is their wont.

I expect to see Rick Wagoner blame his engineers when finally GM bites the dust.

As the grim sales figures coming out of GM predict a collapse of massive proportions,the management,always the last to know pretends that things will be better if they announce a “revolutionary” product.This time it is the so called battery powered car called the Volt.

Even this announcement was a loaded lie.The car has a battery which, when fully charged, has a range of 40 miles when it is run entirely with battery power.The car also has additional power available from an engine that can be run with gasoline, gasoline-ethanol mixtures and biofuel.

Unfortunately for GM, Toyota’s Prius precedes GM’s own by more than ten years.That car which cannot be kept on the dealers lot for than 24 hours as it flies off because of enormous demand,is going to be made into a plug-in hybrid version which promises to do everyting GM promises to do in  some unstated future date.What is remarkable is that Prius was developed from Toyota’s own internal funding when there was no market for a hybrid car and gasoline was at about $1 a gallon.After the development Toyota introduced the car to the US market which ridiculed it.Yet, year after year, the car built up its market by demonstrating its reliability and its fuel efficiency.That performance has brought its sales figure to close to one million automobiles and even a company of Toyota’s impressive resources is now finding itself hard to keep up with the burgeoning demand.

In recent months, as the price of petroleum has surged past $135 per barrel, Toyota says it is developing Lithium-ion batteries that can give a longer range than the current Nickel-Metal Hydride batteries and intends to go past petroleum to pure electric propulsion.

The reason GM finds itself in this unenviable situation is that sometime in the 70’s GM gave up on making cars its central business and squandered the opportunity to build a car company that can be proud of its technical accomplishments.Instead it thought it could use money to replace innovation and compete with others because of its sheer size.That mindset was predictable when GM’s board,in a palace coup,rid itself of an engineer CEO,Robert Stempel,and replaced him with an accountant/finance guy who was better at reading financial statements than be comfortable with product development.

This is also the theme of Kevin Phillips’s book BAD MONEY where he shows how the relentless financialization of our businesses has undermined our competitive position in many industries and led to the hollowing of our manufacturing base.

Let us not delude ourselves.A car like the Prius could never have been allowed to be developed at GM because the accountants in charge would never have appreciated what the car could do and would have even less appreciation for the fact that it provided fuel efficiency when the price of fuel was only $1 a gallon.
This was highlighted by a comment by GM’s Car Czar ( ha,ha,ha!) Bob Lutz, who said hybrid cars were crap.

There is no way for GM to recover from its present sad state unless the accountants are fired and engineers and scientists are put in charge.Because that is not likely to happen,GM is facing its demise,fast or slow.

Echoing a sentiment attributed to Che Guevara about Vietnam, it appears that Wall Street,especially the Investment bankers, have decided to bail themselves out by fleecing the consumers at the gas pump.The ploy here is to speculate that oil is going to be less plentiful and hike up the price of a barrel of crude oil, which has hit $137.00.

The moneys harvested by the investment banks will be used to bail them out of their fix caused by their mortgage crisis and collapse of several investment banks like bear Stearns and possibly Lehman Bros.

This bailout, like all previous ones, would be built on the back of the average American taxpayer and the return of poverty and starvation among the world’s poorest people.

The Enron like hoax built on oil speculation will continue until the US taxpayer cannot bear the burden anymore and the collapse of empire occurs both domestically and internationally.

It is crunch time for the American Empire built on debt, speculation and war.

Although I am certain that George Carlin will not receive even a tenth of the adulation from the people who matter in American Broadcasting,he was a giant where it counted.In the hearts and minds of people who did not follow the herd.Conformity was not George’s great suit and his biting commentary on religion,our social mores and our predatory attacks against the powerless have made him a cultural icon.In this he reminds me of Frank Zappa, a man whose perceptions rival those of Edith Wharton.

So we mourn the passing of a true American legend,one who kept us from losing our marbles completely.

In his last interview with Keith Olberman, George said in reference to the treatment of prisoners and the religious intolerance unleashed by Bush,”this country is finished”.He said it in the sense of having lost its ideals and become a malignant entity.

Although it made me sad to agree with George, I know that so long as we continue to produce George Carlins and respect their contributions, we never have to worry about the small minded tyrants among us.

Rest in peace George.You were the best.

As one speaker after another ascended the podium to deliver his praise for Russert at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts,it occurred to me that this display by well known figures in Russert’s own profession should be seen as an audition for potential replacements for his chair which was very lucrative for Russert himself.That such an audition would involve two qualities that the chief recruiters at NBC would require is also beyond question:servility and being a reliable articulator of the point of view of the ruling class.

To understand this, one needs to go back to Russert’s own personal history. He started out as an intern for Senator Moynihan of New York, another unabashed basher of the people who do not have any power in our society.He was the one who coined the term “benign neglect” to consign the needs of black people to the trash bin.Having imbibed that poison during his internship,Russert set about redirecting his energies to the art of becoming wealthy which he discovered was better than being idealistic.His statement “idealism is for paupers” says it all.

His search for means of getting wealthy led him to Neutron Jack Welch, the powerful Chairman of GE,the ultimate money making machine in American life.In a barren life that viewed the bottom line as the be all and end all of existence, Neutron Jack has bullozed all things good about life by his relentless drive to optimize profits.After his retirement from GE, Neutron Jack discovered his inner sex drive,promptly divorced his long suffering wife and went straight into the arms of a student,30 years his junior, who interviewed him for a Harvard Business Review article.That article,of course, elevated him to near mythical status among American business icons.

Like many other manufactured personae in American life that too is a lie.GE’s business model, such as it is, is based on total aversion to risk and creation of monopoly status in a spectrum of industries.The risk aversion produced the GE Aircfat Engine Business which depends on huge defense related contracts year after year cranking out predictable profits year after year.These profits are plowed into subsidiaries like NBC which too has become hugely profitable because many companies which supply parts and services to GE Aircraft Engines become advertisers on NBC.Then,of course,there is GE Capital which is bigger than most of the banks existing worldwide and is now reeling from the crisis in capitalism.So, this is the man to whom Russert turned to as he sought riches for himself.

His efforts were rewarded when Neutron Jack sat him on the throne of Meet the Press from where Russert launched his shabby attacks on anyone who attacked the Establishment which meant anyone who said anything that Neutron Jack disapproved of.In doing so, Russert stood the old maxim “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted” on its head.That endeared him to Neutron Jack even more and he became an icon of every wannabe in the broadcast world.That,of course, included the ever more bland Brian Williams,and an army of Brian Willaims clones.

Those clones were,in essence, auditioning for the part of Moderator of Meet the Press which would open a window to the world of the Powerful by making it possible for the person to learn exactly what the Powerful think.The job essentially involves slipping these ideas into current political narratives without showing that you have been coached.

Through their orgiastic display of affection for a man who articulated his own shameless vision of how he perceived his function,these wannabes signaled to the recruiters that they would be just as servile as Mr.Russert was.

That,they perceived this to be the most important qualification, tells us all we need to know.  

When President Bush asked me to take a walk through the streets of Baghdad to show how well the ‘surge’ was working I jumped at the chance.I didn’t know much about Iraq, why we were there and who the Sunny and the Shites were.I just knew that I had to make sure I could walk the streets of Baghdad without looking scared.My friend Hillary did that but then Hillary is the one who scares everbody.

After our plane landed at the Baghdad airport, I had to duck and run for cover quickly to avoid getting hit by sniper fire.That was my first indication that something was awfully wrong in Iraq.I was determined to find out what it was.So, I put on my kevlar vest and headed in the APC to General Petraeus hideout.

General Petraeus is a great American.He explained to me what the surge was doing.From what I gathered the ‘surge ‘was just putting more troops on the ground so American officials who visited Baghdad for their show tours would be able to walk at least two blocks from the Green Zone without armed escorts numbering one whole brigade.That made a lot of sense to me because I was about to take such a walk myself.The second thing the General,who is a great American, told me was that there are two kinds of Iraqis: the Sunnys and the Shites.The Sunnys are our allies and the Shites are mad at us and they are the troublemakers.That is only for this week.Next week it will be the other way around.

That was so clear to me,I asked the General, who is a Great American, how come no one has explained this to me before?The General, who is a man of few words but a great American nonetheless, shrugged his shoulders and said I did not know this myself until I spent many months inside the Green Zone in my bomb proof bunker.My Iraqi interpreters explained everything to me.Next day, they went out of the Green Zone and blew themselves up suicide bomber style and killed dozens of people who work for me.

After this excellent introduction to Iraq,it was my turn to ask the General:”General, with due respect, I cannot tell the difference between a Sunny and a Shite, how do you manage to do it?They all look alike to me”.The General had a knowing smile, he leaned over and whispered “promise me John that you will keep it secret.I don’t know a Sunny from Shite.But I can fake it better than anyone back home.That makes me an expert,don’t you think?”

Now the entire Iraq war began to make sense to me.I am going to go back home and tell the people we are winning the war.As my friend Hillary says, perceptions are the only things that count.

As the pundits who showed up to vent their grief upon Tim Russert’s sudden death went on about his many qualities that they found affecting,I wondered what it was about Tim Russert’s work that was so extraordinary.In a time in which erudition is frowned upon and even considered nerdish, none of the pundits could provide a shred of evidence for Tim Russert’s knowledge base.

His knowledge was limited to a few square miles around Washington, D.C. and quite possibly also around the posh island of Nantucket where men of his means flock to get away from the riffraff.By his own admission he had given up on his idealism which he developed during his internship with Senator Moynihan.He was bent on acquiring wealth and he realized that idealism is for paupers.Acquisition of wealth required that you make the wealthy comfortable.Russert did it better than anyone in the NBC menagerie by cozying up to the neanderthal Chairman,Jack Welch of GE/NBC.

Welch realized that he had an eager lapdog who will do his bidding and gave him the chair at Meet the Press.As the moderator of that show, Russert managed to carry out the edicts of Jack Welch and, by osmosis, those of the Republican Party.He managed to produce a show titled “A Day in the Life of President Bush”, which outdid all others in dressing up an idiot in  philosopher’s clothes.Welch was so impressed by that performance he made Russert a very wealthy man by showering him with salary, bonuses and stock options.Russert, not content with this, decided that he would reap even greater benefits by becoming Jack Welch’s neighbor in Nantucket Island.

It is this that the network mourners of a few days ago were regretting.Now that Russert was gone, and Jack Welch is out of the picture, how do I cozy up to Jeff Immelt(current GE CEO) and come at least close to the harvest Russert reaped?This was a thought on  everyone’s mind.

In our society, money occupies a central place.If you have it you are good.If you have it in plenty you must be very good.And if you have it in incalculable amounts, you must be wiser than Solomon.Russert showed through his ability to decipher the ways of corporate titans that the purse strings could be loosened to one’s benefit by saying the right things.And even more importantly, not saying the things your corporate masters don’t want said.

This is why shows like Meet the Press cannot examine why there were no WMDs and why Judith Miller’s piece of trash was quoted on the show by Cheney during the run up to the Iraq War.Russert made sure that MTP was a sanctuary for corporate and administration criminals as they lay waste to civilians, nearly a million of them, for the crime of being brownskinned Iraqis.

That the pundits would mourn such a man for more than fourteen hours does not give one hope that the times they are gonna be a-changing any time soon.

The Caspian Sea is one of the earth’s great natural resources.It is adjoined by Russia,Iran,Azerbaijan,Turkmenistan.Not far away are Iraq, Armenia and several countries that hold great promise for oil and natural gas.In addition to oil, this region is the world’s only repository of sturgeon which yields caviar.And I did not even mention that the Caspian is the largest reservoir of freshwater in the world apart from the Great Lakes.

To understand why the Bush administration conquered Iraq and is now eying Iran as its next victim, we need to go back to the PNAC document which lays out the scene in stark terms for us.These people populate the upper reaches of the American Empire and came to the conclusion that if the American dominance has to be preserved into the next century it must not merely have access to oil but it must deny such resources to potential adversaries.Which,of course, means absolute control over those resources.

The PNAC documents also calls for a Pearl Harbor style cataclysmic event to make Americans support any initiative against oil-rich countries under the guise of a war against terror.The entire Caspian region except for Russia and the more distant Armenia are mostly Islamic.And where have we heard of an event similar to Pearl Harbor carried out by Islamic terrorists?

Why is the conquest of Iran vital to this agenda of American imperialism? Oil, to be useful,has to be transported over long distances by pipelines to the end users.In this case the markets happen to be in India and China, two great emerging economic powers with nearly 40% of the world’s population and with growth rates averaging close to 10 percent annually.
The most logical route to this market would be overland through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.An alternate route through Turkey is also available at much greater cost.The subjugation of Iran would yield plentiful oil and natural gas for distribution and would also provide the cheapest pipeline route to India.Iran has such a plan along with Pakistan and India to distribute natural gas.That would cut out the middle men of the US oil companies which is why there is an urgency to create a terror scenario for Iran with or without the help of our satrap,Israel, in the Middle East.

It would not matter if all of the Iranians suddenly became Christians overnight, the die is cast for them.The demonization has started and it is only a matter of when, not if, Iran is invaded.It is just too valuable a property to be let go.

The bottom line in the Empire’s thinking is this: All the world’s oil is belonging to us.We will have it for the making of the glorious American Empire.Even if we have to pay $10 a gallon at our pumps and impoverish most of our nation.

One look at the map around the Caspian sea tells us why.That inland sea, as is well known, has an enormous potential as an oil source.Already the wells at Baku are large producers and nations like Armenia,Azerbaijan,Turkmenistan,Tajikistan are clamoring to develop their fields or discover new ones.One might say that the US has all these countries well under its thumb.

Iraq, which is practically swimming in oil, has been conquered by the thugs of the Bush administration,It is not too far from the Caspian basin.Iran is the only power,rich in oil and natural gas, that is not yet under the control of the US.What is worse is that the delivery of these fuels to the markets in India or China would require laying a pipeline through Iran to a port in West Pakistan.So, one might say that Iran is the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle that the US needs to have.

Following our usual practice of demonizing a country before invading it and stealing their resources,the demonizing has been going on for quite sometime.The Israelis have of course chimed in like an Amen chorus accusing Iran of developing enriched Uranium for weapons.The US will continue this drum beat until the day of invasion.Mrs.Clinton, who is well schooled in the art of abetting Bush’s invasions while professing to be against them, has already threatened to “obliterate ” Iran and will keep ratcheting up the volume on cue.

The invasion of Iran has nothing to do with nuclear weapons.It is about the need of the hegemons for other people’s resources.That groundwork has already been laid with the invasion of Iraq.Iran will complete the ringing of the Caspian Sea with American lap dogs.