Posts Tagged Sauron
Let them eat cruisers …
Posted by redlinedoc in I never saw THAT coming on April 21, 2010
The big boys at Chrysler appear to have taken the pipe, 4 BILLION (with a ‘B’ folks) in losses since exiting bankrupty! I doubt that will stop the executive piggies from snorting at the money trough in the name of needing to pay the best and brightest.
We need to remind ourselves that the Mouth of Sauron himself, the Chrysler damage control guy, at meetings this past year said “Oh .. we put a bad engine in that car — but — (pregnant pause and I presume a wolfish smile), we don’t make them anymore.” Not making one of the mechanically lousiest cars on the road is scarcely a strategy designed to win hearts and minds of Americans.
The car had a sluggish start. It was very retro, very cute, very flawed. The power train with an automatic could scarcely get the car out of its own way. Add a turbo and stickshift and it did go. Fixing the cars, it was my mechanic’s nightmare, was another thing. It would appear that the engine had been dropped into the car without regard for access. After all what fool would want to fix this? Access to the engine required removing the right side of the car and all the steering gear there. The engine mounts blocked access to such non critical parts as the timing belt adjustment.
I attended school at UCONN (University of Connecticut) which at the time had one of the finest civil and mechanical engineering departments in the country. I have friends from MIT, CALTECH, CASE to name but a few. They seem pretty competent. Is it possible there’s a large vacuum at Chrysler which sucks the smarts out of the engineering staff, followed closely by the moral vacuum which removes all traces of morality. I have long thought that American ingenuity can solve most problems. The difficulty is that American greed removes the problem solving substituting marketing glitz, full of sound and fury, signifying, nothing.
Plunder me again
Posted by redlinedoc in Commentary of the times on April 19, 2010
As I read Paul Krugman’s – “Looters in Loafers”.i felt a bit prescient having blogged Bonuses for Bettors before the current revelations. Perhaps that should be re-evaluations. Slippery as eels these folks, they fall back on ‘caveat emptor
” although the only non-blinded fellows in the room were they. It was the impending release of poor Jeffrey, once the smartest guy in the room, realizing there were more cats to be skinned, er I mean folks to be fleeced. Well Jeff felt he got a raw deal and he, unable to wallow in the spoils.
When first I read of the looting and larceny I thought ‘heads on pikes‘; but I’m not blood thirsty enough for that. Then I watched Lehman implode and the jackals gather at the corpse to pick the sweet meats. Not one of them felt there was any wrong doing. Indeed they were all self righteous. At that time how little we knew.
I’ve generally supported the aims of this administration (nationally), but find myself watching the the internal dealing and the Goldman-Sachs revolving door spinning so fast its really a fan. I once saw a special about how an engineering firm kept their government work on one side of the hall and their civilian contracts on the other, claiming a mehitza of sorts so that the engineers, who otherwise ate in the same mess facilities, used the same parking lots and other than sharing separate entryways, were really not at all co-mingled. Right. When the former chieftans of Goldman Sachs run not only the regulating agencies but are also judge and jury I wonder. Hmmm. Right.
There is not an ‘appearance of wrongdoing’. It is offal on the table, and it would appear to be us, the American public. Perhaps I should revisit my former thoughts. Heads on pikes seem not so bad
Last you a lifetime!
Posted by redlinedoc in I never saw THAT coming on July 14, 2009
I found myself unaccountably angry at statements from the auto manufacturers the other day. The mouth of Sauron from Chrysler tells us that to save money and jobs (and get a handout from Uncle Sam), that they’re dropping several lines, among them the PT Cruiser. Not much new. One of the reasons they’re dropping the cruiser is that they put a bad engine in the thing; but it sold. So what!?
So what? So I’m one of the poor schleps that bought a PT Cruiser but had some misgivings about the power train. I put a lot of miles on a car, somewhere around 36000. I bought their extended warranty because it came with ‘lifetime’ oil changes. I figured at 30-40$ a clip and I change oil monthly. Dutifully I took the car in for changes. Once day I heard a horrible racket from the engine. It was the power steering pump, I later found out. My mechanic looked at the car and realized (he called me under the car) to see the broken front motor mount, the torn highpressure power steering link and the torn oil line. Hmmmm.
Cars are for me rather like black boxes. These even -=I=- with my untrammeled vision could easily see. The oil had been changed a mere 3 days before! The dealer never did get back to me. I stopped using the oil change service.
The car will last until it dies. I keep it oiled and well fed but I know that time is not on my side. Now that its been orphaned things will only get worse. The fat cats at Chrysler will dine well and sleep without ethics. What saddens me most is that the country I love, the country I fought for, the country I raised my children in is eating itself, or rather being eaten alive by the corporations who made it.
There was a time when things were built to last. There was always a wink and a smile when some things had built in obsolesence. Where are the buggy whip manufacturers, the boom box makers, the 8 track fabricators .. but things were built with an eye toward building customers.
My next door neighbor when I was a kid used to tell stories of his dad who ran a general store in Coventry CT. One of the customers (in the late 1800′s) came in complaining about the axe he had. ‘Best axe I ever bought’ said he ‘ six new heads, seven new handles. Last me a lifetime’.
The mouth of Sauron
Posted by redlinedoc in Uncategorized on June 21, 2009
I’ve had my bouts with American cars and probably won’t buy another for some long time.
The first was with GM diesels. In the late 70′s there was a gas crisis and my dad decided that the best way was to go diesel. The local dealer sold not one but two impala diesels. One never worked all that well costing before its well earned retirement 0.72 cents per mile. The dealer never really got it right, going through one battery after another. Finally the car spit out its transmission parts, the torque of the engine far greater than the transmission design. The dealer offered to repair the transmission splitting the difference so that ‘no one would get hurt’… 1300$ would be my share. I went to the local transmission fixit place who completed the entire repair, 340$. Ahh well. The war of the batteries continued burning out one battery then another, the dealer only charging me the 75$ swap charge each time. Finally the dealer fessed up; he was only and oils and lubricant’s fixer for diesel and had no idea what was going on. Several weeks later the car gave a groan, spit out many parts on the ground. I gave the car to the local trade school. They could not understand why I would give them a car with a working radio.
I swore off GM.
Recently I read that GM had made a V-6 2.8L engine with a firing order 1-2 3-4 5-6. The crankshafts reliably cracked around 30K miles. The solution. Wait. Most of these cars have only 5oK warranties. Hmmmmmmmmmmm.
Some years later I buy a Chrysler PT cruiser. I did the research which suggested that the repairs were more than average. Little did I suspect it was a plan on the part of Chrysler. I got a plan with the car which included oil changes. The oil change guy at the dealership must not have been part of the dealership plans. He never saw the leaky high pressure lines and in doing the oil change managed to rip another line under the car.
Some time later, my mechanic, not at the dealership, goes to change the timing belt, a necessary repair. To do this requires complete disassembly of the right side of the car. Success. But now it needs adjustment. The plate to adjust this is located directly behind the front motor mount. One of the local dealerships suggests “cut it off and weld it back” REALLY!
None of that is as pertinent as the words from the leadership at Chrysler. As they were marching down the road to bankruptcy, one of their fearless leaders, who no doubt will be reinstalled and highly bonused and paid by the American taxpayer in the name of saving his job, announces that “we put a bad engine in that car (the PT Cruiser); but, we’re not making them anymore”.
Words of comfort, direct from the mouth of Sauron!
Pish tosh
Posted by redlinedoc in I never saw THAT coming on June 22, 2011
Ahh my faith in the society of robber barons is renewed! On the news: A fine of 156 million is levied for stealing. No jail. No restrictions just the fine at 1% of last years net. Wow! The cost of doing business.
I’m not dismayed anymore. I’m sad. I’m sure I’m not alone. The weasels are in the hen house and have eaten all the chickens and wonder why there are no eggs.
More interesting than the fine is the underlying lie. The company, and apparently the big five are all involved, took money from investors, short sold the investment (this means they bet AGAINST the investor making money), told them how wonderful the packaged securities were and then laughed at them for their folly.
Ho Humm. Business lying as usual. Whats the news here? We’ve suspected for some time that the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) was bought and paid for, but now having raped the American economy and managing to blame the poor outcome on the suckers who bought into their racetrack scheme, the government fails to even slow down this juggernaut.
I agree with comedian Lewis Black who said “You should expect of your leaders what you expect of an experienced canoe guide. We’re going down that fork in the river and not the other because down there there’s a *#$(* waterfall!!” What we have are disneyesque leaders pushing us off the cliff like lemmings, to make a ‘good show’. We should preserve the banks because they’re our salvation. HAH.
I watch, from the poorest census district in the United States, not 40 miles from nearly the richest, with the realization that we have always blamed the poor for our outcomes. They’re the ones who did this. They created the financial collapse, not the liars at the banks, not the conniving realtors who sold properties they knew would never be repaid, nor the investment banks which rolled all this compost into securities, laughing at the unicorns and morons that would buy such stuff that they themselves had bet against! Imagine that. An so they have left a trail of devastation and destruction that will take years, if ever to recover from. The folks, trusting their employers to look after them had very low social security payouts but good supplemental income from investments made by their employers – now all vanished at the racetracks of the banking world.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it ws the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.” I’d hope there would be some public outcry, anger at the blood in the streets. How Dickensian this has all become.
banking, business+ethics, Dickens, fairness, other+peoples+money, poverty, robber baron, Sauron, underemployed, underinsured, urban, vulnerable
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