Humor/Satire Alert
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.” -- Groucho Marx
Along those lines, check out this actual note from a senior-level person at Chrysler, dated Sunday, July 19, 2009.
Monday morning, I attended a breakfast meeting where the speaker/guest was David E. Cole, Chairman Center for Automotive Research (CAR and Professor at the University of Michigan). You have all likely heard CAR quoted or referred to in the auto industry news lately.
Mr. Cole, who is an engineer by training, told many stories of the difficulty of working with the folks that the Obama administration has sent to save the auto industry. There have been many meetings where a 30+ year experienced automotive expert has to listen to a newcomer to the industry, someone with zero manufacturing experience, zero auto industry experience, zero finance experience and zero engineering experience, tell them how to run their business.
Mr. Cole's favorite story is as follows:
There was a team of Obama people speaking to Mr. Cole (engineer, automotive experience of 40+ years, and Chairman of CAR). They were explaining to Mr. Cole that the auto companies needed to make a car that was electric and liquid natural gas (LNG) with enough combined fuel to go 500 miles so we wouldn't "need" so many gas stations (a whole other topic). They were quoting BTUs of LNG and battery life that they had looked up on some website.
Mr. Cole explained that to do this you would need a TRUNK FULL of batteries and a LNG tank as big as the car to make that happen, and that there were problems related to the laws of physics that prevented them from...
The Obama person interrupted and said (and I am quoting here): "These laws of physics? Whose rules are those? We need to change that." (Some of the others wrote down the law name so they could look it up.) "We have the Congress and administration. We can repeal that law, amend it, or use an executive order to get rid of that problem. That's why we are here, to fix these sorts of issues."
..... And these are the same people who are going to fix healthcare?!
7 hours ago
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