KSFO 560 AM San Francisco, ABC Radio Network, Citadel Broadcasting

Morning Hosts Lee Rodgers and “Officer Vic”

12-04-2008 during 6:00 am show

Lee Rodgers: [heh, heh, heh] But you know there is an old saying if you can’t dazzle them with footwork, baffle ‘em with bull-bleep. There is a lot of it in the air these days. By the way speaking of the car business and those self sacrificing car company executives, I was reading a piece in the American Spectator, by one of my favorite writers, actually, but I have to say I think he is totally wrong in making the argument that Detroit car company executives were perfectly justified in flying the private company jets to Washington when they first when to Washington for that Begathon a couple of weeks ago. And he relies on the old argument that time is worth so much it shouldn’t be wasted in Airports, much less driving, God forbid, can’t have car company executive driving anywhere to a meeting although they are doing it this time. They belatedly got the word that it wasn’t exactly good PR to fly in in private jets but he said their time is so valuable it shouldn’t be spent driving or hanging around in airports waiting you know for commercial jets to go and waiting for their baggage and so forth. He’s wrong.  If there time is so valuable with their vast brain power uh that would mean you think that their brains are better occupied with company business. If they are so brilliant how did they manage to run their companies into the ground to the point where they are begging the taxpayers now for a 34 billion dollar bailout. Notice how the price has escalated? 

Officer Vic: um hum.

LR: Notice that? It was twenty five billion dollars and in one week it when up from twenty five billion to thirty four billion dollars. I think that instead of saying that their time is too valuable to fly commercial or god forbid drive, I believe that you could make a better argument that the companies that they run might have been better off if these guys had never showed up for work at all.

OV: I mean what do they do? I mean what do they really do? Except attend meetings and kind of, you know, do PowerPoint presentations for stockholders.

LR: Let’s whore ourselves out to the automobile workers union.

OV: Yeah

LR: And give them everything they asked for, even if it’s going to break the company and let’s make a whole bunch of cars that nobody wants.

OV: Yeah.

LR: This is really high-powered executive decision making, isn’t it?

OV: Yeah. Their time is worth so much they are down on the line going, “Wait. Pick up that wrench over there. No! Drop that hydraulic line over here!” Yeah right.

LR: A few years ago. I don’t know three or four years ago I guess it was, I spent a day at the Mazda automobile factory in Hiroshima in Japan.

OV: Interesting.

LR: Yeah. Went from one end of the assembly line, which you can do, you know there is a walk way, glassed in and you can walk from one end of the assembly line to the other and watched the way THEY make cars. And, it was a revelation to me. To me. They have their own port there in Hiroshima, so the ships pull in one right after the other and the factory is about a mile long and it’s right along side the dock.

OV: Hm hm.