Happy Honda Days!!!

“HAPPY HONDA DAYS” is Honda's theme for the 2011 holiday season. Humbug! They may be happy for Honda, but not for me, and probably hundreds if not thousands of unsuspecting Honda customers who have been intentionally screwed by an under-cover Scrooge operation sponsored by Honda.

What's my beef? My wife and I bought a Honda CRV SUV a year ago today. We put 23,000 miles on the car and the tires are now near bald, showing the replacement marks.

How could this be, you might ask? A new car blows through a set of tires in just one year – at the 23,000 mile mark? I took the car into Friendly Honda in Poughkeepsie where we bought it and complained, thinking it was a wheel alignment problem. No, they laughed, the tires had just worn out. This was confirmed by an independent analysis at Midas Muffler in Hudson. Moreover they said the tires were sub-standard, with a “350” rating. They said anyone putting new tires on their car should insist on a “550” rating. They were not surprised that the tires wore out in 23,000 miles. Actually, Friendly Honda said I was lucky to get 23,000 miles. Most, they said only get 20,000.

After thinking about this new situation, I realized it's a new corporate strategy for stuffing Honda's holiday stockings with more bottom line profits and filling mine with coal dust. Maybe contaminated coal dust. Our prior car was a Honda Pilot and its original tires lasted for 60 thousand miles. And just to give this posting added meaning, we are a couple well into our senior years. No jack-rabbit starts at the light, no two-wheel corners and no LaGuardia-airport style breaking.

By the way, the tires are Continentals, 4x4 Contacts 225/65R17 with a “350” wear rating– just to warn other unsuspecting buyers.

This all ended unhappily with a call to 'Friendly Honda” in Poughkeepsie, which referred me in turn to Honda's corporate headquarters. Friendly said it was the “Factory's” decision to put these sleazy tires on my car. Honda Corporate listened politely, but anxiously for me to go away. The only action I got out of them was a promise to route my complaint to some of their departments for future reference.

So what's the economic equation for Honda? They knowingly put inferior tires on my new car because they could make a savings of several hundred dollars on each car sold, and that goes right to Honda's bottom line.

For Mary and me, it means buying another set of tires at a cost approaching one thousand dollars. HAPPY HONDA DAYS!!!  

The Great Republican Conspiracy

The Great Republican Conspiracy.  Yes there is one, and they don't want you to know about it.  To start, Ronald Reagan wanted to basically bankrupt the Federal Government. The punch line he used was to "Starve the Beast." 

That means Bankrupt!  No money, Nada.  Broke.  And basically, we're talking about entitlement programs, which includes the big three: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  These are all Democratic initiatives.  This means a country of tens, hundreds of millions of people going broke, teeth falling out, dying daily by the tens of thousands and living in abject poverty.  A very grim picture

Basically, we're talking about going back to the 19th Century.  Then you had two classes, the very rich and the poor, with very little in between. 

What does that do for the Republicans?  When most people are left to scrounge for one simple meal a day, they don't have much time to think about politics.  And of course, that also means a very large supply of very cheap labor.  Basically, they want us to return to our roots as a third world country.  We're almost there.  Most  jobs today pay minimum wage, and you can't raise a family on that.  No way. 

And guess what, the 19th Century US Barrons also had no taxes to slow down their personal and corporate aspirations.  And that's where we're going to today.  Much lower taxes and a huge spread in wages between the average CEO and the average worker.  In the 20th Century, it used to be about 40 to one.  Now, it's more like 400 to 1.  

More on this later.  It's important that we all wake up.  The Republicans want to take down our country as we knew it.

Republican Plan to Destroy the Economy in 2011

Back to the Future. If the Republicans gain control of the Senate and House, we're in for another deep recession. Maybe even a depression with unemployment soaring double what it is today.

How can I say that? Easy. Just read the history books. Back in 1937, the economy was building out of the depression because of FDR's spending progams and work projects like the WPA. That was too much for the Republicans. They revolted and formed the Conservative Coalition -- a mixture of Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats.

The Conservative Coalition pushed through a broad set of disastrous economic changes, including balancing the budget and drastically cutting Federal spending and bringing WPA projects to a standstill. The American economy took a sharp downturn. And unemployment jumped from about eight percent to well over 20 percent. It wasn't until the increased spending of World War II that the economy once again rebounded. At the War's end, Federal spending totaled over 41% of the GDP, and the GDP itself grew over 70% during the War, so that represented a huge increase in spending. But guess what, that spending took us out of a depression and made the US a world power.

How many times do the Republicans have to hear the message. When unemployment is high and the economy is in the basement, you increase Federal spending. You don't balance the budget.

President Obama has wisely followed FDR's recovery strategy, and it's now beginning to work. After all, you can't turn around the economic mess of the Bush years in a year or two. Let's not repeat the disaster of 1937. Fortunately, millions of citizens believe this is the correct course for our country to follow. I hope they all get out to vote.

What Jaun Williams Should Have Said

By now, everybody knows about Juan Williams' dustup with NPR over his Islamic remarks on the Bill O'Reilly show. I listened carefully to his following interview with Diane Rehm, and was surprised to learn that -- as a news analyst -- he didn't explain himself very well.

He said that he was nervous when passengers garbed in Islamic dress boarded a plane. OK, Juan, you're nervous. So what? What's next, what do you think next? He just left that a big blank page. And that was a mistake.

In my own personal experience, I have had similar situations. I feel uncomfortable, or I come up with a disparaging attitude. That's OK. BUT. But then you need to go on and ask yourself if this is a reasonable reaction. Most of the time, when I think about it, I say, no. It's a throwback to my childhood and a father who was very biased against anyone who wasn't white and Protestant.

I've learned that those reactions were built into my autonomic system. I can't get rid of them. I have to live with them, but I don't have to accept them at face value and I don't have to follow them.

Juan did later in his own interview on the O'Reilly show defend Islam, and that's great. But he left a big hole right after his remarks about being nervous on a plane if passengers garbed in Islamic wear boarded.

There was a recent piece in the NY Times that analyzed where these strong, immediate reactions come from. Back a hundred thousand years or more, when we were hunter gatherers, and there wasn't enough food to eat, we learned to instantly spot someone who wasn't part of our own tribe. And in those days, that meant they would either "eat your lunch" or kill you. And as a result, your reaction was either fight or flight.

Now, good old Darwin has taught us, with his ideas about survival of the fitest, that back in those days, the faster you could recognize a "foreigner" the faster you could kill him or run away to hunt and forage another day. And that meant that your tribe would prosper. So we end up with billions of folks on the planet who instantly react against someone not of their tribe, like Juan, sitting in a plane.

That doesn't make the reaction right. It just makes it real, and something we all need to think about and to deal with. When you get one of those cave-man reactions, you need to turn on your brain and think the situation through. Think of Darwin again. Those hunter-gatherers ultimately prospered because they found out how to use their brains -- and that is a far more potent force -- for good, hopefully, than the ax or arrow.