New column: Don't call it bankruptcy

Wow, Megan's article should be sent to the entire Congress and our current President. It should be plastered on the front page of the NYT.

While I understand Megan's point that DC could screw up a bailout and there is no doubt much truth in what she says. However, I went to read the whole post and I am really puzzled by some of her anger, especially at Tesla. What I don't understand is why she is so upset about this company. As far as I know, it is not affiliated with the Big 3 automakers and is a company based on a free market business model that has chosen a strategy of building a luxury sports car for capitalism-based strategic reasons. Tesla knows that it has to incur very high initial costs and is only at a "proof of concept" stage in development. Thus, Tesla cannot effectively build an "affordable" mass produced car currently and may not be able to for years. The process of getting the car made has been long, difficult, and full of setbacks, however, that does not mean that the effort has been wasted by any means because it actually provides that company with hands-on experience in building an electric car and the new fleet will provide real world performance feed back. Maybe she's mostly angry that she cannot afford to buy one, but she wasn't the initial target market for Tesla and she's not being forced by "Big Government" to buy one. Her other angry rant is that urbanites have no place to plug-in on the street. While this might be true, I'm sure we can find her some examples of EV owning urbanites that have come up with creative ways of resolving the issue (and I'm sure that they won't involve massive government handouts of money.) Further, our electric grid (although in poor shape) has been built out quite well and it is relatively easy to build charging stations. As more EV's come to market, I would think it would be a future profit making venture to have a street level charging
station that would operate something like parking meters. Build outs of this sort would be far cheaper and easier to manage than creating, shipping, storing, and using hydrogen. But that said, the lesson I learn from our national reliance on strictly gasoline based vehicles is that it is best to encourage all kinds of new technologies because you don't know when reliance on one sole fuel source will lead you to a dead end.
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Lastly, this contention that "none of them have the faintest idea how to build [a green car]" is not true. I cannot defend GM's business decisions over the last 20 years, nor am I going to try. However, GM did built the EV1 and it was used in CA and a few other states. Ford also produced an EV that was a truck. These projects failed for a variety of reasons, but the fact that the companies have attempted EV's in the past means that the do at least have a "faint" clue. I will leave it to engineers to discuss the true technological merits of their efforts, but from what I have read and heard what GM is doing with battery technology on the Volt project is real and significant. I do not know in great detail the status of GM's hydrogen project, but I know that at one time I saw in interview in which the CEO talked about all kinds of non-auto motors and products that they were developing to run on hydrogen.
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The main problem with these technologies is that they have taken a great deal of time, effort, and money. The issues confronting a green car ironically run parallel to the issues to oil exploration and development. What I mean is that as the price of gasoline has gone up, public outcry for oil exploration and new drilling as well as the development of green technologies goes up. As the price of gasoline goes down, the public interest wanes and the money to develop both oil reserves and green technologies dries up. This is a very real shortcoming of our political process and our "free" market economy that may very well make all the hand-wringing moot as we return to the 70's and face gas shortages and have no viable alternative fuel.

Guess I can rant as well as the rest of 'em.

SUBPRIME THANKSGIVING
(Arlo Guthrie--Alice's Restaurant)
William Banzai7

This song is called Hank's Restaurant, and it's about Hank Paulson, and his
restaurant, but Hank's Restaurant is not the name of the restaurant,
that's just the name of the song, and that's why I called the song Hank's
Restaurant.

You can get anything you want at Hank's Bailout Restaurant
You can get anything you want at Hank's Bailout Restaurant
Walk right in if you're a tanked bank
Just a half a mile from the Federal Reserve Bank
You can get anything you want at Hank's Bailout Restaurant

Now it all started Thanksgiving Day 2008- when my friend Warren and I went up to
visit Hank at the restaurant, but Hank doesn't sit in the there much these days, he spends alot of his time together with a fella named Blankfein
over at AIG's office, in a big corporate tower downtown. And being in a tower like that, they got a lot of
room downstairs. Havin' all that room, they decided that they didn't
have to take out their subprime garbage for a long time.

We got over there, we found all the toxic subprime garbage in there, and we decided it'd be
a friendly gesture for us to take the garbage down to the non-performing asset dump. So
Warren and I took the 700 billion tons of subprime garbage, put it in the back of a red Humvee
stretch limo, including CDSs and CDOs and other implements of mass financial destruction and headed
on toward the non-performing asset dump.

Well we got there and there was a big sign and a chain across across the
dump saying, "No Dumping on Thanksgiving." And we had never heard of a dump
closed on Thanksgiving before, and with tears in our eyes we drove off
into the sunset looking for another place to put the securitized financial garbage.

We didn't find one. Until we came to a side road, and off the side of the
side road there was another fifteen foot hole and at the bottom of the
hole there was a pile of Dot.com garbage, prospectuses, analyst reports etc. And we decided that one big pile
of financial garbage is better than two little piles, and rather than bring that one up we
decided to throw our's down.

That's what we did, and drove back to the restaurant, had a Thanksgiving
dinner that couldn't be beat, went to sleep and didn't get up until the
next morning, when we got a phone call from FBI Director Mueller. He said, "Kid,
we found your name on an offering circular at the bottom of a half a ton of
securitization garbage, and just wanted to know if you had any information about it." And
I said, "Yes, sir, Mr. Director, I cannot tell a lie, I put that circular
under that garbage."

After speaking to Director Mueller for about fourty-five minutes on the telephone we
finally arrived at the truth of the matter and said that we had to go down
and pick up the subprime garbage, and also had to go down and speak to him at the
NY Branch office. So we got in the red Humvee Limo with the
CDOs and CDSs and implements of financial destruction and headed on toward the FBI's office.

Now friends, there was only one or two things that the Director coulda done at
the FBI's office, and the first was he could have given us a medal for
being so brave and honest on the telephone, which wasn't very likely, and
we didn't expect it, and the other thing was he could have bawled us out
and told us never to be see driving toxic asset backed garbage around the vicinity of Wall Street again,
which is what we expected, but when we got to the FBI's office
there was a third possibility that we hadn't even counted upon, and we was
both immediately arrested. Handcuffed. And I said Mr. Mueller sir, I don't think I
can pick up the garbage with these handcuffs on." He said, "Shut up, kid.
Get in the back of the car."

And that's what we did, sat in the back of the car and drove to the
quote Scene of the Crime unquote. I want tell you about Wall Street, where this happened here, they got a few Federal regulators, the SEC, the CFTC, the FDIC and the FBI, but when we got to the
Scene of the Crime there was all kinds of state and federal regulators running around, this
being the biggest financial crime of the last five years, and everybody wanted to
get in the newspaper story about it. And the FBI, they was using up all kinds of
equipment that they had hanging around the anti terrorism bureau.
They was taking plaster tire tracks, finger prints, dog smelling prints, and
they took twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles
and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each
one was to be used as evidence against us. Took pictures of the approach,
the getaway, the northwest corner the southwest corner and that's not to
mention the aerial photography.

After the ordeal, we went back to the jail. Director Mueller said he was going to put
us in the cell. Said, "Kid, I'm going to put you in the cell, I want your
wallet and your belt." And I said, "I can understand you wanting my
wallet so I don't have any money to spend in the cell, but what do you
want my belt for?" And he said, "Kid, we don't want any hangings." I
said, "did you think I was going to hang myself for subprime fraud?"
Mueller said he was making sure, and friends Director Mueller was, cause he took out the
toilet seat so I couldn't hit myself over the head and drown, and he took
out the toilet paper so I couldn't bend the bars roll out the - roll the
toilet paper out the window, slide down the roll and have an escape. The FBI Director
was making sure, and it was about four or five hours later that Hank
(remember Hank? It's a song about Hank), came by and with a few
nasty words to Mueller on the side, Bailed us out using Federal taxpayer money, and we went back
to the restaurant, had a another Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat.

After dinner a nice fella named Pandit showed up with some tasty cookies. He seemed
plenty nervous and had a hard time communicating with us ordinary folks....

You can get anything you want, at Hank's Bailout Restaurant
You can get anything you want, at Hank's Bailout Restaurant
Walk right in if you're a tanked bank
Just a half a mile from the Federal Reserve Bank
You can get anything you want, at Hank's Bailout Restaurant