Tia; Where should we start? How about what got us so rattled,
such as the two billion dollars that GM could lose in the strike going
on and why we looked at upgrading our Defcon status. The fact that is an
illegal strike makes it a case of civil disobedience. It’s illegal due
to the fact that their contract states that they can only deal with local
issues or safety concerns such as speeding up the line to increase production.
Neither of these were the reason for them to go out on strike.
Russ; Was it about pay?
Tia; Partly. Also the fact that GM wanted to lay off
fifty thousand workers so they could modernise and improve it’s plants
around the country. That number might be high but that is approximately
close. We also saw that the stock market dropped four hundred points in
a week and a half. Again, why we did not step up our level is that it did
not meet any of our criteria of a drop of a hundred and fifty points at
the end of day. There was a point where I was summoned to Omal’s office
because of a drop of two hundred and fifteen points and we went over that.
When I was in the meeting I had my little ear device so I could hear what
the stock market was doing and I decided against Omal that we should not
step up and make an announcement and this was done because I felt that
the market was going to recover, as it was dropping so rapidly my feeling
was that investors would come in and bargain hunt which they did. That
day it ended down ninety four points. Also, a natural disaster which has
been discussed quite a bit lately is the fact that eighty nine individuals
have died recently in Texas due to the heat. There is close to half a billion
dollars used in electricity usage, cattle deaths and so on. It is pushing
up the prices of food throughout the United States, primarily in beef and
chicken prices. That still did not meet the criteria necessary for an upgraded
alert status. Everything was real border point when we made our decisions,
fortunately, the Flint plant’s problem kind of aided being settled helped
us come down from our readiness point.
Now let us move along to my pet subject,
Bill Clinton. First of all, has the president perjured himself? Let us
assume that he didn’t and she (Monica) says they didn’t have sex. This
then takes the sting out of impeachment processes which in my opinion is
good due to the fact that if he is impeached, Al Gore will become president
and things will not go as well as they should. Basically people will not
trust anyone who had anything to do with Bill Clinton. Now, she says that
they did and he has committed perjury, then that is a felony but it is
not something that is desirable for an impeachment. With the way things
are going, the proceedings for the trial for impeachment will likely take
place after he leaves presidency. Also the investigations into campaign
financing and selling or letting US companies give technology to the Chinese
is also something that is very serious and is an impeachable offence. However,
again if he is impeached, then the government is hamstrung, he becomes
a laughingstock, the US becomes a laughingstock, so again I don’t think
that they are going to impeach him. As much as it would be the appropriate
thing to do. However, if they do impeach him, the correct thing for him
to do would be to stand down though he would probably not and instead fight
it tooth and nail. Now because we have a busy night, I’m going to put on
our guest speaker.