01 March 2008

Les Deluge


Nortrop-Grumman EADS KC-30 Aerial Tanker with Friend

I was thinking about money this morning, or rather, trying not to think about it. You probably were, too.

You cannot get around it. The markets sank again on yet another deluge of bad news about the burden of the crappy mortgages- one of the big holders were have never heard of wrote off another $200 billion in bad debt.

Who the hell is AIG, anyway? And why did they buy all that bogus paper?

All I know is that I may as well be throwing my contribution to the 401k out the window every month. That is the story of all my investments; I remember the drug company that had the miracle anti-radiation drug that I thought would be so useful in the post-attack market, and the stock market index fund that was fool-proof, except to fools.

Losers.

Why I didn't invest in Euros at the beginning is beyond me. I knew this was going to happen, but I just could not bring myself to invest in Europe over America. It turns out even the Air Force is less patriotic than I was, and what sort of chumps does that make us?

At least the color from the greenbacks as it pours from my window will brighten up the landscape in preparation for the Spring.

Of course, there are bright spots, and it is not all bad to be in the National Security Business. Goodness knows we are not, and likely never will. The budget dance is so ponderous that what is in the President's budget being debated on the Hill right now, so whoever gets elected this fall is not going to have a whole hell of a lot to say about it.

I am pretty sure I can stay employed until the budget turn-down happens under President Obama, and if something strange happens and it is President McCain, we are set through my social security.

Senator McCain has a visceral hatred of the cozy deal that Boeing tried to work with the Air Force a few years ago. Boeing's Chief Financial Officer, Mike Sears, and former USAF senior acquisition executive Darlene Druyun have both served their time in jail now, though I don't expect they will be voting for the Senator from Arizona.

It was not that McCain favored the overseas opposition to Boeing; he just didn't like criminal behavior.

I saw one of the guys from Northrop-Grumman yesterday. We are battling them on a contract on some other continent, and happen to be triangulated on a deal with the Boeing Corporation. We are not directly involved with the KC-30 aerial tanker program, and I did not know that that moment that Northrop had won the huge shoot-out for the replacement.

I did later, and it explained why the Northrop guy seemed to be in such a good mood.

Boeing has had the business since the Eisenhower Administration, and this is one of those programs that will go on for a generation, and there are so many billions of dollars involved that it frankly boggles the mind.

There will be protests and unpleasantness, to be sure, since the Northrop consortium partnered with the Frogs. That is the heart of the bitterness in this business.

We have pretty much emerged from the funk that set in when the Toyota and Honda concerns began building automobiles here in North America. The French aircraft is going to be built in Alabama, ultimately, but the sting is real and deep in Washington State, where the losing Boeing candidate jets would have been built.

Former Majority Leader Trent Lott, he being of the Mississippi wing of the Republican Party, and his serving association Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, are both part of this.

I think this marks the successful culmination of the first major project of the Lott lobbying concern, founded right after his abrupt retirement from the Senate ahead of some mildly restrictive ethics legislation.

 Of course, Senator Shelby is quite proficient in this sort of thing on his own, but parts will be built in Mississippi as well as nineteen other states, including California, New Mexico and Michigan.

But there are big smiles this morning in Paris, and all along the Redneck Riviera.

I don't claim to know what this means, any more than I know if the enhanced competition of the Japanese car companies meant anything particularly inimical, except for the subsequent death of some old-fashioned and non-competitive American companies.

Nothing major will happen, at least not at first, which will be the same thing with the next Administration, whoever it is. Only over time do the consquences become clear, and that will be someone else's problem.

Apres nous le deluge, right?

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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