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Subject: Remember Iacocca? Take a look at this.

Just as true today as it was when his book first came out. He was, and still is, a brilliant businessman! Often we need to be reminded of Iococca's words.



Remember Lee Iacocca, the man who rescued Chrysler Corporation from its death throes? He's now 82 years old and has a new book, 'Where Have All The Leaders Gone?'.

Lee Iacocca Says:

'Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage with this so called president? We should be screaming bloody murder! We've got a gang of tax cheating clueless leftists trying to steer our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even run a ridiculous cash-for-clunkers program without losing $26 billion of the taxpayers' money, much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, 'trust me the economy is getting better..'

Better? You've got to be kidding. This is America , not the ****ed, 'Titanic'. I'll give you a sound bite: 'Throw all the Democrats out along with Obama!'

You might think I'm getting senile, that I've gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore..

The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs.. While we're fiddling in Afghanistan , Iran is completing their nuclear bombs and missiles and nobody seems to know what to do.


And the liberal press is waving 'pom-poms' instead of asking hard questions. That's not the promise of the ' America ' my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I've had enough. How about you?

I'll go a step further. You can't call yourself a patriot if you're not outraged. This is a fight I'm ready and willing to have. The Biggest 'C' is Crisis! (Iacocca elaborates on nine C's of leadership, with crisis being the first.)

Leaders are made, not born. Leadership is forged in times of crisis. It's easy to sit there with thumb up your butt and talk theory. Or send someone else's kids off to war when you've never seen a battlefield yourself. It's another thing to lead when your world comes tumbling down.

On September 11, 2001, we needed a strong leader more than any other time in our history. We needed a steady hand to guide us out of the ashes. A hell of a mess, so here's where we stand.

We're immersed in a bloody war now with no plan for winning and no plan for leaving. But our soldiers are dying daily.

We're running the biggest deficit in the history of the world, and it's getting worse every day!

We've lost the manufacturing edge to Asia , while our once-great companies are getting slaughtered by health care costs.

Gas prices are going to skyrock again, and nobody in power has a lucid plan to open drilling to solve the problem. This country has the largest oil reserves in the WORLD, and we cannot drill for it because the politicians have been bought by the flea-hugging environmentalists.


Our schools are in a complete disaster because of the teachers union.

Our borders are like sieves and they want to give all illegals amnesty and free healthcare.

The middle class is being squeezed to death every day.

These are times that cry out for leadership.

But when you look around, you've got to ask: 'Where have all the leaders gone?' Where are the curious, creative communicators? Where are the people of character, courage, conviction, omnipotence, and common sense? I may be a sucker for alliteration, but I think you get the point.

Name me a leader who has a better idea for homeland security than making us take off our shoes in airports and throw away our shampoo?

We've spent billions of dollars building a huge new bureaucracy, and all we know how to do is react to things that have already happened.

Everyone's hunkering down, fingers crossed, hoping the government will make it better for them. Now, that's just crazy.. Deal with life.

Name me an industry leader who is thinking creatively about how we can restore our competitive edge in manufacturing. Who would have believed that there could ever be a time when 'The Big Three' referred to Japanese car companies? How did this happen, and more important, look what Obama did about it!

Name me a government leader who can articulate a plan for paying down the debit, or solving the energy crisis, or managing the health care problem. The silence is deafening. But these are the crises that are eating away at our country and milking the middle class dry.

I have news for the Chicago gangsters in Congress. We didn't elect you to turn this country into a losing European Socialist state. What is everybody so afraid of? That some bonehead on NBC or CNN news will call them a name? Give me a break. Why don't you guys show some spine for a change?

Had Enough? Hey, I'm not trying to be the voice of gloom and doom here. I'm trying to light a fire. I'm speaking out because I have hope - I believe in America . In my lifetime, I've had the privilege of living through some of America's greatest moments. I've also experienced some of our worst crises: The 'Great Depression,' 'World War II,' the 'Korean War,' the 'Kennedy Assassination,' the 'Vietnam War,' the 1970's
oil crisis, and the struggles of recent years since 9/11.


LET'S GET THE MUSLIM ROOKIE OUT OF THE WHITEHOUSE!!!
Original Post

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quote:
Originally posted by JerrySmith:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/iacocca.asp

Not entirely accurate. I thought I remembered seeing him interviewed on his book tour before Obama was President.


PICKY. PICKY, PICKY. By dang you understood it didn't you? It is a long read, but someone needs to take up the mantle and carry this Nation forward. It is NOT the NITWIT and his legion of pee-brains either.
Yes, I remember KILLER Iacocca. He was the big dog at Chrysler when the company decided that it would be better--meaning more co$t effective(!)--to let a few innocent people burn to death in Ford Pintos rather than to modify the vehicle's design, at a grand cost of $11 per vehicle, to keep the gas tank from rupturing in a collision as a result of being pushed up against the differential housing. Yeah, I remember that scumbag.

"Fighting strong competition from Volkswagen for the lucrative small car market, the
Ford Motor Company rushed the Pinto Into production in much less than the usual time. Ford
engineers discovered in pre-production crash tests that rear-end collisions would rupture the
Pinto's fuel system extremely easily. Because assembly-line machinery was already tooled when
engineers found this defect, top Ford officials decided to manufacture the car anyway –
exploding gas tank and all – even though Ford owned the patent on a much safer gas tank.
For more than eight years afterwards, Ford successfully lobbied, with extraordinary vigor
and some blatant lies, against a key government safety standard that would have forced the
company to change the Pinto's fire-prone gas tank." The Pinto came to be known at Ford as "Lee's car." Should have been "Lee's firetrap"! Iacocca and his money-driven cohorts at Ford are murderous lowlifes! Read the details of this sordid business here:

http://sociology101.net/readings/Pinto-Madness.pdf
quote:
Originally posted by beternU:
Yes, I remember KILLER Iacocca. He was the big dog at Chrysler when the company decided that it would be better--meaning more co$t effective(!)--to let a few innocent people burn to death in Ford Pintos rather than to modify the vehicle's design, at a grand cost of $11 per vehicle, to keep the gas tank from rupturing in a collision as a result of being pushed up against the differential housing. Yeah, I remember that scumbag.

"Fighting strong competition from Volkswagen for the lucrative small car market, the
Ford Motor Company rushed the Pinto Into production in much less than the usual time. Ford
engineers discovered in pre-production crash tests that rear-end collisions would rupture the
Pinto's fuel system extremely easily. Because assembly-line machinery was already tooled when
engineers found this defect, top Ford officials decided to manufacture the car anyway –
exploding gas tank and all – even though Ford owned the patent on a much safer gas tank.
For more than eight years afterwards, Ford successfully lobbied, with extraordinary vigor
and some blatant lies, against a key government safety standard that would have forced the
company to change the Pinto's fire-prone gas tank." The Pinto came to be known at Ford as "Lee's car." Should have been "Lee's firetrap"! Iacocca and his money-driven cohorts at Ford are murderous lowlifes! Read the details of this sordid business here:


A 1991 law review paper by Gary Schwartz[17] claimed the case against the Pinto was less clear-cut than commonly supposed. The number who died in Pinto rear-impact fires, according to Schwartz, was well below the hundreds cited in contemporary news reports and closer to the twenty-seven recorded by a limited National Highway Traffic Safety Administration database. Given the Pinto's production figures (over 2 million built), this was not substantially worse than typical for the time. Schwartz argued that the car was no more fire-prone than other cars of the time, that its fatality rates were lower than comparably sized imported automobiles, and that the supposed "smoking gun" document that plaintiffs claimed showed Ford's callousness in designing the Pinto was actually a document based on National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulations about the value of a human life rather than a document containing an assessment of Ford's potential tort liability." Doofus Big Grin
quote:
Originally posted by kperk014:
quote:
Originally posted by beternU:
Yes, I remember KILLER Iacocca. He was the big dog at Chrysler when the company decided that it would be better--meaning more co$t effective(!)--to let a few innocent people burn to death in Ford Pintos rather than to modify the vehicle's design, at a grand cost of $11 per vehicle, to keep the gas tank from rupturing in a collision as a result of being pushed up against the differential housing. Yeah, I remember that scumbag.

"Fighting strong competition from Volkswagen for the lucrative small car market, the
Ford Motor Company rushed the Pinto Into production in much less than the usual time. Ford
engineers discovered in pre-production crash tests that rear-end collisions would rupture the
Pinto's fuel system extremely easily. Because assembly-line machinery was already tooled when
engineers found this defect, top Ford officials decided to manufacture the car anyway –
exploding gas tank and all – even though Ford owned the patent on a much safer gas tank.
For more than eight years afterwards, Ford successfully lobbied, with extraordinary vigor
and some blatant lies, against a key government safety standard that would have forced the
company to change the Pinto's fire-prone gas tank." The Pinto came to be known at Ford as "Lee's car." Should have been "Lee's firetrap"! Iacocca and his money-driven cohorts at Ford are murderous lowlifes! Read the details of this sordid business here:


A 1991 law review paper by Gary Schwartz[17] claimed the case against the Pinto was less clear-cut than commonly supposed. The number who died in Pinto rear-impact fires, according to Schwartz, was well below the hundreds cited in contemporary news reports and closer to the twenty-seven recorded by a limited National Highway Traffic Safety Administration database. Given the Pinto's production figures (over 2 million built), this was not substantially worse than typical for the time. Schwartz argued that the car was no more fire-prone than other cars of the time, that its fatality rates were lower than comparably sized imported automobiles, and that the supposed "smoking gun" document that plaintiffs claimed showed Ford's callousness in designing the Pinto was actually a document based on National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulations about the value of a human life rather than a document containing an assessment of Ford's potential tort liability." Doofus Big Grin



Oh, thank you so much. It is such a relief to learn that Iacocca and Co. and their combustible Pinto only burned 27 innocent people to death!

By the way, the Schwartz article is not the exoneration your little paste-up claims. Here is a more thorough explication on the combustible Pinto matter, with an excerpt below:

http://www.bloomingtonwilpf.or...FriendsinDetroit.pdf

"The most famous incident was decided in a California case in 1981, Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Co. In 1972 a woman invited her neighbor, a 13-year-old boy named Richard Grimshaw, for a ride in her new Pinto. As they drove along a freeway a carburetor problem stalled the car, bringing it to a halt in the middle lane. The following car appears to have slowed, but struck the Pinto in the rear at perhaps 30 miles per hour. The Pinto caught fire, and the driver died. Passenger Grimshaw survived, but was badly burned and endured dozens of operations as a result of his injuries. A national publication broke a Pulitzer Prizewinning story which suggested that Ford management had omitted inexpensive safeguards in the design of the Pinto because they would have cost more than the legal defense against claims of negligence. The trial judge declined to admit the evidence supporting that claim into the court proceedings, but the story was widely circulated. The final decision awarded Grimshaw compensatory damages of $2.5 million, and punitive damages of $3.5 million.
Ten years later attorney Gary Schwartz revisited the decision in a law review article in which he contended that the evidence against Ford was not so compelling as popularly believed. He based this claim primarily on comparisons with other subcompact contemporaries of the Pinto, both foreign and domestic. It is not clear whether Schwartz’s conclusion is to be taken as an exoneration of Pinto or a condemnation of its contemporaries. Schwartz might have clarified the matter by determining whether the simple fix effectuated by the factory recall improved the Pinto’s safety record, and whether later subcompact designs were safer than Pinto and its contemporaries. Another question that might have been raised was why the carburetor, a highly refined and reliable device that should not have failed as it did, nevertheless failed in the Grimshaw Pinto.

http://www.bloomingtonwilpf.org/localagenda/OurFriendsinDetroit.pdf

It is definitely not to Ford's credit that they lied about the crash testing of this death trap:

"This scenario is no news to Ford. Internal company documents in our possession show that Ford has crash-tested the Pinto at a top-secret site more than 40 times and that every test made at over 25 mph without special structural alteration of the car has resulted in a ruptured fuel tank. Despite this, Ford officials denied under oath having crash-tested the Pinto."

LINK:http://motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto-madness

Consider also:

Ford engineers knew that the Pinto’s gas tank design was susceptible to explosions from rear-end collisions, mainly from previous experience with the Capri, a European car produced by Ford on which this problem had occurred and had been fixed. In rear-end collision tests, a Capri with a rear-mounted tank was susceptible to gas tank rupture in impacts as low as 20 miles per hour. This problem was corrected on the Capri by mounting the tank over the differential, which resulted in no tank rupture after rear-end impacts as high as 30 miles per hour. For actually noted the Capri’s safer fuel tank location in its advertising."

SOURCE:Charles B. Fleddermann, Engineering Ethics, 2 ed., Prentice Hall, 2004, pp. 72-73
Last edited by beternU
quote:
Originally posted by pineywoodscat:
quote:
Originally posted by JerrySmith:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/iacocca.asp

Not entirely accurate. I thought I remembered seeing him interviewed on his book tour before Obama was President.


PICKY. PICKY, PICKY. By dang you understood it didn't you? It is a long read, but someone needs to take up the mantle and carry this Nation forward. It is NOT the NITWIT and his legion of pee-brains either.



Not really, I was simply pointing out that all of this info wasn't directed at "the nitwit" at all.
quote:
Originally posted by beternU:
Yes, I remember KILLER Iacocca. He was the big dog at Chrysler when the company decided that it would be better--meaning more co$t effective(!)--to let a few innocent people burn to death in Ford Pintos rather than to modify the vehicle's design, at a grand cost of $11 per vehicle, to keep the gas tank from rupturing in a collision as a result of being pushed up against the differential housing. Yeah, I remember that scumbag.

"Fighting strong competition from Volkswagen for the lucrative small car market, the
Ford Motor Company rushed the Pinto Into production in much less than the usual time. Ford
engineers discovered in pre-production crash tests that rear-end collisions would rupture the
Pinto's fuel system extremely easily. Because assembly-line machinery was already tooled when
engineers found this defect, top Ford officials decided to manufacture the car anyway –
exploding gas tank and all – even though Ford owned the patent on a much safer gas tank.
For more than eight years afterwards, Ford successfully lobbied, with extraordinary vigor
and some blatant lies, against a key government safety standard that would have forced the
company to change the Pinto's fire-prone gas tank." The Pinto came to be known at Ford as "Lee's car." Should have been "Lee's firetrap"! Iacocca and his money-driven cohorts at Ford are murderous lowlifes! Read the details of this sordid business here:

http://sociology101.net/readings/Pinto-Madness.pdf


Once again old bitter is attacking the messenger and not the message. Bitter, what part of the message would you like to refute?
quote:
Originally posted by ferrellj:
The points are entirely accurate. The actual quote has been changed, but the points are still good.


The quote was HEAVILY edited to omit some very powerful criticism of George W. Bush and Republicans. The version posted is a DISHONEST representation of what Iacocca actually said. Changing the "actual quote" is no small thing when you compare the original with the highly selective editing performed on it by scheming weasels who want to use Iacocca's reputation to advance their ideology. Maybe the edited version was produced by the same dirtbag who "edited" (i.e. DISTORTED) quotes from Obama's book to make it seem like he pledged to "stand with the Muslims" when he said nothing of the sort.

SHAME on folks who are so flagrantly dishonest that they find nothing wrong with perpetrating this kind of deception.
quote:
Originally posted by pineywoodscat:
quote:
Originally posted by JerrySmith:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/iacocca.asp

Not entirely accurate. I thought I remembered seeing him interviewed on his book tour before Obama was President.


PICKY. PICKY, PICKY. By dang you understood it didn't you? It is a long read, but someone needs to take up the mantle and carry this Nation forward. It is NOT the NITWIT and his legion of pee-brains either.


That IS piney wood SCAT, isn't it?
quote:
Originally posted by kperk014:
I think it would be smart to remember that this whole rhubarb was started by a cranky old, bitter buttturd who found it necessary to attack someone who, even dimocrats were attaching their hopes on his ability to save Chrysler. Of course he did and how quickly some of idiots on here forget.


Let's see: Score for saving Chrysler A
Score for burning people A++++ (much better at human incineration!)
quote:
Originally posted by beternU:
quote:
Originally posted by kperk014:
I think it would be smart to remember that this whole rhubarb was started by a cranky old, bitter buttturd who found it necessary to attack someone who, even dimocrats were attaching their hopes on his ability to save Chrysler. Of course he did and how quickly some of idiots on here forget.


Let's see: Score for saving Chrysler A
Score for burning people A++++ (much better at human incineration!)


Is your blindness preventing you from attacking other automakers who's cars were almost as bad?
quote:
Originally posted by kperk014:
quote:
Originally posted by beternU:
quote:
Originally posted by kperk014:
I think it would be smart to remember that this whole rhubarb was started by a cranky old, bitter buttturd who found it necessary to attack someone who, even dimocrats were attaching their hopes on his ability to save Chrysler. Of course he did and how quickly some of idiots on here forget.


Let's see: Score for saving Chrysler A
Score for burning people A++++ (much better at human incineration!)


Is your blindness preventing you from attacking other automakers who's cars were almost as bad?


Ahem--lest you forget--or lest your OWN blindness has confused you--this string was begun by someone posting an item that focused not on any "other automakers" but upon Lee Iacocca. Unlike you, I try to stay on topic and not to berate others who do the same. I suppose you might have been satisfied if I had posted a treatise exploring the entire realm of 1970s-1980s miscreant behavior by all American automakers. Sorry, Bub, but I haven't the time for that enormous task.

Thanks for the lunch!
quote:
Originally posted by beternU:
quote:
Originally posted by kperk014:
quote:
Originally posted by beternU:
quote:
Originally posted by kperk014:
I think it would be smart to remember that this whole rhubarb was started by a cranky old, bitter buttturd who found it necessary to attack someone who, even dimocrats were attaching their hopes on his ability to save Chrysler. Of course he did and how quickly some of idiots on here forget.


Let's see: Score for saving Chrysler A
Score for burning people A++++ (much better at human incineration!)


Is your blindness preventing you from attacking other automakers who's cars were almost as bad?


Ahem--lest you forget--or lest your OWN blindness has confused you--this string was begun by someone posting an item that focused not on any "other automakers" but upon Lee Iacocca. Unlike you, I try to stay on topic and not to berate others who do the same. I suppose you might have been satisfied if I had posted a treatise exploring the entire realm of 1970s-1980s miscreant behavior by all American automakers. Sorry, Bub, but I haven't the time for that enormous task.

Thanks for the lunch!



bub, I don't defend anyone as being perfect 'cause they aint' no sucha thang . Just because Iacocca is Conservative, you felt driven to paint him as the devil. You've got a much worse devil to confront, bub. He's staring at you in the mirror every morning. People of your ilk cause innocent people to be killed everyday because of your coddling of criminals so make a fiery post and brand yourself. Wink

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