|
From the desk of Michael Burns
This morning, I’m not here to spout my personal opinion, or try to get anyone to open their minds on a subject. I’m here to let our listeners know that something very important to them, important to all of us, is about to be taken away.
It was about three years ago, maybe a little more, that a very unusual man, a doctor, walked into the office at Dave Nemo Entertainment. Now, we have people visit here all the time, and a lot of them come here to tell us why we think Dave Nemo Entertainment should be associated with or support their business.
But this man was different, and his idea was different. He wanted to talk about truckers the state of their health, and the lack of health care facilities accessible to them. But, more importantly, he was prepared to do something about it, himself. He was ready to put his personal reputation and his personal wealth on the line to make a difference. And he kept his word, he made good on his promise.
If you will think back three years, even though truckers all over the country were dealing with very serious health problems, you never heard a word about it. We were the invisible part of America with health problems no one was aware of, a no way to make it better.
Now, you cannot pick up a newspaper or a magazine or listen to a radio show without hearing someone trying to address the problem. Do you remember the missing driver reports? Do you remember what was the conclusion of most of those missing driver reports? Truckers were dying in their trucks, in truck stops, away from their homes and their families. I could be wrong, but do those incidents seem to be less frequent than they used to be?
We have gone from a group of people who knew everything about the truck we drive and nothing about the body we live in, to people who know their blood pressure, their BMI, their blood glucose levels, and the amount of calories they consume in a day. Truckers are involved in exercise programs, weight loss cooperatives and walking clubs. And when a driver needs attention, there are places where he or she can go, and get help.
What kind of help? Well, you know most of it. Blood test, diagnosis, advice, counseling and referrals. What you may NOT know, is that because of the work of Dr. John McElligott and his staff at PDMD drivers have received help in special arrangements that have been made with other associated health care providers and hospitals across the country, who understand and admire the work of PDMD clinic staff, to receive surgery worth millions of dollars, top-flight health care, and intercession with life-threatening diseases. Many times that has been done at a fraction of the normal cost, because it was personally negotiated on the driver’s behalf by Dr. John himself.
Why am I bringing this all up? Because at this moment, as you are driving down the highway, the very existence of PDMD clinics is hanging in the balance. Unless the traffic through these clinics, places that drivers get treated with care and respect, increases immediately, the investors will have to make the decision to close them, take their losses, and pay the creditors who made the first five clinics of the planned 80 a reality. Let me tell you a little about these investors, before you draw the wrong conclusion. They are, to the person, people who got into this because they wanted o improve the state of health of all the professional drivers in America.. They have emptied their bank accounts, some of them have sold cars, property, mortgaged their homes, and even sold their homes to make these clinics a reality. But, even though they want to continue this quest with all their hearts, it has reached the point where responsibility to get creditors paid must be considered. It is one of the ugly realities of doing business.
You can save this valuable resource to this industry. We don’t need concerts or benefits or fundraisers, we need each of you do something that will benefit you. All we need to do is show them how valuable these clinics are to us. Today, and I mean TODAY, and tomorrow, and over the next week, I am asking every driver passing near a PDMD clinic to stop in and do something for YOURSELF. Have you been thinking about getting a hemoglobin A1C test, a five minute test that tells you your average blood glucose level over the past 3 months. It takes about five minutes, it gives you invaluable information, and though it costs 65-68 dollars almost everywhere, it’s 30-35 dollars at PDMD. All the results are confidential, and will help you and your doctor get a plan of action to help you. Or, maybe you have thought that you ought to get a confidential sleep study done, before the FMCSA requires a sleep study – and the results immediately affect your future. A sleep study normally costs hundreds of dollars, but they are provided at PDMD to commercial drivers for $75.
If you honestly feel that PDMD clinics are of no benefit to this industry, and just another organization trying to make money off the truck drivers, then do NOTHING. They will be gone and off the lots in the very near future. However, if you feel, as we do, that PDMD clinics are one of the most valuable resources ever made available to the trucking industry, then we are asking to pull into the nearest PDMD clinic, On I-10, I-35, I-40, I-285, today. If not today, tomorrow. Be a patient, be a participant, be one of the people who saved the PDMD Clinics for yourself and for other drivers to come. After you visit, call us and tell us about your experience. Let other drivers know what a valuable resource we may lose.
· PDMD - Knoxville, TN
o Petro Stopping Center
Knoxville, TN
I-40/ I-75, Exit 369
(865) 238-0288 Office
· PDMD - West Memphis, AR
o Petro Stopping Center
West Memphis, AR
I-40, Exit 280
I-55, Exit 5
(870) 587-4186 Office
· PDMD Sleep Central: (865) 399-0926
· PDMD _ El Paso, TX.
o Petro Stopping Center
El Paso, TX
I-10, Exit 37
(915) 219-5085
· PDMD - Atlanta, GA
o Petro Stopping Center
Atlanta, GA
I-285, Exit 12
(678) 733-8301 Office
· PDMD - Laredo, TX.
o Travel Centers of America
Laredo, TX
I-35, Exit
(956) 790-8661 Office
From the desk of Michael Burns
I work diligently in my life, against my human nature, to neither give in to fear nor allow other people’s fears to influence me. But recently, I have begun to have a new fear that is all my own. Listening to the news, watching these petty protests taking place around the country, hearing people decry new projects being proposed by the new administration, I fear that we, as a nation, have forgotten how to accomplish great things.
What is going on here? Our President has stated that this country needs a high-speed rail system, and we should spend 8 billion dollars of the stimulus package to build a new high-speed rail system, creating new jobs along the way. Now first of all, it’s going to cost a LOT more than 8 Billion, so let’s just allocate 25 billion up front and see if we can come in under budget for once. Some members of congress, full of fear and trying their best to appear frugal to their constituents, say we should settle for a train that goes 125 to 150 mph and save billions, or just give up on the idea because rail transit just doesn’t work for America.
But that should not be our focus. Japan, which is barely 1000 miles from end to end, has the Bullet train (which is now more than 40 years old by the way). It travels at 227 mph and averages 164. The Japanese also have a newer Maglev train that has reached 367 mph. Germany, which is only slightly larger than the state of New Mexico, has the Transrapid which travels at 220 mph with a full load of happy, air-conditioned, comfortable passengers.
Considering the size and breadth of the United States, we need a train that travels at 600 miles per hour on electricity generated by windmills along the route, managed by its own state-of-the-art electrical grid which also benefits the communities it passes through and has a carbon footprint of ZERO. Now, you’re asking, "Are you crazy Michael Burns? That technology doesn’t exist! No one on earth has been able to do that!" Well, you’re right, it doesn’t and that should be our number one reason for setting this as our goal.
On May 25th, 1961 when President Kennedy said we would put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth, THAT technology did not exist either. But, infused with the belief that we, the people of the United States, could do ANYTHING, we set off on that quest. Just seven years later, we sat in front of our televisions spellbound, and watched as Neil Armstrong placed the first human footprint in the dusty soil of our lunar neighbor.
The first step was project Mercury. If you look at a Mercury capsule now, it looks as if it was built with spare parts purchased at Radio Shack, but it worked. Over the next years, our technology grew by giant leaps until it resulted in the ultra-sophisticated Apollo spacecraft, which is still a technological marvel forty years later.
How much did that venture cost us? The real numbers may never be known, but the best estimate I can come up with from researching records that ARE available put the cost between 30 and 35 billion 1960’s dollars which would be approximately 400 billion 2009 dollars. OUCH!! And don’t forget, the U.S. was still on the gold standard then. That was money that literally came out of our pockets, no printing up the difference, almost 2000 dollars out of the pocket of every man, woman, and child in America.
So, what did we as Americans get back for that? Well, in addition to an economy that grew at an average of 2.6% a year every year through the life of that project, we got microprocessors. Is that a big deal? If they were to disappear it would make for a very frustrating day. Your dashboard and communication systems are full of them. The modern diesel engine cannot run without them. Your improved fuel economies and higher torque-curves are a direct result of microprocessors. Additionally, your cell phone, your laptop computer, your refrigerator and cooler, your television and satellite radio receiver would not exist without them. Speaking of your satellite radio, it could only be a dream without the space program. In order to broadcast via satellite, someone had to first invent the communications satellite – a direct result of the lunar space program. Your GPS? Same answer. Those fancy digital thermometers you stick in your ear instead of someplace far less comfortable? Same answer, the space program. In fact, almost any product using the word digital came from the space program. Smoke detectors, hand-held vacuum cleaners, water filters, high-efficiency foam insulation for homes, high efficiency air-conditioning systems and heat pumps, advanced metal coatings, portable x-ray machines, pacemakers, biofeedback devices, memory-foam mattresses, even freeze-dried foods are a direct result of the space program. It is estimated for every dollar spent on the space program, seven dollars was returned to the U.S. economy in the form of new products.
A high speed rail system in the U.S. may or may not seem to be the most important thing on our national "to do" list. At least not until we run out of jet fuel or the price rises again and bankrupts our airlines. However, the time has come for us, as a nation, to strive for greatness again. It is time for Americans to amaze the world. It is time for us to stop listening to the fearful and turn to our visionaries for advice and leadership. Let’s dare to reach higher than anyone has previously dared. Let us return to a world where Popular Science outsold People magazine. Let’s dedicate ourselves to making grand ideas into realities for the rest of the world to emulate and envy. Let us lead the way at 600mph and see the rest of the world can catch up.
From the desk of Michael Burns
Of all American Industry, it would be difficult to point to one more poorly managed or more self-destructive than the American automobile industry. One has to ask the question, “How did that happen?”
The American Automobile industry was once the model for the industrialized world. In the 1940’s the automobile industry helped support the war effort and helped the world defeat fascism. Following the war years, the auto industry, fueled by cheap and plentiful oil, forged ahead with technological innovations aimed at bigger, faster, and more powerful. In the 1960’s, they made an attempt to satisfy the American tastes for monster cars and monster engines, while dabbling in “compact cars” that were smaller and more fuel efficient. At the end of a less-than-successful run of “compact” cars, the U.S. auto industry surmised that the American public didn’t like compact cars – and never could figure out why every Volkswagen Beetle shipped to the U.S. was snatched up immediately after delivery to the showroom. In the early 70’s they watched with arrogance and disdain as every Toyota Corona and Nissan pickup imported here was adopted by an American driver before the salt water was completely washed off the car.
As problems occurred due to increasingly poor quality of the American cars, as stories leaked out that auto manufacturers actually had meetings to decide how many customers had to die before it was worth their while to redesign a product they knew was defective, many Americans decided they had been duped too many times and turned their backs on American cars, many vowing never to buy another.
Trying to have it both ways, U.S. manufacturers told you it was patriotic to buy American-made cars, while they moved their manufacturing out of the United States to Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and other places, the domestic content of everything except Domestic pickups spiraling downward.
At the same time, Honda, Toyota, BMW with the Mini Cooper, Volkswagen, and Mercedes Benz with the Smart Car have all proven that small economical cars need not be cheap or junky. It was never true that we hated small economical cars, we just didn’t like the Falcon, the Comet, the Chevette, the Lark or the Vega. Does anyone listening remember the GMC Whim? The $1100 super-sub-compact that was flying off showroom floors in 2001 – gone. Does anyone remember the GM EV1 electric car? The owners almost created a cult following who actually sued GM to get their cars back. They can build them, why don’t they?
Now these same U.S. auto makers have lined up outside the Bailout Bank of the United States of America, with their hands out yelling, “Me too!” Their executives borrowed a page from Lee Iacocca’s biography and are promising they will work for $1 per year (no, they aren’t including their stock earnings or options). They are threatening “gloom and doom” the likes of which the U.S. economy has never seen if they are allowed to go out of business.
And a part of their argument may be correct. The United States represents the single largest market for new automobiles in the world. New car sales in America is a 400 billion-dollar-per-year treasure of which every manufacturer in the world wants a piece.
We as American citizens, as the actual lenders in this debacle, are forced to ask ourselves one question. Do we trust these guys? When we look back at the history of the American auto manufacturer, what do we see? Have they ever shown leadership with products that we needed or did they pander to the least sensible of our desires? Have they ever voluntarily incorporated safety features they knew would save lives, or did they wait until the Federal Government or the Insurance Industry forced their hand and mandated that those features be incorporated. Did they encourage research and experimentation, or wield their corporate wealth and political power to crush any possible competitor no matter how shaky that operation might be.
At least two of the three American auto manufacturers have the largest pool of engineering and design talent that exists anywhere. They design and manufacture automobiles that are competitive in markets all over the world. If they cannot survive, other manufacturers from around the world will rush to our shores to re-hire the auto workers and build the cars for this market. While the balance of trade, the large profits that will leave our shores for the home country of the manufacturer should concern us, it would not be unusual for congress to find a way to impose taxes and tariffs that would enable us to keep a substantial part of that money.
The auto industry’s employment practices are out-of-date, their products have become irrelevant, their facilities (except the executive offices) are anything but state-of-the-art.
They also still possess enormous clout and resources within the financial world. They are not without resources. Do they need our tax dollars? I don’t think so. If they don’t get the bailout will they really cease to exist? I don’t believe that’s true either. If the 700 Billion to 2 Trillion bailout of the financial industry hadn’t occurred would they have even considered asking for a government bailout? Probably not. I am forced to ask myself this one question. The Auto industry and the Oil industry have been connected at the hip for nearly a century. The oil industry has hundreds of billions of excess profits lying around in their coffers. If the oil industry isn’t jumping up to bail out the U.S. manufacturers, why should we?
No industry in history has ever touted the merits of the capitalistic free market system more than the American auto industry. Let them live or die by their own words.
|
