PRELUDE TO A DEFCON
7-30-98
BY TIA







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.

 
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