Richard Keith Latman - The Blog

Obama's Middle East Speech = Worthless

Barack Obama had a head start when he stepped onto the stage in Cairo on Thursday. He had already pledged a "new beginning" to the American people, and now the same grand concept was on offer to the Muslim world: the policies of the Bush administration, in other words, were history. The symbolism was better too. It wasn't just the fact that an American president whose middle name is Hussein was extending a hand to his father's coreligionists, but also that among those in attendance in Cairo were representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood as well as some Egyptian dissidents. Both groups had been conspicuously absent from Condoleezza Rice's 2005 speech in Cairo, which was delivered at American University 

The president also came off much better than George W. Bush did with his own big outreach speech in January 2008, delivered from the opulent Emirates Palace hotel in Abu Dhabi to an audience of sleepy petro-moguls. Obama's choice citations from the "holy Qur'an"—"Whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind"—worked well. So did his deft historical references to Islam's role in "paving the way for Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment." To loud applause, he even pronounced "Assalamu alaikum" correctly.

Still, as Obama himself seemed to acknowledge, his speech won't have a shelf life of more than a few days unless it is accompanied by real policy changes. There have been some signs of that, notably the administration's stark rhetoric toward Israel about freezing West Bank settlements and the president's commitment to withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2011. But this is really only the beginning. For if Obama's outreach is ever to amount to anything more than swiftly forgotten words, he needs to begin to roll back nearly a century's worth of Arab-Western history.

Let's start with now. Israel and the Palestinians are still dug in against each other, and Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri seized the moment to remind their fellow Muslims that Obama's "elegant words" can't disguise the fact that the president is pushing Pakistan to drive Muslim militants out of Swat. Beyond that, the Muslim Brotherhood and other dissident groups are still banned from politics. Obama's glad-handing with Saudi King Abdullah and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak were reminders that the fundamental political structure of the Arab world hasn't changed.

Obama delivered some fine-sounding sentiments on how governing through "consent, not coercion" and providing "the freedom to live as you choose ... are not just American ideas. They are human rights. And that is why we will support them everywhere." But that sounded all too similar to Bush's oft-repeated assertion that democracy is not "America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to mankind," and Rice's declaration in Cairo that "democracy is the ideal path for every nation."

The president was right to focus on the essential "truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap and share common principles, principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings." Despite bin Laden's rants about grievances going back to the Crusades, the enmity between the West and the Arab world is a relatively modern phenomenon. As Fawaz Gerges, a scholar at Sarah Lawrence College, told me a few years back, there have been many "interalliances between the world of Islam and the West. There has never been a Muslim umma, or community, except for 23 years during the time of Muhammad. Except in the theoretical minds of the jihadists, the Muslim world was always split. Many Muslim leaders even allied themselves with the Crusaders."

No, the enmity between the West and the Arab world really began nearly 100 years ago with the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, by which the British and French agreed to divvy up the Arabic-speaking countries after World War I. Things got progressively worse after the creation, by the Europeans, of corrupt, kleptocratic tyrannies in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Jordan; the endemic poverty and underdevelopment that resulted for most of the 20th century; the U.N.-imposed creation of Israel in 1948; and finally, in recent decades, American support for this status quo.

Obama can't begin to undo even a little of this, which means that his fine words in Cairo are likely to be remembered as just that—words.

Would You Buy a Car from Barack Obama?

The real test of Barack Obama's sex appeal is coming soon to an automobile showroom near you - Would you buy a new car from this man?

The president has given his personal warranty on cars from Detroit - if a fuel pump on your new Pontiac falls apart and the dealer won't make it good, just call the White House and ask for the president. Happy days are here again.

The transformation of the American automobile industry into a government operation, managed from Europe, may be the preview of how Mr. Obama intends to remake America in the image of the Old Country. London's Financial Times reported Monday that Sergio Marchionne, the chief executive of Fiat, has big plans for consolidating Fiat, Chrysler and General Motors Europe into an enormous new publicly traded European car company.

Joining the Opel, Vauxhall and Saab models from GM with Fiat and Chrysler would create a company that could generate revenues of $106 billion annually on sales of 7 million cars, making Fiat/Opel, as the company would be called, second only to Toyota as the world's largest automobile company. Note the weasel words "would" and "could."

"From an engineering and industrial point of view," Mr. Marchionne told the newspaper, "this is a marriage made in heaven." Mr. Marchionne says the new company would reap "synergies" by borrowing, merging and adapting the various models. But "synergies" don't always translate to good cars. Nobody walks into a showroom to kick the tires of synergy.

All hail Fiat/Chrysler, of course, and may all the little Fiats run forever. But Fiat's reputation in America is not great; those who remember them at all remember Fiats are underpowered tin cans, shoddy and unaccountably ugly given the Italian gift of good design, tolerable for the relatively short distances typical of European road trips. But not at all happy with running at high speeds on the interstates all day, 600 miles from dawn to a destination in early evening.

The Fiat scheme, like most European ventures into the marketplace, requires a caress from the dead hand of government. Mr. Marchionne must first persuade the governments in Britain, Germany and others where Opels, Fiats, Vauxhalls and Saabs are built under the GM umbrella to lend a hand - and a lot of cash. The "market" is mistrusted in the European social-welfare states because it swiftly and efficiently separates winners and losers.

GM and Chrysler collapsed just as they have actually begun to build good cars. The automakers are learning to their considerable pain that destroying a reputation - a "brand," in the pretentious jargon of the marketing men - is a lot easier than building one. Putting together loans backed by greedy governments will be considerably easier than fixing what went wrong in Detroit. The further irony is that the United Auto Workers, which extracted the featherbed contracts a quarter of a century ago that doomed GM and Chrysler, will now hold a majority stake in Chrysler and a slightly smaller stake in GM.

We'll see now how the UAW deals with self-abuse. In the early '70s GM imagined that it could stay rich forever selling junk if only it could avoid strikes that shut down the junk-assembly lines. So it agreed to anything the unions demanded.

Then the Japanese arrived with cars of modest size and high quality; the impact on Detroit was of a reprise of Pearl Harbor. This time there was no wake-up call. Good times continued in the junkyard. Soon the Japanese were through with lunch and beginning to sup on Detroit's dinner.

The news Monday from Tokyo was hardly heartening for Detroit. The Japanese car factories have reduced a glut of inventory and are building cars in numbers again. Toyota said it built 472,000 cars in March, many of them in the United States, up 40,000 over February. Honda and Nissan said they built more cars in March, too. Toyota, which has replaced GM as the world's biggest auto manufacturer, has negotiated a 26-percent cut in the wages of its union workers and announced Monday that it would cut bonuses for nonunion managers by 60 percent.

"Buying American" is not as simple as it once was; Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Hyundai, BMW and Mercedes are built in America, too. Buying from GM and Chrysler may be an act of good citizenship, anyway. But if you buy a Pontiac Vibe or a Chrysler convertible, keep Barack Obama's telephone number at hand.

iMagicLab Credibility or My Credibility or Something Like That ;)

I haven't written about the Microworkz days in a while but once again there is some moron on the web writing a bunch of crap about who I am or what iMagicLab is. I guess it goes without saying that when you put yourself out into the media or public eye you have to be prepared to take or shot or two. Those faithful readers of this BLOG know that I've taken more than my share over the past decade and my decisions as a young guy will color who I am forever. As I've written before: Don't judge a person by the way they fall, judge them by the way they get up.

I am actually very proud of the way I learned from my mistakes in life and maybe just for a moment I'd like to get on my soapbox and tell you about a few. Those that have read here for a long time maybe go on to the Obama post, it's much more fun :)

1. iMagicLab or iCarMagic is the exact opposite of Microworkz.com. At Microworkz we billed first for hardware, built the hardware and then tried to deliver. At iMagicLab we spent years building the product FIRST, making sure we could deliver BEFORE we were paid and now our reputation amoung our customers is impeccable. Run iMagicLab with the BBB, with the courts, with whatever forum you wish: A perfect record and a lesson clearly learned.

2. Our business model is pay as you go at iMagicLab and there is never a contract or commitment. Again the point is we promise what we deliver each and every day to our customers: Another lesson learned.

3. iMagicLab employs seasoned professionals across the organization and not the young agressive folks we had at Microworkz.com. Don't get me wrong, our Microworkz staff worked hard every day, but this time I chose people with a track record of success in every department: Do I have to say it again? Lesson learned.

You know, it hit me very hard back in 2000 when then Judge Overstreet said that bankruptcy was for honest debtors and I wasn't being honest. It was not only true (I hid my ex-wife's wedding ring from the court) but it was indicative of who I was at the time. Those words were the proverbial "rock bottom" for me and, like the story goes, there was only one direction I could go. Another lesson learned and it set the stage for the great success that is iMagicLab.

Now, we're not perfect here at iMagicLab and no software ever is. Over the past 5 years we've served tens of thousands of users every day, grown to be one of the largest CRM companies aimed at the automobile retailer and are certainly the technology leader in our field. Our customers are loyal, the team is fanatical and our products speak for themselves.

I got up from my failure and I'm proud to be standing tall... this is the last time I am going to write about the subject. Next? I'm thinking politics....