Frank Oresnik's Chevy truck dubbed ‘old girl’ recently passed the one million-mile mark thanks to an engine built in Flint.
"This engine is a real marvel," Oresnik said in a telephone interview with The Flint Journal. "It keeps this truck going and going. I'm a complete booster of the job your men and women did on my engine."
Officials at General Motors Corp. said the engine in Oresnik's Chevy Silverado was manufactured at the former Flint V-8 Engine Plant off Van Slyke Road, which ceased production in 1999 and was demolished a year thereafter.
The durability of the engine is not surprising to V-8 workers. Actually, some of them are still building said engines at Flint Engine South, a plant situated on the same General Motors property. "They were good engines," UAW Local 659 shop chairman Joe Ledford said of the V-8 that powered Oresnik's truck. "That's all we've ever done is build engines."
Oresnik has been in the news for quite a while now. He hit the one million-mile milestone in southeastern Wisconsin with a National Public Radio audience listening in and a camera crew filming. "I can't tell you how much fun it was," Oresnik noted. "It was really humbling, all this interest."
Oresnik passed the million-mile mark Feb. 8 in southeastern Wisconsin while on his way back home to Catawba, located in Price County, about an hour west of Rhinelander, reported MLive. "I won't say it was relief ... it was exhilarating," he said later during a stop in Gresham. "This truck has been so dependable over the years."
Oresnik said there has been some interested in General Motors or Shell Oil buying the truck. But he said he has interest in taking a roadtrip to Michigan and meeting workers who built the engine in Flint as well as those who assembled his truck in Pontiac.
John Crabtree, Flint Engine South's plant manager, said in an e-mail that Oresnik would not be disappointed if he visited some of the "greatest engine building talent in the world today."
"I was extremely proud to be the plant manager of the V-8 plant," Crabtree concluded. "Whether we're talking about the eight cylinders that we built then, the world-class six cylinders that the same workforce makes today, or any engine that GM needs for tomorrow. ...This is just another reminder that our Flint South team is always up to the challenge.”
According to a recent report from the Associated Press, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate $92 billion in lost wages annually in the United States from smokers who die prematurely. The article also states the economic cost of smoking includes $75.5 billion per year in direct health care costs.
Several employers are desperately trying to help their workers break the smoking habit, not just for their health care costs but also for the general well being of their employees, long after they have left the company. Even ABC’s popular Boston Legal aired an episode recently about an employer trying to assert authority over an employee to stop smoking in an effort to lower health costs.
Some companies have found the services of breakthrough smoke cessation programs. The approach has helped thousands in Europe rid the smoking habit and has seen early success in its infancy in New York.
Rick Tejpaul spearheads one such program. He states,“Health costs and lost wages, along with productivity have recently been under the microscope due to smoking habits of the American workforce.” He continues, “In the last few weeks we have been called by quite a few companies asking us to come in and help their workforce with the process of quitting smoking.”
There are companies that are contemplating increasing the premiums for their smoking workers. Most do not want to get to this point. Decision makers within corporate are willing to pay for smoke cessation programs. Smoking is at an all time low in this country and individuals, corporations and the medical field are seeking support. All that is required is a motivated person who wants to quit.
For more information on this European, patented method please visit www.nicocess.com for more information.
Dr. Evelyn Heredia-Eckerle is a Family Chiropractor. She is a Member of the ICA(International Chiropractic Association), and Director of Phoenix Chiropractic and Wellness Center. The center is located at 288 Hempstead Avenue, West Hempstead, NY 11552. You may contact her at: drevelyn@hotmail.com or visit: http://www.phoenixwellnesspc.com.
Article Source: ezinearticles.comAmerican exceptionalism is the notion that the Americans have a distinct and special destiny different from that of other nations and is the single most powerful force in forming the American identity; the identity formed throughout history, aimed at maintaining superiority and aspiring to leadership. This way the Americans have got a sense of mission to fulfill, not only as part of their national identity, but also as an inseparable element of their international role as a leader. But this sense of mission exceeds far beyond the reality that the US administration is the world’s military master who leads wars and manages disputes, eradicates communism and establishes democracy, as part of its hard power.
It farther entails soft power strategies the US administration sincerely follows in the international field of power. As Joseph Nye states, soft power plays a role in the domain of “intangible power resources such as culture, values, identity, and institution” to “get others want what it wants” (qtd. in. Evelyn Goh, p. 79). This means bringing unity in others’ ideas and ideals in line with the American interests. To reach this end first it should persuade others to believe in its difference and superiority, and then have its so-called ‘values’ distributed all over the world, in order to establish them as the best values for humanity. Through these games of power, then, US administration makes advantage of this national sense of mission to accomplish its international ends.
Exceptionality, as Paul T. McCartney (2004, p. 401) states, emerges two impulses associated with; exemplarism and vindicationism. By exemplarism it is meant that the Americans want to set a model for all others, according to their ideals and values, which are believed to be far superior than the others’ and also in line with the essential values of mankind. Democracy, for example, is not an American value to which others are unfamiliar or unwilling to accept. However the Americans identify democracy with their own values and virtues and this way try to propagate American democracy all over the world. Vindicationism means to change the world in a way to think and act more and more like the Americans. Others must accept American democracy with its necessary elements, in order to transcend. However, the essence of exceptionalism is maintaining superiority all over the rest and making them its followers. But the only viable way to achieve this superiority for the Americans is by canonizing their cultural products.
Canonization, primarily the concept of exclusively presenting some works of literature as valuable, is applicable to any other cultural product. Since any cultural product may not find a place in the world’s canon, a tremendously huge investment project is needed for it to gain the membership. In addition, to maintain the membership, the product should have certain characteristics, without which it would turn out to have no values. These characteristics are, according to Harold Bloom (1995, p.3), strangeness and originality added to beauty. To add to the formula he provides for canonicity, I find multi-layered-ness necessary for a cultural product to end up in the canon. Any cultural product having, or at least pretending to have such characteristics will find a place in the international taste and will survive; these are American products, labeled with American values, which should survive to help this country achieve its goal as the world’s leader, with the least costs and injuries.
Cultural products, ranging from American clothing style to American movies, from American foods to American poems, from American advertisements to American music, should have exotic qualities in order to draw attentions, and at the same time to reaffirm American values as the best. They should be original in terms of representing American ideas to the audience. The peoples all over the world should find it a novel experience in their lifetimes of dreaming for better, aspiring for solutions and enjoying transcendent feelings.
Beauty is the second element in selling a cultural product to peoples, as canonical. By beauty is meant aesthetic American values. But the yardstick for beauty in the so-called ‘culture industry’ is not necessarily humane or spiritual. The producers have discovered that by providing colorful pictures of romance, depicting masculine strength and feminine tenderness they would achieve what they are after: attracting audiences all over the world. Even they have come to the conclusion that by mythologizing these aspects they would glue the consumers to what they provide them with.
Finally, any canonical product is to have several layers of meaning and applicability in order to attract the widest range of audiences at the same time. The producers are wise enough not to overlook the issue of cost-effectiveness; i.e. satisfying millions by paying the least and receiving the most. They intimately are aware that to appease the thirst of millions of people with different, and sometimes contending, cultural backgrounds, ideas and ideals, religious beliefs and ideologies, monetary budgets and lifestyles they should offer something of utility; otherwise they will be losers, both commercially and politically.
Having provided all these elements in a cultural product, the producer will assure himself and the whole American system that the product will enter the cultural canon. Then the result would be most satisfying and not only the sense of mission Americans feel is fulfilled, but also the US administration will have others want what it wants, in the most peaceful way.
However a question remains unanswered and that is ‘whether these are achieved so easily?’ billions of dollars are invested annually, millions of people work hard all the time to provide new ideas, researches are conducted all through continents, and new movements are created and the old ones die recurrently to achieve this end. Hundreds of billion dollars go to American companies annually, hundreds of million people compete to compete hard to achieve the standards, ideas are changed into what the powerful want, and people are drowned in the new movements, for those in power to become more powerful. But the Americans are ignorant of others’ awareness. Not everybody buys American values today.
References: Bloom, Harold 1995. The Western Canon (New York: McMillan) Goh, Evelyn 2003. Hegemonic Constraints: the implications of 11 September for American power. Australian Journal of International Affairs, 57, 79. McCartney, T. Paul 2004. American Nationalism and U.S. Foreign Policy from September 11 to the Iraq War. Political Sciences Quarterly, 119, 401.
Article Source: ezinearticles.com|
|