The question is does Toyota need any excuses for the defects in their products that
caused a record recall? I say NO! I am not the only person bouncing around the world wide web who can recall that some 20 odd years ago the FORD Pinto caused much bigger problems and many more deaths and that company was NOT good enough to affect a recall.

The rationale for FORD has become famous for college business ethics classes
and was highlighted in the 1999 movie Fight Club.   So, before Edward Norton as
the unidentified main character found his imaginary friend Tyler Derden, he was
going about his vocation of paying off for auto manufacturing defects one by one
because over all it was cheaper than a recall.

And FORD’s rationale went something like this:

Exhibit One: Ford’s Cost/Benefit Analysis
Benefits and Costs Relating to Fuel  Leakage
Associated with the Static Rollover
Test Portion of FMVSS 208

180 burn deaths, 180 serious burn injuries,
2100 burned vehicles
Unit Cost:  $200,000 per death, $67,000 per injury, $700 per vehicle
180 x ($200,000) + 180 x ($67,000) +
2100 x ($700) = $49.5 Million

11,000,000 x ($11) + 1,500,000  = $137 Million
original profit on cars sold; subtract
49.5 million from that, and there is still
a reasonable profit

From Ford Motor Company internal memorandum: “Fatalities Associated
with Crash­-Induced Fuel Leakage and Fires.” Source: Douglas Birsch and
John H. Fielder, THE FORD PINTO CASE: A STUDY IN APPLIED ETHICS.
BUSINESS, AND TECHNOLOGY. p. 28.1994.

Contrasted with the PINTO from FORD of some years ago, the Prius from
Toyota looks good.  The company recalled to correct, and the head of the company
went before congress voluntarily to apologize.  Still the Toyota brand is
the largest selling in the world.

Ben Bernanke with Hank Paulson made TARP happen as reported in The New Yorker.
I have thought that print magazine to be of the highest literary quality for some years,
but more recently, there appears from time to time monumental journalism as
in the case of Sy Hersh and, with the piece I now focus on, James B. Stewart.

I like Ben Bernanke.  He is well-studied and from my home state of Georgia.

I had never liked George W. Bush in even the smallest way until his noble gesture.
However, he was the President of the United States.  The ghost of Harry Truman would have me respect the man for the office held even if I cannot for the qualities of the man himself or the lack of some qualities.  Bush was or is known as a man we might want to sit down and chat with, say in Starbucks, since he does not consume alcohol.  I would not want to sit and chat with him and considered him the one president in my entire lifetime not as intelligent as myself.  But, I am here to point out his very noble gesture that I know about
from James B. Stewart’s piece in The New Yorker.

With my family, I really enjoyed our last time in New York, and we stayed
at the Algonquin Hotel which has some sort of connection (like wallpaper) to
The New Yorker magazine.  Staying at that hotel, one can find complimentary
copies of that magazine in the room.  Weeks later I got around to reading
the piece entitled EIGHT DAYS by James B. Stewart from the September 21st 2009 issue.
It was about how the Bush administration had managed the financial crisis of about
a year earlier.   It was a crisis greater than politicians of George Bush’s party
would now like to admit.

According to the piece which was incredibly dense with detail, it all started
with trying to save but not saving Lehman Brothers.  Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke pulled in the players and grouped them and re-grouped them and asked them to solve these problems while those other problems were adding links to a chain.   An un- named Treasury official quoted by Stewart said it this way:    Lehman Brothers begat the Reserve collapse which begat the money market run, so the money-market funds wouldn’t buy commercial paper.
The commercial paper market was on the brink of destruction.
At this point the banking system stops functioning   …
Suddenly, you have a global bank holiday. Nobody knew about the problems at A.I.G.
That subject  just popped up during the course of those eight days.

Bernanke and Paulson in the end engineered T.A.R.P., and the world bottomed out which means that they just kept confidence in important institutions from going any lower.  Most of the people in Congress who voted in favor of T.A.R.P. would live to blame it on President Obama, but why not give credit rather than point blame. Give credit to both Bush and Obama.  It was necessary!

Here is the nobility:   Page 76 of that New Yorker piece, third column over midway down:

You’re the experts, and I’ll support you, says the President

Paulson launched into a discussion of political issues, and the need to
win over conservative Republicans as well as the Democratic leadership.

Hank, let me worry about the politics.  You do what is right, says the President.

There is the nobility.  Am I the only one who can see it.  People, who after the fact think that T.A.R.P. was a bad idea just because it was too much spending, need to know that that spending saved the world from another Depression.  Give credit not blame for that.  Now there is the faction of the Republican Party that knows T.A.R.P. was necessary AND another faction that wants to forget Bush AND yet another faction that wants to have a tea party with the Mad Hater.

New York Times rejected my Op-Ed piece,
so here I publish it myself:

Ultimate Japanese Irony

I am an American living in Japan, and maybe I say that too often, so here
is something I haven’t said already: I am definitely not a professional diplomat nor
any expert on international relations. Without such expertise, I am claiming to know more about political moods in Japan than most people who have officially represented the United States of America to the country of Japan. If you’ve been making a list of negative things left over from the Bush administration, please add renegotiating a status of forces agreement with Japan.

In case I was hinting around too much or was somehow vague, let me state out right
that I most probably understand the stance of the government and people of Japan more
than Howard Baker, the first Bush era ambassador and J. Thomas Schieffer, the second
ambassador.   No brag, just fact. But, don’t let that shake anyone up because
it is common to appoint ambassadors for no reason
other than hey, lemme do ya a favor

Yukio Hatoyama is the new Prime Minister of Japan.   Of course, he is a nice guy.
Junichiro Koizumi was a nice guy.   Koizumi was popular and therefore in office for
some years. We had a couple of short-timers between Koizumi and Hatoyama.
Those two were from the same party as Koizumi. Koizumi and his party, which had been in power for the majority of the time since WWII, became UNpopular even more suddenly than Bush and his party.

Here is the ultimate irony. Many Americans sincerely believe that
the Japanese constitution was written by or at least dictated by officials from
the United States after the war. The only parts that were dictated by, most probably,
MacArthur himself were the part that reduced the power of the emperor and the part that
said war can no longer be used to solve our problems. The irony is that the most conservative people of this country, the ones whose fathers or grandfathers would have wanted the emperor to be involved in policy, totally embrace the war-renouncing
passages of the Japanese constitution.

Did you reach out and touch what I’m saying? American conservatives seem
to like war, but Japanese conservatives absolutely do not. The people in power are
not as extreme as my tone here, but they do want to RENEGOTIATE. As if relations between countries were like an American professional athlete’s with his team.

I am going to assume that the United States has a status of forces agreement
with any and all countries wherein there are any American military installations.
Here is the chain of events. In early summer of 2008, the Iraqi parliament rejected
a status of forces agreement proposed by the U.S. that would have kept troops
there indefinitely. It required all of the months to the end of the Bush administration
to get the kind of agreement that the Iraqi parliament could agree to, one whose
timetable is being followed by the Obama administration, and all troops
are expected to be out in another year or 16 months? Is that accurate, hope so.

Imagine the Japanese reaction: All American troops will be out of that country?
When will most American troops be out of this country.

I honestly don’t know if the newest status of forces agreement
for Japan is already in effect, but I am pretty sure that no funds have
been spent. What funds do you think I mean? I mean that the U.S. military
expects the Japanese government to pay for relocation of bases to less
populated areas. This was negotiated when Junichiro Koizumi was
still Prime Minister, and Don Rumsfeld was still running the Pentagon.

Japanese people like America. Take that to mean American pop culture or just culture.
They will still tell you this is Japan. Take that to mean “We are our own country” which is
nothing more than what Americans like to say of themselves and their country.

May 15, 1972 was when Okinawa was returned to Japanese rule,
and that is now where the local people are most disturbed by what
is not supposed to be but seems like the continued occupation.
Other installations can much more easily be tolerated.
The heart of the matter for the renegotiation would be the Marines
on Okinawa. Of course, an American base helps the local economy just
like back in the States, but the people would give that up to get relief
from the intrusion. this is Japan

In Japan symbolism is powerful. Do Americans know that there were Japanese troops in Iraq?   They were in the City of Samawah for almost two years, and there was flying troops of other countries in from Kuwait, and now there is a refueling mission in the Indian Ocean in support of American efforts in Afghanistan. These symbolize violations of the constitution according to everyone counted as politically conservative in Japan. The Katoyama government in Japan has notified the Obama administration that that Indian Ocean operation will be discontinued as the new year gets under way because yearly legislation is required to keep it in place, and such legislation will not be submitted for the new year and beyond.
President Obama is comfortable with that.

The new ambassador to Japan from the U.S. is California lawyer John Roos,
and he recently visited the Peace Park and Memorial in Hiroshima, and he expressed
that he would like President Obama to do the same. If Barack Obama were to visit
that place, he would be the first sitting U.S. President to do so certainly since
the bombings. I know that Jimmy Carter signed the guest book there
after having left office.

It would be difficult for Barack Obama to speak, as he would be expected
to do, at the peace park if Japanese people might be thinking about a continued
occupation negotiated by Rumsfeld. It would be very appropriate for Barack Obama to speak at the peace park since the Nobel people listened so well when he said that
he wanted to eliminate nuclear weapons in the world.