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.