Toyotathud: The Ending?

Toyota Cops a Plea!

(FBI Busts Mass Murdering Foreign Conspiracy)

Wonderblog ™ Was Right All Along!

(Steve Jobs Was Right. It’s Still A Mystery What Causes Sudden Acceleration Syndrome)

All Japanese People Are Evil!

(Stepped Right Into The Nutterverse, Didn’t I?)

The Nutterverse is all a-blog and twittering with sentiments such as:

“It's funny how GM gets hit with this ignition switch recall issue and suddenly Toyota's "Sudden Unintended Acceleration" story is back in the news. An attempt to divert attention from GM's embarrassment? A pro-domestic manufacturer propaganda move?”

We here at the HIL-GLE Wonderblog™ will not be goaded into returning the fire of such obvious Jap-symps and/or under-employed Japanese students hired by PR firms to spray the web with such innuendo. All we will say is that their Posting English is much better than their Chinese and Russian counterparts. The Wonderblog™ is also pro people getting paid for writing—even if it’s LIES, even if it’s Japanese students with semi-worthless degrees in English who are doing the collecting. God Bless You, Every One!

Since it’s really impossible to cover the reaction to a story while it is still happening, our purpose tonight will be to detail the present, sort some fact from fiction and uncover the real stories behind the story. In short, blow our own horn and then add to the heaps of speculation already swirling about. Like Newsweek, we have no paid staff and little in the way of journalistic standards. So this is the best we can do.

Ardent readers of the Wonderblog ™, the 22 millionth most influential blog on the internet, undoubtedly are already well informed as to the missteps of the monstrous Toyota  industrial complex. (Or you can just follow the link flags at the bottom of this posting.) We were amongst the first to cry foul when Toyota magnanimously declared that the problem with its cars careening wildly out of control was caused by STUPID AMERICAN DRIVERS.  Ace Wonderblog ™ wags contended that though STUPID AMERICAN DRIVERS are indeed a problem, they seem to navigate the momentum apparatus of most cars with the same degree of effectiveness. The spate of acceleration incidents was fairly particular to TOYOTA DEATHTRAPMOBILES. Therefore we did not buy the explanation.

Nor did Steve Jobs. But he’s dead and we’re alive—alive, unlike so many Toyota drivers. Not to make light of someone’s death (although that’s what we just did). Frankly, if I were killed in a Toyota, I would not find this very funny at all.

The rest of our crusade you can read at your leisure. For a while there it looked like the Wonderblog ™ was going to go down with some major egg on its internet face. It even surrendered at one point. But before we go on, let us take a whiff of victory…

*One internal memo, released prior to an angry hearing on Capitol Hill, showed the company crowing about having talked the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration out of ordering a recall, saving Toyota millions of dollars. Toyota has insisted that it did not intentionally deceive federal regulators, but the investigation showed otherwise.

* (T)he largest criminal penalty ever levied against an auto company. It surrounds, as you say, the problem that Toyota cars had in the early 2000s with unintended acceleration. There were several deaths reported as a result of cars suddenly taking off, seemingly out of control. So Toyota has agreed after a prosecution by the U.S. Attorney's Office and the Justice Department to pay $1.2 billion.

*Attorney General Holder talked about Toyota intentionally making misleading public statements, concealing from consumers the details of the problems, the delaying of full recall, and said that the company treated this as a public relations problem rather than a public safety emergency.

That’s what victory smells like: dead bodies. Some libertarian activists recently erected a statue to the Victims of Communism in Washington DC. The formerly-human statistics involved in this tragedy can be firmly accounted for under the ledger heading of Victims of Capitalism. Any forthcoming memorial can be a joint US/Japanese project.

To be blunt, the real fault is Six Sigma, an American Industrial Religion inflicted on the Japanese. Constant cost take outs and step removals are its heartbeat—the physical demands of engineering be damned. Also, Toyota leaped ahead with a new manufacturing protocol before it was ready. But that’s the fine print. The layman’s bottom line is that Toyota cheaped out and their cheapo touch killed people.

People kill people for money. Whether it’s a penny saved or a penny earned. The reality is that Toyota is beyond the reach of US laws. We will have to prevail upon Providence for a true accounting for this orchestrated act of evil.

What the Wonderblog ™ does want to see is some American tail sent to the pokey. Regulators weren’t deceived, they were bought off. (See previous postings under the Toyotathud flag.) Toyota hired one government agency to smite another government agency’s findings. The STUPID AMERICANS involved in that need some three hots and a cot Me Time. On that we won’t back down.

As for Toyota, the Wonderblog ™ is ending its vendetta. It isn’t so much that Toyota is a chastened and reformed bad actor—we see no evidence of contrition nor reform—but rather that the Wonderblog ™ is firmly committed to quitting while it is ahead.