In public, Toyota is running apologetic TV ads, vowing to win back customer trust. Behind the scenes, the Japanese carmaker is trying to learn all it can about congressional investigations, maybe even steer them along if it can.

It is all a part of an all-out drive by the world’s biggest automaker to redeem its once unassailable brand – under siege now as Toyota’s global recall expanded to some 8.5 million cars and trucks. The recall of 440,000 of its flagship and very trendy Prius and other hybrids, plus a Tokyo news conference where the company’s president read a statement in English pledging to “regain the confidence of our customers,” underscored a determination to keep buyers’ faith from sinking to depths from which it might not be able to recover again.

Facing U.S. congressional inquiries and government investigations, Toyota through its army of lawyers and lobbyists is working full-tilt to salvage its reputation. The confidential strategy – as Toyota will say little publicly about it – includes efforts to sway upcoming hearings on Capitol Hill and is based on experiences by companies that have survived similar consumer and political crises – and those that haven’t.

It was recently revealed that State Farm, the largest U.S. auto insurer, said it had informed federal regulators late in 2007 about growing reports of unexpected acceleration in Toyotas. That raised new questions about whether the government missed clues about the problems.

Federal safety officials said they were examining complaints from Toyota Corolla owners about steering problems.

Some say that the best strategy for Toyota would be apology, openness, details about a specific fix – plus a little help from friends on Capitol Hill.

Friendly legislators can limit the duration of congressional hearings and ask convenient questions that would give Toyota officials a chance to tell their side of the story. The goal would to limit unfavorable news stories about the hearings to as few days as possible, while making sure the company avoids being confrontational.

The Toyota recalls are the highest-profile congressional probe of the auto industry since a series of deadly accidents prompted the Firestone tire recall in 2000. Most of the tires were on popular Ford Explorer sport utility vehicles. Although the tires might have been defective, few other vehicles besides the Ford Explorer rolled when the Firestones blew out. Funny that Firestone seemed to take most of the blame for these design and manufacturing defects.

Both companies suffered damage to their reputations, but both bounced back. Ford was proactive, briefing officials with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Congress and stressing that the safety of their customers was paramount. Firestone offered to replace its tires for free. Everything was pretty much forgotten and neatly swept under the carpet. We wonder if Toyota will manage to come out of this smelling like a rose…

Technorati Tags: accelerators, brakes, congress, hybrids, lobbying, recalls, reputation, steering, Toyota

The Washington, DC area got hit with the largest snowstorm in years last December, and then in late January a few more inches fell. Despite the fact that cross country skiing was just sublime in both cases, these events caused all kinds of problems, partly because the people responsible for clearing the roads were relying – as usual on chemicals, rather than snowplows and sand.

The pre-treating of the roads with salt has actually created ice under the beautiful, dry and powdery snow. There was no reason for spreading chemicals, particularly in view of the fact that the temperatures were much too low for salt to do any good. What it indeed caused were numerous accidents, and often the inability to slow down, stop, or climb inclines – all courtesy of the Virginia, Maryland and District of Columbia departments of transportation.

Where a plowed (or even unplowed) roadway would have been fairly easily to negotiate without salt, the authorities – that are apparently already running out of money because of their extravagant use of chemicals and hiring of often unnecessary private trucks – the salt-melted and then re-frozen snow created expensive and often very dangerous skating rinks for cars, usually in all the worst places.

Seems like still another example of our tax dollars at work.

As we write this on Friday morning, another snowstorm, which is supposed to last more than 24 hours and dump around two feet of snow in the area, is fast approaching.

The snow blowers, snow shovels and bags of salt have long been unavailable. The authorities – such as they might be – have strongly recommended that everyone stay indoors for the duration and basically get ready to watch the Super Bowl. Consequently, the grocery stores got totally overwhelmed by mobs of often glassy-eyed shoppers, filling their carts to overflowing with milk, beer, Wonder “bread”, pretzels, bottled water and the inevitable soup cans, “flavored” with among other things high fructose corn syrup.

Even late in the evening on Wednesday and Thursday it was almost impossible to find a parking spot at any of the local supermarkets. Inside, practically every person pushing a shopping cart was breaking the indoor speed limits, the shelves were often bare and the lines at the registers snaked around into almost every aisle. It appeared that it would take at least an hour just to get to a cashier, or a self-checkout gizmo.

If six, or even 24 inches of snow can cause such mayhem, we wonder how things would look, if we actually faced a real, serious emergency…

Technorati Tags: Nation’s Capital, Panic, Snow salt, Snowmageddon, stores, washington

Anne Applebaum wrote a very insightful op-ed piece in the Washington Post today, basically about how different events influence our policies post factum. We fully agree with the notion that such knee-jerk reactions, which are usually implemented way after the fact are too often bound to fail.

Here’s Anne Applebaum’s article:

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All of you frequent fliers out there, you know the drill. Take off your shoes, because of Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber.” Remove your hair gel from your backpack because of the bombers who targeted Heathrow using liquid hydrogen peroxide. When you get on a plane, you must also, from now on, be prepared to remove any blankets from your lap before landing – too bad if you’re asleep! – because of the Christmas Day underwear bomber.

When someone invents a way to hide explosive powder inside a toothbrush case, prepare to remove your toothbrush. And while you’re at it, throw a pinch of salt over your left shoulder as you board the plane. But never, at any moment, imagine that the rigamarole of airport security is guaranteed to make you safer – for no one knows which of these measures, if any, is actually necessary.

Worse, no one has any financial or political incentive to find out. The fact is, since the hurried and heavily politicized creation of the Department of Homeland Security and its junior partner, the Transportation Security Administration, neither their priorities nor their spending patterns has been subject to serious scrutiny. They have never been forced to make hard choices. On the contrary, both have been encouraged by their congressional funders to spend money in reaction to every perceived new threat, real or otherwise: Thus full-body scanners, unacceptable as recently as last summer, will now be rushed into use. In just a few years – under a Republican administration and mostly Republican Congresses – these institutions thus grew into vast, unruly bureaucracies, some of whose activities bear only a distant relationship to public safety.

So customary has it become to repeat old, familiar lists of ludicrous public projects that readers who cannot bear to read the litany one more time might want to skip to the next paragraph. For yes, it is true: Having started with 13 employees in January 2002, the TSA now employs 60,000, and in the process of its expansion the organization found it had money for all kinds of extras. As I wrote in 2005, some $350,000 of its $6 billion budget once was spent on a gym; $500,000 was spent on artwork and silk plants, and untold millions are annually spent in overhiring, since determining when there will be long security lines at an airport has never been the sort of thing at which the federal government excels.

As for the DHS, its 2010 budget came in at $55 billion, some of which (according to the economist Veronique de Rugy, writing in 2006) will invariably be spent on things like the $63,000 decontamination unit in rural Washington, where no one was trained to use it, more biochemical suits for Grand Forks, Nev., than the town has police officers to wear them and $557,400 worth of rescue and communications equipment for some 1,500 residents of the town of North Pole, Alaska. Not to mention what is spent on the “needs” of the constituents of other important members of Congress.

It is not actually DHS or TSA employees who are at fault for these kinds of decisions. From the very beginning, security experts and even the agencies’ own inspectors general have pointed to the absurdity of TSA and DHS spending patterns, many of which are driven by the latest scare story (I wish I’d been at the celebratory New Year’s Eve party undoubtedly thrown by the manufacturers of those full-body scanners). And from the very beginning, Congress has fought back against critics, repeatedly allocating funds to unnecessary local projects, reacting to sensational news stories, spending money in ways that suit its members and then declaring itself shocked – shocked! – to discover that our multibillion-dollar homeland security apparatus was unable to stop a clearly disturbed Nigerian from boarding a Detroit-bound plane.

Imagine if the TSA’s vast budget were dedicated to the creation of a cutting-edge computer network that could have made security officers in Amsterdam instantly aware of the warning from the Detroit bombing suspect’s father. Imagine that, instead of relying on full-body X-ray scanners or long-haul flight-blanket deprivation, we had highly paid and trained consular officers in places such as Nigeria. Even then security would not be perfect (and I’m not sure that airborne terrorism is even the worst thing we have to worry about). But it would make sense to have a smaller, less expensive and less wasteful system. It would make sense to have a system based on real risks and priorities, instead of the stories featured on cable news. It would make sense to fight the next battle, for once, instead of the last one. “Sense,” though, is not the criterion by which public money is spent in this country – and hasn’t been for a long time.

Technorati Tags: airline security, Anne Applebaum, knee jerk reactions

The “Independent” senator from Connecticut has already stated, quoting as he says, a U.S.  official:“…if we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war”.

At the same time, there are some still unanswered questions about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed attempt to destroy Northwest Airlines flight 253.

According to some passengers of flight 253, there were some pretty suspicious things going on both before the boarding of the plane in Amsterdam and during the flight itself.

Take a look at this video.

No proof as yet, but the whole thing looks mighty fishy…again.

At the same time, new rules imposed by the Transportation Security Administration limit on-board activities by passengers and crew in U.S. airspace. Apparently, during the final hour of flight passengers must remain seated. They won’t be allowed access to carry-on baggage or to have any items on their laps.

Sounds like still another great idea. We suppose that somebody “in the know”, must know something, such as that a potential, or real terrorist will only perform his, or her dirty deeds ONLY in the last hour of the flight.

This could be great material for a show such as Saturday Night Live, or the Colbert Report, or maybe even for a third installment of the movie Airplane.

Just think of a terrorist, who is determined enough to kill himself, along with everyone on board, waiting for the last hour of the flight to do it…geez…

Technorati Tags: Events, Flight 253, Lieberman, nigerian, suspicious, Terrorism, Yemen

Republican Representative Michelle Bachmann from Minnesota has called upon Americans to once again converge on Washington in a last minute protest to stop the House from passing the health care reform bill. Bachmann asked tea party protesters and all concerned citizens to not just protest outside the Capitol, but actually go to congressional offices and visit their representatives.

I had the misfortune of riding the Metro train into Washington Thursday, along with a sizable group of these protesters, where I was able to look at a goodly number of them up close and to listen to some of the conversations.

That experience seemed to perfectly mesh with a story I was at that moment reading in the Washington Post, which said that about 75 percent of the country’s 17 to 24-year-olds are ineligible for military service, largely because they are poorly educated, overweight and have physical ailments that make them unfit for the armed forces.

Glancing from the paper up to the people surrounding me on the train, it was quite obvious that the story was basically correct. Listening to the conversations only confirmed that feeling.

Will this be the caliber of citizenry, which might be influencing how you or I will live in the next few years, or the way, in which our children and grandchildren will be forced to live?

President Obama’s Wednesday trip to Wisconsin, to emphasize the need for an improved education seemed more necessary than ever before…

Technorati Tags: Bachmann, Caongress, conservatives, Education, Health Care reform, military, obesity, protest, tea baggers