Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Toyota Recall and Economic Warfare

As I have been reporting, key Toyota officials believe that the aggressive stance taken against Toyota by the National Transportation Department has more to do with an attempt to drive auto buyers towards General Motors, then it does with major concerns about the safety of Toyota vehicles.

Wayne Madsen puts the recall in even deeper context:
The Obama administration has expanded its economic warfare against other countries, first reported on January 18 by WMR in the case of an authorized financial campaign against Venezuela. The Obama administration, according to WMR’s Asian sources, is waging an economic warfare campaign, coupled with industrial sabotage, against Japan through a pre-planned operation directed against the Japanese automobile manufacturer, Toyota.

WMR has learned that the Obama administration authorized the anti-Toyota campaign as a warning shot to Japan over its reformist government’s insistence that the U.S. pull its military troops out of Okinawa. WMR has learned that Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, have decided to turn the screws on Japan, not only for auto market leverage, but also to punish Japan over the insistence by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and the newly-elected anti-U.S. military mayor of Nago on Okinawa to move the U.S. military off of Okinawa.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a former congressman from Peoria, Illinois, and who is owned and operated by Peoria-based Caterpillar, whose major competitor is Japan’s Kubota Tractor Corporation, kicked off the anti-Toyota campaign when he stated that all Toyoya owners should stop driving their vehicles and return them to the dealership for a fix. LaHood was referring to a problem with some uncontrolled acceleration problems with some Toyota vehicles. However, LaHood painted a wide brush in his comments about Toyotas when the problem, which resulted in a voluntary recall of millions of Toyota vehicles, including the popular Camry and Corolla, by the Japanese auto giant, affected only a small fraction of Toyota vehicles. LaHood has also threatened Toyota with unspecified civil penalties.

Asian intelligence agencies have discovered that LaHood was implementing a White House operation to grab a major portion of Toyota’s market share and hand it over the General Motors and Ford. The Obama administration, through its bailout of GM, has become a virtual auto company and, therefore, is playing economic hardball with Japan. Ford also benefited from the Obama administration’s stimulus package. The chief architects of the anti-Toyota campaign, according to our sources, are Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and White House Chief of Staff Emanuel.

By increasing GM’s viability at the expense of Toyota, Geithner sees a potential windfall when the federal government sells its share of GM stock to the public...
Madsen goes on to state that Obama seems to want to outdo Bush in the being belligerent to foreign governments department. Obama continues, for example, to irritate China with minor tariffs and the like. Given that China and Japan are the largest buyers of U.S. government securities, with gob loads of more Treasury debt on the way, this harassment of China and Japan appears particularly bizarre.


(ViaLRC)

8 comments:

  1. If you wanted to collapse a country, wouldn't overwhelming it with debt and then irritating it's two biggest debt holders so they would dump the debt be a great way to do it?

    Just a thought. Maybe Obama just doesn't know what he's doing. It's hard not to turn into a conspiracy theorist with our government.

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  2. @Anonymous

    That's my point. These recalls go on all the time. Why all this high profile noise about Toyota?

    They didn't handle the PR properly because they thought it was business as usual and didn't realize it was a targetted attack until much later.

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  3. Honda is next if Hatoyama doesn't get in line.

    http://www.postbulletin.com/newsmanager/templates/localnews_story.asp?z=50&a=437062

    Japan doesn't want our bases anymore. Would you want Britian still basing soldiers here?

    The Chicago Machine knows what it is doing.

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  4. While the annoyance of those buying our government securities is a problem of sorts, this is one area the Prez may not be too far off the mark on this one. Japan has been conducting economic warfare against us for years. The move is a legitimate defense. Beyond this, he may be shooting himself in the foot with the move as it may be that the only way the current madness will stop is when our "friends" will stop feeding our addiction to deficit spending.

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  5. Larry,

    How has "Japan" been attacking "us" for years? And furthermore, what happens if I disagree, and prefer "Japan" (somehow embodied by one company, Toyota, which has US employees, many thousands of them) not be attacked on my behalf?

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  6. "They didn't handle the PR properly because they thought it was business as usual and didn't realize it was a targetted attack until much later."

    agreed, its blatantly obvious that the media circus is utterly arbitrary and targeted.

    Have you heard of a GM Montana thats had the same problem? No? Well I have, but its not headline news hysteria and seneate circus material, same problem different company.

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  7. (continued)
    same problem different company...
    ...but no barking

    or as Sherlock Holms would put it "the dog that didnt bark"

    ReplyDelete