DOT Secretary pulls back from telling owners not to drive their Toyota’s

 

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood just said he misspoke when he earlier advised owners of the eight recalled models to park them and not drive them until they can be brought into dealers to have their accelerator pedals repaired.

He said it was "obviously a misstatement" and apparently is falling back on earlier advice, which is that owners should take in their recalled cars for repairs when notified, but you can keep driving your car unless it shows signs of having a sticky accelerator pedal.

I want to encourage owners of any recalled Toyota models to contact their local dealer and get their vehicles fixed as soon as possible. NHTSA will continue to hold Toyota's feet to the fire to make sure that they are doing everything they have promised to make their vehicles safe. We will continue to investigate all possible causes of these safety issues.

Earlier in the day, the  Associated Press had reported:

LaHood's warning came Wednesday in testimony before a House Appropriations subcommittee on transportation. LaHood says his advice to owners is to "stop driving it. Take it to a Toyota dealer because they believe they have a fix for it."

Toyota's most recent recall in the United States affects 2.3 million vehicles with the potential for sticking gas pedals. LaHood told reporters earlier in the day that Toyota owners should contact their dealer immediately and "exercise caution until repairs can be made."

 

In addition, Transportation is probing to see if other automakers might have the same problems as Toyotas if they share similar pedal systems.  And it's getting complaints about braking systems in Prius. Yesterday LaHood called Toyota weak on safety and said his own department had to send an official to Tokyo to prompt the pedal recall.

Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Toyota have been recommending only that drivers be careful and look for symptoms that their cars could have unintended acceleration --  even though Toyota stopped selling the models last week.  To Drive On, this made no sense. If the cars are dangeous enough that they can't be sold, how could owners still be fine driving them?

Still no response from Toyota to today's developments.

Source: [ USAToday ]

Thanks for that first-hand view. Another word for their excuse is mythos, their view of the world with which they make sense of events and their own actions. Blankfein’s mythos, that the MOTU serve a primarily social function, shapes the cosmos that grows the psychos with the “money is the measure of all things” ethos that sucks people into the Wall Street money machine. The power of this post, IMO, comes from massacio’s busting of that myth.

massacio shows us how the world looks through Blankfein’s myth; contrasts that with the facts; then returns to a clarified view of Blankfein’s world, hoisting the despotic Lords of Wall Street, in metaphorical terms of their own mythos, on their own rhetorical petards.

What exactly is the myth of the Wall Street machine? Here’s how it looks to me.

There’s a world of wisdom in our myths, I’m always saying, but the one “true” religion these days, our de facto state religion, is an outdated, Newtonian version the myth of Western science (of the cosmos as a construct of fully-automatic mechanical forces among atomized particles between which there is no middle ground, no Commons, no intrinsic identity with all there is; you know, Cheney’s world). Tom Engelhardt calls it “a religion of force.”

Strange thing is, and this comes from a total science geek: if we assume the cosmos, our very own source, to be nothing but god-forsaken dirt; one big mechanism governed by Newton’s laws–of which, of course, our science, economy and military are the supreme examples; then we end up making Newtonian voodoo dolls of our natural-born selves.

This is my answer to the question many have asked, regarding the conflation of money with speech.

If the cosmos is a mechanism, and if the economy is a cosmic justice-dispensing machine (either God’s own or no one’s own), then the unit of energy analogous to the erg is the dollar. Recall that we shipped the largest amount of cash in the history of the world to Iraq, pallets full of $100 bullets.

Words, too, become reduced to quantum energy packets, in the minds of unreconstructed mechanists. What’s the difference between deploying snipers, and deploying Message Force Multipliers? They both:

* hide their violent intentions;
* target vulnerable audiences;
* make career-advancing killings.

The myth of the Newtonian mechanism is the Achilles Heel of our political economy. We can no longer simply apply more leverage to every problem under the sun while denying “externalities” like pollution, toxins, et cetera.

Metaphorically speaking, were in the same condition as Neo was when he awoke, to find himself an organic being in a hyper-mechanized world (in the movie The Matrix).

We’ve been reduced to “consumers,” mere appetites on two legs, when in fact we are self-sovereign citizens. That’s why I’ve been saying, reclaiming our inalienable humanity is the first step toward humanizing our politics. Mechanistic, atavistic, reductionism (the deliberate effort over the last 60 or more years, to reduce the social sciences to physics, the better to predict an control our behavior) marched us into this Waste Land. The view of society Blankfein presents for us, as opposed to the one he uses to make it rain money on his friends, is “through a glass, darkly.”

What happens if we turn that view around? I think that’s the beauty of this post. That’s exactly what massacio has done here, using Blankfein’s own myth-making, to expose the Lords of Wall Street as the despots they are at heart.