As I surmised in an earlier post regarding VW, other manufacturers are cheating. Mitsubishi just got caught cheating on fuel economy numbers. The company’s stock has been hit so hard it has lost half its value.
Yeah no doubt. Its a dog eat dog world out there. Not to editorialize but laws need to be reasonable and supported by the majority of the population, not just special interest groups. Seems silly that people rely on this information anyway. I suppose next we’ll find out that Whirlpool cheated on their washer and dryer power and water usage estimates and California will file suit to get them bought back. Oh for shame. Is nothing sacred? To me anyway its a non issue.
@Bing - I couldn’t agree more. I was simply reiterating my point from the VW scandal that they are all a bunch of cheaters. I work in regulatory compliance. Show me a new set of regulations and I will show you a bunch of companies working furiously to get around them.
They’ve been cheating for a long time. It’s the only car company that has had some of its executives jailed.
The fact that Pearl Harbor was bombed by Mitsubishi Zero aircraft makes no difference to me at this time.
They were on my “do not buy” list for a long time due to the use of our soldiers as slave labor during the war and never coming clean or apologizing. Once they did though a few years ago it was OK to buy a Mitsubishi again.
@Bing German Krupp, Mercedes, Opel, and many other German companies making war materials used slave labor as well.
A friend of our family was shipped to Germany to work in a munitions factory there. He luckily survived and returned to Holland in 1945.
Yup. A sad time that hopefully we have learned from. I guess the lucky ones made it to the factories and not the camps. Gives me the willies just thinking about the poor guys forced to jump off the cliff when they were of no use any more.
Mitsubishi should be suitably fined for their crime, if that is what lying on gas mileage numbers is in Japan.
Honda cheated 20 years ago for disabling ECMs and had to pony up a quarter billion dollars to do the same thing VW is doing; along with a 15+ million dollar fine from the Feds.
A few years ago Honda was caught again shipping illegal small engines for mowers, etc in the U.S. so the first lesson did not sink in apparently.
Trucks are not immune either. Volvo, Mack, Navistar, Renault, Cummins, Detroit, Caterpillar, and others were also caught by the Feds on emissions to the tune of about a billion dollars.
What’s the line from Nascar? “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying!” I’m sure it’s a “cat and mouse” game, and “creative” gimmicks to meet the letter of the law aren’t even illegal. What did Mitsubishi do–over-inflate the tires?
“Krupp, Mercedes, Opel, and many other German companies making war materials used slave labor as well.”
…and GM had the chutzpah to sue the US government for damages resulting from the aerial bombing of their Opel factories by the US Army Air Corps! That is correct. They were manufacturing a variety of war materials for the Nazis, but–somehow–thought that they should have been exempted from being bombed.
While it is true that they had little choice but to comply with Nazi directives, at the same time they were making a nice profit by manufacturing materials that took the lives of US servicemen.
I am not positive on this last point, but I believe that they were successful in collecting damages from the US government.
So, GM was playing both sides of the fence? Because I know auto factories in the USA were used for tanks, airplanes, etc.
Of course, all of the US car companies made various products for our war effort, ranging from aircraft engines to things as simple as little trailers for Jeeps.
In the case of the ultra-complex Rolls Royce Merlin aircraft engine, that was one project that was not open to competitive bidding. The War Department felt (correctly) that ONLY Packard had the expertise to manufacture that engine with the necessary precision.
As to less complex things like little trailers for Jeeps, after the American Bantam Company lost the contract (to Willys and Ford) to produce the Jeeps that they had actually designed, at least the War Department gave American Bantam a contract to make Jeep trailers.
In any event, ALL of the US car companies made some sort of materials for the war effort, and GM has the distinction of making them for both sides.
Hmm less regulation and let the corporation self regulate would have solved that problem, but transgender bathrooms are a problem, confused.
https://www.tedcruz.org/five-for-freedom-summary/
Abolish the IRS, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. A Cruz Administration will appoint heads of each of those agencies whose sole charge will be to wind them down and determine whether any programs need to be preserved.
Internal Revenue Services – end the political targeting, simplify the tax code, and abolish the IRS as we know it.
Department of Education – return education to those who know our students best: parents, teachers, local communities, and states. And block-grant education funding to the states.
Department of Energy – cut off the Washington Cartel, stop picking winners and losers, and unleash the energy renaissance.
Department of Commerce – close the “congressional cookie jar” and promote free-enterprise and free trade for every business.
Department of Housing and Urban Development – offer real solutions to lift people out of hardship, rather than trapping families in a cycle of poverty, and empower Americans by promoting the dignity of work and reforming programs such as Section 8 housing.
II. TWENTY-FIVE FEDERAL “ABCs”
Empower the people by reducing the alphabet soup of Agencies, Bureaus, Commissions, and other programs that prop up special interests, at the taxpayer’s expense. A Cruz Administration will identify all unnecessary programs – these 25 are merely a start:
Eliminate the following Agencies, Bureaus, Commissions, and programs:
Appalachian Regional Commission
Climate Ready Water Utilities Initiative
Climate Research Funding for the Office of Research and Development
Climate Resilience Evaluation Awareness Tool
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Corporation for Travel Promotion
Global Methane Initiative
Green Infrastructure Program
Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program
Legal Services Corporation
National Endowment for the Arts
National Endowment for the Humanities
New Starts Transit Program
Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund
Presidential Election Campaign Fund
Regulation of CO2 Emissions from Power Plants and all Sources
Regulation of Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Vehicles
Renewable Fuel Standard Federal Mandates
Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation
Sugar Subsidies
Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery
UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
UN Population Fund
USDA Catfish Inspection Program
Geeze, sounds like a breath of fresh air to me.
It wasn’t only the auto companies that were commandeered for war production but nearly every industry was converted to support the effort. Remember we had a very small military and were very unprepared. We didn’t even have a legitimate war department. So everything was accelerated to catch up. Plus raw materials as well as most other commodities were rationed. If you had a factory, you weren’t going to get materials to operate unless sanctioned by the government. It was literally a world war and we were fighting to remain a nation.
I hadn’t heard the Opel plant story. I’m not saying GM didn’t sue for damages but I had never heard that. Ford for sure was making money from the Nazis at least from the start and he along with many other in the country didn’t see it as our fight and therefore not unpatriotic. Of course back then companies were compensated in many ways to make sure they kept production up. The military decided the contracts, the labor force, the rationing, etc. I remember my dad telling about needing tires to be able to drive from Wisconsin where he was assigned to Minnesota to visit. The only way he could get them was with approval from the local Colonel in charge of ship production.
^I remember a teacher talking about his dad, a welder. Not only was his skill in high demand, he got extra gas rations for his welder, which never, ever (wink) went into his gas tank, I was told…
“I hadn’t heard the Opel plant story. I’m not saying GM didn’t sue for damages but I had never heard that.”
According to this scholarly research effort regarding GM/Opel and the Nazi regime, GM received $33 million in war reparations because its German factories had been bombed by the Allies:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/gm.html
Be prepared to read a LOT of information, because that site contains a wealth of information on GM’s very profitable association with Hitler’s regime, in addition to its post-war receipt of $33 million from the Allies.
Yeah I ran across that report yesterday. Sounded like they got paid in 1967 though. Like said though lots of companies had German interests and made money as Germany’s economy picked up due to war spending. IBM, Chrysler, etc. Sounded like Sloan though looked forward to the overthrow of the US system. There are similar enemies today.
Then there is the MIT Sloan School of Management and interesting WP article on Harvard and MIT work in Venezuela. Maybe its time to start cleaning house at some of these distinguished schools too.
The Mitsibushi act was also listed in the Mexican newspapers.
You know…What really kinda burns me up here is the fact that todays vehicle emissions are a Flower Sniff compared to the 10’s-70’s… Car emissions have cleaned up so vastly in this day and age…and yet the Govt makes MORE and more Regulations ever so tightening regulations that are putting companies out of business in the name of the “Environment”
Well…this is getting too much… The US…in the name of the “Environment” close down our Clean Burn Coal Electricity companies…only to farm out the same task to China…who could give a rats patoot about the environment and or How to burn coal in as clean a manner as the US companies that were shut down…All via tightening Over Regulation. The Result? FAR Greater environmental damage… So Whats the logic there? Its not the environment…I can promise you… Its the DOLLAR.
The same thing appears to be occuring in the Auto Industry…we are over regulating companies our own and others out of business… Only to farm things out somewhere else…where there are no regulations or less regulations…
Its sortof a great way to break up the companies that have control of an industry…to introduce another industry…that wouldn’t have stood a chance on its own…without the over regulation… Strange that…
Why? Methinks someone found a way to personally profit from these little endeavors… Y’all can extrapolate this into many other areas if you like…
Conspiracy theories aside… Rome did the same thing to its citizens prior to falling apart at the seams.
Blackbird