Toyota's Acceleration Problems: It's not just the Floormats ...

As Toyota reels from problems with some of its cars' unintended acceleration (and resulting accidents), and institutes an expensive worldwide recall of autos, it's worth recalling how this matter was handled in a recent appearance at The Commonwealth Club of California by James Lentz, the president and COO of Toyota Motors Sales USA.

He spoke to The Club's Climate One division on November 17, 2009, when the accelerator issue was becoming known but hadn't yet blown up in the company's face. Following his main speech, Lentz took questions from the audience, including one about the accelerators. Lentz said the company tests everything for safety. He blamed the problem on floor mats, which supposedly were being trapped by the accelerator pedal, and after a follow-up question, he says the same problem is occurring with other car companies.

Today, the acceleration problem is being blamed on everything from faulty brakes to the cars' computer systems, and Toyota is facing a public relations nightmare. The head of the company, the descendent of the company's founder, has apologized and promised to improve safety quality.

You can watch the entire video above and make up your own mind.

Travel Guru Peter Greenberg and Health Care Guru Zeke Emanuel on Comcast in Bay Area This Month

For those of you in the Bay Area who are subscribers to Comcast, here's a heads-up about two upcoming Commonwealth Club programs that will be broadcast on Comcast cable channel 715:

Travel expert Peter Greenberg will air this Sunday, February 7, at 10 p.m.

Health care expert (and brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel) Zeke Emanuel will air Sunday, February 14, at 10 p.m.

David Walker Takes on America's Fiscal Spree

Former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker has been warning for years about America's out-of-control spending. He currently serves as president and CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation and recently authored Comeback America: Turning the Country Around and Restoring Fiscal Responsibility.

Can we save Social Security? How does health-care reform get helped or hurt by reforming our fiscal foundation? As he notes in a recent speech to The Commonwealth Club, the country was facing huge levels of national debt even before the financial crisis of this past year and a half; with the record deficits of the past year and the new year, Walker's topic of fiscal responsibility is certainly not going out of style. Alas.

Watch the video above from his January 25, 2010, speech to The Club, or listen to the audio here.

(Quick note: The video above is the entire hour-long Commonwealth Club program, so to avoid having the video stop and start, you might want to pause it after a few seconds, let more of it download, then continue.)

Frank Luntz Seeks to Frame Debate About Financial Re-Regulation

 

GOP pollster Frank Luntz speaks to The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco. November 6, 2009. Photo by John Zipperer.

Republican strategist Frank Luntz told a Commonwealth Club audience in November 2009 that Californian supporters of gay marriage had made a mistake by choosing the word marriage in their fight against the anti-gay-marriage referendum Proposition 8. "If you want to resolve this issue in a way that some of you want to resolve it, take out the word marriage," he explained. "If I were advising those on the Left who want equality in marriage as they define it, then don't say the word marriage, and you will get it, because the American people believe that marriage is between a man and a woman and that's what they think. But: They are hostile, openly hostile to discrimination."

Luntz, who makes his living dissecting what Americans tell him they believe and suggesting ways for political groups to get their message across to the public, said that the way an argument is framed can be all the difference in whether Americans accept it. "My issue with those on the far Right and those on the far Left is that, You don't want to win, you just want to shout, and you never get anything through as a result."

In other words, words matter.

Now, Luntz is weighing in on the efforts to re-regulate Wall Street, an effort championed by another recent Commonwealth Club speaker, former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. But Luntz is advising folks who worry that the effort to impose more regulation on the financial services industry will hobble private business.

Over at Huffington Post, Sam Stein writes that Luntz has authored a memo telling opponents of reform to frame the reform effort as being chock-full of all those bad words that make Americans recoil: bank bailouts, lobbyists, loopholes, and bureaucracy. "Washington's incompetence is the common ground on which you can build support," Stein quotes Luntz's memo.

At the bottom of Stein's article is a window for reading the entire Luntz memo, so you can read it and make up your own mind if it will be useful in the policy debate.

Commonwealth Club members will be able to read an excerpt of Luntz's speech in the February/March issue of The Commonwealth magazine, out this week.

Eliot Spitzer on Confronting the Financial Crisis

Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer came to The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco this week to talk about "The Cataclysm of 2008-2009."

Spitzer, who served as New York State's attorney general before assuming the governorship, had a reputation as AG for going after corporate white collar crime and Wall Street figures. That history has earned him more than a few enemies in the business community, but it also gave him a point of view on the large-scale financial meltdowns, chicanery, and mistakes that have come to light in the economic crisis.

Listen to audio of his speech here.

Robert Reich Gives 2010 Economic Forecast

Robert Reich, former labor secretary during the Clinton administration and currently a professor at UC Berkeley, gave the Commonwealth Club's annual economic preview. The Bank of America Walter E. Hoadley Economic Forecast saw Reich speak to a sold-out crowd on January 22, discussing how far we've come since the financial crisis began, what legislation can work and what won't, and what we can expect in the coming year.

James O'Keefe: The Case of the Senator's Telephone

Conservative activist James O’Keefe was arrested along with three accomplices on Monday this week after being caught tampering with the phones in Democratic U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu’s downtown New Orleans office. O’Keefe, 25, and cohorts Joseph Basel, 24, Robert Flanagan, 24, and Stan Dai, 24, have been charged with entering a federal building under false pretenses with intent to commit a felony – a charge that could carry a 10-year sentence.

If you’ve glanced recently at our calendar, you might already know that this could spell ominous news for O’Keefe’s speaking engagement at The Club next week, where we hope he’ll share his experience as an investigative journalist (or noisome muckraker, depending on where you get your news) in uncovering the alleged dirty side of a little organization called ACORN – the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. As of January 29, O’Keefe’s Club speaking engagement is still on.

In a series of online exposés, O’Keefe and partner in (uncovering possible) crime Hannah Giles visited ACORN offices in Baltimore, D.C., L.A. and New York posing as a pimp and prostitute (respectively) who were interested in starting a legitimized brothel that hinged upon successfully housing and “training” underage El Salvadoran illegal-immigrant prostitutes. The advice that O’Keefe and Giles received from the ACORN tax specialists – whose paychecks are heavily subsidized by taxpayer dollars – was certainly surprising: all of it involved tax evasion. ACORN has charged that O'Keefe edited the videos, removing portions in which the ACORN employees showed that they didn't take O'Keefe and Giles seriously.

The resultant furor was fairly sharply divided down party lines, with Republicans labeling ACORN a corrupt and evil institution and Democrats labeling ACORN a corrupt and evil—wait, wait, that’s not right. As ACORN was investigated and defunded by Congress, Republicans and Democrats instead got into a fairly catty debate as to whether or not O’Keefe and Giles’ work constituted “investigative journalism,” with right-wing pundit Andrew Breitbart of biggovernment.com taking them under his wing even as Fox News took care not to get too cozy .

With O’Keefe’s recent Louisiana episode (details remain scant as of this writing), we may have the FBI weighing in on the debate on his February 13 hearing. In the meantime, The Club's Inforum division is working on a remote conference with the undercover journalist on Monday, February 1. Check our web site for the latest. 


UPDATE: The James O'Keefe event at The Commonwealth Club has been postponed.


--By Andrew Harrison

Four More Years for Ben Bernanke; What Will He Do?

Ben Bernanke was confirmed by the U.S. Senate today for a second four-year term as chairman of the Federal Reserve. He was supported by 70 senators, which sounds like a lot but is actually the lowest support a Fed chairman has ever received.

His reactions to the financial crisis have been lauded and lamented; he has been criticized for being too slow, too fast, too interventionist, too power-hungry -- and all of that likely contributed to his relative unpopularity in the Senate chamber. At the same time, he is Fed chair at a time of economic troubles unmatched since the Great Depression, which just happens to be an era on which he is a scholar.

David Wessel, economics editor for The Wall Street Journal and author of In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic (and perhaps the only person to compare speaking to The Commonwealth Club with Judge Judy), addressed The Commonwealth Club in September 2009 on the topic of "Ben Bernanke vs. the Great Panic." Watch the video above of that presentation to see what insight Wessel offers into Bernanke's decision-making, and what that tells us about how the Fed chief is likely to steer the economy in his second term.