Saying that safety practices at General Motors were “broken,” federal regulators on Friday imposed the biggest punishment they could on the automaker and condemned it over its failure to promptly report a defect that G.M. has linked to 13 deaths. G.M. will pay a $35 million penalty — the maximum allowed and the largest ever imposed on an automaker — and will be required to make wide-ranging changes to its safety practices that will be supervised by the government, another first for an automaker. “What G.M. did was break the law,” Anthony Foxx, the secretary of transportation, said at a news conference.Wait, 35 million is the maximum allowed? Really? Because a few years ago, shortly after GM finished closing selected dealerships on instructions from corporate in Washington, Toyota was negotiating a settlement with the owners of GM:
Toyota (TM) on Wednesday reached a $1.2 billion settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, ending a criminal investigation into issues that caused inadvertent acceleration of certain vehicles.
...the deal, which marks the largest penalty ever imposed by the government on a car manufacturer, also includes independent monitoring of Toyota’s safety practices and deferred prosecution for three years on a wire fraud charge.Emphasis added because damn, somebody is lying. And c'mon, any idiot blogger could surmise that GM knew about the problem for years, probably during the Bush years as well, but they chose to reveal the issue and settle until they had emerged from bankruptcy and severed ties with the government, leaving the old GM as the responsible party. All concurrent with GM choosing a female CEO to soften the corporate image knowing tough times may be coming.
Don't even ask where the mainstream media is on this.
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