As a gloomy, snowy February came to a close in the nation’s capital, so did the most recent circus attraction on Capitol Hill.  Several days of congressional hearings on the Toyota recalls didn’t exactly deliver many more facts for Americans but they did leave behind a plethora of speculation and opinion to feast upon.  While the saga now known as GasPedalGate flailed around quietly for several years, it’s suddenly taken center stage and today plays out like a bad made-for-TV-movie, complete with its villain, its victims, and most telling, a very long list of opportunists.

To see the full picture, the story begins in California with the history of General Motors and the United Auto Workers in the 1980’s, and GM’s rescue by Toyota through a little venture called NUMMI.  Today, in 2010, the NUMMI chapter nears its close.  But before it does, the Fremont, California plant and its rank and file workers will serve as unwilling pawns in what could turn out to be an orchestrated blueprint for incapacitating the strongest competitor to Government Motors and one of the most significant threats to labor unions here and around the globe.

Today’s rendition has been so manipulated and so propagandized, the facts have all but been removed from the storyline.  The bread crumb trail of truth has been trampled upon and so broadly scattered about, the trail is almost beyond the point of recognition.

The story that emerges is the collusion of forces in Big Labor, Big Government, Big Journalism, Big Litigators and Big Progressive Philanthropy.  And no, I’m not talking Breitbart sites.

The History of NUMMI

When a bankrupt and bailed out General Motors officially announced in June 2009 that it would be pulling out of its joint venture with Toyota, it marked the end of another era.

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I have had the pleasure of Greenpeace taking my trash every Sunday night after I put it out — the contents winding up in staged “stories” in outlets like Deutsche Welle, the Independent, El Pais and Old Red herself, the Guardian, whose reporters never even called before cobbling unrelated offal together to spin their yarn. Not content to address the issues when old fashioned (if lame) intimidation efforts were handy, the green machine have also labored over breathless press releases announcing with whom they’ve seen me dine, and plastered the walls and leafleted Kyoto negotiating conferences with my mug as a “climate criminal”. As I detailed in Red Hot Lies, that’s child’s play compared with the death threats and attempts on scientists’ lives when they dare push back against The New Red that is Big Green.

So naturally, when I see an email touting a “tribunal”, in Spanish though it may have been, I look closer. Courtesy of a translating software and a little cleanup work, here’s today’s missive from Friends of the Earth International. When reading it, recall how the International Criminal Court was hailed by academics and even our then-president as an environmental treaty. Recall how we are poised to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty which despite its name purports to regulate land-based sources such as transport and electricity generation, just like Kyoto except that it has its own court, one that has already shown its willingness to go rogue and set its jurisdiction ad hoc.

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