Volkswagen AG executive Oliver
Schmidt is due to be sentenced this week for “cheating” Uncle. He faces seven
years in federal prison and up to $400,000 in fines. His professional life is,
of course, kaput. He will never work again.
Starbucks,
perhaps.
And
his personal life is probably ruined, too. Not many wives stand by their
convicted felon.
Schmidt
is only 48 years old – and his life is over. All because he – along with other
VW executives and engineers – “cheated” on federal emissions tests, which
amounts to the same thing as making a right turn on red when there’s clearly no
traffic around. A violation of statute; no actual harm caused to anyone.
But
the affront to the authority of the state, that is another matter. It’s why
cops lurk in wait at intersections in the middle of the night, waiting to
waylay a right-on-redder. The cop can see it’s safe to make the turn. He knows
no one is threatened with any harm as a result of the perfectly safe right turn,
the red light notwithstanding.
But
the law must be obeyed – which is another way of saying the state’s authority
must never be questioned.
Same
thing here.
Schmidt
harmed no one. VW’s diesels harmed no on. The only “evidence” adduced to
convict Schmidt and nail him – and VW – to the cross is the hearsay speculation
of EPA bureaucrats, who claim that
microcosmic, fractional differences in the output of oxides of nitrogen (NOx),
a byproduct of combustion, are “harmful.”
In
the same way that making a right on red with no one around is.
The
EPA – and federal courts – were not required to prove that anyone (literally,
any one –
even a single actual human being) was harmed by the “cheating.” Just as it is
not necessary to establish that a right-on-red harmed anyone.
The
only thing that matters is that the government be obeyed – regardless of the fatuity
of the “offense.”
Schmidt
and VW regarded this as absurd – just as any normal person regards it as
idiotic to sit stupidly at a red light in the middle of the night and not make
that turn when it’s obvious there’s no one else around for miles.
But
after a few months in Room 101, poor Schmidt has come around.
Like
Winston Smith after his conversion, Schmidt loves Uncle now. He has written the judge
who will preside over his sentencing a mewling apologia in which he states that
he feels “misused” by his former employer.
“I
must say that I feel misused by my own company in the diesel scandal or
‘Dieselgate,’ ” Schmidt wrote to U.S. Federal Judge Sean Cox, according to a
letter filed in court and which was published by Germany’s Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
“In
hindsight, I should never have agreed to meet with Dr. Ayala on that day,” he
wrote – describing a meeting with Alberto Ayala, a California Air
Resources Board bureaucrat.
“Or
better yet, I should have gone to that meeting and ignored the instructions
given to me and told Dr Ayala that there is a defeat device in the VW diesel
engine vehicles and that VW had been cheating for almost a decade. I did not do
that and that is why I find myself here today.”
California’s
emissions rigmarole is even more fatuous than federal fatuity.
VW
was under immense pressure to get its cars “certified” for sale in what is
still – for the moment – the country’s largest market for new cars. So a little
harmless shuck and jive occurred. Bureaucrats were bamboozled. This kind of
thing used to be applauded as Yankee Ingenuity but today is regarded as almost
a kind of mental aberration, like not loving Big Brother or really seeing those
fingers . . .
”
. . . O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb
hidden and the four fingers extended. ‘How many fingers am I
holding up, Winston?’ ‘And if the party says that it is not four but five —
then how many?’ The word ended in a gasp of pain.”
One
wonders whether – a couple of years hence – we will find a watery-eyed Schmidt
drowning himself in Victory Gin at the Chestnut Tree Cafe . . .
.
. .
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