The assault on VW for “cheating” Uncle is metastasizing.
The little Uncles – state governments – are piling on.
Five of them (New Jersey, Texas, New Mexico, Kentucky and West Virginia) have formally filed civil lawsuits over the TDI diesel emissions “scandal,” seeking millions of dollars in fines.
48 state-level attorney generals are “investigating” VW.
This on top of the federal witch hunt launched by the U.S. Justice (sic) Department in January that hopes to milk $46 billion out of VW AG (which includes Audi and Porsche).
Even for a major corporation, that’s a lot of coins. If the Feds are successful, it will likely mean der untergang for VW.
The Justice Department accuses VW of “violating clean air laws,” but the interesting thing about that is the “laws” at issue are actually regulatory edicts issued by EPA, which is not a legislative branch of the government. Not that this is of any importance, of course. The federal government long ago ceased paying even lip service to that “goddamn piece of paper” (as The Chimp styled it) called the Constitution that’s supposed to serve as the owner’s manual for the form of government we’re repeatedly told we live under but which we haven’t actually enjoyed for decades – if ever.
What happens is, Congress passes vaguely worded laws – in this case, the Clean Air Act and its amendments – and unelected bureaucracies such as EPA are given wide latitude to divine and then “implement” their interpretation of what Congress intended. This amounts to giving bureaucracies such as the EPA de jure (as the lawyers style it) legislative power, something never authorized by the Constitution much less agreed to by the public.
So much for “consent of the governed,” eh?
That’s obnoxious all by itself.
But if the facts about the VW “cheating” scandal were explained to people, most of them would agree the witch hunt is just that.
A witch hunt.
And they’d be outraged.
The automaker is accused of embedding code in the software that controls the operation of its TDI diesel engines (about 580,000 of them) that enabled them to get through Uncle’s Byzantine emissions testing protocols while emitting “up to 40 times” the legally allowable maximum of exhaust emissions in real-world driving.
