A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.
Volkswagen was founded by the Nazis before World War II. The people who created that cute little bug created a global conflict in which tens of millions were killed, six million of them in an attempt to extirpate an entire religion. Thus it should surprise no one that 60 years later, VW gassed Americans in America by disabling emissions controls on VW diesel engines.
Volkswagen, James Stewart of the New York Times reports, has a “…clannish board and a deep-rooted hostility to environmental regulations among its engineers.”
The former Volkswagen executive said Volkswagen’s engineer-driven culture takes the notion even further. He said the engineers feel that the politicians are guilty of rank hypocrisy, especially in the United States, also grumbling that electric cars make no sense as long as power plants are burning fossil fuels.
“There’s an attitude of moral superiority there,” he said. “The engineers think they know best.”
That Volkswagen is nonetheless obliged to obey applicable environmental laws, he said, is a notion likely to fall on deaf ears in Wolfsburg, especially compared to demands to be No. 1 in sales. (The motive for the software evasion is widely believed to have been to increase sales of diesel-powered cars in the United States.)
Such attitudes are hardly confined to Volkswagen, and a willingness to circumvent environmental regulations may emerge at other automakers. But Volkswagen’s board may be especially insulated from outside opinion, given its paucity of independent directors.
Germany never will bring Volkswagen to heel. The company’s profits über alles behavior is the quintessential expression of that country’s authoritarian national character.
So the remaining question is whether the United States will have the wisdom and backbone to inflict the harshest possible criminal, economic, and diplomatic penalties on Volkswagen. The VW managers, board members, engineers, assembly line workers, everyone with knowledge of the crime, must spend their best years in the gefängnis. All VW products must be banned forever in the United States. Stop selling them. Get them off the road and out of the country. Seize VW’s assets in the U.S. Demand reparations from Germany. Suspend or break diplomatic relations with German until this is resolved to the U.S.’s satisfaction.
I’m beginning to believe that Henry Morganthau was right when he advised Franklin Roosevelt that after WWII, Germany should be reduced to an agrarian economy and forbidden from ever again becoming a manufacturing powerhouse. Grow cabbage, but don’t build cars. That’s still a good idea. German character is too dangerous to entrust with any kind of power.