RALPH HOAR
IN MEMORIAM

Raging Hoar Moans
What Happened to Three Strikes and You're Out?

Even when the flogging appears fierce, NHTSA's practice of flogging automakers when they break the law is little more than a wet noodle exercise. In thirty years, it amounts to less than $10 million, scarcely a fraction of Bob Eaton's stock options for a single year.

Attorneys who represent people who have been seriously injured in automobile crashes spend their own money in hopes they can find a judge who will insist that an automaker make full disclosure of whatever they haven't already destroyed. Time and again, the information those attorneys are able to extract reveals that automakers frequently lie to curtail federal safety rulemaking and, at best, tell half truths when faced with a safety defect investigation. The automakers are probably not the only ones, but they're the only ones I'm likely to get around to in this lifetime.

Discovering the ebb and flow of sanctions associated with the change of administrations may have provided a faint hint of the joy that I.F. Stone must have felt as he uncovered corporate and government misadventures and wrote about them in his rag. And what irony that the law and order folks who brought us "three strikes and you're out" did not see fit to apply that standard uniformly. These latter day conservatives would put a petty thief in jail and toast the deeds of manufacturers who repeatedly flaunt the laws that are supposed to keep us safe. It's true that corporate scoff-laws are different: They pay their fines with stockholders' money, contribute millions of dollars to political campaigns, and have high-priced PR flacks to bellyache for them when they get held accountable. Ironic, perhaps. Surprising, no. With all the jails being built, there must be room for a few corporate dons whose decisions kill and maim as surely as any Mafia boss' orders.

OPTSF236

4/1/99