LET'S LYNCH SOMEBODY

Remember the little Attorney General of Connecticut testifying before a Congressional committee on the vicious greed of the oil companies last winter? He had all the charm of an Anacin commercial, and the networks did their best to put him on with the same frequency, too, for he had a marked gift for theatrics. With great fanfare and publicity, he filed a suit against the oil villains for anti-competitive practices and other fashionable charges. With equal fanfare, the Attorney General of Florida filed a similar suit, and with only little less publicity, the Attorney General of Colorado declared that he had a suit under consideration.

The interesting thing is that after all this hectic publicity, the networks never told you what happened to all those suits, so let us tell you: The Connecticut and Florida suits were thrown out of court as totally void of merit, and the Colorado suit was never even filed for utter lack of evidence.

Does that mean that the merry sport of kicking the oil companies has gone out of fashion?

Not at all. If we can't kick the oil companies for violating the law, the FEA seemed to say, let's kick them for obeying it, and it hit them with a suit alleging that they took advantage of a "loophole" in the FEA's allocation regulations.

These regulations are something that must be seen to be believed. The latest version (they have been amended 16 times since they first appeared last January!) has no less than 178 pages of fine print in 3 this sea of bureaucratic gobbledegook. "Independent marketer," we found in the definitions of Subpart B. §211.51, Section (a), "means either a branded independent marketer or a nonbranded independent marketer." Presumably it also means either a tarred-and-feathered or a non-tarred and feathered independent marketer. But a page further, we read "A nonbranded marketer is a firm engaged in the and (c) is not a branded independent marketer." Similarly, one might add, a nonconformist is a person who (a) is not a centipede, and (b) is not a conformist.

In any case, what the suit is about is that the FEA forced some refiners to sell crude at cut rates to other refiners, but expressly allowed them to recapture the difference of such artificially increased costs in product prices. A loophole, surely, is something that is left out; but the price regulation is something the FEA expressly put in. It now thinks maybe it shouldn't have done that, and with iron logic, it has slammed the companies with one more suit.

However, as in the case of the Connecticut Attorney General, the merits of the case are not important. It will take months before the suit is dismissed, but Mr. Sawhill will gain political capital immediately. For as every one knows, the man who joins in with everybody else to lynch the oil companies must be a good guy.