posted on September 9, 2001 11:29:48 PM new
But I am referring to testing and knowledge that was at hand.
Ford knew the Pinto exploded when rear ended and decided that it was cheaper to pay off the law suits than correct the problem and kept producing and selling them.
They had as much knowledge beforehand as the drunk driver and made a conscious decision to do the act that killed and burned people.
Again- how is this act by Ford any different than what a drunk driver does ? There is no difference, except one will face criminal penalties and one will not.
We seem willing to execute a mentally ill person to "protect" society, but remain silient when a corporation kills even more people and faces absolutely no criminal liability.
We are making decisions based on political reasons rather than any notion of even basic justice.
Ford projects a great image, and we want to execute a bedraggled, mentally ill woman that killed fewer people. Yates will never employ thousands of people, she will never pay money to a lobbyist, she will be lucky if she even gets adequate legal representation. She represents one of the politically weakest people in our society, a mentally ill, stay at home mom. I hope she has a strong back to hold the weight of all the people who want to jump on it. This isn't justice, it is being a blind bully to judge her the way many people are. We attack because she is unable to defend herself, not because she is a "murderer". We remain silient about the powerful mass murderers, because we are cowards.
posted on September 9, 2001 11:43:38 PM new
It sounds like you'd like to believe that these sorts of cold-blooded dollar vs. injury decisions aren't made by corporate execs, Kraftdinner, and that's understandable.
Take your door slamming example... Do you think a car goes into production without that door being slammed, mechanically, hundreds of thousands of times during testing? On top of that, there are precise calculations made on paper - cost of materials, good and better, vs. durability and safety, etc. It's not an art. It's a science.
And it's more than just consumer safety, the same sorts of calculations are made in regards to employee safety. A two dollar guard piece might make it impossible for an employee's arm to get caught in machinery. But, having the piece in place will slow a production line by X %. If the cost analysis comes down on the higher production side, having a certain number of employees injured, through "workplace accidents" is acceptable. You'd be surprised (or maybe not) to hear what some employers have done, not only in not installing safety equipment, but to removing safety equipment already in place, or knowingly putting their workers in deadly situations, for the sake of their bottom line.
posted on September 10, 2001 12:36:20 AM new
No, not at all donny. With any type of manufacturing the cost analysis is the bottom line. I understand this. In car manufacturing, a huge chunk of what you pay for goes for insurance - employee medical & company liability. It's like the word accident no longer applies, and it's either your FAULT or mine.
We complain about how much things cost, so when we decide to buy the $20,000 car instead of the $40,000 car, is it the fault of the manufacturer because it is not as safe as the more expensive car? As the new owner of that car, do I hold any responsibilty if the car isn't perfect? Do we just blindly accept what is sold to us and sue if it doesn't live up to our expectations?
posted on September 10, 2001 03:27:34 AM new
Nope, it's not an easy answer any way around, is it? I don't know what the answer is myself. Where is the line?
Seems to me, I remember when Pintos first came out, they were heavily advertised all over the place, and the big selling point was the price, and, from what I remember, the base price was $1919. Those numbers were HUGE in their advertising, really oversized.
As it turns out, Pintos were little more than death traps on wheels. Inexpensive ones, to be sure, but death traps just the same, because of design flaws that Ford knew about and chose not to correct.
If they had corrected the flaws, perhaps the cars couldn't have been marketed at the $1919 price. When you're basing your profit on selling millions of cars, even a relatively small loss of profit per car is going to make a large impact.
It seems to me that that's where Ford's decision turns from merely distastefully profit-driven to heinous. Ford pushed these Pintos hard at a very attractive price, counting on undercutting the competition to sell millions of them. And it worked. Ford could have had a safer design, at least one that didn't have the high risk of turning the car into a fireball in rear-end collisions. But if they had, they would have lost the advantage that they were counting on to draw the low-price car segment of the consumer population.
We know some cars are safer, and more expensive, than others. I bought my daughter a little used Honda this year for $4k. I know Volvo's are safer, but I couldn't have gotten a comparable Volvo at that price. Maybe I could have gotten her one of those huge old Buicks like her father's father bought him when we were in school together. That thing was like a rolling tank. But keeping gas in one of those is expensive, a strain on a college student's budget. So, I bought her this little Honda and sent her up to Atlanta to take her chances. (She totalled it 2 weeks ago, no one was hurt, nothing exploded.)
So, her little Honda pretty much lived up to my expectations. If she had been driving that old Buick her father had when he was in college, the accident she was in might have merely dented the Buick's fender. As it was, it totalled the Honda, mashing one back corner totally in, axle all bent up, etc. But it didn't explode.
So, no, I don't expect a car to be totally safe, at any price. But I also wouldn't expect that, in order to advertise a $1919 price, undercutting every competitor, that a car should be so extremely dangerous that an accident that in other cars of its general price range would be non-fatal would turn this car into a ball of flame. Pintos weren't trying to draw off Cadillac customers. They were trying to draw off customers in their own price range, like Hornets, or whatever the small, low-priced cars of the day were.
And now I've gotten far afield of the subject of the thread, but these sorts of questions without easy answers sure are interesting to think about
posted on September 10, 2001 11:20:06 AM new
If we are willing to accept a corporation's cost accounting as making it OK to kill and mame becuse it offers us economy in the market, then if Yates claims she killed her kids because a funeral is cheaper than raising them or collecting the insurance is more profitable than letting them live, then she shouldn't be prosecuted either.
There is no moral difference between these 2 situations. The only real difference is that we will over look a car makers crime to get a less expensive car. The car maker "gives" us something for us to ignore the killing and crippling of "other" people. Yates has "nothing" to offer us, so we'll prosecute and/or execute her. As donny mentioned, I am picking on car makers, but it goes on throughout business.
As I said before, it is a political criminal system, not a justice system. Decisions are made without regard to justice.
Murder is OK as long as it is economical and done by a faceless corporation.
posted on September 10, 2001 11:38:31 AM new
When REAMOND mentioned the point that if Yates claims she killed her kids because a funeral is cheaper than raising them or collecting the insurance is more profitable than letting them live, it reminded me of something that happened when I was about 9 years old. We had been living in Arizona and had just moved to California. We were looking for an apartment but all of them said NO KIDS. We were all pretty frustrated living in a hotel for the previous 2 weeks and not being able to find a place to live. Finally my mother said, "Maybe we should just take the kids out and drown them!" and the landlord at that particular apartment said, "Yeah, why don't you!" I remember that conversation like it just happened yesterday. My mother was so upset and sounded serious about it that I was paranoid for quite some time about whether my mother would hurt me and my brother. My brain just kinda gets stuck when I think that parents could actually harm their own children. Most are trying to protect their children from harm and to think that in some families the parents are the ones doing the harming just bothers me. There was abuse in my family and so maybe that influences me so that I feel strongly about stuff like this. I don't have children (by choice) but if I found out that I was pregnant I certainly would become like a mama bear and become very protective of the child.
posted on September 10, 2001 11:47:58 AM new
Being a "moma bear" towards children is the normal responce.
Having a mental illness will derail that normal responce. Yates is not the first to harm their own children while being mentally ill.
I would hope that if you do ever have children all will go well for you. But I nor anyone else can guarantee that you will not have PPD, causing you to not to even want to be in the same room as your baby.
posted on September 10, 2001 12:28:16 PM new
You're right, REAMOND. Once you factor that into the equation, it changes everything. Although not everyone with this disorder kills their child but it probably happens more often than we think. The frightening thing is that there were so many kids in this case.
posted on September 10, 2001 01:26:30 PM new
PPD has varing degrees of effect. Changing your mind and not wanting to nurse a baby after it is born may be a mild symptom. Some woman litterally "shut down" due to the conflicting emotions brought on by PPD.
We had a woman in our state that did the same thing as Yates a couple of years ago. Shortly after the birth of her third child, she killed all 3 of her children.
I'm glad that NOW or any other organization would come to her aid. This mental illness needs to be publicized for these mothers to get real and effective help.
Edited to add to Kraftdiiner and Donny-- The question of civil damages responsibility for defective products lands squarely on the companies. Why ? Because they have the means to spread the costs for these expences in addition to the clear assignment of fault. If you suffer $2 million is damages, how do you recover ? If the companies are made to pay, they can spread the costs over millions of sales and over decades or even centuries of time, a family can not do that.
These lawsuits have had another effect. The U.S is one of the safest places in the world to live. The costs have been measured in pennies on the dollar cost of a product or service. Medical malpractice adds little more than 5 or 6 cents to your medical dollar.
But look what we receive in return for these pennies. I hesitate to even drink the water or eat the food in another country much less than visit a doctor in a foreign country. Flying on foreign airlines is the same result.
There are many who claim these lawsuits go too far. But those same people are the ones crying in a lawyer's office when their son loses a couple fingers from a defective product, or the daughter loses a leg, or worse yet when thier infant child is burned alive in a car.
As long as it happens to "someone else", many can "accept" a few limbs or lives lost due to product defects. But when it hits home, they change their minds quickly.
[ edited by REAMOND on Sep 10, 2001 01:46 PM ]
[ edited by REAMOND on Sep 10, 2001 01:48 PM ]
posted on September 10, 2001 02:10:38 PM new
For what it's worth, I don't see much difference between what Andrea Yates did and a woman who has multiple abortions. In fact I find it the height of hypocrisy that the Constitution empowers women to kill their children in the womb, yet punishes them for doing it after birth.
In the Yates instance, the children were subjected to a greater degree of conscious mortal terror. But in the end, aborted or drowned, the children are dead, murdered by their mothers.
posted on September 10, 2001 03:34:33 PM new
Constitutionally there is a difference between abortion and killing a person.
The reason abortion is legal falls on 2 fronts. The Court wasn't convinced that a fetus should have legal "personage". But most import was the privacy issue. There are however governmental "interests" in the fetus that are still not fully defined.
For the pricavy issue the Court realized that if the govt has the power to tell you can not have an abortion, it is also within its power to insist that you will have an abortion. By holding that a pregnancy is a "private" issue, the govt has limits to intervention, correlating to govt "interests".
Abortion, even when illegal, was never tried as murder, but did carry criminal penalties.
Murder requires that a "person" be killed by criminal human agency. Even when abortion was a crime, it wasn't considered homicide. Just as shooting someone that is already dead is not murder because once dead you are no longer a "person".
Even current laws that have criminal penalties for killing a fetus in a car accident or shooting is not charged under murder.
Bestowing a moral equivilant of human to a mass of cells is rife with problems and inconsistencies, as we are realizing in the stem cell debate.
However, the abortion debate is becomming irrelevant.
The debate will be upon us soon enough about the 2 classes of people we will have on this planet, those who are genetically modified to be smarter, stronger, "better" looking, longer living, and those who can not afford the modifications. Those modified will excell "us plain folks" and literally take over all aspects of power within our society.
While the debate smolders about these disparities internationally about medical care,food, shelter, and medicines, we will be faced with these questions within our society instead of with third world countries.
