Fog Facts by Larry Beinhart

Author:Larry Beinhart
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781560258865
Publisher: PublicAffairs

It ended up in court with both sides refusing to pay the claims.

Neither side fought to make sure that the human beings who had damaged their health while building things for Halliburton got their medical care paid for. The few news stories on the litigation and the background events which led to it, that made it out of the fog, didn’t even mention what happened to them.

One of the primary goals of this administration is tort reform. A tort is a civil wrong for which the law may supply a remedy. Tort reform is packaged as protecting your local OBGYN, so he or she won’t be afraid to deliver babies.

In reality, it will do a great deal more to protect large industrial companies.

Companies like Halliburton, which incurred liabilities through their conduct—exposing workers to asbestos—and bad business decisions—deciding to self-insure and buying another company with asbestos liabilities.

We have a system in which regulation is weak and getting weaker. There has rarely, if ever, been a fine for misconduct so large that it exceeded the additional profit made by breaking the rules. Suing is the only system we have in place to get recompense when a person is injured by a corporation that poisons the water or the air or that sells tainted food, by automobiles that explode, by products that poison children, or by drugs that destroy one of your organs or cause premature death as a side effect, even though the companies had cause to know it would happen.

Even, oh, for the romantic days of classical capitalism, when businessmen were risk-takers! Now, alas, it is being replaced by Bush-Cheneyism, where businessmen get the government to come in and cover for their mistakes.

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