The first responder opens with a gush of emotional well unthought acrimony.
"What a crock! "The citizens of the Valley and Gulf Coast have been victimized by poor decisions in corporate boardrooms, favoring greed over safety. Citizens serving on juries in Rio Grande Valley and Texas Gulf Coast have done their constitutional duty, and in doing this most honorable service, have protected their fellow citizens from the unkind actions of others, and have made our country a safer place."
"Greed over safety"? Pot calling kettle black comes to mind, sheesh!
Leave it to a Corpus attorney of such questionable character to blame the corporations for the greedy nature of local attorneys and the populace. Everyone in this community is trying to hit the lotto, witness the thousands of fraudalent claims as such broken foundations and mold, and no, I am not a member of any organization, just not easily taken by a bunch of lies."
In concurrence with the first responder; it is agreed, the claim is a bit embellishing and heroically ebullient nevertheless Mr Watts opening averment, ("The citizens of the Valley and Gulf Coast have been victimized by poor decisions in corporate boardrooms, favoring greed over safety) cogently defines an element that bullies the average citizenry. An Actuary is a person whose work is to calculate statistically risks, premiums, life expectancies, etc. for the insurance industry and the emerging "bean-counting" approach to risk management in the Corporate Scheme. This "bean-counting" rings clear and is exemplified in the movie "A Class Action" . The central premise of the film is roughly analogous to the controversy surrounding the Ford Pinto and Mustang II.
Durrill v. Ford Motor Company
A rear end collision fire case in which a 1974 Ford Mustang II vehicle exploded into flames. The two occupants of the vehicle, Devary Durrill and Bonnie Watkins, died of burns. The accident happened in Corpus Christi Texas and was tried by Perry & Haas. Watts worked at the Corpus Christi plaintiffs’ firm Perry & Haas, where he trained in vehicle litigation and was involved in numerous suits against Ford.
In the movie "A Class Action" the auto manufacturer utilizes a "bean-counting" approach to risk management, whereby the projections of actuaries for probable deaths and injured car-owners is weighed against the cost of re-tooling and re-manufacturing the car without the defect (exploding gas tanks) with the resulting decision to keep the car as-is to positively benefit short term profitability.
WATT if it was your daughter, wife, son or another whom you hold dear in your heart; WATT amount is worth the life of a human being?
Basically the actuary crunches the numbers and calculates a probability. How many people will die and how many will be injured (if the defect is not corrected) The number of dead and injured are translated into a dollar amount which is weighed against the cost of re-tooling and re-manufacturing the car without the defect. The decision is made and carried out knowing that their product will kill people. They know their decision will take the life of an X number of unknown and unborn heirs to the HELLHOLE of a death trap to be sold as the dealerships assure the consumer that the product is safe.
The Ford Pinto, one of the best-selling cars of the 1970s, had a defective gas tank with an unfortunate tendency to burst into flames in rear-end collisions. Instead of fixing the Pinto, Ford lobbied against federal regulation affecting fuel tank safety. As part of the lobbying effort, the company prepared a cost-benefit analysis. According to Ford's engineers, it would cost $11* per car, or $137 million per year for the industry as a whole, to meet the rollover standard, while avoiding an estimated 180 deaths per year, along with an equal number of serious burn injuries and a few thousand wrecked cars.
Ford's cost-benefit analysis valued those lives at a mere $200,000 apiece. That number was calculated by the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration at the request of the auto industry, mainly on the basis of lost wages, plus medical and legal costs and a small amount for pain and suffering. At $200,000 per head, 180 deaths are "worth" $36 million, not nearly enough to "justify" a $137 million expenditure. As Ford saw it, spending an extra $11 per car to fix the gas tank just wasn't worth it.
Despite Ford's lobbying, the gas-tank safety regulation was adopted. Ford responded by immediately, and inexpensively, making the 1977 Pinto safer. But the damage to the company's image had been done. The public realized that Ford had knowingly produced a dangerous car, leading to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of preventable deaths. Ford finally discontinued the model in 1980. --adapted from Priceless
WATT recourse do we have?
WATT will force manufacturers to decide in favor of preserving the life of a human being?
The only way to convince a Corporate Giant is for the cost analysis to favor correcting the defect and the only way to do this is for the cost of a wrongful death to exceed the cost of re-tooling and re-manufacturing the car without the defect.
Yes, in the eyes of those who have not experienced the ordeal of losing a loved one from a defective products such as Ford Pintos exploding upon impact, Firestone tires falling apart in the Texas heat, Chrysler minivans ejecting belted children due to poor door latches, or due to gross neglect by corporate chieftans, countless bad drugs pulled from the market because of no effective regulatory controls at the FDA and pharmaceutical companies decisions to place profits over patient's lives (Rezulin, Baycol, Fen-Phen, Vioxx), old ladies subjected to unnecessary second surgeries to replace tainted hip implants, 40% is a hefty amount to share with a lawyer.
On the other hand WATT choice will stop the recurrence of such preventable accidents? No amount of money can ever compensate for the loss of a loved one or for permanent injury?Is it worth it for someone to pay you 60% of $500 million so they will hold accountable the ones responsible for deciding to burn your daughter alive?
Ask Dusty Durrill, maybe you will see things differently?
