Atrios sums it up:

“We're a dozen or so old, white, mostly male people who for the most part don't hold elected office. Unless the presidential candidates do what we tell them to do, we're going to encourage our short divorced pal from New York City to spend a billion bucks of his personal fortune to fuck around with the election because that's what the people need.”

Unity 08 - ain't it great!

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2007_12_30_archive.html#8494206846617616054

I can see you don't understand what happened. the girl was harmed because the drain cover had been removed by other children just before the accident.

Oh, I see, it was other children that killed her. Sta-Rite was, of course, completely innocent.

The jury didn’t buy that. And there have been over 20 other lawsuits against the company for the product itself, where there were no “evil” children involved.

The Edwards lawsuit was in 1997. Sta-Rite lost another big one in 2003 (104 million) when a faulty pump severely injured a 14-year old boy.

“A Dade County jury determined Aug. 1 that a Sta-Rite single-horsepower pump was responsible for trapping Lorenzo Peterson underwater for several minutes. The incident caused the boy to suffer irreversible brain damage. He now lives in a permanent vegetative state and is under 24-hour medical care.

The Peterson family, from North Miami, Fla., claimed in its lawsuit that the pump was unsafe and Sta-Rite made no effort to modify the design to make it less dangerous or to warn distributors about risks it caused for swimmers, said Michael Haggard, the Miami-based lead attorney for the Petersons.”

I don’t think that corporations intentionally booby-trap their products, but I do think that they continue to sell unsafe products because they calculate the risk of losing a lawsuit vs. the cost of product changes and their cost/benefit analyses often lead to decisions that ultimately result in death and injury.

I know that those with a “corporations can do no wrong” mindset will never admit that, but there are responsible corporations and irresponsible ones. Sta-Rite has developed quite a history of being in the later category.

http://tinyurl.com/33ma3k

Leona Helmsley, the wealthy hotel operator and real estate investor known for her tyrannical behavior (“Queen of Mean") toward her employees and others was so used to her privileged position in the oligarchy that she pronounced (without any fear) her infamous dictum:

“We don’t pay taxes. Only little people pay taxes.”

These days, under the Bush aristocracy, they have added to Helmsley’s pronouncement an addendum:

“We don’t have to obey the law. Only little people have to obey the law”

Like Hemsley, the Bush administration is openly contemptuous of not only the rule of law, but also the “little people” who are the only ones they expect laws to apply to.

They fully expect to be rewarded for their lawbreaking and, at this point, I can’t seem to see a scenario as to why that won’t happen.

However, that was Leona’s thinking at one time too – before she was convicted of federal income tax evasion and other crimes in 1989 for which she served 19 months in prison.

Funny how that happened to such a fine upstanding member of the oligarchy – it was quite a shock.

Perhaps you'd like to tell us what corporate produced items you think we should give up? Cars, food, clothes, TV's, computers? Tell us how to live our life, O wise sage of the world.

How about hazardous pool drains that suck the intestines out of small children? Despite 12 prior law suits with similar claims Sta-Rite refused to include a warning about this potential danger. Screw ‘em, they said, we’ll do what we want to do, and if kids die, too bad.

The lawsuit brought by Edwards changed that.

Of course, if you’re only concerned about Sta-Rite’s bottom line, then, of course it would been much better if children continued to die rather than have one of those “evil” trial lawyers bring a successful lawsuit that “damaged” their profits and resulted in an unfortunate “transfer of wealth” to people who didn’t deserve it.

Regarding the letter in today’s NYT:

“Mr. Edwards, as a trial lawyer, made his money through lawsuits that merely took from one pocket and gave to another, and probably destroyed wealth in the process.”

What this “fellow at the American Enterprise Institute” completely ignores is that the “wealth” created by the corporations sued by Edwards was the result of dangerous products produced by them. The result of these lawsuits, therefore, is safer products and fewer people killed or injured by them.

Sadly, that result is not even considered “valuable” by AEI types whose only measurement of what is “good” or “bad” are the profits of corporate management. The lives of American citizens do not fit into their perverse calculus that does not include people, only profits.