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.

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.

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

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

Bloomberg is basically just Rudy Giuliani with a billion or two dollars to spend to alter the election.

Today over at Front Page, Rudy lays out the steps that we need to take in order to become a “resilient society” including programs called Borderstat, Terrorstat, and Readystat, which have more than an Orwellian ring to them, as does the entire article. It might as well be called “learning to love Big Brother.”

He lays out a basis for our entire society to live in constant fear except for one sentence in the last paragraph where he says that we will declare “our right to live in freedom of fear.”

There is no mention of any other rights that Americans have. And sadly, it appears that the only way to get to the point where we don’t live in fear is to live in constant fear.

War is peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

And now, Freedom of Fear is Fear of Freedom. Or something like that.

Is this the type of society that Bloomberg is on his way to promoting? If it is -- if it's just Rudy's views with a "softer tone" -- then it is a society that we definitely need to fear.

http://tinyurl.com/2rofur