Oh Man. Dwight Meredith has a devastating post up about compensatory damages.
As Bill Clinton knew so well, in order to make a complicated point comprehensible to average Americans who have no first hand experience with abstract issues involving big money and policy choices — you personalize it, you draw contrasts and you frame the issue in terms of human values.
These are real human beings who have been determined to have suffered a life changing loss due to negligent or conscious actions on the part of corporations. It is not about the “greedy trial lawyers.” It is about them.
It is beyond dispute that pain and suffering is a real, actual, legitimate loss. The hard question is how much money is required to compensate for a given amount of pain and suffering. There is no scale that actually balances pain on one side of the scale and money on the other side. The Bush administration suggests that a lifetime of pain and suffering result in compensation of a maximum of $250,000.
Perhaps we can put that amount into perspective by comparing it with other values our within society.
In 1999 Ken Lay dispatched an empty Enron Jet to France to fetch his daughter Robin home from Nice. The cost of that flight was was $125,000 or one half of what the Bush administration considers to be the value of a lifetime of pain and suffering.
The Bush administration’s latest tax cut proposal would have reduced Dick Cheney’s taxes by $220,000 in the last year he worked at Halliburton. That tax relief is approximately 90% of what the Bush administration believes to be the damages for a lifetime of pain and suffering.
Invested in 10-year Treasury Notes currently yielding 4.02%, $250,000 could provide a yearly income of $10,050. A full time minimum wage earner makes approximately $11,850 per year.
Last year Braves pitcher Gregg Maddox earned more than $13,000,000 and pitched almost 200 innings. Mr. Maddox earned more than what Mr. Bush feels is adequate compensation for a lifetime in a wheelchair for every four innings he pitched.
The Chicago Tribune does a thorough analysis of the administrations duplicity and mendacity in the Michigan case. Thomas Spencer at Thinking It Through cuts to the chase:
In short, W and the boys are saying one thing in public and something entirely different in their legal arguments before the Supreme Court. Just one more example of this administration’s astonishing dishonesty with the American people.
It’s not exactly surprising though. Since Nixon’s folks are largely running this adminstration, it doesn’t exactly surprise me that they would take such a Nixonian approach. If you recall Nixon once said “Watch what we do, not what we say.”
Apparently these folks learned well from their former boss because Nixon’s caveat applies to the present administration as well.
Spencer is a historian who knows whereof he speaks. The Nixonian character of this administration cannot be overstated. They overtly reject Bush I and try to assume the mantle of Saint Reagan, but this is the party of dirty tricks, ratfucking, enemies lists, secrecy and imperial executive power.
Texas A&M University officials are trying to stop some students’ plans to mark Monday’s Martin Luther King Jr. holiday with an-off campus party at which guests are encouraged to mimic stereotypes about blacks.
“It’s hard to understand how students could live in today’s world and think a party playing on stereotypes of African-Americans would be acceptable,” said Ron Sasse, director of dormitories at the College Station campus, where 85 percent of the students are white and 3 percent are black.
Fliers at the Walton Hall dormitory advertised the event and encouraged partygoers to mimic stereotypes and “think ghetto.”
Oh come on. It’s just a little bit of modern Minstrel fun on Martin Luther King Day. True, King was the leader of the most important civil rights movement in our history and was assassinated by a racist scumbag, but that’s no reason you can’t dress up in blackface on his birthday and make fun of African-Americans. Lighten up (no pun intended.)
All I can say is thank gawd they got rid of that racist affirmative action in those Texas universities. There’s obviously no advantage to having more African-Americans on campus. Those fun-loving pranksters don’t need to have any black people around to challenge their prejudices or make them defend such insulting stereotypes face to face with those they seek to humiliate and demean. No need at all.
MLK had it right. People should be judged by the content of their character.
Why Not Capital Punishment for Double Parking, Too?
Talk Left discusses the case of a man accused of attempted espionage. Ashcroft is seeking the death penalty.
Please, please spare me any hand-wringing on this one about the families of the victims and how the only possible justice for them is “an eye for an eye.” There are no families of the victims, because THERE ARE NO VICTIMS.
Does everyone feel comfortable with the idea of executing people for espionage that wasn’t even committed? Particularly when Robert Hansen, everybody’s favorite Clinton hating G-Man, was personally responsible for numerous deaths of American agents by the KGB and he got life (and we taxpayers are paying his pension to his wife.)
Of course, Hansen had information to share because he was guilty as sin and his crimes reached to highest level of the clandestine spy world, so they couldn’t kill him. Who knows what he might say in a courtroom? But, this poor schmuck is just a mentally challenged loser so they can “make an example of him.”
That’s Justice with a capital J.
Correction: That’s Hanssen. Thanks to Patrick Neilsen Hayden for the heads up.
Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged directs us to this delicious little bit of feline DC back-biting.
I honored the rule about keeping confidences,” says Frum, 42. He also honored the rule, he says, “of keeping the president’s thinking confidential as he’s thinking it.” (It’s unclear, however, how familiar the author was with the president’s thinking. Asked how many one-on-one meetings he had with the president, Frum says there were “six or eight.” But when pressed to exclude walk-by encounters in the hallways, the total falls to “two or three.”)
He has fleshy pale cheeks, bright brown eyes and an eager bearing that leaves the impression of an overgrown boy. Frum is sitting in his office at the American Enterprise Institute, where he is a resident fellow. He is surrounded by stacked boxes of “The Right Man.” Speaking in a smooth, NPR-perfect voice, he has completed 17 radio interviews by lunchtime. He began at 6 a.m. and will be finished by midnight.
Frum is attempting what is probably an impossible balancing act: He wants to “speak truthfully about what I saw” at the White House while still hoping for the administration’s love. He observes from outside the sanctum but still promises an “inside account.” He is a self-described “minor player” who still feels qualified to write that Secretary of State Colin Powell is the “deadliest bureaucratic knife fighter in the whole Bush administration.”
All of which has made him a figure of some disdain, both within and beyond the Bush circle. This is manifest in a classic Washington form: Conversations with people who know Frum begin with on-the-record praise and spiral into on-background ridicule. “There’s a sort of desperate edge to David’s need to be noticed,” says one well-known conservative who knows Frum and has ties to the White House. Frum has an outsider’s zealousness for recognition, he says. In addition to still being a Canadian citizen, Frum was also one of the few Jews in the Bush White House, a point of which he seems acutely conscious.
As Julia pithily observes: Shame no-one in the White House realized what a loser this guy was before he set our foreign policy, isn’t it?
Matt points to an unintentionally hilarious look at SUV manufacturers market research:
According to market research conducted by the country’s leading automakers, Bradsher reports, SUV buyers tend to be “insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors and communities. They are more restless, more sybaritic, and less social than most Americans are. They tend to like fine restaurants a lot more than off-road driving, seldom go to church and have limited interest in doing volunteer work to help others.
I hesitate to condemn the many fine people who drive these behemoths, but as a resident of Los Angeles, it’s pretty clear that in this town, at least, a good many SUV drivers are young girls who drive at 80 mph on the freeway during rush hour while simultaneously applying mascara and talking on the phone. I’ll leave it up to the experts to decide whether they might generally fit the picture of those descibed above. The Greg Easterbrook review of High and Mighty in TNR
says “…One such wise man, named Clotaire Rapaille, tells the Big Three that people buy SUVs “because they want to look as menacing as possible.” I can’t say why these young women want to look menacing, but I can confirm that they are a roadway menace in a crowded big city.
Ryan Barrow at That Said draws a nice analogy between the auto manufacturer’s cynical marketing of SUVs and George W. Bush’s cynical marketing of his anti-affirmative action policy. After quoting the Easterbrook piece he adds:
Like the manufacturer of an SUV, the President is peddling his product by appealing to our fears and base nature with deliberately misleading language and imagery. Rather than an enlightened and judicious system which aims to make some accomodation for citizens whose race is held against them every waking day, the UM’s admissions process is derided as a morass of quotas and reverse-discriminatory tomfoolery. For quota, we have discovered, brings all sorts of negative imagery and paranoia to mind, enabling us to dismiss the historic suffering of this country’s minority citizens and to demand that they once again Yield to the supposed interests of an overwhelmingly privileged majority; Bush rhetoric encourages us to do so. And it allows a handful of unsuccessful applicants – who avowedly believe that they were the particular white people who ended up on the short end of the deal – the satisfaction of playing the Scooby Doo victim, moaning and crying about how they’d have gotten what they wanted if it wasn’t for those meddlin’ brown kids, while all the while protesting that a mildly race-conscious admissions process is merely a sop to moaners and cryers who just can’t get it done on their own.
Pete apparently never was more wrong than when he wrote that one. was he? I’m going to buy his story for the time being, especially since the charge — “suspicion of harboring an image” — is sufficiently vague and (Don’t say it!)”Orwellian.” However, the guy is now a punchline for every two-bit Morning Zoo guy on AM radio now. I’m 49. I’m not supposed to get disillusioned like this any more.
You probably saw the story where the Vatican put the knuckle down on American Catholic politicians — read John Kerry and (maybe) Nancy Pelosi — about hewing to the company line regarding certain issues on which a “well-formed Christian conscience” does not permit them to take a certain position. Now, ever since John Kennedy gave his speech to the Baptist ministers in Texas back in 1960, we American Papists have taken comfort in the fact that this peculiar “double loyalty” issue had been put to rest. Now, with their institutional church possessing on issues of human sexuality the approximate moral credibility of a barnyard goat, the bureaucrats in red beanies have decided to raise it again. If Kerry has any brains at all, he’ll make a speech this week telling these ermined layabouts to go climb a tree. My own informed Christian conscience won’t rest until a battalion of them are hauled off to the sneezer on conspiracy charges.
Noticed that Weepin’ Joe Lieberman (D-Madame Tussaud’s), burnishing his hepcat credentials, appeared with Conan and with Jon Stewart this week. It was like hearing Cotton Mather rap.
I was just wondering if anyone but me finds it wierd that the President of the United States holds these Nuremburg style rallies to talk about serious issues like tax policy or social security when he’s not election campaigning. I saw him whip the hand picked crowd into a complete frenzy the other night with the phrase “we need ta pass tort reform!” You would have thought he was announcing the capture of bin Laden. (who?)
I know the guy was a cheerleader and all, but is this really appropriate? And who are these freaks who get completely hysterical over the words “tort reform?” It’s creepy.
PLA has an interesting post up about tort reform and defensive medicine. It brought to mind a debate on the Lehrer news hour the other night about “traaaal lawyers” and their monstrous greed and avarice.
The defender of liberty and all that is good and clean — the corporate apologist — kept complaining about how these evil toe-art lawyers were conning innocent unknowing Americans into filing suits against their will and then taking all the ill gotten gains when they rape the Godfearing American job creating corporations. One of the “reforms” he was lobbying for was to eliminate contingency fees.
Satan’s handpuppet pointed out that it would hardly make sense for him to pour a bunch of his own money into these cases, which he does in these contingency arrangements, if he knew they were frivolous because he could not hope to recoup it if he didn’t win.
The sainted corporate defender didn’t respond, but it made me realize that these bastards are actually trying to persuade average Americans that corporations are at a disadvantage in a courtroom. They want people to believe that plaintiffs lawyers are able to take completely bogus cases, pour huge sums of their own money into them, convince a judge that the case is for real, use all their wiles on the jury of complete idiots…er… average voters (oops) who are mesmerized by their devilish powers to convince them to bankrupt the guileless corporations for no good reason at all.
If this is the case then the huge stables of highly paid lawyers representing these corporations in court really suck at their jobs, don’t they? Perhaps rather than outlawing the practice of contingency fees altogether it would make more sense to hire those corporate lawyers on a contingency basis too. It seems to have a very salutory effect on performance.
Matt Yglesias poses a challenge to liberals on their position on affirmative action and legacy admissions. He says:
…the point here isn’t that the existence of legacy admissions is irrelevant to the affirmative action debate. The point is that liberals owe the world an explanation of exactly what the relationship is supposed to be. Should both be abolished, or neither? Are we making a serious policy point here or are we just mocking the president?
From the standpoint of principle, for what it’s worth, I think one offsets the other. The legacy admission is a pure expression of reward based on systemic privilege and the affirmative action admission is a pure example of redress based on systemic underprivilege. They represent the two main groups of our society that are judged and rewarded in accordance with characteristics that have nothing to do with them as individuals– inherited privilege and inherited color. (Even athletics, after all, requires more than just genes. You do have to work at it.) Yet, privilege and color are fundamental forces in American life, whether we want to admit it or not. On this issue they are bound together.
Everyone else on a college campus is a mishmosh of various athletic, artistic and academic talents along with regional obligations and various other missions assumed by the school, wherein students with a certain baseline level of skills are exposed to the most diverse group of people that the college can muster. It benefits elite children of privilege to have exposure to people of color and it benefits people of color to rub shoulders with children of privilege. Indeed, jocks and geeks and artists and musicians and rich kids and black kids and foreign kids all living together on the same campus and sharing classes and making friendships is a demonstrably educational experience, which is after all, the point.
So, I say keep both affirmative action and legacy admissions along with all the other criteria that the school decides creates the best opportunity for learning.
On a strategic level, unfortunately, I think that many reasonable people have been gulled into thinking that the affirmative action issue is one of fairness and that without it students would otherwise be admitted to college purely on “merit.” The legacy issue is the most crystal clear example of why this is not so because it is such a perfect comparison to racial preference. And it draws attention to the fact that the Republicans are not acting out of a desire for true meritocracy. One cannot say that people should not be admitted to college because of their race, which after all is a heritable characteristic, something they receive from being the child of certain parents through absolutely no effort of their own, while defending the legacy student like George W. Bush who also was admitted to college because he was the child of certain parents and through absolutely no effort of his own.
Indeed, one could make the case that Bush was far less deserving than the average racial minority who is admitted with extra points, because unlike them he had the good fortune to be sent to the best private schools in the nation and could have engaged tutors and SAT preparation etc., to bring him up to the level at which he could have been admitted on a meritocratic basis. After all, those who wish to abolish affirmative action always make the case that the best way to ensure equal opportunity is to ensure that the primary and secondary education system properly prepares all students to the best of their ability. George W. Bush and all the other privileged rich kids who rely on legacy admissions to attend college are a screaming example of those who have every possible advantage in terms of preparation for college and still fail to win their place in the institution of their choice on the basis of their own accomplishment. Certainly, they are far worse examples of a meritocratic ideal than a black student who came from sub-standard schools in a lower middle class family and had none of these extraordinary opportunities to better their academic performance.
This dichotomy illustrates to sincere people that the issue is more complicated than it seems and makes them question the motivations of those who consistently argue as if unfairness in admissions is only a matter of race. Since I believe that most Americans are not racist and don’t wish to be used for the purpose of pandering to racists, I think it behooves liberals to expose these coded appeals.
The issue of legacy admissions is strategically useful for Democrats because no matter how sincerely argued on both sides, it is primarily a political football that serves as a useful symbol for those who believe that all of this “race” business has just gone on long enough — they’re tired of hearing about it and, — Judas Priest, haven’t we done enough for those people already?
Legacy admissions are the way to show people who believe that the issue has been raised out of a concern for fairness that they have been duped. Republicans should be forced to explian why they have been such passionate advocates of meritocracy when it comes to blacks and hispanics and yet so silent on the issue of meritocracy when it comes to the children of wealth and privilege.
…which leads to the question of who really plays the “class warfare” card, doesn’t it?
Note: edited for embarrassing misspelling of Matthew Yglesias’ last name.