Tort reform

By Capt. Fogg

It's an idea everyone can get behind. We need to stop those lawyers from winning huge settlements that make life expensive for the rest of us, right?

"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures," said Daniel Webster, and getting people angry or afraid to the point where they don't assess the unintended consequences is the cheap tactic we're usually subjected to - and effectively, I should add. No, I'm not going to rehash the way we've been deprived of our freedom and privacy by the administration's Punch and Judy show. We've been had repeatedly in the same way since I can remember.

Since I started studying being propagandized in grade school, I was told that in this great country, (say it's the greatest or you're a traitor) everyone was entitled to his day in court. That principle is one of the many casualties, not only of our invasion of Iraq but of the success of our unofficial Corporate House of Lords.

Some of the boilerplate you may have signed when dealing with employers, banks and other entities may effectively have been a Faustian bargain if not worse. Ask the Woman who was raped by co-workers for KBR in Iraq why she has no recourse whatever and why KBR was allowed to dispose of evidence without breaking any law. Ask her why she is denied the right to sue in Federal court. Tort reform is the answer:

"Tort reform" is a deliberately deceptive term coined in the 1980s by tobacco, pharmaceutical, insurance and gun lobbyists and lawyers who set about to transform our civil justice landscape by eliminating corporate exposure to civil liabilities,

writes Peggy Garrity in the Los Angeles Times.

Tort reform is a game of bait-and-switch in which ordinary citizens have been snookered by carefully orchestrated and relentless propaganda into seeing a phantom boogeyman in the much-reviled "trial lawyer" who brings "frivolous lawsuits" to "runaway juries" that render "out of control verdicts" in "judicial hellholes," making insurance rates and the costs of all goods and services go up.

We're still waiting for the results, but Halliburton, the recipient of corporate welfare so massive as to defy description and which, being now based in Dubai, doesn't have to bother with those pesky taxes, is essentially free to deny that day in court to anyone who works for them and anyone else if they happen to be raped, harassed, beaten or killed in their Iraqi fiefdom.

Wave the flag, America. Make sure your lapel pin is in place and let's keep booming and bragging about how great we are and how unpatriotic our critics may be. Just keep marching and don't pay any attention to the cliff.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)