Dear Editor:
In 1965 Ralph Nader wrote "Unsafe at Any Speed," a study showing that many American automobiles were unsafe. The Chevy Corvair was prominent in the study because there were more than 100 lawsuits pending against it. To discredit Mr. Nader the automobile industry hired private detectives to dog him, prostitutes to try and entrap him, they tapped his phone and so forth. In the end the government stepped in and strengthened the product liability laws concerning automobiles.
The goal was to protect us from corporate America. Any product that has the potential of harming us is studied in detail by corporations. Once a product has been designed and manufactured, there is a certain threshold of deaths or damage to humans that is "acceptable" in the corporate world.
To roll back this threshold further, corporations have enlisted the National Chamber of Commerce and conservative politicians to push endlessly for "tort" reform. They coin the phrase frivolous lawsuits and picture gold-digging Americans to frame the issue. Ultimately, this is not the major issue for corporate America they allege. In most cases it is small potatoes but it does help fatten their bottom line.
There is a new documentary which probably will not be shown in Jefferson City called "Hot Coffee." It highlights the McDonald's suit in which a plaintiff was a given a large settlement for being scalded by McDonald's coffee.
The movie will tell you details that you do not know. Corporate America, the national Chamber of Commerce, conservative politicians, comedians and others distorted the facts of the case. Like the cigarette issue, the defective car issue and many other stories, this story is far more complex than presented.
Recently I heard a local radio caller state that citizens are very smart and will only buy the politically correct product. He was talking about incandescent light bulbs.
Then I read a letter in this newspaper that said parents and children were too irresponsible to make proper dietary decisions. I believe these individuals would call themselves conservatives but I found their reasoning to be contradictory.
No one has all the answers. Unless there is a balance of free market activities and reasonable regulations and enforcement, the public will not prosper.
The path of deregulation has gone very far. Moneyed interests pay politicians and pundits to undermine reasonable enforcement to our detriment and then pay them to misinform us.
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