I was reading Robert Reich's essay called
Toothless Tigers and Tort Reform, and you could say I saw the future, and the future is not pretty.
How bad is it? How about Timothy-McVeigh-times-10,000,000 bad?
It isn't hard for hardcore conservatives to support this current government, the same that want as little government as possible running their lives. By that core belief, they are able to get away with just about anything. As I asked in a previous post, "what is a country without laws?" I'd like to add to that question a partial answer - a country where corporations can produce products that kill people and are meagerly held responsible by a fine that is but the smallest slap on the wrist possible.
$250,000 maximum for a penalty against a corporation that produced a potentially lethal product that they are responsible for testing and providing good safeguards? For a corporation that intakes $1 billion annually?
By this, I think we may have found one of the causes of terrorism - complete helplessness from justice and accountability on those that irreparably harm people.
Does not our government understand that by removing these crucial safeguards from citizens that they are opening the door for domestic terrorism to be the one final answer against these malpractices? Do they not understand that while malicious lawsuits still exist, and will likely always exist, the abilities to make major lawsuits against corporations and others are there to prevent other forms of lawlessness from taking place? Like it or not, massive punitive lawsuits are one of the things that keeps terrorism from taking over our way of life here in this country.
Think about it. Your son, the one person you love more than anyone else and whom you can't possibly live without, has had weak kidneys throughout his teenage life, and a corporation has a drug, approved by the FDA, that is supposed to help it. Your doctor approves it, and provides a prescription. However, unbeknownst to you, it does irreparable damage to his heart, something the drug never listed as a side effect, and your son abruptly dies, the cause of which, the doctor concludes, was from the intake of that same drug designed to help cure that one ailment your son suffered. The corporation, by not including that disclaimer nor doing enough tests to ensure that the drug was safe, is responsible (as is the doctor who prescribed it), but because of the new tort reform, not only would you not be able to sue to ensure enough damage was done to the irresponsible corporation (and possibly the doctor too) but worse, you may not be able to find any lawyer who is able to withstand the onslaught of that company's lawyers. And your son, the one person you could not live without, remains dead, with no means of compensation.
So, with nothing left to lose, you've opened the very real possibility of that man going postal on those in charge of the corporation. It doesn't have to be a bomb, he could simply wait for the men to arrive in their limos before opening fire on them with a rapid-fire machine gun that our government has just made legal to buy again in our great country. You could say that he runs the risk of dying too, but given that his son was all he had left, you could venture to say that he really didn't care if he died......which ironically is how a lot of today's terrorists feel.
It is that lack of and means of obtaining accountability that is one of the causes of terrorism. McVeigh, of whom I have no reason in the world to defend, wanted to make certain his government got the accountability he felt they didn't get before. Palestinians blow up Israelis, along with themselves, because they have nothing to lose and because this is the only means they know of to hold Israel accountable for their actions against their families and friends. How many more terrorists are our government officials willing to make by their actions? Such shortsightedness in helping out their buddy corporations and special interests is leading to long-term terrorism, foreign and domestic, and they don't even see it.
When the rule of law is gone, as I mentioned before, the country becomes every man and woman for themselves. Chaos will reign, anarchy will rule, violence will be widespread, and corruption will know no bounds. I know this will probably be taken out of context and blown up to be as something pro-terrorism, but I'll say it anyway: tort reform and other such safeguards, such as governmental accountability, are the peaceful alternatives to terrorism, in that the rule of law is applied and administered, rather than the barrel of a gun or the shrapnel of a pipe bomb. You remove those things from society, you open the floodgates for people to assume that terrorism, however wrong it is, will be the only means of accountability against those that do wrong upon others.
It's amazing that these so-called Christians and moral value crusaders do not see the hell they are primed to make here on earth by their selfish actions. Then again, given that many of them "gots to have their guns," maybe they are foreseeing something we don't or that we can't believe could happen here.