P000498
Tuesday, February 12, 2002 8:36 AM
Spin from the windy city
Spin from the windy city
In an editorial of the 10th of February, the Chicago Tribune published a PR piece that might as well have come straight from the desk of Kenneth Feinberg. He claims to be appalled by the cry of greed on the part of the uninformed public, while still repeating the deceptive "$1.65 million average award," figure, this time not even adding the fine print "before deductions." The article states that some of us have said that this is not enough, but what I hear is that many say that the $1.65 million figure is meaningless. A significant number of families will get zero ("0") under the final interim rules. From a show of hands it appears that about half of the families in one meeting which I attended, expect to receive nothing from the Fund, myself included. Are we wrong to complain?
The headline of the piece is "Putting a price on a life" but the reader has to wait for the closing punch line for the answer that "There is no dollar value of a human life" but $250,000 is the best we can come up with. We are told to believe it makes no sense to look at the history of "tort" law where slip and fall injuries routinely run past that figure, major surgical procedures and rehabilitation can exceed this and today the cost of raising and educating one child through college exceeds $300,000. The government's position is like saying the value of a Van Gogh masterpiece is a little less than the cost of the canvas, turpentine and oil used to produce it.
The article alleges that " that Congress clearly intended the fund as a safety net for those who did not have substantial life insurance or other assets" but I can not find any language in the law or implementing instructions that corroborates this assertion; the law does state, however, that its purpose is "to provide compensation to any individual ... who was physically injured or killed" This is not a welfare program. In fact, if the intent of the law were to narrow the gap between the have and have nots, this peculiar implementation by the Special Master exacerbates the gap by artificially capping all noneconomic losses which include the extraordinary pain and suffering of being incinerated alive, to the cost of painting supplies, if you will.
We are reminded that "[o]f course, no one is forcing the families to take the money and forfeit the right to sue" but, the Special Master spends 15 minuets of his presentation telling us that the government has stacked the deck by capping the liability of the airlines and giving itself the option of being first to recoup any payments made from the Victims' Fund. Under the present final interim rules the government payout is estimated to be a low as $2 billion after deductions and that the entire sum could be recovered from the airlines insurance. So much for the Special Master's "generosity argument."
Perhaps most disappointing is the way the Special Master promotes his pillaging of the victims in these airy PR pieces distorting the truth. He considers his job as "10 percent lawyer, 40 percent rabbi, 50 percent shrink." I would gladly exchange this for a 100% honest man.
Individual Comment
Newtonville, MA