A001490
Tuesday, December 11, 2001 7:21 PM
sept 11th fund
My son died in the WTC disaster. I have a real dilemma
in answering the call for comments. It seems that the
government is not a non partial observer here, but
conveniently, is appointed to determine the
compensation plan, and is suggesting to the families
of the victims to sign over their right to appeal.
This seems to be counter to all logic, I have always
viewed the legal system to be, in some degree, a
matter of gamesmanship, who has the best lawyer wins.
And it seems that the government is advising the
victims not to obtain counsel. Am I incorrect in my
observation? I am seriously asking this question, not
rhetorically.
Shouldn't the victim's families have some idea of a
dollar figure? What is the reasonable expectation? I
don't think that alot of time has to be spent on form
design here. There should be some straight forward
method of determining who victims and families are, if
we can't figure this out, then the whole process is
brought to question.
What is Fair Compensation? Well, there are some
precedents for this question, what were the
settlements in other disasters? How do they relate to
this one? Somehow I believe that the trauma of this
horrific event exceeds anything that we have
experienced to date. It serves no purpose now to
assign blame, but security measures from an Airline
and Government poin of view were seriously lacking.
Then there are issues with what I perceive to be the
government's position on reducing any award by any
collateral sources of income. My son chose to take the
responsible route and funded some security measures,
this was a cost that he bore, and was a factor in
looking at possible alternatives to employment as it
factored into his salary requirements. Now to penalize
his family for his investment in insurance seems to
send a message that says don't be fiscally
responsible, if you sacrifice (by purchasing
insurance) you will just provide justification for
decreasing the amount of a settlement. Does a family
suffer less because they have insurance? I can tell
you this isn't the case at all.
Another quandry that I have is one of trust, frankly,
in the Government, to be really fair; this Airline
legislation, why is no one worried about how much
money is being moved to the Airlines? There seems to
be so much concern about the money going to victim's
families, where is this money coming from, well, of
course, it comes from the citizens. But it is
appropriated and managed by the Government, so the
Government has this commitment to fund the victims
relief, but is it in their interest to minimize the
total payout? Won't it make their problem easier to
find the funds if the relief to the families are
minimized? So now we have a proposal to not go to
court, to minimize the costs, the Government is the
author of this proposal. Is this fair or self-serving?
I have seen our Legal system work, it seems to be
based on the adversarial system. Now we are pushing to
remove this adversary process. Did the Airlines not
have their lobbyists active during the legislative
process? How was the dollar amount of the bailout
arrived at? Was there give and take by the pro-Airline
lobbyists and politicians? Was this as visible as the
Victims Relief issue?
There seems to be so many examples of civil cases
where the original settlement offers are fractions of
what our Legal System finally judged to be fair, will
the Government offer be fair from the start? The
Government seems to have set itself up as the agent of
the Airlines in this issue. I would just like to be
more confident that the proceedings will be fair. I
think more information is necessary to make a
decision.
Individual Comment