GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
So, no, the Ford decision to sacrifice safety for money, and to do so in a cold-blooded and secret way, did not sit well with the American public.Made in America: The Pinto, and Other Cars of My Youth
By Gaynell Gavin, May 24, 2016
http://beltmag.com/made-america-cars-youth/
' . . . Unbeknownst to me, the Indiana Pinto crash was about to occur, and Grimshaw was wending its tortuous way through the California legal system when, on a hot summer day, I ran a stop sign that was totally obscured by a tree and another car hit mine on the front passenger side. My five-year-old was not with me. My sister and I were the only ones in my Pinto. The car was totaled, but neither of us was seriously injured. We had no idea what it meant to have the Pinto struck in the front rather than the rear. . . '
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' . . . My mother revealed this information to me over three years after my Pinto was totaled.
I recall her now, dark hair graying, eyes blue as ever, seated at my Formica kitchen table when I got home from law school one spring afternoon, her greeting a demand, “Do you know what Ford has done? Do you?”
I dropped a pile of books on the table, glanced at the patient maple’s greening spread outside my kitchen window, and sighed. “Of course I don’t know, Mom. I’m a single-parent law student. I’m always in class, fixing breakfast or dinner, or reading bedtime stories or textbooks full of old law cases. I might be able to explain what ‘fee tail male’ means, but other than what I learn from you, I have no clue what’s going on in today’s world. What did Ford do?”
“Those men, those goddamned patriarchal prick Ford men, sat around together and decided it would be cheaper to have defective gas tanks and let people burn up in their Pintos than to pay something like ten dollars a tank to fix them. So that’s what they did.” Her voice rose in rage with each syllable. . . '
I still wonder exactly how, even if you are doing a totally by the books cost benefit analysis, you could have come up with the idea that wrongful death suits are somehow going to be cheaper than a relatively minor replacement. It seems as if the concept of brand security was completely ignored, and the cost of wrongful death cases were drastically underestimated. The stupidity of that is just mind boggling, and that is completely leaving out the ethical side of things.we discussed the Ford Pinto last month:
Stud farm: how could the Pinto have been improved?
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...ow-could-the-pinto-have-been-improved.432868/
I said, if you compare it to the behavior of a mob boss, it would be hard to find a more cold-blooded example of killing for money.
Someone else said, No, that's really unfair. When a mob boss has a person killed, it's a particular person for a particular reason. The mob boss doesn't just throw a grenade into the roadway.
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So, Ford Motor Co. really messed up. But to a considerable extent, and this is the hard part, it's common practice. Plus, it's something that our legal system is seemingly incapable of dealing with.
Each year's Pinto did meet that years regulation.. . . Then again, I have also heard that the Pinto narrative is actually a myth that has just been repeated a lot, especially by business professors in college for the ethics lesson, because they are lazy . . .
This is a 56-page article in the Rutgers Law Review!. . . A Rutgers Law Review study of the Pinto in 1991 goes into detail on how this became such an oft repeated myth: http://www.perishablepundit.com/docs/The_Myth_of_the_Ford_Pinto_Case.pdf )
And this aspect really interests me --- that in an anti-corporate campaign, Democrats and Republicans may not line up according to the usual scorecard.A Local D.A. Charges the Pinto with Murder—and Watergate's James Neal Comes to Its Defense
People Magazine, Joyce Leviton, Feb. 4, 1980.
' . . . Adds [Michael] Cosentino: “It’s kinda funny that I’m a conservative Republican involved in a case you’d think a flaming liberal would bring. I just believe in what I’m doing.”
So there we have it. "Anti-corporate sentiment" that is not willing to kick ass and name names is never going to be more than an easily manipulated and misled emotion that can serve any politician of any stripe just about equally well; everyone has pet solutions to problems, it is a matter, in politics, of which have credibility to whom. In order for an "anti-corporate crusade" to have traction, it has to have an ideology it stands for, a world view, a narrative, and it has to have a game plan for systematic action that follows from that viewpoint. If FMC legally complied with regulatory requirements, then there is no legal issue, no matter how calloused or clueless leaked internal communications might make unnamed, or even in an ATL, named executives look. The issue is entirely political--not "FMC is run by criminals!" because in fact their actions were legal, but rather "Big companies like FMC (and a long laundry list of like companies with like rap sheets of poor regard for public welfare, or a short code term referring audiences to well known such lists) manipulate politicians, allegedly technocratic regulators, and frame the laws and shape the court decisions to give us an inhumane and unfair kind of normal condition, and we the people must act to check them and restore a proper balance so that decisions take public welfare into due account at every step." In making such a bold claim leaders of such a movement will burn their bridges with the powers that be, and must hope either to forge a new basis of power to bring them back to the table of relevant influence, or else look to being defeated, defamed and relegated to irrelevance in a great cause they fail to win. It is very easy for Hollywood to make movies that stimulate and then cathartically release rage or fear; that's just business as usual. Lurid headlines sell papers and weekly news magazines and attract eyes to the tube for Nielsen ratings; "If it Bleeds it Leads" is conventional journalistic wisdom. But having a follow-through involves forming a serious political coalition that on same risks, if not lives (and God knows the more lurid imagery of corporate shenanigans doesn't rule out the prospect of assassination) then anyway fortunes/careers and sacred honor are on the chopping block, and blowing the whistle on bad behavior is only part of the battle--if one has no solutions one is prepared to offer to encourage and reinforce good behavior, than all one is accomplishing is making people feel bad. As a Jules Feiffer cartoon of the era (actually IIRC early Eighties, but it overlaps the 1970s pretty well) has a mainstream spokesman saying, "America needs to feel better." I do not think it is the responsibility of every whistleblower to have a program for reconstructing the world; it is reasonable for them to figure we live in a big world with a lot of smart people in it and just pointing out the problem is a public service and someone else can be expected to find the answers and implement them. But if that does not happen--if no one is smart enough to think of it; if someone has potentially popular and workable answers but is torpedoed by interests that stand to lose and no one takes up their dangerous banner and adds this act of sabotage to the rap sheet they hope to hold bad actors politically accountable for; if society is deeply structured to make solutions in the public interest quixotic without massive and drastic reform that people will understandably be hesitant to risk endorsing, let alone doing the work of implementing--then the upshot is that people do not want to hear sad stories with sad endings; if you can't make a Hollywood win out of it, it might as well never have been uttered since people in an uncomfortably weak, exposed, limited position they see no way out of would rather avert their eyes from the void and focus on what they can control, what they can feel powerful at--and this means that if an oligarchy is smart and not so overly arrogant as to neglect to throw these masses a line they can cling to, it will do that and divert a large portion of those who logically ought to array against their masters to support them instead and denounce the troublemakers.Each year's Pinto did meet that years regulation.
Now, Mark Dowie in his Mother Jones article argues that this was in large part because Ford Motor Co. was so successful at slowing down regulations pertaining to vehicle fire from 1968 all the way to 1976.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto-madness/
But be that as it may, the damn car met regulations.
I disagree. In fact, someone made the argument that some of the biggest successes of the Civil Rights movement, like Birmingham and Selma, were not the carefully planned, programmic endeavors, but rather were ad lib responses to circumstances.. . . In order for an "anti-corporate crusade" to have traction, it has to have an ideology it stands for, a world view, . . .
Selma and Birmingham were specific moments that occurred in the context of an ongoing movement that had, at the time of these events, been systematically striving toward a clearly conceived goal that was consciously aimed at and worked toward for over a generation. Organized civil rights activities and campaigns go back to the 1920s and earlier. The appointment of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court was not just some random thing that suddenly changed everything; he had been striving in courtrooms across the nation for decades. During most of these decades of struggle, the movement had been frustrated to the point that a reasonable person, one who did not feel driven by some deep obligation to a necessary higher value, would give up; in 1950 the Civil Rights movement had little to show for it; Truman had integrated the armed forces by Presidential command but that hardly meant the services changed structure and culture at a stroke--the same people were in the same places in the rank structure, and it would take again at least a generation for the implications of an integrated service to become fully normal--if in fact the current rank structure does reflect equal opportunity based on a color blind meritocracy! It would hardly blow my mind to learn of severe disparities remaining--after all, I am an Air Force brat, my father flew fighter jets, but I don't recall ever observing a fellow officer in any of his squadrons who was African American, between the late '60s and the entire decade of the 1970s. But anyway the integration of the forces was the largest single milestone of advance I can recall--I am no student of the CRM in detail and might not be accounting for other incremental stuff since the general nadir of African American rights in the 1920s that might seem individually petty but cumulatively added up to serious betterment. Anyway as of say 1950 the amount of betterment that still lay ahead for African Americans to take their place as regular US citizens able to compete and participate on a fairly equal basis was appallingly large. It was still fundamentally OK for the formal laws of a state, and even for Federal laws, to discriminate based on race--not in certain Constitutionally defined matters it wasn't, such as voting (Jim Crow barriers to African American voting were a layered array of laws that put up barriers ostensibly not about race with loopholes and bypasses designed to let whites through but not blacks, and outright political terrorism to dissuade them being too clever following whites through the loopholes) but by and large unless some pesky Amendment specified equality, the law was assumed to be free to impose whatever race based restrictions the white majority chose to legislate. Interracial marriage was still illegal in so many states that a mixed race couple could not drive or take a train from New York to San Francisco without becoming criminals along the way many times. Lynchings continued; millions of private contracts containing quite invidious "racial covenants," not to mention customary discretionary decision making in customer service, hiring, and promotion prevailed with no legal principle making it risky to plainly state that race was a factor in differential treatment. Schools of course, especially in places where African American populations were significant fractions of the whole, were racially segregated by default--not just in the South; in the North the form of discrimination often included geographical separation, with AAs effectively unable to settle in white districts and forced to settle in the black ghetto, meaning that their schools, arranged in geographical districts, would be separate from white schools in the north as well as the South.I disagree. In fact, someone made the argument that some of the biggest successes of the Civil Rights movement, like Birmingham and Selma, were not the carefully planned, programmic endeavors, but rather were ad lib responses to circumstances.
Plus, this gives healthier interplay between theory and practice.
I am very open to the idea that things were better in the 1940s, for example, Gov. "Big Jim" Folsom of Alabama and his Christmas message of 1949, and then got worse for a while after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision of May 1954. However, I don't know enough about the Civil Rights era to really know for sure.. . . other incremental stuff since the general nadir of African American rights in the 1920s . . .
And maybe people would joke even more than bottled water is a luxury item not really needed.
PS This product did not exist when I was 16 in 1979 (at least not on any big level I was aware of).
Ozarka water did this in suburban Houston in the late '70s / early '80s.. . . in places like Los Angeles, back in the '70s and I don't know how much earlier, paid services like the Sparklets company would deliver very large bottles of water to households to be put into water cooler stands to dispense the water cup by cup; at that time the empty containers would be picked up by the water delivery guys to be taken back to the plant to be presumably cleaned. The tap water in most parts of the greater Los Angeles area was never very good you see, very mineralized. . .