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Charles Jaco has written opinion and commentary pieces for dozens of magazines and newspapers. Each week, read and comment on a fresh on-line version. The discussion page enables you to share your view points world wide. If you would like to make a comment go to the " Join the discussion" link below. If you would like to view past editorials visit the Editorial Archive. Editorial: 09/08/00 Senator Arlen Spector thinks he knows a criminal case when he sees one. So does the Venezuelan Justice Ministry. Republican Spector, staunch defender of Clarence Thomas and stickler for the fine points of law, is a former Pennsylvania prosecutor. Those dormant prosecutorial genes snapped back to life while Spector was grilling the CEO's of Ford and Bridgestone-Firestone as they sat as far apart from each other as possible before the Senate Appropriations Committee. Spector called their failure to warn the public about their products "...tantamount to second degree murder." The Murder Two statute in most states usually has a line that refers to something like "...willful, wanton, or reckless disregard of human life." Meanwhile, Venezeula has said it will probably file criminal charges against executives of both companies for selling products they knew to be defective. No one is suggesting that Ford CEO Jacques Nasser or Firestone's Japanese owners sat awake at night making pillow talk to their spouses. "Dear, I think it'll be okay to kill several dozen people because otherwise we'd have to spend tens of millions to fix our product. Where do you want to go on vacation this year?" Killing or maiming people is notoriously bad for business. Just ask the makers of Tylenol and Thalidomide. Being reluctant to release honest information about problems can be just as bad. Just remember what happened to General Public Utilities after Three Mile Island, or Exxon after the Exxon Valdez. But there is growing evidence that someone or several someones somewhere in the corporate food chain knew that certain Firestone tires might peel like a banana at high speeds and that Ford Explorers had a nasty tendency to roll over unless their Firestone tires were purposely and dangerously underinflated. And with at least 88 people dead, both Senator Spector and the fiscales in Caracas think someone should go to prison. Amen, as long as they reserve some cell space for officials at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. NHTSA-types didn't start moving on the problem until 1998, when an overworked, underpaid cubicle claims inspector at State Farm Insurance headquarters in Bloomington, Illinois began e-mailing the Feds about the Firestone/Ford accidents that kept crossing his desk. Look at the evidence so far. The first wrongful death Firestone/Ford lawsuits were filed in 1992 and 1993. Both companies settled many of the suits before they went to trial, shushing up the victims' families with cash. Firestone denied that it ever had studied the tread seperation problem and wasn't aware of it. So now come confidential internal Firestone documents obtained by the Associated Press, showing that Firestone was not only aware of the peeling tires, they commissioned a two-year study in 1997 and 1998. Ford, meanwhile, discovered that the Explorer had that old bugaboo of automotive designers everywhere, a high center of gravity. So to keep the SUV's from rolling over like Rover begging for a bone, Ford ordered that the Firestone tires on the Explorers be inflated to pressure under the manufacturers recommendations. The less air in a tire, the more rubber surface makes contact with the road, the less likely it is that you'll end up bouncing around like a banana in a blender when your Explorer pulls a Blue Angels maneuver. Underinflation also weaken the tires and makes them more likely to pull apart. NHTSA had the statistics on all of the accidents, but either never looked at them or never bothered to put two and two together until the State Farm employee did the right thing. So what should be done about all this? Firestone and Ford will be sued, of course. The settlements will cost them hundreds of millions of dollars. They're spending hundreds of millions more on everything from replacing tires for free to airlifting new tires from Japan to spin control. Bridgestone-Firestone's stock has been falling like the January mercury in Green Bay. Ford has shut down production at SUV plants temporarily to free up tires as replacements. This whole thing could hurt Ford for years and might drive Firestone out of business. Nice, but not nearly enough. Somewhere in the Ford and Firestone corporate suites and factory floors, people knew that shoddy products were being shipped and that those products might endanger human life. They decided that the risk was not worth the extra cost. They decided, quite simply, that money was more important than people. They should go to jail. The New Moralists of the new millenium are fond of clucking their tongues about personal reponsibility. Corporations are entities. As such, they are faceless, amoral things. They exist as giant collectives. Their only purpose is to make profit. It seems to work pretty well most of the time. But corporations are also made up of human beings. Each one of them bears the burden of knowledge, free will, and responsibility. If they knew, they are accountable. If they are accountable, they should be behind bars. Will it bring back the dead? No, and neither will money. It's a simple matter of justice. Having a cellmate named Bubba or Abdul might tend to concentrate an executive's mind wonderfully. |
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