>>> Max Sawicky <sawicky at epinet.org> 03/10/99 02:45AM >>> fact, I wouldn't even be going on about this, but for the fact that goofy equations between depraved murders, factory owners, and the Mayor of New York just make what I try to do more difficult. The problem is, people mistake you for me, so when they see me, they expect you. And I have to waste time explaining the difference. Or that I know the difference between a guy who runs an unsafe factory, and someone who walks through a Long Island Railroad train, shooting people dead at random. (Hint: the difference is not that one is innocent and one isn't.)
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Charles: The main goof up is to think that the guys who run many unsafe factories are innocent compared with random murderers. The deaths of people who die from many factory decisions are foreseeable and random. As one of the Supreme Court Justices formulated it in tort law, one intends the forseeable and necessary consequences of one's actions. The same principle applied to many profit before people decisions supplies a reckless mental element that corresponds to the mental element of recklessness or depraved indifference to human life that are elements of legal murder, although the bourgeois criminal legal system does not consistently apply its own logic, of course. The types of killings that Max distinguishes are more are logially more comparable than he indicates.
One infamous example it Ford's foreknowledge of the exploding rearended Pinto. Recall was more expensive than paying wrongful death suits and so they let the people die. That is profits before people murder in a Peoples' Court.
Charles Brown