by Patricia Goldsmith

In a 1973 court case involving General Motors, documents showed that a GM engineer had created a cost-benefit analysis to decide whether or not to correct a serious defect in the company’s Malibu model. The analyst calculated that GM would pay $200,000 in legal costs for each of the projected 500 lives lost each year due to the defect. Fixing the defect, the study showed, would be more
expensive than paying the costs of litigation. So they didn’t fix it. .

. . George Bush’s failure to protect against the predicted attacks of September 11 and now Hurricane Katrina can only be understood if we’re willing to follow the same unimpeachable logic GM used -- just think in dollars and cents; ask yourself who benefits. Hint: White House political guru Karl Rove has been put in charge of the massive post-Katrina reconstruction effort, and already it is clear that the same folks who got all those sweetheart, no-bid contracts in Iraq will be inking the really big deals....

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Sept05/Goldsmith0919.htm