dojP000567.xml

dojP000567.xml

born-digital

email

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2002-02-27

Wednesday, February 27, 2002 3:34 PM
Cries in the night

February 27, 2002

Kenneth L. Zwick, Director
Office of Management Programs
Civil Division
U.S. Department of Justice
Main Building, Room 3140
950 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20530

Dear Mr. Zwick:

When I read the comments of some of the hundreds of victims' plaintive cries for justice, renting cries that pierce the night, I am appalled. Does anyone know what these people are going through? Does anyone read the protestations to the interim rules? Just four short months ago we had hope at least that we would not have to grovel. The no-fault Victim Compensation Fund would save us our dignity and honor. No angry courtrooms and high priced lawyers would be required.
That was then and now it is the no-virtue Victimization Fun -- the creation of piddling minutiae gathering obsessed bureaucrats who can't talk straight. The government has taking away our right to sue the many responsible parties--airlines, plane manufacturer, FAA, airport security, port authorities, WTC operations, architects, CIA, FBI, INS and replaced it with a cynical public relations artist.

Mr. Feinberg has told families that he has no power to increase the $250,000 "pain and suffering" element of the award. He said he negotiated that figure with the White House, the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget. How can he be an impartial ombudsman under these circumstances? Yet in the Feb 7, 2002 meeting in Boston he stated that the $250 000 was "his figure" that he came up with it. What mental gymnastics does he use to equate the two statements? "If that number is going to be changed, it will have to be by Republicans applying pressure to the administration," he told a group of families in New York during an acrimonious meeting. He later berates &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp for making it a partisan issue in one of their debates.

Mr. Feinberg is a shill for the administration, setting up a $1.65 million bogyman with which to alienate the victims who dare complain. How can he persist as late as Feb 7 in saying that only a small number of people will get nothing from the Fund under the current rules after attending so many meetings with victim's families. Does he not read the hundreds of protests posted and perhaps thousands censored protests.

In an unsigned editorial of the 10th of February, the Chicago Tribune published a PR piece that might as well have come straight from the desk of Kenneth Feinberg. He claims to be appalled by the cry of greed on the part of the uninformed public, while still repeating the deceptive "$1.65 million average award" figure, this time not even adding the fine print "before deductions." The article states that some of us have said that this is not enough, but what I hear is that many say that the $1.65 million figure is meaningless. A significant number of families will get zero ("$0") under the final interim rules. From a show of hands it appears that about half of the families in one meeting which I have attended, expect to receive nothing from the Fund, myself included. Are we wrong to complain?

The headline of the piece is "Putting a price on a life" but the reader has to wait for the closing punch line for the answer that "There is no dollar value of a human life" but $250,000 is the best we can come up with. We are told to believe it makes no sense to look at the history of "tort" law where slip and fall injuries routinely run past that figure, major surgical procedures and rehabilitation can exceed this and today the cost of raising and educating one child through college exceeds $300,000. The government's position is like saying the value of a Van Gogh masterpiece is a little less than the cost of the canvas, turpentine and oil paint used to produce it.

The article alleges that " that Congress clearly intended the fund as a safety net for those who did not have substantial life insurance or other assets" but I can not find any language in the law or implementing instructions that corroborates this assertion; the law does state, however, that its purpose is "to provide compensation to any individual ... who was physically injured or killed" This is not a welfare program. In fact, if the intent of the law were to narrow the gap between the have and have nots, this peculiar implementation by the Special Master exacerbates the gap by artificially capping all non-economic losses which include the extraordinary pain and suffering of being incinerated alive, to the cost of painting supplies, if you will.

We are reminded that "[o]f course, no one is forcing the families to take the money and forfeit the right to sue" but, the Special Master spends 15 minuets of his presentation telling us that the government has stacked the deck by capping the liability of the airlines and giving itself the option of being first to recoup from the airlines insurance any payments made from the Victims' Fund. Under the present final interim rules, the government payout is estimated to be as low as $2 billion after deductions and that the entire sum could be recovered from the airlines insurance. So much for the Special Master's "generosity argument."

Perhaps most disappointing is the way the Special Master promotes his pillaging of the victims in these airy PR pieces distorting the truth. He considers his job as "10 percent lawyer, 40 percent rabbi, 50 percent shrink." I would gladly exchange this for a 100% honest man. --

Any accountant would have sampled the impact of the interim rules before they were released and I suspect that OMB did just that and was the inspiration for the 'now you see 'em, now you don't rules' , that give with one clause and take away with another. Even if the DOJ and OMB forced the rules on Mr. Feinberg, an honorable man would speak out against them or resign.

Individual Comment
Newton MA

2002-02-27