Jurors just go after the deep pockets
To the editor:
In response to the Friday story on the hepatitis C trial, “Drug firms liable again”:
How did someone find 24 people gullible enough to believe that “the bottle did it?” The bottle didn’t jump off the shelf and pour its contents into the victims’ bodies. A human being injected those people with contaminated equipment; a human being who was trained to know better.
Clearly the jury selection process is flawed. Individuals with two grains of common sense must have been rejected for that fact. Flawed juries support the notion that a business has to put out a warning or prohibition against any possible human stupidity. They have a total disregard of the concept of personal responsibility. Is this a consequence of the “nanny state”?
Potential liability due to this kind of injustice is one of the reasons for our economic doldrums. Businesses have to spend too much of their money on insurance and lawyers, both of which are drains on productivity and increase our costs.
Opposite to what we like to believe, the system didn’t work, and we are all the losers.
Pat Sharp
Las Vegas
Raising funds
To the editor:
I read in Wednesday’s Review-Journal that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was in town to help “raise money for (Gov. Brian) Sandoval’s political coffers” at a dinner at The Venetian. The article says the cost of attendance was $1,000 per person or $10,000 to “host a table.”
Because the governor is not running for office, I’m wondering why he’s looking for money.
And I’m wondering who paid and what they expect for their money.
In short, where did the money come from, and what did it buy from an elected official?
If the governor can’t make it on $140,000 per year, maybe he should look for work in the private sector. I understand that NV Energy pays its president and CEO more than $5 million a year. Maybe he could get work there.
My question, again: Who paid our governor, and what did they get for their money?
Ron Ingram
Las Vegas
Oil plan
To the editor:
Friday’s column by far-left columnist Alexander Cockburn (whose father was the co-founder of the Communist Party of Great Britain) accuses American oil companies of fraud, lying and economic sabotage in their promotion of the Keystone XL pipeline that would bring Canadian oil to Texas refineries (“Scarce oil? We’re swimming in oil”).
He then mentions the Alaska pipeline and how the rapacious oil companies are selling our oil to Japan instead of supplying the American markets.
Well, after the environmentalist obstruction of the 1970s, that perfectly safe pipeline was finally built. The caribou herds have prospered under the unexpected heat provided by the pipeline.
And then the environmentalists found another excuse to kill it by forbidding the use of the existing but unused pipeline connecting the port of Long Beach in California with the Gulf Coast refineries. And so the solution was to send huge oil tankers around South America or to ship oil by small tankers through the Panama Canal. Both of those solutions would have made the Alaskan oil prohibitively expensive.
But then American ingenuity intervened: Alaskan oil was sold to the Japanese running much shorter tanker routes, to be replaced by Japanese purchases of Venezuelan oil to be delivered to the Gulf Coast refineries through much shorter tanker routes.
And so, to the great consternation of our environmentalists and communists like Mr. Cockburn, we have decreased our dependence on Arab oil.
Marc Jeric
Las Vegas
