I've never been more appalled with American big business until I finished reading Mark Dowie's "Pinto Madness", where the Mother Jones writer breaks down the controversy surrounding the Ford Pinto models from the early to mid-1970's. In the 70's assigned human life the price of $200,000 in order to figure out how cost-effective certain safety precautions would be if they adopted federal safety standards. Dowie presents (in great detail) how hard Ford fought to present the danger of the Ford Pinto as a fault of anyone and anything but the company's fault. I've been pretty understanding in how people might let money affect their relationships, but this is a line that cannot be crossed. It boggles my mind that Ford willingly let people burn to death in the interest of their own profits. Not only that, but even when they were ordered to pay out settlements to people who were injured because of the car's engineering flaws, they only continued to do so because it would've been more cost-effective rather than just fixing the cars to make sure no one died in a fiery car crash. This is quite literally the most preposterous thing I've ever heard in my entire life. Lee Iacocca's hand in this could not have been guided by anyone else but Lucifer's; the fact that he knew people were losing limbs, having their faces melted off, and losing family members in one of the most painful ways fathomable, but was okay with it because his profits would still be soaring makes me sick to my stomach. Sometimes, you have to stop for a second and think about what the cost of a dollar really is.
