Kenneth R. Feinberg
WHAT IS LIFE WORTH?
The Unprecedented Effort to Compensate the Victims of 9/11
By Kenneth R. Feinberg, 213 pages. PublicAffairs. $24.
Posted on 06/15/2005 6:04:48 AM PDT by OESY
Less than three months after the World Trade Center collapsed, a Washington lawyer, Kenneth R. Feinberg, was handed a highly unusual job. In an effort to prop up the airline industry, Congress had passed the Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act. Along with loan guarantees, the new law called for a special fund to compensate victims of the 9/11 attacks. The amount of the compensation, and who qualified for it, would be decided by an all-powerful official known in legal language as a special master. Mr. Feinberg, a mediator best known for resolving the Agent Orange class-action suit, got the nod.
In "What Is Life Worth?" Mr. Feinberg offers a valuable first-person account of the 9/11 compensation fund and its workings. He makes clear, for the first time, exactly how peculiar the law governing the fund was, and the enormous difficulties, ethical and practical, that resulted from its ambiguous language and hastily written guidelines.
"Never before had a government offered individuals millions of dollars in tax-free compensation for a tragic loss," Mr. Feinberg writes. "And never before had government funds been so unregulated. There was no earmarked congressional appropriation limiting the size of awards or constraining my discretion. My budget was unlimited; the payouts would be determined only by my personal judgment and experience." In the end, Mr. Feinberg would award more than $7 billion to 5,560 victims and family members.
The compensation fund was a strange blend of compassion and cold calculation. Washington's lawmakers wanted to express, in dollars, the nation's sense of outrage and grief. Thousands of innocent people had died on the front lines of a new war....
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
WHAT IS LIFE WORTH?
The Unprecedented Effort to Compensate the Victims of 9/11
By Kenneth R. Feinberg, 213 pages. PublicAffairs. $24.
What is precedent worth?
Until very recently, the life of a US solider killed in combat was worth $12,000 to the US taxpayer...
Life will truly be worth little unless this nation awakens from its slumber begun (again) not long after 9/11; and unless the enemy within is directly confronted and defeated DAILY.
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