SAY GOOD-BYE TO YOUR DAY IN COURT - PART 1

By: Thomas McKelvey Cleaver

On the day he signed legislation protecting his corporate sponsors from the threat of class action lawsuits to bring their excesses and crimes to account, President Bush went on to say that his next goal is to limit further litigation over the issue of asbestos. He claimed that 70 companies had been forced into bankruptcy with the loss of more than 10,000 jobs, all to pay $70 billion in claims by plaintiffs, "many of whom weren't even sick." In the President's view, the legal system is being misused by these "frivolous asbestos claims," which are holding back the economy.

In the same week, Senate Majority Leader and serial kitten killer Bill Frist made the claim on the Senate floor that one of those 70 companies - the W.R. Grace Company - was "a reputable company driven unfairly into bankruptcy."

As usual, both the President and his Senate Majority Leader are lying about an important issue, one that has severely affected many people who likely voted for George W. Bush.

The case of the W.R. Grace Company is of more than passing interest, since it represents the worst aspects of both the problem of asbestos contamination, and the contamination caused by Republican political intervention in the cases. It is no coincidence that the President and the Majority Leader would mention the company by name, since this case personally involves the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney. In 1995, while Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, he made an executive decision to acquire the W.R. Grace Company, without doing the due diligence necessary to easily discover the asbestos liability claims the company faced (sort of reminds you of the way he led the charge into Iraq without accurate information, doesn't it?).

While the President and the Senate Majority Leader were claiming W.R. Grace company had been unfairly driven into bankruptcy, the Grand Jury in Missoula, Montana, had two weeks earlier brought felony indictments against seven former and current top W.R. Grace executives for having knowingly put their workers and the public across the entire United States in danger with their mining activities in Libby, Montana, over the past 50 years.

Here's a little background:

W.R. Grace Co. mined asbestos-contaminated vermiculite in Libby, Montana since the late 1940s. For those who don't know what this is, vermiculite is a substance that is widely used in home heating insulation and floor tiles used in kitchens across the country. The result of the contamination was that hundreds of the company's employees have died over the years of asbestos disease, along with many residents of the town of Libby who never worked in the mine but were exposed to asbestos fibers in windswept dust coming from the mine.

The executives of W.R. Grace not only knew from the beginning the hazards of asbestos and did nothing about it, but they also committed outrageous and reckless misconduct in the course of the asbestos litigation over the past twenty years, which resulted in the company receiving punitive damages by the jury hearing the cases. It was this punishment for deliberate, demonstrated, proven illegal, outrageous and reckless behavior that drove the company into bankruptcy and may yet put Halliburton - and Dick Cheney's personal fortune, which stems from his time at the Halliburton helm - at risk of being held corporately responsible for the crimes committed by Grace.

As it happens, the economic ripples of this case extend far beyond Dick Cheney's billfold. Over the years, 700 mills nationwide have processed millions of tons of the asbestos-contaminated vermiculite mined by W.R. Grace, and government experts believe it highly likely that most of these mills have released hazardous levels of asbestos dust into the environment. It is estimated that 35 million American homes have Zonolite insulation in them, a W.R. Grace product manufactured from the asbestos-contaminated vermiculite.

When the Environmental Protection Agency wanted to issue a warning about Zonolite in 2001, it was rejected by the Bush Administration's Office of Management and Budget as an "onerous regulation" of the housing industry.

When the World Trade Center towers fell, they released a toxic cloud that included hundreds of tons of asbestos insulation and thousands of tons of asbestos-containing floor tiles, made from the asbestos-contaminated vermiculite mined by W.R. Grace. When the Environmental Protection Agency wanted to alert the residents of lower Manhattan to the health hazard, the agency was overruled by the Council on Environmental Quality, which wished to avoid any action that might slow the reopening of Wall Street. Instead, that good Republican "moderate" Christie Whitman stated publicly that the air in lower Manhattan was "safe to breathe." Her claim was later disputed by the EPA's Inspector General. In the three years since 9/11, medical authorities have found that 60 percent of those who worked at Ground Zero have developed persistent upper and lower respiratory tract symptoms associated with asbestos disease. Many of the firefighters, police, and other first responders who toiled in the ruins have been forced into early retirement for medical reasons as a result of this toxic contamination.

Asbestos disease was first tracked in the early 1960s, when Dr. Irving J. Selikoff's pioneering studies demonstrated the threat of asbestos insulation and the spread of the disease in workers employed in installing such insulation. He then demonstrated that asbestos disease was striking less-exposed workers who worked with the insulators in shipyards and building construction sites. Other investigators discovered the spread of the disease among wives and children of those who worked with asbestos, who were dying as a result of exposure to the asbestos fibers and dust carried home by their husbands and fathers on their clothes.

Beginning in the 1970s and through the 1980s, product liability class action lawsuits were brought against the manufacturers of asbestos insulation. Most of these plaintiffs were able to prove that the asbestos manufacturers had not only known that asbestos could cause fatal lung disease since at least the late 1940s, but had withheld this information from their employees. With that knowledge, thousands of other suits have been brought by construction workers, factory workers, refinery workers, brake mechanics and other workers who have either developed asbestos disease or whose chest X-rays show evidence of lung damage caused by their exposure.

Asbestos diseases include asbestosis, a scarring of the lung tissue, lung cancer, and mesothelioma, which is an always-fatal tumor.

Millions of homes, office buildings and factories throughout the country still contain significant amounts of asbestos insulation. This means that whenever these structures are renovated or demolished, there is a definite possibility of continuing asbestos contamination of the local environment with the release of asbestos fibers. Asbestos disease will be responsible for the disability and death of people for most of the rest of the 21st century. The Environmental Working Group estimates that 10,000 people will die of asbestos disease in the next 20 years.

This isn't some "crisis" brought about by ambulance-chasing tort lawyers who successfully shopped around for jurisdictions where they could win big. Just like his attempt to point to a "crisis" in Social Security, the President's claims that a public health crisis should be seen as a crisis of "frivolous lawsuits" is as big a lie as his claim that he went to war in Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein from using weapons of mass destruction.

The Republicans and their corporate supporters want to create a $140 billion asbestos compensation fund to satisfy all asbestos claims present and future, in return for those so compensated waiving their right to a jury trial on their claim. The figure of $140 billion was not arrived at through any attempt to quantify how many people might develop asbestos disease and submit claims, or how much compensation they deserved. The figure came from the Republicans in Congress asking the asbestos industry and its insurers how much they would be willing to pay to eliminate their liability. Anyone who has had the slightest experience suing an insurance company for a car accident knows they always settle short. The figure of $140 billion is - at best - perhaps half of what would be fair and just compensation. Since no one knows how many people will bring claims, there is no assurance the trust fund has any hope of remaining solvent.

As usual, Bush wants to cosset the comfortable, extending assistance to companies that behaved with proven criminal negligence in failing to notify their employees and customers of the known dangers of the product they were selling, while selling out the millions of workers and their families - many of whom likely voted him into office.

No wonder the Republicans are worried about "frivolous asbestos claims." In the newspeak of the GOP, "frivolous claims means anything that threatens their bank accounts.

Note: This is Part I in a two piece series, you can find Part II in next weeks edition of "This Week's Mess"