[Mb-civic] Bush Tort Reform: Executive Clemency For Executive Killers

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Bush Tort Reform: Executive Clemency For 
Executive Killers
Friday, February 18, 2005
By Greg Palast


It's s great day for the Eichmanns of corporate America. President Bush
minutes ago signed the ill-named 'tort reform' bill into law, limiting
class action suits. Doubtless, Ken Lay, former Enron CEO, is grinning as
are the corporate suite killers at drug maker Merck who are now safer from
the widows and orphans of Vioxx victims. Closing the doors of justice to
the ruined and wrecked families of boardroom bad guys is nothing less 
than
executive clemency for executive executioners.

You think my accusation is over the top? Well, please talk with Elaine
Levenson.

Levenson, a Cincinnati housewife, has been waiting for her heart to
explode. In 1981, surgeons implanted a mechanical valve in her heart, the
Bjork-Shiley, "the Rolls-Royce of valves," her doctor told her. What
neither she nor her doctor knew was that several Bjork-Shiley valves had
fractured during testing, years before her implant. The company that made
the valve, a unit of the New York-based pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, never
told the government.

At Pfizer's factory in the Caribbean, company inspectors found inferior
equipment, which made poor welds. Rather than toss out bad valves, Pfizer
management ordered the defects ground down, weakening the valves 
further
but making them look smooth and perfect. Then Pfizer sold them 
worldwide.

When the valve's struts break and the heart contracts, it explodes.
Two-thirds of the victims die, usually in minutes. In 1980, Dr. Viking
Bjork, whose respected name helped sell the products, wrote to Pfizer
demanding corrective action. He threatened to publish cases of valve strut
failures.

A panicked Pfizer executive telexed, "ATTN PROF BJORK, WE 
WOULD PREFER
THAT YOU DID NOT PUBLISH THE DATA RELATIVE TO STRUT 
FRACTURE." The company
man gave this reason for holding off public exposure of the deadly valve
failures: "WE EXPECT A FEW MORE." His expectations were realized. 
The
count has reached eight hundred fractures, five hundred dead-so far.

Dr. Bjork called it murder, but kept his public silence.

Eight months after the "don't publish" letter, a valve was implanted in
Mrs. Levenson. In 1994, the U.S. Justice Department nabbed Pfizer. To
avoid criminal charges, the company paid civil penalties-and about $200
million in restitution to victims. Without the damning evidence prized
from Pfizer by a squadron of lawyers, the Justice Department would never
have brought its case.

Pfizer moans that lawyers still hound the company with more demands. 
But
that is partly because Pfizer recalled only the unused valves. The company
refused to pay to replace valves of fearful recipients.

As we've all learned from watching episodes of LA Law, in America's
courtrooms the rich get away with murder. Yet no matter the odds for the
Average Joe, easy access to the courts is a right far more valuable than
the quadrennial privilege of voting for the Philanderer-in-Chief. This wee
bit of justice, when victim David can demand to face corporate Goliath,
makes America feel like a democracy until today, when our President
blocked the courtroom door with his 'tort-reform' laws.

We can even vent our fury on the führer. I have in my book a copy of a
letter from Adolf Hitler. In it he's agreeing to Volkswagen's request for
more slave laborers from concentration camps. This evidence would never
have come to light were it not for lawsuits filed by bloodsucking lawyer
leeches, as the corporate lobby would like to characterize class-action
plaintiffs' attorneys. In this case, the firm of Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld
& Toll, Washington, DC, outed this document in a suit on behalf of slave
workers whose children died in deadly "nurseries" run by the automakers
VW, Ford, Daimler and others. (If Hitler had been captured, he might have
used the defense, "I was only taking orders . . . from Volkswagen.")

But the Nazi profiteers have their friends in the corporate lobby.
Victims' rights are under attack. Waving the banner of "Tort Reform,"
corporate America has funded an ad campaign portraying entrepreneurs 
held
hostage by frivolous lawsuits. But proposed remedies stink of special
exemptions from justice. One would give Pfizer a free ride for its deadly
heart-attack machines. A ban on all lawsuits against makers of parts for
body implants, even those with deadly defects, was slipped into patients'
rights legislation by the Republican Senate leader. The clause, killed by
exposure, was lobbied by the Health Industries Manufacturers Association,
which is supported by-you guessed it-Pfizer.

At their best, tort lawyers are cops who police civil crime. Just as a
wave of burglaries leads to demand for more policemen, the massive
increase in litigation has a single cause: a corporate civil crime wave.

And today, the corporate killer gang received executive clemency from our
President. They don't call him the 'Chief Executive' for nothing.

A decade ago, after eighteen buildings blew up in Chicago and killed four
people, I searched through the records of the local private gas company on
behalf of survivors. What I found would make you sick. I saw engineers'
reports, from years earlier, with maps marking where explosions would be
likely to take place. The company, People's Gas, could have bought the
coffins in advance.

Management had rejected costly repairs as "not in the strategic plan."
It's not planned evil at work here, but the enormity of corporate
structures in which human consequences of financial acts are distant and
unimaginable.

I admit, of the nearly one million lawyers in the United States, you could
probably drown 90 percent and only their mothers would grieve. But as 
Mrs.
Levenson told me, without her lawyer and the threat of a class action
tort, Pfizer would not have paid her a dime of compensation.

The tort reformers' line is that fee-hungry lawyers are hawking bogus
fears, poisoning Americans' faith in the basic decency of the business
community, turning us into a nation of people who no longer trust each
other. But whose fault is that? The lawyers? Elaine Levenson put her trust
in Pfizer Pharmaceutical. Then they broke her heart.

-----
Greg Palast is author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best 
Democracy
Money Can Buy, from which this is taken. For more information go to
http://www.gregpalast.com/


To receive Palast's investigative reports, sign up at
http://www.gregpalast.com/contact.cfm
-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option 
D - up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone 
forwarded you this email and you want to be on our list, send an 
email to ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
   ---   George Orwell


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20050218/60335f0e/attachment.html