Bush Tort Reform: Executive Clemency For Executive Killers

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.

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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/

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