Bush Tort Reform: Executive Clemency For Executive Killers
Friday, February 18, 2005
By Greg Palast
http://www.gregpalast.comIt'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.
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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.
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