posted February 20, 2005 03:20 PM            

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/[/i]

posted February 23, 2005 12:33 PM            

Here's the agenda, as laid out by the president and the Republicans who control Congress: First, limit people's power to right wrongs done to them by corporations. Next, force people to repay usurious loans to credit card companies that make gazillions off the fine print. Then, for the coup de grace, hand over history's most successful public safety net to Wall Street.

Of course, the GOP and the White House use slightly different language for this corporate-lobbyist trifecta: "Tort reform," "eliminating abuse of bankruptcy" and "keeping Social Security solvent" are the preferred Beltway phrasings for messing with the little guy.

The first installment came last week with the passage of a law that will make it more difficult for consumers to win class-action lawsuits against private companies. Because state courts, which are closer to the people, have proved sympathetic to the liability claims of ordinary folks, the new legislation puts many class-action suits in federal courts, which turn out decisions more attuned to the heartfelt pleas of corporate attorneys.

What is so phony about the much ballyhooed tort reform is that it aims not at overzealous lawyers but only at those who happen to represent poorer plaintiffs. Corporate lawyers are very much in play in writing this new legislation.

Which is why we should expect severe limits on the amount of damages that can be collected by those harmed by asbestos exposure or by medical malpractice. Memo to would-be Erin Brockoviches: Don't give up your day job.

Next on the corporate wish list is savaging Chapter 7 bankruptcy relief, which is offered to individuals who can't pay their debts. It allows them to give up nonessential assets in exchange for a fresh start. Chapter 7 has been a tool for family and societal stability for decades; torquing it in the favor of credit card companies has been a fantasy of the industry for almost as long.

Never mind that it is obvious to everybody who gets junk mail that lenders should be far more responsible about how they hand out credit cards. The credit industry's sleazy come-ons, onerous interest rates and frantic marketing to teenagers go unaddressed by Congress; it is only consumers who are expected to be conscientious.

Is "onerous" too strong? Hardly. It's way beyond onerous when a struggling parent puts back-to-school expenses on an "introductory rate" credit card and then sees the interest rate surge toward 30% when she's two days late with her payment. Now $500 in books and clothes are going to cost her thousands by the time she can afford to finish paying for them. Ironically, considering the number of senators and representatives who love to quote Scripture, such outrageous usury was explicitly condemned in the Old Testament as what it is, "extortion."

And while the story of Jesus in the temple is also being roundly ignored, so is that other once- sacred pillar of the Republican philosophy, states' rights. Nearly all states have reasonable limits on interest rates, which have been trumped by D.C. politicians in the thrall of corporate lobbies. Sure, business interests deserve some clout in a democracy, but this is ridiculous.

In fact, the GOP's legislative calendar looks like a wish list sent over to the White House from the Chamber of Commerce across the street. Senate Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist (Tenn.) dropped in there the other day after a breakfast meeting with the president to assure the chamber that its wishes would soon be law. After all, the chamber spent $168 million to push the anti-class-action lawsuit bill along. Still to come this session: raising allowable emissions standards on major pollutants, oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the granddaddy of all corporate payouts, privatization of Social Security.