ThePopTort

In the News

Great piece in Forbes, called “How caps on medical malpractice cases hurt the most vulnerable victims.”

LA Times analysis about the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case to decide if drug companies that produce defective or dangerous drugs should be immune from lawsuits.  “If the ruling this fall is made for the defendant – the pharmaceutical company Wyeth – it would tilt the playing field largely in favor of the pharmaceutical industry...” says the paper.

Hospitals suing tobacco companies!

Corporate lawyers for Chevron indicted by the Ecuadorean government “accused of being part of a conspiracy to fraudulently certify that Chevron predecessor Texaco had completed the cleanup of more than 100 mines in the Ecuadorean rainforest in the 1990s. The government released Chevron from liability on the basis of those certifications.” 

Drug company influence on the medical profession is something we all know about – but here’s more proof. "The influence that the pharmaceutical companies, the for-profits, are having on every aspect of medicine ... is so blatant now you'd have to be deaf, blind and dumb not to see it," said Journal of the American Medical Association editor Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, a longtime industry critic. "We have just allowed them to take over, and it's our fault, the whole medical community."

State Farm agrees to settle major Katrina lawsuit.

Civil rights lawsuit by man recovering from intestinal surgery, against police who tore out his catheter during a police search.

Wyoming lawmakers discuss severe problems with the state’s workers compensation system.

Illegal spying lawsuit still going forward against phone giants and government – for now!

The Hurricane that Keeps on Giving

Some may recall that the Center for Justice & Democracy's project, Americans for Insurance Reform (AIR), set up a toll-free insurance hotline on September 12, 2005 – days after Hurricane Katrina - to monitor a huge number of hurricane-related insurance complaints. Some of these cases ended up in an AIR report called The Insurance Industry’s Troubling Response To Hurricane Katrina, detailing “a significant pattern of callousness, unfairness, and generally inept performance by many companies.  In some cases, insurers’ conduct worsened the suffering of policyholders, many of whom were left hungry and homeless by the hurricane.”

Well, the stories never got much better and it is now particularly painful to see new stories like these.

Like, in an absurdly unfair turn of events, courageous insurance-industry whistleblowers Cori and Kerri Rigsby, former Katrina insurance adjusters, were told they must page $65,000 to their former employer, E.A. Renfroe, which had sued them after their allegations of widespread fraud went public. One ABC News 20/20 segment “detailed the Rigsbys' claims that State Farm cheated many Mississippi policyholders whose homes were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.”  These women are heroes.

And here’s another.  Remember that horrible class action bill that Congress passed in 2005? (Some background about class actions here.)  Well, now this law is haunting - and hurting - Katrina victims. 

Specifically, an anti-trust case against major insurance companies for price-fixing and low-balling hurricane Katrina and Rita claims, which was originally brought in state court because state laws were at issue, was thrown into federal court by the insurance companies - and apparently will now stay there thanks to the dumb federal class action law.

Will Gulf Coast policyholders ever get a break here?

Are Manufacturers Really Blameless for FEMA's Toxic Trailers?

Yet another situation where corporate wrongdoers are trying to hide behind an incompetent federal agency to immunize themselves for the harm they cause.

As part of Congress' ongoing investigation into FEMA's toxic trailers  provided to Hurricane Katrina victims, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a hearing yesterday focusing on the manufacturers of the trailers.    

At the hearing, we got a sense of how manufacturers plan to blame the government for the companies' poisoning of Katrina victims with formaldehyde,

In advance of the hearing, a GOP staff analysis said companies that make recreational vehicles should not be blamed for high levels of formaldehyde in trailers that the Federal Emergency Management Agency set up to house people displaced by Katrina in 2005.

From the New York Times,

Democrats and hundreds of current and former trailer occupants who are suing the manufacturers do not accept this defense. Some Gulf Stream [one of the manufacturers of the trailers] employees complained they, too, were suffering effects from formaldehyde exposure, including nose bleeds, shortness of breath, dizziness and bleeding ears. One employee told Democratic investigators there was a foul odor in the plant as the trailers were being made.

''FEMA failed by ignoring the dangers of formaldehyde,'' Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee Henry Waxman said.

But the California Democrat insists Gulf Stream's failure is different: ''The company did test trailers after hearing the first reports of high formaldehyde levels. It found pervasive formaldehyde contamination in its trailers. And it did not tell anyone,'' Waxman said.

Gulf Stream's Shea said this is not the case. There was no actual ''testing'' of trailers, he said. Instead, there was informal screening with a handheld device that measures the level of formaldehyde in the air called a Formaldemeter, which is not a scientific test. And Gulf Stream asked FEMA if it should test the trailers, but FEMA said no, Shea said.

Wonder what "Heckofajob Brownie" would have said about all of this?

Op-Ed begs question, "Is the Mississippi Supreme Court a 'rubber stamp' for powerful corporate entities?"

According to the author, Alex A. Alston, Jr., the answer is yes!  And this from an unlikely source - a corporate defense attorney.  Alston, who has been a corporate defense attorney for over 40 years, wrote a wonderfully poignant op-ed about the court's overwhelmingly lopsided number of decisions in favor of corporations.  Alston's op-ed, which recently appeared in a Mississippi newspaper, The Clarion Ledger, noted that over the past four and a half years, "a plaintiff's success rate in reversing a jury verdict for the defendant is an astonishing zero." Talk about an un-level playing field.  Alston goes on to say that all we need to do is follow the money trail to find out why justices have been so pro-corporation in Mississippi:

How can it be that during the last 4 1/2 years powerful corporations, hospitals, and insurance companies have prevailed in the state Supreme Court in nearly every case? Can an injured plaintiff ever be right?

Perhaps it is because we elect our Supreme Court justices. In the 2002 election, insurance companies, large corporations, and doctors poured millions of dollars into the campaign coffers of most of the justices. One of the new judges that year alone received over a million dollars from these sources...

Probably the best indication of how a Supreme Court justice will rule is the source of the political contributions he or she receives...

If powerful corporations and insurance companies have financed a justice's campaign, you would not be far off in guessing that his or her rulings will most likely be in favor of his donors.

For the full op-ed click here.

Formaldehyde FEMA Trailers

We've blogged in the past about the horrendous effects of Hurricane Katrina and the continued difficulties that many victims face nearly three years later (See here and here). As if Hurricane Katrina victims haven't suffered enough, hundreds of thousands of displaced Gulf Coast homeowners are also dealing with the adverse health conditions caused by hastily constructed FEMA trailers. In their haste to move displaced residents into temporary housing, the feds ordered the construction of billions of dollars worth of trailers that contained excessive levels of formaldehyde - a chemical linked to several types of cancer.  Whats worse is that the government directions/specifications to builders was only one page long.  As a side note, my grocery lists are often longer than FEMA's specification sheet.  From a Washington Post article:

Within days of Hurricane Katrina's landfall in August 2005, frantic officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency ordered nearly $2.7 billion worth of trailers and mobile homes to house the storm's victims, many of them using a single page of specifications. 

Just 25 lines spelled out FEMA's requirements, with little mention of the safety of those to be housed. Manufacturers produced trailers with unusual speed. Within months, some residents began complaining about unusual sickness; breathing problems; burning eyes, noses and throats; even deaths.

(Keep reading)

Instead of focusing on quality and safety, FEMA concerned itself with speed.  So far 17,000 trailer residents have alleged getting ill as a result of the trailers and have filed a class-action against the federal government and 64 trailer manufacturers.  In what has been an ongoing debacle in dealing with one of the worst natural disasters in American history, hopefully these Katrina victims will get some relief through the civil justice system.

 

Kick'em When They're Down

Once again, the country's wealthiest lobbying group the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is picking on the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast region.  For the last several years they have been putting out a report based on a survey of corporate lawyers (um, biased?  Aren't these the folks hired to defend companies accused of wrongdoing?) who ranked the states legal climates.

And according to their reports, just a couple of months after Hurricane Katrina hit, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama dropped to the bottom of their 2006 list – and have stayed there.  According to Joanne Doroshow, Executive Director of CJ&D,

"For three years now, the U.S. Chamber has inexplicably decided to target the struggling Gulf Coast region for criticism as it tries to recover from one of the worst disasters in our nation's history, which killed thousands, displaced millions, and left hundreds of thousands without jobs or income.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce should be helping this battered area instead of launching attacks on it.  These states are working hard to recover and bring businesses back, with some significant success according to recent employment figures."

Mississippi Gov Opposes Protecting Kids Against Bad Products

The Governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, vetoed a bill (HB1240) last week that would have created an outlandish thing called the "Children's Product Safety Act." The bill would have had the disastrous purpose of better protecting kids against dangerous or defective products including toys with excessive amounts of lead paint.  Can you believe why anyone would want to protect children against unsafe toys?

As outlined in the legislation, the Attorney General would compile a list of bad products and publish it for the public to see. Oh the shock and horror.  Anyone who tried to resell or manufacture the dangerous products on this list would be in violation of the state's Consumer Protection Act. I almost can't continue.  Who would favor such legislation? (Actually, the Mississippi legislature did and attempted to override the Governor's veto, but came up six votes short.)