Asbestos Everywhere

These must be the "frivolous asbestos claims" Bush has been talking about:

W.R. Grace & Co. and seven of the corporation's executives were indicted Monday for engaging in a long-running conspiracy to "knowingly release" hazardous asbestos fibers that placed the entire town of Libby, Montana, "in imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury," the Justice Department announced. 

The indictment says for many years company officials knew, and tried to hide, the dangers to the community of 8,000 residents from its hazardous mining operation. Prosecutors say 1,200 residents of Libby have suffered lung diseases and related pleural abnormalities from exposure to tremolite asbestos. The document says more than 20 town residents suffered "an extremely rare and fatal form of cancer in humans known as mesothelioma."

Or maybe he's talking about these:

The Halliburton Company settled legal claims with about 120 families of asbestos victims in the Pacific Northwest this week, agreeing to pay out $30 million and to create a fund for future victims of the deadly fiber.

The local settlement was part of a $4.3 billion national settlement involving about 250,000 plaintiffs who had sued the company in connection with exposure to asbestos products distributed by Halliburton subsidiaries.

Matthew Bergman, attorney for the local families and one of seven lawyers involved in negotiating the settlement, said today that Dresser Industries, a Halliburton subsidiary, knew since the 1930s that asbestos was harmful, yet issued no warnings. Locally, asbestos products were widely used in shipyards, pulp mills and power plants.

Many of Bergman's clients worked at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, he said. Some were civilian workers and others were sailors, some of whom remember sleeping in bunks beneath pipes insulated with asbestos, he said.

Thank goodness Bush is finally getting serious about stopping those dirty trial lawyers from forcing giant corporations to compensate the people they knowingly kill.  It's about time.

Comments

[Karl Maher]

What a disingenuous post. You might as well be Peter Jennings claiming "Hey, no bias here!"

From a 2002 Rand Corporation analysis of asbestos litigation:

-- Annual filings have risen sharply in the last few years.

-- Increasing claims for nonmalignant injuries explain the recent growth in the asbestos caseload.

-- The number of mesothelioma cases filed annually has been rising slowly ... but they represent a tiny fraction of all claims.

-- ... there is widespread agreement that a majority of the claimants without cancer are functionally unimpaired...

-- Five states -- Mississippi, New York, West Virginia, Ohio and Texas -- which accounted for only 9 percent of the cases filed before 1988 handled 66 percent of filings between 1998 and 2000.

-- The litigation has spread far beyond the asbestos and building products industries. The list of defendants now ranges across 75 out of 83 different types of industries in the U.S. ... the litigation has spread to touch almost every type of economic activity in the U.S.

-- A total of $54 billion has already been spent on asbestos litigation.

-- Transaction costs have consumed more than half of total spending.

-- About 65 percent of compensation has gone to nonmalignant claimants.

Asbestos litigation is an immense problem, recognized not only by President Bush but by the Supreme Court, which has repeatedly called on Congress to solve this problem in its Fibreboard and Ayers opinions.

I'd further urge you to take a look at who voted "yea" on the class-action bill this week.

[Sufferer]

Yeah, it's not too frivolous to us who are suffering from it either. mesothelioma is a horrible disease and it hurts so much to see Bush declare my pain, suffering, and eventual death as "frivolous".