The View From 1776

-------------------
As noted in The Prostitution of Science, one of the main tracks of scientific fraud is the use of putative scientific experts to support manufactured lawsuits.  The scientific “experts” and the tort attorneys rake in fees, sometimes in the tens of millions of dollars. 

Forbes Magazine, in its January 9, 2006, issue, describes yet another of these operations under the title “Twitch & Shout.” Reporter Mary Ellen Egan writes:

“One of the hottest topics on the tort lawyer conference circuit is welding rod litigation. A $1 million award in 2003 got lawyers’ attention. An Illinois maintenance worker convinced a jury that the manganese fumes emitted during welding caused his Parkinson’s.....
But recent events open a window into how a tort claim becomes epidemic. In December the first two welding cases in a mass tort with 5,300 claimants imploded amid charges of faked injuries. And now defense attorneys for a dozen companies are asserting that manganese-induced Parkinson’s and its supposed symptoms were fabricated “out of thin air” by lawyers and a physician working with them.

“The lead trial lawyer is tobacco tort king Richard (Dickie) Scruggs. The physician who saw the majority of claimants is Dr. Paul Nausieda, medical director of the Regional Parkinson’s Center in Milwaukee. “He’s a one-man epidemic,” proclaims defense attorney John Beisner. “He defines manganism, designs the screening process and does the diagnosing.”

“According to Beisner, the scenario went like this: Scruggs and fellow plaintiff lawyer John (Don) Barrett ran TV and print ads in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere advising welders that they could be entitled to monetary awards if they had symptoms ranging from headaches to insomnia. The welders would then contact the lawyers’ firms. The lawyers would refer them to Nausieda.

“Once they arrived at Nausieda’s screening site, welders would fill out a fact sheet that asked if they suffered from complaints such as headaches and tremors, and if they’d been seen by a doctor. Once the sheet was completed, the potential claimants were observed for a few minutes by either Nausieda or one of his interns, some of whom weren’t trained in neurology. After the exams Nausieda would either write up or sign off on the diagnoses, the vast majority of which were manganese-induced Parkinson’s. For his work Nausieda has been paid more than $1 million by the plaintiffs, says Beisner.

“The first crack in the plaintiffs’ case came in December as two suits were headed for the courtroom in Cleveland. In one case plaintiff Dewey Morgan admitted in his deposition to lying on his questionnaire, and the other case was pulled, says Beisner, because plaintiff Scott Landry had a history of cocaine and alcohol abuse that could account for most of his symptoms.”

Conclusion:  too often “science” is just a business to enrich a small group of insiders, via fraud, at the public’s expense.

Seldom do individual plaintiffs get much of the damages awarded by juries.  Often they get no more than coupons from the defendant companies to buy merchandise at a discount.  In my own experience, several times class-action attorneys sent form letters informing me that I was entitled to a settlement award in cases that I didn’t know existed.  The settlement amounts coming to me in all cases were less than $10, but, according to the legal documents accompanying the letters, the attorneys collected six-figure fees.

Who then benefits from the virulence of the tort-bar’s class-action suits?  The big winners, in addition to the lawyers, are the liberal-Progressive politicians, who get most of their financial support from these lawyers and from the teachers’ and public employees’ labor unions.

And “nobody” is the loser.  After all, the insurance companies pay for it, don’t they?

It’s obvious to most people who have thought about it seriously, even for a few minutes, that in fact there are enormous costs to these piratical legal forays based on junk science.

First, as insurance companies shell out payments on billion-dollar jury awards, everyone has to pay higher insurance premiums.  But, in liberal-Progressive land, that’s OK.  It’s just a social-justice transfer of bad, capitalist wealth from the undeserving rich to the deserving poor. Isn’t that the purpose for which our forebears wrote the Constitution?

Second, as ever more and larger jury awards are made on trumped-up evidence and small-town antipathy toward big companies, more and more products are pulled from the market, or never get to the market.  Not because these products are bad, but because anyone using them might potentially sue the producers. 

Banks fear to lend money to small, start-up companies run by struggling entrepreneurs; insurance companies won’t insure them.  As fewer such innovators, shut out by fear of the tort-bar, survive or even start at all, the United States becomes increasingly dependent upon its old and somnolent companies that are most vulnerable to foreign competition.  When our competitiveness is squeezed into desperate attempts to survive only by cost-cutting, more and more jobs must be outsourced to India and other nations not yet infected with the virulent tort-bar.

Third, a very large number (probably more than 70) of companies have been bankrupted by tort-bar class-action suits.  Again, that’s OK by the liberal-Progressive standards of the ACLU and its collaborators among liberal Republicans and liberal Democrats.  After all, it’s just Marxian textbook redistribution of wealth, from corporate fat cats to deserving workers. 

But who really pays for the billion-dollar jury awards?  Ultimately it’s working people, through loss of jobs in the target companies, bankrupt pension funds, disruption of other companies that supplied the target companies or bought their products, and the many towns where the target companies’ production and shipping facilities were located.

Visit MoveOff Network Members