INSULATED FROM HONESTY: The Quarter-Trillion Dollar Asbestos Criminal Conspiracy

For the last couple of weeks, full-page ads have been appearing in The Washington Post demanding that the Senate pass something called the FAIR Act – the Fairness in Asbestos Injury Resolution Act, Senate Bill #852 – sponsored by Republican Senator Arlen Specter.

The ads come with heart-tugging pictures of pleading grandmas millions of whom are going to suffer painful deaths, it is claimed, unless this life-saving legislation is passed.

It’s really difficult to adequately describe how massive a con-artist scam this is, so let’s start with a number: $140 billion. That’s how much Specter’s bill would cost – at a minimum.

Here’s some more numbers. In the past dozen years, 700,000 people have sued over 8,000 companies, schools, and municipalities for asbestos-exposure damages. In 2003, some 110,000 individual claims were filed in that year alone.

Asbestos litigation has bankrupted over 70 corporations, costing 60,000 jobs, and forced companies to pay out over $70 billion in court judgments and settlements. The suits were filed as "class action" lawsuits by trail lawyers, who of course got most of the money.

The litigation is predicted to eventually produce as many as 3 million individual claims, with a final total of $200 to $300 billion paid by businesses and insurance companies in judgments – or by the taxpayers via Specter’s bill should those companies go bankrupt which many will.

That’s over a quarter of a trillion dollar pot of ripped-off gold at the end of the trial lawyers’ rainbow. And over 95% is willful fraud.

The majority of these hundreds of thousands of lawsuits are people who simply claim exposure to asbestos, yet exhibit no symptoms of asbestos-caused disease such as mesothelioma (a form of lung cancer) or asbestosis. Since there is such a high "latency" period between exposure and disease (sometimes 40 years or more), these are folks who say they should be paid damages now because they might get sick years from now.

The entire basis for the mass class action, however, is chest x-rays of claimants’ lungs which radiologists – medical doctors certified in radiology – have sworn show positive evidence of asbestos-caused diseases. It turns out that the trial lawyers bribed the radiologists.

That’s right: The quarter-trillion dollar asbestos litigation is a criminal conspiracy between plaintiff trial lawyers and the medical doctors they bribed to fake the evidence. .

The August 2004 issue of the peer-reviewed medical journal, Academic Radiology, published a report by the Radiology Department of Johns Hopkins University. Its investigators had given 551 chest x-rays judged positive by the trial lawyers’ radiologists to a group of independent radiologists. All identifiers on the x-rays were masked, with the independent radiologists given no information on what to look for.

Of the 551, only 25 were determined to have asbestos lung diseases, or 4½ %. The other 95½ % showed no evidence of disease.

In other words, radiologists paid by trial lawyers to interpret an x-ray were over 2,000 percent more likely to find signs of asbestos diseases than an independent radiologist. There is no way out of this: the trial lawyers bribed the radiologists.

Yet the massive litigation continues – because judges, and politicians like Specter, are so scientifically ignorant and uneducated, the trial lawyers continue to intimidate them.

The solution for this scam is the same as in the silicone breast implant scandal. There again, billions were paid out to trial lawyers and companies bankrupted without any scientific evidence that such implants caused cancer or other diseases.

Dozens of independent studies showed no connection between implants and cancer or autoimmune disease. Yet the suits went on with trumped up junk science until Federal Judge Sam C. Pointer ruled that only peer-reviewed evidence counted and everything else including "expert witness" testimony for the plaintiffs was speculation and not admissible.

Such judges are rare – and juries with a modicum of scientific understanding are far rarer. Plaintiff lawyers insist on stupid jurors and will almost always reject a prospective juror with any background in science, engineering, or medicine.

Arlen Specter understands none of this. He proclaims that to get a piece of his $140 billion, "You have to be able to prove that the problem you have is caused by asbestos."

Yet if that were the case, all claims based on exposure alone would be dismissed, as would 95% of those claiming disease with bribed radiology. To pay off legitimate claims would require a small fraction of $140 billion – a very small fraction.

There is that fraction, no doubt. Navy veterans and dockyard workers, for example, who sprayed on asbestos insulation in closed areas in Navy ships got asbestosis, lung cancer, and other terrible ailments. The government needs to take care of them – even though the asbestos prevented fires on ships during World War II, and thus saved many more lives than it took through disease.

Another factor is smoking. Inhalation of asbestos fibers over time, especially the needle-like amphibole-type fibers, increases one’s chances of lung disease by around 5 times over normal. Smoking a pack a day increases those chances by ten times.

You don’t add these chances, you multiply them. Smoking has a "synergistic" effect: a smoker exposed over time to asbestos is 50 times as likely to have lung disease than normal.

Still another factor is the type of asbestos exposure. Serpentine-type or "white" asbestos was mostly used in the US, and is far less carcinogenic (its longer fibers are harder to get deep into the lungs for example) than the amphibole-type with its high iron content (producing hydroxyl radicals which can mutate DNA). The former came from nearby Canada, while the latter from Africa and little used here.

You cannot lump all these factors, different people with different risks and different causes, all together in one class action suit. Such suits must have "homogeneity" among the claimants, they must have undergone the same conditions resulting in the damages claimed.

Arlen Specter and his co-sponsors – such as Pat Leahy, Dianne Feinstein, George Voinovich, Orrin Hatch, and Chuck Grassley – need to be told to dump this scam and pass a law that orders no money whatever be given to simple exposure claims, and recognizes only claims with provable damage via independent radiology as justified.

While they’re at it, they could add an amendment mandating that only judges with at least a Bachelor of Science degree from a recognized university may adjudicate cases involving questions of science. Oh, and another amendment strictly limiting the number of prospective jurors a lawyer can arbitrarily reject.

The asbestos scam is such a perfect example of how massively corrupt our judicial and political system has become.

Instead of the trial lawyers, their radiologists, together with many claimants who well know their claims are fraudulent, going to jail for conspiracy, politicians like Specter want to reward them with at least hundred and forty billion dollars of taxpayers’ money, bankrupt hundreds if not thousands of companies, and have hundreds of thousands of people lose their jobs.

What did Falstaff say he wanted to do to the lawyers? If his character were speaking today, he would likely add crooked doctors and stupid politicians to the list.