Chemical Corruption

TomPaine.com, Laura Donnelly
Published May 10, 2005

This morning, the Senate is taking up an asbestos bill meant, originally, to provide payments to people who developed cancer or lung diseases from working with asbestos. The bill would create an asbestos trust fund from which liability payments could be dispersed, rather than relying on asbestos producers-many of whom are facing bankruptcy-to pay victims. The bill sounds a lot better than it is. A number of big firms-including Dow Chemical, General Electric, General Motors and Pfizer-are silently salivating at the thought of the asbestos bill, because their lobbying efforts could soon pay off to the tune of $20 billion. Under the current asbestos laws, companies with liability for asbestos-related illness and death must pay the victims. A lot of these companies are facing Chapter 11 proceedings. If the new asbestos bill passes, their Chapter 11 liabilities would be erased in favor of the companies contributing to a new asbestos national trust fund. But here's the catch: The value of those trust fund contributions would be a lot less than what the companies are expected to pay now. In fact, the savings amount to about 79 percent. The bill didn't just happen this way. A new report from the nonprofit consumer advocacy group Public Citizen found that a group of asbestos makers and Fortune 500 companies have been lobbying forcefully for at least two years to ensure that the trust fund contribution limit would be well bellow current liability levels. The companies created the innocuous-sounding Asbestos Study Group, which spent about $27 million between in 2003 and 2004 to lobby Congress for the liability loophole. (The ASG refuses to make its membership list public, which doesn't help the shadiness factor.) And Public Citizen found that more than half of the lobbyists working for ASG and the big companies walked right from government service into the lobbying industry. Eight lobbyists were actually former members of Congress. And though asbestos hasn't been in the news nearly as much as it was 20 years ago, when the dangers were first recognized, it's not a small problem. About 10,000 Americans die from asbestos-related causes every year, according to the Environmental Working Group. The good news is that opposition-from both sides of the aisle, actually-may stop the asbestos bill in its tracks. Dems are worried that the fund won't be big enough to cover all the injured workers, and would impose difficult standards for victims to prove the connection between asbestos and their health problems. GOPers are worried that an asbestos fund could create a new rush of claims. In short, nobody is thrilled about this bill-except those big firms.