News Flash: fat makes you fat

[archenemy]

Did you know that The Association of Trial Lawyers of America is changing its name to the American Association for Justice?

Now THAT makes me sick.

[foraker]

And here I was thinking we were talking about people *today* showing a lack of personal responsibility, despite labels saying "Hey! Fuckwit! These things will kill you!". Even with the labels, surveys have basically said that even with that knowledge, there are plenty of people who don't care. I would be interested to know if, before the labels appeared in 1969, if smoking was really bad for you was common knowledge.

[archenemy]

Funny, the computers I buy don't come with any warnings.

[mattp]

Did you know that The Association of Trial Lawyers of America is changing its name to the American Association for Justice?

Now THAT makes me sick.

 

What makes ME sick is the insurance companies trying to fool the public into thinking that legal liability is what is driving a medical industry crisis, or the President's saying that all the asbestos claims are frivolous, or all the completely bullshit fabricated stories of "outrageous" personal injury lawsuits.

 

There are plenty of jerks in the legal profession, and maybe more than in many other but certainly not all professions, but the fact is that it is indeed all about justice. I think we've got a fairly good system and trial lawyers are part of what makes it work. I'd hate to think how our society would look if there were no lawyers, but those who waste all day long on cc.com were running the legal system.

[JayB]

OK then. We are talking about the limits of "personal responsibility" and

where government regulation is needed or where legal liability is the answer.

 

I'm glad we've at least gotten that far.

 

Now: do I understand you to say that the tobacco industry did not do anything for

which they should have been sued?

 

Or do you think the perpetrators of large-scale fraud and deceipt should have been jailed?

 

Or should the tobacco companies have been allowed to continue to foist

misinformation and manipulated products on the market without any intervention?

 

I think in the case of tobacco companies, I would have been happy to see a judgement issued by a Federal Court which hit them with a punitive fine for knowingly issuing false information about the hazards associated with using their product, and compelling them to issue a public statement in which they acknowlegdge the well established medical facts concerning tobacco use. You lied, pay a fine, acknowledge the facts - end of story. This outcome would provide the accountability and transparency that people seem to think is the crux of the issue.

 

What I would not have is what we got, which was a legal settlement in which the states collectively foisted their fiscal woes upon the manufacturer of a legal product on the premise that they were responsible for health consequences that resulted from the trillions of choices that individuals collectively made over several decades to continue smoking despite the unambigous, well-established, and abundantly clear risks associated with smoking.

[mattp]

OK, so they should have been fined. Should it have been enough of a fine to really hurt? Should the INDIVIDIUALS involved have been held personally accountable, or should just the shareholders have seen a reduction in the value of their stock value?

[JayB]

Did you know that The Association of Trial Lawyers of America is changing its name to the American Association for Justice?

Now THAT makes me sick.

 

What makes ME sick is the insurance companies trying to fool the public into thinking that legal liability is what is driving a medical industry crisis, or the President's saying that all the asbestos claims are frivolous, or all the completely bullshit fabricated stories of "outrageous" personal injury lawsuits.

 

No one is saying, for example, that each and every Asbestosis related claim is fraudulent. Most people who are well acquainted with the issue and are not trial lawyers have conceded that there's overwhelming evidence of massive fraud in asbestosis related class action lawsuits, and that continued litigation - rather than a legislative settlement - is injurious to everyone except the lawyers engaged in the lawsuit.

 

Brief Summary

 

Brief highlight:

 

"Silicosis, like asbestosis, is a scarring of the lungs but is caused by the inhalation of large quantities of fine sand dust. Like asbestosis, silicosis, once a scourge, is a disappearing disease because of strict government regulations and employer practices. Deaths attributable to silicosis have dropped over 80% in the past 30 years. But beginning in 2002, claim filings in state courts, mostly in Mississippi, reached "epidemic" proportions.

 

 

 

The reasons for the "epidemic" are that key states began to adopt comprehensive asbestos litigation reform and Congress took up consideration of a fund (paid for by defendants and insurance companies) to pay claims as a way of taking asbestos litigation out of the tort system. Worried about the future of their enterprise, lawyers, doctors and screening companies abruptly shifted gears from ginning up claims based on asbestosis to claims based on silicosis. As one lawyer acknowledged, "why reinvent the wheel."

 

 

 

All this became clear when 10,000 of the 35,000 pending silica claims were centralized into a federal multi-district litigation (MDL), presided over by U.S. District Court Judge Janis Jack, a Clinton appointee. During the course of the MDL, one of the doctors who diagnosed 3,617 of the 10,000 plaintiffs as having silicosis recanted all of his diagnoses, provoking Judge Jack to observe that "it's clear this . . . diagnosing] business is fraudulent." She went on to issue an unprecedented order that allowed defendants to cross examine every doctor in her presence who had provided a silicosis diagnosis as well as the owners of the screening companies."

 

I hardly think that all attorneys are Satan's Foul Minions, but you seem to be arguing that the public's interest is always aligned with that of the Trial Lawyers in particular and the legal profession in general, which is an opinion that seems to be confined to...Trial Lawyers.

 

I'm no enemy of either attorneys or the concept of legal accountability, but the profession is doing both itself and the public a disservice by refusing to either acknowledge a need for any reform whatsoever, and by defending even the most outrageous abuses of the legal system by the peers.

[JayB]

OK, so they should have been fined. Should it have been enough of a fine to really hurt? Should the INDIVIDIUALS involved have been held personally accountable, or should just the shareholders have seen a reduction in the value of their stock value?

 

I'm not sure how to define "really hurt," in this context, but I'm sure there's a precedent or two that they could follow to make that kind of determination. I wouldn't support them making up a punishment out of the blue that's totally inconsistent with the principles used to determine the fines levied against other enterprises.

 

If any of the folks at the tobacco company broke the law by either committing purgery or some other offense then by all means they should be punished.

[foraker]

The individuals are being held accountable by their poor health and, in many cases, death. Is the fine dispropotionate to the offense? I don't know. Personally, I despise smoking but it seems odd for the state to be fining an industry for a vice it profits from. I wonder how much of that money actually ended up going towards public health. PRobably not a lot. Probably disappeared into 'the general fund'. One question, the state also benefits from liquor sales which clearly have many deleterious health consequences. "Everyone knows" liquor is bad for you. Are you saying it's not the same for cigarettes? If it is, why hasn't anyone gone after the liquor companies and the beer brewers?

[archenemy]

Did you know that The Association of Trial Lawyers of America is changing its name to the American Association for Justice?

Now THAT makes me sick.

 

What makes ME sick is the insurance companies trying to fool the public into thinking that legal liability is what is driving a medical industry crisis, or the President's saying that all the asbestos claims are frivolous, or all the completely bullshit fabricated stories of "outrageous" personal injury lawsuits.

 

There are plenty of jerks in the legal profession, and maybe more than in many other but certainly not all professions, but the fact is that it is indeed all about justice. I think we've got a fairly good system and trial lawyers are part of what makes it work. I'd hate to think how our society would look if there were no lawyers, but those who waste all day long on cc.com were running the legal system.

Agreed. Politicians are the cream of the crop. Is it a wonder so many of them are also lawyers?

[JayB]

The individuals are being held accountable by their poor health and, in many cases, death. Is the fine dispropotionate to the offense? I don't know. Personally, I despise smoking but it seems odd for the state to be fining an industry for a vice it profits from. I wonder how much of that money actually ended up going towards public health. PRobably not a lot. Probably disappeared into 'the general fund'. One question, the state also benefits from liquor sales which clearly have many deleterious health consequences. "Everyone knows" liquor is bad for you. Are you saying it's not the same for cigarettes? If it is, why hasn't anyone gone after the liquor companies and the beer brewers?

 

It is surprising that companies that sell booze haven't been subject to a wave of equally dubious lawsuits. One reason is because they were smart enough to realize that acknowledging that drinking can be bad for your health, and moreover that acknowlegding medical facts would have no effect whatsoever on their sales. I think another, more important factor is that drinking is both more widespread and not nearly as frowned upon as smoking in this culture, so supporting this kind of lawsuit might be a political liability, unlike the case with tobacco.

[mattp]

I'm no enemy of either attorneys or the concept of legal accountability, but the profession is doing both itself and the public a disservice by refusing to either acknowledge a need for any reform whatsoever, and by defending even the most outrageous abuses of the legal system by the peers.

 

Where did you get the idea that "the profession" was arguing that there was no need for any reform whatsoever?

 

In the last Washington election, for example, the Trial Lawyers sponsored referendum that would have held attorneys who filed fivolous lawsuits more accountable for doing so.

[JayB]

The fact that anyone in the profession is defending the Asbestos Megacluster under any pretense, for starters.

[mattp]

Lets see: Owens Corning and those other companies deliberately hid the information from the public for - what was it? Decades?

 

I have not followed how the whole business actually ended up, and I know that once the train started rolling there were certainly lots of people who jumped on for the ride when they didn't have meritorious claims and plenty of attorneys who were less than scrupulous were drawn by the prospect of making lots of money, but I would say that the legal system actually worked much better than you suggest:

 

companies who clearly were shown to have hidden the dangers of asbestos usage, and who had refused to help the victims or their widows were taken to the cleaners and we are no longer exposing millions of workers to this hazard every year.

 

Again, if you believe in personal responsibility, I suppose you might say that the executives who were responsible for this should have gone to jail and all of their assets seized, but most of us would say that is too extreme and that business would be crippled and the Chinese would rule the world if we held poor entrepeneurs responsible in this fashion.

[Fairweather]

Agreed. Politicians are the cream of the crop. Is it a wonder so many of them are also lawyers?

 

Brilliantly stated!

[mattp]

Off White is right: why DO you hate America? Have you ever considered running for office, so you could actually do something to help fix our wretched society like maybe fix that wasteful school system that you complain about or straighten out those spendthrifts in the State government?

[Fairweather]

You seem a little tense, Matt. Maybe you'd feel better if you sued someone today....or wrote out a really big check to the "American Association for Justice" or their #1 benefactor, The Democratic National Committee.

[fishburneiv]

At the end of the day, Tobacco companies were a politically unpopular group, sitting on a massive pile of money, and this made them an easy target for public confiscation of the profits that they made by selling a legal product to adults who were fully aware of the risks associated with using it.

 

excerpt from http://nosmoking.ws/news/newstobaccomarketskids0801.htm

 

Sara Bogdani had just turned 17 last summer when she slipped into a short skirt and started working as a Marlboro girl.

 

While the rest of her high school friends spent their vacation laboring in restaurants or lounging at home, Sara donned a red hat, a T-shirt with a cowboy on the back and a knapsack full of Marlboros and other Philip Morris cigarettes.

 

Then she hit the streets of Tirana, the capital of Albania and her hometown, offering a smile and a free pack to anyone who professed a love of smoking and looked, well, almost as old as she was.

 

"As long as they weren't 14 or something, it was O.K.," Sara said in a telephone interview, noting that a co-worker was also 17. As for her bosses, "they were just glad if you gave out all the cigarettes," said Sara, who now works with an antismoking group.

 

Just as it is in the United States, giving cigarettes to teenagers is illegal in many countries, including Albania, where Marlboro girls stroll the streets. But while the practice has all but disappeared from American cities, it goes on with striking regularity in many developing nations, and Philip Morris is far from the only tobacco company that the World Health Organization has accused of crossing the line in trying to entice those underage with free cigarettes.

 

A new study of schoolchildren 13 to 15 in 68 countries, conducted by the W.H.O. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that about 11 percent of the children in Latin America and the Caribbean were offered free cigarettes by a tobacco company representative in 1999 and 2000. In Russia, nearly 17 percent said they had been given free cigarettes. In Jordan, it was 25 percent.

 

I think we're gonna be OK in the U.S. though.

 

Kids Giving Up Cigarettes For Cigars

Perhaps, an unintended consequence of the huge emphasis our society places on the hazards of smoking cigarettes: More people, particularly teenagers wanting to be "cool," are lighting up cigars, according to a new report.

 

Case in point: Although a New Jersey report found cigarette smoking among teens had dropped by some 30 percent, smoking cigars had increased among boys (17 percent) and girls (10 percent). Also, a 2004 survey of Cleveland teens found cigars consumption had exceeded cigarette use.

 

As if anticipating many teens may not like the typical taste of cigars, tobacco manufacturers have taken advantage of all the junk food marketing kids have been exposed to over the years by offering cigars in various flavors (apple, cinnamon and grape).

 

And, due to escalating taxes on cigarettes imposed throughout the country, it may be cheaper in some areas for teens to smoke cigars...

[mattp]

Good idea. I'm thinking about suing Jon and Timmy for wasting the last four years of my life for me. The ba&*%rds have been lying to us all along, saying our participation here is only a matter of personal choice. Maybe I'll name YOU as co-defendant.

[Fairweather]

First you'd have to prove an elevated heart rate is unhealthy. Then you would have to demonstrate a lawyer's time is more valuable than anybody else's.

[Peter_Puget]

Please don't underestimate the benefits of smoking related weight loss.

[mattp]

Nope. There are three elements to my claim:

(1) I wasted my time. My post-count at 7,000 posts is my evidence. Res ipsa loquitur.

(2) It was Jon and Tim and your fault. I may have a harder time proving Jon and Tim are responsible, but your frequent baiting of me, for which I am not responsible in any way, is clear proof in your case. (Maybe I'll drop Tim and Jon, and just name YOU. You got a deep pocket?)

(3) I suffered damage as a result. I have at least one witness who will testify I'm suffering an elevated heart rate.

[mattp]

Careful there, PP, or I'll add you to my suit. In fact, that does it. You're in. Will you accept service or do I have to send the process servers after you?

[archenemy]

First you'd have to prove an elevated heart rate is unhealthy. Then you would have to demonstrate a lawyer's time is more valuable than anybody else's.

Bwaahahhhahaaaaaa

 

so true!

[archenemy]

Oh wait, a lawyer would first have to prove he has a heart.