Corporate America's "Man of the People"
Bush is rumored to be thinking of nominating Michael E. Baroody, a corporate lobbyist, and executive vice-president of the anti-union National Association of Manufacturers, as the new head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
In an interview on June 22, 2006, Baroody ventured his opinion that litigation against the asbestos industry are, in his words a "scandal", although scientific papers dating back to 1898 linked asbestos with conditions such diffuse pleural thickening and pleural plaques (often fatal), mesothelioma (often fatal), as well as lung cancer - and corporations were found to have deliberately withheld this information from workers for decades.
Baroody never mentions the lives and loved ones of the 600,000+ claimants over the last few decades in the asbestos "scandal", many of whom paid the ultimate price after being deliberately duped - but instead attempts to point to the fact that litigation has "bankrupted more than 75 companies" as the real outrage.
So much for Baroody's views on consumer protection. So much for "compassionate conservatism". Baroody's lamented bankruptcy figure even bely two key facts - most of the indicted corporations simply creatively reorganized to avoid litigation (and let the isolated asbestos-related spinoff take the damage) as well as the obvious, which is that a bankruptcy is a legal device that aborts fiduciary responsibility on the part of the plaintiff (the asbestos company).
Baroody is simply one of countless hundreds of Bush cronies who could care less about the health of working Americans. In this administration, he's unfortunately in good company.
In an interview on June 22, 2006, Baroody ventured his opinion that litigation against the asbestos industry are, in his words a "scandal", although scientific papers dating back to 1898 linked asbestos with conditions such diffuse pleural thickening and pleural plaques (often fatal), mesothelioma (often fatal), as well as lung cancer - and corporations were found to have deliberately withheld this information from workers for decades.
Baroody never mentions the lives and loved ones of the 600,000+ claimants over the last few decades in the asbestos "scandal", many of whom paid the ultimate price after being deliberately duped - but instead attempts to point to the fact that litigation has "bankrupted more than 75 companies" as the real outrage.
So much for Baroody's views on consumer protection. So much for "compassionate conservatism". Baroody's lamented bankruptcy figure even bely two key facts - most of the indicted corporations simply creatively reorganized to avoid litigation (and let the isolated asbestos-related spinoff take the damage) as well as the obvious, which is that a bankruptcy is a legal device that aborts fiduciary responsibility on the part of the plaintiff (the asbestos company).
Baroody is simply one of countless hundreds of Bush cronies who could care less about the health of working Americans. In this administration, he's unfortunately in good company.
