April 25, 2005

Senator Charles Schumer

Re:  Preserve Our Civil Rights, Hold Mass Polluters Accountable, Vote No on Unfair Asbestos Bail Out Bill

Dear Senator Schumer;

My name is Leonette Giannini, and I am writing you today to let you know that I lost the love of my life on February 13, 2005.  My husband, John, died that day of mesothelioma caused by asbestos exposure.  He was diagnosed the day before his fiftieth birthday and died 5 months later.  The cancer was especially aggressive causing him excruciating pain every day of the 5 months he lived.  The tumor was physically visible, protruding out from his left side where it originated. He could not walk without getting out of breath because the cancer eventually spread from his left lung to his right lung to around his heart.  He could not lie down to sleep because of the pain so he slept sitting up in a chair.  We tried everything medically available to us from chemotherapy to any clinical trial that was available, but mesothelioma is too aggressive and at this time there is no cure.  John never lost hope, praying for an answer to his illness.  We tried to call doctors and specialists around the country begging them to help us, but the research and money for research are not available for this cancer.  The doctors told us to go home and call hospice.  Can you imagine you or your family member getting this death sentence?  It is truly devastating for everyone in the family.

John grew up in the Poletown district in Detroit where the whole neighborhood was destroyed to put in the GM plant.  He just graduated from law school at that time and started specializing in condemnation law, helping the people displaced in the neighborhood.  The houses that were bulldozed around him all had asbestos siding  He was exposed to asbestos products at work, at home and from the clothing of relatives.

I am also writing to you today about the trust fund bill.  The trust fund bill will help the companies, who poisoned John, but it will not adequately compensate me for my loss.  I have filed a civil lawsuit.  The bill would wipe out my lawsuit.  It would wipe out unpaid settlements.  It would void all the work done on my case and confiscate unpaid settlements.  It would abolish the legal system to shield indicted companies like W.R. Grace from accountability.  It would create a massive federal bureaucracy that is empowered to limit pay outs, restrict eligibility criteria and delay compensation if the trust fund runs dry, which it will.  I do not expect the corporate-sponsored bureaucracy to be very friendly to asbestos victims.  The more money they pay out, the sooner the trust will go insolvent, and they will be out of a job. 

Out of a $140 billion trust fund, it requires the mass poisoners to spend only about $10 million a year on medical research and treatment.  This is a cruel slap in the face.  The companies who poisoned John will save billions of dollars but they won’t have to plow any of that windfall blood money into cleaning up their mess.  More will die and suffer as the guilty celebrate their government bail out.

I can go on.  The trust fund will not have enough money from the get go.  It will take at least two years for the new federal agency to get up to speed.  Many of the insurance companies and manufacturers are already saying they are unwilling to pay.  Instead of compensating victims, they will hire their lawyers to hold up the trust, just as they did with the superfund law, which made lots of defense lawyers rich, but didn’t clean up many toxic waste dumps.  The bill doesn’t spell out who has to contribute and how much.  Foreign insurance companies likely will balk over their bill and we won’t have any recourse.

To delay the inevitable insolvency, the bill imposes a burden of proof that is far more stringent than the civil courts require.  The bill caps the fee for our attorneys (but does nothing to cap the runaway hourly fees the defense lawyers charge), which will discourage us from appealing bad bureaucratic decisions.  The Administrator will be like a dictator with totalitarian authority to stiffen medical criteria, reduce awards and take his sweet time in declaring the fund solvent.  The bill forces victims to fight each other for the scraps.  The folks in Libby, Montana will get $400,000 for asbestosis claims, while a person with the same disease will only get $25,000.  This is patently unequal treatment.  The sad truth is there are hundreds of horribly contaminated shipyard, steel mill, refinery and asbestos mining/factory towns where death and disease are rampant (for example, Manville, New Jersey).  And the exposure criteria discriminate against those who were exposed to asbestos after 1976 while remodeling homes, repairing brakes, going to contaminated schools or living next to an asbestos industrial site.

Who in Washington D.C. decided that the life of every mesothelioma patient was worth $1.1 million?  The government compensated the victims of 911 on average of about $1.7 million.  Sadly, the bill allows the administrator to give a little bit more to some claimants (if they are younger than 51 years old), if he can take away money from the older patients (age 65 and up), to make up the difference. The corporate sinners get to cleanse themselves with token pay-offs and their government accomplices end up compounding the crime by robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Please honor your commitment as a U.S. Senator to serve all of the people and uphold our Constitution.   Most courts do have procedures for expediting the resolution of claims by mesothelioma patients.  If there are problems with the tort system, let’s fix those problems, and not use the few abuses as an excuse to abolish our civil jury system. 

A medical criteria bill should be considered, not a bill that rewards the perpetrators of the worst toxic poisoning this country has ever seen.

Nothing will bring back my husband or change the future that I now have to look forward to alone.  John should not have died from this devastating disease at such a young age with his whole future ahead of him. I only hope that you vote to protect future mesothelioma patients and their families who are suffering unbearable sadness and pain from this horrible disease.

Sincerely,

Leonette Giannini
Sterling Heights, MI

• Click here for more letters from asbestos cancer survivors taking action against inhumane asbestos trust/bail out bill (SB 852)

*** POSTED ON APRIL 25, 2005 ***