Trial Lawyers Flex Muscle in Beltway

It has 60,000 members and a $19.4 million annual budget. It has never - ever - lost a legislative battle in Congress. Every last member has passed the Bar. And, of late, it has had Ralph Nader's Public Citizen on its side.
This ominous-sounding organization is the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, the political-action committee that operates on behalf of this country's trial lawyers.
Politically - as then-Vice President Dan Quayle so frequently expounded during last year's campaign - the trial lawyers have always been a Democrat-friendly bunch of people: looking out for victims (or apparent victims) of medical malpractice, corporate misdeeds and so on.
When George Bush cried that Bill Clinton was backed by "every trial lawyer who ever wore a tasseled loafer," he apparently was right. Lawyers gave nearly a half-million dollars to the Clinton-Gore campaign last year, according to the fall 1993 issue of Common Cause Magazine.
During the Reagan-Bush years, the ATLA succeeded in blocking a gaggle of legal reforms sought by right-leaning manufacturing, insurance and business interests, Common Cause reported. It's also worked to stave off federal no-fault car insurance (which would have left lawyers out of the lucrative insurance claim pipeline), the Montreal Protocols (which would have limited plane-crash victims' right to sue), and, perhaps most notably, laws intended to make it tougher for victims of defective, toxic or dangerous products to sue and win awards from manufacturers, according to CC.
Depending on where your sympathies lie, this all might sound like positive work. Now, however, the ATLA is working to fight the medical malpractice provisions in President Clinton's health-care package, which threaten to scuttle the whole caboodle. Given the organization's success rate, the lobbying effort has some health-care reformers worried.
One of Hillary Rodham Clinton's first ideas for malpractice reform called for a system of "enterprise liability," which supporters said would reduce legal costs, encourage hospitals and other providers to carry more insurance, and prevent malpractice from occurring in the first place by transferring liability from the individual doctor to the provider. When the American Medical Association helped to shoot down that idea, the trial lawyers went crazy when the First Lady hinted that malpractice award caps might be proposed as an alternative, Common Cause reported.
What is clearly a crumb intended to persuade the reform-cautious AMA to swallow the Clintons' health care ideas is just as clearly anathema to the trial lawyers. Predictably, the contingency-fee-dependent ATLA equates award caps with a lack of concern for patients.
"Telling doctors it's all right to commit malpractice is the wrong thing to do," the magazine quoted a notable malpractice attorney as saying. "They should not immunize a special interest group for injuring and killing people."
In this battle, least, the ATLA has the support of Nader's Public Citizen, the Consumer Federation of America and the Consumers Union. "Thank God there is an ATLA looking out for people's rights," CC quoted a Public Citizen official as saying.

(Editor's Note: This article is merely based on a report by Common Cause and does not reflect The Free Press' position on legal reforms that would limit the rights of plaintiffs.)



Making Paper Without Trees

The controversy over timber harvests in the Northwest has revolved primarily over the amount of trees being cut, with little attention paid to what the timber is being used for, or possible alternative sources of fiber.
This may be changing, however, as recent protests against the logging of old growth timber on Vancouver Island demonstrate. In addition to targeting the timber companies that were downing some of the last remaining ancient forests on the island, protesters targeted GTE, which was buying the wood to make telephone books for Los Angeles. By pointing out the eventual product that these trees would become, as well as the devastating impact of the clearcutting, their arguments became even more disturbing.
Incidents like these are raising public curiosity about the potential of non-wood sources of fiber, especially for making paper products. An article in the September/October 1993 issue of World Watch magazine explains in detail current efforts around the globe to produce paper out of non-wood fiber.
The ancient Egyptians made paper out of the papyrus plant, explaining the origins of our modern-day word, which comes from the Greek papyros. Since the early 1900s, however, nearly all the world's paper has been made from wood. It is now estimated that 70 percent of all paper pulp is made of virgin wood fiber.
As the World Watch article points out, a wide variety of fibers are currently being used around the world to make paper. These include cereal straws, sugar cane waste (bagasse), bamboo, hemp and kenaf (a relative of hemp lacking THC). Where trees grown for fiber can only be harvested every 7 to 30 years, other fiber crops can be harvested annually. And fiber from agricultural waste does not require anymore land than that which is already used for crops such as rice, wheat and barley.
According to World Watch, agro-waste presently accounts for 6 percent of all paper produced worldwide and "agro-waste generates enough pulp to supply most (if not all) of the world's paper needs without any use of trees." In addition, processing of straw-based paper consumes only 24 to 30 percent as much energy as wood does.
Fiber crops such as hemp and kenaf currently produce about 4 percent of the world's paper. They require about half as much land as trees to produce the same amount of paper. Hemp serves as a natural herbicide and is valuable for restoring soil nitrogen in crop rotation.
A study of 500 plant fiber alternatives begun by the USDA in the 1950s found after several decades of study that kenaf is even better than hemp. Although technical problems exist, such as storage of the fiber before it begins to biodegrade, the biggest obstacle to widespread use, says World Watch, is a lack of investment capital.

- Investigative Digest Compiled by Free Press staff

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Common Cause Magazine: $20/year - 2030 M St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20036, (202) 833-1200).

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Contents on this page were published in the October/November, 1993 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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