At President George W. Bush’s recent
“National Economic Conference,” an entire session was devoted
to bashing trial lawyers — and what a rollicking good time it was!
A panel of corporate interests wowed the handpicked
audience of Bush partisans with jabs at the lawyers who try to hold
wrongdoing corporations accountable. Bush nodded and chuckled as panelists
cried about people who sue these business empires.
For example, Home Depot CEO Bob Nardelli was there,
wailing that his $64 billion-a-year retailing Goliath is a target for pesky
consumers and their lawyers. “You’ve got deep pockets colliding
with shallow principles,” Bob snorted, drawing guffaws from an
appreciative president who is urging Congress to limit the rights of
consumers to sue companies such as Home Depot.
Missing from Bush’s bashfest was Mary Penturff.
Even if she’d been invited, she couldn’t have come — she
was killed when her head was crushed by a 75-pound box that fell from one
of Home Depot’s “high-stack” shelves. Janessa Horner
couldn’t be there, either. The body of this 3-year-old was shattered
by wood fragments when more than a ton of kitchen countertops fell 10 feet
from a Home Depot forklift, splitting a main blood vessel in
Janessa’s brain. She died four hours later.
Nardelli tries to keep secret the number of people
killed or maimed by Home Depot — which has been labeled “the
most dangerous store in America” — but it’s known that in
one year alone the company was getting 185 injury claims per week. Why
doesn’t Bob do something about it? Because it’s more profitable
for him to settle with the families than to change the dangerous way in
which his stores are operated.
And it’s even more profitable for him to back
his buddy Bush, who’ll then push a law to keep families such as Mary
Penturff’s and Janessa Horner’s from suing.
This article appears in Jan 27 – Feb 2, 2005.
