Thursday, June 19, 2025

👿☠️

 

When I wore a younger man’s clothes (much younger; back in the early ‘80’s), I worked as a paralegal before I went to law school.

The firm I worked for represented a party in the then-burgeoning and soon voluminous asbestos cases. This was long before Johns-Manville escaped liability in bankruptcy court (they shed their liability like a snakeskin. Congress closed that loophole, which is the only reason Alex Jones is still fighting the bankruptcy trustee.), and the fund was finally established, even later, to end the lawsuits and compensate the victims of asbestos. So it was endless plaintiffs (people who had worked with asbestos products. The stuff was in everything: insulation, roofing materials, floor tiles. The only thing it didn’t do was hold together; but you could fix that. Or they thought they could. Asbestos is very friable. But like pollen, it’s virtually indestructible. That’s why industry liked it; and nobody paid attention to the dust. Which was tiny particles of asbestos, getting into your lungs. Forever.) and a small city (it seemed) of defendants.

All of the cases I touched (mostly depositions I read and summarized) involved asbestosis: lung damage from asbestos fibers (dust). Roughly equivalent to emphysema. Most of those cases were about who had liability, and so who would pay what to whom, and how much? The usual work of products liability, IOW. The horror stories, which I don’t remember working any case on, were all about mesothelioma.

It’s cancer of the mesothelial lining of the abdomen. So far as I know, the only cause is still exposure to asbestos. Any case like that was settled quickly, because it was a wrongful death case. 40 years ago, nobody lived long after that diagnosis. Because it was contiguous tissue and didn’t need a blood or lymph system to spread it, it was a wildfire. It was anyway,  as it literally grows and drips onto internal organs, so it moves damned fast.

I remember this because I organized the files in these cases (there were hundreds? Memory may exaggerate.), and there was reading matter on the then-new to non-specialists subject. And reading what I now remember about the cancer related to it (other than lung, which could be from other carcinogen. These were lawsuits, after all; cause mattered.), I read the story of a 10-year old boy.

I remember him as 10 years old, but don’t hold me to that. I’m sure he wasn’t older than that. This was a case history in some materials about the dangers of asbestos and mesothelioma. What I’ve never forgotten is what happened.

His father was changing the brakes on his car. Asbestos brake shoes, because that’s what everyone used. Heatproof; indestructible; but friable, so they would wear down, they would have to be replaced. His son was helping; and Dad used compressed air to blow the “dust” out of the brakes, thinking nothing of it. Why should he? I had asthma as a child, they tell me. For a short period, they thought I wouldn’t make it. My father virtually chain smoked. Years later I realized I was raised in a chimney; the house was always filled with smoke. My father was neither evil nor selfish. He just didn’t make the connection until much, much later. As I say: who knew?

The son got a face full of dust. And a diagnosis of mesothelioma. He was dead within a year. It must have been a horrific way to die.

I think of that boy, and his father, whenever I even hear the word “asbestos.” I have no sympathy for the people who trade in it; nor the people who would allow the trade in it. There is a reason asbestos abatement procedures are so rigorous, so time consuming, and so necessary. People who would let that mineral back into commerce in this country deserve the lowest place in hell, for eternity. And I don’t believe in hell. But if it would make a difference, I’d make an exception.
“Trump’s support for asbestos'” Ars Technica adds, “has been welcomed in Russia, a primary asbestos supplier to the US. In 2018, a Russian asbestos company began marketing asbestos with Trump’s face and a seal reading ‘Approved by Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States.'”

In 2019, The New York Times pointed to this photo on a Facebook page showing pallets of asbestos stamped with a seal that featured President Trump’s face and the alleged endorsement—a “public relations stunt.”

“Strangely enough,” Fast Company also reported, “Trump himself wrote in his 1997 book Art of the Comeback that he believed asbestos bans were a conspiracy ‘led by the mob, because it was often mob-related companies that would do the asbestos removal.'”
The lowest place in hell. Maybe even a little bit lower.
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