Furthering Asbestos Claim Transparency Act (FACT) of 2013

Floor Speech

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Mr. NADLER. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

This amendment would ensure that the transparency the bill's supporters demand from the victims of the asbestos industry will also be applied to the corporations that have inflicted so much damage and so much suffering over the years.

The amendment would require that a defendant seeking the information required by the bill must himself provide information about threats to the public safety or health. This information must be provided to any other person or to any Federal or State entity that has the authority to enforce the law regulating activity relating to such information.

This would go a long way to addressing the longstanding efforts by these corporations to conceal the facts surrounding their actions from the public, from their victims, and from government agencies charged with enforcing health and safety laws.

Too often, cases are settled specifically in order to prevent evidence of wrongdoing from becoming public. More importantly, because of the secrecy of these settlements, other people who have been injured have no way of gaining important information about their exposure, their illnesses, or the settled liability of the companies that made them sick.

Information about the concealment of wrongdoing never becomes public, and the people who have suffered have no way of knowing about the wrongdoing that caused their suffering or its extent. Governmental agencies that are charged with protecting the public health, whether in the workplace or the home, are deprived of the information they need to enforce the laws we have enacted.

If the sponsors of this legislation really mean what they say about the need for transparency and accountability, they will support this amendment. There has been too long a record over too many decades of concealment, disassembly, and lawlessness, and too many lives destroyed because of that illegal conduct for us to tolerate the continued coverup. This amendment will go a long way toward remedying that situation and toward correcting the unjust imbalance in the current system.

Without this amendment and the openness and clarity it would provide, this bill would favor only those who inflicted the harm and would give them yet another advantage over the victims. We should stand with the people whose lives have been destroyed, not with the corporations whose illegal and immoral conduct destroyed those lives.

This amendment would prevent a situation where as part of a settlement compensating a victim it is agreed to keep key information relevant to the public health and safety secret so that more people will not be victimized.

When such terms of the settlement are kept secret, other people will not learn that a given product contains asbestos or that a given product leaked asbestos and, therefore, will not know that they potentially were harmed, and government agencies may not learn facts necessary to exercise their responsibility to protect the public.

At the very least, we should be evenhanded and demand of the wrongdoers the same transparency that this bill demands of their victims, a transparency which will enable other victims to understand their remedies and will enable government agencies to better enforce the law. Unless you want to assist tortfeasors and wrongdoers in concealing the effects of their wrongdoing, you should support this amendment.

I urge my colleagues to vote for the amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. NADLER. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 30 seconds.

In reply to the gentleman from Virginia, the amendment refers to ``such party agrees to make available information.'' Such party is asbestos trusts, not a small business. So I don't know what he is talking about with small business requirements being imposed by this amendment, and the amendment deals with information that the trust must make available. It does not deal with the underlying burdens that the bill places on victims, which is what the gentleman was referring to. This has nothing to do with small business.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers), the distinguished ranking member of the committee.

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Mr. NADLER. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time.

The underlying bill imposes burdens on victims of asbestos poisoning because of an unsubstantiated allegation that the trusts, set up by the tortfeasors, by the giant corporations that caused the problem, may be suffering some fraud, although there is no specific about that.

The amendment simply says that if we are going to request information of the victims, we should request minimally that the representatives of the tortfeasors, the trusts, tell us the information that will prevent further people from being harmed.

I urge support of the amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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