Today is the official release date for “Kings of Torts,” an account of the legal scandals that sent Mississippi trial lawyer and Dickie Scruggs and his tobacco lawsuit partner Paul Minor to prison. The authors are Alan Lange of Jackson, Miss., founder of YallPolitics , and Tom Dawson, the retired federal prosecutor who was lead counsel in the Scruggs cases. (Author profiles.) From the book’s website, KingsofTorts.com:

Kings of Tort chronicles the sordid tale of judicial bribery and political intrigue in Mississippi, birthplace of the tobacco litigation and long known as one of the most tort-friendly jurisdictions in the nation. It features the story of Dickie Scruggs, who was largely credited with bringing down Big Tobacco in the early 1990s. From his ascent to a net worth of nearly a billion dollars to his seemingly unfathomable downfall stemming from his role in improperly influencing two local judges to influence cases involving fee disputes with other lawyers, the book documents how those in Scruggs’s own trusted circle of tort barons turned on him and cooperated with federal authorities. It also shows the political influence he wielded with judges, attorneys general, and even his own brother-in-law, former US Senator Trent Lott.

Press coverage here. The book is being published by Pediment Books.

Elsewhere, movie critic, radio talk show host and author Michael Medved is promoting his newest book, “The 5 Big Lies About American Business: Combating The Most Toxic Myths About The Market Economy.” He blogs about the book at CNBC:

At a time of near universal economic suffering, there should be more openness than ever to the revolutionary and ultimately life-changing realization that you gain, rather than losing, from the progress of the people around you. By the same token, bad luck for the privileged never brings more blessings for the impoverished. Severe losses for the business elite will lead directly to collapsing, companies, communities and even societies.

For some readers, the logic in my book will sound distinctly counter-intuitive – in attacking cherished, ubiquitous, but groundless beliefs like the profound, automatic superiority of small business over big business (actually, every small business yearns to get big), or the common assumption that government responds more directly to public needs and preferences than do private companies (actually, few bureaucracies ever go out of business by ignoring or insulting the people they serve, but arrogant, inefficient corporations close down every day).

Medved is one of the most thorough and calm presenters of information and arguments among the talk radio hosts we’ve encountered. He’s certainly picked a timely topic.

From The Boston Globe, with a reviewer who strikes a tone we hadn’t see in the other reviews of the anti-Chevron movie, a world-weary cynicism. The inaccuracies are still the same, though.

From “An ecological disaster meets a media circus“:

In “Crude,’’ the anger onscreen spreads as slowly and inexorably as toxic sludge. The documentary follows a pending class-action lawsuit filed by 30,000 Amazon tribespeople against the US petro-giant Chevron for contaminating an area of land the size of Rhode Island.

But it’s not a class-action suit and it wasn’t filed by 30,000 Amazon tribespeople.

Even the Amazon Defense Coalition’s PR person, Karen Hinton, eventually admitted this basic fact — a basic fact that the Globe gets wrong.

Gee, if the reviewer starts off with a glaring error, wonder what else in wrong in the piece?

P.S. Today is the movie’s last day in Washington, D.C. It had a two-week run at the E Street Cinema, which the producers must regard as a success.

The publicity machine has geared up for the umpteenth premiere of the anti-Chevron movie, “Crude,” this time at the E Street Cinema Friday just a few blocks down from NAM-HQ. Joe Berlinger, the director, will be at the premiere, perhaps proclaiming his objective distance as he did in this San Francisco Chronicle interview:

I have maintained throughout the entire production period and release an arms-length relationship with everybody involved, so that the film is treated as a piece of objective journalism—because it is.

Berlinger will be appearing at the DC showing with Luis Yanza, an Ecuadorian activist, and Steven Donziger, the American trial lawyer who is directing the lawsuit.

Now that’s objective distance!

To be fair to Berlinger and the movie, you learn a lot about the trial lawyer/activist/media combine that drives the litigation. He shows Donziger in full trial-lawyer mode, coaching Ecuadorian Indians to be more emotional when speaking to company stockholders, successfully selling Vanity Fair on doing a piece he can use to market the lawsuit (”Jungle Law“), and begging for more money from the Philadelphia law firm that’s subsidizing the litigation in the hopes of a big payout.

And there’s a scene in the movie where Donziger berates an old, shaky judge in Quito and then verbally attacks an attorney out in the hallway for the sake of the cameras. (See our earlier Shopfloor.org post.) It’s ugly bullying from Donziger, but you don’t really learn how cynical the abuse is until you read Peter Maass’ description of the encounter.

Maass is author of “Crude World,” a global maligning of the oil industry, with a chapter devoted to Donziger and the litigation. (Maass is also a sympathetic promoter of the movie.) In the book, Maass reports:

Donziger had known for months that Chevron had built a villa at the [army] base and agreed to give it to the military once the case ended. Donziger hadn’t opposed the deal because Chevron was not popular in Lago Agrio; he’d realized that the company’s lawyers would be safer with military protections. But with more than a dozen news-hungry journalists recording the moment, Donziger suspected that the time was right to accuse the military of being on the payroll of gringo oilmen. He was correct. The accusation made national headlines, and a little more than a month later the Ecuadorian military canceled all military contracts with oil firms and ordered Chevron off the base.

In other words, Donziger originally didn’t make an issue of legitimate security precautions because the opposing legal team faced potential harm. But when it served his purposes — when the cameras were there to record the mock outrage — he’d gladly renege on any understanding and put those lawyers in danger.

A truth-teller. Sure.

More …

• Yet another over-the-top release from The Amazon Defense Coalition about “Crude’s” D.C. showing.
• An article by Peter Maass on the litigation, “Slick” from Outside Magazine, which includes another telling of Donziger browbeating the judge in Quito.
• In Spanish, the kind of headlines that Donziger’s cynical stunt produced in Ecuador, “Amazónicos denuncian que Chevron Texaco usa base militar para sabotear juicio.”

Fascinating piece in today’s Washington Post about the financial records of George Washington being examined by historians, “Washington: First in War, Peace — and Accounting.” With a good reminder:

As thoroughly researched as the life of Washington has been, his career as a warrior and statesman has largely overshadowed his entrepreneurial history. He was the CEO, in effect, of a farming, manufacturing and real estate operation that by the end of his life encompassed more than 50,000 acres of field and forest. Farms, fisheries, weavers, smithies, a grist mill, a distillery — these were just part of the Washington empire.

Below we noted the lawsuit the Kivalina Alaskan native village has brought against oil, coal and power companies, suing them for contributing to global warming that has supposedly eroded the village’s shoreline. Now some filmmakers are out to depict this calamity, using the litigation as the narrative device.

From Public Nuisance Wire, “Film company shoots Kivalina documentary before trial ends“:

TORONTO - A Canadian-based film company has begun filming a documentary aimed at exposing the controversial case of Kivalina v Exxon Mobil.

Filming began last month in the tiny Alaskan village of Kivalina, a 3.9 square-mile town with a population of around 399 people. The village is in the middle of a lawsuit with Exxon Mobil over allegations the big oil company’s excess gas emissions have caused erosion and damages to the town.

In a press release, Phoebe Greenberg, one of the film’s producers, said she was intrigued by the subject matter and that the dramatic consequences of global warming affect not only the small Alaskan community, but the world as well. 

The production company labels Exxon one the world’s “worst polluters,” claiming the oil giant should pay for the consequences of global warming.

Too bad they have their minds made up already. We were hoping for an objective documentary by an objective filmmaker telling both sides of the story objectively. You know, like the anti-Chevron movie, “Crude.”

Ms. Greenberg better not hope for boffo box-office. “Crude” pulled in $4,219 in weekend gross last weekend, Oct. 2-4, That’s right. Four thousand bucks in four theaters, off 72 percent from the previous weekend.

Total domestic sales as of October 4? $81,257. That’s not quite the “huge hit” that Amazon Watch proclaimed. Tendentious documentaries that pretend to be something else just don’t sell.

Twin Cities humorist James Lileks is scanning content into his The ’30s website, and today brings us the colorful world of flooring courtesy the Armstrong promotional publication, ”Dream Kitchens for 1939.” 

The nice thing about Lileks is that while he pokes fun and satirizes, he doesn’t mock. And Linoleum floors must have been a big hit in 1939, both durable and colorful. The kitchen designs are nice, too:

[Note] the ingenious use of vertical space for serving. A sparkling chromium frame supports broad plate glass shelves and underneath is a spice for parkgin the de luxe custom-built glass and chromium service cart. At the left is another tidy arrangement — a chopping board with extension to house a stool, a wide ledge to accomodate the food grinder, and underneath, a neat slide to hold the pan for drippings.

A slide for the drippings? Sold!

Armstrong remains a great American manufacturer of flooring products and more, we note.

This Saturday is one of the big annual cultural days in Washington, D.,C., the National Book Festival on the Mall. It’s an event sponsored by the Library of Congress but paid for by private sponsors. (AT&T, for example, supports the children’s events.)

There’s a long, long list of authors speaking. We’ll be trying to catch Mark Kurlansky, who has written the engaging, commodity-related history books, “Cod” and “Salt.” (Hoping he’ll do “Zinc” and “Sisal,” too.)

Here’s the official poster, which prominently displays familiar images from “Alice in Wonderland.” Hope it’s not a pre-1985 version, banned by the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.

More seriously, one of our goals of walking through the exhibits tomorrow is to see whether there’s any reference to the CPSIA’s outlawing of children’s books that could conceivably, possibly, potentially have minute but not-dangerous amounts of lead in their inks or other components.

Walter Olson at Overlawyered.com today catches us up on the book-related damage from the CPSIA, noting that the Consumer Product Safety Commission has yet to issue guidance for pre-1985 books. He quotes from a Publisher’s Weekly article:

Thom Barthelmess, president of the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, says most librarians are waiting to see what happens. “We’re hoping for a happy resolution, so our collections aren’t decimated,” he says. If the CPSC’s ruling results in libraries needing to pull books from shelves, “there would be huge ramifications,” he continues. “If we lose a lot of titles printed before 1986, many of which are irreplaceable, it would have a huge impact on the nature of our collections.”

If we had to guess, it would be that few people — if anyone — participating in the National Book Festival will be familiar with the CPSIA’s book banning. Hope to be proved wrong.

Falsehoods upon falsehoods are at the core of the legal shakedown against Chevron by U.S. trial lawyers, environmental activists and the Ecuadorian government, aided by an uncritical media. We see another round of unquestioningly repeated falsehoods in the recent coverage of “Crude,” the anti-Chevron movie now being released around the country.

Here, from today’s The Los Angeles Times, the review by Kenneth Turan, who simply accepts the movie’s claims as true.

The outrage in question is the subject of a class-action suit filed by 30,000 citizens of Ecuador against Chevron, the world’s fifth-largest corporation, alleging that 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater were dumped into the Amazon between 1972 and 1990, fatally poisoning the land and water and sickening inhabitants

That’s a lot of propaganda packed into a single paragraph, starting with the word “outrage.” And …

Class-action suit? No. That’s wrong. There are no class-action suits in Ecuador. Class action litigation is, alas, an American legal malady.

Filed by 30,000 citizens of Ecuador? No. That’s wrong. The suit was filed on behalf of 48 plaintiffs and all the damages would go to the Amazon Defense Coalition, with U.S. contingency trial lawyers getting their cut. (Although the Ecuadorian government now claims it would get 90 percent.)

18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater were dumped? Only in the most tendentious interpretation of the term “toxic wastewater.” In fact, it was “production water,” i.e., the water produced in the drilling of wells, everywhere in the world. It was handled according to the prevailing environmental standards at the time — and Texaco (Chevron’s predecessor) — was released from environmental claims by the Ecuadorian government after completing its remediation work on well sites. Meanwhile, Ecuadorian law still allows the discharge of produced water.

Think about it: 18 billion gallons of toxic waste? It’s a preposterous claim on its face, yet it’s a familiar charge in the attacks against Chevron, one that is simply repeated as true by documentarians and reporters alike.

More…

• We review “Crude” here.
• And for Chevron’s perspective — and a useful supply of facts — see this summary.
• As we’ve noted repeatedly, Chevron paid our way for a quick trip to Ecuador in June to see first-hand the oil region and to discuss the claims against it.

From BeyondChron, an “alternative” news-site based in San Francisco, a column by labor writer, Randy Shaw, “Michael Moore’s New Film Galvanizes AFL-CIO“:

Demonstrating his passionate commitment to progressive change and single payer health care, Michael Moore held the U.S. premiere of his new film, Capitalism, A Love Story, last night in Pittsburgh in conjunction with the AFL-CIO national convention. Sponsored by the National Nurses Organizing Committee and other unions, Moore gave the day’s most powerful speech at the Convention Center before leading a march through the streets of Pittsburgh accompanied by labor and health care activists. The march ended at the movie theater, when Moore spoke again to the now roaring crowd. The film, which will be available in theaters nationwide on October 2, fulfills Moore’s claim that it represents the fruition of his twenty-year film career. Whereas Sicko exposed the conflict between Americans perception of caring for others and the lack of a national health care system, Capitalism, A Love Story challenges our transformation of the “free enterprise” to holy status. This is not only Moore’s best film, but it is the most politically incendiary film put on the American screen in memory. Most important, Moore’s film will prove an excellent organizing tool for unions and other progressive groups, and can be a catalyst for change.

Is it shocking that union activists would be galvinized by an explicitly anti-market, anti-business, anti-profit movie by a dishonest moviemaker?

Well, it’s no surprise. But it’s a terrible public relations move by the AFL-CIO leaders, who in siding with Moore are siding with a fundamentally hostile view of America’s employers. (”Capitalism is evil,” says new Michael Moore film.) There are many members of Congress — and former members of Congress — who rue the day they endorsed paranoid conspiracy movie, “Fahrenheit 911″ by appearing at its Washington, D.C. premiere. We bet there will be AFL-CIO members who will soon regret the day they cheered Michael Moore.

UPDATE More news coverage…
The Pitt News, “Filmmaker Michael Moore lambasts capitalism at Pittsburgh film premiere”

Wall Street Journal, “Radical Filmmaker’s Surprising New Targets,” commentary from Matthew Kaminski:

Mr. Moore can’t be judged as a documentary film maker, except dismissively. He confuses issues on purpose. He repeatedly ignores the other side of the story. He never asks why, for example, a company might take out an insurance policy on a key employee. That’s just greed. He compares the free market system to Nazism.

Odious.

From the American Library Association, an Aug. 27 “dispatch” on how librarians should treat the children’s books that might contain minute traces of lead.

On August 26, 2009, the CPSC’s final rule on children’s products containing lead was released. [Final rule here.] In the rule, CPSC confirmed that libraries have no independent obligation to test library books for lead under the law. CPSC also announced its intention to release a Statement of Policy specifically providing guidance for libraries with regard to the treatment of older children’s books that could potentially contain lead. According to our conversations with CPSC officials, that Statement of Policy should be released within the next several weeks.

While we await the Statement of Policy, ALA recommends that libraries take the following actions. If a library is aware that any children’s book does indeed contain lead above the legal limits or otherwise presents a danger to children, it should remove it from public access, for instance by moving it to the non-circulating collection. We would also ask that if libraries do learn of any books containing lead to please let the ALA – Washington Office know so that we might share that information with other libraries. When the Statement of Policy is released, we will promptly notify our members.

Independent obligation or not — and what does that mean? — don’t libraries have to assume that pre-1985 children’s books are printed with lead-bearing ink? No, the books pose no danger to children, but the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act outlaws children’s products that could conceivably permit the absorption of ANY lead. In effect, it’s an absolute ban.

The American Library Association has been awfully passive in its response to the CPSIA’s excesses. You would expect an association that sponsors an annual Banned Books Week to rise up in righteous anger against a law that, you know, bans books.

(Hat tip: The Recliner Commentaries.)