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Lessons from "Erin Brockovich"
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March 28, 2000 | NEW YORK -- Although the advertising and reviews have emphasized the remarkable performance of toothy diva Julia Roberts (and her push-up brassiere) in the title role, that isn't what makes "Erin Brockovich" a must-see for the Republican nominee. No, the Texas governor should study this movie because its subtext concerns so-called tort reform, an excruciatingly dull topic out of which Soderbergh has fashioned a compelling story. Tort reform, for those who haven't been paying attention, is the catch phrase used by conservatives in their campaign to limit the legal liability of corporations that hurt or kill citizens, by negligence or design. An important part of Dubyah's recent claim to be a "reformer with results" derives from his success in pushing a major tort reform bill through the Texas Legislature a few years ago.
Joe Conason Joe Conason's column appears in Salon News every other Tuesday.
Actually, "Erin Brockovich" is about Bush, along with the Republican congressional leadership, former independent counsel Kenneth Starr, the right-wing lawyers and jurists associated with the Federalist Society and the corporate lobbyists who have so lavishly financed the Bush campaign and the Republican National Committee. All of the above are, in a certain sense, the movie's unseen villains -- because if their version of tort reform had prevailed during the period when this true story occurred, the heroine played by Roberts would have had no legal recourse against the company whose wanton water pollution injured and killed dozens of ordinary citizens. For those Americans who may not have seen it yet, the movie's plot involves a giant electric utility that, for many years, has been casually polluting the water of a small California community with a toxic rust-prevention chemical called hexavalent chromium. Adding insult to such horrific injuries as breast and colon cancer, the utility firm has purposely misinformed its working-class neighbors, telling them that the chemical leaching from vast open pits into their water supply is good for them (which it would have been, if it had happened to be another type of chromium that is an essential human nutrient, but of course it wasn't). The title character, a brassy, hard-luck divorcée working for a personal-injury lawyer, notices the suspicious correlation of cancers and other catastrophic illnesses in the vicinity of the utility's chromium-spewing installation. The company has been buying up its neighbors' homes for chump change, apparently in an effort to get rid of the problem on the cheap before anybody realizes what has been going on. Motivated by the awful suffering of the families who have been unwittingly poisoned by this corporate crime, Erin Brockovich organizes them to assert their rights in court against Pacific Gas and Electric. She rummages through public records and develops sources like an investigative reporter until she and her boss have enough evidence to confront the utility. But before the story reaches its exhilarating payoff -- a settlement in the hundreds of millions -- Brockovich, her boss and their plaintiffs must leap the imposing hurdles of the judicial system.
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