CategoryVictim Claims

America has grossly undercounted its opioid-dependent babies. They deserve justice

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They cry every night, and yet they are unheard — the hundreds of thousands of American babies born in this century to mothers hooked on opioids, a manmade crisis fueled by the greed of some of the nation’s biggest pharmaceutical companies. One reason that everyday Americans don’t know as much as they should about these children born into what the doctors call Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome...

BP’s new outrage: We can’t pay because oil is too cheap

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Every time that I hear or read about what the folks at BP are up to lately, I have the same thought: Can you believe these guys? Forget — if you can, for one minute — that these are the people whose gross negligence and corner-cutting caused 5 million barrels of crude oil to spew in to the Gulf of Mexico. in an accident that also claimed 11 lives. But since then, it’s been...

BP is injuring the Gulf clean-up workers all over again

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There’s a lot of things about dealing with BP regarding the Gulf oil spill and its aftermath, which has cast its pall over the region for the last four-and-a-half years, that make you want to pull your hair out. But nothing has been as agonizing as the company’s bitter treatment of thousands of clean-up workers who took to the Gulf in an effort to rescue birds and turtles, and to...

“The people who live along the Gulf Coast know the truth”

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It was gratifying to see that the editorial board of the New Orleans Times-Picayune has picked up on the issue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its treachery against the small- and mid-sized business owners of the Gulf Coast. As you’ll recall, last week we spotlighted how the inside-the-Beltway-based national Chamber — which receives the bulk of its support and is increasingly...

HUGE NEWS: Judge finds BP was “grossly negligent” in 2010 spill

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If you’ve been reading this blog regularly for the last four years, the notion that BP was grossly negligent in its actions linked to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe won’t come as a surprise to you. It’s a well-established fact, by this point, that the British oil giant ignored a series of looming problems in its offshore deepwater rig. The Big Oil icon nevertheless...

Slammed twice by BP, shipper says “I’m not going to give up”

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Earlier this summer, I told you about an outrageous breech of promise by BP — how the oil giant was abruptly closing down an internal-claims program that was intended to help business owners who wanted to resolve their claims from the 2010 oil spill, quickly and fairly. This was supposed to be an alternate route for those who didn’t want to go through the burden of dealing with the...

BP outrageously breaks another promise to the people of the Gulf

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Over the last few months, I’ve watched in amazement as BP has spent untold millions of dollars on lawyers, on expensive full-page advertisements in America’s leading newspapers, and on other media all with one goal in mind: Overturning a multi-billion-dollar oil spill settlement crafted and vociferously advocated for by its own attorneys! We’ve discussed this before: BP insists...

More on how ’60 Minutes’ whitewashed BP

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Earlier this week, I told you how the most important story regarding BP and the Gulf of Mexico — its ongoing degradation of that precious natural resource, from the tar balls that assault our beaches on a daily basis to depleted fish stocks — is getting lost on the BP-manufactured controversy over claims by victims of the 2010 oil spill. BP’s belly-aching reached its largest...

The other side of the BP story in the Gulf

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A lot of people are talking about a story that aired Sunday night on the popular CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes” about BP and the 2010 Gulf oil spill. In essence, the story was an opportunity for executives from the oil giant to repeat the same old whine that I’ve written about here recently — that they never expected so many billions of dollars in claims from residents and...

Why Big Oil’s assault on Baton Rouge must be stopped

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 The other day I told you that Big Oil — alarmed in Louisiana about the citizenry finally fighting back after decades of environmental abuse, and uncertain about their political prospects past 2015 — is launching an epic legislative assault in Baton Rouge. Their army of lobbyists is seeking no less than a rollback of anti-pollution standards in the state, back to a time before the...

Stuart H. Smith is an attorney based in New Orleans fighting major oil companies and other polluters.
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