August 7, 2004

John Edwards and the Resurrection of Trial Lawyers Inc

More Good-Guy, Bad-Guy Mythology From the Right

by H. L. Rucks

From the same people who gave us Losing Ground and America In Black And White, comes Trial Lawyers Inc, a fairly recent shot in the unending barrage of literature from the foundation-funded right. Trial Lawyers Inc first came out in September 2003 to considerable fanfare from the Wall Street Journal and the National Review. Its purpose was to add to the corporate clamor for tort reform.  Its authors at the conservative Manhattan Institute, however, have found a new target for its invective—John Edwards.  On C-SPAN’s Washington Journal Sunday, July 11, just five days after Kerry’s announcement of Edwards as his running mate, Jim Copeland, director of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Legal Policy showed up with graphs and campaign-finance figures to sound the alarm against John Edwards, whom he called a “wholly owned subsidiary of Trial Lawyers Inc.” It would be a national catastrophe,” Copeland said, for such a man “to have the ear of the president”. Later in the program, when callers brought up specific cases Edwards had tried, Copeland retreated. He wasn’t saying that everything John Edwards had ever done for his clients was shameful, just a lot of it.

Trial Lawyers Inc makes no such concessions. Billed as “a report on the lawsuit industry”, it is a thirty-two page demonization of trial lawyers. The Manhattan Institute counts among its benefactors a long list of foundations associated with right-wing agenda, including some run by billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. It’s a well-known catapult for books attacking affirmative action and social safety-net programs that benefit the poor. One of its more famous proteges was Charles Murray, author of the Bell Curve.  If you don’t remember, the book was a nasty polemic disguised as research that used I.Q. test results to compare black and white intelligence and deduce that the 15 point difference was genetic proof of the futility of affirmative action.

Trial Lawyers Inc gets its title from a fictitious organization named Trial Lawyers Inc., a literary device invented for the purpose of lumping all trial lawyers together in what its authors would have us believe is a secretive conglomerate of “tort kingpins” bent on sucking the US economy dry with spurious lawsuits to the tune of $40 billion a year in profits. These profits are “50% more than Microsoft or Intel and twice those of Coca-Cola”, the article tells us.  It bases its figures on “conservatively” estimated numbers, since the actual figures are hidden by the litigation industries’ cloak of lawyer-client confidentiality. The total cost to the American economy is nearly a staggering $200 billion a year—or “more than 2% of America’s GDP”. And the future looks even grimmer: “The overall cost of this ‘tort tax’ on our economy over the next ten years will be more than $3.6 trillion, assuming tort costs increase at their 30-year trend. If tort costs increase at their 2001 pace, the ten-year cost of the tort tax will be over $4.8 trillion—almost triple the size of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts combined.”

The report gives plaintiffs in tort cases short shrift beyond saying, “even assuming that the underlying lawsuits have merit, much of this cost is wasteful and excessive—at least $87 billion, according to the president’s Council of Economic Advisors”. The only details of actual tort cases are those allegedly illustrating gross frivolity and the boundless greed of trial lawyers. Forget Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovitch, forget Paul Newman in The Verdict, forget Gene Hackman in Class Action—tort law, the report would have us believe, is pure Al Pacino in Devil’s Advocate.  The plaintiff’s bar is a “menace”, a “dangerous racket”, a “behemoth”, a “juggernaut”, “a nightmare”, a “parasitic plague”, and a “fourth branch of government” that usurps the power of elected officials and regulatory agencies. (As if Republicans were losing sleep over the violated sanctity of governmental regulatory agencies.) The only attempt made to explain why juries and jurisdictions across the nation award such extravagant sums in so many baseless cases is to claim all the district-attorneys, judges, and even jurors are on the take from Trial Lawyers Inc. Most of this occurs in “magnet courts”, specially selected jurisdictions that act as litigation “havens”, much as certain offshore venues provide tax havens.

From the very first the “report” exceeds the bounds of responsible reporting and reverts to the kind of snide ridicule right-wingers like pass off as investigative journalism.  It flogs its big business paradigm to utter exhaustion, dividing plaintiff litigation into product areas with sardonic titles:

Mature Product Line—Asbestos

Mature Product Line—Medical Malpractice

High-Growth Product—Mold

High-Growth Product—Regulated Industries

New Product Development—Fast Food

It constructs company divisions and conjures up a phony “Leadership Team” called “Motley’s Crew” complete with photos and mini-biographies:

Ron Motley-- Founder and Chairman

Dickie Scruggs-- President, Tobacco

Peter Angelos-- Co-President, Asbestos

Mel Weiss-- Co-President, Class Actions (Securities)

Elizabeth Cabraser-- President, Class Actions (General)

John Edwards-- President, Government Relations

Ralph Nader-- Co-President, Public Relations

Joan Claybrook-- Co-President, Public Relations

It devotes a paragraph entitled “Favorite Son” to bashing John Edwards for selling his soul to Trial Lawyers Inc. “Edwards has in turn enthusiastically supported key provisions backed by Trial Lawyers, Inc., including helping to defeat proposed limitations on personal-injury lawsuits in the event of a terrorist attack and seeking to make it easier to sue health maintenance organizations”. It remarks that Edwards’ recent campaigns have received over half their outside funding from people connected with the trial lawyers industry.  It closes with the same charge leveled by Copeland on C-SPAN, that John Edwards is a “wholly owned” subsidiary of Trial Lawyers Inc. Even to sleepy listeners of Washington Journal, this characterization seemed ironic, given the well-documented corporate and foreign funding of George W. Bush.  Copeland tried to parry these charges by arguing that, while George Bush gets his contributions from a diverse range of corporate and business interests, John Edwards is indebted only to trial lawyers. Ergo, we should feel more secure with a president who is beholden to many lobbies than with a vice-president who may be beholden to one. If conservative Republicans were truly outraged by corporate contributions to politicians they would certainly have proposed more robust campaign finance reforms in the past and would not have opposed so bitterly the McCain-Feingold attempt to reign in the wholesaling of political influence for which the Bush Administration has deservedly earned a truly awesome reputation.

In the end, Trial Lawyers Inc is no report at all. It’s a broadside against tort laws and a plaintiff’s bar that hold powerful corporate and business entities responsible for some of their most egregious behavior. It’s purpose is to vilify a sector of society known to fund and support Democrats. There is something eerily laughable in its use of a business model to excoriate trail lawyers and its tone of corporate populism in defense of big tobacco and asbestos, not to mention its moral indignation at John Edwards’ receiving campaign contributions from an interest group, given that the Manhattan Institute is a wholly owned subsidiary of Conservative Think Tanks Inc.  

  HUMOR   TOTALLY BOGUS NEWS BITES: Conservative Economist Blames Clinton for Decline In June Retail Sales July 14, 2004

Appearing on FOX NEWS today, Malcom Rumbull, a senior fellow at the Richman Institute, a conservative think tank, blamed the 1.1 percent slide in retail sales announced by the Commerce Department Wednesday on the recent reappearance of former President Bill Clinton on prime time news spots. Clinton has been appearing for interviews and talk shows the last month promoting his autobiography My Life. “Just when President Bush’s tax cuts were finally beginning to take hold and counteract the Clinton Recession,” Rumbull said, “Clinton had to show his degenerate face in public again.  The psychological impact of that on consumer confidence is inestimable. I mean, when you’ve spent three-and-a-half years climbing out of the hole Clinton’s tax hikes and budget surpluses put us in, and the first thing you see is that effete liberal smirk of Clinton’s . . . We’re lucky the decline wasn’t even steeper.” Rumbull said he expected the economy to get back on track, “as soon as that pervert crawls back under his rock up in Harlem”. 

Gay Matrimony Takes Its Toll On Straight Couple       Wambat Bay, Florida      July 15, 2004

“It just wasn’t the same,” said Granger Nettles.  “Our marriage just fell apart,” added his wife of four years, Martha.  The couple had just returned from Tallahassee where they had obtained a quick divorce. Now they were wandering around their apartment stuffing belongings into plastic bags and cardboard boxes.  Their pain was visible. It was obvious they still loved each other.

“We were just watching the news,” recounted Granger, “and this pair of fruits was on the courthouse steps somewheres up there in one of them Yankee states and they were kissing each other and holding up a sign said ‘Just Married’. We just looked at each other.”  “We both felt dirty like,” said Martha. “I knew right then we were in trouble.”  The heartbroken couple continued dividing up their property as they explained how they had hung on for several weeks afterwards, going through the motions, hoping against hope. But in the end it was no use.  “If men can marry men, and women can marry women, marriage just don’t mean nothing anymore,” said Martha with tears in her eyes.  “I just can’t be a party to no institution that’s been dragged through that kind of filth,” concluded Granger as he finished wrapping the last of Martha’s knickknacks, a pair of porcelain lovebirds, in newspaper and put them in the box with the rest.

So what kind of lawyers do Republicans like?

Surely Republicans don’t hate all lawyers. In fact, it is rumored that more than a few of them are lawyers.

Could it be the loophole lawyers who help their clients shelter billions in profits by engineering complicated cross-border leasing schemes that show bogus losses?

Could it be the dummy transaction lawyers who conjure up offshore companies to enable their clients to stick us with billions they should have to pay in taxes?

Could it be the guardian angel lawyers who keep the government tied up in court for years when it tries to prosecute their clients for massive tax fraud?

Could it be the shell game lawyers who help companies leave hundreds of acres of polluted land in their wakes by handing off their assets before filing bankruptcy and skipping out on the cleanup costs?

What about the patent lawyers who help drug companies keep cheap generic drugs off the market so Grandpa and Granny and everybody else will have to keep paying through their noses (and mouths)?

Or what about the copyright lawyers who keep getting copyright limits extended for light years into the future thus shrinking the public domain the founding fathers once envisioned and protected?

How about white collar crime lawyers who insure that CEO’s and high officials of companies who snatch the purses of pension plans and stockholder equities and the energy-using populations of entire western states don’t get even a tiny fraction of what’s coming to them?

Or how about those corporate and contract law lawyers businesses use to sue the pants off each other to the tune of billions each year?

And neither last nor least, what about those crafty presidential election lawyers who fly around the country on corporate (Enron) jets and descend on certain states to make sure the right votes don’t get counted (some 15 of whom were given high positions in the new Bush government after the 2000 election)?

If the truth be known, all these kinds of lawyers are dearer to Republicans than Baptist preachers and confederate Supreme Court justices.  They help corporations and the super rich stiff the IRS and the rest of us for between $300 and $400 billion a year in taxes alone, plus untold fortunes in anti-populist litigation that keeps all us corporate serfs in our places down on Enron Farm. The Republicans certainly love them, but NOT TRIAL LAWYERS.  Not those scumbag, bootstrapping, bounder, Complaintiff’s Bar grifters like John Edwards who get humongous awards for the minute percentage of wrongfully injured ordinary people who are lucky enough to get their cases taken.

To be sure, the country is in need of some kind of tort reform.  The question is who’s going to write it? The tobacco, asbestos, drug, mining, chemical, insurance, and anti-work-place-safety lobbyists and lawyers George Bush favors or legislators and advocates who have the public welfare at least in the backs of their minds?

More Bogus News Bites

Noble Savage Bookshelf

The images below are links to Amazon.com where you can view descriptions and reviews of these books.

IN THIS ISSUE:

Second Verse Same As the First . . .

Neither the shameful partisan attempt to smear Ambassador Joe Wilson nor the contrived side show of Sandy Berger impersonating Inspector Clouseau should take our eyes off the truth of what the Bush Bunch would have us forget:  In the run up to war, the Bush administration chose at every point to seize upon any and all intelligence, flawed, flaky, or fraudulent, to herd the country into a war in Iraq.

Believing Your Eyes

Fahrenheit 9/11 and the Embedded Mainstream Media

“Michael Moore’s documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11 has turned the heat up under the Bush Administration in a way that our mainstream media, over the course of more that three years of nearly continuous scandal and bad government have not . . . The press, however, never woke up from their comfortable dream that the country was in good hands. Unquestionably good hands. And, of course, there was absolutely no incentive for them to bite the hands that fed them.”

The War In Iraq: Just And Wrong

Why did we really go to war in Iraq. This article, first published in December 2003 hit the nail on the head concerning the rationales for war and the prospects for its success. It remains today a chilling and insightful discussion of how and why the Bush Administration decided to risk all and push the United States into a perilous war on the Arabian Penisula:

”We never really won the War in Iraq, we merely forced it to take another form-- a form already quite familiar to countries like Algeria, Pakistan, and Israel.  Especially Israel.  For, in fact, what we have unwittingly done in Iraq is create and inflict upon ourselves our own version of the West Bank and Gaza.”

Crony Capitalism

Find out about the dire infection that has spread to all parts of the body politic.

Redneck Highway