Rightist Crap

Rightist crap is based on such gross dishonesty and distortion. See the following. While the abuse Stossel references did occur, the underlying claims, by and by and were either legit or tossed by the courts. Rightist tort reform would keep the truly injured from recourse while the system as it is, by and by, provides it own reform: judges tossing meritless cases.

Assholes like Stossel are dangerous idiots....

Fox Bidness Journal:

Foes of lawsuit abuse have been writing gleefully about the fall of Dickie Scruggs, Bill Lerach and Melvyn Weiss. All three lawyers are likely to spend time in jail for plotting to bribe a judge (Scruggs) or paying kickbacks (Lerach and Weiss).

Good riddance.

Locking them up will stop them from further damaging America – at least for a few years. But it's a small victory for reformers.

New members of the parasite circus will just step forward to take their place. And what these aggressive class-action and securities lawyers do legally is more damaging to America than the crimes that Scruggs, Lerach and Weiss committed. They broke laws to cheat other lawyers out of some loot, but at least that barely hurt the public.

An editorial in this newspaper justifiably mocked Lerach for declaring his lawbreaking a mere "foot fault" ("I stepped over the line," he said). But at least paying off plaintiffs honestly reflects how such lawyers get rich. Often, they are less "officers of the court seeking justice" than businessmen colluding with plaintiffs in a lucrative extortion business. Legal extortion. But still extortion. Companies pay the lawyers to go away even when it's unclear that they did anything wrong.

Once companies pay, it's logical that the plaintiff/partner who helped the lawyers enrich themselves should get a cut of that loot. That's a fairer deal than what typical plaintiffs in class actions get: coupons or a check for perhaps $1.26.

A federal judge will soon decide whether to award Lerach his cut of what may be the biggest class-action legal fee ever. Lerach extorted – I mean persuaded – J.P. Morgan, Citigroup and a Canadian bank to give $695 million to him and other lawyers who claimed the banks were culpable in the Enron debacle. On March 19, 2007 an appellate court ruled that the banks were not culpable. But so what? Fairness doesn't necessarily govern this game. The game is more about rounding up lots of complainants and using America's one-sided legal system to terrorize businesses into settling.

Companies could fight and win, but that distracts managers from what they ought to be doing. And they might get a bad jury and lose the entire company. It's safer to settle.

Our legal system invites lawyers to act like bullies. For "20/20" tonight, I report on a class-action lawyer who's suing his neighbor for smoking in her own apartment. Toxins are "being breathed every day by our 4-year-old," says Jonathan Selbin of Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein. His frightened neighbor had the apartment manager seal off air ducts between the two apartments, but Mr. Selbin sued anyway, claiming smoke was in the hallway. Mr. Selbin's neighbor was unusually feisty in going to the media to fight back, at least for a while. But last night, she decided to settle. After all, Mr. Selbin had written her that he had a legal advantage, because he and his wife "are both lawyers, and both litigators, for whom the usual barriers to litigation are minimal." Right. Mr. Selbin wrote ABC, "I have recovered more than $2 billion in cash for consumers defrauded by companies. I am proud of what I do." He wouldn't tell us how much of the $2 billion he kept.

What do we get from this kind of "private law enforcement"? Very little. James Copland of the Manhattan Institute points out, "The small, diversified investor is as likely to be a buyer as a seller and thus a payer in a class action settlement. The 'little guy' pays money to himself." Actually, it's worse than that: Little guys come out behind because the lawyers pocket so much.

If securities class actions really deterred fraud, their high cost might be justified. But research from St. John's Law School Prof. Michael Perino shows that most of these lawsuits follow SEC investigations. The lawyers don't unearth frauds. They come in like vultures after the problem is already revealed. We pay for that.

Onerous as the legal fees are, the nastier cost is the loss of so many good things. Weiss's former firm got companies to pay $45 billion in damages. That's $45 billion that will not create new jobs or life-saving drugs.

The fear also reduces options. After Dickie Scruggs filed his post-Katrina class action against insurance companies, State Farm, citing an "untenable legal environment," stopped insuring homes in Mississippi.

America needs judges willing to say "no" to legal bullies. America also needs the legal standard that works in most of the world: "loser pays." Without reform, the parasites will take away your money and your choices.

Fascinating Pix

No, really.

How Else Lenders Are Screwing The Economy

Foreclose then don't take title, don't pay property taxes, leave property abandoned. In the corporatist state, corporations rule, we don't just slave for them, we're also their victims -- and Our Leaders enable all this because the corporatists corrupt them. It's the way the modern world work. To Our leaders, you're nothing, just schmucks that empower them, give them the opportunity to screw you. (Jeez, this all makes Eliot Spitzer look good!)

Americans' Hate For Their Leaders' Policies

The Times:

Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.

In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002.

I don't care what they say. With one caveat (no time to discuss it though), I belive McCain is as good as elected.

Sorry: there's a second caveat: I've been wrong before.

Continuing Failed Policies: See The Saint's Love Of Our Troops

Support the troops -- by bringing them home?

Nah.

First you have to get rid of Our leaders, including keeping Johnny Mac out of the White House. You know, not every pol lies and panders on the stump, saying crap you know they won';t come through with. When The Saint says he'll continue Beloved Leader's (not really his, of course) policies, I believe him 1005.

See this for a clue how much you can count on him to continue the crap:

Our Wonderful, Weird World....

The Success Of The Takeover Of This Nation By The Corporations

An explanation and description.

Not A Joke: Our Leaders Claim Presidential Fiat Overrules The Bill Of Rights

So it's official: There may as well be no rights left in this country, it's all meaningless.

The Justice Department sent a legal memorandum to the Pentagon in 2003 asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned al-Qaeda captives because the president's ultimate authority as commander in chief overrode such statutes.

[more]

The memo is here and here.

When She's Right, She's Right....

History Lesson Of The Day

Read it now.

Flash! The Saint Is A Lying Hypocrite

Okay, just a reminder....

A Genius Speaks

Kevin Phillips is one of a whopping two old-fashioned conservatives I love. (You know, guys who are conservative not anti-American extremists. You know, old-fashioned conservatives are just to the immediate right of modern liberals.) He's brilliant and knows everything. And he's, like, always right. Like now.

Economic, financial and regulatory issues should dominate politics and government in the United States for the next two or three years, which is important enough. National discourse may also have a new and deserving bogeyman. Franklin D. Roosevelt had Big Business, Ronald Reagan had Big Labor, and my guess is that the new president inaugurated next January will have Big Finance.

True, finance has been whupped by presidents before. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, for example. But that was in the quill-pen era when the financial sector was a pup. Today's financial services sector, by contrast, is a grasping, gargantuan combination of banks, stockbrokers, insurancemen, loan sharks, credit-card issuers, hedge fund speculators, securitization mavens and mortgage operators. Over the last five years, financial services has reached a swollen 20-21% of U.S. GDP -- the largest sector of the private economy.

Manufacturing led financial services by 2:1 back in the 1970s, but by 2006 beaten goods production had shrunk to just 12% of GDP.

Do most Americans understand this? Of course not. Newspaper front pages have shunned any discussion; 60 Minutes has not even spared the transformation sixty seconds, despite its vast implications. This upheaval is probably "the greatest story never told" about the two decades between, say, 1986 and 2006.

Nor was it an economic accident. Computerization was a prequisite, as was the rise of financial mathematics. However, I would say that the two most important underpinnings of financialization lay in the rise of public and private debt as a mainstay of American culture and economics and the perpetual liquidity and bail-out support of the Federal Reserve Board under Alan Greenspan. During Greenspan's 1987-2005 tenure, the sum of public and private debt in the United States quadrupled from just over $10 trillion to $43 trillion. Finance became the industry that was not allowed to fail but was permitted to enlarge and metastasize its behavior almost at will. Regulation was minimal. Favoritism was omnipresent.

The result, alas, has been all over recent headlines. America's biggest ever housing bubble, with 57 varieties of exotic mortgages and home prices now plummeting at rates unseen since the 1930s. The United States turned Credit Card Nation, with a citzenry in thrall to plastic, 20% interest rates and late fees for just about everything. Huge banks like Citigroup feel no shame in paying billion-dollar fines for colluding with Enron's tax and accounting deceits. And since mid-2007, national and world credit markets have been panicked and paralyzed by hitherto obscure instruments -- the stand-outs are collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) -- that not even their designers and packagers can explain.

Adolescent versions of Frankenstein finance became a crash and a disaster for Americans in 1929 when the industry was new and represented only 10-15% of the economic weight of American manufacturing. Now, by contrast, the unraveling of a second financial sector-turned casino involves literally the biggest force in the American economy. Who knows how much of this hubris and malfeasance is going to unwind unpleasantly or how long that will take?

In fact, phony Washington statistics and warped market measurements make it doubly hard to tell. The federal Consumer Price Index is already regarded by many Americans as a con job, and the press periodically quotes investors who state their belief that current U.S. inflation is really 6 to 9 percent a year, not the 2-4 percent the government alleges. I agree. On top of which, because the value of the dollar has dropped so far, the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the end of March was not really 12,200, a number barely up from its 11,700 peak in 2000. If you measure the Dow in Swiss francs or euros, two strong currencies, it has already lost some forty percent of its 2000 value. Too many Americans live in a dream-world of economic misinformation.

I began writing about these matters with a 1990 book entitled The Politics of Rich and Poor, and in several other volumes since then. Today, the economic negligence of Washington and Wall Street, more than two decades in the making, has led to a multi-dimensional crisis in which this country faces an unprecedented convergence of problems: unprecedented debt, tumbling home prices, reckless money supply expansion, growing inflation, insufficient and expensive oil, and an eroding dollar. Sadly, there may no longer be a plausible way out.

Link.

:( Sad But True....

No. 6....

Geek Image Of The Day

Link.

Torture Is US Policy

See the proof.

Get the short version here.

Global Corporatism On The March; Website Gets A "Cease And Desist" -- From Using A Color

Some asshole major corporation believes they have rights in a color. Not in a product-confusion way but in an absolute way. Welcome to the 21st century and the triumph of Global Capitalism over the rule of law and freedom of individuals.

Scandal Of The Day; Keeping Things In Perspective

No wonder Formula 1 is so popular....

Max Mosley said Tuesday he will remain president of auto racing's governing body despite calls for him to resign because of his role in a sex scandal.

He wrote to officials at his organization, acknowledging his embarrassment and asking for their support. A copy of the letter was obtained by The Associated Press.

The News of the World, a British tabloid, accused the 67-year-old Mosley on Sunday of engaging in sex acts with five prostitutes in a scenario that involved Nazi role-playing. Although he didn't deny his participation, Mosley said there was no "Nazi connotation to the matter."

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The Viddie, Like, Everyone's Posting; Goodbye, Monica, Hil's The One Who's %$#&ing -- Obama

Who Loses Because Of Spitzer's Hubris And Sex Addiction

Last fall, former New York governor Eliot Spitzer appointed a task force to address the state's high rates of malpractice by hospitals and doctors. The task force was also charged with making recommendations for lowering doctors' med mal premiums, which soared 14 percent last year. The insurance industry and doctors' groups seized the opportunity to press for new restrictions on medical malpractice lawsuits, which they claim would reduce the premiums. As other states have learned, though, such limits usually only result in windfall profits for insurance companies while leaving injured patients with no recourse should their doctor, say, amputate the wrong leg.

Consumer groups in New York had long suspected Spitzer of siding with the doctors on this issue, largely because his brother is a downstate neurosurgeon. Their suspicions were confirmed when Spitzer stacked his medical liability task force with more than 20 representatives from the hospital, medical and insurance industries, while consumer protection and patient safety groups got just three spots. The consumer reps have largely been shut out of the task force deliberations, and despite repeated demands, they've been denied access to the insurance industry data, which supposedly justified the limits on lawsuits. Recently, the consumer members learned from local newspapers that the task force had drafted a major reform proposal that would be released soon. None of them had ever seen it.

Now that Spitzer has resigned, the groups are hoping his replacement, Governor David Patterson, will open up the process. In a letter today, representatives from NYPIRG, the Center for Justice and Democracy, the Center for Medical Consumers and others wrote Patterson, "We refuse to be mere window dressing, to be used as stage props to create the illusion of inclusion, while proposals that affect the life and safety of every health care consumer in our state are drafted in secret. We hope you will redirect the state’s efforts towards reducing the deaths and injuries caused by a tiny fraction of the state’s physicians, rather than enabling error, negligence, and malpractice to be subsidized by taxpayers."

Link.

How Car Dealers Screw You

I know you know they do it. Everyone knows they do it. This how.