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Microcap & Penny Stocks : HITSGALORE.COM (HITT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mighty_Mezz who wrote (2741)	7/4/1999 2:43:00 PM
From: Mighty_Mezz	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 7056

The business world is full of brochures and workshops showing companies how to sue critics for defamation. Lawyers call these suits SLAPPs -- Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. A trial judge says: "They are suits without substantial merit that are brought by private interests to stop citizens from exercising their political rights.... The purpose ... ranges from simple retribution for past activism to discouraging future activism." Here are some real examples. A landfill owner sued a Texas woman for $5 million for calling his operation a dump. An incinerator builder sued a high school teacher in Missouri for $6.6 million for writing an anti-incinerator letter to the editor. Canada's two huge logging companies, MacMillan Bloedel and Fletcher Challenge have sued hundreds of citizens, communities and environmental groups for saying bad things about clearcutting. Monsanto, maker of genetically engineered bovine growth hormone (BGH), sued several small Midwest dairies for advertising that their milk is BGH-free. McDonalds sued two British activists for putting out a pamphlet claiming that Big Macs are unhealthy and harmful to the environment. Companies don't SLAPP on these suits in order to win them. Most are dismissed out of court. When they are tried, they are overwhelmingly decided against the plaintiff, and even the rare corporate win can be costly. After two and a half years in court McDonalds finally forced the two junk-food critics to pay damages totalling 0.6 cents for every dollar the company had shelled out in legal costs, and the trial did far more to publicize the activists' accusations than the activists ever could have. But the legal outcome is not the point. The point is that the threat of legal action scares and silences all but the bravest of critics. iisd1.iisd.ca