cont. from prior post)
Among other trial lawyers who bankrolled Senator Edwards is Bill Lerach, founder of San Diego-based Milberg, Weiss, Bershad, Hynes & Lerach L.L.P., who has been called “the Fred Baron of California.” During three decades as a lawyer, Lerach “has successfully sued and intimidated over 600 companies in class action litigation.” By one estimate his law firm “initiates more than half of all the shareholder lawsuits in the country, and eighty percent of the class action lawsuits in California.” He is so identified with securities class-action litigation that in corporate America to be hit with such a legal action (or “legal extortion,” as its critics call it) is called getting “Lerached.”
“I’m the Willy Horton of securities law,” boasted Lerach to one audience in 1995. “They say I make too much money doing this….so I make a sh-t pile of money – so what?” he was quoted saying in Buzz magazine that same year. The money that he, Fred Baron, John Edwards and other trial lawyers make, of course, is taken from consumers like you in the form of higher prices in a host of ways. Businesses must carry more insurance and can afford to hire fewer people. Doctors are forced to order unnecessary tests in order to practice defensive medicine. Inventions that could improve our lives do not come to market because of fears of lawsuits.
As the late Robert Heinlein used to say, TANSTAAFL – his acronym for “There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.” You might be given a sandwich for free at a picnic, but somebody had to pay the cost of growing the wheat, baking the bread, making the baloney and mustard, assembling the sandwich and shipping it to you.
Other trial lawyers funding the Edwards bandwagon include John O’Quinn. As the Manhattan Institute’s Walter Olson, author of The Rule of Lawyers, wrote earlier this month, O’Quinn reaped tens of millions of dollars from silicon breast implant litigation “even as science refuted the notion that silicone was causing autoimmune disease.” He also gives campaign contributions to judges in the same county court system where his lawsuits get tried.
Another big Edwards’ bank-roller is Tab Turner, whose litigation specialty is blaming car crashes on purported automotive defects such as “unintended acceleration.” Because of a probe of his firm by the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, Turner has become the poster boy for behavior that may be widespread among the law firms supporting Edwards. Huge political contributions have come from such firms’ low-paid workers who, according to what one in Turner’s office admitted, were promised reimbursement. If this was done, it is a violation of campaign legal limits on how much an individual or company can donate to a candidate, directly or via others. A deeper investigation of bundling and other law firm techniques to funnel cash to Edwards could expose a scandal of money-laundering more abusive than Vice President Al Gore’s swag bag full of $5,000 checks from a Los Angeles Buddhist Temple’s nuns who had taken vows of poverty. This, of course, is precisely why the left-wing media will do no such investigation.
Another puppet master pulling Edwards’ strings is Paul Minor, former president of the Mississippi Trial Lawyers Association. Minor earned $71.5 million from tobacco settlements and gave $75,000 to Edwards’ New American Optimists PAC in 2002. (Edwards has denounced this kind of money as “the worst virus” in our political process, while at the same time stuffing his own political pockets full of it.) Minor is scheduled to go on trial August 16 in Jackson, Mississippi. He was indicted on “charges of extortion, fraud and bribery in an influence-peddling scandal at the Mississippi Supreme Court.” Do not hold your breath waiting for the New York Times or Dan Rather to report on this case, or on the ties that bind John Edwards’ to Paul Minor and lawyers like him.
“People try to pretend the law is not a business. Baloney. It’s big business,” said Lerach.
The billions pocketed by trial lawyers and shared with their Democratic Party, tort-reform-opposing political allies get paid for in the end by you at an average cost of $2,884 for every family of four every year. God help America if candidates owned by trial lawyers, now greedy for power as well as money, are able to take control the White House and to remove the last checks-and-balances that restrain trial lawyer ambitions.
John Edwards is a “perfect messenger” for trial lawyers, said Baron. He comes across as warm, honest, caring, smiling and to many female voters boyish and sexy. He preaches compassion for the little people he has “defended against giant HMOs and insurance companies” (while pocketing himself up to half of what juries awarded to his clients). But as the Washington Post’s David Broder wrote in 2002, Edwards “almost has to take a populist stance as a way of putting a favorable gloss on his long career as a trial lawyer.”
Hollywood actors such as Dennis Hopper have embraced Edwards in part for his warmth, cuteness and theatrical skills for eliciting empathy that could have made him a successful soap opera star or the next Brad Pitt.
But in Washington, D.C. Edwards is seen as someone with no foreign and little domestic policy knowledge or experience. “Those who have tried to discuss complex issues with Edwards beyond his scripted first glib sound bite,” said veteran Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund, “have found that you can wade through John Edwards’ deepest thoughts without getting your ankles wet.”
“One evening while he was campaigning for the Senate in North Carolina, Edwards was faced with a choice of several events he might attend,” reported Charles Peters of the leftwing Washington Monthly in June 2003. “An advance man suggested, ‘Maybe we ought to go to the reception for Leah Rabin.’ Edwards responded, ‘Who’s she?’ ‘Yitzhak Rabin’s widow,’ replied the aide. ‘Who was he?” asked Edwards.”
Imagine having as President or Vice President a John Edwards who did not know that Rabin had been the Prime Minister of our ally Israel. Later on MSNBC Edwards, aware of his foreign affairs ignorance, declined when Chris Matthews asked him (as happened in an interviewer’s ambush to then Governor George Bush in 2000) if he would like to identify leaders of several small nations. Like Matthews, the rest of the left-leaning establishment media generally takes care not to expose Edwards’ gaffes or signs of incompetence on the campaign trail. One glaring exception was an Edwards’ appearance on “Meet the Press” so evasive, unspecific and lightweight that it left liberal pundits visibly embarrassed that this was one of their leading candidates. This footage will not be re-aired prior to the November 2004 election. And in that same spirit the left-leaning media does not deflate Edwards’ many little deceptions, e.g., saying in every speech that his father was a “mill worker” when in fact his father was more of a management boss over blue-collar workers, a retired mill supervisor.
Democrats have accused President George W. Bush of seeing the world as black and white, good and evil. But as Wall Street Journal writer David Robinson recently noted, John Edwards in his book Four Trials and in his speeches exhibits a far more chilling and unforgiving us-versus-them dualism, a world of victims and villains in which capitalists are almost always portrayed and penalized as bad guys. Such is the mentality of this tort lawyer who uses the same slick, polarizing, hypnotic rhetoric on voters that he learned to use on juries to make himself very, very rich. No wonder Edwards has been called “the new Bill Clinton.”
One judges a tree by its fruits and a lawmaker by his votes, not his words. John Edwards talks like an optimistic moderate, but according to the highly regarded National Journal his voting record is the fourth most left-wing in the entire U.S. Senate and is to the left of reputed liberals such as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senator Ted Kennedy. Edwards also has a perfect 100 percent record according to NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Action League, for his support even of the partial-birth abortion procedure viewed by many moderate Democrats as infanticide. This explains why Edwards refused to answer when Washington Post reporters twice asked him during a joint interview if he agreed with running mate Senator Kerry that life begins at conception. The Kerry-Edwards theme of the interview was “restoring truth to the presidency, but Post reporters Jim VandeHei and Dan Balz showed where, again and again, these politicians have lied and evaded issues, as Edwards did here.
Since 2001 the AFL-CIO has rated Edwards a perfect 100 for his support of organized labor. He is more protectionist on trade issues than his running mate, which is part of why organized labor likes him. In 2000, for example, Edwards voted against extending trade and tariff benefits to the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa, a vote that could have meant poverty, disease and early death for the families of millions of impoverished, unemployed blacks and Hispanics thrown out of work by Edwards’ implicitly-racist and anti-Hispanic vote.
Hundreds of other questions ought to be raised about John Edwards…but will not be pursued by the dominant leftwing press. To mention just a few: what is behind Edwards’ strange obsession – his determination to create a super spy agency inside the U.S. patterned on Britain’s M.I.5 to do surveillance on Americans – that has frightened both the FBI and civil libertarians of the left? What political use might he and John Kerry make of all the information about private citizens such an agency would gather?
What is the real story behind Edwards’ little-known 2002 agreement to sell one of his mansions to Michael Petruzello, a registered lobbyist and foreign agent employed by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for half a million dollars more than the mansion’s market value? Even after whispers of controversy killed this “sweetheart deal,” it left a $100,000 deposit in Edwards’ pocket. Petruzello had visited North Carolina with important Saudis as part of a publicity effort and had placed pro-Saudi TV ads in North Carolina and 19 other home states of Senate Intelligence Committee members such as Edwards, obviously to influence them. Fifteen of the 19 terrorists who attacked the United States on 9/11 were Saudis, and many questions about their links to Saudi Arabia remain unanswered.
“The potential conflict of interest is readily apparent,” said Kent Cooper, former head of the government’s public disclosure office for federal candidates, about Edwards “when a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence receives $100,000 in a real or sham business deal with a foreign agent or a person with extensive foreign contracts at the same time the Senate is investigating possible lapses in national security.”
Should John Edwards himself be required to register as a foreign agent bought and paid for by the royal family of Saudi Arabia? And should a John Edwards who, in effect, has pocketed $100,000 from Saudi Arabia be elected to a position of trust only a heartbeat away from becoming President of the United States?
Edwards in speeches appears mild-mannered and reasonable. That is not how he appeared during his Judicial Committee inquisition of Bush Federal Court appointee Judge Charles Pickering. Edwards cut off the Judge’s answers, asked vicious questions and then demanded that the veteran civil rights defender answer his questions with only a “Yes” or “No.” It was demagoguery of the sleaziest sort, giving onlookers a glimpse of the nasty leftist ideologue and partisan political assassin who hides behind Edwards’ usual gentile mask.
National Journal ranks Senator John F. Kerry as having the most leftward voting record, to the left of all 99 other members of the Senate. Senator Kerry, who with his wife has family wealth that may exceed $1 billion (hard to say because she refuses to release her
tax returns) is also the wealthiest member of the Senate. Edwards, worth no more than $70 million, may be only the fourth wealthiest Senator. (Perhaps this is what Senator Edwards means when he says there are “two Americas,” one of extremely wealthy limousine leftists like himself and Senator Kerry and the other made up of the rest of us who pay our taxes rather than use gimmicks as Edwards did to avoid paying taxes.)
Senator Edwards presumably pays some taxes too, but as a lawyer he knows ways and means beyond the ken of most of us. Edwards, for example, as a practicing attorney in 1995 re-established his business as a professional corporation in which he was the only employee. Most of his huge earnings under this company were defined as dividends, not income. Because of this, for years Edwards paid no Medicare taxes on a positive cash flow of at least five million dollars, thereby saving himself hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in taxes.
On the other hand Senator Edwards has not hesitated to use tax money for himself. His required legal filings identifying campaign contributors reveal that in 2000 Edwards’ campaign coffers were enriched by nearly $10,000 from the “University of North Carolina,” and that in 2000 and 2002 his campaign got a combined total of more than $44,000 from the “State of North Carolina.” Has Senator Edwards found a way to take coerced dollars for his partisan Democratic campaigns from both Republican and Democratic taxpayers in North Carolina?
These filings also clearly show how right University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato was to say: “Edwards is very, very vulnerable to a charge of being in hock to a powerful and wealthy group of individuals, the personal injury attorneys. The Senator can’t work against their interests, given the money they have given him, and if he works for them, he opens himself up to even more criticism.” But of course the left-leaning national media has deliberately avoided reporting on these puppet masters and their strings of gold that now control both Kerry’s and Edwards’ every move.
The Kerry-Edwards ticket is ample evidence that in 2004 the Democratic Party is no longer the party of blue collar working people. It has been taken over by special interests and fat cats, and none are more special or fatter than the trial lawyers who now fund, run and own this political party. |
