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To: Bill Wexler who wrote (29200)	3/4/1999 2:32:00 PM
From: JDN	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 31646

To all you Clinton Lovers out there: Remember this when Litigation fattening the wallets of a few attorneys destroys your investments next year. JDN ** Y2K INVESTMENT WATCH: Once Again Clinton Democrats Line Up With the Lawyers Against High Tech America!!! Why is it that the Clinton administration and Democrats in general seem so often to line up with the vested interests of lawyers whose business it is to bring class action suits against corporations for failing to keep shareholders informed and now for prospective Y2K malpractice? It occurred again yesterday when the Senate Commerce Committee voted 11-to-9 favoring legislation backed by leading computer and software companies to delay Y2K lawsuits during a 90-day ''cooling-off'' period, cap punitive damages in ''Y2K'' cases, and limit the liability of company executives for failing to fix computers by Jan. 1, 2000. The bill is authored by John McCain, Arizona Republican. All nine votes against were Democrat. Dozens of industry groups support McCain's bill, including the Information Technology Association of America, which represents IBM, Microsoft, AT&T and 11,000 other high-tech companies. If approved by the full Senate and the House in its current form, McCain's bill would cap punitive damages to $250,000 for many businesses and limit the personal liability of corporate officers and directors to $100,000 in many cases. A House version would cap lawyers' fees in most Y2K cases to $1,000 an hour. Hmmm..... Hmmm..... $1,000 an hour??? Now, that's tough to take. Yes, of course one could argue that consumers need to be protected, but that's a matter of definition. WBN would argue that the true interests of the mass of consumers lies with resisting letting Y2K become a litigation pigpen with massive resources of as much as a trillion dollars being diverted from productive investment to lawyers with consumers in the end picking up the bill in the former of higher prices. The McCain bill would make it harder for plaintiffs to recover damages for ''economic losses'' stemming from Y2K problems, but the ultimate right to sue would remain. And let's agree, a thousand bucks an hour isn't exactly chopped liver???