-Caveat Lector- ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Date sent: 23 Sep 1999 17:19:25 -0000 To: List Member <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> From: "Common Courage Political Literacy Course" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Corporate Henchmen Info on this email course is at the bottom. The Legal Gladiators: How Corporate America Protects Profits at Your Expense Myth: The genius of American capitalism is that corporations compete in a free market environment designed to favor the companies that are most efficient at giving consumers what they want. In reality, corporate power over consumers and the entire society is increasing at an alarming rate. One form of power is pushing costs of doing business onto taxpayers, such as when utilities shift the costs of managing radioactive waste to governments, "a kind of lemon socialism," write Ralph Nader and Wesley J. Smith in "No Contest: Corporate Lawyers and the Perversion of Justice in America." Another form is the creation of private governments. "The Walt Disney Company's 22,000 acres near Orlando, Florida, are a private government with taxing, police, and zoning powers over a territory as large as San Francisco. The private corporate domains, such as giant shopping malls, 'business improvement districts,' and their counterparts in the housing area, the so-called gated communities, continue to break legal ground, stretching corporate sovereignty and shrinking public places," the authors write. This problem is made possible by the legal hired guns who are essential to preserving corporate power. Just how old is it? Consider this admonition: "Instead of holding a position of independence, between the wealth and the people, prepared to curb the excesses of either, able lawyers, to a great extent, allow themselves to become adjuncts of great corporations and have neglected their obligation to use their powers for the protection of the people. We hear much of the corporate lawyer and far too little of the 'people's lawyer.'" It sounds like a warning from Ralph Nader, and it is quoted in his book. But it's actually an insight made by then corporate attorney, Louis D. Brandeis--in 1905! Picking up on Brandeis's insight to show just how corporate lawyers do it, the authors reveal a full bag of tricks which will be the subject of future emails. But for now, consider the emblematic case of Lloyd Cutler, famous for serving as the White House lawyer under Clinton. * Corporate lawyers weaken the regulations responsible for ensuring public safety. "In 1966, the major U.S. automakers hired Cutler to gut the proposed motor vehicle safety legislation… More than 100,000 Americans lost their lives and many more were seriously injured while Cutler masterminded years of delay for his auto industry paymasters to keep air bags out of any federal safety standards." Cutler even represented the Ford Motor Company in the early seventies against air bags when General Motors, however briefly, was touting the devices. In another example of efforts to weaken regulation, his firm has also lobbied to weaken the Drug Safety Act of 1962. * Lawyers defend corporations accused of conspiring to minimize competition. "Representing the Automobile Manufacturers Association back in the late 1960s, Cutler persuaded the Justice Department's antitrust division to drop a pioneering criminal prosecution of the automobile industry for 'product fixing'--namely, conspiring to restrain competition by agreeing to freeze technological innovations related to vehicular smog controls," write Nader and Smith. * Lawyers also work diligently to protect profits, even when it means denying life-saving drugs to poor patients who can't afford them. "Earlier, in the sixties, Cutler represented the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers of America's (PMA) drive to block the McKesson and Robbins Company's agreement to sell the government of Colombia lower-priced generic drugs--from 80 to 90 percent cheaper than the brand-name medicines for some important antibiotics. Senator Nelson's investigator, economist Benjamin Gordon, believed that the effect of the PMA's opposition to generic drug marketing would be to deny necessary medicines to large numbers of impoverished people in South America," they write. * Corporate lawyers are indispensable in procuring corporate welfare. "Cutler's recent Canadian client is Barrick Goldstrike Mines, Inc., which located $10 billion worth of gold on federal public land in Nevada. Prior to joining the Clinton administration, Cutler pressed Bruce Babbitt, Clinton's secretary of the interior, to sell the land above the gold deposits for the tiny sum of $9,765--a price of about five dollars per acre, authorized by the antiquated 1872 Mining Act. Babbitt denounced the giveaway of the people's gold and urged passage of pending reform legislation in Congress to give the government a more realistic value for such lucrative public properties. But Congress did not act and, while Cutler was serving his dual roles as White House counsel and attorney with [the firm] Wilmer, Cutler, Secretary Babbitt had to sell the billions in gold to Barrick Goldstrike at lower than firesale prices." Looking at the larger picture, the authors write: "With relentless focus and resources, the Lloyd Cutlers of the legal world work to indenture government and the people to large corporations, to have government subsidize in many ways entire industries, to compromise the arms-length relationship between government and business by systematically undermining the rule of just law that is supposed to protect wronged or harmed citizens. By complex means, public assets, from natural resources to medical research and development, are given away to private monopoly ownership and/or control. … "Attorneys like Lloyd Cutler [including his many imitators] matter intimately and often adversely to the health, safety, and economic well-being of many people here and abroad. They matter to the quality of the air, water, soil, and food. They matter to the state of our democracy and the integrity of the law and its enforcement. They matter to future generations, who will inherit the harmful results of their labors." These facts come from Ralph Nader and Wesley J. Smith's "No Contest: Corporate Lawyers and the Perversion of Justice in America." For more information, click here http://www.commoncouragepress.com/nocontest.html TOMORROW: What kind of health insurance do Americans really want? This is the free Political Literacy Course from Common Courage Press: A backbone of facts to stand up to spineless power. Email 13, September 23 1999. Week 3: Corporate Crime. 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