Well - no way around it now - Obama is attacking me and all those like me and I am not happy. It is true that I am an Edwards fan, and make no apologies for it. But the notion that I or any other Democratic attorney would dare establish a snobbish hierarchy of what type of law is most meritorious is absurd. Yet, there it is Obama - in that awful kind of repellant condescion that smacks of the privileged is now attacking Edwards for being a trial lawyer -
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Besides the fact that I am personally insulted - no big thing in the grans scheme of things - the new line of celebrity sneering at us common folk betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what is going on today in America. Join me, below the fold, if the subject has any interest.
About 60 years ago - maybe a little more a major American industry - tobacco - discovered that the product it was selling was deadly - not metaphorically, not hypothetically, but medically proven to be deadly. They had a choice - they could divulge the information, inform the consumer and let the chips fall - or they could commit fraud that was cancerous - hideously, painfully, nastily horribly cancerous. They chose the latter.
When "trial lawyers" began to seek remedies for those injured as a result of this fraud - Big Tobacco began a massive, multi-million dollar campaign to create a tort "crisis" and smear plaintiff's lawyers - heretofore a hardy band that made their living representing the little guy - as rich, greedy, evil, "trial lawyers."
No study exists that indicates that verdicts or lawyers compensation or trials raise prices or insurance rates or any of the things that this agit-prop portrays. Yet this campaign was so successful that today the heirs to such figures as Madison, Lincoln and Darrow are dismissed by a candidate for the Democratic party under the label of trial lawyers.
Soon - big insider corps got all a twitter - why look at how we can do that - we can institute a new economic model - some called it Reagonomics - but most of us know it as what it is - the Negligence economy. Now, as we see mines collapse, toys poison, bridges fall and the financial industry implode - we can see the one unifying thread is that those who cherish incompetence, negligence and sloth as virtues have been rewarded because the attack on the funadamental American principle of checks and balances has been so successful.
So now - your job is imperiled, your health hanging on the decision of an unaccountable bureaucrat and the traditions of America trashed - and who joins in this melee - a candidate for the Democratic Party's Presidential nomination.
Somewhere - long ago - across the fields of Illinois a tall gaunt trial lawyer honed his skills and in the judgment of many historians helped save the Union. Today a tall gaunt insider from Illinois seeks to divide and destroy the Democratic Party.