Novelist John Grisham's latest work, The Appeal, is both relevent and frightening. It delves into the murky relationship between big business, unregulated money, attack advertising, and the literal buying of state supreme court justices to get a pro business, anti-consumer court system that would take us back to the good old days of our industrial revolution when workers had no rights and businesses had no laws whatsoever.
Grisham points out that 31 states have elections for state supreme court justices. A number of other states have elections for county prosecutors. Most state attorney generals are elected instead of appointed. As a result, a battle of funding between big business supporting "strict constructionists (the very concept itself is b.s. but more on that later) and trial lawyers, environmental groups, and consumer advocates supporting the so-called "liberal" judges.
Vast sums of money are spent on these judicial elections. If the "liberals" prevail, critics assail the courts as beholden to trial lawyers, whereas if the strict constuctionists are elected, businesses will be basically immunized from so-called frivelous" lawsuits and the price of their stock — the only thing that matters to Wall Street Republicans — soars.
Grisham admits that his idea of a polluting chemical company complete with a Monty Burns-like CEO that personified evil was a composite. IMO the story rang true as my partner's second cousin was one of the six children that died of cancer in Woburn, Mass. that was portrayed in both the book and film, A Civil Action.
The story takes place in a fictional town in Mississippi that has become a dumping ground for the local chemical plant. The water became contaminated but officials from the plant and the town continued to insist all was well when everyone knew otherwise.
Then people started dying. The word "cancer cluster" became part of everyday conversation as the situation became more dire. Restaurants were banned from serving the town water and the town had to resort to having its water supply trucked in.
Needless to say, when things got bad, the company skipped town and set up a factory in Mexico. The townspeople found a set of lawyers brave enough to take on the chemical company owned by a man worth billions.
Naturally, the details come out at the trial and the lawyers win a massive award of $41 million. The corporate CEO vows that the trailer trash that won will never collect a dime.
The CEO, much like our real robber barrons, suffers from cognitive dissonance. On the evening that the verdict is announced, he ends up paying $18 million for a piece of modern sculpture that was outrageously overpriced, but bought it anyway because he didn't want another billionaire he was a rival with to win the auction.
So the evil CEO meets with a shady consultant that tells him that $8 million will buy him a judge on the Miss. supreme court that will be "amendable" to reversing the $41 million verdict.
The CEO is told, $1 million is on the books as "consulting" fees. The rest of the money is off shore and untraceable. A clean cut nobody is selected because he has never been a judge, therefore he has no opinions issued that can be critiqued.
Slick direct mailers appear the day the candidate is announced. The mailers paint the sitting justice a s a liberal that supports gays and coddles criminals. Neither is true, but it doesn't matter.
The campaign to buy the seat is so cynical that they find a gay couple to challenge the state law on gay marriage in Mississippi. Never mind that the couple live in Chicago, and only rented a home, got drivers licenses, and bought a used car to appear as if they lived in Mississippi.
Much like our current campaign climate, the negative campaigning works. Even when caught using the gay couple as a red herring on gay marriage, the voters still elect the god-fearing judge because he wants to execute criminals and block gays from marrying.
There is a tragic nexis between this new judge and his views about liability, punitive damages and being a business friendly judge. The judge struggles with his views when his son is severely injured as a result of both a faulty product and an incompetent hospital staff that misdiagnoses the boy's injury which leads to the boy having permanent brain damage that was completely avoidable.
The plot was illuminating as Grisham points out that like many conservatives, the judge, only becomes empathetic for victims of malpractice and product liability to be parasites that are being counseled by a bunch of abulance chasing lawyers out to make a buck. Naturally, the judge spent his entire career before the election working on behalf of insurance companies that deny, deny, deny, then obfuscate so that you take a pittance of a settlement because they force you to.
In the end, as always, the forces of evil win out. The appeal is reversed as the judge votes with those that he is beholden rather than the family that he used a campaign prop.
So what happens in the novel is repeating itself all over America as these state supreme court justices are actually activists pretending to have judical restraint. IMO when you gut case law and create a completely unlevel playing field that blindly supports big business first you are the same kind of "activist" judge that conservatives use a s a straw man.
Trial lawyers can't make any money because their are no big cases. The pro-business court is used to bring more corporations to the state. Yet nothing changes for the people in a positive sense.
The corporate migration brings economic hardship and even death as companies are free to act illegal because they have bought and paid for the state supreme court. This is playing out right now in West Virginia and other states too.
In West Virginia, a supreme court judge was on vacation with a CEO that had a multi-million dollar lawsuit on appeal before the court. Of course, given how Dick Cheney and Antonin Scalia were all Brokeback Mountain (not that there is anything wrong with that) on a duck hunting trip and Scalia ruled that it had no impact on his decision that effectively blocked us from learning about Cheney's true agenda during his secretive energy policy meetings.
What does the novel say about corporate America? Clearly, crime pays. For the evil CEO, it allows him to reverse the verdict, he uses the bad publicitiy to actually cause the price of the stock to drop so steeply that no one wants it, so he buys it up cheap and ends up with 80 percent of the stock of the company and that much richer...only he isn't satisfied because he wants to double his money again.