I recently watched a bad movie with a great quote (apologies to Sacha Baron Cohen fans). In The Dictator, the title character makes the following speech:
Why are you guys so anti-dictators? Imagine if America was a dictatorship. You could let 1% of the people have all the nation's wealth. You could help your rich friends get richer by cutting their taxes. And bailing them out when they gamble and lose. You could ignore the needs of the poor for health care and education. Your media would appear free, but would secretly be controlled by one person and his family. You could wiretap phones. You could torture foreign prisoners. You could have rigged elections. You could lie about why you go to war. You could fill your prisons with one particular racial group, and no one would complain. You could use the media to scare the people into supporting policies that are against their interests.
I thought it would be disrespectful to only display part of the quote, but the part that resonated for me with my published views on the tactics of the US Chamber of Commerce is the part about scaring the people into supporting policies that are against their interests. Both its long campaign for tort reform and more recent campaign against the legal funding industry through introduction of "model acts" to me smack of this same characteristic.
Both "tort reform" and legislating legal funding out of existence are efforts by the big insurance companies to maintain their overwhelming power advantage over consumers by watering down the rights of consumers to access the legal system, and the rights of consumers to demand fair settlements when injured. When the insurance giants propagate their talking points about "the bogged down legal system", and "the high cost of a litigious society", their concern is about how big insurance is inconvenienced by the rights of the consumers. They still, however, want their litigation rights as insurance companies preserved.
Yet you never see the insurance companies sitting at the table in these debates. They sit in the back of the room (literally) while their front groups do their dirty work. Front group number one is the US Chamber of Commerce, and it is complimented by other entities funded by them, including their tort reform/legal funding bashing subsidiary, the Institute for Legal Reform (sounds Kafka-esque, right?) and other @USChamber offspring, like freeenterprise.com. Sound like a lot of shells? It should, because they are shells.
The clever thing about these shells is that they make great punching bags. You can say all you want about them, but you never land a blow. Because they insulate those behind them. I could talk all day about how the US Chamber, ILR, etc, is on a mission to eradicate legal funding and devastate consumer rights through model acts (watch out Tennessee, Illinois and Indiana, they already have attack bills ready for 2014), but there are no faces or products associated with these groups, and no obvious motives.
But if I told you that the primary donors and sponsors (the puppeteers) behind these organizations are big insurance companies, would it make more sense? That is indeed the case. And the grand-daddy sponsor of these efforts is State Farm, by far the largest auto insurance company in America by market share.
In 2009, the US Chamber's Institute for Legal Reform disclosed its board members on its IRS filings. The following website used that information to "out" @USChamber members and their hypocritical behaviors (like instigating lawsuits themselves on silly stuff), which led the US Chamber to become more secretive about its membership.
http://www.fixtheuschamber.org/...
However, it cant stop tooting its own horn, or paying homage to its financial sponsors. So you can see from this below article on State Farm's CEO, now Chairman of the US Chamber, who the real puppet master of the US Chamber is, and why tort reform and ending the legal funding business is of high value to the US Chamber.
http://www.freeenterprise.com/...
Note that not only is the CEO of State Farm the Chairman of the US Chamber of Commerce, but his father was as well in the 1970s when he was State Farm's CEO. And by the way, "freeenterprise.com" is the "digital platform" of the US Chamber of Commerce.
In 2012, at the same time the CEO of @statefarm was elevated to the post of Chairman of @uschamber, @uschamber started its aggressive attack on the consumer legal funding industry. @uschamber and friends aggressively dropped 21 bills in 14 states in 2013. All were intended to kill the industry. As outgunned as it was, the legal funding industry was able to get the true version of its story told. To their credit, most state legislators listened. Only one bill passed, but that was after the Oklahoma legislature took the US chamber's model act "to ban" through debate, and reversed it into a bill to include industry promoted protections for consumers that does not eliminate the legal funding business.
State Farm has served its corporate elite well, though not its policyholders whose rights continue to weaken over time through aggressive claims adjudication practices and front groups like the US Chamber that do State Farm's dirty work.
Some additional source material:
http://www.naic.org/...
http://www.carinsurancecompanies.net/...
http://www.delaydenydefend.com/...
For more on what Legal Funding (or Lawsuit lending, as the US Chamber likes to call it), see my prior diary:
http://www.dailykos.com/...