Edwards’s leadership PAC financed 70% by trial lawyers
In 2001 Edwards launched his New American Optimists political action committee, a 527 Leadership PAC to aid “Democratic candidates who support a reform agenda for giving people a greater control over their futures,” i.e., who might support an Edwards presidential bid in 2004. More than 70 percent of its contributions came from trial lawyers, their law firms or family members.In fact, with rare exceptions such as Hollywood impresarios Steve Bing and Haim Saban and the investment firm Goldman Sachs, virtually every penny of Edwards’ political contributions from 1998 into 2004 has come from trial lawyer-linked sources. (Contributors have included low-paid staffers in law firms, one of whom admitted that she had been promised a $2,000 reimbursement for her donation to Edwards, an apparent laundering of an illegal campaign contribution by her bosses.)Edwards’ presidential run in 2003 and 2004 flew via “Learjet Lawyers Airlines,” almost every day using the private corporate jets of six wealthy trial lawyer law firms. The campaign laws that politicians wrote for themselves required Edwards to reimburse this customized luxury travel at only the cost of a first class airline ticket for each flight. But even at this absurdly low bargain-basement price, his campaign reimbursed a single law firm $138,000 for the use of its jet aircraft.
That law firm is Baron & Budd P.C. of Dallas, Texas. Its controversial founder Fred Baron, who in 2001-2002 was President of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA), chaired the finance committee for Edwards’ campaign. (Baron is now co-chair of the Kerry-Edwards Victory ’04 Committee.)
Among other trial lawyers who have bankrolled Senator Edwards is Bill Lerach, founder of San Diego-based Milberg, Weiss, Bershad, Hynes & Lerach L.L.P., who has been called “the Fred Baron of California.” During three decades as a lawyer, Lerach “has successfully sued and intimidated over 600 companies in class action litigation.” By one estimate his law firm “initiates more than half of all the shareholder lawsuits in the country, and eighty percent of the class action lawsuits in California.” He is so identified with securities class-action litigation that in corporate America to be hit with such a legal action (or “legal extortion,” as its critics call it) is called getting “Lerached.”
“I’m the Willy Horton of securities law,” boasted Lerach to one audience in 1995. “They say I make too much money doing this….so I make a sh-t pile of money – so what?” he was quoted saying in Buzz magazine that same year. The money that he, Fred Baron, John Edwards and other trial lawyers make, of course, gets passed on to consumers as higher prices in a host of ways. Businesses must carry more insurance and can afford to hire fewer people. Doctors are forced to order unnecessary tests in order to practice defensive medicine. Inventions do not get marketed because of fears of lawsuits.
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“People try to pretend the law is not a business. Baloney. It’s big business,” said Lerach. The billions pocketed by trial lawyers and shared with their Democratic Party tort-reform-opposing allies get paid in the end by you at an average cost of $2,884 for every family of four every year. God help America if candidates owned by trial lawyers, now greedy for power as well as money, are able to take control of the White House and to remove the last checks-and-balances that restrain trial lawyer ambitions.
John Edwards is a “perfect messenger” for trial lawyers, said Baron. He comes across as warm, honest, caring, smiling and to many female voters boyish and sexy. He preaches compassion for the little people he has “defended against giant HMOs” and other corporations (while pocketing himself up to half of what juries awarded to his clients). But as the Washington Post’s David Broder wrote in 2002, Edwards “almost has to take a populist stance as a way of putting a favorable gloss on his long career as a trial lawyer.”
Discover the Networks 7/22/04
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=631
