Plague of Lawyers, Continued

If there is one word which describes the activities of the legal profession, that word is bribery. However, this practice is less important in the poorer areas of the nation than the equally effective force of intimidation. Bribery reaches its apogee in the large cities, and among the major law firms, which handle multi-million dollar cases. In small towns, money rarely changes hands, because the legal system functions on political influence, fraternal ties, and the ubiquitous club laid along the rear of the neck. There is a certain "noblesse oblige, " that is, I owe you and you owe me, or "one hand washes the other." The latter was the favorite saying of an attorney with whom I worked for several years.

Few legal bribery cases are ever brought to the attention of the public. However, one such case, involving the august Wall Street law firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore, exposed the activities of one of the firm's senior partners, Hoyt Augustus Moore. In the early 1930s, Moore was legal counsel for the giant Bethlehem Steel Company, a J.P. Morgan enterprise. This firm, in the course of its monopoly, tried to take over a competitor in the wire rope field, a practice supposedly forbidden under the stringent terms of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. It seemed that a federal judge, Judge Albert W. Johnson, would uphold the decision against Bethlehem Steel. However, Johnson, wishing to appear a reasonable man, let it be known that for a token payment of $250,000 (the equivalent of five million dollars in 1989 funds), he could be persuaded to withdraw his objections to the takeover. In later testimony before a Congressional committee, Counsellor Moore stated that "this amount is not excessive and not objectionable." Payment was delivered forthwith.

Despite his public acknowledgement that he had committed the crime of bribing a federal judge, Hoyt Augustus Moore continued his distinguished legal career for some twenty-five years after the event. In 1959, he retired at the age of 88. Not only did the New York Bar Association ignore his admission of a crime; Judge Johnson was later elected president of his bar association! He later was indicted for bribery and conspiracy, but he won acquittal, after his co-conspirators refused to testify in the case.

In September of 1978, Mahlon Perkins Jr., the senior partner of another sacrosanct Wall Street law firm, Donovan Leisure (it had been founded by General Wild Bill Donovan, a World War I hero who later organized the Office of Strategic Services under British auspices during World War II, later reorganized as the present Central Intelligence Agency) pleaded guilty to lying under oath when he stated that he had previously destroyed certain documents that his opponent in an antitrust lawsuit had obtained court orders that he produce. Not only did Perkins lose the case; a verdict of $81.5 million was rendered against his firm. Perkins was sentenced to serve one month in prison, but the bar association refused to take any action against him. If the bar associations can ignore crimes of this gravity, how could anyone believe that they would take action on the complaint of a private citizen?

Indictments against leading members of the legal profession could be cited for many pages; these will suffice to make the point. The fact remains, however, that the greatest damage they have inflicted has been the betrayal of the nation through their activities in international conspiracies. We have cited John Foster Dulles; although he is the most notorious of the conspirators, he has not lacked for emulators on many lesser levels. The Wall Street Journal has noted that his firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, seems to have lost much of its clout, and its important clients, in recent years. No doubt it requires a partner capable of similar intrigues before its enormous fees are renewed.

Present legal practice, in the experience of the present writer, consists almost entirely of the game known as "Let's Make a Deal." The result of this practice is that few lawyers today have a working knowledge of legal strategy, or even of the requirements of writing a simple motion. Early on, in my appearances in our courts, I discovered that I was creating consternation in the ranks of these "nonpractising lawyers," because of the scope and length of my legal briefs. Because of my many years of training and practice as a researcher and writer, I had no objection to spending many hours reading such legal tomes as the United States Code or the Corpus Juris Secundum, books which my opponents rarely opened. As a result, the judges were hard put to deny my motions in the face of the feeble efforts of their distinguished colleagues. However, this never prevented them from doing so. Their only hope was that after persistent rejection on every level of the courts, I would run out of funds, or I would become discouraged and go away. In fact, I stayed on to see just how corrupt the system actually was. It was a fascinating experience.

The most tried and true technique of exhausting the opposition, that is, by wiping out their financial resources, did not work in my case. I was not paying the expense of a large law firm, or of a single lawyer, to handle my work. My greatest expense was typing paper and ribbons, perhaps ten dollars a month. This expenditure enabled me to keep six or eight cases going in state and federal courts. However, my best efforts were usually torpedoed through the legal technique of "discovery." Briefly stated, discovery entails an order from the court that you turn over all documents and evidence of your case to your opponent, so that he will then have the weapons to fight you. The opposing lawyers sift through all of your documentation, extract all the evidence favorable to you, and have the judge declare it "inadmissible." At the same time, all evidence favorable to their side will automatically be ruled "admissible" by the judge. In forty years of court practice, I never saw this practice overlooked, nor did I ever see it fail to produce a decision against me.

Discovery also requires prolonged appearances in pre-trial depositions, providing answers to lengthy questionnaires, known as Written Interrogatories, and answers to Requests for Admission. If these procedures fail to destroy you, the court then goes to Order for Production of Documents. Usually, this means that the court orders you to produce your great grandfather's passport and similar papers which have not been seen by anyone for many years. Failure to do so results in immediate court sanctions, including indefinite jail sentences until the documents are produced. The discovery techniques, on which present legal practice depends, constitute, first of all, a trial of the case by the opposing lawyer without benefit of judge or jury, and second, a bill of attainder against the party who is ordered to appear. Bills of attainder are strictly prohibited by the Constitution of the United States, yet every judge to whom I made this notice ignored it. At that time, I did not understand that the admiralty law of England has superseded the Constitution in American courts. Bills of attainder are not prohibited in admiralty law.

Roy Cohn, reputed to be a fierce opponent in a courtroom, writes in his autobiography, "In a Hall of Fame example of the tail wagging the dog, discovery has become the be all and end all of trial practice. Years are spent in 'discovering' the other fellow's case, in the privacy of conference rooms in brilliantly decorated law offices paid for by clients who are supposed to be getting a fair shake for their money and instead are all too often getting a shakedown by lawyers who would not know how to try a case before a jury if their lives depended on it. Depositions, it's called, and all it does is finally support incompetents who are afraid to show up in court."

Cohn glosses over the fact that discovery is more often employed to destroy the opponent before trial, through protracted expense and abuse. The Wall Street Journal noted that by September, 1988, the Wall Street firm of Drexel, Burham and Lambert had spent some $140 million to defend itself against charges of violations of securities laws, a cost which included $40 million for copying one and a half million pages of documents. The firm finally settled out of court, agreeing to pay $650 million in fines for charges which it might have been able to disprove in court, after paying legal costs of double the amount of the fine. The Department of Justice case against the giant American Telephone and Telegraph Company was also a lawyer's dream, involving the payment of hundreds of millions of dollars in legal costs, which you, gentle reader, wound up paying through increases in your telephone bills.

As you may have suspected, the Department of Justice, the largest law firm in the world, specializes in creating such lawsuits for the benefit of lawyers everywhere. This explains F. Lee Bailey's cryptic comment on "the cold fear associated with being a defendant in an American court." M & N Associates, in a poll taken in 1968, found that 68% of American citizens did not believe they could obtain a fair trial in any American court. The famed lawyer, Gerry Spence, in his most recent book, "With Justice for None" writes that "The truth is that there is no justice in any court for the American people."

Libel suits also remain a fertile field for lawyers, as the judgments and legal expenses have no limits. When two liberal writers of the New York school, Lillian Heilman and Mary McCarthy, went to court against each other, the results were disastrous for both. Heilman had a long record as an habitual liar. After she married Hollywood script writer Dashiell Hammett, she took all the income from his work, refusing to allow his children by a previous marriage to receive any funds. However, it was her reputation as the most outrageous liar in a profession not noted for its dedication to the truth, which caused her fellow liberal, Mary McCarthy, to speak in exasperation during a nationally broadcast interview on the Dick Cavett show, characterizing Heilman as "a holdover. . . tremendously overrated, a bad writer and a dishonest writer." She followed this denunciation of Heilman, which might be excused as legitimate literary criticism, with an actionable statement when she concluded, "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."

After brooding over McCarthy's statement for a few moments, Heilman called her lawyers. In February, 1980, Mary McCarthy had to defend herself in a libel suit. Despite the fact that she had long been a darling of the literati, and had had many best sellers, she soon found her savings decimated by legal expenses. Her New York attorneys charged her $35,000 for filing one motion in this case. (I sometimes filed three and four motions in a single day, but I had no comparable expenses). The case dragged on, as cases do when one has expensive New York lawyers. Lillian Heilman died in 1984, before the case came to trial, a considerable relief to Mary McCarthy. It is a truism of the legal profession that one never can predict what a jury might do; the usual award in libel cases of this type is one dollar, but punitive damages, which are aptly named, and which are pure admiralty law, can amount to millions of dollars.

The famed unpredictability of juries has now given rise to a new art, the art of jury selection. It is an art, because the final framing of the painting depends entirely on which jurors the lawyers have selected. One might call this the fine art of stacking the jury; although jury stacking is theoretically illegal, this has never prevented anyone from trying it. Members of a jury usually base their final decisions on factors of race and sex, or on the way a defendant, if she is a woman, does her hair. This is understandable when we consider that after days or months of listening to conflicting testimony, most jury members have not the faintest clue as to which party is in the right.

In recent decades, juries made up entirely of poor, black Democrats in District of Columbia criminal cases have routinely voted for the conviction of white, middle class Republican White House staff members in political show trials. The Watergate trials were the apogee of this process, which reached a new wave with the conviction of most of Ronald Reagan's White House staff in recent years. Reagan's closest associates, among them Michael Deaver and Lynn Nofziger, were found guilty on vague charges by black juries, who were perhaps expressing their resentment at having had to endure three hundred years of slavery in the United States. At any rate, the crimes of which they were accused were beyond the scope of these jurors, whose daily lives were filled with the necessity of surviving in a murderous, drug-saturated environment. The Moscow show trial of Colonel Oliver North continued this brave tradition. Even the Washington Post was driven to comment on the possibility of injustice because "the entire jury was composed of another race." Even the Washington Post forbore to mention "the race that dare not speak its name" — the reader was left to conjecture whether Col. North was being tried before a jury of Chinese, or perhaps Indians.

Representative Scoundrels

Our legal system is usually described as "the adversary system." The two opposing clients come before the court for an impartial judgment by either a judge or a jury, or by both. In practice, the court room adversarial system creates rancor and hostility on both sides. It precludes processes and solutions which are potentially satisfactory to both litigants, because it is more profitable for the attorney to keep them at each other's throats. Each attorney assures his client that he is certain to win, therefore the case must be prosecuted all the way through the court. Instead of arbitration, or dispute resolution, which would be much cheaper and more satisfactory to the litigants, they are deluded into going for a total victory. The lawyer gains everything and loses nothing by urging this path. If his client loses, he will try to persuade him to appeal this "unjust" decision. The result is more fees for the attorneys and for the courts.

Early in my legal experience, I was astounded when a lawyer with whom I was then associated gave me one of the keys to a successful legal practice — an attorney will often lose your case on purpose, so that you can then be persuaded to file an appeal. We were in court when I noticed that the defendant's attorney had failed to call a key witness to testify. This witness's testimony would have won the case, which was then lost. "Why didn't the lawyer call that witness?" I asked my associate. "Oh, that's routine," he assured me. "He wanted the guy to lose the case, so that he could file an appeal. It's only business."

This was my first revelation about how our legal system really works. I have never forgotten it. Perhaps this was what Oliver Wendell Holmes, the patron saint of modem lawyers, meant when he said, "The law has nothing to do with justice, under a trial by battle system in which the goal is victory — not justice." He went on to say that the lawyer can permissibly employ a host of stratagems and tricks to obscure the truth, manipulate witnesses, and pander to the jury and the judge on the basest motions. The philosophical justification for the adversary system is the claim that the opponents are "evenly matched." This is never true, but it remains the favorite myth of the adversary system. In 1906, the legal authority, Roscoe Pound, described it as "the sporting theory of justice." Jerome Frank declared that "Of all the possible ways to get at the falsity or truth of testimony, none could be conceived that would be more ineffective than trial by jury. The client and the counsel have different personal agenda."

Frank strikes at the root of the matter when he notes that client and counsel have different stakes in the trial. The client wishes to preserve his property and his liberty. The counsel wishes to keep the cash flow coming into his office.

Dr. Richard Gardner noted in a letter to the New York Times, June 18, 1989, that "After 25 years of experience working primarily as a court appointed impartial examiner (primarily in custody litigation but more recently in child sex-abuse litigation), I am convinced that the adversary system is not only an inefficient way to ascertain the truth, but is the cause of significant psychiatric disturbance in all those unfortunate enough to be subjected to its procedures."

Trial by jury, which was demanded as a right in our Declaration of Independence, and which is now guaranteed by our Constitution, is now threatened, not as a principle, but as a method which has been corrupted by the machinations of our legal system. Jury trial has been diminished by the tactics of the "adversarial" lawyers, and also by the carefully loaded "instructions" which the judge delivers to the juries. As I pointed out earlier, all evidence favorable to my case was routinely ruled inadmissible by judges, while all evidence against me was routinely admitted. How can any jury be expected to reach a fair decision under such circumstances? Even if I had been allowed to present the evidence in my favor, the judge would have neutered it by his loaded instructions to the jury.

Since the courts prevent anyone from adequately representing himself in litigation, we return to the important factor of the quality of one's legal representation, when a citizen employs an attorney. The late Roy Cohn, who died of AIDS, became the nation's most renowned lawyer on the strength of his political and ethnic affiliations. He represented such important clients as the Mafia, the Catholic Church, and members of the nation's wealthiest families. These clients were attracted to him, not merely by his legal abilities, but by his reputation for ruthlessness. His underworld clients included such notorious gang leaders as Sam (the Plumber) Cavalcante, Carmine Galanto, Tom and Joe Gambino, and Fat Tony Salerno. However, in a revealing study of Cohn's legal abilities, Nicholas von Hoffman states that Cohn's clients seldom received the legal quality they were paying for. He turned over most of his legal work to a cadre of poorly paid law students and recent graduates. Cohn himself had little time for the dreary work of preparing legal briefs, because he spent most of his hours in a mad search for pleasure. He "flung roses riotously, riotously, with the throng." He paid for as many as a half-dozen five hundred dollar a night callboys to accompany him on his yacht on a single outing. All of these "expenses" were charged against his legal fees, on which he paid no taxes.

To maintain his alternative lifestyle, he often charged outrageous fees in cases which were nothing more than legal shakedowns. In August of 1978, he sued Henry Ford II, claiming that Ford had looted the company of $750,000 in tribute extorted from a food concessionaire. The information had come to Cohn from a disgruntled former Ford employee. The charge was thrown out because Cohn had neglected to file it in the proper jurisdiction. When he threatened to refile the case, Ford gave him $100,000 in "legal fees" to drop the case. Cohn was later disbarred for taking $100,000 in "loans" from a wealthy client. He continued to flit from night club to night club in his Rolls Royce, maintaining his headquarters in a luxurious Manhattan townhouse.

During these years, most of Cohn's legal abilities were squandered in efforts to survive special task forces from the New York U.S. Attorney, Henry Morgenthau, task forces from the Department of Justice in Washington, and task forces from the Internal Revenue Service. The wasting of many millions of dollars in taxpayers' funds in the prosecution of Cohn was not based on moral objections, because of his homosexuality and his reputation as a "Mafia mouthpiece," nor was it based upon the fact that he was Jewish, because many of his opponents from government agencies were themselves Jewish, notoriously Henry Morgenthau. The battle against Cohn was waged because he had early on taken a turn to the right, unlike most of his Jewish colleagues. He played a crucial role in the prosecutions of atomic spies Julius and Eshel Rosenberg, and in the prosecution of Alger Hiss. He also became Senator Joe McCarthy's chief of staff in McCarthy's short-lived and doomed anti-Communist crusade.

Cohn represented the "neoconservative" group among American Jews, who were headquartered in the Trotskyite group, the League for Industrial Democracy, a Rockefeller sponsored operation. These Jews were vociferously anti-Moscow, because of Stalin's murder of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City, and they were unanimously in support of the State of Israel. Cohn was adopted by such rabid "anti-Communists" as George Sokolsky and columnist Walter Winchell, and frequently dined with them at their reserved table at Table Fifty in Manhattan's Stork Club. Other favored visitors to this table were J. Edgar Hoover and his consort, Clyde Tolson, and Frank Costello, then head of the New York Mafia families.

It was the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg which caused the diehard Stalinist Communists in the U.S. government to vow revenge against Roy Cohn. Special "Get Cohn Squads" routinely sallied forth from the Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service, and various state U.S. Attorney's offices. Much of the ensuing harassment and publicity succeeded only in bringing additional clients and fees to Cohn's offices. Prospective clients concluded that with all that government opposition against him, Cohn couldn't be all bad. Cohn was able to get away with these practices for many years, because he had early learned the precepts of surviving in this nation under our present legal system, that is, the difference between de jure, a confession which carried the force of law, and de facto, or mere gossip. Most of the charges against Cohn were based on mere gossip, the FBI "raw files" obtained from informants who in every instance had a special interest in "getting Cohn." The FBI files were replete with items about the altar boys and handsome young priests whom his close friend, Cardinal Spellman, brought to the nightly outings on Cohn's yacht. In his frantic efforts to destroy Cohn, U.S. Attorney Morgenthau subpoenaed many of Cohn's clients before grand juries. The Department of Justice routinely offered special deals to criminals who would testify against Cohn, bargaining to have criminal charges against them dropped if they would aid the Department to "get Cohn." These witnesses usually refused to cooperate, because they were more afraid of Cohn and his associates than of the Department of Justice.

Roy Cohn was an exception in the present legal profession because he was theoretically of the right, whereas most attorneys are pronouncedly loyal to the left. On July 22, 1988, the National Review noted that Queens President Claire Shulman had refused to deliver her scheduled address to the graduating class of the City University of New York Law School, because they insisted on the playing of the Communist anthem, "The Internationale," as the theme of the ceremonies. The school authorities had simultaneously banned the playing of the American anthem, "The Star Spangled Banner," and the display of the United States flag at the school ceremonies, because they would be "a distracting influence." Indeed, their display might have caused a riot among the fiercely Stalinist Communist law students. Notwithstanding the official ban, a few students risked their future careers and their diplomas by waving small American flags during the ceremonies, thereby guaranteeing they would not be hired by the Department of Justice or any other government agency.

Critical Legal Studies

The fact that many American attorneys are dedicated Marxists of the Stalinist Communist persuasion, as opposed to the Trotskyite Tel Aviv Communist faction, does not prevent, but rather encourages them, to charge their clients as much as possible. As individual venture capitalists who are actually Marxists, they delight in charging their middle class conservative American clients, who are usually businessmen, the only group of Americans who can actually afford to hire an attorney, tremendous fees for relatively little work of dubious value.

The political allegiance of these attorneys has been epitomized in a new philosophical program of legal studies called "Critical Legal Studies." This philosophy of revolution claims that all current American law is "the instrument of capitalist oppression," and that it must be "deconstructed" by a Stalinist conspiracy within the legal profession. This philosophy had found its apogee in the Legal Services Corporation set up by the U.S. government under the Stalinist Democratic Party. Its funds were promptly cut from $321,000,000 to $241,000,000 in 1981, when the Reagan counter-revolution, led by the Trotskyite faction of the Communist Party, swept into office in Washington. The Legal Services Corporation had been set up with the objective of providing legal aid to families too poor to afford an attorney, a group which encompassed most of the population of the United States. However, the young lawyers hired by the LSC found family legal matters such as divorce and custody too boring and too far removed from their Stalinist Communist loyalties. They began to concentrate on suing other government agencies, on housing and welfare disagreements.

Critical legal studies found its natural home in the halls of Harvard Law School, which has been traditionally Marxist since its dominance by a Viennese immigrant, Felix Frankfurter, early in this century. Frankfurter was publicly denounced by President Theodore Roosevelt as "a dangerous revolutionary," a recommendation which caused his cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to appoint him to the Supreme Court. Today, Frankfurter's heirs at Harvard Law School are engaged in a bitter internecine struggle, in which two groups of diehard Marxists, outspoken enemies of the American Republic one and all, have engaged in a civil war. The Marxists who are attempting to do away with traditional legal studies and replace them with the Critical Legal Studies program, in a campaign to do away with "bourgeois law," are opposed by the old line Marxists who have dominated the school since the days of Felix Frankfurter. The CLS advocates claim that the present legal system must be "liberated," so that it will no longer operate on behalf of property owners, but only on behalf of the "oppressed," with its goal as the ultimate "redistribution" of all privately owned property. The "Crits" argue that law professors should exchange their jobs every six months with janitors, a basic goal of the Maoist Communist philosophy. Jeffrey Hart characterizes the goals of the Crits as "the ministrations of vermin," although they offer eloquent testimony to the present insanity of the American legal system, and may thereby serve a useful cause.

The extreme pro-Marxist bias of the American legal profession may be explained by simple business necessities. A Marxist state which inflicts endless 1984 decisions on the people requires frequent hiring of lawyers in efforts to survive the diktat of the State power, and to defend one's person, one's liberty and one's property from Marxist seizure by the government. Once the state has become totally Communist, the need for personal representation apparently vanishes. This is made obvious by the fact that in the entire Soviet Union, there are only 27,000 professional lawyers, as compared to some 675,000 in the U.S. Communist lawyers in the Soviet Union are members of the privileged classes, with membership in the Communist Party, and living as members of the Nomenklatura, the special class which enjoys a lavish life style while most of their Russian subjects live in misery and poverty. These "advocatura" are organized under statutes of the USSR, whereas, according to the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, "In bourgeois states, lawyers join professional organizations only to defend their own private interests." This definition ingenuously ignores the fact that Soviet lawyers are also preeminently concerned with their private interests.

The Nomenklatura classification of American lawyers is most evident in the District of Columbia, where one in every seventeen residents is an attorney. In contrast, the state which has the most lawyers, Massachusetts, has only one lawyer for 212 residents; in more rural states, the figure drops to one in six hundred residents. The high ratio of lawyers in the District population is explained by the fact that the national government offers easy pickings for the parasitic greed of the legal profession. Arriving in the District as a Congressman, a lawyer may later be defeated for office, but this will be but the beginning of a more prosperous career as a lobbyist, or as a highly paid government bureaucrat whose decisions will involve billions of dollars. Current lobbyists in Washington earn about $700,000 per year, with another $500,000 in perks such as chauffeured limousines, two hundred dollar dinners, and a choice of expensive male or female prostitutes. The current American Medical Association lobbyist and a few other pleaders for special interests are paid about one million dollars a year, with an equal amount in personal expenses. The Internal Revenue Service chooses to look the other way at these events taking place on its own doorstep, preferring to reserve its most dire punishments for newspaper-boys, scrubwomen and waitresses. Those in the upper echelons of remuneration usually have little to fear from the IRS. When billionaire Ross Perot was advised to hire former IRS Commissioner Sheldon Cohen, he was able to save fifteen million dollars in taxes on his stock profits. Cohen lobbied a special tax bill through Congress for Perot, as is frequently done, and Perot laughed all the way to the bank.

Because of their relative affluence, one might expect that American lawyers would be stolid, middle class conservatives. However, their incomes are largely dependent upon the existence of a ruthless Marxist state power in Washington and in the various State capitals, as evidenced by the Critical Legal Studies group at Harvard, and by the bias of the younger lawyers hired at the Department of Justice in Washington. The Legal Services Corporation diverted most of its funds to such leftist groups as the American Civil Liberties Union and its favorite projects, among them Planned Parenthood, Safe Sex, the Sonoma County Sanctuary Movement, and other approved Marxist organizations. In September, 1988, the Legal Services Corporation mounted a well-financed campaign to force HUD to turn over foreclosed homes to the homeless. The resulting forced delays in sales cost taxpayers more than five hundred thousand dollars, and opened the door to widespread corruption in HUD. The chaos created by the LSC agitation created opportunities for many sellers of foreclosed HUD homes to bank the proceeds in their own bank accounts; most of it will never be traced, although a few HUD officials admit to embezzling millions of dollars, much of which they claim they turned over to the "poor," although they acquired yachts, expensive homes and other assets in the process.

The Legal Services Corporation, like so many of the governmental aberrations which plague the nation, was the personal project of a single member of Congress, Senator Warren Rudman of Vermont, in whose view the agency could do no wrong. A current critic of the agency, Clark Durant, insists that the agency should fulfill its designated mission of helping the poor, and that it should cease to fund leftwing think tanks to do away with laws on monogamy, lobby for a negative income tax, that is, government payments to those who pay no tax, and prompting the socialization of housing. Durant also outraged the American legal profession when he proposed that the Legal Services Corporation could stretch its budget by hiring paralegals to do much of the work performed by its staff of lawyers, such as the writing of wills, deeds, and leases.

American Civil Liberties Union

The headquarters of the Marxist bias among American lawyers has been for many years the American Civil Liberties Union, whose existence and exposure played a dominant role in the 1988 campaign for the Presidency of the United States. The goals of the ACLU are succinctly stated in "The Red Network";

"it is directed by Communist and Socialist revolutionary leaders . . . it works untiringly to further and legally protect the interests of the Red movement in all of its branches — Red strikes, Atheism, sex freedom, disarmament, seditious 'academic freedom,' and 'freedom of speech' for Communists only."

Although it was an outgrowth of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism," and thus continuously battles any religious symbolism in any aspect of American life, it has always been first and foremost an agency of the Communist Party. The U.S. Fish Report notes that the ACLU had provided bail for Communist defendants in a strike in Gastonia, N.C. during which the chief of police was murdered. 'The Civil Liberties Union was active from the beginning of the trouble in the cases both at Marion and Gastonia.' The N.Y. State Lusk Report says:

"The American Civil Liberties Union, in the last analysis, is a supporter of all subversive movements; its propaganda is detrimental to the State. It attempts not only to protect crime but to encourage attacks upon our institutions in every form."

The U.S. Fish Committee report officially stated, Jan. 1931,

"The A.C.L.U. is closely affiliated with the communist movement in the United States, and fully 90% of its efforts are on behalf of communists who have come into conflict with the law. . . . the main function of the A.C.L.U. is to attempt to protect the communists in their advocacy of force and violence to overthrow the government, replacing the American flag by a red flag and erecting a Soviet Government in place of the republican form of government guaranteed to each State by the Federal Constitution."

Among its most active members are the aforenamed Felix Frankfurter and George Foster Peabody. A director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Peabody exemplified the close affiliation of some bankers with the most violent aims of the Bolshevik movement.

A recent issue of the ACLU's 576 page Policy Guide lays down the party line to be followed in specific context; Policy 318, "it opposes work requirements at government-assigned tasks as a condition of eligibility for welfare on the grounds of fairness, dignity and privacy." However, the ACLU offers no objection to the excesses of the Internal Revenue Service when it breaks into homes and offices to seize assets from private citizens in order to finance the "welfare state." As a proponent of "redistribution of income," the ACLU cheers when ruthless government agents seize the private assets of American citizens to finance its Marxist state. On foreign policy, the ACLU is succinct but undeviating, "Abolish all covert operations."

The fact that most of the CIA's covert operations throughout the world have been on behalf of leftwing groups, rather than in opposition to them, carries no weight with the A.C.L.U., whose policies are generally adopted word for word by the Stalinist fanatics of the Democratic Party. A.C.L.U. members quail at the mention of the horrible phrase, "national security," because national security is the antithesis of the A.C.L.U. program for a world Communist government. Its members are often found engaged in active acts of treason, whether turning over secrets to foreign governments, or destroying the living standards which make life bearable within the geographical limits of the United States. Policy No. 92 states that "the ACLU opposes tax exemptions for religious bodies," a policy which originated in its other incarnation as the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism. However, the A.C.L.U. does not oppose the large tax exempt foundations which contribute millions of dollars to the A.C.L.U. budget.

Policy No. 242 urges that "all criminals except those guilty of such crimes as murder and treason, be given a suspended sentence. . . and sent back to the community." In fact, the A.C.L.U. actively intervenes on behalf of murderers and those accused of treason, furnishing legal and financial assistance. Policy No. 242 has become the guideline for most American judges today; they routinely hand out suspended sentences, and return the most violent criminals to the community for "work release" and "community service" programs. Policy No. 210 calls for legalization of all narcotics, including 'crack' and 'angel dust,' contending that "the introduction of substances into one's own body" is an inalienable civil liberty.

Despite its historic agenda, the ACLU Policy Book remains unknown to most Americans, even to those taxpayers who continue to be assessed many millions of dollars each year to pay for the frivolous and destructive lawsuits brought against communities by the A.C.L.U. Their target is often local government bodies, thus avoiding the better-financed federal agencies. It was the rumored existence of this agenda which torpedoed the Presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis in 1988. Dukakis seemingly had a clear road to the White House — he had a weak opponent, a fanatically supportive media coverage, the support of the entire government and academic bodies, and absolute support from all minorities, including the homeless and the homosexuals. His campaign was sunk by one photograph of a convicted rapist, Willie Horton, and by the A.C.L.U. agenda which had brought about the release of Horton. Dukakis proudly proclaimed that he was a card-carrying member of the A.C.L.U., thus identifying him s elf irrevocably in the public mind with Willie Horton. At no time did he ever repudiate the Communist origins of the A.C.L.U., which had its original incarnation on Dec. 18, 1914, as the American League to Limit Armaments, a spinoff from the Emergency Peace Foundation, headed by Communist propagandist Louis Lochner.

Its other founders were Jane Addams, of Hull House, later revealed to be a secret member of the Communist Party; John Haynes Holmes, a prominent Communist activist; Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, a rabid Communist apologist; Morris Hillquit, a founder of the Socialist Party and a paid agent of the Soviet Government; and George Foster Peabody, a "capitalist" who sought to implement Lenin's demands for a nationalized bank and "confiscation of assets" for the "crime" of "concealing income," which became the official program of the IRS. It was Peabody who had rescued the tottering Soviet government in 1918 with ready infusions of cash, aided by his fellow directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William Laurence Saunders, deputy chairman of the bank, who wrote to President Wilson on October 17, 1918, "I am in sympathy with the Soviet form of government as the best suited for the Russian people," and William Boyce Thompson, a financier who announced that he was personally donating one million dollars to promote Bolshevik propaganda in the United States!

Without funds from these bankers, Communism, which has never won an election anywhere in the world, would have died an early death. Every Communist government has been installed by military takeover, a fact which the A.C.L.U. never mentions in its copious socialist propaganda.

The A.C.L.U. continued to be liberally supported by the bankers, because of its dedication to their Soviet ideals. In 1920, it took the name American Civil Liberties Union, under the leadership of Roger Baldwin, an Anarchist Socialist who had already spent a year in jail because of his revolutionary work. Its National Committee now consisted of Baldwin, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and William Z. Foster. Both Flynn and Foster later became chairmen of the Communist Party of the United States. A 1943 Report of the California Fact Finding Committee on Un-American Activities concluded that:

"The ACLU may be definitely classed as a Communist front. At least 90% of its efforts are expended on behalf of Communists who come into conflict with the law."

This conclusion was repeated verbatim in a 1931 judgment of a Special House Committee to Investigate Communist Activities in the United States. A Barron's weekly story, August 26, 1968 by Shirley Scheibla concluded that "Careful study of ACLU cases. . . reveals that nearly all the causes it has taken up tend to weaken law and order and the ability of society to defend itself. Some landmark cases give Communists more freedom to destroy the nation from within. Those involving the draft code erode the state's ability to defend itself against armed attack. Other significant ALCU cases diminish the authority of schools and police and the influence of religion."

Typical of A.C.L.U. operations is the New York Student Rights Project. Its director, Alan Levine, told assembled students, "Oppressive institutions give you no right at all to say why you go there, how long you go there, and what you do while you're there. Indeed, you can not exercise the rights the courts have told you you have without disrupting the system." The already demoralized school system faces interminable lawsuits seeking "students' rights." Another A.C.L.U. operation, its National Prisoner Project, was defined in the A.C.L.U. national newspaper, Civil Liberties, issue of March, 1973, "First, get the prisoners out. Next, protection of prisoners' First Amendment activities. Next, reform of pretrial facilities." The A.C.L.U. Women's Rights Projects sponsored the Equal Rights Amendment, a lawyers' dream which would have resulted in every woman in the United States suing every man for her "rights." The A.C.L.U. Death Penalty Project worked to abolish capital punishment in the United States, a goal which was won and then relinquished as the death penalty was reintroduced to stem the rapidly mounting crime toll throughout the country. A.C.L.U. also is the leader in the national campaign for gun control, more properly called "gun seizure." It has long been a truism in Washington that only the possession of some five hundred million guns by American citizens has postponed the Communist seizure of power in the United States. In the Soviet Union, only trusted members of the Communist Party are allowed to own guns. The Massachusetts A.C.L.U. Newspaper, The Docket, stated in its April, 1974 issue on Civil Liberties, "The Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts favors all bills that seek to control ownership of guns. Where firearms are widely owned, there is a threat to free expression of ideas." The truth is that free expression of ideas is prohibited where private ownership of guns is prohibited, as in the Communist countries.

The A.C.L.U. continues to work tirelessly against all forms of piety and religious observance throughout the United States, such as the singing of 4 'Silent Night" during Christmas celebrations in public schools, the posting of the Ten Commandments in the schools, and the installment of Nativity scenes on public property. A.C.L.U. leaders demand the removal of the words, "In God We Trust" from our coinage, and the phrase, "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance, although the entire Pledge of Allegiance remains a favorite target of the A.C.L.U.

For years, the A.C.L.U. claimed to be against all forms of racial discrimination. In 1963, the organization suddenly reversed its longstanding policy, coming out for racial quotas in every field of American life. It abandoned its cry for "equal opportunity," replacing it with "preferential treatment" for its favored minorities. When columnist Pat Buchanan wrote a column exposing some of the A.C.L.U. treachery, its executive director, Ira Glasser, wrote him a vehement letter, accusing him of "McCarthyism, terrorism and slime." How Glasser or anyone else could be terrorized by a mere newspaper column was not explained.

In 1988, the A.C.L.U. finally involved itself in a situation about which the present writer had been complaining for many years, in letters to the press, articles, and books. This is the infamous section of the statutes which establishes severe penalties for anyone who reveals any information of complaints about a judge. A columnist had written about this statute on the editorial page of the Washington Post in 1977, suggesting that it was probably unconstitutional, as indeed it is. In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, decreeing that the state could not prosecute reporters for reporting "secret judicial investigations." The state Judicial Inquiry and Review Commission routinely received complaints from the public against judges, which were promptly buried. Its director finally admitted that in some fifteen years, only one or two complaints had actually been investigated. Nevertheless, the director of the commission continued to warn all complainants that it was a criminal offense for anyone to talk about his complaint, and that he would be prosecuted!

The A.C.L.U. filed suit on the grounds that both the state code and the Judicial Inquiry and Review Commission violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments protecting free speech and due process. The complaint stated that the law enables concealment of "evidence of substantial misconduct by judges." It took the A.C.L.U. seventy years to discover a statute about which citizens had been complaining for decades.

Because of the numerous lawsuits which it generates, the A.C.L.U. functions as the godfather of the American legal profession. Most of these suits are intended to weaken the institutions of the nation, such as schools and churches, but many are so trivial in origin as to create new markets for lawyers where none previously existed. The flood of "job discrimination" and "sexual harassment" lawsuits which engulf our major companies have seriously weakened our ability to compete in the world economy. Thus the A.C.L.U. has actively worked to promote the rise of Japan, Korea and West Germany in their domination of our auto and appliance markets, while simultaneously encouraging the wave of "mergers and acquisitions," promoting the giant monopolies which the Sherman Anti-Trust Act claimed to have outlawed.

American Bar Association

The professional organization by which the lawyers have become the Nomenklatura, or ruling, elite, in the United States is the American Bar Association. This organization selects, and for all practical purposes, elects judges to our courts. It not only "recommends" judges, but also passes on their qualifications, labelling them "able," "mediocre," or "not recommended." The reasons for the latter unfavourable designation remain shrouded in secrecy, but are always based upon political or ethnic prejudices. Rarely does it have any bearing on the character, the training, or the ability of the designate, "not recommended" simply means that the elitists of the American Bar Association have decided to blackball someone who does not fit into their narrow categorization. Such unfavorable decision is always spared anyone who has the necessary qualifications, the most important being membership in a Masonic lodge. The ABA system ensures that a small, dedicated group, existing in an atmosphere of conspiracy and secret goals, can dominate the selection of all judges in the United States.

Like most invasions of our rights, the inspiration for the American Bar Association invasion came directly from England. Our Constitution guarantees our citizens equal rights under the law; the British Secret Service has sought to undermine this guarantee by decreeing that the laws of the United States shall be administered by persons who want unequal rights, or special licenses. The Constitution tried to prevent this by expressly outlawing grants of special privilege. The American Bar Association had its inception at a meeting in the summer of 1878 of some seventy-five lawyers from eleven states. The guiding force of the group was Simeon E. Baldwin, a descendant of Roger Sherman, a Governor of Connecticut, and a Justice of the state's Supreme Court. The ABA subsequently underwent three periods in its history: from 1878 to 1902, it was a strictly professional organization dedicated to improving the practice of law; from 1902 to 1936 was its era of national expansion, when it became a genuinely national organization; and from 1936 to 1950, when it became a truly elitist organization, which sought to extend its control over other aspects of American life. It was in 1936 that the ABA adopted a federalized constitution, creating a monolithic organization which was tightly controlled by a small group of elitists. It also founded the National Association of Law Schools in 1900, giving it control of the crucial field of accreditation, and the National Conference of Commissioners of Uniform State Laws, giving it access to the statutes of every state.

The appearance of the ABA as a genuine national force first came in 1909, when a group of British lawyers arrived in Chicago to set up a monolithic organization. They were actively assisted by John D. Rockefeller, who was then setting up the University of Chicago to promote the principles of British Fabian Socialism, with a gift of fifty million dollars. The Illinois legislature then passed a statute that only members of the legal union, the ABA, would be allowed to practice law within that state. With this act, the State of Illinois, for all practical purposes, seceded from the constitutional union of states, by granting special privileges in violation of the Constitution. This statute also set up a class system in the United States. Other states were persuaded to adopt the Illinois statute, California in 1927, and the other states in the 1930s, until the ABA had achieved its goal of national power.

Yale law professor Fred Rodell characterizes the union members of the ABA, the duly licensed and chartered "lawyers" as "purveyors of streamlined voodoo and chromium-plated theology," whose "weird and wordy mental gymnastics" enable them to carry on a "high class racket." There are now some 180 "approved" law schools in the United States, licensed by the ABA to turn out "approved" lawyers. On graduation, these lawyers are still mere apprentices, because they have been taught little or nothing about how the legal system actually operates, or what a lawyer must do to earn his fees. They are not taught the classics of the law, such as the works of Coke and Blackstone, but they endure months of semantic quibbling about the law of contracts or the meaning of a household. This is to prepare them for the practice of the law merchant.

During some forty years of research into the problems plaguing this nation, the present writer dug down to the strata of a common plateau, which revealed the simultaneous origins of the various forms of criminality infesting the land. It had begun with a small fraternity of international bankers who first fastened their central banking system onto the nations of Europe, and later, in a secret meeting at Jekyl Island, Georgia in 1910, conspired to create a "Federal Reserve System" (which was not federal, had no reserves, and was not a system, but a syndicate). In "The World Order," I revealed the tentacles of the financiers which manipulated the governments of the world. I proved that the three professions which were doing the most damage were the bankers, the lawyers, and the doctors. Educators came in a strong fourth. In "Murder by Injection," I exposed the medical profession, and in the present work, I expose the legal profession, despite its function as a legal octopus whose fierce squirting of black ink confuses and subdues its prey.

In all of these works, I have found myself dealing with essentially the same families and the same groups, both within the United States and abroad. A recent television expose of a Dr. James Burt, who had for years performed strange sexual operations on his women patients with the knowledge of his peers, carried the official disclaimer of the medical profession from a prominent physician, "Of course the other doctors knew what he was doing, but they wouldn't dare expose him. He might sue them, and no one wants to get involved in that horror which is our legal system." The lush profits from malpractice suits have made the medical field easy pickings for the legal vultures, while discouraging conscientious doctors from adequately treating their patients. The result is intended to be the final socializing of all medical practice in the United States, under the total control of the government.

The ABA carries considerable weight in the operation of the legislative process. The Resolution of the 74th Congress, on Aug. 27, 1935, of the Joint Resolution Consenting to an Interstate Oil Compact to Conserve Oil and Gas, would not have been possible without the ABA, whose members drafted a Federal Oil and Gas Conservation Act in 1935, subsequently passed as a state law in South Dakota in 1955 and later in other oil-producing states. This drive for "conservation" was intended solely to protect the oil monopoly of the Rockefeller interests and their many subsidiaries. It forbade newcomers from drilling so as to control production and maintain high price levels. This program was originally formulated at the ABA annual meeting in Seattle in July of 1928. An act was written which removed the major oil companies from the control of the anti-trust laws (vol. 53, pp. 72-89). In 1934, the Governor of Texas, who just happened to be the president of Humble Oil, one of Rockefeller's main acquisitions, used this ABA act to call out the National Guard, stopping further drilling by independent producers. Congress was then ordered to draft national approval of this act by the Joint Resolution of 1935.

The ABA maintains a number of active subcommissions which constantly review and redraft laws controlling the daily lives of all Americans. Their recommendations, like their "approvals" of candidates for judgeships, are always accepted by the pertinent Congressional committees as worthy of being drafted into law without changing so much as a comma, yet no citizen has ever elected any member of an ABA commission to national office. Typical of these secret commissions is the ABA's Section on Patent, Trademark and Copyright Law, which was exposed in the Senate Judiciary Hearings of February 3,1974 under the title, "The Organized Bar: Self-Serving or Serving the Public?"

The Committee found that the incoming chairman of this influential ABA section was Theodore Bowes, a member of a secret ABA operation known as "the Tuesday Group." Bowes was a former General Patent Counsel for the Westinghouse Corp., and a prominent Washington lobbyist in the field of patent law. The "Tuesday Group" was a clique of lawyers which drafted the Scott Amendments, proposals which would exempt many presently illegal patent practices from the antitrust laws. The "Tuesday Group" then persuaded Senator Hugh Scott to introduce them on the Hill. Scott was a Washington politician who enjoyed many of the perks of a prominent political figure. He was able to indulge his penchant for collecting priceless Chinese antiques, a hobby which was beyond the means of most of his colleagues on Capitol Hill.

The Judiciary Committee found that other ABA Sections were headed by lobbyists from leading corporations; the chairman of the Environmental Controls Committee of the ABA comes from a large Richmond, Virginia law firm representing Humble Oil, three power companies, three railroads, General Motors, a gas pipeline company and a chemical corporation. He seemed an ideal choice to draft regulations on pollution. The Judiciary Committee further stated, "The Coal Committee (of the ABA) is headed by a lawyer from Consolidation Coal Co; his vice chairman is the lawyer for the National Coal Association; the Oil Committee chairman, the General Counsel of Cities Service and his vice chairman is General Counsel for Humble Oil; the Forest Resources Committee (of the ABA) has a chairman whose law firm represents Georgia-Pacific and Moore Oregon Lumber; the vice chairman's law firm represents U.S. Plywood, Champion Paper etc."

The entire Senate Judiciary Committee report is a fascinating expose of the intrigues in which lawyers engage to protect the profits of their clients, while these firms defraud and injure the American public. The ABA also takes strong public positions on many political issues; the entire organization unhesitatingly endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment in the confident expectation of generating billions of dollars in extremely profitable lawsuits. Indeed, it was the fear of an avalanche of lawsuits which finally caused the ERA to be defeated. This one amendment would have paralyzed an already overburdened court system.

Much like the American Medical Association (which is also headquartered in Chicago), the enormous influence exercised by the American Bar Association lies in its monopolistic practices. It controls the means of entering the profession by controlling the accreditation of law schools, just as the AMA controls the accreditation of medical schools and hospitals. In all but two states, Georgia and California, the would-be lawyer must attend an "accredited law school," that is, accredited by the ABA, before permission is granted to take the state bar examination, which is also prepared under the supervision of the ABA. Legislation is now under way in California to end the opportunity for non-accredited students to take the bar exam in that state. The bar exam prevents anyone from practicing law, even though Robert H. O'Brien, chairman of the California Committee of Bar Examiners, admits that the bar exam does not accurately predict the ability of future attorneys. Those who pass are then admitted to the "integrated" bar association, the state monopoly, which has the power to punish any attorney who fails to conform to its stringent controls. For years the state bar associations have operated in open defiance of anti-trust laws, conspiring to fix fees, prohibiting advertising by attorneys, and prosecuting anyone accused of unauthorized practice of law. Competence is not an issue. The bar monopoly can and does prosecute highly skilled legal practitioners, such as paralegals, trust officers, and others whose skills and experience more than qualify them to practice law.

The ABA particularly frowns upon anyone who is labelled a "tax protestor" by the vigilant agents of the IRS, or who criticizes any person or institution of the Establishment. Although the ABA tries to present a public figure of a stem moral entity which prosecutes and punishes any attorney suspected of "moral turpitude," judges publicly known to have accepted bribes have been elected presidents of bar associations. An ABA panel commissioned to look into the disciplinary situation among lawyers in 1970 summed up its findings in one word, "scandalous."

Although few Americans are aware of the ABA and its sinister machinations, its conspiracies affect the daily cost of living for every American. The ABA strongly urges the extension of state powers over the lives and property of every American. Whether one wishes to call this Marxism, or 1984, or Communism, it most definitely is not American, nor is it the Republic for which we stand. For this reason, there is now rising opposition to the ABA and the monopoly which it exercises over the practice of law. In Austin, Texas, Daniel Madison has filed a suit against the ABA, the Texas Supreme Court, the University of Texas Law School, and the Law Schools council for violation of the antitrust laws, and for conspiracy to keep power from non-lawyers. Madison explains his suit with these words, "If you're rich, you can have all the justice you want, but if you are a working class citizen, you may get little or none. That is the system in America."

Liability and Tort Law

The precipitous decline in American production and export income has been ascribed to many factors, such as poor American workmanship, the strength of the dollar, and other factors. However, only one scholar, Peter Huber, has dared to put the blame where it most plainly lies. In his fully documented work, "Liability: The Legal Revolution and Its Consequences," he tells us that

"Tort law was set in place in the 60s and 70s by a new generation of lawyers and judges. . . Some grew famous and more grew rich by selling their services to enforce the rights they themselves had invented."

Although a few Americans may have been pleased by the enormous settlements won for them by their lawyers against American manufacturers, the overall result has been devastating. More than thirty billion dollars a year is now spent on such lawsuits, according to recent studies by the Rand Corp., with more than half of this sum going to attorneys as fees. Huber says that the industrial havoc wrought by this practice "accounts for 30% of the price of a stepladder and 90% of the price of childhood vaccines." He writes that an amorphous new jumble of contract and tort law, called "contort law" overrules our most important economic freedom, the freedom to make advance commitments and to arrange deals on terms mutually agreeable."

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Sept. 28, 1988, Huber cites the reluctance of insurance companies to write liability coverage at any price, with a concurrent decline in overall safety as new technologies are withheld from the market, and the decline of American competitiveness in foreign markets." He says, "U.S. contort law gives foreign manufacturers an important competitive edge." Huber has found that tort law costs the American consumer $300 billion a year! The overall verdict of Huber's book is that there has indeed been a revolution in liability cases, with the result that in the past thirty years tort law, the law of accident and personal injury cases, has been altered by judges and law professors to make the law "more compassionate," and more anti-business, a logical result of the growing Marxism of the American bench. The results may be seen on every hand; in the rapid obsolescence of the "Rust Belt"; the growing deficit of the U.S. balance of trade, and in the growing foreign investment in the United States. In 1988 it had grown to $304 billion, which included 33% of chemicals, 12% of all manufacturing in the U.S., 12% of printing and publishing, and 10% of fiber and textile manufacturing. Huber is not the only one to attribute this tragic decline in American assets to the malignant depredations of our legal profession.

Huber recommends as a first step the repeal of the judge-invented collateral-source rule, thus relying on direct insurance of goods and services. It is unlikely that the judges will back down from the dilemma which they themselves have created, or that the insurance companies could afford the vast amounts required for direct insurance coverage. Whatever the outcome, the situation can be traced all the way back to Starkey's apt observation during the reign of King Henry the Eighth, "Everyone that can color reason maketh a stop to the best law that is beforetime devised."

The excesses of tort law are the consequence of earlier abuses by lawyers in the early years of this century. Lawyers usually acted as claim agents for companies facing a damage suit, using their talents to persuade the victim to sign a release on payment of minimal damages. This practice backfired when the lawyers realized that they could make much more money by representing the victim against the companies, extracting huge settlements, of which they took one-third in contingency fees, plus untold "expenses." The practice was little more than ambulance chasing, but it proved very lucrative.

The red lights of the ambulances still prove to be an irresistible attraction to the legal profession. The Wall Street Journal headlined on Sept. 1, 1988, "Texas Bar Rushes to Crash Site to Protect Victims from Certain Lawyers," "Attempting to protect victims' families from solicitations by unscrupulous lawyers, the State Bar of Texas rushed its own lawyers to the site of the Delta Airlines crash at Dallas International Airport." The article noted that "solicitation by lawyers is a crime, usually a misdemeanor, known as barratry."

On Feb. 16, 1989, the Wall Street Journal memorialized "the dozens of lawyers who raced to Bhopal in the days after the accident and later brought the victims' cases into U.S. courts." The mad, mad world aspect of the lawyers' rush to Bhopal was occasioned by the tempting prospect of thousands of clients, when the Union Carbide plant at Bhopal had a gas leak in 1984. The lawyers actually signed up thousands of clients, but were thwarted when the Indian government assumed control of the litigation in 1986. Union Carbide agreed to a $470 million settlement, with payment to the registrar of the India Supreme Court. This apparently left the American lawyers in limbo, as they would have no access to the funds. In tort action, it is axiomatic that the lawyer takes his payments off the top. It is unlikely that India's bureaucracy will be willing to share the loot, most of which will probably never reach the victims. For the "Bhopal flyers" it may be a bitter pill.

Louis Vuitton, the French leather goods manufacturer, developed another new angle on the attorney problem. Instead of continuing to hire lawyers to battle against counterfeiters who illegally put the Vuitton name on their products, Vuitton has now prosecuted more than fifty cases in New York by having judges appoint corporate counsels as special prosecutors. These counsels then launch criminal contempt proceedings against offenders who violate court injunctions against counterfeiting. Because such counterfeiting is now a $5.5 billion a year problem, other manufacturers have followed suit. They have shifted their costs onto the shoulders of a public prosecutor, because they have notified him of the commission of a crime. It is then his duty to prosecute it. However, when the present writer has done this in the past, the government agencies have refused to prosecute. No action has ever been taken on notification of serious violations of law.

The legal profession continues to make its fees from public misfortunes. When the A. H. Robins Co. of Richmond, Va. marketed a faulty intrauterine device, the Daikon Shield, some 195,000 women who were injured by it filed claims for their injuries. The firm sought protection under the Federal Bankruptcy Act, but eventually set up a $2.4 billion fund to settle the flood of personal injury lawsuits. In Sept. 1988, a confidential report concluded that a major Wall Street law firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft (as in President Taft), violated conflict of interest laws in an "impermissible appearance of impropriety" by simultaneously representing a committee of Robins' plaintiffs and the five trustees who will be disbursing the billions in settlements. The Cadwalader firm was said to have played the principle role in nominating four of the five trustees. Millions of dollars of potential revenue for the Cadwalader firm are at stake.

The national crisis among the savings and loans banks has been explained by the involvement of lawyers in the longstanding campaign to "deregulate" them. Those same lawyers are now stepping in to write proposals for "resolving" the problems. The Wall Street Journal noted on Jan. 31, 1989 that Thomas Vartanian, the former general counsel for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, wrote the laws which deregulated the thrift banks. After they went bankrupt as a result of that deregulation, he joined the New York powerhouse law firm of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver and Jacobson. The firm earned some twelve million dollars in 1988 by handling 55 thrift mergers. Vartanian's deputy at the FHLBB, Patrick Doyle, also has built up a thriving savings and loan business, at the Washington law firm of Arnold and Porter.

Washington remains the preeminent home base for the lawyer lobbyist, some eleven thousand now holding court there. The dean of Washington tax lobbyists is Charles Walker, whose CEW Associates represents a powerful corporate base, known as the Group of 14. These 14 major corporations include Alcoa, ATT, Bechtel, Champion, Dresser, DuPont, IBM and others, with aggregate sales of $260 billion a year, and employing two million workers. They depend on CEW to handle tax code changes which will affect their profits. Walker came to Washington as the protege of Robert Anderson, Secretary of the Treasury from 1957-1960. Walker became overseer of Congressional relations for the Treasury Dept., later writing the Tax Reform Act of 1969. He earned a valuable reputation as the man to see if you wanted something done in Washington in the tax field. His firm now makes millions per year. His mentor, Robert Anderson, was not so fortunate. Although he later became president of the American Bankers Association, he was disbarred in New York on Jan. 11, 1989, after conviction on tax evasion of $240,000 from 1983-84, and having operated an illegal bank which cost investors some $4.4 million.