As you can read, the headline states, “Lawyers seek ‘victims’ for class action lawsuits,” with two unidentified well-dressed men and a whole bunch of other individuals dressed as men and women with the heads of chimps superimposed on their bodies (sorry the size of the ad is so big), implying you-know-what about the plaintiffs in these suits.
This insulting garbage is brought to us courtesy of the Washington Legal Foundation, which, as noted here by SourceWatch, was established in 1977 by Chairman and General Counsel Daniel J. Popeo to "fight activist lawyers, regulators, and intrusive government agencies at the federal and state levels, in the courts and regulatory agencies across the country."
This 1998 interview with Popeo noted that the WLF, at that time, had received about $3 million in contributions from about 500 companies, though the SourceWatch article notes that, between 1985 and 2003, the group has received about $7 million in funding on top of that.
Though Popeo, in the 1998 story, apparently did not like being associated with any coalition or funding source, SourceWatch states that the WLF “sought and obtained funding from Philip Morris and the now defunct Tobacco Institute.” As a result, the WLF has also repeatedly sued government agencies that oversee public health functions, like the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, who they sued over workplace smoking policies (decrying what it calls the “junk science” of “anti-tobacco zealots”).
The WLF went after the FDA because of what the group thought was delays in allowing drugs and medical devices to market, and to show the revolving door that exists between the WLF and Bushco, this post notes that Daniel E. Troy effectively landed on the WLF board after leaving Bushco’s FDA, doing his very best to hurt the agency from doing its job to ensure the safety of products under its purview (such as, in particular, Vioxx…as John Mack says, the WLF is to the First Amendment what the NRA is to the Second Amendment, with Troy as the Mike-Brown-FEMA equivalent).
Perhaps the WLF’s biggest infamy, though, is due to its attacks on Interest On Trial Lawyers Only (IOLTA) funding. As this link explains…
(For New Jersey) The IOLTA Fund was created by Supreme Court Rule 1:28A, and operates under the auspices of the Court, with an independent Board of Trustees. A small administrative staff handles the day-to-day management of the IOLTA program.As SourceWatch continues…
Very often, the amount of money that a lawyer handles for a single client is nominal in amount, to be held for a short period of time, or is the result of multiple parties or clients deciding to pool advance payments against the costs of litigation in a single fund. It would not be feasible for attorneys to establish separate interest-bearing accounts for such clients, as the cost of administering the accounts, including the lawyer's time and the bank's charges, would be greater than the amount of interest that would be generated. The Supreme Court of New Jersey permits these client deposits to be pooled in common trust accounts which are interest-bearing to IOLTA. The income is forwarded to the Fund directly by the financial institution once the IOLTA Trust Account has been established.
The money collected by IOLTA is dedicated to providing legal representation and assistance to the poor, improvements in the administration of justice, and legal education to the public. The funds can be used for no other purposes.
The WLF began filing suits in a number of states to prevent IOLTA from receiving the interest on lawyer trust accounts. Among the suits was one pursued all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States with a potential recovery of $20. The reasoning behind this was outlined in a fundraising letter by the (Popeo):I guess one of the WLF’s principles is that people who aren’t well-moneyed or well-connected should starve, be incapacitated somehow or wronged in some other fashion and receive absolutely nothing – typical Repug garbage, of course.
"We are finally in a position we've fought more than a decade to reach...a position where we can deal a death blow to the single most important source of income for radical legal groups all across the country."
Among the foundation's adversaries in the litigation, Popeo continues, are radical left-wing groups purporting to represent the interests of the homeless, minorities, and gay and lesbian activism. In that particular instance, the WFL spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to litigate a $20 case to the Supreme Court of the United States because doing so provided it an opportunity to "deal a death blow" to a program that was inconsistent with its principles.
This link contains the most recent information I can find on the case heard before the Supremes, with the supposition being that they would reaffirm a lower court ruling that the IOLTA’s use of interest on client deposits (with the interest being donated to charity) did not constitute a “taking” in violation of the Fifth Amendment (Atrios has more here from 2003 on this, referencing some other posts linked above).
So, as far as Popeo is concerned, the WLF is ready to fight for any business against what it views as excessive governmental regulation, but it would deny that privilege in a heartbeat to anyone seeking a class-action remedy for a grievous wrong of one type or another?
This of course is typical for the WLF, which is but a tiny cog in the huge wheel of right-wing policy organizations that have operated to the detriment of the majority of this country for years and years by campaigns of misinformation and lawsuits.
At least they seemed to have failed in the IOLTA nonsense, though, since the Jersey link from which I took the earlier background information was dated in 2006. However, as Spencer Tracy so correctly stated in “Inherit The Wind,” “fanaticism and ignorance are forever busy, and need feeding” (proven by their ad yesterday).
The WLF should put that on the masthead of all of their correspondence.
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