On May 7, the original version of this essay, even shorter than today’s version, was posted predicting a lawyer fee accumulation by the year 2030. The clarification follows.
Few Americans understand the legal term ‘Settlement Agreement’ in civil lawsuits. When the ‘lawyer shakedown’ is an easy ‘slam-dunk’ like suing a Billionaire for ‘sexual harassment’ or even more so ‘rape’ the BIG MONEY almost always is divided between the (tax-free?) secret ‘lawyer fee’ and the (tax-free?) plaintiff at a ratio of one-third to one-half for the lawyer and the rest for the (usually recruited) ‘plaintiff.’ The plaintiff claiming ‘rape’ can spend years returning to the social or business ‘rapist’ relationship without any history of filing a single ‘criminal complaint.’
Easy Big Money is Easy Big Money FOR LAWYERS. If a ‘rapist’ Billionaire pays $2 billion worth of multiple ‘settlement agreements,’ the lawyers will receive $666.7 million to as high as $1 billion.
‘Settlement Agreement’ lawyer ‘fees’ can really add up and are 100% UNREGULATED BY GOVERNMENT PROPERTY CONTRACTS even though they are Property Contracts ‘enforceable’ in the Two-Tier John Roberts-led Judiciary. (They call it the ‘Rule of Law’ without the ‘Two-Tier’ modifier.)
The last time that I smoked cigarettes for a couple of years, over 35 years ago, cigarettes cost $2/pack. That is because government taxation and regulation took the 18-25 cents (in a vending machine) very profitable to the cigarette companies retail price and drove it up to about $2 over the course of 30 years.
[The Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) federal regulatory agency grew much bigger over the years. Back in the early days of the Republic, when there was a Whiskey Rebellion avoiding paying federal tax, President George Washington got on a horse and led the little army to suppress it. I am not sure what year it was that tobacco was added to the agency’s duties that made the department AT instead of just A. Nor do I recall when the contemporary, for many decades, liberal fatuity that there are no crime problems only gun problems made the department of AT into the department of ATF.]
The cigarette company SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT, facilitated by profiteering Wall Street Investment Bankers (just by coincidence), also created several Lawyer Billionaires. Many of the same lawyers, who kept losing money on Plaintiff Bar Contingency Fee unsuccessful liability lawsuits, joined with their equally corrupt Lawyer colleagues only merely at the Mega-Millionaire level. (Through Insider Trading and assorted forms of graft for many years, hundreds of our Professional Politicians have also achieved that ‘level’ of wealth.)
The state attorney general lawyers and their legislative lawyer colleagues changed the way century-old liability law operates in yet another tale of ‘Greed for Profit’ lawyer cleverness. Somehow, the state government lawyer crooks conferred contingency fee relationships with future billionaire lawyers. This is why cigarettes today cost almost as much as legal or illegal cannabis. In every generation, during one’s teenage years, everyone knows friends who smoke cigarettes for a while, even if they do not personally do so. It is an unfortunate phase everyone’s adolescence observes or even experiences. The growth in the price of cigarettes has little to do with economic inflation. Corrupt government and lawyer greed explains it all.
(I had better stop before I start screaming “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”)
