With apologies to my attorney friends, the saying "95 percent of lawyers make the rest of them look bad" remains one of my favorites.
And a story in yesterday's New York Times did little to change this. The lawyers who were involved with negotiating the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) of 1999 (and made obscene amounts of money in the process) are now going after food manufacturers using a similar strategy. This is almost funny.
According to the Times, Don Barrett, a lawyer in Mississippi earned a mere $200 million from the MSA, but he apparently can't live on that, so he and his well-meaning colleagues are suing ConAgra, a giant Nebraska-based food company, for mislabeling a number of their products, including the always-dangerous Swiss Miss cocoa.
Mr. Barrett says, possibly even with a straight face, that "It's crime--and that makes it a crime to sell it." He and the rest of his merry men want the products in question taken off the shelves. I feel safer already!
And clearly in the interest of humanity everywhere, his group might seek damages equaling four years of sales for all mislabeled products. The fact that these guys stand to make billions of dollars does, I concede, tarnish their philanthropic credentials somewhat, but I'm still sure that they mean well.
The food industry is not without blame either. Their marketing practices haven't been exactly pristine. Taken at face value one might conclude that, given the number food items labeled as "healthy" and "natural" (in the obligatory green package), anyone that eats a granola bar should theoretically be immortal. And another thing--am I supposed to be surprised that my milk is "Raised By Farmers?" As opposed to lingerie salesman or bassoonists?
This is going to create all sorts of problems for marketing departments at food companies, since pretty soon they will run out of chemicals that they can boast that are excluded from their foods. Most of the deadly poisons like sugar, salt, artificial colorings, artificial sweeteners, preservatives, gluten, lactose and corn syrup are already proudly trumpeted as being absent from so many products. What will the next gimmick be? Plutonium-free eye drops? Delicious Pop Tarts-- no tapeworms!
While this may sound stupid, if you didn't read the Times article, you haven't even been exposed to the true meaning of the word yet.
In 2009 two mothers sued PepsiCo, claiming that Cap'n Crunch's Crunch Berries did not actually contain berries. In a ruling that ranks right up there with the Dred Scott decision, a federal judge threw the case out stating that "a reasonable consumer would not be deceived into believing that the product [contained a fruit that does not exist]."
I should hope so, because anyone with the IQ of plankton pretty much knows that one is just as likely to find a Steinway grand piano in the damn box as a berry. I suppose the decision could be reversed on the grounds that Quaker is misstating the Cap'n's military record, and the cereal should really be named Lt. Crunch.
Should history repeat itself, it is worth taking a look at how the MSA played out. The money paid by Big Tobacco ($252 billion over 25 years) protected the industry from lawsuits from individual states, and was intended to be used to fund anti-smoking programs.
How did that work out? Not all that well really, since only about 3 percent of the revenue was actually used for anti-smoking programs, however, plenty of it was used to plug state budget deficits, build bridges and highways and other ways that states spend our money.
In the end, Big Tobacco, looking to cut their losses, "agreed" to a shakedown by lawyers representing individual states, which, instead of funding anti-smoking programs simply grabbed the money and used it as a bank account. The addicted smokers got next to nothing, but this was hardly true for the lawyers--they got between 10 and 25 percent of the take depending on the state they represented--tens of billions of dollars.
Government at its finest.
So, by all means, let's repeat this process. Another big payday for the tobacco lawyers, decreased revenues for the food companies, which will no doubt be passed on to you, and something approaching zero public benefit. All in the name of Crunchberries.
Is this a beautiful country or what?
"Cereal Killers" (Medical Progress Today)