Wake Up, Little Lawsuits, Wake Up!

Attention everyone who has lost money in the Nasdaq! If we get together we can sue a bunch of people who have deep pockets and maybe get some money back! No matter what, one of the people we sue will pay and then our lawyers, at least, will get some money. Oh yeah, we will only get a pittance, a few dollars here, a few smackers there. But the lawyers, now they will pull down big change because, if you have enough defendants and enough plaintiffs, the money starts adding up big-time.

So let's start suing. How about we sue everybody who sold stock on the day the Nasdaq hit a high last year? That's a good class of defendants. How about we go after all of the people who underwrote the dot-coms? Logical class. You know what, an even better class might be the people who underwrote the business-to-business stocks, what a sham they were. How about suing all of the analysts who had strong buys that went to buys? Big group there. Oooh, oooh, even better, let's go after the venture capitalists who made it all happen. Bill Gross must still have some money. Those Kleiner Perkins guys, they seem smug. That tall guy who used to play for Princeton, Wimblad? Or is he Hummer? Those guys could write some big checks for certain!

Why don't we go after John Malone and Bill Gates and Andy Grove? If these dupes hadn't been taken in and helped sponsor so many of these dot-bombs, we wouldn't have gotten in either. They tricked us into believing we would be safe in these stocks.

Wow, there's an awful lot of defendants out there. One of them must be willing to write a check to us to make us go away. Then we can send out a couple of dollars each to the millions of plaintiffs and keep the other third all for ourselves! Isn't capitalism grand?

Yeah, that's what I think of this IPO class action lawsuit. It is a joke, something that our system allows because we never crack down on the trial lawyers and their shenanigans; we just accept them as a tax on the system like the Internal Revenue Service. They are so powerful, so "charitable" in their contributions to politicians, that they will never be defeated. So they keep tolling the system. You think there is anything more to it? You think they fulfill a key function of protecting us? You are a dupe and an agent of their enterprise then. They are shameless in their attempts to chisel away at true capitalism.

I always thought that, perhaps, in the innermost sanctums, they would actually talk a good game about what they do, that they wouldn't be shakedown artists. But a couple of years ago, after I coughed up big dough to the Democratic party, I got invited for a cup of joe with Bill Clinton and a couple of other party bigwigs. Sure enough, one of these plaintiff's lawyers was there talking about how much money they give and how important it is that they not be stopped in Congress by those who want to ban these kinds of stupid suits. Right in front of me, the guy is saying this! Man, I wanted to throw up. You get 15 minutes with the president and you just want to talk about how to make yourself even richer? I looked around at the room, the Map Room, where FDR had planned to stop Hitler during World War II, and my stomach just churned. These guys will stop at nothing to shake down American industry.

But the reporters will present the case as even-handed. Heck, if you sue in this country, you must be aggrieved, right? People don't sue for no reason. They won't bother to recognize that it is the lawyers who trumped the suit up, the lawyers who went looking for plaintiffs, the lawyers who are just sitting around in a room thinking about who to target next.

And with the cost of lawyers still way too high, some of these defendants will cave fast, which will then cause others to cave and, in the classic prisoner's dilemma, checks will get cut, lawyers will get rich, defendants will get poor and the plaintiffs will get their nickels and dimes. The pox on American industry will continue. What a joke this all is. Who can possibly take this stuff seriously? The judges won't, but by the time it gets to a ruling by a judge, so much money will have been spent that it would be better to settle.

These lawyers can't lose. They are in the ultimate good business. If you could own shares in these suits -- something that they specifically ban -- you would be a size buyer. If you could own shares in their firms, you would want to file a 13-D. Oh, I guess we could go join them. Heck, I went to law school, I could set up one of these shops myself. But then again, I would have to live with myself. How do these guys do it?