Republicans on Lawyers

As an occasional tassel-wearing attorney, I find it ironic to hear the Republican candidates blame the economic malaise resulting from years of Reaganomics upon attorneys. While reading how Hillary Clinton, who 20 years ago in an esoteric law journal, espoused ideas about children that are positively mainstream today, my wife (an attorney who owns a pair of tasseled shoes) was on the telephone to Ohio gathering crucial information to fill out the necessary forms so that her mother and two aunts will be able to collect approximately 40% of her now-deceased grandparents’ unfortunate investment in American Continental.

It was Reaganomics, which promoted greed and monumental debt in the 1980s, that helped slide the nation into the economic doldrums and permitted thieves such as Charles Keating to defraud thousands of innocent elderly. It took courageous, hard-working, contingent-fee-seeking, tassel-shoe-wearing attorneys to pursue complex litigation against big rich law and accounting firms and their wealthy insurance carriers to force them to come up with at least some compensation for unsophisticated senior citizens. The innocent investors who helped put the Republican Administration in power were simply not savvy enough to realize that savings and loans should be in the business of lending money, not selling bogus debentures, a policy encouraged by the Republican philosophy of the 1980s.

HOWARD FIELDS

Calabasas