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Notes: The big business lobby frequently uses a brilliant piece of propaganda to get the average citizen to side with it. The health-care lobby has trotted it out again in ads and on the floor of the Senate in the debate over how far the patient's rights bill should go. That piece of propaganda is to claim that trial lawyers will be the only ones who will profit from the issue.
A classic rule of propaganda is to take a truth and exagerrate it. While it's very difficult to change a person's mind about something, it's not so hard to inflame what a person already believes. The American public dislikes lawyers and thinks they're greedy, and therein lies the kernel of truth for the big business lobby to work with -- that is, convince the public that trial lawyers are the only ones who stand to benefit. That tactic performs the amazing feat of getting average people to be willing to give up their rights to sue and collect damages from big businesses when they're wronged. It's worked with tort reform and the propaganda war is now on with patient's rights. Getting an individual to sympathize with a corporation is masterful since a corporation cannot reciprocate. Instead corporations exist only to make a profit and are totally without sentiment, despite the warm, golden, gauze-filtered commercials about corporations one can see on television on Sunday mornings and during prime-time news shows. 07.01.01
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