The joys of federalism -- tobacco edition

There is this weird thing that's going on in Florida -- and only Florida -- in which long-time smokers, or in most cases their survivors, are winning millions upon millions of dollars from tobacco companies.
Only Floridians are allowed to sue.  Only Floridians (or their families) who can prove that they were addicted to cigarettes before it became public knowledge that cigarettes were addictive killers, got cancer (and in most cases died) have a hope in hell of winning. 
                                                                         * * *
Here's what happened as best as I can figure out:  In 1994, a class action lawsuit was filed in a Florida state court against all of the major tobacco companies.  There ensued a lot of really complicated legal stuff over the next 12 years, including a separate suit by the states themselves against the tobacco companies culminating in the "Master Settlement Agreement" in which the tobacco companies agreed to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to the states to pay their Medicaid costs for treating indigent smokers, and individual suits in most other states were somehow verboten as part of the agreement.
But in this one case, now known as Engle v. Liggett Group (Fla. 2006), the Miami trial judge certified a nationwide class of people with smoking-related diseases and survivors of deceased smokers.  A jury eventually heard the case and awarded damages of more than $145 billion.  A state appeals court later said the class can only be made up of Florida residents.
Then the Florida Supreme Court in 2006 decertified the class altogether and tossed out the $145 billion verdict, but it ruled that class members -- 8,000 of them -- could file individual suits using the Engle jury's findings that the tobacco companies lied about the dangers and addictiveness of smoking over decades.
                                 * * *
Sooo, ever since that ruling, trial after trial has been going on in the Florida courts with varying results.  The family of one woman won $300 million, later reduced to $37 million, another family won $5 million, later overturned, the widow of a construction worker got $75 million.
Overall, the families have won nearly 70 percent (42 cases) of the trials held so far and the tobacco companies have won about 30 percent (19).  One verdict has been overturned and several large awards have been reduced in the Florida appeals courts.  Interestingly, in April the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the tobacco companies' appeals of four cases -- thus upholding verdicts of $28 million, $15.8 million, $3.4 million and $6.2 million.
In doing so, the high court also affirmed the Engle ruling itself -- that is, the one that decertified the class, overturned the $145 billion verdict but said plaintiffs could use the jury's findings to pursue their own suits -- in Florida only. 
And so, the trials go on.  Only 7,930 or so to go.
In a recent case, a Florida appeals court ordered a new trial on damages because the smoker's husband was listed on the verdict form as supplying his wife with cigarettes, allegedly contributing to her death and thus perhaps prejudicing the jury to award low damages of only $500,000.
In another case, a Florida appellate court has thrown out a $79.2 million jury award against R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.  finding that the $7.2 million compensatory damages portion was larger than the evidence at trial reasonably supported.
Some attorneys are making boatloads of money, some appellate judges are beholden to the tobacco companies for their election campaign money, some families are really making out big-time, some are losing heart-breaking amounts of money they thought they had won from sympathetic juries.  The tobacco companies are employing phalanxes of lawyers and the only fun aspect of the whole thing is watching juries take those companies for astronomical amounts of money.  

What I find so strange is this:  How did we get to the point that only Floridians can sue for wrongdoing that the tobacco companies committed on millions of people nationwide?   Or, since the states settled with the tobacco companies in 1995, why is it that anybody is allowed to sue? Or why isn't everybody? 
It's all part and parcel of our very odd and somewhat rare federal system in which the federal government and each of our 50 states can make separate and sometimes very unequal laws.
You do see the occasional suit in some other state, but they have become rare as statutes of limitation have expired, not to mention smokers.   Only the Engle class members are guaranteed the right to sue. 
It is not that way in most other countries where one set of laws govern the entire country.
Ain't life grand in these United States?

How an ALEC bill becomes a law

Just had to share this with you.  From Mark Fiore at PRWatch.org.

'We were living on the edge'

Mitt and Ann Romney enjoying their summer home at Lake Winnipesaukee

I recently came across this 1994 interview with Ann Romney that just leaves me speechless (not really, but please, please read it. It's priceless).
It seems that Ann and Mitt were really "struggling" in college, circa late 1960s, so much so that they lived in a basement apartment that cost $62 a month and were so poor that they had to use a door for a desk.
"We were living on the edge, not entertaining," as they both attended Brigham Young University, she tells the Boston Globe in this Oct. 20, 1994, interview when Mitt was running for governor of Massachusetts.
Well I can feel for her. In 1967 I too was living on the edge, in my senior year at Rutgers, College of South Jersey, in lovely downtown Camden, working two or three part-time jobs (who can remember now), living in an $80 a month apartment, with help from a roommate who was also struggling, and spending $25 a week between us for food in a good week.
If I wanted to cut up my 1967 college yearbook, I could show you a picture of me with the College Center Activities Committee. I was summoned to pose for the photo while I was working one of those two or three jobs so there I am in a hideous canary-yellow waitress-bus girl uniform that I wore while busing tables in the college center.  Hey, it was a job and I was not too proud to do any job that kept the wolf from my door.
According to the interview with Ann Romney, despite the fact she and Mitt were struggling students, she was kicking out a kid every year or two and not working because she and Mitt thought it was important "for me to stay home with the children, and I was delighted."
"Mitt and I walked to class together, shared housekeeping, had a lot of pasta and tuna fish and learned hard lessons."
"I had a baby sitter during class time, but otherwise I'd hold my son on my lap while I studied," she said.
What! A baby sitter? I was the baby sitter. No woman I ever went to school with could afford to have children and go to college at the same time.
Maybe baby daddy could go to school, but baby momma got baby sitters only so she could work to put baby daddy through. Already back then Ann's universe and the rest of our universes were diverging into different planes of existence.
I walked to classes too, right out my back door.  And I ate a lot of tuna fish and pasta (though I don't think we called it that back then) and even, on occasion, canned bacon.
That's right. Bacon in a can. The most God awful stuff on the face of the Earth.  My roommate and I also shopped for label-less mystery cans at the Campbell Soup Co. thrift store. You never knew what was in the can until you opened it.
Mitt and Ann and my roommate and I and millions of other baby Boomer children were alike in one respect -- we had been brought up to believe that education was the pathway to a comfortable Middle Class existence and we understood that our college poverty was temporary.
Here's where we were different. She claims that neither she nor Mitt got any help from their very well-to-do parents during those college years. Hard to believe, but okay. I'll take her word.
My mother and stepfather didn't help me either, other than buying me a $200, 10-year-old Volkswagen. But I am eternally grateful that my father faithfully sent me $50 a month.
I think now that must have been an awesome struggle for him as he was living in a trailer and supporting a second family while working at a GE plant. Without that monthly stipend I would most assuredly not have graduated from college.
Here is another way the college-era Romneys and I were different. I really was struggling.
I was literally living hand to mouth, never knowing whether I would make tuition or rent from one month to the next. And I hasten to acknowledge that I was not alone.   Millions of us have gone through that mill.
The Romneys, on the other hand, had a very nice fallback: They owned a fair amount of American Motors stock, courtesy of Mitt's father, that they could sell when the rent money came due, according to Ann.
Did I mention that Romney's father, George, was the president of American Motors?
It's not clear how much stock Mitt had in those horrible old college days.  By one estimate, it was roughly $60,000 worth in 1969 dollars (about $377,000 today), not "we're facing starvation" by any means.
Here's Ann: "Five years later, stock that had been $6 a share was $96 and Mitt cashed it so we could live and pay for education."
Ann does admit that Mitt's daddy helped them out with a loan so they could buy their first home for $42,000 in Belmont, Mass., around 1971, which they sold seven years later for $90,000.
"So we not only stayed for free, we made money.  As I said Mitt's very bright," Ann told the Globe.
He may be very bright, but making money on that house doesn't prove it.  The Romneys merely took advantage of the same rising housing market the rest of us did.
My husband and I bought a home in 1970 in Trenton for $24,000 and sold it in 1979 for $54,000. We then bought a home in Swarthmore for $100,000 in 1981 that we sold in 1990 for $210,000.  I bought a house for $154,000 in 1991 and sold it three years ago for $275,000.  And we were financial dimwits.
Here is what is clear -- from the time they were "poor students" until now, Mitt and Ann Romney have never lived on the edge as you and I did, as most blue collar, Middle Class and poor people did and do.
They have never known what it was like to work your way through college because you had to and then work the rest of lives to provide a comfortable life for your families. They have never lost their job to outsourcing, their home to foreclosure or 40 percent of their retirement savings to Wall Street gambling like so many of the rest of us have. They have never had to go back to work in their retirement years because they don’t have enough money even with Social Security to survive.
They knew that one brief period of pretend belt-tightening in college and that was it.
Mitt Romney has been retired since 1998 (or 2001 depending on whether you believe him or his SEC filings) and is still raking in millions of dollars a year from his former business.
Our 401Ks have $100,000 or so if we were lucky and frugal and didn't get killed by the stock market. 
His IRA (and here’s a great mystery) has $102 million.
"We were struggling" my sweet patootie.

More than 1 million PA voters may lack valid IDs

The Justice Department is investigating the PA Voter ID law

This just in: the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating the Pennsylvania Voter ID Act and an expert report submitted to the Commonwealth Court ahead of Wednesday's court hearing on the new law  may help it establish a good case of vote suppression.
The report estimates that 1,055,200 registered Pennsylvania voters (almost 13 percent) lack a valid photo ID and 1,364,433 or 14.4 percent, of eligible voters lack a valid ID to vote in November's presidential election.
If this report is correct, that's more than 1 million of the state's  already registered, already on the books, voters who do not qualify to vote under the state's new voter ID law.  That's out of the state's roughly 8.8 million total registered voters, or nearly one in nine. 
Worse, an estimated 1.2 million eligible Pennsylvania voters think they have a valid ID, but do not, according to the 97-page report based on surveys conducted by Matt A. Barreto, Ph.D., of the University of Washington and Gabriel R. Sanchez, Ph.D, of the University of New Mexico.   
Even worse, 37 percent of eligible voters, 34 percent of registered voters and 34 percent of those who voted in 2008 are totally unaware that a photo ID law exists, the report says.
That's one-third or more of the state's potential voters who don't even know they will need to produce a driver's license or other government-sanctioned photo ID with when they walk into their polling place in November.  Fortunately a majority of them will have a valid driver's license.  Let's hope they bring it with them.
In addition to the lawsuit, Applewhite v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, No. 330 MD 2012, which will be heard starting at 10 a.m. Wednesday, it was disclosed today that the U.S. Department of Justice has opened a formal investigation of the state's voter ID law by sending a three-page letter to Pennsylvania Secretary of State Carol Aichele Monday asking her for a bunch of annoying records, including the entire state voter registration list AND the entire current state driver's license and personal identification card list AND all documents identifying registered voters who lack acceptable proof of identification AND the records supporting Aichele's recent estimate that only758,000 registered voters lack state-issued photo ID.
By the way, the DOJ wants those records in 30 days. 
The DOJ's probe marks the first time it has publicly acknowledged a formal investigation of a voter ID law passed in a state which is not covered by Section 5 of the 1964 Voting Rights Act, which requires certain states with a history of racial discrimination to have changes to their voting laws precleared.  The Pennsylvania investigation falls under Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits any state from enacting a “voting standard, practice, or procedure that results in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.”
And, in Professor Barreto's expert report, the DOJ has a big helping hand in proving that minorities are being denied the right to vote.   He found that the biggest impact of the new law will be on Latino voters, 18 percent of whom lack a valid ID compared to non-Hispanic  whites (14 percent)who  lack a valid ID.  Also more women (17 percent) than men (11 percent) do.
The kind of good news is this: Barreto estimates that among eligible voters, 86% of whites and 86.8% of Blacks possess a valid photo ID, and for registered voters the figures are 87 percent and 86 percent.
But enough statistics.  Read the report if you're a statistics maven.
Sufficient to say, we're having some fun now, boys and girls.

The big lie and low-information voters

As Inquirer political columnist Dick Polman so ably points out in today's paper, the Republicans are pushing a lie of colossal, world-class proportions when they claim that the Affordable Care Act is the "biggest tax on the Middle Class in American history." 
In fact, the penalty for not buying health insurance, according to Polman and the Congressional Budget Ofiice, will fall on only 1.2 percent of the public -- those who do not have employment-based insurance,  Medicare, Medicaid or some other government insurance program, like military or veterans' programs, and who are not too poor to pay for private coverage but just won't do it.
By the way, it's not a tax just because the Supreme Court upheld it as constitutional under Congress' taxing powers.  Literally tens of  thousands of fees, tax deductions, tax credits and other government-regulated financial arrangements are allowed under the taxing power that are not direct taxes.   These include the premiums that retired government employees pay for their government-run health insurance. 
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his spokesmen have already flip-flopped on the issue, saying first that he agreed with President Obama that the penalty for not buying insurance coverage is not a tax, then, buying into the party's propaganda, that it is.
Romney is a rather poor candidate to be attacking the ACA, as it is modeled on his own Massachusetts health care plan, which the vast majority of Massachusetts citizens are perfectly happy with.  Which explains why he never talks about his governorship. 
Romney's flip-flopping is not so concerning in the presidential race as three other factors:  (1) voter suppression, (2) the ocean of campaign financing money being raised much more successfully by Republicans than Democrats and (3) Republican TV commercials already saturating the national television markets proclaiming that the ACA is the "biggest tax on the Middle Class in American history."
Here in Pennsylvania, we learned last week that House Majority Leader Mike Turzai (R. Allegheny)  boasted to a Republican group that Pennsylvania's new Voter ID law will guarantee Romney's win in Pennsylvania, then we learned that as many as 10 percent of the state's already legally registered voters could be disenfranchised, including upwards of 180,000 voters in Philadelphia.
It was nice of Turzai to finally be truthful about the purpose of the law -- to disenfranchise Democratic voters.  As many, many people have been pointing out for some time, voter fraud involving people trying to impersonate other people at the polls is, and has been, virtually non-existent, not only in this state but throughout the US.
Photo ID not so easy
Those that say, "Well, all people have to do is go down to the nearest PennDOT office and get a photo ID" are delusional.  It is way more complicated.
You have to have  or obtain a Social Security card.  I haven't seen mine in decades, probably since I obtained a new Pa. driver's license in 1991. Everybody knows their number, but many don't have their actual cards.
Step 2 is to have or obtain a birth certificate.  This is sometimes impossible for older people, people who were born at home and people who were born in places where records have been lost over time.  
Step 3 is to make sure your name harmonizes with all your records. If you have never used the name on your birth certificate or if you changed your name when you married, that creates more problems.
Step 4 is to get yourself and your papers to the DMV.  Then you have to request and fill out an affidavit swearing that you will be using the ID only for voting and that you can't afford to pay the $13 for it.  If you have had to pay for your birth certificate or the photo ID card, that's a poll tax plain and simple. 
Students have to have a college photo ID with an expiration date, which as of two months ago, 80 percent of Pennsylvania colleges did not issue.   Finally, if you are not already registered, you have to go do that. 
I can see a lot of students, poor and elderly saying,"Why bother.  I just won't vote."
If that was the goal of Gov. Tom Corbett, Rep. Turzai and Senate Majority Leader Dominick Pileggi,  congratulations, mission accomplished.  
Brainwashing the rest
So once you cull out the 800,000 or so mostly Democratic voters in Pennsylvania, you are still left with the job of making sure the remaining Democratic, independent and Republican voters are adequately subliminally conditioned to vote against their own economic interests and for those of the corporations.
That means running millions of dollars of "Big Lie" TV commercials at every opportunity.  We will not be able to mute or channel-surf away from these ads fast enough, and most people won't even try.  They'll just sit there and absorb the crap-- delivered in stentorian tones while bad photos of the opposing candidates are projected -- until viewers become convinced that whatever they are seeing was their opinion all along.
Many people will go out and vote who have been mesmerized by the ads and haven't bothered to research the facts or issues.   These are the so-called "low-information voters" who -- in enough numbers -- can decide the economic future of generations.
One Tea Party" acquaintance sends me gushing emails talking about how handsome Romney is and how much she loves him, with many multiple exclamation points, even while her own economic and health coverage circumstances are desperate.  But she tells me, she opposes ACA because it might end up covering illegal immigrants.  So much better to deny health care to millions than to let a single undeserving person get away with anything. 
Unfortunately, this woman has a PA driver's license so she will get to vote.  

Vagina, vagina, vagina

Thanks Daily Times for making me blogger of the week!
I'm going on vacation tomorrow and don't have a long post in mind, but let me just say this on behalf of women everywhere: vagina.
Two Democratic Michigan state legislators were banned from speaking against yet another Draconian bill to suppress women's rights last week, apparently for saying the word "vagina."  Which is the anatomically correct word for the part of a woman's body that seems to scare the living daylights out of some men.  But please check out the link above for details on the bill that the Michigan State Assembly voted to approve.  That's more important than some silly tactic to silence women, which you may have noticed, never works.

Center three, l-r: Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer, Rep. Lisa Brown, and Eve Ensler

So the Michigan Legislature's silly tactic brought out Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, who is always willing to talk about her vagina, and several hundred other women to protest on Monday.  I won't make you watch the five-minute video, though you can find it on YouTube (Eve Ensler Michigan), but here is Ensler's address to the crowd.  She just says it all so well.  Thank you, so aptly named Eve.

Thanks for coming out and standing up for vaginas!
I am over you being afraid of vaginas! I am over trans-vaginal wands and dudes who want to control my vagina but are afraid to know my vagina, respect my vagina. Who can't even SAY vagina!
I am over the over-regulation of women's health clinics and women's bodies and vaginas when those same over-regulators do nothing to protect those same women when they get pregnant, when they get raped, unemployed and sick and need more financial support.
I am over dudes who pretend to care about personhood and cut Planned Parenthood which makes the health of my personhood possible.
I am over forces who wanna call victims of rape "accusers" and not "victims".
I am over you having the chutzpah to redefine rape so that a drugged woman or a date-raped woman wouldn't even be considered a raped woman.
And, by the way, I'm over RAPE!
I'm over rape culture, rape mentality, and rape jokes.
I'm over people not understanding that rape is not a joke and I'm REALLY over being told I don't have a sense of humor and women don't have a sense of humor when most women I know (and I know a LOT of women) are really fucking funny.
We just don't think an uninvited penis up our anus or up our vagina is a laugh riot.
I am over free women getting raped in the US military by their comrades.
I am over women still being silent about rape because they're made to believe it's their fault and they did something to make it happen.
I am over dudes voting against the Violence Against Women Act when one in every three women on this planet will be raped or beaten in their lifetimes.
The destruction and the muting of women is the destruction of life itself. No women: no future. Duh!
I am really over some powerful men pretending this deep love of fetuses and babies and life when we know it's all about your terror of our sexuality and power. If you, if you really cared about life, you  would never, ever consider letting a woman die rather than performing an abortion.
You would ask the life-givers, the women, what they need and want and you would listen to them. You would honor their vaginas, maybe even worship their vaginas. You would cherish the word "vagina" and know there is nothing dirty or disgusting about the place where all life comes from.
I am over the Michigan state legislature, and any legislature, censoring, rebuking and removing Lisa Brown because they find the word "vagina" contemptible or out of bounds or lacking decorum. My vagina's got to got decorum!
And I am over all those other legislators that went along with it and didn't stand up.
I want to say something to all the good men here: I'm a little over it. You are brave and wonderful. But where are you? You live with us. You make love with us. You father us. You befriend us. You brother us, get nurtured and mothered and eternally supported by us. So why aren't you standing with us? Why aren't you driven to the point of madness and action when you see us being raped and humiliated and censored? Why don't you care about this as much as you do about sports?
I am over brilliant remarks being called "tantrums" and outspoken being called "crazy" and lacking decorum when they are just smart.
I'm over it! We are over it! This the moment. This is the moment. This is where it all turns around. This is the moment when we talk back and speak back. This is where we rise up.This is where we say "yes" to Lisa Brown. "Yes" to Barbara Byrum. "Yes" to every brave woman who is standing with us today. Gretchen Whitmer. Barbara Byrum. Stacy Erwin-Oakes. Dian Slavens. Rashida Tlaib. Vicki Barnett. Joan Bauer. Ellen Cogen Lipton. Maureen Stapleton. And all the amazing actors and activists up on this stage.
This is where we say: "VAGINA!" Say it!
CROWD: VAGINA!
Say it!
CROWD: VAGINA!
Not 'cause we're provocative. Not 'cause we're dirty. Not 'cause we're trying to make you uncomfortable. Not 'cause we're immoral or inappropriate.
VAGINA!
CROWD: VAGINA!
'Cause they're beautiful and real and mystical and alive and powerful and SO ARE WE!
And I wanna say to all these Republicans: we are free, YOU are free!

Even Tinkerbell believes in government regulation

Clap your hands if you believe that eliminating virtually all government regulation of business --  banking, employment, health and safety, environmental, insurance, food safety -- will instantly, or even slowly, transform our economy into a dynamic machine in which corporations will hire millions of new workers, always do the right thing by its customers and workers and make us all healthy, happy citizens of an unimaginable utopia. 
No?  Me neither.  

But George W. Bush did, which is why he appointed anti-regulation zealots to regulatory agencies (FDA, USDA), didn't fill empty positions in regulatory and investigative agencies, had his attorney general concentrate almost exclusively on child porn prosecutions while financial ripoffs were rampant, (Ashcroft), slowed EPA cleanups to a crawl and let his SEC investigators spend their days actually watching pornography -- all of which helped lead us to the biggest economic meltdown this side of the Great Depression.
 Mitt Romney also believes in the magic of cutting government regulation.  Here's what he says:

Federal agencies today have near plenary power to issue whatever regulations they see fit. Though most are nominally controlled by the president, in actual practice agencies are frequently able to act autonomously with little or no presidential oversight. The end result is an economy subject to the whims of unaccountable bureaucrats pursuing their own agendas.
A Romney administration will act swiftly to tear down the vast edifice of regulations the Obama administration has imposed on the economy.  It will also seek to make structural changes to the federal bureaucracy that ensure economic growth remains front and center when regulatory decisions are made.

That'll be the day. 
Certainly government regulation is not perfect.  It took 17 pounds of paperwork and 15 years  to convince the government to transfer ownership of a mothballed Vietnam War-era destroyer, the USS Edson, to a group wanting to make it a floating museum  in Michigan.
But the vast majority of government regulations are intended, and do, protect our health, safety and pocketbooks (food inspections, Occupational Safety and Health rules, Workers compensation, wage and hour regulations, consumer protection laws, environmental protection, unemployment insurance) and they retrieve billions in taxpayer money each year stolen by crooked bankers, insurers, health care providers and others.  A few examples from this year and last:
* The nation’s five largest mortgage servicers agreed in March to a landmark $25 billion settlement with a coalition of state attorneys general and federal agencies.  This is the largest joint state-federal settlement in history and it is the result of a massive civil law enforcement investigation and initiative by state attorneys general, state banking regulators, and nearly a dozen federal agencies. (Not big enough, but it's a start.)

Bartlett Grain Co. explosion

* Dr. Jacques Roy of Dallas, Texas, is accused of bilking Medicare of nearly $375 million by recruiting homeless and fake patients to sign for care that wasn't provided.  If convicted, this doctor is likely to go to prison for a very long time.
* The New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance  today (March 8, 2012) announced that in 2011 the Department recovered more than $31.8 million for consumers and medical providers from insurers and financial institutions. (Not all regulators are federal.)

* The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that BP North America Inc. has agreed to pay an $8 million penalty and invest more than $400 million to install state-of-the-art pollution controls and cut emissions from BP’s petroleum refinery in Whiting, Ind.  Kind of a middling EPA score)

* Bartlett Grain Co. L.P. faces five willful and eight serious safety violations cited by the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration following an October 2011 grain elevator explosion in Atchison that killed six workers and left two others hospitalized.

* The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) next week (June 4, 2012)  will begin instituting a zero-tolerance policy for six additional strains of E. coli that are responsible for human illness.
* The owners and managers of Nifty Fifty's have pleaded guilty to skimming $15 million in receipts from their five restaurants and evading $2.2 million in federal employment and personal taxes.   We pay our taxes in this country when the pols don't provide huge loopholes.
* There are 6.6 million unemployed 18-26-year-old college students and graduates, high school grads and those in between who cannot get a job but who can, for a short time, remain on their parents' health insurance.  That's a government  regulation too.  No one on the Bush Administration gave a crap for these young people who break bones, develop odd diseases, need their wisdom teeth removed and can't be persuaded to ride their motorcycles with a helmet.
* The Department of Justice will recover $21 million from SunTrust banks, that will go back to 20,000 black and Hispanic mortgage payers who were charged high rates than other bank customers.  To find these 20,000 victims, government investigators and their computers had comb through 850,000 mortgage applications.  Truly your tax dollars at work.
* The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the nation's consumer protection agency, is warning consumers to be on the alert for scam artists posing as debt collectors. It may be hard to tell the difference between a legitimate debt collector and a fake one. Sometimes a fake collector may even have some of your personal information, like a bank account number.
I could write and document thousands of pages of this sort of thing every week. This is what government does. It plays cop or umpire or detective between us and countless abusive corporate interests.  It regulates and tries to control the excesses of the capitalist system.
Government investigations, regulations, arrests, indictments and sentencings go on constantly, hundreds of times a day as various agencies go about their jobs.  You never hear about 99 percent of them.  They're small potatoes.  Many of them go to jail, many pay large fines and many do both.
Then occasionally the government catches up with the Bernie Madoffs. Does his experience make you want to start a Ponzi scheme?  That''s a benefit of government regulation as well.
If  you want to see this seamy underbelly of day-to-day government, just Google the various government agencies, go to their reports or press release tabs and just start reading:  DOJ, EPA, EEOC, HSS, IRS, FTC,  Labor Department, USDA, OSHA, SEC, state departments of banking, insurance, labor, industry, health, agriculture, FBI.  I guarantee you, you won't keep up with it.
If you have access to Westlaw, look up publications called Westlaw Journal  Government Contractor, Bank and Lending, Health Care Fraud, White Collar Crime and Insurance Coverage, just for starters.  These biweeklies and monthlies chronicle the big ripoffs year after year, decade after decade.  A few issues of any of them will make you sick to your stomach, but perhaps also a little proud of what our unsung watchdogs do on their best days to catch millions of bad guys out there ripping us off.
 Romney is right.  These agencies do act autonomously with little executive oversight as do countless other federal and state agencies.  They're supposed to. They do cost businesses money, money that  businesses have stolen the taxpayers, consumers or their own employees.  Are we supposed to just sit back and let them do that in the name of a robust economy?  Forget Ayn Rand, doing well for oneself has never led to doing well for society.
Are we supposed to go back to the days of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, Love Canal, a burning Cuyahoga River, the Great Laeks filled with dead fish, acid rain, smog so bad everyone was urged to stay indoors, Bhopal, the Station nightclub fire, PCBs in cow's milk, diet drugs that kill you -- just so businesses can flourish in a unregulated climate?  Have you ever heard of Rocky Flats, Hanford or Agent Orange?  The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act,  the Superfund Act?  Building codes, the National  Highway Transportation Safety Administration?
Clap your hands if you're are in favor of eliminating all of the regulations and regulatory agencies that are protecting us from all these things.  Do you want to return to the 1920s?  I can't hear you.