June 10, 2009 --

Are Some Lawyers Still Getting $700 an Hour?

LPR wonders if law schools should be required to inform applicants that
lawyers are also found in the ranks of the unemployed. LPR learned a year ago
that the job market for U.S. lawyers has shrunk -- even for for lower-level jobs like document review.

LPR heard from a friend, recently. that a German journal reported some American lawyers are getting reduced salaries from their firms to provide services to the poor. LPR has attended meetings, the past 12 months, of lawyers in straitened circumstances. LPR has yet to read about unemployed lawyers in the U.S. media -- unless, having direct knowledge of the problem, it has unconsciously avoided articles on the subject.

LPR has no information about programs that will pay lawyers doing volunteer work for the poor -- except for one program offering $10 an hour -- with a limit of ten hours a week. It would take seven weeks under this program to earn what some lawyers make in one hour. Anyone consider that huge legal fees have led to zero billable hours for members of the bar?

How much longer will The New York Times publish?

LPR is not likely to read about lawyer woes -- or any other problems -- in The New York Times which, effective June 1 raised its newsstand price 33 1/3rd percent -- up 50 cents from $1.50 to $2.00 (with a 25% hike in the price of the Sunday Times -- from $4.00 to $5.00).

Goodness. What does the paper think it is -- an oil company? Seems to LPR that prices like that will either put the Times out of business -- or get it a government bailout (too important to fail).

Well, He Didn't Blame Nixon

New York Times columnist -- and Nobel laureate -- Paul Krugman, writing in the paper, June 2, put most of the blame for our economic ills on Ronald W. Reagan.

And that is how LPR learned what political economics is all about: explain economics from a political position.

Mr. Krugman admitted there is "plenty of blame to go around" and continued: "But the prime villains behind the mess we're in were Reagan and his circle of advisers." Earlier in the column, Mr. .Krugman wrote: "Now, the proximate causes of today's economic crisis lie in events that took place long after Reagan left office...." Apparently, nowadays, one must be very sophisticated in dialectical thought to reach the level of Nobelist in economics.

LPR saw no blame apportioned by Mr. Krugman to 30% interest on credit cards,
to noose-tightening gas prices (and there the oil companies go again), to politicians demanding a mortgage-to-all policy -- in brief, to the practice of predatory capitalism.

Could it be possible that for Mr. Krugman, economic explanations reflect one's
own convenience -- not the reality of the many?