How Big Tobaccos Kansas City Law Firms Killed Healthcare
Reform
Breaking
News January 18, 2010
by
Stew Webb
Federal
Whistleblower
Exclusively
for the Whistleblower Network News
www.stewwebb.com
On
December 4th, Michael Gans, the Clerk of the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of
Appeals delivered a very special Christmas present for Greg Bentz the former
president of the Kansas City Metropolitan Bar Association (KCMBA). Bentz is a
partner in Polsinelli Shughart PC, a racketeering defendant in Lipari v. General Electric et al being
appealed in Michael Gans’ court. Samuel Lipari is appealing a dismissal by U.S.
District Court Chief Judge Fernando J. Gaitan Jr. who turned out to have been
on the board of directors of one of the defendants in the Novation LLC hospital
skimming conspiracy, St. Luke's Health System. Greg Bentz also happens to be on
the St. Luke's Health System Board of Directors.
Lipari’s
racketeering and RICO conspiracy claims had arisen out of misconduct by the
KCMBA firms Polsinelli Shughart PC, Husch Blackwell Sanders LLP and Lathrop
& Gage LLP during the course of antitrust litigation by Lipari’s business
Medical Supply Chain over being prevented from entering the now 2 Trillion
dollar market for hospital supplies controlled by the Novation LLC cartel.
The
Novation LLC cartel is recently in the news again with US Attorneys in
Massachusetts on January 15th charging Novation LLC cartel founding and
controlling member Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) with paying over $10
million in kickbacks to increase sales of a pharmaceutical while rewarding the
healthcare administrators with bribery and ties to other J&J Novation LLC
cartel controlled medical supplies. Per se Sherman Antitrust Act violations.
The
prevention of competition in the markets for hospital supplies resulted in the
recent loss of over 60,000 automotive related manufacturing jobs in the State
of Kansas that had been above living wages and has left the state’s legislature
facing 2010 with over $400 million dollars of revenue shortfalls, requiring a
second year of drastic budget cuts. The revenue shortage is falling hard even
on the Kansas Judicial Branch, which is being required to furlough all court
personnel for six or more weeks this Spring.
In
Missouri, the prevention of competition in the markets for hospital supplies
has taken a much higher human toll. The former Missouri Republican Governor
Matt Blunt was forced to cut back Medicaid eligibility, removing over 90,000
Missourians from healthcare coverage. The shortfalls in revenue and lost jobs
from the un-competitiveness of Missouri businesses forced by the Novation LLC
cartel to pay artificially inflated healthcare benefit costs is exponentially
creating more state residents without health insurance. A crisis visible to the
nation during MSNBC "Ed Show" from the Kansas City Convention Center
on December 10th.[i]
The
present to former KCMBA President Greg Bentz from Clerk Gans was supposed to
have vindicated Bentz’s tenure over the KCMBA at the peak of its corporate
defense attorney members’ power and opulence visible on the Kansas City skyline
as the many law firm skyscrapers. The association’s greatest epoch was in the
latter part of the roaring 2000’s when KCMBA firms defending Big Tobacco had
created a “victory by any means” legal culture, complete with locked elevator
floors and attorney employees avoiding cameras.
The
big law firms did not change their business model as the ethical truth became
more widely known through cracks in the façade like the September 2, 2005
Kansas City Business Journal article quoting the Notre Dame Law School
professor G. Robert Blakey (on KCMBA member Shook Hardy & Bacon) who stated
the government's many mentions of the lawyers in the tobacco racketeering case
are "an indication they could have sued them" and the later
revelations about Lathrop & Gage LLP’s former Chief Executive Tom Stewart’s
involvement of the firm in Bush Administration political efforts to
disenfranchise African Americans. Tom Stewart left as it became revealed that
L&G star Mark F. “Thor” Hearne’s bad legal advice on fee office
transactions to Governor Matt Blunt prevented Blunt from being able to run for
reelection and precipitated the unlawful firings of US Attorneys to obstruct
justice in the USDOJ criminal investigation. Despite this, the giant KCMBA
members wanted to emphasize their economic advantage, doubling down on the
skill sets used to destroy the careers of university medical researchers
investigating the hazards of smoking or starve out the victims of smoking until
their survivors accepted a few house payments.
Under
Greg Bentz the KCMBA promised to secure the revenue of the city’s largest firms
in a time when newly minted law school graduates representing plaintiff’s
against Kansas City area corporate defense firms could research electronic
databases for the freshest case law controlling arguments and one hundred year
old KCMBA big firms with the paper brief banks and endless exploitable junior
associates that were a competitive advantage in an earlier time were instead
forced to compete on a level playing field. The big firms appeared on the
covers of local big business and upscale living magazines. Big was good. A
principal in Shook Hardy & Bacon described the number of attorneys planned
for the firm's new headquarters in “acres.”
Greg Bentz represented the KCMBA’s largest members and the commodity
they were really selling. Influence.
Publicly
a champion of the Missouri Plan, the nation’s gold standard in solutions to
prevent judicial corruption, Greg Bentz advocated strongly in public venues
that any further efforts to reform the selection of judges in Missouri should
be vigorously opposed. Partisan political influence over the judiciary would be
against public policy. However, the KCMBA under Bentz concealed its member
firms’ involvement with the Republican Party and its coveted political power
and influence in both State and federal governments until the beginning of
2009.
Being
on the other end of the Bush White House emails laundered through the
Republican National Committee servers gave the big KCMBA law firms the commodity
Greg Bentz, Bentz’s firm Polsinelli Shughart PC, and the KCMBA firms Husch
Blackwell Sanders LLP and
Lathrop
& Gage LLP were selling. Neither the state’s governor Matt Blunt or the
President’s right hand political advisor Karl Rove called kids just out of KU
or MU law schools leasing a room in some suburban “law office” in the middle of
the night. These “wannabe” attorneys would never be able to call in favors and
deliver outcomes for their clients.
Worse
yet, some of the “favors” called in would be disciplinary actions against new
attorneys precisely for acting ethically and in the public interest. In
Missouri state officials violating every law would obtain a suspension of Scott
Eckersley, a graduate of Brigham Young University and a devout Mormon. In the
latest outrage in Kansas, state women’s prison officials themselves involved in
prostitution and drug rings would start the process against un- corruptible
civil rights attorney Keen Umbehr for exposing their crimes.
In
the spirit of Greg Bentz, Kansas state officials will at least ensure Umbehr
will forever be ineligible to practice before the US Supreme Court. Favors
matter.
Greg
Bentz’s KCMBA was silent on member’s participation in attempting to usurp the
Missouri Chief Supreme Court’s role on the judicial nominee selection committee
to give the Republican governor more control.
Bentz’s
KCMBA was also silent on the need of the Republican Party under Karl Rove to
utilize networks of friendly Republican judges for politically motivated prosecutions.
It is still under reported in the media about how Rove’s plan to target
promising lower level Democrat office holders across the nation started in
Kansas City, Missouri.[ii]
A pioneer of this new harder right view of justice was Judge Fernando J. Gaitan
Jr. Bentz’s former fellow defendant St. Luke’s Health System director.
Most
troubling of all, the KCMBA under Greg Bentz was silent on the Republican Party
turning the Missouri US Attorney’s office into a protection racket, furthering
the GOP’s interest in subverting voting civil rights protections, firing the
very competent Moderate Republican US Attorney Todd Graves and replacing him
with the more Kansas and GOP acceptable Bradley J. Schlozman.
The
Patriot Act was in full swing during Greg Bentz’s KCMBA tenure, including the
repeatedly abused “letters of inquiry.” The Johnson County, Kansas
telecommunications giant Sprint was the backbone of the FBI’s repackaging and
distribution of the NSA warrantless wiretapping Stellar Wind product to GOP friendly
state’s attorneys general and even Karl Rove’s political operatives. To KCMBA
corporate defense attorneys many of whom are also and long suffering KC Chiefs
fans this was like being with a winning football team for a change.
Big
Tobacco defense techniques like obstructing justice through retaliation against
an opponent’s witnesses outside of court became celebrated among members of the
Kansas City Metropolitan Bar Association in informal gatherings. When the
Missouri farmer Dustin Sherwood was having 9 million dollars in property and
bank accounts extorted from him[iii]
in a Western District of Missouri US Bankruptcy Court proceeding by Polsinelli
Shughart PC, Husch Blackwell Sanders LLP and Lathrop & Gage LLP and every
Missouri licensed attorney he contacted refused to represent him, Greg Bentz as
president of the KCMBA refused to help Sherwood.
Michael
E. Gans released the Polsinelli Shughart PC decision at 10 am on December 4th
without realizing that 30 minutes earlier, additional Kansas City Metropolitan
Bar Association member law firms and attorneys had received a detailed
complaint fully supported with complete evidentiary documents exposing they had
joined the racketeering conspiracy during 2008 and 2009, committing felonies of
mail and wire fraud taking additional tangible property from Lipari’s Lee’s
Summit medical supply business trying to enter the market to reduce hospital
costs.
The
KCMBA law firms had never even counseled their hospital supply monopolist
clients to not commit further crimes against the plaintiff suing them.
The
December 4th Christmas present was supposed to be the vindication of
Greg Bentz’s Big is Good tenure as president of the KCMBA. The period described
in Lipari’s RICO lawsuit when Polsinelli Shughart PC attorneys committed
repeated frauds on the Kansas and Missouri federal courts and Blackwell Sanders
LLP attorneys even falsified their client’s participation in 16th
Circuit of Missouri State Court ordered mediation and had conspired with City
of Blue Springs officials to misrepresent transactions over a 10 Million dollar
office building on I-70.
No
one at Polsinelli Shughart PC bothered to tell Eighth Circuit Clerk Michael E.
Gans that as a consequence of repeated rulings contradicting federal statutes,
controlling case law and even the rules of civil procedure, the Tenth Circuit
Chief Clerk Patrick Fisher Patrick J. Fisher and then later Judge Michael W.
McConnell had to resign from that federal appeals court. Seven days after Gans
issued the decision purporting to uphold Kansas City Judge Gaitan, the Tenth
Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge made the surprise announcement he is
leaving the bench.
The
Chief Clerk of the Eighth Circuit US Court of Appeals Michael E. Gans was
probably in the dark about the ring of judges participating in protecting
General Electric a founding and controlling member of the Novation LLC cartel
during the Bush administration. Included in the ring was the Northern District
of Illinois US District Court Judge Mark Filip, also figuring in Lipari’s
lawsuit. But in Michael E. Gans’ defense everyone outside a judicial corruption
investigation acting on information provided by the Kansas Private citizen
David Martin Price and former Chief Judge Eugene R. Wedoff was kept from having
knowledge that would have prevented Mark Filip from being approved as the
Deputy Attorney General of the United States, let alone serving as Acting
Attorney General from January 20 to February 3, 2009.
Judicial
review of trial court decisions is the practical way the nation’s federal bench
is policed against misconduct. The December 4th Per Curium decision
upholding a dismissal of all of Lipari’s RICO claims by U.S. District Court
Chief Judge Fernando J. Gaitan Jr. in direct contradiction to a unanimous
holding by the US Supreme Court as controlling law in a timely Rule 59
reconsideration filed by Lipari with Judge Gaitan and the Eighth Circuit’s
contradiction of its own controlling case law on the ineligibility of Judge
Gaitan to preside over a case where he had failed to disclose he was on the
board of directors of a defendant raised eyebrows among attorneys around the
nation trying to increase healthcare access in the face of the Novation LLC
cartel’s stranglehold.
Now
questions have been raised about whether any judicial review had even taken
place. Lipari filed a timely request for En Banc review of the three judge
screening panel that had upheld Judge Fernando J. Gaitan Jr. Calls were made
confirming the en banc motion had been received by fax and by mail, but still
no notation was recorded on the Eighth Circuit online appearance docket. Favors
matter.
Why
look gift horses in the mouth? Greg Bentz’s big is good philosophy during his presidency of the KCMBA was effective.
The Novation LLC cartel defendants including General Electric never even had to
answer discovery requests in Kansas or Missouri.
Healthcare
insurance companies spent over a Billion dollars fighting healthcare reform,
largely with Washington D.C. “K Street” law firms. News stations around the
country broadcast hours of testimony against healthcare insurers even though
they were not responsible for a decade of double digit increases in the costs
of providing healthcare.
The
nation will probably remove Democrats from the majority in the US House and
even Roy Blunt briefly pulled ahead of Robin Carnahan in the Missouri US Senate
race polling over widespread dissatisfaction with healthcare reform. But, for
those fortunate Novation LLC cartel corporations that were clients of Kansas
City Metropolitan Bar Association law firms, the people’s elected
representatives never knew the Novation LLC cartel’s role in pricing healthcare
out the public’s reach. Even when it was as visible as the difference in care
between Novation LLC’s St. Luke’s Health System and the publicly funded Truman
Memorial Hospitals. Power and influence is worth every penny.