Word: legalism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...24th Street in downtown Washington. At any given time, half a dozen working subgroups were meeting in conference rooms scattered around the hotel buildings. Smaller clusters of players from each side accumulated in the halls. Moore--"tough, decisive, the dominant figure," a participant called him--meandered through these scattered legal islands like his state's namesake river, picking up information and providing his judgments...
Without some form of reparations, apologizing for a historical wrong is an empty gesture. For one thing, both the slaves and the slave owners are long since dead, and you can't repent for the sins of others. And even if you could, our legal system recognizes that repentance without compensation serves only to make the apologizer feel good while doing nothing for the victim. It's why the U.S. government not only apologized but paid $20,000 apiece to Japanese Americans who were sent to concentration camps during World War II. And why Germany not only apologized...
...come this far. Profit margins on cigarettes are now about 34%. Last year Philip Morris had an operating profit of $4.2 billion on domestic cigarette sales of $12.5 billion. Unquestionably, tobacco is a cash crop that can cover the settlement tab and still reward stockholders. And with advertising and legal outlays likely to be scaled back, the industry can recover some of its costs immediately...
...taking after a two-week run-up in which shares of Philip Morris, the No. 1 tobacco company, jumped 9%, reaching a new high on Thursday, while No. 2 RJR rose 14%. Tobacco stocks have sold at a discount, compared with other packaged-goods company shares, because of the legal uncertainties. Many analysts expect the stocks to keep on chugging once Wall Street can reliably calculate the settlement costs. "As uncertainty is removed, the stocks move up," says Roy Burry, tobacco analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. Investors may be willing to pay up for the newfound safety of predictable, if lower...
...update their manufacturing facilities, resulting in several rounds of layoffs. There could be yet another wave of consolidation--or even wholesale corporate restructuring--across the industry, as cost cutting becomes paramount. Some lawyers will lose out as the industry redirects some of the $600 million it spends annually on legal expenses. Remarkably, the industry will find some savings on its tax bill: the settlement costs are deductible...