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Managing Your Intangibles or Comparing Wal-Mart's Legal Expertise with the Legal Expertise of Small Towns and Villages

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Small towns and villages often wind up electing their most prominent businesspersons as members of council and mayor. The legal expertise that this type of elected official brings to the office appears to be real estate, zoning, variances, and hiring friends to do the work, without going to jail in the process. If you think this is adequate to cope with a major retailer such as Wal-Mart or Home Depot, you are wrong, and it is this inability to grasp the legal problem that has enabled the major retailers to wipe out independent wholesalers, jobbers and retailers throughout the United States for the past 30 years or so.

At one time I was interested in how farmers lost their farms, and I started to make some inquiries. I found out from a former sharecropper about some of the problems, and I was able to come to a conclusion that many farmers in the United States lost their farms because they did not seek relief under the Robinson-Patman Act. See my website at My Farmgate Website or Why Farmers Lost Their Farms. The problem seems to be that the prices that farmers were getting in the market place was not enough for them to buy the farming goods they needed and still make a profit. The largest farming organizations were able to make huge profits when selling their crops into the market, but the small farmers couldn't. This indicated to me that the small farmers were getting charged too much for the goods they bought to work their farms, and that a Robinson-Patman Act price discrimination suit could have given them the money they needed to save their farms.

The same thing has been happening with independent wholesale, jobber and retail businesses. They are paying too much for their goods and are unable to resell their goods profitably, even though the large major retailers are offering their goods for much less to the public and are enjoying huge profits. For example, last year AutoZone had an admitted 46.1% profit margin (not including various payments and benefits obtained from manufacturers, I suspect) and Advance Stores (Advance Auto Supply) enjoyed an even higher profit margin, of 46.8%, selling their goods for prices near or probably slightly above the prices set by AutoZone. Meanwhile, the smaller, independent competitors, charging higher prices are unable to compete because their profit margins are in the neighborhood of 33-35%, approximately.

Wal-Mart and the other major retailers are very sophisticated. They have a fortune invested in software and databases and other intellectual property. Broadly, intellectual property is protected by patent, trademark, copyright or secrecy agreements, and the breach of any of them gives rise to the right to sue someone for patent, trademark or copyright infringement or (as to secrecy agreements) for breach of agreement or breach of trust, among other claims. It is this array of intangibles that protects the value of the largest corporations and enables them to get larger and larger, at your expense and mine.

Isn't it about time for residents of the nation, or of a town, village or county, to take stock of the intangibles applicable to them, and to manage them with appropriate lawsuits in the event the intangible rights are being infringed?

I wrote a book explaining how the Robinson-Patman Act should be enforced by local towns against major retailers and their suppliers (manufacturers) because of the illegal prices that are being given to the major retailers, which prices are driving local businesses out of business. See my website for my book, Saving Main Street and Its Retailers at Website for Saving Main Street and Its Retailers In my book I introduced my concept for the "Town Attorney General", a lawyer to be appointed by any town or village or county in the United States for the purpose of enforcing the laws protecting the local residents and small businesses (which laws are the intangibles for small-town residents that I referred to above). My website is www.townattorneygeneral.com. Then, I created a website to run for council or mayor in every one of the nation's 18,500 towns and villages, to be able to get myself or some other qualified person appointed as town attorney general - see my website at Website for Default Candidacy for Mayor/Council. Then, I decided to run for New York Attorney General to be able to help get my town attorney general program established in New York State. See my campaign website at Website for Carl E. Person for NYS Attorney General - Green Party.

If America as we know and love it is to be saved, it is going to be through the enforcement of laws at the local level of government. We need to enforce the nation's laws that the Federal government no longer enforces, laws such as the antitrust laws that are needed to protect the residents and small businesses of the nation's 18,500 towns and villages. The town attorney general is the person to do this. It expands the office of the state attorney general by having an attorney general for civil law enforcement in every town and village in the United States. This is a powerful way to get around the fact that the top of our federal government refuses to have the appropriate agencies enforce the nation's laws against the nation's and world's largest corporations. The reason for this, of course, is that the major corporations are in control of the U.S. government and is able to have the U.S. government do what is best for major corporations and not what is best for the nation's citizens and small businesses.

The town attorney general will change this, and doesn't even need any new laws to start right away. As soon as the town attorney general is appointed by a town, village or country, the attorney will start managing the intangibles belonging to the town and its residents and small businesses, and find a way to have the claims brought into court. Some of the claims might be purchased by the town, with an interest kept by the seller of the claim, to enable the town to commence and maintain lawsuits on a regular basis, and not throw this obligation on human beings that have insufficient funds and after being put out of business may have less interest in maintaining a lawsuit while trying to change careers (or going to work for the major corporations that put them out of business).