  Worried about the seemingly ever-increasing power and corruption of America's CEO's?&nbsp; George Melloan of the Wall Street Journal (subscription site -- sorry) says guess again: Indeed, if anyone still doubts that lawyers have moved from their control of the Congress and the statehouses to now include a mastery of corporate America, he should look again. State attorneys general have seized the tobacco industry and made it into a cartel earning rents on behalf of state treasuries. Plaintiff lawyers are milking corporations for billions with product-liability class actions. The Sarbanes-Oxley "corporate responsibility" law has arguably made the general counsels of companies more powerful than CEOs by giving the lawyers legal responsibility for minding the behavior of other executives.
Lawyer versus CEO -- maybe that's what Schumpeter meant by the " urlLink creative destruction of capitalism . " &nbsp; One thing is certain: In the tag-team stranglehold of ever-increasing regulation and invented liabilities (mostly, but not exclusively, product liability), the consumer/employee/stockholder (i.e., the little guy) usually ends up as collateral damage in any battle of the elites. &nbsp; urlLink 
