This month's rant deals with the crazy fast food lawsuits that are popping up all over the place and then taking a look at other industries that may soon be next in line. With the gauntlet having been thrown down and scads of opportunistic lawyers on the rampage, anybody with a few bucks in their wallet is now a potential target and up for grabs.

When you think about it, it was only a matter of time before lawyers started searching for lucrative litigation niches within the fast food industry. While most of us need food to exist (lawyers on the other hand can survive quite nicely for years on the blood they suck from their victims), some foods when consumed in excessive quantities can actually be detrimental to our health.

Although we are a free people and are free to eat as much or as little as we like and control of the types of food (not to mention the amounts) we scarf down, these facts do not serve the interests of lawyers and their unquenchable desire to make money by the truckloads.

This fast food lawsuit phenomenon holds the potential for being extremely good news for lawyers and here’s why. Fast food fare can potentially make us fat and it is this potentially that can help make our case. As if we need to remind you once again, it’s not your fault that this meal may contain high levels of salt, fat, sugar and cholesterol. Hey, you didn’t make the meal, you’re just trying to buy a fast, affordable lunch. Even though you are the one who decides what you will eat, it’s not your fault that the meal is relatively inexpensive, is readily accessible and is fast and easy.

The next time you pull up to the drive through window at your local burger doodle and place your order — a belt busting double meat cheeseburger, a super large order of fries and a 44 ounce soft drink, why not add a little extra to this cholesterol, fat and sugar laden lunch time fare?

While you’re at it, why not toss in a lawsuit to boot? hey, we all know that fast food isn’t the greatest thing for us to eat, especially on a regular basis. But in hustle and bustle that is American life these days, we’re collectively eating more fast food than ever before.

If your blood pressure beginning to read in quadruple digits, if there's a little more handle in your love handles than you really want and if the scale reads "tilt" when you weigh yourself in the morning - then maybe, just maybe, you and your other corpulent friends should get together and look into suing the burger doodle for your ill gotten "gains."

After all, it’s not your fault that you’ve been scarfing down burgers and fries faster than a speeding bullet. The burger doodle made them too tempting to resist and should be held accountable for its transgressions — and you may be entitled to compensation!

Harking back to Cash Flow 101, lawyers need victims to survive. And if they don’t have enough people standing in line meeting the victim criteria, they have learned how to "create" a never ceasing contingent of suckers, losers and stooges from which to choose.

The lawyers, under the guise of protecting life’s pushovers who have been taken advantage of by the many big, bad, money grubbing companies out there, are seeing and seizing opportunities to sue, sue and sue some more.

Who do they sue and what do they sue about? Does it really matter any more? Of course not. While lawyers generally want to piece together a claim that has at least a fragment of credibility, they know that their lawsuits do not necessarily have to pass the common sense litmus test. If common sense had anything to do with the lawsuits, could all of those multi-millionaire lawyers have ever prevailed in those ridiculous tobacco lawsuits? Get real.

OK, after the lawyers riddle the fast food industry with lawsuits, who's next in line?  Where do we start? Why not begin our witch hunt with those dastardly devious ice cream makers? Using the tobacco lawsuits as a guideline, where the tobacco companies knew their product was not a healthy choice for us, getting the goods on the ice cream industry should be a snap.

After all, these purveyors of dairy desserts know, and have known for a quite a while, that their product is fattening. If you gulp down ice cream by the gallon, you can get real fat — and getting fat is not good. Then to squeeze the noose around their necks a little tighter, the lawyers would need only point out that the ice cream producers have knowingly made their product just too tempting for regular folks to resist.

With every flavor imaginable available over the counter (you don’t even need a prescription for goodness sakes!), these underhanded ice cream companies have methodically and intentionally duped an unwitting American public into getting hooked on this stuff. When people fall prey to this type of deceitful conspiracy (otherwise known as great marketing to the rest of us in the business arena), lawyers see victims, lots of victims, and that’s not a pretty sight if you’re the ice cream companies. But why stop there?

Peanut butter should also easily fit quite nicely into this "they knew beforehand" category as well. It has long been rumored that the peanut butter manufacturers have been methodically jacking up the peanut content of their product, slowly but surely making millions of Americans peanut butter junkies. We have to have our fix!

How dare those rascals try to sneak even more peanuts into their peanut butter products. But never fear, lawyers are on to their little plan.

Lawyers, using the Big Tobacco lawsuits as a model for their class action effort against Big Peanut Butter, will demonstrate how Big Peanut Butter knew good and well years ago that their products were loaded with peanuts. At least Big Tobacco provided a Surgeon General warning on their product — and the tobacco snuffing lawyers still shredded them to pieces.

With no warning label at all, lawyers are sure to make Big Peanut Butter pay for their devious behavior! And what about the taste? The peanut butter companies have purposely made their product deliciously sweet to the palate, almost too good for the average Joe to resist as a matter of fact.

That means it’s not our fault (it never is nowadays) when we get hooked on peanut butter. A good trial lawyer, armed with this kind of damning information, already has a leg up on any potential lawsuit. Better watch our Mr. Peanut.

But there’s even more to the story than meets the eye. As children, many of us devoured countless thousands of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, never realizing at the time that we were mainlining fats, sugars and oils. Come to think of it, jelly has a lot of sugar in it too, doesn’t it? Maybe we had better contact a lawyer just to be safe.

We all witnessed firsthand what happened when it was suggested that Big Tobacco targeted teenagers in their marketing, didn’t you? Well the Big Peanut Butter lawyers will show beyond a reasonable doubt that the peanut butter makers did them one better by targeting small children for crying out loud. Little kids, not even old enough to smoke, were condemned to a lifetime of codependency.

Peanut related products dominated our childhood years — peanut butter sandwiches, peanut butter crackers, peanut butter cookies. Everywhere you look — we were eating peanut butter concoctions. Many of us still do today. We’re an addicted assemblage of peanut butter junkies, and as a result, we should be entitled to compensation. Cha-ching! Maybe we should all drink to that.

What will we be drinking? Milk? Colas? Beer? The hard stuff? All look like lawsuits looking for a place to happen. Milk, tantamount to shooting up cholesterol, contributes to hardening of the arteries. Oh sure, we can buy that unleaded low fat milk, but why should we? Whole milk tastes a whole lot better and should generate a whole lot more money in our lawsuits. And we’re not just talking milk money, mind you.

Colas are loaded with sugar and caffeine. Beer and hard liquor adds inches to our waistlines and pickles our livers. All the aforementioned possess the primary prerequisites the lawyers are looking for — the makers, distributors, manufacturers and the like knowingly dupe the public into buying their products by making their products pleasing to the tastes of their consumers. Don’t laugh. You shouldn’t be surprised to see major class actions in these areas in the not to distant future.

So who could be next? How about those chocolate companies? First and foremost, these behemoths have the primary requirement needed as a potential lawsuit target — they’re loaded! If you’ve got the money honey, you’re likely up to your armpits in lawyers. And Big Chocolate has oodles of money, not to mention what those scalawags have been doing to us for all of these years.

What have they been doing, you may ask? Come on, get with the program, they have been selling us their super sweet, super tasty, super sugary confectionery treats. Never mind that we love the taste of chocolate (it’s part of the game plan to get us hooked on their product) and we are free to decide how much or how little we consume.

If you’re going to get good at suing at random, you’ve got to remember the number one thing that we’ve repeated with monotonous regularity and that is — nothing is ever your fault. NOTHING! Even if you polish off one candy bar after another like they’re going out of style, you’re a victim and simply can’t help yourself.

Is it your fault the candy bar tastes great? Hell no. Is it your fault that the candy bars are relatively affordable and can actually, in many instances, be purchased in bulk bags? Hell no again. Is it your fault that candy bars are readily available at nearly every grocery store, convenience store and large discount store in America? No, no and no again. 

Repeat after me, "It’s never my fault, it’s never my fault." Hmmmm, just a thought. Maybe, just maybe, the grocery stores, convenience stores and large discount stores are complicit in this candy bar scheme and could be held liable as well?

Are these silly examples? At one time not so long ago I would have said yes they are, but no longer. With lawyers are the warpath looking for the next sitting duck to scalp, no one is safe and secure from the lawsuit mania that has swept across our nation — including yourself.

Where do lawyers draw the line? There’s a very simple answer — lawyers don’t. Nothing is off limits or out of bounds any longer, particularly when lawyers smell a huge payday in the offing. Every single company doing business in America now finds itself with a huge bull’s eye painted on its back, a wide open target for the legions of lawyers to take a shot at every day.

Americans, regardless of where they reside, live in an environment where every move they make and every statement uttered can prove to be a possible litigation magnet. Lawyers can sue anybody, anywhere — over just about anything — and they do.