FOCUS: Charles Pierce | Corporations Are Superior People
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "Corporations are people too, my friend, and they are bigger and more powerful people than you ever will be."
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Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "Corporations are people too, my friend, and they are bigger and more powerful people than you ever will be."
READ MORE
In which we learn that Teddy Roosevelt turneth over in his grave.
onster job here by Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Michael Corkery of The New York Times on yet another level to which citizens have become subordinate to their jobs, and to the corporations that deal them out. Corporations are people too, my friend, and they are bigger and more powerful people than you ever will be.Over the last 10 years, thousands of businesses across the country — from big corporations to storefront shops—have used arbitration to create an alternate system of justice. There, rules tend to favor businesses, and judges and juries have been replaced by arbitrators who commonly consider the companies their clients, The Times found. The change has been swift and virtually unnoticed, even though it has meant that tens of millions of Americans have lost a fundamental right: their day in court. "This amounts to the whole-scale privatization of the justice system," said Myriam Gilles, a law professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. "Americans are actively being deprived of their rights."
Is this practice regulated by anyone so as to protect the worker as well as the corporation? Of course not. This is Judge Roy Bean, without the horses, revolvers, and the rotgut whiskey.
For companies, the allure of arbitration grew after a 2011 Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for them to use the clauses to quash class-action lawsuits. Prevented from joining together as a group in arbitration, most plaintiffs gave up entirely, records show. Still, there are thousands of Americans who — either out of necessity or on principle — want their grievances heard and have taken their chances in arbitration. Little is known about arbitration because the proceedings are confidential and the federal government does not require cases to be reported. The secretive nature of the process makes it difficult to ascertain how fairly the proceedings are conducted.
This, of course, works out splendidly for the companies involved. For the truly injured parties, not so well.
All it took was adding simple arbitration clauses to contracts that most employees and consumers do not even read. Yet at stake are claims of medical malpractice, sexual harassment, hate crimes, discrimination, theft, fraud, elder abuse and wrongful death, records and interviews show. The family of a 94-year-old woman at a nursing home in Murrysville, Pa., who died from a head wound that had been left to fester, was ordered to go to arbitration. So was a woman in Jefferson, Ala., who sued Honda over injuries she said she sustained when the brakes on her car failed. When an infant was born in Tampa, Fla., with serious deformities, a lawsuit her parents brought against the obstetrician for negligence was dismissed from court because of an arbitration clause. Even a cruise ship employee who said she had been drugged, raped and left unconscious in her cabin by two crew members could not take her employer to civil court over negligence and an unsafe workplace. For companies, the allure of arbitration grew after a 2011 Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for them to use the clauses to quash class-action lawsuits. Prevented from joining together as a group in arbitration, most plaintiffs gave up entirely, records show.
That case—Concepcion v. AT&T Mobile—was brought by a California couple who were understandably piqued at having to pay $30 for what was supposed to be a free cellphone. The Supreme Court, with Justice Antonin (Short Time) Scalia writing for a 5-4 majority, ruled that a contract the Concepcions had signed with AT&T barred them from seeking class-action damages in civil court. This opened a loophole through which most of corporate America proceeded to come hurtling. The results, as theTimes series suggests, have not been good ones.
Among the class actions thrown out because of the clauses was one brought by Time Warner customers over charges they said mysteriously appeared on their bills and another against a travel booking website accused of conspiring to fix hotel prices. A top executive at Goldman Sachs who sued on behalf of bankers claiming sex discrimination was also blocked, as were African-American employees at Taco Bell restaurants who said they were denied promotions, forced to work the worst shifts and subjected to degrading comments. Some state judges have called the class-action bans a "get out of jail free" card, because it is nearly impossible for one individual to take on a corporation with vast resources.
When Senator Professor Warren talks about "tricks and traps" in the financial system, this is what she's talking about.
How did financial products get so dangerous? Part of the problem is that disclosure has become a way to obfuscate rather than to inform. According to the Wall Street Journal, in the early 1980s, the typical credit card contract was a page long; by the early 2000s, that contract had grown to more than 30 pages of incomprehensible text. The additional terms were not designed to make life easier for the customer. Rather, they were designed in large part to add unexpected–and unreadable–terms that favor the card companies. Mortgage-loan documents, payday-loan papers, car-loan terms, and other lending products are often equally incomprehensible. And this is not the subjective claim of the consumer advocacy movement. In a recent memo aimed at bank executives, the vice president of the business consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton observed that most bank products are "too complex for the average consumer to understand."
And remember that McDonald's coffee-scalding case that got blown up into an argument for tort reform, the case that the tort-reformers haven't been able to shut their gobs about for over two decades? (Remember also how almost everything that everybody knew about that case was wrong?) Why does that case – and the malarkey surrounding its political utility – still resonate while the woman who was drugged and raped, and then prevented from suing her employer die unheard in our politics?
Because the media is owned by corporations and corporations are people, my friend. Reckless people people who have gone sociopathic with greed, but people nonetheless.
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