Month: November 2015

“Privatization of the justice system”
by Tom Sullivan

Just yesterday I was wondering what ever happened to “frivolous lawsuits” and the runaway juries Big Bidness and Republican lawmakers used to cite as reasons to push for tort reform. It seems Republicans couldn’t deliver. Big Bidness went to Plan B: circumventing the courts entirely. The New York Times brings us up to date:

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 There, rules tend to favor businesses, and judges and juries have been replaced by arbitrators who commonly consider the companies their clients, The Times found.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.”

Who needs awards caps when there are no juries and no awards? That is, at least as far as reporters can tell. Proceedings are private and secretive, the decisions “nearly impossible to appeal.” The rest of the article is a lengthy and grim dive into example upon example of arbitration, “a rigged system of expediency,” working well for the companies and not so well for victim/plaintiffs:

“Private judging is an oxymoron,” Anthony Kline, a California appeals court judge, said in an interview. “This is a business and arbitrators have an economic reason to decide in favor of the repeat players.”

They tend to favor repeat customers over plaintiffs they will never see again. Go figure.

In a related story, the Times examines how high the deck is stacked against consumers in everything from credit cards to online shopping through arbitration agreements that include bans on class action lawsuits. Supreme Court rulings in 2011 and 2013 “enshrined the use of class-action bans in contracts” and
rendered action lawsuits all but impossible:

“This is among the most profound shifts in our legal history,” William G. Young, a federal judge in Boston who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, said in an interview. “Ominously, business has a good chance of opting out of the legal system altogether and misbehaving without reproach.”

More than a decade in the making, the move to block class actions was engineered by a Wall Street-led coalition of credit card companies and retailers, according to interviews with coalition members and court records. Strategizing from law offices on Park Avenue and in Washington, members of the group came up with a plan to insulate themselves from the costly lawsuits. Their work culminated in two Supreme Court rulings, in 2011 and 2013, that enshrined the use of class-action bans in contracts. The decisions drew little attention outside legal circles, even though they upended decades of jurisprudence put in place to protect consumers and employees.

Which is to say (as I have), the corporate beast has slipped its collar. Now you are wearing it. The beast holds the other end. One of the behind-the-scenes players in the class-action saga? John G. Roberts Jr. By the time the antitrust case of Italian Colors (a restaurant) v. American Express reached the Supreme Court, Roberts was chief justice. In ruling for American Express, Justice Antonin Scalia defended arbitration, noting, “The antitrust laws do not guarantee an affordable procedural path to the vindication of every claim.” Even if class action is the only viable method for individuals to take on a corporation. In other words, puny humans, you are SOL.

Thinking back to George W. Bush and the heyday of agitation for tort reform, it is no wonder that the phrase has all but disappeared on Capitol Hill. The justice system corporations used to complain was out of control a decade ago is working just fine now, so long as it incarcerates poor people in private, for-profit prisons (debtors’ prisons, in some cases) and large companies have found a way to bypass it and get favorable judgments behind closed doors. Trial by a jury of peers violates an essential rule of the new power dynamics: corporate persons are your betters, not your peers.

Update: Fight back at faircontracts.org [h/t RP]

Going directly to the mooks

by digby

In another clever media move, Trump is appearing on Fox Sports “The Herd” tomorrow night at 8pm. They’ve been promoting it all day during football:

Presidential hopeful Donald Trump is set to join The Herd on Monday, Nov. 2.

In case you’ve missed it, Colin Cowherd has been talking about Trump quite a bit over the last few weeks, and even said he’s rooting for the businessman after previous favorite Marco Rubio made a “lame joke” about the Patriots on Twitter.

“I’ve changed my vote back to Donald Trump,” Colin said. “At least Trump’s material is funny.”

Breitbart noted Cowherd’s advocacy back in September:

Colin Cowherd made his debut with Fox Sports 1 Tuesday with his show “The Herd” and commented on GOP front-runner Donald Trump’s candidacy, saying that he has “made the media insignificant.”

Cowherd said that Trump is “driving the mostly left-leaning media crazy,” and that it is “so clear” that the left-leaning media is “rooting against Trump.”

“Trump has rendered the media largely irrelevant and they don’t like it. He mocks them, he calls them out, he says things that are viewed as inappropriate and the poll numbers go up. That’s my take. Trump is giving the finger to the political process. He is bursting through the polls, making the media irrelevant and they don’t like it,” Cowherd later explained.

This is powerful stuff, reaching out beyond the normal political audience. I don’t think Trump’s making the media irrelevant though. He’s just using them in a way that nobody else has done it. Including this guy.

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QOTD: Ted Cruz

by digby

Yes, he seriously said that the lasy debate’s CNBC moderators were all left-wing operatives doing the bidding of the Democratic Party:

“What you wouldn’t have is a bunch of left-wing operatives whose object is that whoever the Republican nominee is, they want him as battered and bruised as possible so the Democrat wins in November,” Cruz said at the Iowa GOP’s Growth and Opportunity Party in Des Moines on Saturday.

“Instead you’d have moderators that were trying to help conservatives make a decision who’s going to be the best and strongest conservative to represent us and win, who is the proven conservative, the consistent conservative,” he added.
[…]
The Texas senator and presidential candidate suggested a debate should be hosted by conservative radio hosts Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin.

“You know, how about we stop letting left-wing liberals moderate Republican debates?” he said.

“How about instead of a bunch of attack journalists, we actually have real journalists?”

Evidently, the Fox News moderators, Brett Baier and CNN’s Hugh Hewitt along with the commie symps at CNBC are all left wing operatives. And Republicans seem to be buying it.

I hope they do ask Hannity, Limbaugh and Levin to moderate. Should be very illuminating.

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Sunday Funnies

by digby

The big funny of the week was the GOP Debate.  If you missed it, you can see it here….

Via The New York Times

Via The Nation

Trumpie’s people


by digby

This story about Trump supporters is really something. It’s clear that what they’re responding to is his ongoing repetition that America is a loser country which he will make great once again. And they like his plan to do it: get rid of immigrants, stop being politically correct (which translates into stop giving all those gays, feminists, blacks etc “special rights”) and fight the foreigners who are trying to destroy us.

And it’s also clear that many of them think this because of all the social changes and economic insecurity  the last few decades have brought. Basically they are all feeling like they’ve fallen behind and they can’t catch up. They like Social Security and bemoan the fact that they have no pensions. Trump support Social Security and speaks to their greater economic worries by telling them who to blame: our feckless “leaders” (who are all dumb, unlike these salt of the earth voters who get it) immigrants,  gays, feminists, African Americans, foreigners.

Never the billionaires. Like him. Whom he always portrays as just doing business the way business is done.  Funny that. But they don’t mind. As long as America has “so many victories they’ll be coming out of your ears.” That’s what they want victories.  The question is, victory over whom?

Ben Carson thinks debates should be like friendly fundraisers with supporters

by digby

John Amato got this exactly right:

In Carson’s world, the candidates should gather round, eat cheese and crackers, talk a little policy with Sean Hannity, let the voters get to know them. Explain their thoughts without having to bother about facts and other nonsensical things.

It’s true. Here’s what he said:

CARSON: Well I think we should have moderators who are interested in disseminating the information about the candidates, as opposed to, you know, ‘gotcha’ ‘you did this’ and ‘defend yourself on that.’ you know, what is very important right now, we have so many incredible problems that are facing us as a nation, you know, we’re being divided, we’re fiscally irresponsible which is creating an unstable economic foundation, you know we’re not taking an appropriate place in the world in terms of leadership.

Basically he thinks “debates” should be infomercials where a “host” acts as if he or she is “interviewing” the salesman and the “audience” pretends to be thrilled and claps wildly at every applause line. You know, the kind that features “testimonials” like this:

Or like this (which is actually much less irresponsible that the one Dr Carson endorsed, although charging people for a “kit” to tell them to lose weight and eat less sugar is still a scam, just less medically irresponsible.)

I think Carson may be a person who suffers from psychological disorder called extreme gullibility. It seems to me that he simply believes everything he reads and sees. And since he’s also in the wingnut bubble he reads and sees a whole lot of crazy rubbish.

I agree with this from Amato too:

The smugness in which he answered Martha’s questions was unsettling. I think he really believes he’s above the primary process and shouldn’t be subjected to it at all.

Unsettling yes. Also too, very creepy. His preternatural calm is started to really freak me out.

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Fiorina’s latest whopper

by digby

She sort of admitted it today:

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina acknowledged that she was incorrect during last week’s primary debate when she claimed “92 percent of the jobs lost during [President] Barack Obama’s first term belonged to women.”

After the debate, fact checkers pointed out Fiorina had recycled the statistic from former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who first made the claim in the 2012 election. It rated “Mostly False” by Politifact four years ago.

“I misspoke on that particular fact,” Fiorina said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Until now, Fiorina has defended her use of the “92 percent” figure as accurate.

But she also kept on with the misleading nonsense anyway:

“The fact-checkers are correct,” she said. “The 92 percent — it turns out — was the first three and a half years of [President] Barack Obama’s term and in the final six months of his term things improved,” she said Sunday.

Here’s the Fact Check which explains that the men had already lost their jobs under George W. Bush’s Great Recession when Obama took office. Honestly, the this person is addicted to peddling bullshit. Of course in that she’s no different than the rest of them, she’s just more emphatic about it:

Romney’s campaign pointed to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics employment figures from January 2009, when Obama took office, and March 2012, for all employees and for female employees.

Here they are:

* Total Nonfarm Payroll Jobs:

January 2009: 133,561,000

March 2012: 132,821,000

Net loss: 740,000 jobs.

* Total Female Nonfarm Payroll Jobs

January 2009: 66,122,000

March 2012: 65,439,000

Net loss: 683,000 jobs.

They then divided the net loss among women by the total net loss and came up with 92.3 percent.

Beyond the numbers

The first problem we find with Saul’s tweet is that it begins counting job losses the first month Obama was in office. We have taken points off previous claims for blaming officeholders for situations that existed at the beginning of their administrations, before their policies have had time to take effect. One could reasonably argue that January 2009 employment figures are more a result of President George W. Bush’s policies, at least as far as any president can be blamed or credited for private-sector hiring.

We reached out to Gary Steinberg, spokesman for the BLS, for his take on the claim. He pointed out that women’s job losses are high for that period of time because millions of men had already lost their jobs. Women were next.

“Between January 2009 and March 2012 men lost 57,000 jobs, while women lost 683,000 jobs. This is the reverse of the recession period of December 2007-June 2009 (with an overlap of six months) which saw men lose 5,355,000 jobs and women lose 2,124,000 jobs,” Steinberg told us in an email.

So timing was important. And if you count all those jobs lost beginning in 2007, women account for just 39.7 percent of the total.

Gary Burtless, a labor market expert with the Brookings Institution, explained the gender disparity.

“I think males were disproportionately hurt by employment losses in manufacturing and especially construction, which is particularly male-dominated. A lot of job losses in those two industries had already occurred before Obama took office,” he said. “Industries where women are more likely to be employed – education, health, the government – fared better in terms of job loss. In fact, health and education employment continued to grow in the recession and in the subsequent recovery. Government employment only began to fall after the private economy (and private employment) began growing again.”

(Burtless contributed $750 to Obama’s campaign in 2011. However, in 2008 he provided advice on aspects of labor policy to the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and he has worked as a government economist and served on federal advisory panels under presidents of both parties.)

Betsey Stevenson, a business and public policy professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and visiting economics professor at Princeton University, who previously served as chief economist for Obama’s labor secretary, also pointed out that “in every recession men’s job loss occurs first and most, with unemployment rates for men being more cyclical than those of women’s.”

She added that many of women’s job losses have been government jobs — teachers and civil servants — which have been slower to come back because they require greater government spending.

So have Obama’s policies been especially bad for women?

Said Stevenson: “I don’t think you could point to a single piece of evidence that the pattern of job loss: men first then women, is due to the president’s policies. It’s a historical pattern that has held in previous recessions.”

Our ruling

Romney’s website said that women account for 92.3 percent of jobs lost under Obama.

By comparing job figures with January 2009 and March 2012 and weighing them against women’s job figures from the same periods, Saul came up with 92.3 percent. The numbers are accurate but quite misleading. First, Obama cannot be held entirely accountable for the employment picture on the day he took office, just as he could not be given credit if times had been booming. Second, by choosing figures from January 2009, months into the recession, the statement ignored the millions of jobs lost before then, when most of the job loss fell on men. In every recession, men are the first to take the hit, followed by women. It’s a historical pattern, Stevenson told us, not an effect of Obama’s policies.

There is a small amount of truth to the claim, but it ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.

Update: She went on Fox News Sunday and said that this was the a liberal media plot to discredit the messenger. Never say she doesn’t know how to play to an audience.

So that’s that

by digby

Paul Ryan appeared on the morning shows along with a gaggle of other Republicans and explainex that nothing whatsoever was going to change:

New Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Sunday dismissed Democrats’ calls for a paid family leave law as another “federal entitlement,” and said his position isn’t at odds with recent remarks that he wants to spend weekends with his young family in Wisconsin.

“I don’t think people asked me to be Speaker so I can take more money from hard-working taxpayers, so I can create some new federal entitlement,” Ryan said during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.” “But I think the public wants to have members of Congress that represent them, that are like them.

And this:

Newly-elected House Speaker Paul Ryan all but ended any chance of comprehensive immigration reform during the final year of President Barack Obama’s term in office.

In an interview airing Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Ryan said the president has “proven himself to be untrustworthy on this issue.”

Ryan said consensus on other issues affecting immigration policy, such as border enforcement, could be possible. But because the president took executive action, comprehensive reform is off the table.

“I don’t think we can trust the president on this issue,” Ryan told NBC’s Chuck Todd. “The president has proven himself untrustworthy on this issue because he tried to unilaterally rewrite the law himself. Presidents don’t write laws. Congress does.”

When asked about conservative critics who believe Ryan would be willing to work with a Democratic president on immigration reform in 2017, he replied, “I was elected Speaker of the House to unify the Republican Congress, not to dis-unify the Republican Congress. That means my job is to lead us to consensus and to, on big controversial issues, operate on that consensus.”

I hope everyone understands that by unifying, he means that the House will be unified under the right wing. They run things. And he’s not going to oppose them. Boehner took the “important stuff” off the table — the essential governance necessary to keep the nation from collapsing — and now it’s all wingnut theatre. I think they figure once they win the election the dynamic will shift and they’ll start really accomplishing stuff under President Rubio, Cruz or even Carson. Until then, it’s all about indulging the loons.

Update: Also too, he says he has always believed in defunding Planned Parenthood but he really wants the Benghazi-style Planned Parenthood witch hunt committee to e able to put a big show first. It will be the first of many such shows.

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Freedom: Bow now or bow later
by Tom Sullivan

Let’s not point fingers, but for all their hands-over-their-hearts, pocket-Constitution-carrying, misty-eyed Americanity, there are certain of our neighbors who are just not comfortable with democracy. With one-person, one-vote. With freedom of speech and religion that is not theirs. With facts that do not support their preferred view of the world. With not being in control. Galileo Galilei knew a few. As Jesus said about the poor, they will be with us always.

Thomas Jefferson knew to be wary of them:

Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting “Jesus Christ,” so that it would read “A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;” the insertion was rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.
-Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, in reference to the Virginia Act for Religious Freedom

So it was no surprise that things did not go smoothly in Spring, Texas this week when the Church of Lucifer opened its doors:

The Luciferians officially opened their doors on Friday, with their first meeting scheduled for Saturday. But they were greeted by a vocal group of Christians after having their building vandalized this week. Video taken by ABC13 Friday evening shows protesters upset with the organization’s presence gathered outside, with a law enforcement presence needed to keep the peace.

“This is what we get when we have freedom of religion,” protester Christine White told ABC13 angrily. “We ought to be filling up the whole street here, that they have to pass through us to get into that church.”

White continued to say that God loves the Luciferians “enough to say, ‘you either bow now, or you will be forced to bow later,’ and then it’s too late.”

Just maybe it’s not God who wants them to bow.

Many of the protesters were from a group calling itself The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), which believes it is “on the front lines of the Culture War, peacefully defending the values of tradition, family and private ownership.” Hard to find a better definition of that bizarre amalgam of Horatio Alger, Ayn Rand and Jesus Christ that for many Americans passes for Christianity.

Threats to their cultural or political dominance are mortal ones. A North Carolina state senator told a publisher bluntly during a public meeting, “I am the senator, you are the citizen. You need to be quiet.” Some politicians don’t want to govern. They want to rule.

As we saw this week in the third GOP presidential debate, they really get testy when challenged. They prefer that, as Heather Cox Richardson wrote about Fox News, “a few white men reign unchallenged in a world of Christianity and free-market capitalism. This worldview is inherently right.” Woe unto you who challenge it:

This insistence on a false reality was in full force Wednesday. When charged with his connection to the disreputable nutritional supplements company Mannatech, Dr. Ben Carson denied any involvement with it. He lied. When Becky Quick asked Donald Trump to explain his assertion that Senator Marco Rubio was “Mark Zuckerberg’s personal senator,” Trump denied that he had ever said such a thing. He lied (that exact phrase was on his campaign website). When asked about the national debt, Senator Ted Cruz ranted that such a question simply illustrated “why the American people don’t trust the media,” then went on to misrepresent the substantive questions the moderators had asked by turning them into cartoon sound bites. Carly Fiorina’s astonishing lie was in the last debate, when she insisted—contrary to all evidence—that she had seen a video in which Planned Parenthood employees murdered a baby to sell its organs.

These lies are symptoms of the real problem: that the rigid ideology of Movement Conservatives concentrates power in a very few wealthy men. When asked to justify with actual math the regressive economic policies that underlie all of their candidacies, the candidates obfuscated. Their numbers do not add up, as they have not added up since President Reagan’s budget director David Stockman notoriously made supply-side tax policy work with a “magic asterisk” that represented cuts and loophole closures to be made later. Charged with the fact that his ideas do not work in the real world, Carson simply said “that’s not true… when we put all the facts down, you’ll be able to see that it’s not true, it works out very well.”

Insisting that the world is as strict-father grifters say it is because they say so is by now an established strategy. You will bow now or bow later. Digby pointed to Rick Perlstein’s analysis of the GOP dabate. It looked something like a medicine show:

It takes a lot of energy to sustain a lie. When enough people do it together, over a sustained period of time, it wears on them. It also produces a certain kind of culture: one cut loose from the norms of fair conduct and trust that any organization requires in order to survive as something more than a daily, no-holds-barred war of all against all. A battle royale. A circus, if you prefer.

Perhaps the freak show is more appropriate. It takes a contortionist to avoid all the swords thrust though the magician’s death box.