OMNI
"...if
way to the Better there be,
it exacts a full look at the Worst."
—Thomas
Hardy
"I
refuse to live in a country like this, and I'm not leaving"
Michael Moore
Danes
claim truly about their country where “few have too much and fewer still too
little.” There are many
capitalisms. US elites chose to make a
land where too many have too much, and too many have too little. –Dick
|
Speaking Truth to Power
|
“I
wonder how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out
the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all
children everywhere as our own.” Howard
Zinn
My blog: The War Department and Peace Heroes
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/
Newsletters:
http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/
Index:
http://www.omnicenter.org/omni-newsletter-general-index/
See Class,
Corporations, Economics, Globalization, Greed, Inequality, Information Control,
Lobbying, Marx, Military Industrial Complex, Monopoly, Occupy, Regulation,
Socialism, US Economic Imperialism, Working Class, and related newsletters.
No. 9 and
No. 10 at end.
Contents #11
Taibbi,
Lies about Bailout
Ad Busters
on US Capitalism
Ad Busters
on Canadian Capitalism
Moyers & Co. Programs
Richard
Wolff’s Books
Jim
Wallis, Serving the Common Good
Contents #12
Animated
Film on Nature of Capitalism
Connaughton,
Moyers
Interviews Sheila Bair and Richard Wolff March 22
Stagnation
Tunnel
People and Economic Collapse
Dauvergne
and Lister, Corporate Takeover of
Sustainability
Smil, What
We Have Taken from Nature
Blinder,
Cause and Cure of Economic Crisis
Leopold,
World of Top Hedge-Fund Managers
Garson,
How the 99% Lives in the Recession
Contents #13
Dick,
Moyers & Co.: Victims of US Capitalism in
Scheer, Predatory Takeover, The Great Stickup
Taibbi, Big
Banks Price-Fixing
Dick, Warrior
Capitalism
Taibbi,
Everything Rigged
Leech, Capitalism
Genocidal, Rev. by Sethness
Richard
Wolff
Kroll,
2012 Elections and Billionaires
Remedies
Gibson,
Public Banking
|
|
VICTIMS
OF
BILL
MOYERS & CO., JULY 7, 2013, “TWO FAMILIES”
Part
I: A story of the consequences on middle
class and lmc families of the economic shrinkage for these classes beginning in
the 1970s. In 1991 Moyers interviewed
2 families in Milwaukee who had done everything right to achieve their American
Dream of owning their own home, educating their children, and so on, and then
their companies cut back and then closed, the jobs sent abroad. The Neumann family is white, 3 kids, the
husband working for Briggs-Stratton, the wife able to be home and raise the
kids. The
Part
II: His scholar interviewees were
Barbara Garson, author of Down the Up
Escalator, and Barbara Miner, Lessons
from the Heartland. Like all of
Moyers’s guests, these knew the subject deeply and widely, all the contexts
helpful in understanding what happened to the 2 families and why. Their solutions among others: restore unions and raise wages I found this segment too brief, but Moyers
has been interviewing people for several years about the causes and cures of
the economic troubles experienced by the mc and lmc. [And see my newsletters on
This
Tues., Moyers’ 3rd program about the 2 Families will be shown as
Frontline’s offering, 9pm.
THE
TAKEOVER
ROBERT
SCHEER, THE GREAT AMERICAN STICKUP. Nation Books, 2010.
Featuring
fresh takes and real-time analysis from HuffPost's signature lineup of
contributors
HOT ON THE BLOG
Robert Scheer
Posted: September 14, 2010 09:47 AM
'The Great American Stickup':
It Was The Economy, Stupid
What's Your Reaction:
Read More: Banking , Bill
Clinton , Business , Clinton , Economic Books , Economic Crisis , Economic Meltdown , Economy , Great American Stickup , Investment Banking , Investment Banks , Investmenting , Politics, Reagon , Reagonomics , Robet
Scheer , Trading , US
Economy , Wall
Street , Books
News
Excerpted from 'The Great American Stickup'
"It Was the Economy, Stupid"
"How did this happen?" ~ President George W. Bush
"It was a humbling question for someone from the financial
sector to be asked--after all, we were the ones responsible." ~ Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson
Jr., former Goldman Sachs CEO
They did
it.
Yes, there is a
"they": the captains of finance, their lobbyists, and allies among
leading politicians of both parties, who together destroyed an American
regulatory system that had been functioning splendidly for most of the six
decades since it was enacted in the 1930s.
The big cop-out in much of what has been written about the banking meltdown has
been the argument by those most complicit that there was "enough blame to
go around" and that no institution or individual should be singled out for
accountability. "How could we have known?" is the refrain of those
who continue to pose as all-knowing experts. "Everybody made mistakes,"
they say.
Nonsense. This was a giant
hustle that served the richest of the rich and left the rest of us holding the
bag, a life-altering game of musical chairs in which the American public
was the one forced out. Worst of all,
legislators from both political parties we elect and pay to protect our
interests from the pirates who assaulted us instead changed our laws to enable
them.
The most pathetic of excuses is the one provided by Robert Rubin,
who fathered "Rubinomics," the economy policy of President Clinton's
two-term administration: The economy ran into a "perfect storm," a
combination of unforeseen but disastrously interrelated events. This
rationalization is all too readily accepted by the mass media, which is not surprising, given that it neatly absolves
the majority of business reporters and editors who had missed the story for
years until it was too late.
The facts are otherwise. It is not conspiratorial but rather
accurate to suggest that blame can be
assigned to those who consciously developed and implemented a policy of radical
financial deregulation that led to a global recession. As President
Clinton's Treasury secretary, Rubin,
the former cochair of Goldman Sachs, led the fight to free the financial
markets from regulation and then went on to a $15-million-a-year job with
Citigroup, the company that had most energetically lobbied for that
deregulation. He should remember the line from the old cartoon strip Pogo:
"We have met the enemy and he is us."
For it was this Wall Street and Democratic Party darling, along
with his clique of economist super-friends -- Alan Greenspan, Lawrence Summers, and a few others -- who inflated
a giant real estate bubble by purposely not regulating the derivatives market,
resulting in oceans of money that was poured into bad loans sold as safe
investments. In the process, they not only caused an avalanche of pain and
misery when the bubble inevitably burst but also shredded the good reputation
of the American banking system nurtured since the Great Depression.
If we accept a broad dispersal of blame or a sense of
inevitability -- or simply ignore the details, since they can be so confusing
-- we lose the opportunity to rearrange our institutions to prevent such
disasters from happening again.
That this is true has only been reinforced by the tentative
response of the Obama administration
in its first year. Even after a crash that economists agree is the biggest
since the granddaddy of 1929, the president's proposed reform legislation stops
far short of reintroducing the kind of regulation of the markets that prevented
such disasters in the intervening eighty years. We still see a persistent fear,
stoked by the same folks that led us into this abyss, that regulation and
scrutiny will kill the golden goose of Wall Street profits and, by extension,
If we as a people learn
anything from this crash, however, it should be that there are no adults
watching the store, only a tiny elite of self-interested multimillionaires and
billionaires making decisions for the rest of us. As long as we cede
that power to them, we can expect to continue getting bilked.
Three key myths consistently propagated about the financial
markets proved devastating in this event. The first is that buyers and sellers
are all logical and well informed about what they are doing, so the markets
will always be "corrected" to provide accurate price values. The
second is that whatever happens in these "free markets," the general
public will not be hurt -- only irresponsible gamblers will lose their shirts.
The third is that whenever the government gets involved, it will only screw
things up; even if regulators only ask questions, it will poison the pond and
spook the fish, to everybody's detriment.
All of these assumptions were proven false; the brave new world
order of super-rational high-tech derivative marketing based on a Nobel
Prize-winning mathematical model turned out to be a prescription for financial
madness. A win-win system too good to be true turned out to be a cruel hoax in
which most suffered terribly -- and not just that majority of the world's
population that suffers from the whims of the market, but even some who
designed and sold the new financial gimmicks. Left to their own devices, freed
of rational regulatory restraint by an army of lobbyists and the politicians
who serve them, one after another of the very top financial conglomerates
imploded from the weight of their uncontrolled greed. Or would have imploded,
as in the examples of Citigroup and AIG, if the government had not used
taxpayer dollars to bail out those "too big to fail" conglomerates.
Along the way, these companies -- including the privatized
quasi-governmental Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac monstrosities -- were exposed as
poorly run juggernauts, with top executives having embarrassingly little grasp
of the chicanery and risk taking that was bolstering their bottom-lines. Worst
of all, damage from this economic chain reaction didn't, of course, stop at the
bank accounts of Saudi investors or American CEOs but led to soaring
unemployment and federal debt, the acceleration of the home foreclosure
epidemic, massive unemployment, and the wholesale destruction of pension plans
and state education budgets.
The Biggest Price-Fixing
Scandal Ever
The Illuminati were amateurs. The second
huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks
can't fix.
onspiracy theorists of the world, believers
in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we
skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little
different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We
found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories
spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may
be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.
You may have heard of the
Libor scandal, in which at least three - and perhaps as many as 16 - of the
name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates,
in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion
(that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When
that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest
financial scandal in history - MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it
"dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of
markets."
That was bad enough, but now
Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm
ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated
by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the
Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers
at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to
manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the
prices of interest-rate swaps.
Interest-rate swaps are a tool
used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage
their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's
about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile
of assets about 100 times the size of the
It
should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix
the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks - including Barclays,
UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/279-82/17152-focus-the-biggest-price-fixing-scandal-ever
WARRIOR
CAPITALISM by Dick Bennett
The
union of capitalism and militarism is widely observed in the
Reader Supported News
| 14 June 13
FOCUS: Matt Taibbi | Everything Is Rigged, Vol. 9,713: This
Time, It's Currencies
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
Taibbi
writes: "Given the LIBOR story, the Interest Rate Swap manipulation story,
the Euro gas price manipulation story, the U.S. energy price manipulation
story, and (by now) countless others of the 'Everything is Rigged' variety,
this screams out for immediate notice."
READ MORE
Truthout
The Structural Genocide That Is Capitalism
Sunday, 16 June 2013 00:00
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/16887-the-structural-genocide-that-is-capitalism
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)"The
dominant class at the world level . . . has become the enemy of all
humanity." - Samir Amin, Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending
Capitalism?
Garry Leech, an author who had
previously penned a book on the FARC insurgency in
In this book, Leech guides his readers through theoretical
examinations of the concept of genocide, showing why the term should in fact be
applied to the capitalist mode of production. He then illustrates capitalism's
genocidal proclivities by exploring four case studies: the ongoing legacy of
the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in Mexico; the
relationship between trade liberalization and genetically-modified seeds on the
one hand and mass-suicide on the part of Indian agriculturalists on the other;
material deprivation and generalized premature death throughout much of the
African continent and the global South, as results from hunger, starvation, and
preventable disease; and the ever-worsening climatic and environmental crises.
Leech then closes by considering the relevance of Antonio Gramsci's conceptions
of cultural hegemony in attempting to explain the puzzling consent granted to
this system by large swathes of the world's relatively privileged people -
specifically, those residing in the imperial core of Europe and the United
States - and then recommending the socialist alternative as a concrete means of
abolishing genocide, while looking to the Cuban and Venezuelan regimes as
imperfect, but inspirational experiments in these terms. In sum, while I take
issue with some of his analysis and aspects of his conceptualization of
anticapitalist alternatives, his work should certainly be well-received, read
and discussed by large multitudes.
Leech begins his text by referencing the original formulator of
the concept of structural violence, Johan Galtung. In 1969, Galtung famously
expanded prevailing notions of societal violence to include consideration of
"the avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs or . . . of human
life." Key to Galtung's formulation of structural violence in this sense
is the gap between "the potential and the actual," or "what
could have been and what is." Thus, avoidable death resulting from
preventable or treatable diseases today constitutes violence, given the technological
progression of modern medicine, whereas centuries ago this would not have been
the case, according to Galtung. For Leech, then, capitalist society is
indelibly marked by structural violence, as the vast inequalities in wealth and
access to which it gives rise lead small minorities to be overwhelmingly
privileged, while large groups of others are prevented from meeting their basic
needs.
Transitioning then to consideration of the question of whether the
large number of avoidable deaths observed under conditions of capitalism should
in fact be considered genocidal, Leech concedes that the UN's 1948 Convention
on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide excludes mass death
resulting from one's pertaining to a given social class as constituting
genocide. However, he notes that an initial draft of the Convention from 1947
did include death or injury resulting from "lack of proper housing,
clothing, food, hygiene and medical care, or excessive work or physical
exertion" within the definition of genocide. Hence, while such a
formulation did not appear in the final version with which we are all familiar,
Leech does not accept legal positivism in this case as final; in this vein, he
could have done well to have also mentioned that Raphael Lemkin, inventor of
the concept of genocide, himself believed the charge should include mass murder
of persons following from their belonging to particular classes. Leech nonetheless does mention
that the 1998 Rome Statute defines the crime of extermination in part as
"the intentional infliction of . . . deprivation of access to food and
medicine calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a
population," so in this sense has the weight of international law behind
him. Leech's only remaining theoretical difficulty, then, is to argue that
intentionality exists within the context of the perpetuation of capital-induced
genocide: This proves an easy task, for the question of intent in judging
capitalism is not one of examining the actions of particular persons or states
(as in most traditional cases of the charge of genocide) but rather of judging
the "logic" of the system as a whole. Hence, structural genocide -
defined by Leech as "structural violence that intentionally inflicts on
any group or collectivity conditions of life that bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part" - can be said to be an intentional
outcome of adherence to norms which govern a social system that by nature
"inevitably results in . . . death on a mass scale," as does capital.
For Leech, the proffered defense of willful blindness - "such was not our
intention," the system's managers might exclaim - is no defense at all.
Or, in Jean-Paul Sartre's words: "The genocidal intent is implicit in the
facts. It is not necessarily premeditated."
Following this opening
discussion of the theoretical case for considering capitalism to be genocidal,
Leech takes a few particularly devastating examples from the contemporary world
to illuminate his argument. In Mexico, the passing of NAFTA in 1994 has led to
the dispossession of campesinos (peasants) on a grand scale, as the country's
stipulated importation of heavily subsidized maize and other crops from the
United States effectively led millions to abandon agriculture and migrate to
Mexican and US cities in search of employment in the manufacturing sector, in
accordance with neoclassical theories of "comparative advantage" -
and very much mirroring the means by which capitalism emerged historically
through the destruction of the commons in England. For Leech, this forcible
displacement has resulted in the explosion of precarity within the informal
sector of the economy in Mexico, as many ex-campesinos fail to find traditional
proletarian jobs, and it has also driven the horrifying feminicides of
maquiladora workers in the Mexican border regions, migration en masse to the
United States (and attendant mass death in the Sonoran desert), as well as the
horrid drug war launched in 2006 by then-president Felipe Calderón. Leech sees
similar processes in
Alarmingly, in
Leech further
illustrates his case regarding capitalism's structurally genocidal nature in a
chapter examining Africa south of the
In these terms, Leech
also discusses the toxic role of the capitalist pharmaceutical industry, which
famously and "logically" invests an overwhelming percentage of its
research and development funds in highly profitable schemes for lifestyle drugs
directed at first-world consumers - at their most absurd, treatments for
baldness, erectile dysfunction, and so on - instead of in essential medicines
that could relieve the horrendous disease burden borne by the peoples of the
global South. Leech starkly illustrates these tensions by noting that, were the
eight largest US pharmaceutical companies to have gained an average profit of
$6.8 billion instead of $7.7 billion in 2008, with the difference going to
purchase anti-retrovirals for the 3.8 million HIV+ Africans who go without any
treatment at all, a considerable percentage of the estimated 1.3 million annual
deaths observed on the continent resulting from HIV/AIDS could be prevented.
Leech summarizes this all rather starkly: "There is no clearer illustration
of the shortcomings in trying to reform the behavior of capital than the
ongoing annihilation of poor people in sub-Saharan
A similarly horrifying
genocidal tendency for which capitalism is responsible is the next one briefly
examined by Leech: that of the specter of catastrophic climate change. Leech
claims it to be a "truly inconvenient truth" that the capitalist
system itself is incapable of mitigating the total threat posed by global
warming and instead precipitates this grim eventuality due to its incessant
need for ceaseless expansion and profit, based principally on the indefinite
exploitation of hydrocarbon resources. Clearly, it is the world's poor who so
far have suffered the most from capitalism's degradation of the climate,
despite having contributed next to nothing to the perpetuation of this
world-historical problem: the estimated 2,000 Kenyan farmers who killed
themselves upon the failure of rains in 2008, as Leech mentions, or the 260,000
Somalis murdered in the 2011 famine that followed from the worst drought in the past 7 decades. Leech observes
that the ever-increasing annual death toll for which capital-induced climate
destabilization is responsible will merely cause the overall number of 10
million annual preventable deaths to burgeon, leading ultimately perhaps to the
deaths of "millions - or even billions," in what may well develop
into the extermination of humanity altogether.
With his
antepenultimate chapter "Legitimizing the Illegitimate," Leech
follows Gramsci in seeking explanations for the means by which such a brutal
system as capitalism has reproduced itself over time. He observes plainly that
"most people's world views currently reflect the values of capital,"
at least within more affluent northern societies, and that capitalism proceeds
with its genocidal proclivities while enjoying "the apparent consent of a
significant portion of the world's population." Like Gramsci, Leech
largely faults the hegemonic cultural processes that obtain within
core-imperial societies - formal education, the media, work arrangements, etc.
- for normalizing the prevailing state of affairs, in part by excluding the
barbarous proceedings of capital from consideration - in contradistinction to
his own volume. Channeling Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and other theorists
with similar concerns, Leech notes that Western consumers remain largely
ignorant of the extreme violence that is required as the very basis for the
relative privileges they enjoy in global terms; worse, perhaps, most
Northerners - a majority of whom, claims Leech, enjoy "middle-class
lifestyle[s]" - have the capacity to escape the alienation driven by
capital precisely by engaging in mindless consumerism, thus perpetuating the
vicious cycle. For Leech, resistance to the rule of capital is far more evident
in the global South, where Western imperial military ventures have long been
employed to pacify and control the course of history, in radical denial of
self-determination, dignity, and justice.
Leech closes this
volume with a plea for socialism as an alternative to capitalist genocide.
Given the development of his argument in preceding chapters, he declares that
any means of attempting to overcome the extreme violence of capital cannot
serve merely as a "band-aid" to the metaphorical "appendage
severed by the brutality of capitalism." The system itself must be
overthrown, dismantled; the point is not simply to apply anemic reforms that
might slightly attenuate capital's genocidal logic, but to abolish the
genocidal system altogether. For Leech, the most appropriate political
alternative is that of a socialism marked by participatory decision-making and
social control of the means of production; crucially, as well, this project
should include concern for nature - hence, "eco-socialism" - as much
of the historical experience of socialism clearly has not.
Following from
assertions made earlier in the book, Leech sees the peoples of the global South
as playing a seminal role in presenting anticapitalist alternatives in the
present day. Indeed, he endorses Marx's late assertions on the possibilities
for noncapitalist societies to simply skip the capitalist stage and enter full
communism in accordance with pre-existing communal, socialistic values.
In this sense, Leech ends with an appraisal of contemporary experiments
in socialism, as in
All these successes
notwithstanding, Leech makes some rather problematic assertions in this final
chapter on socialism. For one, he claims that the Castros' infamous
imprisonment of those critical of the regime was undertaken "to defend the
collective rights of Cubans," and cites George Lambie's assertion that
"the Cuban state . . . is benign towards the population." One
can think of many eminent and reasonable observers who would strongly disagree
with such characterizations! Similarly, in his discussion on eco-socialism,
Leech presents Bolivia under Evo Morales as taking significant measures to
protect the environment - without mentioning the 2011 controversy over the
government's plan to build a highway through the indigenous nature reserve
(TIPNIS), or the general charge of extractivism, as raised most significantly
by the unofficial Mesa 18 at the April 2010 World People's Summit on Climate
Change and the Rights of Mother Earth held in Cochabamba, which criticized the
Morales government's perpetuation of mining and oil and gas exploitation and
for this reason was banned from the conference's proceedings.
Despite our
disagreements - I would say that Leech has performed a great service with his
presentation of capitalism as being structurally genocidal. Perhaps among the
most revolutionary acts one can take, as Rosa Luxemburg asserted, is to
"proclaim loudly what is happening." Leech's volume does this well
and should be greatly commended for this, given the general struggle to
"displace and estrange the world" (Adorno) from mainstream presentations
of it that would have existing power relations live on indefinitely or until
such time as catastrophic destruction sets in, whether through impending
nuclear war, environmental collapse or a combination of these two.
It is to be hoped that
Leech's passionate contempt for the brutality and senselessness of capital will
be taken up by radical social movements seeking to intervene toward the
disruption of the hegemonic death-system, in favor of more emancipatory
tomorrows. While it is questionable to hold, as Leech does, that such ends will
be served by the seizure of state power and the development of Marxist
political parties, and though I would argue that the case of proletarian
complicity with capitalist imperialism is more complicated than Leech would
have it, what is not open to question is the utter depravity of the structural
violence inherent to capitalism. As Mark Twain wrote in contemplating the
infamous legacy of the Jacobin Terror during the most intense period of the
French Revolution: "There were two 'Reigns of Terror' if we would but
remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other
in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a
thousand years; . . . our shudders are all for the 'horrors' of the minor Terror,
the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death
by the axe [or guillotine], compared with life-long death from hunger, cold,
insult, cruelty, and heart-break? . . . A city cemetery could contain the
coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught
to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins
filled by that older and real Terror - that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us have been taught to see in its vastness or pity
as it deserves."
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
JAVIER
SETHNESS
Javier Sethness is a
libertarian socialist and rights-advocate. He is author of Imperiled Life: Revolution against Climate Catastrophe (AK Press, 2012), and he blogs on
various aspects of the crises of capital at Notes Toward an International Libertarian Eco-Socialism.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||
[The
following was forwarded to me by David Druding 7-7-13 with this note: “My credit cards already got cut up when
these money handlers all voluntarily {illegally) refused to facilitate $
transfers of litigation donation funds for WikiLeak's Julian Assange and
Bradley Manning as they attempted to reveal the truth about US military &
foreign policy to the US public & the world. Silencing the truth and
surveillance are now a big lucrative biz in the
This media-ignored decision by the corp shill majority on the Supreme Court
will hopefully see a bunch more cut into pieces in our plastic recycle bins.” --Dick]
There was almost no media discussion of the recent Supreme Court decision.
(photo: unknown)
Evening
News Ignores Supreme Court Decision That Protects Corporate Immunity By Sergio
Munoz, Media Matters for America
vening cable and network news have almost
completely ignored the Supreme Court's sweeping decision in American Express v. Italian Colors, a 5-3
decision that further privatizes and restricts access to justice for everyday
Americans by allowing corporations to immunize themselves from judicial review.
Despite the fact that American
Express was a
highly contentious pro-business opinion by the conservative bloc of the
Supreme Court - even by their extremely corporate-friendly standards - a Media Matters search of Nexis transcripts reveals
that with the exception of one brief non-primetime mention on PBS, not one
cable or network evening news show addressed the decision.
Traditional contract law has long held that certain unconscionable
agreements are unenforceable. Contractual clauses are traditionally voided if
they eliminate victims' ability to enforce their statutory rights, making
Justice Antonin Scalia's American
Express opinion to the
contrary "a betrayal of our precedents, and
of federal statutes like the antitrust laws," according to
Justice Elena Kagan's scathing dissent.
In this case, American Express used its monopoly
powers over a group of
small business owners to force them to accept exorbitant credit card fees in a
seemingly blatant violation of antitrust statutes. When these small businesses
grouped together to pursue a class action protecting their consumer rights,
American Express pointed to a clause in the card agreement that not only
blocked access to the courts in favor of forced arbitration, it also prohibited
plaintiffs from joining together in this mandatory forum.
But because of the high cost of bringing actions against this
well-defended corporation, individual claims are financially prohibitive,
leaving the small businesses without "effective vindication" of their
federal rights under antitrust law. Not only are these mandatory arbitration
clauses forcing victims of corporate abuse to forego the courts in favor of
privatized (and confidential) justice, they are barred from making it remotely
affordable. From Justice Kagan's dissent:
Here is the nutshell version of this case, unfortunately
obscured in the Court's decision. The owner of a small restaurant (Italian
Colors) thinks that American Express (Amex) has used its monopoly power to
force merchants to accept a form contract violating the antitrust laws. The
restaurateur wants to challenge the allegedly unlawful provision (imposing a
tying arrangement), but the same contract's arbitration clause prevents him
from doing so. That term imposes a variety of procedural bars that would make
pursuit of the antitrust claim a fool's errand. So if the arbitration clause is
enforceable, Amex has insulated itself from antitrust liability - even if it
has in fact violated the law. The monopolist gets to use its monopoly power to
insist on a contract effectively depriving its victims of all legal recourse.
And here is the nutshell version of today's opinion, admirably
flaunted rather than camouflaged: Too darn bad.
Unfortunately, American
Express is yet another
example of the conservative justices' extreme and continued favorability toward
corporate interests, especially those pushed by the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, and utter hostility toward class action lawsuits and the
consumers and workers who bring them. And these decisions - AT&T v.
Concepcion, Comcast v.
Behrend, Wal-Mart v.
Dukes - are
piling up at an alarming rate.
American Express will only add fuel to
the fire by underscoring new ways that corporations can now insulate themselves
from a vast range of federal laws. From Mother Jones:
In an amicus brief submitted in this case on the side of the
small businesses, lawyers for AARP, Public Justice, and the American
Association for Justice warned that if the court sided with Amex,
"statutes intended by Congress to protect weaker parties against stronger
parties will essentially be gutted. Small businesses might as well move to a
different country where they no longer enjoy the protection of the antitrust
laws. At the whim of an employer, workers could be required to prospectively
waive their Title VII [anti-discrimination] rights. Consumer protection laws
such as the Truth in Lending Act could be silently, but inescapably, repealed
by corporations with the stroke of a pen."
Indeed, if the court ruled that Amex could use an arbitration
clause in a contract with a much less powerful party to escape punishment under
the Sherman Antitrust Act, there's no reason why a big company couldn't create
contracts that prevent people from filing sex discrimination, consumer fraud,
or other similar claims in any venue. Laws that Congress passed to protect the
public could simply be voided through artfully written arbitration clauses that
create expensive hurdles to pressing a claim.
As Kagan observed, conservative justices are aggressively stretching
for appellate decisions they can overrule - "[t]o a hammer, everything looks
like a nail" - as they relentlessly create new ways to close
off what has traditionally been one of the most effective ways for plaintiffs
to defend their rights against more powerful corporate defendants. This obvious
right-wing campaign with so many angles - corporate dominance of a
Ultimately, if those anchors and producers who chose to ignore American Express are lucky enough to not be parties to
these unfair contracts, good for them. Their viewers, however, are increasingly
not this lucky as one-sided arbitration clauses and class action waivers gain in popularity among corporationsseeking
to insulate themselves from liability for their bad behavior.
In fact, maybe television news employees should look at the fine
print of their contracts as well. They might already be part of the story
they're ignoring.
Methodology
Media Matters conducted a keyword
search of evening weekday television transcripts available on Nexis that
included "american express" or arbitration or "class
action" in conjunction with "supreme court." Evening was defined
as occurring between 5:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. and news transcripts for PBS,
ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC were examined. The time period surveyed
was from June 19 through July 2.
RICHARD WOLFF
By
Richard D Wolff, MR Zine |
News Analysis
Capitalism in Crisis: The Code That Forms a Bar to Harmony
By
John Plender, The Financial Times | Op-Ed
Capitalism in Crisis: Richard Wolff Urges End to Austerity, New
Jobs Program, Democratizing Work
By
Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! | Interview and Video
Andy Kroll | Billionaires Unchained
Andy Kroll, TomDispatch
Kroll
writes: "Today, politics is a rich man's game. Look no further than the
2012 elections."
READ MORE
Contents #9 Nov. 12, 2012
Hedrick
Smith, Who Stole the American Dream?
To
Schneiderman: Prosecute or Resign
Taibbi,
Why Government Doesn’t
Barofsky, Bailout on TARP
Nader:
Where Were the Whistleblowers?
Freeland, Plutocrats
Reich,
Book on US Capitalism
Reich,
Interviewed About US Capitalism
Survey: Confidence in Capitalism Declines
Wolf: Global Financial Fraud
Looking
Back at Capitalist Greed, PBS: Remember
the Triangle Fire
Contents #10
Ha-Joon
Chang, About Capitalism
Gibney
Video:
Hacker and
Pierson: Winner-Take-All Politics
Bybee, War
on Wages
Foster and
McChesney, Monopoly-Finance Capital
Pollin,
Full Employment
Wenz,
Progressive Taxation
Mondiot,
Unregulated Capitalism and Climate Change
Williams,
Socialism
No comments:
Post a Comment