Supreme Court Screws U.S. Consumers

Oh yes! The Supreme American Taliban Court voted in favor of fucking the American consumer/worker.

by mrbeen38 Wed Apr 27, 2011 ( Link at bottom of story ) Today the United States Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, issued an incredibly disturbing opinion for United States consumers (i.e. all of us). In AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion the Court held that corporations can ban consumers' rights to take corporations to court, individually or in class actions, through arbitration clauses in consumer contracts. Virtually every consumer contract we enter into contains buried within it a term saying that by signing the contract we agree to settle all disputes in arbitration and do not have a right to band our claims together in court in a class action. In the case of Discover Bank v. Superior Court, 36 Cal. 4th 148 (2005) the California Supreme Court held that the inclusion of such clauses in consumer contracts was unconscionable in light of the fact that consumers have absolutely no say as to the terms of the agreements they enter into with corporations. Thus those clauses are unenforceable and consumers are allowed to file class action claims in state courts. Today, the United States Supreme Court overturned that opinion holding that states do not have the right to find a contract's arbitration clause unenforceable because their ability to do so is preempted by the Federal Arbitration Act. What does this mean for you and I? Well, in short, without access to courts and without the right to band together in class actions, consumers will have virtually no ability to put an end to bad and illegal corporate practices and will have virtually no ability to recover any damages they suffer resulting from bad corporate practices. Most individuals, for example, are not going to take a corporation to arbitration for a small claim of say $50. If they did so, the cost of arbitration to them would likely exceed the amount of their claim. Likewise, in arbitration, consumers would have no right or ability to obtain an injunction stopping a corporation from further engaging in an illegal practice. In short then it means that any time you have to sign a contract for a product or service, corporations have been given free reign to falsely advertise their products, breach the terms of the contract, and outright steal money from you and there is little or nothing you can do about it. The threat of class action litigation has often served as a deterrent on corporations from engaging in illegal and un-consumer friendly practices. Through their decision, the Supreme Court has removed this deterrence and corporations are free to rip consumers off with virtual impunity and without fear of legal action that would otherwise vindicate the rights of consumers. Unsurprisingly, this story appears to have received very little media coverage despite its far reaching implications for virtually every person in the United States. The Supreme Court has given corporations yet another victory in their quest to utterly dominate the people of the United States. Today is a truly sad day for consumers - all of us - the People of the United States of America.Updated by mrbeen38 at Wed Apr 27, 2011 at 03:51 PM PDT Wow! The rec list! This is my first attempt at a diary so thank you very much to all who recommended it. I tried to include a link to the opinion when I initially wrote this diary but for some reason it didn't work, so here is the link: http://www.supremecourt.gov/...

From dailykos.com.
Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up
by DemFromCT Sat Apr 10, 2010
Saturday punditry, and if you need a second opinion...

NY Times editorial:
President Obama might be tempted to replace Justice John Paul Stevens with someone bland enough to slip through the Republican chain of opposition in the Senate. If he is, we recommend he read a few of the opinions that Justice Stevens wrote in the last 34 years.

EJ Dionne:
Justice John Paul Stevens’s retirement is an enormous loss for the country, and particularly for progressives who have valued his brave and straightforward defense of civil liberties, equal rights and equal justice over many years.
But his departure should not lead to a bloody battle over his successor. Whomever President Obama names to the court will be no more liberal than Stevens -- and might possibly be slightly less so.

Charles Blow:
On the issue of the court being completely composed of former federal judges, she said: "In the past, we’ve had a very diverse court, at times, and typically we’ve had people on the court who didn’t serve one day as a judge. Sorry. You know. I’m a judge. I like judges. But we don’t need them all on the court. And we need people of different backgrounds."
In fact, according to a 2005 article in The Christian Science Monitor, 41 of our Supreme Court justices have had no prior judicial experience. That’s more than a third.

TAPPED:
I don't think there's any mystery about how Republicans are going to handle President Obama's nominee to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stephens. Here are some revealing quotes from a short Wall Street Journal post on the retirement announcement (all emphasis mine). Mitch McConnell: "Americans can expect Senate Republicans to make a sustained and vigorous case for judicial restraint and the fundamental importance of an even-handed reading of the law." Orrin Hatch: "[S]omeone who would be an activist judge, who would substitute their own views for what the law requires, is not qualified to serve on the federal bench." John Cornyn: "Our nation deserves a Supreme Court nominee who is committed to deciding cases impartially based on the law, not on personal politics, preferences, or what’s in the nominee’s ‘heart.’" Man, it's gonna be a great summer.

Monica Potts:
It’s not surprising that Stupak, who stood front-and-center in the health-care debate over its treatment of abortion, would want to leave after such a bruising battle. The end result of health-care reform is that access to abortion will be at least as restricted as it ever was, and likely more so. That was true without Stupak’s more restrictive amendment to the house bill, and would likely have been true even if he’d never raised a fuss over abortion.
The problem is, once you use anti-abortion rhetoric to criticize the health-care bill, the legislation's actual provisions on abortion -- that women would have to use their own money to buy abortion-riders because federal subsidies can't be used to pay for abortions, so plans in the exchanges can't offer them -- don’t matter. For voters who do not support abortion rights, the bill is forever associated with abortion, and Stupak played a roll in that. Since he ultimately voted for the bill, it was inevitable that he would be branded a sell-out.

Ezra Klein:
Compare Nelson and Stupak to people such as Mark Warner or Brad Ellsworth, both of whom are moderate Democrats who had serious concerns about the bill, but who spent their time quietly getting those concerns addressed rather than using them to get TV bookings in advance of a high-profile deal. Nelson and Stupak made themselves into targets for both the left and the right, and ended the process with lots of notoriety but even more new enemies. Warner and Ellsworth haven't suffered from the same backlash. The old model in which moderate Democrats justify their vote for a bill by talking trash about it until they get bought off doesn't work in an environment where the media and the political opposition is waiting to pounce on the buy-off.

Gail Collins:
At the Minnesota [Palin-Bachmann] rally, Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a presidential hopeful, tried to glom onto some of the glitter, but all he could come up with was "Wall Street gets a bailout, the poor get a handout and everybody else gets their wallets out," which is mean without being exciting. The crowd yawned.
Pawlenty is supposed to be one of the new breed of level-headed conservatives, but by next year he may be wearing snowshoes for his speeches and accusing Obama of surrendering our freedom to Finland.