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/...

... In Which I Politely Flip Out. When Have Assassinations Become Acceptable?

by Dauphin
Thu Apr 08, 2010
What. The. Fuck. Actually, there are no other words which I can use to express my disappointment with Obama Administration's latest move: As both the New York Times and The Washington Post have confirmed, the Obama Administration has, for the first time in history, allwed the CIA to assassinate an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim imam and extremist.

From the New York Times:
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is believed to have shifted from encouraging attacks on the United States to directly participating in them, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Tuesday.
But the director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, told a House hearing in February that such a step was possible. "We take direct actions against terrorists in the intelligence community," he said. "If we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that." He did not name Mr. Awlaki as a target.
The official added: "The United States works, exactly as the American people expect, to overcome threats to their security, and this individual — through his own actions — has become one. Awlaki knows what he’s done, and he knows he won’t be met with handshakes and flowers. None of this should surprise anyone."
Really. Now, as a general principle, it's not considered illegal under international law to off someone who's an imminent threat to the security of a State. I admit, al-Awlaki is a nasty piece of work. People who write screeds advocating jihad against the United States and recruit for al-Quaeda. But imminence tends to be interpreted rather restrictively under both the US and international law.
In 2006, for example, a group of Canadian Muslims listened to Mr. Awlaki’s sermons on a laptop a few months before they were charged with plotting attacks in Ontario to have included bombings, shootings, storming the Parliament Building and beheading the Canadian prime minister.
"Al-Awlaki condenses the Al Qaeda philosophy into digestible, well-written treatises," Mr. Kohlmann said. "They may not tell people how to build a bomb or shoot a gun. But he tells them who to kill, and why, and stresses the urgency of the mission."
The horror! Clearly this is a man deserving of a bullet in a head! Well, my country has a saner limit to hate speech: Inciting people to violence is sanctionable. If they actually act on it, you can go to chokey for up to fifteen years (the minimum is three), if the Court really decides you've screwed up. But the United States has a little case called Brandenburg v. Ohio:
Conclusion:
The Court's Per Curiam opinion held that the Ohio law violated Brandenburg's right to free speech. The Court used a two-pronged test to evaluate speech acts: (1) speech can be prohibited if it is "directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action" and (2) it is "likely to incite or produce such action." The criminal syndicalism act made illegal the advocacy and teaching of doctrines while ignoring whether or not that advocacy and teaching would actually incite imminent lawless action. The failure to make this distinction rendered the law overly broad and in violation of the Constitution.
http://www.oyez.org/...
And let's just say that Brandenburg, a leader of the Ku Klux Klan, was a very nasty man. In tone, if not in politics, his screeds weren't that dissimilar from al-Awlaki's. So you have the absurd situation of something which doesn't rise to the level of banned speech not being enough to condemn you before a court but being enough to put you on the CIA's shit list. I mean, am I the only one who sees a bit of a problem with this? The Court would find no illegality but the executive branch can, without any judicial oversight, issue a de facto death warrant for someone. And, aside from their pro-Islamic and pro-al-Quaeda bent, Mr. Awlaki's screeds really aren't that different in tone from what the right wing lunatic fringe spouts.
And with regard to this case people usually spout that the man is obviously guilty as sin. Really? As determined by whom? The court of Public Opinion? That convocation of morons? The jury and the magistrates ignorant, the Judge Reporter a careless journalist? Yet, we are supposed to take it on faith that the executive has enough evidence, providence, and safeguards to order a summary execution of an "imminent" threat without any outside oversight at all. Here is a little something called the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution:
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
I think the law couldn't be clearer: If you're a member of the US army or naval forces, of a militia in time of war or public danger, the Grand Jury part doesn't apply. First of all, the question whether we're in a state of war is irrelevant, since al-Awlaki isn't a member of the US armed forces. Secondly, this, if a war it be, is a very strange war. There has been no formal declaration of it, although certain laws of war do apply because of the AUMF that were given, but - and I should stress this - despite that, as even the Bush administration was forced, through clenched teeth, to admit in Hamdi, there is no state of war declared. Only Congress can do that, which is why AUMFs are very specific as to what they allow.
Furthermore, who are we waging war against, pray tell? Al Quaeda isn't a sovereign power. And, pathetically, we want it both ways: We want all the privileges of waging war yet we want to imprison enemies. Sorry, you can't convict enemies in a war and imprison them for waging it; yet I was under the impression that's exactly what most of the world does with terrorists. Clearly it's a criminal matter, not a matter of war. I mean, I don't care, we can call it a war, but that means that when al-Quaeda is destroyed all its captured soldiers have to be released.
Finally, as for those who thunderously proclaim that al-Awlaki isn't a citizen, because "he's a traitor," pray tell, who determined it? Last I looked no law determined you lose your citizenship ex lege if you act like a shit. And even if it did, which institution formally weighed available evidence and revoked his citizenship? Could he defend himself? Al-Awlaki protests innocence, but, with orders being given to put a bullet in his head, it's a bit hard for him to argue his case. It might even be a tiny bit dangerous.
Besides, that pesky thing called the Fifth Amendment applies to all people, not just citizens. So, dear citizens of the United States of America who have a problem with the assassination of one of your own, what the fuck took you so long? Your own cherished preamble to the Constitution, which you do so love to invoke for political goals, states that everyone has been endowed with inalienable rights, be it citizen or foreigner, Jew or Gentile, black or white or scarlet (with the exception of political rights, of course), and that everyone has the right of due process.
Yet, apparently, in cases of OMG TERRORISM the executive could, without supervision, allow executions of foreigners based on Carefully Weighed Evidence. Never mind the fact that no outside institution ever saw it and never mind the fact that the internal procedure has even fewer safeguards than mediaeval inquisitorial procedures had. I mean, the accused could at least petition the inquisitor to perform investigative acts for him before referring his report to the college of magistrates.
And, when that restriction on due process carefully went unnoticed, because, hey, it's just them damn foreigners, right? the next and perfectly logical step of arbitrage of who is worthy to get human rights has started differentiating between worthy and unworthy citizens people get worried. No kidding. This could've been seen a mile coming.
The logic here is the logic of homo sacer, of outlawry: We'll grant everyone human rights... except for people we don't like. Those people can be dealt with with impunity. This is actually a nativist branch of legal reasoning that occasionally resurfaces in the United States, like untreated syphillis. The reasoning is that because this is the US Constitution it should only apply to citizens, not, say, foreigners under the power of the United States. Basically, it aims at a personality principle (let everyone carry their law with them) without bothering to recognise any law that protects foreigners, not the US law nor their home law.
That is the true issue here, arbitrage between personal rights. Political rights are subject to arbitrage, but personal rights aren't. That has never been contentious, not since, well, the French Revolution. And it's a tacit policy the US can afford to maintain because there is no reciprocity.
Consider, for example, the US being on the receiving end. How many people here would cry bloody murder if Berlusconi were to declare the convicted CIA agents an imminent threat and authorised their assassination? And the nativist logic goes further: If other nations were to apply nativist legal reasoning, it would mean that a US tourist in, say, France, could be robbed, raped, killed, chopped into little pieces, and dumped into the river with impunity. After all, it's just a foreigner, right?
Do everyone a favour, please, and point out to everyone you know that acknowledging others' human rights, substantive and procedural, isn't a matter of convenience but of legal and moral obligation. And point out that, if you give non-citizens equality before the law which your law demands chances are the same courtesy will be extended abroad.
To the Obama Administration: You weren't doing a bad job. Healthcare reform I supported. Even the expansion of offshore drilling I could tentatively support, if accompanied with investments into green energy. But extrajudicial executions I cannot support. If you truly feel you have to assassinate someone, at least establish a procedure where you have to get a judicial approval. It would be vile, of course, but less vile than being able to decide "within the family" that someone, citizen or foreigner, is worthy of execution. Now, I'll still tentatively support you, because the other side is worse, but unless you clean your act up this is a bloodstain that just won't wash off. And if you are going to order extrajudicial executions, Mr Obama, no offence, but I hope the dead haunt you in your sleep for the rest of your life, even if the condemned were guilty. That's not how it is done.

Update:
As burrow owl points out below, trial by military commission is perfectly acceptable and in this case the laws of war do apply as determined by Ex Parte Quirin. However, that case still subjects killings to limitations (for example, in case an enemy lays down his arms, and so on), according to the laws of war, which is why I'd argue a carte blanche for assassination is still problematic. Two former attorneys general, as per the Daily Beast, disagree, arguing that it's simply a decision on "how war is to be prosecuted."
http://www.thedailybeast.com/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Update II: The more I think about this the more I see the logic that led the Obama administration. I don't have a problem with invoking Ex Parte Quirin to justify a trial before military commission, and the fact is that there is no overriding need to capture enemies under the laws of war.
However, the problem is shown by the limits of the analogy used. It was established that you can declare war on an organisation like al-Quaeda. But this organisation is not a sovereign state and is not organised like one. The problem in such an organisation is (i) its cellular structure (what if some parts desire an armstice and others don't?), and (ii) stemming from that, how do we judge cases when a suspect's position is similar to the position of a member of criminal organisation, but not necessarily an enemy combatant? For example, are people who launder money for AQ enemy combatants? Because of this, while I see where the administration is coming from, I'd still have to disagree with its approach. You can only take an analogy so far.
In short, I'd argue the structure we're using to fight AQ is seriously lacking in detail and some safeguards should be introduced.

This shit sounds more like something that I would have expected from former Prez George Bush.

Iran's Past Democracy...

...and that would be the one which was alive in Iran back in the day before the United States took it away from the Iranian people, as Chris Hedges from truthdig.com points out. My links are still not working correctly so please bear with me.
Published on Monday, June 22, 2009 by TruthDig.com
Iran Had a Democracy Before We Took It Away
by Chris Hedges

Iranians do not need or want us to teach them about liberty and representative government. They have long embodied this struggle. It is we who need to be taught. It was Washington that orchestrated the 1953 coup to topple Iran’s democratically elected government, the first in the Middle East, and install the compliant shah in power. It was Washington that forced Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a man who cared as much for his country as he did for the rule of law and democracy, to spend the rest of his life under house arrest. We gave to the Iranian people the corrupt regime of the shah and his savage secret police and the primitive clerics that rose out of the swamp of the dictator’s Iran. Iranians know they once had a democracy until we took it away.

The fundamental problem in the Middle East is not a degenerate and corrupt Islam. The fundamental problem is a degenerate and corrupt Christendom. We have not brought freedom and democracy and enlightenment to the Muslim world. We have brought the opposite. We have used the iron fist of the American military to implant our oil companies in Iraq, occupy Afghanistan and ensure that the region is submissive and cowed. We have supported a government in Israel that has carried out egregious war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza and is daily stealing ever greater portions of Palestinian land. We have established a network of military bases, some the size of small cities, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kuwait, and we have secured basing rights in the Gulf states of Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. We have expanded our military operations to Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Egypt, Algeria and Yemen. And no one naively believes, except perhaps us, that we have any intention of leaving.

We are the biggest problem in the Middle East. We have through our cruelty and violence created and legitimized the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads and the Osama bin Ladens. The longer we lurch around the region dropping iron fragmentation bombs and seizing Muslim land the more these monsters, reflections of our own distorted image, will proliferate. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that “the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.” But our hypocrisy no longer fools anyone but ourselves. It will ensure our imperial and economic collapse.

The history of modern Iran is the history of a people battling tyranny. These tyrants were almost always propped up and funded by foreign powers. This suppression and distortion of legitimate democratic movements over the decades resulted in the 1979 revolution that brought the Iranian clerics to power, unleashing another tragic cycle of Iranian resistance.

“The central story of Iran over the last 200 years has been national humiliation at the hands of foreign powers who have subjugated and looted the country,” Stephen Kinzer, the author of “All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror,” told me. “For a long time the perpetrators were the British and Russians. Beginning in 1953, the United States began taking over that role. In that year, the American and British secret services overthrew an elected government, wiped away Iranian democracy, and set the country on the path to dictatorship.”

“Then, in the 1980s, the U.S. sided with Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war, providing him with military equipment and intelligence that helped make it possible for his army to kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians,” Kinzer said. “Given this history, the moral credibility of the U.S. to pose as a promoter of democracy in Iran is close to nil.

Especially ludicrous is the sight of people in Washington calling for intervention on behalf of democracy in Iran when just last year they were calling for the bombing of Iran. If they had had their way then, many of the brave protesters on the streets of Tehran today—the ones they hold up as heroes of democracy—would be dead now.”

Washington has never recovered from the loss of Iran—something our intelligence services never saw coming. The overthrow of the shah, the humiliation of the embassy hostages, the laborious piecing together of tiny shreds of paper from classified embassy documents to expose America’s venal role in thwarting democratic movements in Iran and the region, allowed the outside world to see the dark heart of the American empire. Washington has demonized Iran ever since, painting it as an irrational and barbaric country filled with primitive, religious zealots. But Iranians, as these street protests illustrate, have proved in recent years far more courageous in the defense of democracy than most Americans.

Where were we when our election was stolen from us in 2000 by Republican operatives and a Supreme Court that overturned all legal precedent to anoint George W. Bush president? Did tens of thousands of us fill the squares of our major cities and denounce the fraud? Did we mobilize day after day to restore transparency and accountability to our election process? Did we fight back with the same courage and tenacity as the citizens of Iran? Did Al Gore defy the power elite and, as opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi has done, demand a recount at the risk of being killed?

President Obama retreated in his Cairo speech into our spectacular moral nihilism, suggesting that our crimes matched the crimes of Iran, that there is, in his words, "a tumultuous history between us." He went on: "In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians." It all, he seemed to say, balances out.

I am no friend of the Iranian regime, which helped create and arm Hezbollah, is certainly meddling in Iraq, has persecuted human rights activists, gays, women and religious and ethnic minorities, embraces racism and intolerance and uses its power to deny popular will. But I do not remember Iran orchestrating a coup in the United States to replace an elected government with a brutal dictator who for decades persecuted, assassinated and imprisoned democracy activists. I do not remember Iran arming and funding a neighboring state to wage war against our country. Iran never shot down one of our passenger jets as did the USS Vincennes-caustically nicknamed Robocruiser by the crews of other American vessels-when in June 1988 it fired missiles at an Airbus filled with Iranian civilians, killing everyone on board. Iran is not sponsoring terrorism within the United States, as our intelligence services currently do in Iran. The attacks on Iranian soil include suicide bombings, kidnappings, beheadings, sabotage and "targeted assassinations" of government officials, scientists and other Iranian leaders. What would we do if the situation was reversed? How would we react if Iran carried out these policies against us?

We are, and have long been, the primary engine for radicalism in the Middle East. The greatest favor we can do for democracy activists in Iran, as well as in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf and the dictatorships that dot North Africa, is withdraw our troops from the region and begin to speak to Iranians and the rest of the Muslim world in the civilized language of diplomacy, respect and mutual interests. The longer we cling to the doomed doctrine of permanent war the more we give credibility to the extremists who need, indeed yearn for, an enemy that speaks in their crude slogans of nationalist cant and violence. The louder the Israelis and their idiot allies in Washington call for the bombing of Iran to thwart its nuclear ambitions, the happier are the bankrupt clerics who are ordering the beating and murder of demonstrators. We may laugh when crowds supporting Ahmadinejad call us "the Great Satan," but there is a very palpable reality that has informed the terrible algebra of their hatred.

Our intoxication with our military prowess blinds us to all possibilities of hope and mutual cooperation. It was Mohammed Khatami, the president of Iran from 1997 to 2005-perhaps the only honorable Middle East leader of our time-whose refusal to countenance violence by his own supporters led to the demise of his lofty "civil society" at the hands of more ruthless, less scrupulous opponents. It was Khatami who proclaimed that "the death of even one Jew is a crime." And we sputtered back to this great and civilized man the primitive slogans of all deformed militarists. We were captive, as all bigots are, to our demons, and could not hear any sound but our own shouting. It is time to banish these demons. It is time to stand not with the helmeted goons who beat protesters, not with those in the Pentagon who make endless wars, but with the unarmed demonstrators in Iran who daily show us what we must become.

The fight of the Iranian people is our fight. And, perhaps for the first time, we can match our actions to our ideals. We have no right under post-Nuremberg laws to occupy Iraq or Afghanistan. These occupations are defined by these statutes as criminal "wars of aggression." They are war crimes. We have no right to use force, including the state-sponsored terrorism we unleash on Iran, to turn the Middle East into a private gas station for our large oil companies. We have no right to empower Israel's continuing occupation of Palestine, a flagrant violation of international law. The resistance you see in Iran will not end until Iranians, and all those burdened with repression in the Middle East, free themselves from the tyranny that comes from within and without. Let us, for once, be on the side of those who share our democratic ideals.

© 2009 TruthDig.com
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, will be out in July, but is available for pre-order.
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