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Local Media REALITY CHECK -- great piece about forced arbitration

9/1/2014

WOW. This FOX affiliate's "Reality Check" is an amazingly good piece of local TV journalism. WELL WORTH A WATCH.

Please share the video at the link with as many people as you can. Until everyday people realize just how badly the justice system has been privatized, corrupted, and turned against us, the real people, businesses will keep getting away with using arbitration to cover up their crimes and they will continue pouring money into campaigns to lock in their unfair dispute resolution scheme, where they get to use the power of the courts against you, but not the other way around.

Popular outrage is the only antidote. We have to start defeating any candidate for federal office who won't make fixing this mess a top priority.

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Great video explanation of why you need robust class action rules

5/18/2014

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New head of Public Justice on a very misunderstood topic, one that the captive corporate press will never get right:

Media Matters . . . blogs videos and whatnot are incredibly well done and professional. They simply do fantastic work. They take important progressive issues and make them entertaining, and educate people and change minds.

Just today, they’ve released a video explaining why class action lawsuits are important, how they help workers and consumers, giving several examples. I’m honored and excited to have been interviewed extensively in the video, although they’ve added in a lot of clever animation, music, motion, photos, news articles, etc., so it’s not just a talking head, it’s something aimed at reaching a broader audience.

Here’s a link to the video:
http://publicjustice.net/content/executive-director-paul-bland-talks-media-matters-america-about-class-actions-and-justice

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Great summary of why arbitration clauses in consumer contracts undermine the rule of law

11/28/2012

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I got into a brief online discussion of the latest US Supreme Court Inc. decision upholding the "rights" of corporations (fictitious persons that are actually nothing but piles of property given certain permissions) to force consumers into arbitration.

I noted how odd that the folks who were all upset about the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") were paying no attention at all to Supreme Court Inc.'s far more radical steps into post-Constitutional law in the area of turning state governments into legal nothings.

Essentially, since Justice Rehnquist, the main thrust of Supreme Court Inc. has been to dispense with states entirely and turn the US into a single, monolithic entity where corporations are free to to locate in and claim the legal protections of the most backward states, while using a pre-Depression statute, the Federal Arbitration Act, in ways that its authors and courts never imagined it would be twisted.

Thus, since the 1970s, Supreme Court Inc. has moved to turn real people -- the ones whom the Founders who drafted the Constitution thought government was supposed to serve and protect -- into faceless non-entities who, in any conflict with corporations, should and almost always do lose.

The apogee (so far) of the Court's decision to enshrine corporate power where the Bill of Rights used to be is the notorious Citizens United decision. In Citizens United, the corporate power radicals on the Court, with no necessity to reach the issue, undid nearly a century of work to limit the sale of elections to the highest bidder. And that was just one example of Supreme Court Inc.'s relentless push to endow property with Constitutional rights, even as those rights that are clearly written into the Constitution for protecting people from oppression -- like the 7th Amendment right to civil jury trials -- are turned into dead letters.

Astonishingly, the radical justices most enamored of this ever-expanding, federalism-destroying posture are the ones who like to call themselves "conservative." (They also love to claim to follow the original intent of the Constitution's framers, regardless of their own personal preferences -- apparently the Founders loved corporate power much more than they thought they did!) In the exchange, Prof. Peggy Radin of the University of Michigan Law School concisely summed it all up as follows:

      Yes: Arbitration clauses are a threat to federalism because they are ousting state law consumer protection, aggregative remedies, and much else.

     Arbitration clauses are also a threat to the common law itself, and therefore to common law adjudication and the power of common law judges. The more the power to decide disputes is transferred to nongovernmental private parties whose decisions are without any public record and without any precedential value, the more the common law system is undermined. There is no opportunity to know whether like cases are treated alike, and no opportunity to rely upon past decisions in planning future actions.

     Arbitration clauses are also a threat to the rule of law, because they are destroying the right to redress which must be part of a legal system that honors and enforces the rights that it is set up to establish and protect. They are privatizing what must be public. The opportunity to rely on public decisions that are precedential in order to plan future actions is also a requisite of the rule of law. A regime of ad hoc decision making giving no notice to those who are subject to the law violates the rule of law.

     For the same reasons as above, mass market arbitration clauses make a mockery of equality before the law.

(Prof. Radin is the author of "Boilerplate: The Fine Print, Vanishing Rights, and the Rule of Law," in which these (and other) issues are discussed.)

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As soon as you are done with voting and election work, send eBay an opt-out too -- Postmarked by Friday!

11/5/2012

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In my haste to warn people about the malicious changes being imposed by PayPal to strip you of your rights under the law, I failed to notice that eBay is doing the same thing, and has an even tighter deadline for responding! Read the prior post (below) and visit the story for the full details. The punch line is here:

If you want to opt out of eBay’s arbitration rules, you’ll need to send a similar letter
postmarked by Nov. 9, to:

eBay Inc.,
c/o National Registered Agents, Inc.,
2778 W. Shady Bend Lane,
Lehi, Utah 84043.

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See for yourself what really happened with the notorious "McDonald's Hot Coffee" case

6/24/2011

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UPDATE:
In case you missed last night’s premiere of HOT COFFEE, you can still catch this important film.

HBO and HBO2 are re-airing the film several times over the next few weeks (all times Central):

HBO:

June 30 (12:30 PM) Central time
July 2 (9:00 AM) Central time
July 5 (9:30 AM) Central time
July 10 (3:00 PM) Central time
July 12 (11:30 PM) Central time

HBO2:

June 29 (7:00 PM) Central time
July 16 (5:10 AM) Central time
July 25 (3:55 AM) Central time
July 28 (5:30 PM) Central time

"Hot Coffee" is also available on HBO’s on-demand service. And DVD copies of the film will be available in the fall.
==========================
Tune in for the HBO premiere of Hot Coffee -- a documentary about the fictions and false alarms that threaten the civil justice system.

Former Public Justice Foundation President Susan Saladoff produced and directed the film as an article of faith and a labor of love. Years of hard work paid off for her when Hot Coffee was screened at this year's prestigious Sundance Film Festival. Shortly after that, HBO optioned the film.

Hot Coffee is a compelling and provocative documentary that everyone will find enlightening. For more information about Hot Coffee on HBO, click here.

To watch the trailer for the film, click here. We are proud to claim Susan as one of our own.
Arthur Bryant, Executive Director
Public Justice and the Public Justice Foundation
email: exd@publicjustice.net
voice: 202-797-8600
web: http://www.publicjustice.net

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Looking for TV, phone, or Internet services in Oregon?

4/28/2011

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     Telecom companies love to mousetrap the unwary with lots of tempting cheese (low teaser rates) and a nasty surprise (early cancellation fees that apply even when you have to cancel because they aren't living up to their bargain).
     And now that the US Supreme Court, Inc., has followed its pro-corporate and anti-consumer, anti-real-people bias to its illogical yet perfectly consistent conclusion (in deciding recently that consumers can't band together to hold abusive companies accountable in collective arbitration), it's more important than ever that you, before you sign ANY contract with ANY company, take the time to understand (a) what you are buying; (b) what you are supposed to pay; (c) and what constitutional rights you are being forced to give up and what protections you are waiving so that the companies can abuse you at will without any fear of having to appear in front of a jury of real people and answer for their conduct.
     To that end, if you are considering getting or renewing a contract for cell phone, cable or satellite TV, or Internet service, you should know about CUBConnects.org, a free service provided by Citizens Utility Board of Oregon (CUB).
     The companies in this field are some of the worst bad actors imaginable, regularly winning polls of "Worst Company in the World." They are fantastically profitable, providing a "service" with a marginal cost approaching zero, and yet they spend virtually nothing on training customer service representatives (CSRs) and they give them no authority to actually solve the problems that their absurdly complex rate tables and overlapping promotions and schemes create. Worst of all, they use outrageous early cancellation fees as a club to keep you from telling them to stick their "service" in their ear when you realize how the bills you are getting have nothing to do with what you were promised on the phone or on your doorstep.
     My advice:
    1) Do not sign up with ANY of these companies over the phone or at your door.
    2) Go to an in-store kiosk or a separate store to speak with a sales person.
3) GET A WRITTEN OFFER from them -- what you are buying and how much it will cost.
4) DO NOT SIGN IT until you take it home and READ IT with a highlighter in hand. Highlight any penalties or early cancellation provisions that they've hidden in there (such as mandatory arbitration provisions). Notice how the contract is all about letting them get away with anything, while limiting your ability to hold them accountable.
5) IGNORE them when they tell you that the offer is "only good today" -- whatever they're pushing, if they don't want you to read their offer and compare it to other choices, you don't want it.
6) Go to CUBConnects.org and compare you offer with the others out there, and read the blog and its warnings.
7) If you want me to look over their offer with you, feel free to give me a call and make an appointment; for $35 or less, I'll look over their offer, point out any red flags, and help you consider your options.

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Comcast Customer? Did you pay a late fee between July 2003 and November 2010?

2/4/2011

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If you did, you've got money coming, but you have to speak up here:
To make a claim, customers can visit www.oregonlatefeesettlement.com.

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Local Media REALITY CHECK -- great piece about forced arbitration

Great video explanation of why you need robust class action rules

Great summary of why arbitration clauses in consumer contracts undermine the rule of law

As soon as you are done with voting and election work, send eBay an opt-out too -- Postmarked by Friday!

See for yourself what really happened with the notorious "McDonald's Hot Coffee" case

Looking for TV, phone, or Internet services in Oregon?

Comcast Customer? Did you pay a late fee between July 2003 and November 2010?

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