Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/10/06/one-rule-for-me.html
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Capitalist assholes will be capitalist assholes. The revolution can’t start soon enough. Marx was right.
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…that forging those customers’ signatures on forced arbitration agreements meant that the customers couldn’t sue the bank for ripping them off.
I think that mischaracterizes WFs argument. Their argument is that those customers previous agreements to binding arbitration for earlier accounts covered the fraudulently created accounts.
So it’s not “We picked the lock on your door, so it was unlocked when we came in,” it’s more like “You let us in to use your phone, so OF COURSE we are able to rummage through your underwear drawer.”
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I just had a brainwave. This isn’t part of some shadowy agenda to turn back the clock. Corporations have just become powerful enough that hellaciously expensive lawsuits can be treated as research and development to reduce “costs” (fines). If they lose this case then they can tweak it and bring it back later, or just write it off as a business expense. The cost is relatively fixed while the profit from winning a case keeps growing. We’ve reached a point where “Subvert Democracy” is as feasible an option for increasing profit as “Automation” is.
Alcohol. Fucking now.
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Except neither he nor Lenin accounted for human greed.
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There’s a couple fixes for that.
It’s obvious that a financial penalty won’t have the desired effect of ‘stop being a collective a*%hole’, so the other option is to hold the entire board of directors and the entire C level management team responsible and throw the lot in jail and bar them from working in the industry.
Another alternative is to kill the corporation. (Difficult, I know, but it’s possible)
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Yet another reason I’m glad I’m an anti-capitalist.
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Unfortunately, class-action suits aren’t a matter of “little guys banding together.” They’re more like one law firm finding one “class representative” and then getting the suit going. The longer it takes, the more the lawyers get paid, so neither side is in any hurry to see justice. The perfect solution for both sides is for the settlement to come at the moment when it exactly equals the sum of legal fees. Too bad for the “plaintiffs.”
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“while customers who band together in class actions, aggregating their losses until they add up to a pile worth suing over, extract real penalties from crooked companies.”
Actually, it’s the tort lawyers who gain from class action lawsuits. They get millions upfront when the payout occurs and usually every lawyer for miles around has signed on as “co-counsel” and the plaintiffs get a few bucks at most each.
I’d be curious as to examples where the members of the class got anything significant out of any class action. And I don’t mean the two or three exemplars who get a few thousand dollars each but the the “rank and file” of the class.
I once got a coupon good for ten per cent off my next purchase of some item as part of a class action settlement but I Noticed something like forty eight lawyers on the documents who got multiple millions between them for “fees and expenses”, so color me less than impressed.
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Yeah, that’s kinda a big flaw in the plan. I’d just be happy with the revolution and not worry about the consequences right now.
Jail. I don’t know whether you have to throw the entire C level management in jail but jail is the only way to deter these guys. Fining the company won’t do it and even fining them personally probably isn’t going to be enough. Killing the corporation doesn’t work because everybody just goes on to commit fraud for another company.
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One fairly sure-fire way to tell that you are dealing with conservatives and the super-rich is that they are almost impervious to recognition of hypocrisy/ irony.
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Also, that would put a big hole in my argument that corporations are NOT people since you can’t kill them.
Maybe they just has a more optimistic view of human nature.
Logic: If the plantifs have a valid point, they should not be allowed to bring the suite, themselves being a coalition. If they do not have a valid point, they should lose the suite. Any other options?
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People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
-Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
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Yeah, good point. I guess the proper way to kill a corporation would be to jail the board and the C levels, and then dismantle the company as if it had gone into Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
(or actually murderize the board and C levels, but that’s a bit too squicky for my tastes.)
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As Homer Simpson has said “That’s okay Lisa, I used to believe in things too”
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ummmm, yea. I got nothin’…
