So in the case of the fake contracts, why are they suing rather than seeking prosecution for fraud?
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I love MLS, but they have a lot of connections with shady companies. Starting with overall sponsor and FC Dallas sponsor, Advocare; CenturyLink and the Seattle Sounders; Herbalife and the LA Galaxy. I’m probably missing a few.
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You know, this kind of b.s. is never going to stop until we start hanging some suits.
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The only people who can bring criminal charges in the US judicial system are federal and state prosecutors’ offices. Unfortunately, most of those are elected or appointed by elected officials, which in principle should mean their accountable to the people, but in reality means their accountable to the people who fund their campaigns and from whom they hope to get cushy corporate jobs from after they leave “public service”.
The goal of binding arbitration clauses is to keep it out of the civil courts and diverting any lawsuits to private arbitration courts where the judges are paid for by the companies themselves, a blatant conflict of interest allowed on the fiction that customers and employees “agree” to it when in reality the companies bury it in the obscurity of tomes of small print and even if they didn’t, telcos are typically regional monopolies.
Them forging people’s signatures on contracts is basically the middle finger to peasants that says fuck you, we own America’s farce of a judicial system.
TL;DR ~ In theory yes, in practice no because the prosecutors are bought and paid for by the 0.1%. However fucked up the US justice system appears from the outside, multiply that by ten to start to get some idea of how corrupt it truly is.
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Sounds like it’s time to pierce the corporate veil & go after the owners directly.
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At the company I worked for a few years ago, for many years we got by with whatever “business-class” DSL the local phone company offered. It was pretty terrible, and during bad weather or just because the planets were out of alignment or whatever the signal would get pretty awful at times, or cut out entirely. Because we had to be in constant contact with a server in another state in order to function, that was a problem.
Eventually, my boss, the owner of the company, decided to have a dedicated T1 line set up between the locations, and CenturyLink was who we settled on to do it. It was a big, happy sales pitch followed by a months-long nightmare of missed appointments, broken promises, “we didn’t plan for this, and it’s going to be another $3000 and we can’t install the line until next week sometime, but we’ll probably be late if we show up at all,” and, well, you name it.
More than once, I’d see the boss looking near tears, defeated, on the phone with them again, pleading with them to help him, because his business was essentially shut down, again, for an entire day. We went most of a week at one point without internet or phones. It was so bad, but once we were in, they had us and they knew it.
My boss had a rare cancer-like disease that caused lymphatic tissues around his body to grow out of control in a non-malignant but still horribly painful and eventually deadly way. It required him to have his immune system destroyed, followed by a stem cell transplant (after which he had to get all his immunizations again, like a newborn baby). He was in the hospital for nearly 6 weeks, at death’s door for several of those weeks.
Much later he would joke that that was the second most horrible thing he’d ever been through.
They’re that bad.
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The NSA used “you can’t prove we spied on you specifically so you don’t have standing” to ward of many a lawsuit from the EFF.
Once again government funded innovations are adopted used by the private sector.
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Why do you need to interact with the corporate veil at all? Surely you can find a “contract” with CenturyLink CEO Glen F. Post III’s “signature” on it stating that he owes you $1 million per day. I’m sure you can find a piece of paper with his actual signature on it (most likely some SEC filings.) Just because you used Wite-Out to cover the actual SEC data and typed the terms of the contract over the correction fluid doesn’t invalidate it, by CenturyLink’s reasoning.
By reading this reply, you concede that I’m rubber and you’re glue and all contracts bounce off me and stick to you.
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Jesus, they have John Scalzi as a customer.
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If one side can arbitrarily change the terms of a contract, how is it still a contract?
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Any advice for someone who is soon going to be forced to deal with them?
YES: Get a Calyx wifi hotspot if you live in an area with Sprint coverage. You will pay $500 for the first year of unlimited wifi ($600 if you opt for the fancier hotspot hardware), and $400 per year thereafter. @doctorow has given it a few burnished reviews. That’s a tad under $34/month. And that $34/mo funds privacy advocacy and education, and is, as a contribution to a 501c3, tax deductible.
I have been using this for a few months and it rocks.
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Two Presidents. Obama was perfectly happy with the mortgage robo-signers. Gave them a 100% free pass.
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Yeah, Centrurylink is as bad as comcast and all other cable companies, with the added incentive that they don’t have to do squat because they are the local exchange carrier for a significant portion of their service area… Fortunately, as they’ve been buying up other telcos and re-forming the New Bell Monopoly™, they’ve been keeping the grunts on the ground. (probably because the unions would scream and perform ‘job actions’ (iirc) to get their points across)
Here in Arizona, we’ve gone (IIRC) from Mountain Bell to US West to Qwest to CenturyLink, and there’s a handful of companies that made bank from repainting the fleet that many times.
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Seems like that would be an admission…
Oooooh, thank you! I’ve been looking to get away from my current wifi provider, and that $500 a year deal is better financially and data-wise than the plan I was thinking of signing up with. Plus, it sounds like a terrific cause… the only drawback is paying all at once, but I’m gonna look at my budget and see if I can swing it. 
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It’s even better: $500 for the first year, and $400 thereafter… ($100 is for the wifi hotspot hardware).
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Seconded. No matter what they advertise to me CLink has 3mbps at best in my neighborhood to offer and Comcast can give me 100mbps (provided I pay extra anyway) and so far the 30mbps has been plenty fast.
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We’ve been happy with them so far. No cramming, no slamming, no upselling, Just fiber to the home for a lot less than Comcast. Knock on wood
