Tort Reform
By Capt. Fogg
It's an idea everyone can get behind. We need to stop those lawyers from winning huge settlements that make life expensive for the rest of us, right?
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures." said Daniel Webster and getting people angry or afraid to the point where they don't assess the unintended consequences is the cheap tactic we're usually subjected to - and effectively, I should add. No, I'm not going to rehash the way we've been deprived of our freedom and privacy by the administration's Punch and Judy show. We've been had repeatedly in the same way since I can remember.
Since I startedstudying being propagandized in grade school, I was told that in this great country, (say it's the greatest or you're a traitor) everyone was entitled to his day in court. That principle is one of the many casualties, not only of our invasion of Iraq but of the success of our unofficial Corporate House of Lords.
Some of the boilerplate you may have signed when dealing with employers, banks and other entities may effectively have been a Faustian bargain if not worse. Ask the Woman who was raped by co-workers for KBR in Iraq why she has no recourse whatever and why KBR was allowed to dispose of evidence without breaking any law. Ask her why she is denied the right to sue in Federal court. Tort Reform is the answer.
We're still waiting for the results, but Halliburton, the recipient of corporate welfare so massive as to defy description and which, being now based in Dubai, doesn't have to bother with those pesky taxes, is essentially free to deny that day in court to anyone who works for them and anyone else if they happen to be raped, harassed, beaten or killed in their Iraqi fiefdom.
Wave the flag, America. Make sure you lapel pin is in place and let's keep booming and bragging about how great we are and how unpatriotic our critics may be. Just keep marching and don't pay any attention to the cliff.
Cross posted from Human Voices
It's an idea everyone can get behind. We need to stop those lawyers from winning huge settlements that make life expensive for the rest of us, right?
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures." said Daniel Webster and getting people angry or afraid to the point where they don't assess the unintended consequences is the cheap tactic we're usually subjected to - and effectively, I should add. No, I'm not going to rehash the way we've been deprived of our freedom and privacy by the administration's Punch and Judy show. We've been had repeatedly in the same way since I can remember.
Since I started
Some of the boilerplate you may have signed when dealing with employers, banks and other entities may effectively have been a Faustian bargain if not worse. Ask the Woman who was raped by co-workers for KBR in Iraq why she has no recourse whatever and why KBR was allowed to dispose of evidence without breaking any law. Ask her why she is denied the right to sue in Federal court. Tort Reform is the answer.
" 'Tort reform' is a deliberately deceptive term coined in the 1980s by tobacco, pharmaceutical, insurance and gun lobbyists and lawyers who set about to transform our civil justice landscape by eliminating corporate exposure to civil liabilities."writes Peggy Garrity in the Los Angeles Times.
"Tort reform is a game of bait-and-switch in which ordinary citizens have been snookered by carefully orchestrated and relentless propaganda into seeing a phantom boogeyman in the much-reviled "trial lawyer" who brings "frivolous lawsuits" to "runaway juries" that render "out of control verdicts" in "judicial hellholes," making insurance rates and the costs of all goods and services go up."
We're still waiting for the results, but Halliburton, the recipient of corporate welfare so massive as to defy description and which, being now based in Dubai, doesn't have to bother with those pesky taxes, is essentially free to deny that day in court to anyone who works for them and anyone else if they happen to be raped, harassed, beaten or killed in their Iraqi fiefdom.
Wave the flag, America. Make sure you lapel pin is in place and let's keep booming and bragging about how great we are and how unpatriotic our critics may be. Just keep marching and don't pay any attention to the cliff.
Cross posted from Human Voices
Labels: Corporatocracy, Justice, rule of law
posted by Libby Spencer at 11:40 AM
3 Comments:
my idea of the finest tort reform would be to bring back code duello. think, if some rat bastard like bill o'reilly or a ken lay could reasonably expect a call some fine morning that went along the lines of:
you're a lying, cheating, rat bastard piece of shit. you, me, tomorrow on the sand bar at low tide. bring a goddamned knife. low tide takes the loser.
they might mind their ethics better. remember the duels that andrew jackson fought while running for office? the press quit writing shit about his wife didn't they?
i rest my case.
Bill O'Reilly and me, alone in some deserted place. Such things as dreams are made on. . .
Having been in the law business for two decades, working for tort attorneys, the war on torts has been especially alarming to me. Sure, there's some bad apples out there filing frivilous lawsuits but overall, the tort attorneys are the only thing keeping us safe from total corporate mayhem.
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