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	October 30, 2004

'TORT REFORM' THE LATEST BUZZWORD FOR CORPORATISTS' ASSAULT ON CITIZENS Jeff Milchen, director of Reclaim Democracy, has written an excellent recap for Common Dreams of how the law is working to the advantage of corporatists, and against the interests of citizens and consumers. It's all part of the relentless war on democracy being perpetrated by corporatists to keep their customers in line. That war has two fronts: Protect corporations from litigation by victimized citizens and consumers, by capping limits and introducing regulations prohibiting lawsuits against some industries altogether. This is 'justified' by wildly exaggerating the prevalence of 'frivolous' lawsuits inititated by individuals. Enabling corporations to pursue litigation against aggrieved citizens by threatening to bankrupt or jail them for hurting the corporation's reputation with their charges Milchen points out that 80% of US lawsuits are now initiated by corporations, not individuals. And the large majority of legal actions thrown out by judges as 'frivolous' were initiated by corporations. The vast majority of large multi-million dollar 'runaway' lawsuit awards are also given to corporations, not individuals. Even litigation against pharmaceutical companies, blamed for driving up drug costs, is mostly launched by competing pharma companies to protect their patents. The principal effect of tiny litigation caps would be to discourage legitimate actions against corporate abuse, and that's why corporatists, who have politicians in their back pockets, are working so hard to pressure for "tort reform". Milchen says: "The attack on trial lawyers is really an attack on citizens' ability to sue corporations, and it goes far beyond this election cycle; it's part of a long-term assault on the rights of citizens and small business owners to hold corporations accountable via the courts. Having successfully undermined or dismantled regulations on big business in many realms, the next corporate agenda item is to regulate us  -- to strip citizens of our right to punish corporate crime and criminals." As I mentioned before, I think the deceitful mantra of "tort reform" to prevent "frivolous litigation and runaway awards" is being jointly orchestrated and repeated by the Bush Administration (notably Cheney) and their corporatist donors to soften the public up for a major assault on citizen defense against corporate abuses, in a second Bush term. And in other corporatist news, in an editorial in today's NYT a doctor and executive with a major pharma company admits "Americans are dying without the appropriate drugs because my industry and Congress are more concerned about protecting astronomical profits for conglomerates than they are about protecting the health of Americans." The author calls for legalizing and facilitating the re-importation of drugs from Canada and Europe for America's poor. I suspect he'll be looking for a new job soon. The graphics above are from Eminem's amazing video Mosh. See it in quicktime here, or in realplayer or windows media player here.  Daily Kos has (no laughing, kids!) posted an interpretationof the video for older viewers that don't get all the references. It's extremely clever; watch it more than once to pick up all the metaphors. Now if we can only get musicians and Hollywood to realize that corporatism is the enemy, not just government, we could really start getting somewhere. Thanks to David M. for the links. 2:35:29 PM  trackback []  comment []

© Copyright 2004 Dave Pollard. Last update: 01/11/2004; 5:34:34 PM.