Arbitration was created to allow giant companies with equal bargaining power to settle disputes without incurring expensive court battles. So, when IBM and AT&T struck a deal, they'd agree that instead of going to court, they'd hire a neutral person to decide who was right.
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But in the 21st Century, a string of Supreme Court rulings have paved the way for "forced arbitration" - when a company tells its customers or workers that as a condition of doing business, they must give up all the legal protections that come with the right to sue.
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Once you've been bound over to arbitration, a company can maim, cheat or murder you and your only recourse is to ask a corporate judge, on the company's payroll, to decide whether you are entitled to compensation.
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You will not be surprised to learn that arbitrators overwhelmingly find in favor of the companies that pay their invoices.
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We've experienced a quiet epidemic of binding arbitration. Your dentist or physiotherapist probably expects you to sign one. So does your kid's piano teacher. Your ISP. And, of course, your boss.
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Corporate America have been plumbing the depths of this accountability-ducking get-out-of-court-free card for years, sneaking arbitration into terms of service and other documents no one ever, ever (ever) reads.
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But, at last, we've found the bottom of this pit of despair. Massachusetts's highest court has ruled that a small-print notice that says, "By signing up you agree to the terms and conditions" does not constitute an agreement to arbitrate disputes.
The case concerns Christopher Kauders, who is blind and was illegally denied rides by Uber drivers. Uber's arbitration waiver forces riders to concede to the fiction that drivers are independent contractors, so Uber said Kauders needed to sue the drivers, not Uber.
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The court rejected this theory because Uber didn't force Kauders to go to the page with the Terms and Conditions (that no one ever, ever, ever reads) before clicking "I agree."
And yes, that is a VERY small win, but seriously, at least we've found the bottom.
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One of Lenny Bruce's most famous bits is "Eat, Sleep and Crap," which identifies the origin of civilization in the creation of agreements:
"Let's see. I tell you what we'll do. We'll have a vote. We'll sleep in Area A. Is that cool?"
"OK, good."
"We'll eat in Area B. Good?"
"Good."
"We'll throw a crap in area C. Good?"
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The idea that we negotiate the rules by which we conduct our affairs - rather than having them crammed down our throats - is the cornerstone of what it means to be in a free society.
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Democratically elected legislators create the rules by which we live: you can't sell poison as food, or maim people through negligence or malice.
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Binding arbitration yanks those rules out from under us: "By being stupid enough to click this link, you agree that I'm allowed to come over to your house, punch your grandmother, wear your underwear, make long distance calls and eat all the food in your fridge."
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The normalization of binding arbitration - the normalization of surrendering your legal rights in favor of a corporate judge who always sides with the house - is a grotesque, slow-motion train wreck for the very idea of a free and just society.
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In 1997, the Clinton administration created the "1033" program, whereby the Pentagon gave away its "surplus" equipment to local law enforcement agencies, leading to the nationwide militarization of America's cops.
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In the decades since, 1033 became a $5B industry: beltway bandits lobby their pals in the DoD to place massive orders for weapons and materiel which are immediately declared "surplus" and transfered to undertrained cops nationwide.
Opponents of this program hypothesized that it would obey Checkhov's Law: "A machine-gun in the police armory in Act One will go off by Act Three. And then again, and again, and again."
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"Partner with us today to build a better tomorrow" - that's the slogan for @oportun, a predatory lender that sued more poor latinx people during the pandemic than any other.
The company sued longtime customers who'd spent years in a debt-trap of endless payments and refinancing, customers who lost their jobs and missed some of those payments.
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It was just an escalation of business-as-usual for a company that has sued 30 customers a day, every day since May 2016. The company filed 10,000 lawsuits in the first five months of the pandemic. They are among the nation's most litigious lenders.
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Then came books like @ZephyrTeachout's BREAK 'EM UP, a political thriller that zeroes in on the role monopolies play in today's brutal and terrifying emergencies, from covid to climate:
MONOPOLIES SUCK is @Sally_Hubbard's action-oriented book on monopolies, drawing on her work with the @openmarkets Institute, laying out a practical program you can follow to help create structural changes and end monopolism:
A timely post in today's @PublicDomainRev brings us the storied history of "The Revolutionary Colossus," a recurring image of "a king-eating colossus" that spread widely and in many forms during the French Revolution.
One classic depiction comes from Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin's grampa) in "The Economy of Vegetation" a poem in 1791's "The Botanic Garden."
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Or as @sswesner summarizes it for we poesie-impaired types: "Between thick dungeon walls, a giant lies asleep. He’s chained to the ground, large limbs folded, enmeshed in a web of ropes, a blindfold over his closed eyes."
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US law enforcement has literal centuries of shameful history of infiltrating and spying on politically disfavored activist groups, from trade unionists to suffragists to abolitionists to civil rights advocates to antiwar advocates.
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Long before #cointelpro, federal agencies were intercepting communications and embedding as provocateurs in radical political movements, often with the help of mercenary "contractors" like the @pinkerton_agent. The digital age only ramped up this public-private surveillance.
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The #NoDAPL protests were infiltrated and surveilled by beltway bandits who billed the US taxpayer handsomely for the service.