An excellent read is George Lakoff’s Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives. Among the things he discusses are class action law suits and the framing used by the right wing to make Americans believe that the current government is going after “frivolous” lawsuits to protect our interests, ie, keeping prices down for us. In reality “frivolous” lawsuits make up well under 5 percent of all class action lawsuits. The objective of the right wing in stopping many of the filings of class action lawsuits is a “strategic initiative.” According to George Lakoff strategic initiatives are "a plan in which a change in one carefully chosen issue area has automatic effects over many, many, many other issues areas."
In Jack Dalton’s article Bush, The Republican Party, and Eliminating Competition Through "Strategic Initiatives" he states that “at the core of Bush and the Republican Party wanting to "cap" or, if possible, eliminate liability lawsuits by individuals and especially class action lawsuits, is a much broader strategy to "de-fund" the Democratic Party. A substantial portion of the Democratic Party's funding is donations from trial lawyers and their associations. These are the lawyers that generally speaking are the ones that hold the practitioners of bad medicine and companies that violate the law accountable by representing those that have been harmed. In short, eliminate the lawsuits, you eliminate a chief source of funds for lawyers and therefore their ability to donate to the Democratic Party. Lose enough funding sources and you might as well hang a sign on the door saying, "Gone fishin' don't know when, or if I'll be back.”
Dalton further says that, “Then there is the issue of liability lawsuits. Stifle the lawsuits; make it more difficult to get into court by switching from state courts to federal courts; end these lawsuits (which the Bush cabal refers to as Tort reform) and with one stroke of the pen they will have eliminated all the potential lawsuits that will be the basis of future environmental legislation and regulation.”
In a nutshell the right wing wants corporate America to be able to do as they please to us without repercussion to poison our water with chemicals, ignore labor laws, stop lawsuits where a faulty product injures or kills a consumer, etc and to "de-fund" the Democratic party among other things. What does the right wing and corporate America get out of this equation? PROFIT at the cost of your well being.
So before you start supporting the end of “frivolous” lawsuits know exactly what is at stake. There is more to this issue than what meets the eye. If you don’t care about workers rights, laws that protect consumers and our environment then by all means support these selfish, self serving bastards. When will the majority of conservatives learn that George W. Bush and his cronies don’t care about you? Their God spells his name M-O-N-E-Y.
And for the religious out there that believe the right wing conservatives are on your side I might ask you which side of this debate Jesus would be on? Huh? Do you think he’d be on the side of the big corporations? Think about it.
1 comment:
Labor law violations are becoming much more common as there is less money to pay employees and more work to be done.
My husband worked for a small business for over a year, got fired because he demanded more time off or overtime pay. He was working literally 4 days a week... 4, 24-hour days with no sleep between. Sometimes 5 days.
They took away his unemployment, saying he 'deliberately failed' to show up to work. He was too tired to move, was the real case. They had a lawyer, we couldn't afford one. We then sued them through the department of labor for labor law violations. They shaved 8-10 hours off each weekly paycheck and never paid him overtime, even at 80 + hours/week.
Think after living on unemployment and my 10hr week between classes, then being given 14 days to come up with 8 weeks' worth of unemployment to repay, that we could have afforded a lawyer for the labor law case? Not even close. We couldn't afford food.
That's why the government needs to protect us from people like that. I bet our case would have been considered 'frivolous' by GW and his cronies. Meeting basic living expenses is beyond the scope of their understanding.
We need to put someone in office that didn't grow up so 'privileged' and actually understands the plight of most Americans.
Long-winded but I think I made my point.
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