By John Ballard
Listening to Nader is like smoking crack or eating sugar with a spoon.
The content is so powerful the average listener cannot intake it all without getting dizzy.
He covers a lot of ground in his interview with Amy Goodman, but this quickie from the transcript is enough to chew on all day.
If the truth of what he calls contract peonage could be meaninfully spread to enough people there is a chance something might be done to correct the problem. It is the reason Elizabeth Warren strikes fear and anger in the hearts of so many politicians.
...the real issue in Elizabeth Warren is contract peonage. The American people, every day, engage in transactions, with these contract�fine-print contracts wrapped around their necks, strangling them. They have really destroyed the concept of freedom of contract in this country. Listen up, so called Tea Partiers, and get on board here. And this is what led to the mortgage debacle. There�s no time to explain it now, but the point is that corporations have taken over these contracts. They unilaterally change them. They block people from going to the court. They�re constantly penalizing�termination fees, this penalty, that penalty. It�s a total contract peonage. Contract serfs, that�s what they�ve turned the American people into. And they don�t even compete over these contracts. For example, if you don�t like Allstate, State Farm is the same, or if you don�t like Ford, GM contracts are the same. So people are trapped. And that is what is increasing the greed and the risk, in terms of deploying the insecurity that brought down the economy.
If contract peonage turns the American people into contract serfs, it is under the auspices of both major political parties. It appears that limiting damages in court cases is part of that process as well as the power of judges setting aside guilty verdicts. I remember well the case of a nanny who was found guilty of manslaughter in killing a baby which entailed a four year prison term, and the judge immediately, I mean immediately overturned the verdict and released the nanny allowing her to go home that day. The battleground always ends with justice in society because legislators make the laws, including how the judicial system works.
ReplyDeleteLaws limit freedom because they are supposed to protect us and serve as punishment for wrongdoers. Now, laws often protect, not the citizenry, but privileged groups at the expense of the rights and freedoms of the citizenry. Increasingly, the judgment of elected politicians in the two parties is often so skewed and irrational like our country's invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan that one wonders where the country is headed and how strong is the free press to confront the vagaries of simply bad, incompetent or corrupt government. Television news is usually more like a warm potholder for the pot, which is our government.