C’mon, dammit . . . Now this is really pissing me off!
Maybe not this month, perhaps not even this year or next, but sooner or later business is going to try to rip you off. The impulse is in the breed, and the proclivity to step beyond all limits is written through history in blood and tears.
I have a suggestion, when you encounter someone trying to tell you how the “market,” if left alone, without government interference, is self-correcting. Throw the person against the wall, then slap hell out of them for insulting you, as if you’re so dumb you’ll swallow any line of bull.
Yesterday, the Republican Supreme Court of non-activist judges ruled along straight party lines in Stoneridge v. Scientific-Atlanta, 06-43 that corporations can rob you and all investors blind, they can engage securities fraud, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.
“Suppas on, en I gotta git to it. Thet about does it doan it Billy Ray?”
Last session the Court held they could divine the intent of “Bong hits for Jesus,” and that employees had no right to sue for disability and employment compensation when the corporation or another court miscounted the days left to appeal rulings. EVERYTHING, as in E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G is now unabashedly of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations, and whether it’s you or the environment that takes the hit is just plain tough.
After handing down the ruling, the Court put the Enron investors’ suit on their list of cases to consider. If the Supremes either decide to not hear the suit involving $30 billion in investors and retirees lost savings or to hear it and decide along yesterday’s guidelines . . . I mean, folks who have been seriously wronged by scoundrels . . . Business and industries associations have been referring to such cases as “frivolous litigation,” and every one of us knows someone who has swallowed that trail of crap, then spewed it out, almost on cue. Friv’lous lawsuits . . . and everything gets reduced to the McDonald’s hot coffee or the lost pants at the dry cleaners level, and still we associate with druids like these; “keepin’ peace in the fambleh yeh know.”
The election this year is important. And if any one of us or our kids or grandkids are to have any chance at justice whatsoever, we absolutely must elect a Democrat as president, and we’ve got to make it highly personal to those who like to think of themselves as our friends that this is so much more important than any friendship. If we don’t change things, if the current course of events keeps heading down that same sorry path . . . What’s the alternative available to us? Take to the streets? Storm the Bastille?
Personally, I don’t see an alternative, if we can’t change the way things are headed. Do you?
— Ed Tubbs
