Neil had a post up last month about how the attempts to equate John Edwards taking money from unions and trial lawyers with Hillary Clinton taking money from corporate lobbyists is part of the larger conservative effort to redefine “class warfare” in a way that makes it look like workers’ rights are a bad thing.
John Edwards once got a debate question about how he could consistently rail against corporate lobbyists while accepting lots of donations from trial lawyers. Aren’t they just as bad? And how about the other group that likes Edwards so much — organized labor?
The answer is simple. If you think that consumers have been robbing corporations blind, or that the balance of power between workers and executives is unfairly tilted against executives, then these donors should make you look darkly at John Edwards. But if you think consumers need better protection against corporations whose products disembowel little girls, or if you think that the next president needs to fight tooth and nail for working people’s interests, you should be happy that trial lawyers and unions support him.
The “omigod trial lawyers and unions” crap is straight up monocle-clutching robber baron shit. It’s a philosophy that would posit that the real tragedy of a mine collapsing is not the loss of the coal miners’ lives, but the loss of profits that come from rebuilding the mines. It’s the philosophy that made people defend child labor and shoot into crowds striking for some time off so their families know what they look like. It’s the blatant belief that anyone who clears less than a million a year is subhuman. Literally subhuman, as demonstrated by this advertisement that ran in the NY Times a week ago.
That monkey is you. You, the working stiff whose only recourse if some huge corporation screws you over is to sue. Screws you over by say, by making a product that sucks out your intestines, which is what happened with the “Jacuzzi lawsuit” that Republicans mock John Edwards for taking, because apparently we non-rich animal people should simply accept it if our financial betters decide that we won’t be having our intestines inside our bodies.
This is what people who are screaming about “tort reform” think of you. That the very idea that you, a non-rich person who probably thanks the Disco Ball when it’s pay day, should have rights is disgusting and that the federal government’s job is to strip you of those rights. If their actions lead to intestinal loss or scalded genitals or your husband dead at the bottom of the coal mine, then your legal recourse should be the same as a rabbit’s that got run over by a car—nothing.
Jill has more, including some points about how there’s a race-baiting aspect to the tort reform attempts, particularly how proponents like to draw attention to the fact that black people have as much right as white people to sue in order to get white working class people to turn against the right to sue for damages if you’ve been damaged. And since the Republican revolution has been mostly about convincing white working people to relinquish power and rights to make sure that black people don’t have any, I wouldn’t underestimate the power of the racist appeal.
64 Responses to “Do they even let your kind into the courtroom?”
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My favorite one was the SOTU address where Bush said asbestos lawsuits were frivolous. Mesothelomia sure is! Anything that makes your lungs look like is hilarious!
Wait, so pictures of apes are obviously racist this week, as opposed to the week before last, when they weren’t?
I’m so confused.
Please find the quote where I said that, grendel. Please. Because if I did in fact say that your reading was completely wrong and there was nothing to it, then someone else logged on under my name and wrote it. Because I do believe if you read the thread, I said that multiple interpretations were possible.
I would caution against reading this ad strictly as racist. I think the most straightforward interpretation is that people who join class action lawsuits are monkeys. I do believe white and black people are permitted to sue for damages and all are hated by conservatives who support “tort reform”. Now, I’d suggest that they’re hoping that some racist white people think “black people” right away and that shuts down their rational thought processes. But the narrow interpretation that suggests that monkeys could only represent black people doesn’t fit the evidence—they’re saying everyone who joins these lawsuits is a stupid monkey. I’d hate to see a debate go up about whether or not this is racist or classist or what. It’s both, and to different degrees to different audiences.
Interesting (and I guess in retrospect inevitable) how quickly this discussion circled back to American racism, since when reading Neil’s eludication of the distinction between the interests of corporations versus unions or “teh trial lawyers” (as though the lawyers defending corporate outrages in court are somehow not also “trial lawyers” too) I reflected on the oft-heard rightist meme that “hey, blacks or other ‘minorities’ are racist too!”
It is always obvious to me that even when some of these people are indeed just as bigoted as white bigots, they don’t have the power in US society to commit the offenses the white power structure routinely does.
Furthermore, I think there is every reason to assume that most of these counter-bigots have evolved their views in defensive, self-protective reaction, and the bigotry will probably dissolve as the dominant “white-uber-alles” racism of the USA is weakened and hopefully ended, just as lawyers like Edwards would stop bringing cases against corporations if they began behaving like ethical and law-abiding entities instead of robber barons. If either of these hoped-for millenia ever actually arrived, anyone trying to persist in these roles would stand revealed as irrelevant cranks with no merit to their cases. Since in fact we are mired deep in systematic ruthlessness, it takes ideological contortions to continue blind to these merits of these cases.
And thus, lots of behavior and organizations that are accused of being “reverse-racist” are nothing of the sort.
The assumption that human beings exist to compete ruthlessly with one another and that “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” blinds what passes for mainstream “thought” to the actual merits of the issues at hand.
Yeah, I’m sick of the whole “tort reform” charade too. Until I see government inspectors ticketing people for not shoveling their sidewalks and inspecting daycares once a week for safety, lawsuits are the only enforcement mechanism we’ve got for many of the laws and regulations out there. They’re not as efficient a mechanism as I would like, but I doubt the corporate whiners have a better idea.
I’d hate to see a debate go up about whether or not this is racist or classist or what. It’s both, and to different degrees to different audiences.
I guess grendel never heard of an image doing double duty in advertising, as though every ad out there is targeted to only a single demographic group. Or perhaps he’s just dishonest and is looking to “score a point.”
You forgot about all the damage the rabbit did to an innocent tire or two, for which the rabbit owner should of course be held accountable.There was a headline in the NYT’s editorial page in late June or early July that read “Justice Denied”. Of course, everything that the right wing does is racist, sexist and homophobic rolled in to one.
I am also totally disgusted by the “tort reform” nonsense. These are the same people who want a woman to remain quadriplegic for life after she was injured by her OB-GYN’s “mistakes”.
The GOP is out of touch with reality. They want to slam the court doors shut for over 80% of the population.
The current system really is a form of vigilantism. I think there’s no way around it. But until governments decide to step up, and take this sort of thing out of civil courts, and into criminal courts, where they belong, then frankly it’s much much much better than nothing.
Notice you never see these “tort reformers” talking about replacing the current system with anything. They’re just looking to protect criminals.
We should be willing to shut down companies who repeatedly rip off their employees/customers. Fuck the shareholders. Who ever said an investment was required by law to make a penny?
Orson Scott Card of all people once slapped his righty readers by pointing out that in the U.S. we’ve basically decided to regulate by trial lawyer, which is much less efficient but better than nothing.
He had to write, I believe, 2.767 posts about the Muslim peril before being allowed back into their good graces.
Wow!
This is my cue as the resident troll on this topic…
White people are the primary sufferers from racism at a gross gdp per capita level, not black or any other minority, who are suffering from the *show*.
What, you don’t think so? When TV news show OJ Simpson’s trial in a different way from how the trial was done (instead of good lawyers decisively showing police misconduct as a material question, they emphasize the jury being a bunch of stupid and nationalistic black people)
What, you don’t think so? The telly showed mostly the Katrina sufferers as black and from 9th ward or somesuch. However, the disaster struck both black and whites (many of them relatively well off) at a relatively equal level. Katrina destroyed most of East New Orleans, Lakeview, Gentilly, Slidel, and Metarie, not to mention all the folks down the southeast arm following the Miss. River. Do you think NOT showing as many of those guys, or as much of the Mississippi coast disaster was an accident?
and there’s plenty more where that comes from.
One should *never* ignore the various flavors of schadenfreude, from the “compassionate” kind to more malignant varieties. Luck has *always* been a big part of how people judge status in society. It’s why many of us have so much pleasure from misfortune.
So long as white people think of racism as something that *they* do to other people, they will miss the essential nature of racism to their own oppression. Evil (not freedom) really ain’t free, you know!
So Amanda, when you see that monocle clutching going on when Edwards is going around, it’s ‘cause they view Edwards as an *agent of good luck*. When they think of jury trials, they tend to think of them as lottery winnings. And of course the victims don’t deserve to be *lucky*. They do generally try to avoid thinking that restitution was deserved, that would make them or their friends “bad people”. Then they think about seeing some jumped up negro with money from one of those lawsuits showing up at their country club, and then get *really* upset…
“nationalistic black people”???
I think some of your spittle obscured your vision on that one. So, they’re patriots?
Well, doesn’t it take that to ignore the fact that the jury wasn’t all black? And that everyone is roughly the same in penchant to be rational or irrational?
Jury nullification by “black” juries is a pretty damn rare occurance. Nobody likes the damage caused by “innovative” behavior…
The telly showed mostly the Katrina sufferers as black and from 9th ward or somesuch. However, the disaster struck both black and whites (many of them relatively well off) at a relatively equal level. Katrina destroyed most of East New Orleans, Lakeview, Gentilly, Slidel, and Metarie, not to mention all the folks down the southeast arm following the Miss. River.
this just doesn’t make sense. the inhabitants of the 9th ward, treme and bywater, who were mostly african-american and lower-income, were most in need of aid in evacuating and most screwed over by the tardiness and neglect; their residents were disproportionately represented in the superdome and convention center; and these neighborhoods are STILL the most lacking in reconstruction work and the least repopulated, and not because residents haven’t attempted to return. and don’t get me started on the public housing projects, that’s an outrage. this is partially true for new orleans east too, which was largely black but not very poor. the white and middle-class neighborhoods that you mention may have been equally damaged by water but official support and money for their rebuilding came almost immediately, and residents have been allowed to return. it’s insulting and awful that you want to conflate “equal property damage” with “equal damage to victims” or “equal damage to communities” or “lack of racism”.
the more rural areas DID get the shaft when it comes to reporting and aid — my guess is because people are more horrified by the destruction of a city than of a place they imagine didn’t have anything in it in the first place. it’s anti-rural, i imagine, and they’re rightly bitter about it. but you’re completely off-base about the rich urban white people got equally fucked over by katrina thing. i’m one of them. katrina may have really sucked even for me, but all that means is that it sucked even worse for people who didn’t have a car or money for a hotel or friends with a spare room.
Wow, Shah8 that was some barely coherent nonsense you just spewed.
Keep in mind that Edwards gets a lot of corporate money too. That’s why he favors keeping our troops in Iraq after 2008.
History_mom…Web usually moves too fast for me to ever tighten anything up in time. ADHD can be a real damper…
roula, perhaps my writing is indeed super unclear, but you’ve made my point, sorta. I am talking about the emphasis on the TV. I am also talking about *gross, financial, takings* of the event. I am aware that many black families lost everything they had, and many are scattered to the winds, and there is tremendous emotional damage associated with the event.
I should know. I follow hurricanes as a hobby, and I followed just about everything that happened in NO and the Miss coast. I read many books about the hurricane. The best books, btw is the one by Jed Horne, and another by Christopher Cooper and Robert Block. I also read quite a few books on african american history, on many facets, from interactions with native americans, to the conflicts between populist BT Washington and elitist Debois, to how whites viewed slavery and segregations, and so forth and on. I am very much knowledgable about race, and less so about sex (which is why I’m a big fan of Pandagon).
So roula, you haven’t said anything I don’t know, and don’t already have a considerable compassion for. I’m trying to make an apparently sophisticated argument, and so far making a hash of it (which is why I’m a troll…I’m trying to get the right words together and try again in another thread).
Racism in the US is part of a sophisticated class system, as much as in Japan, class struggle is meted out in a couponing system, or as how any other first world country maintains the upper class. I’m trying to bring more focus on how upper middle class to worker class people as a whole interacts with the system. I want to point out how *any* system requires some sort of fuel to propagate itself into the future. Black people have a minor proportion of the gdp. There simply isn’t enough sustenance in Black America that the post-cash crop system could take to support all the costs of racism. If this is true, then where is the system getting the cash to support huge numbers of black men in jail? Or how does it bear the costs of discrimination on productivity (which is NOT minor)?
So where DOES it come from? Let’s start with New Orleans. If the media doesn’t show ALL of the victims of Hurricane Katrina on a regular basis, and does not convey the true sense in how everyone living on the gulf coast is struggling, does anything gets done at a centralized manner? Or do we have our resident racist congressman Tom Tancredo argue that everyone on the Gulf Coast is a whiner and undeserving of help, we’ve already given what we as a country should (even though so little of that reached the people in need). The ability of Tom Tancredo to be so publically heartless is directly focused on the image of black people as unlucky sad sack sufferering losers. The media help support this image. Why? Well, think about how many billions of dollars have been directed at the Gulf Coast. Think about how little of that reaches *any* of people outside of the good ole boy network. Think about the attempt to turn NO into some kind of cajun disneyland. Do you think for one second that working class white people would be allowed to help build or staff it? What this is, is truly MASSIVE public corruption disguised by many of the more subtle aspects of a racist society. Corruption that also assists in the death of NO with little national outcry, because after all, only stupid people live below sea level. The reporters get their pulitzers and GE and their fellow corporate behemoths gets their snouts deeper into the public trough. …While the average joe feels that his miserable life is at least better than “those people”.
It’s the same along *so many* other pathlines. Luck, deserving, undeserving, public losers, are all shone on with unerring accuracy to produce a result that results in *everyone* but the top .2 percent or so people losing. Health care, immigration, equitable education funding, unions? The opposition to all of these things are mediated *directly* by the perception of how other ethnicities are percieved to benefit. We have a hugely profitable health care industry that is visibly destroying the country through outsized extraction of value from everyone else. Yet Universal Health Care (not insurance) was blocked by southerners, and is blocked by people who want to view luck as divinely granted. That if they are the right race, sex, with the right connections, and working hard, will be among the lucky future rich. And they don’t want to see any of that money that’s rightfully theirs when they’re rich.
Roula. I’m sick of being in a game show. I don’t want to ask a question, nor do I want to spin the wheel. Especially when I’m the booby prize (say the guy their prized blonde daughter marries and causes scandal). I want white people to have a more sophisticated idea of how race works, and how it robs them blind (in some cases, literally). The more of an awareness that this is a game, the better chance we all get to hang Alex Trebeck or whoever the dungeon master de jour is, and exit craptastic Seahaven Island.
Roula if you want a *fast* and well written way of getting at what I’m talking about, read Gilbert’s Stumbling Into Happiness with any book on Reconstruction or desegregation of your choice.
/rant off
p.s. Why do you think the media hates John Edwards? Unlike Clinton who promise a better working system (for whom, is vague), or Obama who promises an inspirational variety of technocratic leadership, Edwards is promising that the system would be more responsive to their needs, and that unlucky people aren’t bad people, or lazy. Shit happens, and it’s the responsibility to make sure that the burden is equitably shared. The more you see on how the system works, more you might see how profoundly the system would hate John Edwards, as mild as his steps are in this direction.
Okay, Shah, so your basic point appears to be the classic “everyone is screwed over by capitalism, and racism is just a symptom and/or a distraction” meme. Racism is used to divide the working classes so that they won’t rise up against our corporate masters, something like that. And therefore we ought to stop talking about racism over and above that which is necessary to see it as a means of dividing us all.
So my question to you is how do you get people to see beyond racism when it’s the primary prism through which they view life? Yes, some white people took it hard in NO, and some well-off blacks didn’t so much. But it’s black people who are imprisoned in trailer camps while whites are moving back in. You can’t get someone imprisoned in one of those camps to agree that it’s really just a means of fragmenting the poor — and you’re not going to get the poor whites to agree, either. The central message of the modern Republican party to poor Southern whites is “We’re going to fuck you bad, but the blacks will still have it way worse.” And it works like a fucking charm.
But what if it were possible? Is it ridiculous of me to suggest that the Dems might make this one of their talking points? Maybe I’m just too hung over to make any sense at this hour, but what’s the harm of addressing the systematic ways that conservatives turn poor white people against ethnic minorities in order to reinforce the status quo and their own class and race privileges?
Is the subject so taboo that the only people who can discuss it are us “Librul ‘Leet” here at Pandagon? I don’t think the concept is so complex that it couldn’t be distilled down to a soundbyte. As with all things, however, I could be wrong.
My goodness, that picture is pretty freakish. It’s one thing to demonize trial lawyers, but it’s another thing entirely to demonize ordinary consumers who have been injured by unsafe products.
Okay felagund…
1) Yup, everyone is screwed over by capitalism. Whether that is over and above how much people generally try to screw over each other, I don’t know. But european capitalism is directly based on coerced commerce and mercantilism. The capitalist system we have today is based on this.
But understand this. White people are still the primary sufferers. Racism is a tool, and not an effect, with the primary goal of extracting wealth wherever that might be. It is not simply a divide and conquer mechanism. It’s not even divide, or primarily for the working class. It’s a means to commodify the consent of widely ethnically diverse white people, very much as Chinese might talk about the Han populace (even though Han comprises of fairly different ethnicities, on top of what ethnic minorities Chinese government people will admit to).
2) I do not think we should stop talking about race in any way, shape, or form. I believe white people, even liberal white men, have a firm psychological investment/instinct in percieving their luck in not being black, or disabled, or female. I believe that this tendency spoils most of the aid liberal white men could give in rectifying social ills, by lowering the ability to empathise. This happens in general. So many non poor people just don’t get how hard/expensive/undignified being poor is, and how *most* of that is mediated by *charity*, of all things. So many people intuitively believe that if they give something, they have the permission to hurt that person as well. I believe that the discourse would be better suited to *add* in the relative huge (mostly financial) costs racism has for white people, and increase the awareness of how the system, for all of it’s protests about being beyond race, is intimately invested in perpetuation of a racist society. I think, if one is more aware of how one suffers (and more disinvested in Calvinist logic), despite whether you (as a class) have some kind of majority of suffering (like I’m arguing), or not, then one can better craft how to stick it to the man.
2) What do I want out of this discourse? Sorta like Scotty the postmodern engineer rediscovering his scottish heritage through his brough. I want to break up (by starving the monolith of the necessary binding energy) “white” solidarity and fragment it into smaller ethnic/social communities with different interests, and playing coalition politics to suit their needs. Makes it much harder to govern, especially poorly, but also much harder to steal from people on such a massive scale. And much harder to justify harming minorities (since everyone is a minority then).
3) As for black people in prison camps. Can you do very much for them without stabilizing the injustice? With the media against you, and the local elite, black and white, very much jealous of each dollar that enters?
Or can you do more by showing white people in Mississippi/Alabama how their elite use the image of black public schools in order to prevent a progressive tax system. The vast majority can’t truly send their children to good private/parochial schools, because it costs, at a minimum, 10k a year to adequately educate a child for a year. Money they don’t have. So they send their children to a costly network of shitty private schools that can’t do much in the way of teaching, and ignore the fact that a taxpayer paid for beaurocratic infrastructure exists for educating their children. If they ever got to realizing that they should insist on adequately funded public schools, and using them, despite the fact that black people use them as well…then that would mean nice, big, tax increases on the wealthy and businesses.
There are more ways, and better sneaky ways, of discourse, when you take the n-word out of the game. How come *we* can’t use dog whistles for a good cause anyways? That does not mean that we stop talking about when kids displays nooses as a way to intimidate other kids. We just need to have a better understanding as a group how to disintermediate Calvanist thought practices from race in discussion and action.
Please give me a specific example of how white people are the primary sufferers of racism.
This is one of my favorite pieces of misinformation about Edwards and trial lawyers in particular. The little girl was injured at a neighborhood pool about a mile from my house, a neighborhood pool that my boyfriend’s family still belongs to. She was injured in the kiddie pool. Not a Jacuzzi.
If you go to that neighborhood, which I drive through frequently, you’ll see that it’s a regular middle-class neighborhood. These people are decently off but they aren’t super-rich by any means.
I just enjoy how the right wing tries to play on class tensions by calling it a “Jacuzzi lawsuit” (like “hot tub liberals”). As though the injury were a just punishment for having a Jacuzzi — when in fact it was just a plain old shallow pool, like the one my mom used to take me to splash in when I was little.
Felangund, I believed I outlined how I determined my statement.
If you wish for more clarity, tell me, what do you mean by suffering? By brutality? Of course not, but that wasn’t what I was talking about. I was talking about brutality as a *show*, and as a means to take things from a third party.
shah8:
You seem to be saying that white people are the main sufferers of racism for two reasons. First that the specter of being one of “those people” keeps whites in line and because there are more whites than POC in this country.
Although I certainly wouldn’t argue that the former is an effect (though not dominant) of racism, I don’t think that numbers alone make whites the primary sufferers from racism, except for a pretty odd definition of suffer.
To shah8
Han-Chinese is indeed an ethnic group, and it is the majority. The thing is, the Han-Chinese had very little qualms about intermarrying with our Arab/Muslim neighbours, the Kaifeng Jews, the various clans and tribes and even members of other countries that existed before the entity that will become China ate them up. So it’s /Chinese/ that comprise of different groups, the majority being the Han, which are by now, mixed with others to various degrees. Since it’s confusing to id people as 1/16 this, 1/16 that and so on, most people pick one group and stick with that culture, and it is usually Han, and they are usually recognized as such.
Asian people are far from All The Same, our skin colours doesn’t make us share anything beside look, UNTIL we are outside our countries when we are lumped together and perception affects our reality. Ditto for blacks in North America, in a way, white people made them by lumping them together, forcing people who previously had little in common beside the colour of their skin to group together to fight against oppression imposed upon them on the grounds of their appearance.
That above is why ‘white people’ are NOT an /oppressed group/, having not been enslaved on mass by the colour of their skin the way the African groups had, ‘white people’ had never been striped of their distinct cultural origins by force. Though in countries where there are different groups and racism, ‘white people’, regardless of whether they are as distinctly Finnish or English or Polish or French, if they can pass as ‘white people’, they will be capable of enjoying the privilege granted to them by those who see them as ‘white people’.
- Mercurial Georgia
That advert is absolutely atrocious. Who paid for it, and where can I send my letters of complaint (in addition to the New York Times)?
Also the accident in the children’s pool is tragic, and any attempt to lessen or obscure what happened is inexcusable. Looks like I’ll be writing many letters today.
///
shah8, I am finding your statements unclear as well, which is why I am asking you for further clarification before I comment.
Is there any way you could more clearly outline what analysis is your own, what statements you have read/heard from other sources, and indicate where you are getting your information from? My background happens to be in the analysis of race, social reproduction, and macro-economics, so what I am looking for from you would be a citation, rather than further explanation.
Thanks
Well…part of the point, though I did not elaborate on this, is how odd the measurement is *now*.
How can you compare the suffering with say, 50k black people who lost everything, valued at 500 million dollars and perhaps 1000 relatives…with 100k white people who lost a third of their net worth, valued at 10 billion dollars and 400 relatives? You cannot.
Yet we make snap judgements all the time about who is more deserving of pity and/or cash. And much of the time, it’s determined by what’s on the TV. And then it gets even wierder. For example, we see Rodney King being beaten, and then we see Reginald Denny getting smashed, but we as a public never grasp or even have a chance to grasp that the LAPD’s militarization was impacting on everyone, and that the people who manned the stores feared the USC fratboys more than putative rioting black people. Even past that, people get fscking wierd about what they see on TV. I mean, have you ever discussed the rave scene in the Matrix Reloaded with many people? I’ve noticed that the lack of visual cues about status during the dance truly subliminally freaks certain people out, unlike similar scenes in vampire movies even though blood is pouring, and not sweat and saliva. Vampires eating people are more righteous than just a bunch of people having a good time, celebrating life communally!
So besides the truth of what I say, I also wanted to say this as a cultural jamming method. Get people to see how the hate crime affects the people for whom it was committed as well as the group of people it was meant to terrorize. Get people to realize that they consider themselves not to be a victim only because they say they aren’t victims, and society permits them to act so. I want to make the essential schadenfreude more visible as a cue to help or hurt, and its essential poison in helping other.
p.s.
It’s why I hate the term “nice guy”. I know it’s an appropriate term for the kind of people we’re intellectually talking about. But it’s also a very nice term to put down genuinly nice people/immature people/mechanistic (autistic pay it forward types)/and just downright socially ignorant people. It’s a term that’s really easy to aim on an instinctual level in a way that not true of a term like “concern troll”.
(as though the lawyers defending corporate outrages in court are somehow not also “trial lawyers” too)
Technically speaking, yes. However, the people who are commonly referred to as “trial lawyers” are plaintiff’s attorneys and more than likely members of the American Trial Lawyers Association.
The interesting thing about this ad (and you can see the whole thing, with text, at Feministe) is that it’s specifically against class actions, but doesn’t specify which type of suit. And there are a lot, including consumer suits, shareholder derivative actions, civil rights cases, etc.
Often, products liability cases such as those that Edwards made his reputation on aren’t actually class actions. Class actions are meant to address large-scale injuries where the injuries are pretty much the same. So you get stuff like class actions brought by shareholders, where the injury is on a per-share basis; civil rights class actions, where a policy affected all people in the class in pretty much the same way (i.e., when the NYPD decided to not allow people arrested during mass demonstrations to have desk appearance tickets); or consumer cases (such as the one I got a notice for, which was for being overcharged for CDs).
When you have a products liability case, the injury will vary from person to person, even though it’s the same product and the same defect. Which is one of the reasons that a plaintiff’s class has never been certified in asbestos litigation (even though you get cases with 1000 named plaintiffs).
Shah8: You lost my willingness to entertain your argument the minute you argued that white people suffer from racism more than the groups they (collectively) oppress. The incoherence just made it that much easier to ignore most of what you’ve said.
“I’d hate to see a debate go up about whether or not this is racist or classist or what. It’s both, and to different degrees to different audiences”.
Ah well…
Mercurical Georgia, I had gotten my thing about Han chinese from reading chinese history, hence Han and Mang and Thai subgrous and Bo and Hakka and Hokien and Manchu and Persians and Arabs, etc, etc etc. I was trying to remark on the idea of the homogenation of varoius groups as a distinct political strategy to hold together the empire. The Romans did this as well to a certain extent. And I was trying to relate that to the concept of white race as a means to make the populace easier to rule, make general enemies like native americans easier to kill, and make slavery a viable social foundation.
I don’t think I ever used the term oppress wrt white people. I said that they are the primary sufferers. I do not think that’s the same thing. Black people are oppressed. I’m saying that the point of oppressing black people and other minorities is to extract wealth (in terms of economic opportunities, assets, and children) from white people. And I’m saying that the magnitude of suffering (as a class) from the extraction is *greater* than the visible oppression of minorities (as a class). I’m saying that people are highly invested in believing that they are “divinely lucky” and not one of the people at the bottom rung of society, and so they avoid appreciation of their losses.
Shy Girl
I have applied a *very* syncretic approach to thinking about this. I don’t have much in the way of access to books specifically on this topic. When I was in college, I was a forensic debator (not a very good one, as you obviously must know), and there were many race positions. I first heard alot about whiteness and about Barbara Flagg then. I did quite a bit of research in post-secondary education acceptance and outcomes, so I read books like The Bell Curve, The Shape of the River, and their like published before about 2000. I read many education blogs during that time period, like FAIR. I also read many articles, more than I can remember who wrote what, but I definitly remember being impressed by Lani Guineer (she’s a tad too awesome for words). Fast forward to now, I get much of my knowledge from political blogs, from publically available (non JSTOR–and I really hate them)articles, and I play alot with the concepts developed in the more social science fiction like Cherryh’s Cyteen. From nonfiction, well, I have not read too much of the literature, I have yet to read my copy of Screen Saviors by Hernan Vera and Andrew Gordon. I’ve read Eric Foner’s Forever Free and Kevin Kruse White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. I’ve also read Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White. This is what I can remember reading recently specifically about race. However race so permeates american society such that many other books like Gilbert’s Stumbing Into Happiness has very direct applications towards the mechanism of individual bigotry. At a societal level, many of the economic history books, like Kenneth Pomeranz’s books have many tangential points of interest to race. Books on japanese social dynamics are a real great help on providing context.
Anyways, as a general rule, most of my thoughts, when they run in this direction is focused on heirachy in general. I tend to think of sexism and racism as two relatively different problems because the motives for generating these are fairly different. Sexism is a matter of generational warfare at heart while ethnicism is mostly about class. Ethnicity is constructed, Sex is not, and sometimes I think people run into the HL Menken quote about problems, ease of solutions, and correctness.
I’ve given up on any type of egalitarian. I think people are just too instinctually heirachal, and nobody will ever buy in on any equal split schemes beyond the size of about 150 people. Instead, I would bargain for a more rational and much less malevolent system of heirachy.
Now this one, is truely stream of thought!
But really, thanks for the questions, you guys are helping me to focus on what is important…
if a double post happens, sorry
Mercurical Georgia, I had gotten my thing about Han chinese from reading chinese history, hence Han and Mang and Thai subgrous and Bo and Hakka and Hokien and Manchu and Persians and Arabs, etc, etc etc. I was trying to remark on the idea of the homogenation of varoius groups as a distinct political strategy to hold together the empire. The Romans did this as well to a certain extent. And I was trying to relate that to the concept of white race as a means to make the populace easier to rule, make general enemies like native americans easier to kill, and make slavery a viable social foundation.
I don’t think I ever used the term oppress wrt white people. I said that they are the primary sufferers. I do not think that’s the same thing. Black people are oppressed. I’m saying that the point of oppressing black people and other minorities is to extract wealth (in terms of economic opportunities, assets, and children) from white people. And I’m saying that the magnitude of suffering (as a class) from the extraction is *greater* than the visible oppression of minorities (as a class). I’m saying that people are highly invested in believing that they are “divinely lucky” and not one of the people at the bottom rung of society, and so they avoid appreciation of their losses.
Shy Girl
I have applied a *very* syncretic approach to thinking about this. I don’t have much in the way of access to books specifically on this topic. When I was in college, I was a forensic debator (not a very good one, as you obviously must know), and there were many race positions. I first heard alot about whiteness and about Barbara Flagg then. I did quite a bit of research in post-secondary education acceptance and outcomes, so I read books like The Bell Curve, The Shape of the River, and their like published before about 2000. I read many education blogs during that time period, like FAIR. I also read many articles, more than I can remember who wrote what, but I definitly remember being impressed by Lani Guineer (she’s a tad too awesome for words). Fast forward to now, I get much of my knowledge from political blogs, from publically available (non JSTOR–and I really hate them)articles, and I play alot with the concepts developed in the more social science fiction like Cherryh’s Cyteen. From nonfiction, well, I have not read too much of the literature, I have yet to read my copy of Screen Saviors by Hernan Vera and Andrew Gordon. I’ve read Eric Foner’s Forever Free and Kevin Kruse White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. I’ve also read Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White. This is what I can remember reading recently specifically about race. However race so permeates american society such that many other books like Gilbert’s Stumbing Into Happiness has very direct applications towards the mechanism of individual bigotry. At a societal level, many of the economic history books, like Kenneth Pomeranz’s books have many tangential points of interest to race. Books on japanese social dynamics are a real great help on providing context.
Anyways, as a general rule, most of my thoughts, when they run in this direction is focused on heirachy in general. I tend to think of sexism and racism as two relatively different problems because the motives for generating these are fairly different. Sexism is a matter of generational warfare at heart while ethnicism is mostly about class. Ethnicity is constructed, Sex is not, and sometimes I think people run into the HL Menken quote about problems, ease of solutions, and correctness.
I’ve given up on any type of egalitarian. I think people are just too instinctually heirachal, and nobody will ever buy in on any equal split schemes beyond the size of about 150 people. Instead, I would bargain for a more rational and much less malevolent system of heirachy.
Now this one, is truely stream of thought!
But really, thanks for the questions, you guys are helping me to focus on what is important…
shah8, are you saying that the largest portion of the economic profit made off of racism is made off of white people? I could agree with that if the numbers were correct.
I don’t think we can say that the suffering of White people is more than the suffering of Black people in a racist society, because I think an individual Black person suffers more. And you can’t add up the White suffering and call it greater than the Black suffering because there are more White people.
I seem to be having problems posting another long one…
Mercurical Georgia, I had gotten my thing about Han chinese from reading chinese history, hence Han and Mang and Thai subgrous and Bo and Hakka and Hokien and Manchu and Persians and Arabs, etc, etc etc. I was trying to remark on the idea of the homogenation of varoius groups as a distinct political strategy to hold together the empire. The Romans did this as well to a certain extent. And I was trying to relate that to the concept of white race as a means to make the populace easier to rule, make general enemies like native americans easier to kill, and make slavery a viable social foundation.
I don’t think I ever used the term oppress wrt white people. I said that they are the primary sufferers. I do not think that’s the same thing. Black people are oppressed. I’m saying that the point of oppressing black people and other minorities is to extract wealth (in terms of economic opportunities, assets, and children) from white people. And I’m saying that the magnitude of suffering (as a class) from the extraction is *greater* than the visible oppression of minorities (as a class). I’m saying that people are highly invested in believing that they are “divinely lucky” and not one of the people at the bottom rung of society, and so they avoid appreciation of their losses.
The second half…
Shy Girl
I have applied a *very* syncretic approach to thinking about this. I don’t have much in the way of access to books specifically on this topic. When I was in college, I was a forensic debator (not a very good one, as you obviously must know), and there were many race positions. I first heard alot about whiteness and about Barbara Flagg then. I did quite a bit of research in post-secondary education acceptance and outcomes, so I read books like The Bell Curve, The Shape of the River, and their like published before about 2000. I read many education blogs during that time period, like FAIR. I also read many articles, more than I can remember who wrote what, but I definitly remember being impressed by Lani Guineer (she’s a tad too awesome for words). Fast forward to now, I get much of my knowledge from political blogs, from publically available (non JSTOR–and I really hate them)articles, and I play alot with the concepts developed in the more social science fiction like Cherryh’s Cyteen. From nonfiction, well, I have not read too much of the literature, I have yet to read my copy of Screen Saviors by Hernan Vera and Andrew Gordon. I’ve read Eric Foner’s Forever Free and Kevin Kruse White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. I’ve also read Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White. This is what I can remember reading recently specifically about race. However race so permeates american society such that many other books like Gilbert’s Stumbing Into Happiness has very direct applications towards the mechanism of individual bigotry. At a societal level, many of the economic history books, like Kenneth Pomeranz’s books have many tangential points of interest to race. Books on japanese social dynamics are a real great help on providing context.
Anyways, as a general rule, most of my thoughts, when they run in this direction is focused on heirachy in general. I tend to think of sexism and racism as two relatively different problems because the motives for generating these are fairly different. Sexism is a matter of generational warfare at heart while ethnicism is mostly about class. Ethnicity is constructed, Sex is not, and sometimes I think people run into the HL Menken quote about problems, ease of solutions, and correctness.
I’ve given up on any type of egalitarian. I think people are just too instinctually heirachal, and nobody will ever buy in on any equal split schemes beyond the size of about 150 people. Instead, I would bargain for a more rational and much less malevolent system of heirachy.
Now this one, is truely stream of thought!
But really, thanks for the questions, you guys are helping me to focus on what is important…
Maybe this might a really quick way to say it.
I’m making an argument about whiteness –> white privilege –> value of privilege is much cheaper than value of harm for white people –>controversial but perhaps true statement that value of harm of white people > value of harm for black people –>how do we measure harm? –> measurement of harm is probably influenced and minimized as another aspect of white privilege.
Even if it was a jacuzzi, it would still be horrible. Really, Chuck Palahniuk wrote a short story where that happened (though in much less innocent circumstances) and people fainting during readings of that.
straight up monocle-clutching robber baron shit
I am so stealing this.
The other half of the OMFG!LAWYERZ!!!1!!! game is that the corporate tools are trying to eliminate both government regulations, and the enforcement of the regulations that exist. So if some poor fool does happen to get a case in court, the defense trial lawyers will argue gosh, we met or exceeded the government standards, so how can it be wrong?
zuzu - don’t forget it’s not the American Association for Justice (AAJ). I used to think that the name change was stupid, until I read how much it was making the Overlawyered/NAM crowd shit their pants.
Though really I think many people are fooled by all those “crazy lawsuit’ stories and don’t do much research, and so support tort reform.
It’s a little like abortion. Only mine is OK; everybody else’s is wrong.
“Though really I think many people are fooled by all those “crazy lawsuit’ stories and don’t do much research, and so support tort reform.”
I think it’s the Republican’s old friend “Failure Of Imagination” rearing its ugly head. There seems to be a tendency by some to give the benefit of the doubt in many circumstances, especially those involving “Authority” vs “somebody else”, whether it is earned or not.
For example:
“Americans would never stoop to using torture!”
“Why of course George Bush has a plan for winning the war in Iraq!”
“It’s unthinkable what we would fail to protect and rebuild one of the oldest American cities from hurricane damage!”
So, added to that, you get things like:
“No corporation in the world would harm their customers like that and expect to stay in business!”
Some people seem incapable of recognizing just how bad some other people can truly be…
Re: shah8
Was it by a Chinese author and which one?
I’m Chinese, my mom told me about the different ethnic groups of China, and I did my own readings, in English and Chinese. I think me and the other Chinese are capable of defining what we are.
The defining character in the Chinese word for Chinese stuff, is ‘中’, middle or central or used in this sense, ‘collective’, to signify the unity of all the distinct ethnic group, one of which is 漢族, the hans to which I belong, and the dynasty named after them would be the one when they ruled. It was a definitely distinct group onto its own, at least in the beginning, over time, the Han-Chinese, along with other Chinese, will understandably pick up characteristics of other ethnic groups it shares its country with (example; rice eating, not all Chinese ethnic group have rice as its staple diet).
If you were trying to make a point, you used the wrong one. Hans were not created out of homogenization of different groups, rather, different groups were absorbed into it since the Hans-Chinese were doing the land stealing empire thing back when the British was still in some kind of stone age.
White people are not the primary sufferers of racism in North American, unless you define suffering as the harrrrd-work that is being the president.
A comment more pertinent to the title story.
Clinton has problems relating to this. He chose to react in a systematic way comparable with Kennedy. Grab a bunch of no-nonsense guys, with a no-nonsense slogan. He then triangulated against blacks by going through with a manisfestly unfair death penalty, and spoke up with his Sister Souljah comment. Think about it, nobody knew of Sister Souljah, especially relative to guys like Easy E or 2livecrew. That one was an excellent dogwhistle, considering how much Souljah talked about social justice. The pattern was largely the same throughout his presidential career. He was very careful in trying to seem tough on minorities in order not to provoke too high negatives among the suburbia set.
Edwards could do the same. Make some antiunion statements and try and triangulate there as well. I think he’s going to have a hard time, in general with being a trial lawyer. It isn’t going to be about how much good he did, whatever that might be. It’s going to be entirely about status line-jumping with the reagan democrats. I think the only real chance he has is to run further to the left and with a more vocal populist bent as well.
Re: Monkeys.
The caption is, /Lawyers seek ‘victims’ for class action lawsuits/, this jib, is questioning whether the ‘victims’ qualify. I don’t think the /stupid/ monkey interpretation works, since, even if they weren’t victims, if they get their money, that’s not stupid. I think this ad is questioning whether the victims are really victims, having actually suffered damages, and deserved compensation for them.
Maybe it’s saying, that in lieu of humans…rich white humans, the lawyers have taken to defending the victims who don’t have the right to be defended, monkeys, who of course, can’t sue for damages in real life. …and if the monkeys represent people who are black and/or poor, then the message would be, ’sit down and shut up, your pain isn’t real’, or rather, doesn’t count because of the non-human thing.
Mercurical Georgia…
hot damn, lay off a bit! I did *not* say what you think I said. I said the homogenation of the various groups was a political strategy similar to the Romans. And I had meant, in effect the *exact* same thing what you had said. People were treated as if they were Han as a political and legal strategy. Where I might go *further* than you is that there was not a little Han cultural imperialism going on. And I was trying to apply it how “white” culture is an aggregate of different “white” ethnicities, given roughly the same overall political and legal sanctions. And no, I am no expert on chinese history, philosophy, or sociology, but man…I can hold my own in discussions with chinese friends here. You aren’t the first chinese speaker I’ve known, and you wouldn’t be the tenth, and I was not typically thought of as especially ignorant by any chinese I’ve known. And I actually give a damn about your opinion so…Let’s just, on the topic of china, allow me to stipulate to everything you said.
And lastly, if white people were not the primary sufferers of racism, how do you know this? How did you judge that, of course, blacks and hispanics and asians all got the superhard screwing? I am not denying any holocausts, or slavery, or the deaths on the railways, or the farms, or anything like that.
Eh, I give up. I was trying to do something similar to what Lani Guinier was trying to do wrt to voting. Sneaky ways to get people to act in their interests. I can’t do this even as well as I could in a chat forum, let alone person to person, and I don’t like getting people I like mad or offended. So… no more trolling Pandagon on this topic for me…
I think the “trial lawyers” thing is really a beautiful piece of propaganda, worthy of Goebbels or Himmler. Because one of the most terrifying things in a non-rich person’s life is for a rich person or company to sic a lawyer on them. If some company decides you owe them money and sends a lawyer after you, the best results you can hope for are expensive and unpleasant.
So the class warfare represented by collection agencies, non-paying insurance companies, foreclosure-happy banks and eviction-happy landlords gets neatly turned around into an argument about why the powerless shouldn’t have representation.
You know, I went over to the link at Jill’s, and got to see the ad in full. What was so damn wierd about the ad, is that in the first paragraph of the text, it implies that the monkeys are having a good time and making oodles of money. The second and third paragraph continues with how the monk-uh, apes, are staging invasion upon all the good companies and splitting up the proceeds. The fourth paragraph talks about how the advocacy groups are determined to stop this disorder. The *last* paragraph, though, is a warning. Lawyers can turn people into MON(oops apes, I mean)!
Soooooo…Apes making out good, having the good life robbing corporations and living the good life, but NO! Wicked Lawyers of the EAST and WEST are secretly turning people! into monkeERRapes!! to achieve their nefarious aims! Watch out, or you’ll become one of the damned…apes apes apes yeah, apes!
That is one, big, headfuck in that ad.
How ‘white people’ are oppressed;
1. In the 1600s, the white people of North America suffered when their land was stolen….OH WAIT, it was the aboriginal who suffered when /their/ land was stolen by the white people from England, France, and further south, Spain. It was the white people who identified themselves as civilized in spite of the burning people at the stake and later, the use of children as chimney sweeps, while the aboriginals who lived with each other went down as savages in the history books. …and on the note of racism, while white people wrote off the aboriginals as savages on account of being different;
“Look at those shirtless savages!”*gets a heatstroke from wearing a 3 piece suit in the tropics
“Look at their silly warpaint and feather headgear” *adjust beaver hat and reapply lead powder to face*
“They eat their enemy’s heart, how barbaric!” *readies the children for a family fun afternoon of attending a public hanging where the hung would likely lose control of his/her own bowel movements while being slowly suffocated OR the rope is too tight and the head flies off like a bride’s bouquet*
2. In the 1700s, various people of Africa systemically raided Europe of white-skinned slaves, capturing, caging, and auctioning them like animals because of the colour of their skin. The African public is reassured that this is not immoral because white people are…there is that word again, ’savage’, and primitive on account of not having capitalistic division of their society. From then on, it stayed downhill for the white people. Long after slavery was abolished, white people continued to be scrapegoated and lynched. White people were en mass denied good employment and good lands because they were seen as stupid and violent and uppity. Black governments made laws that forbid miscegeny to guard against scary white men from STEALING THEIR WOMEN. People call the cops when they see white men hanging around their neighbourhood. In the year 2007, a white face in the congress and among the rich is still the exception and the uncommon rather than the norm….OH WAIT!
3. White men suffers from being seen by Asian men as being either sterile or threatening (re; criminal). It is impossible for a white women to go through a year without being harassed by gangs o full-of-shit Asian frat boys who watched Pretty Women too many times. White women are viewed as mail ordered bride, a commodity. OH WAIT! (Okay, breaking sarcasm a minute here, white /women/ are totally seen as commodity too, but it is different, though I don’t know if it’s better or worse to be seen as a white-producing uterus that must be controlled cause it’s god’s will vs. a sex toy that can be acquired, abused, and discarded. I’ll like to not go there with the which is worse contest in this department. Though white women does have more power than Asian women to change the views of the white men of their family, their children at least. As for me if I have children I will make sure that any son I have will never embarrass me by whining about how non-Chinese are ’stealing our women'’, WTF?)
I realize that the point is stale, but I’d rather not fire and forget.
But that’s just weaselling. You referred to any intimation that the cover was racist as a “joy-killing narrative”, and that you “didn’t see [it] coming”; while you never came out and said it wasn’t racist, you certainly seemed more concerned that people were pointing it out than you were about the actual, y’know, racism. Oh, I don’t. But I do think that it’s ironic that the racist (but apparently not that racist, since it didn’t occur to you when you saw the cover for your own book) imagery can be freely criticized when someone else does it, but you wash your hands of any culpability when it’s tied to your own name.I also interpreted the “your kind” in the post title as referring to black people, as there’s more of a history of obviously segregating public services by race than there is by class. Not to say that the latter doesn’t exist, but the former has been way more blatant.
And I guess you missed the book cover dustup (I don’t see any posts from you there); my kvetching doesn’t make much sense unless you read that.Thanks, grendel. It’s good to know that even though I responded openly and took action, you’re going to act like I denied your point and refused to do anything. Because if I did the former, it’s just so much harder to villainize. Which is exactly what I said from the beginning—I’ve found, over time, that people aren’t going to let a small thing like not getting the racist-sexist-meaniehead reaction they desired get in the way of a flamewar. Listen to someone/don’t listen to someone/pretend to be deaf/fall on the ground begging forgiveness, you’ll be treated the same no matter what.
But it’s very liberating, in a way. Knowing that I’ve been cast in the role of the bad guy and some people will stick by that no matter what means I can quit worrying about what others think and act according to my own conscience. Which I did.
Believe it or not, I didn’t know that you’d taken action. The comment thread is long, and when I wandered off, you were still being defensive and blaming criticism on jealousy or what appeared to be generic liberal contrariness. Mea culpa. I don’t see it in the thread; what action did you take? Statements like this can be thrown at any criticism. If you had a blurb from Joe Francis on the front of your book, and people called you on it, you could just as easily say this. It’s a generally defensive response that doesn’t admit the possibility of error. Throwing up your hands and claiming that you’ll never be perfect isn’t a very mature response.Please skip this comment if you’re easily grossed out. This has been bothering me since I read the story in the first place, and I figure I’ll get my objections out here.
The short story is called “Guts“. I don’t know why people seem to think he’s the greatest author in the world; I’ve seen far creepier copypasta. It’s not even physically plausible–for example, urethral sounding has to be done extraordinarily delicately with sterile instruments and a large amount of lubrication. You can’t just jam a wax rod up your urethra without experiencing mind-shredding pain.It should go without saying that a rectal prolapse of the sort that the narrator suffers would cause enough pain to be noticed before he hit the surface; probably enough to send him into shock.
Or the simple logistics of the story–when the narrator’s intestines go all woobly, he’s got his shorts “looped around [his] neck” (however that’s supposed to work), but later, said intestines are “still hanging out the leg of my yellowstriped swim trunks” when if he’d managed to pull them back on, they’d obviously be coming out of the waistband.
And, of course, anyone who’s had a radical bowel resection of the large intestine, especially one that leaves the patient with six inches of large bowel, will end up with a colostomy; the narrator manages to get away without one. The result of losing your large intestine isn’t that “it comes out still food”; the large intestine mainly absorbs water and a few particular vitamins (I know B12 off the top of my head, but probably others); tuna fish and lima beans do not look like food when they get to your large intestine. Your alimentary canal is about thirty feet long; the large intestine is around a seventh of that. The fibrous parts of corn husks, maybe, but nothing digestible will be undigested by the time it gets there.
But maybe he’s having his audience on, seeing as how by the end of the story he’s asking us to believe that sperm can survive for several hours in a chlorinated pool and make their way through clothing.
Grendal, I didn’t know about that other stuff but I thought the implication at the ending was unbelievable. I don’t think its a great story, my point is that any sane person would think that having your intestines sucked out of you is horrible.
grendelkhan:
Believe it or not, I didn’t know that you’d taken action. The comment thread is long, and when I wandered off, you were still being defensive and blaming criticism on jealousy or what appeared to be generic liberal contrariness. Mea culpa. I don’t see it in the thread; what action did you take?
Amanda, grendelkhan, the action has probably been missed by more than one person because it’s in the post itself at the top, rather than in the comments.
I think I missed it the first time, having my fingers hovering over ctrl-end the moment the page was served to my browser.
Um, what? How is suing someone in civil court “vigilantism?” One might as well say any political process whatsoever is “vigilantism,” unless one has some theory of governmental authority that is not based on democracy. What distinguishes legislative action, or the policies of an executive, or the courts, from “vigilantism” in a democracy is that rules have been made about due process and are presumably followed. It’s up to the judges and other enforcers of the court systems to make sure this happens, but if we can assume the rules are being enforced, then what happens in a courtroom is due process by definition.
I quite agree with your later point that much of what is accomplished in our haphazard legal system in civil court ought to happen in criminal court. But to compare tort trials in civil court to vigilante mobs is to buy in to the very point Amanda is contesting–that there is something unseemly about the “mob taking over.” The worst thing about vigilantes is that generally they enforce reactionary rather than progressive communal passions, which is to say that the same people who already control the formal systems use informal ones to reinforce the former with plausible deniability. I suppose, in the same way, that the wrong plaintiffs often bring cases to civil trial–that “respectable” middle-class people get much farther along in the process and get the lion’s share of settlements, and other offenses equally egregious or worse go unchecked because they happen to be committed against less “credible” victims. In that respect I suppose regulation by litigation resembles vigilantism, as does the fact that the outcomes are haphazard.
But a dirty secret of tort trial victories for the consumer, the injured bystander, and other “little guys” is that the substantial fines and awards of the lowest courts that get all the press are very often overturned or greatly reduced on appeal. The low courts often have juries that sympathize with the plaintiffs; the higher ones tend to have judges that favor the corporations.
So in that respect, regulation by litigation is the opposite of “mob justice;” the former is an ostensible concession to equal justice, based on rational case-making and demonstration of harm rather than mere deference to the powers that be, while the latter, in actual history as opposed to myth, is a way for the powers that be to get what they want when it happens to be in contravention of policies they think it wise for the state, in its majesty, to proclaim in public. When a lynch mob has done its work, there is generally no recourse, and no accountability; in this respect the higher and less “mob-like” the court is, the more it is like a lynch mob in effect.
Foxwell said:
“The low courts often have juries that sympathize with the plaintiffs; the higher ones tend to have judges that favor the corporations.”
Another explanation could be that appellate judges are more dispassionate in viewing the case than juries sometimes are.
Plaintiff’s lawyers as a group squeal just as loud as any industry lobby when their own livelihoods are subjected to regulatory control.
While not terribly elegant, your points were rather forcefully made and I agree with them. An important point should be added to your comments. Many of the families (the top 1%) who support deregulation and cronyism that places government oversight agencies such as FDA, OSHA, and MSHA in the hands of industries they’re supposed to regulate have been wealthy for generations. These same families (including the Bush family) opposed the Progressive agenda of Theodore Roosevelt some 100 years ago. They fought tooth and nail against regulation and it was only Roosevelt’s tenacity, skill as a politician, and overwhelming popularity that forced Congress to pass laws that Bush and supporters have tried to gut. These families have never ceased their goal of returning American life to the deregulation of the 1890s.
Many of these wealthy families supported German National Socialism (they liked how Hitler worked with industry) and eugenics (on mentally deficient and typically poor people). They devised the federal reserve to control of the money supply. It is worthwhile taking the time to read and comprehend what many of the people in this tightly knit group of extremely wealthy people believe/ The add showing people as monkeys much sums up what they think of the majority of the population: People exist to serve their betters.
If one goes a step further and identifies the influence of these families in education, government, science, medicine, the arts, non-profit corporations, banking, media/communications, and manufacturing; for me any way, I found it fascinating and frightening. This group maintains their homogeneity through intermarriage, they socialize with each other, sit on the boards of corporations, non-profits, colleges and universities, control most of the large businesses…their influence in American life is often subtle but neverthess substantial. Perhaps 100 extended families control much of what occurs in American life. This fact is America’s little secret and it is never discussed. I realize this sounds conspiratorial but facts are facts.
The advertisement against trial lawyers is very interesting. The obvious message is that trial lawyers are making moneys out of victims. The much more subtle message is that trial lawyers represent disposable commodities.
The one that pisses me off the most is the McDonald’s coffee law suit, which is generally considered to be the poster child for frivolous law suits/excessive jury awards. Most people have never bothered to learn the real story. The claim was hardly frivolous and the judge reduced the damages awarded by the jury. Our legal system has built-in safeguards to deal with truly frivolous law suits and excessive jury awards. The media deserves a big share of the blame — they sensationalized the oversimplified version of the story and never bothered to follow up and report the end result.
Shah8:
Just a quick suggestion: You seem to be looking at aggregate “suffering,” and even then mostly from an economic point of view. I would recommend also thinking about some form of per-capita “suffering.”
In the aggregate model, its very easy to say that since there are more white people being screwed out of money, etc., then white people suffer more–more is lost overall from their entire group because there are more of them and they have more to start with. But that ignores the fact that, on a person-by-person basis, blacks and most other non-whites are hurt much more severely–the average “suffering” (however you’re measuring it) per person in these groups is much greater, but the aggregate “suffering” is less because there are fewer of them and they have less to lose to begin with.
I would suggest also incorporating some notion of a baseline for wealth when talking about losses between groups. For example, 100k whites who lose 10 billion dollars is not necessarily as devastating a loss as 50k blacks who lose 500 million dollars–because the blacks had less at the start.
A quick analogy will hopefully drive this point home: If you’re making $20,000 /year and take a 50% pay cut, you’re now making $10,000 /year and are now in a terrible situation (if you weren’t already). If you’re making $200,000 /year and are cut down to $100,000 /year, you may have trouble meeting some of your pre-existing financial committments (that had assumed the higher salary), but you’re not going to have to decide between eating this week and paying the rent. Pain and suffering due to loss increase exponentially as you move down the wealth curve.
The idea that whites as an entire group suffer more severely from racism may be true and I could definitely see it as possible if you just take a 1st-order, economic/class view of it. But when you get to the individual level and include more than just monetary loss, whites actually have it quite good and its non-white groups with black or brown skin that get trampled on.