Corporations Find a Friend in the Supreme Court

[ElNono]

Long read

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/business/pro-business-decisions-are-defining-this-supreme-court.html

[boutons_deux]

"the Supreme Court’s business decisions are almost always overshadowed by cases on controversial social issues."

same for VRWC/Repug political strategy. sucker the often single-issue voters with social issues like God, gays, guns, racism(Repug Southern strategy) while the politicians and the corporations they enable screw them and the country ever other way.

[boutons_deux]

"In the Comcast case (http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/11-864_k537.pdf), subscribers seeking $875 million in damages charged that the company had swapped territory with other cable companies to gain market power and raise prices. But the legal issue before the court was technical. It concerned the sort of evidence needed to allow two million subscribers in the Philadelphia area to band together as a class.
Justice Scalia said the plaintiffs’ evidence was not enough to allow them to proceed as a class. They could still, he said, pursue their complaints individually."

:lol

Destroying class action suits coupled with corporate contracts forcing all disputes into the corporate kangaroo-court arbitration where citizens lose 90% of the time enables the corporations to screw employees and customers without restraint. And of course, they do, all the time.

[boutons_deux]

"businesses are free to run their operations without fear of liability for the harm they cause to consumers, employees and people injured by their products."

the only major anti-business decision I'm aware of was about BigPharma's perennial attempt for a "shield law".

"The Comcast decision is just over a month old. But lower courts have already relied on it to reject class actions contending harm from defective trucks, poisoned drinking water, discrimination against disabled workers, misrepresentations in insurance policies and improperly docked wages."

If one was diseased, maimed, or killed by a BigPharma product that was FDA-approved, FDA being the caputured regulatory police owned by BigPharma, then the approval "shielded" BigPharma from liability.

BigPharma will continue repeteatedly, as it has for many years, to obtain the shielding.

[boutons_deux]

"the justices in the majority were appointed by Republican presidents and the dissenters by Democratic ones."

[boutons_deux]

iow, the VRWC/1%/Repugs/UCA have fucked America, which is unfuckable.

[boutons_deux]

So Far This Term, Top Corporate Lobby’s Win Rate Before The Supreme Court Is 6-1 (http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/05/06/1960561/so-far-this-term-top-corporate-lobbys-win-rate-before-the-supreme-court-is-6-1/)

Continuing a dramatic winning streak that has spanned the Roberts Court era, the Chamber of Commerce has won six of its seven Supreme Court cases decided thus far (http://theusconstitution.org/text-history/1966/not-so-risky-business-chamber-commerces-quiet-success-roberts-court-early-report) this term. In all, it filed amicus briefs in 18 cases this term, making the top corporate lobby a preeminent Supreme Court influencer. The Chamber also files numerous petitions at at the earlier stage when the Supreme Court is deciding which decisions to hear, shaping its docket such that the Chamber is poised to have participated in 24 percent of the Court’s decided cases this term, according to a new report from the Constitutional Accountability Center:

Over the past thirty years, the Chamber’s participation rate has increased six-fold, from 4% in the early 1980s to 24% today.

This dramatic increase in participation is a reflection, in part, of the Chamber’s success in shaping the Court’s docket. As SCOTUSblog reported in early April, the Chamber remains “the country’s preeminent petition-pusher,” as it filed the greatest number of amicus briefs at the cert. stage of any private organization during SCOTUSblog’s three-year study period (running from May 2009 to August 2012). Importantly, the Chamber also has the highest success rate of any of the ten most active organizations during this period – with the Court granting 32% of the Chamber’s cases overall. Therefore, the Chamber is not just participating in cases that the Court decides to hear, but it’s also aggressively and successfully working to shape the Court’s docket.

The Chamber’s win rate has also increased dramatically in the Roberts Court, illustrated in the chart below:


https://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/945364_10150295999889984_905030367_n.jpg
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/05/06/1960561/so-far-this-term-top-corporate-lobbys-win-rate-befo
re-the-supreme-court-is-6-1/