Posted on 04/28/2011 1:41:05 PM PDT by Nachum
San Francisco - The US Supreme Court has granted a whopping victory to AT&T, the US Chamber of Commerce, and supportive corporations, by reversing previous court decisions that had prevented corporations from requiring individual arbitration of customers' complaint. By issuing its 5-4 decision on Wednesday, the Court has essentially stripped away individuals' rights to band together in class-action lawsuits should a corporation choose to include an arbitration requirement in its contracts or
(Excerpt) Read more at theregister.co.uk ...
The point of these lawsuits is to prevent numerous small scale thefts. Nobody will hire a lawyer and waste more time if they were cheated out of a few bucks.
As the old saying goes...
You can’t steal a million from one person. But I guess now you can steal a dollar from a million people and get away with it.
In jest, this ruling that will no longer help the class action lawsuit will decrease the money earning potential of many Mississippi lawyers realistically. In jest, it will bankrupt many of them taking away their sole source of income.
We were lucky here in NE Mississippi as we had only six tornado warnings and many set down briefly, unlike those as close as 20 miles. The worse were at 50 miles to 140 miles from NE Mississippi.
It might actually end up being a hit to their bottom line which causes them to rethink their poor behavior
... results in lower profits and therefore lower returns for Sally Secretary's IRA, Margie Manager's 401K, Stanley Sophmore's college fund, and Tommy Truckdriver's pension, as well as for the regular Mom and Pop investors who have maybe $5k or $35k invested in some mutual fund that includes the company's stock.
Now that is funny right there.
LOL. Thanks.
I’m glad that you are intact. What about Red_Devil 232? I think he’s near Meridian.
Sure, you say “officers” but you mean stockholders don’t you. You want to pick Bill Gates’ pockets.
Such unadulterated bullsh*t!
First off, most of the stock is owned by a relatively few people. Those would be the people that would be affected and well they should. If they are allowing the company they own stock in to engage in sleazy business practices then they deserve to take the hit.
And even in the rare case of companies where much of the stock is owned by a myriad of people, either directly or indirectly through mutual funds, then screw them too. After all, this is a free market and we are all supposed to be on our own. We should all be fully aware of everything that every company we invest in is doing. If I have money in a mutual fund that invests in hundreds or thousands of companies and I don't know everything about all those hundreds or thousands of companies then I am just being a lazy a*s punk bitch and deserve everything that happens to me.
After all the poor bastards that got hosed by ATT should have read every word of the agreement they clicked on and known that they wouldn't have gotten the free phone that ATT seemingly promised them.
Or do you think that shareholders should be cut some sort of slack in this supposedly free market we have?
Bill Gates engaged in illegal behavior. Microsoft had a monopoly position in the software they sold and engaged in unfair business practices because of that.
I don't want to pick Bill Gates' pocket because I envy him, or because I am too lazy to make my own money. I want him and his company to be punished because they violated the law, and because I want other companies who find themselves in similar positions to be deterred from engaging in similar practices.
I would like for there to be a truly free market. A market where I as a consumer and as an employee have true choices. I don't want to find out that the reason I wasn't able to purchase a Dell computer with Linux for years after Linux was a viable operating system was because Microsoft refused to sell it's operating system to Dell at a reasonable price unless Dell agreed to sell no other operating system but Microsoft's.
In the short run, in a dreamy idealized free market system that dewy-eyed libertarians believe in, any company should be able to do anything they can get away with.
In a true free market the short term decisions of scumbag corporate whores need to be weighed against the long term goal of keeping the market free of artificial barriers to entry.
Microsoft was putting up all sorts of artificial barriers to entry. They were not competing by making better software, but by using their clout to keep their competitors out of the market. Or else they were giving away things free, that they could afford to take a loss on, in order to prevent companies from making a go of it by selling similar products at a reasonable price.
Microsoft should have been punished regardless of what I think or want to happen. Its only because I expect a little justice every once in a while in a country that used to be based on the rule of law, but evidently is based on the rule of lobbying.
Are you a moron, or do you just play one on Free Republic?
Still a voluntary contract. I just think they trying to protect themselves from the maw of the tort bar. I’ve been informed of about a dozen instances where I am a member of a class and can have something completely worthless and the lawyers make millions. In most instances I have been perfectly happy with the goods and services offered. In the other cases, I write it off to a learning experience, that ole caveat emptor thingy I learned in Latin class.
If you write a post that sounds like a liberal complaining about "big oil", I am going to call you, or any other FReeper on it.
That doesn't include IRAs.
So, what's the deal here, you don't think "the people" should be able to participate in the stock market directly or indirectly ~
When you threaten to imprison the officers and stockholders of the firms you want to punish you do get down to hauling away a truck driver with 5 young children from time to time.
Limited liability has value at all levels of the ownership chain.
What's $20 from 1791 worth in today's currency?
What has big oil got to do with this?
Take your original post (#4) and substitute "big oil" for "AT&T" and "oil companies" for "phone companies" and you will see that your post could have been written on DU.
Oh please, come back into the earth’s orbit. You are too way out there.
Believe it or not, SarbOx actually succeeded in pushing through a provision that allows personal assets to attach to any ruling against a corporation for fraud on reporting. The CEO’s personal assets would attach if he signed any document attesting to the financial condition of his company, and it was found later that it was otherwise.
This would hold whether the CEO ‘knew’ about it or not.
The corporate shield has been EXTREMELY abused.
The information there is from 2006. From 2006-today, the dollar has lost about another 14.3%, so adjust the answers accordingly/
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