So much good stuff in the Sideshow, I hardly know where to begin. Here’s an appetizer!
Lina Khan in The Washington Monthly, “Thrown Out of Court: How corporations became people you can’t sue […]All this may seem like an archetypical story of our times, combining corporate misconduct, cyber-crime, and high-stakes litigation. But for those who follow the cutting edge of corporate law, a central part of this saga is almost antiquarian: the part where Target must actually face its accusers in court and the public gets to know what went awry and whether justice gets done. Two recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings – AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion and American Express v. Italian Colors – have deeply undercut these centuries-old public rights, by empowering businesses to avoid any threat of private lawsuits or class actions. The decisions culminate a thirty-year trend during which the judiciary, including initially some prominent liberal jurists, has moved to eliminate courts as a means for ordinary Americans to uphold their rights against companies. The result is a world where corporations can evade accountability and effectively skirt swaths of law, pushing their growing power over their consumers and employees past a tipping point.” Khan discussed the article with Sam Seder on The Majority Report.
The French Revolution was a general class struggle pitting the Bourgeoisie (merchants and artisans) against the oligarchy (nobility and clergy). The Bourgeoisie wanted the “liberty” to make more money by expanding (free) markets (kings were very territorial) and by having the freedom to buy the labor of the serfs (kings owned the serfs and their labor while the clergy owned their souls). The Bourgeoisie won and the industrial revolution soon followed. Machine produced goods gave us two new groups, the Capitalists and the workers. The workers became “free citizens.” Free to sell his or herself to the highest bidder. Or to the lowest. Anything to keep a roof over the head and the belly full.