The Enduring Imperative of Bernie Sanders
Why Bernie Sanders is Right and How Biden is Making it Harder to Sue Corporations
By
David Gottfried
Exhibit A for the Proposition that Most Liberals in the Democratic Party Are Utter Phonies:
Let me be clear: Joe Biden and the chattering chickens of the Democratic Party are infinitely better than today’s Republican reprobates, largely a bunch of cretins, with the morality of cannibals, who make Ronald Reagan seem as peaceful as the Dalai Lama and George Wallace as progressive as George Mc Govern.
However, the best you can get from chattering chickens is chicken salad, and as President Lyndon Johnson once said, in regard to the political fortunes of Richard Nixon, chicken salad has a strong propensity to turn into chicken shit.
And we must remember that Bernie Sanders is and was infinitely bolder and nobler that Senator Joe Biden, who in the Senate was known as the Senator from Mastercard. Sanders reminded us that the Democratic Party had lost its purpose and identity. For example, New York City, which is as blue as the bluest sapphire in the finest jewelry stores, is a town in which shlock has become as expensive as sapphires, homelessness abounds, class chasms are reminiscent of the era of the robber barons, and secretaries and sanitation men pay a much higher proportion of their income in taxes that Hedge Fund Managers, a class of gluttons judiciously protected by the regnant prince of corporate liberalism, Mr. Chuck Schumer.
Some people as of late may have forgotten about Bernie Sanders as a few incremental changes have lessened the plight of the poor: In some places the minimum wage has risen, unemployment is down, more workers are starting to unionize, and wages are rising.
However, the minimal improvements in the economy are about to be washed aside like the coastal structures that were just recently bludgeoned by Hurricane Ian.
As we all know, the nation is experiencing inflation, as is the whole world. What it the traditional cure for inflation ? High interest rates designed to “cool down” (what a euphemism, it suggests we’re all going into an air-conditioned movie) the economy. After all, when people are too poor to buy stuff, prices have to come down. Biden does not seem to object to the Fed’s steep and steady interest rate increases. Of course, the Federal Reserve is a semi-autonomous entity, designed to be protected from political pressure, but if it is allegedly protected from political pressure, why does it always take the side of the monied class. Nowadays, whenever the stock market takes a big hit, the Fed turns the money faucets on for Wall Street while it never gives a damn while the Rust belt, the ghettos and Appalachia are starved of liquidity like a desert. Although presidents who were supposedly much more conservative than Joe Biden gave us a nationwide wage-price freeze in lieu of a state sponsored recession (Richard Nixon imposed a wage-price freeze in July 1971 and it lasted until sometime in 1973), Joe Biden, ever the dutiful choir boy at the Church of Corporate Democracy, wouldn’t think of such socialistic measures.
HOW JOE BIDEN’S JUSTICE DEPT IS MAKING IT HARDER FOR INDIVIDUALS TO SUE CORPORATIONS
Today I read an article in the New York Times about an upcoming Supreme Court case pertaining to jurisdiction over corporations. It made my blood boil. It made me remember that we must heed Sanders and his Rooseveltian message. Let me explain:
If A sues B, the very first question the Court must ask is whether the Court has Jurisdiction over B. When a Court has jurisdiction over B, it has the legal right to render orders and decrees regarding B’s life, such as whether B must pay damages to Mr. A or go to jail.
Let me address the problem visa vis individuals who get hurt by corporations.
Suppose Mr. A ate a product made by company B and that product gave him Cancer. Mr. A may want to sue B. Mr. A, if he is like most individuals, does not have offices and attorneys all over the United States. If he is from New Jersey, a state once designated cancer alley because it was like a petri dish crawling with industrial toxins, he probably has one house, somewhere in Jersey. The corporation may be based in California and incorporated under the laws of California. Traditionally, Courts would say that Mr. A, who is an individual who has one home in New Jersey, would have to sue the corporation in California, not the easiest thing to do as how does one continue to go to work in New Jersey if one is constantly traveling to the West coast to meet with attorneys, go to Depositions etc.
Back in the years when the Democratic Party really meant something, the law was changed. In 1945, in a case between the State of Washington and the International Shoe Company, the Supreme Court said that although a big company may be based in Delaware, it might make a lot of money from the good people of Indiana. Since the company is making money off of Indiana, the Courts of Indiana are entitled to exercise jurisdiction over that corporation set up under the laws of Delaware.
In the present case, in which Joe Biden’s justice dept is taking the corporate side, an individual who got cancer sued the culpable party in the State of Pennsylvania. The company moved to dismiss the suit, claiming that the Court did not have jurisdiction because Pennsylvania had no right to exercise power over the company. The company said it was based in another state. The Company had registered to do business in Pa. A Pa law said that if a company registers to do business in Pa, it has agreed to let the Pa courts have jurisdiction over the company. The company said the law was unconstitutional. The Biden Justice Dept filed a “friend of the Court” brief, with the Supreme Court, taking the side of the Company.
The lower courts sided with the company. For some reason, the lower courts, and the Justice Dept., seem to have overlooked the fact that the company has over 2000 miles of railroad tracks strewn across the State of Pennsylvania. Nevertheless, in their zeal to defend corporate power, the courts, and the Justice dept., saw the company as completely foreign and alien to Pa.
The brief by the Biden justice dept. was as ambiguous as the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade. (In some segments of the Dobbs decision, the Court said that its decision would not abridge other substantive due process rights, such as the right to gay sex in the privacy of your own home (Lawrence v. Texas), but in other segments of the decision it strongly suggested that gay rights was on the chopping block.)
In its brief for the company, the Biden justice dept. suggested that it would still adhere to the notion that if a corporation had sufficient contacts with a state, that state could exercise jurisdiction over the corporation. However, in other segments of the brief, it suggested that a state could only have jurisdiction over a corporation if the state was the home state of the corporation. In endorsing the lower court’s decision to dismiss the suit, the brief eerily echoed 19th century conceptions of jurisdiction:
“A state court may exercise general jurisdiction over a corporation only if the corporation is “at home” there, but Pennsylvania is not respondent’s home State.”
Likewise, the Justice Department’s brief approvingly noted that the Supreme Court, according to the lower court, was tightening rules on jurisdiction and moving away from the liberalizing traits of the aforementioned International Shoe Company case;
“The Court rejected the “exorbitant” and “unacceptably grasping” theory that a court may exercise general jurisdiction over any defendant that does “‘substantial, continuous, and systematic’” business in the forum (state).”
My question for the Court and the Justice Dept: Why is a state’s court “unacceptably grasping” if it exercises jurisdiction over a company that does substantial, continuous, and systematic business in the forum (state).”
The Justice Biden dept. seems to think that individuals who are suing corporations are villainous because they don’t want to travel 2000 miles away from home to sue a state in the right forum. Actually, it’s the other way around: Very often large companies have clauses in contracts which provide that the consumer agrees that Nebraska or Kansas or Delaware is the only state where any suits regarding the contract can be brought. As I said in an earlier substack article, consumers are very often financially skewered by what are known as “adhesion contracts,” promulgated, for the most, by large corporations: An adhesion contract has these common traits:
A) There is a gross inequality in bargaining power. One party is a mammoth corporation; the other party is a gray, ashen clerk wearily on his way to a premature death because, as Henry David Thoreau put it. “Most Americans lead lives of quiet desperation.” They don’t demonstrate or shout or make a fuss. They slowly, politely wither away and die while vulgar, thieving mothafuckers are laughing all the way to the bank.
B) The idea that the consumer can bargain with the corporation is as fictional as the Nazi contention that World War Two started when Poland invaded Germany.
C) The contract is very long and insufferably wordy all the better to make it harder to comprehend
D) Hidden within the welter of words, ninety percent of which is sheer verbal diarrhea spanning some 27 pages, is a provision that makes you wish you had taken hemlock instead of signing the contract.
E) The offending and odious provision is, according to more progressive scholars of jurisprudence, something that adhered to the contract like dirt. Hence, the term adhesion contract.
It’s stuff like this that makes me realize that Bernie Sanders, for all of his faults (On some issues I staunchly disagree with him) is the very best politician in this country with respect to economic issues. And long after Joe Biden and his chattering chickadees slide off to Floridian senescence and senility, the words of Bernie Sanders will still reverberate in our memory, like the austere and solemn sounds of a Shofar on Rosh Hashanah.
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