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How Corporate America Shut the Courthouse Doors to Average People
http://billmoyers.com/2014/07/07/how-corporate-america-shut-the-courthouse-doors-to-ordinary-americans/
Little evidence suggests that Brennan’s analysis followed congressional intent. “There was nothing in the legislative history that says Congress favored arbitration,” says Loyola Law School’s Margaret Moses. “The Supreme Court just stated it and then kept citing itself. It’s spurred a huge policy shift, with no basis in legislation.”
However baffling its reasoning, this drastic shift by the court followed a decade during which the conservative legal movement had rapidly gained intellectual clout and political power. The infamous 1971 “Powell memo” — a call to arms to corporations written by then corporate lawyer Lewis Powell, who would join the Supreme Court the following year — had galvanized the business community into organizing against liberal groups and consumer activists like Ralph Nader.
This court’s turn also accorded with a well-financed political campaign for “tort reform,” a conservative cause backed by groups such as the Federalist Society and the Olin Foundation. George H. W. Bush campaigned on tort reform in 1991, while Vice President Dan Quayle headed up the Council on Competitiveness, which held as a central aim eliminating class-action litigation against business. As one scholar of the movement put it, the prevailing belief at the time was that America suffered from “too much law, too many lawyers, courts that take on too much — and an excessive readiness to utilize all of them.”
And true enough, by some measures litigation had increased. In 1962, for example, US district courts conducted just under 6,000 civil trials; by 1981, they conducted more than 11,000. Public figures and the media tended to attribute all of this growth to “frivolous” lawsuits and zealous trial attorneys, but the rise also traced back to other factors, such as the civil rights wins of the 1960s, which meant that laws now protected a much larger segment of the population.
There is much more on the link.
110 replies
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Wow. They do not want us to know they are Fascist. It's not good for public relations. 
Top-to-Bottom, ideas you don't read anywhere else nearly enough.
To help spread a little more light, Maria Galardin's TUC (Time of Useful Consciousness) Radio:
Alex Carey: Corporations and Propaganda
The Attack on Democracy
The 20th century, said Carey, is marked by three historic developments: the growth of democracy via the expansion of the franchise, the growth of corporations, and the growth of propaganda to protect corporations from democracy. Carey wrote that the people of the US have been subjected to an unparalleled, expensive, 3/4 century long propaganda effort designed to expand corporate rights by undermining democracy and destroying the unions. And, in his manuscript, unpublished during his life time, he described that history, going back to World War I and ending with the Reagan era. Carey covers the little known role of the US Chamber of Commerce in the McCarthy witch hunts of post WWII and shows how the continued campaign against "Big Government" plays an important role in bringing Reagan to power.
John Pilger called Carey "a second Orwell", Noam Chomsky dedicated his book, Manufacturing Consent, to him. And even though TUC Radio runs our documentary based on Carey's manuscript at least every two years and draws a huge response each time, Alex Carey is still unknown.
Given today's spotlight on corporations that may change. It is not only the Occupy movement that inspired me to present this program again at this time. By an amazing historic coincidence Bill Moyers and Charlie Cray of Greenpeace have just added the missing chapter to Carey's analysis. Carey's manuscript ends in 1988 when he committed suicide. Moyers and Cray begin with 1971 and bring the corporate propaganda project up to date.
This is a fairly complex production with many voices, historic sound clips, and source material. The program has been used by writers and students of history and propaganda. Alex Carey: Taking the Risk out of Democracy, Corporate Propaganda VS Freedom and Liberty with a foreword by Noam Chomsky was published by the University of Illinois Press in 1995.
SOURCE (Search down to "Carey"
: http://www.tucradio.org/new.html
Thank you for the kind words, Uncle Joe! What Yoko said and what you said!
Just...WOW..... 
I was just starting out with one quote but then got inspired to run with it.
It does make it convenient and I believe this is only a drop in bucket
That is a lot of good reading!
since I haven't seen you speak out against the practice!
What a ridiculous form of "argument" you have been reduced to. Enjoy your cognitive dissonance/corporatist politics though!
the same can't be said for slavery and committing atrocities against the Native Americans, those facts are well known.
You skipped right over them finding no objection until you got to Al Gore and instead of focussing on the message of the OP and thread, regarding the dangers of corporate power, you felt the overwhelming need to derail the argument.
But I do appreciate you kicking the thread.
You never know, it was just kind of a spur of the moment thing.
