Hillary voted against it...We hear a lot from Obamites about the Senate records of anyone running against St. Obama but it is as if St. Obama's Senate record doesn't exist. Has the msm which has attacked Hillary and Edwards' records ever mentioned this bill?
-snip-
Well, Obama has made a pattern of accommodation and capitulation ever since he got to the Senate - and, as a result, keeps getting rolled.
He voted for President Bush's class action bill that made it harder for victims of pollution and other corporate malfeasance to be compensated, voted for President Bush's 2005 energy bill that included massive oil, coal, and nuclear subsidies, and voted to allow credit card companies to raise interest rates over 30 percent - all the while getting no help from Republicans in passing the Democratic agenda.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/glenn-hurowitz/barack-obama-worlds-wor_b_67922.html-snip-
But while Obama has a solid liberal record, many believe there is a difference between a liberal and a true progressive. For example, his signature legislation today is his "healthcare for hybrids" proposal, which would give away hundreds of millions to auto companies to relieve them of some of the costs of paying for retirees' healthcare. In exchange, the companies would produce more fuel-efficient vehicles. The goals are unassailable, but the policy reflects the liberal carrot of appeasing a powerful industry rather than the progressive stick of forcing that industry to shape up by simply mandating higher fuel-efficiency standards.
The occasions when Obama has broken with his party indicate similar inclinations. Just one month into his term, the former civil rights lawyer defied the Democrats and voted for the class-action "reform" bill. Opposed by most major civil rights and consumer watchdog groups, this Big Business-backed legislation was sold to the public as a way to stop "frivolous" lawsuits. But everyone in Washington knew the bill's real objective was to protect corporate abusers. A few weeks later, though he voted against the credit-card-industry-written bankruptcy bill, Obama also voted against an amendment that would have capped credit-card interest rates at a whopping 30 percent (he defends his vote by claiming the amendment was poorly written).
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060626/sirota/2-snip-
Tort 'Reform' TriumphsNot satisfied with nibbling away at the welfare state, already the thinnest in the industrialized West, conservatives have spent more than twenty years demonizing lawyers and ridiculing victims in order to eliminate a uniquely American right, rooted in the Seventh Amendment, that allows juries to assess damages in civil courts for corporate misbehavior. In Europe and Japan, governments compensate victims; in this country, it is often done, haphazardly, by entrepreneur-lawyers. The same lawyers are more successful in another, quite accidental way: regulating and punishing companies that pollute, maim or cheat--a critical function at a time when government does less and less to force them to act responsibly. Fifteen state attorneys general recognized this when they called on the Senate to dump or amend the class-action bill.
The bill, like the other anticipated tort "reforms," was produced by the same right-wing think tanks that gave us the proposed Social Security overhaul and Medicare privatization and was marketed by the US Chamber of Commerce, which along with a coalition of businesses has spent tens of millions of dollars on the effort. Much of that money has gone to support like-minded elected officials. In the 2004 election, for example, the Chamber helped spend millions in seven battleground states to pay for ads urging voters to support lawsuit restrictions endorsed by Bush and opposed by John Kerry
. Such efforts are part of a strategy embraced by Bush guru Karl Rove to drain cash from tort lawyers, who overwhelmingly support Democrats.
-snip-
On its face, the class-action bill is mere procedural tinkering, transferring from state to federal court actions involving more than $5 million where any plaintiff is from a different state from the defendant company. But federal courts are much more hostile to class actions than their state counterparts; such cases tend to be rooted in the finer points of state law, in which federal judges are reluctant to dabble. And even if federal judges do take on these suits, with only 678 of them on the bench (compared with 9,200 state judges), already overburdened dockets will grow. Thus, the bill will make class actions--most of which involve discrimination, consumer fraud and wage-and-hour violations--all but impossible. One example: After forty lawsuits were filed against Wal-Mart for allegedly forcing employees to work "off the clock," four state courts certified these suits as class actions. Not a single federal court did so, although the practice probably involves hundreds of thousands of employees nationwide.
In one such case in Washington State, attorney Toby Marshall is representing 40,000 workers, each of whom stands to gain, on average, a couple of hundred dollars in unpaid wages. While this may be a significant sum for people making just over minimum wage, it's far too little to merit a lawyer's filing an individual claim, especially given the cost of suing the nation's largest retailer, which Marshall estimated at several hundred thousand dollars. That would mean Wal-Mart would never have to pay Georgie Hartwig for the meal and rest breaks she says she wasn't allowed to take over the seven years she worked for the chain. Hartwig said that if she protested, she was told, "You're on Wal-Mart time."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050307/zegart
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
