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Congress Investigates Carriers' Debt Collections
Julie188 writes "'Tis the season for the government to crack down on abusive practices by your secretly evil national wireless carrier. Next up: a congressional committee will be looking into a debt collection practice that prevents customers from filing lawsuits. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) will be examining a contract clause that forces customers to waive their right to sue and instead agree to forced arbitration. He is hot on the tails of the carriers after a similar investigation of credit card companies lead to nine banks removing the forced arbitration clause from their contracts. This follows the week's earlier news that the FCC was going to try to come up with new rules to prevent wireless bill shock."
Tis the season for the government to crack down on abusive practices by your secretly evil national wireless carrier
That is the worst kept secret EVER. They are all evil, every last one of them, and if you don't know this by now then you must not have ever had a cellphone before.
They should ban forced arbitration clauses in any one-sided contract including credit cards, telecommunications service, cable service and utility service.
Arbitration is essentially a system of parallel, private courts run by corporations, for corporations and for the express purpose of denying justice and avoiding the laws of the land. It's an absolutely corrupt system and should not be allowed to exist in any form whatsoever. Allowing seemingly innocuous instances of this practice has lead to private companies forcing rape victims to give up their rights. Corporation employees can abuse people in any way they please and can rely on their own private courts to avoid any reprecussions. Judges support this creeping privatisation of the judiciary as they are rewarded with handsome salaries as the private magistrates of these twisted courts.
Around the time of the Jamie Leigh Jones rape arbitration scandal, I remember speaking with someone in management about arbitration--I live in Ireland. He claimed that the trend in business--magazines, conferences and so on--was pushing arbitration heavily. As the "modern" way of doing business. The conversation sent a chill down my spine. The laws of my country and the people in it were being put in dire jeopardy, our legal protections being replaced right under our noses by this latest innovation in American savagery. At least I live in the EU; I can only imagine what must be occurring in Latin America or indeed the US itself.
Arbitration is lawlessness. It is rule by the powerful over the weak. It's not even a form of order, as arbitration courts have no strict rules, no obligation to consider precedent, no means of appeal, and are not even obliged to publish their rulings, let alone have an open court. The North Koreans have a more enlightened legal system--and again that is not hyperbole. Any society that accepts the rule of such courts has abandoned all pretence of justice and equality and has turned the clock back a thousand years before even the Magna Carta. And no other society should follow them down the path to ruin.
May the Maths Be with you!
Yes, and this is done by denying people their rights. It's much cheaper to pay a rent-a-judge to deliver the verdict you'd prefer; I'm not disputing that. But my position is that this is an illegitimate system, and is essentially lawlessness in a pinstriped suit.
It was the purest form of arbitration. The whole rotten system was laid bare for the world to see just how corrupt it really was, and exactly what its true purpose is. There are numerous examples of companies having people signaway their rights with smallprint mines in contracts. It's fraud, and the financial system once again leads the way, with credit card contracts being rife with these crooked mandatory binding arbitration clauses.
So where there is no law, we must rely on private industry to make its own. No. Never. Better no law at all than a corporate one--and that's not hyperbole!
May the Maths Be with you!
I have no idea what you're talking about
Its simple. If you hold the money supply constant while the population quadruples you create a currency shortage. No different than if you held anything else constant... housing for example.
Bottom line, you can't hold currency constant.
You think people benefit because now they have to spend $500 to get a business suit instead of the $5 it cost in 1910? Or ~$200/week on food instead of the ~$2 it used to cost? If you do think that's beneficial, then you're no better than the corporations.
I didn't say this benefits people. I just said holding it constant doesn't. So to sum up: Not expanding it causes problems. Expanding it to much causes problems.
They're taxes, yes. The thing is, they're taxes on the telco that they are passing through to you based on an estimation of your share" of their actual obligation. The money you pay the telco goes in their pocket and if they slightly over-collect from enough people they can pocket it. This is distinct from sales tax which mandates any over-collection to be turned over to the state. The "taxes" section is taxes you owe that the business collects on the government's behalf. This distinction is why they're separate.
Honestly, what a business should do when they get a tax increase is raise their rates. People object, of course, so the telcos lobby heavily to be allowed to "pass this on" directly so they don't look like the bad guy. In reality, it's a simple cost of doing business and should be rolled into the normal rate. At least, that's my opinion.
You know the thing about UDP jokes? I don't care if you get it or not.
Arbitration is useful in many circumstances.. just not when it's in one-sided contracts. My grandfather, for example, served as an arbiter for quite a few years after he retired. Most of the disputes he presided over had to do with local business disputes over payment, quality of goods, etc.. they were too large to be adjudicated in small claims court, and too small for it to make sense paying lawyers for full blown civil litigation. Sometimes there initially would be a court filing, and the judge would recommend the parties go to arbitration instead since it would be cheaper for both, in which case most of the time the parties both go and select a mutually acceptable arbiter.
The main problem with arbitration occurs when one party gets to choose the arbiter, which leads to moral hazards and conflicts of interest. Even consumer-corporation binding arbitration would not ipso-facto be a bad thing, so long as the consumer had equal say in choosing the arbiter (which would tend towards local arbiters). The two problems with binding arbitration in the consumer contract world is that the corporation chooses the arbitration firm, and the locale. This means that it's often no cheaper for the consumer to go into arbitration than it would be for them to sue (since say, they live in Kansas and the arbitration firm is in California), while the corporation can put a lot of pressure on the arbitration firm to find in their favor as the price of continued business.
As long as arbitration remains essentially local, and the arbiter is mutually acceptable to both parties, it's often a lot cheaper while being just as equitable as a civil tort (more so in some cases, since you can pick an arbiter that has expert field knowledge, rather than hoping the judge is a quick learner).