Democracy is a cargo cult.

But let us all pray that the Trump God-Emperor can do his little dance, and make the skies rain liberal tears. If we are all here in four years, it will have been divine providence.

Differentiating my post count and extrapolating a bit says I'm well on my way to GBK power levels. Muahahaha

It's pretty magical we have gotten to where we are tbh

Democracy has never been better.

Huge American monopoly commits a crime.

Citizens witness the crime and report it on the internet, because that's the only place actual government/corporate crimes can get reported anymore.

Report goes viral, as idealists worldwide pray for justice to be done.

Media corporations pick up the story, spend a week making fun of the criminal corporation for bad customer service, while insisting the whole time that it wasn't actually a crime.

Story becomes about bad customer service, not about criminal actions. Government believes them.

Neoliberal think tank says extreme capital concentration is awesome, pro-consumer regulations are the real problem. Government listens.

Corporation settles out of court with the victim under non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreement. Maybe the victim got a million dollars, maybe the victim got threatened into silence. Who knows?

Federal prosecutors refuse to try the criminal case, assuming the investigation hasn't already been buried by this point.

Criminal corporation buys back its own stock to hold the price up until the public outrage dies down again.

Laws are changed to make crime legal, as long as you're a huge American corporation.

Criminal corporation announces its most profitable year ever.

The gears driving the American economy slip a little more.

If you read ^ and thought I was talking about United, you're only 1% right.

Yep, reminds me of the McDonald's coffee incidence. When a McDonald's store, which had received over a dozen complaints about the temperature of the coffee, never did anything to fix the situation, and when a women spilled some on herself, causing large areas of 3rd degree burns, sued to cover medical costs, and was awarded a couple million in punitive damages.

Of course, and I remember this vivdly as a kid, they launched a massive media campaign, painting her as a greedly, careless person, they suggested corporations are constantly the victims of frivolous lawsuits and there are people making millions through the courts, that people in America are just always going around suing over the littlest things, etc.

I mean, it was really just a (successful) campaign to control torts. Basically corps successfully reduced the cap on how much can be awarded in punitive damages, so they can't be sued for as much, no matter how egregious their actions.

Of course, America is in no way a particularly litigious society. That entire thing was a myth.

Well it looks like clickbait just went 'nuclear'.

The part that throws most people off is when the media abets corporate crime by harshly criticizing the perpetrator.

Every major news article about United incident called it overbooking, and said that United should have offered a better deal before denying boarding to these customers. Should, because United had the legal right to remove those passengers anyway. Like it was just a dick move or something.

But that's the big effin' lie here! US law is actually very specific about how, when, and why passengers may be removed from an aircraft or denied boarding. The flight wasn't overbooked; they wanted to use those seats for their own off-duty employees, which is a very different thing. Passenger airliners are legally required to give preference to paying customers over off-duty airline employees. It was also legally too late to do anything about it, because he had already boarded the aircraft and was sitting in his confirmed seat. United was committing a crime when they asked him to leave, they were committing a tort offense by breaking their own service contract with him, and they were committing a crime when they called the airport police to have him removed.

Basically, United is a criminal organization. In this case, and probably many others.

Having late-night comedians laugh at them, having NBC and Fox and those **** companies talk about how terrible their customer service is, that **** is actually helping them because it's taking attention away from the fact that they broke the ****ing law and that the government isn't going to do a god damn thing about it. Laws aren't for rich people and corporations, they are for poor people. And if a $20k a year idiot hell ****er corporate employee tells a cop to beat the **** out of someone, they do it. Hail ****ing Hitler.

That sounds pretty simple. Are United settling similar cases left and right in order to avoid a legal precedent against their illegal actions?

Who knows? Probably not. Most people don't know their rights.

So keeping in mind their volume of patronage, they're chancing a bunch of customers coming along who do know their rights or are introduced to those rights after the fact? The law not being so straightforward and so clearly on the victims' side when applied to these cases would make more sense to me.

Most people certainly can't afford advice from lawyers and most certainly don't have the privileges required to study law. They simply go through life trusting that what authority figures tell them is correct.

Most people take dinner vouchers and count themselves lucky.

Here's a good deflationary article about the use of the MOAB: http://www.vox.com/world/2017/4/13/15292418/moab-mother-of-all-bombs

I know. I think some people would feel their rights being offended enough to take action, though.

I mean, you could easily say the same thing about slaves in America. "Why didn't they just revolt"?

From what Jon wrote, the letter of the law would very clearly be on the offended customers' side, and successful litigation should then be a matter of awareness and affording a half-decent lawyer. I'm no expert on American history, but I do know that was not the case for the slaves.

If this thread were twitter, which one of us would be Trump?

This one would have been more effective.

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I mean, just watch a few episodes of cops. Most people incriminate themselves within the first few minutes of talking to the police. People do not comprehend Miranda warnings, are we really expecting them to know things about obscure laws? Especially where there are literally thousands of federal laws. I just think you overestimate how much people are willing to go and access freely available basic truths.

My comparison to American slaves was a poor one, but the point was that, just because something seems like an obvious action against an obvious wrong, doesn't mean people will do it.

I mean, consider this. Per California law,



There is nothing wrong with entering an intersection on a yellow, CA being a yellow permissive state, so as long as you're in the intersection when the light turns red, you're okay. Yet, I've had multiple Californians argue that point, claiming that if you're in the intersection at all when the light is red, you can get a ticket. Why did (in particular two separate people) believe this? Because they were pulled over and the officer told them that.

I spoke a bit more and it seems that in both cases, the officer was either misinformed or lied, but they admitted the officer was right and they had run a red light. So of course they got a ticket, they confessed to doing it. In other words, they were morons. But that's most people. They were nervous because an officer had pulled them over, he told them they had done something wrong, and they trusted authority. We're fairly hardwired to respond this way, laws aside.

But yeah, that's how things go in America.

And I gave that example because you would think people would try to understand the laws of something like driving, which most of us do on a regular basis, over the laws of when airplane staff can legally remove you from a flight.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/dont-like-privacy-violations-dont-use-the-internet-gop-lawmaker-says/




Unless you want to apply for a job. Not that Jim Sensenbrenner would know, since he hasn't had a real job since 1969.

Stop electing out of touch morons.

I googled some facts. They were exactly as Jon laid them out in the first place, so I was wrong to doubt that. United are in clear violation of federal law, no matter how incredible it seemed to me that they've managed to keep breaking the law without getting into crippling legal trouble.

If I am to believe what the media is saying, they are currently in crippling Twitter trouble.

If you want something truly shocking, look up how persistently and brazenly corporations have violated labor laws throughout history, and how little they're ever punished for it.

The US government isn't enforcing antitrust laws anymore.

Sorry, that's not entirely true.

There is still one thing facing antitrust prosecution: ETFs, which are mostly popular among middle class retirement savers because they mitigate the risk of stock market speculation (something we're all required to do in order to retire).

http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21707191-passive-investment-funds-create-headaches-antitrust-authorities-stealth

how DARE you disgusting proles refuse to play after we worked so hard to rig the game

tl;dr money managers only care about the rich clients

Yeah, you really don't want fund managers to care about you.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you but I don't understand why funds that can be traded with great flexibility compared to other types of funds mitigate the risk of speculation. Retirement savings should traditionally be kept long term. I don't see how an ETF is beneficial in this regard but apparently they're all the rage.

No minimums, penalties, or cash calls. More liquid. Possible to buy with lower fee individual brokerage accounts and tax-free savings accounts. Index-tracking funds revert to GDP growth and have low management fees.

Sure, but you get what you pay for and you'll likely earn less interest long-term playing around with ETFs than with other funds. I probably just inferred too much from your post but since an ETF is easier to trade it seems more likely, to me, to be susceptible to speculation.

Very few active managers outperform index-tracking in the short term, and virtually zero outperform it in the long run. That's before their management fees. The idea that active management yields better returns is a marketing myth and has no basis in reality.

So I FINALLY got around to opening all of my Trump For President propaganda. The rest are all in letter form. If there's enough morbid curiosity, I'll scan and post them.

Of course I'd look at the performance of the funds first before making the assertion. I understand what active management is but I kind of look at an ETF as a fund that the investor can actively manage similar to the way a day trader might. I am not saying they're the same of course. Anyway, you point was with regard to antitrust prosecution. Since I'm mostly skipping large chunks of this thread now, could you explain how you mean that?

Whoa. You're friends with Donald Trump??