One of the most important things about having “99% of what I need done” today is that it can actually feel like a Friday. It isn’t a Tuesday where I rapidly have to rush to do a thousand things.... those things have mostly been done already. And tomorrow I won’t be at work. In fact, tomorrow I will be getting my first haircut of the year- so I’ll have to take and post before/after of that considering exactly how many months have passed without haircut!
But… yeah. Today is The Hundred Hearings in the afternoon and cleaning and trying to prepare for 6/22 trials.... and, for work, that’s it. Which, in some ways, is kind of funny. Because… it is this job. I can still fill every hour of the day because (seriously) people never stop violating the law. Not even just what people call “technical bullshit violations” like speeding and running stop signs. And yes you should note that I do not call those “technical bullshit violations”… speeding kills and running stop signs kills and I’ve had BOTH of those cases with fatalities just within the last 12 months. BUT too many people refer to things like that as “technical bullshit violations” because (and I’ve had this screamed at me in Court) “IF NOBODY WAS HARMED BY IT, IT SHOULDN’T BE AGAINST THE LAW!” Which, as though we needed more proof in this timeline, further establishes that people lack the ability to contemplate anything outside of their own experiences. I hear much the same argue-screamed in our courts about Drunk Driving. People honestly screaming that, if it didn’t hurt anyone, it shouldn’t be against the law! ::deep sigh:: If an event causes enough damage enough times or actively kills people too frequently.... how can you not understand there being a law against it? Humans exhaust me.... but it also points to this cyclical spiral to the bottom. Ignorance bore our current predicament and the ignorance on display in our current predicament begets deeper ignorance in the future. Which spirals. Because Dumb Today makes Dumber Tomorrow and Dumber Tomorrow makes Dumber in the Future. As I’ve said before.... this is a hell of a time to know what the law is actually supposed to be!
But of course, that’s also the reason why I am pro-regulation despite my state and my government seeing regulations of any kind being anti-business. Yes, I do think that we shouldn’t have any regulations on Farm Runoff or Pesticides or Chemicals that go into our water (sarcasm). We’ve already reached the “Nitrate levels are bad; no watering yards or plants” levels in this state again this year. We are dangerously close to having more months with “Water Shortage Due to Nitrates” than less! But heaven forfend we take any action to regulate anything! A genuine thought running through our GOP Super Majority right now? “Any law that could jeopardize short term corporate profits is evil- without exception!” So… yeah. When the government itself is saying “As long as it doesn’t hurt anyone I care about- we don’t need a law about it”… then I can see why the citizens think the same. But, again, that’s just.... the Dumb being led by the Dumb. BUT as Iowa is again ramping up to activate a nuclear power plant… it is also the exact moment where we either (a) Get Smarter; or (b) Enjoy a catastrophic fuck around and find out.
SIMPSON’S LEVEL HYPOTHETICAL:
Google is offering to help pay for a nuclear reactor under strict terms that Google Datacenter receives 90% of the power generated. (That’s not a hypothetical. That’s actually happening in Iowa right now.) But here’s the SIMPSONS LEVEL HYPO about it all: let’s say that Google discovers not dumping nuclear waste into public waterways cuts into their profits by 25%. Let’s say their insurance numbers crunchers predict that anticipated law suits from dumping nuclear waste into public waterways would only cut into their profits by 10%. THEY ARE FINANCIALLY INCENTIVIZED, then, to dump nuclear waste into public waterways.
(Again, dipping back into reality for a moment)- Regulations against businesses are intended to be a response to that kind of calculation. A fine against the company of such an advanced level that it removes the financial incentive to hurt the public. Regulations plus Criminal Codes are intended to be a response to particularly egregious harms where a company can be civilly held liable and the individuals responsible can be criminally held liable.... as a way to seriously disincentivize a company and a person from committing egregious harm. THE PAINFUL TRUTH AND REALITY, however, is that our Country has (for so long) been run by destructively PRO-Corporation Lawmakers that even the regulations cannot create sufficient financial disincentive. Within the last ten years, the most horrible “This corporation did wrong and the government is intervening” that I can recall… fined the corporation less than 5% of it’s profit for that year. If, by violating the law, I can reach profits of $90 million for the year… and you fine me less than $4.5 million? I made $7.5 million per month… your fine, for me breaking the law and doing harm.... is less than 3 weeks of my profits.... where my harm was committed for the entire year (and may have future consequences to others in years to come). So yes… our current system is woefully inadequate… because the lawmakers are enacting “As long as it doesn’t hurt anyone I care about” policies. And, to be tragically more abrupt about it… the lawmakers are actually enacting “As long as I can make money from it” policies. Thus why a government predominantly run by the Senior Citizen class is acting like “I don’t give a shit what the harms might be in 10 or 20 years; I want more money now!”
Oh.... and, just to address what may be stated.... for those thinking, “Well, if the individual harm is great enough, that person can sue the corporation and make a killing!” There are some significant roadblocks.
Let’s consider that such a thing was even possible… the bar to suit can be excessively, ridiculously high. How much money do you have presently? OR (more commonly) how much money do you have after paying for the medical bills that accrued because of the Company’s harm? Because you need to be able to afford an attorney. If you’re lucky and enough people were harmed badly enough, you could join a class action suit… but even then, someone needs to kick that off. Preliminary costs of attorneys and lawsuits can be pretty steep. Getting a firm capable of going up against MASSIVE Corporate Law Teams carries a hefty price. But let’s say your case is so desperate that some fool attorney agrees to work strictly on contingency (rare). The corporation knows if they have a strong defense or not. If they have a strong defense, they’ll do whatever they can to get the suit heard as soon as possible to get the whole case thrown out. If they have a weak defense or no defense- they’ll stretch the damned thing out for years. “We need to schedule depositions of all of plaintiff’s witnesses. We’ll depose 1 expert in May, 1 expert in June, 1 expert in July. We’ll depose 2 of the plaintiffs in August but we’ve got a massive medical malpractice case in August so we’ll pick up the depositions again in November”.... they will drag it out forever. Too many people truly have died waiting for their suit to be finished.
BUT entering into that? There are three realities that, again, screw the non-corporate entity.
(1) TORT REFORM: Under the guise of “responsibility” many conservative governments frequently complain about (and demand) TORT REFORM. This is often a law that specifically places a cap on the amount of money that can be won in a lawsuit. Class Actions have a larger cap; but individual actions can be rather strict. And they always reference the damned McDonald’s case… because America is exceptionally weak to propaganda. The McDonald’s Coffee case? The lady almost died; McDonald’s had been warned repeatedly about the issue before, the lady’s medical needs and expenses were extreme (skin grafts and more).... and even still, McDonald’s won its appeal of the severity of damages so McDonald’s didn’t have to pay NEARLY what people think. But every time the Conservatives seek TORT REFORM, somebody brings it up. With TORT REFORM- I don’t care if your medical expenses from this harm were $12 million… we’ve capped the maximum amount that can be awarded at $5 million. Sucks to be you.
(2) MEDIATION & ARBITRATION: Now, I won’t sit here and lie to you. Attorneys in our private lives are not taking the time to pour over every syllable to every USER AGREEMENT we see in the wild. For too many of us- that’s what we get PAID to do and after 10 hours of reading contracts all day, I don’t give a shit what CrunchyRoll’s User Agreement says- I just want to watch some fucking anime. HOWEVER as a standard boiler plate concept in almost every User Agreement you’ve ever signed… the company has stated if you have a problem and seek financial compensation, then you must first enter into mediation & arbitration with the company at the location and within the terms the COMPANY dictates. 100% true story. Perhaps the most famous recent case of this nonsense was Jeffrey Piccolo’s case against Disney. His wife died at a Disney Park due to negligence from the staff (would at least be the argument).... but when Piccolo filed a wrongful death action against Disney- Disney filed to have the matter dismissed because Piccolo’s Disney Plus User Agreement contained language requiring all suits against Disney to be resolved through arbitration at a location and with requirements as chosen by Disney. NOW as with most things… if your case is particularly egregious, if the facts are particularly heinous, and/or if the specific harm is so far beyond anything that could be reasonably predicted.... you can succeed in arguments against arbitration. BUT that takes us back to the original problem.... how much can you afford an attorney to challenge a mega-corporation’s army of lawyers? And for how long can you afford that?
(3) STATE LAW BARRING SUIT: Thank you, Iowa! (eyeroll) This is beyond Tort Reform as Tort Reform is intended to act “generally”. This TYPE of suit must adhere to this GENERAL standard. But Iowa… already the home of the worst cancer rates in the country… decided they needed to protect specific agriculture-related corporations by law! It is funny… the same legislature that can’t seem to write a Criminal Code without massive “oopsies” did a REALLY fine job of writing this law (whenever that happens, you can rest assured that a Lobbyist wrote the bill, handed it to a legislator, who then submitted it. That happens WAY more than you think and I’ve always hated that.) But this law, which Iowa’s GOP Super Majority made sure to give priority to so it could be voted into law immediately..... specifically the “intelligent, it’s not evil” way to describe it- Pesticide Labels issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency “shall be sufficient” in satisfying any requirement to warn users of the product’s health and safety. Again- sounds reasonable on its face. But in practice? Let’s say that I sell Toxic Avenger Pesticide. The EPA slaps a label onto my product that states “Do not mix with drinking water. Do not get product into eyes. Do not drink product. Misuse of this product may cause death.” THAT warning label means I am protected from civil liability from everything on the label. What THIS LAW does, however, is it also says “The corporation is protected from civil liability from everything NOT on the label as well!” This creates MASSIVE issues for SO MANY reasons. Not least of which… let’s say we call the product Toxic Avenger Pesticide because in our proprietary lab tests, it was determined that repeat uses over several years would turn a person’s skin green and cause it to start sloughing off. A RESPONSIBLE COMPANY would either put that on the label as warning or not sell the product at all. BUT THIS LAW permits me to sell the pesticide, make a killing, and protects me from being sued from the harm I knew about but was not caught by the EPA. Iowa is too damned close to being a Mono-Industry State as it is; but I would expect to see similar bullshit in other states regarding their biggest industry and corporate involvement.
So… that’s why “Civilian filing civil suit” is an incomplete, inauthentic, and wholly inappropriate response to the “We don’t need a law or regulations” perspective.
And I go into that to bring it full circle. What I’m seeing more and more of is what I’ve referred to as “The downward spiral of equality.” In my observations, it seems that the human does not see equality as a way of lifting up but of dragging down. In a case like this.... where we are seeing the government say (and put into practice) increasingly obvious laws written from the perspective, “As long as it doesn’t hurt anyone I care about”.... a “Lifting Up” sense of equality would be to demand better behavior, better lawmakers, better representation. Instead, we get “dragging down” sense of equality where people recognize what the lawmakers are doing and instead say, “As long as it doesn’t hurt anyone I care about, it should be legal!” Our lawmakers should be our equals. They represent us after all. But nobody sees these people as “the equal to the common man” for a dozen different reasons. Our celebritization of political figures, our general feelings of other, better regarding wealth… the lawmakers don’t see themselves as our equals and we don’t see them as our equals. Plus, the statistics and figures don’t lie. Our political figures are not in power to represent US. Our political figures are in power to represent THE WEALTHY and CORPORATIONS. So… I do get the populi being “in order to be equal, we should be free of legal consequences, too!” But.... it’s the rule following empathetic person in me, I guess. It’s the idea of “When I was punched, it hurt. So I don’t punch others, because I know it will hurt them.” versus the thinking “When I was punched, it hurt. So I am going to punch other people to hurt them.” Y’know- the old chestnut that says, “There are two kinds of people in the world. The kind that think I had to go through it, so you do, too; and the kind that think I had to go through it, so you shouldn’t have to.” We seem to be living largely in a world of I had to go through it, so you do, too..... which makes sense when you consider the parenting advice before about 1995. But that topic is best left for another day.
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