BY: Vincent L. Hall
For all the bad press it gets, gang membership doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Now I am not advocating that you or anyone else join the Crips or the Bloods or the Hatfields or the McCoys. But clearly in this country, “membership has its privileges!”
America is full of trade and social compacts, and because you are not a part of any gang of individuals with binding interests, you are at a serious disadvantage. Democracy Now, the one-hour podcast that I listen to daily, made it plain in one sitting. Amy Goodman, the gracious and left-leaning host, further validated my belief about gangs last week.
She used two segments to lift authors and their books.
Brendan Ballou, CEO of the Public Integrity Project and a former federal prosecutor who himself spent two years prosecuting January 6th Capitol rioters. His new book is titled When Companies Run the Courts: How Forced Arbitration Became America’s Secret Justice System. Listen to his explanation.
“So, America has a secret justice system that surrounds us, and yet we know almost nothing about it. It is an alternative to the public court system called forced arbitration. It’s a system where, instead of having a judge, you have a private arbitrator, who is typically or often paid for by the very company that you are trying to sue. Proceedings happen in secret and can almost never be appealed. And so, unsurprisingly, these courts almost always rule in favor of the companies rather than the consumers or employees!
Why does that matter? Ballou goes further.
“Now, this all matters because we are increasingly being pushed into this private justice system. And if it feels like companies are increasingly beyond the reach of the law, if you’re getting scammed by companies, overcharged by companies, getting worse customer service, getting discriminated against, hurt or even killed by companies, if that seems to be happening more than it used to, forced arbitration, pushing cases outside of our court system and into this secret justice system that companies largely control, can explain why companies are getting worse in so many ways.”
We already knew that Injustice Clearance Thomas and that ungodly gang of six he sits with on the Supreme Court are aligned against justice for the commoner. But America’s judicial and legislative gang has plotted you out of the picture long before you get to the appellate phase of jurisprudence.
And if Brendan Ballou’s book and thesis didn’t get you, Amy had another guest in the queue to buoy the need for gang membership.
Author and political science professor at Northwestern University, Jeff Winters, reminded us that there is another, much smaller and more exclusive gang we need to worry about.
I saw a guy with a “homemade” T-Shirt that read, “Save the Planet, Kidnap a Billionaire,” and now I get it.
Listen as Professor Winters, whose new book, “The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies,” brings this gang’s history into our present perspective.
“If you take the gap between the wealthiest Roman senators and the average person in Imperial Rome, who was either a slave or a small farmer, the ratio of their wealth was about 16,000 to one.
If we fast-forward — sorry, if we fast-forward to today in the United States, and we take the average person in the Forbes 400 compared to the median person in the United States, that has exploded to 140,000 to one.
And so, we are just dramatically, dramatically more unequal. Our wealth is far more concentrated in fewer hands than ever before.”
Let me bring his point into closer view for you. While the list of about three men contend to become the first trillionaires on the planet, the masses of Americans and all humankind are in rapid economic decline.
Quit Playin!
If your mail is not addressed as Bezos, Musk, or Ellis, you need to form a gang with others of similar monetary means, regardless of race or political persuasion.
A long-time Texas Metro News column- ist, Dallas native Vincent L. Hall is an au- thor, writer, award-winning writer, and a lifelong Drapetomaniac.
