Corporate exploiter faces arbitration "guerilla war"

A couple of items down on this blog there’s one about forced arbitration. This one, about the same general topic, is considerably more uplifting.

Faced with a class-action suit filed on behalf of customers who claim they were tricked into paying to file their taxes, TurboTax-maker Intuit knocked the case down. The company insisted its customers had agreed to forego their right to take their grievances to court and were required to use the private arbitration system instead.

But even as Intuit was winning in the class-action case, that very arbitration system was being weaponized against the Silicon Valley company.

A Chicago law firm is using a novel legal strategy by bankrolling customers bringing tens of thousands of arbitration claims against Intuit. Win or lose, this strategy could cost Intuit tens of millions of dollars in legal fees alone — a threat that could prod the company to be more open to a giant settlement. - ProPublica

Another way the greedheads are screwing up schools

Some vo-tech classes in high school are not a bad thing. That's been going on forever. But as in so much else the pathologically exploitative greedheads are looking to take control.

However, career and technical education programs funded by major companies tend to narrow student learning to the needs of specific employers and can be harmful to students’ long-term employability, limiting their future opportunities.

In a soon-to-be-released study, we looked at the increasing influence of corporations in shaping career and technical education programs in public schools. We found that when corporations gain control of school curriculums—rather than educators, parents, and elected school boards—students get locked into narrower courses of study.

This diminishment of opportunity is often sold to parents as “career pathways” to their children’s future employability. But insufficient attention has been given to the collusion among corporations and government bureaucrats to provide big companies with workforce training at taxpayers’ expense. - The Progressive

Forced arbitration is evil

There are proposed legislative remedies noted in the article, but they probably won't happen soon.

If anything, 26% is a very conservative estimate of wage theft among low-wage workers subject to forced arbitration. We believe the percentage is likely even higher, due to the lack of compliance incentive for these employers as a result of their decision to impose forced arbitration on their workers.

The claim-suppressive effect of forced arbitration was detailed in Cynthia Estlund’s pathbreaking 2018 article, The Black Hole of Mandatory Arbitration. Estlund found that, faced with the prospect of having to submit their claims to forced arbitration, the vast majority of workers—98%—never file a claim at all. With no effective access to justice, workers simply abandon their claims. - NELP

An excess profits tax would be a good deal

Trying for it would be good politics, too.

So COVID has been a grotesque bonanza for America’s most concentrated industries. The long-term cure for the supply crunch is drastic re-regulation of the global logistics system, as well as rebuilding domestic manufacturing and supply. The Biden administration’s antitrust crackdown will also help reduce pricing power.

In the meantime, we need an excess profits tax, to tax away the opportunistic price hikes, just as we did in World War II. Profits that exceeded a normal rate of return, based on several pre-pandemic years, would be subject to a much higher rate of tax.

This idea will both spotlight the real source of the inflation and help pay for the domestic industrial policy that we need to prevent future supply shocks. Even if it’s not enacted, Biden should propose it. - The American Prospect

GoFundMe campaigns are not a valid safety net

The "safety net" we need is universal single-payer. Take the greedheads totally out of the loop. COVID has made that even more obvious than it was before.

New research (last) week affirms the grim reality of medical crowdfunding. The study found that few GoFundMe campaigns over a five-year span raised enough money to meet their goals. And those started by people living in areas with higher levels of medical debt, uninsurance, and low income raised less money than others living elsewhere...

“Despite its popularity and portrayals as an ad-hoc safety net, medical crowdfunding is misaligned with key indicators of health financing needs in the United States,” the authors wrote. “It is best positioned to help in populations that need it the least.” - Gizmodo

The real cost of constantly aggrandizing the ultra-rich

This is part of it. You also have to add in the corporate welfare (including the majority of "defense" spending) and so forth.

Over the next few decades, the richest American families could avoid paying about $8.4 trillion in taxes, or more than four times the cost of the stalled Build Back Better package, according to a report released Wednesday.

The Americans for Tax Fairness report—entitled Dynasty Trusts: Giant Tax Loopholes that Supercharge Wealth Accumulation—urges Congress to fix the federal tax code to address dynastic wealth.

The new analysis details how loopholes have made the payment of estate, gift, and generation-skipping taxes—collectively called wealth-transfer taxes—effectively optional for the "ultrawealthy" and thereby accelerate the "accumulation of dynastic wealth."

"Ultrarich families use dynasty trusts—the term for a variety of wealth-accumulating structures that remain in place for multiple generations—to ensure their fortunes cascade down to children, grandchildren, and beyond undiminished by wealth-transfer taxes," the report explains. - Common Dreams

Cryptocurrency needs to be throttled

Tightly regulated, at the very least. I've been waiting for a while to run across a really righteous rant about the stuff. Here it is.

But the story of cryptocurrency is about more than just a bunch of gullible people losing their shirts gambling with Monopoly money. Cryptocurrency mania is part of a the same social forces that created libertarianism, rising fascism, and Donald Trump.

It's all rooted in the overblown sense of entitlement held by a lot of Americans — especially white Americans, and especially male Americans. It leads them to believe they are above having to live with the same social contract that binds the rest of us. Millions of Americans have decided that they not only can, but should, cheat the system — even to the extent of having separate currency systems. The result is that social structures we all rely on are starting to get shaky and, in some cases, are already on the verge of collapse. - Salon