Stay Free! Daily

The beginining of the end for Flash freedom?

Minnesota teen Jeff Wiese, who shot up his family, his school and himself for a total of 10 deaths, was a flash animator in his spare time. His page on Newgrounds.com gives some data on him, and the pull-down menu will take you to two of his shorts, predictably grim in tone and eerily foreshadowing of his rampage.

Who wants to bet this spells the end of flash on the web as an open, unrestricted avenue of expression, at least for minors?

Still no class

The Republicans in Congress, continuing their crusade to protect the little man by the self-evidently more expedient measure of protecting large corporations, have passed a bill removing jurisdiction over class action suits from state courts. President Bush eagerly  signed it into law last Friday. In the Orwellian bill-naming tradition that brought us the civil-rights infringing "Patriot Act" and the standards-loosening "Clean Water Act" comes the proposed "Class Action Fairness Act of 2005."

CAFA is yet another shiv in the public ribs under the heading "tort reform." The motivation behind tort reform is so anti-democratic, so designed to permit the worst business excesses, that any minor improvements are overwhelmed by the underlying corporate welfare.

To give credit where it is due, CAFA goes a long way to eliminate "coupon settlements." Under the old regime, class plaintiffs in a coupon settlement would receive nothing but a coupon to buy more goods from the company that screwed them the first time around. Coupon settlements are more like promotions for the settling defendants than actual settlements. In one notorious case against a number of cruise lines, the lawyers proposed a settlement that would give each class member a $50 coupon toward a cruise; however, the lawyers calculated their fees as a percentage of the award as if the coupons were cash. The judge was so incensed at the attorneys for selling out the class in such a way that he converted most of the attorneys' fees into similar coupons. So good for CAFA for getting rid of this nonsense.

The second feature (not a bug!) of CAFA makes it virtually impossible to bring a class action in state court. Corporations hate the pre-CAFA system because they say greedy plaintiffs' lawyers bring suits in "jackpot justice" counties with dimwitted judges and benefit far more than the class members do from the settlements. It isn't that the well-known plaintiff's havens like Madison County, Illinois or Jefferson County, Texas are representative of the country; they are not. It isn't that federal judges aren't typically more talented jurists than their state-court counterparts; they are. It isn't that trial lawyers don't benefit more from the suits than the plaintiff's; they do. It is that all of these things make class actions useful.

Even when a class action results in $20 million for the lawyers and five cents for each of 100,000 plaintiffs, the defendant has to pay twenty million bucks. It is easy for companies to steal five cents at a time from a lot of people if there is no reason for anyone to try and stop them. ("How do we make money? Volume.") Large counsel fees are part of the solution, not part of the problem. (And they typically aren't out of line anyway.) "Plaintiff's counties" make this benefit even more real by forcing would-be corporate thieves to watch their backs. Taking them out of the class action system is a thumb in the eye of juries, plaintiffs' rights and federalism. (Who is surprised that federalism takes a back seat when the oxen of the rich are being gored?)

Maybe federalizing class actions won't hurt this system, but a lot of people who want to swipe a nickel from you when you aren't looking sure think it will.

Like Stephen Colbert, but Without the Jokes

Somehwere, Edward Bernays is smiling.

Through the magic of early Web posting, you can read Frank Rich's Sunday column today on the increasingly disturbing Jeff Gannon scandal. Rich quotes sources claiming that the White House would have to have been complicit in allowing a fake reporter for a fake Republican news outlet into official press briefings where he could ask fake questions. Gannon-gate comes after the Government Accountability Office declared that a series of fake news reports on Medicare produced last year crossed the line into illegal propaganda.

Looks like Karl Rove has caught on to the DIY "make your own media" revolution!