> It is crazy how a company making false claims can ruin you so easily, and you cannot fight back or be compensated.
It doesn't have to be a company making false claims. Cross the wrong person anywhere in the world and you can have the police and courts come after you.
To be precise, the problem is deeper than any one branch.
In the US system of government, checks and balances are essential to counter overreaching and abuse from any single branch. If no such checks exist against unjust prosecutions by law enforcement (the executive branch), then by default, either the judiciary or legislative branch must be at fault, or both.
In this case, it's clearly BOTH the US legislature and US courts have been remiss. Both should step in and outlaw any private funding of public law enforcement, as well as require ALL public court prosecutions to abide by the same burden of proof and evidence required of any gov't/DA-led investigation.
To allow the routine "negotiation of guilt" between prosecutors and the prosecuted to circumvent due process certainly is a violation of the Constitution -- something all three branches share culpability for allowing.
> To allow the routine "negotiation of guilt" between prosecutors and the prosecuted to circumvent due process certainly is a violation of the Constitution -- something all three branches share culpability for allowing.
I’ve always wondered why plea deals don’t count as perjury? You’re saying you did something when you didn’t.
Man it has very little to do with government and everything to do with your worship of free market nonsense. In a capitalist society capitalists own the government. AKA private power. So the judiary being corrupted to benefit corporate interests is a no brainer since that is the way the system is designed. It is working as intended.
It is crazy how a company making false claims can ruin you so easily, and you cannot fight back or be compensated.
You can fight back, and if you win you would be very well compensated in the form of actual and punitive damages (assuming the insurance company didn't settle before trial).
Of the ruling class - not capital. Those two are not synonymous historically at all - remember the literal aristocracy of the warrior elite which also shows up in dictatorships.
This isn't mere pendantry but pointing out it is a matter of power.
Not really, no. The American aristocracy tends to have a lot of capital, but has been pretty exclusionary toward those without that aristocratic background. Less than parts of Europe, but it's the same beast. America has historically had pretty high income mobility. In my area the majority of capital owners are not from the upper classes.
The real purpose of the justice system is to make people believe in it so they avoid settling their own disputes. Anything else is incidental. Actually punishing criminals and not punishing innocent people helps, but is by no means necessary.
It’s like democracy: the primary advantage is that people think they can effect change so they will refrain from violent revolution. Whether voters can actually effect change is largely irrelevant as long as people believe it.
Most businesses -- even large businesses -- run on very low margins. The average person drastically overestimates the margins of businesses in general.
It doesn't have anything to do with 'working class'. Such things are pretty meaningless outside of political bullshit-making.
There are two real economic classes of people in the USA.. productive class and the parasitical class.
The productive classes consists of people of all income levels. They could be poor, rich, or in between. These are people who generate more wealth and value for society then they consume. Could be janitors. Could be farmers. Could be CEOs of fortune 500 companies. Small business owners. The whole gamut.
Then you have the parasitical class made up of people who can control vast amounts of wealth on paper, or not, but really don't produce anything themselves. Again all income levels. Could be a guy running scams on section 8 subsidized housing so the state pays his mortgage. (having a low-income girlfriend rent his house under the program while he pretends not to live there is a common approach). Could be massive arms manufacturers like Lockheed Martin. And politicians and other state apparatus and cronies that make their money through mechanisms like regulatory capture and taxes.
So it's up to the productive classes of people to provide the material wealth and value that is then used by the entire population of the country. The provide all the food, all the clothing, all the transportation services, they build all the housing, pay all the taxes, etc etc.
The source of political power for the government then is based on it's ability to extract a percentage of that wealth and then redistribute it. It's not just through taxes that they achieve this, but also through regulations and other controls of the market. The mechanisms can be overt and they can be subtle, but the goal is always the same: Take a portion of somebody's work output and give it to somebody else to get them to go along with what you want. Calling it 'socialism' really misses the point.
It's what always have existed. It's what kings used to gain and keep power. And it's what modern governments use to gain and keep power. Same thing, different lies. Ordained by God to rule, or 'will of the people'.. it's still all made up nonsense.
For example the Pentagon, in the USA, has hundreds of billions of dollars it spent that are simply unaccounted for. They know they spent the money. But they really don't know who it went to. Or why it was spent. Or really what it was spent on.
Most American's call that waste. But when it comes to the parasitical classes.. it's not waste. It's profit. And they have zero desire to ever see these sorts of 'problem' fixed.
So they don't get fixed. The real point has nothing to do with what they are buying. The important thing is who gets the money.
And thus it's the most critical job of the government to keep it's population working as hard as possible and generating as much economic activity as possible. So they generate sets of incentives and punishments... like working with banks to protect their debts. Also corporate culture plays a huge portion, propaganda from a variety of sources is all completely critical to making sure all this stuff keeps working.
People with massive student loans, massive car payments, massive mortgage payments, are kept that way because at that point they are working their asses off for virtually nothing. All their money ends up going to the banks one way or another. They are living pay check to paycheck and are terrified at the prospect of losing any sort of wealth generating capability because even a small dip in productivity will spend them into a even deeper debt spiral.
Sane people would just walk away from something like that. Once they got tired of the car they would just walk away from it. Got tired of the house, just walk away. So it's up to the government in schools working with banks and other groups to propagandize the population and convince them that it's in their best interest to spend all their lives generating the income for other people to use.
When George Bush said that if you stop buying stuff the terrorists win... to him that is not hyperbole or odd thing to say. It's actually a accidental moment of complete honesty. The goal of the terrorists is to undermine the economy that the government stands on top of.
And it doesn't need to be 100% one way or the other.
In this particular case the insurance companies are subsidizing their profits through the use of law enforcement to carry out investigations.
It is crazy how a company making false claims can ruin you so easily, and you cannot fight back or be compensated.