Eideard

When AT&T started slowing down the data service for his iPhone, Matt Spaccarelli, an unemployed truck driver and student, took the country’s largest telecommunications company to small claims court. And won.

His award: $850.

Pro-tem Judge Russell Nadel found in favor of Spaccarelli in Ventura Superior Court in Simi Valley on Friday, saying it wasn’t fair for the company to purposely slow down his iPhone, when it had sold him an “unlimited data” plan.

Spaccarelli could have many imitators. AT&T has some 17 million customers with “unlimited data” plans who can be subject to throttling. That’s nearly half of its smartphone users. AT&T forbids them from consolidating their claims into a class action or taking them to a jury trial. That leaves small claims actions and arbitration.

Late last year, AT&T started slowing down data service for the top 5 percent of its smartphone subscribers with “unlimited” plans. It had warned that it would start doing so, but many subscribers have been surprised by how little data use it takes for throttling to kick in —often less than AT&T provides to those on limited or “tiered” plans.

Spaccarelli said his phone is being throttled after he’s used 1.5 gigabytes to 2 gigabytes of data within a new billing cycle. Meanwhile, AT&T provides 3 gigabytes of data to subscribers on a tiered plan that costs the same — $30 per month.

When slowed down, the phone can still be used for calls and text messaging, but Web browsing is painfully slow, and video streaming doesn’t work at all…

Companies with as many potentially aggrieved customers as AT&T usually brace themselves for a class-action lawsuit. But last year, the Supreme Court upheld a clause in the Dallas-based company’s subscriber contract that prohibits customers from taking their complaints to class actions or jury trials.

Just in case you thought the sleazy array of Republicans added to the Supremes in the last couple of decades would never come up with decisions that affect your daily life. Add a moneygrubber corporation decision like this – to the Citizens United crap decision which says a corporation is just another person when it comes to bankrolling politicians.

Greedy bastards like AT&T can stand on one foot for a couple centuries while individuals try to take their cases through small claims court one at a time. A couple hundred bucks means a lot more to ordinary working folks than beancounters shuffling lawyers on retainer through local courts on a platoon system designed to screw us all.

The Illinois Supreme Court’s recent decision to permit the televising of trials in the state’s circuit courts brings to mind another question of television in a court: the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court will soon hear oral argument — the fascinating, highly informative back-and-forth between the justices and the lawyers before them — in a monumental case that will determine the constitutionality of the government’s new health care plan.

Everyone is interested. C-SPAN has asked the justices for permission to televise the extraordinary five-and-a-half hours of oral argument (most cases get just one hour) scheduled for March 26 through 28. But the Supreme Court, despite numerous requests and even proposed congressional action extending over several decades, has never permitted television.

The justices fear the presence of cameras would tarnish the court’s dignified proceedings. But bear in mind that the Supreme Court doesn’t try cases, so there’s no danger of uncorking sensational trials like those of O.J. Simpson, Casey Anthony or Michael Jackson’s doctor. That’s not the issue.

Chief Justice John Roberts — offered the usual crap arguments politicians always come up with about undue influence, blah, blah.

In fact, there’s lots of experience to point to, and the precedents are clear: television would not impair the Supreme Court’s dignity or its proceedings.

Two-thirds of the state supreme courts admit cameras to their oral arguments. Two federal appellate courts have allowed them. They’re standard in the Supreme Court of Canada. Most of these courts have welcomed cameras for years without adverse consequences, effectively dispelling the vague worries of the justices in Washington…

In Canada the proceedings of the nation’s Supreme Court have been televised since the mid-1990s. Four fixed cameras, mounted high on the walls of the courtroom in Ottawa, face the bench and the counsel’s podium. When a judge asks a question, she pushes a button that both opens her microphone and focuses a camera on her.

“Our judges are proud of it,” said Andres Garin, executive legal officer of the Supreme Court of Canada. “There’s no downside. It has not been disruptive. There’s no playing to the camera.”

Of course, if the U.S. Supreme Court should allow television, but then finds that its presence is deleterious, the justices could always reverse their own decision. They’ve done it before.

Political cowards are usually political hypocrites. Please, let’s don’t ascribe legitimate motives to the hacks in black robes who oppose transparency. There are members of the court who support the broadcasts. They’re the one who weren’t appointed by Republicans.

Yup. The Supreme Court says corporations are just people. Their money doesn’t count anymore than money from you or me.

Let me get my Wellies on before this crap gets any deeper.

The U.S. Supreme Court last week passed up the chance to decide whether opening up a public meeting with a sectarian prayer, usually invoking the name of Jesus — a practice carried out in broad swaths of Red State America — is constitutional.

Every business day, thousands of government bodies at all levels begin sessions with prayers. Those prayers are supposed to be “non-sectarian” — they are supposed to appeal to a Supreme Being without reference to religion. But what if a prayer delivered at the start of a government meeting makes a specific reference to a particular religion, for example, using the name of Jesus?

A panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most conservative U.S. appeals courts in the country, has ruled such specific references are unconstitutional.

The U.S. Supreme Court last week left that ruling in place, but whether the appeals court ruling will have an effect on the government meetings across the country opened with Christian prayers remains to be seen.

The high court could always take on the dispute in some future case. But for the moment the appeals court ruling is the law in the Fourth Circuit: North Carolina, Maryland, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia…

The Supreme Court denied the request for review last Tuesday without comment.

And local bible-thumpers will continue to violate the law same as it ever was. You expected different?

As I am wont to say within this context, Separation of church and state – in the United States – is only observed when it comes to paying taxes.

Funny who supports what – when it’s convenient

The Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday for the first time in an important church-state separation issue that ministers cannot sue their churches claiming they had been fired in violation of employment discrimination laws.

The justices unanimously overturned a U.S. appeals court ruling that the job of a former teacher and minister at a church school was secular rather than religious and she could pursue her claim that she was improperly fired in violation of federal law…

The justices for the first time adopted a rule used for decades by some U.S. appeals courts that the government generally cannot delve into church affairs and religious beliefs in employment cases involving ministers or other clergy members. The high court accepted what is known as a “ministerial exception” to the employment discrimination laws. It generally bars the federal government from examining employment decisions by religious groups for employees with religious duties, such as ministers.

The case involved the Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School in Redford, Michigan, and former teacher Cheryl Perich, who was also a minister. She taught secular and religious classes…

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled against her.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the opinion that the First Amendment of the Constitution barred such lawsuits, that Perich was a minister and her employment discrimination lawsuit must be dismissed.

He said delving into a church’s employment decisions involving a minister would improperly interfere with its internal affairs and infringe on a religious group’s constitutional right to shape its own faith and mission.

Anyone think Roberts and the rest of his flock will be so industrious when it comes considering the question of religions paying taxes to the nation which so vigorously protects their civil rights?

Contents potentially offensive to some. If you’re easily offended by George Carlin – go away!

 
The Supreme Court is poised to take a fresh look at a key aspect of multimedia regulation — “indecent” material aired on the broadcast networks during the supposedly “family friendly” prime-time hours of 8 to 10 p.m. Oral arguments in this key free-speech dispute will be held Tuesday.

Why pretend this is a “fresh” look? The fundamentalist nutballs in charge of America’s right-wing demand changes to free speech time after time. When sufficient pimps for censorship are in place in Congress and the Supreme Court – this predictable dog and pony show arrives on the set.

At issue is whether the Federal Communications Commission may constitutionally enforce its policies on “fleeting expletives” and scenes of nudity on prime-time television programs, both live and scripted. The agency had imposed hefty fines on broadcasters for separate incidents. An expected ruling by summer could establish important First Amendment guidelines over expressive content on the airwaves.

A range of competing interests are at stake: Free speech versus censorship; regulation versus responsibility; art versus indecency.

No consideration of a public capable of making a choice, competent to run their own family lives. The origins of “political correctness” in conservative censorship still rule.

ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox are all parties in the case challenging the FCC regulations. A federal appeals court in 2010 for a second time struck down the government’s policies, concluding they were vague and inconsistently applied. Pending fines against the broadcasters were dismissed. The government then appealed to the high court…

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Jack Abramoff and Dickhead

Ethics reforms put in place since the influence-peddling scandal surrounding high-rolling lobbyist Jack Abramoff haven’t cleaned up the system “at all,” a now-free Abramoff says.

Abramoff served three and a half years in prison for conspiracy, fraud and tax evasion before his release last December. In an interview…he said the reforms imposed after his guilty plea have little effect while campaign finance remains untouched.

“You can’t take a congressman to lunch for $25 and buy him a hamburger or a steak or something like that,” he said. “But you can take him to a fund-raising lunch and not only buy him that steak, but give him $25,000 extra and call it a fund-raiser — and have all the same access and all the same interactions with that congressman…”

“There’s an arrogance on the part of lobbyists, and certainly there was on the part of me and my team, that no matter what they come up with, we’re smarter than them — we’ll just find another way through,” he said.

The high-flying Republican lobbyist pleaded guilty to a raft of federal corruption charges in 2006 and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors investigating Washington influence-peddling. He admitted illegally showering gifts on officials who provided favors for his clients in a probe that led to convictions or guilty pleas for 20 lobbyists and public officials — including Ohio GOP congressman Bob Ney and Stephen Griles, the Bush administration’s deputy interior secretary.

Between the two phony political parties – and a Supreme Court packed with rightwing political appointees – democratic processes in legislation and regulation continue to be removed as quickly as they were the day Newt Gingrich rolled out his contract on the American people in 1994.

Lobbyists still have greater access – legal and upright they say – than they did before that fateful time. The Supreme Court says “Corporations are people, too” and their dollars pour into political chamberpots like so much greenback diarrhea.

Abramoff was the champion of gaming the system designed by corrupt corporate ideologues, agreed to nowadays by both Democrats and Republicans. He ought to know how it works.

Tracking gear planted on Arab-American student’s car by FBI

In a series of rulings on the use of satellites and cellphones to track criminal suspects, judges around the country have been citing George Orwell’s “1984” to sound an alarm. They say the Fourth Amendment’s promise of protection from government invasion of privacy is in danger of being replaced by the futuristic surveillance state Orwell described…

Last month, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn turned down a government request for 113 days of location data from cellphone towers, citing “Orwellian intrusion” and saying the courts must “begin to address whether revolutionary changes in technology require changes to existing Fourth Amendment doctrine.”

The Supreme Court is about to do just that. In November, it will hear arguments in United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259, the most important Fourth Amendment case in a decade. The justices will address a question that has divided the lower courts: Do the police need a warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspect’s car and track its movements for weeks at a time?

Their answer will bring Fourth Amendment law into the digital age, addressing how its 18th-century prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures” applies to a world in which people’s movements are continuously recorded by devices in their cars, pockets and purses, by toll plazas and by transit systems.

The Jones case will address not only whether the placement of a space-age tracking device on the outside of a vehicle without a warrant qualifies as a search, but also whether the intensive monitoring it allows is different in kind from conventional surveillance by police officers who stake out suspects and tail their cars.

There is little if any difference between the Big Brother practices ordered by George W. Bush and continued by Barack Obama. Either flavor of government agrees with the other that national interest – as defined by the politicians in charge – supersedes any individual right to privacy. No due process or habeus corpus is required because no warrant should be required to spy on anyone in this nation.

For some of you this will come as an affront, a shock. If you don’t fight back, you will not only be required to get used to it – you will be told to “lay back and enjoy it”. Various levels of police, local, state and federal, have been utilizing illicit tactics like this for decades – whether officially banned or not. That’s no reason to give up and stop fighting. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.

Scumbag-in-chief Thomas says corporations have a right to political secrets

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year opened the floodgates to corporate political donations, much of it secret, but a process begun in another government agency may force those donations into the light of day…

The Supreme Court’s narrow decision in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission…said the political speech of corporations was protected by the First Amendment. That applied even if the funds corporations were spending in political races belonged to stockholders…

Justice Kennedy said limiting corporate political contributions was an exercise in thought control…Not that Justice Kennedy has anything against thought control on behalf of corporations.

Since then, Americans were faced with the prospect of increasingly expensive elections funded by increasingly covert political donations from corporations, not from individuals, with both major parties, Democratic and Republican, scrambling for their share of unlimited money.

Riding to the rescue were 10 corporate law professors who call themselves the “Committee on Disclosure of Corporate Political Spending.” In August, the group submitted a “petition for rulemaking” to the Securities and Exchange Commission with a simple message: “We ask that the commission develop rules to require public companies to disclose to shareholders the use of corporate resources for political activities.”

In other words, if executives want to participate in high-stakes politics using corporate funds, they should have to publicly tell stockholders what they’re doing. After all, those corporate funds belong to the stockholders, not corporate management with their own political agendas…

“Disclosure of corporate political spending is necessary not only because shareholders are interested in receiving such information, but also because such information is necessary for corporate accountability and oversight mechanisms to work,” the petition argued. “The Supreme Court has often recognized, and indeed relied upon, these accountability mechanisms, particularly when corporations use shareholder resources for political purposes…

The petition was filed using Rule 192. Under the rule, if the SEC decides to act on the petition it must file notice in the Federal Register of the time and place of the rulemaking procedure.

But the SEC is under no compunction to act on the petition at all. Meanwhile, the money is flowing and the clock is ticking toward the 2012 election.

The odds are split on whether or not the SEC actually gets off their rusty-dusty and does anything about this petition for a decision.

On one hand, given the history of who the SEC actually thinks they work for there is little or no reason to expect anything to done which positively supports the needs of shareholders much less the public at large.

On the other hand, the SEC is still a bit gunshy about appearing to be complete phonies under the corporate thumb – even though it’s true – because of all the bad press they’ve gotten for ignoring the buildup of corruption that dropped everything from the Madoff Ponzi fraud to the subprime massacre and the resulting Great Recession – into their responsible laps. They may do something about the petition just to cover their buns.

Brazil’s Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that the nation should recognize same-sex unions.

The court voted 10-0 in favor of recognizing the unions. One justice abstained because he had spoken publicly in favor of same-sex unions when he was attorney general.

The court ruled that the same rights and rules that apply to “stable unions” of heterosexual couples will apply to same-sex couples, including the right to joint declaration of income tax, pension, inheritance and property sharing…

Some gay rights groups have encountered strong resistance in parts of Latin America, where the influential Roman Catholic Church often opposes measures allowing same-sex unions or adoption by same-sex couples.

Argentina became the first Latin American country to approve same-sex marriage in 2010. Mexico City approved same-sex marriage in 2009. And several other countries in the region have legalized civil unions.

Brazil’s high court ruling came in response to two lawsuits — one filed by the Rio de Janeiro state government in 2008 and another in 2009 by the Public Ministry, a group of prosecutors that is part of the federal government but independent from its executive, legislative and judicial branches.

In most cases – despite opposition from religions still stuck into the 14th Century – results like this have been accomplished by governments which recognize the responsibility to lead the way in civil rights for their citizens.

Reflect upon the fact that this has never especially been the case in the United States. Civil rights advances here have resulted from decades of political and social pressure from activist citizens upon a recalcitrant and reluctant government.

That’s not saying there weren’t similar movements in Latin America prior to government cooperation. But, the differences are dramatic.