That’s economic damages, which aren’t at issue here. I strongly agree that it’s more critical to ensure poor people have their future costs covered, but I have yet to be convinced that their suffering is greater.
I don’t think I ever said that the caps are intended to avoid jurisdiction shopping, since I can’t really see how they would achieve that end. Sorry if I implied this somewhere. Rather, I was just pointing out another aspect of the reform which can hardly be considered class warfare. As I understand it, the forum-shopping reforms are different, e.g. class action suits beyond a certain size are now being prodded towards the federal courts in an effort to stop huge class actions heading to places like Madison County.
Oh, I’m sure - but by and large, suits aren’t filed by the defendant. In any case, I agree that attempts to ensure consistency should benefit neither plaintiff nor defendant at the expense of the other, but this really isn’t a reason not to address forum shopping.
Wouldn’t dream of it. Indeed, it’s been my point that there are all sorts of losers from a wonky justice system (these doctors were rich and naughty earlier in the thread), and as such, “class warfare” is just a downright daft way to describe attempts at reform.
I don’t think you give your average blue collar republican enough credit. They aren’t all dupes. You’ll just have to accept that to a large portion of the US population, God, Guns, and Gays are issues at least as important as the economy. You can dislike it; you can try to wrap you mind around it and fail; but you are wrong to assume such large numbers of people are bleating sheep. In a way, it’s scarier knowing that they aren’t.
C’mon, we’ve got five very strong examples of Bush admin attacks on the middle class and the poor (OK, only 4 1/2 for the poor) and yet somehow each and e very one of them isn’t what it seems to be. You conservatives are like a kid who doesn’t bring his homework in one day, it’s “the dog ate my homework.” Next day, “A giraffe ate my homework.” Next day, “My homework was caught up in a dust devil and vanished into the sky.” etc etc. You know the kid is slacking no matter how ready he is with excuses.
We know the class war is ON. We just have to convince the TV idjits to fight back.
Sometimes silence is not surrender, EC. We are simply allowing you to play quietly in the corner with your quaint notions while we smile indulgently at you.
Do you have a single actual point to make? Or are you limited to this entirely nonsensical blitheringly stupid meta-debate? Are these rhetorical questions? Is the Pope Catholic? Are you really going to limit your posts in this thread to “ah, you know I’m right really”?
I’m deeply amused to discover that I’m conservative, however. I shall be sure to remember that, the next time I think I’m for gay marriage, drug legalisation and against internment, federal ID, the death penalty and any number of others from a laundry list of authoritarian wet dreams. Must be making it all up. Heaven forbid we should actually have a debate based on facts or (horror!) pragmatism - no, we’ve all got to be either on your side or t’other, isn’t that right? Sounds a lot like something your favourite President once said…
No, we know that you are an idiot with an odd penchant for ‘ON’ (as opposed to the humble ‘on’). Spouting retro marxist slogans doesn’t actually constitute fact, however amusing it is that some fools still use that phrase.
I just can’t see the “class warfare=Republican” thing.
We have a conservative govt in Australia. They are doing likewise with making life easy for the rich. But guess what? The previous Labor administration did exactly the same thing!
I just can’t see your average senior Democrat politician living payday to payday, is all.
Aside from occasional well-intentioned but hopeless liberal-left governments that drag the economy to the shithouse (like Australia had in the 70s), the majority of Labo(u)r /Dem governments in recent years have been pulling the same stunts as their counterparts on the right - to the point of being indistinguishable from them. Modern liberal-left politics has seen a return to 1960s-style social issues being their main platforms (opposing the war on Iraq, etc) - they are very quiet about economic issues, where they frequently are rubbing shoulders with the conservatives.
Is there a class war going on? Well yes, if you like, although that term sounds very dated to me. I think it could be better termed as “the powerful fucking over the powerless, as they have done for millennia”. Yet, it’s so far beyond a Dem/Rep divide, it’s not funny. The fact that we have three pages of points of order on specific policies and links to arcane pieces of legislation in this thread (from both sides) is enough to make it clear that you can no longer point your finger and say “there is the party for the wealthy”.
They’re all at it. As they always have been and always will be.
I always get a particular mental image when I hear the term “Class Warfare”. I picture enraged leftists storming the nice houses, corporations, and government. They kill the leaders and take all the other oppressors hostage. They celebrate their power and glory and things go well for a month or two. After that however decisions need to be made, labor becomes unruly because of disorganization, and actual work needs to be done. Within 6 months, the whole country becomes an almost uninhabitable shithole. It slowly dawns on the leftists that they have imprisioned or killed anybody that actually knew how to make things work.
You know what, I basically agree with you… I’ll still maintain that tort ‘reform’ is likely to have a disproportionate effect on the poor (especially if done in ways such as capping all damages, as I believe Virginia did), but it is a stretch to call it class warfare. Stupid, but not class warfare. I’ll not hiack any further.
See, this is the cognitive disconnect that I really don’t understand. While there are certainly idiotic things about corporate culture today, they’re a minor part of a greater whole, and there are idiotic aspects of any organization you can name. Business as a whole, however, is what drives the American economy and to treat businesses as entities that are inherently evil and should be tolerated only until a way is found to get rid of them altogether is madness. ( And for the life of me I can’t figure out what’s to replace them unless it’s some type system where the government or the “people” (same thing) control business-socialism or communism in other words. I don’t see this as any kind of improvement.) Honestly, reading what a lot of the liberals on these boards write, it seems that their idea of the perfect society is one where the only people in charge are lawyers and government bureaucrats. That sounds pretty much like hell on earth to me.