A Threefold 'Thank You' to Los Angeles
Dear Los Angeles: I'm Thankful For...
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A Photo Gallery of the Things I am Grateful for This Year
Canter's & Ice Cream Sandwich Could Live in Perfect Harmony
I LOVE L.A.! My Thanksgiving Thanks
"Everyone is a victim of discrimination and everyone gets paid," according to a report that says Los Angeles' civil court system is one of seven "judicial hellholes" nationwide and ranks it the sixth most unjust. Basically, if sue for discrimination, you win, finds the American Tort Reform Foundation.
The best example?
Last year, the city paid $1.5 million to Tennie Pierce, an African-American firefighter on the receiving end of a prank in which dog food was mixed in with his spaghetti. Two white fire captains later sued, claiming they were scapegoats and subjected to discriminatory discipline and were awarded $1.6 million.
But the LA Superior Court spokesman told the Daily News the report is based on an "entirely subjective series of observations. We receive 1 million new nontraffic filings per year. In a court with that caseload, it's inevitable some people will be unhappy with the results of their litigation." Whether if either side is right or wrong, we'll let you be the judge of that.
Photo of the LA County Criminal Court Building by JT3_11 via Flickr
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"The American Tort Reform Foundation" does rigged studies funded by ultra-right conservatives who have a powerful motive for bias. Sure, if they cherry pick lawsuits, they can find cases of people winning crazy settlements from each other for no good reason. But that's not what this is about.
At the end of the day, most tort reform advocates simply want businesses to be able to injure our bodies and poison our water without the repercussion of lawsuits. Since our regulatory agencies have been gutted and stripped of funding ever since 1980, there really is no other way to take corporations to task except through giant settlements, and yeah, they HAVE to cost millions, because big companies won't change to avoid a thousand dollar fine.
Need proof? This group's funding comes pretty much exclusively in the form of grants from three donors:
A) the John Templeton Foundation (run by the man Slate magazine calls "a conservative sugar-daddy http://www.slate.com/id/1822/)
B) The Carthage Foundation (which also funds the "American Civil Rights Union," a group founded to keep gays out of the Boy Scouts)
and
C) $1 Million (almost its entire bankroll) from The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. MediaTransparency.org has this to say about Harry Bradley:
"Bradley supports the organizations and individuals that promote the deregulation of business, the rollback of virtually all social welfare programs, and the privitization of government services. As a result, the list of Bradley grant recipients reads like a Who's Who of the U.S.Right. Bradley money supports such major right-wing groups as the Heritage Foundation, source of policy papers on budget cuts, supply-side economics and the Star Wars military plan for the Reagan administration; the Madison Center for Educational Affairs, which provides funding for right-wing research and a network of conservative student newspapers; and the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, literary home for such racist authors as Charles Murray (The Bell Curve) and Dinesh D'Souza (The End of Racism), former conservative officeholders Jeane Kirkpatrick, Jack Kemp and William Bennett, and arch-conservative jurists Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia."