Hot Coffee, a documentary that premiered at Sundance. the film’s director, Susan Saladoff. She spent 25 years as a public interest lawyer representing victims of corporate negligence.
Susan Saladoff talking:
There has been a huge public relations campaign over the last 25 years to convince the public that we have too many frivolous lawsuits, that we have out-of-control juries, that we need to change our civil justice system, which is our third branch of government, where an average person can go head-to-head with the rich and powerful, with corporations. And people have a completely distorted view of our civil justice system because of this public relations campaign. And I wanted to tell the truth. I wanted people to understand that they were giving up their constitutional rights every day to access the courts, and they didn’t even know they were doing it.
So a tort is a civil wrong. We have a criminal justice system and a civil justice system. We all know what the criminal justice system is. But when people are injured by a defective product or if they’ve had, you know, been the victim of a medical negligence, they have the right to go into a court system and bring a case against the person or the entity, the corporation, that harmed them. Those kinds of injuries are called torts. They’re civil harms.
Jamie Leigh Jones was 19 years old. She lived in Houston, Texas. And Halliburton is huge in Houston. I mean, it’s like the biggest corporation down there. And she went to work for Halliburton in their IT department. And when she was hired, she was asked to sign an employment contract. What she didn’t know was that embedded in the employment contract is something called a mandatory arbitration clause. These clauses are in all of our contracts now. They’re in our cell phone contracts, our credit card contracts, if you get a car loan, a mortgage. Some doctors are now putting them in their consent clauses.
What they are is they are literally contracts, where people are asked to sign—oftentimes they don’t even have a choice to sign. If you get a credit card, for example, and you use it, you’ve agreed to mandatory arbitration. People don’t even know what it means, because it’s something—no dispute has happened yet. But if you have agreed to that and then you have a dispute with the company or the entity, you have waived your right to the court system. And people say, “Well, why should I care about that?” Well, why you should care is because the company that you are having the dispute with, once you’ve signed that, they pick the decision maker, the arbitrator, they pay for the decision maker, the decision maker doesn’t have to give a reason why they’ve come up with the decision, it’s completely secretive, and there’s no right to appeal. And what everyone is doing these days is they are literally voluntarily giving up their right to access the court system, and they don’t even know they’re doing it.
as a result of Senator Franken’s bill before the Senate, Halliburton has dropped their appeal, and now she has a court trial scheduled for May of 2011.
It’s unbelievable. But it’s happening—I mean, even though she represents sort of an extreme of what happens in a mandatory arbitration clause, it’s really happening to all of us. And we need to know that as a society. We need to tell Congress to stop these mandatory arbitration clauses from being in all these contracts.
Judge Oliver Diaz actually was a justice of the Mississippi State Supreme Court until he was targeted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for defeat because he wasn’t corporate enough.
Oliver Diaz talking:
I think people are very familiar with elections in America, and for years you’ve had corporations donating to the executive branch, presidents and governors, of the legislative branch, your House of Representatives and Senate. You’ve had massive amounts of funding, and people expect that when you have elections.
The judiciary, the judicial branch of government, has been separate from that for years and years. But what we’ve seen lately are these corporations coming in, putting money into judicial races, and they’re promoting candidates who tend to support corporate interest rather than a fair, level playing field for average persons. They’re actually putting money into the system in order to get people serving on the bench who would rule in the best interests of corporations rather than a fair judiciary.
in Mississippi, Supreme Court elections are—Supreme Court races are by popular election. And I was appointed by the governor when there was a vacancy on the court and then had to stand for election. Folks had a chance to observe my judicial record, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce decided that they could get a better candidate for their interests rather than me. And they came into Mississippi at a time when this had never been done before and put millions of dollars into the election against me to support my opponent. It’s sort of—if you’re familiar with the Citizens United case at the U.S. Supreme Court recently, corporations were able to contribute massive amounts of money without having to disclose where those funds come from or even how much money they’ve put into the races in Mississippi. And so, I was faced with having to run an election with massive amounts of money coming in against me and having to raise the resources on my own
I had to disclose every single penny that I raised. I had to disclose who I raised it from, how I spent it. Yet, corporations are able to come in and not have to disclose where their money comes from or how they spend it. Yeah, it’s really a disadvantage for candidates. And it’s going to start happening all across the country. This is not unique to Mississippi. This is the trend that’s going to happen across the United States.
I did win my first election. it was a very close election, and it went into a runoff. There were three candidates, and we were in the top two, and we had to face a runoff. We ran for—in the election, which was three weeks after the general election, and were able to win in the runoff. But after the election, the U.S. attorney, who was appointed by George Bush—was a Republican congressman, a guy who had gotten defeated for Congress, and George Bush put him in for U.S. attorney—he then began to investigate Democratic donors to judicial races in Mississippi and began a prosecution of me at that time, a prosecution based upon my campaign contributions.
I was indicted for bribery, actually, based upon the campaign contributions, because I had to disclose my campaign contributions. They were able to see who donated. They looked at my largest contributor, which was a very good friend of mine named Paul Minor. He was actually a major Democratic donor across the United States. He was one of John Edwards’ largest contributors at the time. And they began to investigate
We weren’t able to raise enough to combat these millions that were coming in, and so we took out a loan from the bank. Mr. Minor co-signed that loan for my campaign. Because he was such a good friend of mine, I had never voted on a single case that he had before the Mississippi Supreme Court or me while I was on the bench. Yet, we were being investigated for bribery. I thought it was—I thought it would be an open-and-shut case. I said, “There’s no way they could even pursue this. They’re going to look at the record, and they’re going to see that I’ve never even voted on his cases.”
This took me off the bench for over three years.
I had to stand for election again. And again, the Chamber came in, put massive amounts of money against me, and I was defeated in the second election, because of—well, you could imagine the publicity that I had received while I was on the bench, and it was very difficult to overcome that.
I was completely acquitted in the trial. The jury found me not guilty of everything.
The jury deliberation in the first trial, it lasted for a little while. We were completely acquitted. Three days after I was acquitted, I was re-indicted again. The federal prosecutor said, “Well, if it’s not bribery or campaign finance laws, he must have—he must have not properly disclosed this on his income, so we’re going to indict him for income tax evasion now.” I was tried again, completely acquitted. Jury was out for about 15 minutes and found me not guilty of everything again.
But I lost the second race.
The original opponent, actually, I think he probably fared a little better. After I defeated him in the election, George Bush nominated him for a federal judgeship, and he’s now serving as a federal judge.
Karl Rove play any role in this. We’ve since learned that this is sort of the MO that the Rove and his machine actually used. They came into the state of Texas and took over the Supreme Court there. Alabama, they did the same thing. And they used that as a launching pad to sort of pick off state Supreme Court justices all around the country, using that model.
– from democracynow.org