Three cheers to Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson (pictured) who just put the criminally corrupt National Arbitration Forum (NAF) out of business.
As of the end of this week, they will no longer be accepting any cases on consumer disputes under a consent decree.
The NAF, the favorite venue for credit card and cell phone company kangaroo courts, argues that they did not have the resources to defend themselves in this case, but the reality is that they do not have the facts to defend themselves in this case:
….In one case, NAF ordered a woman to pay the credit card company MBNA almost $8000 because she had the same name as another woman who owed MBNA money. Conversely, when a Harvard Law Professor named Elizabeth Bartholet, who used to work part-time as an NAF arbitrator, handed down a single decision against a credit card company she was immediately stripped of her caseload by NAF at the request of the credit card industry.
….
Unfortunately, NAF was vulnerable to this kind of attack because the evidence against it was so overwhelming–not every forced arbitration company has a Harvard Law professor prepared to testify about how they were strongarmed into shafting consumers–so it remains to be seen whether another, equally offensive company will emerge to fill the void (a bill, currently pending in Congress, would end the practice of forced arbitration in consumer and employment contracts altogether). Even so, the near-total demise of NAF is one of the most important pro-consumer developments in decades; for the first time in years, credit card companies may actually have to follow the law.
When a member of the Harvard Law faculty gets kicked for ruling for the consumer once, it will be hard impossible to get a jury not to throw your sorry asses in jail.
Pam Martens of Counter Punch properly calls the mandatory arbitration system Judicial Apartheid, and she also notes that the NAF was quite literally owned by the bill collection agencies like Mann Bracken, Wolpoff & Abramson, and Eskanos & Adler, and testimony that, “Management meetings in which personnel were instructed to call arbitrators and tell them, prior to the release of the decision to the parties to the arbitration, to change decisions they had issued that found against the Famous Parties [credit card companies].”
There is a bill in Congress to put an end to this, but I am not inclined to believe that it will see the light of day, and in any case, the people behind this need to go to jail, not just be put out of business.
Previous posts are here.
What’s more the, as Elizabeth Warren, the woman who chairs the oversight committee being stonewalled by the US Department of the Treasury on TARP oversight notes, the arguments against a dedicated consumer protection agency