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"Though bought-off politicians like to regurgitate the line that punitive damages are supposedly skyrocketing and thus hurting business, the numbers tell the opposite story. They were only awarded in 6 percent of all trials, and averaged just $50,000. That’s actually an outrage - punitive damages are intended not as compensation to a victim, but as punishment to big companies so they don’t misbehave again, meaning punitive damage rulings have to be big in order to make an impact. For many large companies, $50,000 is barely a rounding error…Remember, these are the awards above and beyond what an individual gets for their tribulations. They are the punishments that make sure the guilty company does not do what it did again. That means in many cases punitive damages have to be large in order to make a company get the point. If they are too small, the company will know it can continue such misbehavior, and simply chalk up the verdicts as minor costs of doing business. That does no good. Think about it this way – let’s say you are parking your car at the airport. If it costs $10 to park in the lot that’s far away, but a parking ticket is only $5 for parking illegally right in front of the terminal, there would be no incentive for you not to break the law. In fact, there would be every incentive for you to break the law. That’s the same thing that happens when punitive damages are limited. Companies can often have a financial incentive to abuse people, because the cost to them if they get caught – the punitive damages – are less than the amount they make by misbehaving."
Rest assured this hostile takeover of our legal system by Big Money interests is not going to stop. All you have to do is look at Delphi to see the outlines of what’s next. As Businessweek reported, the company is trying to get the court system to rubber stamp its plan to give executives roughly $98 million in new bonuses while terminating previously negotiated labor contracts and demanding huge wage cuts from workers. The move is part of an overall strategy "to use the bankruptcy courts to drastically slash Delphi’s U.S. presence, thus freeing it up to focus on its already vast overseas production."
This, of course, says nothing of the outright corruption spreading within the court system. Nathan Newman documents how the revolving door between the bench and the corporations the bench is supposed to regulate is spinning faster than ever. Similarly, the Washington Post last week uncovered evidence that organizations providing "free trips to hundreds of federal judges received large contributions from tobacco, oil and other corporate interests" - reminiscent of cash-in-envelope payoff schemes in eras past, and a problem we know goes all the way up to people like Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.