By This seems like one of those amendments you wouldn’t want to vote against, even if you’re a Republican. But what do I know?
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Why not shoot the perpetrators? And maybe some congressmen? (congress?)
Here’s the roll-call.
As I suspected, none of the female members of the GOP senate caucus voted against it, and they were joined by a handful (stress on the “number that could fit in a person’s hand” part of handful) of the more generally sensible GOP male senators. I was disappointed to see Graham and Alexander (the other two GOP senators generally not crazy) not among them.
The rest of the list is a roll call of the usual suspects. It’s kind of awe-inspiring watching that party self-destruct.
I’ve been thinking about this a little more. As a small business owner, am I liable if one of my employees get raped? That is, should an employee be able to sue me because she/he was raped while working at my company?
It seems like the people who committed the crime are liable, not the company, unless somehow the company was at fault.
Daniel, the perps were employees. The point of the suit is that KBR clearly did not provide adequate protection and prevented any accountability by virtue of an arbitration clause, hence the legislation.
Jon Stewart (and Colbert as well) is a National Treasure for how they can cut to the heart of the matter.
And nope, the mash-up of the crackers defending Halliburton / KBR for actual gang rape, juxtaposed with their attacks on ACORN for merely being accused of trying to helpout a (fake) pimp is just priceless.
Yes.
If you run an appliance repair service, and one of your employees goes on-site and rapes the homeowner while they’re there, you can bet you will be sued the crap out of. Add in that if you try to protect your rapist employee from prosecution, you should effing go to jail along with him.
And when your company has an institutional policy of protecting its employees from prosecution on any number of crimes, now you should be sued, go to jail, and your company should be sold off to pay restitution to your victims.
If the attacker and the victim are both your employees, and the crime happens on your property, and the victim takes the attacker to court, I think that court might require you to demonstrate that the company was in no way at fault.
Halliburton apparently has fine print in their employment contract that says the victim cannot take the attacker to court at all, and Mr. Franken’s amendment is to disallow such fine print. Yes?
they locked her in a frakkin’ CONTAINER for 24 hours and threatened her. It wasn’t a single rape, it was conspiracy among a wide number of employees plus covering it up and hiding from the law. There’s no frakkin’ way they’re not liable. It’s way different than a single rapist who was not colluding with various levels of the company, and in which the company was supportive of the victim and worked with and not against police.
I see no reason an employee of your’s shouldn’t be allowed to sue you for anything if they can prove that your actions or inactions led to or contributed to them coming to harm. I mean we have the whole concept of worker’s comp for this reason, an employeer has a certian level of responsibilities to his or her employees to provide a safe working environment.
This is not to say that those people who were directly involved get off the hook. You can sue both of them.
No, you don’t sue the rapist. You have them arrested. It’s a criminal case, not a civil one.
There is a civil case against Halliburton, though, and they should be sued.
I would have to agree with most that have replied to you. Yes you should be held liable for your employee being raped if you don’t provide a safe work environment or try to cover it up. If a company doesn’t provide all its employees a safe work place then why shouldn’t that person be able to sue.
Companies need to show that they did everything in their power to prevent this from happening. If they protected the rapists, or did not provide adequate security, then the law may indicate they are at some fault.
But the crux is that some companies are getting special protection. A customer of McDonalds doesn’t sign a form saying they will not sue if the drive thru lady shoots them.
At the least you should be able to use the corporate laws on the books already and let the judicial system look at the case, and see if the company was neglectful in the matter, or protected the criminals.
Of course if the company isn’t providing a safe workplace they are liable. That’s why I ended with saying “unless somehow the company was at fault.” It’s if the company ISN’T at fault is what I’m thinking about.
That probably doesn’t apply to the Halliburton case, but I’m also trying to understand why they would vote against it.
In your small-business-owner example, no, you are not automatically at fault… but court proceedings will determine whether you are at fault. Halliburton is not automatically at fault either, but apparently their employment contract prevents the court proceedings.
The voting-against-it rationale ostensibly opposes public meddling in the private sector, which I totally dig, but this seems like an obvious loophole in the requirement that contracts not be illegal.
That is, their you-can’t-prosecute-rape clause protects them from being implicated in a case of Employee A v. Employees B C and D; a vote against Al Franken’s bill is a vote to protect Halliburton. From rape victims.
Voting against it was probably a reflex. The government shouldn’t interfere in private sector contracts, which BTW the amendment doesn’t. The amendment doesn’t say that you are not allowed to have a rape liability waiver in your employment contract it just say that if you do then the government is not going to do any buissnes with you. Personally I think that the existence of the clause is enough to prove the company is libel since someone considered an employee being raped likely enough to write it into the contract but decided that the better solution is to try and cover the company’s behind rather then make sure that employees don’t get raped (therefore eliminating the risk of lawsuit).
Ah, good distinction, thank you.
Wow… Just wow. Why would anyone vote against this? Absolutely ridiculous.
Because Halliburton owns them.
That’s how politics work. You vote for the interests of those who pay for your elections. Our only recourse is to make sure they don’t get re-elected.
Yes, their objection is disguised as opposition to the federal government meddling in private contracts, but the real reason is that they are being loyal to Halliburton.
The pullquote on that video is Jon Stewart saying “If, to protect Halliburton, you have to side against rape victims, you might want to rethink your allegiances.” That’s funny, but it’s not a joke.
People vote against it because rape is already against the law, and these scum bag rapists already should go to prison, but more and more GOVERNMENT with more and more LAWS makes us less free not more free.
Just a hunch.
All laws sound wonderful, add them all up, you get tyranny.
Again, just a hunch.
But nobody voting against this is “pro-rape” and anyone who’d think or say something so stupid should be sued for slander (if said, thinking is still ok unless you “hate” or anything, oh, another big government thought police state that you sound like a really bad person for opposing, when actually you’re a patriot).
Sorry to make you all think, go back to your enjoyable “smarter and nicer than thou” fest.
And anyone so obsessed with Randian nonsense that they call themselves John Galt is just a moron.
Sorry, go back to not thinking and just assuming that makes you smarter than everyone else.
Hey! Nonsense? Personally, I think Objectivism is pretty keen.
I think it’s a deeply flawed philosophy with one good idea at heart.
But you don’t meet my moron criteria. Notice that you are not calling yourself John Galt.
Objectivism had its day, and then studies showed that altruism was far more logical on an evolutionary scale than Rand understood. This makes the basis of her philosophy rather pointless. Her philosophy is more of a rebellion toward communism than any kind of positive claim for individualism.
Toward communism?!
Why don’t you reply to his points rather than throwing childish insults?
Wrong. The contract says you can’t prosecute the law. That is the issue. The rape victim cannot sue the rapists because of fine print in the employment contract. The bill is intended to render such fine print illegal… which it probably should be, don’t you think?
Oh noes. The big bad GOVERNMENT is making LAWS that stop companies from requiring employees to sign away their ability to sue if they are raped.
The sky is falling. Tyranny is here.
I can’t stand Ayn Rand.
Me neither. I couldn’t, until recently, mentally crystallize what was so abhorrent about it, but then I found this article, which pretty much sums it up.
Here’s a quote to give you a feel:
Definitely worth a read.
An interesting article, though I have a quibble. To say that Rand was primarily influenced by Nietzsche is akin to saying that Martin Luther King, Jr. was primarily influenced by racism. It’s technically true, sure, but not in the specific way it is being implied, but nearly the opposite. Rand herself mentions in her writings that she separated from Nietzschean thought very early, since it attacks both her elevation of reason above all other modes of thought and her objective metaphysics. To imply that Nietzsche’s work had much to do with hers is a disservice to Nietzsche.
I thought the message of Atlas Shrugged was not that wealth is virtue, but that effectiveness is virtue. Good is productivity and evil is incompetence. I like that. Possibly a flawed philosophy, but more than one good idea.
…and also that “from each according to his ability, for each according to his need” is a raw deal for the ability people
Only if they forget that we are a social species.
Yeah. Pretty much nobody is capable of providing directly for all of their needs with their own abilities in a modern society.
And let’s not get into the very young, the very old, and the infirm.
The whole point is fairness.
If you’re a multi-trillionaire living next to a family dying of starvation, something isn’t fair.
But on the flipside you’re struggling to feed your own family, and you’re forced to give money to lazy asses, that’s not fair either. The key is finding the balance; mitigating the ‘raw deals’ on both sides.
My problem with Randian philosophy is it won’t even allow that level of analysis.
I disagree.
The shorter argument.
Fairness can be defined either as equality of original position, or equality of result. They are, unfortunately, mutually exclusive in most cases.
LMNOP, you’ve said you lean libertarian (me too, yay me), which I think of as extremely similar to Objectivism but not as merciless. I know it’s a really blanket term, but what do you think of as the critical difference that makes Ayn Rand an idiot but (say) minarchist libertarianism totally sweet?
I’m a “libertarian” (and lately I’ve really been starting to hate that label) for two reasons. From an almost purely consequentialist stance: systems that include humans tend to work in a humanizing (as opposed to dehumanizing) way only when people are given freedom to choose to arrange their own priorities and make their own voluntary connections. To the extent that structural freedoms increase human happiness and productivity and survivability, they are good. Freedom is a means to other ends.
I also like freedom-in-itself as an end. This, though, is a minor end for me when it comes to politics. The overpowering consideration for me is whether freedom produces good things.
Now, given the fact of structural inertia (it is easier, politically, to pass laws than to repeal them, to grow government rather than to shrink it, to increase restrictions than to increase freedom of action), there should be a heavy presumption against proposed changes, until it can be reasonably shown that the ends of the change outweigh the ends being provided for (however imperfectly) by a lack of interference, not just in the specific area, but systemically. There is an inherent inequality which causes societies to naturally slide towards a stultifying totalitarianism, and so all increases in police power or regulatory power should be approached with trepidation.
Consequentialism is anathema to Randians. They could not even consider, in the framework of their philosophy, the notion that if you tax every business a little bit, take that money and build, say, an interstate highway system or a fiber-optic network backbone, that the major result is an increase in those businesses profits by orders of magnitude as they reach new markets and new clients, to say nothing of the benefits for others. They talk only in terms of ends, and the end they see here is that the integrity of the people taxed is infringed by the ability for an entity like the government to arbitrarily take their stuff away and ostensibly give it to others (in order to build things that, had the money remained theirs, in all probability they never would have built). “Freedom” itself has been infringed, and it’s a slippery slope to gulags from there.
Most minarchists talk in basically the same way. Every libertarianism driven by the Non-Aggression Principle ends up like the Randians, and participates in the same basic foolishness: it treats every person as a self-sufficient and complete monad, instead of as a interpenetrated and interconnected social creature; there is only one end, that end is freedom for the monad to go on being alone. The political philosophy that can’t build interstate highways and the Internet is a stupid philosophy, whatever its other virtues on paper. Consequentialist libertarianism like mine has always existed alongside the more idealistic versions, but it has generally been a minor and shunned fellow traveler because we tend to raise such embarrassing points as, you know, highways, and it basically lacks the clear-cut comfortable ability to produce programmatic answers about what is and is not always reasonable for a government or a society to do with its power to coerce which is what attracts many people to libertarianism in the first place.
The non-aggression principle leads to foolishness? I don’t follow.
My bad, I didn’t mean to say “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” was about fairness. That’s a different argument.
I simply meant to say I base my values system around fairness, which is how I justify progressive taxation / redistribution of wealth.
The whole Randian argument hinges crucially on the supposition that an unfettered free market will benefit everyone, in some way. However, looking at western economic systems to date, unfettered free markets gradually result in the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people. That’s not fair, and in the interest of keeping the system stable (and fair), you need to step in from time to time.
That’s not to say every worker everywhere should make the same amount, and get government provided meals etc. I mean, I get the whole ‘incentive for success’ thing as much as the next guy.
However, looking at western economic systems to date, unfettered free markets gradually result in the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
There is one thing about which doctrinaire libertarians are absolutely right: we have never seen a free market. It has never really existed. In reality, if such a thing were to be created, it is really anyone’s guess whether it would work the way they assume it would or more the way you’re assuming it would.
The non-aggression principle leads to foolishness? I don’t follow.
A guy is drowning in the sea. The only guy around who has a life-buoy owns it, does not wish to share it, and does not wish to use it to save the drowning man.
Is it morally permissible to take the buoy by force in order to save the drowning man?
Yes.
The great hypocrisy of the Randians is that they could only have the time to make these arguments while living in an interconnected society where many of their needs are met by other people.
I’ve never met a Randian who refused to drive on public roads, or wouldn’t call the fire department if their house was on fire, or the police if they were robbed. Instead, they scream at the top of their lungs when a one cent tax on gasoline is implemented to pay for any of those things.
When you strip away all of the rhetoric, the Randian position seems to be, “I want all the stuff I have now, I just don’t want to have to contribute to maintaining it in any way that isn’t entirely voluntary.”
But when you’re the drowning man, the philosophical reasons why you can’t get a life preserver are fairly meaningless.
Hm.
Yes and no. No, it would not be morally permissible for a state agency to take the buoy by force. Yes, it would be permissible for an individual. For one thing, the NAP is an axiom for state policy and laws, not personal moral behavior. For another, it is a rare case where the initiation of force would give the best consequences.
I think consequentialism and minarchism are compatible. However: yes, I see how the NAP is pretty deontological, I hadn’t thought of it that way. Perhaps initiation of aggression is not always evil regardless of the consequences, but I still think it’s a good rule of thumb.
No dogma.
For one thing, the NAP is an axiom for state policy and laws, not personal moral behavior.
Er, since when? The NAP restricting individual behavior is how libertarians justify laws against murder, rape, assault, and larceny.
For another, it is a rare case where the initiation of force would give the best consequences.
The threat of force is considered (I think correctly) as equivalent to force in itself, and taxation is nothing if not takings backed by the threat of force. Hence the arguments about highways and the internet, goods whose very existence is owed to money taxed for those purposes.
Perhaps initiation of aggression is not always evil regardless of the consequences, but I still think it’s a good rule of thumb.
I think in dyadic relations it’s a great rule-of-thumb. In anything more complicated it ceases to function very effectively.
I think the principle specifically applies to civilized society, and “lifeboat situations” are not civilized society.
Yes, I think taxes are a necessary evil. Is that the critical difference? Minarchism is wired but anarcho-capitalism is tired?
OK, let’s take it out of lifeboat situations then. If you are driving your car in excess of the speed limit, a police officer may pull you over to the side of the road and detain you, and perhaps fine you. The detention is an initiation of force, backed by a threat of force of a more severe nature.
Without such a system that allowed for the state to initiate force against individuals driving faster than the speed limit, road fatalities would increase precipitously. The practice of detaining and ticketing for speeding clearly violates the NAP. Is it a bad idea?
Yes, I think taxes are a necessary evil. Is that the critical difference? Minarchism is wired but anarcho-capitalism is tired?
But once taxes are accepted as a necessary evil the NAP is already abandoned as a principle. My point is only once that line is crossed, one’s libertarianism needs to be justified and guided by something other than the NAP.
I tend to think that Ayn Rand was an obtuse, shallow philosopher and a terrible writer, but I can’t quite hate her. She did give this speech, which in the broad strokes is an elegant defense of philosophy as a discipline (even if it is tainted by her silliness in parts), and so she gets that.
Everybody gets one.
Yes, but I just can’t bring myself to feel sorry for her rich, entrepreneur characters like John Galt. Seriously, people don’t become captains of industry on sheer merit, there is a whole lotta other advantages that get thrown into that pot as well (like coming from a wealthy family). So why should I feel sorry for the outrageously advantaged???
You shouldn’t. She was a prat about that stuff. Like I said, the only good thing she’s ever done is that speech. All her fiction is rot.
She inspired Neil Peart to write the lyrics to 2112, one of my favorite albums of all time.
So she has that going for her.
2112 Overture is my morning alarm clock tune. (Periodically swapped with Where There’s a Whip There’s a Way from the Rankin/Bass Return of the King, which is terrible except for that song.)
Oh Jon Stewart, you make me laugh, even about silly Republicans who don’t want to stop companies from doing whatever the hell they want.
I’ve always wondered how people (people, not politicians) can complain about Big Government and what it could do to their lives, but seem to have no problem with gigantic, faceless corporations. At least you have the potential for representation in the government, what say do any of us have in the way a corporation runs.
(And, I just have to add, being anti-giant corporation, is NOT being anti-business. It just means that you go to your local coffee shop rather than Starbucks)
This video “is not available in your country” (for me that’s the UK). What can one do?
Arrgh!
Emmigrate?
The legislative information for the amendment is available here.
Go figure, Kit Bond voted nay (yes, sorry, my state was one of the nay-sayers)
And the fact that it was voted against just floors me! Yes, government should not interfere with private company affairs, but this is a no-brainer. Most companies all ready run background checks as they do not want to hire criminals (and a rapist would in fact apply), and if an employee were to slip and fall on ice in the parking lot walking into the building, the company would be liable there as well. Personal injury and worker’s comp all ready exist. Rape is obviously more serious than a twisted ankle, but still. And that fact that it is even in the contract in the first place just disturbs me. Usually, items like that only get included when the issue has come up before.
As Stewart points out, the government sure as heck should interfere when that private company was hired by the government.
True, but in the real world (the one the government doesn’t live in often), if a company strongly disagrees with the practices of a contractor, they just don’t have to hire them. I was just pointing out that in some regard, I understand what the opposition is saying, but since no longer using Halliburton is probably not going to be an option, then I agree they should be held to a higher standard.
LMNOP wrote, “…we have never seen a free market.”
People say the same thing about communism (by definition). Perhaps that’s because it’s not the least bit feasible.
Of course, I’m not entirely sure what is meant by a “free market.” Care to attempt to define it?
A marketplace entirely free of government control.
No minimum wage, no workplace safety rules, no price controls, no environmental impact controls.
The idea is that market forces will create those things better and cheaper than government interference does.
All of this is believed by people who apparently have never read about Britian during the industrial revolution, where none of those rules existed, and market forces created them entirely without government interference.
Oh, wait, that’s right. Children were used as slaves, the air and water werbso badly polluted that they’re still trying to recover, and getting your arm ripped off in a coal powered textile machine just meant that you got fired.
Not quite, Ty. A true free market regulates against use of direct force and fraud (these things being necessary to exclude for the existence of a voluntary market). There was quite a bit of state interference in Britain in the market during the industrial revolution (import export restrictions, most prominently), just not in directions (such as workplace safety, child labor, and environmental controls) that we would today.
And it is not a violation of the free market to exclude child labor; children are not usually considered capable of entering into many mutual arrangements, and so it is easy to regulate their entrance into the marketplace. That Britain didn’t says more about their cultural values than anything about free market economics.
But I agree it would be unfeasible to implement because of the high third-party costs of pollution and other externalities. I am not a free-market zealot; just pointing out we have scant data on what it would be like to live with one.
“direct force and fraud”
I deliberately didn’t mention the violence used by those companies because I actually know how the free market is defined.
I mentioned wages, working conditions and pollution. Three things the free market crowd thinks should not be regulated. And I don’t see how removal of import export restrictions during the industrial revolution would have made any of those things better.
My point is that we have seen how factories were run when the government didn’t interfere. They were dangerous filthy places where the poorest people made pennies a day. And nothing in the ‘market’ put any pressure on the owners to change that.
My point is that we have seen how factories were run when the government didn’t interfere. They were dangerous filthy places where the poorest people made pennies a day. And nothing in the ‘market’ put any pressure on the owners to change that.
Well, I would also point out that cultural and personal expectations are vulnerable to a ratcheting effect. What was acceptable to people (conditions they would tolerate) are not the same as those they would tolerate today. If the regulations suddenly disappeared tomorrow, a factory owner would still not be able to pay pennies a day, because nobody would work for him.
Right up until EVERY factory decided to pay pennies a day, because, why not?
The ratcheting goes both ways. My father’s generation went to work with the absolute expectation that they would work for the same company all their lives, receive a very livable pension at retirement, and have fully funded healthcare for the entire family. And this wasn’t just executives, this was any blue or white collar job.
I don’t know anyone that expects that sort of stability now. Companies learned that turnover kept costs down, people would work for companies with no benefits, and that raiding the retirement fund could be gotten away with.
If the only jobs left for a minimum wage level worker paid $1 an hour, there would still be people working those jobs.
Pennies, probably not. A few bucks, probably.
Free trade practices put folks in other countries out of work, and guess where they come to find work? Guess how little many of those folks would be willing to be paid for their labor?
And let’s talk about things that folks wouldn’t have the option of avoiding, such as certain roads/bridges and schools. It’s bad enough that health care is a for-profit industry. Let’s destroy the commons. Yeah, let’s allow private companies to charge ridiculous sums for the use of a bridge, for instance. As opposed to paying for that bridge via progressive taxation.
Privatization of nearly everything and zero taxation. That’s what I got from reading Wiki’s page. In other words, complete and utter disaster. No thanks.
“No minimum wage, no workplace safety rules, no price controls, no environmental impact controls. The idea is that market forces will create those things better and cheaper than government interference does.”
Yeah, anyone who believes that’s realistic is just as delusional as the folks who think a man who may have existed ~2000 years ago is coming back to life.
Since Ayan Rand is discussed (I’m not a fan btw, I find the idiologue to be ice-cold):
“When I say “capitalism,” I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.” – Ayn Rand
What happened to the video? Black box now? Is it just too too controversial for the domain holder?