Over the last several years, thousands of businesses across the country — from big corporations to storefront shops— have used arbitration to create an alternative system of justice. In arbitration rules tend to favor businesses, and judges and juries have been replaced by arbitrators who commonly consider the companies their clients. The change has been swift and virtually unnoticed, even though it has meant that tens of millions of Americans have lost a fundamental right: their day in court. “This amounts to the whole-scale privatization of the justice system,” said Myriam Gilles, a law professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. “Americans are actively being deprived of their rights.”

In this scenario is there anything to protect the customer or the worker as well as the corporation? Of course not.  For companies, the allure of arbitration grew after a 2011 Supreme Court   ruling cleared the way for them to use the clauses to quash class-action lawsuits. Prevented from joining together as a group in arbitration, most plaintiffs gave up entirely, records show. Still, there are thousands of Americans who — either out of necessity or on principle — want their grievances heard and have taken their chances in arbitration. Little is known about arbitration because the proceedings are confidential and the federal government does not require cases to be reported. The secretive nature of the process makes it difficult to ascertain how fairly the proceedings  are conducted.  This, of course, works out splendidly for the companies involved. For the truly injured parties, not so well.

All it took was to add an arbitration clause, something that most employees and consumers do not even read. . Yet at stake are claims of medical malpractice, sexual harassment, hate crimes, discrimination, theft, fraud, elder abuse and wrongful death, records and interviews show. The family of a 94-year-old woman at a nursing home in Murrysville, Pa., who died from a head wound that had been left to fester, was ordered to go to arbitration. So was a woman in Jefferson, Ala., who sued Honda over injuries she said she sustained when the brakes on her car failed.  Just two of scores of such cases.  Some state judges have called the class-action bans a “get out of jail free” card, because it is nearly impossible for one individual to take on a corporation with vast resources.

The redoubtable Senator Warren talks about tricks and traps in the financial system –  this is what she’s talking about?

How did financial products get so dangerous? Part of the problem is that disclosure has become a way to obfuscate rather than to inform. According to the Wall Street Journal, in the early 1980s, the typical credit card contract was a page long; by the early 2000s, that contract had grown to more than 30 pages of incomprehensible text. The additional terms were not designed to make life easier for the customer. Rather, they were designed in large part to add unexpected–and unreadable–terms that favor the card companies. Mortgage-loan documents, payday-loan papers, car-loan terms, and other lending products are often equally incomprehensible. (have a look at your cellphone terms of business, printed in type size too tiny to read).  And this is not the subjective claim of the consumer advocacy movement. In a recent memo aimed at bank executives, the vice president of the business consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton observed that most bank products are “too complex for the average consumer to understand. And this is all because, according the the daft Supreme Court (about to get very much worse) the media is owned by corporations and corporations are “people”. Do the justices have any idea what they have done?