Monthly Archives: November 2011

In Which I Get a Remarkably Small Check

Very, very faithful readers may recall back in December 2007 I posted I Am A Plaintiff in which I recounted my discovery that I was part of a class of persons who had been subjected to improper foreign currency fees when using a US credit card abroad.

As I reported then, the proposed settlement offered me three choices:

  1. $25 cash money.
  2. Estimate how many days I was abroad in 1996-2006, and get a rebate of 1% of what they guess I spent with my credit card based on some formula they do not disclose. Key to that formula is whether I characterize my travel as sometimes/often/mostly “business,” “visiting friends or relatives,” or “vacation or leisure”. (In fact it was some of each.)
  3. Provide detailed receipts of my credit card usage abroad in that period and get 3% back.

I chose option two, having calculated that I was abroad for 394 days during the relevant period.

Today, about three and half years after claims were due, I got my check — for $51.81. This doesn’t seem like much, as I’m sure I would have spent more than $5181 while doing a combination of fairly high-priced business travel, some holiday travel, and just being, over the space of more than a year. And indeed, the note attached to the check I received states that “All refund amounts are reduced because the full amount of all the claims exceeds the amount in the settlement fund.”

Poking around on the settlement website reveals very little about how they calculated this figure. I was not able to find a clear statement of what the settlement value was, what the lawyers’ share of the settlement was, or what was left after they took their share. I was able to learn that 10 million (10 million!) claims were filed. I was not able to learn what formula(e) the parties used to value the claims — something I’d have liked to see. I did, however, learn that the amount claimed exceeded the amount of the settlement, so that payments were reduced according to a complicated formula in the Court-approved Revised Plan of Administration and Distribution. But the site does not reveal which of the various contingency plans in that document were used, nor how much of a discount got applied to claims like mine. (If I understood it right, it does say that the folks who picked option one got their $25, so I didn’t get paid much for all the effort of going through old calendars and diaries and calculating the number of days I was abroad.)

All in all, one has a sense that the purpose of the claims web site is not to inform but to obfuscate, while appearing to meet some minimum formality of seeming disclosure.

Commonly, a complaint about class actions is that the victims don’t even bother to make claims. In this case that is emphatically not the case, since 10 million claims were filed (I’m not clear, though, if it was 10 million people, or if there may have been multiple claims by holders of multiple cards). But at the end of the day, even people like me who had what one would think would be a fairly substantial claim — abroad more than a year — gets peanuts. Without knowing the size of the settlement one can’t say whether it may serve some deterrent function in the future, but I have to wonder if it was large enough to achieve that.

Incidentally, the note attached to the check says there’s a second, separate lawsuit,, Ross v. American Express Co., regarding the mis-use of arbitration clauses. If you were forced into arbitration, don’t get your hopes up too high: that case was settled for $49.5 million, of which only $13.875 million remains after court costs and attorneys’ fees. Perhaps it is apt that lead class counsel have their offices on Locust Street?

Posted in Law: Everything Else | 4 Comments

Nicely Updated

The law, in its majesty, bars the individual and the corporation alike from camping out while assembling for redress of grievances.

The law, in its majesty, allows the individual and the corporation alike to spend money on political ads.

Unqualified offerings

Posted in 99% | 1 Comment

Something Cheerful

SFDB has a heartwarming Duck Tale.

Posted in Florida | 1 Comment

Discuss

David Atkins writes at Hullabaloo

There is a serious culture war at work in the United States. It involves a courageous minority of outraged citizens up against a majority that is either apathetic, or directly defending of the agents of the status quo. That minority suffers the slings and arrows of contempt and cursed spite as it does its best to set right a nation in times out of joint, and only years or even decades afterward do the majority of citizens cast a fond gaze backward, imagining that they were or would have been on the activists’ side at the time. The capacity of society for anachronistic delusion and self-regard is nearly limitless.

Just as Glenn Beck’s venomous followers comically attempt to adopt the mantle of Martin Luther King, Jr., so too will some right-wing blowhard 30-40 years from now claim to embody the spirit of the heroes of Zuccotti Park in the service of whatever reactionary force they happen to be extolling a generation hence.

Thus has it always been, and thus will it ever be.

This is an heroic narrative. But isn’t there something about it that doesn’t ring quite true?

Posted in 99% | 4 Comments

Law On the Ground

Earlier today, a New York judge entered an injunction allowing the Occupy Wall Street protestors to re-occupy Zucotti Park. (That injunction was later overturned. No doubt further appeals are likely, although I’m not optimistic about their chances.)

During the period in which the injunction against the police action was in force, some protestors attempted to re-enter the park. Despite the court order, the NYPD did not allow it.

See NYPD Assaults Man & Punches Woman in Face at OWS / Liberty Plaza for their reaction:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxR8VHFvsl8

There is law on the books, and there is law on the ground. I doubt any of the police will be reprimanded in any meaningful way; more likely they will be (privately) congratulated.

(I think in the long run, this is more likely to feed the OWS movement than to harm it. They may now have to shift tactics to something that doesn’t involve standing in the cold 24/7.)

Posted in 99%, Law: Everything Else | 1 Comment

Putting the Boot into Occupy Wall Street (UPDATED)

Mayor Bloomberg has failed to transcend his origins: he sent the cops in to empty Zucotti Park.

UPDATE: There appears to have been substantial coordination between mayors in many (15?) cities, officially under the auspices of the National Conference of Mayors, but with major support by Homeland Security and perhaps the FBI. See Oh. Homeland security AND the FBI for some details.

Digby summarizes the clearing of Zucotti Park for us:

Watching it unfold has had the same surreal feel as watching the early days of Tahrir Square. As big as the story of the clearing of the park is, one of the interesting side stories is also that all the major news networks, cable and otherwise, were silent. They were showing no live video from New York. Only Raw Story had a live stream, still ongoing as of this writing. And as with Egypt, by far the best way to learn about events happening on the ground was via Twitter.

Per various twitter reports:

  • Protesters were told to take their belongings and leave. Any belongings not immediately carried out by protesters were then tossed unceremoniously into a massive pile on the street and loaded into dumpsters. This included the tents, the entire 5,000 book OWS library, and the bike generators.
  • Most subways and trains into downtown were blocked, including with cops at entrances
  • The Brooklyn Bridge was shut down until 6am
  • All media and press were not allowed within a block of Zucotti Park
  • Airspace over Zucotti was blocked by police helicopters and legally blocked to prevent any media coverage
  • Journalists gathered together to attempt to gain access were denied. According to one report, one cop tore a press credential off a journalist, while another responded to a journalist’s claim to be press by saying, “not tonight.”
  • One New York Times journalist reported arrested, and city councilmember Ydanis Rodriguez reportedly arrested and bleeding from the head
  • Multiple individuals injured, bleeding, including one carried out on a stretcher
  • Doormen locking buildings around Zucotti to prevent residents from exiting to witness events
  • Counter-terrorism police units on scene

Oakland’s protestors got the boot too.

The strategy of force will fail.

Posted in 99% | 4 Comments