“Hot Coffee” is a new HBO documentary, by Susan Saladoff, that was screened at the Albuquerque DocuFest held at the Kimo Theater last week. The film was an official selection at Sundance and at a host of other national, and international film festivals this year. Our group saw it last Sunday afternoon and then had some lively conversations about its impact and importance.

“Hot Coffee” uses the famous 1992 “hot coffee lawsuit” against McDonalds as the springboard into a scathing indictment of the cooption of the American civil justice system by the corporate and individually wealthy.

The well-known suit was filed by 79-year old Stella Liebeck after she suffered third-degree burns when a cup of Mickie-D’s 180-degree coffee spilled in her lap. Ms. Liebeck underwent extensive medical treatment and skin grafts as a result of the burns and incurred tens of thousands of dollars in medical expenses. She sued McDonalds only after numerous requests for reimbursement of those expenses and assurances that the coffee temperature would be lowered – so that no one else would be hurt. McDonalds’ only pre-litigation response was an offer of $800.00 to “settle the matter.” At trial, it was determined that Ms. Liebeck was entitled to full reimbursement of her expenses as well as her pain and suffering, and she was awarded approximately $160,000 in actual damages. But the jury did not stop there. After hearing evidence that McDonalds had received over 700 complaints of other coffee burns before Ms. Liebeck was hurt, the jury awarded punitive damages against McDonalds in the amount of $2,100,000. (Punitive damages are awarded against a defendant when the jury concludes that its conduct has been egregious and warrants punishment.) On appeal, however, the punitive damage award was reduced to approximately $480,000.

This dramatic and often misunderstood legal battle is the gateway into a story of the corporate-based takeover of civil justice in America. It kicks off an examination of the rhetorical strategies that were and are used by the wealthy to argue for limits on liability through “tort reform” and to oust members of states’ judiciaries whose decisions favor consumers over corporations. The documentary paints a picture of designed and steady erosion of individual access to the civil justice system for the redress of harm engineered by the wealthy and powerful. It characterizes civil court as the only forum for meaningful individual complaint against corporate harm, and corporations as the personification of uber-greed determined to prevent any dialogue about accountability and redress. Whether or not one agrees with the film’s obvious bias, the study reveals how powerful rhetoric is, its amoral nature, and the determinative force of wealth in shaping information. It is this last point that resonates for me. Wealth is a daemon.

My concern takes shape against this background. Social action is generally effected through legislation, election and media in our democracy. We elect a president to enforce law, the legislature to make law, and the judiciary to evaluate law and its application. The media, ideally, helps to bring transparency to these civil processes, to provoke conversation about how and whether they operate to achieve our national values – fairness, equality, order and prosperity. They are what Burke might have called tyrannizing images in the sense that they are regarded as the virtually-sacred principles that ground the structure of our society and its government. But, all things being equal, the plurality of our national community makes these processes messy. Laws, their interpretation and enforcement, are designed to restrict some behaviors and to permit others, to punish some and reward others. This is not a static operation; it is dynamic and mutable, changing according to society’s changing needs and according to the flux of need created by pluralistic communalism.

What always threatens this delicate, lumbering process is wealth. Wealth can buy laws, their interpreters, their enforcers and the media’s view of it all. Even if the purchase is not overt, the economically privileged consistently have their way. Whether through self-restraint or coercion, the poor – even the not-as-rich – are effectively silenced because they cannot afford to buy the space to be heard, whether in the legislature, the courts or in the media. Their rhetoric is not backed by the power of money, and it is undervalued, misunderstood and silenced when money-backed talk out shouts it. Who is “right” and who is “wrong” is not the issue – it is how many voices are heard. For me, this is the real value of “Hot Coffee.” Perhaps an unintended consequence, the film is a potent exposition of one-sided, unchallenged rhetoric, of what happens when only one voice has the resources to make itself heard – of what happens when wealth becomes the tyrant. When dialogue is foreclosed, is violence often far behind?