A Uniter, At Long Last

Here's the good news, kids: Your phone company owes you a thousand bucks. Owes you a thousand bucks, that is, if their name happens to be AT&T or Verizon or BellSouth. If it's Qwest, you have my sympathy.

ThinkProgress has the goods. You see, the phone companies -- everyone but Qwest -- violated the law when they turned over our phone records to the NSA. The Stored Communcations Act, to be specific. And as it happens, there's a stiff penalty for violating that law: not less than $1,000 per violation. Can you say Class Action Suit? I knew you could.

But wait! It gets better! Sure, the phone companies are going to try to get out of paying you that thousand bucks, and Comrade Bush is going to do his best to help them. But this time, they're in way over their heads. Think about it: do you want to be the person to tell one hundred million Americans that they're not going to get that one G note? One hundred million Americans who, thanks to the Bush administration's woeful economic policy (steal from the poor, give to the rich) have been treading water for the last five years? One hundred million Americans whose gas bills have just doubled, to the tune of... oh, maybe a thousand bucks extra per year?

I'm thinking there just might be a March on Washington of unprecedented scale if word got out that most of America was entitled to a four-figure check and King George was going to stand in their way. And if that happens, ol' W will have turned out to finally be a uniter, not a divider, in the end.