Whether it was pushing for health care reform, reigning in Wall Street or keeping dangerous prescription pills off the market, Public Citizen’s researchers, analysts and lobbyists have been on the front lines, standing up to corporate power and holding government accountable.
We don’t have deep corporate pockets backing us like our opponents do (Public Citizen maintains its fierce independence by not taking any corporate or government money), but what we do have is the support of our members, activists and people like you. You’ve answered the call time and time again by signing our petitions, calling your members of Congress and giving what you can during these tough economic times.
The antiflu drug Tamiflu may be flying off the shelves, but there is little evidence that it is effective.
In an article posted free for a week on our WorstPills.org site, Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, explains why. Basically, the only research conducted on Tamiflu has been done by Roche, the drug’s maker, which of course has a huge stake in showing that the drug does wonders for you if you have the flu.
The company claims that it reduces hospital admissions, bronchitis and pneumonia. But an investigation by the British Medical Journal and British Channel 4 concluded that such claims were meritless.
What is needed, Dr. Wolfe says, is an independent review of the raw data.
You’ve probably heard members of Congress spouting off lately about how the imposition of caps on medical malpractice payouts in Texas has been so great.
Not only has the percentage of uninsured people in Texas increased — remaining the highest in the country, with a quarter of Texans now uninsured — but the cost of health insurance in Texas has more than doubled.
That’s right, more than 125,500 signed our petition to demand an end to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s lobbying against Sen. Franken’s (D-Minn.) amendment to bar defense contractors like Halliburton/KBR from forcing employees with sexual assault and discrimination claims into arbitration.
Public Citizen, along with MoveOn.org, National Alliance to End Sexual Violence, Consumer Action, Workplace Fairness, National Association of Consumer Advocates, Take Back Your Rights PAC, Alliance for Justice and the Jamie Leigh Foundation, sent the following petition to U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue:
Defense contractors routinely force their employees to give up their legal rights to press charges if they are sexually assaulted on the job. I urge the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to stop lobbying in favor of this terrible practice and to stop protecting rapists.
Now the amendment is on its way to restoring victims’ rights against and defense contractors’ shadowy attempts to conceal these injustices.
If the Franken amendment passes in the defense funding bill, it means that U.S. contractors must allow victims of sexual assault and discrimination to take their claims to court – a right that has been systematically denied to them through a forced arbitration clause slipped into their employment contracts (along with workers in numerous other sectors ).
Finally, workers who are victims of these injustices will be able hold the defense contractors who employ them accountable.
Nevertheless, the fight is far from over for the millions of other workers, consumers, home owners, patients and others who are e stripped of their right to go to court just by using a product or service, or taking a job.
Nobody should have to give up their right to go to court if harmed by a company as a condition for a contract. Congress now needs to pass the Arbitration Fairness Act (H.R. 1020 / S. 931) and end forced arbitration once and for all.
If you didn’t already believe that our health care system is irretrievably broken and a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system is the way to go, then you need to read this piece by a former Miami Herald columnist who just got laid off.
Robert Steinback starkly outlines what will happen when his insurance runs out at the end of January: “I am scheduled to begin dying on Feb. 1, 2010.”
Because Steinback has diabetes, which is considered a pre-existing condition, he is unable to get insurance while unemployed. He notes that those opposing a government-option health plan because they fear the decisions that would be made by government bureaucrats seem to have no problem with health care being rationed by insurance bureaucrats whose sole aim is to cut costs.
As Steinback says, please contact your senators and tell them to cater to patients, not the insurance industry. For Steinback and so many others, time is running out.
Most importantly, the bill creates a powerful financial consumer watchdog agency. Had the Consumer Financial Protection Agency existed during the go-go years earlier this decade, it could have prevented millions of consumers from being ripped off – and protected the banks from themselves. The financial crisis would have been significantly less severe.
It also contains some modestly beneficial provisions in investor protection, establishing liability for credit ratings firms, regulating derivatives and imposing leverage limits on the largest institutions. And it includes an important measure for a comprehensive public auditing of the Federal Reserve. But the bill doesn’t do nearly enough to rein in the Wall Street banksters and is wholly incommensurate with the devastation Wall Street has wreaked across the land.
The bill does very little to address industry structure. Wall Street and the big banks engaged in reckless betting under the belief that they were too big to fail – that they were protected by a federal backstop. The biggest banks are now bigger than they were before the crisis. The solution to the too-big-to-fail problem is to Continue Reading »
Any day now, the Supreme Court will decide the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case. In fact, this Monday is the next most likely day for a decision. We are bracing for it, because it could dramatically tip the balance of power in our democracy.
Since the day the case was re-heard on Sept. 9, when Public Citizen members and activists held protests across the country, we’ve been waiting to hear if the decision will have limited, but worrisome consequences, or if the court will unleash unlimited corporate spending in our elections. In previous decisions, the Supreme Court repeatedly has upheld the constitutionality of the ban on direct corporate spending to influence elections. But the Roberts Court may now reverse a century’s worth of precedent on limits to corporate spending.
At the heart of the case is the debate about free speech rights of for-profit corporations. Though the First Amendment was designed to protect the free speech rights of people, for the past three decades, a divided Supreme Court has transformed the First Amendment into a powerful tool for corporations seeking to influence the political process. This could reach an extreme conclusion in Citizens United v. FEC.
The House financial reform battle has been nothing if not brutal. Can you join the fight for the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009 (H.R. 4173)?The bill goes to a vote on the House floor tomorrow, and we need you to turn up the pressure on your representatives.
Here is an update on amendments that your representative needs to know you support, and those that need to be defeated.
SUPPORT the Stupak/DeLauro/Larson/Van Hollen amendment on derivatives. Regulators must have the authority to ban abusive derivatives instruments rather than simply reporting them to Congress, and transactions which violate the law should be considered invalid.
OPPOSE the Minnick amendment to eliminate a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) from the bill. It would leave enforcement of consumer protection and civil rights laws in the hands of the same existing regulatory bodies that resoundingly failed to use them.
OPPOSE the Marshall amendment, which would deny financial whistleblowers the right to hold their employer accountable in court when they are retaliated against.
Call or email your representative today. You can also show your support by signing the petition at Change.org . With enough signatures, the message about the need for a Consumer Financial Protection agency will be blasted to thousands more activists. We need to stand firm against predatory banking practices and prevent financial crises from crippling our economy ever again.
How can the federal government generate a lot of money for such things as health care and jobs, while not harming the middle class or the poor?
Through a speculation tax, that’s how. It’s a tax on trades of stocks, derivatives and other financial instruments – the things the wealthiest Americans trade the most. Just a quarter-percent tax on these things could raise $100 billion a year. That’s not chump change.
No ifs, ands, or buts: President Obama’s lobbying and ethics reforms issued so far are changing the landscape of lobbying and public service. Some of the changes are so dramatic – such as the first-ever “reverse revolving door” restriction designed to screen out industry representatives and their lobbyists from capturing the agencies that regulate them – that K Street is up in arms, even threatening litigation. That kind of reaction does not come in response to “symbolic” reforms. Yes, these are genuine substantive changes – just ask the hundreds of corporate lobbyists who are involuntarily vacating their positions on advisory panels come Jan. 1 under orders from the White House.
But more can be done. And much to the uneasiness of K Street, much more is likely to be done.
When it comes to defining who is a lobbyist subject to registration, the current empirical thresholds for determining who must register are quite good. The problem is not the thresholds; the problem is in Continue Reading »
