consumer advocate - Represent Consumers

Are you one of those people who are constantly saying “there oughta be a law”? I am - which is probably why I ended up a consumer advocate.

Some pretty lofty assumptions about democracy are built into that quaint phrase, if you think about it. For one, it assumes that law is a good way to resolve disputes (as compared, say, to fists or guns). Also, that everybody will obey the law. Perhaps most obvious, when someone says, “there oughta be a law,” they’re asserting our right as Americans to make things better for ourselves by getting the legislative branch to address an issue of public importance.

Indeed, the "the right of the people...to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" is built into the First Amendment - the same amendment that five members of the United States Supreme Court pretty much erased from the Constitution in the Citizens United case two years ago.

By now, everyone understands that by giving corporations the same First Amendment rights as humans, and then ruling that spending money to influence elections is a form of “free speech,” the Supreme Court in Citizens United unleashed a tsunami of corporate money that will drown out the voices of 99% percent of Americans in favor of the 1% who have the wealth to determine who wins elections. “Free” speech can’t compete with hundreds of millions of dollars of paid propaganda.

What’s not been much discussed is how the Supreme Court decision actually conflicts with the rest of the First Amendment: it has negated our right to petition government for a redress of grievances.

Consider another Supreme Court-imposed debacle: in 2011, the high court ruled that consumers who sue big companies in class actions can be thrown out of court and forced to go into “arbitration” – a system in which the company hires private “judges” to determine whether the company broke the law. The Federal Arbitration Act specifically says that arbitration doesn’t apply if the arbitration clause violates a state’s consumer protection law. But the Supreme Court refused to recognize that exception. The case is Concepcion v AT&T Mobility. In that lawsuit, consumers challenged AT&T for adding extra charges to the purchase of a cell phone that the company had advertised as “free.” The decision – another enormous victory for big corporations – strips American consumers of their right to hold a company accountable for rip-offs big or small.

Unlike the Court’s ruling in Citizens United, which interpreted the US Constitution, Congress could easily amend the Federal Arbitration Act to reverse the Concepcion decision. But will it? Forget about the House of Representatives: it’s controlled by corporate Republicans who are owned by the cell phone companies. (The House was close to passing a bill that would have allowed telemarketers and debt collectors to call consumers’ cell phones with recorded messages. A huge public outcry delayed the legislation.)

But in the Democrat controlled US Senate, a bill to override the Supreme Court’s arbitration ruling has only fifteen cosponsors.

In California, we are lucky to have the ballot initiative, which allows us to take matters into our own hands when state legislators are too beholden to special interests to deal with important issues. Using the initiative process, California voters passed Proposition 103 to restrain price gouging by auto, home and business insurance companies. My colleagues at Consumer Watchdog are now proposing an initiative to put health insurance premiums under Proposition 103’s controls. But even the people’s initiative process has been corrupted by corporate money. And attempts to ban corporate interference in ballot initiative campaigns ran smack into, once again, a decision by the United States Supreme Court.

Indeed, you don’t have to be an astute observer of politics to know that corporate money has long corrupted politics. Our report, “Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America” (PDF), published in March 2009, got right to the bottom line in its title. Between 1998 and 2008, Wall Street invested $5 billion in Washington, a combination of money for lobbying and campaign contributions that won deregulation and other policy decisions that enabled the financial industry to do as it pleased. The ensuing orgy of unbridled speculation came to a halt in 2008 when the financial industry threatened to shut down the system unless they got trillions of dollars in loans, tax breaks and other taxpayer bailouts.

Laws regulating corporate spending in elections and lobbying were intended to limit the damage to democracy. Some, including me, would argue that they didn’t work anyhow. But Citizens United has eliminated any chance of righting the imbalance of political power between corporations and human beings short of changing the United States Constitution itself. We’re proposing exactly that: a 28^th Amendment to the Constitution that reads “The protections of the First Amendment that apply to the spending of money on lobbying and elections, whether by contributions, expenditures or otherwise, shall extend only to human beings.” Join us right now.

After two years in office, President Obama has decided it's time to fix one of the colossal mistakes of his predecessor: too much federal regulation.

I don't remember George W. Bush as a consumer advocate who, in his zeal to regulate corporations, got carried away. But last week President Obama announced a new priority for his administration. Federal regulations “sometimes have gotten out of balance, placing unreasonable burdens on business—burdens that have stifled innovation and have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs,” the President explained, implying that it was in fact the government that crippled our economy, just like pro-corporate conservatives have been saying.

Faced with this threat to our national security, there was only one thing to do, and Obama stepped up. He commanded the entire federal government to review every regulation on the books and get rid of “outdated” rules and “unnecessary paperwork.” In a rousing call to arms, the President concluded: “This is the lesson of our history: Our economy is not a zero-sum game. Regulations do have costs; often, as a country, we have to make tough decisions about whether those costs are necessary.”

Obama didn’t invent the cost/benefit approach to regulation. That was concocted by big business-funded think tanks and adopted by President Ronald Reagan, who issued Executive Order 12291 immediately after taking office in 1981. Its preface is eerily similar to Obama’s, proposing “to reduce the burdens of existing and future regulations, increase accountability for regulatory actions, provide for presidential oversight of the regulatory process, minimize duplication and conflict of regulations…”

Reagan demanded that any regulation that imposed costs on businesses that exceeded its "benefits" be eliminated. The problem is that cost/benefit analysis doesn’t always take into account certain intangible considerations or values that are difficult to quantify in dollars, such as the benefits of unpolluted water or the worth of a human being. In an infamous internal memo (PDF) uncovered in litigation over the now extinct Ford Pinto’s exploding gas tank, company executives compared the cost of fixing the vehicles ($137 million) versus what it would have to pay for expected deaths and injuries ($49.5 million) and decided that the cost of repairing each car - $11 dollars – exceeded the benefits.

Government is supposed to protect us against such reasoning, not use it as a guiding principle.

I was working at Public Citizen Congress Watch in Washington, D.C. at the time, and Reagan’s disdain for government regulation became the centerpiece of his Administration agenda. James Watt, Reagan’s controversial appointee to the Interior Department, sacked the agency, turning it into a mouthpiece for oil, mining and other industries supposedly regulated by the agency. The Reagan Administration’s deregulation of savings banks led to reckless investments, fraud and corruption, necessitating a bailout – sound familiar? – that ultimately cost taxpayers about $124 billion.

Is history repeating itself? In a nod to those who supported him as a candidate because of his forceful speeches against special interests and corporate abuses, President Obama was careful to acknowledge the importance of “child labor laws,” “the Clean Air Act” and federal rules against “hidden fees and penalties by credit card companies.” In a nod to the elephant in a pink dress sitting on the divan in our living rooms, the President noted that “a lack of proper oversight and transparency nearly led to the collapse of the financial markets and a full-scale Depression.” “Where necessary, we won't shy away from addressing obvious gaps” in federal rules, Obama insisted.

It's painfully obvious that the President hoped his foray into Reagan-style anti-regulation rhetoric would curry favor with Wall Street, its wholly-owned subsidiary, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and their toadies in Congress. They’ve been very, very mad at the President ever since he had the temerity to sign a toothless financial reform bill that left the financial industry free to revert to its pre-bailout speculative ways, not to mention the hopelessly compromised health care law that requires every American to buy health insurance from private insurance companies starting in 2014, but does not effectively regulate how much we have to pay them.

Obama went so far as to announce his new regulatory policy in a guest column for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, where at least one attack on Obama is on the menu every day.

This latest gesture of appeasement didn’t work out as the President hoped, though. "Yes, but" was the nearly universal response from the intended recipients of the President’s largesse, as Associated Press reporter Tom Raum reported. For your convenience, I’ve highlighted the “but factor”:

“Obama’s action is ‘a positive first step,’ said Thomas J. Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s biggest business organization. But, Donohue added, ‘a robust and globally competitive economy requires fundamental reform of our broken regulatory system.’ He called on Congress to 'reclaim some of the authority it has delegated to agencies.’"

“The National Association of Manufacturers said it ‘appreciated’ Obama’s call for a regulatory review, but called for Obama to demonstrate results by ‘delaying poorly thought-out proposals that are costing jobs,’ listing the EPA’s proposals to regulate greenhouse gases as a prime example."

A “spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, called Obama’s review a welcome acknowledgment that government regulations have economic consequences. But he said the president should take bolder steps immediately.”

"David Walker, former U.S. comptroller general, said in an interview that it was ‘fully appropriate to engage in a baseline review of existing federal regulations.’ But Walker, head of a balanced-budget advocacy group called Comeback America Initiative, questioned having the agencies themselves hunt for harmful regulations. ‘We need to have an independent review process that has transparency,” he said. Walker said many of today’s regulations date back to the 1950s and need to be revamped.”

For a little conjunctional variety, here's the response of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor:

“Obama’s executive order ‘shows that he heard the same message I did in the last election - that Americans are sick and tired of Washington’s excessive overreach and overspending.’ ‘While I applaud his efforts, we must go further,’ Kantor added. He proposed more aggressive steps to strike down ‘needless and burdensome’ regulations that plague businesses and stifle job growth.”

President Obama still doesn’t understand that his political opponents will never voluntarily support anything he does, short of a complete capitulation (and perhaps not even then). This is not just a matter of interest to the political class. If the White House spends the next two years trying to placate the implacable, the rules, regulations and legislation needed to restore the economy and protect the public health and safety are never going to see daylight.

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There Oughta Be A Law…. But There Won’t Be Unless We Change the Constitution

Death by a Thousand "Buts"