The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is taking public comments on its plan to let consumers publicize their stories about how various financial institutions have wronged them, and Public Citizen helps you leave a public comment supporting this plan. Banksters hate it, but what are they afraid of? Sounds like the CFPB is trying to perform a service for the American people, like the Better Business Bureau used to do, and like Angie's List does now -- hell, like almost any website that sells stuff does now! -- except that CFPB's service would be for folks wronged by banks, credit card corporations, and similar entities. And banksters have the resources to gain redress on actual incidents of libel in the CFPB database. More likely they just think they shouldn't have to go through the trouble of filing a lawsuit, even one they're going to win. Or perhaps they think they have the "right" to insert gag clauses into standard customer contracts, like some small-time crooks have done. Or maybe they even think criticism equals "terrorism." Don't laugh -- the last two Administrations have really opened a Pandora's Box there, you know.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support S. 912, the Television Consumer Freedom Act, which would induce cable corporations to offer their channels a la carte, then both the Parents Television Council and Free Press still help you do that. Just because it's cheaper for the cable corporations to offer cable channels in big packages doesn't make it right. There is no reason on Earth you should have to pay for Fox News or MTV just to get the channels you do want. I mean, you don't surf the internet that way, do you? So why should you have to pay for cable channels that profoundly offend your sense of decency, of morality, of civilization? Because you are paying for them -- maybe you're only paying 75¢ a month for Fox News, but multiply that by all the households in America and you see the problem. And the solution -- if a relatively small number of Americans can withhold payment from Fox News, it'll change its behavior with a quickness. No, it will -- big players always overreact to a slight dip in the market. And therein lies some hope for us.
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