You've heard Wells Fargo say they're trying to make things right after getting caught conducting widespread fraud against its customers by opening fake accounts in their name? Well, scratch that, as Wells Fargo is using forced arbitration clauses in its customer contracts to keep lawsuits over that fraud out of the courts. Forced arbitration, as you know, takes away your right to a day in court and pushes your lawsuit to an arbitrator the offending corporation can be reasonably sure will rule their way. Banksters don't really care how they look to the rest of society, do they? And I'm not sure Wells Fargo could easily prove that they can use customer contracts to shield themselves from the consequences of their own lawbreaking -- especially considering that the "contracts" were based, in large part, upon fiction.
Complaint filed with FTC alleges that a corporation manufacturing two "smart" toys violate U.S. law by recording voice data from the children who play with them and sending them off (via a rather insecure connection, no less!) to a third-party defense contracting corporation -- which could be using it for other purposes. The defense contractor, for its part, says in its own privacy policy that you really shouldn't share any information with it if you're under 18, but clearly they're "not responsible" for the actions of the toy's manufacturer which feeds them that info! A manufacturer which made a toy! For children! Which just so happens to suck up anything it hears from anyone around that toy while it's on! But I see something even worse behind the impulse to collect ever-more personal data from ever-more people -- I see a desire to replace human beings with dolls who make a show of "relating" to their owners. It's like none of these people ever watched The Twilight Zone as a kid.Ho hum, fast-food corporations raise the spectre of automation to argue against $15/hour wages for its workers. It's a hostage situation: don't make me give my workers a better life, or their jobs get it! It's also utter rubbish, not just because fast-food corporations have been talking about automating for-freaking-ever, but also because, well, you've used the automated checkout line at your supermarket, and you know it sucks. Besides which, corporations will use any excuse to get rid of jobs! After all, people are so unpredictable, what with having families and lives outside of work and so forth.
You may have read many reports about exactly how Republicans will repeal the Affordable Care Act now that President Obama's about to leave office, but you won't be surprised to learn that Republicans are basically planning to repeal the law without replacing it with anything that might actually work. Health savings accounts are, guess what, biased toward the rich, and high-risk pools, as you know, are very expensive because everyone in them is either sick or very sick. But save the best for last: letting insurance corporations sell across state lines would not only cripple states' ability to protect consumers, but would siphon off most of the healthier folks to the out-of-state insurers, leaving, again, what's essentially a high-risk pool for the in-state insurers to deal with. An insurance pool only works if it has sick and healthy people together -- which is why a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system would work best, since everyone would be in that pool.
Finally, Heather Smith at Grist lists "Five Lessons Activists Can Learn from Florida's Successful Ballot Fight to Defend Solar." Read the whole thing, because it's quite educational, but lesson number one is actually quite close to my heart, believe it or not: "(c)onservatives can be big clean energy boosters -- if you sell it right." Clean energy fits in very nicely with actual conservative thought -- for what conservative wouldn't want the opportunity to be left alone to make their own renewable power that doesn't hurt anyone? It helps, of course, to remember that the "conservatives" who care about nothing but fossil fuel corporation profits aren't conservative, but reactionary.
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