As you know, the House passed H.J.Res. 111 a mere five days after its introduction in July, which means H.J.Res. 111 must be a bad, bad bill. And H.J.Res. 111 would nullify the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's regulation keeping banks from forcing consumers into arbitration (and thus out of our courts) to settle disputes. Banksters love talking about how consumers win more money from arbitration than from class action lawsuits, but they, ah, leave out a few things. One, consumers rarely win in arbitration; if you don't win, you collect zero dollars, so it's no consolation that someone else, somewhere, won thousands of dollars. Two, banks can use arbitration against you, and they almost always win when they do, which means you lose thousands of dollars. And if you have a better chance of bringing a bankster to justice in a real court -- and this is the banksters' real issue! -- you should put aside your own lust for "winnings" and actually, like, win. I know that's a novel concept in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, but I advance it nonetheless. So use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Senators and tell them to protect consumers by rejecting H.J.Res. 111.
Meanwhile, given the Trump Administration's zeal for putting military weapons in the hands of local police officers, Demand Progress helps you tell Congress to put an end to the 1033 program that allows our Defense Department to give local police departments military-grade weapons. Why would the police need bazookas? Not to fight crime, surely, since a bazooka (or a grenade launcher, or a machine gun, or a tank) is actually a very imprecise tool toward the end of apprehending suspects and interrupting crimes. But bazookas, grenade launchers, machine guns, and tanks are very good for crowd control, of course, and what with the rise in anti-trump and anti-Nazi wannabe rallies over the past eight months, the Trump Administration is very concerned with controlling crowds, regardless of what they tell you. If the Trump Administration were actually concerned with doing the people's will, rather than holding onto power and wealth by any means necessary, they wouldn't have to worry so much about all these protestors. But Congress created the 1033 program, via a 1997 defense authorization bill, and Congress can take it away, too. So let's encourage them to do that.
Finally, the good people of Mina la India, Nicaragua, are trying to keep the British mining corporation Condor Gold from mining for, you guessed it, gold in their locality. Gold! It's like they live in the 19th century. Doesn't matter that a Canadian corporation mined gold here for close to 20 years in the middle of the last century -- it only matters what the good folks of Mina la India want, which, sadly, doesn't seem to matter to their government, which has handed over more than half of the mining concessions Condor Gold possesses in the area over the last decade. The Condor Gold project threatens to displace families from their homes, destroy livelihoods, and pollute the waters, and the corporation has even gone so far as to sue the citizenry there. So here's where the Big Stick of Bad PR comes in: the Condor Gold project's second-largest investor is the International Finance Corporation, an arm of the World Bank; if we can get the IFC to pull its money from this project, this project will have a much tougher time succeeding, and the good folks of Mina la India will be closer to securing their future. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell the IFC to divest from Condor Gold's efforts to build a gold mine in Mina la India.
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