The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has, apparently, not taken even one enforcement action against banks or debt collectors or credit card corporations over the last four months, and now it's soliciting public comments on a proposal to get rid of the "civil investigative demand" tool for its investigations, hoping that since you're not a lawyer, you won't say anything about it. But even if you're not a lawyer, you can look at the law describing the tool and see that its authors obviously built in safeguards to prevent governmental abuse. I must conclude, then, that the corporations who'll whine the most about this see any regulation of their activities as "abuse." Don't let the whiners win: Public Citizen helps you tell the CFPB to fulfill its legally-mandated duty to protect consumers from financial predators by preserving the civil investigative demand tool.
Meanwhile, S. 2471, the Granting Release And Compassion Effectively Act (or GRACE Act), would, as its title suggests, make it easier for criminals who are terminally ill to get a compassionate early release -- largely by requiring prisons to do better in notifying terminally prisoners of their options, and allowing prison staff and a prisoner's family members to help filing release requests -- and also make it easier for families to visit their terminally ill relatives while they're still in prison. We should interpret none of this as "being weak on law and order," since our civilization does (and should) value the quality of mercy. And the GRACE Act doesn't even ask all that much of us! I mean, Hollywood dark comedies aside, we don't presume that folks who can barely stand up for any length of time will go out and rob banks, do we? Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support merciful treatment of terminally ill prisoners by passing the GRACE Act.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our USDA to abandon its efforts to let pork processing corporations control far more of the pork inspection process, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Our USDA has already tried this with chicken earlier this year, but our activism against their attempts caused them to fail; perhaps they're figuring that fewer people eat pork than chicken and thus won't care as much. But folks do eat bacon, sausage, pulled pork, scrapple, and the like, so I suspect our USDA will find that it's calculated incorrectly. Speeding up processing lines and letting pork processing corporations do their own inspections won't just result in bad meat and sicker people -- in a nation where every incident of food poisoning in America seems to find its way to the news, I feel compelled to state again -- but it'll also result in more workplace injuries and more miserable workers. All that so pork processing executives can make more money! Does that sound like America to you?
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