H.R. 1423/S. 610, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal (or FAIR) Act, would (as its title suggests) invalidate any arbitration agreement a corporation forces upon an employee or customer if the dispute concerns employment, product safety, antitrust law, or discrimination. These little "agreements," as you know, force you into an arbitration proceeding generally of your opponent's choosing, which denies you your rightful day in court and also very likely denies you a positive outcome. If this bill passes, we'll never have to hear, again, of folks who get raped in nursing homes but whose families can't sue, or folks whose lenders illegally renew thousand-percent loans but can't sue, or folks whose banks use their names to open fake accounts but can't sue. Really, these are not "frivolous" lawsuits. So Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our right to a day in court by passing the FAIR Act.
Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell our Army Corps of Engineers to reject the Pebble Mine project in Alaska's Bristol Bay. You probably know the drill by now: mining for copper in Bristol Bay will not only pollute good Alaskans' water and disrupt the unique and fragile ecosystem, but it'll also be the death knell for the Bristol Bay's sockeye salmon industry, one of the world's most famous salmon fisheries and one that supports 14,000 jobs. You probably also know that not even that most inveterate corporate defender, former EPA head Scott Pruitt, could see his way clear to approving the Pebble Mine project, and you probably also know that a lot of Pebble Mine's potential investors have gotten cold feet. But none of that is any reason to be complacent, since we are currently ruled by a President who thinks it's honest work to buy low, suck the wealth out of the resulting failure, and foist the burdens of that failure on the taxpayer. So let's make sure we do our duty.
Finally, a Change.org petition helps you tell Pennsylvania state legislators to cap insulin prices in that state. In days of old (and, who knows, maybe tomorrow, too), right-wingers would have decried such things as TEH PRICE CONTROLZ!!!!! But arguing against "price controls," here, would be the same as arguing in favor of big pharma corporations setting insulin prices so high that diabetics start rationing their insulin and then die. Is it naive to suggest that right-wingers will perhaps exercise some shame at the prospect of being called objectively pro-diabetic death? I kid, of course -- right-wingers tend to recast any shame they deserve as liberal oppression, at which point I say: c'mon, we're either the people who want to give everyone participation trophies or we're the people who are waiting for you in the parking lot with baseball bats, but we can't be both.
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