Lucas,Corporate lackeys in Congress and the major media are trying to convince you that regulations meant to protect people from the ignoble impulses of Big Business are the worst thing that ever happened to our country.
Public Citizen -- as it has done for 40 years and counting -- is fighting to preserve regulations that prevent corporations from risking your health and safety in their incessant pursuit of profits.
Read on to learn more about why we need strong regulations and how Public Citizen is resisting the corporate assault on vital public protections.
Those who want to diminish or eliminate the ability of the people to set reasonable limits on the behavior of corporations seem to be forgetting recent history:
- A worldwide recession caused by Wall Street tycoons, many of whom are back to their old tricks, even after you and I bailed them out.
- 11 workers killed, more than 200 million gallons of oil spewed into the ocean, and incalculable ecological and economic devastation throughout the Gulf region as a result of BP cutting corners so it could make a few million more in profits.
- 29 miners sacrificed to Massey Energy's reckless greed.
- Thousands upon thousands of us sickened, injured or killed by bacteria-tainted food, lead-painted toys and malfunctioning cars.
We must not underestimate this threat. And your support is absolutely essential to our work to keep the playing field fair and to keep us all safe.
Please contribute $25, $50, $100 or more and give Public Citizen the strength to stand up to the corporate onslaught.
Congressional leaders have formally asked more than 150 corporations, trade associations and neoconservative think tanks to provide a wish list of consumer, environmental, public health and other protections to eliminate.
They got a huge response.
Make no mistake. This is the leading edge of an insidious movement to strip away regulations that keep our food safe, our air and water clean, and our economy from collapsing -- all with the aim of maximizing corporate profits that are already at record highs.
"Junk economics" is being used to mislead the public and attack regulations under the pretense that they cost jobs and limit economic growth. Public Citizen has examined the corporate "analyses." They're chock full of fake calculations and deliberately exclude the benefits of regulation.
We've launched a grassroots campaign to fend off the corporate assault on regulatory protections. We're going to profile victims of corporate wrongdoing to highlight the real-world impact of regulatory failure. We're going to deconstruct groundless claims about the "costs" of public protections -- and document the enormous benefits.
We're going to expose how members of Congress who propose eliminating regulations are really just doing the bidding of their corporate sponsors. We're going to offer expert testimony, publish reports, educate the public and build a broad coalition to turn back the attack on public protections.
Your generous support is critical to our campaign. Please contribute today.
Help Public Citizen get out the real facts on job preservation and growth -- irrefutable truths that we will use to expose corporate fallacies, reframe the debate and protect vital regulations.
Business is plenty good for business right now -- just not for workers. U.S. corporations raked in record profits of $1.678 trillion in 2010. Their failure to hire new workers has nothing to do with regulations.
Corporations and their apologists routinely overstate the costs of public protections and ignore their benefits. For example, citing cost estimates from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the corporate-funded Heritage Foundation says that more than a third of the costs associated with implementing regulations issued in 2010 is attributable to fuel economy standards. Yet Heritage fails to mention that the same agency also estimates that those standards would confer benefits worth three times the costs.
With your generous support, we're going to fight not only to hold our ground in the corporate attack on health, safety, environmental and other public protections -- we're going to push to regulate Big Business more strongly.
With your help, we'll win new rules so that corporate crime no longer pays.
We need stronger prescription drug safety rules and enforcement. The FDA is compromised because 50% of its budget for drug review and approval is provided by the pharmaceutical industry. As a result, the agency often seems more loyal to Big Pharma than to the public it is supposed to serve.
Since the adoption of drug company funding in 1992, the FDA has reviewed and approved a record number of new drugs that later had to be recalled from the market. In fact, Public Citizen research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association has shown that one in five new drugs was found to have a significant safety problem after it had been approved.
Corporations simply cannot be trusted to place your health and safety ahead of their bottom lines.
We need to regulate polluters to protect our health and the planet. Greenhouse gas and other pollutants threaten us with climate catastrophe, while worsening a virtual epidemic of asthma and other lung diseases. Stronger clean air rules will unleash a wave of technological innovation that will improve environmental health and reinvigorate our economy.
And, of course, we need much tougher rules on oil drilling to prevent a recurrence of the BP disaster.
Your help is urgently needed to turn the tide against Big Oil, King Coal and other dirty industries.
We need to regulate Wall Street and other big corporations to save jobs. The failure to regulate the financial services industry -- and to enforce existing regulations -- led directly to the Great Recession and the loss of eight million jobs (most of those in small businesses).
Public Citizen won the first steps in Wall Street reform last year thanks to the involvement of tens of thousands of our activists and supporters. With your continuing help, we will defend those gains and push forward for additional measures to protect consumers and our economy from predatory practices in the financial industry.
Corporations, emboldened by many new allies in Congress, are moving quickly to gut fundamental regulatory protections. Only an organized, vocal, highly visible, motivated resistance on our part can stop them, and I can't overstate the need for your help.
We need your support -- right now -- to ramp up our massive public outreach campaign and make clear to Congress the value of good regulations and what we all stand to lose without them.
We cannot allow -- we will not allow -- corporate greed to prevail over the public interest.
Please rush the most generous contribution you can to help Public Citizen defend public health and safety.
Thank you.
Robert Weissman
President, Public Citizen Categories: