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Proposal Details

Proposal ID	501
Proposal	PLATFORM: Consumer Protection
Presenter	Platform Committee presenter, Green Party of California sponsor
Floor Manager	David Strand
Phase	Closed
Discussion	07/19/2010 - 08/01/2010
Voting	08/02/2010 - 08/08/2010
Result	Adopted
Presens Quorum	31 0.6666
Consens Quorum	74 0.6666 of Yes and No Votes

Background

CONTACT:mGary Ruskin, 415-472-2859, gary.ruskin@gmail.com

The Green Party of California submits this amendment to update the 2004 platform, and to express our Green values in the more graceful style of the 1996 and 2000 platforms. We eliminated antiquated facts and references, and made the language more clear, concise, and precise.

The 2004 section on consumer protection was quite vague. We added planks to explain our Green vision on issues such as product safety, federal preemption, product labeling, whistleblower protection and consumer privacy.

The Green Party of California's delegation to the GPUS originally voted to approve this proposal in April 2010. In our state, we require 2/3rds for passage. Then, in the spirit of seeking consensus with Greens across the country, we attended 11 platform committee conference calls and read more than 500 suggestions posted on the GPUS Platform Committee website and created at the GPUS meeting in Detroit. Based on these ideas, as well as some of our own, our delegation edited our proposals by wiki and then voted again on these edits in July.

Proposal

Substitute the following language as the new text for the section called "Consumer Protection" in Chapter II of the GPUS platform.

Our position: Greens support strong consumer protections against fraud, dangerous products, usury, corporate greed and rip-offs.

Greens believe that prevention and justice are at the heart of consumer protection. Millions of lives will be saved or lost depending on the strength of our consumer protection laws. We aim to stop corporations and others from defrauding consumers or endangering them with defective products or negligence. We stand with consumers, who have been injured or defrauded by corporations and others, and support their efforts to redress the wrongs done to them. We stand with whistleblowers, who are often the public’s best protection against corporate crime, fraud and waste.

GREEN SOLUTIONS

1. Strengthen product safety standards and enforcement for a variety of products, including food, motor vehicles, pharmaceuticals and airplanes.

2. Restore state health, safety, and consumer protection laws by striking federal preemptions that weaken state law.

3. Preserve and expand product labeling requirements to ensure that consumers are informed about the origin, ingredients and ecological life cycle of all products, including animal testing and the product's organic, recycled and genetically-engineered content. Include information about the nutritional value and the vegetarian or vegan status of food products.

4. Prohibit corporations from concealing information about public health, labor conditions or environmental safety via protective orders or confidential settlements.

5. Expand class action rights against manufacturers of unsafe products and practices, and strengthen the civil justice system and supply the resources necessary to bring to justice to those corporations that injure innocent consumers.

6. Protect whistleblowers against demotion, job-loss and other forms of retaliation.

7. Oppose "tort reform" that undermines consumers' ability to seek redress, and "medical malpractice reform" that relieves negligent doctors of responsibility for injuring or killing their patients.

8. Grant consumers the right to limit collection and secondary use of personal information by any commercial entity.

9. Prohibit lenders and credit card companies from charging more than 12% annual interest, indexed for inflation, along with broad protections against unwarranted fees and other abusive terms.

10. Prohibit the widespread practice of price-gouging against women and the poor.

11. Repeal the mis-named Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 in order to restore Chapter 7 bankruptcy as a viable final safety net for consumers caught by health crises, unaffordable mortgages, credit card debts and student loans.

12. Ban the use of mandatory arbitration clauses in consumer contracts, which companies use to shunt consumers into anti-consumer and unfair dispute resolution processes.

13. Establish new independent government consumer advocacy agencies to protect the interests of consumers, and restore the U.S. Office of Consumer Affairs.

14. Support policies to encourage citizens, taxpayers, ratepayers and consumers to form Citizens Utility Boards to advocate for the public interest.

Resources

Time line: Compilation into new 2010 GPUS Platform upon completion of the voting on all proposed amendments.

Resources: Time and effort of volunteers to compile the platform

References

Visit the Platform Committee webpage for this proposal at: http://www.gp.org/committees/platform/comments/?p=571.

On the webpage, you can see various formats of the proposal created by the GPUS Platform Committee and the amendment proposal sponsors including the 2004 and 2010 texts side-by-side. You can also read and respond to comments from Greens around the country, including many who are not on the Green National Committee.

Here is the 2004 Platform text which is being replaced:

Consumers have the right to adequate enforcement of the federal and state consumer protection laws. Health and safety are of paramount importance, so we oppose lax or inappropriate regulatory actions.

a. Consumers should have the right to participate in decisions that affect their lives and protect their interests, beyond simply voting on election day.

b. We support the creation of consumer advocacy agencies in order to protect the interests of consumers against corporate lobbyists who have too often successfully argued before regulatory agencies against consumer rights. We would require legal monopolies and regulated industries (including electric, gas, water, and telephone utilities) to set up statewide consumer action groups to act on behalf of and advocate for consumer interests.

c. We call for better information for consumers about the products they buy, and where and how they are made. We endorse truth in advertising, including the clear definition of words like “recycled” and “natural.”

d. We defend the rights of individuals to participate in class action lawsuits against manufacturers of unsafe products. We call for restrictions on secrecy agreements that may prevent lawsuits by not revealing damaging information.

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