Congress Investigates Carriers' Debt Collections

Julie188 writes "'Tis the season for the government to crack down on abusive practices by your secretly evil national wireless carrier. Next up: a congressional committee will be looking into a debt collection practice that prevents customers from filing lawsuits. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) will be examining a contract clause that forces customers to waive their right to sue and instead agree to forced arbitration. He is hot on the tails of the carriers after a similar investigation of credit card companies lead to nine banks removing the forced arbitration clause from their contracts. This follows the week's earlier news that the FCC was going to try to come up with new rules to prevent wireless bill shock."

Comments

If you need an honest man

[ciaran_o_riordan]

I think Dennis Kucinich is someone that can be trusted to look after the people instead of pandering to business.

Re:If you need an honest man

[dkleinsc]

He's no communist, and he's definitely not a kook. He's my congressman, and I've spoken with him at several public events. The thing is, he has throughout his career taken stands that upset the rich and powerful, so they often do their best to portray him as a kook.

For instance, the most famous episode from early in his political career (as mayor of Cleveland) was refusing to sell Cleveland's municipal power company to the private company that controls most of Ohio's electricity market. The electric company's pals at the banks then threatened the city with default rather than rolling over the debt as they had been doing for decades. Dennis stood his ground, the banks made good on their threat, and Kucinich lost his reelection bid. But in the long run he saved residents and businesses in Cleveland millions of dollars in electric bills.

His more recent exploits include:
  * Refusing to support the Patriot Act.
  * Refusing to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He consistantly votes against appropriations for those wars, and has been doing so since before they started.
  * Introducing articles of impeachment against both George W Bush and Dick Cheney.
  * Acting as one of the leaders of the backbencher holdouts for a public option in the health care reform bill. Unfortunately, Obama was able to convince him that HCR without a public option was better than no HCR, so he eventually voted for it.

The Democratic leadership doesn't give a damn what he does, though, because he's not good at getting oodles of lobbyist dollars (gee, I wonder why). So when he was running for President in 2008, the questions he got during debates were about whether he'd seen a UFO, not about his plans for reforming health care without mandating that everyone buy insurance.