A11. Consumer Protection

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Platform - Green Party US
  II. Social Justice
        A11. Consumer Protection

The Green Party supports strong consumer protections against fraud, dangerous products, usury, corporate greed and rip-offs.

We 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.

We recommend the following actions:

• Strengthen product safety standards and enforcement for a variety of products, including food, motor vehicles, pharmaceuticals and airplanes.
  
• Restore state health, safety, and consumer protection laws by striking federal preemptions that weaken state law.
  
• Preserve and expand product-labeling requirements to ensure that consumers are fully 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. Require stringent "Eco-Labeling" requirements which show the "environmental impacts associated with the production or use of a product." This may include land use, water use, waste byproducts, emissions, and more.
  
• Prohibit corporations from concealing information about public health, labor conditions or environmental safety via protective orders or confidential settlements.
  
• 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.
  
• Protect whistle blowers against demotion, job loss, and other forms of retaliation.
  
• 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.
  
• Grant consumers the right to limit collection and secondary use of personal information by any commercial entity.
  
• 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.
  
• Prohibit the widespread practice of price gouging against women and the poor.
  
• Repeal the misnamed 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.
  
• Ban the use of mandatory arbitration clauses in consumer contracts, which companies use to shunt consumers into anti-consumer and unfair dispute resolution processes.
  
• Establish new independent government consumer advocacy agencies to protect the interests of consumers, and restore the U.S. Office of Consumer Affairs.
  
• Support policies to encourage citizens, taxpayers, ratepayers and consumers to form Citizens Utility Boards to advocate for the public interest.