According to New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, it is critical work to force coal and other fossil fuel companies to start being honest about the damage they are doing to our planet. Schneiderman is out to prove that big oil and other fossil fuel businesses are no longer invincible when it comes to the … More Peabody Coal: Time to Come Clean
On July 14, 2005, three former child slaves filed a class action lawsuit in California federal court against Nestlé, Cargill, and Archer Daniels Midland for being trafficked and forced to work on the cocoa plantations of the Ivory Coast. The lawsuits seek to hold the companies liable for the torture, forced labour, and arbitrary detention … More Big Business Has Failed an Entire Generation of Children
Prison and jail communications is a $1.2 billion a year business. Securus Technologies, Inc. is leading provider of phone services inside the country’s prisons and jails serving approximately 2,000 correctional facilities and more than 850,000 inmates in 45 states. The company processes over one million calls per day. Securus’ website claims that its database contains … More The Recording of Prisoner Phone Calls: Privacy and the U.S. Constitution
Can anyone really make a career as a professional artist? According to the folks at the Academy of Art University, that is the “revolutionary principle” that has taken enrollment through the roof from 2,200 to 16,000, while bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenues from starry-eyed art students subsidized by federal … More Sheepskins and False Hopes: Financial Fraud Alleged Against the Academy of Art University
DeVry University is one of the nation’s largest for-profit colleges with nearly $2 billion dollars a year in revenue and over $1 billion dollars in market capitalization. Now, the government is accusing the school of deceiving consumers about the likelihood of finding a job. The Federal Trade Commission is suing DeVry for misleading consumers about the employment and … More Possible Debt Relief for Victims of For-Proft College False Advertising
Prison and jail phone calls, which typically cost much more than non-prison calls. Loved ones and friends have had to pay up $1 per minute to talk to an incarcerated parent. This is because many prisons and jails profit by granting monopoly telephone contracts to the company that will charge families the most. Prison phone contracts are based … More New Rate Caps for Prison Phone Calls
Much of the chocolate that consumers buy originate and are obtained from sources in the Cote D’Ivoire (“Ivory Coast”) in West Africa. The cocoa used to make this chocolate is harvested by slave laborers, many of whom are children not even 10 years old. Some are abducted and kidnapped, others are sold by its family … More Child Slavery: Chocolate’s Dark Side
Human trafficking is the fastest growing means by which people are enslaved, the fastest growing international crime, and one of the largest sources of illegal profits. (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime). $150 billion: ILO report, “Profits and Poverty: The Economics of Forced Labour” (2014) available for download here. According to the International Labour … More Modern Day Slavery: A $150 Billion Business
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA) Federal and state laws prohibit using an automated telephone dialing system to make or send unsolicited telemarketing calls, texts, and faxes. You could be entitled to $500 to $1,500 per call from any telemarketer who violates the TCPA. The law specifies several technical requirements for telemarketers to lawfully use … More The TCPA: Telemarketers Could Be Paying You $500 to $1500 Per Junk Text or Fax
The Law Office of Robert L. Teel 