You have basically two options.

1. vote for Democrats, and make sure your Democrat representatives know that you care a lot about consumer protections

2. make a shit ton of money so you can fight these companies on more even footing

Reactionary and minimal lawmaking. A cultural thing since wild west times, because of freedom-mindset. Lead to more and more influence of financial strong parties, lead to laws supporting said parties.

I'm not an expert in any of those areas and from europe, but that's how i understand the USA.

To make major, sustained, positive change would require widespread violent revolution.

Sorry I'm not american, but what is Pet Rent? never heard of that

Because non-ordinary people make the rules.

revolution i hear you say?

I just started listening to a new podcast series called Master Plan that talks about how this happened deliberately and systematically over decades. It followed the Powell Doctrine. You can hear a conversation between the primary host, David Sirota, and Brianna Joy Gray (she's not one of my favorites, but I tuned in because it was him) on Bad Faith podcast.

Not that I would recommend this, but I feel like the shittiness of business correlates in inversely with the public's opinion on molotov cocktails.

If your fucking business burns down weekly because you keep fucking people over, you're not going to stay in business very long.

It sounds like you need a tenants union.

Local organization is a great option. Not everything needs the federal government to come in and smack people.

We surely can do both, but you personally can start a tenants Union today.

1. Contact local counsel. There's probably an attorney who practices in rental law near you that does free consultations.

2. It's not that we don't have protections it's that we have an access to justice issue.

I'd argue it's because citizens have no voice. The media has there corporate narrative, but the public interest has very few organizations in advocacy of it.

Support local journalism (financially), work to break any media control on the narrative.

The first thing people could start doing is stop providing free labor to the media. It's all over Lemmy.

Don't link to a corporate news outlet. Link to an .edu or PBS or NPR or a quality international publicly funded news organization. Or better yet build your own narrative, your own opinions. Discuss your opinions respectfully on !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world . Build momentum and take away the corporate medias control.

Without a public voice advocating for the people, it will be very hard to change any legislation in the peoples favor.

Corporations tried out binding arbitration and the people just took it with very little complaining. So why not keep eroding consumer protections or the other rights citizens fought for in the before times?

It's just corporations and rich assholes running the show and they absolutely do not give a fuck about anyone but themselves, especially if the anyone is ~~poor~~ ordinary. The only way to solve the issue is to completely remove these entities from the equation and start making our own protections.

People don't fear for their lives when they fuck people over any more. We need to bring that back somehow. Ratfuckers should be fearful after they ratfuck somebody that they're going to get theirs.

We're peasants and there's nothing we can do about it.

a glitch that excluded my pet rent and water bill. I ended up with over $1,000 in late fees. Despite hours on the phone, it turns out their system doesn’t really do auto-pay and requires a fixed amount instead of covering the full rent

You got over $1000 in late fees from a single month of not having the full amount?