In response to growing pressure about promoting unhealthy food to kids and contributing to the obesity epidemic, the fast food industry did what every industry that produces a harmful product does: it pledged to voluntarily end the harmful practices that started drawing scrutiny to the industry. Accordingly, in 2006 the Council of Better Business Bureaus launched its Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI), a voluntary code of conduct under which fast food purveyors pledged to promote healthier food choices in their advertising, and to use messages encouraging good nutrition in ads aimed at kids.

As with other voluntary corporate codes, the CFBAI has proven more effective at staving off regulation of the fast food industry than protecting kids from predatory advertising and marketing practices. Since signing onto the Initiative, the fast food industry has found many ways to evade its purported intent and promote their unhealthy foods to kids more than ever.

The U.S. Supreme Court may continue its march towards permitting greater corporate "rights" in the case AT&T Mobility vs. Concepcion, scheduled for oral argument on Tuesday. If the Court sides with the telecom giant, it will greatly weaken rules regarding an individual's right to join class-action lawsuits, one of the most powerful legal tools available to citizens and consumers.

Class actions allow everyday Americans to join together and bring a single lawsuit in cases of widespread violations of individual rights. These suits are particularly useful when individual damages are relatively small, making it difficult or cost-prohibitive to bring an individual suit. A class action lawsuit allows wronged persons to band together, thereby making their claims more effective and efficient. Such aggregated lawsuits aim at deterring corporate misconduct regarding misleading consumer practices, unfair hiring practices, product defects, toxic pollution, civil rights violations, and other abuses. Class action suits have been highlighted in popular culture in films like Michael Clayton, (which dealt with a corporation’s violent reaction to a class action lawsuit filed by persons sickened by health effects from its lethal pesticides) or Erin Brockovich, involving a class-action suit against the world's largest utility company for contaminating the water supply with cancer-causing chemicals.