Checking Corporate Power
Over the last three years, I built sustained national movements to end forced arbitration — the fine-print “ripoff clauses” that corporations use to block consumers and workers from holding them accountable when they break the law.
In 2016 and 2017, I led a national coalition of 375 groups in a high-stakes campaign to defend the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)’s arbitration rule from Congressional repeal. My campaign drove over 100,000 grassroots comments in less than three months and collected nearly 100,000 additional signatures urging Congress to protect the final rule. In the end, Vice President Mike Pence cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to gut the reform. But my campaign advanced further than ever expected, and public opposition to these abusive practices shot up to unprecedented levels.
In 2018, I built another nationwide campaign from the ground up to defend investors’ ability to hold corporations accountable for fraud. Forced arbitration of investor claims remains a live issue at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Flipping the Electoral College
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, some friends and I immediately began organizing a digital campaign to block Trump from office. Launched just one week out from election day, DemocrEC had the distinction of being the first web portal to allow voters to urge members of the electoral college to honor popular vote. Our innovative platform enabled users to contact electors directly without exposing either side’s personal information.
I directed our strategic communications, embracing what was very bold messaging at the time: declaring Trump an illegitimate President-elect. As the campaign’s primary spokesperson, I made the case for flipping the electoral college in major media profiles and live interviews, even recruiting celebrity endorsers. In just five weeks, the movement to subvert the electoral college toward democratic ends went from being dismissed as a pipe dream to being debated in mainstream discourse. In the end, DemocrEC sent over one thousand personalized emails to electors in dozens of states per week, and our rhetoric was immortalized in an Saturday Night Live skit (coincidence? Maybe not).