CREDO helps you tell our government not to use unmanned aerial drones to spy on American citizens. Seems self-evident, right? Not to Congress, nor to the Obama Administration, which recently directed the FAA to issue regulations on using drones in domestic airspace, with no guidance from Congress as to how to protect our privacy. But that's what happens when our government listens to corporate lobbyists instead of listening to government's owners, the American people. And, of course, it's worse when they listen to corporate lobbyists who think of "civil liberties" as a "challenge" to be overcome, rather than as rights to be respected. I know, I know, establishing probable cause and getting warrants is all so "quaint" in our post-9.11 age. Well, color me conservative, then.
Meanwhile, word on the street is that AARP's CEO will meet with, and I quote, "powerful Washington establishment figures who are on record favoring cuts to Social Security and Medicare," while AARP staffers conduct a "listening tour" presumably aimed at ordinary folks. Who will they listen to? Us, of course, if we speak loud enough. After all, we worked for these benefits, and we all can think of other ways to cut the deficit that don't involve cutting a good program that doesn't even cause deficits -- closing offshore tax havens, letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, and raising taxes on millionaires, to name three that took me less than a second to come up with. So both the Campaign for America's Future and Firedoglake help you tell the AARP to stop with the cutting Social Security talk already.
Finally, the Indian government passed a patent law in 2005 preventing drug corporations from extending drug patents by making insignificant tweaks to their drugs. Yay for the Indian government! But the drug corporations won't take this lying down -- Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis is suing the Indian government, hoping to get the Indian Supreme Court (which plans to rule in eight days) to overturn the law. If Novartis wins, prices for dozens of drugs will automatically go way, way up, well beyond what citizens in the developing world can afford to pay. But wait, you may ask -- doesn't Novartis have intellectual property rights in this instance? Of course they do -- they just don't have a "right" to make insignificant changes in their drugs just so they can get around the law. Sum of Us helps you remind Novartis CEO Joe Jiminez of this fact.
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