The National Women's Law Center helps you tell President Obama to stop federal contractors from retaliating against folks who discuss their pay with their co-workers. Why? Because comparing pay with co-workers is, oftentimes, the only way folks can tell they're getting screwed. Thankfully, the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act restores a worker's right to take action within 180 days after discovering the pay inequity in their paychecks (rather than within 180 days after the pay inequity began, as the Supreme Court would have had them do), yet many companies still have pay secrecy policies. Mr. Obama can issue an Executive Order telling federal contractors they can't do that anymore; it's not the Paycheck Fairness Act or anything, but it's a start. And he doesn't even need the approval of President Boehner or President McConnell! Still, we gotta stay on him.
Meanwhile, the EPA has released its proposal for new tailpipe emissions standards, and the Sierra Club helps you tell the EPA to adopt the strongest standards possible. The EPA would essentially apply California's tougher gasoline emissions standards across the nation, cutting sulfur in gasoline by 60 percent and nitrous oxides in gasoline by 80 percent. (You find both sulfur and nitrous oxides in smog.) Naturally, the oil corporations don't want to comply, even though automakers are more sanguine, since with the new emissions standards they won't have to build one car for California and one for the rest of the country. But I kinda think of clean air as priceless -- even beyond all the health care costs we'll save if our kids suffer less from asthma, or all the construction and plant jobs corporations will create to keep up with the new rules.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Pennsylvania legislature to pass a moratorium on fracking, CREDO still helps you do that. Why? Because Pennsylvania can't protect its citizens from the ill effects of fracking, well beyond their inability to inspect more than a tenth of state oil and gas wells. This is the state which allows municipalities to charge a piddling impact fee but prevents them from enforcing their own environmental regulations, the state whose own Department of Environmental Protection issues incomplete water reports to homeowners. And our legislators know as well as we do that fracking poisons the air and water -- why else did a few local state Senators slip a fracking moratorium for the counties around Philadelphia into the 2012 state budget? One day they'll have to actually drink fracked water. But it doesn't have to come to that.
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