The House of Representatives has begun debate on its own Farm Bill, and where the Senate bill would cut food stamps by $4 billion over the next 10 years, the House would cut $20 billion over that period -- and that wouldn't actually reduce the deficit very much, but would cut off two million folks from food stamps, including almost 300,000 children who get free school meals. These social programs, you see, don't actually cost very much money in the grand scheme of things, but they do a lot of good for a lot of people, so cutting them actually hurts people more than, say, cutting $4 billion in annual oil subsidies would ever hurt an oil industry awash in profits. And hello! The economy still sucks out there, meaning more and more Americans have trouble just getting food to their tables. In this country of plenty, no less! The AFSCME helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose food stamp cuts.
Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep atrazine out of our drinking water. Atrazine is a fairly effective and inexpensive weed killer, and we use over 75 million pounds of it annually. But of course when I said "inexpensive" I only meant "for its producer": for the rest of us, who'll pay with breast and prostate cancer and birth defects and reproductive issues, atrazine is quite expensive, and we'll likely drink some of it today, since the United States Geological Survey has found atrazine in at least 80% of our streams and 40% of our ground water. The European Union banned atrazine back in 2004, but the EPA hasn't done anything about it despite acknowledging its toxicity, and atrazine's manufacturer, the Swiss corporation Syngenta, reported $1.6 billion in profits as recently as 2011. You know what that means, good peoples? That means it's up to us. As usual.
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