Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI) has been busy, first lending his name to a "fast-track" "free" trade bill so corporations can run roughshod over our lives even more than they already do, and then introducing a tax "reform" bill that would gut the Earned Income Tax Credit, cut taxes for top income earners again, continue to tax dividends and capital gains at a lower rate than other forms of income, and let corporations continue to shove profits overseas so they can avoid paying their taxes on it. You see a theme here? I bet you do -- screw working folks and all praise Our Glorious Captains of Industry, though these Captains do little these days other than redistribute their workers' wealth upward to themselves -- and, you know, crash the economy every few years. And Mr. Camp puts forth this plan not even eighteen months after the President wouldn't shut up about taxing the rich a little more and still won a second term. It's really like they don't listen to anyone at all. So we make them listen: Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Camp tax "reform."
Meanwhile, California legislator Richard Bloom has introduced the Orca Welfare and Safety Act, which would ban keeping Orcas in captivity in California. Don't laugh, and don't say "only in California," either -- Scientific American's Board of Editors argued in their March 2014 issue that orcas and elephants, being intelligent and social creatures, shouldn't be held or raised captive in zoos or water parks at all. And n.b. that the Sea World orca named Tilikum has now killed two trainers, whereas wild orcas (despite being called "killer whales") don't attack people at all. An Orca can be 32 feet long and weigh 22,000 pounds, so keeping an Orca in a 40-foot-by-60-foot tank would be like you or I spending our entire lives in a closet. Sound like a good idea? Possibly Mr. Bloom's bill actually trails the popular will, as killer whale shows at water parks draw smaller crowds, and Sea World has received a lot of bad PR due to the documentary Blackfish and a recent Animal Welfare Act bust. So Sum of Us helps you tell the California state legislature to ban the practice of keeping orcas in captivity.
Finally, Free Press reminds us that the only corporations that really benefit from the absence of strong net neutrality rules are service providers like AT&T and Comcast and Verizon -- other internet-based corporations, like Google, Amazon, Netflix, Yahoo, and Facebook, stand to lose from the absence of net neutrality rules. Now perhaps you're saying all those corporations are too big to worry about being shut out of a regime where the big telecoms tell everybody where they can go on the internet. But just because they can pay the AT&Ts and Verizons and Comcasts of the world bajillions of dollars to keep their content flowing on the internet doesn't mean they want to. And I'll bet at least one of those corporations has an executive who remembers what it was like to build something out of nothing, which will be a much less frequent occurrence in a post-net neutrality world. And the FCC's new Chair, Tom Wheeler, is a former telecom lobbyist himself -- meaning he's only likely to listen to pro-net neutrality arguments if they come from other big corporations. So Free Press helps you tell Google et cetera to fight for strong net neutrality regulations.
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