Don't look now, but the House actually passed a decent bill at the end of last year -- H.R. 3309, the Innovation Act, a Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) production which received an unusually robust 325-91 vote in favor. The Innovation Act addresses that scourge of this new century, the patent troll. What's that, you ask? A patent troll goes around taking out patents on everything they can think of, not so they can create interesting and innovative things, but so they can sue people who create interesting and innovative things. Nice work if you can get it! But H.R. 3309 would stop these Actual Frivolous Lawsuits by requiring the plaintiff to specify exactly what part of the patent the defendant is violating, and would force losing plaintiffs to pay the legal fees of their defendants. That last part's important: the patent troll basically banks on you, the Actual Innovator, to give up and stop doing what you're doing because you can't pay to fight them in court. Now, the Senate must take up the bill, so the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell the Senate to pass the Innovation Act.
Meanwhile, the FDA has, as you know, issued guidelines for antibiotic use on factory farms, among them the requirement that veterinarians write prescriptions for those antibiotics. Previously, factory farms could get them without a prescription, but now they can't, and while some vets might fall for the factory farm line that they need these drugs to produce meatier animals, I suspect most vets won't, and in any case the FDA requirement that vets actually see the animals or visit the farms where they're kept would, I imagine, deflect corruption further. Still, the Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell the FDA to improve and maintain these requirements. In your letter, you'll call for (among other things) better public data collection on antibiotic use and ending antibiotic use that doesn't address a specific illness. Since some four out of five antibiotics still go to nominally healthy feed animals, and that makes diseases stronger as a result, you would not be histrionic to say our health is at stake.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to hold the line against the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" and legislation to fast-track "free" trade agreements, Public Citizen still helps you do that. The Camp-Baucus fast-track bill failed to gain any traction in the House or Senate, but we've all been around the block enough times to know that legislative bodies like to pass unpopular bills when no one's looking, which means we must be ever-vigilant, especially against a "free" trade agreement that would limit our internet freedoms and give corporations more "rights" to overturn our environmental and labor laws. President Obama's own trade representative has said that if the American people knew what was in the TPP, they'd oppose it, hence "fast-track" bills, which limit debate and forbid amendments. You'd think, in America, a bill the people oppose would be DOA, but our venal and stupid elites will keep any zombie animated. So we'll kill that zombie, over and over again.
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