Presente helps you tell the Gates Foundation to withdraw financial support from the GEO Group, a private prison corporation. You need not have a strong opinion of the Gates Foundation's (or, for that matter, the GEO Group's) good-evil orientation to support this effort, nor need you have an opinion on how badly prisons generally treat non-whites and immigrants. I support it for one simple reason: keeping folks in prison is our government's job, not a job our government should outsource to private corporations. When it's our government's job, that means it's our job, and even if our government monitors how well private corporations house and care for our prisoners -- which is no safe bet! -- that still puts a wedge between us and our government. It also makes prison corporations richer without rehabilitating prisoners or making communities safer. And to those who wail WHERE WILLZ TEH MONEYZ COME FROM TO RUNZ TEH PRIZUNZ!!!!: stop letting our governments give away our tax money to big corporations for "job creation," since corporations generally give that money to their CEOs and shareholders instead. One can find a lot of money there.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Senate to pass the Innovation Act, which would keep "patent trolls" from suing actual innovators into the poorhouse, then the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you do that -- using their Fix Patents call tool. What do patent trolls do? Patent trolls go around patenting the littlest and most common things they can find, so that when other folks make actually-useful things out of them, the patent trolls can sue them. Nice work if you can get it! Seriously, we've become a society that doesn't reward hard work anymore, and so it goes with patent trolls, who bank on you not wanting to go through the pain and hardship (and, ah, risk of bankruptcy) of a lawsuit so they can extort a settlement to go away. The Innovation Act would shift the financial burden of these frivolous lawsuits to the bad actors filing them, and would also make these bad actors cite exactly which parts of their patents they think are being violated. The whole patent-granting process in America still needs a considerable amount of reform, but the Innovation Act would do a lot of good.
Comments