Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our government to regulate CEO compensation as vigorously as the Dodd-Frank financial reform law requires. "Or perhaps more vigorously," you may be tempted to add, but it's been six years since the financial services meltdown, and over four years since Congress passed Dodd-Frank -- and regulators still haven't produced a strong rule preventing CEOs from benefiting financially from the catastrophes they cause. And they surely did benefit: executives at Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns squirreled away $2.5 billion right before their corporations melted down. Where is the incentive for banksters to do things the right way -- you know, by loaning out money to other businesses that have an actual shot at doing something that would make all our lives better -- if CEOs constantly benefit from failure? It's well past time to reintegrate them into civil society and restrain them from running roughshod all over the rest of us, and the first step is calling them to account when they fail. A truly free market would demand no less.
Meanwhile, funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program (or CHIP) will expire in September of 2015, so MoveOn helps you tell Congress to ensure that they continue funding CHIP without any interruptions. Yeah, I know, September 2015 is eleven months away, but consider that Congress goes so far out of its way to do nothing that could actually benefit its owners, the American people. Consider, also, that since its passage in 1997, CHIP has cut the number of uninsured children in America almost in half -- in fact, 93% of all American children now have health insurance, versus 87% of the adult population. Now that's a record of success that could put it in the Tea Party's sights -- and most of them don't have the couth to pretend they like children's health insurance but they don't like Big Gummint's involvement in it. And the fact that CHIP funds go from our federal government to our state governments in the form of a block grant -- which was, you know, conservatives' favorite thing back in the day -- probably matters less to them than getting attention for being a snot. Let's discourage bad behavior by reassuring our Congressfolk that CHIP is still the people's will.
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