The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell the EPA and President Obama to regulate methane pollution from the oil and gas industry. Currently the EPA does not regulate methane pollution, which accounts for less than one-tenth of all the pollution we spew into the air but is, pound for pound, much worse for the climate than carbon dioxide, which must be why the methane mitigation industry (which seals leaks from gas drilling wells) is taking off in America. Oil and gas corporations won't like it, and I'll bet they'll cite falling oil prices as a reason for government inaction -- as if anyone who actually buys gas could possibly find that reasoning sympathetic, particularly if they know that oil prices were that high in the first place mainly because of speculation, or if they remember that people bashed Mr. Obama when oil prices were high, as well. And no you are not a hypocrite if you're trying to ban fracking and ask the EPA to regulate a by-product of fracking -- you're merely trying to fight for the common good on every front.
Meanwhile, Mr. Obama has directed the Department of Labor to revise and simplify overtime pay rules. I'm old enough to remember when overtime was a big deal -- specifically, in 2003, when Tha Bush Mobb's Labor Department tried to make it harder for workers to get overtime, and America's Congressfolk were so bombarded by letters from their constituents that they actually voted against the Bush rules in legislation. Tha Bush Mobb's Senate lackey, Bill Frist, eventually folded the overtime rules into (get your surprised face ready) end-of-year omnibus spending legislation, but we'd made our point rather emphatically, and now we have a chance to get some real work done. Overtime rules currently cap the salary at which people can get overtime at a mere $23,000 annually (which, to be fair, Tha Bush Mobb Labor Department actually raised, from $8,000 annually); Moms Rising helps you tell the Department of Labor to raise that cap to $69,000 annually. No this won't "kill jobs" -- actually, it would force corporations to hire more people, so they pay less overtime, and this is one of the reasons we have overtime to begin with.
Finally, we recently passed the 21st anniversary of the Clinton-era North America Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, though a better name would be SHAFTYA, because that's what it's done, both to American workers whose jobs got magically changed into Mexican ones, and also to Mexican workers who found themselves trapped as wage slaves in American corporations. And our current Democratic President, having apparently learned nothing from the last one, still pushes the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" and its attempts to subjugate American law to the whim of "investor-state tribunals" who will always come down on the side of some corporation's "right" to pay its workers in dung pellets and dump poisonous crap in our air and water. The TPP has, as you know, received rather little coverage from the "liberal" media, and even less critical coverage. Why? Because they fear our anger, that's why -- which we can make manifest by letting Public Citizen help us tell our Congressfolk to reject "free" trade agreements like the TPP that make a mockery of the rule of law.
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