Congress did hold hearings last week on the as-yet-untitled-and-unnumbered Thune/Upton bill that would purport to achieve net neutrality objectives while hamstringing the FCC from achieving those objectives with the authority the Legislative branch has already given it; the hearings did not, apparently, result in a bill actually being proposed (congress.gov has no bills from either Sen. Thune or Rep. Upton at the time of this writing), but you can look at a "discussion draft" of the bill here. It's a short read, a little over six pages, and it confirms our suspicions that the bill does not actually achieve net neutrality -- it fails to define "reasonable network management," and it should, since that's the exception to all of its proscriptions on blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. Plus it also strips the FCC of its authority to do these (and other) things, almost like that's the whole idea. So Common Cause helps you tell your Reps and Senators to reject the Upton/Thune net neutrality "solution."
Meanwhile, as we're all too aware, Republicans control both houses of Congress now, making passage of campaign finance disclosure laws -- especially in the Senate, whose Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, equates campaign finance disclosure law with "bullying" -- a daunting if not impossible task. But President Obama, who had some tough talk about "dark money" ads in his most recent State of the Union address, has the power (granted to the Executive branch by a past Legislative branch, and not repealed by the current Legislative branch) to change the game, and not even by putting pressure on the very, very recalcitrant Securities and Exchange Commission: he can issue an Executive Order mandating that any corporation that does business with our government disclose its political spending, and Public Citizen helps you tell the President to do just that. Right-wingers complain this violates corporations' "privacy," as if a corporation is a person and not a thing. But we have the right to know what corporations receiving taxpayer money -- our money -- do with it.
Finally, Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators and Governors to ban fracking in your state; just find the state in which you live and click on it, and write yourself a letter. Why ban fracking? Because gas drillers can't do it safely -- they can't do it without befouling the air and water, particularly the water, and they can't do it without ratcheting up climate change radically, since the methane gas escaping from fracking wells traps much more heat than even carbon dioxide does. And why do we dare hope our state will do it? Because New York state, sitting on a massive chunk of Marcellus shale, did just that, and their Governor, Andrew Cuomo, is certainly no liberal. Perhaps he hoped the science would tell him fracking was OK for our air and our water (certainly the gas drilling industry employs enough scientists who'll tell you that), but it didn't, and it may be a long time before the gas industry figures out how to get the gas out without allowing massive amounts of carcinogens and other toxins to enter our water tables and endanger our health. Certainly we don't need to be their guinea pigs until then.
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