First things first. The House may vote today on two more anti-consumer bills with somewhat unwieldy titles: H.R. 50, the Unfunded Mandates Information and Transparency Act, and H.R. 527, the Small Business Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act. H.R. 50 would actually require the Executive branch, before it proposes regulations, to take extra input from the corporations being regulated. Like corporations don't have enough say in everything! H.R. 50 would also require regulators to place far more weight on "foregone business profits" than the matter really deserves, as if spending money to do more to protect your customers is some kind of injustice. And H.R. 527 would stunt regulatory power in the name of "helping small businesses," as if small businesses are the ones dumping whatever they like in our air and water. Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose H.R. 50 and H.R. 527, and allow the Executive branch to carry out its regulatory functions, already granted by Congress, in a manner that allows the people, and not corporations, to have more say.
Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the EPA to reduce carbon emissions from aircraft engines. This notion doesn't come out of the blue -- airplanes pump out a lot of greenhouse gases, more than everyone and everything in South Korea put together, and more to the point, the D.C. District Court mandated in 2011 that the EPA make aircraft emission rules using the Clean Air Act for guidance; the EPA was supposed to finish "studying" the matter last year, but now plans to be done in April. And air traffic is only going to grow in the future -- folks may well reduce their automobile usage, and may even replace a big chunk of it with walking and bicycling, but their options for getting across the country if they have to simply aren't as varied. Yes, AMTRAK still runs plenty of trains, but that takes rather more time, and doesn't run to, say, Hawaii. And even if we worry about the difficulty of enforcing regulations across national borders, strong rules tend to bring your neighbors in line. Just ask California, whose landmark auto emission regulations are now America's.
Finally, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State helps you tell our government to reject spending public money on private schools. Why? Because apparently this week is "School Choice Week," brought to you by the Heritage Foundation and other organizations dedicated not only to destroying the public school system, but soaking up the taxpayer money that would go to the public school system. No one wants to outlaw private schools, but diverting public money to schools that can take whomever they like and which don't have to follow federal anti-discrimination laws is an odd way to fix whatever problems public schools have -- which problems, as you may know, have always been a bit overblown. Are some schools failing? Yes, some schools are failing, largely because the local economies around them are failing, which problem we can begin to fix by taxing millionaire income at 91% just like we did in the old days, and spending that money rebuilding our middle class. But diverting public money -- your money -- to schools that don't fix the problem, and make other problems worse? Ah, no.
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