Roots Action helps you tell Congress to let crucial freedom-killing parts of the USA PATRIOT Act to expire. These include business record searches, roving wiretaps, and the nefarious Section 215, which the NSA uses to justify its data-vacuuming program. The good news? They're all going to expire on June 1. The bad news? Congress and the "liberal" media would never admit an actual debate on whether these sections of the PATRIOT Act protect us or hurt us -- they'll just wave the bloody shirt of terrorism and say you don't love your country if you're unwilling to let our government spy on your neighbors with less restraint than ever before, and certainly with less restraint than the Fourth Amendment demands. But now Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-WI) -- who did not author the PATRIOT Act, as is commonly supposed, but authored the anti-terrorism bill Tha Bush Mobb replaced with the PATRIOT Act -- has been circulating a letter to colleagues trying to get them to support an end to the enabling of wanton government spying; good for him, and good for anyone who supports this effort.
Meanwhile, you may recall a bipartisan energy efficiency bill from Sens. Portman (R-OH) and Shaheen (D-NH) in 2014 that should have been a bank shot for Congress, but wound up getting weighed down irrelevant and nefarious amendments, perhaps because it was an easy bill to pass, or maybe just because OBAMA!!!!! Anyway, the aforementioned Senators have reintroduced the bill, numbered S. 535, and though congress.gov doesn't have a text of the bill or a summary thereof as of this writing (which happens more frequently these days, for some reason), but the last bill would have provided the means for updated building codes and more efficient building construction, both of which would have helped businesses save money and create jobs. Brook no nonsense from any of your Congressfolk about how we're too broke to do such things, since these things would help our economy, not hurt it, like all of Congress's favorite corporate tax handouts do. The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell Congress to support efforts to make our buildings more energy-efficient.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to stop trying to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Seriously, the CFPB exists to protect us, consumers and citizens, from the predatory practices of Wall Street banksters, who are approximately the least popular people in America right now, so let Congressfolk eager to take the reaper's scythe to this nascent agency explain why they need to do that. No explanation that begins and ends with it's just another Big Gummint alphabet agency that we don't need will do -- everyone remembers the 2008 financial services meltdown, and everyone outside of Fox News audiences remembers exactly who did it to us: big banks and their ever-more exotic financial "instruments" designed to redistribute income from the folks who earn it to the folks who gamble with it. It would not be uncivilized to call banksters nihilists. But it would be uncivilized to let them do exactly as they please.
Comments