Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop trying to destroy the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a.k.a. SNAP, a.k.a. "food stamps." Moms Rising's email action tool helps you tell your Congressfolk to vote against any more cuts to SNAP, but it also helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject legislation restricting access to SNAP or radically changing its structure -- say, to a block grant program that could let states use food stamp money for purposes other than food stamps. This is a favorite trick of right-wingers, converting federal spending into block grants that states can spend as they like -- like, maybe, you know, to plug the holes they've blown into their budgets with their excessive tax cutting for rich folk and corporations. And converting SNAP into just such a thing won't actually reduce Big Gummint Spending, but it would make it a lot less effective in helping working families eat. Taking a decent-running government program and making it run a lot worse -- why, it's almost like that's the plan or something. I kid, of course -- I'd be a schmuck to think it's not a plan.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania's state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) is revising state oil/gas regulations, and, well, you know the drill: they're better than they were under Mr. Corbett. but not as good as they could be. The DEP's proposals don't prohibit leaky open pits drilling corporations use to store fracking waste, they don't mandate that drillers look around for abandoned and orphaned wells before drilling (since Pennsylvania has over 100,000 of those), and they don't force gas drillers to bring in clean water to communities whose water they've fouled up nor do enough to mitigate noise from drilling so people living nearby don't go nuts. And here's another drill you know: big gas corporations are trying to get the DEP to reject even modest changes, so they can keep making money hand over fist, your drinking and bathing water be damned. So the Sierra Club helps you submit comments to the DEP about their oil and gas regulatory proposals. (The Sierra Club also provides a sample letter here; it'll give you an idea of how your comments should look.)
Finally, the city of Philadelphia is, as you may know, negotiating a new 15-year franchise agreement with Comcast, which headquarters in our fair city, and the city will hold hearings next week in which good citizens can speak their mind about Comcast and its corporate citizenry. So Free Press helps you find a public meeting at which you, if you're a citizen of Philadelphia, may comment about your experiences with Comcast. You may remember that the city wouldn't release the results of the needs-assessment report it took by interviewing Philly residents -- well, I misspeak: it wouldn't release the report to the public, though it did apparently show the report to Comcast. That's not a good start for the city -- though, given the I-heart-business mentality of our Mayor, nominal Democrat Michael Nutter, it's not a tremendous surprise -- but at least the city was embarrassed enough to release the report to the public. Spoiler alert: people don't like Comcast, and would very much like to take this opportunity to get better corporate behavior from them. This renegotiation provides such an opportunity.
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