Are you tired, good citizens, of seeing banksters continue to flourish in Our Ongoing Economic Armageddon, while the rest of us scrape by? Of course you are. And do you want an America where our financial titans engage in activities that actually help small businesses succeed and that actually help create jobs and better products and processes -- rather than simply enrich its biggest actors in an ongoing game of roulette? Then Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a financial speculation tax (or "Robin Hood tax") that would slow down all the volatile, software-driven, "high-speed" trading Wall Street does. While Rep. Ellison (D-MN) has introduced a bill that would institute this tax -- or, rather, reinstitute it, since such a tax did exist in America until the early '70s -- Public Citizen wouldn't make you support that particular bill, if you think (like me) that a financial transaction tax should be higher (say, one percent) than the figures that get bandied about in the Beltway, which range from 0.03% to 0.5%.
Lately, the House of Representatives voted against letting VA doctors discuss or recommend medical marijuana to their patients for the next calendar year. But does good news come from this development? Of course it does -- despite the Republicans' current 60-vote majority in the House, the vote itself failed only by a mere three votes, and that's called progress, especially in a society that has long completely overreacted to the threat posed by pot. Though these wheels grind slowly, the powerful are coming around to the superior wisdom of the electorate in this instance. And H.R. 1538/S. 683, the CARERS Act, would let states legalize medical marijuana without worrying that the federal government will shut them down, would let VA doctors recommend medical marijuana to the soldiers who need it, and would let researchers work on pot without worrying the feds are going to bust their door down. So the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to loosen medical marijuana restrictions so the people can benefit.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to keep unlabeled Chinese chicken out of our school lunches, then Food and Water Watch helps you do that. How does this happen? As we noted earlier this week, country-of-origin labeling for meat, fruit, and vegetables began in America in 2008, but the law doesn't require country-of-origin labeling for processed foods from other countries, and though the USDA has banned Chinese raw chicken from coming here, noting the Chinese government's laxity with food safety regulation and inspection, the USDA still green-lighted shipments of Chinese processed chicken here, though the same lax regulation and inspection regimes apply. The good news? Your Congressfolk are as sensitive to the Big Stick of Bad PR as anyone else, and with the recent news that American fast food eateries in China somehow got Chinese processed chicken for their nuggets, it'll be harder for even the most noxious teabagger to wield the Big Stick of Let the Corporations Do Whatever They Want.
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