The House plans to vote on "free" trade "fast-track" today, and Public Citizen, Food and Water Watch, and Sum of Us all help you email or petition your House Rep and tell them to reject "free" trade "fast-track." But you'll want to call, too: Campaign for America's Future helps you call, and NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, provides a toll-free number, 1.888.410.0619, that you can also use to call your House Reps. If "fast-track" does pass the House -- and that would likely be a one-vote victory with that last vote coming after a particular House Rep gets his or her arm twisted for several hours -- we'll keep fighting, by demanding that President Obama release the names and corporate affiliations of those who have had special access to TPP negotiations, as Common Cause helps you do, and by telling our Congressfolk to force publication of the TPP (which can be done by any member of Congress in a number of ways), as Demand Progress and a host of other organizations help you do. And remember, also, that if "fast-track" passes, that doesn't mean the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" automatically passes; it just means Congress won't be able to amend it, or debate it for more than an hour. But we'll bring the noise to that fight, too.
Meanwhile, our government has been very busy granting waivers from extra regulatory scrutiny to banksters who have actually been caught doing bad things (like rigging interest and exchange rates) so they can continue to provide retirement advice and planning to good Americans -- because someone who says "Yes, I committed a felony to steal more money from more people" is exactly who you want running your retirement program. So CREDO helps you tell the Department of Labor to hold public hearings on any bank waivers they're evaluating. The SEC, naturally, has already voted to give out these waivers, but the Department of Labor also gets a say in the matter. Oh, and speaking of the SEC, CREDO also helps you tell President Obama to replace Mary Jo White as the SEC's head. Ms. White has voted with Republicans to grant exactly those waivers we were just discussing, plus she ignored the millions of comments she got about campaign finance disclosure for publicly-traded corporations and shelved the proposal indefinitely. Her SEC has also allowed most lawbreakers to settle without admitting guilt. Mr. Obama needs to get someone in there who'll protect American shareholders, not banksters.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to end its toxic association with the American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC), then the League of Conservation Voters still helps you do that. As of this date, over 100 corporations have ended ties with ALEC, mostly over their support/promulgation of racist voter ID laws (and also over "Stand Your Ground" laws, which I personally don't blame for tragedies like the Trayvon Martin shooting, but I'm likely not in the majority opinion there), but lately they've been hemorrhaging members over their insistence that climate change isn't happening and attempts to deal with it will kill jobs (rather than the truth, which is that it'll "kill" a CEO's ability to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home). Yet Pfizer's official position on climate change is that yes, it is happening and yes, we should do something about it, so why hang on to ALEC? Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast to cut their ties with ALEC, as well. Because if you're going to dream, you might as well dream big.
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