Sign Here Now helps you tell Congress to force American corporations to bring back the more than $2 trillion they've socked in offshore tax havens and pay their fair share on it. That last part's important -- even some Republican Presidential candidates favor bringing that money back home, but they also favor those corporations paying far less than the 35% corporate tax rate on it. So those corporations can "create jobs," they'll say, even though the last corporate tax amnesty from 2004 didn't result in a whole lot of job creation -- in fact, some of the corporations that brought home the most money back then cut jobs and paid out the profits they returned to shareholders. That's not a way to create jobs -- giving corporations no choice but to create jobs is how you create jobs, since corporations all seem to regard jobs as an "expense," rather than an engine of economic development. Plus letting corporations bring home profits at a lower rate only makes them sock more money overseas. Your mama taught you that enabling bad behavior creates more of it; why don't our Congressfolk know that?
Meanwhile, USPIRG helps you tell Congress to ban antibiotic abuse in feed animals. Factory farms, as you know, give nearly four out of every five antibiotics produced in America to healthy feed animals, partly to make them "meatier" and partly so they can better endure the horrendous conditions they'll face in factory farms (standing in absurdly small areas, usually in their own poop, et cetera). But we know that creates superbugs, and USPIRG projects that some 80,000 Americans will get the infamous superbug MRSA this year, and since MRSA can't be killed with the antibiotics we have, it's too often deadly, killing around 11,000 good Americans every year. It's not the only thing causing antibiotic-resistant superbugs, but when we're using four out of five antibiotics on animals that aren't actually sick, we know it's contributing a lot. And no, the end of routine antibiotic use on factory farms won't mean TEH END OF CHEAP FOOD!!! But if it did, wouldn't it be worth it, you know, not to have to go back to the 19th century where the next cut you get could kill you?
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to stop Charter's attempt to buy Time-Warner Cable, then Common Cause still helps you do that. We applied enough pressure to help stop Comcast's attempt to buy Time-Warner, but this merger will be little different: it would create another cable/broadband behemoth like Comcast, and the resulting behemoth would control both the New York and Los Angeles cable and broadband markets, and are good New Yorkers and Los Angelenos less deserving of cable and broadband choice than the rest of us? Not that we have very much of it, either -- most markets are dominated by one provider or another, meaning consumers become captive to whatever lousy service that provider wants to charge ever-higher prices for. And don't let right-wingers tell you that you have information choices on the internet, for these are the same people trying to kill the net neutrality that allows you the choice you have, and having a choice of one corporation providing that internet service is little better than voting in a Communist election.
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