The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell four Executive branch departments (Interior, Commerce, Treasury, and Agriculture) to implement laws regarding rewards for wildlife crime whistleblowers. The Obama Administration treats whistleblowers like traitors, but they're not traitors -- they're patriots saving the taxpayer money, and if they make our government look bad in the process, then our government deserves to look bad. Seriously, we can't be so defensive about Democratic administrations that we forget the difference between right and wrong. Congress mandated that these four departments implement whistleblower rewards for public servants who provide information about poaching and wildlife trafficking crimes that lead to convictions -- in 1981. For those of you keeping score, that was 34 years ago, more than enough time to foul up your first marriage to your high school sweetheart or realize you're on the wrong career track. Why should we ever make public servants wait that long to enjoy full protection under the law?
Meanwhile, some Congresscritter or other managed to get a poison pill into the most recent debt limit/budget bill, which now allows corporations to robocall your cell phone. Shades of the omnibus spending bill from late 2003, another "must-pass" bill that incorporated loosened media consolidation rules and loosened overtime regulations therein, even though both initiatives were wildly unpopular, and had even been voted down by both Houses of Congress that year. At least S. 2235, the HANG UP Act, would re-ban robocalls to your cell phones -- if we make the House and Senate feel our wrath, of course. Do not be swayed by politicians who contend that debt collectors have a right to contact debtors, because they don't have a right to make harassing robocalls, they don't have a right to harass relatives or references, and they don't have a right to keep calling numbers that have been reassigned to non-debtors (which harasses them). So Consumers Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the HANG Up Act, and keep robocalls off our cell phones.
In other news, hydropower corporations have launched the "Unlock Hydro" campaign, with which they hope to get bills like H.R. 8 passed, bills that would reduce hydropower corporations' responsibility to take clean water and thriving wildlife into account when they build their dams, bills that would switch federal and state responsibilities wherever doing so would allow hydropower corporations to evade their responsibilities as stewards of civilization. "Unlock hydro," indeed -- as if clean water and healthy wildlife are "locks," waiting to be sliced open by the sledgehammer of industry! Clean water and healthy wildlife aren't locks -- worshipping mammon such that you ignore your responsibilities is a far worse "lock" than any clean water regulation could ever be. And by "evading responsibilities" I don't just mean building without seeing what already lives there -- I mean pushing the cost of cleaning up any messes these hydropower corporations make onto the taxpayer, which is what, class? A bailout, simple and plain. American Rivers helps you tell your Congressfolks to reject these pro-money, anti-responsibility, and anti-clean water bills like H.R. 8.
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