As you know, the Department of Labor lately issued rules mandating retirement account advisers (including pension advisers) to adhere to a "fiduciary responsibility" standard -- meaning they have to put their clients' needs ahead of their own. But two House bills (H.R. 4294 and H.R. 4293) would nullify these standards, and H.R. 4294 and H.R. 4293 would also amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, respectively, to codify old exemptions to the fiduciary responsibility standard and carve out new ones -- meaning that certain retirement advisers would continue to get to put their own mammon-worship ahead of your secure retirement, and thus our Congress encourages corruption. Sadly, both these bills have the sheen of bipartianship, with five Democratic co-sponsors each, but good Americans don't care about bipartisan government; we care about good government. So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject these fake retirement advice "reform" bills.
Meanwhile, Stanford University scientists have found that gas drillers practicing hydrofracturing (better known as "fracking") are directly injecting chemicals into shallow freshwater aquifers. You may recall that the "liberal" media flogged the EPA's 2015 report as "proof" that fracking was perfectly safe to drinking water and that folks who said otherwise were just alarmist or extremist, but the 2015 report actually found more evidence of water contamination (if not "widespread" contamination) than in past reports, and also admitted the constraints of its research (i.e., that the law allows frackers to keep their chemicals a "trade secret," and gas drilling corporations wouldn't cooperate with the EPA) -- and we should not really construe that as a thumbs-up for fracking. Word on the street is that the EPA's peer review board has expressed dissatisfaction with the 2015 report, so Penn Environment helps you tell the EPA to start over again and conduct a more thorough review of the threats to clean water, and to health, posed by fracking.
Finally, a Change.org petition helps you tell the Governor of Michigan to release Devontae Sanford. I didn't have to know that Mr. Sanford is serving 39 years in prison for a quadruple-murder to which someone else has since confessed -- I needed only know that Mr. Sanford is developmentally disabled and was only 14 at the time of the crime, meaning that even if he did kill four people, his predicament begged better care from the adults in his life, not hard time. And that was before I learned that the police questioned him without his parents or an attorney present -- and that he later said he only confessed because police promised him he could go home if he did. It sure seems like a lot of adults failed Mr. Sanford. And I'll suffer no guff about how we have to "teach kids responsibility" by putting them in prison. The time to "teach kids responsibility" is well before that, and if we as a culture are failing at that task, the solution isn't to send kids off to where we don't have to deal with them anymore. The solution is to stop failing.
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