As you know, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) has issued its long-awaited payday loan rules, and now the public gets the chance to comment upon them, so Stop Payday Predators helps you tell the CFPB to implement the most vigorous payday lending regulations possible. The REGULASHUNZ IZ TEH EVULZ!!!! crowd won't approve, but haters gonna hate, and the CFPB's proposal would curb the worst excesses of payday loans, car title loans, and the like, mainly by mandating more stringent credit checks and restricting rollovers. I guess the right-wing answer would be people should pay their debts! Such a statement should earn no praise, since no one has ever said people shouldn't pay their debts, but right-wingers would do better to say creditors shouldn't trap people in debt. Then again, blaming the victims, not the perps, is the right-wing way. And when fewer than one in six payday loan borrowers can pay the loan back before their next paycheck, you know something's wrong with the system, not the people.
Meanwhile, the defense authorization process has, as you know, been weighed down by a series of right-wing legislative proposals that would never pass as stand-alone bills and have little or nothing to do with national defense. But one amendment, courtesy Senators Murphy and Paul, would prevent our government from shipping bombs to Saudi Arabia until they do more to protect civilians in their war with Yemen, and another (courtesy Sens. Udall and Lee) would stop our government from shipping arms to Syrian fighters unless the Secretary of Defense can certify that those arms aren't finding their way to al-Qaeda or ISIS. It's not too much to ask for better behavior from our nominal allies before we send them killing machines -- I mean, being an ally doesn't mean signing on to every stupid thing your allies do, just as being a friend doesn't mean signing on to every stupid thing your friends do. If Our Glorious Elites have forgotten such lessons, we must remind them. Hence Just Foreign Policy helps you tell your Senators to support the Murphy-Paul and Udall-Lee defense authorization amendments.
Finally: Pennsylvania residents, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislators to support fairer redistricting in the Commonwealth, then Fair Districts PA still helps you do that. HB 1835 and SB 484 would change the state constitution so that, instead of party-controlled legislatures drawing Rorschach-blot legislative districts that deliver their party unearned victories, an independent state commission consisting of the four party leaders in the state legislature and a fifth member (chosen by the other four or, if things get dire, the state Supreme Court) who is not "a local, State or Federal official" and who would chair the commission. Putting redistricting to such a commission, rather than a legislature controlled by one party or the other, would go much further toward giving us, as they say, a state where voters choose their legislators, rather than one in which legislators choose their voters. You need only look to Iowa, where the Congressional districts are fairly-evenly matched and competitive every two years, to know that fair redistricting is no pipe dream.
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