Remember yesterday, when we discussed the Pennsylvania bills aiming to protect gays and transgendered folks from discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations? (Of course, if you remember anything about yesterday, you're doing a lot better than the "liberal" media typically does! But I digress.) H.R. 3185/S. 1858, the Equality Act, would do what the Pennsylvania bills would do at the federal level -- it would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act so that it would also prevent discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity. It would also empower the Department of Justice to bring complaints on citizens' behalf if they've been denied equal access to public resources (including public colleges) on the basis of the three items listed above. I guess the more clever right-wingers will squeal about EXPANDUD BIG GUBMINT!!!!, but I only hear that complaint when we expand our government's ability to work on our behalf -- when government wants to funnel taxpayer money to corporate cronies, I hear very little such complaining. CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight discrimination by supporting the Equality Act.
Meanwhile, no less a personage than former President Carter has called for all Congressional, gubernatorial, and Presidential campaigns to be publicly-financed. Various bills toward this end -- the Government by the People Act in the House, the famous Fair Elections Now Act in the Senate -- would set up a system that would match small donations; candidates could opt out of the system if they wanted, but doing so would almost certainly become a weapon against them in a campaign. The more right-leaning among us might opine that government should not be subsidizing political speech, but I think that philosophical objection pales before the reality of big corporations subsidizing political speech, which essentially elevates corporate "grievances" above the people's grievances, thus making what should be a right into a pay-to-play system. And I also think the conservative position would be to despise concentrated power anywhere, not just in government. So Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to loosen the death-grip of corporate campaign financing with a public system.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to close the "carried interest" loophole that allows hedge fund managers to pay a much smaller tax rate on their income, then Patriotic Millionaires helps you do that. Specifically, you'd be telling your Congressfolk to support H.R. 2889/S. 1686, the Carried Interest Fairness Act, which would essentially declare any money hedge fund managers make from all their hedge-funding to be "ordinary income," not capital gains, and thus hedge fund managers' income would (since they tend to make very large amounts of money) be taxed at the top rate of 39.6%, rather than at the top capital gains rate of 20%. When even Donald Trump instructs us that "hedge fund managers get away with murder," you can be sure that making sure hedge fund managers pay taxes just like the rest of us has very broad support. The only reason they don't is because they can extract tax breaks through campaign finance donations -- none of them are dumb enough to actually ask for a quid pro quo, but we're not dumb enough to conclude that such arrangements simply don't exist because they're unspoken. Money talks, as they say.
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