Scott Pruitt's hearings for EPA Administrator begin today, so you can use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to call your Senators and tell them to reject Mr. Pruitt's nomination. Mr. Trump's Cabinet nominees have hit upon a fairly clever mantra in their hearings: that their past extremism doesn't matter if their job in the Cabinet will be to enforce the law. But that mantra doesn't even work with Mr. Pruitt, for his current job in Oklahoma as state Attorney General is to enforce the law, but he's left good Oklahomans in the lurch time and time again when he had to choose between enforcing the law and placating some big campaign donor. You think he won't leave America in the lurch, too? Ideologues like Mr. Pruitt and Mr. Trump say regulations get in the way of job creation -- but no corporation creates jobs if it can get away with it! And regulations do create jobs for the people who help corporations comply with them -- the people who help redesign and rebuild power plants, for example. And, really, clean air and clean water are far too vital to leave up to corporatist ideologues.
Meanwhile, Sign for Good helps you demand that the Department of Justice (whoever runs it!) require that law enforcement agencies report all deaths of folks in custody. The DOJ already has the power to do this, too, with authority granted by the Death in Custody Reporting Act, and to folks who reflexively respond that we should just "let police do their jobs," I'd respond: is killing people who have not been convicted of a crime, whether accidentally or deliberately, part of their job? And seriously, what do police officers have to hide? If an unusually high number of Americans die in custody in a particular town, why shouldn't the rest of the town's residents know that? Particularly since, you know, it might directly impact their lives? You won't find a Trump Attorney General who'll agree with you, of course -- Mr. Sessions, during his hearings, has said the Justice Department needs to be more of a "partner" to police. Of course, I'm only satisfied when the police is a partner to the American people. And just because Mr. Trump ain't with us doesn't mean we shouldn't speak out -- if anything, we should be more persistent.
Finally, from the "Dystopia is happening now!" file: did you know that harvesting pregnant horse blood was a thing? Apparently, it is -- (mostly) European pharmaceutical corporations hook up pregnant horses to machines that drain their blood, which often leads to shock, anemia, collapse, and, as you might imagine, death. Why do they do it? Because the blood of a pregnant horse, and only a pregnant horse, contains a hormone used to regulate the reproductive cycle of pigs (and therefore meat production) at factory farms. Always it seems to come back to factory farms! Is it really so great that most Americans don't produce any of their own food anymore? Of course, the horse's story gets worse: no one tells the corporations when they should stop drawing blood -- though you'd think they'd be smart about it, and not take so much that they kill the horse! -- and these corporations also induce both pregnancies and abortions in the course of their work. Next time someone says big pharma corporations are vampires, now you can say "you don't know the half of it!" Avaaz helps you tell the EU to stamp out the pregnant horse blood trade.
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