Given that the Senate would rather rush through a vote on unpopular Trump cabinet nominees than give the American people a chance to weigh in, I'm going to advise that you go on offense, and call your Senators (using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page, of course) to oppose the nominations of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General and Steve Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary. You can oppose Mr. Sessions because you're not convinced he'll protect either civil rights laws or the right of folks not to get shot to death by police before they've even been accused of a crime, and you can oppose Mr. Mnuchin not merely because he seemed to have a hard-on for foreclosing upon homeowners while running OneWest (with the aid of corporate welfare, naturally!), but because he "omitted" more than $100 million in personal assets in his December disclosures to the Senate. I was about to say you and I should have $100 million we can just forget about!, but if we did, we might also be hopelessly corrupt. Love of money does that, after all.
Speaking of going on offense, Rep. Conyers (D-MI) has reintroduced H.R. 676, the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, and you can call your Reps and Senators and urge them to support it. H.R. 676 would, of course, expand Medicare to include all Americans and thus create a single-payer health care system -- you know, like most other civilized nations have. People who oppose it like to say TEH CREEPING SOSHULIZM!!! and TEH TAXEZ WILL GOEZ UPZ!!!!!, but it's not "creeping socialism" so much as "creeping effective health insurance," one that would make controversies over uninsured folks and pre-existing conditions and out-of-network costs a thing of the past. And it wouldn't "increase taxes, either -- it would merely take the money you and your employer are already paying for your health insurance and call it a payroll tax. And it would reduce what you and your employer are paying, too -- after all, England and France famously pay less than half in health care expenses per capita what Americans pay. Why can't we have nice things, too? Merely because Our Glorious Elites don't want us to have them?
In other news, you've no doubt heard multitudinous reports that President Trump plans to slash trillions of dollars in government spending that actually helps people and actually exemplifies our values as a civilization -- you know, versus the kind of spending that merely funnels hard-earned taxpayer dollars to some government official's cronies, which is exactly the kind of Big Gummint Donald Trump seems to like. Per media reports, Mr. Trump would privatize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, zero out funding for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, eliminate Violence Against Women grants (because what else does a "pussy-grabber" do?), cut funding for renewable energy research, civil rights enforcement, and community policing -- and that's before we get to all the corporate welfare handouts, privatizing Medicare, cutting Social Security, and rolling back regulations on banksters. Is this what happens when 46% of the electorate elect a President? Not when 100% of Americans get to have their say about anything they want, at any time, regardless of whether or not Steve Bannon tells you to "shut up" or Trump votaries beg you to "give him a chance." Hence CREDO helps you oppose Trump's draconian, anti-American budget cuts.
Finally, Mr. Trump has lately signed an Executive Order that would allow work on the Dakota Access Pipeline to proceed more easily -- but his own investments in the pipeline have been of some interest in media reports. Mr. Trump held shares in Energy Transfer Partners and Phillips 66, two corporations involved in the pipeline's construction; a Trump spokeshack has announced that Mr. Trump has since divested in Energy Transfer, but we've heard nothing about his investment in Phillips 66. Hence MoveOn helps you tell Congress to require that the President prove he's divested from Phillips 66. I know plenty of reasonable-sounding but unscrupulous right-wingers are champing at the bit to reply that every President has cronies, and that since Mr. Trump's been more successful at business than all the other Presidents before him, his cronies will be more obvious. That objection would easily earn two counter-objections: 1) that we have an obvious interest in ensuring the President does not make decisions that directly benefit him, and 2) the fact that "every President has cronies" does not make it right. That's before we get to the meaning of "success" in the context of Donald Trump, which we could argue at least two ways.
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