Senate hearings for Rep. Tom Price's nomination as Health and Human Services Secretary began yesterday, and Steve Mnuchin's hearings for Treasury Secretary begin today, but you can express your opposition to both with one phone call and two sentences, using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page. Your Senators need to know that Rep. Price's oft-stated desire to privatize Medicare makes him unfit to administer Medicare to our nation's seniors, and that Mr. Mnuchin's mania for making unearned millions off unfortunate foreclosed homeowners makes him unfit to head up our nation's Treasury. For Rep. Price, though, you could also cite simple corruption, as Judy Stone, writing at Forbes, summarizes here. The big story lately has been CNN's report that Mr. Price introduced a bill that would benefit Zimmer Biomet literally days after investing in Zimmer Biomet himself, but Ms. Stone's article documents a years-long pattern of corruption that's pretty hard to ignore. Even, perhaps, by the Diaper-Loaded-Brat-in-Chief who nominated him.
Meanwhile, Republicans will control both Houses of Congress and the Executive branch in a little over a day, so naturally (so to speak) they want to gut the Antiquities Act, with which the Executive branch designates certain national monuments, thus protecting them from polluters. With Mr. Trump anxious to drill everywhere immediately regardless of the consequences for good Americans' air and water, you can expect this attack with a quickness. Already the House has declared (in that notorious "rules package" from earlier this month) that it will consider any legislation that sells or gives away publicly-owned land (and/or the energy resources contained therein) to be "budget neutral." That'll be true whether it actually is budget-neutral or not -- and only seems to exist to prevent the American people from knowing which public lands have been sold off and for how much. What do they have to hide? An attempt to give away public lands to their cronies that'll be unpopular with the lands' actual owners, the American people? The Sierra Club helps you tell Congress to treat our public lands with the respect they deserve -- and treat us with the respect we deserve.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the 17 banks currently financing the notorious Dakota Access pipeline to divest from that project, then CREDO still helps you do that. The Army Corps of Engineers has delayed giving some permits to Energy Transfer Partners (the corporation building Dakota Access) until they can complete another environmental review, but you can bet that the regulation-hating President Donald Trump will put as much pressure on the Army to dispense with that pesky environmental review as he can -- a lot of it through Twitter, I suspect -- and I wouldn't count on Congress being a stalwart defender of clean water and religious freedom (yes, Virginia, Native Americans also get to have religious freedom; it isn't just for right-wing bigots). But if the money ain't there, then it ain't getting built, no matter what our government does. A few banks have already divested from the project, but it's been a while since anyone saw water cannons hitting peaceful protestors, so the rest of them might be waiting until they think no one's watching. Which is why we remind them that we are watching them.
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