You've no doubt heard that President Trump's budget proposal would slash funding for just about anything good our government does, and now you can add "EPA funding" to that list, as Mr. Trump apparently plans to cut EPA staffing by a fifth in his first year and cutting overall funding by about a quarter. And his cuts include Energy Efficiency programs, Environmental Education and Environmental Justice grants, and other grants that help states and regions enforce environmental standards. Those poor, poor fossil fuel corporations, constantly under siege by the big, bad old EPA! That's the picture Donald Trump paints, and it's a ludicrous one -- fossil fuel corporations aren't in any danger of going down as long as our government hands out public lands for them to plunder, and Big Gummint EPA helps keep our air and our water clean on our behalf. And they're already understaffed and underfunded, so cutting these further would only put more lead in our water and more cancer-causing chemicals in our air. It'd also make certain CEOs richer, which I'm pretty sure is all Mr. Trump really cares about. So use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to call your Reps and Senators, and tell them you don't want EPA funding cut, but expanded.
Continuing along this theme, PennPIRG helps you tell your Senators to reject any attempt to cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It's appalling that you tell right-wingers about the $12 billion the CFPB has won back for consumers from banksters so far, or their rules restricting payday lenders' ability to trap folks in a cycle of debt forever, or their work exposing the Wells Fargo fake account scandal that Congressfolk from both parties condemned, and the only answer you get is TEH REGULASHUNZ ARE KILLINGZ TEH JOBZ!!!!! Why "job creation" should ever depend on a financial predator's ability to rip off as many consumers is possible is something the right should try to explain. But, as PennPIRG's email missive reminds us, "(b)eing able to save, invest and manage your money without fear of being ripped off isn't some wildly controversial idea -- it's a hallmark of a civilized society." Which must by why eminently uncivilized Republicans -- including their standard-bearer, Donald Trump -- are so hot to destroy it. But they don't get all the say around here.
Finally, today a Tennessee state House subcommittee plans to consider HB 888, yet another "bathroom bill" that would force transgendered students to use the restroom of their birth gender rather than the gender they're actually living. Hence the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Tennessee legislators to reject HB 888, and thus protect the rights of transgendered students. Why bother with these "bathroom bills"? It can't really be out of a sense that transgendered students will molest children, because no right-winger has ever backed up such an argument with anything other than fear and emotional manipulation. So if "protecting children" isn't the point of "bathroom bills," what is? Ginning up rage from right-wingers so they'll vote against their interests, that's what. And I bet most right-wingers don't even hate transgendered folks, but they support these bills because they hate liberals and would do almost anything to piss liberals off. But that's not really better, because their hate won't make liberals suffer, but it sure will make transgendered kids suffer.
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