Congress is home again this week, and are thus more vulnerable to their constituents than they are when safely sequestered in D.C., as the author of the bill that stole our internet privacy away, Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake, found out last Thursday when his constituents yelled at him at a town hall for 2 1/2 hours. I mention internet privacy not merely because the Republicans' repeal of FCC regulations protecting our internet privacy should result in Republicans losing dozens of seats in 2018, but also because it's a big part of the Republicans' big plan to kill FCC net neutrality rules, which require internet service corporations to treat all pieces of network traffic equally, and thus allow you, not some corporation, to control your internet experience. Republicans say they want the FTC, not the FCC, to manage internet service provider privacy, but it just so happens that the same law that allows the FCC to regulate net neutrality prevents the FTC from regulating internet privacy as practiced by internet service providers! So you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to tell your Reps and Senators that you know their game and you want your internet exactly the way it is -- that is, you want it to remain yours, not theirs.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Nebraska Public Service Commission to reject TransCanada's application for the Keystone XL pipeline, then CREDO still helps you do that. Yes, the Trump Administration State Department has approved Keystone XL, but, as you know, our federal government isn't the only game in town -- state governments also get their say, and if Nebraska doesn't want Keystone XL running through it, then Nebraska gets to stop it. A lot of right-wingers will very quickly become big fans of Big Government when that happens, though of course honorable and principled conservatives won't. But good Nebraskans have been voicing their concerns over Keystone XL dragging its 800,000 or so barrels of filthy tar sands oil through their state every day, not just because of Nebraska's vast swaths of farmland, but because Nebraska sits on the Ogallala Aquifer, an underground water table that provides clean drinking and bathing water to some two million heartland Americans in eight states. Our federal government didn't do its job, and may pay the price for that in court, but we need to apply pressure everywhere, particularly in places where it might work.
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