Didn't think I'd forgotten about the "American Health Care Act," did you? Of course not -- though the Senate no doubt wishes we would. The Senate may be a more conservative body than the House ("conservative" as in "less likely to upend entire systems"), but don't count on them to "moderate" the House bill's ill effects. I generously count two Republican moderates in the Senate, whereas I also count three far-right Senators who've already made demands similar to or worse than the House bill; in a 52-member caucus, it ain't hard to see which group has more pull. So go ahead and call your Senators, using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (bottom if you're on a cellphone) and tell them to reject not just the American Health Care Act, but all of the assumptions underpinning it. After all, spending money on working families isn't evil, health insurance corporations don't deserve more freedom than people do, and no one should be denied skin cancer treatment because they once had eczema.
Meanwhile, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell ExxonMobil and Chevron, who are both about to hold annual shareholder meetings, to stop blocking our efforts to curb the ill effects of climate change. Shareholder power hasn't proven to be a panacea for capitalism's ills -- too many corporate boards simply ignore their shareholders when their wills diverge now -- but at least their shareholder meetings will draw some media attention, and therefore the possibility of the people wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR against them. This has worked in getting more and more corporations to abandon the American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) merely because of ALEC's climate change denialism, so perhaps we can make it work here as well. And chances are your pension fund is a shareholder in ExxonMobil or Chevron, so it's not like you don't "deserve" a say about what's happening. Even if I could possibly agree that one should "purchase" democracy by buying shares in a corporation, that is.
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