Given Congress's failure to repeal methane emissions limits on public lands late last week, today's as good a day as any to let the Environmental Defense Fund help you call your Senators and tell them not to slash EPA funding as President Trump is so hot to do. But then again, why play defense? You can just as easily tell your Senators to increase EPA funding, so that the EPA can actually do more of the things our laws mandate that it do! EPA funding has, after all, been chronically short since the early 1980s, which makes it much harder to chase down the fossil fuel drillers who leak methane into the atmosphere and dangerous carcinogens into the water, for example. No one, and I mean no one, wants dirtier air and dirtier water -- even the CEOs who constantly whine about regulations preventing them from creating jobs boo-freaking-hoo won't drink the water near their drilling wells. And one more time: a CEO would never create a job if he didn't have to -- but regulations do create jobs, for all the people who have to figure out how to comply with them.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1776/S. 771, the Improving Access to Affordable Prescription Drugs Act, then Sign Here Now still helps you do that. The bill would, as its title suggests, help good Americans get prescription drugs more affordably, partly by letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices and allowing reimportation of cheaper-and-no-less-safe-because-they-re-the-same-damn-drug drugs from Canada, but also by hiking taxes on corporations that jack up the prices of their drugs. A word about that: corporations that pull a Daraprim or an EpiPen on the American public justify it by saying that the cost of drug research causes them to jack up prices. Now, how do we know that's utter bullshit? Because research is an expense, and only profits get taxed. Revenue minus expenses equals profits. So you don't need an economics degree to be able to smell that pile of dung -- in fact, I wonder if economics degrees actually hinder such olfactory acuity.
Finally, you've heard that Trump Administration Attorney General Jeff Sessions has directed federal prosecutors to level the most serious charges possible at accused nonviolent drug offenders, and also to seek mandatory minimum sentences wherever possible. Of course, that's his prerogative, but it's also a dumb idea. Every Executive branch makes do with finite resources by deciding it'll go after some things more than other things, but what do you think causes more problems in America? People smoking weed in their living room, or banksters illegally foreclosing on homeowners? Have we heard a peep from the Trump Administration about this latter item? No, we have not -- in fact, we have at least one foreclosure fiend in Mr. Trump's own cabinet. And though politicians constantly talk like we're in a massive out-of-control crime epidemic, we're actually not -- and even if we were, wouldn't treatment for drug addiction take care of the problem more effectively? So the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell the Justice Department to rescind its memo, and thus support smarter crime prevention in America.
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