The Trump Administration notified Congress a while back that it intends to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, also knowns as NAFTA (or, perhaps, SHIFTY) -- but Mr. Trump has also decided not to get rid of the most odious thing about NAFTA, the "investor-state tribunal" that allows corporations to nullify our laws and exact tribute from the taxpayer for having those laws in the first place. Thus we have every reason to fear that Mr. Trump would scrap NAFTA only to give us something that would be an even larger corporate welfare giveaway than NAFTA already is -- you know, just like he's planning to do with his health care "reform" plan, his tax "reform" plan, and his HARD POWER! budget. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell your Congressfolk the kind of trade deal you'd like to see in NAFTA's place -- like eliminating the "investor-state tribunal," including strong environmental and labor standards, and rules that would keep medicine costs down. Alternately, you could use the tools in the upper-right hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) and tell your Reps and Senators what you want over the phone.
Meanwhile, former WalMart worker Jasmine Dixon has begun a petition at CREDO Mobilize which helps you tell WalMart to institute a good paid family leave policy for all its hourly-paid employees. We haven't managed to get paid family leave laws passed at the federal level (mainly because Republicans are all like this guy), and though we have managed to get some state and local initiatives passed, certainly no law prevents us from petitioning one of the nation's largest employers (particularly one of the nation's largest employers of low-paid workers) and prodding them to do the right thing -- not least because WalMart has responded to the Big Stick of Bad PR before. No use retorting that you should have to earn paid family leave; everyone needs paid family leave sooner or later, and saying you have to "earn" it is a little like saying you have to "earn" clean air and clean water. Of course, Our Glorious Elites secretly believe that as well, but given that Our Glorious Elites also believe banksters are the Greatest People Evah, they're not the folks who should be telling us what "earning things" is all about.
Finally, as you know, the CBO has scored the House's health care bill, and found it would ultimately deprive 23 million folks of insurance over the next decade, versus the 24 million figure it found for the bill's previous iteration. But you may be surprised to learn which "liberal" media outlet decided to use that 1 million uninsured difference to mislead. USA Today tweeted that "#BREAKING: CBO says House Obamacare repeal bill covers 1 million more people than prior draft." I'd have expected that kind of spin from Fox News! USA Today received a crapload of critical comments afterward, and have since issued a series of tweets that I suppose aim to "correct" their rubbish headline. But their more accurate tweets didn't get nearly as much social media play as their more Trump-friendly one, and I can't help but think that was a deliberate calculation on their part, since it gets them attention coming and going. But USA Today isn't generally a bad paper, so if you contact them using information at the above link, you can tell them they should avoid the appearance of using sensational, misleading headlines to generate drama.
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