H.R. 10, the so-called Financial CHOICE Act, passed the House a few weeks ago, because what's more American than giving banksters more tools to screw good people over? H.R. 10 is so awful that its defenders have few things to say in its favor, except that ALL REGULASHUNZ IZ TEH BADZ!!!! and IT HELPZ TEH SMALL BIZNIZZIZ!!!!! Here in the reality-based community, of course, we know that regulations restricting financial predators are not, in fact, bad, and we also know that right-wing politicians love telling you that they do everything they do for small businesses when, in fact, they do everything they do for big corporate campaign donors. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the biggest problem small businesses have isn't government -- it's big corporations using their power to squash them before they have a chance to do great things. H.R. 10 still has to go before the Senate, so use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to tell your Senators to protect good Americans from financial predators and reject H.R. 10.
Meanwhile, state government officials in Arizona and Utah have urged the Trump Administration to lift a 20-year uranium mining ban in the area around the Grand Canyon. These officials claim that the uranium ban kills jobs, as if uranium poisoning wouldn't kill tourism jobs, and that Big Gummint shouldn't designate monuments in states, as if that's not at all self-serving. But now they also claim, in a spurt of Bush-Mobb caliber bullshitting, that uranium mining doesn't pollute groundwater. And what's to stop President Trump from claiming that his Grand Canyon will be the bigliest yugest Grand Canyon ever, one that will magically make even more tourism dollars while making his mining cronies rich? If you mess up the Grand Canyon, you've messed it up forever -- and if you put uranium into the River that provides drinking water for 40 million people, then you've messed them up forever, too. So Roots Action helps you tell your President and your Congress that the Grand Canyon should be a national monument.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Pennsylvania Assemblyperson to stop two pro-pollution bills passed by the state Senate, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. The two bills, as you may know, are SB 624, which would allow longwall coal-mining corporations to pollute public waters as long as they have a plan to clean it up later, and SB 561, which would require the state legislature to approve any and all Executive branch-issued regulations that could conceivably have a "significant economic impact." Of course, a lot of clean air and clean water regulations do have such an impact -- they drive health care costs downward. But I suspect that's not the "impact" Pennsylvania's state legislators care about -- I'm pretty sure they care about the impact such regulations might have on a corporate CEO's ability to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home. And as for SB 624, why would you trust a corporation's "plan" to clean up their mess? You make corporations clean up their mess, because that's the only way it can work.
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