Social Security Works helps you tell Congress to protect and expand Social Security, not cut and privatize it. Since everyone who tries to destroy Social Security says they're trying to save it, you have to be specific: if someone's out to cut Social Security benefits, or give it up to the vagaries of the stock market so banksters can collect unearned commissions, then they're not trying to save Social Security. Even if they say so! Good intentions don't go a long way with me ordinarily, but lying about one's good intentions goes nowhere with me at all. You know what else goes nowhere with me? Scare stories about TEH SOSHUL SECURITIEZ IZ RUNNINGZ OUTZ OFZ TEH MONEYZ!!!!!! I'm old enough to remember when very serious projections from very serious people said the trust fund would run out by last year. And even if it were in trouble, very simple solutions present themselves -- chief among them, lifting the payroll tax so that income above $121,000 gets taxed into the system -- if our politicians had but the will to, you know, do the people's will.
Meanwhile, H.R. 3089, the Corporate Transparency Act, would force folks who start corporations to disclose that corporation's "beneficial owners," i.e., anyone who has (or shares) voting power or investment power in a corporation. Disclosing such information would essentially end the practice of forming a "shell corporation," which generally exists to launder money, and no, right-wingers, the Corporate Transparency Act would not infringe someone's "freedom of speech"! Money is not speech, and using corporations to conceal one's Medicare fraud or tax evasion or drug trafficking or terrorism certainly doesn't qualify as "speech," either. You may be pleased to learn that, in this drama-soaked, hyper-partisan time, three of H.R. 3089's seven House sponsors are Republicans -- two from New York and one from California, and you might describe any of them as moderates in the right light. You might even describe one of the Democratic sponsors as a moderate in the right light! So Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight corruption by supporting the Corporate Transparency Act.
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