Yesterday morning, President Trump announced -- on Twitter, of course -- that our government would no longer "accept or allow" transgendered soldiers to serve in our military. Oh, but he didn't stop there -- he said our military "cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military (sic) would entail." What "disruption" is he talking about? Apparently, he's talking about an annual $8.4 million (at most!) increase in health care costs for the military, but you know that in any other context, Mr. Trump would call $8.4 million "chump change," just to remind everyone how rich he is; what a whiny crybaby he becomes ("ZOMG $8.4 MILLYUNZ!!!!!") when it's time to score points with those other notorious crybabies, the religious right. Hence Freedom for All Americans helps you tell the President to retain current U.S. policy regarding transgendered soldiers and their continued service to our country, and to apologize for his disgusting remarks.
Meanwhile, Free Press helps you tell the FCC to investigate Verizon Wireless for possible violations of net neutrality. What has Verizon done? Apparently they've slowed videos from Netflix and YouTube, and worse, gave conflicting explanations as to why: first they were doing a "test," then they were "optimizing" video streaming. Perhaps "optimizing" is just their euphemism for "throttling," or the intentional slowing of your network connection -- ISPs can slow down traffic in the service of "reasonable network management," but slowing down one kind of traffic, or traffic from one or two sources, isn't "reasonable network management," it's discrimination. And, you know, the FCC hasn't gotten rid of the 2015 Open Internet Order yet, and thus has a duty to investigate any possible violations of that Order. This is a duty the FCC currently doesn't give one rat's hind quarter about, no doubt, but that doesn't make it any less of a duty -- or, to be more direct, any less of a legal obligation.
Finally, the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 15/S. 1242, the Raise the Wage Act, which would increase our federal minimum wage to $15/hour by 2024. Folks who constantly squeal about small businesses making payrolls should attend the words "by 2024"; the minimum wage would increase by roughly a dollar an hour every year for the next seven years, which isn't a hardship for bosses. Of course, these folks don't really care about small businesses -- they care about large corporations, whose executives regard every dollar spent on a worker's salary as a dollar they could have had! And if the BUT TEH SMALL BIZNIZZIZ!!!! crowd really want to do something for small businesses, they could, oh, I don't know, fight the monopoly power of corporations like Amazon, which controls half of every dollar spent online, and has put more small businesses out of business than perhaps any other corporation in history (maybe even more than WalMart!).
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