Remember when the NLRB said that fast-food workers could actually hold their franchises' parent corporations liable for wrongdoing? Well, of course our beloved Congressfolk are trying to reverse that, with H.R. 3441, which they have the stones to call the Save Local Businesses Act, as if your local McDonald's is really a local business getting no backing (or pressure) whatsoever from a big corporation! Its main sponsor, Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-AL) instructs us that the bill would "restore() the commonsense joint employer standard." Of course the notion of having two employers when you have only one job may not strike most folks as "common sense," particularly when common sense would more likely tell us that corporations use the franchise arrangement to avoid accountability for their evil -- particularly when a big corporation tells a franchise get x amount of work done y fast, without hiring more workers or paying more overtime, and keep to z budget. Make it work! So call your House Reps and tell them to reject H.R. 3441.
Meanwhile, as you know, President Trump's Department of Health and Human Services now allows corporations to use their "sincere" "religious" (or merely "moral"!) "beliefs" as an excuse to deny birth control coverage to their employees, so CREDO helps you tell HHS to reverse its decision on birth control. I've long said that a boss's "religious beliefs" aren't better or more important than yours or mine, but the Affordable Care Act's no-cost birth control mandate also saves all of us money, to the tune of $1.4 billion annually. And no-cost birth control coverage doesn't just save us all money, it saves us all abortions. You may mark the American right's continued spiral into bat-guano insanity by the fact that they want abortion to be illegal and they want birth control to be illegal, too, even though birth control obviously gives women an option before abortion. Of course, right-wing politicians don't care about solutions -- they only care about keeping their votaries ensnared in a state of self-feeding rage. But civilized people don't need to put up with that.
Finally, al-Qaeda-linked terrorists murdered Bangladeshi gay activist Xulhaz Mannan in his own apartment, with another gay rights activist, in front of his elderly mother 18 months ago, but Bangladeshi authorities still haven't brought his murderers to justice, despite access to ample CCTV footage and eyewitness accounts. And that's quite possibly because they don't give a crap! Mr. Mannan founded Bangladesh's one and only gay rights magazine, and attempted to organize a gay youth rally in 2015, only to be thwarted by Muslim extremists threatening to kill anyone who showed up. Homosexuality is still illegal in Bangladesh, but the "crime" of homosexuality (which, admittedly, is not very strictly policed there) comes with specific punishments up to and including life imprisonment, and thus a vigilante death penalty contravenes law and order. But the appetite for law and order does differ from person to person, as we know, so Amnesty International helps you tell the Bangladeshi government to bring Mr. Mannan's murderers to justice.
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