H.R. 4223, the BURMA Act of 2017, has a terrible acronym, but don't hold that against it: the bill would impose economic sanctions against Burma as long as it continues to kill its minority Rohingya population. Over 600,000 refugees have left for Bangladesh to escape the Burmese military's ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya. It doesn't matter that they started it, not just because the Buddhist majority in Burma and the Muslim Rohingya have been fighting each other for decades, but because ethnic cleansing is never the answer. It's a shame I have to say that out loud in 2017, but, apparently I do, in an era where the "liberal" media seem to be so fascinated with Nazi wannabes. H.R. 4223 would end American military assistance to the Burmese military, prevent American banks from holding money for them, and prevent them from getting visas; after all, where you've got leverage, you've got to apply it. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the right of ethnic minorities not to be slaughtered by governments by supporting the BURMA Act.
Meanwhile, S. 2155, the so-called Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, would actually expose good Americans more to financial predators -- and worse, it has that bipartisan rotten-meat sheen with nine Democrats among its 20 Senate sponsors. Right-wingers sell pro-bankster bills like these as "pro-community bank" bills, but how many "community banks" have $50 billion in assets? That's the threshold for extra regulatory scrutiny, naturally, and S. 2155 would quintuple it, to $250 billion, which doesn't benefit "community banks" unless you think American Express and Credit Suisse are "community banks." And letting smaller banks engage in high-risk mortgages (which S. 2155 also does) doesn't help out those banks, or their customers. I must ask again: what have banksters done to deserve all these welfare handouts? So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Senators to reject S. 2155 and thus actually protect their constituents. (By which I mean us, the people, not their big donors. What a shame that I have to spell it out.)
Finally, CREDO also helps you ask the FCC Inspector General to investigate whether the FCC's recent decision to loosen media consolidation rules represent a "sweetheart deal" for the Sinclair Broadcast Group, and stop work on the merger in the meantime. Both the FCC decision and the proposed merger represent a particularly virulent strain of right-wing thought: that "freedom" mainly means freedom for corporations, not people, and that our government should never restrict the freedom of corporations in order to enhance the freedom of people. Preventing the Sinclair-Tribune merger isn't primarily about giving a notorious Trump mouthpiece like Sinclair more power -- it's mainly about letting small, local media providers enter the market, compete in the market, and flourish in the market, and also about enabling those small, local media providers to be more accountable to communities, and no reasonable person thinks letting big media corporations buy up more media outlets serves these goals. Perhaps that's why both liberals and conservatives tend to oppose media consolidation.
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