Last week, the House actually passed a bill that would undermine the Americans with Disabilities Act! And it crept up on the House's calendar awfully suddenly; why it's almost like they had something to hide. H.R. 620, the so-called ADA Education and Reform Act of 2017, would force disabled folks to give a corporation six months' notice before suing them for blocking access to their building (as forbidden by the ADA), and those corporations would then get those six months to put together a plan for getting rid of their access barriers and make "substantial progress" toward getting rid of them, whatever that means. The bill's proponents shriek TEH FRIVOLUZ LAWSUITZ!!!!!, but you know what stops frivolous lawsuits? Sunlight. This monstrosity warrants a phone call to your Senators, so you can tell them that rights delayed are rights denied.
Meanwhile, with FCC Chair Ajit Pai now under investigation by the FCC Inspector General over the possibility that he communicated improperly with Sinclair Broadcasting shortly before loosening media consolidation rules in a manner that just so happened to benefit Sinclair's effort to assimilate Tribune Media, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to call upon the FCC to block the propose Sinclair-Tribune merger. The FCC blocking the merger sure would be the sound PR move, given how everything looks and how unpopular media consolidation is across the political spectrum, but this is a federal government that revels in telling us to go fuck ourselves. The President somehow won with 46% of the popular vote, so we do what we want! Look at our balls swing! They'll learn differently, but good people always help people learn their lessons more quickly. And we are good people.
Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a pair of bills that would crack down on those credit reporting corporations that don't take proper care of your personal data. You know, like Equifax, which lost the personal info of some 140 million good folks -- and lost rather more of that information than they originally said, because of course they did. But S. 2289, the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act, would establish an Office of Cybersecurity within the Federal Trade Commission -- an office that would oversee matters of data security -- and would set penalties for corporations that expose customer data. Meanwhile, S. 1816, the Freedom from Equifax Exploitation Act, would expand fraud alerts and allow Americans to request a free credit freeze from any credit reporting corporation they suspect has exposed their data. After all, we deserve better from credit reporting corporations than they've been giving us.
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