You've heard that our Administration wants to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census? Well, Common Cause helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 2580, which would prohibit questions about citizenship or immigration status on Census forms. You may well be thinking, what's the big deal? And while actual undocumented immigrants might well duck the Census regardless of whether it asks about their status, other folks -- like folks whose papers will expire in time, or folks whose papers are set for life but who often get mistaken for "illegal immigrants" -- might duck the Census, too, and that will reduce their representation in Congress and the funding that goes to their communities. The Census plays a big part in determining all that, so let's help it achieve an "actual enumeration" of the population, as the Constitution requires.
Meanwhile, Good Jobs Nation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 15/S. 1242, the Raise the Wage Act, which would increase the federal minimum wage to $15/hour over a seven-year period. No, it won't kill jobs, or else we'd see rampant unemployment in areas of the world where minimum wages like these are standard, and we don't. No, it's not too-much-too-soon, because the wage would go up gradually over seven years. And no, it won't kill small businesses, because more highly-paid employees will spend a lot of those extra wages at those same small businesses. If this bill passes, I expect a lot of its good ideas -- including narrowing the gaps between the standard minimum wage and both the tipped minimum wage and the disabled worker minimum wage -- will get stripped out. But let's start negotiating with our demands, rather than what we'll settle for.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state Governor to ban Monsanto's version of the herbicide dicamba that destroys crops on neighboring farms, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. The State Plant Board of Arkansas banned this herbicide for that state's main growing season (though not for the entire growing year), but every state's got farms, and everyone depends on farms for food, and no one deserves to have their livelihood ruined by a pesticide that doesn't stay put where it's supposed to. And Monsanto developed this version of dicamba specifically to work on its own versions of cotton and soybean plants that resist dicamba more! Could they be trying to force farmers to use their products under threat of crop (and livelihood!) destruction? Hey, it's a question worth asking!
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