As you no doubt heard, our President floated the idea of getting back into the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade deal that he got us out of -- an action that would completely undo his one good work as a President. Of course he doesn't deserve sole credit for getting us out of the TPP, or even more than half the credit -- we deserve most of the credit for tanking the TPP, given that our activism against it killed it in the first place, and don't forget that we faced down unified and powerful support for the TPP from virtually all of our government and media elites. And the TPP remains just another "free" trade deal that would outsource our jobs and nullify our laws; for our President even to suggest re-entering it might well send a message to NAFTA renegotiators (who are working as we speak) that maybe they can go ahead and make that deal even worse. So Public Citizen helps you tell our leaders, one more time, to reject "free" trade deals that put corporations ahead of people.
Meanwhile, Wild Earth Guardians uses the occasion of Earth Day to remind us to tell our Congressfolk to keep their hands off the Endangered Species Act. Since the Endangered Species Act sure does seem to attract efforts to destroy it in the name of "reforming" it, "hands off the Endangered Species Act" does seem like the best thing to say to our Congressfolk right now. And these "reformers" aren't exactly interested in making the Endangered Species Act work more efficiently -- their real program is opening up more land to fossil fuel drillers, pesticide manufacturers, and loggers. That's right, it's all about the money. And it's not even about working families' money, but corporate CEO money, some of which (the part those CEOs don't use to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes) will presumably come back to these Congressfolk in the form of campaign donations. Addiction to big corporate money is a sickness, to be sure, but we don't have to tolerate it.
In other news, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep the Census Bureau from asking folks about their citizenship or their immigration status in 2020. It may sound common-sensical to you that the Census Bureau should ask folks whether they're really citizens or not, but let me explain why it actually isn't. First off, folks with cloudy immigration status already avoid the Census; the danger here is that folks whose immigration status is actually quite solid, but who have had trouble cutting through bureaucratic red tape in the past, will avoid the Census. Second, the Census doesn't just count people -- the Census also helps determine the size of Congressional districts, as well as our federal government distributes funding, which means less representation and less money for districts with immigrant populations. In short, the Census citizenship question is actually a backdoor way to deny government services to folks of color -- services they're paying for with their taxes even if they're not citizens! -- and why should we put up with that?
Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject road building and logging in the Tongass National Forest. You know, it strikes me as a conservative position to argue that we should keep 1,000-year-old trees around, because they teach us a lot about history and science. Certainly a conservative wouldn't say it's better to cut them down and make them into things that don't last nearly as long, right? But today's "conservatives" seem to think that anything that makes some executive money is an unqualified moral good. And some of them think that mastering the natural world in this manner is itself an unqualified moral good, though that philosophy does sound almost exactly like a conservative stereotype of a liberal philosophy. But civilized people of either political persuasion always concern themselves with teaching our children about what lasts and what fades away -- and civilized people teach Congress about that, too.
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