The world has seen video of the squalid conditions of ships that transport livestock; these "death ships" are, as you might imagine, overcrowded with inadequate access to food and water, and they're so hot that animals literally cook to death inside -- and then get thrown overboard! All because crowding more animals into less space means more money for corporate executives -- I say that to inoculate you against the hostage-taking argument they're bound to make that making us transport livestock more humanely means higher prices for you. Gosh, they never raise prices when they give themselves more money! Anyway, New Zealand has already banned shipping of livestock for slaughter, and when the World Organisation for Animal Health meets in just a few short weeks, more countries may follow suit. Would it kill people to eat what grows nearby, after all? Avaaz helps you tell the nations of the world to stop the live export trade.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4505/S. 2177, the Restoring Overtime Pay Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. The Obama Administration tried to raise the pay threshold below which corporations had to pay their workers overtime, so that more working families could get overtime pay, and also so that corporations would get tired of paying out all that money and just hire more workers. But a federal judge found that their overtime pay rule violated the National Labor Relations Act by failing to exempt white-collar workers, as the NLRA mandates; thus the Restoring Overtime Pay Act would amend the NLRA by creating an exemption-within-the-exemption for white-collar workers who make less than $48,000 annually, thus getting them overtime. I think it's a fairly clever way to deliver better opportunities for workers -- but only if we support it.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject a "balanced budget amendment" that would force cuts in Medicare and Social Security and make raising taxes on the rich almost impossible, then CREDO still helps you do that. Politicians squeal about TEH DEFICITZ!!!!! every time our government works on behalf of the American people, and those same politicians never complain about deficits when they're cutting taxes for the rich or funneling corporate welfare to their cronies. But anyone who's ever bought a car, bought a house, or taken on a student loan knows that sometimes you have to spend more than you've got right now so that you can get ahead later. And hello! Nobody thinks this country's going belly-up anytime soon, so we're not exactly going to run out of lenders anytime soon. Our current President does often seem to be doing his damnedest to make America go belly-up, but this ain't his country -- it's ours.
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