If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your U.S. House Rep to nullify the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal, then Stop the FCC still helps you do that. Net neutrality officially ended last Monday, as you know, and though the big telecom corporations haven't started censoring websites or slowing websites down or forcing you to watch junk news videos before your websites load or herding some of your websites into internet "slow lanes," but the only reason they haven't done these things yet is because they're not completely stupid -- they know it's better to take your freedoms away a bit at a time, rather than rush to take them all away at once. And net neutrality is about your freedom to go where you want to go on the internet, rather than have a bunch of big corporations tell you where to go. The Senate already passed a "resolution of disapproval" aiming to nullify the FCC's repeal; now the House must do the same. But they won't, unless we demand it.
Meanwhile, our Administration's Department of Energy has concocted a truly moronic scheme to force utilities to buy a set percentage of their electric power from coal and nuclear. Brought to you by the same people who call renewable energy standards "welfare handouts"! Coal corporations are failing, not because of some "war on coal" drama, but because natural gas is considerably cheaper, and solar and wind are price-competitive now. And nuclear power plants have never made any money. How do we know? Because our government keeps giving them "loan guarantees," which only "guarantee" that taxpayers bail them out when they fail! I wish I could believe that this chunk of corporate welfare is all about our coal miners, but it's not -- the only people our President cares about are other bosses, and he sees the rest of us as just tools. So the Sierra Club helps you demand that our Energy Department scuttle its plan to force utilities to buy more from failing fossil fuel corporations.
Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5728/S. 2810, the Workplace Democracy Act. The Workplace Democracy Act would amend the National Labor Relations Act to curb corporations mislabeling their employees "independent contractors," to keep corporations from forcing employees to attend anti-union presentations, to force more good-faith negotiating efforts between corporations and unions, to allow employees to choose a card-check election instead of a secret ballot election to join a union, and to repeal "right-to-work" laws at the state level -- among other things! The only other thing I would ask for would be to allow farm workers to organize. But this bill is the gold standard of labor legislation in these times -- and when we have strong unions, we have better wages and better working conditions. So don't believe the right-wing hype that unions "make us less free," because all they do is make corporations less free to hurt us.
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