S. 3348, the Accountable Capitalism Act, would (among many other good things!) make big corporations get a federal charter that can be revoked if the corporation behaves badly, require two out of every five members of a corporate board of directors to be elected by that corporation's workers, and ban any political contributions if they're not approved by three-quarters of that corporation's shareholders. Thus no shareholder would ever have to ask, again, "they spent my money on Josh Freaking Mandel?" Of course, banksters and their enablers will protest that corporations only exist to serve shareholders, but as Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism points out, that's not actually a legal requirement -- and whatever happened to making corporations accountable to the people, and to our civilization? I think the Accountable Capitalism Act warrants a phone call to your Senators. They'll never see it coming.
Meanwhile, Consumer Reports helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration to help prevent contaminants from ending up in child food products. Seriously, if we can't protect our children, what good are we? Consumer Reports has lately found high levels of "heavy metals" in snacks, baby cereals, packaged fruits, and other foods intended for children; one of those heavy metals is arsenic, which Consumer Reports also found in rice and apple juice back in 2014. The FDA did begin writing guidelines limiting arsenic not too long thereafter, but guess what happened in the meantime? A Republican openly and aggressively hostile to any sort of government regulation somehow parlayed his 46% showing in the popular vote into an Electoral College majority, and so limiting the amount of arsenic, cadmium, and lead kids ingest in their food may not be so much of a priority at the FDA anymore. Unless we all raise our voices at once, that is.
Finally, Sens. Donnelly (D-IN) and Crapo (R-ID) have offered an amendment to the next Health and Human Services Appropriations bill, and their amendment would fund HHS investigation into "cancer clusters," or communities where more folks get cancer. The chemical safety law they unfortunately named after the late Sen. Lautenberg (who proposed far, far better chemical safety legislation before his death) does, at least, mandate that our federal government investigate "cancer clusters," which sure do seem to pop up next to aggressive polluters -- but that mandate has, naturally, gone unfunded by Congress. The Donnelly-Crapo amendment would, at least, fund that effort, hence EDF Action helps you tell your Senators to approve the Donnelly-Crapo amendment that would get folks who have been given cancer by pollutants a fighting chance at justice. All we want is a fighting chance, after all.
(Yes, I've heard the news. So when's that terrorist attack coming?)
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