If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support S. 3357, the Anti-Corruption and Public Accountability Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. S. 3357 would (among other things!) help keep lobbyists out of our government and keep our politicians out of lobbying after they leave office, prevent politicians from owning individual stocks while they're in office, and subject federal contractors to more public scrutiny. In addition, S. 3357 would reclassify federal administrative law judges as civil service jobs -- to reverse our President's efforts to pack those positions with his cronies -- and it would make the IRS release eight years of tax returns for all Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates (as well as two years' returns for Congressional candidates). All of that would help get rid of, as our President might say, a lingering stench in our government. So let's do it.
Meanwhile, Sum of Us helps you tell big pharma corporations to stop stashing their profits in overseas tax shelters. We should, of course, continue to demand that our Congressfolk pass laws that make corporations pay their fair share of taxes -- so that good Americans and small businesses don't have to bear all the burden of paying for roads, bridges, firefighters, libraries, schools, and the like -- but we might as well go right to the corporations, too, particularly the ones who charge us an arm and a leg for drugs they tend to need a lot of taxpayer money to even make. The Big Stick of Bad PR makes a big crack and a big hurt -- even when corporations respond by saying we already pay all the taxes we're supposed to pay under the law! They hope you don't know that they spend millions of dollars every year getting our Congressfolk to write the laws that lower their taxes. The good news? I think that ship has sailed.
Finally, a group of good government organizations (including People for the American Way and Project South) helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal our Administration's notorious Muslim travel ban. No use arguing with me that TEH BAN IZ ALSO FOR TEH VENEZWAILYUNZ!!!!!, because we all know our Administration put them (and a few other nations) in there just so our Supreme Court would have an excuse to say "see, it's not a religious ban per se!" But if it looks like dung and smells like dung, you don't have to taste it just because some right-winger says "you can't prove it's not meatloaf." The Muslim ban is a stain on our national character, not just because it unfairly targets folks based on their religious beliefs, but because it is a policy that diddles the rage glands of America's most rage-addled folks. And, frankly, they shouldn't get all the say about everything in America.
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