Canada, Mexico, and the United States signed the USMCA trade deal late last week -- but still has to be ratified by our House and Senate to take effect. The USMCA has its good points -- namely it's near-obliteration of the "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) system, which nullifies our laws and bleeds taxpayer money -- but it also has its bad points (namely its corporate welfare for Big Pharma and its weak enforcement mechanisms for labor and environmental standards), so Public Citizen helps you tell your Reps and Senators to demand improvements to the USMCA before approving it. I must say I'm quite pleased to hear no one in Congress demanding a "fast-track" process for trade deals, since "fast-track" processes tend to cut the people out of the process by cutting Congressional debate out of the process. And really, what are "fast-trackers" going to do? Say we need to sign the USMCA now for national security purposes?
Meanwhile, H.R. 7109/S. 3615, the Restoring Justice for Workers Act, would amend both the National Labor Relations Act and the Federal Arbitration Act to prohibit "predispute" forced arbitration agreements between employers and employees -- to which more than half of all employees must now submit! -- as well as class action or collective action bans. The bill would also prohibit retaliation against employees who won't enter into arbitration agreements with their employers. Bosses like to tell you arbitration is better for employees than class action suits (spoiler alert: they're wrong), but then why do they feel they have to force you into arbitration as a condition of employment, or force you to waive your right to a class action lawsuit? I mean, that's awfully suspicious, isn't it? So the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Reps and Senators to support the Restoring Justice for Workers Act.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Reps and Senators not to screw around with the Endangered Species Act, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. Various Congressdolts have proposed "reforms" that would, in essence, gut the Endangered Species Act, "reforms" which have included forcing our government to rescue endangered species in a mere five years (why, it took 40 to save the bald eagle), mandating a full vote of Congress to even designate a species as endangered, and allowing Governors to nullify endangered species designations. But it ain't just Congress: our current Administration wants to introduce more economics into the whole process. Because mammon is everything to our President and his corporate cronies! They should be ashamed of themselves -- and, more to the point, we should shame them, whether we think it'll do any good or not.
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