If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass the most vigorous version possible of H.R. 1, the For the People Act, then Common Cause still helps you do that. H.R. 1 essentially incorporates (among other goo ideas) the Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Fair Elections Now Act, and the DISCLOSE Act, all worthwhile bills that have merited our support in the past. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would have plugged the giant hole our Supreme Court blew in the Voting Rights Act by establishing a new pre-clearance formula for states with a long history of voting rights violations. The Fair Elections Now Act would have established a public campaign finance system that wouldn't have outlawed massive bajillionaire campaigns but would make them more politically toxic. And the DISCLOSE Act would have forced big campaign donors to disclose their identities. H.R. 1 wouldn't just do these good works -- it would also set up nonpartisan redistricting commissions in the states and enable automatic voter registration at the federal level. These are all good things! So let's do them.
Meanwhile, you may have heard that scientists have linked PFAS chemicals (PFAS basically stands for "per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances") to cancer, liver damage, and asthma, which is very unfortunate, since you can find PFAS chemicals basically all over the place -- in non-stick saucepans, food packaging, and firefighting foam, to name three fairly common places, and now in our drinking water as well. Our EPA had apparently planned to release a draft action concerning PFAS, but then the shutdown happened, and seriously do you really expect our EPA, as it's currently constituted, to do the right thing about this matter? This is an EPA, after all, that seems to care only about "liberating" corporate executives from ever having to worry about their products harming people's health. But we don't have to wait for them: we can prod Congress to act, and so the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to help keep our water clean by acting against PFAS chemicals. Don't be the one to tell me about the far worse things PFAS chemicals replaced -- science always advances, and as civilized people we have a duty to keep up.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big tech corporations Amazon, Microsoft, and Google not to sell facial recognition software to any of our federal, state, or local governments, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. You would, I hope, be wary of using any fancypants technology until we're sure it won't hurt us -- I mean, that would be a conservative way to be! -- and of course we can't be sure of that with facial recognition technology, not when the technology seems to work much better with white men than any of the many other demographics in our melting pot, and certainly not when the vast majority of faces law enforcement will have on file are non-white. And law enforcement mostly has photos of suspects, not convicted criminals -- I mean, some 117 million faces appear in law enforcement files, and though we're the most incarcerated nation on Earth, we haven't put more than a third of Americans in jail. We really should take this innocent-until-proven-guilty thing as seriously as our Founders did.
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