As you may know, our Administration's new trade pact with Mexico and Canada, the USMCA, would dramatically curtail the use of the hated "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) system that allows foreign investors to nullify our clean air, clean water, and labor laws. But the USMCA also extends monopoly rights for new medicines, which essentially gives big pharma corporations a massive welfare handout. It also keeps drug prices high, which causes people to stay sick and die -- if you don't believe me, contemplate the diabetics who respond to the high cost of insulin by rationing it, and sometimes die as a result. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to demand that the USMCA eliminates these handouts to big pharma corporations. Don't let big pharma's but-how-can-we-find-new-treatments-if-we-can't-make-obscene-money excuse sway you -- not just because research is already a tax-deductible expense, but because they're really protecting their executives' "right" to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home.
Meanwhile, Philadelphia residents, take note: you've been dutifully separating your recyclables from your trash for years now, right? Well, thanks largely to incompetence, your city has lately sent about half of your recycling as trash to incinerators for a few years now. (Don't get distracted by reports of "contamination rates" -- or the rate of dirty items or trash items in recycling bins -- being a little over 19% in 2017, not just because 19% ain't close to 50%, but because waste management corporations process those items out as part of their contracts.) Most of the city's excuses don't wash -- they complain they can't get long-term waste management contracts in an industry that actually desires long-term waste management contracts, for example -- but they've made a promise to us, one that we've paid taxes to maintain, no less, and whining about how difficult it is to deliver on your promises is not the American can-do spirit. So Penn Environment helps you tell Philadelphia's Mayor and City Council to fix the city's recycling program.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject three so-called "pro-net neutrality" bills circulating through Congress, then Free Press still helps you do that. Net neutrality, as you know, is the principle that you should get to determine where you want to go on the internet, without some big corporation having the ability to herd you into some junk news ghetto, and thus internet service providing corporations should deliver all internet traffic with the same urgency, rather than prioritizing some traffic over others. And you know how reasonable that all sounds, unfortunately, by the number of bills pretending to uphold its principles while actually destroying them! The bills in question -- H.R. 1006, H.R. 1096, and H.R. 1101 -- would let corporations slow down traffic and censor other traffic, and of course they'd also prevent our FCC from ever regulating net neutrality again; if that doesn't sound like net neutrality to you (and it shouldn't!), then get with your Congressfolk right quick.
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