If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to ensure that the USMCA trade agreement doesn't lock in all those super-high drug prices that help kill good Americans, then Replace NAFTA still helps you do that. No, "kill" is the right word to use in the previous sentence, because when life-saving drugs like EpiPen cost hundreds of dollars per dose, then folks with severe allergies can die, and when diabetics ration their insulin because it's too expensive, they die, too. I've said before that the USMCA does a lot of good and necessary things -- the ratcheting down of the notorious "investor-state dispute settlement" system, a system that nullifies our laws, is absolutely necessary. But no law of physics compels us to "take the good with the bad" in a trade agreement -- we're Americans, so we should insist on all the good we can get, and compel our representatives to do that on our behalf.
Meanwhile, so great is our Administration's hatred for regulations that actually do some good for America that they're actually trying to roll back energy efficiency standards for light bulbs. For decades now, right-wingers have gotten away with portraying us as anal do-gooders for trying to make light bulbs more efficient; why can't we do the same to them for insisting that light bulbs use more energy? Certainly we can do the same to this Administration for looking under every rock to find some regulation they can overturn for the benefit of the only people they care about, i.e., corporate executives. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell our Department of Energy to reject its own plan to roll back light-bulb energy standards. Seriously, I'm thinking an ad lampooning this Administration for going after light bulb efficiency standards would work well. It's just, you know, Democrats would have to run it.
Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency to limit all the PFAS chemicals in our drinking water. PFAS chemicals are the kind of thing you find in non-stick saucepans and firefighting foam, but they tend not to break down very well after use, and they could be lurking in the drinking water of a third of America, ready to contribute to higher incidences of hypertension, cancer, and developmental delays in children. The EPA has lately proposed restricting two kinds of PFAS chemicals, and listing them as "hazardous substances"; that ain't nothing, but it's also a reversal from their announcement not even a month before that they wouldn't limit any PFAS use, which got a lot of negative publicity, particularly from good Americans who live around military bases, which use a lot of PFAS chemicals -- enough, perhaps, to make them reverse their ground a bit. And that tells us we can get more out of them.
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