Word on the street is that FCC Chair Ajit Pai will recommend approving the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger, so today might be a good day to call our Justice Department at 1.202.804.1389 and urge them to reject the merger. In this era of right-wing dominance, our legal system tends to view the "harm" caused by corporate mergers very, very narrowly: they only seem to care whether or not a merger will dramatically raise prices for consumers. Mergers do tend to raise prices for consumers simply because they decrease competition, but our courts need to go back to viewing "harm" as broadly as they used to do. Ask one of the tens of thousands of people who are going to lose their jobs as a result of this merger whether it causes them harm. Ask the working families who get discounted service from T-Mobile and will almost certainly lose it in the merger whether it causes them harm. We know concentrated corporate power harms all of us, so let's get to fighting.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Moms Rising helps you tell your state legislators to pass paid family leave and medical leave legislation. (Legislators plan to introduce bills toward both ends shortly.) America is, as you know, the only country on Earth that doesn't provide paid family or medical leave for its citizens -- and it is also, as you know, the only country on Earth that has seriously proposed raiding Social Security pensions to pay for family and medical leave! -- but we could pay for family and medical leave insurance with a minuscule payroll tax hike, or, heaven forfend, by amending the state Constitution so that rich folks actually pay a higher rate of taxes than working folk! Why would it be a minuscule tax hike? Because not everyone uses insurance at once! Indeed, that's how insurance has always worked. Six American states, the District of Columbia, and the rest of the planet already do it, so let's do it in Pennsylvania as well.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Right-wingers love asking, where's the money for that?. Usually, the answer is "tax the rich so that gazillionaires don't have 22 vacation homes or start collecting mountains," but, truth be told, we're not going to tax the rich to the tune of $3.4 trillion annually, which is what the right-wing Mercatus Center tells us Medicare for All health insurance will cost. However, we also know that we're already planning to spend $49 trillion over the next 10 years on health insurance, which means that, yes, we already know where the money is; we just have to capture it. Capturing it will be harder to explain than to do, but we also know that this is America, the can-do country, and matters of accounting should never stop us from doing the right thing.
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