With the Venezuelan non-president attempting, and utterly failing, to overthrow the democratically-elected President Nicolas Maduro, but our Administration still insisting it's considering a "full range of options" for military intervention there, Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1004/S.J.Res. 11, which would block our Executive branch from indulging in any military action in Venezuela without express authorization from Congress. Which is how it's supposed to be, after all! Congress declares the war, and the President fights it. Too many folks today think "the President declares the war," but that's not what our Constitution says -- our Constitution makes Congress declare war precisely so that an Executive doesn't get too powerful. Congress has largely abrogated this duty over the decades, but they'll get back on track, if enough of us speak out. Ideally, they'll have no damn choice.
Meanwhile, our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) put out decent payday lending rules in 2017 while Richard Corddray was still in charge, so naturally this Administration's now-defanged CFPB wants to put out new payday lending rules that roll back protections for good Americans against financial predators. Because freedom! I'm sure the same folks who reflexively say "if you can't do the time don't do the crime" about various worthwhile criminal justice reform initiatives will say "if you can't pay back the loan, don't get the loan" about payday lending rules, though they'd vastly overestimate the financial options available to the poorer working families whom payday lending corporations target with their 300 percent loans. Such folks always attack the victims of injustice rather than the perps, which isn't very "law and order" of them. Stop Payday Predators helps you tell our CFPB to reject its own efforts to expose more good Americans to payday loan predators.
In other news, our Administration is trying to roll back offshore drilling regulations our government put in place after the 2010 Spillageddon in the Gulf. You remember that, right? Almost five million barrels of oil spilled, almost $100 million lost by the Louisiana shrimp industry, all those animals coated in oil and dying of organ damage and hypothermia? This Administration, in its zeal to serve executives and only executives, would dramatically loosen testing requirements for the blowout preventers that would, as their name suggests, prevent another Deepwater Horizon blowout from happening. What is it about oil CEOs that makes them act like their mamas never taught them to clean up their own messes? Maybe it's the feeling that we might be able to power our nation without them! Anyway, Environmental Action helps you tell our Department of Interior to scuttle its own plans to roll back oil drilling safety protections.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Justice to stop using the "Black Identity Extremist" as an excuse to spy on peaceful black protestors, then Free Press still helps you do that. You'd think our FBI would be more obsessed with unpeaceful white supremacists, since there seem to be more of them now than there were a few years ago and I wonder what changed? But, alas, our FBI still sees the actually-wronged trying to work within our democratic processes to make it right and calls that evil, as they've done virtually since their inception. But if they would take police brutality more seriously, they might find they have fewer black protestors to spy upon, and maybe they can get more important work done. Then again, spying on and harassing black protestors tends to create more of them, which means more money for spying and harassment, ad nauseam. After all, why solve problems when you can partake in endless dramas instead?
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