Word on the street is our House would pass spending bills that would dramatically increase our EPA's overall budget, increase National Park Service funding, increase clean energy research and clean water infrastructure investment, and double research on dangerous (and ubiquitous) PFAS chemicals, among other things. Who would oppose these things? Only a Scrooge McSmallgovernment, that's who, and it's well past time we painted the objectively pro-pollution crowd into a corner. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your House Reps to support strong anti-pollution provisions in upcoming spending bills. And there won't be any "I decide what we vote on" from Mob Boss Mitch in the Senate, either, because the Senate has to pass funding bills, too, and shutting down our government isn't actually very popular, even if punishing those responsible for shutdown dramas has proven difficult.
Meanwhile, our Senate has passed a bill that would help good Americans stop robocalls from coming to their houses and cellphones! S. 151, the TRACED Act, would (among other things) force big telecom corporations to use call authentication technologies and mandate the FCC to write rules allowing customers to challenge calls' authenticity. That's a hell of a lot better than what the FCC would do, which is suggest to corporations that they should authenticate calls voluntarily. As if corporations ever do the right thing without being dragged kicking and screaming into it! Now it's our House's turn to consider the bill, so Consumer Reports helps you demand that our House pass the most vigorous anti-robocall reforms possible. I mean, robocalls are so unpopular that our Senate took the initiative and actually churned out a decent bill, so there's no reason our House can't do even better.
In other news, H.R. 1994, the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (or SECURE) Act of 2019, almost unanimously passed the House last week -- but that doesn't mean it's a giant ball of happy! The SECURE Act would (among its provisions) protect corporations from being sued if they select certain annuities for their 401(k) plans and then the annuities go belly-up, taking all the money with them. Why Congress would give welfare handouts like this may puzzle you, until you learn that House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-MA) has taken campaign contributions from at least nine insurance corporations or trade groups. So CREDO helps you tell your Senators to reject the SECURE Act's pro-retirement scam provisions and expand Social Security instead. See what we did there? We stopped talking about what they want us to talk about and started talking about what we want instead. We have to do that every day if we want to take America back from those who worship mammon.
Finally, fast food corporation McDonald's has lately committed to getting antibiotic abuse out of its beef supply chain, a far more important development than its previous commitment to getting it out of its chicken supply chain, and we have our pressure to thank for that development. Now Consumer Reports helps you tell another fast food corporation, Wendy's, to get the antibiotic abuse out of its beef. We use four out of every five antibiotics in feed animals, not sick people or sick animals, and we do it to fatten those animals up and help them survive the factory farm experience, neither of which is a particularly good reason to bring back the world where the next cut might kill you. (The Sierra Club also helps you tell our FDA to regulate antibiotic abuse on family farms more vigorously than they do now; we might do better with Wendy's than with our FDA, but duty is duty.)
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