H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act, would (as its title suggests) force corporations to disclose their "beneficial owners" -- the folks who create the corporations and, presumably, benefit financially from their existence. Believe it or not, we don't do this in America, so skewed toward corporate power have our laws always been. And forcing corporations to disclose their owners will have real benefits: we'll better be able to stop the banksters, terrorists, tax-evaders, sex traffickers, drug money launderers, and big campaign donors who use shell corporations to hide their wrongdoing. Don't believe any don't-tread-on-me tantrums from the right -- corporations aren't people, and don't have the same rights as people, and corporation owners don't have a "right" to hide criminal behavior, either. Hence CREDO helps you tell your House Reps to crack down on corporate misbehavior by passing the Corporate Transparency Act.
Meanwhile, Environmental Action helps you tell the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems to scuttle its plan to build new and inadequately-tested nuclear reactors near the Grand Teton National Park and invest in renewable energy instead. I know, nuclear power plants, every one a potential Chernobyl or Fukushima, near public lands -- terrible idea, right? And you don't even need to see every nuclear power plant as a potential terrorist target, either, or as an almost-certain money-loser that the taxpayer will need to bail out, though both of these are true as well. Really, all you need know is that the price of solar and wind production has come down so far in the last 20 years that now homeowners can reasonably expect to be able to pay to solarize their houses with home equity loans. That has come about with very little corporate or utility help; think of what their help could do to push renewables across the finish line in America.
In other news, with the rise of white supremacist groups selling their disgusting wares online, Sum of Us helps you tell big payment-processing corporations like MasterCard, VISA, and PayPal to stop letting white supremacist groups use their services. What's that, you say? Isn't that denying white supremacists their right to have their views heard, as well as their right to make money as they see fit? Well, no, because neither of these rights actually exist -- white supremacists do have the right to believe whatever obnoxious and emotionally-cripped shit they want in the privacy of their heart, and they have the right not to be put in jail by our government for those beliefs, but they do not have a "right" to sell those beliefs on bumper stickers and T-shirts, nor do they have a "right" to make money however they like -- I mean, if that were true, we could never put a burglar or a bankster in jail. So trouble not your heart, if racists have to get real jobs. Work builds character, after all.
Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell investment management corporation Vanguard to support a shareholder resolution aimed at breaking up Google. You don't need to know about Google's inability to protect your privacy or their illegal tracking of your location or their complicity in Chinese government censorship or accusations of wage theft and sexual harassment against them to want Google broken up. All you need to know is that when we look for information online, we say we're going to "google" it, for Google has so much power over our lives that its name has become a verb. And any corporation that has that much power deserves to be broken up -- even if we can credibly say that Google has done a lot of good. You know what other corporation did a lot of good? Netscape. Seriously, they had the best browser/email application in the world in the late 1990s. But I don't mourn their oblivion -- and I would mourn if they'd wound up monopolizing the internet.
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