David Koch passed away a few weeks ago, and if we want to make his life truly meaningful, we can, at the least, allow Americans for Tax Fairness to help us tell our Congressfolk to close the loopholes that result in the kind of absurd fortunes like the one Mr. Koch amassed largely tax-free. Some folks on the right indulge in a sort of hyper-individualism, in which they assert that we're only free when one person is as free as we can imagine, and if you see a kind of logic in that, you must also see that when one person achieves that much freedom, they trample over everyone else's freedom merely to make a meaningful life for themselves. When we restrained the freedom of the richest individuals, we created the greatest middle class in history -- and in recent decades we've destroyed that middle class by indulging in these individualist fantasies, where we celebrate those with billions of dollars they can never spend, fleets of classic cars they can never drive, or the umpteen huge vacation homes they can't live in at once. So let's promote some real freedom.
Meanwhile, the Amazon rainforest, a.k.a. "the lungs of the Earth," continues to burn, largely because of the lawless regime of Brazil's President, Jair Bolsonaro, who has encouraged loggers and farmers to burn trees in order to "spur development" -- and, not incidentally, infringe on the rights of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. Mr. Bolsonaro, as disgusting a human being as has ever held office, has gone on to accuse non-governmental organizations of setting the fire themselves, and has figured their motive as trying to make money off climate change, though sane people know that no environmental group will ever make as much money fighting climate change as a big corporation will make causing it. Anyway, while European nations offer financial aid with one hand, they're planning to conclude yet another of those notorious "free" trade "deals" with Mercosur, a sort of South American common market composed of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. If you're familiar with "free" trade, you know that'll just make everything worse, so Sum of Us helps you tell the European Union to scuttle the EU-Mercosur "free" trade "deal."
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