Demand Progress helps you tell your House Reps to repeal Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, which allows our government to collect information (like financial transactions and medical records) on good Americans who've done not a damn thing wrong. Hopefully we're running out of people who would protest but you could become a terrorist one day, you never know! Sadly, the surest way to run out of those people would be to have more of them know their government is spying on them, because we all think we're completely innocent and it's only those people who need our government to keep tabs on them. But when you give government that power, you know they're going to have their own definition of "those people," and that definition is going to skew black and brown and Muslim. You may not be black, brown, or Muslim, but this is America, so someone you know and love probably is, and you shouldn't wait until they get caught in our government's dragnet before you do something about it.
Meanwhile, you may have heard that several big asset management corporations have begun to push big corporations to address climate change -- but BlackRock hasn't, and has, in fact, undermined shareholder resolutions aimed at getting big corporations to change their ways and pollute less. Shareholder resolutions are about the closest thing investors have to democracy in the corporate world (though it's certainly not preferable to democracy!), and even a resolution with substantial minority support can get corporate boards to do the right thing, but BlackRock, with all the billions it controls, doesn't seem to be on board, and that may be your money tied up in there if you have a pension or retirement account somewhere. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell BlackRock to start pushing corporations to do more to combat climate change. Don't believe them if they tell you retirees will suffer if you make us do the thing! Hopefully you recognize that as a) hostage-taking and b) not at all the American can-do spirit.
Finally, H.R. 2245, the Ceasing the Importation of Large Animal Trophies (or CECIL) Act, is of course named for the endangered African lion killed by a hunter back in 2015 -- you remember Walter Palmer, the most hated man in America that week? -- and it would help prevent more "trophies" from coming into the United States. If you're hung up on the notion that an animal that's endangered over there might not be endangered here, please note that our Endangered Species Act does list animals from other nations. And you'll also want to attend Sec. 3 of the bill, which would mandate that our Secretary of the Interior certify, before handing out any hunting permits, that the a potential trophy animal's country of origin "adequately provides for the conservation and monitoring for that species." If we enact and enforce such protections, we'll have fewer rich jerks showing off their trophies of vulnerable animals. So Environmental Action helps you tell your House Reps to protect endangered species by passing the CECIL Act.
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