If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment that would allow our government to regulate campaign finances again, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. H.J.Res. 48, the "Democracy for All" amendment, would end the fiction of corporate "personhood," explicitly stating that "(t)he rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons only. Artificial entities, such as corporations, limited liability companies, and other entities, established by the laws of any State, the United States, or any foreign state shall have no rights under this Constitution and are subject to regulation by the People, through Federal, State, or local law." The amendment also authorizes state, federal, and local governments to regulate campaign finance, so that "all citizens, regardless of their economic status, have access to the political process, and that no person gains, as a result of that person’s money, substantially more access or ability to influence in any way the election of any candidate for public office or any ballot measure." So there we are.
Meanwhile, you've heard our President's bloviating about "piles of dead birds" at the foot of windmills? Then you will be interested to hear that our Administration has basically decided not to prosecute violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, by allowing oil, electric, and fishing corporations to simply claim they didn't "intend" to kill any of the birds they routinely kill! Law and order! Remember how Antonin Scalia would get heated about attempts to discern the "intent" of a law? I'd like to think he'd be just as hoppin' about this Administration's attempts to simply assign a benign intent to violations of the law. And anyway, if an oil corporation doesn't cover its waste pit though its executives know birds will drown in it, then what do they intend? They intend to harm, and they intend to break the law -- no finger-shaking about how they "only intend to save money," lest that become the "religious conscience" of the new decade. If we wanna be all law and order, we actually have to be all law and order. Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our Administration to scuttle its plan to let bird-killers off the hook.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1185/S. 463, the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (or FAMILY) Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Brook no silliness from anyone about HOW WILL WE PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ!!!!, because the cost to the worker making $50,000 annually for this program would be $8.33/month -- about the price of four Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers at Wendy's, or about a buck and a half less than the price of Boz Scaggs's Silk Degrees album on iTunes. Seriously, it's not a lot of money for a lot of peace of mind. And everyone won't be using family leave at once! Because that's not how insurance works! Insurance is when people pool together their resources to help any one of them, or any few of them, through a tough time. We've forgotten this because our culture drills this everyone-for-themselves ethos into us, to the point where fools call things like the Affordable Care Act "socialism" and never face the scorn and ridicule they deserve. But we need to get back to what works in America, and what works in America is Americans helping each other out.
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