At last, Michigan's government may be ready to rein in Nestlé's mad drive to siphon off public water at pennies a gallon in order to sell bottled water at dollars a pint, as three bills -- HB 5290, HB 5291, and HB 5292 -- would, respectively, bring the state's water under the public trust, ban the sale of bottled water outside of the Great Lakes area, and expand two state agencies' ability to protect public water. I guess right-wingers will squeal about bans and burdensome regulations, but let's read over the first phrase of the first sentence again: is there really nothing wrong with taking the state's public water at pennies a gallon and then selling it as bottled water at dollars a pint? Right-wingers would call that "capitalism," as if any conceivable money-making scheme is moral simply because it makes someone some money. But I would call it "stealing," and assert that ensuring everyone can have access to clean water is actually moral. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Michigan state legislators to protect their state's public water.
Meanwhile, our Administration wants to expand "religious" exemptions under Title IX far beyond what common sense would require. Currently Title IX -- which states that "(n)o person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance" -- carves out limited exceptions for religious schools, but our Administration would of course allow anyone to claim any sort of exception based merely on their own "religious" "conscience." And when I tell them the kind of world my "religious" "conscience" would entitle me to have -- I've spoken about that matter at some length -- I bet they'd rush to tell me "well, that's different," or "your conscience is worse than my conscience!" At which point reasonable people would agree that Title IX should stay the way it is. So the National Women's Law Center helps you tell our Department of Education to scuttle its own pro-discrimination proposal to essentially gut Title IX.
Finally, you know facial recognition is evil technology, not just because it's one more tool that unscrupulous governmental and corporate actors use to snoop on good Americans, but also because it's bad at its stated purpose, all too frequently mixing black people up even more than your Tea Party uncle does. But tech corporations keep trying to find new markets for their lousy wares, and now they're eyeing schools. Can you say "school-to-prison pipeline," boys and girls? You would think that the debacle at the Iowa Democratic Presidential Caucus this past week would give bad "technological solutions" a permanent black eye, but then politicians of both parties love bad technology, and the big campaign donation money that inevitably comes with it. On the other hand, those of us who love freedom can tell our Congressfolk to prohibit schools from using facial recognition technology, as Demand Progress helps us do. Hey, we're never going to get them to do the right thing if we don't tell them to do the right thing.
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