Daily Kos helps you tell your state officials they must make voting-by-mail available to all of your state's voters. I've been hesitant to mention voting-by-mail, not just because I fully intend to vote at my local voting booth this November come hell, high water, or pandemic, but because voting-by-mail isn't secret balloting and because the states that have been doing voting-by-mail well over the years have been doing it, well, for years. Still, I've tolerated non-secret balloting in other arenas (I voted absentee in 2004), and it's not like the voting-by-mail wisdom of states like Washington and Oregon just can't be reverse-engineered by folks in other states, and maybe a mandate will provoke your state into seeking and accumulating that wisdom. One thing's for sure: a lot of politicians would just prefer not to face the voters if they don't have to, and the pandemic gives them an excuse. But we don't tolerate excuses around here -- the politicians need to do their damn job and ensure everyone can vote.
Meanwhile, Daily Kos also helps you tell credit card corporations to waive monthly payments and interest while the pandemic is crippling the economy. One might well retort how do you expect them to make money especially when the economy is in the toilet? I expect them to make money by being generous now so that folks will still value their services later! Too many Americans won't think of the long term, and that's because our government and our media have conditioned us that way! But I'm old enough to remember when corporations did think of the long term -- largely because our government actually enacted and enforced regulations that gave them no choice! But if you just lost your low-paying job and can't make ends meet, the last thing you need is your credit card corporation haranguing you about your payments. No, people don't use credit cards for merely frivolous items, not anymore -- too many Americans use credit cards because they have to. Let's give them a hand up.
Finally, you've heard about price-gouging on things like saniwipes and hand sanitizer, and you may have told corporations like Amazon to stamp out that price-gouging on their sites, but, ah, price-gouging is also illegal, and those who jack up prices to absurd levels in a time of crisis deserve punishment for their evil works. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop price-gouging during this pandemic. Our FTC has been warning us that price-gouging could happen -- but that may be the extent of its interest in stopping price-gouging! They might well claim, as right-wingers typically do, that they "trust consumers" more than they trust mandates, but if that really worked, we wouldn't have any monopolies in America, would we? And when we have monopolies (or collusion between corporations), you can "trust consumers" all you want, but they won't have the tools to do something about price-gouging. This is why we have laws, and regulations, and it's why we have law enforcement! Maybe you heard that having law enforcement had something to do with black people, but really it has to do with all of us.
Comments