Thanks to our President's incompetence, our hospitals won't have enough ventilators to cope with the mass of coronavirus infections we face, which means we're going to be overusing the ventilators we do have, which means more of them will require repair -- and did you know that some ventilator manufacturing corporations don't make their repair manuals easy to use, or even access? Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell ventilator manufacturers to release service info that hospitals will need to fix their ventilators. Worried about hospital techs "fixing them wrong"? Then those techs deserve the best information! Worried about violating "trade secrets"? Not when millions of good Americans might die in the next few weeks! A lot of right-wingers, when they talk about the values to which we must hold even when inconvenient, think "protecting trade secrets" as one of them! And not, for example, telling the truth or not manipulating people. Then again, some right-wingers are really all about preserving profits no matter how inconvenient! But to paraphrase a famous philosopher: if money is all you want, then money is all you'll get.
Meanwhile, Philly sports fans might have heard that our local NBA team, the 76ers, was about to impose a 20 percent pay cut on its at-will employees (who aren't working, as you know, because the NBA ain't playing) until, well, local media covered the story, and then the hedge fund billionaire who owns the Sixers realized he'd stepped into a mountain of dung and reversed himself. (The NHL's New Jersey Devils had announced a similar pay cut scheme; guess which hedge fund billionaire owns the Devils as well as the Sixers?) In this spirit, Color of Change helps you tell NBA teams to pay all their laid-off workers for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic. Thousands of good Americans work in NBA arenas, and when the teams ain't playing, and their cities are in various stages of lockdown, where can they turn for a steady income? Sadly, in their immediate future, they might turn to payday lenders and get trapped in 300% death spirals of debt -- or, they might be forced to make either-or decisions about health care and bill-paying that really aren't either-or. So let's have as little of that in the richest country on the planet as possible.
Finally, we strive to practice good physical distancing (a.k.a., "the artist formerly known as 'social distancing,'") so that we don't get infected with coronavirus, or infect other good Americans with coronavirus, but what of folks who can't see their loved ones incarcerated in prison? They're left with video conferencing, and it's bad enough that video conferencing doesn't help keep folks who've served their time from going back to jail anywhere near as well as live, face-to-face visits with loved ones, but video conferencing tends to be a damn racket, saddling prisoners and their families with absurdly high bills, and why? Because they can. What are prisoners and their families going to do about it? Go find another service provider? Hence Color of Change helps you tell our elected officials to make prisoner/loved one communication free during the coronavirus pandemic and thereafter. Really, just because someone can make money doing something, doesn't mean anyone should make money doing something. Sorry, I forgot who was President for a moment.
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