Word on the street is that Congressional Democrats are about to cave on the next pandemic relief bill, a bill that would have no more funding for unemployment insurance, no help for our U.S. Postal Service, no funding to ensure we can all vote by mail in November, and no money for states and localities; hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to include these things in the next pandemic relief legislation. And you've likely heard that big corporations tapped out the $350 billion small business loan fund in mere minutes, and that's largely because the CARES Act a) defined a small business as one with 500 employees and b) allowed big corporations to call themselves "small businesses" if they have fewer than 500 employees at individual locations, meaning that Potbelly got to feed on corporate welfare, admittedly a joke that writes itself. I think you should call your Reps and Senators and tell them to amend the CARES Act so that it defines a small business as one that has 50 or fewer employees (as the Family Medical Leave Act and the Affordable Care Act do) and doesn't let big corporations use the fiction of franchising to pretend they're small businesses. They sure won't see that coming!
Meanwhile, you know what we're seeing a little bit less of during this global pandemic? Wars, that's what -- after the U.N. Secretary General's plea for worldwide ceasefires on March 23, Colombian rebels have declared a unilateral ceasefire, both government and the Communist rebels in the Philippines have observed a ceasefire, and even the Saudi/UAE coalition has ceased hostilities (at least until tomorrow!) against Yemen. Hence Roots Action joins with Win Without War to help you tell the rest of the world's governments to observe a ceasefire, too. At this writing, 45 armed conflicts are going on around the world, with nine of these resulting in a thousand deaths or more over the past year; ideally we wouldn't want ceasefires to end just because we get the pandemic under control, but certainly now isn't a good time to make the conditions caused by this pandemic worse, as wars tend to do. And, not for nothing, but we fight a lot of wars for really stupid reasons -- try drilling deep into the causes of the war on Yemen, for example, and you'll be wholly unimpressed. So let's at least make it harder for wars to start up again.
In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Governor to ensure that we protect vulnerable prison populations during this pandemic, then the Daily Kos Liberation League still helps you do that. What's that you say, right-wingers? That the people who aren't criminals are just as important as prisoners? Yeah, way to be shallow, right-wingers. First off, more than half of all Americans in jails have not been convicted of a crime -- they're just there because they can't make bail, and their continued detention should represent a continuous offense against law and order in America. Second off, prisoners can't socially distance -- why, a lot of them can't even use the can in peace! -- and if we make them stay in a hothouse of COVID-19 infection, that'll keep the disease alive. I say spread 'em out, and give the disease fewer points of attack. (And no, no one is saying let's release all the murderers. Why do right-wingers love fighting straw men? Because straw men can't fight back! But we can.)
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to demand that our President restore funding to the World Health Organization (or WHO), then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Our President's announcement of his decision accused the WHO of "severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus," "fail(ing) to adequately...share information in a timely and transparent fashion," and ”(costing) valuable time" through its "delays" "in declaring a public health emergency." As far as I know, there's no truth to the rumor that our President accidentally read a list of his own failures in managing this pandemic here in America. In this, our President follows Tha Bush Mobb's example -- Tha Bush Mobb, after all, successfully convinced a majority of Americans to cling to them even harder because their own failures made the world a worse place. But this President also projects all of his failures onto other people; we'll see in November if the American people find that palatable. In the meantime, we might as well communicate our will.
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