As you know, Congress is contemplating another pandemic-related relief bill, so we might as well tell them what to do. Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund a more secure voting process, including expanded voting-by-mail, early voting, same-day registration, and voter and poll worker safety. Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to save our U.S. Postal Service from the financial crisis caused by both this pandemic and Congressional malice. Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund internet access for all Americans as the pandemic drags on. The Center for American Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand food stamp programs for all the folks who now aren't working and thus can't buy a whole lot of food. And the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose any more corporate welfare for corporations and rich folks. I've been advocating a lof of these things for a long time now, and folks who oppose it seem to just make up reasons to do it now. Keep that in mind as you go through the world, trying to do the right thing.
Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell Microsoft to support our "right to repair" by giving us more access to the service diagrams, repair software, spare parts, and tools we need to fix our computers. Microsoft has played whack-a-mole with right-to-repair bills wherever they've come up, but they've made their newest Surface noticeably more repair-friendly, so maybe they're ready for more pressure. I'm old enough to remember when upgrading my RAM and my processor in my laptop in the late '90s, but just a few years later I couldn't even find the screws in my next one, and that's not all about "efficient design"; it's also about mystifying computers so you don't even try to make them better. But we're Americans, dammit, and we ought to be able to fix what we own! It's more self-reliant that way, and we all remember self-reliance as an American virtue, don't we? I'll tell you what ain't an "American virtue": manufacturing computers that become obsolete a few months after you buy them! And the pollution that results ain't an American virtue, either.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to abandon its own "Censored Science" proposal, then Breast Cancer Action still helps you do that. Our EPA calls it the "Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science" rule, but Breast Cancer Action's moniker is far more apt, because our EPA's proposal would do the opposite of making rule-making science more transparent: it would, actually, make rule-making science more corporate, since corporate studies are magically more likely to meet the new proposed standard. How did this happen? The EPA decided that any scientific study that contains any data that isn't "publicly available" -- but a lot of good scientific studies, including those that have informed Clean Air rulemaking that has literally saved good Americans tens of trillions of dollars in health care costs, have confidential data like people's private information in them. Thus they make "transparency" more opaque, and enable more corporations to pollute more filth into our air and water. Nice work if you can get it, I guess. So let's not take this lying down.
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