As our government contemplates a new trade deal with Kenya, Rethink Trade helps you leave a public comment with our U.S. Trade Representative outlining exactly how you'd like that trade deal to go down. I won't lie: the USMCA represents a significant improvement on NAFTA -- it curtails the harm that "investor-state dispute settlement" systems do to our laws and to our livelihoods. But I'd also be lying if I told you our President deserved all the credit for that -- actually, we deserve most of the credit for that, by agitating as we have done for decades against the kind of pro-corporate "free" trade agreements that outsource our jobs and nullify our laws. Hence we can head off yet another pro-corporate "free" trade agreement that big pharma corporations and big fossil fuel corporations want (and don't they get enough welfare handouts already?) by telling our Trade Representative that we want trade agreements to put people above corporations. The commenting tool will suggest specific demands that you will want to make. Hey, we're the bosses of our government, so we get to make demands.
Americans for Financial Reform joins with MoveOn to help you tell your Congressfolk to expand funding to our Postal Service so it can continue operating. Our President of course says won't do that, maybe because he thinks he can privatize it, and though that wouldn't save the taxpayer any money (taxes haven't funded our USPS since the early '80s), it would make some Presidential crony or other more money. But our Post Office helps keep us together in tough times -- it gets us our paychecks and prescriptions, it gets health care providers their lab tests and medical supplies, and come November, it might be carrying all our votes. Hey, maybe that's why our President wants it to die! Seriously, though, corporations like FedEx and UPS don't deliver the mail better -- neither deals with anywhere near the volume of the USPS. And, hate to pile on, but if our government allowed our USPS to offer more postal banking services, and didn't compel it to pre-pay employee pensions 40 years in advance, our USPS could weather this pandemic a lot better -- and, since we depend so much on our USPS, so could we.
Meanwhile, 18 Million Rising helps you tell social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to shut down coronavirus misinformation and hate speech. Asian-Americans have felt the sting of racism acutely due to this pandemic, and our President sure doesn't help when he calls the coronavirus the "Chinese virus," amirite? Of course I don't blame him when other Americans hurl racist epithets and commit physical assaults against Asian-Americans -- I blame the perpetrators of violence for violence! -- but a civilized person would go out of his way not to give people ideas, particularly in a land which specifically barred Chinese-American emigration for over 80 years and where racists have spewed forth "yellow peril" arguments for centuries. And no, our First Amendment doesn't give social media platforms a "right" to "allow" any manner of hateful rubbish on their platforms, any more than it mandates that book publishers must publish any manuscript they receive; defending racists from imprisonment merely for their racism is one thing, but enabling racism by being a bad publisher is another thing entirely.
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