Stop me if you've heard this story before: our House passed H.R. 6800, the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (or HEROES) Act, and since it would help states and localities, fund our Post Office, extend higher unemployment benefits, expand working family tax cuts while repealing a big hedge fund manager tax cut, and issue another round of (bigger) stimulus checks, it better resembles a real pandemic relief bill than the corporate-welfare-larded CARES Act. So naturally our Senate says they won't ever pass it -- and instead they'll concentrate on ensuring that big corporations get immunity from lawsuits for opening their doors before they're supposed to. But if we all call our Senators and demand that they pass the HEROES Act, we'll stand a better chance of success; tying up their phone lines is something they notice, after all. Tools for finding your Senators' phone numbers are in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone).
Meanwhile, no law prevents you from specifically telling your Senators to reject the McConnell plan to give out said "blanket immunity" to corporations over COVID-19 issues, as Public Citizen helps you do. (You can add that to your phone call above, if you like.) I mention this mainly because Public Citizen frames the issue in a way I'd neglected to do thus far: around your "right to sue," or, more specifically, your right to redress grievances, in court, against those who harm you. The tort "reform" crowd loves to trick you with isolated stories about the lamest lawsuits they can find -- and the punchline of most of these stories is that the lawsuits failed, or that judges reduced the largest awards! Which means they're not even good stories! But isolated anecdotes ain't science, particularly in a nation where corporations file the vast majority of all lawsuits, and isolated anecdotes certainly don't prove that the harm done to you wasn't real. So when they talk about "frivolous" lawsuits, just remember they're trying to hurt you.
Finally, continuing with our CARES Act corporate welfare them, Daily Kos helps you demand that our Congress impose criminal penalties for corporate CEOs who misuse CARES Act funding. CARES Act funding was, allegedly, supposed to keep good Americans working and reward corporations that kept good Americans working. Admittedly that's not the way I'd do it -- yes, I would mandate that our government create work for out-of-work Americans because hello! 39 million Americans unemployed in two months! But I digress. Sen. Warren (D-MA) asked Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin if he could ensure that corporations receiving CARES Act money will keep even one American working, or if he could ensure that executives who file false information about who they're helping could be held liable -- and of course he couldn't, because he belongs to the Administration That Only Cares About Bosses. So, yeah, we need to make some noise about that.
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