Our Congressfolk hope to ram a PATRIOT Act reauthorization down America's throat this week, so Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop any extension or expansion of that law's abusing spying powers. I wish I could say this has been an exclusively Republican problem, but Democrats haven't been any better when they've been the gatekeepers -- two years of exclusive control of Congress and the Presidency yielded exactly bupkus as far as rolling back such abuses as warrantless wiretapping, and thanks to Edward Snowden we know that our government expanded its powers during the Obama years. Oddly, this President's NSA has declared it really doesn't need all that power to spy on American phone calls and emails, and historically it is odd for a government to give up a spying power it's gained. It's a lot easier for governments to give up the powers they use to restrain corporations and rich folks from abusing the rest of us, amirite? But let's keep working for a government that delivers the services we pay for with our taxes and then leaves us alone.
Meanwhile, our President has floated the possibility that he won't allow federal aid to flow to states with so-called "sanctuary cities"! Huzzah! Another right-wing hostage crisis! And another maneuver that makes our President looks like he's done something about the "scourge" of immigration when, in reality, he's done nothing, as usual. What is a "sanctuary city"? A city that won't cooperate with the feds on immigration matters unless the feds present a damn warrant; get a warrant and poof! No "sanctuary." You'd think right-wingers, who have swordfights all the time over who's "more conservative," would champion local control of law enforcement matters, but no -- instead, they make "sanctuary" just another cuss word! And our President benefits from undocumented immigrant labor as much as the next guy -- though his are "the best people," I bet! -- and has no interest in, say, letting farmworkers unionize under the National Labor Relations Act, which would actually result in fewer big ag corporations importing foreign workers to drive down everyone's wages. Anyway, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our Congressfolk to prevent our President tying aid to "sanctuary cities."
In other news, the ACLU helps you tell big fast food corporation McDonald's to give all its workers paid sick leave now. Like we've been saying, if they want to do business, they need to take all the steps necessary to ensure that you don't die from your next Big Mac, and that includes giving their workers paid sick leave so that they don't come to work sick and make everyone else sick and, you know, unflatten the curve. McDonald's has almost a million employees, whom they already don't pay enough, such that nearly half of McDonald's workers who come to work sick do so explicitly because they can't afford the loss of money; McDonald's should be paying its workers a lot more (and some people need to get over the notion that fast-food workers "don't have skills," at least until they take a turn at the drive-in window), but getting them paid sick leave will help in the meantime. And boy oh boy McDonald's had better not try to say that kind of decision-making is "up to the franchises." The "franchise" is a fiction executives use to deny accountability for their own failures. And the way they treat their workers sure does count as failure.
Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to block any attempt by our President to give a billion-dollar-plus bailout to the uranium mining industry. Let's make a list of things you can do with uranium, shall we? Well, there's making nuclear weapons, and powering nuclear power plants, and not a damn thing else. No, we don't use it in yellow paint anymore, because it's freaking poisonous. Scientists have long linked uranium to cancer, it leeches too easily into the water table, and uranium ore gives off radon gas; you know we get houses checked for radon before we move in for a good reason, right? And not for nothing, but uranium prices have basically cratered over the last 40 years, basically because you don't need any more nukes when you have enough to destroy the world hundreds of times over, and also because nuclear power plants don't make any money no matter how many corporate welfare handouts it gets. So isn't it a bit late to be giving the uranium mining industry a bailout? And don't renewable sources of energy look a lot better?
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