Happy Monday, good Americans! Both the ACLU and the Friends Committee on National Legislation help you tell your Congressfolk to address police brutality and racism in legislation. The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the COPS and 1033 programs which bloat police forces and give them military weapons, respectively, and the FCNL helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the 1033 program and pass H.R. 7120, the Justice in Policing Act. As you know, the Justice in Policing Act would (among other things!) crack down on racial and religious profiling, limit police officers' "qualified immunity" in lawsuits, and require body cameras for all police officers. It's not "anti-police" to demand these things -- if anything, it's pro-police, because these reforms would keep police officers working, and would make them work more effectively. Don't settle for police officers telling you how can I do my job if these bills pass? Not just because everyone complains about procedural changes keeping them from doing their job, but also because you know how that particular complaint really translates: "how will I ever do my job if I can't impose a death penalty upon black people without even charging them with a crime?"
California residents, take note: with price-gouging on medical supplies still a problem during this pandemic -- and folks who say and you're surprised by that? really need to just slap themselves, because the problem we all have isn't that it's a "surprise" but that it's morally wrong -- SB 1196 would give California's price-gouging law a much-needed update, by closing a loophole that allows new sellers to engage in price-gouging without penalty (I wonder who thought that up!) and by extending protections for consumers against price-gouging beyond the current 30-day limit, which is surely inadequate to a pandemic that's been going on for over three months. Regardless of where California's numbers are right at this moment! Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida have all seen surging infection numbers this past week, so clearly the heat ain't killing it, and if it's alive somewhere, it could spread anywhere, even to places that had it under control. No, COVID-19 is going to be with us for a long time -- and, sadly, so will people who take advantage of it. Strike a blow against them by letting CALPIRG help you tell your CA state legislators to protect consumers from price-gouging by passing SB 1196.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International helps you tell our Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) to protect immigrants and asylum-seekers by freeing them from ICE concentration camps and local jails. What are we protecting them from? Getting COVID-19, of course, since you can't exactly "socially distance" in a jail or a concentration camp -- indeed, the name "concentration camp" does suggest that very inadequacy. Personal to those who get their shorts in a bunch over the hint of freeing immigrants from detainment: they have not been found guilty of a crime. They have not even been charged with a crime. So many people beat their chests (or whatever, amirite?) about "law and order," but cannot recall that our Founders revolted from the British Empire over such matters as detainment without charge. Of course, such folks also generally believe immigrants to be natural criminals, a belief enabled not just by their President but by decades of right-wing pundits yammering about immigrants and crime. Actual data doesn't support the notion that immigrants commit more crimes than American citizens, but data matters little to people who constantly masturbate to their unquenchable rage.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to protect we-the-taxpayer from using the CARES Act to loot our hard-earned money, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Yeah, "loot" is the right word! And it's about time we paid more attention to the looters taking our tax money than the looters who make protestors look bad maybe on purpose. Our government said it'd "help out small businesses" with the Paycheck Protection Program in the CARES Act -- and then our President removed the acting Inspector General who might actually have done a good job overseeing the program, and then a couple of big corporations got caught taking PPP money although it'd be easier to sell a bridge in Brooklyn than sell the American people on the proposition that they were actually "small businesses" that "needed" the money, and then our Treasury Secretary, the Artist Formerly Known as the Foreclosure King, said that he wouldn't tell the people who was taking PPP money because that info was "proprietary" and "confidential." Which was exactly the opposite of what he told us before Congress passed the bill! Jesus Mary and Joseph these crooks aren't even good at being crooks.
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