The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to prevent police from using "less lethal" weaponry on protestors. "Less lethal" means, I suppose, that we have no right to get upset unless police use "lethal" weapons? So if you've ever lost an eye to a rubber bullet, or lost your hearing to a stun grenade, or gotten burnt by tear gas, you should be sitting at home saying "at least it wasn't a lethal weapon"? And those who get skull fractures and die from tear gas cartridges can't testify to the "lack of lethality" of these weapons. Cold would be the heart that would say that protestors deserve such treatment! Of course, that heart could mask its own coldness by simply equating protestors with looters, even though now -- in an era where everyone carries around an HD camera in their pocket! -- we know a lot of looters are agents provocateurs, and we know the violence at protests flows mainly in one direction. Spoiler alert: in the protestors' direction, not the police's.
Meanwhile, another day, another Presidential nominee who'll favor big corporations over her true bosses, the American people: one Nancy Beck, former chemical industry lobbyist, now EPA toxicologist ensuring that chemical safety regulations favor her former employers, and now, perhaps, chair of our Consumer Product Safety Commission. She's figured prominently in our EPA's efforts to do as little as humanly possible about PFAS chemicals, which you may better know as "forever chemicals" because virtually everyone has them in their bloodstream, and scientists have linked them to cancer and birth defects, so of course she should head up the CPSC, whose name, after all, doesn't have the words "product" or "safety" in it, right? Oh, wait. So the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Nancy Beck to our CPSC, lest we one day realize that our President has spent years not complaining about her, which is (as with Messrs. Mnuchin, Ross, and DeVos) is the surest sign that someone does not have a soul.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop corporations from abusing COVID-19 relief, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Remember when our President and our Treasury Secretary promised there'd be "oversight" into how $500 billion of taxpayer money was disbursed as "paycheck protection"? And then remember when our President replaced one of the Inspectors General who would have actually overseen the program (and likely done a good job at it)? And then remember when big, big corporations like Perkins and Ruth's Chris Steak House got caught taking money always intended for small businesses and the resulting PR storms forced them to give the money back? And then remember when Mr. Mnuchin, who wears glasses so people don't punch him in the face, said the information about which corporations got COVID-19 relief was too "proprietary" and "confidential" to be released? All sounds like a corporate welfare scam, doesn't it? And it's a scam we must stop.
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