It's Monday, so it's time to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, and reject the suite of bills Republicans call the HEALS Act. It really is as simple as a Goofus and Gallant strip: the HEROES Act would fund our Post Office, fund unemployment benefits, fund COVID-19 testing and tracing, fund localities and states, and issue another round of (bigger) stimulus checks -- while the HEALS Act would make three-martini lunches fully tax-deductible, immunize corporations from lawsuits when they kill people, and make it a lot easier for Congress to cut our Social Security benefits. Don't worry that the two parties are "negotiating" over what a final COVID relief bill would look like, because the HEROES Act is what that bill should look like. Besides, we don't have to negotiate with them -- they have to negotiate with us. You might call that naive, but I've seen it work enough times to want it to work all the time -- and we can make it work all the time by speaking out all the time.
Speaking of our Post Office, MoveOn helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to remove its new Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy. I guess his defenders will say he's a "logistics executive" who's "shaking up" our Post Office, but we all know logistics employees, not executives, have all the expertise, and cutting off overtime, slowing mail delivery, embarking on a mass firing spree, removing mail sorting machines, and moving blue mailboxes around all look less like "shaking things up" and more like "sowing chaos for our drama king President." And yet there are more even pressing reasons to remove Mr. DeJoy: he still owns a considerable stake in his former corporation, which feeds extensively on taxpayer funds including USPS contracts, and recently bought stock options in Amazon, which uses our USPS a lot but which is also trying to establish itself as a USPS competitor. Adding corruption to incompetence is a tried-and-true formula for our President, but we don't have to put up with it.
Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act. What does the Moving Forward Act do? It would (among other things) extend this year's infrastructure funding for another year, extend several other transportation- and safety-related funds for the next five years, establish a fund to rebuild transportation infrastructure in rural areas, strengthen safety rules across all modes of transportation, and fund the rebuilding of lead-lined water infrastructure. Here's a sad note: despite the obvious need for infrastructure funding, and the bill's concentration on rural areas and clean water, H.R. 2 got exactly three Republican votes, one of whom was a Democrat until late last year. If the big media pundits got a hold of this information, they'd whine about the bill's lack of "bipartisan" appeal. Sane people, of course, would retort that Republicans have no interest in governing, and thus no "bipartisan" appeal can work with them. And that's why we step in.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to fully fund our Indian Health Service, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. I'm sure I don't have to say don't they know there's a pandemic on? -- especially since the Navajo Nation, in particular, had it worse than New York state three months back, and you remember how bad New York state had it. But I may have to address folks who, while not particularly bigoted, may wonder "why we're still doing stuff for the Indians." Because obliterating Native cultures might take hundreds of years to redress, that's why. "But I didn't have anything to do with that," such folks might respond. I could respond in a number of ways -- "it's not all about you," "your relative lack of culpability doesn't fix the problem I just described" -- but how about we just say America is a great nation, capable of undoing the harm it inflicts upon the undeserving.
Comments