You remember those accountability features Congress built into the CARES Act? Yeah, there weren't enough of them, I know, but our Administration seems determined even to ignore the ones that exist, as our Office of Management and Budget (or OMB) has apparently told federal agencies disbursing COVID-19-related relief funds to simply ignore reporting requirements -- including the one that would tell us whether this use of taxpayer funding actually saves any jobs! I keep saying the same thing because they keep doing the same thing -- this Administration doesn't hate "bureaucracy"; they only hate that part of the bureaucracy that actually help good Americans, hence their utter disgust for anti-pollution regulations, and their utter disgust for laws that would hold them accountable to their bosses, the American people. Who are the ones who fund their little corporate welfare slush fund, I feel compelled to note with the italics hammer. Hence the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell our OMB to rescind its guidance that hides how well our government uses our money during this pandemic.
Meanwhile, giant investment corporation BlackRock has (and stop me if you've heard this one before!) talked a good game about being "socially responsible" in their investments, which would be gratifying, especially coming from a corporation that manages close to $6 trillion in assets (as of 2018) -- except that they still invest directly in Palantir, the notorious data management corporation that helps our Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) run its even more notorious concentration camps. So investing in family separation, terroristic raids, putting kids in cages -- it all sure makes the phrase "socially responsible" sound hollow! The more charitable among you might tell me it takes time to root out all the evil in your portfolio once you've resolved to do it, but that's why we point it out to these big corporations, right? Hence the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell BlackRock to pull its investments out of the concentration camp business by divesting from Palantir. I mean, evil can find plenty of money on its own, I would think.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 3884, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment & Expungement (or MORE) Act, then Drug Policy Alliance still helps you do that. The MORE Act would not only legalize marijuana (by removing it from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act), but would invest in the communities of color at which our government has targeted its half-century-long "war on drugs." No, "targeted" does not overstate the case -- but you don't have to believe me about that; you can believe former Nixon Administration counsel John Ehrlichman, who said, out loud, that the "war on drugs" had rather little to do with illicit drugs taking away good Americans' freedoms and rather more to do with targeting civil rights and anti-war protestors. And yes, drugs do take away your freedoms, if you abuse them, and no, not every street drug should be legal, but putting pot on the level of something truly destructive like heroin smacks of the mistakes of the Prohibition Era. And surely we don't want to go down that road.
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