Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell your Congressfolk to outlaw felony disenfranchisement. Felony disenfranchisement is, sadly, a story almost as old as America, and governments have always sought to take the vote away from the very same people those governments target with law enforcement. No, really, it's that simple: our governments go out of their way to fill our prisons with as many folks of color as they can, and then they try to take the vote away from them when they get out. (In the early 19th century, felony disenfranchisement also targeted white folks our government didn't find white enough.) Now 48 out of 50 states don't let prisoners vote at all -- while letting governments stash prisoners in largely red areas precisely to enhance the power of those red area voters! -- and now over six million Americans can't vote even though they've paid their debt to society as determined by our legal system, the one that's already treating folks of color unfairly to begin with. And if states won't do right by their citizens, our federal government has to step in.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 619, which barely passed the state Senate a year ago, will suddenly get a House committee vote this week, and SB 619 is a noxious piece of crud that would virtually cripple our state's ability to keep pollution out of our rivers and streams. SB 619 would narrow our state clean water law's definition of "pollution" to exclude most kinds of pollution, plus it would let corporations determine if they should report their spills to our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP), which is like letting burglars off the hook if they decide to keep quiet about their burglaries, and would prevent our DEP from requiring that said corporations clean up their spill or prevent future, similar spills, which I guess means our legislators think it's all right that kids don't clean up their messes. Which don't harm good Pennsylvanians as much as water pollution does! Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your state House Reps to protect our clean water by rejecting SB 619. Don't brook any foolishness about how SB 619 "creates jobs" -- if we're all dead from poisoned drinking water, ain't no jobs gonna help us.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Labor to reject its own proposal to let more employers reclassify workers as "independent contractors" so they can avoid their obligations under the law to treat those workers fairly, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Among these many, many obligations corporations wouldn't have to meet if this Administration gets its way? They wouldn't have to pay workers a minimum wage, they wouldn't have to pay workers overtime when they work more than 40 hours a week or 8 hours a day -- and they wouldn't have to collect Social Security and Medicare taxes for their workers! Yes, that's right, this proposal is yet another way our Administration attacks Social Security and Medicare, and if corporations are afraid of taking advantage of our President's notorious payroll tax "holiday," they'll be far less afraid of calling their workers "independent contractors," and our Administration will kill Social Security and Medicare that way. So let's stop that, shall we?
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