Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure the rich pay their fair share of taxes, by enacting a wealth tax and fully funding our IRS. You'll note several news hooks there: billionaires are making a killing (so to speak) during this pandemic while over 60 million Americans have filed for unemployment at some point over the last seven months, while the New York Times reported that our President paid literally $750 in taxes in 2017 and 2018. But there's one other news hook you might have missed: Congress has been defunding our IRS for the last decade, to the point where our IRS admits it goes after poorer tax cheat suspects because they don't have the money to fight rich ones in court. That's a despicable state of affairs, beloved only by those who hate all taxes and who have no apparent idea how many of the services they enjoy only exist because of taxes. Congress literally takes food out of our mouths by defunding the IRS, because if you can't stamp out tax avoidance by the rich, someone's still got to pay for roads and bridges and libraries and cops.
Meanwhile, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8178/S. 4533, the Anti-Racism in Public Health Act. The bill would establish a "National Center for Anti-Racism and Health" within our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) and would also mandate that our CDC researches how structural racism (including police brutality) impacts public health. You may find all of that less useful than bills that would actually punish police brutality, curtail redlining, or deliver aid to minority neighborhoods ravaged by COVID-19, but conducting research on these matters is also important, not least because our government really hasn't done that research with this much vigor before. Folks say they always put the landfill next to the black neighborhood, but such arguments need to rise above anecdotes and get backing from scientific research. And we also haven't really confronted police brutality as a public health issue yet. If we did these things, we'd do good works, so this bill merits our support.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Apple to respect our right-to-repair with its products, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. Apple has long been notorious for making their products almost impossible to upgrade and repair on your own, but Apple has also done its share of greenwashing, and has pledged to be completely carbon-neutral in 10 years. If it doesn't make its products easier to reuse, though, how can it do that? If our landfills are overflowing with "obsolete" hardware, how are we going to kick climate change's ass? The U.S. PIRG Education Fund has lately informed us that if we could all get another year out of our cellphones, the climate change impact would be like taking over 600,000 cars off the road! Granted, we have almost 275 million cars on the road right now, but now imagine what getting another year out of your desktops and laptops and iPads would be like. If we had more power to repair and upgrade our own stuff, we would do a lot of good. After all, people still like saving money. Some folks still even pride themselves on their thrift.
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