If you've missed previous opportunities to tell Facebook to stop letting its algorithms push racist/violent posts in our faces all the time, then Free Press still helps you do that. It's one thing to let racists spew their filth on Facebook, but it's another thing entirely to help their hateful sputum get a much larger audience than they would otherwise have gained on their own merits. But wait, isn't all this trampling on Facebook's freedom of speech? Short answer is "no," for at least three reasons. One, telling Facebook to do something isn't the same as making them do something. Two, if we regard Facebook as an "information service" (and I'm not saying we should, though the law does), and thus virtually absolve them of responsibility for monitoring the content folks post, we're telling them to stop amplifying certain speech, not censor that speech. Three, Facebook is a corporation, which is to say a thing, and regardless of what corrupt Supreme Court Justices say, things don't have rights; people have rights.
Meanwhile, have you heard of "nurdles"? Nurdles are plastic resin pellets that function basically as a building block for larger plastic products -- but nurdles get lost or unused, so every year some 9,000 truckloads of pellets get dumped into, guess where, our oceans. Does that sound like a good idea? Especially since these nurdles collect into massive trash pits in the ocean and wind up in the digestive systems of marine life? Well, at least one of our Senators (Democrat Tom Udall of New Mexico, who's retiring, unfortunately) has recognized the problem and sponsored S. 4681, the Plastic Pellet-Free Water Act, which would compel our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to issue regulations preventing these nurdles from polluting our waterways. Of course, if our President wins re-election, his EPA will either delay such rules or write bad ones, but if the bill passes, a judge can force them to do their job. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to protect us from pollution by passing the Plastic Pellet-Free Water Act.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8178/S. 4533, the Anti-Racism in Public Health Act, then the Daily Kos Liberation League still helps you do that. It's fairly obvious by now -- hell, it was fairly obvious before the pandemic -- that folks of color are less likely to have access to affordable health care, and more likely to have the pre-existing conditions (like diabetes and asthma) that make good health harder to achieve, and no it's not because THOSE PEEPULZ EATZ MOREZ OFZ TEH DINGDONGZ!!!!! It's because they get redlined into worse neighborhoods and are far more likely to have toxic waste dumps put near them! Anyway, the Anti-Racism in Public Health Act would essentially mandate that our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) do more research on racism in public health, and would also establish a Law Enforcement Violence Prevention Program, since getting shot by police does tend to impact one's health.
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