You've heard, perhaps, that Congress is thisclose to passing a COVID relief deal -- and you've likely also heard that this "deal" will contain no money for states and localities and stimulus and unemployment relief amounting to half of what we got under the CARES Act, while bringing back all of the CARES Act's corporate welfare. Here's what we should do in response: call our Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act! Now that was a stimulus bill, and our House passed it seven months ago (remember that the next time you hear your right-wing uncle cry that TEH DIMOCRATZ AREZ HOLDINGZ UPZ TEH BILLZ!!!!), and the HEROES Act would fund states and localities, fund COVID testing and tracing, fund unemployment benefits at the level of the CARES Act, repeal the big hedge fund manager tax cut given out by the CARES Act, and give working Americans bigger stimulus checks than the CARES Act. Bigger than whatever this Congress tries to pass this week, too! So don't think you just have to take whatever Congress dishes out, and certainly don't act like you do.
Meanwhile, you've likely also heard that states are getting many, many fewer doses of the Pfizer vaccine than they thought they were getting, and our Administration, being the very embodiment of leadership and accountability, apologized for getting that wrong. Nah, I kid -- this Administration has not accounted for itself to the states, but our HHS Secretary has blamed Pfizer for the foul-up, which naturally they deny, saying they have millions of doses ready to go but have heard nothing from our Administration, whose nominal head seems to spend most of his time on Twitter savaging fellow Republicans and spreading even more lies about "voter fraud." This, as more Americans die from COVID each day than died from the 9/11 attacks, which were, as I recall, a Damascus moment for a whole generation of right-wingers! Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our Administration to get its act together and get folks the vaccines they need. Yeah, I know, this Administration doesn't ever seem to listen when we tell them to do their damn job, but they ignore us in the hope we'll go away. But after they're gone, we'll still be here.
Finally, you may have heard, from our "liberal" media, that Venezuela has fallen upon economic hard times -- but you may not have heard, from our "liberal" media, that one of the main reasons good Venezuelans have it so bad is that our government has imposed sanctions upon them for years! One of FAIR's recent email missives catches the New York Times doing this very thing earlier this month, describing how Venezuela's midterm elections went yet again for the United Socialist Party to which Messrs. Chavez and Maduro belong (again, after opposition parties boycotted the election; maybe our Republican party will start getting similar ideas in America?) and describing the "deep economic challenges" Venezuela faces without mentioning American sanctions as one of them. Make no mistake: just as our "liberal" media seemed sanguine toward Brazil's irredeemable asshole of a President because he'd be "good for business," they hate folks like Mr. Maduro because they won't turn over their economies to multinational corporations. The link above helps you encourage the Times to correct the record.
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