So, Joe Biden gets inaugurated President today, and he's released a broad outline of a COVID-related stimulus plan, which has much to recommend it, and much that needs improvement. So go ahead and read all about it, and then use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and call your Reps and Senators and tell them what you think. On the plus side: a $15/hour minimum wage, expanded tax credits for working families, 14 weeks of paid family leave for folks dealing with closed schools, $160 billion for expanded testing and vaccination, and $350 billion for states and localities (that's in addition to education funding). On the minus side: stimulus checks need to be $2,000, not $1,400; enhanced unemployment insurance needs to be $600 monthly, not $400; and money earmarked for small businesses had better not turn into corporate welfare this time. I don't know how they'll fund it, but go ahead and tell them to fund it by raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy (while keeping tax cuts for working folks, since those are the ones that'll expire soon!).
Meanwhile, you can tell your Senators (while you have them on the phone about the Biden stimulus plan) to convict Donald Trump on our House's impeachment charges and ensure he'll never able to run for any kind of elective office again. Mitch McConnell has said lately that his Republican colleagues' vote will be a "vote of conscience," but really they should convict on the strength of the case against him, and that crime did go down in broad daylight, after all. Now, quite a few Republican Senators may vote to acquit because (as some of their House colleagues told reporters last week) they're literally afraid Mr. Trump's followers will kill them and/or their families. Now, anyone who'd kill or threaten a Senator or their family members should be locked up, obviously, but if you want to be a legislator, you have to do the right thing, and doing the right thing takes guts. Your job title is "Senator," not "Senator except for impeachment votes against politicians with insane followers." You don't see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez run for the hills after all the death threats and rape threats she gets, do you?
I really hope to wind down with coup-related action alerts soon, but here's one more: both Free Press and Daily Kos help you tell big corporations to stop donating to the 147 Congressfolk who voted to overturn the 2020 Presidential election results. This Gang of 147 didn't vote to overturn their own election results, you may have noticed! As it happens, Amazon, Facebook, Comcast, and Google all decided to "pause" their campaign contributions in the wake of the January 6 attempted coup, but we need a little bit more from them than that: we need them to stop contributing to them, and we need to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against them, a stick which we know well will hurt. Do you worry that Republicans will just find someone worse, and big corporations will just give money to them? Then you turn the Big Stick of Bad PR on them again until they relent. Besides, Republicans are going to have a hard time recovering from the PR black eye they've deservedly gotten over this coup attempt. And ain't no Nelson Rockefellers coming to rescue them.
Finally, Data for Progress helps you tell soon-to-be-President Biden to issue an Executive Order mandating that our federal government buy more sustainable and made-in-America goods. He can do this without having to run to The One American Super-President Mitch McConnell or The One Great Hope for Moderation and Unity Joe Manchin, and most people will appreciate it. Government's going to buy American? About time! And only rageheads don't like the idea of sustainable production. Now, Data for Progress sells this initiative as a way to fight climate change, which it is (no, really, buying American means less energy expended to send goods across the globe), but frankly it's a good initiative for other reasons, too. For example, buying more American goods helps save American jobs, and buying more sustainable goods means less pollution. And our government's going to have its work cut out for it, as you know, so the more American jobs we save, and the less we pollute in getting America restarted, the better.
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