Long story short: demand justice for Daunte Wright and his loved ones, tell President Biden to include a stronger Estate Tax in his infrastructure/jobs plan and shut down the Dakota Access pipeline, tell our FDA to stop antibiotic abuse on factory farms, tell our government to break up monopolies like Google and Amazon, and tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop abusive debt collection calls. The following paragraphs will provide email/petition links for all of these action alerts. Good hunting!
First things first. Change.org helps you demand justice in the Daunte Wright shooting. The wheels of justice have moved relatively quickly, I suppose -- both the officer who shot Mr. Wright and her Police Chief have resigned their positions, and authorities have lately arrested the officer on a second-degree manslaughter charge. But, frankly, said authorities could have justified a murder charge, merely because the 26-year officer couldn't possibly have mistaken her relatively heavy handgun for her relatively light taser. Manslaughter may be where it ends up -- murder is a hard charge to prove, after all -- but the state may also be reducing expectations so it can let her off. So, clearly, we still need to make our will known.
Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell President Biden to include an Estate Tax hike in his infrastructure/jobs plan. Too many Democrats still live in the year 1999 and think the Estate Tax is a relic of the past, but they're as wrong about that as they are about everything else -- there's nothing "evil" about taxing large estates, and no you won't destroy any family farms if you do. Even the people who pretend to worry about that can't find any evidence of it! And if we raised the Estate Tax just to where it was at the beginning of the Obama Administration, we'll raise upwards of $230 billion over 10 years, or around one-tenth of the plan's total cost. Of course we should raise it even higher, like the For the 99.5 Percent Act would do. And feel free to tell President Biden that.
Food and Water Action helps you tell President Biden to shut down the Dakota Access pipeline. He's already shut down construction on Keystone XL, and Dakota Access is already leaking and thus already polluting, so if anything, that's more urgent. And don't brook any silliness about how shutting it down would "kill jobs"! Building pipelines and causing pollution is not the only way to create jobs! Hell, building solar and wind farms would be a good way to create jobs. And good luck getting most folks who complain about "job-killing" to notice when corporations actually kill jobs. They'd do better to notice when they can't drink the water because some pipeline has befouled it.
The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell our FDA to strengthen its proposal for antibiotic use on factory farms. 7 out of 10 antibiotics in America go, no, not to sick people or animals, but nominally healthy feed animals, so factory farms can get more meat out of them and also so animals can better endure the squalid conditions of factory farms, and that's a system that will one day take us back to a world where the next cut could kill you because none of our antibiotics work anymore. Just about everyone in America but factory farms oppose antibiotic abuse, yet the factory farms still get their way. So we keep telling our FDA, and telling them, and telling them, because very often you have to tell people more than once.
Demand Progress helps you tell your government to break up big tech monopolies like Google and Amazon. The immediate news hook, of course, is Amazon's (so far!) successful push back against unionization efforts at its Bessemer, Alabama plant; we could of course tabulate organizers' critical mistakes in that effort, but we can do little about that, other than to publicize those mistakes; we can do more about getting out government to do the job it's supposed to do, which is keep big corporations from running roughshod over the rest of us.
Finally, Change.org helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to roll back rules allowing debt collecting corporations to harass you online about debts you might not even owe. The Trump CFPB sympathized mainly with poor, beleaguered corporations and felt they should be allowed to interrupt your entire life with demands for money you can't just poop out. And the Trump CFPB also seemed to feel that making corporations verify that you even owe them any money was too much a "burden" for them. For the Biden CFPB, that could change -- the Senate hasn't confirmed the estimable Rohit Chopra as CFPB Director yet, but the CFPB's acting Director is the also-estimable Dave Uejio -- but only if we speak out.
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