Long story short: tell PA state legislators to curb pollution and pass "right to repair" legislation, tell Texas state legislators to reject an anti-abortion bill, tell big tobacco corporations to stop aiming their products at children, tell President Biden to fire two notorious Social Security Administrators, and tell Facebook to keep Donald Trump off their platform permanently. The paragraphs below offer email and contact tools for each of these alerts.
Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your state legislators to protect our clean water from longwall coal mining. What's longwall mining? That's when you dig into the ground to remove a long wall of coal (hence the name); this "wall" can be 1500 feet wide and two miles long, and, as you can guess, it can cause an awful lot of pollution and property damage. As it happens, coal corporations don't fill in the "wall" they've removed, so if your house sits above it, you're in big trouble. And of course state officials have found longwall mining responsible for nearly all the mining-related damage our streams have suffered in southwestern PA. Best to switch to solar and wind, which don't churn the earth anywhere near as much as coal corporations do.
Staying in PA for our next alert: Penn PIRG helps you tell your PA state legislators to pass "right to repair" legislation. We heard a lot about this when we were short on ventilators for COVID patients, and ventilator manufacturers didn't make it easy for third party repair techs at hospitals (who have been, in my own personal experience, excellent) to fix them. It's no better for farmers, who can't fix their own tractors (despite being, in my own personal experience, quite handy) because big corporations like John Deere don't make their manuals very accessible. They'd rather you go to them, or to one of their hand-picked "authorized dealers"! But trying to make good Americans so dependent on corporations is not very bootstrappy, you know.
Care2 helps you tell Texas state legislators to reject HB 3326, which would ban all abortions without exception and would charge anyone involved with an abortion with homicide -- which could result in someone getting the death penalty for abortion, since Texas still punishes some murders with the death penalty. The bill cites a dissenting opinion in a recent Supreme Court case concerning Louisiana's anti-abortion law, but seriously, facing the death penalty for seeking a medical procedure literally protected by our federal Constitution, as per the actual majority decision in Roe v. Wade? Some people can't help but do the helicopter dance in front of us. But they aren't "tougher" than the rest of us, they're weaker; otherwise, why would they strut?
Progress America helps you tell big tobacco corporations to stop offering flavored tobacco products to children. You know how Jeff Sessions says pot is a gateway drug to much worse stuff? That's rubbish, but flavored tobacco products actually are a gateway for kids to pick up a cigarette habit as adults, as some four out of five kids who smoke started out with a tobacco product that tasted like chocolate or apple or bubble gum or any number of things. And giving kids a damn nicotine habit? Gosh, I guess big corporations just want a nation full of harried, overworked people, and they want them to start early! I hate to say "children are our future," but they fucking are, and we need to treat them like they are.
If you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Biden to fire the two Social Security Administrators who are trying to bollocks up Social Security, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. How have Andrew Saul and David Black tried to bollocks up Social Security? Roll call! They delayed seniors' stimulus checks! They added extra disability benefit reviews just-because! They pressured SSA judges to deny people disability benefits! You worked for Social Security, you fought for it, you paid into it, and you've earned it -- and you sure as hell deserve better than to have assholes steal it from you.
Finally, Free Press helps you tell Facebook to ban Donald Trump from its platform permanently. Hasn't America been a much nicer place since he hasn't been able to bombard us with his obnoxious spew? Yes, it has. Facebook has no moral or legal obligation to keep enabling Mr. Trump's horridness -- especially now that Mr. Trump has announced he's going to start his own social network! This is something people with too much money can do! They're not being "oppressed" by existing social media keeping them off their platforms! They're not being "canceled"! Rage-filled people do nothing but whine, and they still get too much say in our civilization. But we can contain them. We do outnumber them, after all.
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