Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep payday lenders from gouging us, tell President Biden to guide cities toward using alternatives to police wherever possible, stop the flow of military weapons to local police departments, and help remove barriers to poorer nations vaccinating their citizens, and tell your cable provider to "un-Fox" your cable package. The paragraphs below will tell you how to contact these various entities. Good hunting!
Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to roll back Trump-era rules that let payday lenders gouge more good Americans. 18 states (plus the District of Columbia, which should be a state) have capped loan interest at 36% or lower -- but the Trump Administration let payday lenders loan via banks in other states that, naturally, didn't have the loan interest cap. I'm old enough to remember when conservatives would never have allowed such a thing to happen. In these times, you could be forgiven for thinking Trumpian "conservatives" just go out of their way to hurt people so other people can make more money. What, it looks like something else?
The ACLU helps you tell President Biden to use his various purse-string and guidance powers to encourage localities to use alternatives to policing. I've said it before and I'll say it again: we use police officers like the Swiss Army knives of our culture, and no one is so good at everything that we can use them that way, so we shouldn't suggest that "more training" is the answer, either. Police officers should serve warrants and make arrests, and that's it. Firefighters should fight fires, EMTs should respond to emergent medical situations, and social workers should respond to mental health calls and domestic violence calls. Don't be tempted to say "that'll never work," because some localities are trying it now, and it works.
Black Lives Matter helps you tell President Biden to end the notorious 1033 program, which allows our federal government to send surplus military weapons to local police departments. Who don't use them to make their communities safer -- they use them to hurt protestors who protest their brutality in the first place! President Biden reportedly had an Executive Order curtailing the 1033 program all ready to go early in his Administration, but may have gotten cold feet after the National Association of Police Organizations weighed in. Now he may be thinking his good words about the Chauvin verdict will be enough, and he can continue to ignore his commitment to actually stopping police violence. We need to come together to say, guess again, Mr. President.
Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to support the proposed WTO waiver that will allow poorer nations to make COVID vaccines and give them to their people. They always talk about the supposed primacy of "intellectual property" when they say we can't do things like this, but a) our hard-earned taxes developed these vaccines, so we do in fact get a say, and b) no post-apocalyptic survivor will sit around a campfire saying "yeah, that superbug killed most of the world's people, but at least big pharma corporations got to make some more money!" Not convinced? Then consider that the pandemic can start all over again as long as it's alive somewhere in the world. As someone smarter than me put it: no one is safe until everyone is safe.
Finally, Consumers United for Fairness helps you, as they put it, un-Fox your cable box, which is to say, get your cable carrier to stop carrying Fox News as part of a "basic" package. So why this time? Oh, we could probably flip on Fox at any moment and find a good reason, but let's settle for Tucker Carlson alleging that the Chauvin jury convicted Mr. Chauvin not because there's a nearly-10 minute video showing him killing George Floyd, but because they were afraid of rioting if they exonerated him. Right-wingers love law and order until it gives them results they don't want! Does Mr. Carlson have a right to say such crap without being jailed by our government? Of course he does! But he doesn't have a "right" to be a highly-paid TV pundit; hell, he doesn't have a "right" to be broadcast, or else anyone who wanted a nightly news show would have to get one. And he certainly doesn't have a "right" to have his salary paid in part by the hundreds of millions of Americans who would never watch his program.
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