Long story short: tell your Congressfolk that you want a jobs bill that invests in the care economy and invests in renewable energy, tell President Biden to end all arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, tell our CFPB to protect us from debt collector harassment, tell Pennsylvania state legislators to reject yet another pro-pollution bill, and tell Louisiana state legislators to ban the "panic defense." Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find phone numbers for your various state and federal legislators, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!
Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in the care economy as part of the American Jobs Plan and invest in renewable energy as part of the American Jobs Plan. We're all going to need more care someday, and our seniors need more care now, so investing in the "care economy," as they call it, is as much an investment in our future as investing in roads and bridges. And n.b. "investing in our future" when considering whether we should build out more solar and wind in an infrastructure bill. Investing merely in more gas drilling and more oil drilling is going to give us an uninhabitable planet one day; investing in renewable energy will give us, as Millie Jackson would say, a fighting chance. Politicians need to start putting our needs above their rich cronies' "needs."
Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to end all arms sales to the Saudi/UAE coalition currently raining death and misery upon Yemen. He has ended "logistical and military support" for the coalition, and has frozen arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and these ain't nothing, but people are still dying in Yemen -- the U.N. estimates that 400,000 kids under 5 could die this year from hunger -- and we're still following through with all of Donald Trump's midnight arms sales to the Saudi/UAE coalition, so we need to communicate our will again. Remember that the big arms manufacturing corporations don't really want this war to end, because that'll be less money for them. You'd think some of our big "free" marketeers would just respond that those corporations ought to be able to adjust if they want to survive, but as usual, you can't count on them. But we can count on us.
Consumer Reports helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to roll back its proposed rule that would allow debt collectors to deluge you with unlimited emails, text messages, and direct messages on social media platforms. Plus the rule would let them call you every day if they want, and the rule would let them harass you without even determining if you owe them any money! Which latter item you could very well construe as an attempt to defraud you! This rule was, of course, a Trump-era CFPB rule, since Donald Trump only lived to serve other bosses; the Biden-era CFPB may yet approach the level of the Obama CFPB, which was one of that Administration's best Executive branch agencies -- but only if we make our voices heard.
Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your state legislators to reject yet another pro-pollution bill, SB 275. SB 275 would prevent any PA municipality from "(a)dopt(ing) a policy that restricts or prohibits, or has the effect of restricting or prohibiting, the connection or reconnection of a utility service based upon the type of source of energy to be delivered to an individual consumer within the municipality." Sounds wordy and harmless, right? Wordy is never harmless! The bill wants to prevent municipalities from making their utilities more renewable; the only "restricting or prohibiting" the bill cares about is ""restricting or prohibiting" oil and gas. It's corporate welfare, in other words. And how conservative, to want to prevent smaller governments from having more say in the decisions that affect them! Let's deliver this bill to the oblivion it most richly deserves.
Finally, Change.org helps you tell Louisiana state legislators to outlaw the "panic defense" tactic in murders of LGBTQ+ folks. Yes, Louisiana is one of 38 states that doesn't explicitly prevent lawyers from deploying the "panic defense," but from whence does this "panic" supposedly issue? Oh, from the "panic" a defendant feels when propositioned by someone gay or transgender or otherwise not prototypically "straight." I'm going to go out on a limb and say that almost every man in America has gotten hit on by a dude without murdering him. Murder equals unlawful death plus malicious premeditation, without the absurd excuse that he just couldn't cope with the guy who hit on him! So I would say folks who deploy the "panic defense" are anti-law and order.
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