Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to save unemployment benefits, make the CTC expansion permanent, pass police reform legislation, end "qualified immunity" for police officers, ban Arctic drilling, and raise the minimum wage. 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 your Congressfolk's phone numbers (where applicable), or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.
Moms Rising helps you tell Congress to save unemployment benefits from the 20-plus state Governors who are trying to end it. Because the "generous" benefits are "keeping people from looking for work"! They hope you don't think that if jobs aren't paying more than unemployment benefits -- on which no one lives like a corporate CEO! -- then maybe the jobs should just pay more. You know, like they would in a free market! The economy's not "roaring back," either -- perhaps, as Atrios suggested a few weeks ago, Our Glorious Elites thought the April job figures would be a lot better than they were and just plunged ahead with the story they wanted to tell anyway! But we're past the point where we have patience with stupidity, right?
Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the American Rescue Plan's Child Tax Credit expansion permanent. That may be a lot of capitalized words all at once, so I'll put it more plainly: the expansion means anyone with children under 6 gets a $300 check every month, and anyone with children between 6 and 17 gets $250. Monthly three-digit checks for folks with kids -- what an idea! And one that got by me in all the coverage of the American Rescue Plan, which suggests maybe Democrats should, you know, run on that in 2022. Though they barely mentioned it in 2021! It's like they're ashamed of their good works! But we're not -- and we're going to keep on them to do more good works.
The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1280, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Specifically, you'll demand that your Senators pass a bill that would cut off the flow of military weapons to police departments, ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants, raise use of force standards in police departments, and reform the "qualified immunity" doctrine (which see next paragraph). Maybe Republicans can attack "that Democrat special interest bill" that bears George Floyd's name, but see if they'll defend chokeholds, or tear gas for protestors, or no-knock warrants, or police getting off scot-free for killing people. I would imagine that these would be tougher to defend.
The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to end "qualified immunity" for police officers. As I said last week, it should be hard to convict someone of a crime -- even someone who pisses you off! -- but the "qualified immunity" doctrine, in practice, is a "get out of jail free" card for police officers who commit evil deeds. Folks who tell me how can they do their jobs with all of this pressure? need to ask themselves one question: should a person who commits a crime like murder get off just because they're a police officer? It's not "all this pressure" to hold people accountable for their wrongdoing. And, sadly, police officers need to be perfect. It's one reason why I think they should have less to do.
Environmental Action helps you tell your Senators to permanently protect the ANWR (or Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) from fossil fuel drilling. The 2017 tax "reform" included a provision opening up ANWR for drilling (indeed, it may have been the only reason Lisa Murkowski voted for it), but the 2021 lease sale didn't produce very many bidders, which means that our decades-long agitation has made big corporations loathe to go into ANWR, but I'd much prefer that the force of law kept them out. Scientists have been saying for decades that we're just not going to get very much oil out of ANWR, which would make it unnecessary to list all the other reasons (stopping pollution, preserving Native American culture, protecting endangered species) we'd have to stop drilling in a freaking national wildlife refuge. I mean, what else do they need "refuge" from? Aliens?
Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass a bill raising the federal minimum wage to $15/hour. You've no doubt heard some of our older morons in politics and media say things like I only made $2/hour; what's wrong with that? Generally they made $2/hour 50 years ago; $2 in 1971 dollars is $13.19 today, thanks to a little thing called inflation that apparently only exists when right-wingers want to fear-monger about federal spending. Raising the minimum wage won't cause runaway inflation, or else a Big Mac in Denmark, where McDonald's workers make more than $22/hour, wouldn't cost roughly the same as it does here. And you know what else? Big restaurant corporations have already told investors that a $15/hour minimum wage won't hurt their business -- and if they were simply lying to their investors, there'd be consequences.
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