Long story short: tell big credit corporations to fix errors in our credit reports, tell TikTok to stop collecting biometric data, tell our EPA to enact vigorous methane regulations, tell our Bureau of Land Management to keep drillers away from Dinosaur National Park, tell Facebook to ban Donald Trump permanently, and tell President Biden to forgive $50,000 of student loan debt per person. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will. And good hunting!
Consumer Reports helps you tell the big credit reporting corporations to fix errors on their reports and make their reports more transparent and accessible to their customers. Which could be any of us! More than one in three Americans told Consumer Reports that they've found errors in their credit reports, and an error could cost you a job, a house, or a loan, so this ain't nitpicking here. You'll also ask Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion to freeze your credit by default (rather than make you jump through hoops to freeze it, you know what I mean) and making credit reports and credit scores free to access forever. I eagerly await Republicans complaints that this would all be some kind of "job-killing" plan.
Fight for the Future helps you tell big social media corporation TikTok to stop collecting biometric data, like voice and face prints, from its customers. All these newfangled social media contraptions seem to come up with all these newfangled ways to intrude upon your privacy! And it's no use saying this is the future, there's no such thing as privacy, because that's a defeatism a civilized person can't abide. Losing $92 million in a biometric-related lawsuit earlier this year and $5 million to an FTC fine (for collecting children's data, no less!) have apparently taught them the wrong lesson. Perhaps the Big Stick of Bad PR can teach them the right one.
The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to fashion stronger methane regulations than the ones we've got. For all the good reasons: because methane-mitigation technology has gotten a lot better over the years, because methane packs a climate change punch even worse than coal, because leaking methane into our air is not only pollution but also a waste of energy, and because leaking methane into our air is not only pollution and a waste of energy but also steals taxpayer royalties, since any usable energy found on drilling operations on public lands belongs to us. Congress famously failed to roll back Obama-era methane rules in 2017, but the Trump EPA rolled them back late in 2020; now it's time to roll back the roll-back, and keep pollution and climate change from killing us.
Penn Environment helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to keep oil and gas drilling away from the Dinosaur National Monument. They call it that at least in part because you can find actual dinosaur fossils in the cliff faces! The century-old monument straddling the border between Colorado and Utah isn't just the home of historical wonders, but of two rivers that feed the Colorado River, so if some big corporation goes blasting a mere mile from the edge of the monument, it'll pollute the drinking water used by over 40 million people. It's not worth polluting that much water just so some executive can gild the plumbing on his 19th vacation home. Executives ought to learn to make money off renewable energy. Hell, some already have.
Progress America helps you tell Facebook to ban Donald Trump permanently. Some liberals have publicly worried about the free speech "risk" of doing such a thing, too, but remember that hardly anyone was using Facebook 13 years ago, so we don't actually have to treat it like it's the all-media or something. And Facebook's a private corporation, so it doesn't have to publish everything someone wants, any more than Random House does. We should hold Facebook liable for the slander and terrorist threats it publishes, but that's a different discussion. And besides, who stopped Donald Trump from putting his rantings on a weblog like we did in the old days? Oh, right: he did, because he apparently has no patience. So let's stop coddling him.
Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to forgive $50,000 of student loan debt per borrower. He's showing an awful lot of reluctance, and I remember when Barack Obama showed this kind of reluctance, it meant he wasn't going to do anything. But don't let that stop you! We need to keep on him, because we're right -- forgiving that much student loan debt would stimulate the hell out of this economy, plus it would show we're actually willing to correct the wrongs we commit as a civilization. What "wrong" was that, you ask? The wrong where we told everyone they should go into massive debt on a college degree so they can get good jobs -- and then took away all the good jobs! Worse than Lucy with a football, we were. So let's do better.
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