Long story short: tell your state legislators to draw fair, ungerrymandered districts; tell our FDA to revoke its approval of a dangerous drug, tell Michigan state legislators to reject yet another anti-trans bill, tell Amazon to stop spying on good Americans, and tell our FDA to restrict antibiotic abuse on factory farms. 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 and/or state legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting, and have a happy and safe weekend!
Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators draw fair and transparent legislative districts. Which is to say, not the kind of Rorschach-blot legislative districts, the kind that exclude sides of streets and even individual houses, that tend to keep individual legislators in power when they haven't earned it either through good works or superior persuasion. This is one of the things that sucks about the future: given the choice between doing the hard work of earning power or using the computer software that can gerrymander a tailor-made district that'll return you to power without very much effort, legislators typically choose the latter. And we all hate that. But we have to tell them that, and we have to tell them that often.
Public Citizen helps you tell our FDA to revoke its approval of aducanumab, a drug that ostensibly treats Alzheimer's disease. Too many good Americans would quickly respond how dare we hurt the effort to stop Alzheimer's, but we have to consider whether approving a drug that caused brain bleeding and swelling in 40% of clinical trial participants, a drug our FDA's own independent advisory committee told them not to approve, a drug that will cost patients over $50,000 a year to take, might actually hurt the effort to defeat Alzheimer's Disease. Before you do the right thing, you have to get the right thing right.
Change.org helps you tell the Michigan state legislature to reject yet another bill that would mandate that transgender students only play sports in their birth gender. Why do boys become girls again? It sure ain't so they can dominate girls' sports and then hang out with their crew and talk about girls, but that's what right-wingers apparently want you to believe. When transgender folks come out, they risk getting harassed, getting the crap kicked out of them, even getting killed; maybe our politicians should focus a little more on that, and not so much on absurd fantasies about competitiveness in sports.
Media Justice helps you tell Amazon to permanently stop using its power to spy on people. Yeah, Amazon has responded to the Big Stick of Bad PR, but only conditionally: it has renewed a ban on selling facial recognition technology, the kind that can't tell black folks apart any better than your Trumphole uncle can, to law enforcement, but that ban ain't permanent, and even as they announced that ban, it rolled out Sidewalk, a network that would run all manner of data from your Amazon devices into one big spying network. So, clearly, we need to keep at them. Jeff Bezos may be so rich he can blast off into space, but the Big Stick of Bad PR can still bring him back to Earth.
Penn PIRG helps you tell our FDA to set more stringent standards for antibiotic use on factory farms. Specifically, you'd ask our FDA to limit all medically-important antibiotic use on factory farms to 21 days; currently our FDA allows factory farms to use about a third of these antibiotics indefinitely, so Penn PIRG's proposal represents an improvement. Some three million Americans get sick from an antibiotic-resistant superbug every year, and that represents a little less than one in every hundred Americans, and I know you know at least a hundred people, right? So hopefully that drives the point home -- you know, in addition to the prospect that one day the next cut could kill us and all we'll have to show for it is richer corporate executives.
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