Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare in the American Jobs Plan, pass the IG Independence and Empowerment Act and the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, and investigate Amazon's abuse of its workers, and expand our Supreme Court, and tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General DeJoy. 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 and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.
Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare in the American Jobs Plan. Because, as they say, "expanding Medicare is human infrastructure," even if Republicans say infrastructure isn't "real" unless it's roads or bridges. I would say investing in senior health care is the infrastructure of a civilization; even if you're of the mind that seniors' lives are almost over and not that important, which I hope you're not, fact is we're all working to be seniors ourselves one day, and we're going to need vision, hearing, and dental care just as much as we do now, if not more. Investing in senior health care also represents an investment in creating American jobs. After all, we don't presume robots will be delivering all that additional care, do we?
Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 2662, the IG Independence and Empowerment Act. Inspectors General work in every part of our government's Executive Branch, rooting out waste, fraud, and inefficiency, but we just witnessed the spectacle of President Trump firing IGs left and right and replacing them with cronies wherever he could -- the kind of thing you see in dictatorships, not America, right? But H.R. 2662 would make it a lot harder for rogue Presidents to fire Inspectors General merely for doing their jobs, plus it would also give IGs broader subpoena power -- currently IGs can only subpoena current government employees, and you can see how someone could evade a subpoena by quitting, right? -- and would specifically give Justice Department IGs the authority to investigate Justice Department attorney wrongdoing, which they strangely don't already have. Our House has already passed this bill, and it'll make our government work better, so our Senate should pass it, too.
Presente helps you Send a message to your members of Congress and tell them to support S. 2051, the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act. S. 2051 would, as its title suggests, prevent our government from using facial recognition or biometric surveillance technology, plus it would prevent states from receiving certain law enforcement-related federal grants unless they also ban these technologies. Why? Because they're bad technologies -- they do evil, and they don't even do evil particularly well, which makes them more evil. Facial recognition, as you know, can't tell Black folks apart any better than your Trumphole uncle can, and biometric technology (which includes facial recognition) mainly seems to detect "nervousness," which doesn't help us stop crime so much as it helps us arrest nervous people. So, yeah, how about we not use bad technology, even when its makers say it's great technology?
Sum of Us helps you tell Congress to investigate Amazon's abuse of its workers. There are a lot of them now, after all, and they make at least $15/hour, as Amazon's endless PR campaign tells us repeatedly, never mind that organized activists (including Sen. Sanders!) shamed them into paying their workers more. But they still have a lot of problems at Amazon -- our media has documented the problems Amazon drivers have in finding time to use a rest room or eat a Whopper lest they fail to meet production quotas, but Amazon's warehouse workers face the same problems. If we really need to have that Doctor Who DVD the next day, then Amazon should hire enough people to make that a reality, not work the ones they've got like they're a damn sugar plantation.
Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand our Supreme Court. It's not like they've never done it before, after all! That's for all those folks who say you can't just expand the Court for political reasons -- actually, yes, we can, and we've done it at least six times in our history (most recently in 1869), and anyway why should Mitch McConnell be the only one who gets to expand his power? I think our Founders would have side-eyed Mr. McConnell's stonewalling of the Garland nomination and a 46% President picking three Supreme Court justices in four years. And, frankly, we have 13 federal Courts of Appeal, so I'd prefer 13 Supreme Court Justices, one to handle appeals coming out of each Court.
Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. For trying to throw the election to Donald Trump, obviously, but also for proposing, in all seriousness, slowdowns in service and rate hikes. Can you think of the private sector executive who would be hailed as a genius for mandating higher prices and worse service? Yet our government stupidly brings in private sector executives all the time like Mr. DeJoy to do exactly that! I feel like there's a double standard there, somewhere. And, not for nothing, but our Postal Service doesn't only deliver junk mail, like a lot of idiots say -- it also delivers life-saving drugs for a lot of Americans, and that's not exactly the kind of thing you can skimp on. So let's fire the guy who would do that.
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