Long story short: tell Mississippi's Governor to free Tameka Drummer, tell your Congressfolk to stop Amazon from abusing its workers, and tell them to pass the MORE Act, the People's Response Act, the For the People Act, and the Equality Act. 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, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.
First things first: Change.org helps you tell Mississippi Gov. Reeves to free Tameka Drummer, who is serving a life sentence for being caught with two ounces of pot. Mississippi lately passed the Earned Parole Eligibility Act, which will get people like Ms. Drummer out of jail for nonviolent offenses, but not Ms. Drummer, because of her two previous convictions for voluntary manslaughter and aggravated assault. But she served her time for those two crimes, and is only getting life-without-parole because of a state three-strikes law. I think it's safe to say she got caught in the cracks here, and mercy demands we let her out. Common sense demands we get rid of these three-strikes laws that virtually ensure that folks who commit crimes can never raise themselves up, and if freeing Ms. Drummer publicizes that, all the better.
Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would protect workers from Amazon's spying practices. Of course bosses need to know what their workers are doing, but Amazon's workplace spying practices go well beyond that, and into ensuring that more workers get hurt by dictating how long tasks are supposed to take down to fractions of a second. This is why Amazon's warehouse workers try to avoid going to the bathroom! And it's also why Amazon had over 65 serious workplace injuries daily in 2020, or about twice the industry average. If getting your Doctor Who DVDs out the next day is that urgent, they should hire more people to do the work! Surely Jeff Bezos can break a little off his personal space-walking fund to pay for it.
Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3617, the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act. If the MORE Act were law, people like Tameka Drummer wouldn't find themselves serving life-without-parole for possession in the first place! Also, people like Sha'Carri Richardson wouldn't be disqualified from Olympic competition for pot use, and anyone who thinks pot gives you some kind of "competitive advantage" is mistaken. If anything, it makes you less competitive! The MORE Act would also invest in communities most harmed by the "war on drugs" and expunge pot convictions from a lot of folks' criminal records, and these would also be good works. So let's tell our Congressfolk to do them.
Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4194, the People's Response Act. The People's Response Act would move the federal response to mental health crises from our Department of Justice to our Department of Health and Human Services, which would give grants and coordinate research on getting health care professionals, rather than police officers, to be the first responders to folks with mental health crises. Some folks would reflexively call that "defunding the police," but I would call it taking a burden from police and putting it on folks who can better handle it. I've long said we ask too much of our police, but the People's Response Act can guide us to a system that works better than the one where police are the first responders to everything. And, not for nothing, but sending cops out on these calls too often ends in death.
Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Plus Daily Kos helps you sign up to call West Virginians and urge them to urge their Senator, Joe Manchin, to vote for the For the People Act. Again: Mr. Manchin's stated refusal to support the For the People Act not only defies logic, it defies the will of his constituents, who actually approve of all the things in the bill, not just the ones he pretended weren't in the bill but would have been in his "less partisan" "compromise" bill. Our leaders might be willing to indulge in all kinds of fantasies about "bipartisanship" and "compromise," but we can't, not when state legislators all across America are trying to prevent people from voting as we speak.
Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Tired of right-wing legislators whining and wailing about the possibility you might be in the same public bathroom as a transgender person? Tired of banks refusing to loan to gays because they're gay, or bosses firing employees because they're gay, or landlords refusing to rent to gay couples? The Equality Act would fix all that, merely by amending the Civil Rights Act so that it includes gay and transgender folk among its protected classes. And if folks complain about the "unprecedented assault on religious freedom" the Equality Act supposedly represents, you have two choices: 1) tell them the Civil Rights Act already grants religious freedom exceptions and the Equality Act doesn't amend that part of it, or 2) ask them why their "religious" "freedom" depends so much on hurting gay folks. Maybe 3) get them to slap themselves, if you can.
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