Long story short: tell world governments to ban NSO-style spyware, tell President Biden to end our involvement in Yemen for-real for-real, tell our FCC to update communications device radiation rules, and tell Congress to pass the PASTEUR Act and the Overdraft Protection Act and end qualified immunity for police officers. 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.
Fight for the Future helps you tell world governments to ban commercial malware like the NSO Group's Pegasus, exposed by The Guardian late last week as the spyware that can infect your apps, capture your emails and texts, and listen in on your calls. NSO says it's only for "terrorists and criminals," but you and I know better, and not just because governments frequently decide today's irritant is tomorrow's terrorist, but because, you know, they're lying -- of course they mean to spy on innocent folks! In order to scare them into being more compliant with our corporatist-run world! But our lives mean nothing if all we get out of them is a few more years of cold comfort -- and if we don't fight evil wherever it rears its noxious head.
Peace Action helps you tell President Biden to end all American support for the Saudi/UAE-led coalition war on Yemen. President Biden did say he would end "offensive military support" for the war, and that sure is better than Donald Trump's I'm-an-independent-but-I-still-do-whatever-the-Saudis-want act, but his Administration hasn't been particularly candid about what "end offensive military support" means, and we have reason to believe that it means "still selling some arms to the Saudis and helping them maintain their aircraft." Good Yemeni are dying from easily-preventable causes like disease and malnutrition, and that's coming from all that hammering that we're enabling. Wouldn't it be nice if we stopped enabling that kind of thing?
The Environmental Working Group helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission to update its regulations concerning wireless radiation. Our FCC hasn't updated those rules for over 25 years; gosh, can you think of anything that might have happened in the meantime? The mass proliferation of wireless internet is one thing, and the mass proliferation of cellphones and tablets is another. Just about everyone has all three of these things now, and so we get a much higher dose of wireless radiation than we used to. Don't brook any nonsense about how "strict rules about radiation will make the whole economy collapse" -- and I guarantee you some corporate hack is writing that comment as we speak! More hacks should say things like "strict rules about radiation will save a lot of money in health care costs." Though if they did, I guess they wouldn't be hacks.
The Pew Environmental Trusts help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2076, the Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions to End Up Surging Resistance (or PASTEUR) Act. Look past the tortured acronym and see that the PASTEUR Act would spur the development of life-saving antibiotics, a matter of considerable urgency since viruses constantly adapt to the antibiotics we've got, such that some of them become superbugs that antibiotics can't kill. The PASTEUR Act would fund research and development of antibiotics, but it would also vastly improve current drug policy by letting Medicare and our Veterans Administration get the new drugs at cost. And it's a bipartisan bill that would actually represent progress, versus what "bipartisanship" typically represents, which is no progress. So let's encourage better works from Congress wherever we can.
US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4254, the Overdraft Protection Act. The Overdraft Protection Act would require more transparency about overdraft fees and set a limit of overdraft fees your bank could charge you, to one per month and six per year. That may not sound like a big deal, until you make half a dozen transactions without realizing you're overdrawn, at which point your bank would allow all the transactions and hit you with six overdraft fees, which could amount to over $200. If you're tempted to strut around about "fiscal responsibility" when you hear this, ask yourself whether a bank allowing you to overdraw your account just so it can slam you with fees promotes fiscal responsibility. Then ask yourself if a bank deliberately re-ordering transactions just so it can collect fees promotes fiscal responsibility. I think you will sheathe your sword after that. Or, at least, you should.
Finally, Black Lives Matter helps you tell your Congressfolk to end qualified immunity for police officers. Too many police officers escape accountability for serious crimes because they enjoy "qualified immunity," which keeps them from being punished unless they committed a crime that's exactly the same as a crime a previous police officer committed, and how likely is that? A judge who doesn't want to convict can usually find something different between the two cases, and a literalist judge certainly can. There's innocent-until-proven-guilty, and then there's innocent-only-because-of-a-technicality; everybody knows the latter isn't justice, and Black folks, sadly, feel the pain of that knowledge more acutely than most.
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