Long story short: tell Apple to withdraw its plan to scan every piece of data on folks' iPhones, and tell the Biden Administration to suspend big pharma monopolies, cancel student loan debt, scuttle the ConocoPhillips Willow project, reverse its Title 42 refugee ban, and fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.
Both No Spy Phone and the Electronic Frontier Foundation help you tell Apple to scuttle its plan to scan every piece of data on our phones. Which makes a mockery of their oft-stated commitment to user privacy! They say it's to protect kids from sex traffickers, but does scanning every piece of data on every iPhone really do that? Apple's plan would compare photos of children to a national database of "child abuse images," but this is a species of facial recognition software, which we already know isn't very good at its stated purpose. And Apple's plan would also use, you guessed it, an algorithm to inspect kids' phones for sexually explicit messages, but this'll more likely put more gay kids at the mercy of abusive parents, since algorithms tend to regard any gay content as "sexually explicit." So, in sum: you don't want to give up privacy for security, but you certainly don't want to give it up for bad security.
Rethink Trade helps you tell President Biden to suspend big pharma monopolies so that everyone across the planet can get the vaccines. So we can end the pandemic! It sickens me that our leaders place "corporate intellectual property" above ending the pandemic; as long as we try to "do both," COVID will keep getting more opportunities to mutate and kill people. President Biden did say he favored a temporary WTO waiver on intellectual property matters, but saying you support something and actually doing something are two entirely different things, and the 150,000-plus cases we're getting every day now tell us it's well past time to do something.
The Juggernaut Project helps you tell President Biden to cancel federally-held student loan debt. This should be a conservative initiative! Our government would get less revenue, and the money would go back to good Americans so they can decide what to do with it -- yikes, it sounds like a tax cut! Of course, today's "conservatives" don't traffic in ideas; they traffic in rage, hence all that whispering in your ear about how you didn't get to have your student loan debt cancelled, so why should they? As too often happens with "conservatives" today, that kind of argument is utterly childish -- not letting someone else get a benefit merely because you didn't get it? What are we, 12? We have a heritage and traditions to uphold, and that demands maturity.
The Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell President Biden to "walk away" from the proposed ConocoPhillips Willow oil drilling project in Alaska's western Arctic area. Arctic drilling has numerous intractable problems -- chiefly, the near-impossibility of remediating oil spills and our lack of knowledge about the ecosystems we'd disrupt -- but last week an Alaska District Court judge revoked the permit ConocoPhillips got from the Trump Administration, on the grounds that the Trump Administration (and stop me if you've heard this one before!) didn't adhere to federal law in analyzing the environmental impact of the Willow project. Seems like a good opportunity for the Biden Administration to simply wash its hands of the whole thing! And you can help them reach that decision.
NETWORK helps you tell President Biden to reverse his decision extending the notorious Title 42 ban on refugees, a ban based on the tenuous proposition that refugees might make the COVID pandemic worse. Governors DeSantis, Abbott, and Noem are already doing a bang-up job of that, amirite? The Trump Administration's decision to impose a Title 42 ban came from none other than advisor/man with a face even a mother could punch Stephen Miller, and loathe as I am to use ad hominem arguments, that fact alone should indicate that this Title 42 ban ain't about health care but about racism -- and about using any conceivable tool in the toolbox to slow emigration to the United States. You know what would slow emigration to the United States? If we stopped using the world as our litter box, that's what! So let's demand that our leaders do the right thing, in the right way.
Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General DeJoy already. Not just for trying to throw the 2020 election to Donald Trump, not just for raising prices and cutting services which is such a bold way of fixing problems, but for our USPS giving contracts to his old employer and for him investing in a fund run by one of our USPS Governors, Ron Bloom -- who not long ago said he thought Mr. DeJoy was doing a great job! If I pulled all this crap at any of my jobs, I'd be out on my ass. But in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, having money means never having to say you're sorry, or being held accountable for your actions. Let's work to change that, shall we?
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