Long story short: tell Facebook to stop trying to obstruct research on the ill effects of social media, tell your Congressfolk to fund Social Security more fairly and pass the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act and the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, tell President Biden to end notorious Title 42 expulsions, and tell schools to ban biometric surveillance of our children. 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.
Free Press helps you tell Facebook to reinstate accounts relating to NYU Ad Observer research. You may remember this story from last week: NYU researchers were looking into how ads on social media spreads bad information, but suddenly found their accounts locked out, with Facebook telling them that an FTC rule protecting consumer privacy compelled them to act. Of course, an FTC official quickly said that was bunkum -- NYU researchers weren't prying into normal Facebook user accounts, but were looking at advertising accounts, which suggests Facebook was actually just trying to scuttle their research, because it might tell us things Facebook didn't want us to hear. That's a look Facebook would want to avoid, I would think. They can't avoid it now, but they can at least rectify their error; some good could come of it, after all.
Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security by making millionaires and billionaires pay more into the system. Specifically, you'd ask your Congressfolk to start applying the 12.4% payroll tax to income over $400,000, so if that's not you (and I'd bet it's not, since that income level describes a mere four-tenths of one percent of all Americans), then you won't pay any more into the system -- but folks with money might, and thus enable the rest of us to live more comfortably on Social Security into old age. Reports of Social Security's "insolvency" are of course hysterical -- I'm old enough to remember when it was supposed to run out of money in 2016! -- but if we can make it run better and do more for good Americans, why wouldn't we do it? After all, you worked for it, you paid into it, you fought for it, and when you retire, you deserve to enjoy it.
World Beyond War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4718, the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act. H.R. 4718 would empower our President to impose sanctions on nations that commit genocide, crimes against humanity (the bill enumerates 11 of these), or war crimes (36 of these), and would also prevent our government from selling weapons to a nation that commits any of the aforementioned crimes. The bill would even prevent such things as intelligence sharing and security training, except in the context of maintaining embassies and evacuating American citizens. The bill would also create a Commission on Atrocity Accountability and Human Rights who would recommend policies that would help us fulfill our duties under the bill. So this bill isn't just a moral bill, it's a smart bill. And we need more of those!
Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, which would simply ban Congressfolk from investing in stocks, except for T-bonds and for certain "widely-held investment funds"; a Congressperson wouldn't have to divest of their holdings before taking office for the first time, but wouldn't be able to make new investments. We just learned that Sen. Rand Paul bought Gilead stock right before the pandemic, after receiving a briefing about the pandemic, and since Gilead makes a famous COVID treatment drug, we must ask, once again, why Congressfolk should ever get to "play the stock market" when they're inevitably going to vote on legislation concerning investments? Money prejudices everything, after all.
Amnesty International helps you tell President Biden to end Title 42 restrictions on immigrants and asylum-seekers. Title 42 allows our government to deport folks when "there is serious danger of the introduction of [a communicable] disease into the United States," but why do that and then utterly fail to restrict international travel? Because racism, that's why. Because chest-puffing over immigration, that's why. The Biden Administration has lately announced it would continue the policy, which made all the right-wingers yelling and screaming about immigrants bringing COVID with them cluck-cluck in approval, right? No? They just kept yelling and screaming about immigrants bringing COVID with them? What a surprise! Seems to me we're keeping the COVID pandemic going well enough without imaginary help from border-crossers.
Finally, End Child Surveillance helps you, guess what, tell schools to stop spying on their kids using facial recognition technology. Which sucks! Which tends to racially profile people! Which is supposedly a "bonus feature" of temperature scanners designed to identify students who might have a fever! Which also sucks! I mean, you've had your temperature taken by a remote infrared thermometer, right? Then you know it sucks! This sure all sounds like a scam designed to herd kids around, and I wouldn't put it past the corporations that manufacture them to also have their hands in the school-to-prison pipeline! Hey, if I thought of it, they thought of it. And prison is big business now. So let's not let money or convenience rule all of our decisions. And certainly let's not let our schools do that.
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