Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to strike a blow against meat packer monopolies, pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis voting Rights Advancement Act, pass data privacy legislation and the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and end fossil fuel subsidies. 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 legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.
First off, this'll seem a bit inside-baseball, but Matt Stoller writes about monopoly meat-packers causing higher meat prices, and notes that Sens. Grassley (R-IA) and Tester (D-MT) have written a bill with actual bipartisan support, called the 50-14 or "spot market" bill. This bill would require big meat packing corporations to buy half of their meat on the open market -- rather than force all cattle ranchers into contracts that may give ranchers assurance they'll be able to sell their cattle, but also makes it far too easy for meat packers to fix prices. It won't actually break up the monopolies, but it'll give ranchers a lot more breathing space. This bill merits a supportive call to your Congressfolk, and don't be swayed by the arguments against the bill -- as Mr. Stoller demonstrates, they rely on bad arguments and manipulated data.
Both Left Action and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. Never mind that Joe Manchin prefers this bill to the For the People Act, because it's not so different that it doesn't deserve our support. The Freedom to Vote Act would expand your access to the voting booth, clamp down on partisan gerrymandering and dark money, restore voting rights to ex-felons, provide 15 days of early voting across America, enact same-day voter registration, and make Election Day a national holiday, plus it'll clamp down on states' recent attempts to gain the power to overrule the will of the voters in their elections. All of this would better secure voting rights in America, and thus merits our work on its behalf. (Also, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you write a letter to the editor supporting the Freedom to Vote Act.)
Both Daily Kos and People for the American Way help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This bill would amend the Voting Rights Act so that our Justice Department could clamp down on voting law changes from states and localities that have demonstrated a clear record of vote suppression -- and not just states and localities from the South, which was our Supreme Court's objection in Shelby County v. Holder. And since a lot of the states that have changed their voting laws lately just so happen to have a vote suppression record, one would think our Justice Department could and would do something about them. We'll likely have to nix the filibuster to get any voting rights bills passed -- but first, let's demonstrate, unmistakably, that the people want voting rights reform in America.
How to Stop Facebook helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass real data privacy legislation in America. Our Federal Communications Commission enacted pretty good regulations protecting data privacy, but that was back in 2016 -- and our Congress promptly repealed them, via the notorious resolution of disapproval process. But now, with approximately zero Americans left who think data breaches and targeted ads and enabling Nazi wannabes is just the price you pay for staying in touch with those people you had a few laughs with freshman year, Congress should be more amenable to protecting your data, and protecting you from corporate surveillance. But we still have to tell them. (Oh, and don't fall for the calls for a new bureaucracy just to regulate Facebook; that'll just have our government rubber-stamping what Facebook does, and we've already got that.)
In a peripherally-related matter, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. This bill would close a Mack truck-sized loophole in the law, which currently prevents your internet service-providing corporation from selling your personal data to law enforcement -- but which does not prevent the third-party data gobblers that buy your data from your ISPs from re-selling it to law enforcement! And you deserve better than that, even if you have committed a crime that law enforcement should be able to discover. We don't have a Fourth Amendment for nothing, after all -- we have it so that we don't send innocent people to jail by accident, and so we don't create a police state that sends its enemies to jail at will. And we're not as far from that as we'd like to think.
Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to end fossil fuel subsidies forever. That'll be tough, since the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" includes even more fossil fuel subsidies, but we should still communicate our will. And though the recent California oil spill instructs us as to why we might not want to funnel taxpayer money toward corporations that pollute, you can of course make a more conservative argument against fossil fuel subsidies. Not ALL GUBMINT SPENDINGZ BADZ!!!!!, because that's a reactionary argument -- you can merely argue that the fossil fuels are an entrenched technology and hardly need taxpayer help to survive. Yes, they talk about "facing crises" all the time, but they're BSing you. They don't need your money.
Comments