Long story short: tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's FCC nominations, tell Amazon and Google to stop fueling the Israeli occupation of Palestine, tell President Biden to fire Louis DeJoy already, tell our government to stop robotexts as well as robocalls, and tell our EPA to regulate "chemical recycling" as vigorously as possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.
Free Press helps you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's two FCC Commissioner nominees. They're both good -- like a surprising number of Mr. Biden's first-term nominees! -- and at the FCC they'll have their work cut out for them. Without five Commissioners, we won't be able to reinstate net neutrality, and thus our FCC won't be able to force internet service providing corporations to, well, provide service during times of trouble. Like, you know, a pandemic, when literally everyone needs internet service! Or a wildfire -- you recall how Verizon throttled California firefighters' attempts to communicate with each other in 2018? We have no reason to put up with big telecom corporations' attempts to abuse us, but we're on our own fighting it if our government doesn't punish them when they do wrong.
No Tech for Apartheid helps you tell Amazon and Google to stop helping Israel occupy Palestine. They're both invested in Project Nimbus, as it happens, which provides cloud computing services to the Israeli military -- which makes them much, much better at occupying Palestine and oppressing Palestinians. But over a thousand Google and Amazon workers have demanded that their bosses back out of this project, which makes them courageous -- I mean, folks get fired for less in this "free" market system! But though this kind of technology is spreading, we can still win this battle. We got Microsoft to stop funding facial recognition technology in Israel last year, and this year we got Amazon to stop selling facial recognition technology (at least for now). So it's time to bust out The Big Stick of Bad PR. They're afraid of it because it works.
Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to fire Postmaster General DeJoy -- or, more precisely, fire USPS Board of Governors member Ron Bloom so he can get another USPS Board of Governors member in there who will fire Mr. DeJoy. Mr. DeJoy, you recall, tried to deliver the 2020 election to Donald Trump by slowing down services knowing full well our Postal Service would be doing more ballot-delivering than ever before; he also raised prices and cut services, and I'm old enough to remember when that kind of thing would get you fired in the private sector. Also, reports of his corruption have multiplied in recent months. Remember when he told Congress "get used to me"? That sassiness works a lot better from folks who don't try to shit all over everything. Dude's got to go.
Consumer Reports helps you tell our government to fight robotexts. Our Supreme Court, in an otherwise little-noticed decision earlier this year, dramatically narrowed the reach of the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act, saying that law only prevents a certain kind of robo-dialing that few robodialers actually use anymore, blasting open a loophole that now allows robodialers to spam you with texts, and guess what didn't exist in 1991? Our Supreme Court apparently loves to prove that a literal mind can be quite a curse, and often to the rest of us. You know what's on our side, though? People absolutely hate unwanted phone calls, so why would folks like unwanted texts more? Of course, first we have to make an absolute stink about it; otherwise our government will just figure everything's alright. Silence is assent, as Sir Thomas More would say.
Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to regulate "chemical recycling" in the most vigorous manner possible. And if that means "by outlawing it," who am I to complain? Proponents say "chemical recycling" (or melting down plastic into fuel) will help us avoid the worst effects of climate change, but they say the same thing about nuclear power, too, and it's about as cogent an argument. They want to melt down plastic, which already pollutes, and then use it as fuel which will also pollute? This isn't a solution to the pollution problem; it's a solution to the "some CEO doesn't have enough money to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home" problem. Which isn't a real problem! The real problem is the climate change "solution" that actually causes more climate change, and that's what "chemical recycling" is. So let's fight that.
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