Long story short: tell our government to abandon a long-term plan to privatize Medicare, tell our EPA to cut methane emissions in the most vigorous way possible, tell our Department of Labor to help protect pension plans from climate change, tell REI to get PFAS chemicals out of their products, tell the Biden Administration to reject the proposed Willow drilling project in Alaska and stop a massive drilling lease in Alaska's Cook Inlet, and tell our EPA to stop corporations from using working-class neighborhoods as their dumping grounds. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.
Public Citizen helps you tell our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to scuttle a Trump-era plan to privatize Medicare. This would be the "Direct Contracting" plan, which allows Medicare to assign seniors to private health care plans managed by private corporations and insurers, even if the senior signed up for traditional public Medicare. In other words, Donald Trump told seniors that what they want doesn't matter, which should ring a bell. The fact that the Biden Administration hasn't thrown this program in the trash where it belongs means either they haven't gotten around to cleaning up that particular corner of the Augean stables or they secretly hope nobody notices it. If it's the latter, well, too late! And if enough of us speak out, Medicare will have no choice but to scuttle the program.
The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to issue the strongest methane emissions-cutting rule possible. We have many good reasons to cut methane emissions -- methane emissions pack a much bigger climate change punch than coal emissions do, methane emissions also represent lost usable energy, and on public lands methane emissions also represent lost royalties for the taxpayer. Also, you know, air pollution; you're going to be breathing the air all your life, after all, and there'll be no gated community to run to if we can't breathe the air. You'll also ask our EPA to ensure that the rule includes older gas and oil drilling plants; too many of the biggest polluters get "grandfathered" out of anti-pollution regulations. Word on the street is the EPA's rule is pretty good, but we've still gotta fight.
The Environmental Defense Fund also helps you tell our Department of Labor to approve a proposed rule to allow retirement funds to take climate change into account when making their decisions. After all, if you don't have a planet to live on, all your 401(k) money won't mean a thing! And the Labor proposal also reflects a reality too often overlooked (or, perhaps more precisely, "overlooked") by our "liberal" media -- that solar and wind have achieved parity of cost with fossil fuels more and more over the years, and sane investors wouldn't want to be caught with all their money in dying industries. Usually that's the thing you don't see until it's too late -- especially when you're obsessed with investing in "stuff that has worked for a long time." And a lot of stuff that has worked for a long time still works! But you've also got to know when to jump ship, and now's the time.
Consumer Reports helps you tell outdoor gear corporation REI to get the PFAS chemicals -- that's right, the "forever chemicals" -- out of their products. My guess is that REI would find that challenging, what with all the PFAS in their jackets and boots and tents and such, but tough toodles, because Americans deserve corporations that can change with the times. America certainly deserves corporations that live up to their "we're so green" PR, and REI certainly pumps out plenty of that. And you can probably recite this from memory by now, but PFAS chemicals are everywhere, and they don't break down, and they easily find their way into our bodies and wreak all kinds of health care havoc there. Getting the PFAS out of even one corner of one industry would be, as a famous philosopher has said, a BFD. So let's help make that happen.
The Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell the Biden Administration to keep ConocoPhillips's notorious Willow project from moving forward, while the Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell the Biden Administration to scuttle plans to offer over a million acres from Cook's Inlet to gas and oil drilling corporations. The American people hardly ever make any money from those sales anyway, given how much say big corporations have in the royalty rates to begin with! And both of these projects will pollute the hell out of Alaska, a land about which we don't know nearly enough to go fiddling about with new drilling projects. Remember when George H.W. Bush said the caribou like the Alaska pipeline, because they brush up against it? Our civilization doesn't appear to have advanced very far from that analysis. Which is one reason we keep fighting Arctic drilling.
Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our EPA to fight big polluting corporations from creating ever more "sacrifice zones" where good Americans can't live anymore. It's been a matter of popular knowledge for more than two decades -- at least since the time I saw Mystery Science Theatre 3000 reference it in an episode! -- that big polluters love building near communities with lots of Black and Brown folks in them, figuring, I guess, that nobody will miss them and/or that the folks who live there won't organize to fight them. Of course those folks do organize to fight them, but what a big help it would be to have our government standing with them for the first time ever! But they'll only stand with those communities if we demand they stand with them.
UPDATE. I apologize for messing up the link in paragraph 3, and I've now corrected it.
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