Long story short: tell your PA state Assemblyfolk to reject pro-pollution bills, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Farm System Reform Act, the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, the Baby Food Safety Act, and the GI Bill Restoration Act. 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 and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.
Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your PA state legislators to reject a pair of objectively pro-pollution bills, HB 1947 and SB 275. They would, guess what, explicitly forbid Pennsylvania cities and towns from enacting laws that would help them get off our national addiction to fossil fuels. Very conservative of them! What ever happened to "the smallest body of people should make the most important decisions affecting that body of people"? Money, that's all -- if a municipality decides to buy only solar or wind power, then big gas and oil executives won't be able to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Sad! And Pennsylvania's Supreme Court found similar legislation unconstitutional, so let's save our legislature from further embarrassment by communicating our will.
Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4421/S. 2332, the Farm System Reform Act. The Farm System Reform Act would place a moratorium on the building of new factory farms, restore country-of-origin labeling laws for meat, and help break meat packer monopolies by reinstituting "spot market" meat sales, so that meat packing corporations don't force farmers into sales agreements that ultimately crush them. Hopefully you don't look at phrases like "no more building of factory farms" and say "but won't that drive prices through the roof?" We're seeing, right now, how oversized ships are actually driving inflation upward, simply by making themselves the only conceivable option in shipping. We're not there yet with oversized farms, but if big corporations get their way, we will be. Thus we have to stop them before they do.
Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1541, the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act. Some folks pay over a buck a minute to talk to their loved ones in prison, and folks can't afford that. And prisoners certainly can't afford that, since they don't even make anything close to minimum wage in prison. If you find yourself thinking then they shouldn't have done the crime then ha ha ha snort, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider that folks who can stay in touch with loved ones without paying an arm and a leg have a much better chance of staying out of prison once they get out than folks who can't stay in touch with loved ones, and 3) consider that just because you're in prison doesn't mean big telecom corporations should take advantage of you. If you need to slap yourself again, go ahead. Wisdom ain't easy.
Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2229/S. 1019, the Baby Food Safety Act. If you've heard of toxic metals like cadmium, arsenic, lead, and mercury in baby food, then you see the need for such legislation. And this bill's pretty comprehensive -- it'd impose maximum levels of toxic metals in baby food, require our FDA to review and lower those levels if necessary, expand our FDA's recall authority over toxic baby food, and even commission research on agricultural methods that'd reduce toxic metals in baby food. Our government, commissioning research -- why, that sounds like our government doing their job! And if the thought of government research makes you guffaw, just remember: without it, you'd have no COVID vaccine. No, really. You didn't think private corporations did all that, did you?
Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5905, the Sgt. Isaac Woodard, Jr. and Sgt. Joseph H. Maddox GI Bill Restoration Act, which would extend G.I. Bill benefits to survivors and descendants of Black soldiers who fought in World War II. Why? Because the G.I. Bill enabled a lot of good American WWII soldiers of Italian, Polish, and German descent to get into the middle class for the first time -- but denied that access to Black soldiers, using methods of discrimination you won't have to work too hard to imagine. We made them a promise, and we reneged on it; now, with the GI Bill Restoration Act, we can make it right. Naturally, right-wingers will call this "reparations," like that's a bad word. They'll try to make any word a bad word! But that shouldn't keep us from doing the right thing.
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