Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ocean Shipping Reform Act, extend the Child Tax Credit expansion, expand Postal banking pilot programs, and pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the Ban Conflicted Trading 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.
Our House passed H.R. 4996, the Ocean Shipping Reform Act, earlier this month, by an astounding (and actual bipartisan) margin of 360-64; Matt Stoller explains why the bill is a good one, and the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) help you call your Senators and tell them to pass it. The Ocean Shipping Reform Act essentially re-regulates the shipping industry, an industry in which the big corporate players have, as Mr. Stoller explains, too many financial incentives to gum up the works. Now that the works have been pretty gummed up for several months now -- and you see how gummed up they are in just about every American port! -- our House decided to do something about it. Now we must tell our Senate to follow suit, lest they think we'll forget.
You'll also want to call your Congressfolk and tell them to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent. Who's the biggest opponent of this enormously popular initiative? Sigh, it's Joe Manchin, who has apparently told his fellow Senators that parents will just waste those $250 and $300 checks every month on drugs. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) reports somewhat differently: "The stories I hear the most, if you put it in categories, are child care, school supplies, college fund, phone bills." That sounds like a Senator who actually listens to his constituents -- versus Joe Manchin, who clearly listens only to made-up anecdotes from his corporate executive pals. And again, the people who invent such crappy stories, and spread them, should not get all the say about everything in America.
Save the Post Office helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand postal banking pilot programs in the year-end appropriations bill. Since that's apparently the only thing we're going to pass this year! Seriously, our Post Offices offered basic banking services until half a century ago; now the big banksters won't go into poor rural or urban neighborhoods, leaving those good citizens at the mercy of pawn shops and payday lenders. Expanding postal banking would go a long way toward helping those good Americans make a better life for themselves and their children. (Fun fact: Louis DeJoy deserves no credit for supporting postal banking services, because the USPS labor contract actually mandates the pilot programs! So you can also tell that to your anti-union friends.)
People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. It's a good bill, even though it's Joe Manchin's bill -- it doesn't have the ethics provisions of the For the People Act, but it does almost all of the other things the For the People Act does, plus it cracks down on states trying to subvert the voters' will, which has been a problem in a lot of states this year. Of course, you'll also ask your Senators to ditch the filibuster, at least as it relates to voting rights bills, in order to pass this bill this year. Kyrsten Sinema has already said, once again, that no she will not do that, presumably because we should only "get to yes" by capitulating to Republicans on every conceivable demand no matter how absurd. We should still get ourselves, and our Senators, on the record.
Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act. The news hook, of course, is the Business Insider report alleging that almost one out of every 10 members of Congress have broken insider trading and conflicts of interest laws, while over 180 Congressional staffers have failed to meet disclosure rules required by law. It's no use saying if you had that insider info, you'd try to profit from it, too, because it's wrong, and trading in corporations you will oversee as part of your job in Congress is also wrong. Thus the Ban Conflicted Trading Act would mostly prohibit Congressfolk from trading in stocks at all. Hey, if you know you can't control yourself, then you need to submit to the control of our laws.
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