Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, the Protecting Our Democracy Act, the PASTEUR Act, the REDUCE Act, and the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment 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.
Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act. This bill would prevent any Congressfolk from engaging in most stock trades and from serving on for-profit boards, plus it would also include short sales. When someone sells a security intending to buy it back later, that's a short sale, and folks don't do this unless they think the value of that security is about to tank. You can imagine why we would want to keep our Congressfolk from doing that -- in their oversight duties, they may already know a particular security (or a particular sector of the economy!) is about to tank, and certainly they shouldn't profit from that. Why, it might lead them to pass laws that cause other securities to tank! And that'd be evil, so we should stop that.
Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act. This bill would prevent Presidents from doing a lot of the awful things Donald Trump did while he was President, like limit national emergencies (like the vanity border wall "emergency"), prevent removal of Inspectors General without cause (like he did through much of 2020), and limits our President's ability to pardon the unworthy (like Steve Freaking Bannon!). It does a bunch of other things, too, like require Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates to provide 10 years of tax returns, without excuses! And no, this ain't "looking backward" -- particularly if Donald Trump comes back in 2024. Or if someone worse wins the Republican nomination!
Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3932/S. 2076, the PASTEUR Act. This bill would fund $11 billion in grants to develop new antibiotics, and if that seems like a lot of money, consider that the bill would fund $11 billion once, not annually, and also consider that $11 billion a drop in the water in the vast ocean of a $4 trillion-plus federal budget, plus it would actually do a lot of good. The world is full of superbugs like the one we're battling now; antibiotic abuse has certainly made it a lot easier for superbugs to wreak their havoc, but we also need to develop new antibiotics that'll kill these bugs dead. Better to spend taxpayer money on that than on, say, welfare for oil corporations that already make crap-tons of money. We could make a longer list than that, but you get the idea.
Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5389, the REDUCE Act. Make sure it's H.R. 5389; there are other REDUCE Acts out there this term, of varying quality. This REDUCE Act would impose an excise tax on virgin plastic -- which is to say, plastic manufactured for the first time -- and would create a Plastic Waste Reduction Fund to help clean up the mess we've made from all the plastic that's in our oceans and landfills. Folks throw away, on average, 287 pounds of plastic every year, which is close to a pound a day (and this pandemic sure hasn't helped that figure, has it?), and our EPA tells us that less than 10 percent of the plastic we try to recycle actually gets recycled, so clearly we've got to do better as a civilization. That's why we have to reduce the amount of plastic we make to begin with.
Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4445, the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act. We should be ending forced arbitration for everything, but let's at least make our Congressfolk say I oppose giving sexual assault victims and sexual harassment victims their day in court. Don't let them say this is a boon for trial lawyers! If people don't want trial lawyers to prosper, they should do less evil! If your boss gropes you without your asking for it, your employment contract might require you to submit your complaint to an arbitration board that'll almost certainly rule in favor of your boss, but H.R. 4445 would simply prohibit that where sexual assault and harassment are concerned. So let's do that.
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