Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to ban themselves from stock trading, stop letting rich families evade Estate and gift taxes, lower drug prescription prices, end qualified immunity for police officers, fight plastic pollution, and save our Postal Service. 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, well, ban themselves from trading or owning individual stocks. They'll act all offended about that -- how dare you tell me I can't separate the stocks I own from the decisions I make concerning the businesses in which I own stock! Yeah, they really say stuff like that. Well, guess what? It's our job, as citizens, not to trust our Reps and Senators to do the right thing; it's our job to make them do the right thing. Owning stock in a corporation over which you may have to perform oversight duties is an invitation to corruption. And sooner or later, the 13-dimensional chess they all play in their heads will demand they accept such invitations. Unless we stop them, of course.
Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop America's richest families from dodging Estate and gift taxes. Which they may do over a period of decades, even centuries! All the while they get their Congressdolts to write laws which help them evade taxes, and thus deprive the rest of us of "nice things" like paid family leave, an expanded Child Tax Credit, bridges that don't collapse, and water pipes that don't poison us. Fewer of our Congressfolk want to repeal our Estate Tax than they did two decades ago, but too many still want to cut it, to "save family farms" even though no family farms have ever gone under because of our Estate Tax. So they ain't changed enough, and they won't, unless we make them.
Moms Rising helps you tell your Senators to lower prescription drug prices. We pay many times more money for prescription drugs than any other similarly-wealthy country on Earth, to the point where good Americans have to ration their insulin (and thus risk death!) just so they can make ends meet, and the only reason for any of that is big pharma greed! How much is enough for these people? And how much is enough for tools like Kyrsten Sinema, Kathleen Rice, Scott Peters, and Bob Menendez? At least eight out of every 10 Americans want Medicare to be able to negotiate its own drug prices, but the aforementioned four said no, and because Democratic margins are narrow, we can't have what we need to survive and thrive in America. So we keep telling them, until they fear being left behind, because that's all that'll get folks like that to do the right thing.
Black Lives Matter helps you tell your Congressfolk to end "qualified immunity" for police officers. "Qualified immunity" is the doctrine our Supreme Court developed in the late 1960s, which basically shields civil servants from lawsuits for their wrongdoing. I guess the notion was that our government did it, not them, but every government has a few bad apples, and anyway we have tools to punish governments, like, you know, turning them out of office. But what of those individual civil servants who do the inexcusable? Like murder Black folks for the heinous crime of brandishing a cellphone? If you respond to stories like that by saying I SUPPORTZ OUR POLICEZ!!!! like a damn robot, please do two things: 1) slap yourself, and 2) consider whether you might be a slave to authority. Being a slave to authority is not a good look for a can-do American.
Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2238/S. 984, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act. This bill would phase out a lot of single-use plastics, since they all just wind up in landfills and in our air and water anyway (remember that part), plus the bill would also force plastic manufacturing corporations to clean up the mess they've helped make, by collecting and recycling plastic products. Now, about "remembering that part": this ain't just about keeping plastic out of our landfills, or about keeping it out of our oceans where it's strangling all the life. It's also about keeping it out of our bodies, since scientists tell us we now ingest about a credit card's worth of plastic every week. Where it only does us harm! So let's fix that.
Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. Our House passed this bill by a wide, actually-bipartisan margin last week; now it's our Senate's term, and this is not only a good bill, it's a good bill that'll actually do a lot of good, by removing the onerous mandate Congress placed on our Postal Service (to prepay decades of retiree benefits in advance, a mandate required of no other public or private entity) back in 2006. It's possible that Republican Senators, who never pass up an opportunity to do evil, will try to attach numerous poison pill amendments to a bill the American people want and should pass. Go ahead and tell them they'd better not do that, because Jesus Mary and Joseph we're not hostages, we're free people.
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