Long story short: tell Florida state legislators to reject the "Don't Say Gay" bill, tell President Biden to sanction Russian oil and gas corporations and invoke the Defense Production Act to build renewable energy infrastructure, tell big corporations to pressure Texas's Governor into rescinding his anti-trans policies, tell our Department of HHS to ensure a key pro-higher drug prices NIH official has as little say as possible about march-in rights for Xtandi, and tell big corporations to stop insuring dirty fossil fuel projects. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.
First things first. MoveOn helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject the notorious "Don't Say Gay" bill. The bill no longer requires school officials to tell parents of gay or trans kids that they're gay or trans -- that's a conversation those kids would want to have on their terms, you know, in a free country! -- but the only reason that part of the bill's gone is because good Americans spoke out against it. Shine some light on the rest of the bill, which would criminalize even talking about queer issues in a school setting -- regardless of how relevant it might be to, say, a history or social studies class -- and we might be able to kill it like the vampire upon our culture that it is. (No use telling me that restriction only applies to third-graders and younger, not when Florida educators are going after much older kids as we speak!)
Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to sanction the Russian oil and gas industries, and I quote, "no matter the impact it would have on the price of fossil fuels" here in America. America has suffered from worsening inflation ever since the reactionary U.S. Chamber of Commerce declared "war" on American antitrust enforcers, and you won't have to drive around much to see that gas prices are already going up, again, though, again, to some degree they're hiking prices because they can. Still, I'd prefer higher energy prices to coddling Mr. Putin's favorite fossil fuel corporations. Besides, we can fill the gap in other ways -- like ending stupid sanctions against Venezuela, for example. Or using renewables!
Speaking of which, Stand.Earth helps you tell President Biden to ban fossil fuels from Russia and invoke the Defense Production Act to help manufacture more renewable energy infrastructure. It is a matter of defense, after all -- we would build more renewable energy infrastructure in order to, literally, defend ourselves from Russia using its fossil fuel leverage to browbeat us into submitting to their outrageous invasion of Ukraine, and (as Stand.Earth's email missive points out) will not require Mr. Biden to get permission from One Great And True Real American President Joe Manchin. He'll piss and moan about it, as drama kings tend to do, but ain't everyone sick of that already? I bet most folks are quite sick of it, and need only to be reminded of it. We're not all conscious of all of our feelings at once, after all.
In light of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's latest attempt to pander to the most rage-addled among good Texans -- classifying commonly-accepted health treatments for transgender kids as "child abuse" -- Public Citizen helps you tell Texas's five biggest corporations to lean on Gov. Abbott and tell him to rescind his bass-ackward trans policies. Big corporations need all the good PR they can get, after all! And if right-wingers attack corporate power because it's too "woke," well, we can work with that, too. Greg Abbott enacted his notorious anti-trans policies before his primary; perhaps now that he's won, he can pretend he didn't do it. Let's at least make him earn that, by wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR against the corporations that could actually make him do better.
Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell HHS Secretary Becerra to make sure National Institutes of Health (or NIH) official Dr. Mark Rorhbaugh recuses himself from any march-in proceedings the Biden Administration initiates over the prostate drug Xtandi. Dr. Rorhbaugh apparently has worked with big pharma lobbyists to sabotage march-in proceedings from within, which isn't his job at our NIH, because in government, you're supposed to serve the people, not the big corporations! This matters because our NIH handles march-in rights proceedings -- that is, those proceedings in which our government mandates a generic version of a drug that its creator charges too much for. And maybe the guy who's actively working against cheaper life-saving drugs shouldn't get to make all the decisions about making cheaper life-saving drugs! Seems reasonable to me.
Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell several big insurance corporations to stop funding polluting projects that help exacerbate climate change. Lately the American International Group, better known as AIG, has declared it will stop insuring new tar sands, Arctic drilling, and coal projects, and that's good news, not least because you almost certainly helped that process along if you were part of the public pressure that changed minds at AIG, but other famous big insurance corporations, like Chubb and Liberty Mutual, have not declared any such intention. Well, like I said, big corporations need all the good PR they can get, and they need to avoid the Big Stick of Bad PR as much as they can, so perhaps with a little more public pressure, we can get Chubb and Liberty Mutual to do the right thing.
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