Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act and pass the Energy Security and Independence Act of 2022, and tell our federal government to rein in big ag monopolies and protect American workers from heatstroke. 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.
The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act so that our government doesn’t use it to bludgeon journalists. Specifically, you’d ask your Congressfolk to pass Amendment 617 to the defense authorization bill, authored by Rep. Tlaib (D-MI), and I’m glad someone did the extra reading for Sausage Making 101 by attaching necessary legislation to must-pass bills! Currently our government has too easy a time prosecuting and silencing heroic whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, John Kiriakou, and Daniel Hale; we should make it harder for them to do that. I mean, that could be any of us witnessing evil and having a conscience!
Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7439/S. 4013, the Energy Security and Independence Act of 2022. This bill would amend the Defense Production Act so that it specifically authorizes our President to invoke it to build renewable energy infrastructure; I don’t think Russia’s war on Ukraine is the biggest reason gas prices went up (that would be “corporate greed”), but it’s really not a far walk from foreign policy disasters to energy supply chains, and instead of staying vulnerable to world events so that big oil executives can keep getting richer, why don’t we ensure we can make more of our own energy here instead?
Food and Water Action helps you tell our U.S. Department of Agriculture (or USDA) to stop big ag corporations from running roughshod over small farmers and ranchers. The Packers and Stockyards Act nominally protects small farmers and ranchers from the ill effects of consolidation and monopolization, but our government hasn’t enforced it for at least the last 40 years, which means small farmers and ranchers now exist at the mercy of meat-packing middlemen. The Reagan Revolution didn’t “set our economy free,” not even from bureaucracy, but it gave middlemen and speculators all the control over our economy; it sure would be nice if our USDA would help a brother out here.
Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell our Occupational Safety and Health Administration (or OSHA) to pass emergency heat standards for American workers. After all, it’s only going to get hotter from here on in, and we’re already almost halfway into July. I am a little surprised to learn that heat kills more folks than tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods, but should I be? Those weather events get all the ink, but most folks who die of heatstroke hardly know it’s happening to them while it’s happening, and too many of our workplaces think only of the bottom line, and not of their workers’ safety. That’s why we have our government: so it can step in on our behalf when big corporations won’t do the right thing.
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