Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Government Surveillance Reform Act, expand Medicare to include all Americans, and stop trying to injure our CFPB’s ability to protect us from financial predators. 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 pass the Government Surveillance Reform Act. This bill would do three fairly significant things: it would prevent our FBI from getting your data without a warrant, it would close the loophole law enforcement uses to get your data from private data collecting corporations without a warrant, and it would let more good Americans sue our government for the harm illegal surveillance causes. These would all be unqualified good works for the American people, so our Congressfolk should do them, without pretending crime is always going up. Seriously, if you can’t get a warrant to continue your investigation, then you should really reconsider whether law enforcement is for you. Unless, of course, you want to go live in a fascist country, then Godspeed.
Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a Medicare-for-All health insurance system. It’s an easy sell! The Koch Brothers said Medicare for All would cost $32 trillion over 10 years, but our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the system we’ve got now will cost $49 trillion over the same period! You can do the math – expanding Medicare to include every American would save $17 trillion over 10 years! I’d say that three times in a 30-second ad. I might also say you’d fund it with a small employer-side payroll tax (“employer-side” meaning, of course, that employees don’t pay it) capturing the money big corporations currently spend on private health insurance. All that’s left are the really desperate arguments.
Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any legislative riders that would harm our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB)’s ability to protect good Americans from financial predators. The “CFPB Restructuring Rider” would take CFPB authority from its director and hand it over to a five-person commission, and two of the commissioners “must have private sector experience in the provision of consumer financial products and services” – after all, it’s not like those folks would have self-interest or anything! – while the so-called “Small Business Lending Rider” would prevent our CFPB from collecting data on lending to Black-, Brown-, or woman-owned businesses, which just sounds cruel to me. Anyway, these are clearly fall-back positions, so let’s put them on their back permanently.
Thieves in the Temple will take the next week off, so I wish all of you a happy and safe holiday, and we'll be back November 27 or thereabouts.
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