- Action #1 – Call your senators now!
- Action #2 – Email your senators now! Indivisible and NAACP scripts to mix-and-match!
- Action #3 – Get your friends and relatives in Arizona and West Virginia to call their senators
Share this video with GOP friends and family you know…
It’s getting close, resistance-campers! Biden wants this done before he heads off to explain why we can’t have nice things (Manchin, Sinema) to the Glasgow Climate Summit.
(From Indivisible National) Right now, congressional committees are drafting the budget reconciliation package, the legislative vehicle for passing an inclusive recovery package. This means we’re in a key moment for advocacy as we fight to win the most progressive reconciliation bill possible. Today, Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters that negotiators still haven’t reached agreement on language to expand Medicare benefits and lower the price of prescription drugs, two major pieces of their agenda, but insisted “a final deal is within reach.”
ROAR INTO THEIR PHONES/ FILL UP THEIR EMAIL – We need to make sure no Democrat in the Senate blocks priorities that 70% of regular non-billionaire Americans want from being included in the reconciliation bill.
Action #1 – Call your senators now!
Action #1 – Mini-script for calling: I’m calling from [zip code] and I want Sen. [___] to commit to passing an inclusive recovery through reconciliation, immediately after the House sends over their bill.
We urgently need a recovery bill that lowers prescription drug prices for all Americans, expands Medicare, provides a path to citizenship, and includes generational investments in climate, housing, education and the care economy, including permanent child tax credits without work requirements, and paid family and medical leave – all while making the ultra rich and big corporations pay their fair share through the Billionaires tax at the very minimum. This cannot take a back seat to an inadequate bipartisan bill.
We need the full recovery agenda, and I’ll be watching to ensure that Sen. [___] is fighting for it.
Contact:
- Senator Feinstein: email, DC (202) 224-3841, LA (310) 914-7300, SF (415) 393-0707, SD (619) 231-9712, Fresno (559) 485-7430
- and Senator Padilla: email, DC (202) 224-3553, LA (310) 231-4494, SAC (916) 448-2787, Fresno (559) 497-5109, SF (415) 981-9369, SD (619) 239-3884
- Who is my representative/senator?: https://whoismyrepresentative.com
Action #2 – Email your senators now! Indivisible and NAACP scripts to mix-and-match!
This is from the NAACP’s #BuildBackBlack agenda.
Option #1 – Email script from the NAACP: Dear Sen. [__]. My name is [___] and I live in [city/state]. I was excited to learn that the U.S. Senate passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Package (BIF), positioning our country to make historic investments in our physical infrastructure, while also creating millions of new jobs. However, just as important are many of the social investments included in the Build Back Better Act or the Human Infrastructure package. As negotiations on Capitol Hill are taking place, I found it imperative that I write this letter strongly urging you to support a final package that includes full funding for programs and tax incentives that address the most pressing needs within the African-American Community. As your constituent, I urge you to:
- Support the permanence of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) with ITIN inclusion and without work requirements. The CTC alone has the ability to benefit ninety percent of children and reduce child poverty by historic percentages, which will have a positive generational impact on low-income and middle-class communities of color across the country
- Support 2-years of free community college and lower the cost of tuition for low- and middle-income students at minority-serving institutions
- Support the expansion of Medicaid and Medicare
- Support 12-weeks of paid family & medical leave for workers
With the implementation of the Billionaires Income Tax (BIT), the Build Back Better Act, and all the necessary programs and incentives will be paid for. This transformative legislation has the potential to address many historic racial inequities, which I know is your priority as an elected official. Communities of color across the state are counting on you to ensure this once-in-a-lifetime plan comes to fruition and forever reshapes the lives of families and communities!
I look forward to hearing back from you, on where you stand on this important legislation, and what more I can do to help you advance its passage.
Option #2 – Email script from Indivisible: I want Sen. [___] to commit to passing an inclusive recovery through reconciliation, immediately after the House sends over their bill. Biden’s Build Back Better plan invested in the rest of us, the 99% of Americans who’ve helped create the exponential wealth of our top 1%. Our tax dollars funded trillions on tax cuts and profits for billionaires and corporations and supported endless wars, with little for regular Americans to show for it but injured soldiers, ruined small businesses and financial instability. Now we demand you act to create legislation that centers us – the 99% – that’s taking our health, our education, our communities, along with our responsibilities to our children, our elders and our future generations seriously. The original proposal of $3.5 trillion was a deal, not a burden. It which would have brought us closer to the humane norms of the rest of the developed world and unlocked productivity and freedom for us regular Americans.
The following are issues that are important to me, to my family and to most of the voters in the nation.
[Choose all or some of examples below. You can also pick out one or two and write how they personally affect you and your family.]
- Invest in a pathway to citizenship for millions of immigrants;
- Citizenship for DACA recipients, TPS holders, and essential workers.
- Inclusion of all immigrants in the recovery package.
- Give us a pathway to accessible, dignified health care:
- Use medicare to negotiate drug prices, limit launch prices and tie prices to equivalents in peer countries. Ensure low-cost or free life-saving prescriptions available to all. No more insulin deaths!
- Expand Medicare to cover vision, dental, and hearing.
- Lower the eligibility age to 60 years old;
- Invest in our Climate, including a Clean Energy Standard (with NO FOSSIL FUEL SUBSIDIES!) and a Civilian Climate Corps;
- Invest in our Care Economy, including universal child care, child tax credits for millions of families, federally guaranteed paid leave for all, and creating good jobs in the home and community based-care sector;
- (NAACP) Support the permanence of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) with ITIN inclusion and without work requirements.
- Invest in our future
- Invest in our housing, especially deeply affordable housing and housing for unhoused populations; and
- Invest in our good will. Pay for this package and address extreme wealth inequality at the same time – a two-fer! Taxing the ultra rich and big corporations, with either Sen. Wyden’s Billionaires Tax, or the wealth tax from Sen. Warren, so they finally pay their fair share.
- Fund the IRS so they can both effectively deliver emergency payments and take on wealthy tax cheats.
- Restore the inheritance tax basis used prior to the 2017 Tax Scam.
- Make millionaires and billionaires pay the same rate as everyone else into the Social Security trust fund and increase the income tax exemption on low-income recipients. Set the minimum level 25% above poverty level and tie it to a wage index so seniors don’t fall behind.
- Close the stepped-up basis loophole. Don’t let the GOP use family farm horror stories from the last century as an excuse. Not only has that not been true for decades, families who continue farming and small businesses are exempt from Biden’s plan.
Contact:
- Senator Feinstein: email, DC (202) 224-3841, LA (310) 914-7300, SF (415) 393-0707, SD (619) 231-9712, Fresno (559) 485-7430
- and Senator Padilla: email, DC (202) 224-3553, LA (310) 231-4494, SAC (916) 448-2787, Fresno (559) 497-5109, SF (415) 981-9369, SD (619) 239-3884
- Who is my representative/senator?: https://whoismyrepresentative.com
Action #3 – Get your friends and relatives in Arizona and West Virginia to call their senators
Minimal call script: I’m calling from [zip code] and and I’m furious that Senator [Sinema (AZ), Manchin (WV)] has threatened to undermine the budget reconciliation bill currently being written. There’s no excuse for risking urgent proposals like lowering drug prices, strengthening Medicare, universal child care, and climate action. Instead of political stunts, I expect them to support the Democratic agenda.
Senator [Sinema (AZ), Manchin (WV)] must stop obstructing the budget reconciliation bill based on an arbitrary and imaginary price cap. The total investment in regular Americans is long overdue and spread out over 10 years. I’m disappointed with positions [she/he] has taken so far, especially [her opposition to raising the corporate tax rate and marginal income tax rates on the wealthy/ his opposition to the CEPP] and will be watching to see if they change course.
Contact:
- Senator Sinema: email, DC (202) 224-4521
- Senator Manchin: email, DC (202) 224-3954
- Who is my representative/senator?: https://whoismyrepresentative.com
Seriously, do they think we didn’t notice…
What are we getting for our +20% in combined taxes? Let’s compare, point by point, with the Swedish guy above and they talk to our legislators…
- Healthcare: Even with the Affordable Care Act, two-thirds of all personal bankruptcies are due to medical bills, with 20% of those in the 55+ age group. 70% of Americans with medical bills had to cut their food expenses to avoid bankruptcy.Our students owe. A 2019 poll found 25% of Americans say they or a family member have delayed medical treatment for a serious illness due to the costs of care. 34 million Americans know of family member or friend who died in the last 5 tears after being unable to afford treatment.
- College: U.S. student loan debt totals $1.6 trillion as of March 31, 2021. 62% of students graduate with debt and the average U.S. household with student debt owes $57,520.
- Retirement: “The U.S. is on a path to a predictable and unfortunate outcome — millions of working Americans unable to meet their basic needs in retirement.” This is helped on by corporation replacing pensions with 401k’s or refusing benefits entirely.
- Welfare: Read and weep. “In comparing poverty in the U.S. to these OECD countries, we find that American poverty is both more prevalent and more extreme.”
- Parental leave: Among 41 countries, the U.S. is the only developed country that does not require employers to provide any paid leave to new parents, though some states, like R.I, and N.J. require it.
- Child care: Rich countries contribute an average of $14,000 per year for a toddler’s care, compared with $500 in the U.S. The Democrats’ spending bill tries to shrink the gap.
- Paid sick leave: The U.S. is the only developed country that does not guarentee paid sick leave in any capacity, though some states like NY and CA have statewide mandates.
Democrats are being forced to cater to the moderate and conservative Democrats in the House and Senate, and the current target range is around $2 trillion. Now they have to decide how to make $1.5 trillion in cuts.
- Did they think we didn’t notice the GOP’s 2017 Tax Scam, which mostly benefited the wealthy and corporations, will cost us nearly $1.9 trillion over 10 years? (possibly up to $3 trillion through 2029)That it didn’t solve any of the problems regular American families face, such unaffordable child care and hospital bills, the high cost of education, decades-long wage stagnation and growing inequality?
- Did they think we didn’t notice that the GOP intends to cut our social safety net – Medicare and Social Security – to pay for their 2017 scam if and when they return to power?
- Do they think we don’t remember how the wealthy and corporations profited from the $4 trillion COVID bailout? (Seriously, we’re still pissed about this.)
- How the GOP snuck a $170 billion tax benefit into the 2020 CARES Act in which 82% of the benefits will go to just about 43,000 taxpayers, mostly hedge fund investors, or like our ex-president, a real estate business owners.
- How the wealthy and large corporation got first shot at the SBA loans. How more than half ($2.3 trillion) went to many businesses that weren’t required to show that they were impacted or keeping workers employed.
- How $651 billion in tax breaks didn’t stop companies from laying off workers – the Cheesecake Factory, for example, got a $50 million tax break and laid of 41,000 people.
- How $454 billion went to the Federal Reserve to stabilize markets, allowing companies like Wells Fargo, At&T and others to borrow at a lower lower rate, while still laying off workers.
- How corporations used their $670 billion Paycheck Protection Program for CEO packages, for stock buybacks, and for dividends and acquisitions, instead of protecting employees’ paychecks.
- Do you think we didn’t read that over 50 large corporation paid zero in taxes last year? That the nation’s 25 richest people paid only $13.6 billion in federal income taxes between 2014 and 2018, or about 16 percent of their reported income over that period — and a very, very small sliver of their wealth. A 16% tax rate is lower than the rate a single worker making $45,000 a year would pay, including Medicare and Social Security taxes.
INDIVISIBLE VENTURA 