Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell Congress to prohibit banking executives from serving on the 14 Federal Reserve boards. No doubt some folks still say nobody knows the banking business better than the banks, and so nobody knows how to regulate the banks better than the banks. Only three words need be said in response: conflict of interest. The banks sure do know how to make money -- they're still doing it, even though they crashed the economy and the rest of us are still struggling. But you don't even need to believe bankers are really corrupt -- you only need believe that giving bankers all the power to make the rules that govern their activities is a temptation to corruption. S. 3219 would fix that, plus it would prohibit Federal Reserve employees and board members from investing in the corporations they're overseeing. That "inside knowledge," also, isn't an advantage but a temptation.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Trader Joe's to stop buying antibiotic-addled animal meat, Moms Rising still helps you do that. I've gone on about how we pump the vast majority of all antibiotics in America into farm animals, in a largely vain attempt to help disguise the squalid conditions in which they live. But I probably haven't gone on enough about the other big problem with overusing antibiotics on factory farms -- they make antibiotics less effective in fighting disease. Everybody knows that the more you use an antibiotic, the more resistant bacteria becomes. So if we're putting most of our antibiotics into animals so they won't get sick as they live in their own filth in very small spaces, then we're giving bacteria a lot more chances to defeat the antibiotics. Almost all of us, from left to right, oppose that state of affairs -- but the factory farms seem to own the Obama Administration, so we're taking it to the grocers.
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