We used to wait.

As you may know, wikileaks's main source for its multitudinous document dumps lately has been U.S. Marine Private Bradley Manning, now in military custody. You may not know that he's been subject to inhumane treatment for five months now -- can't communicate with almost anyone, can't read a newspaper, can't hardly sleep or walk around. If you're not a fan of what wikileaks has done, you might well be tempted to cheer these conditions, but set aside, for a moment, that (as Ralph Nader suggests here) opposition to wikileaks' actions might require a lot of intellectual inconsistency. Merely consider that Mr. Manning has not been convicted of a crime, and that we've been fighting similar treatment of "enemy combatants" for years now. And consider that some of the conditions of his detainment are, at the very least, suspicious -- for example, he's under "Prevention of Injury" restrictions despite (per his psychologist) not being a danger to himself/others, and these restrictions have also lasted far longer than normal. Finally, ask yourself: are we not a nation of laws? Aren't our freedoms and traditions strong enough to treat actual or perceived enemies decently while in our custody? Firedoglake helps you petition for better treatment for Mr. Manning.

Meanwhile, a massive fire in the That's It Sportswear clothing sweatshop in Bangladesh killed dozens of people on December 14, and seriously injured dozens more. These are the kind of folks who pull down less than two bucks a day making clothes for American brands ranging from Abercrombie & Fitch to Wrangler to Target, and, as you've probably already guessed, several exits in that sweatshop were locked. But a coalition of labor groups in Bangladesh have demanded compensation for the fire's victims and families, as well as independent and thorough safety inspections of all multi-story factories, and they're asking for our help. So change.org helps you petition corporations using That's It labor to compensate victims and investigate safety conditions. Doesn't sound like much, does it? It is much, though -- corporations respond to bad PR. I certainly hope that none of these corporations try to tell us that the sweatshop exits were locked because the workers keep trying to leave. Golly, why would an underpaid, overworked laborer ever try to leave a job site?

Closer to home, People for the American Way help you tell Fox News (sic) advertisers to stop advertising there. Similar campaigns have stopped most companies from advertising on Glenn Beck's program-if-we-can-call-it-that, but this petition would tell advertisers to stop advertising on Fox News entirely. I'll say it again: if we want to fight big media immorality and decadence, we have very little choice in this corporate economy but to start boycotts. We do not have a la carte cable packaging, so that we could simply not pay for stations we don't like, and since these stations are all privately owned, our government has little leverage as well. These stations survive only because large corporations continue to give them advertising money. But, as I said, large corporations don't like bad PR. They overreact to it, in my opinion. And, right now, that's the best weapon we have against them.

Finally, speaking of immorality and decadence, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy instructs us that the Wall Street Journal is full of soup to tell us that the top tax-bracket increase Oregon passed earlier this year caused up to 10,000 wealthy Oregonians to flee the state. Long story short: the Journal editorial focuses on the fact that 10,000 fewer Oregonians earned over $200,000 than the state expected -- without noting that 60,000 more Oregonians earned less than $100,000 than the state expected, which (in the absence of, I don't know, a big pile of address change forms) suggests that the 10,000 wealthy Oregonians didn't move out of state, but simply had a bad time of it due to the economy. And if this error seems vaguely familiar, well, there may be a reason for that.

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