Food and Water Watch helps you tell the National Organics Standards Board to prohibit apple and pear growers from labeling their produce "organic" if they use the antibiotic tetracycline. That's what organic standards are for, right? Keeping artificial stuff out of food? Yet apple and pear growers have enjoyed an exemption from organic standards for years, and want to extend that exemption for another three years. Tetracycline helps combat fire blight (so named for its burnt appearance, though the pathogen Erwinia amylovora causes it), but the whole point of organic labeling is to prevent the consumer from ingesting harmful chemicals, and tetracycline (which studies have linked to lupus, breathing problems, and fetal bone growth issues) is one of those. Also, using antibiotics on fire-blighted trees has helped create even stronger strains of Erwinia, and there are other ways to fight it (like planting more resistant varieties and more vigilant pruning). Of course, they're more labor-intensive, but I hear a lot of people are looking for jobs these days. And "organic" is a label you really ought to earn.

Meanwhile, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell Congress to enact stronger standards for storing radioactive nuclear waste. Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Currently more than 70 sites store nuclear waste (tens of thousands of tons of it!) in "spent-fuel pools," which aren't particularly safe from terrorist attacks and need lots of energy to maintain, instead of dry casks, which are made of steel and concrete and which have no need for electrical maintenance (thus making them safer during a power outage!). And the pools were only supposed to be short-term storage to begin with! It's a wonder we don't have more problems -- which, I imagine, would be the right-wing response to any effort to move spent nuclear waste to dry casks. But it has happened elsewhere -- a spent-fuel pool ruptured and leaked radioactive material into the air during the Fukushima disaster -- and if we can imagine it happening here pretty easily, we should deal with it promptly. And this seems to me the more conservative viewpoint -- after all, we do have life and property to conserve, don't we?

Finally, Public Citizen helps you support an end to the arbitration forced upon consumers by corporations. As you may recall, Sens. Franken (D-MN) and Blumenthal (D-CT) introduced the Arbitration Fairness Act in the Senate in 2011, and Rep. Johnson (D-GA) introduced a version in the House. They've yet to re-introduce the Act in this Congress (thomas.loc.gov has nothing for "arbitration fairness" as of this writing), but that doesn't mean it's not important right now, or that we can't talk about it with our Congressfolk. More and more corporations -- like banks, cell-phone providers, and cable corporations -- slip forced arbitration agreements into their contracts, and as you may recall, the Supreme Court ruled in 2011 that corporations could force consumers into agreements that actually prevent them from banding into classes and filing class-action lawsuits. And the arbitrators don't rule in your favor very often, because they get their checks from the corporations -- though, really, since we buy the corporations' products and services, we're paying for it. But no one should have to give up their rights just to get a product or service -- or a job.