The Parents' Television Council still helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a la carte cable packaging. Their email tool still describes an episode of American Horror Story, but we've got bigger fish to fry -- our cable news channels talk too damn much about celebrities, promote punditoids who yell and scream all day, hire corporate flacks to discuss issues without disclosing their conflicts of interest, and let guests lie on their programs without challenging them -- all worse than some overly showy piece of drama. But even if we don't like cable "news" channels, we're still paying for them -- even if we make the cable company come out and block the channel. They make money hand over fist, these cable news channels, but if we can buy only the channels we want to buy without having to buy a bunch of other channels in a package, we can make them change their behavior much more quickly than even a well-organized advertiser boycott could.
Meanwhile, Public Citizen helps you ask your Senator for a copy of the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade deal. Public Citizen suggests your Senators might be mad at not having a copy themselves, and while it is true that they almost certainly don't have one, and it is true that Hell hath no fury like a Senator disrespected, I suspect more of them don't care whether or not they have it, given that most of the folks who support "free" trade seem to be in Congress. This "free" trade "deal" is so nefarious that hardly anyone can get any details about it, but we know from leaks that it would send more American jobs offshore, jack up medicine prices, keep you from visiting certain pages on the internet, and let corporations override national environmental or labor laws they don't feel like following. Your Congressfolk may not care how we feel about "free" trade, but that bit about overriding our laws? I bet they do care about that.
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