Moms Rising helps you tell Wendy's and Burger King to take soda out of kids' meals. You know, so we can help keep kids from becoming obese and getting Type 2 diabetes, since sugary beverages pump more added sugar into kids than all other sources of added sugar combined. I bet I'll hear some libertarian-types saying what are you, anti-choice? Those would be some damn inattentive libertarians, of course: we're not saying stop selling soda, we're saying stop selling soda as part of a combination meal. Go to almost any fast-food joint and the default drink in kids' meals is soda. Why does it have to be like that? Because soda is so cheap, which in turn is because our government hands out billions of dollars in subsidies to the corn syrup producers? There's no damn good reason for it. And though we've tried and failed (for the moment!) to get our government to stop doing that, certainly there's no harm in asking of our fast-food titans to make it harder for kids to get their hands on soda. The kids will have to talk their parents' ears off to get it -- just like we did in the old days, and we turned out fine.
Meanwhile, Comcast has announced plans to buy Time Warner Cable. See any problems with that? Here's one big one: Comcast is the nation's #1 cable provider, one that already owns NBC and Universal Studios, among other things. Who's #2? Time Warner Cable, of course. Combine the top two cable providers into one company and you'll have a monopolistic behemoth just about no one will be able to stop from jacking up prices and compromising our privacy and trampling over network neutrality. One of the biggest problems with the media today is that too few corporations own too much -- no sense telling me there are 500 channels when only four corporations own them -- and we can't get our cable channels to serve its customers better because, in most media markets, you'll have only one big cable company, with no competition to keep everyone honest. Hence Free Press helps you tell the Department of Justice and the FCC to block a Comcast/Time Warner merger. They might do it -- Justice blocked the AT&T/T-Mobile merger a while back, as you may remember -- but they have to hear from us first.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to hike the minimum wage to $10.10/hour, here are three more, from the Campaign for America's Future, Moms Rising, and NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby. Folks making minimum wage make a shade over $15,000 annually, and most folks who make minimum wage are women, and over a quarter of those women have children. And to all the haters: no one budgets absolutely perfectly or enjoys a life untouched by unforeseen circumstances. It's always better to give these folks a hand up rather than ridicule them. And no, hiking the minimum wage won't cause prices to go up or force small businesses to cut jobs (like small businesses have the luxury!) -- but, as our President said the other day, it will put more money in the pockets of working folks, which means they'll have more money to spend, which means businesses will have more customers and will hire more workers to keep up with the demand. We used to know how all that worked. I wonder what happened. Oh, right -- the rich got all the say about everything.
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