Both Friends of the Earth and CREDO help youtell Interior Secretary Sally Jewell to protect the Chaco Canyon ruins from fracking. Can you believe that the Bureau of Land Management is actually mulling whether to issue permits to drill for gas near a World Heritage Site? All right, maybe it's not that hard to believe, but under Ken Salazar, Interior actually stood tall against folks who wanted to mine near the Grand Canyon, and if the Chaco Canyon isn't as well-known, the thousand-year-old Anasazi ruins and roadways and rock engravings so revered by Pueblo and Navajo deserve our protection from the dreams of gas drilling moguls and their enabling politicians who want to turn this area of New Mexico into their very own North Dakota. Archaeologists dig here, too, and generally do rather better at leaving historic areas unspoiled than corporate drillers do. Sometimes, it's not just about protecting our air from chemical geysers, or preventing our water from becoming brackish and gelatinous and flammable. It's also about protecting our civilization from those who'd assault it just to get some coin.
Meanwhile, Consumers Union helps you tell the Obama Administration to release the premiums that health insurance corporations are seeking for next year. The Obama Administration hasn't done this since 2012, thus violating the law -- the Affordable Care Act, no less, since the Affordable Care Act not only mandates that our government release proposed insurance rates annually but also make public the reasons health insurance corporations seek rate hikes. The ACA, then, actually puts health insurance corporations on the hot seat -- too often these days you find out how high a health insurance corporation wants to jack up rates almost by accident. You'd think Republicans would be howling to the heavens about the Obama Administration ignoring the law (ignoring its President's signature legislative achievement to boot!), but I've heard nothing from them about this, as if they've decided only to attack the law when it does no good to do so. Might people want to find out if insurance corporations are screwing them? Apparently taking up that cause doesn't get Mitch McConnell re-elected.
Finally, Free Press joins with Roots Action to help you tell our government to block the proposed AT&T/DirecTV merger. By now you know that I'd prefer that no corporation own any other corporation, anywhere, a predicament somehow allowed by the same Constitutional amendments that somehow permit corporations to enjoy the rights of people. And no sentient life forms (except those employed by big telecom corporations, of course!) now think that these mergers "create jobs" or "improve services," and Free Press takes pains to point out that, for the price AT&T plans to pay for DirecTV plus the price Comcast plans to pay for Time-Warner, AT&T and Comcast could put fiber broadband in every single house in America. But why do that? That doesn't redistribute wealth upward to the CEO as efficiently as greedily gobbling up every corporation you can. And did you know AT&T has promised it'll enforce net neutrality on its own networks for three years? How magnificent of them to declare they'll continue to provide the experience every single internet user in America expects as a matter of course! They might as well promise you that you'll get to eat the next dinner you make.