The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your House Rep to repeal the post-9.11 Authorization to Use Military Force, or AUMF. Both Bush and Obama Administrations have used the AUMF -- intended to give the President the ability to go after those who attacked us on 9.11 -- to justify new wars, warrantless wiretapping, drone strikes in countries with whom we're not currently at war, and indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay. But the Schiff Amendment to the last Defense Authorization bill fell a mere 27 votes short of passage; that amendment would have repealed the AUMF. It could be for the best that the amendment failed -- how disheartening would it have been to see the amendment pass the House and maybe even pass the Senate but then see the amendment get "conferenced out" just because Mr. Obama threatened a veto? And besides, we're better off putting the matter directly to Congress and getting their answers through their votes -- and we're also better off putting the matter directly to Mr. Obama.
Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell WalMart not to sell unlabeled, genetically-modified seafood. The FDA has received almost two million comments protesting their approval of genetically-modified salmon, but they've only been a moderately more stalwart defendant of the public good since Mr. Obama took over from Mr. Bush, which is really saying something. Still, if you can't get government to do its job, you can get big grocers to do theirs -- and Target, Safety, Kroger, and Whole Foods have already committed to keeping the Frankensalmon out of their stores. But America's biggest grocer, WalMart (and who'd have thought we'd ever have said that twenty years ago?), has not committed either way, and that's not to say they'll automatically do the wrong thing just because they've wreaked so much destruction on our economy. Certainly they're no less susceptible to the Awesome Power of Bad PR than anyone else. No, really: huge amounts of money only insulate you so much from bad PR, and frankly I think corporations generally overreact to bad PR, which is all the better for us.
Finally, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell the FDA to mandate that food corporations include information about added sugar in their food labels, if you haven't done so already. As you may recall, the FDA hasn't updated food labeling requirements in decades, but its current proposal does a lot of things right, and mandating "added sugar" information is one of them. Currently labels tell you how much sugar is in your food, but not how much sugar got added to the food, and that's a big deal -- folks are far too used to colas that have three times the sugar they need to have in order to taste good, and corporations can hide added sugars in fruit- and milk-based drinks more easily, since both fruit and milk already have sugar in them naturally. Thankfully, the FDA's proposal includes making corporations note added sugars in food (as well as noting amounts of Vitamin D and potassium and basing calorie counts on more realistic serving sizes), but the OBAMAZ TELLZ TEH PEEPULZ WHATZ TO EATZ!!!! crowd will be their usual emptiest-wagon-makes-the-loudest-noise selves, so the FDA will need all the support they can get.
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