Consumers Union helps you tell the FCC to stop the proposed Comcast-Time Warner cable corporation merger. You didn't think we forgot about that, did you? Certainly Comcast hopes you've forgotten, so badly did they acquit themselves in the court of public opinion -- it actually claimed the merger would improve service to Time Warner customers, which would be like the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers merging with the 2008 Detroit Lions and predicting a Super Bowl win from the result. Then a Comcast lobbyist whined that the people opposing the merger were the "same group of people" who've opposed media consolidation for decades, though polling later found that barely 11% of Americans think the merger is a good idea. (Said idiot also pretended Hulu competes with Comcast when Comcast owns Hulu, and also suggested that Comcast's real competitor is wireless, which would surprise anyone who's ever been frustrated with their wireless.) Note, also, that the merger would slash-jobs-not-create-them, and would make an already too-powerful corporation more powerful, in a nation where too many folks only get one cable corporation delivering services to their area.
Meanwhile, Breast Cancer Action helps you tell the EPA to force gas drilling corporations to disclose the chemicals they use in fracking. The suggested comment is, as you might imagine, mostly about breast cancer, but what's wrong with that? It's not like breast cancer is a good thing. And politicians who constantly rail about EPA "job terrorists" will not dare appear to be, you know, objectively pro-breast cancer. If less than half of all women who get breast cancer have no risk factors, and if studies continue to link toxic chemicals with breast cancer, and if our government continues to allow gas-drilling corporations to keep the chemicals they use in their processes a "trade secret," then we have every right to suspect, certainly, that the toxic brew that finds its way into our air and water wherever gas drilling corporations frack is responsible for some of that, and "some of that" is too much of that. Personal to those who defend fracking by speaking of our need to "wean ourselves from foreign oil": is there really only one way to do that? And must we necessarily sacrifice our health to do that? Very little health care is even possible without clean water, after all.
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