Action: unsafe oil refineries, and "personal belief" exemptions from vaccines.

As a strike by oil workers drags on, the Sierra Club helps you tell oil corporations' management to get serious about workplace safety. U.S. oil refineries suffer a serious workplace accident -- involving fires, explosions, or releases of toxic chemicals -- about once every eight days; imagine if your workplace put you in mortal danger around once a week. You may respond, well, oil drilling is dangerous work, but should a civilized society tolerate an unsafe workplace anywhere? Is keeping ordinary citizens inside their homes for days on end because the local oil refinery caught fire and pumped toxins into the air really what we should settle for, as the "price" of having oil? If oil refineries force workers to work 12 hours at a time, sometimes every day for two weeks, then why not hire more people? Let me guess: oil corporations, like big banksters, are now only about how much money executives can extract from their corporations with the least amount of work. We have every right to demand better.

Meanwhile, the California legislature is mulling SB 277, which would end the practice of letting parents "opt out" of immunizing their children because of their "personal beliefs," whatever they are, and Marin County parents Carl and Jodi Krawitt have started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell California's government to cut out the "personal exemptions" for immunization. The Krawitts, you may know from the news, have a seven-year-old son whose four-year battle with leukemia left his immune system compromised to the point where he couldn't receive vaccinations -- this, because California state laws "respect" the "personal" "choices" of parents regarding their stupid fears that vaccinations cause autism, which, by the way, they don't. Why do the stupid people get all the say about everything again? A civilized society would not allow "personal choices" like these if they abridged the rights of other people not to have measles or whooping cough. But civilization requires maintenance, and that's why we're here.