First things first. The government of Iran has imprisoned Bahareh Hedayat since 2010, for "crimes" including "insulting the President," "insulting the Supreme Leader," protesting discrimination against women, and writing a letter encouraging other good Iranians to continue struggling peacefully for change. Oh, and also "gathering and colluding to commit crimes against national security," which is what they all say when all their "charges" make them sound like whiny brats who can't take the heat. And Ms. Hedayat's sentence runs until 2020. Note to American right-wingers: this is what oppression actually is -- this is not criticism or shame from your friends and neighbors, this is a government actually taking people's freedom away because they said and did things that government didn't like. Still, the Big Stick of Bad PR works here as it does elsewhere; Iran's government may pretend it doesn't care very much what other folks think, but they live in a world with other people in it just like the rest of us, so Change.org helps you tell the Iranian government to release Ms. Hedayat.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1709, the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Sometimes you have to communicate your will to your Congressfolk hundreds of times before they get it, and we're better off thinking that doing something will help than throwing up our hands and giving up, because that would be throwing up your hands and giving up on democracy, and I won't have that, not in my America. Yes, it's disheartening that we're seven years into the Hope and Change era and banksters still run the damn show, but banksters are also the George Zimmerman of the economy -- they get away with horrible crap, but everyone hates them. The 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act would help keep banksters out of the speculation business, and thus force them to do the things that actually help economies, like loaning money to budding small businesses. Really, I don't want banksters to be so hated. I want them to stop doing the things that prompt the rest of us to hate them. And I'm happy to help them do that.
Finally, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell ExxonMobil to cut ties with ALEC. ExxonMobil has, as you might imagine, more incentive to cut ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council than most: ALEC has become synonymous with climate change denialism, and a big fossil-fuel corporation like ExxonMobil would want to at least pretend they care about the world they're going to leave to future generations. And no amount of advertising about their "commitment" to reversing the effects of climate change would convince anyone if they still hung with ALEC. Of course they'll tell us that hanging with ALEC is solely about ALEC's reactionary economics, as if that is going to make any of us happy, but we know better. And ExxonMobil has one other incentive: having done a crapload of actual climate change research back in the day, they face the possibility of a RICO lawsuit, much like the one that punished the tobacco corporations for lying about the health effects of cigarettes. There's no need to keep that arrow in your quiver if you're not inclined to do so.
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