The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell Congress to help Flint, MI through its water crisis. Flint's unelected "Emergency Manager," you recall, decided to save a few bucks by forcing Flint to stop drawing its drinking water from the relatively well-managed Detroit water supply and draw it from the thoroughly-polluted Flint River instead, without realizing, apparently, that the water-treatment chemicals used to clean up the Flint River water would corrode Flint's ancient lead pipes. The Obama Administration has declared a federal state of emergency in Flint, but Congress has dragged its feet funding any halfway-decent solution to an urgent problem. Over 8,500 children under age six in Flint have now been exposed to toxic levels of lead, and will almost certainly experience the developmental problems scientists commonly associate with lead poisoning, the kinds of problems that did, after all, lead us to ban lead in gasoline and paint all those years ago. Now it's in people's water, and those people can't wait.
Meanwhile, the International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell chocolate-manufacturing corporation Godiva to get rid of the child labor and low wages from its supply chain. Chocolatiers get about 60% of their cocoa from two places -- Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire -- and farmers there have to feed their families on $2/day. While Godiva has talked a better sustainability game lately, it remains too much like most big corporations these days: valuing scale over quality, caring about delivering money to executives and shareholders rather than improving products and processes, let alone improving lives. And fair trade chocolatiers are proving you can do these things, by committing long-term to cocoa farmers, paying them fairly for what they grow, and getting children out of a life of burning fields and spraying dangerous chemicals and into school, where they can get a shot a better future. Everyone deserves a shot at a better future, after all -- even if that throws a wrench into the income-redistribution-upward schemes of the super-rich.
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