Today's as good a day as any to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're viewing on your cellphone) to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to reject the Trump budget or anything close to it. You know the drill: the Trump budget slashes spending that actually helps people, while jacking up spending that helps corporations. We should really call it the corporate welfare budget, since that's what it is. Seriously, a $54 billion hike in military spending, when we already spend more money on the military than all the countries ranked second through eighth in military spending combined? When we could eliminate considerably more than that in waste and unnecessary weapons? I mean, the only reason anyone's spent 25 years trying to build the F-35 fighter jet is corporate welfare, and that's a far greater moral hazard than spending on food stamps, public broadcasting, rural arts funding, and scientific research, to name just four necessary things that would suffer under the Trump budget.
Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard by now that the State Department has approved the Keystone XL pipeline. And you may have responded to that news by saying that sure was fast! You would not be alone in that -- though the Obama Administration sure did seem to drag its feet on the whole process, the sheer speed with which the Trump Administration got this done makes it more likely that they didn't go through all the legal procedures in approving it. Of course, for Donald Trump, law and order is for losers. Despite the rapid approval, the Keystone XL pipeline still faces many hurdles -- the Nebraska Public Service Commission has yet to approve that part of the pipeline that runs through Nebraska, for example, and this has long been a sticking point with good Nebraskans, as they scramble to protect the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides clean water to nearly two million good Americans in eight midwestern states. Hence the Sierra Club helps you urge the Nebraska PSC to reject permits for the Keystone XL pipeline.
Finally, Just Label It helps you tell the Nestlé corporation to label its genetically-modified foods for-real for-real -- by which I mean "not with QR codes" that only a smartphone can read, because that's not a good way of telling people whether your foods contain genetically-modified organisms or not. Nestlé doesn't just make iced tea, Crunch bars, and bottled water from public water sources, you know -- they also own a bunch of popular brands, including Buitoni pasta, DiGiorno pizza, Gerber baby foods, and Lean Cuisine meals. (They make a lot of dog and cat foods, too.) Would it kill Nestlé to commit to labeling its GMO foods, as many other major corporations have done? No, it would not -- certainly monks with quill pens don't write all their food labels, and certainly not everyone would reject GMOs in their foods even if they knew their foods even had them. If good Americans want to buy GMO foods, they should be able to -- and if good Americans don't want to buy GMO foods, they should be able to know which foods have GMOs in them.
Comments