Word on the street is that the FCC could vote to kill net neutrality -- and thus give corporations more power to steer you where they want to steer you on the internet -- just before Thanksgiving, when they think no one will be watching. Too late! Battle for the Net helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them you want strong net neutrality rules that protect our right to determine for ourselves where we want to go on the internet. You know, kinda like the rules we have now, the rules FCC Chair Ajit Pai is so determined to destroy so he can please his corporate cronies. You hear whispers that some Congressfolk would like to put a stop to Mr. Pai's plan, but that they're just not hearing enough from their constituents about it. Frankly, I don't know what part of "millions of comments in favor of strong net neutrality rules" they missed the first couple of times around, but if they're going to announce exactly what it is that will make them move, then I think it's perfectly all right to oblige them. This time.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania state legislators are actually trying to exempt big corporations from paying into the state's energy efficiency program. SB 805 would also prevent any such corporations from receiving any funding from state energy conservation plans, but that's symmetry, not fairness. Fairness would be compelling every corporation to participate, with the larger corporations having to accept that they'll never get as much back in grant money as they put in, because with great power comes great responsibility. Right-wingers love saying "rights have responsibilities," a phrase with which no one actually disagrees, but I rarely hear them say power has responsibilities -- in fact, it often seems their entire program aims to relieve the powerful of any responsibility to civilization. So Penn Environment helps you tell your PA state legislators to reject SB 805 and preserve the state's energy efficiency program.
Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell the FDA to stop delaying implementation of their new nutrition labels already. Brook no silliness from the Trump Administration about how they're going to gut the rules anyway, so there's no sense in making big food producing corporations follow them now -- and be aware that such statements can and will be used against them in the inevitable lawsuit accusing them of regulating in bad faith, which is actually against the law. Changing food labels is not prohibitively difficult, since the big food corporations don't use monks with quill pens to write each and every food label, and the new food labels would improve the old ones, by ending confusion over serving size and listing added sugars. If big corporations are really going to throw a hissy fit over this, you have to wonder why. Do they aim to hide, say, the outsized power of the corn lobby, which takes so much taxpayer money to produce high-fructose corn syrup that the price of soda virtually hasn't changed in over 35 years?
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