Many major clothing corporations have signed on to the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety so we don't have more Rana Plaza garment factory fires that kill thousands of garment factory workers -- but our work ain't done here, because Amazon hasn't signed on, and Amazon is close to being America's top clothing seller now, and sells plenty of clothing made in a few dozen Bangladeshi factories that the other big retailers won't touch. If you're still hung up on "free markets" always being right, consider the case of the woman who was trapped in the Rana Plaza rubble for three days and had to saw half her arm off just to get out. And then let Demand Progress help you tell Amazon to help ensure garment workers don't work in deathtraps by signing onto the Bangladesh Accord. Don't take any guff about how we should really talk to their "third-party" suppliers about that -- as if they don't use these suppliers to escape accountability in the first place.
Meanwhile, in the wake of yet another contaminated Romaine lettuce outbreak, Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to give our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) the power to investigate how these food poisoning outbreaks come about. Food poisoning is one of those things that still makes the evening news programs even despite these programs' ongoing effort to say nothing of importance to their viewers, so maybe we should empower our government to get to the bottom of E. coli outbreaks, maybe? Yes, even this government, which ain't gonna be with us forever. And if our FDA finds that irrigation water contaminated with feces was the cause, as most observers think, and if this finding shames the FDA that, you may recall, delayed implementing irrigation water-testing rules not that long ago, well, confronting the shame you cause yourself is a character-building opportunity, and I would never want to deprive government agencies of such opportunities.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to protect endangered and threatened species by passing H.R. 4348, the PAW and Fin Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. Our Administration has lately issued regulations that would make it considerably harder to protect endangered and threatened species from encroaching fossil fuel corporations, but the PAW and FIN Act would nullify these changes, and would also prevent our Administration from using "economic factors" in considering how to enforce the Endangered Species Act. By "economic factors," of course, our Administration means "money lost by bosses." No, that's all they mean -- bosses are all they care about. Oh, our President can go on TV and claim people fight him because he's "fighting for you," but his record shows he only fights for other bosses who think, as he does, that they're on top because they belong there. They don't. This is America. We do.
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