Avaaz helps you tell the U.N. Human Rights Council, world governments, and corporations doing business in China to fight that nation's continued oppression of over a million Uyghurs. The U.N. Human Rights Council will meet in Geneva for the next month, so now's an especially good time to get their attention! As you know, China has detained over a million of its ethnic Muslims, and detainment in China also includes torture, rape, and family separation. Of course, earlier this week we were taking Apple to task for failing to provide secure messaging apps on their Apple Store in China, and, well, China's ongoing oppression of the Uyghurs is just one of the things Chinese activists get "disappeared" for talking about with each other. And oppression, in these times, requires a lot of corporate help, particularly in the area of surveillance and DNA databases. But we can wield the Big Stick of Bad PR and get corporations, governments, and the U.N. to respond. Indeed, we already have.
Meanwhile, Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell six fairly famous American corporations to stop enabling Israel's ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory. If you just read that sentence and immediately thought that telling those corporations to pull out would mean the death of Israel, then consider this: just as "being a friend" and "enabling whatever your friend wants to do no matter how harmful it would be" are two entirely different things, supporting Israel's right to exist and thrive and enabling it to wipe out Palestine are two entirely different things. I suspect most Americans understand that, though Our Glorious Elites pretend not to. But if we get Airbnb, Expedia, Trip Advisor, General Mills, Motorola (which provides a lot of the technological backbone for checkpoints and surveillance in the occupied territories), and Booking Holdings to stop doing business in occupied Palestine, we'll get some change.
Finally, both Moms Rising and Public Citizen help you tell our government not to give out exclusive licensing rights for a coronavirus vaccine to big pharma corporations. Sadly, our Health and Human Services Secretary, Alex Azar, has already announced that he can't even guarantee a coronavirus vaccine would be affordable -- dig the can-do American spirit he evokes there! -- since "we need the private sector to invest" and (sigh) "price controls won't get us there." Both of those statements are absolute horsedoodle -- insisting that price controls can't control prices is, of course, a special kind of stupidity long fashionable on the right, but the fact is that we the taxpayers will do most of the investing in any coronavirus vaccine, as we have done since 2002. So, no, we don't actually need private investment -- in fact, we could redirect a very small portion of federal budgetary misspending (cough vanity border wall cough!) to get it done.
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