If you've poked around on Amazon lately, you may have found $50 bottles of hand sanitizer and $200 bottles of disinfecting wipes; I wonder why? Amazon has since removed many of these products, but you have to wonder why they didn't seem to see it coming, particularly since, you know, price-gouging in times of crisis is as old as the hills. Or maybe you don't have to wonder why they didn't seem to see it coming -- they make more money off price-gouging than they do off regularly-priced goods, and the only thing that stops the corporation responsible for about half of all online sales from embracing price-gouging with both arms is the Big Stick of Bad PR. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell Amazon to put safeguards in place before the price gouging starts. And, not for nothing, but price-gouging magically found some of Amazon's own products, too. If only we had antitrust laws to prevent this sort of thing! Of course, we do; our government just doesn't enforce them, because TEH FREE MARKETZ!!!!!!
Meanwhile, factory farms continue to spew their filth into our waterways, creating low-oxygen "dead zones" where nothing can live or grow, and if you find yourself thinking well, that's so we can keep chicken prices down, I would remind you that focusing exclusively on the next pack of cutlets you buy at Shop Rite is short-term thinking, and antithetical to a civilized existence. And if you find yourself thinking well, it's only fish that are dying, remind yourself that civilizations have been eating fish for as long as we can remember and pollution doesn't just go away because we'd prefer not to see it. Factory farms are also guilty of cramming feed animals into ever-smaller pens and pumping them full of antibiotics so they can produce more meat, but if factory farms help cause the destruction of civilization, we probably won't argue too much about whether it was antibiotic abuse or pollution that destroyed us. So let's just avoid future dystopias entirely by letting Penn Environment help us tell our Congressfolk to stop the expansion of factory farms in America.
Finally, federal courts have so far upheld our FCC's nefarious net neutrality repeal, but have struck down our FCC's attempts to prevent states from enacting their own net neutrality legislation, so Daily Kos helps you tell your state legislators to ensure real internet freedom for their constituents by enacting the most vigorous net neutrality legislation possible. Net neutrality, as you know, is the principle that says that you, and not some big corporation, should be able to determine where you want to go on the internet -- that an internet service-providing corporation can't, for example, deliver content from its "partner" corporations before the content you want to see, or block content merely because those content-makers haven't paid the proper tribute, or censor perfectly lawful content. You may well ask: how come Twitter should be able to block abusive speech but Comcast shouldn't? Simple: Twitter is a publishing house, while Comcast is a utility, regardless of what our FCC thinks.
Comments