Long story short: tell big chocolate corporations to stop using child slavery, tell state pensions to stop investing in Facebook, tell President Biden to reject an oil export facility in the Gulf of Mexico, tell 88 Energy not to drill in the Arctic, and tell President Biden to stop deporting immigrants under Title 42 authority and fire USPS Board of Governors member Ron Bloom. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.
Care2 helps you tell big chocolate corporations Hershey's, Nestlé, and Mars to get child slavery out of their manufacturing processes. Just in time for Halloween, too! These three corporations tell us they've gotten the child slavery out of their products, but that's a lyin'-ass lie, as these corporations still get their products from West African cocoa farms that use child slaves. These children work from sunrise well into the evening, which doesn't exactly give them very much time for school or family, and it can't be a coincidence that big chocolate corporations make billions of dollars in profits. These corporations are all big enough that they could strong-arm cocoa farms into doing better -- but they won't, unless we embarrass them with the Big Stick of Bad PR. And given their record, we'll likely have to do it more than once.
Sum of Us helps you tell big state teacher pension funds to get their money out of Facebook. Yeah, it's a great investment -- until you remember that Facebook knew it was harming children and did nothing about it, and until you remember that Facebook cares about "engagement" and doesn't care whether that engagement does actual people actual harm. And by "actual harm," we don't just mean algorithms that magically connect Nazi wannabes, but the Myanmar military's slaughter of the Rohingya. Social media has fallen far -- time was you had your pick of networks to help you connect with people, but now we're all on Facebook, and only because it's a monopoly, with the other networks gone now, some of them (WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram) literally assimilated by Facebook. But, again, when we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR, we do a lot of good.
The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our Maritime Administration to reject the proposed oil export facility off the coast of Texas in the Gulf of Mexico. Hasn't the Gulf suffered enough from oil spills? This particular facility aims to transport close to 750 million barrels of oil annually, which is more than all the offshore drilling in the Gulf produces -- and, as you remember from the 2010 Spillageddon, you don't have to spill all of that oil to befoul our water and kill local industries. And we saw the danger again earlier this month when another underwater pipeline leak belched out almost 600 gallons of oil off the coast of Southern California. Hate to sound like a broken record, but we'd do a whole lot better relying more on renewable energy -- after all, how many bird-killing sun spills have you experienced?
Penn Environment helps you tell Australian oil corporation 88 Energy to abandon plans to drill near the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR). I've said it before and I'll say it again: once you burn oil, it's gone, leaving behind only pollution and ill health in its wake, but wild areas live forever -- if we can keep them. And all the other standard objections -- that the inevitable oil spills are even harder to clean up in frigid areas than in temperate ones, that we know little enough about the Arctic that we're almost certainly underestimating the damage we'd do in drilling -- still apply. Plus you'd hate to kill the world-famous sockeye salmon industry in Alaska. Always they talk about "creating jobs," but never do they confront the jobs they'll destroy. And not for progress, either, but for greed.
The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell President Biden to abandon the Title 42 deportation policy, born of the mind of Stephen Miller, need I say more? I need say more: deporting immigrants solely because "there's a pandemic going on" isn't just stupid -- natural-born rage-heads are keeping this pandemic going on quite well enough by themselves, thank you very much! -- but it doesn't speak very well of our civilization, does it? Don't we bear any burden to do the right thing? The right thing to do here is to evaluate asylum claims on their merits, give everyone due process, and admit refugees running from countries that'll kill them if they return. The right thing to do is most certainly not pretend you're protecting Americans by throwing everyone out.
Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to fire USPS Board of Governors member Ron Bloom, which will make firing Postmaster General Louis DeJoy a lot easier. Mr. Bloom has praised Mr. DeJoy's work in slowing down services and making us pay more for them -- I guess rich people see things a little differently than we do -- and I'm sure none of that has anything to do with Mr. DeJoy investing in a fund run by Mr. Bloom! And now we have further evidence of Mr. DeJoy's corruption, as he took his time recusing himself from making decisions about over a dozen corporations he had invested in and which had business before our Postal Service. But let's not wait until it's blindingly obvious to President Biden that Mr. DeJoy has become a liability; instead, let's pressure him now.
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