Long story short: tell our Justice Department to review Steven Donziger's case, tell big corporations to stop donating to anti-voting rights politicians, tell big insurance corporations not to insure the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline, tell our government to ensure that our NIH gets listed on the Moderna vaccine patent, tell our EPA to to ban PFAS chemicals in food storage products, and tell our government to break up Amazon. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.
MoveOn helps you tell our Department of Justice to review the Steven Donziger case and get justice for him. Steven Donziger is the lawyer who helped the Cofan indigenous people of Ecuador the biggest pollution judgment in history -- $9.5 billion -- from Chevron, after the big oil corporation illegally dumped billions of gallons of oil waste on Cofan land. That was a decade ago; after all that time, Chevron hasn't paid, but that doesn't mean they haven't been busy, trumping up a racketeering charge against Mr. Donziger in Ecuador and a contempt charge in the United States; soon he'll be reporting for a six-month prison sentence here, and if you're thinking he's really paying for daring to hold Chevron accountable, well, I couldn't blame you. Luckily, we have some say about whether justice happens in America, too.
People for the American Way helps you tell big corporations to stop donating to anti-voting rights politicians. And if that means "stop donating to all Republicans except for Lisa Murkowski," hey, that ain't my fault, just as it ain't my fault Republicans' response to any setback is to run even farther to the right. That's their fault, and it is also weak Democratic politicians' fault. And it is also the fault of big corporations that talk a good game about voting rights but still send campaign donations to politicians who suppress the vote. Corporate PR hacks no doubt stand ready to tell you their donations aren't about voting rights but about economics, or something. Trouble is sending a politician money enables them to do everything they do, and withholding campaign donations will help discourage bad behavior.
Public Citizen helps you tell big insurance corporations to steer clear of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline. You know how usually we fight pipelines that run through big aquifers which provide drinking water to millions of people? Not imagine a pipeline that not only runs right through Africa's largest lake, Lake Victoria, and also runs right beside the second-largest freshwater lake on Earth -- no, really, that's in Africa! It's Lake Tanganyika, which sits on the border shared by Tanzania, Burundi, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo border -- but which also runs through one of Africa's few earthquake zones, virtually guaranteeing a pipeline burst even more than bad pipeline safety already does. A lot of sun falls on Africa; they should concentrate their efforts there, maybe? First, let's kill this project.
Public Citizen also helps you tell our government to ensure that our National Institutes of Health (or NIH) gets listed as a co-inventor of the Moderna vaccine patent. Sounds like not such a big deal, but it is: the corporations get all the credit for the vaccines, when actually our government does a lot of the research that makes them possible. Not to mention a lot of the funding, or in the case of the Moderna vaccine, almost all of the funding. Seriously, instead of Republicans picking stupid fights over Dr. Seuss and Big Bird, let's make them fight over our government getting the credit it deserves for making the vaccines that have saved so many good American lives. They'll lose that fight every time. Which is one big reason they pick the other fights.
Penn Environment helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to keep PFAS chemicals out of plastic food containers. They call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals," because they're just about impossible to break down and because they get into your body and cause all sorts of health care problems -- and one of the main places you'll find them is in your plastic food containers, many of which probably advertise themselves as "microwave-safe" but, ah, no. I'm old enough to remember when "shatterproof" plastic was The Future, but now I'd take the relative fragility of glass over all the pollution and ill health plastic has caused. And I'm pretty sure we didn't really understand how bad it would get! But once you do know, you have a duty to your civilization to help fix it.
Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell our government to break up Amazon. Not just because its former CEO, the ubiquitous Jeff Bezos, is the richest man on Earth, and not just because it handles about half of all online sales, and not just because it killed all the smaller bookstore chains like B. Dalton and Encore and Waldenbooks, but because it collects so much data on its users that it can offer the same products small businesses offer at a lower price and thus crush small businesses. I used the Italics Hammer there so folks who yammer on about small businesses would see it. And no, breaking up Amazon won't mean you'll wait forever to get stuff! And even if it did, gosh, do you remember 1993? Do you remember special-ordering books you didn't see on the shelf? Gosh, do people even understand hardship anymore?
Comments