Long story short: tell the McMinn County School Board to stop banning books about the Holocaust, tell the Joint Commission to help ensure proper staffing levels at health care facilities, tell our CFPB to keep big tech's grubby mitts off payment systems, tell Pepsi to stop funding anti-abortion politicians in Texas, and tell FERC to stop big energy corporations from charging its customers for trade association dues. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.
First things first. MoveOn helps you tell the now-notorious McMinn County School Board in Tennessee not to ban books about the Holocaust. Oh, sure, they claim they banned Art Spiegelman's Maus from an eighth-grade language arts class because of its eight cuss words and all the "nudity" (i.e., one nude frame, of a mouse, after she's killed herself!), but we know from all their super-dramatic speeches at the school board meeting that it's all about waving their power in your face, and we also know they'll only use that power against books that might make them uncomfortable, even though any great book, really, should make folks uncomfortable. That's part of learning, after all. Thus the usual remedy: shame and shunning from more civilized folks like us. (Also too, I bet a hundred rock bands adopt the name Nude Maus this year.)
Change.org helps you tell the Joint Commission (which accredits health care organizations, including hospitals) to require safe staffing ratios as a condition for accreditation and certification. If the Joint Commission were to agree, that would be a big deal, because right now far too many hospitals -- even during this pandemic, or perhaps I mean especially during this pandemic -- are trying to provide care with too few workers. Workers make money after all, and that's money that the CEO could be using to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home! But more nurses and doctors and therapists and social workers and technicians means less fatigue, fewer mistakes, and better care for patients. You don't want one nurse to handle the entire ER, right? No, because soon enough it'll be you or someone you love who needs it.
Demand Progress helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to ban big tech corporations like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google from owning payment systems. Because then they'll have all your financial data! Does that sound like a good idea? It'll also result in monopolization of those payment systems, to which right-wingers would normally reply well, that's a matter for the FTC, ha ha ha snicker short, but now they won't, since ardent anti-monopolist Lina Khan now runs the FTC. And it's not just about "finer targeting of ads," either (which isn't even happening, given how many right-wing ads I get on my Facebook news feed!) -- it's also about more big corporations holding more treasure-troves of data that eventually get hacked, so that some crook can steal money from you. So, you know, let's fight that.
UltraViolet helps you tell Pepsi to stop funding anti-abortion politicians in Texas. Texas, you may recall, passed an anti-abortion law that not only outlaws the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy (before most women even know they're pregnant!), but empowered citizens to sue abortion providers for performing the procedure -- because what is standing to sue, anyway? We just don't know! And Pepsi is yet another corporation that makes noises about "diversity" and "supporting women" but then turns around and forks over $15,000 to the Texas GOP. They claim they support Democratic and Republican politicians, but that isn't the point at-fucking-all: the point is when politicians pass anti-woman legislation, you don't reward them with campaign donations; you shame and shun them. I'll keep explaining this until people with money finally get it.
Finally, the Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (or FERC) to ban big energy corporations from charging you for the money they shovel to trade associations. This means your electric provider can charge you for the money it uses to join some anti-clean air or anti-clean water trade group, rather than charge their shareholders for those membership dues. You wouldn't want to contribute money to some group that advocates for more pollution, right? No, you would not. But big energy corporations make you do that! And with all the monopolization happening today, you can't switch to an energy provider that doesn't do that as easily as you deserve to. So, no, we shouldn't allow them to do that -- we should empower the consumer to make more decisions that affect them.
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