Long story short: tell our government to stop bank mergers and curb bank overdraft fees, tell RayBan to ditch social media stalker sunglasses, tell our government to designate the Delaware Water Gap a national park, and tell Apple and Google to deplatform Steve Bannon. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.
Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell federal regulators to stop all bank mergers until they can strengthen merger guidelines. What good do mergers do? They make executives richer, but that doesn't qualify as a "good" to anyone but the right-wingers who only care about how well they do. In the meantime, mergers kill jobs, kill competition, and raise prices for everyone, usually in ways that aren't obvious, and because they're not obvious, judges ignore them. And bank mergers are even worse, because they limit your options if you're trying to get a loan to buy a house or start a business, and also because banks don't like going into rural or urban areas. But the folks who live there are people, too! And we all deserve better.
Americans for Financial Reform also helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to stop absurd bank overdraft fees. Because the last damn thing you need, as you're struggling to make ends meet during a pandemic, is a bank charging you ridiculous overdraft fees. These fees drive poorer Americans out of the banking system and puts them at the mercy of pawn shops, check-cashing joints, and payday lenders. And despite the whining of the Price Controls Are Always Evil crowd, an April 2020 poll found 75% of Americans wanted our government to regulate overdraft fees more. Republican respondents dragged that number down, right? Nope -- 76% of Republican respondents wanted more government intervention there, too. (Independents dragged the number down; there's a lesson there, somewhere.)
Sum of Us helps you tell sunglass corporation Ray-Ban to stop making "smart" glasses for Facebook. Why? Because their glasses secretly record people, supposedly to help people "tell stories." You've seen the "stories" function on Facebook? Have you ever seen something so counterintuitive? Particularly after using Facebook's far more intuitive newsfeed for all those years? And they hawk it like it's sliced bread! Anyway, these "smart" glasses look just like sunglasses as they're secretly recording you -- unless you happen to see a small white light on the frame, which you likely won't. And anyway, if you've given the matter any thought, you will probably conclude, as I have done, that there are already too many stories floating around. The world needs good stories, recollected in tranquility rather than taped by stalkers.
Environmental Action helps you tell our government to designate the Delaware Water Gap as a national park. Or, more likely, a "national park and preserve," since our laws don't allow hunting in a national park but do allow it in a preserve (which could be carved out of a national park). The Delaware Water Gap, a creation of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, now gets about as many visitors as the Yellowstone National Park but has about one-ninth the budget, and America strangely doesn't have many national parks east of the Mississippi River; maybe folks think that New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey comprise some urban hellhole, but all these states feature vast swaths of gorgeous and relatively unspoiled land, of which the Delaware Water Gap is just the most famous. So, really, why on Earth not?
Finally, in case you thought Joe Rogan was the only jerk with an undeserved platform, Care2 helps you tell Google and Apple to remove Steve Bannon's podcast from their respective platforms. Mr. Bannon was too much of a jerk for Spotify, which removed him in late 2020 after he said he'd put the heads of Anthony Fauci and Christopher Wray "on pikes" as "a warning to federal bureaucrats." "Joking," right? Mr. Bannon's podcast has since alleged repeatedly that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election (by getting seven million more votes, apparently!) and said "all hell will break loose tomorrow" on January 5, 2021, which I'm sure was just "analysis." Yeah, I used to listen to obnoxious jerks, but then I became a man, and put away childish things. And our big, bold corporations need to do the same thing.
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