Long story short: tell our government to pause bank mergers, tell local governments to stop cracking down on striking workers, tell the International Satellite Laser Ranging Service to stop helping Russia, tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop "junk fees," tell big pharma corporations to share their vaccines so fewer people die, and tell corporations to stop advertising on Fox News. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.
Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell federal regulators to stop allowing banks to merge until our government can institute merger guidelines that better protect good Americans. And if our government decides that mergers do, in fact, injure good Americans -- a conclusion they appear to have already made! -- well, big banksters who want to merge and become even bigger will just have to sacrifice for the common good. Everyone in America has made immense sacrifices during this pandemic, except for big corporate executives, who, oddly enough, have just gotten richer while the rest of us ran to stand still. Does that sound like America? No, it does not -- unless one has a very cynical view of America. Cynicism is easy; civilization takes work.
More Perfect Union helps you tell local governments to stop putting corporate interests ahead of everyone else's when dealing with striking workers. Police will squash strikes and escort scabs to jobs, while judges will set absurd limits on how many striking workers can picket and (even) where they can stand. Does that sound like free speech to you? Governments profess to be concerned with "inconveniencing" other people, but if striking workers risk alienating passers-by when they picket, why do we need to limit their picketing so severely? And those who would complain about them blocking workplace entries had better not be the same folks who cheered on the convoys in Canada, for they surely alienated plenty of passers-by, and were far noisier than any group of picketers.
Change.org helps you tell the International Satellite Laser Ranging Service to stop providing data to Russia, so that Russia won't be able to make its GPS service work. Then, if they want to figure out where they're going next in Ukraine, they'll have to read the street signs just like we did in the old days! And I've heard that good Ukrainians have already figured out what to do about that. Seriously, we are doing the right thing in shaming and shunning Russia -- though of course the many Russians who don't support the war, and risk life and livelihood protesting it, deserve our support -- but there's no reason to make it easier for Russia to invade Ukraine. Keeping the data that helps run Russian geo-location efforts away from them won't affect too many Russians too badly. Just, you know, the ones at war.
More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to go after bank "junk fees." A "junk fee" might be an overdraft fee or an insufficient funds fee, the kind of thing a bank hits you with not because you really cost them $15 or $20 with your mistake, but just because they can. After all, it's a pain to move your money to another bank (or credit union hint hint), and your new bank probably won't be much better about the junk fees. And junk fees tend to slam the poorest among us, who aren't "bad at managing money" but merely don't have enough money to manage it effectively! Our CFPB apparently feels like we do, but we still need communicate our will, so they can better fight the banksters' inevitable frivolous lawsuit.
Amnesty International helps you tell big pharma corporations to share their COVID vaccines with the billions of world citizens who can't get them now. I usually argue pragmatically about this matter -- the more citizens worldwide get vaccinated, the less these new COVID variants can fester and bite us in the ass. But it's also the compassionate thing to do. Big pharma CEOs don't agree, because they only see money, though of course they don't put it like that: they have a litany of excuses, involving "the shareholders" and "the future" and such. But these are the concerns of small minds! Having money, cultivating the appearance of having money, the next awful thing you have to do to secure both of these to avoid shame -- we've got to do better than all of that. Big pharma CEOs can do better by getting COVID vaccines to everyone on Earth.
Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Fox News already. "That's where all the eyeballs are" is no excuse -- we have an obligation, as a civilization, to make sure eyeballs get somewhere useful, and Fox News isn't useful, unless you consider "trapping people in a death-spiral of masturbatory rage" useful. (Spoiler alert: it is not useful.) You can pick whichever recent asinine utterance by a Fox News "personality" you like, but it may be enough at this moment in our world's history that the Kremlin has told Russian media that they should share as much of Tucker Carlson's bloviation as possible, as if he speaks for anyone but the masturbatory-rage crowd. These may be the proverbial emptiest wagon of our discourse, but we outnumber them.
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