Long story short: tell our FTC and DOJ to enact the most vigorous anti-monopoly policies possible, tell our SEC to force big investment corporations to be more transparent, tell President Biden to use all his legal power to lower prescription drug prices, tell big social media corporations to detoxify our news feeds, tell Zoom to stop trying to collect more data on users under the guise of "reading emotions," and tell our Interior Department to restore endangered species protections for gray wolves. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.
Public Citizen helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice to enact the most vigorous anti-merger guidelines possible. It's pretty simple: mergers kill competition, kill jobs, and raise prices, as we're seeing with three shipping magnates controlling 80% of the market and dictating terms to the rest of us, as we see when big corporations all but announce they pass on higher costs to good Americans to keep the outrageous profits coming, as we see in a hundred relatively small sectors of the economy (semiconductors, lab supplies, local media) where monopolies become the lynchpins that undo much larger sectors, and as we see when investment funds all but say they're looking to invest in monopolists über alles. All that's evil, so we've gotta fight it, and we've gotta fight it to the death.
Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission to force big investment corporations to be more transparent about their fees and their performance. Folks liken such transparency to a good nutrition label that helps you avoid foods with too much salt or fat or added sugars, and it's a good analogy; that must be why the banksters hate it so much! Banksters would prefer you just trust them that they can make your investments grow faster than anyone else, when their track record (particularly vis a vis state pension funds!) suggests they not only don't do better than the others but they charge you more than the others. You like to make more money, right? Then you ought to support more transparency from banksters.
Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to use his already-existing lawful power to lower prescription drug prices for good Americans. When even the New England Journal of Medicine tells you to do it, maybe you ought to listen! You can likely enumerate the ways Mr. Biden could do it -- he could seize patents of taxpayer-funded drugs (i.e., most of them) and let more generic manufacturers make drugs, or he could start investigating price-gouging among drug manufacturing corporations -- but he could also simply immunize our government from patent infringement suits. Hey, drug prices are going up way, way faster than (even today's!) inflation, and people die as a result, so I say do it all, and do it now.
The Kairos Fellowship helps you tell big social media corporations to "fix the feed," which is to say get the hate and lies out of our social media newsfeeds. They can do this in a couple of ways: first, by fixing or getting rid of the algorithms that ensure that obnoxious, hateful crap gets prioritized in your newsfeed; second, by hiring more people in order to monitor obnoxious, hateful crap on social media; and third, by disclosing their efforts in these directions. They'll hate to do all of that, because it's more work for them and more money they'll have to pay other workers! But making a mania of squeezing more money out of less work is more surely the mark of decadence than any celebrity drama you see on TMZ. This mania hurts America, and all civilizations, in every conceivable way, which is why we consecrate our lives to stopping it.
Fight for the Future helps you tell Zoom to stop scrutinizing emotions on Zoom calls. Zoom is, guess what, trying to use AI to read our emotions so they can create yet another datastream they can sell to third-party data brokers, but guess what else? Like facial recognition technology, their emotion-reading technology sucks! I mean, why not use AI to read the bumps on our heads, or better yet, measure our craniums? Facial expressions don't all say one thing or another, as anyone who's ever heard of sarcasm knows, and if they think an algorithm can read us pretty well, I got some everyday jerks that algorithms have helped turn into frothing white supremacists to show them. And not for nothing, but Zoom ain't the only game in town for video conferencing. But we'll try the Big Stick of Bad PR before resorting to boycotts.
Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Interior Department to restore protections to gray wolves under the Endangered Species Act. The gray wolf may not be endangered per se, but our ESA has never been about waiting until things got dire for a species before stepping in, and with Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana embarking on state-sanctioned, testosterone-addled wolf hunts this year, things are getting pretty near dire, even if our ESA has helped the gray wolf come back from the brink over the last half-century. I mean, there's protecting your cattle, and then there's killing one-fifth of the wolves in your state in a mere two and a half days, as Wisconsin has lately "accomplished." I'm not particularly anti-hunting, but I am anti-stupid, and states are acting dan stupid about wolves.
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