Long story short: tell our FDA to ban menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars, tell Scholastic to stop aiding and abetting book banning, tell Pfizer to stop jacking up the price of its COVID treatment, and tell our FCC to reinstate net neutrality. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.
The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to ban menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars. Because they make people like cigarettes and cigars when they’d otherwise avoid them and the lung cancer that comes with them, that’s why! Used to be I’d say smoking needs no additional inducement – nicotine is an addictive drug, after all, and people used to think themselves sexy because they smoked – but I’m happy to report that that’s changed, thanks in large part to our government successfully suing tobacco manufacturing corporations (even though Tha Bush Mobb crapped on that, too, with a much-too-small settlement). So now I guess smoking does need an additional inducement. But smoking will kill you dead, and miserably so! So how about we stop enabling that sort of thing?
The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell Scholastic Books to stop providing a “bigot button” for public school officials who don’t want kids to read books about race and gender. Scholastic has always been the name in getting kids to read books – I got excited whenever the truck came to our school – but sometimes they get a little timid in the face of rage. And I guess it’s possible someone at Scholastic decided the process of “letting parents opt out” could go a little more easily, but nothing should be easy for bigots! Certainly not banning books! And my impression of kids has always been that they can handle more of the out-of-the-ordinary than adults say – which makes me wonder what adults’ real agenda is. I kid! I do not actually wonder! Their real agenda is banning books that don’t put white folks at the center of all existence.
Public Citizen helps you tell big pharma corporation Pfizer not to jack up the price of COVID treatment Paxlovid to almost $1,400 per treatment. No use objecting that insurance will pay for it, since a) not everyone has health insurance thanks to their employer’s cheapness and b) when insurance corporations overpay for drugs, premiums shoot up for everyone and then insurance covers less and soon it hardly covers anything. And, ah, how much does Paxlovid actually cost to make? According to Harvard researchers, $13.38 per five-day course of treatment – the same course Pfizer wants to charge $1,390 for, or 100 times the cost. Nice work if you can get it! And surely those who’ve died for lack of COVID treatment would cheer Pfizer on for making all that money! I kid, of course; price-gougers deserve eternal hellfire, so let’s try to convince Pfizer not to go further down this road.
Finally, Battle for the Net helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to reinstate the net neutrality rules that helped keep our internet free of censorship and slower service. Net neutrality is one of the single most popular political causes of the last 20 years, and it’s popular with everyone across the political spectrum; the only people who don’t like it are the ones who want to herd you into their corporate fiefdoms on the internet. Now some folks will say they like getting Netflix or Disney Plus for free with their new phone provider! But what about the folks who use Hulu or Paramount Plus? They’re paying more, and not because one streaming service is actually better than another, but merely because they want to use a different service from the one their provider wants them to! And that’s not “freedom.” Corporations love aligning with other corporations to curtail your actual freedom, and make it look to you like it’s “more” freedom! The return of net neutrality would put a stop to all of that.
UPDATE. Scholastic has declared it'll end the "bigot button" practice described above. Sometimes justice comes quickly! But let's not ever get complacent.
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