Van Jones, Green America, and the NWF are among some of the latest messages I have received to address the problem of corporate and investor speculative ideology and influence.
Will you help craft our plan to solve this problem by helping to choose the best ideas for making sure we ALL pay our share? To inspire your thinking check out this new video from a group of self-made millionaires and billionaires who get it. They have a simple message of responsibility and patriotism that I wish every giant corporation and ultra-wealthy person shared: "Tax me."
Take a look at the video. Then help choose the best ideas here:
We, the American taxpayers, have put a ton of resources on the table, creating a stable and highly productive environment for businesspeople. If their businesses do poorly, they shouldn't be expected to pay back much in the form of taxes. But if they do well, they SHOULD.
They're benefiting from our public schools, our roads, our courts and so much more that America provides to help them succeed. But they aren't paying us—their real anchor investors—back. Simply put, it's unpatriotic. Those who do well IN America, should do well BY America. That's what made America great, in the first place.
Instead we just keep seeing more tax shelters, tax breaks, and tax loopholes. Now some of these folks are even willing to put our entire country's financial future at risk by using the debt ceiling crisis to push for more cuts to critical government programs—while refusing to consider closing some of those loopholes or raising tax rates on the wealthy.
This has to stop.The question we have to figure out now is how to turn things around. How can we stop tax dodging and make sure all of America's giant corporations and super-rich folks help us invest in a prosperous future for our country?
We can best answer these questions when we put our heads together. So it's up to all of us to take part today. It's easy, and it doesn't take a lot of time. Just click here to visit the new Contract for the American Dream site. Help choose the best ideas:
–Van Jones
Working for safer, toxin-free, personal care products is an important green issue. If toxins that exist in small amounts in the products we use every day can trigger health problems from asthma to cancer, imagine what happens to the workers exposed to these toxins in much higher doses?
The same goes for environmental impact. Years ago, Horst Rechelbacher, founder of Aveda captured my imagination with his simple thought exercise: If all the products we use for caring for our hair and skin were made from organically grown plants, there would be a whole beautiful world of thriving green plants all around us.
Many great, green companies in our Green Pages pursue this mission. In this newsletter issue, online editor Andrew Korfhage interviews Mary Kearns of Herban Lifestyles , a member of our Green Business Network™, and finds out more about her safe, natural, green, and organic soaps, lotions, and body care products that are literally safe enough to eat.
And our senior editor Tracy Fernandez Rysavy, brings us the other side of the story from her article "Is It Poison?" in our April/May Green American magazine.
Tracy exposes how a mere 200 of the roughly 85,000 chemicals used in the US have been tested by the EPA since the Toxic Substances Control Act was passed in 1976. Worse, no tests at all have been done to look at the damage caused when more than one chemical is present. And since the average American is exposed to 126 chemicals in their personal care products each day, chemical interactions can multiply the impact on your health.
We call out the 9 worst toxins to avoid in your personal care products (and we've got a downloadable poster of them on our Web site).
Finally, Green America's policy director, Fran Teplitz, informs me of an important new piece of legislation just introduced in the US House of Representatives. The Safe Cosmetics Act of 2011 would strengthen the authority of the FDA to block the use of unsafe chemicals in our cosmetics and personal care products. Please learn more about this legislation below and take action with our allies at the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics today.
Here's to good health and safety for all,
Alisa Gravitz,
Executive Director,
Green America
Alisa Gravitz,
Executive Director,
Green America
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