In September, the Center for a New American Dream
sponsored a Carbon Conscious Consumer (C3) campaign called Junk Your Junkmail.
For a $41 fee, of which 1/3^rd was donated to nonprofits, I hired a business
called 41pounds.org
to get me off the direct mail lists and cancel my catalogs. Named for the 41
pounds of unsightly paper fat your mailbox consumes per year, they guaranteed  an 80% reduced-carbonhydrate mail diet.

Years of
research studies and the personal experiences of affected communities have
clearly demonstrated that large supermarkets and big box stores are bad for
communities, workers and the environment. The continued expansion of large-scale
retail outlets leads to the closure of local businesses and the destruction of
more jobs than the new stores create. The profits that the big box corporations
earn from their new market share get funneled straight to their national
headquarters, rather than staying in communities to help infrastructure and
local public programs grow.

Some Democrats are supporting this effort because President Alan
Garcia of Peru has agreed to improve some international labor laws with
presidential decrees. But Peruvian labor leaders think this is
insufficient and will not protect the rights of the majority of people,
75 percent of whom work in the informal sector of the economy.

The International Labor Rights Forum has been working to stop child labor in the cotton industry for years.  For more information and to watch more videos about abuses in Uzbekistan's cotton industry, click here (or you can check out the favorite videos on our YouTube station).  You can also read the report by the Environmental Justice Foundation on this issue, titled White Gold: The True Cost of Cotton, here.