20,000 Sacrificed In Annual Blood Offering To Corporate America

WILMINGTON, DE, The Onion—The nation looked on in reverence Friday as 20,000 citizens were decapitated, dismembered, and burned alive in the name of Corporate America, continuing the age-old annual rite to ensure bounteous profits in the coming fiscal year.

"Corporate America has always provided us with plenty," said High Priest James N. Cahill, who opened the ceremony by plunging the horn of a bull into a fair-haired child's abdomen and using the freshly spilled blood to write the current value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average upon sacred parchment. "JPMorgan Chase, General Electric, and all in the great pantheon of publicly traded entities will continue to watch over us so long as we appease them each year with human lives."

"The prophecies are clear," Cahill continued. "As we utter the hallowed incantations and make our humble sacrifices of flesh, so shall the shelves of retailers overflow with the most desirable consumer products."

The blood offering follows last week's Feast of Increasing Market Values, a yearly celebration during which Americans gather with their families under the second Q4 full moon to give thanks to corporations and to pray for cash dividends during the holiday shopping season...

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Harry Potter and Social Justice

by Julie Clawson 11-17-2010

Seeking justice for the oppressed. Working to end the connection of child slavery to chocolate. Helping heal a devastated Haiti. Mobilizing young people to respond to a story of redemption by imaginatively working to build a better world. I think many of us Christians would hope that those words were describing the work of the body of Christ, intent on following the path of Jesus Christ in this world. In this case, they are actually descriptions of the Harry Potter Alliance. That’s right — the Harry Potter Alliance.|

Since 2005, the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) has existed as a nonprofit organization intent on using the weapon of love (and a common affinity for Harry Potter) to combat the dark arts of our world. As their mission statement states, they use “parallels from the Harry Potter books to educate and mobilize young people across the world toward issues of literacy, equality, and human rights. Our mission is to empower our members to act like the heroes that they love by acting for a better world.” And it’s working. With more than 100,000 members and nearly 60 chapters worldwide, this real world gathering of Dumbledore’s Army is making a difference.

For example, let’s examine the case of the chocolate industry, and its connections to child slavery and unfair wages. In the Harry Potter books, Hermione Granger discovers that the food served at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is made by house elves (unpaid servants), and so she organizes a campaign for their fair treatment. The HPA responded similarly by asking Time Warner, the parent company that markets all Harry Potter merchandise, to switch the chocolate used in their merchandise to fair trade chocolate. They do not want chocolate made in the name of the boy who used love to save the world to support systems of injustice like child slavery.

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