Groupon is a site where people can get significant discounts on stuff, with one significant limitation: There have to be enough people taking advantage of a particular Groupon deal for the deal to take effect. If not enough people join in the offer, it is rescinded. The Groupon site works as a great way to provoke word of mouth, as people communicate with others about the deal in order to make sure that the discount is activated.

I’m happy to note that there’s a great Groupon deal for one of the businesses we work with: Skreened. Skreened is a shirt retailer that only sells shirts that are made in the USA, free of sweatshop labor. They’re a super-ethical company, and so they take a portion of their profits and make Kiva microloans to people in developing countries as well.

On top of that, when you buy from our particular Skreened shop, Irregular Apparel, we’ll make a Kiva microloan of our own, plus another donation to a progressive organization. Good things happen all over when you order one of our Skreened shirts.

For the next 7 hours, a special Groupon offer allows you to claim a coupon for a 50 percent discount on a Skreened shirt. The offer is good for a year from the time you claim it. So, you don’t even have to need a tshirt now – just so long as you’ll know that you’ll be wanting a tshirt within the next year, you’re covered.

Today’s Groupon Deal for Skreened has already been activated, too. A minimum of 25 participants was passed hours ago. 123 people are now participating. Why not join in?

When you buy one of our sweatshop-free t-shirts, you do more than spread a liberal political message across your chest. For every shirt we sell, we pledge to donate $1 to a progressive political cause and to send another $1 to someone starting up a small self-administered enterprise in the developing world.

This month, we’re combining the two pots of money and sending all of our donation to the World of Good Development Organization (related to but not the same as the World of Good network of Fair Trade shops) — and we’re doing so because World of Good combines progressive organizing with overseas microgrants. The microgrants are directed toward community improvement projects in the developing world, with local organizations hired to implement the projects in order to achieve a second-order infusion of community capital.

At the same time, World of Good seeks to empower the people who make goods and the people who buy goods with concrete information about existing and livable wage standards in countries across the globe. World of Good has a fair wage guide that provides four measurements for “fairness” and allows a person to compare what these fair wages would be to actual wages a factory worker receives in a country. Another project of World of Good is to gather empirical information about actual wages for particular types of jobs in a country. These sorts of information can provide bargaining power for factory workers and the power to make ethical decisions for consumers.

In case you were wondering what those Skreened shirts look like on an actual bod:

It’s an American subspecies, made sweatshop-free.

Would you buy a ketchup-stained shirt? I don’t mean a shirt mistakenly stained with ketchup. I mean a shirt that someone stained with ketchup on purpose, a shirt with a design on it made from ketchup. Think biodegradable ink; think about being able to tell your friends, when they ask what’s up with that shirt, “yeah, man, it’s ketchup.”

So, imagining that the design is to your liking, would you?

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It’s a statement attributed to the Buddha, Siddhartha Guatama, from ages ago, but it’s not a statement worth repeating because it was made by the Buddha or because it’s ages old. The idea is that people should not follow teachers of wisdom, but should instead cultivate their own wisdom.

Listen to others, by all means, but test every assertion made by leaders, and if their assertions don’t match reality, don’t follow the paths they have cleared. Go your own way, and trust your own skeptical mind.

It’s a pre-modern version of the popular aphorism, question authority, written within the outline of the meditating heretic of Hinduism.

Let experience be your guru.

Every time someone buys one of our our sweatshop-free t-shirts, we set aside a dollar to donate an organization carrying out liberal-minded activities for the greater good.

This time around, we’re donating to SkyTruth, an non-profit organization that collects, develops and disseminates images that document the impact of human development on the Earth. Based in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, SkyTruth is currently tracking beach incident reports related to the BP Gulf oil spill. Last year, Skytruth provided imagery of the Montara oil spill in the Timor Sea at a Congressional hearing. By providing information to the public uninfluenced and unfiltered by corporate interests, Skytruth makes it easier for the rest of us to know what’s really going on.

For every shirt we sell through Skreened, we dedicate a dollar to a low-interest Kiva microloan fund to someone who is trying to start up an independent business. We won’t derive income from this; any money we make from these microloans will be sent back for more overseas development. Our latest microloan goes to Mamadou Barry of Senegal, who is starting a business by taking used and broken motorcycles, repairing them, and selling them to others.

Last year, when the print-on-demand corporation CafePress introduced higher prices for buyers and lower compensation for graphic designers, many outraged designers for CafePress reacted by declaring their intention to leave CafePress behind and take their activity elsewhere. The call went out: Boycott CafePress!

A year later, however, there’s no sign of decreased activity by designers. Between midnight and 8:45 AM on the morning of Thursday April 15, 2009, 11288 new graphic designs had been introduced for sale at CafePress. Between midnight and 9 AM this morning (a sleepy early summer Saturday), 15730 new graphic designs were introduced. That’s not a slowdown. It’s an acceleration.

The following were the five most popular t-shirt designs we sold on Skreened during the month of May 2010:

Each of these five most popular designs has to do with the issue of immigration. Interestingly, none has to do with the issue of oil spills, another contender in the public imagination for salience. I wonder why this difference emerged. Is there a difference in how people feel about the issue as relevant for activism?

The humor of the undead is trickier than I thought.

After recalling the insistence of the media earlier in the last decade that “irony is dead,” I thought it would be fun to poke at the notion with an “Irony is Undead” t-shirt. I thought it would be a cinch. The above are my two attempts, and I don’t think I quite succeeded.

Verbal irony involves the juxtaposition of what is literally said and what is actually meant. Problem 1: What does a zombie say? What’s on a zombie’s mind? What are a zombie’s motivations? Well, it wants to eat people, mostly. But Problem 2: zombies are inarticulate, typically speaking simply and in incomplete sentences. In order to express a zombie’s ironic statement, you’d have to successfully express two opposing notions using the same small set of ideas while keeping it all on the limited topic of eating someone.

I thought that maybe the best expression of zombie irony would be clumsy irony, since zombies are clumsy creatures. Following this, I considered “Me Not Want to Eat You At ALL!” as an example of undead irony, but dropped it because it’s not really even primitive irony, just a lie.

Can you do better? What would an ironic zombie say?

Whenever you buy one of our sweatshop-free liberal t-shirts, we donate a dollar to an organization carrying out liberal activities for the greater good. Most of the time, we donate to a liberal policy organization, but for this go-around we’re donating to Tri-State Bird Rescue and Research, an organization that has been participating in activities to rescue birds caught in oil slicks since 1976. Since then, Tri-State Bird Rescue has sadly had enough demand for their expertise to stay rather busy. The organization has sent a delegation down to the Gulf Coast and is participating in bird rescues as we speak.

If you have some dollars to spare, we encourage you to send a few to Tri-State Bird Rescue.

We sell American Apparel shirts through Skreened because we know those shirts are made in the USA with worker protections, pay and environmental standards that overseas sweatshop production does not match. As of this morning, those shirts offer a slightly wider range in style, too.

Every shirt we sell through Skreened is now available printed on an American Apparel v-neck t-shirt in white, green, yellow or blue. Skreened calls two of those colors “mint” and “lemon,” but I just can’t go along with that practice. People should not eat our shirts.

To keep this website and our tummies going, we sell political t-shirts with liberal messages on them through Skreened, a printer whose awesomeness is both aesthetical (they print shirts on demand on an immensely bigger area of shirt than either CafePress or Zazzle) and ethical (they sell shirts made under American labor and environmental standards by American Apparel). To balance out the American-only emphasis in production, we dedicate a dollar in low-or-no-interest Kiva microloans to help kick-start independent non-factory entrepreneurial efforts in the third world.

Our latest microloan goes to Sarantuya Sambuu to help cover the cost of supplies for her cafe in Arhangai, Mongolia. We won’t take any proceeds we receive from this microloan as income; rather, we’ll put those funds right back into more microloans to help people avoid the sweatshop trap and make a sustaining living on their own.

Every time you buy one of our sweatshop-free t-shirts at Skreened, we donate a dollar to a group that promotes progressive politics in America. Our latest donation goes to the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to finding and releasing information about various government activities and shenanigans as broadly as possible and in the most useful formats possible. Among the Sunlight Foundation’s latest projects are the National Data Catalog (a point for the collection and dissemination of government data that’s already broader in scope than the government’s own Data.gov) and Political Party Time (an effort to collect and disseminate lobbyists’ invitations to secret fundraising parties for politicians).