Tell Exxon: Use your massive profits for cleaner energy!

Pressure is mounting on ExxonMobil as they approach their annual shareholders' meeting this Wednesday, May 28.

Facing growing concerns about the future of the company and Exxon's failure to address climate change, more and more shareholders believe that ExxonMobil is not using its massive profits ($40 billion in 2007) in a way that will best serve its consumers, investors and the environment.

We need everyone to tell Exxon that business as usual – creating climate emissions, destroying Canada's forests for tar sands, and hurting the world's poor – is not acceptable. Take action with us, if you haven't already:

http://www.coopamerica.org/takeaction/exxon/

Open Letter to Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer and Yellowstone Superintendent Suzanne Lewis:

www.westyellowstonenews.com May 16, 2008


Open Letter to Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer and Yellowstone Superintendent Suzanne Lewis:

I have just seen the press release on your decision to haze bison near West Yellowstone into the Park. How absurd and despicable! Aside from the fact that green-up has barely begun inside the Park, not to mention that bison are now calving and hazing them creates additional unnecessary stress for them, your "little" operation conveniently ignores the conspicuous lack of cattle anywhere near Horse Butte and the Upper Madison.

You're not protecting cattle against brucellosis--a truly frivolous and dishonest assertion. You're merely torturing bison to please the obsolete and oligarchic livestock industry.

The livestock industry clearly owns your offices. Your actions willfully neglect the public trust--your duty to the citizens of Montana and the United States to conserve and protect bison against all enemies. The livestock industry is the enemy of bison, but you have thrown your support to the wrong side. It may be politick to do so, but it is neither courageous nor moral.

Once again, the State of Montana and Yellowstone National Park are demonstrating that the mentality and brutality of the police state drives the so-called Interagency Bison Management Plan. You may have the law--not to mention the big battalions--on your side, but you don't have history on your side. It is we, those of us who know the truth, who are writing the history. And history will not treat you two any better than it has treated Chivington and Custer.

Slaughter all the bison you want; how will history remember you? We all already know the answer.

Sincerely,

Robert Hoskins

Crowheart, Wyo.




http://westyellowstonenews.com/articles/2008/05/16/opinions/letter2.txt

Mass Atrocities Against Ethnic Minority Civilians - TAKE ACTION

US Campaign For Burma.org

Child Soldiers
Forced Labor
Sexual Violence
Health Crisis/Landmines
3200 Villages Destroyed

Eastern Burma is Asia's worst Internally Displaced People (IDP) crisis zone, with over half a million people on the run from the military dictatorship's vicious attacks and ethnic cleansing. Burma's ethnic nationality areas around the country are all subject to the military dictatorship's attacks and abuses.

The situation in Eastern Burma, however, is particularly dire: the armed conflict raging in Eastern Burma is the world's longest currently-running conflict. The military has destroyed over 3200 villages, and Eastern Burma is now the world's most heavily mined region. In 2006 alone, 82,000 people fled from or were forced from their homes to become IDPs in Eastern Burma, now living in camps guarded by ethnic resistance armies, barely surviving. These people have fled direct attacks aimed at ethnically cleansing resource-rich areas and consolidating the military dictatorship's control over the entire country. The military uses tactics such as rape, forced labor, abducting children to be soldiers, torture and executions to instill their reign of terror over eastern Burma.

The attacks on civilians in eastern Burma started for a number of different reasons. It is important to understand that the areas under attack by the ruling military junta have been controlled by ethnic groups in Burma for many years. The present military junta has never controlled these areas. The junta began carrying out a war in order to take over these areas from the ethnic minorities, which had their own government, security apparatus and commerce. The junta wants complete, totalitarian control of the entire region.

Watch the trailer to Witness‘ video “Shoot on Sight” to learn more.

http://uscampaignforburma.org/learn-about-burma/attacks-eastern-burma

Internal Displacement in Eastern Burma: 2007 Survey
- From Thailand Burma Border Consortium (www.tbbc.org) .

Campaign of Brutality
- From Free Burma Rangers (www.freeburmarangers.org). A report and analysis of Burma Army offensive Against the People of Northern Karen State, Eastern Burma, Feb 2006- Feb 2007. Free Burma Rangers is a good source for up to date information on the situation

Map of Displaced Villages 1996-2007
- From TBBC

Report on Satellite Imagery of the Conflict in Eastern Burma
- Produced by the Geospatial Technologies and Human Rights project as part of
the Science and Human Rights Program (SHRP; http://shr.aaas.org) of the American Association or the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Tell TIAA-CREF to put genocide-free investing on the ballot

Investors Against Genocide

New campaign launched
to get TIAA-CREF
to put genocide-free investing
on the ballot
for its July 15, 2008
shareholders meeting.

https://www.investorsagainstgenocide.net/IAGSendAMessageTIAA-CREF.htm

How to support genocide-free investing at TIAA-CREF

Please join our shareholder campaign for TIAA-CREF to commit to genocide-free investing. Though TIAA-CREF is not one of the largest holders of problem companies, such as PetroChina, it should live up to its marketing credo of “financial services for the greater good."

You can play a key role whether or not you are a TIAA-CREF shareholder. You and your organization can help by sening messages to TIAA-CREF and by spreading the word about the campaign to get the genocide-free investing proposal on the ballot for the July 15, 2008, shareholders meeting.
Send a message to TIAA-CREF asking them to put the genocide-free investing shareholder proposal on the proxy ballot for voting at the July 15, 2008, shareholder meeting. Though it was submitted five months in advance, TIAA-CREF is pushing the proposal to July 2009! Your voice as a customer, along with many thousands of others, is especially important!
Submit a shareholder proposal to a TIAA-CREF fund. We've made it easy to play a part. See below.
Tell your friends and forward them this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Tell TIAA-CREF You Do Not Want Your Retirement Money to Support Genocide
Forward this email text to your friends and ask them to support the effort to get our proposal on the upcoming ballot and to make TIAA-CREF genocide free.
Write a letter to the editor of your local paper. Click here for a sample.
Most local weekly newspapers (not the large metropolitan dailies) will publish all letters to the editor received from town residents. You can easily find the email address by searching for your paper on the Internet. You will most likely find instructions on submitting a letter to the editor in the "Opinion" section. To make it easy, we’ve drafted a sample letter that you can cut and paste into an email and send to your hometown paper.
Raise awareness at your workplace, especially if your employer offers TIAA-CREF funds in its retirement plans. Get your company and co-workers involved.
Make a donation. We are a volunteer-based organization so 100% of your contribution will go directly to shareholder outreach.
Publicize the campaign to your group's members via email to your list, website, internal magazines and bulletins.
Provide a statement of support from your group.
Use the campaign materials that we've provided.
Contact us with your ideas and interest in working together on this campaign. Thanks for your help!
Learn more about genocide-free investing and our strategy and plans for shareholder proposals.

Oppose a Sweeping New Federal DNA Database! Say NO to the DNA Fingerprint Act!

Oppose a Sweeping New Federal DNA Database! Say NO to the DNA Fingerprint Act!
Synopsis
Go here to tell the government we don't want them to have the power to collect our DNA: http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/component/main?main=DocumentDetail&o=0900006480511b01

Description
At the end of 2005, a little-noticed provision was slipped into the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) reauthorization bill that provided the federal government with the power to collect and permanently retain DNA samples from anyone arrested for any crime whether or not they are convicted, any non-U.S. citizen detained or stopped by federal authorities for any reason, and everyone in federal prison. Now the government is trying to put the DNA Fingerprint Act into practice.

This is a dangerous invasion of privacy. DNA is not a fingerprint – it contains vast amounts of sensitive medical information about us.

Congress held no hearings on this dangerous legislation, even though it:

threatens the privacy of millions of Americans;
has a disproportionate affect on people of color;
potentially clogs our criminal justice system with information about law-abiding people (which could hinder criminal investigations); and
turns the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” on its head.
Implementation of this law means that more than one million innocent people will have their DNA forcibly collected, analyzed and retained in a government database each year. Federal agencies would be required to take DNA samples from:


Individuals arrested for the most minor of crimes, such as peaceful protestors who are demonstrating on federal property.
Countless numbers of visitors from other countries who are pulled aside in airports by the Transportation Security Administration.
Lawful immigrants seeking admission to this country, whether at the land border or in passport control at the airport.
Further, implementation of this law will have a dramatic impact on communities of color and further the assault on the rights of immigrants. Currently only a limited number of crimes trigger inclusion in the federal DNA database. By including the DNA profiles of everyone held in federal prisons, where people of color are held in alarming disproportion, this law aggravates the racial inequities of the federal criminal justice system. Collection of DNA from all immigration detainees will further slant the database toward a more disproportionate inclusion of Latinos.

This is a potentially critical problem if the federal government were to permit what they call “familial searches,” already permitted in many states and in the UK, where law-enforcement use DNA profiles to search for genetic similarities. This effectively increases the reach of the database to include the relatives of everyone whose profile is already there, creating an even greater racial imbalance in the system. The number of people affected by the program would mushroom exponentially.

Center for Constitutional Rights http://ccrjustice.org/search/node/dna+fingerprint+database

Whaling Scandal -- Take Action

Go here to take action:

http://usactions.greenpeace.org/action/start/192/?session_action=reset&action=start&usa_source_template=gpusa

We've said for a long time that Japan's so-called research program is actually commercial whaling in a flimsy disguise. But today, we have the evidence in our hands.

After a four-month long undercover investigation, Greenpeace exposed evidence of widespread embezzlement of whale meat occurring right under the noses of the public officials who run the whaling program.

The best cuts of whale meat, used to make whale bacon, are smuggled into crew cabins, preserved in salt, and then shipped home in boxes marked "cardboard" or "salted stuff" to be sold on the black market. Greenpeace intercepted one such box -- worth up to $3,000.

Greenpeace has evidence that more than a ton of whale meat was snuck from the whaling ship this year alone. One of our sources claims to have heard a crew member boast of building a house on the proceeds from his illegal take.

And, after all of this, we're still supposed to believe that the hunt is all in the name of scientific research to help the whales? Come on! Nobody is buying that line anymore.

TAKE ACTION NOW!

Now is the time to rock the boat in Japan. The whaling program has been an embarrassment to Japan's Foreign Affairs department all year. Your letters helped cancel the humpback hunt - and now in the spotlight of this scandal, it's time to cancel the rest.

Take action and send a message to the Prime Minister asking him to end whaling for good! We need your help to put an end to "research" whaling once and for all.