Be a "Pollworker for Democracy"

This year, you have an amazing opportunity to ensure a fair election, protect the right to vote, and get paid for doing so. How? By becoming a pollworker.

That's why CREDO Action is proud to sponsor the "Pollworkers for Democracy" project - a nonpartisan effort to get more people involved in protecting our elections - in order to support our democracy. We'll provide you with information to supplement your pollworker training, and also a system to report and track any problems on and before Election Day.

Your county still needs pollworkers for the November 4th general election. By signing up as a pollworker, you can support our democratic system...and get paid!

Click here to sign up to become a pollworker.

http://act.credoaction.com/event/events/index.html?id=&action_id=11&rc=dems

This is America. We don't jail journalists here.

Jailing journalists is unacceptable in a democracy. But that's exactly what is happening at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn.

Award winning journalist and host of "Democracy Now" Amy Goodman was arrested by St. Paul police while covering a protest outside the Republican National Convention. Though clearly identified as press, Goodman was charged with "obstruction of a legal process and interference with a 'peace officer.'" Two of her producers were arrested for "suspicion of felony riot."

This video is upsetting, but you deserve to know what's really going on.

Goodman and her producers were released last night. (An AP photographer was also arrested and released). But the charges are still pending.

This story has been virtually ignored by the mainstream press. The cable channels are providing extensive coverage of events related to the Republican National Convention, but there has been a virtual news blackout on the arrest of Amy Goodman and the Democracy Now team.

Americans deserve to know that journalists are being jailed for trying to do their jobs. E-mail CNN President Jonathan Klein and NBC News President Steve Capus today (NBC News controls MSNBC) to demand coverage of this brutally important story.

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/dont_arrest_journalists/?r=1376&id=796-834353-WjrLCJx

Safe Energy For the Gulf: Hold the Line on Fish-Killing Machines

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals pose a threat to commercial and recreational fishing in the Gulf. Despite the fact that Gulf Governors have vetoed the development of any further open-rack vaporizer, or open-loop systems, which would run Gulf seawater through radiator-like racks, energy companies continue to try to gamble with our marine wildlife to increase their profits.

The TORP Bienville LNG terminal is currently seeking a permit to use 127 million gallons of Gulf water a day to vaporize imported natural gas. The drastic temperature change, and physical damage caused by the process would destroy billions of fish eggs and larvae by the day. While the terminal is proposed for 63 miles off the Alabama shore, it is close to critically important, marine wildlife reef habitat.


Alternatives to open-loop terminals exist and are supported by fisheries experts at the federal and state level throughout the Gulf. Take action today to tell the Coast Guard, the Department of Transportation, and Alabama Governor Bob Riley to allow only fish-friendly technology.



http://action.healthygulf.org/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=25392

Don't Buy Big Oil's Land Grab

Did you know that oil companies are already sitting on 68 million acres of leases that they aren't even drilling? Which kind of makes you wonder: Why are Big Oil and its allies suddenly desperate to get their hands on the last few places that are still protected -- our natural treasures, wildlife refuges, and pristine coastlines? They wouldn't use the concerns caused by high gas prices as an excuse to grab it ALL, would they?

Big Oil and its allies would like you to think that more drilling will ease your pain at the pump, but that's not the truth.

The bottom line is this: More oil drilling will not lower gas prices or create energy independence - it will only make the world's richest oil companies richer.

Check out our map showing how much of our country Big Oil already has.

Average Americans are being squeezed by high energy prices, and the oil companies are taking advantage to push their long-term drilling agenda. They have been spreading a map full of lies though the Internet.

Help us counter their propaganda -- pass this map and the truth along to your friends and ask them to pass it along too.

http://www.sierraclub.org/bigoil/map.asp

Tell McDonalds to be a Leader and Not a Laggard!

Mc Donald's is the biggest of the 11 Fast Food Junkies buying their paper packaging from Southern forests. We know that McDonald?s is in the process of completing their latest Corporate Social Responsibility report and we know that it will include new language about an environmental paper packaging policy.

What we don?t know is whether McDonald?s will step out as a corporate leader with a policy that supersizes their commitment to protecting forests and increasing the post-consumer recycled content of their packaging and packaging efficiencies like right-sizing and light-weighting.

We need to make sure that their commitment is truly sustainable and not just greenwashing. Tell McDonalds CEO Jim Skinner that Southern forests are too important to be wasted for fast food packaging!


http://dia.dogwoodalliance.org/da/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=25345&t=nwTemplate.dwt

Support the TRADE Act

The Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment (TRADE) Act, cosponsored by fair trade champions Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Rep. Mike Michaud (D-Maine), was introduced on June 4, 2008 with over 50 House and Senate original cosponsors! This landmark legislation sets forth in concrete, detailed terms a progressive vision for good trade agreements in the future and criteria to renegotiate existing failed pacts like NAFTA and the WTO.

Fifteen years of the NAFTA/WTO model has led to massive job loss, downward pressure on wages and the loss of nearly 300,000 family farms. It's given broad, expansive new rights to foreign corporations to challenge our environmental and public health standards and flooded the U.S. with unsafe imported food and products. And it has devastated developing nations, where millions of family farmers have been forced off their land, and where poverty, despair and desperation-driven mass migrations have grown.

The TRADE Act lays out in detail a new path forward for U.S. trade policy to achieve societal goals such as good jobs, safe food and promotion of basic human rights, healthy communities and environmental protection.

What you can do:
We now need as many representatives and senators as possible to publicly support this bill by signing on as cosponsors. Write your members of Congress now and urge them to cosponsor the TRADE Act!

To use the Global Trade Watch contact form, click here: http://action.citizen.org/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=24836

For more information:
Available here: http://www.citizen.org/trade/tradeact/


http://www.citizen.org/trade/tradeact/

Allow Testimony or Face Impeachment!

Tell President Bush that he must allow executive branch officials to testify or he will face impeachment
On September 26, congressional oversight may be dead. The Constitution that has served our nation so well since 1789 may be hopelessly and forever diminished. Our federal government and, in turn, our nation may never be the same.

Those are the stakes.

In order for our government to function, we must have checks and balances. In order to prevent a president from assuming king-like powers and to ensure that all presidents are held accountable for their actions, Congress must have effective congressional oversight ability. And, of course, our presidents must respect that power.

George W. Bush does not.

It is time to put an end to this defiling of our Constitution. The U.S. House of Representatives has set September 26 as a target date for adjournment. By that time, Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, and Josh Bolten must comply with the congressional subpoenas they have been issued – and which a federal judge has ordered them to follow.

If they do not, then George W. Bush must be impeached and removed from office.

If he is not removed from office, Congress will have established a standard under which a president may deny Congress’s investigative power without penalty. That simply cannot happen.


Please take a moment to speak for your nation at this link:

salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2165/t/1027/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=25316

Do Not Pass Go. Go Directly to Pass223.com

Do you have five minutes to help bring the U.S. Senate into the 21st century? Do you have a phone? Are you at your computer? (If you're reading this, you probably are.) Then we've got a favor to ask. The Senate is considering a bill -- S. 223 -- that would require senators to disclose their campaign contributions electronically, just like the House and presidential candidates have been doing for years. The Sunlight Foundation, CRP and other transparency advocates have been pushing hard to get this bill passed this session, and we now have more than 40 co-sponsors of the bill. We need your help to get it passed into law.

http://pass223.com/

Want Some Basic Human Dignity with that Burrito?

The Nation Peter Rothberg on 07/29/2008 @ 12:48pm

In recent years, Taco Bell and Burger King have foolishly resisted efforts by activists to marginally raise the piece rate they pay tomato pickers only to eventually buckle under the pressure of well-deserved bad press. Chipotle Mexican Grill seems to have learned nothing from their lessons.

Although Chipotle, the expanding Colorado-based restaurant chain formerly owned by McDonald's, touts its fair treatment of animals and its locally-sourced organic avocados, its colorful, interactive website neglects any mention of the fair treatment of farm workers. While CEO Steve Ells boasts about his "Food With Integrity" brand, he has ignored countless letters and petitions from all over the country, asking for an extra penny per pound for his tomato pickers.

Migrant pickers typically work ten to twelve hour days, earning a piece-rate of about forty-five cents for each thirty-two pound bucket of tomatoes. Work is never guaranteed, there is no health care, and no overtime pay. The average annual income for a farm worker is $10,000.

Or take this snapshot of the average workday of a Florida tomato picker (with credit to the fine blog, The Pump Handle):

*4:30am: Wake-up. Prepare lunch in your trailer.
*5:00am: Walk to the parking lot or pick-up site to begin looking for work.
*6:30am: With luck, a contractor will choose you to work for him for the day. The job may be 10 to 100 miles away.
*7:30am: Arrive at the fields and begin weeding or waiting while the dew evaporates from the tomatoes. You are usually not paid for this time.
*9:00am: Begin picking tomatoes--filling buckets, hoisting them on your shoulder, running them 100 feet or more to the truck and throwing the bucket up into the truck. Work fast because you must pick 2 TONS of tomatoes in order to earn $50 today.
*Noon: Eat lunch as fast as you can, often with your hands soaked in pesticides. Return to work under the smoldering Florida sun.
*5:00pm: (sometimes later, depending on the season): Board bus to return to Immokalee.
Between 5:30 pm and 8:00 pm: Arrive in Immokalee and walk home.


(And the next day, get up and do it all again. Photos here)

Surely a company that took over $1 billion in annual sales last year can afford a modest raise request. Instead, Ells has tried to side-step the issue by looking to purchase tomatoes from places other than Florida.

Galvanizing the grassroots organizing by and for the Florida tomato pickers is the same group that led the successful fights against Taco Bell and Burger King -- the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), founded in 1993 as a "community-based worker organization" with members from diverse backgrounds, in low-wage agricultural jobs throughout Florida.

On Friday afternoon, August 8th, the CIW along with hundreds of members of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) will be in Denver at Chipotle's corporate headquarters to demand that the restaurant chain work to ensure fairer wages and more humane working conditions for farmworkers. If you're in the Denver area, please join what should be a large and powerful action. if you're not, see what you can do to help the campaign, which has garnered the attention of Congress, with lawmakers earlier this year calling for the Government Accountabilty Office to launch an investigation into working conditions.

CIW's website is filled with details on the demonstration, sample letters to Steve Ells, and other ways that you can do something for some of the poorest and hardest working people in America, including urging Chipotle customers to print out this letter and hand it to the manager at your local Chipotle restaurant. The CIW has gone up against Goliath before and won. With dedication and solidarity, this fight can also be won.

Co-written and researched by Mica Schlosser.



http://www.thenation.com/blogs/actnow/340332/

14 Wolf Pups Executed in Alaska

Soon after Alaska's Board of Game approved the killing of all wolves in an area near Cold Bay, state officials illegally killed 14 wolf pups after gunning down their mothers -- yet another grisly chapter in the Alaska’s out-of-control wolf slaughter.

Please make an emergency donation to help save the lives of Alaska’s wolves and fight the barbaric policies of the Board of Game.

Here’s what happened: State wildlife agency personnel staked out a known wolf denning site -- a practice that is illegal under Alaska law -- and, using helicopters, they gunned down 14 adult wolves from the air, part of an effort to boost caribou populations in Southwest Alaska.

When they landed, they found the 14 helpless pups in the nearby dens -- just weeks old -- and methodically shot each one in the head. 28 wolves gunned down in all.

Please donate now to help save Alaskan wolves from Alaska’s out-of-control Board of Game.

Alaskans are now moving to end the Board of Game’s barbaric aerial hunting of wolves through a ballot measure.

On August 26th voters can pass this ballot measure and ban this awful practice before another deadly season begins.

We are helping Alaskans for Wildlife, a coalition of local grassroots activists, hunters and citizens who secured the 55,000 signatures to put this measure on the ballot. Already, they have reached thousands of voters across the state with their hard-hitting mailings.

Please help us raise $80,000 by August 7th so that we can help Alaskans for Wildlife reach 125,000 voters with mailers like the one on the right -- and end barbaric aerial hunting.

We’re up against wealthy groups like Safari Club International who are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to defeat the ballot measure.

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has even signed off on a $400,000 state-funded propaganda campaign to justify the state’s barbaric wolf slaughter from the skies.

Your support is crucial to combat this million dollar campaign.

On August 26th, Alaskans can end the wolf slaughter from the skies. With your help, we can win for the wolves.


https://secure.defenders.org/site/Donation?ACTION=SHOW_DONATION_OPTIONS&CAMPAIGN_ID=6465&autologin=true&s_einterest=C4&s_Affiliate=C4akwolf_&s_src=4JY08WDCSAW&s_subsrc=4JY08WDCSAW_EJG08D1&JServSessionIdr010=wyrsxdup42.app25a

TELL CONGRESSIONAL LEADERSHIP TO PASS A STRONG TOY SAFETY BILL
Congressional Leadership needs to hear from you, instead of the industry, on the Product Safety Bill. As the two bodies decide the fate of the final bill, it’s a crucial time to make your voice heard.

http://www.uspirg.org/action/product-safety/toy-safety-bill?id4=ES

It was more than a year ago that we first began to see the reports about the millions of toys recalled for toxic lead and other hazards. The news was shocking, and we weren't alone in calling on Congress to take swift action to protect our kids.

But more than a year later -- despite the outcry, despite the clear need for reform -- Congress hasn't delivered a bill to make toys safer.

And you won't believe what's holding it up now: ExxonMobil, the world's richest oil company, is standing in the way. Why? The company wants to kill a provision that would ban toxic phthalates from plastic toys. ExxonMobil just happens to be one of the largest manufacturers of that chemical.

Unbelievable.

Please sign our letter to the congressional leadership. Tell them to stand up to ExxonMobil and deliver a toy safety bill that really protects our kids:

After 45 million children's products were pulled from store shelves in 2007, I can hardly believe that we're still waiting for Congress to act.

Earlier this year, both the House and Senate passed a version of a bill to improve toy safety. But now, as the final bill is being hammered out, ExxonMobil has joined forces with the toy industry and the chemical industry in an all out attempt to weaken this bill.

And with precious little time left to pass a strong bill -- Congress will recess in August -- ExxonMobil just might get its way. That is, unless we can keep the pressure on Congress to deliver the strong toy safety bill they've promised

Let Olympic Sponsors Know You Want Positive Change

We are asking people all over the world to voice their concern to Olympic Sponsors over the Chinese government's continual support of atrocities in Burma.

Please send an email to the corporate Olympic Sponsors and ask them to use their leverage with the Chinese government to urge political change of their policy towards Burma. The Olympics should not be tainted. Let them know that if China's policy does not change than you are planning on boycotting all Olympic merchandise and purchasing of their merchandise during the Oylmpics.


http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1189/t/5102/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=23631

League of Women Voters ~ Stand Up and Fight for Civil Liberties

Before Congress left for the Independence Day recess, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 6304, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, a bill that would seriously threaten the civil liberties of all Americans. The Senate is poised to act on this same bill when it returns from recess on July 8.

We need you to encourage your Senators to keep protecting civil liberties by opposing legislation that would authorize warrantless wiretapping of American citizens without judicial protections and would grant immunity to telecommunications companies for possible illegal eavesdropping!

Tell your Senators to oppose H.R. 6304 and limit the ability of government agencies to obtain information about Americans without the appropriate judicial constraints. While the intelligence community needs the authority to track terrorists abroad, this can and should be done without threatening our civil liberties.

TAKE ACTION

1. Contact your Senator now, by phone or by email, and tell them to stand up for civil liberties and vote against H.R. 6304. Tell them that warrantless wiretapping of Americans is unacceptable in a democracy. Remind your Senators that retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies is wrong. To contact your Senator by email simply enter your zip code in the box above.

2. Send this alert to other concerned citizens - your grassroots network, your friends and coworkers. Encourage them to contact their Senators today!

BACKGROUND

Learn more about what the League has done to protect civil liberties.

Sign up to receive Action Alerts directly by email. Don't miss an opportunity to take action! It's easy to sign up and the League will never share your email with others: http://takeaction.lwv.org/lwv/mlm/signup/.


http://capwiz.com/lwv/issues/alert/?alertid=11573871&type=CO

Exxpose Exxon

As the world's largest private oil company, ExxonMobil has the power to direct the energy industry and policy makers toward a cleaner, more secure energy future. Instead, it is using its wealth and power to take America backwards.

ExxonSecrets.org has been tracking ExxonMobil's funding of front groups and junk science for close to a decade.

Find out what you can do to counter ExxonMobil's deliberate and deadly obfuscation to prolong their obscene profitmaking.

http://www.exxposeexxon.com/

When Words Fail

Climate change activists have chosen a magic number

by Bill McKibben
Published in the July/August 2008 issue of Orion magazine


I ALMOST NEVER write about writing—in my aesthetic, the writing should disappear, the thought linger. But the longer I’ve spent working on global warming—the greatest challenge humans have ever faced—the more I’ve come to see it as essentially a literary problem. A technological and scientific challenge, yes; an economic quandary, yes; a political dilemma, surely. But centrally? A crisis in metaphor, in analogy, in understanding. We haven’t come up with words big enough to communicate the magnitude of what we’re doing. How do you say: the world you know today, the world you were born into, the world that has remained essentially the same for all of human civilization, that has birthed every play and poem and novel and essay, every painting and photograph, every invention and economy, every spiritual system (and every turn of phrase) is about to be . . . something so different? Somehow “global warming” barely hints at it. The same goes for any of the other locutions, including “climate chaos.” And if we do come up with adequate words in one culture, they won’t necessarily translate into all the other languages whose speakers must collaborate to somehow solve this problem.

I’ve done my best, and probably better than some. My first book, The End of Nature, has been published in twenty-four languages, and the essential idea embodied in the title probably came through in most of them. It wasn’t enough, though, nor were any of the other such phrases (like “boiling point” or “climate chaos") that more skillful authors have used since. So in recent years I’ve found myself grasping, trying to strip the language down further, make it communicate more. This year I find myself playing with numbers.

When the Northwest Passage opened amid the great Arctic melt last summer, many scientists were stunned. James Hansen, our greatest climatologist, was already at work on a paper that would try, for the first time, to assign a real number to global warming, a target that the world could aim at. No more vague plans to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or keep it from doubling, or slow the rate of growth—he understood that there was already enough evidence from the planet’s feedback systems, and from the quickly accumulating data about the paleoclimate, to draw a bright line.

In a PowerPoint presentation he gave at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco last December, he named a number: 350 parts per million carbon dioxide. That, he said, was the absolute upper bound of anything like safety—above it and the planet would be unraveling. Is unraveling, because we’re already at 385 parts per million. And so it’s a daring number, a politically unwelcome one. It means, in shorthand, that this generation of people—politicians especially—can’t pass the problem down to their successors. We’re like patients who’ve been to the doctor and found out that our cholesterol is too high. We’re in the danger zone. Time to cut back now, and hope that we do it fast enough so we don’t have a stroke in the meantime. So that Greenland doesn’t melt in the meantime and raise the ocean twenty-five feet.

For me, the number was a revelation. With a few friends I’d been trying to figure out how to launch a global grassroots climate campaign—a follow-up to the successful Step It Up effort that organized fourteen hundred demonstrations across the U.S. one day last spring and put the demand for an 80 percent cut in America’s carbon emissions at the center of the political debate. We need to apply even more pressure, and to do it on a global scale—it is, after all, global warming. But my friends and I were having a terrible time seeing how to frame this next effort. For one thing, the 180 or so countries that will negotiate a new international treaty over the next eighteen months are pretty much beyond the reach of effective lobbying—we can maybe influence the upcoming American election, but the one in Kenya? In Guatemala? In China? And for another, everyone insists on speaking those different languages. A Babel, this world.

But a number works. And this is a good one. Arcane, yes—parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere. But at least it means the same thing in every tongue, and it even bridges the gap between English and metric. And so we secured the all-important URL: 350.org. (Easier said than done.) And we settled on our mission: To tattoo that number into every human brain. To make every person on Planet Earth aware of it, in the same way that most of them know the length of a soccer field (even though they call it a football pitch or a voetbal gebied). If we are able to make that happen, then the negotiations now under way, and due to conclude in Copenhagen in December of 2009, will be pulled as if by a kind of rough and opaque magic toward that goal. It will become the definition of success or of failure. It will set the climate for talking about climate.

So the literary challenge—and the challenge for artists and musicians and everyone else—is how to take a mere number and invest it with meaning. How to make people understand that it means some kind of stability. Not immunity—we’re well past that juncture, and even Hansen says the number is at best the upper bound of safety, but still. Some kind of future. Some kind of hope. That it means kids able to eat enough food, that it means snowcaps on mountains, that it means coral reefs, that it means, you know, penguins. For now 350 is absolutely inert. It means nothing, comes with no associations. But our goal is to fill it up with overtones and shades and flavors. The weekend before we officially launched the campaign, for instance, 350 people on bicycles rode around the center of Salt Lake City. That earned a story in the paper and educated some people about carbon dioxide—but it also started to tint 350 with images of bicycles and the outdoors and good health and pleasure. We need 350 churches ringing their bells 350 times; we need 350 spray-painted across the face of shrinking glaciers (in organic paint!); we need a stack of 350 watermelons on opening day at your farmers’ market; we need songs and videos; we need temporary tattoos for foreheads. We may need 350 people lining up to get arrested in front of a coal train.

It makes sense that we need a number, not a word. All our words come from the old world. They descend from the time before. Their associations have congealed. But the need to communicate has never been greater. We need to draw a line in the sand. Say it out loud: 350. Do everything you can.

Restore Pesticide Reporting at National Agricultural Statistics Service

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced on May 21st that it plans to cut its Pesticide Reporting at National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). The program tracked national pesticide use and proved critical for consumer groups, scientists, farmers and environmental groups to monitor pesticide trends and impacts.
NASS' elimination of the Agricultural Chemical Use Database will have a major impact on consumers' Right to Know about pesticide residues and food safety.
Pesticide Reporting has become particularly important in the last ten years since Genetically Engineered Crops have become widely used and pesticide use has actually increased!
Please contact USDA Secretary Ed Schafer and your Congressperson today!

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/642/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=24757

Take action on forced labour and exploitation of domestic workers in the Philippines

Domestic workers in the Philippines, the vast majority of whom are women and girls, are not given the same protections as other workers under labour laws and work in other people's homes hidden from public view. This leaves them particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation, and many are the victims of forced labour. Many domestic workers migrate from rural areas to the cities and are vulnerable to trafficking, as well as to debt bondage.

The Domestic Workers Bill, known popularly as the Batas Kasambahay, was first filed in 1995 and affords key protections to all domestic workers. For several years, the passage of the Batas Kasambahay has been delayed by Presidential impeachment proceedings and various other postponements.

The enactment of the Batas Kasambahay would be a vital step forwards in ensuring that domestic workers in the Philippines are not subject to abuse, exploitation and forced labour. Anti-Slavery International urges the Philippines Government to prioritise this legislation and ensure that it passes without further delay.


http://www.antislavery.org/homepage/campaign/phillippines.htm

Why won't America join the movement to ban cluster munitions?

Over half the world's governments agreed last week to a ban on cluster munitions. But not the United States. Our government not only skipped the deliberations, but continues to defend its policy of keeping and using these deadly weapons.

Why won't America join the movement to ban cluster munitions? Our executive director Sarah Holewinski sat down with a premier expert to find out.Marc Garlasco is senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch and a board member of CIVIC. He was instrumental in getting the ban passed and was there at its signing.

Sarah: The US says it can't support the Convention on Cluster Munitions because its military then couldn't help countries devastated by tsunamis and earthquakes. Is this true?


Marc: This is circular reasoning at its best. First of all, what humanitarian operation uses cluster munitions? The real issue is US ships have cluster munitions on them, and the US was worried their allies who did sign the Convention could no longer work with it because of that. But this is a non-issue. No humanitarian or peacekeeping operation has ever been allowed because of weapons.

Take the landmine ban treaty, for example. The US didn't sign that and yet has worked together with allies like the UK (who did sign it) for years. What's more, this new Convention allows for those kinds of partnerships, whether cluster munitions are on ships or planes, so this is a non-issue.

Sarah: But the US says it needs cluster munitions to defend the country. Do we really need them?

Marc: We haven't used them since 2003, so let's just say they're obviously not indispensable when fighting a war. There are plenty of other weapons that can defend the country and not indiscriminately kill and maim civilians, who represent the vast majority of victims.

Sarah: The US says it won't "unilaterally get rid of" clusters.

Marc: The Cluster Munitions Conventions is nowhere near a unilateral effort. There are 111 countries who have agreed to destroy their stockpiles and not use these horrible weapons again, including key NATO allies like the UK, Germany, France, and Canada. If they can do it, so can the United States.

Sarah: So, as a nation, we're really behind the 8-ball here, aren't we?

Marc: Couldn't have said it better myself.
*********************************************
We need your help to limit one of the world's most indiscriminate and deadly weapons - cluster bombs.

US-made cluster bombs have been used in many of the world's deadliest conflicts, including Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the former Yugoslavia. Though intended for the battlefield, these weapons frequently contaminate areas where civilians live, causing death and injury to innocent men, women, and far too many children. Even when conflicts end, unexploded cluster "duds" are often left behind, posing a constant threat for years to come.

TAKE ACTION NOW! Use the form below to tell your Senators and Representatives to co-sponsor the Cluster Munitions Joint Resolution that presses the United States Government to sign on to the Cluster Munitions Convention.

Despite the seriousness of this problem, the United States did not participate in the Cluster Munitions Convention and refuses to sign the treaty. Several Senators including Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Diane Feinstein (D-CA), and Rep. James P. McGovern (D-MA) have drafted a "joint resolution" which calls on the American government to sign the Convention and prioritize the safety of men, women and children in conflict zones. Never doubt, your letters make a big difference.

Read the full text of the Cluster Munitions Convenition.
Image courtesy of the BBC.

Here are the Congress members who've already agreed to co-sponsor this important action. They do not need letters because they're already on board!

Sen Sanders, Bernard [VT]
Sen Cardin, Benjamin [MD]
Sen Feingold, Russ [WI]
Sen Brown, Sherrod [OH]
Sen Durbin, Dick [IL]

http://action.civicworldwide.org/t/1538/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=7109

Florida PIRG : Behind Closed Doors? Not This Time.

Check with your state PIRG for this action...Every six years Congress debates our transportation future behind closed doors. We can't let that happen this time.

Urge Congress to double the portion of federal transportation funding that goes to clean, efficient alternatives to driving.

http://www.floridapirg.org/action/transportation/petition?id4=ES

$544 Billion in Subsidies for Nuclear Industry

News Release

$544 Billion in Subsidies for Nuclear Industry

June 2, 2008

Institute for Public Accuracy

KARL GROSSMAN
Grossman just wrote the piece "Half-Trillion Dollars for Nukes!" which states: "With Wall Street unwilling to finance new nuclear plants, U.S. Senators Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and John Warner of Virginia have cooked up a scheme to provide $544 billion -- yes, with a 'b' -- in subsidies for new nuclear power plant development.

"Their move will be debated on the floor of the Senate Tuesday, June 3.

"A Lieberman aide describes the plan as 'the most historic incentive for nuclear in the history of the United States.'

"The Lieberman-Warner scheme is cloaked in a climate change bill -- the claim being that nuclear power plants don't emit greenhouse gases and thus don't contribute to global warming. However, the overall 'nuclear cycle' -- which includes mining, milling, fuel enrichment and fabrication, and reprocessing -- has significant greenhouse gas emissions that do contribute to global warming."

Grossman is a professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, author of several books on nuclear technology and host of the nationally syndicated TV program Enviro Close-Up.
More Information


For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=1725