Hate and fear have no place in the United States. Join our #TrumpWatch BINGO during tonight’s State of the Union to ensure discriminatory rhetoric does not become policy. #SOTU
President Trump will continue to spin his fake news and hateful rhetoric while visiting the US/Mexico border but Americans know the truth. Tell your Senator to say no to the border wall. #TrumpShutdown http://fal.cn/rGyX
Families, like the one in tonight’s #MadamSecretary, are constantly making the difficult choice to leave their homes and flee from violence and persecution.
Head over to our Twitter at 10PM ET for a live tweet. We’ll be featuring posts from the cast and crew of the show as well as our refugee rights researchers and campaigners. #FamiliesBelongTogether
If you care deeply about injustice, please act by donating today. Now is your last chance to #GiveHope. Donate in the next few hours and your gift will go three times as far. http://fal.cn/r.7m
For years, Amnesty International has investigated human rights atrocities in conflict-affected countries like Syria and Yemen. We cannot do this work with you. Donate now. Our triple match ends at midnight. #GiveHope http://fal.cn/rd7y
Your donation TODAY will go three times as far to immediately help our human rights work in places like Yemen, the U.S./Mexico border and Syria. Without passionate and generous supporters like you, there is no Amnesty. Thank you for your kind support. #GiveHope http://fal.cn/rPZm
This morning I learned that an estimated 10-20,000 big cats are kept as “pets” in the United States. 5,000 of these are tigers, which exceeds the number of wild tigers left: about 3,900.
This photo is from a story that recently made the news and is just one of countless instances where these animals are found in basement or garage cages, often agitated and living in deplorable conditions. These “pets” are typically owned by people who have no knowledge or room to raise such an animal. Once they become too big or ferocious to handle, they are further isolated and neglected.
There are also yearly cases of killings and maulings if these animals get loose, posing a threat to both owners and their neighbors alike.
In response, Representative Jeff Dunham (D-CA) has reintroduced the Big Cat Public Safety Act (H.R. 1818) to prohibit ownership of big cats by private individuals and unqualified exhibitors. Please, tell your U.S. representative to cosponsor this commonsense legislation today.
As you read this, the Senate prepares to vote to change the rules. If they are allowed to do so, President Trump could win his battle to change our country into a place where only the connected, corporations, and even the corrupt have power — without accountability through the rule of law. In the less than 80 days since Donald Trump took office, he’s attempted to ban Muslims, end health care for 24 million people, break up immigrant families, abandon the responsibility to enforce laws that protect people from police brutality, and rescind the environmental rules that were saving our planet. Now he wants to remake our Supreme Court in his own political image by placing Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court.
Join the fight and call your senators now @ 888-877-2040 to say #StopGorsuch. The Supreme Court is a job for life.If Judge Gorsuch is confirmed, we’ll likely face 40 years of court decisions that favor corporations over workers as well as the privileged and powerful over the vulnerable who need their civil rights protected.
Yes, we can stop him by calling our Senators now at 888-877-2040.
Already our allies in the Senate are filibustering and delaying Gorsuch’s confirmation, but Republican leadership are planning to cheat by changing the rules to allow for him to be confirmed with only 51 votes, instead of the normal 60 needed to confirm a Supreme Court justice. We know it is better to have the seat go unfilled for the moment, rather than have it filled by the wrong person for 40 years.
Don’t change the rules, change the nominee.
If that’s not enough, well-connected and conservative partisans have donated millions of dollars to promote television ads making Gorsuch appear to be a friend of civil rights, when his record says otherwise. These well-to-do partisans are the same ones who donated millions to hold off President Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court for nearly a year, preventing him from even getting a hearing. And yet they now want us to accept Gorsuch getting the express lane to the Supreme Court — with a rule change, too.
Please support our work as we continue to fight the important battles that protect democracy and the rights of all people.
Please call your senator now and tell them to #StopGorsuch and join us and over 200 organizations committed to protecting the civil rights that keep our democracy real. This is not a partisan question of which party gets a seat on the Supreme Court; it’s a question of whether our democracy will remain real to the average American. It’s about whether an administration that is running roughshod over the rights of many Americans will put a judge in the Supreme Court who won’t protect those rights.
We say unequivocally and unapologetically: “No.”
Visit our website for a page full of social media resources to help #StopGorsuch:
President Trump’s allies in the Senate are hell-bent on ramming through his extreme pick for the Supreme Court, promising a final vote this week.
We can’t allow politicians to install a justice on our highest court who’s hostile to women’s fundamental health and rights. With the future of abortion access, birth control coverage, and respect for people’s fundamental rights at stake, we have to make our voices heard — loud and clear, right now — before the final vote. As a Planned Parenthood Defender, you know the value of speaking out when it’s needed most.
No Senate action has higher stakes than the confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee. With a lifetime appointment, a single justice can dramatically reshape our most fundamental rights.
Thank you for making your voice heard when it matters most.
Sincerely, Cecile Richards, President Planned Parenthood Action Fund
CALL SCRIPT
Hi, my name is ____________ and I live in _____________.
I’m calling to ask my senator to vote NO on Judge Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.
I’m extremely alarmed by Judge Gorsuch’s history of interfering with reproductive rights, including access to birth control and care at Planned Parenthood. Gorsuch has ruled in favor of the idea that corporations are people and a woman’s employer should be able to decide whether or not she has access to birth control. I do not trust him to uphold my fundamental rights, including the right to access abortion.
I’m counting on my senator to do the right thing and vote no on his nomination.
Thank you for your time.
(And if your senator opposes Gorsuch, thank them and encourage them to keep fighting!)
Hey! Don’t forget that #GlobalCitizen is happening September 29th! THIS COMING MONTH! You’ll see me. Download the @glblctzn app to take action for FREE TICKETS! https://glblctzn.me/nyc2018
Through regulations, incentives, and public/private partnerships, governments hold the keys to transform and build the green economy. Similar to the industrial and information revolutions, governments must incentivize their citizens, businesses, and institutions to build a resilient future.
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – Socrates
The reason I read this book was that I wanted to know more about sustainable agriculture. So, I search on the internet and found a list of 100 books on this topic. There were a lot of textbooks and literature for farmers and professionals in that area. So, in the end, I picked this one by Jonathan Safran Foer as it seemed to be more for newbies to the area. I got it as an audiobook and started listening. After a few minutes, I checked if I had accidentally bought another book as as Foer went on an on about suicide notes and breathing the same molecules as Hitler and Julius Ceasar - it was very confusing and not clear at all, what all that got to do with climate change and agriculture.
But I kept going - much easier with an audiobook than with a printed book, I suppose - and it slowly became clear.
Take action to honor the Uvalde elementary school victims.
The death toll continues to climb from a mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Last year, over 1500 children and teenagers were killed by guns in the US. Enough is enough. Gun control legislation is needed to end senseless gun violence in America.
“… “I’m taking action because I feel desperate,” said U.S. climate scientist Peter Kalmus, who along with several others locked himself to the front door of a JPMorgan Chase building in Los Angeles. A recent report found that the financial giant is the biggest private funder of oil and gas initiatives in the world.
“It’s the 11th hour in terms of Earth breakdown, and I feel terrified for my kids, and terrified for humanity,” Kalmus continued. “World leaders are still expanding the fossil fuel industry as fast as they can, but this is insane. The science clearly indicates that everything we hold dear is at risk, including even civilization itself and the wonderful, beautiful, cosmically precious life on this planet. I actually don’t get how any scientist who understands this could possibly stay on the sidelines at this point.” …”
“When I was 26, I went to Indonesia and the Philippines to do research for my first book, No Logo. I had a simple goal: to meet the workers making the clothes and electronics that my friends and I purchased. And I did. I spent evenings on concrete floors in squalid dorm rooms where teenage girls—sweet and giggly—spent their scarce nonworking hours. Eight or even 10 to a room. They told me stories about not being able to leave their machines to pee. About bosses who hit. About not having enough money to buy dried fish to go with their rice.
They knew they were being badly exploited—that the garments they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a month. One 17-year-old said to me: “We make computers, but we don’t know how to use them.”
So one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?
It took a very long time for him to understand the question. When he finally did, he looked at me like I was nuts. You see, for him and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large, organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.
This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your political beliefs—firstly and very often lastly—through personal lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping fair trade and local and boycotting big, evil brands.
These very different understandings of social change came up again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would give talks about the need for international protections for the right to unionize. About the need to change our global trading system so it didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet at the end of those talks, the first question from the audience was: “What kind of sneakers are OK to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”
Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global greenhouse-gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”
The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we—as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy, is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together. As part of a massive and organized global movement.
The irony is that people with relatively little power tend to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power. The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act not only together, but to act on a rather large political canvas. To try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand structural changes.
In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even individual activists. And the result is that, despite our power and privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes—the policy and legal work— to others.”
This is why the media keeps pumping out articles about plastic straws and avocados that focuses on what we, individually, are doing to destroy the environment, when really the most pollution comes from multinational corporations and the only thing that will save us is global collective action.
As a conservation and wildlife educator, I see these things a lot. How do I inspire people to push for change while also not inducing ecophobia and nihilism? The answer is often individual action. While sure, one person being vegetarian or using reusable bags, planting a pollinator garden, or sending a corporation a message about their unsustainable palm oil might not make an immediate change; what it does do is create more fighters. More voices for conservation. They tell their friends, and the dominos start falling, and corporations making the biggest impact start to lose money, people start noticing lies of politicians about ‘clean coal’. Individuals can spread the word, and cause the uprising. So continue buying fair-trade, being a loud vegetarian, going plastic free and together we can make a difference. Together we can get LOUDER. And please, most importantly VOTE for those who give a damn about our people and planet.
Every action you take counts, no matter how small, and together, our actions add up to something much bigger. Check out the impact we’ve made with #MonthOfAction so far. And we’re not done yet! See how you can get involved here: http://bit.ly/_Month-Of-Action_
Hundreds of people are rallying outside JFK airport to protest against Trump’s muslim ban. Here’s a statement of support from the New York Tax Workers Alliance:
“Our 19,000-member-strong union stands firmly opposed to Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. As an organization whose membership is largely Muslim, a workforce that’s almost universally immigrant, and a working-class movement that is rooted in the defense of the oppressed, we say no to this inhumane and unconstitutional ban.”
![“We Are the Weather” by Jonathan Safran Foer [Book Review] → http://ecogreenlove.com/?p=](https://64.media.tumblr.com/943841ebf2b34f5ea1e808bd3a3b7f1f/48ed663785cb0cad-db/s1280x1920/4ce8e78a2c3bd67bf17ce338d7f6c5a3e5864961.png "“We Are the Weather” by Jonathan Safran Foer [Book Review] → http://ecogreenlove.com/?p=")
