Monthly Archives: August 2017

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

A pivotal moment ~ Vicky Wyatt, Greenpeace


We can’t let polluters invade, drill, and destroy communities!

Donate Today!

Protect human rights, health, and the environment.

Right now we face a massive expansion of the U.S. pipeline network. You know Trump fast-tracked Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines — those are just the beginning. Other oil and gas pipelines are in the works that could violate human rights and threaten to destroy the environment, wildlife, and people’s way of life. And these pipelines could dash our last hopes for a stable climate.

Stopping the construction of pipelines, and investing in clean energy, is our only option if we’re going to stop runaway climate change. Whether or not these pipelines are a direct threat to your community, more fossil fuel infrastructure is bad news for all of us. Please donate now to help Greenpeace fight back against tar sands pipelines and support all our programs to protect our climate and communities.

More pipelines mean more spills — and that means contaminated water sources, the loss of people’s land and livelihoods, and the suffering and death of wildlife. These dangerous pipelines are also in violation of Indigenous rights — taking the lands of tribal and First Nations and building pipelines without consent. We’re working on every front to defeat pipelines and keep fossil fuels in the ground, but we won’t get anywhere without you.

Give today to power the resistance and support all our work to protect the environment!

Here are just a few pipelines that are in the works:

    • The TransMountain pipeline is a tar sands oil pipeline headed towards the west coast of Canada. It would ship nearly 1 million barrels of the world’s dirtiest crude oil per day. The TransMountain cuts across Alberta and British Columbia, and would make the waters of the Pacific Northwest an oil tanker superhighway.

 

    • Spill-prone Enbridge just started construction on its Line 3 Replacement tar sands pipeline on both the Canadian and Wisconsin sides of Lake Superior.

 

  • The Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley pipelines would stretch from Marcellus Shale in West Virginia, bringing billions of cubic feet of natural gas through Virginia and (in the case of the Atlantic Coast pipeline) into North Carolina. In addition to the dangers of a natural gas explosion, a massive escalation in fracking and natural gas plants is a cost our climate can’t afford.

These are just a few of the battles we face against the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to invade, drill, and pollute our communities. Your support now will help us keep fighting on every front to protect people and the environment — pressuring big banks to defund pipeline projects, training activists in non-violent direct action, and bringing the truth about pipelines into the public eye through new reports. I hope we can count on you to stand with us and stand up for our communities and climate!

Thank you,

Vicky Wyatt
Greenpeace USA

P.S. Our rights, our water, our climate, the health of our communities and our whole planet are on the line. Please give now to support all of Greenpeace’s work in this pivotal moment

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

ABB Joins NYS Council on Women & Girls, Launches New Defending Democracy Project, & Wins Big in the States!


A Better Balance

 

ABB Joins First-Ever New York State Council on Women & Girls 

On August 2, Governor Cuomo announced the creation of the first-ever New York State Council on Women and Girls. ABB Co-President Dina Bakst is honored to serve on the Council’s Steering Committee, which is comprised of women leaders in academia, advocacy, business, and media. In addition to the Steering Committee, the Council is made up of the leaders of all New York State agencies, who are charged with ensuring every policy and program takes into account the experiences of women and girls. The Council will meet quarterly and focus on nine impact areas: education, economic opportunity, workforce equity, leadership, health care, child care, safety, STEM, and intersectionality. In January, the Trump administration disbanded the White House Council on Women and Girls. The New York State Council sends a strong message that women’s rights will not be overlooked in New York.
Know Your Rights: ABB’s Summer of Outreach & Education
This summer, ABB has been actively conducting outreach and education on a variety of topics impacting working families. August is National Breastfeeding Awareness Month, and our staff has been spreading the word about nursing mothers’ rights in New York. ABB attorneys are conducting a series of trainings throughout New York City to educate pregnant women, new mothers, and birth professionals about breastfeeding rights.
We’ve also been ramping up our outreach efforts around paid family leave, as covered workers in New York State will be able to take paid family leave starting on January 1, 2018. These efforts have included trainings at the LGBT Center in Manhattan, focusing on how the paid family leave law specifically applies to LGBTQ families, and at the Manhattan VA Medical Center on key workplace rights for veterans and their caregivers including benefits that will be available to military caregivers under the paid family leave law. In addition to our efforts in New York, ABB also led a national webinar on recent developments around paid family and medical leave, featuring on-the-ground leaders from Washington State and Washington, D.C.
Finally, this month, Preston Van Vliet (shared staff person with Family Values @ Work) presented a workshop at the Family Week conference in Provincetown, Massachusetts about the need among LGBTQ parents for paid leave policies that are inclusive of every family, as well as an all-day workshop with Forward Together at the Western States Center’s Activists Mobilizing for Power conference in Portland, Oregon about the importance of inclusive family definitions for cross-movement, long-term advocacy.
Federal Watch
We’ve been paying close attention to the Trump administration’s and Congress’s attempts to roll back women’s rights, workers’ rights, and LGBTQ rights, threatening our core values of fairness and economic security for all families. Most recently we highlighted the administration’s restrictive definition of “close familial relationship” for the purposes of enforcing a travel ban on refugees and other people from six Muslim-majority countries; the devastating consequences repealing the Affordable Care Act would have had for women’s and maternal health; the Department of Justice’s disavowal of anti-discrimination protections for lesbian, gay, and bisexual employees; and Donald Trump’s announced ban on transgender service members in the U.S. military. And we’ve been fighting back. We recently signed on to a letter opposing Congress’s attempt to limit collection of data from employers that helps to identify discriminatory pay practices. We will continue to keep the public informed about the latest challenges and developments in D.C. through our Federal Watchblog series.

 

Progress for Working Families in Massachusetts and Washington State 
On July 27, Governor Baker signed the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) into law, making Massachusetts the 22nd state to ensure that pregnant workers do not have to choose between a paycheck and a healthy pregnancy. ABB worked closely with local advocates and lawmakers to make the PWFA a reality. Congratulations to our partners at MotherWoman, the coalition leading the PWFA effort in Massachusetts, and to all others who worked on this campaign!
We are continuing to work with advocates in Massachusetts to further progress for working families. Raise Up Massachusetts, the coalition we supported as they fought for and won paid sick days for the Bay State, recently filed for a 2018 ballot initiative to enact paid family and medical leave. We are proud to be part of this innovative effort to ensure that all working families can access the paid leave they need.
Washington State also achieved a significant victory for working families this summer. In July, Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed the state’s new paid family and medical leave law. Washington is the sixth U.S jurisdiction to enact such a law and the third to do so in the last two years. Workers will be able to take leave under the law starting in 2020.