Months ago, our community decided on a crazy goal – the largest mobilisation on climate change in history. Yesterday, we blew past our wildest expectations, with a climate march *6 times* the size of anything before it!!! This was 80 city blocks of New York:

And this was London, Berlin, Bogota, Paris, Delhi, and Melbourne…

Over 675,000 of us marched around the world. It was a beautiful expression of our love for all that climate change threatens, and our hope that we can save this world and build a society powered by 100% safe, clean energy. Click to see more pictures from the day:

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/climate_march_reportback/?biEWLbb&v=46379

Together, we made history, but it’s just the beginning. The crucial Paris climate summit is 15 months from now — that’s where we need a global deal. By March next year, countries have pledged to make their national commitments — so our movement will divide to focus on these national targets. But every few months until Paris we’ll come together globally again and again, bigger and bigger, to beat a drum for change, for 100% clean energy, that our leaders can only follow. The movement we’ve been waiting for has begun.

With gratitude,

Ricken, Emma, Alice, Iain, Nataliya, Patri, Oliver, Diego, Rewan and the whole Avaaz team

PS – We worked with thousands of organisations to make this day happen and particularly love our friends at 350. But our community deserves to celebrate the step we’ve taken. The Avaaz team and community played a central role in almost all the marches and events held. The Guardian called it “an organising triumph” for Avaaz and the BBC said “the marches brought more people on to the streets than ever before, thanks to the organisational power of the social media site Avaaz.” We fielded hundreds of organisers and thousands of volunteers, and donations from our community provided millions in funding to the effort. The challenges of our time call us to be better, and together we’ve done that, growing and changing into a new and more effective kind of movement, a movement that is now both online, and offline. Huge gratitude to everyone who made it happen. 

National Women’s Law Center
Hobby Lobby. McCullen. Young?

If you’re a Supreme Court watcher, you probably know the first two are recent Supreme Court decisions of particular importance to women. But do you know about the third case, coming up next?

In its past term, the Supreme Court issued two rulings (Hobby Lobby v. Burwell and McCullen v. Coakley) that could potentially have a significant impact on both women’s health and women’s economic security. Although the legal issues in these cases differed, in both of its decisions the Court indicated that women’s reproductive health needs could be singled out for lesser legal protections.

Will the trend continue this Supreme Court term? The Court has already decided to hear the pregnancy discrimination case (Young v. UPS), and may see another contraceptive coverage case before the term is out.

Join our webinar on Thursday, October 2 at 1:00 p.m. ET to learn more about the new term and what Court’s decisions last term tell us about it.

Thanks for everything you do for women.

Sincerely,
Emily J. Martin
Vice President and General Counsel
National Women’s Law Center

Judy Waxman
Vice President for Health and Reproductive Rights
National Women’s Law Center

In this week’s address, the President thanked Congress for its strong bipartisan support for efforts to train and equip Syrian opposition forces to fight ISIL. This plan is part of the President’s comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy to degrade and destroy the terrorist group, and does not commit our troops to fighting another ground war. America, working with a broad coalition of nations, will continue to train, equip, advise, and assist our partners in the region in the battle against ISIL.

In the coming week, the President will speak at the United Nations General Assembly and continue to lead the world against terror, a fight in which all countries have a stake.

Click here to watch this week’s Weekly Address.

Top Stories

It’s On Us to Stop Sexual AssaultYesterday at the White House, President Obama joined Vice President Biden and Americans across the country to launch the “It’s On Us” initiative — an awareness campaign to help put an end to sexual assault on college campuses. “It’s On Us” asks everyone — men and women across America — to make a personal commitment to step off the sidelines and be part of the solution to campus sexual assault. READ MORE What’s a Continuing Resolution and Why Does It Matter? This week, Congress passed and President Obama signed something called a Continuing Resolution, an important measure that ensures our government has the resources necessary to address key domestic and national security goals in the months ahead. Want to learn what exactly a Continuing Resolution is and what this one includes? Here’s a few answers to some key questions that many Americans may be asking. READ MORE Stepping Up Our Efforts to Help Combat the Ebola Outbreak At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta on Tuesday, President Obama discussed the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and announced a major increase in our efforts to help fight the outbreak. While reiterating that the chances of an Ebola outbreak in the United States are very unlikely, the President emphasized that the outbreak is still a national security priority, and that the government has “devoted significant resources in support of our strategy.” READ MORE

I know we spend a lot of time talking about how Republicans’ plans will hurt the middle class.

So today, I’m going to change things up a bit. There are so many reasons voters should vote Democratic in November. Here are 5 reasons that I wanted you to focus on to demonstrate why everyone should vote Democratic this November:

1. We’re trying to overturn Citizens United.
2. We’re fighting the Koch brothers.
3. We’re refusing to end Medicare as we know it.
4. We’re refusing to privatize Social Security.
5. We’re defending a woman’s right to choose.

If those sound like good reasons to you, I hope you’ll consider pitching in $5 to help my team reach our $200,000 goal before the FEC deadline at the end of the month.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is doing invaluable work to make the markets for credit cards, mortgages and other financial products and services fairer and more transparent. And once again, the financial industry is going all-out to block those efforts.

The industry’s latest threat involves a proposal to make the CFPB’s complaint system more useful and user-friendly by giving consumers the right to include the specifics of their complaints in a searchable public database.

Please join us in telling the CFPB: Don’t back down from your proposal to let consumers share their stories publicly.

Hundreds of thousands of people have used the CFPB’s complaint system, and more than 30,000 cases have already resulted in monetary relief. Complaint data also helps the CFPB detect and respond to broader patterns of industry error or misconduct. The complaint system could be far more valuable, though, if consumers had the option of publicly describing their bad experiences. That way, consumers would be able to learn about the experiences of others and make more informed choices, and financial companies would have an added incentive to compete by actually trying to satisfy their customers, not by trying to put something over on them.

But financial companies, just as they fought the creation of the CFPB in the first place, are fighting its complaint proposal tooth and nail – through the press, through lobbying, and through a highly deceptive advertising campaign in which the industry falsely claims that businesses would not have an equal right to post their responses.

That’s why we need to fight back.  Urge the CFPB to stand firm and help consumers share their experiences and hold big banks accountable.

Speak up today, because the big banks are working feverishly hard to take away our chance to speak up in the future.

Thank you for your continued support for real financial reform.

Sincerely,

Lisa Donner
Executive Director
Americans for Financial Reform