Tag Archives: obama

Yesterday, a group of courageous people just like you were arrested in the belly of the beast: TransCanada’s U.S. headquarters in Houston, Texas. These were mothers, fathers, grandfathers, great grandmothers, scientists, and teachers who staged a peaceful sit-in with a clear message: No Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

At RAN we have a policy never to ask you to take an action, online or offline, that we don’t believe will make a strategic difference and have an impact that is worth your time. What I’m about to ask you to do might be one of the most important political acts you take this year.

Right now President Obama and his State Department are weighing their decision on whether this disastrous dirty energy pipeline is in our national interest. Our job must be to show enough opposition to the pipeline to ensure the president stands on the right side of this historical moment. That’s why we need you to join those standing up against Keystone XL in protest.

Will you join more than 75,000 people saying No to Keystone XL? Sign up for an action near you TODAY!

More than 75,000 people, including many of you, have signed RAN, Other 98% and CREDO’s Pledge of Resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline—pledging to participate in peaceful civil disobedience, to risk arrest if necessary, to stop this dangerous tar sands pipeline.

This is our next big step in the Pledge of Resistance together. This summer, after months of hard work and organizing, more than 400 volunteers have stepped up to lead acts of dignified protest in towns and cities across the country.

Will you join them by signing up today to participate in a local protest in your hometown?

To be clear, this is a serious request of your time, your passion and, potentially, your liberty. We’re asking now because it’s critical.

These actions are coming together because of months of work by literally hundreds of people. A group of seasoned direct action organizers built a training curriculum and traveled to cities around the country to teach people like you how to plan and lead a safe, strategic sit-in. Hundreds of activists stepped up to attend these rigorous two-day weekend trainings, and then went home to put that training into action. Now we’re asking: Will you join them?

The dates for these local actions have not been set, but the dates of action trainings have. We’re asking everyone to get in touch with local action leaders so we can prepare for action now and are ready to respond if President Obama signals his intention to approve the pipeline. That is our most strategic window to have the biggest impact.

Find your nearest Pledge of Resistance action and sign up to be a part of it!

Soon after you sign up for an action, you’ll be contacted by your local action leader, who will send out a time for your group to meet in person, get trained up, and move forward to put together everything you will need for a local sit-in action. There will be roles for everyone: those risking arrest and those not risking arrest.

The location for these actions will be relevant to your town. Likely locations will be: Administration buildings like State Department, EPA and Federal offices, oil industry contractor offices, and branches of TD Bank, a major investor in tar sands development.

All that’s missing is you.

		In Solidarity,
		Scott Parkin Senior Energy and Finance Campaigner Twitter:@dirtyenergy

P.S. Got questions? Check out http://nokxl.org/why-pledge-resistance/.

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

$#!^@#%!

09/24/2013 Nativegrl77

CAP Action War Room

GOP Takes Obamacare Meltdown To A Whole New Level

A mere seven days remain for Congress to pass a spending bill in order to avoid a government shutdown. But Republicans are farther away than ever from agreeing to a reasonable plan that would keep the government open.

On Friday, the House GOP continued its march toward shutdown by passing a bill that ties keeping the government open to–surprise!–fully defunding Obamacare. Once again, Republicans refuse to do the hard work of actual governing in favor of playing political games that threaten to sabotage the economy. But while the vote only solidified the GOP’s ideological and dangerous strategy, it opened the floodgates for more infighting among its owns members. Here is what a number of key GOP players and establishment thinkers have to say about the “defund at all costs” plan:

GOP Sen. John McCain (AZ): “I can tell you that in the U.S. Senate, we will not repeal or defund Obamacare. We will not. And to think we can is not rational.”
GOP Strategist Karl Rove: The GOP defunding strategy is “self-defeating…It is an ill-conceived tactic, and Republicans should reject it.”
Fox News Host Bill O’Reilly: Defunding Obamacare is “fanaticism on the right,” O’Reilly says. “There’s no way Obamacare is going to be defunded. It’s not gonna happen.”
GOP Sen. Tom Coburn (OK): “Tactics and strategies ought to be based on what the real world is, and we do not have the political power to do this.”
GOP Sen. Rand Paul (KY): “I’m acknowledging we can’t probably defeat or get rid of Obamacare.”
GOP Sen. Kelly Ayotte (NH): “I don’t believe they should shut down the government to [defund Obamacare], and I don’t think that is a strategy that is good for America.”
GOP Sen. Johnny Isakson (GA): “It’s total atrophy. We’re earning our 11 percent popularity. It’s easier to talk about Obamacare than the major sources of our problems.”
Wall Street Journal Editorial Board: “Kamikaze missions rarely turn out well, least of all for the pilots… The kamikazes could end up ensuring the return of all-Democratic rule.”

Now, they all may just be trying to protect their party’s interests. But they seem to know what most Americans already do: the extreme demands by the GOP to push a narrow ideological agenda are out of touch. A new bipartisan CNBC poll released today proves that point. Almost six in ten Americans oppose defunding the health care law if it means a government shutdown, while just 19 percent support. A poll released last week found that only 23 percent of Americans want to make the health care law fail.

BOTTOM LINE: Republicans’ political games are threatening our nation’s economic recovery. Americans don’t want to shut down the government and want an end to the hostage-taking political tactics that place ideology over practical solutions for stability and growth.

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

a message from David Simas

09/18/2013 Nativegrl77

Hello, everyone —

In the early hours of September 15, 2008, five years ago last Sunday, Lehman Brothers announced it would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Lehman was a giant of the financial system — the fourth-largest investment bank in the US, a firm that employed thousands of brokers and analysts, with billions in assets that were suddenly worthless — and its collapse sent shock waves through the global economy.

Suddenly, it was obvious that the next president of the United States would inherit a staggering economic crisis. But the challenge that President Obama was forced to confront didn’t just begin in 2008. Even before Lehman Brothers, middle-class security had been slowly eroding for decades as jobs became obsolete or were shipped overseas.

So as we mark this anniversary, we’ve asked senior staff from across the Obama administration to sit down and talk about the moment when key decisions were made — the factors they weighed, the results of the actions that President Obama took. What we’ve put together is a behind-the-scenes look of the decision-making process that you won’t find anywhere else.

Check out the story of America’s recovery, then share it with your friends.

By the end of 2008, the economy was shrinking by an annual rate of more than 8 percent, our businesses were shedding 800,000 jobs a month, and credit was frozen for families and small businesses. We were in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. On the day that I first began working in the White House in 2009, the auto industry was on the brink of collapse and the President was wrestling with how to help the millions of families in thousands of communities who would have been devastated if the motor companies died.

That’s the lens through which President Obama saw his responsibilities, and it’s a consistent theme in all the stories we’ve collected. Every decision he made was meant to stop the economy from spiraling out of control, put people back to work, and reverse the trends that had buffeted middle class for decades. The task was nothing short of monumental — to clear away the rubble of the crisis and lay down a new foundation for sustained economic growth in the United States.

There’s no diminishing the severity of the challenge we’ve overcome together, and we’ve got a lot more work to do to rebuild an economy where everyone who works hard has a chance to get ahead. But five years after Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, we want to help everyone get the context and see the full picture.

Take a minute to learn more about where we are five years after the start of the financial crisis:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/five-years-later

Thanks!

David

David Simas Deputy Senior Advisor The White House @Simas44

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

53 days

09/09/2013 Nativegrl77

We can’t let West, Texas happen again. west TX chemical explosion

It’s time for the President to take action. Send a message to President Obama right now and urge the administration to adopt better safety standards for chemical plants!

Rick Hind, Greenpeace

A small town in Texas will never be the same after fifteen people lost their lives when a fertilizer plant exploded back in April.

The explosion was so big it registered as a 2.1 magnitude earthquake and destroyed a 37-block area of West, Texas. The most tragic part of it all is that the explosion along with the death and destruction that followed didn’t have to happen.

There are safe, affordable alternatives to the dangerous chemicals like the ones used in the Texas fertilizer plant available right now. But instead of making the switch, the chemical industry has chosen to spend its money lobbying Congress so that it can keep putting millions needlessly at risk. And up until now, that strategy was working.

Things are changing though. President Obama recently issued a directive to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop plans for new safety measure at chemical plants by November. What happens next is up to us. It’s your voice versus the chemical industry.

Send a message to President Obama and the EPA right now and urge them to adopt safety standards that prevent chemical disasters.

You’re likely close enough to a facility that stores or uses deadly chemicals, like chlorine gas, to be at risk if something unexpected were to happen. Most people in the U.S. are.

Chemical safety isn’t just an environmental issue — it impacts communities everywhere. That’s why we’ve been working closely with a diverse coalition of groups including labor and environmental justice groups to send a clear message to the administration: the time to act is now.

President Obama has been outspoken on this issue in the past. In fact, back when he was a Senator from Illinois he had this to say,: “We cannot allow chemical industry lobbyists to dictate the terms of this debate. We cannot allow our security to be hijacked by corporate interests.”

Take action and tell President Obama and the EPA that now’s the time to put those words into action and prevent another disaster like the one in West, Texas.

A decade ago the EPA proposed using the Clean Air Act to enforce commons sense rules for chemical plants like the one in West, Texas. For a decade Congress and two Presidents have been dragging their feet.

Legislation that would address this problem has completely stalled in Congress and is going nowhere thanks to the deep pockets of the chemical lobby. It’s up to the President to do the right thing and he needs our support to make it happen.

If the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the nuclear disaster in Fukushima and the West, Texas explosion have taught us anything in the last couple of years, it’s that disasters happen. There’s no sense for millions of Americans to remain needlessly at risk from dangerous chemicals when safer alternatives exist.

Tell President Obama you support him using his authority to do what Congress won’t, and put the safety and health of American citizens ahead of corporate interests.

Sincerely,

Rick Hind Greenpeace Legislative Director