Senator Warren and Senator Merkley need your help. It’s important!

Two Federal Reserve Board seats are open, and the President will soon decide who should fill them.

In addition to setting monetary policy, the Fed is the single most important  financial regulator and has a hugely important role in determining how the financial system works and who it works for.

The makeup of the Fed’s Board of Governors will be felt in countless decisions about whether or not we will have a fairer, simpler, and more stable banking system.

Tell the White House now: nominate Fed Governors with a deep commitment to reform and a hard-nosed understanding of Wall Street’s dangerous ways.

Senators Warren and Merkley put it clearly in a letter to the White House:  “It is critical that the two remaining nominees for the Board be leaders who possess expertise in financial regulation and have demonstrated a strong commitment to financial reform.”

We agree.  So let’s add as many voices as we can to the delivery of this crucial message.

America is still living with the effects of the 2008 financial crisis. Tens of millions of families have suffered the loss of jobs, homes, and massive amounts of household wealth as a result of Wall Street abuses enabled by a generation of bank-coddling regulators. The Fed was a huge culprit, failing to do its job to crack down on predatory lending or high-risk gambling.

Today, the big Wall Street banks are bigger than ever and remain a source of tremendous risk to the economy. Too many of the reforms mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 have yet to be implemented, and the financial industry is working overtime to derail the process permanently. That makes it more crucial than ever to have Fed governors with a record of standing up for reform.

When the position of Fed Chair was open earlier this year, Senator Warren, Senator Merkley, and countless people like us spoke up, and we knew we had made a tremendous difference when President Obama nominated Janet Yellen instead of Larry Summer.   We can make that kind of difference again.

Tell President Obama to nominate Fed candidates who will stand up for everyday Americans and against Wall Street’s risky behavior.

Thank you for your attention.

Sincerely,

Jim Lardner
Americans for Financial Reform

| By CAP Action War Room

Hobby Lobby’s Effects Are Being Felt Beyond Birth Control

It’s been almost three months since the Supreme Court ruled in the Hobby Lobby case that for-profit, secular businesses who have religious objections to birth control may defy federal rules requiring that they include contraceptive care in their employees’ health plans because it violates the employer’s religious liberty rights.

The ripple effect of the Hobby Lobby decision could lead to a cascade of poor outcomes for the nation. And now, the repercussions of that decision are starting to come out — including the potential for it to be broadened even farther and threaten the rights of even more people, including children.

First: A federal judge in Utah cited the Hobby Lobby decision to say that a member of a polygamous religious sect could refuse to testify in a federal investigation into alleged violations of child labor laws because he objects to testifying on religious grounds. The case involves the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), which broke off from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the domination commonly known as Mormons — due to a century-old dispute over polygamy. (The sect’s leader is currently in prison after he was convicted of sexually assaulting two underage girls — the youngest of whom was 12 years-old — that he claimed have taken as wives.) Before Hobby Lobby, it’s unlikely that the claim would prevail. Although federal law offers fairly robust protections for religious liberty, this law only applies when the federal government “substantially burden[s] a person’s exercise of religion.” Hobby Lobby, however, largely wrote the word “substantially” out of this law.

Second: Religious conservatives are admitting what they really want out of Hobby Lobby, which is to push the decision even further and restrict birth control access even more. Last month, the Obama administration announced an accommodation for employers with religious objections: they can exempt themselves completely from the federal rule requiring employer-provided health plans to cover birth control, so long as they inform the government that they seek a religious exemption and tells them which company administers their health plan. But now, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty — the same Becket Fund that represented Hobby Lobby in its successful lawsuit in the Supreme Court — has filed a court document on behalf of Ave Maria University, saying that even that degree of accommodation is insufficient. Ava Maria doesn’t even think they should be required to let the government know that they are not providing their employees birth control at all. If the justices honor Ave Maria’s idiosyncratic objection, then it is unclear that the Obama administration could design any accommodation that will survive the Supreme Court.

Third: What if children with parents who have religious objections to vaccines could attend public schools, and those public schools could not compel them to get vaccines? That is a very real possibility with widening religious liberty exemptions. In all 50 states, schools require students to get vaccinated for preventable diseases like measles, mumps, whooping cough, polio, and chicken pox before they enroll. But parents are increasingly obtaining a non-medical exemption to the requirement through a “philosophical objection” loophole. For example, compared to just seven years ago, twice as many California parents are deciding against vaccinating their kindergartners, according to public health experts in the state. This past year, California has faced a record-breaking whooping cough epidemic.

BOTTOM LINE: The Hobby Lobby ruling is already having effects that go beyond the Supreme Court ruling. These decisions ignore a fundamental fact: religious liberty is the right to practice religion as you wish and the freedom to not have religion imposed on you by others, especially corporations.

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Yesterday, after months of pressure and the signatures of nearly 115,000 people, Google announced it was ending its support for the American Legislative Exchange Council.

This is not just a victory for us, but for the millions of Americans whose lives are made more difficult by ALEC’s anti-environment, anti-education and anti-worker agenda.

Our voices are being heard – Google’s exit followed quickly on the heels of Microsoft’s departure from the group less than a month ago.

Now it’s time for Facebook to join them. Please, help us turn up the pressure on Facebook by telling them to leave ALEC – today!

Across the country, people are pushing back against backroom deals and pay-to-play politics. They know that ALEC and the crooked politicians they work with have no place in our state legislatures.

With your help, we’ve shone a light on ALEC’s greed and power grabs. That’s why more than 90 corporations and 400 state legislators across the country have pulled their support from ALEC in just the past few years.

So, take a moment to savor this great victory and then help keep this momentum going by signing our petition telling Facebook to say goodbye to ALEC.

Thanks for your great work,

Marisol

Could a Fukushima-scale nuclear disaster happen here?

If we raise an additional $200,000 this September, a UCS donor will give a $1 million grant to fund our Center for Science and Democracy.

Fracking companies hide hundreds of chemicals from public scrutiny—blasting them into our own backyards. We all have a right to know what may be threatening our families’ health and safety.

Help change the policies that keep fracking secret. Donate now.

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