Last week we learned that the FBI not only made mortgage fraud its lowest priority in its investigations -- this after the Department of Justice promised that mortgage fraud would be a considerably higher priority. You may remember that Attorney General Eric Holder spent the eight-year wilderness of Tha Bush Mobb years lawyering for banksters and thus conclude: this is news? Yes -- it is always news when our government fails to fulfill not only its implicit promise to work on behalf of its owners, the American people, but its stated promises to do so. Hence Daily Kos joins with Action for the Common Good and the Home Defenders League to help you tell the Justice Department to make mortgage fraud investigation a higher priority. To think banksters have the nerve to compare people angry at them with Nazis! Banksters have made money hand over fist in the five-plus years since they crashed our economy with their greed and venality, and now that they're also the nation's biggest landlord, they'll keep making that easy money. Our duty? To make them pay for the damage they've done.
Meanwhile, Body Shop has begun to receive some bad PR for sourcing mica -- which it uses in products such as lipstick, eyeshadow, and nail polish -- from Indian mining corporations which use child labor in their mines. You remember India, the poster child for Neoliberal Economies that Really Work? Sure these economies work -- for their paymasters, but not for the vast majority of the world's population slaving away in dangerous and illegal mines and getting paid in dung pellets. So Sum of Us helps you tell Body Shop to stop using child labor. Yes, I know, L'Oreal owns Body Shop, but surely Body Shop is no mere puppet, right? And don't believe the hype that demanding moral behavior of corporations results in higher prices for consumers -- all it really demands is that corporate CEOs pay themselves less money, and maybe forego gilding the plumbing on their 19th vacation home. (This "hype," by the way, comes from people as high up as the British Prime Minister. Excuse me, I mean the former Labour British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, not the current Tory British Prime Minister, though I don't imagine Mr. Cameron's views on the matter are any better.)
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to rescind the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) which has led us into the Afghanistan and Iraq quagmires and which threatens to lead us into future quagmires, then both CREDO and the Friends Council for National Legislation help you do that. Note that each action alert references different bills -- the CREDO alert asks you to support Rep. Lee's bill, H.R. 3852, and the FCNL alert asks you to support Rep. Schfif's bill, H.R. 2324; the latter bill repeals the AUMF on the last day of 2014, while the former repeals it immediately. And there's hope for these efforts -- last year's vote to repeal the AUMF fell only 33 votes short in the House of Representatives. Think such a vote would have received 185 votes in the 2004 or 2006 Congresses? Of course, the accomplished fearmonger George W. Bush was President then, and his successor is, at the very least, a rather less accomplished fearmonger. So now's the time to get this bill passed, lest the American people elect Scott Walker, a more accomplished fearmonger than Messrs. Bush and Obama combined, President in 2016.
Comments