President Obama wants another half-billion bucks for arms and for training "appropriately vetted" Syrian fighters. It's one thing to focus the harsh light of public opinion on Syria's leaders, who have been killing good Syrians for years, but it's another thing entirely to throw more guns into the mix, and if you've been following American foreign policy for the last few decades, then you have every reason to doubt our ability to "appropriately vet" foreign leaders. Oftentimes "appropriate vetting" based on good intelligence falls prey to turf wars and outdated paradigms, but it also falls prey to deadly sin number one, pride. And if you're still afraid that what will happen in Syria (or, for that matter, Iraq) will cause another huge terrorist attack in America, your fear doesn't justify doing just anything, and you need to remember that, once upon a time, Saddam Hussein was "our bastard" in Iraq, a Sunni counterweight to the emergent Shi'a regime in Iran. How did that work out for us? We fought Mr. Hussein not once but twice, taking him down the second time, and in the process made Iran stronger. Oh, sure, a bunch of Administration cronies got very rich off our wars, but we-the-people didn't even benefit very much from all the alleged trickle-down. Hence Roots Action helps you, the war-weary, to tell President Obama and Congress to reject further military involvement in Syria.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to support S.J.Res. 19, the Constitutional amendment that would allow Congress and state legislatures to make laws limiting campaign contributions and thus undoing the damage done by the Supreme Court's judicial activism in Citizens United v. FEC, then Roots Action (what is it, Roots Action day?) provides another one. When corporations and rich folks get to donate whatever they want to political campaigns, bad things happen: the very richest of these corporations and rich folks get more say about everything than everyone else, money that would be better spent hiring people to do useful things for society instead gets spent on misleading attack ads, and the wealthiest among us tend to "buy" huge tax breaks for themselves, which puts more of the tax burden upon the rest of us. This is a land where even two-thirds of rank-and-file Republicans thinks the Supreme Court got it wrong, but since the Senate is full of people who only listen to their richest campaign donors, we may need to do even more to persuade them to do the right thing. Hence Public Citizen, Common Cause, and USPIRG (among many other groups!) have organized rallies taking place tomorrow and Thursday, largely in front of Senators' offices; you can find a rally near you here.
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