Voters in Greece gave the leftist party SYRIZA a near-majority of Parliament seats on Sunday, and then SYRIZA then promptly formed a coalition government with the far-right, anti-bailout party Independent Greeks; some of the Independents' platform is unpalatable, but it would be nice to see populists on left and right come together to do some good for once. Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell our government to encourage foreign governments to negotiate fairly with Greece. What's there to negotiate? Greece has had three-count-'em-three bailouts, but with austerity policies forced down its people's collective throat as a condition thereof, hence Greece still has a 25% unemployment rate. Syriza won the elections after promising more public investment, less cutting of public services and jobs, and a better debt repayment deal -- in short, Syriza promised a path that might actually result in economic recovery. We can help them on this path by encouraging European nations to negotiate a deal that better ensures Greece's self-sufficiency, versus the continued enrichment of EU cronies.
President Obama will submit a budget proposal to Congress soon, and Public Citizen helps you tell the President to include a financial transaction tax, also known as a "Robin Hood tax," in that proposal. Republicans will declare it DOA, but let's at least make them oppose what's actually in it -- let's make them argue that an 0.03 or 0.5 percent tax (that's respectively three one-hundredths of one percent and half of one percent, "liberal" media) is a job-killer or an economy-killer. Fact is, the vast majority of all Wall Street stock transactions are now done by computer software, and they don't build or re-build economies -- these transactions don't loan money to businesses so they can develop innovative products or processes, but merely allow banksters to make money without doing any of the work that helps great nations rise. And even the tiniest Robin Hood tax will raise billions of dollars annually in revenues, without hitting working families with higher taxes or Medicare and Social Security cuts. Why are these such bad things again?
Meanwhile, Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell the Bureau of Land Management to protect the Chaco Canyon area of New Mexico from fracking. Chaco Canyon, in the Four Corners region where four Western U.S. states meet, sits on a motherlode of shale gas, but gas drilling corporations have already demonstrated that they can't perform hydraulic fracturing (or "fracking") anywhere without polluting the air and water. They also can't do it without exacerbating the ill effects of climate change, because fracking releases a lot of methane into the air, and methane is much, much better at trapping heat than even carbon dioxide. There's a law and order element to this, too -- by its own account, the BLM has never properly researched the effects of fracking in the Chaco Canyon area, and its own resource plan forbids fracking in that area, but they've still approved nearly 120 fracking wells and have also leased some 20,000 acres in the Santa Fe national forest for gas drilling. If you can't ensure drilling in our national treasures is safe, maybe government is not the right place for you.
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