If you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to finally debate, and then end, the war in Iraq and Syria, then Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you do that. Reps. McGovern (D-MA), Jones (R-NC), and Lee (D-CA) have introduced invoked the 1973 War Powers Act to bring forth a privileged resolution, H.Con.Res. 55, which aims to end the war President Obama started in Iraq and Syria late in 2014. President Obama says the 2001 AUMF gives him the authority to conduct air strikes (and, now, deploy ground troops) against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, but it doesn't -- the Constitution says only Congress can give him that authority, which they declined to do last year, mainly out of cynicism. And I do not believe that since we broke Iraq and created ISIS, we should fix it with more bombing and more fighting that will, one day, help create a group of monsters that even ISIS would find uncivilized. Negotiating with regional powers to fight ISIS is the only way to go. If that means we have to talk to Iran (which 47 of our Senators thought was a great idea a few months ago), so be it.
Meanwhile, closer to home, did you know that our laws let large coal corporations avoid fully insuring themselves against mine-related cleanup costs if they have, in theory, enough cash to pay for their cleanups themselves? Well, coal corporations are making less money than they used to -- not so much because of ZOMG TEH REGULASHUNZ!!!! as because of the rise of natural gas and (to a much lesser extent) the rise of renewable energies -- and now Peabody Energy, the world's largest coal corporation out of St. Louis, still lobbies our government to give it a break on cleanup insurance despite claiming losses of over $750 million last year. And I suppose if the government sticks to its guns here, Republicans will squeal WAR ON COAL!!!!! They should answer this: is breaking the law OK when your big coal donors do it? We should fix the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act so that coal corporations buy private cleanup insurance entirely, to ensure they'll clean up their mess without a taxpayer bailout, but in the meantime, we need to enforce the law as it is. So CREDO helps you tell our government to force Peabody to clean up its toxic mess.
Finally, the Sierra Club helps you tell the Bureau of Land Management to charge private gas and oil corporations more for the privilege of drilling on our public lands. If we must permit allow gas and oil drillers to pollute our public lands, we damn sure better get a fair price for that, but currently we're not even getting that -- we're getting a few dollars per acre for the right to drill on public lands. Which are, as I've said, our lands -- we are the owners of this land, and our government should be managing our lands in our interest. And if unfortunate realities mean they won't manage it in a way that protects our air and water, they should at least manage it in a way that gets us the largest financial return, and doesn't merely prop up unearned corporate profits. Personal to right-wing pimps: do not retort that doing so would hike energy prices, when CEOs have the power to pay themselves fewer millions of dollars every year and keep prices where they are, and certainly do not retort that charging more would "kill jobs," as if gas and oil drillers will suddenly replace all their workers with robots out of spite.
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