The Obama Administration invaded Libya back in 2011 -- which has actually helped make matters there worse. So, naturally, the Obama Administration wants to escalate military action in Libya, because if you've failed at something, of course you should always do more of it! The excuse, as always, is "fighting ISIS." Anyone else notice that terrorist groups seem to show up wherever we invade? Think there might be a simple solution to that? Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell Congress to debate and vote on this new war in Libya (use the petition's comment section to tell Congress to reject this war, too), while Roots Action helps you tell Congress to block funding for this new war in Libya. Congress failed to stop the 2011 Libya war, then fiddled while the Obama Administration started bombing Syria and Iraq in 2014; soon the President will just bomb whomever wherever whenever under the "authority" of the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs. But Presidents must not have absolute power to make war, or Presidents will simply make war the very second they don't get what they want. And that's not democracy anymore.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to pass H.R. 2867/S. 1659, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. You know the drill by now: the Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, struck Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act -- the part listing the states and municipalities which must get pre-clearance from the U.S. Justice Department because of past voting rights violations -- on the grounds that it no longer responded to current affairs, though the fact that several of those states singled out by Section 4(b) immediately started implementing strict Voter ID restrictions would undercut that opinion somewhat. The Voting Rights Amendment Act would answer the Court's ruling (as the Court all but invited Congress to do) by mandating that any state or municipality that has established a pattern of voting rights violations must get Justice Department pre-clearance -- and given the proliferation of restrictive Voter ID laws all over America, a lot of those states and municipalities may well not be in the South, answering the Court's suggestion that Section 4(b) now "unfairly singles out" the South.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to investigate the allegedly racist lending practices of Clayton Homes, then Color of Change helps you do that. Clayton Homes financed more than seven out of every 10 mobile homes bought by black folks in 2014 -- and seven out of 10 sure sounds like a monopoly to me, and you know what happens with monopolies: they make their customers suffer. And sure enough, as the Mike Baker/Daniel Wagner article from late December in the Seattle Times reminds us, you have to clear a much higher bar if you're a black person to get an interest rate from Clayton similar to one a white person gets -- like, you have to make twice the money. And Clayton's interest rates are already twice the national average for mobile home loans -- which, again, is something you can do if you're a virtual monopoly. This is all very important stuff. We only live one life, after all, and its bad enough we spend so much of it making huge mortgage payments that, through the "magic" of compound interest, enrich banksters more than they enrich you. But being cheated more merely because of the color of your skin makes that even worse.
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