H.R. 5474, the Berta Caceres Human Rights in Honduras Act, would cut off our government's funding of military and police operations in Honduras, until the Honduran government conducts appropriate human rights investigations. The money ain't big, at least as far as our budget is concerned -- $18 million -- but you can bet Honduras is counting on it, and frankly it's well past time our government did something about a regime that overthrew the so-liberal-he-made-the-corporations-sad President in 2009 while our State Department was mulling over the precise definition of the word "coup." And this regime has apparently committed numerous human rights violations since then, including the murder of the Honduran activist Ms. Caceres in early March. A regime that detains, tortures, rapes, and murders its own people is a sorry regime indeed, but a regine that has the power to induce better behavior from such a regime but does nothing is a shameful one. Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 5474, and thus support human rights in Honduras.
Meanwhile, our government also plods on with the mindlessness of missile "defense," having built such "defense" sites in Alaska, California, and Romania and eager to build more of them in places like New York and Ohio. Why do I put "defense" in quotation marks? Because missile "defense" depends on notoriously inaccurate missiles suddenly acquiring the capability of shooting down other nation's missiles in mid-air, when those missiles can defend against our missiles easily (and inexpensively) with reflective paint or Mylar ballons as decoys. Furthermore, we know that "successful" missile defense tests are generally rigged so that they're impossible to fail! And what do missile "defense" proponents say when confronted with all of this evidence? Just launch more missiles at the incoming missile -- which, surely, our opponents would never think of! Hence Roots action helps you tell our government to scrap plans to expand our missile "defense" program. What should we do instead, you ask? Gosh, I don't know -- how about doing the hard work of making and maintaining peace?
Finally, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (or PHMSA) has actually proposed fairly strong pipeline safety rules -- which, naturally, the big energy corporations hate, because these rules would hamper their ability to redistribute worker income upward to executives. Good pipe safety regulation actually creates jobs, after all -- jobs for engineers and designers and inspectors and technicians -- and as any modern executive knows, you can't keep all the money yourself if you have to pay other people. But America has endured far too many pipeline bursts over the years, and these bursts aren't very easy to clean up (though they're fairly inexpensive to clean up, for the corporations who put crappy pipelines out there, as long as they can count on the government doing everything for them!). Indeed, you may recall how TransCanada's long record of skimping on pipeline safety helped doom its attempt to build the Keystone XL pipeline. So the Sierra Club helps you tell the PHMSA to implement the most vigorous pipeline safety rules possible.
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