In light of the New England Journal of Medicine study suggesting that the actual death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria is at least twelve times higher than the official death count, Climate Hawks Vote helps you tell your Congressfolk to do more to ensure Puerto Rico's recovery from the Hurricane. Specifically, you'd ask Congress to offer Puerto Rico more aid and more debt forgiveness, help Puerto Rico rebuild so that it stays in public hands and uses more renewable energy, and investigate our Administration's incompetence in helping Puerto Rico rebuild. I rate the first two items as the most important -- banksters have saddled Puerto Rico with debt the way they saddled Greece with debt, and those same banksters would love nothing more than to privatize Puerto Rico's power grid. They call it an opportunity to steal more of the people's wealth, but I call it an opportunity to do things right, and we should make the best of it.
Meanwhile, with "liberal" media coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict so weighted toward Israel, Roots Action helps you tell "liberal" media outlets to provide more coverage of Palestinian activists and victims, and more context for reports of violence in the region. Roots Action's petition also helps you demand that reporting on Israeli killing of Palestinians "use the active voice," which is to say, none of this "such-and-such number of people died in a clash" when the actual story is "Israeli forces killed x number of Palestinians." You know that "liberal" media types, who are so proud of knowing so much more about writing than you or I, will be insulted to be told to use active verbs. As you know, they have the same problem discussing police killings -- though not Palestinian killings of Israelis. The American people are nowhere near as one-sided about these issues as our elites in government and media are -- and our media need to recognize that.
Finally, Illinois recently became the 37th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. But wait, you may be asking, didn't the Equal Rights Amendment expire decades ago? Well, it's true that Congress did write the Equal Rights Amendment with an expiration, but it's also true that the Constitution plainly does not require an amendment to be passed within a certain period of time -- in fact, Congress first passed the 27th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (concerning Congressional pay) in 1789, but the 38th state didn't ratify it until 1992, or 203 years later, if you're keeping score at home. So United4Equality helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them to support H.J.Res. 53/S.J.Res. 5, which would excise the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment, thus bringing it back to life. (Don't believe it if ERA opponents try to tell you that changing the amendment would, or should, require a revote -- Congress changes laws all the time, and doesn't require revotes on those laws when they do!)
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