Now that Iran has apparently taken its "fierce revenge" on two American bases in Iraq -- an attack our Administration knew about beforehand because this has all been one big drama, people! -- House Democrats will bring a War Powers resolution to a vote today, a resolution that would restrict our President from taking future military action against Iran without the Congressional approval our Constitution demands. Hence both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Win Without War help you tell your Congressfolk to support a War Powers resolution that would restrain our President. Also, if you want to take to the streets today to protest war with Iran, then No War With Iran! helps you find a demonstration near you. Don't believe the hype that we shouldn't "hamstring our President" from "protecting Americans," because "protecting Americans" is nowhere near as important to this President as pretending to be tough before the cameras, and also because if any President demands hamstringing, it's this one. And if any President demands it, then all Presidents must get it.
Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell the CEOs of chocolate-producing corporations Mars, Hershey, and Nestlé to stop using child labor to make their candy bars. Some two million kids in West Africa (you have to go where the cocoa grows, after all) work on growing and harvesting cocoa, which involves using heavy instruments and spraying pesticides; some of them are as young as 10 years old, and they might make very little money or they might make no money. Once again we must ask ourselves: is this the world we would have made? A world where we force kids to do hard labor to make candy bars? I know someone is going to pipe up with well you don't want your candy bars to cost ten dollars each, do you? I would advise that person to do three things: 1) slap themselves, 2) contemplate how little effect the $20 fast-food worker wage in Denmark has on the price of a Big Mac there, and 3) slap themselves again, because "cheap goods" does not excuse evil.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4348/S. 2491, the PAW and FIN Act, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. The PAW and FIN Act would (and this is becoming a sad refrain!) roll back Administration rules that make it easier for polluters to kill off endangered and/or threatened animal species. For example, our Administration would force our policymakers to consider the "economic costs" of listing a species as threatened, and by "economic costs" you know they mean the cost to some executive or other who now won't be able to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home? They sure don't mean "jobs"; why, they don't even say jobs! Big thinkers in the Administration don't consider that money always goes away, but a species we protect from extinction can live forever. This focus on short-term executive pay rather than the things that last -- why, it's like this Administration isn't conservative at all.
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