World Events:
Bush's EPA wants to let corporate polluters off the hook - you can stop them!
The EPA is threatening to remove one of the most important tools we have for protecting ourselves against industrial polluters by proposing to scale back corporate reporting requirements under the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) program. Since this program was created back in the early 1980s, the TRI has provided the public with critical information about the chemicals that pose a serious threat to our health, while simultaneously providing incentives for companies to reduce their toxic emissions.There is no justification for weakening this successful program, other than to please large corporate polluters, who view public disclosure as a costly nuisance.
Join others in sending a strong message to the Bush Administration that this is unacceptable public policy in a democracy! It's extremely critical that we fight this misguided and dangerous attempt to curtail corporate responsibility to the American public.
The EPA is accepting public comments only until January 13, 2005. Don't miss this chance to be included in the public record!
Bushís Snoopgate
The president was so desperate to kill The New York Timesí eavesdropping story, he summoned the paperís editor and publisher to the Oval Office. But it wasnít just out of concern about national security.Kashmir, Kashmir
The unshaken world looked on in horror as school buildings collapsed on children during the Kashmir earthquake. Carrie and I watched a man clawing at rubble because his little girl or boy was somewhere under there. A television journalist, reporting from the scene, said every child in that village had died.Television journalists report on all kinds of awful events from all kinds of places, and it is part of their job to calmly relate even the most terrible facts. Yet this particular television journalist, standing just a few feet away from the grief-maddened parent, looked as if he, too, had been crying.
Then the 24-hour news cycle turned its attention to the next scandal, the next storm, the next talking point.
But the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India who survived the earthquake donít have the option to change the channel. Three million are homeless and a harsh mountain winter is setting in. Three million who survived will die in the coming weeks if not enough is done to help them.
It will take money and effort. And both are wanting.
You would think the governments of rich western nations would consider saving three million lives a no-brainer. For one thing, they are human lives, and from our pulpits and benches we constantly and truthfully proclaim that human life is an absolute value.
There are humanitarian reasons to make every effort to save these lives. There are ethical reasons, spiritual reasons, and even (though it is horrible to say so) political reasons, given that most victims are Muslim and the west has, to say the least, not done the best job of winning Muslim friends lately. But that is just logic and ethics and the religious duty of one human being to another, and thus not enough is being done.
So it is up to us, the people, to reach into our pockets and give whatever we can to aid agencies working to save lives in South and Central Asia.
Exxonerate ExxonMobil?
In the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, America is facing many challenges. One of the challenges facing the Bush administration and Congress is how to pay for the much needed but costly rebuilding efforts underway along America's Gulf Coast.Last week, ExxonMobil announced a record breaking $9.9 billion in profits. As if that weren't enough, Congress recently gave the oil and gas industry, including ExxonMobil $10.7 billion in tax breaks. It simply does not make sense for taxpayers to subsidize an incredibly profitable multi-billion dollar industry while Congress slashes programs for the most needy.
That's why 21 environmental and consumer groups have come together to demand that ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond decline the tax breaks and subsidies from the federal government. Click here to join us in demanding that ExxonMobil does the right thing by declining these unfair tax breaks.
Don't Be Duped by Bottled Water
If bottled water is not necessarily cleaner or safer than public water, why have bottled water sales doubled in the United States over the past decade? And why do one of six people in the United States only drink bottled water?Sad Democrat? Become Republican!
Here's how.Exiles from a city and from a nation
By Cornel WestIt takes something as big as Hurricane Katrina and the misery we saw among the poor black people of New Orleans to get America to focus on race and poverty. It happens about once every 30 or 40 years.
What we saw unfold in the days after the hurricane was the most naked manifestation of conservative social policy towards the poor, where the message for decades has been: 'You are on your own'.
Sorting Out Opinion From Fact On Katrina
The Bush White House is furiously spinning to lay the blame on the Governor and Mayor of Louisiana.However, the Governor followed the appropriate protocol and, in accordance with the National Response Plan (NRP), asked the President in accordance with the Stafford Act, to declare a State of Emergency.
Now MSNBC is spinning the myth that the President had to "beg" the Governor of Louisiana to take action.
Frustrated: Fire crews to hand out fliers for FEMA
ATLANTA - Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?"As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.
Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.
