24 Hours to Stop Keystone XL

We have 24 hours to stop the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

The Senate could vote as early as Tuesday on a deal that would greenlight construction of the pipeline. After President Obama rejected Keystone XL last month, many Senators are rushing to resurrect it in order to protect their friends, Big Oil. As you read this, the oil industry is tightening the screws on the remaining Senators they need to get this thing passed.

To stop them, we need a remarkable response. That’s why for the next 24 hours we’re uniting with a coalition of good government groups to blitz the Senate with messages from across the country demanding that they reject Keystone XL. Our goal is to collect and send 500,000 messages between now and the vote on Keystone. Dozens of organizations are working together, and we will be joined by bloggers, media figures, and our celebrity allies to make our message unavoidable.

We don’t have a second to lose. Can you sign the petition to the Senate right away and then share it with your friends?

There is no way to build Keystone XL that does not accelerate production of the tar sands and contribute disastrous amounts of carbon to climate change. The only people benefiting from this pipeline will be Big Oil – every single claim about the positive economic impacts has been proven false by independent review.

For the next 24 hours, it’s all hands on deck. We’ve rigged together some online tools to help you email your friends, share the petition on Twitter and Facebook. But we also need you texting everyone you know, calling up your mother and asking her to sign on, shouting out the news from the rooftops.

On Tuesday at noon, a team in Washington, DC will march into the Senate with 50 giant boxes, each holding 10,000 signatures (or more!). It will be a unified show of our power: our voices against the dollars of the fossil fuel industry.

Thanks for everything you’ve done already. Let’s make the next 24 hours a big, big deal.

The Best New Year’s Resolution: Leave your bank in 2012.

Quit smoking; read more; eat healthier – all great plans for 2012. But when it comes to new year’s resolutions, there’s only one that’s going to change the year for everybody: Leave Your Bank, and Move Our Money from the big banks in 2012.

Declare your New Year’s Resolution with thousands of other people today: in 2012, we’re going to Move Our Money.

Moving your money out of megabanks like Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America is not only a good thing for our economy – it’s a good thing for your wallet and your community.

Instead of paying ridiculous fees and needless surchanges, your money will be doing good closer to where you live – whether that’s through a credit union that serves non-corporate people, or a community bank that invests in your hometown.

Let the word know: in 2012, you’re going to move your money out of the megabanks once and for all.

Been delinquent on moving your money in the past? This is the perfect opportunity to finally get it done: let the world know it’s going to take place, and give yourself the entire year to make it happen.

End The Banker Bonuses This Holiday Season

Did you know we could end the unemployment crisis this very moment?

It’s very simple – if last year’s bank executive bonuses from the six biggest financial firms we bailed out went to creating jobs with middle-class jobs with benefits, the unemployment rate would plummet to 6.75% – the same as before the financial crisis.¹

The banker bonuses have gotten more and more obscene – and instead of spending the money we gave them in the bailout on hiring new workers or failproofing their risky investments, the big banks are lavishing their executives with unearned bonuses. Even worse, that bonus money represents a small percentage of their total compensation – they could do the right thing and only take a small hit on their overall take-home pay.

How bad has it gotten? Even worse than we feared: According to the latest data on year-end bank bonuses, 3.5 million jobs with benefits could’ve been created by spending last year’s reported executive bonuses from only six firms: Wells Fargo, Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and CitiBank.²

Are they serious? At a time when record numbers of Americans are dealing with joblessness created by their financial crash, and homelessness created by their forged foreclosures? The big bank attitude seems to be “Big Bonus for me – the rest of you can go Scrooge Yourself.” Well, we’re not going to take it this holiday season.

Join us in sending a message to the big banks TODAY: it’s time to spend the bonus money on human needs, not executive greed. You can refuse the bonuses – or accept us Occupying your bonuses.

Some of the most brilliant economic minds to predict the financial crisis are now calling attention to the awful risk and moral hazard presented by out-of-control banker bonuses. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has taken to the New York Times editorial page with an inconvenient truth: it’s time to eliminate banker bonuses.³

Bonuses are particularly dangerous because they invite bankers to game the system by hiding the risks of rare and hard-to-predict but consequential blow-ups, which I have called “black swan” events. The meltdown in the United States subprime mortgage market, which set off the global financial crisis, is only the latest example of such disasters.

1. “Big Banks Bonus Bonanza Annual Report 2010“, Appendix: Total Job Creation By Bank, SEIU; Extrapolation of job data taken from “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey“, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Department of Labor.
2. Ibid.
3. “Taleb: Banker bonuses should be banned“, Boing Boing.

It’s Time For Clarence Thomas To Recuse Himself

Watch our first letter delivery to Justice Thomas:



Associate Justice Clarence Thomas is set to hear a landmark case on President Obama’s Affordable Care Act – even though he has a direct financial stake in its failure. Justice Thomas needs to recuse himself.

How blatant is Justice Thomas’ conflict of interest? 74 members of Congress urged him to recuse himself from any decision regarding the ACA – more than six months before it even reached the Supreme Court. Justice Thomas only revealed under longstanding legal obligation that opposing the ACA brought his household hundreds of thousands of dollars through his spouse Ginni Thomas’ lobbying – with promises of future gigs if she can defeat the piece of legislation before the bulk of it goes into effect.

Sign our emergency letter to Justice Thomas today: Recuse yourself from ruling on President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

This isn’t a question of legal philosophy – this is a question of being honest. It’s time for Justice Thomas to recuse himself.

We echo the 74 members of Congress who joined earlier this year to affirm the following:

The appearance of a conflict of interest merits recusal under federal law. From what we have already seen, the line between your impartiality and you and your wife’s financial stake in the overturn of health care reform is blurred. Your spouse is advertising herself as a lobbyist who has ‘experience and connections’ and appeals to clients who want a particular decision – they want to overturn health care reform. Moreover, your failure to disclose Ginni Thomas’s receipt of $686,589 from the Heritage Foundation, a prominent opponent of health care reform, between 2003 and 2007 has raised great concern.

This is not the first case where your impartiality was in question. As Common Cause points out, you ‘participated in secretive political strategy sessions, perhaps while the case was pending, with corporate leaders whose political aims were advanced by the [5-4] decision’ on the Citizens United case.

Given these facts, there is a strong conflict between the Thomas household’s financial gain through your spouse’s activities and your role as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.