Extremely high electric bill. I cannot afford these bills. Please HELP!!!

Vera Scroggins is a 63-year-old community activist who has been exercising her constitutionally guaranteed First Amendment rights and speaking out about the hazards of fracking. In retaliation, the Cabot Oil & Gas Corporation sought, and a judge granted, an injunction so broad it prevents Vera from entering a total of 312.5 square miles of land in her home state of Pennsylvania -- including the homes of some of her friends, her neighborhood grocery store, her eye doctor, and even the nearby hospital! While fracking companies may not appreciate activists who take a stand, we simply cannot allow them to so egregiously violate the freedom of speech and freedom of movement to which every American is entitled by the Constitution of the United States. Take a stand against corporate retaliation. Defend the constitutional rights of all Americans. And let Vera know you've got her back.

Urban Partnership Bank owes us a high-quality redevelopment of their longtime home at 71st & Jeffery. The current proposal to build a strip mall would destroy the historic architecture, density, and transit orientation of our neighborhood crossroads to make a quick buck. Hold Urban Partnership Bank to a higher standard: demand a sensitive reuse of the buildings for economic development that maintains the future potential of 71st & Jeffery to be a vibrant, attractive commercial crossroads - think 53rd Street in Hyde Park or 95th Street in Beverly.

IF OUR HIGHER MONEY MANAGERS CAN GET A PASS AND RUIN OUR ECONOMY AND WE HELP LIFT IT BACK, LET'S ALL GET A BREAK AND INCREASING OUR SCORES TO AUTOMATICALLY TO 700,N OW WE CAN BREAK EVEN.

Since September 2013, eleven universities – Duke University, University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Temple University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Georgetown University, Brown University, Penn State University, University of Wisconsin and Syracuse University – have formally required their brands producing collegiate apparel in Bangladesh to sign the Accord, as a condition of producing university apparel. This is a broad group of universities, representing Big Ten sports schools, Ivy League schools, and public schools. These universities’ actions have shown that there is nothing preventing universities like ours from taking a stand for workers rights. The time is now for Emerson College to follow the lead of these other universities and require its brands to sign the Accord. The actions of these universities are already making an impact on the behavior of brands in the collegiate market. In response to this growing university pressure, eight college-logo apparel brands – Fruit of the Loom, Adidas, Knights Apparel, Top of the World, New Agenda, Cutter & Buck, Ahead LLC and Zephyr Headwear – have signed the Accord since our campaign began. Fruit of the Loom's signing of the Accord is significant not only because it is the first company affiliated with the corporate-controlled, non-binding Gap/Walmart "Alliance" to also join the Accord, but also because it is the tenth U.S. company to join the Accord. Nevertheless, at the date of writing, several major licensees in Bangladesh, including Columbia Sportswear and VF Corporation, have refused to sign the Accord. This indicates a dire need for more universities to issue a formal requirement for their brands to sign. We would also like to clarify that, as part of the university requiring its brands to sign the Accord, we expect the university to terminate its licensing relationship with Jansport and VF Imagewear, unless their parent company VF Corporation signs the Accord. As you know, the WRC officially recommended to its affiliates in October 2013 that “colleges and universities add, to their existing labor rights requirements for licensees, a requirement that licensees that sourced, produced or purchased collegiate apparel in Bangladesh as of January 1, 2013, or do so at any point thereafter, become signatories to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh." VF Corporation, parent company of Jansport, VF Imagewear, North Face, Timberland, and Vans, contracts with a factory called Optimum Fashions in Bangladesh to produce collegiate VF Imagewear apparel. In August, the Worker Rights Consortium conducted a safety assessment of Optimum Fashion. After VF attempted to prevent the WRC from accessing the factory, the WRC’s inspection uncovered a number of very serious safety hazards, all of which constitute violations of university code of conduct provisions requiring licensees to maintain safe workplaces and any of which could result in injury or death to workers. These violations “included inadequate means for workers to escape the factory in the event of a fire and structural flaws that would facilitate the rapid and widespread propagation of deadly smoke throughout the factory building.” (http://www.workersrights.org/Freports/WRC%20Fire%20Safety%20Assessment%20re%20Optimum%20Fashion%20Wear%20Ltd%20%28Bangladesh%29%2012.5.13.pdf) Given that VF Imagewear and Jansport both belong to the same parent company, and given that it is the decision of the parent company, not the subsidiary, to sign or not sign the Accord, the university should cut ties with all VF Corporation brands, including Jansport, unless VF Corporation signs the Accord. To not do so would be a logically and morally inconsistent position for the university to take. Please let us know as soon as possible if the university will be applying the requirement to sign the Accord to all VF Corporation subsidiaries, including Jansport.

Comcast, the biggest cable and Internet provider, is trying to take over its chief rival Time Warner. This would give Comcast a near-monopoly, and a presence in every major media market in the country. With almost no competition, a merged Comcast-Time Warner would have no reason to keep prices low, or offer consumers more choices, much less improve its infrastructure. Millions of rural customers who have been waiting for decades for broadband internet access would likely have to keep on waiting. We already deserve much better than we're getting from telecom giants. America lags far behind the rest of the developed world in Internet service, speed and affordability. The profit-greedy telecom industry has opposed infrastructure improvement at every opportunity. If two of the worst and most incompetent cable providers consolidate their power, America's digital divide will grow as we all fall farther and farther behind the rest of the world. Moreover, allowing only a handful of giant corporations to be the gatekeepers for almost all media and Internet services would be disastrous for privacy, freedom of speech, and what's left of an open Internet.

VICTORY! Governor Brown has now signed SB 27, the bill to force Dark Money non-profits to reveal their secret funders in California elections! Senator Cannella ended up voting for the final version of SB 27, one of three Republican Senators to do so. His vote was crucial to its passage. Thank you, Senator Cannella! And thanks also to all of you who asked him to vote "Yes". As California Clean Money Campaign President Trent Lange said afterwards in the Sacramento Bee: “Governor Brown’s signature of SB 27 marks a turning point in the fight to reveal secret funders of political campaigns. It starts to shed light on dark money in California and serves as an example for the entire nation." Your petitions and calls worked! SB 27 became law after more than 40,000 people like you signed petitions. More than a thousand people applied extra pressure by calling their legislator. SB 27 was a great coalition effort in which the California Clean Money Action Fund worked with not only the bill author Senator Lou Correa, the sponsor FPPC, and our CA campaign finance friends at California Common Cause, California Forward, and the League of Women Voters of California; but also with national organizations like Public Citizen, CREDO Mobile, Courage Campaign, Progressives United, Represent.Us, causes.com, MoveOn.org, Money Out Voters In Coalition, MapLight, Label GMOs: California's Grassroots, Lutheran Office of Public Policy - California, Moms Across America, and others. Thanks to everybody who signed and helped us achieve this historic victory! PLEASE ADD YOUR NAME TO THE PETITION and we'll tell you how you can help pass other crucial bills to end the dominance of Big Money in politics, like SB 52, the California DISCLOSE Act and SB 1272, the Overturn Citizens United Act. -- Your friends at the California Clean Money Campaign (www.CAdisclose.org)

Since the disastrous Citizens United ruling, billionaires and other special interests are funneling record amounts of money through secretive non-profits, trying to buy our elections. Federal prosecutors even say that a foreign tycoon exploited loopholes to try to rig the outcome. This kind of dangerous secrecy must stop. S.B. 27 will make sure billionaires, foreign tycoons, and other special interests can't hide behind Dark Money non-profits. It requires any group spending $50,000 in California elections to reveal exactly who gave the money. It's a key step before passage of the California DISCLOSE Act (S.B. 52). Senator Anderson voted “No” on S.B. 27 the first time around. It's now been significantly amended --and received bipartisan support in the Assembly-- so urge him to vote “Yes” now! The vote could be any day.

After months of ignoring the concerns of UW students, Chancellor Rebecca Blank has said she will decide within days whether to take real steps to protect garment workers in Bangladesh who produce UW apparel. We know she’s under tremendous pressure from massive apparel conglomerates like VF Corporation and Walmart to let them get away with a weak corporate-dominated initiative known as “the Alliance” that would continue to endanger workers. Join us in asking Blank to take a real stand for workers by requiring UW licensees sign onto the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh instead. Let Blank know that UW needs to take a stand for garment workers who produce UW products, and we will not settle for empty corporate schemes. On April 24, 2013, the Rana Plaza factory collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh killing 1,134 workers — the worst factory disaster in history. The Bangladeshi government has admitted that an estimated 90% of Bangladesh’s garment factories are not structurally sound. Just this past Thursday, March 6th, another fire broke out at a factory in Dhaka just 40 minutes after workers had left for the day. Currently, 21 companies that produce UW-Madison licensed products source out of Bangladesh. Since last September, students have been running a campaign to “End Deathtraps,” asking the university to require UW licensees to sign onto the Accord on Fire and Building Safety. Additionally, the university’s Labor Codes Licensing Compliance Committee has advised her to require brands to sign the Accord. The Accord is a binding agreement between unions and brands that allows workers to have a voice in health and safety issues and be directly involved in independent, certified factory inspections. It holds brands accountable for the factories from which they source, and requires them to pay for necessary renovations and repairs. Ten universities across the US have already required their licensees to sign onto the Accord, including Duke, Penn State, and NYU. However, UW Chancellor Blank has turned a blind eye to this urgent issue. Let her know that it would be a huge mistake to do anything other than require that our licensees sign onto the Accord.

We have a right to make healthy, responsible, and informed choices about the food we eat. Yet it’s usually impossible to know whether our food contains GMOs. GMOs aren't without risk -- many are designed for increased pesticide use, which has been linked to serious health and environmental effects. And they usually don't undergo independent safety testing before being brought to market. While Connecticut passed a GMO labeling law last year, it won't go into effect until four other states pass similar laws. But in the meantime some stores, like Whole Foods, have responded to the strong concern of customers by labeling their GMO products. Stop & Shop should take the lead here in Connecticut and start labeling its store-brand products that contain GMOs. Sign this petition to the head of Stop & Shop and ask him, as a customer, to label GMOs in their store-brand products.

On March 1 the New York Times ran a graphic accompanying its article on Venezuela that showed an “implied inflation rate” of more than 300 percent. This is a statistic that was manufactured by the Cato Institute. It is not a meaningful measure of inflation, and there are few economists who would accept it as such. (1) New York Times editors have refused to correct this error, despite being presented with explanations of why it is wrong. Inflation in Venezuela is currently running at 56 percent, which is high but is not hyperinflation. The Times, following Cato, is using a formula to calculate what inflation would be if people had to pay for all of their goods and services in dollars purchased on the black market. But as every Venezuelan consumer knows, this is not the case. For virtually all of the purchases that make up the basket of goods measured by the Consumer Price Index, Venezuelans use domestic currency. The Cato measure is measuring the change in the black market dollar exchange rate, which is not the same thing as inflation, even if the two variables may be related. The uselessness of this measure can be seen on the graph itself, where the “implied inflation rate” turns negative in 2008-09, at a time when actual inflation was running at 25-31 percent. The Times’ error violates standard economic reporting because it is standard to use official statistics, which come from government or international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund (which has not challenged or criticized Venezuela’s consumer price index). The only exceptions are when the official statistics are not considered by economists to be true, and there are reliable private estimates. An interested party should not be able to simply make up a new statistic for inflation, unemployment, poverty, etc. and expect that a reputable media outlet will report it along with the official statistic that is used by economists and international agencies. Urge the New York Times to correct the record by signing our petition. References: 1. "NYT Violates Standards of Basic Economics and Journalistic Procedures in Reporting on Venezuela Inflation," Mark Weisbrot, Center for Economic and Policy Research, March 6, 2014, http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/nyt-violates-standards-of-basic-economics-and-journalistic-procedures-in-reporting-on-venezuela-inflation

Facebook users are tired of being penalized for using the social networking tools that Facebook gives us.