Deficit reduction should not come at the expense of low-income families with children, our seniors and the disabled, or our veterans. Without housing stability, many will remain homeless, find it difficult to maintain a job or find one, let alone provide stability and schooling for their children. I understand this message at gut level. When I was ten, my father, suffering from mental problems and not able to find work, left the family. Welfare programs provided a bridge for my mother, my three siblings and me until she could find a job to support us. Three of us children went on to earn college degrees.

We have a sheriff eviction notice to vacate our home this next Thursday July 25th. My wife of 27 years is unable to work and is being denied disability benefits and my daughter is a full time student trying to complete college.

How is it that my brother gets 40 years for guns that he was never caught with or around, yet Zimmerman stalks and shoots a kid and gets off Scott free????

On average, New Jersey’s 2,500 school buildings are 50 years old and are four times more densely populated than office buildings. Age, overcrowding, and deferred maintenance strain ventilation, heating, and electrical systems, which, in many cases, result in dangerous conditions that threaten the health of students and staff and impede students’ learning. Everyday, students in New Jersey are exposed to hazardous conditions like mold, lead, PCBs, and poor indoor air quality resulting from decades of delayed repairs and the failure to start and complete new school construction projects. On May 24, 2011, the New Jersey Department of Education, together with the New Jersey Schools Development Authority, requested that each SDA district (formerly known as Abbott Districts) identify and describe any potential emergent conditions that may exist in the district’s school facilities. The DOE regulations 2 define an emergent condition as “so injurious or hazardous that it causes an imminent peril to the health and safety of students and staff.” In response, school districts submitted more than 700 applications for emergent projects to be reviewed by the DOE on an “expedited basis” as required by the regulations. In the spring of 2012, a mere seventy-six of the applications were approved. Now, over a year later, the SDA has completed only a few of these projects and has not committed to complete the remaining projects by the beginning of the 2013-2014 school year. This is unacceptable. Allowing repairs to wait for over two years unnecessarily exposes students and staff to unsafe and unhealthy conditions. We request that you ensure all approved emergent projects be completed by this September -- before our children and staff return to school. Communities across the state remain in desperate need of functioning, modern, and safe school facilities. Every day our students and those entrusted to teach and care for them, enter buildings that are unhealthy and unsafe. If we expect to have thriving schools and effective learning environments, these emergent repairs must be addressed. Every child has a right to receive a quality education and the facilities in which these students receive their education should be of high quality, and sound structure.

How is it that my brother gets 40 years for guns that he was never caught with or around, yet Zimmerman stalks and shoots a kid and gets off Scott free????

I want a National Registry for convicted animal abusers. It should include cross reference between States, stiffer sentences, mandatory home inspections, and the convicted shall never own an animal or sit for an animal again! The Registry will require each convict to provide valid proof of residency from either a driver's license or State ID that will be kept in the Registry's data base. In the event a convict moves, and/or changes his/her name and does not provide this information to the Registry, the convict will be charged with evading local authorities and sentenced to 10 years at a Federal Prison.

The Texas State Board of Education (TXSBOE) has already begun working on its once-a-decade adoption of science textbooks for Texas classrooms. And for years, an anti-science faction of that board has done all it can to undermine the science of evolution and climate change by giving equal weight to nonscientific beliefs like climate change denial and the idea that dinosaurs and humans coexisted. Whether you have school-aged kids or not, this fight is too important to the future of Texas and the nation to ignore. With over 5 million students, Texas is one of the country's biggest buyers of textbooks. And that has an impact on other states, because book publishers often follow our lead so that they don't have to create different versions of the same science books.

Millions of Americans are affected by the plight of childhood sexual abuse. As a survivor I want to bring to light this issue,an especially as it pertains to African American men, which more times than not goes unnoticed and is taboo in the African American community (''Black men are everything but they cant be child molesters'').

The Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission ruling granted corporations the right to unlimited spending on super pacs based on earlier decisions. First, corporations in a number of decisions have been granted 1st amendment free speech rights. Second, Buckley vs. Valejo has been interpreted to say money is equivalent to speech. The Court thus ruled that since free speech is not to be limited, neither is political spending. Long before the Citizens United decision, money played an excessive role in our government and in our lives. 94% of the time in California the candidate who raised the most money won the election. Corporations have been claiming constitutional rights for over 100 years. * Besides 1st amendment right of free speech, corporations have claimed and won 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 14th amendment rights. The right of privacy has been claimed, but not yet secured. *Claiming rights against search and seizure, corporations protect themselves from complying with worker safety regulations and requirements related to pollution. * Claiming right not to speak, the dairy industry sued and won against a law requiring labeling products from cows which were given BST, a bovine growth hormone. The precedence has implication for labeling GMO food. * Claiming 5th amendment taking rights, laws against drilling horizontally under people’s homes for coal were struck down, and entire towns in Pennsylvania sank in 1922. The precedence has implication for fracking. Big money manipulates all three branches of government—the legislative and executive branches though campaign financing, lobbying, and threats to harm the economy, the judicial branch through hiring the best lawyers to seize constitutional rights. While exhaustive grassroots work can successfully counter big money in elections, all future Supreme Court decisions will be determined by precedence and the constitution. Thus, the only recourse to return our democracy to We the People is a constitutional amendment. It is critical that an amendment address both constitutional rights only belonging to human beings and that money is not equivalent to speech. If corporations are curbed of rights, but money remains as speech, CEOs instead of their companies will fund campaigns. If money is ruled as not speech, corporations will continue to usurp rights meant for people to damage our planet, health, safety, and way of life. Given the difficult process of amending the constitution, it does not make sense to accomplish the goal with two or more amendments. There are bills which separate the two issues and bills which only address the single Citizens United decision as well as half measures which leave non-profit corporations alone. The NRA is a non-profit. The Nolan-Pocan We the People bill is the only one which is comprehensive.

To convince Congress, New York State and New York City to enact an investment tax credit to allow individuals and corporations to invest in a Natural Resilience Fund to help fund the gap for existing and proposed climate resilience efforts in New York City and State.

Millionhoodies is a multiracial alliance of concerned citizens, civil society organizations, and community leaders who are fed up with the unprecedented levels of unrestrained violence directed at young people of color in this country.

We are facing foreclosure like many homeowners. We must stop this bill from being enacted. This bill protects the banks not the homeowner. It would prevent the homeowner from suing the banks for any fraud, robo-signing, false affidavits .