Many of you, I hope, are familiar with CREDO Mobile and CREDO Long Distance from Working Assets, and the fact that we donate 1% of our members' phone bills to progressive nonprofit groups every year. I had the privilege this month of delivering big checks to a couple of my favorite organizations -- Rainforest Action Network and the Ploughshares Fund, and let me tell you, that's a lot of fun. (Here's the full list of our 2007 donations.)
For those of you reading this who are CREDO members, or have a Working Assets credit card, thank you. You make all of this possible. You rock. :-)
But in addition to our donations program, our political team (on which I serve as the Activism Manager) has been up to quite a lot over the past few months. So I thought I'd recount some of the issues we've been working on, acknowledge and thank some of the individuals and partner groups who've helped us along the way, and open the floor up to all of you for questions or suggestions.
1. CitizenLetters -- this is one of our highest-impact activism programs, through which our members order printed letters that we send to decisionmakers on their behalf. Most months see an average of 20-25,000 letters sent; sometimes up to 32,000 or so. CREDO Members -- please be sure to look for these letter opportunities in your bill every month and order them if you agree with the topics. Or, you can simply sign up for our Automatic Citizen Letter program, and we'll send them automatically for you every month.
- January: We asked the House to pass the "Stop Outsourcing Security Act" to put an end to Blackwater's abuses in Iraq, and asked the Senate to approve the Home Ownership Preservation and Protection Act to crackdown on predatory lending.
- February: We asked the House to pass the Iraq Strategic Agreement Review Act and compel Bush to submit his long-term Iraq agreements for Congressional approval; and asked the Senate to pass the Clean Water Protection act and stop the practice of mountaintop removal mining.
- March: We're asking the Senate to defy Bush's budget cuts and fully fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; we're also sending letters to Tim Russert at MSNBC, telling him to ask the presidential candidates questions about global warming.
- April (sneak preview) - We're calling on the Department of Justice Inspector General to investigate political influence in the prosecution of Don Siegelman, and also calling on the Senate to overturn the EPA's denial of California's request for a clean car waiver.
2. CREDO Action Online
Our big focus over the past few months has been the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping program, and encouraging Congress not to give the lawbreaking telecom companies retroactive immunity. We recruited
Matt Browner Hamlin to help us in this fight, and worked closely with the
ACLU and the progressive netroots to help the House develop a backbone. So far so good -- but there's still a lot of work ahead of us on this issue.
We've also continued our focus on stopping new coal-fired power plants, working with the Sierra Club, Rainforest Action Network and other environmental groups. We participated directly in stopping 30 out of the 59 coal plants that were cancelled or postponed last year, and are working really hard in Kansas right now to help uphold Governor Sebelius' courageous veto of legislation that would have allowed the massive Sunflower proposal to go through.
Over the past few months, we also hooked up with kossacks orangeclouds115 and shirah to get involved and stop Monsanto's attempts to muzzle dairy farmers who want to tell their customers that their cows aren't injected with artificial growth hormones. So far our members from Ohio and Missouri have chimed in with thousands of actions, and we're keeping an eye on where Monsanto and their astroturf groups go next.
Starting in January, here are just a few of the other actions we've run online:
- Called on the New York Times to fire Bill Kristol
- Told Governor Schwarzenegger not to slash funding for the California State Park system; we're also calling on him to halt the untested and unproven aerial spraying of pesticides over urban areas in California
- Worked with NARAL Pro-Choice America and called on the Senate to reject Richard Honaker, possibly Bush's most right-wing nominee ever (and that's saying a lot, I know)
- Along with our friends at VerifiedVoting.org and Common Cause, we came out in favor of Representative Holt's Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act (H.R. 5036)
- Along with the League of Conservation Voters, we're calling on Congress to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for good with permanent wilderness designation
- Along with FreePress and the other members of the Save the Internet Coalition, we're strongly supporting Representative Markey's bill to preserve Net Neutrality
- We also teamed up with Public Knowledge, Free Press, and several other groups to file a petition with the FCC that phone carriers should not be allowed to discriminate in the provision of text-messaging services, and our activists submitted several thousand comments in support of this petition.
- We supported Senator Feingold's S.2633, which would have started a safe and phased redeployment of our troops out of Iraq.
- On the fifth anniversary of Bush's disastrous invasion of Iraq, we co-sponsored anti-war rallies with MoveOn and United for Peace & Justice, and recently also encouraged our members and activists to go see the "Stop Loss" movie and sign a petition to Defense Secretary Gates to end the stop-loss policy.
- And just in the past week or so, we chimed in with Common Cause and Progressive Maryland to help support clean elections reform in Maryland, and also are now calling on the Chinese government to end their brutal repression in Tibet.
3. Online Voter Registration - We're closing in on 750,000 voter registration forms completed through the online widget that we developed with Rock the Vote, and expect that number to keep going up rapidly in coming weeks.
If you have a blog or website, are you doing your best to get your readers registered to vote? Maybe you should be. Click here to get the widget for your site -- it's extraordinarily easy to set up, and our widget is available for any individual or group to use.
4. CREDO Mobile Action program -- We've built what I believe to be the country's largest network of activists using mobile phones to make social change, the CREDO Mobile Action Program. Last summer we used the network to bird-dog pro-war politicians in their home districts, and earlier this year alerted our mobile activists to call Congress right before an important wiretapping vote. (Why not join today?)
5. Ringtones & other fun stuff from CREDOAction.com
- We recently published a really cool ringtone from Bush impersonator James Adomian -- "This call may be illegally wiretapped by the Bush Administration. That's my administration. Heh heh heh..." A real conversation starter, let me tell you.
- We continue to publish David Sirota, Will Durst, Ellen Goodman, Robert Scheer, and (my personal favorite) Joe Conason; we also feature Tom Tomorrow's latest comics.
- When will our long national nightmare be over? With the Bush Countdown widget on your website, you can count down the days. :-)
6. Flash Activism Network - Our Flash Activist Network members have weighed in so far this year on warrantless wiretapping and retroactive immunity, supporting Senator Feingold's bill to start getting our troops home from the occupation of Iraq, and -- just about to roll out -- a new alert calling on the Chinese government to end their brutal crackdown in Tibet.
So...now that you've read all this...does this sound like the kind of socially-responsible socially-activist phone company you might want to support? When you switch your mobile service over to us you'll keep your number, we'll send you a cool new phone, and we'll even pay to break you out of your current contract with those other guys. (We also offer great long distance service, with 12 coupons for Ben & Jerry's® when you sign up.)
But I also want to open up the floor for any & all suggestions or comments. If you're a current member, how has your service been? If you're not a current member, what could we do to help you become one? And, member or not, what issues do you think we should be working on to advance our shared ideals -- our CREDO, if you will :-) -- of peace & international freedom, civil rights, economic & social justice, environmental protection, voting rights & civic participation? The floor's all yours.