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THE NIRS WHITE HOUSE PETITION--A NEW APPROACH....
RAISE YOUR VOICES AND SEND LETTERS TO PRESIDENT OBAMA THROUGH OUR SYSTEMS, NOT THEIRS!
ACT TO END TAXPAYER SUBSIDIES FOR NEW NUCLEAR REACTORS!
Dear Friends,
As you know, in late September, the White House launched a new website to enable people to directly petition the Obama administration. The White House promised a formal response to all petitions which received 5,000 signatures within 30 days.
NIRS decided to try out that site and created a petition that demands something President Obama has the clear power to do: to stop asking Congress for taxpayer subsidies for new nuclear reactors, beginning with the next federal budget.
As it turns out, the White House website and petition-signing process was flawed, cumbersome and enormously frustrating for many people. As of today, nearly 12,000 people (11,981 to be exact) tried to sign this petition directly through NIRS own servers. Thousands more tried to sign through Facebook, Twitter and the like. Only 3,815 of these thousands have been successful so far. THANK YOU to each and every one of you who signed and who tried to sign.
Now we're going back to a tried-and-true approach: Please send a letter to President Obama, with the identical content as the petition (with one extra line expressing frustration with the petition process). Let's make sure all our voices are heard! And let's not stop at 5,000 letters; let's deluge the White House with your raised voices.
We do still hope to reach the 5,000 threshold for a formal White House response and we still encourage you to sign the White House petition here; their system can only get better, it can't possibly get any worse. People do get through, the leading petition--to legalize marijuana--has some 55,000 signers.
If you need some more incentive to try again, check out this article from the American Nuclear Society (ANS) about our petition and the nuclear industry's counterpart. Although their petition has been pushed heavily online by Nuclear Energy Institute, Areva and now ANS, it still has only a relative handful of signatures. We want to stay well ahead of them!
Whether you've already signed the White House petition, or just couldn't get through, we know our systems work! Please send your letter to President Obama, demanding an end to nuclear subsidies, today.
International friends: as you know, what happens in the U.S. can certainly affect the entire world. You can participate in this letter campaign, and we encourage you to do so.
Finally, after you send your letter, we hope you will make a tax-deductible contribution to NIRS. Our online fundraising, which went up after Fukushima, dropped significantly the past two months--and your support is absolutely critical to our work. We're not kidding when we say we can't do this work without you. Your activism is crucial; but so are your donations of any size.
Thanks so much for all you do,
Michael Mariotte
Executive Director
Nuclear Information and Resource Service
nirsnet@nirs.org
www.nirs.org
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