First, some good news. Just days ago, the state Senate in Maine voted to implement Rank Choice Voting for the 2020 elections. And in Massachusetts, a similar effort has just cleared a major hurdle. But, how can we benefit from things like rank choice voting or a national popular vote system if people have to use electronic voting machines that are hackable, broken, and don’t have voter-verifiable ballot paper trails?

The fires raging in the Amazon are the result of generations of racism, colonialism, and capitalist greed. And the flames are being encouraged and fanned by Brazil’s president: a fascist hell bent on taking Brazil back to a dictatorship. A man who during his presidential campaign promised that “there will not be a centimeter more of indigenous land.”

Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio and Utah lead the way on fighting gerrymandering in 2018 when voters passed reforms by overwhelming margins to make redistricting fair and transparent. This year, New Hampshire and Virginia passed reforms that are now in their final stages of becoming law. And, active efforts are underway in at least four more states to do what the Supreme Court won’t: end the destructive practice of partisan gerrymandering.

It’s hard to believe that the Sunrise Movement has only been around for two years. The youth-led climate activist organization has been an incredibly effective force in a time of cowardice and inaction.

I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but Mitch McConnell has been extremely unpopular in his own state since the last time he won reelection in 2014. So, even though he currently has a 47 percent disapproval rating and a 38 percent approval rating in Kentucky, we shouldn’t give that too much weight when it comes to defeating him in 2020.

This Pride Month also celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. And while Pride is a celebratory time, it continues to be the protest it always was as the Trump administration attacks the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community on multiple fronts.

Nearly a year after the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal, the Government Accountability Office released a report on the lack of a comprehensive federal privacy law governing private companies’ collection, use or sale of user data. Its big conclusion was that...yea, it’d be a good idea to have a federal law that protects people. Who would’ve thought?

Disrupting markets wasn’t enough. Big Tech is now flagrantly disrupting a century of labor rights victories that were already crumbling under the weight of the gig economy. And these high tech companies are wielding their influence the old fashioned way. Uber, Lyft, Handy, Amazon, TaskRabbit, and more, are investing millions in lobbying in dozens of states to be treated differently under the law than any other company with workers.

In the latest blow to reproductive justice, over the last few months the Trump Administration has made radical changes to Title X, which is the only federal program exclusively dedicated to providing low-income people with affordable birth control and reproductive health care.

Since March of 2015, the U.S. has been providing weapons, intelligence and mid-air refueling support to Saudi Arabia and the UAE in their intervention in the Yemen Civil War. Over 17,600 civilians have died in air strikes and more than 85,000 Yemeni children have died of starvation. More than 8 million Yemenis are at risk of famine and a cholera outbreak has affected 1 million people. Yemen is a full on humanitarian crisis and the U.S. is not only complicit, but has the power to end it.