Thieves in the Temple.

Down in the well.

Yesterday I suggested we make demands of our Reps and Senators in re the debt limit -- you remember, no Medicare benefit cuts, no more tax breaks for rich folks and corporate non-folks. But I should also have suggested you call the U.S. President and make the same demands, because, right now, he's not on our side. One could call Mr. Obama's desire to give cover to Republicans stupid, or one could call it evil; it doesn't matter. You can call the White House at 1.888.245.0215, and you can write the White House here. I had been wondering how Mr. Obama would squander the miraculous opportunity Republicans presented him by voting almost uniformly in favor of the Ryan budget, which destroys Medicare in every useful meaning of the word "destroy." I guess now I know. We're the only thing stopping him.

Mr. Obama further told us yesterday that Congress could create jobs by (among other things) passing three Bush-era "free" trade deals. You mean the "free" trade deals that'll send jobs overseas and let corporations break U.S. law with impunity, sir? And tell the Colombian trade unionists who are getting assassinated or beaten or burned that "free" trade deals work wonders for any economy. You can't enjoy a good economy if you're dead. Hell, you can't enjoy it if you're not rich, the way our elites are going. In the meantime, Public Citizen helps you tell Congress, again, to oppose the Colombia "free" trade deal. You hope Senators like Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Bob Casey (D-PA), who helped rid us of the President's fast-track trade authority in 2007, will be able to do the will of their voters again. Otherwise, they could be toast.

Closer to home, Pennsylvania passed a budget earlier this week, with no impact fee or severance tax for gas drillers. You know, because that would be "un-American," according to our Lord and Savior Tom Corbett, even though a majority of Pennsylvanians support it, and just about every other gas-driling state has one. I didn't realize that the Pennsylvania legislature had actually promised to pass some sort of fee, nor that they'd written that promise into the budget they passed last year. Well, they probably think that since they got the budget done, they can forget about it for another year. Penn Environment helps you tell them they're wrong. Tell them "no more damn free rides for the gas industry." What are they going to do? Drill from Ohio?

Finally, IKEA has proved somewhat intransigent to our demand that the Swedish company treat its American workers as well as its Swedish workers, so we're gonna tell 'em again. For those of you just tuning in: IKEA's Swedwood plant in Danville, VA pays its workers as little as $8/hr, whereas IKEA's Swedish workers get $19/hr. It gets better: Danville workers lost over 1,500 days last year due to accidents, were forced to sit through union-busting meetings, and often learned on Friday night that they were being forced to work the weekend. Sound like good management to you? While the mandatory overtime has apparently stopped, the Swedish corporation seems content to tolerate the rest of it, possibly since it's happening over here. How about that? We're someone else's Mexico now. You shouldn't feel any better about that than good Mexicans do. So fight it.

Work it.

So: Democrats might cut Medicare benefits in their ongoing "negotiations" with Republicans over the debt limit. Republicans, meanwhile, won't accept any revenue increases on high-income earners -- not on hedge fund managers who pay fewer taxes on their billions than you do on your tens of thousands, not on oil and gas corporations, not even on corporate jets. "Republicans would rather crash the economy than accept new taxes on corporate jets" should be a campaign ad, but Democrats are too "civil" to run it. It doesn't matter. If this is still a democracy, and not a country ruled by idiots, then we need to call our Reps and Senators and tell them: no Medicare benefit cuts, no more tax breaks for the rich and for corporate non-persons. And yes to taxing corporate jets. How much more of the world we fought to create must die in flames so the rich can gild their plumbing?

Meanwhile, in California, the Assembly passed AB 591, which would give California the toughest fracking disclosure law in the nation, and thus help save good Californians from the plight suffered by the many good Pennsylvanians who can now light their tap water on fire. AB 591 would force gas drillers to disclose exactly what chemicals they're injecting into the ground to loosen up the gas, which at present we only know after the fact, when scientists test the water. However, the state Senate still has to pass the bill, and the gas drillers are working their mojo on California's state Senators as we speak. Of course, Senators are only supposed to respond to the people's mojo. CREDO helps you work it. I can't imagine that any sane California Senator would decide that your right to clean water isn't as important as a gas drilling corporation's "right" to be "free" from the "cost" of doing the right thing. But you never know until you exert your will.

Idiot country.

House Reps are home this week, so, thanks to NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, you may call your Reps at their home district offices and tell them that any debt "deal" must include revenue increases. Need more to talk with your Rep about than the usual corporate-profits-high-regular-folks-suffering? Then check out this letter-to-our-government written by high-profile religious folk, calling for a "circle of protection" around programs that actually help good Americans in times of trouble. Seriously, only the "liberal" media means "you must make sacrifices" when they say "we all must make sacrifices." And that's because they're owned by big corporations, or are big corporations themselves.

Meanwhile, despite long-standing bipartisan support, Congress still hasn't been able to keep big corporations from using antibiotics as a growth aid in livestock. Apparently pumping antibiotics into farm animals makes plumper, meatier animals (and, not incidentally, helps them survive miserable lives penned up in factory farms). But it also makes new strains of hard-to-kill bacteria, and it also makes farm animals less able to fight off infections with each successive generation. Who could have predicted that using antibiotics for some purpose other than their actual purpose would backfire? CREDO helps you support the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act. Some 70% of all antibiotics in America go, no, not to sick people, but to healthy animals. What votary of government accountability could possibly support that insanity?

Meanwhile, closer to home, Pennsylvania wants to wrap up its state budget by June 30 so they can go to Cancun or wherever, so Penn Environment helps you tell your Pennsylvania legislature not to pass a budget without an impact fee for gas drillers. Since "we're broke," the same corporations who are, as we speak, throwing billions of dollars into expanding their activities in Pennsylvania can pay what gas drillers pay in every other big gas-drilling state in America. Even though Tom Corbett has vowed to veto any budget containing an impact fee therein. Even though Tom Corbett thinks an impact fee is "un-American" despite the fee's majority support among Pennsylvanians. What a terrible human being. Who can, like anyone else, redeem himself by doing the right thing.

Finally, over 70 Democratic lawmakers signed a letter defending the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, including some names you'd expect (Dan Boren, Henry Cuellar) as well as some names you wouldn't (Raúl Grijalva? Peter Welch?). It gets better: almost all of these 70-plus lawmakers got campaign contributions from AT&T. In other words, what Chief Justice Roberts calls "free speech" looks, to the unjaundiced eye, suspiciously like bribery. The rest of the universe also knows that the merger will kill jobs, kill competition, jack up prices, and destroy net neutrality, so Free Press helps you tell your Rep these things, and tell them to take their name off the letter shilling for the AT&T merger.

On shareholders, app blocking, school vouchers, and wars.

The Coffee Party helps you support the Shareholder Protection Act. I still can't find the bill on thomas.loc.gov, but the Coffee Party tells us that the Shareholder Protection Act would mandate that corporations inform shareholders of their political contributions, so that shareholders can invest their money elsewhere if they like. That's worth doing, but I don't know if the Shareholder Protection Act still requires a shareholder vote on campaign contributions. Certainly you could add that to the letter you write. I'm a two-thirds, no-proxy-vote man myself, but I do remember putting up with a Shareholder Protection Act that only mandated a majority vote and allowed proxy votes. Still, ask for what you will, not what you think you'll get. That's the American way.

Meanwhile, Verizon and Google seem to want to keep apps off the Android market. Now, that's not real "free market" of them, is it? Trouble is, Verizon might be breaking the law by blocking apps -- Verizon wanted access to public airwaves in order to expand its G4 network, but the FCC wouldn't let them have it unless they agreed not to block applications. So Free Press helps you demand that the FCC investigate Verizon's actions. Maybe Verizon wants us to think our government is discriminating against them, since several other providers have also blocked apps. And certainly our government should be stopping that, too! But Verizon uses public airwaves, so they have to play by the public's rules. It's really hard to feel sorry for a corporation -- especially these days, when they don't even try that hard to snow you.

As I mentioned Saturday, the Pennsylvania state Senate still hasn't voted on SB 1, the nefarious school-vouchers-we-can't-afford-because-we're-broke bill. But they're on a deadline: both Governor and legislature want to finish the budget by June 30 (before the legislature's summer recess), and since SB 1 spends money for public schools on private schools, it needs to be included in the budget, so we've got a good shot at stopping it. The Pennsylvania ACLU helps you oppose school vouchers in Pennsylvania. Feel free to put a phrase like "support the state constitution" in the subject header if you like, since Section III, Article 15 of the state constitution forbids funneling of public school money to private schools. Aren't Republicans supposed to be the "defend the constitution" guys? Or is that just what they want us to think?

Finally, if you missed Thursday's action alert demanding that the Washington boneheads start bringing our troops home so we can get some work done here in America, I've got a few more. Roots Action helps you demand that Congress cut off war funding, and Campaign for America's Future helps you demand that our government end the war in Afghanistan and use the savings to rebuild the economy. Also, Warisacrime.org (formerly After Downing Street) tells us that Reps. Kucinich (D-OH) and Amash (R-MI) will offer an amendment to the Defense appropriations bill that would end all involvement in the Afghanistan war by October 1 of this year; you may want to call your Reps and support that effort. Tools for contacting your Reps are, as always, in the upper left-hand corner of this page; the Capitol's toll-free line, at 202.224.3121, can also connect you to your Reps.

The show so far for Saturday, June 25, 2011.

Well, the wars are still going on. A House resolution authorizing the Libya war for one year failed yesterday, but another House resolution actually defunding the Libya war also failed. Bob Novak, God bless his soul, might say that this is like Solomon solving the whose-baby-is-this problem by slicing the baby in half. It's possible that Mr. Obama has gamed Republicans into this corner, but that's nothing to celebrate. Those of us who live closer to the ground than our Beltway cloud-minders value human life on a pretty personal level, and we don't want Democrats playing with our lives, either. That's true even if the games they play actually hurt Republicans. Which, in the case of the Libya war, I can't even say for sure is true.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the Pennsylvania Senate apparently didn't vote on SB 1, the school-vouchers-we-can't-afford bill, yesterday. (The PA legislature website states that the last action on SB 1 took place on April 27, and also lists no Senate roll call votes for Friday, June 24.) The PA Senate comes back tomorrow in late afternoon, so maybe they're planning to pass it with no one watching. However, the Washington Independent reports that SB 1 "has been slow to win support from conservative senators who view the legislation as too costly." Which I'm extremely glad to hear! I admit I think so little of Republicans these days that I don't expect actual conservatism from them. Then again, the Pennsylvania House did pass HB 934, Daryl Metcalfe's nefarious voter ID bill, on Friday, despite its striking non-resemblance to anything a conservative might actually do. To think the man actually had the gall to say the bill addresses "significant voter fraud plaguing Pennsylvania's elections"! I guess he figures everyone watches Fox News, so he didn't have to prove that said "voter fraud" was happening, let alone "significant." The bill goes to the state Senate now; I'm sure I'll have new alerts fairly shortly.

After considerable input from good citizens like yourself, Interior Secretary Salazar says he now supports a 20-year ban on uranium mining claims in land surrounding the Grand Canyon. Of course, Mr. Salazar could change his mind, given that he hasn't actually imposed said 20-year ban, but merely extended a moratorium on new mining claims in the Grand Canyon area for six more months. Presumably we'll be back before those six months are up to give Mr. Salazar further advice as he requires it. Hopefully he won't heed the counsel of Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ): according to Mr. Franks, protecting the Grand Canyon is all about giving in to "rabid environmentalists." Never mind that too many of Mr. Franks's past pronouncements were all about giving in to rabid birthers. Mr. Franks wants you to believe that if you want uranium-free drinking water, you're some kind of extremist. Funny how often extremists call everyone else an extremist.

The Chinese government has released Ai Weiwei -- you may have called on China to release him some time ago -- but we also learn that (per the Xinhua news agency) he has pleaded guilty to tax evasion, the crime they always try to get you on when they can't get you on anything else. The BBC dryly notes that the release coincides with the Chinese Premier's visit to Germany and the U.K., where Mr. Ai has fairly strong professional ties. Still, I get the feeling that the man has been, for all intents and purposes, silenced, so I'm not celebrating a whole lot.

Oh, yeah, almost forgot: Congress ain't raised the debt ceiling yet. I haven't attended all the 13-dimensional chess being played over this, but I suspect that when Mr. Obama does swoop in at the last minute and solve everything, his approvals will go up again, just as they did after the Bush tax cut "compromise," just as they did after Mr. bin Laden's death. Every time Mr. Obama cleans up a Republican mess (and it doesn't even matter how well he cleans it up!), the American people seem to like him better. I hope, for our sakes, that Republicans finally catch on to this, and stop trying to set everything on fire.

Dirt.

Pennsylvania plans to vote on SB 1, which would give $1 billion in taxpayer money away to private schools in the form of vouchers, today; Keystone Progress helps you, PA resident, email your Senators. You may amend the email tool so as to better get their attention. Maybe like this: "I thought we were 'broke.' If we're 'broke,' how come we're giving away a billion dollars to private schools, in the form of vouchers that don't guarantee payment, don't guarantee admission, and don't guarantee success? You do realize this'll raise property taxes, don't you? You do realize that by refusing, even, to make voucher recipients accountable for the job they do teaching kids, you would give up any credibility you might have as a conservative? I mean, don't conservatives preach accountability? Or is that only for us, and not for big corporate donors? And you do realize that $1 billion is actually a lowball estimate, that the real price could quadruple? How, exactly, is that 'fiscally responsible?' And you do realize that Article III, Section 15 of the Pennsylvania Constitution pretty much forbids this bill?" It's not terribly civil, I know, but they're being damn stupid, and I'm not civil to people when they're being stupid.

Dadgum voucher people prevented me from leading off with this item like I wanted to: Free Press helps you tell the FCC to put an end to "covert consolidation." What's "covert consolidation," you ask? That's when media outlets run news items produced by other media outlets, most obviously on TV, where a station in one market might air the same story run in another market -- same reporters, same camera angels, same biases, everything. It's gotten to the point where the FCC tells us that almost one-third of TV stations run news produced by some other station. Media outlets no doubt consider this a mere cost-cutting move -- why hire all these reporters and camera operators and producers, anyway? Maybe because cost-cutting isn't a media outlet's first responsibility; a media outlet's first responsibility is serving the local community, and that means airing stories that mean something to that community, rather than force-feeding their own idea of what means something so they can more easily gild their plumbing. And, incredibly, doing the right thing by your community also means doing the right thing by the economy -- paying more attention to local matters means more jobs for more people. Some of them might turn into actual journalists!

Meanwhile, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State help you tell President Obama to prevent religious organizations from taking government money and then discriminating in hiring based on religion. Yup, religious organizations who are federal contractors can do that, thanks to Mr. Bush's Executive Order 13279, which carved out an exemption to FDR's landmark Executive Order 11246, which barred defense contractors from discriminating based on "race, creed, or origin." That old word in the middle there, "creed"? Still means something. (Later Executive Orders extended protections to all defense contractors. I've long said, if you take government money, you should play by government rules -- and that's a fairly compelling reason for religious organizations not to take government money at all. Now I say: take our money, don't discriminate against us. I just don't think this is that hard. Of course, to a Beltway insider, it's just too hard to do anything that could possibly help anyone -- except their rich friends, of course. Doing things that help their rich friends is easy.

Into the lens.

You may have heard that Apple is developing technology that would turn off your smartphone remotely at events where filming is nominally prohibited. Can you say "kill switch," boys and girls? Apple supposedly aims to prevent filming of live concerts, but can we think of anyone else who might not want to be filmed? That's right, Middle Eastern dictators and security forces, whose abuses have been extensively documented by good citizens in the Middle East using smartphones. Think maybe American media figures or politicians also might not want Americans filming them, lest their Macaca Moment get plastered all over the internet? (The 2006 Macaca Moment arrived via analog video, I know, but today it'd more likely arrive via smartphone.) And if you're a band or record company looking to stop people from profiting (such as they do!) from taping your shows, why not hire people to stand in your audience with smartphones and get out the band- or corporation-sanctioned product that way? See? The solution is always to create more jobs. Anyway, Free Press helps you tell Apple to abandon its efforts to create a smartphone "kill switch."

Meanwhile, closer to home, Penn Environment helps you urge the Pennsylvania legislature to renew the Growing Greener program, which helps restore polluted waterways across the state. The program helps fund preservation of farmland, the cleanup of abandoned mines, the restoration of parkland around rivers and streams, the creation of recreational trails, and the upgrading of sewer systems, to name just a few things. These all sound like things that would stimulate the economy, don't they? And they sound like things that protect our most precious natural resource, clean water. We need this program more than ever now that our government lets gas companies use chemicals that set our tap water on fire, but I fear that our state legislators will deep-six the program out of some notion that WE'RE BROKE!!!!!!! WAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!! How many times must I tell these pimps! Always do the right thing by the people you serve. And, er, don't tell us we're "broke" when you refuse to make the income tax more progressive or charge a severance tax on gas drillers, or when you shuttle hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money toward private schools. Excuses, excuses.

Finally, you may know that the U.S. Conference of Mayors has passed a resolution supporting efforts to end our three-plus wars and demanding that the President and Congress "bring these war dollars home to meet vital human needs." The Conference of Mayors apparently hasn't done such a thing since the Vietnam war, and we're now in rather more dire straits, financially, than we were back then. So Roots Action helps you tell your Reps and Senators to heed the U.S. Conference of Mayors' call. It shouldn't be this tough. We went into Iraq and Afghanistan without justifying it and without paying for it; we've drawn down in Iraq somewhat, but just yesterday Mr. Obama told us that he'd only be withdrawing 10,000 troops (or one-tenth) from Afghanistan this year, and would take a full year to withdraw 20,000 more, which puts us back where we started in 2009. And he still maintains he can bomb Libya without authorization from Congress under the War Powers Act. And we're still involved in various shenanigans in Yemen and Pakistan. All this while almost one-fifth of American workers are unemployed or underemployed. Sorry, I guess everything looks simpler to me than it does to a politician or a pundit.

Metamorphosis.

Forget Republicans and their "liberal" media enablers lauding the "courage" of people who want to gut your Social Security and your Medicare and your Medicaid while cutting taxes on the rich. True Majority helps you support The People's Budget, put forth by the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The People's Budget not only ends the Bush tax cuts for the rich, it hikes taxes on millionaires and billionaires, and it also ends the deficit-swelling wars in Iraq and Afghanistan faster and more responsibly than Mr. Obama has done thus far. And, amazingly, the People's Budget even cuts the deficit. The Ryan budget, that "courageous" and "bold" document, doesn't even do that. And supporting the People's Budget doesn't preclude you from supporting better prescriptions for our future -- like hiking taxes on millionaires and billionaires all the way up to Eisenhower-era levels.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2018, the so-called Clean Water for Cooperative Federalism Act, would prevent the EPA from objecting to certain permits states give to corporations, even if the EPA's objection might prevent pollution. These fellas do realize that the Federalists supported a strong central government, don't they? They didn't imagine a need for environmental regulation very much, true, but then they didn't contend with mountaintop removal mining or hydrofracking, either, and I suspect they'd prefer an EPA that could stop states from issuing permits that dump crap into our water and make it unsafe for us to drink. And our noble Representatives do realize safe drinking water is popular, right? You know, with people? Maybe not with corporations, but corporations aren't people. American Rivers helps you tell your Rep to oppose H.R. 2018.

Scarecrow.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the 1.6 million women who wanted to file a class-action discrimination lawsuit against WalMart. As disgusted as I am that a company can now evade class action lawsuits merely by virtue of its size, I see the same silver lining some lawyers see -- that scads of smaller class-action lawsuits, significantly more provable by Mr. Scalia's standard than the huge class-action suit against the corporation, will proceed and possibly exact more justice, just in smaller amounts. Anyway, the National Women's Law Center sees the Wal-Mart suit as an occasion to help you support the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would tighten enforcement loopholes in the Equal Pay Act, and which Republicans filibustered with their bare Senate minority last term. Further, the National Women's Law Center will sponsor rallies today in solidarity with the Wal-Mart women; you can find a rally near you here.

Meanwhile, Keystone Progress still helps you oppose HB 934, Pennsylvania's voter ID bill. Why oppose a voter ID bill, you may well ask? Because "stricter voter ID bills" is a solution in search of a problem, voter "fraud" being nowhere near the problem right-wingers want you to think it is, and furthermore it's a solution that makes problems worse. How? By demanding government-issued ID from seniors, minorities, and low-income voters who do not routinely get government ID and haven't needed it to vote in many years, Pennsylvania's government would effectively disenfranchise those same seniors, minorities, and low-income voters. You have to wonder, sometimes, if that's the idea. And imposing unnecessary government-based requirements, keeping people from voting -- these ideas emanate from nominal conservatives, yet they don't sound particularly conservative. Actually, they sound anti-conservative. Again, you have to wonder.

Finally, NETWORK helps you instruct Vice President Biden that any "deal" over increasing the debt limit must include revenue-raising provisions. This would make Republicans fly into horrible tantrums, but I don't care so much about the tantrums of Republicans as I do about cutting deficits responsibly, and cutting deficits responsibly means taxing upper-income earners responsibly and closing tax loopholes responsibly. We're telling Mr. Biden, by the way, because he's been in charge of negotiating the whole debt limit "deal" with which we'll avoid another economic armageddon. Now these are Beltway elites we're talking about, so they're going to make a "deal" which will hurt you and please their elite friends. But, again: it doesn't matter what they want. It matters what we want. Otherwise, we might as well give up on democracy, and I'm not doing that.

Tax amnesty for corporations.

New York Times writer David Kocieniewski instructs us about the tax amnesty, er, "tax holiday" you may have heard about, in which corporations would bring their overseas income back to America in exchange for paying a lower rate on that income, just as they did in 2005. Defenders call it a "second stimulus," implying that corporations would bring back money and invest it in the economy. Mr. Kocieniewski takes until paragraph 6 to destroy that transparently self-serving argument (long story short: it didn't work that way in 2005, and why would anyone think it would?), but at least he spends thirty more paragraphs eviscerating it -- which right-wingers will no doubt cite as an example of "liberal bias," which I understand to mean "reporting of facts that don't support right-wing schemes." Anyway, this is as good a time as any to communicate your will that your Reps and Senators oppose this corporate tax amnesty. Ahem! "Tax holiday." Tools for contacting your Reps and Senators are, as always, in the upper left-hand corner of this page.

(I'm well aware that "amnesty" isn't really a bad word. But I'm not always sure right-wingers understand that when they labor to make a neutral word into a bad word, they can suffer the consequences just as easily as the rest of us.)

Economics for realists, part 247.

Did you know that just about the entire town of Libby, Montana is on Medicare right now? Kay Tillen at firedoglake.com explains why: airborne asbestos from a vermiculite mine had sickened and/or killed thousands in Libby and the surrounding area of Lincoln County, and all attempts to gain restitution via the courts (against the W.R. Grace Company, which owned the mine) failed. So Sen. Baucus -- who famously said single-payer was "off the table" during the health care reform effort that ground up most of 2009 -- essentially instituted single-payer health care for Libby, Montana, by inserting a provision in the health care reform bill. It's exactly the sort of thing that'll get Mr. Baucus re-elected in 2014, whether he deserves it or not. Anyway, I can't begrudge help for folks who found asbestos in their home insulation or (even!) on their school running tracks. But it does give us an opportunity to note that Rep. Conyers has re-introduced his single-payer health care bill, H.R. 676, a.k.a. the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act. I think a phone call to your Reps in support of H.R. 676 is in order.

Meanwhile, NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, helps you oppose the Colombia "free" trade agreement. We've got plenty of reasons to oppose all "free" trade agreements -- they send American jobs overseas, and encourage corporations to enslave folks in other countries. But Colombia is, as you may know, a special case, because they're the World Capital of Killing Labor Leaders. And just this past April, representatives of the Latin America Working Group and Lutheran World Relief reported from Colombia's northern coast that conditions hadn't changed that much. We do want to get away from doing business with bastards, even "our bastards," right? And surely we'd want to get away from doing bad business, with anybody, right? "Free" trade pacts ain't good business for anybody but corporate CEOs. (They'll say it's good for shareholders, of course, but if shareholders knew how much blood was on their fattened dividends, they'd revolt.)

Finally, Color of Change helps you tell the FCC to oppose the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, if you haven't already. You likely already know why you should oppose the merger: the merger will destroy jobs (as the two corporations consolidate for "efficiency"), it won't lower prices (fewer competitors generally doesn't mean lower prices), and won't protect network neutrality so that you, the consumer, can decide where you want to go, rather than some corporation telling you where you can go. You may not know that several prominent and decent activist organizations have lined up behind the merger -- and hard to believe, Harry! They're all groups to which AT&T has donated large sums of money. You may also not know that AT&T has been flogging a chart supposedly demonstrating that mergers do-so lower prices, but that they've actually rigged the chart by ignoring the evidence they can't refute. In a sane society, AT&T would be losing this battle, because the facts aren't on their side. I guess you know what that means.

Food safety, budgeting, media racism.

You may have heard about the E. coli outbreak in Germany that killed 31 and infected over 3,000 others. Our Congress, however, is pretending it didn't hear about all that. H.R. 2112, the Agriculture appropriations bill, would cut $200 million from the Food and Drug Administration's efforts to implement the food safety overhaul passed last year. Why? Because it's Communist Socialist Nazi Kenyan anti-colonialist or something. Or because all regulations are Satan -- even those that actually help prevent consumers from eating contaminated food and dying. Hard to believe, Harry, that not eight months after the first food safety overhaul in over 70 years, one passed with broad bipartisan support in this decidedly non-bipartisan era, Republicans want to play games with the people's will and the people's lives. Consumers Union helps you call out this insanity.

Meanwhile, H.J.Res. 1 would amend the Constitution to demand a balanced budget from Congress. Now you may well be saying, "I gotta balance my checkbook; why can't Congress?" Think hard about this: did you have several hundred grand just lying around to buy a house? No, you had to get a mortgage; you had to go into debt. When you needed car repairs or home repairs, did you refuse to use your credit card because the expenditures weren't "paid for"? Did you refuse to take out loans to continue schooling because the expenditures weren't "paid for"? Worse, did you then refuse to get a better job to pay your bills because you're dead-set against revenue-raising of any kind? That's the government Republicans want -- one that acts completely unlike you do when you are faced with hard times. Need I mention that the government could be taxing the rich a lot harder and we wouldn't be talking so much about the deficit in the first place? NETWORK helps you tell your Reps that a balanced budget amendment is a bad idea.

Finally, Color of Change helps you call on Fox News to fire Eric Bolling for his latest racist flatugasm. Mr. Obama had the President of Gabon over at the White House the other day, and Mr. Bolling suggested that this was not the first time Mr. Obama had a "hoodlum in the hizzouse" (Frankie Smith, call your lawyer!). He kept riffing on that, too, like that kid at that party you went to in college who kept repeating the same jokes after no one laughed the first ten times. And it wasn't that long ago that Mr. Bolling told us Mr. Obama was "chugging a few forties" in Ireland while Joplin, Missouri got hit by tornadoes. And no this was not Mr. Bolling "(getting) a little fast and loose with the language" -- as others have pointed out, his production team had already photoshopped a gold tooth onto Mr. Bongo's face and were ready with a clip of hip-hop artist Common to go along with the whole "hoodlums" theme. I mean, if you wanted to attack Mr. Obama for hosting a man with a rotten human rights record, you wouldn't need to be a racist pig about it. Why does no one ever try this? Are we so addicted to getting attention for doing wrong that we've forgotten how to act better?

Unemployment insurance and shareholder protection.

S. 904/H.R. 1745, the so-called JOBS Act, would let states take the unemployment money they get from our government and then use it to cut corporate taxes and shore up state trust funds, among other things. Anybody see the problem with that? Actual unemployed people wouldn't get any money. They wouldn't get help in bad times, they wouldn't be able to spend the money in bad times and thus stimulate the economy in bad times, making the bad times somewhat less bad. The bill's sponsors will probably tell you that states should have the right to determine what they want to do with that money. No, they shouldn't -- "unemployment insurance" should be for unemployed people. As a famous philosopher once said, words mean things. Anyway, it doesn't matter what they do; matters what we do. And we should tell our Congressfolk that S. 904 is a monstrosity. Seriously, take money that unemployed people need in bad times, and give it to corporations? Why don't Republicans just hit us with the back of their hand over and over again? It'd waste less ink.

But it's not all bad news -- the Shareholder Protection Act is back (though I can't find either House or Senate versions on thomas.loc.gov just yet). I hear too often from right-wingers that we shouldn't worry about corporations, that the shareholders can take care of the evil they do -- as if our laws compel corporations to tell their shareholders very much of the evil they do! The Shareholder Protection Act would not only require corporations to tell their shareholders what campaign contributions they're about to make and to whom, but would require that shareholders vote on said contributions. There were a few versions of the Shareholder Protection Act in the last Congress; the later version made the threshold for approving campaign contributions smaller (a majority vote versus a two-thirds vote) and allowed proxy votes. I might be willing to put up with a Shareholder Protection Act that allows a majority vote and proxy votes at this stage -- shareholders may be unusually attuned to campaign contribution matters these days, and so may not let their proxies walk all over them. In any case, Public Citizen helps you support the Shareholder Protection Act.

King of the mountain.

Amazingly, the California legislature has passed SB 104, the Fair Treatment for Farm Workers Act, which would, essentially, permit farm workers to organize via a majority sign-up and registration cards rather than a secret ballot election. In other words, it's the Employee Free Choice Act for California farm workers. But Gov. Brown apparently hasn't decided if he's going to sign the bill yet. If he's worried that the bill would outlaw the secret ballot, he doesn't have to -- like the Employee Free Choice Act, which has been wrongly accused of "outlawing the secret ballot," SB 104 would give California farm workers a choice between a secret ballot election at a polling place and a card check election, the latter of which could help workers avoid intimidation by their bosses. If you're a California resident, American Rights at Work helps you tell Gov. Brown to sign the Fair Treatment for Farm Workers Act.

Meanwhile, the Central New York Oil and Gas Company plans to install a gas pipeline through Pennsylvania's Endless Mountains, garroting some 600 fairly pristine acres in the process. But the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has to approve the project first, and they're taking comments on whether they should produce an Environmental Impact Statement on the project. I've been hearing that the FERC doesn't particularly want to produce said study, and perhaps they don't, but it doesn't matter what they want to do; it matters what we want them to do. Central's MARC I project would put in a lot of gas wells along the pipeline, many of these near coal mining sites both active and inactive; sound like a pretty big air and water pollution risk to you? Sound like something making a big deal about? So Earth Justice helps you demand a thorough environmental study of Central's project. Really, what are they afraid of?

Against fracking, REAL ID, and Fox News.

The FRAC Act is back! And CREDO helps you tell your Senator to support it. What does the FRAC Act do? The FRAC Act closes loopholes in the Clean Water Act that gas drillers currently enjoy. Why is that important? Because gas drillers use a method of drilling called "hydrofracturing" -- known popularly as "fracking" -- that pumps dangerous chemicals into the ground, chemicals that wind up in your drinking water. You've seen that scene from Gasland where the fellow lights his drinking water on fire? I rest my case. Meanwhile, Penn Environment tells me that the Department of Energy will hold a hearing tonight in Washington, PA about Marcellus Shale gas drilling. It's at Washington and Jefferson College, 60 South Lincoln Street; the hearing runs from 7-9pm, but if you want to speak, you have to be there at 6.30pm to register. The gas drillers will be busing in their "concerned citizens," so good folks from our side have to go, too. If you can't go, you can still submit a written statement to shalegas at hq dot doe dot gov.

Speaking of Pennsylvania, the regressive state legislature has the chance, and perhaps even the will, to do some real good, by opting out of the federal REAL ID program. In creating a national ID card out of state drivers' licenses, our government would force Pennsylvania to streamline its state DMV database to national standards, and then link said database to all other state DMV databases to create one large national database. Now, if you're an identity thief, which would you rather deal with: a state database with all its state-mandated idiosyncracies, or one big national database? And don't believe the hype that your national ID card would be fake-proof. As anyone in the security business will tell you, any ID can be faked. (As you may know, Bruce Schneier came up with a lot more reasons a national ID card would be a bad idea back in 2004.) The ACLU helps you encourage your legislators to support SB 354, which would block the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania from participating in REAL ID.

Finally, Media Matters provides a petition demanding that advertisers pull all their ads from the Fox News Channel, for all the reasons you might expect. You might call this "starving the beast," except that Fox News also makes good money from cable service providers, and in any case Fox News isn't the entire beast -- News Corp. is the beast, and once upon a time Fox News was one of Mr. Murdoch's money-losing enterprises, a labor of love, I suppose, that News Corp. could absorb as long as Fox's entertainment division made money. So, while shaming advertisers must be done, and doesn't violate any corporation's "rights" -- the First Amendment protects you from your government, not from activists, advertisers, customers, or employers -- we must also remember to support a la carte cable packaging, so we don't have to pay for Fox News if we don't want it in our homes. (You can, of course, amend the Parents' Television Council contact tool to your liking.) Also, we'll need to pass laws preventing corporations from owning media, and vice versa. But that's a long-term project.

Against war and childhood obesity.

I've gotta confess something: I haven't passed along action alerts about the various McGovern/Jones resolutions (and, before that, Feingold resolutions) demanding that Mr. Obama set a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan, because I think we should be withdrawing from Afghanistan right damn now. Don't get me wrong, I'm still pleased that the latest McGovern/Jones resolution came damn close to passing, but I still think it's like starting negotiations with your compromise position, and I don't do that. Now CREDO helps you tell Mr. Obama to end the war in Afghanistan, now. (If you'd rather sign a petition than make a phone call, Council for a Livable World helps you do that.) The military apparently plans to withdraw less than a tenth of its force in Afghanistan by the end of 2011, which wasn't what Mr. Obama promised us. And now that we've gotten bin Laden, what are we still doing there? We're not going to impose our will on Afghanistan any better than anyone else ever has, and why should we?

Meanwhile, CALPIRG helps you tell our government to stop subsidizing obesity in children. How does our government subsidize obesity in children? By subsidizing corn and soybean production, and thus high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils, our government makes soda and fast food much cheaper to eat than it otherwise would be -- and thus makes it more likely that kids will eat it. If government subsidized the production of fruits and vegetables like they subsidize corn and soybeans, you'd better believe kids would eat better, because the fruits and vegetables would be cheaper. Folks who complain that replacing corn syrup in our food production chain would be too hard ought to look to Europe, where you can't get high-fructose corn syrup in your Coca-Cola and it tastes just as good with about a third of the sugar content. And n.b. also that attacking Social Security and Medicare may be the third rail for the American people, but attacking corn and soybean subsidies is the third rail for the American elites, and they'll fight back -- and not just by trying to make you feel like you're choosing between Iowa farmers and childhood obesity. But, like many hard fights, it's a fight worth fighting.

Tornado victims as hostages and mining historical sites! What will they think of next?

You've heard about the tornado that took 139 lives in Joplin, Missouri. You may not have heard that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has refused to fund disaster relief for the people of Joplin, unless said disaster relief is offset by cuts in other areas. Mr. Cantor's stance is so disgusting that Republican Rep. Emerson, who represents Joplin, raged at the "quibbling over how we're going to offset" "the devastation and tragedy these people are facing" -- "quibbling," I'd add, that for Mr. Cantor (and for Ms. Emerson) only touches on spending cuts and not taxing millionaires and billionaires more. But it doesn't matter what they do; it matters what we do. MoveOn helps you call out Mr. Cantor's folly. I'd like to say Mr. Cantor should lose his next election -- he got a career-low 59% in 2010, during a Republican wave, no less -- but I shudder to think what let's-all-get-along Democrat might replace him.

Meanwhile, you may not know that 90 years ago, over 10,000 coal miners fought a coal corporation army (no, they were not called Blackwater) in Blair Mountain, West Virginia. Why? Because they'd been exploited for half a century, and they wanted to bargain collectively for wages and better working conditions. The corporate side, by the way, also had World War I bombers. The "Battle of Blair Mountain," though a short-term defeat for labor, galvanized the nation's labor movement, and good citizens have been trying to preserve the site on the National Register of Historic Places -- which briefly listed the site in 2009, before bureaucratic shenanigans got it de-listed. But now a pair of coal corporations -- including Massey Energy, whose substandard safety practices helped kill 29 workers last year -- wants to practice "mountaintop removal mining" at the Blair Mountain site. I'm sure the irony isn't lost on them. So change.org helps you petition the Department of the Interior and the state of West Virginia to save the Blair Mountain site.

Finally, a bit of good news: AB 52, which would give the California state insurance commissioner the power to stop absurd health insurance rate hikes, passed the lower House in the state assembly on Thursday. Of course, every silver lining has a dark cloud: the bill still has to pass the Senate, and may face a fight there, if its excruciating path to a successful House vote is any indication. I presume I'll have an action alert from CALPIRG once the California state Senate Health Committee has its way with the bill. But the journey of a thousand miles, et cetera.

Super revenue-raising Tuesday!

Today, June 7, is the 10th anniversary of Tha Bush Mobb tax cuts -- which, as we know, delivered billions of hoardable bucks to the richest Americans, didn't grow the economy, and certainly didn't grow government revenues. Then the banksters collapsed the economy with their shell-game antics, and Republicans took advantage of Mr. Obama's inadequate response to the collapse to get many of their numbers elected to state and federal government, all unctiously intoning that "we're broke" and "everybody has to make sacrifices." And by "everybody," of course, they mean you, and not their rich donors. Thus a multitude of good citizenly organizations help you tell Congress to hike taxes on millionaires and billionaires: CREDO provides a petition, NETWORK provides an email tool, Wealth for the Common Good helps you call your Congressfolk, and True Majority helps you find a demonstration near you. Yes, folks are taking to the streets over this, and why not? We're truly a sick, immoral, and decadent society if we cut services for the sick and destitute while cutting taxes for rich folks who don't do anything but hoard money. I'd hate to think we're a sick, immoral, and decadent society, but sometimes the evidence before me is just too much to bear. So let's remake our world into one we can be proud of. Today's as good a day to start as any.

Speaking of Tha Bush Mobb tax cuts, United for a Fair Economy still provides a "tax cut calculator" which you may use to discover how much Tha Bush Mobb tax cuts saved you. But first, though, put in the number 1,000,000 in for income, just for kicks. See how big that Bush Mobb tax cut is? Almost $39,000 -- enough to pay a lot of folks' salaries for an entire year, though that's not what they usually do with it. Now put in the number 39,000, which is more like your annual income. And how big is that Bush Mobb tax cut? $838 -- nice to have, but you know it won't last much longer than a week. What if your income was a billion dollars? Well, then, your tax cut would be almost $46 million. That's just the tax cut, mind you, on top of all the money you'd already have. And n.b. few people make a million or billion bucks of just plain old income -- someone who made $900,000 in income and $100,000 in capital gains would have had an even larger kickback than the fellow who made a million dollars in regular old income. One reason you may want to find out your tax cut, of course, is that you may want to donate it to the Bureau of the Public Debt, so that you can keep your tax cut out of the economy and demonstrate more fiscal responsibility than grandstanding Republicans. If you don't do that, of course, I get it -- we've all got bills to pay, and not a whole lot of money to pay them with, almost like that was the plan all along.

Single-payer in Vermont, women drivers in Saudi Arabia.

You may know that Vermont just passed a single-payer health care bill, which would provide health care coverage to every resident of the state without interference from private health insurance corporations. But you may not know that Vermont can't implement single-payer unless they get lots of waivers from the federal government. So firedoglake helps you tell HHS Secretary Sebelius to grant every waiver Vermont requests, on favorable terms. It's not like granting waivers is unprecedented -- some 30 corporations just got waivers from HHS so they could deliver worse health care coverage than federal law requires. But the big health care corporations also want Vermont's plan to fail. One more time: it doesn't matter what they want; it matters what we want. And if we all pressure HHS to do the right thing, then they'll know what we want. And if they don't do what we want, again, then they'll get turned out of office. It ain't that tough to do anymore.

Meanwhile, did you know that Saudi Arabia effectively bans women from driving? Or from pretty much any sort of moving around -- riding the bus, riding a bike, walking in public -- without the consent and accompaniment of a male relative? Saudi Arabia might have really stepped in it, though, when they arrested Manal al-Sharif for driving a car -- with her brother and with his permission, I might add. One high government official (and cleric) suggested that Manal should be "flogged in the women's marketplace as a model and a lesson." Any of this sounding even remotely 19th century to you, let alone this century? Change.org helps you tell King Abdullah to drop charges against Manal. Apparently Saudi women plan to protest the various bans on their movement by driving en masse on June 17. Good luck to them, and shame on any man who'd try to stop them.

Finally, here's an update on two initiatives we've been watching in this space. First, the Kucinich resolution that would have ended the Libya war failed, as Mr. Boehner successfully lulled many House Republicans into voting for a weaker resolution demanding more information, justification, etc. I doubt it'll do much good, but I'd be happy to be wrong. Meanwhile, the Obama Department of Education gave in to corporate lobbying and issued far weaker rules on for-profit colleges than they'd originally proposed. You have to wonder why Mr. Obama rarely seems to give in to lobbying from the American people. It can't have anything to do with the billion dollars he hopes to raise for re-election, can it? Mr. Obama may have to learn the hard way that money doesn't win elections, but votes do. And votes have to be earned.

Straight, no chaser.

Well, the House apparently plans to vote on H.Con.Res. 51 (which would end the war in Libya) today after all -- along with some watered-down version Mr. Boehner hopes will peel votes. You can thwart his machinations by writing or calling your Rep in support of H.Con.Res. 51. Note that even long-time Republican fool Dan Burton of Indiana is a co-sponsor of H.Con.Res. 51, and that Arizona Senate candidate Jeff Flake (currently also a Republican House Rep, though rather less a fool than Dan Burton) also supports the bill, saying "Republicans have been too eager to support some military ventures abroad. And this, I think, is perhaps a little more consistent with traditional conservatism." Naturally I do wonder where this wise counsel was when a Republican President started all these wars, but I'll take it now. Especially since Mr. Boehner won't.

Meanwhile, FAIR helps you tell the "liberal" media to start covering liberal alternatives to the Ryan budget. For too long most Americans have thought the Ryan budget -- that "serious," "bold" document which cuts taxes for the rich and cuts taxes for corporations and privatizes Medicare without even reducing its cost -- is the only game in town. But the Progressive Caucus in the House released a "People's Budget" at the same time, and while the "People's Budget" isn't progressive enough for me, it would raise taxes on the wealthy, it would enact a financial speculation tax, and it would balance the budget in 10 years without repeatedly showing the needy the back of its hand. Moreover, liberal alternatives to OMG CUT SPENDING NOW!!!!!! are quite popular with, you know, the American people. But of course the "liberal" media won't cover a liberal alternative to the Ryan budget -- unless we shame them into doing so. I'm going to remain an optimist and assume any of them have any shame.

Meanwhile, if you haven't addressed oil tax loopholes with your Senators, the Sierra Club still helps you tell your Senators to close tax loopholes for oil corporations. If your Senators are writing you back, they may be citing the "need" to encourage drilling in the U.S. to reduce oil dependence. Of course that's bunk -- oil corporations would rather hold on to land and not drill on it precisely so they can write it off on their taxes -- but, more precisely, it's beside the point. Why on earth must large, profitable corporations get billions of dollars in tax breaks they clearly don't need? And why do we give the tax breaks as an "incentive" for good behavior, rather than, I don't know, giving tax breaks after good behavior? I mean, you don't give your kid his cookies and then hope he does his homework, do you?

Finally, some good news: the Supreme Court may have ruled that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited funds on political campaigns, but shareholders at some big corporations are fighting back by demanding more disclosure of their corporation's political spending. Shareholder resolutions can be considerably more powerful than you might think: if a shareholder resolution even gets 25 or 30% of the vote, the CEOs get antsy, because that represents a large chunk of shareholders who might suddenly sell their stock and embarrass the hell out of the company, and then the CEO will have to explain what went wrong. And this is a welcome development, because for too long right-wingers have told us that a corporation only has an obligation to its shareholders, while they've never compelled corporations to tell their shareholders very much of anything (other than financial information). I hope we will soon see that this is not now, nor has ever been, a world where love of money is all.

Hard times.

You may have heard that the House leadership planned a vote yesterday on H.Con.Res. 51, a resolution to end the war in Libya, but pulled it when they thought it might actually pass. Fox News's source indicated the House leadership preferred a narrow loss that would send a "message" to the Obama Administration, though one would think passing the resolution, thus actually preventing further Administration action in Libya, would also "send a message." Anyway, Repubs are doing their damndest to pass the worst possible Defense Authorization bill, but it's not going as well as they'd hoped -- the bill includes amendments prohibiting use of ground troops in Libya and stating that its passage doesn't authorize the Libya war, and the McGovern-Jones amendment demanding a quicker pullout in Afghanistan damn near passed. Sadly, Section 1034, which lets the President wage war on anyone-anywhere-anytime-even-on-Americans-in-America-right-now, still remains in the bill, despite the best efforts of Reps. Lee (D-CA) and Amash (R-MI). So Roots Action helps you demand that Congress pull out of Libya and ensure future Libyas don't happen again.

Meanwhile, Rep. Royce (R-CA) plans to introduce a bill that would destroy the National Housing Trust Fund. Mr. Royce tells us that the NHTF is "a slush fund for special interest housing groups" -- imagine, a "slush fund" that Congress refuses to fund! One almost yearns for those halcyon days when Republicans told us that we should do everything on our own and not expect help from anyone, lest our fellows consider us worthless and weak. The National Housing Trust Fund has only been around since mid-2008, and it's never been all that well-funded. We've been pushing for a mere $1 billion in funding (far less than one-tenth of one percent of the national deficit) so we can help low-income folks get decent housing and create jobs for all the planners and engineers and construction workers who'd help them. Why is that so much to ask of Republicans? NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, helps you fight the destruction of the National Housing Trust Fund.

California residents, take note: AB 52 would give the state insurance commissioner veto power over proposed health insurance corporation rate hikes. You may remember Anthem's proposed 39% rate hike on individual policy holders from 2010, and Blue Cross's proposed 59% rate hike on the same folks from earlier this year. You may not know that health insurance corporations have jacked up rates 131% over the last 10 years in California, which figure rather outstrips inflation. And they've never been made to justify any of it! Now, thanks to all the bad PR they got, Blue Cross did eventually drop the proposed 59% rate hike, so some of you might say well, we don't need to give the government new powers -- everything worked out for the best! First off, it's your government, so the power's yours. Second off, bad PR won't work as well when it's every damn corporation jacking up rates all at once, a fairly easily-imaginable scenario, and that's what a properly-empowered insurance commissioner can stop. So CALPIRG helps you tell your state Assemblyperson to support AB 52.

First grandma, now your kids.

H.R. 1939 would roll back safety standards in the 2008 Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act -- including lead safety standards in children's toys. Republicans do remember kids getting sick off toys from China that had lead in them, do they not? And that's not all: H.R. 1939 would also gut the Consumer Product Safety Commission's public database -- because why would you want to know what toys are dangerous to your children? -- and even undermine crib safety rules in child care centers. Do they, like, want to hurt children or something? Republicans serve one master and one master only: the corporation. They do not care about the economy, they do not care about the deficit, and they certainly don't care about the small business, the hostage they always parade in front of you when you criticize them. Oh sure, they'll say safety regulations kill jobs and that corporations can't be made to do anything in times of economic trouble, but that marks them as people who won't do hard work in tough times, the most worthless sort of people. So Consumers Union helps you demand a semblance of humanity from your Reps. Seriously, voting for H.R. 1939 should be as toxic as voting to destroy Medicare.

Meanwhile, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you fight state bills allowing advertising on school buses. Why? Because kids already watch too damn much advertising on TV, and corporations toss around terms like brand extension too readily when talking about advertising to children. Worse, corporations interfere with the parents' right to ensure a good education for their child, and now they're using (hard to believe, Harry!) state budget troubles as a way to get their crappy products into the minds of kids. Some of the bills you'll see described at the above link, I'll admit, would prevent sexual material and alcohol/tobacco advertising in school bus ads, but let's not give people too much credit. And, ah, let's note that other bills don't -- Kentucky's bill, for example, has literally no proscription against sexual material in school bus ads. And let's also note that none of the bills listed prohibit junk food ads. If there's something in the world worse than a crappy plastic toy made by slave labor, it's junk food. (You can find action tools for individual states on the right-hand side of the above link.)