Thieves in the Temple.

The holy righteous wrath of the Italics Hammer!

Mr. Obama is trying to get the state attorneys general to accept a "deal" (Lord, I hope that's a bad word one day soon) that grants the big banksters immunity for their foreclosure-related crimes, including but not limited to "robo-signing." But New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has refused to take part in such a settlement thus far, and CREDO helps you stand with him, and thus stand with law and order. Mr. Schneiderman might be Only One Guy, but as the Attorney General from the state that includes Wall Street, he's one pretty important guy: if he doesn't play ball, the whole "deal" -- which exchanges fines and supposed reforms for immunity from criminal prosecution for banksters -- could fall apart. As well it should: no sane, decent, and moral society should be forced to accept law-breaking by its richest and most powerful members as a price for getting something done. Does Barack Obama not understand that conservatives hate us precisely because we tolerate evil?

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has recognized that contraception is basic health care, and that's not evil -- but they're getting a lot of guff from right-wingers, and we all know how stalwart Mr. Obama is when he's challenged. Right-wingers have largely complained about the purported lack of an exemption for religious folks, but the HHS Required Health Care Plan Guidelines actually do exempt certain religious employers from covering contraception. And I worry, actually, that the exemption's too broad, or that certain decision-makers will get to impose their religious beliefs on the rest of us. How many times must I tell these pimps! You don't get to exercise your religious freedom at the expense of everyone else's religious freedom. You don't like birth control pills? Then don't use birth control pills. But don't tell the rest of us we can't, not unless you're willing to make them illegal. The ACLU helps you tell the Obama Administration to stand its ground on affordable contraception.

UPDATE. The Justice Department has sued to stop the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, which we've been fighting for months now. Good for the Justice Department. More details as they arrive.

Many rivers to cross.

As I'm sure you know (especially if you live in the Northeast), Virginia had an earthquake measuring 5.8 on the Richter scale last Tuesday. As you may not know, some 20 percent of nuclear reactors worldwide sit near fault lines, and sure enough the North Anna plant sits about 10 miles from the Tuesday earthquake's epicenter. The plant didn't melt down or anything -- it's shut down since the quake, with back-up generators keeping the core cool -- but even plant owners seem to question whether the plant is really as safe as they said it was. So USPIRG reminds us that they still provide a petition asking that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission stop licensing (or renewing licences of) nuclear power plants. Our government has heavily subsidized the nuclear power industry for over half a century now (with Mr. Obama has stepping up such efforts), and you have to ask why it can't get on its own feet. Perhaps it's just not reliable enough.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the Chesapeake Energy Corporation is playing a very interesting game in Pennsylvania -- holding up gas royalty payments to landowners, they say, because the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers isn't issuing permits fast enough! Damn, now corporations think they can control our own Armed forces! Furthermore, they want even more exemptions from the Clean Water Act so they can build whatever pipelines they like, even across streams and rivers, without proper oversight. I guess they don't mind it so much if you can light your tap water on fire because they rush to build pipes that aren't safe underwater. And why should we let them take landowner royalties hostage? Corporations should just pay people what they owe them and stop whining about why they "can't" -- the real reason they "can't" is that it would hinder their CEOs' ability to gild the plumbing in their third vacation home. The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk not to grant Clean Water Act exemptions to gas companies in the name of landowners who are owed royalties.

Shameless.

A big earthquake hits Virginia, a big hurricane sweeps up and down the East Coast -- and, almost as if on cue, Rep. Eric Cantor (E-VA) suggests we'll have to make spending cuts before we can spend any money on emergency disaster aid. In a sane society, a heartless idiot such as he would never win re-election again. Even in this insane society, he's in trouble: consider that, in a district where he routinely got two-thirds of the vote in previous elections, where that number slipped slightly in the Democratic wave elections of 2006 and 2008, his vote total slipped even lower in the Republican wave election of 2010. You'll say, well, he still got 59% of the vote, and I'll say, well, so did fellow Virginia Republican Virgil Goode in 2006 before he went down in 2008. This can happen to all of them, even though the Democrats are doing their damndest to make Republicans look better. Anyway, Eric Cantor is cruel to demand partisan spending cuts as a condition to helping good citizens rebuild their homes and lives after disasters, and Left Action helps you tell him so.

Meanwhile, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you comment on the EPA's proposed "scientific integrity" policy. Why does the EPA need a scientific integrity policy? To shield itself from the kind of partisan interference that characterized Tha Bush Mobb's reign of error, especially during its second term. By "interference" I don't mean "having different priorities than I have" -- I mean actually manipulating or suppressing EPA scientific analysis of smog, formaldehyde pollution, and climate change, to give three examples. I mean, science is science, but Tha Bush Mobb couldn't even let America know the facts. Sadly, the draft version of the EPA's scientific integrity policy still lets the Executive branch censor or suppress EPA research -- which is a shame, since the EPA has been one of the brighter lights of the Obama Administration. But, like I always say: it doesn't matter what they want; it matters what we want. They'll never get properly humbled if we don't tell them, though.

Finally, if you haven't yet told the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction that ending the wars would be a great way of reducing the debt, Just Foreign Policy still helps you do that. Our current agreements mandate that we pull all troops out of Iraq by December 31 of this year, and out of Afghanistan by 2014. Of course, the 2014 pullout already represents a broken promise by Mr. Obama, and as we speak the Obama Administration is trying to keep troops in Iraq after 2011, so we should absolutely pressure the Joint Select Committee to end the wars as part of a debt deal. How much money would we save? If we ended the wars on schedule, as described above, we'd save $200 billion over the next ten years, according to the Congressional Research Service -- but that figure is likely low, since our government tends to spend more per soldier when it deploys fewer soldiers. In any case, $200 billion is one-sixth of the Joint Select Committee's goal. Reducing military spending to 2007 levels would represent another half of that goal, totalling two-thirds. And no one who needs Medicare and Social Security would have to go without them!

The harder they come.

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell the "Super-Congress" to reduce the deficit fairly. "Fairly" means actually creating jobs, raising taxes on millionaire and billionaire income, and protecting programs that actually help the people (who are the owners of government, after all). You've probably noticed that every time a corporation wants some handout these days, they say it'll "create jobs." That's because they think we're stupid and we don't understand how jobs get created. Jobs get created by, you know, hiring people. To do things. To make stuff. To serve communities. Not by cutting taxes for rich folks and corporations even more, which this "Super-Congress" (packed as it is with economic reactionaries) will no doubt try to do.

Meanwhile, the Office of Management and Budget has been delaying updating certain labor regulations. After two 14-year-old girls got electrocuted last month on a Monsanto corn farm in Illinois, OMB finally moved forward with child labor regulations, but now they're stalling on silica dust regulations that they should have approved or amended in May. Do you remember change.org's petition to stop sandblasting of jeans, which released silica particles into the air and made workers sick? Well, sand, bricks, and cement also contain silica, meaning an awful lot of construction workers get exposed to it, and many of them could also develop serious breathing problems that could wind up killing them. Could it be that some corporation or other doesn't want the regulation to move forward? Their will doesn't matter; ours does. Hence Public Citizen helps you demand movement on the silica dust regulation.

Finally, the ACLU helps you tell the Department of Justice to fight voter-suppression efforts. Under the Voting Rights Act, the DOJ still has the power to block state laws that affect citizens' right to vote, and they'll announce on Monday whether they'll block a voter ID law in South Carolina that would effectively disenfranchise more than 175,000 poor, senior and minority voters who don't have government-issued photo ID. Of course, voter ID laws like South Carolina's have passed in several other states (including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania), but the DOJ's decision in South Carolina might put the scare into them. Oh, the right wing will cry about it, and accuse our government of tyranny, which they never did when Mr. Bush was tapping good Americans' phones. But the government-issued photo ID is the poll tax of our time.

Breakneck speed.

No Labels looks a bit too let's-all-get-along for my taste, but they did something awesome this week: they called every last damn member of the House of Representatives and found that a mere 40% of them planned town hall meetings with constituents this month. (In the days since No Labels first put out their report, that number has increased somewhat.) Congress is out of session in August, of course, and although I've glibly referred to that as their "vacation" (and one I've often wished they'd stay on), that's actually not the case: they're supposed to be meeting with constituents. Well, they're not -- and some of those who are, including Lou Barletta (R-PA) and Paul Ryan (he of the infamous "Ryan budget") -- are actually charging citizens money to go to their townhalls. Imagine that: the people's servants charging the people they serve for the "privilege" of speaking to them? That should be against the law. Anyway, you can look at the No Labels list and see if your Rep is holding any townhalls this month -- and then you can use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to call your Rep's office and give 'em hell. Better to call your Rep's nearest local office at this time of month, of course. (And if your Rep is holding townhalls, you can find dates and times here, courtesy of Consumers Union.)

Meanwhile, I wonder if the 70-odd Democrats who signed a letter promoting the "benefits" of the AT&T/T-Mobile merger feel ashamed of themselves now that AT&T's argument that the merger will create jobs and make broadband buildout easier has largely crumbled. Nah, of course they don't. But that doesn't mean we'll flinch from the application of shame, which is one of our most solemn duties as citizens. So Free Press helps you call your Rep (if your Rep was one of the letter's signers), and Color of Change helps you petition said Reps for same. What did we learn last week? That AT&T doesn't "need" to merge with T-Mobile to build out its broadband network to cover 97% of America -- in fact, AT&T could do that for one-tenth of the price they'd be paying for T-Mobile. We also learned that T-Mobile has already offered 20,000 severance packages in anticipation of the merger, which belies AT&T's claim that the merger will "create jobs." Color of Change also reminds me that AT&T and Verizon -- which, together, would control over 80% of the American cell phone market if the merger goes through -- oppose treating all network traffic neutrally, which is the cornerstone of a free web. Two corporations telling you what you can see and what you can't see on the internet? That's too much power concentrated in too few hands.

Finally, the Wall Street Journal admits, sort of, that millionaires really aren't leaving states that have jacked up taxes on high-end income like Maryland and Oregon, but that our ongoing economic armageddon is simply turning a lot of millionaire income into hundreds-of-thousandaire income. And by "admit," I mean they completely forget to mention that they trumpeted the meme so loudly, and they don't admit they were actually wrong to do that, or that they weren't actually sitting on stacks of millionaire address change forms that might prove their point. Instead, they play the lies-damn-lies-and-statistics card -- "(t)hose who make $1 million accounted for about 0.2% of all tax returns but paid 20.4% of income taxes in 2009," they intone, as if the number of millionaires matters as much as the amount of millionaire money to be taxed. Also, apparently, they're using the same headlines. Master propagandists, those fellows. Best of luck to them when they take their works to the pearly gates.

Disorder.

I've long complained that corporations ought to be using their record profits to hire people (versus, say, spending millions upon millions on political campaigns), but they won't, because they worship mammon. And now comes the news that corporations trying to get tax breaks from our government, ostensibly so they can hire more people, don't want anyone to know how many folks they're hiring in the U.S. versus overseas. If your twelve year-old pulled this crap, you'd see through it, right? Corporations can't be trusted to do anything but squash the small businesses that might actually create jobs, so Rep. Schakowsky (D-IL) will soon introduce the Emergency Jobs to Restore the American Dream Act (sorry, it doesn't make a cute acronym), which would spend some $225 billion over two years just to put good Americans back to work, and would fund the program with tax hikes on millionaire and billionaire income. I think a phone call is in order to your Reps and Senators. They'll never see it coming.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that Bay Area Rapid Transit (or BART) -- which serves San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and surrounding ares in California -- shut down cell phone service last week in advance of a planned protest (against a killing by transit police, no less). A BART spokeshack claimed that public safety concerns trump First Amendment rights, apparently forgetting that in 2001, BART felt differently, after noting that so many New Yorkers found cell phone service invaluable while the Twin Towers were being attacked. The BART hack also forgot a few other things that happened this year -- when Mr. Mubarak cut off internet service throughout Egypt, when Mr. Cameron shut down UK Uncut's facebook page. When will these pimps learn that you make bad publicity worse by trying to stifle good folks' ability to spread it? Better just to do good works, I think. I know the elites don't think that way, but that means we just have to remind them to be functioning members of society, and not a bunch of damn tyrants. So Demand Progress helps you tell BART not to shut off cell phone service on their trains anymore.

For the love of money.

The "Super-Congress" must reduce the debt by $1.2 trillion over ten years by Thanksgiving, and while defense cuts are on the table, ending the wars, apparently, isn't. So Just Foreign Policy helps you urge your Reps to end the wars as part of any debt-reduction "deal." Very few warmongers have any taste for defending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan anymore; now the pro-war forces tell us that ending the wars would amount to "phony" deficit reduction, since plans for troop withdrawals are already in place. But "plans" can always be shunted aside, and the Obama Administration is trying to shunt them aside as we speak -- they're trying to keep troops in Iraq even though complete withdrawal is supposed to happen at the end of this year, and withdrawals in Afghanistan keep getting pushed back, all the way to 2014 now (and that's not a complete withdrawal). So, yeah, folks who try to tell you cutting the wars is a "phony" way to end deficit reduction are either lying or stupid. I usually bet on "lying" these days.

Meanwhile, Capital One is acquiring ING Direct USA, ING Groep's online banking arm in America, and ING customers are quite mad about it. I don't blame them -- I don't approve of ING's we're-a-banker-and-a-broker business model myself, but I certainly don't want another bank owning any part of it, let alone a credit card magnate trying to turn itself into a bank; that'd be piling sin upon sin upon sin. And, actually, the pile of sin is even higher than that: ING Groep (a Dutch corporation) is only selling ING Direct as a condition of the bailout the European Commission gave it in 2008. Always with the damn bailouts! When will all these bailouts stop dumping on consumers? Hence Consumers Union (via the Petition Site) helps you tell the Federal Reserve Board to give the public more time to comment on the Capital One/ING "deal." And not that you should care, but you're not putting out ING Groep by pushing against the sale; ING Groep has until 2013 to rid itself of ING Direct USA.

Finally, I'm as annoyed as ever that our push to get antibiotics out of the fattening-up-animals business and back into the making-people-less-sick business hasn't worked; I guess this formerly bipartisan effort is just another casualty of the Republicans' refusal to govern or let anyone else govern. That shouldn't matter -- the FDA had until this past June to address the issue, but didn't. So the Pew Charitable Trusts (via the Petition Site) help you tell the FDA to protect us from overfeeding of antibiotics to feed animals. I'm not exaggerating in the first sentence, by the way; we now use the vast majority of our antibiotics on feed animals -- not on people, not even on sick animals. In this life, the push for mammon has its price -- not necessarily for the big corporations who rake in the unearned dough, but for good folks like you and I who can't fight off disease as well because using antibiotics on feed animals has made diseases more resistant. Also for the animals, who must endure cruel, unsanitary conditions and whose descendants also wind up less able to fight disease.

The country is young.

First things first. You no doubt know that Syrian citizens have been peacefully protesting their government since March, and you no doubt also know that the Syrian government has responded by shooting the protestors, detaining and torturing them, and bombing their homes. The U.N. could do something about all of that -- they could stop weapons from going into Syria, they could freeze Mr. Assad's internationally-held assets as well as that of his cronies, and they could appeal to the International Criminal Court. But thanks to a few inexplicable holdouts (South Africa, Brazil, and India), the U.N. Security Council has been unable to act. It's bad when President Obama, not known for his lightning-quick reaction to oppression, has already called for Mr. Assad's abdication. Amnesty International helps you tell the recalcitrant Security Council members to stop blocking U.N. efforts to pressure the Syrian regime.

Meanwhile, closer to home, America's richest citizen has told us that he and his brethren need to pay more in taxes. Mr. Buffett didn't say how much more, and he did say some "future promises" need to be "pare(d) down," which I don't believe is true, but his op-ed attracted the usual litany of ridiculous responses (Citizens for Tax Justice tabulates a few of them here). Again, it doesn't matter what the "class warfare" whiners think; it matters what we think, and polls suggest that most of us agree with Warren Buffett. Thus, both MoveOn and CREDO help you demand that Congress hike taxes on millionaires. CREDO's alert supports S. 552, a Bernie Sanders production that would hike millionaire tax rates by a little over five percentage points -- that's too low for my taste, but it would help sop up the deficit pool.

Finally, the House intends to introduce its own version of S. 968, the PROTECT IP Act, which would (as you may remember from an earlier alert) let the Justice Department force internet service providers to block users (that's you) from accessing any website that's been accused of enabling intellectual property theft. I don't think our Founders would be thrilled to find their descendants aiming to keep people from associating with websites accused, not convicted, of a crime. But then the Senate was just recently trying (and, thankfully, failing) to give the Director of Intelligence the ability to strip employees of their pensions if they were accused, not convicted, of leaking classified information. And you can, of course, imagine our government compelling ISPs to deny access to websites our government just doesn't like, and finding some crony or other to accuse said website of "copyright infringement" to cover their ass. That's what happens when we let money rule our lives and we let corporations rule our nation -- we render our most sacred beliefs (and "innocent until proven guilty" is surely one of these) utterly meaningless. We don't have to be like this, of course, for Demand Progress helps you tell your Reps and Senators to oppose PROTECT IP.

See America right.

Did you know that Pennsylvania chocolate-maker Hershey tricks foreign students into working as wage slaves? I didn't, until yesterday, when said students staged a sit-in at Hershey. Hershey apparently recruits hundreds of students every year via a State Department visa program, collecting thousands of dollars from each and promising a taste of American life. I shudder to think that they got it: they spent 40 hours a week packing chocolates under questionable working conditions and took home between $40 and $140 a week after "expenses" deducted by the corporation. It gets better: these jobs used to be union jobs paying around $18 an hour. It gets even better: when Hershey realized the students were organizing, office bigwigs "reminded" them, in meetings, that they could be deported if they didn't do their jobs. I don't think those kids did bad work -- I've had more than a few of these jobs myself -- but I do think they should have been paid more for it, and I do think they were tricked into thinking their experience of America was going to be different, and I applaud their courage in standing up for themselves. Keystone Progress helps you tell Hershey's CEO to stop exploiting foreign students when they could be paying folks a decent wage for a decent day's work.

Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission (in concert with a few other agencies) has proposed voluntary guidelines in re marketing food to children. Voluntary, I said! And yet the big food and big advertising corporations are trying to kill them. Though they're voluntary. You've watched enough TV to know, I trust, that the food they market to kids is mostly crap -- fast food, soft drinks, allegedly nutritious snacks, "fruit" "drinks" mostly comprised of water and sugar. Did I mention the guidelines were voluntary? Big corporations cry like little brats when somebody asks them to take something other than money into account, or something other than themselves into account, and I'd prefer that our government be big and bad on our behalf and just tell these fat cats to stop pummeling the airwaves with ads for crap. But if enough of us make a stink, we can get the big corporations to do more than they want to do, even with all their money and their fake studies promising economic armageddon (as if we're not already living through that). Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell these corporate CEOs that you want them brought to heel. (CCFC also provides, for your edification, their comments on the proposed guidelines.)

Finally, I note that our newest Republican Presidential candidate, Texas Governor Rick Perry, has said that some of Fed chair Ben Bernanke's actions in re our ongoing economic Armageddon are "almost treasonous, in my opinion," and added that "I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas." "Almost," "in my opinion," "ugly" -- only a coward hides behind words. I note, also, that Barack Obama missed an opportunity for a "teaching moment" by not pointing out that Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution has a different definition of "treason" than "printing more money to play politics" or whatever. In fact, by saying he'd "cut (Mr. Perry) some slack" because he's "only been at it for a few days now," Mr. Obama reveals, if we needed further revelation, that he's One of Them. With Mr. Nader not running, and with potential billionaire candidates looking mostly like arrogant pricks, our choices in 2012 are indeed slim, at least at the Presidential level. Good thing that's not really the point, isn't it?

Thunder on the mountain.

AT&T still hasn't assimilated T-Mobile, but that doesn't mean they won't -- the FCC might yet sign off on a "merger" that won't deliver lower prices, won't deliver better service, and certainly won't deliver "more jobs." As anyone who's given the matter any thought knows, mergers result in fewer jobs, as the two merging corporations form a more "streamlined," "efficient" super-corporation. And, as if on cue, T-Mobile has already offered 20,000 severance packages. (Meanwhile, an apparently inadvertently-leaked letter from an AT&T lawyer demolishes AT&T's other arguments.) But AT&T spends millions every year on bribing lobbying Congressfolk, and they've also donated millions to non-profits, many of which, strangely, came out in favor of the merger earlier this year. So Free Press helps you tell President Obama to use his dadgum bully pulpit against the AT&T/T-Mobile merger. And please, Mr. President, no excuses about the need to calm the markets. Corporations are not a bunch of babies, even when they act like them.

Meanwhile, closer to home, Pennsylvania Gov. Corbett still plans to let the state's Growing Greener program expire, even though Growing Greener funds sewer system upgrades, parkland restoration, farmland preservation and abandoned mine cleanup, all to make hundreds of miles of Pennsylvania rivers and streams healthy. And, ah, anybody else think all that sounds like economy-stimulating, job-creating work? I mean, we can't just build robots to cut new recreational trails or fix old sewer pipes. Now Mr. Corbett has famously done a lot of kayaking lately, as if to say, see? I'm not trying to make your water unsafe! I mean, look! I'm in the water! Well, let him drink the Goddamn water after one of his fracking cronies injects Frankencrap into it and Growing Greener ain't around to clean up the mess. Penn Environment helps you tell your state legislators to keep the Growing Greener program alive. They're no more into clean water than our Governor is, but they'll have to face the Pennsylvania electorate sooner than he does.

Hard to be human again.

This new Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has been quite the servant of empire -- he said we should cut Medicare before cutting defense spending, and now he wants to keep a permanent force of about 10,000 American soldiers in Iraq. But we already promised to leave Iraq at the end of this year! What to do, what to do? Well, Rep. Lee (D-CA) has introduced H.R. 2757, the Iraq Withdrawal Accountability Act, which would forbid our government from spending any money on maintaining U.S. armed forces or military contractors after December 31 of this year. The bill would also prevent funding for a permanent military base in Iraq. Both Just Foreign Policy and Peace Action West help you tell your Congressfolk to end the war in Iraq by the end of this year. Because, ultimately, our opinion matters more than Leon Panetta's opinion. It has ever been so.

I understand that while I was away, Mitt Romney destroyed any hope he has of ever becoming President, during this exchange with protestors at an Iowa rally. "Corporations are people, my friend"? He might as well have said "chairs are people, my friend." Americans oppose Citizens United v. FEC and corporate "personhood" by large majorities in poll after poll, and even our center-right President has vocally opposed Citizens United, so this Romney flatugasm, which will live forever on the internet along with its protestors' wit and wisdom, has done, I think, permanent, irreparable damage. I'm sure he's game to explain it, ad nauseum, because he's good at that. I'm not sure anyone is game to listen, though. Just in case, be sure to visit Mitt Romney's campaign website at nochance2012.org.

Emerald city.

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett wants to privatize Pennsylvania's state parks. I'm sure he will tell you he was just responding to a reporter's question about what he might privatize, but that certainly doesn't mean he won't try. It's bad enough thinking about corporations mismanaging state parks -- your parks, where you walk and swim and hunt and fish -- but in Pennsylvania you must also think about the possibility that gas drillers will buy up state parks and soon you'll be able to light your tap water on fire. Hence, SignOn helps you tell Gov. Corbett not to privatize state parks. As I've suggested, I'm not a fan of privatization generally -- basically, corporations will buy up state parks and mismanage them so that their CEOs can pocket all the money. But with gas drilling being so woefully unregulated in this state, privatization would be a double whammy. And what's wrong with, say, a gas severance tax to pay for more lifeguards, Mr. Corbett? Oh, I forgot: he thinks a gas severance tax is "un-American."

Meanwhile, you may remember that Apple got in trouble when folks learned that the iPhone and iPad can actually track your location in space-time, but your cell phone already provides a treasure trove of information about your location in space-time, as well as your friends' location in space-time, and the government wants that information. And, ah, not necessarily for benign purposes: been to a labor protest lately? How about a church? How about a therapist? How about a gun shop? Beginning to see the problem? Consider, also, that your government no longer thinks it has to get a warrant from a judge to get your cell phone records, and I think we're seeing the Big Brother Boondoggle we've all feared all our lives. But thankfully, Rep. Chaffetz (R-UT) and Sen. Wyden (D-OR) have sponsored bills (H.R. 2168 and S. 1212, respectively) that would throw up barriers to those who'd try to get your cell phone records, and the ACLU helps you support those bills.

Finally, you may have heard that 45,000 Verizon workers went on strike last week. You may not have heard (because why would the "liberal" media tell you?) that Verizon's top five executives gave themselves pretty hefty raises the previous week. They must figure they made all of Verizon's bajillions in profits, not their workers. You know, the ones who actually did the work. Hence the word, "worker." Did I mention that Verizon is yet another American corporation that doesn't pay any taxes? They pay no taxes, they pay their executives like they were phaoraohs, and then demand givebacks from the workers who make all their success possible -- wow, with that business model, it's no wonder our economy is crumbling. Of course, the greatness of America is this: we see the problem, we attack the problem, we solve the problem. And so both Free Press and American Rights at Work help you tell Verizon to deal fairly with its workers. It's not like it doesn't have the money.

Public image.

The Gambian government, not known for its sterling human rights record, charged three journalists with "treason" last month. What was their crime? Distributing T-shirts saying "Coalition for Change The Gambia, End to Dictatorship Now." Even when one keeps in mind that most governments have a broader definition of treason than the U.S. Constitution does, that's not treason. For one thing, one need not overthrow the government to end a dictatorship -- one may end a dictatorship by changing the laws the putative dictator enforces. Ha! The good news is, dictatorships seem as averse to bad publicity as multinational corporations do, so The Petition Site helps you demand the release of all imprisoned journalists and activists. Surely President Jammeh would just hate for the world to find out what else he might have been doing all these years.

Posting may be light this week, so please patronize the excellent sites on the left and right sides of this page in the meantime. Also, look out for your Rep or Senator having a townhall meeting near you -- and when you see them, be sure to, ah, communicate your displeasure with them and to them.

Face the change.

You know how the government of China loves spying on its people, and putting them in jail when they speak out against their government? Well, Cisco Systems -- probably Thee Name in network connectivity here in the U.S. -- has apparently been helping China out, by selling them internet surveillance and censorship tools. We probably only know that, of course, because Chinese writer Du Daobin and two others sued Cisco last month (in the U.S. District Court in Maryland) for its role in Chinese oppression -- and wouldn't ya know it, the Chinese government has since reportedly detained and interrogated Mr. Du. The Electronic Freedom Foundation helps you tell Cisco to stop helping China trample the human rights of its citizens. Because there is-so such a thing as bad publicity.

Meanwhile, here in America, the big banks got big bailouts from the taxpayers, they fought reform efforts tooth-and-nail, and they still enjoy outlandish profits -- what else could they possibly want? Triple-digit payday-loan interest rates and onerous overdraft fees, that's what. Now imagine that first item for a minute -- big banks want to get directly into the loansharking business. Does that sound safe to you? As far as overdraft fees -- which banks could avoid, incredibly enough, by declining purchases when you don't have money to pay for them -- banks can re-order a customer's transactions so their accounts empty faster and incur more fees. Doesn't that sound like it ought to be illegal? Sadly, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (or OCC) seems to think there's nothing fishy about these matters, but they're taking public comments about them, so both Public Citizen and Americans for Financial Reform help you leave those comments.

Finally, change.org helps you tell high-end clothing corporation Dolce & Gabbana to stop sandblasting its jeans to give them that somehow desirable "distressed" look. No, literally sandblasting. What's wrong with sandblasting, you may ask? It puts a lot of dust (mainly silica) in the air, and in workers' lungs, and a lot of workers wind up dying from the resulting breathing problems -- all to accomplish what can be accomplished simply by wearing jeans until they wear out. Versace, Gucci, and Levi's have all stopped using sandblasting, and though they have not stopped the absurd practice of making jeans look like someone's actually done any work in them, at all, ever, I appreciate that at least they've stopped sending Bangladeshi and Turkish workers to early graves in that pursuit. Yet Dolce & Gabbana continues to hold out, for some reason. But, as I've said already, there is-so such a thing as bad publicity.

Reset.

We can all tabulate, with laughable ease, the foul details of this most recent debt limit "deal," but I note that the biggest part of the "deal" kicks the can down the road -- specifically, to Thanksgiving, by which time a 12-member "Super Congress" (by God, that sounds even worse than a regular Congress!) will have to figure out how to cut the deficit by $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years. And here I sense opportunity. We've got three and a half months to tell them what to do. Here's what I'm going to tell them:

End all the frickin' wars already. Bring back the Estate Tax at pre-Bush Mobb levels. Tax income over $1 million at 91%, just like Eisenhower did. Tax dividends and capital gains as income, just like Reagan did. Let Medicare negotiate the price of prescription drugs, just like private insurance companies and the Veterans Administration do. Close the carried interest loophole that lets hedge fund managers pay well below the top tax rate on their billions in unearned largesse. Tax all stock trades at one percent (which, alone, would raise over half a trillion dollars a year). Require folks to pay payroll taxes on income over $107,000. End offshore tax havens for corporations (the so-called "Cayman Islands loophole"). Close the corporate tax loopholes that allow bailed-out banks to pay nothing in taxes for entire calendar years.

And here's what I'm going to tell them not to cut: the corporate tax rate, Social Security benefits, Medicare benefits, Medicaid benefits, education, the FDA, the EPA, the CFPB, or anything else that helps give good Americans a shot at a better life.

Now you may well be saying to yourself: self, this Super-Congress is going to be rigged from the start, with fire-breathing, government-hating Republicans and moderate, let's-just-all-get-along Democrats. And that's almost certainly the truth! But who cares? Representatives are supposed to represent, hence the word "representative." Senators are supposed to represent, too, because the people vote them in. If our nominal representatives come to understand that this is our will -- and, frankly, I've seen nothing to suggest that it's not -- then they will do it. We may have to tell them a million times. We may have to call them every day and tell them; we may have to go to their offices and tell them; we may have to go to Washington and tell them. But if we tell them enough times, they will do it, if for no other reason than that they're afraid for their jobs. Good luck and God bless.

The show so far for Tuesday, August 2, 2011.

Perhaps incongruously, I've decided to share nothing but good news today, some of it pertaining to things we've worked on in this space.

First up: President Obama proposed an increased automobile fuel efficiency standard covering the years 2016 through 2025. The standard, 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, falls a bit short of the standard we were fighting for (60 mpg), but considering that CAFE standards aim to get us only to 35.5 mpg by 2016, 54.5 is a pretty good number. Of course, this standard isn't final yet, nor is it perfect -- environmentalists point to a 2018 "review," ostensibly to assess whether the 54.5 mpg standard can still be met, which could quickly turn into an out, and I have some reservations about whether the standard can stop automakers from making outrageously fuel-efficient cars they don't actually intend to sell, but intend only to boost the "fleet" average. So, toward that end, the Sierra Club helps you tell our President to keep loopholes out of the standard.

Also, in an illustration of the maxim that there is-so such a thing as bad PR, Scholastic has cut back its InSchool Marketing division by 40%, and mostly by cutting corporate-sponsored materials. You may recall that Scholastic had soiled its good name by passing off corporate-written claptrap in public schools as "educational materials" -- stuff written by coal companies extolling the greatness of coal without mentioning little things like pollution, or stuff written by SunnyD that gets kids to drink more of their not-terribly-fruity-but-awfully-sugary product. Well, Scholastic has cut that back, and though we'd like them to cut it out, it's a start, and we'll keep an eye on it. Admittedly I've become a bit rigid about public schools -- they belong to us, hence the word "public," and since they belong to us, they ought to be strong, too, so that they don't get tempted to take corporate money to pay for band uniforms and the like. Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you thank Scholastic for their deeds.

Finally, Health and Human Services has announced that it will require all new health insurance plans to cover birth control without co-pays. Personally I wouldn't be terribly upset if birth control were subject to fair co-pays (though $50 a month is a lot, frankly), but it's been like pulling teeth to get health insurance corporations to cover birth control pills when they jump at the chance to cover Viagra, so I'll take it. I'll admit I'm not looking forward to hearing right-wingers whine about how birth control pills cause abortions (they don't) or how pregnancy isn't a "condition" (it is) or how the rule interferes with folks practicing their religion (nope, doesn't do that, either). But such is the price we pay for progress. Planned Parenthood helps you tell HHS that you support their decision.

How long.

As you might expect, the unemployed have trouble getting jobs in this economy. As you might not expect, some employers refuse to even consider unemployed folks for jobs. And (except in New Jersey, which recently banned the practice) this may not be against the law. Now I'm not particularly against using employment status as one factor in evaluating applicants, but I would want to know why someone's unemployed, and not just assume they're layabouts when corporations have been slashing payroll for years on their way back to record profits. And flat-out disqualifying the unemployed is just cruel to the millions of good Americans who are now out of work for nine months, on average. So True Majority provides a petition demanding that online job search sites like Monster and CareerBuilder refuse ads from employers who refuse to hire the unemployed. Because, as you know, nobody wants bad PR.

Meanwhile, you may know that the President, Secretary of Defense, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff all certified on July 22 that don't-ask-don't-tell repeal won't hurt military readiness, which means don't-ask-don't-tell will finally be repealed on September 20, thus enabling gays to serve openly in the military. So the Servicemembers' Legal Defense Network provides a guide to navigating the new post-DADT military environment. Long story short: gays will still get harassed in the military, but their harassers will have to be considerably cleverer about it than they've had to be, and gays will still have tools to address that harassment. One can't stress enough, though, that the SLDN's guide doesn't apply to today's environment -- gays can still be discharged under DADT until September 20.

Finally, we approach our latest economic Armageddon, in the form of another debt "deal" with Republicans. The answer to the question "when will Barack Obama realize that surrendering to Republicans is bad politics as well as bad policy?" remains, I think, "he already knows." I mean, no one could go to Columbia and Harvard and be this dumb, right? I've said it before: he took our hopes and dreams upon his back so he could dash them, so we would never hope nor dream again. But in this, he will fail, because this is America, and America is so much stronger than its stupid, vain, arrogant elites.