Thieves in the Temple.

Silver machine.

Sen. Casey's bill to force disclosure of fracking chemicals might be dead in the water, so to speak, but we can still pressure Interior Secretary Salazar to force gas drillers to disclose the chemicals they use to drill for gas and set our tap water on fire. I didn't know the Secretary of the Interior had that authority, but apparently he does, probably because gas drillers drill on public lands. Mr. Salazar has actually been pretty good on issues close to his home state of Colorado, and plenty of gas drillers operate there, enough that even Democratic Gov. Hickenlooper, who thinks concerns over fracking are "overblown," has called for fracking chemical disclosure rules. Firedoglake helps you tell Mr. Salazar to force fracking chemical disclosure.

Meanwhile, Senators Wyden (D-OR) and Udall (D-CO) have publicly questioned our government's interpretation of the PATRIOT Act. That's right, our government might well have decided that the PATRIOT Act gives them even more power than it actually does -- and, apparently, not even for collecting information on terrorism suspects, but for collecting information on folks with no connection to espionage/terrorism cases. Who could have predicted that our government, having been given too much power, would then abuse it? And our government has been relying on secret interpretations issued by secret courts to do what it's doing, which doesn't sound a whole lot like democracy as we understand it, does it? CREDO helps you tell Attorney General Holder to shine some light on what our government is doing.

Finally, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell Mr. Obama to stop TransCanada's Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. What is the tar sands pipeline? It's a pipeline that would carry crude oil, extracted from tar sands, from Canada through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma down to Texas, where the oil would be refined. And what's the problem with this? Well, pipelines break. And this pipeline happens to run over the Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies almost a third of America's agricultural water, not to mention drinking water for millions of Americans. Worse, TransCanada's pipelines break more -- they had a dozen pipe leaks last year, and had to shut down pipelines twice this past May because of oil spills. And one of them occurred in Kansas, through which the XL pipeline would travel. As we learned in the Gulf last year, it only takes one accident to create a disaster.

What side you on?

The Senate may vote soon on S.J.Res. 6, a "resolution of disapproval" essentially rescinding the net neutrality rules the FCC issued late last year. Normally we don't waste time defending those quite inadequate net neutrality rules, but if the corporations get their way on this, they can get their way on anything -- you won't be able to go where you want on the internet anymore, because corporations will be able to censor any content they think is a threat to their profits, and they'll also be able to stamp out innovation, since internet innovation comes from individuals, not corporations. And the punchline? Just about everyone, on both sides of the political spectrum, supports net neutrality. The only folks who support this "resolution of disapproval" are the big corporations and their lackeys in Congress. Come on, Congress! This is either the land of the free or it's the land of screw-you-if-you're-not-rich. Free Press helps you tell them which side they're supposed to be on.

Earlier this year, Congress debated an online privacy bill; it didn't get anywhere, of course, because this is the Congress of Screw You. But corporations can sell your information to anyone who has a credit card, and there's very little you can do about it -- you can't see what corporations are selling (info about your marriage? Your divorce? Your traffic tickets?) unless you pay for the "privilege." And you can't correct errors (like bankruptcies or crimes committed by someone else) in the information they sell, nor can you put a stop to corporations selling that information in the first place. During those aforementioned hearings, Sen. Toomey infamously mused that if we gave consumers such rights, it could "break the internet." "Break the internet"? Any internet that would break because free people exercise their right to privacy is an internet not worth having in the first place. So Consumers Union helps you tell Congress to give you the power to protect your privacy on the internet.

Shutdown.

Rallies on behalf of the U.S. Postal Service are occurring all over America today; Roots Action helps you find one, and also helps you support H.R. 1351, which would address the USPS's financial troubles without executing the Postmaster's draconian plan to slash 100,000 jobs (perhaps not coincidentally, all union jobs) and shut down 3,000 local post offices. Since the 1980s, the USPS has lived without government appropriations, but in 2006, Congress required the USPS to make $5 billion annual pre-payments toward its pension fund, which no one else in America has to do, and which payment now makes up the entirety of the USPS's deficit. In other words, this is another manufactured crisis designed to break the back of a unionized workforce and a government service that actually works pretty well. That doesn't matter, though -- it's your postal service, and you don't have to let the thieves in Congress take it from you, so their corporate paymasters can deliver your mail at their will.

Meanwhile, here's some news that will not surprise you: a study by Laurence Ball, Daniel Leigh, and Prakash Loungani finds that, generally, austerity “lowers incomes in the short term, with wage-earners taking more of a hit than others; it also raises unemployment, particularly long-term unemployment.” The sponsor of the study may surprise you, though: the International Monetary Fund, which has pushed more than its share of austerity plans on developing nations over the years. Ah, but there's the rub: the IMF's study only looked at austerity measures in "17 advanced economies," all of which you will recognize as Western-countries-plus-Japan. And the study only looks at the last thirty years, thereby ensuring that its assertion that cutting spending is "less painful" than tax hikes gets backing mostly from thirty years of tax hikes on working people. Still, one should ask, when someone says tax hikes are painful: what kind of tax hikes? And for whom?

Lost and found.

70 Congressfolk have signed a letter to the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction calling for an end to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the end of these wars would all by itself and then some meet the Committee's mandate to cut $1.5 trillion from the deficit over ten years. So Roots Action helps you support that effort. That's "end the wars," not "lower troop levels as Mr. Obama would like." And the $1.8 trillion in savings would be in addition to planned troop drawdowns. Hopefully Congress does not persist in its belief that cutting Medicare a) would make the economy healthy and b) would be really, really popular with a vast majority of Americans. I mean, if they do, they'll suffer on Election Day. But Americans would suffer in the meantime, and I don't want that. Better to do all we can to encourage Congress to do the right thing, and then punish them afterward if they don't.

Meanwhile, closer to home, Governor Corbett persists in thinking he can sell off Pennsylvania state parks so he can "raise revenue" or whatever. But as Keystone Progress tells it, "our state parks are not businesses, they are public assets. State parks have visitors, not customers.  The Pennsylvania Grand Canyon is a natural treasure, not an amusement theme park." And while those parks help keep a lot of air and water clean and give us places to hunt and fish and explore, all corporate types ever see, it seems, is a lot of land not making any money. And they're not even right about that! PA state parks return nearly $10 to the economy for every dollar the state invests, per Penn State's 2009 study, and employ over 10,000 people. If the corporations got it, the parks would return a lot more money to the CEO's bank account and employ a lot fewer people. So Keystone Progress helps you demand that the state hold onto its parks. They belong to all of us, not just Gov. Corbett's rich donors.

Back in Washington, Congress isn't just out to destroy the economy -- they're looking to set fire to everything. H.R. 2497/S. 1380, the HALT Act (which stands for "Hinder the Administration's Legalization Temptation," because, apparently, our Congressfolk can't write as well as fourth-graders), would, among so many other things, force the President to deport undocumented immigrants who are also victims of domestic violence. As things are now, you can get at least a deferral of deportation if your husband's beating the crap out of you; if Congress gets its way, you can't. I'm not a fan of corporations importing undocumented immigrants so they can lower wages for the rest of us, but I'm not a cruel bastard, either, like folks who wrote the HALT Act. Mr. Obama already deports undocumented immigrants faster than Mr. Bush ever did, and has already put over 5,000 more security troops at the Mexican border than Mr. Bush had in 2008, but I guess it'll only be enough for Congress when they can actually watch people get hurt. So the Petition Site helps you fight the HALT Act.

Finally, the Institute for Southern Studies instructs us as to how Troy Davis could have been saved. We learn that several of the prosecution's witnesses in the Davis case had very specific trouble identifying Mr. Davis as Mr. MacPhail's shooter -- one could only recognize him by his clothes (most people, as you know, change their clothes more often than they change their appearance), while another couldn't put a face with the shooter at first, and still another claimed to recognize him from 120 feet away in the dark. We also learn that the way the criminal justice system does things isn't the only way. We could be using more "double-blind systems," in which lineup administrators don't know who the subject is and thus can't subtly lead witnesses to identify them. We could also present lineup subjects sequentially, rather than all in one line, so that witnesses don't feel pressure to pick someone out of a row. We'd probably convict fewer people, I suppose. But you know, Blackstone's formulation, Genesis 18:23-32, et cetera.

All I want is a fighting chance.

Amazon shoppers, take note: workers in Amazon's Allentown, PA warehouse report brutal mistreatment. It ain't Foxconn, I'll admit, but why should anyone work in 114-degree heat, with overtime mandated, with paramedics waiting to carry you out on hot days, with Quislings brandishing warning letters for being unproductive for several minutes of your shift? Plus temp workers usually don't get hired as permanent workers there -- they just got worked until they quit or get hurt. And the punchline? Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is worth over $18 billion. Could he break a little of that off for decent pay and decent working conditions, and not hide behind at least I'm creating jobs and offering his workers "free water"? American Rights at Work helps you tell Amazon to correct its misdeeds. It sure ain't like you don't have options as a consumer.

Meanwhile, fresh off their victory in getting their Frankenfalfa approved by the USDA, Monsanto wants to get its very first genetically-modified straight-to-table vegetable, a sweet corn, in your grocery store soon. What's the problem with that, you ask? Well, for one thing, Monsanto built its sweet corn so that it could withstand its infamous pest-killer, Roundup -- and some pests are already getting wise to Roundup, which of course nobody who thought about it for ten seconds could possibly have predicted. For another thing, the corn actually produces a pesticide. You like eating pesticide? And for another thing, studies have linked the GMO corn to crop failure, sterility in animals, and even organ failure in mammals. Can't blame Monsanto, I suppose -- they've spent so much time genetically modifying feed for animals who are going to die anyway that they probably just didn't think of all these things when they made their Frankencorn for humans who want to live a long time. Anyway, CREDO helps you tell some of the big grocers you don't want Monsanto's Frankencorn in your stores.

Finally, Mr. Obama held a townhall in Maryland on July 22, during which he discussed hiring in federally-funded faith-based groups, and though he opposed discrimination in such faith-based hiring on the campaign trail, well, now? Religious groups have "more leeway" to "hire somebody who is a believer of that particular faith," he said. Not with our tax dollars they don't, Mr. President. I don't even understand the political calculation of making the promise and then reneging on it -- does he really think that any rage-filled right-winger, anywhere, will ever vote for him, ever? Does he imagine that any Religious Right leader will be so impressed with his inaction that he'll even try to convince his votaries to lay off Mr. Obama? When will he learn? These folks can't be persuaded; they can only be shamed. Americans United for the Separation of Church and State helps you tell Mr. Obama to keep his damn promise.

Love goes on.

Deficit plans and job plans might be all the "liberal" media wants to talk about, but they're not the boss of us. Mr. Obama is still pushing three "free"-trade pacts -- with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama -- and the only thing "free" about them is the folks that'll be set "free" from having jobs. Oh, and the foreign corporations that will be set "free" from having to follow American laws. Sound like something you want? It probably doesn't -- most Americans across the ideological spectrum oppose "free" trade, and in the past such opposition has even been bipartisan in Congress. So Public Citizen helps you oppose the Obama "free" trade pacts. (Even though they're leftover from Tha Bush Mobb's reign, you can't blame everything on Mr. Bush forever.) You won't be able to buy as much cheap crap as you used to if we moved toward "fair" trade with foreign nations. You won't even be able to buy as much functioning expensive goods. But when have things ever really made you happy?

Meanwhile, Public Citizen also helps you tell your government to end oil speculation. Specifically, Public Citizen helps you tell the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (or CFTC) to place "position limits" on futures traders. So what's a "position limit"? A "position limit" restricts how much of the market one trader can control. You see the utility of a "position limit," I would imagine, just as you see the utility of breaking up monopolies and trusts -- if any one player gets too big, they get to rig the game in their favor, thus crushing all the small traders. Naturally the big Wall Street banksters have been heavily lobbying the CFTC against position limits -- because, you know, they'd like to stay big and get bigger, never mind whether that helps anybody but them -- and the CFTC dutifully cancelled a rule vote scheduled for today. But you can tell the CFTC chair to do the right thing. He'll never see it coming.

Of course, we're not going to completely ignore the deficit today. USPIRG helps you tell the Joint Committee who are not now and have never been a "Super-Congress" to cut four specific corporate welfare handouts. Do oil companies really need handouts to help them figure out how to drill for oil? Does the dairy industry need a handout specifically to get more cheeze on pizza? Do big corporations need handouts to advertise their products in foreign lands? Do big corporate farms need billions in handouts to make cow feed cheaper? Gosh, whatever happened to pulling yourself up by your bootstraps? And here's the punchline: USPIRG and the National Taxpayers' Union came up with this list. The National Taxpayers' Union is a right-wing organization. See? Actual bipartisanship! Not that tepid bipartisan milk the "liberal" media serves up.

Finally, we mourn the death of Troy Davis, executed by the state of Georgia last night at around 11 pm EST, some four drama-filled hours after he was scheduled to be executed. I remain convinced that enough doubt -- not "smoke and mirrors," not "manufactured doubt" -- remains about his guilt that the state of Georgia should not have put him to death. If the state can't nail that down, then we the taxpayers have to pay to keep him in jail. I would think our governments would be more aware of that fact; I suspect they're not because they wanted to appear tough on crime at any cost, and many Americans wanted the same. But I also suspect that Americans are getting more tired of such posturing.

Dig for fire.

Troy Davis will be executed at 7pm tonight; both Amnesty International and Color of Change still help you try to convince the Georgia parole board and/or Chatham County D.A. Larry Chisholm and/or Judge Penny Freesemann to step in and stop his death. I must admit I'm a bit disgusted by the statements of the former Chatham D.A. Mr. Lawton and the U.S. District Judge Mr. Moore -- I understand that no one likes to revisit the past ad infinitum, but if the case against executing Mr. Davis is really "smoke and mirrors" (Mr. Moore) or "a manufactured appearance of doubt" (Mr. Lawton), surely they'd have, you know, said why exactly. We-did-so-do-a-good-job blanket statements don't persuade me when no physical evidence links Mr. Davis to the crime, when seven of nine original witnesses have recanted their testimony, or when dozens of other witnesses have described state coercion. And, uh, headline: death! Can't call take-backs if you get this one wrong.

Meanwhile, the House may take up H.R. 2401, the TRAIN Act, as early as today. What would the TRAIN Act do? Among other things, the bill would delay mercury rules indefinitely, delay rules concerning cross-state pollution indefinitely, and create a panel that would essentially do nothing but slow down the work of the EPA. Interesting, that Republicans would want to solve a perceived bureaucracy problem by creating more bureaucracy. Interesting, also, that though Republicans pretend to care about job-killing regulations, they don't pretend to care about people-killing bills -- this bill will (per OMB Watch) kill over 25,000 Americans a year, by failing to prevent the cancers and asthma attacks and heart attacks that stronger regulations would prevent. And, uh, headline: corporations aren't hiring because they don't want to. So OMB Watch, the Sierra Club, and the Environmental Defense Fund all help you try to derail this wreck of a bill. (Like I said, I'll stop with the puns if they stop with the stupid acronyms.)

Finally, Mr. Obama made another well-received speech (well-received even by liberals!) on Monday, in which he called for tax hikes on the rich as a deficit-cutting measure. Republicans have reacted in a predictably histrionic manner (the "largest tax hike in modern history," et cetera), but Citizens for Tax Justice has reacted somewhat differently: they're calling Mr. Obama's deficit-reduction proposal a tax cut. Which, of course, it is -- extending the Bush tax cuts for 98% of the population would increase the deficit, though I still support that. I'm also a bit perturbed that the big tax hike of Mr. Obama's plan -- the so-called Buffett rule stipulating that millionaires shouldn't pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes than those of us in the middle class -- remains frustratingly undefined. I know where I'd start negotiations: with a return to the 91% tax rate on millionaire and billionaire income under Eisenhower. I'd try to end there, too, unlike some Democratic Presidents I know.

There is no time.

First things first. The state of Georgia will execute Troy Davis on Wednesday (not today, as I thought) unless we can convince them that questions surrounding his conviction (of which there are many, as you know) demand that he be spared. So if you've missed all the other petitions and emails, we've got one more, courtesy Death Penalty Focus and SignOn. However, Color of Change has learned that Chatham County D.A. Larry Chisholm could stop the execution by asking the sentencing judge to withdraw Mr. Davis's death warrant. Apparently, Mr. Chisholm has this power because he asked the judge to issue the warrant in the first place. So Color of Change helps you ask Mr. Chisholm to help Mr. Davis.

Word on the street is that Mr. Obama will propose (as part of his own deficit-cutting plan) a "Buffett tax" that would hike rates on millionaire income; I'd like to be hopeful, but I've watched Mr. Obama offer half-measures before. In the meantime, CREDO helps you tell the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction not to cut Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security benefits. Which, of course, does not prevent you from advocating actual deficit-cutting measures, like hiking the payroll tax ceiling or letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices. Or raising income taxes on millionaires back up to Eisenhower-era levels. Or taxing dividends and capital gains as income. Or closing loopholes enjoyed by corporations and hedge-fund managers. Or enacting a small financial speculation tax (which would not tax your ATM transactions or bank deposits, in case you've received that stupid chain email). Or, you know, ending the wars.

Finally, if you've missed earlier opportunities to comment on HHS's decision to mandate that health insurance corporations cover birth control without co-payments, the National Women's Law Center provides yet another opportunity. And the contact tool obliquely enlightens me about the whole "religious exemption" problem -- why do corporations get religious exemptions? Corporations aren't religious; people are. And many religious people (are you sitting down, Glenn Beck?) actually use birth control. It sounds like the "religious exemption" exists solely for the purpose of denying larger groups of people access to birth control, people who may be religious but who still don't agree with the fact of their exemption. Really, the best person to determine how you practice your own religion is you. Golly, that almost sounds conservative.

Fox on the run.

H.R. 2401, the TRAIN Act, would derail the EPA's efforts to keep soot, mercury and smog out of our air. (If you want me to stop with the bad puns, tell your Congressfolk to stop with the tortured acronyms.) Typical Republican flatugasms accompany the bill: making power plants pollute less will cost jobs, we just haven't had enough time to establish what would really work. See how they always they take jobs hostage! Do they ever take the CEO's unearned millions hostage? And the Clean Air Act has empowered the EPA to regulate air pollutants for twenty years. If corporations can't adjust by now, and can't keep adjusting to the process of scientific discovery, maybe they don't deserve to exist. See, now I sound like the conservative! The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose H.R. 2401.

Meanwhile, in case you thought the News Corporation's phone-hacking scandal was going away, House Oversight Committee Chair Rep. Issa (S-CA) went on Fox News (owned by News Corp., in case you didn't know) this past Tuesday and suggested that his committee wouldn't investigate News Corp. over phone-hacking allegations because "this is a story about a unit in another country" (the 9.11 families are in this country, sir) and "we don't start picking on media whether they’re the left or the right just because we can." This isn't "just because you can," sir -- last I looked, bribery and phone hacking are crimes, and a corporation with the will and power to commit such crimes whenever it likes is a thing to be feared and contained by a free republic. So Free Press helps you demand that Mr. Issa launch an investigation.

Finally, H.R. 2306, a Barney Frank/Ron Paul production, would effectively legalize marijuana in the U.S. The bill would lift restrictions on its transportation across state lines except where state law already restricts import into or export from that state, which, ideally, would please the honest states' rightists among us. The bill would also remove marijuana from the list of Schedule I drugs. Marijuana, frankly, isn't dangerous enough, or medicinally useless enough, to be a Schedule I drug, and we divert a lot of precious law enforcement power to arresting and jailing pot users that we ought to be using to arrest and jail coke dealers. And n.b., also, that the Controlled Substances Act doesn't even list alcohol and tobacco as "controlled substances." Its authors may have learned a lesson from alcohol prohibition. So the Petition Site helps you support H.R. 2306.

Breakdown.

If you missed Public Citizen's alert helping you stand up for commonsense governmental regulation, here it is again. We should make this point repeatedly: corporations have rigged the economy so that they get record profits and we get bupkus, yet corporate lackeys in Congress insist that corporations are just getting all wobbly from the burden of government regulation. Let me repeat: record profits. At a time when none of us are seeing, you know, record employment or record income. Clearly not wobbly. And regulations do help the economy -- they create jobs for people who help corporations understand and implement their obligations to the rest of us, and they lighten other burdens on the economy, too, burdens like lost time due to illness. Regulations don't "prevent innovation," either -- they spur it. Nuns fret not!

Speaking of which, the gas drilling corporations in Pennsylvania have spent all week telling us that their drilling doesn't present air-related health issues. Certainly not from giant gas-and-polluted-water geysers that shoot 75 feet in the air for sixteen hours straight, like the one from June 2010 just outside Moshannon State Forest! And certainly not when half the state doesn't meet EPA air quality standards now, or when almost 800,000 good Pennsylvanians suffer from asthma! One more time: stronger clean air standards means innovation in gas drilling methods, which creates jobs for the people who dream up new methods and people who have to refit equipment, plus they also mean less time asthmatics have to stay home from work because they can't breathe. It just doesn't mean gas drillers can more easily divert money into their CEOs' pockets so CEOs can gild their plumbing. So Penn Environment still helps you comment on stronger EPA air quality standards.

Finally, California does not restrict the use of Bisphenol-A (or BPA) in plastic baby bottles and sippy cups, despite BPA's record of causing developmental and reproductive problems in infants. I know, California is usually out in front of these things. Thankfully, the California legislature has passed AB 1319, which would ban BPA from beverage containers children use; all that has to happen now is that Gov. Jerry Brown has to sign the bill. Which the paddle-to-the-left-then-paddle-to-the-right veteran might not do: chemical corporations have successfully scuttled state-wide bans in the past, and they're lobbying Gov. Brown right now as we speak. They're likely whining that strict regulations in one state would be a burden to them as they try to sell their goods in other states. But making one set of sippy cups for California and another for Idaho is not the only way to deal with the law's requirements. Nuns fret not! CALPIRG helps you tell Gov. Brown to sign the bill.

New life.

Republicans and their corporate paymasters have been saying since time immemorial that environmental regulations kill jobs. But the Environmental Defense Fund responds succinctly: the weak economy is not the environment's fault. Nor is it your fault for demanding cleaner air and cleaner water, for demanding freedom from poison, freedom from asthma, freedom from flammable water. Whose fault is this bad economy again? That of shell-game Wall Street titans and the government regulators who wouldn't regulate them, as you no doubt recall from being sentient in 2008. And maybe I haven't made the case enough: environmental regulations don't just create jobs for all the people who help corporations comply with them; they also save money by saving people from hospital visits, lost work and lost school days. So the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfools to stop running over the regulations that protect you.

Meanwhile, the Department of Interior gave Shell Oil a (conditional) green light to start drilling in the Arctic, despite our best efforts; they could start drilling less than a year from now. As you probably know, drilling in the Arctic might be even worse than drilling in the Gulf. For one thing, we don't understand the Arctic ecosystem as well as we understand that of the Gulf. For another thing, an oil spill would be a lot harder to clean up in frozen water (in a foggy, windy part of the world, no less) than in temperate water. In other words, it'd be hard to clean up for legitimate reasons, versus the Spillageddon last year, which couldn't be cleaned up because BP refused to have clean-up crews on stand-by 24/7. Funny how even cleaning up your own environmental messes can create jobs! Anyway, the Wilderness Society helps you tell Interior Secretary Salazar to halt Shell's progress in the Arctic.

Finally, if you've missed any of our recent alerts concerning the fate of Troy Davis, scheduled to be executed by the state of Georgia in five days, the ACLU has one more. You may remember the particulars of his case: the state convicted him without any physical evidence, most of the witnesses whose testimony convicted him in 1991 have recanted, and some witnesses have alleged in affadavits that the state coerced their testimony. Folks who oppose the death penalty, I would think, don't want to see him dead on general principles. But folks who support the death penalty, I would think, wouldn't want him dead, either, because, you know, he might be innocent and the death penalty is a very serious responsibility and you shouldn't kill innocent people just to show how big your testicles are. I should add that if the Georgia Parole Board grants Mr. Davis clemency, it wouldn't set him free, but merely change his sentence to life without parole. Still, it's a chance.

Windout.

The Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction continues meeting, and at least half of them will never, ever increase taxes on corporations or rich folk -- unless they hear from you, in force. So NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, helps you tell your Joint Committee members that they must raise taxes on millionaire and billionaire income in order to cut the deficit. You might want to flesh out your letter a bit; my list of demands from early August may assist you toward this end. Meanwhile, Joint Committee member Senator Jon Kyl (A-AZ) has thrown a major tantrum, saying he'll quit the Joint Committee if they consider any defense spending cuts -- which increases the possibility of Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security cuts. Like the world needs Jon Kyl so badly! The Pentagon can't find over $2.3 trillion of the money it's spent over the years and he thinks it's a sacred cow! True Majority helps you tell the Joint Committee to ignore Jon Kyl's whining and cut some of that Pentagon pork.

Meanwhile, you may not know that Hyatt Hotels is waging class warfare on its housekeepers. They've cut staff, forcing the remaining staff to work harder, leading to abnormally high injury rates; they've fought legislation in California aiming to protect housekeepers from injury and safety violations; they've fired workers without cause and then forced them to train their minimum-wage, no-benefit temp replacements; and they've turned heat lamps on striking workers in the middle of a July heat wave. That last move, especially, was quite classy. Now, you may well be saying, what's the big deal with cleaning bathroom floors on your hands and knees? Well, it isn't a big deal, until you do thirty of them a day, and then you may well be asking why your employer can't just provide a bucket and a mop. Hotel Workers Rising helps you give Hyatt hotels the what-for.

Finally, closer to home, Pennsylvania state Sen. Stewart Greenleaf (R) has introduced two bills, SB 1205 and SB 100, that would reform mandatory sentencing laws in the Commonwealth. SB 1205 would let PA courts waive mandatory minimum sentences in cases where the offender doesn't have a long rap sheet, and the offense didn't involve death, serious injury, or a dangerous weapon. SB 100, meanwhile, would help folks serving mandatory minimums get into alternative sentencing programs, with time served under such programs counting toward their minimums. Per Mr. Greenleaf: "Mandatory sentences have been extended from applying to 'big-time dealers' to many smaller fish who deal drugs to support their own addiction. Unfortunately, we have not slowed the flow of drugs into our communities...(a)t least two-thirds of our inmates have drug addiction issues. Pennsylvania's state inmate population increased from 8,000 in 1980 to 51,000 today and mandatory minimum sentences are a big reason why." Families Against Mandatory Minimums helps you support Mr. Greenleaf's efforts.

Ship of fools.

In the wake of Mr. Obama's well-received job-creation proposal from last week, I have a slew of related action alerts. First, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers helps you tell your Congressfolk which parts of Mr. Obama's proposal you think would work and which ones you think wouldn't work. You might go one better and, using the miracle of cutting-and-pasting, write one email, at one link, including both likes and dislikes. CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to create jobs without cutting Medicare or Medicaid, and Wealth for the Common Good helps you demand higher tax rates on millionaire income and the closure of overseas tax havens, both of which will help fund job creation. Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell Congress not to use job-creation as an excuse to go on a regulation-slashing binge, since we all know regulations create jobs. You could even combine all of these actions into one email you can send via the first or second link above.

Meanwhile, you may not know that some 40,000 folks in Vietnam's "drug treatment centers" are actually at forced-labor camps. Folks get picked up after one positive urine test -- or perhaps with fewer than one positive urine test, if one happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time -- and then are basically treated like slaves, beaten with clubs or denied food or held in isolation if they don't meet ridiculously high work quotas. I can already hear American right-wingers saying "damn! I wish we could do that with our dregs!" But you may well be asking yourself, self, where is this going, besides being a vague warning to check where my clothing and soccer balls are made? Well, our government is negotiating a huge "free" trade agreement with eight Pacific nations, including Vietnam, and you may not want your government to enter into any sort of agreement with a country that uses slave labor, so the International Labor Rights Forum helps you communicate such thoughts to the U.S. Trade Rep. You may or may not also want to communicate your opposition to "free" trade generally.

Finally, Troy Davis has another nine days to live before the state of Georgia executes him for a crime he may not have committed, a conviction the state obtained solely on eyewitness testimony, much of which now appears to have been coerced by said state. All I have to say to death penalty advocates who think you have to break some eggs to make an omelette is that other staunch death penalty advocates like Bob Barr and William Sessions have supported Mr. Davis's quest to avoid dying. Actually, no: all I really have to say to those fools is you'd feel differently if it were you. So Mr. Davis's sister has begun a petition on change.org asking the Georgia Parole Board to stop her brother's execution; you can sign onto that here. The Parole Board has stated there should be "no doubt" about a person's guilt before execution. This execution, to put it mildly, would not meet that standard.

Destination unknown.

National Nurses United, out of sunny Oakland, CA, helps you tell the Senate to pass a financial speculation tax. We've discussed this before -- a 0.25% tax (that's one-quarter of one percent, not 25 percent) on things like derivative transactions and currency conversions would raise over $100 billion a year in the U.S. It is not a tax on investment, per se -- when you invest, you expect small returns on your money over much longer periods of time, but when you speculate, you expect a big return in a short period of time, although you know there's a good chance you'll lose your shirt. So a financial speculation tax would target speculation, not least because too much speculation crashes the economy, as you no doubt remember because you're not two years old -- or paid to forget, like the "liberal" media.

Meanwhile, Penn Environment helps you send a comment telling the EPA to adopt strong smog rules. What's that, you say? President Obama scuttled the EPA's attempt to put strong smog rules together just last week? One more time: it doesn't matter what he wants, it matters what we want. A massive outpour of public comment supporting strong smog regulations might actually change his mind, which is as it should be. And you've got good reason to support strong smog rules, especially if you're in Pennsylvania, where almost 800,000 good citizens suffer from asthma, where over half the state doesn't meet EPA air quality standards now, and where uncontrolled gas drilling stands to make air pollution worse. Mr. Obama did say last night that we shouldn't have to choose between jobs and safety. Let's make him actually walk that walk, shall we?

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

Roots Action provides "ten obvious sources of revenue that have not been tapped" -- and they turn out to be the names of ten CEOs who pal around with President Obama. These ten individuals took home $160 million in pay in 2010, but their employers paid negative $5.4 billion in taxes. That's right, our government paid them, which is rather unlike how it is with you and I. They must have gotten all that free money from the government because of all the jobs they've created! Anyway, Roots Action helps you call for more taxes on millionaire income and corporate income. Of course, more than ten individuals make millionaire or billionaire money, and more than ten corporations skimp on their obligations to our government and our society, so taxing them appropriately would do rather more for our deficit super-duper-scream-time-emergency than cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security benefits for folks who actually need them. It can't always be the folks without five vacation homes always doing the suffering on everyone's behalf. Can it?

Meanwhile, the state of Georgia plans to execute Troy Davis on September 21, though he could very well be innocent of the 1991 murder of which he was convicted. You may know the story pretty well by now -- Mr. Davis got convicted though the state provided no forensic evidence against him and (according to at least a dozen sworn affidavits) coerced or pressured much of the testimony against him. You may also know that seven of nine original witnesses have changed or recanted their testimony, and that even staunch death penalty advocates like Bob Barr and William Sessions have advocated on Mr. Davis's behalf. Despite all of our efforts, it looks grim, but we've got one more shot before the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, and Amnesty International helps you demand a stop to his execution.

Down to zero.

Republicans still plan to hold up Federal Aviation Authority funding if we don't let them count non-votes as "no" votes in union elections among airline workers. It's no use telling Republicans that non-votes don't count as "no" votes in any other election, or that none of them would be in the House right now if we counted votes that way in their elections, or that counting non-votes as "no" votes gives corporations an even bigger incentive to intimidate its workers into sitting out union elections. Reason doesn't work with Republicans; only unyielding courage works. So American Rights at Work helps you tell your Rep to oppose Section 903 of the FAA reauthorization bill, and thus ensure that union elections remain democratic in the airline industry.

Meanwhile, if you haven't yet told the White House to keep its promise to address antibiotic abuse in animals, the Pew Charitable Trusts helps you do that. They also help you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 965/S. 1211, the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2011. What will future societies make of the fact that we give over 2 out of every 3 antibiotics in America to healthy animals? Not to sick people, mind you, or sick animals, but healthy animals? I don't need future generations to tell me what to make of it. It's damn stupid, and we should stop being stupid so big corporate factory farms can continue to make unearned profits from fattened-up animals living in dirty little pens.

Adequate desire.

Remember when Mr. Obama said science, not politics, would guide environmental policy? Well, he seems to have broken yet another promise on Friday, by unilaterally squelching EPA efforts to regulate smog. Said the EPA would be reviewing the standards in two years anyway, never mind that he could be saving lives now, or that Mitt Romney will be letting the Tea Party write them by then. So much for all that goodwill he could have created with his new 54.5 MPG-by-2025 fuel efficiency standard! So who's got the action alerts? More like who doesn't: take your pick from (in no particular order) MoveOn, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, and Green for All.

In other news, Congress returns to work today -- feel free to boo! -- and will get right to work setting fire to everything they can. Meanwhile, Mr. Obama plans to address Congress with his own jobs plan (and shame on him for not giving Jim DeMint a copy first!). So, we could be hip-deep in it before we know it. Time to pre-empt, then: Campaign for America's future helps you draw a line in the sand on Social Security and Medicare. I'm sure I'll have more action alerts very shortly, but I wonder how many I'll bring up -- frankly, I still find my list of demands from early August perfectly adequate, and I wonder if bringing up very many more action alerts begging for more of this and none of that will actually cloud the issue. Oh, well: I guess that's what the future's for.

Brainstorm.

Lookee here, good peoples -- actual bipartisanship! David Segal of Demand Progress and Patrick Ruffini of Don't Censor the Net have joined to write an Oregonian op-ed excoriating S. 968, the PROTECT IP Act. You remember PROTECT IP, right? The bill that would shut down websites accused, not convicted of pirating intellectual property? Well, I'll let them tell it: "Imagine you're the successful owner of a heavily trafficked website. Your income and that of those with whom you work depends entirely on the advertising revenue and payments provided by visitors to your site. One day, without warning, your site no longer appears at its domain, your advertisers have backed out, and you can't even find your site on Google. You've been disappeared – blacklisted by new regulations set by Congress in the PROTECT IP Act." Later they explain why PROTECT IP hurts aspiring artists and entrepreneurs, contrary to what PROTECT IP's big corporate supporters assert. You can read the op-ed in full here, and then you can tell your Congressfolk to oppose the PROTECT IP Act.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that 30 Bangladeshi workers died in a sweatshop fire in late December; you may also have told U.S. clothing corporations to help out their suffering families and build sweatshops that are less likely to catch fire. A lot of these corporations, to their credit, heeded your advice and pledged to take action, but J.C. Penney has broken its pledge. So both the International Labor Rights Forum and change.org help you tell J.C. Penney to keep its promises and do right by the workers who make their goods. (The ILRF actually sponsors both action alerts, so use one or the other.) Bangladesh has seen almost 500 workers die from sweatshop fires in the last five years, but as I keep saying, there is-so such a thing as bad PR, and if multinational corporations feel the pressure to insist on better working conditions, they'll do it, and if they insist on better working conditions, the workers will get them. It's that simple.

Finally, September promises to be a month of demonstration and outrage against Pennsylvania's callous efforts to enrich gas drillers at the expense of Pennsylvanians and the clean water we deserve. The Citizens Marcellus Shale Commission, formed by several civic/environmental groups, will hold public hearings in various locations over the next two weeks; you can find hearing times and dates, and sign up to speak, here. Also, gas drilling CEOs will attend something called "Shale Gas Insight," basically a trade show for the industry, at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia next week, so the aptly-titled Shale Gas Outrage will hold rallies, marches, and conferences in response; their schedule is here. Among the speakers at the September 7 rally will be Gasland director Josh Fox, who gave us, among other things, this scene. You know, the one where a Pennsylvania citizen lights their tap water on fire? I might have discussed that matter a few times.

Mmm, giant slabs of bile between thick slices of bread that are also made of bile!

First things first: ever heard of a "gestation crate"? A gestation crate is a crate designed to hold a female breeding pig, and nothing else. Seriously, ever spent a day in a room only a little bigger than you are, where you can sit in only one position to eat, sleep, and poop? Well, a breeding pig can spend a lifetime in such a place, and as you might imagine, that pig is miserable: she'll bite the bars of the cage, she'll get pressure sores, she'll get more infections. Many nations have banned gestation crates, as have eight U.S. states, and two of the three major U.S. fast-food chains (Burger King and Wendy's) have begun using gestation-crate-free pork. Notice who's missing? That's right, McDonald's. But blame their main pork supplier, Smithfield's, too -- they committed to getting rid of gestation crates over ten years (ten years?) and then reneged on that promise because, you know, the economy. And now, the punchline: Smithfield is yet another corporation enjoying record profits at the moment. So no more damn excuses: change.org helps you pressure McDonald's to pressure Smithfield to stop using gestation crates for pigs. Sound a little roundabout? Hey, it's an interconnected world. And there is-so such a thing as bad PR.

If you missed yesterday's CREDO petition opposing the broad settlement that would immunize banksters from all their foreclosure shenanigans in exchange for slap-on-the-wrist fines and the vague hope that we might one day discover all they've done, well, MoveOn has another one. MoveOn reminds me of a few things I neglected to tell you yesterday: one, that Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden (way outclassing his dad) also stands against the settlement; two, that the threat of prosecution gives us leverage to force the banksters to help the homeowners they've hurt; and three, that these idiots crashed the economy. So, to sum: banksters destroy the economy, return to record profitability with the help of massive government bailouts, continue to throw good Americans out of homes they often can't even prove they own, face no accountability for what they've done -- and not a peep, even, from the rabid law-and-order types in this country, so hungry to send young kids to jail for carrying a dime bag of pot? We're a truly sick, immoral, and decadent society if we allow the banksters to get off. So let's not. And no, I don't care if this cuts off the flow of Wall Street money to Mr. Obama and gets Rick Perry elected. You do the right thing, and then you fight to do the right thing again. It ain't that damn deep.

Finally, if you're as sick and tired as I am of Eric Cantor still having a job doing anything remotely important or complex despite his abject cruelty in insisting on spending cuts to pay for disaster relief, both CREDO and Roots Action help you oppose his cruelty. The latter alert explicitly calls for an end to oil and gas subsidies in exchange for hurricane relief; it should be amusing to watch Mr. Cantor talk his way out of that one. The former alert directly petitions Mr. Cantor, but I must confess I have no interest in talking to him, because it's obvious he doesn't care about anything but serving his corporate paymasters. I only want him unelected, and as I said earlier this week, a 2012 defeat for Mr. Cantor is more of a possibility that most folks think. Jesus Mary and Joseph there must be a penalty for being as cruel and stupid as he is. Otherwise, why are we drawing breath?