Thieves in the Temple.

Shame of the nation.

Hot on the heels of a truly Grimm whistleblower "protection" bill, we learn this: a half-dozen former and current FDA staffers claim, in a lawsuit, that the FDA monitored their email. Perhaps not coincidentally, the staffers were warning Congress that about a dozen approved medical devices were unsafe -- they malfunctioned, missed cancers, made false diagnoses, even put patients at risk of getting cancer. Also perhaps not coincidentally, two of the six staffers were fired, two others didn't have their contracts renewed, and two others were passed over for promotions. The complaints began in 2007, but lest you sniff that faint Bush Mobb odor, the harassment alleged by the suit began in January 2009. Note, also, that we are not exactly looking at a well-running medical device-approval process to begin with. The National Whistleblowers Center helps you tell our government to stop harassing FDA whistleblowers.

If you missed any alerts about extending federal unemployment insurance so that it doesn't cause massive pain to great numbers of Americans, then the National Employment Law Project still helps you tell your Congressfolk to demand a clean extension of unemployment benefits. The House of Representatives (sic) tried to use the December 31 expiration as a lever to force through unconscionable changes in unemployment insurance, like drastic cuts, mandatory drug testing, and letting states use federal umemployment money for purposes other than actually paying unemployed people. But then they overplayed their hand in early December, as the are-they-stupid-or-are-they-evil crowd occasionally does, and so they had to agree to a two-month extension. That extension ends February 29, so the time to put the pressure on your Representatives is now. It is not the kind of pressure a nominally liberal President could deliver. It is the kind of pressure only the American people can deliver. So let's deliver it.

If you missed the oppressed Apple worker alert from yesterday, I've got another one, this one from Sum of Us. I must confess that I've shortchanged "liberal" media coverage of this issue somewhat -- the New York Times has been reporting on it for a while, and NPR's This American Life covered it earlier this month. And from such reports we learn that long hours for low pay ain't even the end of it -- repetitive motion injuries get workers fired after a few years, and many are also exposed to a neurotoxin that cleans iPhone screens. But wait, you say, aren't we exposed to that neurotoxin, too? Well, you might swipe your screen a few times a day to turn it on, but an Apple worker will swipe tens of thousands of screens over the course of a day. N-hexane, the neurotoxin in question, dries a few seconds faster than rubbing alcohol. But Apple's profit margin exceeded 40% last quarter. They're sitting on $100 billion in cash. So they can change their ways.

Hurricane.

So, like your iPhone, or iPod, or iPad? Well, dig this: when Apple redesigned the iPhone's screen "at the last minute," the Chinese plant that makes iPhones got 8,000 workers out of bed to work a 12-hour shift affixing the new screens. The executive relating this story added: "The speed and flexibility is breathtaking. There’s no American plant that can match that." Would we want that, especially over a fricking cell phone? And the article doesn't mention that 18 of that plant's workers tried to kill themselves in 2010 (14 of them died). The plant, Foxconn, responded with a pay hike for Shenzen workers, but they still work 12 hours a day, six days a week, for less than $20 a day. So a Mac enthusiast has started a petition on change.org telling Apple to do more to protect the workers who make its products.

Meanwhile, Twitter plans to begin censoring its users' twitterings in certain countries which "have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression," as a Twitter spokeshack put it. But I think people matter more than governments, and people all have pretty much the same idea about freedom of expression -- that I ought to be able to say what I want, as long as I don't trample on someone else's right to say what they want. I'd also hate to see Twitter stop being a force for good in the world, as it has been in the Middle East. And why do we have to help repressive governments, who can simply learn to use the technology to their advantage if they want to keep their people down? Why not let the people in repressive governments take their chances? Don't we owe them at least that much respect? So Demand Progress helps you tell Twitter not to give in to repressive governments.

Closer to home, word on the street is that Pennsylvania's governor, Mr. Corbett, plans to lift a moratorium on further gas drilling in state forests early next month, which would open our state forests to the kind of air and water pollution we've come to expect from gas drillers. Some 40% of our state forests are already open to gas drilling, but that's no excuse not to protect the rest, though a fellow with Mr. Corbett's decidedly sour temperament might say so. So Penn Environment helps you tell the Governor and the legislature not to lift the moratorium on new drilling in state forests. We all want more jobs, we all want to create our own energy -- but making our water undrinkable and unusable is too high a price to pay. If we don't have clean water and air, we don't have health. And we've got other options -- solar and wind leap to mind, though Tom Corbett and his cronies can't own the sun or the wind.

Finally, Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) is back with his nefarious H.R. 2483, the so-called Whistleblower Improvement Act. I was going to complain about the bill's Orwellian title, but then I realized the bill plans to improve whistleblowers! Like this: H.R. 2483 would make whistleblowers report suspected wrongdoing to their employers first, and would also, perhaps not coincidentally, give employers more leeway to retaliate against whistleblowing employees. In other news, Michael Grimm thinks you should report suspected burglary to the burglar before reporting it to the police -- and also thinks the burglar should be able to retaliate against you without penalty. This bill faces a long road -- it just passed out of subcommittee in December -- but let's not be complacent. The National Whistleblowers Center helps you tell your House Rep to oppose H.R. 2483.

Everyday people.

The Center for Constitutional Rights helps you demand that Mr. Obama close Guantánamo, as he promised right after he became President. Yeah, yeah, I know -- Congress played NIMBY with the detainees, there are fewer detainees in Guantánamo now than under Mr. Bush, et cetera. One detainee is too many -- if you can't charge the guy, you need to let him go. And if it's the right thing to do, then find a way to do it -- where was Mr. Obama's bully pulpit when Congress wouldn't allow detainees to be kept on our soil? And yeah, yeah, I know, if he closes Guantánamo, he's got other Guantánamos at the ready overseas (or at home!). But let's make him juggle, at least. And note well, that if CCR's petition gets 25,000 signatures by February 6, the administration has pledged to respond. That doesn't mean he'll agree to close it. It does mean he'll be embarrassed if he doesn't, and, as I like to say, there is-too such a thing as bad PR.

Meanwhile, the Obama Administration has proposed revising the "companionship exemption" to the minimum wage; currently, that exemption includes home care workers. Ever been a home care worker, or known one? It's damn hard work, helping seniors and disabled folk to live more independently in their own homes, and certainly home care workers deserve more generous pay. So the Department of Labor has proposed extending minimum wage and overtime rights to home care workers, and is taking public comments on that proposal as we speak; PHI Policy Works helps you leave said comment. I just can't wait for right-wingers to say that home care corporations will all collapse if their workers make minimum wage, when all that'll happen is that the workers will be able to make their way in life a little better and their CEOs won't be able to gild their plumbing.

Finally, those bozos in the Tennessee Tea Party have demanded that we remove all references to the Founders owning slaves from the history books. What a bunch of damn weaklings. Seriously, if knowing that the Founders did some bad things makes you act like a diaper-loaded little brat, I don't want you in my foxhole, because we're a stronger nation when we admit our failings and fix them, not a weaker one. And they want to call the slave trade the "Atlantic triangular trade." And they think we're weak when we insist on using hyphenated names to describe ethnicities? I am so, so sick and tired of the stupidest and weakest people in American getting all the damn say about everything. Care2 helps you tell the Tennessee state legislature to ignore the Tennessee Tea Party's folly. I damn sure hope I never hear anything about this again.

Distant early warning.

Long-term unemployment insurance expires at the end of February, and if I know Republicans, they will try to use any extension to do horrible things -- Mr. Boehner has already signaled that he might try to make Mr. Obama reverse his decision on the Keystone XL pipeline (a decision he might reverse anyway, if TransCanada submits a new application) in exchange for getting the payroll tax cut extended, and the payroll tax holiday and unemployment extension might both get done at once. And House Republicans have already tried couple an unemployment extension with drastic cuts in benefits and new hoops for unemployed folks to jump through. So the National Employment Law Project helps you tell Congress to extend unemployment insurance without playing any damn games. Congress's corporate paymasters are sitting on trillions of dollars and not hiring people; if Congress won't make them help, then Congress has to help.

Meanwhile, PennEnvironment combines with MoveOn to help you demand that the state of Pennsylvania impose a moratorium on fracking. You know why -- who wants to drink tap water that can be lit on fire, or tap water that's otherwise polluted? Who wants gas explosions polluting the air? Mr. Corbett likes to tell us that he'd rather have the jobs gas drilling creates than not have them. Silly little Pennsylvania Governor -- the Marcellus Shale ain't going anywhere. What are gas drillers going to do, try to slant-drill from Ohio? Before we go gas drilling, we should ensure the process is safe -- a tall order, I know, given (for example) the hundreds of thousands of unfilled and now unused water wells all over the state, but anything worth doing is hard. Or, as a petition signer in Reading puts it: "It is important to evaluate the long term effects of any innovative process versus the immediate benefits." Wow, that sounds almost conservative. And it sounds rather unlike Pennsylvania's "conservatives."

I'm your villain.

The ACLU helps you helps you tell Congress to support S. 1212/H.R. 2168, the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act. The bills (sponsored by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden and Republican Representative Jason Chaffetz, respectively) would prevent our government from using our cell phones as tracking devices without a warrant. You remember warrants? Those things law enforcement is supposed to get from judges before they come after you? If you don't, I don't blame you; the last two Presidents have done their damndest to make you forget them. At least the Supreme Court hasn't forgotten them: the Court ruled earlier this week, in U.S. v. Jones, that by attaching a GPS device to Antoine Jones's car and tracking him for a month without a warrant, our government violated the Fourth Amendment. Strangely, many in Congress don't think this ruling applies to cell phones. I could attribute that attitude to fuzzy thinking about technology, fuzzy thinking about terrorism, or simply thirst for power. I'm not sure any of that matters, though, if the result is tyranny.

Meanwhile, Public Citizen helps you tell the Securities and Exchange Commission to require publicly-traded corporations to disclose their political spending. Why the SEC, you ask? Because the SEC has a mandate to protect shareholders from corporate abuse, and if corporations are going to spend shareholders' money on political campaigns the shareholders wouldn't approve, then the corporations are abusing their shareholders. The 41 Senate Republicans already made sure we couldn't have the DISCLOSE Act, and the Democratic House made no serious effort to move Rep. Capuano's shareholder protection bills during the last Congress, so we make a stand here. Remember that corporations, despite all their hot air about how corporations should be accountable to their shareholders and not our government, don't actually have to tell their shareholders almost anything about what they're doing with their money. For corporations, it's shareholder rights only when it's convenient. I have a feeling that's going to change in a big way in the coming years, and this can be a start.

Dynamite.

CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a Constitutional amendment to end corporate personhood. Why? Short answer: because a corporation is a thing, not a person, and because money isn't speech but property. Somewhat longer answer: because when folks with more money spend more money electing Congressfolk, they get, in effect, more of a First Amendment right to redress grievances than the rest of us do, and the First Amendment doesn't guarantee more rights to people with more money. Consider, also, the spectre of jacked-up corporate spending in the 2012 Presidential election, and with it, the spectre of the truth getting repeatedly jacked up. We may well have at least one Presidential nominee (if Mr. Gingrich can keep up his snake-oil tour going) who thinks corporations should be spending more, not less, on Presidential campaigns. I'm such a churl I'd rather have corporations spending all that money they're sitting on to hire people to make stuff.

Meanwhile, we won a few victories over the last week. Congress postponed votes on SOPA and PIPA, the internet blacklist twins. To think that all it took was for us to complain in force! Trouble is, all it'll take for Congress to shove these bills down our throats again is for us to be too busy doing victory laps to notice, so Free Press helps you tell your Senators to kill SOPA and PIPA once and for all. Also, Mr. Obama mandated insurance, without co-pays, for contraceptives in federal health care exchanges, only exempting houses of worship, thus not exempting church-affiliated hospitals, colleges, or social service providers. Though I maintain that access to birth control should be a decision for individuals, not organizations, at least houses of worship will more likely be filled with folks who oppose birth control than the other organizations listed above. So Planned Parenthood and the National Women's Law Center help you thank Mr. Obama. Like I said before, thank him now and he might do the right thing again one day.

Readings for Sunday, January 22, 2012.

America's Last Conservative, Paul Craig Roberts, tells us why we should vote for Ron Paul. Long story short, "(o)nly Ron Paul understands that if the Constitution cannot be resurrected from its public murder by Congress and the executive branch, then Americans are lost to tyranny." Mr. Paul's positions on Bush/Obama abuses of power are, of course, impeccable, though his general opposition to the safety net repels most liberals, myself included, and I suspect Mr. Roberts thinks less of the effectiveness of American people's opposition to that "public murder" than I do. Mr. Roberts also argues that a President Paul would be so isolated from Congress that he wouldn't be able to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, et al if he wanted to, and anyway he doesn't want to until we can restructure the economy so that we don't need them. I'm not inclined to believe that restructuring is possible, though I don't doubt Mr. Paul thinks it is (and he was one of only four House Republicans to vote against the Ryan budget, you may remember). But I'd be more inclined to agree that our elites would, in fact, prefer to raid the safety net under cover of a Democratic Administration and a Democratic Congress -- though, after the events of the last three years, they'd be foolish to push for that again in 2013.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan tells us why we should vote for Barack Obama. Long story short, "given the enormity of what he inherited, and given what he explicitly promised, it remains simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right and purist left have yet to understand or absorb. Their short-term outbursts have missed Obama’s long game." I wouldn't call extending the Bush tax cuts or cutting Medicare "accomplishments," and I value some accomplishments more than others anyway -- I don't think killing Mr. bin Laden, for example, would rate a full paragraph in any lengthy assessment I'd make. Having not expected that much from Mr. Obama to begin with, I'm more frustrated with him than disappointed, and though I've long entertained the notion that Mr. Obama is playing a "long game," I've also long suspected that believing in the "long game" is a way of excusing his failures of courage, and if you don't do everything you can while you have a 70-seat House majority and a 20-seat Senate majority you might not even get to play a long game. I'd quarrel with Mr. Sullivan, also, on whether the GOP really understands "the language of victory and defeat," unless losing 20 House seats, eight Senate seats, and the Presidency in 2008 humbled Republicans in a way I somehow missed. At least I rate as "purist" in Mr. Sullivan's eyes, rather than "unhinged." That's something.

Clampdown.

Consumers Union helps you demand that the FDA test medical devices and implants at least as rigorously as it tests prescription drugs. Don't laugh: medical devices and implants do, in fact, receive a lot less scrutiny from the FDA than prescription drugs do -- approximately 90 percent get precisely zero pre-market testing, zero safety testing, zero inspection, and zero post-surgical monitoring. For things like heart valves and hip replacements and surgical mesh, too! How did this happen? Nah, just kidding, you know how it happened -- medical device corporations didn't want to spend money rigorously testing their products, because, you know, job-killing socialism. Well, usually their hacks pull it together enough to say people will die if we don't get these miracle devices out quickly!, when too often people die if they do get their miracle devices out quickly. I'm not sure I can even call that irony; isn't irony supposed to be more subtle?

Meanwhile, the day after the Great Internet Blacklist Blackout of 2012, the Department of Justice shut down MegaUpload.com. Did they arrest anyone who actually illegally pirated copyrighted material? Who knows? Then the DOJ's own site (along with that of Universal Music, RIAA, and MPAA) faced an Anonymous denial-of-service attack this morning. Rep. Sherman (D-CA), who's angling to represent the newly-redrawn California district that includes the big movie corporations, promptly cluck-clucked that the MegaUpload arrest shows why we need SOPA! I'm no fan of piracy, but I maintain that the spectre of our government shutting down anyone on flimsy or false accusations of copyright infringement shows why we must oppose SOPA and PIPA. Remember that some well-paid idiots happily argue that linking to a news article to prove you don't make stuff up "infringes copyright." So Demand Progress, Color of Change, Access Now (nice tagline!), and MoveOn all help you continue to oppose SOPA and PIPA.

Finally, USPIRG and Citizens for Tax Justice join forces on a report exposing the connection between corporate lobbying and the tax breaks they "just so happen" to receive. No, really: people actually say this, that we shouldn't beat up on corporations for taking the tax breaks that just happen to be available to them. Long story short: 280 corporations spent $2 billion lobbying our government from 2008-2010 and got (are you sitting down?) $223 billion in tax breaks, which number comprises almost half of their total tax burden for these years. And almost 30 of those corporations actually paid a negative tax rate, meaning we the taxpayers paid them for the honor to have them do business in our great land. Let me guess: they need all those tax breaks for job creation. Oh, wait, no, it can't be that, because the unemployment rate is still ridiculously high. I must conclude that they "need" all those tax breaks to gild the plumbing on their CEOs' tenth vacation homes.

Super-connected.

At Bank of America's next board meeting, shareholders plan to introduce a resolution calling on management to refrain from spending in elections. Bank of America has that money to spend, you know, after getting over $40 billion in bailouts from we-the-taxpayers, after paying negative $1 billion in taxes in 2010, after running 115 tax havens -- but there's already too damn much corporate money to buy corporate-friendly tax codes from corporate-friendly Congressfolk. And you may not be a shareholder in Bank of America, but you're going to live in the world that Bank of America has made and will continue to make with its political contributions, so you have just as much of a say in it as anyone else. So USPIRG helps you tell BOA CEO Brian Moynihan that you'll be watching the result of the upcoming resolution. And remember: a shareholder resolution doesn't have to actually pass to work. It just has to get enough votes that it puts the scare in the CEO and his cronies.

Meanwhile, the state of Pennsylvania has decided to reinstate an "asset test," which would require you to have less than $2,000 in assets ($3,250 for seniors and the disabled) to qualify for food stamps. The test would exempt housing, retirement benefits, and (luckily) one automobile from being counted as "assets." This may sound like a common-sense reform, until you consider that getting a new apartment would wipe out well more than $2,000, that catastrophes don't always happen one at a time, that seniors are often saving for their burials, and that, you know, government really shouldn't be discouraging people from saving for a rainy day. And Pennsylvania has one of the lowest rates of food-stamp fraud in the nation! And food stamp benefits come from the federal government, so Pennsylvania won't actually be saving any money! I don't need to go on about the stimulative effects of food stamps on the economy, do I? The Governor's phone number is 1.717.787.2500, and you can find your state legislators' numbers here.

Also, add Cooper Tire & Rubber Company to the list of corporations doing their workers wrong. The company was losing money in 2008, so its Findlay, Ohio plant workers give up $31 million in pay and benefits to help out. Here are the results: a) Cooper has exceeded $300 million in profits since 2009; b) Cooper executives paid themselves millions in bonuses; c) Cooper bought itself a new corporate jet; d) Cooper locked out its Findlay employees on Thanksgiving weekend, even though workers were willing to continue working through negotiations on a new contract. Do our elites fail to understand why so many of us are so reluctant to make sacrifices these days? Now, it just so happens that Cooper's Texarkana (AR) plant has a labor contract up this month, and Cooper would rather not have two lockouts at once. And we can help them in this aim, thanks to American Rights at Work, which helps you tell Cooper Tires to get their act together and negotiate fairly with their workers.

I'd be remiss not to mention that Mr. Obama rejected a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline yesterday. Every day we can stop TransCanada from polluting the heartland's waters is a gift from God, but I do wonder how this will play out for Mr. Obama politically. Last month's payroll tax cut debate was a PR debacle for the Republicans, but I doubt the "liberal" media will connect their demand for a too-quick decision on Keystone XL with said debacle, though the Republicans insisted on linking the two. The Keystone XL pipeline won't create many jobs, won't help the environment, and won't get us off of oil, and it might dump crude oil in our tap water, but I wonder how much of that information will get through the "liberal" media, too. In the meantime, we could do worse than thank Mr. Obama for an unusually courageous decision, which Public Citizen, the Sierra Club, and the Environmental Defense Fund all help you do. If we thank him now, he might even do something courageous again someday.

Rid of me.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, until last year Mr. Obama's Chief of Staff, has proposed a slew of ordinances limiting public assembly and public protest, ostensibly because of the upcoming NATO and G8 summits. Mr. Emanuel's ordinances would hike fines twenty-fold for all offenses, institute a more regimented permit-gathering scheme, and designate all street protests as "large parades" requiring $1 million in liability insurance. I feel compelled to ask: why does Mr. Emanuel hate freedom? And I imagine elites would applaud efforts like Mr. Emanuel's, though if they feel so beleaguered by street protestors, they might want to start with the man in the mirror. Chicago's City Council could be voting on the ordinances today, so change.org helps you tell City Council to vote them down. If City Council votes them down, I suppose Mr. Emanuel will complain about all these out-of-towners having influence over City Council. Yo, pimp: if you don't want the public to stand against you, don't stand against the public.

Speaking of protest, you probably know that Wikipedia, Reddit, and other large websites are "going dark" today in protest of Congress's internet blacklist twins, SOPA and PIPA. The House has lately said it won't take up SOPA again until February, but the Senate stubbornly insists on plunging ahead with PIPA, hence the blackout. And the blackout has even earned SOPA and PIPA its very first TV news coverage! If you go to Wikipedia or Reddit on your home computer today, you will find action pages which you may use to tell your Reps and Senators to kill SOPA and PIPA. Also, reddit blogger Jason Harvey explains why the politicians are wrong when they claim SOPA and PIPA only apply to "foreign" sites (long story short, just about every domestic site also has a foreign address) and why SOPA and PIPA won't stop piracy. Dig this: the State Department actually funds firewall circumvention efforts in nations that censor the internet. Guess who takes up those efforts in a SOPA/PIPA regime?

Smokestack lightning.

The Pennsylvania state legislature comes back to work today -- greeted by hordes of citizens angry at their efforts to dole out handouts to the gas drilling industry, one hopes -- and if you haven't registered your opposition to HB 1950/SB 1100, the Sierra Club still helps you tell your legislators to kill the bills and start over. Bills that don't protect the environment from gas drillers who'd light our tap water on fire are bad bills. Bills that assess impact fees lower every other gas-drilling state in the country -- impact fees that are optional, no less -- are bad bills. The people should not put up with bad bills from the legislature, even if that legislature is dominated by Republicans. And no it sure as hell doesn't matter that these bills constitute a small step forward from the day Tom Corbett called impact fees "un-American." If you improve from "completely awful" to "slightly better than completely awful," you don't get cookies from me.

Meanwhile, I must report, with regret, that it's not true that you can identify genetically-modified fruit at the supermarket by their PLU codes. Rumor was you can look at the five-digit code on stickers attached to fresh fruit and if the first digit's an "8," then it's genetically-modified. What's that, you say? You've only ever seen four-digit stickers on fruit? Well, there you are, then. Now, the International Federation for Produce Standards, which assigns the PLU codes you see on those stickers, has in fact assigned a five-digit code to genetically-modified produce (see page 17), but the code is optional, and no one uses it. Because, you know, you probably wouldn't buy it if you knew it was Frankenfood. One hopes our government doesn't hold out this "suggested global best practice" as an example of how well voluntary standards work. Though, for all I know, they think it does work -- think Tom Vilsack does much of his own grocery shopping these days? (Get your real non-GMO shopping guide here -- it's even an iPhone app!)

Four horsemen.

Pennsylvania state legislators return to work tomorrow, still anxious to pass their unpopular gas drilling bills, HB 1950/SB 1100. But plenty of good citizens plan to meet them at the state Capitol rotunda at 11 a.m., to let them know that the people oppose gas drilling corporations running roughshod over them. You can RSVP for this event, if you like -- but if you can't make it out there tomorrow morning, you can still call your state legislators and tell them to oppose HB 1950/SB 1100. You know, I'm not even hearing people say that legislation allowing the state to override stronger municipal environmental standards and set optional and hysterically low impact fees for gas drillers is the best we can do with the legislature we got. But that's not good news -- if this next attempt to pass HB 1950/SB 1100 fails, its progenitors will probably decide they just didn't explain the bills well enough to the people. Hard as it is to pass dung off as meatloaf, our legislators do seem to have a taste for dung, as long as it can be dumped on us.

Meanwhile, I'm a bit shocked to find that Children's Hospital of Philadelphia has refused to perform a kidney transplant for a two-year-old girl because she's developmentally-disabled. The family has even declared they'd donate the kidney, but no dice -- she'll need another kidney transplant in 12 years, the hospital says, and she'll need to take a lot of medications for the rest of her life, and in other news, life is struggle. Here's another news update: you cannot predict the future with such absolute certainty -- Amelia Rivera's new kidney might outperform their expectations, or we may develop treatment regimes over the next few years that allow her to manage her health care more effectively. Maybe they need to meet some more developmentally-disabled folks; then they'd be less likely to write them off. Change.org helps you tell CHOP not to let Amelia Rivera die just because she's developmentally-disabled.

Finally, as we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday today, Roots Action helps you demand that we stop giving corporations the rights of "personhood." Now you may well be asking yourself: self, what's the connection between Dr. King and corporate "personhood"? Well, while he had pretty famous and pretty strong opinions about civil rights, he also had pretty famous and pretty strong opinions about income inequality, and while I'm no Oracle at Delphi, I can't imagine Dr. King witnessing today's income inequality and still pushing for a corporate "right" to spend as much as it wants on electioneering in the name of "civil rights." I can much more easily imagine Dr. King drawing a direct connection between the two. And, sadly, I can also quite easily imagine today's "liberal" media calling him "Socialist" for doing so. (Also, if you want to participate in a local anti-corporate "rights" event this weekend, go here or here.)

Walk on the water.

If you've missed any opportunities to give your Congressfolk what-for about the internet blacklist twins, SOPA and PIPA, the People's Email Network provides another one. I'll let them tell it: "The bill is so poorly written and vague in its definitions that it would potentially criminalize innocent behavior, an open door to selective prosecutions. Worse yet, it would give single troll complainers the power to completely and unilaterally shut down websites on false accusations, and force those sites to engage in lengthy legal battles to restore themselves." They also point out that two original Democratic sponsors of SOPA (Messrs. Schiff and Berman) just so happen to represent districts containing big Hollywood studios. So I guess you can tell your right-wing friends that SOPA is a massive welfare handout to the Hollywood movie industry that assaults their values.

Meanwhile, just as we're assured that negotiations on a "settlement" with banksters over foreclosure fraud are coming to a close, we learn that the number three man at the Department of Justice, Mr. Obama's lead negotiator of said "settlement," will leave his position in two months. Given Mr. Perrelli's departure, and given the now half-dozen state Attorneys General who oppose the "settlement" (in which, broadly, banksters would pay a fine that wouldn't hurt them and would never admit to any wrongdoing), we might well be tempted to believe that the "settlement" is toast. But now is no time to get complacent! So CREDO, MoveOn and the Campaign for America's Future all help you demand a Justice Department investigation into alleged bank fraud during our ongoing foreclosure Armageddon. Now is also not the time to say we're looking forward, not backward. Are we a law-and-order nation, or are we not?

Finally, I note that Newt Gingrich, again, thinks there ought to be limits on free speech -- specifically, on the free speech of Occupy Wall Street protestors who allegedly blocked him into his own campaign headquarters at some recent indeterminate point in time, "forcing" him to cancel an event because he didn't want to "risk some kind of big confrontation." Surely, as a Ph.D. and a "student of history," Mr. Gingrich must know that free speech doesn't flow in one direction at a time, and that refusing to confront a protest group is not the same as our government putting a gun put to your head and/or putting you in jail. I must conclude, therefore, that he's merely indulging in that favorite right-wing sport, trying to make everyone feel sorry for you. Even the most loyal Republicans are going to get sick of all the damn whining coming from their standard-bearers eventually. Aren't they?

Son of a gun.

Our leaders talk a lot about shared sacrifice, but wouldn't allow an 0.2% increase on millionaire income to fund the payroll tax cut extension, and won't let H.R. 2669/S. 1346, the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act, come to a vote. What on earth is wrong with demanding that corporations and hedge fund managers sacrifice their unearned tax loopholes? Over 80% of the 100 top publicly-traded corporations have shell companies overseas -- one Cayman Islands building somehow houses over 18,000 corporations so they can evade their taxes. And hedge fund managers routinely pay the 15% capital gains rate, not the 35% top income tax rate, on their unearned billions, even though their money is, you know, income. Even Saint Reagan insisted that all income be taxed the same, that we do not treat investment income as if it's better than the money you and I take home. So USPIRG helps you tell Speaker Boehner to permit a vote on the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act.

Meanwhile, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced over the weekend that France should have a financial transaction tax -- he even called it a "moral issue" and said that banksters ought to "repay for the damage they have caused." Can you guess which current American President doesn't sound like that? Sure, he bashes banksters every once in a while, but he doesn't make the moral case for a financial transaction tax -- that it's the right thing to do. I'm long past done with people who locate America's moral sickness in its tolerance of gays or abortion -- any healthy society restrains its most powerful members from raining dung on the rest of its people, but America doesn't. You can judge our health as a society accordingly. So Roots Action helps you demand that Mr. Obama show some leadership on financial transaction taxes. You can't trust Mr. Obama to do the right thing; you can only make him do the right thing.

Finally, the Pennsylvania state legislature didn't pass the nefarious gas drilling bills, HB 1950 and SB 1100, despite large Republican majorites in both houses and a Republican Governor salivating to sign it. Think maybe the bills didn't pass because they're, like, so singularly unpopular? If so, then good, because that's how it's supposed to work: the legislature is supposed to be afraid of us, not the other way around. The legislature plans to try again on HB 1950 and SB 1100 when it returns on January 17, and you may join activists from all over the state at 11 a.m. that day at the Capitol Rotunda in Harrisburg, PA. You know, to say hello, and tell them to kill bills that assess hysterically low and optional impact fees while simultaneously hamstringing municipalities from enforcing their own clean water laws. If the legislature doesn't see this coming, they're the dumbest people on earth. Not that that's improbable, of course.

Crushed by the wheels of industry.

The federal minimum wage for most workers is $7.25/hr, but for tipped restaurant workers, it's only $2.13 -- and has been for twenty years. And inflation has gone up a bit since then, as I'm sure you know. Does that seem fair? Thankfully, H.R. 631, the Working for Adequate Gains for Employment in Services (or WAGES) Act, would jump that tipped worker minimum wage to $3.75 in 90 days, then to $5/hr in a year, and then up to 70 percent of the federal minimum wage for most workers (and not less than $5.50/hr) in two years. Certainly H.R. 631 warrants a phone call to your Reps and Senators, who will, as usual, never see it coming. You may want to mention that raising minimum wages stimulates economies and that businesses relying on tipped workers have it pretty easy already, so there's no excuse for attaching all kinds of big corporate tax cuts to the bill, as Congressfolk like to do. (Heads-up on H.R. 631 courtesy Moms Rising.)

Meanwhile, Public Citizen helps you tell Congress to make medical device-testing more rigorous. This ought to be a no-brainer -- you don't want any of your loved ones injured by a medical device that went to market before we could make sure it was safe, do you? But for the corporations that profit from medical devices, a faster FDA-approval process means more money, though it means less safety for you. Of course, the big corporations will tell you that new and innovative devices have to make it to market fast, because sick people are suffering now, but if the product isn't safe, how much good can it do? This is one of those times when we should make sure solutions aren't worse than the problems they purportedly aim to solve. One might even call that a conservative viewpoint. It'll be tough -- though big corporate tentacles may not actually reach directly into the brainstems of our Congressfolk, you could be excused for thinking that's the case. But we can make it easier by speaking out.

Finally, NYU student (and big gaming fan) Shashank Kasturirangan has come up with an innovative way to fight SOPA and PIPA, the internet blacklist twins -- he's started a petition on change.org to tell video-gaming company EA (you know, "it's in the game!") to come out against SOPA and PIPA. EA hasn't taken a public position on the bills, which would, as you know, allow our government to shut down internet websites accused, not convicted of copyright infringement, which could shut down freedom of speech on the internet. But the Entertainment Software Association, a lobbying organization to which EA belongs, is a big supporter of SOPA and PIPA. EA sure would throw a wrench into the proceedings if it were to buck the ESA, but it won't do it without enthusiastic prodding from the gaming community. I'm not particularly a gamer myself (I lettered in pinball), but you may be, so here's the petition.

Round lights.

As you know, Mr. Obama said that he'd never, ever detain an American citizen without trial, even though the just-passed NDAA lets him do that. So Congress has apparently devised a workaround: H.R. 3166/S. 1698, the Enemy Expatriation Act, which would permit our government to strip citizenship from Americans found "engaging in, or purposefully and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States," "hostilities" meaning "any conflict subject to the laws of war." H.R. 3166 amends the Immigration and Nationality Act, which instructs us that you'd virtually have to renounce your citizenship and join a foreign army fighting the United States before your government can strip you of your citizenship. Yet H.R. 3166 invites the spectre of governments calling peaceful demonstrators "terrorists" and stripping them of their citizenship. And by "them," of course, I mean us. You may want to call your Congressfolk about H.R. 3166/S. 1698, using the tools in the upper left-hand corner. They'll never see it coming.

Meanwhile, public outcry managed to halt Congressional action on the "internet blacklist" bills, SOPA and PIPA, even to the point that the Man Who Would Kill Medicare, Paul Ryan, has come out against the bill -- but you'd never know it from our televised "liberal" media news coverage, which has been almost completely nonexistent. Now that couldn't be because the big "liberal" TV stations are owned by corporations that support SOPA and PIPA, could it? Free Press helps you encourage them to do better -- because surely they would not want to be accused of excessive self-interest! And, just in case the threat of being imprisoned by your government for no damn good reason doesn't move you to oppose SOPA and PIPA, here's a blog post entitled "Why the Movie Industry Can't Innovate and the Result is SOPA." Marvel at the list of emergent technologies first bitterly opposed and then reluctantly embraced by corporate America! And then note how our great "free market" innovators, given more "freedom to innovate," actually stifle innovation! Who'da thunk it?

Finally, Mr. Obama still plans to expand drilling in the Arctic Ocean, although a) we hardly understand the ecosystems in the Arctic and b) it's a lot harder to clean up a spill in cold or frozen water than it is in the Gulf (and look at the bang-up job BP did cleaning that up!). So, if you haven't commented to the Bureau of Ocean Management about Arctic drilling already, the Wilderness Society helps you do that. Elsewhere in Alaska, the Obama Administration has wisely withdrawn the Bristol Bay area from consideration for Arctic Ocean drilling leases, but the oil companies still angle to drill there, though the Bristol Bay area provides some 40 percent of the world's wild seafood and the fishing industry makes billions of dollars a year there. Hasn't the oil industry done enough damage to our water, to our land, to our food? The Pew Environmental Trust helps you encourage the Obama Administration to continue protecting the Bristol Bay area.

Spirits drifting.

Roots Action helps you tell your state and federal legislators to end the fiction of corporate personhood. You'll also be interested to know that you can join your fellow citizens in protesting the Citizens United v. FEC decision in which the Supreme Court established First Amendment rights for corporations; you can find out more about those protests here and here. And what do proponents of corporate "personhood" have to say? Well, nothing, really -- they just put words in your mouth (no one said there was anything "uniquely harmful" about corporate campaigns, just that all the damn money they spend drowns out other folks from speaking), or indulge in slippery-slope fantasies ("Imagine the New York Times being prohibited from paying for its writers," etc.), or to suggest that now small businesses can compete on a level playing field with big businesses. I'm not kidding. Oh, and they claim money is speech, which it's not. I'm one of those yokels who believes speech is speech, and money is property.

Meanwhile, the New Hampshire state legislature plans to abolish gay marriage this week, via HB 437. What impeccable timing! The state's Presidential primary is tomorrow, the whole nation's watching, and this is the image the legislature broadcasts to America? Doesn't the Tea Party (which has quite the foothold in New Hampshire) have some interest in showing it's not all about hate and rage? Well, Craig Stowell, a conservative Republican from New Hampshire, has started a petition on change.org to discourage the legislature from abolishing gay marriage. (No, that's not an oxymoron; I said "conservative Republican," not right-wing or reactionary Republican.) With Mr. Stowell, it's personal, because his brother is gay and was bullied because of it -- "There were nights that I worried I may wake up and he wouldn't be there any longer," he said. And now his legislature aims to go back to treating gays like second-class citizens. Horsedoodle! Here's the petition.

Finally, the FDA may have punted on factory farm antibiotics generally, but apparently they do seek to limit using one class of antibiotics on factory farm animals: cephalosporins. Cephalosporins actually comprise an almost infinitesimally small percentage (a lot less than one percent, in fact) of the all the antibiotics used on factory farms, and their use on factory farms actually declined by over 40% from 2009 to 2010, but cephalosporins can be used on children without any warnings or precautions (unlike fluoroquinolones or tetracyclines), and the FDA has had so little success banning antibiotics from factory farms over the last few decades that this move almost looks like courage. Of course, it'll look a lot less like courage if they back down. So we put steel in their spine, by supporting the cephalosporin ban in a public comment to the FDA, which Pew Charitable Trusts helps you leave.

Penny rants for Friday, January 6, 2012.

We've got good news for the economy -- no, not the latest unemployment or GDP figures, but minimum wage hikes in eight states beginning on January 1st. Though right-wingers have overrun many state legislatures, existing law in these eight states mandates that the minimum wage must keep pace with inflation, so now each of these states has a higher minimum wage than the federal standard of $7.25/hr. The CNN article seems sanguine about the stimulative power of higher minimum wages, which is refreshing. No doubt right-wingers will scream "bias," since the article quotes only one putative expert, from the National Employment Law Project (which provides us with action alerts). But "liberal" media "analyses" usually just quote "experts" who tell us minimum wage increases do nothing but harm, and never challenge them on the inevitable lack of support for that statement. Someone would need to explain to me how that's not bias.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama recess-appointed Richard Cordray to the CFPB and three officials to the NLRB this week, and the reaction from liberaldom was, approximately, it's about effing time. Though I normally expect Mr. Obama to cave, I'm not surprised by the appointments -- the CFPB is one of his cornerstone legislative accomplishments, and the NLRB is on the verge of operating without a quorum. Also, Mitch McConnell's not going to win people to his side by complaining about the precise length of a recess between the Senate pro forma sessions that have prevented recess appointments as far back as 2007, like the Constitution gives a damn about any of it. Note well, though, that Mr. Obama still has made fewer recess appointments than just about every other recent President, against far more obstruction from the opposition party. I do not understand the efficacy of constantly getting sand kicked in your face -- most people recoil from Presidents who constantly take abuse without fighting back.

Finally, as you know by now, Rick Santorum came within eight frickin' votes of winning the Iowa Presidential primary this week. One is tempted to chuckle at hard-right Republican voters placing their hopes in a man who lost a Senate re-election effort six years ago, by 18 points, but I feel compelled to ask: can he win the the big prize? And I feel compelled to answer: yes, he can. Pundits tend to overplay his working class roots (versus his millions "earned" as a consultant in recent years, for example), but they're not nonexistent, and the economy's still bad and Mr. Obama hasn't done enough about that. So, if the economy remains bad, and if we start seeing cracks in Mr. Obama's legendary discipline, and (this is important) if Mr. Santorum can learn to speak about half as loud as he normally speaks, then yes, Rick Santorum can win Florida and Ohio and Nevada and maybe even Pennsylvania. And sure he can get the nomination -- these days, the "liberal" media tolerates so much filth spewing from right-wing mouths that Rick Santorum must seem almost quaint to a lot of folks.

Can't wait.

We're coming up on another sad milestone -- the 10th anniversary of Guantánamo's opening, on January 12. And, not incidentally, we're also coming up on the third anniversary of Mr. Obama's promise to close Guantánamo within a year, which never happened -- we still hold over 170 men there without charges, men largely turned in by neighbors and bounty hunters on trumped-up rubbish, and these men still don't get to challenge their detention or win their release. Lest any rage-filled terrorist "hunters" still check in here, I'll tell you one more damn time: if we could be certain they're guilty, we'd have at least charged them with something by now. So the Center for Constitutional Rights will host events in Washington, New York, and San Francisco on January 11, all protesting the continued existence of the Guantánamo Bay detention center and demanding its closure. CCR provides more information here. CCR will hold other events over the next three weeks protesting Guantánamo as well. And if you can't make it to any of the three aforementioned locales on the 11th, CCR can help you start your own event.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama signed the NDAA last week, which permits the military to detain American citizens indefinitely. He said (in his signing statement) that he wouldn't use that power to actually detain American citizens, which must be an incredible comfort to people who believe Presidents always do what they say they're going to do. (For a counterexample, see paragraph one above.) But H.R. 3702/S. 2003, the Due Process Guarantee Act of 2011, amends the Non-Detention Act of 1971 by explicitly stating that no "authorization to use military force" empowers the Executive branch to "authorize the detention without charge or trial of a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States apprehended in the United States, unless an Act of Congress expressly authorizes such detention." And dig this: three of the 16 Senate sponsors are actually Republicans! Mike Lee and Rand Paul you'd probably expect, but Mark Kirk you wouldn't, since Mr. Kirk typically plays off his "moderate" image by acting the war hawk. Maybe this bill could even pass the Congress of Screw You! But not without us. So Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Due Process Guarantee Act.

In other news, the holidays came and went, and though our government tried to slip a few things by us (the FCC's media consolidation rule loosening and the FDA's punt on factory farm antibiotics, in addition to the NDAA signing), the Obama Administration still hasn't realized its dream of settling with the big banksters on their illegal acts. Part of that is because half a dozen Attorneys General oppose the deal, but part of it is also that we oppose the deal, so Color of Change helps you continue to oppose any "settlement" with Wall Street and demand criminal investigations instead. It's not necessarily that they wrecked the economy playing with our money and our lives, or even that they continue to benefit as the rest of us are struggling -- it's that they broke the damn law, which requires that banks demonstrate that they actually own mortgages. The law either means something, or it doesn't. It doesn't "mean something" when people do the wrong thing and then "mean nothing" when corporations do the wrong thing. And a "deal" where banksters won't admit to criminal wrongdoing in exchange for a fine that won't hurt their bottom line isn't "the best we can do." It's taking a dump on all the values we hold dear in a civil society.

Penny rants for Tuesday, January 3, 2012.

I admit I was hopeful when I started reading this article, in which both Republican and Democrat House Financial Committee poobahs (Spencer Bachus and Barney Frank, respectively) seemed to call for more accountability from Wall Street. At last, real bipartisanship? I wondered. And then I learned they just wanted to get financial corporations to admit they did something wrong as part of SEC settlements, which is, of course, exactly the sort of mild medicine Republicans and Democrats can agree upon. And then Mr. Frank said that he hadn't really decided if anything should be done, that he's not sure making corporations admit to wrongdoing is enough of a "deterrent," because, after all, "that’s what you’re trying to do with these things, deter bad behavior." Here I thought we were trying to punish bad behavior. Mr. Bachus, last seen trying to destroy the financial reform bill that bears Mr. Frank's name, seems content to let Mr. Frank do all the talking. It's almost as if that's the idea.

Meanwhile, Matt Taibbi informs us that "The Meaningless Sideshow Begins" today in Iowa. I've largely ignored the positioning leading up to today because, you know, it's depressing. But Mr. Taibbi says the U.S. Presidential race, once a drama that riveted the world, has been dwarfed by too many things in recent years -- the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and, you know, the demonstrations and revolutions happening all over the Middle East -- and since the candidate with the most money wins most of the time, we'll be left "with one 1%-approved stooge taking on another." I wish he was wrong, but I'm pretty sure he's right -- unless putative Justice Party candidate Rocky Anderson, once a two-term Mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah, proves a better outlet for voter frustration than Ron Paul. Seven paragraphs in, at least, we get to the good news: that Montana's Supreme Court has ruled against a corporation's complaint against the state's nearly hundred-year-old law banning corporations from spending directly on political campaigns or committees. Even if Ron Paul wins, you won't hear a better story coming out of Iowa today.

It's about that time.

The Congress of Screw You plans to take up SOPA, the "internet blacklist" act, and/or its doppelganger, PIPA. SOPA and PIPA -- sounds like a pair of psychotic fairy tale twins. "Sopa and Pipa, with blood on their smocks/coming to lock you up in their stocks!" Anyway, we learned over the holiday that, despite Congress's alleged love of the rule of law, over 800 House-assigned IP addresses have downloaded books, TV shows, software, and, ah, works of art with titles like Gangland Cream Pie. And we have also learned that dozens of organizations support SOPA and PIPA, including some you wouldn't expect, like the IBEW and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The second link contains contact information for these organizations (as well as for five Democratic co-sponsors of PIPA), so that you may tell them to oppose the internet blacklist bill because it can and will be used by our government to intimidate its political opponents (or, more precisely, the political opponents of their paymasters). You wouldn't be crass if you added that way too many House members and/or staffers are downloading stuff illegally as we speak.

Meanwhile, around the same time the FCC voted to loosen media consolidation rules, big corporations got another Christmas present from the Obama Administration -- the FDA has decided not to try to rein in rampant antibiotic misuse on factory farms. This, although factory farms now consume 80 percent of all antibiotics in the United States, although it's obvious to everyone except the meat industry that overuse of antibiotics in animals promotes stronger pathogens and sickly animal descendants. The FDA recognizes all of this, of course -- it just seems to think voluntary standards will do the job, despite the dictionary meaning of the word "voluntary." The meat industry, for its part, thinks "voluntary" means "mandatory." You know what I think? I think telling corporations what to do like they're a bunch of Goddamn unruly children is our solemn duty as American citizens. Fortunately, the FDA will take public comments on its antibiotic inaction; the Wired link above contains the FDA public comment page (which will time out after 20 minutes, so you may want to compose your comments beforehand).