Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: and it's *bad* drama, part 989.

Biden Administration asserts that it does, in fact, have the lawful authority to seize patents for drugs developed at least partially with taxpayer money, if big pharma corporations are charging too much for said drugs. Of course asserting authority isn’t the same as using that authority, but this is a good first step. Now watch as the big pharma corporations threaten to sue the Biden Administration into oblivion, as if anyone’s rooting for them to keep demanding so much money for these drugs that folks can’t get healthy anymore. Watch, also, as right-wingers whine about how Mr. Biden is “abusing his power,” though they seem to prefer a President who’s already vowed to abuse his power if elected in 2024.

Surprise, surprise, CNN poll finds about half of Republican voters support Biden Administration policies aiming to halve carbon emissions by 2030, though given that pollution is actually quite unpopular, that number really ought to be much higher. Naturally, fewer than half of Americans approve of Mr. Biden’s handling of environmental issues, but even there you see good news – they may not approve because nearly three out of five Americans think the Administration isn’t doing enough, regardless of whether they approve of the things the Administration is doing. Also too, broad questions aren’t particularly useful. Remember when Mr. Obama’s approvals were low in 2012? How’d that work out for Mitt Romney?.

Texas Supreme Court blocks woman from getting an abortion at state Attorney General’s request, though her child would almost certainly be born dead and the birth would probably injure her badly enough that she wouldn’t be able to have children again. Next time someone tells you their health insurance shouldn’t have to pay for someone else’s abortion because of their “conscience,” ask them about this one, or about any ectopic pregnancies, or any other thing you can think of, and maybe also ask them if their conscience should get between an American and their doctor. Also too, Texas’s draconian anti-abortion law does allow women to get abortions if their lives are in danger or to “prevent substantial impairment of a major bodily function,” which begs the question: does Texas’s government really think childbirth isn’t a “major bodily function”?

Hoo boy Republicans think that pretending to be not such woman-haters about abortion will actually trick significant numbers of people into voting for them, but people won’t forget Republicans spending half a century making themselves into the woman-hating party just because individual Republicans claim “but I’m different.” And the masturbatory-rage crowd won’t be thrilled with their standard-bearers trying to nuance their positions, either. Republicans have to hope Democrats won’t hit them too hard on their “evolving” positions, and though they used to be able to count on Democrats to hit back soft or not at all, recent electoral returns suggest that day is done, particularly where abortion is concerned.

Finally, with Kevin McCarthy announcing his departure from our House of Representatives at the end of this year, Rachel Hadas at The Conversation looks over some classical dramas like Antigone, Ajax, and Julius Caesar and finds Mr. McCarthy a “slight unmeritable man” (in Mr. Shakespeare’s words) who was “not a hero.” “McCarthy does not qualify as a hero,” she writes. “To be humiliated, to fall, you have to have attained some height to begin with.” I keep saying that all Republicans do these days is drama and it’s never even good drama, and the “fall” of Kevin McCarthy seems to exemplify that trend.

Action: concerning child labor, banksters, and billionaires.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Child Labor Act, the Ending the Carried Interest Loophole Act, and the Billionaire’s Income Tax. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Child Labor Act. What’s that, you say? There are already child labor laws on the books, so why do we need more? Partly because some state legislatures have loosened their own child labor laws, inexplicably – I mean, seriously, why do you do that if you’re concerned about winning elections? – but also because corporations flout those laws without getting appropriately punished. The Stop Child Labor Act would stiffen penalties for corporations that exploit our children, plus it would let kids sue those corporations over the harm done to them. So let right-wingers squeal TEH TRIAL LAWYURZ!!!!! at that development. They’ll be even lonelier than they are now.

Patriotic Millionaires also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ending the Carried Interest Loophole Act, which would, as its title suggests, get rid of the tax loophole that lets hedge fund banksters pay a lower tax rate than working families. This has been an anvil around our necks for years now, but of course Kyrsten Sinema, back when she was the 50th vote in our Senate last year, just had to demand keeping that loophole around as tribute for passing the Inflation Reduction Act! She’s a walnut in the batter of eternity, of course, but if we made people vote on this bill – and then, and this is important, ran ads against folks who voted against it – we might finally slay this fat and lazy dragon once and for all. And that’s worth the effort.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire’s Income Tax, which would not convert billionaires into paupers, as right-wingers pretend – indeed, it wouldn’t even tax wealth under $1 billion, and if you can’t make it on $999,999,999, then you're a clown who deserves no one's attention. But the bill would raise over $500 billion in revenues over the next decade; think of anything we might do with $500 billion over 10 years? Like, maybe, expand the Child Tax Credit so more working families can have more breathing room? Hey, that’s just one thing we could do! And if we don’t make the rich pay more and working folks pay less, we’ll never get anything done in America. Taxing the rich was good enough for our grandparents, and it’s good enough for us.

Action: concerning internet freedom, education, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell our FCC to promote internet freedom, tell school boards to stop lying about climate change, and tell our FTC to stop big fossil fuel corporation mergers. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Battle for the Net helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to reinstate network neutrality, the principle that you, and not some big telecom corporation, should decide where you want to go on our internet. Don’t believe the hype that “net neutrality will lead to higher prices,” because you’ve just spent almost three years watching big corporations raise prices for any damn reason. It’s hard to take someone hostage by threatening to do something you're already doing all the time! And if we bring net neutrality back, that means we can stop big corporations from censoring websites, or from slowing down websites that haven’t paid them tribute. You say they’re doing little of that now, and that may be, but if we don’t make it illegal, sooner or later they’ll do it all the time, and then it’ll be too late.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell state school boards to stop lying to children about climate change. Yes, the right-wing fever that’s swept school boards across America extends even here, as the Texas Board of Education just rejected seven textbooks for including material about climate change. One Texas Republican even said, “America's future generations don't need a leftist agenda brainwashing them in the classroom to hate oil and natural gas.” Imagine that! All common sense and scientific truth is now a “leftist agenda”! If only the leftist agenda were that good! Seriously, there ain’t gonna be any future generations if we let big oil and gas corporations make our planet unlivable. And politicians who are too weak to handle that truth deserve to live on government cheese.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop the proposed Chevron/Hess and Exxon/Pioneer Natural Resources mergers. Because big corporate mergers are always bad! Yes, I said always! So corporate shills on financial cable news shows can call me an “extremist”! Look, they either care about small businesses or they don’t, and letting already too-big fossil fuel corporations get even bigger basically means they don’t. What’s that I hear? Small businesses aren’t going to drill for oil ha ha ha snort? But they’ll have to deal with oil and gas corporations pretty much as a condition of existence, and if those oil and gas corporations are too big, they'll squeeze small businesses with impunity. And that’s un-American. Listen to all my extreme language today!

Action: concerning taxes, AI, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand the Child Tax Credit without poison pills, protect American workers from AI, and pass the Affordable Insulin Now Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021 that put $250 and $300 checks per child in working families’ bank accounts. You know, I feel like I don’t need to justify that action any further – fewer kids in poverty, more money for strapped working families, what else needs saying? – but it’s December, which means it’s end-of-year budgeting time, which means Congress will try to pass a bunch of noxious crap they’d never get through without it being an “emergency,” so go ahead and tell your Congressfolk to pass a CTC expansion with no poison pills attached! That means no corporate welfare and no more tax cuts for the rich – do the right thing, and nothing else.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect American workers from the spectre of Artificial Intelligence (or AI). We just watched the Hollywood actors’ union fight management’s attempts to replace them with AI-generated doppelgangers, but that won’t just happen to them – it’ll happen to any American worker who has a CEO who twirls his mustache at the prospect of replacing all his workers (and all their “costs”) with mounds of dung, and “any” includes you and you and you and I. Hell, it’s already happened, for real, at call centers all over the world. You ever try to fix a problem and wind up yelling “operator!” into the phone? Then you know what I’m talking about. Our economy needs more people in it, and fewer “big,” “bold” “entrepreneurs” who live to kill our jobs.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Affordable Insulin Now Act, which would extend the benefit Medicare recipients get – namely, their insulin costs capped at $35/month – to all Americans. What a shame that we have to stop big pharma corporations from charging literally an arm and a leg for insulin, and what a shame we have idiots like Herschel Walker telling us that if we just eat right we won’t have to use insulin, which will definitely not impress anyone born with diabetes (or those who are rationing their insulin while keeping spreadsheets about their calorie intake). And if anyone starts ranting about “price controls,” you have a number of good rebuttals. Like you say “price controls” like it’s a bad thing. Or 1973 called; it wants its right-wing talking points back.

Action: concerning junk fees, banksters, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell our FTC to outlaw junk fees, tell our Federal Reserve to force banks to have more cash on hand, and tell President Biden to put better people on our USPS Board of Governors. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to enact the most vigorous anti-junk fee rule possible. From concert and airline tickets to utility bills and even rent, good Americans are getting slammed with fees that seem to come in at the last minute, when you’re already emotionally-invested in the sale. Being up-front is a simple principle, right? Yet big corporations can’t stop whining about any effort to actually make them be up-front! WAAAAAH WE CAN’TZ MAKES TEH MONEYZ REGULATORYZ BURDENZ NANNY STATEZ!!!!! All of which put together doesn’t add up to even one-tenth of we deserve to know how much we’re going to pay before we buy something. Don’t corporations have responsibilities anymore? Or is that just for us “little people”?

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Federal Reserve to force banks to increase the amount of capital they have on hand, so that they – and, by extension, we – can weather their bad decisions better. Banksters of course hate the idea that they should actually have real cash money in their vaults, because then how can we take the risks that make us rich, er, grow the economy? They say all of that like it’s not the very reason we demand they have more money on hand! We all lived through the Bankster Armageddon of 2008, and we all know that it wasn’t subprime mortgages that collapsed the economy but banksters’ hifalutin “financial instruments” that “create” “wealth” but destroy jobs and small businesses and lay waste to our livelihoods. So our government needs to make them do better.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell President Biden to replace two expiring terms on our USPS Board of Governors with two folks who’ll fight to make our Postal Service actually better. I mean, of course, as opposed to the rubbish plan promulgated by current Postmaster DeJoy; his “better” involves slashing jobs, cutting services, and charging good Americans more money for the services that are left. That kind of “better” is typical of a corporate executive who doesn’t actually know how to do anything of value. Sound harsh? Tough! I’m right, and corporate America is wrong! “Increasing” “value” for “shareholders” (read: executives) is exactly the kind of thing that kills civilizations, but I don’t actually think our civilization deserves to die. As long as we can keep it, that is.

Around the table: brought to you by the word "drama."

You’ve been hearing that Americans just don’t “get” how well our economy’s doing? And you’re not particularly inclined to blame them, even though wage growth is actually outpacing inflation for the first time in decades? Well, Paul Waldman reminds us that the vast majority of folks who tell pollsters that the economy’s doing badly are Republicans, which totally tracks! Particularly since Republican poll respondents seem to think our economy’s worse than it was in 2009 or 2010 – which, like, we’re not stupid, OK? – and also since Americans generally act like this is a good economy, i.e., by starting businesses or spending more money.

At least one California corporation thinks that electric car batteries can be used for solar power storage systems even if they’re so depleted that the cars can’t use them anymore, so I guess that’s for your right-wing friends who can’t stop whining BUT WHEREZ WILLZ WEZ PUTZ TEHZ EXPIRUDZ BATTERIEZ HA HA HA HA STUPIDZ LIBRULZ!!!!!! If you still have right-wing friends, of course. (Oh, and if they whine that TEH ELECTRICZ BATTUREEZ CAUSEZ MOREZ OFZ TEH FIURZ!!!!!, well, they’re full of soup about that, too.)

Good West Virginians could be paying more to clean up coal corporation pollution, and let us note that state legislators of both parties have failed to fund the state’s abandoned mine clean-up program (and way before coal corporations started going belly up), while West Virginia’s Republican Governor just fired a critical clean-up fund advisor, and President Biden has somehow failed to even nominate a new Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement administrator (who could force West Virginia’s government to act). The story even features the gnarled hand of Tha Bush Mobb promising to issue new, stronger regulations and then, stop me if you’ve heard this before, never getting around to it or explaining why. Of course Tha Bush Mobb was never the place to learn to clean up your mess.

In case you were wondering, yes our “liberal” media gave a lot more coverage to Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark than they’ve given to Donald Trump’s “vermin” remark, and it’s no use objecting that people are so numb to what Donald Trump says now that of course our media didn’t say much about it, or that maybe we shouldn’t respond to everything he says with more coverage, or, even, that Mr. Trump may not have meant you or I per se when he said “vermin.” Because guess what? No one murdered a “deplorable,” but someone will absolutely murder a “vermin.” (Of course, when he then tries to say it’s all Mr. Trump’s fault, I’ll remind everyone that murder is absolutely something for which one needs to take personal responsibility.)

When I hear that drama hound Jesse Watters at Fox News found a clip of President Biden drinking a milkshake through a straw and thought that was unmanly or something, all I can say is gosh, Mr. Watters, hate yourself much? And though we could tabulate all the layers of this hypocritical onion (Mr. Watters didn’t get upset that time His Personal Lord and Savior himself used a straw on a smoothie!), better to tell all your friends and neighbors to vote against drama in 2024, and fight drama every day until Election Day 2024.

David E. Clemenston at The Conversation reminds us that folks judge people like now-expelled Rep. George Santos (E-NY) as “trustworthy” “almost entirely from perceptions of their demeanor, not the words they utter,” and though he talks about Mr. Santos as someone who “speaks with certitude” and “has a charming, friendly, and interactive manner,” his point maps on to something I’ve been thinking for a long time. The advantage Republicans have today is tone, not better arguments – they sound like go-getters and problem-solvers, where too many Democrats sound like they’re just trying not to anger anyone (particularly their big donors!), and whether people articulate it or not, they hate politicians who sound like that.

Finally, staying with the George Santos Experience, Steve Bannon’s so full of rage about his expulsion – because rage is, apparently, all he can feel – that he says if “They want a civil war, they got one!” Seriously, a “civil war” over the expulsion of George Santos? Just as junkies only care about junk, dramatic people only care about drama, and if Donald Trump wins in 2024, dramatic people like Steve Bannon will be running this country into the ground again. So let’s do everything we can to prevent that from happening. Yes, even if it means re-electing a boring old Democratic President who’s actually doing a good job.

Action: concerning foreclosures, junk fees, and Twitter.

Long story short: tell our VA to help veterans stay in their homes, tell our FTC to fight junk fees, and tell big corporations to abandon Twitter. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Veterans Administration (or VA) to prevent veterans from being foreclosed out of their homes. Our VA allowed veterans to defer mortgage payments during the pandemic – you remember when unemployment was 14%? – but now our VA is telling veterans either to pony up five figures or refinance their homes post-haste, though they’d be refinancing at much higher interest rates now. Hence at least four Senators have asked our VA to extend the mortgage-deferment program and pause all VA loan foreclosures, which sure seems like kindness to me. I guess some folks would rather throw veterans out on the streets when it sure wasn’t their fault a pandemic slammed into America. But I think a capitalist system that benefits the rich more than it benefits anyone else can take the hit.

More Perfect Union also helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to enact the most vigorous anti-junk fee rule possible. Our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) is also working on an anti-junk fee rule, but out FTC’s purview is broader (i.e., not just the banking industry), so their rule could do even more good – but only if we speak out. And this ought to be a lay-up! No one likes finding out that the good or service they bought actually costs more than they thought it was going to cost, after all, and no use saying that’s just how things are, get used to it, not when you don’t actually have to get used to it, since no law of physics or morals compels us to accept any abuse a corporation heaps upon us in the name of TEH FREE MARKETZ!!!!! People before markets!

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Twitter, or X, or whatever; plenty of corporations have stopped advertising on Twitter, but not all corporations, and no corporations should help fund a hellscape where assholes can bully the disadvantaged and then claim DISCRIMINASHUNZ!!!! whenever someone stands up to them. Beware of hostage-taking in opposing arguments! Plenty of disadvantaged folks still use Twitter or X or whatever, they’ll say, and they’ve spent years building audiences and making connections there, so boycotts only hurt them! But I suspect these disadvantaged folks would say the same thing anti-apartheid activists said in the late ‘80s: “seriously, you’re worried about things getting worse for us?”

Action: concerning government spying, voting rights, and judicial ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to rein in government spying, strengthen voting rights, and issue a code of ethics with teeth for our Supreme Court Justices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Government Surveillance Reform Act, which would, at long last, force federal law enforcement officers to get a fucking warrant before looking at all the information our government collects (or buys from third-party private data-collecting corporations, which the GSRA would also stop). Seriously, get a fucking warrant! It’s all I’ve ever asked! Sorry to drop f-bombs there, but that’s what our government deserves for pretending that what worked for over 200 years suddenly stopped working because 9.11. You’ve noticed no one whines about the “war on terror” anymore, right? That’s because Tha Bush Mobb used it to grift America, and they succeeded, so now everyone can pretend they were never all that big a jerk about it. But I will never forget.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would plug the hole our Supreme Court blew in the Voting Rights Act with their Shelby County v. Holder ruling. Our Supreme Court said the Voting Rights Act unlawfully discriminated against Southern states, but the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would address that objection by ensuring that any state or locality with a record of vote suppression, regardless of their location within the U.S., would come under additional Justice Department scrutiny. So don’t believe the hype that we don’t need to pass this bill because “the South has changed.” Why would they be afraid of additional scrutiny if they’re doing nothing wrong?

Finally, the National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, which would hold our Supreme Court Justices – who have been reported with their hands in all kinds of cookie jars lately – to the same ethics standards to which all other federal judges must adhere. What’s that, you say? You heard that our Supreme Court developed and released a code of ethics just recently, one that broadly resembles the code of ethics for all other federal judges? That is to laugh! Yeah, our Supreme Court put out a voluntary code of ethics a few weeks ago, but it ain’t hard to imagine each and every one of them (not just Sam Alito or Clarence Thomas!) imagining that whatever gift they’re about to receive is the “exception” to all rules. That’s why we have laws, good peoples!

Penny rants for November 29, 2023.

Where does one begin with the observation that a lot of Republican state governments are trying to remove local Democratic officials and curtail governing power of Democratic localities? Really, one could say so many things! Like: so much for letting the voters pick their representatives! Or: so much for letting the smallest government make the most decisions about its constituents’ welfare! Or: so much for making sober decisions based on the data! I say that last thing because “runaway crime” is the reason right-wing governors remove liberal prosecutors and district attorneys from office, but both violent crime and property crime are half what they were 30 years ago, even if right-wing whining about it often seems like it’s double what it was back then. The good news? Many more people are willing to call out these things as “not conservative” now. I’m old enough to remember feeling like it was just me.

Amanda Marcotte criticizes the Washington Post for saying liberals won’t date right-wingers anymore like that’s a bad thing. If there’s one thing our “liberal” media still does that I can’t stand, it’s whine about how liberals refuse to engage with right-wing assholes – I mean, buying right-wing coffee or right-wing underwear is one thing, but who in their right mind would demand a woman lash herself to a Trumphole for life in holy matrimony because America needs her to? We liberals have suffered a lifetime of being told we’re worthless and weak and traitorous for our beliefs, and no, us calling right-wingers callous assholes simply doesn’t compare as an injury. And not for nothing, but I don’t hear our “liberal” media outlets demanding that white folks date Black and Brown folks or foreigners so that they, too, can appreciate “alternative perspectives”; only Trumpholes get this kind of affirmative action from our “liberal” media. Jesus Mary and Joseph haven’t we pandered to them enough?

You probably already know that sports writers will happily tell us that the Carolina Panthers’ bankster owner is much more of a problem than newly-fired head coach Frank Reich, and while we’d all have fun recounting the tale of how the owner spent a mint landing a talented-but-small quarterback and then surrounded him with bad blockers and receivers, we should also question the notion that hedge fund magnate David Tepper “made billions of dollars hiring smart business people to do smart business things.” Hopefully we all know by now that making a billion dollars requires reputation and connection more than “smarts,” and a brief perusal of Mr. Tepper’s PR describes a man who made a living buying big corporate stock when it's low and selling it when it goes up again, which anyone can do, if they have enough cash to start with. So, yeah, big shock that he’s running the Panthers into the ground.

Finally, when I hear that “Americans Are Angry About Immigration,” which is what a Gallup poll supposedly shows, I am reminded of two things: a) bad politicians whine about immigration just like they whine about crime when they realize they have literally nothing else to offer the electorate, and b) it helps to actually look at the data. The author infers "anger" from the fact that 40% of Americans say we’re letting in too many immigrants, but that number was still higher throughout most of the 2000s, and the only years it fell below the current level was when we had a nativist asshole as President; do we really want to go back to that just so four out of 10 Americans will feel better? Also, nearly as many Americans (37%) don’t seem to feel one way or the other about it; maybe getting those people mad at hysterical nativists would be a better strategy – politically as well as morally! – than constantly pandering to people who'll just find something else to be enraged about.

Action: concerning health care, bankster fees, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell our FTC to investigate UnitedHealth for denying health care to elderly patients, tell our Federal Reserve to slash the debit card processing fees banksters charge merchants, and tell the Biden Administration to fix our Postal Service with two new and better members of its Board of Governors. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to investigate UnitedHealth for using AI to override doctor’s decisions and deny health care coverage to elderly patients. They think they’re so smart, using AI to do that! Now we can say it wasn’t really us, it was just the algorithm! Thing is, today’s executives are stupid, and I’d lay money that some overpaid “decision-maker” at UnitedHealth put that italicized sentiment or something like it in an email, and I want our government to read such an email, so that we can put yet another nail in the coffin of greedy health insurance corporations. UnitedHealth seems to let AI get between you and your doctor, just like right-wingers said Obamacare and Medicare-for-All would! Thing is, right-wingers are stupid.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Reserve to slash banksters’ hidden debit card transaction fees. Banksters assess a fee of 21 cents plus .05% of the transaction account, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it adds up, to the tune of over $16 billion paid by merchants last year. Don’t be the fool who says that banks create debit cards and thus can charge whatever they want! Nobody should be able to charge “whatever they want,” and right-wingers remind us of that fact every time they say people just have to pay what the market will bear. Banksters can charge whatever they want, but the market sets prices? OK, whatever! Seriously, though, nobody likes hidden fees, and nobody likes skimming, either – and hidden debit card fees will be skimming, if our Fed follows through.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell President Biden to allow the (already-extended) terms of two Trump appointees to our USPS Board of Governors to expire and replace them with good people who’ll be good stewards of our Postal Service. And if “being a good steward” of our USPS means firing Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, well, we all have to make sacrifices for the common good. Mr. DeJoy has been insisting that we make all the sacrifices, though, with all his “bold” plans to cut jobs, slash services, and raise prices. That’s a hell of an entrepreneur we’ve got running our Postal Service, right there! Not only do good Americans depend on our Postal Service for life-saving medications more than ever before, but we can expand banking and licensing services instead of cutting services people need.

Around the table: mostly good news from antitrust enforcement to health care in Rwanda.

Big news: Lee Hepner at Big observes Thanksgiving dinner prices falling by almost 5%, and sees the hand of the Biden Administration antitrust efforts behind it – specifically, our Justice Department has broken (of all things) a turkey monopoly, our government has thwarted one proposed airline merger and forced another to be put on hold, and a federal jury found two big egg-producing corporations guilty of price-fixing, meaning those high prices that were all over the news last year had little to do with avian flu. It’d be nice if the Biden campaign would actually, you know, run on these efforts – but it’d also be nice if our “liberal” media covered these efforts the way they hysterically covered sky-high egg prices in the first place.

Have some more good news! Portugal lately relied entirely on renewable electricity for six consecutive days at the end of October and beginning of November. Plus Portugal made so much electricity they were able to export it to Spain for most of that stretch! Six days in a row is a big deal; the more it happens, the less we’ll have to hear about the “war on coal” and other manufactured outrages. And we should at least make it harder for Our Glorious Elites to manufacture outrages.

In a related note, the Guardian tells us that legendarily-frigid Norway has done a great job relying on heat pumps to heat their homes, largely through federal subsidies and – this is important – the absence of federal subsidies for fossil fuels. So when nay-sayers whine that heat pumps don’t work when it’s too cold, they actually mean it only returns about twice the heat for the electricity you use to run it when it’s far below freezing, which is another way of saying we want you to use the perfect to murder the good. Way too many folks still prefer chaos to progress.

In another related note, I am more than a little surprised to hear that electric scooters and e-bikes have displaced four times more demand for oil than electric cars have done, though, admittedly, much of that increase has come from China, where good Chinese were already riding mopeds a lot. I’ll admit I’ve always kinda side-eyed this option, figuring that e-bikes, especially, are for people who don’t want to exercise, but a) that may not even be true, since most folks split their exercise off from their transportation and b) it sounds like it’s actually helping save the planet. Also c) I moved to an area that’s really, really hilly and I see the attraction of an e-bike a little better now.

Ho hum, Iowa Republican official’s wife gets convicted of 52 counts of voter fraud, as she apparently filled out election forms for Vietnamese immigrants who, imagine that, didn’t really understand what she was doing. Strange how we only seem to catch right-wingers for actual voter fraud, despite all the whining they do about it. Ms. Taylor faces a max of five years of prison per charge; not that I think she’ll really get that (or that I think she should get that), but it’ll be interesting to hear right-wingers suddenly find Jesus about long prison sentences.

Ari Paul at FAIR reminds us that Elon Musk’s "thermonuclear" defamation lawsuit against Media Matters is “About Destroying Free Speech.” He must hope us “little people” don’t get it in our heads to tabulate which big corporate ads turn up right next to all that disgusting anti-Semitic/pro-Nazi content he allows on Twitter! I’d say I hope Mr. Musk loses this frivolous lawsuit in the most humiliating manner possible, but I actually doubt he’s physically capable of humiliation. Which is yet another reason a civilized society shouldn’t let billionaires grow this big!

Finally, Rwanda has seen a significant drop in malaria cases, to the point where its national Biomedical Center says it’s on track to achieve zero malaria. Scientists point to increased use of mosquito netting and indoor insecticides as major factors in the drop, and that, I’m sad to say, will be good practice for when too many folks refuse the malaria vaccine the World Health Organization has just approved. But Rwanda’s success reminds us that good people doing good works are everywhere on Earth, even in nations we call “developing” – or worse.

Action: concerning government spying, Medicare for All, and financial predators.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Government Surveillance Reform Act, expand Medicare to include all Americans, and stop trying to injure our CFPB’s ability to protect us from financial predators. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Government Surveillance Reform Act. This bill would do three fairly significant things: it would prevent our FBI from getting your data without a warrant, it would close the loophole law enforcement uses to get your data from private data collecting corporations without a warrant, and it would let more good Americans sue our government for the harm illegal surveillance causes. These would all be unqualified good works for the American people, so our Congressfolk should do them, without pretending crime is always going up. Seriously, if you can’t get a warrant to continue your investigation, then you should really reconsider whether law enforcement is for you. Unless, of course, you want to go live in a fascist country, then Godspeed.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a Medicare-for-All health insurance system. It’s an easy sell! The Koch Brothers said Medicare for All would cost $32 trillion over 10 years, but our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the system we’ve got now will cost $49 trillion over the same period! You can do the math – expanding Medicare to include every American would save $17 trillion over 10 years! I’d say that three times in a 30-second ad. I might also say you’d fund it with a small employer-side payroll tax (“employer-side” meaning, of course, that employees don’t pay it) capturing the money big corporations currently spend on private health insurance. All that’s left are the really desperate arguments.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any legislative riders that would harm our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB)’s ability to protect good Americans from financial predators. The “CFPB Restructuring Rider” would take CFPB authority from its director and hand it over to a five-person commission, and two of the commissioners “must have private sector experience in the provision of consumer financial products and services” – after all, it’s not like those folks would have self-interest or anything! – while the so-called “Small Business Lending Rider” would prevent our CFPB from collecting data on lending to Black-, Brown-, or woman-owned businesses, which just sounds cruel to me. Anyway, these are clearly fall-back positions, so let’s put them on their back permanently.

Thieves in the Temple will take the next week off, so I wish all of you a happy and safe holiday, and we'll be back November 27 or thereabouts.

Action: concerning child labor, campaign finance, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop child labor violations, amend our Constitution to regulate campaign finance again, and enact automatic voter registration nationwide. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Child Labor Act, since a lot of corporations have been breaking child labor laws lately and a lot of (red) states have tried to loosen their own child labor laws so that more underage kids can do more dangerous work. You know how right-wingers used to say you should oppose abortion because you might abort the next great concert pianist or the next creator of the polio vaccine? Strange how they don’t say that when kids fall off roofs or get run over by forklifts or cut off their hands with circular saws at jobs that are too dangerous for them. Of course, others have described the Republican view of life as sacred right up until birth, but that doesn’t mean they should get all the say about child labor.

The Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment that would overturn our Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United v. FEC decision, which has helped flood the airwaves with horrible political campaign ads. Did you see those Citizens for Sanity ads in Pennsylvania in 2022? Imagine Monty Python writing satirical campaign ads; now imagine them discarding those ads because they weren’t funny enough, and that's what a Citizens for Sanity ad was like. Seriously, approximately no one in America likes watching political campaign ads, and more than two-thirds of Republican voters think our Supreme Court messed up Citizens United. Our opponents will only respond with hysterical and nonsensical hypotheticals, so it’s OK to tell your Congressfolk to do the right thing.

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact nationwide automatic voter registration, where good Americans can be automatically registered to vote whenever they go get drivers’ licenses and suchlike. Right-wingers say automatic voter registration causes more “voter fraud,” so what do they say about Gov. Shapiro’s automatic voter registration program in Pennsylvania leading to a massive jump in Republican voter registrations? I’ll tell you what they have to say: THREE MILLYUNZ ILLEGALZ HILLARYZ TRADEZ THEIRZ VOTEZ FOR TEH DRUGZ!!!!! No, that’s literally what arguing about this with a right-winger is like. So let’s just do the right thing without worrying about other folks’ stupid opinions.

Penny rants for November 16, 2023.

Lee Hepner describes Our Glorious Elites’ recent efforts fighting the Biden Administration’s anti-monopoly thrust with bad legislative proposals. One proposal would have specifically let car dealers slap on hidden fees – everyone trusts car dealers, right? – while another would have prevented our Transportation department from stopping mergers, leading one to wonder if JetBlue just handed out a couple stacks of bills for that one. None of these proposals have passed – this is the Drama Caucus running our House, after all – but once you realize that some Congressfolk are objectively pro-high airline ticket prices and objectively pro-junk fees, you may see potential for Democrat attack ads, except for all the Democrats who don’t seem to get it, either. But any “liberal” media questioning of pro-monopoly candidates should begin like this: “over 70% of Americans – including almost 80% of Biden supporters and 70% of Trump supporters – think monopolies are bad. So why do you oppose the will of the American people?” The answers will be hilarious.

Another day, another study finding that liberal cities are actually not inundated by crime – this one finding that retail crime has returned to pre-pandemic levels, even if all you remember is that hysterical “liberal” media coverage of the crime spike from 2021 and 2022. Also, too, when you hear that Target has blamed closure of nine stores on retail crime, check to see if they offer any proof of that claim (they don’t!), or if maybe other factors like consumers changing their spending habits might have more to do with the closures (they do!). Also, generally, don’t trust any “liberal” media reporting about crime, since they care about sensationalism more than anything else. After all, federal figures indicate that both violent crime and property crime are about half what they were 30 years ago. The good news: banging the saucepan about crime doesn’t seem to work as well for political campaigns as it used to, or else Pennsylvania voters would have elected a lot more Republicans these last two election cycles.

Finally, when I heard that a sitting U.S. Senator almost fought a union leader on the Senate floor, I wasn’t at all surprised to learn it was Oklahoma’s Markwayne Mullin, whom you may recall as the House Rep who told his constituents in 2018 that it’s “bullcrap” that they paid his salary – he was trying to make a broader point about how he’s all “self-made” and stuff, but he was still wrong, and anyway his broader point was also wrong. And now he’s Peter-Principled his way to our Senate, in a state where Democrats can’t even get two candidates with different last names to compete in two simultaneous Senate races. But between this and Matt Gaetz actually filing an ethics complaint against Kevin McCarthy for allegedly elbowing another House Rep, we’ve got at least the beginnings of a montage for every Democrat attack ad in 2024. Of course, Democrats have to have the guts to run those ads.

Action: concerning health care, Arctic drilling, and bad media.

Long story short: tell your state legislators to keep drug prices down, tell the Biden Administration to protect the Arctic from drilling, and tell big cable corporations to stop paying the “Fox fee.” Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your state legislators to create Prescription Drug Affordability Boards that can cap drug costs. In a nation where life-saving drugs costs more than they do anywhere else on Earth, where big pharma corporations jack up the price of life-saving drugs just because they can, where good Americans ration their insulin at the cost of losing their own lives, Prescription Drug Affordability Boards are the least our state legislators can do to protect us from predatory corporate drug pricing. Some states have health insurance commissioners who can cap insurance premiums, but we need that sort of thing for drug prices, too. When your right-wing pals call that “bureaucracy,” remind them how well the “free” market is keeping drug prices down! And stop inviting them to your cookouts.

The National Resources Defense Council helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management (or BLM) to protect our Arctic public lands from fossil fuel drilling. If you hear folks say “there’s nothing up there anyway,” remind them that, at the very least, the salmon they get from the supermarket often comes from up there, and it won’t anymore if oil corporations pollute the water, as they all eventually do. Anyway, they’re wrong, and their ignorance of the area shouldn’t carry more weight than the views of folks who actually like clean water and wildlife diversity. But if we don’t leave public comments on the Biden Administration proposal – I hear it’s actually pretty good – then their ignorant views will carry more weight than ours. That would be a tragedy, and an avoidable one at that.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell big telecom corporations to stop paying high rates to the Fox News (sic) Channel. It’s bad enough that if you want to watch HGTV or the Cartoon Network you have to pay for a cable package that includes Fox News, but Fox News demands relatively usurious rates from cable corporations for the “privilege” of delivering rage and hate to Americans broken by a half-century of bad economic policy! And that means you pay more for cable, and Fox News makes money they don’t deserve to make! In a sane and decent world, on-air “personalities” like Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld would have to live on government cheese, because they wouldn’t be good at anything people need. In our sick, immoral, and decadent world, they make millions of dollars spewing filth every night, and we need to fight that.

Action: concerning government shutdown dramas.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass a clean government-funding bill without drama, bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion without using it to keep handing out corporate welfare, and reject any attempt to slash IRS funding. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

It’s government shutdown week again, so the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject cuts to programs good Americans actually need and fund our government without hysteria or drama. This is typical right-wing garbage: wail about TEH DEFICITZ!!!!! and then punch working families in the face while leaving cutting corporate welfare intact. But any one of us, at any time, might need food stamps or Head Start or, you know, affordable housing that doesn’t have lead paint in it – yes, this is what our Best and Brightest Leaders Ever have proposed to do! But cut tax breaks for corporations that outsource our jobs overseas? Republicans would never! And that’s why we fight them 24-7.

It gets worse! The National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021, the one that put $250 or $300 checks per child every month in working families’ bank accounts – but Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk not to extend corporate welfare handouts. Rumor has it Republicans might support the former to get the latter, but we don’t have to have both to get one done! There’s negotiation, and then there’s hostage-taking; holding CTC expansion to corporate welfare is hostage-taking, and the parties can talk about their numbers in our House and Senate all they want, but they’re supposed to negotiate with us, not each other. No law on Earth compels us to accept a side dish of shit with our steak.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any Republican attempt to slash IRS funding. Don’t believe any BS that added IRS funding “gives them the ability to come after little people,” because hello! Our IRS was so underfunded they could only go after us “little people,” because we can’t hire million-dollar lawyers to get us off the way rich folks and corporations can! Strange that Republicans have stopped saying even that; it’s like they looked at the 2022 election results and found out that it didn’t get them enough votes! Most of us Americans, once we clear out all the distractions Our Glorious Elites force down our throats, understand that taxes pay for things we all use and rich people and corporations need to pay a lot more in taxes than working families do.

Action: concerning monopolies, the Oakland A's, and social media.

Long story short: tell our FTC to stop proposed Exxon and Chevron mergers, tell major league baseball owners to reject Oakland’s proposed move to Las Vegas, and tell Meta to stop using algorithms to trap kids on Facebook. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop the proposed Exxon/Pioneer and Chevron/Hess mergers. Because those mergers would give those big corporations even more power to hurt us! Don’t brook any stupidity about how some monopolies are “beneficial” because they deliver “efficiencies,” because the only “efficiency” they “deliver” is the more “efficient” upward redistribution of income from hard-working Americans to fat and lazy bosses. Certainly don’t brook any stupidity about how monopolies give us “lower prices”! We’ve just witnessed high inflation and record corporate profits happening at the same time! Monopoly corporations are obviously gouging us! And that’s why our government must use the power we give it on our behalf.

More Perfect Union helps you tell major league baseball owners to reject the Oakland franchise’s proposed move to Las Vegas. It’s the same story we’ve heard since a Texas Rangers owner named George W. Bush foisted it upon us all those decades ago: another billionaire owner (here John Fisher of the A’s) born on third base acting like he hit a triple, saying he “needs” a publicly-financed new stadium or the A's won’t be able to “survive” (wow, it’s like he forgot all about Billy Beane!). It’s never about a baseball team’s “survival” – it’s always about one rich person’s greed, whether it’s John Fisher or Jeffery Loria or Peter Angelos or George W. Bush. Only seven MLB owners would have to reject the proposal to stop the move – but most of them are rich idiots like Mr. Fisher. That’s why we must raise our voices.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell Meta (the parent corporation of Facebook, another arrangement that should not exist in a civilized society) to stop targeting children with algorithms that keep kids on the platform more than is healthy for them. And it’s not healthy for them – imagine the peer pressure you grew up with multiplied by 10 – and folks can’t just say “kids just need to be strong enough to stay off it” because children can’t make adult decisions. This is why we outlaw statutory rape and child porn! So go ahead and regard people who say “kids just need to be stronger” as useful idiots for corporate power, since their real argument is “never tell a corporation what to do, ever.” They likely know it, too. Evil people are never as stupid as they want you to think.

Around the table: why we shouldn't sleep on a second Trump term as a "lame duck" term, and other lessons.

Thom Hartmann describes, in considerable detail, Republicans’ rightward march to fascism over the last 40-plus years, and I can only add two things: one, that Democrats could very easily link Mr. Trump calling our soldiers “losers” and “suckers” with Tommy Tuberville’s 80 million military holds in campaign ads, and two, it’s not enough to say Donald Trump will be a lame duck if he wins in 2024 (which will be how many Republican voters rationalize voting for him again), because if he can get his votaries to shoot enough people, he’ll be much closer to an America where folks like him can do what they like and no one else can. Which is, of course, the essence of the fascist impulse.

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett has, on at least three occasions, sold millions of dollars in stock shares in which his corporation was trading, which would not only strike virtually anyone as a conflict of interest, but which Mr. Buffett has said out loud would be a conflict of interest. OK, I guess he’ll say that he said he shouldn’t be buying stocks Berkshire buys and he merely sold stocks Berkshire bought, but once you confront that time he boosted Wells Fargo stock on TV right after selling millions of dollars of Wells Fargo stock (or the fact that he’s called for higher income taxes on the rich but not higher investment taxes), that’d seem like hair-splitting. Anyway, so much for “the one billionaire we like”!

The good folks of the Pennridge School District in Bucks County, PA, managed to boot all five Moms for Liberty members from their school board on Election Day, and when I read that “Moms for Liberty, in the end, was a very expensive trap that the Republicans built for themselves,” I can’t help but respond that this trap is merely emblematic of the much larger trap Republicans have built for themselves – all they can do now is create hysterical dramas to win elections in the short term (which doesn’t always work; see “crime, hysteria about”), because once they have power, they either use it to directly hurt people (as the Moms for Liberty-dominated school board did) or create even more hysterical dramas. People hate book banning, after all, and people only “hate” Black/Brown/gay/trans folks because right-wingers want to distract them from the fact that their economic policies have taken their livelihoods and happiness away.

When I hear that “You Have a Right to Know Why a Health Insurer Denied Your Claim,” but “Some Insurers Still Won’t Tell You,” I’m reminded that a big reason we don’t let corporations get so big in the first place is so they can’t break the law with impunity like this. I mean, if the law tells a corporation to stop hurting people, and that corporation simply refuses to stop hurting people, that corporation is injuring our civilization, and deserves to die for it. (I mean, a corporation is a thing, not a person, so calling for its death isn’t “uncivil.” And don’t listen to folks who cry out “if you kill a corporation you’ll kill all the jobs!” Why, corporations spend virtually all their time killing jobs already! Think how many small businesses can start in their absence, doing work that actually helps people, and employing people they can’t regard as mere marks on a ledger the way corporations do.)

You know how Rep. James Comer (E-KY) has been banging his saucepan about a $200,000 loan Jim Biden paid to Joe Biden in between Joe Biden’s terms in the Executive branch? Well, guess what Mr. Comer has in his own past! “According to Kentucky property records, Comer and his own brother have engaged in land swaps related to their family farming business. In one deal — also involving $200,000, as well as a shell company — the more powerful and influential Comer channeled extra money to his brother, seemingly from nothing. Other recent land swaps were quickly followed with new applications for special tax breaks, state records show. All of this, perplexingly, related to the dealings of a family company that appears to have never existed on paper.” Republicans have represented Kentucky’s 1st district since the 1994 wave, but the district actually has more registered Democrats; I presume a lot of these Democrats have been voting Republican for decades without bothering to change their affiliation, but I still see an opportunity for Democrats here. If he were to lose his 2024 re-election bid, Mr. Comer would no doubt whine about “the weaponization of the vote.”

Finally, West Virginia Democratic (?) Senator Joe Manchin won’t run for re-election in 2024, and rather than recount his various follies, let’s just say don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya. And no, I don’t care about the excuse that Mr. Manchin “represented a red state,” because Byron Dorgan represented a red state for 18 years, and he kept winning because he fought “free” trade, corporate crime, and bad media policy; everyone, liberal or conservative, approved of him for these good works. Yeah, I first said that over a dozen years ago, and I guess I’ll just have to keep saying it until our leaders finally learn.

Action: concerning health care, taxes, and labor.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect women’s health care, bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, and pass the PRO Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support legislation that protects women’s health care, including abortion and birth control. Polling consistently tells us that most Americans support abortion and birth control, which is yet another reason I don’t give up on the American people, even if their leaders are monsters. And supporting abortion and birth control is the right thing to do! No one salivates at the prospect of aborting a fetus, but the far worse thing to do is to re-create a society that values women only as breeders, and that’s where the pro-life movement aims to go. No use brandishing the word “religion” at me, either. Last I looked, both Judaism and Islam agreed with me, and they’re religions, too.

NETWORK, the Catholic social justice lobby, helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021. You remember, the one that put $250 and $300 checks per child in working families’ bank accounts every month? Seems to me if Virginia’s Republican Governor can schedule tax rebates to hit voters’ mailboxes the week before Election Day, Democrats could have reminded them of the $250 and $300 campaign ads that hit working families’ bank accounts every month. Sadly, they’re still too weak to do that, let alone keep those actual tax cuts coming, but that’s why we’ve got to tell them what to do all the time.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the PRO Act, which would make it a lot easier for American workers to organize and bargain collectively for better pay and working conditions. We’re seeing how well unions work for good Americans even now with the United Auto Workers’ recent victory over Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, a victory that includes 25% pay raises over the next 4 ½ years and the reopening of a Belvedere, IL plant that had employed 1,200 workers. The PRO Act would, among other things, make it a lot harder for corporations to force workers to attend anti-union meetings, so Congress needs to get that done.

Action: concerning drug prices, taxes, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell our government to end big pharma extortion, offer free tax filing, and reinstate net neutrality. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell President Biden to stop big pharma corporations from extorting the American people over the price of drugs. The most recent news hook is Pfizer deciding to charge 1,000 times what it costs to make COVID treatment drug Paxlovid – because what are you going to do, let COVID keep you sick? But the same logic applies to Joe Manchin’s daughter jacking up the price of EpiPen to over $600 a dose, Martin Shkreli’s jacking up of the anti-parasitic/anti-HIV drug Daraprim fifty-five-fold, and insulin being so expensive that diabetics ration it – you’ll either pay or die. People who do this to us deserve eternal hellfire, but let’s not have good Americans die needlessly in the meantime.

Demand Progress also helps you tell our federal government to finally offer free tax filing via our IRS. Don’t tolerate anyone saying you’re going to let Big Gummint do it? Jesus Mary and Joseph who do they think big tax prep corporations submit their work to? Free tax filing not only cuts out the cost, it also cuts out the middle man – in this case, a quite costly middle man! – and time was conservative economists were all about getting rid of all the middle-men in our economy. Now, of course, right-wing economists applaud any skimming as “genius,” but there’s no need to give them all the say about everything just because they have advanced degrees. Too many people have advanced degrees in serving Our Glorious Elites.

Finally, Battle for the Net helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to reinstate the most vigorous net neutrality rules possible, so that big corporations can’t censor or throttle the websites we want to visit. Don’t cower before threats of you won’t be able to get free Netflix with your new T-Mobile account or whatever, because in the old days we recognized that sort of bundling as anti-competitive collusion, which we have way, way too much of in our economy today, even after the Biden Administration’s efforts. In somewhat more recent old days, good Americans across the political spectrum loved net neutrality; doesn’t actual bipartisanship mean anything anymore?

Action: concerning child labor, child care, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to toughen child labor laws, extend child care funding, and reject any “debt commission” to cut our earned benefits. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Child Labor Act. In the wake of child labor violations almost doubling over the last year, and Iowa actually passing a law to allow more child labor that violates federal law, the Stop Child Labor Act would increase penalties for violations, allow our government to put repeat offenders in jail, and let children seek compensation for the harm done to them. This is basic law-and-order stuff here, and let’s be honest: do we want our kids to have real childhoods like we always say we do, or do we want them to grow up in sweatshops? We can’t have both.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the emergency child care stabilization funding first offered during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yeah, the pandemic is over (or, more precisely, “over”), but some three million-plus kids will lose access to child care if we don’t extend the funding, and I don’t know about you, but if it only costs $16 billion (out of some $6 trillion in total federal outlays) to get these kids the care they need, I do it without blinking. Congressional monsters may not feel the same way, but they’re supposed to do our will, not beat their chests about whom they hurt. Personal to folks who say just have one parent stay home: you’ve never done any household budgeting, have you?

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to use a “debt commission” to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or food stamp benefits. That’s right, food stamps too! Nobody lives like Elon Musk on food stamps, and anyone, including me or you, might need them some day. And that’s right, Medicaid too! Medicaid is actually pretty popular, though it also has an unearned reputation as Something Only Those People Get. Social Security and Medicare I trust I don’t have to defend once again. But we have to defend them from our own leaders! And if we do, we’ll win.

Action: vote!

If you have any problems voting today – said problems may include, but are not limited to, finding the polling place, voter intimidation, accessibility issues, voting machine problems, and provisional ballot issues – or if you witness anyone having these or any other problems, Election Protection has a toll-free line for you to call. It's 1.866.OUR.VOTE – or, if mnemonic devices such as "OUR VOTE" actually slow you down when you're trying to dial (as they do for me!), that's 1.866.687.8683. Don’t be skittish about making that call, because our enemies sure aren’t skittish about preventing you from voting.

Odd-numbered year elections don’t even get the respect that midterm elections do, but we will vote (or finish voting) in a lot of important elections today. Mississippi and Kentucky will elect Governors, while Pennsylvania will elect a new state Supreme Court judge and New Jersey and Virginia will elect entire legislatures; in both of these latter states, voters may tell us whether 15-week abortion bans are really more popular than six- or eight-week abortion bans. Voters in Ohio will vote on whether to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitution, and the fact that Donald Trump handily took Ohio twice seems unreflected in recent polling; Ohio voters will also vote on legalizing pot, same notation. And Maine will vote on whether to create a public power utility that can acquire private utility corporations, as well as seven other questions. And Republicans all over America will test their thesis that fearmongering about rising crime (remember, both violent and property crime are about half as bad as they were 30 years ago) will result in electoral gold, a thesis that did not exactly bear fruit for them in 2022 (especially in Pennsylvania!). So the fact that no Presidents or Congressfolk stand for election today doesn’t make this Election Day inconsequential.

And once again, remember that voting is a citizen's absolute minimum duty in America. This is our government, no matter how little it resembles a good government, and our duty as citizens is to make it a good government, first on Election Day, and then on every day thereafter. Still, our work on every day thereafter will be a lot harder if we don’t turn all the bad politicians out of office we can. And there are only bad reasons for not voting. Negative campaigning is an especially bad one – folks do realize politicians run negative campaigns in order to alienate voters and make them stay home, right? If you stay home, you can't vote against the bad people who want you to stay home! And cynicism about the state of the nation is not only a bad reason to stay home, it's a bad reason to do anything. Yes, things get discouraging. But I pray that we always have the strength to refuse to drink from the cup of cynicism.

Readings for November 7, 2023.

Ho hum, Factcheck.org finds that the Republican Israel-funding bill doesn’t actually offset its cost with budget cuts as advertised. You already know the reason: cutting the increase in IRS funding actually results in considerably less revenue coming in and therefore larger deficits. Whatever happened to spending money to make money? Indeed, our Congressional Budget Office says the bill would actually increase the deficit by about twice as big as the bill’s size. Still, Republicans have a total hard-on for protecting rich folks from getting audited: I wonder why. And dig Mike Johnson’s rhetorical hostage-taking: “I think if you put this to the American people and they weigh the two needs, I think they’re going to say standing with Israel and protecting the innocent over there is in our national interest and is a more immediate need than IRS agents.” What would the people say if he’d made them choose between Israel and corporate welfare handouts? Of course we’ll never know, because he’ll never ask, because he’s evil.

David Swanson claims that our military has trained over 30% of all mass shooters in America, and though finding a military background for 40 of 127 mass shooters doesn’t complete the picture, I’m inclined to agree – it’s a lot easier to kill a lot of people when you’ve been trained to kill a lot of people, after all. Also, our “liberal” media don’t face this problem any better than they face police brutality: “statistically, virtually all veterans are not mass shooters. But that can hardly be the reason for not a single news article ever mentioning that mass shooters are very disproportionately likely to be veterans. After all, statistically, virtually all males, mentally ill people, domestic abusers, Nazi-sympathizers, loners, and gun-purchasers are also not mass-shooters. Yet articles on those topics proliferate like NRA campaign bribes.” We’d respond to this news, I would hope, by maybe not getting into so many Iraq-type wars in the future, since those wars send so many shells of people home.

Economist Hal Singer, who says he supports the Biden Administration’s “economic policies generally,” still explains the many ways it’s failed working families. Chiefly, he reminds us that higher Fed interest rates mean higher credit card interest rates (21 percent, up from 16 about a year and a half ago), higher student loan interest rates (almost six percent, about double what it was three years ago), and higher mortgages (almost eight percent now, when three percent loans were plentiful as late as 2020). What could Mr. Biden have done instead? Use the “bully pulpit” to shame corporate “greedflation” practitioners, or impose price controls, or have our government manufacture products like insulin, or go after price-gougers more aggressively (and appoint judges who don’t have their head up their ass about such things, I could add). So, a lot of wasted opportunity, there. It’s just Joe Biden’s dumb luck (and ours!) that our Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade and Republicans can’t govern their way out of a paper bag.

Action: concerning the Dakota pipeline, corporate crime, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell our government to scuttle the Dakota Access Pipeline, start going after corporate criminals, and enact automatic voter registration. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Native Alliance Organizers Fund helps you tell our Army Corps of Engineers to scuttle the notorious Dakota Access Pipeline. Word on the street is that the Corps essentially farmed out their proposal to a big oil corporation to write! And of course our government has already rerouted the pipeline so it wouldn’t pollute water where more white folks live (both in South Dakota and in Iowa!), and then violated treaties made with Native American nations (as well as our laws!) during its construction. At least a judge ordered the Corps to do another environmental review, after doing a shoddy one in advance of the pipeline’s 2016 approval; now we’ve got a chance to tell them what we think of it, again.

Public Citizen helps you tell your government to start going after corporate criminals a lot more vigorously. Sam Bankman-Fried got convicted of fraud, but that’s unusual; it’s almost always the little guy paying for some little crime while the big guys get away with big crimes. That’s the “weaponization of law enforcement,” not right-wing whining over how Donald Trump is somehow the “victim” of his 91 felony charges. They want to talk about “government going after political opponents”? All of us little guys are potential political opponents of Our Glorious Elites, so they come after us and leave each other alone. We should at least tell them we’re on to them.

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your state government to enact automatic voter registration already. Why would they not? Because they want as few people to vote as possible, that’s why, and sadly I’ve found that true of Democratic governments as well as Republican ones. Fewer votes means fewer people to control! Remember that when they tell you they oppose automatic voter registration because it’ll “enable voter fraud.” You mean the “voter fraud” they can never convict anyone of? And keep in mind we live in a time where so, so much paperwork documents our every move, so don’t believe the “voter fraud” hype.

Around the table: a bankster heads to jail, and other, more expected developments.

Lookee here, Virginia’s Republican Governor is sending out tax rebates the week before an election. Mandated by law, of course, but I’m sure the timing of the rebates is a complete accident. In other news, monkeys fly out of my butt. Good news: all those rebates Donald Trump handed out in 2020 didn’t help him win re-election, so it may not help Republicans running for office in Virginia this year, either. It might hurt them, actually – people don’t like thinking they’re easily bought.

In a related note, Virginia’s government has apparently underestimated how many voters they’ve unjustly unregistered – they said it was 270, but it was actually almost 3,400. They can blame “software glitches” all they want, but we all know that Republican governments screw up on purpose so they can “prove” “government doesn’t work” and then you go along with their plan to privatize everything. If 3,400 doesn’t seem like a lot of voters to you – many other states deregister many more voters, after all – remember that every vote counts! Particularly to governments that do better at suppressing votes than at governing!

D.C. Attorney General files lawsuit against 14 local landlord corporations, claiming they colluded with Texas-based rental pricing corporation RealPage to keep rent prices artificially high in our nation’s capitol. From the ProPublica report on RealPage from last year, you may remember that its flacks said, out loud, that rental agents had “too much empathy” which would make you spritz your coffee all over your keyboard if you had that kind of sense of humor. Apparently, though, this lawsuit has testimony from a worker at one of the landlord corporations named in the suit, that “of course” they colluded to raise prices – “it’s the entire reason landlords used the software,” he said. So, it could be a winner – unless they get a judge who subscribes to the numerous stupid arguments defending monopolies.

Ha ha ha independent Presidential candidate/anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says that under him our National Institutes for Health would be taking “a break” – “for about eight years,” and hey, dream big there, buddy! – from studying infectious diseases. Luckily for us, he’ll never be President, and the anti-vax crowd will never be that big. But I’d lay money that Donald Trump, who needs every vote he can get, will soon say this “break” was his idea all along.

When I hear that the Biden Administration wants to be able to approve arms sales to Israel without Congressional notification, I can only ask why such sales would ever need such secrecy. They’re acting like the American public are wholly behind Israel in their current war with Palestine, but of course we’re not, even given Hamas’s evil October 7 attack. In any case, at least one observer calls the attempt “an insult to Congressional oversight prerogatives,” which is a fancy way of saying they’re trying to keep us from knowing what they’re doing, which surely never predisposes us kindly toward our government.

“Republicans May Have Found a Winning Election Strategy,” Newsweek announces, but the key word in that formulation is “may,” because the “winning” strategy turns out to be getting Republican voters to vote early – a strategy they’ve had trouble embracing after Donald Trump told them not to – and though I suppose it could make a difference, early Republican votes still account for only around 40 percent of the votes (versus, say, 51%) in seven swingy Virginia state legislative races, and you’re supposed to win elections by getting more total votes, not just more early votes. Anyway, I’m glad to see Republican voters giving up their irrational fear of early voting; maybe they’ll be better able to give up some of their other irrational fears.

Finally, some good news: a New York jury convicts the unfortunately-named Sam Bankman-Fried of defrauding investors and customers of some $10 billion, and since Mr. Bankman-Fried (no, I won’t refer to him by his initials, he’s not FDR or LBJ or even OBJ) was a “star” in the world of bitcoin, this verdict should make people realize that bitcoin isn’t so hard to understand that we just can’t prosecute fraud cases relating to it. Why, it’s almost like bitcoin votaries want you to think it’s hard to understand! And, of course, they’re not new, either – folks have been mystifying how economies work since time immemorial. And I shudder to think what’s become of their immortal souls.

Action: concerning internet freedom and ALEC.

Long story short: tell our FCC to bring back net neutrality, and tell big corporations to stop funding ALEC. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to bring back net neutrality, the principle that forces big telecom corporations to deliver all data with the same priority, and prevents those corporations from herding you into junk news ghettos or delivering corporate “partner” content before the content you want. This is why folks all across the political spectrum support net neutrality! Our government didn’t make net neutrality the law of the land until 2015, but corporations hesitated to violate its principles before then, and have only violated its principles since the Trump FCC’s 2017 repeal in ways that seem to benefit consumers – by packaging Netflix or Disney + for free with new accounts, for example. That might seem like a good thing, until you decide you don’t like Netflix anymore and have to pay extra for something like Hulu. So let’s make big telecom corporations do right by all of us again.

Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Voter ID laws, Stand Your Ground laws that never seem to protect Black folks the way they protect white folks, criminalizing protest – these are just some of the evil works of ALEC over the last decade-plus, but ALEC would starve to death without corporate funding, and our efforts over the years have already induced over 100 big corporations to drop ALEC, but there are lots of other big corporations in America still funding ALEC, not least among them Pfizer, Chevron, Blue Cross, Eli Lilly, Anheuser-Busch, UPS, FedEx, and, of course, the Koch Brothers. And don’t buy the BS line that these corporations only ally with ALEC for “economic reasons.” If anything, that’s even worse!

Action: concerning monopolies, affordable housing, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell our FTC and DOJ to stop the proposed United Health/Amedisys merger, tell state and local officials to make it easier to repurpose empty office buildings as affordable housing, and tell your Congressfolk to allow our Postal Service to offer more services. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) and Department of Justice (or DOJ) to block the proposed United Health/Amedisys merger. If we allow that merger to happen, we would allow a big corporation to take a competitor of the market and become even more powerful, which means the resulting behemoth would have more power to kill jobs, cut services, and raise health care prices which are already too damn high. United Health would absolutely do all of that, because they’re already doing all of that! United Health is just another corporate worshiper of mammon, and worshipers of mammon have had too much say about everything in America for far too long. We won’t be able to change this sad state of affairs, however, unless we speak out in numbers they can’t deny. And our laws require our federal agencies to listen to public comments, so let’s do that.

MoveOn helps you tell state and local officials to make it easier to repurpose office buildings into affordable housing. Too many working families still don’t have an affordable place to live, largely thanks to landlords (who are becoming ever more corporate!) raising rents higher than inflation because they can. On the other hand, we have too many office buildings that’ll never be occupied again now that the pandemic taught us that we can do so much of our work from home without hurting anyone. It’s almost like the solution presents itself! States and localities would have to change zoning and land-use laws in order to help convert office buildings into living spaces, but that’d be easier than waiting for new houses to magically go up. And they’d have to refit those office buildings to make them more livable! But that better not be too tough for a can-do society.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal laws preventing our Postal Service from offering more services, like postal banking. The only reason your Congressperson would oppose such a thing? Oh, you know, “big government is always bad” tell that to Social Security, Medicare, and the interstate highway system or “banks should do all the banking in America” never mind that banks don’t go to a lot of rural and urban areas and local Post Offices can fill that gap or “the Post Office has never made money” though we really shouldn’t evaluate every single thing in the world on its money-making potential. Especially a Constitutionally-mandated service provided to the American people! Seriously, we really don’t want a world where everything is like the private sector, where greed can run free without very much accountability to the people.

Action: concerning health care, taxes, and executive pay.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act, the OLIGARCH Act, and the RECOUP Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act, which would give our government the power to manufacture generic drugs wherever name-brand drugs are too expensive for good Americans to afford. Specifically, the bill would create an Office of Drug Manufacturing within our Department of Health and Human Services, and would keep drug corporation lobbyists or senior executives of such corporations that’ve broken our laws out of that department; the Office would be able to manufacture any drugs for which patents have expired, if big pharma corporations can’t produce enough of them (like what happened with Ozempic last year!) or if big pharma corporations are simply charging too much for them. This would make health care cheaper, and anyone who cries SOSHULIZMZ!!!! should really stop driving our roads if they don’t want to be hypocrites.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the OLIGARCH Act, which would establish tax rates on wealth based on median household wealth in America ($121,700 as of 2019, per our Federal Reserve), ranging from two percent on household wealth 1,000 to 10,000 times median household wealth to eight percent on household wealth 1,000,000 times median household wealth. At present, this tax would only affect folks worth over $121.7 million, and two percent of that figure would still leave those folks with a lot of money, so don’t believe the hype that it’d actually be much worse. Certainly don’t believe any slippery-slope BS that it’d eventually be 100% (a cursory examination of our history will tell you how hard it is to raise taxes on the rich). People with no arguments will say anything, but they shouldn’t win.

Finally, Take On Wall Street helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the RECOUP Act, which would literally recoup the sales of stocks and other assets that bankster executives make right before their banks crash. This just happened with both the Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank failures, so it’s not a solution in search of a problem. And don’t think of this as a punishment for things CEOs might have done; think of it as a punishment for being a bad boss. Really, you don’t have to prove that they maliciously drove their bank off the edge and cashed out before everyone else knew what was happening. I mean, that would be the way to bet! But this is a bill that would punish incompetence. Folks don’t argue they have a “right” to be incompetent if it hurts other people, do they? I guess they do. But they shouldn’t, and they certainly shouldn’t get all the say about everything.

Action: concerning executive pay, nursing homes, and junk fees.

Long story short: tell President Biden to ban corporations that pay their CEOs too much from federal contracts, tell our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to strengthen their proposed nursing home patient-to-staff nursing home ratios, and tell our CFPB to stop credit card corporations from assessing onerous fees. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Inequality.org helps you tell President Biden to stop giving out federal contracts to corporations that pay their CEOs excessively. Yeah, President Biden can do that, because Congress has given him that power through legislation! And if Congress wants to keep him from doing that, they can take his power away. In the meantime, about half of all corporations feed at the taxpayer trough, so really, the least we can do is insist that if they pay their bosses bajillions of dollars while paying their workers in dung pellets, they can’t get taxpayer largesse anymore. As fate would have it, the big automaker corporations currently facing lengthy strikes by their workers have taken hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars these last few years, so how about we, as a famous philosopher used to say in another context, just say no?

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) to strengthen their proposed patient-to-staff ratios for nursing homes. Which receive some $90 billion in Medicare and Medicaid funding annually, in case you were wondering how our government gets to set such ratios. Remember, that’s your money going to help seniors get the care they need! So let’s not leave it up to the big nursing home corporations, and certainly not to the bankster hedge fund corporations that have been gobbling up nursing homes and “cutting costs,” which always means cutting care. You didn’t think it meant cutting executive pay or hedge fund manager commissions, did you? It never means that to a worshiper of mammon. Thankfully we non-worshipers of mammon also get a say, so we should use it.

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to limit credit card late fees to $8. Because credit card corporations don’t need any more than that to pay the cost of processing late fees, that’s why! And also because $40 late fees, if borrowers don’t pay them, just get added to the borrower’s balance and thus become considerably larger. And, ah, you’ve seen your credit card’s interest rate lately, right? Credit card interest rates average over 21% today, versus about 16.25% in 2022 and 14.6% in 2021. That effect of higher Fed interest rates most assuredly doesn’t benefit working people (though other effects – like the obliteration of the low- or no-interest loans for rich folks that keep working people from buying homes – most assuredly do). So onerous late fees get a lot bigger a lot faster. And if they don't reflect a corporation's actual costs, then they're junk fees, simple and plain! Thus we tell our CFPB to keep them down.

Action: concerning endless war, our earned benefits, and Congressional corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to call for a ceasefire in the Israel/Palestine conflict, reject any Social Security/Medicare/SNAP benefit-cutting commission, and enact a stock-trading ban for members of Congress. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to call for a ceasefire in the Israel/Palestine conflict. Israeli politicians talked big about revenge at the beginning, but we’re a few weeks in now and that big ground campaign hasn’t materialized, though they’ve kept on pounding Gaza with air strikes, which are of course nowhere near as “surgical” as they tell you; why, it’s almost like the whole idea is to kill as many Palestinians as possible without actually damaging Hamas very much! After all, Israelis might not keep Mr. Netanyahu around without an enemy to hate. If that analysis strikes you as a bit Machiavellian, just ask American right-wingers how well actually achieving the goal of overturning Roe v. Wade has worked out for them. A ceasefire wouldn’t just be good for the citizens of Gaza, it’d be bad for a Netanyahu’s government; if you made me pick I’d pick the former, but I sure wouldn’t complain about getting both.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the creation of a commission designed to cut Social Security, Medicare, or food stamp benefits. Because that’s all the “fiscal responsibility” this super hard-right Congress can stomach! Always they want to cut the benefits that don’t actually break budgets but do actually help good Americans, but never do they want to cut defense spending or corporate welfare, and of course raising taxes on the rich and on corporations is verboten among our political “leaders.” You should be aware that some of our erstwhile “centrists,” like Kyrsten Sinema and Mitt Romney, also approve of the notion of cutting our earned benefits “behind closed doors.” But the whole point of America is not to let politicians do anything behind closed doors to begin with, and that’s why we fight.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to prohibit members of Congress from owning stock in any corporation at any time. Don’t like it? Then don’t be a Congressperson! Go be a regular rich person or whatever! Public service means something! Or, at least, it should, and it should also mean something that roughly three out of every four voters, meaning roughly 75%, think we shouldn’t allow Congressfolk to trade in stocks, since they’ll almost certainly have to vote on a matter affecting the corporations they invest in sooner or later. Newt Gingrich once said that if 70% of the American people want something, they should get it. What Rube Goldbergian contraption of an argument would he deploy to get out of that? No doubt it would provoke this response: “so, if 70% of the American people want something, they should get it, except for banning Congressfolk from trading stock?”

Around the table: of price-fixing, product safety, and American "hearts."

Lee Hepner writes about fighting price-fixing when it’s algorithm-driven. Turns out the problem’s even worse than simply arguing that even if everyone’s using the same algorithm, is that really a monopoly? – it’s also judges who, in Mr. Hepner’s words, “create() a Catch-22: plaintiffs need to have more specific evidence of an unlawful conspiracy before they can begin the litigation discovery process to get that same evidence.” And folks who would characterize strong enforcement of the Sherman Act as “judicial activism” might want to consider that judges currently “re-writ(e) the law to provide immunity to price fixing.”

Factcheck.org evaluates “evidence” of corruption in re that payment from Jim Biden to his brother Joe Biden, finds it wanting. Trouble is that Rep. Comer (E-KY), when confronted with the notion that “Joe Biden provided a short-term, no interest loan to his brother, and that six weeks later James Biden paid that money back with money obtained in a business deal that did not involve Joe Biden,” has nothing to say in response but well, I don’t believe it, and if you’re going to prove wrongdoing, you’ve got to have more than that. It must be mere coincidence that their Presidential nominee for 2024 might well be in jail for actual corruption in not too long.

Uh oh: big corporation finds its breathing machines are defective – that, for example, they could “spew dangerous particles and fumes into the lungs of patients,” no lie – but tells its distributors to keep selling machines they have in stock. And these machines were defective to the tune of over 3,500 complaints over more than a decade! Is this what people mean by “CEOs take a lot of big risks you could never understand, so they deserve all that money”? It’s more likely evidence that corporations with subsidiaries in more than half the countries on Earth are too big to safely exist.

We’d best respond to a few Republican House Reps’ efforts to expel fellow Rep. George Santos – facing 23 federal charges as we speak – as drama. Two-thirds of our House Reps, not half-plus-one, would need to vote to expel Mr. Santos, meaning it almost certainly won’t happen, but the endangered House Reps in New York state calling for the expulsion vote will get to shield themselves from claims that they didn’t do enough about their colleague. And in the unlikely event it does happen, the Democrat who runs to replace him won’t have George Santos to kick around as a campaign issue. So, yeah, that’s all very clever, unless you insist, as I do, that cleverness benefit more than a handful of people.

New House Speaker Mike Johnson (E-LA) responds to Maine mass shooting by telling Sean Hannity that “the problem is the human heart, it’s not guns,” but note well the Biden Administration’s response: “We absolutely reject the offensive accusation that gun crime is uniquely high in the United States because of Americans’ ‘hearts.’” I mean, yeah, Mike Johnson, you did kinda say Americans’ “hearts” are worse than the hearts everywhere else on Earth, since "the human heart" doesn't cause nearly as many mass murders anywhere else on Earth. Golly, maybe Joe Biden isn’t as dumb as people think.

Finally, speaking of our new House Speaker, you may not know that Mike Johnson is an acolyte of David Freaking Barton, having said that Mr. Barton’s “work” “has had such a profound influence on me and my work and my life.” Of all the terrible things we’ve heard about Mike Johnson in the last week, this may be my least favorite – he’s an “acolyte” of the man who says the Founders said all kinds of right-wing crap but can’t document any of it? If you’re an acolyte of a snake-oil salesman, you’re either evil or a fool, neither of which recommends you for a leadership position, certainly.

Action: concerning Social Security, saving our Postal Service, workers' rights, and school lunch debt.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act, let our Postal Service offer more services, pass the PRO Act, and pass the School Lunch Debt Cancellation Act . Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act. Currently, folks who get SSI benefits, who most assuredly do not get rich from their maximum monthly payments of $914 per month, can’t have more than $2,000 in savings (and just $3,000 for couples) or they’ll lose their benefits. Presumably, I don’t have to tell you how quickly you can go through $914, or how easily you can lose $2,000 (or $3,000) to the slightest mishap. The SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act would at least raise those limits to $10,000 per person (and $20,000 per couple, thus eliminating the “couple penalty”) and would also exclude retirement benefits from calculating those limits. Let right-wingers whine about fraud or “people getting free stuff.” Standing up to cruelty is a basic skill of civilized people.

Save the Post Office helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would permit our Postal Service to offer more services. The Postal Service Reform Act allows our Postal Service to offer limited fishing hunting licensing services, but they could do so much more, particularly for otherwise underserved rural communities – they could offer basic banking services, obviously, but they could also offer vehicle charging, parking lot wi-fi, grocery delivery, and checking on seniors. Now, about that last item, you just know right-wingers would love to squeal TEH BIG BROTHURZ CHECKINGZ ONZ TEH SENYURZ!!!!! Just remember that these are the same people who willingly bought Alexas and cellphones, and thus allowed private corporations to spy on them pretty much with impunity. I’m so sick of right-wingers yelling “big gummint” whenever we might get our government to do good things.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, which would outlaw most corporate union-busting and give teeth to law enforcement when it goes after such corporate interference with worker organizing. You might even say that folks who oppose the PRO Act are objectively pro-defunding the police, or objectively anti-law and order. If folks come at you with unions make workplaces worse when you tell them they should support the PRO Act, come right back at them with so you think it’s OK for corporations to force their workers to sit through anti-union propaganda when they’ve got work to do? And if they respond it’s their money ha ha ha snort, ask them how shareholders should feel about them pissing it down the drain on anti-union propaganda, which is very expensive.

Finally, RISE helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the School Lunch Debt Cancellation Act, which would pay off the over $250 million of school lunch debt “accumulated” by good Americans. I put “accumulated” in quotation marks for many good reasons: one, our taxes should pay for school lunches, so nobody goes hungry, and two, it’s bad enough we blame adults for their poverty before we ever blame their bosses for refusing to pay them enough, but how bad is it, then, that we blame children for their parents’ poverty? I mean, you’d have to be a special kind of cruel to do that. Sadly, quite a few educators are that cruel, going so far as to publicly shame kids who don’t get caught up on the school lunch debt they shouldn’t even have to begin with. If we did more for those kids, we’d certainly give those educators a chance to be better versions of themselves.

Penny rants for October 27, 2023.

When I hear that nearly a quarter of Americans think “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” I again think that about a quarter of our electorate is batshit insane, and these folks have let themselves get led from one manufactured outrage to another over at least the past 20 years. And I think, again, that though three-quarters should be able to outvote one-quarter, we all know that another quarter or our electorate enables the insane quarter, either by imagining any Democrat is far worse or by thinking they can use the crazies to get things done. I’ll admit I’m amused to hear 57% of Republicans say “America’s best days are behind us” when Republicans spent those best days trying to turn them into these days, by setting wealth and corporate power “free” and slashing government spending that actually helped people. Maybe our pollsters should ask Americans how they feel about the disappearance of the 91% tax bracket and the end of big projects like ending poverty (or even just the interstate highway system!) when they ask if America’s on the right or wrong track. It might be illuminating.

From McKay Coppins’s new bio of Mitt Romney we learn that Kyrsten Sinema doesn’t care much about what’ll happen to her if/when she doesn’t get re-elected, because “I can do anything” (though she may be overestimating her career options) and because “I saved the Senate by myself.” Let us recall that she “negotiated” a bipartisan infrastructure bill by giving in to all of Republicans’ major demands, then killed her own party’s signature bill by refusing to raise taxes on the rich or let Medicare negotiate drug prices; then, when these positions became untenable, she permitted a 15% minimum corporate tax and limited Medicare drug price negotiation in exchange for keeping the notorious “carried interest” loophole (which allows banksters to pay a lower tax rate than bus drivers). So, some “savior,” there, and as for “sav(ing) the filibuster,” “save” is a weird word to describe a tool that’s only hurt good Americans for years. And dig her spokeshack comparing Mr. Coppins’ reporting to “a game of telephone.” I’d contemplate a defamation lawsuit if I were him.

We also learn from the Romney bio that the 47% video story apparently sent Mr. Romney into (per David Corn at Mother Jones, the reporter who originally broke the story) “an emotional tailspin and caused him to ponder dropping out of the race.” Hearing that he refused to blame anyone but himself for his troubles might seem refreshing – after all, Donald Trump never seems to take the blame for anything (or pass up an opportunity to blame others for his failures) – but, really, stepping up and taking blame is a basic skill of civilized people, and we should remember that Mitt Romney put himself in a tailspin of depression because he pandered to rich folks about poor folks. And we should also remember that that Republicans have learned nothing from that mistake. And almost certainly on purpose! After all, if you can just run people from one manufactured outrage to another, and thus keep them in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage, you don’t actually have to do anything.

Finally, on that note, meet your new U.S. House Speaker, four-term Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson! That was always the best play for Republicans – to tire everyone out with drama and then elect some relatively-unknown asshole – but this is the future, where Mr. Johnson has left records of his deeds and words all over the internet just like everyone else, and hopefully we all know by now that a soft-spoken asshole is still an asshole. And I said it was their “best” play, not a good play. Every single Republican Rep voted for this fool; folks like Don Bacon and Mike Lawler may have complained enough about their choices to fool their constituents, but what about folks like Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania’s 1st? He voted for the worst person for Speaker every chance he had and didn’t account for it to his constituents, so I suspect the good folks of Montgomery County (who just put a Democrat in the state House for the first time in forever) may not want to keep tolerating this drama.

Action: concerning voting rights, child care, consumer protection, and bankster pay.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, keep investing in child care, reject efforts to defund our CFPB, and stop banking executives from cashing out right before their banks crash. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our freedom to vote, by passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. Yeah, Republicans won’t want to do it, but let’s frame that the way civilized people should frame it: Republicans should get with the program and do what the hell we tell them to do, regardless of how they feel about it. Representatives are supposed to represent, after all, and both the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act would not only help more good Americans vote, it will give good Americans more tools to fight back when state and local governments try to suppress their vote. And good Americans deserve that! So we should get it, regardless of what Republicans “think.”

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep investing in expanded child care across America. I mean, if you’re going to tell people to get married, and you’re going to tell people to get jobs, and you’re going to tell them to have children, and then you’re going to pay them so little that both parents have to work, then you ought to help them afford child care, which is stupid expensive for no reason other than that some folks realized they could make unearned millions off child care merely because everyone needs it. The American Rescue Plan Act expanded federal funding for child care centers during the pandemic, but now that funding’s about to expire, with child care for over three million kids about to expire along with it, so how about we not be so damn cruel?

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject legislation that would break our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Barack Obama was no dummy, so he insisted that our Federal Reserve fund our CFPB, rather than Congressional appropriations, and though our Congressfolk have no problem with such a funding structure in other contexts, they seem to get their shorts in a bunch about it with our CFPB. I wonder why. I kid, of course! I do not wonder at all! Republicans in Congress want to zero out CFPB funding whenever they like so they can do the bidding of their big bankster donors – and this they want to do when banksters remain approximately the most unpopular people in America! And unpopular across the political spectrum, I might add! So let’s remind our Congressfolk who their real bosses are. It’s us. We’re their real bosses.

Finally, Take On Wall Street helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the RECOUP Act, so that we can finally prevent banksters from making craploads of money the week before their banks crash. Yes, this happened just recently! Silicon Valley Bank’s CEO sold over $3.5 million of stock right before SVB collapsed, while executives at First Republic Bank sold around $12 million of stock in the months before that bank went under; nice work if you can get it! Seriously, if they tell people their bank is doing fine, and then unload millions of bucks in stocks in their own bank, they’re saying that they lied to all those people when they said their bank was doing fine! I guess they think they’re OK because we may not have their lies on tape, but their actions gave away their lies, and anyway there’s no Constitutional right to millions of dollars in compensation when folks hurt all the people whose money they were holding for them, for “safekeeping.” This is Civilization 101 stuff.

Action: concerning tobacco, book banning, drug prices, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell our FDA to ban menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars, tell Scholastic to stop aiding and abetting book banning, tell Pfizer to stop jacking up the price of its COVID treatment, and tell our FCC to reinstate net neutrality. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to ban menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars. Because they make people like cigarettes and cigars when they’d otherwise avoid them and the lung cancer that comes with them, that’s why! Used to be I’d say smoking needs no additional inducement – nicotine is an addictive drug, after all, and people used to think themselves sexy because they smoked – but I’m happy to report that that’s changed, thanks in large part to our government successfully suing tobacco manufacturing corporations (even though Tha Bush Mobb crapped on that, too, with a much-too-small settlement). So now I guess smoking does need an additional inducement. But smoking will kill you dead, and miserably so! So how about we stop enabling that sort of thing?

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell Scholastic Books to stop providing a “bigot button” for public school officials who don’t want kids to read books about race and gender. Scholastic has always been the name in getting kids to read books – I got excited whenever the truck came to our school – but sometimes they get a little timid in the face of rage. And I guess it’s possible someone at Scholastic decided the process of “letting parents opt out” could go a little more easily, but nothing should be easy for bigots! Certainly not banning books! And my impression of kids has always been that they can handle more of the out-of-the-ordinary than adults say – which makes me wonder what adults’ real agenda is. I kid! I do not actually wonder! Their real agenda is banning books that don’t put white folks at the center of all existence.

Public Citizen helps you tell big pharma corporation Pfizer not to jack up the price of COVID treatment Paxlovid to almost $1,400 per treatment. No use objecting that insurance will pay for it, since a) not everyone has health insurance thanks to their employer’s cheapness and b) when insurance corporations overpay for drugs, premiums shoot up for everyone and then insurance covers less and soon it hardly covers anything. And, ah, how much does Paxlovid actually cost to make? According to Harvard researchers, $13.38 per five-day course of treatment – the same course Pfizer wants to charge $1,390 for, or 100 times the cost. Nice work if you can get it! And surely those who’ve died for lack of COVID treatment would cheer Pfizer on for making all that money! I kid, of course; price-gougers deserve eternal hellfire, so let’s try to convince Pfizer not to go further down this road.

Finally, Battle for the Net helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to reinstate the net neutrality rules that helped keep our internet free of censorship and slower service. Net neutrality is one of the single most popular political causes of the last 20 years, and it’s popular with everyone across the political spectrum; the only people who don’t like it are the ones who want to herd you into their corporate fiefdoms on the internet. Now some folks will say they like getting Netflix or Disney Plus for free with their new phone provider! But what about the folks who use Hulu or Paramount Plus? They’re paying more, and not because one streaming service is actually better than another, but merely because they want to use a different service from the one their provider wants them to! And that’s not “freedom.” Corporations love aligning with other corporations to curtail your actual freedom, and make it look to you like it’s “more” freedom! The return of net neutrality would put a stop to all of that.

UPDATE. Scholastic has declared it'll end the "bigot button" practice described above. Sometimes justice comes quickly! But let's not ever get complacent.

Penny rants for October 25, 2023.

When I hear that a New Jersey state Senator, aptly named Ed Durr, said on Facebook a few years ago that “(a) woman does have a choice. Keep her legs closed!” and that state Democrats are using his words to tar other state Republicans, I am reminded that Mr. Durr spent around $300 to unseat a putative titan of the state Senate (Stephen Sweeney) in 2021 and that nobody covered all the stupid and obnoxious crap he said on social media before that until after the election. When I then hear that Republicans promise to “support women and teens facing unexpected or unwanted pregnancies” and “lift them up and help them and their families with access to adoption services, health care, financial and food assistance, counseling and treatment, and family planning” (as Idaho Gov. Brad Little has said in justifying his state’s abortion ban), I am not surprised to hear that Idaho Republicans cut funding for all that stuff almost on cue – and I’d prefer to see Democrat ads about that kind of hypocrisy, instead of the more sensational stuff that should have simply ended Mr. Durr’s campaign two years ago, but instead made him into the Democrats’ Useful Idiot almost like that was the whole idea.

When you hear that Texas Republicans are stalling gerrymandering-related lawsuits – and thus preserving their otherwise-unearned legislative majorities – by claiming all sorts of “privileges,” including lawyer-client privilege and “legislative privilege,” you may well wonder why privileges, even Constitutionally-established ones, always seem to outweigh rights in America. And when you hear that “legislative privilege” aims to protect the privacy of legislative debates, you may reasonably wonder why legislators’ “privacy” is more important than our right to know what legislators are doing, putatively on our behalf. Because they’ll be more honest with each other if we don’t know what they’re saying? Ah, they know how that sounds, right? And if someone defends Texas Republicans because “citizens won’t understand how private deliberations work and will overreact,” you only need ask why leaders don’t prevent such overreaction from happening before it starts. That’s what leaders do, after all, even in a world where our “liberal” media know nothing about anything and sensationalize everything. Sadly, today’s leaders work harder at excusing their failure to lead than at, you know, leading.

The good people at Popular Information offer another reminder that hysterical media reports about “crime waves” and “America in chaos” stand in conflict with the facts. Property crime may be up this year, but violent crime and murders are down, and both property crime and violent crime are half (or less!) of what they were in 1991, even though whining about it from our political class seems to have doubled over that time. Meanwhile, wage theft (which politicians never talk about for some reason!) outpaces property crime, and don’t even get me started on polluters and banksters. Seriously, I’m beyond fed up with tough-on-crime posturing. Politicians swing their balls about crime because they have literally nothing else to offer voters, and the only consolation is that it doesn’t work as well as it used to, or else Pennsylvania wouldn’t have been a wave year for Democrats in 2022. Hate to pile on, but when Vivek Ramaswamy says we need to institutionalize more people – which, I hate to say, we probably do – just remember that if he’s elected President, there’s no way in hell he’d ever actually do it, because how can you keep people in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage if you actually help make their lives better? Whenever you think of tough-on-crime politicians, think of the hate monster from “Day of the Dove.” Then they’ll make perfect sense.

Action: concerning spending cuts, Speaker drama, tax cuts, and judicial ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to oppose cuts to critical programs and fund our government like they said they would, reject any House Speaker who voted against certifying the 2020 election, restore the Child Tax Credit expansion, and pass ethics rules for our Supreme Court. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject cuts to programs that deliver services good Americans actually need – like rental assistance, safe housing, healthy food, and education – and pass government funding bills that adhere to the debt limit agreement made between House Republicans and President Biden. What’s that, you say? The House can’t do anything until it has a Speaker? If we tell them they need to do the things we put them there to do, in numbers they can’t deny, they’ll have no damn choice but to stop their drama and get back to work. You didn’t know Republicans were trying to cut those things in order to fund our government, did you? Think maybe there’s a reason for that? Those cuts all hurt people; that’s the reason.

In a related note, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject anyone for Speaker of the House who voted against certifying the 2020 election – and who therefore gave aid and comfort to the seditionists trying to nullify that election on January 6. What’s that, you say? That only leaves Tom Emmer? Actually, it doesn’t (almost 300 House Reps, many of them Republicans, voted to do their duty that day), but even if it did, tough fucking shit, Republicans! This is what happens to you when you spend all your time hurting people, and if nobody cares about your pain, maybe you need wonder if that’s your fault! (So the cuss word filter seems to be totally off at this blog now. And I used to apologize for using cuss words! You can express yourself without doing that, I’d say. But the likes of Christopher Shays, Sherwood Boehlert, and Walter Jones are gone; all that’s left now are motherfuckers, and they don’t deserve civil treatment.)

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore the Child Tax Credit expansion in effect for most of 2021. You remember, the one that put $250 or $300 checks per child in working families’ bank accounts every month, so they could cope with the higher prices of, well, everything? Some morons say the expanded CTC made inflation worse, which, like, ha ha ha ha ha inflation was so much worse after the expansion expired I mean duh. But then I guess said morons can retort that folks saved up all that extra money and caused inflation to go up with their spending a year later but ha ha ha ha ha only two kinds of people say something that stupid: people who have no idea how fast we go through money, or people who think you have no idea how fast we go through money. And people like that definitely shouldn’t get more say about everything than us.

Finally, the National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a real code of ethics for our Supreme Court Justices. I hopefully don’t have to recount all of the ethics imbroglios we’ve discovered lately concerning Justices Alito and Thomas, dutifully reported by ProPublica and suggesting that folks who had business before our Court (or who had business with folks who had business before our Court) might have plied these two folks with fairly sizable gifts that they may have broken the law in failing to disclose. Don’t be hoodwinked by Justice Barrett’s recent proclamation that yes, our Supreme Court should have some kind of ethics guidelines in place, for we can’t discount the possibility she’s saying that so she can make sure any resulting guidelines are toothless. Better we tell our Congressfolk what we want, and then make them do it.

Readings for October 24, 2023.

Why is America “out of ammunition,” according to Matt Stoller? Let’s cut to the chase: it’s monopolies, which our Department of Defense does next-to-nothing to fight, or even discourage. Despite the wars going on in Israel and Ukraine, “today government cash goes increasingly to stock buybacks rather than actual armaments,” which proves, once again, that banksters ruin everything. How bad is the problem? “(T)here are just two people in the Department of Defense who look at mergers in the defense base,” Mr. Stoller writes. “You couldn’t staff the morning shift of a small coffee shop with that, and yet two people are supposed to look at the estimated four hundred mergers plus going on every year among defense contractors and subcontractors.” But hey, it’s not like we won World War II by breaking Alcoa’s aluminum monopoly when they couldn’t produce enough fighter planes. Oh, wait: that is actually a big reason we won World War II.

Wondering how Tha Bush Mobb felt about the current Israel/Palestine war? Inae Oh at Mother Jones reveals that, surprise, surprise, they favor genocide against Palestinians – but now Tha Bush Mobb’s rank-and-file are more prone to turn on their Personal Lord and Savior! After George W. Bush opined that Israel shouldn’t be “consumed by rage” as it obliterates Gaza, his former spokeshack Ari Fleischer – remember when we thought they couldn’t get any worse than Ari Fleischer? What innocence we had! – goes on about how nobody said Americans shouldn’t be “consumed by rage” after 9.11, though I think many Americans have learned a lesson or two about that after all these years. I was about to say Mr. Fleischer forgot that all of Mr. Bush’s “buts” are as meaningless as they ever were, but more likely he was just obeying the fundamental Republican urge of this era: to create drama.

Action: concerning food safety and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to make baby food manufacturers get the heavy metals out of their foods and allow our Postal Service to do more than just deliver packages. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation requiring that baby food manufacturing corporations test all their products for heavy metals before they go on the market. The state of California has done just that, and California is a big enough economy – eighth largest in the world if it were its own country, last I heard – that baby food manufacturing corporations will wind up doing a lot more testing, but really, we shouldn’t punish babies in Wyoming and Nebraska just because their Congressfolk wouldn’t think to do this. Too much baby food has arsenic, lead, cadmium, and mercury in it these days, and it shouldn’t be a tough thing even for a drama-hound Republican to demand better.

Save the Post Office helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the law that prevents our Postal Service from offering new services such as postal banking. The Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 allows our Postal Service to offer some licensing services, but our Postal Service could do so much better if we didn’t tie their hands – they could sell public transportation tickets, offer wi-fi in parking lots, host electric vehicle charging stations, and check on seniors, all in addition to the basic banking services that would sure help out those folks in rural and urban areas where banksters don’t even want to go. This vision is a much, much better vision than Postmaster DeJoy’s “vision” of fewer jobs, higher prices, and worse service. It’s the kind of crap vision only a worthless CEO could come up with, and we’re better than CEOs.

Action: concerning Social Security, corruption, and housing.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject all efforts to cut Social Security, tell Sen. Menendez to resign already, and tell your Congressfolk to increase housing funding. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject all right-wing efforts to cut Social Security benefits or raise the retirement age. Because people already work long enough for executives who hate them! And when right-wingers say we have to go “behind closed doors” to cut Social Security benefits, they’re really saying I hate democracy. I mean, there was a reason Bush the Lesser couldn’t even get a Republican-dominated House and Senate to vote on privatizing Social Security in 2005 – and that was because the people wouldn’t stand for it. Using a government shutdown as leverage to cut our earned benefits isn’t really any better – it’s still hostage-taking, and it’s still fascist. But these drama hounds will do it if we don’t speak out in numbers they can’t mistake.

Win Without War helps you tell Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) to resign his Senate seat. He’s entitled to try to prove his innocence in court, but no law compels us to put up with him as a U.S. Senator any longer, because no one has a “right” to a Senate seat. This is a hard thing to explain to some people, as we were all reminded during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination. And the indictments keep coming for Sen. Menendez, the latest one for conspiring to act as a foreign agent for Egypt. But Mr. Menendez acts like his constituents are rallying around him, although at present he’s polling around five percent in the Democratic Senate primary for 2024. So it wouldn’t kill him to actually show some leadership and resign.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase, not cut, housing funding. Perhaps our Congressfolk don’t know this because they live such sheltered lives, but rent is out of control in America now, thanks in part to the corporation with the monopoly on software that "suggests" rental prices, which means that federal housing assistance has to keep going up just to keep pace. I guess that doesn’t matter to the Republicans who can’t even find a new House speaker, since they think any government funding that actually helps people is evil. But they matter a whole lot less than we do, and the more we act like it, the more we’ll get out of our government to begin with.

Action: concerning genocide, government shutdowns, and school lunch debt.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to prevent genocide against Palestinians, stop this interminable government shutdown drama, and cancel school lunch debt. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressfolk to do what they can to stop Israel from committing genocide against Palestinians. Don’t let folks interpret this call as anti-Semitic, or even as dismissive of Israeli losses – I mourn all the dead; every life taken by terrorism represents one fewer chance at a better world. But if we can’t oppose genocide, then what good are we, really? And justifying the genocide of Palestinians by pointing to Hamas’s evil is, logically, rather like justifying a genocide of Americans by pointing to our right-wing domestic terrorists. Indeed, Mr. Putin used similar reasoning to attack Ukraine. Want a good rule for living? Don’t be like Vladimir Putin.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk not to let our government shut down, again. You know what government shutdowns mean – parks close, checks don’t go out, no food stamps for folks who need it, air traffic controllers work for nothing if we’re very lucky – and since our government belongs to us and exists only to do our will, then politicians are defying our will if they let it shut down without funding it properly. I do not give one rat’s hind quarter if Republicans still haven’t elected a House Speaker by then, because work is work, and duty is duty. These preening, drama-loving "representatives" make almost three times what I make, but I earn every cent, unlike them.

Finally, RISE helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the School Lunch Debt Cancellation Act, which would (as its title suggests) cancel the $260-plus million in school lunch debt that somehow encumbers our nation’s children in the richest country on Earth. Seriously, we can’t call ourselves a civilized society if we won’t feed kids because they can’t afford school lunches which our taxes should already pay for. I’m happy to report that in five American states taxes do now make school lunches free for our children, but can we at least alleviate the suffering of those who don’t have that yet? And can we at least stop shaming our kids for something that’s not their fault at all? We don't use shame just because we can, after all.

Action: concerning taxes and Medicare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich, restore the expanded Child Tax Credit, and reject a Medicare trustee nominee with too many ties to private health insurance corporations. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich, including legislation instituting a Billionaire Minimum Income Tax. Remember that Futurama episode featuring wrestling robots, where one of the most hated wrestlers was called the Millionaire? Now it’d be the Billionaire, because billionaires, simply put, make a lot of money off other people’s work and hardly ever pay any taxes. No use arguing that it doesn’t get taxed because it’s not particularly liquid, not just because “wealth on paper” still gets rich folks loans with real money in them, but because they want it that way precisely so that they don’t pay taxes! Yikes, don’t think just because something does happen that it must happen – or should.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore the expanded Child Tax Credit that existed for most of 2021. You remember, the one that delivered $250 and $300 checks per child, per month into working families’ bank accounts? Why, that’s like a campaign ad that writes itself! And, Democrats being so smart they’re dumb, they couldn’t keep that campaign ad going. Note well that the Child Tax Credit expansion did not just get blown on drugs, like Joe Manchin said and yes I will personally make sure he never lives that down, but did in fact cut child poverty in half – and, of course, when it went away, child poverty doubled again. So smart, they’re dumb, I said.

Finally, Be a Hero helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Demetrios Kouzoukas as a Medicare trustee. Because he makes six figures for a private, for-profit health insurance corporation that offers those notorious “Medicare Advantage” plans that siphon off taxpayer money toward bad health care plans! And won’t say whether he’ll stop taking private health insurance money if he works for our public health insurance plan! And don’t believe anyone who says that private health corporation executives know things. The only thing they know how to do is squeeze workers and customers for money, and that’s no skill to brag about.

Action: concerning medical debt, junk fees, and facial recognition.

Long story short: tell PA state legislators to make it easier to escape medical debt, tell our government to break up the Ticketmaster monopoly and end the abusive practice of assessing “junk fees,” and tell states to ban facial recognition software from our schools. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Pennsylvania Health Access Network helps you tell your state Senator to pass legislation helping good Pennsylvanians escape medical debt more easily. Don’t fall for any ball-swinging about how if you didn’t want the crushing debt, you should’ve done things differently, because thanks to banksters and big health insurance corporations anyone can take on medical debt at any time, no matter how many miles they run or how much fiber they eat, and it’s not like you ever have the “option” to just get sicker because you never know which medical practitioner is suddenly not in your network anymore. Our PA House already passed this legislation; now our Senate must act.

MoveOn helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to break up the Ticketmaster monopoly and end their notorious practice of assessing “junk fees.” You know what a junk fee is just by looking at the last ticket you bought and see all the “convenience fees” and “ticket fees” and “delivery fees” and “order fees” and “fuck you we do what we want fees” (did I make that last one up? It sure doesn’t seem like it) that balloon the price of your ticket far beyond what they said it’d cost. And Ticketmaster can get away with that because they basically control the entire ticket market these days. Monopolies only benefit already overpaid corpulent executives; regular folks like us deserve better.

Fight for the Future helps you tell states to ban facial recognition software in our schools. Where does one start with this absurdly shitty idea? With the software’s apparent inability to tell Black folks apart any better than your right-wing uncle does? With all the data this software collects about students that can be monetized and used against them? With the corporate welfare inherent in handing out taxpayer money to private corporations to create bad software? With administrators abandoning any pretense that they’ll simply walk around the school and find out where folks are and what they’re doing? I really don’t know where to start with this one. I know where to end, though: by telling states to kill it dead.

Around the table: don't let evil get you down, part 875.

Here’s an incredible story: the mainstream Israeli media is raking Binyamin Netanyahu over the coals for failing to anticipate the biggest terrorist attack on Israel Hamas had ever managed, and I say good for them, because, really, you shouldn’t get to say only I can protect you and then utterly fail to do that. Imagine if American media outlets had castigated George W. Bush for failing to anticipate 9.11 in advance; even 22 years later they’re too scared to do that! And now they’re also afraid to do that to Mr. Netanyahu, and he’s not even an American politician.

In a related note, Maariv poll shows Israeli public support for the Netanyahu axis absolutely cratering, and though voters’ apparent preference for the Benny Gantz axis ain’t much better, this finding is the precise opposite of what most of us who lived under otherwise improbable sky-high George W. Bush approval ratings would expect, and which only reinforces my conviction that Donald Trump threw Mr. Netanyahu under the bus the other day because he knows as well as I do that Mr. Netanyahu’s done. But it also reinforces my general optimism about the human race – genocide, it turns out, is not popular.

When I hear that our IRS has audited Microsoft to the tune of almost $30 billion, I feel compelled to say that this is why we passed the Inflation Reduction Act, for though this particular audit is a decade in the making, it began before Republicans in Congress started slashing our IRS’s budget due to bogus charges of bias. When you see how Microsoft did it – channeling profits through a Mexico warehouse it owned that merely burned software onto CDs – you probably won’t even be impressed with their chutzpah. Imagine being the guy who defends that sort of thing!

When confronted with the horror of the right wing’s “Project 2025” program – which would (if Mr. Trump wins the Presidency in 2024) replace virtually everyone in the Executive branch with Trumpholes so he doesn’t have to face any accountability for what he’s done anymore – I realize that one way to put their program is that they would defund the police. I mean the police who go after corrupt politicians, but I wouldn’t even put that descriptor in an ad; I’d just say defund the police over and over again, because these haters don’t deserve the gift of nuance.

Did late night “sensation” Greg Gutfeld really say we shouldn’t have elections anymore because the fact that January 6 protestors got longer sentences than Philadelphia looters “proves” that “elections don’t work”? Why, yes, he did. Pssst: they got longer sentences because trying to nullify the will of the American people with violence is actually a worse crime than looting. So let me guess how he deals with the backlash: I was just joking. HA HA HA NO MORE VOTING HA HA HA! Seriously, why can’t right-wingers STFU about the Philly looters? They sound like people who don’t have a leg to stand on. Worse, they sound like people who know they don't have a leg to stand on, and don't have the guts to admit it.

Finally, Amanda Marcotte reviews the trouble Republicans are having finding a new Speaker of the House after deposing the last one for whatever reason. I heartily approve of the layups she takes here – “So much for fascist order and discipline,” “Calling this a ‘clown show’...is unfair to the skill and training of actual clowns,” “Aren't far-right movements supposed to make the trains run on time?” – but hang on, also, for more trenchant observations like “authoritarian movements valorize assholes, mistaking cruelty for strength and showboating for passion.” By the end we will be reminded that the only thing fascists excel at is murder.

Action: concerning internet freedom, health care, and pollution.

Long story short: tell our FCC to bring back net neutrality, tell the Biden Administration to make over-the-counter birth control pills free to all Americans, and tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous auto emissions standards possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to reinstate network neutrality protections post-haste. Net neutrality would ensure that your internet service-providing corporation won’t slow down or censor websites you want to see merely so they can push junk news in front of your face or favor websites they want you to see (likely because those websites paid your internet service-providing corporation). It’s one of the few political issues that unites liberal and conservative – which of course meant it was over a decade of pulling teeth to get our FCC to enact it, and then of course meant the Trump FCC repealed it, because people don't matter to Trump, only bosses do. So let’s bring back net neutrality, and make Americans matter again.

Daily Kos helps you tell the Biden Administration to compel health insurance corporations to cover over-the-counter birth control without cost to good Americans. Let right-wingers throw a tantrum over such an event if they like! They always throw tantrums whenever women get something good in their lives! And while having to get a prescription for birth control pills is obstacle enough, cost is also a pretty big hurdle, as you would know if you compared the cost of virtually any over-the-counter medicine with a prescription versus without. Women deserve control over their bodies, and they deserve to control their bodies without having to worry about whether they can afford it. If you have to pay more for it, after all, it’s not a right, is it?

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous auto emissions standards possible. Who wants to pay more for gas and have their cars belch more filth into our air and water? No one, not even the most right-leaning individual you know. But then the big oil corporations don’t want to do it, and then the most right-leaning individual you know – who really would like to pollute less and make cars run more efficiently – winds up squealing about TEH BIG GUMMINTZ REGULASHUNZ!!!!! and TEH FREE MARKETZ!!!!!! and this is why we can’t talk anymore even though we all want the same things. But talk past them, and to our EPA, and we might get some things done in America.

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, Social Security and Medicare, and food labeling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop enabling Israel’s occupation of Palestine, reject any Social Security/Medicare-cutting commission, and pass the Food Date Labeling Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Jewish Voice for Peace and Roots Action help you tell your Congressfolk to stop enabling the Israeli occupation of Palestine. No use saying Hamas started it, and not just because it would take forever to unwind the you-started-it thread – it all comes back to one nation having the power to exterminate another, which Israel can do to Palestine mainly because of our support. No less an authority than Amnesty International has declared Israel an “apartheid regime,” and it’s beyond sad to hear Israel’s Defense Minister call Palestinians “human animals” as if no one had ever called Jews that. We don’t want extermination on our conscience, I trust.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to create a “closed door” commission so Congress can cut Social Security and Medicare benefits without oversight by the American people. That’s their whole argument: the cuts “need” to be made, so we have to give Congress more power to do it. But it’s horseshit – all we need do is start taxing income over $160,200 into the system, and we won’t need any “commissions” to make “hard decisions” about our earned benefits. No, they’re not “entitlements”! Our government didn’t give them to us out of the goodness of their hearts; we fought for them, and we’ll keep fighting for them, because you have to fight for the future every day in this life.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Food Date Labeling Act, which would streamline our food labeling system so that we throw away perfectly good food a lot less than we do now. Say goodbye to “sell by,” “freshest on,” and “expires on,” and say hello to “best if used by” and “use by,” the former of which tells you when food starts to deteriorate and the latter of which tells you how long you can eat that food. A staggering 40% of the food we make in America ultimately goes to waste, which in turn means we waste a lot of water and energy, too, not to mention there are starving kids right here in America; the Food Date Labeling Act will help us, as they say, waste not and want not.

Action: concerning violence against protestors, medical debt, and ALEC.

Long story short: tell Iran to free Toomah Salehi, tell our CFPB to force big credit-reporting corporations to exclude medical debt from credit reports, and tell big corporations to stop funding ALEC. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Iran to release hip hop artist and activist Toomaj Salehi immediately. (Mr. Salehi protested Iran’s hijab law after “morality police” killed Mahsa Amini over it last year.) Iran’s habit of arresting and torturing protestors does not exactly win hearts and minds among the world’s peoples, and convicting Mr. Salehi of an obviously made-up crime like “corruption on Earth” only reveals their utter insecurity, like the proverbial naked emperor who, upon finding everyone laughing at him, retaliates with mass shootings. And while, as Americans, we need to remember our own complicity in this horror – our government helped topple a democratically-elected leader, then installed a Shah so foolish and venal he gave Muslim fundamentalism its opening – we also need to fight fascism wherever we see it, and whatever the flavor, it’s operating in Iran today.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to force big credit-reporting corporations to exclude medical debt from our credit ratings. Currently the Equifax/TransUnion/Experian axis won’t do that, because including medical debt on credit ratings makes it harder for good Americans to get good credit, and that tends to benefit the worst actors among our bankster class. But our CFPB argues that medical debt has nothing to do with someone’s credit-worthiness, and they’re absolutely right – if you get sick, and your employer gives you crappy health insurance, what are you supposed to do, stay sick or die? Our CFPB looks ready to do our will here, but they still need to hear from us.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Think of any BS laws we’ve had to fight over the last couple of decades – “voter ID” laws, the “Stand Your Ground” laws racist states don’t even consistently enforce, laws criminalizing protest against corporate power – and you’ll likely see the gray, gnarled hand of ALEC behind it. At least 100 big corporations (including Coca-Cola, Walmart, Verizon, and Amazon) have dumped ALEC over the years thanks to our agitation, but that still leaves such big corporations as Pfizer, Chevron, UPS, FedEx, Eli Lilly, Anheuser-Busch, and (surprise, surprise!) Koch Industries. So we’ve got some work to do.

Action: concerning voting rights, solitary confinement, and our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect voting rights, end solitary confinement at federal prisons, and protect our CFPB from Republicans who'd defund it. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our voting rights, including passing the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The former bill would, among other good works, force big donors to disclose their campaign contributions and prevent partisan state legislatures from gerrymandering Congressional seats to their own advantage; the latter bill would force any state or locality (even one outside the South!) that routinely suppresses voting rights to submit their election law changes for Justice Department review. Doesn’t matter that big-drama Republicans don’t want to do it, because they will, eventually, pay the price for refusing to listen to us. But only if we’re loud enough.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Solitary Confinement Act. Two centuries ago, Quakers conceived of solitary confinement as a way for a criminal to reflect on his wrongdoing, but in modern hands solitary too often becomes a way of punishing without rehabilitating, plus we use it all the time, and plenty of tools lose effectiveness when overused. The End Solitary Confinement Act would outlaw solitary at federal prisons, except for four-hour periods, and even then only as a way to de-escalate crises; the bill would also expand oversight and due process for prisoners. Don’t listen to anyone who says it sounds like you want every prison to be Club Med! Treating prisoners like human beings and actively helping them rehabilitate themselves ain’t fucking Club Med, and anyone who says so is an asshole. End of.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to subject our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to the Congressional appropriations process. Currently our Federal Reserve funds our CFPB, using fees from banks, and before you think but maybe Congress should always get to appropriate funds for federal agencies, note well that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (or FDIC) and Federal Housing Finance Agency (or FHFA) also get their funding from our Federal Reserve, and ain’t nobody whining about that! If folks only whine about our CFPB getting such funding, maybe our CFPB's doing something right! So let’s keep it that way. And here's three more words that describe those who would zero out CFPB funding: defunding the police.

Action: concerning bankster pay, big ag, and food safety.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the RECOUP Act, reject the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression Act, and pass the Expanded Food Safety Investigation Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Take On Wall Street helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Recovering Executive Compensation Obtained from Unaccountable Practices (or RECOUP) Act. Remember how the Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic, and Signature Bank (the last one had Barney Frank as a director, ha ha) all collapsed a little over six months ago? And did you know that Silicon Valley Bank’s CEO sold over $3 million in stock right before its collapse and a few First Republic executives sold about $12 million in stock in the months before its collapse? The RECOUP Act would, as its acronym implies, allow our government to recoup such executive compensation a full two years before a bank collapse. Maybe that’ll teach executives that they’re supposed to look out for their customers before they look out for themselves! OK, perhaps not. But if we don’t come out in force for this bill, it’ll be much harder to provide such teachable moments to executives in the future.

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression Act. The bill sure sounds like it has a good name, but it’s an Orwellian title like so many others: it would nullify any state and local laws governing animal cruelty and food safety, which I have to say is real fucking “small government” of them! Right-wingers insist that the smallest communities know best how to govern themselves – until those communities stand up to right-wingers’ big ag paymasters and won’t allow them to put animals in cages in which they can barely stand or pollute their rivers with hog poop. I think the smallest community should get to set stricter standards without worrying about how billionaire corporations will cope – and if they want to set looser standards, we have to make damn sure they don't hurt anyone else. But you don’t get to have “states’ rights” just to oppress Black and Brown folks but not for anything else. End of.

Finally, in a related note, the Center for Science in the Public Interest helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Expanded Food Safety Investigation Act, which would allow Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) and Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) workers to go into factory farms and sample the kinds of diseases animals have that people could get. No use squealing BUTZ TEH ADMINISTRATIVZ STATEZ!!!!! about this, since a disease doesn’t respect state or local boundary lines any more than processed food does. How are we going to stop pandemics if we don’t deploy people to where they might be able to stop them? And why must corporate profits always be more important than our health, or our civilization? Folks who’d want to “debate” these matters should have no say about a damn thing in America.

Action: concerning corruption, gerrymandering, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to call for Sen. Menendez’s resignation, tell the Wisconsin state legislature to abandon its election-nullification scheme in impeaching Justice Protasiewicz, and tell your Congressfolk to let our Postal Service offer more services. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Peace Action helps you tell your Senators to demand the resignation of Sen. Bob Menendez already. Just like Brett Kavanaugh and so, so many others, Mr. Menendez pretends not to know the difference between the right to presumption of innocence and the “right” to a position of power; he also, not incidentally, pretends that the people of New Jersey are really, really rooting for him, when the only reason they even put him in office is that they can’t stand the idea of putting a Republican in our Senate. In other words, read the room, dude! Anyway, only two kinds of people keep half a million dollars in cash in their homes: old people who don’t trust banks, and corrupt people. I’m pretty sure I know which category I’d put Bob Menendez in.

Rise helps you tell the Wisconsin state legislature to abandon its efforts to impeach Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz before she’s even heard a case. Their BS reason for impeaching her? Oh, she criticized gerrymandering on the campaign trail, which they think “prejudices” her. But everyone except elected politicians who couldn't win without gerrymandering opposes gerrymandering! It’s not a tough thing to say, and doesn’t even predict how she’d rule on a particular gerrymandering case (see Kennedy, Anthony). So, you think they’ll listen to us? They won’t want to. But they also won’t want to be humiliated by public outcry against their obvious folly, and they’ll only feel that humiliation if we all speak out against them. And make no mistake: they’re trying to nullify the people’s will as expressed in an election, so they deserve all the humiliation we can give them.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to improve our Postal Service by allowing it to offer new services, like postal banking, selling public transportation tickets, and checking in on seniors. That’d be better than the coward’s way out of slashing jobs, raising prices, and cutting services, and maybe letting our Post Offices offer more services is a far better way to ensure we have a Postal Service in the future – a Postal Service that our Constitution has actually mandated into existence and requires that we maintain, I feel compelled to point out. The privatizers will tell you that a privatized Postal Service could fulfill that Constitutional mandate with enough oversight. If you believe that, I’ve got some extra scholarships to Trump University to sell you.