Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning government spying, defense spending, and worker safety.

First things first. The House will vote today on legislation that would prevent our FBI from using Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act to spy on our internet histories without a warrant. No one objects to a search conducted once our government gets a warrant, but for damn near 20 years now, our government has used the "war on terror" to justify spying on good Americans unconstitutionally. This is one of the reasons we revolted against Great Britain in the first place! Our Founders were tired of British soldiers busting doors down and turning their houses over whenever they felt like it, and for good reason: folks deserve to be free from harassment by their government. (No, paying taxes to cover health care isn't "harassment." Like I didn't see that coming!) Anyway, you can either call your House Reps and demand that they pass the Lofgren/Davidson amendment (formerly the Wyden/Daines amendment that failed by one vote in the Senate) that would restrict government spying, or you can let Defending Rights and Dissent help you email them.

Meanwhile, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban any arms sales to Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates for the next five years -- which would emphatically curtail our involvement in their war on Yemen. They'll whine that Congress shouldn't tell them what to do, but that is, in fact, Congress's precise role as our Founders envisioned it -- to tell our President whether or not he can go to war, or even spend money helping other countries go to war. Remember all that "foreign entanglements" talk in history class? Yeah, it was a real thing. Of course, there's a recent news hook -- our President just so happened to fire a State Department Inspector General who just so happened to be looking into Secretary of State Pompeo's $8 billion weapon sale to Saudi Arabia, which bypassed stated Congressional will and may have been illegal to boot. It won't be enough to drain this particular Presidential swamp; we'll also have to make sure future Presidents don't create similar swamps, and one way to do that is to restore Congressional prerogative and power in this instance.

Finally, you've seen those Amazon ads in which they take worker temperatures and such? They're really trying to reassure us that we won't get COVID-19 from our even-more-ubiquitous Amazon packages! But how serious can they be if they're firing workers who blow the whistle on squalid conditions at Amazon warehouses? They should just be able to refute their arguments with facts! Particularly if they're worth $24 billion more than they were at the start of our government's attempts to contain this pandemic, as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos now is. I mean, they say such riches are an achievement, after all, and even if one disagrees (ahem!), a man with $24 billion more than he had just two months ago shouldn't have to resort to firing "troublemakers." So MoveOn helps you tell Mr. Bezos to better protect his workers' (and therefore the public's!) health and reinstate those fired workers right away. He's not insensitive to public pressure, after all -- it's the only reason Amazon hiked worker wages a few years ago! So let's deliver that pressure.

UPDATE. Apparently Democratic leadership has blown so many holes in the Lofgren/Davidson amendment to the PATRIOT Act reauthorization bill that Defending Rights and Dissent has withdrawn its endorsement of the amendment; you can still call your Congressfolk and tell them that you support the Wyden/Daines amendment to the Senate bill, even if the Senate didn't pass it. Remember: it doesn't matter what they want; it matters what we want. I'm going to keep saying that until we all believe it -- and when that happens, the politicians had better watch out.

Action: concerning good pandemic legislation.

Stop me if you've heard this story before: our House passed H.R. 6800, the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (or HEROES) Act, and since it would help states and localities, fund our Post Office, extend higher unemployment benefits, expand working family tax cuts while repealing a big hedge fund manager tax cut, and issue another round of (bigger) stimulus checks, it better resembles a real pandemic relief bill than the corporate-welfare-larded CARES Act. So naturally our Senate says they won't ever pass it -- and instead they'll concentrate on ensuring that big corporations get immunity from lawsuits for opening their doors before they're supposed to. But if we all call our Senators and demand that they pass the HEROES Act, we'll stand a better chance of success; tying up their phone lines is something they notice, after all. Tools for finding your Senators' phone numbers are in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone).

Meanwhile, no law prevents you from specifically telling your Senators to reject the McConnell plan to give out said "blanket immunity" to corporations over COVID-19 issues, as Public Citizen helps you do. (You can add that to your phone call above, if you like.) I mention this mainly because Public Citizen frames the issue in a way I'd neglected to do thus far: around your "right to sue," or, more specifically, your right to redress grievances, in court, against those who harm you. The tort "reform" crowd loves to trick you with isolated stories about the lamest lawsuits they can find -- and the punchline of most of these stories is that the lawsuits failed, or that judges reduced the largest awards! Which means they're not even good stories! But isolated anecdotes ain't science, particularly in a nation where corporations file the vast majority of all lawsuits, and isolated anecdotes certainly don't prove that the harm done to you wasn't real. So when they talk about "frivolous" lawsuits, just remember they're trying to hurt you.

Finally, continuing with our CARES Act corporate welfare them, Daily Kos helps you demand that our Congress impose criminal penalties for corporate CEOs who misuse CARES Act funding. CARES Act funding was, allegedly, supposed to keep good Americans working and reward corporations that kept good Americans working. Admittedly that's not the way I'd do it -- yes, I would mandate that our government create work for out-of-work Americans because hello! 39 million Americans unemployed in two months! But I digress. Sen. Warren (D-MA) asked Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin if he could ensure that corporations receiving CARES Act money will keep even one American working, or if he could ensure that executives who file false information about who they're helping could be held liable -- and of course he couldn't, because he belongs to the Administration That Only Cares About Bosses. So, yeah, we need to make some noise about that.

Action: helping small businesses yea, enabling financial predators nay.

Our House passed the HEROES Act late last week, and though it's a good bill offering real relief to those impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, we can do more. Hence H.R. 6918, the Paycheck Recovery Act, would deliver actual help to small businesses (which the bill defines as having fewer than 20 employees, not "fewer than 500 at any one location" like the CARES Act) and guarantee continuing paychecks to those businesses' employees who make less than $90,000 who have lost their jobs during this pandemic. Close to 40 million Americans have now lost their job, and if I were a betting man I'd say most of them make less than $90,000. The assistance would end once the unemployment rate stays below seven percent for three months in a row. Oh, and no small business receiving assistance under this bill would be able to use the money for stock buybacks, executive bonuses, or payments to shareholders. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to help out small businesses and their employees by passing the Paycheck Recovery Act.

Meanwhile, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our government that, as they put it, "(a) pandemic is no time to gut the rules meant to keep consumers safe from financial scams." OK, there's never a good time to do that, but doing it now is just another gut-punch for good Americans, and this Administration is contemplating plenty of evil along these lines: they're trying to gut rules restricting predatory payday lenders, they're trying to lift rules on the kind of speculative trading that almost destroyed our economy in 2008, and they're trying to roll back rules that make banks invest in the communities in which they do business. Who told them that redlining and banksters and 300% payday loans are all popular? The self-interested fools who think whatever's good for them is good for America, and the idiots who have somehow dominated all debate on economic policy for the better part of the last half-century. I long for a land where hurting working people isn't the only policy choice, but first, let's stop the hurt as best we can.

Action: concerning government spying, worker safety, and affordable vaccines.

Our Senate passed a USA PATRIOT Act reauthorization bill last week that failed to include an amendment offered by Sens. Wyden (D-OR) and Daines (R-MT) that would have required our FBI to get a warrant before getting our internet search and browsing histories. Getting a damn warrant used to be fundamental law-and-order, but now most law-and-order types equate "supporting the police" with "letting the police do whatever they damn like no matter how many black men they kill without even charging them with anything," which makes such folks no better than the ones who seem to think a few old folks dying to restart the economy is A-OK. But I digress. No American should stand for our government being able to get our internet histories without a warrant issued by a judge who has been convinced by lawyers that they have a better than 50% chance of conviction if they get the warrant. Hence Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to demand that House leadership include the Wyden/Daines amendment in PATRIOT Act reauthorization, and thus protect our right not to have our government looking over our damn shoulder while we're surfing the web.

Meanwhile, our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) provides voluntary guidelines that would protect workers at essential workplaces -- if their employers would follow them! Alas, the word "voluntary" tells you why they don't, although corporations tend to fight the mere existence of voluntary guidelines, too, claiming that voluntary guidelines always turn into mandatory ones like being told to do the right thing is some great injustice. Along comes H.R. 6559, the COVID-19 Every Worker Protection Act, which would empower out Department of Labor to issue occupational health and safety standards that would protect health care workers who have a high risk of exposure to COVID-19. You might counter that our current Labor Secretary is Eugene Scalia, no great friend to the working family, but Labor Secretaries come and go, and laws like these mandate regulations, and if the Executive branch simply fails to issue regulations that conform to the obvious intent of the law, courts can correct them. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect American workers by passing the COVID-19 Every Worker Protection Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our President to end monopolies on life-saving drugs, like whatever working coronavirus vaccine eventually emerges, then Progress America still helps you do that. He'll most likely echo his HHS Secretary, Alex Azar, who said out loud that he couldn't ensure that a coronavirus vaccine would be affordable because "we need the private sector to invest." That statement is a multilayered onion of wrong. Big pharma corporations don't get rich by preventing people from dying, or "the private sector" would have created a coronavirus vaccine already. Getting "the private sector to invest" can't be that necessary since our government already shovels so much taxpayer money toward "private sector" drugs. You don't actually need the private sector to invest, if you're investing in the people's interest. And why does our government act like big pharma corporations have us all hostage? This is America, dammit, and Americans don't just throw up their hands and say "we need the private sector to invest" whenever we want to do great things. We do them.

Action: concerning Social Security, debt harassment, and pollution.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject this Administration's plan to cut folks four- or five-digit checks in exchange for having them defer collecting Social Security for a few more years when they're older, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. Of course, after one Administration spokeshack said that proposal was all but DOA, Larry Kudlow-who's-wrong-about-everything promptly said it was actually very much alive, so don't believe the hype coming from our Administration; rather, believe in your ability to make your representatives do what's right. It's not enough just to say this is like the Marco Rubio proposal to take from future Social Security benefits to fund paid family leave now -- we also have to confront the fact that we don't know what the future holds for us -- maintaining your health now gives you a better chance at a peaceful future, but it doesn't guarantee it -- and therefore we don't know if we're just going to be able to push off retirement a few more years when we're in our late '60s. Best to fight for the program you've worked for, paid into, and deserve to enjoy in your golden years.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or whatever it calls itself these days to crack down on debt collector harassment. Yes, debt collectors are still harassing good Americans with demands for payment as if the fact that almost a quarter of good Americans don't have enough work right now simply doesn't exist. But then, pretending that facts simply don't exist is becoming a survival strategy for big corporations! I mean, debt collectors have never been popular (and it is a tough job), but since the 2008 bankster meltdown big corporate lenders have rivaled them in unpopularity! And if you're still saying if you didn't want the debt collection calls you shouldn't have taken on the debt please do four things: 1) slap yourself, 2) contemplate how many houses and cars and college degrees you bought with cash, 3) contemplate more fully that folks take on debt so they can better their futures, and 4) attend the word "harassment" in the first sentence. Being reminded that a bill is due is one thing, but getting phone calls every two hours is another thing entirely.

Finally, stop me if you've heard this one before, but our Administration has decided to ignore its scientists, who recommended stricter regulations against soot pollution, and keep soot pollutions standards exactly where they are. Well, they may not be our Administration's scientists anymore, since EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler replaced the panel working on soot standards with a more industry-friendly panel, so that they could "find" that coal and oil and wood just don't put that many pollutants in our air! Is it a victory that our Administration didn't propose weakening them? Nah, you know what they say: if you're standing still, you're losing ground, particularly when Harvard scientists have lately found that soot pollution increases your risk of death from the coronavirus, which conclusion is hardly a great leap from figuring that any air pollution makes breathing harder, and thus makes diseases that hinder your breathing more deadly. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell our EPA to better protect the health of good Americans by strengthening soot standards, as our EPA's own scientists recommended.

Action: concerning voting rights, corruption, toxic waste, and paid sick leave.

Happy Tuesday! Now call your Senators and tell them to protect voting rights, internet freedom, secure pensions, higher wages, and many other good things by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. And if folks say don't you know there's a pandemic going on, remind them that leaders (which our Senators are, sadly) don't get to take tine off from doing the right thing.

Meanwhile, our Justice Department so-called continues its quest to gut the False Claims Act, our most powerful weapon against governmental fraud, waste, and abuse, because DRAIN TEH SWAMPZ!!!!! Seriously, how does someone "serious" about corruption conclude that the False Claims Act is the problem? Probably the same way someone concludes that Medicare is the "real price-fixer" even though it has literally no authority to negotiate the price of drugs. Anyway, our Justice Department wants the power to dismiss whistleblower claims without said whistleblowers ever getting hearings. And what if whistleblowers aim to expose wrongdoing by our Justice Department itself? Aw, come on, you can trust our Justice Department! But we didn't earn a thriving democracy by trusting our leaders, we got it by checking them. And not for nothing, but with more than $3 trillion in new deficit spending these past two months, there's going to be a lot of corruption to find. Hence the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell our Justice Department to end its quest to gut the False Claims Act.

In other news, our Environmental Protection Agency, ever looking for important work to avoid doing, has allowed the number of unfunded Superfund sites in need of serious toxic waste cleanup to triple just since Andrew Wheeler became EPA Administrator. Maybe you'll say well, it tripled to only 34, but that's the most in 15 years, and you won't be impressed very much with the math if you live near one and thus face the prospect of lead, mercury, arsenic, and other toxins in your air and water, and all the health care issues that go with it. How many times must I tell these pimps! Spending money now to clean up the Love Canals of this nation saves us all money later in health care costs -- but it doesn't save some polluter corporation CEO enough money to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home, I suppose. Seriously, this Administration does not care about you, unless you're a boss, too. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to do its damn job and clean up Superfund sites already. I know, we're always telling this government to do its damn job, but that's our duty as Americans, and we'll keep doing it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell McDonald's to provide paid sick and family leave to all of its employees, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Hey, I'm not going to argue with all of the harried parents who just want to get something in their kids' stomachs, but if McDonald's is going to be an "essential" business, then its workers are essential, too, and McDonald's should treat them as such. And you know, I barely touched on this last time, but I should say more about it: fast-food workers are-so skilled. It isn't just that people who call them "unskilled" would melt down before the pressure of drive-through; it's that, basically, Our Glorious Elites have always spent all their time cutting down working people, in every era. You know how we hold manufacturing workers in such high esteem today? We didn't when they were the backbone of our economy -- we said they were mere machine jockeys with jobs monkeys could do. Let's try to remember that next time we're tempted to give a cashier the side-eye.

Action: concerning good pandemic legislation, medical supplies, stock trading, and drilling royalties.

The House passed H.R. 6800, the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (or HEROES) Act, last Friday night, but the Republican-held Senate has described the bill as "dead on arrival," even though (as a pair of ITEP analyses instructs us) the HEROES Act is a lot more like a good pandemic relief bill than the CARES Act. The HEROES Act provides help for states and localities, extends unemployment insurance, expands the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC), funds our Post Office through an election during which they'll be quite busy, repeals a particularly noxious tax-cut-for-the-rich, and expands direct payments to Americans making less than six figures. So now would be a good time to call your Senators and demand they pass the HEROES Act -- not least so that we render irrelevant Republican "priorities" like a payroll tax-cut-for-the-rich and "blanket immunity" for corporations that open too early. Senators should only find their constituents' will relevant, but let's not give them the excuse that we never communicated that will.

Meanwhile, we've all seen how our President likes to hijack medical supplies, to the point where hospitals have marked trucks containing medical supplies as food trucks so the feds wouldn't take them. But now comes S. 3627, the Medical Supply Transparency and Delivery Act, which would help bring an end to this Wild West state of affairs by requiring our government to coordinate requests for medical supplies from states and localities, establish fair pricing for these supplies, and communicate with states and localities a whole hell of a lot better than they've been doing. Don't suppose we shouldn't leave such matters to our federal government, particularly this one, but COVID-19 doesn't respect state boundaries, as all those too-early-reopening red states are finding out as we speak, amirite? So Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to help get medical supplies where they're needed by passing the Medical Supply Transparency and Delivery Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to ban stock trading by members of Congress, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. We've long heard that our leaders don't need to follow the rules because they can be trusted to do the right thing, but that's un-American, if I may be blunt -- our duty as Americans demands that we never "trust" our leaders, but always hold them to the high standards that come with their leadership positions! Of course, with our current President apparently running a months-long seminar in How Not to Lead, I guess it's easy to see how we got confused. But with the FBI now formally investigating Sen. Burr's massive stock dump after he received a briefing on how bad COVID-19 was about to be, and with too many other members of Congress (roll call! Kelly Loeffler! James Inhofe! Dianne Feinstein! Donna Shalala!) under public scrutiny for doing similar things, we should now have enough evidence that we can't trust our leaders to place our interests above their own.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Interior Secretary to stop cutting the royalties that oil and gas corporations must pay to drill on public lands, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. One fine day -- preferably after we support renewable energy much better than we currently do -- we won't allow any pollution on public lands! But until then, they shouldn't pay less to the taxpayer (i.e., you) for the privilege! That's right, when gas and oil corporations get to drill on the land that belongs to the American people, they have to pay the American people for the privilege -- which means if our government rolls back drilling royalties, they are taking food out of your mouth. No, I think that's a perfectly valid way of seeing it -- your money pays for the services you need and deserve, and when you have less money (as you would, if our Administration continues to get its way on this matter), you get fewer services or worse services. And you're an American! So you don't have to put up with that.

Action: concerning human rights, Social Security, and pandemic gouging.

I was skeptical of H.R. 5880, the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act, when I saw that it would give our President the duty of imposing sanctions on nations that commit genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity; I'd prefer to get that kind of power away from the Executive branch, which already conducts too much foreign policy unilaterally. But Title II would establish a 10-member United States Commission on Atrocity Accountability and Human Rights, who would have to deliver at least one report annually (to Congress, the Secretary of State, and the President) detailing which countries the President should sanction, and that would give we-the-people additional leverage to pressure our President to do the right thing. And when H.R. 5880 talks about "sanctions," it talks exclusively in terms of things like arms sales and "security assistance," so I say H.R. 5880 would improve what is, at present, a very politicized process. Hence World Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act.

Meanwhile, our Administration has floated a scheme -- called the "Eagle Plan," like they're aliens from another planet seeing American patriotic symbols for the first time! -- to offer good Americans $5,000 or $10,000 if they'll just raise their retirement age. And like their earlier plan to offer paid family leave now in exchange for fewer Social Security benefits later, this is exactly the kind of short-term thinking that has been destroying America for the last 40-plus years. And it's also exactly the kind of evil that governments perpetrate on desperate citizens after enacting policies that make them more desperate -- as our President's abject mishandling of this pandemic just so happens to have done, now that over 33 million more good Americans have no job and 27 million of these have no health insurance. They might be more receptive now to a four- or five-digit bribe, but money flies away and they'll be sorry when they're 70 and still working. So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject this new scheme to cut your Social Security benefits.

Finally, corporations like GrubHub are actually thriving in the midst of this pandemic, because they can get food from local restaurants to your door without you or restaurant employees having to go out and risk death -- but GrubHub also appears to be gouging those restaurants with outlandish commissions and fees! It's like GrubHub doesn't know there's a whole other meaning to the word "grub"! Hence Color of Change helps you tell GrubHub's CEO to cap its commissions at 10% and drop its usurious fees. You'd think they'd be content with the increased business (if not the reason for the increased business), but once a corporation makes itself "the name" in some area, as GrubHub is the name in food delivery services right now, it's like it thinks it has a license to steal. And, not for nothing, but it wouldn't be too much to ask that our government use the power we have given it to stop monopolies from happening in the first place. The BLACK HELICOPTURZ1!!!! crowd would squeal, but they don't get all the say about everything. Not in my America, at least.

Action: concerning better pandemic relief legislation and better energy policy.

H.R. 6800, the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (or HEROES) Act, would provide another $3 trillion in pandemic relief, and it would do a lot more good than the CARES Act did, since it would provide $500 billion in state and local assistance and $200 billion to front-line essential workers, extend unemployment benefits and student loan debt relief, fund more COVID-19 testing and tracing, give additional help to farmers and low-income renters, bolster both our Post Office and our election security, and provide another round of direct payments to Americans ($1,200 each, for up to five household members). And yet it could be better! So Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to include the Paycheck Guarantee Act in the bill, so that good Americans making up to $100,000 annually can continue to get paid and keep their health insurance coverage even after they've been laid off. And since Senate Republicans have already said they won't vote on it, you can call your Senators and tell them they should pass it. They'll never see it coming.

Of course, Senate Republicans have fixated on blanket immunity against lawsuits for corporations as pandemic "relief," though that won't resonate with a lot of good Americans, who are more likely to be a plaintiff than a defendant. Really, only a few Americans get their shorts in a bunch over TEH FRIVOLOUX LAWSUITZ!!!! But all Republicans can think about, in the middle of a pandemic that's put over 30 million good Americans out of work, is protecting big corporations from their own wrongdoing, particularly if they reopen before state/local/federal guidelines say they can. And this ain't about corporations losing lawsuits and going under -- they've got enough well-paid lawyers and it's already hard to prove wrongdoing because the Founders designed our justice system to protect the innocent. No, this is all about the hassle of fighting lawsuits, since politicians seem to care more about a rich man's hassle than a poor man's misery. But People for the American Way help you tell your Congressfolk to reject "blanket immunity" for corporations. (Alternately, you could add this to the end of your phone call to your Senators.)

Finally, this pandemic continues to show us the necessity of having clean air and a livable planet -- or so I would hope! So the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to put funding for renewable energy ahead of funding for fossil fuels, for once. Your Tea Party uncle might tell you that things like the Green New Deal are a way of sending us back to the 1800s -- you know, those halcyon days when everyone powered their washing machines and flat-screen TVs with solar panels and wind turbines! But most folks, across the political spectrum, think renewable energy will improve on our current system and promote self-reliance. And your average renewable energy setup will cause a lot less pollution than burning coal, gas, and oil does, which means cleaner air, which means more breathable air, which means less asthma and lung disease, which means fewer good Americans placed at the mercy of a COVID-19 pandemic. It also means less spending on health care -- which means renewable energy isn't just the environmentally-conscious option but also the fiscally-responsible option. How odd that more "moderate" politicians don't talk this way.

Action: concerning unemployment, energy policy, public water, and factory farms.

One of the few good things to come out of the CARES Act was an expansion of unemployment benefits; now guess what our government wants to get rid of ASAP? The benefits expire at the end of July, but given the jones so many of our elected leaders have to "reopen" the economy, we could be back in the middle of an unflattened curve by then. And some of them say it's OK if some folks die if we "reopen" the economy faster! Apparently they do not know the definition of "mammon-worship" anymore. But over 30 million folks are out of work, the official U3 unemployment rate is over 14% (and the real U6 unemployment rate, which also counts the discouraged and underemployed, is almost 23%), and not that many Americans will be rushing into Best Buy even if they all open up tomorrow, so I think we should be prudent and prepare for the likelihood that workers will be unemployed past July. Also, too, when the answer to every question is GOVERNMENT SHOULDZ DO TEH NOTHINGZ!!!!, it's well past time to look at the man in the mirror. The Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the unemployment insurance boost past its original expiration date.

Meanwhile, too many politicians want future pandemic relief legislation to include corporate welfare handouts for big oil and gas corporations, and our Administration has rolled back oil and gas royalty rates on public lands even though that's our damn money! But along comes H.R. 6707/S. 3611, the Resources for Workforce Investments, Not Drilling (or ReWIND) Act, which would keep big fossil fuel corporations from taking funds meant for working families and small businesses, roll back our President's drilling royalty cuts, block new gas and oil leases, and stop banksters from taking over any oil or gas corporations in trouble. The bill would also prevent our Administration from overstocking oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, since seizing resources and directing them to where they're not needed seems to be a pattern with this President. And if right-wingers respond by whining about the bill's "Democrat priorities," they run the risk of suggesting that preventing corruption and mismanagement is only a "Democrat priority." So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to support saner energy policy by passing the ReWIND Act.

In other news, Nestlé plans to siphon off yet another source of public water at pennies a gallon, in order to make absurdly more expensive and not significantly more convenient bottled water -- this time at Ginnie Springs in northwestern Florida, and this though Ginnie Springs is dangerously low, and largely from overpumping. As it happens, the Suwannee River Water Management District has already heeded the thousands of public comments it received on this matter, and has thus denied Nestlé any new permits -- but Nestlé, of course, is taking the matter to court, because, as we know, corporations never ever file frivolous lawsuits! Only injured people ever do that, with the help of mustache-twirling trial lawyers! That's what right-wingers say, anyway. But big corporations don't need to take public water in order to make bottled water; rather, our state, local, and federal governments need to manage water effectively on our behalf and with the tax dollars we pay them. Hence Environmental Action helps you tell Nestlé to abandon its plans to drain Ginnie Springs merely for mammon.

Finally, H.R. 6718/S. 3221, the Farm System Reform Act, would not only ban new factory farms and the expansion of current ones, but would phase out current factory farms over the next 20 years. Factory farms aren't a more efficient way of delivering meat to consumers than small family farms: they're just a more efficient way of clogging up public waters with animal manure, and a more efficient way of redistributing income upward to executives. And they're also a more efficient way of making antibiotics useless, since some seven out of every 10 antibiotics in America still go to nominally healthy feed animals, so they produce more meat and so they better endure the squalid conditions of their imprisonment. To those who would still cite "high food prices" as a reason not to end this sordid state of affairs, we need but ask: how did Americans ever get enough to eat before factory farms came along? We did it through saner farming policy, of course, and not "big ag corporations know best" policy. So Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support better agricultural policy by passing the Farm System Reform Act.

Action: concerning good House bills, defense spending corruption, conservation funding, and tax-cuts-for-the-rich.

Happy Tuesday! Now call your Senators and tell them to protect voting rights, internet freedom, secure pensions, higher wages, and many other good things by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Yes, it's a pandemic, but the Senate is meeting, right now, to confirm some more right-wing anti-law-and-order federal judges, so certainly they can consider some good legislation while they're in town.

Meanwhile, our Defense Department has proposed rolling back the few protections we have against the "revolving" door between defense contracting corporations and our Defense Department, which is (at least nominally) supposed to consist of public servants. And I bet our right-wingers defend this action, claiming that "our President's getting rid of burdensome regulations" (as if laws against burglary "burden" thieves) or "the only people who understand defense spending are the ones who spend the money" (as if only thieves truly understand how you should dispose of your property!) or, perhaps, that you can trust this Administration to do the right thing, because our President is a "disruptor"! And there you have the real reason right-wingers might support such corruption -- because Their Man is doing it. Loyalty to people is always dicey, to say the least, but loyalty to our shared heritage as Americans (which includes our efforts to make America a more perfect union) will never let us down. So the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell our Defense Department to scuttle its own efforts to increase defense spending corruption.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislators to reject the current version of HB 1822, which aims to cut funding for 16 worthwhile conservation funds, then the Sierra Club helps you do that. One thing the latest Sierra Club missive mentions that I didn't last time: a lot more good Pennsylvanians are visiting our public parks these days, because with all the shops and restaurants closed, our public parks are about the only place you can go outside, enjoy yourself, and practice physical distancing, so cutting funding for them is a profoundly stupid thing to do during a pandemic. Of course the pandemic is their excuse in the first place -- let's stop spending money on these things, because we don't have as much of it. If only our politicians had that eye toward corporate welfare in state budgets! But they don't: they'd cut what actually keeps good Pennsylvanians' air and water clean long before they'd cut some unearned tax break for some corporate crony who didn't even use it to create jobs! Unless we remind them that we are their bosses, of course.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to repeal tax-cuts-for-the-rich passed in the CARES Act, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. That would be the $130-billion-plus tax break that only 43,000 rich Americans get! At a time when over 30 million Americans have lost their jobs and likely their health insurance as well, meaning they face crunching household debts at a time when they have no income! But all that's what you get when you put a "businessman" in charge of our government -- particularly a "businessman" who only cares about other bosses, not regular folk like us. And our Administration continues to swing how utterly out of touch they are in our faces, by sending out Larry Kudlow-who's-wrong-about-everything to propose more tax breaks for tourism and sporting events and more business expensing tax breaks as a way to solve this ongoing economic Armageddon. I don't imagine good Americans standing in line just to get in the supermarket finding any of that persuasive. Unless Democrats don't offer superior reasoning, that is.

Action: concerning government spying, immigration policy, paid sick leave, and corporate welfare.

Our Congressfolk hope to ram a PATRIOT Act reauthorization down America's throat this week, so Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop any extension or expansion of that law's abusing spying powers. I wish I could say this has been an exclusively Republican problem, but Democrats haven't been any better when they've been the gatekeepers -- two years of exclusive control of Congress and the Presidency yielded exactly bupkus as far as rolling back such abuses as warrantless wiretapping, and thanks to Edward Snowden we know that our government expanded its powers during the Obama years. Oddly, this President's NSA has declared it really doesn't need all that power to spy on American phone calls and emails, and historically it is odd for a government to give up a spying power it's gained. It's a lot easier for governments to give up the powers they use to restrain corporations and rich folks from abusing the rest of us, amirite? But let's keep working for a government that delivers the services we pay for with our taxes and then leaves us alone.

Meanwhile, our President has floated the possibility that he won't allow federal aid to flow to states with so-called "sanctuary cities"! Huzzah! Another right-wing hostage crisis! And another maneuver that makes our President looks like he's done something about the "scourge" of immigration when, in reality, he's done nothing, as usual. What is a "sanctuary city"? A city that won't cooperate with the feds on immigration matters unless the feds present a damn warrant; get a warrant and poof! No "sanctuary." You'd think right-wingers, who have swordfights all the time over who's "more conservative," would champion local control of law enforcement matters, but no -- instead, they make "sanctuary" just another cuss word! And our President benefits from undocumented immigrant labor as much as the next guy -- though his are "the best people," I bet! -- and has no interest in, say, letting farmworkers unionize under the National Labor Relations Act, which would actually result in fewer big ag corporations importing foreign workers to drive down everyone's wages. Anyway, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our Congressfolk to prevent our President tying aid to "sanctuary cities."

In other news, the ACLU helps you tell big fast food corporation McDonald's to give all its workers paid sick leave now. Like we've been saying, if they want to do business, they need to take all the steps necessary to ensure that you don't die from your next Big Mac, and that includes giving their workers paid sick leave so that they don't come to work sick and make everyone else sick and, you know, unflatten the curve. McDonald's has almost a million employees, whom they already don't pay enough, such that nearly half of McDonald's workers who come to work sick do so explicitly because they can't afford the loss of money; McDonald's should be paying its workers a lot more (and some people need to get over the notion that fast-food workers "don't have skills," at least until they take a turn at the drive-in window), but getting them paid sick leave will help in the meantime. And boy oh boy McDonald's had better not try to say that kind of decision-making is "up to the franchises." The "franchise" is a fiction executives use to deny accountability for their own failures. And the way they treat their workers sure does count as failure.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to block any attempt by our President to give a billion-dollar-plus bailout to the uranium mining industry. Let's make a list of things you can do with uranium, shall we? Well, there's making nuclear weapons, and powering nuclear power plants, and not a damn thing else. No, we don't use it in yellow paint anymore, because it's freaking poisonous. Scientists have long linked uranium to cancer, it leeches too easily into the water table, and uranium ore gives off radon gas; you know we get houses checked for radon before we move in for a good reason, right? And not for nothing, but uranium prices have basically cratered over the last 40 years, basically because you don't need any more nukes when you have enough to destroy the world hundreds of times over, and also because nuclear power plants don't make any money no matter how many corporate welfare handouts it gets. So isn't it a bit late to be giving the uranium mining industry a bailout? And don't renewable sources of energy look a lot better?

Action: concerning access to health care, oppression of Native Americans, and Congressional stock trading.

Win Without War helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) and our U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (or USPTO) to ensure that any medicines we develop to fight and defeat COVID-19 be free and available to anyone around the world who wants it. Don't believe the hype that corporations have a right to make whatever money they want off live-saving medicines! If we believe that, then we believe money is more important than human life, and I won't stand for that, not in my America. Don't even believe the hype that corporations deserve to make money because they spend so much money in research and development, because a) money spent in research and development is an expense, which they don't pay taxes on and b) they spend a lot of taxpayer money in research and development, too, which means they can submit to our will considerably more than they do. Too many politicians think power is all about socializing the risk and privatizing the profits; I long to live in an America where its people punish politicians who think like that. We used to do that, so we can do it again.

Meanwhile, our President actually took over 300 acres of land from the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe's reservation in Massachusetts, because the Mashpee decided to build a casino, and our President didn't want their casino to interfere with the nearby casinos in which some of his cronies had a vested interest! Folks, this is why you don't elect a "businessman" as President! This is why you don't let public servants have any "business interests" at all! (We're going to return to that latter notion in the next paragraph, by the way.) The Mashpee, for their part, have responded to this news: "We the People of the First Light have lived here since before there was a Secretary of the Interior, since before there was a State of Massachusetts, since before the Pilgrims arrived 400 years ago...This administration has come and it will go. But we will be here, always." Amen to that! Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop our President's money-grubbing by passing H.R. 312, the Support the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Reservation Reaffirmation Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation preventing any members of Congress from trading any stock at all, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. In the wake of Sen. Burr selling over $1.7 million in stock before the stock market crashed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we should recognize the value of having public servants who won't be hamstrung by their own private interests. And if the politicians think that's too much to ask, then they should quit and let better people have a turn! Seriously, Sen. Burr (and Sen. Loeffler, and Sen. Inhofe, and Sen. Feinstein) can surely find other work, work where they won't be tempted to sell out their constituents, who are their bosses. They tell me if I insist on such purity from people then there won't be anyone left to serve in Congress. That's a cynical attitude, of course, and cynicism is evil. But if we don't insist on such purity we won't get any purity at all. And we deserve a crapload more purity from our politicians than we're getting.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, pollution, and paid sick leave.

Happy Tuesday, good folks! Now call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. I know a lot of folks don't want to hear about voting rights, paycheck fairness, and the minimum wage right now because they want to get back to normal. But if we pass these bills, we can get a much better normal than the one we used to have. That normal wasn't good enough for a lot of Americans anyway.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: our reactionary state legislature advanced a pair of pro-pollution bills, HB 2146 and SB 327, on Earth Day, because HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW SNORT. Seriously, those of us who try to do better by our planet every day hardly have time for the sophomoric behavior of certain politicians. But HB 2146 and SB 327 would block state executive branch agencies from implementing any new clean air or clean water regulations until 90 days after our Governor's emergency declaration ends, because what says GAAAAH TEH EMERGENCIEZ!!!!! like "make sure big corporations can pollute more"? Seriously, it's like our politicians don't understand regular people like us -- as we look at this pandemic and say how do we pay the water bill this month?, they look at this pandemic and say "how do we let polluters pollute more?" The one way to get our legislators' attention, of course, is to communicate our will to them; the more they ignore our will, the bigger the chance they'll be looking for work come Election Day. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your PA state legislator to protect us from polluters by rejecting HB 2146 and SB 327.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Governor that we can't "reopen the economy" until we all have paid sick leave. I know, we all have a temptation to write sentences that go "we can't reopen the economy until (we do this thing that I always say we should do anyway)," but it's actually true with paid sick leave, because when workers don't have paid sick leave, they go to work sick, and they get their co-workers sick, and they get their customers sick, and if they get everyone sick with COVID-19 because Governors and Presidents tell everyone to get back to work already, then all the work we did trying to keep ourselves safe goes for nothing. And then we get to fight another round of trillion-dollar corporate welfare handouts! You have to wonder if that's our President's goal: to stoke the crisis wheel, and put us in the deepest possible fiscal hole, until we have no choice but to cleave to him. If that's his game, of course, I intend that he lose it, because I don't cleave to politicians, and I bet you don't, either. We cleave to the truth, and we tell the truth, and if the politicians don't get it, we tell it until they do.

Action: concerning further pandemic relief legislation.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Today's action alert is all about the next pandemic relief bill -- what it should have, what it shouldn't have. I think you can make this one a phone call to your Reps and Senators, but I've also included as many email/petition links as I have, if you're pressed for time. The next coronavirus pandemic relief bill should include the Paycheck Guarantee Act, emergency funding for our U.S. Postal Service, adequate health care for prisoners, and stronger worker safety protections at food processing plants. But the next relief bill should not have more funding for our President's vanity border wall or other welfare handouts for defense contractor corporations, payroll tax cuts, or lawsuit liability protections. (I don't have action alert links for those last two -- yet! -- but they're important.) I'll describe why all this is important, as briefly as possible, in the paragraphs below.

The Paycheck Guarantee Act (Congress.gov doesn't have a bill number, text, or summary at this writing) would cover 100% of paychecks for all workers making less than $100,000 who lose their jobs for the next three months, and would keep those workers enrolled in employer-sponsored benefits like health insurance. So, if we have 30 million unemployed, and pay them $5,000 a month for three months (which would be above the median salary for American workers), plus $3,000 for health insurance during that time (which would be above the average per capita spending on health insurance), we would spend $540 billion. We've already spent more than that on "small business" payroll protection, and most of that went to big corporations! And if your Tea Party uncle starts to ask where the money's coming from, just remind him that billionaires have made over $400 billion just in the last month and a half. You may also remind him that such concern about deficits and debts made more sense when Congress mostly threw away our money in the last pandemic relief bill. Really, it wouldn't be uncivil to do that.

We continue to demand better funding for our Post Office despite Presidential intransigence on the matter. He finally spelled out a condition under which he would accept such a thing happening -- and it involved quadrupling the prices our Post Office charges to good Americans like you and I! Think of that -- quadrupling the price on meds for our veterans via the VA! Quadrupling the price of mailing your stimulus check! Quadrupling the price of sending lab samples and reports all over America! And our Post Office might well be delivering our votes for President this November, and if it runs out of money before then, you think FedEx or UPS will deliver your votes? They will charge you a lot more -- a lot more than quadruple a postage stamp, too! -- and neither one of those corporations has ever handled anywhere near the volume of mail our Post Office handles routinely. Hate to pile on, but Congress put our Post Office in a position where a pandemic could have killed it by mandating that it pre-pay health insurance and pensions decades in advance, a condition Congress has imposed on literally no other entity. Why, you might think they were trying to kill our Post Office! But they still have to reckon with us.

Now, as far as making sure folks in prison get the medical care they need, I know a bunch of Americans will respond: why? Let me begin by appealing to their self-interest: prisoners do not get to practice "social distancing" -- why, many of them can't even pee in privacy! -- which means they're basically a massive Petri dish for COVID-19. And guess what? Prisoners are not the only folks who spend a lot of time in prisons! A prison full of COVID-19 sufferers will spread the disease to guards and administrators (who can't just do their jobs on Zoom, amirite?) and then they'll spread the disease to their families and communities, and then all the hard work the rest of us have done to stay safe could be for naught. And now, for those who do not listen to arguments involving self-interest: a great nation doesn't treat its prisoners like dung; a great nation treats its prisoners like they can actually rehabilitate themselves and contribute to society when they've repaid their debt to society. Don't let your right-wing friends respond BUT TEH MURDERERZ!!!! Most folks languishing in jail right now haven't been convicted of any crime.

Big Ag's role in the pandemic has come under some scrutiny lately, as our President has invoked the Defense Production Act -- but not to force big corporations to make ventilators or masks, but to keep big food processing corporations (even the ones where COVID-19 runs rampant!) making food. That'd seem like a reasonable exercise of his power under the law, if our President made these food processing corporations take more precautions to ensure their workers don't die and kill everyone else in their vicinity before they die, but of course he didn't, which is why we're asking Congress to do that in the next pandemic relief bill. Hey, if one thinks food processing corporations are that important, one must also believe that protecting the workers who make the food are also that important. I mean, our President may think only other bosses like himself are important, but Americans aren't like that. Put six beers into any of his votaries and most of them will tell you that they're not like that! Food processing workers aren't just folks we should work extra hard to protect in a pandemic, they're also our family, friends, and neighbors.

When contemplating even more corporate welfare handouts for defense contracting corporations, you must ask: aren't big defense corporations happy enough with the hundreds of billions of dollars they've gotten from the 46% President than they would have gotten from the 48% President? You'd think these paragons of the American can-do entrepreneurial spirit would have, I don't know, saved some money for a rainy day, like they tell the rest of us to do! But they've still got their hands out -- gotta meet absurdly high profit projections or die, after all! -- so they can build even more nuclear weapons we don't need, even more weapons systems that don't work, and (of course!) our President's signature vanity border wall that can barely stand up to a stiff wind or a brutal gang of cutting implements from Lowe's. And, as Win Without War reminds us in its latest email missive, "(w)e need more N95 masks, not more F-35 jet fighters." It's even funnier because F-35 jet fighters -- with their expected cost of $1.5 trillion over the next half-century, think war-making will change any by then? -- have become the poster child for Defense Department boondoggles.

Our President still insists that if he caves in to any of our demands, we have to cave in to one of his -- namely, a payroll tax cut (or, more likely, the elimination of the payroll tax entirely and the alleged funding of Social Security "through other means"). Yeah, individual workers would get a little more money from a payroll tax cut -- but big corporations will get a lot more from it, since workers and employers each pay half the tax, and while workers most likely have only one employer, how many workers does an employer have? Yeah, that math shouldn't be hard. And, ah, payroll taxes actually fund something fairly important: Social Security, which gives our seniors a more dignified and comfortable retirement, as it should, since they worked for it and paid into it their whole lives. Using the pandemic as cover to destroy Social Security is profoundly evil, and anyone who would do such a thing is profoundly evil -- but, sadly, using the pandemic to destroy Social Security is just another day at the office for this President, who commits evil with nearly every breath he takes. So, yeah, the price of a few more dollars in your paycheck from a payroll tax cut/holiday ain't worth the harm it'll do, and I'd sure hate to think Americans could be bought so cheaply.

Both the Republican Senate Majority Leader and the House Minority Leader have insisted that the next round of pandemic relief must include protection from lawsuits for businesses! And there you have Republican priorities explained in just one sentence -- delivering medicines and ballots is optional, but things that would give CEOs "peace of mind" are non-negotiable! And while lawsuits against businesses have gone up lately, if a business has properly adhered to state and federal guidelines in reopening or containing the pandemic, it shouldn't have to worry too much about losing a lawsuit, and if a business is smart enough about it, its lawyers can get an actual frivolous lawsuit dismissed before it does too much financial damage. If a business isn't smart enough about all of that, of course, then we have to wonder why it must be allowed to continue, let alone receive corporate welfare from the taxpayer! But Republicans, despite their attachment to Social Darwinism, never wonder about that -- they consider lawsuits by people against corporations to be the highest form of sin, though you'd have to think they could make their case (so to speak!) with more than isolated anecdotes about those few times the system doesn't work. "Lawsuit liability protection" doesn't belong in this bill, let alone any other bill.

In closing (cue cheers from the convention crowd!), we deserve a lot better from pandemic relief legislation than we've gotten so far, and we need to be very specific about what we want, so we can get more of what we deserve. And we won't get any of what we deserve if we don't speak out. These Reps and Senators have isolated themselves from us -- the Democratic Congressfolk learned that "lesson" in 2010, whereas the Republican Congressfolk didn't learn it until 2017 -- so we have to apply pressure everywhere we can. If you call their Washington offices these days, you're likely to get sent to voicemail; it's not useless to leave a voicemail message, but you're much better off getting a live person, so you can take a few minutes out of their day that they might prefer to spend playing Candy Crush or commiserating with like-minded folks -- and if all of us call our Reps and Senators, we can take up a lot more of their time. I recommend that you go to your Reps' and Senators' websites and find their local phone numbers; I also recommend you program all those numbers into your cellphones. Sometimes I have to call all nine of one of my Senator's phone numbers in order to reach a live person -- and I'll do it, because they shouldn't get to isolate themselves from their-bosses-the-people and then keep winning. Not in my America.

Action: concerning internet freedom, worker safety, and conservation in Pennsylvania.

Battle for the Net helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to reinstate the net neutrality rules it repealed back in 2017. Why now? Because with more Americans working from home and more schoolkids taking classes at home, we are seeing, in real time, why we need our FCC to force internet service providers to treat all of its network traffic with equal importance. FCC Chair Ajit Pai says he's watching to make sure big telecom corporations don't just kick people off, but thanks to his own ideological predilections, he has absolutely no power to make big telecoms treat us all well! He can only beg! And begging big corporations to do the right thing sure is a great look for our government, which exists, after all, to serve us -- better to make big corporations do the right thing, and then punish them if they don't! Because if history has taught us anything, it's taught us that big corporations won't do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do -- but we get much better results if we make them do the right thing.

Meanwhile, you may not know that our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) uses private contractors to staff its call centers! And you may not know that one of them -- a corporation called Maximus, operating a CDC call center in Hattiesburg, MS -- trained 70 newly-hired employees without following physical distancing rules, and surprise, surprise! At least one got infected. And then Maximus didn't provide protecting equipment to its employees, or allow enough of them to work from home though "call center operator" seems like an obvious work-from-home job! I'd call all that irony, except for the nagging sense that irony should be subtler than that. Hence Good Jobs Nation helps you tell CDC Director Robert Redfield to ensure that all workers who answer calls for the CDC be able to keep themselves safe during this pandemic. Not for nothing, but Mr. Redfield could do that a whole lot more easily if our government didn't keep outsourcing vital services to private corporations. Our government's supposed to work for us, after all.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Commonwealth's reactionary state legislature continues taking a reaper's scythe to any government program that might actually benefit people, now with HB 1822,which aims to slash the Environmental Stewardship Fund, the Conservation District Fund, and the Keystone Recreation, Park, and Conservation Fund, and if that seems like "too many funds" to you, consider how much money our state gives away in corporate welfare to gas and coal, and consider how often legislators slash funding for good conservation programs over the years just so they can one day argue "hey, let's get rid of it, no one'll miss it." You'll miss the clean air, clean water, and parks to go hiking, fishing, and hunting in, I can guarantee you that! So let's not be like the proverbial frog in a pot of boiling water who doesn't realize he's cooked until it's too late. HB 1822 has already passed the House but awaits a Senate vote, hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state Senator to protect conservation funding by rejecting HB 1822.

Action: concerning taking care of Americans during a pandemic.

All the trillions of dollars Congress hands out and they still don't protect good Americans who, through no fault of their own but certainly through great fault of their President, don't have jobs and thus can't pay their utility bills. More than a few localities have imposed moratoria on evictions and water shut-offs, but this pandemic is everywhere, so why not protect everyone? And this isn't a matter of giving "handouts" to people who don't deserve it -- like I said, they didn't ask to get laid off! And Congress hasn't had any problem giving out massive handouts to big corporations (under the guise of "helping small businesses," no less!), so maybe it's time to start protecting people. Hence both the Sierra Club and Consumer Reports help you tell your Congressfolk to make sure good Americans don't get their utilities shut off during a pandemic. Consumer Reports makes another good point: as good Detroit residents still have trouble getting their water turned back on, big corporations like Pepsi and Coke were taking public water, selling it, running up far larger unpaid water bills, and getting precisely zero shutoff notices. It's a shame we have to remind the politicians that they work for us, but we'll keep reminding them.

Meanwhile, you know what else good Americans need now that they can't send their kids to school and they're either not working or working from home? Internet access, that's what. I guess right-wingers will say is this going to be yet another thing we just hand out for free? Of course, that formulation describes precisely none of the services our government delivers, since we pay for them, with our tax money. And even though our FCC disagrees, the best way to look at our internet is as a utility, not a content provider (like, say, Facebook), since it supplies the entire community with something it needs -- information. Kids have to go to school over the internet now, for example, and we already charge our various state, local, and federal governments with the task of educating our children, so how can we deny internet service to anyone during a pandemic? Particularly since the internet bill is yet another bill people can't pay when they don't have jobs? Of course, internet service providing corporations tend to be private, and they deserve some competition from state and local governments (i.e., community broadband) on that front, but in the meantime, Battle for the Net helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure all Americans have internet access.

Finally, big food processing corporations have suffered enough work stoppages due to the pandemic that a spokeshack for one of them, Tyson Foods, has come out and said, and I quote, "the food supply chain is breaking." And I know a lot of right-wingers would cite exactly that statement as proof that we just can't give workers paid sick leave right now, but, as usual, the opposite is true: if "the food supply chain is breaking," that's precisely the time to ensure that workers have paid sick leave, so they can take time off, get themselves better, and -- I keep saying this, and I hope people are finally getting it -- not make other people sick. I keep saying this, too: if you fire a worker for being sick, you then have to replace that worker, and you have to find someone willing and able to do the work, and you have to train them to do the work, and a lot of bosses have come around to the notion that it's better for business to just give your workers paid sick time instead of churning them over constantly. And while Tyson sounds the alarm over the food chain breaking, they're not taking care of their own very well, hence MoveOn helps you tell Tyson to give its workers paid sick leave.

Action: concerning physical distancing, our Post Office, and pollution.

It ain't just red state Governors who are reopening their states too early -- it's also Democratic Governor Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, who's planning to loosen physical distancing standards (OK, you know them as "social distancing standards," but I'll keep trying) in the coming weeks, without securing the widespread testing and tracing we need to fully understand the threat we still face. I would hate to think all those stupid right-wing protestors had an outsized say in the conversation yet again! So let Keystone Progress help you push back against stupidity, by helping you tell your Pennsylvania state government to put people before profits and let the science dictate when we start relaxing physical distancing standards. One more thing: we've now had a million confirmed coronavirus cases in America, but we hardly test for it, so we don't know how many we've really had -- unless New York state's finding, that more than one out of every eight of its residents have COVID-19 antibodies, is instructive. I would hate to think we'd have another spike in cases because our leaders don't have the patience we elected them to have.

Meanwhile, a consortium of good government groups (including Progress America, Demand Progress, and Daily Kos) helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest an additional $25 billion in our U.S. Postal Service. I mean, we just pissed away $350 billion in a "small business relief fund" that mostly went to big corporations, and we're pissing away some $150 billion every year in lost revenues thanks to the 2017 tax "reform," so $25 billion ain't that much to ask to keep a good service going, one that helps all Americans. Right-wingers have wanted to privatize our Post Office since time immemorial, and to them every crisis is an opportunity to do evil, but we don't have to put up with that. Nor do we have to put up with our President calling our Post Office "a joke" because it doesn't charge us four times as much! Note well, however, that our President did say there are circumstances under which he'd authorize more funding -- absurd circumstances, to be sure, but I say he just showed us weakness, and it's well past time we attacked when right-wingers are weak.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our EPA to reverse its new, supposedly pandemic-related policy of not enforcing any damn clean air and clean water regulations. Like I said, cynical right-wingers imagine every crisis as an opportunity to do evil, and thus the ones who run our EPA think a pandemic that attacks good Americans' ability to breathe means nothing so much as a time to let big polluting corporations make our air harder to breathe. As a young man, and an aspiring cynic, I suppose I would have found this amusing, but having long rejected cynicism and, hell, having become a man and having put away childish things, I find it all quite disgusting. I wish I could be sure that the worshipers of mammon will find their hell -- or maybe I would simply prefer that they find their hell in this lifetime, so we can all see it, and so future generations can be taught how not to be. In the meantime, I suppose we'll all have to settle for merely doing our duty as best we can.

Action: concerning good works, bad tax policy, and good farm worker policy.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. At least one observer has said that our House passed all these bills so they could give the impression they "did something," without having actually done anything. But if we pressure our Senators to pass these bills, and then pressure our President to sign them, then we've done something, which is the whole point of a democracy.

Meanwhile, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Reps and Senators and demand that they repeal the millionaire tax break Congress slipped into the CARES Act. How does this tax-cut-for-the-rich work? It allows hedge fund managers and real estate speculators -- and why not just describe both occupations as "speculators? -- to avoid taxation by shifting their present-day losses to prior years, which would enable them to refile those years' tax returns and get a big refund check -- and by big, I mean an average of $1.6 million. So how does that $1200 stimulus check look to you now? Repealing the tax break would save at least $170 billion annually, and, perhaps more importantly, would send the message that speculators are not the most important people in America. Maybe people who, you know, actually make good products and provide good services are more important than the folks who make our economy into their version of Draft Kings. They've been saying for years that speculators do really important work, but if you've attended bankster behavior over the years, you know the most important thing they do is teach us how not to be.

Finally, the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell our Congressfolk to protect our farm workers during this pandemic. That means fair wages, paid sick leave, paid family leave, and better worker safety protections, among other things, and don't be the one who says they're just a bunch of illegals anyway, so who cares? People are people regardless of the status of their green card, particularly during a pandemic, which is the moment a great nation rises up and proves its greatness, amirite? And you don't prove your greatness by hair-splitting over whom you help. Besides which, as I keep saying, letting farm workers unionize under the National Labor Relations Act would solve all of these problems -- they could better get the wage and safety protections they deserve, and big corporations couldn't drive wages down by bringing foreign workers in. A lot of our problems have very easy solutions -- if our politicians would but solve them! Of course they don't solve them because their big donors have told them not to. That's why we have to make them solve them.

Penny Rants for Monday, April 27, 2020: special "Our Glorious Elites still suck" edition!

When our President demands that our Post Office "raise the price" of its services "four times" or he won't approve any more funding, you have to remember that our President is demanding that our Post Office raise prices on us! He wants good Americans like you and I to pay more to send a letter though the post! The fact that our Post Office delivers good services so cheaply (despite all of our government's attempts to destroy it, I should add) is what makes it "a joke" to him -- it's just not serious, to him, unless some boss or other can parade his unearned wealth around. Consider, also, that "rais(ing) the price four times" is all that can make private mail-delivery corporations like UPS and FedEx competitive with our USPS -- they handle a fraction of the mail our USPS does, and frankly, they're not that much faster, not anymore. When right-wingers want to mismanage everything into oblivion to prove that "the private sector does it better," you should remember that when they do that, they are taking food out of your mouth. And how do you treat people who do that?

Right-wingers have their excuses for our President's apparent endorsement of injecting/ingesting disinfectants late last week, but they pale before the simple fact that calls about possible exposure to household cleaners more than doubled in New York City the day after. I have long hoped that our President would single-handedly destroy the Presidential bully pulpit merely through his bad behavior, and then folks would never trust what our President says again, as our Founders always intended. But I never imagined people might literally poison themselves first. We'll certainly never look at the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" the same way again. (As an aside, if we take his claim that "I was asking the question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen" at face value -- and when has divining his One True Intent behind his actions led anywhere other than rank absurdity? -- then you must conclude that a guy who would do that "just to see what would happen" is an evil bastard. And how do you treat evil bastards?)

Ryan Grim at The Intercept evaluates new evidence supporting Tara Reade's sexual harassment and assault complaints against then-Sen./now somehow presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden. As Mr. Grim reminds us, "(f)or Baker’s statement (denying that Ms. Reade had ever filed a complaint with Mr. Biden's office about his conduct) to be true, Reade would have had to have lied to her friend, brother, and mother about having complained to Biden’s office. There is no obvious reason Reade would make up a story to those closest to her about the Senate office not taking Biden’s harassment seriously, while at the same time resisting pressure to go to the press." Now might be a good time to remind everyone that Mr. Biden hasn't actually sewn up the nomination yet, and no one's advanced a sexual harassment/assault complaint against Sen. Sanders. (No, complaints of harassment and insensitivity against some of his campaign workers aren't the same thing, even if our "liberal" media did more pearl-clutching about that than they've done about Ms. Reade's accusation.)

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Pat Robertson agrees with a viewer that God sent this pandemic to America as punishment for abortion, gay marriage, and anti-Israel sentiment. Oh, but not just that, his remaining defenders will say -- he also said "we have abused the poor," which most right-wingers consider a duty, not a sin. But listen to Mr. Robertson describe abortion -- "we have taken the life of the innocent, slaughtering them by the tens of millions, children made in the image of God" -- and then listen to him hesitate before saying "we have abused the poor" and then quickly turn to describing how the pandemic has ravaged us, and you might come to one of two conclusions: a) poverty just doesn't get his anger up like abortion does, or b) he threw "we have abused the poor" in there just to stave off criticism that he's just another heartless evangelical. But he's not very good at the latter -- does anyone remember him speaking out about the necessity of fighting climate change in 2006? No? Well, now you know all the good that did -- and maybe (especially since he's a denier again) all the good he intended it to do.

Action: concerning pollution, immigration, and bankster misbehavior.

You've no doubt heard that our Administration has rolled back the Mercury and Air Toxics Standard, which had already done a good deal to reduce pollution from coal corporations. And not because our President "cares" about coal miners! How many times must I tell these pimps! Coal miners breathe air, after all, so dirtying their air a little more doesn't help them -- though it does help their bosses gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes, and for our President, that is what "saving coal" is all about! It's always about other bosses with this guy! And not for nothing, but polluting the air more is approximately the last thing you should do during a pandemic that literally chokes people to death. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our Administration to stop rolling back pollution protections during a pandemic, or, indeed, during any other time. If coal corporations want to survive, why don't they embrace renewable energy? They'll whine about how "tough" that is, but these are our "best" and "brightest" entrepreneurs, after all, so maybe they ought to live up to their own PR.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell our President to give asylum-seekers a fairer process. There is, after all, a world-wide pandemic going on, even if there are fewer wars going on as a result, and folks do deserve our mercy. Don't brook any silliness from right-wingers about how WE HAVEZ TO TAKEZ CAREZ OF OUR OWNZ!!!!! No one has actually said otherwise! Though plenty of right-wingers actually do espouse not taking care of our own, and too many of them also indulge in rage-fantasies that every single refugee, merely by being in America, takes food out of an American child's mouth. That being said, yes, if we stopped importing foreign workers to do the jobs that we (wrongly) imagine Americans won't do, we would better be able to practice the mercy of a great nation by helping more refugees from war-torn or plague-torn lands. Strangely, that's not how we do it in America, because it doesn't enable some CEO somewhere to gild the plumbing on his 19th vacation home. I sure do hope some Americans remain who regard civilized behavior as more worthy of preservation than a millionaire's unearned income.

Finally, our Treasury Department says it'll allow banks to seize your stimulus check in order to cover fees or debts. This comes, of course, from the Treasury Department headed up by the Foreclosure King, Steve Mnuchin, who once foreclosed on a grandmother who was 27 cents in arrears on her mortgage, and who recently claimed that you should be able to make your stimulus check last 10 weeks! Maybe that was true the last time he ever had to count the cost of anything -- or maybe he's just a bad human being who doesn't care about anything he says or does. But the whole point of a stimulus is to get money in people's hands so they'll spend it and keep the economy going, but if banks are just going to take it from you -- to pay off debts they've likely tolerated for a long time! -- then it's not very much of a stimulus, is it? Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk and your Treasury Department to stop letting banks take people's stimulus checks. I don't necessarily expect our politicians to listen -- but I do expect them to suffer embarrassment in the eyes of the American people if they fail to act.

Action: concerning good House bills, the right to repair, Congressional corruption, and food safety.

It's Wednesday morning, so call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Our Senate will claim it has more important things to do than protect voting rights, equal rights, worker wages, internet freedom, and public lands, but it's bollocksed up that one more important thing (i.e., pandemic policy) it has to do, plus they actually do have time to pass good House bills. We'll need to communicate our will en masse to convince them of that, though, so let's get to it.

Meanwhile, our President is doing his damnedest to keep ventilators from getting where they need to go (i.e., versus where he thinks he can get more votes), but he ain't the only one: ventilator manufacturing corporations act like everything's a big trade secret and so they make it almost prohibitively difficult for hospitals to fix broken ones. It ain't like hospitals don't have people on staff who spend all day fixing machines, either -- a lot of things in a hospital can break, and a lot of very handy people do the work of keeping them going. Hence Color of Change helps you tell ventilator manufacturing corporations to let hospitals fix the ventilators they have, by releasing manuals, schematics, software, and other repair aids. Color of Change reminds us that -- contra what some observers tell us, that our President's votaries are the ones who are really going to suffer from his managerial incompetence/malice -- that COVID-19 has hit communities of color the hardest, and those communities tend to vote against our President. Gosh, if I didn't know better, I'd say he planned it that way. But let's fight for better health care management -- on every front.

In other news, at least four Senators dumped stock they owned right after hearing how bad the coronavirus pandemic was going to get -- and a few of them went out of their way to reassure their constituents that it wasn't going to be so bad! -- but somehow these Senators (of whom Richard Burr of North Carolina is perhaps the most famous now) have not resigned their offices in shame and humiliation. I'm old enough to remember when the scent of corruption was enough to send a Senator to an early retirement! Since our Senators clearly can't be trusted anymore, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban Congressfolk from trading any individual stocks while they serve their constituents in office. Don't brook any silliness about how you can "trust" Congressfolk to know the difference between right and wrong. Obviously we can't! And it's not our job to "trust" our representatives so much as it's our job to ensure they serve us. I mean, you wouldn't want to think they just create crises all the time so they can benefit financially from them, would you?

Finally, our USDA has been granting way too many waivers to big chicken processing corporations so they can speed up their inspection lines even faster! You can imagine the problem: speeding up slaughter lines allows more pus, more blood, more bile, and more pathogens to get by inspectors and get into your chicken parm. When our government allows a corporation to have one federal inspector doing three chickens per second -- or, worse, when our government allows a corporation to self-regulate its own safety inspections! -- well, that's not "relieving corporations of unnecessary regulatory burdens," that's relieving consumers of the healthy meat they expect to buy at the supermarket! Food poisoning, as you know, still makes the news virtually every time it happens; I'm just spitballing here, but that might be because people don't want their food to kill them or their loved ones. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell our USDA to stop making it easier for food processing corporations to make us sick with their meat.

Action: concerning the coronavirus pandemic and its effects.

Word on the street is that Congressional Democrats are about to cave on the next pandemic relief bill, a bill that would have no more funding for unemployment insurance, no help for our U.S. Postal Service, no funding to ensure we can all vote by mail in November, and no money for states and localities; hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to include these things in the next pandemic relief legislation. And you've likely heard that big corporations tapped out the $350 billion small business loan fund in mere minutes, and that's largely because the CARES Act a) defined a small business as one with 500 employees and b) allowed big corporations to call themselves "small businesses" if they have fewer than 500 employees at individual locations, meaning that Potbelly got to feed on corporate welfare, admittedly a joke that writes itself. I think you should call your Reps and Senators and tell them to amend the CARES Act so that it defines a small business as one that has 50 or fewer employees (as the Family Medical Leave Act and the Affordable Care Act do) and doesn't let big corporations use the fiction of franchising to pretend they're small businesses. They sure won't see that coming!

Meanwhile, you know what we're seeing a little bit less of during this global pandemic? Wars, that's what -- after the U.N. Secretary General's plea for worldwide ceasefires on March 23, Colombian rebels have declared a unilateral ceasefire, both government and the Communist rebels in the Philippines have observed a ceasefire, and even the Saudi/UAE coalition has ceased hostilities (at least until tomorrow!) against Yemen. Hence Roots Action joins with Win Without War to help you tell the rest of the world's governments to observe a ceasefire, too. At this writing, 45 armed conflicts are going on around the world, with nine of these resulting in a thousand deaths or more over the past year; ideally we wouldn't want ceasefires to end just because we get the pandemic under control, but certainly now isn't a good time to make the conditions caused by this pandemic worse, as wars tend to do. And, not for nothing, but we fight a lot of wars for really stupid reasons -- try drilling deep into the causes of the war on Yemen, for example, and you'll be wholly unimpressed. So let's at least make it harder for wars to start up again.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Governor to ensure that we protect vulnerable prison populations during this pandemic, then the Daily Kos Liberation League still helps you do that. What's that you say, right-wingers? That the people who aren't criminals are just as important as prisoners? Yeah, way to be shallow, right-wingers. First off, more than half of all Americans in jails have not been convicted of a crime -- they're just there because they can't make bail, and their continued detention should represent a continuous offense against law and order in America. Second off, prisoners can't socially distance -- why, a lot of them can't even use the can in peace! -- and if we make them stay in a hothouse of COVID-19 infection, that'll keep the disease alive. I say spread 'em out, and give the disease fewer points of attack. (And no, no one is saying let's release all the murderers. Why do right-wingers love fighting straw men? Because straw men can't fight back! But we can.)

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to demand that our President restore funding to the World Health Organization (or WHO), then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Our President's announcement of his decision accused the WHO of "severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus," "fail(ing) to adequately...share information in a timely and transparent fashion," and ”(costing) valuable time" through its "delays" "in declaring a public health emergency." As far as I know, there's no truth to the rumor that our President accidentally read a list of his own failures in managing this pandemic here in America. In this, our President follows Tha Bush Mobb's example -- Tha Bush Mobb, after all, successfully convinced a majority of Americans to cling to them even harder because their own failures made the world a worse place. But this President also projects all of his failures onto other people; we'll see in November if the American people find that palatable. In the meantime, we might as well communicate our will.

Action: concerning voting-by-mail, our Post Office, tax cuts for the rich, and health care equipment.

America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, helpfully reminds us that voting-by-mail actually has a lot of problems, and that these problems mostly afflict (you guessed it!) poor folks and folks of color. In some states, you need to have a witness co-sign your ballot; in three states you have get a notary to sign it, which costs money, you know? In a lot of states, you also need to mail a copy of your ID with your vote, and we all know how state ID processes tend to deprive poor folks and folks of color of their right to vote. That's before we get to whether or not your ballot ever gets to you, since if you're poor, you tend to move around more, or what happens if you mark an "X" instead of filling in the box entirely and the machine can't read it! Mr. Palast makes a number of good suggestions -- barring witness signatures, barring signature challenges in the absence of a stolen ballot accusation, mailing every voter a ballot -- for a good voting-by-mail bill at the end of his post, so you can call your Reps and Senators and demand that of them.

Of course, we can't make voting-by-mail work for us if we don't have a U.S. Postal Service! Our USPS might run out of money by the end of September, a mere five weeks before Election Day, and it's almost like our President planned it that way! He didn't, of course -- he prefers to let his incompetence create crises that he then exploits for his own glorification, just like George W. Bush used to do, even if Mr. Bush was more civilized about all of that. But we have other reasons to want our Post Office to continue doing its job, mainly that it actually does a very good job despite all of the crippling blows Congress has dealt it over the years, and our Post Office delivers those medicines and medical supplies that must travel through the mail better than all the other options. What, you think UPS will drop your medicine at your door on the cheap? You think FedEx will charge 55 cents to mail your ballot? Privatization doesn't mean "better service," it means "you pay more money." So the Center for American Progress helps you tell our President to drop his opposition to fully-funding our Post Office.

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard about how the pandemic "relief" bill gives more relief to some folks than it does to others, as in an average of $1.7 million of "relief" to folks who own "pass-through corporations," a corporate welfare handout so big that our Joint Committee on Taxation estimates it'll cost us $90 billion this year. And that would be enough to, just as a for-example, fund tuition-free college at state universities and community colleges for an entire year, let alone get us more ventilators, more masks, and more COVID-19 tests. Gosh, remember when Republicans excoriated Democrats for demanding that their "pet projects," like securing the vote during a pandemic, be included in the pandemic relief bill? We should have known, just from the fact of that complaint, that the finished bill would be larded down actual Republican pet projects benefiting their rich donors. Hence Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal this nefarious tax break.

Finally, National Nurses United helps you tell our President to finally start using the authority granted to him by the Defense Production Act to force big corporations to start making the personal protective equipment our health care workers need to keep us well during this pandemic. You know his excuse for not doing it, right? That it would be TEH BIG GUMMINT OPPRESSINGZ TEH PEEPULZ!!!! Yeah, he really said that -- even used the phrase "black helicopters" in saying it. This, from the Administration that has demanded the power to indefinitely detain people while the pandemic keeps our courts from operating! Yeah, that's not Black Helicopter Land; only making corporations do what they should do in times of trouble is Black Helicopter Land. Ronald Reagan used to say that a government that can do anything for you can do anything to you, but the long game he began as President has now resulted in a government that can do anything to you but can't do anything for you! And we do pay taxes, so we deserve to get good services in return. This President pretends not to get that, but he ain't the damn boss of us.

Action: concerning Social Security and world health funding.

Because I don't get all the action alerts at once, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to use any future coronavirus relief legislation as a bludgeon to hurt our Social Security. "Hurting Social Security" includes both cutting the benefits we've fought for and worked for and cutting the payroll taxes that fund Social Security. You'll also ask your Congressfolk to expand Social Security benefits; you know that can be done by raising the cap on income that can be taxed into Social Security, so don't brook any nonsense from your Congressfolk about that. You know, our President, as a "businessman," drove at least four corporations into bankruptcy and drained the wealth out of them as they crashed and burned, and we've all thought well, at least you can't bankrupt a country so easily. But then you look at a $3 trillion-and-counting budget deficit, and you look at Social Security's nearly $3 trillion trust fund, and you start to think that, well, maybe that's the way to bankrupt America! So how about we not let Our Glorious Elites get away with such unconscionable evil?

Meanwhile, you've heard that our President has decided to hold up funding for the World Health Organization (or WHO), ostensibly until "a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization's role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus," but more likely to distract everyone from his own severe mismanagement and covering up the spread of the coronavirus. I don't know if he has to wait for Congress to authorize such a move, or if Congress has already delegated that responsibility to him, but why not make that issue moot? MoveOn helps you tell both your Congressfolk and our President to restore the WHO's funding. This sure is a hell of a time to cut funding to an organization trying to help people not get sick and die! But, of course, as we have seen repeatedly over the last three-plus years, our President thinks any time is a good time to cause chaos and hardship for other people. Why, he's like a one-man Bush Mobb! George W. Bush is not the most popular of our ex-Presidents, of course, but if we do the right thing now, we can bring about this President's eventual and deserved humiliation much sooner.

Action: concerning good pandemic policy, the right to repair, and regulatory science.

As you know, Congress is contemplating another pandemic-related relief bill, so we might as well tell them what to do. Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund a more secure voting process, including expanded voting-by-mail, early voting, same-day registration, and voter and poll worker safety. Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to save our U.S. Postal Service from the financial crisis caused by both this pandemic and Congressional malice. Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund internet access for all Americans as the pandemic drags on. The Center for American Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand food stamp programs for all the folks who now aren't working and thus can't buy a whole lot of food. And the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose any more corporate welfare for corporations and rich folks. I've been advocating a lof of these things for a long time now, and folks who oppose it seem to just make up reasons to do it now. Keep that in mind as you go through the world, trying to do the right thing.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell Microsoft to support our "right to repair" by giving us more access to the service diagrams, repair software, spare parts, and tools we need to fix our computers. Microsoft has played whack-a-mole with right-to-repair bills wherever they've come up, but they've made their newest Surface noticeably more repair-friendly, so maybe they're ready for more pressure. I'm old enough to remember when upgrading my RAM and my processor in my laptop in the late '90s, but just a few years later I couldn't even find the screws in my next one, and that's not all about "efficient design"; it's also about mystifying computers so you don't even try to make them better. But we're Americans, dammit, and we ought to be able to fix what we own! It's more self-reliant that way, and we all remember self-reliance as an American virtue, don't we? I'll tell you what ain't an "American virtue": manufacturing computers that become obsolete a few months after you buy them! And the pollution that results ain't an American virtue, either.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to abandon its own "Censored Science" proposal, then Breast Cancer Action still helps you do that. Our EPA calls it the "Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science" rule, but Breast Cancer Action's moniker is far more apt, because our EPA's proposal would do the opposite of making rule-making science more transparent: it would, actually, make rule-making science more corporate, since corporate studies are magically more likely to meet the new proposed standard. How did this happen? The EPA decided that any scientific study that contains any data that isn't "publicly available" -- but a lot of good scientific studies, including those that have informed Clean Air rulemaking that has literally saved good Americans tens of trillions of dollars in health care costs, have confidential data like people's private information in them. Thus they make "transparency" more opaque, and enable more corporations to pollute more filth into our air and water. Nice work if you can get it, I guess. So let's not take this lying down.

Penny Rants for Wednesday, April 15, 2020: with more important reminders about evil, voting, and deficits.

You may be tempted to see it as a good sign that our "liberal" media have been picking on Brazilian President/irredeemable asshole Jair Bolsonaro for his abject mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, but Brian Meir at FAIR reminds us that a) he ain't the only world leader bollocksing up that job and b) our "liberal" media still excuse (or praise!) Mr. Bolsonaro's cruel economic policy and disgusting public utterings. You will also want to resist the temptation to make fun of Mr. Bolsonaro for apparently being unable to put a mask on, because right-wing politicians look stupid on purpose, partly so that you focus on their stupidity and not their evil, but also so that they seem more "normal." After all (so the reasoning goes), how evil can someone be if they can't put on a face mask or speak in complete sentences? Of course our own lived, shared experience -- not just of this President, but of Tha Bush Mobb and Ronald Reagan, in particular -- should lead us to answer "quite evil." If we haven't already split the knot and concluded that stupid is evil, that is.

Nate Silver at Five Thirty Eight presents a pretty good analysis of last week's Wisconsin primary. I feared that right-wing coronavirus denialists would outvote regular Wisconsinites, but a liberal candidate unexpectedly pounded a right-wing incumbent in the state's sole Supreme Court race, which will hopefully make political parties pause before hiding important elections in primaries so that only their diehards will turn out. And speaking of turnout, about two-thirds as many folks voted in the 2020 primary as did in the 2016 primary, partly due to the pandemic (and, ah, all the state's machinations because of the pandemic!) and partly due to neither party's primary being particularly competitive. But the big story? Some 80 percent of Wisconsinites voted absentee, up from a mere 10 percent in the 2016 primary; as more Wisconsinites get used to the idea that they don't absolutely have to go to a polling place to vote, maybe that number will go up -- although we have to make Congress help out our Postal Service by then; you don't think UPS or FedEx are going to deliver these votes, do you?

You've hardly heard about this from teabaggers and the many other species of deficit peacocks, but our annual budget deficit could get as high as $4 trillion this year. That's of course due to recent pandemic-related legislation pumping out $2.5 trillion of as-yet-uncollected tax revenue, but let us not forget that our Congressional Budget Office (or CBO) said it'd be over a trillion this year well before the pandemic hit, just like it was about a trillion last year, and why? Because of the 2017 tax "reform," of course, a bigger gift to rich folks than the recent $2 trillion-plus "stimulus" was! You know how this game's going to go if Joe Biden beats our President at the polls this November: he'll be "hamstrung" to do anything of consequence because of the deficit, though deficits never seem to stop Republicans from cutting taxes on rich folk, and folks like Sean Hannity will yell TEH BIDENZ HAZ ALREADYZ TRIPLEDZ TEH DEFICITZ!!!!!, just like he blamed Mr. Obama after Tha Bush Mobb rammed a $700 billion bankster bailout down our throats at the end of their term. Of course, I fully expect Mr. Biden to go along with these fictions -- unless we make that impossible, of course.

Action: concerning paid family leave, student loan debt, and mountaintop coal mining.

As Congress contemplates further pandemic-related legislation, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a national (and permanent) paid sick leave policy. Previous coronavirus-related legislation gave workers two weeks of paid sick leave if they got the coronavirus, but what of future pandemics, and what of the illnesses we pass through all the time? Tens of millions of good Americans go to work sick because they can't afford not to, and with a pandemic raging, we can't afford to have sick people working! If you're still of the mind that "real workers don't need paid sick leave," consider more carefully the economic benefits of paid sick leave! That's right, they're real, and you can measure them -- like reduced costs for employers in not having to train new employees all the time, and reduced costs of health care when folks actually taking care of themselves instead of going to work sick and infecting everyone else. And speaking of infecting everyone else, you can even measure how well paid sick leave keeps flu rates down. Even after this pandemic is done with us, we'll still need paid sick leave.

Wanna know what else Congress ought to do if they're serious about "stimulating" the economy? They ought to cancel all student loan debt, as Daily Kos helps you tell them to do. Now wait a minute, you might be saying, we don't want to give people the idea they can just run up a lot of debt and we won't make them pay it, do we? We don't, but that's not the impression cancelling student debt would give, in reality -- cancelling student debt would more likely give people the idea that colleges and banks were gouging them in the first place. 46 million good Americans have student loan payments, and they owe, between them, over $1 trillion, and paying that, plus all the interest, is a far bigger drag on the economy than most folks realize. Well, most folks who don't have student loan debt, anyway -- I'm pretty sure the good folks who put off buying houses and starting families because they still have six figures of debt understand the problem all too well. And it's about time our Congressfolk did, too.

Finally, coal is losing to gas and renewable energy and no amount of corporate welfare from our government can stop that, but they're plugging ahead anyway, planning to open East Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau, which, while not federally-protected land per se, is the largest hardwood forest on the planet, and (like many of our public lands) home to clean air, clean water, and gorgeous vistas that all Americans enjoy. But hey, some coal corporation CEO needs to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home, so oh well! Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our government to reject its plan to ruin yet more of our public lands for the greater glory of coal CEOs. You know, I've just realized that I haven't said this anywhere near enough: when our government gives welfare handouts to crony corporations, you're paying for that, with your taxpayer money. Usually I hear "they're taking your money and giving it to people who don't need it" as cover for some unexamined racism; is it too much to ask that we hear it as part of a thorough examination of corporate power?

Action: concerning trade, our Postal Service, and social media hatred.

As our government contemplates a new trade deal with Kenya, Rethink Trade helps you leave a public comment with our U.S. Trade Representative outlining exactly how you'd like that trade deal to go down. I won't lie: the USMCA represents a significant improvement on NAFTA -- it curtails the harm that "investor-state dispute settlement" systems do to our laws and to our livelihoods. But I'd also be lying if I told you our President deserved all the credit for that -- actually, we deserve most of the credit for that, by agitating as we have done for decades against the kind of pro-corporate "free" trade agreements that outsource our jobs and nullify our laws. Hence we can head off yet another pro-corporate "free" trade agreement that big pharma corporations and big fossil fuel corporations want (and don't they get enough welfare handouts already?) by telling our Trade Representative that we want trade agreements to put people above corporations. The commenting tool will suggest specific demands that you will want to make. Hey, we're the bosses of our government, so we get to make demands.

Americans for Financial Reform joins with MoveOn to help you tell your Congressfolk to expand funding to our Postal Service so it can continue operating. Our President of course says won't do that, maybe because he thinks he can privatize it, and though that wouldn't save the taxpayer any money (taxes haven't funded our USPS since the early '80s), it would make some Presidential crony or other more money. But our Post Office helps keep us together in tough times -- it gets us our paychecks and prescriptions, it gets health care providers their lab tests and medical supplies, and come November, it might be carrying all our votes. Hey, maybe that's why our President wants it to die! Seriously, though, corporations like FedEx and UPS don't deliver the mail better -- neither deals with anywhere near the volume of the USPS. And, hate to pile on, but if our government allowed our USPS to offer more postal banking services, and didn't compel it to pre-pay employee pensions 40 years in advance, our USPS could weather this pandemic a lot better -- and, since we depend so much on our USPS, so could we.

Meanwhile, 18 Million Rising helps you tell social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to shut down coronavirus misinformation and hate speech. Asian-Americans have felt the sting of racism acutely due to this pandemic, and our President sure doesn't help when he calls the coronavirus the "Chinese virus," amirite? Of course I don't blame him when other Americans hurl racist epithets and commit physical assaults against Asian-Americans -- I blame the perpetrators of violence for violence! -- but a civilized person would go out of his way not to give people ideas, particularly in a land which specifically barred Chinese-American emigration for over 80 years and where racists have spewed forth "yellow peril" arguments for centuries. And no, our First Amendment doesn't give social media platforms a "right" to "allow" any manner of hateful rubbish on their platforms, any more than it mandates that book publishers must publish any manuscript they receive; defending racists from imprisonment merely for their racism is one thing, but enabling racism by being a bad publisher is another thing entirely.

Action: concerning good House bills and better health care policy.

Happy Monday! It's time once again to call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. The House has passed a lot of good legislation that would protect voting rights, internet freedom, consumer safety, and working family wages (among many other things!), and the fact that Senate Republicans hate all of that should be immaterial. But it'll only be immaterial if we act.

Meanwhile, if this pandemic has taught us anything, it's taught us that our health care system -- which covers fewer people while still spending more money than just about any other developed nation -- needs an overhaul, and in poll after poll after poll most Americans support overhauling it by expanding Medicare to include all Americans. Now the haters love to tell you that this support falls after folks "realize they'll have to pay more in taxes for it," but that's rubbish from supposition to conclusion, since even right-wing think tanks tell us we'll save money under a Medicare-for-All system, and Sen. Warren's plan for funding Medicare-for-All would literally capture all that money we're currently spending on health care and use it to fund Medicare. And get more bang for our buck, frankly! Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass Medicare-for-All legislation. After all, if unemployment goes up to 30%, and most folks get their health insurance through their employer, well, you can see the problem, I trust.

Finally, speaking of that problem, we can, in the short term, reopen Affordable Care Act enrollment to handle all the applications we're going to get anyway, but of course our President has already said he's not doing no way no how, since TEH OBAMACAREZ MUSTZ BE DESTROYEDZ AT ANYZ OF TEH COSTZ!!!!!! I'm pretty sure I have described the level of reasoning behind his decision fairly precisely. 17 million unemployment claims in three weeks is a literally unprecedented event, and that means up to 17 million more uninsured. Yes, the law already allows you to apply for health insurance via the ACA exchanges outside the regular enrollment window if you lose your job, but maybe our government would do better to have a Special Enrollment period, given the sheer number of applications they're about to get? Unless, of course, this Administration wants to fuck everything up. Even if they do, their "will" matter less than ours, and duty is duty, so Daily Kos helps you tell our government to reopen ACA enrollment to handle the coming onslaught of applications.

Penny Rants for Sunday, April 12, 2020: special "imagine a different world or die" version!

"To Heal from COVID-19," say Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin in an interview with C.J. Polychroniou at TruthOut, "We Must Imagine a Different World." They mean, of course, that we can't go back to the system ("government bad," "free market," "maximal profit") that created the awful response to the problem, and they also mean, of course, that we ought to stop doing things like giving out health insurance via one's employer (some 17 million Americans have lost their jobs over the last three weeks, and those who had health insurance of course lost it) and "squandering the enormous financial privileges enjoyed by the U.S. on propping up the neoliberal edifice that has denominated economic life in the U.S. and the world for the past 40 years," as Mr. Pollin puts it. You know what else we need to do, and I've been saying this for a long time? Stop being spectators in our own democracy. Our democracy and our heritage and our history all belong to us -- not our so-called leaders, the most corrupt and decadent people who have ever lived, who live to steal everything we've ever fought for and died for and who now stand that much closer to doing so.

Isaac Arnsdorf at ProPublica digs deeper into our President's removal of Glenn Fine from the pandemic relief oversight board -- and explains why the other members could go next. Our President essentially demoted Mr. Fine from his position as Acting Defense Department Inspector General and appointed someone else to the Inspector General position, which made Mr. Fine ineligible by law to serve on the oversight board, and guess what? Each of the other four members of the oversight board is also an acting Inspector General. Yes, this would be a very easy way to replace the entire oversight board with a bunch of cronies so that all of our President's other cronies can steal trillions of dollars of your taxpayer money! Remember when our President tried to fire all of our Inspectors General at the beginning of his term, only to be told that was illegal? Well, he figured out a way! I can't help but wonder: when Sen. Grassley (R-IA) teams up with enough other Congressfolk to change the law so our President can't pull this stunt again, what nefarious evil will Mitch McConnell extract from Mr. Grassley in exchange for allowing his efforts to succeed?

In a truly stunning moment, venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya goes on cable news and says we'd be a lot better off letting hedge fund managers "get wiped out" than trying to preserve the economic system that seems to prize them above all others. "A hedge fund that serves a bunch of billionaire family offices?" he says. "Who cares? Let 'em get wiped out. Who cares? They don't get to summer in the Hamptons? Who cares!...on Main Street today, people are getting wiped out. And right now, rich CEOs are not, boards that had horrible governance are not, hedge funds are not. People are." Notice how he differentiates between hedge funds and people there? Yeah, I know CEOs are people, too, but you can understand why we would be confused about that. Of course the CNBC talking head says it would be "immoral" to let any entity get "wiped out" by the pandemic, but you know how it is with these clowns: their moral compass only flickers when some bankster gets hurt; when they contemplate their baristas getting fired through no fault of their own and struggling to pay their bills, they just shrug and say "that's life." Hard to believe that this era of conservative governance values people who don't work over people who do!

Finally, Taegan Goddard at Political Wire pointed out late last week (it was a members-only post, so I can't link to it) that our President's approvals for handling the pandemic are not only falling, they actually look better than they really are! (Scroll down to the top of page 5, Q 14_A, for the relevant data point.) Of the 48% who approved of our President's handling of the pandemic on Thursday, a solid 12 percentage points comprised people who "approved" mainly because "it is important to be supportive of (our President) during this time of national crisis" -- and, thus, not so much because they thought he was actually doing a good job! You'll recall, hopefully, that the infamous "70% approve of Iraq War" poll taken the day the war began included 15 percentage points of folks who didn't actually approve of the war but thought it was important to "support our President." Of course, it's not our job to "support our President"; it's our President's job to support us. And note well that the biggest chunk of respondents who "approve" this way are self-described independent voters, which should remind you that folks who call themselves "independent" ain't necessarily smarter than you.

Action: concerning debt slavery, election security, and whistleblower protection.

Worried that you won't be able to make ends meet during this pandemic without maxing out your credit cards? Well, H.R. 6370/S. 3508, the Disaster Protection for Workers' Credit Act, will help good Americans out, by preventing lenders from giving negative reports to credit reporting corporations during the pandemic, by prohibiting credit reporting corporations from putting negative information on good folks' credit reports, and by forcing them to remove any such information they do put on credit reports. Everybody knows that if you max out your credit cards while you literally can't find a job for however long this pandemic is going to go on, you're not a loser, and we shouldn't let big corporations treat you like one. Don't believe anyone who tells you this will be a "slippery slope" to never accurately reporting real credit risks again -- all you need do to see they're wrong is read the bill at Congress.gov. It's not even that long! So Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to help out good Americans during this time of distress by passing the Disaster Protection for Workers' Credit Act.

Meanwhile, hot on the heels of a positively ridiculous Wisconsin primary election, where folks literally risked death (and also broke the law) to stand in line to vote, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to safeguard the 2020 elections. Anyone who opposes efforts to secure elections should answer this question: do you believe everyone should vote? You might be surprised at the answers you get to that question! For a long time, right-wingers pretended they were in favor of everyone voting, but now they're more open about their real feelings: that anyone who doesn't vote Republican is "stupid" and if they're stupid, they should not vote. You'd think, being nominal "conservatives" and all, that they would take responsibility for explaining why their ideas are worthy of everyone's votes! And you have to wonder why they don't do that. And by that, I mean "they don't do that because they know they can't win the argument, even if they constantly misdirect away from their own foul-ups by pointing at transgender people in your bathroom or the second-tier corruption of Democrats."

Finally, you probably won't be surprised to learn that hospitals are silencing and even firing workers who expose wrongdoing during this pandemic -- wrongdoing including unsafe working conditions! You probably also know that whistleblowers have actual rights, and that our Occupational Safety and Health Administration (or OSHA) has a mandate to tell workers about their rights. Guess what OSHA ain't hardly doing? That, too, is not a surprise, not just because an ER doctor in Washington state just lost his job after publicly denouncing the lack of personal protective equipment (or PPE) in his hospital, but also because you know this President hardly staffs his government and thinks anyone who doesn't make him money is useless. Hey, you probably worked for a manager or a supervisor like that once! And now we've got one as our President. Hence the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to "wake up OSHA" and get them to remind whistleblowers of their rights, as is their job. It's a shame we have to tell our government to do the job we have given it as their bosses, but duty is duty. And doing this duty will save lives.

Action: concerning more good coronavirus policy, for prisoners, bank account holders, and video conferencing software users.

You'll be pleased to hear from the ACLU that prisons have released some 9,000 folks at risk of getting sick from this pandemic because there's no place to practice "social distancing" in prison -- even when you're taking a dump! -- but we could be saving more people from near-certain death, hence the ACLU helps you tell federal and state governments to release infirm and elderly prisoners. If you're worried that they're going to come over to your house and kill you, kindly attend the words "infirm and elderly." Also consider that, if you think that, you're putting your own irrational fears above other folks' lives. Also consider that more than half of folks in jail at this moment haven't even gone to trial yet, and where in our Constitution does it say you should serve a sentence before being convicted of a crime? Also consider that we're putting too damn many people in jail to begin with. And not the right ones, either! Who should go to jail more -- the dude caught (or, perhaps, "caught") with an ounce of pot, or the CEO who empties out his workers' pension funds and escapes with a golden parachute?

Speaking of CEOs, MoveOn helps you tell JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon to suspend all overdraft and late fees during this pandemic. Ever heard Jamie Dimon talk? He sounds like he thinks he's the greatest human being who ever lived -- despite being a mere bankster and not, say, Jonas Salk -- and when you challenge him on the merits of his ideas, which ain't that damn hard, he starts getting snippy with you. And all the while it's obvious he thinks he's being sardonic when he's being snippy! But charging a boatload of fees is a stupid way to make money. How many times must I tell these pimps! Imposing banking fees is not work! You know what's work, for a bank? Identifying people and businesses on the rise before anyone else does, and making sure you're the one who gets them the funding they need. That's work! Gaming the system so you bleed people of their hard-earned money while you do nothing? That's not work, just like trading at the speed of light with the help of computer algorithms isn't work. I do insist that work be good for civilization. It's not too much to ask.

Finally, the video conferencing software Zoom is all the rage these days, what with so many good Americans working from home -- but Zoom has also caught a lot of justified flak, not just for letting racists hack into meetings and spew racial epithets across the screens of black users, but also for privacy and security issues in general. Indeed, quite a few folks have already moved on from Zoom for this very reason, and Zoom would have been better off fixing their problems first and then spreading out; it wouldn't have made them as much money at first, but they'd be much better-positioned for the long term. Hardly any big corporation thinks about the long term anymore! It's like they're not really conservative at all! And people who get hurt by a product tend to avoid it in the future, even if the corporation that made the product fixes it. Anyway, Zoom might be feeling the sting of the Big Stick of Bad PR, so we should keep applying it. Toward that end, the Action Network helps you tell Zoom to implement end-to-end-encryption for all its users.

Action: concerning corruption and corporate welfare.

Our President has of course announced that he'll fire the Inspector General who first processed the whistleblower complaint that led to impeachment! On the basis that he's not a "fan" of our President! We're long past the point where we find such honesty refreshing, I hope. And we hear that our President plans to fire a bunch of other Inspectors General, presumably also on the basis that they're not "fans" of his. Of course we don't have Inspectors General to suck up to Our Personal Lord and Savior; we have them to root out corruption in our government -- which should be of keen interest to us, as governmental corruption can only occur with our tax money. Thankfully, the Inspector General Act gives Congress 30 days to stop the firing, so the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop the firing of Inspector General Michael Atkinson. Don't brook any talk about Presidential "prerogatives," because that pales next to the people's prerogative to expose corruption and punish corrupt public servants.

You've heard, no doubt, that our government wants to pass yet another relief package relating to the pandemic, and with the previous package being full of big corporate payouts, what do you suppose will be different about this one? So naturally our President thinks that we should deal with the problems restaurant workers and owners are currently having making ends meet by bringing back more corporate welfare handouts! Specifically, he wants to jack up the corporate meals deduction back up to 100% (currently they can only deduct 50% of the cost of meals) and bringing back the corporate deduction for entertainment. If you're scratching your head wondering how that's supposed to help a cook pay her water bill, well, you're not alone. I don't know how much more proof folks need that our President only cares about other bosses -- I mean, you'd only come up with that idea by talking to a boss! Hence Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to put people ahead of profiteers and reject yet more tax-cuts-for-the-rich in any future stimulus legislation.

Speaking of which, our President also seems obsessed with giving oil corporations some corporate welfare goodies in the next stimulus bill. First he said gas would be down to 99 cents a gallon in America and that would be like getting a "tax cut," then he praised Saudi Arabia for declaring it would ratchet back oil production, which would pretty much wipe out that "tax cut." Since then he's met with oil corporation executives because as I keep saying he only listens to other bosses. Big oil corporations, frankly, don't need any more handouts, even if people are driving less than they did a month or so ago, so Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any more handouts for big oil corporations in future stimulus legislation. Don't brook any silliness about how "oil corporations only make seven cents per gallon," because they sold over 140 billion gallons in 2015, and banging the SEVEN CENTZ!!! saucepan is like saying CEOs are underpaid because they only make four dollars every time they draw a breath.

Finally, you know who might actually need some financial assistance? Our Post Office, that's who! Our taxes haven't funded our Post Office since the early '80s (take that, would-be Post Office privatizers!), and our Post Office has said it might shut down by June, and not just because of this pandemic: Congress has forced our Post Office to prefund its workers' pensions for the next 40 years, a demand Congress has never made of any other entity and one that costs our Post Office $5 billion annually. Despite all the obstacles our government keeps throwing in its way, our Post Office, in my experience, continues to do a pretty terrific job -- and we'd miss them if they weren't around, that's for damn sure. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to give a hand up to our Post Office in any future stimulus legislation. Go ahead and remind your Congressfolk that we may be doing a lot more voting-by-mail this election, and that they surely don't want to be perceived as anti-voting! And no we're not all just going to switch to UPS or FedEx! They cost a lot more money!

Penny Rants for Tuesday, April 7, 2020: special "our leaders still suck, except for the few who don't!" edition.

From Julia Carrie Wong at The Guardian we learn how hydroxychloroquine became a coronavirus "miracle cure." It began in March with a study out of France that didn't draw treatment and control groups from the same population and didn't ensure that physicians didn't know which treatment they were giving out -- that's basic science, you know -- plus they gave some-but-not-all patients an additional antibiotic (at which point you don't really know whether the drug did its work or not!), plus they used a tabulating loophole to be able to claim a "100% cure rate" that didn't exist. Then a drama king study co-author made a viral social media video, fellow drama king Elon Musk tweeted about it to his 33 million followers, and drama king right-wing news outlets (including Fox News) banged the saucepan about it. And then our drama king President (who, not incidentally, has a small financial interest in a corporation that makes the drug) jumped on the bandwagon. Not for nothing, but not only have folks have killed themselves taking this drug, but other patients who need the drug for its intended purposes have less of it now, proving, again, that it's too short a walk from government stifles the individual to only I matter!

From Eileen Applebaum and Rosemary Batt at Naked Capitalism we learn "What Wall Street Doesn’t Want You to Know About Hospital Emergency Rooms." This will explain -- better than anyone else has, I think -- why you get all those surprise medical bills from your ER visit! A doctor might work in a hospital emergency room, but her employer will be a "physician staffing firm" that the hospital contracts to run the ER -- and that "physician staffing firm" will likely be out of your health insurance corporation's network, hence the surprise bills. Hey, guess what you wouldn't have to worry about if Medicare covered all Americans? Networks, that's what. But if you think BIG GUMMINT!!!1111 shouldn't run health care, you would have to explain why you think hedge fund managers should -- or you'd have to come up with an alternative that isn't "the free market," since "the free market" got us into this mess. In the meantime, you should look at TeamHealth's firing of Dr. Lin (for blowing the whistle on equipment shortages and bad hospital safety practices) as, well, exactly the sort of thing that happens in a totalitarian state. And then ask yourself whether you can vote out, or put popular pressure on, hedge fund managers the way you can do on our elected officials.

From Suze Wilson at The Conversation we learn how New Zealand Prime Minster Jacinda Arderns's handling of the coronavirus pandemic "is giving most Western politicians a masterclass in crisis leadership." As often happens, a lot of leadership is messaging -- "stay home to save lives" puts the action and the goal pretty succinctly -- but it's also about having a plan early, sticking to it, and getting people to buy in without threatening the Heavy Hand of Law Enforcement (that latter tool a favorite of those leaders who don't get it right early). And it's also about being genuinely accessible to your bosses, the people, which for Ms. Arderns happens in daily briefings that don't go completely off the rails, as well as in live Q-and-A sessions on Facebook. And where American punditoids flail about demanding a "date certain" when they can go back to their favorite coffee shop again, New Zealand stands virtually alone among Western nations in setting a goal to eradicate COVID-19, instead of just hoping we get through it. In short, I couldn't blame you for turning this into a big "Goofus and Gallant" strip with Ms. Arderns as Gallant and our President as a diaper-loaded Goofus.

Action: concerning good House bills, good coronavirus policy, and bad media coverage.

Because we don't give up, it's time once again to call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). When our Congressfolk have other priorities -- like giving away as much taxpayer money they haven't even collected yet amirite? to corporate cronies as possible -- it's time to get them focused on the important things, like voting rights, internet freedom, public lands, and health care. So let's get to it.

Speaking of the important things, the pandemic took the lives of at least seven folks in federal custody last week, and if you think that's no big loss, please do the following things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider that five of them were there on drug charges, and we should be curing drug addicts, not putting them in jail, 3) consider that at least two of these had high-risk health conditions almost sure to kill them if they got the virus, and 4) prisoners can't freaking practice any form of physical distancing and once one prisoner gets infected, pretty much all of them are at risk -- and that would include all kinds of people the state is detaining without having convicted of a crime. But now H.R. 6400/S. 3579, the Emergency Community Supervision Act, would reduce the kind of overcrowding that leads to mass graves by releasing certain prisoners into community supervision -- not violent prisoners, since right-wingers are no doubt already claiming the bill would do that. So the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to practice both mercy and pragmatic public policy by passing the Emergency Community Supervision Act.

Finally, MoveOn helps you tell the big news corporations to stop covering our President's live coronavirus updates. It's a shame it's come to that, but it has, and when they say but it's news whenever the President says something, they're helping to ensure we live in a society where we all think our President is more important than we are. Well, he's not -- especially this one, amirite? Our news organs will also tell us that we're supposed to treat daily updates from our government about a pandemic with some importance. To which I respond: I wish our President would treat those daily updates about this pandemic with some importance! To him, it's just another opportunity to take all the credit for the good, blame everyone else for the bad, and otherwise act like a damn drama king. And the news already gives us too damn much drama! Our "liberal" media would also do well to learn that their job isn't covering the news passively so much as it's telling us the truth. If covering our President's clown car act gets in the way of the truth, then they need to stop covering it.

Action: concerning Medicare-for-All health insurance, voting by mail, and other excellent ideas.

At the risk of being accused of "using the pandemic as an opportunity to pass my wish list" -- an accusation I usually hear from people actually using the pandemic as an opportunity to pass their wish list! -- I think you should call your Reps and Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act. We all can see that the "free market" didn't make enough masks and didn't make enough ventilators -- and we all can see that the "free market" would never have made enough masks and ventilators to withstand a pandemic because there's no money in saving people from the coronavirus; the people who die, after all, are no longer a "burden on the system." That's not me talking; that's every health care CEO after his sixth beer talking. I would also tell your Congressfolk that Sen. Warren's plan to fund Medicare-for-All -- she would convert what corporations are already paying private insurers into a kind of fee that would fund Medicare-for-All -- is the best one. You know, for when they ask HOW WILLZ TEH LIBRULZ PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ!!!!!

I'm going to put a lot of repeat action alerts at the end today, because this is going to be a busy week, but I want to highlight this one, in which Daily Kos helps you tell your state governments to allow voting-by-mail for the 2020 election. We've told Congress to do it, but getting Congress to do something good for their-bosses-the-people is like pulling teeth, so now we tell state governments to do it -- and they might be more responsive, even in red states, being as they're more likely to run into their constituents than federal-level politicians are. I say "even in red states" because Republicans are saying the same damn thing -- our President suggested to Fox and Friends last week that if too many Americans vote, Republicans won't win any elections, and the Georgia House Speaker echoed those "concerns" shortly afterward. You know what I say to that? It's bootstrap time! If you're afraid no one will vote for you, stop your whining and try persuading them!

Meanwhile, Avaaz helps you call for a global ceasefire as the pandemic rages. I know some idiot will say, again, "you're just using the pandemic to pass your own pet initiatives," but I would a) challenge them to produce the last time I called for a global ceasefire (spoiler alert: never) and b) I would remind them that wars just make pandemics worse -- wars create more destruction and more refugees, and wars take health care workers away from fighting the pandemic, either by killing them or putting them on the front lines where they're just fixing up troops well enough so they can go be cannon fodder again. And, seriously, can we name a war that's worth fighting right now? That war on Yemen, for example, might make Saudi Arabia's government feel safer, but really it does nothing but put good Yemenis on the brink of famine and kill the Houthis who are some of the best fighters of al-Qaeda on Earth. The Syrian civil war has been going on for almost a decade now, and to what end? Too often it seems like everyone's moved on from war except the politicians, so we should bring them to heel.

Finally, as I've said, I've got a lot of action alerts for this week (and it's only Monday!), so I'm going to summarize the ones I've talked about before. The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to contain coronavirus in our nation's concentration camps, since, you know, immigrants and refugees are people, too, even if our President says they're not. Also, the Union for Concerned Scientists helps you tell our President to start using the Defense Production Act to manufacture masks and ventilators already; he still hasn't done it, because GUMMINT BAD!!!!, but such ideology really should wither before the spectre of death. And Penn PIRG helps you tell your state Attorney General to investigate Amazon for price-gouging of medical supplies; they've said they're cracking down on it, but you know they also benefit financially from it, so you'd like to see some action. Last but not least, People for the American Way helps you tell our SEC to investigate any Senator who may have benefited financially from selling their own stock in advance of the pandemic. These ain't big asks, frankly -- and we'll keep asking until they do our will.

Around the table: in which we look corruption and venality in its orange face yet again.

Wondering why South Korea can test so many of its citizens (and thus flatten the coronavirus curve) while America can't? Could be at least in part because our Administration had to have our President's son-in-law benefit financially from it! He had a vested interest in the corporation our HHS contracted to create a website that would supposedly have helped you evaluate your symptoms and find a testing center near you -- and then the website never went live, possibly because they all knew they'd stepped in it. Thus our Administration wasted time and lives trying to figure out how to profit from this pandemic. Nice work if you can get it! (Also, too, our President's votaries should remember that he promised a "national network of drive-through test sites" which has not as of yet materialized. I kid, of course: our President's votaries never remember anything that might reflect badly on their Personal Lord and Savior.)

Suraj K. Sazawal at Defending Rights and Dissent reminds us that we should not allow our government to use physical distancing rules to roll back Constitutional protections. As they're very anxious to do, amirite? And as they like to do to cover up their own incompetence, as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been very slow to impose physical distancing rules in his state, but very quick to blame New Yorkers for coming to Florida with the virus, and almost as quick to sic our National Guard to question New Yorkers when they come down (and even track their movements with an app, though of course I don't suppose he'll necessarily develop a good app). And that's before we get to our Justice Department's recent attempts at power grabs -- or the USA PATRIOT Act.

Hamilton Nolan at In These Times tells us "What a General Strike Would Take." We've never had a general strike larger than an American city, but quantum physicists might tell us that whatever we imagine comes to pass sooner or later -- though nobody wants an "indiscriminate" general strike in which "truly essential" workers would participate. In any case, we'd best not think of so many good Americans now out of work as an opportunity, not just because recasting someone else's misery as your opportunity is what evil people do, but because the West Virginia teacher union's strikes of 2018 and 2019 were not a response to an obvious "opportunity." We shouldn't be waiting for the right landscape so much as creating it.

In a related note, that peach of a Philippine President says police and military will shoot anyone who violates lock-down laws. The Philippine National Police Chief said later that of course they all know he didn't mean what he actually said, but the Philippine President is the same fellow who openly encouraged folks to shoot drug dealers dead -- after all, who better to protect the due process rights of others than a rage addict with a gun? I just know our own President wishes he could have uttered the line "(d)o not intimidate the government. Do not challenge the government. You will lose." Hopefully you noticed as quickly as I did that if he'd said "do not challenge your government," it wouldn't have come off as well.

Ho hum, even Florida's current Administration contends that the state's unemployment website is a "shit sandwich," and its design under previous Governor and now Senator Rick Scott "was about making it harder for people to get benefits or keep benefits so that the unemployment numbers were low to give the governor something to brag about." But note well Mr. Scott has now won three consecutive elections -- with 49, 48, and 50 percent of the vote, to be sure -- because Democrats didn't field candidates who could convince large numbers of Floridians that they would actually do things for their bosses, the people.

Finally, our President insists that we should all show up to the polls in November -- and claims, of course without evidence, that voting-by-mail would cause all kinds of voter fraud -- but he himself has requested a vote-by-mail ballot for the upcoming Florida primary! And that's just another reminder that our President believes rules are for little people, not big people like him.

Action: concerning government spying, racism, and health care.

Our President seems averse to making bad "free" trade deals that nullify our laws, so why is he prepared to make a deal with the United Kingdom that would allow their law enforcement to search through American data without getting a warrant in an American court? It'd work the other way, too -- our police could search through data held in the United Kingdom without following British privacy laws, either. The Cloud Act allows foreign governments to negotiate agreements with our government to get access to data located in the United States, but we shouldn't just give that over willy-nilly -- they should have to respect our laws, just as we should have to respect theirs. That's not jingoism or xenophobia, that's just basic law and order; you can't reach out to other people if you don't stand your ground. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop any agreements with foreign governments that allow them to run roughshod over our laws.

Meanwhile, if you've been working from home a lot lately, you've probably used a lot of Zoom, the video conferencing software -- but you may not have heard that "Zoom bombers," or hackers, like to disrupt the calls of black folks and put racial slurs on their screens! I shudder to imagine what it would be like to have nothing better to do than that, but that's some folks' lives. Perhaps as a result of its sudden ubiquity in our lives, Zoom hasn't exactly done a sterling job keeping its lines secure, so the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell Zoom to ramp up its cybersecurity so that racists don't go "Zoom bombing" on its black users. I suspect Zoom might be receptive to the Big Stick of Bad PR here, because it might be the big dog of video conferencing now, but it's also not the only game in town, so they might not be the big dog for long. Hell, more than a few folks are going to take a second look at Skype or Hangouts -- or a first look at Webex, Whereby, or Starleaf.

Finally, a few states (like Massachusetts, New Jersey, Virginia, and Washington) have recognized abortion as an essential health service which can't be closed during a pandemic, but, well, I could make a long list of states that have done the opposite and so could you I bet, so Daily Kos helps you tell your state governments to recognize abortion as an essential health service and stop restricting access thereto during this pandemic. Why? Because our Constitution protects women's rights to birth control, of course, and because abortion actually is an essential service, as you would know if you thought about the fact that a fetus keeps growing in your uterus the longer you don't have access to an abortion. Anything can happen during that time, including an unforeseen risk to the life or health of the mother. So you may have to tell your state governments to stop the grandstanding, though that doesn't make today that much different from any other day.

Action: concerning gas mileage standards and better coronavirus policy.

File this, also, under "evil done under cover of a pandemic": our EPA has announced that it will roll back clean car standards! The same standards that force car manufacturing corporations to give you more miles to the gallon, which saves you money at the pump! And for what? So our President can take yet another dump on one of the Obama Administration's few good works? You've heard it from their own mouths, how "cars will be cheaper" if they pollute more (ah, but higher gas prices will be with you for the entire life of your car) and how "it'll save lives because people will drive more if their gas is cheaper and thus have more accidents" (ah, but more pollution makes people sicker). Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your state Attorney General to fight the rollback, and the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to reverse this rollback. Hate to pile on, but the rollback will cost jobs, since regulations always create jobs for people trying to figure out how to adhere to them, and we'll have more trouble selling cars abroad where the standards are stricter. But as long as some CEO somewhere is redistributing income upward to himself, this Administration doesn't care.

Meanwhile, Iran and Venezuela aren't the only nations suffering under American sanctions during a pandemic -- so is Palestine. You've heard New York Gov. Cuomo talk about how many tens of thousands his state still needs to withstand this pandemic? Well, the Gaza Strip has a mere 56 ventilators, to go with its 40 ICU beds, for two million people, in a region the United Nations has declared would soon be uninhabitable thanks to over a decade of bombings and blockades. If you're inclined to say well that strip is just full of terrorists anyway so whatever, then ask yourself how two million terrorists could be so ground down! After all, it only took 18 terrorists to take down the World Trade Center and drive our government insane. Maybe, just maybe, most people in the Middle East are actually folks like us, and maybe, just maybe, most people don't deserve to be crushed in a pandemic. Hence Jewish Voice for Peace joins with M Power Change to help you tell your Congressfolk to act to end the Israeli blockade of Gaza so that its people might actually survive this pandemic.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our state and federal governments to suspend co-pays for prisoners who need medical attention. We went over this a few years ago: a prisoner who has to pay a $5 co-pay for a medical appointment may be getting a cheaper co-pay than you are, but given that a prisoner might be making 15 cents an hour (if they even have a job!), a $5 co-pay is actually an onerous charge that prevents prisoners from getting the care they need -- and thus putting other prisoners and prison workers at risk. There's also this little thing called a coronavirus pandemic going on, and a single prisoner deciding he can't pay a co-pay could feed the fire of this pandemic, especially in prisons, where "physical distancing" isn't actually possible. I mean, they're not going to set prisoners free (even though most of them haven't been convicted of a crime, but are awaiting trial) and they're going to shake them down for medical appointments, too? That's not how a civilized society conducts itself.

Around the table: now with even *more* dastardly deeds done under cover of a pandemic!

Hoo boy now our Administration is trying to get Venezuela to agree to a "transition plan." Venezuela had an election over a year and a half ago, but that matters little to the President who somehow got into office with only 46% of the vote. I guess this is the "good cop" half of their strategy -- charging President Maduro with drug trafficking being the "bad cop" part -- but dig Elliot Abrams, somehow this Administration's Venezuela "expert," saying he wants people in charge "who can work with the other side," which is always code for "people who can capitulate to right-wingers." And dig Secretary Pompeo's statement that Venezuela's crisis is a "man-made crisis." Indeed, this crisis was, to a large degree, made by the evil men in Washington, D.C. who imposed sanctions upon Venezuela. Maybe the people of Venezuela will have something to say about all of this, as they did when Tha Bush Mobb tried to overthrow his predecessor.

Margaret Flowers at TruthOut reminds us that "The US’s Wave of Hospital Closures Left Us Ill-Equipped for COVID-19." The American population has gone up by about 50% over the last 45 years, but the number of hospital beds has gone down by over 50% over the same period, and "down" is the wrong direction to go in, obviously. And, as you might imagine, rural hospitals tend to close down even faster than urban or suburban ones. What's to blame? Greed, as usual. What would be a good solution to greed? Why, Medicare-for-All, of course, which would push the private health insurance system out and make it more accountable to you, as your government's owner! Don't be the one who complains about "wait times"; folks in rural areas wait until after they die of preventable issues because they have no hospitals. Here, as elsewhere, the "free market" has not provided.

If you've been crushing on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo because, unlike our President, he projects the image of someone who knows what he's doing, let Ross Barkan at The Nation remind you that Mr. Cuomo helped set his own state up for this mess by letting big corporations close and consolidate hospitals and trying to slash Medicaid funding. Hey, you know what might solve the problem of having "too many people" on Medicaid? Why, Medicare-for-All health insurance, of course! Let me know if you think I'm beating a dead horse here. Not that it'll change what I'm doing.

In the wake of the CNN CEO claiming that he broadcasts all of our President's crapshow briefings because it showcases how "tough" his network's questions are, Neil DeMause at FAIR reminds us that "limiting" our President's time on-screen "Isn't Censorship, It's Journalism." Journalists are supposed to get at the truth, after all, not merely be stenographers to power. And you know, I was about to be generous and say they've simply forgotten the fact that they already don't broadcast every single possible piece of news that could be broadcast, so it's hard to call every single choice not to broadcast something "censorship." But they've got as much or more semiotic training than I do, so I'm going to go ahead and assume they're just pretending to be stupid, so they can better serve evil.

Speaking of how you actually do journalism, Isaac Chotiner at The New Yorker interviews a "contrarian" whose questionable coronavirus theories have informed our Administration's "thinking," and refutes said "contrarian"'s misstatements in italics right after he makes them. Easier to do in print than on TV, I suppose, but then that recommends print over TV, doesn't it? Every damn journalistic outlet should do what The New Yorker did here; we can even call it "doing a New Yorker" if they like. (As an aside, theorizing that viruses "evolve" from strong to weak is only a cut above Todd Akin's insane ramblings about "legitimate rape." Plus, Mr. Epstein does what they all do when someone calls them on their BS: he starts yelling.)

Finally, some news you can use: Markos Moulitsas at Daily Kos helps you "cut the cord" with your cable service provider so you don't subsidize Fox News's disgusting behavior anymore. You may not watch Fox News, but you're still paying for Fox News as part of your cable package; it's $20/year, but that's more than the other sucky cable news channels get, and since at least 93 million households still get cable TV, which means Fox News gets over $1.8 billion just from being part of your cable package, and though their advertisers are deserting them in droves, they're still making all this passive money from you. Don't give it to them! You'll be happier and richer.

Action: concerning big pharma monopolies, coronavirus coverage, and pollution.

Gilead Sciences -- you've heard of them, they're the ones making a killing, so to speak, by charging over $70,000 for their Hep C drug -- has also tried to corner the market on a potential coronavirus treatment, by exploiting a loophole in the law that allows big pharma corporations to enjoy more monopoly rights on drugs that treat "rare" diseases. You're thinking coronavirus ain't rare, since it's all we're talking about, but the law defines "rare" as afflicting fewer than 200,000 people at the time the corporation applies for special treatment, and thus coronavirus is still "rare" at this writing, though maybe not in a few hours. Gilead faced some PR backlash for its naked attempt to monopolize that drug, and has thus decided not to exploit that loophole -- but they still haven't committed to making the drug affordable, which, given their history with their Hep C drug, they might not. Unless and until we bring the Big Stick of Bad PR! Public Citizen helps you tell Gilead Sciences to ensure that everyone can get its coronavirus drug, not just the well-off.

Meanwhile, it ain't just Fox News that's misinforming us during this pandemic crisis -- it's the usually more-estimable Associated Press! The AP's standard "What You Need to Know About the Virus Outbreak" passage it usually inserts into its articles might lull you into a false sense of security, what with "most people" getting "mild to moderate symptoms" "that clear up in two to three weeks," and saying "the vast majority of people recover" is, well, TBD, frankly. And, perhaps more to the point, will be of exactly zero comfort to you if you're one of the ones who die horribly. The Centers for Disease Control puts this matter somewhat differently: "Covid-19 can result in severe disease, including hospitalization, admission to an intensive care unit and death, especially among older adults. Everyone can take actions, such as social distancing, to help slow the spread of Covid-19 and protect older adults from severe illness." So for the AP, "what you need to know" somehow excluded "what you need to do"! FAIR helps you tell AP to get their act together in re informing good Americans about the pandemic.

Finally, our Administration's EPA has just announced its proposal to restrict the science that it can use to make decisions on how to protect our clean air and clean water. The EPA started this process back in 2018, but received some 600,000 comments (including yours, perhaps!) opposing their attempt to a) let it use corporate-backed science to make decisions and b) only use "publicly-available" studies to make decisions, when they know damn well that the reason most good scientific studies aren't "publicly-available" is that they contain good Americans' private health into and medical records. So, confronted with so many Americans telling them they were full of soup, what did they do? They decided to delay their proposal until they thought no one was listening -- you know, like, in the middle of a pandemic. But we are listening! Our Glorious Elites (including Mitch McConnell!) pretend you can only ever do or think or say one thing at a time, we know that's utter bunkum. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our EPA to use real science in deciding how to stop pollution.

Around the table: why do they manage the pandemic response to badly? So they can use it to crush us! And other horrible truths.

Hungarian parliament gives its Prime Minister rule-by-decree powers which of course will end once the pandemic is over yeah sure. Our President is looking to give someone a high-five! This would be another good time to remind you that while we're not there yet, we could get there pretty easily -- particularly since fear of dying from a pandemic will likely depress turnout on Election Day.

Not long after General Electric announces it'll lay off 10 percent of its aviation workers in America, GE workers protest, pointing out that all the idle factories could be repurposed to manufacture ventilators for coronavirus patients. "If GE trusts us to build, maintain, and test engines which go on a variety of aircraft where millions of lives are at stake, why wouldn’t they trust us to build ventilators?" says one worker. I'm going to go out on a limb and say the reason is because they're trying to use the pandemic to destroy their unions.

In a related note, big corporation takes taxpayer money to build a ventilator, only sells that ventilator overseas -- and then enters talks with current Administration to build a more complex and more expensive ventilator! Socialize the risk, privatize the profit, as they say. And as one observer reminds us, "(t)he market is not going to give priority to a relatively no-frills but dependable ventilator that’s not expensive." In other words, big corporations have decided there's no money in saving people from a pandemic; we'll see how they feel when there are far fewer of us around to buy their stuff, amirite? And remember when they give you that nobody could have predicted crap that our government has actually been trying to fund inexpensive ventilators since at least 2005.

I wonder whether Fox News (sic) really has to worry very much about legal action after they swore up and down that the coronavirus pandemic was a hoax. Yes, the Murdoch clan was apparently taking steps to protect themselves from the pandemic while their punditoids were calling it a big fat lie, but questions of who-knew-what-when may be more difficult to nail down than we think, and maybe the courts will take the difference between "news" and "opinion" more seriously than they should. I say "more seriously than they should" because media outlets actually don't have an obligation to broadcast every single conceivable opinion under the sun, and if they're pushing denialists to the forefront and people die because they believe them, we should hold them accountable, just as (trigger warning: I'm about to invoke Dean Baker's best-ever analogy again) we hold publishing houses accountable when they hurt people with what they publish.

Finally, because it had to happen sooner or later, Sen. McConnell (E-KY) suggests that our President didn't do so well heading off this pandemic because he was so busy defending himself from impeachment. Well, maybe he shouldn't have tried to bribe the Ukrainian President, then! I was going to add "it's not like every single worker in an Administration has to concentrate on the most important thing happening at any moment" -- particularly just because our media isn't covering anything else, a particularly awful the-map-is-exactly-the-territory argument from Mr. McConnell -- but then I remembered that this President has hardly anyone actually working for him in this Administration. Which is, yes, another reason we should never have elected him.

Action: concerning good House bills, internet freedom, and voting rights.

It's once again time to call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). Why do I keep harping about these things in the middle of a pandemic? Because protecting voting rights and health care and public lands and internet freedom actually sustain us in pandemics and help us avoid future pandemics! So let's get to it.

Meanwhile, Free Press helps you tell big telecom corporations to provide cheap or free unlimited internet service during this pandemic. You've no doubt been inside a lot during this pandemic, so you've likely been, ah, availing yourself of the various entertainment our internet easily provides, but that's not the only reason to press for super-affordable internet during a pandemic -- you're likely to get most of your information about how to fight the pandemic via our internet, and why would we make such a thing too expensive for some people? Unless we're cruel and heartless, that is. If you've been attending this argument, you'll no doubt wonder why we don't regulate our internet like a public utility! The answer, of course, is that we did -- until this President got elected, and decided that anything the previous President did that actually helped people should be shat upon, and so he put his cronies in at the FCC and they stopped regulating the internet as a utility. In the absence of sound public policy, the people must resort to shame.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state elected officials to ensure we can all vote by mail during this election season, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. While it's true that voting by mail is a good response to folks' fears that they'll get coronavirus from the voting booth, it's also true that voting by mail solves a number of other vote suppression hurdles people face -- there ain't long lines when you vote by mail, and there ain't no voting machines to "lose" your vote (or switch your vote to some other candidate!) when you vote by mail. Voting by mail doesn't necessarily address gerrymandering or caging, but that's why we're also telling our Senators to pass H.R. 1 (the For the People Act) and H.R. 4 (the Voting Rights Advancement Act). It may be giving them too much credit to say so, but this Administration may have hit on the ultimate vote suppression scheme -- the pandemic that'll scare people into staying home even when it's over! But voting by mail can help defeat such a scheme.

Action: concerning our pandemic, and the various evils our government does under its cover.

We're almost two months after our first coronavirus diagnosis and somehow we still don't have enough tests! And we need them; after all, we can't all just cough on a rich person or shake hands with our President! Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell tell Brent Giroir, our Assistant Secretary for Health in the Department of Health and Human Services and the man who runs coronavirus testing in America, to ensure everyone who needs a coronavirus test can get one. And, like, now -- I'm sick of hearing all the supposed can-do types who run our country shrug and say we can't do this. We can give away hundreds of billions in bailouts under cover of a pandemic, but we can't test our own citizens? Who wants to take that achievement to the pearly gates? They used to say a government that can do anything for you can do anything to you, but they helped create a government that can do anything to you but can't do anything for you. And we deserve better.

Meanwhile, speaking of dastardly things done under cover of a pandemic: you may have heard that our Department of Justice (sic) has asked Congress for the ability to detain Americans indefinitely -- you know, because courts will be closed, or open irregularity, and thus they "can't" grant us our constitutional rights of due process and habeus corpus. Awfully suspicious, eh? Another thing our all-powerful government just "can't" do, and if you don't think this government (or the next one) won't abuse that power, I know a dead Nigerian prince who left you a lot of money. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt by our Administration to grab the right to detain Americans indefinitely. If you're thinking well, this is just until the pandemic is over, I direct your attention to our NSA's warrantless surveillance of good Americans, which has gone on for almost 20 years after 9.11; when our government abuses its power, it doesn't want to stop.

Remaining on the topic of "dastardly things they do under cover of a pandemic": our EPA has declared that it won't enforce clean air or clean water regulations very vigorously during the pandemic, citing physical distancing. I'm old enough to remember when conservatives routinely said stop complaining about how hard it is to do the right thing and just do it! But today's right-wingers spend an awful lot of time whining about why they can't do the right thing. You think clean air and clean water enforcers couldn't be designated essential personnel? You have to wonder why this Administration hasn't done that! And please understand that when I say that, I mean "because this Administration hates regulations that actually help people, and only likes regulations that let someone push their allegedly religious bigotry on someone else." Too harsh? The truth always is. So the Sierra Club helps you tell our Administration to stop making excuses and protect good Americans from polluters.

Finally, Whole Foods's CEO, John Mackey, has actually said that if some of his workers need paid time off during this pandemic, then their co-workers should be gracious enough to "donate" their paid time off! Gosh, is that all it takes to be a CEO -- to refuse to help your own workers in their time of need? And they say getting rich is hard! Seriously, those of us who aren't rich might actually have a lot to be proud of. And Whole Foods, as you know, is owned by Amazon, whose CEO, Jeff Bezos, is worth over $100 billion, that's "billion" with a "b," and he's echoed Mr. Mackey's suggestion that workers "donate" their paid time off, proving, again, that you don't get to be the boss by being generous or humane. I swear, if I've done one good work before I die, it'll be to make the word "boss" into a cuss word, a matter our President has helped a lot with, amirite? In the meantime, MoveOn helps you tell Messrs. Bezos and Mackey to ensure their workers have the paid time off they need.

Around the table: exposing *even more* bad behavior and bad arguments.

Eric Cortellessa at Yes! magazine writes about "How to Save Elections from a Pandemic," by describing how voting-by-mail goosed up turnout rates in Salt Lake County, Utah. The sanitary effects of voting-by-mail are obvious, but it hadn't occurred to me before that transferring completely to voting-by-mail would not only eliminate the long lines at (certain!) polling places, but it would also create a paper trail that a voting machine couldn't easily obscure. Your state government could still use a voting machine to (mis)count the votes, but stealing an election would be harder -- at least in the long run, as corrupt state governments will no doubt entrust the transition to utter incompetents and hacks in the short run.

Our Justice Department indicts Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro for drug trafficking. Well, if you can't squeeze him out of office by taking a dump on his nation's economy, and you can't pretend a "movement" will topple him even with our "liberal" media's collaboration, I guess you could always indict him! Naturally "(t)he evidence they point to against Maduro is thin," in one observer's words, and six times as much cocaine flows through Guatemala as does Venezuela, but Guatemala's President is a right-wing prick just like ours, so he's not getting indicted! Maybe our President will invade Venezuela to arrest Mr. Maduro, as Bush the Better did to get rid of Gen. Noriega back in the day; admittedly, our President has had a very hard time getting Americans very emotionally-invested in his relentless anti-Maduro saucepan-banging, but then, that's always been a double-edged sword.

With a long line of right-wing blowhards suggesting that we should be forcing retired seniors to go back to work to help us out during the pandemic, Hamilton Nolan at In These Times has a simple suggestion: "Back to Work? You First." Then he imagines a litany of unpopular-and-deservedly-so characters waiting tables, bagging groceries, and running cash registers; not that these are bad jobs, per se, but it would surely humiliate folks like Arthur Laffer and Lloyd Blankfein to have to work them! So zing, as they say. As an aside, it has occurred to me that wishing people would die so the economy could get moving again isn't just cruel and heartless, it's bad economic theory. After all, people can't spend money when they're dead!

Our President's handling-the-pandemic numbers are -- surprise, surprise! -- going down again, and I'd like to think it's because of all his recent bad behavior! Saying our media want to "keep our country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success" reminds you that, like everything else, he thinks this pandemic is all about him. And when you come to grips with the fact that he only started making noise about ending physical distancing after six of his own properties got closed down, you are further reminded that he thinks everything is all about him. And here you thought America was all about us!

In a peripherally-related note, our President all but admits that he's going out of his way to make life harder for good Americans in certain states merely because their Governors have "not (been) appreciative to me." What a big baby! Our President isn't the first to play these games, of course, but that doesn't make it right, and hanging such corruption out for all to see will not only make it easier for the next President to act like a petulant brat, it'll make it easier for all of us to do such things in our lives. He's a role model, whether he likes it or not. And as a role model, well, he's falling short.

Finally, because we need some good news: a federal District Court judge tosses all of the permits our Administration issued for the Dakota Access pipeline, citing all the public comments our Administration ignored in the permitting process. You know, like that "the pipeline’s leak-detection system was unlikely to work, that it was not designed to catch slow spills, that the operator’s serious history of incidents had not been taken into account, and that the worst-case scenario used by the Corps was potentially only a fraction of what a realistic figure would be." See, if you're going to issue permits for a project like this, you actually have to address these things, because it's the law. The ruling doesn't stop the pipeline (which had at least five spills in the first six months of its operation) from operating, but that might be coming. In the meantime, go treat yourself; some restaurants are still open for pick-ups and deliveries, after all.

Action: concerning war on Yemen, debt relief, and humane treatment of detainees.

Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell your House Reps to reintroduce a War Powers resolution to end our unconstitutional involvement in the war on Yemen. As you may recall, both House and Senate passed such a War Powers resolution in 2019, but not by a large enough margin to overcome a Presidential veto, and if you're wondering why we're bothering to try again, remember that a) right is right and duty is duty and b) just as the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen has pushed good Yemeni citizens to the brink of famine, the coronavirus pandemic threatens to wreak even more havoc, and the war has crippled Yemen's ability to respond to the pandemic. Our President will veto it again, and probably complain about having to tear himself away from Fox and Friends to do it, but I always say make him do it -- make him create more bad karma for himself and those who'd follow him off a cliff.

Meanwhile, Avaaz helps you tell G20 world leaders to offer debt relief to the nations of Asia, Africa, and South America. Why? Because the coronavirus pandemic will get there eventually, too, and developing nations sure could use a break. How will good folks packed into slums be able to afford good health care, or any health care, in these lands? If that voice in your head still says but everyone should pay their debts, please consider that the developed nations of the world kinda forced these loans on developing nations so that they could be more like them and less like themselves. All for free markets! And debt relief is not exactly unprecedented in the world, not just if you've heard of the word "jubilee," but if you've attended recent history -- even the IMF forgave $100 million in loans after ebola worked its will. So many of us are being so generous these days, and our leaders should be more like us.

Finally, with the first detainee in an ICE concentration camp recently testing positive for the coronavirus, Amnesty International helps you tell our government to ensure that all immigrants and asylum-seekers in custody get the medical care they need in order to survive this pandemic. Like our prisoners, these detainees also live in conditions that'll make the virus spread a lot faster than normal, plus they don't get very good care there, and they are human beings, after all. So please don't be the fool who says well what about our own people? Literally no one has advocated putting folks in concentration camps ahead of everyone else! We merely demand that America be the great nation we say it is by treating everyone as if they're important. That is the promise of America, after all. Either we mean that promise we make, or we're just another ignorant and arrogant nation about to fall into the ashheap of history.

Action: concerning health care, working families, and humane treatment of prisoners.

Thanks to our President's incompetence, our hospitals won't have enough ventilators to cope with the mass of coronavirus infections we face, which means we're going to be overusing the ventilators we do have, which means more of them will require repair -- and did you know that some ventilator manufacturing corporations don't make their repair manuals easy to use, or even access? Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell ventilator manufacturers to release service info that hospitals will need to fix their ventilators. Worried about hospital techs "fixing them wrong"? Then those techs deserve the best information! Worried about violating "trade secrets"? Not when millions of good Americans might die in the next few weeks! A lot of right-wingers, when they talk about the values to which we must hold even when inconvenient, think "protecting trade secrets" as one of them! And not, for example, telling the truth or not manipulating people. Then again, some right-wingers are really all about preserving profits no matter how inconvenient! But to paraphrase a famous philosopher: if money is all you want, then money is all you'll get.

Meanwhile, Philly sports fans might have heard that our local NBA team, the 76ers, was about to impose a 20 percent pay cut on its at-will employees (who aren't working, as you know, because the NBA ain't playing) until, well, local media covered the story, and then the hedge fund billionaire who owns the Sixers realized he'd stepped into a mountain of dung and reversed himself. (The NHL's New Jersey Devils had announced a similar pay cut scheme; guess which hedge fund billionaire owns the Devils as well as the Sixers?) In this spirit, Color of Change helps you tell NBA teams to pay all their laid-off workers for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic. Thousands of good Americans work in NBA arenas, and when the teams ain't playing, and their cities are in various stages of lockdown, where can they turn for a steady income? Sadly, in their immediate future, they might turn to payday lenders and get trapped in 300% death spirals of debt -- or, they might be forced to make either-or decisions about health care and bill-paying that really aren't either-or. So let's have as little of that in the richest country on the planet as possible.

Finally, we strive to practice good physical distancing (a.k.a., "the artist formerly known as 'social distancing,'") so that we don't get infected with coronavirus, or infect other good Americans with coronavirus, but what of folks who can't see their loved ones incarcerated in prison? They're left with video conferencing, and it's bad enough that video conferencing doesn't help keep folks who've served their time from going back to jail anywhere near as well as live, face-to-face visits with loved ones, but video conferencing tends to be a damn racket, saddling prisoners and their families with absurdly high bills, and why? Because they can. What are prisoners and their families going to do about it? Go find another service provider? Hence Color of Change helps you tell our elected officials to make prisoner/loved one communication free during the coronavirus pandemic and thereafter. Really, just because someone can make money doing something, doesn't mean anyone should make money doing something. Sorry, I forgot who was President for a moment.

Action: concerning voting rights, coronavirus policy, and price-gouging.

Daily Kos helps you tell your state officials they must make voting-by-mail available to all of your state's voters. I've been hesitant to mention voting-by-mail, not just because I fully intend to vote at my local voting booth this November come hell, high water, or pandemic, but because voting-by-mail isn't secret balloting and because the states that have been doing voting-by-mail well over the years have been doing it, well, for years. Still, I've tolerated non-secret balloting in other arenas (I voted absentee in 2004), and it's not like the voting-by-mail wisdom of states like Washington and Oregon just can't be reverse-engineered by folks in other states, and maybe a mandate will provoke your state into seeking and accumulating that wisdom. One thing's for sure: a lot of politicians would just prefer not to face the voters if they don't have to, and the pandemic gives them an excuse. But we don't tolerate excuses around here -- the politicians need to do their damn job and ensure everyone can vote.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos also helps you tell credit card corporations to waive monthly payments and interest while the pandemic is crippling the economy. One might well retort how do you expect them to make money especially when the economy is in the toilet? I expect them to make money by being generous now so that folks will still value their services later! Too many Americans won't think of the long term, and that's because our government and our media have conditioned us that way! But I'm old enough to remember when corporations did think of the long term -- largely because our government actually enacted and enforced regulations that gave them no choice! But if you just lost your low-paying job and can't make ends meet, the last thing you need is your credit card corporation haranguing you about your payments. No, people don't use credit cards for merely frivolous items, not anymore -- too many Americans use credit cards because they have to. Let's give them a hand up.

Finally, you've heard about price-gouging on things like saniwipes and hand sanitizer, and you may have told corporations like Amazon to stamp out that price-gouging on their sites, but, ah, price-gouging is also illegal, and those who jack up prices to absurd levels in a time of crisis deserve punishment for their evil works. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop price-gouging during this pandemic. Our FTC has been warning us that price-gouging could happen -- but that may be the extent of its interest in stopping price-gouging! They might well claim, as right-wingers typically do, that they "trust consumers" more than they trust mandates, but if that really worked, we wouldn't have any monopolies in America, would we? And when we have monopolies (or collusion between corporations), you can "trust consumers" all you want, but they won't have the tools to do something about price-gouging. This is why we have laws, and regulations, and it's why we have law enforcement! Maybe you heard that having law enforcement had something to do with black people, but really it has to do with all of us.

Around the table: our President blusters and blunders on, part 685.

World Health Organization starts using the phrase "physical distancing" in place of "social distancing," and boy is that overdue! "Social distancing" always implied, certainly to me, that you were supposed to completely isolate yourself from other people, and boy wouldn't Our Glorious Elites like it if we were all completely isolated from each other! That has always been the downside of physical distancing -- I discussed this in a little more depth on Monday -- and we still have to beware of it. And let's not get too excited about social media filling in the gaps; yes, if this pandemic had happened in 1979 and we'd practiced physical distancing we'd have suffered much worse for it, but social media can be just as much a distraction as a help. I would hope we all know how to connect with and relate to each other by now.

Katie Bo Williams at DefenseOne explains why our President still isn't using the Defense Production Act to ramp up productions of ventilators and respirators (among other things). I was ready to say the answer was "because you can't prolong the drama by actually solving the problem!" But Ms. Williams's answer -- that our President really believes TEH FREE MARKETZ!!!!! can do the job better than our government, even though it's not doing anywhere near as good a job as he says it is -- is better, even if it leads to the same result, i.e., prolonging the drama.

In a related note, author Max Brooks explains on NPR exactly why our President is wrong not to have invoked the Defense Production Act already. Key statement: our President "is spinning some sort of tale about...black helicopters coming in and taking over factories. That's not how it works at all. What happens is the federal government has the network to identify where the production chain is and how to help the private sector work through this, because the private sector doesn't know. And as an example, I have a World War II rifle made by the Smith Corona typewriter company. Smith Corona worked with the federal government to then partner up with the Winchester Company, to then share resources and to share tools and talent to then produce the rifles that we needed. That's how it works. It's not some sort of KGB coming in and taking over everything. It is guidance and streamlining. And only the federal government has the experience to know how to do that." Of course, it's much easier to claim BIG GUBMINT KNOWS TEH NOTHINGZ!!!! when you populate your Administration with know-nothings. And again, I could have written exactly the same sentence about Tha Bush Mobb.

Nick Sholders at In These Times describes "How White Conservatism Stole Country Music." It ain't a long and winding road from pain to nostalgia to bitterness, of course, but the critical moment seems to have come a little less a hundred years ago, with the segregation of blues and country in the marketplace, even though both musics derive from rich and diverse sources -- if you remember how '80s classic rock stations played virtually no black artists aside from Jimi Hendrix, you'll have a sense of how that worked. We also tend to think of rural America (and therefore country music) as white, even though the slide guitar is a Hawaiian instrument and the banjo originated in West Africa.

Finally, Sasha Abramsky at The Nation provides a decent summary of how His Assholiness, our President, has been "managing" the coronavirus crisis in the last week or so. Spoiler alert: by blaming everyone else for his mistakes and causing bad things to happen. "(T)wo months...that could have been spent building up stockpiles of medical supplies" could be one of his epitaphs, but note well that in addition to ignoring unemployed airline workers as he tries to bail out their bosses and letting the virus fester in overcrowded concentration camps, he recalled all Peace Corps workers from overseas and then fired them -- because some Peace Corps volunteer made a joke at his expense once? I don't know, but it really might be for that small a reason, given that he's that small a man.