Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning good House bills, racism on social media, and ancient forests.

Happy Wednesday, good Americans! It's time to call your Senators and tell 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. This week we add H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, which would make Washington, D.C. our 51st state; the House passed this bill late last week. Our Senators really have no excuses opposing any of these bills, so get in their grills and tell them to pass them now.

Meanwhile, over 180 corporations have stopped advertising on Facebook because of their years-long enabling of Nazi wannabes; Mr. Zuckerberg has explained away all this enabling, however obliquely, by talking about his unwillingness to restrict "free speech." Of course, our First Amendment protects us from our government, not from publishing houses, which Facebook most assuredly is, even if communications law doesn't currently define them as such. Saying "I have to publish every dung nugget from obviously bad human beings because I'm Facebook" is a little like saying "I have to accept every single manuscript that comes across my desk because I'm a publishing house." And, like, that's not how that works! Hence Color of Change helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Facebook during the month of July. And Sum of Us helps you tell Reddit to ban racist hate speech on its platform. Reddit bills itself, not without justification, as "the front page of the internet," but the Southern Poverty Law Center found it also to be the home of "violently racist" content as far back as 2015, so why should they be exempt from our fury?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 2491, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. The Roadless Area Conservation Act would prevent our Department of Agriculture from permitting road construction in areas where Roadless Rule regulations already prohibit them; yes, we actually have to tell our Administration to do this, because they're trying to work around the Executive branch's own regulations. Why not just rewrite them? Possibly because their efforts will ultimately fail in court, like most of them do! Our Administration ultimately aims to let loggers into the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, which is a rain forest, yo, with, like, thousand-year-old trees in it. But I guess making desks and toilet paper from thousand-year-old trees is better than keeping thousand-year-old trees around and being able to study them and learn from them. Put six beers into our President and I bet he puts it pretty much like that. He'd probably also call you a LOOOZER!!!! for disagreeing with him. But he'd just be projecting, as usual.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, clean water, law and order, and corporate welfare.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your U.S. Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. The HEROES Act is actual good stimulus legislation that would help fund states and localities, fund contact tracing so we can get a better handle on this pandemic, expand tax credits for working families (and repeal a massive corporate welfare handout for hedge fund managers), fund our Post Office so it can continue to do the good work it does which could very well include delivering your votes on Election Day, extend enhanced unemployment benefits for the tens of millions of Americans who will likely still need it after it expires at the end of next month, and provide bigger stimulus checks for good Americans making less than six figures. What is the reason for not passing this bill? It sure ain't THE DEFICITZ!!!!!, because our President proved with his 2017 tax "reform" that he can blow up deficits quite well, thank you very much. And that was before the corporate welfare-laden CARES Act passed! So let's spend our money on some good things for once.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that Consumer Reports found an awful lot of arsenic in Whole Foods-manufactured bottled water brand Starkey Spring Water -- it almost had the federal limit of 10 parts of arsenic per billion, and if you're saying, "well, it's still under the limit," remember that a) getting just under the federal limit for some poison or other is no reason to high-five oneself and b) all the other bottled water brands Consumer Reports tested finished with fewer than three parts per billion. Of course, any bottled water testing high for arsenic is quite ironic, since the big corporations have been telling us for years that bottled water is "healthier" than tap water; that the biggest health food chain in the nation sells it is just gravy. Now, I'd rather bottled water didn't exist at all, but if we must have it, it really shouldn't make us sick. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell Whole Foods (and its parent corporation, Amazon) to protect its customers and stop selling Starkey Spring Water.

In other news, Moms Rising helps you tell your Mayors and Governors to help break the "school to prison pipeline" by getting police officers out of our public schools. As I've said, we use police officers as the Swiss Army knives of our civilization -- we put cops in schools before we put counselors in schools; we put cops in schools before we put social workers in schools; hell, we put cops in schools before we put nurses in schools! And no police officer, no matter how great, can wear that many hats. The science instructs us that schools with actual professionals like the three I listed above not only have fewer disciplinary incidents and suspend and expel their students less; they also show higher academic achievement and higher graduation rates, both of which you kinda want from a school. Not for nothing, but the kids in these schools also have less fear that a police officer will pre-judge you based on school and harass you repeatedly when you get out of school. So let's do the right thing, both for kids and for cops.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6707/S. 3611, the Resources for Workforce Investments, Not Drilling (or ReWIND) Act, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. The ReWIND Act would impose a moratorium on new gas and oil leasing (and drilling permits), prevent any banks that fed at the CARES Act trough from embarking upon new fossil fuel-related investments for the next two years, and ban our President from hoarding unneeded oil at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The bill would also roll back our President's recent drilling royalty cuts; these cuts mean the American people get less money from big fossil fuel corporations in exchange for the privilege of drilling on public lands. Our President casts this as a way of "stimulating the economy," but you'd be more accurate describing it as "corporate welfare" -- or, more pungently but no less precisely, as "our President taking food out of our mouths." Too harsh? Too bad: the truth is always harsh, though it always leaves us as better people.

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, COVID-19 testing, police brutality, and food stamps.

First things first. In less than a week, Israel plans to annex parts of the West Bank, virtually ending Palestine's prospects for realistic statehood; it's bad enough that some 25 miles separate the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but to turn the West Bank into a kind of Swiss cheese makes it considerably worse. Hence Avaaz helps you tell European leaders use their power to stop this annexation, while Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop military funding for Israel. If you think all of that is "not being a friend to Israel," then navigate away from this page right now, because being an actual friend, in real life, means standing up to your friend when you think they're doing wrong, and Israel is doing wrong here, and not even insuring its own security. When you occupy someone else's land, after all, you make a lot more problems for yourself, not least in the people of that land retaliating against your rule after you've demolished their homes and moved your own citizens in. Then again, for some "thinkers," keeping chaos going is a feature, not a bug. We need to move past that as a civilization.

Meanwhile, you've seen COVID-19 cases spiking over the last few days, right? Listen only to our President and you'll think it's because WE DOEZ TEH MOSTESTZ TESTZ EVAHZ!!!!!!, but though we may be doing more tests than any other country, we also have more people than almost any other country, so bragging about "doing the most tests" -- rather than, say, doing the most tests per million citizens, where we currently rank a bit outside the world's top 20 countries -- is meaningless, since you're not trying to win a race but control a pandemic, a task made easier when you test enough people. And if that's harder because America has a lot of people, well, you don't become the greatest country on Earth by making excuses! Anyway, although our President's votaries are falling all over themselves asserting that he didn't really ask "his people" to "slow down the testing," our President is defunding over a dozen test sites, which is the difference between a mound of dung the flies have found and a mound of dung they haven't found yet. Hence both Demand Progress and Public Citizen help you tell your Congressfolk to stop the closure of these testing sites.

In other news, Progress America helps you tell your local politicians to ban police use of tear gas and rubber bullets at peaceful protests. And if you're asking what if protests become violent, remember that the answer is "powerful people want protests to become violent!" And sending police to a protest with riot gear doesn't exactly cut down on violence! We are starting to see, I think, that a lot of our "solutions" to law-and-order issues over the years have created most of our actual problems, the main "solution" being "insisting on solving every single problem in society with a police officer." I bet a lot of police officers are sick of that, and I also bet they're sick of the paradigm that says the only way to deal with protestors is to crack their skulls -- or put their eyes ou, as rubber bullets have been known to do. And let's not fall for the rubbish that the anti-mask protestors armed with assault rifles got on better with the police because they were "more peaceful." Black folks who protest police brutality try to change the system; armed white dudes who whine about having to wear masks are the system.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Senators to increase food stamp and child nutrition funding during this pandemic. Because working families ain't working! And that'll still be true even if our President decides to masturbate in public over our economy adding another few million jobs this month, when he was blaming everyone but himself as it lost over 30 million jobs because he blew off dealing with a coming pandemic. Really, it is a testament to us, the American people, that we're doing as well as we are, and we're doing that well in spite of our President. But I digress. When all these good Americans can't work during a pandemic, that's the time our government has to step in and help folks out. With our money, of course -- I mean, that's what food stamp money is, since we paid into the system designed to help us out during hard times. And if you still think of food stamps as something "those people" get -- rather than something you could get if you fall on hard times! -- well, I guess you don't understand the whole concept of community.

Action: concering various law and order matters and conservation funding.

Public Citizen helps you tell your U.S. House Reps to impeach Attorney General William Barr. If we'd had our way, he'd never have been confirmed as Attorney General in the first place, and he hasn't exactly risen above our low expectations since then -- he acts like he works for our President and not for his real bosses, the American people. Earlier this week, a former Justice Department prosecutor testified before our House that our Justice Department weakened its recommended sentence for Presidential crony Roger Stone, and though he didn't come out and say Mr. Barr ordered that reduced sentence, well, we're not schmucks. (That sentence was for one count each of obstruction of justice and witness tampering, and five counts of making false statements, and not "nothing," as I'm sure right-wingers are yelling as we speak.) Of course, before that, he forced out a U.S. Attorney who was getting too close to some other Presidential cronies and tried to drop perjury charges against Michael Flynn to which he'd already pled guilty. And there's his lying about the Mueller report, and his defiance of Congressional subpoenas -- your law and order Administration, ladies and gentlemen!

Meanwhile, the ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban facial surveillance technologies. Yes, we can tell our government to ban things that hurt us! Yes, we can tell our government that some technologies simply aren't good enough to continue to exist! And facial recognition technology, to put it bluntly, sucks -- it can't tell black people apart any better than your right-wing uncle. And "letting the market work out its problems" is a horrible idea, since it hurts good Americans now -- really, the reasonable, moderate thing to do would be to ban it unless and until its designers can actually make it work so that it can't be used simply to harass black folks and protestors. Then again, I suspect that's a feature, not a bug -- facial recognition software really exists not to find criminals, but to harass those who represent a "threat" to Our Glorious Elites, and if such harassment results in (say) a black man waiting 30 hours in jail before law enforcement figures out that he looks absolutely nothing like their suspect, well, I guess they call that gravy. I mean, I do prefer to believe the best about people, but they're making that damn hard.

Finally, Congress hasn't fouled up every conceivable legislative initiative this term -- Congress has not only authorized the Land and Water Conservation Fund permanently, so that it doesn't just expire every few years and we let our public parks wither and die, but our Senate has, in passing S. 3422, the Great American Outdoors Act (and by a veto-proof 73-25 tally), permanently funded the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and also created a National Parks and Public Lands Legacy Fund to address specific repairs in our public lands. Now the bill goes to the House, and you'd like to think our House would pass this bill with a quickness, particularly since it did so well in a Republican-held Senate, but you never know with politicians. Who's going to try to use a must-pass bill to get some unearned goody for some crony, one wonders? Like I said, you never know. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your House Reps to pass the Great American Outdoors Act with a quickness. Let's try to pass it with a two-thirds majority, too, because you never know what nefarious bee is about to enter our President's bonnet, either, and we do best when we make Presidents unnecessary.

Action: concerning good COVID-19 policy and better plastics legislation.

You may have noticed that new coronavirus cases have spiked lately (which means spikes in coronavirus deaths likely aren't too far behind). You may also have heard our President suggest at that Tulsa rally that he asked "my people" to "slow the testing down please," ostensibly to make "his" numbers look better though of course they're not "his" numbers but ours. He's also said that more testing leads to more cases -- though more testing obviously doesn't automatically lead to the higher percentage of positive tests we're now seeing in Texas, Arizona, and Florida -- and he's also said "(w)e are leading the world in testing," which BFD, because we have over 300 million people; both Iceland and Denmark are testing almost twice as many of their citizens per million as we are, for example, and perhaps not coincidentally, those nations both have fewer cases and deaths per million citizens than we do. Anyway, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to demand more funding for COVID-19 testing. Be sure to let them know that you don't believe the President's hype, and also feel free to tell them why.

In a related note, S. 3677, the COVID-19 Every Worker Protection Act, would compel our Occupational Safety and Health Administration (or OSHA) to issue emergency regulations (since COVID-19 is only recently emergent, after all) that would protect health care employees, first responders, and other workers who face an acute threat of COVID contamination. Such regulations would at least work around the nefarious actions of our President, who has responded to the COVID-19 threat by rolling back safety regulations and enforcement and by keeping food processing plant workers at work whether they're safe there or not; I'd say "when all you've got is a hammer everything looks like a nail," but saying this President even has a hammer would be an unwarranted act of charity. I know, I know, what are the chances "his" OSHA will issue good regulations? We'll fight that battle when we get there; for now, let's insure they actually issue the regulations in the first place. Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our workers by passing the COVID-19 Every Worker Protection Act.

Meanwhile, you've likely heard that debt collectors have been snatching up some folks' stimulus checks from the CARES Act before they can even see it! To those pedants who would say well, you should expect that when you've got debt, I would say only two things: 1) slap yourself, and 2) the whole point of a "stimulus" check is to stimulate the economy, which a stimulus check won't do if it goes right back into the pocket of some bankster or other, amirite? But along comes S. 3841, which would prohibit creditors from doing this sort of thing, and if I read the bill correctly, it would apply to any other stimulus checks Congress might issue this year. S. 3841 comes from Republican Sens. Grassley of Iowa and Scott of South Carolina, plus five Democratic co-sponsors because the Republican caucus is so irredeemably decadent you can't even get more than two of them to sign onto a common sense idea like this! In any case, US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep creditors from taking away your stimulus check before you've had a chance to stimulate the economy with it. It is your money, after all.

Finally, Congress is contemplating handing out a billion dollars in corporate welfare to the plastics industry -- but there's a better legislative option than that! H.R. 5845/S. 3263, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, would actually start getting us off our utter dependence on plastics by (among other things) increasing the amount of recycled material plastic products must have, phasing out single-use plastic products starting in 2022, mandating that our EPA establish a national recycling standard for plastics, and limiting how much plastic trash we can export. With all the PFAS chemicals winding up in our drinking water and all the plastic trash winding up at sea, I'd say the clock's ticking. I will say I do not support taxes on plastic shopping bags -- those are exactly the kinds of taxes that hurt working families way more than the corporations that make the bags! -- but programs that refund consumers who bring back plastic containers is a good idea. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight plastic pollution by passing the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act.

Action: from good House bills to bad hunting regulations.

Happy Wednesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell 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. These are all good bills: the Voting Rights Advancement Act, for example, would put the teeth back into the Voting Rights Act that our Supreme Court knocked out, while the Save the Internet Act would reinstate the FCC's pro-internet freedom net neutrality rules as the law of the land again. So tell your Senators to pass these bills, with no excuses.

Meanwhile, H.R. 7221, the Prohibiting Law Enforcement Use of Chemical Weapons Act, would (as its title suggests!) prevent police from using tear gas as a weapon. If you're of the mind that reforms such as these would "keep cops from doing their jobs," please think about it: how many crooks do police apprehend with tear gas? It is an enormously cumbersome and imprecise weapon, much more so than a handgun or a taser. Of course, crooks don't get apprehended with tear gas -- but peaceful protestors sure do! And that's who the tear gas is really for. You would also want to consider why police would need a weapon soldiers haven't been able to use since 1997; I would discard answers that include the phrase "because the streets are so much more dangerous now," because a) that's not true and b) I just said that tear gas is a bad weapon to fight crime with. No, really, people do pretend to be that stupid. Anyway, the Other 98 helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect peaceful protestors from police violence by passing the Prohibiting Law Enforcement Use of Chemical Weapons Act.

In other news, Amazon has stepped up its feel-good PR campaign -- you saw the ad with the deaf single dad? Yeah, they'll fire his ass, too, if he walks too slowly in the warehouse -- almost like they know they achieved their position as the world's number one online retailer mainly by doing evil! Amazon has also lately imposed a one-year moratorium on police use of its infamous (and pretentiously-titled, don't think any of that Kraftwerk coolness rubs off on you!) Rekognition software. You remember Rekognition, right? The facial recognition software that's almost as bad at telling black folks apart as your right-wing uncle is? A one-year moratorium is exactly the kind of thing that's designed to make people feel good about using Amazon again -- and then quickly forgotten once the PR storm passes over, as it will for a lot of Americans, though not for a lot of black Americans who still have to face random police brutality. Anyway, MPower Change helps you tell Amazon to cut all of its ties with law enforcement. They're still providing cloud computing services to ICE, after all; think that helps out anyone but Amazon?

Finally, our National Park Service finalized rules in several Alaska national parks allowing hunters to kill bears and cubs while they hibernate and shoot wolves and coyotes while they're with their pups; the rules also allow hunters to shoot coyotes from motorboats and lure bears out of their dens with donuts so they can shoot them. Well, that all sounds very sporting, doesn't it? It doesn't sound like "good Americans ritualizing how their forebears used to survive"! It doesn't even sound like "an excuse for a bunch of guys to hang out and get drunk," as one hunter described hunting's purpose to me years ago. No, the word we're looking for here is cruel, though Alaska's Congressional delegation supports the change, claiming that it -- hey, not my words, but Sen. Murkowski's! -- is a "matter of states' rights"! Who knew the "right" to own slaves was at play here? And on federal land, no less! So, in short: it's not just cruel, it's also bad law-making. And since our Administration wants to do this to other Alaska national parks, the Alaska Wilderness League helps you oppose similar cruelty in other federal parks in Alaska.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, Juneteenth as a national holiday, misspent tax money, and government spying.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Today's as good a day as any to call your U.S. Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. The HEROES Act is that rarest of animals, actually good stimulus legislation that would actually help states and localities survive the absence of tax revenues these past few months, and fund our Post Office so it can continue to do the good work it does, and extend enhanced unemployment benefits for the tens of millions of Americans who will very likely still need it after it expires at the end of July, and repeal another odious tax-cut-for-the-rich that was accidentally-yeah-sure passed in the CARES Act, and provide bigger stimulus checks for good Americans making less than six figures than the CARES Act did. Of course Republicans want to include "blanket immunity" from lawsuits for corporations that open up in defiance of state and federal guidelines. If that doesn't get your goat, just say the words "blanket immunity" in the same voice that South African diplomat said "diplomatic immunity" in Lethal Weapon II. Say it over and over again in your head. Then make the call.

Meanwhile, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to make June 19 -- popularly known as "Juneteenth" and commemorating the day Union soldiers took over the last Confederate slave state -- a national holiday. Please don't be the whitesplainer who says BUT TEH DELAWAREZ AND TEH KENTUCKIEZ STILLZ HAD TEH SLAVEZ UNTILZ TEH DECEMBURZ!!!!!, because June 19, 1865 was the last day anyone could say maybe slavery's not really going to end in America, and really, who are we to argue with the millions of black folks who have been celebrating Juneteenth for over 150 years? Now, plenty of Americans would oppose the idea of a Juneteenth national holiday out of "patriotism" or something -- why do we always celebrate what America does wrong? they might say. I don't look at it that way, of course -- I look at it as a way of celebrating making a wrong right, which is more an American tradition than pretending you never did anything wrong in the first place. I'd say it's more patriotic, too.

In other news, it ain't just "small business" money this government seems to have aggressively misappropriated lately -- it's also over $100 milllion Congress directed to be spent on "consumables and medical care" for immigrant children held in various detainment centers, but which Customs and Border Protection (or CBP) spent instead on such "consumables and medical care" as all-terrain vehicles and computer upgrades. And I guarantee you the very same people who squealed like pigs about SOLYNDRA!!!! will shrug about this corruption. They might even say IT'Z ONLYZ TEH HUNDREDZ MILLYUNZ!!!!, and it's true that $100 million ain't much in the context of over $4 trillion in federal spending, but for any immigrant who got denied health care and died because someone at CBP spent money intended for their care on a motorcycle, it would be literally everything. Years ago I'd have said that even the most anti-immigrant American would blanch at such a state of affairs, but not now. Hence the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to punish CBP for redirecting money meant for immigrant health care.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop our government from being able to spy on our internet activity without a warrant, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. The WAR ON TERRURZ!!!!! crowd can carefully attend the three words "without a warrant" before getting their shorts in a bunch -- if our government can convince a judge they've got a better-than-50% chance of getting a conviction if they look at an American citizen's browser history, then they get to look at that history. Trouble is, governments aren't doing the work required to get to that level! Sympathetic folks on the right who try to explain the warrantless spying power they oppose tend to imagine that folks who want that power are merely trying to "do something" about terrorism. I'm not going to say they're wrong -- in fact, I'm sure they're right about at least some individual bureaucrats -- but I'm also going to go after warrantless-spying efforts as if they're just doing it because they enjoy doing evil, because they are doing evil, regardless of their good intentions.

Action: concerning various law and order matters.

Happy Monday, good Americans! Both the ACLU and the Friends Committee on National Legislation help you tell your Congressfolk to address police brutality and racism in legislation. The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the COPS and 1033 programs which bloat police forces and give them military weapons, respectively, and the FCNL helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the 1033 program and pass H.R. 7120, the Justice in Policing Act. As you know, the Justice in Policing Act would (among other things!) crack down on racial and religious profiling, limit police officers' "qualified immunity" in lawsuits, and require body cameras for all police officers. It's not "anti-police" to demand these things -- if anything, it's pro-police, because these reforms would keep police officers working, and would make them work more effectively. Don't settle for police officers telling you how can I do my job if these bills pass? Not just because everyone complains about procedural changes keeping them from doing their job, but also because you know how that particular complaint really translates: "how will I ever do my job if I can't impose a death penalty upon black people without even charging them with a crime?"

California residents, take note: with price-gouging on medical supplies still a problem during this pandemic -- and folks who say and you're surprised by that? really need to just slap themselves, because the problem we all have isn't that it's a "surprise" but that it's morally wrong -- SB 1196 would give California's price-gouging law a much-needed update, by closing a loophole that allows new sellers to engage in price-gouging without penalty (I wonder who thought that up!) and by extending protections for consumers against price-gouging beyond the current 30-day limit, which is surely inadequate to a pandemic that's been going on for over three months. Regardless of where California's numbers are right at this moment! Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida have all seen surging infection numbers this past week, so clearly the heat ain't killing it, and if it's alive somewhere, it could spread anywhere, even to places that had it under control. No, COVID-19 is going to be with us for a long time -- and, sadly, so will people who take advantage of it. Strike a blow against them by letting CALPIRG help you tell your CA state legislators to protect consumers from price-gouging by passing SB 1196.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International helps you tell our Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) to protect immigrants and asylum-seekers by freeing them from ICE concentration camps and local jails. What are we protecting them from? Getting COVID-19, of course, since you can't exactly "socially distance" in a jail or a concentration camp -- indeed, the name "concentration camp" does suggest that very inadequacy. Personal to those who get their shorts in a bunch over the hint of freeing immigrants from detainment: they have not been found guilty of a crime. They have not even been charged with a crime. So many people beat their chests (or whatever, amirite?) about "law and order," but cannot recall that our Founders revolted from the British Empire over such matters as detainment without charge. Of course, such folks also generally believe immigrants to be natural criminals, a belief enabled not just by their President but by decades of right-wing pundits yammering about immigrants and crime. Actual data doesn't support the notion that immigrants commit more crimes than American citizens, but data matters little to people who constantly masturbate to their unquenchable rage.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to protect we-the-taxpayer from using the CARES Act to loot our hard-earned money, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Yeah, "loot" is the right word! And it's about time we paid more attention to the looters taking our tax money than the looters who make protestors look bad maybe on purpose. Our government said it'd "help out small businesses" with the Paycheck Protection Program in the CARES Act -- and then our President removed the acting Inspector General who might actually have done a good job overseeing the program, and then a couple of big corporations got caught taking PPP money although it'd be easier to sell a bridge in Brooklyn than sell the American people on the proposition that they were actually "small businesses" that "needed" the money, and then our Treasury Secretary, the Artist Formerly Known as the Foreclosure King, said that he wouldn't tell the people who was taking PPP money because that info was "proprietary" and "confidential." Which was exactly the opposite of what he told us before Congress passed the bill! Jesus Mary and Joseph these crooks aren't even good at being crooks.

Action: concerning Medicare-for-All, CARES Act transparency, and offshore drilling.

Two million COVID-19 cases and over 100,000 deaths in America with no end in sight argues well enough for a different approach to health care than LETZ TEH MARKETZ DOEZ ITZ!!!!! But you know what else argues well enough for a different approach? Stories of folks who survive COVID-19 and get slammed with million-dollar medical bills! Which we all knew would happen, even with "assurances" that health insurers wouldn't do it! So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to "cut through the red tape" and enact Medicare-for-All health insurance. Like how Social Security Works flips the script there, to tell us that private health insurance corporations are the real purveyors of "red tape"? I do enjoy having the right's memes thrown back in their faces. If your right-wing friends and neighbors persist in asserting that folks who survive COVID only to get million-dollar bills somehow get what they deserve, you may go ahead and assume that said right-wing friends and neighbors have never had to deal with a huge medical bill. I wouldn't wish such a thing on anyone! But if someone got big medical bills and then changed their perspective on the "free market" as a result, I wouldn't complain, either.

Meanwhile, our Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin -- notice how our President hasn't soured on him? That must mean he's truly evil! -- told Congress last week that our Administration wouldn't release the names of the corporations who got loans under the Paycheck Protection Program because that's "confidential" and "proprietary" information. And of course he said the exact opposite back in April when they were ramming the CARES Act down our throats! Talk about looters! Today's looters (a lot of whom are agents provocateur aiming to make protestors look bad) are pikers compared to this Administration! So the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to demand that our government account for how it spent our money. Accountability: it ain't just for liberals! You may protest that "we don't know" that big corporations are using the PPP to steal money from the taxpayer (i.e., you and I!), but we're also not schmucks, and we also know that quite a few not-very-needy big corporations did get PPP money, and we also know that promising transparency and then snatching it away when you think people have forgotten your promise is a pretty good way to loot the taxpayer.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Interior Department to impose a moratorium on all offshore drilling leases. Of course, our Interior Department has already leased a few hundred thousand acres off the Gulf of Mexico to oil drillers -- and right in the middle of a pandemic, too, almost like that's the whole idea -- but no law of physics mandates that we can't tell them to stop. And offshore drilling is awfully unpopular these days. How do I know that? Not just because Florida's Republican elected officials tend to fight offshore drilling there, and not just because I remember the Spillageddon in the Gulf from (checks calendar, takes deep breath) over a decade ago, but also because our Administration plans to start drilling offshore in Florida after the election, which is a hell of a thing to tip us off about before the election! Did we learn this through our Administration's incompetence or through the heroism of fed-up Interior bureaucrats? We'll leave that to historians to decide. In the meantime, matters like opening up Florida's shoreline to massive pollution is a matter for us to decide, so let's make the right decision.

Action: concerning defense spending and Social Security.

In light of recent events, Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to move money away from military spending and toward the kind of spending -- on education, science, fighting pollution, et cetera -- that actually sustains a civilization. Reps. Lee (D-CA) and Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have proposed moving $350 billion and Sen. Sanders (I-VT) has proposed moving $74 billion, and in a nation that spends more than half of its discretionary budget on its military, either proposal would do us all a lot of good. If your Tea Party uncle retorts with we ain't free without soldiers, remind him that the above-described proposals don't zero out military funding, and that military spending is, really, a band-aid solution to problems that smarter investment in our future -- as investing in education and clean air/clean water regulations most assuredly is -- could have prevented in the first place. Yes, ensuring that good Americans get the good services they deserve from their own tax money does prevent a lot of problems. Certainly it's better than dreaming up ways to convince us that giving more of our tax money away as corporate welfare is somehow good for us.

p>Meanwhile, despite taking over a year just to form a government, Israel still schemes to annex about a third of the West Bank, and our government plans on helping them in this nefarious end. (If you fly into a rage whenever someone criticizes Israel, just navigate away from this page. Seriously! I have no time for people who see everything as an opportunity to start a pissing match.) Naturally, our Congressfolk would like to help Israel out via S. 3176, though Americans are fairly ambivalent toward Israel these days and Israel's let's-get-tough act sure hasn't made it secure. Could the failure of Mr. Netanyahu to form a government for over a year signal that Israelis themselves are more than ready for real change? Possibly from a potential leader who isn't merely Netanyahu-Lite like Benny Gantz is? I like to be optimistic, but, you know, I've been disappointed before. Hence Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject Israeli annexation of Palestine by rejecting S. 3176. I don't know who ain't got the memo yet, but Americans ain't putting up with the limited choices Our Glorious Elites have been offering anymore. And that'll be true even if our President gets re-elected.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject our Administration's so-called "Eagle" plan to give Americans money today in exchange for reduced Social Security benefits in the future, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. I bet you know someone who says so what? Shouldn't we let people make their own decisions? You need only answer that question with another question: "so if a burglar breaks into a house and offers one of the residents a few bucks in exchange for letting them steal stuff from everyone, we should just let them make their own decisions?" The "Eagle" plan would give some people a little money now in exchange for reduced benefits later, but where's this "now" money coming from in the first place? It's coming from us, just like those stimulus payments ultimately came from us, just as (by definition!) all taxpayer money comes from us. If they ultimately decide to take that "now" money right out of Social Security Trust Fund or via the payroll tax cuts our President won't STFU about, well, that'd just be icing on the cake, wouldn't it? Let's act now, so we're not thinking about all that when we're 80 and living in a cardboard box.

Action: concerning all those good House bills, anti-renewable energy desperation, and statehood for D.C.

Happy Wednesday, good folks! Now call your Senators and tell 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. No we must not give up on all of these good works, which would protect voting rights, fight discrimination, make our internet free again, ensure minimum wage workers can better make ends meet, and help protect protections for pre-existing conditions -- among many other things! So don't let them tell you only one thing at a time matters! That's what they want you to think so you forget to fight for all the things that matter!

Meanwhile, an alleged nonprofit called the New England Ratepayers Association (or NERA) has filed a petition with our Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (or FERC) that could destroy the practice of "net metering," by which home solar users sell their unused power back to their local utility. Specifically, NERA claims that our federal government, not the states, should regulate net metering, because net metering is somehow by definition a "wholesale sale" (even if users get retail prices for their unused power, apparently) and only our federal government gets to regulate wholesale sales. That will baffle anyone acquainted with the defintion of the word "wholesale," to wit: "being sold in large quantities to be retailed by others." Solar users do sell their unused power literally "to be retailed by others" (since the power goes to the utility corporation), but the idea that solar users sell "in large quantities" is laughably absurd. Clearly NERA is counting on this Administration, which hates renewable energy with a passion bordering on the murderous, to destroy solar power for them. So Penn Environment helps you tell our FERC to reject NERA's desperate petition asserting that net metering is a "wholesale sale."

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunties to tell your Congressfolk to make Washington, D.C. our 51st state, then the Daily Kos Liberation League still helps you do that. I didn't think of this, but the Daily Kos Liberation League points out that our President deployed federal soldiers in D.C. neighborhoods to round up a few hundred peaceful protestors; when you consider, also, that our President displayed disgusting indifference in teargassing protestors out of his way so he could do a photo op at a church, you, too, might consider that making D.C. a state, which would have a Governor, might provide a useful check against future Presidential obnoxiousness. All the other arguments against D.C. statehood, in a word, suck -- D.C. can't be "too small" if it has more people than three actual American states, and if you're worried that they'll just elect two more Democrats to the Senate, then be a Republican who earns their vote. Sheesh, it's not that damn hard, and Republicans don't need any more welfare from our laws than they already get.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, Chaco Canyon, the quality of mercy, and working families.

If you've missed previous opportunities to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, then you can still use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Senators' phone numbers. I know, it's been weeks since the House passed that bill, and all kinds of other things are happening right now, but guess what? No law or social more compels you to attend only one thing at a time, and to the exclusion of all other things! Our Glorious Elites pretend only one thing at a time could possibly matter to anyone, but we're still seeing over 20,000 cases of coronavirus every day, and a crapload of good Americans will still need unemployment benefits after the end of July, and we still need to fund a Post Office past the end of September, and states and localities still deserve assistance thanks to all the reduced revenues of this recession, and at least one big tax-cut-for-the-rich still deserves repeal and oblivion, and another round of increased stimulus checks for all of us sure wouldn't hurt, so get on the stick and communicate your will to your Senators before they imagine you've forgotten all about the hard work they still need to do.

Meanwhile, our Interior Secretary has actually extended a comment period concerning opening up the Greater Chaco Region of New Mexico to even more fracking. And you know what that means! It means he didn't get enough pro-pollution comments from the fracking lobby! I mean, this Administration never wants to hear more from the American people, since good Americans generally oppose all the things this Administration does! Even the 2017 tax "reform" suffered from so much opposition from the people that they could barely pass the damn thing! And that cost Democrats exactly nothing in the 2018 midterm elections -- this, after Our Glorious Elites have been saying for years that opposing "tax cuts" is "political poison"! But I digress. Food and Water Action helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to halt its plans to drill for gas in the Greater Chaco Region. Why? Well, not just because drilling tends to pollute our air and water (and, of course, drillers will pay less in royalties to us because that's how our 46% President wants it!) -- the Greater Chaco Region also includes land sacred to the Navajo. Our Administration cares so much about religion -- just not when it's Native American religion!

In other news, Willie Simmons committed a $9 robbery back in the 1980s -- and has served 37 years for it! How did this happen? Mr. Simmons had three other offenses (all nonviolent, naturally) on his record, and thus got a life sentence under Alabama's "habitual offender" law. I don't need to tell you that Mr. Simmons served our country in the Army or that drug addiction may have figured in his "crime spree" -- I need only reiterate, with the italics hammer, that he's serving a life sentence for stealing nine freaking dollars. If you know any supposed devil's-advocates who'll say if you can't do the time don't do the crime or he should've gotten a lawyer to help with his appeals, just ask them: is it fair to give someone life in prison for stealing nine dollars? Any answer other than "no" -- and that most definitely includes "no, but" -- deserves no further engagement; just let your little Glaucon go with God, because God might be their only friend at the end of the line. In the meantime, let's try to do some damn justice and tell Alabama Gov. Ivey to commute Mr. Simmons's sentence, as Change.org helps you do.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Walmart to give its workers a seat on its corporate board, then United for Respect still helps you do that. Because why the hell not? Are other CEOs the only people who know anything about running a corporation? Actually, given how badly so many corporations do at anything other than redistributing worker income upward to executives, I suspect most CEOs know just about nothing about running a corporation! And, in my lengthy experience as a worker bee, I've found that the people who actually do the work know more about how to do the work than the folks who bloviate all day about "the challenges ahead," which are always challenges for you, not for them! In any case, Walmart's situation is unique, and not just because it smashes any unionization effort with a frightening malice -- Walmart has been making a crap-ton of profits during this pandemic, but its executives have been dragging their feet ensuring their workers are safe at a store where it's almost impossible to socially-distance. So let's help our sisters and brothers help themselves! That's what a conservative would do, right?

Action: concerning various law and order matters.

H.R. 7120, the Justice in Policing Act, would ban chokeholds, allow police to use deadly force only as a last resort, crack down on racial and religious profiling, limit police officers' "qualified immunity" in lawsuits, require body cameras for all police officers, limit police departments' access to military weapons, and criminalize lynching at the federal level -- among many other good works. I'd eliminate "qualified immunity" and police departments' access to military weapons myself, but H.R. 7120 is a good start. And when right-wingers call all that "socialism" or something, just remind them that plenty of good Americans want to abolish the police entirely, so maybe they need to get on board with this reform. And when they proclaim their love for "law and order," ask them if it's lawful that police murder black folks in their sleep, as they did with Breonna Taylor back in March. So Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to start reining in police misconduct by passing the Justice in Policing Act.

Let's not stop there, though: the ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the 1033 program that gives police military weapons and the COPS grants that give us too many police officers. Once upon a time more cops might have seemed like the answer, but not now -- we've avoided solving problems and instead turned police officers into the Swiss Army knives of our civilization. If we were to focus on rehabilitating drug addicts instead of putting them in jail and forgetting about them, for example, there's a big swath of work we've just taken off our police's hands. Someone's still got to serve warrants and arrest corporate criminals, but must every conceivable 911 call involve police? If you're still afraid of "defunding" police, note well Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)'s answer when asked what "defunding" the police looks like: "It looks like a suburb. Affluent white communities already live in a world where the choose to fund youth, health, housing, etc., more than they fund police." I think we're looking at the winning argument here, folks.

Meanwhile, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink is another public figure saying all the right things about "racial equity" ("equity"? Gosh, does the moneybrain ever turn off with these people?) but still failing to put his money where his mouth is, by continuing to fund the New York City Police Foundation that helps NYC police buy military weapons! And yes, that would be the same NYPD currently teargassing and driving trucks into protestors! So, so many of our so-called "best and brightest" think they can just "share from the heart" and be done with it, but those of us who have been doing our damnedest to maintain a civilization know that the work is never done, and certainly not done with a few choice words likely written by some hired PR hack. And what does BlackRock do in the first place? They do the kinds of "risk management" we used to call speculation, and when The Economist, a magazine never seriously mistaken for a liberal rag, calls BlackRock the world's largest shadow bank, remember that "shadow bank" isn't necessarily a compliment. You know, like "bankster." Hence Color of Change helps you tell Mr. Fink to stop funding the New York City Police Foundation.

Finally, while we're still peripherally on the subject of toxic white supremacy but I repeat myself, you may have heard all of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's pablum about "free speech" lately and about how it's not really his job to prevent it. But you may not know that, per a whistleblower complaint, that Facebook still auto-generates pages that allow white supremacists to recruit new members! And not to bond over their mutual love of knitting or Doctor Who! We can be reasonably sure that white supremacists try to connect with others of their nefarious ilk so they can find people to help them commit crimes against non-white folk. You can be a white supremacist in America without going to jail, of course, but if you go around actually trying to create your white ethnostate by, say, killing black folk or Hispanic folk or Muslim folk, well, you've broken a bunch of laws right there. Hence the National Whistleblowers center helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to take the appropriate action against Facebook for its failure to stamp out white supremacist organization.

Action: concerning good House bills, genocide in Burma, and carbon regulation in Pennsylvania.

Happy Thursday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell 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. They've been avoiding passing these bills because they would actually do good things for Americans -- like protect voting rights, health care, and internet freedom -- instead of redistribute good Americans' wealth upward to corporate cronies, which is what politicians tend to prefer to do. You know what we prefer to do? Communicate our will until they can't ignore it.

Meanwhile, you may recall that the Burmese army has done its damnedest over the last few years to exterminate the Muslim Rohingya population, resulting in nearly a million Rohingya (i.e., almost all of them) fleeing to neighboring Bangladesh. But S. 1186, the Burma Human Rights and Freedom Act, would do a few things that would improve this situation. The bill would aid humanitarian efforts and reinstate certain trade restrictions, for one, but it would also prevent any taxpayer money from flowing to Burmese security forces until our State Department can certify that the Burmese military are behaving in a more civilized behavior -- admittedly a statement this State Department would rush to certify without evidence if our President decided it might make him look good, but maybe not the next one. The bill would also prevent our government from handing out visas to folks who've committed human rights violations in Burma and sanction any corporations controlled by such folks -- even if our President calls them "very fine people"! Hence the International Campaign for the Rohingya helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight genocide by passing the Burma Human Rights and Freedom Act.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: our state legislature is chomping at the bit to prevent our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) from issuing any climate change-related regulations whatsoever! Oh, HB 2025's executive summary says it aims at carbon emissions regulations that impose a carbon tax, a matter about which reasonable people may be ambivalent, but Section 4(a) of the bill clearly prohibits Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection from enacting any climate change-related regulations, whether they come with a carbon tax or not! That is what we call a bait and switch, folks, and you have to wonder why our state legislators felt the need to lie to us. And by "you have to wonder," I mean "because lying is all you got left when you can't win the argument on the merits." There's really no excuse for opposing climate change action now -- no reasonable human being believes it's a hoax, and the only people saying it's a hoax are people who make money saying it's a hoax. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state legislators to protect our planet by rejecting HB 2025.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, contact tracing, and health care funding.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Fair Districts PA is conducting a "day of action" today, in which we would tell our state Reps and Senators to support fair redistricting in the state by passing HB 22 and HB 23, and Fair Districts PA's website will help you do that. I sure had a lot of trouble accessing Fair Districts PA's website as I was writing this post, and that sure does seem a bit suspicious, doesn't it? I mean, after the shenanigans the legislature has pulled over the last few years in their efforts to avoid passing legislation that would (as the saying goes) let the voters choose their legislators instead of letting legislators choose their voters, it's a question worth asking. Still, you can always use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your state legislators and call them and tell them to pass HB 22 and HB 23, so that we can prevent more absurd gerrymandering by the legislature. And remember: if they don't do it now, it'll be very, very tough to get them to do it before they redraw districts again next year.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell your U.S. Senators to fund contact tracing so we can stop the spread of COVID-19 now and in the future. "Contact tracing" is what it sounds like, a process by which we find out who's come into contact with folks who have COVID-19 and test them, and then find the folks who've come into contact with them and test them, and so on and so on. It's hard, unsexy work -- I think I've just described two reasons why this Administration doesn't want to do it! -- but we've been doing this with diseases for decades, and you may not know that we didn't eradicate smallpox for good until we did contact tracing (though certainly universal vaccines against smallpox helped). Really, we shouldn't have to tell our government to do this, since it's the right thing to do and it's what governments have been doing for over half a century, but, you know, duty is duty. Of course, if the Senate just passed the HEROES Act, which would already fund contact tracing, they could solve the problem in a jif; I won't complain if they figure that out, too.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to restore American funding to the World Health Organization (or WHO), then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Let's not get bogged down in arguments about foreign entanglements, because we're not talking about some alliance that commits us to doing evil, nor are we talking about some "free" trade deal that outsources our jobs and nullifies our laws -- the World Health Organization has done a good job helping the world's people deal with this pandemic, and our funding helps them do that good job. Of course, it's the "good job" part that most likely led our President to terminate WHO funding -- the WHO's competence was showing up his own arrogant ineptitude, and nobody does that to the Drama King without paying the price! But the President doesn't get all the say about this matter -- Congress can simply budget the money and tell him to spend it, and ain't a damn thing he can do about it, except whine and stamp his feet. Which he's good at.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, law and order, and public lands.

If you've missed previous opportunities to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (or HEROES) Act, well, now's as good a time as any! Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Senators' phone numbers; you might want to program all of your Senators' phone numbers (including their local ones) into your cellphone. No, seriously, sometimes I make 10 calls before anyone answers the phone, and that's when there's no pandemic! While you have them on the phone, you might also want to tell them to reject any effort to give "blanket immunity" from lawsuits to corporations relating to the pandemic, since that's the only thing Mitch McConnell seems to want to do. If it's truly a "frivolous" lawsuit, it'll die in court; what's the big deal? And be sure to mention all the good things the HEROES Act would do, like help fund states and localities, fund our Post Office, extend higher unemployment benefits, expand working family tax cuts, repeal a big hedge fund manager tax cut, and issue another round of (bigger) stimulus checks.

Meanwhile, the law nominally lets us sue public officials, including police officers, when they trample over our rights, but our Supreme Court has spent the last half-century-plus blowing a Mack truck-sized hole in the law in creating the doctrine of "qualified immunity," whereby courts can throw out lawsuits against government officials merely because the court hasn't heard such a case before, which sure takes "respecting precedent" to an unwarranted extreme. But H.R. 7085, the Ending Qualified Immunity Act, would prevent courts from dismissing cases against police officers after divining their' "good faith" or "reasonable" belief that their unlawful conduct was lawful, and it would also prevent them from throwing out cases merely because the defendants allege that "rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution or laws were not clearly established at the time of their deprivation by the defendant," since, actually, they are. Should we excuse evil merely because of good intentions? Of course not. Hence both Public Citizen and Defending Rights and Dissent both help you tell your Congressfolk to restore law and order by passing the Ending Qualified Immunity Act.

Finally, S. 3422, the Great American Outdoors Act, would not only fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund but would also establish a National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund to help preserve our public lands. That's been a bigger deal to a lot of good Americans these last few months, as public parks are now often the only places still open if you feel like getting out of the house. As we all do! A man could look at the list of 59 Senators (out of 100) co-sponsoring this bill and be heartened that 15 of them are Republicans; 15 plus 47 in the Democratic caucus equals a filibuster-proof majority in favor of the bill! But alas, it's not a veto-proof majority, and if Mob Boss Mitch doesn't bring the bill up for a vote then it'll get zero votes, so Penn Environment helps you tell your Senators to support our public lands by passing the Great American Outdoors Act. Our President didn't veto the bill permanently establishing the Land and Water Conservation Act, but then again, the Senate passed that bill 92-8 and the House passed it 363-62. We might need those kinds of numbers again, and we won't get them if we sit on our hands.

Action: concerning actual law and order matters in America.

You've heard our President's grandstanding about the "thousands and thousands of heavily-armed soldiers" he planned to sic on protestors, not long after using rubber bullets and tear gas on protestors in D.C. so he could do a photo op holding a Bible in front of a church. And our President also deployed a thousand "mystery troops" in our nation's capitol who would only say they were with the Department of Justice! Nothing to see here, amirite? But the fact is, our Governors have also put National Guard troops in our streets, supposedly to stop violence, but we all know that some of these looters we've been hearing about are agents provocateur out there to make protestors look bad, and, ah, some of these National Guard troops are causing the violence themselves! You could ask David McAtee, shot by National Guard and Louisville police in Kentucky a week ago and left in the street for half a day, except he's dead now. Win Without War helps you tell your state Governors to pull National Guard troops off our streets now and stop militarizing our public spaces.

Meanwhile, Congress failed to pass a PATRIOT Act reauthorization last week, even though they'd twisted it into the kind of freedom-killing bill they love to pass under the guise of TEH NASHUNUL SECURITIEZ!!!!! Hence we have another opportunity to tell our Congressfolk to pass legislation stopping our government from spying on our internet search and browser histories without a damn warrant, as Demand Progress helps you do. No, really, it's simple: if an Administration can convince a judge to allow law enforcement to snoop on our browser histories and we have no complaints, but they better not do it on their own. And I do appreciate Demand Progress's reminder that our President tried to get the IP addresses of over a million people who committed the heinous crime of visiting a website that opposed him! You know, because someone broke a window on Inauguration Day. You've heard that you shouldn't give government more spying powers because you don't know what a bad government would do with that power? You know now.

In other news, you may have heard the story of Anthony Swain, paralyzed from the waist down and suffering from cystic myelomalacia, who sat in jail for four years until he got the coronavirus like so many other prisoners have. So what did he do? Nothing! Literally nothing, because he hasn't been put on trial yet! That's right, police arrested him on drug charges in 2016, and then the judge set his bail at $650,000, and since like most people he doesn't have $650,000 lying around, he was trapped in prison. This is why we fight cash bail, and sadly, when folks like Philadelphia D.A. Larry Krasner make moderate reforms to the bail system, a lot of police officers complain they can't do their jobs anymore! If your job relies on putting paraplegics in jail for four years without them even getting a chance to face their accusers like it's a damn Kafka novel, then maybe you should get a new job. Color of Change helps you tell Florida's Attorney General to let Mr. Swain out of his damn cage already. You know, before they kill him.

Finally, Fight for the Future helps you tell your Mayors and City Council members to end all partnerships between Amazon and police departments. In the old days we imagined that our government would push surveillance on us, but we welcomed corporate surveillance into our homes willingly! We welcomed Amazon's Alexa into our homes, and let Alexa record our conversations; we bought Ring doorbells, and let Amazon record whatever was happening in front of our homes, and then Amazon developed their nefarious Rekognition (with a "k," how fucking pretentious!) software that can hardly tell black people apart, and now they furnish police departments with that data, warrants be damned. And Jeff Bezos calls himself a libertarian! Of course Amazon is trying to win the PR battle by saying that they, too, believe that black lives matter! Given their record, one could reasonably ask: how about acting like it? And you can do that, by letting Free Press help you tell Amazon to cut its ties with law enforcement, including local police departments and the notorious Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE).

Action: concerning police brutality and "free speech."

First things first. As you likely know, our President used rubber bullets and tear gas on protestors outside a church on Tuesday evening so he could hold up a Bible in a photo op. And House Speaker Pelosi responded swiftly by introducing legislation that would prevent our President from ever doing something like that again! I kid, of course -- did the "swiftly" give it away? So Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would prevent our President from deploying our military against the American people, while Adhila Akbar has begun a petition on Change.org that helps you tell your Congressfolk to forbid law enforcement from using tear gas for riot control purposes. The Geneva Protocol of 1925 outlaws the use of tear gas in war, so why is it OK to use it on protestors? Or do governments value their enemies more than they value their own people? It's a question worth asking! Don't come at me with WELL WHAT ABOUT TEH LOOTERZ!!!! Do you believe looters are literally worse than your enemies at war? Either the answer is no, in which case you're wrong, or it's yes, in which case you're evil like our President.

Meanwhile, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been flailing about lately trying to explain why he hasn't tamped down on our President's naked exhortations to violence. He started out saying that it was about "free speech," which we know to be rubbish because we know our First Amendment protects us from our government, not Facebook; then he pivoted to "it's not so bad," which we also know to be rubbish because our President has perpetrated violence against American citizens this very week. Hence Free Press helps you tell Facebook to ban users who fail to follow Facebook's own policies against hate speech and promotion of violence. Yes, Facebook actually does have those policies, which is yet another reason we know Mr. Zuckerberg's gyrations are full of soup. Jesus Mary and Joseph even Twitter -- as in #Twitterisforracists, which was the last thing I ever said on Twitter before leaving -- has started to brandish its power against some of our President's more absurd utterings. Surely Mr. Zuckerberg doesn't want to be outclassed by Mr. Dorsey? (Sorry, I'm not sure how to reach a billionaire, other than to assume he relates to the world more or less like a 12-year-old boy.)

Finally, if you missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to end the 1033 program that gives police military weapons, Daily Kos, Demand Progress, and Roots Action all help you do that. Plus the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to support that goal and others, including the PEACE Act, the End Racial and Religious Profiling Act, and the Eric Garner Excessive Force Prevention Act. And please don't let your friends and family act like only liberals want to stop all this "tough on crime" posturing -- the first folks to introduce me to Families Against Mandatory Minimums were Libertarians, conservative Radley Balko has done some of the most powerful writing about the folly of "tough on crime" policies, and Matt Purple at The American Conservative (founded by Pat Buchanan, you may recall) not only calls for the end of the 1033 program, but reminds us that where police tend to fire gas canisters at protestors who call for an end to racist policing, they sure were nice to whiny-ass anti-lockdown protestors who arrived with assault rifles. Liberals and conservatives agree: this shit has got to stop.

Action: concerning good House bills, corruption, and worker safety.

Happy Wednesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to protect voting rights, health care, public lands, 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 remember: every call you make moves the needle in our direction, and every call you make exposes our so-called "leaders" for the spineless and/or malicious tools they are, and even when it doesn't look like it's doing any good, all your good works do add up.

Meanwhile, with all the corporate welfare our government's been handing out in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we've seen far too many attacks on the federal Inspectors General who would be overseeing these handouts and making sure they don't abuse the taxpayer. Seriously, when you put it like that, how can anyone reasonably support our President's efforts to get rid of Inspectors General? He removes the Inspector General who handled the whistleblower complaint that led to his impeachment; he removes Glenn Fine from his position overseeing the "Paycheck Protection Plan" after Mr. Fine forges a career exposing actual corruption in our government; he removes the Department of State IG after he starts looking into whether that $8 billion-plus Saudi arms deal was really legal. Recall that our President wanted to fire all the Inspectors General upon taking office (because getting 46% of the popular vote is surely a mandate for that!); cooler heads talked him out of it then, but clearly he's had them in his sights all along, and why? Because he knows they can get him. Hence the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to better protect our Inspectors General from removal by obviously corrupt Presidents.

Finally, Walmart workers have been doing their job throughout this pandemic, but getting their management (which is making record profits, of course!) to ensure worker safety and offer paid sick leave has been like pulling teeth! Hopefully not too many Americans are still saying things like "how hard can it be to be a Walmart worker? How much skill can it take?" Remember that we said similar things about manufacturing workers fifty years ago -- we said they were mere machine jockeys, not "real workers" like the folks who built furniture with their bare hands -- and now that they're almost all gone, and we're a lot more used to the idea of machines making things than we were back then, we lionize them. Now we have so many more service workers than we used to have, and I hope we won't wait until we struggle with inattentive and unsubtle automated "workers" to appreciate them! Hence United for Respect helps you tell Walmart to give its workers a seat on its corporate board, so workers can communicate their needs more effectively to their bosses. What on Earth could be the harm in that? That executives make a little less money and have to do better by their workers? Oh, the horror!

Action: concerning police brutality and Social Security.

First things first. You've heard that good Americans are protesting police brutality against black folks in general and the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in particular -- and you've also heard some Americans are using the protests as cover to loot and destroy property. You may even have heard -- and from our "liberal" media, no less! -- that quite a few white folks are looting and destroying property, and at least some of these folks may be agents provocateur. But if you're not protesting, you can still fight police brutality. H.R. 4359, the PEACE Act, would require that federal law enforcement officers can only use force against Americans only when "necessary" -- not merely when "reasonable," which is the current (and obviously quite inadequate) standard -- and would also require training for officers when they deal with more vulnerable populations. And the bill would prevent officers from justifying killing someone if their own "gross negligence" made the death "necessary." So Peace Action helps you tell your House Reps to help protect vulnerable folks from police brutality by passing the PEACE Act.

While we're on the subject, Sen. Schatz (D-HI) has announced that he'll introduce an amendment to the upcoming defense authorization bill that would end the sale of military equipment to local police departments, and so now would be a good time to call your Reps and Senators and tell then you would support such an effort. Perhaps depriving police departments of weaponry as looting is going on sounds counter-intuitive, but I would respond that military weapons don't help police departments fight crime -- you don't need a grenade launcher to break up a meth ring, you need boots on the ground in communities making connections and asking questions -- and that when you do give police military weapons, well, they tend to use them, and not against criminals! They tend to use them against protestors, and, ironically enough, often against protestors who speak out against police brutality. Maybe "ironically" is too good a word there; the word better describes things we can't or don't anticipate. Too much of this world makes too much sense; I wish that prompted our leaders to help us create a better one.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject any Administration effort to weaken or destroy Social Security -- including their so-called "Eagle" plan to let folks collect money now in exchange for a later retirement -- then Social Security Works still helps you do that. In the above link, you will also tell your Congressfolk to reject our President's proposed payroll tax cuts and/or holidays -- which are, of course, efforts to destroy the very mechanism by which we fund Social Security! -- and you will also tell your Congressfolk that, if anything, we should expand Social Security. How can we expand Social Security? Easy: simply start taxing income over $132,700 into the system. Currently the payroll tax that funds Social Security only applies to income under $132,700, and, well, as you know, a lot of folks make a lot more than that in a year -- hell, a few folks have made billions just during this pandemic! -- and if we get that money into the system, then we might be able to silence all this pablum about SOSHUL SECURITIEZ IZ RUNNINGZ OUTZ OF TEH MONEYZ!!!!! Hope springs eternal, after all.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, the Dakota Access pipeline, and voter registration.

Our House passed the HEROES Act almost a week and a half ago, but our Senate still hasn't moved on it, so let's start off the week by calling our Senators and telling them to pass it already. You can find tools for finding your Senators' phone numbers in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're looking at it on your cellphone). You probably know the reasons we should pass the HEROES Act: because it would give funding to states and localities, because it would fill shortfalls in our Post Office's funding, because it would expand tax credits for working families, because it would roll back corporate welfare for certain very well-off individuals, and because it provides another one-time stimulus check to Americans who don't make six figures. But in your phone call, you may also want to ask them to strike a provision allowing defense contractors to bill our government rather more than they need to in order to keep their workers afloat. The provision allows those corporations to bill our government for executive pay and marketing expenses, and we don't need to accept that as the price for doing good works.

Meanwhile, a federal district judge ruled in late March that our Army Corps of Engineers (and stop me if you've heard this one before!) did not "adequately discharge() its duties" when expediting permits for the infamous Dakota Access pipeline in 2017, and thus ordered the Corps to conduct a more thorough review as required by law. As Rep. Grijalva (D-AZ) put it, "(i)ndustry needs to learn that if you throw in with (this) administration, you will bear the costs of its reckless incompetence." Given the number of regulatory changes courts have already thrown out because our Administration thinks the law is for little people like us, you'd think corporations would have learned their lesson by now. I guess that means they're not good actors, either! We might better be able to influence our Army Corps of Engineers, however, since they're required by law to listen to us, hence Environmental Action helps you tell the Corps not to grant any new permits for the Dakota Access pipeline. The pipeline, of course, leaked upwards of five times just in 2017, including a 200,000-gallon-plus spill in November, so I would say it ain't just the people who have spoken on this matter.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to make online voter registration available to all Americans in advance of the November election, then Common Cause still helps you do that. Online voter registration won't necessarily help folks who can't get online (and there are quite a few of those!), but it would help those who have internet access and who can't get to the local DMV or the local election office because COVID-19 has shut them all down. I presume our President's votaries will squeal TEH VOTERZ FRAUDZ ALL TEH DEADZ DUM-O-CRATZ DOINGS TEH VOTINGZ!!!, but if you look over actual research on the matter -- you know, versus hysterical collections of accusations, insinuations, and things-you-just-know -- you will find researchers have a very, very hard time finding actual incidents of voter fraud. A Loyola law professor found 31 credible incidents of voter fraud out of one billion ballots cast between 2000 and 2014; even Tha Bush Mobb looked very hard for voter fraud between 2002 and 2007 and managed to convict a grand total of 86 people. As Mr. Bush himself might have said, there's just no there there.

Action: concerning good House bills and good farm policy.

Happy Thursday, good peoples! 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. I wouldn't blame you for thinking we're doing no good, since it's been almost a year and a half for some of these bills. But these bills are good works on issues from voting rights to internet freedom to the minimum wage, and we can't stop fighting for them until we win.

Meanwhile, H.R. 6718/S. 3221, the Farm System Reform Act, would achieve its stated aim by banning new factory farm construction and the expansion of existing factory farms, plus it would phase out current factory farms over the next 20 years. Factory farms have created many evils -- we've gone into two of them, pollution and antibiotic abuse, at some length over the years. But you know what else factory farms have done? They've helped make the small family farmer almost nonexistent in America! Factory farms can scale down expenses and scale up profits better than any small farmer can, but to what end? So that America becomes dependent on miserable animals, dung-filled waterways, and rampant antibiotic-resistant superbugs just to have relatively inexpensive chicken parm? So that a few big ag executives can dictate policy to the American people, policy that'll benefit them a lot more than it benefits us? Big factory farms aren't just bad for our health, our air and water, and our small farmers: they're bad for democracy. So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to support saner agricultural policy in America by passing the Farm System Reform Act.

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?