Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning sanctions, abortion, drug prices, the war on Yemen, and conservation.

Long story short: tell President Biden to lift sanctions on Venezuela, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Women's Health Protection Act, lower prescription drug prices, end the war on Yemen, and pass the Recovering America's Wildlife Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, reminds us that it we really want to hit Vladimir Putin in the family jewels, we should lift our sanctions on Venezuela, which could produce more cheap oil than Russia ever could if our sanctions weren't crippling them. You can still contact President Biden here; I'd say call him at 1.202.456.1111, but that number only operates between 11 am and 3 pm on Tuesday through Thursday. Did Venezuela invade someone to get sanctioned by our government? Of course not -- we're sanctioning them for wanting to nationalize their oil and levy taxes against big oil corporations, which they have the right to do, being a democracy and all. Yes, they are a democracy; can we say as much about Russia, let alone the numerous other nations we enable? So let's tighten our grip around Mr. Putin's neck and correct a serious injustice in one fell swoop.

Our Senate votes today on H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act, so Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass this bill. If you call your Senators, and you know you're calling one who'll likely vote against the bill, all you need do is list the good things the bill would do, such that they would be compelled to answer: yes, I want clinics to dispense harmful information just to lead women away from getting abortions, and yes, I want forced ultrasounds on all pregnant women, and yes, I want abortion clinics to adhere to absurdly-high standards just so most of them close, and no, I don't want women to be able to get abortions even if their pregnancies threaten their lives. Seriously, let's make them put it like that.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices. 80% of Americans want Medicare to be able to negotiate drug prices, just so drug prices can be lower for everyone, and even Newt Gingrich says if 70% of Americans want something they should have it, but because Kyrsten Sinema and Bob Menendez don't want it -- two people -- we can't have it, even though one in three Americans are currently rationing their medicines because they really can't afford them. That includes one in four Americans rationing insulin, though insulin is literally a life-saving drug. So this isn't just about doing the will of the American people, it's also about fucking saving lives. Sorry, these Senator Galaxybrains bring out the cuss words.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a War Powers Resolution that would end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Remember when Donald Trump would conduct a "different" kind of foreign policy? Well, he didn't stop our involvement in the war that's driving a nation to famine and killing some of the best counter-terrorists on Earth, so you know that was a lie. And remember when Joe Biden said he'd be ending military support for the war? That's still going on, sadly, so you know that was a lie. A War Powers Resolution would at least take back (and use!) the power that Congress should never have delegated to Presidents (including Barack Obama, you didn't think he was off the hook, did you?) to begin with.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2773/S. 2372, the Recovering America's Wildlife Act. What would this bill do? It would fund our most pressing wildlife conservation efforts, and it would draw that funding from the folks who violate our clean air and clean water laws and pay fees and fines because of it. The Senate version of this bill, you may notice, has an equal number of Democratic and Republican sponsors at this writing (16 of each); even the House version counts 37 Republicans among its 164 sponsors. Presumably Republican politicians support this bill because it lets states dictate which are our most pressing wildlife conservation needs; I might do it differently, but I wouldn't let the perfect murder the good, either. So let's get this done.

Around the table: more thoughts about Ukraine, labor, QAnon, and taxes.

So Russia invades Ukraine, and then the marvelous happens: good Russians take to the streets to protest the war. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: when you protest in America, your leaders ignore you and a good chunk of people proud of their cynicism just laugh at you, but when you protest in Russia, you lose your job and get dragged off to jail. These Russian folks are brave, and though they face terrible consequences for their activism, they will probably get more done than we do when we take to the streets. Unless, of course, we're right-wingers taking to the streets to protest tax hikes or vaccine mandates that don't exist; then our government will act like we're more important than we really are.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is going so well that now Tucker Carlson is trying to pretend he never said any nice things about Vladimir Putin, although this is the future, where the enterprising scholar (here Bess Levin at Vanity Fair) can find everything you've said and done in public with ease. I just wish pointing out his obvious hypocrisy meant more -- Fox News won't ever fire Mr. Carlson, who also has a cush landing as a Hungry Man heir if things ever get really tight. But even Donald Trump is now trying to say that when he said Vladimir Putin was "smart" it wasn't really praise, which suggests that Vladimir Putin will be a very lonely fellow if he wins his land war, and that is, after all, the best he deserves after what he's done.

Better news from Mexico: workers at another Mexican auto plant are trying to shake off their employer-friendly union for a real one that might actually help them get better pay and benefits and working conditions. The incumbent union is supposedly offering 500 pesos per vote, which ain't much (it would allow good Mexicans to subsist at the poverty level for about four and a half days), but which, sadly, may buy a lot of votes anyway. I'm always distressed by how little it takes to buy people -- remember how Bank of America got workers to put more homeowners in foreclosure with $25 bonuses and gift cards? -- though after 40-plus years of neoliberalism I probably shouldn't be surprised. Anyway, I wish these auto workers luck, since they have a long road ahead of them.

When I hear that 17% of Americans are QAnon true believers, per a PRRI survey, I have to say I'm not too surprised, having long figured that the portion of the electorate that's bat-guano insane is around 25%. 17% ain't 25%, but right-wing enablers have created plenty of other dramas to keep that portion of the electorate crazy. I'll say the crazy beliefs have gotten crazier -- used to be I said you were crazy if you thought George W. Bush was doing a good job in 2007, which doesn't quite compare to "a Satanic cabal of child molesters control our government." I still think folks who thought George W. Bush was doing a good job in 2007 were crazy -- and I also think they've just been swapping one crazy belief for another all these years. Maybe they just put them all on a lazy Susan and give it a spin. I'm pretty sure that's what right-wing "influencers" do.

When confronted with the fact that he advocated raising taxes on 100 million Americans who supposedly "don't pay taxes" and don't have "skin in the game" in his 11-point plan to "Rescue America," Sen. Rick Scott (E-FL) does what they all do: he lies about it. And Sean Hannity helps him, of course, saying that he "couldn't find" the tax hike in the Scott plan, that it must be in "invisible ink"! Then again, if Donald Trump shoved a broomstick up Mr. Hannity's ass, he'd tell you he couldn't find that, either. "I couldn't find it! It must be invisible!"

Finally, Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro at Lawfare remind us that "Putin Can’t Destroy the International Order by Himself," because other nations' response to his lawlessness, if it's vigorous enough, will help preserve that order. Messrs. Hathaway and Shapiro talk strictly about war's own illegality as established by Kellogg-Briand and the U.N. charter -- we could argue about how, say, our little Iraq adventure damaged the international order, though we might not refer to the aforementioned two documents to prove it. But their post is a pretty good primer on law and order, particularly for those who think "law and order" only refers to shooting Black folks.

Around the table: concerning the Ukraine, inflation, transgender folks, social media, and a heartland business that's doing it right.

Angus Roxburgh at The Guardian argues that sanctions against Russia for invading the Ukraine should target Mr. Putin's advisors, not his funders, because targeting the billionaires hasn't worked, and targeting those members of Russia's legislature or Mr. Putin's council who actually advise him -- and who "love to swan around on yachts, ski slopes and fine hotels in the west, posting pictures of themselves on Instagram" -- would hurt more. This is such a good idea you have to wonder why Western nations haven't done it already, and I shudder to think that the answer might be "because we need Vladimir Putin around to distract you from our doings."

Since Facebook is "fact-checking" the assertion that corporate greed causes a large part of inflation, here's a mainstream media report entitled "Rising Fuel Prices and Corporate Profits -- Not Wages -- Are Chiefly to Blame for Inflation." OK, they put corporate profits second, but baby steps! This is our "liberal" media, after all! But let's quote: "If higher worker pay was truly the main driver of prices, it follows that more labor-intensive service sectors of the economy would be seeing the largest jump in consumer prices. Yet the inflation picture today shows the exact opposite: price increases for goods are outstripping services by a factor of three." And if energy price hikes add only two percentage points to inflation, and labor costs add next to nothing, well, that leaves five and a half points to attribute to corporate profits.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered the state's child protective services agency to investigate any child who's had any sort of "sex change" procedure as possible "child abuse." That extends only as far as hormone therapies and puberty blockers; our laws already prohibit more invasive surgical procedures, but naturally Texas is "focusing" on that, too. You know what would be really cynical? If Gov. Abbott trumpeted this order so he could survive a primary challenge against someone even further right than he -- then reminded everyone in the primary that the agency didn't actually investigate any children on this basis during the general election. See? I'm not actually a knuckle-dragging ogre like the liberals say! Except, of course, that the threat of investigation still exists, and can, in fact, be carried out if too many rage-addled right-wingers notice that "nothing's being done." If Beto O'Rourke can't prepare for that, he deserves to lose. Hey, I'm just a schmuck on the internet and I can game it out; this is his job.

Ho hum, Donald Trump's new social network, the daringly-named Truth Social, is not only suffering from technical glitches that have bloated its waitlist to 500,000 folks, but has already booted people off its network for perceived offenses despite billing itself as a "free speech" haven. Of course Mr. Trump probably looks at the waitlist and says "look at all the people who want to join!" And as I've always said, you can kick anyone you want off your privately-held network, but maybe you should slow your roll on the "free speech" pity party if you're going to do that. Hilariously, Truth Social has received a number of five-star reviews from folks who not only haven't used it, but say they're still having trouble getting on it! Maybe these folks really think the Deep State is keeping them from signing on, but you know who else reviews something without having used it? A troll. And their Personal Lord and Savior is the greatest troll of them all.

So how does a "Century-Old Small-Time Retailer" in West Virginia "Survive() Walmart," per John W. Miller at The Daily Yonder? By "realiz(ing) we’d have to sell higher quality products, put a premium on service and also develop relationships with everybody in town," per Ruttenberg's owner/manager, and yes you're "more likely to pay $100 than $25 for a pair of work boots, but they’ll last longer, and that transaction will keep money in the community and feed a relationship with the family selling you the shoe." As for "developing relationships," that's mostly about learning all your customers' names and asking how they're doing; how odd, that the solution to all the problems hyper-mechanized efficiency causes is always people.

Finally, leave it to Donald Trump to call the Russian invasion of the Ukraine "smart," in the sense that "he’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions." You know, in the sense that making all that money without paying any taxes (as he has frequently been accused of doing) was also "smart," as he suggested in the second Presidential debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016. The more cynical among us probably agree with Mr. Trump, but cynicism is evil, and more to the point, let's see if the cynics call it "smart" when Mr. Putin drags down his entire regime by fighting a guerrilla war in the Ukraine for however long he stays invested in that. So proud of their "learning" in "the School of Hard Knocks," some people are. (Hate to pile on, but his bringing up the "rigged election" to Laura Ingraham provokes me to ask: if this guy was Teh Greatest President Evah, as he has so often said, how come he couldn't "rig" his own re-election? How does someone so great constantly get tripped up by his enemies?)

Action: concerning rape, pollution, taxes, and law and order.

Long story short: tell Honduras to sign a bill allowing rape victims to access emergency contraceptives, tell Chile to start regulating the clothing industry, tell New York's Governor to extend clemency to Robert Webster, tell President Biden to end offshore drilling, tell our IRS to simplify free tax filing, and tell our Justice Department to hold Donald Trump accountable for the January 6 attempted coup. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Avaaz helps you tell Honduran President Xiomara Castro (Honduras's first female President) to sign a bill that would repeal Honduras's ban on emergency contraception. She's under a lot of pressure not to sign the bill, and you can guess how that pressure reveals itself: "this is too risky a move for a President not even a month into her term," "the first female President shouldn't appear to be too friendly to women," "don't you know we only outlawed the killing of women in 2013 and we barely prosecute it?" But right is right and wrong is wrong, and you know what's wrong? Raping 12-year-old girls and demanding they carry any resulting pregnancies to term, that's what. And that happens in Honduras all the time. Good Hondurans bear the primary responsibility for getting their President to do their will, but nothing prevents us from helping out.

Sum of Us helps you tell Chilean President Gabriel Boric to stop allowing big clothing corporations to use Chile as a dumping ground. You've heard of the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," a massive floating island of plastic trash now three times as large as France floating in the Pacific? Now acquaint yourself with the mountain of clothes growing in the Atacama Desert, made up of clothes manufactured largely in Asia, unsold in Europe and America, and dumped as trash in Chile. Ugly, to be sure, but you may not be convinced that this is a big deal, particularly for a new President who, having declared that "(n)eoliberalism was born in Chile, and here it will die," might be looking for bigger fish. But nobody wants their country used as someone else's trashcan. Indeed, Mr. Boric may owe his election to that sentiment.

Change.org helps you tell New York Gov. Hochul to free Robert Webster, currently serving a 50-year sentence for arson. You'll recognize most of this story -- a conviction based entirely on witness testimony, exculpating evidence not fully explored at trial, a judge failing to account for Mr. Websters' status as a minor during sentencing -- but you may also be wondering: half a century for arson? The arson's aftermath involved a police officer's murder, which may have induced a longer sentence for Mr. Webster -- a much longer sentence than the one given for the police officer's murder, if you can believe it. Has Mr. Webster been even better than a model prisoner despite spending two-thirds of his life in prison? Yes, he has. So let's help him out.

The National Resources Defense Council helps you tell President Biden to end offshore drilling. The Administration has just started leasing a million acres off Alaska's Cook Inlet for gas and oil drilling, and I've recited the problems with Arctic drilling enough over the years -- oh, hell, one more time: oil spills are even harder to clean up in the Arctic's frigid waters, we know little enough about the Arctic ecosystem that we don't know all the harm drilling would do, and fishing is a big industry in Alaska that would be endangered by the inevitable oil spill. A federal court stopped the Biden Administration's big Gulf of Mexico leasing plan, but the Administration ought to see the writing on the wall by now, not just in court, but in a warming world where other, more renewable technologies can shoulder more of our energy burden.

Public Citizen helps you tell our IRS to implement free tax filing for good Americans who have relatively easy tax filing to do, which is most of us. Our laws already authorize our IRS to do this! And if you have relatively straightforward tax issues, our IRS already has all the information it needs to fill our your damn tax return for you! I suppose the objection would be that "tax-filing is a big business in America," but if a big chunk of that business doesn't need it, does that business deserve to be so big? Of course not! That business will have plenty of work for folks with complex investments and the like. But charging folks hundreds of dollars every year for doing work they don't need to do? That's profoundly wasteful, and our economy shouldn't churn money from waste.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our Justice Department to hold Donald Trump accountable for his actions leading up to the January 6 attempted coup. We have lately learned that Mr. Trump was already preparing to fight a 2020 election loss in court three months before Election Day, and while I'm sure his votaries call that "being prepared," it also means folks like John Eastman (who wrote the infamous memo laying out how Mike Pence could have invalidated 2020 election results on January 6) and Cleta Mitchell (who participated in Mr. Trump's infamous "find 11,780 votes" call to Georgia's Secretary of State) might have more to tell, since they advised these legal efforts from the start. And look, we all know he would have done anything to win; now we need only know what laws he might have broken.

Around the table: book banning book banning book banning book banning!

Daniel Larison, writing at Common Dreams (which is odd!), asks "Could Western Media Hysteria Lead to War With Russia?" There are so many laugh lines in this article I think I'd actually get tired of highlighting them, but the depths to which our "liberal" media will sink to keep this drama going is no laughing matter. How many folks will try to tell me tomorrow at the water cooler that our withdrawal from Afghanistan, or China's possible interest in taking over Taiwan, are "causing" this "crisis," even though folks who argue that can't argue it for shit? If Mr. Putin really tries to annex the Ukraine, it will become his Iraq, and his rule will be yet another cautionary tale to future generations. And though I'd hate to see good Ukrainians suffer either fighting his rule or living under it, let's not expend yet more blood and treasure just to keep him from destroying himself.

In a related note, Donald Trump goes on some dude's podcast to assert that Vladimir Putin is "very savvy" to go into those eastern, pro-Russian areas of the Ukraine, but why is he "savvy"? You'll never learn from Mr. Trump -- he just keeps repeating the same point over and over again, and his votaries will call that "logic" or "analysis," and worse, our "liberal" media will pass it along as such without calling the Emperor out for being naked and swinging his balls in our faces as he does every time he opens his mouth.

A CDC report informs us that scientists have found an extraordinary number of ticks in a Pennsylvania park tested positive for deer-tick virus -- 92% of the 25 sampled, almost four times higher than reported anywhere else in America, ever. Scientists aren't finding this level of deer-tick virus in other areas of the state, so we may find out it's something unique to Lawrence Township Recreational Park. But deer-tick virus is about five times as lethal as COVID, and as the planet keeps warming, we're going to have a lot more ticks. I wouldn't say deer-tick virus will be the next pandemic, at least not yet, but we ought to keep an eye on it.

In my hurry to lambaste Sen. Rick Scott for proposing higher taxes on a hundred million Americans, I forgot to remind everyone that the whole idea that 47% of Americans "don't pay taxes" and need more "skin in the game" is complete bullshit. These people who "pay no taxes" all pay payroll taxes, Medicare taxes, state taxes, sales taxes, and in some cases city wage taxes, and previous studies found that folks in the lower economic brackets actually pay a comparable percentage of their income in taxes when you figure all those things in, so feel free to tell everyone that Republicans want to raise taxes on the people who can least afford it, because it's absolutely true no matter how many Republicans try to distance themselves from the Scott platform in the coming days.

When I hear that 65% of rural voters view Democrats "unfavorably" -- with 48% of voters viewing them "strongly" unfavorably -- all I can say is that it doesn't have to be this way! Polling has also told us that rural Americans like things like Medicare-for-All, taxpayer-funded community college, and treatment for drug addiction rather than incarceration; seems like Democrats could make inroads in rural America by actually fighting for these things, as well as fighting for the small farmer who'd otherwise get trampled by big ag. The article makes other good points -- support for rural hospitals and expanding rural broadband would also get Democrats a long way with rural folks -- and I'll concede that rural voters are more hostile to "defunding the police" particularly when it's put like that, but I'd discard the finding about immigration. Nobody cares about immigration unless they're already regularly-enraged -- which, again, fighting for the things mentioned above would fix!

Finally, a CBS News/YouGov poll tells us that 80% of Americans oppose banning books "for discussing race and criticizing U.S. history, for depicting slavery in the past or more broadly for political ideas they disagree with." It really should be 100%, but 80% suggests that opposing book banning should be a layup for Democrats, until we remember that 80% of Americans also support Medicare drug price negotiation, and Democrats can't deliver that even when they don't have a filibuster to stop them. Then Republicans reframe the issue as "parents' rights," and Democrats give up, instead of saying by "parents' rights" you really mean "book banning." Seriously, they should make "book banning" their two favorite words for the next eight months, though I can't shake the feeling that they've already psyched themselves into losing Congress.

Around the table: Republicans have an agenda! (Spoiler alert: it sucks.)

When I hear that women fight reactionary forces in Kuwait who call the mere presence of yoga classes an affront to Islam, I can't be too proud that at least American women can go to yoga classes largely unmolested, not least because American women still had to get their husbands' permission to get credit cards during my lifetime. These right-wing drama hounds may say they're "defending the daughters" of Kuwait, but American right-wingers sound no different, and I'm pretty sure they look at how much further Kuwaiti women have to go and wish they could start America from there! I wish the women of Kuwaiti luck, and how about the rest of us stop appeasing assholes?

Sanitation workers in San Diego County win a fairly substantial raise after going on strike for seven weeks with enthusiastic community support. Yes, even though they weren't getting their trash picked up, to the point where the city of Chula Vista actually declared a public health emergency. The new contract did not resolve many of the workers' grievances -- like poorly-maintained garbage trucks, that's a big one -- and I think it'll take many, many more strikes to get those issues resolved, because they don't actually work for the county government, but for Republic, a corporation that collects trash in 40 states and pays its CEO $12 million annually. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's yet another argument against privatization.

Jim Hightower describes "Corporate Profiteers' Pandemic Strategy" thusly: "Gouge Consumers and Blame Joe Biden." "What the GOP bemoans as America’s inflation problem," he writes, "is actually a corporate greed problem" (italics in original, I swear!) because "our economy doesn’t remotely resemble a competitive marketplace." You'll be familiar with the record-profits-but-still-raising-prices-story, but you may be less familiar with corporate monopoly's effects on small businesses, such as the cattle ranchers who get less money for their beef as meat processors charge consumers more. Read to the end so you can do something about all of this, versus just staying angry.

John F. Tooker at The Conversation warns us that we are overusing seeds coated with insecticides. Coating a seed with insecticide? What will they think of next? With neonicotinoid-coated seeds now being planted in just about all corn and cotton fields and about half of soybean fields, the answer to that question is, as always, "whatever allows big ag to hire fewer workers." Pretty soon nobody's going to have the money to buy food! Mr. Tooker isn't anti-neonic per se, but would prefer that farmers use integrated pest management, which I sure hope wouldn't involve introducing any more invasive species (after all, the spotted lanternfly is one of those species that makes neonics useful).

From the "Who Greenlighted This?" file: a bitcoin "mining" corporation rescues a Montana "zombie" coal plant which had operated on only 46 days in 2020, and perhaps not unexpectedly, the climate change emissions skyrocket. "This isn’t helping old ladies from freezing to death," one observer notes, "it’s to enrich a few people while destroying our climate for all of us." So how did Marathon get its gnarled hand around the Hardin plant? Oh, the usual way -- by promising JOBZ!!!! Though we read yesterday about how fossil fuel corporations' job promises typically fall well short. And while wind isn't the zero-sum game coal is, I'd prefer wind turbines power homes and businesses rather than speculative investments. No, I will not call it "currency," because it's not currency. Words mean things, after all.

Finally, Sen. Rick Scott (E-FL) releases an 11-point agenda for Republicans if they take back Congress in 2022, and most of it makes you realize that Mitch McConnell's refusal to issue any agenda makes him the brains of that outfit. I've already got the ad written: "Sir, what would Republicans do about inflation?" "We'll finish the border wall and name it after Trump!" "I see. So what would Republicans do about high prescription drug prices?" "We will make a law saying there are only two genders!" "Don't see how those relate; so what would Republicans do about paid family leave?" "We're going to take critical race theory out of the schools!" "OK, so family, schools, I guess -- what would Republicans do about corporate monopolies?" "We will make private corporations do everything government does!" "Uh huh. Oh, and what's this I hear about Republicans wanting to raise taxes on half of all Americans?"

Action: concerning Social Security, corruption, corporate taxes, price-gouging of prisoners, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to increase Social Security benefits, ban stock trading by members of Congress, pass a 15% corporate minimum tax, prevent big telecom corporations from price-gouging prisoners, and pass the Postal Service Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5723, the Social Security 2100 Act. As Jon Schwarz explains here, the Social Security 2100 Act would expand benefits for all Social Security recipients, and it would also increase the minimum Social Security payment from 85% of the poverty line (which we all know is too low!) to 125% of the poverty line. It'd do other good works, too, but when Joe Manchin hears that it'll only expand benefits for five years, he'll bellyache about it. Let him! If the nation sees a pro-Social Security bill die at his gnarled hand, they'll want better Democrats in our Senate, and in the meantime House Democrats can run on their vote in favor of it. They still have to vote, of course -- apparently the bill's sponsor, Rep. John Larson (D-CT), hasn't put his own bill before the House Subcommittee he chairs! Here's how to get in touch with him.

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban stock trading by members of Congress. Quite a few different bills (and promised bills) now address this matter, but we need to ensure they don't produce a bill riddled with loopholes you could drive a Mack truck through. We can't just say "don't trade stocks" and be done with it; we have to ensure their spouses also adhere to the ban (since hiding your assets in your spouse's portfolio is a common trick), and we also have to ensure they don't trade in things like derivatives and futures. A Congressperson may vote on bills that help corporations in which they're invested, and they may also investigate corporations in which they're invested; some will pretend offense that we think they can't separate their self-interest from America's interest, but, ah, we know better.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a 15% corporate minimum tax, so they don't get away with paying no taxes (or worse, getting money back from our government). Yeah, I'd prefer a 55% corporate tax on profits over $1 million (I'd keep it where it is for profits under $1 million), but a 15% minimum tax would do a lot of good, and I'd happily call it a stepping stone to where I'd want to be (which is, guess what, where we were in the 1950s). We can't keep going on having corporations pay nothing, and having governments pretend that "research and development tax breaks" are "incentives." The incentive to research and development is that expenses don't get taxed; everything else is horseshit.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 2489, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act. As you know, prisoners pay an arm and a leg just to make a phone call to their loved ones, and when your Trumphole neighbor says well then they shouldn't have done the crime ha ha ha snort, remind them that prisoners who can easily stay in touch with their families won't go back to prison as much, so we all have an interest in making sure prisoners can do that without getting gouged. And, yeah, if you're feeling ornery, tell them that Captain Kirk wouldn't stand for a society that gouges its prisoners just because some corporation wants some unearned profits so their CEO can gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home. Yeah, Captain Kirk don't play that! And Mr. Spock don't play that, either!

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act, which would (among other good works) lift the onerous mandate requiring our Postal Service to prepay retiree benefits decades in advance. H.R. 3076 passed the House by an astounding 342-92 vote, while S. 1720 counts 14 Republicans among its 27 sponsors, but naturally Sen. Rick Scott (E-FL) blocked its quick consideration, claiming that the bill would hurt Medicare. By depriving it of the money our Postal Service doesn't have to begin with? I'd call that pretzel logic, but I know Rick Scott's not stupid, but evil, and he will say whatever lets him and his cronies privatize our Postal Service. People like him should never win so much as a Yahtzee game, so we've got work to do.

Around the table: more about monopolies, inflation, ivermectin, antibiotic abuse, and phantom jobs.

Matt Stoller's optimism about monopoly power extends even to defense spending, where the "free" market used to rule, in the sense that big defense contracting corporations just got bigger until we only have two corporations manufacturing rocket motors, and having two is really no better than having one, as two corporations can just carve up a market to benefit them (and not to benefit us). You may recognize Lucas Kunce, now running for a U.S. Senate seat as a Democrat from Missouri, as the co-author of an American Conservative piece about how monopolies hurt national security. I think Mr. Stoller is more optimistic than I'd be about this matter, though some say I'm prone to optimism; in any case, I'd prefer to believe he's right.

Joseph Stiglitz at In These Times provides another corrective to inflation "panicking." Some folks like to make fun of Joe Biden for saying inflation would be "temporary," but the December inflation rate was about half of the October rate (and the January rate, which just came out, was about the same as the December rate). Also, too, inflation's been going up for about a year, after a year in which the economy essentially shut down for three months, and a year is actually rather temporary in the greater cosmic sense. I hate to keep saying this, but I'm old enough to remember when inflation was above 10% for years. In place of interest rate hikes, Mr. Stiglitz proposes a temporary middle- and lower-class tax cut (which Republicans will hate, since it excludes their big donors), as well as policies targeting supply chain issues (of which the Ocean Shipping Reform Act, passed by our House late last year, might be one).

Folks who think all scientists are out for money and fame -- a belief they would never have entertained before Anthony Fauci clashed with their Personal Lord and Savior, Donald Trump -- may want to attend two scientists who appear to have taken ivermectin's COVID-treating potential seriously, until the science disabused them of the notion. Along the way you'll nod when you read, once again, that correlation is not causation (the Tyler Vigan link is pretty funny!), and that the "kitchen sink" approach to treating anything is a pretty damn good way of not proving anything in particular works. (In a related note: a study out of Malaysia finds that ivermectin works rather worse as a COVID treatment than your standard corticosteroid treatment.)

A study out of Emory University finds that spraying the antibiotic streptomycin on crops may make bees a good bit dumber, to the point where they don't function very well as pollinators. Now, this study took place entirely in the laboratory, but it doesn't bode well for future studies that will take place on actual farms where actual antibiotics get sprayed -- which, in turn, doesn't bode well for the many species of bees that pollinate our crops. And seriously, spraying antibiotics on crops? There are other ways to fight fire blight, for example, although you'll notice they involve more attention, from people, and since big ag doesn't like to hire people, we'll have to fight further.

Finally, Wenonah Hauter at In These Times instructs us that "The Fossil Fuel Industry Doesn't Create Nearly as Many Jobs as it Says It Does," a nugget of wisdom you'll probably remember from the debate over the notorious Keystone XL pipeline, where right-wingers yammered on about TEH JOBZ!!!!! even though we knew the pipeline would create only a few thousand construction jobs for two years and then create only a few dozen permanent jobs. How do they do it? Simple: they count damn near everything, like convenience store workers who work at gas stations, as "jobs created by fossil fuels," whereas if you counted only those jobs directly created by the industry, well, the number wouldn't be nearly as impressive. And those convenience store workers would still be selling milk and cigarettes if they didn't also happen to have gas pumps on-site. (As you may know, the only state where a worker actually pumps your gas for you is America's Greatest State, New Jersey.)

UPDATE. A reader informs me that Oregon also mandates that workers pump your gas. That should instruct me to refrain from all the cheerleading I do for America's Greatest State, New Jersey! Alas, I may not learn this lesson right away.

Action: concerning health care, monopolies, pollution, and bad cable news channels.

Long story short: tell President Biden to lower prescription drug prices, tell our government to reject a big bankster merger, tell our EPA to ban the herbicide dicamba and require more electric heavy-duty trucks on the road, tell our government to stop flogging "carbon capture" as a climate-change solution, and tell cable corporations to stop carrying the Fox News Channel. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to use his lawful power to lower prescription drug prices. After all, certain Congressdolts said "no" to Medicare negotiating drug prices, and in a Congress with slim margins a few miscreants can always get their way, so let's stop trying to negotiate with them and let's start trying to get President Biden to do the right thing. Specifically, the above-linked petition helps you ask President Biden to use "march-in" rights, granted by the Bayh/Dole Act of 1980, to manufacture cheaper generic drugs. At least 80% of Americans supported Medicare drug price negotiation, and I bet 100% of Americans oppose price-gouging and live-saving medicines breaking their bank accounts, so I would hope Mr. Biden would feel fairly secure in taking action the people need and want. Boy, I'd hate to be wrong about that.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Federal Reserve Bank and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (or OCC) to reject a proposed U.S. Bank/Union Bank merger. Never heard of either one? Well, let's keep it that way! And, in fact, let's break up both those banks so the resulting banks will be even less famous! Fame might be a good reason to buy a book, but it's no reason to choose a bank. And once upon a time, you had a savings and/or checking account at a bank that only had one branch, and because this bank only had one branch, the folks who worked there knew the folks living nearby and could tailor their services to those good folks. Now, big banks expect you to tailor your needs to them. And you deserve better than that! So let's fight this merger.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to ban herbicide dicamba from use on our farms. Dicamba has wreaked enough havoc on farms that don't use it -- it's a notorious drifter! -- that even Republican politicians have restricted its use, but the 2021 growing season saw no less disturbance and disruption than previous growing seasons, which means using it at all threatens farms everywhere. Monsanto figures in this story, of course, first by manufacturing a "better" version of dicamba a few years back and then offering dicamba-resistant crops as a "solution." But these are not solutions to those of us who do not worship mammon! We should treat food as a right rather than a thing to be sold; in the meantime, let's get dangerous chemicals off our farms.

Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell our EPA to start strengthening emissions standards for heavy-duty shipping trucks, with the goal of getting them all electric. Right-wingers will look solely at the goal and say pie in the sky much, liberal? Ha ha ha snort! But no reasonable person says that! Everyone knows it takes time to get internal combustion engines out of commercial trucks, but the need is no less urgent: these trucks comprise about a quarter of all carbon emissions in America, meaning that getting them to pollute less would be, as a famous philosopher once said, a BFD. And not for nothing, but highways more likely run through Black and Brown neighborhoods, exposing those folks to more pollutants than the rest of us. Why, it was almost like that was the whole idea! But we can do better.

Stand.Earth helps you tell our government to stop giving corporate welfare handouts to "carbon capture" corporations. Only when we embrace solar power, electric cars, geothermal heating, and hydroponic farming will we slow our roll toward climate disaster; "solutions" like natural gas, nuclear power, and "carbon capture," where corporations capture the carbon emissions before they hit the air and either store them in the ground or reuse them for other purposes, might make some executive rich, but they won't help us keep our planet. Carbon capture, it turns out, is nowhere near as far along in its development as it would have to be, plus corporations use a lot of the carbon they do capture to dig for oil! What a way of telling good people all over the world to fuck off and die! If you take as kindly to that as I do, give your government what-for.

Finally, Inequality Media Civic Action helps you tell big telecom corporations to stop offering Fox News on their networks. We've made some headway starving the beast that is the One America News Network, but going after Fox News, now the number one source of right-wing rage for over two decades, will, I expect, be harder, even though I presume most of its viewers will find other, better things to obsess about once they can't easily get to Fox News. Now, some folks don't like to do things like this; they call them censorship. But governments censor; when consumers band together against a product they don't like, that's just the churn of civilization. Why, some folks would even call it the free market in action!

Around the table: the plundering of public goods, and other evils.

Paul Rosenberg at Salon talks with Donald Cohen, co-author of The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back." You probably know the story pretty well by now -- how "efficiency" means "less service for you," for example -- so if you want to skip ahead to the "How We Can Fight Back" part: one, "debunk the idea that the private sector is always more efficient"; two, point out "the public things that are all around us," not just roads and streetlights, but also clean water, seat belts, and paint without lead; and three, demand more of our politicians than they're used to. My experience is they've lived so long on Easy Street they'll fold under mild pressure from the public. In the meantime, put the book on your Powell's wish list.

Surprise, surprise, Facebook is turning its "fact-checking" powers on memes and posts saying that corporate greed causes inflation. How long before water-makes-you-wet memes get similarly "fact-checked"? And while Agence France-Presse is the oldest state-owned news organ in the world, and a hell of a lot better than some of Facebook's other fact-checkers (cough The Daily Caller cough!), fact is Facebook didn't "correct" anything, but merely offered a counter-opinion and called it a fact. And now that they've done this, they're only helping to spread the corporate-greed-causes-inflation idea even more! You know, kind of like how Maus vaulted to the top of Amazon's best-seller list after that Tennessee school board banned it.

The expanded Child Tax Credit has been gone for almost two months now, and to no one's surprise, the monthly child poverty rate went from 12.1% in December to 17% in January. That's nearly 3.7 million more kids in poverty; put a face to any of them and then consider that Joe Manchin said (or, more likely, parroted what his big donors said) that people just spent their CTC money on drugs! This is just one more data point demolishing that notion -- I mean, if spending CTC money on drugs was that widespread, you wouldn't see child poverty go up almost five points in one month. When will our leaders get any better at leadership?

I'd love to think that yet another substantive investigation into the shaky ethics of Ryan Zinke while he was Secretary of the Interior could scuttle his chances of winning back a Montana House seat (Montana has two House seats now, so he wouldn't be winning back his old one per se), but Montana's state legislature has gerrymandered those two seats pretty well, and Democrats can always snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, as they're so good at doing. Still, I'm old enough to remember when the appearance of corruption ended careers; how about we go back to that?

When I hear that Rep. Billy Long (R-MO) is very, very upset that Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) didn't tell him he would endorse someone else for the 2022 open Senate seat, I'm compelled to say waaaaaaah. Rep. Long's long list of complaints (and his long list of "liberal" media outlets to which he's airing these complaints) can't be a good look to Republican primary voters. But Mr. Hawley's been shrewd here -- his endorsee, Rep. Vicki Hartzler, is a stealth Trumphole, not like Eric Greitens and Mark McCloskey, who are overt Trumpholes but who also have more formerly-closeted skeletons on the rampage. Lucas Kunce could beat her, but as I've said, Democrats are so good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory they'll jam someone "safer" down the throats of good Missourians.

Finally, Pennington, NJ Starbucks worker Sara Mughal describes "How We Turned the Tables On Starbucks Union-Busters." Long story short: Starbucks workers across the land talk with each other and compare notes, and at their mandatory anti-union propaganda meetings they bring a crap-ton of questions so that even the managers get exasperated with answering after a while. They're finding out what I found out a long time ago: our opponents don't have any good arguments! And once you figure that out, the only way they can beat you is to cheat, by, oh, hypothetically now, firing workers for trumped-up wrongdoings.

Action: concerning health care, indigenous folk, good Afghans, facial recognition, and factory fur farms.

Long story short: tell Germany to support the pandemic waiver at the WTO, tell Tanzania to stop evicting indigenous folk from their ancestral lands, tell our government to release Afghani citizens' funds, tell our local governments to stop using ODIN facial recognition tech, and tell the European Union to ban fur farms. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Sum of Us helps you tell Germany's government to stop blocking the COVID vaccine patent waiver at the World Trade Organization (or WTO). Yeah, Germany's in on that, too, putting corporate intellectual property rights above the health of the world's people. Two and-another-things about that: one, we should be calling it, at the very least, intellectual property shared by corporations and our government, since taxpayer money and research made those vaccines, and two, by "the world's people" I mean all the world's people, not just the folks too poor to pay for COVID vaccines, because if they get it, then everyone's going to get COVID again, and maybe not as friendly a variant thereof as we've seen so far. Also, if we get Germany to back down, it'll make the Biden Administration's obstruction harder to justify.

Avaaz helps you tell Tanzania's government to stop evicting Maasai indigenous folk from their ancestral lands in the nation's northern area. It ain't just indigenous folk in the Amazon or Ecuador fighting this battle; indigenous folk are defending their land from big corporations all over the world, and it just might be that they know what's best for the land they live on. Too conservative? Not one "conservative" bloviating in public today would put indigenous people above money, even though all money goes the way of all flesh, while civilizations based on lasting values can endure forever. The Maasai may not be battling drilling and mining corporations, but they are battling a tourism/trophy hunting corporation from Saudi Arabia, so yeah, I think they know what's best for the land they've lived on for centuries.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our government to disperse good Afghan citizens' funds. Because the money belongs to them! And we should pressure the Taliban in ways that don't require starving Afghan people! You may well be asking yourself, self, what if the Taliban gets hold of this money before it can get to its rightful owners in Afghanistan? But I doubt they'll do that -- a government can only create so much chaos before it backfires on them, and when a mere 2% of Afghan children have enough food to eat, I think we can all see the Taliban is well past that point. Which means, again, the compassionate thing to do is also the practical thing to do. Funny how often that happens -- but not so funny how our politicians never seem to see it.

The Kairos Fellowship helps you tell your local governments to stop using ODIN facial recognition technology to spot and harass homeless folk. One more time: facial recognition technology sucks! And using it to arrest homeless folk also sucks! You know what wouldn't suck? Putting homeless folks up in tiny houses, which would cost less than picking them up and putting them in shelters or hospitals or jails. If folks saw how tiny these tiny houses would be, they wouldn't feel jealous of someone else getting "something for nothing," either. You know what else wouldn't suck? Well-funded public housing and rent control laws. When we stopped spending money on public housing in the 1980s, the homeless population exploded, and I think there's more than mere correlation there.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell the European Union to ban fur farms. Now I have nothing against folks making fur coats for themselves, just like I have nothing against folks raising chicken for themselves, but the fur farms that Italy has recently banned feature squalid conditions that you probably won't find completely unfamiliar, like almost impossibly small and almost impossibly dirty cages. That's right: fur farming is very much like factory farming of chickens and pigs in the United States! We might do better calling them factory fur farms, in fact! As I said, you want to make a coat out of animal skins, you go right ahead. But factory fur farms don't care about anything but efficiency -- or, more precisely, efficiently making their executives money -- and that goes hand-in-hand with soul-destroying cruelty.

Around the table: right-wingers want to "defund the police," and other truths.

When Matt Stoller talks about big tech corporations trying to "defund the police," he means that big tech corporations donate to the politicians who'll cut off funding for our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC), who enforce antitrust law and who are more hostile to monopolies than at any time in at least 40 years. Strange that every time Republicans try to cut funding for our IRS or for Medicare's fraud investigators, they don't call it "defunding the police," though that's really what it is. But just try to criticize a cop for killing a Black man who was brandishing a cellphone, and these very same people will scream their lungs out at you like their mamas never taught them any manners. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you yammer on about "urban crime" but you never mention corporate crime, I won't listen to you.

Good news, everyone: Ecuador's Constitutional Court has ruled that indigenous populations have the right to veto any drilling or mining projects on their land. When Marco Rubio hears about this, I'm sure he'll yammer on about trial lawyers, even though getting a small community's permission before drilling for oil or gas near their homes would strike most reasonable thinkers as the conservative thing to do. Giving the most autonomy to the most local forms of government is still conservative, right? Or has the word been tortured until the only thing it says is more money for rich people?

Matthew Jordan and Sydney Forde at The Conversation tell us that "Canadian Trucker Protests Show How the Loudest Voices in the Room Distort Democracy." I've said truckers have the right to close off roads even though they're a bunch of whiny brats, but yeah, if I were living in Ottawa right now, I'd probably be disgusted with all the horn-blowing. Well, as they say, the emptiest wagon makes the loudest noise. You know, just like in campaign finance!

If you've been thinking that the successful recall of three San Francisco school board members sends yet another signal of a Republican wave in 2022, don't think that, and not necessarily because their replacements will be appointed by a Democratic Mayor anyway. Folks much closer to the controversy inform us that the main issue voters had with the school board was its rampant incompetence -- they cared more about renaming Abraham Lincoln High School than, you know, figuring out how to get kids educated in a pandemic. I mean, getting Confederate names off schools is fine. But Abraham Lincoln was a stone-cold slavery fighter! No, really -- look past his carefully-calculated public pronouncements and look at his personal letters, in which he can't STFU about how much he hates slavery.

Some observers, noting that Republican Senators on the Finance Committee boycotted a meeting about a particular Fed nominee, wonder if they'll do the same to the eventual Supreme Court nominee. Some of them are already talking like she won't be qualified just because she'll be Black and female, though plenty of Black women are qualified enough to serve on our Court. And thus the same Senators who rushed the Kavanaugh and Barrett nominations will suddenly become apostles of patience and prudence if their stupidest questions aren't answered to their liking. And Joe Manchin will pretend not to notice Republicans inflicting yet another injury to his beloved "bipartisanship," and Kyrsten Sinema will just blame all liberals everywhere for not "getting to yes" with the party that only says yes when they get everything and you get nothing.

Finally, some more good news! our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) will reinstate California's authority to set stricter emissions standards than our federal government. This means, of course, that automotive corporations will build their cars to stricter standards, because California has a lot of people in it, you know, but they did it before Donald Trump, so they can do it again after Donald Trump. We really don't ask that much of our "big," "bold" "entrepreneurs."

Action: concerning Yemen, algorithms, labor, small businesses, antibiotics, and Presidential misbehavior.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end our involvement in the war on Yemen, hold corporations accountable for their algorithms, pass strong labor legislation, protect small online businesses, make antibiotics strong again, and investigate former President Trump's removal of official documents to his private residence. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end all American support for the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Specifically you'll ask that your Reps support a War Powers resolution aiming to end our involvement there; it'd be nice if our government would only go to war when Congress specifically authorizes it, as used to happen in the old days, but in the meantime, I'd take a War Powers resolution. 16 million good Yemeni sit on the edge of famine, and for what? Because the Saudis don't like the Houthis? The Houthis are some of the world's best at fighting al-Qaeda, but then so were the Kurds, and we sure sold them out to an even more odious dictator. How about if we stop making foreign policy decisions that constantly put us on the wrong side of decency? Our Founders didn't think that was too much to ask.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6580/S. 3572, the Algorithmic Accountability Act. A CEO's only job is, literally, to make decisions, but now lazy CEOs farm out their decision-making to algorithms, and it ain't just about Facebook algorithms automatically creating groups that let racists find each other much more easily than if they had to put some work into it -- it's also about algorithms charging some people higher prices, hence the recent controversy over Tinder, which was apparently charging older daters more money -- on the precept they'll swipe left more frequently than younger folks more mesmerized by appearances? It's a question worth asking! "Personalized pricing," Tinder called it, but "personalized price gouging" might be a better name, and we should fight that.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act passed our House almost a year ago, and given all the good things it would do -- it would stop corporations from trying to make all their employees into "contractors," it would stop employers from forcing their workers to sit through anti-union propaganda, it would outlaw forced arbitration in union contracts, it would prohibit corporate retaliation against whistleblowers, and it would give workers more choice in how they would vote for unionization -- it's hard to see how a sane, moral, and decent Senate would oppose it. We must conclude, therefore, that our Senate is not sane, moral, or decent. So we must make them so, by communicating our will until they can't deny it anymore.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the inclusion of the SHOP SAFE Act in larger trade legislation. What would the SHOP SAFE Act do? In the name of "protecting intellectual property," it would force online small businesses to jump through additional hoops about the products they sell, to make sure they're not "counterfeit" -- and then subject those small businesses to abuse anyway, since the internet marketplaces that host them will use, you guessed it, algorithms to detect "counterfeit" items, and they'll be just as good at that as facial recognition software is at telling Black folks apart. Politicians constantly talk about "protecting small businesses," and then they go and pull shit like this. Unless we stop them.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3932/S. 2076, the PASTEUR Act. The PASTEUR Act would fund development of new antibiotics, which we need mainly because we've abused the ones we've got so badly that superbugs rise up all over the world. Yes, "abuse" is the right word there -- we give seven out of every 10 antibiotics to nominally healthy farm animals so they can endure squalid conditions in family farms, instead of, you know, sick people or sick animals. The result? The world is full of superbugs! Also, too, exposure to COVID leaves folks vulnerable to another, bacterial infection -- which means hospitals treat all of their COVID patients with antibiotics out of an abundance of caution, thus antibiotics become less effective. Creating new antibiotics will give us a little more breathing space, at least.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate former President Trump's removal of some 15 boxes of Presidential records from our White House to his Mar-a-Lago residence. It's almost comic how often this man implicates himself law-breaking, but our failure to hold him to account for his many sins is no laughing matter at all. Anyway, the Presidential Records Act of 1978 doesn't let you just take any old document home, and not just because some of them might be classified "Top Secret," as they were with Mr. Trump. Why, you might be hiding something the American people deserve to know! It's almost comic how little respect Donald Trump shows to the people, but the fact that so many Americans think he's their Personal Lord and Savior is no laughing matter at all.

Around the table: the pragmatism of fighting pollution, and other truths.

Sonali Kohatkar delves into "greenwashing," and finds corporate promises of getting their act together vis a vis climate change wanting. She says their "net-zero emissions" promise "is akin to saying that it’s okay to litter all over your neighborhood if you also pick up trash elsewhere in the future because the net amount of trash you will have thrown onto the street will someday be zero." Of course, whatever we pollute today will make people sick today, regardless of how little we pollute tomorrow. Defenders of continued dependence on fossil fuel have nothing in response except, of course, hostage situations -- don't make us pollute less, or these contact lenses get it! Which shows a profound lack of imagination -- I mean, a solar power grid would make contact lenses impossible to manufacture? I thought this was the can-do country!

Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-NY) says she'll retire from Congress at the end of this term, and though most "liberal" media coverage focuses on the horserace aspects of her decision (ZOMG 30 DEMOCRATZ RETIRINGZ BIGZ REPUBZ WAVEZ!!!!!!), I rather think her retirement means that opposing Medicare drug price negotiation is now political poison. She was one of the big House voices against Medicare drug price negotiation; in fact, her position on that was probably the first anyone had heard about her. Anyway, Rep. Rice, don't let the door hit ya where the Good Lord split ya.

In a peripherally-related note, Joe Manchin says he wants to raise corporate tax rates and capital gains tax rates -- though he says nothing about higher tax rates for the rich! -- but Kyrsten Sinema remains as elusive as ever on these goals. Note well how her spokeshack answers questions about Sen. Sinema's current stance on taxes: "there are many ways to pay for (social spending plans) that do not include tax-rate increases that hurt small businesses and our economic competitiveness while we continue to emerge from a pandemic and economic downturn." That whole thing is a fecal blast from 2011 -- Paul Ryan used to say higher tax rates on the rich "hurt small businesses" and reduce "competitiveness," plus we're in a pandemic should remind you of we're in a recession, which induced Barack Obama to wait until he got re-elected to roll back some of Tha Bush Mobb tax cuts. Sen. Sinema should emulate Kathleen Rice's example and retire in 2024.

Jesus Mary and Joseph Starbucks has created a website for its anti-union propaganda. Called "We Are One Starbucks," no less! Referring to the employees it mistreats as "partners," no less! And they required workers to sign off having received an email about it! And they got a Starbucks worker to intone this before the camera: "Do you wish to continue to have your voice used independently? Or do you want your voice to be represented by a union?" When you don't have a good contract, your boss says your "independent" opinion means nothing, because it only comes from you (and he probably says that to everyone with the same opinion!). Get a good contract, and it's a lot harder to ignore you. (And what a bunch of BS about dues! When I started in my current field, I paid around 30 cents an hour in dues, and made $12 an hour more than local non-unionized workers in the same field did. Arguing about dues works better in an economy where folks don't make enough to make ends meet, I'll admit.)

Ho hum, the state of California files suit against Tesla for some old school racism in the workplace, including segregating Black workers, giving them the most physically-demanding jobs, and calling their work areas "porch monkey areas" and "the slave ship," among other things. Oh, and "among other things" includes racist graffiti in the bathroom. I'd bet that if you put six beers into Elon Musk he'd have an attitude about it, but sadly I don't think anyone would take that bet. (As an aside, I didn't know he was from South Africa! I'd hate to think that has anything to do with the behavior described in this complaint.)

Finally, Gabriel Filippelli at The Conversation describes "How Poisonous Mercury Gets From Coal-Fired Power Plants Into the Fish You Eat," and I might not read this over dinner if I were you. When mercury first emerges from a coal plant and makes its way to the ground and to waterways, it's actually quite benign, until a bacterium transforms it into the toxic methylmercury. (Right-wingers will leave off that last phrase when justifying cutting mercury emissions standards.) Worms eat the mercury, and fish eat the worms, and you eat the fish, and at every step more mercury accumulates. Note well that the presumed cost of reducing mercury toxics from coal plants just about equals the estimated lost productivity from mercury poisoning, so vigorous mercury emissions regulations aren't just moral, they're practical. Strange how often doing the right thing is also doing the pragmatic thing.

Action: concerning free speech, monopolies, drug prices, pollution, and public lands.

Long story short: tell our government to protect the right to protest, reject a bankster mega-merger, allow generic manufacturing of an anti-prostate cancer drug, ban fracking wastewater use in the Delaware River, and ban oil and gas drilling in or near Chaco Canyon. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Color of Change helps you tell our Department of Justice to protect the right to protest in America. States have passed a slew of laws aiming to put protestors in jail -- or worse, allow people running over protestors to get off scot-free like they didn't just murder someone either because they inconvenienced them or because they want to create drama -- so now our federal government needs to act. And just guess how many of these laws states will ever use to convict the coming caravan of whiny truckers! Luckily for us, when those truckers do come, everyone will see them as the whiny, diaper-loaded brats they are. Protesting a mandate for a vaccine that'll save your life! I swear, these people drink rage juice or something. Anyway, states are going after peaceful folks protesting real injustices, and our DOJ needs to stop that.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Federal Reserve and our Comptroller of the Currency to reject a proposed U.S. Bank/Union Bank merger, which will put over $660 billion in assets under control of one corporation. Our government hasn't rejected a bank merger in 15 years, which has contributed to our loss of 70% of our banks in the last 40 years, which has in turn led to banksters monopolizing markets and raising prices for consumers because they can. You know, like how corporations are stoking the 7.5% inflation rate now? Not only that, but when all the banks are big, they don't go to rural and urban areas, leaving their residents at the mercy of payday lenders and pawn shops. And they deserve better, which is why we must stop this merger, and all that are like it.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to allow other drug corporations to manufacture a generic version of the noted anti-prostate cancer drug Xtandi. Xtandi pills cost $400 per pill (not per bottle or per thousand, per pill), and for some patients that'll amount to nearly $190,000 annually! Plus we pay five times more for it than folks in other countries, and if you were anticipating that the next phrase was going to be all about how taxpayers paid for 100% of the research that brought forth Xtandi, well, you're right! Generic manufacturers could sell Xtandi for as little as $3 a pill and still make a profit, and President Biden does have legal authority to force generic manufacturing of a drug, said authority coming from the Bayh/Dole Act of 1980. This should be a layup, really, so let's get to it.

Food and Water Action helps you tell our Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) to ban fracking waste and use of Delaware River water for fracking. Fracking does use a lot of water, after all, and we've got better uses for it than enriching gas corporations' executives. Yeah, I know, gas is cheaper than most other kinds of energy, but how can we say that's a good thing if we can't drink the water? Go solar and go wind and you might pay more in the short run, but you'll cause less pollution, plus you'll save money in the long run. Our DRBC did ban fracking in the Basin last year, but they did not ban big corporations from drawing water out of the Delaware to go frack somewhere else, and once that water's gone, you don't get it back. And our DRBC's own proposal to keep frackers from taking our water is weak, so let's try to make them do better.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to protect the Chaco Culture National Historical Park from gas and oil drilling. More specifically, you'll ask them to protect Chaco Canyon and the area 10 miles out from it in all directions from gas and oil drilling. We've supported a Chaco Canyon drilling ban because of pollution and because it's holy land to nearby Native populations, but we've got another reason to support it: as drilling and grazing creep ever closer to Chaco Canyon, more and more wildlife flee to the Chaco Canyon area as a refuge, and it's more than a bit cruel to drive wildlife out of an area you drill in and then go drill in the area they've sought refuge. Some would call that the circle of life, but it's not; it's just a circle of money, and money don't last.

Around the table: concerning crime hysteria, corporate climate BS, and other stupid crap.

If you find yourself inundated with TEH CRIMEZ IZ TEH RISINGZ!!!!! media reports, Amanda Mull's December reporting on "The Great Shoplifting Freak-Out" provides a much-needed corrective. Why should we suspect stories alleging that organized shoplifting is on the rise? Partly because we don't categorize them correctly (i.e., we lump in armed robberies with shoplifting when they're really two different things, and our media too often links the two), but mainly because if crime rates really are up for 2021, that's most likely because we had a pandemic-related lockdown in 2020, and thus didn't get out to commit many crimes. Think Republicans didn't talk about that at Legion of Doom Headquarters? Of course they did.

I guess we should not be surprised to learn corporations pledging to get to "net zero carbon emissions" are mostly BSing us, as a NewClimate Institue/Climate Market Watch study finds they'll only get their emissions down 40% by 2030 and less thereafter. It gets worse: corporations seem to think they'll be able to plant enough trees so they don't actually have to change their dirtyass habits. It gets even worse: corporations are cherry-picking their worst climate-emissions year (in the case of CVS, 2019) to make their carbon reductions look more impressive than they really are. It gets even worse than that, but this should serve as a reminder that promising to do better ain't the same as actually doing better. Right, Joe Rogan?

Jesus Mary and Joseph no, banning Donald Trump from Twitter is not a slippery slope toward Nazism, or else we could claim that every unpublished novel in America is a slippery slope toward Nazism. What is a "free voice"? A voice free to redress grievances with our government without being put in jail, and that's it. It's not "a voice free to bloviate endlessly on Twitter." And of course right-wingers don't want you to remember why Twitter finally banned him -- because he incited an attempted coup on January 6. And you also know David Perdue doesn't fear a "one-party state" in America -- he wants his party to be the one party.

Here's a provocative statement from Hamilton Nolan at In These Times: "Legalized Sports Betting is a Class War Against You." Money quote: "States like to think of the tax revenue they bring in from legal gambling as free money from heaven, but it amounts to a regressive tax on citizens, aimed most intensely at those who are so desperate for financial salvation that the vanishing hope provided by the idea of hitting the lottery is worth the certainty that you will, in fact, not hit the lottery." Remember that gambling websites aren't in it to lose money to you. And now pretty much anyone with a smartphone (i.e., pretty much everyone) can gamble easily, which won't result in addiction for everyone, but will result in a little less money every month, and more decisions about which bill you can get away with not paying this month. And that money is going to rich gambling corporations, which makes it what, class? An income redistribution upward scheme.

When I hear that Rand Paul hopes the Canada trucker protest comes down to every city in America, I feel compelled to note, again, that I don't oppose the tactic, but I think the people employing the tactic in this particular instance are a bunch of diaper-loaded brats. Maybe he should be careful about what he wishes for, though, because COVID cases are way down from that mid-January peak, most American states are about ready to get rid of mask mandates, and our Supreme Court struck down President Biden's vaccine mandate (except in health care). So if truckers start blocking highways in mid-March, most Americans are going to see them as a bunch of whiners, just like I do now.

Finally, this New Yorker interview with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has a clickbait title, and foregrounds her description of Congress as a "shit show" although there's really no better word or phrase for it, but the article reveals her as a thinker of considerable power and clarity, and if you don't like what she's saying, the first thing I'm going to ask you is to repeat something, anything, she's actually said. But talking about the difference between being "reactive" and "responsive" on important public issues? Confessing that she wonders whether she's "poking the bear" too much? Saying depression is a natural response to your politicians constantly failing you? These are all examples of deep thinking, unlike, you know, what you get from Kyrsten Sinema, who obviously thinks of herself as a galaxy brain.

Action: concerning corruption, taxes, health care, racism, pollution, and our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to ban themselves from stock trading, stop letting rich families evade Estate and gift taxes, lower drug prescription prices, end qualified immunity for police officers, fight plastic pollution, and save our Postal Service. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to, well, ban themselves from trading or owning individual stocks. They'll act all offended about that -- how dare you tell me I can't separate the stocks I own from the decisions I make concerning the businesses in which I own stock! Yeah, they really say stuff like that. Well, guess what? It's our job, as citizens, not to trust our Reps and Senators to do the right thing; it's our job to make them do the right thing. Owning stock in a corporation over which you may have to perform oversight duties is an invitation to corruption. And sooner or later, the 13-dimensional chess they all play in their heads will demand they accept such invitations. Unless we stop them, of course.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop America's richest families from dodging Estate and gift taxes. Which they may do over a period of decades, even centuries! All the while they get their Congressdolts to write laws which help them evade taxes, and thus deprive the rest of us of "nice things" like paid family leave, an expanded Child Tax Credit, bridges that don't collapse, and water pipes that don't poison us. Fewer of our Congressfolk want to repeal our Estate Tax than they did two decades ago, but too many still want to cut it, to "save family farms" even though no family farms have ever gone under because of our Estate Tax. So they ain't changed enough, and they won't, unless we make them.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Senators to lower prescription drug prices. We pay many times more money for prescription drugs than any other similarly-wealthy country on Earth, to the point where good Americans have to ration their insulin (and thus risk death!) just so they can make ends meet, and the only reason for any of that is big pharma greed! How much is enough for these people? And how much is enough for tools like Kyrsten Sinema, Kathleen Rice, Scott Peters, and Bob Menendez? At least eight out of every 10 Americans want Medicare to be able to negotiate its own drug prices, but the aforementioned four said no, and because Democratic margins are narrow, we can't have what we need to survive and thrive in America. So we keep telling them, until they fear being left behind, because that's all that'll get folks like that to do the right thing.

Black Lives Matter helps you tell your Congressfolk to end "qualified immunity" for police officers. "Qualified immunity" is the doctrine our Supreme Court developed in the late 1960s, which basically shields civil servants from lawsuits for their wrongdoing. I guess the notion was that our government did it, not them, but every government has a few bad apples, and anyway we have tools to punish governments, like, you know, turning them out of office. But what of those individual civil servants who do the inexcusable? Like murder Black folks for the heinous crime of brandishing a cellphone? If you respond to stories like that by saying I SUPPORTZ OUR POLICEZ!!!! like a damn robot, please do two things: 1) slap yourself, and 2) consider whether you might be a slave to authority. Being a slave to authority is not a good look for a can-do American.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2238/S. 984, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act. This bill would phase out a lot of single-use plastics, since they all just wind up in landfills and in our air and water anyway (remember that part), plus the bill would also force plastic manufacturing corporations to clean up the mess they've helped make, by collecting and recycling plastic products. Now, about "remembering that part": this ain't just about keeping plastic out of our landfills, or about keeping it out of our oceans where it's strangling all the life. It's also about keeping it out of our bodies, since scientists tell us we now ingest about a credit card's worth of plastic every week. Where it only does us harm! So let's fix that.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. Our House passed this bill by a wide, actually-bipartisan margin last week; now it's our Senate's term, and this is not only a good bill, it's a good bill that'll actually do a lot of good, by removing the onerous mandate Congress placed on our Postal Service (to prepay decades of retiree benefits in advance, a mandate required of no other public or private entity) back in 2006. It's possible that Republican Senators, who never pass up an opportunity to do evil, will try to attach numerous poison pill amendments to a bill the American people want and should pass. Go ahead and tell them they'd better not do that, because Jesus Mary and Joseph we're not hostages, we're free people.

Action: concerning racism, voting rights, Medicare, defense spending, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell state legislatures to stop trying to erase Black history education, tell states to stop taking voting rights from felons, tell President Biden to end a Trump-era Medicare-privatization scheme, tell Google to stop working with our Pentagon on AI technology, and tell President Biden to cancel student loan debt and release the memo his office prepared on the matter. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell state legislatures to stop trying to "disappear" Black history from their schools' curricula, while People for the American Way helps you tell state legislatures to stop erasing the history of all historically-oppressed Americans. Go ahead and sign both! Now, I don't oppose a school board's right to determine curriculum for its students. Of course they have the right to do that! And we have the right to tell them they're doing it wrong if they're doing it wrong! And we also have the right to tell folks who think patriotism equals denying the evil we've done that patriotism acknowledges that evil, and then works to fight and defeat that evil. Hey, nobody said civilization was easy.

Common Cause helps you tell state legislators to stop taking voting rights away from felons merely because of their past felonies. Rights ain't rights if some folks don't have them! And taking voting rights away from felons, in a society that systematically targets Black and Brown folks, is racist, period, end of. Lately we've seen good folks go back to prison because they didn't know their past conviction made voting illegal for them, and the reason they didn't know? Because some states would rather just put you in jail than tell you you're doing something that could land you in jail! I mean, it sure looks that way. Generally we should err on the side of more people voting rather than fewer. And people who think otherwise know they'd lose a fair fight.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to end the pilot program that delivers Medicare recipients into private health insurance plans without their knowledge or consent. Yes, the Trump Administration really started such a thing, and while it often seems like they were just a bunch of Medicare-haters, they also saw an opportunity to please the banksters who back the Direct Care Entities (or DCEs) that take over part of a senior's medical care. Run that name through your tongue again. Direct care entities -- why take three words to say "carer"? And why use the word "entity," like it's some suddenly-sentient satellite from Star Trek? Because if they told you the truth about what they were doing, you wouldn't go along. And neither should the Biden Administration.

MoveOn helps you tell Google to stop entering into AI tech contracts with our Pentagon. Because they're going to use AI to kill people, that's why, and though our defense mavens will no doubt tell you that using AI will save soldiers' lives, anyone who read Philip K. Dick's "Second Variety" knows what's really going to happen: AI will take over and start killing anyone it likes, for its own damn reasons. And maybe Google shouldn't be putting its billions behind such madness; at least, that's what a large number of Google's employees seem to think. Besides which, I think the best way to save soldiers' lives is not to fight stupid wars. Have we fought any non-stupid wars lately? No, we have not. And if we fight in Iran and the Ukraine as some defense contractors want, that won't change.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to a) release the memo his office prepared detailing his power under the law to cancel student loan debt, and b) cancel the damn student loan debt. It would give breathing room to millions of good Americans who we told go to college so you can get a good job -- millions of Americans who learned they weren't going to realize that promise! President Biden campaigned on forgiving $10,000 per borrower, which ain't a whole lot, but it's something; now he's claiming he can't do that, and sitting on the document that may well say he can do more than that. Joe Biden can be short of compassion at times (as he can be with marijuana law, as well); let's see if we can help him be his best self here.

Around the table: covering inflation, censorship, right-wingers, vaccines, and bipartisanship.

Apparently Democratic politicians are having a difficult time messaging inflation hikes -- they're "kind of all over the place" when describing the causes of inflation, quite possibly because inflation has several causes, while Republicans just say "Big Gummint spending" like the demonic robots they are. But I am in a position to help! Here's what Democrats should be saying, particularly if they're at all emotionally-invested in our FTC's anti-monopoly efforts: "corporations are causing most of the inflation, by jacking up prices just because they can." You're welcome, Democrats.

Ari Paul at FAIR reminds us that "Defenses of (Joe) Rogan Aren’t About Free Speech; They’re Right-Wing Solidarity," as we would know from right-wingers' ignorance/indifference about Starbucks baristas who get fired for organizing, or the Catholic school teacher fired for twittering about her school memorializing two dead police officers. And no one's actually censoring Mr. Rogan! Censorship is something the state does; it's not something Neil Young does, and no, it's not something activists do, either. And if at-will workers can be fired for pretty much any reason, might that be a reason to support labor unions? I mean, we can't all insulate ourselves from harm by becoming obnoxious podcasters.

I applaud Amanda Marcotte at Salon for saying we ignore/belittle Marjorie Taylor Greene's drama at our own peril, and not just because I think the real Ronald Reagan was more like Phil Hartman's famously energetic and detail-oriented ass-kicker who only acted like a doddering old man for photo shoots. But I think Ms. Greene intended a joke by swapping out "Gestapo" with "gazpacho" (it's harder to say, after all); she wanted you to imagine "Nancy Pelosi's secret police" as such Birkenstock-wearing liberals they must eat gazpacho soup all the time, and switching to "goulash" for the follow-up was just icing on the cake. It's not a transcendent joke -- gazpacho may be "exotic" in America, but folks from all walks of life eat it at its birthplace on the Iberian peninsula. But it's not devoid of actual cleverness, either. Such a thing might give me hope for Ms. Greene's soul, except that I'm too old for that.

Sarah Lazare at In These Times discusses Moderna's refusal to share vaccine info with South African scientists, who have had to reverse-engineer the Moderna COVID vaccine on their own. An impressive achievement, surely, but they shouldn't have had to do it -- not just because it's cruel to let people die of a disease they don't have to die of, and not just because the longer most of the world's people don't have a vaccine the longer we're going to have to deal with COVID, but because our government should have stepped in and told Moderna you couldn't have made that vaccine without our help, so we're going to make you give South Africa the info they need. But that would be too much like, you know, not worshiping mammon. (Also, Ms. Lazare reminds us that it's racist to assume that Those Countries don't have the "resources" to make COVID vaccines. Every country has doctors, engineers, and poets.)

Finally, from the "Whatever Gets You Through the Night" file: Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), quite possibly the most useless of all the useless moderates who plague our political scene today, says of recent relatively bipartisan legislation moving through Congress: "(w)hat the Democratic leaders seem to have finally realized is that in a 50-50 Senate, the only way you’re going to be able to produce any accomplishments that matter to the American people is to work across the aisle." Set aside, for a moment, that the things Democrats tried to pass without Republican help (paid family leave, Medicare drug price negotiation, higher taxes on the rich) actually remain quite popular with Americans, who would consider any of them "accomplishments that matter." Fact is, we may be seeing this burst of non-awful bipartisan legislation only because Republicans have realized that 14 years of absolute obstruction is played out, and it'd help to actually pass some bills for which they could actually take credit. The trouble with that stratagem? Democrats can more easily take credit for a functioning government if they control it. If they have the will, of course.

Action: concerning the minimum wage, dictator lobbyists, work scheduling, foreign campaign donations, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise the minimum wage, shun dictator lobbyists, and pass the Schedules That Work Act, the Get Foreign Money Out of U.S. Elections Act, and the Postal Service Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the minimum wage. What was the federal minimum wage in 2009? $7.25 an hour. What is it in 2022? $7.25 an hour. How much has inflation gone up since 2009? 31%. And if the minimum wage had gone up 31% since 2009, it'd be $9.50/hour. Of course, if the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation since 1969, when it was $2/hour, it'd now be $15.32/hour, making the Fight for 15 movement about 32 cents an hour behind! I won't hold that against them, because they've done great work raising state and city minimum wages all over America. But all of America deserves a higher minimum wage; our politicians don't really lead on such things, but we can make them follow. Really, our leadership is all that's ever got them to act.

MoveOn helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop meeting with dictator lobbyists. Because people who work for dictators deserve shame and shunning, if anyone does! Yet some foreign dictators hire ex-Congressfolk and their ex-staffers as lobbyists in D.C.; their numbers include, incredibly, former Rep. Ed Royce and Nancy Pelosi's ex-Chief of Staff, who both shill for Egypt, and former Senator Norm Coleman and former Rep. Buck Mckeon, who both shill for Saudi Arabia. You can see why having a former member of Congress might benefit these nations, but you'd have a harder time seeing how that benefits us. If anything, these folks already get too much say in how America works, or doesn't work. The good news? Shining any amount of light on these relationships makes them wither like vampires in noonlight. So let's get to shining.

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6670, the Schedules That Work Act. If you work retail, or restaurants, or other service jobs, you work an absurd schedule that can hardly even be said to fulfill the needs of your employer, and good luck making a doctor's appointment or picking up the kids from school. The Schedules That Work Act would fix that, by requiring 11 hours between shifts for all workers and notice of schedules two weeks in advance (and compensation for workers whose schedules get changed or cancelled with less than two weeks' notice). The bill would also prevent retaliation against employees who request changes to meet obligations. I can already hear all the bad managers in the world saying HOW CAN I DO MY JOB?! But the good managers would welcome the certainty the bill promises.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6283, the Get Foreign Money Out of U.S. Elections Act. Among the so, so many other harms it's done, our Supreme Court's notorious Citizens United v. FEC ruling -- which cited the doctrine of corporate "personhood" to assert a "right" for corporations to flood campaigns with more funding than ever before -- actually gave foreign citizens a way to influence campaigns with contributions, by essentially using American corporations to launder those contributions. Campaign donations from foreign citizens is otherwise illegal, so this is a big deal, and we need H.R. 6283 to close that loophole. It's bad enough that rich Americans can drown out the rest of us; we don't the whole world drowning us out, either.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. I know, we just did this on Tuesday! But on that very afternoon, our House passed H.R. 3076 by an astounding 342-92 vote, which you will recognize as an actually bipartisan vote, since it included 120 Republican "yea" votes, which is well over half the caucus. And the Senate version, S. 1720, counts 14 of its 28 co-sponsors as Republicans. Turns out hamstringing our Postal Service into prepaying almost a hundred years of retiree benefits in advance so that it has financial problems only a few years later is quite unpopular! And many Republicans appear to have heard that. Still, it certainly wouldn't hurt to remind them that you're watching them.

Around the table: the Starbucks empire strikes back, and other developments.

Here's something I hadn't considered before: David Swanson, in discussing a recent ethics book written for popular consumption, says ethicists constantly ask the wrong questions -- "How should I drive? How should I shop? How should I tell my friend his hat is ugly? Who the fuck cares? Are you or are you not helping to build effective movements to decarbonize, demilitarize, and deplutocratize?" And my memory of classical philosophy is that no, these questions rarely-if-ever come up, for a lot of reasons you can imagine. Even questions like "should I eat this veggie burger if it comes from across the country and therefore contributes to climate change?" only deal with the very, very smallest of choices we make -- it seems ethicists never consider "should I pressure my Congressdolt to stop blocking climate change legislation?" And that's much closer to the beginning of activism than its end.

Amazon's had a rough news week, and deservedly so: an ITEP report found that Amazon dodged over $5 billion in taxes just last year, while a Good Jobs First/UNI Global Union report finds that Amazon has extracted another $4.7 billion in corporate welfare globally over the last decade -- I know they call them "subsidies" or "tax breaks" or even "tax incentives," but corporate welfare is the best term for them, and maybe only because "money they stole from our future" is a little unwieldy. It gets better: Amazon execs worry that they go through warehouse employees so quickly they'll eventually run out of people to hire. I was going to say it's like they're a 17th century sugar plantation, but those workers generally lasted a couple of years, where Amazon workers all too frequently last only a few weeks, so I guess Amazon is more like the Omicron variant than a sugar plantation.

Those completely apolitical Supreme Court Justices of ours just voted, by a 5-4 margin, to let an Alabama racial gerrymander stand until they can hear the appeal, which will almost certainly be long after the 2022 election. Sad that it's left to Chief Justice Roberts, who's done as much to injure voting rights as anyone, to reason for the minority that the three-judge panel from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama had struck down the gerrymander according to already-existing law "with no apparent errors for our correction." Justice Kavanaugh, of course, said it was too "(l)ate" to indulge in "judicial tinkering." "Late? It's February! Primaries aren't until May! They can redraw the maps in a week! And when Republicans challenge the New York gerrymander, it'll suddenly be a matter of extreme urgency for Justice Kavanaugh no matter where on the calendar it is by then.

Democratic Senate candidate Gary Chambers burns a Confederate flag in a new political ad, not long after smoking a doob in a previous ad. OK, those are pat descriptions of two ads you really, really need to see (and which you can see, at the link above); after that, check out his January Senate announcement video -- yes, I easily predicted which phrase got turned on its head by the end, but I was no less thrilled. That's about four minutes of video total, after which you might well start to hope this Baton Rouge-based community organizer crushes John Kennedy against all odds in 2022. Unfortunately, he'll first have to get past the former soldier/moderate the party no doubt prefers in the primary.

You may have noticed that right-wingers use the word "woke" a lot more than liberals do; hence it should be no surprise that someone has made a list of all the things Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says are "woke," a list so expansive that "at this rate, Ron DeSantis will have trouble defeating wokeness. To him, it seems to be nearly everything." This should be a campaign ad against him! Have him saying the word "woke" over and over and over again, list all the things he says are "woke" (your education, your job, your computer, maybe even your roads) and close with a scene of Mr. DeSantis getting cornered by ghosts chanting the word "woke" until he loses his mind! Nah, Democrats will never run that; after all, it might work, and then they'll have to do something with their mandate.

Finally, Starbucks fires seven workers who were trying to organize a union at a Memphis cafe, ostensibly for "violating several safety and security policies," including at least one policy that may not exist. I guess the only surprise is that this didn't happen sooner; how strange that calling in workers on their day off to propagandize them about unions didn't work! My days off are sacred, and I bet most folks feel the same way. Reminds me of the two Madison, WI Whole Foods workers fired in 2002 for "improper disposal of a latte," who just so happened to be trying to organize a union there! (This story has a happy ending: that store did ultimately unionize. I hope this one has a happy ending, too.)

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, Amazon rainforest oil, heavy metals in foods, airline refunds, and fairer pay for flight attendants.

Long story short: tell Israel to end its apartheid against Palestine, tell California to stop importing oil from the Amazon rainforest, tell our FDA to vigorously limit heavy metals in foods, tell our DOT to force airlines to give refunds for cancelled flights, and tell airline corporations to pay flight attendants fairly for all the work they do. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to end his nation's apartheid against Palestine. I hate to use that word, but for close to 50 years the word has had a meaning in international law; per the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, apartheid refers to certain crimes "committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime." That's the Israel/Palestine relationship in a nutshell, and if you're only thinking of the bad things Palestinians do, recall that Israel holds all the power in this relationship. You have heard, perhaps, that Mr. Bennett would be even less sympathetic to this call than his predecessor. Duty calls nonetheless.

Stand.Earth helps you tell California to stop getting oil imports from the Amazon. Now, you can think of a very good reason to stop buying Amazon oil right off the top of your head -- because the Amazon rain forest is the best carbon emissions sink we have on Earth, and what do you think oil drilling will do to all of that? But if you're a regular reader of this blog, you know there's another damn good reason to boycott Amazon oil: because that irredeemable asshole President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil wants to completely destroy the Amazon (and the numerous indigenous folks who live there) by turning it into money he and his cronies will never live long enough to spend. You certainly wouldn't want to enable him! So save the planet, certainly, but also poke Mr. Bolsonaro in the eye. He deserves no better.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to set vigorous limits on heavy metals in food. Consumer Reports has lately found high levels of heavy metals such as lead and arsenic in almost one-third of popular herbs and spices, and if you're like me, you put that stuff in your food without even thinking about it! And this is like a lot of things: do it once and you'll probably get away with it, but do it many times and you'll have serious health issues. And so will your children -- they're even worse at just "getting the lead out" of their bodies than we adults are. Our FDA doesn't actually plan to consider this question until 2024. I don't need to tell you what else might happen in 2024 that ensures it never gets done. So let's prod them into doing the right thing now.

US PIRG helps you tell our Department of Transportation (or DOT) to force big airline corporations to give cash refunds for cancelled trips. Airlines have cancelled at least 20,000 flights just since Christmas Eve -- it wasn't that long ago! -- and I don't care whether that was because all of their workers had the omicron variant or not; if you can't provide a service you promised to make, you need to make it right, particularly when you're sitting on a mountain of cash with which you can make it right. It's a shame we even need to tell our Department of Transportation to do this! Big airline corporations should care enough about you to do it on their own! Of course, they're just another sector of our economy that thinks it's so indispensable it can do what it wants. But they ain't bigger than us.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Change.org helps you tell big airline corporations to pay flight attendants for the time they spend helping folks board the plane. It wasn't that long ago I was on a plane, so I remember the flight attendants being right there when I boarded, and to hear they make as little as $2 an hour for that even though they're supposed to be there was more than a little sickening. People think flight attendants don't do anything if they're not handing out peanuts and booze, but a lot of work goes on that either folks don't see or folks take for granted. I don't even take saying hello to me as I board a plane for granted; I don't know if I could greet a hundred people in a row nicely. If we are in that era where service is the main things folks have to sell, then folks ought to at least be well-paid for it.

Around the table: what happens when private equity becomes your landlord, and other sad tales.

From Kassandra Frederique at TruthOut we learn that "Drug Decriminalization is Working in Oregon," and "Other States Should Follow." We should make clear that Oregon has decriminalized possession, not dealing, and in any case folks caught with small amounts of drugs still get fined ($100, and not everyone can pay that as the need arises!), just not arrested. Also, Oregon hasn't properly distributed allotted funding for drug treatment and housing. Folks may even quarrel with Oregon documenting addiction help to 16,000 out of over 4.2 million total residents, but we've been doing it the other way for 50 years to no positive effect, and if you're one of (for example) the 111 overdoses reversed at Max's Mission this past year, I wouldn't blame you for looking upon Oregon's decriminalization efforts more positively.

Heather Vogell at ProPublica describes what happens "When Private Equity Becomes Your Landlord," and I'll bet you can predict a lot of it: rents go way up, no one collects your trash, and no one fixes your hot water when it breaks, all because banksters don't know how to do a damn thing but suck money out of a property like the vampires they are. And this is why, if we must have landlords at all, we prefer landlords who live nearby (maybe on the top or bottom floor) and only have the one property to manage, because you can get them face-to-face more easily (and thus shame them more easily, if that becomes necessary) than some hedge fund bully who can't even hang curtains. That's the bad news. The worse news: our government, via our Federal Housing Finance Agency, enables this nefarious process.

When confronted with a list of eight things that would have to go right for Democrats to keep both houses of Congress in the 2022 midterms -- a list that includes COVID containment, inflation going down by summer, steady GDP and stock market growth, supply chain issues worked out, no global crisis, President Biden's approvals getting into the high 40s by summer, Republicans running Springer-cam candidates, and Republicans still talking about the "stolen" 2020 election -- I find myself saying things don't look so bad! You can't predict global crises, necessarily (that's item five), but items one and three will happen, items four, seven, and eight will likely happen, and item six will happen if the other five things happen. The only other thing I worry about is inflation (item two), and that's because I don't see monopolies ending the price-gouging that's their best shot at getting Republicans back into power in Congress. Unless we all get in our cars and block off streets and honk our horns all day about it! I am no more than half-joking about that.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) goes on Face the Nation, and faced with a mild question -- do you think Donald Trump is wrong to suggest the Vice President has the power to overturn elections? -- he responds like a damn broken robot, giving the exact same canned answer twice without answering the question. And thus Mike Pence outclasses him, which I can't imagine was Mr. Rubio's aim. This saying-the-same-thing-without-answering-the-question thing is what prompted Chris Christie to make fun of him in that 2015 Presidential debate. Val Demings had better wipe the floor with this guy in 2022.

When I hear that Joe "the Penguin" Manchin now says his "biggest opposition" to the Build Back Better Act was that it didn't go through "the process" of Senate committees, all I can do is shake my head. Set aside, for a moment, that the "process" went through him because it wasn't going to pass without his blessing; set aside that he demanded that all the bits Republicans could conceivably support get broken off into a separate bill; set aside, even, that he withdrew his own support for his own final counter-proposal. "All bills for raising revenue," which the Build Back Better Act certainly was, "shall originate in the House of Representatives," per Article I, Section 7 of our Constitution, and the bill most certainly did go through various House Committees, if "process" was what he was ever really worried about. Actually, he's only worried about one thing: how much drama he can create and how much damage it'll cause. "With great power comes great responsibility" is clearly a phrase he's never taken to heart.

Finally, some good news: our IRS has dropped its plan to use the ID.me facial recognition system, after much protest, possibly including yours. Go get yourself a Buffalo chicken cheese steak, or whatever reward you like, and consider that the only response facial-recognition proponents have in this article (and this is the New York Times, so every corporate hack gets more than enough say!) is "you'll lose your identity if you don't do what we want." Before even considering that facial recognition also could well misidentify you, particularly if you're Black, note well that the only argument they have in its favor is fear. Fear's a good reason to avoid assassin bugs, but it's not a good reason to give up what remains of your privacy.

Action: concerning tax evasion, pollution, rent control, pregnant workers, and forced arbitration.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to give our IRS the resources it needs to catch rich tax cheats, permanently protect the Boundary Waters from pollution, and pass national rent control legislation, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to fully fund our Internal Revenue Service (or IRS) so it can catch wealthy tax cheats. You've heard that we lose $1 trillion every year in unpaid taxes, and you've also heard that our IRS goes after low-level tax cheats simply because they don't have the money to fight rich tax cheats and their well-paid lawyers. And that's why we should fund our IRS properly! It won't break the bank and it'll bring back far more money than it'd cost. If certain people would stop with the BS about how they'll come for the little guy if they come for the big guy, that'd be nice, too. I mean, again, our IRS can't afford to do anything but go after the little guy. So less drama, more reality, as usual.

President Biden cancelled two mining leases that would have polluted the famous Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota, which is terrific, but it doesn't offer any guarantees about the future, so now the Wilderness Society helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect the Boundary Waters from mining for good. Among the many other reasons to protect the Boundary Waters -- like, that lots of wildlife lives there, and that it's a big, big tourist draw, which also means it supports lots of jobs and brings in lots of money -- the Boundary Waters is also sacred to several Native American nations. We still care about religious freedom, right? Or do we only care about religious freedom for bigots? You could forgive me for thinking that's all we care about. But I'd prefer to live in a better America than that.

Hot on the heels of a Senate banking committee hearing about the matter, the Center for Popular Democracy helps you tell your Senators to support various reforms that would curb corporate control of housing. These would include more investment in public housing and one of my personal favorites, national rent control. Only a few states and municipalities cap the rents landlords can charge, and most states actually prevent any of their municipalities from instituting any kind of rent control, but as recent events have shown us, we can't count on "market forces" to ensure everyone has a place to live any more than we can count on "market forces" to keep us healthy and well-educated. To those who would assert that "all price controls are bad," you need only retort "so paying less money is bad?" I think everyone can get behind that argument!

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1065/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would require employers to make reasonable accommodations to pregnant workers at the workplace, including giving them less strenuous work and more bathroom breaks while they're pregnant, and I said the word "reasonable" with the italics hammer in a perhaps-vain attempt to forestall right-wing arguments like "they'll let pregnant workers run the place!" The bill would also prevent employers from firing workers just for being pregnant, and would also prevent them from refusing to consider a pregnant job applicant just because she's pregnant. It feels like we've been fighting for this bill forever; sometimes it takes this long, and we have to just keep fighting. I'd prefer not to wait until men can get pregnant before it passes, though.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4445, the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act. So many employment contracts mandate forced arbitration for all employee grievances, but forced arbitration more often than not results in your boss winning, and you losing -- and in some cases, you paying for the forced arbitration! You'd have a better chance of winning in a court of law, and H.R. 4445 would at least prevent corporations from forcing you into arbitration over sexual abuse or harassment charges. Yes, I'd prefer to end forced arbitration for all disputes, but bosses seem to go even further out of their way to ignore sexual assault/harassment charges, and passing H.R. 4445 would get our foot in the door toward that end. And that's worth doing.

Around the table: the Ukraine *still* could be Russia's Iraq! And other truths.

Patrick Cockburn instructs us again that "Putin is Playing a Strong Hand on Ukraine" "as Long as He Doesn't Invade." British and American officials are creating a lot of drama here, but the former Ukrainian defense minister tells us that the 127,000 soldiers along the Ukraine's borders "is not enough for a full-scale offensive." That sounds right, once you consider that the area of the Ukraine is over 600,000 square miles, whereas the area of Iraq is a little over 437,000 square miles, and you recall Gen. Shinseki telling us in February of 2003 that 150,000 troops in Iraq would be nowhere near enough to occupy that nation -- a matter about which he was entirely correct! Further reports from both the Ukraine and France should obliterate British and American drama about the matter once and for all, though I know they won't.

Alex Pareene may not be entirely serious in titling his latest missive "Abolish States," but he does point out a lot of problems with contemporary "states' rights" conservatism If we can even call it conservatism! "States' rights" was always "a fig leaf for Jim Crow and 'massive resistance,'" true, but states also act like the federal government they profess to hate when they restrict the will of local governments. Mr. Pareene gives many examples of this nefarious phenomenon, and you can no doubt think of more; Pennsylvania residents need only remember the state legislature's efforts to stop municipalities from banning fracking during the Tom Corbett era. Why, if I had a dollar for every time I said "now there's conservatism for you!" back then I might be able to quit my day job. Professing a dedication to "federalism," as right-wingers do, doesn't wipe such hypocrisy away, of course; you either believe the smallest body of government should make the most decisions, or you don't. (I do happen to believe that! I also believe it can't happen without a strong federal government restraining wealthy/corporate power.)

When I hear that some QAnon followers can be brought back to the fold of civilization by Wordle, I find it fairly easy to resist glib statements like "you're just replacing one addiction with another," and not just because an addiction to Wordle is far better for you than an addiction to QAnon. I will admit that I've largely failed to apply the great truism of drug addiction treatment -- i.e., that you have to fill a patient's life with nurturing human connections so they don't turn back to drugs -- to folks addicted to various forms of right-wing rage. I still think we need to shame and shun such people, and I also think one person can't single-handedly re-fill someone's life with healthier obsessions, but clearly I need to develop more supple strategies.

I've long wondered why Donald Trump doesn't grab onto Ohio Republican Senate candidate Josh Mandel with both hands, and apparently I'm not the only one. I'd assumed that Mr. Mandel was perhaps too obsequious in his Trump-worship and that it actually put the big man off, but apparently Mr. Trump thinks Mr. Mandel is "a charisma-free weirdo and dork" (not exactly an absurd judgment) and has also talked a lot about Mr. Mandel's sex life (a matter about which Mr. Trump should show more restraint). I'm a little puzzled that Mr. Trump hasn't also called Mr. Mandel a loser -- after all, he ran for Senate in 2012 and lost by six points despite tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions buttressing his run -- but then perhaps he's hedging his bets in case Mr. Mandel emerges as the winner, at which point he'll pretend nothing described in this paragraph happened.

Anthony DiMaggio, writing at Salon, says that his research indicates that Dominion Voting Systems has a "strong case" for defamation against the Fox News Channel. Long story short: Fox News presented evidence-free stories about alleged voter fraud concerning Dominion, refusing to air Dominion's more evidence-based rebuttals, and Fox News viewers believe that voter fraud is rampant to a much larger degree than consumers of any other media outlet, which suggests that Fox's anti-Dominion reporting actually did defame the corporation. That's almost all one would need -- one would still have to prove "actual malice," but even that isn't necessarily about proving intent, but more about proving recklessness in publishing false information. Any Fox News workers write emails protesting that these reports weren't good enough to air? Any Fox News bosses respond that they didn't give a rat's hind quarter? That's the kind of evidence Dominion could win on. (Yes, I know corporate "personhood" is an issue here, but I'm going to go ahead and file that under "goose/gander.")

Finally, GM workers in Mexico vote overwhelmingly for an independent union to bargain collectively on their behalf. An "independent" union, you say? Apparently employer-friendly unions dominate the Mexican labor movement, and you could easily imagine how they might not be working in your best interest, I would think. A 2019 labor reform law requires all union workers to vote on their existing contracts by next May, which provides an opening for workers to get real representation at work; at present, only two dozen union shops have thrown out their union, but the GM plant at Silao is the largest shop to do so to date. I wish them the best of luck -- and I wish all Mexican workers the best of luck in overcoming all their obstacles to justice, so that one day American corporations stop looking to Mexico as a way of depriving Americans of their well-paying jobs.

Action: concerning Congressional corruption, saving our Post Office, climate change, algorithms, and Supreme Court ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, the Postal Service Reform Act, the Future Generations Protection Act, the Algorithmic Accountability Act, and the Supreme Court Ethics Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act. This bill would prevent Congressfolk from trading almost any stock while in office, which makes sense -- even if your Congressfolk have no oversight power over the financial sector, they probably have oversight power over another economic sector, and folks trade stocks in pretty much any sector. And n.b. Sen. Burr's massive health care stock sell-off not long after he received an early 2020 briefing revealing how bad the COVID pandemic would be -- at the same time he told his constituents not to worry too much about it! And we don't just note hypocrisy here; how many of his constituents stood pat on their portfolios because of his public advice, while he made over $1 million on more inside info?

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076, the Postal Service Reform Act. The "big," "bold" "entrepreneur" Donald Trump installed as Postmaster General thinks the solution to our Postal Service's troubles is, get this, higher prices and worse service! That'll thrill you to death if you're relying on the mail for your insulin! Of course, his true aim is to privatize our Postal Service, so that prices can be even higher and services can be even worse, but he and his CEO buddies can rake in the dough! The Postal Service Reform Act can help stop this, by removing the yoke Congress placed on its back in 2006, the one that requires our Postal Service to prefund retiree benefits almost a century in advance. Our Postal Service is ours, and we gotta take it back.

Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6168, the Future Generations Protection Act. I'm sure a lot of right-wingers would read H.R. 6168 and declare it "radical," but then they call any necessary act "radical," as part of their program of preventing you from doing anything to make our world better, and preventing new electric plants from emitting greenhouse gases, banning fracking on land and offshore, and banning exports of most domestically-produced oil or gas are all pretty good ideas. Take fracking, for example: is clean water or cheap energy more important? The answer's obvious, but this is America, so we don't even need to pick one or the other if we move to solar and wind. The "problem," I guess, is that gas makes executives richer, but that's a bad reason to make big decisions.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6580, the Algorithmic Accountability Act. This bill would direct our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to regulate "automated decision systems" and the like that big corporations use so they can hire fewer workers and so leaders can evade accountability for their decisions. Oh, sorry, said the quiet part out loud again! Seriously, the bill would require our FTC to oversee a wide range of algorithm-made or algorithm-assisted decisions, with hiring, education, energy bills, health care, and financial services being just a few of them. And yes this is within our FTC's purview! Denying someone a loan or rejecting a job application because computer said no are absolutely matters of trade! They're also matters of morality, of course -- at least, to civilized people.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4766/S. 2512, the Supreme Court Ethics Act, which would impose an ethical code of conduct on our nine Supreme Court Justices, currently the only federal judges who are not covered by such a code. We must not have thought we needed it in the past! After all, these were the best of the best! But we don't think that anymore, more than half having been appointed by men obviously unfit to be President. We also don't think that because Justices Thomas and Barrett have failed to recuse themselves from obvious conflicts-of-interest over the past year. And boy, do Supreme Court Justices blow a gasket when you point out things like this to them! They forget that even though they get appointed by our President to lifetime jobs, they still serve the American people.

Around the table: "legitimate political discourse."

Republicans not only censure Reps. Cheney (R-WY) and Kitzinger (R-IL) for not marching in jackboot lockstep with the party's orthodoxy in re January 6, but go so far as to slam them for participating in the House January 6 Committee and thus, in their words, participating in the "persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse," which of course aims to gaslight you into thinking that an attempted coup is jes' folks talking in the public square. They tried to walk it back, of course, but they said what they really think about "ordinary folks" protesting -- as long as they're not protesting war or police brutality or climate change, of course. But trying to impale a cop with a Blue Lives Matter flag? Running a Confederate flag through the Capitol? Looking for AOC and Nancy Pelosi so you can kill them? Too legit to quit, apparently.

Matt Stoller's piece from late last week, "Mergers Ruin Everything," is one of his best. Not only does it go deep into why the AT&T/Time-Warner merger was bad for America -- roll call! Lost jobs! Broken promises! Higher prices! Content behind paywalls! Lost TV shows like Adam Ruins Everything! -- he makes a long, long list of economic sectors where mergers have made everything bad, including lab testing (where the duopoly "slow-walked the roll-out of more COVID testing" like that's something we should just put up with), audio streaming (need I say more than "Spotify"?), and movies (where Disney's, ah, made a few moves these last few years). The lists of corporations monopolists have bought (CVS bought at least 10 big corporations over the last 30 years, many of which you'll remember) are also quite startling. I think only a fool would believe monopolies are good after reading this article. There aren't that many fools in America, but they do seem to get far too much say about everything.

Ho hum, America's richest families will likely evade over $8 trillion in taxes over the next two dozen years, if we keep Estate Tax rates where they are. The Estate Tax is yet another area in the American discourse where the American people are in one spot and all the politicians are in another one, possibly because the politicians know more rich people than the rest of us do. Unfortunately, good Americans are still susceptible to big corporate gaslighting about higher taxes on rich families, trotting out that stupid family-farms-will-die trope, even though no one has ever found a single family farm that died because of the Estate Tax, and also, you know, big ag corporations kill family farms far more efficiently than any tax hike on the rich ever could. I don't expect any part of this argument will move someone like Kyrsten Sinema, to whom appearing like a "bipartisan" "maverick" is far more important than doing the right thing.

Last week I celebrated tumbling viewership rates for cable "news" channels, and while I still don't want to get in the habit of celebrating other folks' misfortune, damn Facebook lost $230 million in value in one day last week, mostly because Facebook itself trumpeted a gaggle of bad news items, like lost profits and fewer users. I'll never view Facebook as an unqualified evil -- I've met a lot of good folks I never would have met if not for Facebook -- but it has done a lot of evil, and anyway social media should only be a place where you start getting to know people; ideally it should all be like Meetup used to be (and still is, I'm told, though hardly anyone uses it anymore), and should help people who wouldn't otherwise meet get to know each other in real time. Also, email's a far better social media tool than what we call social media today. (And hate to pile on, but we already did the metaverse; it was called Second Life. I never saw a need for it, and most folks seem to agree with me now that the novelty's worn off.)

Finally, I'd hoped to be challenged by this article entitled "Progressives Who Want Joe Rogan Off Spotify Should Be Careful What They Wish For," but, alas, no. Claims that Mr. Rogan's politics are "more complex" should remind you of a 25-years-and-counting scam run by a certain loofah-loving right-winger who only did things like criticize Ann Coulter and interview Seymour Hersh respectfully so he could claim "independence." Also, no liberals "trust" corporations to keep stupid people off the air, which is why a massive online protest against Mr. Rogan happened in the first place! And we don't have to imagine what would have happened to anti-war voices if Spotify had existed in 2002, because weblogs did exist then, and they have persisted well after mainstream media ignored them and right-wingers vilified them as "traitors." Even when the article concedes that censorship and editing aren't the same thing, it suggests that Spotify is less like an editorial board and more like the Post Office, as if radio stations were mere "mail carriers" and never had editorial duties. Finally, as for campaigns like these getting "turned on the left," that already happens -- yikes, we're in the middle of a book-burning craze! -- and if we want to win those battles, we have to organize better.

Action: concerning war, education, student loan debt, violence against protestors, payday lenders, and social media.

Long story short: tell your government to avoid another senseless war, this time in the Ukraine; tell Florida state legislators to reject the "Don't Say Gay" bill, tell President Biden to forgive student loan debt, tell our Justice Department to fight anti-protestor laws at the state level, tell our FDIC to fight payday lenders, and tell Facebook to release its human rights assessment in re hate speech in India. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. Do we want yet another stupid war, whose proponents will constantly accuse us of treason when we don't support it because it's stupid? No, we do not! Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk and your President to stop warmongering and fearmongering about the Ukraine/Russia crisis. Also, World Beyond War helps you find an anti-war protest near you. If Russia invades the Ukraine, they will quickly find themselves bogged down in the same sort of decades-long quagmire like we did in Afghanistan and Iraq, yet Western nations still go on about the "threat" to world peace if Russia invades. Don't worry that plenty of Trumpholes also oppose a war in the Ukraine; I welcome their help and their activism. Plenty of conservatives opposed the Iraq War, after all, not that you knew that from watching cable "news" at the time.

Change.org helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject HB 1557/SB 1834, the notorious "Don't Say Gay" bill, which would (among other things) prevent Florida school teachers from bringing up homosexuality in class "in the primary grades." The bill's sponsor says that's grades K-3, and goes on to lament that all third-graders need to learn about in school is reading and math, but guess what? All of my 3rd grade classmates back in the day knew what "gay" was, even if they didn't actually know what sex was. Right-wingers pretend kids aren't ready for that stuff, but they're not just wrong about that, they're insulting those kids. And it's never too early to learn to not alienate other people just because they're different from you. Next they'll say kids can't hack masculine and feminine articles in Spanish.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to release the memo detailing his authority to forgive student loan debt, and then forgive up to $50,000 of that debt per student. His office prepared that memo almost a year ago; I wonder why we haven't seen it yet! By which I mean, of course, that it tells us something he doesn't want us to hear. He promised to forgive $10,000 of student loan debt on the campaign trail, then told us he doesn't really have the authority to do that, but since our federal government holds most student loan debt, I really doubt that's the case. Why would we forgive student loan debt? Because we promised them a secure and lucrative life if they went to college, and they don't have it! We broke a promise to those students, so we ought to make that right.

Color of Change helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) to fight anti-protest laws at the state level. Because those laws violate our rights, that's why! Even if you're blocking a road, you don't deserve to get run over! That's something those anti-vax truckers are going to find out about next month when they come down to D.C., amirite? Of course, states aren't passing anti-protest laws because of right-wing protestors; they pass them because of Black Lives Matter protestors and anti-Trump protestors and climate change protestors, and we know this because of the timing. In Tennessee you can't camp out at the state Capitol or else you'll be convicted of a felony, which would then deprive you of your right to vote; in Georgia, folks can threaten protestors with violence with immunity. We have to stop all that stupid crap.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (or FDIC) to stop letting payday lenders use banks as a front for their usurious loans. Because it's illegal in addition to being immoral! The Trump Administration actually allowed payday lenders to evade state interest caps by essentially laundering their loans through banks from states without interest caps; even after courts overturned their rule, the Trump Administration let those payday lenders keep at it! Now our FDIC has a chance to actually enforce the law, but we still ought to tell them to do it, lest some future Trump Administration try this kind of crap again. If our FDIC enforces the law and keeps good Americans out of runaway debt, we can truly say they've helped drain the swamp.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to release the full internal human rights report assessing hate speech on Facebook in India. They did it in 2020, but they're not releasing it, and although that's kind of a way of saying Facebook bears a lot of responsibility for Muslims in India fearing they're going to get beaten up or killed, you'd still like to see that responsibility broken down to cases. Facebook has already taken some well-deserved PR hits over its facilitation of hate speech in Myanmar (helping to bring about an ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims there), and hell, its algorithms in America help Nazi wannabes find each other without folks even creating or administering a group! Facebook should come clean; I mean, if they've done nothing wrong, they've got nothing to fear.

Around the table: from wrong-headed protestors in Canada to wrong-headed American economists.

When I hear that truckers in Canada are "snarling traffic, disrupting business and residential neighborhoods and leading the police to compare the demonstrations to a 'siege' on the nation’s democracy," I wonder if these protestors would have responded to liberal protestors who also clog city streets, albeit just with their bodies, by demanding the "right" to run them down. Of course I don't disapprove of the truckers' tactics, but we all have a duty to protest the real wrongs in our society, and vaccine mandates ain't one of those. Anyone who protests them, when so many worse things that cause actual harm are going on, is a crybaby. That's true no matter how many hard hats they own./p>

Militia members take over a northern California county board of supervisors, after county residents spend nearly two years acting like snowflakes about the county's not-even-all-that-restrictive COVID-19 restrictions. Why Carlos Zapata isn't in jail for the threats he made in 2020 I couldn't say -- except to suggest that maybe the "Reagan Republican" recently deposed in a recall, Leonard Moty, didn't understand that he and his kind were always a gateway drug to this kind of thing. (And Patrick Jones is yet another far-right-winger who says "we want to return to a county where we grew up" without wanting the high tax rates on the rich that were once a feature of every county where folks like him grew up.)

When I hear that Bank of America is refusing to forgive certain small business PPP loans -- even blocking those businesses from getting relief from our Small Business Administration -- I'm tempted to ask how did Bank of America get the power to screw over small businesses like this? Except, of course, that I already know that Republicans controlled the Presidency and the Senate when they passed the CARES Act, which created the so-called Paycheck Protection Program. I also know that even though Democrats wouldn't have done that much better if they controlled everything, "not much better" might be the difference between being in business or being in the poorhouse for at least a few small businesses. Also too, I doubt Tom Brady had this problem.

When confronted with the news that a right-wing pastor in Tennessee actually put together a well-attended book-burning ceremony, the only advice I can offer to Democrats is 1) get video, 2) put it in every Democratic election ad, and 3) say "this is who you vote for when you vote Republican!" Seriously, we're in trouble if book-burning isn't politically toxic to those who do it. (Actually, the right-wing pastor who ran this book-burning has created a lot of drama over the last few years, not limited to 2020 election BS and COVID denialism. If you vote Republican, you're voting for all of that, too! Tolerate no "I'm voting for lower taxes and better judges" rubbish from your friends and neighbors!)

From Julie L. Holcomb at The Conversation we learn "How 18th Century Quakers Led a Boycott of Sugar to Protest Against Slavery." Yes, even good Americans in the 18th century understood that the sugar industry not only enslaved its own workers (who typically died three years after starting work in that brutal trade), but enabled the spread of slavery everywhere else. And we sure ain't the first people ever to link consumption and morals, for the Quakers did that hundreds of years ago; in this, as in so many other things, we stand on the shoulders of giants.

Finally, Larry Summers "predicts" that high inflation will keep on going throughout the year, and I say "predicts" because most of us know by now not only that much of this inflation is corporate price-gouging (when corporate profits are as high as they are, that's kind of a tell!), but that corporations are price-gouging in response to Joe Biden's rather aggressive actions against monopoly power, which makes Mr. Summers's "prediction" more of a threat delivered on behalf of his corporate cronies. But in that context, his "prediction" that inflation won't fall below 3 percent by the end of 2022 would be a rather specific threat to pass along, since if inflation falls to, say, 4 percent, I think Democrats will benefit at the ballot box in November. Perhaps the corporations are a bit afraid Mr. Biden might succeed. Perhaps they should be. But they'll only have reason to be if we fight monopoly power, too.

Action: concerning corruption, health care, pollution, and forced arbitration.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, the Protecting Our Democracy Act, the PASTEUR Act, the REDUCE Act, and the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act. This bill would prevent any Congressfolk from engaging in most stock trades and from serving on for-profit boards, plus it would also include short sales. When someone sells a security intending to buy it back later, that's a short sale, and folks don't do this unless they think the value of that security is about to tank. You can imagine why we would want to keep our Congressfolk from doing that -- in their oversight duties, they may already know a particular security (or a particular sector of the economy!) is about to tank, and certainly they shouldn't profit from that. Why, it might lead them to pass laws that cause other securities to tank! And that'd be evil, so we should stop that.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act. This bill would prevent Presidents from doing a lot of the awful things Donald Trump did while he was President, like limit national emergencies (like the vanity border wall "emergency"), prevent removal of Inspectors General without cause (like he did through much of 2020), and limits our President's ability to pardon the unworthy (like Steve Freaking Bannon!). It does a bunch of other things, too, like require Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates to provide 10 years of tax returns, without excuses! And no, this ain't "looking backward" -- particularly if Donald Trump comes back in 2024. Or if someone worse wins the Republican nomination!

Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3932/S. 2076, the PASTEUR Act. This bill would fund $11 billion in grants to develop new antibiotics, and if that seems like a lot of money, consider that the bill would fund $11 billion once, not annually, and also consider that $11 billion a drop in the water in the vast ocean of a $4 trillion-plus federal budget, plus it would actually do a lot of good. The world is full of superbugs like the one we're battling now; antibiotic abuse has certainly made it a lot easier for superbugs to wreak their havoc, but we also need to develop new antibiotics that'll kill these bugs dead. Better to spend taxpayer money on that than on, say, welfare for oil corporations that already make crap-tons of money. We could make a longer list than that, but you get the idea.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5389, the REDUCE Act. Make sure it's H.R. 5389; there are other REDUCE Acts out there this term, of varying quality. This REDUCE Act would impose an excise tax on virgin plastic -- which is to say, plastic manufactured for the first time -- and would create a Plastic Waste Reduction Fund to help clean up the mess we've made from all the plastic that's in our oceans and landfills. Folks throw away, on average, 287 pounds of plastic every year, which is close to a pound a day (and this pandemic sure hasn't helped that figure, has it?), and our EPA tells us that less than 10 percent of the plastic we try to recycle actually gets recycled, so clearly we've got to do better as a civilization. That's why we have to reduce the amount of plastic we make to begin with.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4445, the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act. We should be ending forced arbitration for everything, but let's at least make our Congressfolk say I oppose giving sexual assault victims and sexual harassment victims their day in court. Don't let them say this is a boon for trial lawyers! If people don't want trial lawyers to prosper, they should do less evil! If your boss gropes you without your asking for it, your employment contract might require you to submit your complaint to an arbitration board that'll almost certainly rule in favor of your boss, but H.R. 4445 would simply prohibit that where sexual assault and harassment are concerned. So let's do that.

Around the table: the Ukraine could be Russia's Iraq! And other truths.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch informs us that "(t)he essence of the crisis in Ukraine is that Russia can gain many benefits from its unspoken threat to invade, but none at all from actually doing so." When you hear that "Russian troops might be able to capture Kyiv in a week" but not keep it, you may well be reminded of our adventure in Iraq -- right down to the part where apparent Western efforts to "stoke a phony crisis" in the Ukraine resemble how Western intelligence got Saddam Hussein's WMD holdings dead wrong. So the next time you hear media histrionics about the Ukraine, take a deep breath.

Florida legislators are actually trying to limit the scope of future ballot initiatives there, mindful of the fact that Florida has a $15/hour minimum wage and has restored voting rights to some felons, which Florida legislators would never have done on their own, no matter how much good Floridians agitated about it. Limiting the people's say in their government and their own lives -- yeah, that'll go over well! When we hear from Florida legislators about this effort, they'll of course deny that's what they're doing -- they'll brandish words like "reform" and "streamline," because they know they're doing evil, and they know their constituents know it, and what choice will they have? Besides, you know, not doing evil.

A.B. Stoddard at The Bulwark says Republicans are winning the new culture war over vaccines -- and says "(i)t's time for Democrats to stop worrying about alienating the unvaccinated and start explaining to the rest of the country how the unvaccinated -- and the Republicans who coddle and truckle to them -- have screwed the rest of us." Yes, I agree that President Biden should have done that already. I'd add that he also needs to blame the big actors driving all the controversy -- i.e., the dark money groups funding anti-vaxxers. Folks who won't get vaccinated deserve our scorn, but they don't operate alone -- bad people with a lot of unearned money enable them.

Uh oh: somehow-former Dolphins head coach Brian Flores sues the NFL and three of its clubs for racism in conducting head coaching searches -- and texts from Patriots head coach Bill Belichick help his case. The key takeaway here is not that all Brians look alike to Mr. Belichick, but that he apparently learned that the Giants would hire Brian Daboll before they'd even interviewed Mr. Flores, rendering the latter's interview a token one, and I doubt the Giants can explain that away without alleging that Mr. Belichick lied. And if you're thinking Mr. Flores's charges of "bad faith" can't stick, just remember that year everyone interviewed Falcons Special Teams Coordinator Keith Armstrong though no one had any intention of hiring him -- and remember, also, how many teams have lined up to give Josh McDaniels second chances, although he's a demonstrably worse head coach than Mr. Flores.

Finally, I hate to celebrate the failings of others, but I'm sure going to do that here: daily cable "news" viewership "fell off a cliff" in 2021. Of course, they "fell off a cliff" compared to their record numbers in 2020, but still, this is cause for celebration. The article wonders whether folks are just tired of all the COVID and all the politics, but does not, sadly, evaluate the thesis that people are simply sick and tired of all the drama and cowardice and venality inherent in cable "news" programming for the past several decades. Not likely, you say? C'mon, let a man dream of a world in which everyone is as sick and tired of cable "news" as he is.

Action: concerning racism, slave labor, facial recognition, false advertising, and right-wing media.

Long story short: tell Oregon legislators to end the use of non-unanimous juries, tell your pension fund to pressure Apple to fight slave labor in China, tell our IRS to stop using facial recognition tech, tell our FTC to stop employers from advertising fake pay rates, and tell AT&T to stop funding OAN. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Oregon residents, take note: Color of Change helps you tell your state legislator to pass SB 1511, so that everyone in Oregon convicted of a crime by a non-unanimous jury vote can get a retrial. States have historically used non-unanimous juries for certain criminal cases pretty much so they could put more Black folks in jail, but by 2020, when our Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional (citing the racist origins of the non-unanimous jury therein), Oregon was literally the last state in the union to use them, having even been outclassed by Louisiana, which outlawed them in 2019. Unfortunately, our Court didn't require retrials for those convicted by a non-unanimous jury before their ruling; SB 1511 would fix that, and thus help close a sad chapter in American history.

Sum of Us helps you tell your pension fund to pressure Apple to stop using forced Uyghur labor in China to make its products. More specifically, you'll tell your pension fund to vote for two shareholder resolutions at the next Apple shareholder meeting on March 4. Apple supposedly has systems in place to root out slave labor from its supply chain, but now that journalists have found at least nine of Apple's suppliers rely on Uyghur slave labor in Chinese concentration camps, we have, ah, reason to believe those systems aren't working, so one shareholder resolution would require Apple to account for that. A second resolution would aim at Chinese government requests to remove apps from Apple's app store, and since journalists have used some of these apps to find out about Chinese treatment of Uyghurs, Apple needs to account for that, too.

Fight for the Future helps you tell our IRS to stop using facial recognition or biometric surveillance tools. Facial recognition technology sucks, is racist, and far too frequently results in innocent people getting arrested, but for the purposes of this discussion, those are symptoms of a far bigger problem -- if facial recognition technology can't even get your face right, if it too easily gets flummoxed by a person aging or getting disfigured in an accident, how can it fight identity fraud, which is our IRS's purported reason for using the now-notorious ID.me? ID.me also collects a lot of personal data -- I mean, it works with our IRS! -- meaning the fact that it only shares some of that data with other corporations shouldn't ease your mind. We may fear malice more than incompetence, but let's not allow incompetence to run so rampant it looks like malice.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to outlaw fake pay rate scams. What's a fake pay rate scam? It's when an employer puts out a job listing with a higher pay rate than they have any intention of paying; they also advertise hourly rates as "plus tips" when they actually include tips, plus they advertise managerial jobs that they don't actually have open, and then offer you a lower-responsibility job, hoping to slip that lower pay by you! And folks don't necessarily have the luxury of "just not taking the job" -- if you're on unemployment, and you turn down a job, you don't get your unemployment benefits back. However, all of this falls under "truth in advertising" laws, which our FTC must enforce, so all that remains is for us to tell them to enforce them.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell AT&T to cut all ties with the notorious One America News Network. AT&T owns about two-thirds of DirecTV, which will stop offering OAN this coming April, and while that's a big deal, OAN only exists in the first place thanks to AT&T money, and we have no indication that money train's going to stop rolling. Indeed, AT&T said they wanted a competitor to Fox News, but why should there be more than one right-wing propaganda outlet? Hell, why should there be one? OAN peddles 2020 election lies and COVID misinformation just like the other right-wing "news" channels, and our commitment to freedom of speech does not require us to enable right-wing propaganda to corrupt the minds and souls of good Americans. It doesn't require corporations to fund it, either.

Around the table: election workers and banned book clubs good, corporate tax avoidance and stoking rage bad.

Who are the "Trio Who May Have Figured Out How to Save American Democracy," according to Steven Rosenfeld at The New Republic? The three retired election officials in Arizona who thwarted the Cyber Ninja's "fraudit" of Maricopa County votes by simply correlating voting data with widely-available public records, that's who. And they showed that tens of thousands of folks did not vote from beyond the grave or the land of fiction and yes, tens of thousands of solidly Republican voters in the Phoenix suburbs did vote for Joe Biden in 2020. I'd like very much for folks like Benny White to be right that their work could have forestalled the proliferation of the Big Lie if they'd gotten there earlier, though I doubt they are. But we could get ahead of the next Big Lie, thanks to good folks like these.

Ho hum, Netflix made a record $5.3 billion in profits in 2021, but paid a hair over one percent of that in taxes. In each of the four years since the Trump tax "reform" lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, Netflix has paid between 0 and 1 percent in taxes, though right-wingers always say we lower tax rates to increase compliance! The Build Back Better Act would have at least instituted a 15% minimum corporate tax on corporations with profits over $1 billion, but our One True Great and Real Lord President Joe Manchin killed that, though he apparently supports it. You know, just like with his own voting rights bill! It ain't just the Pearly Gates that'll be unkind to his works -- history won't be kind, either. I mean, this crap just doesn't read well.

Eleanor J. Bader at TruthOut informs us that good Americans are forming banned book clubs in the wake of right-wing book-banning efforts -- with at least one started by a 14-year-old student, and pretty much anyone who remembers being that age knows that such students are the last people you want to tell what they can't read. You hate to see a school board's oversight function devolve into right-wing political correctness, but that's what happened, in too many areas of our great country, and you can tell these groups know they're full of soup by how easily they switch from decrying critical race theory to decrying pornography, as if they know they can't win the argument on the merits unless they keep moving the goalposts. I'll bet Louise A. Spilsbury's anti-bullying book is worth a read, regardless of what various school boards think.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon argues that Donald Trump has "seized control" of the narrative surrounding the January 6 attempted coup, as Democrats take their time with their January 6 Commission and our "liberal" media has "fail(ed) to treat Trump's downright criminal aggression on this front with the gravity it deserves." But though I agree that our media's fallen down on the job again, and no one's ever lost money betting on Democrat weakness, I'm not sure Mr. Trump has actually "seized control" here. We all saw it on TV, after all, and every time he or some Trumphole tries to gaslight us about it, all we need do is recall the Confederate flag flying through the Capitol halls or the Capitol Police officers getting beaten with Blue Lives Matter flags or, well, all the yelling. But yeah, our DOJ should have arrested Mark Meadows already. We can't be nice to him just because he used to be a Congressman.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, as much as I'd love to believe that Donald Trump was at a rally over the weekend acting "Like a Man Who Knows He’s About to Be Held Accountable for the First Time in His Life," I rather suspect he doesn't really think he's about to go to jail -- he's just playacting for the crowd, pretending he sympathizes with all of their reversals in life. And once you start playing this game, you can't really stop -- in fact, you have to keep upping the rage. Most Republicans already know this, and approve of it; they would just prefer to keep upping the rage a little more slowly.

Action: concerning monopolies, bank fees, internet privacy, public lands, and evil podcasts.

Long story short: tell our government to stop bank mergers and curb bank overdraft fees, tell RayBan to ditch social media stalker sunglasses, tell our government to designate the Delaware Water Gap a national park, and tell Apple and Google to deplatform Steve Bannon. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell federal regulators to stop all bank mergers until they can strengthen merger guidelines. What good do mergers do? They make executives richer, but that doesn't qualify as a "good" to anyone but the right-wingers who only care about how well they do. In the meantime, mergers kill jobs, kill competition, and raise prices for everyone, usually in ways that aren't obvious, and because they're not obvious, judges ignore them. And bank mergers are even worse, because they limit your options if you're trying to get a loan to buy a house or start a business, and also because banks don't like going into rural or urban areas. But the folks who live there are people, too! And we all deserve better.

Americans for Financial Reform also helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to stop absurd bank overdraft fees. Because the last damn thing you need, as you're struggling to make ends meet during a pandemic, is a bank charging you ridiculous overdraft fees. These fees drive poorer Americans out of the banking system and puts them at the mercy of pawn shops, check-cashing joints, and payday lenders. And despite the whining of the Price Controls Are Always Evil crowd, an April 2020 poll found 75% of Americans wanted our government to regulate overdraft fees more. Republican respondents dragged that number down, right? Nope -- 76% of Republican respondents wanted more government intervention there, too. (Independents dragged the number down; there's a lesson there, somewhere.)

Sum of Us helps you tell sunglass corporation Ray-Ban to stop making "smart" glasses for Facebook. Why? Because their glasses secretly record people, supposedly to help people "tell stories." You've seen the "stories" function on Facebook? Have you ever seen something so counterintuitive? Particularly after using Facebook's far more intuitive newsfeed for all those years? And they hawk it like it's sliced bread! Anyway, these "smart" glasses look just like sunglasses as they're secretly recording you -- unless you happen to see a small white light on the frame, which you likely won't. And anyway, if you've given the matter any thought, you will probably conclude, as I have done, that there are already too many stories floating around. The world needs good stories, recollected in tranquility rather than taped by stalkers.

Environmental Action helps you tell our government to designate the Delaware Water Gap as a national park. Or, more likely, a "national park and preserve," since our laws don't allow hunting in a national park but do allow it in a preserve (which could be carved out of a national park). The Delaware Water Gap, a creation of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, now gets about as many visitors as the Yellowstone National Park but has about one-ninth the budget, and America strangely doesn't have many national parks east of the Mississippi River; maybe folks think that New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey comprise some urban hellhole, but all these states feature vast swaths of gorgeous and relatively unspoiled land, of which the Delaware Water Gap is just the most famous. So, really, why on Earth not?

Finally, in case you thought Joe Rogan was the only jerk with an undeserved platform, Care2 helps you tell Google and Apple to remove Steve Bannon's podcast from their respective platforms. Mr. Bannon was too much of a jerk for Spotify, which removed him in late 2020 after he said he'd put the heads of Anthony Fauci and Christopher Wray "on pikes" as "a warning to federal bureaucrats." "Joking," right? Mr. Bannon's podcast has since alleged repeatedly that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election (by getting seven million more votes, apparently!) and said "all hell will break loose tomorrow" on January 5, 2021, which I'm sure was just "analysis." Yeah, I used to listen to obnoxious jerks, but then I became a man, and put away childish things. And our big, bold corporations need to do the same thing.

Around the table: good news at Starbucks, bad news in Poland (and elsewhere in America).

In case you'd lost track, upwards of 54 Starbucks stores have now begun the process of unionizing, including 15 just this past Monday. Only the first two stores in Buffalo have actually begun collective bargaining for better pay and working conditions, but this is good news. Sadly, woke-ass Starbucks management haven't stopped the mandatory anti-union propaganda meetings, replete with whining that unions will divide workers from management, though you might think management has done a pretty good job of that already, and anyway no one wants "unity" with someone who'll hurt you so they can redistribute your income upwards to themselves. Really, the similarity with how domestic abusers talk is more than a little upsetting.

From Mikhal Dehel at Boston Review we learn that "Poland's Current Memory Politics Are Rewriting History" in a way you'll find eerily similar to what Americans like Glenn Youngkin aspire to do. Last year a Warsaw District Court convicted two historians of "violating the honor" of a former mayor of Warsaw during World War II, all due to a single footnote in which one Jewish woman testified that this man had robbed her and ratted out other Jews to the Nazis. Because, apparently, Polish law (rammed through by a right-wing government, imagine that) only allows you to blame the Nazis for what happened in Poland, even though we all know the Nazis had collaborators everywhere. End result: historians won't want to do research anymore if someone's descendant has a sad. People need to grow the fuck up, particularly about their past.

When I hear that Nancy Pelosi's going back to being a Republican "bogeyman" now that she's running for re-election, I must ask: do Republicans not remember Abigail Spanberger turning that against David Brat in 2018? Of course, to demolish this sad attempt at relevance, you have to count on Democrats to actually do what Ms. Spanberger did, which is remind their Republican opponents that they're not actually running against Nancy Pelosi and that using the current House Speaker as a crutch for your own bad ideas is just a bad look. David Brat might even give them similar advice, to the degree that they'd listen, and to the degree that he's capable of self-knowledge.

Pennsylvania Senate candidate David McCormick says he never outsourced jobs, though he's on record having done just that (and using it to get a job with Tha Bush Mobb) two decades ago. Trumpholes hate outsourcing, which recommends them, though I still think it's more about the foreigner-hate with them, and not so much about the whole "let's not pay foreign workers in dung pellets just so we can avoid paying American workers decently" thing. Between that and Mehmet Oz's difficulties, I'm even more convinced that Jeff Bartos will be the Republican Senate nominee -- and that Trumpholes, at that point, will judge him to be a fellow traveler, regardless of what he's ever done or said.

Finally, when I hear that Democrats in Congress still think they can get Joe "the Penguin" Manchin to agree to some part of the Build Back Better Act, all I can say is: fools! He's going to keep playing Lucy to your Charlie Brown for the next 10 months, because he wants Republican majorities in both Houses after the 2022 elections, all so he can make himself "essential" going into his 2024 re-election bid. I mean, who's going to lift a finger to help him get re-elected in 2022 if Democrats wind up with, say, 56 Senators? Anyway, we're still going to have a lot to say about all that, but it'd be easier if we were already out in the streets protesting Democrat weakness and inaction. I'd have already willed those protests into existence, if I could.

Action: concerning campaign finance, taxes, conversion "therapy," and travel bans.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fight big corporate campaign donations, pass the Get Foreign Money out of U.S. Elections Act, give our IRS the money it needs to catch rich tax cheats, ban conversion "therapy," and pass the NO BAN Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to amend our Constitution so we can restrain big campaign finance donations again. Virtually everyone in America wants that, which I guess is why our Congressfolk haven't done it -- they think "bipartisanship" is "what corporatists on both sides want," not what Americans on both sides want. Now some folks argue for even more corporate money in campaign ads, but luckily their arguments all suck -- they range from "incumbents will pass laws restricting spending by challengers" (you can think of about a hundred other laws that would prevent that from happening!) to "campaigns cost money, you know" (which doesn't justify spending just any amount of money on a campaign). Stupidity can't keep winning in America!

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6283, the Get Foreign Money Out of U.S. Elections Act. Because they're American elections, that's why! If they were world elections, we wouldn't be having this discussion! Our laws already ban individual foreign citizens from donating to American campaigns -- so now those folks just buy American corporations and use them like a wet dishrag. We can of course blame our Supreme Court's disastrous Citizens United ruling for that (as well as for everything I describe in the preceding paragraph), but H.R. 6283 would close that loophole. And if that corporation's American employees want to contribute to campaigns? Gosh, there are hundreds of ways to do that these days, so shed no tears for them.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to give our IRS the funding it needs to catch all the rich folks who cheat on their taxes. Infamously, our IRS has lately told us it only has the money to catch poor tax cheats, since they can't poop out the money they'd need to fight back, so we need to fix that. No matter how many stupid, lying ads right-wingers run about it! During the infrastructure bill debate, an organization somehow called the Coalition to Protect American Workers ran ads equating hiring more IRS agents with higher taxes, and also insinuated that they'd find the money to fund that by "defunding the police." But let's not have people without shame getting all the say in how we run our country.

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban conversion "therapy" in America. Canada just banned it, and nations such as Germany and Malta have also banned it, but our mania for pandering to the weakest, most bigoted among us has thus far prevented us from doing it, and our politicians need to adult up about it. Conversion "therapy," you may recall, tries to convert gay folks into straight folks by using such "techniques" as having the gay person re-enact past sexual abuse while naked. I'd call that unscientific, just like our Surgeon General did 20 years ago, but I guess doing so would just provoke the masks-are-abuse and vaccines-don't-work crowd. But those people just live to be provoked anyway, so I don't care. Someday they'll learn they're not the center of the universe.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1891, the NO BAN Act. The NO BAN Act would prevent a President from unilaterally enacting anything like Donald Trump's infamous "Muslim ban" -- or Joe Biden's unjustly-not-infamous late 2021 ban on eight African nations supposedly in response to the Omicron variant of COVID. You see how well that did in containing Omicron, right? The NO BAN Act would prevent our President from enacting any travel ban based on religious discrimination or racism, and would require our President to create the narrowest possible ban if it's based on a "compelling government interest." Frankly, I'd rather make Congress pass such bans, if they're ever necessary, but I don't let the perfect murder the good, and the NO BAN Act would do some good.

Around the table: monopolies still suck, and other truisms.

You know those "parent" groups opposing masks and critical race theory? The chances of them being funded by big dark money groups is actually pretty good. So the next time we see someone who's "just a mom" or "just a dad" getting up and acting all spastic about "kids wearing diapers on their faces," we'd do well to assume some rich school-privatizer might be behind them. And remember that school boards are representative bodies, aiming to, you know, represent parents' will, not give individual, very loud parents all the say about everything. A lot of folks on the right say they just want a voice in the public square when they really want to be the only voice in the public square.

When you confront the awful history of how consolidated farming has become over the last 70 years, you may well be tempted to ask: is there any area where monopolies don't make everything worse? And the answer would be no, there is no area. You may also be tempted to ask what kind of monster looks at a lot of folks farming and call that an "inefficiency" when, really, everyone should be farming. That's not one of the solutions author Zoe Pharo presents, but the others -- among them stopping big ag mergers and creating land trusts -- would do us all some good. Because no one will sit around a campfire one day saying we may not be able to raise crops anymore, but at least food was cheaper for a while, and a few corporate executives got richer!

So why do leisure/hospitality workers seem to be quitting their jobs more than anyone else? Because they get paid in dung pellets, they usually work on nights and weekends, and they constantly have to be nice to everyone, for starters. Now add in the COVID pandemic and its layoffs and furloughs, and having to fight (sometimes physically!) with customers who won't wear masks or get vaccines because they're so much better than the rest of us, and you've got a pretty toxic stew, there. A lot of folks in hospitality go on to get more education (and thus more debt, I fear) or go to work for themselves, which we all ought to do anyway and I wish them luck with that.

Ho hum, our "liberal" media can't stop talking about crime, and can't stop cherrypicking crime stats so we all talk about crime, too. This, even though also this "spike in murders" over the last two years still doesn't meet the standard set by murders between 1970 and 1996, and the answer can't always be "more cops" -- as if "cops" are mere tools we can throw at a problem, and anyway it ought to be "more cops who walk beats," at the very least. And the "awful lot of 'could have's, 'may have's and 'possibly's" author Julie Hollar finds in these arguments just so happen to resemble the could-haves, may-haves, and possiblys you see in right-wing arguments linking immigration with terrorism. Also too, murder is one crime; how are we doing with all the others? Oh, right, all those crime rates have gone down.

Finally, Turkish President/real peach of a man Recep Tayyip Erdogan, confronted with a 36% inflation rate, fired the head of Turkey's statistics agency. Well, I can't wait to see what next month's inflation numbers look like! Seriously, I can think of one guy at Mar-a-Lago who witnessed this and seethed with jealousy, though of course if he becomes President again, he'll do it just so he can declare he single-handedly killed inflation. (The article also tabulates Mr. Erdogan's other recent civil service firings, which I'm sure also makes Mr. Trump jealous.)