Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning banking regulation, health care, junk fees, and stock buybacks.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the TABS Act, reject any proposed cuts to Medicaid and CHIP, and pass the Junk Fees Prevention Act and the Stock Buyback Accountability 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 Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Taking Account of Bureaucrats’ Spending (or TABS) Act, which would replace our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s independent funding mechanism – a mechanism good enough for other banking regulators – with the whim of Congressional funding. You’d think with all these bank failures, our Congressfolk would understand that we actually need a strong CFPB, but up is down in their world. I’m sure they’ll use this as a bargaining chip in debt limit “negotiations”; they might even succeed. But to hell with what they want, because they’re supposed to negotiate with us.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any proposed cuts to Medicaid or the Childrens’ Health Insurance Program (or CHIP). Again, to hell with what the deficit peacocks want! Medicaid and CHIP help a lot of good Americans, and they sure in hell ain’t breaking our budget’s back. Now, throwaway defense spending and low taxes on the rich? Those things are breaking our budget’s back. But Medicaid and CHIP are popular across the political spectrum, probably because even right-wingers have to use it! If you come to rely on something, you’ll hate the politicians who take it away, and you’ll punish them. Right, Sam Alito?

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Junk Fee Prevention Act, which would vastly reduce the harm junk fees – like ticket fees, airline fees, and “early termination” fees – cause good Americans. Who likes junk fees that far outstrip whatever expense a corporation incurs to fix a problem or make something convenient? Nobody but the people who collect those fees, that’s who! And they ain’t a majority of a damn thing in America! OK, they may be a majority of bad people, but let’s not deal civilization yet another body blow because a majority of bad people demanded it. I have a feeling our descendants would not want that to be our epitaph.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, which would quadruple the stock buyback tax that only corporations will ever have to pay. Stock buybacks used to be illegal, and for good reason – not only do they concentrate corporate power in a few hands (and concentrated power in a few hands should concern all Americans regardless of ideological predisposition), but corporations tend to spend more on stock buybacks than on, you know, new equipment. Everyone needs to buy that every once in a while! And if they won’t do the right thing, then our government’s gotta step in on our behalf. This ain’t hard.

Action: concerning free speech, endless wars, tax cuts for the rich, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell Florida legislators to reject an anti-free speech bill,and tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq War AUMF, repeal the Trump tax cuts for the rich, and pass the Social Security Expansion 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.

Free Press helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject SB 1316, which would require any blogger who writes about Gov. DeSantis or state legislators register with the state or face heavy fines. Can you say "poll tax," boys and girls? And how do they justify such a thing? By saying all we want to know is who our enemies are? Here’s who your enemies are, Florida: everyone who thinks for themselves. And that’s most of us in America. I’m serious; no more than a quarter of Americans are mindless drones lapping up whatever right-wingers spew forth. They get a lot more media coverage than we do, but to quote a famous philosopher: they do not surround us; we surround them. So let’s remind everyone of that.

The American Friends Service Committee helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that “authorized” the Iraq War. And while the 2002 AUMF, like the 2001 AUMF that enabled all kinds of madness in the “war on terror,” is worse than a wad of used toilet paper, every President since Bush the Lesser has used it to justify all manner of extra-legal military adventures – think Obama in Libya and Syria and Trump in Iran and Syria. We can’t bring back dead soldiers or dead Iraqis, or those whom ISIS has exterminated, but perhaps we can begin to earn their forgiveness by repealing the 2002 AUMF.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Trump tax-cuts-for-the-rich, which would include the tax cuts in the top tax brackets and the massive cut in the corporate tax rate. Republicans are doing the helicopter dance about “deficits” and “debts,” but they all voted for the Trump tax cuts, which helped make trillion-dollar deficits in America the norm. So if they won’t force the rich to pay more in taxes now – you know, because DEFICITZ BADZ!!!!!! – then why should we listen to them about a damn thing? And if Democrats won’t have guts, we’ve got to have it for them.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act. When right-wingers play offense, what do we do? Play offense! Nobody roots for the team running the prevent defense at the end of the game! And taxing rich folks to pay for expanded Social Security benefits is actually quite popular, as you would imagine, given that most Americans, as I’ve said, are pretty smart. What are right-wingers going to do, pretend that taxing the rich is dumb? Taxing the rich, more than anything else, made ours the greatest middle class in history after World War II. So take no BS about this matter.

Action: concerning banksters, anti-trans posturing, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to strengthen banking regulations, reject the so-called Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, and pass the Ensuring Women’s Right to Reproductive Freedom 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.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to make our banking regulations stronger. Specifically, you’ll ask Congress to insist that banks with over $50 billion in assets follower stricter regulations; that’s what the Dodd-Frank Act did in 2010, but in 2018 Congress raised that limit to $250 billion – and one of the most ardent supporters of that change was none other than the CEO of the Silicon Valley Bank that recently failed! Why, it’s almost like that was the whole idea. We shouldn’t stop there – I eagerly await the “outlaw hedge funds” action alert – but we can certainly communicate our will on this particular matter right now, while the iron’s hot, as it were.

The National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which would merely prevent any transgender or intersex kids from participating in school sports. Too many politicians don’t want to solve real problems – like, hey, we fund boys’ sports way more than we fund girls’ sports, and too many kids get sexually abused by folks they trust – but they sure do have time to swing their balls in our faces about transgender folks. And for the umpteenth time, no boys are going to become girls just to excel in girls' sports that (at best!) they'll spend the rest of their life getting paid less to do! It's like they don't remember what being a hormone-addled teenager was like – or hope you don't.

Free and Fair Democracy helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ensuring Women’s Right to Reproductive Freedom Act. This bill would prohibit state law enforcement from preventing women from crossing state lines to get abortions where they’re legal, and would not only empower state Attorneys General to enforce such a law, but for private citizens to get civil relief under such a law. Maybe Marco Rubio will call such a thing a boon for trial lawyers! Which would be a clever way of saying nothing about abortion, I suppose. Anyway, why do we need so many trial lawyers? Because we have so many powerful wrongdoers!

Action: concerning taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise capital gains taxes on the rich, pass a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, raise Medicare taxes on income over $400,000, and pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy breaks down all the tax provisions President Biden has proposed in his budget, and they’re pretty good – the worst I can say about them is they don’t go far enough, but that’s still a lot better than, say, the positively poisonous “FAIR” Tax. One especially worthy item in the Biden budget is the proposal that would tax capital gains as income for folks making over $1 million annually. That would protect small homeowners while going after rich tax cheats, and if you can do both at once, it’s a good idea. You can call your Congressfolk and tell them to enact that, or to pass the Biden budget as a whole (which Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you do); either action would do us all good.

Care2 helps you tell Congress to pass President Biden’s proposal for a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax. I’ve suggested that his proposal would resemble Sen. Warren’s, which imposed a very small wealth tax on large estates, but actually our President’s proposal would impose a minimum 25% tax on households worth over $100 million, and would include unrealized assets (i.e., stocks and properties those households haven’t sold yet) in that calculation. And by demanding such a tax during a time of debt-limit hostage-taking, we’ll tell our Representatives that we won’t stand for more austerity drama. Personal to pedants stuck on the “$100 million” figure: you’re not one of them, either, so maybe don’t defend them?

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to support President Biden’s proposal to raise Medicare taxes on income over $400,000. Currently rich folks pay 3.8 percent in Medicare taxes on their income, but President Biden would raise that to 5 percent, again, only on income over $400,000, which, again, almost certainly ain’t you or I. In fact, that number represents only one out of every 50 taxpayers – go to most parties and you won’t see literally anyone there who’d pay more money (and again, only on that part of their income over $400,000) in Medicare taxes. And it would help keep Medicare solvent, so let’s do it.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act. Stock buybacks used to be illegal, because they concentrated corporate power in a few hands, rather than dispersing it among a multitude of shareholders, and if you’ve watched corporations ruin America over the last few decades, you know that “corporation” and “concentrated power” are two terms you should never read in the same sentence. This bill would quadruple the tax on stock buybacks, which would help discourage stock buybacks and thus help break this concentration. So let’s help do that.

Action: concerning the freedom to work, immigration, law and order, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell our FTC to outlaw noncompete clauses, tell the Biden Administration not to bring back Trump-era immigration policies, tell our Justice Department to disclose data about deaths in police custody, and tell our Postal Service to reject the DeJoy privatization plan. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to ban noncompete clauses in employment contracts. “The freedom to change jobs is core to economic liberty and to a competitive, thriving economy.” Who said that, some object of “free” marketeer hero worship? No, it was our own FTC Chair, Lina Khan, and though that does bode well for our efforts, you know that corporations – also somehow the object of “free” marketeer hero worship – will be flooding our FTC with their comments about how they can’t lose trade secrets when they lose employees, even though we already have other laws to deal with that. So we’ve got to show up.

Amnesty International helps you tell the Biden Administration not to bring back the notorious asylum ban and family separation plans. Everyone hated the Trump Administration for doing these things, so why would President Biden bring them back, inflicting cruel and needless hardship on folks who thought they were getting away from all that? Because he’s “moving to the center,” I suppose, though the “center” doesn’t comprise an “average” between right-wing cruelty and left-wing compassion. And anyway, no right-winger will ever support him for it, or acknowledge he did it. Really, there’s no upside here, for President Biden or anyone else. But he’ll do it, unless we get in his grill about it.

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell our Department of Justice to disclose how many good Americans die in police custody. Because the law demands it, that’s why! I don’t care if the police unions don’t like it! If they don’t like it, they can stop killing people in custody! One wonders why anyone dies in custody – I mean, isn’t law enforcement in control at that point? Too often the answer is because cops thought they deserved it, which isn’t very law-and-order of them, nor of us. And to those who think we should just put up with it because crime, I can only say: go live in a real police state.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell our USPS to fire Postmaster DeJoy and reject his 10-year plan to cut services, slash jobs, close Post Offices, and raise prices. Because a plan to cripple our USPS in this manner is also a plan to privatize our USPS! And we should fear that even more with our Postal Service, since our Constitution literally mandates that we keep the mail moving, and right-wingers would love for big corporations to gouge us at the same time they’re “fulfilling” that mandate. It’s all fun and games until a diabetic doesn’t get their insulin because they didn’t sign up for spam emails from some private mail carrier. You know late capitalism, so you know that’ll happen.

Action: concerning voting rights, defense spending, health care, and food stamps.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect voting rights, cut defense spending, lower prescription drug prices, and strengthen the food stamps program. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill would authorize our Justice Department to pre-clear any voting rights changes from any state or locality with a history of vote suppression – and not just certain Southern states, as the original Voting Rights Act mandated (and which mandate our Supreme Court struck down in 2013). Granted, most of the states and localities suppressing the vote the hardest are still in the South, but this bill would restore the teeth our Supreme Court knocked out of the Voting Rights Act. And we all need that bill to have some more bite again.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the People Over Pentagon Act. We spend as much money on defense as the next eight countries on that list combined, and how did that do for us in Iraq and Afghanistan? I’ll tell you how well it did: it proved the old conservative saw that you can’t just throw money at a problem! But, as any liberal will tell you, you can improve good Americans’ lives by spending tax money wisely, and ensuring that defense contractor CEOs can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home while depriving good Americans of, say, paid family/medical leave or health care funding definitely isn’t wise. But they’ll keep doing it, until we make them stop.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices for all Americans. I guess with Eli Lilly’s announcement that it’ll cap insulin prices, our Congressfolk will say it proves that “only private sector action creates lasting change.” But, ah, insulin is just one drug, other big pharma corporations haven’t capped insulin costs, and without our FTC’s announcement of action against the Pharmacy Benefit Managers (or PBMs) that jack up prices as much as or more than big pharma greed, Eli Lilly might not have capped those costs, either. Of course I mention that FTC action because it proves government can help create lasting change in America – but only if we demand it.

Finally, Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to strengthen the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, otherwise known as food stamps. Because weakening it is a stupid idea! Yes, I, too, have heard stories about folks getting food stamps when they’re not supposed to, but that’s a separate issue from ensuring everyone who needs them can get them. No, really, fraud is always a separate issue. You’re supposed to stamp out fraud and bring fraudsters to justice! That’s the law-and-order position! But you’re not supposed to let the mere presence of fraud make you throw up your hands and stop doing the right thing. That’s what bad people want, and why should they get all the say about everything?

Action: concerning abortion, education, internet freedom, and school meals.

Long story short: tell Walgreens to dispense abortion medication to all Americans, tell Florida legislators to reject efforts to ban anti-racist education from college classes, tell President Biden to fill the last FCC seat with a good public servant, and tell our USDA to enact the most vigorous school meal nutrition standards possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Both UltraViolet and More Perfect Union help you tell Walgreens to stop refusing to dispense abortion medication even in states where it’s still legal. As you know, Walgreens said last week it wouldn’t dispense mifepristone in 20 states, which happened to be the 20 states whose Attorneys General sent a letter to Walgreens threatening to sue them over same. Of course, abortion is still legal in some of those states, and our FDA gave its blessing to nationwide distribution of mifepristone last year. Well, I know something even better than 20 state Attorneys General applying pressure: the American people applying pressure. So let’s get to that.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell Florida lawmakers to reject any legislation that would abolish Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (or DEI) programs at universities. Florida colleges have begun to dismantle their DEI programs on their own, and fascists love it when people are fascist to themselves before the brownshirts come to beat them up. And that’s why we have to step up here, too. There are more important things than the drama of right-wing “hurt feelings," and one of them, as I know from lived experience, is the knowledge and wisdom that these programs contain.

Free Press helps you tell President Biden to fill the fifth seat on our Federal Communications Commission post-haste with a public interest-minded nominee. Sadly, that nominee won’t be Gigi Sohn, who withdrew from consideration after a brutal two-year-plus attack from big telecom corporations and their nefarious allies, but while I presume Ms. Sohn was the best person for the job – never mind what Kyrsten Sinema thinks! – I don’t presume she’s the only person for the job. And our FCC needs all five Commissioners, not just to bring back network neutrality, but also to spend recently-authorized infrastructure money fairly. So let’s remind our President of his job here.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Agriculture to enact the strongest school meal nutrition standards possible. Better school meal standards was virtually Tom Vilsack’s only accomplishment as Mr. Obama’s USDA Secretary, but I’m happy to report that since Mr. Vilsack has been fully on board with President Biden’s anti-monopoly program, which means he can actually triple his good works in just a few short years, by improving those school nutrition standards even more. Republicans will hate it, but then they’re objectively pro-childhood obesity and pro-childhood diabetes anyway, so why listen to them? Seriously, they really do suck.

UPDATE. I totally forgot to write that individual introductory paragraph today, and I apologize for that. I've corrected that mistake now.

Action: concerning child labor, health care, immigration, and product safety.

Long story short: tell Iowa state legislators to reject a bill that would loosen child labor laws, and tell your Congressfolk to defend Medicaid and CHIP and pass the DREAM Act and the Sunshine in Product Safety 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.

Care2 helps you tell Iowa state legislators to reject Senate File 167, which would loosen child labor laws so that corporations could put 14-17-year-olds to work in such carefree childhood vocations as demolition, mining, and meatpacking. Perhaps even worse, the bill would let corporations off the hook in civil suits for any kids they neglected, sickened, injured, or killed at the workplace! Because trial lawyers bad! No: putting kids to work in dangerous occupations is bad, though maybe it’s not as snappy a bumper sticker slogan. Look, either children are the future, or they’re just another workforce for fat-cat bosses to use and discard. They ain’t both. And if we have any say about it, they ain’t the latter.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to defend both Medicaid and the Childrens’ Health Insurance Program (or CHIP) from Congressional debt-limit hostage-takers. Maybe they won’t get Social Security and Medicare cuts and then again maybe they will, but we need to put them on notice about Medicaid and CHIP as well. Medicaid is less popular than Social Security and Medicare, because of the absurd perception that it only helps lazy people, but it’s no less important than any of the other programs they’ve taken so much flak about cutting. And Republicans already let CHIP expire once, so they don’t care about kids, and why should they keep getting away with that?

The Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk pass the DREAM Act, which, as you no doubt remember, would help immigrant children whose legal standing in America has lapsed, but who’ve met certain standards of service and education, to remain in America (and keep contributing to American culture) rather than get deported back to the countries they’ve never known. Because that’s cruel! And to those who reflexively respond AMURKIA FIRSTZ!!!! to everything because they can’t argue their way out of a paper bag: the DREAM Act would help, at most, some 1.9 million folks out of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in America, so this is not so damn much to ask.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Sunshine in Product Safety Act, which would let our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) warn the American public about dangerous products without having to get permission from the corporation that manufactured the dangerous product first. Yes, you read that right! Currently we can’t spread the word about dangerous products lest we hurt some corporation’s fee-fees! That’s because Congress amended the Consumer Product Safety Act to give corporations an effective veto over product safety announcements in 1981. Still we deal with the bitter fruits of the Reagan Revolution. This is why we fight.

Action: concerning taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called “FAIR” Tax, any extension of the Trump tax-cuts-for-the-rich, and any attempt to repeal the additional IRS funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, and tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire’s Mininum Income Tax. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to pass the so-called “FAIR” Tax, which would replace our income, corporate, payroll, and Estate taxes with a single 30% sales tax, which would be like immediate 30% inflation. And given all our talk about Social Security lately, we should note that, in addition to the 893 other reasons we should reject the “FAIR” Tax, it’ll eventually cause Social Security to fail. You remember the “FAIR” Tax would replace the payroll tax, which funds Social Security, and with ITEP telling us the rate would have to be more like 60% to raise the same money, well, you see where that’s going. Kill this beast before it kills us.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to make the Trump tax cuts permanent. The “FAIR” Tax, in addition to all its other evils, would represent a massive tax cut for the rich, and so do the Trump tax cuts, where that 2.6-point cut at the top end represents hundreds of thousands of dollars for many, many undeserving rich. But I have good news for you: the Trump tax cuts didn’t keep Democrats from taking our House back in 2018, so don’t get spooked by any “they’re coming for your tax cuts” BS. Did you even notice you got a tax cut? It’s entirely possible you didn’t. You sure didn’t get a couple hundred grand like some folks did!

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any efforts to repeal the additional IRS funding provided by the Inflation Reduction Act. No, our IRS isn’t coming for your money! At least, not more than it was when it was underfunded and understaffed and only went after the folks who filled out their Earned Income Tax Credit or Child Tax Credit wrong. Now our IRS has the money to go after rich folks, and I have more good news for you: Republicans’ fearmongering over IRS funding didn’t exactly deliver the sturm und drang electoral showing they were counting on in 2022. So don’t believe their hype here, either.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, one that’ll actually get at the massive amounts of wealth billionaires hoard and never pay taxes on because they don’t actually sell off those assets. Don’t believe anyone who tells you billionaires deserve to keep what they got! These clowns trip over their own penis in public every day! And not for nothing, but even if our Supreme Court eventually strikes it down – and since it’s something that’d actually help people, they’re no doubt masturbating over that opportunity as we speak – that’ll be just another nail in the coffin of their reputation.

Action: concerning drug prices, pollution, law and order, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell other big pharma corporations to lower insulin prices, tell our EPA to enact the strongest soot standards possible, tell President Biden to fire DHS Inspector General Cuffari, and tell our USPS to reject the DeJoy plan to privatize our Post Office. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell big pharma corporations Novo Nordisk and Sanofi to lower their insulin prices in more or less the manner Eli Lilly has lately done. I hate relying on corporate good will to do the right thing, because they’ve been awash in money so long they have no idea what right and wrong is anymore, but I’m not above using the leverage that presents itself, either. The Big Stick of PR has clearly already worked on Eli Lilly – with a vital assist from our FTC’s announcement that they’ll crack down on the Pharmacy Benefit Managers that jack up drug prices as much as big pharma greed does. And we can make it work on other big pharma corporations, too.

Both the Environmental Defense Fund and Penn PIRG help you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous soot standards possible. Power plants create a lot of soot, as you may know, and those fine particulates can really mess with your breathing – and worse, considering that soot carries a lot of toxins and carcinogens in them. You may remember addressing this matter a decade ago; you may even wonder why we’re addressing it again. One answer is because we don’t always get everything we need the first time we fight for something; another answer is because 10 years is a long time to learn a lot more about how pollutants hurt us. And we’re past worrying about how executives will cope, right?

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell President Biden to fire Department of Homeland Security (or DHS) Inspector General Joseph Cuffari already. Mr. Cuffari has become notorious for keeping knowledge of DHS wrongdoing away from Congress – and thus from us, since Congressfolk represent us – and he also interfered with our Congress’s investigation of the January 6 attempted coup, by failing to inform Congress that the Secret Service had deleted certain texts sent on that day, and even preventing his own office from recovering those texts. So, yeah, if a guy interferes with our right to know just to preserve his power and/or prestige, his ass needs to go.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell our U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors to end Postmaster General DeJoy’s plan to privatize our Postal Service. Because that’s what a plan to slash jobs, cut services, and raise prices obviously is! People like Louis DeJoy live to screw things up and then claim “the private sector can do better,” which is like spreading feces all over your walls to justify hiring a cleaning service. But privatizing the delivery of life-saving medicines won’t result in better service or lower prices, because everything they privatize ultimately becomes more expensive – and less accountable to us, since it’s “theirs” now. So let’s keep our Postal Service ours.

Action: concerning Social Security, refugees, banksters, and the minimum wage.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act and the Afghan Adjustment Act, reject the TABS Act, and raise the minimum wage. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Civic Shout and Social Security Works help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act, which would ensure that income over $250,000 gets taxed into the system for the first time. Yes, currently Social Security doesn’t tax income over $160,200 annually, meaning that only working people pay into the system; the fat-cat class is exempt! I suppose right-wingers would argue that since they don’t need Social Security they shouldn’t have to pay into it, but that’s exactly the sort of everyone-for-themselves masturbation that’s gotten this country into the trouble it’s in. Rich folks need to pay more into Social Security, for the good of all Americans.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would help some 78,000 Afghan refugees living in America to get legal immigrant status. I can already hear the right-wingers saying when are we going to provide for our own people? As if a great nation has to choose! And, you know, as if giving legal status to a refugee really injures someone else. I didn’t ask for Tha Bush Mobb to invade Afghanistan, nor did I ask the Obama and Trump Administrations to stay there, so I also didn’t ask for tens of thousands of Afghan refugees. But I’m not an evil bastard, either, so I’ll still demand we take care of them, because that’s what great nations – and great civilizations – do.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Taking Account of Bureaucrats’ Spending (or TABS) Act, which would repeal our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB)’s independent funding mechanism, and instead subject it to the whim of Congressional funding. Other banking regulators have independent funding mechanisms, so why not our CFPB? Because banksters hate our CFPB, and Republicans live to suck up to their bankster overlords, that’s why. This may all be moot, since our Supreme Court obviously has the long knives out for our CFPB. But we should still tell our Reps how we really feel about their drama.

Finally, the Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour or more, since $15/hour has been a calling card for so long that inflation’s outrun it a bit. Don’t brook any right-wingers telling you good luck getting that through this Congress ha ha ha snort. Congress passed a minimum wage hike in 2007 why? Because they wanted to? Because Democrats had impregnable majorities in either House? No, because we demanded it. And don’t brook any where’s it going to stop? hysteria from right-wingers, either. That’s a loser’s argument. It’s going to stop when we get justice. Which is what they’re really afraid of.

Action: concerning sexism, slave labor, monopolies, and product safety.

Long story short: tell Florida state legislators to reject legislation that would ban women’s studies courses, tell Volkswagen to get Uyghur slave labor out of its supply chain, tell our Transportation Department to stop the proposed JetBlue/Spirit merger, and tell our FTC to ensure that corporations only slap the “recyclable” label on actually recyclable products. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Care2 helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject HB 999, which would essentially ban all gender and women’s studies courses from state colleges. Because waaaaah! Really, is there another reason? My younger self had his share of faults, but he did me a solid by buying the text to a collegiate women’s studies class, so I could read it when I had time, and I have to tell you that when I read it, I didn’t cry like a diaper-loaded brat about all the harm men have done to women over the millennia, nor did I blame everyone but myself for my feelings. And what I learned, I’ll use to make our civilization better. Jesus Mary and Joseph the weaklings in charge of things in America disgust me. And this is why we fight.

Eko helps you tell Volkswagen to stop making money off Uyghur forced labor in China. The Uyghurs, you may recall, are Muslims whom the Chinese round up and send to concentration camps like they’re an aspiring Nazi Germany or something. You know, I think I may have accidentally mentioned something that the German corporation Volkswagen might not want brought up – like that Volkswagen was a Nazi project to begin with! Not a terribly successful one before the war, but how times change! China tortures over a million Uyghurs, but they couldn’t do it without Volkswagen’s help, which is why we’re busting out the Big Stick of Bad PR.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Transportation Secretary Buttigieg to stop the proposed Jet Blue/Spirit airline merger. Our laws already grant the Transportation Secretary the authority to apply a “public interest” standard to block mergers, and Mr. Buttigieg wouldn’t even have to put his case before a judge if he did, and surely airline consolidation doesn’t serve the public interest! More Perfect Union also points out that Spirit currently runs nonstop flights out of Detroit while JetBlue doesn’t; think JetBlue will keep those nonstops if they buy Spirit? I kid, of course. But Mr. Buttigieg might want to think about that before he runs for statewide office in Michigan.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) that we should only see “recyclable” labels on products that can actually be recycled. I’d say that sounds like common sense, but it actually sounds simpler than common sense. You’ve likely challenged our EPA to force corporations to stop putting the “widely-recyclable” label on products you can’t actually recycle widely, but this matter concerns corporations lying to consumers, so we can also make it an FTC matter. Don’t let anyone tell you this isn’t a big deal, because if you can’t recycle it, you have to incinerate it, and incineration pollutes our air and water with deadly toxins. So, yeah, we gotta do that right.

Action: concerning voting rights, taxes, and paid family/medical leave.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, reject the “FAIR” Tax, pass the Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, and pass legislation creating a paid family/medical leave system. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This bill would let our government stop states and localities with a history of vote suppression from changing their laws so they can suppress votes even more – which, you may recall, our government could do until our Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. Our Court said it unfairly targeted Southern states, but the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act would explicitly state that our Justice Department could scrutinize any state or locality that suppresses votes. Nobody should vote against this bill, but we still need to get in our Congressfolks’ grills about it.

Both Moms Rising and Daily Kos help tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to pass the so-called “FAIR” Tax, which would replace all income, corporate, payroll, and Estate taxes with a single, 30% sales tax. That would be like 30% inflation on everything you buy! Care to imagine how big your rent or mortgage would be? And when you remember that payroll taxes fund Social Security and Medicare, you might think paying 30% more for a gallon of milk would be a bad way to fund that. We need to get back to taxing the rich and corporations, not least so they can’t control us anymore, but the “FAIR” Tax only takes us in the opposite direction, toward more misery and chaos. If we speak out, we can kill it in its crib.

Speaking of taxing the rich, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, which would ensure that the richest Americans pay at least 20% of their wealth every year, and if that seems like a lot, remember that they’re billionaires and they’ll still have a lot left over. You’ve gotten by on a lot less than a billionaire, I guarantee you that, but while the pandemic might have cost you your job, billionaires somehow only got richer! As I’ve said, we need to limit the amount of damage billionaires do to our civilization, and the Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax will help us start to do that again. But not if we don’t fight for it.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation granting paid family/medical leave for all Americans. Because only six other countries on Earth don’t have it! Those other countries, by the way, are the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Nauru, Tonga, and Papua New Guinea – yes, even Russia offers paid family/medical leave! We could get this done through budget reconciliation, but we won’t have a chance at that unless we communicate our will to our Reps and Senators in numbers they can’t deny. Don’t let folks tell you it would “cost too much.” You know what costs too much? Workers coming in sick or worried about their sick loved ones because they can’t get a day off!

Action: concerning Social Security, taxes, representation, and conversion "therapy."

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security, reject any Trump tax cut extension, make our House of Representatives larger, and ban conversion “therapy.” 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 the Social Security Expansion Act, which would tax income over $250,000 into the system for the first time, and would not only expand benefits by over $2,000 annually, but would start counting inflation the way it actually affects seniors, who can’t just switch to cheaper drugs or cheaper health care the way younger folks can (and who, ah, don’t buy a whole lot of fancy clothes or iPhones or TVs, either). Used to be half of America’s seniors lived in poverty; now 10% do, thanks to Social Security. That’s why right-wingers hate it. But they don’t get all the say about everything.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to extend the Trump tax “reform.” The income tax bracket cuts of that “reform” expire at the end of 2025, but while you may have saved, say, $1,500 annually from that tax “reform,” rich folks have saved several hundreds of thousands of dollars more, so when we say the Trump tax “reform” mainly benefited the rich, we’re not lying. Or being “jealous” – Jesus Mary and Joseph if money mattered that much to me I’d have more of it than a hundred Donald Trumps. Anyway, the rich need to pay more, and most Americans agree, so we should reject any extension of their unearned tax cuts.

The Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to make our House of Representatives larger. This won’t “grow bureaucracy,” because when our House legislated about the matter, over 110 years ago, America had about one-quarter the population it has now, so yeah, more House Reps would actually serve good Americans better. And you’ve seen the size of some of these districts, right? I don’t just mean huge single-district states like Wyoming and the Dakotas, either – try imagining the task of visiting all of Arizona’s 2nd district, which at over 20,000 square miles is larger than nine states and D.C. So yeah, we actually do need more House Reps.

Finally, Cedar Key Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act, which would, for once and for all, outlaw “conversion therapy,” the horrific snake-oil method by which folks purport to turn gay folks straight. “Conversion therapy” “works” through such “methods” as having gay folks re-enact childhood sexual abuse while not wearing any clothes, which our Surgeon General derided as unscientific two decades ago. So it’s actually not so great that 20 American states have banned the practice since then; something like that should be banned everywhere. The Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act would do that – but only if we speak out about it.

Action: concerning junk fees, immigration, and taxes.

Long story short: tell our CFPB to end credit card junk fees, tell President Biden to abandon the Trump-era asylum ban, tell our IRS to actually crack down on rich tax evaders, and tell our government to make tax filing free. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to outlaw credit card junk fees. Your credit card corporations doesn’t need to charge you $35 and $50 and $100 late fees when $8 will actually cover their costs! They only need to cover their costs! They don’t need to profit from your misfortune! Profiting from your misfortune is evil! Let me know if I’m not being absolutely clear here. And make no mistake, the banksters will still make money if we cap their credit card fees – it just won’t be as easy for them to make enough money to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home, that’s all. And that’s not a hardship for a healthy civilization.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to scuttle his plans to revive the Trump-era asylum ban. This supposedly “conservative” notion – that we should default on the side of assuming that potential asylees don’t have a case, or that we should require them to seek asylum in a neighboring country, never mind how dangerous that country is! – actually increases immigration-related bureaucracy, as I’m sure Donald Trump intended. Naturally the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the Trump ban; maybe Mr. Biden thinks our Supreme Court will overrule them. Better to evaluate asylum claims carefully, like civilized people would.

Daily Kos also helps you tell our IRS to actually crack down on wealthy tax-evaders, as intended by the Inflation Reduction Act. We need our IRS to prove that it can actually work the way we intended it to work. Anyone can screw up and then claim TEH GUBMINTZ DOESN’TZ WORKZ!!!!! – right, George W. Bush? – but getting our IRS to catch a couple of rich tax cheats will help defeat the right-wing zombie lie that more IRS funding means more poor people get harassed. If you’ve been awake these last few years, you know our IRS was so under-funded it could only go after the poor! That's why we must make our IRS do the right thing.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Daily Kos also helps you tell our government that tax preparation should be easy and free, and not corporate welfare for big tax-prep corporations. Think about it: your employer has already given our IRS all the info it needs to fill out a tax form, and you very likely don’t invest in the kind of convoluted schemes designed to evade our laws, so why do you need to get someone to help you fill out your taxes? Because our IRS made a deal with corporations that they wouldn’t create a free tax-filing option if those corporations did – and then they made those free options almost impossible for you to find! And we deserve better than that.

Action: concerning child labor, insulin prices, Medicare funding, and climate change.

Long story short: tell your state Governor to protect child labor laws, and tell your Congressfolk to cap insulin prices for all Americans, fund Medicare better, and reject any effort to roll back investment rules that protect pensions from climate change. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your state Governor to stop any efforts by your state legislature to gut child labor laws. You’ve heard of young kids enduring slave-labor conditions to make chocolate? Consider that our government has caught several big corporations breaking child labor laws in America – and consider, also, that right-wing state legislators are trying to loosen child labor laws in several states. I’m sure they’ll say it’s about kids getting $10 from grandpa for reformatting their hard drive, but that’s a load of horsedoodle – this is about exploiting 14-year-olds in dangerous construction jobs so you can pay them less. The children are our future – unless they’re just another workforce.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to cap the price of insulin at $35/month for all Americans. Currently folks on Medicare get that cap – Democrats could only get that cap through reconciliation last year, since it concerns government spending – but all Americans deserve it, and don’t tolerate any nonsense about how “price controls are bad.” You say “price controls” to Americans suffering 6% inflation and they’ll likely say that sounds like a great idea! And certainly don’t tolerate any nonsense about how “folks just have to eat better” – not in a nation that subsidizes sugar like we do, and not in a world where kids are born with diabetes.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Assuring Medicare’s Promise Act, which would ensure that certain taxes mainly paid by rich folks (including the Net Investment Income Tax and the Self-Employment Contribution Act) actually find their way to the Medicare Trust Fund. The bill wouldn’t actually raise taxes on anyone, and though I’m certainly game to do that to ensure Medicare is always there for us, the bill certainly deserves our support. More than the right-wing fools who whine about TEH LOSTZ JOBZ!!!! every single time someone tries to do the right thing in America, that’s for sure.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell Congress to reject Republican efforts to roll back a Department of Labor rule requiring big corporations to keep our retirement savings safe from climate change risks. If that sounds a little inside baseball to you – which Republicans are counting on! – consider that if climate change makes our planet unlivable, you won’t have a pension! Our laws mandate that our government protects investors – which you are, if you have a pension plan – and putting the “rights” of polluters above the rights of all Americans sure is some real short-term thinking. Naturally Republicans, being “conservatives,” are all about the short term. No reason we need to be, though.

Action: concerning railway safety, abortion rights, antibiotic abuse, and school lunch nutrition.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to improve railway safety and protect abortion rights, tell Walmart to get antibiotic abuse out of its meat supply chain, and tell the Biden Administration to improve school lunch nutrition standards. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Both Food and Water Watch and Demand Progress help you tell the Biden Administration to a) reinstate the braking rule the Trump Administration repealed and b) make hazardous transport restrictions stronger so that trains carrying five cars of flammable carcinogens don’t pollute the air and water of good Americans. Like how Transportation Secretary Buttigieg pretended b) simply didn’t exist while saying his hands were tied on a), which itself wasn’t even true? So much for those Presidential ambitions! Seriously, though, he’s got to start doing a better job, not for the sake of his own career, but for the sake of the American people, who deserve better than to live in fear of trains spewing filth.

Civic Shout helps you tell President Biden to take all lawful executive action that he can take to protect abortion rights from right-wing state legislatures. President Biden did issue an Executive Order back in August, but it didn’t do a lot – it didn’t protect a woman’s right to get legal and effective abortion medication across state lines, it didn’t guarantee that Medicaid would fund a woman’s trip across state lines to get an abortion, and it didn’t lock down the privacy of folks’ personal data when they get abortions. It made moves in all of these directions, but our Administration needs to do more, lest more poor women die because right-wing legislators like making their balls swing.

Penn PIRG helps you tell Walmart to get the antibiotic abuse out of its meat supply chain. You know why: overusing antibiotics on nominally healthy farm animals – to make them meatier, and to help them endure their squalid living conditions – makes antibiotics less effective when actually sick people or animals need them, and thus makes more superbugs. Didn’t we just close down a country over a superbug? Anyway, Walmart is now the biggest grocer in America, controlling over a quarter of the market, and they’ve also made no commitment to getting antibiotics out of their food chain. Hence we bust out the Big Stick of Bad PR. Hey, it’s worked before, and it can work again.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell the Biden Administration to adopt the most vigorous school lunch nutrition standards possible, which will only help the many poor kids who might not get a good breakfast or lunch except at school. Then get ready for the right-wing rubbish about “apples getting thrown away” and “districts unable to keep up with the standards,” which are just code for “we want more Pepsi machines in schools so we don’t have to fund them with taxes.” I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Republicans are objectively anti-children’s health, objectively pro-childhood obesity, and objectively pro-childhood diabetes – which last item also makes them objectively pro-high health care costs.

Action: concerning voting rights, warrantless spying, and Supreme Court ethics.

Long story short: tell Texas state legislators to reject yet another vote suppression scheme, and tell your Congressfolk to stop spying on us without a warrant, end warrantless collection of private money transfer data, and pass 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.

First things first: Cedar Key Progress helps you tell Texas state legislators to reject HB 2390, which would outlaw polling places on college campuses. A normal person who’s not well-acquainted with politics might well say: well, that seems like a total waste of time! But, sadly, too many of us who are familiar with politics figure that Republicans are just trying to suppress Democratic votes and throw up our hands, thinking it’s just “partisanship” and “both sides do it.” But “partisanship” and “both sides do it” are never good reasons to enable evil. And have liberals proposed closing polling places in rural areas and suburbs? No, we have not.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is the section that enables our government to collect all sorts of private information about us without a warrant. I use the italics hammer on that phrase to dissuade folks who think "our government has to do something to fight terrorism!" If our government wants to fight terrorism, they can get warrants – there’s a big gulf between wanting to terrorize people and actually terrorizing them, after all, and real terrorists will out themselves enough before then to justify a warrant. Our government doesn’t need to spy on the rest of us, though.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to end warrantless collection of private money transfer data. So every time you use Western Union or MoneyGram, an Arizona-based non-profit collects the data, and then allows federal, state, and local law enforcement (including FBI and DEA personnel) to access that data. Warrants, schmarrants! If you’re old-fashioned, like me, you don’t want police to gobble up money transfer data without a warrant – even if it catches drug traffickers! – because then they’ll start gobbling up your PayPal and Venmo transactions, and then maybe you’ll get carted off to detention somewhere. If freedoms aren’t for everyone, they’re not freedoms.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Supreme Court Ethics Act, which would, at long last, subject our Supreme Court Justices to the same ethics standards to which every other federal judge must submit. You need not find Justice Thomas’s actions in re the January 6 attempted coup suspicious to support this bill, nor need you find accusations of leaking against Justice Alito or accusations of influence-peddling at the Supreme Court Historical Society convincing. You need only remember that our duty, as Americans, isn’t to trust our leaders to be ethical, but to make them be ethical.

Action: concerning voting rights, endless war, racism, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, repeal the Iraq AUMF, and pass the Justice for Black Farmers Act, and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC already. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Do you remember how our Supreme Court said the Voting Rights Act unfairly targeted Southern states for additional federal scrutiny – but also said Congress could fix the bill by ensuring that any state or municipality could face that same scrutiny? This bill does that! And right-wingers will whine that “it’s not needed” (which, like, duh) or “the South has changed” (also duh, in addition to being literally irrelevant to the bill). But they’re walnuts in the batter of eternity. We, on the other hand, are eternity, as long as we do good works.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to finally and for once and for all repeal the Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that authorized our adventure in Iraq. Come March 20, that mistake will be 20 years old, and at least three U.S. Presidents have used the Iraq AUMF to justify other stupid military adventures. Plus, you know Our Glorious Elites would love to party like it’s 1980 and wage war on Iran – Barack Obama actually solved this problem, but then Donald Trump pissed all over it, and now Joe Biden can’t (or won’t) fix it. That just makes it that much more urgent that we get this war-making tool out of the hands of this President and all future Presidents.

The Union for Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Justice for Black Farmers Act. Anyone who whines that we gotta do even more for Blacks? clearly doesn’t understand just how deeply we’ve injured Black Americans at virtually every opportunity, and so it goes with Black farmers trying to get land. If you know anything about redlining, if you know anything about how our government systematically shut Black folks out of every program meant to help good Americans, you won’t be surprised to find that Black farmers also face a long history of discrimination. And you won’t hesitate to help them, either. Unless you’re a troll, I guess.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) already. President Biden has now nominated Ms. Sohn three times to help do the very important job of keeping big telecom corporations from telling you where you can go and what you can do on the internet; he’s been admirably steadfast about this matter, and his steadfastness should find its reward here, not merely because doing the right thing should always find its reward, but also because the utter nonentities who oppose her are walnuts in the batter of eternity who shouldn’t get all the say about a damn thing in America.

Action: concerning noncompete agreements, junk fees, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell our FTC to ban noncompete agreements, tell our CFPB to outlaw credit card junk fees, tell our CFPB to break up Wells Fargo, tell our FTC to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, and tell our government to ensure prisoners also enjoy the benefits of any junk fee bans. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to ban noncompete clauses in employment contracts. These clauses keep folks from working for any sort of competitor even after they leave a job, but Jesus Mary and Joseph shouldn’t people get to decide that on their own, without having some corporations do it for them? Noncompetes supposedly prevent employees from betraying their old employers’ trade secrets, but guess what? There are already laws against that! And here you thought conservatism was all about shedding unnecessary laws! Turns out that’s a liberal’s job, as usual – and if we speak out, our FTC, which seems already inclined to do our will, might actually do our will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to outlaw credit card junk fees. Our CFPB does actually seem inclined to take action on the matter – their proposed rule would limit credit card late fees to $8, which would cover a bank’s actual costs, rather than whatever phantasmagorial costs they insist require $30 and $50 late fees. But you also know that banksters will be submitting their comments full of bad arguments and half-truths, so we’ve got to be there with the actual truth. And then, perhaps, this particular income-redistribution-upward scheme can die the death it richly deserves. It’s not so damn much to ask.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to break up bankster corporations Wells Fargo, while Inequality Media helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop the proposed Kroger-Albertsons merger. The first alert helps you tell our government to break up a corporation that’s already doing us harm – Wells Fargo has been illegally assessing junk fees and opening accounts folks don’t want for many years now – while the latter action alert helps you stop a corporation from becoming so big it’ll do us harm. A Kroger-Albertsons merger would create the second-biggest grocery corporation in America, which means lost jobs and fewer choices, so let’s not have that.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our government that any program reducing or eliminating junk fees must apply to folks in prison as well. Because they’re otherwise in no position to fight back! I know a lot of people will hear this and say well if they don’t like it they shouldn’t have done the crime, but that’s glib and asinine. Being civilized requires that we avoid cruelty, after all. And when someone injures our civilization, and we demand restitution for that injury, should we keep heaping on additional forms of “restitution” just to look tough? No, we should not. So let’s do our duty as civilized people.

Action: concerning taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called “FAIR” Tax, pass the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act, institute a windfall tax on big corporations, and pass the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax Act and the Stock Buyback Accountability 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 reject the so-called “FAIR” Tax. Having trouble imagining the damage a 30% sales tax would do to your bank account? How about adding 30% not just to your grocery bill, but to your rent or your mortgage, too? And if you’re thinking maybe Republicans will smarten up and nominate someone sane to be our next President, recall that Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and Tim Scott have all supported the FAIR Tax. Indeed, Donald Trump has supported it rather more tepidly than any of these! Supporting 30% inflation should seriously end all their campaigns, but it won’t, unless we speak out in numbers no one can deny.

The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy has written about the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act, which would prevent big corporations from reporting profits amounting to ten times the entire economic output of a nation (as they’ve done with the Cayman Islands). The Trump tax “reform” lets corporations pay a lower rate on offshore profits – which means corporations pretend they make money elsewhere so they can pay less taxes on it! If they paid more of their fair share, we’d have better roads and bridges, and we’d also have better public services, like Medicare and paid family/medical leave. So you may want to call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass this bill.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall profits tax on big corporations. Again: when you see high inflation and record profits at the same time, you don’t need an economics degree to know you’re getting screwed. Actually, an economics degree might be a positive impediment to knowing you’re getting screwed, but I digress. We need to let big corporations know that their greed has consequences; our government has done a pretty crap job of that for the last 40 years, but certainly not for lack of effort on our part. And the fact is, we’re right and they’re wrong, and just as being wrong should have consequences, being right should have rewards.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax Act and the Stock Buyback Accountability Act. The former bill would tax a billionaire’s actual wealth and not just the small part they realize from selling their assets every so often, while the latter bill would increase the tax on stock buybacks from one percent to four percent, so that big corporations do less buying back of their own stock and more investing in the actual work they do. Both would start us back on the path to actual fair taxation in America, so we should get in our Congressfolk’s grills about them.

Action: concerning immigration, food stamps, college for all, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell Texas state legislators to reject an anti-immigrant bill, and tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to cut food stamps and pass the College for All Act and the Social Security Expansion 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: Free and Fair Democracy helps you tell Texas state legislators to reject the notorious SB 147, which would prevent immigrants from owning homes in that state. Always they say we gotta do something about foreigners owning American land, but this bill doesn’t even target Chinese corporations! No, it targets regular folks, who are just trying to make a go of it like the rest of us. SB 147’s sponsor, no doubt reveling in all the attention, says she’ll amend the bill to exempt immigrants who’ve actually gone through the system (including dual citizens). I’ve got another way to protect those good people: strangle this damn bill, and any like it, in its crib.

Republicans want to cut food stamps again, so you may want to call your Reps and Senators and tell them NFW. With apologies to Bill Maher, I propose a new rule: you don’t get to complain about high inflation and then cut food stamps! That may be even worse than complaining about inflation and then rejecting the Child Tax Credit expansion that put hundreds of dollars in working families’ bank accounts every month in 2021. Food stamps may have a bad name thanks to right-wing propaganda, but any of us might need them someday, and it’s cruel to take away something that helps working families deal with still-too-high prices. So we need to get in their grills about this right away.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the College for All Act. Don’t think of this as being about TEH FREE STUFFZ FORZ TEH YOUNGZ PEEPULZ!!!!! Think of it as being about restoring the reality of 60 years ago, when state colleges were generally free for state residents; that’s just one thing that helped build the greatest middle class in world history. Of course, right-wingers said the last thing you want is an educated working class, and so Our Glorious Elites have spent the last few decades making higher ed unaffordable. But we need to fix that, so we can, dare I say, make America educated again.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act, which would at long last tax millionaire income into the system and expand benefits for everyone. Our Glorious Elites pretend that cutting Social Security is the “bold” move, but you don’t cut a program that everyone likes and that works well because of large budget deficits caused largely by Republican tax cuts for the rich – you expand that program! Cutting Social Security because blah blah get mandatory spending under control bullshit bullshit – isn’t “bold” so much as it’s stupid. And we have a duty, as Americans, not to tolerate stupidity.

Action: concerning education, cruelty to animals, and Arctic drilling.

Long story short: tell the College Board to stop caving to right-wingers over its AP African-American Studies course, tell your Congressfolk to ban glue traps, and tell our government to reject the Willow drilling plan in the Arctic Ocean. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell the College Board to stop caving to right-wingers over the AP African-American Studies course. The Florida Board of Education rejected it, and then Gov. DeSantis (E-FL) said it was worthless, and how did the College Board respond? By removing “controversial” elements and adding more right-wing Black content to the curriculum! They said educators were weak, and they were right! Not that I mind teaching people about Thomas Sowell; at least it’ll innoculate students against folks like Thomas Sowell in real life. But we’ve got to stop treating right-wing whining as if it’s “serious discourse.”

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation outlawing glue traps. We think of glue traps as a “humane” way to get rid of mice, but it’s not – it causes the pest to starve to death, at the very least, and can even cause it to suffocate (if its mouth gets in the glue, presumably); a more humane way of getting rid of mice would be to get a cat or two, and usually cats don’t even have to kill mice, but merely deter them. You know, we don’t know a whole lot about death – we think about it a lot, and we tell ourselves stories about it so we feel better about it, but we imagine things like glue traps aren’t cruel merely because all the animals’ suffering happens out of our sight. But “out of sight” doesn’t mean “doesn’t suffer.”

Finally, Food and Water Watch helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to reject the Willow drilling plan in the Arctic ocean. By now you know the drill: cleaning up spills in the Arctic is many times harder than cleaning them up in temperate climes (and corporations don’t want to clean up their messes there, either!). Also, we know so little about the ecosystems up there that we really ought to avoid screwing it up – though we do know enough about the salmon industry in Alaska (one of the world’s biggest) that we know we’ll screw it up if we’re not careful. And it’s never a matter of “if” a big oil corporation will spill a lot of oil into our oceans – it’s always a matter of when. So, yeah, let’s not do this stupid thing, either.

Action: concerning taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject to so-called “FAIR” tax, institute a billionaire’s income tax, and tax excessive corporate profits. 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 reject any effort to ram the so-called “FAIR” Tax down our throats. Democrats should be running a thousand attack ads saying instead of making the rich and corporations pay their fair share of taxes, Republicans want to make you pay 30% inflation on everything you buy! They could also say 60% inflation, since the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy says we’ll need to institute that big a tax to make up for all the lost income, corporate, and estate taxes – all of which the “FAIR” Tax would repeal. Still, you could say all that to your House Rep. It’s all true.

Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a billionaire’s minimum income tax. Which would not be a “100% tax” or whatever BS Donald Trump said that time, but a 2% tax on billionaire wealth. Really, this is the least they should do! We should be taxing the hell out of income over a million dollars so we don’t have obnoxious billionaires to begin with! And with fewer billionaires, we’ll have more millionaires, and we sure as hell will have more successful small businesses. All these things help a civilization! So we ought to fight for them, by first making the rich pay more of their fair share.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax excessive corporate profits. When you have the highest inflation in 40 years and record corporate profits at the same time, you don’t need to be a Fulbright Scholar to see the connection. And a windfall corporate profits tax would allow us to impose a surcharge on all this corporate price-gouging, simply by measuring current profits against average profits for the last five years (or, possibly, by simply assessing a 4% surcharge on corporate profits, since inflation’s generally been around 2% and is now over 6%). However we do it, we’ve got to show CEOs that greed has consequences.

Action: concerning Social Security and Medicare, campaign finance reform, and stupid Congressional investigations.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, overturn the Citizens United decision, and end frivolous investigations. 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.

Today’s as good a day as any to call your Reps and Senators and tell them not to cut Medicare or Social Security benefits. (I say “benefits” because people like Rick Scott pretend that cutting costs, as Medicare drug price negotiation would do, is the same as cutting benefits.) Don’t believe the hype that “Republicans don’t want to cut Social Security and Medicare,” because of course they do, and remember: they don’t need 218 votes to cut Social Security and Medicare, they only need five votes, since that’s the number of Republicans who can prevent a bill from getting to the 218 votes it'd need to pass our House. But if we communicate our will in force, we can prevent this catastrophe.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to overturn our Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United decision now. How much money did campaigns spend during the 2022 elections? Nearly $17 billion! Can you think of better things to do with $17 billion than run stupid ads trying to get clowns elected to offices they don’t deserve? Yes, you can – and so can the CEOs spending the money, if they’d abandon their stock market über alles paradigm and return to helping us create an economy that’s a little more grounded in reality. Actually restricting the ability of the rich to spend billions of dollars so frivolously will help us get to that economy.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop conducting stupid “investigations.” Folks may say that since the people elected Reps who somehow think our government has “weaponized” against “conservatives,” that those Reps have the right to conduct investigations as they please, but that’d only be true in a nation where your will only counts on Election Day. Does your will only count on Election Day? No, it counts every day, and our Congressfolk are supposed to do our will every day, so you can tell your Congressfolk what to do every day. And if that results in less self-pitying whining from right-wingers, all the better.

Action: concerning junk fees, tax cheats, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fight junk fees, reject efforts to repeal IRS funding, and confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC. 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 legislation outlawing “junk fees.” You are no doubt acquainted with the “service fees” that come with event tickets and airline tickets, or the “early termination fees” you get slammed with when you change phone or internet providers. Well, guess what? Nobody likes them, except for the corporate executives who dream them up and the politicians who lap up their money, and we shouldn’t let them have all the say about everything. The Biden Administration has moved against credit card late fees and bankster junk fees, but our Congressfolk ought to have the good sense to get aboard. The American people want it, after all.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to reject the House bill that would defund our IRS. You’ve heard me say Republicans only hate the parts of our government that actually help good Americans? Here’s a perfect example! Republicans spent years defunding the police at our IRS so they couldn’t go after rich tax cheats – and thus our IRS only went after poor tax cheats, which is, oddly enough, what Republicans warned would happen if we funded our IRS like we give a damn about law and order. Republicans sure do have a disconnect with reality. So let’s stop enabling them.

Finally, Restore the Fourth helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) already. Ignore the obnoxious corporate propaganda that has prevented her confirmation! Ms. Sohn has fought for an open internet for three decades, and she helped create both the Open Internet Order that codified net neutrality in our laws and the Broadband Consumer Privacy Rules that protected consumer privacy on our internet. Of course, the Trump FCC repealed the Open Internet Order and the Republican Congress repealed the privacy rules in 2017, but Ms. Sohn has done good works her whole life, and would keep doing so as FCC Commissioner.

Action: concerning workers' rights, separating families, and cruelty to animals.

Long story short: tell Amazon to negotiate with organized workers already, tell your Congressfolk to outlaw separating families over unpaid foster care bills, and tell our government to outlaw cruel hunting practices. 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 Financial Reform helps you tell Amazon to negotiate with its labor union already. When evil can’t prevent something from happening, what do they do? They stall, in this case by simply refusing to meet with the union that the workers have already approved to get them better pay, benefits, and working conditions. This is like when Republican Presidents simply delay writing legally-mandated clean air and clean water regulations, because they can’t win the argument on the merits, and they can't simply disregard our laws. And Amazon may think they're Too Big to Fail, but they can’t disregard our laws, either. Particularly if we all let them know we’re watching them.

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation ensuring that states can’t take children away from families over unpaid foster bills. This mainly affects families who become homeless and put their kids in foster care, but that could be any of us but for the grace of God, and anyway why aren’t our taxes paying for temporary foster care? Ask the politicians who’ve been slashing taxes at the behest of their corporate and wealthy masters. I’m sure state and local officials will say well, we need money, too! But great civilizations don’t split up families to collect debts. And great civilizations certainly don’t treat people as a commodity – especially children, who can’t even legally consent to much of what happens to them.

Finally, the Humane Society helps you tell our National Park Service to outlaw cruel hunting practices in Alaska. This is a no-brainer, seriously, and what do right-wingers say in response? That we should “trust hunters” to do what’s right? If you don’t know it’s wrong to kill mother bears in their dens while their cubs watch so you can hang a trophy on your wall, then we shouldn’t “trust” you any more than we “trust” our elected officials to do the right thing. We all have a duty to maintain and strengthen our civilization, and identifying a group of “tough guys” you want to pander to (and if they’re so tough, why do they need pandering?) doesn’t excuse them from that sacred duty.

Action: concerning price-gouging, D.C. statehood, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell our government to stop COVID vaccine price-gouging, and tell our Congressfolk to enact legislation making Washington, D.C. a state and repealing the notorious Hyde Amendment. 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 our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to stop big pharma’s attempts to price-gouge us on COVID-19 vaccines. I almost typed “their” vaccines in that sentence, but that would have been a mistake, since they developed those vaccines with massive infusions of taxpayer money, i.e., our money. And that alone should give our HHS Department the authority to stop price-gouging on our behalf! Republicans will say they don’t have that right, but we all know by now that Republicans only hate the parts of Big Gubmint that actually help good Americans. So ignore them.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation granting statehood to Washington, D.C. Currently they don’t have it, even though they have more citizens than Vermont or Wyoming, and not having statehood causes problems – like when right-wing crybabies want to overthrow our government and D.C. has to wait for Virginia to call out their National Guard to help beat that attempted coup back. It causes other problems, like when right-wing politicians at the federal level make decisions for D.C. they shouldn’t be able to make. Don’t brook any whining about D.C. statehood meaning “two more Democratic Senators”! If Republicans want Senators that bad, they can win arguments.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance (or EACH) Act, which would repeal the Hyde Amendment (that prevents federal funding of abortion in public health insurance programs like Medicaid) and keep our government from interfering with private health insurance corporations that cover the cost of abortions. With 58% of Americans approving of Medicaid covering abortions and disapproving of the Hyde Amendment, our Congressfolk should understand that they need to adhere to the will of the people here, as elsewhere. It is their damn job, after all.

Action: concerning debt limit drama, factory farms, and OAN.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end debt limit hostage-taking and pass the Farm System Reform Act, and tell Roku to boot OAN from its streaming TV lineup. 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 “end the debt limit game of blackmail” and actually reform the whole system. And not in the way Sen. Hawley (E-MO) would – by simply exempting Social Security and Medicare from the debt limit, which won’t end right-wing hostage-taking – but by either passing the Protect Our CREDIT Act (which would force Congress to disapprove of a Presidential debt limit-lifting by a two-thirds vote) or simply repealing the debt limit altogether. I prefer the latter solution, and that’s what I’ll tell my Congressfolk to do. So a clean debt limit now, repeal it in the future, and enough of the damn drama already.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Farm System Reform Act, which would ban the construction of new factory farms and phase out existing ones by 2040. Don’t be the fool who says but then chicken will cost a million dollars, because big corporations raise prices whenever they feel like it; indeed, we’ve received a Master’s-level education in this truism over the last two years. And factory farms cause or enable a host of other evils, be that antibiotic abuse, animal abuse, or a complete refusal to rotate crops or try new varieties of crops. The worst evil, of course, is the evil factory farms do to the small farmer who’s trying to do the right thing and make a living.

Finally, UltraViolet helps you tell Roku to drop One America News Network (or OAN, or OANN) from its free channel lineup. You may hesitate before this task. We asked big cable corporations to drop OAN, but those were big cable corporations charging us an arm and a leg for their product; if you’re not paying for Roku, then what’s the harm? Here’s the harm: inclusion in a free channel lineup like Roku or Pluto TV gives a channel legitimacy, and invites corporate advertisers to place their wares before their viewers, which entrenches that unearned legitimacy. Anyway, who says we can’t tell Roku what to do? People who believe in private property über alles, and those people should not get all the say about everything.

Action: concerning taxes, Social Security, and Medicare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the FAIR Tax, lift the Social Security payroll tax cap, and end Medicare privatization. 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 reject the so-called FAIR Tax, which would replace income and corporate taxes with a single, national 30% sales tax. Remember when inflation was 9% not that long ago? Now think of the FAIR Tax as 30% inflation. Better yet, think of it as 60% inflation, since the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy says the tax would have to be that big to make up for all the lost income and corporate tax revenue. Hate to pile on, but rich people who don’t spend as much of their money as you do will make out like bandits. So let’s put yet another stupid idea in the ground.

Demand Progress helps youtell your Congressfolk to lift the payroll tax cap on Social Security, so that Social Security can tax income above $162,000 annually. And Jesus Mary and Joseph no more bullshit about Social Security being an “entitlement” or how it’s “running out of money,” particularly when we can alleviate any future money problems by taxing more of rich folks’ income into the system. With even Joe Manchin making pleasing noises about the concept, we should note that this could be done though budget reconciliation – if not with this House of Clowns, then with a Democratic House starting in 2025. They’ll have to hold onto the Senate, too, but everything worth doing in life is hard.

Finally, People’s Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end Medicare privatization. OK, the way they put it is “tell Congress to stop Medicare profiteers,” but “profiteer” is a good enough word for private health insurance corporations that work through so-called Medicare Advantage, particularly since we’ve heard so many news reports lately of Medicare Advantage not paying for services. Indeed, not only does Medicare “Advantage” kick a lot of sick seniors off their health care plans, but a lot of folks switch back to traditional Medicare in their last year of life. They say “older and wiser” for a reason, apparently! But us younger folk can sure do a better job taking care of our elders.

Action: concerning monopolies, data privacy, and recycling.

Long story short: tell our government to fight various forms of monopoly behavior, tell our government to protect good Americans’ data privacy, and tell our EPA to revamp the “widely-recyclable” label so that it describes plastics that can actually be recycled. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

In anticipation of President Biden’s State of the Union address tonight, in which we expect he’ll talk at length about the importance of fighting monopoly power in America, let’s do all the monopoly-fighting in one paragraph today: Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to ban non-compete agreements so Americans have more freedom to work where they like, plus they also help you tell our Department of Justice to break up the LiveNation/Ticketmaster monopoly so good Americans can go to concerts without paying an arm and a leg again. Meanwhile, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our FTC to crack down on “junk fees” banksters like to charge, plus they also help you tell our federal government to break up repeat-offender corporation Wells Fargo. Also, Inequality Media helps you tell our FTC to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger so good Americans have more choices among our nation’s supermarkets. It may take a few more minutes today, but a few more minutes today may mean a lifetime of more freedom later, and that’s worth it.

Free Press helps you tell our government to protect good Americans’ online privacy a lot better than they currently do. Free Press cites the recent T-Mobile customer information hack (the second in two years, apparently!) as a news hook, but let’s be frank: in 2017, our government repealed pretty good FCC regulations that protected American’s online privacy, because the economy Big Gubmint light touch campaign donations. Our government hurt us that day; you may have noticed that I’m pretty unforgiving when our government hurts us. But, you know, if they want forgiveness, they can always do the right thing. I am capable of forgiving and forgetting; if it doesn’t seem that way, that might be our government’s fault more than mine.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to make sure that plastic corporations that make non-recyclable plastic can’t use the “widely-recyclable” label on their products. Sounds an awful lot like common sense, right? But then we know our government’s tenuous relationship with the concept – common sense tends to fly right out the window whenever it conflicts with some corporation’s “right” to more unearned goodies, and so it goes here, where we recycle less than 3% of all polypropylene plastic, for example, but are willing to stamp far too much of it with the “widely-recyclable” label. That induces good Americans (especially good American waste workers) to waste a lot of time with stuff that’s in the wrong bin. Let’s not have that.

Action: concerning campaign finance, price-gouging, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment overruling Citizens United and prevent big oil corporation price-gouging, and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC already . 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 a Constitutional amendment to overturn our Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling now. That ruling called laws restricting campaign finance “unconstitutional,” even though virtually everyone in America, conservative or liberal, supports such restrictions, and anyway money isn’t “speech” any more than a corporation’s a person. And though its proponents argue that redressing one’s grievances against a government costs money these days, having more money shouldn’t give you “more rights.” (I wish that were the worst argument against campaign finance reform; this post I wrote almost nine years ago lists some of those.)

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would penalize big oil corporations for price-gouging. Whenever you see high price hikes coupled with high profits, you’re free to say “look, I’m not a schmuck.” Oh, sure, they said it was the war in Ukraine, but, again, we’re not schmucks. And we don’t live in a “free” market, either – we live in a corporation-dominated market, where corporations make decisions based on what delivers the most money to their executives and shareholders, not on, you know, what’s good for people. Or even what’s good for the corporation long-term! And that’s why our government has to step in on our behalf.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission already. Look, I don’t care that big telecom corporations hate her, and I don’t care that one police union in Chicago hates her; I care that she helped create our FCC’s short-lived net neutrality order from 2016. Every normal person who’s ever thought about net neutrality – the principle that you, not some corporation, should decide how fast and in what order internet documents gets to your computer – likes it; it doesn’t matter whether they’re liberal or conservative, and when liberals and conservatives stand together against the corporations, we deserve to win. Getting Gigi Sohn on our FCC will help us get that win.

Action: concerning Medicare privatization, corporate taxes, and price gouging.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to get private corporations out of Medicare and close corporate tax loopholes, and tell our FTC to investigate the egg industry for price-gouging. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to get private insurance corporations out of Medicare. Tha Bush Mobb opened the door to private corporations taking taxpayer money to deliver worse service than our government – and thus “prove” the right-wing canard that TEH BIG GUBMINTZ DOESN’TZ WORKZ!!!! – and even under President Biden that door’s opened wider, even though higher costs and worse service accompany every privatization scheme. And instead of worrying that your granddad won’t get dental and hearing care, ask yourself why every Medicare recipient doesn’t get dental and hearing care. (Spoiler alert: Kyrsten Sinema wouldn’t allow it in 2021, because bipartisanship!)

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to close corporate tax loopholes. Of course, another way to describe corporate tax loopholes is corporate welfare, since corporations are getting public money for doing not a damn thing. Or for doing what they were going to do anyway! Seriously, corporations need an “incentive” to spend money developing products? What the hell else do they have to do? Yes, I know, corporations have spent the last 40 years doing nothing but whatever raises their stock prices, and some of President Biden’s policies have started to break that nefarious trend. But we still need to tell our Congressfolk that corporate welfare is evil and that they need to fight it.

Finally, Demand Progress also helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to investigate egg-producing corporations for price-gouging. Yes, anywhere you see price spikes like the one you’ve seen for eggs, your first suspicion should be fraud, and here just as elsewhere, the offending corporations are raising prices and garnering record profits. It’s a shame it’s come to that, but I think it’s pretty obvious by now that big corporations are trying to steal all the money they can before President Biden’s FTC, SEC, and DOJ start winning too many antitrust cases. So we the people are not exactly at a disadvantage here – and we need to press our advantages wherever we can.

Action: concerning health care, corruption, and law and order.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass Medicare-for-All health insurance legislation, pass the CLEAN Act, and pass legislation that would keep police away from traffic stops. 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.

Progressive Hub helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass Medicare-for-All health insurance for all Americans. I bet we all know at least one conservative who says our government couldn’t possibly do a worse job at health insurance than the private corporations do, and when you contemplate how much more money we spend on our patchwork public/private system than virtually every other rich nation on Earth, you can see why. And Medicare-for-All would spend a lot less money on health insurance than our current system. But don’t take my word for it – take the word of the Koch brothers-funded Mercatus Institute.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the CLEAN Act, which would make the Office of Congressional Ethics permanent and give it more power to actually investigate the ethics imbroglios our Congressfolk somehow constantly find themselves in. Making the Office permanent would shield it from the kind of political games we just saw Republicans play, where they used the will-they-or-won’t-they drama of Speaker McCarthy’s ascension to weaken the office, a move so politically fraught just six years ago that even then-President-elect Trump opposed it. One of the reasons we have laws? To protect ourselves from the lawmakers! And it works more often than the cynical would admit.

Black Lives Matter helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would keep police out of the traffic incidents. About one out of every 10 police killings start out as traffic stops, and we all saw the video of five Memphis cops beating Tyre Nichols to death, so we’ve got to do something. And, as I’ve often said, we need to stop using our police officers as the Swiss Army Knives of our culture, and that means getting them out of a lot of situations we take for granted are “police matters” and letting them concentrate on serving warrants and making arrests. I say that’d be more pro-cop than any of the I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!! nonsense you hear from right-wingers every time cops kill Black folks.

Action: concerning mask mandates, Israel and Palestine, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the Travel Mask Mandate Repeal Act, stop funding Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, and pass the FRESH START Through Bankruptcy Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Travel Mask Mandate Repeal Act. Tired of wearing masks on public transit? Maybe you are and maybe you aren’t – me, I still like not getting sick! – but this bill represents yet another Republican attempt to go after an ant in the kitchen with a sledgehammer and not only miss the ant but destroy the refrigerator, because it would repeal all mask mandates and ensure only Congress can enact new ones. These clowns are about to crash the economy over nothing, so I sure wouldn’t trust them to do the job our CDC obviously does better even if you’re not completely happy with it.

The American Friends Service Committee helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop funding Israel’s oppression of Palestinians – if nothing else, Israel has more than enough funding and arms to keep stoking the cycle of violence there without our help – and Progress America helps you tell President Biden to fight the Netanyahu agenda, which includes enabling far right-wing racists and hamstringing courts. Most Presidents, Democrat or Republican, make noise about standing up to Israel every once in a while, and none of them ever do. And now the fascists are poised to take control of Israel! There’s a lesson in there, somewhere. And we have to make our government learn it.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the FRESH START Through Bankruptcy Act, which would let folks discharge their student loan debt via bankruptcy after 10 years. Currently student loan debt is the only kind of debt that bankruptcy can’t help fix, which should help convince you that our bankruptcy system – “reformed” by Tha Bush Mobb in 2005 – is broken. Don’t let folks tell you this bill will induce “laziness” on the part of our youth – old folks have been calling young folks lazy since time immemorial! – because students can still get in trouble for not paying their loans during that decade they can’t declare bankruptcy.

Action: concerning workers' rights and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect workers’ right to organize, reject House efforts to defund the police at our IRS, and tax capital gains at the same rate as wages. 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.

If you’re bummed to hear that the percentage of union-organized workers has hit a historic low – although the raw number of unionized workers did increase by more than 250,000 last year – then you may want to call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, which would make it a lot harder for corporations to intimidate their workers, and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which would make governments let their workers organize. Winning union elections ain’t enough if your boss won’t negotiate and you can’t get our government to make them; both these bills will help these matters.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to reject the House Republicans’ plan to defund the police at our IRS and protect the rich and corporate tax cheats they seem to consider their only real constituents. They say funding our IRS enables them to come after you, but our IRS has only been going after poor people because they don’t have the money to fight rich people and their lawyers! I’d like to think that’s a reason Republicans fell far short of expectations during the midterms. If it’s not, I’m going to be banging this saucepan for a long, long time! And so should you, particularly with your Senators.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk we should tax capital gains at the same rate we tax wages. It’s all income, after all! Tha Bush Mobb’s 2003 tax “reform” spewed forth this particular injustice; they actually wanted you to think investors need more “protection” from taxes than secretaries and bus drivers! They also wanted you to think unrealized assets aren’t income, either. When rich folks got all those low- or no-interest loans, they backed them with unrealized assets! They won’t get more of those loans now, thanks to the Fed’s interest rate hikes, but the injustice of working folks getting taxed harder than rich folks remains. And we should fight that until it’s gone.

Action: concerning law and order, debt limit drama, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell Alabama’s Governor to commute Rocky Myers’s death sentence, tell President Biden to hold the line against Republican debt-limit drama, and tell our Justice Department to go after states that try to make abortion drugs illegal. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. Amnesty International helps you tell Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey to commute Rocky Myers’s death sentence. Mr. Myers has been on death row for the murder of his neighbor since 1994, but his conviction has, well, more than a few problems – slim-to-none evidence actually links him to the murder and the evidence that does has inconsistencies and the taint of possible cop coercion, plus he’s been diagnosed as intellectually-disabled since he was 11 and his state-appointed appeals lawyer basically abandoned him. Oh, but there’s more: the judge in his case overruled the jury in giving him a death sentence, which is now illegal in Alabama. This shouldn’t be tough! Unless you’re trying to look “tough,” I guess.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to keep holding the line against Republican debt ceiling hostage-taking. He’s been holding the line against this particular drama so far, but we’ll need to keep reminding him that we don’t want Republicans to crash the economy so they can get spending cuts they’re not even willing to spell out. The only people who want the chaos and disorder that comes with Republican hostage-taking are Our Glorious Elites, who have no memory of what real work is like, if they ever even did it in the first place. And (as evidenced, I would think, by the word “elites”) they sure ain’t a majority of Americans, so they shouldn’t get all the say about everything.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell our Justice Department to challenge, in court, all state abortion bans that contravene federal law. Because they have a good argument – namely, that federal law invests in our Food and Drug Administration the authority to determine good Americans’ access to abortion drugs (which have proven to be safe enough to use at home) one can get through online or brick-and-mortar pharmacies, so states don’t actually have the right to ban such drugs. Remember: if you’re against abortion, don’t have one. You may have heard that a lot of pro-life women don’t even adhere to this dictum.

Action: concerning labor and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell our FTC to slap down non-compete agreements in employment contracts, tell your Congressfolk to stop accepting donations from the National Restaurant Association (a.k.a. “the other NRA”), and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC already. 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 share your experience with non-compete agreements with our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC). No doubt your experience with a non-compete agreement in your employment contract, one that prevents you from taking a higher-paying (or simply better) job with a competitor of your current employer, is not positive, since we know (both from scientific study and common sense) that non-compete agreements drive down wages and make workers less free. And you know big corporations will weigh in with their bogus arguments about “trade secrets” (which entirely different laws deal with!), so our FTC needs to hear from you.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop accepting campaign contributions from the “other” NRA, the National Restaurant Association. They’re yet another “small business association” that exists solely to redistribute worker income upward to executives, and lately they’ve made low-paid food workers take a $15 food safety class and then used that money to fund its own efforts to keep their wages down! And I’ll bet the whippersnapper who came up with that “food safety” scam thinks he’s the smartest person who ever lived, though he may not feel that way when he gets to the Pearly Gates. But if we expose this scam now, we'll save souls in the future -- maybe even his!

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Senators to confirm net neutrality architect Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission. President Biden nominated her again, because she’d do good work for America, and 51 Democratic Senators can more easily ignore the excuses offered by big telecom corporations than 50 could. I know Joe Manchin voiced “doubts” about Ms. Sohn, but I bet Kyrsten Sinema – who opposes net neutrality, because nothing says “maverick” like taking the side of the corporations against virtually every American! – was the real reason Ms. Sohn couldn’t get on our FCC before. Put Ms. Sohn on our FCC and we not only get better telecom policy, we isolate Ms. Sinema further, as she deserves.

Action: concerning abortion rights and social media.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to protect federal abortion law, tell online pharmacies to shop sharing abortion-related data with Google, and tell big social media corporations to hold Donald Trump to the same community standards as everyone else. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Justice to challenge, in court, any state abortion ban that violates our federal laws. Our FDA has lately finalized a rule making medication abortions (via mifepristone and misoprostol) more available to good Americans – even though online pharmacies – but of course right-wing state governments want to make medication abortions illegal, which would (at the least) scare a lot of people into not getting the abortions they need because they’ll leave a data trail on the internet. Our Justice Department may not support federal law very vigorously here – unless we demand that they do it.

In a related note, Daily Kos helps you tell online pharmacies that sell abortion pills to stop sharing private patient info with Google. Because that data – whether it’s location data, device data, or unique browser data – could identify folks to local law enforcement personnel, and those personnel could be trying to enforce a state law that federal law pre-empts. Federal law does allow Americans to get mifepristone and misoprostol, after all, and our Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, not our FDA’s authority to regulate those drugs. Remember: if you’re against abortion, then don’t use abortion pills.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell big social media corporations like Twitter and Facebook to hold Donald Trump to the same standards they hold everyone else if they start publishing his nonsense again. Seriously, don’t brook any stridency about “free speech” – do magazine and book publishing corporations publish every manuscript they get because of “free speech”? No, they do not. And ignore Elon Musk’s pretensions – these corporations do actually have community standards, and they’ll hold you or I to them when we cross them but pretend it’s “free speech” when the rich and powerful do it. That’s evil, and we should fight it.

Action: concerning student loan debt and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to let student debt be discharged via bankruptcy, stop scam political action committees, and undo the harm caused by the Citizens United decision. 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 let student loan debt be discharged via bankruptcy. Since the late ‘90s it’s been almost prohibitively difficult to do that, and not long after that college started to become almost prohibitively expensive; think there might be a connection there? I’d be a schmuck if I didn’t! So when you hear that young folks ought to just buckle up and pay their debts, remember that colleges have made all those debts much, much larger than they’ve ever been, and the least we can do to free people from a life of servitude (yes, college is that expensive now!) is let them get rid of their debts through bankruptcy after a decade.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Scam PACs Act. Some Political Action Committees (or PACs) exist just to steal money from seniors and veterans and redistribute that income to PAC executives, believe it or not. (OK, it’s not actually that hard to believe.) But the Stop Scam PACs Act – sponsored by Reps. Porter (D-CA) and Crenshaw (R-TX) during the last Congress – would amend the Federal Election Campaign Act so our government can go after anyone (not just folks who’ve committed actual fraud) who misrepresents themselves so they can steal money from vulnerable Americans. That’d be a big help to those folks, and we should help them.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would undo the evil effects of our Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC ruling and start reigning in campaign finance again. I know – the Republicans in charge of our House now would never do that, and the minority Republicans in our Senate would filibuster any legislation that somehow made it out of our House. But our will is our will, and almost no one in America, conservative or liberal, thinks unrestrained campaign financing is a good thing. When they don’t listen, we just keep telling them, because we’re right.

Action: concerning the debt ceiling, hedge funds, and taxes.

Long story short: tell President Biden to hold the line on a clean debt ceiling increase, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act and reject Republican efforts to defund the police at our IRS. 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 President Biden to reject Republican hostage-taking and demand a clean debt ceiling increase. Republicans want to force Social Security and Medicare cuts, and they surely have other irredeemable evils in mind, but they don’t get to do any of that just because they have a tiny majority in our House. President Biden has held the line so far, and good for him, but he needs to stay strong, which means we need to remind him to stay strong. Even Barack Obama wouldn’t negotiate with Republicans the second time they tried to take our government hostage in 2013, and Joe Biden was there for all of that, but we still must keep expressing our will.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act, which would (as its title suggests!) ban hedge funds from buying up so many American homes that actual Americans can’t buy them or live in them themselves. And when good Americans can’t buy a home, they also can’t bind themselves to our communities in a way that nourishes those communities. So don’t brook any “free” market silliness. Hedge funds shouldn’t get to do whatever they want – they should serve American communities, and when they keep houses out of good Americans’ hands so they can gamble with them (and with our economy!), they don’t serve us at all.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Republican plan to defund the police at our IRS. Or, as one email missive put it: “why are Republicans helping criminals?” Too many Americans secretly cheer rich tax cheats, presumably because they'd like to be that rich, but tax cheats are criminals, and the richest of them cheat all of us. When rich folks don’t pay the millions (or billions!) in taxes they owe, that means less money to fix roads, less money to fund schools, and less money to keep our air and water clean. Among other things! So we need to stop this latest effort to serve mammon.

Action: concerning education and voting rights.

Long story short: tell Florida to teach the AP African-American studies course, tell North Dakota to stop targeting gay and trans books in book bans, and tell Pennsylvania to reject proposed sore loser constitutional amendments. 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 state legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Organize For helps you tell the Florida state Board of Education to let high schools there teach African-American studies. The AP African-American Studies program may be new, but that doesn’t mean it “significantly lacks educational value,” as Gov. DeSantis says. And don’t take it for granted that Florida already teaches the Black experience, not just because Florida Republicans have created a lot of education drama lately, but because a lot of Floridian crybabies pretend to be “offended” when someone points out the South embraced slavery and Jim Crow with both arms. But facts are facts, and Americans face them.

North Dakota residents, take note: state legislators want to throw librarians in jail if they don’t remove “sexually-explicit” books from public school libraries. And “sexually-explicit” includes any book about gay or trans issues, though those books aren’t “sexually explicit” just because of their subject matter. Another way of putting it: sexuality isn’t “explicit,” let alone “obscene,” merely because it’s different from yours, and certainly not if you’re not actually watching it. So Openstates.org helps North Dakota residents find their state legislators. And remember we have a word for book banning efforts that target folks oppressed due to race or sexuality, and that word is fascist.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause still helps you tell your state house Reps to reject the Republican suite of sore loser constitutional amendments that would enshrine Voter ID in our state constitution – remember when Tom Corbett’s government couldn’t make Voter ID work, even before our state Supreme Court struck it down? – and put the state’s (Republican) Auditor General in charge of elections. That latter item, especially, isn’t just sore loser thinking but short-term thinking – what if a Democrat wins the Auditor General race in 2024? Then Republicans will amend our state constitution again, I guess. You’ve heard that power without wisdom is evil? Republicans prove it every day.

Action: concerning price-gouging and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop big oil price-gouging and reject the so-called FAIR Tax. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to penalize big oil corporations for price-gouging. It ain’t tough math: high inflation plus high profits at the same time equal big corporations taking advantage of us. I always thought gas prices shooting up at the same time as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a cover, too. It’s amazing how, even 20 years ago, even conservative economics would have caught this rather intimate relationship between high inflation and high profits, but today's right-wingers don’t care about facts, only about drama. And our “liberal” media has coddled them for too long. But that’s why we step up.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to pass the so-called FAIR Tax. The so-called FAIR Tax would replace our income, corporate, and payroll taxes with a national sales tax, one they used to call a “23% tax” although it was always a 30% tax. 30 cents on the dollar is 30%, you see, but 30 is 23% of $1.30, and 23 is less than 30, so it sounds better! But it’s not how we’ve done math for thousands of years, and when most folks realize they’re paying a lower tax rate right now – even the 24% bracket extends all the way up to $182,100 in income for single folks – they won’t go for a 30% sales tax. But we’ve got to make folks realize that, and we have to put our Congressfolk on notice.

Action: concerning pollution, forced arbitration, and renters' rights.

Long story short: tell our EPA to enact stronger soot standards, tell the New York Times to get rid of forced arbitration clauses for subscribers, and tell Connecticut state legislators to do more to keep rents down. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous soot standards possible. Our EPA last updated the standards about a decade ago, and set those standards a bit higher than scientists would have liked; the Trump Administration, of course, ignored calls to tighten the standard in 2019, but perhaps this EPA will listen a little more closely. Tighter standards ain’t a whole lot to ask, especially since soot particles are so small they can go right to your bloodstream, and wreak all kinds of havoc, including asthma, COPD, Parkinson’s, dementia. So if big polluting corporations whine, let’s remind them that America is a can-do country.

Public Citizen helps you tell the New York Times to stop forcing its subscribers into arbitration. You’re an American, so if you’ve got a problem with the Times, you should be able to address that problem in a court of law, not some “arbitration” “court” that’ll almost certainly rule against you. And you should be able to band together with your fellow Americans in a class-action suit, too. Forced arbitration is easier and cheaper for the Times, but you can’t place a high-enough price on lost rights. Don’t believe the right-wing hype that average arbitration awards are bigger than average class action awards. What’ll your “average” be after you lose? Zero.

Finally, Cap the Rent CT helps you tell the Connecticut state legislature to start protecting renters more. Rent in Connecticut has gone up 20%, on average, and in some areas has gone up 40%; have we had 20% inflation over the last two years? No, but just as corporations have hidden their record profits in our high inflation just because they can, landlords have jacked up rent prices beyond what their increased costs require, just because they can. Cap the Rent helps you ask for (among other things) a 3% cap on rent hikes and expanded Good Cause protections (so landlords can’t just throw you out without a good reason). Hard to believe anyone would oppose such things, but that’s we speak out: so they don’t.

Action: concerning debt ceiling drama, high drug prices, and defunding the police.

Long story short: tell President Biden to demand a clean debt ceiling increase, and tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to jack up prices on life-saving medicines or defund the police at our IRS . 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 President Biden to demand a clean debt ceiling increase from Congress, one that doesn’t cave to Republican attempts to take us all hostage. “Clean” means no Social Security cuts, no Medicare cuts, and no cuts to our CFPB, SEC, FTC, or DOJ Antitrust Division, all of which are doing great work attacking the monopolies that crush our civilization. We should win this fight, not just because Democrats control the White House and the Senate, not just because attempts at hostage-taking should always be met with maximum force, but because not even Barack Obama would negotiate with Republicans over the debt ceiling a decade ago.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any Republican attempt to roll back the drug price caps in the Inflation Reduction Act. Shame we have to tell our Congressfolk “don’t jack up prices on life-saving medicines,” but here we are – the Republican Party of George W. Bush and Donald Trump and In That Order, who do unconscionable evil, then gaslight you and call you traitor when you fight them. Whomever votes to raise prices on life-saving medicines should lose their next election. It’d help if Democrats nominate candidates who’ll actually fight for their constituents, and not be the Next Iteration of Pete Buttigieg.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject Republican efforts to defund our police at our Internal Revenue Service. Doesn’t sound so populist when you put it like that, does it? And that’s exactly what Republicans want to do – they want to literally defund the police who catch the rich tax cheats who are their true masters. Oh, sure, they say ZOMG TEH IRSZ IZ COMINGZ AFTURZ YOUZ!!!!!, but that’s horsedoodle – our IRS hasn’t had the money to go after anyone but poor folks for years. Republican fake populism clearly didn’t work for them in the midterms, so let’s not let it work now, when everything counts.

Action: concerning sore losers, junk fees, and insurrectionist lawmakers.

Long story short: tell Pennsylvania state legislators to reject sore loser constitutional amendments, tell our FTC to fight the junk fees that seem ubiquitous in our society, and tell your Congressfolk to investigate legislators who may have committed insurrection against our government. 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.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislator to reject Republican sore loser constitutional amendments that would enshrine Voter ID in our constitution and take election-running authority away from the Commonwealth’s counties and give it to the just-so-happens-to-be-Republican state Auditor General. When Democrats re-took the lower house by one seat, we thought we'd be done with this, but a) one of them died and b) two others resigned to take U.S. House seats; hence we have a problem. But we deal with that problem, as usual, by communicating our will to our state lawmakers until they do our will.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to fight the kind of death-by-a-thousand-cuts junk fees we have to put up with in our cable bills, our ticket sales, and our hotel bills, among so, so many other places. After all, disguising the real cost of your product is illegal. Of course right-wingers say the “free” market will provide a solution, but you know what happens in the sort of “free” market they ram down our throats? Big corporations gobble up other corporations until they have no competitors, meaning you have no actual choice to find another provider for your service, and they can just keep charging you junk fees out the wazoo until you die. And as civilized people, we don’t have to put up with that.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate legislators who may have aided the attempted coup of January 6, 2021 against our government. One new Rep – Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin’s 3rd, bet Ron Kind feels great about retiring now – was there on January 6, and Paul Gosar of Arizona’s 9th, a man so beloved by his own family that they've cut ads urging citizens to vote against him, was allegedly hip-deep in insurrection planning. There are others, including the North Carolina state Rep who tried to erase his own social media posts putting him at the Capitol’s door at the moment crybabies breached it, and our Constitution does prohibit insurrectionists from holding office, so let’s get to it.

Action: concerning Guantánamo Bay, ivory poaching, and public water.

Long story short: tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay already, tell the British Parliament to include hippo teeth in the UK Ivory Act, and tell the California Water Board to protect good Californians’ water from private corporations. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility already. We’re still holding 35 Muslim men there, and we haven’t charged most of them with a crime; at the risk of beating a dead horse, if they were that dangerous, we should be able to charge them with something. Plus we’ve tortured more than a few of them, which of course means we learned nothing of consequence from them, in addition to staining our national heritage further. Generally, if George W. Bush did it, we should stop doing it. That’s a good rule for life as well as politics. And if Joe Biden wants a foreign policy victory, he could get one here, by doing our will and closing Guantánamo.

Care2 helps you tell the British Parliament to improve the UK Ivory Act – which bans the sale of elephant ivory – by also banning the sale of hippopotamus teeth. Hard to believe, but that’s where the demand has gone, now that most countries ban the sale of elephant ivory. Guess which other species has had a hard time sticking around? That’s right, hippos, who (like elephants) are losing habitat all the time and face poachers. I guess right-wingers who didn’t like the UK Ivory Act would natter on about the “unintended consequences” of the law, i.e,, that it’s spurred poaching of hippo teeth. But that’s horsedoodle. When criminals change their tactics, that doesn't mean we just throw our hands up and walk away; it means our laws have to change as well.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell the California Water Board to stop Blue Triton from siphoning public water out of the San Bernardino National Forest. You know the drill by now: big corporations take public water from us for pennies a gallon, and then resell it as “bottled water” for a lot more than that. A government that allows this is either evil or very, very short-sighted. And all that rain California’s gotten lately doesn’t change the fact that they’re still in a drought (since a drought ain’t over after a few days of flooding any more than climate change is over because it snowed three feet). And the money you get from selling off public water lasts a short time, but public water lasts forever – if we can keep it.

Action: concerning methane emissions, screen time, and sales taxes.

Long story short: tell our EPA to issue the strongest methane regulations possible, tell our FTC to keep big tech corporations from manipulating children into staying online forever, and tell 22 states to stop levying sales tax on menstrual products. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The National Resources Defense Council helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to issue the strongest methane regulations possible. Our EPA has lately issued a proposal that updates their 2021 proposal, and that’s good, but it doesn’t go far enough – it could limit flaring and leakage from storage tanks more vigorously, to name two issues. Methane leakage is so prevalent in gas drilling that it's birthed an entire industry (the “methane mitigation” industry) to combat it. And it packs a climate change punch that’s 80 times worse than coal emissions, which are still pretty bad. Accommodating gas drilling corporations ain’t worth it if we don’t have a planet to live on.

Fairplay helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to ban website/app design that manipulates kids into spending more time online. Asvirtually every scientist not directly in the employ of a big tech corporations would tell you, kids don’t need to be spending all that time in front of screens, and they certainly don’t need apps and programs that reward them for spending more time onscreen. Too often we imagine ourselves so helpless in the face of evil. We should react to the news that big corporations manipulate children into spending all their time onscreen not with “well, that’s just the ‘free’ market at work, what can you do?” with “so stop them.” Children are our future, after all.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell 22 states to stop charging sales taxes on menstrual products. I’m not a fan of sales taxes anyway – they hurt working people harder than rich folks – but I’m even less of a fan of sales taxes on essential items, which is why states tend not to assess sales taxes on groceries, though not “luxury” items like coffee. If you’ve ever started bleeding uncontrollably out of your vagina without any warning, then you know that a tampon is not a “luxury” item. For most men, I’m sure it’s a matter of not thinking, though in my experience that statement doesn’t make women feel any better. But if the result is sexist, the intent matters little, and if it’s sexist, we need to fix it.

Action: concerning taxes, voting rights, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell your Senators to block the House’s efforts to defund our IRS, tell Pennsylvania state legislators to reject vote-suppressing constitutional amendments, and tell our Justice Department to investigate the Ticketmaster monopoly. 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. Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Senators to reject the House-passed bill which would defund our IRS of most of the money the Inflation Reduction Act provided. Republicans have been flogging the ZOMG TEH IRS WILL COMEZ FOR TEH YOUZ!!!! lie for years; how’d that work out for them on Election Day? Well, they lost ground in our Senate, and barely won our House, so, ah, not well. And that money would help our IRS go after rich tax cheats; our IRS already goes after poor tax cheats because they’re easy pickings. So let’s not tolerate any more defund-the-police craziness from Republicans.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the ACLU helps you tell your state legislators to reject proposed constitutional amendments that would enshrine Voter ID – which we know amounts to voter suppression against seniors and minorities – and take election oversight away from Pennsylvania’s counties and put it in the hands of the auditor general. Who, let’s check, just so happens to be a Republican right now! What a coincidence! Our legislature must pass such amendments in consecutive terms before they can go before the voters, and our Governor has no part in this process, so we Pennsylvanians had better get in our legislators’ grills right now if we want to stop them from doing this noxious crap.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division to investigate the Live Nation/Ticketmaster monopoly. The Obama DOJ actually said the 2010 Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger would give us “robust competition,” which is a real head-scratcher, and not just because the resulting merger has actually given us sky-high ticket prices, junk fees, and crappy service. When one corporation controls so much of the market, where will you go when that corporation (for example) changes ticket prices once they’re in your basket or assesses fees that increase prices by 75%? Nowhere, that’s where, and that’s why we need to break up Ticketmaster.

Action: concerning the minimum wage, Congressional ethics, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell New York’s Governor to raise that state’s minimum wage to $20/hour, tell your Congressfolk to expel George Santos, and tell President Biden to get with the firing of Postmaster General DeJoy already. 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.

More Perfect Union helps you tell New York Governor Hochul to get on board with raising the state’s minimum wage to $20/hour (and New York City’s minimum wage to $21.25/hour). I can already hear the right-wingers shout WHENZ WILLZ ITZ ENDZ!!!!!, but we first started calling for a $15/hour minimum wage a decade ago, and it still ain’t quite there in New York state. And ain’t nobody’s food and rent prices got lower during that time! I bet we’ll eventually see legal action against today’s landlords for price-fixing, now that President Biden’s made that a thing our government does again. In the meantime, workers need a way to keep their heads above water.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expel Rep. George Santos (R-NY). New York Democrats should have beaten this guy, but they didn’t, so now it’s up to us. Mr. Santos has done so badly that I even doubt he’s gay! Normally when someone says they’re gay, I figure they know themselves better than I do, even when it’s a guy who was married to a woman as recently as 2018 – being gay still gets you beat up in much of America, after all! But now that we know that he’s almost completely fabricated the rest of his life’s story, I don’t even trust him on the one thing I’d be inclined to trust him on. I bet a lot of his constituents feel the same, and they deserve better.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell President Biden to fire Postmaster General DeJoy and expand postal services. After all, Mr. DeJoy tried to sabotage the 2020 election, and has cut jobs and cut services – including the delivery of life-saving medicines – while raising prices. Your typical, post-Reagan CEO pretends the only way to fix budget problems is to cut services, but a bold entrepreneur might say that bringing back basic banking services (which our Postal Service provided until the late ‘60s) might bring in more dough. But the right has folks thinking bold means stupid. Thankfully, we’re not stupid.