Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence and sane drug policy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass six good House-passed bills that "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell won't even allow them to vote on, well, you can still call them and demand both that they vote on it and that they pass it. We need to call them, because if we don't, these Senators can always say "well, I didn't hear about it from my constituents," and we should never let them use that excuse -- particularly during the month of August, when they're all in their home states meeting with constituents, at least nominally. You better believe their big donors are trying to get their attention this month! The six bills in question, as you may recall, are H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Anyone who opposes voting rights, civil rights, fair pay, better pay, internet freedom, and secure elections doesn't deserve to be a Senator anyway.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1456/S. 597, the Marijuana Justice Act, would not only remove pot from federal scheduling (which would essentially legalize pot), but would withhold federal funding for prisons in states that haven't legalized it and have arrested a disproportionate number of folks of color for pot-related offenses. The bill would also expunge federal convictions for pot-related offenses and establish a Community Reinvestment Fund to help communities ravaged by the notorious "war on drugs." We spend too much time and money chasing after pot-smokers when they do about as much damage as drunkards do, and you no doubt recall how our effort at banning alcohol went. Of course, we also spend so much time and money chasing after pot-smokers because our government thought it was a great way to oppress civil rights protestors! Don't just take my word for it, though -- take the word of President Nixon's domestic policy guru/Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichmann! Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact saner drug policy by passing the Marijuana Justice Act.

Action: concerning lead poisoning and obnoxious racism.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 930 would protect Pennsylvania's children against lead in their schools' drinking water, by requiring testing, mandating testing result disclosure to parents, and keeping lead levels in school drinking water below five parts per billion. We're now five years after the Flint drinking water crisis, and residents across Pennsylvania are finding lead in their school drinking water, but we still don't have vigorous standards against lead, though any amount of lead causes brain damage in children, and they don't exactly grow out of that. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Pennsylvania state Reps to protect our children by cosponsoring and passing HB 930. What's the argument against testing our schools' water for lead, I wonder? That "we don't have the money"? If a civilization accepts that as a reason for failing to protect our children, then that civilization deserves to die -- particularly if it keeps handing out endless welfare to corporate cronies.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Twitter to do a much better job policing hate speech on its site, then Color of Change still helps you do that. And to those who squeal TEH FREE SPEECHEZ!!!!, recall that our First Amendment protects us from our government, not from commercial media -- just as your local newspaper is under no obligation to print your neighbor's rants about black folks merely because he wants to be heard, Twitter can ban any speech it likes, and its executives need only worry about whatever PR backlash might result. And if (as Dean Baker said not long ago) Facebook is a publisher and thus should be held to the same standards to which we hold other publishers, then so is Twitter. Twitter's CEO, unfortunately, seems to think obnoxious racism is difficult to define. Here's a clue: when they start putting up swastikas, it means they're obnoxious racists. I mean, you'd have to be, to take up the banner of a nation we defeated in war over 70 years ago.

Action: concerning financial predation and the death penalty.

Because our Administration hates all regulations that actually help good Americans, our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) wants to gut its whistleblower protection program. You can understand why governments hate whistleblowers -- because they expose the wrongdoing of politicians and political appointees! -- but the sheer hatred of the last two Administrations is still a bit surprising. Our SEC's proposed rules would automatically disqualify any whistleblowers who take their concerns directly to SEC Commissioners, would disqualify whistleblowers merely because they filled out paperwork wrong, and would put an arbitrary cap on whistleblower rewards; I'm no great defender of filling out paperwork incorrectly, for example, but the SEC's proposal would be like taking a sledgehammer to an ant. Why, it's almost like they're coming up with ways to protect their cronies from scrutiny! The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell our SEC to abandon its plans to make whistleblowing on financial firms a lot harder.

Meanwhile, the ACLU helps you tell Missouri's Governor to grant clemency to Russell "Rusty" Bucklew, because lethal injection would be, in his case, cruel and unusual. Mr. Bucklew suffers from a rare disease that grows tumors full of blood in his head and neck, and if he gets lethal injection, chances are those tumors would rupture and cause Mr. Bucklew to choke to death on his own blood. If you're reading that and saying so what? He's gonna die anyway, then you're doing civilization wrong -- we're supposed to be leaving as good example for future generations to follow, not wallowing in considerations of expediency until we become corrupt and cynical. And if you're familiar with the crime for which Mr. Bucklew got convicted, you might well be tempted to ask he sure didn't treat his victims with very much mercy, so why should we? Answer: the whole point of civilization is to lift ourselves above the murderer's level, not bring ourselves down to it. Maybe setting a good example will come back into vogue one day, but only if we lead.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2155, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, then Color of Change still helps you do that. S. 2155 would make it a lot less attractive for big private equity corporations to do the thing they've done with impunity the last decade -- buy up large retail corporations, run them into the ground, and suck their wealth out in bonuses and fees on their way out the door. To think they have the gall to say we shouldn't "punish success," and that our richest Americans are merely the ones who have worked the hardest! How does running corporations into the ground and extracting their wealth benefit our civilization? Hell, how does it even qualify as "work"? And these predators have wiped a million jobs from our economy over the last decade; funny how folks who squeal about an increased minimum wage "killing jobs" have nothing to say about that. A lot of these folks are just nihilists, of course, but civilized people don't admire wanton destruction, let alone predators getting rich off it.

Action: concerning racism, immigration, and debt.

Wondering how hate groups get such a foothold on the internet? It ain't because they're right or because they're popular -- it's because they get money to spread their hate, and big charity corporations enable this horror by allowing some $11 million to flow through their "donor-advised funds" (or DAFs) between 2014 and 2017. Don't get the idea that "helping racists donate money to racist groups" is some kind of free speech issue, because a) money ain't speech and b) our First Amendment doesn't exist to promote hate speech, but merely to prevent folks from being thrown in jail merely because their speech is noxious to civilized people. And, ah, what law compels big corporations to fund hate speech merely because some donor wants to? If a donor wants to donate that badly, they can just write a check and send it where it needs to go; our First Amendment does not require that funding hate speech be easier than that. Hence Color of Change helps you tell big corporations to stop enabling the funding of hate groups.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell nine big hotel chain corporations to refuse ICE in their apparent quest to turn American hotels into immigrant detention centers. It's hard for me to see exactly how ICE could compel hoteliers to do this on their behalf, except through intimidation, and indeed four big hotel chain corporations (Marriott, Choice, Hilton, and Hyatt) have refused to cooperate with ICE. You don't even need to find ICE particularly odious to demand that hoteliers stop enabling them! You only need wonder why our government can't provide proper housing for detained immigrants on its own. And you might well conclude that maybe our government spends too much taxpayer money on private prison corporations -- which apparently can't do the job, or else ICE wouldn't be turning to Motel 6. Remember when we all used to imagine that evil was administratively apt? Yeah, this Administration sure is full of "evil geniuses." Nobody ever said Lex Luthor couldn't work within a budget.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) not to make it easier for collection corporations to harass us, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Yes, that's right, our CFPB, which exists to keep us away from financial predators, would allow debt collectors to call you seven times weekly per debt -- meaning per loan, per credit card, per health care bill, and heaven forbid have more than one of any of these -- and would also let debt collectors call your friends and family! I still know right-wingers who would say well, then, don't take on any debt you can't afford! They say this as if people plan to get slammed by unscrupulous health insurance corporations! But you may, if you like, point out them that debt collectors too often call folks about debts they've already paid or never had to begin with. Surely your right-wing acquaintances will find that objectionable. They are very proud people, after all.

Action: concerning Social Security, methane emissions, and working families.

You know how we've been talking about expanding Social Security, so that we can get ahead of talk from Our Glorious Elites about cutting "entitlements"? Well, H.R. 860/S. 229, the Social Security 2100 Act, would do just that, by actually increasing benefit amounts, increasing the amount of Social Security benefits retirees can enjoy tax-free, and creating a Consumer Price Index that accurately reflects seniors' economic trials. You know, rather than using "Chained CPI," which assumes that if something becomes too expensive, folks just switch to something cheaper. Can you imagine seniors "just switching" to cheaper drugs? No, you can't. Social Security has helped hundreds of millions of Americans live a more dignified retirement, free of poverty and want, and this is despite 40 years of politicians and their corporate paymasters trying to wreck the program and advancing every problem they've created as a reason to cut the program. So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our retirements by passing the Social Security 2100 Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2711, the Methane Waste Prevention Act, would require gas drilling corporations to capture 99 percent of the methane gas that escapes from their operations within five years. H.R. 2711 would also require gas drillers to flare (or burn) that minuscule amount of methane gas they fail to trap, and would require our government to set standards for gas drilling equipment so that it doesn't leak methane gas. Methane leakage is, as you know, a byproduct of hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), and it tends to trap far more carbon emissions in our atmosphere than even coal does. And methane is also, you know, usable fuel which does us not one bit of good if it's floating around in our atmosphere. Don't abide any whining about how all this is so hard and will cost gas drilling corporations money; their money isn't more important than our air and our climate. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our clean air and help slow the advance of climate change by passing the Methane Waste Prevention Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject our President's nomination of Eugene Scalia to be our next Secretary of Labor, then CREDO still helps you do that. We don't oppose him because he's the late Justice Scalia's son, but because, well, of his entire career helping big corporations run roughshod over working people; the Wall Street Journal called Mr. Scalia one of the banksters' "go-to guys for challenging financial regulations," which doens't exactly speak to his love of working people, as does his work helping WalMart overturn a Maryland law which would have mandated that WalMart contribute something-anything to their workers' health insurance. Mr. Scalia also seems to have a unique animus against ergonomic safety regulations, which you'd only find sympathetic if you haven't noticed that technology has created more desk jockeys than hard hats over the years. He even lamented that such regulations would force businesses to "hire more workers," to which the only reasonable response would be: we can only hope!

Action: concerning good House bills and a bad Senate bill.

It's Monday, so it's time once again to call our Senators and tell them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. The House passed all these bills, but the Senate won't even vote on them, because Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell (E-KY) won't even hold a vote on any of them. He even calls himself the "Grim Reaper" now! Who but an insane person would be proud of the fact that they refuse to pass legislation promoting voting rights, civil rights, equal pay for women, a higher minimum wage, freedom from corporate interference on the internet, and safe and secure elections? Seriously, let that be your meditation object as you call your Senators. You'd think a few of them would want to go on the record supporting the things I've listed above, but too many of them think of politics as nothing more than team sports -- a profound offense to those of us who call America our team.

In the wake of a mass murder apparently perpetrated by someone who really, really hated immigrants, Republicans have responded swiftly -- with legislation that would further injure immigrants! Yay priorities! S. 1494, the so-called Secure and Protect Act, would (among other nefarious works) impose an unnecessarily high screening standard on potential aslyees, essentially prevent Central American refugees from even getting asylum in the U.S., and deny immigrants due process by subjecting them to abnormally fast "rocket docket" hearings. Naturally, Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called a Committee vote on the bill without even letting Democratic members speak on it, which is what you do when you're really confident in your bill. And aslyees and refugees are actually the least likely people to commit terrorism, because, you know, they're fleeing terrorism in their home countries. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to resist this persistent posturing about immigration by rejecting the so-called Secure and Protect Act.

Action: concerning good science, bad science, and bad media.

You've heard, no doubt, about our Administration's multitudinous attempts to hide and purge scientific information that good Americans deserve to know. Hence S. 2220, the Open and Responsive Government Act, would amend the Freedom of Information Act so that folks couldn't hide "confidential" information from the public unless it would actually cause them substantial harm. S.2220 would also specify more precisely that you can't withhold a big slab of information from the public merely because a portion of it might meet the "substantial harm" standard. These are good ideas, of course, but why are they urgent now? Because our Administration's EPA has packed its scientific advisory boards with (you guessed it) industry figures who could claim all kinds of "substantial harm" if FOIA requests would require answers from them. Of course, I'd rather not have this revolving door between corporations and our government in the first place, but in the meantime, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Open and Responsive Government Act.

Meanwhile, Sky Gray, of Asheville, NC, has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell online retail corporation Amazon to stop selling "conversion therapy" books. "Conversion therapy" -- which aims to "convert" gay folks (including children!) into straight folks by, among other odious methods, making them re-enact their sexual abuse -- is now illegal in 14 states. Are you feeling a little anxious about whether you're "suppressing free speech" by telling Amazon to do this? Rest assured that you're not -- Amazon can always say "no," after all, if they think they can withstand the bad PR that'll result. But our First Amendment only guarantees writers of "conversion therapy" books the right not to be imprisoned by our government for their speech -- it does not guarantee an audience for your speech, and it does not guarantee you the right to make money off your speech. In a sane and moral society, such books would be available at the gay-hating version of Paladin or Loompanics -- but not necessarily on America's biggest bookseller.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell corporations to stop advertising on Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Ingraham Angle on the Fox News (sic) Channel, then Color of Change helps you do that. Why? Well, because of everything they've ever said and done, really, and why do such terrible people get so many TV shows? It's like our media only care about drama! But both talking heads have also spread around plenty of racist pablum over the last few years, and with so many white supremacists going around shooting people these days, well, it's not a good look. And I wish we lived in an America where simply "changing the channel" was enough, but it's not enough, because even if we're not watching it, we're still paying for it, and corporations are still advertising on it. In the absence of a good a la carte cable packaging law, we can at least wield the Big Stick of Bad PR on their advertisers.

Action: concerning social media and Arctic drilling.

CREDO helps you tell big tech corporations Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to ban white nationalist and other hate groups from their platforms. And again, it's not a matter of "free speech no matter how noxious": our First Amendment guarantees that folks can't be put in prison for the mere fact of their noxious speech, but it does not guarantee a platform for your noxious speech, let alone a living. And let's also bury the suggestion that we merely oppose speech "we don't like" -- nobody should like it when far-right assholes cheer another racist for carrying out a mass murder! Big tech corporations (Facebook especially) act like it's so hard to keep assholes from ruining their platforms, but it really isn't -- they could stop valuing executive salaries like they're the only thing worth preserving in civilization and break off some of that money to hire more people to monitor speech on their platforms. For such powerful people, our big tech CEOs sure do act helpless an awful lot. And we shouldn't tolerate such weakness.

Meanwhile, our Department of Interior plans to push ahead with oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) this year, but Environmental Action helps you tell our Secretary of the Interior not to allow drilling in the Refuge. We call it a "refuge," after all, because we'd like some part of the old world to keep going, uninterrupted by the churning of the new one. Of course, the folks in charge of our government now, though they call themselves "conservative," don't value the past except insofar as they can convert it into money for some crony or other. And that's all we'll get by drilling in ANWR, scientists having found that we're not going to extract very much oil from the area. There is something truly noxious about converting wild places into nothing more lasting than money, which always gets spent and always cries out for replacement. Of course, such noxiousness is our President's calling card. Might we at least convert his bad example into a warning for future generations?

Action: concerning banksters, pollution, and privacy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2155, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. You may well be saying to yourself, self, I'd very much like to stop Wall Street looting, too, but would this bill really do that? The answer is yes, S. 2155 would basically take all the joy banksters feel when they suck all the assets out of a corporation -- it would impose a 100 percent tax on all the fees private equity firms impose on a corporation for two years after they buy it, it would make those firms actually take on more of the debt they've assumed rather than simply transfer it back to the corporation they've bought, it would give workers more of a chance to recover what they've lost after their employer goes bankrupt, and it would make private equity firms' doings more transparent. These firms don't just kill big chain stores like Sears and Payless -- they kill local newspapers all over America, too (the Denver Post being the most famous example). And S. 2155 will help us stop them.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 707, 708, and 709 would give the state Attorney General "concurrent jurisdiction" over certain clean air and clean water laws in the state, and thus give our AG the power to initiate investigations into these matters. Given that our Attorney General is supposed to, you know, enforce the law on behalf of the people of the Commonwealth, you would think our AG would be able to do that on his own, but no -- current law mandates that our AG must first get a referral from the state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) or a local district attorney. I have to admit I'm at a loss to explain why the state of Pennsylvania does it that way -- it sounds a lot like a decades-old turf battle won in favor of someone who may not even be alive now, frankly. But we don't need to put up with inter-bureaucratic turf battles, because our Attorney General answers to us. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state Senators to help our state government protect us from pollution by passing SB 707, 708, and 709.

Finally, in the wake of yet another data breach exposing the private data of over 100 million good Americans, Fight for Privacy helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass strong legislation that protects the privacy of good Americans' online information. There's no use saying if you still want privacy, don't put your information online, because putting your information online is basically necessary now, unless you pay for everything with cash and never take out a loan. I will say I continue to be disappointed with our Congressfolk's apparent inability to process the fact that we should be able to opt in to corporate attempts to sell our data to third parties. It wouldn't "break the internet" (as Sen. Toomey infamously put it in 2011), and it wouldn't even be very hard to do -- and it would protect a lot more people from a big bank that somehow decides to put all of its sensitive information on a freaking Amazon cloud server. When will folks realize that "cloud computing" doesn't actually make our lives better? It only makes it easier for big corporations to make big money.

Action: concerning Social Security, renewable energy, and Presidential bad behavior.

2020 is coming, which means more fearmongering from the Koch brothers and their like-minded ilk about "runaway" "entitlements," and which likely also means that our President will go back on his promise not to touch Social Security because of TEH DEFICITZ!!!! he made worse with his tax cuts for the rich (probably not until after re-election, though). And it also means that the "liberal" media outlets that supposedly hate our President will be considerably more blunt then he about the "need" to cut "entitlements." So let's head them off, by telling our Congressfolk that we must expand Social Security, not cut it, as Social Security Works helps you do. The haters keep trying to sound "reasonable" and "serious" about cutting Social Security, and they keep failing -- but only because we stand up to them. We worked for it, we paid into it, we fought for it, and when we retire, we deserve to enjoy it. So don't let the haters and their scare numbers take it from us.

Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend funding for clean energy programs. Would it be crass to mention to them that they take big campaign donations from the fossil fuel corporations they still subsidize even though they don't really need it? No, it would not be crass. Would it be crass to mention that we just had the hottest June in recorded history and massive heat waves devastating the country in July, and that using more renewable energy and less fossil fuel energy would help us suffer less of that? Would it be crass to mention the increased health care costs from dirty air and dirty water caused by pollution from fossil fuels (and, ah, not from renewables)? The answers are, in order, "no" and "no." And though renewable energy has grown tremendously across America over the years, it still only provides about 10% of our electricity, and it still needs support from our government -- which really means support from us, the taxpayers. We should get the livable future we pay for, right?

Elyse Marin has begun a petition on Color of Change which helps you tell the Anschutz Entertainment Group (or AEG) to stop hosting our President's rallies. That's right, it's time for the Big Stick of Bad PR again -- if you're a corporate sponsor giving stadium space to our President so he can have his little Nuremberg rallies where his votaries all squeal "lock her up" and "send her back" and other noxious crap, then you deserve to be pointed out and shamed until you change your behavior. I know there are still folks who are so proud of their cynicism that they'll say well how do you say no to the President, huh? Gosh, 54% of the electorate said no to him on Election Day 2016 (though, as you know, he's not a man who takes "no" very easily!), and anyway, saying no to our President is part of our birthright as Americans, a lesson I bet meant a lot more to the cynics when Barack Obama was President. Is it too much to ask that no big arena in America enable our President's obnoxious behavior?

Action: concerning good bills, soldier pensions, and mass shootings.

That stack of good House-passed bills keeps piling up on Mitch McConnell's desk, and he doesn't care what you think about that, but that's OK, because we don't care what he thinks! Go ahead and call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act. Mob Boss Mitch ain't the boss of your Senators, after all -- you are. People say I'm naive for thinking we can get Republican Senators to pass bills supporting voting rights, civil rights, internet freedom, better paychecks, and secure elections. But what would they hate even more than passing these bills? Being humiliated and jobless, that's what, and if enough of us speak up, they'll either bow to our will or be humiliated and jobless. Having the better arguments ain't enough -- we also have to deploy them, in force.

Meanwhile, our Supreme Court gave our President the green light to appropriate some Defense Department funds for his vanity border wall, and then the Pentagon announced late last week that it would divert almost $225 million in military pension funds toward the wall. Taking from our troops' retirement to keep drama going -- how utterly despicable! I wonder how our President's votaries will explain it away. Perhaps they'll say it's only $224 million, which I'm sure will comfort our retired soldiers as they make ends meet. Or they'll say they're taking a lot more from real defense spending, so shutup or he's cutting money for weapons we don't even use, and that's a good thing -- but neither of these arguments can magically convert taking pension money into a good thing. Our President's phone number is 1.215.456.2011. He doesn't care what you and I think, but he's also sensitive to bad PR, so doing our duty might actually yield a result here.

Finally, on the heels of yet another mass shooting perpetrated by yet another white supremacist asshole, too many of our politicians are offering "thoughts and prayers" again, apparently having completely forgotten the backlash they got over their "thoughts and prayers" last year. Hence Greyroots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to get to work and pass some common-sense gun control legislation for once. Since I oppose very much control of handguns and hunting rifles, I'm going to use Greyroots' contact tool to specify the common-sense legislation I want -- legislation that would amend the National Firearms Act to make it just as hard for folks to get semi-automatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons. And all that bill did was get tommy guns off our streets. Our main job as civilized people is to fix problems without resorting to violence; if we don't commit to that, we'll never have enough weapons for the resulting apocalypse anyway.

Action: concerning debt collectors, food safety, and prison privatization.

Because our Administration only works for bosses and not for people, our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) is as we speak planning to allow debt collectors to harass and abuse customers even more than they do, in part by allowing debt collectors to send an unlimited number of texts and emails without customer consent. If you're sitting back thinking well then they shouldn't have run up the debt in the first place!, please do two things: a) slap yourself, b) contemplate that not getting deathly ill or having massive student debt may be a matter of luck rather than superior intellect, and c) consider that debt collectors often have bad information and thus call people who do not actually owe them any money! Now imagine debt collectors calling every damn day to demand payment on an unowed debt. Empathy: it's not actually that hard! Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your CFPB to scrap its plans to let debt collectors harass and abuse good Ameicans even more than they do now.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to implement a new rule limiting the amount of pathogens like E.coli in the water they spray on our food. Sounds fairly commonsensical, doesn't it? Not to this Administration, where they seem to think that delay, delay, delay is the American way. And they're slow-walking these food safety rules a little over a year after an E.coli breakout among Romaine lettuce killed five folks and sickened another 210 across 36 American states. If "five deaths" doesn't sound that impressive to you, please do four things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider whether anyone should die from a damn salad, 3) imagine it happening to someone you love, and 4) slap yourself again, because even contemplating 2) and 3) isn't enough to expiate your sin. And if you're tempted to think the FDA's delay saves corporations money and regulatory headaches, think about how rising health care costs might mean more than that. And maybe slap yourself again.

Finally, we've managed to get six big banking corporations to stop giving new loans to private prison corporations, and the commitments from JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, SunTrust Bank, BNP Paribas, and Fifth Third Bancorp represent almost three-quarters of the money private banks currently get -- but that still leaves over a quarter of the money! Hence Moms Rising helps you tell PNC, Barclays, and other banking corporations to stop profiting from our Administration's cruelty. And I don't think I have to tell you stories of kids being torn from their parents and sleeping on concrete floors in detention centers in order to persuade you to join this call. All I need to tell you is that imprisoning folks for whatever reason is something we should be doing, as a civilization and as owners of our government. We should not leave it up to some private corporation that cares first and foremost about their bottom line. And once we fully grasp that our own taxpayer money funds cruelty, we'll be better positioned to stop it, as is our right and our duty.

Action: concerning corporate spying, forest regulations, and immigration.

Have you heard of Sensorvault? Sensorvault is Google's database of location data culled from folks who use Android phones and folks who use iPhones with Google apps installed -- meaning Google has known where you've been at pretty much any time over the last decade. And Sensorvault holds that information indefinitely, meaning that law enforcement can access it at will -- and our legal system has been issuing warrants allowing law enforcement search geographic areas where crimes occurred rather than suspects, which instantly turns those investigations into fishing expeditions. And if you're at a protest just as a crime is occuring a mile away, you could get swept up in that fishing expedition, which would infringe upon your right to free speech. And, ah, you can easily imagine our government concocting "crimes" just to harass a lot of protestors, right? Yes, you can. We need much better laws governing the use of this location data, but for now, CREDO helps you tell Google to shut down Sensorvault, since the Big Stick of Bad PR still works.

Meanwhile, our U.S. Forest Service has proposed rule changes that would allow it to fast-track certain logging projects, and though its supporters cite "analysis paralysis" and "frivolous lawsuits" as obstacles to projects that otherwise wouldn't actually hurt our national forests, I don't think a lawsuit is "frivolous" merely because it might prevent some corporation from making a few million extra dollars, and I also don't think that scientific analysis is really "paralysis." I'm sure some folks can name actual projects that wouldn't cause any damage so-why-make-them-wait, but I would hope we would make such decisions based on the science and not on anecdotes, and in any case we really should be asking the question "what's the rush, then?" There's also the matter of public commenting, which the new rules would curtail and which I consider sacred in a democracy. Hence the Wilderness Society helps you tell our Forest Service to reject its proposal to shield certain projects from public oversight and scientific data.

Finally, in the wake of this Administration's constant hysteria over BS-13 and "caravans" and "people coming to take your jobs" (like the people our President imports to do seasonal workers at his wineries?), Win Without War helps you tell our Department of Defense Inspector General to investigate our Administration's use of soldiers at our Southern border. Just as we shouldn't fear gun violence research, we shouldn't fear an Inspector General investigation into why we need our military when we already have a Border Patrol. And if our Inspector General concludes that we have a military down there in order to spy on activists and journalists and to terrorize people running from another country's catastrophe, well, I hope our Administration is big enough to handle the backlash! (And yes, I made that crack about our President using foreign workers at his own corporations for a reason. If we stop enabling bosses who import workers in order to drive everyone's wages down, we'll be able to help out refugees running from real horrors much better than we do now.)

Action: concerning data security, Arctic drilling, gun research, and cryptocurrency.

Lately our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) has fined Equifax $650-$700 million for failing to secure the private data of almost 150 million Americans, but that's not as big as it sounds -- if you don't believe me, divide the fine by the number of people it hurt! -- and good Americans need more protection than that. Hence H.R. 2545/S. 1336, the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act, would establish an Office of Cybersecurity within our FTC which would regulate data security at credit reporting corporations, would set strict notification requirements for data breaches, and would make penalties for losing consumer personal data a lot steeper. If you're one of those who reflexively respond oh great another bureaucracy, I would remind you that "just letting the corporations who know their stuff do it" clearly ain't working, and that's the world we're already in. Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect consumer data by passing the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the CEOs of BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips to back out of their apparent plans to drill in the Arctic. Drilling in the Arctic has been a fever dream of big oil since time immemorial, but we all know the reasons we shouldn't drill there -- for one, it's much harder to clean up an oil spill which will happen in the Arctic than it is even in the temperate Gulf of Mexico (and you recall how well BP cleaned up that spill, which is to say "not particularly well"). Here are some more reasons: it'll threaten the famous Alaskan sockeye salmon industry, wreck the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, endanger the Native populations of the region, and it won't even give us very much oil. If I, an hourly-paid schmuck, can recite these reasons off the top of my head, then I bet a lot of other people can, too -- and surely these not-very-popular big oil CEOs are acutely aware that There Is-So Such a Thing as Bad PR. If we need to remind them of that with (wait for it!) the Big Stick of Bad PR, hey, we're here to help.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Senate to fund gun violence research by our Centers for Disease Control and our National Institute of Health, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Congress last year passed a spending bill that explicitly authorized gun violence research by these agencies, but naturally they didn't actually give them a dime to do that research; what are they afraid of? I'm no great fan of keeping people from having handguns and rifles -- though I think it should be just as hard to get semi-automatic weapons as automatic weapons -- but there's no harm in researching gun violence scientifically, and our CDC and NIH have sterling reputations, though I imagine our President's trying to change that as we speak. Even the author of the Dickey Amendment that restricted gun violence research in the first place said before he died that he regretted his amendment's effects. I wish that remorse was more contagious in Congress these days, but hey, that's why we're here.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to block Facebook's efforts to create its own damn currency. Yeah, you read that right, and I'm sure Libra will be even more annoying than bitcoin has been over the years. They're selling cryptocurrency as, get this, a way of reaching the "unbanked" citizens of the world. Setting aside that we should never privatize currency, and setting aside, also, that Libra won't help the "unbanked" if they're also "uncomputered," there's a better way to help the "unbanked": stop treating the world as your personal fuckjar. Seriously, when we keep the world's biggest actors from exploiting good folks from other lands, those good folks will have more power to do the things they want to do with their lives, and they won't need Libra or whatever to do it. And an important step toward restraining the world's biggest actors would be to stop "freeing" obnoxious tech CEOs from "burdensome" regulations because they're such great "innovators." Mostly what they innovate is new ways to separate you from your money.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, robocalls, copyrights, and immigration.

It's Monday again, so let's call our Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. And this week we add to that list H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act, which would (among other good works) mandate paper ballots for federal elections. The House has passed all these bills, but Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell still refuses to hold a vote on any of them. Still, we have a voice, and we believe that secure elections, voting rights, civil rights for gay and transgender folk, paycheck fairness for women, higher wages for working families, and internet freedom for all Americans are all good things that our Senators should support, particularly if they want to remain Senators. You can find tools for finding your Senators' phone numbers in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone).

Meanwhile, both House and Senate have passed anti-robocall bills, but they didn't pass the same bill, so now House and Senate must conference out a bill that can go to our President, and you know how that can go -- for example, a lot of the worst parts in that 2017 tax "reform" bill somehow found their way into that bill during the House/Senate conference! -- so Consumer Reports helps you tell your Reps and Senators to agree upon the most vigorous anti-robocall bill possible. A conference bill should, for example, ensure that big telecom corporations give you free tools to end all those "spoofed" calls that pretend to be from your bank or our IRS or even your own damn number, and it should also crack down on international scam call rings. Remember: our Reps and Senators would be nothing without us, so they had better do our will here, not some big donor's will. I mean, nobody likes robocalls except scam artists and other people nobody wants to talk to on the phone. Surely Congress can hit a bank-shot layup?

In other news, H.R. 2426/S. 1273, the CASE Act, purports to streamline the process by which folks can redress copyright violations, but that ain't as good as it sounds -- by taking copyright-related claims out of our courts and creating a separate office within the U.S. Copyright Office to evaluate them, the CASE Act will open the floodgates for copyright trolls to slap copyrights on everything they can find so they can harvest settlements from the unsuspecting. If you think you won't be affected because you don't violate copyrights, ask yourself: have you ever shared a meme on Facebook or Twitter? If the answer is "yes," then it will affect you, once folks slap copyrights on everything in sight, knowing they'll get a quick hearing from the U.S. Copyright Office rather than letting the wheels of justice in our courts grind slow. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect us from copyright trolls by rejecting the SAFE Act.

Finally, we've been trying to get Greyhound to stop letting Border Patrol agents on their buses willy-nilly, but they don't care what you think, so the ACLU helps you tell Greyhound's owner, FirstGroup plc, to stop Greyhound from letting Border Patrol agents on their buses unless they have a warrant or are at an actual CBP checkpoint. Of course if CBP or ICE agents have a warrant, or the bus is passing through a CBP checkpoint, agents can get on board and search, but the CBP has been searching buses without warrants and declaring that pretty much anywhere is now a "checkpoint," and they've also taken plenty of folks of color off buses without having any real suspicion that they're undocumented immigrants. Again, Greyhound has demonstrated that it doesn't care about any of that, so we have to alert their owners to what they're doing. In a sane, decent, and moral society I wouldn't ever have to say this, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society I often have to, so I will: law and order don't exist just to give us whatever results we want.

Action: concerning banksters, energy efficiency, and marijuana policy.

S. 2155, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, would restrain the noxious behavior of the private equity firms and hedge funds that buy up corporations, suck the wealth out of them, and leave their workers jobless. You have seen a lot of this in recent years, with the closures of thousands of ToysRUs, Kmart, Sears, and Payless stores, among others -- and in Philadelphia, with the recent closure of Hahnemann Hospital. Over a decade after the banksters almost destroyed this economy for good, they somehow have so much power that they can even dictate whether a corporation can continue! Dare I mention that these banksters are also invested in the private prison industry that's currently making big bucks separating families at the border? Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect working families from vampire banksters by passing the Stop Wall Street Looting Act.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your state legislators to improve energy efficiency standards for almost two dozen appliances sold in the Keystone State. There's really no downside to appliances that use energy more efficiently -- they use less power, cause fewer carbon emissions, emit fewer pollutants, and (this is the one most folks will hear) cost less money on your energy bills. OK, there's one "downside" -- appliance corporation CEOs won't be able to make things as cheaply as possible, and thus make enough money to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home. They won't put it like that, of course -- they'll say your appliances will cost more money. But our post-apocalypse descendants won't be sitting around the campfire saying sure, our planet's almost unlivable now, but at least ovens cost a little less for a few years!

Finally, H.R. 3884/S. 2227, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, would at long last essentially legalize marijuana at the federal level by removing it from Schedule I, where it's never belonged -- really, pot is as dangerous as heroin? As if! -- and would allow folks who have pot convictions in their past to apply for resentencing and expungment of their record. The MORE Act would also tax pot products and use that money to help communities most ravaged by the "war on drugs," i.e., communities of color. Hence the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support saner drug policy by passing the MORE Act. Folks may wonder why I advocate for stronger laws protecting good folks from predatory corporations and more relaxed laws about marijuana. The reason is simple: corporations do a lot more damage than pot does, and our laws ought to recognize that.

Action: concerning taxes, immigration, government spying, and pollution.

S. 309, the For the 99.8 Percent Act, would make our Estate Tax a lot more progressive, by lowering the threshold at which we start taxing estates, from $10 million to $3.5 million, and by creating 39, 45, 50, 55, and 77% tax brackets, such that if you died with an estate of $5.5 million, your first $3.5 million would face no taxation, the next $750,000 would get taxed at 39 percent, and the last $1.25 million would get taxed at 45%. The Reagan Revolution purported to release constraints on individual accomplishment, but what have we gotten with all these tax cuts for the rich we've enacted since the mid-'60s? A class of elites who have divorced wealth from work and who believe they have a right to insulate themselves from their communities, that's what. With the For the 99.8 Percent Act, we could begin to take our world back from them, and so CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to strengthen the Estate Tax by passing the For the 99.8 Percent Act.

Meanwhile, our Administration might soon deport a lot of Syrians with Temporary Protected Status back to the war zone from which they originally ran. Our Administration would like you to believe that folks with TPS are all terrorists-waiting-to-happen, but even more reasonable folks might well ask why some people get Temporary Protected Status that lasts for years or even decades. After all, it's temporary, right? But folks who get TPS come from countries that haven't resolved the problems that forced them to flee in the first place, which, in this case, include the decade-long military attacks within Syria from the Syrian government, Iran, ISIS, Russia, and the United States. So if none of that's gone away, our Administration sending Syrians with TPS back just to "prove" they're "doing something" would be cruel. We could forestall this cruelty by telling our Congressfolk to protect these good folks with legislation, as Win Without War helps you do.

In other news, ICE personnel have been collecting your driver's license photo without your consent! Do they need your consent, you ask? Well, are you the target of an ICE investigation? If no, then no -- they would need a warrant to get that photo, but you know our government thinks warrants are quaint, and anyway TEH CARAVANZ WILLZ KILLZ USZ ALLZ!!!!!! Have any legislatures authorized ICE to collect driver's license photos willy-nilly? No, they have not -- but too many DMVs have proven too cooperative when ICE "asks" to get these photos. But why do they need photos of your grandmother who's been here 96 years? For their facial recognition technology, of course -- you know, the technology that thinks all black folks look alike. Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to head off this clusterfrack of lawlessness and incompetence by banning ICE from accessing DMV databases.

Finally, the biggest oil leak in American history continues unabated, with the Taylor Energy Corporation still leaking 4,500 gallons daily into the Gulf of Mexico, as it's done for the past 14 years. I don't need to tell you how awful 4,500 gallons of oil a day is for the creatures who live in the Gulf, but I have to say I'm also appalled by the waste. This leak has spewed almost 23 million gallons of oil into the Gulf over the years; maybe that's the proverbial drop in a bucket to a big corporation, but the average American drives 12,000 miles a year, and at 25 miles per gallon, would use around 480 gallons of gas, deriving from about 1,000 gallons of crude, meaning you and about 1,640 of your friends could have been driving around on that oil all these years, instead of it just leaking away and polluting the Gulf. So Environmental Action tell our EPA to stop Taylor Energy from leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Action: concerning working families, immigration, discrimination, and climate change.

H.R. 3590, the Building Our Opportunities to Survive and Thrive (or BOOST) Act, would enact a new tax credit of $3,000 annually for folks making less than $50,000 -- said credit would be higher for heads of household making less than $80,000 and married couples making less than $100,000 -- and the worst thing I can say about the BOOST Act is that it suggests we pay for it by repealing most of the 2017 Republican tax "reform" and enacting a fee on banksters with more than $50 billion in capital, when it should just be doing these things. Naturally the right is hysterical about it -- they're crying WHOZE WILL TEH PAYZ FOR TEH ITZ!!!! (psst: I just told you) and TEH PEEPULZ WILL WORKZ TEH LESSEZ!!!!, to which I have two responses: 1) you say that like it's an unqualified evil and 2) some folks clearly overestimate what folks would do with $3,000. Quit their jobs? C'mon, we all pay bills. CREDO helps you tell your House Reps to support working families by passing the BOOST Act.

Meanwhile, the tech corporation Palantir has become notorious lately for its huge contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE), and though corporate spokeshacks have long said Palantir software doesn't contribute to our Administration's deportations, internal emails beg to differ. And while I wouldn't be upset at the mere possibility that Palantir helps our government deports undocumented immigrants, fact is they lied about it, instead of making the case that they were helping our government do necessary work. But then again, perhaps they lied about it because they're also helping our Administration tear children from their families, which civilized people generally agree is inhumane. Palantir has already suffered a bit from the Big Stick of Bad PR, but that only means more of us need to wield it! Hence Free Press (among other good government groups) helps you tell Palantir to break off its ties to ICE.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big corporations like AT&T and Amazon to stop donating big wads of cash to politicians who are pro-discrimination against gay and transgender folks, then CREDO still helps you do that. A lot of big corporations position themselves as gay- and transgender-friendly these days, but they still support candidates who aren't, and we're all tired of excuses like "we support them for the economic issues, not the bigotry." And in and of itself, corporate pro-gay and pro-transgender positioning is of limited utility, and if corporations align with Democrats on social issues, that's all the more incentive for Democrats not to pressure corporations on economic issues. Indeed, it's almost like that's the whole idea! But if corporations cut off monetary support for pro-discrimination politicians, just so happens they'll also starve right-wing economic ideas of oxygen, too.

Finally, our United States Geological Survey (or USGS), upon whose research the National Climate Assessment draws in part, will now use scientific models that can forecast climate change's effects only up until 2040, even though most models forecast through the end of the century, and even though basically everyone knows that the worst effects of climate change will come after 2040. That'll teach the National Climate Assessment to embarrass our President! Clearly this Administration -- currently dueling with Tha Bush Mobb for the dubious honor of "most anti-science government of modern times" -- would rather you didn't know how bad climate change is going to get, lest it affect their plans to help fossil fuel CEOs redistribute ever more income upward to themselves. So Penn Environment helps you tell our USGS to abandon its plans to fudge climate change science for the benefit of big polluting corporations.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, net neutrality, humane immigration policy, and voting rights.

If you've missed previous opportunities to call your Senators to tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, well, it's not too late, because Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell still refuses to hold a vote on any of these House-passed bills, since "I get to decide what we vote on," like the voters made him Sultan-with-Absolute-Power or something. And now you can add H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, which our House passed late last week. So, we've got bills that promote voting rights, civil rights for gay and transgender folk, paycheck fairness for women who don't get paid the same way men do, internet freedom for all Americans, and a $15/hour minimum wage by 2025; these are all good things, and our Senators should support them. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Senators' phone numbers. You may have to call local numbers; I've found the D.C. numbers hardly work anymore, for whatever reason.

While you've got your Senators on the phone: the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals may rule this week on our FCC's so-called "Restoring Internet Freedom" rule from 2017 -- the rule that repealed the 2015 Open Internet Order that made net neutrality the law of the land -- and if it strikes the 2017 net neutrality repeal down, the big telecom corporations will be in your Reps' and Senators' ears with a quickness, trying to get bogus "net neutrality" legislation passed so that big telecoms will still be able to block and slow down the websites you want to see. So tell your Senators that, if the D.C. Circuit rules against the 2017 net neutrality repeal, you want them to leave the 2015 Open Internet order as-is and reject any bill the big telecoms push. Big telecoms are among the least popular corporations in America because of their monopolist practices and lousy service -- but our politicians love them, because they give lots of money to political campaigns, so politicians would prefer to do their will, rather than ours. That just means we have to make our will unmistakeable. (Be sure to call your House Reps afterward.)

In other news, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight our Administration's monstrous behavior in re immigrants by passing H.R. 2203, the Homeland Security Improvement Act, and H.R. 3239, the Humanitarian Standards for Individuals in Customs and Border Protection Custody Act. H.R. 2203 would (among other good works) create a National Commission to investigate the inhumane practices conducted by our Administration and would prohibit family separation of would-be immigrants except under extreme circumstances (i.e., if the parents are abusing the children). H.R. 3239 would (among other good works) spell out food/water/shelter requirements for detainees -- you recall that this Administration told the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that no law actually compels them to provide soap to detainee children! -- and would establish procedures for our Homeland Security Inspector General and our Government Accounting Office to oversee our Administration's detainment practices. Our House could vote on both these bills any day now (they both passed out of committee last week), so let's make sure we communicate our will to our Reps.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you demand that state governments restore all voting rights to formerly-incarcerated citizens without making them pay fines or fees. Let's not get stuck in the weeds over whether you should pay all your debts to society in addition to serving your sentence before you get your right to vote back, because you should never lose your right to vote in the first place. I don't care if you're a murderer, a child molester, or a corporate criminal -- you should never lose your right to vote. I put "corporate criminal" in there, of course, just to remind everyone why certain state politicians pressed to force felons to lose their voting rights in the first place -- because of racism! Politicians know that our justice system mainly puts folks of color in prison, at much higher numbers than white folks and usually for much smaller crimes than the kind big corporate executives get away with, hence taking away their voting rights is a way of keeping them down even when they're out of prison. So let's not let racism rule our lives.

Action: concerning copyright trolls and corporate tax loopholes.

H.R. 2426/S. 1273, the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (or CASE) Act, should set off your alarm bells first with the tortured acronym of its title and then with the word "alternative," because guess what "alternative" they're talking about? That's right, an "alternative" to settling small copyright-related claims in a court of law! Why our courts and our laws never seem to be good enough for our politicians I'll never know, but the CASE Act would let "claims officers" in our Copyright Office to hear copyright complaints and assess fines -- which would essentially enable copyright trolls to stamp copyrights on everything that ain't nailed down and then get an expedited hearing about the matter which will almost certainly go in their favor. There's a reason they might not try that in an actual court of law, you know. Thus the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect law and order by rejecting the CASE Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to close corporate tax loopholes that benefit for-profit private prison corporations, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. S. 1827, the Ending Tax Breaks for Private Prisons Act, would prevent corporations that operate prisons from being able to call themselves a real estate investment trust (or REIT) subsidiary, which sure sounds like a loophole even if you've never heard of a REIT before. A REIT is, per section 856 of our Internal Revenue Code, "any corporation, trust or association that acts as an investment agent specializing in real estate and real estate mortgages"; mainly that means office complexes, shopping centers, and apartment buildings, but private prison corporations? That sure does seem to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the law, and we could put "following the spirit of the law" another way: doing the right thing.

Action: concerning immigration and the minimum wage.

Tiana Smalls has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the Greyhound bus corporation to stop letting immigration agents on their buses without a warrant. "Without a warrant" is the key phrase here -- with a warrant, Greyhound would have to let them on, but Greyhound lets these agents on warrant or not, surely knowing that they transport a lot of immigrants all across our great nation, and thus Greyhound enables border agents in violating folks' rights. If you're tempted to say YOU JUST WANTZ TEH OPEN BORDURZ!!!!!, please attend the phrase "without a warrant" again. And generally I would advise you to look into your own past and see where your ancestors might were mistreated for being "strangers," because almost all of us have some of that in our history, and whatever privilege you now enjoy only came to you on the backs of the generations of good Americans who suffered hardship and ostracization.

Along those lines, CREDO helps you tell big online retail corporation Amazon to stop helping this Administration oppress immigrants. What's that, you say? Our President is always attacking Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos? Well, that's all drama, because Amazon has been gobbling up government contracts related to our Administration's animus against immigrants -- Palantir's Investigative Case Management system, which has helped our Administration ramp up surveillance and targeting of immigrant populations, now uses Amazon Web Services as a cloud computing host, and AWS also hosts a big chunk of our Department of Homeland Security's databases, too. Amazon is also trying to sell its notorious "facial recognition" software, the pretentiously-titled Rekognition, even though Rekognition is notorious in the first place because, like your Tea Party uncle, it can hardly tell black people apart. And being a part of the New Concentration Camps is surely Bad PR if anything is.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 582/S. 150, the Raise the Wage Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. Your House Reps could be voting on this bill any day now, and even though minimum wage hikes get routinely passed by states and localities all over America, and even though the $15/hour minimum wages adopted in some cities have not resulted in the hysterical forecasts promulgated by doomsayers, they're still at it, so they need to hear from you. But don't believe the hype that a higher minimum wage "kills jobs." Our CBO has indeed reported that a $15/hour minimum wage would displace somewhere between zero and 3.7 million jobs by 2025 (the median figure was 1.3 million), but consider that even this highly-unequal economy typically creates close to 2.5 million new jobs every year, and consider, also, that the CBO reported that 17 million workers would make more money. Surely that's a consideration, amirite?

Action: concerning Senate obstruction, our President's tax returns, and protections for working families.

Today's another good day to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. (You can find your Senators' phone numbers using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page -- or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page.) Why is Mob Boss Mitch blocking them from a Senate vote? Because he doesn't want his members to go on record opposing voting rights, internet freedom, tools for workers to rectify pay gaps, and civil rights for gay and transgender folk. He also doesn't want our President to go on record as opposing these things, once he vetoes the bills. If this all sounds like the opposite of courage to you, well, you're not alone. And if House Democrats don't run thousands of ads in 2020 touting their votes in favor of these bills, that'll be the opposite of courage, too.

Meanwhile, now that the state of New York has passed a bill mandating that the state comply with Congressional requests to turn over tax returns on state residents, CREDO helps you tell House Democrats to actually request our President's tax returns. House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-MA) has been strangely slow in making that request, but that's why we're here: to remind our Congressfolk of our will. And though our President's apologists call this "Presidential harassment" -- a phrase that sure does sound like whining! -- fact is we have plenty of probable cause to start an investigation into his tax returns, beginning with his own refusal to release them and continuing on through New York Times reporting on our President's massive alleged tax fraud. And if we nail him for tax fraud, what will his apologists say? That it's OK for our President to cheat on his taxes? Well, perhaps I shouldn't tempt fate with these fools.

Finally, H.R. 2474/S. 1306, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (or PRO Act), would, as its title suggests, give workers tools with which to organize and collectively bargain for better pay and working conditions. Specifically, the PRO Act would stiffen penalties for employers who interfere with employee organizing efforts (including votes!), and close a lot of current loopholes in our labor laws, which corporations have been driving Mack trucks through lately. You remember how our Supreme Court ruled that Kentucky nurses could be classified as "supervisors" on hysterically flimsy pretexts? Well, the PRO Act would fix that. You remember how FedEx classified all its drivers as "independent contractors" just so they could avoid paying health insurance and also so they could make their drivers pay for their own trucks? The PRO Act would fix that, too. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the PRO Act.

Action: concerning humane treatment of prisoners and unconstitutional war.

Two years ago, when Hurricane Harvey slammed into Louisiana and Texas, did our state and federal governments move prisoners who couldn't get out of the hurricane's way? No, they did not. And are they planning to do so now that another storm is about to hit the Gulf Coast? Not unless we tell them to, in numbers they can't ignore, so Roots Action helps you tell federal, state, and local officials to move their prisoners out of the storm's path. If you're saying if they didn't want to be left in the path of a major storm they shouldn't have done the crime, just navigate away from this page right now -- if you won't treat your prisoners humanely, you have no business calling yourself a civilization. And if you're saying WHEREZ IZ TEH MONEYZ COMINGZ FROMZ!!!!!, don't be the fool who advocated for more tax cuts for the rich and more corporate tax cuts. As anyone acquainted with arithmetic would tell you, actions have consequences.

Meanwhile, the House did pass an amendment to its defense authorization bill that would prevent our President from waging war on Iran without Congressional approval, but as you know, that's exactly the kind of amendment that dies in conference, hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1039, the Prevention of Unconstitutional War with Iran Act. You may have heard that the British Ambassador to the United States claimed that our President abandoned the Iran nuclear deal in order to "spite" President Obama. I don't know whether that's true or not -- it fits our President's penchant for drama! -- but he certainly didn't abandon it because it wasn't working, and now he has a Secretary of State and a National Security Advisor (both of whom he picked after firing their predecessors) who are constantly agitating for war with Iran. So let's remind our President that his job is to listen to us.

Around the table: here, have some more of the red pill!

Federal immigration officials are using "gang databases" to conduct their nefarious family-separation-at-the-border activities. You remember "gang databases," right? The databases you might find yourself in for no reason, particularly if you're a person of color? The ones you can't challenge if you somehow discover your inclusion therein, in violation of your habeus corpus rights? So, to sum, our government is using bad information to conduct bad policies. Of course, we as Americans deserve better, and I'll brook no rubbish about ZOMG TEH MS-13 GANGZ ARE COMINZ FORZ TEH YOUZ!!!!! Being afraid of MS-13 is a lot like being afraid of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in 2002. And if Democrats don't run a Presidential candidate who actually tells the truth, our current President will use the BS-13 to fearmonger his way to victory.

Speaking of fearmongering, our Department of Defense does not actually have any evidence that Iran killed over 600 American troops during the Iraq war. As of late June of 2016, we've lost 4,424 troops in that nefarious war, so 600 sure does sound like a lot, doesn't it? And dig how they said "608," because an exact number is always true! Read the whole thing, because the pro-war arguments don't get any better -- they're easily refutable with mainstream media reporting, in fact, and this from a media that loves war. All of this does beg the question: if you're worried about Shiite Muslims having too much power in the Middle East, why topple Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, in the first place? And why should we as Americans allow the past to hold is hostage in the present and the future? Yeah, waging war on Iran sure does look like piling shit on top of shit and hoping it magically turns into a house.

And speaking of the forked tongue of certain Democratic Presidential candidates, Marjorie Cohn at TruthOut reminds us that "Kamala Harris Has a Distinguished Career of Serving Injustice." As soon as you realized that her position on federally-mandated busing is the same as the former Vice President whom she attacked in that debate, you probably already suspected that, but it's nice to have the full story of how she ran interference for jail trusties who illegally elicited confessions, how she wouldn't allow DNA testing on a death row inmate who was probably innocent, and how she opposed a bill requiring her office to investigate police shootings while she was California's Attorney General. And she didn't investigate the "foreclosure king," now-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, when she had the chance! Also, too, where's she been on cash bail reform? Far behind Philadelphia's Larry Krasner, that's where.

Dave Zirin at The Nation explains "Why No One Watches Baseball Anymore," and I'd say the problem may be even worse than Mr. Zirin describes: the sheer length of the game turns people off, but even that is a symptom of the real problem -- that the game's gotten so damn thinky-think that players and managers hardly play anymore. Now they grow every pitcher to throw hard and strike people out, and every team carries 12 or 13 of them for every conceivable situation, so pitchers don't know what to do anymore when they get tattooed, as happens to all of them in time. And these days they grow every hitter to "be patient" and hit home runs, so now hitters can't execute a simple hit-and-run or a sacrifice bunt, which speeds up the game as much as it spices it up. You'll recognize baseball's other problems from, well, everything else in our civilization -- the Commissioner tinkers with "limiting mound visits" and "shortening time between innings" with all the imagination of an accountant, and cable TV deals and public stadium-financing make baseball owners rich without having to do very much actual work. Thus, between baseball's boredom and football's head trauma, basketball stands poised to become our national pastime.

Finally, former Air Force Colonel/failed House candidate Amy McGrath raised a boatload of cash on her first day challenging Mob Boss Mitch in Kentucky's 2020 Senate race, but then she took two distinct and opposite positions on the 2018 nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to our Supreme Court in a matter of hours. Folks, this is why Democrats lose elections -- not because they don't relate to racists enough, not because they're not pro-life enough, and certainly not because they're not "pro-business" enough, but because everyone can tell they don't mean what they say. Calling Matt Jones!

Action: concerning unconstitutional war, Senate obstruction, and working families.

The House plans to vote on amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act today, so now's the time to call your House Reps (using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page, if you're viewing it on a computer, or the bottom of this page if you're on a cellphone) and tell them to vote in favor of a) the Khanna amendment that would prevent our President from participating in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, and b) the Khanna-Gaetz amendment that would prevent our President from waging war on Iran without Congressional authorization. Just Foreign Policy also advises us not only to tell our Congressfolk to vote in favor of these amendments, but also to tell them to push for a recorded vote. Congressfolk would prefer to pass these amendments "en bloc" via voice vote -- which tells everyone how many folks voted in favor of an amendment but not which way individual Congressfolk voted. But how can we hold our representatives accountable for what they do if we don't know how they vote?

Once you're off the phone with your House Reps, you can call your Senators and tell them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. We've discussed these bills at some length; they would, respectively, protect voting rights more vigorously, extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folks, give working folks more tools to fight pay discrimination, and reinstate the FCC's 2015 pro-net neutrality order as the law of the land. Of course Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell won't bring these House-passed bills up for a vote, because (and I quote) "I get to decide what we vote on." By his actions, we know that Mr. McConnell believes the American people should not challenge the "right" of Our Glorious Elites to run (and ruin!) everything. If that belief sounds singularly un-American to you, then you would want to reassert your power as an American by communicating your will to your Senators.

Finally, H.R. 2474/S. 1306, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, would (as its title suggests!) enhance workers' ability to protect themselves via collective bargaining on wages and working conditions. Specifically, the bill would make it harder for corporations to reclassify employees as "independent contractors," would clarify the National Labor Relations Act's definition of "supervisor" to prevent corporations from pretending their employees are "supervisors" when they're really not, and would stiffen penalties for many offenses corporations perpetrate against working folk. Right-wingers would complain that working folks don't have a "right" to organize, but these are the same folks who argue that bosses have the right to do whatever they like regardless of whom it hurts, so how much credibility do they have? People for the American Way (among other groups) helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act.

Action: concerning monopolies, ubiquitous advertising, and the minimum wage.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to break up big tech corporations. The House Judiciary Committee is holding hearings on this matter as we speak, so now's as good a time as any to communicate your will. I'm sure some folks out there think this world would be a whole lot bleaker without same-day shipping from Amazon and instant answers to almost any question from Google and the ability to connect with almost anyone on Facebook, but fact is Amazon's crushing of small businesses, Google's on-again, off-again collaboration with the totalitarian government of China, and Facebook's apparent inability to protect your private data (to name just three problems with big tech corporations!) all make this a bleaker world. Besides which, do you really believe the boons big tech have given us simply wouldn't exist without big tech monopolies? Small businesses invented virtually everything of consequence on the internet, then big corporations gobbled them up and acted like we could never live without them. But we can certainly dream better than that.

Meanwhile, a Russian corporation wants to put giant billboards in space. No, really: it wants to launch a bunch of satellites that'll display logos of prominent products three miles above the Earth. Thing is, you can't just "change the channel" if you don't like it (an argument I've long found wanting anyway) -- you look up, and it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it. What, are proponents of this plan really going to say just don't look up at the sky? But then, people say all kinds of stupid crap these days without any apparent self-editing. Let's head off such embarrassment by allowing Penn Environment to help us tell our Congressfolk to outlaw "space billboards." No use retorting that if some other country is going to do it, then why shouldn't we? That's not what being a civilized person is all about -- sometimes, it's about being civilized even when you know you're going to lose, because future generations might learn from you. So let's have them learn the right things, OK?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to give working families a raise by passing H.R. 582/S. 150, the Raise the Wage Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. The Raise the Wage Act would raise the minimum wage in America from $7.25/hour to $15/hour over the next five years, and it would eventually bring minimum wages for tipped and disabled workers into parity with the minimum wage for the rest of us. You won't be surprised to learn that Republicans oppose the bill, given that so few of them know (or remember) what it's like to work three jobs because you have to, but you might be surprised to learn -- oh, forget it, you won't actually be surprised to learn that some corporatist Democrats also oppose the minimum wage. But states and municipalities have been hiking the minimum wage -- without ill effects -- at the behest of their voters for many years now, so it seems, as it too often does, like a lot of politicians are behind the times. But that's why we're here: to bring our representatives up to speed.

Action: concerning banksters, immigration, and privacy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would impose a small financial transaction tax on big Wall Street banksters, then Americans for Tax Fairness would still help you do that. The bills in question are H.R. 1516/S. 647, the Wall Street Tax Act, which would impose a 0.1% tax on financial transactions including stock and derivative trades, and H.R. 2923/S. 1587, the Inclusive Prosperity Act, which would impose a range of taxes (from 0.005% to 0.5%) on same; the highest tax imposed here would be $5 per $1,000 in trades. Folks on the right are calling this a "tax on my 401(k)," as if all financial speculation winds up in pension funds, and as if $5 per $1,000 is onerous -- and as if reducing the number of trades banksters make, which these bills would do, wouldn't actually stabilize markets. Most people understand all of this intuitively -- unless, of course, their salary depends on them not understanding it. But if we get it, we must act.

Meanwhile, I have two private prison-related action alerts for you: in one, Color of Change (among others) helps you tell your Congressfolk to close a loophole that allows private prison corporations to avoid taxes, and in the other, Moms Rising helps you tell two big banking corporations to pull their investments from private prison corporations. Both of these are also concentration camp-related, of course, since this Administration thinks detaining immigrants in inhumane conditions and funneling taxpayer money to corporate cronies is a two-fer. Even the Obama Administration had started getting private prisons out of the immigrant detainment business; the least we can do is hold the folks who work for us (i.e., our government) accountable to us. And certainly private prison corporations deserve no special treatment from our tax code; at least S. 1827, the Ending Tax Breaks for Private Prisons Act, would stop private prison corporations from calling themselves "Real Estate Investment Trusts."

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell three big airline corporations (JetBlue, Delta, and American) to stop using facial scanning technology on their customers. Why? Well, we'll begin with the airlines' explanation: it makes things faster! After all, presenting your boarding pass or your passport (which biometric screening would replace) takes several seconds, and Delta claims that using biometric screening saves a whole nine minutes per flight. Would you want to take "I saved nine minutes per flight" to the Pearly Gates? I didn't think so -- it would display a distinct lack of imagination. The downside, meanwhile, is that we don't have a whole lot of law covering facial scanning, so who knows how long the airlines hold on to the information or which government agency they give it to without a warrant? Yeah, I know the airlines say they don't store the info, but you don't trust corporations more than you trust your government, do you? Of course you don't. So let's not trade liberty for convenience.

Action: concerning unconstitutional war-making and big telecom gouging of prisoners and their families.

Reps. Khanna (D-CA) and Gaetz (R-FL) have proposed an amendment to the defense authorization bill that would prevent our President from taking military action against Iran without Congressional authorization. Don't believe the hype that this President "doesn't want war," because no President is stupid enough to tell you they want war anymore -- they all act like "they have no choice," even when they themselves bring about the conditions that would "force" them into war, in this case by withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal that absolutely positively kept Iran from getting nukes. Also remember that this is the President who justified staying friends with Saudi Arabia by saying Iran was worse. Also remember that nine-year economic expansions don't last forever. The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to support an end to constant unconstitutional war-making by supporting the Khanna-Gaetz amendment.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop big telecom corporations from gouging prisoners by passing S. 1764, the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. The late Mrs. Wright-Reed started campaigning for affordable calls from families to loved ones in prison after realizing that she had enough money to get the medicine she needed to survive or talk to her grandson in prison, but not both, and the sad thing is I know some right-winger out there would respond to that story with some combination of she just should have found a way or get a job! or learn a new employable skill. I got a better idea: why don't we stop big corporations from stealing money from us? Why should anyone have to pay $25 for a 15-minute phone call? Is it civilized to heap punishment after punishment upon prisoners (and their families!) just to prove what big balls we have? Or is that just drama?

Action: concerning overtime pay, student loan debt, and abortion.

H.R. 3197/S. 1786, the Restoring Overtime Pay Act, would essentially restore the overtime pay threshold the Obama Administration's Department of Labor set at around $47,400 -- meaning anyone who makes less than that annually must get time-and-a-half if they work overtime. A federal district court struck the Obama standard down in 2017, ruling (persuasively, I think) that the standard didn't follow the Fair Labor Standards Act, which exempts "any employee employed in a bona fide executive, administrative, or professional capacity" from getting overtime pay. But the Restoring Overtime Pay Act would mandate that employees would have to make around $47,400 annually to be exempted, which is not only a clever workaround, but one that'll get eight million more Americans the overtime pay they deserve! Hence the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to help working families by passing the Restoring Overtime Pay Act.

Meanwhile, Education Secretary DeVos -- who has somehow survived over two years in her position -- is actually considering selling federal student loans to banksters! Naturally our Education Department's position is ZOMG TEH DEBTZ IZ OVER $1.5 TRILLYUNZ WE HAVEZ TO DO TEH SOMETHINZ!!!! But using a crisis to justify just any old action is what despots do, and our Administration doesn't want to be looked upon as despots, right? I mean, in America, that's a bad look. Now, they might not actually be able to do this, because the law says they can't sell off federal student loans if that would cost taxpayers money -- and federal student loans generally already make money. But that doesn't mean they won't try, and then dare the courts to stop them. Indeed, that's what they've done so far, and they can't always fail. In any event, CREDO helps you tell our Department of Education not to sell student loans to banksters.

Finally, H.R. 2975/S. 1645, the Women's Health Protection Act, would stop states from outlawing abortion, or otherwise preventing women from getting abortions. This should be a no-brainer, since our Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade explicitly says states can't outlaw abortion, and even the Roberts Court has found it rather difficult to chip away at abortion rights. The Women's Health Protection Act would also stop states from enacting or enforcing those noxious "ultrasound" bills or making absurd demands of hospitals, to name just two roadblocks states have thrown up in recent years. No one, and I mean no one, likes the idea of abortion. But the idea of compelling women to be breeders no matter their circumstances is worse. If men could give birth, we'd be having a different conversation. Until then, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect women's health by passing the Women's Health Protection Act.

Action: concerning immigration, Honduras, and equal pay.

You've all heard the stories coming out of the border concentration camps -- kids sleeping on cement floors, babies left largely unattended, and inadequate soap, food, and water. You may also have heard that our Administration has argued before the 9th Circuit that the law doesn't compel them to provide soap per se. Hence the ACLU helps you tell Congress to investigate the conditions at these concentration camps and hold Customs and Border Patrol accountable for their actions -- which include the deaths of six children in custody -- and Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to address this ongoing humanitarian crisis of our Administration's making. You know how I hate to pile on (i.e., that I don't)? Well, family separation at the border is actually fiscally irresponsible! $775 a day in taxpayer funding to care for one child at a concentration camp! This policy doesn't work on any level!

Meanwhile, the military coup in Honduras -- one enabled by the Obama Administration's hair-splitting over the precise meaning of the word "coup" -- is now 10 years old, and things ain't getting any better for the good people of Honduras, as poverty has grown and the government mocks law and order by imprisoning human rights activists and killing and injuring protestors in the street. But we have leverage: our Congress can pass H.R. 1945, the Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act, which would suspend "security" aid to the lawless government of Honduras, and our government could actually enforce the labor standards enshrined in one of those notorious "free" trade deals, the Central America Free Trade Agreement. Hence the International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell our government to stand up for the good people of Honduras. I mean, if this were Venezuela, President Bolton would already have sent 5,000 troops, amirite?

Finally, CREDO helps you tell the U.S. Soccer Federation that the U.S. Women's National Team deserves the same pay and the same standard of medical care as the Men's Team. You may know that one of these two teams has won three World Cup titles and four Olympic gold medals since 1991, and guess what? It's the team that faces more discrimination! The Women's Team got a pay hike in their 2017 collective bargaining agreement with the Soccer Federation, but they still don't get equal pay with the Men's Team that, frankly, isn't nearly as accomplished, and yet the U.S. Soccer Federation still makes the Women's Team play more on injury-causing Astroturf and doesn't promote their matches nearly as much as they do the Men's Team. And no it doesn't matter that "women's soccer doesn't make as much money" -- what matters, in America, is the law, which requires that we pay men and women the same if skill level and responsibilities are the same. That is only fair, after all.

Action: concerning arbitration fairness, pollution, and high drug prices.

H.R. 1423/S. 610, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal (or FAIR) Act, would (as its title suggests) invalidate any arbitration agreement a corporation forces upon an employee or customer if the dispute concerns employment, product safety, antitrust law, or discrimination. These little "agreements," as you know, force you into an arbitration proceeding generally of your opponent's choosing, which denies you your rightful day in court and also very likely denies you a positive outcome. If this bill passes, we'll never have to hear, again, of folks who get raped in nursing homes but whose families can't sue, or folks whose lenders illegally renew thousand-percent loans but can't sue, or folks whose banks use their names to open fake accounts but can't sue. Really, these are not "frivolous" lawsuits. So Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our right to a day in court by passing the FAIR Act.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell our Army Corps of Engineers to reject the Pebble Mine project in Alaska's Bristol Bay. You probably know the drill by now: mining for copper in Bristol Bay will not only pollute good Alaskans' water and disrupt the unique and fragile ecosystem, but it'll also be the death knell for the Bristol Bay's sockeye salmon industry, one of the world's most famous salmon fisheries and one that supports 14,000 jobs. You probably also know that not even that most inveterate corporate defender, former EPA head Scott Pruitt, could see his way clear to approving the Pebble Mine project, and you probably also know that a lot of Pebble Mine's potential investors have gotten cold feet. But none of that is any reason to be complacent, since we are currently ruled by a President who thinks it's honest work to buy low, suck the wealth out of the resulting failure, and foist the burdens of that failure on the taxpayer. So let's make sure we do our duty.

Finally, a Change.org petition helps you tell Pennsylvania state legislators to cap insulin prices in that state. In days of old (and, who knows, maybe tomorrow, too), right-wingers would have decried such things as TEH PRICE CONTROLZ!!!!! But arguing against "price controls," here, would be the same as arguing in favor of big pharma corporations setting insulin prices so high that diabetics start rationing their insulin and then die. Is it naive to suggest that right-wingers will perhaps exercise some shame at the prospect of being called objectively pro-diabetic death? I kid, of course -- right-wingers tend to recast any shame they deserve as liberal oppression, at which point I say: c'mon, we're either the people who want to give everyone participation trophies or we're the people who are waiting for you in the parking lot with baseball bats, but we can't be both.

Action: concerning law and order, immigration, and various good bills Mob Boss Mitch won't even bring up for a Senate vote.

First things first. Late last year, five-months-pregnant Marshae Jones started a fight with another woman, who then shot Ms. Jones in the stomach, killing her unborn baby -- but now the state has indicted Mr. Jones for manslaughter and let the actual shooter go free! Their reasoning: the would-be mother "initiated and continued the fight" with the shooter. Hopefully you'll recognize that as utter horsedoodle, since, hopefully, you never got away with anything as a kid by saying "he started it!" Call me old-fashioned, but I would charge the shooter for the shooting, in part because I accept our responsibility, as civilized people, not to respond to every provocation we get -- let alone with force! Hence Change.org helps you tell the Pleasant Grove police department to dismiss the charges on Ms. Jones and charger her shooter instead.

Meanwhile, hundreds of workers at the Boston furniture corporation Wayfair walked out last week in protest of their employer's furnishing of our Administration's border concentration camps for immigrant children, so Sum of Us helps you tell Wayfair's CEO to stop selling furniture to these camps. Now, you might be saying, I hate what our Administration's doing as much as the next guy, but don't these kids need beds to sleep in? But you should recognize that as a rhetorical hostage situation! You're not cramming these kids into squalid rooms, and you're not going before federal courts arguing that you don't have to give these kids soap because the law doesn't spell that out; our Administration is doing all that, and corporations like Wayfair are helping them. So if you bring the Big Stick of Bad PR upon corporations like Wayfair, you might help end our Administration's family separation policy, which will only help these kids.

Finally, your Senators are home this week, so go ahead and call them and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. Long story short, since I've been telling the long story on these bills for months now: H.R. 1 would better protect our voting rights and make gerrymandering harder; the Equality Act would extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folks, the Paycheck Fairness Act would help folks get equal pay for equal work, and the Save the Internet Act would restore internet freedom for people, not for corporations. I know, I know, Mob Boss Mitch says the Senate won't vote on these bills because (and I quote) "I get to decide what we vote on," but pressuring our Senators to pass these good bills is still our duty as Americans. And, you know, all Mitch McConnell has been doing for a dozen years is blocking good legislation. I shudder to think that's what he's taking to the Pearly Gates.

Action: concerning voting rights, pollution, and taxes.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4/S. 561, the Voting Rights Advancement Act. I know, the For the People Act passed the House, but Mob Boss Mitch won't let the Senate vote on it, so it's time for Plan B, which is "squeeze the politicians on the specifics." The Voting Rights Advancement Act would plug the holes our Supreme Court blew out of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder -- and would do so in a way that doesn't "single out" Southern states (our Court's main problem with the Voting Rights Act) but would "single out" any state or locality with an established, demonstrable record of voting rights violations. Republicans have been opposing voting rights reforms for-freaking-ever; why, it's almost like they're afraid people won't vote them into office unless they have a few dozen ways to suppress the vote! And of course vote suppression makes it more difficult to punish politicians who suppress the vote -- but this is a democracy, and we can still speak out in force, so we can still make it right.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would keep ubiquitous PFAS chemicals out of our food and water. PFAS chemicals appear in just about everything, from firefighting foam to food wrappers; the Sierra Club calls them "forever chemicals," because they're just about indestructible. If you're thinking maybe you like "indestructible," recall that indestructible chemicals don't break down into more harmless chemicals, and that PFAS chemicals increase your risk of kidney damage, thyroid problems, and cancer. Also, the FDA's found them in foods ranging from sweet potato to chocolate cake, and over 100 cities have found them in their water supply. So, yeah, it's well past time we did something about all of that. Various Congressfolk have introduced over 20 bills that would address the problem, and now we've got to get Congress to move them, so they can become law and protect us from serious health care problems.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to impose a financial transaction tax on Wall Street banksters. A few bills in Congress would do that: H.R. 1516/S. 647, the Wall Street Tax Act, would impose a 0.1% tax (that's one-tenth of one percent, not "one percent" or "10 percent," "liberal" media!) on financial transactions including stock and derivative trades, and H.R. 2923/S. 1587, the Inclusive Prosperity Act, would impose a range of taxes, from 0.005% to 0.5% -- none of which are "five percent" or "50 percent," though, again, our "liberal" media will report it as such by "mistake." Seriously, a financial transaction tax (which supporters often call a "Robin Hood Tax") is fairly popular across the board -- with everyone, it seems, except politicians. And politicians have betrayed us in the past -- remember when candidate Obama supported it, only to be "talked out of it" by Larry Summers once he became President? We can prevent that from happening again only by communicating our will to our Congressfolk until they do our will.

Action: concerning "limited strikes," gun violence research, and corporate welfare.

Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell Rep. Engel (D-NY) that it is unconstitutional for our President to conduct a "limited strike" on a foreign country without a Congressional declaration of war. Seeing the differing responses of Rep. Engel and Sen. Sanders (I-VT) on the matter is rather like reading a Goofus and Gallant strip, except that the guy with the unkempt hair is actually Gallant here. It should be fish-in-a-barrel easy to refute Mr. Engel's suggestions that military strikes without Congressional authorization are OK as long as someone, somewhere, can define them as "limited," but sadly our "liberal" media doesn't seem prepared to do it, as they parrot the lines Mr. Engel himself parrots. And I hate to be a hard-ass (OK, I don't), but "t(ying) the President's hands" isn't a bug in our Constitution, it's a feature. The Founders were fairly disgusted with untrammeled executive power exercised by a wannabe tyrant, as you may recall. You know, like the 46% President we've got now.

Meanwhile, our House slipped $50 million for gun violence research (to be conducted by the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control) into a must-pass budget bill, so CREDO helps you tell your Senators to ensure that this legislative rider makes it into their budget bill, too. I've laid out my boundaries on gun control -- I want semi-automatic weapons treated the same as automatic weapons (which means there'll be almost no semi-automatic weapons on the streets), but I don't want universal background checks or greater limits on gun or rifle ownership. That being said, I, at least, am confident enough in my beliefs that I see no harm in funding more federal research on the matter. Oh, and that absolutely is my way of saying the rabid pro-gun crowd is not secure enough in their beliefs to endure the trauma of research that might (or might not!) tell them what they don't want to hear. And any Congressfolk who are "afraid" the research will "automatically" (semi-automatically?) lead to gun bans can, you know, perform oversight duties.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Sierra Club helps you tell your state Senator to oppose SB 618, which would give corporate welfare handouts to big coal corporations to burn off their coal waste. These handouts would total over $750 million over the next 17 years, and if you're thinking maybe we should give corporations some incentive to deal with their waste, consider, first and foremost, that giving corporations "incentives" to do the right thing is always a bad idea -- almost certainly they'll take the "incentive" and do nothing. Consider, also, that burning off coal waste in this matter doesn't reduce the volume of the waste very much and adds to the pollutants already in our air. Consider, finally, that there are better ways to ameliorate this problem, like revegetating on top of the coal waste, which not only works better but costs less. You thought conservatism was about being fiscally responsible? If so, then the funnel-taxpayer-money-to-cronies-at-all-costs crows is not conservative.

Action: concerning trademarks, national forests, and bad leadership.

Big construction equipment corporation Caterpillar has actually asked the U.S. Trademark Office to remove trademark registrations that have the word "cat" in them, particularly that of Cat and Cloud Coffee of Santa Cruz, CA! Where do we begin with this? With the implication that anyone would ever confuse the maker of asphalt pavers and backhoe loaders with a freaking coffeeshop? With the notion that any apparel sold by a coffee shop could possibly be confused with any apparel sold by Caterpillar? Folks, this is what happens when we, as a civilization, decide that corporations should police themselves because they know their businesses best -- instead of innovating new products and processes, as a heavily-regulated civilization would force them to do, they just look for ever-more convoluted ways to make money without working, like frivolous patent requests. Hence Change.org helps you tell Caterpillar to stop bullying small businesses and stop acting like the world's biggest trademark troll.

Meanwhile, our Administration is totally hot to open up Alaska's Tongass National Forest to logging corporations -- thousand year-old ecosystems apparently being a profound insult to our Administration's ongoing program of inculcating short-term thinking into every governmental decision process -- but H.R. 2491, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, would revoke the U.S. Department of Agriculture's power to grant exemptions to the famous "Roadless Rule," which, as you may know, keeps roads and the associated development out of national forests. Of course big corporations would like to have roads in national forests, because that would make it a lot easier to extract the natural resources from national forests -- and, ah, to ruin national forests with their pollution, though big corporations will never admit they've ruined a forest even after they cut the last tree down. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect national forests and (as Penn Environment says) "keep wild areas wild" by passing the Roadless Area Conservation Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject our Administration's nomination of Barry Myers to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (or NOAA), then a consortium of good government groups (including CREDO and People for the American Way) still helps you do that. Mr. Myers used to own AccuWeather (more on that in a minute!), and as its owner constantly banged his saucepan to privatize our National Weather Service, and now our President wants to put him in charge of the National Weather Service? Also, when Mr. Myers divested from AccuWeather, he sold his ownership stock at cut-rate prices to family members; does that seem on the up-and-up to you? And the numerous sexual harassment claims filed by AccuWeather employees during Mr. Myers's tenure there -- claims that resulted in a six-figure fine assessed by our government -- also call Mr. Myers's leadership abilities into question generally. NOAA administrator is a leadership position, after all.

Action: concerning war with Iran, the Equal Rights Amendment, and hidden ticket fees.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop our Administration from starting a war with Iran, then Greyroots Action still helps you do that. We have good reasons for not going to war with Iran -- like, that we'll utterly fail at "regime change" like we always do, and that we'll help create more terrorists from the ranks of regular Iranians who watch what we do. Also, we already had the nuclear weapons problem under control until our Administration pulled out of it; why should we reward their stupidity and venality with the war they want? Don't believe the hype that our President is furious with Messrs. Bolton and Pompeo for wanting to "push us into a war." Nobody put a gun to his head and made him hire those guys, particularly when he already had people in those jobs! He put them in those jobs either because he really wants to go to war with Iran or because he wants to look like the guy who prevented with Iran; either way, it's drama, and it's not even good drama. So let's not reward drama anymore.

Meanwhile, a consortium of good government groups (including People for the American Way and Progress America) helps you tell Virginia state legislators to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (or ERA). What's that, you say? The expiration date for ERA ratification was 1982? Tell that to the Nevada and Illinois state legislatures, who ratified the ERA in 2017 and 2018, respectively, meaning that 37 of the required 38 states have ratified it. And tell that to the good citizens who have been petitioning their Congressfolk to repeal the 1982 expiration date, expiration dates not being particularly common in Constitutional amendments in the first place. While you're at it, tell that to the women who've been waiting for justice all their lives. If Virginia ratifies the ERA, only one more state has to do it, and then Congress has to repeal the expiration date, and voila! The ERA becomes the law of the land. But none of that will happen if we don't speak out.

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell Ticketmaster to stop springing hidden fees upon ticketbuyers. You look at ticket prices and they're already too damn high because bands don't have to put the effort into touring that they used to -- not that very many older bands will tell you they really enjoyed being on the road! -- but then Ticketmaster heaps on an average of 27 percent of tickets' face value in stuff like service charges, processing charges, and convenience charges! And lately Ticketmaster has announced that it won't give its customers honest, up-front pricing, unless our government tells them to. Didn't they take Corporate Propaganda 101? You're supposed to promise to do better in order to forestall government action, and then when you utterly fail to deliver on that promise, you say "well what are you going to do? Not see Thom Yorke? Hahahahaha!" But, actually, they're not the only game in town anymore, so maybe they'd do well to get ahead of the curve here.

Action: concerning war on Iran and Senate intransigence.

You see how late last week our President prepared a military strike on Iran, only to call it off at the last minute because he suddenly decided it wasn't "proportionate" to take 150 lives over an unmanned spy drone shot down over the Strait of Hormuz? So Presidential, right? Ah, no -- I don't have documentary evidence that he concocted the whole scheme to make himself look better, but I'm also not a schmuck, and our Founders didn't create a Constitution expressly designed to reign in executive powers so we could give our President the benefit of the doubt. So our task is the same today as it was yesterday -- to stop yet another stupid war with another nation that's not just going to roll over while we try occupying it for the next 20 years. So now's the time to call your Congressfolk and tell them to use their power stop the march to war with Iran. Tools for finding your Congressfolk's phone numbers are, as always, in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone).

While you've got your Senators on the phone, you can also tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. Mob Boss Mitch says the Senate won't vote on these bills because and I quote "I get to decide what we vote on," but pressure your Senators enough and they'll cave, because the only thing they really fear is the voters turning them out of office. Yes, I wish we could turn bad politicians out of office more easily, but H.R. 1 would make that task easier by protecting our voting rights. The Equality Act would extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folks, the Paycheck Fairness Act would help folks get equal pay for equal work, and the Save the Internet Act would restore our internet freedom. Don't let folks say supporting the President against Iran is more important -- our opponents can't win arguments, so all they do is create drama. But, as free people, we don't let drama dictate what we do.

Action: concerning forced arbitration, children's privacy, and prisoner rehabilitation.

Years ago, JP Morgan Chase decided to stop using forced arbitration clauses in its customer contracts, after a considerable amount of public agitation -- but now, thinking, perhaps, that no one's watching them anymore, they plan to put forced arbitration clauses back in for their credit card customers. But we are watching them, so Public Citizen helps you tell JP Morgan Chase to withdraw their attempt to force customers into arbitration. Those customers deserve a day in a real court, just like everyone else in America, not some fake "court" either paid for or selected by the corporation, one that in practice rarely rules in a customer's favor. If you've fallen prey to the propaganda that ZOMG YOU CAN MAKEZ TEH MORE MONEZ IN TEH ARBITRASHUNZ!!!!!, then please read the last 10 words of the previous sentence over again. You don't get some big-sounding "average" award if you lose! And then you won't have money or justice.

Meanwhile, Facebook is not widely-known for defending your private information very well, but they do even worse for the kids who use its service, because sex traffickers will use Facebook to get to them and lure them into a life of exploitation too horrible to contemplate. Hence the international human rights organization Love146 has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell Facebook to change its default privacy settings for children so that sexual predators have a much tougher time getting to them. In signing, you'll advocate for two changes in Facebook's default settings -- that friend lists be private, and that children only receive direct messages from people they've marked as "close friends" -- and an "only my friends" setting for the question "who can see me on other people's friend lists?" Sexual predators often get to kids through their friends, so these proposals will help keep them safe. To, you know, be kids.

Finally, you know how big telecom corporations force prisoners and their families to pay onerous phone rates? Well, S. 1764, the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, would empower our FCC to determine and regulate "just and reasonable rates" for "any audio or video communications service" a prison provides, "regardless of the technology used," and thus help more prisoners talk to their families, which the data tells us means fewer prisoners going back to jail. This FCC, chaired by Ajit Pai, may think all that's bunk -- Mr. Pai, as you may recall, justified FCC inaction by suggesting that prisoners could just use burner phones stuffed into dead cats thrown over prison walls. Lucky for him, he doesn't have to sell that to the late Ms. Wright-Reed, who campaigned against usurious prison phone rates after realizing she could either pay for medicine or pay to talk to her incarcerated grandson, but not both. Hence Free Press helps you tell your Senators to support prisoner rehabilitation by passing the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act.

Action: concerning corporate transparency, nuclear power, racist enabling, and big tech monopolies.

H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act, would (as its title suggests) force corporations to disclose their "beneficial owners" -- the folks who create the corporations and, presumably, benefit financially from their existence. Believe it or not, we don't do this in America, so skewed toward corporate power have our laws always been. And forcing corporations to disclose their owners will have real benefits: we'll better be able to stop the banksters, terrorists, tax-evaders, sex traffickers, drug money launderers, and big campaign donors who use shell corporations to hide their wrongdoing. Don't believe any don't-tread-on-me tantrums from the right -- corporations aren't people, and don't have the same rights as people, and corporation owners don't have a "right" to hide criminal behavior, either. Hence CREDO helps you tell your House Reps to crack down on corporate misbehavior by passing the Corporate Transparency Act.

Meanwhile, Environmental Action helps you tell the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems to scuttle its plan to build new and inadequately-tested nuclear reactors near the Grand Teton National Park and invest in renewable energy instead. I know, nuclear power plants, every one a potential Chernobyl or Fukushima, near public lands -- terrible idea, right? And you don't even need to see every nuclear power plant as a potential terrorist target, either, or as an almost-certain money-loser that the taxpayer will need to bail out, though both of these are true as well. Really, all you need know is that the price of solar and wind production has come down so far in the last 20 years that now homeowners can reasonably expect to be able to pay to solarize their houses with home equity loans. That has come about with very little corporate or utility help; think of what their help could do to push renewables across the finish line in America.

In other news, with the rise of white supremacist groups selling their disgusting wares online, Sum of Us helps you tell big payment-processing corporations like MasterCard, VISA, and PayPal to stop letting white supremacist groups use their services. What's that, you say? Isn't that denying white supremacists their right to have their views heard, as well as their right to make money as they see fit? Well, no, because neither of these rights actually exist -- white supremacists do have the right to believe whatever obnoxious and emotionally-cripped shit they want in the privacy of their heart, and they have the right not to be put in jail by our government for those beliefs, but they do not have a "right" to sell those beliefs on bumper stickers and T-shirts, nor do they have a "right" to make money however they like -- I mean, if that were true, we could never put a burglar or a bankster in jail. So trouble not your heart, if racists have to get real jobs. Work builds character, after all.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell investment management corporation Vanguard to support a shareholder resolution aimed at breaking up Google. You don't need to know about Google's inability to protect your privacy or their illegal tracking of your location or their complicity in Chinese government censorship or accusations of wage theft and sexual harassment against them to want Google broken up. All you need to know is that when we look for information online, we say we're going to "google" it, for Google has so much power over our lives that its name has become a verb. And any corporation that has that much power deserves to be broken up -- even if we can credibly say that Google has done a lot of good. You know what other corporation did a lot of good? Netscape. Seriously, they had the best browser/email application in the world in the late 1990s. But I don't mourn their oblivion -- and I would mourn if they'd wound up monopolizing the internet.

Action: concerning government spying, health care, and paycheck fairness.

You've heard that even our National Security Agency would rather not have the authority to Hoover up good Americans' phone data without a warrant, as Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act allows? Well, Reps. Amash (R-MI) and Lofgren (D-CA) would at the very least restrict our government's use of Section 702, by prohibiting spying without an actual investigative target (i.e., an actual suspect!), by prohibiting spying on folks outside the U.S. just to collect data on someone inside the U.S., and by prohibiting spying that our government knows is entirely domestic in nature. And Reps. Amash and Lofgren will offer this legislation as an amendment to a must-pass appropriations bill, one that'll fund most of the government for the next fiscal year, so it's got a good shot at becoming law. Hence Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans' privacy by passing the Amash/Lofgren anti-spying amendment.

Meanwhile, our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) has proposed a rule rolling back yet more Obama-era health insurance protections preventing discrimination against gay/transgender/queer folk as well as women. Now, I think the 2018 elections proved that taking away people's health care so unpopular that it causes politicians to lose elections, so what's our Administration's game here? Same as it always is -- to suggest that protections for "those people" aren't as important as yours! And a lot of Americans, who fancy themselves to be hard hats and not hippies, still fall for that even though they're not particularly mean to folks who aren't like them in their daily lives! And once you go down this road, as a citizen, you find it harder and harder to admit you were wrong. So get it right the first time, and let the ACLU help you tell our HHS to scuttle its plan to deny protections against discrimination to vulnerable people in America.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The Paycheck Fairness Act would give women more tools to find out they're making less than men for doing the same work, mainly by making it legal for workers to discuss their pay with their co-workers, which is usually how they find out they're getting shafted (and which, perhaps not coincidentally, their bosses try to prevent them from doing). Moms Rising also reminds us that this past June 10 was the 56th Anniversary of the Equal Pay Act's passage, and yet women still make less than a dollar for every dollar a man makes, even when you adjust the data for comparable skills and experience. Right-wingers will tell you that just proves that laws that try to help people just don't work! They're wrong, of course -- the battle for justice doesn't end with a single law, and we must re-earn justice every day of our lives.

Action: concerning Medicare drug prices, abortion, product safety, and defense spending.

We've spent a lot of time trying to get Mob Boss Mitch to hold Senate votes on good bills passed by the House, but sadly, it's also like pulling teeth to get Democratic House leadership to consider some good bills. Case in point: H.R. 1046, the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act of 2019, which would, as its title suggests, finally let Medicare negotiate its drug prices on behalf of our seniors -- and would empower our government to manufacture its own generics if big pharma corporations refuse to negotiate in good faith. Why would Democratic leadership not want a vote on that? Could it be because Democratic leadership is far better at raising money from big corporations -- including big pharma corporations -- than they are at legislating? It's a question worth asking! Or, more precisely, it's a question worth making moot by demanding that Democratic House leaders allow a vote on the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act, which Social Security Works helps you do.

CREDO helps you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 29975, the Women's Health Protection Act. The Women's Health Protection Act would prevent states from passing legislation outlawing (or putting onerous restrictions upon) abortion; you may have noticed that states have been doing a lot of these things lately. Would you respond that we should let the smallest government make the most decisions about the most people's health and welfare? I am, after all, neither immune to nor automatically disdainful of such arguments! But you're better off taking that argument up with our Constitution, because our Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision specifically says we cannot leave the legality of abortion up to the states. Given the current composition of our Court, that argument may not hold much longer. But I'll still oppose outlawing a procedure when only half of Americans (i.e., women) could ever serve time for it -- I mean, the only fair thing to do would be imprison men for the ill-considered sex that also contributed to the abortion, and I know no man in America would support that.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would ban unsafe baby sleepers, like the Fisher-Price Rock 'n Play, and other unsafe baby products. An April Consumer Reports investigation revealed that sleepers like these have helped kill over three dozen babies, and you can't just pretend you're Brit Hume and say that's not so big a number, because every baby is the apple of someone's eye. And our Consumer Product Safety Commission knew, for several years, that the Rock 'n Play had helped kill babies, but took no action until the aforementioned investigation revealed more deaths than our CPSC had said. Consumer Reports will also help you call for a ban on crib bumper pads that help cause suffocation and strangulation, and tougher safety standards for dressers so they don't tip over on babies, since that also leads to over two dozen deaths annually. Again, if these numbers don't seem so impressive, just imagine it's your baby. That should do it.

In the wake of the news that our government is actually making a defense contractor pay for overcharging our government -- not a big-name defense contractor, nor a huge amount of money ($16 million) in the context of a $700 million-plus annual defense budget, but it's still a good work -- a consortium of good government groups (including Public Citizen, Roots Action, and Win Without War) helps you demand a $200 billion annual cut in defense spending. I often hesitate to put a number out there that looks arbitrary, but you don't even have to know that we already spend more on defense than the next seven countries combined to know that we can afford it -- you only need know that we routinely throw billions of dollars at weapons that clearly don't work. Which is to say they don't actually help defend us -- at "enriching corporate CEOs" and "funneling corporate welfare to big corporations," I guess these weapons do work. Call me old-fashioned, but I think defense spending ought to defend.

Action: concerning unconstitutional war-making, discrimination, and working families.

After last week's alleged attack on oil tankers in the Middle East -- a drama where all the actors involved can't even agree upon what really happened -- our Administration is even hotter for war with Iran. Fortunately, it's not their call to make -- it's our call to make, through our representatives in Congress. Hence both CREDO and the Friends Committee on National Legislation help you tell your Congressfolk to stop the march to war with Iran. Do not believe the hype from your elected officials about "tying the President's hands." How many times must I tell these pimps! Our Constitution demands that we "tie the President's hands" in war-making! It's a feature, not a bug! Our Constitution reserves war-declaration power for Congress, and reserves war-conducting power for our President, but having the power to conduct a war is not the same as having the power to start a war. That's the way our Founders wanted it, and that's the way it should be.

Meanwhile, the Tennessee Holler has reported that Coffee County (TN) District Attorney Craig Northcott has declared that he doesn't prosecute gay or transgender domestic violence cases. His his reasoning? "The reason there’s extra punishment on domestic assaults is to recognize and protect the sanctity of marriage," he says (so I guess he doesn't prosecute domestic violence in unmarried hetero couples either!), and since "there’s no marriage to protect," (because of course he doesn't "recognize" our Supreme Court's ruling legalizing gay marriage) "I don’t prosecute them as domestics." He can believe whatever he likes -- I, too, often think our Supreme Court is wrong! -- but his job is to enforce the law, which says gay marriages are marriages. And no, "religious" "conscience" plus "prosecutorial discretion" does not equal "I can do whatever I want." Hence the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Mr. Northcott to resign, now that he has professed his lack of devotion to law and order.

In a directly-related note, 18 Million Rising helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. The Equality Act would ensure that federal law grants the same protections under the Civil Rights Act to gay and transgender folk that other long-oppressed minorities (like women and folks of color) can get. If it bothers you that women and folks of color would no longer get more protections than gay and transgender folk, you really need to reacquaint yourself with the whole concept of fighting the real enemy. And if you subscribe to the notion that, say, the Equality Act will enable men to join the WNBA -- I wish I were kidding about this! -- then contemplate more closely how well someone who tried that would be received in any of his social circles. You might also want to contemplate more closely whether the slight possibility of such an occurrence is really worth continuing to let landlords refuse to rent to gay folks or employers refuse to hire gay folks or knuckle-dragging state legislators continuing to torment transgender folks.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2694, the Pregnant Workers' Fairness Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The Pregnant Workers' Fairness Act would ensure that employers make "reasonable accommodations" for workers who become pregnant -- which would include giving them sit-down work wherever possible and being lenient on bathroom breaks since anyone who's ever been pregnant would tell you they always have to go to the bathroom. It would not, of course, include letting them spend their entire shift in the bathroom, since that would be an unreasonable accommodation; I put that there for those who have so little faith in our justice system that they fear "small businesses" getting swamped with "frivolous lawsuits." And the bill would also prevent employers from firing workers (or otherwise retaliating against them) just because they get pregnant. I mean, all that would be quite anti-family, don't you think?

UPDATE. One Taylor Swift, of Nashville, TN -- perhaps you've heard of her! -- also has a petition (on Change.org) which helps you voice your support for H.R. 5, the Equality Act. It has close to 300,000 signers as of Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at noon EST, so leveraging some star power to help this thing get passed would be worth your effort even if you've already called and written your Senators. Taylor Swift's a good egg.

Action: concerning debt in Puerto Rico, cruel immigration policy, and drilling in ANWR.

You recall that Hurricane Maria slammed Puerto Rico so hard that Congress needed to pass more disaster relief legislation to help it out, right? And you also recall that Puerto Rico was deeply in debt to begin with, and Congressional legislation passed under President Obama basically enabled banksters to keep scavenging the Puerto Rico economy? Crap like this wouldn't happen if Puerto Rico were a state, let me tell you! But H.R. 2526/S. 1312, the U.S. Territorial Relief Act of 2019, would wipe out Puerto Rico's debt and compensate debt-holders up to $15 billion -- even the hedge funds that swooped in like vultures, though they'd have to waive manager's fees, and I bet some of them find that so offensive they won't take the compensation. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to help out struggling U.S. territories wipe out their debt. And if you think that's "rewarding bad behavior," just slap yourself. Why should I bang my head against a wall?

Meanwhile, People for the American Way helps you tell our Administration to stop abusing immigrant children. I know it's hard to keep up with this ongoing humanitarian crisis our Administration has forced upon us, but long story short, our Administration still separates families at the border, still sets up these families (including their children) for human rights abuses, and no longer even provides legal services or recreational activities for these children, which sure will stop right-wingers from going on the TV and telling us that forced detention is like summer camp, right? I kid, of course -- right-wingers don't let the truth stop them! And though I know this Administration does not give one rat's hind quarter what you and I think -- not just about their inhumanity, not just about the political calculation that's gone into it, but also their who-are-you-to-tell-us-what-to-do attitude -- our duty to tell them what we think remains.

Finally, H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, would prevent our government from handing out oil and gas drilling leases in the Coastal Plain of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) -- which sure is timely, since our Administration has apparently already told oil executives that leases in this area "will happen in 2019." Previous attempts to lease ANWR have failed, even in Republican-dominated governments, and H.R. 1146 currently has 180 co-sponsors, but let's not get complacent -- no, not even because we have the better argument (drilling in ANWR won't release all that much oil, but it will adversely affect caribou and Native American populations), because H.R. 1146 will only become law if we demand it, at every step of the legislative process. Hence the Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge by passing the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act.

Action: concerning pollution, robocalls, pensions, and antibiotic abuse.

Word on the street is our House would pass spending bills that would dramatically increase our EPA's overall budget, increase National Park Service funding, increase clean energy research and clean water infrastructure investment, and double research on dangerous (and ubiquitous) PFAS chemicals, among other things. Who would oppose these things? Only a Scrooge McSmallgovernment, that's who, and it's well past time we painted the objectively pro-pollution crowd into a corner. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your House Reps to support strong anti-pollution provisions in upcoming spending bills. And there won't be any "I decide what we vote on" from Mob Boss Mitch in the Senate, either, because the Senate has to pass funding bills, too, and shutting down our government isn't actually very popular, even if punishing those responsible for shutdown dramas has proven difficult.

Meanwhile, our Senate has passed a bill that would help good Americans stop robocalls from coming to their houses and cellphones! S. 151, the TRACED Act, would (among other things) force big telecom corporations to use call authentication technologies and mandate the FCC to write rules allowing customers to challenge calls' authenticity. That's a hell of a lot better than what the FCC would do, which is suggest to corporations that they should authenticate calls voluntarily. As if corporations ever do the right thing without being dragged kicking and screaming into it! Now it's our House's turn to consider the bill, so Consumer Reports helps you demand that our House pass the most vigorous anti-robocall reforms possible. I mean, robocalls are so unpopular that our Senate took the initiative and actually churned out a decent bill, so there's no reason our House can't do even better.

In other news, H.R. 1994, the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (or SECURE) Act of 2019, almost unanimously passed the House last week -- but that doesn't mean it's a giant ball of happy! The SECURE Act would (among its provisions) protect corporations from being sued if they select certain annuities for their 401(k) plans and then the annuities go belly-up, taking all the money with them. Why Congress would give welfare handouts like this may puzzle you, until you learn that House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-MA) has taken campaign contributions from at least nine insurance corporations or trade groups. So CREDO helps you tell your Senators to reject the SECURE Act's pro-retirement scam provisions and expand Social Security instead. See what we did there? We stopped talking about what they want us to talk about and started talking about what we want instead. We have to do that every day if we want to take America back from those who worship mammon.

Finally, fast food corporation McDonald's has lately committed to getting antibiotic abuse out of its beef supply chain, a far more important development than its previous commitment to getting it out of its chicken supply chain, and we have our pressure to thank for that development. Now Consumer Reports helps you tell another fast food corporation, Wendy's, to get the antibiotic abuse out of its beef. We use four out of every five antibiotics in feed animals, not sick people or sick animals, and we do it to fatten those animals up and help them survive the factory farm experience, neither of which is a particularly good reason to bring back the world where the next cut might kill you. (The Sierra Club also helps you tell our FDA to regulate antibiotic abuse on family farms more vigorously than they do now; we might do better with Wendy's than with our FDA, but duty is duty.)

Action: concerning campaign finance reform, violence against women, and evil media.

Our Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC ruling -- which used the ancient and nefarious doctrine of corporate "personhood" to expand big corporate campaign financing -- remains a blot on our culture. But H.J.Res. 2 would amend our Constitution to allow Congress to "regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections," which would include "prohibiting" "artificial entities created by law" "from spending money to influence elections." Big corporate campaign spending is popular with approximately no one -- except the big corporations who buy votes this way! Yes, that's an accurate way of putting it: money isn't speech, it's property, and everyone but a pedant sees that big corporate campaign spending results in corrupt corporate lackeys in office. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to slow the flow of big corporate money into political campaigns.

It's not just the American Dream and Promise Act, the For the People Act, the Equality Act, and the Save the Internet Act that aren't getting the proper attention from our Senate -- it's also H.R. 1585, the Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization Act, passed by our House back in April but still sitting on the Senate's general calendar two months later. I suppose that's an improvement over the aforementioned bills, but your Senators could still use your counsel; hence Amnesty International helps you tell your Senators to pass the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act. Are they refusing to pass it because it would give tribal courts more power to go after sexual violence, child abuse, sex trafficking, and the like? I sure hope not, because that would mark them as pedants -- and also as hostage-takers, since the bill would also help federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement entities communicate with each other about these issues.

CREDO helps you tell advertisers to drop the Fox News program The Ingraham Angle. CREDO cites Laura Ingraham's recent defense of evil white supremacist/anti-Semite Paul Nehlen as the immediate news hook (a simple graphic causes so much trouble these days!), but a better reason to tell advertisers to abandon her is everything she's ever done -- she's been an ambulance chaser for far-right causes for three decades now, and she doesn't obsess over nationalism and xenophobia these days because she's really given all that a lot of thought, but because she thinks that's where the money is. Let's prove her wrong. And while we're talking about it, Media Matters helps you tell advertisers to drop Fox News generally, since they're all pretty terrible. If you want to call your Congressfolk and demand that they pass a law letting you choose your cable channels a la carte so you don't have to pay for this rubbish, well, tools to find your Congressfolks' phone numbers are in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone).

Action: concerning internet freedom, war in Yemen, immigration, and the minimum wage.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, then Free Press still helps you do that. H.R. 1644/S. 682 would "save the internet" by reinstating the 2015 Open Internet order that forced big telecom corporations to deliver all network traffic to its destination at the same speed, without discrimination. The FCC repealed that order in 2017, and I told you then that you wouldn't necessarily notice any change to your internet right away, because the big telecoms aren't so stupid as to take away all your freedoms at once. But they most assuredly have been working to do that -- Verizon's throttling of Santa Clara County firefighters in the middle of a wildfire is perhaps the most famous example, but researchers have also found Sprint throttling Skype and several big telecoms throttling Netflix and YouTube. That's how it begins; let's make sure this is also where it ends.

Meanwhile, one of the architects of our Administration's "national emergency" declaration enabling it to bypass Congress and the will of the people and sell arms to the Saudi/UAE coalition currently waging war on Yemen -- a former defense contractor lobbyist named Charles Faulkner -- has lately left his State Department job in a black cloud, and now some Congressfolk want to have a hearing on the whole matter this week. As well they should -- the Saudi/UAE bombing of Yemen serves no purpose but to put Yemeni citizens on the brink of famine and bring shame upon anyone who helps it, and of course this latest "national emergency" drama testifies to the ineptitude and cowardice of our President, who got 46% of the popular vote and naturally acts like he has absolute power. Hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban arms sales to the Saudi/UAE coalition. Doing whatever Saudi Arabia wants because TEH IRANZ!!!!! is no way to run a foreign policy.

In other news, American Dream and Promise Act has passed our House, meaning it goes to our Senate, where it may never get a vote. That would be a shame, because the American Dream and Promise Act would fix what our President broke when he issued an Executive order (one since stayed by our courts) ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) program for those folks brought to America as children who now know no other home as adults. The American Dream and Promise Act would once again extend protection from deportation for these folks as long as they meet certain criteria, like continued settlement in our country, two years in our military, and continued enrollment in college. You might think, gosh, this is how a conservative would conduct immigration policy; pass judgment on the "conservatism" of today's Republicans as you like, but in the meantime, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass the American Dream and Promise Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 582/S. 150, the Raise the Wage Act, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. The bill would raise our minimum wage from $7.25/hour to $15/hour, and would ultimately bring the minimum wages for tipped and disabled workers into parity with everyone else's; anyone who says I JUST CAN'TZ RUNZ TEH BIZNIZZIZ!!! after that can first be pointed to the fact that the $15/hour minimum wage would be phased in over five years and second be told they just don't have very much of that can-do American spirit, do they? People in some parts of America already have a $15/hour minimum wage, and it hasn't exactly destroyed their economies -- when folks make more money, they have more money to spend, and thus pump more money into the economy. Of course, CEOs who think all economies should revolve around them find that intolerable, but they don't get all the say around here.

Action: concerning poverty, corruption, monopolies, and privatization.

Our Office of Management and Budget (or OMB) would like to calculate poverty using the "Chained CPI" measurement, which would essentially redefine inflation downward and thus redefine poverty upward. You may remember Chained CPI from the Social Security debates of the past decade -- Chained CPI portrays inflation as lower than it really is, by assuming that once an item's price rises a certain amount, consumers will simply switch to a cheaper item. Already sounds like a scam, doesn't it? And just as the last Administration mooted using Chained CPI to calculate Social Security benefits -- which doesn't work, because seniors have a lot of fixed costs and can't just "switch to what's cheaper" whenever they like -- this Administration wants to use it to claim that not so many folks are struggling, which means fewer of those who are actually struggling will get federal benefits like Medicaid. Hence the Coalition on Human Needs (among other good government groups) helps you tell our OMB to reject its plan to take health care away from more good Americans.

Meanwhile, S. 1393, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, would (as its title suggests) make it against the law for Congressfolk to trade stocks. If that sounds extreme to you, consider how often Congressfolk ever do the people's will versus how often they seem to do some big corporation's will, and then recall that corporations trade stock and people don't. Americans are getting a constant reminder from our President of how much they hate corruption, and they generally figure that Congressfolk will do what pleases them before they'll do what's right, but really, why should we put up with that? And folks who say we can "trust" Congressfolk to trade stock and do the right thing are ignoring the evidence of their own eyes -- and they're making about as bad an argument as saying cable news guests can take money from big corporations and still pontificate "objectively" about matters that concern their paymasters. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore some faith in our democracy by passing the Ban Conflicted Trading Act.

In other news, our FCC has given its blessing to the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger -- even though we all know this merger, like all other big corporate mergers, will reduce competition, raise prices, concentrate economic power in fewer hands, and cause a lot of people to lose their jobs -- but our Department of Justice can still step in and stop the merger, so Free Press reminds you that you can still call our DoJ, at 202.804.1389, and tell them to block the proposed merger. Our DoJ -- led, such as it is, by William Barr, who is, among so many other things, a man who believes corporations know best about everything -- probably won't want to block the merger, but again: it doesn't matter what they want, it matters what we want. One day, we will live in an America where all Americans really believe that, and communicate their will to their representatives in government until they cry uncle. Until then, we just have to keep reminding folks that we really do have the power -- if we use it.

Finally, our President, who has repeatedly assured us that he will pick the "best people" to work in our government, somehow thinks Barry Myers should lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA runs, among other things, the National Weather Service, which has done such a great job over the years that Jim Freaking DeMint defended it while in the Senate. And, ah, what did Mr. Myers do for a living until recently? Why, run AccuWeather, a private weather forecaster which has long salivated at the prospect of either crippling or buying out the National Weather Service! Putting Mr. Myers in charge of the NOAA is real fox-in-charge-of-the-henhouse territory; that's a cliché, I suppose, but this Administration is so terrible you can cut them down with little more than cliches. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Senators to reject Mr. Myers's nomination to the NOAA. Don't believe the hype that since Mr. Myers has answered the conflict-of-interest charge by resigning from Accuweather, because he sold his stock to his own family at a very large discount; what does that look like to you?

Action: concerning patents and pollution.

Remember a few years ago, when our Supreme Court ruled that you couldn't patent human genes because, well, you didn't make them? Congress may undo that good work with legislation that would nullify the ruling and allow big corporations to patent human genes again, so Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep big corporations from patenting our genes. Some Congressfolk will claim that this legislation doesn't do that, but all you need do to refute them is attend the discussion in paragraphs 8 through 11 of this article. Trigger warning: a lawyer claims the ruling has caused "a dead stop in research in the United States on isolated natural products." You'll recognize that as a hostage crisis -- give me monopoly power over human genes, or the science gets it! You'll also recognize it as absurd, since we're more likely to do good work about "isolated natural products" if many entities can research them, rather than one corporation valuing money more than science.

Meanwhile, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned our EPA's 2015 coal ash rule last year, ruling that it did not adequately protect good Americans from the water pollution caused by coal ash leaking into groundwater -- as mandated to do by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which grants our EPA rule-making power in this matter. Yes, I totally put that last clause in there to forestall complaints about BIG GUMMINT!!!! But even though the coal ash rule dates from the Obama Administration, now this Administration must fix it -- again, as mandated by our laws and our courts -- and you can probably guess their enthusiasm for that task. Still: it doesn't matter what they want; it matters what we want -- if we speak out loudly enough. Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our EPA to comply with our courts and write a strong coal ash rule. That would be the law and order thing to do, after all.

Finally, H.R. 2156, the RECLAIM Act, would help states clean up air and water polluted by abandoned coal mines Reclaiming abandoned coal mines -- which put a lot of filth into our air and water, particularly in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, from which (perhaps not coincidentally!) many of H.R. 2156's sponsors hail -- would not only make our air and water cleaner, but would create jobs for workers abandoned by a dying coal industry. And H.R. 2156 actually has almost a dozen Republican co-sponsors and just passed out of the House National Resources Committee by a 26-10 vote; with Senate Majority Leader Mitch "I decide what we vote on" McConnell also hailing from Kentucky, maybe H.R. 2156 can pass both houses of Congress! But we've still got to stay on our Congressfolk, so Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to cut pollution and help out depressed areas of our country by passing the RECLAIM Act.

Action: concerning pollution and racism.

Our Administration plans to open up public lands near wildlife refuges and wilderness areas in California to oil and gas drilling. One wonders if this is their revenge on California for being a liberal paradise, but there's a bigger issue here: California is still woefully short on water, even a year after a seven-year drought finally ended, and supports an agriculture sector that produces about two-thirds of America's fruits annually. And California farmers responded to the drought by irrigating their crops with fracking wastewater, which testifies to that water shortage and suggests that, well, maybe gas drilling isn't the best use of our water tables to begin with. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management (or BLM) to reject its own plan to open up relatively untrammeled California lands to drilling. Remember: they'd rather ignore us, but if they do, we can stop them in court.

Meanwhile, Free Press helps you tell our FBI to stop trying to hide the onslaught of white supremacist violence in its official data. How are they doing this? By lumping all sorts of phenomena into one category, called "racially-motivated violent extremism," which would allow our FBI to lump white supremacists who shoot people with black protestors who get shot at by police. And that also means that the new category would also allow inattentive evil media outlets to run rampant with bogus statistics "mistakenly" attributed to black protestors! Well, as they say, a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on, but our government should not enable lies to get around so quickly. And the problem isn't black protestors getting loud with people who don't listen; the problem is white racists shooting black and brown people dead. And our FBI needs to confront that, just as we all do.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to end our President's Muslim ban by passing H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, then People for the American Way (among others) still helps you do that. The NO BAN Act would repeal all three of our President's Muslim bans, would prevent future Presidents from issuing similar travel bans, and would strengthen the Immigration and Nationality Act by explicitly preventing discrimination on the basis of religious belief. Would it be too much to ask of our government to make decisions on who can travel to and from our country on a rational basis? Would it be too much to ask of our President not to stoke rage and hatred on our fellow citizens with his Executive Orders? I'm an eternal optimist, so my answer to both of these questions would be "no, it would not be too much to ask." But that's only true if we demand that it be true.

Action: concerning war in Yemen, discrimination, and pollution.

Our President, as you know, has declared yet another of his "national emergencies" so he can sell weapons to the Saudi/UAE coalition that's currently raining down bombs on impoverished Yemenis. What's the "emergency"? Saudi Arabia needs weapons to defend itself from Iran, or something. Iran is now the excuse for everything, apparently. "Where's my tax cut? Iran took it!" (Maybe I shouldn't give our President any ideas.) Since our President has declared an "emergency," Congress can't stop him from selling arms using the Arms Control Act -- but we can tell Congress to simply ban arms sales to the Saudi/UAE war effort with new legislation, which Win Without War helps you do. I've said it before and I'll say it again: a President who needs to declare "emergencies" so he can accomplish unpopular legislative aims isn't a guy who "gets things done;" he's a weak man and a bad leader.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1756, the Preventing Credit Score Discrimination in Auto Insurance Act, would, as its title implies, would prevent car insurance corporations from setting insurance rates based on your credit score, and would prevent credit reporting agencies from furnishing car insurance corporations with that information. And here you thought your auto insurance corporation might raise or lower your rates based on your driving history! But now car insurance corporations charge folks more if they have low credit scores, which sure does seem like a recipe for car insurance corporations not getting paid, but it does trap lower-income folks in a cycle of debt. Too much of our economy seems predicated on punching people in the face when they're down; if you hate that as much as I do, then let CREDO help you tell your Congressfolk to fight financial predators by passing the Preventing Credit Score Discrimination in Auto Insurance Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to ban glyphosate, Just Label It still helps you do that -- but do it quickly, as the EPA's public commenting period on the matter ends tomorrow. Glyphosate was in the news after several juries found Monsanto liable for billions of dollars in damages when folks who routinely used RoundUp (Monsanto's brand-name version of glyphosate) got cancer, and we dump around 250 million gallons of the stuff on our crops annually in America. Note well, also, that Monsanto's genetic engineering projects tend to center around making their crops more resistant to RoundUp, rather than, say, increasing crop yields so farmers can produce more food. Upon hearing that many farmers are already moving away from spraying glyphosate on their crops before harvest, you have to wonder what the EPA's hesitance to ban it would be. And by "you have to wonder," I mean "because corporate welfare."