Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning the American Jobs Plan and how to pay for it.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk, once again, to listen to us as they consider jobs legislation, and fund it with higher taxes on the wealthy. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

You've heard that a group of 10 Senators (only five of whom are Republicans, when you'd need 10 to overcome a filibuster) have come to an "agreement" about a $1.2 trillion (really only $569 billion in new spending) infrastructure bill? One that doesn't raise taxes on corporations or the wealthy, doesn't promise to fund renewable energy infrastructure, and doesn't fund the care economy we're all going to be a part of as we get older? Well, we've got action alerts for you today, then! Daily Kos still helps you demand a "big, bold, and green" jobs plan. Hey, why should we care what 10 Senators agreed to? None of them seem to think it's all that important to agree with us. Which is why we keep telling them, as often as we need to.

Both the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Moms Rising help you demand that your Congressfolk help build a care economy infrastructure. Think about it: child care costs an arm and a leg, elder care costs an arm and a leg, and workers in these fields get paid in dung pellets; keep leaving it up to the "free" market and we'll have a nation of debt slaves with a few CEOs at the top who gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Spend our taxpayer money insuring that care workers get good pay for good work and we'll start to build something we can be proud of. And it'd be nice if Republicans would stop pretending that it's not "infrastructure" if you can't drive on it. A civilization needs an infrastructure of hard-working, dedicated citizens more than it needs roads.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3805/S. 2028 and thus enact a "millionaire's surtax." I think millionaire income should be taxed at 91% just like the good old days and the bill's "millionaire's surtax" would raise the 37% rate on millionaire income only to 47%, but I try not to let the perfect murder the good, and we should take every opportunity we can to send our Congressfolk the message that the rich don't pay enough in taxes, a matter about which we got a painful reminder this week from ProPublica. Afraid it's not "biparatisan" enough? Over half of Republicans support it, per a Hart Research poll, so enough of that.

Inequality.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1979/S. 794, the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act. This bill would actually raise corporate taxes if a corporation's highest-paid employee makes more than 50 times as much as its median-salaried employee; that tax rate would go up a half-percentage point in that case, and the rate would scale upward, such that a corporation with a 500-to-1 pay ratio would wind up paying five percentage points more. Again, I'd raise it all the way up to 55% for corporate profits over $1 million (and I would expect to lower the ratio that way, too), but let's communicate to our Congressfolk the fact that we think some people make too much money while the rest of us are scraping along, and that they should do something about it.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1459/S. 510, the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act. This bill would enact a "wealth tax" that would finally start to get at the trillions of dollars the ultra-rich sit on -- you know, that money right-wingers always say will "trickle down" to the rest of us? Well, it doesn't, but the wealth tax would impose an annual tax of 2% of assets between $50 million and $1 billion and 3% on assets above $1 billion. It'd raise a lot of money, and the super-rich would still be super-rich -- sure sounds pretty harmless, doesn't it? Then all the whining right-wingers will do about might leave you scratching your head.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, health care, discrimination, corporate spying, and antibiotic abuse.

Long story short: tell your state legislators to draw fair, ungerrymandered districts; tell our FDA to revoke its approval of a dangerous drug, tell Michigan state legislators to reject yet another anti-trans bill, tell Amazon to stop spying on good Americans, and tell our FDA to restrict antibiotic abuse on factory farms. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's and/or state legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting, and have a happy and safe weekend!

Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators draw fair and transparent legislative districts. Which is to say, not the kind of Rorschach-blot legislative districts, the kind that exclude sides of streets and even individual houses, that tend to keep individual legislators in power when they haven't earned it either through good works or superior persuasion. This is one of the things that sucks about the future: given the choice between doing the hard work of earning power or using the computer software that can gerrymander a tailor-made district that'll return you to power without very much effort, legislators typically choose the latter. And we all hate that. But we have to tell them that, and we have to tell them that often.

Public Citizen helps you tell our FDA to revoke its approval of aducanumab, a drug that ostensibly treats Alzheimer's disease. Too many good Americans would quickly respond how dare we hurt the effort to stop Alzheimer's, but we have to consider whether approving a drug that caused brain bleeding and swelling in 40% of clinical trial participants, a drug our FDA's own independent advisory committee told them not to approve, a drug that will cost patients over $50,000 a year to take, might actually hurt the effort to defeat Alzheimer's Disease. Before you do the right thing, you have to get the right thing right.

Change.org helps you tell the Michigan state legislature to reject yet another bill that would mandate that transgender students only play sports in their birth gender. Why do boys become girls again? It sure ain't so they can dominate girls' sports and then hang out with their crew and talk about girls, but that's what right-wingers apparently want you to believe. When transgender folks come out, they risk getting harassed, getting the crap kicked out of them, even getting killed; maybe our politicians should focus a little more on that, and not so much on absurd fantasies about competitiveness in sports.

Media Justice helps you tell Amazon to permanently stop using its power to spy on people. Yeah, Amazon has responded to the Big Stick of Bad PR, but only conditionally: it has renewed a ban on selling facial recognition technology, the kind that can't tell black folks apart any better than your Trumphole uncle can, to law enforcement, but that ban ain't permanent, and even as they announced that ban, it rolled out Sidewalk, a network that would run all manner of data from your Amazon devices into one big spying network. So, clearly, we need to keep at them. Jeff Bezos may be so rich he can blast off into space, but the Big Stick of Bad PR can still bring him back to Earth.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our FDA to set more stringent standards for antibiotic use on factory farms. Specifically, you'd ask our FDA to limit all medically-important antibiotic use on factory farms to 21 days; currently our FDA allows factory farms to use about a third of these antibiotics indefinitely, so Penn PIRG's proposal represents an improvement. Some three million Americans get sick from an antibiotic-resistant superbug every year, and that represents a little less than one in every hundred Americans, and I know you know at least a hundred people, right? So hopefully that drives the point home -- you know, in addition to the prospect that one day the next cut could kill us and all we'll have to show for it is richer corporate executives.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, whistleblowing, drug costs, abortion, and discrimination.

Long story short: tell your PA state legislators to pass anti-gerrymandering legislation, and tell your Congressfolk to add strong whistleblower protections to the Climate Risk Disclosure Act, and pass the For the People Act, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act, the Women's Health Protection Act, and the Equality Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's and/or state legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Fair Districts PA helps you tell your state legislators to pass SB 222, which would establish a redistricting commission with some teeth in Pennsylvania so that legislators can't gerrymander themselves into unearned power. Two-thirds of good Pennsylvanians support a redistricting commission taking the power to gerrymander away from state legislators, and their number also includes a majority of Republican voters, so I say the voters have spoken here and the legislators should do our will, period, end of. And, while I'm thinking about it, Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act -- which would force every state to use a redistricting commission to redraw districts, rather than let legislators carve out their own personal fiefdoms with Rorschach-shaped districts that exclude single houses from districts. Might as well fight on every front, that's what I say.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to add strong whistleblower protections to H.R. 2570/S. 1217, the Climate Risk Disclosure Act. Big corporations love bragging about how green they are, but the Climate Risk Disclosure Act would actually force those corporations to disclose their investments in fossil fuels to their shareholders -- but without whistleblower protections, corporations will more easily hide such investments, because those who would expose them could be intimidated, fired, or otherwise abused. Whistleblowing is not for the faint of heart; folks who do it resign themselves to years of being unemployed and unemployable until they finally win their case and get some reward for their good works. So we ought to protect them wherever we can.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act. Republicans will whine that it's not "bipartisan," nor does it represent an effort to "compromise," but, as usual with Democratic bills, it is a compromise -- the bill would phase in Medicare drug price negotiation, as a sop to big pharma corporations, I'm sure, and would only require negotiation on 50 such drugs by 2024, and the "negotiated maximum price" might not be that much lower than it is now, at least in the short term. So, if you want H.R. 3 to be better, there's space in the comment block of the petition tool for that. But certainly don't let your loved ones think this is some radical, unrealistic bill. It's certainly much kinder to big pharma than I would be.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755, the Women's Health Protection Act. Republicans legislators all over America are passing anti-abortion laws as quickly as they can -- because dealing with the real problems facing their constituents isn't as easy as strutting before the cameras! -- but the WHPA would stop states from outlawing abortion or enacting restrictions on abortion that wind up making abortions nearly impossible to get. Why? Because allowing the continued assaults on abortion rights in America will force women back into being valued as breeders, and nothing else. Anyway, don't want an abortion? Then don't get one. Strange that I have to explain that.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. One more time: the Equality Act would prevent landlords, banks, and employers from discriminating against gay and transgender folk merely on the basis of being gay or transgender. It would do so by adding gay and transgender folks to the protected classes in the Civil Rights Act, and the Civil Rights Act already has a broad exemption for religious freedom, so don't believe right-wingers when they tell you it's an "unprecedented assault on religious freedom," because it's not. Don't believe right-wingers when they say "well, we should do something about discrimination against gay and transgender folks," either, because they never tell you what that is, and because what we should do about discrimination is already in the Equality Act. If I sound like I have no patience with stupidity, that's because I have no patience with stupidity. So I won't get started about fever dreams of boys becoming girls just so they can dominate in field hockey.

Action: concerning Social Security, social media, saving our Post Office, fuel efficiency standards, and pollution.

Long story short: tell President Biden to fire two Social Security Administrators, tell Facebook to permanently ban Donald Trump, tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General DeJoy, tell our EPA to enact more vigorous fuel efficiency standards, and tell President Biden to block the proposed Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. You can call President Biden at 202.456.1111 or use the White House contact form, or use the email/petition/comment tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to fire two Social Security Administrators Andrew Saul and David Black, and fix the Supplemental Security Income (or SSI) program. Messrs. Saul and Black have done their damnedest to set fire to as much of our Social Security programs as they can, making it unnecessarily harder to apply for SSI benefits and "forgetting" to send info to our IRS so seniors could get their stimulus checks. You'd also ask our President to increase benefits so they at least meet the federal poverty level -- contrary to what Rand Paul might thnk, $794 a month ain't inducing anyone to fake back pain -- and raise asset limits, which are stuck at 1989 levels. Among other things! Making programs work better and firing bad workers ain't "socialism." Actually, it's what we expect and deserve from our government.

Left Action helps you tell Facebook to make its ban of Donald Trump permanent. Yeah, Facebook extended his suspension for two years, but if you lose an election and then whine about it being "stolen" without any damn evidence and then incite an attempted coup at our Capitol, then Facebook can err on the side of caution and just wash its hands of Donald Trump. Folks who still think this is about "free speech" -- as if anyone's put him in jail for spewing his filth! -- need to remember that this is 2021, where virtually anyone can publish their rants, however good or bad, on the internet. Why, Donald Trump just started writing a blog not even a month ago! And then, not even a week ago, he stopped. So he certainly has little standing to complain about "free speech."

People for the American Way helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who tried to throw the 2020 election to Donald Trump by gumming up the works at our Postal Service and is trying to raise prices and cut services as we speak. Of course, the news that our FBI is investigating him for illegal campaign finance is just icing on the cake -- and could this be the thing that finally spurs our USPS Board of Governors to move? I kid, of course -- the only thing that should spur them to move is our will, communicated vigorously. And we'll keep communicating it until we get the Post Office we deserve, again.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to overturn the notorious "clean car" "standards" issued by the Trump EPA, and then set more vigorous ones. Because saving money on gas and polluting less are actually very popular with the American people! You can only get them to go along with less fuel-efficient cars by lying to them ("it'll reduce car prices," as if you won't lose that sticker price discount over the years you're paying more for gas) or demoralizing them ("accept the results," "then win more elections," etc.). Neither of those is a lasting strategy for governing, or, indeed, for preserving and perfecting a civilization. So, yeah, let's fight that.

Finally, Presente helps you tell President Biden to halt construction on Enbridge's notorious Line 3 pipeline. As we speak, over a thousand activists have blocked further construction of Line 3, and they're calling attention not merely to Line 3's path through Ojibwe holy lands but to Enbridge's, ah, not-so-steller pipe safety record. Remember when an Enbridge line ruptured and created the biggest inland oil spill in American history? It was only a decade ago, and you can bet the good folks of Kalamazoo, MI remember, since that spill dumped oil into 40 square miles of the watershed there. President Biden can stop this pipeline, ignore the right-wing wailing about TEH JOBZ!!!! -- and then stop negotiating with Republicans so he can actually help create jobs. Sounds like a win-win to me.

Action: concerning endless war, public trans, government spying, corruption, voting rights, and polluter welfare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Iraq war AUMF, create zero-emission public trans, release COINTELPRO files to the public, and pass the IG Independence and Empowerment Act, the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the End Polluter Welfare Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's and/or state legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that "authorized" war with Iraq and which all subsequent Presidents have used to fight unconstitutional wars all over the world. I put "authorized" in quotation marks because only Congress can authorize war, and they have to go through the trouble to declare war, not "give the President power to fight wherever he pleases." This is one of the reasons we broke off from England, folks! And Presidents have been abusing the AUMF for over 18 years now. Which means this mistake's old enough to vote, and it's damn near old enough to drink! So let's kill it already.

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you demand that Congress pass legislation creating a zero-emission public transportation system. Yeah, we keep telling our Congressfolk what we want from this jobs bill, but they keep ignoring us -- so perhaps we should change tactics and demonstrate that the people want public transportation that doesn't choke the world with pollution. It's not so much to ask, right? Right-wingers act like people who like electric buses are weak. Of course, they then go around whining endlessly about how everyone thinks they're racist, but that's beside the point. The point is, having a livable planet in 30 years isn't "weak." Even if a few oil and gas executives don't get to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Which is what right-wingers really favor, whether they'll admit it or not.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2998, which would release all of our FBI's COINTELPRO files to the general public. I guess this bill's opponents will argue "bygones!" and "look forward" and "saying any part of our past wasn't absolutely perfect is treason!" But COINTELPRO went after protestors and activists ranging from anti-war and civil rights organizers to the Ku Klux Klan. Hey, maybe that's how you get right-wingers to support H.R. 2998! I kid, of course -- today's racists know well enough to disavow any love for the Klan. And yet our most recent departed President's campaign slogan was a Klan slogan from the '70s! So, again, learn about the past, and we can make a more perfect union in the future.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2662, the IG Independence and Empowerment Act. "IG" stands for "Inspector General," and you may recall, particularly during 2020, how much maneuvering that irredeemably corrupt President did just to avoid the scrutiny of Inspectors General, who spend all their time investigating waste and fraud and abuse of power. You may even remember that Mr. Trump had to be talked out of firing all of them at the beginning of his term! Well, the IG Independence and Empowerment Act would place more limits on a President's ability to fire IGs and allow IGs to subpoena folks who've left our government if they can shed light on wrongdoing. It's bad if all that stands between us and oblivion is an Inspector General. But, ah, it's a lot worse if they're not there, or if they're a Presidential lackey.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Meanwhile, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. And Public Citizen helps you tell them to do both. I know, I know, One True Real and Great American President Joe Manchin has expressed a preference, but he ain't the boss of us. And, toward that end, Daily Kos helps you sign up and call West Virginians and urge them to urge their Senator to vote for the For the People Act. 79% of them support the For the People Act, after all! And if he's going to write 299 stupid paragraphs about why he won't, at least we can get his constituents to embarrass him.

Finally, both the Sierra Club and Food and Water Action help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. Our government shovels $15 billion annually toward oil and gas drilling corporations that don't need it; how would you feel about that if it were your money? Oh, right: it is your money. The bill would also prohibit federal funding (which is, again, your money) toward fossil fuel R&D and/or international fossil fuel projects. Solar and wind power aren't pie-in-the-sky technologies anymore -- walk around your neighborhood and count the roofs with solar panels if you're unconvinced. Also attend the ridiculous stories you hear about wind turbines; if wind really didn't work, wouldn't they just tell you that?

Action: concerning jobs, voting rights, net neutrality, the filibuster, arms sales to Israel, and vaccine waivers.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the Biden/Manchin capitulation on the American Jobs Plan, tell PA state legislators to reject another absurd election "audit," tell our FCC to reinstate net neutrality rules, tell President Biden to support ending the Senate filibuster, tell our government to stop funding the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and tell President Biden to support COVID vaccine waivers at the WTO. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's and/or state legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

In light of the Senate parliamentarian's ruling that Democrats can use reconciliation once more this year, not twice, and Joe Biden's utter capitulation to Republicans on corporate taxes, and Joe Manchin's announcement that he won't support a jobs bill done through reconciliation, and general Democratic "anxiety" about raising taxes, it's time, once again, to call your Congressfolk and make demands for a real jobs plan. These demands would include: a 55% corporate tax bracket on profits over $1 million, the creation of a public broadband network, the creation of public electricity utilities that run entirely on renewable energy, and every last lead pipe and tottering bridge and broken road in America fixed. Seriously, we must not be held hostage to "the best they could do." Democrats deserve to lose their majorities after this debacle, but I suppose there's time to change their minds, if we do it loudly enough. But we'd better step up, because we're not going to have a country anymore if we don't.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators to reject any effort at a 2020 election "audit," particularly one spurred by Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-33). It's not enough to say "you want another stupid "audit" by people who can't tell their ass from a hole in the ground?" It's not even enough to say "You lost! Get over it! Accept the results!" It's not even enough to point out that Sen. Mastriano was there on January 6. No, these "audits" are part of an attempted coup by Donald Trump, who swears he'll be "reinstated" as President in or around August. So you can go ahead and tell your PA legislators they will be accessories to this attempted coup if they allow this "audit" to happen. Only weak people think Donald Trump won that election. And weak people shouldn't get all the damn say about every damn thing.

In the wake of the news that nearly four out of every five comments filed on our FCC's net neutrality repeal in 2017 were faked by big telecom corporations, Daily Kos helps you tell our FCC to reverse said repeal and reinstate the 2016 Open Internet Order that made net neutrality the law of the land. Net neutrality, as you know, forces internet service providing corporations to serve up all files with the same urgency, which means you, not some corporation, get to determine what your internet experience is like. We don't have a fifth FCC Commissioner yet, and that doesn't help us get net neutrality back, but if we establish our will now, our FCC will have a harder time defying it later.

Daily Kos also helps you tell President Biden to support ending the filibuster. Earlier he said he'd support making Senators work a lot harder for it, and that's far from worthless, but our Senators pooh-poohed that, since it involved doing actual work for your obstruction, so it's time for President Biden to put the squeeze on them. Maybe he thinks calling out Sens. Manchin and Sinema while commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre was squeeze enough -- and, again, that was no small thing -- but they didn't seem to get the message. And if they won't listen to him, we should make them pay the price of not listening to us.

Both Freedom Forward and Daily Kos help you tell your government to stop funding the Israeli occupation of Palestine. I've said it before and I'll say it again: you can get bogged down in all the who-started-it if you like, but you cannot deny these two things: 1) Israel has way, way, way more firepower than Palestine and with great firepower comes great responsibility, and 2) all those nations that supposedly want Israel "wiped off the map" or whatever ain't exactly rushing to Palestine's aid. We don't need to give Israel any more weapons; they seem to have plenty of ability to defend themselves - and do indefensible things to others. It's not for nothing that I hear, unprompted, from co-workers, that Israel is becoming what they most hate.

Finally, Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to follow through on his support for a World Trade Organization (or WTO)-sanctioned COVID-19 vaccine waiver, which (contrary to the absurd proclamations of big pharma corporations) would help more folks all over the world get the vaccines they need. Don't get complacent about the dropping infection and death numbers in the United States (which are still only a little lower than they were this time last year!), because the rest of the world needs help, too, and every day we prioritize intellectual property rights over human life, not only do people die, but the COVID virus gets a little more time to mutate into something that'll bite us in the ass again. Once again, the compassionate is also the pragmatic.

Action: concerning abortion, protecting wildlife, the Estate Tax, polluter welfare, government spying, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell PA state legislators to reject anti-abortion bills, and tell your Congressfolk to pass wildlife corridor legislation, the For the 99.5% Act, the End Polluter Welfare Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the Medicare for All Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's (or state legislators') phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the ACLU helps you tell your state legislators to reject the noxious anti-abortion bills HB 904, HB 1500, and HB 118. HB 904 is one of them-there "fetal heartbeat" bills which are essentially backdoor abortion bans, HB 1500 bans abortion after a Downs Syndrome diagnosis which will only prevent the diagnosis from being made in the first place, and HB 118 would require women who have miscarriages to fill out death certificates and pay to cremate their remains, which is straight-up cruel to grieving women who most certainly didn't "fake" a miscarriage just to have an abortion. Seriously, that last item goes into the pile with "border crisis" and "crime wave" as things that are just bullshit. Anyway, abortion is a right, and one that most Pennsylvanians support, so maybe preening before the extreme right isn't what we pay legislators to do.

Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to introduce and pass legislation creating more wildlife corridors, or overpasses above highways that prevent senseless wildlife deaths. I guess right-wingers will try to make "wildlife corridor" a cuss phrase, like they did with "secular humanism" back in the day and "chain migration" a couple of years ago, but there's no good reason for that. And wildlife corridors don't just save animal lives, they also save human lives, because we have fewer car collisions when animals get their own lane reconnecting their habitats. How about that: what benefits them also benefits us, plus it creates jobs for the folks who build the corridors. Makes you wonder about big-development-über-alles, doesn't it?

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2576/S. 994, the For the 99.5 Percent Act. The For the 99.5% Act would hike Estate Taxes on the wealthy when they die, and when I say "the wealthy" I mean "maybe two out of every thousand Americans," i.e., almost certainly not you or I or almost anyone you know. Do you have less than $3.5 million to your name? Then you will not get hit with the Estate Tax. And don't believe the tall tales about how the Estate Tax ruins family farms, either! Not even when they come from the Governor of South Dakota.

The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. Because big oil and gas drilling operations don't need the money, that's why! Gas is the last cheap fossil fuel, and will probably persist as an industry for at least another generation despite its polluting effects, and oil corporations have made $2 trillion in profits over the last 30 years, so they don't need the money, certainly not more so than the more nascent renewable energy technologies. Certainly don't believe the hype that "oil corporations only make 12 cents a gallon" or whatever -- it's like saying CEOs are underpaid because they only make $3 every time they draw breath. Which is stupid.

The Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. What if we polled good Americans on the question "do you want law enforcement to get your private data when you haven't committed a crime?" I bet most Americans say hell no! to that! Well, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would prevent private data-collection corporations from selling your data to law enforcement willy-nilly; law enforcement should have to get a warrant if they suspect you of a crime. And yes, our Fourth Amendment is supposed to guarantee that they have to do that, but our "law and order" politicians have been chipping away at that right for years. So let's make them stop.

Finally, Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. I was just talking about polling, wasn't I? Well, actual polls have found, for three decades, that most Americans want Medicare to cover everyone in America! And these polls come from big corporations that you would think would have a vested interest in extracting exactly the opposite result! So I think we can trust their reading of the popular will in this instance. It's true that support falls when you start asking about how we'll pay for it. But ask folks if they support Medicare-for-All if we pay for it by capturing the money corporations already pay private insurers and converting that money into an employer-side payroll tax, and I bet support stays the same.

Action: concerning privacy, transparency, and pollution.

Long story short: keep Amazon from connecting your smart devices to a larger network, tell our SEC to mandate more transparency for shareholders, tell New York state legislators to ban facial recognition technology, tell our EPA to enact vigorous clean car standards, tell insurance corporations to cut ties with coal, and tell federal regulators to keep corporations from siphoning public water. The following paragraphs contain email/petition tools for each of these alerts. Good hunting!

First things first: The Guardian reports that Amazon customers have less than a week now to opt out of its plan to turn all the "smart" devices in your house into a giant "mesh network" called Amazon Sidewalk, which, as you might imagine, would raise significant privacy and spying concerns. Maybe you don't want your Alexa to be on the same network as your neighbor's Ring, amirite? Per the article, if you have an Alexa or Ring app, you need to disable Sidewalk in that app's settings, but you only have until June 8 (that's this coming Tuesday) to do so, so you might as well get to it.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to tell corporations to be honest with their shareholders, especially in re its actions (or lack thereof) on climate change and workers' rights. Shareholders care about that stuff, after all, and how do I know? Because if you have a pension plan through your employer, you may well be a shareholder! And you have opinions on how you want your money invested. I mean, not everyone's all "just make me the most money"; even those of us who fear poverty in our old age still don't want to destroy the planet or hurt people just to avoid it. And our SEC does work for shareholders, who are also taxpayers, so let's tell them to do the right thing.

Sum of Us helps you tell New York state legislators to ban facial recognition technology there. Because it's bad at its job and can't tell Black people apart any more than your Trumphole uncle can -- and also the state of New York has nearly 20 million residents, making it the third most-populous state after California and Texas, so if New York bans it, facial recognition corporations will have a tougher time working around it, and thus you'll see less of it elsewhere as well. Which is a good thing! The last thing you want in your life is to be hauled away to jail because some POS software thinks you committed a crime. Just ask Nijeer Parks.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous clean car standards possible. The Obama EPA enacted fairly strong standards that helped good Americans spend less on gas and pollute less, but the Trump EPA couldn't wait to undo them, because Obama. Now the Biden EPA gets its chance to undo the Trump EPA's actions, but they'll still need to hear from us, in numbers that can't be denied. I mean that: government agencies can't simply ignore public comments, and where they defy the public, they have to come up with good reasons, lest they get smacked down in court. Hey, it happened routinely to the Trump Administration.

Public Citizen helps you tell big insurance corporations like Lloyds of London, AIG, and Tokio Marine to stop insuring and investing in coal plants. Two dozen other big insurance corporations have washed their hands of coal recently, and for good reason: why insure an industry that's dying, that is actually more expensive, over the life of their plants, than solar and wind are now? I guess Lloyds et al think energy's more reliable if you can churn the ground to get it -- like they've never heard of, you know, battery storage! That means we got to bring out the Big Stick of Bad PR, which makes all corporations run in fear. (Of course, we have to keep wielding it, or they'll come out of hiding and do the wrong thing again.)

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell our U.S. Forest Service to stop BlueTriton from siphoning water out of the San Bernardino National Forest in California. Since California is in a drought, as it often is in summertime, and drought doesn't just mean thirst and agricultural hell, but also wildfires all over the state -- so letting private corporations take water that belongs to the people isn't the smartest idea, is it? Just so happens BlueTriton -- apparently aspiring to be the "new Nestlé," in Sum of Us's words -- has already ignored water regulators' efforts to stop them. It's like they don't understand that those regulators work for us. Thus it's time to flex our power.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, defense spending, gouging of prisoners, drug policy, discrimination, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your state legislatures and redistricting commissions to cut out all the partisan gerrymandering, and tell your Congressfolk to cut defense spending and to pass the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, the MORE Act, the Equality Act, the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Common Cause and Demand Progress help you tell your state officials to reject any and all partisan gerrymandering this term. Are state legislators and redistricting commissioners used to this sort of attention? No, they are not! Many of them will no doubt profess to a complete and utter surprise that so many of their constituents care about this! At which point they'll think they've put us off our guard and then go back to doing whatever nefarious works they planned to do anyway. Which is why we'll stay on them. Gerrymandering is the last refuge of politicians who can't win arguments on the merits, and why should they continue to win when they haven't earned it?

Both Daily Kos and Win Without War tell our Congressfolk to cut defense spending already. Because we are number one in military spending on Earth, and we spend more than numbers two through twelve combined. And has that made us more secure? Apparently not, since we still go bananas about nonexistent "border crises" and "crime waves." Yet President Biden, apparently having forgotten that right-wing media gave Barack Obama precisely zero plaudits for increasing defense spending, has just asked for $13 billion more than even Donald Trump got last year. I mean, you want to do better than Trump, but not in that way, certainly not when we have so, so many other needs as a nation.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1541, the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, which would prevent big telecom corporations from gouging prisoners and their families when they try to make phone calls. See, this is simple: there's rehabilitating prisoners, there's punishing prisoners, and then there's gouging prisoners, and why should a civilized nation tolerate the last item? Particularly since making it prohibitively difficult to pay for contact with loved ones makes rehabilitation a lot harder? Prisoners need to talk to their loved ones while they're paying for their crimes, and it's not "coddling" to, you know, not gouge them. Some kid at some big telecom corporation came up with the idea of overcharging prisoners and their families, and probably even called it a "captive market," ha ha ha snort. I wonder how he'll do at the Pearly Gates.

Both the Drug Policy Alliance and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3617, the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, which would take pot off Schedule I (where it's never belonged), invest in communities most harmed by the "war on drugs" (which was always putting down protestors and Black folks), and expunge pot convictions from a lot of folks' criminal records (pot convictions help prevent them from getting jobs, and therefore puts them back on track to commit crimes to make ends meet). Why did we fall for things like Reefer Madness again? Because the cotton industry didn't want hemp as a competitor, basically. Think of all the pain we've caused because one group wanted to keep their advantages unfairly; it doesn't reflect well on us. Ending that pain does reflect well on us, though, so let's do that.

The Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. The Equality Act, contrary to what you've heard from right-wingers, would add gay and transgender folk to the protected classes in the Civil Rights Act. Also contrary to what you've heard from right-wingers, the Civil Rights Act already has a fairly broad exemption for religious organizations, so there is literally no truth to all the right-wing whining about how the Equality Act is TEH BIGGESTZEZ INJURIEZ TO TEH RELIGUZ FREEDUMZ EVAHZ!!!!! No, the bill is mainly about preventing banks, doctors, and landlords from discriminating against gay and transgender folks. Most people are actually against that sort of discrimination now. (And if you're about to whine about transgender boys playing girls' sports, read almost any of my other paragraphs about this topic. I don't reinvent the wheel for anyone's amusement.)

Finally, Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Meanwhile, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Hey, weren't we just talking about gerrymandering? The For the People Act would fix that (among other things) by making states use redistricting commissions, rather than self-interested legislators. And the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would plug the hole our Supreme Court blew out of the Voting Rights Act with Shelby County v. Holder -- and make it better! Republicans in the Senate won't vote for any of that, etc., but it's still our duty to communicate our will -- and to communicate that our will hasn't changed.

Action: concerning jobs, taxes, unemployment, our Post Office, immigration, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to divert the Child Tax Credit expansion to fund the American Jobs Plan and to prevent state Governors from prematurely ending extended unemployment benefits, tell our Post Office to reject Postmaster General DeJoy's plan to cut services and raise prices, tell President Biden to end yet another racist Trump-era immigration practice, and tell Senate Democrats, again, to end the filibuster. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

You know the latest Republican "counter-proposal" on the American Jobs Plan aims to repurpose unspent American Rescue Plan money -- but what you may not have realized is that "including unspent funds from the American Rescue Plan in the American Jobs Plan would repeal the Child Tax Credit Expansion that delivers $250 or $300 checks to working families every month for the next year. The fact they even proposed that shows how tone-deaf they are -- and how much confidence they have that it'll ultimately mean nothing in 2022. They might be right about 2022; these are Democrats we're talking about, after all, the same ones who are strangely not bringing up Republican involvement in January 6 every single day. So, yeah, repealing the CTC expansion should be an easy campaign ad for Democrats -- just show one hand passing a $250 check to another hand twelve times, and then show a Republican politician intercepting them all -- but, again, these are Democrats we're talking about. Which is why we need to get on the phone with our Reps and Senators and tell them no to repealing the CTC expansion. If Democrats allow that to happen, they deserve to lose their majorities in 2022. And the American democratic experiment will likely be dead at that point.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop Governors in nearly half of American states from ending expanded unemployment benefits prematurely. Those expanded benefits expire at the end of September anyway; what's the hurry? Especially considering we still have over 6% official unemployment (the more telling U6 figure, which counts folks who've given up looking for work and folks who want to work more hours, stands at 9.9%)? The "hurry" is that Republican politicians want to look like they're "doing something," and as we should know from decades of watching this happen, politicians who look like they're "doing something," even something abominable, always have the political advantage. This is why we constantly tell Democrats to actually do something. Will they listen? If enough of us speak out, they'll have to.

Progress America helps you tell our Postal Regulatory Commission to reject Postmaster General DeJoy's proposal to raise prices and cut services. I keep putting it like that because it should be obvious what a bad idea that is. Do you remember being dissatisfied with our Post Office's performance before the pandemic? I don't, and I used it all the time! They did extremely well considering all the pressure our government puts on them -- taxes haven't funded our Post Office since the early '80s, and our laws mandate that our Post Office prefund its employee benefit plans over 80 years in advance, which no other entity has to do. But, sure, let's believe the Trumphole who came in and said he had to "get tough." "We have to raise prices and cut services"? How un-American is that?

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to end the Trump-era policy that used COVID as a pretext to expel asylum seekers without due process. "Always the wrong solution for the wrong reason" should have been Donald Trump's campaign slogan. Why is it wrong to kick asylum seekers out because they might have COVID? Because you can treat COVID, that's why! At least, you can if you have the slightest amount of competence; of course, when Mike "Let's Start an HIV Mini-epidemic in Rural Indiana Counties" Pence as your COVID policy leader, you don't have competence. It's also wrong because if someone really has COVID, you're sending them back to a country that probably can't treat COVID as well as we can, where they'll infect a lot more of their fellow citizens -- which also makes it more likely COVID will survive and mutate into versions that'll infect us again. Of course, for Stephen Miller, all that was probably a feature, not a bug. But if racism and bad leadership makes all your policy for you, then you're doing policy wrong.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Democratic Senators, once again, to end the Senate filibuster. Because they say it actually impedes bipartisanship, and they're right! Back when the Senate filibuster wasn't so easily invoked -- Senators used to have to talk for 48 or 72 hours to stop a bill, but now Senators just say they're not going to end debate, and then they go off to dinner or the theater or wherever, which actually ends debate! -- Senators would more likely support bills, knowing that'd give them a chance to shape it more like they wanted it. Now Senators filibuster bills that require campaign finance disclosure and prevent big corporations from taking tax breaks after they outsource jobs. You'd think, given how popular both those things are, Senators would risk losing elections doing that. But they don't, because the filibuster is too painless and too easy to use, so much so that Sen. Manchin (D?-WV) won't consider ending it even though his friends on the other side of the aisle just humiliated him by filibustering the January 6 commission bill. But that's why we remind them of our will.

Action: concerning corporate taxes, our Post Office, nursing home neglect, paid family leave, oil drilling in the Everglades, and fairness for pregnant workers.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise corporate taxes to pay for the American Jobs Plan, tell our Post Office to reject Postmaster General DeJoy's plan to cut services and raise prices, tell President Biden to help hold nursing homes accountable for neglect, tell your Congressfolk to enact paid family and medical leave, tell our Interior Department to reject oil drilling in the Everglades, and tell your Senators to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting, and have a happy and safe Memorial Day weekend!

Another day, another Republican "counter-offer" on the American Jobs Plan that ain't as large as it looks, plus they want to fund it with unspent American Rescue Plan money! So the Americans for Tax Fairness Action Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund the American Jobs Plan with corporate tax hikes, not stupid tricks. "User fees" count as a stupid trick; like sales taxes, these always hit lower-income working families the hardest, and we can't just blame Republicans for it, either -- some of our Democratic Senators (cough Mark Warner cough) favor "user fees," too. So we need to disabuse them of that thinking. If you can fund good works by raising taxes on the corporations that constantly use their power against us, you do it. This shouldn't be hard to understand.

Our Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, is as we speak finalizing his plan to gut Post Office services and charge you more for whatever he's generous enough to keep doing, so Progress America helps you leave a public comment smacking it down. If right-wingers get in your grills demanding that you come up with a better solution, well, you can always say "repeal the mandate that our Postal Service pre-fund employee benefits for an absurd length of time," since Congress designed that mandate specifically to cause our Postal Service problems later on (even Mr. DeJoy wants to end this mandate, because stopped clock rule, I guess), or "allow our Postal Service to offer basic banking services to folks in rural and urban areas banks won't touch," which our Postal Service could do until the late 1960s. Right-wingers won't be listening, but it won't matter, because our government has to listen to our public comments. Seriously, there could be legal ramifications if they don't.

Public Citizen helps you tell our President to reject the Trump Administration "advisory opinion" that nursing homes should be immune from COVID-related lawsuits alleging neglect. Let them fight it out in court, obviously! Too many corporations think they have a "right" not to have to go through the trouble of defending themselves, but if they've done good Americans wrong, then good Americans have an actual right to force them to make it right. Again, I shake my head at the fact that I still have to explain things like this. I know most people get it, but the people who don't -- or, more likely, pretend not to -- seem to have too much say about everything. That only means we need to be louder.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass paid family and medical leave. That supposedly will be the one of the main aims of the American Families Plan when President Biden puts it out later on this year, but best to tell your Congressfolk now that we want paid family and medical leave. Seriously, they need to know right now that this is a priority with us. We're basically the only wealthy nation on the planet that doesn't have it, and only a Scrooge McSmallgovernment says look how well we're doing without it! Because we'd do a whole lot better with it if we didn't have to worry about getting time off whenever the baby gets a 104-degree fever or grandmom falls in her bathtub.

Sum of Us helps you tell our Interior Department to reject Burnett Oil's application to drill in the Everglades. Not just because it'll pollute our air and water and disturb unique ecosystems -- and these are both good reasons not to drill there, and maybe do some solar and wind infrastructure elsewhere! -- but because Burnett already has two drilling sites in the Everglades and hasn't cleaned up their messes there, though they've committed to doing so. When someone doesn't do what they say they're going to do, they murder a part of the world. Oh, and the area they want to drill this time? Just so happens to be Seminole holy land, which suggests, again, that politicians only care about the religions of white people.

Finally, the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1065, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. The bill would force corporations to make "reasonable accommodations" to pregnant workers, and would prevent corporations from refusing to hire someone just because they're pregnant. You'll notice that each of those phrases preemptively refutes right-wing whining -- no, pregnant workers wouldn't be able to force their bosses to set up workstations in the bathroom, and no, corporations wouldn't be forced to hire pregnant workers just because they're pregnant. Right-wingers are formulating these "objections" as we speak, not to spark debate but to destroy it. Let's not have any of that.

Action: concerning antibiotic abuse, recycling, labor, privacy, equality, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell our FDA to fight antibiotic abuse on factory farms, tell Pennsylvania legislators to stop defunding recycling programs, tell your U.S. Senators to pass the PRO Act, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, the Equality Act, and the Medicare for All Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell our FDA to do a better job restricting antibiotic abuse on factory farms. You don't want to live in a world where the next cut could kill you -- I have three cuts on my fingers as we speak -- so you don't want seven of every 10 antibiotics go to, no, not sick people or animals, but nominally healthy animals, and antibiotics all stop working as a result. And our FDA needs to do more than they've thus far proposed -- we clearly can't rely on factory farm veterinarians to voluntarily stand up to their factory farm bosses, for example. Sometimes you have to make people do the right thing.

Penn Environment helps you tell Pennsylvania state legislators not to slash funding for the Commonwealth's Recycling Fund. Hard to believe we have to tell them that, isn't it? But we do -- after all, they've done it four times over the last 12 years, and now some recycling centers won't collect plastic, glass, or paper, even. As a citizen, you do the hard work of separating your refuse so we're not completely surrounded by trash, but PA state legislators can't be bothered to do their part. That's why we get in their grills so they have no choice but to do their part.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. Your right-wing Congressfolk will no doubt respond that of course they believe in protecting workers' rights, but the PRO Act "goes too far." That's BS. How is preventing corporations from forcing workers to attend anti-union meetings "going too far"? How is preventing corporations from retaliating against organizers and whistleblowers "going too far"? How is giving workers (versus their employers) the choice of voting via card check or internet "going too far"? They're not, that's how. So don't believe the hype.

The Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Because we shouldn't let third-party data harvesting corporations sell your private info to law enforcement! Law enforcement is supposed to get warrants to look at that, not just buy it from some corporation! And don't brook any silliness about how "there's no privacy on the internet," because that's loser talk -- we should be able to enjoy the internet and feel safe. That's what America's all about, isn't it?

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. When they say "this bill is an unprecedented assault on religious freedom," ask yourself how denying gays and transgender folks loans and jobs and apartments fulfills anyone's "religious freedom." Here I thought religious freedom was about worshiping (or not!) at the church of your choice, not about forcing your beliefs down other folks' throats. In my experience, religion is a lot more than who you hurt.

Finally, Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. And don't brook any silliness about how "it's too hard" and "it can't be done." You know what was too hard and couldn't be done once? Ending slavery, getting women the vote, raising taxes on the rich, and enacting a minimum wage, among many other things we've done as Americans. And I'm pretty sure that good Americans who get slammed with surprise medical bills don't want to hear about what's too hard and what can't be done. And anyway, the only things worth doing are tough.

Action: concerning drug prices, voting rights, public investment, and food stamps.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, tell Pennsylvania state legislators to let election officials count early-arriving votes before Election Day, and tell your Congressfolk to fund overdue public transportation repairs and pass the MEAL Act, the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your PA state legislators' and Congressfolk's phone numbers (where applicable), or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation allowing Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices. Which virtually everyone supports! Except big pharma CEOs, of course, and we shouldn't let them have all the say about everything. The news hook, here, of course, is Rep. Porter (D-CA) embarrassing yet another CEO who deserved it, in unleashing her whiteboard to show how AbbVie has jacked up the price of Humira (the world's best-selling drug presently, treating arthritis and psoriasis, among other illnesses) 144% over the last nine years. You'd think high demand would result in lower prices! But you'd be wrong; if you really, really need a medicine, you're less likely to haggle over the price. Which is why we should let Medicare use the power of a 60-million-plus pool to bring drug prices down for everyone.

Common Cause helps you tell Pennsylvania's state legislature to let vote-counters actually count the votes they receive early before Election Day, instead of forcing them to wait until Election Day proper. Why did they do that? So they could make it seem like Donald Trump won the morning after the election, of course, and thus plant the seed of all his WAAAAAAH THEYZ STOLEZ TEH ELEKSHUNZ!!!! lies thereafter! No, I'm pretty sure that's the reason. It's not like we're asking election officials to put themselves out; ensuring a correct vote count is their job, after all. And we make that job harder by creating the illusion that the votes cast on Election Day somehow count more than the votes cast beforehand. (No, I'll not brook any hard-guys-vote-in-person silliness. Aren't we all too old to be swinging our penises around?)

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund long-overdue repairs to public transit. How long overdue? The NCTJ estimates that dedicating $20 billion annually for the next 12 years would eliminate the backlog. And that's not something we need to do instead of the American Jobs Plan, either, $240 billion over a dozen years not being a very large slice of the federal spending pie. No, I think calling attention to the public trans repair backlog -- and to the many, many jobs attacking that backlog would create! -- only brings more positive attention to the American Jobs Plan. Maybe the backlog will get incorporated into it! And billionaires made over a trillion bucks since the pandemic's start, so it's not like we just can't find the money.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2387, the Making Essentials Affordable and Lawful (or MEAL) Act. The MEAL Act would end the nefarious practice of keeping felony drug convicts from getting food stamps and other federal assistance, a practice which, if you think about it, defies all logic and common sense. Do convicts not need food if they can't get a job (which, thanks to the notorious "box" on most job applications, they often can't)? And how does denying them the federal assistance they need help them reintegrate into society? Again, too many politicians (including, sadly, our current President!) have made too much of a name for themselves calling cruelty and stupidity "tough love." This country is still young, but it shouldn't be that immature.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Because it'll fight gerrymandering, absurdly expensive campaigns, and all kinds of (frequently racist) vote suppression, of course! Also, if you've got a few hours, Daily Kos and Common Cause have teamed up to help you call West Virginia residents and ask them to call their state's senior U.S. Senator, Joe Manchin, and tell him to change his mind about supporting the For the People Act. The For the People Act enjoys supermajority support in polls there, just like everywhere else, and we at least need to deny him the excuse that his own constituents didn't call him. (He'll likely ignore us if we call from out of state -- a truism I've long heard but admittedly found hard to accept.)

Common Cause, People for the American Way, the Daily Kos Liberation League, and the League of Conservation Voters all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore that part of the Voting Rights Act that our Supreme Court killed in Shelby County v. Holder -- the part that allows our government to pre-approve voting rights changes in states and localities that have historically suppressed the vote. After this year, that's going to be a lot of states and localities! So we'd better get that done, and done quickly -- with or without the Republicans' blessing (though Lisa Murkowski has signaled her support for the bill; now we only need nine more to avoid a filibuster! Or, you know, fewer, if we just get rid of the filibuster).

Action: concerning unemployment, taxes, police brutality, Arctic drilling, and the minimum wage.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to save unemployment benefits, make the CTC expansion permanent, pass police reform legislation, end "qualified immunity" for police officers, ban Arctic drilling, and raise the minimum wage. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers (where applicable), or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Moms Rising helps you tell Congress to save unemployment benefits from the 20-plus state Governors who are trying to end it. Because the "generous" benefits are "keeping people from looking for work"! They hope you don't think that if jobs aren't paying more than unemployment benefits -- on which no one lives like a corporate CEO! -- then maybe the jobs should just pay more. You know, like they would in a free market! The economy's not "roaring back," either -- perhaps, as Atrios suggested a few weeks ago, Our Glorious Elites thought the April job figures would be a lot better than they were and just plunged ahead with the story they wanted to tell anyway! But we're past the point where we have patience with stupidity, right?

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the American Rescue Plan's Child Tax Credit expansion permanent. That may be a lot of capitalized words all at once, so I'll put it more plainly: the expansion means anyone with children under 6 gets a $300 check every month, and anyone with children between 6 and 17 gets $250. Monthly three-digit checks for folks with kids -- what an idea! And one that got by me in all the coverage of the American Rescue Plan, which suggests maybe Democrats should, you know, run on that in 2022. Though they barely mentioned it in 2021! It's like they're ashamed of their good works! But we're not -- and we're going to keep on them to do more good works.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1280, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Specifically, you'll demand that your Senators pass a bill that would cut off the flow of military weapons to police departments, ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants, raise use of force standards in police departments, and reform the "qualified immunity" doctrine (which see next paragraph). Maybe Republicans can attack "that Democrat special interest bill" that bears George Floyd's name, but see if they'll defend chokeholds, or tear gas for protestors, or no-knock warrants, or police getting off scot-free for killing people. I would imagine that these would be tougher to defend.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to end "qualified immunity" for police officers. As I said last week, it should be hard to convict someone of a crime -- even someone who pisses you off! -- but the "qualified immunity" doctrine, in practice, is a "get out of jail free" card for police officers who commit evil deeds. Folks who tell me how can they do their jobs with all of this pressure? need to ask themselves one question: should a person who commits a crime like murder get off just because they're a police officer? It's not "all this pressure" to hold people accountable for their wrongdoing. And, sadly, police officers need to be perfect. It's one reason why I think they should have less to do.

Environmental Action helps you tell your Senators to permanently protect the ANWR (or Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) from fossil fuel drilling. The 2017 tax "reform" included a provision opening up ANWR for drilling (indeed, it may have been the only reason Lisa Murkowski voted for it), but the 2021 lease sale didn't produce very many bidders, which means that our decades-long agitation has made big corporations loathe to go into ANWR, but I'd much prefer that the force of law kept them out. Scientists have been saying for decades that we're just not going to get very much oil out of ANWR, which would make it unnecessary to list all the other reasons (stopping pollution, preserving Native American culture, protecting endangered species) we'd have to stop drilling in a freaking national wildlife refuge. I mean, what else do they need "refuge" from? Aliens?

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass a bill raising the federal minimum wage to $15/hour. You've no doubt heard some of our older morons in politics and media say things like I only made $2/hour; what's wrong with that? Generally they made $2/hour 50 years ago; $2 in 1971 dollars is $13.19 today, thanks to a little thing called inflation that apparently only exists when right-wingers want to fear-monger about federal spending. Raising the minimum wage won't cause runaway inflation, or else a Big Mac in Denmark, where McDonald's workers make more than $22/hour, wouldn't cost roughly the same as it does here. And you know what else? Big restaurant corporations have already told investors that a $15/hour minimum wage won't hurt their business -- and if they were simply lying to their investors, there'd be consequences.

Action: concerning taxes, vaccines, occupations, detentions, and our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pay for the American Jobs Plan with corporate tax hikes and not "user fees," tell your Congressfolk to beef up IRS enforcement so we can catch more tax cheats, and tell our President to fund world vaccine efforts, stop funding Israel's occupation of Palestine, close the Guantánamo Bay detention center, and replace one more member of our USPS Board of Governors. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers (where applicable), or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pay for the American Jobs Plan by taxing corporations, not working people. Because that's what "user fees" are -- they're basically a damn sales tax, and we should outlaw all sales taxes anyway, because they always hit working people harder than wealthy people, and taxes should hit wealthy people harder, not so much because there's more money there as because wealthy people will take away all your rights if they become too powerful. You know, like they're doing now! And definitely don't tolerate any Republicans who say "only the people who use the roads should pay for the roads," as if corporations don't use roads.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk they need to fund our IRS properly so they can catch more wealthy tax cheats. This is basic law and order stuff here -- imagine your government saying we can't pay for cops, so we're just going to let the burglaries keep on happening. You wouldn't tolerate that, would you? Well, why would we tolerate the loss of $1 trillion annually simply because Congress has starved it of money the last decade? That's $1 trillion that rich folks and corporations have essentially burgled from us! We shouldn't have to! Congress should do their damn jobs! And now I'm over my exclamation point quota for this paragraph.

Public Citizen helps you tell the Biden Administration to invest $25 billion in vaccine development around the world. Because you can kill it here, but if you don't kill it there, too, it's gonna come back here and kill you, and very likely in mutated form. Hopefully we don't need the argument put any more pragmatically than that! And $25 billion out of over $4 trillion in annual federal spending not only isn't a lot, but would get you a lot more than you paid for it. Unlike, say, defense spending, where outspending the next eight highest-spending countries combined actually hasn't brought us any more security. Odd how little real security actually costs.

Speaking of which, MoveOn helps you tell the Biden Administration to stop funding Israel's continued oppression of Palestine. How often to I hear Israel is becoming that which it came into existence to fight these days? Quite often! And I'd probably think differently about Israel's actions in Palestine if I were convinced they really were alone against an entire world, but which of their Middle Eastern neighbors is standing with Palestine right now? Judging by the imbalance in the death tolls, I'd say none of them. And that means Israel has been captured by the folly that any fight is a good fight, and all fights must be fought to the death. It's always sad to see folks become what they most hate. And true friends don't enable it, as we have for decades.

Daily Kos helps you tell the Biden Administration to close the Guantánamo detention center already. Guantánamo remains a stain on our national soul, and if you're not getting the stains out of your soul, you're not living a moral life. And no, it's rubbish that Guantánamo's detainees will all "return to terrorism." Most of them never were terrorists to begin with! How do I know? Because if they were, our government would have convicted them of something over the last 20 years, that's why! "Too difficult to prosecute, but too dangerous to release" was a particularly noxious Obama-era fecal blast. We would laugh at Vladimir Putin saying that -- but we tolerate it here, too. And we shouldn't.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell President Biden to oust another USPS Board of Governors member, Ron Bloom, and replace him with someone qualified and more likely to fire Louis DeJoy. But I repeat myself! President Biden can replace Mr. Bloom because he's already served on the Board past his term, and Mr. Bloom has incomprehensibly endorsed Mr. DeJoy, when Mr. DeJoy deserves only shame and shunning for the "work" he's done. He tried to steal the election for Donald Trump! You don't just "get along" with people who do that! And now he's about to take a Post Office that was running pretty well and ensure that it runs badly, for "cost-cutting" reasons, of course. If that's what our "best and brightest" entrepreneurial minds do, well, then, they're not our "best," are they? They're more likely grifters, in fact. And we deserve better.

Action: concerning January 6, the Estate Tax, unemployment, pollution, and vote suppression.

Long story short: tell Democrats to hold January 6 hearings without Republican help or support, tell your Congressfolk to pass the For the 99.5% Act, tell states to stop using facial recognition software in unemployment applications, tell our EPA to roll back the Trump-era rule forbidding states from setting stricter car emissions standards, and tell Pepsi to stop funneling money to vote suppressors. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers (where applicable), or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting, and have a happy weekend!

Consumers United for Fairness helps you tell Democrats to go ahead and hold hearings on the January 6 attempted coup without Republicans. 35 Republican House Reps actually voted for the independent commission legislation, but if we don't get 10 Republican votes in the Senate for it (hey, go ahead and call them, what could it hurt?), then Democrats should just move ahead. Are they afraid of being called "partisan" for it? Then they should all lose their next elections! Because they don't have the courage to do the job! Do the right thing, then worry about Republican hurt fee-fees. Bunch of damn brats, Republicans are. And it's about time Democrats stopped acting afraid of them. (I'm aware that the word "acting" implies this might all be one big drama. The only way to counter that is to be real with your Reps and Senators.)

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2576/S. 994, the For the 99.5 Percent Act. What would the For the 99.5% Act do? It would institute five Estate Tax brackets, ranging from 39% at the low end ($750,000 to $3.5 million) to 65% at the high end (over $1 billion). We all just witnessed billionaire wealth increase over $1 trillion during this pandemic, so it ain't like they ain't got the money. And one more time: this bill will kill exactly zero family farms! Too many good liberals still let this zombie lie live in their head, but even the organizations plugging this lie can't find a single example of a family farm lost to the Estate Tax! Next time you're in a room with 200 people, please understand that the For the 99.5% Act would only ever tax approximately one of them.

Fight for the Future helps you tell states to stop using facial recognition software on good Americans trying to file for unemployment. Because facial recognition sucks! It can't tell Black folks apart any better than your Trumphole uncle can! And just as higher walls tend to be confounded by taller ladders, some scam artists have, no joke, resorted to 3D-printed face masks in order to confound the software, meaning the supposed fraud prevention measure has actually become a fraud creation measure. And, you know, submitting to software that makes everything worse also makes your wait for unemployment benefits longer! Just at the moment you really can't have any of that! So go ahead and deploy the winning argument against the officials trying to hurt you.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reverse the Trump Administration's rule preventing states from setting stricter auto emissions standards than our federal government does. If you're the kind of person who says f'ing California and their f'ing emissions standards making me work harder, then you're not the kind of person who says f'ing car manufacturers and their f'ing inefficient cars making me pay more for f'ing gas, and not just because the latter describes a real problem real Americans face. Seriously, we have to stop putting corporate executive whining on the same level as actual problems. No one says they don't have a right to complain, but they also don't have a "right" to get their way whenever they complain. No amount of money can buy you a right.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell PepsiCo to stop donating to organizations and candidates who help suppress votes. Corporations can talk all they want about how "the right to vote is a cornerstone of American democracy," as a Pepsi spokeshack has said, but actually putting your money where your mouth is? That's another thing entirely. Pepsi gave half a mil to the reactionary U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 2020, and said Chamber is leading the charge against H.R. 1, the For the People Act, a bill some two-thirds of Americans actually support in numerous polls. Their spokeshacks will say they only give to the Chamber for economic reasons, which is to laugh -- not just because it's actually kind of insulting to think we'll like the reactionary Chamber's economic agenda, but because the Chamber can spend its donations how it likes, and Pepsi knows that. So enough stupid crap from corporations.

Action: concerning the Child Tax Credit, paid family and medical leave, internet freedom, public transportation, and corporate welfare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, pass paid family and medical leave, and pass the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act, the Freedom to Move Act, and the End Polluter Welfare Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools on the bottom of this page.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent. This summer, that expansion will deliver an extra $300 monthly to folks with children under 6, and an extra $250 to folks with children between 6 and 17. I've given this matter a lot of thought lately, and it sure seems to me that an extra $250 or so monthly will give parents a lot of breathing room, which will help them be the best parents they can be. Already our everything-for-the-rich-and-screw-everyone-else economy makes it hard for them to be their best; the CTC expansion is a rare government policy that actually does that. So we really ought to keep it around.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a paid family and medical leave plan. Paid family and medical leave will be a focus of President Biden's American Families Plan, but it might be better in the short run to tell them we support paid family and medical leave in the abstract, and then hold them accountable for the details later; at that point, they won't be able to say their constituents didn't talk about paid family and medical leave. We're the only big nation on Earth that doesn't have it, and no it wouldn't be particularly onerous to fund. You've heard that America's billionaires have made over $1 trillion more since the pandemic's beginning, right? Well, that'd be a good place to start.

Both Consumer Reports and the ACLU help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1783/S. 745, the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act. Again, though President Biden's American Jobs Plan would nominally include more broadband, our Congressfolk still need to hear from us about it, not least because too many of them (cough Republicans cough) have been banging their saucepans telling everyone that broadband isn't "really infrastructure." All you need to do to prove them wrong is go through a pandemic! Now kids go to school over the internet, adults go to work over the internet, folks see a doctor and buy groceries over the internet -- yeah, it's obviously infrastructure. Why do we listen to Republicans again?

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2287/S. 1172, the Freedom to Move Act. Since at least the beginning of the Reagan years, we've been caught up in the idea that we should each have our own cars and rely less on trains and buses to get us around. But I think we're seeing the folly of that idea -- not just that it's selfish, but that it'll also help destroy our planet a lot faster. And you know, not everyone can have a car -- some people just don't make enough money, and they need public transportation as a result. Hence the Freedom to Move Act would issue grants to help make fare-free public trans a reality; after all, why shouldn't we spend our money on things we might all use? (And, not for nothing, but yeah, this bill or something like it could also get folded into the American Jobs Plan, so best to let our Congressfolk know we want better public transportation.)

Finally, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act, which would end some $15 billion of corporate welfare for big fossil fuel drillers. I have to say I find far too many fiscal hawks will go after social spending with almost absurd ease, but will never say anything about corporate welfare -- which is far larger, and which represents a far greater immorality -- unless you provoke them, and why should I have to provoke people to do the right thing? Can't people do the right thing on their own? Can't they follow their own philosophy consistently and fight all big government handouts? If they can't, you have to wonder who might be lining their pocketbooks.

Action: concerning big pharma, transgender kids, the "citizen's arrest," social media, birth control, and Rahmbo.

Long story short: demand more affordable EpiPens, protect transgender kids in North Carolina, help end the concept of the "citizen's arrest," tell Facebook to keep Donald Trump off its platform, tell President Biden to roll back the Title X "gag rule," and tell your Senators to reject Rahm Emanuel as the next Ambassador to Japan. You'll find email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

Change.org helps you tell Viatris to make EpiPen more affordable. Sound familiar? A few years ago, when Mylan owned EpiPen (Mylan merged with Upjohn in 2020 to create Viatris), it got in hot water for pricing it at $700 for two doses; the drug being delivered costs about a buck, and in 2009, two EpiPen doses cost "only" $100. But $700 for a life-saving drug that monopolizes the market? That's uncivilized, particularly coming from the richest civilization on the planet. In Europe they pay a whole lot less, despite the spectre of socialized medicine. Or do I mean because? In fairness, EpiPen also has competition over there, which our notorious "free" market somehow hasn't delivered. That means we're left with embarrassing EpiPen's owner into submission.

Change.org also helps you beat back yet another anti-transgender bill, this time SB 514 in North Carolina, which would (stop me if you've heard this one before) ban transgender surgeries and treatments in the Tar Heel state. The bill's authors appear to think trans kids are faking it, but if so, they don't understand children, like, at all -- the most important thing to a kid is approval, and coming out as trans risks that approval, whether from family or peers; who does that just for attention? When the "attention" you get is getting kicked out of your house or beaten up in science hall, the answer is "nobody." And it's not like there aren't ten thousand other ways to get attention that don't involve announcing you're really a different sex than you look like you are. Hell, for me it was aggressive sarcasm. You may be surprised to learn that people still remember me for it.

Progress America helps you tell New York state to outlaw "citizen's arrest" laws. Maybe you think of the "citizen's arrest" as something you saw on The Andy Griffith Show, though the "citizen's arrest" is as old as the hills -- or, at least, medieval England. But encouraging citizens to arrest other citizens doesn't befit a civilization that has police officers, and encourages far too many folks to do things they shouldn't do. Case in point: George Zimmerman, who was not a police officer but who took it upon himself to apprehend Trayvon Martin because he looked "out of place" or whatever. And you can all too easily imagine Trump-soaked citizens taking it upon themselves to "right" "wrongs" with powers they haven't earned and don't deserve.

Speaking of which, Free Press helps you tell Facebook to permanently ban Donald Trump from its platform. Because Donald Trump does not have a First Amendment right to a Facebook platform, that's why! He only has a First Amendment right not to be put in jail for his speech -- unless, of course, he makes terroristic threats, commits libel or slander, or (pretends to rack brain) incites folks to riot. Facebook is a private corporation, and though it too often acts like it just can't do anything about user content, we would best regard Facebook, both conceptually and legally, as a publishing house. And we don't demand that publishing houses accept every single manuscript, do we?

Daily Kos helps you tell the Biden Administration to repeal the Trump Administration's Title X "gag rule," which keeps health providers from discussing abortion with their patients while receiving Title X grants. You've heard me say take government money, play by government rules enough times to think I might support the Trump-era "gag rule," but I've always said that when discussing employers taking our taxpayer money and then discriminating against employees. That's just wrong. Preventing health providers from discussing legal options for women's health care as a condition for getting federal grants? That's also wrong -- abortion is a legal procedure and a legal right.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell your Senators to reject Rahm Emanuel's nomination as Ambassador to Japan. Because he's got a long rap sheet: as Barack Obama's first Chief of Staff, he was also the chief architect of capitulation in 2009 and 2010 -- calling liberals "retards" at one point for the heinous crime of wanting more out of a Democratic President than warmed-over Clintonism -- and from there he went on to serve two terms as Mayor of Chicago, overseeing systemic police brutality and privatizing as much of the city's public services as he could get his mitts on. And no, he gets no credit for Democrats retaking the House in 2006; if any one person gets credit for that, it's Howard Dean. We can't let the worst Democrats continue to fail upward.

Action: concerning jobs, law and order, pregnant workers, privacy, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk about your "red line" for the American Jobs Plan, tell your Congressfolk to oppose military weapons and "qualified immunity" for police officers, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the Medicare for All Act. You can 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 Congressfolks' phone numbers, or use the links in the following paragraphs.

Tired of hearing how "bleak" the prospects are for a "bipartisan" American Jobs Plan? It's bleak enough that we're even negotiating with the supporters of the January 6 insurrection! The Republicans' "red line" is, of course, NO NEW TAXUZ!!!! -- although "use fees" somehow don't count as taxes to them, at least at this moment -- and President Biden's "red line," unfortunately, does not appear to include "the bill must raise taxes on corporations." Want a better red line? The American Jobs Plan must include a 55% tax rate for corporate profits over $1 million, must invest substantially in clean water, renewable energy, and the care economy, and must not include "use fees," which always hit working people harder than they hit rich people. Our red line matter more than their red lines -- if we speak out. (Daily Kos helps you communicate your will in re corporate taxes and renewable energy and the care economy.)

Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3227, the Demilitarizing Local Law Enforcement Act, which would end the notorious 1033 program which funnels surplus military weapons to local police departments. Seriously, if you heard "police get military weapons" in nations like Iran or Russia, you'd find that alarming, wouldn't you? Don't let "but police have it hard" get in the way of you finding that alarming here in America, too, because these weapons don't help police deal with criminals -- they help police put down peaceful protests against their brutality! And don't put the phrase "defund the police" in your counterarguments, either. This is literally not "defunding the police," and attaching any concept that makes you mad to any other concept that makes you mad is not argument worthy of civilized people.

Further along these lines, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to end "qualified immunity" for police officers in America. "Qualified immunity" is the legal doctrine, promulgated by our Supreme Court in Pierson v. Ray, that protects government officials (including police officers) from civil suits over their discretionary actions (i.e., actions not mandated by law), unless the plaintiff can prove those actions violated "clearly-established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known." But in practice, folks trying to get relief from police brutality have to prove something almost exactly the same happened to someone else, and that they got relief, in order to get relief themselves. And judges have used the narrowest excuses to throw cases out -- "your example was about police siccing a dog on a suspect lying down with their hands to the side, but you were sitting down with your hands up, so it's not the same! Too bad!" No, I didn't make that up. We should make it hard to convict people of crimes in America, but we shouldn't make it damn near impossible. "Qualified immunity" does that, and Congress should end it.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1065, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. Too many women in America have to choose between having a baby and having a job, and why should it be like that? If men could get pregnant, you'd best believe bosses would make every conceivable accommodation at the workplace, like assignments with less lifting and more tolerance of bathroom breaks. But too often we assume women have "ulterior motives" for getting pregnant, when, hey, who would get pregnant just to get light duty? Don't believe the hype that the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would "make it impossible for bosses to do their jobs." The bill pointedly does not force bosses to make unreasonable accommodations. When you read bills, you learn things.

The Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Our laws already prevent most corporations (including the big telecoms and social media corporations) from selling your information to law enforcement -- but our laws don't prevent the third-party data collecting corporations that buy that data from selling it to law enforcement! Which they do, so if you're a Muslim looking up which direction Mecca's in on your phone, now our government can find out about it, and harass you if they want. There's a reason we demand that law enforcement get warrants to investigate you -- it's for your protection! And we deserve that protection even when big corporations figure out how to work around it. And that's why we have lawmakers.

Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. The Medicare for All Act would ensure that all Americans have health insurance, including the 30 million or so who can't get health insurance now, and we could deliver better care more cheaply. How? Well, for one thing, Medicare-for-All won't have a slew of million-dollar executives who need to be paid first. Also, Medicare-for-All will bargain with doctors and hospitals and big pharma corporations with the strength of a 330-million-person-plus pool, and in insurance bargaining, there's always strength in numbers. Don't worry that doctors won't be able to "make money"; doctors still make plenty of money everywhere that governments guarantee that everyone gets health care. So, really, there are no counter-arguments. (Cost isn't one, either; I've shot that zombie in the head many times, most recently last week.)

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, voting rights, the filibuster, public lands, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell our government to do the right thing about the Israel/Palestine conflict, tell your Congressfolk to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, write a letter to the editor advocating that we end the Senate filibuster, and tell President Biden to reverse Trump-era land grabs at several national monuments and forgive student loan debt. You can 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 Congressfolks' phone numbers and/or use the links in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

First things first. MoveOn helps you tell President Biden to call for an immediate ceasefire in the Israel/Palestine conflict and an end to Israeli evictions of Palestinians, while Demand Progress helps you tell our government to stop funding Israeli occupation of Palestine and Avaaz helps you tell world governments to sanction Israel for its actions. You don't need to know "who started it" to support these petitions; you only need to know how it is -- one nation is way more powerful than another, and brutalizes the other. And of course you should also be suspicious when you notice that the violence has buoyed the electoral fortunes of the Israeli Prime Minister who can't win an election outright but somehow stays in power.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Meanwhile, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. You've no doubt heard that New Great and Bounteous One True American President Joe Manchin likes the latter bill but not the former, but who cares? We want both! We want both the bill that would help us end partisan gerrymandering and force big campaign donors out into the light and the bill that would restore the Voting Rights Act! Why should we have to settle just because Joe Manchin's the 50th vote?

Speaking of all of that, Common Cause helps you write a letter to the editor of your local paper advocating that we end the Senate filibuster. I used to advocate for fixing the filibuster, so that the Senators who would use it would actually have to work for it by explaining, at considerable length, why they oppose campaign finance disclosure or ending tax breaks for corporations that outsource jobs overseas (to name just two popular initiatives they've filibustered over the years), but fuck that: Senators have abused this power, so they get nothing from now on, and Mitch McConnell's threats to slow down Senate business to a crawl if they get rid of the filibuster are irrelevant. Remember when Sen. Bunning (R-KY) singlehandedly stopped any further unemployment insurance considerations in 2010? Yeah, he wasn't running for re-election. Anyone who stops a popular bill because he wants a proper quorum to turn on the lights in the Senate building won't get re-elected, either. If we have anything to say about it, that is.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell President Biden to roll back Trump-era land grabs at several national monuments, including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. When Trump votaries contemplated the phrase "drain the swamp," do you think the phrase "by chipping away at national monuments so that gas and oil drillers could pollute it" followed naturally in their minds? I would say not! Folks love their national monuments a lot more than Our Glorious Elites would like you to think, and they're actually not all that emotionally invested in big corporate CEOs making even more money from gas and oil drilling. Tell them "it's for the jobs" and you may get most of them to pause -- but tell them "that's what they want you to think," and then explaining exactly why that's what they want you to think that (i.e., as in the previous sentence above), will win most of them right back. Too bad our "liberal" media never thinks to do that. Hey, we can't do everything. That's why we live in a civilization.

Finally, both the ACLU and Daily Kos help you tell President Biden to cancel at least $50,000 in student loan debt per borrower. You've heard folks say they can't retire because they still have tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt? Well, it's not actually the kind of thing that deserves the response well you should have thought of that before taking on all that debt ha ha ha snort, because our society has been telling everyone for years they have to get a college degree if they want to survive, and when you go telling people that, you either have to deliver on that or make it right if you don't. And forgiving $50,000 in student loan debt will make that right for a lot of people. Personal to those who'd be jealous: go gripe with God about when you were born, and God will you the same thing I will, that every damn thing in the world ain't about you.

Action: concerning jobs, war, debt, pollution, and law and order.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk that you want a jobs bill that invests in the care economy and invests in renewable energy, tell President Biden to end all arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, tell our CFPB to protect us from debt collector harassment, tell Pennsylvania state legislators to reject yet another pro-pollution bill, and tell Louisiana state legislators to ban the "panic defense." 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 phone numbers for your various state and federal legislators, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in the care economy as part of the American Jobs Plan and invest in renewable energy as part of the American Jobs Plan. We're all going to need more care someday, and our seniors need more care now, so investing in the "care economy," as they call it, is as much an investment in our future as investing in roads and bridges. And n.b. "investing in our future" when considering whether we should build out more solar and wind in an infrastructure bill. Investing merely in more gas drilling and more oil drilling is going to give us an uninhabitable planet one day; investing in renewable energy will give us, as Millie Jackson would say, a fighting chance. Politicians need to start putting our needs above their rich cronies' "needs."

Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to end all arms sales to the Saudi/UAE coalition currently raining death and misery upon Yemen. He has ended "logistical and military support" for the coalition, and has frozen arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and these ain't nothing, but people are still dying in Yemen -- the U.N. estimates that 400,000 kids under 5 could die this year from hunger -- and we're still following through with all of Donald Trump's midnight arms sales to the Saudi/UAE coalition, so we need to communicate our will again. Remember that the big arms manufacturing corporations don't really want this war to end, because that'll be less money for them. You'd think some of our big "free" marketeers would just respond that those corporations ought to be able to adjust if they want to survive, but as usual, you can't count on them. But we can count on us.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to roll back its proposed rule that would allow debt collectors to deluge you with unlimited emails, text messages, and direct messages on social media platforms. Plus the rule would let them call you every day if they want, and the rule would let them harass you without even determining if you owe them any money! Which latter item you could very well construe as an attempt to defraud you! This rule was, of course, a Trump-era CFPB rule, since Donald Trump only lived to serve other bosses; the Biden-era CFPB may yet approach the level of the Obama CFPB, which was one of that Administration's best Executive branch agencies -- but only if we make our voices heard.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your state legislators to reject yet another pro-pollution bill, SB 275. SB 275 would prevent any PA municipality from "(a)dopt(ing) a policy that restricts or prohibits, or has the effect of restricting or prohibiting, the connection or reconnection of a utility service based upon the type of source of energy to be delivered to an individual consumer within the municipality." Sounds wordy and harmless, right? Wordy is never harmless! The bill wants to prevent municipalities from making their utilities more renewable; the only "restricting or prohibiting" the bill cares about is ""restricting or prohibiting" oil and gas. It's corporate welfare, in other words. And how conservative, to want to prevent smaller governments from having more say in the decisions that affect them! Let's deliver this bill to the oblivion it most richly deserves.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell Louisiana state legislators to outlaw the "panic defense" tactic in murders of LGBTQ+ folks. Yes, Louisiana is one of 38 states that doesn't explicitly prevent lawyers from deploying the "panic defense," but from whence does this "panic" supposedly issue? Oh, from the "panic" a defendant feels when propositioned by someone gay or transgender or otherwise not prototypically "straight." I'm going to go out on a limb and say that almost every man in America has gotten hit on by a dude without murdering him. Murder equals unlawful death plus malicious premeditation, without the absurd excuse that he just couldn't cope with the guy who hit on him! So I would say folks who deploy the "panic defense" are anti-law and order.

Action: concerning taxes, voting rights, food safety, polluter welfare, law and order, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk not to be cowardly about raising taxes on the rich, tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Baby Food Safety Act, the End Polluter Welfare Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the Medicare for All Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition links (where applicable) in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Dan Pfeiffer, clearly one of the better political thinkers to emerge from the Obama Administration, argues that Democrats ought to "lean into" tax hikes on corporations, because, and I quote, "(t)he idea that Biden’s proposals to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy are a political liability flies in the face of all of the polling as well as basic common sense." Hear, hear! Voters reward courage; they don't reward "this is the best we could do" or "Republicans wouldn't let us do more," and they sure as hell don't reward "I couldn't do the right thing because I'm in a swing district." You know what "swing" voters crave most from their reps? That they do the right thing! And they'll settle for the "courageous" thing, so you want to do an actual courageous thing before Republicans do the fake courageous thing. So go ahead and call your (Democratic) Reps and Senators and tell them they'll only get to keep their majorities if they do the right thing and raise corporate taxes. You can also tell them, if you're feeling ornery, that you wouldn't want to suspect that they're pretending not to understand this very basic calculus so that they don't offend their big donors. Votes win elections, not cash.

While you've got your Senators on the phone, tell them to pass H.R. 1/S. 1, the For the People Act. The Senate Rules Committee deadlocked on the bill on Tuesday, but Sen. Schumer used his power as Senate Majority Leader to advance the bill to the full Senate anyway, so now's the time to put the pressure on your Senators. They're no doubt hearing from the other side, though I'm not sure what arguments the other side could reasonably advance -- how can they say it's "a solution in search of a problem" when numerous state legislatures have repeatedly demonstrated the problem? How can they argue "record turnout in 2020" when states scurry to pass laws to ensure that turnout doesn't happen again? How can they say "bills like this should be passed in a bipartisan manner" when Republicans have acted in an entirely partisan manner for over a dozen years? Seriously, their arguments are dung. They need to hear that killing gerrymandering dead, disclosing big campaign donors, and ensuring same-day and automatic voter registration are actually pretty popular.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1019, the Baby Food Safety Act. Because baby food sure as hell shouldn't have high levels of lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury in it! And the Baby Food Safety Act would actually set maximum levels for these toxins' presence in baby food, and establish mechanisms for lowering those levels as advancing scientific research would require. Why would we give babies food that might expose them to cancer and brain damage? The more pertinent question might be "why did big food manufacturing corporations do nothing about these things even when they knew about them?" Because a President Trump would let them get away with it no matter what we said, that's why. We have a better chance of influencing a President Biden in our direction, and that's why we need to tell our Congressfolk to pass this bill.

The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. The bill would, as its title suggests, cut some $15 billion annually in subsidies to big polluting corporations (like oil and gas drilling corporations) who hardly need the taxpayer help. And yet they'll fight to the death to keep them! Even as they admit to each other that tax breaks hardly matter in the decisions they make! (Hey, don't take my word for that -- take former Bush Mobb Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's word for it!) And, ah, why are we giving these handouts to polluters when we could be giving more of a hand up to solar and wind and geothermal? These things don't pollute anywhere near as much as fossil fuels do, and it ain't like the sun and the wind and the ground are going anywhere. Unless we destroy them all! How about we do the hard work of not doing that?

The Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Big telecom corporations can't sell your personal data to law enforcement -- but they can sell them to private data broker corporations, which can sell your data to law enforcement! The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would close that loophole right quick, which would not only protect your right to privacy on the internet (I never agreed with folks who throw up their hands and say you just don't have any privacy on the internet; it's a species of cynicism), but would also save the taxpayer money! Yes, it would, since it's easier to just buy up a bunch of data ("WE NEEDZ IT TEH NOWZ, SO PAYZ UPZ!!!!!!") than it is to get warrants. Which is why we make law enforcement get warrants.

Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. Which would expand Medicare to everyone and (by almost everyone's estimation, though they often don't put it quite like this!) cost less than funneling trillions of dollars into our current health insurance system, the system that slams you with surprise thousand-dollar medical bills all the time and moves doctors in and out of networks all the time. With Medicare for All, we'd have one network, and we'd have the bargaining power with private hospitals and doctors that a 330-million-strong pool would have! Plus we could fund it merely by capturing the money big corporations already pay private health insurers in an employer-side payroll tax (and please note that "employer-side" means "employees don't pay one penny more"). Sounds like a win for the American people all the way around.

Action: concerning law and order, immigration, antibiotic abuse, food safety, marketing to children, and dog-fighting.

Long story short: tell California judges to stop setting absurdly-high bail that no one can afford to pay, tell President Biden to reunite the rest of the families torn apart by President Trump's family separation policy, tell McDonald's to stop enabling antibiotic abuse on factory farm, tell Pepsi to get glyphosate out of its food products, tell YouTube to stop using autoplay and recommendation features on its Kids channel, and tell Russia to ban dog-fighting. You can find email/petition links for each of these action alerts in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

Color of Change helps you tell the California Judicial Council to stop setting bail higher than defendants can reasonably pay. Some folks will react HOWZ CANZ TEH COPZ DOZ THEIRZ JOBZ!!!!!, but note well the words "defendant" and "reasonably pay" in the previous sentence -- if we're putting people in jail indefinitely before convicting them of a crime, we're not being a law-and-order nation; we're being a dick-swinging nation, and we should stop doing that. Furthermore, the California Supreme Court has lately ruled, in In re Humphrey, that "conditioning freedom solely on whether an arrestee can afford bail is unconstitutional," so the Judicial Council would be following the law in issuing a new guidance that conforms with the law. We want judges to follow the law, don't we?

The ACLU helps you tell the Biden Administration to keep reuniting families separated by the Trump Administration's evil border policy. Yeah, they've begun that process, but they've got at least a thousand families to go. And you'll specifically ask them to reunify families, bring them to America, protect them from deportation, provide support for them, and stop separating them to begin with. Some folks will bristle at the prospect that having your family carved up would gain you immediate, if not permanent, entry into the United States. But, really, it's the least we could do for them after putting them through everything we've put them through. And the likelihood they'll turn out to be (fill in name of whomever Republicans are drumming up hate against this week) is really very small. Most immigrants are running from far more serious trouble than what we imagine they'll create here!

Avaaz helps you tell big fast food chain corporation McDonald's to stop sourcing its meat from farms that abuse antibiotics. If we must have big corporations, we might as well leverage them toward our ends -- a big customer like McDonald's can change farming practices all over if we can use the Big Stick of Bad PR to make them stop getting their beef and chicken from farms that pump their animals full of antibiotics. This will be a life-and-death matter at some point in the future, because using seven out of every 10 antibiotics on nominally healthy feed animals sure is a great way of creating superbugs that can't be put down with antibiotics. It could take us back to the 18th century, a time when your next cut could kill you. Must that be the price we pay so we can have absurdly rich big ag executives?

In a similar vein, the Environmental Working Group helps you tell Pepsi to get glyphosate out of its food products. I don't just mean the infamous soda pop, I mean Quaker Oats, Lays, Tostitos, Doritos, Rold Gold, Life, and Rice-a-Roni, among others, and Pepsi owns all of these! Scientists have linked glyphosate to cancer for many years now, and Pepsi has done considerably less about glyphosate in their food than other big food manufacturing corporations, to the point where some Pepsi foods have nearly five times as much glyphosate in them as scientists consider safe. Again, Pepsi owns a lot of foods, and they don't like the Big Stick of Bad PR any more than anyone else, so if they do the right thing here, they can effect a lot of positive change in America. Just as their executives imagined they'd do, I'm sure, the day they set out to be rich!

Fight for the Future helps you tell YouTube to stop offering autoplay and recommendations features on its YouTube Kids channel. Because then the kids just watch videos all damn day! And they watch videos that are bad for them all damn day! You don't trust YouTube to give you good suggestions about anything but music videos, do you? I have friends who watch a lot of YouTube videos -- good YouTube videos about politics and science, they do exist! -- and then get recommendations to watch Jordan Peterson videos. Their algorithms don't serve your interests, after all, they serve YouTube's interests, and YouTube's interest is in keeping you watching videos, and shoving rage-inducing videos in your face is the easiest way to keep you watching. Why would we imagine they'd run a kids' channel any better than that?

Finally, Care2 helps you tell the Russian government to ban dog-fighting. You'd prefer the Russian government ban Vladimir Putin, perhaps, but just consider how awful dog-fighting is from the dog's point of view. Would you enjoy the humans you trust forcing you to fight another dog for several hours until one of you dies? Would you enjoy being the "bait dog" who has all his teeth removed and his mouth sealed shut so other dogs can practice their killing skills? How would you bright-side your way out of these scenarios? Yeah, dog-fighting is as old as the hills in Russia, but just because it's "history" doesn't mean we need to keep doing it, or tolerating it. See "statues, Confederate" for more information on that topic.

Action: concerning taxes, health care, chemical safety, public transportation, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to make the American Rescue Plan's Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, fight big pharma price gouging, pass the PFAS Action Act and the Freedom to Move Act, and keep bigger, heavier trucks off our roads. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers -- or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion from the American Rescue Plan permanent. The CTC expansion provides an extra $300/month to parents of children under 6 and $250/month to parents of children between 6 and 17, and I can tell you from experience that an extra $250 a month goes a long way. I guess all the Republicans who voted against it but will still try to take credit for it will argue that it was only supposed to last a year anyway, but, ah, are children going to stop having needs after this pandemic is over? The CTC expansion is good policy that'll cut child poverty in half in America, and would cost a mere $109 billion (out of some $4 trillion-plus in federal expenditures) in 2021, and when was the last time our government spent $109 billion to do people some good, instead of just throwing it away on corporate welfare? That would be a habit we would want to help them cultivate.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight big pharma corporation price gouging. Surely our Congressfolk know we all hate big pharma price gouging -- diabetics who spend more on insulin than they do on their rent or mortgage certainly know it more acutely! -- but we still have to tell them we expect them to do something about it, and even though the Social Security Works petition doesn't get into many specifics, there's still space in the comments for you to get into specifics. Like, say, allowing Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices, which even the right-wing Mercatus Center says would save over $80 billion annually. And $80 billion in lower costs for the taxpayer could help pay for a lot of better things -- like expanding Medicare.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the PFAS Action Act. The House passed the PFAS Action Act last term, and even though that bill attracted two dozen Republican votes in the House, Mob Boss Mitch wanted no part of it in the Senate, which meant two more years of "forever chemicals" that never break down and which scientists have linked to cancer and reproductive issues in our water. The PFAS Action Act would require PFAS manufacturers to clean up their own messes -- which seems as unprecedented in our politics as it doesn't in our parenting! -- and would require our EPA to limit the amount of PFAS chemicals that can appear in our water. That would cause a lot of non-stick pan makers and firefighting foam makers to make their products differently, but c'mon! This is a can-do nation!

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Move Act. What would the Freedom to Move Act do? It would offer grants to states and localities so they can offer fare-free public transportation -- it is public transportation, after all! -- and also so they can build out more public transportation to underserved urban and rural areas. The bill would authorize $5 billion in grants annually, which one could fund almost entirely by repealing oil and gas drilling subsidies! Those are big, big private industries that don't need taxpayer help, after all, but public transportation by definition belongs to us, and everyone who wants to use public trans should be able to. I am irritated to find any of these are controversial matters.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep bigger, heavier trucks off our highways. But bigger, heavier trucks can haul more, says the tiny little Satan sitting on my right shoulder, and thus save money! Yeah, Satan always loses me at "save money." Bigger, heavier trucks can haul more, that's true, but bigger, heavier trucks can also overturn more easily and they can also use more gas and pollute more easily and they also damage our roads and bridges more easily, so there has to be a point where having the biggest, heaviest truck actually costs us all more money, even if it allows some trucking executive to gild the plumbing in his 14th vacation home. And no one's advocating hauling goods in Geo Smart cars. Satan was just about to tell me they were. But I'm so on to Satan.

Action: concerning abortion, voting rights, discrimination, and "bipartisanship."

Long story short: tell the Texas state legislature to reject an anti-abortion, anti-law and order bill; tell your Congressfolk to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Equality Act; and tell your Congressfolk that you want results, not "bipartisanship." 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 legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

First things first. The Texas state legislature, not satisfied with suppressing voting rights and injuring trans children, continues its reign of terror with HB 1515, the so-called Texas Heartbeat Act, which is not only one of those bills that would make abortions illegal after a fetal heartbeat can be detected -- i.e., before most women even know they're pregnant! -- but would also allow anyone in Texas to sue any abortion provider for violating any of HB 1515's provisions. The bill's authors sell that as a way of keeping state law enforcement out of, well, enforcing this particular law like that's some kind of "compromise" or something, but we have a thing called "standing" in lawsuits for a reason -- to prevent precisely this kind of chaos where anyone who "feels" aggrieved by anything, ever, can sue anyone they like over anything they feel aggrieves them. Standing typically requires a) evidence of direct injury and b) some degree of certainty that a court can actually redress it. But once again, the party that constantly whines about "frivolous lawsuits" seems determined to create more of them with this anti-law and order bill. Progress American helps you oppose it.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Mob Boss Mitch McConnell (E-KY) says "100% of my focus is on stopping this new administration" -- again, apparently zero percent of his focus is on serving the good people of Kentucky! -- so let's contemplate what that "100% focus" would mean with regard to his plans to stonewall the For the People Act: it would mean state legislatures could keep drawing Rorschach-looking legislative districts that exclude individual houses on individual streets just so undeserving incumbents can be easily re-elected; it would mean states could continue to use bogus "databases" to pretend that citizens with common first and last names are voting in several states at once; it would mean state legislatures could continue to restrict early voting, mail-in voting, and automatic and same-day voting registration at their own whim; and it would mean no campaign finance disclosure of big donors even though virtually everyone in America wants that and such disclosure doesn't actually violate big donors' rights. So let's end the Age of McConnell by telling our Senators what they should really do.

Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. What would the continuing Age of McConnell mean for this bill? It would mean our Justice Department could do next-to-nothing about states that continue to suppress votes. It's no accident that, after our Supreme Court's Shelby County v. Holder decision -- which eviscerated this power granted to our Justice Department by the Voting Rights Act -- that those very same Southern states our Court felt the Voting Rights Act now "unfairly" targeted made a slew of changes to their voting rights laws! These changes just so happened to cement Republicans' unearned advantage in those states. So if Mitch McConnell gets his way here, Republicans will eventually make it so that no non-white person anywhere can vote, not that they'd ever put it like that, of course.

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. What will Mob Boss Mitch's "100% focus" on stopping this new Administration" mean here? It will mean that landlords can continue to refuse to rent to gay and transgender folks merely because they're gay or transgender, that banks can continue to refuse to serve gay and transgender folks merely because they're gay or transgender, and that states and localities can continue to keep transgender folks out of public restrooms merely because they find them icky. That may not mean much to you if you're not gay or transgender, but it would mean a lot to those who are, because they would continue to get pushed around by the law instead of be protected by it, as we all deserve. Ignore all that crap about boys playing girls' sports. I've gone into why it's crap a bunch of times already, and I won't go into it anymore. At some point, bad ideas have to die if they've lost the argument. And the folks who keep repeating them should be treated as whiners.

Finally, because they need to be told at least a million times before they get it, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk that you do not want bipartisanship if it means good legislation can't pass or only bad legislation can pass. Seems commonsensical, until you listen to Joe Manchin say the same stupid crap over and over again like he has no idea which political party just tried to overturn the election on January 6. Was he even in the building? Anyway, when did we hear about "the importance of bipartisanship" in 2017, when Republicans controlled every branch of government? Approximately never. We only hear about it when Democrats control every branch of government! Because Democrats might actually do something good for people! I'm sick and tired of living in the Age of McConnell, where "bipartisanship" means "Democrats and Republicans coming together to do whatever Republicans want." The American people matter, too. And we need to step up and remind them of that, every damn day for the rest of our lives if necessary.

Action: concerning jobs, pollution, Guantánamo, our Post Office, and un-Foxing your cable box.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk that yes home and community care service spending absolutely belongs in the American Jobs Plan and to pass the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act; tell President Biden to close Guantánamo Bay already; tell your Senators to confirm USPS Board of Governors nominees so they can fire Postmaster General DeJoy; and tell your local cable provider to "un-Fox your cable box." 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 get your Reps' and Senators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below. And good hunting! It's almost the weekend!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk that we should absolutely invest in home care and community care services. The Republicans are all up on the TV telling us that anything other than roads and bridges isn't "real infrastructure" (which they're won't vote to fund either, by the way), but actually, home and community care are real infrastructure -- if you think, you know, that civilization consists of people, rather than things. And if you've ever done home and community care (ahem!), then you know it's absolutely essential work that, frankly, we're going to need more of as the years go by. So don't let Republicans tell you your work isn't essential, or "real." And, ah, why do we let seditionists tell us what's essential or real again?

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 984, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act. S. 984 would make plastics corporations responsible for single-use plastic waste, by forcing them to contribute financially to the collection and processing of all that waste; that would be quite the welcome change from having everyone else clean up all of their mess. And then we'd see all that trash disappear right quick! Because they'd then make recyclable and reusable plastics, of course. Corporations don't like losing money, as you know. Don't worry that this change will be "too much" for them or that it'll "kill jobs." Corporations always complain about change -- but they can adjust more easily than us, because they have more money.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell President Biden to close the notorious Guantánamo Bay detention center. Guantánamo has been a stain on our nation for almost 20 years now, a place supposedly for detaining "the worst of the worst" terrorists, but when they hold you there for five or 10 or 14 years (like Mansoor Adayfi, whose book Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo comes out soon), they're all but announcing you're not a terrorist. Remember the Obama-era formulation "too difficult to prosecute, but too dangerous to release"? No one is "too dangerous" to charge, convict, and sentence. If you think so, go live in a dictatorship already, because you're not tough enough for civilization.

Common Cause helps you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's three USPS Board of Governors nominees -- so they can then fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, whose service-cutting and price-hiking ways make a mockery not just of our Post Office but of America. Where's the can-do spirit, Mr. DeJoy? Saying "we've got to raise prices and cut services" when our Post Office was running a crap-ton better before he got there sure ain't the can-do spirit I grew up with. You've heard that the reconstituted USPS Board of Governors might not fire Mr. DeJoy after all? We'll address that with the Board of Governors shortly. But your Senators should still know that you want him fired.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to "un-Fox your cable box" -- that is, get your cable corporation to dump Fox News -- here's the link. Now, perhaps you're saying to yourself, self, what about all the other far right news channels like OAN and Newsmax? Are we going to boot them off our cable box too? And the answer would be: sure, if we've got to! But this is mainly about Starving the Beast that is Fox News of all the user fees they collect from big cable corporations, which stick those fees in their prices for your basic cable package. OAN and Newsmax will surely become Beasts in due time, but in the meantime, let's teach our cable providers that there'll be a price for carrying noxious news channels full of drama and junk news.

Action: concerning jobs, taxes, broadband, the Middle East, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk that "going big" on the infrastructure/jobs bill is more important than "going bipartisan"; tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax, make broadband internet more accessible to all, and stop Israel from oppressing Palestinian children; and tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to reject a slew of pro-pollution bills. Use the tools in the upper-right corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's (and PA state legislators') phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the American Jobs Plan "big, bold, and green" -- and reject weakening it just to get Republicans on board. Not just because Republicans tried to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, either. Fact is, we've got a lot of problems in America that we can address by a) raising corporate taxes and then b) spending that money on projects -- like rebuilding sewer lines and building out renewable energy -- that'll make this nation greater. When everyone has clean water, we'll be greater. When everyone uses energy that doesn't kill the planet, we'll be greater. And when everyone has a job helping accomplish these things, well, you get the idea. Even if Republicans don't.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax. It's a piddling little tax, frankly -- two percent on assets over $50 million, and then three percent on assets over $1 billion -- but it'd raise a lot of money (upwards of $250 billion annually), and frankly these billionaires made out like bandits during this pandemic. Naturally, with all their money, they can buy more time with folks like Joe Manchin and tell tall tales about how "dangerous" it would be to raise taxes on the rich right now. But according to them, there'll never be a good time to do that. Can't raise taxes on the rich because the economy's bad! Can't raise taxes on the rich because the economy's good! All we have is our voices, so we'd better use them.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1783/S. 745, the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All (or AAIA) Act. We've all seen, I would hope, how integral broadband has become over the last year, thanks to the pandemic, but if you live in a rural or urban area or a reservation, you don't have the access the rest of us have, thanks to big telecom corporations refusing to build out into areas where they can't make money hand over fist! The AAIA would, among other good works, better-fund the FCC's Emergency Broadband Benefit program and pre-empt state laws that forbid municipalities from offering their own broadband services. Which are excellent wherever they're tried; just ask the good residents of Chattanooga, TN.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2590, the Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act. The bill would keep our government from spending taxpayer money on Israeli oppression of Palestinians, including putting kids in military detention, demolishing homes, and grabbing more Palestinian territory. We're already violating international law by doing all of that! And most Americans would prefer we didn't enable their behavior. And no, you're not an "anti-Semite" for not wanting your taxpayer money to hurt other people. Even American Jews have been hearing that for years! Best to define "anti-Semitism" as, you know, things that hurt Jews, not things that merely interfere with Israel's political aims.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state Senators to reject five objectively pro-pollution bills. Stop me if you've heard this one before, but these bills (HB 72, 139, 288, 939, and 950) would hamstring our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) from issuing clean air and clean water regulations, mainly by granting the legislature additional powers to stonewall those regulations. All for the greater glory of gas and oil drilling corporations! The law already grants our DEP the power to issue regulations; if you don't like the regulations they issue, you leave public comments, which our DEP has to take into account in making a final decision. You don't demand tenth, eleventh, and twelfth innings in a game you lost in the standard nine.

UPDATE. The Sierra Club link in the final paragraph above no longer directs you to the five-bill action alert, possibly because the state House has now passed all those bills; calling your state Senators about the five bills would be the only option left, and the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page would help with that.

Action: concerning anti-transgender bills, racist media coverage, big tech monopolies, law and order in Oregon, and "forever chemicals."

Long story short: tell Texas state legislators to reject a slate of anti-transgender bills, tell our "liberal" media to stop exhibiting bias against folks of color, tell our federal government to break up big tech corporations, tell the state of Oregon to stop using non-unanimous juries, and tell our EPA to keep PFAS chemicals out of our clean air and clean water. You will find email/petition tools for each of these actions in the paragraphs below. Good hunting!

Change.org helps you tell Texas state legislators to reject no less than 10 anti-transgender bills they're currently mulling. And one of them is an objectively pro-child molestation genital-inspection bill, just like the one in Florida (while I'm thinking about it, here's that petition), plus a trio of bills that would call transgender operations and hormone treatments "child abuse." In other words, these bills want to force schools to actually commit child abuse, while calling things that aren't child abuse "child abuse"! And this is exactly the kind of absurdity to which you must resort when all you can do is diddle other people's rage glands. (I noticed, incidentally, that one of the candidates who made the Texas 6th runoff, state Rep. Jake Ellzey, co-sponsored HB 68. Did no one think to put that in a campaign ad? Or were they all too scared of who they'd offend?)

Free Press helps you tell our "liberal" media outlets to dismantle any anti-Black racism still in their newsrooms. Folks who think racism died in 1965 won't understand, but every time you hear that a Black man shot by cops for brandishing a cellphone was "no angel," every time you hear a Black shooting victim was "arrested 67 times," and every time you read a newspaper report parroting police reports as irrefutable truth, you are still witnessing racism in action in America today. Of course, once these newsrooms make the pledge, we'll hold them to it. In the meantime, there is some benefit to exerting popular pressure, and then measuring how much of that pressure will make media outlets respond. Another way of putting it would be "the Big Stick of Bad PR works."

Demand Progress helps you tell your President and Congressfolk to break up big tech corporations like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. There are all kinds of reasons to break up monopoly corporations in any field, but here's one relating to big tech corporations: surveillance. All these corporations Hoover up all kinds of data on you, and they also manufacture surveillance technology (like Amazon's Ring and Alexa) that your government can use against you when you haven't done a damn thing wrong. When big corporations decide you're a "terrorist" for patronizing one of their competitors, or leaving a bad review of their products, or for not buying any products at all, you'll see exactly what I mean.

Color of Change helps you tell Oregon's Attorney General to stop jailing people when they're convicted by non-unanimous juries, and to release and retry all those who went to prison without a jury unanimously convicting them. Finding the whole concept of a unanimous jury makes justice just too hard in America? It's supposed to be hard! Go live in an actual police state if you want it to be easy! And the states that used non-unanimous juries to convict criminals, guess what, used it disproportionately against non-whites. Most states stopped doing that a long time ago; now only Oregon remains, which would be a surprise to people who've only gone through Portland, but not to folks who know that Oregon put a whites-only clause in its original state constitution. So lets encourage them to start making up for all that now.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our EPA to limit PFAS dumping in our waterways. They call PFAS a "forever chemical" because even our formidable immune systems can't break it down, and scientists have linked PFAS chemicals to cancer, thyroid disease, and liver damage, among other ill effects. And you can find PFAS in just about everything -- firefighting foam, non-stick pans, stain-resistant fabrics, foam food packaging -- and now we learn that you can find it not only in your shampoo and your seafood but at the top of Mount Everest. How did that happen? Hey, it's everywhere and it hardly ever breaks down, so you don't need to be a quantum physicist to predict it'll turn up at the world's roof. So what we do now matters.

Action: concerning taxes, education, birth control, reforestation, privacy, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fund our IRS properly so it can catch more tax cheats; tell your Congressfolk to pass the College for All Act, the EACH Woman Act, the REPLANT Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the Medicare for All Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to better fund our Internal Revenue Service so it can catch rich tax cheats. Our IRS estimates that tax evaders cheat us out of $1 trillion every year, and that represents about a quarter of our entire federal budgets most years, so the law and order thing to do, the pro-law enforcement thing to do, would be to give our IRS the funding it needs to make tax cheaters pay up, so we can then properly fund roads, bridges, schools, firefighters, police, et al. And now you know why Republicans stamped their feet so much in the early 2010s about "political bias" at our IRS -- so they could curtail collections, starve our government of money, and make it run so badly that even fascist assholes routinely get elected to federal office now. And if Congress doesn't fund our IRS, just look out for the QAnon/Trumpholes that'll take over Congress in 2022.

Speaking of things better tax collection could pay for, Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2730/S. 1288, the College for All Act, which (among numerous other reforms) would pay for tuition and fees for all students who come from families that make less than $125,000 annually. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the bill's main sponsor, says the money would come from the Tax on Wall Street Speculation Act, which would tax stock trades at half of one percent, bonds at one-tenth of one percent, and derivatives at one-two hundredth of one percent; this bill would raise around $240 billion annually, which, in the context of the $1.2 trillion in wealth billionaires have accumulated during this pandemic, sure ain't too damn much to ask.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2234/S. 1021, the EACH Woman Act. The EACH Woman Act would repeal the notorious Hyde Amendment that prevents federal funds from covering abortions, but abortion is a legal medical procedure, and thus federal funds should cover it. The Hyde Amendment has essentially kept the world the way it was before Roe v. Wade, when rich folks could get abortions and poor folks can't. Right-wingers are always complaining about "how many babies Those People are always having," but then cling to the Hyde Amendment like grim death. It really is like they'd just prefer a world where nobody ever solves any problems and rageheads get to pop off all the time. But we're Americans, and we deserve better than that. And if you're against abortion, don't get one.

And now for the rare Arbor Day-related action alert: Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the REPLANT Act. The REPLANT Act would help reverse deforestation in America by mandating the planting of over a billion trees over the next decade, and if you're thinking of indulging in some hippie-punching over this, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider that trees help purify our air and thus help us stay healthier, 3) consider that trees also trap a lot of carbon dioxide and thus help mitigate the effects of climate change, and 4) a lot of animals use trees to find food and shelter their children. How much of any of that does your average office complex or gas drilling well do? Yeah, that's what I thought.

The Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. The bill would close the legal loophole that allows big data mining corporations to sell your personal data to law enforcement, a sale which completely circumvents our Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. Big telecom corporations can't sell your personal data to law enforcement, because it's against the law; big data brokers should face the same prohibitions. And if that puts them out of business, well, why do we tolerate a business model that's essentially "make money violating other people's rights"? A sane, moral, and decent society asks these questions; this sick, immoral, and decadent society doesn't ask them anywhere near enough.

Finally, Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. Expand Medicare to include everyone, pay for it by converting the money big corporations already pay for private insurance into an employer-side payroll tax, and voila! We've solved all health insurance problems without any workers -- or corporations! -- spending a penny more on health insurance, plus we stop leaving 30 million Americans out in the cold. Plus no more surprise bills, no more four-digit deductibles, and no more networks with shifting boundaries. People who want to keep their private insurance? Too bad! You'll just have to settle for much better insurance.

Action: concerning "bipartisanship," voting rights, discrimination, paycheck fairness, and Muslim bans.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk not to injure infrastructure/jobs legislation just to attract a few Republican votes and look more "bipartisan," and tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Equality Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and the NO BAN Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

The Washington Post reports that both President Biden and Congressional Democrats might make significant concessions on the coming infrastructure/jobs bill to attract a few Republican votes and look more "bipartisan," so it's time to get on the phone with your Reps and Senators and tell them, again, that you don't care about "bipartisanship"; you only care about good legislation. And the Biden jobs plan is already a compromise! Most folks would want higher corporate taxes and more public investment! And, again, why on Earth are we valuing "bipartisanship" with the party that tried to overturn the election? You should never "work with" people who tell we-the-people to go fuck ourselves like they did on January 6. So get on the horn with your Reps and Senators and tell them to wake up already.

Bold Progressives helps you tell your Senators to pass both the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act -- even if it means ending the filibuster to do it. The former bill would end partisan gerrymandering, guarantee 15 days of early voting in every state, automatic registration, and same-day voter registration all across America, end racist vote suppression practices including the notorious Interstate Crosscheck, and mandate disclosure of anyone who donates more than $10,000 to campaigns. The latter bill would restore the Voting Rights Act's legal protections against states continuing to suppress the vote. And don't listen to Joe Manchin's foolish ramblings about how even forcing Senators to earn their filibuster by talking through it would "weaken" the filibuster. Right now weak people use the filibuster stop any kind of progress from happening anywhere in America. And I call that un-American.

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Don't be dissuaded by right-wingers' hysterical fantasies of boys playing girls' sports, or ridiculous claims of the bill being an "assault" on religious freedom. Instead ask yourself: why does a bill that would prevent bosses, banks, and landlords from discriminating against gay and transgender folk constitute an assault on religious freedom? And ask yourself what teenage boy would undergo a sex change just to dominate girls' sports! Not just because professional women athletes make a pittance compared to men, but also because you don't just become a girl and then try to hang out with your buddies and talk about girls! Yikes, it's like they don't understand people.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act. The Paycheck Fairness Act would make penalties for gender-related pay gaps more costly, expand the Fair Labor Standards Act's sex discrimination proscriptions to include pregnancy and gay and transgender statuses, and prevent employers from instituting rules preventing workers from talking about their pay with their co-workers, since that, sadly, is how most women find out they're getting discriminated against. The bill would also narrow, but not eliminate, the employer's ability to claim that any pay differences are due to bona fide factors such as experience and qualifications, as H.R. 7 says: "Such defense shall not apply where the employee demonstrates that an alternative employment practice exists that would serve the same business purpose without producing such differential and that the employer has refused to adopt such alternative practice." This all sounds like common sense to me.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1333, the NO BAN Act. The NO BAN Act would prevent future Presidents from issuing anything like Donald Trump's infamous Muslim ban, partly by explicitly preventing religious discrimination in such travel bans, and partly by making the Executive branch report to the Legislative branch within 48 hours after imposing any travel bans. The NO BAN Act passed the House with exactly one Republican vote in favor -- of course it was Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania's 1st; think the state legislature will try to gerrymander him out? -- but that does not prove that "the bill isn't good enough" because it "isn't bipartisan," but rather proves that trying to attract Republican votes, in this day and age, is a fool's errand. I mean, at the risk of beating a dead horse, this is the party that tried to overthrow the government because it didn't like the 2020 election results; why wouldn't you feel tainted if any of them voted for your bill?

Action: concerning vaccines, drug prices, police brutality, chemical safety, and methane emissions.

Long story short: tell certain House Reps that vaccine access is more important than intellectual property rights, tell your Congressfolk to control drug prices, fight police brutality, and keep PFAS chemicals out of our products, and tell Pennsylvania state regulators to close a major loophole in its gas drilling emissions proposal. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the following paragraphs.

Word on the street is that Democratic Reps. Scott Peters (CA) and Ron Kind (WI) are trying to dissuade President Biden from supporting a waiver that would allow vaccine development all over the world -- meaning, I guess, that Messrs. Peters and Kind are objectively pro-COVID. Standing up for "intellectual property rights über alles" is a dubious enough proposition even outside of a pandemic, but, ah, fellas? Taxpayer money helped develop these vaccines, so they're not "someone else's property." And as long as COVID is alive somewhere on Earth, it can come back to bite us. So, you know what's coming: you can reach Rep. Peters at 202.225.0508 and Rep. Kind at 202.225.5506. Remind them not just of their moral duty here, but also that taking this stance after getting all that big pharma money, which both men have done, is a bad, bad look.

Here's the kind of action alert I normally avoid passing along: Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk that, hey, drug prices are too high and they should make sure drugs cost less. Yeah, that's usually too vague for my taste, but it's also exactly the kind of thing Congressfolk need to hear, and frankly there aren't too many ways they can come up with to pretend to lower drug prices. If you want to tell them to let Medicare negotiate drug prices and/or empower our government to manufacture generic drugs whenever prices go above a certain level and/or assert more control over drugs taxpayer money helps to fund in the first place, well, hey, there's a comments section on the petition.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2892, the Protect Our Protestors (or POP) Act, and H.R. 2893, the National Police Misuse of Force Investigation Board Act. The former bill would make police violence against protestors a federal crime, and the latter would create a federal agency tasked with investigating deaths in police custody. Don't let folks tell you that cops can't do their job if we pass these bills, and not just because literally everyone who's ever had a job has said that when their jobs' standards have changed. Police officers aren't supposed to mow down peaceful protestors with tear gas and rubber bullets, and they're also not supposed to kill people before even charging them with a crime. I mean, if you can't hold yourself to those standards, maybe you need to sell shoes.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act, which would empower our EPA to regulate PFAS chemicals. You may know PFAS chemicals better as "forever chemicals" that don't break down, that scientists have linked to cancer and thyroid issues, and that you can find in damn near everything, from nonstick pans to food wrappers to firefighting foam. Congress might actually be eager to pass this bill -- just say the words "keep our firefighters healthy" to Republicans and they at least give the matter some thought -- but we ought to tell them what we want them to do anyway, because big corporations come along and make them an awfully forgetful lot.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) to fix a loophole in its proposal to control methane emissions from gas drilling. The DEP's proposal exempts older facilities from its scrutiny, which would only make sense to you if you accept the conventional "wisdom" that we should cut older buildings a break because they're old, but that's rubbish, not just because a building is a thing and not a person, but because the older facilities cause more than half the pollution, which should make sense to you, regardless of the conventional "wisdom." Some wisdom doesn't need quotation marks, after all.

Action: concerning worker rights, voting rights, monopolies, and clean air and clean water.

Long story short: tell certain Democratic Senators to get behind the PRO Act already, tell Arizona legislators to reject vote-suppression legislation, tell federal regulators to break up big tech corporations, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat Act and the so-called "FRACK Pack" of pro-clean air and clean water bills. Use the tools in the upper right hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

Word on the street is that three Democratic Senators -- Sens. Sinema (D-AZ), Kelly (D-AZ), and Warner (D-VA) -- have thus far avoided co-sponsoring the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, which our House passed and which even Sen. Manchin (D-WV) and Sen. King (I-ME) have recently co-sponsored. You know what that means, right? Phone numbers! You can contact Sen. Kelly at 202.224.2235, Sen. Warner at 202.224.2023 (or 1.877.676.2759 if you're a Virginia resident) and Sen. Sinema at 202.224.4521. The PRO Act would make it much easier for workers to organize to bargain as a unit for better pay and better working conditions, and who could be against that? Besides the executives who make a lot of money denying workers those things, I mean. But they don't get all the say around here.

Progress America helps you tell Arizona's state Senate to reject a state House-passed bill that would kick 200,000 voters off that state's Permanent Early Voting List. Because Republicans would rather you make a request for an early ballot every damn year, because that's harder than getting one mailed automatically! And for whom would that be most hard? Why, people who can't just go where they like when they like, like seniors, poor folks, rural folks, and folks of color! Naturally Republicans can't claim "fraud" as a reason, because they can't find any (no, the so-called Cyber Ninjas ain't gonna find any, either -- though they might create some!), but they do cite "problems," never mind what they are. The "problem" here, as elsewhere, is that Joe Biden won this state, so let's tell Republicans to stop being sore losers.

Demand Progress helps you tell our federal regulators to break up big tech corporations like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. It's actually a bad thing that Google's become a verb, or that Facebook has driven social media sites like Tribe and Orkut out of existence, or that Amazon controls about half of all online commerce. And I probably didn't say this well enough at the time, but even though the would-be union organizers did a bad job getting Amazon workers together, Amazon still shouldn't be big enough that it can simply crush the best of those efforts. There's only some utility to saying "you should've worked with the landscape as it was" -- if the landscape is that harsh, we also need to change it.

WildEarth Guardians helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 915, the Save Oak Flat Act. S. 915 would repeal that section of the 2015 defense appropriations bill that sold the Oak Flat area of Arizona's Tonto National Forest to Resolution Copper, a notorious mining corporation looking to "develop" that land. Resolution's owner, Rio Tinto, just so happened to once employ then-Sen. Jeff Flake, and also donated big bucks to then-Sen. John McCain. So they got their money's worth! Sadly, the San Carlos Apache, to whom the land is sacred, got bupkus. From the Save Oak Flat Act, they'd get a lot more -- and so would we, since the Save Oak Flat Act would also save our clean air and clean water from over a billion tons of toxic crap.

Finally, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the "FRACK Pack," a suite of bills that would protect our clean air and clean water from the nefarious practice of hydrofracturing, or "fracking." Think it's an accident "fracking" is a cuss word on the 2004 reboot of Battlestar Galactica? I wouldn't dismiss the connection so easily! The bills would, among other good works, force oil and gas corporations to better dispose of hazardous materials, force disclosure of chemicals used in fracking, and authorize our EPA to regulate fracking wells. And I guess the bills' opponents would say it'll "kill jobs." It won't, but what kind of civilization would we be if we continued to insist that we can't have both jobs and clean air and water? No kind of civilization, that's what -- both in that we'd be uncivilized and we'd likely be nonexistent in a few generations. Let's try to avoid these things, shall we?

Action: concerning gun control, anti-transgender bills, campaign donations to seditionists, treating workers right, and flavored tobacco products

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass real gun control legislation; tell Florida and Kansas state legislators to oppose anti-transgender bills; tell big corporations to stop donating to insurrectionist Republican Congressfolk; tell a European hotel-owner to treat its housekeepers right; and tell our FDA to ban flavored tobacco products. The paragraphs below provide all the email/petition links you'll need.

With all the police shootings and mass shootings we've heard about the last few weeks (see, things are really going back to normal!), and with most politicians either shrugging and saying nothing can be done or trying to do things that won't solve the problem, I refer you, again, to Thom Hartmann's proposals for real gun control, which you can share with your Congressfolk. Mr. Hartmann would make it as hard to get semiautomatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons and would regulate guns the way we already regulate cars. I no longer oppose banning assault weapons, but I remain wary of the kind of broad background checks politicians like to propose, and in any case I don't think these policy prescriptions would do as much good as Mr. Hartmann's would. And I prefer solving the problem to worrying about whose feelings we'll hurt if we solve the problem.

The Florida House has passed HB 1475, a bill that would, get this, allow schools to examine the genitalia of young girls in an apparent effort to keep transgender children out of girls' sports, and Change.org helps you tell the Florida Senate to reject this bill. How many ways is HB 1475 an abomination? Let's start with nobody should be looking at children's genitals except a physician trying to diagnose an illness directly relating to those genitals. And then let's go on with how public schools already know which of their students are transgender! I know, I know, some folks think transgender children, or our "tolerance" thereof, are abominations. If that's you, kindly navigate away from this page -- you can learn nothing from me, and yes, that's your fault.

Change.org also helps you tell Kansas state legislators to reject HB 2210, which would make it a felony for doctors to perform gender reassignment surgery or hormone replacement therapy on children, which should make even the folks who think it should be the parents' decision wince. I'm not impressed that Section 1(c) exempts doctors from this crime if "if a child was born with a medically verifiable disorder of sex development" -- that raises the possibility that the bill only exists to create drama, and that's the kind of thing we should smack down whenever we see it. And frankly, I trust any kid who says they're in the wrong body -- how likely is it that they're "just acting out" when there are a) so, so many other ways for kids to "act out" and b) there are so, so many other ways for kids to "act out" that don't result in them getting the crap kicked out of them by their peers? So much right-wing rage doesn't stand up to the gentlest application of logic.

Color of Change helps you tell big corporations such as Toyota and JetBlue to stop giving campaign funds to the same insurrectionist members of Congress to whom they said they'd stop giving campaign funds! I won't say it's useless for big corporations to give lip service to the causes we care about, but what Toyota and JetBlue (among others!) are doing is less than useless -- they want the good PR for "doing the right thing" without the bad PR they deserve for going back on their word. But we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR, so we don't have to put up with any of that. Remember, these Congressfolk smiled upon the events of January 6, even if they didn't actually aid and abet them; depriving them of campaign contributions is more toward the "least we can do" end of the spectrum.

Sum of Us helps you tell Ibis hotel owner AccorInvest to stop paying its housekeepers in dung pellets and treat them like human beings, which includes not running them through "scientific" task-timing, as they're currently doing. They give their housekeepers 17 minutes to change over hotel rooms, and as someone who works for a living, this is personal to me: I'm sick and tired of bosses looking at a spreadsheet and thinking they can learn more from it than they can from, you know, doing the job. Any idiot knows that if you've really got lollygaggers working for you, you confront them head-on, and you don't hide behind stupid assumptions about "how long a task should take" when you won't actually dirty your hands by doing it. Maybe that sounds old-fashioned, but I'm an old-fashioned dude, and this kind of task-timing doesn't sound like "making workers work more efficiently," but delivering wealth upward to executives more efficiently.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell our FDA to ban the sale of flavored tobacco products. They might taste like bubble gum or cotton candy or "tropical twist," but they all contain nicotine, and we really don't need to be starting children on a lifelong addictive habit. Whomever came up with this probably thinks they're a super-genius -- get 'em started young, and we'll be able to keep selling to them until they're old and grey! High-five! -- but they're not; they're just evil. I mean, I insist cleverness should result in good works, not (once again) in redistributing working folks' income to the undeserving rich.

Action: concerning jobs, privacy, health care, corporate welfare, encryption, and Arctic drilling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk what you want from the Biden infrastructure/jobs bill; tell your Congressfolk to support the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, the Medicare for All Act, and the End Polluter Welfare Act; and tell your Congressfolk to support encryption and stop Arctic drilling. 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 contact your Senators -- or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

It's time to be a bit more explicit with what we want from the Biden infrastructure/jobs bill: first, we want real tax hikes on the rich -- the top income rate needs to be 91% and the top corporate rate needs to be 55%, we need to tax investment income equally, we need to cap the mortgage interest deduction so homeowners can still get it but corporations can't game it, and we need to say no to any new sales or use taxes. Second, we want our government to create public renewable energy utilities to compete with the private (and less renewable) utilities -- hey, the Tennessee Valley Authority is still working for its people, and the Republicans there won't touch it! -- and we want fossil fuel workers retrained to build out these new renewable utilities (which sure is better than teaching them to code!). These aren't "impossible" things just because Senate Democrats are wilting under the pressure to raise the corporate tax rate even a little bit! They clearly need some steel in their spine -- and we clearly need to give it to them.

The Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. This bill would prevent our government from buying location data from your phone and computer apps from "data mining" corporations -- as our government is presently doing from phone apps that tell Muslims which direction Mecca is in. You see what's wrong with that, right? I mean besides the racism? That's right, our government didn't get warrants for that data! When your government wants to investigate you, it's supposed to get a warrant from a judge; buying up data (with your taxpayer money, I feel compelled to add) gets around that. And we shouldn't allow that.

Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. Think of health care that covers everyone, with no "networks" for your doctors to slip in and out of, and thus no surprise bills -- that could be Medicare, if we pass H.R. 1976. And when they say how are you gonna pay for it, liberal?, you tell them "we're going to convert the money big corporations already pay private health insurance corporations into an employer-side payroll tax and no one will have to pay a penny more." And when they say "oh yes we will," either repeat the words "employer-side payroll tax" like they're stupid, or congratulate them on their hard-earned cynicism which prevents anything good from ever happening ever.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. The bill would do pretty much what its title says it would do: stop the flow of billions of dollars in taxpayer money into the pockets of big fossil fuel developers. Why do they need handouts, after all? They're well-established technologies which make big money for a handful of corporations. And certainly we should not be funneling taxpayer dollars toward technologies that might well make our planet unlivable within a few generations. We have alternatives like solar and wind that deserve taxpayer assistance more. And we'd only be assisting ourselves in funding them.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to refuse to fund any government effort to undermine encryption. Former Secretary of State Pompeo loudly assumed that anyone who uses encryption in their personal communications must be a criminal, but as usual he's wrong -- journalists often use encryption to talk to sources who might die if someone discovers their identity, and activists often use encryption to avoid getting wrongfully arrested by the state, too. Yeah, I'm sure quite a few aspiring January 6-style terrorists will use encryption as well, but I'm not going to trade liberty for security just to get at them a little more easily.

Finally, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) from fossil fuel development. ANWR has been a political football for over 20 years, and given how little oil will ever come from it and how important the land is to the Native Americans who live there, you have to wonder why. For a long time I supposed that our leaders just thought oil corporation executive salaries were that important, but now I'm starting to wonder if the ANWR "controversy" is just another decades-long attempt by right-wingers to piss off liberals. We can end such a wholly-manufactured drama by permanently protecting ANWR from fossil fuel drilling, and then right-wingers will have to find stupider things to throw fits about.

Action: concerning voting rights, civil rights, paycheck fairness, Muslim bans, and D.C. statehood.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Equality Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act, the NO BAN Act, and the D.C. Admission Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to contact your Senators -- or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. I've heard little from right-wingers about the For the People Act lately, but I doubt that's shame -- it's more likely the complacency of knowing Republicans will filibuster it and Joe Manchin won't let the Democrats overcome such a filibuster. So what would we be missing out on, so Joe Manchin can preserve the "sanctity" of Senate "process"? An end to partisan gerrymandering, 15 days of early voting in every state, automatic and same-day voter registration all over America, and an end to certain racist caging practices including the notorious Interstate Crosscheck. So that's what we'll lose by keeping the filibuster as a tool of wanton obstruction.

Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. As you know, our Justice Department can't stop Southern states from passing restricting voting laws, thanks to our Supreme Court's ruling in Shelby County v. Holder -- that would be biased against the South, they said, but they explicitly said that our Justice Department could have that power if it applied to all states and localities. Well, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would enact that very thing, and then we could stop any state or locality with a demonstrated pattern of vote suppression from passing more vote suppression laws. I'm looking at you, Ohio!

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. My state's junior Senator writes that H.R. 5 "would eviscerate religious liberty protections." Guess what? That's complete rubbish! In H.R. 5 amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 so that it includes gays and transgender folks in its protected classes, but the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already gives fairly broad exemptions to religious organizations, and H.R. 5 doesn't change that! So, either they know they're lying, or they don't know when it's their damn job to know. I don't know which is worse; I'm not sure finding out matters.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act. Congress passed an Equal Pay Act in 1965, which nominally makes it illegal to pay women less than men for the same work, but the pay disparity still exists, because (for example) employers still get to threaten employees with termination if they discuss their pay with each other, even though that's often the only way workers figure out they're getting screwed over. The Paycheck Fairness Act would prevent employers from doing that, among other good works. Do not admit any objections with the words "trial laywers" in it. If employers didn't try to get away with so much shadiness, we wouldn't need so many trial lawyers.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1333, the NO BAN Act, which our House passed last week. The NO BAN Act would prevent future Presidents from passing Trumpian travel bans obviously aimed at Muslims, even if our Supreme Court ignored Mr. Trump's words to that effect (he wanted to enact "a Muslim ban, but legal," according to his wingman, Mr. Giuliani). The bill would not "open the floodgates to terrorists" or whatever right-wingers say it's about, since our President would still have the ability to keep folks from entering, but our President would have to restrict folks based more on facts and laws than on the need to keep rageheads raging. The less say rageheads have over American policy, the better, that's what I say.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 51/S. 51, the D.C. Admission Act, and thus make Washington, D.C. a state. D.C.'s netherland status continues to hurt its citizens -- over 700,000 American citizens have no voting representation in Congress, while they pay more taxes than the citizens of at least a dozen American states while facing more direct Congressional meddling in their affairs. Plus, of course, we just had an attempted coup on January 6; think a Washington, D.C. National Guard unit might have helped deter that? I think so, and the good citizens of our nation's capitol deserve so. And to those who whine that Democrats will get two more Senators: try persuading people to vote for you!

Action: concerning payday loans, police brutality, vaccinations, and bad media outlets.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep payday lenders from gouging us, tell President Biden to guide cities toward using alternatives to police wherever possible, stop the flow of military weapons to local police departments, and help remove barriers to poorer nations vaccinating their citizens, and tell your cable provider to "un-Fox" your cable package. The paragraphs below will tell you how to contact these various entities. Good hunting!

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to roll back Trump-era rules that let payday lenders gouge more good Americans. 18 states (plus the District of Columbia, which should be a state) have capped loan interest at 36% or lower -- but the Trump Administration let payday lenders loan via banks in other states that, naturally, didn't have the loan interest cap. I'm old enough to remember when conservatives would never have allowed such a thing to happen. In these times, you could be forgiven for thinking Trumpian "conservatives" just go out of their way to hurt people so other people can make more money. What, it looks like something else?

The ACLU helps you tell President Biden to use his various purse-string and guidance powers to encourage localities to use alternatives to policing. I've said it before and I'll say it again: we use police officers like the Swiss Army knives of our culture, and no one is so good at everything that we can use them that way, so we shouldn't suggest that "more training" is the answer, either. Police officers should serve warrants and make arrests, and that's it. Firefighters should fight fires, EMTs should respond to emergent medical situations, and social workers should respond to mental health calls and domestic violence calls. Don't be tempted to say "that'll never work," because some localities are trying it now, and it works.

Black Lives Matter helps you tell President Biden to end the notorious 1033 program, which allows our federal government to send surplus military weapons to local police departments. Who don't use them to make their communities safer -- they use them to hurt protestors who protest their brutality in the first place! President Biden reportedly had an Executive Order curtailing the 1033 program all ready to go early in his Administration, but may have gotten cold feet after the National Association of Police Organizations weighed in. Now he may be thinking his good words about the Chauvin verdict will be enough, and he can continue to ignore his commitment to actually stopping police violence. We need to come together to say, guess again, Mr. President.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to support the proposed WTO waiver that will allow poorer nations to make COVID vaccines and give them to their people. They always talk about the supposed primacy of "intellectual property" when they say we can't do things like this, but a) our hard-earned taxes developed these vaccines, so we do in fact get a say, and b) no post-apocalyptic survivor will sit around a campfire saying "yeah, that superbug killed most of the world's people, but at least big pharma corporations got to make some more money!" Not convinced? Then consider that the pandemic can start all over again as long as it's alive somewhere in the world. As someone smarter than me put it: no one is safe until everyone is safe.

Finally, Consumers United for Fairness helps you, as they put it, un-Fox your cable box, which is to say, get your cable carrier to stop carrying Fox News as part of a "basic" package. So why this time? Oh, we could probably flip on Fox at any moment and find a good reason, but let's settle for Tucker Carlson alleging that the Chauvin jury convicted Mr. Chauvin not because there's a nearly-10 minute video showing him killing George Floyd, but because they were afraid of rioting if they exonerated him. Right-wingers love law and order until it gives them results they don't want! Does Mr. Carlson have a right to say such crap without being jailed by our government? Of course he does! But he doesn't have a "right" to be a highly-paid TV pundit; hell, he doesn't have a "right" to be broadcast, or else anyone who wanted a nightly news show would have to get one. And he certainly doesn't have a "right" to have his salary paid in part by the hundreds of millions of Americans who would never watch his program.

Action: concerning campaign finance, drug policy, sacrifice zones, child marriage, and facial recognition.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Democracy for All Amendment and the MORE Act and pass legislation outlawing "sacrifice zones," tell the Michigan state legislature to end child marriage, and tell event promotion corporations to reject the use of facial recognition technology. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the paragraphs below.

People for the American Way helps you tell your House Reps to pass H.J.Res. 1, which would amend our Constitution so that our federal, state, and local governments could regulate campaign financing again. Not that our Supreme Court has tossed all limits on campaign financing, but they've sure made it difficult for regular folks like ourselves to be heard over the din of rich folks' drama. Of course, it goes beyond "having a right to be heard" -- we have an actual First Amendment right to redress grievances with our government, with which the constant flow of money from big corporate donors interferes. Folks with more money don't have more rights, after all -- if they did, they wouldn't be rights, but privileges, and we better not be getting to the point where we call free speech a privilege.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3884/S. 2227, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act. The MORE Act would take pot off of Schedule I, essentially legalizing the drug across our land, and would invest in communities most harmed by the "war on drugs," which, in most cases, will be communities of color. Pot has never belonged on Schedule I with heroin (ask Zombie William S. Burroughs about heroin!), and it's likely less of a "gateway" drug than alcohol, which remains perfectly legal, though we did try amending the Constitution once to ban it and it didn't go well. Basing so much policing around pot isn't going well, either, and I bet a lot of police officers agree, and would look forward to doing more real work.

The Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the notorious practice of "sacrifice zones," wherein our government essentially looks the other way while big corporations put all their pollution in communities of color, hence the term "sacrifice zone." We discussed this a bit yesterday when talking about the Byhalia Connection Pipeline going through communities of color in Nashville. President Biden has lately ordered the creation of a council to study the problem of environmental racism, which may do some good if the people on it are willing to go above-and-beyond, but you have every right to expect that "creating a council" might also result in "doing nothing," as it often does. Putting the force of law behind another front in the fight against racism would do a lot more good.

Change.org helps you tell the Michigan state legislature to make child marriage illegal. You mean child marriage is actually legal somewhere in America? Actually, it's still legal in 46 states! The exceptions are Delaware, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania, at least three of which, ironically enough, right-wingers routinely describe as "liberal" states where "anything goes." But if a child can't consent to have sex with an adult, how can a child marry an adult? And as for laws allowing parental permission for children to marry adults, well, you can see how a child can be exploited that way, I trust. Welcome to episode 87 of my podcast, This Really Ain't That Hard.

Finally, Fight for the Future helps you tell live event producing corporations not to use facial recognition software on concert-goers. "Because it sucks and it's invasive" would be the short answer why, but these corporations are ready with a retort to that: they want to do it to "protect the public from COVID." So, to sum: we can't use a good way of protecting the public from COVID (like having folks carry around those "vaccine passports" to which right-wingers have tried to give a bad name), but we can use a bad way of doing it, one that routinely can't tell folks of color apart any better than your Tea Party uncle and Hoovers up all your data. Is it so much to ask that things not be so stupid?

Action: concerning marketing to children, public lands, and law and order.

Long story short: tell Facebook not to launch an "Instagram for kids," tell our FDA to outlaw flavored tobacco products, tell our President to restore Bears Ears and stop the Byhalia Connection Pipeline, and tell our Justice Department to investigate the alleged crimes of ex-President Trump. The following paragraphs will provide email/petition tools for all of these actions. Good hunting!

Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell Facebook to scrap plans to create an Instagram platform just for children. Because children don't need more attention-diverting, crazy-making internet crap, that's why! Adults can handle it a lot better. You may well be asking yourself, self, didn't they worry about my grandparents reading too many pulp Westerns when they were children? I'm sure they did, but I'm also sure that reading pulp novels is far, far safer than imbibing images far faster than any generation has done before. And giving kids one more way to plug in to the virtual world ain't gonna help them in the real world. So let's tell Facebook to do better by them, rather than prime them to be the good consumer drones of the future.

Progress America helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to ban the sale of flavored tobacco-based products, including e-cigs, menthol cigarettes, and flavored cigars. Again, making these products taste like gummy worm or cotton candy is a way of setting kids up for lung cancer when they're adults; after all, luring adults into smoking now that everyone knows it causes cancer will only go so far. Better to harvest the addicts young, I guess they think, if not say. (And behind closed doors, I'm sure they are saying it.) Seriously, should any product for children be literally addictive?

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell President Biden to restore the famous Bears Ears National Monument to its original size. I guess the courts can one day decide whether the Antiquities Act really gives Presidents the ability to scale down national monuments (Mr. Trump did it, so I lean "no"), but scaling down Bears Ears in the first place was a profound insult to the Native Americans who both pushed for the Monument's creation and took care of it once it was created. Mr. Trump, of course, took about 85% of it away so oil and gas drilling corporations could enrich their executives and befoul the land. I would think anyone would find that offensive.

The Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell President Biden to revoke federal permits for the Byhalia Connection Pipeline. Why? Because it would run through the Memphis Sand Aquifer and thus pollute the drinking water used by good Americans in and around Memphis, TN -- I don't say "potentially pollute" because pipeline leaks are just about a near-certainty, particularly in an age where the corporations that run the pipelines do so with near-impunity. Just so happens the pipeline would run through mostly Black communities as well; you hear enough about that to think that might have been the idea, too. This ain't tough: do more solar and wind and you won't be polluting our air and water so much, particularly in neighborhoods that got it bad enough.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate the various allegations against Donald Trump. I say "allegations" even though we all heard him try to get the Georgia Secretary of State to "find" 11,000 more votes, and we all watched him do a lot of other crap one would think would get you put in jail. If your Trump-loving friend comes at you with "but this is unprecedented!", go back at him with "oh, you wanted a President who'd smash traditions and now you want tradition to protect him?" If you still have Trump-loving friends, of course.

Action: concerning jobs, health care, corporate welfare, D.C. statehood, our Supreme Court, and whistleblowers.

Long story short: tell our President and your Congressfolk to raise the corporate tax rate much higher than some Senators would like; tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare for All Act, the End Polluter Welfare Act, the D.C. Admission Act, and a bill that would add four Justices to our Supreme Court; also tell your Congressfolk to strengthen whistleblower protections for folks who expose money laundering. 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 Congressfolks' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below. Good hunting!

Word on the street is Democrats are about to settle for a 25% corporate tax rate, when 28% was already settling, and all I can say is: congratulations, Democrats! You are about to lose the 2022 midterms! Seriously, making corporations pay more is popular, you know, with people, even if it's not popular with big corporate donors. So go ahead and call your Senators and demand a 55% corporate tax rate, just like the one we had in the '50s when we had damn near full employment almost every year. (Daily Kos also helps you demand higher taxes on corporations and the rich.) If you've got an extra minute, call President Biden at 202.456.1111 (or contact him at this web address) and tell him to give up on "negotiating with Republicans." We've watched Republicans "negotiate" for 20 years -- they block everything, they call their opponents "traitors," and they try to overturn elections when the results don't go their way. The only people our President should negotiate with is us.

Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. Hopefully, spending the most on health insurance and getting less for it than most other rich nations on Earth is not the kind of thing that makes you you want to yell WE'RE NUMBER ONE! Now's a good time for two reminders: 1) we can fund it by converting the money big corporations already spend on health insurance into an employer-side payroll tax and fund Medicare for All without raising taxes on workers even one penny, and 2) the Democrats who ran in Republican-leaning districts but supported Medicare for All tended to win, and the ones who didn't tended to lose. So brook no ten-dollar-word cowardice from your Congressfolk about this.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. As its name suggests, the End Polluter Welfare Act would repeal handouts to fossil fuel corporations to the tune of $15 billion annually. I suppose the same right-wingers who pretend to hate subsidies "except for these" will turn it around at some point and argue that fossil fuel corporations need subsidies precisely because renewables are catching up to them! Of course, renewables barely pollute, whereas oil and gas drilling befouls our air and water and threatens to make our planet unlivable, so right-wingers still lose. Unless we fail to speak out, that is.

Both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and the League of Conservation Voters help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 51/S. 51, the D.C. Admission Act, and thus make Washington, D.C. a state. You'd think Republicans would leap at the chance to give D.C. some autonomy, but alas, no -- they'd prefer to dictate to D.C., and they don't want one more Democratic House Rep and two more Democratic Senators in Congress, though, you know, if you were worried about that, you'd figure out how to win there! Also, too, if D.C. were a state, they'd have been able to protect themselves better from the seditionists of January 6. It's all about giving good D.C. residents the same amount of self-determination all our states have; why is that so much to ask?

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support legislation that would add four Associate Justices to our Supreme Court. Meaning our Court would have 13 Justices, not nine, and just so happens America has 13 appellate courts, so now our current Justices won't have to double up. And Congress can-so do this! The number of Supreme Court Justices has fluctuated throughout American history; law sets the current number at nine, not our Constitution, not our Founders. Don't brook any silliness from Republicans about this matter -- they were perfectly happy to have only eight Justices while it suited them.

Finally, the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to strengthen whistleblower protections for folks who expose money laundering. It's only been a few months that we've had protections for those whistleblowers, but they're not as good as they need to be -- when such folks can face retaliation without recourse to legal avenues, and when our Treasury Department can award whistleblowers as little as one dollar without being challenged, these are not good things. Many whistleblowers will have been out of work for several years and destitute by the time they get that piddling award, so it's important we reward people properly when they put themselves on the line like that. They're helping us be a law-and-order nation, after all.

Action: concerning voting rights, civil rights, paycheck fairness, saving our Post Office, and war in Yemen.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Equality Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act, and also to confirm President Biden's USPS Board of Governors nominees; and tell our President to stop arming the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Senators' phone numbers, or use the links in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. You've heard a lot about Republican vote suppression shenanigans lately, but you may not have heard that "blue" states have fairly restrictive voting laws as well! We notice it less, because crazy Republicans tend to lose elections there, but Rhode Island (for example) has a strict Voter ID law, Connecticut doesn't offer any early voting, and New York makes you jump through flaming hoops to change your party registration in advance of a primary. These states have poor folks and folks of color, too; why should we leave them behind?

Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. What I was just talking about in re restrictive voting laws in "blue" states? The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act could fix that, as well. The Voting Rights Act singled out Southern states for federal approval of voting rights law changes, but the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would amend the Voting Rights Act so that any state or locality with a record of vote suppression would have to submit their voting law changes for federal pre-clearance. Your Republican Senators may be interested to hear that. I mean, of course they've figured that out (even Tommy Tuberville!), but they'll still be interested to know that their constituents have figured it out.

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Right-wingers have been bleating about TEH MENZ INZ TEH WIMMINZ SPORTZ!!!!, and I feel like I've explained pretty well why that's utter bunkum, but Chris Walker at TruthOut tells us even more: not just that most Americans oppose the anti-transgender laws states have been rushing to pass lately, but that scientists find that trans athletes actually don't get much of an advantage by transitioning. If you thought about it for a minute -- that transitioning to another gender involves a lot of hormonal and musculoskeletal changes -- you'd agree. Of course, Republican politicians are trying to create an electorate that doesn't think about anything even for a minute. But we outnumber them, so we don't have to put up with that.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act. Our House passed the Paycheck Fairness Act last week, with exactly one Republican voting in favor of it, and I bet you already know that was Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania's 1st. (Nope, not even former Democrat and avowed disciple of "bipartisanship" Jefferson Van Drew of New Jersey's 2nd.) The Paycheck Fairness Act would (among other good works) prevent bosses from firing workers for talking about their pay with their co-workers, which is usually how women find out they're not getting paid as much as men. I guess Republicans will retort that the Paycheck Fairness Act restricts corporations' rights to restrict your speech! Everyone knows our First Amendment protects you from your government, not your boss, but that doesn't mean your boss's right to restrict your speech must be absolute -- particularly when that tramples over your rights as secured by the law. So don't brook that silliness, either.

Common Cause still helps you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors nominees -- not just because they're good nominees, but because they'll likely fire notorious Postmaster General/aspiring election thief/bad boss Louis DeJoy -- but maybe you should also call Senate Majority Leader Schumer (D-NY), at 202.224.6542 and demand that he actually schedule this vote. President Biden nominated the three individuals well over a month and a half ago, so what's the holdup? You'd hate to think it's because Democrats want to privatize the Post Office, too, but simply want Republicans to get the blame for it. You'd hate to think that, but you also have to consider that. We should let Mr. Schumer know we're thinking that, too.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to stop arming the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. The news hook, of course, is that, contra his promises, our President still plans to approve the sale of "matériel that can be construed to have a defensive purpose," per the New York Times, and though that means fewer guns and bombs, it also means offensive weapons that, well, "can be construed to have a defensive purpose." Yemen is now the second-hungriest nation on the planet per the Global Hunger Index, all to deter Iranian influence there, supposedly, but the Houthi rebels the Saudi/UAE coalition targets are some of the best fighters of al-Qaeda on Earth, and with all the destruction the coalition has unleashed on Yemen, what are the chances good Yemenis actually find Iranian help less attractive now? It's like these wars are supposed to make everything worse. But we don't have to let that happen.

Action: concerning the Uyghurs, private prisons, the PRO Act, vaccine investment, and police brutality.

Long story short: tell big clothing corporations to stop enabling China in its exploitation of Uyghur Muslims, tell President Biden to cancel private prison contracts, tell your Senators to pass the PRO Act, and tell your Congressfolk to spend new nuke money on vaccine development and pass bills that would curtail police brutality. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Reps' and Senators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below.

Sum of Us helps you tell big clothing corporation Zara to stop using Uyghur forced labor in China to manufacture their products. Nobody should profit from slave labor, and nobody should profit from the Chinese herding hundreds of thousands of Muslims into concentration camps where they get tortured and brainwashed, either. Some folks, most likely trolls, will tell you that opposing Zara's efforts to profit off the Uyghurs actually hurts the Uyghurs, because then the Chinese will take it out on them more, or something. Eject such people from your acquaintance! Wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR against corporations profiting from oppression always pressures the oppressors, and any evil they do because they feel pressure is on them, not you.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell the Biden Administration to cancel all prison and detention center contracts with private corporations. Regardless of how you feel about punishment, etc., getting private corporations out of the imprisoning business will save the taxpayer money and make our government more accountable. Private prisons don't "do the job better for less," they do it worse at more expense, and generally they "solve" their accountability problems with large campaign donations. When we inject the profit motive into a public good, the profit motive overwhelms the public good eventually. And this is all a bad way to rehabilitate prisoners or address immigration issues. We still are serious about these things, aren't we?

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act would repeal state-level "right to work" laws (i.e., "right to work for less" laws!), stop employers from requiring workers to attend anti-union meetings or sign forced arbitration agreements, would stop employers from retaliating against employees (including managers) who blow the whistle on labor law violations, and would let employees determine how to conduct a union election. And how does the other side respond? By saying people shouldn't have to join a union if they don't want to. Most people want to, most of the others will be fine with it once they see the benefits, and we can accommodate the political beliefs of the rest (by keeping dues and political contributions separate, for example).

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2227/S. 982, the Investing Cures Before Missiles (or ICBM) Act. The bill would redirect funding away from new intercontinental ballistic missiles (which is what "ICBM" more traditionally stands for, see what they did there!) and toward an even better COVID vaccine. We spend too much money on missiles; we get too little for what we spend on drugs, of course, but you can make your tax dollar go a lot further on a vaccine than you can on yet another weapon. We already spend more on defense than the next eight nations on that list combined, and yet we still worry we're not safe! It's almost like the two facts are related. You know what makes people safer in this day and age, though? Knowing they're much less likely to die from a virus that doesn't have to kill them.

Finally, if you've missed previous action alerts about police brutality, Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end militarization of local police. The Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act and the Demilitarizing Law Enforcement Act both await House consideration, after all, and don't worry about making your Congressfolk sick of hearing about this from you! They're supposed to get sick of hearing about it, and then they're supposed to do something about it! This note, I realize, is of a piece with the previous one -- just as we're wrong that more missiles will keep us safer as a nation, we're also wrong to think more weapons will keep police safer on our streets. You know what keeps police safer? Knowing their communities better, and positively interacting with their communities more. Tough to quantify in a spreadsheet, I know, but that doesn't make it wrong.

Action: concerning justice, the Estate Tax, the Dakota Access pipeline, antibiotic abuse, big tech monopolies, and debt collector harassment.

Long story short: demand justice for Daunte Wright and his loved ones, tell President Biden to include a stronger Estate Tax in his infrastructure/jobs plan and shut down the Dakota Access pipeline, tell our FDA to stop antibiotic abuse on factory farms, tell our government to break up monopolies like Google and Amazon, and tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop abusive debt collection calls. The following paragraphs will provide email/petition links for all of these action alerts. Good hunting!

First things first. Change.org helps you demand justice in the Daunte Wright shooting. The wheels of justice have moved relatively quickly, I suppose -- both the officer who shot Mr. Wright and her Police Chief have resigned their positions, and authorities have lately arrested the officer on a second-degree manslaughter charge. But, frankly, said authorities could have justified a murder charge, merely because the 26-year officer couldn't possibly have mistaken her relatively heavy handgun for her relatively light taser. Manslaughter may be where it ends up -- murder is a hard charge to prove, after all -- but the state may also be reducing expectations so it can let her off. So, clearly, we still need to make our will known.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell President Biden to include an Estate Tax hike in his infrastructure/jobs plan. Too many Democrats still live in the year 1999 and think the Estate Tax is a relic of the past, but they're as wrong about that as they are about everything else -- there's nothing "evil" about taxing large estates, and no you won't destroy any family farms if you do. Even the people who pretend to worry about that can't find any evidence of it! And if we raised the Estate Tax just to where it was at the beginning of the Obama Administration, we'll raise upwards of $230 billion over 10 years, or around one-tenth of the plan's total cost. Of course we should raise it even higher, like the For the 99.5 Percent Act would do. And feel free to tell President Biden that.

Food and Water Action helps you tell President Biden to shut down the Dakota Access pipeline. He's already shut down construction on Keystone XL, and Dakota Access is already leaking and thus already polluting, so if anything, that's more urgent. And don't brook any silliness about how shutting it down would "kill jobs"! Building pipelines and causing pollution is not the only way to create jobs! Hell, building solar and wind farms would be a good way to create jobs. And good luck getting most folks who complain about "job-killing" to notice when corporations actually kill jobs. They'd do better to notice when they can't drink the water because some pipeline has befouled it.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell our FDA to strengthen its proposal for antibiotic use on factory farms. 7 out of 10 antibiotics in America go, no, not to sick people or animals, but nominally healthy feed animals, so factory farms can get more meat out of them and also so animals can better endure the squalid conditions of factory farms, and that's a system that will one day take us back to a world where the next cut could kill you because none of our antibiotics work anymore. Just about everyone in America but factory farms oppose antibiotic abuse, yet the factory farms still get their way. So we keep telling our FDA, and telling them, and telling them, because very often you have to tell people more than once.

Demand Progress helps you tell your government to break up big tech monopolies like Google and Amazon. The immediate news hook, of course, is Amazon's (so far!) successful push back against unionization efforts at its Bessemer, Alabama plant; we could of course tabulate organizers' critical mistakes in that effort, but we can do little about that, other than to publicize those mistakes; we can do more about getting out government to do the job it's supposed to do, which is keep big corporations from running roughshod over the rest of us.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to roll back rules allowing debt collecting corporations to harass you online about debts you might not even owe. The Trump CFPB sympathized mainly with poor, beleaguered corporations and felt they should be allowed to interrupt your entire life with demands for money you can't just poop out. And the Trump CFPB also seemed to feel that making corporations verify that you even owe them any money was too much a "burden" for them. For the Biden CFPB, that could change -- the Senate hasn't confirmed the estimable Rohit Chopra as CFPB Director yet, but the CFPB's acting Director is the also-estimable Dave Uejio -- but only if we speak out.

Action: concerning jobs, media, police brutality, facial recognition, airline refunds, and campaign donations.

Long story short: tell President Biden to show less "flexibility" with Republicans on his infrastructure package, tell your cable provider to stop carrying the Fox News (sic) Channel, tell big corporations to stop funding police foundations, tell Disney to stop using facial recognition software, tell big airline corporations to refund folks who didn't use their tickets in a pandemic, and tell the American Dental Association to stop donating to Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ). I've provided President Biden's phone number below for the first alert, and email/petition links for the others. Good hunting!

Yesterday we learned that President Biden seemed amenable to passing infrastructure/jobs legislation more like Republicans would like. Was he waffling? Was he doing pro forma meetings with Republicans? Was he playing them in yet another game of 19-dimensional chess? The answer doesn't matter. Here's what matters: we call President Biden, at 202.456.1111, and tell him do not pander to Republicans on his signature infrastructure/jobs legislation. This way, we change the story from "what's President Biden going to do?" to what we're going to do. And if enough of us communicate our will to our President, he'll hear it, if for no other reason that some staffer in the White House is going to be sick of all these phone calls. (And if you tell him you want the corporate tax rate to go higher -- say, to 55%, where it was in the '50s -- well, what's the harm in that?)

Consumers United for Fairness helps you tell your cable corporation to stop carrying Fox News. I've said it many times: even if you're not watching Fox News, you're still paying for it, and even if you make the cable company come out and block Fox News, you're still paying for it, and they'll never change their ways until we take away their money, particularly that pile of passive money they get from every cable TV subscriber in America. Seriously, $2 a month per account adds up -- and starving the beast of that $2 a month per account will also add up. Yeah, we finally cut the cord last year, but not everyone will do that, particularly if they like their HGTV and their ESPN and their Comedy Central. We've got the power, so let's use it. (And if anyone bellows TEH FREE SPEECHEZ!!!! at you over this, kindly direct them to the "$2 a month per account" phrase above.)

Sum of Us helps you tell big corporations like Starbucks, Target, and Coca-Cola to stop funding police foundations. Why? Isn't that, like, civic duty or something? Except that police foundations usually get the military weapons and surveillance tech for police departments, which they use to attack protestors and single out folks of color. So it's the opposite of civic duty, actually. And these corporations are trying to appear "woke"! Why, it's enough to make you suspicious of corporate PR! But we've got the Big Stick of Bad PR ourselves, plus the power to stop patronizing these establishments, which even in our monopolistic era ain't as hard as they'd like you to think. So let's do that.

Fight for the Future helps you tell Disney to stop using facial recognition software at their theme parks. Yeah, they say they've started "testing" that software at their Magic Kingdoms, but how much more testing do we need to do? We already know that facial recognition software not only intrudes on our privacy but can't tell Black folks apart any better than your Tea Party uncle can, plus it creates another pile of data most corporations have already proven they can't (or won't!) secure, so hackers can steal it. So it's evil and it's useless -- and useless in a way that makes it more evil. Surely Disney World has more to offer the world than that! And the Big Stick of Bad PR may help them remember that, so let's wield it.

Penn PIRG helps you tell big airline corporations to refund good Americans for all those plane tickets they cancelled in 2020. Too many Americans got vouchers, not refunds, and those vouchers have expiration dates, but the pandemic's still going on, so why should they be punished for continuing to make the right choice? Too often, in this sick, immoral, and decadent civilization, we punish people for doing the right thing and reward them for doing the wrong thing; how about we stop doing that in this instance? If it seems like it might not make that much of a difference to our posterity, rest assured that every time we reward the righteous and punish evil, we make a difference to our posterity. I've seen it happen enough times to know it's worth doing, but every day we must make an example of our good works -- and our good hearts! -- to others. It sure is better than cynicism, I tell you what.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell the American Dental Association to stop donating to Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ). They donate to him, I presume, because he's a dentist! Not just any dentist, either, but a member of the Arizona Dental Association's Hall of Fame! No, really, I'm not kidding. Sadly, Rep. Gosar has made a name for himself for other reasons -- for being one of the ringleaders of the Congressional effort to overturn the 2020 Presidential election (including the attempted coup of January 6!), and for making nice with white supremacists at the America First PAC meeting the next month. Dentistry Hall of Fame or no, this is one character you don't want soiling your good name -- a fact six of his nine siblings have taken to heart by endorsing his opponent in his 2018 and 2020 House races! If they can do it, surely the ADA can, too.

UPDATE. I am sorry to say the White House phone number is not working today; try the White House's contact link instead.

ANOTHER UPDATE. I wish I'd remembered that Fox News actually charges around $2/month in carrier fees to the big cable corporations, not 75¢/month, as it was many years ago; I've corrected the error above.

Action: concerning campaign finance, health care, law and order, drug policy, and D.C. statehood.

Long story short: tell your House Reps to support a Constitutional amendment that would get big money out of political campaigns, and then tell your House Reps to pass the Medicare for All Act, the Demilitarizing Local Law Enforcement Act, the MORE Act, and the D.C. Admission Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find your House Reps' phone numbers -- or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below.

People for the American Way helps you tell your House Reps to pass H.J.Res. 1, which would amend our Constitution so that our federal, state, and local governments could restrict campaign financing again. Go ahead and read the bill at Congress.gov; it's pretty short, and it would also allow governments to distinguish between "natural" persons (i.e., you and I) and "corporations or other artificial entities," which opens the door to banning corporate campaign contributions. Like many bills that don't pass, this is a very popular bill, and right-wingers will come at you with all kinds of hysterical stories about "what could happen" if governments were to regulate campaign finance again. Spoiler alert: they're all rubbish -- and you'll know they're rubbish because none of them ever happened between McCain/Feingold and Citizens United.

Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, and Black Lives Matter all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. You've seen those memes on Facebook about how you go get your COVID vaccine and no one asks you if you've got health insurance or cash on hand, and wouldn't it be wonderful if you got all your health care that way? Expanding Medicare to include all Americans would get us there, and no, you wouldn't be paying an arm and a leg more for it in taxes -- we could convert the money corporations are already paying for private insurance into an employer-side payroll tax, which wouldn't take one penny more out of your paycheck (since it's employer-side; the payroll tax splits Social Security taxes between employer and employee). Feel free to tell your Congressfolk just that. They'll either be impressed or scared; either reaction is fine.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Reps to pass the Demilitarizing Local Law Enforcement Act, which would repeal the notorious 1033 program which funnels surplus military weapons to local police -- who then use it on protestors against police brutality! I'd call that irony, but aren't we supposed to get pleasure from irony? And don't worry that you've also called supporting the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and/or the Stop Militarizing the Police Act, even if these bills have a lot of overlap -- if you voice your support for all of them, then you'll have told your Congressfolk "stop giving the police military weapons" several times, and that's what they most need to know.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Reps to pass the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, which would undo a lot of damage caused by the "war on drugs." No, really -- all the "war on drugs" did was put a lot of people in jail; and in the case of pot, it put people in jail because they used a drug that wasn't particularly dangerous, like cocaine or heroin. The MORE Act would make marijuana legal, invest in the communities most harmed by the "war on drugs," and expunge pot convictions from a lot of folks' criminal records. 16 states have legalized pot now; maybe it's time for our federal government to get the message.

Finally, both People for the American Way and the Progressive Reform Network help you tell your Reps to pass H.R. 51, the D.C. Admission Act. Why? Because it would admit Washington, D.C., as a state, that's why. It would be America's smallest state by a sizable margin (is that a sigh of relief I'm hearing from Rhode Island?), but it would not be America's least populous state (it's ahead of Vermont and Wyoming, and nipping at the heels of Alaska and North Dakota), plus it would be able to run itself the way other states do, instead of relying on our federal government to run it. (Sounds almost conservative, doesn't it?) Our government certainly left Washington, D.C. in the lurch on January 6, didn't it? If D.C. were a state, it'd have its own National Guard, and a lot of weekend fascists would think twice about trying that again.

Action: concerning voting rights, civil rights, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Equality Act, and confirm USPS Board of Governors nominees; also, tell big corporations to stop donating to politicians who restrict voting rights. 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, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below. Good hunting!

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Most folks aren't falling for the ZOMG TEH CHILD MOLESTURZ WILLZ THE VOTEZ!!!!! stupidity, as evidenced by polling finding that two-thirds of Americans support H.R. 1. Newt Gingrich used to say that if 70% of the people want something, they ought to get it, so only a little more education about what's really in the bill -- an end to legislative gerrymandering, automatic and same-day voter registration, 15 days of early voting everywhere, disclosure of campaign donations over $10,000, an end to particularly nefarious forms of racist vote suppression -- should get us over the hump. Even Joe Manchin might hear it then.

Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill would, as you likely know, plug the hole our Supreme Court blew in the Voting Rights Act by creating a new standard with which our Justice Department could stop vote suppression efforts at the state level (specifically, it would subject any state or locality, not just ones in the South, with a record of vote suppression for extra scrutiny). Why haven't Democrats formally introduced this bill yet, or folded it into the For the People Act? I don't know, but does it matter? What matters is what we want, and what we tell our Congressfolk.

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R> 5, the Equality Act. As we speak, states are mulling or passing bills outlawing transgender students from competing in the sports that match their gender. Of course they know no boys will become girls just to dominate girls' sports and sentence themselves not only to a lifetime of making less money playing sports but ostracization from their buddies, but as David Frum instructs us, it's not about winning, or even fighting, it's about looking like you're fighting. Let's remind them there are more important things in life -- you know, like fighting real discrimination that gay and transgender folks face all the time, like getting shut out by banks and landlords and employers strictly on the basis of sex.

Common Cause helps you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's three USPS Board of Governors nominees, not least so they can fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy before he runs our Post Office even further into the ground. His big, bold proposal for getting our Postal Service back on its feet: higher prices and worse service. When I say CEOs are overrated, this is kinda what I mean. Don't let folks say he's just doing what has to be done, because this is America! We don't have to have a Post Office that runs badly! Especially when they're only losing money because Congress mandates that they pre-pay 75 years' worth of benefits! It's a manufactured hostage crisis, again! OK, I've run over my exclamation point quota. Anyway, while you've got your Senators on the phone, you can tell them to pass H.R. 695/S. 145, the USPS Fairness Act, which would repeal that Congressional mandate.

Finally, since we spent a lot of time on voting rights today, Public Citizen helps you tell big corporations to stop donating to politicians who suppress votes. Much more useful, I would say, than merely criticizing them in public, though I don't say that's worthless, precisely. But as many smart people have said, these big corporations gave a lot of money to the politicians who passed laws suppressing the vote. And they've done this dance with us before: they used to say they supported the nefarious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) for "economic" reasons, not for Voter ID or Stand Your Ground reasons. It's a load of rubbish. Let's let them know that we know that -- and give them an opening to do better, for once.

Action: concerning "bipartisanship," the filibuster, whistleblowing, public broadband, methane emissions, and corporate spying.

Long story short: tell Joe Manchin to stop Joe Manchining; write a letter-to-the-editor favoring filibuster abolition; tell your Congressfolk to pass the Peace Corps Reauthorization Act, the Broadband Justice Act, and a resolution of disapproval overturning weak Trump-era methane emissions rules; and tell Spotify to give up its creepy surveillance scheme. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Congressfolks' phone numbers -- or use the email/petition/letter-to-the-editor tools in the links below. And good hunting.

Well, Joe Manchin's really done it this time, not only announcing he'll support no effort to "eliminate or weaken" the filibuster, but that "the time has come" "to usher a new era of bipartisanship." "Bipartisanship" with the party that opposes any and all good proposals and tries to overthrow governments and rewrite voting rules when election results don't go their way? How about "no"? Future historians will point to this moment as the moment Republicans captured the House and Senate in 2022 -- unless we act! Mr. Manchin's phone number, as you likely know by now, is 202.224.3954. Now that he's provoked two action alerts in one week, I'm starting to think he wants to be Donald Trump. No one on Earth should want to be Donald Trump. Even Donald Trump should look in the mirror and say, "wow, I don't want to be that guy."

In a related development, Common Cause helps you write a letter-to-the-editor about the need to get rid of the Senate filibuster. You enter your zip code and see a list of local newspapers to which you might write, and then Common Cause provides a set of talking points you might use to write your letter. Don't fret that Republicans will one day get to impose their will on Americans, because guess what? They do that now, precisely because they exploit the filibuster. Next they'll put holds on bills and demand a physical quorum to turn the lights on and off, but they'll look like little whiny-ass babies when they do that. It would help if Democrats would point to them and say see, they don't want to pass automatic voter registration, that's why they're acting like little babies. But we'll continue to do that if they don't.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Peace Corps Reauthorization Act, not merely because the Peace Corps is generally a good thing, but because the bill would create protections against discrimination and retaliation for whistleblowers. That would have helped Sara Thompson in 2010 after the Peace Corps gave her the anti-malaria drug mefloquine, which our own military won't use because it's too dangerous; Ms. Thompson had no recourse, because our Peace Corps would have simply fired her, and now she suffers from mefloquine toxicity. And remember: whistleblowers ain't out for an easy buck, because after they've suffered through years of harassment and unemployment after they blow the whistle on wrongdoing, ain't no easy bucks ever coming again.

BroadbandJusticeAct.com helps you, as you might guess, tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1904, the Broadband Justice Act. The bill would essentially subsidize broadband as a public utility in public housing -- a thing poorer working families might well need, given that so many folks work and go to school over the internet during a pandemic -- and it might be a good first step toward a national broadband service. If you're worried that Big Gummint would oppress you with a broadband service, just remember that plenty of big private corporations already do that (and for an example of that, see the last paragraph below). And if you're worried that your taxes would subsidize someone else's broadband, don't worry, because our tax money subsidizes plenty of things you use, too.

Here, at last, a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act that would roll back a Trump-era regulation! EDF Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to roll back the Trump EPA's methane regulation, which actually increased the amount of red tape our government would have to hurtle to regulate methane. They said Donald Trump wasn't a conservative -- and they were right! I mean, don't conservatives think more bureaucracy is a bad thing? In any case, methane pollutes our air and packs a bigger climate-change punch than coal -- and not for nothing, but the methane emissions that big drilling corporations vent into the atmosphere represent energy we can't use and (on public lands) royalties our government can't collect. So, what's good about more methane leakage? No, CEOs getting lazier and fatter isn't a "good."

Finally, Stop Spotify Surveillance helps you tell Spotify to abandon its plan to spy on your conservations in order to "better" target music and ads. And here you thought the future would be full of solar panels and cures for intractable diseases and peoples of the world getting along! No, it's full of big corporations trying to get you to buy more stuff, and with Spotify's filing for a patent using voice recognition software, it's also about spying on you to do it. All that fear of government spying we had in the '60s seems so quaint now! It isn't, of course, and we must still fight government spying wherever we see it, but we must also fight corporate spying, too, particularly if our government isn't going to control corporate power on our behalf.

Action: concerning pollution, the right to repair, abortion, marketing to children, Social Security, and banning Donald Trump from Facebook forever.

Long story short: tell PA state legislators to curb pollution and pass "right to repair" legislation, tell Texas state legislators to reject an anti-abortion bill, tell big tobacco corporations to stop aiming their products at children, tell President Biden to fire two notorious Social Security Administrators, and tell Facebook to keep Donald Trump off their platform permanently. The paragraphs below offer email and contact tools for each of these alerts.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your state legislators to protect our clean water from longwall coal mining. What's longwall mining? That's when you dig into the ground to remove a long wall of coal (hence the name); this "wall" can be 1500 feet wide and two miles long, and, as you can guess, it can cause an awful lot of pollution and property damage. As it happens, coal corporations don't fill in the "wall" they've removed, so if your house sits above it, you're in big trouble. And of course state officials have found longwall mining responsible for nearly all the mining-related damage our streams have suffered in southwestern PA. Best to switch to solar and wind, which don't churn the earth anywhere near as much as coal corporations do.

Staying in PA for our next alert: Penn PIRG helps you tell your PA state legislators to pass "right to repair" legislation. We heard a lot about this when we were short on ventilators for COVID patients, and ventilator manufacturers didn't make it easy for third party repair techs at hospitals (who have been, in my own personal experience, excellent) to fix them. It's no better for farmers, who can't fix their own tractors (despite being, in my own personal experience, quite handy) because big corporations like John Deere don't make their manuals very accessible. They'd rather you go to them, or to one of their hand-picked "authorized dealers"! But trying to make good Americans so dependent on corporations is not very bootstrappy, you know.

Care2 helps you tell Texas state legislators to reject HB 3326, which would ban all abortions without exception and would charge anyone involved with an abortion with homicide -- which could result in someone getting the death penalty for abortion, since Texas still punishes some murders with the death penalty. The bill cites a dissenting opinion in a recent Supreme Court case concerning Louisiana's anti-abortion law, but seriously, facing the death penalty for seeking a medical procedure literally protected by our federal Constitution, as per the actual majority decision in Roe v. Wade? Some people can't help but do the helicopter dance in front of us. But they aren't "tougher" than the rest of us, they're weaker; otherwise, why would they strut?

Progress America helps you tell big tobacco corporations to stop offering flavored tobacco products to children. You know how Jeff Sessions says pot is a gateway drug to much worse stuff? That's rubbish, but flavored tobacco products actually are a gateway for kids to pick up a cigarette habit as adults, as some four out of five kids who smoke started out with a tobacco product that tasted like chocolate or apple or bubble gum or any number of things. And giving kids a damn nicotine habit? Gosh, I guess big corporations just want a nation full of harried, overworked people, and they want them to start early! I hate to say "children are our future," but they fucking are, and we need to treat them like they are.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Biden to fire the two Social Security Administrators who are trying to bollocks up Social Security, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. How have Andrew Saul and David Black tried to bollocks up Social Security? Roll call! They delayed seniors' stimulus checks! They added extra disability benefit reviews just-because! They pressured SSA judges to deny people disability benefits! You worked for Social Security, you fought for it, you paid into it, and you've earned it -- and you sure as hell deserve better than to have assholes steal it from you.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell Facebook to ban Donald Trump from its platform permanently. Hasn't America been a much nicer place since he hasn't been able to bombard us with his obnoxious spew? Yes, it has. Facebook has no moral or legal obligation to keep enabling Mr. Trump's horridness -- especially now that Mr. Trump has announced he's going to start his own social network! This is something people with too much money can do! They're not being "oppressed" by existing social media keeping them off their platforms! They're not being "canceled"! Rage-filled people do nothing but whine, and they still get too much say in our civilization. But we can contain them. We do outnumber them, after all.

Action: concerning health care, immigration, fossil fuel funding, D.C. statehood, paycheck fairness, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare for All Act, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, the D.C. Admission Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act -- and tell them to reject the so-called Fair Access to Banking Act and revoke permits for the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. As Paul Craig Roberts, the father of Reaganomics, said many years ago, when the private sector screws up this badly (high prices, bad service, surprise bills, etc.) then our government has to step in. And Medicare works pretty damn well for our elderly, despite the fact that it's basically a high-risk pool which should constantly fail. Think how much better Medicare would work with all these healthy people in it! (How to pay for it? Easy: assess an employer-side payroll tax at about the amount they're already paying for private health insurance. They act like it just can't be done because they don't have the will to do it. Luckily, we do.)

Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2222, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act. What makes a great nation? Treating all people with the dignity and respect they deserve, and much as right-wingers want you to believe that everyone who wants to come here is a murdering raping drug-dealer, most of the folks who want to come here are a) good people and b) running from actual murdering raping drug-dealers. So H.R. 2222 would repeal mandatory detention for immigrants, prohibit solitary confinement, end our government's use of private prisons they refuse to hold to account, and ensuring all detainees get a hearing before an immigration judge. It really is well past time our government acted as civilized as we do.

Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 563, the so-called Fair Access to Banking Act. The bill would compel big banking corporations to fund the fossil fuel corporations they've avoided funding for the last couple of years, under popular pressure, of course. Ain't it just like a Republican to loudly insist that the "free" market is always right until it hits big fossil fuel donors? And then they make the "free" market do what they want! How conservative of them! And they've got some nerve talking about banks "discriminating" against fossil fuel corporations. Major anti-discrimination legislation (the Equality Act) stands before them and all they do is tell hysterical lies about it.

The Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 51/S. 51, the D.C. Admission Act. You know the arguments against D.C. statehood suck when Mob Boss Mitch calls statehood for D.C. "pure socialism." What does that even mean? (And how does it differ from "impure socialism"?) Statehood would actually increase Washington, D.C.'s independence -- it could get vaccine supplies a lot more easily, which is a big deal these days, and it could create its own National Guard, which it sure could have used on January 6! Don't brook any silliness about how "the Founders didn't want D.C. to be a state," lest we use that argument against Idaho, which achieved statehood in 1890, long after all the Founders were dead.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act. Because women deserve to make as much as men for the same work, dammit! Why do people resist this idea? (OK, I know why, but all the reasons are stupid.) Despite the Equal Pay Act of 1963, women still don't make a dollar for every dollar a man makes for doing the same work, but the Paycheck Fairness Act would make it easier for women to find out their bosses are paying them too little and then do something about it. And when Republicans tell you this bill will "just help out the trial lawyers," tell them we'd need fewer trial lawyers if bosses didn't try to get away with wage theft.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to introduce and pass legislation that would revoke all permits for Enbridge's notorious Line 3 pipeline. Line 3 would carry almost a million barrels of tar sands oil daily from southwestern Canada under the Mississippi River to northern Wisconsin. Does running an oil pipeline under the Mississippi sound like a good idea to you? Particularly when you recall that an Endbridge pipeline rupture in 2010 polluted some 40 square miles of the Kalamazoo watershed? Fuel burns once, but clean water is forever -- if we work to keep it.

Action: concerning corporate taxes, voting rights, discrimination, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell Sen. Manchin you want a much bigger corporate tax hike than he does; tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Equality Act; and tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's three appointments to the USPS Board of Governors. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Senators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below.

Jesus Mary and Joseph we have to call Sen. Manchin (D?-WV) again, after he said he wouldn't support hiking the corporate tax rate to 28% in the coming infrastructure bill. He said he also spoke for "six or seven other Democrats" (though not "Senators"), but I'd lay money that when I advocate for a 55% corporate tax rate, I speak for a lot more than six or seven other Americans. And does he even watch TV? Even Meet the Press wouldn't shut up about the 55-plus American corporations paying zero dollars in taxes in 2019. So, again, we have to help him put his finger up to the wind, by calling 202.224.3954 and giving him yet another piece of our minds. I hope he's enjoying himself.

The Sierra Club helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. You may have seen ads attacking the For the People Act; though they make less absurd claims than "child molestors voting" and "workers handing out cocaine to voters waiting in line," the difference between them is nothing more than the difference between a mound of dung the flies have found and a mound of dung they haven't found yet. The things the bill would actually do -- automatic and same-day voter registration, campaign finance disclosure, and end to various vote suppression schemes that just-to-happen to target folks of color -- are all quite popular, and Republicans know that, so they're left with telling hysterical lies and hoping Democrats don't change the filibuster.

People for the American Way, Common Cause, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Senators to support the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. You know all these vote suppression bills state legislatures are mulling or passing in over 40 states? The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would stop most of them dead, by requiring pre-clearance of voting law changes for any state or locality that's demonstrated a habit of suppressing votes -- not just certain Southern states, as the Voting Rights Act originally stated. As I've said, voting rights are actually quite popular in America, except with whom, class? Except with sore losers who think they have a "right" to keep winning elections when they show their constituents nothing but the backs of their hands. So let's put a stop to that.

Both the Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. When a Trump-supporting co-worker tried to tell me that the Equality Act would let boys become girls so they can dominate girls' sports -- a story that falls apart under the most cursory scrutiny -- I told him the Equality Act was really about things like preventing landlords and banks from discriminating against customers just because they're gay, and guess what? He agreed that discriminating against gays like that was a bad thing. You have to tell Trump votaries more than once what the Equality Act's really about, but you have the upper hand in every argument you have about the Equality Act because you have the facts. And I insist that counts for something.

Common Cause helps you tell your Senators to confirm three USPS Board of Governors appointees, not just because they're good nominees, but so they can then fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. I gotta say that trying to sabotage our Post Office's efforts to deliver mail-in ballots should get you fired. You know what else should get you fired? Responding to delivery and service problems you created by threatening higher prices and worse service. That's not the kind of bold, entrepreneurial thinking that we celebrate in America, right? Or do we only celebrate thieves anymore? At the risk of being obvious, I can think of one fairly famous historical figure who did not put up with thieves in his house.

Action: concerning corruption, sore losers, price gouging, antibiotic abuse, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fight defense contracting corruption, tell Texas Gov. Abbott to reject the state legislature's sore loser anti-voting bill, tell our government we need to fight big pharma price-gouging on drugs developed with taxpayer money, tell our EPA to reverse its recent decision allowing big ag to spray antibiotics on orange trees, and tell President Biden to forgive $50,000 in student loan debt per borrower. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find your Reps' and Senators' phone numbers for the first action alert, and then for the others, use either the phone numbers (where applicable) or the email/petition/public comment links provided below.

The Project on Government Oversight reports that our Naval Department plans to cut its internal auditing personnel by 70% -- which means Naval auditors will be much less able to root out contracting corruption. Indeed, you have to wonder if that's the whole idea. Their excuse is that they'll be able to spend more money building ships, because staying within a budget is so hard when you already spend more on defense than the next eight countries on Earth combined! No use saying we might as well gut the auditors because the Navy consistently brings in projects late and overbudget anyway; actually, that's an argument for more auditors. Call your House Reps and Senators about this today and they'll never see it coming.

Public Citizen helps you tell Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to reject the vote suppression bill recently passed by the state legislature. Gov. Abbott's phone number, of course, is 512.463.2000, or 512.463.1782 if you're either from Austin or out-of state (odd tandem, there); let's see if we can jam up at least one of these lines today. You can already tell what the bill would do -- reduce voting hours, get rid of drive-through voting, and keep densely-populated areas from having more voting machines. Plus it would let poll-watchers actually film you voting; I didn't see that one coming, not being evil. Sore losers constantly try to keep people from voting, instead of, oh, gosh, I don't know, being someone worth your vote.

Sorry for the late notice on this, but the Coalition on Human Needs helps you leave a public comment about a federal proposal to keep our government from fighting back against big pharma price-gouging on drugs developed with taxpayer assistance -- but comments are due at midnight tonight, so let's get to stepping. Gosh, if you helped fund a drug with your money, you should get some say over what happens afterward, right? Like, you should especially be able to say don't charge so damn much for this drug that good Americans can't afford it? Maybe we should just have our government develop drugs without resorting to private corporations -- but in the meantime, we need to protect ourselves from getting screwed over by the system we've got.

One of the last things the Trump Administration did before (finally!) leaving office was green-light the use of the antibiotic streptomycin on big ag citrus trees. Because Florida, that's why! But the more antibiotics we spray on crops, the less effective they'll be on human beings and animals when they get sick, and the stronger the superbugs antibiotics can't kill will become. No, we will not, one day, be sitting around a campfire saying "well, the next cut you get can kill you now, but at least we allowed a Republican President to enact a policy designed entirely to help capture the Electoral votes of one state!" Would it be piling on to say that spraying antibiotics on crops is not a long-term solution? No, it would not. Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to reverse this corrupt and short-sighted decision.

Finally, both the ACLU and Daily Kos help you tell President Biden to forgive up to $50,000 in student loan debt per debtor. Why? Because colleges overcharge in the first place, because it'll stimulate the economy, because more folks will be able to start businesses and buy homes if they don't have big student loan debts hanging over them, and because our civilization did kinda promise people that going to college would get you a lucrative career and that's kinda been a lie for many years. Don't be the fool who would oppose debt forgiveness because you paid off all your debts! That would be an occasion for me to deploy the phrase it's not all about you, and with Donald Trump gone, I was really hoping to deploy that phrase a lot less.