Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning our Post Office, offshore drilling, "Instagram for kids," fossil fuel drilling, and right-wing news.

Long story short: tell President Biden to reform our Postal Service and end offshore drilling, tell Facebook to abandon its plans to let children use Instagram, tell AXA's CEO to stop insuring fossil fuel projects, and tell AT&T to abandon One America News Network. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to fire USPS Board of Governors member Ron Bloom and USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy already. He should have already fired Mr. DeJoy merely for slowing down the mail and charging more for it, because why should we tolerate paying more to get our medicine and ballots and Social Security checks slower? I'm old enough to remember when merely proposing such a thing would get you laughed out of the room. But apparently Mr. Bloom stands in the way of our USPS Board of Governors firing Mr. DeJoy, and even better, Mr. DeJoy has invested with a fund Mr. Bloom runs, which sure smells of corruption even if we never put either man in jail for it. If Mr. Biden replaces Mr. Bloom, we're all one step closer to replacing Mr. DeJoy, at which point hallelujah!

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell President Biden to end offshore drilling. You don't need to stop with the recent spill of the Southern California coast -- you need only remember the Exxon Valdez spill and the BP Spillageddon in the Gulf of Mexico, both of which were avoidable and took forever to clean up because corporations don't like paying to clean up their messes. President Biden wouldn't just be fulfilling a campaign promise by ending offshore drilling -- he'd also open up space for the wind farms he wants to line America's coasts, as I imagine it would be difficult to do both things in the same spot. And if I had to pick, I'd rather have the turbines out there -- no, they won't kill all the birds, and no, they won't make you sick, and no, they won't be so noisy you can't function. And we might get to keep our planet.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell Facebook to abandon its ill-conceived (and ill-concealed!) plans to hook children on Instagram. You no doubt know from multitudinous news reports that Facebook knew that young girls who used Instagram had much worse body images than girls who didn't, and it was still like pulling teeth to get them to "suspend" their plans for an Instagram for Kids app. And don't let anyone justify Instagram-for-Kids by saying "they're just going to find a way to get it anyway," not just because defeatism is unworthy of a civilized people, but because our job, as adults, isn't necessarily to play catch-up with social media so much as to give our kids spiritual nourishment so they don't run to social media for it. Old-fashioned of me, I know.

Sum of Us helps you tell AXA CEO Thomas Buberl to stop insuring new gas and oil projects. He's supposedly going to decide on that matter this week, and AXA (which operates mainly in Europe and the Middle East) was the first big insurance corporation to refuse to insure new coal projects, but we still need to let AXA know we're watching, not least because we also know big oil and gas drilling corporations are also watching, and preparing to drown out our voices with the power of big money. Oh, and also their "expertise," which is mainly expertise in BSing and gaslighting. When that's all they got, we need to oppose them, in numbers they cannot mistake. The only way to beat big money is to fight big money, after all -- and our victories today guarantee more victories in the future, as long as we keep working.

Finally, Color of Change helps you tell AT&T to end financial support for the One America News Network. Just because AT&T might have wanted "its own conservative (sic) news network" years ago doesn't mean we have to put up with all the rage-inducing crap on TV news today -- and since AT&T is apparently OAN's sole funder, the first blow we strike might be the decisive one. OAN are the people who tell you lies about the 2020 election, lies about COVID vaccines, lies about the January 6 attempted coup, lies about Black civil rights activists, and lies about how "oppressed" white folks are. They're also the folks who think that people who "believe" Joe Biden won the 2020 election should be executed for treason. I want the assholes who say such things to get the oblivion they deserve. They sure don't deserve more corporate money.

Action: concerning monopolies, voting rights, data privacy, law and order, and fossil fuel subsidies.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to strike a blow against meat packer monopolies, pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis voting Rights Advancement Act, pass data privacy legislation and the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and end fossil fuel subsidies. 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 and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First off, this'll seem a bit inside-baseball, but Matt Stoller writes about monopoly meat-packers causing higher meat prices, and notes that Sens. Grassley (R-IA) and Tester (D-MT) have written a bill with actual bipartisan support, called the 50-14 or "spot market" bill. This bill would require big meat packing corporations to buy half of their meat on the open market -- rather than force all cattle ranchers into contracts that may give ranchers assurance they'll be able to sell their cattle, but also makes it far too easy for meat packers to fix prices. It won't actually break up the monopolies, but it'll give ranchers a lot more breathing space. This bill merits a supportive call to your Congressfolk, and don't be swayed by the arguments against the bill -- as Mr. Stoller demonstrates, they rely on bad arguments and manipulated data.

Both Left Action and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. Never mind that Joe Manchin prefers this bill to the For the People Act, because it's not so different that it doesn't deserve our support. The Freedom to Vote Act would expand your access to the voting booth, clamp down on partisan gerrymandering and dark money, restore voting rights to ex-felons, provide 15 days of early voting across America, enact same-day voter registration, and make Election Day a national holiday, plus it'll clamp down on states' recent attempts to gain the power to overrule the will of the voters in their elections. All of this would better secure voting rights in America, and thus merits our work on its behalf. (Also, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you write a letter to the editor supporting the Freedom to Vote Act.)

Both Daily Kos and People for the American Way help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This bill would amend the Voting Rights Act so that our Justice Department could clamp down on voting law changes from states and localities that have demonstrated a clear record of vote suppression -- and not just states and localities from the South, which was our Supreme Court's objection in Shelby County v. Holder. And since a lot of the states that have changed their voting laws lately just so happen to have a vote suppression record, one would think our Justice Department could and would do something about them. We'll likely have to nix the filibuster to get any voting rights bills passed -- but first, let's demonstrate, unmistakably, that the people want voting rights reform in America.

How to Stop Facebook helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass real data privacy legislation in America. Our Federal Communications Commission enacted pretty good regulations protecting data privacy, but that was back in 2016 -- and our Congress promptly repealed them, via the notorious resolution of disapproval process. But now, with approximately zero Americans left who think data breaches and targeted ads and enabling Nazi wannabes is just the price you pay for staying in touch with those people you had a few laughs with freshman year, Congress should be more amenable to protecting your data, and protecting you from corporate surveillance. But we still have to tell them. (Oh, and don't fall for the calls for a new bureaucracy just to regulate Facebook; that'll just have our government rubber-stamping what Facebook does, and we've already got that.)

In a peripherally-related matter, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. This bill would close a Mack truck-sized loophole in the law, which currently prevents your internet service-providing corporation from selling your personal data to law enforcement -- but which does not prevent the third-party data gobblers that buy your data from your ISPs from re-selling it to law enforcement! And you deserve better than that, even if you have committed a crime that law enforcement should be able to discover. We don't have a Fourth Amendment for nothing, after all -- we have it so that we don't send innocent people to jail by accident, and so we don't create a police state that sends its enemies to jail at will. And we're not as far from that as we'd like to think.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to end fossil fuel subsidies forever. That'll be tough, since the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" includes even more fossil fuel subsidies, but we should still communicate our will. And though the recent California oil spill instructs us as to why we might not want to funnel taxpayer money toward corporations that pollute, you can of course make a more conservative argument against fossil fuel subsidies. Not ALL GUBMINT SPENDINGZ BADZ!!!!!, because that's a reactionary argument -- you can merely argue that the fossil fuels are an entrenched technology and hardly need taxpayer help to survive. Yes, they talk about "facing crises" all the time, but they're BSing you. They don't need your money.

Action: concerning, once more, the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations (including enacting a Billionaire's Tax and a stock buyback tax) to pay for the Build Back Better Act, and make sure the Build Back Better Act invests in our care economy, funds paid family/medical leave, lets Medicare negotiate drug prices, expands Medicare, expands our fight against climate change, and permanently expands the Child Tax Credit. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the full $3.5 trillion for the Build Back Better Act by raising taxes on the rich and on corporations. Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Congressfolk to include the Billionaire's Income Tax in the Build Back Better Act and assess a 2% tax on corporate stock buybacks. Remember when they said the 2017 tax "reform" would put thousands of dollars in everyone's pockets? What it actually did was let big corporate CEOs buy back stock, so that shareholder power is even more concentrated in executive hands. That used to be illegal, by the way! And it should be again. In the meantime, we should discourage it with taxation, and then use that money to do good works, which we will describe below.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in the care economy in the Build Back Better Act. What do we know about child care and elder care? That we'll all need one or the other one day, and they could both be a damn sight cheaper. And none of that is about "creating an entitlement society," but about relieving real burdens on working families that cripple their ability to contribute more to our society -- burdens that only exist to make corporate executives rich. Yes, that's your bootstrap society for you -- this civilization, such as it is, redistributes our income upward to the undeserving rich, and then harangues us to "just work harder." I want this income-redistribution-upward scheme dead before I leave this Earth. Supporting the care economy is just one way to do that.

Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Every other wealthy nation on Earth does it, but our leaders would apparently prefer to churn out corporate executives who buy 18 homes and a hundred classic cars, fly to the edge of our atmosphere and call it "space travel," and build atomic clocks in mountains. You can have one or the other, not both, and I know which one I'll take -- I'll take the society that gives everyone a chance to succeed, rather than worship the folks who've already "succeeded" and indulge their lust for mammon even more. And paid family/medical leave would cost so little! And don't tolerate any whining about "workers abusing the program" -- just catch and punish the ones who do. This ain't rocket science.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make large investments in climate change action. That would include investing in solar and wind power, and it'd also include a methane emissions tax, which would slash carbon emissions from the fossil fuel industry. Yeah, you heard Joe Manchin doesn't want to do this in the Build Back Better Act, either! But he already got his corporate welfare for fossil fuel corporations in that "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" he insisted on having, so where does his greed end? I say "his greed" because of his own large investments in the coal industry, of course. I mean, you'd have to explain his ignorance of his constituents' will somehow! And I think they ought to be heard, for once.

Drug Prices Are Too High, Daily Kos, and Penn PIRG all help you demand that your Congressfolk put Medicare drug price negotiation in the Build Back Better Act, while Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare services for seniors in the Build Back Better Act. Medicare drug price negotiation (which Bob Menendez still opposes, can't someone in New Jersey primary his sorry ass in 2024?) would save tens of billions of dollars annually, and remember what Bernie Sanders said: dental care for seniors isn't an "entitlement." It's more than Medicare covers now, and that has to change.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Moms Rising, and the Juggernaut Project all help you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent in the Build Back Better Act. Working families in America have been getting $250 or $300 checks every month since mid-July, but those will end at the end of this calendar year -- yes, for 2022, working families will still get the expansion in the form of one lump sum at tax time, but why not keep doing it monthly? Families stimulate the economy better with smaller sums of money than they do with large windfalls. And, yeah, it'll be like a political ad every time the check arrives; why on Earth would Democrats refuse such a gift? Oh, right, because they're geniuses at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And that's why we offer our counsel to them at critical moments like these, when they're about to let big donors crash their entire agenda.

Action: concerning health care, working families, slaughterhouse emissions, FDA regulation, Israeli occupation, and right-wing news.

Long story short: tell big pharma CEOs to stop putting their own needs ahead of the world's needs, tell Hello Fresh you support its workers' unionization efforts, tell our EPA to issue strong slaughterhouse emissions standards, tell President Biden not to appoint a big pharma CEO and lobbyist to head up our FDA, tell Amazon and Google to end their support for Israel's occupation of Palestine, and tell AT&T to cut all ties with One America News. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell big pharma CEOs to put people, not their own profits, first, and ensure everyone has access to COVID vaccines. No sense arguing that's not their job or they're only accountable to their shareholders, not when COVID could come back to bite us again and again and again, and overwhelm hospitals again and again and again, because vaccines aren't available in some part of the world. Oh, and putting profits above everyone and everything? Not civilized behavior. Seriously, they ought to be ashamed of themselves. The First Epistle to Timothy instructs us that "the love of money is the root of all evil." Big pharma CEOs putting their own profits above the health of the planet? That certainly qualifies as "the love of money."

Public Citizen helps you tell HelloFresh you support their workers' attempts to unionize and collectively bargain for better pay and better working conditions. HelloFresh has made over $2 billion in profits in the burgeoning meal kit business, but their workers put up with COVID outbreaks in cramped working areas, have their bathroom breaks times, can't hardly get a damn glass of water, and face anti-union propaganda at the workplace disrupting their work because of course they do. The PRO Act would clamp down on all of these things, but until our Senate deigns to pass it, we'll just have to get the Big Stick of Bad PR out for HelloFresh. They ain't been around so long they can just ignore it -- or us.

Penn Environment helps you tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous slaughterhouse pollution regulations possible. Our EPA is mulling these rules as we speak, so if we speak out, we leave a paper trail that the courts can't ignore, if it comes to that. It should come to that less now that Joe Biden is President! Presidential elections do matter for some things, after all. Don't let anyone gaslight you about FOODZ PRICEZ GOINGZ THROUGHZ TEH ROOFZ!!!! if we demand that factory farms pollute less. No one will be sitting around a campfire in a hundred years saying yeah, sure, toxic farm pollution killed off all the fish and made our water undrinkable, but at least food was a little cheaper for a while!

Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden not to appoint a big pharma CEO/lobbyist to run our Food and Drug Administration. We have just seen what happens when our FDA does the bidding of big pharma corporations, in their hasty approval of aducanumab for treating Alzheimer's disease, even though our FDA's own advisory board reviewed the scant evidence of its efficacy and recommended against approval; I would prefer not to have more of that. The particular executive/lobbyist on Mr. Biden's short list, Michelle McMurry-Heath, just so happens to oppose lowering drug prices. We've got enough of those people in our Senate; let's not have them in our FDA as well.

No Tech For Apartheid helps you tell Amazon and Google to pull out of Project Nimbus, which would provide cloud computing services for the Israeli government and military, and thus make them a vital part of occupying and oppressing Palestinians. Almost 800 workers at both corporations have already leveled this demand at their bosses, and their courage demands we join them. And remember: you don't have to unwind the entire history of the region until you figure out who committed the first injury before you decide what you do today. You need only remember that Israel is way, way more powerful than Palestine, and still treats every living Palestinian like a convicted terrorist. And all those nations that hate Israel sure ain't going out of their way to stop them.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell AT&T to cut ties with the fascist news network One America News, which is still pounding the absurd notion that Donald Trump won an election he lost by seven million votes, and whose on-air "personalities" tell us that we who recognize that fact should all be executed for treason. Like any of them have the guts! If AT&T were to withdraw financial backing from OAN, OAN would probably flounder, but hey, that's the genius of capitalism, is it not? If OAN is so great, and the demand for its "news" so undeniable, they ought to be able to survive without a big corporate sugar daddy! And if not, then we wouldn't have to put up with their drama anymore.

UPDATE. Now President Biden is reportedly leaning toward former FDA Administrator Robert Califf as his choice; I remember that being a bad idea at the end of the Obama years, and I can't imagine it's suddenly become a better idea now. Public Citizen has this alert as well.

Action: concerning methane emissions, Oak Flat, war in Yemen, the Hyde Amendment, and the Equality Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep the methane emissions tax in the Build Back Better Act, pass the Save Oak Flat Act, end our involvement in the war on Yemen, and repeal the Hyde Amendment, and tell your Senators to pass 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 legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Did you know there was a methane emissions tax in the Build Back Better Act? I didn't! So you may want to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to tax methane emissions in the Build Back Better Act. They'll never see it coming! This would be a tax corporations pay, not people, no matter how much corporate cronies tell you "people will just wind up paying for it." Sure, if corporations want to be even less popular than they are now! And seriously, why would civilized people tolerate "just passing on the cost to the consumer"? Possibly because corporatists have gaslit us into believing we can't do any better than letting corporations have whatever they want! But methane emissions pack a massive climate change punch, and it's well past time for us to punch back -- and taxing methane emissions could end methane leaks, which would leave climate change with fewer teeth.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1884/S. 915, the Save Oak Flat Act. Oak Flat is an area within the Tonto National Forest in Arizona that just so happens to be sacred to several Native American nations -- but also the site of a planned copper mining project. The two former Arizona Senators Jeff Flake and the late John McCain snuck the Oak Flat copper mine authorization into a 2014 defense authorization bill, since it would never have survived as a stand-alone bill, not least because the corporation operating the project, Resolution Copper, is owned by Rio Tinto, which used to employ Mr. Flake as a lobbyist. If we pass this bill, we can begin to make amends for treating sacred lands like a used dishrag -- unless we're only going to let white people have religion in America, I guess. That seems to be the Republican preference! But they don't get all the say around here.

Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end our complicity as a nation in the killing of Yemeni civilians. We've been trying, and jackboot lockstep agreement with Saudi Arabia's aims ain't pervasive in Congress anymore -- as evidenced by the Biden Administration's proposed $500 million sale of "arms maintenance," which is further from "arms" than we used to be -- but when you've got the advantage, you don't sit back, you press it. People who try to argue with you about this try to tell you BUT IRANZ IZ TEH WORSEZ!!!!, which sure ain't a way of saying "Saudi Arabia is awesome!" or even "what we're doing in Yemen is sad, but it has to be done." They may be handing us victory with their bad arguments, but we still have to take victory.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the notorious Hyde Amendment, which prevents any taxpayer money from funding abortion. Yeah, I would never want an abortion to happen either if I could help it, but I'm not about to tell someone carrying a fetus with no organs, or a fetus that could kill or maim her once delivered, to stand on principle. Hell, I'm not about to tell someone with one more uterus than I have to stand on such principles! When men can give birth, we'll reopen that conversation. And I know, Joe Manchin actually insisted the Build Back Better Act include the Hyde Amendment, probably just so he could do the helicopter dance in front of us yet again. Nyah nyah I'm the 50th vote! Suck on this, liberals! But he doesn't get all the say around here; we do. And all we have to do is act like it.

Finally, since Monday was Coming Out Day, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. This bill represents a major civil rights boon for gay and transgender folk -- no longer could banks, employers, and landlords discriminate against gay and transgender folk merely because they're gay and transgender, and no longer could states pass "bathroom bills" that do nothing but enrage the easily-enraged and hurt transgender folk. And right-wingers call all that discrimination "religious freedom"! But one more time: you do not have a "religious" right to abridge other folks' rights. Some people act like citing one's "religious" "conscience" is a get-out-of-being-civilized card, but it ain't. A lot folks claiming religious exemptions because they don't want to get a vaccine are about to find this out.

Action: concerning labor, pollution, immigration, law and order, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell Kellogg's CEO to treat his workers right, tell our EPA to ban corporate PFAS dumping, tell the Biden Administration to stop all deportations to Haiti, tell our Justice Department to stop Minnesota police form torturing Line 3 protestors, and tell big corporations to stop donating to January 6 coup enablers in Congress. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell Kellogg CEO Steven Cahillane to treat Kellogg's workers right and give them the contract they deserve. That would be a contract which doesn't mandate 12-hour days seven days a week -- if someone made you work that schedule, you'd go on strike, too. Nabisco and Frito-Lay workers have also gone on strike this year, with varying results, but if we make enough noise in the direction of Kellogg's CEO, their workers will more likely get a better contract out of it. It's not like Kellogg's doesn't have the money, either -- like most big corporations (and, ah, almost no small businesses!), Kellogg has cleaned up during the pandemic; maybe its executives ought to reward the folks most responsible for their success, i.e., their workers?

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to ban corporate dumping of PFAS chemicals into our air and water. We call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals" for good reason -- they don't break down and they get into everything, not just our air and water but also our bodies. What happens to them once they get in our bodies? Please refer to the phrase "they don't break down." And scientists link PFAS exposure to cancer, thyroid disease, and liver damage, among other things. Our EPA hasn't yet created any standards for restricting PFAS dumping by big corporations, but they are taking public comments about the matter; now's the time for us to tell our EPA what to do. Remember: if we say nothing, our EPA can ignore us, but if we all speak out, we'll create a paper trail our EPA won't be able to ignore without getting their asses handed to them in court.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell the Biden Administration to stop deporting Haitian immigrants. You no doubt think of Border Patrol agents in cowboy hats on horseback corralling Haitian refugees with whips when you contemplate this matter; why, even Joe Biden denounced it! Yet he continues the same policies that caused that mess -- namely, the Title 42 policy allowing our President to deport pretty much anyone for pandemic-related reasons, though we all know the real threat to our health has lately come from tantrum-throwers in red states. Jesus Mary and Joseph we were down to 9,000 cases a day in June! And immigrants have been coming the whole time, as Fox News will happily tell you, so it ain't them. Not for nothing, but Haitians have just had a Presidential assassination and an earthquake, so mercy ain't weakness here.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our President to nix the notorious Enbridge Line 3 pipeline, and tell our Justice Department to stop police torture of protestors at the pipeline. You should know it's torture just from the phrase police use to describe what they're doing to protestors -- "pain compliance." What, they thought more syllables would disguise their intent? You know the story with Line 3 -- another oil pipeline run by a corporation with a bad pipeline safety record, which means that pipe will eventually crack and contaminate a water table upon which good Americans depend. "Good Americans" here includes the indigenous folks who put their bodies on the line against the pipeline. Hey, the Lakota sure were right about Dakota Access; why do we fail to listen?

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell big corporations like GM and UPS to stop giving campaign donations to the 147 Congressional Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election and thus helped enable the January 6 attempted coup. Remember when big corporations said they were done giving money to politicians like that? That sure didn't last! Corporations act like they have no choice, when having billions of dollars means nothing but choices. And their campaign largesse could have far more dire consequences this time, as the Republicans who retake Congress in 2022 will learn that trying to overthrow a duly-elected government is no impediment to victory! Corporations have a moderate Democrat as President, and Democratic Congressional majorities are too slim to really rock the corporate boat -- but no, that's not enough for them. It's well past enough for me, I tell you what.

Action: concerning water privatization, voting rights, debt drama, law and order, and credit reports.

Long story short: tell PA state legislators to block Aqua Pennsylvania's attempts to take over the Chester Water Authority, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, get rid of the stupid debt ceiling forever, pass the Counseling Not Criminalization Act, get rid of qualified immunity for police officers, and ensure good Americans can get credit reports easily and for free. 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 and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Aqua Pennsylvania, the private water service corporation, wants to take over the publicly-held Chester Water Authority; if they succeed, they'll likely go after the public water services of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh next, which will give them pretty near complete control of Pennsylvania's water. They're basically a monopoly in every municipality they operate, which means what, class? Higher prices for you, that's what! (No, public water isn't a "monopoly," because it belongs to you and thus you have much more control over it.) Pennsylvania's legislature is mulling HB 1936, which would prevent private corporations from buying public water systems unless those systems are in financial distress; I'd prevent it under those circumstances, too, but HB 1936 will improve matters. Thus Sum of Us helps you tell your PA state legislators to support public water.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act, and H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Ignore right-wing rubbish about "letting states run elections," because too many states have recently revealed they want to "run" elections that only Republicans can win. The Freedom to Vote Act would expand your access to the voting booth, clamp down on partisan gerrymandering where politicians choose their voters rather than the other way around, and end states' efforts to meddle in their own elections. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore the Voting Rights Act so our Justice Department can step in and stop states and localities -- and not just Southern ones -- from suppressing the vote. America needs these bills to become law; I'm not sure I can put it any more simply than that.

Democracy for America helps you tell our government to end the absurd debt ceiling threat once and for all. Politicians only ever complain about our national debt when the other party runs things, and so it goes with today's Republicans, who let Donald Trump run up our national debt by nearly $8 trillion (comprising a nearly 40 percent increase) in just four years, but who now imagine we'll buy their gaslighting about how they're the "fiscally responsible" party. They may also imagine they'll be able to extort concessions (privatizing Social Security, cutting Medicare, etc.) in exchange for graciously raising the debt limit, though they haven't actually mentioned any concessions lately. So we need to neutralize the threat, and end the endless hostage-taking. And no, I don't care if President Biden does it on his own. I think most folks would call that leadership, which is a thing we haven't seen from very many Presidents lately.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4011/S. 2125, the Counseling Not Criminalization Act, which would mean fewer police officers and more counselors and nurses in our public schools. Because police officers don't have the skills to stop kids from acting out! And we shouldn't expect that of them! And a couple classes in conflict resolution can't match the abilities of folks who have spent years doing exactly that! Police officers are not Swiss Army knives, after all. If that sounds like "defunding the police" to your right-wing neighbors, then I would have to ask if maybe they care a lot more for "funding the police" than, you know, actually reducing crime. Yesterday's conservatives always said you can't just throw money at a problem; today's "conservatives" yell I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!! every time you try to solve a problem. And boy do I hate yellers.

In a related note, Black Lives Matter helps you tell your Congressfolk to end "qualified immunity" for police officers, so that good Americans can finally get justice for the wrongs police have done to them. And police have done wrongs to them! No amount of I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!! will bring back the Black kids killed for having a toy gun or the Black men killed for pulling out their cellphone. And ending "qualified immunity" won't automatically send police officers to jail, it'll just take away the tool that gives them near-absolute protection from accountability; plaintiffs will still have to prove their case, as they always do. And if your right-wing neighbors tell you "cops can't do their job" without having accountability for the wrong they do, well, ask them how that's conservative. I mean, conservatives always said they were all about accountability.

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell Congress to ensure you can get your credit reports easily and for free. Yes, our government already does provide free credit reports at annualcreditreport.com, but doesn't that website name strike you as a nefarious compromise? As if they went out of their way to let corporations trick you with websites with the word "free" in them? It's always seemed that way to me, that's for sure. So, yeah, we should publicized the fact that annualcreditreport.com is where you go for free credit reports, but we shouldn't let corporations charge you hundreds of dollars or siphon away your private info so they can resell it, either. That's not "the free market" in action; that's corruption in action, and for too long our politicians have just shrugged at corruption and called it "freedom." But if it makes folks less free, how is it freedom?

Action: concerning, once again, the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations (including enacting a Billionaire's Tax) to pay for the Build Back Better Act, and make sure the Build Back Better Act lets Medicare negotiate drug prices, expands Medicare, funds paid family/medical leave, expands good Americans' access to clean water, and permanently expands the Child Tax Credit. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pay for all of the Build Back Better Act by making the rich and corporations pay more taxes and include the "Billionaire's Tax" in the Build Back Better Act. These are not contradictory aims, unless we no longer include billionaires in the "rich," which is a day I hope I never see. Billionaires have made almost $2 trillion more during this pandemic, so while "moderate" Democrats whine about how much to cut the Build Back Better Act, billionaires sit back and laugh. We don't have a merit-based society anymore, not when a catastrophic pandemic actually makes the ultra-rich richer. The first step to rebuilding that merit-based society is restraining the power of the rich, because they run roughshod over our freedoms.

Drug Prices Are Too High, Daily Kos, and Penn PIRG all help you demand that your Congressfolk put Medicare drug price negotiation in the Build Back Better Act. Brook no more excuses or bad arguments from your Congressfolk! No more rubbish about "killing jobs" (don't make me do the right thing, or I'll fire all my workers!) or "price controls are bad" (like people would hate paying less for drugs!) or "it won't do any good" (even a blind infant could see that it will, which is why 80-90% of Americans want it!) or "it's not fiscally responsible" (ah, to let government to pay less taxpayer money for Medicare drugs?). And brook no more silence from certain Congressfolk, either (cough Kyrsten Sinema cough). If they're going to screw us over, we should at least make them explain themselves.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep the Medicare expansion in the Build Back Better Act. I know, it ain't Medicare-for-All, but I don't let the perfect murder the good, and lowering the Medicare age to 60 (which will bring more healthy people into the Medicare pool, and thus save Medicare money!) and giving seniors dental/vision/hearing care are both good works. And let Bernie Sanders teach you how to respond to the Joe Manchins of the world who complain about "everything being an entitlement": "does Senator Manchin really believe that seniors are not entitled to...hear and see properly?" And don't let the Joe Manchins pearl-clutch about "getting Medicare solvent first." Tax the rich harder and we can pay for it. Let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices and we can pay for it. This ain't rocket science.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. I'm gobsmacked that Democrats want to do this but don't want to advertise that they're doing it! How afraid can they really be that Republicans will whine WHEREZ TEH MONEYZ COMINGZ FROMZ!!!!! Jesus Mary and Joseph Republicans have been whining that for longer than I've been alive; you have to prepare for those arguments. Paid family/medical leave will help everyone in America, and even big corporate CEOs know that, and have come around to supporting it in recent years, just like most other Americans do. And there are a million ways to pay for it (Sen. Gillibrand's bill originally would have levied a tiny payroll tax amounting to $8 a month for someone making $50,000 a year), but Republicans act like not wanting to do it means it doesn't exist. We need to stop letting them gaslight us.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1352/S. 916, the WATER Act. Just so happens the best way to do that right now is to get a strong Build Back Better Act passed (which means the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" also passes); the email tool in the link above reflects this reality. Currently the two bills would spend over $30 billion to replace lead water pipes, which is about the amount the WATER Act would require to get the job done. Any amount of lead causes brain damage in children -- it may not be an accident that crime rates have risen and fell with the rise and fall of lead emissions from cars! -- so we can't have lead pipes anywhere in America. Remember what Alexander Cockburn used to say: without clean water, you don't have health in America.

Finally, both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent in the Build Back Better Act. Just as we demand more from our coddled billionaires, we demand more relief for those of us who work hard at real jobs, raise families, and still have trouble making ends meet. Through no fault of our own, I should add -- what, we should all just become hedge fund managers? It seems like a no-brainer to make the CTC expansion permanent, not least because it's put $250 and $300 checks in good Americans' pockets every month since July of this year, yet some "moderate" Democrats oppose the expansion. Because doing so makes them look "tough"? Yeah, snatching a check out of some overworked, underpaid worker sure is tough. I will work to make such "toughness" dead and dishonored before I leave this world.

Action: concerning COVID relief, drug price negotiation, abusive phone rates, abuses of power, and right-wing news.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to stop Alabama from building prisons with COVID relief funds, tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices, protect prisoners from abusive phone rates, and has the Protecting Our Democracy Act, and tell AT&T to drop OAN from the DirecTV network. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Presente helps you tell the Biden Administration to stop Alabama from using COVID relief funds to build new prisons. Yes, you read that right: Alabama actually used $400 million in money for COVID relief to build two megaprisons. Does building a prison sound like "COVID relief" to you? Only if you believe the absurd lie that TEH IMMIGRANTZ AREZ BRINGINGZ TEH COVIDZ!!!! and believe all immigrants should be thrown in prison. And, ah, Alabama has been rocked pretty hard by the Delta wave; maybe some hospitals could use it more than prisons? It's a question worth asking! Anyway, the Biden Administration should get all law-and-order on this effort post-haste -- but they won't, unless we demand it.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices. Tired of hearing about this? Blame New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, who says he can't support Medicare drug price negotiation, not at all because New Jersey politicians have been in the death-grip of big pharma corporations forever, no, sir! In his view, the plan "does not guarantee...that the government’s going to save money, doesn’t guarantee that the consumer saves any money." But then he whines that "(w)e’re going to take anywhere between $3 and $400 billion from the industry," which is, basically, a guarantee that "the government" and "the consumer" will, in fact, save money; he's just trying to confuse you by phrasing it differently. Which is the devil's art, and we should never let the devil get all the say.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would end abusive prison phone rates. When families go into debt just trying to stay in touch with their loved ones in prison, then big telecom corporations are charging too much! It's that damn simple! It's cruel to them, and it's cruel to prisoners! If your right-wing nephew says then they shouldn't have raised a criminal ha ha ha snort, please tell him to do two things: 1) slap himself, and 2) consider that civilized people use prisons to rehabilitate prisoners, and all the science tells us that prisoners who can talk to their families while they're imprisoned are a lot less likely to go back to prison. If the little turd then tells you that scientists are all corrupt, ask him exactly how a scientist makes money arguing that people should spend less time in prison. Or tell him to go play with himself; I can't ask you to have too much patience.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which would rein in the Presidential behavior no one expected from a President until Donald Trump came along. Among the things this bill would do: it would limit a President's ability to declare national emergencies so they can build vanity border walls that can't stand up to a stiff wind, it would prevent Presidents from profiting from their office, and would require candidates to release 10 years of tax returns. The insane, tyrannical behavior of King George III prompted our Founders to create a state that restricts Presidential power; we're all too young to remember King George III, but hopefully we haven't forgotten King George W. Bush or King Donald Trump, both of whom laughed as they hurt hundreds of millions of good Americans.

Finally, MoveOn helps you tell big telecom corporation AT&T to drop the right-wing extremist news network One America News (or OAN) from the DirecTV lineup. We only learned this week that AT&T basically created and funded OAN, a network which has lately suggested that folks who maintain that Joe Biden won the 2020 election by seven million votes should be executed as traitors. Remember opposing the AT&T/DirecTV merger from 2015? Well, this is why -- now AT&T funds OAN and carries it on the TV provider in which it still holds a 70% stake, exactly the kind of "synergy" and "partnership" that has turned those two words into near-cuss words. Apparently AT&T wanted another right-wing news network back in the day! Because who hasn't had enough not just of those, but of the "liberal" media outlets that ape them? Thus it's time for us to brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR.

Action: concerning taxes, social media, Saudi Arabia, and various forms of pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, tell our government to regulate Facebook more vigorously, tell your Congressfolk to void President Biden's proposed $500 million deal with Saudi Arabia, pass the Preventing Harmful Exposure to Phthalates Act, and ban cyanide bombs from the wild, and tell our Department of Energy to reject uranium mining. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise all Build Back Better Act funding by raising taxes on the rich and on corporations. If you're an Arizona resident, you'll definitely want to call Sen. Sinema, since she seems to be the one Senate Democrat who opposes raising taxes on the rich and on corporations. Stop me if you've heard this before, but over two-thirds of Arizonans support raising taxes on the rich and on corporations to pay for the Build Back Better Act. As usual, the "inscrutable" "iconoclastic" "maverick" "earns" her reputation by simply defying the will of her own constituents, in favor of the big corporate donors she seems to hobnob with every weekend. That's not very mavericky, frankly! And we shouldn't let her get away with it.

Free Press helps you tell our government to regulate Facebook a lot more vigorously than we currently do. Specifically, you'd urge Congress to pass data privacy and algorithmic abuse laws and tax social media advertising, and you'd ask various Executive branch agencies to crack down on abusive data practices. I've thought a lot lately about what the internet was like before Facebook; I visited at least four different social networks regularly in the mid-2000s, and visited half a dozen blogs and websites regularly for my news, but now we go to Facebook for all of that (and more -- remember Flickr?), and why should we? And why should they get to do whatever they like with our data, and why should they get to use algorithms to mindlessly ensure white supremacists feel less alone in the world? They've become a monopoly, and we know what to do with monopolies. Even if our politicians have forgotten.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to block President Biden's proposed $500 million weapons deal with Saudi Arabia. Yeah, I know, the money is supposedly for helicopter maintenance, but the Saudis ain't using those helicopters for humanitarian airdrops! The ongoing war on Yemen is just one reason to starve this particular beast, and using Saudi Arabia as a "hedge" against Iranian power in the region is not only a dumb idea but an immoral one, since the Saudis don't exactly use their power for good. Besides, if we didn't invade Iraq in 2003 for no damn good reason, we wouldn't need such a hedge against Iranian power! You look back over the last 20 years in particular and you begin to think we really have been conducting foreign policy for the express purpose of making the world worse. But we don't have to put up with what they do in our name.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4963/S. 2669, the Preventing Harmful Exposure to Phthalates Act. Much like the "forever chemical" PFAS, scientists have long linked phthalates to cancer, brain damage, and birth defects, plus they're everywhere in our plastic products and they get into our bodies to wreak havoc there. Our Consumer Product Safety Commission banned phthalates from children's toys back in 2017, which will protect kids a bit, but we all need that kind of protection. Hence the Preventing Harmful Exposure to Phthalates Act would ban phthalates in food packaging products outright and instruct our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to review the products our FDA typically regulates to see where else we can ban them. If you're worried that we won't have as many food prep gloves after this, remember that this is America, the can-do country, and we've adapted to worse.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell Congress to ban our use of cyanide bombs in the wild. You think it's inhumane when land mines planted 50 years ago in a foreign country blow somebody's arm or leg off decades after the war is over? Now consider that cyanide bombs kill pretty indiscriminately as well -- the bombs don't exactly wait until their target animal is near! In fact, the bombs lure animals in with a sweet scent, so they're actually worse than landmines, which don't exactly lure people to them with hundred-dollar bills or promises of free broadband. How we treat animals tells the world what kind of civilization we are. Yes, even if we raise animals for food, we can still treat them in a civilized manner. We should be able to report to future civilizations that we did a pretty good job at it, and getting rid of cyanide bombs is just one way to do that.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Department of Energy not to fund uranium mining. Uranium is, as you know, a radioactive element that too easily finds its way into our drinking water and into the bodies of wildlife. And of course we haven't figured out a way to store the waste yet. These days you'll mostly find uranium in nuclear weapons, nuclear-powered submarines, nuclear power plants, and depleted uranium weapons; stop me if you hear anything you like in that list! Yeah, you'll also find it (in much, much smaller amounts) in wool, silk, stage lighting, photo chemicals, and even more rarely in glass, but ain't no mining corporation looking to make a killing in these markets -- they're looking for the big weapon money! And for these reasons we say no to uranium mining.

Action: concerning pollution, social media, campaign finance, immigration, and waste.

Long story short: tell the PA DEP to limit air pollution from trash incinerators, tell Facebook to ditch its drama-enabling algorithms, tell big corporations to stop funding January 6 coup enablers in Congress, tell the Biden Administration to drop the notorious Title 42 immigration policy, tell our Department of Homeland Security Secretary to stop deporting Haitians, and tell Amazon to stop throwing perfectly good products away. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) to set more vigorous limits on air pollution. The news hook here is the Covanta trash incinerator in Chester, in Delaware County, which pollutes more than any other trash incinerator of its kind in America. And it takes in trash not just from Pennsylvania, but from New Jersey, Maryland, and New York. That means more mercury, nitrogen oxide, and sulfur dioxide than you should be breathing! Our DEP is looking into Covanta's permit as we speak, and with your help, could do the right thing here. Don't let the right-wingers tell you this is just Big Gummint Destroying Jobs! In America, we do the right thing and we create jobs; they're not mutually exclusive, no matter how much the big polluters want you to think they are.

Daily Kos helps you tell Facebook to ditch its algorithms. Because they cause palpable harm to our civilization, and Facebook knows it! We didn't even need Frances Haugen’s Senate testimony on Tuesday to know this; we need only to listen to Facebook's own words, from a 2018 internal report: "Our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness." That's why troll farms do so well on good Americans' news feeds, that's how white supremacist assholes find each other so easily on Facebook, and that's how anti-vaxxers get so much damn attention! Meanwhile, actual social justice sites (ahem!) can't get so much as a flare up on Facebook. It's not too far to say Facebook favors evil, and as civilized people, we have no obligation to merely put up with it. In fact, we have a duty to stop it. (Not for nothing, but getting rid of algorithms will force Facebook to create jobs for people who would moderate Facebooks' offerings.)

Common Cause helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the Republican House Reps who enabled the January 6 coup attempt. These big corporations said they were done funding the 147 House Reps who votes against certifying the 2020 election and thus gave aid and comfort to those who tried to overrun our Capitol on January 6 -- but obviously they were lying. No, I won't even give them "credit" for "speaking in the moment" and then "thinking better of it later" -- big corporations have a lot of people on staff who think about these things. Now these big corporations need to hear from us about their enabling of fascism in America, and we need to bring the Big Stick of Bad PR down upon them, lest they "think better" again and ignore us again. They'd probably prefer fascism to democracy, you know -- unless we make it impossible for them to act on that preference.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to end our government's notorious Title 42 deportation policy. Stephen Miller came up with the idea of deporting immigrants en masse because ZOMG THEYZ BRINGZ TEH COVIDZ!!!!!!, and I submit that's reason enough to stop the program. However, most of you will want more from an argument than that, so here it is: the Title 42 policy doesn't even protect us from further illness; after all, wouldn't cases have gone up dramatically this past spring if immigrants were really bringing COVID here? We're keeping this pandemic going all by ourselves, thank you very much! And, not for nothing, but you don't even see our Border Patrol whipping Haitian migrants around without Title 42 giving them license to do their worst. And why would we want to do our worst?

In a related note, Moms Rising helps you tell Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas to stop deporting Haitians. He, like President Biden, has condemned the sight of CBP agents treating Haitian migrants like dogs, but he, like President Biden, doesn't seem to understand that he can do something about that, hence the reminder we will give him at the above link. And, not for nothing, but we do have a process for folks who come here from other nations; maybe process is all "Deep State" to some people, but usually those folks have no clue what a Deep State actually is -- it's a real thing, not just something you blame when you don't get your way! -- and we give immigrants the best chance to come here not because we're weak, or because we're trying to "replace" white people, but because we are confident in our greatness. Maybe right-wingers just aren't as confident about our greatness as we are.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell Amazon to stop throwing out hundreds of thousands of perfectly good products. All those laptops have to go somewhere, after all -- like, in landfills, where they will stay for hundreds of years and leech pollution into our air, water, and soil. But I may be going too fast here; you may still be stuck on Amazon throws away laptops! And I wouldn't blame you. Gosh, Jeff Bezos is really the man who has everything! And "hundreds of thousands" is almost certainly a very low estimate -- one warehouse aims to throw away 130,000 items daily, and Amazon has over 180 warehouses. It hasn't occurred to them to donate all these items? I guess it wouldn't, if you already don't pay any taxes. But at the risk of sounding old-fashioned, tax breaks aren't the only reason in the world to do good works.

Action: concerning drugs, evictions, unconstitutional war-making, voting rights, nursing mothers, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the EQUAL Act, the Keeping Renters Safe Act, the National Security Reforms and Accountability Act, the Freedom to Vote Act, the PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act, and the Postal Service Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Late last week our House passed H.R. 1693, the Eliminating a Quantifiably Unjust Application of the Law (or EQUAL) Act -- and by an actual bipartisan margin of 361-66! So what would the EQUAL Act do? It would equalize sentences for crack cocaine and powder cocaine -- a gap the Obama Administration narrowed, but didn't close, in 2010 -- and it would allow judges to resentence crack offenders so they can serve powder time. They always said crack cocaine was more addictive, but that was a lie -- a lie designed to put more Black folks in jail, no less! Our Senate has yet to take up this bill, and a phone call from you telling them to pass it might well encourage them to do so. If we keep quiet about it, that'll make them think they can do nothing, and we sure don't want to enable that sort of behavior!

Eviction Moratorium Now helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5307/S. 2776, the Keeping Renters Safe Act. The Keeping Renters Safe Act would enact the same national eviction moratorium that the Biden Administration had in place, until our Supreme Court struck it down; our Supreme Court would have trouble striking down a moratorium enacted by Congress, though I suppose they're a creative bunch and they're game to try. Why do we still need an eviction moratorium after more than 18 months? Because states have been very, very slow to give out federally-mandated rent assistance; is it fair, really, to put people out on the street because states don't do their job? No, it is not. Don't retort that none of this is "fair to landlords." Landlords can withstand hardship much better than their renters can. And when their renters get paid, they'll get paid. That's how you know the objection is rubbish!

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5410, the National Security Reforms and Accountability Act. What would H.R. 5410 do? It would make it harder to fight "war on terror"-style unconstitutional wars, declare national emergencies, and sell weapons. We should make these things harder! Making them easy, in the name of "not hamstringing our President's ability to act," has caused most of the problems we've had over the last half-century! And hamstringing our President's ability to act is the whole point of giving Congress the power to declare war! You may scrutinize the bill and decide it doesn't go far enough -- you may even prefer the similar S. 2391, the National Security Powers Act -- but if it passed, it would improve our ability to keep our government from fighting stupid wars in our name, and that's a good work to do.

Common Cause, Public Citizen, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. The Freedom to Vote Act is basically the For the People Act without its ethics plank (wonder why Joe Manchin would object to that!), plus the Freedom to Vote Act would clamp down on state legislature power to overrule the will of their voters, which is quite necessary now that several states have given their legislatures that power. The Freedom to Vote Act would still clamp down on gerrymandering and dark money, restore voting rights to ex-felons, provide 15 days of early voting, enact same-day voter registration, and make Election Day a national holiday, so it merits your support, even if Manchinian drama created it.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3110/S. 1658, the PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act. This bill would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act (passed in 1938, well before the workforce had many new mothers among its members!) so that women can nurse in private and without being harassed by bosses. The bill would also ensure women can nurse in a workplace better than a closet or a car or a bathroom. Before your right-wing nephew starts wailing about TEH SMALL BIZNIZIZ!!!!!, attend Sec. 2, which exempts businesses employing fewer than 50 people (though you may want to mention the fact that an employer like McDonald's, known to hide behind its "franchises," might try to drive a Mack truck through that loophole). In any case, nursing mothers deserve better than they typically get from their jobs, and the PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act will give them better if it passes.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. You've heard that our Postal Service has begun charging more and slowing down deliveries, as part of Postmaster General DeJoy's "bold" "plan" to "save" the Postal Service, but we could solve literally all of our Postal Service's financial problems by simply removing the mandate that it pre-pay retiree benefits 85 years in advance, which the Postal Service Reform Act does. I mused earlier today that President Biden might be waiting until Mr. DeJoy's plan falls flat before firing him, but that waiting will hurt people, and the Postal Service Reform Act presents a solution we can implement now, that will bring us better results now. When you can do the right thing right now, you do it, that's what I say.

Action: concerning the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations to pay for the Build Back Better Act, and make sure the Build Back Better Act lets Medicare negotiate drug prices, expands Medicare, funds paid family/medical leave, permanently expands the Child Tax Credit, and addresses climate change. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise all $3.5 trillion for the Build Back Better Act by hiking taxes on the rich and on corporations. Virtually everyone in America wants them to do it, so it shouldn't be such a big lift -- even to the "moderate" Democrats facing stupid Club for Growth ads about the tax hikes. If you're a Congressperson, and you can be swayed by big corporate advertising, then you should resign immediately. The number of folks who actually believe taxing the rich will put people out of work or take money from working families is laughably small, and most of them are rageheads anyway. And they shouldn't get all the say about everything in America.

Daily Kos helps you tell Democrats to ensure the Build Back Better Act allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Which will save the taxpayer at least $450 billion over the next decade! It's a pay-for, not a service we "just can't find the money for." Providing the service also provides the money! Anyway, what day of the Kyrsten Sinema Hostage Crisis are we in now? Has she explained her objection to letting Medicare negotiate drug prices? I kid, of course -- she'll never tell us, because we're the people at the other end of her fuck-off ring. But word on the street is that her actual constituents in Arizona have been giving her an earful about it, so let's all do that with all of our Congressfolk.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to include Medicare expansion in the Build Back Better Act. Specifically, you'll tell them to lower the Medicare eligibility age to 60 and give our seniors vision, dental, and hearing care. It's a bit of a surprise they can't get that now, actually -- unless they get Medicare Advantage, which isn't really Medicare but a private health insurance plan that Medicare funds. Why does Medicare fund a private health insurance plan? Because George W. Bush, that's why. Naturally a prominent "moderate" Democrat opposes expanding Medicare in this way, but this time it's the notorious Joe Manchin of West Virginia (who, as recent reports tell us, also doesn't listen to his constituents). How about making sure all seniors get the "advantage"?

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Like everything we've discussed so far, paid family/medical leave is popular with large majorities of Americans -- so why won't Democrats talk about it? If they'd go on TV and say we're trying to expand Medicare, enact paid family/medical leave, and let Medicare help lower drug prices, "moderate" Democrats would feel pressure to change their stupid tunes. Which I guess answers that question -- Democratic politicians act like "unity" is more important than doing the right thing, but if they don't do the right thing -- and, this is very important, take credit for it -- their unity will mean nothing, because they'll be back in the minority. Oh, and fascists will be the majority. So wakey wakey, House and Senate Democrats!

Both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to include a permanent Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion in the Build Back Better Act. The American Rescue Plan Act included a temporary CTC expansion, which delivers $250 or $300 checks into the bank accounts of working families with children every single month, which is rather like a campaign ad every single month. But you just know the Manchin/Sinema axis waits for Just the Right Moment to demand an end to the CTC expansion expire, because "fiscal responsibility" or something. That's why we need to get in our Congressfolk's grills now -- to make such machinations harder to pull off. And seriously, why should we let Democrats constantly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Again, the alternative is fascism. And that's no alternative.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make large investments in climate change action. I haven't said enough about this, perhaps, but it's a no-brainer: invest in renewable energy and we'll create jobs and beat back the ill effects of climate change. If Democrats don't do it, because fiscal responsibility job killing international competition unity über alles, then, again, they're Ben Simmons standing right under the basket and failing to dunk. The only people who don't like solar power and wind power are a) big fossil fuel corporations and b) the Americans who let right-wingers propagandize them about wind turbines making people sick and solar panels losing their effectiveness to gamma radiation that the Van Allen belt keeps out anyway. And, again, they shouldn't get all the say about everything.

A final word about this issue: don't get caught up in Democratic "negotiations" over these bills -- simply communicate your will, and often. The only folks they're supposed to negotiate with are us. And every time we hear about media pundits and corporate lobbyists opposing higher taxes, lower drug prices, and better policy generally, our politicians and our media insult us. They're supposed to serve us, after all -- and we Americans aren't anywhere near as divided as our politicians and our media would like us to think. As long as they whine about critical race theory, abortion, Dr. Seuss, etc., we look divided. But on everything I've described above, we're not divided. Only they are divided, by their own corruption and venality. And so we've got to get in their grills until we bring them to heel.

Action: concerning essential services, taxes, credit, divestment, and facial recognition software.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act, tell Democrats to stop coddling corporate lobbyists and raise taxes on the rich and corporations already, tell Congress to ensure we can all get good credit reports, tell General Mills to divest from Israel, and tell Uber and Lyft to stop using facial recognition software on drivers and consumers. 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.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4979, the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act, which would (as its title suggests) provide relief to good Americans behind on their water, electricity, and internet bills. If you read that and think when does it end? -- "it" being "government assistance during a pandemic" -- just remember that a) a lot of them didn't have jobs for a significant period during this pandemic and b) large corporations get to run up considerably larger water/electricity/internet bills without suffering any of the consequences. It can't be only the "little people" who suffer from bills piling up. Not in our America, at least. And yes, internet is an essential service, as evidenced by all the Zoom meetings at our jobs and all the Zoom classes our kids had to do for school this past year-plus.

Daily Kos helps you tell Congressional Democrats to stop listening only to the big corporate lobbyists trying to defend their unearned tax cuts and Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund the Build Back Better Act with higher taxes on the rich and on corporations. Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a "billionaire's income tax." Most of the Democrats have listened to us on these matters, but their majorities in our House and Senate are slim, so it only takes a few (cough Joe Manchin Kyrsten Sinema cough) to stomp their feet and say "no," regardless of what their actual constituents think. No, corporations, and corporate lobbies, are not constituents, not least because they're not people. Call me old-fashioned, but I think people should count more than things. (Oh, and I'm fully aware that the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" didn't get a vote in the House last night, and I have no opinion on that -- rather than get mired in the weeds of Democrat "strategy," we need to press them with our will.)

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure all Americans can get free, accessible, and secure credit reports. What's that, you say? You thought our laws already provided for free annual credit reports from each of the three major credit reporting bureaus? It does, but our laws do not prevent corporations from charging you for that information! Just to illustrate how confusing it all is, the only government-authorized website to get free credit reports is annualcreditreport.com; if a website has the word "free" in it, chances are you'll be forking over money for your "free" reports! Furthermore, some credit reporting corporations -- including two affiliated with two of the big three agencies -- may give you credit scores lenders won't actually use! It's a damn shame we have to use credit reports at all in a civilized society, so let's at least make sure they work for us.

Sum of Us helps you tell General Mills to pull out of Israel over its continued occupation and oppression of Palestine. Hey, divestment worked in South Africa, even though they said it wouldn't! I was one of those who said it wouldn't, that it would hurt the South Africans it intended to help, but actual South African activists put me right: it can't get any worse for us than not having any rights to begin with, they told me. And Palestinians are in the same boat today, as Israel takes their land, tears down their homes, and punishes anyone who speaks out. Sorry, folks, that's apartheid, even though they're doing it out of fear. What, fear should excuse evil? No, it should not. I should also point out that their fear is completely unjustified by the facts -- Palestine can't win a war with Israel, and look at all the other nations in the Middle East totally not coming to Palestine's aid.

Finally, Fight for the Future helps you tell Uber and Lyft to ban facial recognition software for drivers and users. Uber and Lyft have been partnering (Jesus Mary and Joseph "partnering" has got to be one of my least favorite words!) with a corporation called Alfi, which makes tablets for vehicles that scan your face and then show you ads based on what it finds. It even tries to tell how you're feeling to show you ads! You walk in with a "sad face," you might get anti-depressant ads! If you walk in with a scowl, do they show you an ad for Fox News or OANN? And once they've got your face, and all the data that could go with it, what will they do with that information? Anything they want, since very few laws even address biometric data. Maybe, just maybe, you don't want screens in your face guessing what you might buy all the time. It's not so damn much to ask. Hell, I remember when that was everyday life! So tell them no.

Action: concerning torture, immigration, Palestine, our Postal Service, and women's health.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to stop police torture of protestors at Line 3, tell the Biden Administration to stop deportation flights to Haiti, and tell Congress to pass the Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act, the Postal Service Reform Act, and the Women's Health Protection 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.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Justice Department to stop police from torturing protestors at Line 3. Ever heard of "pain compliance"? Sounds a lot like "enhanced interrogation," doesn't it? "Pain compliance" describes the practice (not that you'd want to practice this) of inflicting searing pain on pressure points until the person you're inflicting the pain upon cries uncle. If Enbridge is resorting to torturing protestors, they must be having trouble getting everyone on board with their plan to transport tar sands oil over Midwestern water tables. And if Enbridge has to pay county cops to do it, well, maybe the Line 3 pipeline has become too toxic. So to speak.

Both Amnesty International and Moms Rising help you tell the Biden Administration to stop its deportations of Haitians. The recent news hook, of course, is the Customs and Border Protection (or CBP) officers nearly running down Haitian asylum-seekers on horseback, a sight President Biden condemned -- before resuming flights of said asylum-seekers back to Haiti. Hey, did something happen there a month ago? Oh, right, another earthquake. And has something been happening there for 200 years? Why, yes, Western nations including the United States have been treating Haiti like toilet paper, all for having the gall to win independence from France. All these nations were perfectly OK with forcing Haitians to actually pay reparations to former slave-owners. How's that sound, Larry Elder? How about we not be cruel bastards this one time? It'll make the next time easier.

Roots Action 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. It doesn't make a clever acronym, but it would prevent American taxpayer dollars (i.e., your money) from going toward actions that violate international law, such as detaining and maltreating Palestinian children, seizing and destroying Palestinian property (including homes), and annexation of Palestinian territory generally. You really don't have to trace back who-did-what-first in this matter; you only need realize that Israel is a lot more powerful than Palestine, and even worse, acts like they're besieged and beleaguered, which guarantees they'll do a lot worse to Palestine in the future. And that's not something you want to pay for.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. Can you believe there are folks who have "lost faith" in our Post Office? Such folks are largely unaware that the reason our Post Office has funding issues is that our laws mandate that it pre-fund retiree benefits 85 years in advance, a mandate our laws ask of literally no other federal agency, and certainly of no corporation. That means cut services and cut jobs, almost as if Congress planned it that way back in 2006. Lift the mandate and it'll be like lifting a 300-pound weight off the Post Office's chest. Our Postal Service workers will breathe easier, certainly. We can have more of them, too! And postal banking! But first, let's cut the cancer out.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. Republicans won't vote for it (apparently not even the pro-choice ones like Susan Collins, what a good little drone she is!), because it'll actually get rid of all the heartbeat bills and the forced ultrasound bills and the six-week abortion bans and the forced bad medical advice bills that states have passed in order to make it hard for women to get abortions when they need them. Yes, women do need them, if pregnancy puts their life or health in danger, or if their fetus has no organs. And women should get them when they want them, too, lest the state force women into the role of breeders-and-nothing-else again.

Action: concerning evictions, taxes, Medicare, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your state's Governor to distribute eviction assistance funds immediately, and tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, enable Medicare to negotiate drug prices, expand Medicare, and pass the Freedom to Vote 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.

Once again, Daily Kos helps you tell your state's Governor to get with the eviction assistance funding already. States have been giving it out very, very slowly, ostensibly to stop fraud, but you won't be "pro-fraud" if you suspect that "stopping fraud," in this case, actually means "we never wanted to do this anyway so we won't." States have also contracted out a lot of the rental assistance to third-party corporations, which always slows down the process. Government should do the job itself, that's what I say, and stop privatizing its duties. You may also want to remind your Governor that getting the rental assistance out also helps landlords get their money, if you think they might only view landlords as their constituents. Hey, it happens.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise all of the funding for the Build Back Better Act from higher taxes on rich folks and on corporations. You probably know that late last week, Sen. Sinema (D?-AZ) suddenly said -- not even four days before the vote on her pet "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" in the House! -- that she wouldn't support higher taxes on the rich or on corporations, demonstrating, once again, that her fuck-off ring is really for us. I had thought we'd have to put up with her for six or seven terms just like Max Baucus, but both Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman pulled similar shenanigans during negotiations over the Affordable Care Act in 2009, and they both retired in 2012 with their tails between their legs. Maybe Ms. Sinema, who is not rich despite being a shill for big corporations, goes the same way. In the meantime, we need to remind our Reps and Senators what we want -- and that what we want is more important than what she wants, 50th vote or no.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices. Sen. Sinema's opposition figures here, too, but again, what we want matters -- if we communicate it! And People's Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare so that it covers folks older than 60 (vs. the current eligibility age of 65) and covers eye/ear/nose/throat care. Sen. Manchin figures here, of course, saying he can't support Medicare expansion until we can make it more "solvent." But he also supports Medicare drug price negotiation, which he surely knows would save the taxpayer at least $50 billion annually, meaning more money to get Medicare "fiscally solvent," whatever that actually means to Joe Manchin. It sounds more and more like he just doesn't want this to happen, but again, what he wants matters far less than what we want -- if we speak out.

Both Public Citizen and People for the American Way help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. The For the People Act descended into compromised oblivion, and as you may recall Joe Manchin not only failed to spell out what he didn't like about the For the People Act, but then went and listed reforms he wanted that were all in the For the People Act -- but for all this infernal drama, the Freedom to Vote Act is pretty good, and worth your support. It would not only enact same-day voter registration, 15 days of early voting across America, and voting right restoration for ex-felons, it would clamp down on partisan gerrymandering and address state attempts to give their legislatures the power to overrule the voters' will. We need all of that, so we should demand it, and we should get it.

Finally, both Daily Kos and People for the American Way help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. I knew H.R. 4 would essentially restore a big part of the Voting Rights Act by creating a new pre-clearance formula that doesn't "discriminate" against Southern states, but still would clamp down on any state or locality that demonstrates a pattern of vote suppression. But I did not know that H.R. 4 would also give our Justice Department the power to clamp down on gerrymandering, if a court finds that particular gerrymandering act to be racist. Gerrymandering is noxious and ubiquitous enough that we need all the tools our Constitution and our laws can give us to fight it. Even if it makes certain incumbent politicians sad.

Action: concerning Medicare, child care, women's health, saving our Post Office, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices, pass a robust Build Back Better Act, protect women's health, save our Postal Service, and end the Senate 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.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices. Close to 90% of Americans want it, but just enough "moderate" Democrats don't that the whole thing could fall apart, but if Democrats can't do something 90% of Americans want them to do, they don't deserve their power or our support. Seriously, I've been beside myself over this. Scott Peters and Kurt Schrader tell a bunch of lies about Medicare drug negotiation and that's it? Kyrsten Sinema says she won't support it because I've-got-a-ring-that-says-fuck-off and that's it? We should be out in the streets over this, and if I get any news about rallies for Medicare drug price negotiation, I'll pass them along. But at least we can clog up their phone lines so they can't mistake our will.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a robust Build Back Better Act, one that invests in home and community care and permanently expands the Child Tax Credit, among other things, while Moms Rising helps you demand that the Build Back Better Act invests in child care. In a society where most families either have both parents working or only one parent to begin with, child care is becoming essential -- and child care corporations know that, and are charging an arm and a leg for it just because they can, but good Americans deserve better than that. "Moderate" Democrats are trying to kill this bill dead as we speak (and surely Republicans are grabbing the popcorn), but they need to know that they're not exactly representing their constituents right now. They'll ignore us if we keep silent, of course -- so we've got to be loud.

Both the National Women's Law Center and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. Right-wing state legislatures have been screwing around with abortion for the last decade-plus, with their "heartbeat" bills and their ultrasound bills and their outlawing of abortion clinics that don't meet impossible standards and, with Texas's SB 8, a bill that lets literally anyone sue an abortion provider or patient and collect a $10,000 bounty -- never mind if you're having an abortion because your fetus doesn't have any organs, or because it's threatening your own life! Well, the Women's Health Protection Act would put an end to all of that, and if we want a world where women have the freedom they deserve as citizens, we need to put an end to all of that. When men can give birth, I'll be happy to revisit this issue.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. What's the reason our Postal Service suffers? Is it Big, Bad Gummint? Is it that workers get paid too much and get away with too much? Is it bad management? Is it that "stamps cost too little"? Dear reader, it is none of these things -- it is the crushing mandate Congress imposed upon our Postal Service nearly 15 years ago, which makes our Postal Service pre-fund retiree benefits 85 years in advance. No wonder our Postal Service has to borrow money to make ends meet! Get rid of that onerous mandate, one under which literally no other corporation or government entity suffers, and we'll go a long way toward saving our Post Office. Which its quite excellent workers deserve, by the way, just as much as the rest of us do.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell your Senators to get rid of the filibuster. Seems like every day we get more reasons to get rid of the filibuster, and here's another one: Republicans won't vote to lift the debt limit, even though that's a drama they only create when Democrats hold the power. Democrats can do it on their own (and they should, if for no other reason than to prove they're the Adults in the Room), but Republicans have filibustered, or threatened to filibuster, every damn other thing, too. Why, even putatively pro-choice Susan Collins won't vote for the Women's Health Protection Act! Republicans say no to everything, and Americans can't have nice things as a result. We deserve better; it's well past time Democrats did better, and stopped masturbating over the "sanctity" of the institution.

Action: concerning vaccines, refugees, pollution, "fraudits," and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell our government to loosen trade restraints on vaccine production, admit more Afghan refugees, and deliver the most vigorous Clean Car standards possible; tell Pennsylvania state legislators to end their election "fraudit," and tell big corporations to stop donating to Republican insurrection-supporters. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Rethink Trade helps you tell the Biden Administration to stop dragging its feet on stimulating world-wide vaccine production. Despite our Administration's stated preference for a waiver on intellectual property demands that would stimulate vaccine production worldwide -- which would reduce the chance COVID would come back to bite us again and again and again -- we know from an internal WTO document that our Administration has, in fact, not been pressing in any meaningful way on this matter -- they voted against the South Africa/India proposal to suspend intellectual property rules vis a vis COVID vaccines, and they continue to lament "lost momentum" without actually providing any of that "lost momentum" in negotiations. In sum, their ass is showing, and the best way for them to cover it up is to do their jobs already.

Daily Kos helps you tell the Biden Administration to ensure all the Afghan refugees who helped out our 20-year war effort can get asylum in the United States. Compassion is one good reason to do this; we-broke-it-we-bought-it is another. But you know what's a bad reason to do this? The fact that we still have homeless veterans! Well-meaning people have brought this objection to me recently: we're going to take care of Afghan refugees, but not our homeless veterans? Thing is, we actually do have programs that help homeless veterans, and the fact that some of them aren't getting the help we need is actually not a good reason to deny help to everyone (or anyone!) else. I'd go so far as to say their position is illogical, in fact. So if your nephew brings it up, now you know what to say.

Consumer Reports helps you demand that our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) enact the most vigorous Clean Car standards possible, and ignore the self-interested arguments of big auto manufacturing corporations. I guarantee you our comments will vastly outnumber theirs anyway. But seriously, we have all the winning arguments -- if cars get more miles to the gallon, they'll pollute less, and we'll spend less money on gas for all the years we drive them. What does the other side say? That cars will cost less to buy, which means little if you can't breathe the air or pay more for gas. Yet the EPA's plan, as currently constructed, has more than a few loopholes designed to induce agreement from big automakers -- as if they don't always demand more! But we've got to speak up, not least so we can eventually win in court, as we did all through the Trump years.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the ACLU helps you tell your state Senators to end their attempts to bring an Arizona-style "fraudit" to Pennsylvania. Arizona's "fraudit" of Maricopa County votes -- conducted by a firm with no experience in election audits but plenty of experience in saying STOP TEH STEAL!!!!! very loudly -- cost the taxpayer money, amplified absurd election fraud claims, damaged Maricopa County's voting machines to the point they need to be replaced (again at taxpayer cost), and (per at least one very rich Trumphole) will shortly report exactly zero "voter fraud" in Maricopa County's 2020 votes. So, yeah, let's bring all that drama to Pennsylvania! If I cared only about politics, I'd say bring on the fraudit and watch Pennsylvania's independent voters all vote Democrat in 2022. But since I care about civilization, and despise drama, I'm going to advocate for better behavior instead.

Common Cause helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the 147 Congressional Republicans who gave aid and comfort to the January 6 coup. They would be the ones who voted not to certify the 2020 election, even though the "allegations" of "fraud" were utter bullshit, and a lot of corporations talked a good game about not giving them money anymore, but they've quietly gone back on their word. We're talking General Motors, American Airlines, UPS, and Tyson -- all household names, giving their blessing (and their cash) to politicians who acted like diaper-loaded brats earlier this year, and enabled the attempted coup at our Capitol on January 6. They deserve all the bad publicity we can give them, and we're good enough at using the Big Stick of Bad PR that we can make their donations toxic. So let's do that.

Action: concerning voting rights, privacy, law and order, defense spending, cyanide bombs, and plastic recycling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the People's Response Act, and tell your Congressfolk to cut defense spending, ban cyanide bombs, and put responsibility for recycling plastic on its manufacturers, not people. 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 Public Citizen and People for the American Way help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act, which would do almost all of what the For the People Act would do -- it would make Election Day a national holiday, enact same-day voter registration and 15 days of early voting across America, give ex-felons back their right to vote, and clamp down on partisan gerrymandering and "dark money" campaign financing, plus it would block states from overriding election results that give them a sad. It's basically the For the People Act minus the ethics reforms, which leads one to wonder if all that drama Joe Manchin put us through really worth it. And he could still move the goalposts, as he's done repeatedly on other bills this year. Still, this is America, and what he wants should matter a whole lot less than what we want.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Our Fourth Amendment, you recall, protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures by law enforcement, but currently law enforcement can grab your personal data if they get it from a third-party data broker -- which buys your data from your internet service providing corporation, which latter corporation cannot hand over your data to law enforcement without a warrant. The law protects you from your ISP, then, but not from the corporations your ISP sells your data to. A certain strain of right-winger loves to point to this loophole as proof that government doesn't work and laws don't work, when all this loophole proves is that real security is a lifelong effort. I guess right-wingers don't like work.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4194, the People's Response Act. This bill would create a Division on Community Safety within our Department of Health and Human Services, and this Division would help states and localities stop using our police officers as the Swiss Army knives of our civilization, and instead implement better approaches to community problems. I think police should be serving warrants and making arrests -- I don't even want them getting kittens out of trees, because we have animal control officers to do that. And that's just one area where we already accept an alternative to policing without yelling about "defunding the police." Pass the People's Response Act and we can get our state and local governments to do better in other areas as well.

Both Win Without War and World Beyond War help you tell your Congressfolk to cut defense spending already. Because we already spend more on our military than the next 12 nations combined do! And how much of that is for defense, really, and how much of it is for enriching some defense contractor crony or other? We should also question, given the long-term effects of our meddling (still think our CIA planning a coup against Mr. Mossadegh in 1954 was a good idea?), whether we're really a positive force in foreign affairs. No, it's not "unpatriotic" to say so; in fact, I'd say it is unpatriotic to simply refuse to question yourself, since America is all about doing better, and if you're not asking yourself the hard questions, I sure as hell don't want you in my foxhole. Or anyone else's, for that matter.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban our use of cyanide bombs in the wild. You don't like how land mines kill and maim people 50 years after the war's over, right? Now contemplate a capsule that not only lures wildlife in with a sweet smell, but sprays cyanide around indiscriminately when triggered, indiscriminately enough that it kills any and all wildlife in an area, not just the wildlife our government is trying to kill. It sounds like a developer's dream, actually, though I don't imagine unexploded cyanide bombs will just overlook them. Don't be the one who says this is no big deal because "death is always violent." The mere existence of violence doesn't justify perpetrating any and all kinds of violence on other living creatures. And civilization abhors nihilism.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the big plastic-manufacturing corporations, and not taxpayers, take responsibility for recycling their products. They've got more money, after all! You remember when soda manufacturing corporations started advertising their "shatterproof" bottles in the late '70s? You'd see a big bottle of Pepsi bounce on the floor again and again. We sure didn't know what that would bring to our world -- not just dead animals dying of plastic pollution, not just trash islands forming all over our oceans, but good Americans who now ingest about one credit card of plastic every week just by using the plastic products that are now everywhere. So it can't just be your local sanitation department, paid for by your taxes, doing all the work.

Action: concerning evictions, corporate lobbying, taxes, paid family leave, and Medicare.

Long story short: tell your state's Governor to distribute eviction assistance funds immediately, and tell your Congressfolk to stop listening to corporate lobbyists, raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, enact paid family/medical leave, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, expand Medicare, and enable Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Daily Kos helps you tell your state's Governor to get to stepping about distributing federal rental assistance funds. With only 11% of these funds distributed so far, and with the federal eviction moratorium ending, I trust the urgency is clear. But it wasn't clear enough to certain American states, which contracted with private corporations to distribute the money, and these corporations, guess what, haven't done a very good job of it, which may have been the whole idea. When governments contract with private corporations that screw up, it's still government's fault. Of course, they're not just screwing over tenants, they're also screwing over the landlords who are trying to get paid, so let your Governor know your will today.

Clearly Congressional Democrats have lost their way with the Build Back Better Act, so it's time to remind them of our will. First, Daily Kos helps you remind your Congressfolk that they work for us, not the big corporate lobbyists who are trying to preserve the Trump tax cuts for their paymasters. A lot of Democrats appear to have forgotten that fighting corporate lobbyists is actually quite popular with voters! Instead they're acting like big corporate lobbyists get a million votes each while everyone else gets zero, so we need to make a pointed statement about their continued appeasement of big corporations. Big corporations don't drive our economy; people do. Big corporations don't make the big changes; people do. And big corporations don't have the power; people do -- if we but exercise that power.

Concurrent with the preceding paragraph, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax the rich and corporations much harder than we currently do in order to pay for the Build Back Better Act. The American people have pretty much spoken about both of these matters, in poll after poll after poll over the years -- nobody falls for the "corporations need to pay less in taxes to create more jobs," especially considering how poorly the Trump Administration sold it. Also, Barack Obama openly campaigned on raising taxes for the rich in 2012 and won re-election, while Republican tax cuts for the rich and for corporations didn't prevent Democrats from taking back the House in 2018. The American people know the score, better than we did during Tha Bush Mobb's rule. Now we need to take the fight to the politicians.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a paid family/medical leave program in the Build Back Better Act. Again, paid family/medical leave is quite popular with folks who work for a living -- the folks who worry about whether they'll get fired if they take a day off to care for a sick parent or child, or if they get sick themselves and don't want to infect their co-workers, and that latter issue has become a bit more pointed thanks to this pandemic, amirite? Of course, people like our Congressfolk -- who can miss votes at will or pretend their attempts to gin up campaign funding is "work" -- generally don't understand how it is for working people. And that's why we get in their grills until we make them understand.

Both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. The Child Tax Credit expansion just started delivering another $250 or $300 check into the bank accounts of working families across America; why would Democrats want that to stop? Out of "fiscal responsibility," no doubt, and why do they feel the need to act like Republicans? Especially when Republicans themselves are just acting? Politicians will say THERE'S NOZ MONEYZ!!!!! whenever we propose doing something good for the American people, but they'll tell us that corporate welfare will "pay for itself." Those Trump tax cuts were supposed to "pay for themselves"; how did that work out? Working families deserve a little breathing space; it sure ain't like their bosses give them that.

Finally, both Daily Kos and Penn PIRG help you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices in the Build Back Better Act. It's a pay-for, no matter how much "moderate" Democrats pretend "we can't afford it." If someone asked you if you could "afford" having more money, you'd think they were stupid. I've written extensively about this lately, so I'll just add one more thing: "moderate" Democrats would have no right to accuse people of "failing to compromise" with them over this matter, because H.R. 3 (the model for the Medicare drug price negotiation plank) is already a compromise, since it wouldn't cover every drug. It's like Joe Manchin coming up with new reasons to sink a bill every time he agrees to something. And we can't let that kind of behavior win in America.

Regarding Medicare drug price negotiation.

On Wednesday, three "moderate" House Democrats on the Health and Pensions Committee voted with Republicans against a Build Back Better Act provision that would have allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices, and since the resulting vote was 29-29, the provision didn't advance out of committee. While the arc of history bends toward justice, as Dr. King told us, that arc sure looks flat while we're standing beneath it, so we can't merely dismiss pessimism about the Democrats' efforts to use what power they have to do good works for the American people. And Medicare drug price negotiation is a slam dunk as far as the popular will is concerned -- both the Kaiser Family Foundation and Data for Progress have found close to 90% support for it in recent polls -- which would make the Democrats the Ben Simmons of political parties if they can't get it done.

"Moderate" arguments against Medicare drug price negotiation sure ain't slam dunks, either. One of the three "moderate" Democrats who voted against the bill, Rep. Kathleen Rice (NY-14), floated the suggestion earlier this week that Medicare drug price negotiation was "not fiscally responsible," an argument that offends not just intelligence but sentience. Our Congressional Budget Office (or CBO) estimated the savings on drug prices for Medicare drug price negotiation (as per H.R. 3, which wouldn't even let Medicare negotiate the prices of all drugs) at $456 billion over 10 years; House Democrats have, more informally, estimated the savings at $700 billion, and, as I may have mentioned on occasion, the right-wing Mercatus Center rather unsuccessfully buried their finding that Medicare drug price negotiation would save a whopping $840 billion. The fiscal-irresponsibility argument thus fails under the most cursory scrutiny, but "moderates" stand ready to deploy substitute arguments. Rep. Scott Peters (CA-52), having apparently failed to grasp the literal meaning of the word "negotiation," warned of "government-dictated prices" for drugs, and Rep. Kurt Schrader (OR-5) loosed the zombie lie that Medicare drug price negotiation would "kill() jobs and innovation that drives cures for these rare diseases."

The "fiscal irresponsibility" and "government-dictated prices" lies are evil, of course, but persuading folks of that is much easier than it was a dozen years ago. But the "kills jobs and innovation" lie is worse, because it still gives too many good Americans pause. If drug corporations make less money in profits, they'll have to cut jobs? Sounds cut-and-dried! Except, of course, that it's not, and not just because what a corporation spends on research isn't "profit" by definition. For 40 years Our Glorious Elites have conditioned us to accept that literally any time a corporation loses money it should just fire people. But the big pharma corporations could also pay their CEOs less, enable less CEO stock buy-back activity (since that's what normally happens when you give corporations the kind of "freedom to innovate" we're talking about here!), or spend far, far less money on advertising. Or they could take even more taxpayer funding than they already do. As I've said before, American taxpayers funded the Moderna COVID vaccine in its entirety, and as it happens literally every single drug our FDA approved between 2010 and 2016 received at least some taxpayer funding.

But the innovation lie does more harm than that, and it does harm we can quantify, as the aforementioned Data for Progress study found that support for Medicare drug price negotiation softened somewhat (from 86% to 81%) if you mentioned innovation as a reason to oppose it. The "stifles innovation" argument doesn't admit the nature of innovation as we have understood it for thousands of years. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is a cliché for a reason, after all, and corporations, like people, don't innovate because they have the "freedom" to do so, but because they have. The "freedom to innovate" is a meaningless phrase, because none of us "innovates" unless and until faced with an obstacle or problem of some kind. And that's not all the harm the lie does. Let's say corporations simply said they wouldn't research new drugs unless we let them sell to Medicare for how ever much money they wanted, and damn the cost to the taxpayer. Why would we tolerate that? We're Americans, which means, among so many other things, that we don't think of ourselves as hostages; we think of ourselves as free people. Should free people simply let big corporations charge as much as they'd like for prescription drugs under threat of future painful death due to a willful lack of drug research?

I said earlier that the failure of this vote -- which we can rectify, if we do our jobs and get in our Reps' and Senators' grills about it -- makes the Democrats seem like the Ben Simmons of political parties. But there is always the possibility they just want us to think so -- that they fully intend their big budget reconciliation bill to die by a thousand cuts, of which this Medicare drug price negotiation failure would be one, all so that they can continue the horrible drama of post-Reagan American politics, where Democrats do nothing with the power they get, lose their power to Republicans, fundraise on Republicans' evil behavior, and then only gain power back when Republicans do the unconscionable. And though making "moderate" Democrats vote against a popular legislative initiative has some utility, this bill also has more paths to failure now. Voters won't blame Joe Manchin now if the bill fails; they'll blame all Democrats, which would surely usher in a Republican Congress, and also a fascist one. Regardless of Democrats' good or evil intentions, our task is the same: we tell them to do the right thing, and not the "politically safe" thing that is actually the politically poisonous thing. We tell them, if you can bear another sports metaphor, to stop going into the prevent defense with three minutes left in the fourth quarter, because you know what they say? The prevent defense prevents winning.

As always, 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 contact info. Good luck and God bless.

Action: concerning war, whistleblowers, police, and "fraudits."

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations to Use Military Force (or AUMFs), protect utility grid whistleblowers, demilitarize our police, and end qualified immunity, and tell Pennsylvania state legislators to stop whining about the 2020 election and reject any proposed "fraudit" thereof. 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.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 2391, the National Security Powers Act. As you know, the last four U.S. Presidents have used the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations to Use Military Force (or AUMFs) as excuses to launch unconstitutional military adventures at will -- but S. 2391 would repeal both those AUMFs, and about damn time, too. S. 2391 would also put more constraints on future AUMFs -- among other things, it would cut off funding for new military adventures after 20 days unless Congress approves them, and it would sunset all future AUMFs after two years. And then, with some diligence and oversight, we can get back to ensuring Congress declares the wars, not the President. Remember: "hamstringing the President's ability to act" is a feature of our Constitution, not a bug!

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend whistleblower protections to workers who maintain our electric grid. That grid, as you might imagine, is suffering under the weight of climate change weather, and it's also like a big ice cream cone to folks who would want to terrorize good Americans -- and I want you to imagine other Americans, not foreigners, as the folks who would want to terrorize you, since that's likely how it'll be. And yet electric grid workers face retaliation if they report trouble on the grid -- even if they report, say, wildfire-related trouble. You imagine that you go through life doing the right thing, and standing up when the situation calls for it, right? In reality, most of us decide that losing our job and our family suffering isn't worth it. And that's why we need to better protect the people who do stand up.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our government to demilitarize our police. As I've said before, those right-wingers who think of Nazism whenever they confront a vaccine mandate or a sign telling them to wear a mask inside a store should more closely contemplate the spectre of police officers routinely using grenade launchers on protestors. Of course, many right-wingers have already contemplated this, and have decided that militarizing our police is necessary to the degree they use tear gas and rubber bullets on Those People. But it is entirely possible that, in the near future, our government will start going after the folks who bomb abortion clinics and try to overthrow our government, and it may take time, but I think many right-wingers will then see the utility of maybe not making every cop into a walking time bomb.

The Daily Kos Liberation League also helps you tell your Congressfolk to end "qualified immunity" for police officers. It's very, very hard to bring a bad cop to justice these days, not so much because of unions (even though other liberals say so!), but because our courts make it almost prohibitively difficult via the entirely court-created doctrine of "qualified immunity," whereby you can't bring a bad cop to justice unless your case almost exactly resembles a previous case which brought a bad cop to justice. And how many cases are almost exactly like others? This places the burden of proof rather far above "beyond a reasonable doubt" and into the rarefied air of "ain't never happening." And the good folks who've had their brother or sister or mother or father or son or daughter shot for brandishing a cellphone or a water gun deserve more than that.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators to reject any attempt at a 2020 election "fraudit" like the one they had in Arizona. When they're not whining about the utter absence of evidence pointing to widespread voter fraud that would have, say, wiped out President Biden's eight-million vote lead across the nation, they're saying things like if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear! Actually, that's not even true: you have the loss of taxpayer money, for one thing; you have the shame of throwing away that money for bellyaching, for another; and you also have voting machines that have to be decertified and replaced (also at taxpayer cost!) because the people conducting the audit have no fucking clue what they're doing, like the Cyber Ninjas in Maricopa County, Arizona. When will Republicans feel shame over what they've done? When they look around and find no one supports their works. So let's help bring that about. It'll be better for all of us.

Action: concerning Medicare, Guantánamo Bay, vaccines, Arctic drilling, public water, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell our government to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, close Guantánamo Bay, prevent big pharma monopolies from stopping worldwide vaccine production, ban Arctic drilling, and stop private corporations from taking water from our public lands, and tell corporations to stop bankrolling the campaigns of Texas state legislators. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. Word on the street is that the House Energy and Commerce Committee, currently marking up the Build Back Better Act, actually doesn't have the votes to pass Medicare drug pricing reform. Virtually everyone thinks Medicare should be able to negotiate drug prices -- everyone, that is, except big pharma corporations, who appear to be getting all the say about everything, yet again. This is why independents vote Republican in the midterms -- because Democrats are too scared to offend their big donors and do big things. And in 2022, it'll be worse, because most of the Republicans running will be out-and-out fascists. The three members of the Committee most opposed to Medicare drug pricing reform are Rep. Schrader (D?-OR), Rep. Rice (D?-NY) and Rep. Peters (D?-CA). If you're a constituent of any of these three, please call them and tell them to do the right thing, not least because the alternative is fascists taking Congress. Call them even if you're not a constituent, though. It's that important. And big pharma ain't anyone's "constituent," so any Rep who treats them like one has pretty much forfeited the right to nitpick about whether any of their callers are constituents.

Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center already. He promised he would, so he ought to keep that promise! As you know, Saturday marked the 20-year anniversary of 9.11, which means almost 20 years of pretending the "terrorists" we've held in Guantánamo Bay without charge and without trial were "too difficult to prosecute, but too dangerous to release," in the Obama Administration's immortal words. It was all a lie, and we have done our civilization incalculable damage since 9.11 -- and if right-wing crybabies get their way, as they far too often do, we'll continue to suffer the fruits of that damage for years to come. That makes it all the more urgent that we close this self-inflicted wound on our national honor.

Rethink Trade helps you tell the Biden Administration to use every tool at their disposal to ensure vaccines can be produced and administered worldwide. Because the alternative is COVID-19 mutating and coming back to bite us in the ass again and again -- recall that scientists first spotted the Delta variant, currently slicing its way through red states, in India. At the point of life-or-death, things like "big pharma's intellectual property rights" don't matter a whole lot -- or, at least, they shouldn't. And "every tool at their disposal" means pushing for an intellectual property waiver from the WTO, of course, but it also means using already-existing legal authority to force big pharma corporations to produce vaccines worldwide. Taxpayer money invested in them, after all -- taxpayers like you and I paid for the Moderna vaccine in its entirety, in fact -- so we get a say in how they're used.

The Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell our government to stop drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR). Opening up ANWR to oil drilling was a key "achievement" of the Trump Administration, but we all know why we would put "achievement" in quotation marks there -- scientists have long told us we're not getting very much oil out of ANWR, and we know that drilling in the Arctic Ocean presents unique problems, like the near-impossibility of cleaning up the inevitable oil spills in near-freezing water. But you know, the will of the Gwich'in Native Americans who live there, and the Porcupine caribou they depend upon, aren't chopped liver, either. Often, the compassionate thing to do is also the pragmatic thing to do -- but too often, the politicians ignore both in favor of whatever pleases some crony or other. You can fight that by leaving a public comment opposing Arctic drilling.

Environmental Action helps you tell our U.S. Forest Service to deny any permit applications to corporations attempting to draw water from our San Bernardino National Forest in California. BlueTriton, formerly Nestlé Waters North America, drew some 58 million gallons of water from Strawberry Creek in the aforementioned San Bernardino National Forest just last year, but at least California wasn't in a state of drought or anything. Oh, wait, they were! And the drought is even worse this year! This, as farmers struggle to water their crops, to the point where they actually use fracking wastewater on them. Hmm, fracking wastewater on crops, private water siphoning -- could it be that preventing the latter could make the former unnecessary? Why, yes, it could -- but only if we speak out in numbers they can't ignore.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop bankrolling the campaigns of Texas's most extreme right-wing legislators. These would be the legislators who passed both SB 1, Texas's notorious anti-voting law, and SB 8, Texas's notorious abortion ban, and if corporations want to do something more than issue PR releases sympathetic to the plight of women, they can, you know, stop bankrolling the campaigns of these politicians. Of course, they may not want to do more than issue sympathetic PR releases, which is why we brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR. (As an aside, don't be too impressed that Salesforce has vowed to relocate any Texas employee who wants to leave because of SB 8. If you're an employee who requests that, your boss has just learned a lot about you, and you're much better off keeping yourself to yourself as much as possible at your job.)

UPDATE. And on cue: Rep. Kathleen Rice (D?-NY) says she cannot support Medicare drug price negotiation because it is "not fiscally responsible." Wondering how saving the taxpayers $84 billion every year is "not fiscally responsible"? Yes, I bet you are, as is any sentient life form on Earth. Her D.C. office number is 202.225.5516. She deserves to lose her re-election bid, and the way Republicans are going, she'll lose it to Zombie Adolf Hitler.

Action: concerning paid leave, voting rights, Social Security, consumer protection, women's health, and our Supreme Court.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to enact a paid family/medical leave program, pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and expand Social Security, tell your Senators to confirm Rohit Chopra as Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Women's Health Protection Act and the Judiciary 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.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a paid family/medical leave program in the upcoming reconciliation bill. Their constituents would actually like this, since they all have families and they all get sick but they rarely get paid time off unless they have a collective bargaining agreement, but these are Democrats we're talking about, and they're as likely as not to say "we just can't afford it right now." Most folks, confronted with that excuse, would respond we can't afford not to do it! And they'd be literally correct -- while politicians say "we can't afford it" based on some nebulous budgetary scheme that gets thrown out the window as soon as corporations want some welfare handouts, too many Americans literally can't afford to miss a day's pay, or lose a job that won't accommodate their family needs. I say go with the people's will, not the politicians' excuses.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. As Congress guts the For the People Act just to appease the West Virginia Senator and his content-free complaints the bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act remains a strong response to our Supreme Court's own gutting of the Voting Rights Advancement, as it would reinsert and strengthen the provision our Court hated because it "discriminated against Southern states." Which have rushed to restrict the right to vote much, much more over the last eight years! What a coincidence! H.R. 4 would reestablish federal pre-clearance of voting rights changes, but for any state or locality that has demonstrated a pattern of vote suppression. And if that happens to include Southern ones, then they need to do better! I ask so little.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security. "Conventional" "wisdom" has it that we need to cut Social Security benefits because of some time in the future the Trust Fund will supposedly run out of money, but we've blown past a few of those deadlines! Which means you shouldn't trust the AAAAAAAAAAH ENTITLEMENTZ MUSTZ BE REFORMEDZ!!!!! crowd. Better to trust simple math: if we lift the payroll tax ceiling, currently around $142,000 annually, then income over that can finally be taxed into the Social Security system. And then we can increase benefits, improve cost-of-living increases, and improve benefits for surviving spouses and children, among other things. Will the cost-of-entitlements crowd ever shut up? Probably not -- they tend to be rich folks! But if we improve Social Security, they'll have less credibility, and Social Security will be safer.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Senators to confirm current FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra as our next Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) Director. The Trump Administration tried to turn our CFPB into a lapdog for the financial industry -- the same financial industry that crashed our economy in 2008, like no one remembers basic facts! -- but we have every reason to believe that Mr. Chopra will reverse that weak, sorry mandate and turn our CFPB back into an agency that will protect good Americans from financial predators, as it did during Mr. Corddray's tenure. Mr. Chopra even has experience in the CFPB as the official in charge of cracking down on student loan predators, something the Trump Administration found controversial, for some reason. It's too rare to have good people running our government; let's encourage that wherever we can.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. With Texas having essentially nullified Roe v. Wade (yeah, that's what a six-week abortion ban does, since most women can't even tell they're pregnant until afterward!), Congress needs to step in and ensure that women can get abortions when they need them. And it's not very much about "not wanting children" -- it's more about needing an abortion because it's put your life in danger, or needing an abortion because the fetus isn't viable. Right-wingers strut about how only they care about human life, but they demonstrate again and again they don't care about human health care. This is America, of course, so they shouldn't get all the say about everything. Even when they wave guns in our faces.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2584, the Judiciary Act, which would expand our Supreme Court from nine Justices to 13. Daily Kos cites our Court's recent refusal to intervene in the aforementioned Texas anti-abortion law as the most pressing reason to expand our Court, but we could cite a host of others. Chiefly, however, we have 13 Courts of Appeals, and having one Supreme Court Justice preside over each one would better ensure every appeal that needs hearing gets heard. Both the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts have avoided hearing a whole lot of cases, but we can at least put pressure on them to do more of the work they're supposed to do. And if Joe Biden gets to appoint four more Justices? Too bad -- Republicans got enough unearned Court appointments over the years.

Action: concerning Medicare, home care, taxes, drug prices, and corporate welfare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the full Build Better Act, raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, enable Medicare to negotiate drug prices, tell Congress to lower drug prices for everyone, and end corporate welfare for fossil fuel corporations. 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.

With Build Back Better Act text coming within a day or two, now would be a good time to call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass the full bill, with all $3.5 trillion of planned spending. That means (among other things!) expanding Medicare and expanding home- and community-based care services, since these are the two initiatives Congress will most likely drop from the bill. But wait! What about what Joe Manchin wants? Everybody asks that, but not enough of us ask, "what about what we want?" I find it hard to believe that the American people would object to expanding Medicare, since clear majorities in poll after poll find that Americans want everyone on Medicare. I also find it hard to believe that the American people would object to spending on the home- and community-based care that we're all going to need sooner or later. But in order to prove that, we have to speak out.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise all $3.5 trillion for the Build Back Better Act from higher taxes on the rich and on corporations. But wait! What about the Unspeakable Nine in the House Democratic caucus? Again, the correct question is "what about what we want?" The American people have, again, demonstrated in poll after poll that we want to tax the rich and corporations a lot harder than we're currently doing; we have demonstrated this, in poll after poll, despite being relentless propagandized by the politicians and our "liberal" media about the "harm" higher taxes on the rich and corporations would do. And again, we have to speak out in order to prove it -- particularly since the winged monkeys of the right are certainly speaking out.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to close the "stepped-up basis" loophole which enables the rich to avoid taxes on investments. The rich have gamed the system well enough that they never have to sell an investment to get cash -- they can just go get a loan using their investment as collateral for that loan, sheltering their investment from taxation. Don't believe the hype about closing this loophole affecting family farms and small businesses, because the Biden proposal specifically exempts these businesses, as long as the owners hold onto them. "Stepped-up basis" sounds pretty inside baseball, I know, but that doesn't mean your will to close it should count less than the will of some PR hack who makes a living confusing everyone. Your will is your will, and your representatives need to respect that.

Public Citizen still helps you tell your Congressfolk to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. "Moderate" Democrats stand ready to proclaim that we "can't afford" that, but if Medicare can negotiate drug prices, it will save the taxpayer money. As literally any sentient life form would tell you! Let alone the right-wingers at the Mercatus Center, who told us in 2018 (not that they, ah, foregrounded this information) that Medicare drug price negotiation would save us $84 billion annually, meaning $840 billion over 10 years, meaning about one-fourth of the total price of the Build Back Better Act. Does that mean we should still raise all that money from the rich and from corporations? Of course we should! But we should also enact policy that would make Medicare run better for less money. And if the big pharma corporations don't like it, well, again, we need to stop asking about them, and we need to start asking about us.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower drug prices for everyone in America. Medicare drug price negotiation would do wonders for the drug prices our seniors pay, but we all deserve lower drug prices. Seriously, should we merely tolerate corporations that charge a thousand dollars monthly for life-preserving insulin just because they can? Should we tolerate corporations charging $600 for an EpiPen that cost them far less to produce? No, we are civilized people, so we should not tolerate that. And if any of your friends or family tell you that folks should eat better so they don't become diabetic, remember that if any of them become diabetic, they'll assume they worked hard to avoid it whether they really did or not. Pretty much everyone is like that, and civilized people don't assign blame so much as solve problems.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to end fossil fuel subsidies. If they cost us over $20 billion annually, that's $200 billion over 10 years, or around five percent of the cost of the Build Back Better Act; five percent ain't a lot, but surely every dollar counts, particularly when it's our dollars they're talking about. Fossil fuels hardly need the welfare handouts we give them, not when they monopolize their markets, not when they refuse to embrace renewable energy as any forward-looking entrepreneur ought to do, and certainly not when they make money hand over fist. You've heard them say oil corporations only make seven cents per gallon of gas? Think of all the gas you buy, and multiply that by 300 million Americans, and you'll begin to see that argument is a lot like saying a CEO is underpaid because he only gets $6 every time he draws breath.

Action: concerning Guantánamo, student loan debt, uranium mining, cleaner cars, monopolies, and clemency

Long story short: tell our government to close Guantánamo already, fix the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, stop funding uranium mining, make cars cleaner, and break up Amazon, and tell the state of Illinois to show Christian Reichert some mercy already. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Both the ACLU and Amnesty International help youtell our government to close the notorious Guantánamo Bay detention center already. Opened by Tha Bush Mobb after 9.11, the Guantánamo Bay detention center has been holding decidedly non-threatening terror "suspects" for close to 20 years now, and if they were as "dangerous" as they were supposed to be, well Jesus Mary and Joseph we would have put some of them in jail, or, at the very least, charged them with something. What is the likelihood that the three dozen most dangerous people in the world are all in one spot? It's been one stupid and offensive lie with Guantánamo after another for two decades. We managed to get ourselves out of Afghanistan, painful and horrible as that was; getting out of Guantánamo should, quite frankly, be much easier. And when Lindsey Graham says this'll lead to another 9.11, he'll be wrong as usual.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Department of Education to fix the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program. Authorized by Congress in 2007, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program aimed to forgive the student loans of good Americans who spent 10 years in public service (teaching, soldiering, volunteering in the Peace Corps, etc.) and kept up with their student loan payments all the while -- but only 2% of all applicants have ever gotten any kind of loan forgiveness from the program. And the failure happens for bad reasons, including both bad advice ("consolidate all your loans into one private loan whoops private loans aren't eligible") and the proverbial red tape (that somehow considers rounding up your loan payments to be "noncompliance" with your loan terms!) Could it have been designed to fail? Doesn't matter -- we can demand that it work, and we can make it work.

Penn Environment helps you tell our government to stop funding uranium mining. Why do we need uranium? Mainly to make weapons and nuclear reactors; nuclear power hasn't made money for decades, and we already have enough damn weapons. I know, we also use uranium for silk and wool dye and stage lighting bulb filaments, but gosh, should we pollute our air and water everywhere we mine for uranium so we can have those things? C'mon, this is a can-do country! But our government wants to create, essentially, a massive corporate welfare program for uranium mining corporations; does that seem like a good use of taxpayer money, i.e., your money? No, it does not. A better use of taxpayer money might be, oh, I don't know, creating public utilities that use renewable energy. They'd work, and they'd belong to us.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous fuel efficiency standards possible. What's that, you say? You heard that President Biden already did that? Well, our EPA proposed much tougher fuel efficiency standards than those adopted by the Trump Administration, but a public comment period follows every rule proposal, and our EPA reviews all those comments, and then adopts or adjusts the standards based on the comments. And you don't want all the pro-pollution commenters to drown you out, right? Because the big auto corporations are getting their PR flacks to do just that. Granted, their comments will suck, while our comments will be good -- no, it really will be pretty much like that, don't let big corporate PR hacks bamboozle you! -- but if we don't leave comments, we won't get heard. So let's get heard.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to break up Amazon. Amazon has proposed buying MGM studios for $8.45 billion, and for once, our FTC is investigating the matter. And our FTC has some vocally anti-monopoly Commissioners these days, so this investigation might yield results! Still, if we-the-people don't communicate our will, they might get cold feet, as our leaders so often do these days in the face of corporate power. And we'll have plenty of good reasons to oppose the merger -- not just because it'll allow Amazon to prevent MGM from letting any streaming service other than Amazon Prime carry their content, but because of all the jobs and competition that'll get wiped out, since that happens every time we let big corporations merge. It's well past time our government actually enforced antitrust laws with some vigor.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell the state of Illinois to free Christian Reichert. Mr. Reichert somehow got 23 years in jail for pot possession, after what may have been his first significant encounter with law enforcement; I couldn't tell you how he managed to get such an overblown sentence, but I can tell you that you don't even need to believe he's been a model prisoner for the last seven years to think he should get out -- hell, you don't even need to think pot should be legal for him to get out. You don't even need to suspect his trial wasn't on the up-and-up to think he ought to get out! All you need know is that pot is now legal in Illinois, which makes his absurd predicament even more absurd. So letting Mr. Reichert out is a bank shot as far as doing the right thing is concerned.

Action: concerning taxes, Social Security, Medicare, drug prices, clean water, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, expand Social Security, expand Medicare, lower drug prices, get the lead out of our nation's water pipes, and protect workers' 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 Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. You've heard that big corporations have worked their nefarious will on Democrats by shrieking about "international competitiveness"? You've heard that Joe Manchin says he won't support a reconciliation bill over $1.5 trillion? Ain't nothing over until we say it is! If we say, in large enough numbers, that corporations and rich folks need to pay more taxes, then nothing corporate lobbyists or drama-hound Senators will matter. It's that simple! There is no law of physics that says "whatever Joe Manchin says goes." There is no law of physics that says "nothing can be done because there's just too much corporate money in politics." The only law of physics is the popular will. And we have to act like it.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security. Don't believe the hype that TEH SOSHUL SECURITIEZ IZ TEH INSOLVENTZ!!!! Big corporations trot that lie out every few years, in the hopes they will get their grubby hands on what you worked for, paid into, fought for, and deserve. Truth is we can make Social Security by expanding benefits, and we can shore up whatever hole might appear in the Social Security trust fund in 20 or 30 or 70 years' time by raising the ceiling on payroll taxes. Currently Social Security simply doesn't tax income over $142,000, when that's where all the money is! Seriously, lifting the income cap on Social Security's taxes will infuse a lot of life into the greatest pension there ever was. And like I said, Americans deserve to live a dignified retirement.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare in the budget reconciliation bill. Democrats have proposed lowering the Medicare age to 60, expanding coverage to dental, vision, and hearing care, and letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, which will save the taxpayer enough money to fund all the new coverage. And, frankly, lowering the coverage age to 60 will probably save some money, too, as folks do tend to be healthier at 60 than they are later. Indeed, we could very well apply the same logic to argue that Medicare should include everyone, since folks are also generally healthier when they're 20 or 40 than they are at 65 and up. And we will argue that! For now, we need merely argue that expanding Medicare is actually better, even if Chicken Littles say otherwise.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower drug prices for everyone. Why do big pharma corporations charge us more for the same drugs people get in Canada and England and France? Because they can, that's why! And they don't charge more money in those other nations because they can't. Letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices would be a start -- Medicare buys drugs on behalf of over 60 million Americans, after all -- but we can do other things as well, like empower our government to produce generics of a drug if the manufacturing corporation won't lower the price. Hell, we can enact price controls, too! I don't know where "price controls" became this nasty epithet; a lot of good Americans would like our government to control drug prices.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1352/S. 916, the WATER Act, which would get the lead out of our drinking water pipes all over America. Don't hesitate to support the WATER Act just because you also supported H.R. 1376, the GET THE LEAD OUT Act, which essentially does the same thing -- it's more important right now for our Congressfolk to hear that we want the lead out of our water pipes, since the budget reconciliation blueprint passed by both Houses of Congress aims to do just that. And they need to hear that more than they hear "international competitiveness" or "ZOMG inflation" or "ZOMG the deficit," which is what the forces of evil are pummeling our Congressfolks' ears with as we speak. Like I said in today's earlier post, I hate it when horseshit wins. We are the horseshit killers.

Finally, both The Juggernaut Project and Daily Kos help 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 all over America -- the PRO Act's opponents act like that's a bad thing to do or something -- and would also protect workers from their bosses dragging them away from their important work and forcing them to watch anti-union propaganda. Because if you were treating your workers right, you wouldn't need to propagandize them against unions! One good thing about this pandemic? We demand more from our jobs than the back of our boss's hand. If we pass the PRO Act, we can get more of what we want from our jobs.

Action: concerning infrastructure, fracking, police, privacy, endangered species, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell our FCC to better protect communication infrastructure, tell the DRBC to ban fracking-related activities from the Delaware River Basin, tell President Biden to demilitarize our police, tell our FTC to punish T-Mobile for its latest data breach, tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to do better at saving red wolves, and tell AT&T to stop funding anti-abortion politicians in Texas. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Free Press helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to better protect our communications infrastructure from the effects of climate change. And if that means issuing new regulations that make corporations build better infrastructure, too bad! Where private corporations refuse to do their job, government must step in, and by the looks of New Orleans's power outage, the private corporations that "manage" New Orleans's electricity ain't doing their job: aside from the loss of phone services (many of which are cable-provided now!), 911 calls didn't get answered for over 12 hours after the storm hit, and since AT&T manages that service in New Orleans, you can hang that on AT&T. But you'd rather be able to hang it on your government, since you can better fight them if they screw up. AT&T executives can wipe their asses with hundred-dollar bills, so they're immune to accountability.

Food and Water Action helps you tell the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) that it should allow no activities related to fracking near the Delaware River. Fracking you can understand, since it would put dangerous chemicals in a river serving citizens of five American states, and indeed the DRBC did ban fracking in the Delaware River watershed last year. But the DRBC might consider letting gas drilling corporations siphon off Delaware River water to use in fracking elsewhere! That's our drinking water, dammit! The DRBC might also decide to let these corporations store or dispose of fracking waste in the Basin, and, again, that's our drinking water, dammit! Calling that a compromise would be like if King Solomon actually split the baby in half, so let's not let that happen.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell President Biden to demilitarize our police. Police don't need tanks and grenade launchers to arrest folks and serve warrants -- they "need" them to put down the good Americans who protest police brutality! I mean, if you want to go by how these military weapons actually get used. President Biden pledged to end the 1033 program that lets local police departments buy surplus weapons from our military -- but then, says word on the street, police unions got in his grill about it and made him back down. That means we have to get in his grill and make him keep his promise to us! Folks who whine that vaccine mandates are "Nazism" really ought to take another look at police officers who walk the streets armed like soldiers.

Free Press helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to punish T-Mobile for its latest data breach, which has potentially exposed the birthdate, driver's license number, and Social Security number of 50 million good Americans to identity thieves. Why, you can rig up a fake identity on one or two of those items, let alone three! And this is the fifth big data breach at T-Mobile in just three years, so we can look forward to another round of apologies and we'll-do-betters from T-Mobile executives -- who will then do nothing, because, as I put it earlier, they can wipe their asses with hundred-dollar bills. But, again, where big corporations won't do their job, our government has to step in and do it, hence we call upon our FTC to hold T-Mobile accountable. Our FTC has good people in charge of it now, but we still must communicate our will.

The Endangered Species Coalition helps you tell our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to do better at saving red wolves, one of the most endangered species on Earth, given that there are only nine of them at present, where there were 130 as recently as 15 years ago. Our laws mandate that our Fish & Wildlife Service look for a place for them to live in peace (where they won't get hunted or hunt other species into endangerment), but word on the street is that they've let themselves be hamstrung by a single well-connected property developer into abandoning their lawful duty. Federal judges have twice told our Fish & Wildlife Service to do its job, and yet they act like our laws mandate that single property developers get a veto over the law whenever they like. That's not very law and order of them, so we should stop it.

Finally, UltraViolet helps you tell AT&T to speak out against the Texas abortion ban and stop funding anti-abortion politicians there. They'll probably stop at doing the first, which is why we're telling them to do both -- PR releases aren't worthless in and of themselves, but they are worthless without action, and they're certainly worthless if AT&T keeps funding the campaigns of the same politicians who enacted the nefarious abortion ban! AT&T will probably retort that they fund those politicians for "economic" reasons, or even that they won't have enough "access" if they don't fund these clowns. But would that be the can-do attitude of the free market? Because it sounds more like "we've got the power and we're not going to use it." But the Big Stick of Bad PR beats any carefully-worded corporate PR release. And we're not afraid to use that.

Action: concerning abortion, financial predators, taxing the rich, Medicare, and tax cuts for working families.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Women's Health Protection Act and the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act, fund the budget reconciliation bill with higher taxes on the rich and on corporations, allow Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices, expand Medicare coverage to include dental, vision, and hearing care, and make the EITC and CTC expansions permanent. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Daily Kos, Ultraviolet, and Moms Rising all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. You hate how Texas has basically outlawed abortions, and how our Supreme Court has done nothing to stop them? Then we need to pass the Women's Health Protection Act, which would stop abortion bans at the state level, not to mention all the other roadblocks (the finding of "heartbeats," forced ultrasounds, forced bad medical advice) states love putting up so that women can't take care of themselves. If we don't want our civilization to turn women into breeders again, if we don't want women to be forced to carry fetuses without organs or fetuses that develop problems that threaten the mothers' lives or the fetuses of rapists or abusive partners, then we need to pass the Women's Health Protection Act.

US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2508, the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act. Payday lenders can't prey on our soldiers like they used to, because our laws give our soldiers extra protection, via lower interest rate caps and the like; the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act would extend those protections to everyone in America. Because why not? If it helps our soldiers get back on their feet, it can help anyone else get back on their feet. Payday lenders will hate this, but that's OK, because I hate payday lenders and all their evil works. Forcing people into 300% death spiral loans is not a "living." This is America! Payday lenders should do some real work! They should build something, or serve someone, or make people's lives easier. But seriously, this worship of mammon is going to kill us all.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the rich and corporations pay their fair share of taxes to fund the budget reconciliation bill. Corporations and rich folks don't want to pay as much in taxes, so they should just get their way? Nobody would let you or I get away with that! Certainly they shouldn't get more say about that than the American people do -- Representatives are supposed to represent their constituents, after all, and they're not supposed to let the whining of big corporations and rich folks drown out the will of their constituents. Their constituents tell us, in poll after poll after poll, that corporations and rich folks should pay more. We just have to be loud about that.

Pursuant to the aforementioned reconciliation bill, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to allow Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices in the budget reconciliation bill. After all, if they're going to cave on tax hikes, they're going to need money from somewhere, and letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices is a pay-for. Per the right-wing Mercatus Center, Medicare drug price negotiation would save the taxpayer $84 billion annually, working out to $840 billion over 10 years, and thus working out to about a quarter of the reconciliation bill's $3.5 trillion price tag. That doesn't mean we won't hear from "moderate" Democrats that "we can't afford to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices," but that's stupid, and anyone who repeats it deserves ridicule and shame. And if they're in office, they deserve defeat.

Public Citizen also helps you tell your Congressfolk to include dental, hearing, and vision care in Medicare, and without copays. After all, seniors have ears, eyes, and teeth, too! And they're not all gazillionaires, either! A lot of them live on their Social Security checks, after all! It's unconscionable that we've had Medicare almost 60 years and it's only covered drugs less than 20 years (and, as I said above, we can improve that service dramatically!) and we don't cover ENT care at all. Some fools quickly retort that Medicare Advantage does cover all of that, but Medicare Advantage is private health insurance that sucks taxpayer funding out of Medicare (just as charter schools suck public school funding!), and dental, hearing, and vision care shouldn't be "advantages," they should be services all seniors can get.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC) and Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansions permanent. Because they help working families at lower incomes make ends meet, that's why! The CTC expansion is delivering $250 or $300 checks into bank accounts every month, and the EITC expansion now delivers almost $1,000 more annually into the pockets of workers who make less than $21,000 a year (the cap used to be $16,000/year). These tax cuts don't help banksters who don't need an ounce of help stealing money from us, they help working families. If you have personal experience deciding whether to feed your children or feed yourself, you might want to describe that to your Congressperson. They all have their stupid ideologies, but their stupid ideologies are no match for your real lives.

Action: concerning taxes, Social Security, paid leave, "forever chemicals," and drug policy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, expand Social Security, enact paid family/medical leave, protect us from "forever chemicals," and pass the Drug Policy Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations in the budget reconciliation bill. You've heard that lobbyists have gutted the tax-raising provisions in the bill? We might have something to say about that! But only if we, you know, actually say something. I mentioned yesterday that I think Democrats are trying to destroy the bill to keep us all in the perverse hostage situation we've long been in, where Democrats do nothing with their power, then Republicans take over, then Democrats try to cleave us to them by saying "we're not ogres like them!" You can tell your Congressfolk you're on to that plan, and if your Congressperson is on the Gottheimer/Cuellar axis, just remind them that their corporate paymasters will desert them for a Republican at the first opportunity.

This month marks the 86th anniversary of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signing the Social Security Act, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security. You've heard that Social Security will stop paying full benefits by 2037? I'm old enough to remember when that date was supposed to be 2016! So, yeah, it's a load of rubbish -- these hysterical projections never take economic growth into account, for example, when even evil politicians try to grow our economy! -- and we should change the conversation about Social Security from ZOMG IT WON'TZ BE THEREZ!!!! to "if we start taxing income over $142,800, we can strengthen benefits for everyone." People generally prefer optimism to pessimism, in my experience, so we might as well respect human nature in our persuasive efforts.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact paid/family medical leave in America. We're about the only "wealthy" country that doesn't have it, and that's nothing to shout WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about, so let's fix it. And let's not brook any stupidity from "moderate" Democrats that we "just can't pay for it." Why, Joe Biden's a moderate himself, and he'd pay for it by taxing corporations more and taxing rich people more! Of course, the Manchin/Sinema/Gottheimer/Cuellar axis will mumble their excuses at that, so let's just say this: Sen. Gillibrand's paid family medical/leave bill (S. 337, from the 115th Congress) would have paid for it with a payroll tax of one-fifth of one percent, which, for someone making $50,000 annually, would work out to about $8.50 a month. $8.50! So no HOW WILL WE PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ!!!!! It's damn stupid.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act. They won't be as unwilling as you'd think -- even the most right-wing Senators get regular correspondence on the effect of these "forever chemicals" on soldiers' health, since soldiers use, like, a lot of PFAS chemicals in their work -- but you never know when some right-wing Senator will hold popular legislation hostage to, I don't know, forced ivermectin injections for children (gosh, I wish that sounded a lot less likely!), so it's always best to get out ahead of it and communicate your will. We don't need cancer-causing "forever chemicals" in damn near everything we use. And if the big corporations who make the stuff don't like it, just tell them to find another way! This is America, the can-do country!

Finally, the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4020, the Drug Policy Reform Act. The Drug Policy Reform Act would start getting us on the long-overdue path to treatment of drug addiction rather than criminalization -- and think about it: how does putting someone in jail for being addicted really help them? The bill would end criminalization of drug possession (though not drug dealing, you'll notice), start expunging and sealing drug convictions, eliminate "collateral consequences" of drug possession offenses (like losing your right to vote!), and start funding treatment programs. You know who'll really, really hate this bill? Private prison corporations, which feast on drug offenders. But they don't get all the say around here.

Action: concerning slavery, vaccines, worker rights, surveillance, public water, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell Hugo Boss to get forced Uyghur labor out of its supply chain, tell our government to get more COVID vaccines out to the rest of the world, protect Amazon workers, and ban neural data exploitation; tell BlueTriton to stop taking Colorado's public water, and tell President Biden to fire USPS Board of Governors member Ron Bloom. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Sum of Us helps you tell luxury clothing corporation Hugo Boss to get the Uyghur forced labor out of its supply chain. Would it be untoward to note that Hugo Boss made its big move in the '30s making and selling Nazi uniforms? Then I guess using half a million Uyghur slaves in East Turkestan is par for the course! Still, the Big Stick of Bad PR works, even against a corporation that used to make Clothing for the Modern Nazi. Personal to those who worry that about the "unintended consequence" of the Uyghurs getting "hurt" by losing their place in the Hugo Boss supply chain: slavery is intolerable everywhere, in every context. I'm reminded of how anti-apartheid South Africans responded to similar arguments about divestment in the '80s: hey, our lives really can't be any worse.

Daily Kos helps you tell the Biden Administration to share COVID vaccine shots all over the world. I mean, if you want to talk about "world leadership," this is where you would focus, right? You'd focus on doing more than everyone else to ensure that we make sure we never have a pandemic like this again, which means making sure everyone on Earth can get a vaccine, since (as we have experienced over the last two months!) newer, deadlier strains of diseases will start among those unprotected by vaccines. "World leadership" has far less to do with protecting intellectual property and ensuring that big pharma corporations make billions of dollars than it has to do with, you know, protecting people. So let's make sure this Administration hears that.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect Amazon workers from all the corporate surveillance their bosses would inflict upon them. Amazon watches its workers' every move, and makes them move ever faster to keep up with production quotas; nobody could have predicted this would result in workplace injuries at double the warehouse industry average! (Let alone delivery drivers peeing in bottles.) There's helping your employees do better, via stick or carrot, and then there's totally subjugating your workers to your absurdly-high expectations, helped along by computer "research," no doubt. Well, let's see a computer lift 40-pound boxes for eight hours. Hell, let's see a boss do it.

Fight for the Future helps you tell our government to ban harvesting of your personal neural data. What on Earth is that, you ask? Some corporations are developing "brain interface technology" that could, one day, do a credible job not only of reading your mind but influencing it; currently corporations have to make do with simply harvesting all the data you leave around on the internet, but I don't want to begin a lot of sentences with "well, at least Facebook and Google didn't" one day. Laws have historically trailed big technological advances -- look how hard it is for them to keep up with social media! -- but there's no particularly good reason for that. If we have the will -- and, of course, if we make our lawmakers have the will -- we can stay ahead.

Environmental Action helps you tell BlueTriton (a.k.a. the Artist Formerly Known as Nestlé Waters North America) to stop siphoning off public waters in Colorado. Public water belongs to the public, after all, and selling it to corporations for a pittance so they can mark it up several thousand percent to sell as bottled water is bad policy. Better to hang on to your public water so the public can use it! You know, by drinking it, or washing with it -- hell, even watering the grass with it would be better! Did I mention that almost half of Colorado currently experiences "extreme" or "exceptional" drought? So giving away public water is an even worse idea in that context. Let's not do that!

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to replace Ron Bloom as USPS Board of Governors Chair. Yes, as a way of firing Postmaster General DeJoy, who would raise prices and cut services and declare that he's done a great job "saving" our Post Office! Problem is, Mr. Bloom is a big DeJoy supporter, which I'm sure has nothing to do with Mr. DeJoy investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a fund run by Mr. Bloom! I'm old enough to remember when even the appearance of corruption made people resign their jobs. We're not in that America anymore, but if we speak out enough, we might one day bring it back.

Action: concerning voting rights, clean water, saving our Post Office, pollution, corruption, and bad nominations.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, remove all lead water pipes in America, pass the Postal Service Reform Act, bring back the "Polluter Pays" tax, pass the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, and reject Rahm Emanuel's nomination as Ambassador to Japan. 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.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Our House passed H.R. 4 last week; now our Senate needs to follow suit, so that the Voting Rights Act can have some teeth again, after our Supreme Court knocked them out in Shelby County v. Holder. Our Court ruled, in that case, that the Voting Rights Act discriminated against Southern states in its pre-clearance formula (solely because more Black folks vote now than they did before the law, a line of reasoning the late Justice Ginsberg likened to throwing out your umbrella merely because it's stopped raining). Our Court also ruled that a pre-clearance formula that didn't discriminate against the South would pass their muster; hence H.R. 4 would subject any state or locality with a record of vote suppression to submit its voting law changes for Justice Department pre-clearance. Republicans will argue we don't need it, but the evidence of your own eyes will say otherwise.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to replace all lead water pipes in America. Just so happens the budget reconciliation blueprint passed by both House and Senate this month could do just that! And that's what we should demand from our Congressfolk -- the removal of all lead pipes. LCV estimates that $45 billion would get it done, and that's, frankly, not much higher than other bills (most famously the WATER Act) have aimed to allot. And when "moderate" Democrats come at you with "we're afraid to tax corporations more due to international competitiveness," you can come right back with so we should tolerate brain damage from lead pipes anywhere in America? Because that is what these irredeemable weaklings really stand for. And it's about time all Americans understood this dark calculus.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. The Postal Service Reform Act would address the real cause of our Postal Service's recent financial troubles -- namely, the mandate to pre-fund retirement benefits for the next 85 years, like literally no other entity, governmental or corporate, has to do. If you had to pre-fund 85 years of retirement funds, hopefully you wouldn't go around wondering why your pockets are empty all the time. Get rid of that absurd mandate, and most of our Postal Service's financial problems will fix themselves, and we won't have to cut services or hike prices (as Postmaster General DeJoy would do) or close Post Offices (as Congressfolk occasionally propose). Why should only stupid ideas get implemented in America?

US PIRG helps you tell your House Reps to reinstate the "polluter pays" tax, so that big polluting corporations have to pay to clean up their messes. You'll recognize the principle, no doubt, from childhood discussions/arguments with your parents: you make the mess, you clean it up. We all accept that as axiomatic these days, yet we don't make corporations pay to clean up their messes, even though their messes are bigger than any pile of dirty clothes you ever left sitting around. We don't make them clean up their messes, I guess, because of "international competitiveness," but seriously, we should tolerate pollution just so a corporation can "compete"? If that's the price of competition, give me cooperation. And maybe these corporations should talk to your mother about cleaning up their messes. If they're lucky, she won't be holding her wooden spoon.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act. The Ban Conflicted Trading Act would prevent Congressfolk from trading in stocks and securities while they're in office. Because doing such a thing would be a conflict of interest the minute you did it, given that you'll likely be voting on issues that would affect your trading, whether you sat on a finance-related Congressional committee or not. Really, that is the standard to which we should hold ourselves -- even the stink of corruption should send us running in the other direction. Some people argue against passing such laws because they're "common sense." In doing so, they ignore the mountains of evidence that trading corrupts politicians, but they also miss the point -- laws like this wouldn't "insult common sense" so much as fight malice.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Rahm Emanuel to be Ambassador to Japan. What is this, a "lifetime achievement" award? If so, Mr. Emanuel's hardly earned it on the merits! He's been pushing corporatism on the Democratic Party for decades, and he marred his tenure as Mayor of Chicago with (among other things!) his aggression toward the city's education system, his cover-up of the Laquan McDonald shooting, and his privatization of city parking services. And after that record of "accomplishment," we'd put him in charge of relating to a nation with over 100 military bases and the third-biggest economy on Earth. Wasn't Michael Jordan available? He's more accomplished, after all.

Action: concerning evictions, Democrats, Medicare, taxes, whistleblowers, and prisons.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to enact an eviction moratorium, tell "Wall Street Democrats" to stop trying to kill the reconciliation bill, tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, pass the False Claims Amendments Act, and end slavery in American prisons. 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.

Now that our Supreme Court (by the expected 6-3 margin) has ruled the most recent Biden eviction ban unconstitutional, the Center for Popular Democracy helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact an eviction ban at least through December. Right-wingers will continue to shriek about TEH LANDLORDZ!!!!!, but landlords can weather bad times better than renters, and anyway that's beside the point -- the point is that our government enacted renter relief in the American Rescue Plan Act that hasn't gotten to renters yet, so it would be evil of us to let people get thrown out in the streets before we've made sure they got all the help they could get. That won't convince right-wingers, but nothing does anymore, except DIDDLEZ MY RAGEZ GLANDZ!!!!!

Now that our House has passed the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint, the National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell the notorious "Wall Street Democrats" to stop trying to sabotage it. Remember: when they say "the price tag's too high," what they really mean is "we don't want rich people and corporations to pay more taxes," even though wanting rich people and corporations to pay more taxes is the majority position in poll after poll after poll and it ain't even close. We could have better Medicare, lower drug prices, paid family/medical leave, better jobs for care workers, and real tax relief for real American working families, except that for some Democrats, big donors are more important than anything. They need us to remind them whom they actually work for.

Speaking of lower drug prices, the aptly-named Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to give Medicare the power to negotiate its own drug prices. It isn't just a good idea, it's a funding mechanism! Seriously, even the right-wing Mercatus Institute told us a few years ago that letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices would save the taxpayer over $80 billion annually; times that by ten and you've got $800 billion, which all by itself is more than one-fifth of the aforementioned reconciliation bill's $3.5 trillion price tag. Also, it is a really good idea, since Medicare is the biggest buyer of prescription drugs in America and can use its leverage to reduce drug prices for everyone. We deserve good things from our government, but we won't get them unless we speak out.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. The American Rescue Plan Act helped deliver $250 or $300 monthly checks to mailboxes and bank accounts all over America, so of course some right-wing Democrats want to end it; I guess they're just more comfortable going hat-in-hand to some big donor who didn't earn his millions or billions than they are running on, you know, actual accomplishments. If they really want to choose the guy who gilds the plumbing in his 19th vacation home over the kid who got lifted out of poverty, they can go right ahead. But we have to speak out so that if they choose unwisely, they'll get hurt at the polls. And anyone who puts big donors over poor children deserves that hurt.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2428, the False Claims Amendments Act. The original False Claims Act helps our government go after federal contractors (among others) who defraud the taxpayer; and the qui tam provision (literally hundreds of years old, don't let anyone tell you any differently!) has helped numerous whistleblowers get a part of what our government is able to recover; S. 2428 would strengthen anti-retaliation provisions and prevent judges from setting an arbitrarily higher standard for proof in fraud cases. Despite this bill's bipartisan sponsor list, the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" didn't include it, even though it would raise revenue. But that suggests that we need to be more vocal about it.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end slavery in American prisons. Specifically, you'd ask Congress to amend the 13th Amendment -- which allows slavery "as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" -- and then apply our minimum wage laws to prisoners. We'll see how lucrative private prisons are after that! If you're thinking if they didn't want to be slaves they shouldn't have committed crimes, you're making a number of errors in your thinking: one, that any slavery is tolerable, anywhere, at any time; two, that anyone who commits a crime thinks like that; and three (and perhaps most important), that we're only supposed to punish prisoners, not rehabilitate them. So let's not hold ourselves hostage to cruelty.

Action: concerning privacy, monopolies, student loan debt, Arctic drilling, refugees, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell Apple to withdraw its plan to scan every piece of data on folks' iPhones, and tell the Biden Administration to suspend big pharma monopolies, cancel student loan debt, scuttle the ConocoPhillips Willow project, reverse its Title 42 refugee ban, and fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Both No Spy Phone and the Electronic Frontier Foundation help you tell Apple to scuttle its plan to scan every piece of data on our phones. Which makes a mockery of their oft-stated commitment to user privacy! They say it's to protect kids from sex traffickers, but does scanning every piece of data on every iPhone really do that? Apple's plan would compare photos of children to a national database of "child abuse images," but this is a species of facial recognition software, which we already know isn't very good at its stated purpose. And Apple's plan would also use, you guessed it, an algorithm to inspect kids' phones for sexually explicit messages, but this'll more likely put more gay kids at the mercy of abusive parents, since algorithms tend to regard any gay content as "sexually explicit." So, in sum: you don't want to give up privacy for security, but you certainly don't want to give it up for bad security.

Rethink Trade helps you tell President Biden to suspend big pharma monopolies so that everyone across the planet can get the vaccines. So we can end the pandemic! It sickens me that our leaders place "corporate intellectual property" above ending the pandemic; as long as we try to "do both," COVID will keep getting more opportunities to mutate and kill people. President Biden did say he favored a temporary WTO waiver on intellectual property matters, but saying you support something and actually doing something are two entirely different things, and the 150,000-plus cases we're getting every day now tell us it's well past time to do something.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell President Biden to cancel federally-held student loan debt. This should be a conservative initiative! Our government would get less revenue, and the money would go back to good Americans so they can decide what to do with it -- yikes, it sounds like a tax cut! Of course, today's "conservatives" don't traffic in ideas; they traffic in rage, hence all that whispering in your ear about how you didn't get to have your student loan debt cancelled, so why should they? As too often happens with "conservatives" today, that kind of argument is utterly childish -- not letting someone else get a benefit merely because you didn't get it? What are we, 12? We have a heritage and traditions to uphold, and that demands maturity.

The Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell President Biden to "walk away" from the proposed ConocoPhillips Willow oil drilling project in Alaska's western Arctic area. Arctic drilling has numerous intractable problems -- chiefly, the near-impossibility of remediating oil spills and our lack of knowledge about the ecosystems we'd disrupt -- but last week an Alaska District Court judge revoked the permit ConocoPhillips got from the Trump Administration, on the grounds that the Trump Administration (and stop me if you've heard this one before!) didn't adhere to federal law in analyzing the environmental impact of the Willow project. Seems like a good opportunity for the Biden Administration to simply wash its hands of the whole thing! And you can help them reach that decision.

NETWORK helps you tell President Biden to reverse his decision extending the notorious Title 42 ban on refugees, a ban based on the tenuous proposition that refugees might make the COVID pandemic worse. Governors DeSantis, Abbott, and Noem are already doing a bang-up job of that, amirite? The Trump Administration's decision to impose a Title 42 ban came from none other than advisor/man with a face even a mother could punch Stephen Miller, and loathe as I am to use ad hominem arguments, that fact alone should indicate that this Title 42 ban ain't about health care but about racism -- and about using any conceivable tool in the toolbox to slow emigration to the United States. You know what would slow emigration to the United States? If we stopped using the world as our litter box, that's what! So let's demand that our leaders do the right thing, in the right way.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General DeJoy already. Not just for trying to throw the 2020 election to Donald Trump, not just for raising prices and cutting services which is such a bold way of fixing problems, but for our USPS giving contracts to his old employer and for him investing in a fund run by one of our USPS Governors, Ron Bloom -- who not long ago said he thought Mr. DeJoy was doing a great job! If I pulled all this crap at any of my jobs, I'd be out on my ass. But in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, having money means never having to say you're sorry, or being held accountable for your actions. Let's work to change that, shall we?

Action: concerning jobs, war, refugees, voting rights, police violence, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your House Reps to pass the reconciliation budget blueprint, tell your Congressfolk to repeal the "war on terror"-era AUMFs, tell President Biden to raise the refugee cap on Afghan refugees, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, eliminate qualified immunity for police officers, and pass the Postal Service Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: call your House Reps and tell them to vote in favor of the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint the Senate passed a few weeks ago, the budget blueprint that will enable all sorts of good things to happen in America -- higher taxes on the rich and on corporations, a stronger care-based economy, and paid family/medical leave for all workers, just to name a few. A few "moderate" Democrats are trying to take the bill hostage, but theirs is the calculus of cowardice -- the result of their actions, which may also be the aim of their actions, will be to scuttle both the reconciliation bill and the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" at whose altar they kneel. If they do that, they will lose not only their own seats, but the House and Senate -- and this time, they'll lose them to Republicans who openly identify as fascists. So brook no silliness from your House Reps about "the difficulty of raising taxes in an election." You know what's harder than raising taxes in an election? Winning elections in a fascist state when you're not a fascist.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Authorizations to Use Military Force (or AUMFs) that started the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and thus end our "forever war." Some people, and by some people I mainly mean people on the right side of the political spectrum, just aren't happy unless we're at war. Put six beers in them and they'll say war is the way to remake the world! Helluva job they did in Afghanistan, if so. War isn't the way to "remake the world," it's the way to redistribute income from taxpayers into defense contracting CEOs' pockets. You may note that Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) has sponsored these AUMF repeals, as she has done in the past, and you may remember that Rep. Lee was literally the only "nay" vote against the Afghanistan AUMF. If I were her, I'd wear an "I WAS RIGHT" baseball cap from now until the day they put me in the ground. But first, let's have her being right about that count for something.

In a related note, Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to raise the refugee cap for Afghans fleeing from the Taliban, so that more of the 300,000-plus Afghans who helped our military during the war effort can get out. You've already heard famous right-wing blowhards warn us about the coming "invasion" of Afghans, but this should be pretty simple to figure out from a moral perspective -- we did this to them, by invading their country, toppling their government, and promising them we would make their lives better. Now the government we toppled is back in power like the last 20 years didn't happen, and right-wingers expect we'll put racism above letting the Taliban murder the folks who helped us? So much for being the "guardians of morality." Let's not let them make all the damn decisions around here.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Remember when our Supreme Court knocked the teeth out of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder? H.R. 4 would put those teeth back. In the aforementioned Shelby County v. Holder, our Court held that the Voting Rights Act discriminated against Southern states by forcing them to pre-clear their voting law changes with our Justice Department -- but our Court also held that a pre-clearance formula that didn't discriminate against the South would pass Constitutional muster. God only knows if that's true anymore, what with Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Barrett on the Court now, but H.R. 4 would subject any state or locality with a record of voting rights violations to Justice Department pre-clearance. And with so many states trying to suppress the vote as we speak, we need H.R. 4. So brook no silliness about "how the South has changed," because this is about America.

Black Lives Matter helps you tell your Congressfolk and the Biden Administration to prioritize ending "qualified immunity" for police officers when they execute Black folks without even charging them with a crime. I put that last phrase in there because it gives some people pause -- folks will "support the police" without thinking very hard about what it means, but they generally will not support "killing people without charge." A few will, believe it or not, but then every generation has had to deal with crazy people. Without getting too inside-baseball (I've done that in other posts about this matter!), "qualified immunity" restricts your ability to sue a police officer for a wrongful death, and restricts that ability way, way beyond the bounds of common sense -- to the point where parents of teenage kids shot by police can't get the justice they deserve. So let's get our government to do the right thing here.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. Postmaster General DeJoy's response to USPS funding shortfalls? Raise prices and lower services. The Postal Service Reform Act's response? Stop forcing our USPS to pre-fund retiree benefits for employees who ain't even born, get postal retirees into Medicare, and allow our USPS to offer additional services like postal banking -- though the bill doesn't specify postal banking, so you may want to say that you want that in the bill when you talk to (or write) your Congressperson. Virtually all of our USPS's problems can be traced to the pre-funding of retiree benefits, and in my experience, our Post Office continues to deliver exemplary service even with all the crap they have to put up with, and services that work you want to keep working. So let's keep our Postal Service, and let's help it thrive.

Action: concerning voting rights, taxes, working families, the right to repair, and worker rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, raise taxes on the rich, expand the Child Tax Credit permanently, and pass the Fair Repair Act and the PRO 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.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. As Senate Democrats whittle down the For the People Act into uselessness -- apparently because Joe Manchin doesn't have anyone on his staff who actually reads bills -- the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act becomes the gold standard of voting rights legislation, as it would put the teeth back into the Voting Rights Act after our Supreme Court knocked them out in Shelby County v. Holder. This would be a big deal, as so many American state legislators, still wondering how a nice guy like Donald Trump could lose, are trying to restrict voting rights so that next time he (or some similarly nice person!) doesn't lose. So let's get this done.

Both Americans for Tax Fairness and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich already. Sometimes we need to send the message simply and plainly, and this is one of those times, as our House comes back early next week to vote on the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint the Senate passed earlier this month, and as several "moderate" Democrats have threatened to vote against that blueprint if they don't get to vote on the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" first, which, like, waaaaaaaaaaah. Could they be trying to scuttle both? They sure could! Should it matter? No, it should not! The popular will should matter, and polling has told us for years that large majorities of Americans want to tax the rich harder.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. The second monthly $250 or $300 check has just arrived in the mailboxes or bank accounts of millions of good American families, and there'll be at least four more of those, reminding everyone that maybe your government can actually do some good on your behalf! But why shouldn't there be approximately infinity more of those monthly checks? Because TEH FISKULZ RESPONSIBILITIEZ!!!!!? Rubbish -- no deficit peacock ever cared about blowing over $2 trillion in Afghanistan just to return extremists to power after 20 years. So, yeah, how about we spend money helping kids stay out of poverty?

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4006, the Fair Repair Act. You remember watching your dad or granddad fix his car in the driveway? That's largely a thing of the past now, thanks to a society that believes we should never corporations what to do. So now corporations throw up endless roadblocks in front of the good Americans who want to fix their phones and computers, or hire someone who can. The Fair Repair Act would help change that, by forcing corporations to provide manuals, parts, and tools to anyone who wants to fix their products, and not just yowl TEH TRADEZ SECRETZ!!!!! anymore. Don't we value our independence as Americans? Then we ought to pass the Fair Repair Act.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The bill would override state-level "right to work" (for less!) laws, and would also prevent big corporations from forcing their employees to sit through anti-union propaganda while they're on the clock; the bill would even allow workers to use card-check to organize rather than a secret ballot election (which employers tend to manipulate, right, Amazon?). I'm old enough to remember when Senate Democrats took turns joining a Republican filibuster against the Employee Free Choice Act, but now we've got it embedded in a larger bill. And if we get in our Senators' grills, we can make it law.

Action: concerning worker safety, health care, corporate spying, facial recognition, postal banking, and clean water.

Long story short: tell OSHA to issue emergency extreme heat standards to protect workers, tell the Biden Administration to enact strong regulations fighting surprise medical bills, tell Apple to scrap its plan to put a "backdoor" into its next iPhone operating system, tell big corporations to ban facial recognition in their stores, tell our USPS Board of Governors to reintroduce postal banking at our Post Offices, and tell our EPA to protect Bristol Bay, Alaska, from the notorious Pebble Mine project. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Occupational Health and Safety Administration (or OSHA) to institute emergency standards to protect workers from extreme heat. There's been a lot of it this summer, as you know, and there'll be a lot more of it in future summers, and don't let your Republican uncle convince you that this is BIG GUMMINT RUN AMOKZ!!!, because the Occupational Safety and Health Act has authorized such emergency standards since its passage in 1970. OSHA has lately issued an emergency COVID-19 standard for health care workers, so issuing one for farmworkers and construction workers and landscapers ain't exactly a stretch.

US PIRG helps you tell the Biden Administration to restrict surprise medical bills in the most vigorous manner possible. The No Surprises Act made it into the massive stimulus bill Congress passed at the end of 2020, and it authorizes our Departments of Labor and Treasury to issue regulations implementing it; big health insurance corporations, as you might expect, would like a lot of loopholes in said regulations, so they can continue to slam you with unforeseen "out-of-network" charges (your doctor was in-network, but his assistant wasn't! Or the anesthesiologist wasn't!). Damn exploitative, that is, and they'll have quite the conversation about their nefarious works at the Pearly Gates. In the meantime, let's prevent them from robbing us blind.

Fight for the Future helps you tell Apple to scuttle plans to build a spyware backdoor into its iPhone operating system. Apple's iOS 15 update will be able to scan messages and photos from any phone; they say they're doing it to stop child sex trafficking, but that's like firing a nuclear missile at a deadly pathogen or using a sledgehammer to destroy a wasps' nest, and I wouldn't blame you if you thought they always take your rights away by saying it's for the kids. I imagine Apple knows this is a dumb idea -- it's a way for evil people to get even more info from your phone than they already do -- but wants the good PR from "helping kids." They're going to get even more bad PR from "turning your cellphone into a spying device." Let's help them avoid that if we can.

Fight for the Future also helps you tell big retail corporations not to use facial recognition software in their stores. Because facial recognition software often "catches" the wrong person, more often if they're Black -- and because anytime you collect a boatload of data the way facial recognition software does, you're all but telling hackers to come and get it. When you speak out about this, you stand a very good chance of getting big corporations to listen and comply with your will -- a lot of very large corporations, like WalMart, Home Depot, Target, and Starbucks, have already committed not to use this software. But others, like Apple Stores (!) and Albertson's, are using it, so we beat them back with the Big Stick of Bad PR.

The ACLU helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to reinstitute postal banking program at our Post Offices. Post Offices often go where the big banks won't (Post Offices kinda have to!), so they're ideal for those rural and urban areas where your banking choices are this check-cashing joint or that pawn shop or that payday lender. And it's not like it's some nutty, out of the blue idea, because our Post Office offered basic banking services until 1967. And, not for nothing, but the banks you do find in underbanked areas love charging you fees out the wazoo; we can make our Post Office not do that, because our Post Office belongs to us. Or, at least, it should, if we but claim it.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell our EPA to reject the proposed Pebble Mine project using its authority under the Clean Water Act. Even former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who never saw a grift he didn't like, wouldn't touch this project with a ten-foot pole -- knowing, perhaps, that the bad PR from permanently polluting the famous and bounteous Bristol Bay salmon fisheries would follow him to the grave -- but his successor showed a disquieting willingness to entertain the project; the Army Corps of Engineers rejected Pebble Mine's permit application, but what do we know about modern life in America? Bad ideas just keep getting back up like zombies, until we deliver the head shot of the popular will.

Action: concerning social media, Social Security, human rights, corruption, immigration, and spying on children.

Long story short: tell Facebook to stop trying to obstruct research on the ill effects of social media, tell your Congressfolk to fund Social Security more fairly and pass the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act and the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, tell President Biden to end notorious Title 42 expulsions, and tell schools to ban biometric surveillance of our children. 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.

Free Press helps you tell Facebook to reinstate accounts relating to NYU Ad Observer research. You may remember this story from last week: NYU researchers were looking into how ads on social media spreads bad information, but suddenly found their accounts locked out, with Facebook telling them that an FTC rule protecting consumer privacy compelled them to act. Of course, an FTC official quickly said that was bunkum -- NYU researchers weren't prying into normal Facebook user accounts, but were looking at advertising accounts, which suggests Facebook was actually just trying to scuttle their research, because it might tell us things Facebook didn't want us to hear. That's a look Facebook would want to avoid, I would think. They can't avoid it now, but they can at least rectify their error; some good could come of it, after all.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security by making millionaires and billionaires pay more into the system. Specifically, you'd ask your Congressfolk to start applying the 12.4% payroll tax to income over $400,000, so if that's not you (and I'd bet it's not, since that income level describes a mere four-tenths of one percent of all Americans), then you won't pay any more into the system -- but folks with money might, and thus enable the rest of us to live more comfortably on Social Security into old age. Reports of Social Security's "insolvency" are of course hysterical -- I'm old enough to remember when it was supposed to run out of money in 2016! -- but if we can make it run better and do more for good Americans, why wouldn't we do it? After all, you worked for it, you paid into it, you fought for it, and when you retire, you deserve to enjoy it.

World Beyond War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4718, the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act. H.R. 4718 would empower our President to impose sanctions on nations that commit genocide, crimes against humanity (the bill enumerates 11 of these), or war crimes (36 of these), and would also prevent our government from selling weapons to a nation that commits any of the aforementioned crimes. The bill would even prevent such things as intelligence sharing and security training, except in the context of maintaining embassies and evacuating American citizens. The bill would also create a Commission on Atrocity Accountability and Human Rights who would recommend policies that would help us fulfill our duties under the bill. So this bill isn't just a moral bill, it's a smart bill. And we need more of those!

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, which would simply ban Congressfolk from investing in stocks, except for T-bonds and for certain "widely-held investment funds"; a Congressperson wouldn't have to divest of their holdings before taking office for the first time, but wouldn't be able to make new investments. We just learned that Sen. Rand Paul bought Gilead stock right before the pandemic, after receiving a briefing about the pandemic, and since Gilead makes a famous COVID treatment drug, we must ask, once again, why Congressfolk should ever get to "play the stock market" when they're inevitably going to vote on legislation concerning investments? Money prejudices everything, after all.

Amnesty International helps you tell President Biden to end Title 42 restrictions on immigrants and asylum-seekers. Title 42 allows our government to deport folks when "there is serious danger of the introduction of [a communicable] disease into the United States," but why do that and then utterly fail to restrict international travel? Because racism, that's why. Because chest-puffing over immigration, that's why. The Biden Administration has lately announced it would continue the policy, which made all the right-wingers yelling and screaming about immigrants bringing COVID with them cluck-cluck in approval, right? No? They just kept yelling and screaming about immigrants bringing COVID with them? What a surprise! Seems to me we're keeping the COVID pandemic going well enough without imaginary help from border-crossers.

Finally, End Child Surveillance helps you, guess what, tell schools to stop spying on their kids using facial recognition technology. Which sucks! Which tends to racially profile people! Which is supposedly a "bonus feature" of temperature scanners designed to identify students who might have a fever! Which also sucks! I mean, you've had your temperature taken by a remote infrared thermometer, right? Then you know it sucks! This sure all sounds like a scam designed to herd kids around, and I wouldn't put it past the corporations that manufacture them to also have their hands in the school-to-prison pipeline! Hey, if I thought of it, they thought of it. And prison is big business now. So let's not let money or convenience rule all of our decisions. And certainly let's not let our schools do that.

Action: concerning the filibuster, service shutoffs, banksters, and law-and-order policy.

Long story short: tell President Biden to actively oppose the Senate filibuster, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act, end hedge fund predatory behavior, and pass the Break the Cycle of Violence Act and the MEAL 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.

Both Public Citizen and The Juggernaut Project help you tell President Biden to lead on filibuster reform. He's used his bully pulpit to argue for the For the People Act -- said he'd "fight like heck" to get it done, in fact -- but if he's not willing to endorse getting rid of the filibuster, it'll all be for nothing. Republicans use the filibuster to stop everything, which not only means no gerrymandering reform, no campaign finance reform, and no end to racist vote suppression practices, it also means Democrats look like they do nothing all day, which guarantees they'll be in the minority in Congress again. People like it when you do stuff, and they hate it when you don't. It's pretty simple, much simpler than the 13-dimensional chess Democrats seem to play most of the time.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4979/S. 1783, the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act, which would prevent utility corporations from shutting off your electricity and water and the like. I can already hear the right-wingers yell WHEN DOEZ IT ENDZ!!!!! Maybe it ends when they get the boards out of their asses and get vaccinated so we can end this pandemic! After all, a person without essential services is a person rather more at risk of getting COVID, and therefore at risk of keeping the pandemic going. There are times -- many times, in fact -- when the compassionate thing to do is also the pragmatic thing to do. This is one of those times. And remember how the Joe Louis Arena didn't get its water shut off in 2014 even after falling over $82,000 behind on its water bill. And I think people are actually more important than sports arenas.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would rein in hedge funds' predatory behavior. Hedge funds love to swoop in, buy corporations, and then suck the wealth out of them like the vampires they are, and as a result, good Americans lose their jobs. How do we put a stop to that? We tell Congress to make hedge funds (and their executives) legally liable for the evil they do, ban the practices that allow banksters to loot other corporations, protect the workers who'd otherwise lose their jobs and pensions (that last part's important!), and close the corporate tax loopholes that make hedge funds absurdly overpaid. No, they don't "rein in bad actors" in our economy. We've got laws and regulations for that, and if we don't, we make the laws and regulations better. Big corporations make very bad cops.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4118/S. 2275, the Break the Cycle of Violence Act. Which would do what? Fund community-based violence prevention programs, that's what. Which would be a whole lot better than calling the police every time folks can't solve problems with their family, friends, and neighbors. If you're tempted to call this "defunding the police," consider that a police officer should not be the solution to every conceivable problem -- not just for our sake, but for theirs. And if you're temped to call it a "slush fund" for Black folks, remember that no one will get rich of these government grants. Really, if it were all about grift, they'd be banksters. In fact, you really ought to look to the financial sector first if you're looking for grift.

Finally, the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2837, the Making Essentials Affordable and Lawful (or MEAL) Act. The MEAL Act would repeal the law that bans Americans with drug convictions from ever getting food stamps or other forms of public assistance -- which sure sounds like the kind of thing politicians do to look tough, and thus should be opposed on that basis alone. But, seriously, if we actually do believe in rehabilitation, then lifetime bans for drug convictions is the precise opposite of logic as well as the precise opposite of mercy. And as for the folks who don't believe in rehabilitation, well, maybe there's a police state that'll take them in. I hear things are a lot simpler in police states.

Action: concerning taxes, Medicare, familiy care, and climate change.

Long story short: tell our Senate to raise taxes on rich folks, expand Medicare, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, enact the centerpieces of the American Families Plan, and ensure climate change action makes it into the upcoming reconciliation bill. 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.

You can let Sign for Good help you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the super-rich already -- they need to hear the general message just as much as they need to hear the specific ones! -- or you can make a phone call to your Congressfolk and tell them to raise corporate taxes, tax capital gains and dividend income at regular income rates, tax financial transactions, pass a Wealth Tax, and bring back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income (or pass a Millionaire's Surtax, which would only bring it up to 47%, but that'd be the highest it's been in, like, 36 years). Or you can do both! All of these actions would do this nation a great deal of good -- we'd not only have money to build an America that gives its people the services we deserve, but we'd restrain the rich from running roughshod over the rest of us, as they've been doing since approximately 1980. It's not often you can do unqualified good in this world, so seize the opportunity.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices already, and Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare. Our Senators are mulling both expanding Medicare (both eligibility and services) and letting it negotiate its own drug prices in the upcoming reconciliation bill -- no, not the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" they're still working on now, but the next bill, the one that might actually do some good and which they probably don't really want to pass anyway. You just know some idiot in the Democratic caucus will object to the "cost" of letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices when doing so would actually save the taxpayer some $80 billion annually! But we have a lot to say about whether they pass that bill or not. If we say it, that is.

Both Moms Rising and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. Hey, there's another thing that could fit into that reconciliation bill -- along with all those tax-hikes-on-the-rich we discussed in the first paragraph. The Child Tax Credit expansion, which delivers $250 or $300 checks into people's bank accounts every month, is such great policy and great politics I can't quite believe Democrats did it, but they did, in the American Rescue Plan Act, the first reconciliation bill of 2021. They're about to blow it with all their talk about "bipartisanship" and "how do we pay for stuff," of course, but, again, we have a lot to say about all of that -- if we say it.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that the reconciliation bill includes funding for home- and community-based care and paid family/medical leave. These items were the nominal centerpieces of the American Families Plan; now all we have to do is remind how-do-we-pay-for-it Democrats that a) they know damn well how to pay for it and they just have to have the guts to do it and b) if they fail at this, they're all toast in the 2022 midterms anyway. Seriously, you have Congressional Democrats who are all I can't raise taxes before an election. Because cutting taxes sure worked for the Democrats in the 2010 midterms and the Republicans in the 2018 midterms! No use saying we'd be better off without that kind of Democrat in Congress -- I mean of course we would, but we're stuck with them now, so better to communicate our will in numbers they can't ignore or deny.

Finally, both the League of Conservation Voters and the Union of Concerned Scientists help you tell your Congressfolk to ensure the reconciliation bill includes climate change action. I know, climate change, paid family leave, home care, the Child Tax Credit, taxing the rich -- it's all so much! And we've dispensed with it all in five paragraphs, and you can dispense with it all in three phone calls and/or a few minutes with the above links. We're not in maintenance mode with America; we're in pull-the-baby-out-the-damn-fire-now mode, particularly as concerns pollution. All the Millionaire's Surtaxes in the world won't amount to much if we don't have a planet to live on, and we're not getting out of climate change hell without investing in renewable energy technologies, so let's remind our Congressfolks of that, as many times as we need to.

Action: concerning evictions, chemical safety, corporate welfare, worker rights, discrimination, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell our government to extend the eviction moratorium, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the PFAS Action Act, the End Polluter Welfare Act, the PRO 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, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Moms Rising helps you tell our Congressfolk to extend the eviction moratorium. Thanks largely to pressure from House liberals such as Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), the Biden Administration did issue an order extending the eviction moratorium for 60 days in high-COVID areas, and even though real estate groups might get our Supreme Court to overturn it rather quickly, that order isn't useless -- if nothing else, it buys a little time for somehow-undistributed COVID relief money to get to the renters who need it. Still, Congress needs to hear from us that they should do something about this -- Republicans would just love to see hundreds of tent cities spring up all over America. And I'm not worried about landlords' well-being. You don't get to be a landlord if you're not well-off. Besides, hardship builds character; isn't that what we always tell renters?

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act, and -- this is critical! -- not weaken it to please their corporate paymasters. H.R. 2467 would, among other things, mandate that our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) set standards for how much PFAS chemicals we can tolerate in our drinking water; the ideal number would be "zero," given how hard it is to break PFAS chemicals down (they don't call them "forever chemicals" for nothing!) and how scientists have linked PFAS chemicals to cancer and birth defects, but given their ubiquity in our products, we are already compromising by setting any non-zero limits at all. And our Senators know this bill should pass, so they'll try to weaken it and then take credit for it. That's a wicked game, and we shouldn't let them play it.

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. This bill would end some $15 billion annually in corporate welfare subsidies to corporations that, frankly, don't need the money, like oil and gas drillers. Literally the only people in America who want to keep that welfare coming are the oil and gas drilling corporations who get it, and, sadly, they contribute big bucks to the politicians who'll vote on this bill. And these corporations don't spend nearly as much in campaign contributions as they collect in corporate welfare! So we the people need to stop that. After all, we're the majority.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The big story this past week, as you may know, is a National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) hearing officer determining that Amazon did, in fact, break laws during the April unionization vote at its Bessemer, AL warehouse, and our NLRB may order another election in the coming weeks, but wouldn't it be nice if it didn't even come to that? The PRO Act would stop a lot of big corporate abuse and intimidation -- including the forced anti-union propaganda meetings and the retaliation against pro-union workers -- before it happens. Again, big corporations won't like it, and they will spend to stop it. But I would ask this of our Senators: do you really want to take "I was easily bribed repeatedly by big corporations" to the Pearly Gates?

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. Have I mentioned how disgusting I find the arguments against the Equality Act? Why, yes, I believe I have, in some detail. And what's most disgusting about them? None of them are true! Why, those arguments would need to take two buses and a train even to get in the same neighborhood as the truth! The Equality Act prevents bosses, landlords, and banks from discriminating against gay and transgender folks just because they're gay and transgender, end of story. If that offends folks' "religious beliefs," then maybe -- just an idea -- they shouldn't base their religion around who they hate.

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. And 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. Again: the arguments against these bills all suck. The bills would curtail gerrymandering, enact same-day and automatic voting registration, give all voters 15 days of early voting, force big campaign donors to disclose their donations, give power to stop vote suppression at the state level back to our Justice Department, and end certain racist de-registration practices, so if folks call all that "a Democrat power grab," they may want to consider whether it only looks that way because of actual Republican power-grabs -- like Voter ID, or creating Rorschach-blot legislative districts, or closing polling booths in Black neighborhoods, or using the Interstate Crosscheck database to de-register Black voters without telling them, or any of the several dozen other right-wing tricks you can name.

Action: concerning war, privacy, women's health, whistleblowers, and corporate spying.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the National Security Powers Act, the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act, the Women's Health Protection Act, the Pregnant Workers' Fairness Act, the Whistleblower Protection Improvements Act, and the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale 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.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2391, the National Security Powers Act. S. 2391 would repeal all the authorizations to use military force (or AUMFs) relating to war in the Middle East, give Congress more authority over arms sales to other countries, and reform the National Emergencies Act, presumably so the next dunderhead who wants to build a border wall can't abuse it like the last one did. And if anyone tells you this would hamstring the President's ability to act, tell them that's a feature, not a bug. The President is only supposed to lead armies into battle after Congress declares war, not whenever the President feels like it.

Restore the Fourth helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1628, the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act. S. 1628 would ban targeted advertising to children, require that internet corporations get consent before collecting data from children, allow parents and children to more easily delete personal data from private data brokers, and mandate a whole lot more transparency about this issue than we have now. We have the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, but that became law over 20 years ago, and a lot's happened since then -- it's a lot easier to get targeted ads now, for example. S. 1628 would help update COPPA for modern times. Our kids deserve that, after all.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. The bill would essentially legalize abortion all across the land, in anticipation of our Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, which action would allow the states to regulate abortion again, and would make it illegal for states to restrict access to abortion in the ways they've done it over the last decade. The most recent egregious example? The Texas law that lets literally anyone sue an abortion provider for performing an abortion! Never mind proving standing to sue, or even that harm was done to you! A court will strike that part of the Texas law down for those reasons fairly soon, but why make good Americans wait?

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1065/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would require bosses to make reasonable accommodations for workers who get pregnant -- that means more sit-down assignments wherever possible, more bathroom breaks, no firing of workers just for getting pregnant or refusing to hire workers who are just because they're pregnant. I shudder to think of the "objections" Republicans will throw up against this bill. I suspect they'll mostly be TEH TRIAL LAWYERZ!!!!! and TEH BOSSEZ CAN'TZ DOEZ TEH BOSSINGZ ANYMOREZ!!!!!, both of which will be revealed to be utter horsedoodle to anyone who reads the bill, or to anyone who's ever been fired because their boss wouldn't get them a chair.

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2988, the Whistleblower Protection Improvement Act. Folks who blow the whistle on our government's corruption deserve our admiration, because they risk their careers and their personal lives when they do so; people who think they just live off the fat of a huge reward have obviously never blown the whistle on a damn thing in their lives. H.R. 2988 would better protect whistleblowers from retaliation at their jobs -- even if their boss is our President! -- and would give them more access to jury trials and speed up the process of rewarding them (if their whistleblowing merits it), so they can get on with their lives with minimal placing of sharp objects to their wrists after three years of being completely unable to work, just as a for-example. We need their good works, so we need to protect them.

Finally, 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. H.R. 2378/S. 1265 would prevent third-party data broker corporations from selling your personal information to law enforcement personnel, because selling that personal data willy-nilly like that may be lucrative for people who really should go get a real job, but it contravenes our Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. If law enforcement wants to get you, they should get a warrant first, but buying up big chunks of data from brokers lets police work around that. And they shouldn't get to work around it! If you're tempted to get all thin-blue-line about this, just imagine police harassing you because some web search you did in 2009 raised their antennae.

Action: concerning vaccines, jobs legislation, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell employers to give their workers time off so they can get vaccinated, tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich to pay for the reconciliation bill, ensure that climate change, care economy funding, and paid family/medical leave all get attention in said reconciliation bill, expand Medicare, and get rid of the Senate filibuster already. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell employers to give paid time off to their workers so they can get vaccinated. Some folks won't get the vaccine because they think it Owns the Libs, but others won't get it because they can't get time off from work, so telling employers to give paid time off to workers to get the vaccine should help with that. And if a boss says I can't afford it, ask him if he can afford to train a new worker when the old one dies of COVID because he wouldn't let him go get a damn vaccine. And ask him if he'd like to have a mini-epidemic at the workplace and lose a ton of money because of that. There's a reason we all hate bosses -- they never think of anything but the short term anymore. But they shouldn't get all the say about everything.

As Congress prepares for its wholly unearned vacation this month, you'll want to give them a call and list all the tax hikes on the rich that'd pay for reconciliation bill -- a corporate tax hike, raising the capital gains tax, treating dividends as income, a financial transaction tax, the Millionaire's Surtax, the wealth tax, the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, a 91% tax bracket on millionaire income, did I miss any? Feel free to add to your list! After all, Joe Manchin is already making his "how are we going to pay for this?" noises. Good folks of West Virginia, tell him this is how we pay for it! He can only pretend he doesn't hear, and that act will get old fast, if it isn't old already. I think it's old.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to center climate change in the reconciliation bill. You can bet the big polluters will be yelling in your Congressfolk's ears about how stupid solar and wind power are and how we shouldn't be touching big oil's corporate welfare, so we've got to be louder. This has always seemed like a no-brainer to me -- spurring renewable energy production not only creates jobs (and jobs with similar skill sets to those that displaced coal and oil workers would have!), but reduces pollution and slows the ill effects of climate change. The problem, of course, is that our Congressfolk too easily act like they have no brains. Well, you know how it is with people who act stupid -- you just have to tell them again and again and again.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that the reconciliation bill includes funding for home- and community-based care and paid family/medical leave. These were, after all, stated priorities of Joe Biden's, and we always knew a reconciliation bill would follow the infrastructure bill that Joe Manchin insisted had to be "bipartisan," and we always knew that reconciliation bill would have more so-called Democratic priorities in it. And I say "so-called" because these things are actually popular with the American people broadly, so we should communicate our will to our Congressfolk about them. After all, do we really suppose that the good citizens of Wyoming reflexively oppose paid family/medical leave just because their "representatives" in Congress do? I sure hope not.

The Hero Action Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare, by lowering the eligibility age, giving Medicare the ability to negotiate its own drug prices (which will save the taxpayer money!), and offer hearing, dental, and vision care. You'll hear from right-wingers that "Medicare Advantage already offers hearing, dental, and vision! Ha ha ha another libtard owned!" But Medicare Advantage is a private health insurance plan funded with taxpayer money, and why should hearing, dental, and vision be an "advantage"? It should be a standard. And again, do the citizens of Idaho reflexively oppose letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices just because their "representatives" in Congress will move mountains to prevent it from happening? I sure hope not.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to get rid of the filibuster that Republicans have used to block every good thing Democrats have tried to do over the last dozen years. The "success" of the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" doesn't "prove" that we should hold on to the filibuster. Republicans got just about everything they wanted out of that "deal"; its existence only proves that "bipartisanship" means "Democrats and Republicans coming together to do whatever Republicans want." Politicians should do what the people want, and the people want their politicians to do the right thing and stop making excuses about why they can't. And "because the filibuster" sounds exactly like an excuse.

Action: concerning taxes, drug prices, human rights, chemical safety, national monuments, and lead poisoning.

Long story short: tell Democrats to raise taxes on the rich, tell your Congressfolk to pass the Lower Drug Prices Now Act and stop selling weapons to Egypt, tell your Senators to pass the PFAS Action Act and reject the so-called Protect Utah’s Rural Economy Act, and tell our EPA to get the lead out of our water pipes. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell Democrats to tax the rich big-time in their upcoming budget reconciliation bill. Because you can talk about the Wealth Tax and the Millionaire Surtax and the like, but sometimes you just have to say tax the rich already! Now some Democrats are already like I can't raise taxes going into an election year! They're wrong: you can raise taxes on rich people who aren't paying enough in taxes whenever you like, because people actually like that -- as long as you defend what you're doing with some fierceness. Some of these Democrats don't know from fierceness, but that's why we're here -- where they lack it, we must give it.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices already. Somehow they couldn't get this done along as part of the Affordable Care Act, but letting Medicare negotiate its own prices was popular then, and it's popular now. Plus it's a revenue raiser! Which is not only common sense -- forcing Medicare to pay higher prices for drugs costs more money, after all -- but is also supported by research. By right-wing research! The Koch-funded Mercatus Center infamously said it would save Medicare over $80 billion annually -- and remember, Mercatus wants Medicare dead.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop selling arms to Egypt, as well as to other countries with notorious human rights records. Just this past February, the Biden Administration approved a $197 million missile sale to Egypt only days after Egypt raided the homes of six relatives of an Egyptian-American activist. Imagine your government raiding the homes of your parents, your brother, your sister, your nephew, your aunt and uncle, and your grandmother! And then imagine some even larger country selling our government $200 million in guns the next day. Seem like a good idea? No, it does not. So let's stop enabling that.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act. The House passed H.R. 2467 last week with 23 Republicans voting for it, some you already know (Brian Fitzpatrick) and some you'd never expect (Matt Gaetz); the bill would direct our EPA to designate PFAS chemicals -- also known as "forever chemicals" because they never seem to break down like other chemicals do! -- as the hazardous substances they clearly are, and would task our EPA with determining whether PFAS chemicals are also toxic pollutants, because that would require regulation under the Clean Water Act, and thus require our EPA to limit their discharge into our water, particularly our drinking water. There had damn well better be 10 Republicans who'll vote for this bill, and I don't want to hear any whining about "nanny states" from any of them.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to reject S. 31, the so-called Protect Utah’s Rural Economy Act. How would S. 31 "protect Utah's rural economy"? By freezing the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments at the size to which Donald Trump shrunk them as President. Really, that's all the bill does. If you remember that Mr. Trump shrunk these monuments only so that mining corporations could dig up those lands, then you'll probably be just as puzzled as I am that anyone could call this "protecting Utah's rural economy." It's rather like letting foxes have free reign over the henhouse and calling that "protecting our chickens." So let's kill this particular slab of stupid.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our EPA to get the lead out of our water pipes. Specifically, you'd ask our EPA to update its Lead and Copper Rule so that it gets lead pipes out of our water systems, since any amount of lead in your water can cause brain damage, particularly to children. Some Republicans probably want that, since it's their best show at ensuring future generations vote for them, but, luckily, they get literally no say in this matter. Well, they could pass a resolution of disapproval later on, but how would that make them look? It'd make them look objectively pro-dirty water and objectively pro-brain damage, and those aren't good looks. This should be a layup for our EPA, but we still have to tell them to go to the rim.

Action: concerning government spying, the debt ceiling, IRS funding, domestic violence, Medicare for All, and discrimination.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop warrantless FBI data searches, abolish the debt ceiling, increase IRS funding, and pass the Safe Connections Act, the Medicare for All 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 phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Massie/Lofgren amendment (to the Commerce Department Appropriations bill) that would outlaw warrantless searches by our FBI into the massive data bank of internet communications our NSA collects. Our NSA shouldn't be collecting it, either -- they should get a warrant for every damn thing they want to collect! -- but certainly our FBI shouldn't be digging into that data some three million times a year without a warrant. They're just fishing, and one thing folks both left and right agree on in America is that our government shouldn't investigate us without first going to a judge and convincing that judge they can convict us of a crime. The more people you involve in that process, the less some dictator-wannabe can go off half-cocked and do whatever he likes. It's that simple.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to abolish the debt ceiling already. Because why do we have that? Has its presence ever slowed deficit spending? Surely it didn't when Donald Trump passed his tax "reform" and blew up the deficit! The only reason we have a debt ceiling now is so Republicans can act out hostage situations every few years when they're out of power, and that's something we ought to discourage. Don't be tempted to say I gotta budget, why can't our government? Because, as I feel like I've said a thousand times, you don't do that -- otherwise, you'd never have a mortgage, car payment, or student loans! -- and also because you don't have a debt ceiling, which is to say, you may have an idea how much debt spending you can get away with, but you don't send yourself to jail when you go over it.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase IRS funding so we can catch more tax cheats. It's not even deficit spending! Our IRS has estimated we lose $1 trillion every year to tax cheats our IRS simply doesn't have the staffing to catch, and how do you increase staffing? You hire more agents, that's how! Even Larry Summers says you'll raise $11 for every $1 you spend on additional IRS funding (assuming we spend $100 billion over the next 10 years). Don't worry that Republicans say no to it, because they're wrong. And don't get discouraged that increased IRS funding is no longer in the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" because Republicans didn't want it. It's still the right thing to do, and if they're too foolish to realize it, tell them so. They've earned it, after all.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 120, the Safe Connections Act, which will help survivors of domestic violence to escape their horrible situations, by enabling them to get their cellphones off their family plans and still keep their phone number without having to pay onerous fees. Maybe that sounds like a small thing, but I hope you don't learn differently because it's you who needs to get out. The bill would also mandate that our FCC create rules that protect good Americans' privacy when they need this kind of protection. Big telecom corporations should already be able to do all this, but they haven't; if the Safe Connections Act passes, then they'll have to, and good Americans will be able to get out of toxic and life-threatening situations more easily. Seems to me that's what government's for, after all.

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. We've been telling them to expand Medicare as part of their infrastructure/jobs machinations, but I'm done with that process and I think we should all be done with that process, since it's now painfully obvious (with Joe Manchin's declaration that there'll be no reconciliation bill without the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" bill) that our leaders used that process to hurt us. So now it's time for us to be hardasses again, and demand that we expand Medicare to everyone -- not just people over 60, and not just ENT care, but all care, for everyone. It won't be as hard or as costly as everyone thinks -- it'll just be one fewer way for the rich to redistribute our income upward to themselves.

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. Because gay and transgender folk deserve not to be hurt by bad leaders and stupid laws, that's why! And because they deserve the same right to freedom and happiness as everyone else! Right-wingers squeal that if banks and landlords and employers can't discriminate against gay and transgender folks anymore, it somehow impinges upon their freedoms. If they really think that, they're the most clueless, self-absorbed people in America, and why should the most clueless and self-absorbed people in America get all the say about everything? If they're just playing, of course, that's even worse, and why should people who lie like that get all the say about everything? These aren't hard questions -- at least not for civilized people.

Action: concerning Cuba, killer drones, farmworkers, public water, equal pay, and communications policy.

Long story short: tell President Biden to end our trade embargo with Cuba and ban killer drones, tell big agriculture corporations to treat their workers better, tell BlueTriton to stop taking public water from California, tell our U.S. Soccer Federation to pay the Women's team as much as the Men's, and tell President Biden to appoint a fifth FCC Commissioner already. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

With people in Cuba taking to the streets in large numbers to protest, at long last, their oppressive regime, Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to end economic sanctions against Cuba. What's that, you say? That would be like rewarding an oppressive regime? No, actually, it would be like rewarding the Cuban people for their courage! It would also be like reversing a stupid, 60-year-old policy that never had the result it supposedly intended. If you're thinking sanctions did have the intended result -- by driving good Cubans into the streets -- consider why that policy should take 60 years to work. Also consider whether this pandemic, not sanctions, have had more of an effect on what Cubans are doing. Also, really? Starve a nation to hurt its government? That's evil! If we do less evil, we'll see less evil in the world. There's a reason leaders who do evil see crises everywhere years after they take power -- because they make the crises happen!

Win Without War also helps you tell President Biden to ban autonomous killer drones. Those last three words are three of the most chilling words in the English language -- drones that can decide for themselves who to kill? Who thought that was a good idea? Someone who thinks they're very clever, no doubt, but they might well find out differently at the Pearly Gates. You can very easily see, I trust, these "killer robots" making their way to law enforcement via the 1033 program, and killing Black folks with impunity? And eventually killing you "by accident"? You can't hold a drone accountable in a court of law, after all. Banning killer drones now is our only shot at stopping these dystopias. Don't be tempted to think it's like "closing the barn door after the horses have run out." They ain't all run out yet, and do we seriously contemplate doing nothing in the face of evil?

Care2 helps you tell big agriculture corporations to give their workers better benefits, including paid time off. The news hook is that folks have to pick fruits and vegetables in temperatures that are, in some areas of our nation, 25 degrees hotter than normal, and working outside while Western wildfires choke people thousands of miles East ain't easy, either, but big ag doesn't care about anything but money, so the big corporations make tens of billions of dollars in profits while their workers get dung pellets, dehydration, illness, and death. It shouldn't be that hard to break off some of their billions for their workers. Don't worry that "food prices will skyrocket" -- labor costs don't have anywhere near the effect on prices big corporations want you to think they have. And certainly don't be tempted to dismiss the whole issue because mostly immigrants work these jobs. They're people, too, after all.

Environmental Action helps you tell BlueTriton (formerly Nestlé Waters North America) to stop siphoning off public water from the San Bernardino Forest. California is having droughts and wildfires again, so letting some big corporation take water from Strawberry Creek so it can sell it as bottled water at an absurdly-high markup sure seems like a bad idea. Not for nothing, but BlueTriton only has a permit to draw out 2.3 million gallons of water annually -- but took out 58 million gallons last year. So this is also a law and order issue. Unless, you know, law and order is only for Black folks. A lot of people sure do use the phrase like that -- and those same people never use it against a corporation, even one that's obviously flouting the law. I'll keep trying to ensure people use that phrase correctly.

Ultraviolet helps you tell our U.S. Soccer Federation to pay the U.S. Women's Team as much as it pays the U.S. Men's Team. For-real for-real? The Women's Team should make more! I mean, if we believe in paying people on merit! The Women's team has won four World Cups and four Olympic Gold medals in the last 30 years, while the Men's team, well, reached the World Cup quarterfinals in 2002, and not for nothing but I hated how they played that year -- anyone can kick the ball far and run fast! It takes talent to slowly and methodically work your way up the field, precisely the thing a lot of Americans find "boring" about the sport. The USSF will retort that men's soccer is "more competitive" (a difficult statement to justify when men play men and women play women) or that men's soccer "makes more money," which only happens because of sexism in the first place and besides, we're all profoundly tired of arguments based on "more money," right? Our USSF just needs to do the right thing.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell President Biden to appoint a fifth FCC Commissioner already. It ain't just about getting net neutrality back, though of course getting net neutrality back would be a big deal -- it's also about ensuring everyone has access to high-speed broadband (particularly during a pandemic!), fighting media consolidation and media monopolies, and helping local media get back up on their feet after years of assuming big corporations know best. Our Federal Communications Commission has a lot of work to do, particularly in a social media-dominated world, and we would not best be served by a series of 2-2 deadlocks resulting in nothing getting done.

Action: concerning evictions, big tech, police in schools, women's health, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to extend the eviction moratorium, break up big tech monopolies, and pass the Counseling Not Criminalization in Schools Act, the Women's Health Protection Act, the Support Through Loss 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, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Center for Popular Democracy helps you tell our President and your Congressfolk to extend the national eviction moratorium, which could help keep over seven million renters in their homes. President Biden has signaled that he'll let the moratorium lapse -- even though very, very little federal renters' assistance has found its way to renters thus far -- but surely he knows as well as you do that new COVID cases are skyrocketing, so perhaps he'll have a change of heart before the moratorium expires on July 31. Or, more likely, he'll hear from enough of us that he'll have to have a change of heart -- or our Congressfolk will hear from enough of us that they'll force him to have a change of heart. Not every change of heart comes on its own, after all.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a suite of bills that would help rein in big tech corporations. These bills would, among other good works, prevent big tech corporations from favoring their own products on their own platforms, let customers more easily move their data from one platform to another, prevent them from charging outlandish fees to customers when they try to switch to a competitor, and prevent them from buying up corporations solely for the purpose of ending competition -- plus the bills would provide additional funding to those government agencies that would enforce the bills, if they become law. These are all hard enough to oppose that more than a few Republicans have signed on as co-sponsors. That ought to give us a bit of a head start -- not that we should be complacent! -- so let's get cracking.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2125, the Counseling Not Criminalization in Schools Act. This bill would get police officers out of public schools -- which are not safer because they're there, or else we'd stop hearing stories about how they're not! -- and use the money we'd otherwise spend on them to get more nurses and social workers in schools. Right-wingers say this'll result in "more dead social workers," but I think they underestimate how good social workers are at their jobs. And, really, what a thing to say about people, that they can't "handle" tough times. Here you thought conservatives were all about people being good enough to not need Big Gummint help! Clearly right-wingers only say they're "good enough" if they're the "right people," and only cops are the "right people" for them. But they shouldn't get all the say about everything.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. With Mississippi having asked our Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, and with a majority of our Supreme Court justices looking for the right opportunity to do so, it's good to remember what Roe v. Wade actually does: it prevents states from restricting your right to an abortion if you need it. If our Court overturns Roe v. Wade, a lot of red states will rush to outlaw abortion. The Women's Health Protection Act would prevent that, plus it'd take down a lot of laws at the state level (like "heartbeat laws" and the laws that aim to close down most abortion providers in the name of "public health") that restrict access to abortion. If we pass this bill, we can prevent what right-wingers really want: a country that forces women to be breeders, and nothing more. Seriously, that's what they want. And that's an abomination. So let's prevent that.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Support Through Loss Act, which would provide paid family/medical leave to anyone who suffers through miscarriage, pregnancy loss, or other barrier to beginning a family (such as an adoption falling through or a medical diagnosis regarding fertility). The bill would also fund miscarriage and pregnancy loss research via our National Institutes of Health (or NIH). This is a big deal, especially since people feel shame over losing a pregnancy -- and since more than a few nations have tried to charge women who have miscarriages with having had abortions. We have a lot to shame people over, but a miscarriage shouldn't be one of those things. Go after the folks who redistributed all your wealth upward to themselves!

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. Plus Daily Kos helps you sign up to call West Virginians and urge them to urge their Senator, Joe Manchin, to vote for the For the People Act. And 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. These bills are our best chance to stop racist vote suppression and big corporate domination of our elections -- which is why right-wingers tell so many lies about them. They're afraid of the world we'd make. Why should they be afraid? If you can win arguments, you should win them. Maybe they're afraid they can't! But if you can't win on a fair playing field, then don't play.

Action: another exciting edition of "all jobs, all day."

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass better tax policy, better climate change policy, better clean water policy, better broadband policy, and better care economy policy, all so we can get good jobs legislation. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy assures us that Joe Biden's tax proposals would do us all a lot of good, and I agree that they would -- particularly getting rid of the lower tax rate for capital gains and dividends, one of the most grievous injuries inflicted on the American people by the Bush Administration and that's saying something. So go ahead and call your Congressfolk and tell them you want capital gains and dividends taxed like income, since, you know, they are income. It couldn't hurt to remind them that the resulting revenue would help pay for jobs legislation. Don't brook any silliness from your right-wing Congressfolk about "dangerous tax increases." They act like all tax increases are dangerous. Tax increases on the rich aren't -- they help us restrain the rich from running roughshod over the rest of us.

You'll also want to remind your Congressfolk of the other ways we could fund jobs legislation. Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Wealth Tax on millionaire and billionaire estates, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a "millionaire's surtax," and the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Polluter Welfare Act. Also, too, Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Lower Drug Prices Now Act, since that would give Medicare the ability to negotiate drug prices, which would save upwards of $80 billion annually, which could also very easily fund jobs legislation. If you want to tell them to bring back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income -- you know, instead of telling them to institute the "millionaire's surtax" -- then go right ahead! If we all demand the 91% tax bracket, we may not get it -- but we'll certainly be more likely to get the millionaire's surtax.

Both Progress America and the League of Conservation Voters help you tell your Congressfolk that they must include better climate change policy in jobs bills. And what do you know? Better climate change policy not only fights pollution, but creates jobs. And prioritizing renewable energy over fossil fuels not only means fewer droughts and wildfires and hurricanes and heatwaves but less filth in our air and water. And we're going to need people to help us build a better way. No, "liberal" media pundits, we're not going to build a better way with robots! Too many people think robots are really far along in development, which is to laugh. But I'm one of those who think people are considerably more advanced than we used to be. Laugh if you like; we will move past you, and your cynicism will be cold comfort in your lonely old age.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to include funding for getting rid of lead pipes in any upcoming jobs legislation. You'd think Republicans would consider replacing poisonous lead pipes in our sewer systems "real" infrastructure spending, but they don't seem to care very much about that, even though lead poisoning equals brain damage in any child whose drinking water comes from a lead pipe. Maybe they don't care about it because That Only Happens to Those People, but clean water is actually fairly popular among Americans of all races and creeds, and dooming folks to poisoned drinking water should be electoral suicide. It'll only be so if we fight to get the lead out of our drinking water, and Democrats actually follow our lead.

Moms Rising and Social Security Works help you demand paid family/medical leave and better care economy funding, respectively, from upcoming jobs legislation. The United States is approximately last in the world in mandating paid family/medical leave for good Americans, and the care economy will be our future to a large degree, so we might as well ensure that jobs in the care economy are good jobs. Many Americans (and perhaps many more American politicians) still think taking care of the sick and infirm isn't "real work," when it's about the realest work you can imagine, and yes we deserve an America that rewards real work. You know, versus rewarding money machinations that just redistribute worker wealth upward to hedge fund managers. But we won't get that America unless we fight for it.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund expanded broadband in upcoming jobs legislation. We all saw how much we need high-speed broadband during this pandemic -- not just to keep working, but also to keep our children learning. Clearly it ain't just for streaming movies and TV shows anymore, and our government needs to start approaching it that way. And we're probably going to need high-speed broadband for work and school again, as roughly half the country continues to throw a tantrum about getting vaccinated. Nearly 70,000 new cases on Friday! Just like it was precisely one year ago, when they were throwing a tantrum about wearing masks. I'd prefer not to have a resurgent pandemic prove to our politicians how badly we need expanded broadband. But we should at least tell them, or they'll continue pretending they don't already know.

Finally, I'd like to say a few words about how I think the Biden Administration might really want this to play out -- not to demoralize you, but to prepare you. I think the Biden Administration split the jobs bill in two to split us in two, much as the Obama Administration held out the public health care option in 2009 in order to forestall any talk of expanding Medicare to include everyone. And just like they yanked the public option back when it came time to pass the Affordable Care Act, I also think the Biden Administration really wants the far more desirable reconciliation bill to fail, which also means they really want to lose both houses of Congress in 2022 so they can keep this interminable (but very lucrative, for some people) drama going between insane Republicans and spineless Democrats. You'd think Democrats would take a different lesson from recent events -- like, that Republicans are far too dangerous to ever have any kind of power again, anywhere. But if they won't, we have to make them learn that lesson, and we'll only do that if we speak out. We are the only people standing between America and oblivion. And we always have been. So let's step up and be heroes, today and every day.

Action: concerning spyware, war on Yemen, cellphone radiation, antibiotics, bankster fees, and qualified immunity.

Long story short: tell world governments to ban NSO-style spyware, tell President Biden to end our involvement in Yemen for-real for-real, tell our FCC to update communications device radiation rules, and tell Congress to pass the PASTEUR Act and the Overdraft Protection Act and end qualified immunity for police officers. 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.

Fight for the Future helps you tell world governments to ban commercial malware like the NSO Group's Pegasus, exposed by The Guardian late last week as the spyware that can infect your apps, capture your emails and texts, and listen in on your calls. NSO says it's only for "terrorists and criminals," but you and I know better, and not just because governments frequently decide today's irritant is tomorrow's terrorist, but because, you know, they're lying -- of course they mean to spy on innocent folks! In order to scare them into being more compliant with our corporatist-run world! But our lives mean nothing if all we get out of them is a few more years of cold comfort -- and if we don't fight evil wherever it rears its noxious head.

Peace Action helps you tell President Biden to end all American support for the Saudi/UAE-led coalition war on Yemen. President Biden did say he would end "offensive military support" for the war, and that sure is better than Donald Trump's I'm-an-independent-but-I-still-do-whatever-the-Saudis-want act, but his Administration hasn't been particularly candid about what "end offensive military support" means, and we have reason to believe that it means "still selling some arms to the Saudis and helping them maintain their aircraft." Good Yemeni are dying from easily-preventable causes like disease and malnutrition, and that's coming from all that hammering that we're enabling. Wouldn't it be nice if we stopped enabling that kind of thing?

The Environmental Working Group helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission to update its regulations concerning wireless radiation. Our FCC hasn't updated those rules for over 25 years; gosh, can you think of anything that might have happened in the meantime? The mass proliferation of wireless internet is one thing, and the mass proliferation of cellphones and tablets is another. Just about everyone has all three of these things now, and so we get a much higher dose of wireless radiation than we used to. Don't brook any nonsense about how "strict rules about radiation will make the whole economy collapse" -- and I guarantee you some corporate hack is writing that comment as we speak! More hacks should say things like "strict rules about radiation will save a lot of money in health care costs." Though if they did, I guess they wouldn't be hacks.

The Pew Environmental Trusts help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2076, the Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions to End Up Surging Resistance (or PASTEUR) Act. Look past the tortured acronym and see that the PASTEUR Act would spur the development of life-saving antibiotics, a matter of considerable urgency since viruses constantly adapt to the antibiotics we've got, such that some of them become superbugs that antibiotics can't kill. The PASTEUR Act would fund research and development of antibiotics, but it would also vastly improve current drug policy by letting Medicare and our Veterans Administration get the new drugs at cost. And it's a bipartisan bill that would actually represent progress, versus what "bipartisanship" typically represents, which is no progress. So let's encourage better works from Congress wherever we can.

US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4254, the Overdraft Protection Act. The Overdraft Protection Act would require more transparency about overdraft fees and set a limit of overdraft fees your bank could charge you, to one per month and six per year. That may not sound like a big deal, until you make half a dozen transactions without realizing you're overdrawn, at which point your bank would allow all the transactions and hit you with six overdraft fees, which could amount to over $200. If you're tempted to strut around about "fiscal responsibility" when you hear this, ask yourself whether a bank allowing you to overdraw your account just so it can slam you with fees promotes fiscal responsibility. Then ask yourself if a bank deliberately re-ordering transactions just so it can collect fees promotes fiscal responsibility. I think you will sheathe your sword after that. Or, at least, you should.

Finally, Black Lives Matter helps you tell your Congressfolk to end qualified immunity for police officers. Too many police officers escape accountability for serious crimes because they enjoy "qualified immunity," which keeps them from being punished unless they committed a crime that's exactly the same as a crime a previous police officer committed, and how likely is that? A judge who doesn't want to convict can usually find something different between the two cases, and a literalist judge certainly can. There's innocent-until-proven-guilty, and then there's innocent-only-because-of-a-technicality; everybody knows the latter isn't justice, and Black folks, sadly, feel the pain of that knowledge more acutely than most.

Action: concerning the Amazon indigenous, taxes, jobs spending, privatization, chemical safety, and discrimination.

Long story short: tell Brazil's government to protect the rights of indigenous folks from corporate land-rapers, tell your Congressfolk to fund our IRS, fund home and community care, reject the privatization of public assets, and protect us from PFAS chemicals, and tell your Senators to pass 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 phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: Sum of Us helps you tell Brazil's Congress to reject a bill that would allow the Brazilian government to force indigenous peoples from their lands in the Amazon rain forest so that big corporations can develop it. It's not just that the Amazon rain forest is the greatest carbon capture machine the world has ever seen, it's that people live there, and people are more important than profits, more important than development, and more important than some politician's "legacy." Besides, the indigenous people of the Amazon have been a thorn in Jair Bolsonaro's side since day one of his ignominous reign, and any enemy of Jair Bolsonaro is a friend of mine. And yours.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to fully fund our IRS so it can catch more tax cheats. People who avoid their taxes cheat all of us, after all -- they cheat all of us out of roads, bridges, schools, police officers, firefighters, and libraries. Naturally Republicans have balked at more funding for the IRS as a way of helping to pay for the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" they're continuing to hash out, plus the ProPublica reporting about rich folks' tax evasion has made Republicans more defensive of rich folks than of the rest of us, whom they have cheated. I guess they're objectively pro-crime, then! Why do Democrats not paint them this way every day? Because it would be "uncivil"?

The National Domestic Workers Alliance helps you tell Democratic Senate Majority Leader Schumer to ensure the $400 billion proposal for care infrastructure makes it into the big reconciliation bill Democrats are planning later on this year. Presumably Democrats will pass that without Republican help, so all we need to do now is ensure that Democrats don't eject it from the bill because, oh, gosh, I don't know? Because they like shooting themselves in the foot? Because "bipartisanship"? Because debt and spending and I'M SCARRRREEEEDDDDD!!!!!! OK, maybe I'm being a bit harsh, this time -- our government has never invested this much in home and community care before, prospect of creating a million jobs or not. But if you want to make progress, you have to take big steps. Bigger than Democrats are accustomed to taking, to be sure, but we need to be the spine in their back. At least then they'll have a spine.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk not to let the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" privatize public assets in order to pay for other public assets. President Biden wanted to fund it with higher corporate taxes, but Republicans, being the party of "fiscal responsibility," prefer smoke and mirrors, like "user fees" and selling off some bridges and roads and suchlike in order to pay for others. But we need only look to Chicago's privatized parking meters and Bayonne's privatized water system to see what that bodes for America -- higher prices and worse service. You know, like they're trying to do with our Postal Service. Who voted for that? I don't think even Trump voters voted for that.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3990/S. 2047, the No PFAS in Cosmetics Act. PFAS chemicals, as you may know, are the "forever chemicals" you find in carpeting, cookware, food packaging -- and, eventually, in our drinking water and our bodies, where it might well help give you and/or your loved ones cancer, a weakened immune system, or a learning disability. You also find it in cosmetics, and though you may not wear makeup, someone else does, and they wash it off their face at night, and then guess where it goes? Into your drinking water, and into your body. (Consumer Reports also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act, which would do more about PFAS chemicals generally; the former bill has a better chance of passing, but there's no reason you can't say you support both.)

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. The other side has their people calling their Senators going WAAAAAAAAAAH WHATZ ABOUTZ MY RELIGUZ BELIEFZ!!!!!! and WAAAAAAAAAAAH TEH BOYZ WILLZ BEATZ TEH GURLZ ATZ TEH FIELD HOCKEYZ!!!!!!, so we need to be on the horn with our Senators talking about stopping banks and bosses and landlords from discriminating against gay and transgender folks, which is what the Equality Act is actually about. Republican Senators, in particular, pretend the hysterical opinions count more than yours. But we civilized people must make our will unmistakable.