Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning financial regulation, tax policy, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep our CFPB as independent as possible, reject any extension of the Trump tax “cuts,” and pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any bill that would subject our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to the annual appropriations progress. Congress has long found this method of funding perfectly acceptable for other agencies, so why not now, with our CFPB? Probably because our CFPB has done a lot of good work for us. You’d think that’d mean something to our House Reps, given that they’re supposed to represent us (that’s why we call them “representatives”), but apparently the whining of big donors means more, hence why right-wingers want to defund our CFPB, which is an awful lot like defunding the police, since our CFPB catches financial predators. I’d hate for America to be a land where all you have to do to get what you want is have a lot of money and whine a lot.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to extend the notorious Trump tax “cuts.” I put “cuts” in quotation marks because most Americans didn’t get nearly as much benefit from them as the rich and corporations did. I’d happily make tax cuts for lower brackets permanent, but I would never be a hostage to letting rich folks pay hundreds of thousands of dollars less every year and corporations paying millions of dollars less every year. One percentage point is a lot more money at higher incomes, after all. Politicians pretend not to get that, but we do.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act. Big corporation (foreign or not, I really don’t care) wants to mine for copper on Native American sacred land that also happens to be public land? Why, no, thank you. And I’m not particularly anti-copper – the health care industry found out during the pandemic that getting rid of all those copper tables years ago was a big mistake – but I am anti-pollution and pro-clean water and pro-clean air and pro-respecting actual religious freedoms. I guess, for some people, religious freedom only counts if you’re white – or if you’re Black or Brown but also a Republican. That’s not the America we want to pass on to our children and our children’s children.

Action: concerning voting rights and government shutdowns.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and stop all the government shutdown drama. 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 the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would expand voting rights for all Americans, by restoring our government’s ability to stop vote suppression at the state or local level. Our Supreme Court ended that in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, by ruling that the Voting Rights Act (which gave our government the power to stop discriminatory voting rights laws) itself discriminated against Southern states – I know! – but the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would empower our government to stop vote suppression in any state or locality with a documented history of vote suppression. That sounds exactly the kind of thing Congress should be doing instead of indulging in shutdown drama.

Oh, yeah, speaking of that: both the National Women’s Law Center and the Coalition on Human Needs help you tell your Congressfolk to oppose brutal, hateful spending cuts and avert a government shutdown. I trust I don’t have to explain why, oh, but I will anyway: the folks who want to shut down government aren’t just evil, they’re also whiny diaper-loaded brats who act the way they do because they can’t win arguments on the merits. Government shutdowns mean no food inspections, no pollution inspections, no workplace safety inspections, and no soldiers’ pay. Anyone who wants any of that to happen just to prove a point about “spending” is an evil bastard whom we must oppose and defeat.

Action: concerning government oppression, net neutrality, forced arbitration, and political campaigns.

Long story short: tell Iran to free Toomaj Salehi, tell our FCC to reinstate net neutrality protections for internet content, tell our CFPB to end forced arbitration clauses in banking consumer contracts, and tell our FEC to prevent AI-generated falsehoods in political campaigns. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Iran to stop detaining hip-hop artist Toomaj Salehi, because that’s what snowflake governments do when people use art to criticize them. Seriously, imagine Richard Nixon putting Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young in jail after “Ohio.” Bet he thought of it! Bet today’s right-wing politicians would say it out loud a lot more easily! (About whom, though? Taylor Swift? Todd Snider?) But I digress: criticizing a government (for killing a woman for wearing a hijab “wrong,” no less) is no reason to put a guy in solitary and beat the stuffing out of him. I’m sorry that even needs explaining.

Free Press helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to reinstate network neutrality protections for internet content post-haste. Our FCC finally has five Commissioners now, so they have no excuse anymore. Probably no issue has united liberals and conservatives like net neutrality – virtually everyone who’s not a big telecom PR hack wants you, not some corporation, to decide where you go on the internet, without big corporations blocking or throttling your favorite websites or forcing websites to pay for faster delivery. Naturally, confronted with this unanimity of public opinion, the Trump FCC told the American people to fuck off and repealed net neutrality. But the battle has been joined again.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to end forced arbitration in banking industry consumer contracts. Arbitration used to be for big corporations so they could fight each other outside of the court system, but now big corporations routinely force arbitration clauses on you just to buy or use their products, and banks are no different. Don’t believe the BS that the “average” arbitration award is much higher than what you’d get out of a class action suit, because if you lose, averages won’t matter – and your opponent may be able to extract a large award out of you. So yeah, you’re much better off relying on your right to a day in court, even if it doesn’t make you rich.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell our Federal Elections Commission (or FEC) to clamp down on AI-generated lies in campaigns. People want to unleash AI all over everything these days, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t do it! And “fraudulent misrepresentation” of a candidate’s words is already illegal, so it shouldn’t be any different if AI enables it. I guess AI’s creators would say if AI did it, and AI isn’t really sentient, then nobody’s to blame! But you see the problem with that argument in the phrase “AI’s creators,” I trust. Yikes, this shouldn’t be that hard.

Action: concerning big pharma and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell your Senators to stop big pharma drug patent abuse, and tell President Biden to put people on our USPS Board of Governors who will finally fire Postmaster General DeJoy. 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.

U.S. PIRG helps you tell your Senators to stop big pharma drug patent abuse, one stratagem big pharma corporations use to charge absurd amounts of money on the drugs they develop. They use “patent thickets,” or multiple overlapping patents for the same product, and they also use “product hopping,” where they create new patents even for minor changes to a product, and they also use “pay-for-delay” agreements, where they pay plaintiffs to stop suing them because, hey, they’ve got crap-tons of money they made from all their other anti-competitive tactics which result EpiPens costing $600 and AbbVie charging five figures for Humira more than 20 years later and folks rationing their insulin because they can’t afford it. So our Senators need to hear from us.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to appoint two new members to our USPS Board of Governors who will finally get rid of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. He’s raised prices, cut services, and slashed jobs, all things our executive class calls “bold leadership” but which any reasonable person would call bad leadership. He’s also proposed closing Post Offices in rural areas which not only have no viable mail-delivery alternatives but which have to vote by mail because they don’t have actual polling places. And all of these “bold” moves may well kill good Americans, since so many of us depend on our Postal Service for life-saving medicines. I know, he wants to make our Postal Service run badly so he can privatize it. But why should we allow that?

Action: concerning Social Security and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to cut Social Security benefits “behind closed doors” or cut IRS funding, and to bring back the 2021 Child Tax Credit expansion. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to create a Social Security commission that would meet “behind closed doors” to cut Social Security benefits for future retirees like us. If they have to “meet behind closed doors,” that means they want to do something we wouldn’t tolerate, and we wouldn’t tolerate cutting the benefits we worked for, fought for, and deserve to enjoy when we retire. Again, all they have to do is the thing they absolutely won’t do because of their rich donors – tax higher incomes. No “behind closed doors” rubbish, though. That’s the mark of a coward, and it’s also the mark of a fascist. But I repeat myself.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to gut increased IRS funding. Because it’s working exactly the way we intended it to work! Our IRS has answered more than two million more calls than in previous years and has already harvested $38 million from rich tax cheats, and given there’s a lot more fraud out there than that, their continued efforts should yield more bounteous results in the future. Don’t fall for the lie that our IRS will use that money to go after poor people, because news flash! They were already doing that precisely because they were underfunded! Jesus Mary and Joseph I hate stupid arguments.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021, which put $250 or $300 checks every month, per child in working families’ bank accounts. Child poverty more than doubled the year after 50 Republican Senators and Joe Manchin let it expire and let’s make sure we get those villains in the right order, so we should bring that back, so kids can eat and be clothed and other things they have every right to expect of their childhood. Again, brook no lies about “families using those checks to buy drugs,” at least not in the absence of evidence. Any sentence beginning “you just know” is not evidence.

Action: concerning taxes and budgets.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations and pass a clean budget bill without poison-pill dramas. 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.

While House Republicans stage ever-more absurd and obscene dramas about deficits and debt, we can call our Reps and tell them to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations! Hey, if you care about deficits and debt so much, you’d raise taxes on the very folks who can most easily afford it – not regular folks like us who struggle just to make ends meet. The 91% tax bracket on millionaire income and the 55% tax bracket on corporate profits helped create the greatest middle class ever back in the New Deal era, and if we bring them back, we can bring that middle class back again. Worry not that it’ll kill jobs, because bosses do that anyway when we give them too much freedom! They only create jobs when we force them to, and high taxation is one of the best tools we have to force them to do the right thing. So let’s do it.

In the meantime, Public Citizen helps you tell your Reps to pass a clean budget, mercifully free of far right-wing fever dreams and hostage crises. They think they have us over a barrel, because they have to pass something in 12 days or our government shuts down, but that’s never how it is – we have them over a barrel, because a government shutdown sure ain’t gonna reflect well on House Republicans, and neither would a bill larded down with poison pills that would never pass on their own. So let’s exercise our power and make them do the right thing.

Action: concerning voting rights, government funding, and whistleblower protections.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to restore voting rights to ex-felons, pass a clean funding bill, and expand whistleblower protections for federal workers. 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.

Stand Up America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Democracy Restoration Act, which would restore the right to vote in federal elections to released prisoners. Because they never should have lost their right to vote in the first place! Because continuing to punish someone for a crime for which they’ve already served their sentence is cruel! And, not incidentally, because folks who try to deny voting rights to ex-felons mean to deny rights to Black and Brown folks, not because “they commit all the crime,” but because our justice system tends to target them. So, like, enough already.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk you expect them to pass a clean government funding bill, with no poison pills and no manufactured hostage crises. And no means no! Just because politicians want to do something doesn’t mean anyone else wants to do it! Rep. Greene (E-GA) says she won’t vote for any spending bill if our House doesn’t vote on impeaching President Biden over a whole lot of nothing, and we have to stop coddling people who do that. No means no! And no whining means no whining!

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Expanding Whistleblower Protections for Contractors Act, which would, as its title suggests, strengthen protections for whistleblowers and expand those protections to include federal contractors as well as federal employees. Because contractors can dime out some serious corruption, too! And they don’t do it for the money, because no amount of money can make up for lost jobs, livelihoods, families, or friends, so don’t believe big corporate lobbyists who tell you they do.

Action: concerning workers' rights, Social Security, and school lunches.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the PRO Act, tell Republicans you will not stand for raising the Social Security retirement age, and tell your Congressfolk to make school lunches free for all children in America. 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 to tell your Congressfolk to pass the PRO Act, so that corporations won’t be able to walk all over workers trying to organize for better pay and working conditions quite as much as they are now. Folks could only oppose the PRO Act if they think “right-to-work” means something other than “right-to-work-for-less,” or if they think it’s perfectly OK for bosses to simply refuse to negotiate with workers who’ve already voted to organize. And why should such folks get all of the say about everything? Hell, why should they get invites to our cookouts?

Social Security Works helps you tell Republicans we will not permit them to raise the Social Security retirement age. That’s the big solution of “sane” Republicans like Nikki Haley and Tim Scott – none of them will, for example, start to tax income over $160,200 into the system, which would alleviate the shortfalls that are always a few decades off because right-wingers love to cry about “imminent” Social Security “insolvency.” They do it so you’ll be demoralized and fight them less, but don’t let them gaslight you into inaction!

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk that school lunches ought to be free for all children in America. What’s that you say? You mean they’re not already free? By God, what do our taxes pay for, then? Those are all legit questions, but school lunches actually cost money, which fewer Americans have now after half a century of our “leaders” sucking up to big corporate power, so now the especially small minds in government resort to lunch shaming in order to get working families to pony up overdue school lunch bills. No civilization should put up with that – and no civilization should let it get that bad, either.

Action: concerning health care.

Long story short: tell our CMS to enact the most vigorous hospital price transparency rule possible, and tell big pharma corporations to stop trying to stop Medicare drug price negotiation. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

U.S. PIRG helps you tell our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) to enact the most vigorous hospital price transparency rule possible. Because the price of health care is too damn high and none of us have any idea how much things are supposed to cost! Big corporations generally won’t try to argue that point, but they’ll whine about “innovation” and “jobs,” which you can always answer by saying the cost of health care is too damn high and we all think you’re gouging us, and look at you not even lifting a finger to prove you’re not! They’ll try to weaken the rules in other ways (like posting “estimates” or posting prices in computer formats you won’t be able to read); U.S. PIRG lists these, and you’ll oppose them when you sign.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell big pharma corporations to stop suing our government over Medicare drug price negotiation. Virtually everyone supports Medicare drug price negotiation – which proves that the American people are smarter than professional cynics want us to think – but big pharma still wants to try to kill it in court, or at least hurt us in doing so. That’s right, I said hurt us – you think our government is getting the money to defend Medicare price negotiation from somewhere other than our taxes? Big pharma would hurt us just to preserve their unearned billions; that’s really all we have to say about it.

Action: concerning labor, law and order, and cruelty to animals.

Long story short: tell your Senators to confirm Gwynne Wilcox to our NLRB, and tell your Congressfolk to end qualified immunity for police officers and ban cyanide bombs from our public lands. 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 your Senators to confirm Gwynne Wilcox to our National Labor Relations Board. Ignore anything right-wingers say about how our NLRB is waging a “war on employers” or something – they’re just shilling for their big corporate donors, as always, and those big corporate donors would vastly prefer to pay their workers in dung pellets and then prevent them from ever organizing for better pay and working conditions. If they stonewall the Wilcox nomination, our NLRB won’t have a quorum of members to get things done. That’s what right-wingers want. Don’t let them have it.

Both the Daily Kos Liberation League and Defending Rights and Dissent help you tell your Congressfolk to end “qualified immunity” for law enforcement officers. “Qualified immunity,” a doctrine born entirely of a Supreme Court decision, gives police officers too much immunity from wrongdoing, by requiring the circumstances of their wrongdoing to be exactly the same as previous instances of wrongdoing before we can do anything about it. That makes them too protected from accountability. Do we want anyone too protected from accountability? Particularly if they have the power to arrest us and shoot us?

Finally, the Endangered Species Coalition helps you tell Congress to outlaw cyanide bombs on public lands. Cyanide bombs supposedly aim to kill predators, but truth is they’re indiscriminate killers – they maim and kill animals that don’t do any harm to the circle of life, plus they maim and kill people, too. Civilized people don’t accept that as the eggs we must break to make an omelette. I trust I don’t have to argue this point any further.

Action: concerning monopolies, death panels, and robocalls.

Long story short: tell our DOJ and FTC to make corporations account for their aims when they propose mergers, tell our HHS Department to investigate death panel claims against HCA Healthcare, and tell our FCC to crack down on robocalls and robotexts (and tell our Senate to confirm a full slate of FCC Commissioners). Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Our Department of Justice (or DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) have proposed making big corporations account for their actions more precisely when they propose to buy another corporation. Naturally the big corporatists are whining about how much paperwork they already have to do, which may be enough to tell you that you should support the proposed changes. But as Matt Stoller explains further: big corporations don’t even have to answer questions like why they’re merging or who’s on their board of directors or who their competitors are or how much market share they’re proposing to gobble up, even though the answers to most of these questions would reveal that they’re trying eat their competitors alive and make themselves richer at civilization’s expense. We should at least make them commit such answers to paper; you can read the new proposal here, and you can leave a public comment about it here. Don’t believe the hype that these are “radical” changes, because only whiners would tell you that. Certainly don’t believe anyone who says “but we’ve always done things the way I’d prefer we keep doing them,” because anyone who says that commits the unpardonable sin of mistaking their life experiences for the entirety of human history. And, since corporate lawyers aren’t stupid, I’d say they’re committing that sin on purpose, which makes it twice as bad. Don’t let sin rule America, good peoples!

Care2 helps you tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to investigate allegations that HCA Healthcare has used, guess what, an algorithm to push hospice care on patients who actually stand a decent chance of recovering. Because those patients won’t make them enough money, basically! Right-wingers, that’s what a “death panel” actually looks like! And it’s far, far more likely to come from some private corporation than from our government! Note well that Wall Street banksters love HCA stock, which makes HCA suspicious pretty much automatically, and also that HCA once had to pay a $1.7 billion fine for defrauding Medicaid and Medicare (among other federal health care programs). As if to prove our decadence as a civilization, HCA’s CEO back then is now Florida’s junior Senator, Rick Scott. Let's fight the real evil, gang!

Finally, U.S. PIRG helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to crack down on illegal robocalls/robotexts. I’ve gotten no less than half a dozen of these irritants daily this past week, so I know they’re not doing enough, and so do you, I bet. Aren’t I on a damn do-not-call list? Why, yes, I am! But I guess these crooks just count on doing so much crime that law enforcement can’t catch them all. What a thing to bring to the Pearly Gates when you die! It’d help, of course if our Senate were to confirm a full slate of FCC Commissioners, which Free Press helps you do.

Action: concerning worker safety, Medicare, and animal abuse.

Long story short: tell our government to better protect workers from extreme heat, tell President Biden to better protect seniors from privatized Medicare, and tell world governments to ban any products that come from octopus farming. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Labor to do more to protect good American workers from extreme heat, while Civic Shout helps you tell our Occupational Safety and Health Administration (or OSHA) to do the same. President Biden has already directed our Department of Labor to issue hazard alerts related to the heat, but our DOL could be doing more. And OSHA has yet to issue a standard protecting workers from extreme heat, even though we’ve told them to do that before. Folks are dropping dead in the Texas heat, and going to burn wards in Arizona just for falling on the sidewalk, so ignore the politicians who seem to be objectively pro-heat death.

Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to protect our seniors from the greed of private health insurers who have too many grubby hands in Medicare. President Biden has moved a bit slowly on this matter, which is why we’re getting in his grill about it now. Our government has privatized more and more of Medicare over the last 20 years, even though, frankly, anyone who still thinks government couldn’t do better than private corporations in delivering health care is a fool. At least half of all seniors on Medicare Advantage switch back to traditional Medicare in their last year of life, but we don’t want so many seniors to get out of the claws of private health insurers so late.

Finally, Eko helps you tell world governments to ban any and all products that come from farmed octopuses. You don’t need to have seen an octopus squeeze its way off a boat to know that these creatures deserve better – frankly, we shouldn’t wait for animals to impress us with their intelligence before we treat them better! Octopus farms shine a constant light on animals that obviously prefer darkness, plus these farms kill octopi by putting them in freezing water; think you would like that? No, you would not. Doesn’t matter that some corporation thinks they can make a profit doing this, because profit doesn’t justify torture. I can’t believe I still have to say that.

Action: concerning government spying, animal abuse, and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the Cooper Davis Act and pass Canyon’s Law and the FATCAT Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose the Cooper Davis Act, which would force internet service-providing corporations to report to our Attorney General regarding substance abuse violations. I got a better idea: how about our government get warrants for that information? And I got an even better idea: how about we stop putting drug users in jail and start getting them the help they need instead? Sure, we’d have to start seeing drug users as patients and not criminals, and ending the war on drugs also means less racism. But I’m all for enabling our personal growth as a nation – just not by giving law enforcement more weapons to bludgeon us with.

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass Canyon’s Law and outlaw the use of cyanide bombs to kill animals on our public lands. Because cyanide bombs are absolutely heinous! They result in a slow, painful, and torturous death for anyone nearby, and n.b. that pronoun – cyanide bombs don’t just kill animals that prey on livestock, they can also kill any animal who happens to be nearby, and they can also kill any human being who happens to be nearby. In fact, the bill’s authors have named their bill after an Idaho boy who almost died from cyanide bomb exposure. Could it be that just throwing hurt and pain around isn’t the only way to solve problems?

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Fueling Alternative Transportation with a Carbon Aviation Tax (or FATCAT) Act. Again, the acronym isn’t as unwieldy as you might have expected! Believe it or not, folks with their own jets actually pay less in fuel taxes than folks who fly commercial flights (i.e., you and I), but the FATCAT Act would increase that tax eightfold (from 22 cents per gallon to $1.95 per gallon) and end exemptions for oil exploration and logging. Oil and logging CEOs hardly need the handout, after all! And given how oil tax breaks helps foster the right-wing movement that eventually destroyed the New Deal, perhaps we should be more careful about that.

Action: concerning antibiotic abuse, printer ink, and climate change.

Long story short: tell WalMart to get antibiotic abuse out of its meats, tell our FTC to ensure we can get printer ink a lot more cheaply, and tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous carbon emissions rules possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

USPIRG helps you tell WalMart to get antibiotic abuse out of its meat supply chain. Why WalMart? Because it sells about half the groceries in America, that’s why! And getting it to root out the antibiotic abuse from the meat it sells would go a long way toward ending antibiotic abuse in America. Recall that seven out of every 10 antibiotics go, no, not to sick people or sick animals, but to nominally healthy feed animals, partly to fatten them up and partly to help them endure their squalid living conditions, and if we abuse antibiotics like that, we might as well put a welcome mat out for the next generation of superbugs. So how about we make antibiotics effective again?

PennPIRG helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to break the big computer corporations’ iron grip on printer ink. You’d save big bucks using generic printer cartridges rather than the proprietary ones computer corporations bully you into buying, and while their scam certainly operates on a smaller scale than health insurance or cable TV, it’s the same awful principle. Our FTC has done good work, which is why Republicans call FTC Chair Lina Khan a “socialist,” but we should still treat all government agencies as though they’ll only act if we tell them to – because if they don’t, they’ll find (as they did during the Trump years) that it’s actually against the law to simply ignore public comments.

Finally, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous carbon emissions rules possible. Our EPA has finally proposed limiting carbon emissions from existing plants as well as new ones, and that is, as a famous philosopher would say, a BFD. But of course the big fossil fuel corporations doing the polluting will get a lot of oxygen, so to speak, for their rubbish arguments. Waaaah it’ll kill jobs! Waaaah it’ll drive prices up! Actually these rules create jobs for folks who help implement them, and raising prices is to a large degree up to the corporation selling the service, but you know, when you can’t win arguments, just cry a river. Hey, right-wingers do it all the time.

Action: concerning voting rights, taxing the rich, and criminal justice reform.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the ACE Act and pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the OLIGARCH Act, and the People’s Response 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.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called American Confidence in Elections (or ACE) Act, while the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act. Again, this should be easy: the ACE Act would make it harder for you to vote, by making you jump through unnecessary hoops and giving billionaires more say than you, while the Freedom to Vote Act would make it easier for you to vote, by expanding early voting and clamping down on gerrymandering. We live in a world where solutions are actually quite simple and politicians are too cowardly or evil to implement them. And that’s why we have to get in their grills all the time.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Oppose Limitless Inequality Growth and Reverse Community Harms (or OLIGARCH) Act, which I have to say is not as clumsy an acronym as I thought it’d be. The OLIGARCH Act would impose a wealth tax that increases as a particular taxpayer’s wealth goes up, from 2% for households with 1,000 to 10,000 times the median household wealth up to 8% for households with 1,000,000 times median household wealth. Thus the OLIGARCH Act obviates the need to adjust tax brackets with inflation, since it bases its tax on median wealth. Rich folks will lie like mad about this bill, so we need to get out in front of them.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the People’s Response Act (or the PRA). The PRA would (largely through grants and funded research) encourage different approaches to community policing than the put-cops-everywhere-and-make-them-do-everything-model we now employ. This isn’t just better for the folks who lose their loved ones to police violence, it’s better for the police. We use police like Swiss Army knives, expecting them to jump into any situation and handle it effectively, when virtually no one has the flexibility of mind to go right from confronting a violent assault to talking a man out of jumping off a bridge. That just means we, as a civilization, have to be more flexible.

Action: concerning striking workers, encryption, and free tax filing.

Long story short: tell Hollywood to meet actor/writer demands and end their strike, tell Meta to encrypt Messenger chats already, and tell our IRS to ensure that all good Americans can file their taxes directly for free. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell big Hollywood corporate executives to end the writers/actors strike by meeting their demands. Don’t let the occasional Seth MacFarlane or Adam McKay lead you to believe the life of a Hollywood writer is cush – the vast majority of Hollywood writers have just as much trouble making the bills as you or I, while the vast majority of Hollywood executives make millions of dollars, and want to replace all their writers and actors with AI as we speak. Of course, as Simon Pegg has pointed out, AI only imitates other folks’ work and has nothing of consequence to say on its own. Also too, all workers are important. So let’s get in these bosses’ grills.

UltraViolet helps you tell Meta to install end-to-end encryption for all Messenger chats like it said it would. While Meta fiddles, good Americans go to jail for having abortions or helping their family members get abortions – and Meta enables it all by turning over their data to law enforcement! If Meta had to turn over a bunch of data it couldn’t read and cops couldn’t read, that’d help good Americans struggling against our Supreme Court’s right-wing tyranny. You might say this isn’t particularly a law-and-order stance, but I reserve that phrase largely for banksters, polluters, and fascists, not for folks just trying to muddle through, and certainly not for folks offending right-wing wannabe tyrants. Shouldn’t we get more say than wannabe tyrants?

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell our Internal Revenue Service (or IRS) to support direct, free tax filing for all Americans. Our IRS will start a pilot program for direct, free tax filing next year, but this ain’t rocket science, particularly since our IRS already has all the information it needs to do your taxes and we hardly need all the private, for-profit tax-filing corporations standing between us and our obligations to our civilization. I’m sure right-wingers will get around to saying that private tax-filing corporations are job creators, but I suspect most Americans will find that as unconvincing an attempt at hostage-taking as I do.

Action: concerning voting rights, price-gouging, and financial predation.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the American Confidence in Elections Act, pass the Freedom to Vote Act, start punishing price-gouging corporations, and reject the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century 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.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called American Confidence in Elections (or ACE) Act – also known as the “Big Lie” bill – while the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act instead. Don’t ever be tempted to demand that your Congressfolk just pass a bill that incorporates the best bits of both! The “Big Lie” bill, which would impose Voter ID nationally and let billionaires spend even more money on elections, doesn’t have any good bits. Meanwhile, the Freedom to Vote Act would give us more early voting, less gerrymandering, and less campaign spending; clearly those are good bits.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to start holding corporations accountable for their price-gouging. It’s simple: when you have high inflation and record corporate profits at the same time, as you did for most of last year, then you have corporate price-gouging. We used to hold corporations accountable for this sort of thing, before the “free” marketeers took hold of our civilization, and we need to get back to that post-haste, or else corporations will just keep hurting us forever and ever. The year-over-year inflation rate may be down to 3% at present, but we still can’t let corporations get away with what they’ve done.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, which would not only give handouts to crypto corporations that deserve their bad reputation, but would require our Federal Trade Commission to consider “innovation” whenever it writes new regulations! To quote a phrase, right-wingers have tortured the word “innovation” so that it tells them whatever they want to hear; if this bill passes, pretty much any bankster will be able to claim their new fraudulent product is “innovative,” and thus escape much-needed government scrutiny. Do we really want to “innovate” on the definition of a “safe investment” until it includes mostly unsafe investments?

Action: concerning worker safety, tenants' rights, and drug prices.

Long story short: tell Texas legislators to repeal a worker-killing bill, tell our FHFA to protect tenants from greedy landlords, and tell big pharma CEOs to stop suing over Medicare drug price negotiation. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Care2 helps you tell the Texas state legislature to repeal its just-passed law forbidding localities from mandating water breaks for workers. In the hundred-degree-plus heat, no less! Some “conservatives” these are, telling the cities of Austin and Dallas they’re not allowed to give workers ten-minute water breaks! What happened to smaller communities doing better for their people? I can’t even say big corporations really wanted something like this – honestly, a ban on local ordinances allowing water breaks looks like nothing more than a way to swing their testicles in front of good Texans’ faces, which I guess is all Republicans are about now. What, they’re going to govern? That is to laugh! Unless we get in their grills, that is.

People’s Action helps you tell our Federal Housing Finance Agency (or FHFA) to insure that anyone who receives federal government-backed loan treats their tenants with dignity and respect. That would mean, among other things, less stupidly-high rents, less evicting people on a whim, less discriminating against tenants due to race or sex, and keeping homes and apartments safe to live in. I know some property-owning corporations (and some property-owning people!) will squeal HOWZ CANZ I MAKEZ TEH MONEYZ!!!!! If they can’t make money without treating people right, they deserve poverty. And, at the risk of blasphemy, eternal hellfire. Hey, I’m no coddler.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell big pharma CEOs to drop their absurd lawsuit aiming to prevent Medicare from being able to negotiate some drug prices. Some drugs, and not until 2026! Since that’s all we could get out of that “maverick,” Kyrsten Sinema. Imagine thinking you’re “independent” because you suck up to big corporations even more! But I digress. We should tell big pharma CEOs to drop their stupid lawsuit because the Big Stick of Bad PR works! We know it works because it’s worked in the past! It works better on corporations than on politicians, I’ll grant, and I wish that weren’t so, but we’ll take what we can get – and then go get more of what we deserve.

Action: concerning education, airline regulation, and legacy admissions.

Long story short: tell Florida Republicans to get rid of stupid teachings about slavery, and tell your Congressfolk to regulate airlines again and end legacy college admissions. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Care2 helps you tell Florida Republicans that Black slaves did not, in fact, “benefit” from slavery by learning “skills” they could use “later in life,” and to repeal educational standards forcing public school teachers to “instruct” their pupils as such. “Later in life,” Gov. DeSantis said! Of course slavery was always for life, and would still be so if we didn’t fight a damn war over it. Yes, we fought a war to end slavery! Don’t believe cynics and BS artists! Just as it’s good to celebrate what we did right, it’s evil to pretend what we did wrong wasn’t so bad, or was somehow “beneficial.” Folks with privilege can turn almost anything to their advantage. Did slaves have privilege? Of course not! And Florida needs to stop pretending otherwise.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk that our government needs to start regulating airline corporations again. We haven’t regulated airlines for about 50 years, and among other things, that means you don’t get a complementary dinner on a two-hour flight anymore, but now on a much longer flight you have to pay through the nose to get a Panini sandwich that looks like it's been in a vending machine for months. Right-wingers will utter the word “regulation” with a sneer like anyone else feels that way about it anymore! More likely good Americans have become tired enough of cancelled flights and stranded families and lousy customer service that they would welcome a little government intervention.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Fair College Admissions for Students Act, which would prevent colleges from giving preferential treatment to children of their donors and alumni. Our Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, but did nothing about all the failsons of rich donors that elite colleges admit all the time; indeed, those failsons include our last two Republican Presidents. I’m sure right-wingers will pretend to agree with us – but will argue that laws mandating fair treatment aren’t necessary! You’d be within your rights to ask: then what are laws for?

Action: concerning voting rights, tax collection, and public media.

Long story short: tell California to let prisoners vote when they get out of prison, and tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to defund our IRS or our public media. 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.

Progress America helps you tell California state legislators to pass Assembly Constitutional Amendment 4, so that good Californians can vote on whether to restore voting rights to prisoners once they’ve completed their sentence. No one should ever lose their right to vote, but restoring prisoners’ voting rights once they’ve paid their debt to society would be a good start. And yes denying voting rights to felons after they get out is absolutely racist! Black folks make up one-eighth of the population but comprise almost one-third of folks in prison; why, I’d rather have polluters and financial predators comprise almost one-third of folks in prison! In the meantime, let’s be a lot less cruel.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your House Reps to reject any effort to repeal the IRS funding passed in the Inflation Reduction Act. Between this and their grandstanding about the FBI, Republicans are so hot to get rid of law enforcement funding these days! You might even call them the “defunding the police” party! But the added IRS funding has already started to catch some big-time tax cheats, and I know Republicans target our IRS because “no one likes paying taxes,” but people also don’t like schools and libraries closing or bottoming out over potholes or getting put on hold on 911, so maybe we should encourage Republicans to put their big-boy pants on.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to repeal or reduce public media funding. It seems like Republicans always threaten to cut public media funding and they never do, but that’s only because we speak out, so we need to keep speaking out. And, as with our Postmaster General’s zeal for getting rid of post offices in areas where no private mail-delivery corporation wants to go, a lot of public media work in areas where big private media corporations either don’t operate or put out a lot of cookie-cutter media “product” that doesn’t do a damn thing for the good Americans who live there. Sure I wish public media were less pro-establishment, but the folks who have nothing else likely don’t care.

Action: concerning monopolies, banksters, elections, and immigrants.

Long story short: tell our FTC to fight monopolies as vigorously as possible, tell our CFPB to crack down on predatory medical lenders, tell our CFTC to outlaw betting on elections, and tell our DHS to crack down on law enforcement abuse of immigrants. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. Our government has issued new antitrust guidelines, and Matt Stoller describes them at some length and helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to adopt the most vigorous anti-monopoly guidelines possible. Maybe if these guidelines were before that Microsoft/Activision judge she wouldn’t have issued such a stupid ruling – or maybe not! But our merger guidelines have been too lenient for too long, and with all the supply chain problems we’ve had lately, we’ve seen that has to stop. And if you want to call your Congressfolk and tell them to stop trying to defund our antitrust efforts in appropriations bills, what can stop you?

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau People to crack down on predatory medical payment products, like high-interest credit cards you can only use to pay medical bills and high-interest installment loans. Banksters who wave high-interest loans in your face at your moment of need are some of the lowest people on Earth; at the risk of blasphemy, I hope most of them have toasty asses after Judgment Day. In the meantime, we have a task on Earth: to prevent people like that from making a killing on other people’s misfortune. And if you want to call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass Medicare-for-All legislation, what can stop you?

Public Citizen helps you tell our Commodity Futures Trading Commission (or CFTC) not to allow betting on elections. Yeah, they’re really considering that. You’ve heard your co-workers talk about how (insert name of sport they’re always betting on) is fixed? Now imagine how that’ll be if we allow betting on elections! And no use arguing that most betting will be on relatively arcane stuff (i.e., how big a lead in the Hispanic vote a candidate has over the other), because an election is not a sporting event. We treat too much of politics like sports, not just in our allegiances, but in our constant hunger for the latest polling; it makes us sick, immoral, and decadent, so we have to stop it.

Finally, our ACLU helps you tell our Department of Homeland Security (or DHS) to stop collaborating with so-called Operation Lone Star, which has inflicted unconscionable cruelty upon would-be immigrants. Imagine running from death squads in one country only to be met by cops literally pushing you back into the Rio Grande, where they just so happened to have installed razor wire; does that sound like something a civilized people would do? Only the most hardened heart can read these details and say BUTZ WE HAVEZ TO DOZ TEH SOMETHINGZ ABOUTZ TEH ILLEGULZ!!!!! I don’t speak to such hardened hearts anymore; I leave them to God.

Action: concerning Medicare, Social Security, worker rights, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to increase Medicare and Social Security funding, protect worker rights, and protect abortion 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.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act, which would help improve Medicare and Social Security funding by taxing income over $400,000 into both systems, applying payroll taxes to investment income, and closing a loophole that hedge fund banksters use to avoid paying into the systems. These are all much, much better ideas than “going behind closed doors” and cutting Medicare and Social Security benefits without the people hearing about it. After all, you worked for it, you fought for it, you paid into it, and you deserve to enjoy your benefits when you get older.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, which would stiffen penalties for corporations that refuse to let their workers collectively bargain for better pay and working conditions. The main problem with labor law in America is corporations can break it without paying for it, but that’d change with the PRO Act, which would make refusing to negotiate with unions, intimidating workers, and propagandizing them in mandatory meetings a lot more costly. And what’s the alternative? Letting corporations get bigger and richer and hoping that wealth will “trickle down” to workers? Hopefully we’ve seen by now that doesn’t work.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to reject a national abortion ban, while UltraViolet helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Abortion Justice Act, which latter bill would keep abortion between a woman and her doctor. Strange how all the right-wingers who demanded that Obamacare stay out of the whole patient-doctor thing are all too ready now to get between women and their doctors. OK, I guess it’s not “strange” per se – the right-wing desire to turn women back into submissive breeders explains the “strangeness” away. It’s still hypocritical, though. Is it too much to ask that hypocrites don’t get all the say about everything?

Action: concerning pollution, apartheid, and cruelty to animals.

Long story short: tell our EPA to limit carbon dioxide pollution from existing power plants, tell President Biden to withhold military assistance from Israel until it stops oppressing Palestine, and tell our BLM to stop using cyanide bombs on animals. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous carbon dioxide pollution standards possible. Our EPA has proposed limiting CO2 pollution from existing plants for the first time – Obama-era limits only addressed new plants, you may recall – and that is, as a famous philosopher once said, a BFD. Of course the big polluting corporations will flood our EPA with comments about KILLINGZ TEH JOBZ and STRANGLINGZ TEH INNOVASHUNZ!!!!, so we’ve got to remind our EPA that fighting pollution reduces health care costs for everyone, creates jobs for folks who implement the new standards, and helps corporations innovate their processes. I think that does it.

Amnesty International helps you tell President Biden to withhold military/security funding to Israel until it dismantles its apartheid system in Palestine. Hey, Jimmy Carter said it almost 20 years ago! And he actually brokered a peace deal between Israel and Egypt back in the day, so he might know what he’s talking about. You don’t have to believe Mr. Carter, of course – you need only note that Israeli forces are bombing a refugee camp in the West Bank as we speak. Who bombs a refugee camp? Two kinds of people: one, someone actually trying to create terrorists, and two, someone whose sense of self-preservation has gone so wrong they commit atrocities. If Israel is the latter, we can work with that.

Finally, the Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management (or BLM) to ban the use of cyanide bombs in animal control. Yes, we really do that, and it’s as awful as it sounds: the notorious M-44 cyanide bomb lures coyotes and foxes in with a sweet aroma and then shoots out a deadly poison leading to a long and painful death. And of course it’s not even as discriminating as all that, for it also lures in other animals and gives them that same painful death sentence. If a coyote attacked your dog or your child, you still wouldn’t be a civilized person if you wished for such an execution. Civilization demands more of us than that, even in our most inconsolable pain.

Action: concerning voting rights, health care, and right-wing dramas.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject anti-voting rights bills and pass pro-voting rights bills, tell our Senators to make sure all Americans can get insulin, and tell our Senators to get rid of holds so drama kings like Tommy Tuberville can’t prevent over a hundred military appointments. 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.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called American Confidence in Elections (or ACE) Act and instead pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore the teeth our Supreme Court punched out of the Voting Rights Act, while the Freedom to Vote Act would enact universal early voting, clamp down on gerrymandering, restore ex-felons' voting rights, and restrict dark money campaign contributions. But the ACE Act would enact strict Voter ID requirements and open the floodgates for even more billionaire spending on elections. It ain’t hard to tell Goofus from Gallant here.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Senators to make sure everyone who needs insulin in America can get it. It’s a life-saving medicine! If our government can’t prevent big pharma corporations from charging an arm and a leg for it, then what is our government for? Right-wingers would answer that our government has no responsibility to ensure diabetics can get insulin, but would also say our government must ensure that bigots can force their bigotry down our throat, though they don’t put it like that. I would hate for any of them, or any of their loved ones, to get diabetes themselves, but sadly, experience teaches us that such a tragedy is the only thing that ever convinces a right-winger to act human.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell Senate Democrats to break through all of Tommy Tuberville’s super-dramatic holds on military promotions, but how about we do even better and call our Senators to tell them to outlaw holds completely? Democrats have 51 Senators, so they can do this, and if Democratic Senators have put a hold on even two bills or nominations over the last two decades, they’ve completely escaped my attention. Mr. Tuberville, all by himself, and just this year, has put a hold on over 150 military nominations, because abortion or something, but Republicans have done this to plenty of bills over the years, and when one side repeatedly abuses the American people with a tool, we’ve got to take the tool away from them.

Action: concerning Medicare, Social Security, drama, and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act, stop Tommy Tuberville’s big military hold drama, and start taxing billionaires a lot harder. 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 pass the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act, which would, as its title suggests, start taxing income over $400,000 into Medicare and Social Security and start taxing investment income into the system as well. The bill would also close certain loopholes that benefit hedge fund managers and fossil fuel corporations so they start paying more. I’ll never express any alarmism over these programs, because I’ve been hearing hysterical alarms about their "impending" "insolvency" all my damn life, but doing these things would help Medicare and Social Security be even better for good Americans. I know it’s Friday, but let’s get in our Congressfolk’s grills about this.

Care2 helps you tell your Senators to lean on Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville and tell him to stop blocking military nominations. He’s doing it, supposedly, because of our military’s policy to help soldiers who need abortions and who live in anti-abortion states with travel expenses, but Jesus Mary and Joseph how about just winning the argument and getting legislation passed? Could he be pulling this crap because he knows he can’t do these things? I kid, of course – this is exactly the kind of thing evil people do when they can’t coerce good people into doing what they want. Your Senators need to know this is evil. Your Senators also need to know that if they let this appalling drama go on, they never get to call themselves “pro-military” again.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to start taxing billionaires a lot harder than we currently do. Ain’t nobody a billionaire through hard work – after all, you’ve done hard work, and plenty of it I bet, and did it ever get you as far as just sucking up to a bankster? No, it did not. And that’s a sad commentary on our civilization. We can start to fix our civilization by reversing our 60-plus years of cutting rich folks’ taxes and start taxing them again. No, they won’t “move overseas,” because even billionaires don’t just up and move whenever they like. No, they won’t “refuse to create jobs,” because they’re already doing that with all the light taxation they enjoy! Stupidity can’t keep winning in America.

Action: concerning abortion rights, defense spending, and executive pay.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect abortion rights, cut our bloated defense budget, and fight excessive CEO pay. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Republican national abortion ban, while UltraViolet helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Abortion Justice Act, which would protect abortion rights. With six of 10 Americans saying our Supreme court decided the Dobbs wrongly, with 20 of 50 states banning or restricting abortion rights over the last year, with two states putting women in prison for getting an abortion, with women having to get life-saving hysterectomies instead of the medically-necessary abortions that wouldn’t have put their lives at risk in the first place, it shouldn’t be hard for our Congressfolk to do the right thing, but they’ll screw it up if we don’t tell them.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to cut $100 billion from our defense budget. That would still leave around $800 billion for defense, so I don’t think we’ll suffer too badly. We already spend more money on killing machines than the next nine countries combined – their number includes China and Russia, by the way, and we spend 10 times what Russia does – and our Defense Department has itself identified over $100 billion in waste, so you could say that cutting $100 billion from our defense budget is a no-brainer. Of course, it’s not a no-brainer for the no-brain-having-people who represent us in Congress, which is why we have to get in their grills all the time.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, which would tax corporations at a higher rate when they pay their CEOs more than 50 times more than their average worker. That’s not a whole lot to ask, frankly, when my preference would be to tax millionaire income at 91% and tax corporations at least as hard as regular folks – hey, they want to be “people” so badly! – but the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act would improve our civilization, so we ought to enact it. When CEOs make over $100 million a year, and make 300 times what their lowest-paid workers make, we’ve got to do something about that. Don’t listen to folks who tell you it’s “socialist.” They all drive roads, after all.

Action: concerning taxes, Social Security, and Supreme Court ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject Republican tax “reform” plans, boycott Kevin McCarthy’s Social Security-cutting Commission, and pass Supreme Court ethics 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.

Both Americans for Tax Fairness and Public Citizen help you tell your Congressfolk to reject the latest tax scam coming out of the House Ways and Means Committee, which, sigh, provides massive tax breaks to foreign investors and maybe $40 a year in tax breaks to you and I. Why, that smells like the first Bush Mobb tax cut, doesn’t it? Aside from that $300 check I kept returning, I pocketed $60 from that in 2001 and in 2002, even though the “average” tax cut was supposedly around $1,800 annually; I wonder who got the rest of it! I kid, of course – Republicans love cutting your taxes a little so they can cut their big donors’ taxes a lot. We don’t have to put up with that, of course, so how about we not?

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to boycott Kevin McCarthy’s Commission to Slash Social Security Behind Closed Doors Without Any Input From the American People. OK, he’s not calling it that, but that’s what it is, and just as we made Social Security and Medicare benefit cuts too toxic for Congress to consider during the debt limit “debate,” we need to make it toxic for any of our Congressfolk to take part in this clown show of a “commission.” Too many politicians pretend they’re “serious” because they’ll cut someone else’s earned benefits, but they’re not. Actual serious people keep their damn promises, and so should our Congressfolk.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell your Senators to enact new ethics standards for our Supreme Court. We’ve listed plenty of reasons to make our Supreme Court Justices adhere to the same ethics standards every other federal judge has to follow – we’ve lately been reminded of another one, involving the late Justice Ginsburg – but all we need say now is: did you see that shitshow that was the end of their term? If they didn’t pal around with so many rich folks giving them so many gifts, they wouldn’t have issued two of the worst rulings of the new millennium 10 days ago. They claim they’re “incorruptible,” but we know they’re human, so we still need laws to protect us from them.

Action: concerning airline safety, corporate greed, and Congressional ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk not to weaken airline pilot certification requirements, stop corporate price-gouging, and strengthen the Office of Congressional Ethics. 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.

Progress America helps you tell your Senators to abandon Kyrsten Sinema’s effort to make flying less safe. Apparently Sen. Sinema, galaxy-brain that she is, would like to weaken pilot-certification requirements, specifically by letting pilots count hours spent in simulations as hours actually spent flying in the air! You know, just like you count all the hours you spend playing first-person shooter games as time spent at war! Pilots, of course, want to keep the stronger standards, so who doesn’t? Ah, you already know – airline corporate executives, who just so happen to have given Sen. Sinema six figures. Does that mean they should get what they want? No! But if we don't speak out, they will.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop corporate price-gouging. You’ve heard that even the Wall Street Journal has lately smiled on the theory of “greedflation,” which holds that the main (though not only) driver of inflation is actually just corporations raising prices because they can. Of course, the rest of us observed high inflation and record profits happening at the same time and figured that out, but if your salary depends on you not understanding it, etc. Anyway, hard as it may be to believe, Congress used to actually stop this sort of thing from happening! And Congress needs to stop it from happening again, because we deserve at least that much.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to strengthen the Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent watchdog agency that investigates alleged ethics violations by House Reps. Naturally our House weakened that agency six months ago – George Santos really liked that, which should tell everything you need to know – and now some Congressfolk are making noises about weakening it further, since they’re still having a sad over not getting what they wanted out of the debt limit “deal,” I guess. So we’ve got to get in our Congressfolk’s grills about this. We beat back their efforts before, in 2017; we didn’t do it in 2023, but if you make something good happen once, you can make it happen again.

Action: concerning taxes, energy efficiency, and voting.

Long story short: tell our IRS to make tax filing a lot easier, tell the Biden Administration to strengthen federal building codes, and tell state legislators to abandon any proposed internet-voting scheme. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell our Internal Revenue Service to offer free direct tax-filing software, no matter how much the big tax prep corporations whine about it. Most of us don’t have complex investments designed to evade legal scrutiny, so we ought to be able to just file our tax returns with our government and be done with it. And these corporations have been getting caught red-handed trying to divert people from free filing options even as they claim to promote free filing options, so Jesus Mary and Joseph why should they get all the say about everything? And we’re about the only rich country that makes people jump through these hoops about taxes, so let’s maybe be “number one” only at good stuff.

The Sierra Club helps you tell the Biden Administration to update energy efficiency standards for all federally-financed buildings. Even a conservative would agree that if we’re paying for it, we get to set standards, but today’s right-wingers would reflexively call any energy efficiency standards evil. But what’s wrong with living or working somewhere that doesn’t bleed heat, or gets electricity from the sun? What’s wrong with keeping pollutants out of federal buildings? Maybe all that doesn’t make some executive rich, but we’ve spent the last half-century letting these executives dictate to us how we live our lives, and that is not freedom. I mean, yeah, it’s freedom for them, but not for the rest of us. And that is why we fight.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell state legislators to abandon any thought of forcing internet-based voting on their constituents. Because it’s easier to steal an election conducted over computers than it is to steal an election with a paper trail, that’s why! Gosh, it’s almost like that’s the whole idea. Don’t get tempted to think that we’re the greatest nation on Earth so we should be able to do elections over the internet. A better thing to think is that we’re the greatest nation on Earth so we should be able to conduct free and fair elections! Which easily-hackable internet elections won’t be, no matter how many rich people get in the grills of state legislators. So we’ve got to get in their grills first.

Action: concerning child labor and pollution.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to enforce child labor laws, and tell our EPA to enact vigorous mercury and tailpipe emissions rules. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell the Biden Administration to enforce federal child labor laws against the states that would destroy them. Iowa’s new law is justly notorious, allowing younger kids to work more hours at more dangerous workplaces, but a lot of states want to do the same thing; I guess right-wingers “blame” higher wages for that, but those wages are the result of millions of Americans taking stock of their lives during the pandemic and deciding they wanted more from their jobs than the back of their bosses’ hands. So naturally they turn to child labor! Their efforts deserve humiliation then oblivion, so let’s get our government to deliver that.

Moms Clean Air Force helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous mercury emissions rules possible. As with lead, no amount of mercury is safe (just ask Zombie Isaac Newton!), but coal power plants still belch it out. No use going all TEH WAR ON COALZ!!!! whenever we contemplate limiting mercury emissions; one would think a coal corporation would constantly refine its processes to deliver energy more efficiently and pollutes less! But one would also realize that coal corporations, like all the others, mainly try to goose up stock prices at the expense of every other aim, and that’s why our government has to step in on our behalf and make them do the right thing.

Finally, the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous passenger car and truck tailpipe emissions rules possible, so that we pollute the air less and save good American car-drivers money. Passenger cars and trucks account for well over half of all vehicle-caused climate emissions, and if you can go farther with less power, you’ll spend less money as well as pollute less. And why would anyone oppose these things? Are folks really objectively pro-pollution? Well, some are objectively pro-more money for rich folks, and that leads them to be objectively pro-pollution, whether they see that or not. Of course, they don’t get all the say about everything in America – if we speak out.

Thieves in the Temple will be off all next week, so everyone, enjoy your holiday!

Action: concerning health care, medical debt, education, and taxes.

Long story short: tell PA state Senators to keep preventive health care cost-free and help good Pennsylvanians shed their medical debt, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the College for All Act and reject the so-called Tax Cuts for Working Families 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.

Pennsylvania residents, take note of some good news for once: the state House has passed HB 1050, which would insure that good Pennsylvanians can continue to get preventive health care cost-free, as well as HB 78, which would help good Pennsylvanians get rid of their medical debt. Generally if you don’t get medical treatment, you don’t get well, so don’t listen to anyone who tells you that folks with a lot of medical debt are somehow “deadbeats.” And cost-free preventive health care reduces health care costs down the line, regardless of the bleating of the “religious” “freedom” crowd. Now these bills go to the state Senate, so the Pennsylvania Health Access Network helps you tell your state Senators to keep preventive health care free and ensure that medical debt doesn’t cripple the good citizens of the Commonwealth.

RISE helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the College for All Act, which would make community colleges tuition-free and public colleges tuition-free for families making under $125,000 a year. Some people will never listen to anything about how college shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg, but they should know that public colleges were once, in fact, free in California until the late 1960s. They should also remember that college never cost so damn much as it does now. And if you’re susceptible to propaganda about Starbucks baristas with Gender Studies degrees, note well that public community colleges, which actually do a good job at vocational training, are the freest colleges under this legislation.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to vote against the so-called Tax Cuts for Working Families Act, which would extend the Trump tax cuts for the rich. We’ve been trying to get real tax cuts for working families for years – like that massive Child Tax Credit expansion that put $250 or $300 checks in working family bank accounts. That was $250 or $300 per child, too! But the Republican plan is always the same: throw crumbs to working families, but cut rich people’s taxes by tens of thousands of dollars, and that’s what this latest bill would do. The good news is most Americans don’t buy their BS anymore, or else Democrats would have a lot fewer seats in our House and Senate. Still, we’ve got to get in their grills.

Action: concerning voting rights, judicial ethics, and endless war.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, and to repeal the 2002 Iraq AUMF. 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.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Yes, it’s back, and Congress should keep bringing it back until it passes. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore our Justice Department’s ability to reject state voting law changes, and our Justice Department could do that in any state or locality that’s demonstrated a pattern of voting rights abuses. That would close the hole in the Voting Rights Act our Supreme Court blew open in their notorious Shelby County v. Holder ruling. And it would help us restore the voting rights a lot of states have spent the last several years gutting.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, which would force our Supreme Court Justices to follow the same ethics rules every other federal judge follows. Is there a news hook? You bet there is! Paul Singer apparently paid for Sam Alito to go on a very expensive fishing trip to Alaska in 2008 when Mr. Singer had business before our Supreme Court. Long, long experience has taught us that we should not trust our leaders so much as make them do right by us; hence we do not “trust” Sam Alito that they weren’t really pals or that his First Class plane seat was just sitting there unused, we make sure he never does such a thing again. Why should this be hard?

Finally, the Secure Families Initiative helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) in Iraq. That resolution is almost old enough to get itself blind drunk at a bar without getting carded, and all it’s good for is encouraging Presidents to fling us off into more stupid wars, so getting it wiped from our laws shouldn’t be a big deal. And let me state, at least one more time, that our Constitution mandates that Congress declares wars and Presidents conduct wars. And it doesn’t say Congress declares “police actions” or “authorizes military force”; it says war. There are some old words we’ve got to get back to using, precisely because they’ll make us fly right again. “War” is one of them.

Action: concerning discrimination, workers' rights, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Equality Act, the PRO Act, and the Medicare for All Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Equality Act. The Equality Act, as you know, would prevent landlords, banks, and governments from discriminating against gay, transgender, and queer folks, which sounds like something we all ought to support, regardless of the right’s fearmongering about “boys in girls’ locker rooms” like boys will literally become girls just to grope some teenage T&A. But let’s also contemplate state governments conducting “underwear inspections” of kids to make sure they’re not trans and note that the Equality Act would also help us prevent schools from becoming state-mandated child molesters.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. Wondering why Starbucks won’t negotiate with all their workers who voted to unionize? Because the price for failing to negotiate is a slap on the wrist! The PRO Act would change that, by setting deadlines for corporations to negotiate with a fair contract with workers, and getting our government involved in those negotiation if need be; the bill would also stiffen penalties for intimidating workers and forcing them to attend anti-union propaganda meetings. Most times when employers break the law, they don’t have to pay a dime; the PRO Act would change that, so Congress should pass it.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare for All Act, which would put everyone in America on Medicare and ensure we pay a lot less for our health care. As I’ve said before, levying an employer-side payroll tax (i.e., one not paid by workers) totaling the money corporations already pay for private health insurance would fund Medicare-for-All just fine, and even cover the 30 million Americans without health insurance. But just wait until you hear that CEOs at the seven biggest publicly-traded health insurance corporations took home over $330 milllion last year! I wonder how many surprise medical bills that could’ve paid for! Needless to say, we won’t have that problem with Medicare for All.

Action: concerning justice, pollution, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell our Department of Justice to investigate Mika Westwolf’s death, tell Pennsylvania state legislators to better protect good Pennsylvanians from fracking, and tell Delaware state legislators to let felons vote and not to let corporations vote. 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: MoveOn helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate the suspicious death of Mika Westwolf, a 22-year-old Native American woman killed while walking along Montana’s Route 93 on March 31. That’s almost three months ago, good peoples, and with the Montana Highway Patrol refusing to release dash cam and body cam footage, and with no nearby businesses being contacted, apparently, for surveillance footage, it sure does seem like justice will come slowly, as it tends to do for Black and Brown folks in America. Oh, and the main suspect has Aryan Nations ties; you’d sure hate to think the police might want to sweep this under the rug for that reason. So let’s find that out.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Food and Water Watch helps you tell state House Environmental Resource and Energy Committee members to let HB 170 get a full vote by the state House. HB 170 would increase the amount of space between gas drilling sites and schools, hospitals, and water wells, and would also set much longer setback distances for hydrofracturing (or “fracking”) operations; the bill would further prescribe minimum distances between hospitals and other potentially hazardous sites. The only argument against HB 170 is that gas drilling executives don’t have enough money to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes yet, so we ought to pass it.

Finally, Delaware residents, take note: Common Cause helps you give felons the right to vote and reject a bill that would give corporations the right to vote. Nobody should have their right to vote taken away no matter what they’ve done, period, end of sentence. And a corporation is a thing, not a person, period, end of sentence. They’re actually selling giving corporations the right to vote – corporations headquartered in Delaware but with no other presence there, I feel compelled to add – as a way to boost turnout. I’m so old-fashioned I think serving your constituents is the best way to boost turnout. Maybe they should try that.

Action: concerning immigration, media, and health care.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to expand health care for DACA recipients, tell internet service-providing corporations to drop Fox News, and tell Merck’s CEO to drop his lawsuit against Medicare drug-price negotiation . Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

United We Dream helps you tell the Biden Administration to expand Medicaid and Affordable Care Act eligibility to DACA recipients, i.e., “dreamers.” You could say it comes down to if they’re here, don’t be so damn cruel to them, but it’s even simpler than that: DACA recipients left their home countries as small children because their parents immigrated to America, and we’d be cruel bastards to deny them access to health care simply because of a decision made long ago that they had literally no part in. No use squealing about terrorism, etc., at least not if you’re a proud member of the greatest nation on Earth. So many self-styled “patriots” have so little mercy; I wonder why.

Inequality Media helps you tell your internet service-providing corporation to get the Fox News (sic) Channel off their platforms. Fox News just paid out over three-quarters of a billion dollars to settle a defamation lawsuit, and quickly responded by gutting its hard news division, such as it had one, so even if you knew absolutely nothing about the trail of slime it’s left across the country we love over the last few decades, you would wonder why any cable company would carry a “news” channel that had suffered such a reversal (and responded by resolving to get even worse at news-gathering!). Our First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, but not an audience or a pile of money for that speech, so let’s keep up the pressure until they fold.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell Merck’s CEO to “drop your greedy lawsuit” aiming to end Medicare drug price negotiation before it even starts. Of course it’s even worse than a greedy lawsuit – it’s the very definition of a frivolous lawsuit, one that clogs up the courts and delays justice for all. And it’s filed by a rich corporation! There’s a lesson in there, somewhere. Anyway, don’t brook any cynicism from anyone about how Merck is just trying to protect its profits. Our Declaration of Independence speaks of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and none of that includes a “right” to price-gouge good Americans by overcharging them for the medicines they need to live.

Action: concerning tax cuts for the rich, Social Security, Medicare, and stock buybacks.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject attempts to extend the Trump tax cuts for the rich, tell Democrats to ignore Kevin McCarthy’s Social Security/Medicare benefit-cutting commission, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Reward Work Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject Republican attempts to extend the Trump tax cuts for the rich. Yep, our Republican-held House is trying to extend those tax cuts for the rich, and they’ll pay for it by wiping out renewable energy tax credits, because nothing is more important than “owning the libs.” Seriously, it’s like the first question they ask when they make policy is how can I hurt people? And of course wiping out renewable tax credits won’t pay for all those tax cuts for the rich, thus mere weeks after all that posturing about the deficit, they’re going to try to make those deficits even bigger. And they’ll get whatever they want if we don’t speak out.

Social Security Works helps you tell Democrats to ignore Kevin McCarthy’s Social Security/Medicare commission. Republicans didn’t get Social Security and Medicare benefit cuts in their debt limit “deal,” but Speaker McCarthy has announced he’ll put together a commission that’ll get together “behind closed doors” to cut these benefits. They’ll have to do it “behind closed doors” because everyone will hate them even more if they do it out in the open! Sadly, a few Democrats may want to demonstrate their “seriousness” by joining this commission. We need to get in their grills about that, and if we do, they’ll fold, because weak people always fold in the face of strength.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Reward Work Act, which would ban stock buybacks and let workers elect a third of corporate boards. Stock buybacks let corporations plow their profits into buying stock back from other shareholders, instead of investing in, making their workplaces and their products better; it used to be illegal, because it concentrates corporate power in fewer hands, and the Reward Work Act would make it illegal again. And putting more worker-friendly folks on corporate boards would also help make workplaces better. Republicans pretend to be populists, but if they were populists, they’d support this bill.

Action: concerning saving our Post Office, monopolies, and the Endangered Species Act.

Long story short: tell our USPS Inspector General to allow public comments on Postmaster DeJoy’s nefarious plans to ruin our Postal Service, tell our FTC to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, and tell President Biden to step up enforcement of the Endangered Species Act. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Save the Post Office helps you tell our USPS Inspector General to allow public feedback on Postmaster General DeJoy’s proposed changes to our Postal Service. Said changes include slashed jobs, fewer services, and higher prices, which is what passes for bold leadership these days. But I bet the American people would offer actual bold leadership, by saying that shutting down Post Offices in rural areas means rural folks never get any deliveries (since private corporations sure don’t want to deliver there), and also by saying that folks rely on our USPS for life-saving medicines and so maybe cutting services ain’t such a “bold” idea. But we’ve got to speak out if we want to be heard.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, so that grocery stores don’t become concentrated in even fewer corporate hands. This merger would put over 30 grocery brands under one umbrella, and when one decision-maker has that much power, bad things happen – bad things like lost jobs, closed stores, and higher prices. That all has real world consequences, unlike the pablum the monopolists spew forth, which is mostly about big corporations being more “efficient.” The only thing they do more efficiently is redistribute your income upward to their executives, and we have to stop that.

Finally, Endangered Species Act at 50 helps you tell President Biden to, well, make the Endangered Species Act great again. Described by one historian as “the Magna Carta of the environmental movement,” the ESA has saved over 50 species from extinction, including, famously, the bald eagle, grey wolf, and grizzly bear; that leaves only about a million species worldwide on the brink of extinction! Of course Republican Administrations – recently Mr. Trump’s, but also Bush the Lesser’s – have tried to bulldoze right over the Act by issuing new regulations that make enforcement a lot more lax, but the only people who want that are bosses, and they don’t get all the say in my America.

Action: concerning medical debt, price-gouging, and Senatorial whining.

Long story short: tell your PA state legislators to fight medical debt and water corporation price-gouging, and tell your Senators to stop letting holds keep our government from doing their work. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 78, the Medical Debt Relief Act would help good Pennsylvanians get out from under their medical debt, by establishing a Medical Debt Relief Program that would buy up and discharge said debt – which is what organizations like RIP Medical Debt – and, before you ask, would expressly prohibit the Pennsylvania state government from collecting on that debt in Sec. 3 (c) (3) (vi). Imagine that, government doing something that actually improves our lives! The Medical Debt Relief Act merits a phone call to your PA House Reps; the Pennsylvania Health Access Network helps you find your PA Rep, as does the OpenStates tool in the upper right-hand corner of this page.

Staying with Pennsylvania politics for a moment, Food and Water Watch helps you tell your state Senators to repeal Act 12, which enables a lot of predatory water and sewer pricing in the Commonwealth. It’s like I keep going out of my way to say “Commonwealth” for a reason – and it’s almost like that reason is that our water belongs to all of us, and we shouldn’t let private corporations gouge us merely because they provide a service. Ideally our government should provide that service – privatizing water and sewer services doesn’t mean better service, but it does mean regular folks pay more for them. So let’s make sure our state Senators understand all of that.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our Senators to ensure they evaluate and confirm Justice Department nominees. Sen. Vance (E-OH) has put a hold on all Justice Department nominees because waaaaaaah, I mean because of the “weaponization” of our Justice Department against Donald Trump, and I have to say he’s not being very conservative here – I mean, a conservative would say if you don’t want to be hounded by law enforcement, don’t do so many crimes! Or do they only say that to Black folks? Anyway, we might want to call our Senators and tell them to get rid of holds entirely. That Tommy Tuberville is also making a mess of things with Defense-related holds.

Action: concerning health care, education, and food stamps.

Long story short: tell PA state legislators to keep no-cost preventive health care, tell Ohio state legislators to reject an anti-education bill, and tell your Congressfolk to stop with the cutting of food stamps 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.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Pennsylvania Health Access Network helps you tell your PA state House Rep to pass the Health Insurance Preventive Coverage Act, which would ensure that good Pennsylvanians continue to get no-cost preventive health care. But doesn’t the Affordable Care Act already require that of everyone in America? Well, it did, but then that Texas judge, the one who’s had it in for Obamacare since forever, struck it down, in a ruling so terrible our Supreme Court should have an easy time gutting it, although you know how they are. All that's to say we must protect what we’ve won at the state level. And preventive health care helps everyone and saves money, so let’s get to it.

Ohio residents, take note: Civic Shout helps you tell your Ohio state legislators to reject the so-called Ohio Higher Education Enhancement Act, which would prevent colleges from teaching anything that might give right-wingers a sad – like climate change, which the bill somehow declares a “controversial” subject. It’s “controversial” only because corporate executives want to keep polluting rather than embrace new technologies! Oh, and also because of the politicians who suck up to them. Frankly, I don’t find racism “controversial,” either – like climate change, it’s real, it’s happening, and it’s wrong, and folks who can’t handle these truths should move to a police state. In the meantime, let’s not let stupid people win.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk not to cut food stamps. But wait, you may well ask, didn’t the debt limit “deal” take care of that? We sure thought so, didn’t we? But Republicans upset about the “deal” continue to throw tantrums, such that the House couldn’t pass any legislation last week, and Congress also has to pass actual appropriations bills in a few months, so they’ve seized on “more food stamp cuts” as the way to, I don’t know, feel better about themselves? Someone who’d cut food stamps to feel better about themselves will have a tough meeting with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. We could help them avoid that fate by communicating our will that they not cut food stamps.

Action: concerning paid family leave, communications policy, and discrimination.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to enact a national paid family/medical leave program, confirm FCC nominees, and 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 and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to create a national paid sick/family medical leave program. Yeah, like House Republicans will do that! But, as always, it doesn’t matter what they want; it matters what we want, and we’ve never gotten anything of consequence without demanding it, and sometimes we have to demand it for years. Thus it’s always a good idea to tell your Congressfolk that you’d like the thing that virtually every other nation on Earth has – the peace of mind that if you or your family member gets sick, you won’t have to choose between your job and taking care of them. And if you want to tell them to bring back the 91% tax bracket to pay for it – not that it’d cost that much! -- feel free.

Free Press helps you tell your Senators to confirm FCC Commissioner nominees Geoffrey Starks and Anna Gomez. Mr. Starks is already an FCC Commissioner whose term is about to end, so Senators really have no standing to say he’s not qualified! Ms. Gomez ain’t Gigi Sohn, who was railroaded out of a job she clearly deserved by decidedly lesser individuals like Ted Cruz and Joe Manchin, but she’s good enough – hell, if Tom Wheeler was good enough (as he proved to be!), then certainly Ms. Gomez is good enough. And with a fully-staffed FCC, we can finally spend infrastructure money fairly and we can finally get net neutrality back. Our FCC hasn’t been fully-staffed since Mr. Biden’s inauguration, so let’s get to stepping.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Equality Act. Yeah, Republicans won’t do that, either! And worse, they’ll make up stupid stories about what it’ll supposedly do – that it’ll oppress girls in their own locker rooms (with the “onslaught” of trans girls the bill will call into existence!), or that boys will change sexes merely to dominate girls’ sports (like nobody remembers what they were like at that age!). But the Equality Act would actually prevent governments, banks, employers, and landlords from discriminating against gay and transgender folks, and that’s enough reason to pass it. That must be why they make up stupid stories about it! God forbid our government actually protect people, after all.

Action: concerning education, monopolies, and banksters.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” block the proposed PGA/LIV merger, and pass the Failed Bank Executives Clawback 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.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to reject H.R. 5, the so-called “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” which would enable parents to ban books, protest the mere existence of trans children, and block vaccinations of their children far more easily than they can now. I’ve long asserted that parents have the right to make decisions on behalf of their children, but parents don’t have the right to make decisions on behalf of everyone else’s children. Too many educators let one activist parent have veto power over every book in their library, so these folks hardly need any more help creating drama and chaos in our public schools. Don’t we teach our kids not to be so dramatic? Or did that go out the window now once we elected Donald Trump?

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk not to grant an antitrust exemption for the proposed PGA/LIV merger, or “alliance,” or “joint framework,” or whatever they’re calling it to make us think it’s something other than what it obviously is. This is the big golfing merger where the PGA Commissioner said out loud that the proposed merger would help “take the competitor off the board,” which is not the kind of thing you can explain away by saying oh, I was high when I said that. Probably Congress doesn’t have an appetite to let this deal go through, since Saudi Arabia is involved. But they shouldn’t let it go through because it’s bad for our economy, and we should remind them of that.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you pass the Failed Bank Executives Clawback Act, which would, as its title says, claw back executive income (including bonuses, options, and stocks) when their bank fails. Hard to believe our laws actually have to come out and say that banksters shouldn’t make money off of failure, but that’s where we are as a civilization. This is an obvious enough statement that the Senate version of the bill has two Republican co-sponsors out of four, while the House version has two out of five; one hates to wait for Republican approval of even the mildest reforms, but their approval does make it a bit more difficult for right-wingers to convince everyone this is all nanny-state.

Action: concerning child labor, corruption, and pollution.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to enforce federal child labor laws more vigorously, tell our government to remove Judge Aileen Cannon from the Trump indictment, and tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous mercury/air toxin regulations possible Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell the Biden Administration to enforce child labor laws more vigorously, especially now that states are starting to make child labor legal again! You know, because “no one wants to work” – which you may more reasonably read as “no one wants to work for dung pellets” -- except for young kids who’ve never had to make a budget and thus don’t know that $7.25/hour won’t help them get a one-bedroom apartment or pay their water, electricity, or internet bills. Children are either The Future or they’re just another labor pool to exploit; they can’t be both – but it’s moot if the Biden Administration doesn’t do their job.

Care2 helps you demand that U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon have the Trump indictment taken from her. Normally federal judges get cases at random – unless they were involved in some way with those cases before. But that shouldn’t be reason enough to give it to Judge Cannon, since her involvement consisted largely of hindering our Justice Department’s review of documents, her grasp of the law in her orders so tenuous that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned them. Of course I don’t have to mention which diaper-loaded brat of a President appointed her. But Judge Cannon should not oversee the Trump indictment for the same reason you wouldn’t let someone rebuild your house just because they had experience burning it down.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to protect us from mercury and other airborne toxins as vigorously as possible. Don’t believe the hype that “the air is so much cleaner now, so now the EPA is just killing jobs.” We have to work to keep our air clean from the moment we become conscious of that need until the moment we pass from this Earth, and we don’t get to stick a “Mission Accomplished” banner on that effort merely because we want to, or because some big polluting corporation says so. The price of civilization is constant vigilance; I’d hate to be in a foxhole with anyone who thinks otherwise. But I’m happy to protect the air they breathe, too.

Action: concerning conservation, social media, and pollution.

Long story short: tell our government to protect old-growth forests, tell YouTube to stop putting up 2020 election denialist claims, and tell our EPA to regulate truck emissions as vigorously as possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our U.S. Forest Service to protect old-growth forests from logging corporations as vigorously as possible. Once again, while it’s good our government would actually propose to protect old-growth forests – all the Trump Administration ever cared about was making money for bosses, you recall – our Forest Service would still allow far too much logging of these forests to take place. Thousand year-old trees trap carbon emissions like nobody’s business and help keep our air and water clean; in that context, cutting them down so you can make money you’re just going to spend anyway doesn’t seem very far-sighted. But that only means the most far-sighted among us must make ourselves heard.

Both Care2 and Common Cause help you tell YouTube to stop letting users post false claims about the 2020 election. Which Joe Biden won, which was not “stolen” from Donald Trump, which was not plagued by “voter fraud” – you get the picture. YouTube stopped posting such videos for a while, but lately they’ve reversed course; they must think we’re not looking anymore, or that 2020 election deniers have anything to offer YouTube users except masturbatory rage. But Fox News just had to fork over $787.5 million because they amplified this crap in their coverage; we can help YouTube avoid such a fate by reminding them that our First Amendment doesn’t permit or obligate them to publish just any old lie.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to protect us from truck pollution as vigorously as possible. This may be The Future, but we still ship most of our goods on our roads, and tailpipe pollution causes a lot of health problems (not to mention climate change!), so we ought to make that process as painless as possible. And not for nothing, but the ill health effects of tailpipe pollution do hit Black and Brown communities harder, no matter how many right-wingers say so the roads are racist ha ha snort? We built a disproportionate number of those roads through Black and Brown neighborhoods, so again, we should make that fact as painless as possible.

Action: concerning regulations, food stamps, and defense spending.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the REINS Act and pass the RESTORE Act and the People Over Pentagon Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the REINS Act. Is the REINS Act really back, yet again? Yes, it is – the return of the REINS Act when Republicans control at least one House of Congress is now as predictable as water being wet, bears pooping in the woods, or the Pope being Catholic. The REINS Act would give Congress the right to examine Executive branch regulations again, even though Congressional laws already authorize our Executive branch to issue regulations, meaning Republicans actually want more bureaucracy. And you know as well as I do that they mean to go after anti-pollution regulations and anti-financial predator regulations, so let’s not give them more tools to create drama and chaos.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the RESTORE Act, which would stop the cruel practice of banning people with felony drug convictions from our food stamp program for life. Yes, for life – because, as we know, no one ever rehabilitates themselves, nor do we put too many people in jail for drugs! Seriously, politicians who want to prove they’re “tough on crime” and “tough on Those People who use food stamps” push bans like this, but that’s exactly the kind of “toughness” that poisons a civilization. If we let people who stoke rage run our civilization, it won’t be very long before we don’t have a civilization, and passing the RESTORE Act would help us avoid that tragedy.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the People Over Pentagon Act. No doubt someone will retort that what good is putting people first if we can’t protect them ha ha ha snort? Of course, that supposes that we can only protect Americans if we spend so much money on defense – and that all the money we spend on defense actually protects us! We pissed away trillions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the money we could spend teaching children to think or ensuring everyone has health care would protect our civilization a lot better than all the corporate welfare for defense contracting corporations ever could. And it’s well past time we got that right.

Action: concerning harassment of protestors, government spying, and petrochemical pollution.

Long story short: tell DeKalb County’s District Attorney to drop charges against the fund bailing out Cop City protestors, tell Thermo Fisher to stop helping China collect DNA on Tibetans, and tell our EPA to regulate petrochemical pollution as vigorously as possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Color of Change helps you tell DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston to drop “money laundering” and “charity fraud” charges against the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which has been paying bail for Cop City protestors arrested on trumped-up “domestic terrorism” charges. Think of how a government might call any charitable donation you might make, to a cause you believe in, “domestic terrorism” and I think you see the problem here. Plus they’re protesting the construction of a police training center in an urban forest; do police really feel “terrorized” by protests? Do we? Let’s reserve words like “terror” for those who actually blow things up and mass-murder people.

Eko helps you tell Thermo Fisher Scientific to stop helping the Chinese government collect DNA samples from Tibetans. You don’t have to know that Tibet has been an “autonomous region” of China for over 70 years, or that China has met Tibetan protests with all the repressions a modern police state deploys, to see that Thermo Fisher has aided and abetted evil here, and we can help stop that by deploying, once again, the Big Stick of Bad PR. Unfortunately, by “once again” I also mean that Thermo Fisher also supplied DNA kits to China to be used in Uyghur labor camps. But while it may feel like our work as civilized people is never done, it’s still the best work in the world.

Finally, the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to protect us from petrochemical pollution as vigorously as possible. You probably already know the story: our EPA has proposed pretty good regulations, but they could be better! They could, for example, strengthen leak-detection requirements and monitor more petrochemical plants at the fenceline, so we’ve got to communicate our will. You know the big petrochemical corporations will be communicating their will, which will be comprised of word salad about “stifling innovation” and “killing jobs” and “the burden of compliance,” so we’ve got to get ahead of that noise. And remember: “compliance” isn’t a “burden” when you’re not trying to cheat.

Action: concerning taxes, Social Security, Medicare, and stock buybacks.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to tax corporations the rich harder, tell Democrats to boycott Speaker McCarthy’s Social Security/Medicare-cutting commission, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Reward Work 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.

In the wake of this debt limit “deal,” Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to extend the Trump tax cuts for the rich and for corporations, while Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to start taxing billionaires a lot harder if they’re really serious about our national debt. Which they’re not, like ever, but the more we tell them they need to tax the rich and corporations harder, the tougher it’ll be for them to pretend they don’t hear us. I’m old enough to remember when Democrats were too scared to even talk about it, so I know we’ve made progress – and if we keep at it, we’ll make more.

Social Security Works helps you tell Congressional Democrats to boycott Speaker McCarthy’s Social Security/Medicare “reform” commission. He announced it right after getting his debt limit “deal,” and we know why: because we all got in his grill about never, ever cutting Social Security and/or Medicare benefits and as a result he not only didn’t get those cuts, he didn’t even try all that hard for them. But if any Democrats take part in this commission drama, they could make it easier for Congress to cut Social Security and Medicare without input from the American people, and we should never let such a thing happen. So it’s time to get in their grills again.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Reward Work Act, which would absolutely reward work by a) outlawing stock buybacks and b) making corporations put workers on their boards. Thus corporations would (in reverse order) support jobs by hearing more from the people who actually do them and actually investing in those jobs, which they don’t have to do as long as we allow them to plow their profits into consolidating shareholder power into fewer and fewer hands. The way the game is now, all corporate executives care about is making more money for less work, so our government has to step in on our behalf to fix that.

Action: concerning corporate "personhood," debt limit dramas, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell tell Delaware state legislators to kill a bill that would give corporations the right to vote there, and tell your Congressfolk to repeal both the debt limit and the Comstock 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.

Delaware residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell Delaware state legislators to reject HB 121, which would give artificial entities – like corporations, trusts, and partnerships – the same right to vote in elections that actual people have right now. I trust I don’t have to explain why that’s the stupidest idea anyone ever had – corporations and other artificial “people” already have too much power to do evil, and if we give them the right to vote on top of that, we might as well just let fascism in through the front door. Now, this is a state bill, not a federal one, but this is also an idea that could spread like a superbug, first to other states and then to our Congressfolk. So, to quote a phrase, let’s kill it in its crib.

In the wake of this latest debt limit “deal,” Daily Kos helps you tell our President and Congressfolk to get rid of the debt limit for good. Because they only use it for evil, that’s why! And not just when Republicans have control of at least one House of Congress, either – you recall it was like pulling teeth to get it done in late 2021 when Democrats nominally controlled both Houses of Congress, right? And I bet you still have bad memories of the debt limit hostage crises of 2011 and 2013. Anyway, now’s probably the best time to tell your Congressfolk you never want to see a stupid drama like this again. We’ll have to tell them again and again, but no use holding our tongues now.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Comstock Act, which prohibits our Postal Service from delivering obscene materials or abortion medicines (among other things). With the fall of Roe v. Wade, right-wingers have gone crazy citing the Comstock Act, though Congress passed it in 1873 when the world was a lot different – one could argue that at that time that you would more likely get unsafe abortion medications through the mail than safe ones. You would have a tough time arguing that today, though right-wingers will try. Let’s not deign to argue with bullshitters, though – let’s just get rid of the law they want to use to hurt women.

Action: concerning health care and Congressional corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare to include all Americans and outlaw ownership or trade of stocks by members of Congress. 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.

National Nurses United helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass Medicare-for-All legislation. And yes, you can not only pay for it – by harvesting the money big corporations already pay private health insurers with an employer-side payroll tax – but you can cover everyone! Even after the Affordable Care Act addressed these matters, we’re still paying for executive salaries and hedge fund-provoked surprise bills and the stock prices über alles corporate attitude; cut all that out and we’ll cover many more people. Don’t let your friends complain about “bureaucrats running everything,” because better a government bureaucrat, one you can shame into doing better, than a corporate one over whom you have no control.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation outlawing them from owning or trading individual stocks. Even some Republicans are making happy noises about getting this done in this Congress, and though we shouldn’t substitute hope for work, we should note that nobody expected the Postal Service Reform Act to get done last year, either. Certainly everyone in Congress knows that the folks at home already think they’re corrupt as hell, and that Congressfolk owning stock in corporations they might have to oversee at some point is an invitation to further corruption. Still, we should make sure they get this done.

Action: concerning plastic pollution and clicking-to-cancel.

Long story short: tell our EPA to curtail single-use plastic production, and tell our FTC to enact a vigorous “click-to-cancel” rule. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous plastic-reduction regulations possible. So far our EPA plans to stamp out the idea that converting plastic to fuel is “recycling” – fuel only gets used once, too! – but our EPA could do a better job stamping out single-use plastics, which cause a lot of pollution and health problems these days. We’ve only ever recycled about 10% of all the plastics we’ve made, and folks now ingest the equivalent of a credit card a week on average, so we’ve got to stop making so much damn single-use plastic in the first place. Doesn’t matter if it’s convenient! In America, we shouldn’t settle for mere convenience.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to enact the most vigorous “click-to-cancel” rule possible, so good Americans can get out of subscription-based services a lot more easily. Who wants to be paying for gym memberships and streaming services they’re not using but aren’t canceling because of the hoops they have to jump through to do that? I wonder what sort of comments corporate hacks will write to our FTC! Actually, I don’t: it’ll stifle innovation the burden of compliance costs we’ll have to fire people we can’t compete with foreign corporations. That’s all rubbish – but it’ll win the day if we don’t speak out.

Action: concerning taxes, stock buybacks, and sacred lands.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to tax the rich and corporations harder and pass the Reward Work Act and the Ruby Mountains 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.

You’ve heard about the debt limit deal President Biden and Speaker McCarthy negotiated, but Demand Progress still helps you tell your Congressfolk to get rid of the private jet tax deduction from the 2017 Trump tax “reform,” while Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. As they consider this deal, we need to remind them of what their real priority should be: making sure folks with enough money to ruin the world pay their fair share of taxes so we can all have health care and roads and bridges and cops. If nothing else, they’ll more likely remember next time – and if they don’t, we’ll remind them again.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Reward Work Act, which would ban stock buybacks and let workers elect a third of all corporate boards. If you’re not seeing right away how that would “reward work,” recall that quite a few corporations (Bed, Bath and Beyond most recently) have gone belly-up after using their profits to buy back stock rather than, you know, pay workers, develop new products, or improve their operations. Stock buybacks, in short, don’t “reward work,” they reward wealth. And getting more workers on corporate boards will also help keep executives from doing only what’s best for them – which will also reward work. So let’s get this done.

Finally, the Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ruby Mountains Protection Act, which would permanently protect the Ruby Mountains of Nevada – a sacred land to certain Shoshone nations – from oil and gas drilling. The energy you extract from the ground will get used up eventually, and the money big corporate executives make from oil and gas drilling will get used up eventually, but sacred lands are forever, if you can keep them. And the Shoshone have already prevented our government from drilling for oil and gas in the Ruby Mountains in 2019, so we know this can be done; our Congressfolk just have to have the will to do it. And they won’t, unless we express our will in numbers they can’t deny.