Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning climate change, corruption, pollution, mine reclamation, and peaceful protests.

Long story short: tell Home Depot to stop using the Canadian boreal forest for its products, tell our government to investigate FDA corruption in re our baby formula shortage, tell our Army Corps of Engineers to examine pollution from pipelines more vigorously, tell President Biden to nominate a Director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, and tell the Washington Post to stop calling for the removal of peaceful protestors outside Supreme Court Justices' houses. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Environmental Action helps you tell Home Depot to stop sourcing its wood products from the Canadian boreal forest. Our reasoning is the same for our world's largest intact forest as it would be with the Amazon rainforest or the Tongass National Forest: old trees are our best weapon against climate change; they don't call them "the lungs of the planet" for nothing. Thus turning them into cabinets or toilet paper is, in this context, rather short-sighted. And if we can prompt the world's largest hardware store into abandoning logging in the forest, we'll likely get others to follow. If not, the Big Stick of Bad PR is always ready for deployment.

Progress America helps you tell our government to investigate our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) for its role in our current baby formula shortage. And I don't care what corruption at our FDA this uncovers! If you don't want to get shamed and shunned by your civilization, then don't hurt people. Chances are that investigators will find that the revolving door between industry and our FDA doesn't help us deal with food safety crises, and they might also find that our FDA has given established baby formula-manufacturing corporations too much of a free pass on safety inspections. That'd be a shame to learn that, but knowledge is power.

The Climate Reality Project helps you tell our Army Corps of Engineers to close the loopholes that big oil and gas drilling corporations use to evade scrutiny about the pollution their proposed pipelines cause. Specifically, we'll call for less "fast-tracking" of pipelines. We should be "fast-tracking" solar and wind projects, if we must "fast-track" anything at all! Yet big oil and gas drilling corporations constantly assert that their pipelines are "too urgent" to ensure they don't spew filth into our water tables. But no one will be sitting around a campfire in a hundred years saying we can't drink the water now, but at least CEOs made good money for a while!

The Sierra Club helps you tell President Biden to nominate a Director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. We should blame our Senate for dragging their feet on confirming Mr. Biden's nominees, but this one's on our President, because he hasn't even put a name forward. The long name gives you the idea that this is some bureaucratic rando, but with all the coal mines closing up around America, reclaiming and repurposing that land becomes a lot more important, and someone's got to run things at the department that would do that work. And, ah, this is the kind of thing that actually helps potential Trump voters in Appalachia. So how about we do it?

Finally, FAIR helps you tell the Washington Post to stop calling for the repression of peaceful protesting outside of Supreme Court Justice's homes. They actually suggested these protestors were totalitarians! By suggesting that they were "(e)rasing any distinction between the public square and private life"! Key word there, of course, is any -- protesting outside of the private homes of public figures who have, very publicly, made known their opposition to the popular will does not erase literally "any" distinctions between public and private spheres. And, ah, who exactly "harassed" or "intimidated" these Justices? If anything, protestors have been too polite.

Action: concerning Iran, gas prices, drug addiction, our Supreme Court, and our past mistreatment of Native Americans.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to support the Iran nuclear deal, lower gas prices, and pass the MAT Act, the Judiciary Act, and the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies 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.

Peace Action helps you tell your House Reps to support re-entry into the Iran nuclear deal. Congressfolk on both sides have shown a disquieting unwillingness to re-enter that deal, and for what? To appease Trumpholes? To "put distance" between them and President Biden? To gain imaginary and irrelevant leverage over Iran's Republican Guard? Gosh, how about doing the right thing for the right reason for once? The Iran nuclear deal was keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but because Donald Trump decided to shit all over anything Barack Obama did that actually helped Americans, he took it away from us. And now Congress wants to make it harder to get it back? Tell them no.

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to "protect Americans and keep gas prices low," because sometimes you gotta be simple and direct. And also sometimes because your Congressfolk are thick-headed because they only talk to each other and Beltway consultants! Recall Katie Porter telling us that her Democratic colleagues didn't talk about inflation because they didn't see anything about it in polling? The stupid is strong with some of our Reps and Senators! Anyway, if you want to deliver a more specific message -- like "pass H.R. 7061/S. 3802, the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act, which would tax excessive oil corporation profits at 95%," you can add that to your signature.

People's Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 445, the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment (or MAT) Act. All this locking people up for using and abusing drugs, tell me: has that worked? No, it has not, by the evidence that far too many Americans are still addicted to drugs. The MAT Act would remove certain bureaucratic obstacles to prescribing certain narcotic drugs that treat addiction. "Removing certain bureaucratic obstacles" may be the argument that seems to have attracted a stunning 46 House Republican co-sponsors! But only three in the Senate, meaning the Mitch McConnell Obstruction Machine may yet roll over it. Unless we speak out in numbers they can't deny, of course.

Stand Up America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2584, the Judiciary Act, which would increase the number of Supreme Court Justices from 9 to 13. I've been saying we need four more Justices to keep up with 13 federal Appeals Courts, but recent events have made the necessity of getting better Justices up there more urgent to me. And I'm sure it's even more urgent for the women and gays and transgender folks who would be directly affected by Sam Alito's made-up "deeply-rooted" doctrine. I'm able to imagine such a thing because I possess the quality of empathy, a quality today's Supreme Court Justices seem to suppress. Surely Joe Biden can find four more Justices who get what it's like to be human.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5444/S. 2908, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act. Federal boarding schools aimed to "civilize" the Native American, but they separated families and abused students, which ain't exactly civilized behavior. Some folks will refer to this bill as an "apology tour" or "cancel culture" or whatnot, but admitting you've done wrong, and then righting that wrong, is about as American as America can be. Note well that the Quakers put out this action alert and the Quakers admit their own past wrongdoing in running more than two dozen boarding schools! That's how you do it.

Action: concerning law and order, food safety, abortion rights, cluster bombs, and social media.

Long story short: tell governments to end cash bail, tell our FDA to limit lead in fruit juice, tell your state legislators not to restrict abortion rights, tell President Biden to join the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and tell your pension fund to support shareholder resolutions that would rein in Facebook's bad behavior. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell our state, local, and federal governments to end cash bail. Don't listen to the loud voices saying how can cops do their job without cash bail? If you can't do your job without holding people indefinitely without trial, then you need to find a new job. Our Constitution guarantees your right to a "speedy trial," not a "trial whenever we get around to it so we can reassure the weak we're doing something about crime." Certainly you have a right to a speedy trial even if you don't have a crapload of money! And if a poll tax is unconstitutional, why isn't cash bail?

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to put a stricter limit on lead in fruit juice. Our FDA has proposed lowering the current limit on lead in fruit juice from 50 parts per billion to 10 ppb for apple juice and 20 for other juices, but manufacturers are perfectly capable of meeting a more stringent 1 ppb limit -- even if they say it'll "cost them money"! -- and that lower limit sure would be a whole lot better for folks who drink it. Especially kids! They'd have a lot less brain damage, cancer, and diabetes, that's for sure, and thus a longer life, with more potential for doing big things. That is what America's about, after all.

With the impending reversal of Roe v. Wade, Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators not to restrict the right to abortion. I've been loathe to criticize pro-lifers in the past -- though not pro-life politicians, particularly the ones who make their mistresses get abortions! -- but I suspect a lot of pro-lifers simply don't understand that (for example) a woman who tries to carry her fetus to term, but has to abort it because it'll kill her if she doesn't, isn't a "murderer." When it happens to them, perhaps they'll get it, but I wouldn't wish that on anyone, and if I can get it -- having absolutely no chance at ever getting pregnant myself -- then why can't they?

Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to join the world cluster bomb ban, particularly now that Russia and Ukraine are using cluster bombs on each other. Over 100 nations have banned cluster bombs by signing onto the Convention on Cluster Munitions, but of course we're not one of them. Seems to me that if you're a law-and-order adherent, you'd oppose cluster bombs. Why? Because they kill people long after the war is over, which is neither lawful nor orderly. Let's not become so decadent a civilization that we beat our chests about how lawful we are but then let unexploded bombs kill people 50 years after we've all forgotten we were ever enemies.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell your pension fund to vote in favor of shareholder resolutions that would curb Facebook's ability to injure our civilization, i.e., with their algorithms that help white supremacists find each other easily. Now, because Mark Zuckerberg gives him and his cronies 10 votes for every vote everyone else casts, the resolutions won't win. But they rarely do! Even a resolution that gets 25% demonstrates that shareholders might be willing to take their money elsewhere, and executives tend to poop their pants at that thought. Maybe I should put the image of Mark Zuckerberg pooping his pants in folks' heads more often.

Action: concerning baby formula, Medicare for All, paid leave, drug prices, and price-gouging.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fix the baby formula crisis, expand Medicare to include all Americans, pass paid family/sick leave, lower drug prices and expand home health care, and pass a windfall profits tax on oil and gas corporations. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. You've heard of the national baby formula shortage, which is a matter of life and death for a lot of babies? Matt Stoller explains why it's happening -- short answer: monopolies -- and prescribes solutions, which you may call your Congressfolk about. These solutions include: temporarily allowing baby formula imports, particularly from nations with good (or better) food safety regulations; restructuring food stamp markets so they don't create baby formula monopolies; and breaking up our FDA so that one agency doesn't regulate both food and drugs. We may not get the change we need right away, but if we keep at it, it will. And if we do nothing, we'll get nothing.

National Nurses United helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare to include all Americans. Medicare for All will cover more folks for less money, end of story. Don't believe me? Believe the right-wing Mercatus Center, which tabulated the cost of Medicare for All at $32 trillion over 10 years -- or some $17 trillion less than the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid's forecast of all health care spending over the next decade. How do you pay for it, then? Simple: assess an employer-side payroll tax (meaning workers don't pay it!) amounting to what big corporations already pay for the private health insurance that rejects your claims for no good reason and doesn't cover everyone.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact paid family and sick leave for all Americans. Since right-wingers constantly squeal WHEREZ WILLZ YOUZ FINDZ TEH MONEYZ!!!!!, I'll note that Sen. Gillibrand's original bill would have funded it with a 0.4% payroll tax (half paid by the employer, half by the worker), which, for someone making $50,000 annually, would amount to a little over $8 a month. $8! So everyone can take time off to take care of their kids, or their parents, or their grandparents, or themselves when they need to. And I'd fund it by bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income and the 55% tax on corporate profits, which wouldn't be "socialism" so much as "what we did in the 1950s."

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices and expand at-home health care services. Most people want these things, so why can't Congress do it? Because Republicans won't do it! And also because Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema won't do it, because they think they're so much smarter than everyone else! In 2 1/2 years if not sooner, these fools will be shown the error of their ways; wouldn't it be nice if a massive popular outcry helped them see the error of their ways sooner? That goes for your Republican Reps and Senators, too. If enough of us speak out, then doing nothing will actually get them fired for once.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall profits tax on big oil corporations. Because sky-high prices shouldn't lead to sky-high profits! I'm old enough to remember when corporations didn't raise prices solely because of increased costs. Why? Partly because shame still meant something back then, and also partly because we had fewer monopolies then, so we had a higher chance of finding a corporation that wouldn't rob you merely because it had the opportunity. Now they just gouge us because they can. If we pass a windfall profits tax on them, then they can't.

Action: concerning inflation, pollution, corruption, law and order, and immigration.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ending Corporate Greed Act, the Green New Deal for Public Schools Act, the Bipartisan Ban on Congressional Stock Ownership Act, and the People's Response Act, and tell your Congressfolk to end the Title 42 program. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7443/S. 3933, the Ending Corporate Greed Act, which would tax excess corporate profits at 95%. Want to do something about inflation, Democrats? This is it! Let Republicans explain how no corporate profit can really be "excess"! Let Republicans pretend record-high corporate profits have nothing to do with high prices! Most Americans are smarter than that -- yeah, supply chain issues have also contributed to inflation, but mainly it's corporate greed. Of course, this'll only work if Democrats bang that saucepan. And they'll only bang that saucepan if we bang that saucepan first, as loud as we can.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4442, the Green New Deal for Public Schools Act. The original Green New Deal was always a simple "sense of Congress" resolution, but this bill would actually remake our public schools into energy-saving, climate-helping, job-creating buildings, and it would, according to scientists, accomplish the equivalent of taking 17 million jobs off the road. Republicans will whine about the price tag -- $140 billion annually for the next decade. Can you think of anything Republicans have done lately that cost that much or more and did no good? Oh, right, the 2017 tax "reform." So drink a big glass of STFU, Republicans.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6678/S. 3631, the Bipartisan Ban on Congressional Stock Ownership Act, which would pretty much do what it says it'll do -- prevent members of Congress and their spouses from owning any stocks, bonds, derivatives, and the like. Because owning them clouds your judgment when you have to make decisions about them! Which is obvious to anyone who thinks about it! The list of exceptions in Sec. 2(c) -- T-bills, public pension funds, other investments that don't present a conflict of interest -- could be pared down a bit; a lot of public pension funds are in the death-grip of hedge funds these days. But this still represents progress.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4194, the People's Response Act, which would fund alternative public safety responses -- alternative to policing, that is. Some folks would call that "defunding the police," but I suspect they're the same people who call everything "socialism" and "Communism"; this bill wouldn't "defund the police," but would fund approaches like mental health workers and youth programs that would work better than throwing everyone in jail all the time. It'd take a lot of pressure off our police, too; I say that if you want to "support the police," you stop asking them to do every conceivable thing like our brains are that flexible.

Finally, the Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the xenophobic Title 42 program. A lot of Congressfolk -- including, even, some Democrats I actually like! -- are acting like the end of Title 42 would be the end of the world, but that's rubbish. Title 42 expels would-be immigrants without their lawfully-mandated legal hearings for "health reasons," but has it kept COVID numbers down in the U.S.? Obviously not! Right-wingers who refused to mask and refused to get vaccines powered the COVID pandemic quite well enough on their own, thank you very much! So this is no time for any politician to strut like a peacock about being "tough" on immigration.

Action: concerning taxes, abortion, discrimination, and ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand the Child Tax Credit, protect abortion rights, pass the Equality Act, and strengthen ethics provisions for our Supreme Court Justices. 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 Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk not to pass a massive research and development tax break for corporations without first bringing back the expanded Child Tax Credit. You can also say expand the CTC and reject that slab of corporate welfare in the first place! But really, this is simple: working families should pay fewer taxes, because it's harder for them to make ends meet, while corporations flush in record profits should not get any tax breaks. They can write off their research and development already, because it's an expense; why are we letting them deduct that twice? And where's Joe Manchin's concern about inflation whenever the topic of corporate welfare comes up?

Both MoveOn and Change.org help you tell your Congressfolk to protect abortion rights in America. Abortion is health care -- for the woman whose fetus has no brain or organs, for the woman raped by her brother, for the woman who will die if she gives birth, for the woman terrorized by her partner over her pregnancy, and yes, also for the woman who knows she can't raise a child now because she has no money (not everyone can just go work for a hedge fund, after all!) or because she knows she won't raise that child right. And we've lately learned that between 60 and 66% of Americans (depending on the poll) think abortion should be legal in most circumstances, so I think the people have spoken here; now we must remind our representatives to listen.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. By the reasoning, if you can call it that, of Justice Alito's draft opinion, they'll overturn Obergefell v. Hodges at the first opportunity, so we need to codify equal rights for gays and transgender folks in our laws -- otherwise right-wing governments will continue to use the specter of gay and transgender folks to induce rage in our weakest Americans. Plus banks and landlords will be able to deny services to gay and transgender folks just because of who they are. That's what'll continue to be if we don't pass the Equality Act, and that reality should offend all of us.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation holding our Supreme Court Justices to the same ethical standards to which we already hold all other federal judges. It's tempting to blame Sam Alito for all of this -- since his draft ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade has convinced just about everyone who can still be convinced that our Supreme Court is just another political body -- but actually it's Clarence Thomas who didn't recuse himself from a decision involving his wife's involvement in the January 6 attempted coup. Remember: your job, as a citizen, isn't to "trust your government"; it's to make your government worthy of your trust.

Action: concerning monopolies, racism, pollution, abortion, and bad media.

Long story short: tell your government to fight monopolies, environmental racism, and truck pollution; tell big corporations to stop funding anti-abortion politicians, and tell Verizon to drop OAN from their lineup. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to enact the most vigorous rules possible against mergers. Mergers hurt people -- through lost jobs, higher prices, and increased corporate power to do more harm. I bet "higher prices" sure resonates with good Americans right about now, but increased corporate power also means lower wages, dirtier air and water, and more dangerous products. It also means no Medicare drug price negotiation, if you've paid attention to Kyrsten Sinema's big donor gatherings. We can help put a stop to all of that, by telling our government what to do.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our EPA to help communities afflicted most by pollution -- meaning, generally, our poorest communities, which will also be Black or Brown communities most of the time. Right-wingers can sneer at the notion of "racist pollution" all they want, but big polluting corporations situate their most polluting facilities near the poorest neighborhoods for a reason -- namely, that the poorest communities are also the least powerful communities, and thus the least able to stop pollution from overrunning their neighborhood. Thomas Sowell might cringe to hear this, but there's only so much damn bootstrapping folks can do; they also need help keeping polluters out of their grills.

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous heavy-duty truck emission regulations possible. I said "regulations" just to trigger right-wingers who think regulations are inherently evil! Heavy-duty trucks aren't the most common vehicles on our roads, but they do cause most of the air pollution that wrecks our lungs. And we might as well ask for zero emissions from our trucks; even if we don't get them, we stand a much better chance of getting something better than what we've got. And no, regulations don't kill jobs. Corporate executives kill jobs. You know they'd replace you with a mound of dung if they could get away with it.

People for the American Way helps you tell big corporations to stop funding attacks on abortion rights, mainly through their donations to anti-abortion politicians. They say they do it for economic reasons, which is an excuse almost calculated to offend someone like me more, but their intent doesn't matter when the result is a Supreme Court that's all but declared open season on every right not specifically imagined by a 250-year-old dead man. Don't brook any right-wingers saying it's their money and they can do what they want with it. It's your speech, too, and you can shame them and shun them if you like. Corporations don't have more rights than you.

Daily Kos helps you tell Verizon to drop the notorious One America News Network (or OAN, or OANN) from their lineup. We got AT&T to do it, so now we get other corporations to do it. OAN purveys noxious right-wing propaganda with every breath their on-air personalities draw, but don't settle for throwing up your hands and saying they have the right to free speech. First off, people have First Amendment rights, not corporations. And second, insofar as a corporation has a right to speech, it doesn't have a right to publication of that speech, on a platform, anymore than I have a right to compel Random House to publish my books. We have to think harder about this stuff than we used to.

Action: concerning abortion, equality, ethics, power, health, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to codify abortion rights protections into our laws, pass the Equality Act, ensure Supreme Court Justices adhere to ethics standards, pass the Palestinian Children and Families Act and the PASTEUR Act, and confirm Alvaro Bedoya to our FTC. 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.

Avaaz helps you tell Congress to codify abortion rights protections into law. The easiest way for Congress to do that, in theory, would be for our Senate to pass the already House-passed H.R. 3755, the Women's Health Protection Act, but they've already refused to do that. Sen. Schumer says he'll bring it up for a vote again, so that (if nothing else!) everyone will see how their Senators voted, which could be a big deal on Election Day 2022, though I can't say for sure. One thing I can say for sure: it won't end here! If the leaked ruling overturning Roe v. Wade turns out to be the actual ruling, it will give our Court a pretext for going after gay marriage, birth control, and anti-sodomy laws, too. We'll have a very busy time fighting for what we already had, and we'll have to keep fighting for them. Which we'll do, because duty is duty.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act, which would protect gay, transgender, and others from discrimination. Because right-wing state legislatures have been attacking these folks just as surely as they've attacked voting rights and abortion rights the last year and a half! And, as I've said, it'll soon be open season on rulings like Obergefell Griswold, and Lawrence, so we've got to codify protections against discrimination into our laws. Gay and transgender folks don't deserve to be fired, frozen out of apartments and homes and loans, or hounded out of public restrooms merely because they are who they are, so let's stop politicians from enabling all those evil things. And quickly.

In a related note, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure our Supreme Court Justices follow the Federal Judge Code of Conduct. Once there was a time we could convince ourselves that it'd be somehow uncivil to make the highest Court in the land adhere to the same standards as all other federal courts, but no more. And I'm not the only person who thinks so! Polling has told us for years that more and more Americans look at our Supreme Court as a political body, with its own policy aims; Justice Alito's leaked draft sure hasn't helped that look! Neither has Justice Thomas's wife's actions in support of the January 6 coup, or Justice Thomas's alleged poobahs with Gov. DeSantis; it ain't just about Justice Thomas, though. All judges must bow to civilization.

Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2590, the Palestinian Children and Families Act, which would start to extract some accountability from Israel in exchange for American aid. The government of Israel continues to oppress the Palestinian people -- lately in the form of separating families and detaining Palestinian children in prisons where they're more likely to get COVID -- and yet we continue to give them military aid, apparently out of a belief that "support" means lockstep agreement with every policy. Support doesn't mean that, and neither does friendship. And Israel is the far more powerful actor here! Being the far more powerful actor means you must not use your power to oppress others, even if that oppression looks like "security." It never is.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3932/S. 2076, the Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions To End Up-surging Resistance (or PASTEUR) Act, which would help fund the antibiotics of the future. And we're gonna need them! We presently use seven out of every 10 antibiotics not on sick people or sick animals, but on nominally healthy feed animals, and that means more superbugs and more of a possibility that we'll bring back the days when the next cut on your hand could kill you. All so big ag executives could make more money! (They'll say it was so we could have cheaper meat, but is that really a lot better if you can't survive a cut on your hand?) I'd spend directly on making antibiotics, rather than grant money to corporations to do it, but we can fix that later. We need action on this matter now.

Finally, today's as good a day as any to a) call Senate Majority Leader Schumer (here's his contact info) and tell him to schedule a vote on President Biden's nomination of Alvaro Bedoya to our Federal Trade Commission, and b) call your Senators (using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) and tell them to confirm Mr. Bedoya. Mr. Bedoya's opposition to government spying and expertise in digital privacy issues would be enormous assets to our FTC, plus he'd provide a likely third vote in favor of more vigorous antitrust prosecutions; perhaps for this last reason he couldn't get through the Commerce Committee (which deadlocked on his nomination twice), and required a discharge petition to get his nomination considered by our full Senate. But now they must act. We deserve no less.

Action: concerning labor, immigration, corruption, cluster bombs, and law and order.

Long story short: tell President Biden to do better by American workers, tell our government to roll back the notorious 287(g) program, tell state legislators to ban non-disclosure agreements between corporations and legislators, tell President Biden to stop our military's use of cluster bombs, tell the Manhattan D.A. to drop murder charges against Tracy McCarter, and tell our DOJ and USPS to investigate Louis DeJoy for corruption. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to use his lawful authority to expand worker power in America. How would he do this? He could raise the overtime floor so more good Americans can get time-and-a-half when they have to work more than 40 hours in a week; he can force federal contractors to give their workers adequate overtime, sick leave, and vacation time; he can issue new workplace safety standards to protect outdoor workers (like farm and construction workers) and warehouse workers, among other things. And he doesn't have to go to One True Great and Real Super-American President Joe Manchin for any of it -- he can just issue Executive Orders, which our laws allow in these matters, and walk away. And then his approvals might finally go back up! People like it when you do good works, after all.

The ACLU helps you tell our government to roll back the notorious 287(g) program, which nominally gives local law enforcement officers the job of federal immigration officials in an effort to combat crime, but which, in practice, leads to totally non-violent and non-criminal brown-skinned folks getting deported for busted taillights or driving without a license. So 287(g), as our government has practiced it the last five years, doesn't reduce crime and doesn't get rid of the "worst" undocumented immigrants! You would also have to ask why we always seem to be in an immigration "crisis" when we already have so many tools at our disposal, and you might have to conclude that right-wingers don't want to stop undocumented immigration, because then how would they create drama and hysteria? Hey, if I see it, I say it.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell state legislators to ban non-disclosure agreements (or NDAs) that legislators sign with corporations. Because it's profoundly undemocratic! Legislators are supposed to account to their constituents, and a non-disclosure agreement interferes with that. Naturally proponents of corporate NDAs say they "protect sensitive negotiations," but why are they sensitive in the first place? Because if you found out that, say, your Mayor was negotiating to outsource parking meters to a big corporation, you'd be mad? Because they were using your money in a way you'd never approve of if they made their deals in the light of day? Doesn't matter how nice people are when they defend these things; evil doesn't need a Snidely Whiplash mustache anymore.

Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to join the Convention on Cluster Munitions and thus ban the use of cluster bombs by our military. Because they're indiscriminate killing machines, that's why! And they don't just kill over large areas, they also kill over time, because a lot of them don't explode right away. Thus good Vietnamese still get injured, maimed, and killed by cluster bombs we dropped there 50 years ago. Hey, that war's been over since 1975; is it sane, moral, or decent that the Vietnam War still kills people? Think of what your life would be like if some enemy nation dropped cluster bombs in your county, and you never knew if one was going to blow you up on the way to Wawa or ShopRite or the movie theater. Sounds awful, doesn't it? So let's not unleash such horrors on other folks.

Color of Change helps you tell the Manhattan District Attorney to drop charges against Tracy McCarter, accused of murdering her ex-husband. Who repeatedly beat her up, and after she left him, which took guts, he got drunk and assaulted her, and she stabbed him to death in self-defense. Somehow the state refused to present a grand jury with evidence of her abuse, saying it wasn't "substantial enough," which is kind of a bass-ackwards way of admitting there was abuse and anyway shouldn't the jury have decided that if they were mulling charging her with murder? The new Manhattan D.A. even declared his support for Mr. McCarter on the campaign trail; guess what he's been doing since then? I mean, besides giving up on prosecuting Donald Trump. That's right, not a word from him about Ms. McCarter. We ought to try to change that.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Justice Department and U.S. Postal Service Inspector General to investigate Postmaster General DeJoy for personally profiting from the COVID tests our USPS delivered to households in January. Don't brook any silliness about he did some good, why shouldn't he personally profit from it? That is the mark of sickness, immorality, and decadence -- you're supposed to do the right thing because it's the right thing; if you benefit from it, how do you really know you're doing the right thing? I mean, anyone can cobble together a system of values based on what's gotten them goodies in the past; how about we put together a system of values that sustains and nourishes a civilization beyond what it does for us? Or is that old-fashioned?

Action: concerning the Child Tax Credit, drug prices, Social Security, tax filing, animal cruelty, and our FCC.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the expanded Child Tax Credit, lower prescription drug prices, reject any effort to cut Social Security benefits, let most Americans file their taxes for free, pass the Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act, and confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the expanded Child Tax Credit that delivered $250 and $300 checks into working families' bank accounts through most of 2021. Inflation was 8.5% last month; think those checks would have come in handy as working families bought groceries and clothes and school supplies? Yes, I think they would have. But Republicans don't want working families to have them -- every last one of them voted against the CTC expansion in the first place, we must remember. I repeat for the benefit of angry independent voters: every last Republican voted against the CTC expansion. In the meantime, your Reps and Senators need to know that working families need the expanded CTC, and rich folks have to pay more in taxes to fund it, well, we're all in this together, right?

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices for all Americans. What's the news hook this time? Rep. Kurt Schrader (D?-OR) saying in a TV ad that he's fought for Medicare drug price negotiation when he actually did his damnedest to water down Medicare drug price negotiation proposals -- then also claiming that lowering drug prices would "stifle innovation"! I've said it before and I'll say it again: no rich corporation innovates on a damn thing; innovation comes only from necessity, and a corporation that's gamed the system so that all of its decisions result in it getting richer never faces necessity. That's just one reason we need to communicate our will to our Congressfolk, again and again and again until they do our will.

National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to cut Social Security benefits, including efforts like the notorious TRUST Act, which would allow Congress to fast-track Social Security cuts without debate. Does that sound like democracy to you? Or does it sound like a way to steal what belongs to the people without having to account to the people? I kid, of course; it sounds exactly like the latter, and though of course Republicans love anything that lets them bypass democracy, you'd hate to think that Democrats would be so cowardly that they'd support a system that lets them do unpopular things without facing the anger of the people. Again I kid! Of course that's right in their wheelhouse. And that's why we fight their efforts to the death.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to let most Americans file their taxes for free. This is already legal! Our IRS already has all the info on your W-2, and can autofill the blanks on your tax form without the assistance of any third party! And yet we still trundle off to joints like H&R Block to "get our taxes done." Why? Because of a "deal" our IRS cut with tax prep corporations years ago that allows them to (among other things) offer "free" tax filing at the end of a bureaucratic labyrinth you won't likely have the patience to get through. I say if you have leverage -- and if you have the law behind you, you have leverage -- you use it for more than getting next-to-nothing out of big corporations. So let's tell our government to do that.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7398, the Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act, which would, as its title suggests, ban most wildlife killing contests; the only exceptions would be certain kinds of birds and invasive species. I guess some folks will tell you wildlife killing contests help keep down populations of predators, but not only do scientists find that's not true, they also find that the animals who feed on the bullet-ridden carcasses get poisoned and/or killed as well. And certainly don't brook any silly allegations that this bill is "anti-hunting." It's not "anti-hunting," it's anti-sadism, it's anti-cruelty, it's anti-uncivilized behavior. Killing animals is a desultory job if you have to do it; celebrating it as a "game" just cheapens your soul. And don't we have enough of that?

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to confirm pro-internet freedom warrior Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission. How do you know she'd do a good job at our FCC? Not just because she helped get strong net neutrality rules enacted during Mr. Obama's second term, but because big media lobbyists have fought her nomination to the death! Currently our FCC only has four Commissioners, which means they can't bring back net neutrality or ensure that rural and urban areas get their fair share of infrastructure money because every vote will end 2-2. Ms. Sohn will break those ties, and she'll break those ties in the direction of the people's will. Seriously, no one opposes net neutrality except big corporations and their lackeys. And they shouldn't get all the say around here.

Action: concerning Social Security, billionaire taxes, labor, Title X, and Native communities.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security 2100 Act, the Babies Over Billionaires Act, and the PRO Act, increase funding for Title X services, and pass the CDC Tribal Public Health Security and Preparedness 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 Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5723, the Social Security 2100 Act, which would actually expand Social Security benefits and tax higher incomes into the system to help pay for those benefits. Social Security keeps a lot of folks out of poverty, but why shouldn't it keep us out of poverty at a higher level? After all, we worked for it, we paid into it, we fought for it, and we deserve to enjoy it in our old age. And in a sick, immoral, and decadent society where Rick Scott feels secure enough in his evil that he can actually propose sunsetting Social Security within five years, and where Mitt Romney feels secure enough in his evil that he can actually propose fast-tracking Social Security benefits without debate or input from the American people, it's long past time for us to play offense.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7502, the Babies Over Billionaires Act, which would tax unrealized (i.e., unsold) gains of folks worth over $100 million at 30 percent and then use that money to establish a Family Investment Trust Fund, which would disburse that money to the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services "for programs relating to supporting family well-being and the development of children." Hence, Babies Over Billionaires. The bill leaves establishing such programs a bit up in the air for my taste, but we could hash that out in amendments; I certainly wouldn't pass up an opportunity to get at all that money rich folks will never spend, but will instead use as collateral for the low-interest loans that really subsidize their lifestyle.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. We watch corporations do a lot of shady stuff to evade our labor laws, like calling their employees "contractors," forcing them to sit in anti-union propaganda meetings, and intimidating and firing workers who try to organize. The PRO Act would put a stop to all of that! And then working folks' victories over employers like Starbucks, Verizon, and Amazon could multiply all across the land. We know Republicans will filibuster this bill in the Senate, but let's at least have a vote and force them to stand against the 60% of Americans who'd like to be in a union and the 12% of Americans who are already in one. Seriously, it's well past time for Democrats to stop playing not to lose and start playing to win. We do it, so why can't they?

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase funding for Title X family planning services, not merely restore funding to pre-Trump levels. Title X helps working families afford things like birth control, cervical cancer screenings, breast cancer screenings, and HIV testing. Of course you know Donald Trump spent the last four years crippling Title X services, mainly by prohibiting Title X funds from going to clinics that shared information about getting abortion care; this wound up impacting about half the good Americans who used Title X services during the Trump years. Because what is government for, if not for punishing people randomly to make a point? That's what bad government is for, of course, but good Americans deserve much better than bad government.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7577/S. 3968, the CDC Tribal Public Health Security and Preparedness Act, which would allow CDC Public Health Emergency Preparedness funding to reach Native American communities. Native Americans suffered just as much or more from the COVID pandemic as anyone else, and they also suffer high rates of both chronic health care issues (such as heart disease and diabetes) and chronic infrastructure issues (like lack of electricity and running water). There's no moral reason to exclude Native Americans from this funding, but extending assistance to Native communities also means diseases like COVID won't keep rising back up and biting all of us in the ass.

Action: concerning law and order, pollution, labor, corruption, and privatization.

Long story short: tell Texas Gov. Abbott to grant Melissa Lucio clemency, tell Citigroup to get out of the Amazon rainforest, tell Verizon to recognize retail worker unions, tell our EPA to cut pollution from trucks and buses, tell our government to investigate Postmaster General DeJoy, and tell BlueTriton to stop taking the public's water. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first: Ultra Violet helps you tell Texas Governor Greg Abbott to grant Melissa Lucio clemency. A jury convicted Ms. Lucio of murdering her two year-old daughter in 2007, but, well, let's just say it's a bad sign for a verdict when five of the original jurors want a do-over because of evidence they didn't get to hear, evidence that included how thoroughly investigators coerced her to confess in the first place. I'm sure some folks would rather just adhere to the original verdict, not out of laziness but out of a sense that we've got rules, but I think they're misguided: one of the ways we protect our civilization is we make damn sure someone's guilty before we do something like kill them, since you can't really take that back. Erring on the side of innocence is a feature of civilization; too many folks think it's a bug.

Stand.Earth helps you tell Citigroup executives to stop funding oil drilling in the Amazon rainforest. Yes, that still happens, and not just because Jair Bolsonaro runs things in Brazil! But Citigroup executives meet today for their Annual General Meeting, so now's as good a time as any to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against them. They've funded oil drilling in the Amazon -- the world's best weapon against climate change, I feel compelled to restate -- to the tune of $40 billion over the years, which doesn't just mean pollution, but also means running roughshod over the rights of indigenous folks who live there. And yeah, it also means collaborating with the aforementioned irredeemable asshole whom I hope Brazilian voters will be able to turn out of office this year. Yeah, I said collaborating. As Rush Limbaugh used to say, words mean things.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg to recognize the Verizon retail workers' union in Washington state. Stop me if you've heard this before, but Verizon made over $4 billion in profits while cutting retail worker pay, which I guess is how they answer the question how do you think I got so rich? Verizon workers also suffer from the chronic understaffing and absurd scheduling practices that plague so many retail workers in America; could that be the reason Starbucks and Amazon workers are trying to unionize? Don't believe the hype that retail jobs are just unstable and workers should know that when they sign up. As if they have much of a choice! And anyway, calling misery "natural" betrays a profound lack of imagination.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to cut pollution from buses and semi-trucks. Again, throwing up your hands and saying they're big vehicles and they're just going to pollute! shows a profound lack of imagination. Semis and buses pump out a quarter of all pollution from vehicals despite comprising only five percent of all vehicles, and if they only get, say six miles to the gallon, wouldn't they be twice as clean if they got 12? This is the kind of imagination that makes good policy! You can't just sit there and say we'll never get them to get 50 miles to the gallon, so let's give up, but right-wingers want you to make that mistake non-stop, because then their paymasters (like big corporations that don't want to buy all new trucks) get everything they want. And why should they?

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Justice and United States Postal Service Inspector General to investigate Postmaster General Louis DeJoy for possible lawbreaking -- specifically, by holding onto investments in the corporation that just so happened to produce all those free COVID tests we got in the mail. No, it's not a matter of using your connections in the business world! For one thing, our government should have made the damn tests themselves, and for another thing, you're not supposed to personally benefit from the decisions you make on behalf of the public. I'm old enough to remember when public servants avoided the appearance of corruption; now they wave it in your face. Waving it in our face should get them punished, but it won't, unless we act.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell BlueTriton CEO Dean Metropoulos to stop taking public water from the drought-addled communities, or, indeed, any communities. BlueTriton, as you likely know by now, used to be Nestlé’s North American water stealing ahem bottling operation last year, but it's time we reminded the world there ain't no putting lipstick on that pig. And why should there be? Why should corporations get to siphon public water and then charge hundreds of times the amount they paid for the water? They call it "preserving a resource," but governments can do that. The most important thing here is that water doesn't go the way of health insurance, higher education, child care, and, hell, rent -- as an essential item that working families can't afford anymore.

Action: concerning monopolies, drug prices, gas prices, campaign finance, forced arbitration, immigration, and internet policy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the American Innovation and Choice Online Act and the Open App Markets App, tax the windfall profits of big oil corporations, pass a Constitutional amendment that would allow campaign finance law again, pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, reject any bill that would force President Biden to reinstate Title 42, and confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

With the news that both H.R. 5017/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act, and H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, passed through the Senate Judiciary Committee by large bipartisan margins, it's time to tell Senate Majority Leader Schumer (whose contact information you may find here) to put the bills on the floor, not wait for "commitments" from 60 Senators. Because that's a stalling tactic! Both of these bills would strike blows against big tech monopolists, so our Senate should pass them. While you've got him on the line, tell him to put H.R. 6833, the Affordable Insulin Now Act, up for a vote as well. The bill would cap insulin prices, and "waiting to see how the broader reconciliation bill goes" is another stalling tactic! We already know how it'll go: Joe Manchin will string us along for six months and then say he just can't get there. Enough already.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax big oil corporation windfall profits. Right-wingers will say that's "taxing success," but it's actually taxing greed, or taxing price-gouging, either one will do. Every time they call something like that "taxing success," they murder a part of our world, because they help condition folks into thinking corruption equals success. We've got to get back to the society that equates corruption with evil. Anyway, just four big oil corporations made over $70 billion in profits last year, and brook no silliness about how that's only six cents per gallon or whatever, because hello! $70 billion! You can't just slice $70 billion into ladyfingers. Next up on the right-wing noise machine: CEOs are underpaid because they only make 12 cents for every breath they draw!

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.J.Res. 80, which would amend our Constitution to allow governments to regulate campaign finance like sane people again. Let me be clear: nobody but a troll gets up in the morning and says praise the Lord corporations can spend as much money as they want on stupid campaign ads that put us all in a crappy mood! We actually live in a world where two-thirds of Republican voters want the kind of campaign finance laws that our Supreme Court outlawed in their notorious Citizens United v. FEC ruling, so we should pass H.J.Res. 80. Brook no slippery-slope arguments from right-wingers! A Constitutional amendment will not open the floodgates for all kinds of free speech restrictions, not least because money is not speech.

Daily Kos, Public Justice, and Public Citizen all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. Why do so many good government groups want us to pass this bill? Because forced arbitration is awful! It forces people to redress grievances with corporations through arbitration rather than court, and guess what? You're far more likely to lose in arbitration -- it doesn't matter that oh, but the average award is bigger in arbitration if you lose. And not for nothing, but forced arbitration is yet another one of those monopolistic practices by which corporations fix wages. And since wages are the price an employer pays for your labor, wage fixing is also price fixing, and price fixing, as we know, is illegal. Judges don't call it that enough, but we're working on that.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any bill that would preserve the notorious Title 42 immigration policy. Title 42 supposedly aimed to keep immigrants from making the COVID pandemic worse, and guess what? It didn't work -- with their whining about masks and vaccines, right-wing Americans kept that pandemic going quite well by themselves, thank you very much. No, the Trump Administration came up with the Title 42 program just to give them another reason to keep immigrants out of America, and too many Democratic politicians are going all Henny Penny at the prospect of even more immigrants, and the Republican attacks that will come with them. But failing to do the right thing on immigration because Republicans will attack us for it is cowardice. Which, again, Democratic politicians are good at.

Finally, FAIR helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. All you need know about her nomination? That the Wall Street Journal doesn't want her on it, out of a "fear" that she'll "silence conservative voices." Oddly, both the One America News Network and Newsmax have supported her nomination! If the Wall Street Journal thinks net neutrality (which Ms. Sohn would help restore) amounts to "censorship" of "conservative voices," that's their problem, because net neutrality -- which would prevent internet service providing corporations from delivering some files faster than others -- is not censorship. Like "conservative" and "socialist," "censorship" has become a word its users torture until it tells them what they want to hear. But we don't do any kind of torture here.

Action: concerning monopolies, transparency, drug prices, social media, data collection, and conservation.

Long story short: tell our FTC and DOJ to enact the most vigorous anti-monopoly policies possible, tell our SEC to force big investment corporations to be more transparent, tell President Biden to use all his legal power to lower prescription drug prices, tell big social media corporations to detoxify our news feeds, tell Zoom to stop trying to collect more data on users under the guise of "reading emotions," and tell our Interior Department to restore endangered species protections for gray wolves. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice to enact the most vigorous anti-merger guidelines possible. It's pretty simple: mergers kill competition, kill jobs, and raise prices, as we're seeing with three shipping magnates controlling 80% of the market and dictating terms to the rest of us, as we see when big corporations all but announce they pass on higher costs to good Americans to keep the outrageous profits coming, as we see in a hundred relatively small sectors of the economy (semiconductors, lab supplies, local media) where monopolies become the lynchpins that undo much larger sectors, and as we see when investment funds all but say they're looking to invest in monopolists über alles. All that's evil, so we've gotta fight it, and we've gotta fight it to the death.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission to force big investment corporations to be more transparent about their fees and their performance. Folks liken such transparency to a good nutrition label that helps you avoid foods with too much salt or fat or added sugars, and it's a good analogy; that must be why the banksters hate it so much! Banksters would prefer you just trust them that they can make your investments grow faster than anyone else, when their track record (particularly vis a vis state pension funds!) suggests they not only don't do better than the others but they charge you more than the others. You like to make more money, right? Then you ought to support more transparency from banksters.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to use his already-existing lawful power to lower prescription drug prices for good Americans. When even the New England Journal of Medicine tells you to do it, maybe you ought to listen! You can likely enumerate the ways Mr. Biden could do it -- he could seize patents of taxpayer-funded drugs (i.e., most of them) and let more generic manufacturers make drugs, or he could start investigating price-gouging among drug manufacturing corporations -- but he could also simply immunize our government from patent infringement suits. Hey, drug prices are going up way, way faster than (even today's!) inflation, and people die as a result, so I say do it all, and do it now.

The Kairos Fellowship helps you tell big social media corporations to "fix the feed," which is to say get the hate and lies out of our social media newsfeeds. They can do this in a couple of ways: first, by fixing or getting rid of the algorithms that ensure that obnoxious, hateful crap gets prioritized in your newsfeed; second, by hiring more people in order to monitor obnoxious, hateful crap on social media; and third, by disclosing their efforts in these directions. They'll hate to do all of that, because it's more work for them and more money they'll have to pay other workers! But making a mania of squeezing more money out of less work is more surely the mark of decadence than any celebrity drama you see on TMZ. This mania hurts America, and all civilizations, in every conceivable way, which is why we consecrate our lives to stopping it.

Fight for the Future helps you tell Zoom to stop scrutinizing emotions on Zoom calls. Zoom is, guess what, trying to use AI to read our emotions so they can create yet another datastream they can sell to third-party data brokers, but guess what else? Like facial recognition technology, their emotion-reading technology sucks! I mean, why not use AI to read the bumps on our heads, or better yet, measure our craniums? Facial expressions don't all say one thing or another, as anyone who's ever heard of sarcasm knows, and if they think an algorithm can read us pretty well, I got some everyday jerks that algorithms have helped turn into frothing white supremacists to show them. And not for nothing, but Zoom ain't the only game in town for video conferencing. But we'll try the Big Stick of Bad PR before resorting to boycotts.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Interior Department to restore protections to gray wolves under the Endangered Species Act. The gray wolf may not be endangered per se, but our ESA has never been about waiting until things got dire for a species before stepping in, and with Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana embarking on state-sanctioned, testosterone-addled wolf hunts this year, things are getting pretty near dire, even if our ESA has helped the gray wolf come back from the brink over the last half-century. I mean, there's protecting your cattle, and then there's killing one-fifth of the wolves in your state in a mere two and a half days, as Wisconsin has lately "accomplished." I'm not particularly anti-hunting, but I am anti-stupid, and states are acting dan stupid about wolves.

Action: concerning drug prices, billionaire taxes, labor, forced arbitration, free tax filing, and pollution in public lands.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices, pass a Billionaire's Income Tax, allow Congressional staffers to organize, pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, let working families file with the IRS for free, and pass the Reducing Waste in National Parks 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.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Senators to lower prescription drug prices using the reconciliation process. Since Republicans aren't going to help! Republicans think they're a lock for getting our House and Senate back, so they're just going to prevent anything good from happening, like that doesn't hurt people! You know who else needs to hear this message, though? Democratic Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Bob Menendez of New Jersey, that's who! They're not going to listen to anyone but their own constituents -- or, if they can get away with it, just their big donors! -- but if enough of their colleagues hear it, that might help light a fire under their asses. People like that don't do the right thing until they have to.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire's Income Tax and start taxing wealth the way we tax regular income. Republicans (and Joe Manchin!) will leap forward to tell you that we've never taxed that way, but of course there is a little thing called the Estate Tax, and anyway we need to start taxing these people that way, because they run roughshod over the rest of us. And these billionaires don't ever have to sell the property that makes them wealthy because banks will give them cheap loans to live on! Nice work if you can get it! Now, don't brook any nonsense from House Reps that "it's not worth doing because it won't pass the Senate." Even if it doesn't, it's still worth it to put our Senators on the spot.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation allowing Congressional staffers to organize for better pay and working conditions, specifically by repealing Congress's exemption from our labor laws. Congressional staffers get paid $30,000 to $40,000 annually in one of America's most expensive cities to work 60 to 80-hour weeks -- plus many of them have second jobs! -- and this means that most of the folks who work as staffers are folks who come from wealthy families, and don't we have enough wealth being slung around in Congress? If Congressional staffers can organize for higher pay and shorter work weeks, then more folks from all walks of life will be able to work there, and that would do us a lot better than having Congressional staffers who don't really understand how hard most Americans have it.

Public Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. Public Justice's email missive puts the whole case pretty succinctly: "(f)orced arbitration is rigged...it basically allows big companies to avoid accountability when they do something wrong. And you have no say! If you make a claim, you can’t go to court. You can’t get a fair hearing. And 9 times out of 10, you will lose. And there is nothing you can do about it." Unless you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, that is! Don't believe the hype that "the average arbitration award is x thousand dollars," because if you lose (and you very likely will), your "average award" will be zero dollars. Plus the corporation can sue you back and win! And that's no way to get justice in America.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make tax preparation easy and free for all Americans with relatively simple tax needs. If you work for a living, our government should send you a pre-filled tax form (since they know, from employer-provided W-2 and 1099 forms, how much you make), and indeed our government has the legal authority to do that! So why don't they? Bet you can't guess -- because big tax-filing corporations don't want them to! And as you know from the news, the "deal" they made with our government "mandates" that these corporations provide free tax filing to low-income earners, but good luck finding it, not least because these corporations do their damnedest to steer you away from it! If you don't have investments so complex they look like corruption, you should be able to file your taxes for free.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5533/S. 2960, the Reducing Waste in National Parks Act. Keeping single-use plastics out of our national parks? You mean, we don't do that already? Indeed, we do not. And thus our National Park Service must deal with some 70 million pounds of trash every year, and you can bet that plastic bags and plastic wrap and plastic water bottles make up a sizable chunk of that; a review of Yellowstone National Park nearly a decade ago found that plastic bottles comprised half that park's waste stream. And we didn't know this when we embraced the shatterproof bottle, but plastics have become so ubiquitous that we now ingest about a credit card's worth of plastic some way or other every single week. Talk about unintended consequences!

Action: concerning online privacy, child marriage, law and order, education, public water, and plastic pollution.

Long story short: tell the California legislature to pass a bill protecting children online, tell your Congressfolk to pass a child marriage ban, tell our FBI to investigate Jelani Day's death, tell state governments to teach the history of all Americans and not just white ones, tell BlueTriton's Chair to abandon his public water-stealing ways, and tell our government to stop buying single-use plastics. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will, and use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Senators' phone numbers, where appropriate.

First things first: Sum of Us helps you tell California legislators to pass AB 2273, the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, which would help keep kids safer online. Specifically, the bill (per its abstract) would set standards for corporations "that creates goods, services, or product features likely to be accessed by children"; these standards would include "considering the best interests of children" at all stages of production and providing clear community and privacy standards, plus the bill would prohibit them from collecting and using kids' personal data. Big tech corporations want to kill the bill, but let's not allow them to have all the say about everything; kids deserve an internet that speaks to their needs, not one that contorts them into "adults" before they're ready, and certainly not one that bombards them with targeted ads before they can handle it.

Change.org helps you tell our Congressfolk to pass a national child marriage ban. Only six out of 50 states have a minimum marriage age of 18, and it doesn't matter that some religions approve of child marriage, because our civilization as a whole does not, because kids can't make adult decisions about consent to sex or marriage, and in any case religious "freedom" doesn't give anyone the "right" to abridge anyone else's rights, which child marriage most certainly does. Also, kids forced into marriage are too young to file for divorce or get into a domestic violence shelter, leaving them no options except abuse and molestation. If we want to earn the mantle of "civilized people," we need to outlaw child marriage; 300,000 children getting married in America between 2000 and 2018 testifies that we need to do better.

Daily Kos helps you tell our FBI to investigate the suspicious death of Jelani Day, a Black graduate student and aspiring doctor who disappeared last August and whose body was found face-down in the Illinois River 60 miles away from his school a week and a half later. That's suspicious enough, but local police declared his death a drowning three weeks after finding him, and claimed to find no evidence of foul play or intoxication, though they found some of his personal items in more than one location a mile away from his car, which had no keys or license plates. Local police have seemed strangely incurious about all of these suspicious events; perhaps our FBI will demonstrate that curiosity this tragedy, and justice, demands. But only if we demand it of them.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell state governments that our schools "must teach American history, not just straight white history." Right-wingers all over America have demanded that schools excise any teaching of American racism that might offend their frail sensibilities; right-wingers have a word for this kind of person (that would be a "snowflake"), but then they rarely demonstrate very much self-awareness. I quarrel, a little, with the petition's metaphor likening these right-wingers to a "squeaky wheel get(ting) the grease." I mean, it is apt, of course, but a better one would be the emptiest wagon makes the loudest noise. Over the decades, right-wingers have embodied this metaphor over and over again with their drama and hysteria. One does tire of it.

Sum of Us helps you tell BlueTriton Chair Dean Metropoulos to stop siphoning off public water everywhere he goes. BlueTriton bought Nestlé's water bottling operation in North America last year and renamed it, but you can't just put lipstick on any old pig, particularly when BlueTriton has kept up the old Nestlé habit of buying up all the public water it can on the cheap so it can put it in bottles and sell it as "spring water" or whatever. Why do we bother petitioning Mr. Metropoulos? I wouldn't blame you for thinking that's a little like petitioning the Riddler or Mr. Freeze, but we petition him to put him on notice that his name may, one day, be mud to future generations. If there are any! I mean, if folks like Mr. Metropoulos get their way, future generations may not have any water to drink unless they're very, very rich!

Finally, the Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our federal government to stop buying single-use plastics. More specifically, you'll ask the General Services Administration, which controls procurement, to prohibit federal agencies from buying these plastic products. Since they pollute the world and cause health problems for so many people and animals! Our federal government is the world's biggest consumer, and if they will stop buying single-use plastic products, then there'll be a lot less demand for them, and then there'll be a lot less of them clogging up landfills and getting into our air and water and bodies. I can already see the headlines on Fox News: Big Government Won't Let Defense Department Buy Bottled Water! But gosh, how did we ever hydrate before bottled water? They hope you don't ask.

Action: concerning taxes, law and order, energy security, protecting our democracy, immigration, and copyrights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to extend the Child Tax Credit expansion, oversee FBI investigations more closely, pass the Energy Security and Independence Act and the Protecting Our Democracy Act, support ending Title 42, and reject the SMART Copyright 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 Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to revive the Child Tax Credit expansion that put $250 and $300 checks in the bank accounts of working families. Because that will help people struggling with inflation! Don't believe the Manchinean hype that "expanding the Child Tax Credit caused the inflation in the first place." For one thing, if that were true, inflation would have gone down by now, since the CTC expansion expired almost four months ago. For another, corporate greed causes most of the inflation we're experiencing! Corporate pre-tax profits went up 25% in 2021; recall that inflation was about 7% for the entire year. It's cruel to "get tough" on folks who need help making ends meet, and not to get tough on the powerful people who cause all the problems.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to conduct more stringent oversight of FBI "sensitive investigative matters" -- i.e., investigations of political organizations, religious organizations, public officials, or the media. We learned last month that our FBI allowed more than two errors per investigation on average in 2019, errors that contravened our FBI's own rules about these investigations and included such basic failures as failing to get proper authorization to even start an investigation. Law enforcement officers must answer to the law, and if not to the law, then certainly to internal procedures; we can't let them cut corners, because good Americans get hurt when they do. Sure, it's a "political organization" today, but tomorrow it could be you or I.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7439/S. 4013, the Energy Security and Independence Act, which would amend the Defense Production Act of 1950 so that it would cover energy production in America. Donald Trump will tell you that'd be "black helicopter territory" if our government stepped in and made big corporations produce renewable energy so we wouldn't have to rely on foreign countries so much, but no, it's not "black helicopter territory" for our government to actually insure that we rely on ourselves for our energy needs. And if big corporate CEOs think losing a few million dollars off their annual salaries constitutes "government oppression," I'd like to introduce them to some Russian anti-war protestors who could explain to them what oppression is really like.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which our House passed late last year. That also means contacting Senate Majority Leader Schumer (here's his contact info) and telling him to schedule that vote in the first place! No excuses about this one or that one maybe not voting for it! Hold their feet to the fire! The Protecting Our Democracy Act would prevent Presidential abuses of power like those perpetrated by Mr. Trump during his four notorious years in office, specifically targeting a President's ability to profit from his office and abuse his pardoning power, both of which Mr. Trump surely did. I guess this bill's opponents will yammer on about all that being in the past, ignoring the fact that the past teaches a great deal about what to avoid in the future. Hmm, that sounds almost conservative.

NETWORK, the National Catholic Social Justice Lobby, helps you tell your Congressfolk to support ending the Title 42 "health care-related" immigrant expulsion policy. President Biden (finally!) announced that he's ending this cruel policy, one former President Trump supposedly enacted to keep COVID out even though Mr. Trump's most devoted supporters then proved they can keep a pandemic going all by their damn selves. But quite a few Democrats have spoken out against this announcement in recent days -- they smell blood, might it be their own? -- but don't believe the hype that Joe Biden's not giving us tools to deal with the influx of immigrants. Those tools are laws and courts; they take a long time to work their will because they serve justice, not the need for second-rate politicians to "look tough."

Finally, No Censorship Filter helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 3880, the so-called SMART Copyright Act. The SMART Copyright Act would basically force every internet entity that handles content to install automated filters aiming to catch copyright infringement, but if there's something worse than an overzealous human censor, it's an algorithmic censor that can't be reasoned with, let alone tell the difference between actual infringement and fair use! Seriously, too many politicians think machines can just do anything, when the tech bros feeding them that nonsense just don't want to hire people and pay them and give them health insurance and vacation time and paid family/sick leave and the like. And these tech bros laugh at the politicians they con! We won't be laughing if this bill passes, though.

Action: concerning monopolies, health care, pollution, and "liberal" media folly.

Long story short: tell our FTC and DOJ to crack down on mergers, tell your Senators to confirm Alvaro Bedoya to our FTC, tell HHS Secretary Becerra to reduce Medicare premiums, tell Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection to better protect good Pennsylvanians from PFAS chemicals, tell CBS to stop hiring Trump Administration trolls as "news analysts," and tell the Washington Post to stop giving all its oxygen in the education debate to right-wing trolls. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will, and use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Senators' phone numbers, where appropriate.

The American Economic Liberties Project helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission and our Department of Justice to draw up merger guidelines that will actually encourage competition in America again. With Lina Khan as FTC Chair and Jonathan Kanter overseeing antitrust law at DOJ, our government has actually shown a fervor for doing exactly that, and though our FTC doesn't have a fifth Commissioner installed yet (which see next paragraph), the Administrative Procedure Act doesn't permit our government to simply ignore the popular will when it asks for it on matters like this, or else it'll have to answer in federal court, which, as you probably recall, was how most of Donald Trump's regulatory changes died. And if we make it harder for corporations to merge their way into monopolies, we'll bring inflation down. That's worth doing, right? (Matt Stoller, as usual, provides essential background.)

In a related note! You'll want to call your Senators and tell them to confirm Alvaro Bedoya as the FTC's fifth Commissioner; you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Senator's contact info, and you can find Senate Majority Leader Schumer's contact info here, so that you can remind him to schedule a vote on Mr. Bedoya, whose expertise in privacy and technology certainly would help our FTC, since expertise in these issues is, well, lacking in our government generally. Don't believe the hype that Mr. Bedoya has "divisive views," because his views (on protecting kids' online privacy, for example) only divide Our Glorious Elites -- who sincerely believe that no concern of any good American should keep them from making as much money for doing as little work as possible -- from the rest of us.

Both Social Security Works and Drug Prices Are Too High help you tell HHS Secretary Becerra to lower Medicare premiums. Why? Well, specifically because our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) raised Medicare Part B premiums last year, in anticipation of having to cover the exorbitantly expensive and notoriously unproven Alzheimer's drug Aduhelm, which would have cost $56,000 per patient per year. Now, thanks largely to your activism, our CMS has decided it'll only cover Aduhelm for Medicare recipients in clinical trials, but since it's not going to be paying out all that money, it ought to bring premium prices back down. It's only fair! And it was never fair to make everyone pay for a drug our CMS committed to without making sure it even works.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell our state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) to enact more vigorous rules protecting the public from PFAS exposure. PFAS chemicals, as you probably recall, are those "forever chemicals" found in all kinds of products which hardly break down once and now pollute our drinking water. You'll find the gnarled hand of PFAS in a lot of cancers, hormone disruption, immune suppression, and kidney disease; our DEP is doing something, at least, but has excluded a few PFAS chemicals from their rule, meaning it doesn't do enough to keep good Pennsylvanians healthy. That's why we're here, though, and remember: if they just flat-out ignore us and only do what big chemical corporations want them to do, we can go after them in court.

Social Security Works helps you tell CBS not to give cush "analyst" jobs to right-wingers who deserve shame and shunning from the rest of America. Still angry that Tha Bush Mobbers got any work after the humiliations they inflicted on America between 2000 and 2008, but still want to see actual conservatives on TV? Well, former Trump Chief of Staff/man who wears glasses so people punch him in the face Mick Mulvaney ain't it. I would never call that man a conservative; I'd call him a reactionary, or a corporatist, or, I'll admit, a few worse things. And note well that CBS didn't even mention which Administration he'd served under the first time they put him on the air! That means they know they're doing wrong. Which makes our duty to fight their wrongdoing even more urgent.

Finally, FAIR helps you tell the Washington Post to stop letting right-wing bigots have all the say about everything in their articles about education. The title of their April 5 article didn't promise a whole lot to begin with -- "Teachers Who Mention Sexuality Are 'Grooming' Kids, Conservatives Say," and I still think anyone accused of "grooming" who isn't actually grooming should sue. Then, 13 paragraphs later, you finally hear an opposing point of view. I guess the Post will respond "well, we were reporting on what conservatives said," which a) they're not conservatives, they're reactionaries! and b) why not focus on what regular folks say -- including gay and trans kids! -- rather than right-wing trolls who pollute every pond they wade in?

Action: concerning insulin, monopolies, privacy, banksters, and media.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the Affordable Insulin Now Act; tell your Congressfolk to pass the Open App Markets Act and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, reject the Kids Online Safety Act and the SMART Copyright Act, and pass the Stop Wall Street Looting Act; and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: our House passed H.R. 6833, the Affordable Insulin Now Act, earlier this month, so now's the time to tell your Senators to pass this bill as well; you can find their phone numbers using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page. Also, you can find contact information for Senate Majority Leader Schumer here, and tell him to schedule a vote on the bill post-haste. Brook no excuses! Nobody cares if it "has the votes"! Democrats act like it's a mortal sin to lose votes, but sometimes the best way to win a vote in the long term is to lose it in the short term! Won't Ron Johnson's opponent, or Rand Paul's, want to run ads about their refusal to stop price-gouging of diabetics? And won't Mark Kelly and Raphael Warnock (who's sponsored the Senate version) want something to run on? This is Politics 101.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5017/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act, and H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. Both these bills would stop big tech corporations from herding you toward their chosen products, versus letting you get the products you'd like, and note well that the big tech corporations are getting all Henny Penny about these bills. As the article points out, when big corporations tell you a bill would result in apocalypse, you can be pretty sure they're more scared than you should be. Getting to use the app store of your choice to get apps? Preventing big corporations from favoring their products in your searches? That hardly sounds like the end of the world -- unless, I guess, you're used to making money without earning it.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 3663, the so-called Kids Online Safety Act, because (and stop me if you've heard this before!) it wouldn't keep kids safe from online predators so much as it would expand internet surveillance upon them (and, of course, on us as well). The bill would also let state Attorneys General censor websites they deem unsafe for children, which, given so many state-level politicians have done recently, will let them call gay and trans websites "predators." This is exactly the kind of bill that lets politicians look like they're doing something, but actual child molestors and sex traffickers will still circumvent these "protections." Put it like that, and you may move the needle for some of your Senators.

Fight for the Future helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 3880, the so-called SMART Copyright Act, which would force every website to put content filters on it. To what end? To "protect copyright," supposedly, but "content filters" are algorithms, and algorithms won't err on the side of fair use, but will censor like mad, which will cripple free speech on the internet, almost like that's the whole idea. How do we protect copyright, then? We do it with the laws we have; the internet is not so unique a thing that existing laws won't protect copyright anymore. And we also do it by forcing corporations to hire people, not machines, to monitor for copyright violations! Corporations wouldn't hire anyone to do anything if they could get away with it, but people are so much more subtle and effective than machines.

Stop Wall Street Looting helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5648/S. 3022, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. This bill would stop banksters from buying up corporations and draining the wealth out of them by doing at least four things: 1) making banksters legally liable for the wreckage they leave; 2) closing tax loopholes that make predatory behavior so lucrative; 3) protecting workers first when big corporations go bankrupt; and 4) forcing banksters to reveal costs and returns to investors. A bankster who decides to go all In the Company of Men on some big chain restaurant will think twice about bleeding it dry and leaving working families out on the street if he might go to jail for all of that! And even country club jail time would be more law-and-order than corporations paying a fine and then deducting that fine from their taxes.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. How do you know that Ms. Sohn would do a good job at our FCC? Because Comcast went very far out of its way to lobby against her nomination -- and then got caught trying to hide that fact in its lobbying disclosure forms! Our FCC has been deadlocked 2-2 for over a year, meaning (among other things) no net neutrality restoration like virtually everyone in America wants and no work ensuring that infrastructure money helps build out broadband in rural and urban areas where it's needed. I don't care that Republican Senators will oppose the nomination; I don't care that Kyrsten Sinema might oppose it (since she opposes net neutrality, what a maverick!). I only care about doing the right thing, and making our elected leaders do the right thing, and this right thing is long overdue.

Action: concerning anti-war protestors, law and order, pipeline safety, climate change, mercury emissions, and Arctic drilling.

Long story short: tell the Russian government to stop hurting antiwar protestors, tell the Biden Administration to actually lead on trying Mr. Putin before the ICC, tell the Biden Administration to give up its fascination with "carbon capture" technology already, tell our EPA to bring back strong mercury emissions rules, and tell Travelers Insurance to stay away from Arctic drilling projects. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Roots Action helps you tell the Russian government to stop hurting Russian antiwar protestors. The news is full these days of stories of Russian citizens spouting pro-war propaganda, but there's a reason for that: the Russian government arrested all of its anti-war protestors and detained them! In America, our government just laughs at you when you protest them, but in Russia as in many other nations, you could lose your freedom, your livelihood, or your life. They probably count themselves as "civilized" because they don't just shoot them dead in the street! But it takes more than that to be civilized. And not for nothing, but if you've ever been called "traitor" for opposing the Iraq war, then Russian anti-war protestors are your brothers and sisters, and they need your help now more than ever.

Win Without War helps you tell the Biden Administration to lead the effort to put Vlad the Bad on trial at the International Criminal Court for war crimes against Ukraine. I don't need to recount the various war crimes Mr. Putin has committed against Ukraine; you can see them on the TV and on the internet. But despite what Mr. Biden has said, apparently off the cuff, our government generally doesn't have any appetite for prosecuting war crimes at the ICC, lest someone one day prosecute our leaders for war crimes! That's why we've got to speak out, and make no mistake, we're not just fighting Mr. Putin here; we're also fighting a future Donald Trump Administration (or a worse one!) when it enables our troops to commit rape and torture and mass murder in some foreign land to distract from some other evil they're committing against the American people.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell the Biden Administration that "carbon capture" technology is not a climate change "solution." What's wrong with "carbon capture," which aims to trap carbon emissions and store them? It never captures the amount of carbon they say it will, and big corporations use it as an "energy source" only to get more oil out of the ground. Carbon capture proponents will say it should be part of an "all of the above" energy strategy, but stupid ideas should never be a part of any strategy, ever. And if enough of us tell our government to scuttle its carbon capture dreams, our government will eventually have to explain to a federal court why they ignored us. Our recent experience in this area has suggested that wouldn't go well.

Environment America helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous mercury pollution rules possible. Environment America's email missive puts it most succinctly: "When power plants burn coal, mercury is released up the smokestack. That toxic mercury then rains down into our soil and waterways, poisoning fish and threatening our health. Mercury pollution is linked to increased risk of neurological illnesses and nerve damage. Kids are especially vulnerable to the impacts of mercury and can suffer severe developmental issues." Our EPA had a pretty good mercury rule once, and it cut mercury emissions by 85% between 2012 and 2016; I bet you just can't guess what happened next. Well, he's gone now, so now it's time to undo all his evil works.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell Travelers Insurance to refuse to insure oil and gas drilling projects in the Arctic. Because drilling in the Arctic is not only fraught with danger -- the inevitable oil spills are harder to clean up in that frigid region -- but because drilling in the Arctic will threaten actual, thriving industries, like Alaska's famous salmon industry. And oil drilling ain't just about digging a hole and shoving a well into it; it also involves clearing trees, paving roads, and running pipelines, all of which disturb and destroy ecosystems. And not for nothing, but given that Alaska already pumps out a ton of oil and more Arctic drilling doesn't promise that much more, think maybe big corporations just want to ruin protected areas? And should we encourage that kind of immaturity?

Action: concerning clean water, forced arbitration, scientific integrity, corruption, and plastic pollution.

Long story short: tell your Philadelphia City Council to replace lead-contaminated drinking fountains, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act and the Scientific Integrity Act, ban members of Congress from trading in defense stocks, investigate corruption allegations against Postmaster General DeJoy, and pass the Reducing Waste in National Parks 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.

Philadelphia residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your City Councilmember to pass Bill # 220221, which would force the city school district to replace all drinking fountains in schools with lead-filtering ones by 2025. That's because a recent study found 98% of Philly school drinking fountains had lead in them, and recall that no amount of lead in drinking water is safe, and that any amount of lead a child ingests can cause brain damage. So doing something about this shouldn't be this difficult, particularly since the American Rescue Plan Act delivered an extra $1.1 billion to Philly public schools and the district would only have to spend (per Penn Environment) around $6 million of that to fix the problem. But politicians won't do the right thing unless we demand it.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. I don't want to downplay the importance of the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act; it is a major piece of legislation, and I don't think I ever described the Affordable Care Act with that phrase. But why not press your advantage? Forced arbitration is unjust in every contract, for every reason -- and if arbitration is so great, why do corporations force you to use it? If you want to band together in a class action suit with other similarly-wronged folks, why should corporations get to stop you? Because they "deserve" more say than you? They don't -- but they'll get it, if we don't speak out.

Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 849, the Scientific Integrity Act. The Scientific Integrity Act would force Executive3 branch agencies to create (and enforce!) a scientific integrity plan that keeps politics out of scientific decisions. After all, we just had President Troll pack EPA scientific boards with corporate polluter hacks, and that's not the kind of thing that free people should have to put up with. The bill would also keep political employees from muddying up scientific data and give whistleblowers more power to expose wrongdoing. Oh, and it ain't just about the EPA: our Food and Drug Administration sure hasn't earned a reputation for sobriety as of late, what with their greasing the skids for the Alzheimer's drug that may not even work. So, yeah, let's put a stop to that kind of thing.

Inequality Media helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban members of Congress from trading in defense stocks. Why can't we cut the defense budget, even though we spend more money than the next 8 nations combined and still never feel secure? It couldn't be because nearly 50 members of Congress have almost $7 million in investments in defense contracting corporations, could it? I'm still appalled how cheaply people can be bought -- yes, $7 million is a lot of money even when divided among 50 individuals, but you know that's a drop in the budget next to our annual defense budget, meaning that defense contracting corporations can purchase a lot of legislative power for their buck. We need to make a world where our leaders avoid even the appearance of evil.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Postmaster General DeJoy for yet another potential conflict-of-interest, this one concerning the free COVID tests our Postal Service delivered to our houses. Turns out Mr. DeJoy owned stock in one of the corporations that supplied COVID testing kits to the public, and didn't divest himself of said stock; some folks no doubt think this is no big deal, but owning stock in a corporation that might get work from our Postal Service while you're running said Postal Service is an invitation to corruption, the kind of thing our laws proscribe precisely because we don't want such corruption to happen. America may be the get-ahead country, but we don't want it to be the get-over country, and that's why we fight corruption.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5533/S. 2960, the Reducing Waste in National Parks Act, which would ban single-use plastics in our national parks. Not just because you don't want to see that while you're hiking or climbing, but because our national parks protect a lot of our clean air and clean water, not to mention ecosystems you don't see anywhere else. And seriously, how many cheap plastic bags do you need at the Sequoia National Park? There are plenty of alternatives to plastic bottles, coffee cups with plastic lids, and take-out containers, and the internet is anxious to tell you all about them. I suppose some folks must oppose a bill like this, but I suspect they're the same folks who think freedom is mainly all about being as obnoxious as possible and preventing others from shunning you for it.

Action: concerning anti-trans bills, Wall Street looting, campaign finance, conflicts of interest, big tech monopolies, and crack/powder sentencing.

Long story short: tell your PA state legislators to reject anti-trans legislation, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, amend our Constitution to allow reasonable campaign finance regulation again, investigate Justice Thomas's possible conflicts of interest, pass antitrust legislation aimed at big tech corporations, and pass the EQUAL 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: H.B. 972 is yet another state-level transgender athletic ban, and the ACLU helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to oppose it. Look, this thing they pretend to fear, where boys become girls so they can dominate girls' athletics and bump girls out of scholarships to college? This does not happen, not just because federal regulations already require parental approval for trans kids to play sports. The people who pretend they think this happens display no evidence of ever having been a hormone-addled teenager, nor do they understand basic human greed -- people don't change sexes to dominate a sport only to be paid less than male athletes for the rest of their lives! Right-wingers love lecturing us on "human nature," but those of us who actually get it need to speak out.

Stop Wall Street Looting helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5648/S. 3022, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. You've heard enough over the years about banksters buying up corporations and draining the wealth out of them like vampires until all the workers are out in the street. The Stop Wall Street Looting Act would respond to that reality by taxing "carried interest" as regular income rather than investment income, forcing bankruptcy proceedings to take care of workers first, and stiffening penalties when banksters break the law. Note well the word "looting" here, as it reminds us (intentional or not, I couldn't say) that Ayn Rand, the right-wing thinker so many banksters worship, wouldn't call them "makers" but "looters." Hell, I'd call them takers! What a shame that today's elites would disappoint even the worst of our long-dead elites.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.J.Res. 80, which would amend our Constitution to overturn our Supreme Court's notorious Citizens United v. FEC decision and allow our government to restrain campaign finance again. Here's the amendment: "Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to forbid Congress or the States from imposing reasonable viewpoint-neutral limitations on private campaign contributions or independent election expenditures, or from enacting systems of public campaign financing, including those designed to restrict the influence of private wealth by offsetting campaign spending or independent expenditures with increased public funding." Virtually everyone in America supports this! So we should get it done.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Justice Clarence Thomas's behavior, particularly in re the January 6 attempted coup. The news hook there, of course, is his wife's incessant texting with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about the need to overturn the will of 81 million voters in 2020, but Justice Thomas also failed to recuse himself in 2000, even though his wife worked with the Bush transition team, or 2012, when his wife lobbied against the Affordable Care Act, or 2017, when his wife made money from one of the organizations working to uphold the Trump Muslim Ban. He'll insist that he's done everything above-board, but hey, if it looks bad, we should at least see if it is bad.

Both Public Citizen and Antitrust Day both help you tell your Congressfolk to pass antitrust reforms in re big tech corporations. Specifically, both tools help you ask your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, and H.R. 5017/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act; the former bill would stop big tech corporations from favoring their products in your search results, while the latter bill would stop those corporations from forcing their users to use only their app store. That latter item might be a bit mind-blowing -- you're likely used to getting all your apps from one store, and you may imagine that there's just no other way to do it! But this is America, the can-do country, and too often we see that the world is a whole lot bigger than big corporations would like it to be. That's why we keep pushing them.

Finally, the ACLU helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1693, the EQUAL Act, which would at long last equalize crack and powder cocaine sentencing in America, without amendment. Our House already passed the EQUAL Act by a huge, actually bipartisan margin; look over the list of Republicans who voted for it and you're bound to find at least a dozen names of people you really don't like. (Yes, Matt Gaetz was one of them.) It's almost like they've finally figured out that there's no reason to make sentences bigger for crack than powder, except racism. The main danger, I fear, is that some Senator or other will attach some poison pill amendment that would never survive the light of day on its own; feel free to communicate your will about this particular matter more forcefully in your email.

Action: concerning taxes, defense spending, forced arbitration, the Grand Canyon, gray wolves, and marijuana policy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass a budget more like the Biden budget but with less defense spending, tell your Senators to pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, tell your Congressfolk to pass the Grand Canyon Protection Act and reject the Managing Predators Act, and tell your Senators to pass the MORE 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 use the Biden budget as "a roadmap to lower costs, invest in our future and unrig our tax system." You'll find things to like in the Biden budget plan -- the return of the expanded Child Tax Credit, paid family/medical leave, and higher taxes on the rich and on corporations -- but you could also tell your Congressfolk you'd take the Biden budget plan over Rick Scott's "Rescue America" plan, which would raise taxes on lower-income Americans and sunset Medicare and Social Security after five years. People care about making ends meet; the Biden budget addresses that, and Rick Scott's masturbatory rage-addled screed about "wokeness," the only Republican proposal on record, doesn't.

However, Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk you think $813 billion on defense in the Biden budget is way too much. Hey, might as well meet it head-on! Saying you want a budget that taxes the rich harder and helps working families more doesn't require that you accept that we spend even more money on weapons. They're selling it as "keeping pace with China," but China's military budget doesn't comprise even 31% of Mr. Biden's proposal, and what has Mr. Putin's little adventure in Ukraine reminded us? That massive military power not only doesn't guarantee victory (though, of course, our adventure in Iraq should have reminded us of that!), but it's an anchor around a civilization. Bigger guns and higher walls testify to a civilization's insecurity. So let's be more secure.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. Congress has, commendably, ended forced arbitration in re sexual harassment complaints, but should end it for all contracts; the FAIR Act would do that, though the bill would still give consumers and workers the choice to use arbitration to settle a dispute if they'd like; I mention that because this bill's opponents will almost certainly lie about that. I expect folks would rather take offenders to court than to arbitration, once they learn you almost never win in arbitration -- and that corporations can then turn and sue you in arbitration and win! Again, how much of that "average $5,000 arbitration award" do you collect if you lose?

Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1052/S. 387, the Grand Canyon Protection Act, which would remove a million acres of Grand Canyon-area land from ever being considered for any sort of drilling or mining project ever again. Keeping drilling and mining projects away from the Grand Canyon -- which you really do have to see to believe no matter how many photos of it you've seen already -- should be a no-brainer, but though our House passed similar legislation last term, the McConnell Administration wouldn't even bring it up for a vote. We've got another chance to do it again, and this time, the notorious Kyrsten Sinema is the bill's main Senate sponsor! Let's see if she can work that bipartisan getting-to-yes magic for which she's so famous!

Environmental Action also helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 286, the Managing Predators Act, since it would remove gray wolves from the endangered species list in certain states. Thanks to our Endangered Species Act, gray wolves have come back from near-extinction, but they've only recovered about 15% of the range they used to have, and now they face death wherever they are. So naturally this bill would let four states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wyoming) treat gray wolves as if they have no Endangered Species Act protections, and would let all the other states set wolf population goals, as if none of them would ever set an absurdly-low population goal just so it can kill more wolves! Seriously, when they say Congressfolk don't know how to make laws, this is what they mean.

Finally, the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Senators to pass the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act. And Matt Gaetz voted for that bill, too! We live in an age of wonder! Sadly, Democratic Senators have made cowardly noises about the bill -- it's not exactly what they want, you see, though you would think that's why Senatorial debate even exists. We know their real problem, though: Republicans will say they're soft on crime. Like Republicans ever say anything else! Here's what they should do: pass the MORE Act, which most people want done anyway, then remind everyone that Republicans all rejected the American Rescue Plan Act which included more funding for cops and hate the Biden budget that would include more funding for cops. You're welcome, Democrats.

Action: concerning law and order, banksters, insulin prices, student loan debt, climate change, and transparency.

Long story short: tell our Attorney General to prosecute Donald Trump to the fullest extent of the law, tell our SEC to make banksters more transparent about their investment products, tell President Biden to use his existing, lawful authority to lower insulin prices and to cancel $50,000 of student loan debt, tell our SEC to enact vigorous climate change disclosure rules, and tell our FCC to make big internet service-providing corporations more transparent about their services and fees. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell Attorney General Merrick Garland to prosecute Donald Trump to the fullest extent of the law for his role in the January 6 attempted coup. You've heard that Donald Trump will fight to the death rather than accept a plea bargain, and it'll only take one Trump votary on the jury to get him off. But duty is duty, and I have to say Donald Trump does make duty easier, so brazen is he in his criminal acts. A federal judge has lately said, out loud, that "more likely than not" Mr. Trump broke the law, and Mr. Trump's White House reported exactly zero phone calls between 11.17 am and 6.54 pm on January 6. Now how suspicious is that? And what would it say if our President used burner phones during that time? It would say "prosecute to the fullest extent of the law."

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to force banksters to put a kind of "nutrition label" on their products. Food labels tell you how much Vitamin C, calcium, sugar, and fat are in your food, but the big private equity corporations have never had to tell anyone how much they collect in fees or how well their managed funds do -- until now, with our SEC's proposal. They'll be getting in our SEC's grills telling them how most investors already have all that information -- but then how do they bamboozle so many state pension funds into managing them, charging higher fees for worse performance? By enacting the most vigorous rules possible, our SEC can help change that sad state, which would help us all.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to use his existing, lawful authority to lower insulin prices. Folks are risking death by rationing their insulin because it costs so damn much, and if government can't keep people from dying due to corporate greed, what good is it? And just so happens Mr. Biden won't have to run to the Penguin and the Joker to get permission to lower drug prices -- he can seize insulin patents and let generic manufacturers make it, subject to "reasonable compensation" for the patent holder, or he can use "march-in rights" to get more generic manufacturers (or our government itself!) to make insulin, or he can start investigating illegal price-gouging among insulin makers. In any case, millions of diabetics can't wait.

Moms Rising helps you tell President Biden to cancel $50,000 of student loan debt already, as he promised during his campaign. We've gone through the reasons he ought to do that: because student loan debt is many degrees more onerous than it was 50 (or 20!) years ago, and because we, as a civilization, promised folks they could do a lot better with degrees than without them and we failed them in that promise. Some folks will tell you that wealthier people have all the student loan debt, but that's not true, or else the quarter of all student loan debtors who go to grad school would hold more than half of all student loan debt. You can discard arguments like I paid my way, so they can, too, not just because "paying your way" is so much harder now, but because you can generally discard arguments that go "I suffered, so they can suffer, too."

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our SEC to enact the most vigorous climate disclosure rule possible, which would make publicly-traded big corporations tell their shareholders how much climate change has impacted their business operations -- by reporting such things as the heat-trapping emissions they produce or how they plan to meet stated emissions reduction targets. These corporations don't want to do any of that, of course, because they're afraid their shareholders will abandon them, but no corporation has a "right" to have shareholders, while shareholders do have a right to know what they're getting into when they invest. A lot of shareholders don't care only about money; they also care about having a planet to live on 10 or 20 or 30 years from now! So let's help them be the best they can be.

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to force big internet service-providing corporations to reveal what customers would be getting before they pay for a service. As with the SEC's pension rule above, this would amount to a "nutrition label" spelling out things like download speeds and fees. Your cable corporation loves assessing the fee they didn't advertise and you didn't anticipate! So our FCC would put a stop to that, by making them tell you what they're getting. It's a shame we have to compel big corporations to do that, but that's what we get when we don't force them to do the obvious good for decades on end, to the point where right-wingers call attempts at transparency "socialism." But most Americans, liberal or conservative, want their cable corporation to stop lying to them.

Action: concerning Ukraine, housing, government spying, monopolies, domestic workers, and the war on Yemen.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk not to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, pass the Homes for All Act, outlaw geo-fence warrants, pass the Open App Markets Act and the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act, and end our involvement in the war on Yemen. 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.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk not to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Nobody wants to see good Ukrainians suffer at the hands of Vlad the Bad, but nobody wants the U.S. embroiled in a war with Russia, either, since basically everyone will lose that one. Folks don't always understand what a "no-fly zone" really is, either: it's not some magic invisible dome that covers Ukraine, but U.S. planes flying over Ukraine and shooting down Russian planes, which, again, leads to war with Russia, and, again, very likely to Earth's destruction. And polls find majority American support for no-fly zones -- until pollsters explain exactly what that means, and then polls don't find majority support anymore. Yes, it's frustrating when bad people get their way. But a no-fly zone won't constrain Vlad the Bad.

Renters Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7191, the Homes for All Act. This bill would help build new public and private affordable housing, and it would help combat gentrification and promote alternative home ownership models, i.e., to "landlord owns and charges you through the nose." Prices for so many essentials -- health care of course, student loans because they tell you you're worthless if you don't go to college, child care and rent because what else are you gonna do? -- have been going up for much longer than our recent battle with inflation would indicate. And they do it because they can! People don't just up and move whenever they like, certainly not if no apartments will do any better by them. If the "free" market doesn't provide, our government has to step in. That's not "socialism," it's common sense.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation outlawing geo-fence warrants. A geo-fence warrant lets law enforcement ask big tech corporations what devices were in a specific area at a specific time, which may sound like a smart way to catch bad guys, but which actually violates our Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure, as a U.S. District Court Judge has lately ruled. Law enforcement would comply with our Constitution if they got a warrant to find out whether a particular individual's devices were in a specific area at a specific time, but why do all that work when you can go on fishing expeditions? If it's wrong, and if law enforcement won't stop doing it, Congress has to step in and stop them, on our behalf. That's not "big government," it's common sense.

Free the iPhone helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5017/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act. You're thinking that if app makers want to sell their wares on an app store owned by Apple/Android/Google/Microsoft, they have to do whatever the app store owner wants? That's only true as far as making their apps compatible with particular operating systems (if they app maker fails to do that, it'll become apparent to the user right away!). But app stores typically do a lot worse. The Open App Markets Act would prevent corporations like Apple, Microsoft, and Android from forcing app makers to use proprietary in-app payment systems, forcing them to charge the same price in every app store, or punishing app makers who do either of the above. If corporations want "free" markets -- which they all say they do -- then they have to stop choking off competition.

The National Domestic Workers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4826/S. 2569, the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act. Our laws extend many protections to working folks, but for some reason our laws often exclude domestic workers from these protections (and by "for some reason" I mean "because they're poor and/or foreign"). The Domestic Workers Bill of Rights would not only extend minimum wage and maximum hour requirements for domestic live-in workers, it would ensure that those workers get certain other protections (for privacy, paid leave, sane work scheduling, and against discrimination) that, really, all workers should have, but which live-in workers feel particularly acutely. If you live where you work, your boss can abuse you plenty and easily, and nobody should have to put up with that.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a War Powers resolution ending our involvement in the Saudi/UAE-led war on Yemen. Because starving two million children to death is wrong, because fighting undeclared and therefore unconstitutional wars is wrong, and because helping the coalition kill some of the world's best fighters against al-Qaeda is wrong, and ain't it funny how often that last item happens? Ask the Kurds how well we stood by them after they proved their mettle against al-Qaeda! President Biden did promise he'd get us out of this mess, but most of his moves over the last year haven't gotten us out, but more like further in. That means Congress needs to step in -- which, per our Constitution, they should have done in the first place!

Action: concerning corporate taxes, our Supreme Court, water, consumer credit, and our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to enact a minimum corporate tax, confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to our Supreme Court, pass the Future of Water Act and the Comprehensive CREDIT Act, enact a code of ethics for Supreme Court Justices, and electrify our Postal Service's mail truck fleet. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a 15% minimum tax rate on all corporate profits, no matter where they're "earned." I put "earned" in quotation marks not for the usual reason (i.e., do they really earn their money?), but because corporations love pretending they've "earned" all their profits in some untaxed corner of the world rather than in the United States. Remember in 2014, when corporations reported earning more profits in five nations than the entire gross domestic product of those nations? And this year, Elon Musk is the world's richest man, while his corporation, Tesla, will report a loss in the U.S. this year while making big profits outside the U.S. I smell a rat, and Congress needs to root it out.

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Senators to confirm D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as our next Supreme Court Justice. All you need know is that her Republican critics in our Senate basically soiled themselves in public trying to attack her -- Sen. Cornyn wouldn't STFU about the "rights" of religious folks to run roughshod over other folks' actual rights, and Sen. Cruz's clumsy attempts to get Judge Jackson to opine on critical race theory were the most absurd grandstanding. The one charge against Judge Jackson that probably gives you the most cause? Under-sentencing in re child porn possession, though Judge Jackson generally followed probation officers' recommendations if not prosecutors'. And their obsession with her work for Guantánamo detainees was horseshit, because Guantánamo is horseshit. If their best can't stick, they should confirm her.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7182/S. 3886, the Future of Water Act, which would outlaw water futures trading by banksters. A "future," as you may know, is a contract that compels you to buy or sell a commodity at a predetermined future date and price; if that all sounds a little like a way of getting over on someone, I wouldn't blame you. And a future is speculation, figuratively and literally, and speculating on the sale of one of the two most essential elements on Earth strikes me as profoundly immoral. I wouldn't tolerate almost any futures contracts in my ideal economy, but at least most of them only speculate on one sector or other; we won't all eat pork or beef, but we will all need water, so let's keep that out of speculators' hands, shall we?

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4120, the Comprehensive CREDIT Act. If you've ever tried to fix inaccurate info on your credit report, a near-Sisyphean task according to those who've tried it, then the Comprehensive CREDIT Act would help you, by establishing an appeal process for disputes and allowing courts to give injunctive relief while you get it sorted. The bill would also limit the kinds of medical debt that could appear on your credit report and require credit reporting corporations to provide you with more of your credit information, for free, before you need it (to sign a loan, for example). If this all sounds like Big Gummint forcing corporations do common-sense things, ask yourself why corporations aren't doing the common-sense things already. Where they fail, our government must step in.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a code of ethics for our Supreme Court Justices. Our Supreme Court Justices are the only federal judges who don't have one, and in recent days we've seen why that might be a problem, as we have learned more and more about Virginia Thomas's involvement in the January 6 attempted coup. Mrs. Thomas's husband, of course, is Justice Clarence Thomas, the only Justice to dissent from our Court's ruling allowing our House January 6 Select Committee to get certain White House documents. Doesn't matter if his wife's name was nowhere in those documents, because our highest federal officials need to avoid even the appearance of evil. Making them adhere to a code of ethics will help them do that.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to require our Postal Service to make at least three-quarters of its trucks electric. The one vehicle you're likely to see every day in America is a mail truck, and they'll never be the most fuel-efficient vehicles you'll see, so we might as well make them pollute less. (Even in West Virginia, which produces nearly all of its electricity from coal, electric trucks won't pump out the tailpipe emissions gas trucks do.) And what's just as bad as Postmaster DeJoy's decision to contract with a Wisconsin corporation to make gas-powered trucks? That same corporation's decision to move truck production to South Carolina so it wouldn't have to use its own union workers in Oshkosh! So, yeah, let's kill this deal.

Action: concerning Medicare, forever chemicals, border walls, war-mongers, methane emissions, and Fox News.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to end a Trump-era Medicare privatization scheme, tell fast-food corporations to get "forever chemicals" out of food wrappers, tell our government to abandon the "digital border wall," tell the Washington Post to stop publishing op-eds by aging war-mongers, tell our EPA to crack down on methane emissions from factory farms, and tell big corporate advertisers to abandon Fox News. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell the Biden Administration to end the Trump-era program that allows private insurers to pay for some Medicare patient care. Without telling them, I might add! C'mon, you know Donald Trump: if it were such a great idea, he'd never STFU about it! He surely wouldn't have hidden it! Sadly, the Biden Administration seems to be doing just that, having (after a public comment period that I'm sure didn't go well for them) renamed the DCE program (for "direct contracting entities") as ACO REACH, and yes that is an acronym. ACO REACH won't be as odious a program as DCE was, but as one observer said, "you don't slap a band-aid on a tumor and call it cured," and whatever they call it, DCE will remain the tumor that threatens to spread the cancer of privatization to all of Medicare.

Consumer Reports helps you tell fast-food corporations Arby's and Nathan's to commit to getting the PFAS chemicals out of their food wrapping. Doesn't matter that you just throw it out when you're done with it, because they don't call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals" for nothing -- you find them in just about everything anymore, they don't break down into safer elements, and scientists have linked them to cancer. And not for nothing, but the longer you let your cheese fries just sit in that wrapper, the more PFAS you'll likely have in your food. Chick-fil-A and Burger King have lately committed to getting the PFAS out of their food wrappers, following McDonald's and Wendy's; now Arby's and Nathan's need to follow suit, lest we one day get to the point where we can't get PFAS chemicals out of our products and our bodies.

Fight for the Future helps you tell our government to abandon plans to form a "digital border wall." That's got to be better than Donald Trump's vanity border wall, right? Not so much -- the "digital" wall relies partly on facial recognition technology, and as we know, facial recognition technology has the hardest time recognizing the non-white faces that would comprise the bulk of would-be immigrants to the U.S. Also, the "digital" border wall uses drones, which I'm sure will never turn on us. If we must have fewer immigrants to the United States, then we must do three things: 1) make all jobs in America good-paying jobs, 2) stop interfering with other nations' efforts to do same, and 3) stop letting corporations make all the decisions in America. That'll make wisdom and compassion much easier.

Win Without War helps you tell the Washington Post to stop running op-eds from discredited war-mongers. The news hook here? On the eve of the possible resuscitation of the Iran nuclear deal, Post ran a John Bolton op-ed, as if Mr. Bolton hadn't orchestrated its destruction by President Trump. Mr. Trump, for his part, delivered perhaps the only guilt-free laugh line of his Presidency the day he said if he'd listened to John Bolton we'd be on World War V by now! He also pushed that war in Iraq, and if you're thinking maybe we should let bygones be bygones after almost 20 years (!), just remember that no one who pushed that disaster paid for their evil works, which included smearing half of America as "traitors." "Forgive and forget" works in our personal lives, but it just enables politicians.

Food and Water Action helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to start cracking down on the climate change emissions coming from factory farms. This was a big joke to right-wing hotheads a decade ago, but farms pump out more than a third of all methane emissions in America, and not through flatulence but through industrial production. Joke'll be on them when they realize that our EPA can-so regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act, and can-so regulate it on factory farms. They won't do it, though, unless we tell them to do it, and given how much factory farms already get away with by threatening higher food prices, our EPA really won't want to do it, unless we get in their grills about it. And we may have to do it more than once, and we may have to do it in court.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Fox News. No, that's not "censorship"! Governments censor, but our First Amendment doesn't guarantee a "right" to be paid by advertisers, just as it doesn't confer protections against activism or criticism. Why, I'd call it "starving the beast," and if Fox News has to get by with MyPillow and Snuggy ads, that's just the churn of civilization. We don't have to tabulate every awful thing Fox News has ever done to deserve shame and shunning, I trust, though demonizing the half of Americans who opposed the Iraq war as "traitors" does stick in my mind. If you want to meet corporate executives halfway, though, I suppose you could tell them they should abandon Fox because Fox sucks up to Vlad the Bad, and that's a bad look these days.

Action: concerning COVID, gas prices, scientific integrity, no-knock warrants, abortion, and pot.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to approve emergency COVID funding and pass the Stop Gas Price Gouging Tax and Rebate Act, the Scientific Integrity Act, the Amir Locke End Deadly No-Knock Warrants Act, the EACH Act, and the MORE 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 approve additional funding for fighting COVID. Another omicron variant is on its way, and our government has run out of money for testing and vaccines; Congress didn't include more COVID funding as part of its last appropriations bill, apparently because they feared Republicans would object to it and scuttle everything. To which I respond: make them! And though I know the Lancet predicted, a few months ago, that the pandemic would be over soon, that's still a prediction, not a certainty, even if pretty good science buttresses it, so one should be prudent and prepare for the possibility that things could go wrong. Apparently it takes a liberal to preach prudence these days.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7099, the Stop Gas Price Gouging Tax and Rebate Act. Similar to the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act, the Stop Gas Price Gouging Tax and Rebate Act would impose a 50% excise tax on crude oil-producing corporations on profits that exceed 10% over their average profits from 2015-19. The bill would then deliver the proceeds back to working families as monthly rebates. House Democrats should pass this bill posthaste and then put Senate Republicans on the spot. Let them say they can big oil corporations may not be price-gouging; people will love that! And let them be the ones to snatch monthly checks out of good Americans' hands; people will love that, too!

Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 849, the Scientific Integrity Act. You remember how the Trump Administration EPA stacked its scientific boards with pollution industry hacks? Well, the Scientific Integrity Act would fight that, by making all executive branch agencies develop and enforce a scientific integrity plan that keeps politics out of scientific decisions. In practice, that means polluting corporations won't be able to dominate decisions about stopping pollution, a sentence that probably seems self-evident to you, but a lot of politicians seem to have trouble understanding the whole concept! Plus the bill would keep political employees' grubby mitts off scientific findings and give whistleblowers more power to expose wrongdoing. These are good works, and we should make Congress do them.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6877, the Amir Locke End Deadly No-Knock Warrants Act, which would, as its title indicates, vastly reduce no-knock warrants (and therefore deadly ones). It wouldn't outlaw them -- the court issuing the warrant would have to establish "clear and convincing evidence, supported by particularized facts, that...notice prior to entry would substantially endanger the life or safety of the law enforcement officer or other persons," which is the exception for which any reasonable person would ask -- and which most right-wingers will pretend doesn't exist in the bill, though it's in Sec. 3(a)(2). The bill would also outlaw no-knock warrants for drug cases, which would curtail (though not end) unannounced entry.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2234/S. 1021, the Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance (or EACH) Act, which would make federal health care programs cover abortion services, and make federal health care facilities provide access to abortion. Because abortion is a legal medical procedure, that's why! And if we don't provide abortion, we will make women breeders, and we're not much of a civilization if we do that. Pro-lifers would say we're not much of a civilization if we tolerate abortion, but all civilizations have to choose between greater and lesser evils. When men can give birth, and science can progress beyond using abortions to save would-be mothers' lives, we can think about all of this again.

Finally, Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3617, the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment, and Expungement (or MORE) Act. Yes, Democrats will bring it up for a vote, thanks to our pressure; now we have to convince our Reps to pass it. They'll quake in fear of Republicans saying they're "soft on crime," but consider that Republicans say we should have fewer laws preventing polluters from befouling our air and water; why don't we call that "soft on crime"? After all, dumping poison in a lake or river hurts far more people than a burglary does; it doesn't feel that way to the burglary victim, obviously, but pollution still hurts more people. We should think of punishing polluters (or banksters, or tax cheats, or Medicare fraudsters) as being "tough on crime." I'll keep saying it until we do.

Action: concerning taxes, paid family leave, child care, forced arbitration, the right to repair, and electric mail trucks.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to restore the Child Tax Credit expansion, enact a windfall profits tax on oil and gas corporations, pass paid family leave and child care subsidy legislation, outlaw forced arbitration clauses in all contracts, pass more expansive right-to-repair legislation, and force our Postal Service to use more electric trucks. 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 restore the expired Child Tax Credit expansion, which resulted in monthly checks of $250 and $300 (per child!) going to working family bank accounts. In a nation where about 40% of Americans literally do not have $400 for an emergency, getting a check near that amount every month for six months was, as a famous philosopher might say, a BFD, and if you've ever had a family, you know making ends meet every month is tough. Strange, then, that Joe Manchin not only said that the CTC expansion (and not, you know, monopoly power or corporate greed) was the "main driver of inflation," but that CTC expansion recipients just spent their extra money on drugs! Let's make sure stupid ideas like that never win the day in America again.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7061/S. 3802, the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act. With gas prices going through the roof because of corporate greed, this bill would both enact a tax on profits we can tell come from price-gouging and then remit a payment of around $250 to American families making less than $75,000. You know, in case Joe Manchin whines about "means testing" and whatnot. $250 ain't a big check, I know, but it'll also buy around five tanks of gas in most cars, and again, with some 40% of Americans not able to cough up even $400 in an emergency, a $250 check ain't a bad thing to have. It also shouldn't provoke right-wingers into whining about Big Gummint Handouts. I kid, of course -- right-wingers are always whining about something.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact family-friendly policies, like paid family leave and child care subsidies, into their next spending bill. Yeah, Joe Manchin was against these policies, too, but I guess we can't expect folks who literally don't remember a time when they couldn't just take a day off literally any time they wanted to be too understanding of those of us who can't. Nor can we expect folks who have literally never had any trouble finding the money to raise their kids to be all that tuned into those of us who do have trouble covering child care. But that's why we're here -- to remind (or, if necessary, educate) our leaders about our troubles and how they might help fix them. I mean, your personal experience should be a guide to further exploration, not a walled city that keeps everyone else out.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. Our House has already passed this bill! However, unlike with the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, which enjoyed actual bipartisan support, our House passed the more expansive Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act (which would apply to all contracts, be they employment contracts or consumer contracts) on a largely party-line vote, with a mere one Republican vote in support. You'll never guess who, either: Matt Gaetz of Florida! Yes, that Matt Gaetz! Never let it be said that I didn't show Matt Gaetz in his best light. Anyway, this means we'll need to work harder on our Senators to pass this bill, but we're up for that.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4006/S. 3830, the Fair Repair Act. Yeah, I know, the Agricultural Right to Repair Act is still out there and probably has a better chance of passing -- after all, who wants to vote against a bill that lets farmers fix their tractors? -- but fact is we all deserve the right to repair, and manufacturing corporations that keep the information we need to repair something we own from all of us. Gosh, if you own it, shouldn't you be able to fix it? Do big corporations need to keep having power over you after you've bought their product? I'm old enough to remember being able to replace my processor and RAM chips in my laptop, but now they make them harder to fix, plus they herd you into their repair shops, rather than yours. And that just doesn't seem pro-freedom, you know?

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to require that our Postal Service uses at least 75% electric trucks. What's the vehicle you see the most in your neighborhood? A mail truck! So if we can get the most common vehicle we see to be electric, we'd be fighting climate change more than if we bought an electric car for ourselves. And if you're thinking electric trucks aren't "powerful" enough to last, remember that mail trucks don't do a whole lot of highway driving or a whole lot of speeding! Lastly, don't fall prey to the whole ALL TEH ELECTRICKZ COMEZ FROMZ TEH COALZ!!!!! rubbish. Most states produce at least some of their electricity from renewables now, plus electric vehicles don't pump out carbon emissions like gas-powered ones do.

Action: concerning immigration, junk fees, grizzly bears, antibiotic abuse, wage slavery, and the notorious OAN.

Long story short: tell President Biden to end the notorious Title 42 program, tell our CFPB to end bankster "junk fees," tell our Interior Department to protect grizzly bears, tell our FDA to root out antibiotic abuse from factory farms, tell Wendy's to do better by the farmworkers in its supply chain, and tell AT&T to sever all ties with the notorious OAN. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Moms Rising helps you tell President Biden to end the Title 42 program that Donald Trump put in place so he could turn more refugees away. I know they said their Title 42 program was a health care thing, designed to keep COVID out of the United States, but what a crock of shit that was! How much COVID came from Mexico, or Honduras, or anywhere else a "caravan" supposedly came from? Now how much COVID came from a quarter of Americans refusing to get vaccinated in an elephantine hissy fit over Their Guy losing the 2020 election? Yeah, sure was a good thing we kept Mexicans out for "health care" reasons. Title 42 only allows our government to send refugees back without even the hearings our laws guarantee them. As civilized people, we demand better from their leaders as well as ourselves. So let's get to the demanding.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to stop the "junk fees" bank love to impose on working families. You can name overdraft fees as a "junk fee" -- do you really put a bank out that much when you make a math error? -- but our CFPB also wants to hear from you about "fees for things people believed were covered by the baseline price of a product or service," "unexpected fees for a product or service," "fees that seemed too high for the purported service," and "fees where it was unclear why they were charged." Banksters do come up with creative ways to steal your money! And of course they do it the most to working families and seniors. Our CFPB will fight for us -- but only if we demand it.

Change.org helps you tell our Department of the Interior to reject any plans it might have to remove Endangered Species Act protections for grizzly bears. We've been working to help improve grizzly bear numbers for almost 50 years -- yes, good works do occasionally take a very long time. But grizzly bears still only number around 1,200 in the United States (a far cry from 200 years ago, when their numbers were more like 50,000, not that we'd be trying to get back there, necessarily), and when the Governors of Montana and Wyoming talk about revoking protections for grizzlies, they don't foreground "tyrannical federal mandates" or "protecting other animals" or "we got wells to dig!" -- they foreground trophy hunting. It's like they're trying to be soulless! And soulless people shouldn't get all the say about everything.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to eliminate antibiotic abuse on factory farms. We've been telling them for a long time, and it's not like they've done nothing, but the need remains. Two out of every three antibiotics in America go not to sick people or sick animals, but to nominally healthy feed animals, partly to make them "meatier" and partly to help them better endure the squalid conditions at factory farms. And what does antibiotic overuse help create? Superbugs, which took over a million lives worldwide in 2019, which was less than 2% of the 58 million folks total who died that year, but we could see 10 million annually by 2050, per a U.K. government study from 2014. And if a superbug gets you, the number that'll really matter will be 100% of you.

Daily Kos helps you tell fast-food corporation Wendy's to join the Fair Food program, which roots out the wage slavery and unsafe work conditions on farms supplying food to fast-food corporations. Every other big fast-food corporation has joined the Fair Food program, so Wendy's needs to step up its game, lest farmworkers march on Wendy's board chair Nelson Peltz's huge Palm Beach, CA mansion in the next few weeks and brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR against him. Imagine him having a gathering there; and then imagine him and his fellow travelers all laughing at the "little people" who think they can make a difference against his awesome power. Then imagine us winning, because his power is less like a machine gun and more like an anvil around his ankle.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell AT&T to cut off all ties with the notorious One America News Network (or OAN, or OANN). DirecTV dropped OAN from its lineup staring next month, and AT&T owns most of DirecTV, but OAN wouldn't exist without AT&T money to begin with, so starving the OAN beast of a platform isn't quite enough if you're still feeding it. OAN has, of course, filed a hilarious lawsuit against AT&T just for doing what it did, even suggesting that if they don't get an audience fed hand-to-mouth they have no free speech, though dozens of 2000s bloggers got big audiences without big corporate sugar daddy money. To think OAN says that with a straight face and still calls itself "conservative." C'mon, OAN, bootstrap up! Prove you don't need the corporate welfare!

Action: concerning monopolies, drug prices, student loans, internet service, Chaco Canyon, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to investigate whether Amazon lied to Congress about how it uses its monopoly power, tell President Biden to lower drug prices and extend the student loan payment holiday, tell our FCC to require big internet service providing corporations to explain internet charges and speeds clearly to consumers, tell our Interior Department to stop fossil fuel drilling around Chaco Canyon, and tell AT&T to keep its promise to stop contributing to election objectors. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate Amazon for lying under oath to Congress about how it blocks competition. Our House Judiciary Committee has alleged, in a letter to Attorney General Garland, that Amazon obstructed its efforts to discover how it engaged in unlawful anti-competitive practices, which would be like you obstructing a police officer's efforts to learn how you broke into someone else's house and stole their flat-screen. Apparently Amazon's claim that it didn't use data it collected on third-party sellers against them has already succumbed to investigative reporting (which hardly happens anymore!), and our House Judiciary Committee made this letter public, so Mr. Garland can evade further embarrassment by complying with their will, and ours.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to use his lawfully-granted Executive power to lower the price of prescription drugs. What can President Biden do? He can use "march-in rights" granted by the Bayh/Dole Act of 1980 -- which is to say, he can grant the patent license for a drug to another corporation, or even reserve that license for our government, if our government helped fund the patent in the first place, which is usually the case -- or he can declare "eminent domain for patents," and simply assign the patent to a generics manufacturer. The big pharma corporations would whine about either of these things happening, but they'd also fold, because there's nothing they can do. Except, I guess, tell everyone Joe Biden is a tyrant for, ah, lowering drug prices. Yeah, that'll go over well with the American people.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell President Biden to extend the student loan payment pause past May 1. We've said that simply cancelling student loan debt would be the best stimulus we could enact, given that Republicans will block any serious economic stimulus so they can feel important, but given that the average student loan payment (per the Federal Reserve Bank of New York) is $393/month, the payment holiday sure ain't nothing! It amounts to a monthly stimulus that rivals the (now-expired) Child Tax Credit expansion for families with one young child. And to those who say I had to pay my student loans off, so why should they get a holiday? Pick a response: college costs are absurdly high now, we're still getting out of a pandemic, you have a heart of stone.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to force big internet service-providing corporations to give consumers a sort of "nutrition label" which would contain clear information about upload/download speeds, data overage charges, and the fees they prefer to keep hidden. When some right-wing troll asks "why should Big Gummint get involved?" you need only reply have you seen an ad for Comcast etc.? They tell you they're the fastest and you can watch all these fancy TV shows and they never tell you what they're really offering you! Do you remember Xfinity download speeds, or do you remember the Slowskis? Granted, only trolls ask you about Big Gummint in this context anymore -- actual right-wingers hate their ISP as much as you do, and for reasons they can tell their FCC to fix!

Penn Environment helps you tell our Department of the Interior to protect the Chaco Canyon area of New Mexico from drilling and mining corporations. Because it would pollute public lands, kill unique wildlife, and defile an area of religious significance to Native populations. And you've looked outside at the night sky lately, right? And it seems like you see fewer stars in the sky all the time? That's air pollution and light pollution at work, and these things are not at work at Chaco Canyon precisely because we don't drill in there -- drilling rigs would bring massive work lights, which would make the stars invisible to us like it has just about everywhere else. Some things are worth saving, and a night with stars in it is one of them. It shouldn't just be in Van Gogh paintings.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell AT&T to stop delivering campaign contributions to the Republican Congressdolts who voted against election certification on January 6. I wouldn't say they incited the attempted coup on January 6, but I would say they were the "legitimate" arm of that utterly illegitimate movement based on lies and whining. Seriously, it is a whole lot better not to have a President who never, ever stops whining, and thus enables that behavior in his votaries. AT&T must think they've bought some goodwill with us now that they've let their contract with OAN lapse, but if you stop doing one evil so you can keep doing other evils -- and supporting these 147 Congressdolts is evil! -- then you're kinda doing the whole good/evil thing wrong.

Action: concerning monopolies, drug prices, the right to repair, renewable energy, facial recognition, and marijuana policy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Prohibiting Anti-Competitive Mergers Act, lower insulin prices, pass the Agriculture Right to Repair Act, invest in renewable energy, pass the No Facial Recognition at the IRS Act, and schedule a vote on the MORE 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.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7101/S. 3847, the Prohibiting Anti-Competitive Mergers Act. We could wait for our Federal Trade Commission and/or our Department of Justice to deliver on their (admittedly heartening) antitrust promises -- or we could pass the Prohibiting Anti-Competitive Mergers Act and tell them what to do, like automatically block mergers worth over $5 billion and reverse mergers that result in more than 50% market share. Again, our FTC and DOJ have made the right noises in these areas -- I can't recall another FTC that's said it would reverse merges, as this one has done. Still, we're much better off ensuring results than counting on results -- not least because Congress will have a hard time reversing results.

MoveOn helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower the price of insulin. Given that aspiring galaxy brains like Kyrsten Sinema have too much say in matters like these, we need to be as clear as possible -- insulin is a life-saving drug, and making life-saving drugs so expensive that people can't get them, or die trying to ration them, is cruel and inhumane, and civilized people will not accept it, nor will we accept the excuses politicians recite when the popular will pins their backs to the wall. This Congress just passed a major postal service reform bill and a major arbitration fairness bill, so we know this Congress can do things. Personal to those who say if you're afraid you can't afford insulin, don't get diabetes: what about folks born with it? Also, we sane people outnumber you.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 3549, the Agriculture Right to Repair Act. When your tractor breaks, you want to fix it; you do not want to hear that you have to take your tractor to an "authorized repair service" two hours away, nor do you want to hear that that'll cost more money for no damn good reason, nor do you want to hear any BS about "trade secrets." The Agriculture Right to Repair Act will force agricultural equipment manufacturing corporations to make any tool or information available to a farmer who needs to fix their equipment, plus it'll force said corporations to let farmers disable "security functions" in order to fix their equipment, all under "fair and reasonable" terms. This ain't a whole lot to ask, but we've asked for it for a while; now Congress needs to deliver.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in renewable energy now. Gas prices have shot up in the wake of Russia's war on Ukraine -- though we don't rely on Russian oil that much, of course -- and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has lately reported that climate change is basically outrunning us, so we've got both short-term and long-term reasons to step up our renewable energy game. And what of Joe Manchin's complaint that we shouldn't do electric cars because we'd rely too much on China for batteries? Even if that's true, it's not that important when you consider that a) you could charge your electric car at your house and b) nothing matters if Earth's too hot to live on. Oh, and c) you can make car batteries in America if you don't insist on paying all your employees in dung pellets.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 3668, the No Facial Recognition at the IRS Act. You recall that our IRS was going to make us use facial recognition tech just to get to our tax data? And that people rose up and told our IRS no way? And our IRS then suspended its contract with its facial recognition vendor and said they wouldn't make you use it? What if they wait until no one's watching and then contract with another facial recognition corporation and start this crap all over again? S. 3668 would simply prevent our IRS from using any biometric data for administrative purposes, plus it would force them to delete all the biometric data they've already collected. We made enough of a stink about this that we might get this bill passed -- but only if we keep speaking out.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to bring H.R. 3617, the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment, and Expungement (or MORE) Act, up for a floor vote. The bill would essentially legalize pot by removing it from Schedule I, plus it would reinvest in communities ravaged by the "war on drugs" and expunge pot convictions. What's the hangup? Oh, House Democratic leadership's afraid Republicans will scorch them for being "soft on crime." Newsflash: Republicans always whine about crime, regardless of how things are actually going. If they whine about the MORE Act, you tell the voters they literally "defunded the police" by voting against the American Rescue Plan Act. Easy! And, apparently, too hard for galaxy brain Democrats.

Action: concerning taxes, drug prices, paid sick leave, child care, and Oak Flat.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on billionaires, millionaires, and corporations, enact a windfall tax on oil corporations, lower drug prices, pass paid sick leave and child care legislation, and pass the Save Oak Flat 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 Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax on billionaires, while Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a surtax on millionaires and raise corporate taxes. Billionaires made about $2 trillion during this pandemic while we struggled to make ends meet, and a wealth tax (of roughly 2% on wealth over $1 billion) would raise a lot of money. A millionaire surtax would essentially raise the top tax rates on millionaire income by five to eight percentage points, which wouldn't be the 91% rate I want to bring back, but which would do a lot of good. And, of course, we need to tell the 50 Republicans plus Kyrsten Sinema they're wrong about corporate taxes every chance we get. So let's get back to it.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7061/S. 3802, the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act. I didn't know the other day that the bill -- in addition to taxing big oil profits whenever they decide to use inflation or Ukraine (or whatever!) as a cover for hiking the price of gas -- would remit the money it collects from big oil corporations back to working families making less than $150,000 (or, if only one parent works, $112,500), which should help the folks hardest hit by price hikes endure them a little better. Now let's see how many Republicans decide to go on record as voting against taxing big oil corporations and rebating that money back to good Americans. West Virginians, please clog Joe Manchin's phone lines; I don't want him giving those Republicans any more cover.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to, well, lower drug prices for all Americans. The news hook this time? Sen. Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, told Politico that "if we want to reduce drug prices, then we need to do it now," because of "the difficulty of passing something like this in a Republican Congress." In other words, if Republicans win back our House and Senate, they simply won't do it; that's a hell of an admission from the man who'd be Senate Pro Tempore again if Republicans take back the Senate, and it allows his 2022 opponents a campaign angle: if you want to reduce drug prices, replace Charles Grassley with me. Anyway, we already know that Congress won't do a damn thing unless we make it impossible for them not to do it, and that starts with communicating your will to your Reps and Senators until they get it.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund paid family/sick leave. Yes, 50 Republicans and Joe Manchin don't want it, but they're wrong there, too -- why, even a lot of CEOs will tell them that paid sick leave at least gives them some certainty as they deal with employee absenteeism. And the United States is virtually alone in the world in not providing some sort of paid sick leave to working families. Sen. Gillibrand's bills all funded paid sick leave with a tiny payroll tax, amounting to about $8 every month for workers making $50,000 annually; I'd prefer to tax the rich for that as well -- I mean, really, when is Jeff Bezos going to spend $180 billion? You can only go to the edge of space so many times with so many Star Trek actors before it gets old! -- but that should demonstrate how easy it'd be to fund it.

Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass child care legislation much like Senator Murray proposed in recent legislation and President Biden included in the Build Back Better Act. Basically, it would subsidize child care so that working families pay no more than 7% of their income in child care, and that's become a big expense for folks anymore, and you know why? Same reason college and health care have become such a big expense for folks anymore: they can't do without it. This ain't a "free" market at work, this is a captive market at work, and our government has to step in anywhere a captive market develops. What can right-wingers say in response? Don't have kids? Be happy you have jobs? I kid, of course -- right-wingers can't say anything about that, which is why they yammer on so much about critical race theory.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1884/S. 915, the Save Oak Flat Act. You recall former Arizona Sens. Flake and McCain delivering the Oak Flat region of the Tonto National Forest to the big mining corporation for whom Sen. Flake used to work as a lobbyist? The Save Oak Flat Act would reverse that giveaway, and never lease that land to any mining or fossil fuel corporation again, thus protecting Oak Flat from both pollution and desecration, since Oak Flat is also sacred land to the Apache. Sadly, neither of the Democrats who have replaced Messrs. Flake and McCain (Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly) have joined as co-sponsors of the bill. Arizona residents might as well call them both, though I doubt Ms. Sinema will do anything but laugh at them.

Action: concerning monopolies, labor, Russia, bank fees, COVID vaccines, and Fox News.

Long story short: tell our government to pause bank mergers, tell local governments to stop cracking down on striking workers, tell the International Satellite Laser Ranging Service to stop helping Russia, tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop "junk fees," tell big pharma corporations to share their vaccines so fewer people die, and tell corporations to stop advertising on Fox News. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell federal regulators to stop allowing banks to merge until our government can institute merger guidelines that better protect good Americans. And if our government decides that mergers do, in fact, injure good Americans -- a conclusion they appear to have already made! -- well, big banksters who want to merge and become even bigger will just have to sacrifice for the common good. Everyone in America has made immense sacrifices during this pandemic, except for big corporate executives, who, oddly enough, have just gotten richer while the rest of us ran to stand still. Does that sound like America? No, it does not -- unless one has a very cynical view of America. Cynicism is easy; civilization takes work.

More Perfect Union helps you tell local governments to stop putting corporate interests ahead of everyone else's when dealing with striking workers. Police will squash strikes and escort scabs to jobs, while judges will set absurd limits on how many striking workers can picket and (even) where they can stand. Does that sound like free speech to you? Governments profess to be concerned with "inconveniencing" other people, but if striking workers risk alienating passers-by when they picket, why do we need to limit their picketing so severely? And those who would complain about them blocking workplace entries had better not be the same folks who cheered on the convoys in Canada, for they surely alienated plenty of passers-by, and were far noisier than any group of picketers.

Change.org helps you tell the International Satellite Laser Ranging Service to stop providing data to Russia, so that Russia won't be able to make its GPS service work. Then, if they want to figure out where they're going next in Ukraine, they'll have to read the street signs just like we did in the old days! And I've heard that good Ukrainians have already figured out what to do about that. Seriously, we are doing the right thing in shaming and shunning Russia -- though of course the many Russians who don't support the war, and risk life and livelihood protesting it, deserve our support -- but there's no reason to make it easier for Russia to invade Ukraine. Keeping the data that helps run Russian geo-location efforts away from them won't affect too many Russians too badly. Just, you know, the ones at war.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to go after bank "junk fees." A "junk fee" might be an overdraft fee or an insufficient funds fee, the kind of thing a bank hits you with not because you really cost them $15 or $20 with your mistake, but just because they can. After all, it's a pain to move your money to another bank (or credit union hint hint), and your new bank probably won't be much better about the junk fees. And junk fees tend to slam the poorest among us, who aren't "bad at managing money" but merely don't have enough money to manage it effectively! Our CFPB apparently feels like we do, but we still need communicate our will, so they can better fight the banksters' inevitable frivolous lawsuit.

Amnesty International helps you tell big pharma corporations to share their COVID vaccines with the billions of world citizens who can't get them now. I usually argue pragmatically about this matter -- the more citizens worldwide get vaccinated, the less these new COVID variants can fester and bite us in the ass. But it's also the compassionate thing to do. Big pharma CEOs don't agree, because they only see money, though of course they don't put it like that: they have a litany of excuses, involving "the shareholders" and "the future" and such. But these are the concerns of small minds! Having money, cultivating the appearance of having money, the next awful thing you have to do to secure both of these to avoid shame -- we've got to do better than all of that. Big pharma CEOs can do better by getting COVID vaccines to everyone on Earth.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Fox News already. "That's where all the eyeballs are" is no excuse -- we have an obligation, as a civilization, to make sure eyeballs get somewhere useful, and Fox News isn't useful, unless you consider "trapping people in a death-spiral of masturbatory rage" useful. (Spoiler alert: it is not useful.) You can pick whichever recent asinine utterance by a Fox News "personality" you like, but it may be enough at this moment in our world's history that the Kremlin has told Russian media that they should share as much of Tucker Carlson's bloviation as possible, as if he speaks for anyone but the masturbatory-rage crowd. These may be the proverbial emptiest wagon of our discourse, but we outnumber them.

Action: concerning taxes, gas prices, corruption, energy policy, public lands, and saving our Post Office some more.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, tax the windfall profits of oil and gas corporations, prohibit themselves from trading on the stock market, pass legislation promoting renewable energy, pass legislation protecting public lands and rivers, and confirm two USPS Board of Governors nominees so they can 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.

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion that put extra $250 and $300 monthly checks into working families' bank accounts. "Don't Take Away Our Monthly Checks," the petition's title reads, and sadly Congress has already done that, because Joe "the Penguin" Manchin said folks spent those checks on drugs, and no, I will neither forget nor forgive that evil lie. And he wonders why no one wants to talk to him these days! In real life, the CTC expansion helped good Americans buy groceries, clothes, and school supplies for their kids, and with so many good Americans still unemployed this time last year, it gave more than a few families breathing room. And now with inflation at almost 8%, wiping out the otherwise impressive gains workers have made in wages over the last year, we should bring it back.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall tax on oil and gas corporations. Gasoline prices have shot up, and big corporations use the Ukraine war as an excuse to do what they were going to do anyway, just as other corporations have used inflation as an excuse to drive other prices up, so we've got to discourage them somehow. Don't listen to your right-wing friends and neighbors when they whine that a windfall tax would "tax success," because, frankly, that demonstrates a very warped view of success. Scientists who develop new vaccines and teachers who help a generation do better are successes, but people who game themselves into a position to price-gouge a nation aren't successes -- they're parasites, and we should deal with them as such.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to prohibit themselves from trading or owning individual stocks. And why should they do that ha ha ha snort say the cynical, but they should do it because it clouds their decision-making and interferes with their oversight duties. If you've got a million bucks invested in a corporation that makes facial recognition software, how likely are you, really, to regulate their lousy racist technology the way you need to? Not likely, one would think. They get so pissy when you don't trust them, but it's not our job, as Americans, to trust them -- it's our job to make them do our will, and hold them accountable when they don't. Making sure they get rich sure doesn't do anything for their bosses, the people.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that makes renewable energy, not fossil fuels, the future of energy in America. The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently issued a rather dire assessment of what we're doing to our planet, but the Russian war on Ukraine has also, I would think, given a lot of good Americans pause about getting fossil fuels from other countries when we've got plenty of sun and wind here at home. Oh, some right-wingers do see this as an opportunity to make our government allow oil and gas drilling everywhere, but oil and gas ain't gonna be around forever, while the sun rises every morning and the wind always comes back. When they said always said oil and gas were more "dependable," they meant that oil and gas delivered executive pay dependably. We gotta do better.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a slew of bills that would help keep our public lands and rivers clean. It ain't just wildlife that depends on clean public lands and rivers, after all -- we depend on them, too, to provide clean water and to give us places to go and explore. And small businesses also depend on public lands and rivers, because folks who come to enjoy them need to buy stuff just like we all do. Do we think bait shops and canoeing services support any old pollution because "it's the price of a free market"? Hopefully we won't find too many big corporations convincing people that we've "gone too far" in protecting land and water from development, because once they pollute public lands and rivers, it's hard to bring them back to health. We should know by now that we're better off solving problems before they start.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell your Senators to confirm two more USPS Board of Governors appointees so they can fire our Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy. Getting the Postal Service Reform Act passed was important, but we've also got to get Mr. DeJoy out, not just for trying to hamper our Postal Service's ability to get votes where they needed to go, and not just for his allegedly corrupt dealings with former Board of Governors member Ron Bloom, whom President Biden sacked. Fact is, Mr. DeJoy has actually tried to convince everyone that slowing down the mail and charging more for worse service were good ideas, and not some sort of pretext to privatize our Post Office. They're bad ideas, in a can-do America that always finds a way. To deliver life-saving medications, I feel compelled to add.

Action: concerning Ukraine, pollution, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell our government to reject the "no-fly zone" route in Ukraine, tell our EPA to reject the Pebble Mine project, regulate factory farm pollution, and regulate chemical safety and truck pollution more vigorously, and tell President Biden to forgive student loan debt. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Roots Action helps you tell our government not to enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine. It won't do what a lot of good Americans hope it will do (i.e., slow, or even stop, the Russian invasion), because it will then make the Russia-Ukraine war about Russia and America, which is what Russia wants. And hopefully the lessons of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Syria, etc., haven't been lost on us -- great power is more often a curse than a boon, at least when you use it. And, seriously, if we're going to oppose war, as I think most Americans now do, we're going to have to accept the fact that our opposition won't always give us the results we want. Of course I'd love to see Ukraine prevail over Russia! But I'm not willing to blow up the world to do it, and no-fly zones will take us there pretty quickly.

The National Resources Defense Council helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to permanently reject the proposed Pebble Mine project in Alaska's Bristol Bay area. Our Army Corps of Engineers rejected permits for Pebble Mine (finding its mine waste discharge proposal specifically wanting) late in 2020, but that's not a death blow for those who'd build a damn copper mine in Alaska's Bristol Bay, and thus risk not just polluting all the water around it but destroying the fishing industry, a business at least three Native American nations help conduct. It's true this project has been on life support for a long time, but in America, zombies have a way of coming back to life -- unless they get the head shot from our EPA, one supported by our communicated will as citizens. And we gotta speak out for that to happen.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to regulate factory farm pollution. Not just report on it, which they've been loathe to do, so we might as well play hardball. Of course "playing hardball" here is also synonymous with "doing a very necessary good work," since it ain't just animal waste polluting our clean water because of factory farms, but chemicals and drug residues which we really ought to be keeping out of our water in the first place. Not to mention methane! And factory farms have now become the biggest polluters of our water table, so we should tolerate no amount of corporate hostage-taking over "lower prices for meat." If you can't drink the water, saving a few pennies on chicken tenders ain't that important. And if they force us to choose, I'll just have to become a vegetarian.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our EPA to evaluate chemical safety issues more vigorously than they've done or proposed so far. Again, the risk of good Americans getting routinely poisoned by chemicals and burdened with the resulting health care problems should outweigh "the damage we might do to chemical corporations." Why would a civilized person say differently? All of us, not just conservatives, accept that solutions shouldn't be worse than problems, and that change can go too quickly and hurt too many people. These aren't controversial ideas, until they become manias -- until, for example, Republican politicians oppose all environmental regulations because of the "harm" they do to corporations. Hey, corporations are pretty rich! Then can stand to give up a little of their ill-earned largesse so we can all be a lot healthier!

The Climate Reality Project helps you tell our EPA to enact more vigorous truck pollution rules than they have proposed. Admittedly, their proposal isn't bad; it would make new trucks cut carbon emissions and nitrous oxide emissions by 90% over the next decade. Trouble is, corporations won't all be buying new trucks right away! They'll do what anyone would do, which is try to make the ones they've got work as long as they can -- in fact, it'll make some corporations stick with them a lot longer than they should, a habit you certainly don't want to encourage if you're an Executive branch agency. "Punishing thrift," in this case, isn't as bad an evil as "letting pollution kill or hurt people." And again, corporations are rich, and can bear to make their trucks pollute less more easily than any of us can bear cancer.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to release the memo concerning his power to cancel student debt, and then cancel student debt. If the memo said he could do nothing with his existing powers under the law, he'd have already released it, and ended this conversation! So we must assume the memo told him, ah, something different, and he doesn't want to release it because he doesn't want to do it. He campaigned on forgiving $10,000 in student debt per borrower, which won't be much in the context of the six-figure debts students take on now just to get the B.A. everyone says they need to compete in the world, until they want to sell a lot of M.A.s. So, yeah, our President needs to do more, and delaying the restart of federal student loan payments won't be enough.

Action: concerning pollution, worker safety, clean water, and dumping Fox News.

Long story short: tell Brazil to reverse an Amazon-killing rail project, tell our Postal Service to use electric trucks, tell the Biden Administration to protect Chaco Canyon, tell UPS to treat its injured workers better, tell our EPA to get all the lead pipes out of our water, and tell big telecom corporations to stop carrying Fox News in their cable packages. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Sum of Us helps you tell the government of Brazil to reverse course on building the Ferrogrão railway project, which would cut through indigenous lands and destroy nearly a thousand kilometers of Amazon rain forest. Naturally Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro -- who, with Donald Trump out of power, may rank as the world's worst political leader -- doesn't care about indigenous peoples, or about the ancient that do more to fight climate change than perhaps any other spot on Earth, but we care, and frankly we matter more than he does. And, frankly, so do the indigenous people who have heroically fought the Bolsonaro government. At least, in a sane, decent, and moral society, that would be true. But we must work to create and preserve that society every day of our lives. Hence we do it here, regardless of what he or his corporate cronies want.

Penn PIRG helps you tell the Board of Governors of our U.S. Postal Service to change direction on their new fleet of mail trucks and make them all electric instead of gas-guzzling. That'll have a big effect on climate change, since these trucks go all over the country every day. Now some right-wingers will do a victory lap after saying all mail trucks use electricity from coal ha ha ha snort. But even the electric mail trucks that would run in West Virginia (the only state that gets nearly all its energy from coal) won't be pumping tailpipe carbon emissions into our air, and in states that use more renewables, of course, running those trucks will cause even fewer climate emissions. This is progress! Right-wingers want you to let the perfect to murder the good, so that you never do good. We've gotta fight that.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell our Department of the Interior to keep mining and drilling out of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park and its surroundings. By now you may be able to recite the reasons why we'd do that -- mining and drilling pollutes the water, pollution kills wildlife, Chaco has religious significance to nearby Native nations. The Biden Administration has proposed a 20-year ban on new gas and oil leases within a 10-mile radius of Chaco, but we'd like that to extend rather past that, ideally to "forever." I've said it before and I'll say it again: when you blow up land that folks lived on for thousands of years, that land is gone, forever -- and the fuel you'll make from it will be gone almost as quickly, as will the money you make from it. As far as renewable energy, the sun may set and the wind may die, but they always come back.

More Perfect Union helps you tell UPS to stop retaliating against injured workers and start doing right by them. UPS runs a lot of warehouses, as you know, and its workers handle a lot more heavy packages than you or I do, so they get hurt a lot -- and UPS tries to keep them on the job, or catch them in "lies" so they can fire them (if you get asked 50 times exactly what time you got hurt, you think you'll give exactly the same answer 50 times?), or send them to Concentra, a corporate clinic chain that apparently specializes in pushing workers back to work without giving them basic health care like X-rays or MRIs. Not for nothing, but Concentra has close to three dozen complaints on the Better Business Bureau website, where they're ranked one star out of five. UPS needs to do better.

Environmental Action helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to get all the lead pipes out of our water systems. There's money to do that now, thanks to the infrastructure bill Congress passed last year, but our EPA still has to mandate that the lead pipes be gone, or else we risk losing some of that money. There's literally no benefit to having lead pipes in our waterways -- lead leaches out of those pipes and into our water eventually, and there's no safe amount of lead one can imbibe, because any amount of lead can cause brain damage, which then leads to other intractable health problems. You know how you get preventive health care for no additional cost now? Well, we should also get clean water from our government at no additional cost.

Inequality Media helps you tell big cable corporations to take the Fox News Channel off the air. It's not censorship! Censorship is when our government takes something off the air; good Americans joining together to pressure private corporations to take something off the air is just the churn of civilization. And no, Fox doesn't have a First Amendment right to get carried by other big corporations! If folks really want to diddle their rage glands all day, they can go find Fox News on the internet, where big telecoms should deliver all files at the same speed (per net neutrality principles); needless to say, we'd fight algorithms that shove Fox News down your throat. We've got to win civilization every day.

Action: concerning Iran, drug prices, climate change, taxing the rich, our Supreme Court, and our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to allow us to restart the Iran nuclear deal, cap insulin costs at $35/month, pass more and better climate change legislation, tax the rich and corporations more, expand our Supreme Court, and pass the Postal Service Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk not to obstruct our President's efforts to restart the Iran nuclear deal, a major achievement of the Obama Administration. You'll recall how right-wing Senators actively obstructed the deal in 2015 by telling the Iranian government a future Republican Administration would probably scuttle it. Which Mr. Trump did, and for no good reason! The deal was keeping Iran from developing nukes, and its absence has permitted them to develop nuclear weapons technology much further than they had before. Don't brook any stupidity about how you can't "trust" Iran, because the deal required verification of Iran's compliance, not trust. Jesus, right-wingers can be so stupid. Anyway, we can restart the deal -- if we get in our Congressfolks' grills about it.

Both More Perfect Union and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to cap insulin costs at $35/month, for which President Biden asked in his recent State of the Union address Daily Kos wants us to tell them to do it via budget reconciliation, but I'd honestly prefer they force Republicans to filibuster the insulin cap. Not because that legislation might not make it through reconciliation (the Senate parliamentarian killed the $15/hour minimum wage hike, you recall). It's more that I want to get Republicans on record as being objectively pro-death for diabetic children. People all over America are risking death by rationing their insulin because they can't afford it, so I expect they'll be even less receptive to Republican yammering about price controls than I am.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to step up their climate change game, given the possibility that our super right-wing Supreme Court may soon hamstring our EPA's ability to even regulate climate change. If that happens -- and it'd be a hell of a reversal of precedent, since our Court ruled as recently as 2014 that our EPA could regulate carbon emissions under existing law -- Congress will have to write more specific laws, which they're loathe to do, but which they'll have to do if we want a planet to live on in 30 years. The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently found that climate change is outrunning us, so we'd better pick up the pace -- without right-wing rubbish about how "this isn't the government's job."

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a 15% minimum tax on corporate profits, both domestic and offshore, while Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax on billionaires. Neither of these actions does everything I want them to do, but they'll make our tax code a good deal better -- a 15% minimum corporate tax will, with one swoop, end a lot of corporate welfare in America, and the wealth tax will begin to address the problem of runaway billionaires in America. If the nation's billionaires can add trillions of dollars to their net worth while the rest of us are struggling under the yoke of a pandemic, something's very wrong. And we, as Americans, have a duty to make it right. Corporations and rich folks need to pay more taxes, end of story.

Demand Progress also helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand our Supreme Court. Yes, we should do it because six of the nine Justices are far right-wingers, and we should do it because a President rejected by 54% of the electorate in 2016 appointed the last three of those. But there's another good reason: we have 13 federal Appeals Courts in America, so having one Supreme Court Justice to manage each District Court will make all those courts work better. These reasons are all better reasons than ones Congress used the last seven times they changed the number of Supreme Court Justices. And if Republicans think it's unfair to expand our Supreme Court under a Democratic President, well, they should have won the 2020 election. I won't lie: I say that at least partly because I know it'll piss 'em off.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3076, the Postal Service Reform Act. Ignore fake "concerns" about Medicare from certain right-wing Senators (which even Sen. Portman of Ohio have said are bunkum). The bill would allow our Postal Service to offer services like fishing licenses which will increase revenue -- a consistent issue with our Postal Service, since taxpayers haven't funded it for decades -- and would, more importantly, shed our Postal Service of the mandate to prepay retiree benefits decades in advance, a mandate required of no other public or private entity and a mandate that, frankly, feels like a Bush Mobb effort to destroy our Postal Service. With the Postal Service Reform Act, our Postal Service would get much-needed breathing room.

Action: concerning accountability, Russia, climate change, campaign finance, hunting trophies, and law and order

Long story short: tell our DOJ to investigate and possibly prosecute Donald Trump, tell fossil fuel corporations to abandon their Russian investments, tell our Transportation Department to release a promised climate-change reporting rule, tell state legislators to get private corporation campaign donations out of sheriffs' elections, tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to ban importation of hunting trophies, and tell President Biden to pardon non-violent marijuana offenders. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Common Cause helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate Donald Trump for attempting to subvert the will of the American people after winning the 2020 election. Late last week House January 6 panel lawyers alleged in a California federal court filing that Donald Trump and several of his allies committed crimes as part of their efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and if the January 6 panel has enough evidence to say that, then our Department of Justice has enough reason to hold Mr. Trump accountable. We witnessed a lot of these alleged crimes happening in real time, not just on January 6, of course, but also on January 2, during that alternately begging/threatening phone call to Georgia's Secretary of State. But a lot else happened in the dark, too, which is why we need to shine a light on it.

Sum of Us helps you tell French fossil fuel corporation TotalEnergies to quit investing in Russia, and also to quit fossil fuels. Yeah, it may not do the latter just because we say so, but it's more vulnerable to pressure on the former -- though it stands virtually alone among Western fossil fuel corporations in keeping its investments in Russia, saying that no sanctions have compelled them to divest thus far, and also suggesting that gas drilling is a more "realistic" option for getting off climate change. Set aside the fact that wherever gas drilling wells leak methane, they pack a bigger climate-change punch than coal. Switching to gas is the "reasonable" option only because that's their will to begin with! If they put their capital behind renewables, we'd see a lot more renewable energy right now.

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell Transportation Secretary Buttigieg to release the Biden Administration rule mandating measurement of climate change emissions from our national highway system. "Measurement," too, not mitigation! We've tried to get mitigation passed during the 2021 battles over the Biden agenda, with limited success. But the Trump Administration overturned this rule while in office because of course they did, while the Biden Administration has announced they'll reinstate it. Thing is, they haven't actually done that, hence our efforts to get more out of them than they've delivered thus far. They really ought to, since it could very well wind up in court one day, which never went well for Mr. Trump.

Color of Change helps you tell your state legislators to get private corporation campaign donations out of county sheriffs' elections. You know how politicians always tell you that campaign donations aren't bribes because they're not quid pro quo transactions and anyway of course you can rely on them to separate what's good for them from what's good for the public? They lie about all of that, of course, but county sheriffs have a much harder time lying all of that when some private prison corporation, or some real estate magnate, or some big telecom corporation, fills their campaign coffers. Gosh, what could these actors possibly want? Like, you know, land for a private prison, more arrests to fill those beds, usurious phone rates for prisoners? Win here, and we can one day win everywhere else.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to ban importing elephant trophies under the authority of the Endangered Species Act. Savanna elephants are endangered in Africa, which is, of course, where hunters go get their trophies, and maybe once upon a time we could argue that we must deploy trophy hunting as a necessary evil in regions where elephant populations have overrun human populations, but that time sure in hell ain't now, not when elephants all over Africa are in danger of disappearing in our lifetimes. And not for nothing, but if you've ever seen an elephant mourn its dead, you sure as hell wouldn't parade around your neighborhood with a bloody tusk shouting look what I did! The more we learn of our world, the more responsible we must be, but hey, civilization ain't easy.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell President Biden to pardon non-violent marijuana offenders. He campaigned on doing that, so he ought to start keeping that promise. There will be right-wingers who will say "you're not supposed to pardon people to further political ends." Go ahead and ask them how they felt about George H.W. Bush pardoning a slew of Iran-Contra participants or Bill Clinton pardoning big campaign donors or Donald Trump pardoning Steve Bannon, because those are all examples of "pardoning people to further political ends." Pardoning folks we shouldn't have jailed to begin with? That's just righting wrongs, which is something civilized people always do. And if folks want to call "righting wrongs" "political," then let them get caught with their cynicism hanging out.

Action: concerning "don't say gay," energy policy, anti-trans policies, and drug prices.

Long story short: tell Florida state legislators to reject the "Don't Say Gay" bill, tell President Biden to sanction Russian oil and gas corporations and invoke the Defense Production Act to build renewable energy infrastructure, tell big corporations to pressure Texas's Governor into rescinding his anti-trans policies, tell our Department of HHS to ensure a key pro-higher drug prices NIH official has as little say as possible about march-in rights for Xtandi, and tell big corporations to stop insuring dirty fossil fuel projects. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. MoveOn helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject the notorious "Don't Say Gay" bill. The bill no longer requires school officials to tell parents of gay or trans kids that they're gay or trans -- that's a conversation those kids would want to have on their terms, you know, in a free country! -- but the only reason that part of the bill's gone is because good Americans spoke out against it. Shine some light on the rest of the bill, which would criminalize even talking about queer issues in a school setting -- regardless of how relevant it might be to, say, a history or social studies class -- and we might be able to kill it like the vampire upon our culture that it is. (No use telling me that restriction only applies to third-graders and younger, not when Florida educators are going after much older kids as we speak!)

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to sanction the Russian oil and gas industries, and I quote, "no matter the impact it would have on the price of fossil fuels" here in America. America has suffered from worsening inflation ever since the reactionary U.S. Chamber of Commerce declared "war" on American antitrust enforcers, and you won't have to drive around much to see that gas prices are already going up, again, though, again, to some degree they're hiking prices because they can. Still, I'd prefer higher energy prices to coddling Mr. Putin's favorite fossil fuel corporations. Besides, we can fill the gap in other ways -- like ending stupid sanctions against Venezuela, for example. Or using renewables!

Speaking of which, Stand.Earth helps you tell President Biden to ban fossil fuels from Russia and invoke the Defense Production Act to help manufacture more renewable energy infrastructure. It is a matter of defense, after all -- we would build more renewable energy infrastructure in order to, literally, defend ourselves from Russia using its fossil fuel leverage to browbeat us into submitting to their outrageous invasion of Ukraine, and (as Stand.Earth's email missive points out) will not require Mr. Biden to get permission from One Great And True Real American President Joe Manchin. He'll piss and moan about it, as drama kings tend to do, but ain't everyone sick of that already? I bet most folks are quite sick of it, and need only to be reminded of it. We're not all conscious of all of our feelings at once, after all.

In light of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's latest attempt to pander to the most rage-addled among good Texans -- classifying commonly-accepted health treatments for transgender kids as "child abuse" -- Public Citizen helps you tell Texas's five biggest corporations to lean on Gov. Abbott and tell him to rescind his bass-ackward trans policies. Big corporations need all the good PR they can get, after all! And if right-wingers attack corporate power because it's too "woke," well, we can work with that, too. Greg Abbott enacted his notorious anti-trans policies before his primary; perhaps now that he's won, he can pretend he didn't do it. Let's at least make him earn that, by wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR against the corporations that could actually make him do better.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell HHS Secretary Becerra to make sure National Institutes of Health (or NIH) official Dr. Mark Rorhbaugh recuses himself from any march-in proceedings the Biden Administration initiates over the prostate drug Xtandi. Dr. Rorhbaugh apparently has worked with big pharma lobbyists to sabotage march-in proceedings from within, which isn't his job at our NIH, because in government, you're supposed to serve the people, not the big corporations! This matters because our NIH handles march-in rights proceedings -- that is, those proceedings in which our government mandates a generic version of a drug that its creator charges too much for. And maybe the guy who's actively working against cheaper life-saving drugs shouldn't get to make all the decisions about making cheaper life-saving drugs! Seems reasonable to me.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell several big insurance corporations to stop funding polluting projects that help exacerbate climate change. Lately the American International Group, better known as AIG, has declared it will stop insuring new tar sands, Arctic drilling, and coal projects, and that's good news, not least because you almost certainly helped that process along if you were part of the public pressure that changed minds at AIG, but other famous big insurance corporations, like Chubb and Liberty Mutual, have not declared any such intention. Well, like I said, big corporations need all the good PR they can get, and they need to avoid the Big Stick of Bad PR as much as they can, so perhaps with a little more public pressure, we can get Chubb and Liberty Mutual to do the right thing.

Action: concerning surprise bills, maternity coverage, drug policy, factory farm waste, the right to repair, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop interfering with enforcement of the No Surprises Act, make a full year of postpartum Medicaid coverage permanent, pass the MORE Act, force reporting of factory farm waste, and pass the Agriculture Right to Repair Act and the Postal Service Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to abstain from any interference (including lawsuits) their brethren might be contemplating against the enforcement of the No Surprises Act. The No Surprises Act essentially empowers the Executive branch of our government to stop "surprise" billing by medical providers -- you know, the kind where your doctor and your surgeon are in-network, but somehow your anesthesiologist isn't and now you owe $10,000? The Biden Administration announced fairly vigorous rules earlier this year, but naturally some of our Congressfolk, from both parties, are trying to scuttle them, all saying things like "the rules go too far" and "we need a light touch here." What's more unpopular than a surprise medical bill? The bankster who benefits from it! Isn't that enough of a reason for these Congressfolk to STFU on this matter?

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to make permanent the 12 months of post-partum Medicaid coverage. Before the American Rescue Plan Act, Medicaid post-partum coverage ended after 60 days, but though the physical aftermath of a birth might be dealt with by then, the mental side might not be -- post-partum depression is a thing, after all, no matter what right-wing male punditoids say. (I don't need to gender-equivocate here, because the opposition to Medicaid post-partum care has not developed enough that our opponents rush out women who say toughen up, girls!) And, actually, it's not all about mental health -- it's also about poorer Americans who can't just take a day off to go to the doctor, and who thus need more time to get the care they need. Now I'm just waiting for Joe Manchin to say families just spend their extra Medicaid coverage on drugs.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell House Speaker Pelosi and House Majority Leader Hoyer to schedule a vote on H.R. 3617, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act. The MORE Act would essentially legalize pot (by removing it from Schedule I, where it's never belonged anyway) and would also expunge marijuana convictions, which would help a lot of folks injured by our "war on drugs." And no I don't care that Democratic leadership might be afraid Republicans will attack them for being "soft on crime" if they pass the MORE Act! Nobody says Republicans are "soft on crime" when they pass bills allowing banksters to steal more of your money and allowing polluters to befoul your air and water! Let's ensure that's the conversation we have every time someone tries to complain about crime.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that our EPA can enforce reporting of factory farm waste. You may well be asking yourself: self, why can't our EPA enforce factory farm waste reporting already, using its authority under the Clean Air Act? And that's a reasonable question to ask! The reason they can't, as it happens, is because unscrupulous Congressfolk, doing the bidding of big ag donors, constantly slip riders into other bills defunding any EPA effort to enforce rules on factory farm waste! So our EPA makes lawful regulations and then Congressfolk starve them of the money they need to enforce them? Why, you might well call that defunding the police! Hey, enforcing lawfully-made regulations ain't no different from enforcing the law.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 3549, the Agriculture Right to Repair Act. S. 3549 will do as its title suggests: make it easier for farmers to repair their equipment when it breaks down, when a broken tractor, for example, could mean thousands of dollars in lost income if it doesn't get repaired right away. And with big corporations abusing intellectual property rights to keep tools, software, and manuals away from farmers, farmers can only go to a narrow, corporate-approved number of repair techs, so they can't get what they need fixed right away. Our FTC has made helpful noises about the right to repair lately, but some corporations won't do the right thing until we make them. So let's make them. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and power is evil when wielded to do wrong.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. Sen. Rick Scott (E-FL) blocked consideration of the Postal Service Reform Act last month, even though our House passed the bill by an actually bipartisan 342-92 vote, and the Senate version of the bill has 14 Republican sponsors. But now that Mr. Scott got caught advocating tax hikes for folks just trying to make ends meet, how does his obstruction look? This bill would remove the crushing mandate (for prepayment of retiree benefits decades in advance) placed upon our Postal Service by Congress in 2006; it wouldn't get us, say, postal banking, which was a feature of post offices until the late 1960s, but getting rid of the mandate would represent significant progress.

Action: concerning vaccines, clean water, Arctic drilling, and conservation.

Long story short: tell President Biden to pressure Moderna to share its vaccine technology with the rest of the world, tell our EPA to replace all lead-lined water pipes, tell our FDA to vigorously regulate agricultural wastewater, and tell our government to flatline an Arctic drilling project and protect old-growth trees everywhere in America. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to pressure Moderna to share its COVID-19 vaccine technology with the rest of the world. And by "pressure," I would mean "remind them that you can, by law, simply take charge of the patent and force them to share their tech with the rest of the world." You've heard that South African scientists had to reverse-engineer the patent from scratch? Great job, and I'm sure their travails will make a great HBO miniseries one day, but why should it have even been necessary? Someone already figured it out and decided to make the most amount of money possible from it, so millions of folks all over the world have to die? I swear the worship of mammon will kill us all one day, if it hasn't doomed us already. But in the meantime, duty is duty.

Environmental Action helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to replace all lead-lined water lines in America within a decade. The infrastructure bill passed last year will spend more money on lead-pipe removal than we've ever spent at any time in our history, and that's good, but our EPA still should establish the legal goal of getting rid of all the lead pipes in America, because that'll make it less likely that some of that money gets diverted to, ah, purposes not exactly related to lead-pipe removal. And any amount of lead in your drinking water causes brain damage, and we could have as many as 24 million children drinking water with toxic levels of lead in it, so the need is dire, and our EPA needs to recognize that, and our EPA also needs to require that we remedy it.

Staying with clean water for the moment, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to enact the most vigorous agricultural water requirements possible. Meaning what? Meaning big ag corporations have to work harder to keep the animal feces out of the water they use on their crops, and therefore our water, since it all winds up at the same place. It took our CDC nearly eight years to link two 2014 listeria outbreaks -- which hospitalized 22 good Americans and killed three -- to agricultural wastewater. Our CDC further estimates that close to 50 million Americans will get food poisoning this year, and 3,000 will die from it. And nobody laid up in a hospital with a disease they didn't need to get wants to hear that the way we do things now keeps your food cheap!

Both the Wilderness Society and the Center for Biological Diversity help you tell the Biden Administration to scuttle any plans they might have to restart the notorious Willow Project in the Western Arctic Ocean. The Trump Administration green-lit the program in 2020, and like a lot of Trump Administration projects, a judge stopped it because (and stop me if you've heard this one before!) the Administration didn't do the environmental reviews required by law before giving the project the green light. But this is yet another oil-drilling project in an area of the world we don't know enough about to drill in safely. You know the drill: frigid waters, fragile ecosystems, other sectors of the economy (hello, salmon fishing!) that could get injured or wiped out. But you still gotta say things to your government a couple of times (or a couple hundred times!) before they get it.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell the Biden Administration to protect old growth trees from logging wherever they may be in America. I've trumpeted the thousand year-old trees in the Tongass many times in this space, but they're not the only old-growth trees we've got -- we have many pines, junipers, oaks, and sequoias that old (and older) in California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona, and our oldest trees are some of our best climate-change fighters, given that they've been absorbing carbon dioxide far longer than you or I have been alive. And most of these trees only die when they get batted around by severe weather or someone injures them. And I keep saying this, but when they're gone, they're gone, and the money we get from cutting them down will never last as long, or do as much good.

Action: concerning Medicare, drug prices, trade waivers, pot sentences, and facial recognition.

Long story short: tell President Biden to end Medicare privatization, lower prescription drug prices, negotiate a more comprehensive TRIPS waiver at the WTO, pardon marijuana-related sentences, and get rid of the notorious ID.me facial recognition technology all across our federal government. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to end the Trump Administration's Medicare privatization scheme. Which was? Medicare paying Direct Contracting Entities (or DCEs) money to cover part of seniors' health care needs, instead of directly reimbursing providers as is the traditional method, and often not telling seniors they were getting care from a DCE instead of Medicare! But President Biden has apparently decided to rename the program instead of end it, even though we all know that no matter how much you promise "transparency" and "accountability," privatization programs always result in taxpayers paying more money for less service. So it's time to tell President Biden you don't approve of him going in the wrong direction on this matter.

Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to use Executive Actions to lower prescription drug prices for Americans. We asked Congress to lower drug prices yesterday, and today we're asking President Biden to do the same, and frankly asking one person to exercise their legal authority to lower drug prices does seem easier than asking 538 to pass decent legislation. And if right-wingers want to whine about "untrammeled executive power" in regards to drug prices everyone in America agrees are too high, then let them whine. The Biden Administration has many tools left at its disposal, from the frequently cited "march-in rights" afforded by the Bayh/Dole Act of 1980 to the "eminent domain for patents" successfully deployed by Tha Bush Mobb, of all Administrations, right after 9.11. So, no excuses.

Wondering how that whole TRIPS waiver thing at the WTO was going? Well, according to Sarah Lazare at In These Times, not as well as it could be -- the Biden Administration has apparently begun negotiating such a waiver by including only COVID-19 vaccines, and excluding tests and treatments. Actually getting the waiver done for COVID-19 vaccines would enable corporations all over the planet to manufacture generic versions of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and that's no small thing, but people are still going to get COVID, and thus the waiver should also cover antiviral treatments and rapid tests. Today you can call President Biden at 1.202.456.1111, but only between 11 am and 3 pm; you can also write him at the White House contact page here, and tell him to broaden the scope of a TRIPS waiver. He negotiates on our behalf, after all.

Progress America helps you tell President Biden to pardon and expunge non-violent marijuana convictions. Hey, he promised! I was a bit surprised to learn that, too, considering how anti-pot he's been his whole life, but hey, if you promise something, you ought to deliver it, even if (especially if!) right-wingers will demonize you for being "soft on crime." These right-wingers don't even care about crime! At all! How do I know? Because they have no righteous anger against banksters and polluters; when they think of criminals, they only see Black people. And having these convictions on your record keeps you from getting jobs, which makes it more likely you'll land up in jail again. So President Biden should get his pardon on regarding by far the least dangerous drug on Schedule I.

Finally, Dump ID.me helps you tell all branches of our federal government to dump the notorious ID.me facial recognition system. We successfully got our IRS to drop plans to use it this tax season, which yay us, but that leaves, basically, the rest of our government to work on, including our Veterans Administration, which uses ID.me and apparently works so poorly that our veterans and their families can't get emergency assistance or disability payments. That's not the good work you'd want to bring to the Pearly Gates! I mean, I could go on about all the wrongful arrests and wrongful denial of unemployment benefits that Black, brown and trans folks have to endure because of facial recognition technology, but maybe facial recognition technology costing you the money you've earned and need to make ends meet resonates a little more broadly.

Action: concerning sanctions, abortion, drug prices, the war on Yemen, and conservation.

Long story short: tell President Biden to lift sanctions on Venezuela, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Women's Health Protection Act, lower prescription drug prices, end the war on Yemen, and pass the Recovering America's Wildlife Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, reminds us that it we really want to hit Vladimir Putin in the family jewels, we should lift our sanctions on Venezuela, which could produce more cheap oil than Russia ever could if our sanctions weren't crippling them. You can still contact President Biden here; I'd say call him at 1.202.456.1111, but that number only operates between 11 am and 3 pm on Tuesday through Thursday. Did Venezuela invade someone to get sanctioned by our government? Of course not -- we're sanctioning them for wanting to nationalize their oil and levy taxes against big oil corporations, which they have the right to do, being a democracy and all. Yes, they are a democracy; can we say as much about Russia, let alone the numerous other nations we enable? So let's tighten our grip around Mr. Putin's neck and correct a serious injustice in one fell swoop.

Our Senate votes today on H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act, so Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass this bill. If you call your Senators, and you know you're calling one who'll likely vote against the bill, all you need do is list the good things the bill would do, such that they would be compelled to answer: yes, I want clinics to dispense harmful information just to lead women away from getting abortions, and yes, I want forced ultrasounds on all pregnant women, and yes, I want abortion clinics to adhere to absurdly-high standards just so most of them close, and no, I don't want women to be able to get abortions even if their pregnancies threaten their lives. Seriously, let's make them put it like that.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices. 80% of Americans want Medicare to be able to negotiate drug prices, just so drug prices can be lower for everyone, and even Newt Gingrich says if 70% of Americans want something they should have it, but because Kyrsten Sinema and Bob Menendez don't want it -- two people -- we can't have it, even though one in three Americans are currently rationing their medicines because they really can't afford them. That includes one in four Americans rationing insulin, though insulin is literally a life-saving drug. So this isn't just about doing the will of the American people, it's also about fucking saving lives. Sorry, these Senator Galaxybrains bring out the cuss words.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a War Powers Resolution that would end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Remember when Donald Trump would conduct a "different" kind of foreign policy? Well, he didn't stop our involvement in the war that's driving a nation to famine and killing some of the best counter-terrorists on Earth, so you know that was a lie. And remember when Joe Biden said he'd be ending military support for the war? That's still going on, sadly, so you know that was a lie. A War Powers Resolution would at least take back (and use!) the power that Congress should never have delegated to Presidents (including Barack Obama, you didn't think he was off the hook, did you?) to begin with.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2773/S. 2372, the Recovering America's Wildlife Act. What would this bill do? It would fund our most pressing wildlife conservation efforts, and it would draw that funding from the folks who violate our clean air and clean water laws and pay fees and fines because of it. The Senate version of this bill, you may notice, has an equal number of Democratic and Republican sponsors at this writing (16 of each); even the House version counts 37 Republicans among its 164 sponsors. Presumably Republican politicians support this bill because it lets states dictate which are our most pressing wildlife conservation needs; I might do it differently, but I wouldn't let the perfect murder the good, either. So let's get this done.

Action: concerning rape, pollution, taxes, and law and order.

Long story short: tell Honduras to sign a bill allowing rape victims to access emergency contraceptives, tell Chile to start regulating the clothing industry, tell New York's Governor to extend clemency to Robert Webster, tell President Biden to end offshore drilling, tell our IRS to simplify free tax filing, and tell our Justice Department to hold Donald Trump accountable for the January 6 attempted coup. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Avaaz helps you tell Honduran President Xiomara Castro (Honduras's first female President) to sign a bill that would repeal Honduras's ban on emergency contraception. She's under a lot of pressure not to sign the bill, and you can guess how that pressure reveals itself: "this is too risky a move for a President not even a month into her term," "the first female President shouldn't appear to be too friendly to women," "don't you know we only outlawed the killing of women in 2013 and we barely prosecute it?" But right is right and wrong is wrong, and you know what's wrong? Raping 12-year-old girls and demanding they carry any resulting pregnancies to term, that's what. And that happens in Honduras all the time. Good Hondurans bear the primary responsibility for getting their President to do their will, but nothing prevents us from helping out.

Sum of Us helps you tell Chilean President Gabriel Boric to stop allowing big clothing corporations to use Chile as a dumping ground. You've heard of the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," a massive floating island of plastic trash now three times as large as France floating in the Pacific? Now acquaint yourself with the mountain of clothes growing in the Atacama Desert, made up of clothes manufactured largely in Asia, unsold in Europe and America, and dumped as trash in Chile. Ugly, to be sure, but you may not be convinced that this is a big deal, particularly for a new President who, having declared that "(n)eoliberalism was born in Chile, and here it will die," might be looking for bigger fish. But nobody wants their country used as someone else's trashcan. Indeed, Mr. Boric may owe his election to that sentiment.

Change.org helps you tell New York Gov. Hochul to free Robert Webster, currently serving a 50-year sentence for arson. You'll recognize most of this story -- a conviction based entirely on witness testimony, exculpating evidence not fully explored at trial, a judge failing to account for Mr. Websters' status as a minor during sentencing -- but you may also be wondering: half a century for arson? The arson's aftermath involved a police officer's murder, which may have induced a longer sentence for Mr. Webster -- a much longer sentence than the one given for the police officer's murder, if you can believe it. Has Mr. Webster been even better than a model prisoner despite spending two-thirds of his life in prison? Yes, he has. So let's help him out.

The National Resources Defense Council helps you tell President Biden to end offshore drilling. The Administration has just started leasing a million acres off Alaska's Cook Inlet for gas and oil drilling, and I've recited the problems with Arctic drilling enough over the years -- oh, hell, one more time: oil spills are even harder to clean up in the Arctic's frigid waters, we know little enough about the Arctic ecosystem that we don't know all the harm drilling would do, and fishing is a big industry in Alaska that would be endangered by the inevitable oil spill. A federal court stopped the Biden Administration's big Gulf of Mexico leasing plan, but the Administration ought to see the writing on the wall by now, not just in court, but in a warming world where other, more renewable technologies can shoulder more of our energy burden.

Public Citizen helps you tell our IRS to implement free tax filing for good Americans who have relatively easy tax filing to do, which is most of us. Our laws already authorize our IRS to do this! And if you have relatively straightforward tax issues, our IRS already has all the information it needs to fill our your damn tax return for you! I suppose the objection would be that "tax-filing is a big business in America," but if a big chunk of that business doesn't need it, does that business deserve to be so big? Of course not! That business will have plenty of work for folks with complex investments and the like. But charging folks hundreds of dollars every year for doing work they don't need to do? That's profoundly wasteful, and our economy shouldn't churn money from waste.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our Justice Department to hold Donald Trump accountable for his actions leading up to the January 6 attempted coup. We have lately learned that Mr. Trump was already preparing to fight a 2020 election loss in court three months before Election Day, and while I'm sure his votaries call that "being prepared," it also means folks like John Eastman (who wrote the infamous memo laying out how Mike Pence could have invalidated 2020 election results on January 6) and Cleta Mitchell (who participated in Mr. Trump's infamous "find 11,780 votes" call to Georgia's Secretary of State) might have more to tell, since they advised these legal efforts from the start. And look, we all know he would have done anything to win; now we need only know what laws he might have broken.

Action: concerning Social Security, corruption, corporate taxes, price-gouging of prisoners, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to increase Social Security benefits, ban stock trading by members of Congress, pass a 15% corporate minimum tax, prevent big telecom corporations from price-gouging prisoners, and pass the Postal Service Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5723, the Social Security 2100 Act. As Jon Schwarz explains here, the Social Security 2100 Act would expand benefits for all Social Security recipients, and it would also increase the minimum Social Security payment from 85% of the poverty line (which we all know is too low!) to 125% of the poverty line. It'd do other good works, too, but when Joe Manchin hears that it'll only expand benefits for five years, he'll bellyache about it. Let him! If the nation sees a pro-Social Security bill die at his gnarled hand, they'll want better Democrats in our Senate, and in the meantime House Democrats can run on their vote in favor of it. They still have to vote, of course -- apparently the bill's sponsor, Rep. John Larson (D-CT), hasn't put his own bill before the House Subcommittee he chairs! Here's how to get in touch with him.

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban stock trading by members of Congress. Quite a few different bills (and promised bills) now address this matter, but we need to ensure they don't produce a bill riddled with loopholes you could drive a Mack truck through. We can't just say "don't trade stocks" and be done with it; we have to ensure their spouses also adhere to the ban (since hiding your assets in your spouse's portfolio is a common trick), and we also have to ensure they don't trade in things like derivatives and futures. A Congressperson may vote on bills that help corporations in which they're invested, and they may also investigate corporations in which they're invested; some will pretend offense that we think they can't separate their self-interest from America's interest, but, ah, we know better.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a 15% corporate minimum tax, so they don't get away with paying no taxes (or worse, getting money back from our government). Yeah, I'd prefer a 55% corporate tax on profits over $1 million (I'd keep it where it is for profits under $1 million), but a 15% minimum tax would do a lot of good, and I'd happily call it a stepping stone to where I'd want to be (which is, guess what, where we were in the 1950s). We can't keep going on having corporations pay nothing, and having governments pretend that "research and development tax breaks" are "incentives." The incentive to research and development is that expenses don't get taxed; everything else is horseshit.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 2489, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act. As you know, prisoners pay an arm and a leg just to make a phone call to their loved ones, and when your Trumphole neighbor says well then they shouldn't have done the crime ha ha ha snort, remind them that prisoners who can easily stay in touch with their families won't go back to prison as much, so we all have an interest in making sure prisoners can do that without getting gouged. And, yeah, if you're feeling ornery, tell them that Captain Kirk wouldn't stand for a society that gouges its prisoners just because some corporation wants some unearned profits so their CEO can gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home. Yeah, Captain Kirk don't play that! And Mr. Spock don't play that, either!

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act, which would (among other good works) lift the onerous mandate requiring our Postal Service to prepay retiree benefits decades in advance. H.R. 3076 passed the House by an astounding 342-92 vote, while S. 1720 counts 14 Republicans among its 27 sponsors, but naturally Sen. Rick Scott (E-FL) blocked its quick consideration, claiming that the bill would hurt Medicare. By depriving it of the money our Postal Service doesn't have to begin with? I'd call that pretzel logic, but I know Rick Scott's not stupid, but evil, and he will say whatever lets him and his cronies privatize our Postal Service. People like him should never win so much as a Yahtzee game, so we've got work to do.

Action: concerning health care, monopolies, pollution, and bad cable news channels.

Long story short: tell President Biden to lower prescription drug prices, tell our government to reject a big bankster merger, tell our EPA to ban the herbicide dicamba and require more electric heavy-duty trucks on the road, tell our government to stop flogging "carbon capture" as a climate-change solution, and tell cable corporations to stop carrying the Fox News Channel. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to use his lawful power to lower prescription drug prices. After all, certain Congressdolts said "no" to Medicare negotiating drug prices, and in a Congress with slim margins a few miscreants can always get their way, so let's stop trying to negotiate with them and let's start trying to get President Biden to do the right thing. Specifically, the above-linked petition helps you ask President Biden to use "march-in" rights, granted by the Bayh/Dole Act of 1980, to manufacture cheaper generic drugs. At least 80% of Americans supported Medicare drug price negotiation, and I bet 100% of Americans oppose price-gouging and live-saving medicines breaking their bank accounts, so I would hope Mr. Biden would feel fairly secure in taking action the people need and want. Boy, I'd hate to be wrong about that.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Federal Reserve Bank and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (or OCC) to reject a proposed U.S. Bank/Union Bank merger. Never heard of either one? Well, let's keep it that way! And, in fact, let's break up both those banks so the resulting banks will be even less famous! Fame might be a good reason to buy a book, but it's no reason to choose a bank. And once upon a time, you had a savings and/or checking account at a bank that only had one branch, and because this bank only had one branch, the folks who worked there knew the folks living nearby and could tailor their services to those good folks. Now, big banks expect you to tailor your needs to them. And you deserve better than that! So let's fight this merger.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to ban herbicide dicamba from use on our farms. Dicamba has wreaked enough havoc on farms that don't use it -- it's a notorious drifter! -- that even Republican politicians have restricted its use, but the 2021 growing season saw no less disturbance and disruption than previous growing seasons, which means using it at all threatens farms everywhere. Monsanto figures in this story, of course, first by manufacturing a "better" version of dicamba a few years back and then offering dicamba-resistant crops as a "solution." But these are not solutions to those of us who do not worship mammon! We should treat food as a right rather than a thing to be sold; in the meantime, let's get dangerous chemicals off our farms.

Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell our EPA to start strengthening emissions standards for heavy-duty shipping trucks, with the goal of getting them all electric. Right-wingers will look solely at the goal and say pie in the sky much, liberal? Ha ha ha snort! But no reasonable person says that! Everyone knows it takes time to get internal combustion engines out of commercial trucks, but the need is no less urgent: these trucks comprise about a quarter of all carbon emissions in America, meaning that getting them to pollute less would be, as a famous philosopher once said, a BFD. And not for nothing, but highways more likely run through Black and Brown neighborhoods, exposing those folks to more pollutants than the rest of us. Why, it was almost like that was the whole idea! But we can do better.

Stand.Earth helps you tell our government to stop giving corporate welfare handouts to "carbon capture" corporations. Only when we embrace solar power, electric cars, geothermal heating, and hydroponic farming will we slow our roll toward climate disaster; "solutions" like natural gas, nuclear power, and "carbon capture," where corporations capture the carbon emissions before they hit the air and either store them in the ground or reuse them for other purposes, might make some executive rich, but they won't help us keep our planet. Carbon capture, it turns out, is nowhere near as far along in its development as it would have to be, plus corporations use a lot of the carbon they do capture to dig for oil! What a way of telling good people all over the world to fuck off and die! If you take as kindly to that as I do, give your government what-for.

Finally, Inequality Media Civic Action helps you tell big telecom corporations to stop offering Fox News on their networks. We've made some headway starving the beast that is the One America News Network, but going after Fox News, now the number one source of right-wing rage for over two decades, will, I expect, be harder, even though I presume most of its viewers will find other, better things to obsess about once they can't easily get to Fox News. Now, some folks don't like to do things like this; they call them censorship. But governments censor; when consumers band together against a product they don't like, that's just the churn of civilization. Why, some folks would even call it the free market in action!

Action: concerning health care, indigenous folk, good Afghans, facial recognition, and factory fur farms.

Long story short: tell Germany to support the pandemic waiver at the WTO, tell Tanzania to stop evicting indigenous folk from their ancestral lands, tell our government to release Afghani citizens' funds, tell our local governments to stop using ODIN facial recognition tech, and tell the European Union to ban fur farms. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Sum of Us helps you tell Germany's government to stop blocking the COVID vaccine patent waiver at the World Trade Organization (or WTO). Yeah, Germany's in on that, too, putting corporate intellectual property rights above the health of the world's people. Two and-another-things about that: one, we should be calling it, at the very least, intellectual property shared by corporations and our government, since taxpayer money and research made those vaccines, and two, by "the world's people" I mean all the world's people, not just the folks too poor to pay for COVID vaccines, because if they get it, then everyone's going to get COVID again, and maybe not as friendly a variant thereof as we've seen so far. Also, if we get Germany to back down, it'll make the Biden Administration's obstruction harder to justify.

Avaaz helps you tell Tanzania's government to stop evicting Maasai indigenous folk from their ancestral lands in the nation's northern area. It ain't just indigenous folk in the Amazon or Ecuador fighting this battle; indigenous folk are defending their land from big corporations all over the world, and it just might be that they know what's best for the land they live on. Too conservative? Not one "conservative" bloviating in public today would put indigenous people above money, even though all money goes the way of all flesh, while civilizations based on lasting values can endure forever. The Maasai may not be battling drilling and mining corporations, but they are battling a tourism/trophy hunting corporation from Saudi Arabia, so yeah, I think they know what's best for the land they've lived on for centuries.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our government to disperse good Afghan citizens' funds. Because the money belongs to them! And we should pressure the Taliban in ways that don't require starving Afghan people! You may well be asking yourself, self, what if the Taliban gets hold of this money before it can get to its rightful owners in Afghanistan? But I doubt they'll do that -- a government can only create so much chaos before it backfires on them, and when a mere 2% of Afghan children have enough food to eat, I think we can all see the Taliban is well past that point. Which means, again, the compassionate thing to do is also the practical thing to do. Funny how often that happens -- but not so funny how our politicians never seem to see it.

The Kairos Fellowship helps you tell your local governments to stop using ODIN facial recognition technology to spot and harass homeless folk. One more time: facial recognition technology sucks! And using it to arrest homeless folk also sucks! You know what wouldn't suck? Putting homeless folks up in tiny houses, which would cost less than picking them up and putting them in shelters or hospitals or jails. If folks saw how tiny these tiny houses would be, they wouldn't feel jealous of someone else getting "something for nothing," either. You know what else wouldn't suck? Well-funded public housing and rent control laws. When we stopped spending money on public housing in the 1980s, the homeless population exploded, and I think there's more than mere correlation there.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell the European Union to ban fur farms. Now I have nothing against folks making fur coats for themselves, just like I have nothing against folks raising chicken for themselves, but the fur farms that Italy has recently banned feature squalid conditions that you probably won't find completely unfamiliar, like almost impossibly small and almost impossibly dirty cages. That's right: fur farming is very much like factory farming of chickens and pigs in the United States! We might do better calling them factory fur farms, in fact! As I said, you want to make a coat out of animal skins, you go right ahead. But factory fur farms don't care about anything but efficiency -- or, more precisely, efficiently making their executives money -- and that goes hand-in-hand with soul-destroying cruelty.

Action: concerning Yemen, algorithms, labor, small businesses, antibiotics, and Presidential misbehavior.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end our involvement in the war on Yemen, hold corporations accountable for their algorithms, pass strong labor legislation, protect small online businesses, make antibiotics strong again, and investigate former President Trump's removal of official documents to his private residence. 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.

Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end all American support for the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Specifically you'll ask that your Reps support a War Powers resolution aiming to end our involvement there; it'd be nice if our government would only go to war when Congress specifically authorizes it, as used to happen in the old days, but in the meantime, I'd take a War Powers resolution. 16 million good Yemeni sit on the edge of famine, and for what? Because the Saudis don't like the Houthis? The Houthis are some of the world's best at fighting al-Qaeda, but then so were the Kurds, and we sure sold them out to an even more odious dictator. How about if we stop making foreign policy decisions that constantly put us on the wrong side of decency? Our Founders didn't think that was too much to ask.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6580/S. 3572, the Algorithmic Accountability Act. A CEO's only job is, literally, to make decisions, but now lazy CEOs farm out their decision-making to algorithms, and it ain't just about Facebook algorithms automatically creating groups that let racists find each other much more easily than if they had to put some work into it -- it's also about algorithms charging some people higher prices, hence the recent controversy over Tinder, which was apparently charging older daters more money -- on the precept they'll swipe left more frequently than younger folks more mesmerized by appearances? It's a question worth asking! "Personalized pricing," Tinder called it, but "personalized price gouging" might be a better name, and we should fight that.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act passed our House almost a year ago, and given all the good things it would do -- it would stop corporations from trying to make all their employees into "contractors," it would stop employers from forcing their workers to sit through anti-union propaganda, it would outlaw forced arbitration in union contracts, it would prohibit corporate retaliation against whistleblowers, and it would give workers more choice in how they would vote for unionization -- it's hard to see how a sane, moral, and decent Senate would oppose it. We must conclude, therefore, that our Senate is not sane, moral, or decent. So we must make them so, by communicating our will until they can't deny it anymore.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the inclusion of the SHOP SAFE Act in larger trade legislation. What would the SHOP SAFE Act do? In the name of "protecting intellectual property," it would force online small businesses to jump through additional hoops about the products they sell, to make sure they're not "counterfeit" -- and then subject those small businesses to abuse anyway, since the internet marketplaces that host them will use, you guessed it, algorithms to detect "counterfeit" items, and they'll be just as good at that as facial recognition software is at telling Black folks apart. Politicians constantly talk about "protecting small businesses," and then they go and pull shit like this. Unless we stop them.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3932/S. 2076, the PASTEUR Act. The PASTEUR Act would fund development of new antibiotics, which we need mainly because we've abused the ones we've got so badly that superbugs rise up all over the world. Yes, "abuse" is the right word there -- we give seven out of every 10 antibiotics to nominally healthy farm animals so they can endure squalid conditions in family farms, instead of, you know, sick people or sick animals. The result? The world is full of superbugs! Also, too, exposure to COVID leaves folks vulnerable to another, bacterial infection -- which means hospitals treat all of their COVID patients with antibiotics out of an abundance of caution, thus antibiotics become less effective. Creating new antibiotics will give us a little more breathing space, at least.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate former President Trump's removal of some 15 boxes of Presidential records from our White House to his Mar-a-Lago residence. It's almost comic how often this man implicates himself law-breaking, but our failure to hold him to account for his many sins is no laughing matter at all. Anyway, the Presidential Records Act of 1978 doesn't let you just take any old document home, and not just because some of them might be classified "Top Secret," as they were with Mr. Trump. Why, you might be hiding something the American people deserve to know! It's almost comic how little respect Donald Trump shows to the people, but the fact that so many Americans think he's their Personal Lord and Savior is no laughing matter at all.

Action: concerning free speech, monopolies, drug prices, pollution, and public lands.

Long story short: tell our government to protect the right to protest, reject a bankster mega-merger, allow generic manufacturing of an anti-prostate cancer drug, ban fracking wastewater use in the Delaware River, and ban oil and gas drilling in or near Chaco Canyon. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Color of Change helps you tell our Department of Justice to protect the right to protest in America. States have passed a slew of laws aiming to put protestors in jail -- or worse, allow people running over protestors to get off scot-free like they didn't just murder someone either because they inconvenienced them or because they want to create drama -- so now our federal government needs to act. And just guess how many of these laws states will ever use to convict the coming caravan of whiny truckers! Luckily for us, when those truckers do come, everyone will see them as the whiny, diaper-loaded brats they are. Protesting a mandate for a vaccine that'll save your life! I swear, these people drink rage juice or something. Anyway, states are going after peaceful folks protesting real injustices, and our DOJ needs to stop that.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Federal Reserve and our Comptroller of the Currency to reject a proposed U.S. Bank/Union Bank merger, which will put over $660 billion in assets under control of one corporation. Our government hasn't rejected a bank merger in 15 years, which has contributed to our loss of 70% of our banks in the last 40 years, which has in turn led to banksters monopolizing markets and raising prices for consumers because they can. You know, like how corporations are stoking the 7.5% inflation rate now? Not only that, but when all the banks are big, they don't go to rural and urban areas, leaving their residents at the mercy of payday lenders and pawn shops. And they deserve better, which is why we must stop this merger, and all that are like it.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to allow other drug corporations to manufacture a generic version of the noted anti-prostate cancer drug Xtandi. Xtandi pills cost $400 per pill (not per bottle or per thousand, per pill), and for some patients that'll amount to nearly $190,000 annually! Plus we pay five times more for it than folks in other countries, and if you were anticipating that the next phrase was going to be all about how taxpayers paid for 100% of the research that brought forth Xtandi, well, you're right! Generic manufacturers could sell Xtandi for as little as $3 a pill and still make a profit, and President Biden does have legal authority to force generic manufacturing of a drug, said authority coming from the Bayh/Dole Act of 1980. This should be a layup, really, so let's get to it.

Food and Water Action helps you tell our Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) to ban fracking waste and use of Delaware River water for fracking. Fracking does use a lot of water, after all, and we've got better uses for it than enriching gas corporations' executives. Yeah, I know, gas is cheaper than most other kinds of energy, but how can we say that's a good thing if we can't drink the water? Go solar and go wind and you might pay more in the short run, but you'll cause less pollution, plus you'll save money in the long run. Our DRBC did ban fracking in the Basin last year, but they did not ban big corporations from drawing water out of the Delaware to go frack somewhere else, and once that water's gone, you don't get it back. And our DRBC's own proposal to keep frackers from taking our water is weak, so let's try to make them do better.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to protect the Chaco Culture National Historical Park from gas and oil drilling. More specifically, you'll ask them to protect Chaco Canyon and the area 10 miles out from it in all directions from gas and oil drilling. We've supported a Chaco Canyon drilling ban because of pollution and because it's holy land to nearby Native populations, but we've got another reason to support it: as drilling and grazing creep ever closer to Chaco Canyon, more and more wildlife flee to the Chaco Canyon area as a refuge, and it's more than a bit cruel to drive wildlife out of an area you drill in and then go drill in the area they've sought refuge. Some would call that the circle of life, but it's not; it's just a circle of money, and money don't last.