Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: now with approximately 29% good news!

Connecticut State Superior Court judge upholds Public Utilities Regulatory Authority’s order reducing Aquarion water bills by 11% – Aquarion wanted a 9% rate hike – and boy does he sound pissed: between “(i)t bears repeating that PURA possesses broad regulatory authority and equally broad discretion in setting rates” and “PURA is permitted to make its own factual determinations and is not required to accept evidence presented by Aquarion,” it sounds like he had to stop himself from writing how dare you waste my valuable time over and over again for 100 pages. Naturally Aquarion responds that keeping it from raising prices now means will only force it to raise prices in the future. Those who create rhetorical hostage situations deserve their own circle of Hell.

New York state settles with two Republican operatives for $1.25 million over their robocall campaign to keep Black voters from voting by mail. The playbook – telling Black voters that voting-by-mail means getting “tracked” for credit card debt and outstanding warrants – won’t surprise you, and though our FCC also fined them over $5 million, I really wish the state hadn’t settled on this; I really want folks like Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl to get jail time. And were they to emerge with a newfound zeal for getting better treatment and rehabilitation for prisoners, all the better!

When I hear that agents and brokers are switching good Americans out of their Affordable Care Act plans and into new ones without their consent, all I can say is: nice work if you can get it! Seriously, our civilization lets too many people who don’t do a damn bit of work just hurt good Americans over and over again. Getting defrauded in this manner means, among other things, not being able to see your doctors because now because they’re in a different network. Would it be piling on to to mention that if we expanded Medicare to include everyone, we wouldn’t need so many middlemen? No, it would not.

You may be familiar with most of the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) “playbook” on fighting and busting unions – “right-to-work,” prohibiting dues deductions from paychecks, like that. But you may not know about a new ALEC model bill called the “Uniform Worker Classification Act,” which, according to them, “ensures that the 80% of workers who prefer their independent contractor status are able to keep it, rather than being forced into traditional employment models.” You know, because California makes corporations to classify gig workers as “employees” (who get benefits) and not “independent contractors” (who don’t). I bet that 80% figure (if it’s not, you know, made-up) is about as useful as the 75%-prefer-their-private-health-insurance canard – people usually “prefer” the status quo until hard times find them and they learn how the status quo actually hurts them.

Mississippi state legislators can’t seem to pass a bill that would bring back ballot questions, even in the weak form (requiring supermajorities to pass, leaving abortion and the state constitution untouched) they obviously prefer. The 2021 state Supreme Court ruling – which held that ballot questions are unconstitutional, since the state constitution requires them to get signatures in five Congressional districts and Mississippi now only has four – may be the worst court ruling I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty in my lifetime. In the meantime, the legislature seems to telling the good people of Mississippi to go fuck themselves. I wish I could count on them paying for that with their jobs.

Jesus Mary and Joseph now Disney asserts it has a First Amendment right to fire Gina Carano for her social media posts. No, a corporation doesn’t have a First Amendment right to do a God damn thing, because a corporation is not a person, period, end of, full stop. And in the absence of a collective bargaining agreement that protects employees from being fired for their speech, Disney would already have the right to fire her for her speech. We’ve never had First Amendment rights at our jobs – though, as I’ve just suggested, we could organize and get them, or at least get some protection for our political speech, however noxious it might be. As long as we still have the right to organize! Louisiana Republicans are about to take that away from public sector workers as we speak.

Finally, the Oklahoma state House has overwhelmingly passed a bill criminalizing the “intentional or reckless” spread of sexually-transmitted diseases – which could make literally everyone in Oklahoma a felon! I’d think “intentional” would be hard to prove – though admittedly so many folks treat emails and texts like they’re not written records these days! – but “reckless” might be too much in the eye of the prosecutor, especially given that the bill doesn’t define “reckless.” Think any good Oklahomans will get tested for syphilis or chlamydia or the like if this bill passes? No, you do not. The state Senate hasn’t passed the bill yet; maybe they’ll at least pretend to be shamed by the media coverage. Seriously, though, Republicans can’t offer solutions unless they punish good people who don’t deserve it.

Action: concerning voting rights, solitary confinement, and our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect voting rights, end solitary confinement at federal prisons, and protect our CFPB from Republicans who'd defund it. 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 Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our voting rights, including passing the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The former bill would, among other good works, force big donors to disclose their campaign contributions and prevent partisan state legislatures from gerrymandering Congressional seats to their own advantage; the latter bill would force any state or locality (even one outside the South!) that routinely suppresses voting rights to submit their election law changes for Justice Department review. Doesn’t matter that big-drama Republicans don’t want to do it, because they will, eventually, pay the price for refusing to listen to us. But only if we’re loud enough.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Solitary Confinement Act. Two centuries ago, Quakers conceived of solitary confinement as a way for a criminal to reflect on his wrongdoing, but in modern hands solitary too often becomes a way of punishing without rehabilitating, plus we use it all the time, and plenty of tools lose effectiveness when overused. The End Solitary Confinement Act would outlaw solitary at federal prisons, except for four-hour periods, and even then only as a way to de-escalate crises; the bill would also expand oversight and due process for prisoners. Don’t listen to anyone who says it sounds like you want every prison to be Club Med! Treating prisoners like human beings and actively helping them rehabilitate themselves ain’t fucking Club Med, and anyone who says so is an asshole. End of.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to subject our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to the Congressional appropriations process. Currently our Federal Reserve funds our CFPB, using fees from banks, and before you think but maybe Congress should always get to appropriate funds for federal agencies, note well that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (or FDIC) and Federal Housing Finance Agency (or FHFA) also get their funding from our Federal Reserve, and ain’t nobody whining about that! If folks only whine about our CFPB getting such funding, maybe our CFPB's doing something right! So let’s keep it that way. And here's three more words that describe those who would zero out CFPB funding: defunding the police.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning taxes, drug policy, and Medicare for All.

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

Tired of this debt limit drama already? Then let Americans for Tax Fairness help you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations if they insist on having this drama. Our media love to pretend that Republicans taking power just means an automatic debt limit crisis like that isn’t evil, and our media also love to pretend the only two choices we have are default or let Kevin McCarthy’s Band of Horribles cut all kinds of services that people need and none of the corporate welfare their rich donors eat up like Halloween candy. But those aren’t our only choices. They will be, however, if we don’t get in our Congressfolks’ grills about this drama.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the RESTORE Act, which would repeal the ban on food stamps for folks with drug convictions. When are we going to get tired of swinging our balls about crime? When is the punishment given by a judge going to be punishment enough? We heap punishment upon punishment upon criminals when every additional punishment we heap upon them makes it less likely we’ll be able to rehabilitate them into functioning members of society – and more likely they’ll go back to prison. Rehabilitation is the duty of a civilized people, but endless, unquenchable revenge hollows out our souls and makes us uncivilized.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass Medicare-for-All legislation. Most Americans like the idea of expanding Medicare to include everyone, until some fool tells them ZOMG THEYZ WILLZ RAISEZ TEH TAXUZ!!!! But you don’t need to raise taxes on good Americans to pay for Medicare for All – you need only institute an employer-side payroll tax (that means only the employer, not the employee, pays it) which would capture all the money corporations are already paying on overly-expensive private health insurance. So, you’ll pay nothing extra, and your boss won’t pay any more, and we'll be able to cover everyone – what’s not to like?

Around the table: today featuring *half* good news!

Lo and behold, job satisfaction sits at a 35-year high, per a Conference Board survey. At the end, this article finally mentions “higher pay” (it hasn’t been keeping up with inflation, but when does it ever?) as a possible reason for the higher satisfaction, though we also know that folks who weren’t working during the pandemic had time to take stock of their lives and decide they didn’t need all that toxic BS at their particular workplace. (Makes sense, also, that folks with hybrid remote/in-person work arrangements were happier than folks doing just one or the other; now we just need to stop bosses from saying that folks absolutely must commute to work because the economy will die if they don’t, when mostly they just want to spy on workers a little better.)

Minnesota becomes the fourth American state to make phone calls free for prisoners. Big telecom corporations charge prisoners an arm and a leg to make phone calls to their loved ones, because prisoners are literally a captive market, but prisoners who can stay in contact with family members tend not to go back to prison, though private prisons may feel differently about this fact than you or I. Objections range from free phone calls? When did prison become Club Med? (yes, folks have said this to me, sigh) to but you can stuff a burner phone into a dead cat and throw it over the prison wall (that came from the man who served as FCC Chair from 2017-2021), and all I can say to such people is: when does your anger ever bottom out?

Ho hum, big pipeline corporations let their pipes sit out in the sun for years, often without the proper crack-resistant coating, though 50-year-old federal regulations outlaw this. But perhaps, like me, you see the gnarled hand of stock prices über alles here like everywhere else. I mean, these corporations have more than enough money, but they have enslaved themselves to the fiction that if stock prices don’t shoot up every month, they’re doomed. Don’t feel sorry for them, because they have the power to escape, and I rather suspect they just don’t want to, because this particular kind of slavery makes executives very rich – and the rest of us very miserable.

Surprise, surprise, a federal Department of Labor review finds that Iowa’s child labor bill (which Gov. Reynolds hasn’t signed) violates federal law, which seems obvious enough that one might momentarily wonder if Republicans were just creating drama here, by passing a controversial bill they knew wouldn’t see the light of day anyway. I might think that, too, except I can’t believe there’s a vocal minority of regular folks clamoring for kids to work in sweatshops, like there’s a similar minority clamoring to make all abortions illegal. Remember that when they say no one wants to work, the truth is that no one wants to work for dung pellets, which would be every executive’s preferred method of paying workers.

Speaking of actual Republican dramas, Sen. Ted Cruz (E-TX) has launched a very serious Senate probe – into Bud Light’s brief partnership with transgender actress Dylan Mulvaney! And he goes out of his way to refer to Ms. Mulvaney as a “he,” which is very grown up! Is this what you do ahead of a potentially tough re-election campaign? I know people are more ambivalent about transgender folks than I’d like, but at some point these right-wing dramas have to alienate so much of the electorate that Republicans will have to notice. At any rate, I hope Ted Cruz loses his race to a dead shrub. No point to telling me he’s smart when he won’t use his smarts to do good works.

Finally, in the wake of its $787.5 million settlement with Dominion and with another sizable settlement with Smartmatic likely, Fox News has apparently gutted its entire investigative unit, and that’ll teach good Americans not to hold big media corporations accountable! Now, don’t be the one saying they had an investigative unit? because that would be very snarky. But the same Fox executives who trumpeted the Big Lie for the money and then lost a lot of money and now are taking out their mistakes on the rank and file probably think you don’t need to do “investigating” in order to do journalism; they’re wrong, of course, but their attitude is also the cable news norm now. Hence another reminder not to watch cable news, because it’s irredeemably evil.

Action: concerning "forever chemicals," soot pollution, prisoner price-gouging, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous rules against PFAS and soot pollution possible, tell our Justice Department to abandon rules allowing prisons to garnish even more money from prisoners and their families, and tell President Biden to get a good public servant on our FCC as its fifth Commissioner. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous PFAS regulation possible. Our EPA is setting limits on PFAS plastics, a.k.a. “forever chemicals,” in our drinking water for the very first time, and that’s a good thing, since PFAS chemicals are (as evidenced by their nickname) virtually everywhere, from non-stick saucepans to fast food wrappers to plastic water bottles. Also, they don’t break down once they’re in your system, and scientists have linked them to cancer, heart, and immune system issues. So let’s lend our EPA the steel they’re going to need in their spine to withstand all the corporate hackery they’re going to hear.

Evergreen Action helps you tell our EPA to strengthen its proposed soot standards. Currently they’re planning to limit soot particulates – which scientists have linked to asthma, diabetes, heart disease, and cognitive breakdowns – to 10 micrograms per cubic meter, rather than eight, and eight is a lot better. Yeah, I know, two micrograms doesn’t sound like a lot, but you'll also inhabit way more than one cubic meter in a day, and a lot of the biggest killers in America are also the smallest. And not for nothing, but you find a lot more soot in poor, Black, and Brown communities, because big polluting corporations tend to build their power plants near them. Why, it’s almost like they know.

Color of Change helps you tell our Department of Justice to abandon new Federal Bureau of Prison rules that allow prisons to garnish even more money from prisoners and their families. I could argue basic human decency and compassion, and I could argue that sentences should be about loss of freedom and not price-gouging, but note well that these changes will interfere with our ability to rehabilitate prisoners, all so some corporate executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home. Is that why we build and maintain civilizations? No, it is not. And no use arguing but jails need money if you’re not going to tax the rich a lot harder.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell President Biden to nominate a good public servant to be the fifth Commissioner on our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC). I’m sad it won’t be net neutrality architect Gigi Sohn – who may have decided that even more abusive questioning from Senators wasn’t worth the trouble and can we really blame her? – but America is a big place, so she can’t be the only person qualified for the job. And the person Mr. Biden nominates had better champion internet freedom – for people, not corporations – and that person should also champion bridging the racial divide and the rural divide with regard to internet access. So let’s get on that.

Action: concerning corporate taxes, health care, and homelessness.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk not to cut corporate taxes, to sustain expanded Medicaid and CHIP coverage, and pass the Ending Homelessness 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 not to cut corporate taxes during the upcoming lame duck session. Corporations are making record profits, said profits being responsible for half our current inflation, so why give them more handouts? We know cutting corporate taxes is unpopular, not just because Republicans cut them dramatically in 2017 and lost the House the next year, but also because our Congressfolk always leave corporate welfare giveaways until the end of the year, when they hope everyone’s tired and not watching anymore. Well, we’re watching, and fatigue doesn’t keep us from our duty, so let’s give them what-for.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect expanded Medicaid and CHIP coverage in end-of-year legislation. You know, instead of their aforementioned habit of handing out corporate welfare! You’d think our Congressfolk wouldn’t dare cut children’s health insurance – the first three letters of CHIP do stand for “children’s health insurance,” after all – but then Congress totally let the CHIP program lapse in 2017 because they were working too hard on tax cuts for rich folks and not hard enough for, you know, our children. So, yeah, we need to remind them to work for working families.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4496, the Ending Homelessness Act. Rents are shooting through the roof and folks are behind on their rent thanks to pandemic job losses, so yeah, we’d be cruel not to give working families more help affording a place to live. The bill also prevents our government from using criminal history to deny housing assistance – gosh, do we believe in rehabilitating people or not? – and would also prohibit housing discrimination because of a renter’s veteran status. Hey, it ain’t our soldiers’ fault we make them fight stupid wars, so let’s not injure them coming and going.

Action: concerning data privacy, the debt ceiling, and treating prisoners like human beings.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop passport data abuse, ditch the debt ceiling once and for all, and pass the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice 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.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to prevent our State Department from giving law enforcement access to your passport data willy-nilly. Ideally law enforcement would need a warrant to get your passport application data, but our government has spent the last 20 years assaulting the very idea of getting a warrant – this, even though judges will get out of bed to give warrants if the situation’s that urgent, and even though getting a warrant was good enough for our government for over 200 years. No, 9.11 did not “change everything”! And people who think 9.11 “changed everything” are exactly the sort of people I do not want in my foxhole!

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to eliminate the debt ceiling once and for all. Republicans said they’d take the debt ceiling hostage to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, so let’s take the weapon away from them before they break our damn country with it, shall we? The debt ceiling doesn’t do anything for America; politicians have only ever applied the notion of “fiscal restraint” to spending that actually helps good Americans, but time was our Congressfolk just raised the ceiling whenever we got too close to it. Now it’s like pulling teeth to get it raised, with Republicans the way they are now, so it was never any good coming or going, and have I mentioned that I really, really hate drama?

Finally, both Americans for Financial Reform and Color of Change help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2489, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act. This bill would give our FCC the power to cap prices for phone calls from prisoners to their family, since now big telecom corporations charge an arm and a leg for that, and prisoners don’t exactly have an arm and a leg to spend. But when prisoners keep in touch with their families and get out of prison, they tend to stay out; folks still think we’re supposed to help criminals get better, right? So let’s help criminals get better by passing this bill. Putting profits above people is evil.

Action: concerning voting rights, treating prisoners like human beings, and immigrant youth.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Election Mail Act and the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act, and pass legislation protecting immigrant youth. 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 S. 4487, the Election Mail Act. The bill would (among other things) require our Postal Service to process all mail-in ballots the same day they get them, to process mail-in ballots free of charge to the voter, and require states to count mail-in ballots postmarked on or by Election Day that arrive up to seven days after Election Day. And if that makes Republicans whine about how we should always know the winner by 8 pm on Election Day, well, tough toodles. Better to make mail-in voting easier for all Americans. And we all have to deal with change, so why should we coddle Republicans in their incessant efforts to avoid dealing with change?

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2489, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act. Big telecom corporations get to charge usurious rates for prisoners to talk to their families, and these big corporations have massive bankster funding behind them – thus explaining why Americans for Financial Reform brings you this action alert. Prisoners who stay in touch with their families are also more likely to stay out of jail once they get out; you can see why banksters invested in big telecom corporations and private prison corporations don’t want that, but again, why should they get all the say about everything?

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation protecting immigrant youth (i.e., “dreamers”) from deportation. To a nation they left when they were very young and therefore not of their own free will and therefore also to a nation they won’t recognize, I feel compelled to mention again. In the meantime, we could keep hoping that reactionary judges (and Justices!) might interpret the law in such a way as to not be cruel bastards – or we could tell our Congressfolk to solve the problem with legislation. And if they don’t, we tell them again until they do. Easier than relying on a right-wing judge, that’s for sure.

Action: concerning voting rights, health care, and prison phone justice.

Long story short: tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to count mail-in ballots when they get them, and tell your Congressfolk to enact insulin price caps and pass the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice 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: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators to let vote counters count mail-in ballots when they receive them, instead of waiting until after Election Day to start counting them. That’s what created the illusion of Donald Trump leads in both Pennsylvania and Michigan the day after Election Day – and it helped create the illusion of a “stolen” election, almost like that was the whole idea! And can you imagine legions of Doug Mastriano votaries brandishing guns at vote counters at every location in the Philly/Pittsburgh area so that they don’t count the mail-in votes? If you can, then you see the need for reform, I trust.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to cap insulin prices for all Americans. The Inflation Reduction Act capped insulin prices for Medicare patients, since the Senate Parliamentarian ruled that was all they could get through reconciliation, and therein lies the problem: 10 Senate Republicans won’t vote to keep insulin prices low so good Americans don’t go broke paying for a life-saving medicine. I mean, we can’t be the greatest nation on Earth if we let people die because the medicine that’ll save their life is too expensive. So we have to keep on our Congressfolk, and punish them with losing elections if they keep defying our will.

Finally, Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2489, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act, which would prevent big telecom corporations from gouging prisoners and their families when they try to call each other. Just because prisoners are literally a captive market doesn’t mean we should let big corporations charge them whatever they want for phone calls, and not just because prisoners who stay in touch with their families go back to prison a whole lot less. It’s also fucking cruel. Too much “free” market ideology still infects our politics; we act like “interfering” with the “free” market is sacrilegious, though that's what sacrilegious. So it’s time to get right with God.

Action: concerning corruption, phone justice, and the right to repair.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to ban stock-trading by Congressfolk and pass the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act and the Fair Repair 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.

Stand Up America helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban Congress from trading in stocks. Time was our Congressfolk avoided even the appearance of corruption, so afraid were they of the people’s wrath; the people’s wrath hasn’t exactly abated over the years, but politicians have gotten very good at two things: changing the definition of “corruption” so that it includes a whole lot less corruption, and redirecting their wrath at undeserving targets. So we need to bring back the America that punished political corruption, and banning Congressional stock trades would help that project immensely. Don’t believe the hype that Congressfolk know better and can police themselves. That kind of hype kills civilizations.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2489, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act. By now you know the drill: prisons contract with big telecoms to charge prisoners exorbitant rates for phone calls to their families, such that they hardly call their families, even though the science tells us that prisoners who regularly contact their families don’t go back to prison nearly as much as prisoners who don’t, or can’t. Why, it’s almost like that’s the whole idea! You see a prisoner, but a private prison sees dollar signs. The Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act would correct this injustice, so we should make Congress pass it.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4006/S. 3830, the Fair Repair Act, which would essentially enshrine the right to repair in our laws again. Too many corporations make their products essentially impossible to repair – except by themselves, at exorbitant prices! – and they claim the info you’d need to repair it is a “trade secret” or some such rubbish, but this is essentially an unfair trade practice, and the Fair Repair Act would force big corporations to make diagnostic, maintenance, and repair equipment and manuals available to independent repair shops. Presumably you recognize the evil the right to repair would fight: monopolization. So let’s fight that.

Action: concerning voting rights, tax cuts for working families, saving our Post Office, worker safety, and gouging prisoners.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass voting rights legislation and extend the Child Tax Credit expansion, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Postal Service Reform Act, the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act, and the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice 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.

Today's as good a day as any to call your Senators and tell them to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Yeah, we know how they're going to vote -- the Penguin and the Joker won't let Democrats modify the filibuster so Republicans can't just stamp their feet and say no, and then Republicans will filibuster the bills -- even though they'll actually vote to keep debate going and then promptly end debate, because that's how the filibuster has worked for over 40 years -- but duty is duty, and putting them on the record as opposing the people's will multiple times has utility. If you can reach a live person at your Senators' offices, you can ask how many calls they've gotten about this matter and how they break down. The results may be interesting!

Citizens for Tax Justice helps you tell your Senators to extend the Child Tax Credit expansion. This'll be a phone call, so you can piggyback this alert onto the back of the voting rights alert above. January 15 just went by with no $250 or $300 checks for working families for the first time in six months, and I can't imagine working families all over America didn't notice. We've got the Penguin to blame for this one -- he didn't want to extend it in the Build Back Better Act, because, according to him -- or, more likely, his CEO pals -- people use those checks to buy drugs. Drugs! Not, you know, food or clothing or back to school supplies. Anyway, what happened to conservatives trusting people? You might conclude that when right-wingers say they "trust people," they actually mean they only trust rich bosses.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076, the Postal Service Reform Act. You recall how virtually all of our Postal Service's financial troubles stem from a 2006 Congressional mandate to pre-fund its retiree benefits 80 years in advance? When you consider literally no other private or public entity has to follow such a mandate, you might almost think Congress sabotaged our Postal Service -- which meant it was just a matter of time someone like Louis DeJoy came along and said emergency! We have to cut services and raise prices just to stay alive! The Postal Service Reform Act would repeal this mandate, and therefore also the rationale for making our Postal Service run badly. Hey, it's our Postal Service, so we deserve better.

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2193/S. 1068, the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act. This bill -- named for a farmworker who died after working 10 hours in 105-degree heat -- would mandate that our Occupational Safety and Health Administration (or OSHA) create a worker safety standard that would protect our workers from heat-related illnesses and injuries, meaning folks who work outside would get access to rest and shade. Don't brook any nonsense about how we don't have to care because it's only Those People who work in conditions like that, not just because that would be cruel, but also because in a few short years it won't even be true if climate change keeps working its will. Welcome to Chapter 244 of "Compassion Is Pragmatic."

Finally, Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2489, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act. As you know, big telecoms charge prisoners and their families a lot of money just so they can stay in contact, which means a lot of folks just give up because of the expense, which also means these prisoners are more likely to go back to jail. The Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act would authorize our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to cap phone rates for prisoners (more than they're currently doing, surely!) and would also outlaw "site commissions," which are basically kickbacks big telecoms pay to prisons (and which some states actually mandate by law, if you can believe it). And remember: civilized people aren't cruel to the weak, and we certainly don't gouge prisoners.

Action: concerning pollution, farming, prisoners, food safety, and racism.

Long story short: tell your PA state Assemblyfolk to reject pro-pollution bills, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Farm System Reform Act, the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, the Baby Food Safety Act, and the GI Bill Restoration 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: Penn Environment helps you tell your PA state legislators to reject a pair of objectively pro-pollution bills, HB 1947 and SB 275. They would, guess what, explicitly forbid Pennsylvania cities and towns from enacting laws that would help them get off our national addiction to fossil fuels. Very conservative of them! What ever happened to "the smallest body of people should make the most important decisions affecting that body of people"? Money, that's all -- if a municipality decides to buy only solar or wind power, then big gas and oil executives won't be able to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Sad! And Pennsylvania's Supreme Court found similar legislation unconstitutional, so let's save our legislature from further embarrassment by communicating our will.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4421/S. 2332, the Farm System Reform Act. The Farm System Reform Act would place a moratorium on the building of new factory farms, restore country-of-origin labeling laws for meat, and help break meat packer monopolies by reinstituting "spot market" meat sales, so that meat packing corporations don't force farmers into sales agreements that ultimately crush them. Hopefully you don't look at phrases like "no more building of factory farms" and say "but won't that drive prices through the roof?" We're seeing, right now, how oversized ships are actually driving inflation upward, simply by making themselves the only conceivable option in shipping. We're not there yet with oversized farms, but if big corporations get their way, we will be. Thus we have to stop them before they do.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1541, the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act. Some folks pay over a buck a minute to talk to their loved ones in prison, and folks can't afford that. And prisoners certainly can't afford that, since they don't even make anything close to minimum wage in prison. If you find yourself thinking then they shouldn't have done the crime then ha ha ha snort, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider that folks who can stay in touch with loved ones without paying an arm and a leg have a much better chance of staying out of prison once they get out than folks who can't stay in touch with loved ones, and 3) consider that just because you're in prison doesn't mean big telecom corporations should take advantage of you. If you need to slap yourself again, go ahead. Wisdom ain't easy.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2229/S. 1019, the Baby Food Safety Act. If you've heard of toxic metals like cadmium, arsenic, lead, and mercury in baby food, then you see the need for such legislation. And this bill's pretty comprehensive -- it'd impose maximum levels of toxic metals in baby food, require our FDA to review and lower those levels if necessary, expand our FDA's recall authority over toxic baby food, and even commission research on agricultural methods that'd reduce toxic metals in baby food. Our government, commissioning research -- why, that sounds like our government doing their job! And if the thought of government research makes you guffaw, just remember: without it, you'd have no COVID vaccine. No, really. You didn't think private corporations did all that, did you?

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5905, the Sgt. Isaac Woodard, Jr. and Sgt. Joseph H. Maddox GI Bill Restoration Act, which would extend G.I. Bill benefits to survivors and descendants of Black soldiers who fought in World War II. Why? Because the G.I. Bill enabled a lot of good American WWII soldiers of Italian, Polish, and German descent to get into the middle class for the first time -- but denied that access to Black soldiers, using methods of discrimination you won't have to work too hard to imagine. We made them a promise, and we reneged on it; now, with the GI Bill Restoration Act, we can make it right. Naturally, right-wingers will call this "reparations," like that's a bad word. They'll try to make any word a bad word! But that shouldn't keep us from doing the right thing.

Action: concerning voting rights, social media, prison phone rates, plastic pollution, and worker safety.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, and the Protecting America's Workers Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Left Action and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. By now you may know that the Freedom to Vote Act would authorize early voting for 15 days in all states, enact same-day voter registration, make Election Day a national holiday, clamp down on partisan gerrymandering, restore ex-felons' voting rights, and restrict dark money campaign contributions; you may not know that it would prevent states from interfering in elections so that a particularly party can "win" elections when their candidates get fewer votes. So ignore the right-wing rubbish about how "states should be allowed to run their own elections." If they're going to run them badly, then our federal government needs to step in.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. I know, Republicans blocked the bill yesterday, but that's one reason we pressure them -- so they know there will be consequences to their actions. Unless they think "voting against me" is a "terrorist act" or something. I wish I were kidding about that! I think we will be there soon! Anyway, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore our Justice Department's ability to stop states and localities with an established record of vote suppression from suppressing the right to vote any further. That's any state and locality with such a record -- you know, for when right-wingers try to tell you "the South has changed." When no one's brought up the South!

Public Citizen also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. Normally I blanche when I see bills with the words "innovation" and "choice" in their title, but this one's pretty good -- it would prevent big online platform corporations from preferencing their own products, or discriminating against others' products, if the result "would materially harm competition on the covered platform." All monopolistic practices, you may notice! I believe Amazon is in court for this stuff as we speak, but I can think of other big tech corporations that should be shaking in their boots, like Facebook and Google. Or how about Apple? You can only use the "uniqueness" of your operating system as an excuse for so long! At least, that's how it should be. So let's make it be.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1541, the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act. S. 1541 would make our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) cap what big telecom corporations can charge prisoners and/or their families for staying in touch over the phone. So that prisoners and their families can afford them! Currently these big telecoms can charge an arm and a leg for these calls, which is not only cruel, but also reduces the possibility that prisoners will stay out of jail once they get out of jail, and I believe every civilized person works toward prisoner rehabilitation. The only ones who don't, I presume, are the private prison corporation lackeys who love "repeat customers." But they're not civilized. But they don't get all the say around here.

Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2238/S. 984, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act. It's not just about us breaking free from plastic pollution, it's also about the world's marine wildlife, who cannot afford well-heeled lobbyists arguing for their protection. The plastic corporations have big lobbies, but the hermit crab has us, and that's going to have to be enough. Besides which, a lot of animals harmed by plastic pollution can find their way to your dinner plate sooner or later, and if you didn't feel the harm before, you will then. And anyway, you probably did feel it before then -- a World Wildlife Fund/University of Australia-Newcastle study famously told us we ingest about a credit card's worth of plastic weekly -- but you just may not have known it. Now you know, and you can act.

Finally, the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2876, the Protecting America’s Workers Act. The bill would strengthen reporting requirements for workplace injuries and stiffen penalties for workplace safety violations, but it would also expand whistleblower protections, particularly for workers who won't undertake obviously dangerous tasks and those who help inspectors find workplace violations. Maybe this bill doesn't excite people, and big corporations will call it a "job-killer," but this is exactly the kind of bill that could help you out a lot if you get hurt at your workplace because of some boss's negligence. And if this bill passes, employers also won't be able to get away with hurting you just because you're a "consultant" or a "contractor" or a "temp," either. So let's get this done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to enact an eviction moratorium, tell "Wall Street Democrats" to stop trying to kill the reconciliation bill, tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, pass the False Claims Amendments Act, and end slavery in American prisons. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning voting rights, Medicare expansion, paid family leave, Medicaid expansion, and big telecom cruelty.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, expand Medicare, provide paid family/medical leave, pass a bill that would let individual counties and localities accept the Medicaid expansion where states won't, and pass the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act; and attend a rally in favor of the For the People Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The Voting Rights Act used to have a list of states that needed to pre-clear their voting law changes with our Justice Department -- until our Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, ruled that discriminated against Southern states (which comprised most of that list!). The Voting Rights Advancement Act would amend the Voting Rights Act so that any state or locality with a record of suppressing the vote would have to pre-clear their voting law changes. Don't brook any silliness about how "the South has changed" from the likes of Mitch McConnell -- the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would fight vote suppression everywhere, not just the South. So let's get to it.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to improve and expand Medicare, by lowering the eligibility age to 60 and adding hearing, vision, and dental coverage. As they say, seniors have ears, eyes, and teeth just like everyone else, so there's no reason Medicare shouldn't cover them! And though I'd rather lower the eligibility age to zero, lowering it to 60 would be a good first step. I can already hear right-wingers whine how are you going to pay for it? If we pass it as part of the next reconciliation bill, we'd get tax hikes on rich folks and corporations to help pay for it -- plus we could let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, which even the Mercatus Center has said would save Medicare about $84 billion annually. (Toward that end, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3, which would let Medicare negotiate prices for most of the drugs it buys.)

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk you want our government to provide paid family/medical leave to all our workers. That is supposed to be one of the cornerstones of the American Families Plan, so we might as well tell Congress we want it, lest they think the American people care more about whatever manufactured outrage right-wingers want to flood the zone with today. And though asking HOWZ WILLZ WE PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ!!!! does get tiresome, just so happens Sen. Gillibrand's previous family/medical leave bills have already answered that: with a payroll tax that would cost workers making $50,000 annually less than $9/month. Nine dollars! And that's not even how I'd do it! See, this is why I get tired of people who whine about paying for things.

Both Daily Kos and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would let counties and cities sign on to the Medicaid expansion even if state governments won't do it. What would be the opposing point of view there? That "states' rights" are too important? Gosh, that would be a tired argument! States that have refused the Medicaid expansion didn't do so because of some serious policy disagreement, but merely out of cruelty. No, a desire to "stick it to Obama" counts as cruelty; I mean, the result is the same. And if Congress doesn't have a moral obligation to fight cruelty, then why do we have a democracy to begin with?

Both Color of Change and Free Press help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1541, the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, which would stop big telecom corporations from gouging prisoners when they talk to their families on the phone. Is it right that we would take advantage of prisoners and their families in this way? Is any cruelty OK if it makes you look "tough on crime"? And don't be the fool who says well, don't commit a crime, then, since we all know that contact with families helps folks in prison stay out once they get out. Also, too, there's a pandemic on, which means less face-to-face contact with families, which means more phone contact. Like I said, it's cruel, and that means we must change it.

Finally, Deadline for Democracy will be holding rallies all over America this week helping you tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act; here's where to find one. You just enter your zip code and find the event nearest you. Some two out of three Americans support the For the People Act, but Republicans Senators just keep on with their propaganda that an end to gerrymandering, campaign finance disclosure for big donors, 15 days of early voting nationwide, same-day and automatic voting registration, and an end to racist caging practices somehow all constitutes a "Democrat power grab." As usual, Republicans doth project too much -- they're the ones doing all the power-grabbing, and the For the People Act would make it harder for them to do it! So let's get out there, in force, and remind them who they're supposed to serve.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: send the kids to jail for life! And other cruelties.

Our Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, OKs life without parole for children who commit certain crimes -- and Justice Kavanaugh, in his majority opinion, appears to eviscerate precedent even as he claims to uphold it! I do recall this being exactly the kind of thing we feared from a Justice Kavanaugh. And where's the sense, from some of our highest judges, that if a child fails to badly that we even contemplate shutting them away in prison forever, that we, as a civilization, have failed that child? You could count on that, at least, from Anthony Kennedy.

Uh oh: Congressional investigation finds at least one Capitol Police official ordering, on the morning of January 6, that police look only for "anti-Trump" protestors, not the pro-Trump ones who then tried to stage a coup. Characterizing that order as "be on the lookout for counter-protesters because that is often where we have clashes between both sides," as one official does, ain't exactly a denial, and in any case I certainly hope the subsequent events of that day disabused them of the notion that "anti-Trump protestors" is where you look for the violence.

You might be irritated to confront a headline like "State-Supported 'Clean Energy' Loans Are Putting Borrowers At Risk of Losing Their Homes," but the full story is even worse: one of the Obama Administration's brilliant ideas from 2009 was to help low-income homeowners pay for improvements to their homes by giving low-interest loans to municipalities, who would then loan the money to homeowners and have them repay it in their property taxes! Nobody could have predicted that this would be a way to repossess those homes! And I'm pretty sure you were nodding off as you were reading the first sentence of this paragraph, but people with bad, convoluted ideas count on that.

Upon hearing that Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) seeks to "establish her independent bona fides as she faces a tough re-election battle in New Hampshire next year," you have to wonder why she thinks voting against a $15/hour minimum wage and opposing an end to the 20-year war in Afghanistan are good ways to do that. Assert your independence from Joe Biden, sure, but we might more reasonably say that Maggie Hassan is "asserting her independence from the public will," and that never ends well for a Democrat.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) vetoes a bill that would have banned transgender girls from participating in girls' sports, and the state Senate fails to overcome his veto, meaning the bill is dead, for now. Ah, but don't give him too much credit: this may be how they all want the drama to shake out. After all, if you "solve" a "problem," it's much harder to stoke rage over it later. Isn't it?

Finally, the Tennessee state House passes a bill banning state and local governments from requiring COVID vaccines, and all I can say is waaaaaaaaaaah! That's some "conservatism" there, preventing municipalities from determining what's best for themselves! But today's "conservatives" care about nothing but stoking rage in people, and they dishonor their forebears in doing so. I guess they don't see the irony.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning war on Iran, actually rehabilitating prisoners, and sane energy policy.

As you know, the House passed a War Powers resolution last week aimed at keeping our President from launching any more military attacks on Iran -- and now word on the street is that it has the votes to pass in the Senate as well. But don't get complacent! The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you call your Senators and tell them to restrain our President's war-happy ways. Yes, our President can veto this resolution, but let's make him do that! And let's not get caught up in exactly how many Republicans will vote the right way this time, not after Sen. Tillis (R-NC) made all that noise about voting for the resolution of disapproval aiming to overturn our President's "national emergency" declaration and then voted against it. Let's also not get caught up in which Republicans (cough Rand Paul cough!) will vote for this resolution precisely because our President will veto it. The whole point of America is not to sit around the TV and game out outcomes like this is Draft Kings or something -- the whole point of America is that citizens must act.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell American county sheriffs to stop eliminating in-person visits between prisoners and their families. Sheriffs like to tell you we don't have the staff (and here you thought privatization would have solved that!) and we're afraid they'll pass drugs to each other (actual translation: we'll find out how many of our staff are peddling drugs) and, perhaps most importantly, we've got this fancy new video service that lets prisoners essentially Face-Time their loved ones at exorbitant expense! When big telecom corporations offer monetary incentives to use their service, you're right to suspect all their excuses, and when you recall that real live contact from family helps prisoners stay out of jail once their sentence is over a lot more than "video conferencing" does, you'll suspect all their excuses even more. I must say when private prisons claim they just can't have real live family visits, they're not exactly conjuring up the Genius of the Free Market. Where's their can-do spirit?

Finally, you no doubt know by now that Australia is on freaking fire -- so much so that normally recalcitrant koala bears will come gulp down any bottled water you bring to them! -- and yet they're still trying to build coal mines there, most notably in central Queensland, where German chemical corporation Siemens plans to provide rail signaling equipment for the proposed Adani coal mine. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Siemens to end its involvement in the Adani coal project. Here you would add your voice to the voices of climate activists in Germany who've been striking every Friday for months; they've been wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR effectively enough that Siemens's CEO has sounded a bit rueful about his involvement in the Adani project -- but he could be jiving us, you know. And yet, if he really is counting on another coal project to get him his 19th vacation home, he should remember that cheap gas is killing coal, and the falling cost of renewables sure ain't helping, either. We can help him get with the times by telling him to abandon coal mining in a burning country.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning prison strikes and student loan debt.

As you may know, prisoners all over America are going on strike -- with sit-ins, work stoppages, boycotts of commissaries, and even hunger strikes -- to call attention to the various indignities we visit upon them. No, we should not mistreat our prisoners, regardless of what they've done at least not if we're going to call ourselves civilized people. And if we're going to be the greatest nation on Earth, we should be confident enough in ourselves to treat prisoners humanely, and not least because it's the best way to rehabilitate them. Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to listen to, and implement, the demands of the prison strikers. Your Congressfolk will find a lot of these -- paying prisoners in prevailing wages and not dung pellets, for example -- to be very difficult to accept, and some may have public tantrums about it, since, you know, it's OK because our President does that. But you're bigger than they are, so don't let that cow you.

Meanwhile, our Department of Education has proposed rules that would actually hinder good Americans' ability to get loans forgiven after predatory colleges rip them off. Because for-profit colleges are more important than Americans, apparently! I'm old enough to remember when my parents would laugh whenever an ad came on TV for a for-profit college, for back then, for-profit colleges were virtually synonymous with thieves. What has changed in the intervening years? They've bought themselves a gaggle of politicians, that's what! You may well be saying to yourself, self, why bother leaving public comments with a Department of Education that's just going to ignore them? I don't blame you for asking! Here's the answer: because they may break laws in ignoring the popular will, and we can get them in court if they do. Hence Consumers Union helps you tell our Department of Education not to make it so much harder for students to get relief from predators.

Action: fairer sentencing, governmental corruption, and equal rights for gays.

First things first: the Pennsylvania state legislature will vote this week on whether to implement a "risk assessment" tool for sentencing guidelines. Philip K. Dick stories make good movies, not good laws, and if you saw "risk assessment" and thought "another way to put black people in prison for longer," you win a prize! I guess our state legislators want credit for recognizing that folks of color do, in fact, have it harder than white folks do in many ways, but you and I could think of a thousand better ways to fix that. And, strictly speaking, we can't predict whether an individual will commit more crimes once out of prison -- and it is individuals we'd be sending to jail, after all! -- and moreover we shouldn't, not if we really believe in rehabilitating prisoners, not if we really believe in giving folks a second chance after they've paid their debt to society. Hence Color of Change helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to reject "risk assessment" for sentencing.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to get rid of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, then Climate Truth still helps you do that. It is kind of a shame that if he does get fired, or resign under pressure -- and almost half of Congress has called for his head at this writing! -- he'll be remembered not as the man who tried to gut clean air and clean water laws and wasn't even particularly good at that, but as the man who pulled every lever of power he could in order to get perks for himself and his family. Our President, you may recall, declared his support for the beleaguered Mr. Pruitt months ago, possibly (as some have speculated) because he wanted Mr. Pruitt on hand in case he fired his Attorney General, Mr. Sessions. But now that yet another Fox News bloviator with the President's ear, Jeannie Pirro, appears to want Mr. Sessions's job, maybe that'll make Mr. Pruitt obsolete in our President's eyes. Even if it puts yet another Fox News shouting head in our government, it'd be good to get rid of Scott Pruitt.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2282/S. 1006, the Equality Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. The Equality Act would extend Civil Rights Act protections to gays, so that (to give a few examples) landlords couldn't kick them out for being gay, bosses couldn't fire them for being gay, and businesses couldn't deny them services because they're gay. Do you suppose this is a useless task because this Congress, which seems only to care about hurting the American people and delivering more taxpayer money to their corporate cronies, would never pass it? Please disabuse yourself of that notion if you have it, because fighting for justice is never useless -- if nothing else, we can get members of Congress on the record about whether they'd vote for the Equality Act or not, and if they say they'd vote against it, regardless of whatever nonsensical justification they might offer, we have many tools to embarrass them in public. Remember: civilized folks do shame those who deserve it.

Action: campaign finance disclosure, better wages for working families, and rehabilitating prisoners.

Both Public Citizen and Common Cause help you tell the Federal Election Commission (or FEC) to mandate strong disclosure rules on internet campaign ads. (Only sign one or the other, though, otherwise it'll be like sending two comments on the same thing to the FEC.) Disclosure of campaign donors is far more common in TV and print ads, but, generally, our government doesn't get around to overseeing new things until it's far too late, i.e., after Russia allegedly spent a crapload of money influencing votes on Facebook. You know my opinion on that particular development: if Democrats would stand for something other than Not Being Republicans, it'd be a whole lot harder for a foreign country (or big donors) to swing an election their way. But we should demand the same transparency from internet ads that we demand from ads on the more traditional media. And if you're a big donor trying to influence an election, maybe you should have the guts to show yourself.

Meanwhile, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) has proposed a corporate "freeloader tax" for corporations that don't pay their workers enough to keep them off of government aid programs like food stamps. The Republicans' most recent Farm Bill did impose new work requirements on food stamp recipients, but most food stamp recipients are already working, thus prompting the question (as put by the article at the link above): "Is the problem that people aren’t working enough? Or is it that they don’t receive a high enough wage or generous enough benefits from their employer?" Sen. Brown would impose a 0.25% tax (that's not 25 percent, "liberal" media dogs!) on corporations with 25 percent of their workers under the federal poverty line, a 0.50% tax for corporations with 50 percent, and a 1% tax for corporations with 75%. I'd go 1%, 2%, and 3% myself, but still, call your Reps and Senators about this plan. They won't see it coming.

Finally, H.R. 5682/S. 2795, the FIRST STEP Act, would make it easier for prisoners to rehabilitate themselves once in prison, by mandating the Bureau of Prisons to incarcerate them within 500 driving miles of their home, making various improvements to the federal compassionate release process, expanding home confinement sentencing for low-risk criminals, and increasing "good time credits" prisoners earn with good works. And the FIRST STEP Act would also provide additional funding for the drug treatment, counseling, job training, and education programs that prisoners need to get a leg up once they get out. If all this sounds like coddling to you, kindly reacquaint yourself with the purpose of imprisonment, which is not merely to punish but to rehabilitate. Hence Families Against Mandatory Minimums helps you tell your Congressfolk to support actual prisoner rehabilitation by passing the FIRST STEP Act.

Action: vote suppression, fair sentencing, and the war on Yemen.

The notorious "Interstate Crosscheck" program supposedly aims to catch voter fraud by tabulating people with similar names registered in multiple states, but -- as America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, has documented at length -- "Interstate Crosscheck" actually foments vote suppression by allowing states to simply deregister voters who have similar names to folks in other states, and a great many of these folks just so happen to be black or Hispanic. "Interstate Crosscheck" flags voters without checking middle names or Social Security numbers, and if you're sitting there thinking that just means that these folks registered with different middle names, I would remind you of the phrase innocent until proven guilty, which is a bedrock principle of our judicial system, after all. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your state to stop or decline participation in "Interstate Crosscheck."

Meanwhile, did you know that in Pennsylvania you can get your drivers' license suspended for six months (or longer) after doing time on a drug-related offense, even if that offense had nothing to do with driving your car unsafely? An important part of law and order is ensuring sentences fit crimes; another important part of law and order is ensuring that convicted criminals can rehabilitate themselves, but it's awfully hard to get a job, get an apartment, see your family, or participate in your community without a car, especially in places with very little public transportation. If that sounds like "setting folks up to fail and go back to jail," well, that just so happens to be the very market model of the private prison corporation. But HB 163 would repeal the law mandating license suspensions for drug-related convictions, so the ACLU helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to support rehabilitation of prisoners by supporting HB 163.

Finally, S.J.Res. 54, the bill that would end American participation in Saudi Arabia's war on Yemen, is a good bill, but the similarly-numbered S.J.Res. 55 would let our government keep helping Saudi Arabia in its war against Yemen as long as our Secretary of State (whomever that is!) certifies that Saudi Arabia is making a "good faith effort" at diplomacy and helping to alleviate the near-famine and near-plague conditions in Yemen that have resulted from the war. In other words, it lets Senators look like they're doing something about the war without actually doing something about it! Don't brook any silliness about how this fake resolution gives the President more "flexibility," because Presidents don't need "flexibility" -- they just need good Americans to tell them what to do. Hence Just Foreign Policy and Change.org help you tell your Senator to reject S.J.Res. 55 and actually do something about starving Yemeni citizens.

Around the table: a noted centrist suggests that Democrat centrists stop meddling in Congressional primaries, and other tales.

Elizabeth Hinton thinks we should "Turn Prisons Into Colleges." If we could keep prisoners away from the for-profit sector, though, that'd be nice. I suppose the ragehead crowd will squeal PRIZUNZ ARE FOR TEH PUNISHMENTZ!!!!, though actually prisons are for rehabilitation. But those who only care about punishment and retribution can take heart that a lot of prisoners would find studying to be an absolute chore, at least at first. What rageheads will say when more of those prisoners become functioning members of society again? Oh, who am I kidding -- they'll point to the ones who don't and declare the whole thing a failure. And their heroes will say PRIVATEZ PRIZONZ ARE TEH ANSWURZ!!!!!

Our Department of Defense tells Congress it can't tell them not to refuel Saudi planes that go on to drop bombs on Yemen, which suggest a certain ignorance, on Defense's part, on how the Constitution is actually supposed to work. They're not even trying to argue that the 2001 AUMF, which needs to be repealed yesterday if not sooner, gives them all the authority they need! Instead, they're trying to say helping Saudi Arabia bomb Yemen doesn't "constitute 'hostilities'." Anyone want to ask any Yemenis about that?

Ho hum, the Obama Administration started a commission that finally got some health care help for Cold War-era nuclear workers exposed to toxins, but the current Administration has let that commission's expired seats (i.e., all of them) go unfilled. Because GUBMINT BAD REGULASHUNZ BAD ADMINISTRATIVEZ STATEZ BAD!!!! I predict that once someone explains to President Manchild that a lot of these workers probably voted for him, he promptly takes to Twitter to slam Democrats for holding up his nominees, even though they literally can't now.

Well, this is a watershed moment: brilliant but occasionally infuriating centrist Matthew Yglesias not only says the DCCC should stop trying to pick nominees for voters, but that the Democrats' whole elect-someone-who-can-win theory has "very little evidence" to back it. Which we've known for a while -- long before 2016, even! -- but again, nice to have some science behind it, and nice to hear it from an unlikely source, too. Studies do not, in fact, show that candidates who "moderate" their positions do better, and where have Democrats been cleaning up in special elections so far this cycle? In red areas where they did better before 2016, and notin places like Georgia's 6th district, where Barack Obama got shelled but where Hillary Clinton barely lost.

Finally, the Administration has told Idaho it can't break the Affordable Care Act as nakedly as it had planned to do, by selling health insurance plans that don't comply with Affordable Care Act requirements in re pre-existing conditions, for example. Still, we shouldn't congratulate the Executive branch for doing its job, nor should we ignore all the wink-winks in Ms. Verma's letter to Idaho Gov. Otter, which could just as easily have read "we told you how to break Obamacare, but NOOOOO! You had to do it your way!" And, ah, what "freedoms" is Gov. Otter talking about Obamacare destroying? The "freedom" to buy crappy health insurance that won't be there for you when you need it?

Penny Rants for Sunday, October 15, 2017: why video conferencing doesn't work for prisoners, and other horrible truths.

It begins: President Trump ends subsidy payments to insurers that offer health insurance plans in the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Though the end result of Mr. Trump's action will be higher insurance premiums for poorer working families -- indeed, higher premiums have already been the result of the mere uncertainty over whether the Trump Administration would continue the subsidies -- I doubt any lawsuit against it will succeed, which testifies mainly to how badly the Affordable Care Act was written. Congress might be amenable to funding the subsidies, but at what cost? At the cost of further raiding Medicare and Medicaid? At the cost of destroying the pre-existing conditions ban, which nobody except health insurance corporations hates? And you know how I hate to pile on, but a single-payer health insurance system would help us avoid these problems -- particularly the appearance of "bailing out insurers," which, really, is a PR bank shot for Mr. Trump.

The Straight Dope explains to us why "video conferencing" between prisoners and their families is a poor substitute for in-person jail visits between prisoners and their families. Surprise, surprise, video phone calls don't help prisoners stay out of jail once they get out as well as, you know, family actually being there for them, plus the service is crappy and expensive, and some jails stop offering in-person visits the minute they get video conferencing, often at the request of the corporation providing the "service"). This state of affairs does not exactly conjure up "the genius of the free market" -- surely video conferencing, if it were so great, could beat in-person visits on the merits. The punchline: Ajit Pai's FCC has lately stopped efforts to cap prices for this service, because you could stuff a burner phone into a dead cat and throw it over a prison wall! (How I wish I were making that up).

Here's a hopeful note: not long after whining that its hands were so tied it just had to offer Equifax a service contract Equifax didn't even win on the merits, the IRS has suspended said contract with Equifax, at least temporarily. Maybe the IRS hopes we'll all forget about it in a few days, particularly since our drama-addicted President will provide us with many distractions in the meantime, but the fact that the IRS backed down so quickly from their main argument (apparently that whenever a corporation sues them they have to do that corporation's will, how full of American can-do is that?) suggests that such arguments may be as transparent to good Americans as they should be. Consider, however, why on Earth the IRS would be outsourcing customer account verification to a private corporation. You'd think if the IRS did it itself, it'd cost the taxpayer less, regardless of the mountains of BS various PR hacks have fed us regarding the absurd notion that "private corporations do everything better."

Finally, because you deserve some edifying reading, Maria Konnikova at The New Yorker discusses "How Norms Change," particularly vis a vis our racist adolescent President. I've long hoped to report in a few years that Donald Trump single-handedly obliterated the bully pulpit, but whether we like it or not, Donald Trump is an "authority figure," and "authority figures have a strong and rapid effect on social norms in part because they change our assumptions about what other people think" -- the Supreme Court's 2015 legalization of gay marriage may not actually have changed very many opinions, for example, but it suggested to folks that other folks' opinions were changing, and so it goes with the President who has everyone thinking there are more racists then we thought, even though he only got 46% of the popular vote. So what do we do about a President who (for example) makes anti-Semitism appear more legitimate? Other authority figures must speak out -- ideally close-at-hand authority figures, like your professor or your pastor. I like to say we're all moral leaders in America, and that means we're all authority figures as well, so go forth and do good works.

Action: drug sentencing, water pollution, and the Grand Canyon.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell President Obama to release thousands of low-risk prisoners who committed non-violence offenses in time for the holidays. Hopefully, folks released would include folks still serving crack cocaine sentences under the sentencing regime before it was reformed in the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. The Fair Sentencing Act reduced the disparity between crack and powder cocaine minimum sentences from a ratio of 500 to 1 to a ratio of 17 to 1, but quite a few folks are still serving time under the old ratio, and why do that? The newly emboldened racist right will squeal about TEH THOUSANDZ OF PREDATURZ ON TEH STREETZ!!!! -- and they may not even hide behind coded language anymore! -- but good Americans don't gin up drama like that, only bad ones do. Speaking of which, we sure ain't getting any clemency under a President Trump, who declares his Presidency will be a "law and order" Presidency. Of course, Mr. Trump only thinks of black people when he thinks of "law and order," not the corporate criminals he's putting on his cabinet. But we'll still be around to remind everyone of what mercy really means.

Meanwhile, investigators have found lead and copper in the water at the Eastham Unit Prison in Lovelady, Texas, and prisoners there have testified to the water's "sulfur-like smell," "offensive taste," and "gritty residue." The prison administration apparently knows about the problem, as it has provided its guards with clean water, but not their prisoners. I can already hear the Trump votaries rolling their eyes and saying so what? They're prisoners! But as civilized people, we keep the water clean for prisoners as much we do as for everyone else -- I mean, how can you rehabilitate prisoners if you're poisoning them at the same time? And why do we heap punishment after punishment upon prisoners when their sentences and prison rules (which surely do not say "poison the prisoners' water") already detail their punishment? Also, too, consider the quality of mercy, a matter Jesus said more about than he ever said about gay marriage. Roots Action helps you tell the U.S. Justice Department and the Centers for Disease Control to investigate the water pollution at the Eastham Unit Prison.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Obama to declare a national monument around the Grand Canyon National Park and thus protect it for future generations, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. You know why this is particularly urgent: partly because corporations want to get their grubby mitts on the uranium in the area, and they don't care if it pollutes the Colorado River or not, though the river provides drinking water to seven states -- but mainly because the Grand Canyon is a national treasure, part of that great American heritage we ought to be passing on to future generations, rather than digging into so we can get a little energy today for nuclear power plants that can hardly sustain themselves without massive welfare handouts from our government in the first place! No, really, they can't -- and we can't compare their reliance on government handouts to wind power tax credits, since a) wind power is a lot younger and b) fossil fuel corporations spend all their time trying to crush wind power, instead of embrace it.

Around the table: which Presidential candidate has more "secret voters"? And other questions.

This time last week I said I found arguments about "secret Donald Trump voters" more persuasive than other observers have, but the incomparable Digby lets us know that Hillary Clinton may actually be more likely to have "secret voters" -- namely, women who live in fairly right-leaning households whose husbands are all voting for Mr. Trump and who have to "maintain their standing in their conservative communities." That's at least as persuasive as any Trump "secret voter" argument, I'll admit, but I still don't agree that the "secret voter" argument stands at odd with "the swashbuckling, politically incorrect, in-your-face ethos of the Trump movement" -- as I said, a lot of folks are with Trump precisely because he says the things they can't, and presumably don't, and I'll bet some of them are not only married to liberals, but live in liberal communities.

Julia Lurie at Wired tells the story of "How One Company Contaminated Pittsburgh’s Drinking Water" -- with lead, that is. Long story short: Pittsburgh's public water utility was doing a bad job, so the city turned to a private corporation to help fix their water infrastructure -- and wound up having safety and water quality managers laid off and replaced one corrosion control chemical with another, cheaper one that, well, didn't work. The Paris-based corporation "consulting" with the city perpetrated other shenanigans as well; the lesson seems to be that we have to watch our public agencies a lot more closely or we'll wind up with public-private partnerships (or totally privatized agencies!) that are even worse.

And now, from the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: the Obama Administration is telling federal agencies involved in counterterrorism to get involved in anti-bullying initiatives at local and state levels. Because they'd be so good at that! They're likely to tell us (though they seem unwilling to answer questions from journalists about it at present) that they can find future terrorists in today's bullies, which is, as usual, totally the wrong way to go about pre-empting terrorism. The best way to pre-empt terrorism? Stop trying to steal things that belong to other people, like oil.

The Trans-Pacific "Partnership" is wildly unpopular, thanks to popular pressure, but that doesn't prevent the "liberal" media from offering up things like this fluff interview with Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, in which she summarizes all the lame arguments favoring the TPP. America will lose face with the rest of the world if we don't follow through, the TPP will help fight violent extremism, China booga-booga, and by the way Ms. Pritzker doesn't really understand why people are so "anxious." Neither does the article's writer, who never asks about, you know, the investor-state tribunals that would nullify our laws.

Jean Trounstine at TruthOut introduces us to some family members of crime victims who work toward rehabilitation of criminals rather than punishment. I'm not anti-punishment, actually, but most politicians take it way too far, and not, I suspect, out of a sincere interest in justice, but out of a base desire to stoke rage in their supporters. And if the vast majority of crime victims say treatment and crime prevention are more important than punishment, can't the rest of us conjure up some mercy, too? Of course we can. (As an aside, I always like to see Mural Arts Philadelphia get press for its good works.)

Finally, Trump voter Terri Rote faces felony charges of voter fraud in Iowa after trying to vote twice, fearing her first vote for Mr. Trump would be changed because "(t)he polls are rigged." I wonder where she might have heard that? Of course, if we asked Ms. Rote if she was a good, law-abiding person, she'd say yes, and recent events notwithstanding we probably wouldn't doubt it. But this is what right-wingers have been doing to good Americans since time immemorial: convince them to do bad things because they "have to." Come to think of it, the only way to get a good person to do a bad thing is to make them think they have to.

Around the table: tales of greed and corruption, plus bonus desperate stupidity from the Mayor of 9.11.

Jessica Pishko at The Nation asks: "Is Angela Corey the Cruelest Prosecutor in America?" You may know her as the Florida prosecutor who charged 12-year-old Cristian Fernandez with murdering his two-year-old brother, or as the prosecutor who tried to put Marissa Alexander in jail after she fired a gun to scare her abusive husband (no "Stand Your Ground" law for her!), or as the prosecutor who somehow didn't charge Trayvon Martin's killer with manslaughter. But you may not know that her county, Duval County, puts a crapload of people in jail, a lot of them children -- this, while crime falls nationwide! -- or that her nominal counterpart as Public Defender, Matt Shirk, has (until recently) also left behind a trail of incompetence and corruption.

The Obama Administration begins an "aggressive push" to get the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" across the finish line. And, of course, despite boasting that he has the "better argument," he mischaracterizes his opponents as isolationists once again. No one opposes trading with other nations, but most Americans oppose "free" trade deals that outsource our jobs and let "investor-state tribunals" nullify our laws. Why does living in a "global economy" demand that we sacrifice the rule of law to corporations? And it sure would be nice if Politico didn't carry water for Mr. Obama by calling "free" traders "trade supporters" or entire states "trade-dependent," as if rhetorical hostage-taking were OK so long as it's not so obvious.

An Education Trust report finds that the top 138 private colleges -- which, together, control about 75 percent of higher education endowments -- "have mostly chosen not to prioritize educating students from low-income families." Well, they call them "hedge funds with colleges attached" for a reason. Colleges complain that a lot of their endowment money comes with restrictions, but (as the Education Trust suggests) it's not like it doesn't take two to tango there. So we can call this another data point suggesting that enabling absurd wealth does not "free" the rich to be super-generous -- if anything, it traps them in a cycle of greed.

A Breitbart poll -- promising to unskew mainstream polling showing Hillary Clinton ahead of Donald Trump in the Presidential race -- finds Hillary Clinton ahead of Donald Trump in the Presidential race. But liberals shouldn't gloat about that -- surely Breitbart's playing a long game here, and at the very least they're playing a long enough game that they'll put out a bunch of polls solidly agreeing with the mainstream, and then put out a bunch of polls "showing" movement toward Trump or even outright Trump leads, thus lending "data" to the theory that the whole thing was "rigged" if Mr. Trump loses. I suspect they're playing a longer game, of course: they're certainly trying to get their street cred in advance of what should be a historically brutal 2018 midterm for Democrats.

Finally, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani actually said that "before Obama came along, we didn't have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the US" and that "(t)hey all started when Clinton and Obama came into office." It's not the first time he's done this, but I'm still scratching my head trying to figure out what the Mayor of 9.11 could possibly have meant. Does he think 9.11 wasn't a plot of "radical Islamic terrorists"? Were they just guys who flew planes into buildings and killed 3,000 people? Or does he deem the 9.11 attack somehow "unsuccessful"? Perhaps people like Rudy Giuliani just say awful things because the only alternative would be to confess your spiritual corruption before the world.

Around the table: starring stupid government contractors, stupid "liberal" media elites, and stupid racists.

What is "The Biggest Iraq War Scandal Nobody's Talking About," according to Liam O'Donoghue at Salon? That our soldiers who worked near "burn pits" now tend to suffer life-threatening illnesses. What are burn pits? Holes in the ground where garbage got burned, garbage ranging from plastic to Styrofoam to batteries to human corpses. And who operated them on our government's behalf? Why, Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, and Root, of course! You'd have thought Agent Orange would've taught us something, but apparently all lessons fly out the window when there's money to be made -- particularly money to be made at the expense of both the taxpayer and our troops.

Pope Francis I calls for the worldwide abolition of the death penalty, saying that "(t)he commandment 'you shall not kill" has absolute value and applies to both the innocent and the guilty." Haters who stand at the ready to condemn the Pope because it's a day ending in "y" should note that the Catholic Church has actually been evolving in this direction for over a decade. And I think I've come to the same place -- I've long said we should work on rehabilitating souls rather than merely locking them away from the rest of us, but even at the point where the best rehabilitative efforts fail, I can no longer justify killing someone.

You've heard that liberal economists have hated on Bernie Sanders's economic plan, and that their number includes even the incomparable Paul Krugman? Dave Johnson, writing at Futureblog, explains how this happened. Long story short: even the best of Our Glorious Elites seem very afraid of profound change, which the Sanders plan (which would tax the rich a lot harder, cut health care costs, and spend more on infrastructure-building) certainly would be. And using the lousy economic figures of the Bush/Obama years to attack the Sanders plan -- when neither Messrs. Bush nor Obama ever even tried anything on that scale -- is, to quote a famous philosopher, "most illogical."

Daily Kos diarist Barbara Morrill finds that the "Trump rhetoric" that upsets NBC's Chuck Todd isn't his racist rhetoric, his sexist rhetoric, his nativist rhetoric, or his militarist rhetoric -- but his anti-press rhetoric. Why, that's the only thing I sorta-almost like about Donald Trump! I'm guessing Mr. Todd finds anti-media tantrums worse than the others because he's supposed to be objective and not "complain" about the others. To the rest of us, though, it looks like Mr. Todd only finds rhetoric "dangerous" when he's about to be on the blunt end of it. Typical "liberal" media self-absorption.

Finally, in a not-tremendously-shocking development, a right-wing radio host/Republican Congressional candidate in Minnesota has said a number of racist and sexist things over the years. I remember Robert Welch of the John Birch Society saying more or less the same sort of thing 50 years ago about black folks actually having it pretty good in America as far as material possessions go! It is true that your money goes a lot farther in Ghana (and India, and Iran, and Thailand, and most other places on Earth) than it does here, but how does that prove blacks should just shut up and be content with the knowledge that their next contact with police might be their last? I mean, I thought we aspired to better things in America.

Action: retirement advice, clean water, and keeping kids out of jail.

As you know, the Department of Labor lately issued rules mandating retirement account advisers (including pension advisers) to adhere to a "fiduciary responsibility" standard -- meaning they have to put their clients' needs ahead of their own. But two House bills (H.R. 4294 and H.R. 4293) would nullify these standards, and H.R. 4294 and H.R. 4293 would also amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, respectively, to codify old exemptions to the fiduciary responsibility standard and carve out new ones -- meaning that certain retirement advisers would continue to get to put their own mammon-worship ahead of your secure retirement, and thus our Congress encourages corruption. Sadly, both these bills have the sheen of bipartianship, with five Democratic co-sponsors each, but good Americans don't care about bipartisan government; we care about good government. So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject these fake retirement advice "reform" bills.

Meanwhile, Stanford University scientists have found that gas drillers practicing hydrofracturing (better known as "fracking") are directly injecting chemicals into shallow freshwater aquifers. You may recall that the "liberal" media flogged the EPA's 2015 report as "proof" that fracking was perfectly safe to drinking water and that folks who said otherwise were just alarmist or extremist, but the 2015 report actually found more evidence of water contamination (if not "widespread" contamination) than in past reports, and also admitted the constraints of its research (i.e., that the law allows frackers to keep their chemicals a "trade secret," and gas drilling corporations wouldn't cooperate with the EPA) -- and we should not really construe that as a thumbs-up for fracking. Word on the street is that the EPA's peer review board has expressed dissatisfaction with the 2015 report, so Penn Environment helps you tell the EPA to start over again and conduct a more thorough review of the threats to clean water, and to health, posed by fracking.

Finally, a Change.org petition helps you tell the Governor of Michigan to release Devontae Sanford. I didn't have to know that Mr. Sanford is serving 39 years in prison for a quadruple-murder to which someone else has since confessed -- I needed only know that Mr. Sanford is developmentally disabled and was only 14 at the time of the crime, meaning that even if he did kill four people, his predicament begged better care from the adults in his life, not hard time. And that was before I learned that the police questioned him without his parents or an attorney present -- and that he later said he only confessed because police promised him he could go home if he did. It sure seems like a lot of adults failed Mr. Sanford. And I'll suffer no guff about how we have to "teach kids responsibility" by putting them in prison. The time to "teach kids responsibility" is well before that, and if we as a culture are failing at that task, the solution isn't to send kids off to where we don't have to deal with them anymore. The solution is to stop failing.

Action: net neutrality, financial predators, and sentencing reform.

H.R. 2666, the so-called No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act, would prohibit the FCC from regulating internet service prices -- which would render the FCC powerless to act when ISPs indulge in price-gouging or unduly restrictive data caps, since those are "rate issues." Even worse is S. 2283, the so-called Small Business Broadband Deployment Act, which would exempt small businesses from having to comply with net neutrality regulations -- and defines a small business as a business having fewer than 1,500 employees or 500,000 subscribers! Does that sound "small" to you? And don't the customers of these largely rural ISPs deserve the same right to go where they want to go on the internet as the rest of us? And while Comcast has some 139,000 employees now, how fast do you think they'd make the vast majority of them into "independent contractors" if this bill passed? Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject these attempts to destroy the FCC's net neutrality regulations, which enjoy the support of just about everyone not in some big telecom corporation's pocket.

Meanwhile, H.R. 4018 calls itself the "Consumer Choice and Protection Act," and purports to crack down on payday lenders and check-cashing joints (called "deferred presentment providers" in the bill, so now you know what that is), but actually does very badly at this sort of "cracking down." How? First, by amending the Truth in Lending Act to allow loose state laws on payday lending and check-cashing to supersede federal law, and second, by preventing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) from issuing any regulations pertaining to payday lenders or check-cashers for two full years after the bill's passage. And that latter item really tells you all you need to know about H.R. 4018, because the CFPB has been working on "deferred presentment provider" regulations; why not let the CFPB write their rules and let good Americans comment on them? Because that wouldn't get the result financial predators want, that's why. So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 4018.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to support sentencing reform, then both the ACLU and the Friends Committee on National Legislation help you do that. Both action alerts help you support S. 2123, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, an actually bipartisan effort, unlike so many legislative initiatives that claim that mantle. "Incarceration in the U.S. has gone beyond a system of rehabilitation, retribution, or even deterrence," says the most recent email missive from FCNL. "It has become mass incarceration -- a set of reactive rather than effective practices." And that's absolutely true: we put as many people we can in jail simply because we're afraid of what will happen if we don't -- though we should be afraid of what will happen when we fail to rehabilitate wrongdoers. And S. 2123 is a step in the right direction: it will essentially end solitary confinement for children and roll back mandatory minimums, particularly drug-related mandatory minimums. It's the beginning of what we need to do to become a sane and healthy society again.

Action: government spying, energy efficiency, methane regulation, and "banning the box."

Word on the street is that the U.S. Senate will vote on S. 754, the Cybersecurity Information Security Act, today, so Stopcyberspying.com helps you call your Senators and tell them to reject S. 754. You no doubt know why they should reject this bill -- it would make it much, much easier for big telecom corporations to hand over all your private data to the NSA, the FBI, and the CIA, regardless of whether you've actually done anything wrong or are the actual target of an actual investigation, and would also do nothing to address real cybersecurity issues, like encryption, malware, and bad network management. And the bill would also -- because big telecom corporations are so vital to American civilization that they must be protected from the consequences of their bad actions! -- grant broad immunity to those corporations that violate your rights in sharing your data. Even worse, though, the bill's own main sponsor, Richard Burr of North Carolina, has actually admitted that S. 754 won't actually prevent cyberattacks, but merely "limit the damage" afterward. That's not security, folks. This anti-freedom bill must die.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the state Senate plans to vote, as early as today, on SB 805, which would slash funding to Act 129 energy efficiency programs. How? By allowing the Commonwealth's biggest energy gobblers to opt out of funding the program. Why, that's like allowing the country's biggest income earners to pay less in taxes than everyone else! Everyone who pays an electric bill in Pennsylvania has to pay a fee dedicated to Act 129 energy efficiency programs, so under SB 805, most good Pennsylvanians will still have to pay the fee, but the fattest cats won't. It must be because state politics aren't all that sexy, or "fees" aren't all that sexy, that politicians get away with such mess, because pretty much everyone favors more efficient energy production. And note to the "sun tax" crowd: letting the biggest energy users off the hook for paying into a system that benefits all of us is the very definition of a "free rider." The Sierra Club helps you tell your Pennsylvania state Senator to reject the anti-energy efficiency, anti-civilization, pro-fat cat bill SB 805.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the EPA to enact the most vigorous methane pollution regulations possible, then the League of Conservation Voters still helps you do that. What's the trouble with methane? Methane is a far more efficient carrier of global warming emissions than coal emissions, and we're doing more and more fracking in America, and fracking isn't just a source of the chemical pollutants that get in our water tables and make our water unsafe to drink, wash with, or bathe in -- it's also a source of methane emissions, and the methane emissions problem with gas drilling is bad enough that a whole industry (the methane mitigation industry) now exists to deal with it. Right-wingers might call that job creation, but we don't need to cause (or enable) screw-ups just to create jobs. In fact, if folks are free from the kinds of pollution that makes them less healthy, they'll be free to create the kinds of jobs a truly sane, moral, and healthy civilization creates. Why not bring about that better world? Because fossil fuel corporations don't like it?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Obama to issue an executive order mandating that federal employers and contractors stop asking job applicants about their criminal records, then Color of Change still helps you do that. This is better known as the "Ban the Box" campaign, because often in job applications you have to check a box if you've been convicted of a crime; banning the box doesn't prevent employers from doing background checks later, but it does give the applicant more of an opportunity to put forward their qualifications and aptitudes. See, that's what it's about -- giving folks trying to put their past behind them more opportunity. It's pointedly not about hamstringing employers' ability to find the people they want to hire, but it would help both sides if folks previously convicted of crimes can put their best foot forward. And folks who can't get work after they get out of jail often land right back in jail, which does not speak well of a society that aims to rehabilitate prisoners. Getting our government to "ban the box" is a step toward that goal.

Action: "free" trade, and sentencing reform.

In the wake of the completion of negotiations on the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" -- that massive "free" trade deal that would, among other things, allow corporations to run roughshod over our clean air and clean water laws and charge you more for the prescription drugs you need -- Avaaz helps you tell Congress to reject it. The TPP would subject our laws to the whims of "investor-state tribunals" more than ever before, and these tribunals would mainly concern themselves with whether a nation's law costs investors money, as if some rich person losing money is the worst thing that could ever happen in the world. And if the tribunal does rule in favor of the corporation, the taxpayers of a particular nation will have to foot the bill -- and you know what we call that? A never-ending bailout, that's what. The TPP would also extend corporate monopoly power over prescription drugs such that affordable generics will take a lot longer to hit the market. Keep in mind that this is just what we know from leaks. If this sounds horrible to you, and it should, then contact your Congressfolk with a quickness.

Meanwhile, the Obama Administration will release some 6,000 federal prisoners by the end of the month, thanks to the U.S. Sentencing Commission's 2014 easement of sentences for non-violent drug-related crimes (and its subsequent decision to apply that relief retroactively to folks already serving such sentences). But this is only an early step toward finally reforming our criminal justice system so that it's not all about punishment and is more about rehabilitation, which should be the primary goal of a good criminal justice system. S. 2123, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, would enact a number of reforms, which include reducing certain mandatory minimum sentences, applying the relief from other sentencing reforms retroactively, and expanding the "safety valve" system that allows judges to reduce mandatory minimums when appropriate to the crime. So the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Senators to support the bill, and thus support sentencing reform. Don't be afraid to remind your Senator that being "tough on crime" is no way to run a just society, let alone a safe one.

Around the table: from Social Security hit jobs to more vaccine "skepticism."

Dave Lindorff absolutely eviscerates a Katie Couric video purporting to explain Social Security, a video peddling even worse myths about Social Security than the "liberal" media normally peddles. Mr. Lindorff also provides actual solutions that would shore up Social Security, including two I hadn't heard before -- making employers pay a larger percentage of payroll taxes than workers (which workers will notice, and employers won't) or applying the payroll tax to capital gains (which should not be taxed as low as it is in America anyway).

Prison Education Reduces Recidivism by Over 40 Percent," Michelle Chen asks in The Nation, so "Why Aren’t We Funding More of It? Because recidivism makes more money for private prison corporations, that's why! The good news? People both left and right have been coming around to the idea that putting people in jail over and over again just isn't good for anybody. The bad news? President Obama's pilot plan to restore Pell Grants for incarcerated folks, though it "costs basically the equivalent of a budget rounding error," faces Republicans who hate him.

Robert Reich instructs us that we should take new paid-leave policies offered by corporations such as Netflix with "a grain of silicon." For two reasons: one, policies like that of Netflix only apply to "talent," i.e., well-paid and highly-placed employees (as if sorting through all those DVDs efficiently isn't a talent!), and two, folks who happen to be "talent" simply aren't taking the time off because it seems you can't afford to take time off if you want to get ahead. You might want to tell some of these "talented" folks to stand up to their bosses (since you'd think "talent" would have some leverage), but if you do, you also need to tell their bosses that work-life balance is a good thing.

Steve Singiser at Daily Kos Elections asks if Republicans have successfully gerrymandered themselves into a "semi-permanent majority." I'm tempted to respond that gerrymandering isn't something so big that a few courageous Democrats can't handle it. In other words, I'm tempted to answer "yes," and the main reason I don't is that I'm an optimist.

Hannah K. Gold asks "Why Did the FBI Spy on James Baldwin?" You might respond, well, because he was black, gay, and active in the civil rights movement, but then you have to ask why his FBI file is nearly seven times larger than Richard Wright's and nearly half as big as Malcolm X's. And naturally, confronting the FBI file -- which Ms. Gold says reads like "a long, poorly-written novel" "riddled with inaccuracies," including, at one point, a description of Mr. Baldwin as white -- doesn't by itself clear up that mystery.

Finally, Carly Fiorina suggests she'd oppose mandatory vaccination of children, saying "(w)hen in doubt, it's the parent's choice," particularly where "religious freedom" is involved. I guess we're supposed to applaud Ms. Fiorina when she says public schools should still get to keep unvaccinated kids out, but that's a barn-door-horses-out problem. It sure is a good thing the vast, vast majority of people are not in "doubt" about the massive good vaccinations do, or about the consequences of foregoing them.

Action: net neutrality, energy efficiency, and job application fairness.

You remember how the House's Financial Services/General Government Appropriations bill contained a rider defunding FCC efforts to enforce its new net neutrality regulations until three lawsuits could be settled? Well, the Senate Appropriations Committee passed a companion bill apparently doing somewhat less damage than the House bill on net neutrality, but the Senate doesn't get a damn cookie for that. So Demand Progress helps you call your Senators to reject any anti-net neutrality riders in appropriations bills. Feel free to remind them that riders defunding FCC net neutrality efforts are a crappy way of doing something about "rate regulation," just as using a sledgehammer is a bad way to kill an ant. With over four out of five Americans supporting net neutrality -- a number including a higher proportion of Republicans than Democrats -- I think the people have made their will clear. Now our Senators should do their job and listen to the people, instead of holding our will hostage to government shutdowns. The good news? President Obama has noticed these shenanigans, though he hasn't threatened a veto. I presume that'll be our next task.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 2567/S. 1516, the Power Efficiency and Resiliency (or POWER) Act. What would the POWER Act do? The POWER Act would expand tax credits for developing combined heat-and-power (or CHP) and waste heat-to-power (WHP) systems, which capture wasted heat from various industrial processes (including paper and chemical manufacturing) and use it to heat buildings or create more electricity. Wasted heat makes up half of the energy many industrial processes use, so we might as well put it to use if we can. And who would oppose such a thing? Big fossil fuel energy corporation CEOs, that's who -- the people who say things like how can I make money off of that? when they actually mean how can I gild the plumbing on my 19th vacation home off of that? I'm old enough to remember when you could make money by making better products and designing better processes, rather than just funneling campaign contributions to Congressfolk until you got your way. But big fossil fuel CEOs don't get all the say around here.

Meanwhile, on the heels of President Obama's historic visit to a federal prison in Oklahoma last week -- he was the first sitting President ever to see the inside of a federal prison, prompting historian Rick Perlstein to comment, "damn you, Gerald Ford!" -- the ACLU helps you tell Mr. Obama to mandate that federal agencies and federal contractors to get rid of the "criminal record" box on job applications. Mr. Obama did just call for private corporations to do just that, so he might as well put his money where his mouth is. The "criminal record" box on job applications doesn't have very much to do with how well someone does a job -- I suspect that mainly the box helps job screeners make difficult decisions about whom to hire, but I don't believe in using arbitrary criteria to make decisions less difficult than they should be. I also don't believe in making it harder for folks coming out of jail to get work -- if they can't get work because no one will hire them, they're more likely to wind up back in jail. Private prison corporations might celebrate that cycle, but I don't, and they, too, don't get all the say around here.

Action: prison privatization, national parks, and smog regulations.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Watchdog.net helps you tell our Governor and our state legislators to end prison privatization in Pennsylvania. The news hook? The 2013 conviction and 28-year sentence of Mark Ciaverella, Jr., who abused his position as a juvenile court judge to send a lot of folks, including children as young as 10, into a private prison whose owner bribed him to the tune of over $1 million between 2003 and 2008. Sure, it's old news, but private prisons still operate in Pennsylvania, siphoning money from taxpayers (that means you and me) while delivering questionable-at-best results. I don't mean to assert that privatizing our prisons was the sole cause of the Kids for Cash scandal -- the greed of the two convicted judges can't be overlooked -- but the judges would have had a much tougher time sending kids to juvie for mocking their principals on social media if not for the avarice of private prisons. No use asserting that private prisons come about because public prisons can't handle Kids Today, because the answer to that is to make public prisons handle kids more effectively, because that's what civilized people do.

Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans would like very much to enact H.R. 330, the so-called Marine Access and State Transparency Act. Why is it called that? Because it spells MAST! Clever, eh? But what H.R. 330 would really do is make it much harder for the President to designate national monuments -- the President would have to go to Congress for approval before designating any national monuments, and in addition would have to go to state Governors and legislatures for approval before designating any maritime monuments. But Congress has already delegated authority to the President to designate national monuments in the Antiquities Act, and supporters of H.R. 330 really need to explain why they find national monuments so odious that we should have fewer of them -- which ultimately means fewer Grand Canyons and fewer Chimney Rocks. I sure hope they don't say that national monuments are "job-killers," because national monuments tend to attract a lot of tourism, which makes money, just not for corporate CEOs. CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the House's anti-national monuments bill.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell the EPA to issue the most vigorous smog-prevention standards possible. Specifically, the EPA asks if it should hold the ozone limit (since ozone particles are a major component of smog) down to 60 parts per billion, as most doctors recommend. Imagine that, our government actually consulting with doctors on health issues! It's enough to melt a man's heart. On bad smog days, everyone's asthma gets a lot worse, and kids have a lot more trouble breathing while they're playing outside. And since scientists have observed significant spikes in respiratory-related hospital admissions on the worst smog days, you know higher smog standards will save all of us a boatload of money in health care costs. In short, a vigorous smog rule would complement EPA efforts against coal pollution and tailpipe emissions, giving us the cleaner air we all deserve. Naturally, big corporations will oppose these regulations, since (for example) all the health care savings won't go directly into their pockets. But they don't get all the say around here.

Around the table: how governments oppress the press and prisoners -- and how they help overcome drug addiction and protect law and order.

Reporters Without Borders ranks the United States 49th out of 180 nations in press freedom, citing our government's oppression of whistleblowers and Ferguson police's actions against reporters during protests. More complacent folks will note that RWB still rates our press freedom as "satisfactory" (though barely so), but we were 17th in RWB's first ranking in 2002, and, as Lindsey Graham might say, the whole point of being an American isn't to have a press that's a little freer than Haiti's, or one that isn't completely ground down like Eritrea's.

South Carolina prisons have put almost 400 inmates into solitary confinement for -- wait for it -- using Facebook and other social media. South Carolina has made social networking a Level 1 offense, like, you know, stealing, murdering, or rioting. Given that people actually like to be on social media a lot, I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is a deliberate policy designed to drive prisoners into solitary. Naturally, South Carolina is running out of solitary cells, though that might just mean some state government crony will get to build more.

Johann Hari notes that Portugal has cut drug addiction rates in half by taking a less punitive, more rehabilitative approach. I doubt I'll ever see my way clear to legalizing most drugs -- drug addiction takes away your freedoms, and I think meth rings, for example, cause a lot more damage than trying to break up meth rings does -- but certainly putting drug addicts in jail hasn't been a very effective deterrent, and they'll do better if we connect them not just to rehab but to thriving communities. Of course, the private prison industry won't like that, because drug addicts are their best customers. But they don't get all the say around here!

Katherine Cross at Feministing instructs us that constantly calling out utterings as "offensive" limits our ability to talk about the "material harm" some actions do. Choice quotation: "But in the real world actual racism is not about hurt feelings. It’s about being incarcerated, harassed, strip-searched, stalked, murdered, denied career advancement or an education, or being at risk of the foregoing and then having someone rub in one’s face the slurs and stereotypes that animate it all. Against all this, the psychic paper cut of 'cracker' surely pales."

Finally, a Holt County (NE) district judge blocks TransCanada's ability to invoke eminent domain on privately-owned property. If you're saying, but I thought the Nebraska Supreme Court already let Keystone XL go through, note that Judge Kozisek has ruled on eminent domain-related lawsuits filed since that Supreme Court decision. Daily Kos diarist Meteor Blades also explains the other ways in which that decision didn't actually stop Keystone dead.

Around the table: from prisoners getting fleeced to ALEC getting isolated.

Daniel Wagner at the Center for Public Integrity describes the new frontier in separating money from prisoners and their families. Some private corporations now charge exorbitant fees for "handling" prisoners' money -- virtually guaranteeing that prisoners stay in debt -- at a time when governments are shifting more of the prisoners' day-to-day costs onto families. Making a prisoner's family buy his or her toilet paper doesn't sound particularly conducive to rehabilitation, nor does holding their money orders hostage so they'll switch to a fee-heavy, online system. This might change when a judge comes out and says that punishing prisoners and their families beyond what the prisoner's sentence actually mandates is unconstitutional.

Laura Gottesdeiner at al Jazeera describes in a lengthy report how the latest boom in North Dakota's boom-and-bust oil cycle has resulted in polluted local farmlands. The main culprit: a wastewater known as "saltwater" (because it's actually much, much saltier than the oceanwater we normally think of as "salt water") that, when it leaks, sterilizes land and poisons animals. I don't expect oil drilling CEOs to care very much, but I hope the oil workers putting in 80-hour work weeks are attending this matter -- unless they think the food they're going to eat is always just going to come from some faraway place.

Slovakian firm wants to convert billboards into housing for the homeless. The don't-help-until-it's-an-emergency model we use to deal with the homeless in America has turned out to be far more costly than, say, Utah's and Charlotte's programs that simply put the homeless up in spare housing, but I feel compelled to note that most American billboards are higher off the ground than they are in Slovakia. I'd hate to think something like that would sink a project like this, but it might. I'd be happy to be wrong.

California Gov. Jerry Brown signs bill that would hold corporations responsible for acts of negligence against temp workers committed by their employment contractors. The law makes some unreasonable exemptions (the trucking industry?) alongside reasonable ones (businesses with fewer than five temp workers almost certainly aren't packing temp workers like sardines into trucks or levying "fees" so onerous they amount to wage theft), but this is a big deal for an often-abused segment of the workforce -- though I do worry that the Supreme Court will one day rule that of course corporations can't be held responsible for what their contractors do, in a land where so many corporations use contractors in the first place precisely because they don't want to be held accountable for the wrong they do their workers.

Finally, we learn about some other corporations that have also abandoned ties with ALEC, as big tech corporations like Google and Facebook have lately done. You may be surprised to find News Corp. among them -- until you remember that the former News Corporation split off into 21st Century Fox and News Corp. in 2013, and the new News Corp. only owns a few newspapers (like the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal) in America. The bigger surprise might be the inveterate right-wing corporation Overstock.com, but Overstock only worked with ALEC for a year anyway. That leaves oil corporation Occidental as the most notable corporation splitting from ALEC -- because hearing an oil corporation express concern that it might be linked with climate change deniers is actually news, in a world where we're used to hearing about oil corporations funding climate change deniers.

Action: prisoner transfers, clean water, and militarized police.

Firedoglake helps you tell American Governors to stop sending their states' prisoners to out-of-state private prisons. I presume Governors do this because of overcrowding, but we can deal with overcrowding in other ways. We could, for example, focus on rehabilitating drug addicts rather than merely imprisoning them; certainly we could stop locking up small-time non-violent drug users on absurd mandatory minimum sentences. Shipping prisoners to private prisons could be a worthwhile option in isolated instances -- if our state governments were ensuring private prisons delivered good service to begin with. They're not, or else private prisons wouldn't charge exorbitant rates for prisoner phone calls, for example. That's exactly the kind of thing a corporation does when no one's fulfilling their oversight duty. And note that I said "in isolated instances" -- shipping prisoners across the country keeps them away from their loved ones, which hurts their chances at rehabilitation. Yes, I still believe in rehabilitation. A certain Someone may have taught me a little about that.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania's HB 1565 would amend the state's 1937 Clean Streams Law to read that "(t)he use or installation of riparian buffers and riparian forest buffers shall not be required." Required for what, you ask? Well, first, what's a riparian buffer? A riparian buffer is, essentially, a strip of forest planted around a stream to protect it from pollution -- whether that pollution comes from development or agriculture. These buffers do wind up filtering out many of the pesticides and sentiments that threaten the health of streams and the wildlife living in those streams; they also require rather little maintenance after they're put in, and they also shade the water, reduce flood damage, produce alternative crops, and increase the value of the land. So why would anyone want to make such buffers "optional"? What superior water management method has eclipsed it? The answers are, respectively, "because developers want the land" and "none." Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your Pennsylvania state Rep to reject HB 1565, and keep our streams clean.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop the flow of military weapons to local police forces, then Roots Action still helps you do that. We haven't forgotten, I trust, the show of excessive force from the Ferguson (MO) police department against those peacefully protesting the shooting of Michael Brown, but we also don't presume that police officers really want to hide behind all that Transformerama -- we imagine most police want to do a good job, and that they must earn the trust of the communities they serve to do so. But if the Pentagon keeps handing out billions of dollars in war weapons to local police departments, then our police departments will slip back into old habits, just like you or I would in similar circumstances. Thankfully, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) has introduced the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act, which would slow the flow of heavy artillery like armored vehicles, high-calibre automatic weapons, and armed drones to our police departments. How will police protect themselves, you ask? By getting to know the communities they serve, just like in the old days.

Action: sugar's toxic health effects, and clemency for another non-violent drug offender.

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell the Surgeon General of the United States to commission a report on the health effects of sugar consumption. Your folks told you sugar was bad for you, generally because it rotted your teeth, and of course they were right, but they didn't know the half of it -- scientists have since found that the liver breaks down sugar into fats, but the liver stores some of those fats (which affects long-term liver function) and pushes other fats out into the bloodstream, which hikes up your blood pressure and makes your body's tissues more resistant to insulin. Then a vicious cycle ensues, with diabetes, breathing problems, high blood pressure, and heart disease becoming ever more endemic. Sugar is, unfortunately, big business in this country -- remember when the corn lobby put out those pro-high-fructose corn syrup TV ads in early 2009? -- but getting the Surgeon General on board would be a good thing. Remember when President Reagan's Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, came out in favor of condom use in the late 1980s? That won a lot of hearts and minds, and we can do that again in our battle against the bad health effects of sugar.

Another day, another man serving a life-without-parole sentence for a non-violent drug offense -- in the case of Dana Jackson of Louisiana, selling a hundred bucks' worth of heroin to an undercover cop 15 years ago. Mr. Jackson has been a model prisoner, even helping good folks out during Hurricane Isaac, and the Louisiana Pardon Board recommended commuting Mr. Jackson's sentence five years ago. Moreover, the state actually reduced sentences for selling heroin a few years after Mr. Jackson's original sentencing, and then made those sentences retroactive a few years after that. (Louisiana does seem to be ahead of the curve in some matters.) But all these changes in the law didn't apply to people serving life sentences, which means that only Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal can set Mr. Jackson free now. Mr. Jindal will have served two terms at the end of 2015, so he's had more than enough time to consider the matter. I'd hate to think Mr. Jindal would wait until term's end to issue a pardon just in advance of a possible Presidential campaign; the time for justice is always now, so change.org helps you urge Gov. Jindal to free Dana Jackson.

Action: private prisons, and patent trolls.

Presente helps you tell the Gates Foundation to withdraw financial support from the GEO Group, a private prison corporation. You need not have a strong opinion of the Gates Foundation's (or, for that matter, the GEO Group's) good-evil orientation to support this effort, nor need you have an opinion on how badly prisons generally treat non-whites and immigrants. I support it for one simple reason: keeping folks in prison is our government's job, not a job our government should outsource to private corporations. When it's our government's job, that means it's our job, and even if our government monitors how well private corporations house and care for our prisoners -- which is no safe bet! -- that still puts a wedge between us and our government. It also makes prison corporations richer without rehabilitating prisoners or making communities safer. And to those who wail WHERE WILLZ TEH MONEYZ COME FROM TO RUNZ TEH PRIZUNZ!!!!: stop letting our governments give away our tax money to big corporations for "job creation," since corporations generally give that money to their CEOs and shareholders instead. One can find a lot of money there.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Senate to pass the Innovation Act, which would keep "patent trolls" from suing actual innovators into the poorhouse, then the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you do that -- using their Fix Patents call tool. What do patent trolls do? Patent trolls go around patenting the littlest and most common things they can find, so that when other folks make actually-useful things out of them, the patent trolls can sue them. Nice work if you can get it! Seriously, we've become a society that doesn't reward hard work anymore, and so it goes with patent trolls, who bank on you not wanting to go through the pain and hardship (and, ah, risk of bankruptcy) of a lawsuit so they can extort a settlement to go away. The Innovation Act would shift the financial burden of these frivolous lawsuits to the bad actors filing them, and would also make these bad actors cite exactly which parts of their patents they think are being violated. The whole patent-granting process in America still needs a considerable amount of reform, but the Innovation Act would do a lot of good.

Action: prison privatization, handouts for frackers, and "free" trade.

Color of Change helps you tell corporations to stop investing in private prisons. Why? For any number of reasons: private prisons charge by the prisoner, which doesn't exactly motivate them to rehabilitate prisoners and which does motivate them to lobby our governments for longer and harsher sentences. And private prisons also like their profits, which doesn't exactly motivate them to pay people who care for prisoners. (Yes, prisoners deserve to be cared for while they're in prison. Yes, I've had this argument within the last six months. Yes, I'm stunned that we argue this matter, ever, in a civilized society.) And of course private prisons don't exactly help us become a nation that doesn't racially profile black folks. My main objection to the private prison industry, though, is that housing prisoners is our government's job, which means it's our job -- and when have we ever benefited from letting corporations do our job for us?

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania Senate still mulls SB 411, which would open up a massive new loophole in the state's "Good Samaritan Law" so that corporations could take abandoned mine water, sell it to gas drilling corporations for fracking, and enjoy immunity from prosecution. Can you say welfare handout, children? The Good Samaritan Law aimed to get corporations to clean up mine wastewater, but SB 411 would let corporations simply sell that water to frackers, without cleaning it up. And that wastewater would then pollute the water you drink and wash and bathe with, and then you couldn't sue for damages -- even if their wastewater turns your drinking water brown and gelatinous or gives you cancer. Only a legislature that cares for nothing but mammon could do this -- or think that we wouldn't notice what they were doing. Food and Water Watch helps you tell your PA state legislator to reject more handouts for frackers.

Finally, the People's Email Network still helps you tell Congress not to fast-track the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade "deal." You know who likes "free" trade deals that subjugate our labor and environmental laws to corporate "investor-state tribunals," who will be able to void laws at will when we try to hold some corporation to account for polluting our air and water? You know who likes "free" trade deals that will allow corporations to shut down internet sites on suspicion of copyright infringement? Almost nobody, that's who. Unfortunately, most of the people who like "free" trade deals in America seem to be serving in Congress at the moment, and these fools seem determined to force Congress to take a simple up-or-down vote on the TPP, without any debate. Why do you suppose they wouldn't want to debate it -- or even let Americans know what's actually in the "agreement"? What could they possibly be afraid of? Here's what they should be afraid of: the shame and humiliation they earn for hurting us.

Around the table: Iranian city council elections, NSA BS, prisoner mistreatment, food stamps, better pay for federally-funded workers, taxes.

Woman denied City Council seat in Qazvin, Iran, for as-yet-unconfirmed reasons which may include her own youth and beauty. This is a big deal; the press in Iran covers city council elections (which are held every two years) like we cover midterm elections in the U.S. Shame on the election review board members who won't even enumerate the "problems" "causing" them to flout the will of the voters, let alone deal with these "problems" like grown-ups.

Obama Administration finally releases its legal reasoning (on a Friday, no less!) behind all the data-vacuuming its NSA does, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation finds it lacking. "Lacking," as in "(t)here is no direct authorization for the Associational Tracking Program in section Patriot Act section 215," in bold-face type. I hope the EFF does better in its court proceedings than I think they will -- judges have been notoriously willing to let the last two Administrations claim everything's "classified" because, you know, terrorism.

New York state still sticks too many prisoners in solitary confinement, despite its promise to keep prisoners with serious mental health issues out of solitary. New York has made some strides in treating seriously mentally ill prisoners, but on the flip side, has given that diagnosis to many fewer prisoners. Today's nominal "conservatives" will squeal see? This is why government doesn't work! Unintended consequences! But if you let one bad consequence foil all your efforts to do good works, you have no right to call yourself a conservative.

Bloomberg finds that over 80% of the counties in which the number of food stamp recipients doubled between 2007 and 2011 voted for which Presidential candidate? Mitt Romney, of course. Liberals find this sort of thing persistently frustrating -- why do the folks who need the most help vote for the party that gives you the least help? Partly it's social issues, of course, but a lot of folks who get government assistance feel that other people who get government assistance are lazy.

Richard Kirsch tells us how President Obama could move two million Americans into the middle class, simply by issuing an executive order hiking wages for workers in federally-supported jobs. You mean Mr. Obama could so something fairly popular, something that would do a lot of good, and Congress couldn't even stop him from doing it? Then it's a near-certainty he won't.

In case you didn't know much about Jeff Bezos's politics, Citizens for Tax Justice tells you all ye need know about how the Washington Post's new owner feels about taxes. Long story short: he helped defeat a tax-the-rich initiative in Washington state in 2010, he paid zero taxes on over $6 billion in sales in the U.K. in 2012, and he even considered starting Amazon.com on a Native American reservation so he could, in his words, get "access to talent without all the tax consequences." Amazing, how many of our elites think consequences are a) unjust and b) for the little people.

In the wake of a hunger strike now involving 30,000 California prisoners, the ACLU helps you tell the California government to stop forcing prisoners into long-term solitary confinement, as the U.S. Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons recommended seven years ago. California laws on the matter, as you probably know, are a bit fast and loose: state prisons can fling you into solitary for minor infractions like reading certain books and using certain Spanish words. The California prison system, frankly, seems awfully desperate to throw folks in solitary for a minimum of four years just for uttering the word hermano. Didn't we originally conceive of solitary confinement as a way of preventing a prisoner from hurting him or herself or others? As you know, California prisoners have actually asked for very little -- a five-year cap on solitary confinement, a monthly phone call, and restored access to educational materials. And making folks pay for their crimes is a whole lot different than taking out your own rage on the folks who commit crimes.

Meanwhile, Food and Water Watch helps you tell Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett to appoint a qualified Department of Environmental Protection Secretary who might actually protect good Pennsylvanians from the ill effects of fracking for natural gas. The office's previous occupant, Michael Krancer, used to be a lawyer for the gas industry (and who better to protect good citizens from gas drillers than they guy who used to argue for the gas drillers?), and he's since returned to his former employment, not that his conduct while DEP Secretary made anyone think he'd ever left -- you may recall that his DEP gave incomplete water contamination reports to good Pennsylvania citizens inquiring about their drinking water. And this was how he treated his bosses, the people of Pennsylvania! Perhaps Mr. Corbett will appoint someone who'll give a damn about drinking water that doesn't light on fire or turn brown or gelatinous, given that his own re-election prospects are, shall we say, dim. But only if we tell him to do it.

The Atlantic tells us about two cases the Supreme Court will hear that could deal serious blows to organized labor. In one, the Justices will decide whether the Senate was really in "recess" when Mr. Obama made certain recess appointments to the NLRB; in the other, the Justices will decide whether unions can make "organizing agreements" with corporations about how union elections would be conducted (among other matters). I could see the Supremes going either way on the first one and probably against labor on the second -- but whatever happens, we'll just pick up, dust off, and go again.

Don't look now, but a new meme may have penetrated the "liberal" media: that "privacy vs. security" is a false choice when discussing the NSA leaks! On NBC News, no less! With the ever-estimable Bruce Schneier as the column's first expert, no less! Am I wrong to experience the joy of hoping for better days? Or should I note that it's been weeks already, and that David Gregory still gets a lot more eyeballs than Bob Sullivan and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future?

30,000 California inmates begin refusing meals in an apparent hunger strike. Prisoners have called for a five-year cap on isolation, monthly phone calls, and increased access to educational programs, which some folks apparently think are "luxuries." I should note that California imposes harsher terms on prisoners if they're suspected of having prison gang ties, which should offend anyone with a get-warrants-prove-stuff ethic.

EPI's Ross Eisenbrey suggests that government spending, and not lightly-taxed corporate titans, drive innovation. He cites the iPhone, whose nine "core technologies" all received massive military/government help. Is that what Republicans mean when they say defense spending creates jobs? Seriously, Mariana Mazzucato's book The Entrepreneurial State looks like quite the read.

Finally, Nation of Change's Paul Buchheit offers four extremely well-sourced examples of corporate tax avoidance. And dig Whole Foods CEO John Mackey defending Apple just one paragraph in, saying "(t)hey're just following the rules that were created by governments," as if no corporate lobbyist ever paid off any Congressfolk ever to rewrite those rules ever. And then he says "(i)f the government doesn't like the rules, they can change them," as if "they" ain't us. I wonder why he'd want us to think that.

Yesterday, prisoners at California's Pelican Bay State Prison began a hunger-strike for better conditions. In prisons like Pelican Bay, a "supermax" facility, inmates stay in tiny, windowless cells for almost the entire day, and rarely enjoy educational, recreational, or vocational programs, let alone phone calls or visits from family. Hence this change.org petition, demanding that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation fulfill its promise to change these conditions. If you're tempted to think these are the worst of the worst, and they don't deserve any better, please meditate, for a moment, on the definition of the word "rehabilitation," and ask yourself if sitting in complete darkness for 22 hours a day "rehabilitates" anyone. If you're tempted to think they're getting what the law demands they get, recall that the CDCR has already said it'd change its ways in response to a 2011 hunger strike. What a shame that it takes prisoners starving themselves to get the CDCR to make such promises. What'll it take before it keeps them? Bad PR from us, that's what.

Meanwhile, while the Supreme Court has struck down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act -- the section that defined marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman -- it let Section 2 stand, so state and federal governments can still refuse to recognize any same-sex marriage recognized in another state. However, H.R. 2523/S. 1236, the Respect for Marriage Act, would fully repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, and would, in addition, compel our federal government to recognize any same-sex marriage that's legal "in the State where the marriage was entered into" (per S. 1236, Section 3). Though the Respect for Marriage Act won't compel states to recognize same-sex marriages that are legal in other states -- because, you know, states' rights and such -- S. 1236's 42 sponsors include exactly zero Republicans, while H.R. 2523's 169 sponsors include exactly one Republican, Richard Hanna of New York, who seems determined to resuscitate the party's moderate wing all by himself. And he may yet have to! Anyway, MoveOn helps you tell your Reps and Senators (and, not incidentally, your President) to support the Respect for Marriage Act.