Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning child labor and deceptive subscriptions.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to cut child labor law enforcement funding, and tell our government to go after deceptive subscriptions. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to cut funding for enforcement of child labor laws. Can you believe we actually have to tell our Congressfolk this? Particularly since child labor law violations (as you might suspect from media coverage) nearly doubled from 2019 to 2023? Anyone who votes to cut child labor law enforcement should lose their next race! And, as any citizen of a developing nation will tell you, it’s one thing to have strong laws – for example, many of these nations have strong clean air and clean water laws – but it’s another thing entirely to enforce them. So let’s not be morally and spiritually corrupt.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department to protect good Americans from deceptive subscriptions. The news hook here, of course, is Adobe taking a lot of justified PR flak for making folks jump through 20 flaming hoops to cancel their subscription. You’d have to think a lot of other corporations are doing the same thing, because it’s easier to skim money from good Americans than it is to create good products. If our government takes on these subscriptions, they might be able to deter the far worse ones that are no doubt coming. BMW made their seat-warmers subscription-only not that long ago; how long until some corporation tries that for brakes?

Action: concerning campaign finance, child labor, and abortion.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to close the floodgates of corporate campaign spending, make corporations pay harder when they break child labor law, and reject any national abortion ban. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to overturn our Supreme Court’s nefarious Citizens United v. FEC decision and pass the DISCLOSE Act. In Citizens United, our Supreme Court justified flooding political campaigns with even more corporate money by saying, essentially, hey, Congress can still pass a law forcing corporations to disclose their campaign spending. 12 long years later, Congress has not done that, but the DISCLOSE Act would force a lot of corporate spending into the light. So would amending our Constitution to let us limit campaign spending again. So let’s get to stepping.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Child Labor Act, so that the many, many corporations currently trying to replace higher-paid workers with actual children can face stiffer penalties. Yes, child labor is already illegal across America! But corporations can decide to go ahead and break the law anyway because they won’t have to pay too much for it. The Stop Child Labor Act would effectively take that choice away from them, and it should! As I’ve said before, either our children are our future or they’re just another source of cheap labor, but they’re not both.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any and all national abortion bans. That’s no ban, period – no 15-week ban like Mr. Trump reportedly supports, which is also the proposal that helped Democrats reclaim Virginia’s lower state house. And no, “no abortion ban” is not “extreme”! How can the majority position in America be “extreme”? Funny how often right-wingers say that. And what happened to keeping health care decisions between a woman and her doctor? Don’t right-wingers support that? Oh, right – they only support that when they’re trying to keep our government from regulating health insurance corporations at all.

Action: concerning pollution and child labor.

Long story short: tell our EPA to ban chlorpyrifos again, tell big chocolate corporations to stop using child labor, and tell our government to stop buying single-use plastics. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

US PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to ban chlorpyrifos, again. The science remains clear on chlorpyrifos’s ill effects on childhood development, but late last year our 8th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down our EPA’s ban, ruling that they didn’t evaluate whether chlorpyrifos had “high-benefit uses” on certain crops – though another court had ordered them to either ban chlorpyrifos entirely or demonstrate those uses were safe! Sound like a setup? Doesn’t matter – not only must we fight to do the right thing, we also must fight to defend it.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell big chocolate corporations Hershey’s, Nestlé, and Mars to get the child labor out of their supply chains right now. They already promised to do it! 20 years ago! And they still haven’t done it! It’s like these corporate executives never had mamas to teach them to keep their promises. Seriously, though, does working two million African children to the bone justify cheap chocolate bars in America? I’m afraid of how some Americans would answer that question! But most of us know the right answer, and would do the right thing.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our federal government to stop using single-use-plastic. Maybe you and I can’t root all the plastic out of our lives because we don’t control all manufacturing or routinely invent better alternatives to contemporary poisons in our kitchen sinks, but our government, which is about the biggest buyer of anything as well as the biggest plastic polluter on Earth, had better be able to root out single-use plastic in their purchases. Hell, if you have that kind of power, why wouldn’t you use it for good? Because it’s hard? Anything worth doing is hard!

Action: concerning child labor, homelessness, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell big chocolate corporations to stop relying on child labor, tell states to stop ticketing the homeless for public sleeping, and tell your Senators to reject the nomination of an aspiring Social Security privatizer to a Social Security advisory board. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Senators’ phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell big chocolate corporations Hershey’s, Nestle, and Mars to get the child labor out of their supply chains. Two-thirds of all cocoa comes from Africa, where over two million children do back-breaking cocoa-harvesting. What’s that, you say? You heard these corporations pledged to end their involvement in child labor back in 2005 so why are we talking about it now? Because they have failed to keep their promises, that’s why – kids are still out there, not getting to be kids. I sure hope it doesn’t matter to anyone that they’re foreign kids.

Care2 helps you tell American states to stop giving out tickets to homeless folks for sleeping in public spaces. For sleeping! Everyone should know by now that the best way to fight homelessness – you know, besides bringing back the 91% tax bracket that would curtail the rich’s ability to help create more homeless people – is to put homeless people into inexpensive homes, because that’s actually cheaper than constantly providing emergent services. But ticketing people who can’t pay tickets to begin with? Only people who love swinging their dicks around do that, and they shouldn’t get all the say about everything.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Andrew Biggs to our Social Security Advisory Board. Because Mr. Biggs has worked to privatize Social Security, advocated for raising the retirement age, advocated for reducing the benefits you’ve worked for, fought for, and paid into your whole life, and supported Donald Trump’s attempt to defund Social Security in 2020. Would you put a burglar in charge of law enforcement? No, you would not. So let’s not put a guy who’d wreck Social Security in a position to advise our government on how to preserve Social Security. I mean, duh.

Action: concerning child labor, banksters, and billionaires.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Child Labor Act, the Ending the Carried Interest Loophole Act, and the Billionaire’s Income Tax. 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.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Child Labor Act. What’s that, you say? There are already child labor laws on the books, so why do we need more? Partly because some state legislatures have loosened their own child labor laws, inexplicably – I mean, seriously, why do you do that if you’re concerned about winning elections? – but also because corporations flout those laws without getting appropriately punished. The Stop Child Labor Act would stiffen penalties for corporations that exploit our children, plus it would let kids sue those corporations over the harm done to them. So let right-wingers squeal TEH TRIAL LAWYURZ!!!!! at that development. They’ll be even lonelier than they are now.

Patriotic Millionaires also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ending the Carried Interest Loophole Act, which would, as its title suggests, get rid of the tax loophole that lets hedge fund banksters pay a lower tax rate than working families. This has been an anvil around our necks for years now, but of course Kyrsten Sinema, back when she was the 50th vote in our Senate last year, just had to demand keeping that loophole around as tribute for passing the Inflation Reduction Act! She’s a walnut in the batter of eternity, of course, but if we made people vote on this bill – and then, and this is important, ran ads against folks who voted against it – we might finally slay this fat and lazy dragon once and for all. And that’s worth the effort.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire’s Income Tax, which would not convert billionaires into paupers, as right-wingers pretend – indeed, it wouldn’t even tax wealth under $1 billion, and if you can’t make it on $999,999,999, then you're a clown who deserves no one's attention. But the bill would raise over $500 billion in revenues over the next decade; think of anything we might do with $500 billion over 10 years? Like, maybe, expand the Child Tax Credit so more working families can have more breathing room? Hey, that’s just one thing we could do! And if we don’t make the rich pay more and working folks pay less, we’ll never get anything done in America. Taxing the rich was good enough for our grandparents, and it’s good enough for us.

Action: concerning child labor, campaign finance, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop child labor violations, amend our Constitution to regulate campaign finance again, and enact automatic voter registration nationwide. 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.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Child Labor Act, since a lot of corporations have been breaking child labor laws lately and a lot of (red) states have tried to loosen their own child labor laws so that more underage kids can do more dangerous work. You know how right-wingers used to say you should oppose abortion because you might abort the next great concert pianist or the next creator of the polio vaccine? Strange how they don’t say that when kids fall off roofs or get run over by forklifts or cut off their hands with circular saws at jobs that are too dangerous for them. Of course, others have described the Republican view of life as sacred right up until birth, but that doesn’t mean they should get all the say about child labor.

The Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment that would overturn our Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United v. FEC decision, which has helped flood the airwaves with horrible political campaign ads. Did you see those Citizens for Sanity ads in Pennsylvania in 2022? Imagine Monty Python writing satirical campaign ads; now imagine them discarding those ads because they weren’t funny enough, and that's what a Citizens for Sanity ad was like. Seriously, approximately no one in America likes watching political campaign ads, and more than two-thirds of Republican voters think our Supreme Court messed up Citizens United. Our opponents will only respond with hysterical and nonsensical hypotheticals, so it’s OK to tell your Congressfolk to do the right thing.

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact nationwide automatic voter registration, where good Americans can be automatically registered to vote whenever they go get drivers’ licenses and suchlike. Right-wingers say automatic voter registration causes more “voter fraud,” so what do they say about Gov. Shapiro’s automatic voter registration program in Pennsylvania leading to a massive jump in Republican voter registrations? I’ll tell you what they have to say: THREE MILLYUNZ ILLEGALZ HILLARYZ TRADEZ THEIRZ VOTEZ FOR TEH DRUGZ!!!!! No, that’s literally what arguing about this with a right-winger is like. So let’s just do the right thing without worrying about other folks’ stupid opinions.

Action: concerning child labor, child care, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to toughen child labor laws, extend child care funding, and reject any “debt commission” to cut our earned benefits. 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.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Child Labor Act. In the wake of child labor violations almost doubling over the last year, and Iowa actually passing a law to allow more child labor that violates federal law, the Stop Child Labor Act would increase penalties for violations, allow our government to put repeat offenders in jail, and let children seek compensation for the harm done to them. This is basic law-and-order stuff here, and let’s be honest: do we want our kids to have real childhoods like we always say we do, or do we want them to grow up in sweatshops? We can’t have both.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the emergency child care stabilization funding first offered during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yeah, the pandemic is over (or, more precisely, “over”), but some three million-plus kids will lose access to child care if we don’t extend the funding, and I don’t know about you, but if it only costs $16 billion (out of some $6 trillion in total federal outlays) to get these kids the care they need, I do it without blinking. Congressional monsters may not feel the same way, but they’re supposed to do our will, not beat their chests about whom they hurt. Personal to folks who say just have one parent stay home: you’ve never done any household budgeting, have you?

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to use a “debt commission” to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or food stamp benefits. That’s right, food stamps too! Nobody lives like Elon Musk on food stamps, and anyone, including me or you, might need them some day. And that’s right, Medicaid too! Medicaid is actually pretty popular, though it also has an unearned reputation as Something Only Those People Get. Social Security and Medicare I trust I don’t have to defend once again. But we have to defend them from our own leaders! And if we do, we’ll win.

Action: concerning child labor and pollution.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning child labor, corruption, and pollution.

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

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

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

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

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 child labor, pollution, railway safety, and paid family/medical leave.

Long story short: tell our Department of Labor to stop big corporations from using child labor, and tell your Congressfolk to reject the TAP American Energy Act, pass the Railway Safety Act, and enact a national paid family/medical leave program. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Care2 helps you tell our Department of Labor to stop big corporations from using child labor in America. Thought we had that debate already, didn’t you? Thought we were past that, didn’t you? But I think we’ve seen over the past 20 years that there’s no pillar of civilized behavior Republicans won’t destroy to please their corporate paymasters. The question, of course, is whether a Democratic government will bend to their will – which, let’s be honest, has totally been their M.O. for all these years! – or do our will. The answer is the same as always: Democrats will do nothing until we make it impossible for them to do nothing, so we’ve got to get in their grills here just as we do elsewhere.

Environmental Action, People’s Action, and the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 1, the so-called TAP American Energy Act, which would allow more fossil fuel drilling on public lands, reverse all of the renewable energy initiatives in the Inflation Reduction Act, and weaken clean air and clean water regulations. Public lands, renewable energy, clean air, and clean water are all actually popular with good Americans, which must be why Republicans are so hot to shit on them that they’ve actually made this bill their signature bill of this Congress. So let’s stop their latest attempt to inflict their stupidity and venality upon us.

Real Populists helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Railway Safety Act. With Transportation Secretary Buttigieg acting like his hands are always tied even when our laws say they’re not, our Congressfolk have to act, not that they’re all that anxious to do that, either. Why act when you can just look like you’re acting, after all? But even a few noxious Republicans have voiced support for ensuring rail cars have two-person crews (which the bill would mandate), and given how much the East Palestine derailment was in the news, it really shouldn’t be a heavy lift to demand stricter regulations on chemicals and bigger fines for breaking those restrictions. But if we say nothing, they'll do nothing.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass paid family/medical leave legislation. With the House in control of drama-addicted Republicans, and with the Senate’s Democratic majority once again limited by whatever Joe Manchin wants to do, chances of getting paid family/medical leave legislation is low. We should still demand it! Why let them tell us what’s possible? Virtually every other nation on the planet has it, so we should definitely not let them tell us what’s possible! Plus it would be relatively inexpensive – the Kirsten Gillibrand bill would have taken a mere $8 per month out of your paycheck if you make $50,000 annually. Eight dollars! So let’s not let fools dictate reality to us.

Around the table: come get your poll tax, Ron DeSantis!

I’ll admit I had trouble imagining why Republicans are suddenly so hot to repeal child labor laws at the state level, and I still have trouble reconciling their loudly-proclaimed “concern” over children’s education with their apparent desire to send them all to mills and mines 10 hours a day. I guess they’re just trying to suck up to their corporate donors at any cost, especially since quite a few of said donors have been caught violating child labor laws lately. More kids in the mines also helps break labor unions. Last I looked, though, I don’t think any normal people think child labor laws are too strict, or lament that they didn’t work more during their own childhoods.

Amanda Marcotte reminds us that Republican’s apparent inability to define what “woke” means “is a feature, not a bug,” because they can pretend it means anything at all at any time. We learn that Gov. DeSantis is particularly good, or should I say “good,” at mining this vein of vagueness, and I totally mention that because he’s trying to criminalize bloggers' criticism of him as we speak. In any case, I suggest we all go ahead and tell our right-wing friends, to the degree we still have them, that once they use the word “woke” in an argument, they’re conceding the point.

In a related note, Sen. Rick Scott (E-FL) claims that our military is too “woke,” and to support this thesis tells a story about a ship that had to stop “following a Chinese ship” so they could “train everybody on transgender.” One thousand U.S. dollars says this incident never happened, even if “a retired, I think, captain” really told him so – which I also doubt. (At present, the U.S. Navy can find no record of such an incident.) This is the same man who says that reducing Medicare costs amounts to “Medicare cuts” and that poor people should pay more in taxes so they have “skin in the game.” Only in the Fascist State of Florida could he keep winning elections.

Something I hadn’t considered about Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News: if Fox News loses – which possibility ain’t exactly far-fetched, given all those Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson texts and Rupert Murdoch’s own testimony – then shareholders will also be able to file suit against them, meaning Fox could lose a whole lot more than the $1.6 billion Dominion wants, or the $2.7 billion Smartmatic wants. I doubt its most-devoted viewers will abandon them, though. Rage is a hell of a drug, but rage mixed with nonsense is even more potent, particularly if they think it pisses off liberals.

Sandpoint, Idaho hospital says it’ll stop delivering babies in two months’ time mainly because of the “legal and political climate” there. You may recall that Idaho has one of them-there abortion bans where relatives may sue medical providers for performing abortions, such that obstetricians have been leaving the state in droves, with no replacements coming. See, when you’re evil to everyone around you, eventually everyone leaves you. Did these right-wingers really think we needed them so badly that we would put up with any and all abuse? I can only hope their loneliness makes them take stock of what they’ve done a bit.

Finally, might I say that I am beyond disgusted with all the “don’t indict Trump or you’ll make him win” talk? Here’s the worst example of that, from “OMFG why does anyone listen to” Mark Halperin. I won’t list every objection I have with this piece, since those objections would total approximately one per point made, but let’s just leave it at these two: he says it’s unfair that folks aren’t spending the same amount of time on Hunter Biden as they are on Donald Trump, which is rather like saying we should have celebrated the scoring prowess of Marty McSorley the way we did Wayne Gretzky, and he also exhorts us to keep Trump supporters’ feelings in mind if the Big Man gets indicted, to which I must say: fuck their feelings. Everyone has to grow up sooner or later, and that includes folks who wallow in masturbatory rage and the pundits who enable them.

Action: concerning child labor, health care, immigration, and product safety.

Long story short: tell Iowa state legislators to reject a bill that would loosen child labor laws, and tell your Congressfolk to defend Medicaid and CHIP and pass the DREAM Act and the Sunshine in Product Safety 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.

Care2 helps you tell Iowa state legislators to reject Senate File 167, which would loosen child labor laws so that corporations could put 14-17-year-olds to work in such carefree childhood vocations as demolition, mining, and meatpacking. Perhaps even worse, the bill would let corporations off the hook in civil suits for any kids they neglected, sickened, injured, or killed at the workplace! Because trial lawyers bad! No: putting kids to work in dangerous occupations is bad, though maybe it’s not as snappy a bumper sticker slogan. Look, either children are the future, or they’re just another workforce for fat-cat bosses to use and discard. They ain’t both. And if we have any say about it, they ain’t the latter.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to defend both Medicaid and the Childrens’ Health Insurance Program (or CHIP) from Congressional debt-limit hostage-takers. Maybe they won’t get Social Security and Medicare cuts and then again maybe they will, but we need to put them on notice about Medicaid and CHIP as well. Medicaid is less popular than Social Security and Medicare, because of the absurd perception that it only helps lazy people, but it’s no less important than any of the other programs they’ve taken so much flak about cutting. And Republicans already let CHIP expire once, so they don’t care about kids, and why should they keep getting away with that?

The Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk pass the DREAM Act, which, as you no doubt remember, would help immigrant children whose legal standing in America has lapsed, but who’ve met certain standards of service and education, to remain in America (and keep contributing to American culture) rather than get deported back to the countries they’ve never known. Because that’s cruel! And to those who reflexively respond AMURKIA FIRSTZ!!!! to everything because they can’t argue their way out of a paper bag: the DREAM Act would help, at most, some 1.9 million folks out of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in America, so this is not so damn much to ask.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Sunshine in Product Safety Act, which would let our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) warn the American public about dangerous products without having to get permission from the corporation that manufactured the dangerous product first. Yes, you read that right! Currently we can’t spread the word about dangerous products lest we hurt some corporation’s fee-fees! That’s because Congress amended the Consumer Product Safety Act to give corporations an effective veto over product safety announcements in 1981. Still we deal with the bitter fruits of the Reagan Revolution. This is why we fight.

Action: concerning child labor, insulin prices, Medicare funding, and climate change.

Long story short: tell your state Governor to protect child labor laws, and tell your Congressfolk to cap insulin prices for all Americans, fund Medicare better, and reject any effort to roll back investment rules that protect pensions from climate change. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your state Governor to stop any efforts by your state legislature to gut child labor laws. You’ve heard of young kids enduring slave-labor conditions to make chocolate? Consider that our government has caught several big corporations breaking child labor laws in America – and consider, also, that right-wing state legislators are trying to loosen child labor laws in several states. I’m sure they’ll say it’s about kids getting $10 from grandpa for reformatting their hard drive, but that’s a load of horsedoodle – this is about exploiting 14-year-olds in dangerous construction jobs so you can pay them less. The children are our future – unless they’re just another workforce.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to cap the price of insulin at $35/month for all Americans. Currently folks on Medicare get that cap – Democrats could only get that cap through reconciliation last year, since it concerns government spending – but all Americans deserve it, and don’t tolerate any nonsense about how “price controls are bad.” You say “price controls” to Americans suffering 6% inflation and they’ll likely say that sounds like a great idea! And certainly don’t tolerate any nonsense about how “folks just have to eat better” – not in a nation that subsidizes sugar like we do, and not in a world where kids are born with diabetes.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Assuring Medicare’s Promise Act, which would ensure that certain taxes mainly paid by rich folks (including the Net Investment Income Tax and the Self-Employment Contribution Act) actually find their way to the Medicare Trust Fund. The bill wouldn’t actually raise taxes on anyone, and though I’m certainly game to do that to ensure Medicare is always there for us, the bill certainly deserves our support. More than the right-wing fools who whine about TEH LOSTZ JOBZ!!!! every single time someone tries to do the right thing in America, that’s for sure.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell Congress to reject Republican efforts to roll back a Department of Labor rule requiring big corporations to keep our retirement savings safe from climate change risks. If that sounds a little inside baseball to you – which Republicans are counting on! – consider that if climate change makes our planet unlivable, you won’t have a pension! Our laws mandate that our government protects investors – which you are, if you have a pension plan – and putting the “rights” of polluters above the rights of all Americans sure is some real short-term thinking. Naturally Republicans, being “conservatives,” are all about the short term. No reason we need to be, though.

Around the table: fight the real enemy, part 984.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch tells us that "The Republican Party Has Turned Fascist and Is Now the Most Dangerous Threat in the World," and he's not real hopeful that America will reject them, now that too many state election officials have quit (that's what happens when Trumpholes threaten their lives!) and Republican legislators are giving themselves the power to overturn elections on pretexts even flimsier than Donald Trump's. He almost skips over its alliance with big corporate power in his description of how fascism achieves its ends, but then maybe he was depressed enough.

Harsha Panduranga at the Los Angeles Times explains "Why Biden’s strategy for preventing domestic terrorism could do more harm than good." Long story short: because it's largely a rehash of the Obama-era initiatives that didn't work. In any case, connecting would-be right-wing extremists with "mental health and social services" would do a good deal less about right-wing terrorism than, you know, ending the death grip of corporations on our economy. If we're all working, and working happily, and getting ahead, we're a lot less likely to fall for the Proud Boys and Boogaloo Boys of the world. If we're all working for dung pellets and paying extra for privatized water and getting slammed with surprise medical bills, then we're more likely to become right-wing terrorists.

When I read that a single person in Georgia has personally challenged the right to vote of over 30,000 good folks in Georgia that she's never even met, I feel compelled to ask: how is this legal? How can someone like Pamela Reardon prove she has any standing to sue these folks in a court of law? If two liberals in Wisconsin couldn't prove to our Supreme Court they'd personally been harmed enough by state gerrymandering, how can folks like Ms. Reardon prove they've been harmed by nonexistent voter fraud? (And next time someone tells you that "it's regular folks" who have "serious questions" about the 2020 election, just show them a picture of Ms. Reardon, and remind them that of course right-wing organizations like True the Vote want front people who look like "regular folks.")

Las Vegas Raiders defensive end Carl Nassib comes out as gay, and what a shame right-wing talk radio OG Lester Kinsolving isn't with us anymore so he can put unneeded "comic" emphasis on the word "end," as he did when former Washington tight end Jerry Smith came out to discuss his AIDS diagnosis. Of course, Mr. Smith had been retired for many years at that point, and it's a big deal that Mr. Nassib has come out while he's still in his prime. I'm sure right-wingers on social media are saying he's just doing this so the Raiders won't cut him, though, frankly, that wasn't very likely beforehand, and cynicism isn't even charming in a precocious 13-year-old.

Our Supreme Court has issued more famous rulings lately, but they've also ruled that children working as slaves to make chocolate for American candy corporations can't sue those corporations in American court, because (as Justice Thomas suggests) Nestlé and Cargill outsourced all the torture and abuse to Ivory Coast corporations and then said they didn't know what they were doing. One could argue that a leader should know what those who work for him are doing, and one could also argue that outsourcing itself might be evidence that a corporation aims to avoid accountability for what's done in their supply chain. And yeah, I noticed the former Obama official defending Nestlé and Cargill; I wonder how he sleeps at night.

Finally, as New York's mayoral campaign heats up, Julie Hollar at FAIR reminds us that New York's tabloids would rather you be obsessing about crime than, you know, the prospect of being evicted by your landlord because the pandemic forced you out of work and you haven't been able to afford the exorbitant rent. By the time you run down the actual crime statistics in New York -- which are, guess what, generally lower than normal, and much lower than they were 30 years ago! -- you will be reminded that whenever a politician or a media hack talks about a "crime wave," they're gearing up to lie to you. (That's a reminder for President Biden, too, of course.)

Around the table: exposing more child labor, more vote suppression, and more bad arguments about taxes.

British TV channel investigation finds children 13 and younger picking coffee beans used by Starbucks and Nespresso. Let's just let the first sentence of paragraph 2 tell it: "Channel 4’s Dispatches filmed the children working 40-hour weeks in gruelling conditions, picking coffee for a daily wage little more than the price of a latte." Starbucks sure ain't converting low labor cost into lower coffee prices, amirite? And dig Nespresso's CEO asserting that "we’ve launched a thorough investigation" -- "to find out which farms were filmed and whether they supply Nespresso," banking, I guess, that Channel 4 won't be able to expand its investigation to other farms in the future.

Guardian investigation finds Texas closing 750 polling locations since 2012 -- and, guess what, "the overwhelming majority of closures came in areas that saw the largest increase in black and Latino residents." Why, even John Roberts might call that racist! Though he's disappointed me before. Texas replaced a lot of their polling places with "vote centers," which you might suspect they designed to work badly just from the name, which reeks of vagueness. (Do people vote there? Do people count votes there? It's like they don't want you to know!)

What is "The Latest Wildly Misleading Argument Against Taxing the Rich," according to Steve Wamhoff at ITEP? That they already pay a much larger percentage of their income in taxes -- when you leave out things like capital gains and dividends, which comprise most of rich folks' income but generally gets taxed at a considerably lower rate than income. When you add those in, surprise! The top 1% pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes than folks in the 6th to 20th percentiles. Also, too, a Junior Bacon Cheeseburger at Wendy's doesn't cost $199 to a customer who makes a hundred times what you and I make.

In a peripherally-related note, our Congressional Research Service finds that the 2017 tax "reform" did not, in fact, spur business investment or wage growth. Which you already knew, if you know that the way to spur corporations to spend money creating jobs is to threaten to tax their profits a lot harder than we do now, because they'll spend the damn money if they think we're going to tax it, and they're more likely to spend it making stuff and paying people to make the stuff. Still, good to have some data buttressing that knowledge. (And yes, that's Jonathan Chait writing the article. He's really not so bad.)

Finally, Chris Matthews abruptly resigns (or is fired, who knows or cares) from MSNBC's Hardball. And thus ends, for now at least, a long career of blustering on behalf of Our Glorious Elites. Seriously, though, imagine coming to the end of your life and realizing that's who you were -- a pretend "populist" who only showed courage and independence when it didn't matter and sucked up to power the rest of the time. And if you watch the clip of Steve Kornacki coming on right afterward and saying "that was a lot to take in, just now, I'm sure, and I'm sure you're still absorbing that," as if we should all be so emotionally-invested the second highest-rated show (out of three!) on cable news at 7pm, then you know they won't change a thing -- drama is what our media is all about.

Action: fighting child labor, slave trafficking, and racist and sexist media.

You like your Nutella, right? I mean, really, it is impossibly good-tasting stuff. Well, brace yourself: the corporation that makes Nutella uses child labor in Africa to make their chocolate confections. That's right, the Italian food corporation Ferrero (which also makes Kinder Eggs) exploits child labor and slave trafficking to the tune of two million kids in Cote D’Ivoire and Ghana harvesting cocoa, work which requires the use of toxic chemicals. Oh, the kids also get to use machetes, but only to harvest the cocoa, not to retaliate against their captors. Ferrero is the world's third-largest chocolatier, behind only Mars and Nestlé, and Ferrero's gaining on them, having doubled its revenue over the last decade to over $9 billion in fiscal 2015. You know what that means: Ferrero has the money to end its exploitation of child labor and pay adult workers a decent wage. Ferrero's dirty little secret is out now, though, and no corporation likes to feel the impact of the Big Stick of Bad PR, so Sum of Us helps you tell Ferrero to root evil child labor and child slavery out of its supply chain.

Speaking of the Big Stick of Bad PR, over 200 corporations have pulled advertising from Breitbart "News," which aims to export its brand of sexist, racist "straight talk" overseas early next year, so that sad-hearted racists all over the world can "find one another." But this boycott is actually hitting Breitbart where it hurts -- in the pocketbook. Breitbart no doubt wears this boycott as a badge of honor, and fancies itself a site that "fights corporatism," though gosh, that's a laugh, given their outspoken support for the biggest, shallowest corporatist in human history, Donald Trump. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Amazon -- which, as we covered earlier today, is probably the most powerful corporation on Earth, one perhaps rivaling the old Dutch East India Company from time immemorial -- to stop advertising on Breitbart. No use them arguing that eyeballs are there and they gotta go get 'em, because you can get racist eyeballs in plenty of places without lending financial support to the corporation that would give them a "safe space" to be bad human beings. Besides, they're Amazon! They don't need Breitbart's help!

Action: child slavery, and overtime protections.

2014 Nobel Peace Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi has started a petition on CREDO which helps you tell the United Nations to end child slavery and forced child labor. About one of every 10 kids throughout the world still work, many of them as forced laborers in factories and street markets, and there's no good reason for that. And though tales of kids forced to work in carpet factories or gold mines -- or forced to become soldiers -- elsewhere in the world are legion, the experience isn't as far from ours as we might wish. Some 400,000 kids in America work up to 60 hours weekly in dangerous big agribusiness jobs -- which are not family farms, and there's a plain difference between the work you do as part of a family and the work you do as part of some nameless corporation that doesn't have your best interests or your future at heart. Also recall that Newt Gingrich thought it would be brilliant to replace school janitors with 13-year-olds, and that Gary Johnson worried that child labor laws would prevent him from slipping his grandson a twenty for fixing his computer. I mean, sure, we keep our children out of coal mines now, but reactionaries can always make us backslide, so we keep fighting.

Meanwhile, Democracy for America helps you tell the Department of Labor extend overtime protections to more workers. The current ceiling for overtime -- that salary at which employers no longer have to pay you time-and-a-half for any hours over 40 you might work in a week -- is $23,660, which means some nine out of 10 workers can't get overtime pay, unless they're lucky enough to have negotiated that pay in a collective bargaining agreement. The petition helps you advocate for nearly tripling that ceiling to $69,000 and expanding protections to include teachers, IT professionals, and doctors; these moves would make overtime protections about as vigorous as they were in 1975, when they protected nearly two-thirds of the workforce. And no reasonable person could call that a "job-killer" -- overtime protections are, in fact, job creators, in that they make corporations choose between paying outlandish amounts of overtime or (here's a novel thought!) hiring more workers to get the job done. And in the meantime, workers would be fairly compensated for all the extra work they put in. Everyone's a winner -- except overpaid CEOs, who don't get all the say around here.

Action: mortgage fraud, child labor, and the "war on terror."

Last week we learned that the FBI not only made mortgage fraud its lowest priority in its investigations -- this after the Department of Justice promised that mortgage fraud would be a considerably higher priority. You may remember that Attorney General Eric Holder spent the eight-year wilderness of Tha Bush Mobb years lawyering for banksters and thus conclude: this is news? Yes -- it is always news when our government fails to fulfill not only its implicit promise to work on behalf of its owners, the American people, but its stated promises to do so. Hence Daily Kos joins with Action for the Common Good and the Home Defenders League to help you tell the Justice Department to make mortgage fraud investigation a higher priority. To think banksters have the nerve to compare people angry at them with Nazis! Banksters have made money hand over fist in the five-plus years since they crashed our economy with their greed and venality, and now that they're also the nation's biggest landlord, they'll keep making that easy money. Our duty? To make them pay for the damage they've done.

Meanwhile, Body Shop has begun to receive some bad PR for sourcing mica -- which it uses in products such as lipstick, eyeshadow, and nail polish -- from Indian mining corporations which use child labor in their mines. You remember India, the poster child for Neoliberal Economies that Really Work? Sure these economies work -- for their paymasters, but not for the vast majority of the world's population slaving away in dangerous and illegal mines and getting paid in dung pellets. So Sum of Us helps you tell Body Shop to stop using child labor. Yes, I know, L'Oreal owns Body Shop, but surely Body Shop is no mere puppet, right? And don't believe the hype that demanding moral behavior of corporations results in higher prices for consumers -- all it really demands is that corporate CEOs pay themselves less money, and maybe forego gilding the plumbing on their 19th vacation home. (This "hype," by the way, comes from people as high up as the British Prime Minister. Excuse me, I mean the former Labour British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, not the current Tory British Prime Minister, though I don't imagine Mr. Cameron's views on the matter are any better.)

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to rescind the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) which has led us into the Afghanistan and Iraq quagmires and which threatens to lead us into future quagmires, then both CREDO and the Friends Council for National Legislation help you do that. Note that each action alert references different bills -- the CREDO alert asks you to support Rep. Lee's bill, H.R. 3852, and the FCNL alert asks you to support Rep. Schfif's bill, H.R. 2324; the latter bill repeals the AUMF on the last day of 2014, while the former repeals it immediately. And there's hope for these efforts -- last year's vote to repeal the AUMF fell only 33 votes short in the House of Representatives. Think such a vote would have received 185 votes in the 2004 or 2006 Congresses? Of course, the accomplished fearmonger George W. Bush was President then, and his successor is, at the very least, a rather less accomplished fearmonger. So now's the time to get this bill passed, lest the American people elect Scott Walker, a more accomplished fearmonger than Messrs. Bush and Obama combined, President in 2016.