Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning striking workers and financial predators.

Long story short: tell port CEOs to accept striking portworkers' demands, and tell your government to protect us from financial predators in the green lending industry. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell port CEOs to accept portworkers' demands. 45,000 port workers went on strike this week to protest low pay (no, really, only $20/hour for that work?) and automation (ho hum, corporations making billions in profits want to give as many jobs as possible to robots). On occasion, legitimate, life-improving technological progress forces people out of work, but robots ain't that – robots will screw everything up while CEOs make even more money forcing the world to accept incompetence. These CEOs deserve to fail – but they won't, unless we pressure them to give in to their workers' demands.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell various federal agencies to protect good Americans from financial predators in the green lending industry. Lending programs that help folks deal with pollution and climate change are relatively new – which means they probably have a disproportionate number of scam artists, since new areas of our economy tend to get the necessary regulatory scrutiny much later than more established ones. And you know right-wingers stand ready to declare the green lending industry "unreliable." Their hell will be just as hot as ours, but why should any of us live in hell?

UPDATE. Port strikers have reached a tentative agreement with management, one that would raise pay 62% over the next five years but does not address automation. Go ahead and send your message anyway, amending it as you need to. Once you win, you need to keep fighting to keep your wins, and big bosses need to know we’ll do that.

Action: concerning labor, food safety, and pollution.

Long story short: tell Boeing to give its workers a fair contract, tell our FDA to keep lead out of cinnamon, and tell our EPA to keep nurdles out of our water. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Boeing that their striking machinists deserve a fair contract. Our "liberal" media have been telling you that Boeing workers went on strike after rejecting a proposed 25% pay hike. Surprise, surprise: that's not the whole story. Boeing workers are hunting far bigger game: they aim to challenge the entire corporate culture at Boeing, the culture that puts mammon above safety and quality, the culture that puts shareholder “value,” executive pay, and stock buybacks above planes being safe to fly. This could be a watershed moment in our history, like Reagan breaking the traffic controllers' union but in reverse, because if the Boeing workers win, they'll show the world that we can beat the culture of mammon, and workers all over America will suddenly find themselves more powerful than they've been in about half a century. So, yeah, we should help them do that.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to limit lead found in cinnamon. This has been in the news lately, as all manner of food poisoning tends to be; one quarter-teaspoon of cinnamon contains more lead than anyone should ever have in a day, and lead leads directly to brain damage and maldevelopment in children, so our FDA should do at least as good a job as the state of New York, which limits lead to one part per million in spices. Oh, at the risk of piling on, the Project 2025 agenda would make sure our government could never keep our food safe again, so we must act now.

Finally, PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to ban corporations dumpling nurdles into our clean water. Nurdles! They sound so cute! Reader, they are not: used to make virtually any plastic product, they find their way into our oceans and not only kill animals who literally starve to death with bellies full of them and that is a cruel, cruel death, but they can find their way into our own bodies as well, and wreak havoc on our health. Again, not to pile on, but Project 2025 would prevent our EPA from keeping such things out of our water, so we must act now.

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, voting rights, and bankster bonuses.

Long story short: tell our government to stop arming Israel, tell our DOJ to investigate Texas's Attorney General for vote suppression, and tell our Federal Reserve to stop banksters from giving themselves big bonuses for their risky behavior. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our government to stop arming Israel's attempt to blow Palestinians out of existence. Yes, the terrorist attack of October 7 was evil, but so is the Israeli response, and because Israel is much more powerful than Palestine, the response will do more harm, almost as if Hamas intended that all along. And of course Benjamin Netanyahu has no intention of destroying Hamas – he needs an enemy so he can con good Israelis into clinging to him! Cut off his weapons and this house of cards will collapse.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) to investigate Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for attempting to harass and intimidate voters. Which is against the law! Lately Mr. Paxton has threatened to sue Harris County and Bexar County over their plans to make sure eligible but unregistered voters get registration forms. Sounds like a frivolous lawsuit? It gets better – both counties have large Latin-American populations! No use arguing "prosecutorial discretion" when that "discretion" always seems aimed at non-whites.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell Fed Chair Jerome Powell to finalize rules prohibiting bankster CEOs from getting big bonuses for taking absurd risks with their customers' money. I'd say "finally finalize" if it didn't sound corny, but fact is the Dodd-Frank law authorized this rule almost 15 years ago, so our government's got to get to it! Otherwise we could have another bankster Armageddon like we had in 2008, and there might really be torches and pitchforks this time.

Around the table: green shoots rise above the muck, part 883.

When you hear that growing different crops on the same land not only enriches the soil but repels pests, you should be tempted to say well, no duh! But big ag corporations, anxious to write over our collective memory, insist that pounding the soil with endless rows of single crops is the only "efficient" way to feed people, though the only thing it does "efficiently” is redistribute worker income upward to executives. And while you can't just put any bunch of plants together and get the best results, keeping plants apart is far too good a metaphor for the anti-cooperative framework Our Glorious Elites incessantly push on us.

U.N. buys 3D printer called the Crane WASP to build homes for the nearly-four million unhomed households in Colombia. Inspired by the Mason wasp, which creates nests using mud, the Crane WASP can make a home using mud, clay, cement, and even farming waste; the printer costs $180,000, but can print a home for about $1,000, so maybe it could also fight homelessness in America – except that American right-wingers would yell that surely nobody aspires to live in a little home like that! Of course, right-wingers would just build more McMansions, which does little for our civilization except give bloggers something to laugh at.

Another day, another reminder that AI sucks up so much energy that it causes "stress on local power grids" and "mass water evaporation," that latter item especially problematic, as it may take a year for mass amounts of water used in AI development to return to the planet, whereas the water you use to, say, brush your teeth goes right back into the sewer, and gets cleaned up and used again fairly quickly. Google, naturally, blames its excessive energy use on its suppliers. Remember all of this the next time some organization claims that YOU AREZ TEH OPPRESSURZ!!!! if you oppose AI, because they do that now.

From the Indianapolis Star we learn that not only has school voucher cost gone up almost twentyfold in a little over a dozen years, but now families that are in no way poor get to use them, which should make you suspect anyone who says don't get so upset about vouchers, because they help poor people. Helping people pay for private schools is, of course, nowhere near as good as funding public schools properly, even if it doesn't look as sexy. And when former Indiana Governor/Bush Mobber Mitch Daniels tried to reassure everyone back in 2011 that his voucher program wouldn't be so big, he was fronting – now he's proud of how big his program has become, even though it's just corporate welfare for private schools.

While it's true that Donald Trump should really stop saying on TV that he plans to interfere with the 2024 election if it doesn't go his way, particularly when Special Counsel Smith has just secured another election interference indictment, we would do well to remember that when he refers to "interfering with a presidential election, where you have every right to do it," he's signaling to his votaries that they have "every right" to consider anything they don't have as something someone else stole from them – and that they have "every right" to hurt anyone who "stole" it. Certainly we shouldn't be surprised when folks throw bricks through the windows of neighbors with Harris/Walz signs on their lawn.

Proving, once again, that large amounts of money constitute no impediment to stupidity, Elon Musk endorses a theory supposing that only "high-status males" – and certainly not women or "low T men" – should get to run a Republic that's "only for those who are free to think,” which of course means "free to think exactly like us." Well, it sure is a good thing nobody in the world ever attains "high-status" by committing massive fraud or hurting as many people as possible! I kid, of course. I guess only "low T men" give a shit about anyone or anything other than themselves.

Gannett shuts down its notorious AI-infected bad journalism website, which would be good news if it didn't also mean a lot of actual human beings will lose their jobs. Then again, for today's big corporations, that's killing two birds with one stone – destroy journalism with bullshit machines that don't have families and don't need time off, and then fire all the real workers who do! Gannett's CEO, of course, made $4 million last year; I wonder how much he whines that other media moguls make more.

Finally, former Vice President/Sith Lord Dick Cheney says he will vote for Kamala Harris in November because "there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump” and because Mr. Trump "tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him” and "can never be trusted with power again.” So, two things about that: one, given Mr. Cheney’s role in the 2000 election, one can’t help but wonder if his real problem with Donald Trump is that he’s bad at coup-ing. Two, a lot of Trumpholes make fun of Dick Cheney now, but damn near all of them were war-on-terror voters who called their family, friends, and neighbors “traitors” if they opposed the Iraq War.

Action: concerning banksters, school lunches, and jobs.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to roll back so-called "Earned Wage Access" loans. "Earned Wage Access" schemes promise to give you some of your paycheck before payday if you need it, but then slam you with 300% interest rates and usurious junk fees, meaning they're just another payday loan. No use arguing that these loans give good Americans more "choice." In a civilized society, there should be no "choice" to be some rich bankster's prey.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our U.S. Department of Agriculture (or USDA) to limit sugar (and calories from sugar) in school lunches. The "added sugar" part of our food labels is a relatively recent development, and our USDA's proposed sugar limits would be the first-ever. But of course big sugar corporations don't want this to happen! We first started adding sugar to food to conceal that food's spoilage; hundreds of years later, we’ve made it a mania, and no CEO's "right" to more unearned money can change that.

Finally, More Perfect Union also helps you tell Stellantis to honor its contractual promise to re-open the Belvedere, IL plant it closed in 2021. The United Auto Workers (or UAW) union fought Stellantis (owner of Jeep and Chrysler) tooth and nail to get the Belvedere plant reopened, but now Stellantis's CEO wants to delay reopening until 2028 – after the UAW contract expires. So clever! Thus it’s time for the Big Stick of Bad PR to come out. Shame still works, or Donald Trump wouldn’t call it a tool of totalitarianism.

Action: concerning paid sick leave and nutrition programs.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to enact real paid/family medical leave and invest better in food stamps and senior nutritional programs. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact real paid sick/family leave legislation. What did we learn during the pandemic? That everyone needs access to our internet, for one thing, but also that everyone needs paid sick leave, which only a little more than one in four American workers now have. It should be four in four! It’s four in four in almost every other highly-developed nation on Earth! And it would cost an extraordinarily small amount of money! The Gillibrand bill from previous sessions would have funded it with a very small payroll tax amounting to about $8/month for someone making $50,000 annually, but I’d just as soon tax the rich. (Accidentally typed “tax the reich” there for a moment; how telling.)

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk not to cut food stamp benefits so they can increase big ag subsidies. Yes, Congress is really considering doing that – literally stealing from the poor and giving to the rich! Because that’s what farm subsidies have become: welfare for big ag corporations. And it helps make our kids fat! The price of Pepsi has literally not changed, even when adjusting for inflation, in over 40 years; if we subsidized fruits and vegetables the way we subsidize corn, we’d have a lot less childhood obesity, and a lot less diabetes. Thus those who think food stamps are some kind of “moral hazard” would have to concede that handing out corporate welfare to big ag concerns is a far worse moral hazard.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep investing in nutritional programs for seniors like Meals on Wheels. This is yet another program that would spend a little bit of money to do a lot of good, so naturally right-wingers hate it. Clearly they prefer programs that spend a lot of money and only do big corporate executives any good, like the F-35 “fighter” plane. Right-wingers also like saying they’ve got Social Security and Medicare, what more do they want? Two reasons that’s horseshit: one, Social Security and Medicare don’t cover everything, and two, right-wingers are constantly trying to kill the programs they say seniors are lucky to have! So enough with horseshit.

Action: concerning Medicare-for-All, corporate taxes, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare to include all Americans, pass a windfall profits tax on big corporations, and protect women’s health care in America. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you demand that your Congressfolk expand Medicare to include everyone. I don’t mean to put down the accomplishments of the Affordable Care Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, because they have helped people. But our government couldn’t possibly do a worse job delivering health insurance than private health insurance corporations do. And now they’ve become banksterized! Which means more surprise medical bills for you, more income-redistribution-upward to executives, and less health care for everyone. And brook no how-will-we-pay-for-it silliness! We would pay for it by converting the money corporations already pay private health insurance corporations into an employer-side payroll tax. Even the Koch Brothers said that’d save us all money.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall profits tax. Inflation was higher than it’d been in 40 years through much of 2021 and 2022, but corporations reported record profits at the same time, and hopefully you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to see the connection between those two phenomena. Congress can and must pass a windfall profits tax to claw some of that money back, which we can then use to, you know, provide services all Americans can use. We can also discourage corporations from gouging us in the future. Brook no you’re-punishing-success silliness! “Success” is not forcing good Americans to pay more for food and gas than they have to. Success should be useful to all of us.

Finally, Americans for Contraception helps you tell your House Reps to pass the Right to Contraception Act, while Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Comstock Act, a law that aims to prohibit our Postal Service from delivering any birth control- or abortion-related materials. I know, Senate Republicans blocked the Right to Contraception Act, but who would we be if we just gave up after that? We’re right, and they’re wrong, and that still better count for something! And while a 1934 Second Circuit ruling essentially neutered the Comstock Act, our Supreme Court would love to de-neuter it, so we’ve got to get rid of it now.

Around the table: today with 43% good-news-I-guess.

Our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) has proposed eliminating medical debt from consideration in our credit reports – which makes a lot of sense, since surprise medical bills can slam anyone at any time regardless of “how well people take care of themselves” – but of course the debt collecting industry is whining about it! Seriously, their “government picking winners and losers” argument is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard a lot of stupid in my time. Just remember: whenever someone whines about “government picking winners and losers,” they really mean they’re enraged that they don’t get to pick the winners and losers.

Our Supreme Court unanimously strikes down lower court decision banning mifepristone and misopropol (the drugs used in home abortions), saying the plaintiffs – who could not prove they had ever been made to prescribe these drugs against their will – lacked standing to bring the suit. That’s good news, and I guess it’s also good news that “standing” still means something to our Court, because I’ve had my doubts about that. But our Court – perhaps more mindful of how little regard good Americans have for them anymore – may simply be waiting for the “right” lawsuit that lets them snuff out mifepristone and misopropol for good.

Matt Stoller notes recent coverage of the numerous sexual improprieties allegedly committed by former FTC Commissioner/George Mason University professor Josh Wright, perhaps America’s leading intellectual pro-monopolist and also “the Harvey Weinstein of antitrust.” Mr. Wright stands accused of “advanc(ing) the careers of students at law firms and in government...based on whether they were sleeping with him”; he’s lost his job at George Mason as a result, which right-wingers will no doubt blame on the “woke mob.” Why does it matter? Because “(i)t takes a village to abuse power the way that he did,” and “he was allowed to act with impunity for almost twenty years. He was benefitting monopolists, so he could do whatever he wanted.” It sure does seem like using women for sex and believing yourself too powerful to be put in jail come from the same impulse.

You already know AI search answers might tell you to eat a rock or jump off a bridge, but Scientific American reminds us that AI searches also waste a lot of energy – it uses 30 times more energy to “generate” an answer than a regular search uses to simply find one. You’ll remember that “manufacturing” bitcoin also eats up a lot of energy, and you’ll also remember that bitcoin is also a stupid scam, and you may begin to see a pattern. What’s wrong with paying people to do a job again? Oh, right, the CEO can’t redistribute as much income upward to himself if he has to pay people to do a job.

Minnesota Republican Senate candidate Royce White – who used to be a hell of a basketball player, until his fear of flying did him in as a pro – submits for your approval a map purporting to show rising crime in Minneapolis when it actually shows the location of drinking fountains in Minneapolis. This should be the kind of mistake that ends a campaign, but my guess is he knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew he’d get caught, too – first, he stokes a feeling of deprivation about crime, and then another one about how all the liberals got him like Jesus. But like George Santos, he may soon learn that only Donald Trump gets away with being Donald Trump. To the degree he will from now on, anyway!

When I hear that an Arizona man planned to mass-murder Black folks at an Atlanta rap concert in order to spark a race war, all I can say is: what a fucking clown! Mass murders happen so often anymore that it’s virtually impossible to create one that’ll start anything larger! Why, mass murders don’t even prompt politicians to pass common-sense gun control legislation! And this is why I say our “liberal” media can’t give so much oxygen to the “motivations” of mass murderers. I mean, these “motivations” run from being mad at absolutely deserved rejections to thinking the world is “bigger than everyone else knows” but in a really stupid way.

Finally, Donald Trump demands that Joe Biden remove an ad citing the numerous documented instances of Mr. Trump cutting down our soldiers as “losers” and the like. He says he never did any of that, and although you and I weren’t there, fairly mainstream news outlets have reported them, and everyone just saw him get 34 felony convictions over trying to cover up something he said he never did, so I could understand if you didn’t believe these denials. Anyway, this is the age where you just don’t take ads down. He understands that better than anyone; he must be whining because it’ll incite that familiar ragey feeling in his votaries. They need a steady diet of manufactured outrage, of course, lest they get bored and turn to something like gardening.

Action: concerning surprise medical bills, forced prison labor, and energy efficiency.

Long story short: tell Anthem BCBS to pay for Sara Flores’s $13,000-plus surprise medical bill, tell big corporations to stop using forced prison labor to make their products, and tell our government to ensure that all new federally-backed homes meet modern energy efficiency standards. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Missouri Jobs With Justice helps you tell Anthem BCBS to pay for Sara Flores’s medical care. She planned to have her baby at home, but then decided (prudently, she thought!) to have her baby at a medical center in Anthem's network in case of complications – and then, when her baby had complications and needed intensive care, Anthem told her that those providers were not, in fact, in her network, and slammed her with a $13,000-plus surprise bill! And right-wingers wonder why people don’t just pop out dozens of kids anymore! If you see a bankster’s gnarled hand behind this, shifting providers out of networks like the world’s just one big shell game, I wouldn’t blame you. So once again we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR.

Civic Shout helps you tell big corporations to stop using forced prison labor to make their products. Brook no if-you-can’t-do-the-time-don’t-do-the-crime silliness from anyone, because we’re supposed to be rehabilitating prisoners, not forcing them into slavery. Don’t brook any retorts that they learn skills while they’re in jail, because which fascist Southern state’s educational curriculum does that sound like? (It’s Florida. I’m talking about Florida.) Also too, these big corporations could be paying people real money to do these jobs. And no using prison slave labor doesn’t result in cheaper products! It results in richer executives! That’s all it results in, or else we wouldn’t have had such high inflation these past few years.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Federal Housing Finance Agency (or FHFA) to require all new homes backed by FHFA mortgages to meet modern energy efficiency standards. Because when you take the taxpayer’s money, you have to follow the taxpayer’s rules, and there just aren’t enough taxpayers who oppose higher energy efficiency standards. Sadly, there’s not exactly a shortage of people who bellow like a banshee at the news of any new regulation, but they’re far from the majority of Americans, loud and obnoxious though they may be. Some right-wingers have such a hard-on for tossing energy efficiency regulations, but seriously, folks, there are ways to get rid of a hard-on that don’t involve hurting people.

Action: concerning taxes and stock buybacks.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, expand the IRS Direct File program, and pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, which would address several kinds of corporate tax dodging, like headquartering in the Cayman Islands and sucking up tax money while shipping jobs overseas. Remember when Barack Obama made ending tax breaks for outsourcing corporations one of the pillars of his job creation program, and every single Republican in the Senate voted against it? How did any of those dolts get re-elected? I kid, of course – they got re-elected because Democrats (including President Obama) didn’t fight that hard for it afterward. Let’s make sure they don’t make the same mistake again by communicating our will clearly and forcefully.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase IRS funding so they can expand the IRS Direct File program. Virtually every other nation on Earth lets its citizens file their taxes directly with their government for free, but not us! Apparently we’re not happy until some undeserving corporation is overcharging us to do the same thing! Now House Republicans have been throwing tantrums about IRS funding going up at all under President Biden (which hasn’t exactly worked out for them electorally, but I digress), so you know they won’t want to do this, either. But if we all speak out, they’ve got two choices: do our will, or ignore us. Know anyone who likes being ignored?

Finally, Inequality Media helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, which would quadruple the stock buyback tax in America. That tax needs quadrupling, now that Apple plans to spend $110 billion on stock buybacks that reduce shareholder power, increase executive power, and make products and processes and infrastructure worse. Robert Reich reminds me of one more problem with stock buybacks: big corporate executives never pay taxes on the stocks they buy, because they never cash them out! And less tax money means, as you know, less public investment in libraries, cops, bridges, and other services we all use. So we know what we have to do.

Action: concerning health care, fracking, and climate change.

Long story short: tell our government your story (if you have one) about how Medicare Advantage plans harmed you, and tell our government to reject plans to frack on public lands and investigate big oil’s well-documented lies to the American people about their role in climate change. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Attention, those who’ve been harmed by Medicare Advantage plans: More Perfect Union helps you tell our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) your story of how a Medicare Advantage plan harmed you. I’m pleased the Biden Administration wants to collect these stories, since they’ve otherwise acted far too sanguine about the presence of private health insurance corporations sucking out Medicare money (which, ah, is your money, both coming and going). Stories they’ll want to hear may include denied claims, denied treatments, surprise medical bills, and misleading advertising – you know, all the noxious crap you’d expect from total greedheads who will burn in everlasting Hellfire but hurt or kill millions of good Americans first.

Civic Shout helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to reject its proposal to open 40,000 acres of the Wayne National Forest to fracking and oil drilling. Fracking will make your water undrinkable – it’s why Pennsylvania state Republicans from the Philadelphia suburbs got a fracking moratorium in the 2012 state budget – and our public lands have plenty of water in them. Don’t brook any stupidity from right-wingers about the need for “cheap energy,” particularly if they then turn and lie about how you can never get solar power on a cloudy day. “Have you heard of the miracle technology called battery storage?” All these right-wingers really care about is making sure energy corporation executives still get to redistribute their workers’ income upward to themselves, so don’t abide their BS.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate big oil corporations for knowing they were helping cause climate change for decades but lying to us about it the whole time. This story is almost a decade old already, and no oil corporation executives are in jail yet; I know the wheels of justice grind slowly, but does that really comfort anyone who can’t get a drink of clean water or spends hundreds of dollars every month just to keep their house cool? The time for justice is always now. And I know, there’s always the chance that a Justice Department lawsuit will get before a federal judge who thinks corporations have a “right” to lie. Fact is corporations don’t have a right to do a God-damned thing, because corporations aren’t people, they’re things, and letting things rule you is always a fatal mistake.

Action: concerning stock buybacks, bad health care, and judicial corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act and the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act, and tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed 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.

Inequality Media helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, which would quadruple the tax on stock buybacks. They used to be illegal! But then the Reagan Revolution said of course we can trust executives not to abuse their power! They’re people, after all! Except we all know how people get when they get that kind of power, and if we didn’t know, we have 40-plus years of evidence telling us that executives buy back stock (and thus concentrate shareholder power in fewer hands) whenever they can, to the point where Apple now plans a $110 billion stock buyback spree. No corporation should have that kind of power! And too many of them do.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject to so-called More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed Act. You know how right-wingers want you to think they’re not just against anything that would make your life better? Here they’re pretending they really want to do something to help mothers succeed, without abortion. Of course the bill doesn’t do that – instead it diverts more taxpayer money, which is your money, to “crisis pregnancy centers” that take advantage of pregnant women to tell them noxious lies about abortion’s “effects” on their health. And sorry, but sometimes abortion is the “opportunity for moms to succeed.” I wish it weren’t, too, but it is.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act, which would force our Supreme Court to adhere to the same ethics standards to which every other federal judge must adhere. Justice Thomas has lately been saying that Washington is a “nasty” place; don’t you hate it when people do evil and then complain that no one likes them? Maybe he should maybe stop contributing to that nastiness by accepting millions of dollars in gifts from folks who might have business before the Court! I mean, don’t conservatives want everyone to look to themselves first before complaining about how the world’s against them? Or is that only a rule for us?

Around the table: we find good news wherever we can! And don’t shrink from the bad.

Good news: our Supreme Court rules that our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding mechanism is-so Constitutional, with Justice Thomas (is this an election year?) writing the majority opinion, ruling that our CFPB’s funding mechanism – our Federal Reserve system not only funds it, but determines funding levels – has ample precedent in American history. Not least because Congress delegated this authority via legislation, I would think. Naturally Justice Alito, he of the upside-down flag flying in front of his house just after the January 6 insurrection, called our CFPB’s funding mechanism “unprecedented” in his dissent.

More good news! The Biden Administration has proposed reclassifying marijuana from Schedule I – reserved for the most dangerous drugs with the least medicinal utility – to Schedule III. Thus pot would still be illegal at the federal level, but the crippling restrictions on medicinal research would no longer apply, and the tax burden on marijuana businesses would also fall. You should know that the organization Smart Approaches to Marijuana – from whence came the article’s content-free argument against the proposal – opposes both legalization and research, which I would think rather reduces the number of “smart approaches” available to them.

I find good news even in this bad news: unionization effort at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Tennessee fails by a fairly sizable margin, after Mercedes indulges in the kind of relentless anti-union propagandizing that the PRO Act would restrict if Congress would pass it. But Mercedes also made sizable concessions to workers, including ending a two-tiered wage system, making temp workers permanent, and starting a new bonus system, although I wouldn’t blame you for seeing that $700 “performance bonus” they handed out last month as a bribe (and one that works too often on good Americans trying to scrape through another week). But if a corporation treats its workers better out of fear of unions, then unions are still doing their job. And the only thing that’ll keep things moving forward at Mercedes is the continued threat of unionization.

When I hear that a Georgia state law taking effect this July could actually make that state’s voter challenge process even worse than it already is – keep in mind that a mere six professional right-wingers have challenged 90,000 voter registrations in Georgia – I start to think that this stupidity won’t end until liberals start challenging right-wing voter registrations the way right-wingers challenge Black and Brown voter registrations. We wouldn’t have to challenge 90,000 of them, either, before they cry uncle. And then the professional centrists will clutch their pearls about how uncivil liberals are, but it won’t matter, because we will finally have justice.

Uh oh: a Spectrum News report alleges that “millions” of good Texans’ tax dollars got diverted to an out-of-state charter school network founded by Houston’s Independent School District Superintendent, and perhaps not coincidentally, his corporation’s Colorado schools are all struggling, one of them closing down with $5 billion in outstanding bond debt. And yet he apparently gets to Hoover up Texas taxpayer money; nice work if you can get it! I know a lot of folks who fall for the promise of charter schools because their public schools are so awful, but we should make our public schools better, not divert public school funding to someone’s crony private schools that could be even worse.

Finally, continuing with our “nice work if you can get it!” theme, Robert Reich reminds us that Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav somehow made almost $50 million last year despite his corporation losing $3 billion and his stock prices being a third of what they were two years ago. So he’s failing even by the yardsticks he would prefer you use to measure his performance! Measure him by, for example, CNN’s commitment to actual journalism (Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN, an arrangement that by the way should not exist) and he’d come off far worse. And luckily Fran Drescher’s there to remind us that his corporation cries poor when it’s time to pay their workers, but not when it’s time to pay the boss. A mere 50.8% of shareholders approved his pay package; one does wonder how management twisted the arms of that last 0.9%.

Action: concerning stock buybacks, corporate welfare, wind power, and tax cuts for the rich.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, and the NOW Act, and tell your Congressfolk to let the worst parts of the 2017 Trump tax “reform” expire. 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.

Inequality Media helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, which would raise the 1% stock buyback tax (enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022) with a 4% tax, which would, I would think, be at least four times as effective in discouraging stock buybacks, which used to be illegal, because they concentrated shareholder power in fewer and fewer hands, but now are as big a blot on our economy as the hedge fund or the monthly stock report. You know it’s always the folks who already have too much money (i.e., executives) who buy back the most stock, but the Stock Buyback Accountability Act would help make shareholders relevant again.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, which would restore the 35% corporate tax rate, close loopholes that allow corporations to move money overseas and outsource our jobs, and end, once and for all, the practice of using a Cayman Islands P.O. Box as a “headquarters.” Every year, too many big corporations pay literally nothing in taxes – or, worse, suck tax money out of our very pockets. That’s money that could pay for cops, libraries, and bridges! But the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act would help us get that money for the public investment we deserve, so we should do it.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Nonrestrictive Offshore Wind (or NOW) Act, which would repeal the law (passed, sadly, in the Inflation Reduction Act) mandating that wind power leases can only occur after our government has handed out an offshore oil drilling lease. Hey, it was what Joe Manchin would let happen in 2022! And I’m sure more than a few Americans are still so timid about these “new” renewable energy sources that they don’t mind their development being so closely tied to the further development of “established” energies. But renewables have been around for decades, and really, we don’t need training wheels to use them anymore.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires also helps you tell your Congressfolk to let the worst parts of the 2017 Trump tax “reform” law expire. That would, sadly, not include the corporate tax rate cut from 35% to 21% (which is why we need the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act described above) but it would include the big tax cuts for the top income tax brackets and the pass-through deductions that somehow only benefit the already-too-rich. Don’t expect a second Trump term to do anything but give bosses more unearned goodies; best that we take action now, and at least reveal to our Congressfolk a will they will have to work to ignore.

Around the table: in which airline corporations get a comeuppance.

Outstanding news for good Americans: big airline corporations tried to defeat a Biden Administration rule that would have mandated automatic refunds when airlines screw up – and not only lost, but lost big, when Congressfolk actually wrote the Biden mandate into law. “In other words,” Matt Stoller writes, “Airlines for America tried to use their clout in Congress to undercut a popular rule put forward by Pete Buttigieg, a rule designed to fix a problem they caused by screwing people during the pandemic after they got bailed out. But their plan backfired, because politicians, journalists, and policymakers were actually paying attention. So now instead of repealing a rule they don’t like, they got that rule written into law.” Ain’t that great? And if you’re one of those Americans who called your Congressfolk post-haste when you heard about it, you’re part of the reason it’s great. So go buy yourself a Buffalo chicken cheese-steak, of whatever it is you love.

Judd Legum, in “Elon Musk’s Piggy Bank,” explains in considerable detail exactly why Elon Musk doesn’t deserve the $50 billion compensation package a Delaware court invalidated this past January. They’re putting the compensation package – which they claim is necessary so that Mr. Musk “will continue to be driven to innovate and drive growth at Tesla,” how’s that for a hostage situation! – before the shareholders in June, and yes, virtually every argument every board member makes sits on a bed of corrupt self-interest. Aside from the litany of examples of how Tesla’s failing these days, I feel compelled to add that a working family still can’t afford a Model X after a dozen years. Toyota Priuses went from luxury car to working family car in half that time.

Factcheck.org gives us the lowdown on the H5N1 bird flu officials have found in our milk supply. Long story short: the chance of a bird flu pandemic is low right now, since pasteurization does a pretty good job killing it and H5N1 would have to change a lot more to reach humans – but that could always change. Not just because more folks drink raw milk now, but also because researchers have hardly looked at bovine flu – there hasn’t been that much of it, which is a bit ominous, given that H5N1 figuring out how to get to cows might make it easier to figure out how to get to people – and our FDA has apparently found more bird flu genetic material in milk than our USDA has. In the meantime, don’t drink raw milk, cook your meat and eggs well, and stay away from wild birds.

“Who Believes the Most ‘Taboo’ Conspiracy Theories?” asks Paul Rosenberg at Salon. “It Might Not Be Who You Think.” Spoiler alert: it’s white dudes with graduate-level degrees! They’re more likely to believe Sandy Hook was a “false flag” operation or that folks exaggerate Holocaust deaths “on purpose,” and while you may reasonably conclude that the experience of studying an area deeply makes some folks a bit arrogant about areas they haven’t studied very deeply, you still have to wonder why things like Holocaust/Sandy Hook denialism attract them particularly. They said a little knowledge is a dangerous thing – and they were right!

I doubt very much that Donald Trump is “disgusted” by South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s story about how she put her dog down, especially since the story mainly describes Mr. Trump being “disgusted” with Ms. Noem’s poor grasp of “public relations.” Only one time does the article depict him asking why she put the dog down, and even that is still a bit of a walk to grasping that the dog was almost certainly failed by her humans – and I still suspect he only thought to ask in the first place because he observed the PR backlash against her. With this guy, it’s never about humanity; it’s always about the drama.

Come on, Politico, is crypto really “Trump’s New Weapon Against Biden”? There are two types of Americans: Americans who think crypto is a scam, and Americans who don’t think crypto is a scam yet, and unlike anti-vaxxers, the ones in the latter group don’t need to look only to crypto to salve their desperation, since they can run plenty of other garden-variety economic scams. If anything, this gives Joe Biden another opportunity to be The Real Law and Order President, though admittedly he’s flinched from discussing such matters (particularly with regard to monopolies). If I were him, I’d always wear hats saying I put corporate criminals in jail! But Democrats have never taken my advice, to their general detriment, I’d say.

Upon hearing that the Georgia state Republican committee has voted to remove one of its vice chairs, nine-time-illegal voter and convicted felon Brian K. Pritchard, I once again feel compelled to assert that Mr. Pritchard, even though he forged checks, should never have lost his voting rights, and thus shouldn’t be facing the setbacks he’s faced lately. And that’s true no matter how much I despise his politics! Rights aren’t rights if they’re so easily lost – and values aren’t values if they’re so easily amended just to stick it to people you despise.

Finally, New Hampshire’s state legislature raises the legal marriage age to 18, but the process is not without speed bumps, as at least one Republican state legislator defends his support for underage marriage thusly: “(w)hen we do this to people who are of ripe, fertile age and may have a pregnancy and a baby involved, are we not in fact, making abortion a much more desirable alternative when marriage might be the right solution for some freedom-loving couples?” Setting aside that he uses the word “freedom” as an amulet like the rest of them, or how much he sounds exactly like the person QAnon votaries profess to hate: he frames his support as an anti-abortion stance, a less popular stance now that it’s not as theoretical, but the only reason anyone will remember him will be for describing underage girls as “ripe” and “fertile.” We’d be better off remembering the state legislator who said this: “A lot of (Republicans) say oh, we were married at 16 and we turned out great, and my marriage was great, and I always say that’s really great, but all those child marriages don’t end in a happy ending. They end with someone having bruises and cuts and being pushed down stairs and losing their kids.” As a friend of mine once said, never let the living do all the testifying.

Around the table: today with a mere 57% good news.

Our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) discovers that American oil corporations actually colluded with the Saudi Arabian government to raise gas prices, which accounted for about 27% of inflation in 2021 and cost the average American family $3,000 just last year. Not just in higher gas prices, of course, but also in the movement of pretty much any product, since trucks run on gas. But sure, let’s pretend gas price hikes were all about Ukraine and clean air and clean water regulation! And when right-wing morons say our FTC is “out of control,” remember that finding evidence of price-fixing collusion with foreign governments is what they mean by “out of control.”

Biden Administration issues rule requiring minimum staffing requirements in nursing homes for the first time ever. The rule also requires 80% of Medicaid funding to go to nursing home worker salaries, i.e., instead of already-overpaid and overfed executives. The rule will make it harder for big nursing home corporations to keep goosing up profits (and therefore executive and shareholder wealth) by cutting staffing so that nobody in a nursing home can get decent care. So remember that when right-wing morons claim that the Biden Administration rule will “hurt investors” and therefore “close nursing homes,” as if they have never heard of the concept of demand.

Ground breaks on the Brightline West high-speed rail line that would run from Las Vegas to Los Angeles and go as fast as 200 mph; planners expect it’ll be finished in time for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Now cue the thousands of right-wingers (many of them employed by television networks) who will utter the words “high-speed rail” with a snicker in the hopes that everyone else will just assume high-speed rail must be very silly. No, really, that’s as far as they’ll go to argue against it. The good news? People don’t take them nearly as seriously as they used to. January 6 can do that to a movement.

Biden Administration cancels over $6 billion in student loan debt for over 300,000 students who attended one of the many Art Institutes across America between January of 2004 and October of 2017. Now cue the thousands of right-wingers who will squeal HAHAHAHA ART STUDENTZ AREZ SOZ TEH STUPIDZ!!!!!, though of course the real problem here is that the Art Institute lied to its students about what their job prospects would be if they attended the school. Why, they even inflated average salaries by including that of Serena Williams, who attended an Art Institute for a few terms! But to a particular kind of law-and-order mindset, fraud isn’t really a crime when it happens to people you don’t like.

Here’s some great news from Ecuador: voters actually rejected their government’s attempts to re-integrate Ecuador into investor-state dispute settlement (or ISDS) systems, a feature of “free” trade deals which allows big corporations to run roughshod over a nation’s laws by claiming that, say, labor or environmental laws “cost them money.” Which, once again, suggests that when you ask the voters the right question, they tend to give the right answer – although politicians tend to ask the wrong questions on purpose, and asking 11 questions at once, as Ecuador did, can wear voters down (since voters also approved some pretty awful “security”-related initiatives). As an aside, which of these two fools do you want to represent you? is pretty clearly one of the wrong questions.

When I hear that Cigna threatened to fire a doctor who didn’t deny medical claims quickly enough, I’m compelled to ask: maybe finance people shouldn’t make all the decisions all the time at every single corporation? Or maybe private, for-profit health insurance corporations shouldn’t exist? And as for hand-wringing about “efficiency,” the article explains fairly clearly: “(m)easuring the speed and output of employees is common in many industries, from fast food to package delivery, but the use of these kinds of metrics in health care is controversial because the stakes are so high. It’s one thing if a rushed server forgets the fries with your burger. It’s another entirely if the pressure to act fast leads to wrongful denials of payment for vital care.” And dig the Cigna spokeshack claiming that “(e)ven if medical directors were incentivized to review more claims — which they are not — it makes no sense to suggest that this incentivizes denials; it would be far quicker to approve all claims.” And far more expensive to Cigna, they somehow failed to note. Lesson: corporate executives’ mammon-worship will always strangle good service in its crib.

Finally, another day, another reminder that no matter how many times you get crime hysteria from Republicans or your local news program, crime is actually going down. And now RNC spokeshack Anna Kelly says that USA Today’s reporting of these simple facts represent an effort to “gaslight Americans into believing that their lived experiences are wrong.” That should only persuade people who think their lived experiences are everyone’s lived experiences, a character flaw I find more pronounced in Trump votaries than in Americans generally. And those whose “lived experiences” consist only of seeing the same clips of violent crime over and over again on the news are the real gaslighting victims.

Around the table: behold, the *anti-sex party*!

Good news, everyone: the Biden Administration adds back most of the teeth to the Endangered Species Act that the Trump Administration knocked out, by extending the same protections endangered species get to “threatened” species, and by ignoring the “economic impacts” of endangered species protections, “economic impacts” really only meaning “whether some rich CEO gets even richer” to Donald Trump and his kind. The Biden Administration did not reverse a Trump-era rule allowing agencies to essentially disregard any predicted impact that wasn’t “reasonably certain,” but get the right people in agencies – i.e., not industry people – and you can mitigate that error, as well. Joe Biden hit the big targets, and good for him – and good for you if you left one of the 450,000 public comments telling President Biden to roll those Trump-era rules back.

Oregon government ends its experiment with drug decriminalization, by making possession of hard drugs in small amounts illegal again, though they also increase funding for drug treatment programs. I’ve always been wary of legalizing, for example, heroin and fentanyl, but Oregon used the legislative process to overturn the will of the people as expressed in a ballot question, and that’s more than a bit unnerving. South Dakota did it much worse by overturning a campaign finance ban mere months after good South Dakotans approved it, whereas Oregon waited three years, but I’m sure they could have better respected the people’s wishes. Yes, I know, the people elect representatives – but the people speak more clearly and directly through ballot questions.

Ho hum, Elon Musk passes around yet more “extremely concerning” information about voter “fraud” that doesn’t actually qualify as “information,” let alone “extremely concerning,” because it’s utter bunkum. No, anyone getting a Social Security number is not automatically an “illegal” registering to vote illegally, and a state could submit information about a citizen to a voting database more than once; Jesus Mary and Joseph what is wrong with just shutting the fuck up until you know what you’re talking about? Or is that something only “little people” like us, and not the richest man on Earth, have to worry about? Undocumented immigrant voting in elections is extremely rare, and that finding meshes well with actual common sense – folks here without papers tend not to give out very much personal information about themselves for reasons you can easily imagine. Apparently that finding does not mesh as well with some folks’ desire to be constantly enraged about anything and everything – or with certain rich individuals’ strange desire to show off for such people.

Just Security reminds us that most of the D.C.-held January 6-related inmates Donald Trump wants to release assaulted a police officer. (No, really – 10 of the 29 have been convicted of it, while another 10 have already pleaded guilty to it, which makes 20 of 29.) Well, so much for I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!!! And so much for law and order, too. Of course, nobody thinks of themselves as law-breakers, and most folks who break the law tell themselves (and us) that their circumstances were “unique” and they had “no choice.” That is all, of course, very convenient reasoning. Please allow me to keep believing that I’m doing some good by pointing this out.

Newsweek asks if DEI – a term describing efforts to increase diversity, equality, and inclusion in corporations and academia – has become a “racial slur,” now that right-wingers blame literally every bad thing that happens on it, but remember that some people are so evil they’ll turn everything into a bad word. Remember when Barack Obama said he wanted his Supreme Court nominee to possess “empathy”? Oh, how the right-wing media pissed and moaned about that! And if they’d kept it up for longer than a day, they might have succeeded into making “empathy” into a cuss word, too. I wish I'd had as much success trying to turn “bold” into a cuss word during the George W. Bush era.

Donald Trump won’t tell Hugh Hewitt – about as sympathetic a media audience as he could hope to get – that he’s “100% with Israel” even after being asked twice, and while I know a lot of people in America are saying Israel might be wrong to themselves for the very first time (and Donald Trump knows that just as well as I do), just imagine what our “liberal” media would say if a Democrat refused to say directly he was “100% with Israel.” They’d call them weak, or a flip-flopper, or whatever – all things they refuse to say about Mr. Trump, because then they’d have to explain why he’s not actually a “strong leader” like all the polls they conduct say he is.

Finally, the incomparable Rebecca Solnit argues that Republicans – with their opposition to abortion and birth control and their embrace of fascism – have become an “anti-sex movement.” They’re saying it out loud! The Heritage Foundation wants to “restor(e) sex to its true purpose,” i.e., procreation, which means they want women to be breeders and nothing more (plus they want women to have no say over their breeding). Has the sexual revolution has been an unqualified good? No. But it doesn’t have to be for us to protect what women have won over the last half-century-plus, and calling Republicans the anti-sex party would be weapons-grade PR – most people still like sex, after all. I’ll whisper it into as many ears as I can.

Action: concerning data privacy and working families.

Long story short: tell our FTC to create a sort of do-not-call registry for our data, and tell Dollar General to stop with the understaffing and the inflation already. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Do Not Dox helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to create a “do-not-call registry for data brokers,” so that private data brokers can’t collect and sell your private data. Remember when Republicans scuttled our FCC’s pretty good data privacy rule, claiming that this is a job for the FTC? Guess what they’ll say when our FTC does it: this is a job for Congress! And that will be to laugh – these Congressdolts have had plenty of chances to protect us from data pirates, but they’ve proven wouldn’t protect good Americans’ privacy if it meant lost unearned income for some CEO somewhere. And that’s why we’ve got to step up and make our will unmistakable.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Dollar General to stop understaffing their stores and overcharging for products. I guess that’s how a boss makes money anymore – it sure ain’t by coming up with superior products, or better ways of doing things! But just creating more jobs solves a lot of problems, and just because something works for bosses doesn’t mean it works for you and I. Too many good Americans, besieged by similarly bad treatment at their own jobs, shop for everything they can at dollar stores, and thus feed into the mistreatment of their comrades. But if we must have dollar stores – though must we, really? – then we’d better brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR whenever they do wrong.

Action: concerning monopolies, stock buybacks, and cruelty to immigrants.

Long story short: tell our government to break up United Health, force corporations to disclose stock buybacks, and stop putting would-be immigrants in solitary confinement. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Justice Department to break up United Health, which now owns so many surgery centers and doctors’ practices that one might almost think they’re trying to gain control over all of health care! And we have laws against that, even if the Biden Administration is the first Administration to enforce them in almost 50 years. If United Health gets enough power, they’ll be able to jack up health care prices on everyone, and no corporation should have such power. Did I mention that United Health faces accusations of overbilling Medicare? Another way of putting that would be “stealing from the taxpayer,” i.e., you.

Take On Wall Street helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to propose a vigorous stock buyback disclosure rule, so that everyone can see which big corporations are actually investing in their products and which are just concentrating power in fewer and richer hands. Our SEC has already proposed such a rule, but our Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals – the one overrun with Trumpholes – struck it down. Still, why should our SEC give up? Surely we can enact a rule that protects good Americans and passes muster with appeals courts. We’re the can-do country, after all. Or we’d better be.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell the Biden Administration to end solitary confinement in ICE detention centers. Mr. Biden has actually ratcheted up solitary for would-be immigrants, and why? To prove he’s “tougher on immigration” than Donald Trump? How many times must I tell these pimps! Right-wingers will never reward liberals for appeasing them! And treating people like human beings always strengthens a civilization, no matter how many isolated anecdotes about “taking advantage of the system” right-wingers advance. Civilization had better be more than a sum of outrage-inducing anecdotes.

Action: concerning monopolies and pollution.

Long story short: tell our government to stop the proposed Walmart/Vizio merger, and tell our EPA to enact the strongest carbon emissions restrictions possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) and our Justice Department Antitrust Division to stop the proposed Walmart/Vizio merger. But wait, the right-wing Glaucons are saying, it’s a department store buying a TV company, so what’s the big deal? Well, if you think, as I do, that no corporation should ever own another corporation, you already know the answer, but buying Vizio would not only enable Walmart to get a foothold in an area they can quickly monopolize given their size, but it’d give them access to crap-tons of user data. I don’t particularly want Walmart – or any corporation – to have any of that.

Daily Kos Green helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous carbon emissions restrictions possible. Remember when right-wingers called the Obama carbon emissions restrictions – which didn’t even address existing power plants, like this one does – a “war on coal”? Well, how about the war on air? Or the war on health care, since cleaner air results in reduced health care costs? Big corporations hate our EPA’s proposal, since it’ll hamper their executives’ ability to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. But such fools shouldn’t get all the say in America.

Action: concerning monopolies, music, and data privacy.

Long story short: tell our government to block the proposed Capitol One/Discover merger, tell country music stations to play Beyoncé’s obviously-country songs, and tell our government to investigate online retailers’ privacy violations. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Reserve to block the proposed Capitol One/Discover merger. If we let Capitol One buy Discover, that’ll be one less credit card out there, and we need more credit card providers, not fewer! That’s so good credit card corporations can stay good – after all, if you can just buy another corporation, why would you make your corporation deliver good service? That’s before we get to all the good Americans who’ll lose their jobs if we let these two corporations merge. No, there’ll be no “increased market efficiency” coming from this merger – unless we count the “efficiency” of redistributing more income upward to undeserving executives.

MoveOn helps you tell country music stations to start playing Beyoncé’s country songs. I’m old enough to remember Hot Chocolate and the Specials, but since the early ‘80s big radio corporations have resegregated music, until now an estimable artist like Mickey Guyton has become Country’s One Black Friend. But let’s not just pick on country – even Eric Clapton says he’d be nowhere without Robert Johnson, but let’s see a classic rock station (whose One Black Friend is Jimi Hendrix) program that reality. If we can get Beyoncé’s country songs on country stations, we can start bringing these walls down again.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell our government to investigate online retailers’ violations of our data privacy. Wonder how an upstart corporation like Temu can offer relatively expensive items for a buck? Certainly they’re trying to predatory-price their way to the top, just like Amazon did – but Temu can also collect data on its customers and sell it for buku-bucks, even more so than Amazon could at its inception. And some good Americans have found their personal financial info out there after giving it to Temu. So, once again, we need our government to step in and protect us from financial predators.

Action: concerning Medicare, monopolies, and stock buybacks.

Long story short: tell Medicare to stop overpaying Medicare Advantage, tell our FTC to stop the proposed Capital One/Discover merger, and tell our SEC to force big corporations to disclose their stock buybacks. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. Our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) has proposed actually increasing payments to privatized Medicare Advantage health insurance plans – which, as you know from recent reporting, deliver more “advantages” to executives than seniors. Our government has already overpaid Medicare Advantage by tens of billions of dollars, and should be clawing that money back from private insurers, not rewarding them for worse service. Hence you may leave a public comment at regulations.gov, in which you may tell our CMS to reduce Medicare Advantage payments and claw back past overpayments.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to block the proposed Capital One/Discover merger. I can tell you from experience that Discover offers by far the best service to its credit card customers – and I can also tell you from experience that Capital One will end that record of service if we allow it to take over Discover. All because good service doesn’t gild the plumbing in some executive’s 19th vacation home! Our “liberal” media still covers mergers like they’re done deals, but this is America, and Joe Biden’s President, so they’re not done deals. But only if we speak out.

Finally, Take On Wall Street helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to force big corporations to disclose their stock buyback purchases. Because when big corporations buy back stock, they not only concentrate power in the hands of fewer (and richer) people, they also don’t invest in good products and good services. If you think that’s outside of our SEC’s purview, remember that investors also want to know if they’re sinking their money into a good corporation – or just a corporation that delivers big money until, just to pull an example out of the air, a door blows off a plane in mid-air.

Action: concerning health care and working families.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject Medicare privatization, reject nationwide abortion bans, and reject cuts to services working families need and use. 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 reject any plan to privatize Medicare. Because they’ve been talking about that – 0ut loud, too, like it wouldn’t be the most unpopular thing ever. You know what happens when private corporations take over government functions – they start out well, then they gradually start costing more money (which generally gets delivered upward to their executives), then they don’t even provide better services for the extra expense. That third stage is where we are with the notorious Medicare Advantage! So we remind our Congressfolk that what belongs to us must stay with us.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any nationwide abortion ban. Donald Trump supports a 16-week national ban – ha ha, he thinks that’s a “deal,” maybe he should ask Glenn Youngkin how well his proposed 15-week ban worked out for him – but, at the risk of sounding old-fashioned, abortion decisions should always be left between a woman and her doctor. Don’t right-wingers support leaving health care decisions between an American and their doctor? Or is that only when they’re fabricating lies about the Affordable Care Act? And not for nothing, but a national abortion bans would affect working families the most.

Finally, Coalition on Human Needs helps you demand that Congress reject any attempt to “cut deficits” on the backs of working families. It’s always the same damn thing with Republicans: squeal about the deficit whenever Democrats have any power after saying nothing about it when they run up deficits, and then demand cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, et cetera. Why not cut deficits by raising taxes on wealthy folks and corporations? Ha ha ha ha! Because they think wealthy folks and corporations are better than us little people! One day soon they’ll just come out and say so.

Action: concerning natural resources, public lands, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell the DRC President to stop evicting people from their homes to appease cobalt mining corporations, tell our BLM to keep Alaska public lands in public hands, and tell President Biden to get rid of Postmaster General DeJoy already. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo (or DRC) to stop evicting people from their homes so corporations can mine cobalt for electric batteries. Yes, moving from fossil fuels to more renewable energy is a good thing, but no law of nature demands that we disrupt (or end!) the lives of good citizens toward that end. Has no one considered compensating people properly for the good fortune they had in living on top of a valuable resource? Apparently not, and it ain’t just the DRC that does that, of course. But the Big Stick of Bad PR is what we’ve got here, so we better not be shy about using it.

Pew helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to keep 28 million acres of Alaska public lands out of the hands of mining and development corporations. Their latest email missive says we should “keep public lands in public hands” – now that’s a winning argument! And it rhymes! A lot of folks like things that rhyme, as you know. But our BLM is mulling whether to sell or lease this land for development, even though it supports local habitats, supports the salmon industry, and helps fight climate change. I just named three things that mining and development corporations care about far less than executive pay! So we’ve got to get to steppin’ about this matter.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to nominate two more USPS Board of Governors members who’ll oust the notorious Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. He’s been dragging his feet on this for some reason, and even if that reason is “I’ve still shoveling a lot of the horsedoodle left by my predecessor,” getting our USPS right again should be a much higher priority. Not just because of Mr. DeJoy’s legacy of higher prices, worse service, fewer jobs, and fewer Post Offices, but because our USPS delivers life-saving meds all the time, and because it might also deliver a lot of votes this year.

Action: concerning Native Americans, health care, and executive pay.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Tribal Cultural Areas Protection Act, cut funding for fake right-wing abortion “clinics,” and pass the Tax Excessive CEO Pay 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 Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Tribal Cultural Areas Protection Act, which would (as its title suggests) help Native Americans exercise their rights to cultural preservation and religious freedom on their historical lands. We have a long history of breaking every single damn treaty we ever signed with Native Americans, so establishing a Tribal Cultural Areas System (as this bill would do) would go some way toward repairing our relationship. And if it also enables Native Americans to keep polluters from spewing filth into our air and water, well, more power to them, then.

UltraViolet helps you tell your Senators to stop giving away our hard-earned tax dollars to “crisis pregnancy centers.” Our House just voted to take tax dollars away from poor children and give it to these “clinics,” but we are under no obligation to allow our Senate to do the same, whether it’s attached to a must-pass bill or not! We are not anybody’s damn hostages! And no, our hard-earned money should not fund right-wing “clinics” giving out fake ultrasound “pictures” and lying about the “connection” between abortion and suicide. Should our tax money fund efforts to spread lies about vaccinations? Well, this ain’t no different.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act. If worker productivity is up over 60% over the last 40 years, but worker pay is only up less than 18% while CEO pay is up over 1,200 percent, all ye need ask is this: did CEOs really do 1,200 times more work and only get productivity up 60%? Then how did they “earn” that money, exactly? Brook no foolishness about how CEOs deserve all that money because they “take risks.” Jesus Mary and Joseph even when they screw up they don’t lose money! It’s the cushest job on Earth!

Action: concerning banksters, bombing civilians, and executive pay.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to close bankster tax loopholes, stop using taxpayer money to bomb Palestinian civilians, and curb excessive CEO pay. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ending the Carried Interest Loophole Act. You know how banksters pay a lower tax rate than nurses and bus drivers? That’s because our laws allow them to declare the money they make managing other people’s accounts as investment income, and, as you know, our laws have taxed investment income at a lower rate than regular working families’ income since Tha Bush Mobb’s notorious second tax “reform” law. I always say income is income, but I know a few like-minded folks would want the first few grand of investment income taxed at a relatively low rate, as a way of encouraging working families to invest more. But not millions of dollars! That’s just getting over, and we shouldn’t allow rich people to get over.

MoveOn helps you tell our government to stop funding Israel’s bombing of civilians in Palestine with our tax dollars. Key phrase is “of civilians” – no one wants Hamas to flourish, but Israel’s mostly bombing civilians in Gaza, and that’s exactly the sort of thing helps Hamas flourish! I’d say it’s almost like that’s the whole idea but I’m pretty sure it is the whole idea. Imagine being Benjamin Netanyahu, finishing first in nail-biter elections but having to cobble together coalitions that collapse every year, which means more nail-biter elections. If your hold on power is that tenuous, what do you need most? An enemy. Or, you know, good works that make people want to vote for you. Anyway, we don’t need to support mass murder of civilians with our hard-earned money.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to do more to curb excessive CEO pay, particularly in the health insurance industry. Health insurance premiums outstrip inflation (yes, even 2021-22 inflation!) every year by absurd amounts, and what’s one big reason for that? The 10 highest-paid health insurance corporation CEOs earning over a billion dollars between them last year, that’s what! But do they earn that money with better services and better care? That is to laugh! We can curb CEO pay in lots of ways, like bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income. And if they call that “class warfare,” just remind them that their high costs wage actual class warfare on us every day of our lives. All so they can make more money than they’ll ever spend, money they can’t take to the Pearly Gates.

Action: concerning junk fees, safe airways, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell our FTC to fight junk fees, tell our FAA to protect our airways better, and tell our FTC to stop big oil corporation mergers. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to take the most vigorous possible action against junk fees. Remember: folks who oppose FTC action want you never to know what you’re really paying for something until it’s too late, and why would they want that? So they can steal your money more easily, that’s why. And when right-wingers say big government regulations never work, a) remember they’re full of soup and b) ask them if never getting a transparent price is OK with them, because chances are they’ve been hurt by junk fees, too. I hope these rules do us some good before the 2024 election, because you think Donald Trump will protect us from junk fees? That is to laugh – that man is the human junk fee.

Civic Shout helps you tell our Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) to start taking air traffic safety a lot more seriously. And if that means they have to use whatever lawful authority they have to ensure that we have enough air traffic controllers who get enough time off and don’t work themselves to the bone, then we’re just going to have to do that! I know “workers having enough rest and time off so they can stay sharp” is such a quaint concept – one that hinders big corporate CEOs from redistributing even more income upward, that’s for sure! – but air traffic controllers kinda have to be on their game all the time, especially with a New York Times report telling us that safety issues at airports are on the rise. So let’s make our government do the right thing.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell our FTC to stop the proposed Chevron/Hess and Exxon/Pioneer mergers. I keep saying “proposed” because I don’t want people to think that they’re done deals just because our “liberal” media reports on them like they’re already done deals – I mean, that would be tremendously disrespectful of our input, don’tcha think? And not only are they not done deals, the Biden Administration has taken antitrust policy seriously for the first time in about eight Presidents. Another reason we’ve got to tell them to do the right thing: because ten thousand corporate hacks will tell them to do the wrong thing, and spread their BS about how some monopolies are good for people. As anyone who’s paid for anything lately could tell you, they’re not.

Action: concerning health care, taxes, and executive pay.

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

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act, which would give our government the power to manufacture generic drugs wherever name-brand drugs are too expensive for good Americans to afford. Specifically, the bill would create an Office of Drug Manufacturing within our Department of Health and Human Services, and would keep drug corporation lobbyists or senior executives of such corporations that’ve broken our laws out of that department; the Office would be able to manufacture any drugs for which patents have expired, if big pharma corporations can’t produce enough of them (like what happened with Ozempic last year!) or if big pharma corporations are simply charging too much for them. This would make health care cheaper, and anyone who cries SOSHULIZMZ!!!! should really stop driving our roads if they don’t want to be hypocrites.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the OLIGARCH Act, which would establish tax rates on wealth based on median household wealth in America ($121,700 as of 2019, per our Federal Reserve), ranging from two percent on household wealth 1,000 to 10,000 times median household wealth to eight percent on household wealth 1,000,000 times median household wealth. At present, this tax would only affect folks worth over $121.7 million, and two percent of that figure would still leave those folks with a lot of money, so don’t believe the hype that it’d actually be much worse. Certainly don’t believe any slippery-slope BS that it’d eventually be 100% (a cursory examination of our history will tell you how hard it is to raise taxes on the rich). People with no arguments will say anything, but they shouldn’t win.

Finally, Take On Wall Street helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the RECOUP Act, which would literally recoup the sales of stocks and other assets that bankster executives make right before their banks crash. This just happened with both the Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank failures, so it’s not a solution in search of a problem. And don’t think of this as a punishment for things CEOs might have done; think of it as a punishment for being a bad boss. Really, you don’t have to prove that they maliciously drove their bank off the edge and cashed out before everyone else knew what was happening. I mean, that would be the way to bet! But this is a bill that would punish incompetence. Folks don’t argue they have a “right” to be incompetent if it hurts other people, do they? I guess they do. But they shouldn’t, and they certainly shouldn’t get all the say about everything.

Action: concerning executive pay, nursing homes, and junk fees.

Long story short: tell President Biden to ban corporations that pay their CEOs too much from federal contracts, tell our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to strengthen their proposed nursing home patient-to-staff nursing home ratios, and tell our CFPB to stop credit card corporations from assessing onerous fees. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Inequality.org helps you tell President Biden to stop giving out federal contracts to corporations that pay their CEOs excessively. Yeah, President Biden can do that, because Congress has given him that power through legislation! And if Congress wants to keep him from doing that, they can take his power away. In the meantime, about half of all corporations feed at the taxpayer trough, so really, the least we can do is insist that if they pay their bosses bajillions of dollars while paying their workers in dung pellets, they can’t get taxpayer largesse anymore. As fate would have it, the big automaker corporations currently facing lengthy strikes by their workers have taken hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars these last few years, so how about we, as a famous philosopher used to say in another context, just say no?

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) to strengthen their proposed patient-to-staff ratios for nursing homes. Which receive some $90 billion in Medicare and Medicaid funding annually, in case you were wondering how our government gets to set such ratios. Remember, that’s your money going to help seniors get the care they need! So let’s not leave it up to the big nursing home corporations, and certainly not to the bankster hedge fund corporations that have been gobbling up nursing homes and “cutting costs,” which always means cutting care. You didn’t think it meant cutting executive pay or hedge fund manager commissions, did you? It never means that to a worshiper of mammon. Thankfully we non-worshipers of mammon also get a say, so we should use it.

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to limit credit card late fees to $8. Because credit card corporations don’t need any more than that to pay the cost of processing late fees, that’s why! And also because $40 late fees, if borrowers don’t pay them, just get added to the borrower’s balance and thus become considerably larger. And, ah, you’ve seen your credit card’s interest rate lately, right? Credit card interest rates average over 21% today, versus about 16.25% in 2022 and 14.6% in 2021. That effect of higher Fed interest rates most assuredly doesn’t benefit working people (though other effects – like the obliteration of the low- or no-interest loans for rich folks that keep working people from buying homes – most assuredly do). So onerous late fees get a lot bigger a lot faster. And if they don't reflect a corporation's actual costs, then they're junk fees, simple and plain! Thus we tell our CFPB to keep them down.

Around the table: of price-fixing, product safety, and American "hearts."

Lee Hepner writes about fighting price-fixing when it’s algorithm-driven. Turns out the problem’s even worse than simply arguing that even if everyone’s using the same algorithm, is that really a monopoly? – it’s also judges who, in Mr. Hepner’s words, “create() a Catch-22: plaintiffs need to have more specific evidence of an unlawful conspiracy before they can begin the litigation discovery process to get that same evidence.” And folks who would characterize strong enforcement of the Sherman Act as “judicial activism” might want to consider that judges currently “re-writ(e) the law to provide immunity to price fixing.”

Factcheck.org evaluates “evidence” of corruption in re that payment from Jim Biden to his brother Joe Biden, finds it wanting. Trouble is that Rep. Comer (E-KY), when confronted with the notion that “Joe Biden provided a short-term, no interest loan to his brother, and that six weeks later James Biden paid that money back with money obtained in a business deal that did not involve Joe Biden,” has nothing to say in response but well, I don’t believe it, and if you’re going to prove wrongdoing, you’ve got to have more than that. It must be mere coincidence that their Presidential nominee for 2024 might well be in jail for actual corruption in not too long.

Uh oh: big corporation finds its breathing machines are defective – that, for example, they could “spew dangerous particles and fumes into the lungs of patients,” no lie – but tells its distributors to keep selling machines they have in stock. And these machines were defective to the tune of over 3,500 complaints over more than a decade! Is this what people mean by “CEOs take a lot of big risks you could never understand, so they deserve all that money”? It’s more likely evidence that corporations with subsidiaries in more than half the countries on Earth are too big to safely exist.

We’d best respond to a few Republican House Reps’ efforts to expel fellow Rep. George Santos – facing 23 federal charges as we speak – as drama. Two-thirds of our House Reps, not half-plus-one, would need to vote to expel Mr. Santos, meaning it almost certainly won’t happen, but the endangered House Reps in New York state calling for the expulsion vote will get to shield themselves from claims that they didn’t do enough about their colleague. And in the unlikely event it does happen, the Democrat who runs to replace him won’t have George Santos to kick around as a campaign issue. So, yeah, that’s all very clever, unless you insist, as I do, that cleverness benefit more than a handful of people.

New House Speaker Mike Johnson (E-LA) responds to Maine mass shooting by telling Sean Hannity that “the problem is the human heart, it’s not guns,” but note well the Biden Administration’s response: “We absolutely reject the offensive accusation that gun crime is uniquely high in the United States because of Americans’ ‘hearts.’” I mean, yeah, Mike Johnson, you did kinda say Americans’ “hearts” are worse than the hearts everywhere else on Earth, since "the human heart" doesn't cause nearly as many mass murders anywhere else on Earth. Golly, maybe Joe Biden isn’t as dumb as people think.

Finally, speaking of our new House Speaker, you may not know that Mike Johnson is an acolyte of David Freaking Barton, having said that Mr. Barton’s “work” “has had such a profound influence on me and my work and my life.” Of all the terrible things we’ve heard about Mike Johnson in the last week, this may be my least favorite – he’s an “acolyte” of the man who says the Founders said all kinds of right-wing crap but can’t document any of it? If you’re an acolyte of a snake-oil salesman, you’re either evil or a fool, neither of which recommends you for a leadership position, certainly.

Action: concerning voting rights, child care, consumer protection, and bankster pay.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, keep investing in child care, reject efforts to defund our CFPB, and stop banking executives from cashing out right before their banks crash. 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 freedom to vote, by passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. Yeah, Republicans won’t want to do it, but let’s frame that the way civilized people should frame it: Republicans should get with the program and do what the hell we tell them to do, regardless of how they feel about it. Representatives are supposed to represent, after all, and both the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act would not only help more good Americans vote, it will give good Americans more tools to fight back when state and local governments try to suppress their vote. And good Americans deserve that! So we should get it, regardless of what Republicans “think.”

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep investing in expanded child care across America. I mean, if you’re going to tell people to get married, and you’re going to tell people to get jobs, and you’re going to tell them to have children, and then you’re going to pay them so little that both parents have to work, then you ought to help them afford child care, which is stupid expensive for no reason other than that some folks realized they could make unearned millions off child care merely because everyone needs it. The American Rescue Plan Act expanded federal funding for child care centers during the pandemic, but now that funding’s about to expire, with child care for over three million kids about to expire along with it, so how about we not be so damn cruel?

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject legislation that would break our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Barack Obama was no dummy, so he insisted that our Federal Reserve fund our CFPB, rather than Congressional appropriations, and though our Congressfolk have no problem with such a funding structure in other contexts, they seem to get their shorts in a bunch about it with our CFPB. I wonder why. I kid, of course! I do not wonder at all! Republicans in Congress want to zero out CFPB funding whenever they like so they can do the bidding of their big bankster donors – and this they want to do when banksters remain approximately the most unpopular people in America! And unpopular across the political spectrum, I might add! So let’s remind our Congressfolk who their real bosses are. It’s us. We’re their real bosses.

Finally, Take On Wall Street helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the RECOUP Act, so that we can finally prevent banksters from making craploads of money the week before their banks crash. Yes, this happened just recently! Silicon Valley Bank’s CEO sold over $3.5 million of stock right before SVB collapsed, while executives at First Republic Bank sold around $12 million of stock in the months before that bank went under; nice work if you can get it! Seriously, if they tell people their bank is doing fine, and then unload millions of bucks in stocks in their own bank, they’re saying that they lied to all those people when they said their bank was doing fine! I guess they think they’re OK because we may not have their lies on tape, but their actions gave away their lies, and anyway there’s no Constitutional right to millions of dollars in compensation when folks hurt all the people whose money they were holding for them, for “safekeeping.” This is Civilization 101 stuff.

Action: concerning bankster pay, big ag, and food safety.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the RECOUP Act, reject the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression Act, and pass the Expanded Food Safety Investigation 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.

Take On Wall Street helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Recovering Executive Compensation Obtained from Unaccountable Practices (or RECOUP) Act. Remember how the Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic, and Signature Bank (the last one had Barney Frank as a director, ha ha) all collapsed a little over six months ago? And did you know that Silicon Valley Bank’s CEO sold over $3 million in stock right before its collapse and a few First Republic executives sold about $12 million in stock in the months before its collapse? The RECOUP Act would, as its acronym implies, allow our government to recoup such executive compensation a full two years before a bank collapse. Maybe that’ll teach executives that they’re supposed to look out for their customers before they look out for themselves! OK, perhaps not. But if we don’t come out in force for this bill, it’ll be much harder to provide such teachable moments to executives in the future.

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression Act. The bill sure sounds like it has a good name, but it’s an Orwellian title like so many others: it would nullify any state and local laws governing animal cruelty and food safety, which I have to say is real fucking “small government” of them! Right-wingers insist that the smallest communities know best how to govern themselves – until those communities stand up to right-wingers’ big ag paymasters and won’t allow them to put animals in cages in which they can barely stand or pollute their rivers with hog poop. I think the smallest community should get to set stricter standards without worrying about how billionaire corporations will cope – and if they want to set looser standards, we have to make damn sure they don't hurt anyone else. But you don’t get to have “states’ rights” just to oppress Black and Brown folks but not for anything else. End of.

Finally, in a related note, the Center for Science in the Public Interest helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Expanded Food Safety Investigation Act, which would allow Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) and Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) workers to go into factory farms and sample the kinds of diseases animals have that people could get. No use squealing BUTZ TEH ADMINISTRATIVZ STATEZ!!!!! about this, since a disease doesn’t respect state or local boundary lines any more than processed food does. How are we going to stop pandemics if we don’t deploy people to where they might be able to stop them? And why must corporate profits always be more important than our health, or our civilization? Folks who’d want to “debate” these matters should have no say about a damn thing in America.

Around the table: the trials and tribulations of evil, part 989.

I hear that several airline corporations are finding fake parts in their planes, but Jesus Mary and Joseph it’s not a “supplier scandal,” regardless of how badly any particular supplier acts, but an executive pay scandal. I mean, why aren’t airline corporations making their own damn parts? Because that would require them to employ people who do that, and everyone knows slashing jobs is the way to goose up stock prices. Fly the friendly skies!

Ho hum, producer of putatively anti-child trafficking film gets nailed for fondling an underage girl’s breasts. He can say he was going undercover to expose evil and playing a part all he wants, but if he does that, he can’t also say anyway, I thought she was 18! That’s what they all say when they get caught, and saying so means he wasn't confident in your excuses, for some reason. Because they’re lies. That's the reason.

University of Toledo scientists develop method for keeping snow off solar panels, so now would be a good time to mention that when you hear that snow causes a 5 to 15% power loss, keep in mind that’s not a reason to abandon all renewable energy like right-wingers would have you do, but it is a reason to work to make solar panels more effective. We don’t let the perfect murder the good, as right-wingers would have us do, but we still strive for the best.

Judge orders loanshark freed by Donald Trump to repay millions to all the small businesses he bilked. Please don’t let Donald Trump’s follies sour you on the concept of mercy, since that’s almost certainly what he’s trying to do, by being so bad at doling out mercy. I am a little confused as to how going after financial predators could be “partisan.” “Because Letitia James’s doing it” is not a reason.

If I were more (or less) spiritually-advanced I might laugh at the news that several of Rudy Giuliani’s former lawyers are suing him for $14 million in unpaid legal bills, given that Donald Trump appears to have stiffed Mr. Giuliani for similar reasons. As they say, shit rolls downhill. But maybe these clowns can write them off as pro bono hours?

When I hear that Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) might be looking for a gig as a punditoid on CNN, I feel compelled to say that he’s a better Congressman than I ever thought he’d be after his awful Tea-Party-by-the-numbers 2010 Senate campaign, but I also feel compelled to say that all the things he’s been good on (tech monopolies, the Biden impeachment) haven’t yielded actual results. Why, it’s almost like that’s the whole idea, again. I’d be happy to be wrong! But I’m probably not wrong.

Finally, when I hear that now-former Fox News Chair Rupert Murdoch hired Tucker Carlson because he thought he was a moderate who’d balance out Sean Hannity’s rabid Trumpism, all I can say is: pimp, stop lying. Rupert Murdoch knew perfectly well what he was doing, which was continuing to make money off keeping Americans in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage. After all, it beats working for a living!

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning taxes, energy efficiency, and voting.

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

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

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

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

Around the table: the Tulsa massacre *was* racist! And other truths.

When I hear that ”(t)he stock market is not loving Thursday’s job data,” I must ask if we need any more evidence that worshiping the stock market is evil. It’s all big corporations do now, and it hollows out our economy and ensures misery for most of us, so we need to fight it with every breath. (ADP’s job creation data, which reports that our economy gained almost 500,000 jobs in June, reported more than twice as much job growth than the Department of Labor, which reported a hair over 200,000 jobs. Either way, it’s not hard to tell right from wrong here, unless you worship mammon like our corporate CEOs do.)

Thinking maybe North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson was just calling for us to read the works of Hitler and Stalin and Mao more closely in his remarks before Moms for Liberty? Well, when you learn that Mr. Robinson has a history of saying racist and anti-Semitic crap on social media, you won’t think that anymore. Isn’t this about the point where Republicans decide they need to support someone who loves Nazis but isn’t so obvious about it? And who needs to read Mein Kampf just to be sure Hitler was an evil bastard?

When I heard that the New York Times clutched its pearls over Brazilian judges banning Jair Bolsonaro from running for office for the next eight years for the crime of election fraud, the very first thing I thought was: where were they when Brazilian judges were ginning up impeachment charges against one liberal President and throwing another liberal in jail so he couldn’t beat Mr. Bolsonaro in a Presidential race? The answer, of course: spewing forth over three dozen articles sympathizing with the Brazilian justice system. Read the whole thing, because the details are even worse than the summary.

Canadian judge counts a thumbs-up emoji as a contract agreement, meaning the emoji-ing farmer is out over $60,000, and while I might agree that an emoji could constitute a contract agreement in other circumstances, I could not count it as a contract agreement when the questioner merely asked if the emoji-er received the contract. Receiving a contract and approving it are two different things! Sounds like a judge is trying to force a point without adhering to the law or common sense; sound familiar, good Americans?

Donald Trump says he’ll do his next Muslim ban even bigly-er than his last one if he gets re-elected, though I’m not sure that declaration diddles the rage gland of even his most devoted followers; maybe anti-Muslim hate can be reactivated, but more likely they’ve moved on to new hatreds, like anti-racist teaching in schools. But don’t expect that declaration to attract moderates, either – he can talk all he wants about people “blowing up our shopping centers,” but I think everyone knows by now that the face of American terror is white and male, and its heart is right-wing and bigoted.

Finally, Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Schools suggests that we shouldn’t tell kids that the Tulsa massacre of 1921 was racist because “that is Critical Race Theory” and “kids should never be made to feel bad or told they are inferior based on the color of their skin.” He’s tried to backtrack, largely because good Oklahomans seem to protest his every appearance and good for them, but let me just say that when I learned about slavery as a child, I didn’t take it so damn personal because I knew that I didn’t enslave anyone. Sure, I came to understand privilege later, but right-wingers will never get there, because that’s wisdom, and wisdom is their Kryptonite.

Readings for June 28, 2023.

Wendell Potter writes at The Lever about the direct relationship between runaway health insurance CEO pay and higher prices for regular folks. Remember when they tied CEO pay to “performance”? Sounded like a great idea, didn’t it? But in practice, it meant tying CEO pay to increasing stock values – not to developing better products or delivering better services – which means executives get rich by bleeding their companies dry and handing out money to shareholders. Now they get rich by (among other evils) jacking up out-of-pocket expenses so much that over 100 million Americans now have medical debt and you or someone you love will soon be “functionally uninsured.” Wendell Potter’s forgotten more than I’ll ever know about health insurance shenanigans, partly because he partook in them for so long; his work exposing private health insurance horrors over the last 15 years redeems him.

Akilah Wise at Capital B takes some pains to say that scientists don’t really know why some 80% of Black women suffer from uterine fibroids – or why they get them earlier, or why they’re more painful – but by the time you assess her argument, you’ll pretty much come away saying it’s the racism. At least, that’s what I did – you don’t even have to believe “weathering” (or “gradual whittling of Black people’s health due to the chronic stress of racial discrimination”) is a thing to trace human hormone disrupters, dietary and nutritional deficiencies, and higher stress pretty much to institutionalized racism. No, I’m not exaggerating! Do white folks more likely live near polluting power plants, or do Blacks? Do white folks have less access to money and privilege and therefore also better food, or do Blacks? Do white folks fear their next police contact will be their last one, or do Blacks? We could go on about this. Remember, though, that privilege isn’t so much about the help you got as the obstacles you didn’t have to face.

KNKX Public Radio offers a detailed look at “How liberal Seattle created a powerful conservative influencer: Christopher Rufo,” and it’s worth reading, but I quarrel with the notions that a) Seattle “created” him and b) Seattle is all that liberal. Mr. Rufo doesn’t differ dramatically from other right-wingers – he made his bones offering a “conservative” critique of Seattle’s homeless problem, but he did it the same way all right-wingers do everywhere, with “non-sequiturs, factual errors and ahistorical claims.” And we’ve got to get past the notion that cities are “liberal” merely because they're more tolerant; a real “liberal” city would also fund public services, which cities are too afraid to do in the post-Reagan era. Also too, “witnessing authoritarianism up close in China” doesn’t “turn people conservative,” because liberalism doesn’t equal authoritarianism except to those who don’t like liberalism. Seattle didn’t “create” Mr. Rufo – we did, by abandoning our duty to preserve and advance civilization.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning justice, pollution, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell our Department of Justice to investigate Mika Westwolf’s death, tell Pennsylvania state legislators to better protect good Pennsylvanians from fracking, and tell Delaware state legislators to let felons vote and not to let corporations vote. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: MoveOn helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate the suspicious death of Mika Westwolf, a 22-year-old Native American woman killed while walking along Montana’s Route 93 on March 31. That’s almost three months ago, good peoples, and with the Montana Highway Patrol refusing to release dash cam and body cam footage, and with no nearby businesses being contacted, apparently, for surveillance footage, it sure does seem like justice will come slowly, as it tends to do for Black and Brown folks in America. Oh, and the main suspect has Aryan Nations ties; you’d sure hate to think the police might want to sweep this under the rug for that reason. So let’s find that out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning education, monopolies, and banksters.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” block the proposed PGA/LIV merger, and pass the Failed Bank Executives Clawback Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

Around the table: now with even more beatdowns for drama hounds!

Fresh off giving us exactly zero criminal allegations against President Biden and his son on “Judgment Day,” now our House Oversight Committee has started investigating FTC Chair Lina Khan, supposedly for “acting in defiance of legal precedent” (it’s not like we’ve had antitrust laws on the books for over a hundred years or anything!) and for “deviat(ing) from its mission to protect America’s consumer,” by which they must mean America’s job-killing CEOs who can no longer redistribute your income upward to themselves as easily as they could when we just let them buy whatever corporations they wanted whenever they wanted. Good luck with all of that, Gomer, ahem, Comer.

Ho hum, our “liberal” media falls all over itself calling the whole debt limit “deal” a “triumph of bipartisanship.” An alien confronting this phenomenon for the first time would conclude that “bipartisanship” must mean “when one side gets some of its aims enacted and the other side doesn’t,” and very little “liberal” media coverage from the last several decades would dissuade them from that conclusion. Also too, we hear more than enough from our “liberal” media about “winners and losers” among the political parties, but not nearly enough about whether we the American people win or lose with these debt limit dramas.

In a related note, ha ha ha the debt limit “deal” has a good chance of actually increasing spending on food stamps! Of course, actually doing something was never a Republican aim – with Republicans these days, the only aim is drama. Less a laughing matter, of course, is that decreased IRS spending, which Republicans just had to have, will increase the deficit, because our IRS won’t be able to go after rich tax cheats as well as they could before. Still, the debt limit deal managed to preserve over two-thirds of the Inflation Reduction Act’s boost in IRS funding, and as Saul Alinsky might say, if you start with nothing and you get something, you win. (Republicans could say it, too, except they’re afraid of getting radical leftist cooties.)

The incomparable Sonali Kohatkar reminds us that when we advocate for a four-day work week, we need to attend the pitfalls! Like, for example, corporate efforts to cram 40 hours into four days when it should be 32 hours, or our need to make the same money in a 32-hour work week as in a 40-hour work week, or the temptation to use the shorter work week to do more side hustles (when working less is the entire point!). Personal to anyone who responds with “no one wants to work anymore”: virtually every economist worth a damn will tell you that people are far, far more productive today than they were even 50 years ago, so CTFO.

The Columbia Journalism Review tells us about Defector, the worker-owned sports/culture media website that has billed itself, not without justification, as “the last good website.” (Full disclosure: I pay real cash money to read it; Drew Magary’s annual “Why Your Team Sucks” NFL previews are alone worth the price of admission, but the other stuff is also terrific.) So much about Defector is great that I went and digged through this article for criticisms, and here they are: they don’t get many scoops and they don’t cover controversial topics like sports betting very much, each exactly the kind of editorial quirk you’d find in a worker-owned media outlet, not that I'd know that from experience or anything.

And now here comes Cornel West to declare a run for President and actually make me think twice about declaring my vote for Joe Biden months ago. Like Bernie, he supports all the right things, and his candidacy is far, far better news than that of antivaxxer Robert Kennedy, Jr.; Mr. West is probably about as well-known as any American scholar, but still not as well-known as, say, almost any reality TV star, and if you’re still afraid he’ll take enough votes from Joe Biden to elect Donald Trump, I would refer you to the election of 1948, where an unpopular Harry Truman faced two Democrats running to his left and right in the general election and still got over 300 electoral votes. (If Mr. Trump somehow loses the nomination and still runs as an “independent” – which of course he will, because grift – Joe Biden might get 400 electoral votes whether Cornel West is running or not.)

Finally, when I hear that Donald Trump wants to know exactly who in our FBI and Justice Department is actually working on active federal probes into his misbehavior, I’m beyond thinking he’ll purge them all if he wins another term as President. I mean, of course he will! And his millions of votaries who all squeal TEH LAWZ ANDZ TEH ORDURZ!!!!! when police kill another Black man for brandishing a cellphone will all cheer him on. But it couldn’t be that Mr. Trump wants their identities exposed so his votaries kill them before he has to purge them, could it? After all, as any boss knows, it’s so much better to get volunteers to do your work for you than people you have to pay – or, in his case, people you try to avoid paying.

Action: concerning health care and Congressional corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare to include all Americans and outlaw ownership or trade of stocks by members of Congress. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to tax the rich and corporations harder and pass the Reward Work Act and the Ruby Mountains Protection Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

Around the table: ChatGPT is "way stupider than people realize"! And other total non-surprises.

Now it can be told: an AI expert informs us that “ChatGPT is Way Stupider Than People Realize,” because “large language models are good at...saying what an answer should sound like, which is different from what an answer should be.” If you were one of the many teachers who easily detected your students farming out their essays to AI, you already understand this. Of course, if you’re a CEO desperately trying to cut jobs so you can pretend your corporation’s “efficient” and thus goose up your stock prices beyond what any moral or economic reality would justify, then your job depends on you not understanding this. (And sadly, “(i)t gives an answer with complete confidence, and I sort of believe it. And half the time, it’s completely wrong” might as well describe almost any politician you’ve heard of.)

Ho hum, Gov. DeSantis (F-FL) is putting his state workers’ pension funds into the grubby hands of underperforming hedge funds that donated to his campaigns because of course he is. After all, if you want to present yourself to rich right-wing donors as an electable candidate, you can’t just do the culture war stuff, you also have to do the grift! Meanwhile, public employees in Florida haven’t gotten a cost-of-living increase in 15 years! I’d say it doesn’t pay to make everything subservient to one man’s power, but a significant part of Florida’s population apparently doesn’t care, and deserves whatever horrors befall them. (My estimate that a quarter of the electorate is batshit insane applies nationally; surely some states have more batshit insane voters than others.)

Lo and behold, former Rep. Kurt Schrader (D?-OR), who did his damnedest to kill Medicare drug price negotiation even though over 80% of Americans strongly support it, has just gotten a job for a big pharma lobbyist. I wonder if that’s a good hire, considering that his name is now dogshit. I’ll never forget the why-am-I-here-don’t-waste-my-time-just-elect-me-already look on his face as he “debated” the woman who ultimately defeated him in the 2022 Democratic primary – or his whining afterward that the Republican wave of 2022 would begin in his district. His district did flip, but narrowly, and, ah, what wave? I would like to think the times are passing Kurt Schrader by, though big lobbying money might prevent him from realizing that for a little while.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that our Surgeon General says that social media can present “a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” When you’re on social media, you always feel like you’re performing, and why do kids really need that sort of pressure? So they can handle it later? That’s like setting people on fire to prepare them for an eternity in hell. This is why sane people like us have been telling social media to avoid roping kids in. After all, our Congressfolk are about as hands-off about social media as they are about guns – or financial predators. (Our Surgeon General’s advisory does inform us that social media can help marginalized folks find each other and support each other. I have no doubt that’s true – until Elon Musk takes over!)

Ho hum, ”The U.S. Is Unhappy That Mexico Is Spending Money on Its Own Citizens.” One day we’re going to take a good, hard look at our history – and not just our history, but the history of every nation that ever ruled the Earth – and we’re going to find that even when we treated our own citizens well, we did it on the backs of nations that treated their citizens like dung. My hope is that when regular folks read sentences like “President Lopez Obrador’s federal budget for 2023 gives priority to social spending and signature infrastructure projects, rather than the investments needed to address bilateral issues with the U.S. such as migration, security, and trade,” they’ll see it for the whining it is. (AMLO has cooperated with the U.S. more on immigration, though I doubt he’ll ever get much out of that.)

Finally, because the news can’t be all bad, scientists at U. Mass-Amherst have developed technology that can harvest electricity from air moisture, even in the Sahara desert. All my peeps on the Eastern Seaboard are no doubt exclaiming at last! A use for all this damn humidity!, but this technology can work with any amount of humidity in the air, though I imagine it’ll be less effective in the desert. Now comes the part where the big corporations that fund scientific breakthroughs sit on the funding that could make this technology affordable and available to all. Have I mentioned that government funding would comprise an alternative to this reality? Yes, I believe I have.

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 bankster pay, fuel efficiency, and uranium pollution.

Long story short: tell our SEC to curb CEO pay at crashed banks, tell our EPA to enact the strongest possible fuel efficiency standards, and tell the Biden Administration to keep uranium mining corporations away from the Grand Canyon. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to write the most vigorous clawback rule possible for bank executives. The Dodd-Frank law mandated that our SEC write a rule allowing our government to “claw back” CEO compensation after a bank fails, and sadly, our SEC is just now getting around to writing it, but we might as well take this opportunity to help give banksters a reason not to take massive risks with our money that crash banks. As it is now, banks crash and the CEOs get a golden parachute to go away – and that hardly ensures they’ll take care of our money, does it? A good clawback rule will do much better by us.

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the strongest fuel efficiency standards possible. Because literally no one on Earth says I want my car to be less fuel-efficient so that I can pollute more and pay more for gas! Auto CEOs may make all kinds of excuses so they don’t have to make better cars, but we don’t have to listen to them. And certainly don’t let people tell you that stronger fuel efficiency standards mean nothing because we’re still driving and driving means polluting. We don’t let the perfect murder the good, and no law of physics says you can’t support stronger fuel efficiency standards and a more walkable world at the same time.

Demand Progress helps you tell the Biden Administration to keep uranium mining corporations away from the Grand Canyon. Allowing uranium mining to pollute the drinking water around the Grand Canyon area would come perilously close to is nothing sacred? territory. I mean, anyone who’s ever seen the Grand Canyon wouldn’t want any kind of pollution nearby, even before they realize that the Colorado River that runs through the Canyon provides clean drinking water to seven U.S. states. And those who insist you can have both the Grand Canyon and uranium mining are wrong – once uranium mining corporations come in, clean water goes, and once it’s gone, we ain’t getting it back.

Readings for May 16, 2023: special "AI's creators still suck!" edition.

Naomi Klein surveys the AI landscape and concludes that tech CEOs are “kidding themselves” that AI will “benefit humanity.” Benefit their continuing efforts to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes, maybe! “There is a world in which generative AI, as a powerful predictive research tool and a performer of tedious tasks, could indeed be marshaled to benefit humanity,” she writes. “But for that to happen, these technologies would need to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social order than our own, one that had as its purpose the meeting of human needs and the protection of the planetary systems that support all life.” They’d also have to happen in a world where big corporations had any respect for data and the folks who create it, which, of course, they do not. Also too, it’s a bit rich for Our Glorious Elites to say “AI will solve the problems” that Our Glorious Elites could already have helped us solve, if they but had the will.

In a related note, Alex Pareene at Defector reminds us that “The Computers Are Coming for the Wrong Jobs.” AI “is well-suited at the task of blandly rewriting copy, which makes it the perfect employee of the sorts of content mills that exist to aggregate and rewrite tech or entertainment news,” but not so good at, you know, any kind of expression that requires an understanding of language, which certainly includes the kind of scriptwriting that big corporations seem to think is so easy for some reason. (No use telling me most big Hollywood scripts follow the same template these days, because, as we all know, those templates come and go.) Also, “AI as it currently exists – that is, “large language model” programs like ChatGPT – only appears ‘free’ or even ‘cheap’ because it is being heavily subsidized by investors and tech companies that hope to eventually pass along the costs of training and operating these programs to clients like, say, large film and television studios.”

While we’re still on the subject of scriptwriting, turns out the Hollywood writers’ strike “shows how to fight back” against corporations wanting to “replace” you with AI. They’re demanding that studios not replace them with AI, and if they can hold out, they’ll get what they want – and they’ll teach the rest of us that we can protect our jobs, too, since corporations are coming after all of them, not just the ones that produce words. And don’t be heartened by the notion that big entertainment corporations just want to generate scripts with AI and have humans rewrite them so they don’t suck, because studios pay less for rewrites than for original writing. Anyway, don’t watch any scab- or AI-written entertainment; it won’t kill you to give, say, Mad Men another go, and remind yourself what real writing is like.

Finally, this Associated Press report warns that AI-generated ad content could be far worse than deepfakes and memefarms. “Sophisticated generative AI tools can now create cloned human voices and hyper-realistic images, videos and audio in seconds, at minimal cost,” they write. “When strapped to powerful social media algorithms, this fake and digitally created content can spread far and fast and target highly specific audiences, potentially taking campaign dirty tricks to a new low.” Indeed, the Republican National Committee has already created an ad full of AI-generated images (which they identified as AI) of boarded-up storefronts and crime waves coming from Brown people, but at least two can play at that game. Just wait until I get around to creating an AI ad showing what America would be like if Republicans took over; I bet Congress would ban AI in campaign ads with a quickness!

Action: concerning debt limit drama.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protect Our CREDIT Act, raise corporate taxes, and tax private jet usage harder. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protect Our CREDIT Act, which would allow our President to raise the debt limit as necessary. Because Republicans constantly try to hold us all hostage with the debt limit, so they can cut services we all pay for and depend upon! I hate giving Presidents more power, but you know what I hate even more? Politicians who take us hostage so they can hurt us. And no, it wouldn’t violate Article I, Section 7 of our Constitution, which says “All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives”; the debt limit isn’t about "raising Revenue" so much as the revenue already raised and spent.

In a peripherally-related note, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise, not cut, corporate taxes. Yes, corporations are also using the debt limit to extract more corporate welfare they couldn’t extract without a hostage crisis; the link above lists some of those. And none of the little accounting tricks on corporate wish lists create jobs – seriously, can anyone argue that letting corporations write off assets 10 years in advance “creates jobs”? No, they cannot – they just enable corporate executives to redistribute yet more of your hard-earned income upward to themselves. Republicans sure do enjoy giving us the back of their hand, but we don’t have to take it.

Finally, in another peripherally-related note, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax private jet usage harder, not least because that’s about the most wasteful form of travel there is. Problem, of course, is too many Congressfolk have either taken rides in private jets or have private jets! Clearly they don’t understand the whole idea of serving the people. But private jets now make up about one-sixth of all flights while contributing very little to our Federal Aviation Administration, plus they use runways and airports paid for by what? Taxpayer dollars, that’s what. And these planes just piss out carbon emissions. So yeah, we’ve got to tax them harder.

Action: concerning "free" trade, housing policy, and fuel emissions.

Long story short: tell Indo-Pacific Trade Deal negotiators to put people and planet above profits, share your story about background checks and renting apartments with our CFPB, and tell our EPA and NHTSA to enact the most vigorous fuel emissions standards possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Trade Justice helps you tell Indo-Pacific Trade Deal negotiators to ensure that any trade deal prioritize people and our planet over profits. If you think of the notorious “Trans-Pacific Partnership” when you hear about a proposed Indo-Pacific Trade Deal, I wouldn’t blame you, and frankly, I’d prefer no “free” trade deal at all. But our leaders may finally be listening to us; after all, the USMCA trade deal is a dramatic improvement upon NAFTA – for which both former President Trump and House Democrats deserve credit – and I certainly don’t let the perfect murder the good. Still, we should remain on our guard, so that we don’t let the evil murder the good, either.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your story about background checks and renting apartments to our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB). Our CFPB wants comments about this matter, particularly because we all suspect that landlords use background checks to raise rents, and don’t let folks retort so what, landlords will use any excuse to raise your rent, because the whole point of this particular CFPB rulemaking process is to prevent landlords from using any excuse to raise your rent! And background checks tell us nothing about someone’s ability to pay rent.

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (or NHTSA) to enact the strongest fuel-emission standards possible. Don’t listen to the folks who say all regulations hurt small businesses, because how many small businesses manufacture cars? Exactly. Also, regulations capping fuel emissions result in cars that get more miles to the gallon, pollute less, and cost less to fill up. Who could possibly be against these things? Oh, right, auto manufacturing corporate executives, who don’t want to spend money to make money. They shouldn’t get all the say about this matter – but they will, if we don’t speak up.