Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning our Post Office, offshore drilling, "Instagram for kids," fossil fuel drilling, and right-wing news.

Long story short: tell President Biden to reform our Postal Service and end offshore drilling, tell Facebook to abandon its plans to let children use Instagram, tell AXA's CEO to stop insuring fossil fuel projects, and tell AT&T to abandon One America News Network. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to fire USPS Board of Governors member Ron Bloom and USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy already. He should have already fired Mr. DeJoy merely for slowing down the mail and charging more for it, because why should we tolerate paying more to get our medicine and ballots and Social Security checks slower? I'm old enough to remember when merely proposing such a thing would get you laughed out of the room. But apparently Mr. Bloom stands in the way of our USPS Board of Governors firing Mr. DeJoy, and even better, Mr. DeJoy has invested with a fund Mr. Bloom runs, which sure smells of corruption even if we never put either man in jail for it. If Mr. Biden replaces Mr. Bloom, we're all one step closer to replacing Mr. DeJoy, at which point hallelujah!

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell President Biden to end offshore drilling. You don't need to stop with the recent spill of the Southern California coast -- you need only remember the Exxon Valdez spill and the BP Spillageddon in the Gulf of Mexico, both of which were avoidable and took forever to clean up because corporations don't like paying to clean up their messes. President Biden wouldn't just be fulfilling a campaign promise by ending offshore drilling -- he'd also open up space for the wind farms he wants to line America's coasts, as I imagine it would be difficult to do both things in the same spot. And if I had to pick, I'd rather have the turbines out there -- no, they won't kill all the birds, and no, they won't make you sick, and no, they won't be so noisy you can't function. And we might get to keep our planet.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell Facebook to abandon its ill-conceived (and ill-concealed!) plans to hook children on Instagram. You no doubt know from multitudinous news reports that Facebook knew that young girls who used Instagram had much worse body images than girls who didn't, and it was still like pulling teeth to get them to "suspend" their plans for an Instagram for Kids app. And don't let anyone justify Instagram-for-Kids by saying "they're just going to find a way to get it anyway," not just because defeatism is unworthy of a civilized people, but because our job, as adults, isn't necessarily to play catch-up with social media so much as to give our kids spiritual nourishment so they don't run to social media for it. Old-fashioned of me, I know.

Sum of Us helps you tell AXA CEO Thomas Buberl to stop insuring new gas and oil projects. He's supposedly going to decide on that matter this week, and AXA (which operates mainly in Europe and the Middle East) was the first big insurance corporation to refuse to insure new coal projects, but we still need to let AXA know we're watching, not least because we also know big oil and gas drilling corporations are also watching, and preparing to drown out our voices with the power of big money. Oh, and also their "expertise," which is mainly expertise in BSing and gaslighting. When that's all they got, we need to oppose them, in numbers they cannot mistake. The only way to beat big money is to fight big money, after all -- and our victories today guarantee more victories in the future, as long as we keep working.

Finally, Color of Change helps you tell AT&T to end financial support for the One America News Network. Just because AT&T might have wanted "its own conservative (sic) news network" years ago doesn't mean we have to put up with all the rage-inducing crap on TV news today -- and since AT&T is apparently OAN's sole funder, the first blow we strike might be the decisive one. OAN are the people who tell you lies about the 2020 election, lies about COVID vaccines, lies about the January 6 attempted coup, lies about Black civil rights activists, and lies about how "oppressed" white folks are. They're also the folks who think that people who "believe" Joe Biden won the 2020 election should be executed for treason. I want the assholes who say such things to get the oblivion they deserve. They sure don't deserve more corporate money.

Around the table: and now for another exciting chapter of "weak Democrats, insane Republicans."

When I hear that a majority of Americans don't know exactly what's in the Build Back Better plan, I'm inclined to say, no shit, Sherlock! The fact that Democrats allow the discussion to be all about "how much money we're going to spend" leads me to think they're all trying to tank it, not just the Manchin/Sinema/Gottheimer/Cuellar axis. I mean, if they told media outlets and their constituents "we want to lower drug prices, get everyone paid family leave, and cut taxes for working families, and we're going to pay for all of that by raising taxes on the rich and on corporations," people like Joe Manchin and Henry Cuellar would be irrelevant, because their own constituents would be raising hell with them in a way they couldn't avoid. It's sad that Democrats have forgotten how this works -- or, perhaps more precisely, "forgotten."

In a related development, four Senate Democrats say they won't back the Build Back Better Act if Joe Manchin guts all the climate change provisions in the bill. That's as it should be! Of course, no good deed goes unpunished in America, so liberals will get all the blame if this all fails, despite the fact that, again, it's been the Manchin/Sinema/Gottheimer/Cuellar axis saying "no" to things most American people want this whole time. (Also, the gas drilling corporations say we shouldn't enact a methane emissions tax because the cost "would be felt by consumers," as if said corporations have literally nothing to do with passing on that cost, and as if we should merely tolerate corporations doing immoral crap.)

Here's some good news: 20 state Attorneys General have sued to stop the DeJoy plan to cripple our Post Office, and oh boy the suit claims that Mr. DeJoy didn't follow the law in making changes to services and prices. Sound familiar? Of course it does -- it's the thing that tripped up every Trump Administration rule that died in court, which was a lot of them. You can't just do whatever you want in the Executive branch, and our Founders would spin in their graves to observe that, even if none of them could have foreseen a phenomenon such as the Administrative Procedure Act.

When I hear that Terry McAuliffe is hopping mad that the House didn't pass the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal," I feel compelled to wonder why he thinks this is the hill to die on. He knows full well why it didn't pass -- because actual liberals knew if it passed, right-wing Democrats in the Senate would kill the larger Build Back Better Act -- so he indulges in hippie-punching like it's 1993. He deserves to lose -- but more to the point, Democrats deserve to lose as long as they act like cowards. (I say "act like," of course, because, as I've suggested, I think they are acting -- they want to keep things the way they are, and losing their Congressional majorities in 2022 to fascists is part of the plan.)

Lawrence Torcello at The Conversation tells us "How Columbus Day Contributes to the Cultural Erasure of Italian-Americans." You may find that counter-intuitive, particularly if you're sensitive to how badly America's treated Italian immigrants over the years (and if you know that Columbus Day observances began as a sop to ill-treated Italian-Americans), but I'm an Italian-American myself and I'd much rather celebrate Chef Boyardee Day. I'm not kidding -- everyone eats spaghetti now, only because Ettore Boiardi made it seem less foreign to large numbers of Americans. Or how about a day for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ida Lupino, or Alan Alda?

Finally, Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post wonders "How Dumb Can a Nation Get and Still Survive?" Sympathetic as I am to his frustration over lies about masks and vaccines, I've long said it's not stupidity per se that afflicts us, but rage -- Fox News has been enraging folks en masse since at least 2002, and now they have a lot of imitators, both in media and in politics. Hate to sound like a broken record, but it'd help if Democrats would do good works with their power when they have it, lest we all witness the spectacle of a decisive number of voters actually preferring fascists to weaklings.

Action: concerning Medicare, home care, taxes, drug prices, and corporate welfare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the full Build Better Act, raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, enable Medicare to negotiate drug prices, tell Congress to lower drug prices for everyone, and end corporate welfare for fossil fuel corporations. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

With Build Back Better Act text coming within a day or two, now would be a good time to call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass the full bill, with all $3.5 trillion of planned spending. That means (among other things!) expanding Medicare and expanding home- and community-based care services, since these are the two initiatives Congress will most likely drop from the bill. But wait! What about what Joe Manchin wants? Everybody asks that, but not enough of us ask, "what about what we want?" I find it hard to believe that the American people would object to expanding Medicare, since clear majorities in poll after poll find that Americans want everyone on Medicare. I also find it hard to believe that the American people would object to spending on the home- and community-based care that we're all going to need sooner or later. But in order to prove that, we have to speak out.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise all $3.5 trillion for the Build Back Better Act from higher taxes on the rich and on corporations. But wait! What about the Unspeakable Nine in the House Democratic caucus? Again, the correct question is "what about what we want?" The American people have, again, demonstrated in poll after poll that we want to tax the rich and corporations a lot harder than we're currently doing; we have demonstrated this, in poll after poll, despite being relentless propagandized by the politicians and our "liberal" media about the "harm" higher taxes on the rich and corporations would do. And again, we have to speak out in order to prove it -- particularly since the winged monkeys of the right are certainly speaking out.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to close the "stepped-up basis" loophole which enables the rich to avoid taxes on investments. The rich have gamed the system well enough that they never have to sell an investment to get cash -- they can just go get a loan using their investment as collateral for that loan, sheltering their investment from taxation. Don't believe the hype about closing this loophole affecting family farms and small businesses, because the Biden proposal specifically exempts these businesses, as long as the owners hold onto them. "Stepped-up basis" sounds pretty inside baseball, I know, but that doesn't mean your will to close it should count less than the will of some PR hack who makes a living confusing everyone. Your will is your will, and your representatives need to respect that.

Public Citizen still helps you tell your Congressfolk to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. "Moderate" Democrats stand ready to proclaim that we "can't afford" that, but if Medicare can negotiate drug prices, it will save the taxpayer money. As literally any sentient life form would tell you! Let alone the right-wingers at the Mercatus Center, who told us in 2018 (not that they, ah, foregrounded this information) that Medicare drug price negotiation would save us $84 billion annually, meaning $840 billion over 10 years, meaning about one-fourth of the total price of the Build Back Better Act. Does that mean we should still raise all that money from the rich and from corporations? Of course we should! But we should also enact policy that would make Medicare run better for less money. And if the big pharma corporations don't like it, well, again, we need to stop asking about them, and we need to start asking about us.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower drug prices for everyone in America. Medicare drug price negotiation would do wonders for the drug prices our seniors pay, but we all deserve lower drug prices. Seriously, should we merely tolerate corporations that charge a thousand dollars monthly for life-preserving insulin just because they can? Should we tolerate corporations charging $600 for an EpiPen that cost them far less to produce? No, we are civilized people, so we should not tolerate that. And if any of your friends or family tell you that folks should eat better so they don't become diabetic, remember that if any of them become diabetic, they'll assume they worked hard to avoid it whether they really did or not. Pretty much everyone is like that, and civilized people don't assign blame so much as solve problems.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to end fossil fuel subsidies. If they cost us over $20 billion annually, that's $200 billion over 10 years, or around five percent of the cost of the Build Back Better Act; five percent ain't a lot, but surely every dollar counts, particularly when it's our dollars they're talking about. Fossil fuels hardly need the welfare handouts we give them, not when they monopolize their markets, not when they refuse to embrace renewable energy as any forward-looking entrepreneur ought to do, and certainly not when they make money hand over fist. You've heard them say oil corporations only make seven cents per gallon of gas? Think of all the gas you buy, and multiply that by 300 million Americans, and you'll begin to see that argument is a lot like saying a CEO is underpaid because he only gets $6 every time he draws breath.

Action: concerning evictions, chemical safety, corporate welfare, worker rights, discrimination, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell our government to extend the eviction moratorium, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the PFAS Action Act, the End Polluter Welfare Act, the PRO Act, the Equality Act, the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Moms Rising helps you tell our Congressfolk to extend the eviction moratorium. Thanks largely to pressure from House liberals such as Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), the Biden Administration did issue an order extending the eviction moratorium for 60 days in high-COVID areas, and even though real estate groups might get our Supreme Court to overturn it rather quickly, that order isn't useless -- if nothing else, it buys a little time for somehow-undistributed COVID relief money to get to the renters who need it. Still, Congress needs to hear from us that they should do something about this -- Republicans would just love to see hundreds of tent cities spring up all over America. And I'm not worried about landlords' well-being. You don't get to be a landlord if you're not well-off. Besides, hardship builds character; isn't that what we always tell renters?

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act, and -- this is critical! -- not weaken it to please their corporate paymasters. H.R. 2467 would, among other things, mandate that our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) set standards for how much PFAS chemicals we can tolerate in our drinking water; the ideal number would be "zero," given how hard it is to break PFAS chemicals down (they don't call them "forever chemicals" for nothing!) and how scientists have linked PFAS chemicals to cancer and birth defects, but given their ubiquity in our products, we are already compromising by setting any non-zero limits at all. And our Senators know this bill should pass, so they'll try to weaken it and then take credit for it. That's a wicked game, and we shouldn't let them play it.

Both the Sierra Club and Food and Water Action help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. This bill would end some $15 billion annually in corporate welfare subsidies to corporations that, frankly, don't need the money, like oil and gas drillers. Literally the only people in America who want to keep that welfare coming are the oil and gas drilling corporations who get it, and, sadly, they contribute big bucks to the politicians who'll vote on this bill. And these corporations don't spend nearly as much in campaign contributions as they collect in corporate welfare! So we the people need to stop that. After all, we're the majority.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The big story this past week, as you may know, is a National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) hearing officer determining that Amazon did, in fact, break laws during the April unionization vote at its Bessemer, AL warehouse, and our NLRB may order another election in the coming weeks, but wouldn't it be nice if it didn't even come to that? The PRO Act would stop a lot of big corporate abuse and intimidation -- including the forced anti-union propaganda meetings and the retaliation against pro-union workers -- before it happens. Again, big corporations won't like it, and they will spend to stop it. But I would ask this of our Senators: do you really want to take "I was easily bribed repeatedly by big corporations" to the Pearly Gates?

The Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Have I mentioned how disgusting I find the arguments against the Equality Act? Why, yes, I believe I have, in some detail. And what's most disgusting about them? None of them are true! Why, those arguments would need to take two buses and a train even to get in the same neighborhood as the truth! The Equality Act prevents bosses, landlords, and banks from discriminating against gay and transgender folks just because they're gay and transgender, end of story. If that offends folks' "religious beliefs," then maybe -- just an idea -- they shouldn't base their religion around who they hate.

Finally, Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. And Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Again: the arguments against these bills all suck. The bills would curtail gerrymandering, enact same-day and automatic voting registration, give all voters 15 days of early voting, force big campaign donors to disclose their donations, give power to stop vote suppression at the state level back to our Justice Department, and end certain racist de-registration practices, so if folks call all that "a Democrat power grab," they may want to consider whether it only looks that way because of actual Republican power-grabs -- like Voter ID, or creating Rorschach-blot legislative districts, or closing polling booths in Black neighborhoods, or using the Interstate Crosscheck database to de-register Black voters without telling them, or any of the several dozen other right-wing tricks you can name.

Around the table: whiny brats with guns should not get all the say about everything, part 955.

A Washington Post report finds that FEMA doesn't aid a lot of Black families in the deep South because they can't produce deeds and wills to prove they own their land. You should not be surprised to learn that "the long-held tradition of informal land ownership" among Black folks was a necessary response to Jim Crow laws preventing Black folks from even getting wills and deeds to begin with. FEMA's insistence on such documentation doesn't actually come from the law, but from their apparent desire to keep scammers from getting federal assistance. We'd damn well better find another way, though.

University of Chicago neuroscientists find that rats will help their fellow rats escape a trap even when tempted to ignore them with chocolate. They put two rats in a cage, with one roaming freely and one not, and the free-roaming rat was "more agitated" when his cagemate was trapped than when he was in an empty cage, and the free-roaming rat also figured out how to open the trap after a lot of effort. They call it "(t)he first evidence of empathy-driven helping behavior in rodents," but I suspect the only reason we didn't observe this already is that we didn't look for it. You spend a lifetime trying to overcome prejudice only to find you've moved the needle only a little. Still, you do the work, because the work is worth it.

Tennessee fires the state's immunization program director, apparently after she gave completely sound and legal advice that teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 don't need their parents' permission to get the COVID vaccine. Of course this is the right-wing way -- to act like such drama-addled morons that the best of us throw up our hands and disengage from the fight -- but the best part of her story is the part where unnamed busybodies told her she should have been more "politically aware" that sharing the science after being explicitly told to do so by her superiors would be "pok(ing) the bear." People like that should a) slap themselves and b) contemplate a little more seriously the fact that anything "pokes the bear" as far as right-wingers are concerned. Next up on Fox News: Tucker Carlson comes out against oxygen.

Hard to believe, Harry, but an AT&T PAC gave $100,000 to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott the same day he called a special session to pass more vote suppression bills, even though AT&T has voiced support for improved voting access. You hate to say things like "good words mean nothing," but corporations make it so hard not to say such things. I sure hope they don't say "we gave to Greg Abbott to keep a real monster like Allen West out of office," because Greg Abbott is already a real monster.

Ho hum, Texas's February cold snap may have shut down that state's power grid and killed over 200 good Texans, but at least a couple of gas corporations made record profits. I can already hear right-wingers cluck-clucking that NO SUPPLIEZ PLUS HIGH DEMANDZ EQUALZ TEH HIGHZ PRICEZ DUHZ!!!!!!, and I suppose they are free to inflict their reasoning on the families of the dead. Plus they've always said that TEH FREE MARKUTZ!!!! would always prevent this sort of thing from happening, because people wouldn't stand for it. The Free Marketeers didn't imagine state legislators would simply ignore a cold snap to whine about "voter fraud" and transgender athletes and critical race theory. Or did they?

Finally, we learn that Donald Trump apparently thought whomever leaked the story of him hiding in the White House bunker while George Floyd protests went on outside the White House last year should have been "charged with treason" and "executed." Ever get the sense this is a man who says ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME all the time? Perhaps you have. If we ever get to the point where exposing the Emperor's cowardice is "treason," this democracy is doomed. And about a quarter of the electorate are there right now, actively trying to doom our democracy merely because it doesn't tell them only what they want to hear. But I would much rather die in a nuclear war than die because of whiny brats with guns.

Action: concerning surprise medical bills, pollution, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell our government to fight surprise medical bills, tell our EPA to act more vigorously against chlorpyrifos, tell Boeing to stop donating to politicians who try to overturn elections, and tell our President to appoint a strong anti-pollution Commissioner to the FERC. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will. And good hunting!

Penn PIRG helps you tell President Biden to enact the strongest possible rules against surprise medical bills. The No Surprises Act, which passed last Congress, authorizes our Executive branch to write, enact, and enforce rules preventing big health insurance corporations from foisting surprise medical bills on good Americans, but you know those big health insurance corporations (and the hedge funds, don't forget them!) will be all up in our President's grill, saying if he really kept them from, say, billing people for surgeries in-network with anesthesiologists who just so happened to be out of network, it'd kill jobs, or be a "burden," or something. Never do they think about the actual burdens they foist on us. That's why we remind our President.

In a related alert, Change.org helps you tell our government to stop medical collections from getting reported to credit bureaus and stop corporations from garnishing wages to pay those bills. Because people already are afraid to go to the doctor! And they don't need more reasons to be afraid! I suppose someone will come along and say what's wrong with paying what you owe ha ha ha snort, but as usual they ask the wrong question: why should health insurance cost so damn much, and why should so many medical bills come as a complete surprise to you? You can't just bootstrap your way out of a hostage situation -- you also need the law to help you, as civilized people have a right to expect.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reconsider its failure to ban chlorpyrifos from use on crops. You haven't been able to use that chemical in household chores for decades now, so why are we still spraying it on food? When scientists have linked chlorpyrifos to brain damage in kids? Naturally our EPA didn't think this was a big deal under the Trump Administration, but a federal court (of course) told them to go back to the drawing board and either ban it or set safety levels for it. Seems like a lot of Donald Trump's bright ideas die in court, and that's to our advantage. So let's take it.

Public Citizen helps you tell Boeing to stop giving campaign contributions to the Republican Congressfolk who helped try to overturn the 2020 election. After January 6, corporate campaign contributions to these clowns became toxic, but you probably always knew that as soon as we stopped looking, they'd restart their sedition-funding ways. Hence, we're reminding them that we're still looking. Jesus Mary and Joseph Donald Trump lost the election by seven million votes, and people who can't accept that are big whiny babies. Do civilized people let big whiny babies make all the decisions all the time? No, we do not. And big corporations need to start realizing their first duty isn't to their shareholders or their executives but to our civilization.

Finally, Food and Water Action helps you tell our President to appoint a new commissioner to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (or FERC) who will fight for energy policy that reduces pollution and helps us avoid the worst effects of climate change. Because we deserve that! FERC regulates the sale and transportation of gas and electricity, plus it also reviews proposed gas pipelines; you can see a whole lot of trouble there, can't you? Trouble in the form of more hurricanes, more wildfires, more floods, more droughts? Generally FERC has tended to rubber-stamp the dirty energy projects that make all these things worse, but a Commission vacancy comes up on June 30 (why, that's next week!), and that means an opportunity to get someone on there who looks a little more skeptically at these projects. But not if we don't speak up.

Action: concerning jobs, racism, debt, clean water, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk what you want from the infrastructure/jobs bill, and tell your Congressfolk to support Black history, get relief for folks from their utility bills, keep lead out of our drinking water, and end the filibuster. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

Regarding that American Jobs Plan: the Environmental Defense Fund helps you demand that Congress pass a bill that addresses pollution and renewable energy, since Republicans don't think lead-free pipes and solar panels can be "infrastructure." Happy to let oil and gas corporations suck at the corporate welfare teat, they are, but not to do anything about it, even though God only gives you one life. Meanwhile, Progress America helps you tell Democrats, explicitly, "no climate, no deal" -- as in, if the American Jobs Plan doesn't address the issues I've already discussed in the first sentence of this paragraph (among other issues!), then it should die. Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk that whatever they come up with had better not gut the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion. That's part of what "using unspent COVID money" means, since the monthly CTC expansion checks haven't started coming yet. The good news? Those first checks go out July 15, and good Americans with children will get used to them right quick, so if Republicans start talking about the "urgency" of "getting something done," know that they're sweating, and that we can wait them out. (If any of them say we're "weaponizing" the CTC checks, I will smack a pimp. Republicans weaponize everything, so they don't get to whine about "weaponizing" monthly checks they didn't vote for. You'd think they'd have some damn pride. I mean, some of them are going to meet their Maker sooner than I am.)

The Daily Kos Liberation League does some freaking alchemy with this action alert, which helps you tell your Congressfolk to, and I quote, "support Black history education in our K-12 schools and denounce the racist attacks by Republican leaders. That's what all the right-wing attacks on "critical race theory" are really about: preventing our children from learning any decent Black history in our schools. No, it's not about "banning white people" or "sending whites to reeducation camps" or "cancel culture" or whatever swill they're peddling; it's about trying to make sure you don't learn enough about Jim Crow that you can't tell that Jim Crow still operates in America -- more subtly, yes, but that's what evil does when you beat it the first time. And you have to beat it every day of your life.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1783, the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act. As I'm sure you know, good Americans have been having trouble meeting their utility bills during this pandemic; S. 1783 would provide $30 billion to cancel water bill debt, electric bill debt, and broadband bill debt. All of these are essential services -- yes, broadband, too, or have we already forgotten how much work and school we had to do online this year? -- and you know what's far, far worse than the "moral hazard" of government forgiving people's bills? The actual moral hazard of cutting off their services so they can't stay healthy and contribute to society! Look, we can't all be hedge fund managers -- most of us have to do real jobs, and real jobs, as we have been reminded over and over again, don't always pay enough, particularly when we don't have them. The Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act can help more good Americans better endure these horrible truths, and thus better fight another day.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1376, the GET THE LEAD OUT Act, which, despite its name, has nothing to do with local Led Zeppelin-related radio programming. What "moral hazard" will Republicans identify in a bill aiming to (as the title says) get lead out of lead pipes all over America, since literally any amount of lead in your drinking water can cause brain damage? Will they decry all the Big Gummint spending, as if private corporations will ever solve lead-pipe issues on their own? Will they lament all the regulatory bureaucracy supposedly inherent in forcing more lead-pipe disclosure in housing contracts? Will they claim that the bill's funding mechanisms (subjecting more large estates to the Estate Tax and closing the "carried interest" loophole that lets hedge fund managers evade taxes) will "kill jobs"? Yes, that all sounds incredibly absurd, and even if they were valid arguments, they still couldn't hope to meet the real moral hazard of exposing our children to brain damage.

Finally, pursuant to most of our goals this year, Public Citizen still helps you tell your Democratic Senators to end the filibuster. Do we care that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema say they won't support an effort to end the filibuster? Of course we don't! All we care about is that we express our will, and if we tell our Senators enough times, they'll start to look bad for not doing it. And, you know, I spent over a decade defending the filibuster, and arguing that we ought to make Senators actually talk their way through the filibuster like they did in the old days. But, honestly, I've fucking had enough.

Action: concerning credit errors, internet privacy, methane emissions, social media, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell big credit corporations to fix errors in our credit reports, tell TikTok to stop collecting biometric data, tell our EPA to enact vigorous methane regulations, tell our Bureau of Land Management to keep drillers away from Dinosaur National Park, tell Facebook to ban Donald Trump permanently, and tell President Biden to forgive $50,000 of student loan debt per person. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will. And good hunting!

Consumer Reports helps you tell the big credit reporting corporations to fix errors on their reports and make their reports more transparent and accessible to their customers. Which could be any of us! More than one in three Americans told Consumer Reports that they've found errors in their credit reports, and an error could cost you a job, a house, or a loan, so this ain't nitpicking here. You'll also ask Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion to freeze your credit by default (rather than make you jump through hoops to freeze it, you know what I mean) and making credit reports and credit scores free to access forever. I eagerly await Republicans complaints that this would all be some kind of "job-killing" plan.

Fight for the Future helps you tell big social media corporation TikTok to stop collecting biometric data, like voice and face prints, from its customers. All these newfangled social media contraptions seem to come up with all these newfangled ways to intrude upon your privacy! And it's no use saying this is the future, there's no such thing as privacy, because that's a defeatism a civilized person can't abide. Losing $92 million in a biometric-related lawsuit earlier this year and $5 million to an FTC fine (for collecting children's data, no less!) have apparently taught them the wrong lesson. Perhaps the Big Stick of Bad PR can teach them the right one.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to fashion stronger methane regulations than the ones we've got. For all the good reasons: because methane-mitigation technology has gotten a lot better over the years, because methane packs a climate change punch even worse than coal, because leaking methane into our air is not only pollution but also a waste of energy, and because leaking methane into our air is not only pollution and a waste of energy but also steals taxpayer royalties, since any usable energy found on drilling operations on public lands belongs to us. Congress famously failed to roll back Obama-era methane rules in 2017, but the Trump EPA rolled them back late in 2020; now it's time to roll back the roll-back, and keep pollution and climate change from killing us.

Penn Environment helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to keep oil and gas drilling away from the Dinosaur National Monument. They call it that at least in part because you can find actual dinosaur fossils in the cliff faces! The century-old monument straddling the border between Colorado and Utah isn't just the home of historical wonders, but of two rivers that feed the Colorado River, so if some big corporation goes blasting a mere mile from the edge of the monument, it'll pollute the drinking water used by over 40 million people. It's not worth polluting that much water just so some executive can gild the plumbing on his 19th vacation home. Executives ought to learn to make money off renewable energy. Hell, some already have.

Progress America helps you tell Facebook to ban Donald Trump permanently. Some liberals have publicly worried about the free speech "risk" of doing such a thing, too, but remember that hardly anyone was using Facebook 13 years ago, so we don't actually have to treat it like it's the all-media or something. And Facebook's a private corporation, so it doesn't have to publish everything someone wants, any more than Random House does. We should hold Facebook liable for the slander and terrorist threats it publishes, but that's a different discussion. And besides, who stopped Donald Trump from putting his rantings on a weblog like we did in the old days? Oh, right: he did, because he apparently has no patience. So let's stop coddling him.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to forgive $50,000 of student loan debt per borrower. He's showing an awful lot of reluctance, and I remember when Barack Obama showed this kind of reluctance, it meant he wasn't going to do anything. But don't let that stop you! We need to keep on him, because we're right -- forgiving that much student loan debt would stimulate the hell out of this economy, plus it would show we're actually willing to correct the wrongs we commit as a civilization. What "wrong" was that, you ask? The wrong where we told everyone they should go into massive debt on a college degree so they can get good jobs -- and then took away all the good jobs! Worse than Lucy with a football, we were. So let's do better.

Action: concerning endless war, public trans, government spying, corruption, voting rights, and polluter welfare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Iraq war AUMF, create zero-emission public trans, release COINTELPRO files to the public, and pass the IG Independence and Empowerment Act, the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the End Polluter Welfare 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 and/or state legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that "authorized" war with Iraq and which all subsequent Presidents have used to fight unconstitutional wars all over the world. I put "authorized" in quotation marks because only Congress can authorize war, and they have to go through the trouble to declare war, not "give the President power to fight wherever he pleases." This is one of the reasons we broke off from England, folks! And Presidents have been abusing the AUMF for over 18 years now. Which means this mistake's old enough to vote, and it's damn near old enough to drink! So let's kill it already.

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you demand that Congress pass legislation creating a zero-emission public transportation system. Yeah, we keep telling our Congressfolk what we want from this jobs bill, but they keep ignoring us -- so perhaps we should change tactics and demonstrate that the people want public transportation that doesn't choke the world with pollution. It's not so much to ask, right? Right-wingers act like people who like electric buses are weak. Of course, they then go around whining endlessly about how everyone thinks they're racist, but that's beside the point. The point is, having a livable planet in 30 years isn't "weak." Even if a few oil and gas executives don't get to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Which is what right-wingers really favor, whether they'll admit it or not.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2998, which would release all of our FBI's COINTELPRO files to the general public. I guess this bill's opponents will argue "bygones!" and "look forward" and "saying any part of our past wasn't absolutely perfect is treason!" But COINTELPRO went after protestors and activists ranging from anti-war and civil rights organizers to the Ku Klux Klan. Hey, maybe that's how you get right-wingers to support H.R. 2998! I kid, of course -- today's racists know well enough to disavow any love for the Klan. And yet our most recent departed President's campaign slogan was a Klan slogan from the '70s! So, again, learn about the past, and we can make a more perfect union in the future.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2662, the IG Independence and Empowerment Act. "IG" stands for "Inspector General," and you may recall, particularly during 2020, how much maneuvering that irredeemably corrupt President did just to avoid the scrutiny of Inspectors General, who spend all their time investigating waste and fraud and abuse of power. You may even remember that Mr. Trump had to be talked out of firing all of them at the beginning of his term! Well, the IG Independence and Empowerment Act would place more limits on a President's ability to fire IGs and allow IGs to subpoena folks who've left our government if they can shed light on wrongdoing. It's bad if all that stands between us and oblivion is an Inspector General. But, ah, it's a lot worse if they're not there, or if they're a Presidential lackey.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Meanwhile, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. And Public Citizen helps you tell them to do both. I know, I know, One True Real and Great American President Joe Manchin has expressed a preference, but he ain't the boss of us. And, toward that end, Daily Kos helps you sign up and call West Virginians and urge them to urge their Senator to vote for the For the People Act. 79% of them support the For the People Act, after all! And if he's going to write 299 stupid paragraphs about why he won't, at least we can get his constituents to embarrass him.

Finally, both the Sierra Club and Food and Water Action help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. Our government shovels $15 billion annually toward oil and gas drilling corporations that don't need it; how would you feel about that if it were your money? Oh, right: it is your money. The bill would also prohibit federal funding (which is, again, your money) toward fossil fuel R&D and/or international fossil fuel projects. Solar and wind power aren't pie-in-the-sky technologies anymore -- walk around your neighborhood and count the roofs with solar panels if you're unconvinced. Also attend the ridiculous stories you hear about wind turbines; if wind really didn't work, wouldn't they just tell you that?

Action: concerning the Child Tax Credit, paid family and medical leave, internet freedom, public transportation, and corporate welfare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, pass paid family and medical leave, and pass the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act, the Freedom to Move Act, and the End Polluter Welfare Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools on the bottom of this page.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent. This summer, that expansion will deliver an extra $300 monthly to folks with children under 6, and an extra $250 to folks with children between 6 and 17. I've given this matter a lot of thought lately, and it sure seems to me that an extra $250 or so monthly will give parents a lot of breathing room, which will help them be the best parents they can be. Already our everything-for-the-rich-and-screw-everyone-else economy makes it hard for them to be their best; the CTC expansion is a rare government policy that actually does that. So we really ought to keep it around.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a paid family and medical leave plan. Paid family and medical leave will be a focus of President Biden's American Families Plan, but it might be better in the short run to tell them we support paid family and medical leave in the abstract, and then hold them accountable for the details later; at that point, they won't be able to say their constituents didn't talk about paid family and medical leave. We're the only big nation on Earth that doesn't have it, and no it wouldn't be particularly onerous to fund. You've heard that America's billionaires have made over $1 trillion more since the pandemic's beginning, right? Well, that'd be a good place to start.

Both Consumer Reports and the ACLU help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1783/S. 745, the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act. Again, though President Biden's American Jobs Plan would nominally include more broadband, our Congressfolk still need to hear from us about it, not least because too many of them (cough Republicans cough) have been banging their saucepans telling everyone that broadband isn't "really infrastructure." All you need to do to prove them wrong is go through a pandemic! Now kids go to school over the internet, adults go to work over the internet, folks see a doctor and buy groceries over the internet -- yeah, it's obviously infrastructure. Why do we listen to Republicans again?

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2287/S. 1172, the Freedom to Move Act. Since at least the beginning of the Reagan years, we've been caught up in the idea that we should each have our own cars and rely less on trains and buses to get us around. But I think we're seeing the folly of that idea -- not just that it's selfish, but that it'll also help destroy our planet a lot faster. And you know, not everyone can have a car -- some people just don't make enough money, and they need public transportation as a result. Hence the Freedom to Move Act would issue grants to help make fare-free public trans a reality; after all, why shouldn't we spend our money on things we might all use? (And, not for nothing, but yeah, this bill or something like it could also get folded into the American Jobs Plan, so best to let our Congressfolk know we want better public transportation.)

Finally, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act, which would end some $15 billion of corporate welfare for big fossil fuel drillers. I have to say I find far too many fiscal hawks will go after social spending with almost absurd ease, but will never say anything about corporate welfare -- which is far larger, and which represents a far greater immorality -- unless you provoke them, and why should I have to provoke people to do the right thing? Can't people do the right thing on their own? Can't they follow their own philosophy consistently and fight all big government handouts? If they can't, you have to wonder who might be lining their pocketbooks.

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, voting rights, the filibuster, public lands, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell our government to do the right thing about the Israel/Palestine conflict, tell your Congressfolk to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, write a letter to the editor advocating that we end the Senate filibuster, and tell President Biden to reverse Trump-era land grabs at several national monuments and forgive student loan debt. You can 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 Congressfolks' phone numbers and/or use the links in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

First things first. MoveOn helps you tell President Biden to call for an immediate ceasefire in the Israel/Palestine conflict and an end to Israeli evictions of Palestinians, while Demand Progress helps you tell our government to stop funding Israeli occupation of Palestine and Avaaz helps you tell world governments to sanction Israel for its actions. You don't need to know "who started it" to support these petitions; you only need to know how it is -- one nation is way more powerful than another, and brutalizes the other. And of course you should also be suspicious when you notice that the violence has buoyed the electoral fortunes of the Israeli Prime Minister who can't win an election outright but somehow stays in power.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Meanwhile, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. You've no doubt heard that New Great and Bounteous One True American President Joe Manchin likes the latter bill but not the former, but who cares? We want both! We want both the bill that would help us end partisan gerrymandering and force big campaign donors out into the light and the bill that would restore the Voting Rights Act! Why should we have to settle just because Joe Manchin's the 50th vote?

Speaking of all of that, Common Cause helps you write a letter to the editor of your local paper advocating that we end the Senate filibuster. I used to advocate for fixing the filibuster, so that the Senators who would use it would actually have to work for it by explaining, at considerable length, why they oppose campaign finance disclosure or ending tax breaks for corporations that outsource jobs overseas (to name just two popular initiatives they've filibustered over the years), but fuck that: Senators have abused this power, so they get nothing from now on, and Mitch McConnell's threats to slow down Senate business to a crawl if they get rid of the filibuster are irrelevant. Remember when Sen. Bunning (R-KY) singlehandedly stopped any further unemployment insurance considerations in 2010? Yeah, he wasn't running for re-election. Anyone who stops a popular bill because he wants a proper quorum to turn on the lights in the Senate building won't get re-elected, either. If we have anything to say about it, that is.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell President Biden to roll back Trump-era land grabs at several national monuments, including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. When Trump votaries contemplated the phrase "drain the swamp," do you think the phrase "by chipping away at national monuments so that gas and oil drillers could pollute it" followed naturally in their minds? I would say not! Folks love their national monuments a lot more than Our Glorious Elites would like you to think, and they're actually not all that emotionally invested in big corporate CEOs making even more money from gas and oil drilling. Tell them "it's for the jobs" and you may get most of them to pause -- but tell them "that's what they want you to think," and then explaining exactly why that's what they want you to think that (i.e., as in the previous sentence above), will win most of them right back. Too bad our "liberal" media never thinks to do that. Hey, we can't do everything. That's why we live in a civilization.

Finally, both the ACLU and Daily Kos help you tell President Biden to cancel at least $50,000 in student loan debt per borrower. You've heard folks say they can't retire because they still have tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt? Well, it's not actually the kind of thing that deserves the response well you should have thought of that before taking on all that debt ha ha ha snort, because our society has been telling everyone for years they have to get a college degree if they want to survive, and when you go telling people that, you either have to deliver on that or make it right if you don't. And forgiving $50,000 in student loan debt will make that right for a lot of people. Personal to those who'd be jealous: go gripe with God about when you were born, and God will you the same thing I will, that every damn thing in the world ain't about you.

Action: concerning taxes, health care, chemical safety, public transportation, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to make the American Rescue Plan's Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, fight big pharma price gouging, pass the PFAS Action Act and the Freedom to Move Act, and keep bigger, heavier trucks off our roads. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers -- or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion from the American Rescue Plan permanent. The CTC expansion provides an extra $300/month to parents of children under 6 and $250/month to parents of children between 6 and 17, and I can tell you from experience that an extra $250 a month goes a long way. I guess all the Republicans who voted against it but will still try to take credit for it will argue that it was only supposed to last a year anyway, but, ah, are children going to stop having needs after this pandemic is over? The CTC expansion is good policy that'll cut child poverty in half in America, and would cost a mere $109 billion (out of some $4 trillion-plus in federal expenditures) in 2021, and when was the last time our government spent $109 billion to do people some good, instead of just throwing it away on corporate welfare? That would be a habit we would want to help them cultivate.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight big pharma corporation price gouging. Surely our Congressfolk know we all hate big pharma price gouging -- diabetics who spend more on insulin than they do on their rent or mortgage certainly know it more acutely! -- but we still have to tell them we expect them to do something about it, and even though the Social Security Works petition doesn't get into many specifics, there's still space in the comments for you to get into specifics. Like, say, allowing Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices, which even the right-wing Mercatus Center says would save over $80 billion annually. And $80 billion in lower costs for the taxpayer could help pay for a lot of better things -- like expanding Medicare.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the PFAS Action Act. The House passed the PFAS Action Act last term, and even though that bill attracted two dozen Republican votes in the House, Mob Boss Mitch wanted no part of it in the Senate, which meant two more years of "forever chemicals" that never break down and which scientists have linked to cancer and reproductive issues in our water. The PFAS Action Act would require PFAS manufacturers to clean up their own messes -- which seems as unprecedented in our politics as it doesn't in our parenting! -- and would require our EPA to limit the amount of PFAS chemicals that can appear in our water. That would cause a lot of non-stick pan makers and firefighting foam makers to make their products differently, but c'mon! This is a can-do nation!

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Move Act. What would the Freedom to Move Act do? It would offer grants to states and localities so they can offer fare-free public transportation -- it is public transportation, after all! -- and also so they can build out more public transportation to underserved urban and rural areas. The bill would authorize $5 billion in grants annually, which one could fund almost entirely by repealing oil and gas drilling subsidies! Those are big, big private industries that don't need taxpayer help, after all, but public transportation by definition belongs to us, and everyone who wants to use public trans should be able to. I am irritated to find any of these are controversial matters.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep bigger, heavier trucks off our highways. But bigger, heavier trucks can haul more, says the tiny little Satan sitting on my right shoulder, and thus save money! Yeah, Satan always loses me at "save money." Bigger, heavier trucks can haul more, that's true, but bigger, heavier trucks can also overturn more easily and they can also use more gas and pollute more easily and they also damage our roads and bridges more easily, so there has to be a point where having the biggest, heaviest truck actually costs us all more money, even if it allows some trucking executive to gild the plumbing in his 14th vacation home. And no one's advocating hauling goods in Geo Smart cars. Satan was just about to tell me they were. But I'm so on to Satan.

Action: concerning jobs, taxes, broadband, the Middle East, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk that "going big" on the infrastructure/jobs bill is more important than "going bipartisan"; tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax, make broadband internet more accessible to all, and stop Israel from oppressing Palestinian children; and tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to reject a slew of pro-pollution bills. Use the tools in the upper-right corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's (and PA state legislators') phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the American Jobs Plan "big, bold, and green" -- and reject weakening it just to get Republicans on board. Not just because Republicans tried to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, either. Fact is, we've got a lot of problems in America that we can address by a) raising corporate taxes and then b) spending that money on projects -- like rebuilding sewer lines and building out renewable energy -- that'll make this nation greater. When everyone has clean water, we'll be greater. When everyone uses energy that doesn't kill the planet, we'll be greater. And when everyone has a job helping accomplish these things, well, you get the idea. Even if Republicans don't.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax. It's a piddling little tax, frankly -- two percent on assets over $50 million, and then three percent on assets over $1 billion -- but it'd raise a lot of money (upwards of $250 billion annually), and frankly these billionaires made out like bandits during this pandemic. Naturally, with all their money, they can buy more time with folks like Joe Manchin and tell tall tales about how "dangerous" it would be to raise taxes on the rich right now. But according to them, there'll never be a good time to do that. Can't raise taxes on the rich because the economy's bad! Can't raise taxes on the rich because the economy's good! All we have is our voices, so we'd better use them.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1783/S. 745, the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All (or AAIA) Act. We've all seen, I would hope, how integral broadband has become over the last year, thanks to the pandemic, but if you live in a rural or urban area or a reservation, you don't have the access the rest of us have, thanks to big telecom corporations refusing to build out into areas where they can't make money hand over fist! The AAIA would, among other good works, better-fund the FCC's Emergency Broadband Benefit program and pre-empt state laws that forbid municipalities from offering their own broadband services. Which are excellent wherever they're tried; just ask the good residents of Chattanooga, TN.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2590, the Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act. The bill would keep our government from spending taxpayer money on Israeli oppression of Palestinians, including putting kids in military detention, demolishing homes, and grabbing more Palestinian territory. We're already violating international law by doing all of that! And most Americans would prefer we didn't enable their behavior. And no, you're not an "anti-Semite" for not wanting your taxpayer money to hurt other people. Even American Jews have been hearing that for years! Best to define "anti-Semitism" as, you know, things that hurt Jews, not things that merely interfere with Israel's political aims.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state Senators to reject five objectively pro-pollution bills. Stop me if you've heard this one before, but these bills (HB 72, 139, 288, 939, and 950) would hamstring our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) from issuing clean air and clean water regulations, mainly by granting the legislature additional powers to stonewall those regulations. All for the greater glory of gas and oil drilling corporations! The law already grants our DEP the power to issue regulations; if you don't like the regulations they issue, you leave public comments, which our DEP has to take into account in making a final decision. You don't demand tenth, eleventh, and twelfth innings in a game you lost in the standard nine.

UPDATE. The Sierra Club link in the final paragraph above no longer directs you to the five-bill action alert, possibly because the state House has now passed all those bills; calling your state Senators about the five bills would be the only option left, and the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page would help with that.

Action: concerning taxes, education, birth control, reforestation, privacy, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fund our IRS properly so it can catch more tax cheats; tell your Congressfolk to pass the College for All Act, the EACH Woman Act, the REPLANT Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale 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, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to better fund our Internal Revenue Service so it can catch rich tax cheats. Our IRS estimates that tax evaders cheat us out of $1 trillion every year, and that represents about a quarter of our entire federal budgets most years, so the law and order thing to do, the pro-law enforcement thing to do, would be to give our IRS the funding it needs to make tax cheaters pay up, so we can then properly fund roads, bridges, schools, firefighters, police, et al. And now you know why Republicans stamped their feet so much in the early 2010s about "political bias" at our IRS -- so they could curtail collections, starve our government of money, and make it run so badly that even fascist assholes routinely get elected to federal office now. And if Congress doesn't fund our IRS, just look out for the QAnon/Trumpholes that'll take over Congress in 2022.

Speaking of things better tax collection could pay for, Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2730/S. 1288, the College for All Act, which (among numerous other reforms) would pay for tuition and fees for all students who come from families that make less than $125,000 annually. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the bill's main sponsor, says the money would come from the Tax on Wall Street Speculation Act, which would tax stock trades at half of one percent, bonds at one-tenth of one percent, and derivatives at one-two hundredth of one percent; this bill would raise around $240 billion annually, which, in the context of the $1.2 trillion in wealth billionaires have accumulated during this pandemic, sure ain't too damn much to ask.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2234/S. 1021, the EACH Woman Act. The EACH Woman Act would repeal the notorious Hyde Amendment that prevents federal funds from covering abortions, but abortion is a legal medical procedure, and thus federal funds should cover it. The Hyde Amendment has essentially kept the world the way it was before Roe v. Wade, when rich folks could get abortions and poor folks can't. Right-wingers are always complaining about "how many babies Those People are always having," but then cling to the Hyde Amendment like grim death. It really is like they'd just prefer a world where nobody ever solves any problems and rageheads get to pop off all the time. But we're Americans, and we deserve better than that. And if you're against abortion, don't get one.

And now for the rare Arbor Day-related action alert: Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the REPLANT Act. The REPLANT Act would help reverse deforestation in America by mandating the planting of over a billion trees over the next decade, and if you're thinking of indulging in some hippie-punching over this, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider that trees help purify our air and thus help us stay healthier, 3) consider that trees also trap a lot of carbon dioxide and thus help mitigate the effects of climate change, and 4) a lot of animals use trees to find food and shelter their children. How much of any of that does your average office complex or gas drilling well do? Yeah, that's what I thought.

The Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. The bill would close the legal loophole that allows big data mining corporations to sell your personal data to law enforcement, a sale which completely circumvents our Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. Big telecom corporations can't sell your personal data to law enforcement, because it's against the law; big data brokers should face the same prohibitions. And if that puts them out of business, well, why do we tolerate a business model that's essentially "make money violating other people's rights"? A sane, moral, and decent society asks these questions; this sick, immoral, and decadent society doesn't ask them anywhere near enough.

Finally, Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. Expand Medicare to include everyone, pay for it by converting the money big corporations already pay for private insurance into an employer-side payroll tax, and voila! We've solved all health insurance problems without any workers -- or corporations! -- spending a penny more on health insurance, plus we stop leaving 30 million Americans out in the cold. Plus no more surprise bills, no more four-digit deductibles, and no more networks with shifting boundaries. People who want to keep their private insurance? Too bad! You'll just have to settle for much better insurance.

Action: concerning vaccines, drug prices, police brutality, chemical safety, and methane emissions.

Long story short: tell certain House Reps that vaccine access is more important than intellectual property rights, tell your Congressfolk to control drug prices, fight police brutality, and keep PFAS chemicals out of our products, and tell Pennsylvania state regulators to close a major loophole in its gas drilling emissions proposal. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the following paragraphs.

Word on the street is that Democratic Reps. Scott Peters (CA) and Ron Kind (WI) are trying to dissuade President Biden from supporting a waiver that would allow vaccine development all over the world -- meaning, I guess, that Messrs. Peters and Kind are objectively pro-COVID. Standing up for "intellectual property rights über alles" is a dubious enough proposition even outside of a pandemic, but, ah, fellas? Taxpayer money helped develop these vaccines, so they're not "someone else's property." And as long as COVID is alive somewhere on Earth, it can come back to bite us. So, you know what's coming: you can reach Rep. Peters at 202.225.0508 and Rep. Kind at 202.225.5506. Remind them not just of their moral duty here, but also that taking this stance after getting all that big pharma money, which both men have done, is a bad, bad look.

Here's the kind of action alert I normally avoid passing along: Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk that, hey, drug prices are too high and they should make sure drugs cost less. Yeah, that's usually too vague for my taste, but it's also exactly the kind of thing Congressfolk need to hear, and frankly there aren't too many ways they can come up with to pretend to lower drug prices. If you want to tell them to let Medicare negotiate drug prices and/or empower our government to manufacture generic drugs whenever prices go above a certain level and/or assert more control over drugs taxpayer money helps to fund in the first place, well, hey, there's a comments section on the petition.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2892, the Protect Our Protestors (or POP) Act, and H.R. 2893, the National Police Misuse of Force Investigation Board Act. The former bill would make police violence against protestors a federal crime, and the latter would create a federal agency tasked with investigating deaths in police custody. Don't let folks tell you that cops can't do their job if we pass these bills, and not just because literally everyone who's ever had a job has said that when their jobs' standards have changed. Police officers aren't supposed to mow down peaceful protestors with tear gas and rubber bullets, and they're also not supposed to kill people before even charging them with a crime. I mean, if you can't hold yourself to those standards, maybe you need to sell shoes.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act, which would empower our EPA to regulate PFAS chemicals. You may know PFAS chemicals better as "forever chemicals" that don't break down, that scientists have linked to cancer and thyroid issues, and that you can find in damn near everything, from nonstick pans to food wrappers to firefighting foam. Congress might actually be eager to pass this bill -- just say the words "keep our firefighters healthy" to Republicans and they at least give the matter some thought -- but we ought to tell them what we want them to do anyway, because big corporations come along and make them an awfully forgetful lot.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) to fix a loophole in its proposal to control methane emissions from gas drilling. The DEP's proposal exempts older facilities from its scrutiny, which would only make sense to you if you accept the conventional "wisdom" that we should cut older buildings a break because they're old, but that's rubbish, not just because a building is a thing and not a person, but because the older facilities cause more than half the pollution, which should make sense to you, regardless of the conventional "wisdom." Some wisdom doesn't need quotation marks, after all.

Action: concerning worker rights, voting rights, monopolies, and clean air and clean water.

Long story short: tell certain Democratic Senators to get behind the PRO Act already, tell Arizona legislators to reject vote-suppression legislation, tell federal regulators to break up big tech corporations, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat Act and the so-called "FRACK Pack" of pro-clean air and clean water bills. Use the tools in the upper right hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

Word on the street is that three Democratic Senators -- Sens. Sinema (D-AZ), Kelly (D-AZ), and Warner (D-VA) -- have thus far avoided co-sponsoring the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, which our House passed and which even Sen. Manchin (D-WV) and Sen. King (I-ME) have recently co-sponsored. You know what that means, right? Phone numbers! You can contact Sen. Kelly at 202.224.2235, Sen. Warner at 202.224.2023 (or 1.877.676.2759 if you're a Virginia resident) and Sen. Sinema at 202.224.4521. The PRO Act would make it much easier for workers to organize to bargain as a unit for better pay and better working conditions, and who could be against that? Besides the executives who make a lot of money denying workers those things, I mean. But they don't get all the say around here.

Progress America helps you tell Arizona's state Senate to reject a state House-passed bill that would kick 200,000 voters off that state's Permanent Early Voting List. Because Republicans would rather you make a request for an early ballot every damn year, because that's harder than getting one mailed automatically! And for whom would that be most hard? Why, people who can't just go where they like when they like, like seniors, poor folks, rural folks, and folks of color! Naturally Republicans can't claim "fraud" as a reason, because they can't find any (no, the so-called Cyber Ninjas ain't gonna find any, either -- though they might create some!), but they do cite "problems," never mind what they are. The "problem" here, as elsewhere, is that Joe Biden won this state, so let's tell Republicans to stop being sore losers.

Demand Progress helps you tell our federal regulators to break up big tech corporations like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. It's actually a bad thing that Google's become a verb, or that Facebook has driven social media sites like Tribe and Orkut out of existence, or that Amazon controls about half of all online commerce. And I probably didn't say this well enough at the time, but even though the would-be union organizers did a bad job getting Amazon workers together, Amazon still shouldn't be big enough that it can simply crush the best of those efforts. There's only some utility to saying "you should've worked with the landscape as it was" -- if the landscape is that harsh, we also need to change it.

WildEarth Guardians helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 915, the Save Oak Flat Act. S. 915 would repeal that section of the 2015 defense appropriations bill that sold the Oak Flat area of Arizona's Tonto National Forest to Resolution Copper, a notorious mining corporation looking to "develop" that land. Resolution's owner, Rio Tinto, just so happened to once employ then-Sen. Jeff Flake, and also donated big bucks to then-Sen. John McCain. So they got their money's worth! Sadly, the San Carlos Apache, to whom the land is sacred, got bupkus. From the Save Oak Flat Act, they'd get a lot more -- and so would we, since the Save Oak Flat Act would also save our clean air and clean water from over a billion tons of toxic crap.

Finally, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the "FRACK Pack," a suite of bills that would protect our clean air and clean water from the nefarious practice of hydrofracturing, or "fracking." Think it's an accident "fracking" is a cuss word on the 2004 reboot of Battlestar Galactica? I wouldn't dismiss the connection so easily! The bills would, among other good works, force oil and gas corporations to better dispose of hazardous materials, force disclosure of chemicals used in fracking, and authorize our EPA to regulate fracking wells. And I guess the bills' opponents would say it'll "kill jobs." It won't, but what kind of civilization would we be if we continued to insist that we can't have both jobs and clean air and water? No kind of civilization, that's what -- both in that we'd be uncivilized and we'd likely be nonexistent in a few generations. Let's try to avoid these things, shall we?

Action: concerning marketing to children, public lands, and law and order.

Long story short: tell Facebook not to launch an "Instagram for kids," tell our FDA to outlaw flavored tobacco products, tell our President to restore Bears Ears and stop the Byhalia Connection Pipeline, and tell our Justice Department to investigate the alleged crimes of ex-President Trump. The following paragraphs will provide email/petition tools for all of these actions. Good hunting!

Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell Facebook to scrap plans to create an Instagram platform just for children. Because children don't need more attention-diverting, crazy-making internet crap, that's why! Adults can handle it a lot better. You may well be asking yourself, self, didn't they worry about my grandparents reading too many pulp Westerns when they were children? I'm sure they did, but I'm also sure that reading pulp novels is far, far safer than imbibing images far faster than any generation has done before. And giving kids one more way to plug in to the virtual world ain't gonna help them in the real world. So let's tell Facebook to do better by them, rather than prime them to be the good consumer drones of the future.

Progress America helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to ban the sale of flavored tobacco-based products, including e-cigs, menthol cigarettes, and flavored cigars. Again, making these products taste like gummy worm or cotton candy is a way of setting kids up for lung cancer when they're adults; after all, luring adults into smoking now that everyone knows it causes cancer will only go so far. Better to harvest the addicts young, I guess they think, if not say. (And behind closed doors, I'm sure they are saying it.) Seriously, should any product for children be literally addictive?

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell President Biden to restore the famous Bears Ears National Monument to its original size. I guess the courts can one day decide whether the Antiquities Act really gives Presidents the ability to scale down national monuments (Mr. Trump did it, so I lean "no"), but scaling down Bears Ears in the first place was a profound insult to the Native Americans who both pushed for the Monument's creation and took care of it once it was created. Mr. Trump, of course, took about 85% of it away so oil and gas drilling corporations could enrich their executives and befoul the land. I would think anyone would find that offensive.

The Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell President Biden to revoke federal permits for the Byhalia Connection Pipeline. Why? Because it would run through the Memphis Sand Aquifer and thus pollute the drinking water used by good Americans in and around Memphis, TN -- I don't say "potentially pollute" because pipeline leaks are just about a near-certainty, particularly in an age where the corporations that run the pipelines do so with near-impunity. Just so happens the pipeline would run through mostly Black communities as well; you hear enough about that to think that might have been the idea, too. This ain't tough: do more solar and wind and you won't be polluting our air and water so much, particularly in neighborhoods that got it bad enough.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate the various allegations against Donald Trump. I say "allegations" even though we all heard him try to get the Georgia Secretary of State to "find" 11,000 more votes, and we all watched him do a lot of other crap one would think would get you put in jail. If your Trump-loving friend comes at you with "but this is unprecedented!", go back at him with "oh, you wanted a President who'd smash traditions and now you want tradition to protect him?" If you still have Trump-loving friends, of course.

Around the table: the usual -- insane Republicans, weak Democrats.

Surprise, surprise, right-wingers are cherrypicking to argue that Georgia's new voting law is no more restrictive than Colorado's, leaving out little details like that Colorado votes almost entirely by mail and thus doesn't necessarily need more days of early voting, plus you have to ask for a mail ballot in Georgia, whereas in Colorado you just get one. You know what else right-wingers leave out? That Georgia's new law empowers its legislature to interfere far more in the vote counting than they did before -- and, as you may know, Republicans dominate the Georgia legislature. Gosh, I wonder what they'll do if we see an even bigger Democratic wave in Georgia in 2022?

Ho hum, fossil fuel corporations soaked up over $8 billion in corporate welfare from last year's CARES Act, but cut almost 60,000 jobs. Stick a pin in that for the next time someone squeals that we tax corporations so much that they can't create jobs. The reason they don't create jobs is that we don't tax them enough -- faced with the threat of real taxation, they'll spend their money on paying workers and building stuff, and faced with real regulation, they'll stop gobbling up existing properties just to deduct the mortgage interest. Not to pile on, but big fossil fuel corporations already get over $4 billion in corporate welfare annually.

Reactionary Missouri state legislature tries to thwart a Medicaid expansion, despite the fact that the state's voters amended their constitution in order to expand it. I doubt the state legislature will succeed in their efforts once the courts step in, but then that's not the point, is it? As David Frum instructed us recently, the point is to look like you're fighting, not win, or fight well, or even actually fight. And the rageheads will keep eating it up. And there are a lot of rageheads in Missouri. (Though, as an aside, maybe Lucas Kunce can neutralize them in the 2022 U.S. Senate race.)

New Mexico becomes America's second state (after Colorado) to ban qualified immunity for police officers, meaning folks wronged by police brutality (and other misconduct) can now sue and earn restitution. Folks who respond but how can cops do their jobs now should at least ask themselves why police officers need to be protected from accountability in order to "do their job." And if they find our justice system "skewed" in favor of the accused, they should remember that this is the way our Founders wanted it, and if they ever face a state trying to railroad them, they'll appreciate that a bit more.

"Some" Democrats worry that any tax-hike-on-the-rich in an infrastructure bill will "backfire" on them with the suburban voters who used to vote Republican. My advice to them is this: don't be weak and stupid! The tax "cuts" of 2017 didn't drive them into Republican arms in 2018, after all, and (as the article helpfully points out, I was beginning to think I was the only one who remembered) Barack Obama explicitly said, numerous times, that he wanted to raise taxes on the rich in 2012, and still won re-election. I often think Democratic politicos don't really understand voters, and this "worrying" sure doesn't convince me otherwise.

Finally, Kevin Williamson at the National Review -- another right-winger who thinks we should have fewer and allegedly "better" voters -- compares passing laws that help more people vote to loosening standards so we can have more doctors, but Jesus Mary and Joseph you have a right to vote, but you don't have a "right" to be a doctor. And if you're that worried about stupid people voting, you might as well just wear a sign saying "I can't persuade people to do the right thing." And maybe you ought to wonder why that is. Personally, I've found most people to be fairly intelligent and persuadable. Maybe that's because I expect more from them.

Action: concerning health care, immigration, fossil fuel funding, D.C. statehood, paycheck fairness, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare for All Act, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, the D.C. Admission Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act -- and tell them to reject the so-called Fair Access to Banking Act and revoke permits for the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. As Paul Craig Roberts, the father of Reaganomics, said many years ago, when the private sector screws up this badly (high prices, bad service, surprise bills, etc.) then our government has to step in. And Medicare works pretty damn well for our elderly, despite the fact that it's basically a high-risk pool which should constantly fail. Think how much better Medicare would work with all these healthy people in it! (How to pay for it? Easy: assess an employer-side payroll tax at about the amount they're already paying for private health insurance. They act like it just can't be done because they don't have the will to do it. Luckily, we do.)

Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2222, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act. What makes a great nation? Treating all people with the dignity and respect they deserve, and much as right-wingers want you to believe that everyone who wants to come here is a murdering raping drug-dealer, most of the folks who want to come here are a) good people and b) running from actual murdering raping drug-dealers. So H.R. 2222 would repeal mandatory detention for immigrants, prohibit solitary confinement, end our government's use of private prisons they refuse to hold to account, and ensuring all detainees get a hearing before an immigration judge. It really is well past time our government acted as civilized as we do.

Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 563, the so-called Fair Access to Banking Act. The bill would compel big banking corporations to fund the fossil fuel corporations they've avoided funding for the last couple of years, under popular pressure, of course. Ain't it just like a Republican to loudly insist that the "free" market is always right until it hits big fossil fuel donors? And then they make the "free" market do what they want! How conservative of them! And they've got some nerve talking about banks "discriminating" against fossil fuel corporations. Major anti-discrimination legislation (the Equality Act) stands before them and all they do is tell hysterical lies about it.

The Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 51/S. 51, the D.C. Admission Act. You know the arguments against D.C. statehood suck when Mob Boss Mitch calls statehood for D.C. "pure socialism." What does that even mean? (And how does it differ from "impure socialism"?) Statehood would actually increase Washington, D.C.'s independence -- it could get vaccine supplies a lot more easily, which is a big deal these days, and it could create its own National Guard, which it sure could have used on January 6! Don't brook any silliness about how "the Founders didn't want D.C. to be a state," lest we use that argument against Idaho, which achieved statehood in 1890, long after all the Founders were dead.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act. Because women deserve to make as much as men for the same work, dammit! Why do people resist this idea? (OK, I know why, but all the reasons are stupid.) Despite the Equal Pay Act of 1963, women still don't make a dollar for every dollar a man makes for doing the same work, but the Paycheck Fairness Act would make it easier for women to find out their bosses are paying them too little and then do something about it. And when Republicans tell you this bill will "just help out the trial lawyers," tell them we'd need fewer trial lawyers if bosses didn't try to get away with wage theft.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to introduce and pass legislation that would revoke all permits for Enbridge's notorious Line 3 pipeline. Line 3 would carry almost a million barrels of tar sands oil daily from southwestern Canada under the Mississippi River to northern Wisconsin. Does running an oil pipeline under the Mississippi sound like a good idea to you? Particularly when you recall that an Endbridge pipeline rupture in 2010 polluted some 40 square miles of the Kalamazoo watershed? Fuel burns once, but clean water is forever -- if we work to keep it.

Action: concerning tyranny, double-dealing, diplomacy, Social Security, pollution, and corruption.

Long story short: tell big corporations to divest from Myanmar's military, tell France to reject an Arctic drilling scheme, tell President Biden to re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, fire two notorious Social Security Administrators, regulate "forever chemicals" in our drinking water, and support international sanctions against Erik Prince for plotting to overthrow the government of Libya. Lots to digest, I know, but you can accomplish all of these aims easily by using the email and petition links in the following paragraphs.

Are there bigger armed whiners than Myanmar's military? They didn't like the election results, so they overthrew the government -- no, they really overthrew the government, plus if you protest this coup, they murder you. They want us to see them as big and strong and tough but I will always see them bawling, in diapers, stomping their feet. Sadly, they don't act in a vacuum, because big fossil fuel corporations like Chevron and Total support the government of Myanmar to the tune of over $1 billion annually, which motherlode now goes to the military, since it now controls the government. Gosh, what ever should these corporations do? I kid, of course -- they should stop sending money to the illegitimate bunch of crybabies now calling themselves the government of Myanmar. Sum of Us provides the petition.

Hey, speaking of Total: they want to drill for gas in the Arctic ocean, and what's more, France's President, Emmanuel Macron, has been criticizing the project in public while green-lighting it in private! Yikes, I hope he doesn't wonder why he loses his next election in about a year! You know what people hate even more than being told they have to stay indoors? When politicians say one thing and do another! Even in these post-modern times, the eternal verities still hold! Naturally, this Arctic drilling project will both unleash yet more pollution and threaten the lives of indigenous folks, but if we all bring the Big Stick of Bad PR, we can strangle this thing in its crib. Sum of Us provides this petition, also.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Biden to get back into the Iran nuclear deal the Obama Administration negotiated in 2015 (uh, during which he was Vice President), then both Win Without War and Daily Kos still help you do that. Why? Because it was working before Donald Trump trashed it, and it can work again. Does it seem like Iran's asking for more this time? Doesn't mean they should get it, and doesn't mean they're going to get it! It's like the world doesn't understand what "negotiation" is. Granted, that could be at least partly because Tha Bush Mobb demanded that Iran accept all their demands "before negotiations can begin." But surely we don't need to behold ourselves to any Republican orthodoxy. (President Biden's phone number, as you may recall, is 202.456.1111; you can call him about Iran and the next three items, if you like.)

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to fire Andrew Saul and David Black from our Social Security Administration. Why? Because they're trying to destroy Social Security from within, that's why! Because Donald Trump put them there to do just that! Always they deliberately sabotage our government and then say see? Government doesn't work! Like we're all not watching or something. Messrs. Saul and Black did eventually release that data our IRS needed to get stimulus checks out to seniors, but they only did that because we wielded the Big Stick of Bad PR against them. Maybe we should get some people in our government who don't need to be browbeaten into doing the right thing. We deserve it, after all.

Consumer Reports helps you tell President Biden to regulate the notorious plastic chemical PFAS, a chemical found in far too many things that doesn't break down very easily in our bodies or in our air and water (hence the moniker "forever chemicals"). Why not tell our Congressfolk to pass a law getting rid of PFAS, an act even these notorious Congressfolk have warmed toward in the past? Because our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) already has the authority, under the Clean Water Act, to regulate PFAS chemicals, and the EPA works for us. We don't even need to get all George Carlin ("you're a public servant -- go get me a glass of water!") on them. They can just make sure the glasses of water we get ourselves don't have so many toxins in them.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to support international sanctions against former Blackwater/Xe CEO Erik Prince. Not for bilking our government out of all that money being private contractors in Iraq, or for overseeing the shooting deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007, or for being Betsy DeVos's brother -- just for offering to give weapons and mercenaries to a would-be dictator seeking to overthrow the government of Libya, in violation of international law (which does-so matter, despite right-wingers' notions that it shouldn't). America's gotten in enough trouble for doing that, but having private citizens do it would be so, so much worse. We can make our government account to us, but we'll have a harder time making Erik Prince account to us -- unless we enlist our government to help us in that aim.

Action: concerning corporate welfare, the right to organize, paid sick leave, and the global gag rule.

Have you heard that Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) told an oil corporation executive, to his face, that he shouldn't lie to her that oil and gas corporations don't get special treatment in our federal tax code? More of our Congressfolk should do that! And they should also do as Rep. Porter did, and list the precise benefits big fossil fuel drillers get from our tax code! Just so happens Rep. Porter has introduced H.R. 1517, the Ending Taxpayer Welfare for Oil and Gas Companies Act, which would (among other good works!) raise royalty rates paid back to the taxpayer by the fossil fuel corporations when they drill on public lands. Too many right-wingers get away with saying we have to lower these royalty rates "to create jobs," but what they're really saying is that we have to bilk the taxpayer out of money we deserve "to create jobs" -- only so the executives can pocket the extra money and not create the jobs! H.R. 1517 merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators today. They'll never see it coming, and we know how well they do with things they don't see coming.

Meanwhile, H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, passed the House earlier this week, not long after Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) exhorted his Republican colleagues to "stop talking about Dr. Seuss, and start working with us on behalf of the American workers," a statement that's as good a springboard to a Senate campaign as any. Only five House Republicans voted in favor of the PRO Act, and you can name four of them (Alaska's Don Young, I'll admit, was a mild surprise), and that doesn't bode well for its passage in the Senate, where Republicans will be able to filibuster the bill. If we make them talk through their filibuster, of course, they might wind up embarrassing themselves! And please understand by "might," I mean "will." So the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Senators to help out American workers by passing the PRO Act. The PRO Act will help workers like those brave Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, AL, organize for better pay and better working conditions, and why shouldn't we help them do that? Because prices might go up a few pennies? Gosh, don't be that person.

In other news, we should celebrate the passage of the American Rescue Plan, but good Americans still don't have paid sick leave and paid family leave, unless, of course, they belong to a union, and their union bargained and won those things -- or if another employer tried to forestall unionization by granting those things to their workers pre-emptively! Seriously, some bosses do treat their workers well out of the goodness of their hearts, but they're rarer than a T-206 Honus Wagner card, so I wouldn't lay money on that happening if I were you. And, hello! There's a pandemic happening, which increases everyone's need for paid sick leave, to take care of both themselves and their families! Hence Moms Rising helps you tell our government we need a national paid sick leave program, post-haste. We're about the only rich country on Earth that doesn't have one, and that's nothing to shout WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. They're going to say there's "no money" to do that, what with this $1.9 trillion bill we just passed, but they're full of soup -- CEOs still make millions of dollars, and corporations make billions in profits, so the politicians can do it if they just have the will.

Finally, H.R. 656/S. 142, the Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights (or HER) Act, would prevent our President from keeping taxpayer aid out of the hands of foreign non-governmental organizations (or NGOs) just because they provide abortion -- if abortion is legal in the United States and legal in the nation(s) the NGOs operate. This is what the "global gag rule" is all about; Republican Presidents institute it early in their terms, while Democratic Presidents rescind it early in theirs. But shouldn't the taxpayer get a say over where their money goes? right-wingers ask. Strange how they never asked that question when Tha Bush Mobb was using my taxpayer money to attack Iraq against my express wishes! But this is why we have representative government -- if every taxpayer had veto power over every spending initiative, nothing would get done, and even worse, we would never learn how to live together in a community or a civilization. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to promote women's health and freedom by passing the Global HER Act.

Action: concerning taxes, internet access, whistleblowing, and pollution.

Chye-Ching Huang at the New York Times proposes a way for President Biden to fund his dream infrastructure bill: simply restore our IRS's ability to collect the taxes big money earners avoid paying! This is a wonderful idea, and not just because our IRS didn't collect some $570 billion in unpaid taxes in 2019, and may face a "tax gap" of $7.5 trillion over the next decade: frankly, if you owe money to our government, you owe it to the American people, and you shouldn't short your friends and neighbors. But our government has enabled this noxious behavior by pointedly underfunding our IRS. It should be hard to argue against "making big money earners pay the taxes they already owe," but in these times, we have to get One Real True and Great President Joe Manchin on board; his phone number is 202.224.3954. He wants that infrastructure bill "paid for," but every dollar in IRS funding brings back $6 in unpaid taxes, per our Treasury Department, so, hey, this could help us meet his goal of getting that bill "paid for." And, hey, we're all about helping people reach their goals!

With the departure of Ajit Pai, our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) is short one commissioner, meaning it only has four, and it's hard to break ties with four -- and since two Commissioners are Democrats and two are Republicans, you're going to have a lot of ties. It's not such a great time for that, though, since millions of good Americans don't have reliable internet access and have never needed it more -- how many millions of kids are going to school over the internet again? How many folks are trying to sign up online for a vaccine as we speak? How many big telecom corporations are imposing data caps to squeeze more money out of good Americans, again, during a pandemic? Hence both Battle for the Net and Demand Progress help you tell our President to nominate an FCC Commissioner who will support good internet policy, and tell your Senators to confirm said individual. And let's have one who'll help establish a net neutrality policy like the Open Internet Order of 2015; maybe you haven't noticed the loss of net neutrality, but like the proverbial frog in a boiling pot, you're not supposed to notice it until it's too late. So we need a good 5th Commissioner.

Meanwhile, S. 409, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (or CFTC) Fund Management Act, would increase funding for whistleblowers who expose wrongdoing in the bankster sector of our economy; the Dodd-Frank law of 2010 created the whistleblower program, but Congress hasn't effectively funded the program in years, and it's about to run out of money. And S. 409's lead sponsor, Iowa's Chuck Grassley, is a Republican; one Republican and two Democrats join him as co-sponsors, and you'd hate to think our Senate would smother this bill in its crib merely because it's actually bipartisan. Regardless, whistleblowers deserve compensation for the law-breaking they find, and don't think some of those guys are making stuff up just so they can steal money themselves -- whistleblowers can count on getting blacklisted and threatened if they come forward, so the number of "frivolous" whistleblower complaints is not only quite small, but, ah, handled by circumstances. The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to help protect whistleblowers by passing the CFTC Fund Management Act.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) has proposed a rule that would cut methane emissions and other pollutants from oil and gas drilling -- a big deal in a big fracking state like Pennsylvania -- but contains a rather important loophole that a lot of frackers will try to drive a Mack truck through: it would excuse "low-producing" wells from the rule. Maybe that seems logical to you: how much can a "low-producing well" pollute, after all? Problem isn't how much one pollutes, but how much they all pollute all together! Turns out more than half of all methane emissions coming from fossil-fuel operations in the Keystone state come from "low-producing" wells, so the proposed rule wouldn't keep as many pollutants out of our air and water as we'd like. And you can just imagine some big drilling operation deciding to evade regulatory scrutiny entirely by drilling only "low-producing" wells! Hey, if I thought of it, you know they have. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our DEP to close the "low-producing well" loophole in its proposal to cut methane emissions.

Around the table: in which we invoke yet more '70s TV sci-fi to describe current events.

Good news, everyone! The Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) has permanently banned fracking in the Delaware River watershed. This is a major victory, and you deserve congratulations if you contacted the DRBC. However, the DRBC also voted to start rulemaking processes for both selling water to frackers elsewhere and importing fracking wastewater from elsewhere, neither of which is a particularly good idea. When I get action alerts, you'll get action alerts.

Surprise, surprise, a Wall Street Journal analysis finds that energy deregulation in the state of Texas has cost good Texans an extra $28 billion since 2004. Here's the thing about "more competition leading to lower prices": if people simply can't be without electricity, which is where we are as a civilization, then people don't have the bargaining power that more competition would help them use -- especially if governments don't enforce antitrust or collusion laws. At present, Texas has only two electricity providers; that's some "competition," there.

FAIR reminds us that, amid all the coverage of the Perseverance rover giving us brand new pictures of the surface of Mars, our "liberal" media ignored "the Plutonium Bullet We Dodged." Previous Mars probes did fine powering themselves with solar panels, but for some reason we powered Perseverance with Plutonium-238, which would have caused a lot of mayhem if it'd blown up on takeoff, and don't retort that there was only a one-in-100 chance it'd do that, because if it happens, and people die, and you can't drink the water anymore, you won't be telling future generations how unlikely all that was. Wasn't there a Space: 1999 episode about this kind of thing? I kid -- of course there was.

Teaneck, NJ, population 39,776 as of the 2010 Census, has banned its police from using facial recognition technology. Thankfully we only wait until paragraph 2 before hearing that facial recognition technology can't tell black folks apart any better than your Trumphole uncle can. We also learn that Teaneck is just getting around to making its police officers use body cameras, which, no, is not the same thing, not least because we don't use body cameras to identify people so much as we use them to determine if police officers are executing citizens without charge, which should be a much easier matter to determine with a camera.

Upon hearing that "Georgia Dems Take Gambling Hostage Over GOP Voting Bills," all I can say is you go, Georgia Democrats! "Passing a sports gambling bill" is about one-millionth as important as "ensuring everyone can vote," after all. It's a shame this sort of thing will only work on matters like sports betting where state Republicans are divided, but Democrats say they've already identified two more priorities where this might work. Rip the system, that's what I say. And send Chuck Schumer a bottle of whatever you're drinking.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), not running for re-election in 2022, advances the novel theory that Joe Biden will violate an alleged "promise" of "working together" if he doesn't magically produce a COVID relief bill that a single Republican will vote for! Surely he knows that Republicans can continue to manufacture fake outrage over "not being consulted" simply by never voting for anything that might do anyone some good, as they've been doing for the entire McConnell Era. And again: the COVID-19 bill garners supermajority support among regular Americans in polls, meaning it must also garner bipartisan support among Americans. I know liberals are beyond tired of right-wing gaslighting; I can only hope that most other Americans are starting to get tired of that, too.

Action: concerning public lands, right-wing media, racism in health care, and saving our Post Office.

Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell President Biden to stop leasing and permitting for coal operations on our public lands. President Biden has lately put a stop to oil and gas drilling on public lands, but he's strangely left coal out, possibly calculating that he can't lose a single vote in a state like Pennsylvania in 2024, but possibly also calculating that coal, as an industry, is going south and doesn't need another punch in the face right now. But I would say building out renewable energy operations on public lands would be a smarter political move, as well as a smarter move generally. If coal corporations are crashing one by one, they hardly represent a threat to the political order, though their displaced workers might. But we can retrain them to rebuild a renewable energy infrastructure a whole lot more easily than we can "teach them to code." Construction and coding are different skills, after all. And if you really want to "build back better," you also have to build back smarter.

Meanwhile, Sum of Us helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Fox News. I'd tell them to stop advertising on Newsmax and OANN, too, but Sum of Us must smell blood in the water. Fox News, as you know, faces a $2.7 billion defamation/disparagement lawsuit from Smartmatic over some of their nefarious "election fraud" claims, a lawsuit that seems to have made right-wing news organs a little less obnoxious generally. Now you may be tempted to say haven't they suffered enough? But the answer is no, they have not suffered enough. From calling Iraq War opponents traitors to fearmongering over immigrants to whining about the deficit to whining about regulations to demanding jackboot lockstep support for police who kill black folks without a trial or even a charge to carrying Donald Trump's water for four years, Fox News has done incalculable damage to our civilization, and the only just punishment for their evil works is annihilation. Advertisers finally pulling out in large numbers might, at last, help us begin that necessary work.

In other news, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 666, the Anti-Racism in Public Health Act. The bill would create a National Center for Racism and a Law Enforcement Violence Prevention Program at our Centers for Disease Control; the latter program would operate within our CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. If your right-wing friends and neighbors protest ZOMG TEH BUREAUCRACIEZ MULTIPLIEZ!!!!!, remind them that corporations have bureaucracies, too, and maybe a bureaucracy dedicated to researching (and ultimately helping to prevent) the health care burdens we all know folks of color bear in America, and the unique amount of violence done to folks of color by our police isn't such a bad bureaucracy after all. Folks of color are less likely to be paid well, less likely to have health insurance, and more likely to live near a landfill, so we ought to do something about that.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Biden to appoint four decent human beings to our United States Postal Service's Board of Governors -- four decent human beings who might then decide to do the only decent thing and fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy -- then MoveOn still helps you do that. Just about every American who gets mail (i.e., every American) can testify, using only their own recent experiences, that he's not doing a good job, but I expect the right-wing media will whine that he's being "targeted" (or "hunted"!) by nefarious forces like us, even though we're really not "nefarious" -- we just want our Post Office to run well, as our Constitution guarantees. If I had a dollar for every lousy boss I've ever had I might not have to work another day, and I suspect most Americans (again, from sad experience) are at least as good at telling a good boss from a bad one as I am. But we certainly shouldn't tolerate bad leadership from our Post Office.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, COVID vaccines, and pollution.

You've been hearing for weeks now that our Congressfolk are "negotiating" a COVID stimulus bill, that some want to include stimulus checks and some don't, that some want to get it done before the end of 2020 and some don't, but, really, all they have to do to get good Americans the relief we deserve is pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, so go ahead and call your Senators and tell them to do that. The HEROES Act would fund COVID testing and tracing, states and localities suffering from lost tax revenues, and our Post Office, plus it would repeal that notorious tax-cut-for-the-rich they snuck into the CARES Act and would cut working Americans another stimulus check (a bigger one than the CARES Act did). Really, if you want your Senators to pass the HEROES Act, best thing to do is to say the HEROES Act will cut us bigger checks than anything you're proposing now. And don't get caught up in thinking we have to do something now, because that's how they get you to settle for less than you deserve. You deserve the HEROES Act -- at the very least!

Meanwhile, Pfizer's new COVID vaccine stands to make them a crap-ton of money, but a big reason for that is it's damn expensive -- it sold 100 million doses (which would inoculate 50 million people) to our government at $20/dose, and maybe that doesn't sound like a lot, but let's see what it charges retail, and remember that in a lot of the world, folks don't make $20 a day, and they do have other things to buy besides a COVID vaccine. Like, you know, food and shelter. Astra-Zeneca, which is a bit behind Pfizer and Moderna in putting a decent COVID vaccine together, has already pledged to sell its vaccine in lower-income nations at a massive discount. You'd think Pfizer would do the same, having just raked in $2 billion from our government and more from others, but apparently not, hence Sum of Us helps you tell Pfizer to (guess what) put people over profits and supply their vaccine to lower-income countries for less money. It's really for all of us -- if richer nations get everyone vaccinated but poorer nations don't, then we haven't really beaten COVID, have we?

Finally, the big banks say they won't fund oil or gas drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, but our Office of the Comptroller of the Currency aims to put a stop to that: they've proposed a rule that would force banks to fund customers (like fossil fuel drilling corporations) solely on the basis of those customer's "individual risk," and not some "categorical exclusion," like, you know, whether the project will promote pollution. Some folks have called banks' refusal to fund fossil fuel drilling "discrimination," and others have even compared it to redlining. Compare, if you can, "refusing to fund a big fossil fuel project" with "not letting black folks move into your neighborhood." You can't. Our politicians love "free" markets right up to the point it stops working to their liking -- or, more precisely, their big donors' liking. And they also think good folks wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR is "terrorism." Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our Office of the Comptroller to reject this wrong-headed plan to force banks to fund fossil fuel projects.

Action: concerning vaccines, pollution, and "conversion therapy."

The Hero Action Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to make any COVID-19 vaccine free for all Americans. Not just because life is precious, but because the more people get immunized, the quicker we'll kill this disease, and the big pharma corporations shouldn't worry -- I'm sure this isn't the last time we'll need a COVID vaccine. But, you know, Pfizer took a few hundred million Euros to make its vaccine, and Moderna only spent American taxpayer money on theirs, so we should, in fact, get to say what happens with these vaccines. One might respond that these corporations only made those vaccines so they could make money -- and given how little interest big corporations have ever shown in an ebola vaccine, one might be right. But civilized people cannot reasonably put money at the core of every single public welfare decision. That's what our government has done for decades now, and we need to change that.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Wolf to reject the proposed Gibbstown, NJ natural gas export terminal. Mr. Wolf, as Governor, sits on the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) and has the authority to stop this project, which would receive liquefied natural gas transported over rail and truck from Wyalusing, PA and send it overseas, which sure is a strange way of promoting energy independence. Of course, it's also a bad way of promoting "a new energy future" -- a better way would be to go all-in on renewable energy sources, because even though (as Ralph Nader used to say) you can't own the sun, you can own the infrastructure that converts it into electricity. But shipping 3.5 million gallons of liquified gas every single day is an accident waiting to happen, and that accident will pollute our land, our air, and our clean water. So we know what we have to do.

Finally, Change.org provides two petitions which help you protect gay and/or transgender kids: one helps you tell Alabama legislators to reject HB 1, which would actually make it illegal to give health care services to transgender children, while the other helps you tell Pennsylvania legislators to pass HB 1293, which would ban "conversion therapy" there. It's pretty simple: the science tells us that "tough love" for transgender kids (which is what HB 1 supporters obviously prefer) only makes their anxiety, depression, and suicidal wishes much worse, and the science also tells us that "conversion therapy" (which HB 1293 would ban) isn't therapy, or even science. Hate to pile on, but Alabama does worse than most American states in providing mental health care to children to begin with, and "conversion therapy" includes such "therapies" as naked touching, re-enacting sexual abuse, and shock therapy, and why would civilized folks allow these things to happen?

Action: concerning good House bills, election ethics, and drilling on public lands.

Happy Wednesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Remember: don't get discouraged, because that's how they want you to feel. Indeed, the only reason they have the power they do is because so many Americans are discouraged. But when we fight through our discouragement, and we act, we make good things happen.

Meanwhile, People for the American Way helps you tell our Senate Ethics Committee to investigate Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for allegedly trying to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to throw out legally-cast votes in that state. Joe Biden won Georgia by a slim margin, as you know, but Sen. Graham sure seems to have done his part to contribute to all the tall tales about "voter fraud." How did Jaime Harrison raise $100 million and still lose to Mr. Graham by 10 points, huh? Should we take that result as evidence of actual voter fraud in South Carolina? Of course not (we should take it as evidence that Mr. Harrison wasn't such a good candidate!), so let's not imagine that any result we don't like must be "fraud," certainly not without evidence, which Mr. Graham has not provided. Our soon-to-be-ex-President sure does turn everything he touches to dung, doesn't he? Mr. Graham, once upon a time, was the first Senator to condemn the abuses at Abu Ghraib, but now he sucks up to a man he derided not too long ago.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President-elect Biden to keep his promise to ban fossil fuel drilling on public lands, then Wild Earth Guardians still helps you do that. Yes, Mr. Biden did promise to ban fracking and oil drilling on public lands, though not private lands; I suppose he could work around his promise by selling off as much public land as he can to oil and gas drilling corporations, but we'll deal with that if it comes to that. And certainly we should concentrate on renewable energy production, not fossil fuel production that pollutes our air and water. I would advocate that our government get back into the utility business by creating renewable energy utilities that can compete with the privately-held utilities that won't do what's necessary to fight pollution and climate change. Maybe Joe Biden doesn't want to do that; certainly Mitch McConnell doesn't want to do that. But when we make our will unmistakable, it doesn't matter what the politicians want. So let's get to it.

Action: concerning police brutality, media consolidation, and Arctic drilling.

A new Administration comes to power in January, so Grassroots Law helps you tell the Biden-Harris team to do everything they can to stop racist police brutality. Grassroots Law has a good list of demands, and these include reopening police brutality cases left unsolved, ending the 1033 program that sends military weapons to police departments, repeal the Muslim ban and family separation policies, and getting more public defenders and civil rights attorneys involved in our Justice Department's work. A Biden-Harris Administration can accomplish most of this through executive order, without running to Great and Bounteous Real American President Mitch McConnell (or his trusty sidekick, Saint Joe Manchin of the Golden Age of Bipartisanship) for permission. And though Biden-Harris ran on most of this stuff, you know they really don't want to do it if they don't have to. But that's why we make them have to.

Meanwhile, FCC Chair Ajit Pai, who isn't very long for his job, plans to waive media ownership rules so that Fox can gobble up even more properties in the lucrative New York City media market, where Fox already owns two TV stations and the New York Post. And our FCC will only take public comments on this plan until next Friday, December 4, which is what they all do when they know the public will hate what they do. Media consolidation is one of the few issues in America where liberals and conservatives actually agree (i.e., in that they all hate it), so naturally the nominally "conservative" Mr. Pai would do the exact opposite! There's a lesson in there, somewhere. Until they learn it, Free Press helps you tell our FCC not to give out any more corporate welfare handouts to Fox. Fox will probably tell you it just can't compete with Newsmax, OANN, etc. without more handouts, but if it can't compete with those clowns, it deserves to die.

Finally, just about every big banking corporation in America has declared that it won't fund any drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) -- except for Bank of America. Sigh. Of course it's Bank of America! And it'll only take one well-funded (as far as we know!) bankster to ruin a stretch of public land the size of South Carolina. (No, really. Alaska is a really, really big place; people don't get how big it is.) And drilling for oil and gas in ANWR will not only ruin land home to the Gwich'in people and unique species of animals, it won't get us anywhere near as much oil as ANWR drilling proponents would like you to think. And once that oil's burned, and all that money gets spent, there really will be nothing left -- unless we fight to keep what's really important. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell Bank of America to abandon plans to fund Arctic drilling.

Around the table: in which we are reminded what we must do to "push Biden left."

Kevin A. Young at TruthOut instructs us that "To Push Biden Left, We Must Build Movements to Challenge His Corporate Backers." The article draws from Mr. Young's book, Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It; historical examples include the civil rights movement boycotting local businesses in the '60s (which prompted them to pressure politicians), while more recent examples include all the massive civil disobedience (and pressuring of investors) that have stopped a lot of fossil fuel projects cold. Conclusion: "the best way to get better electoral outcomes is, ironically, to build strong non-electoral movements." Certainly we'll do better better donating to union strike funds than to center-right Democratic candidates like Amy McGrath who'll just light your money on fire while losing big.

Hard to believe, Harry, but Amazon uses Pinkerton operatives to spy on their workers. Which proves, yet again, that giving corporations more money doesn't magically cause them to "create jobs," but it just gives them more money to light on fire desperately trying to keep their workers from organizing for better pay and better working conditions. (Also, too, Pinkerton? Like we're all in an episode of Deadwood or Boardwalk Empire!)

Isaac Chotiner at The New Yorker talks with Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy, who claims that our soon-to-be-ex-President's "voter fraud" lies are actually good for his channel. This Isaac Chotiner fellow is damn good at his job -- his interrogation of Mr. Ruddy is almost as good as his interrogation of that COVID "contrarian" from March. I can only add that Mr. Ruddy's claim that Newsmax gets "one million people per minute" is a pretty useless statistic if the million people who are watching Newsmax the next minute are, as I suspect, the same damn people. Why, I might even call it a scare number.

Can it possibly be true that our soon-to-be-ex-President really thinks his lawyers arguing so badly before numerous federal courts are "fools" who "are making him look bad"? I mean, that ship has long sailed, has it not? But when you realize that he thinks laws are for us "little people" and he also thinks any fecal argument can be polished into gold if you just inject more money and more red-faced yelling into it, you can sort of see how he can blame everyone but yourself. You may have more trouble seeing how people who call themselves conservative still give their devotion to a man who always chooses chaos over order.

Finally, Carl Bernstein, who helped take down Richard Nixon with his Watergate reporting at the Washington Post, says that no less than 21 Republican Senators have "repeatedly expressed extreme contempt for" our soon-to-be-ex-President, though only a few have expressed that "extreme contempt" publicly. Out of those 21 Senators, I see 12 up for re-election in 2022; I sincerely hope Democrats don't try to ratfuck those races by pointing out these Senators' infidelity to Dear Leader, because that wouldn't be very civil of them, now, would it? (Sadly, I fear I have just explained exactly why Democrats would never do such a thing.)

Around the table: in which our soon-to-be-ex-President can't stop embarrassing himself.

No, our Army did not "seize" a server from a German corporation in Frankfurt that switched enough votes to "throw" the election. Forget that our Army has denied the story, or that the corporation in question is Spanish and doesn't have a server (or an office!) in Frankfurt and that 97% of American counties don't even use their product -- you should know it's all rubbish when the Congressdolt promoting the story says things like "I don't know the truth" and "(t)here are some that believe," let alone that he uses the passive voice ("there was a German tweet" -- Jesus Mary and Joseph he's not even confident enough in his own lies to say "a German tweeted"). But I guess when you see a big map of America on the TV showing our soon-to-be-ex-President "winning" California, you don't have to think anymore.

Ryan Grim at The Intercept reminds us that "Joe Biden Doesn’t Need the Senate to Boost the Economy and Tackle Climate Change." As President, Mr. Biden can a) wipe out $50,000 of student debt, which could free up some $400 per debtor per month to stimulate our economy; b) prevent corporations from designating their workers as "managers" willy-nilly, which would enable more of those workers to collect overtime pay; c) taking pot off Schedule I, which would stimulate a lot of pot-growing businesses around the nation; and d) use the Financial Stability Oversight Council (created by the Dodd-Frank bank reform bill) to stop investment in fossil fuels. And of course, how much of this he'll actually do isn't just up to him: it's also up to us.

I'm generally pleased to see our "liberal" media noting, as our soon-to-be-ex-President formally requests a recount in Georgia, that Georgia just did a damn recount. Perhaps he's thinking that since he cut into Mr. Biden's lead by 1,500 votes during the last recount, he'll win Georgia if he can just get them to do nine more recounts! It sure is a good thing he's laser-focused on his own election loss, rather than something like everyone and their grandmother getting COVID-19.

Don't trouble yourself over the "backlash" against Tucker Carlson's criticism of Sidney Powell's fever-dream "stolen election" narrative that has so far failed in nearly every one of over three dozen court cases. When right-wingers "fight," it's always drama, and bad drama at that. Tucker Carlson will be back in right-wingers' good graces even if OAN, for example, takes over from Fox News as "the" place for right-wingers to run and hide from facts and good arguments. (Also, too, when Rush Limbaugh's spokeshack asks about "the 'evidence' the election was fair," he's displaying an ignorance of how our legal system works -- the burden of proof is always on the folks who accuse unfairness, for reasons we're seeing play out in those aforementioned three dozen court cases -- and I'm sure this display is solely for show.)

Speaking of our Administration's repeated failures in court, District Judge Matthew Brann's dismissal of our soon-to-be-ex-President's complaint aiming to keep Pennsylvania from certifying election results reads rather like a father trying his damnedest to be extremely patient with a toddler having a tantrum. Dig the part where Judge Brann says he's not listening to another damn "amended" filing because it's just going to be the same damn filing! OK, I'm paraphrasing, but Judge Brann's opinion does read rather like Judge Jones's 2005 decision preventing the Dover school district from teaching "intelligent design" in science classes. Either one could have typed "how dare you waste my time with your frivolous lawsuit" over and over for 35 pages and you still would've gotten the jist.

Finally, when you hear our soon-to-be-ex-President whining on Twitter that Mr. Biden is trying to put together a Cabinet "so quickly" "when my investigators have found hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes," you, again, have to wonder why his legal team hasn't shown evidence of "hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes" to judges in, again, over three dozen lawsuits. And please understand that by "you have to wonder why" I mean "pimp ain't got no damn evidence, that's why."

Action: concerning the HEROES Act and drilling on public lands.

Today's a good day to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. Why is today a goodday? Because President-elect Biden said on Monday, at a press conference I would otherwise have ignored, that "Congress should come together and pass a COVID relief package like the HEROES Act that the House passed six months ago." Not even "a COVID relief package like the HEROES Act the House passed two months ago," but the much better one, passed back in May. That's a signal, folks! The May version of the HEROES Act spent more money, to be sure, but that's what you do when your economy's in trouble, you can print your own money, and your government won't fall anytime soon -- and not to beat a dead horse, but our government could also tax the rich a lot harder and not have as much debt. And we do need the May HEROES Act, not just because it'd fund testing and tracing, but because it'd help out states and localities that can't just print their own money (or even go into debt to dig out of trouble!).

Meanwhile, Food and Water Watch helps you tell President-elect Biden to ban all fossil fuel extraction on public lands, which would fulfill one of his campaign promises. Wait, you've heard that Joe Biden wouldn't ban fracking? Well, he wouldn't ban fracking on private land, but said he would on public lands, like our national parks and wilderness areas. You'd think we wouldn't be drilling there now, but we are, and not only are we doing that, we're failing to collect the royalties we deserve as taxpayers. I mean, it's not a "job-creation" strategy to make oil and gas drilling corporations pay a pittance to drill on public lands, it's a "take food out of good Americans' mouths" strategy, since those royalties would pay for services we all need. Best in any case to tax the rich a lot harder and keep fossil fuel drillers from polluting our public lands, which are ours, after all.

Finally, our soon-to-be-ex-President, seeing the writing on the wall, is rushing to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) to oil drilling. Now that's a hell of a legacy to take to the pearly gates! Yes, Lord, I did ensure that oil drillers polluted a pristine area so that oil executives could make even more money! No, that's really why he's doing it -- it's not for "jobs," and anyway why wouldn't our government create jobs by building out renewable energy infrastructure, so that the workers who helped build it and thus reduced pollution and helped avoid the more calamitous aspects of climate change can tell future generations I helped do that? Because our soon-to-be-ex-President doesn't care about the future and doesn't care about anything but bosses making more money, that's why. The rest of us can tell our Department of Interior to reject lease sales in the Arctic, as the Alaska Wilderness League helps you do.

Around the table: in which we contemplate, again, what "law and order" *should* look like.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy runs down some of the tax-related ballot initiatives from the 2020 election. Successes? Arizona voted to raise taxes on the rich to fund education and Louisiana voted to hike taxes on oil corporations through more realistic tax assessments. Failures? Illinois voters rejected a tax hike on richer folks, and California voters rejected better property tax assessments likely leading to higher property taxes and thus better education funding, both showing us that their reputation as liberal states is somewhat unearned. These results remind us, again, that we need to better persuade more economically-minded voters to vote for their own interests -- an effort mainstream Democrats won't help, with their arrogant belief that "just teaching everyone to write code" will solve all our problems.

Another big pharma corporation, Moderna, reports excellent results on its Phase 3 clinical trials. It's easier to store than Pfizer's vaccine (though that doesn't mean it's easy to store!), but Moderna only plans to offer 20 million doses in the U.S., which means, again, that the poor won't get it. These aren't the only two vaccines in progress, though, and the more corporations come forward with good news about their vaccines, the more like a conspiracy nut our President will sound when he whines that THEYZ DELAYEDZ TEH NEWZES TO PREVENTZ MYZ GLORIOUSEZ VICTORIEZ!!!!! (If you're the winner he claims to be, of course, you should overcome whatever anyone does to you pretty easily.)

Uh oh: Pfizer's CEO apparently dumped over $5 million in stock on the very day his corporation gave us the good news in re its COVID vaccine. I mean, I might have held onto that stock if the vaccine is as good as Pfizer says it is -- unless he knows something we don't! Which, of course, would be information he wouldn't be allowed to trade on! I'm old enough to remember when the appearance of immorality would be enough to stop someone from doing something immoral, but please, right-wingers, tell us again how immorality is all about birth control and gay marriage and transgender folk.

Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito sure did work up a lather in his speech before the Federalist Society last week, and his right-wing defenders can't say well nothing he said should come as a surprise to anyone who's attended his rulings, since they've always said their judges don't impose their worldviews on their rulings! I kid, of course -- right-wingers will say whatever they think will shut you up. Could this rant against gay marriage and mask-wearing and the "right" to trample on other people's rights as long as you invoke God's name be a sign that he's getting tired of it all and might retire? He is 71, after all, and maybe he won't want to wait until 2024.

Here's a surprising announcement: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer revokes a permit allowing Canadian corporation Enbridge's Line 5 fossil fuel pipelines to run underneath the straits connecting two of our Great Lakes, citing "persistent and incurable violations" by Enbridge. Now that's what law and order looks like -- if people think of law and order in terms of "protecting one-fifth of the world's fresh water" rather than "shooting unarmed black folks in the street when they brandish a cellphone," then my work on Earth will be done. And to those who would whine BUTZ WHEREZ WILLZ TEH ENURGEEZ COMEZ FROMZ!!!!, I'd say, hey, this is America, the can-do country, so just do it.

Finally, some other good news: U.S. District Court Judge invalidates our Department of Homeland Security's suspension of new Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) applications, on the grounds that current acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf "was not lawfully serving as Acting Secretary of Homeland Security under the HSA (Homeland Security Act) when he issued the Wolf Memorandum." The judge also wrote that "(t)he court wishes the Government well in trying to find its way out of this self-made thicket," which is judgespeak for "how dare you waste my valuable time." (Though this may explain how Mr. Wolf found the "courage" to refuse to fire DHS's cybersecurity chief at our President's behest -- if Mr. Wolf is in his job illegally in the first place, then literally nothing he does means anything anyway.)

Action: concerning immigration, voting rights, and fracking.

Change.org helps you tell President-elect Biden to roll back our current Administration's immigrant child separation policy on day one of his Presidency. I've heard that he plans to do just that (and about a hundred other things that our laws let him write Executive Orders about) on day one, but you never know whether politicians will keep their promises, and you certainly never know what infernal 13-dimensional calculus Democrats will use to justify inaction. Best to tell them what to do in numbers they can't deny! Our current Administration's policy of separating immigrant children from their families at the border -- in the name of "deterrence," which suggests a profound ignorance about what immigrants run from -- is a black mark on our nation's soul, which you can tell by right-wing excuses about President Obama's border policies like any of those justify the worse policies enacted thereafter. Certainly we do not need our politicians to do evil in our names, but they'll keep doing just that, unless we act.

Meanwhile, Sum of Us helps you tell grocery corporation Publix to stop bankrolling vote-suppressing politicians in Florida. Publix runs over 1,250 supermarkets in the South, including over 800 in Florida, where it's also headquartered, and though it claims (because they all do these days!) that it "rejects racism and discrimination of any kind," it also sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to the same right-wing Florida politicians who defanged the 2018 ballot initiative that would have restored voting rights to felons there. These are the politicians who added the condition that ex-felons would have to pay all their fees and fines before getting their voting rights back, which is less "being a stickler for the rule of law" and more "let's find a way to subvert the people's expressed will." If this still seems a little obscure to you, consider how many big corporations dumped the American Legislative Exchange Council over Voter ID and Stand Your Ground. So we use the Big Stick of Bad PR to make Publix's campaign contributions toxic.

Finally, a pair of local fossil fuel corporations want to build a massive port in Gibbstown, NJ, right on the Delaware River, that'll help them export liquefied fracked gas, which they'll receive and process at the port and then send down the River or on highways or trains; anyone else see the multitudinous problems with that? Like sending volatile, polluting fossil fuels down a river or through populated areas on land? And that's not even mentioning the damage fracking does to our air and water before it's on a train or a boat or a truck! The Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) will meet next month to contemplate final approval of this project; the only thing stopping them from such approval so far is our activism against it, and indeed our Army Corps of Engineers and New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection have already issued permits for the project. But we can still beat it, hence Environmental Action helps you tell the DRBC to protect our air and water by rejecting the proposed fracked gas port in Gibbstown.

Action: concerning violence against protestors, renewable energy, and public water.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: good Nigerian citizens raise their voices in protest of their government's violence against them, only to be met with more violence. While our President must be saying if only that could be me!, sane, moral, and decent people say there ain't nothing a protestor can do that warrants being shot to death on the street or disappeared into a labyrinthine court system. (And when your right-wing friends and neighbors whine BUT TEH LOOTERZ!!!!, you can remind them that a lot of these looters are agents provocateurs like the gas-masked Nazi wannabe who hammered away at the Minneapolis AutoZone.) Naturally the Nigerian government, having studied how bigger countries do it, calls their gang of thugs the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, because who supports robbery? Typical of tyrants, to pretend they're doing it for you when they're doing it to you. Thus CAPPA helps you tell international criminal courts to investigate the violence Nigeria commits against its people.

Meanwhile, the fifth anniversary of the biggest gas blowout in American history, at SoCalGas's Aliso Canyon storage facility in Los Angeles, just passed -- well, the fifth anniversary of its beginning, at least, since SoCal didn't finally plug the leak until almost four months later, meaning good Californians were breathing in all those toxins all that time. California suffers worse droughts and wildfires every year, while still producing two-thirds of our country's fruits and nuts and another third of our country's vegetables, so why does California push more gas production? "Cheap fuel," I guess, but it ain't cheap if you'll have no food, water, or earth in the foreseeable future. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell California to phase out of fossil fuels and shift toward renewables. And don't tolerate the retorts that "you see more solar panels in Cali than anywhere else" -- the big utility corporations, which make most of Cali's power, won't shift to renewable energy unless we make them.

Finally, notorious public water-mongering corporation Nestlé plans to sell all its North American bottled water operations, which means the Big Stick of Bad PR has worked! But it also means we need to make the Big Stick of Bad PR work against whichever corporation (or corporations!) buy up Nestlé's water operations -- which may include Coke and/or Pepsi -- so Sum of Us helps you tell Nestlé and/or whichever corporations buy up its water operations to give back the public water that really belongs to good folks in Colorado, Florida, Michigan, California, and Ontario. I've said it before and I'll say it again: bottled water is a scam, and in those rare places bottled water is cleaner than public water -- like, say, Flint -- then local governments need to improve their public water delivery systems, not sell them to private corporations that'll jack up the price of water so good folks can't afford it. Clean water is the cornerstone of health care on this planet -- but only if we can keep it.

Action: concerning good House bills, internet privacy, and methane emissions.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Yeah, our Senate only wants to put another right-wing stooge on our Supreme Court, and we'll get to that, but we still must remind them of their duty to do right by us.

Meanwhile, if you're wary of how much personal data big tech corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple collect from you, and you should be wary, then Consumer Reports helps you tell your legislators and regulators to do a much better job protecting our personal data. You'll recall that our FCC actually issued pretty good regulations that protected consumer privacy on the internet, but the last Congress couldn't crap all over that effort fast enough, moving quickly to repeal those regulations via the notorious "resolution of disapproval" process. The Consumer Reports petition asks that consumers get more control over their personal data, that corporations be more transparent about their use of that data, and that corporations don't get monopoly control over our internet. Our FCC may not be able to issue new regulations about the matter (yet another unfortunate aspect of the "resolution of disapproval" process), but nothing prevents our Congressfolk from passing bills about the matter. Well, nothing but their own cowardice or avarice, but what else is new?

Finally, our EPA just rolled back Obama-era regulations preventing big oil and gas drilling corporations from leaking methane into the air, and this rollback offends on so many levels -- it causes more pollution, it makes climate change worse, it wastes usable energy, and it deprives good Americans of royalties when it occurs on public lands. But, hey, some bossman somewhere gets to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home, so it's another round of "screw the people" for this Administration. And you know how right-wingers always say they'll just pass the costs of regulations on to the little guy? Well, the "little guy" winds up bearing the costs of methane emissions in all the ways described in the first sentence -- we lose royalties, we pay more for health care because of pollution, and we eventually don't get a livable planet to inhabit because methane emissions pack a much, much higher climate change punch than even coal emissions. That never makes it into the right's "cost-benefit analysis"; as I've said, they only care about the "cost" or "benefit" to executive paychecks. Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to do whatever it takes to roll back yet another Administration rollback.

Action: concerning good House bills, bad methane regulations, and bad corporate acquisitions.

Happy Tuesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Do I "keep saying the same thing"? Yes, I do, if what I keep saying is the right thing. Let our Senators listen to anyone but their big donors for once, and then I'll count the colors in my garden. Until then, it's hammertime.

Meanwhile, our Administration has formally weakened methane emission regulations, by repealing requirements that oil and gas corporations install the technology that would detect and repair methane leaks. Ugh, one more time: methane packs a much bigger climate-change punch than even coal emissions, leaked methane is a waste of usable energy, and leaked methane also deprives the taxpayer of royalties if said leaking occurs on public lands. But what's all that pollution and waste and lost revenue next to gas drilling corporation executives being able to gild the plumbing on their 19th vacation homes? Seriously, that's all our Administration's new rule does: hand out welfare to corporations and rich people. Like everything else they do! Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Senators to block this Administration's new methane emissions rule. Congress would have to accomplish this by passing a "resolution of disapproval," and you may be tempted to wait until a new President and a new Senate come into office, but I wouldn't count on that, and anyway, our duty is always to do the right thing right now.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to block the proposed sale of DNA-collecting corporation Ancestry to big private equity corporation Blackstone, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Hopefully I've identified the problem with the proposed sale by identifying what each of these corporations does -- it's bad enough that big corporations get their grubby hands so deep in your investments, so you certainly would not want their grubby hands in your private information, and your DNA is as private as it gets. And I do not accept the notion that "you give your DNA to someone to help figure out where you came from and you take your chances." Why must it be like that? Because the internet's a big place? Because the "free" market is sacred? I'm so old-fashioned I only think doing what's right is sacred, and letting big corporations buy your DNA info is wrong. And I've never believed the internet is "too big to civilize," no matter how much Our Glorious Elites want you to believe it. And I always choose civilization over chaos.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, our Post Office, Arctic drilling, and corporate welfare.

Happy Monday, good Americans! Now would be a good time to call your Senators (whose phone numbers you can find using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, and H.R. 8015, the Delivering for America Act. At this writing, 122 days have passed since our House passed the HEROES Act, even though the HEROES Act would do everything a decent COVID-19 relief bill should do, like fund testing and tracing, extend enhanced unemployment benefits, and issue another round of stimulus checks. But, alas, Republicans hold our Senate, and the only thing Mob Boss Mitch McConnell knows how to do is stamp his foot and say no. The Delivering for America Act, which would roll back the changes our Postmaster General made to wreck our Post Office, has been awaiting a Senate vote for a somewhat shorter length of time, but this is no less shameful, considering the 2020 election could be at stake. So keep calling your Senators, because shame is all that'll get them to act. No, it works; I've seen it work before.

Meanwhile, opening ANWR to oil drilling was one of the "accomplishments" of the 2017 tax "reform," and our President has lately announced plans to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR). But bad politicians have been trying to open up ANWR to oil drilling corporations for decades, and at this writing five of America's six largest banks have said they won't fund any drilling efforts there. Whether that's because drilling on public lands is rather unpopular or because the big banks know there won't be enough oil in ANWR to justify the effort, I couldn't say. I can say, however, that the notorious Bank of America is the big bank that has not said they won't fund drilling efforts in ANWR, hence the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell Bank of America to reject the funding of Arctic oil drilling projects. Not just for the caribou or for the Gwich'in people, but also for the waste of effort -- it's just not worth destroying ANWR just so a few oil corporation executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Believe me, that's all that's going to come from ANWR drilling. Well, that and pollution and disruption of ancestral homelands.

Finally, H.R. 7781, the End Polluter Welfare Act, would increase royalties for drilling on public lands, prevent our government from offering "royalty relief" to big drilling corporations, repeal liability limits when oil and gas drillers pollute our lands, end new federally-funded fossil fuel research, stop internationally-sourced funding from going to fossil fuel projects in America, and get rid of a bunch of "tax incentives" toward fossil fuel development -- among many, many other things. Seriously, giving fossil fuel corporations welfare handouts would be a little like giving the New York Yankees extra money every year so that they can "stay competitive." Fossil fuel subsidies currently outstrip renewable subsidies by about 2 to 1; this, when renewable energy actually needs taxpayer help precisely because the fossil fuel corporations are so big they can stamp out alternatives. And if you've attended the fact that our West Coast is presently on fire, you know we need those alternatives post-haste. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support sane energy policy by passing the End Polluter Welfare Act.

Action: concerning pollution, government spying, police foundations, and bad media.

On the occasion of yet more wildfires in California, MoveOn helps you tell California Gov. Newsom to stop approving new drilling and fracking leases in the Golden State. A lot of folks say there ain't a dime's worth of difference between Democrats and Republicans, and while that's not exactly true, it doesn't exactly help that California's Democratic Governor, nominally an environmentalist, lets all this oil and gas drilling happen, when making climate change worse is an obvious side effect. Having no clean water is another obvious side effect, since hydrofracturing uses a lot of water -- in a state that frequently experiences drought, no less! In a state already appropriating a lot of water for agricultural uses, no less! So, to sum: the solution to burning lungs, brown sky, ashes falling like rain, and so little water they tell you not to flush the toilet is what? More oil and gas drilling? How about more solar and wind, eh? Last I looked, California got plenty of sun, and you might as well use the resources at hand, rather than dig for more just so a few fossil fuel executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes.

Meanwhile, as good Americans continue to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake by Kenosha, WI police -- and as said police seemed strangely uninterested in the militia member who shot several protestors in the middle of the week -- M Power Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect protestors from FBI surveillance, intimidation, and criminalization. We've told our FBI not to do these things many times, but obviously they think admitting that right-wingers commit terrorist acts is a good enough reason to let them continue to harass black protestors, like they've been doing since time immemorial. But admitting that right-wingers commit terrorism -- you know, like the thing I described in the first sentence of this paragraph! -- is not some great gift to us (it's rather like saying water is wet), and I'm old enough to remember when right-wingers threw a hissy fit over our DHS saying the same thing during the first Obama term. And if you'll refer to the first sentence of this paragraph again, you'll wonder why law enforcement spies on black protestors but seems so helpless when some kid kills a few of them. People have rights even if you don't like them, after all.

And while we're on this subject: if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big corporations to stop funding police foundations, then Police Piggy Bank still helps you do that. It's well past time that police foundations came under some scrutiny -- and it's also well past time the corporations that fund them came under some scrutiny, since these corporations are now falling all over themselves to say how much they love black folks. We-the-people have little-to-no oversight over police foundations, since they're private; certainly we don't have the oversight we have over public police budgets! And police foundations don't typically use this money to have barbecues with the good folks in their neighborhoods -- they more typically use it to buy military weapons they then use on the good folks protesting their atrocities. At least big corporations can be swayed by the Big Stick of Bad PR. Yes, even if they've said "black lives matter" out loud! Anyone can say black lives matter, but it takes hard work to make black lives matter -- or, for a start, to make corporations stop funding police who act like black lives don't matter.

And finally: Free Press helps you tell the Fox News Channel to fire Tucker Carlson. His presentation of Kyle Rittenhouse as a victim after he shot three Kenosha protestors (killing two) may be the last straw, but really, he's been leaving a trail of slime for a long time, most vividly in his almost pornographic reuse of looting and rioting footage over the last few months. He employed this tactic again in his Wednesday night "report," one late night TV show writer Brian Parise describes at length in a public post on his Facebook page. Go find it; it's quite illuminating. Mr. Carlson didn't mention Jacob Blake (i.e., the black man whose shooting by police stoked the protests!) in his report, though you'd think that would provide much-needed context -- but he did show the same clip of a man kicking a fence three times, as well as a black woman hitting a white woman in a church 800 miles away, whenever that happened. Sadly, what he does isn't uncommon -- watch a lengthy news report about anything and you'll see the same clips being used over and over. The difference? Generally they don't push a pro-murder perspective.

Well, this has been a busy week. I remain optimistic, however, that our efforts will, one day, deliver a lot less drama and a lot more peace and quiet.

Action: concerning government spying, pollution, food safety, and fracking.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to reauthorize the notorious USA PATRIOT Act, then the aptly-named Stop the Patriot Act still helps you do that. It sure seems like every Congressperson except Russ Feingold, Ron Paul, and Barbara Less voted for the PATRIOT Act in the immediate aftermath of 9.11, but the PATRIOT Act hasn't made us safer -- it's just made our government more likely to spy on us. What makes us safer, then? Treating people like they're not obstacles to your own wealth, obviously. That's human nature, you say? Don't justify your cowardice with a low opinion of humanity, I say. And you'll notice that our President now calls antifascist activists "terrorists," though I think they only people they "terrorize" are our President and his most racist followers. Well, we said the "war on terror" would become a tool to attack whichever group of Americans some President or other doesn't like, and we were right! (No, this country is not "on fire," Fox News viewers. Go outside on occasion. And wear a mask when you do.)

Meanwhile, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) is once again daring not to live up to its name, let alone its mandate, by deciding that perchlorate winding up in our drinking water is not a big deal. The other places you commonly find perchlorate? Rocket fuel and explosives. But if you're thinking "well, people overstated the problem with that chemical from Agent Orange years ago," rest assured that scientists have a) found perchlorate in all but five American states and b) have found perchlorate disrupts thyroid function and brain development in children and fetuses. And, not for nothing, but our EPA used to find perchlorate in excess of 15 ppm to be unsafe, and our FDA still does, so what happened? We elected an Administration that thinks all regulations that actually help people must be destroyed, that's what happened. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our clean water from the ill effects of perchlorate. Laws can overrule regulations, after all.

In other news, did you know that our Food Safety and Inspection Service (or FSIS) has granted almost 20 waivers to big corporations that want to speed up their meat processing? And that these waivers allow pork processing plants to monitor inspections on their own and chicken processing plants to let nearly three chickens per second go by? Don't they know that food poisoning always makes the news? Would our government think it's OK to let high school students test themselves, or let auto corporations speed up their inspections? And don't they know there's a pandemic going on? Do they only care about big corporate profits? I mean, only caring about big corporate profits is not conservative; it's corporatist, and that's a descriptor you don't want to take to the Pearly Gates. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to force our federal food inspectors to do their real job, which is to keep our food safe.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Governor Wolf sure picked the worst time to sign HB 732, with all its corporate welfare handouts to the fracking industry, because the Attorney General's Statewide Grand Jury investigation into fracking pollution was full of PR black eyes -- like literally "nauseating" air quality, black sludges in toilets, chronic illnesses for folks living near wells, pets dying, and farm animals giving birth to deformed or dead offspring. And that's before we get to irredeemably polluted water tables and the climate change gut-punch delivered by methane emissions from fracking wells. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell Gov. Wolf to suspend all new gas drilling permits until he can put in some more vigorous health and clean air and water protections. Fracking ain't that popular outside of fracking CEOs and their politician lackeys, you know. And no parent ever says fracking may have stunted my child's development, but at least some CEOs got to get even richer!

Action: concerning good House bills, corporate welfare, and police brutality.

Happy Wednesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. They're good bills that would reduce poverty, discrimination, and vote suppression, among other evils, and your Senators have no excuse for sitting on them. They'll keep sitting, though, if we stay silent.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: our state legislators failed to pass an elephantine $670 million tax break for fracking corporations earlier this year, so now they aim to attach it to an unrelated, non-controversial bill and hope no one notices. Too late! Penn Environment helps you tell your legislators to reject any bill that would hand out corporate welfare in the dead of night. This latest would-be abomination comes not even a week after our Attorney General's office issued a grand jury report detailing the pollution fracking causes and our state's poor record in controlling that pollution. And, of course, it also comes in the middle of a pandemic, when our leaders really should be thinking of other things than how much of our taxpayer money they can funnel down some fracking executive's gullet. That's what it's really all about, after all -- it's not about "jobs," it's about executives being able to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Maybe politics should be about us?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to end the 1033 program that supplies police officers with war weapons, then Fight for the Future still helps you do that. Don't get caught up in the hype that police officers' lives are so dangerous that they need bazookas to deal with it! Police officers' lives can be dangerous at times, obviously, but they won't bring down drug kingpins with bazookas -- they bring them down with superior detective work. The real reason they need bazookas, by the evidence, is to attack protestors who protest police brutality! And, yeah, that's a problem that creates itself. If you're still thinking they need bazookas to bring suspects in, ask yourself why officers so often shoot black folks dead without provocation but were able to take Dylann Roof to freaking McDonald's on the way to the station. Don't be tempted to respond with "because Dylann Roof came peacefully" -- to the degree white people "come peacefully," it's because police don't go at them with guns blazing.

Action: concerning government spying, WHO funding, and fracking.

Fight for the Future helps you tell your Congressfolk to block reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act. Because increased, intrusive surveillance of good Americans has done what over the last two decades? Besides chill free speech and prompt law enforcement fishing expeditions? I know some folks will respond to "what has the PATRIOT Act ever done" with the answer "you'll never know how many terrorist attacks it's foiled, because telling you that would jeopardize national security." But think about that answer -- you not only can't prove or disprove it, but you would have to accept life in an untenably fragile world, where no quest for truth can be undertaken lest it lead, however indirectly, to a terrorist attack somewhere. I'm old enough to remember when we accepted that freedom doesn't guarantee good things all the time. Today, we don't -- and, as a result, we're less free. So bollocks to the PATRIOT Act, and all the politicians who fearmonger with it.

Meanwhile, our Administration has actually submitted formal notice to the World Health Organization (or WHO) of its intent to withdraw from the organization. You know, because the WHO's relative competence has embarrassed this Administration, whose incompetence has reached the point where its advisors now say their message is that Americans should "live with" 50,000 new cases a day! I will admit I am a little surprised that they actually had the stones to go through with it, but, you know, our system of government doesn't actually leave a whole lot up to our President -- even though we've left far too much up to our President for far too many years now, and that's sure blowing up in our faces now, isn't it? Anyway, this would be a good occasion to call your House Reps (using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page) and remind them who holds the power of the purse in our government -- and then call your Senators and remind them whom they're supposed to serve.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: late last month, our Attorney General released results of a two-year, grand jury investigation into gas drilling operations and regulations -- and guess what it found? "Systemic failure" on the part of our state government in preventing fracking from polluting our air and water! Preventing pollution is more our government's job, after all, than ensuring gas drilling CEOs make a crapton of money. The report makes eight recommendations, mostly concerning safe transport of gas, better tabulation of air pollution, and more thorough disclosure of fracking chemicals, and enacting these recommendations would certainly reduce pollution in the Keystone state -- but I'm feeling ornery today, so Food and Water Action helps you tell your PA Governor and state legislators to ban fracking entirely. How much air and water pollution comes from solar, wind, and geothermal? Maybe those are the industries we ought to be promoting!

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, clean water, law and order, and corporate welfare.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your U.S. Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. The HEROES Act is actual good stimulus legislation that would help fund states and localities, fund contact tracing so we can get a better handle on this pandemic, expand tax credits for working families (and repeal a massive corporate welfare handout for hedge fund managers), fund our Post Office so it can continue to do the good work it does which could very well include delivering your votes on Election Day, extend enhanced unemployment benefits for the tens of millions of Americans who will likely still need it after it expires at the end of next month, and provide bigger stimulus checks for good Americans making less than six figures. What is the reason for not passing this bill? It sure ain't THE DEFICITZ!!!!!, because our President proved with his 2017 tax "reform" that he can blow up deficits quite well, thank you very much. And that was before the corporate welfare-laden CARES Act passed! So let's spend our money on some good things for once.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that Consumer Reports found an awful lot of arsenic in Whole Foods-manufactured bottled water brand Starkey Spring Water -- it almost had the federal limit of 10 parts of arsenic per billion, and if you're saying, "well, it's still under the limit," remember that a) getting just under the federal limit for some poison or other is no reason to high-five oneself and b) all the other bottled water brands Consumer Reports tested finished with fewer than three parts per billion. Of course, any bottled water testing high for arsenic is quite ironic, since the big corporations have been telling us for years that bottled water is "healthier" than tap water; that the biggest health food chain in the nation sells it is just gravy. Now, I'd rather bottled water didn't exist at all, but if we must have it, it really shouldn't make us sick. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell Whole Foods (and its parent corporation, Amazon) to protect its customers and stop selling Starkey Spring Water.

In other news, Moms Rising helps you tell your Mayors and Governors to help break the "school to prison pipeline" by getting police officers out of our public schools. As I've said, we use police officers as the Swiss Army knives of our civilization -- we put cops in schools before we put counselors in schools; we put cops in schools before we put social workers in schools; hell, we put cops in schools before we put nurses in schools! And no police officer, no matter how great, can wear that many hats. The science instructs us that schools with actual professionals like the three I listed above not only have fewer disciplinary incidents and suspend and expel their students less; they also show higher academic achievement and higher graduation rates, both of which you kinda want from a school. Not for nothing, but the kids in these schools also have less fear that a police officer will pre-judge you based on school and harass you repeatedly when you get out of school. So let's do the right thing, both for kids and for cops.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6707/S. 3611, the Resources for Workforce Investments, Not Drilling (or ReWIND) Act, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. The ReWIND Act would impose a moratorium on new gas and oil leasing (and drilling permits), prevent any banks that fed at the CARES Act trough from embarking upon new fossil fuel-related investments for the next two years, and ban our President from hoarding unneeded oil at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The bill would also roll back our President's recent drilling royalty cuts; these cuts mean the American people get less money from big fossil fuel corporations in exchange for the privilege of drilling on public lands. Our President casts this as a way of "stimulating the economy," but you'd be more accurate describing it as "corporate welfare" -- or, more pungently but no less precisely, as "our President taking food out of our mouths." Too harsh? Too bad: the truth is always harsh, though it always leaves us as better people.

Action: concerning good pandemic legislation, medical supplies, stock trading, and drilling royalties.

The House passed H.R. 6800, the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (or HEROES) Act, last Friday night, but the Republican-held Senate has described the bill as "dead on arrival," even though (as a pair of ITEP analyses instructs us) the HEROES Act is a lot more like a good pandemic relief bill than the CARES Act. The HEROES Act provides help for states and localities, extends unemployment insurance, expands the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC), funds our Post Office through an election during which they'll be quite busy, repeals a particularly noxious tax-cut-for-the-rich, and expands direct payments to Americans making less than six figures. So now would be a good time to call your Senators and demand they pass the HEROES Act -- not least so that we render irrelevant Republican "priorities" like a payroll tax-cut-for-the-rich and "blanket immunity" for corporations that open too early. Senators should only find their constituents' will relevant, but let's not give them the excuse that we never communicated that will.

Meanwhile, we've all seen how our President likes to hijack medical supplies, to the point where hospitals have marked trucks containing medical supplies as food trucks so the feds wouldn't take them. But now comes S. 3627, the Medical Supply Transparency and Delivery Act, which would help bring an end to this Wild West state of affairs by requiring our government to coordinate requests for medical supplies from states and localities, establish fair pricing for these supplies, and communicate with states and localities a whole hell of a lot better than they've been doing. Don't suppose we shouldn't leave such matters to our federal government, particularly this one, but COVID-19 doesn't respect state boundaries, as all those too-early-reopening red states are finding out as we speak, amirite? So Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to help get medical supplies where they're needed by passing the Medical Supply Transparency and Delivery Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to ban stock trading by members of Congress, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. We've long heard that our leaders don't need to follow the rules because they can be trusted to do the right thing, but that's un-American, if I may be blunt -- our duty as Americans demands that we never "trust" our leaders, but always hold them to the high standards that come with their leadership positions! Of course, with our current President apparently running a months-long seminar in How Not to Lead, I guess it's easy to see how we got confused. But with the FBI now formally investigating Sen. Burr's massive stock dump after he received a briefing on how bad COVID-19 was about to be, and with too many other members of Congress (roll call! Kelly Loeffler! James Inhofe! Dianne Feinstein! Donna Shalala!) under public scrutiny for doing similar things, we should now have enough evidence that we can't trust our leaders to place our interests above their own.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Interior Secretary to stop cutting the royalties that oil and gas corporations must pay to drill on public lands, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. One fine day -- preferably after we support renewable energy much better than we currently do -- we won't allow any pollution on public lands! But until then, they shouldn't pay less to the taxpayer (i.e., you) for the privilege! That's right, when gas and oil corporations get to drill on the land that belongs to the American people, they have to pay the American people for the privilege -- which means if our government rolls back drilling royalties, they are taking food out of your mouth. No, I think that's a perfectly valid way of seeing it -- your money pays for the services you need and deserve, and when you have less money (as you would, if our Administration continues to get its way on this matter), you get fewer services or worse services. And you're an American! So you don't have to put up with that.

Action: concerning better pandemic relief legislation and better energy policy.

H.R. 6800, the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (or HEROES) Act, would provide another $3 trillion in pandemic relief, and it would do a lot more good than the CARES Act did, since it would provide $500 billion in state and local assistance and $200 billion to front-line essential workers, extend unemployment benefits and student loan debt relief, fund more COVID-19 testing and tracing, give additional help to farmers and low-income renters, bolster both our Post Office and our election security, and provide another round of direct payments to Americans ($1,200 each, for up to five household members). And yet it could be better! So Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to include the Paycheck Guarantee Act in the bill, so that good Americans making up to $100,000 annually can continue to get paid and keep their health insurance coverage even after they've been laid off. And since Senate Republicans have already said they won't vote on it, you can call your Senators and tell them they should pass it. They'll never see it coming.

Of course, Senate Republicans have fixated on blanket immunity against lawsuits for corporations as pandemic "relief," though that won't resonate with a lot of good Americans, who are more likely to be a plaintiff than a defendant. Really, only a few Americans get their shorts in a bunch over TEH FRIVOLOUX LAWSUITZ!!!! But all Republicans can think about, in the middle of a pandemic that's put over 30 million good Americans out of work, is protecting big corporations from their own wrongdoing, particularly if they reopen before state/local/federal guidelines say they can. And this ain't about corporations losing lawsuits and going under -- they've got enough well-paid lawyers and it's already hard to prove wrongdoing because the Founders designed our justice system to protect the innocent. No, this is all about the hassle of fighting lawsuits, since politicians seem to care more about a rich man's hassle than a poor man's misery. But People for the American Way help you tell your Congressfolk to reject "blanket immunity" for corporations. (Alternately, you could add this to the end of your phone call to your Senators.)

Finally, this pandemic continues to show us the necessity of having clean air and a livable planet -- or so I would hope! So the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to put funding for renewable energy ahead of funding for fossil fuels, for once. Your Tea Party uncle might tell you that things like the Green New Deal are a way of sending us back to the 1800s -- you know, those halcyon days when everyone powered their washing machines and flat-screen TVs with solar panels and wind turbines! But most folks, across the political spectrum, think renewable energy will improve on our current system and promote self-reliance. And your average renewable energy setup will cause a lot less pollution than burning coal, gas, and oil does, which means cleaner air, which means more breathable air, which means less asthma and lung disease, which means fewer good Americans placed at the mercy of a COVID-19 pandemic. It also means less spending on health care -- which means renewable energy isn't just the environmentally-conscious option but also the fiscally-responsible option. How odd that more "moderate" politicians don't talk this way.

Action: concerning unemployment, energy policy, public water, and factory farms.

One of the few good things to come out of the CARES Act was an expansion of unemployment benefits; now guess what our government wants to get rid of ASAP? The benefits expire at the end of July, but given the jones so many of our elected leaders have to "reopen" the economy, we could be back in the middle of an unflattened curve by then. And some of them say it's OK if some folks die if we "reopen" the economy faster! Apparently they do not know the definition of "mammon-worship" anymore. But over 30 million folks are out of work, the official U3 unemployment rate is over 14% (and the real U6 unemployment rate, which also counts the discouraged and underemployed, is almost 23%), and not that many Americans will be rushing into Best Buy even if they all open up tomorrow, so I think we should be prudent and prepare for the likelihood that workers will be unemployed past July. Also, too, when the answer to every question is GOVERNMENT SHOULDZ DO TEH NOTHINGZ!!!!, it's well past time to look at the man in the mirror. The Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the unemployment insurance boost past its original expiration date.

Meanwhile, too many politicians want future pandemic relief legislation to include corporate welfare handouts for big oil and gas corporations, and our Administration has rolled back oil and gas royalty rates on public lands even though that's our damn money! But along comes H.R. 6707/S. 3611, the Resources for Workforce Investments, Not Drilling (or ReWIND) Act, which would keep big fossil fuel corporations from taking funds meant for working families and small businesses, roll back our President's drilling royalty cuts, block new gas and oil leases, and stop banksters from taking over any oil or gas corporations in trouble. The bill would also prevent our Administration from overstocking oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, since seizing resources and directing them to where they're not needed seems to be a pattern with this President. And if right-wingers respond by whining about the bill's "Democrat priorities," they run the risk of suggesting that preventing corruption and mismanagement is only a "Democrat priority." So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to support saner energy policy by passing the ReWIND Act.

In other news, Nestlé plans to siphon off yet another source of public water at pennies a gallon, in order to make absurdly more expensive and not significantly more convenient bottled water -- this time at Ginnie Springs in northwestern Florida, and this though Ginnie Springs is dangerously low, and largely from overpumping. As it happens, the Suwannee River Water Management District has already heeded the thousands of public comments it received on this matter, and has thus denied Nestlé any new permits -- but Nestlé, of course, is taking the matter to court, because, as we know, corporations never ever file frivolous lawsuits! Only injured people ever do that, with the help of mustache-twirling trial lawyers! That's what right-wingers say, anyway. But big corporations don't need to take public water in order to make bottled water; rather, our state, local, and federal governments need to manage water effectively on our behalf and with the tax dollars we pay them. Hence Environmental Action helps you tell Nestlé to abandon its plans to drain Ginnie Springs merely for mammon.

Finally, H.R. 6718/S. 3221, the Farm System Reform Act, would not only ban new factory farms and the expansion of current ones, but would phase out current factory farms over the next 20 years. Factory farms aren't a more efficient way of delivering meat to consumers than small family farms: they're just a more efficient way of clogging up public waters with animal manure, and a more efficient way of redistributing income upward to executives. And they're also a more efficient way of making antibiotics useless, since some seven out of every 10 antibiotics in America still go to nominally healthy feed animals, so they produce more meat and so they better endure the squalid conditions of their imprisonment. To those who would still cite "high food prices" as a reason not to end this sordid state of affairs, we need but ask: how did Americans ever get enough to eat before factory farms came along? We did it through saner farming policy, of course, and not "big ag corporations know best" policy. So Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support better agricultural policy by passing the Farm System Reform Act.

Action: concerning internet freedom, worker safety, and conservation in Pennsylvania.

Battle for the Net helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to reinstate the net neutrality rules it repealed back in 2017. Why now? Because with more Americans working from home and more schoolkids taking classes at home, we are seeing, in real time, why we need our FCC to force internet service providers to treat all of its network traffic with equal importance. FCC Chair Ajit Pai says he's watching to make sure big telecom corporations don't just kick people off, but thanks to his own ideological predilections, he has absolutely no power to make big telecoms treat us all well! He can only beg! And begging big corporations to do the right thing sure is a great look for our government, which exists, after all, to serve us -- better to make big corporations do the right thing, and then punish them if they don't! Because if history has taught us anything, it's taught us that big corporations won't do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do -- but we get much better results if we make them do the right thing.

Meanwhile, you may not know that our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) uses private contractors to staff its call centers! And you may not know that one of them -- a corporation called Maximus, operating a CDC call center in Hattiesburg, MS -- trained 70 newly-hired employees without following physical distancing rules, and surprise, surprise! At least one got infected. And then Maximus didn't provide protecting equipment to its employees, or allow enough of them to work from home though "call center operator" seems like an obvious work-from-home job! I'd call all that irony, except for the nagging sense that irony should be subtler than that. Hence Good Jobs Nation helps you tell CDC Director Robert Redfield to ensure that all workers who answer calls for the CDC be able to keep themselves safe during this pandemic. Not for nothing, but Mr. Redfield could do that a whole lot more easily if our government didn't keep outsourcing vital services to private corporations. Our government's supposed to work for us, after all.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Commonwealth's reactionary state legislature continues taking a reaper's scythe to any government program that might actually benefit people, now with HB 1822,which aims to slash the Environmental Stewardship Fund, the Conservation District Fund, and the Keystone Recreation, Park, and Conservation Fund, and if that seems like "too many funds" to you, consider how much money our state gives away in corporate welfare to gas and coal, and consider how often legislators slash funding for good conservation programs over the years just so they can one day argue "hey, let's get rid of it, no one'll miss it." You'll miss the clean air, clean water, and parks to go hiking, fishing, and hunting in, I can guarantee you that! So let's not be like the proverbial frog in a pot of boiling water who doesn't realize he's cooked until it's too late. HB 1822 has already passed the House but awaits a Senate vote, hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state Senator to protect conservation funding by rejecting HB 1822.

Action: concerning paid family leave, student loan debt, and mountaintop coal mining.

As Congress contemplates further pandemic-related legislation, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a national (and permanent) paid sick leave policy. Previous coronavirus-related legislation gave workers two weeks of paid sick leave if they got the coronavirus, but what of future pandemics, and what of the illnesses we pass through all the time? Tens of millions of good Americans go to work sick because they can't afford not to, and with a pandemic raging, we can't afford to have sick people working! If you're still of the mind that "real workers don't need paid sick leave," consider more carefully the economic benefits of paid sick leave! That's right, they're real, and you can measure them -- like reduced costs for employers in not having to train new employees all the time, and reduced costs of health care when folks actually taking care of themselves instead of going to work sick and infecting everyone else. And speaking of infecting everyone else, you can even measure how well paid sick leave keeps flu rates down. Even after this pandemic is done with us, we'll still need paid sick leave.

Wanna know what else Congress ought to do if they're serious about "stimulating" the economy? They ought to cancel all student loan debt, as Daily Kos helps you tell them to do. Now wait a minute, you might be saying, we don't want to give people the idea they can just run up a lot of debt and we won't make them pay it, do we? We don't, but that's not the impression cancelling student debt would give, in reality -- cancelling student debt would more likely give people the idea that colleges and banks were gouging them in the first place. 46 million good Americans have student loan payments, and they owe, between them, over $1 trillion, and paying that, plus all the interest, is a far bigger drag on the economy than most folks realize. Well, most folks who don't have student loan debt, anyway -- I'm pretty sure the good folks who put off buying houses and starting families because they still have six figures of debt understand the problem all too well. And it's about time our Congressfolk did, too.

Finally, coal is losing to gas and renewable energy and no amount of corporate welfare from our government can stop that, but they're plugging ahead anyway, planning to open East Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau, which, while not federally-protected land per se, is the largest hardwood forest on the planet, and (like many of our public lands) home to clean air, clean water, and gorgeous vistas that all Americans enjoy. But hey, some coal corporation CEO needs to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home, so oh well! Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our government to reject its plan to ruin yet more of our public lands for the greater glory of coal CEOs. You know, I've just realized that I haven't said this anywhere near enough: when our government gives welfare handouts to crony corporations, you're paying for that, with your taxpayer money. Usually I hear "they're taking your money and giving it to people who don't need it" as cover for some unexamined racism; is it too much to ask that we hear it as part of a thorough examination of corporate power?

Action: concerning Social Security, pollution, and immigration.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to "scrap the cap" on income that can be taxed into Social Security. The occasion? Folks making a mere $1 million annually have already hit that income cap (about $137,700) as of yesterday, and won't be paying any more money into Social Security this year. Of course, H.R. 860/S. 269, the Social Security 2100 Act, would tax income above $400,000 as well as income below $137,700, and I wonder why that bill has to have a "donut hole" of funding. Of course I have advocated for the bill's passage, and will again, but we now have an opportunity to communicate our will that all income get taxed into the Social Security system, and thus fund benefit increases now and trust fund shortfalls in the future. We worked for it, we paid into it, we fought for it, and we deserve to enjoy it when we retire, so don't let weakling politicians fearmonger you about it, or tell you that it's just not "possible" to demand better stewardship of it. By demanding what we want, and fighting for it, we always widen the palette of the possible.

You know how our Administration always says regulations hurt businesses with all their rules and stuff? Well, now, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) wants to scuttle rules that require corporations to demonstrate that they're financially able to clean up after their own accidents -- their oil spills, their gas leaks, their coal ash pit leaks, you know. I don't have to explain, I trust, the necessity of making sure big corporations clean up their own messes -- hey, nobody but me cleans up my messes! -- and I'm sure you can also see that this proposal amounts to corporate welfare for the coal industry in particular, an industry about to die at the hands of cheap natural gas and cheaper renewable energy sources. And of course you can also see who's going to pay to clean up their messes if they don't -- we are. You want to be an enabler of bad corporate behavior when they befoul our air and water? If not, let Public Citizen help you tell our EPA to reject its own plan to weaken accountability for polluting corporations.

Finally, our President plans to divert another $3.8 billion of defense spending toward the building of his vanity border wall -- you know the one? The one that a reciprocating saw can cut through, the one a halfway decent climber can scale, the one that an inopportune flood could cause to fall if you don't keep gates open, the one a stiff wind can knock over? I hope we still have historians who will note these ironies -- if, indeed, ironies are what they are! Is it ironic, really, that a drama king who prances and preens about immigration can't actually build a wall that can stand on its own? Do we expect better from drama kings? Do we call it ironic merely because we think so well of our country? We should keep thinking well of our country, of course, and keeping it a country of which we think well means fighting the evils our President perpetrates, so Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to defund our President's vanity border wall. Seriously, "national emergency" my ass.

Action: concerning endless war-making, predatory lenders, and climate change.

As the Afghanistan War enters its 19th (!) year, it's well past time for Congress to investigate the sheer folly of this effort, hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate the Afghanistan Papers, which describe how our government has been lying and BSing its way through this war for almost two decades. The Washington Post, as you may recall, obtained the "Afghanistan Papers" through a Freedom of Information Act (or FOIA) request, and published them in early December; the papers expose government officials declaring the war unwinnable in virtually every conceivable sense but plugging on with the disaster anyway, apparently adhering to the belief that the only thing worse than doing wrong is admitting you're wrong. You may wonder why we're bothering to get Congress in on this. Why, because it's their job -- as it has been all these years! -- and we must always tell them to do their job. And saying we-can't-win-but-let's-lie-about-it-rather-than-change-it is one thing in a memo you don't intend to ever see the light of day, but it's another thing entirely under oath, before the people's representatives. At least, it should be -- and we should make it be.

Meanwhile, banks used to evade state interest rate caps by "partnering" with out-of-state banks that don't face interest rate caps, but our Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (or FDIC) cracked down on them during Tha Bush Mobb years, of all times. But guess what? Times are changing back! With an Administration determined to destroy every regulation that might help good Americans suffer a little less, at least two banks -- FinWise (of Utah) and Republic Bank (of Kentucky) -- have restarted the notorious "rent-a-bank" scheme that lets them offer loans with interest as high as 160% to good Americans facing emergencies, thus assuring that they'll be trapped in a pit of debt for years to come. Nice work if you can get it! But, as I've said, this is already illegal, so the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our FDIC to crack down on banks gaming the system to trap vulnerable folks in usurious loans. No use telling me "this isn't the job of government," not unless you want me to call you objectively pro-financial predator. We should be using terms like these a lot more; maybe they'll help bring shame back to our civilization.

Finally, if you've been attending the wildfires in Australia, you know climate change ain't no "Chinese hoax," as our President put it long ago, and you know we have a lot of work to do to counter its effects -- mainly, move from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Legislation supporting renewable energy is one way to do that, but it's not the only way -- another way is to get private corporations to divest from fossil fuels. We've told banks to divest from fossil fuels, and they've started to get the message, but we also have to get state pension funds out of fossil fuels, so Daily Kos helps you tell your state governors and legislators to get state pension funds to divest from fossil fuel corporations. Our opponents will tell us that we would be "hurting pensioners" if we did that, but you recognize that as a rhetorical hostage crisis by now, and besides, pension funds are kind of in the driver's seat here -- corporations want their business, after all! Maybe state pension funds should act like they're in charge, then?

Action: concerning privatization, pollution, child care, and equal rights.

You may have heard that the Internet Society (or ISOC) plans to sell the Public Interest Registry (or PIR) -- a database containing the names of all .org domains -- to Ethos Capital, a hedge fund management corporation. That should send off alarms, but the results could be even worse than a hedge fund deliberately mismanaging a database in order to extract its value, or even making prices for .org domains go up-up-up: as Mitch Stoltz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes in this very useful primer, selling something of public utility to a private corporation raises a buttload of questions. For example, would authoritarian regimes (ahem!) pay off Ethos to help shut down pesky .orgs that detail those regimes' crimes? Would Ethos cut back on domain name management such that some .orgs that provide lifesaving services can't do it anymore? Luckily, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (or ICANN) has to approve the sale, hence Save .ORG helps you tell ICANN to reject the proposed sale of .org names to a private corporation.

Meanwhile, our EPA wants to weaken rules that prevent power plants from polluting toxic filth into our clean water, because our Administration hates good regulations with a passion bordering on madness. If our EPA gets its way, we'll have more mercury, more lead, and more arsenic in our water, not to mention more dead animals and higher water bills for good Americans -- all so we can hand out more corporate welfare to the dying coal industry. Seriously, the coal industry is dying -- even Murray Energy declared bankruptcy filed for bankruptcy shortly before Halloween -- and it's dying partly because gas is considerably cheaper and partly because renewable energy is starting to achieve cost parity with coal. As Paul O'Neill might say, it's the genius of civilization. But all this Administration cares about is enriching the few remaining coal executives, and they're willing to be objectively pro-pollution in order to achieve this goal. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our EPA to protect our clean water by scuttling its plans to weaken its own regulations.

In other news, it ain't just health care costs and college costs that have skyrocketed over the years -- it's child care costs, too, with a Freddie Mac study finding those costs going up almost 50% over the last quarter-century, and that means a lot in a world where single parents have to juggle working and parenting and two-parent households typically have two paychecks. You may even know someone who gives over their entire paycheck to child care! But H.R. 1364/S. 568, the Child Care for Working Families Act, would (among other good works!) mandate that child care could never cost more than 7% of a family's income, and would also ensure that poor working families can get good child care. Because they're people, too! And also because when we invest in child care, we invest in our future. That's as true when we invest in the poor, because (regardless of what many right-wingers still think) talent crosses lines of race and class. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to give working families the help they need by passing the Child Care for Working Families Act.

Finally, as you may have heard, the Virginia state legislature passed the Equal Rights Amendment, making it the 38th state to have done so. Of course, the original ERA had an expiration date that has long passed, but H.J.Res. 79 would eliminate that date, which means the Equal Rights Amendment could become the law of the land, as it has always deserved to be. Yes, I know, a few of those original 38 states repealed their passage of the ERA, but playing such games of take-backsies may not even pass Constitutional muster, so People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to support equal rights in America by passing H.J.Res. 79. And yes, I can also imagine our Supreme Court (particularly now that it has two younger fresher right-wingers on it!) saying that passing H.J.Res. 79 with anything less than a two-thirds majority would trample on the will of the Congress that passed it, since some Congressfolk surely wouldn't have voted for the ERA without the expiration date. But one might reasonably wonder why we would be more anxious to scrutinize such matters when women's rights are at stake.