Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning banksters, AI, and women’s health.

Long story short: tell our government to crack down on bankster ownership of health care assets, tell big tech to stop using our personal data to train their AI models, and tell our government to force big health insurance corporations to cover birth control at no cost and without a prescription. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our government to crack down on private equity ownership of health care assets, like hospitals, doctors’ offices, emergency departments, and medical equipment manufacturers. Welcome to another exciting edition of Banksters Ruin Everything! Banksters will buy up all of these things and consolidate them so that services are worse but income gets redistributed upward to executives, and they’ll also indulge in “loot-and-strip” practices like usurious management fees and sale-leaseback arrangements (right, Red Lobster?). Result: more money for no-work-doing pricks, and illness, death, and misery for the rest of us. We deserve better.

Eko helps you tell big tech corporations to stop using our data to train AI models. Not least because AI models are pretty slow learners, if recent evidence is any guide (“just deal with depression by jumping off a bridge”!), but also because it’s private, regardless of what cynics tell you. Nothing is private on the internet ha ha ha snort – cynics are such useless people. Anyway, this action could well be the basis of future lawsuits that won’t necessarily make us rich – or even restore to us what we’ve lost – but would punish corporations severely enough that they’ll think twice about doing it more. That may sound a bit long-game, but it’s worth doing.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our government to require health insurance corporations to cover birth control without cost and without a prescription. Don’t believe isolated anecdotes about the “harms” of birth control medication! The people telling those anecdotes just want to hurt women! That’s all they want to do! Sorry, I just don’t think folks are that complex anymore. President Biden can do this with the authority the Affordable Care Act already gives him, just as former President Trump did the opposite with the same authority, and there’s no good reason working families should have less access to the pill than rich folks, so let’s get moving.

Action: concerning data privacy and working families.

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

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

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

Around the table: from TikTok bans to bloodbaths.

Matt Stoller describes why “The TikTok Problem Is Not What You Think.” The article has a lot of great info (particularly on the Biden-led sea change in data privacy protection), but long story short: foreign corporations shouldn’t have so much personal data on American citizens, particularly when those corporations align so closely with obviously authoritarian governments, and TikTok abuses its users just as badly as Facebook does. Also, note well that China happily keeps American internet platforms out of their country and tries to control what foreigners say about China – just say something about Tianenmen Square in a TikTok video if you don’t believe me! No, I don’t want Steve Mnuchin owning TikTok either, but even that’s better than China controlling it.

Do people really not get that the Florida teenagers who used AI to create deepfake nudes of their classmates committed child abuse and child porn? People also really don’t get that the perps are too young to go to jail, but certainly they’re not too young to be shamed, and if they never get into their first-choice colleges as a result of their actions, I won’t shed a tear. In any case, might this be more proof that AI development is moving too fast with too little governmental oversight? Why, yes, I think it might! Don’t brook any nonsense like government doesn’t know enough about AI to oversee it, because that’d be like arguing that only banksters know enough to regulate banks.

From Johanna Richlin at The Conversation we learn that vaccine-skeptical mothers learned to be that way at least in part from all their bad experiences in the health care system. I’m reminded that 17th century poet John Dryden frequently aimed his ire at doctors, and of course we should empathize with women describing a health care system that injures them – you’ve heard that doctors will more likely tell women (especially Black and Brown women) that they’re just bellyaching? And yes, the mammon-worship endemic to our health care industry hurts us all. But what of the evil actors (i.e., Tucker Carlson, Andrew Wakefield, all the YouTube “influencers” who’ve hurt a lot of people but whom history will never remember) who have exploited this landscape?

Ho hum, ”liberal” media journalists actually read Robert Hur’s interview with President Biden over classified documents and suddenly discover that their initial reports on the investigation might have been a little overheated. We have all learned by now, I would hope, that reading is a good way to understand writing, but even after all these years of Donald Trump inflicting chaos and abuse upon good Americans, too many “liberal” media journalists still either cut corners or prefer sensationalism. Happily for Joe Biden, he delivered a State of the Union address earlier this month in which he did not appear to be the addled granddad our “liberal” media would seem to prefer.

Hard to believe, Harry, Special Counsel Jack Smith apparently put a Stephen Miller amicus brief about the Trump classified documents indictment through the woodchipper last week. In Mr. Smith’s telling, Mr. Miller apparently believes that “if a person illegally carries a firearm into a NARA facility or forcibly threatens a NARA employee,” then “NARA (would be) powerless to report that criminal conduct to the FBI,” and would have to “engage in notice-and-comment rule making to promulgate a regulation authorizing it to make such a referral.” But of course Mr. Miller doesn’t even intend to create a legal “precedent”, but merely to (in Steve Bannon’s immortal phrase) “flood the zone with shit” so the wheels of justice can slow down and maybe Donald Trump can win re-election before getting convicted of a crime.

Finally, I can’t wait to hear how right-wingers try to justify Donald Trump saying at an Ohio rally that there’ll be a “bloodbath” if he doesn’t get elected in 2024. Oh, he’s only joking (then explain how bloodbaths are funny!) and oh he’s only describing what will happen if he loses (it’s a good thing no one in human history has ever tried to influence history by pretending to predict it!). Seriously, though, if Trumpholes think Saturdays at the shooting range have prepared them for Civil War, they’re going to be very disappointed. The only people in America actually prepared to wage civil war are our soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of them just want the damn headaches to stop.

Action: concerning monopolies, music, and data privacy.

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning government spying, asset limits, and internet privacy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end warrantless government spying, give SSI recipients the breathing room they deserve, and protect our privacy online. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to expand Section 702 of the USA PATRIOT Act. That’s the section that lets our government spy on us without getting a warrant first; if they’d get a warrant first, we wouldn’t object. It’s that simple! But our government can’t even be bothered to do the thing they’ve been doing for over 200 years, and of course our House has lately tried to hold a “secret session” to discuss this very topic. Why? Because if they talked about crushing our freedoms in public, we’d object! Congressfolk can’t hide behind the “war on terror,” either. Everyone knows by now that most terror in America is home-grown.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act, which would update the asset limits for SSI recipients for the first time in decades. Because $2,000 ain’t hardly anything anymore! You can burn through $2,000 in a New York minute! And note well that if SSI asset limits had been indexed to inflation in the first place, they’d be about where the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act puts them: $10,000 for single folks (and $20,000 for married couples). So definitely don’t let right-wingers BS you with slippery-slope arguments.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass vigorous online privacy legislation that protects good Americans from private data-collecting corporations, including social media corporations. Recall that our FCC enacted good online privacy rules in 2016 – rules that would have prevented big corporations from collecting and selling your data unless you opted in to that, which was much better than letting corporations letting you opt out of it – but of course Republicans couldn’t wait to repeal them in 2017. Have they changed their minds? Ha ha ha they don’t have minds, they just do what their big donors tell them to do. Unless, of course, we speak out.

Action: concerning the right to repair, children’s data, and old-growth forests.

Long story short: tell our FTC to protect our right to repair and prevent big tech corporations from selling kids’ data, and tell our USDA to protect old-growth forests from loggers. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

US PIRG helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to keep standing up for our right to repair. Our FTC has ramped up enforcement of existing laws, and though Republican FTC Commissioners have opposed our FTC’s monopoly-fighting efforts, they’ve supported enhancing good Americans’ right to either fix their own products or take them to independent repair shops to get them fixed. I mean, nobody approves of corporations making products impossible to take apart, or of being forced to take that product to an “approved” repair shop that might be hundreds of miles out of your way, so our FTC needs to hear from us.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our FTC to stop big tech corporations from selling kids’ data. Because our children are our future, or they’re just advertising targets, but not both! Treating people like consumers and nothing else is one of the two or three things corporations do well, I suppose – you know, along with finding loopholes in laws and redistributing worker income upward to executives – but that doesn’t mean we ought to put up with it. Our FTC is mulling new rules preventing kids’ data from being passed around like candy, but they’ll need our help to write good rules.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our U.S. Department of Agriculture (or USDA) to enact the most vigorous protections for old-growth forests possible. Our U.S. Forest Service (which operates under our USDA) has proposed limiting logging of our oldest trees in our national forests, but they’ve left loopholes open that some logging corporation – and, like I said, if corporations do anything well anymore, it’s finding loopholes! – will drive a Mack truck through. Once a thousand-year-old tree is gone, it’s gone forever, and so is the complex ecosystem depending on it, not to mention the centuries of carbon it’s trapped. Maybe the past means something?

Action: concerning sex for water, internet security, and health care.

Long story short: tell world governments to stop letting bad actors extract sex from girls in exchange for water, tell Apple to stop interfering with Beeper Mini’s works, and tell states to stop funding anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers.” Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Avaaz helps you tell world leaders to make it illegal to force girls to have sex in exchange for clean water. This one’s easy! How shameful this still happens, and no use saying it only happens in “developing” nations, because a) no one on Earth should have to sacrifice their virtue to, you know, survive and b) the corporate drama kings who run things in America absolutely will inflict such “mutually-beneficial relationships” on us if we let them, likely after some crisis they let happen but could have avoided. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that the rights we’ve fought for and won can disappear in an instant. And that’s why we fight.

Accountable Tech helps you tell Apple to stop interfering with the Beeper Mini app, which enables Android users to send secure text messages to Apple phones and vice versa. This one’s not as repugnant as the last one, but it is also easy! A big corporation prevents some of its customers from using their product in a secure manner, and then a small corporation comes along and solves that problem – only to see that big corporation try to crush that small corporation. Apple wasn’t a great corporation to begin with, but it’s really lost its way since Steve Jobs died. Happily we can help put them on the right path.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell states to stop using taxpayer money – i.e., your money – to fund anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers.” Maybe I can’t stop folks from going to one of these “clinics” and learning all kinds of wrong shit, but why should we fund them with our hard-earned money? Should governments force taxpayers to fund any other kind of health clinic that hands out wrong information? Imagine taxpayers funding “clinics” telling diabetics to drink all the Pepsi they want! If Pepsi donates enough money to the right politicians, that’ll happen in a New York minute. Hence another dystopia we must help prevent.

Around the table: judges pimp-slap Alabama again!

11th Circuit three-judge panel again rejects Alabama’s redrawn Congressional maps. Alabama state lawyers actually argued before the judges that they don’t have to follow their ruling (which our Supreme Court famously confirmed earlier this year), and if there’s anything a judge hates hearing, it’s that their rulings mean nothing. Hence a cartographer and a special master will redraw Alabama districts this time.

When I hear that big insurance corporations don’t want to cover damages from natural disasters anymore, I can only say we are not a sane and moral society if we allow this evil to happen. Ultimately our government will have to wind up covering such damages, at which point right-wingers will squeal SOSHULIZM!!!!! and then have a circle-jerk lasting several hours. It would have been nice if the Washington Post had reported profit information for the big insurance corporations its article mentioned.

Please remember that “Iran’s Street Art Shows Defiance, Resistance, and Resilience” even if it takes another 50 years for them to get rid of the mullahs. Too many Americans still think the Middle East has no engineers or doctors or poets, but only has angry people who kill each other, and some of the folks who think that are friends or family of yours.

We can make too much of Gov. DeSantis’s apparent refusal to meet with President Biden following Hurricane Idalia – how much do they have to talk about, really? – but the snub sure doesn’t help Mr. DeSantis, who looks like the diaper-loaded brat he usually is anyway and nobody’s going to remember that he whined about all the security arrangements Florida didn’t have any trouble making after the last hurricane. Maybe Joe Biden isn’t as dumb as right-wingers want you to think!

Finally, when I hear that Democratic voters “can’t get enough of” Chris Christie’s “new Trump-bashing persona,” all I can say is OMG what horseshit. And then when I read about all the “liberal” media personalities who are going along with it, I’m even more sure I’m right. Note well that Democratic voters don’t vote in very many Republican primaries, and Republican voters either want Trump or someone who gives them everything Trump gives them without the baggage.

Action: concerning climate change, right-wing bullying, and data privacy.

Long story short: tell our EPA to stop carbon capture foolishness, tell Target to stop cowing to right-wing bullies over pride merchandise, and tell our CFPB to regulate data brokers to the fullest extent of the law. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reject corporate carbon capture shenanigans. Carbon capture sounds like a way to deal with climate change, but so does nuclear power, and like nuclear power, carbon capture has a long record of failing to do what corporatists say it does – it allows big fossil fuel corporations to squeeze more usable energy from fossil fuels, sure, but that’s no substitute for the renewable energies that already cut climate change. We should be doing more of that, and doing less helping big fossil fuel corporations to pretend they’re doing more than they’re doing. Yeah, it’s hard to transition to renewables, but is America the can-do country or isn’t it? We all have to answer that question sooner or later.

UltraViolet helps you tell Target to stop cowing to right-wing bullies over pride-related merchandise. Now you may well ask: why do we care what Target does? We don’t do it for Target’s soul, not least because Target is a thing without a soul; we do it to demonstrate to the world that bigots don’t surround us – we surround them. Too many decision-makers, be they on school boards or in corporate boardrooms, let themselves be taken hostage to one or two bigoted complaints, and that’s when we must raise a million voices at once and deliver lonely bigots to the oblivion they deserve. Right-wingers think they own the Big Stick of Bad PR, but they’re as wrong about that as they are about everything else.

Finally, Stop Data Brokers helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to write the most vigorous rules possible preventing data brokers from abusing us. Data brokers have been buying and selling our personal information for over a decade and our government has done nothing about it. But when data brokers get to do whatever they like, bad things happen, like domestic violence victims suddenly finding their new address out there, or police officers buying up your data to go on fishing expeditions without a warrant. Maybe our CFPB (whose purview is basically financial in nature) isn’t the best agency to rein in data brokers, but I’m sure they can do some good – if we speak out.

Action: concerning mass murder, data privacy, food stamps, and bankster regulation.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to enact sane gun control legislation, reject the RESTRICT Act, reject any effort to cut food stamps, and pass the Secure Viable Banking Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The mass murder at a Nashville school has inspired a lot of stupid thought from right-wingers, so let’s instead call our Reps and Senators and offer a sane plan, one first proposed by Thom Hartmann in 2018, which would a) amend the National Firearms Act of 1934 so that it includes semi-automatic guns as well as automatic ones and b) require gun owners to register their guns, get shooting licenses, and buy liability insurance. (You can read Mr. Hartmann’s full plan here.) Don’t brook any registration-equals-nanny-state-equals-slavery hysteria; we’ve all registered so many things in our lives we hardly think of it.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the RESTRICT Act, which purports to be a data privacy bill (as well as an anti-TikTok bill, since that diddles right-wing rage glands these days), but which contains such vague enforcement language that law enforcement could easily use it to stifle fairly common and necessary internet processes, like Virtual Private Networks (or VPNs). Recall that Republicans couldn’t wait to repeal the actually pretty good data privacy protections our FCC enacted back in the late Obama years, and thus realize that none of them have any standing to foment drama and hysteria about data privacy now.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any efforts to cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or SNAP), a.k.a. “food stamps.” Don’t believe the hype that “we have to cut food stamps to get out fiscal house in order,” because a) food stamps comprise rather less than 2 percent of our government’s spending and b) how about cutting defense spending, since we already spend more on defense contractor executive pay defense than the next nine countries on that list combined? Right-wingers don’t care about fiscal responsibility – they care about keeping our government from doing anything for anyone other than their big campaign donors.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Secure Viable Banking Act, which would restore rules and restrictions on mid-sized banks that originally passed in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial services reform bill, but which Congress repealed in 2018. That 2018 bill was a bad bill then – no matter how “bipartisan” it was – and with the recent failures of the Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank of New York, we now know how bad it was. At least, we hope we know, as in we hope no more banks fail! Pass the Secure Viable Banking Act, and maybe we won’t ever have to know.

Action: concerning corporate welfare, endless war, internet privacy, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject yet more corporate welfare handouts, repeal the 2002 Iraq war authorization, do something useful about internet privacy instead of banning TikTok, and reject any effort to defund Medicaid or CHIP. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 866, which would, in its words, “enhance tax benefits for research activities,” and you know what that means: more corporate welfare handouts. “Research activities” are, by definition, expenses, which make them exempt from corporate taxes (since we only tax corporate profits!); why should corporations get to essentially deduct expenses twice? Oh, right – because all they care about is jacking up their stock prices, never mind the quality of their products or services, and they need an “incentive” to do the right thing. Actually they need laws that make them do the right thing, not handouts.

M Power helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the notorious 2002 authorization to use military force (or AUMF) in Iraq. Didn’t we get out of Iraq, after all? Yes, we did, more or less, but all of our post-Bush Presidents have used the 2002 AUMF to justify all manner of appalling extralegal military intervention, and you may remember that the Iraq War didn’t go so well. Not just because it spilled American blood and squandered American treasure and killed hundreds of thousands of “liberated” Iraqis, but because the subsequent American occupation helped create ISIS, the terror organization that makes al-Qaeda look like a bunch of bureaucrats. So let’s have no more of that.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop posturing about banning TikTok and pass some internet privacy laws with teeth instead. Because there’s nothing uniquely awful about TikTok except its privacy issues, and if you fix the privacy issues, you don’t need to ban TikTok. Personal to the Republicans grandstanding about privacy now: y’all voted to repeal pretty good FCC internet privacy rules in 2017, and that makes you a hypocrite now. Maybe hypocrisy doesn’t matter to Republicans, but that fact doesn’t make me the weakling! Strong people hold to their values even when it’s inconvenient; they certainly don’t forget them for corporate money or whiners’ approval.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any legislation that would defund Medicaid or CHIP. Remember that time the New York Times found that Trump supporters actually liked Medicaid (but hated all the “those people” they thought were on it)? Maybe we had a chance to bond there, but never mind reaching out to masturbatory rage addicts – defunding Medicaid or CHIP is the wrong thing to do, both morally and fiscally. No deficit peacock ever struts around about defense spending even though you’ll find a crap-ton of waste and fraud there. So how about we stop making regular Americans pay for politicians’ mistakes?

Action: concerning monopolies, data privacy, and recycling.

Long story short: tell our government to fight various forms of monopoly behavior, tell our government to protect good Americans’ data privacy, and tell our EPA to revamp the “widely-recyclable” label so that it describes plastics that can actually be recycled. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

In anticipation of President Biden’s State of the Union address tonight, in which we expect he’ll talk at length about the importance of fighting monopoly power in America, let’s do all the monopoly-fighting in one paragraph today: Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to ban non-compete agreements so Americans have more freedom to work where they like, plus they also help you tell our Department of Justice to break up the LiveNation/Ticketmaster monopoly so good Americans can go to concerts without paying an arm and a leg again. Meanwhile, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our FTC to crack down on “junk fees” banksters like to charge, plus they also help you tell our federal government to break up repeat-offender corporation Wells Fargo. Also, Inequality Media helps you tell our FTC to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger so good Americans have more choices among our nation’s supermarkets. It may take a few more minutes today, but a few more minutes today may mean a lifetime of more freedom later, and that’s worth it.

Free Press helps you tell our government to protect good Americans’ online privacy a lot better than they currently do. Free Press cites the recent T-Mobile customer information hack (the second in two years, apparently!) as a news hook, but let’s be frank: in 2017, our government repealed pretty good FCC regulations that protected American’s online privacy, because the economy Big Gubmint light touch campaign donations. Our government hurt us that day; you may have noticed that I’m pretty unforgiving when our government hurts us. But, you know, if they want forgiveness, they can always do the right thing. I am capable of forgiving and forgetting; if it doesn’t seem that way, that might be our government’s fault more than mine.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to make sure that plastic corporations that make non-recyclable plastic can’t use the “widely-recyclable” label on their products. Sounds an awful lot like common sense, right? But then we know our government’s tenuous relationship with the concept – common sense tends to fly right out the window whenever it conflicts with some corporation’s “right” to more unearned goodies, and so it goes here, where we recycle less than 3% of all polypropylene plastic, for example, but are willing to stamp far too much of it with the “widely-recyclable” label. That induces good Americans (especially good American waste workers) to waste a lot of time with stuff that’s in the wrong bin. Let’s not have that.

Action: concerning monopolies, data privacy, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell our FTC to investigate the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, tell big tech corporations to protect our data, and tell our DOL to crack down on corporate misclassification of workers. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to investigate the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, which would merge at least a dozen grocery store chains into one bloated corporation. Sound like a good idea to you? Only if you enjoy job losses, higher prices, fewer choices, fewer stores, and less local control over groceries! Executives love that crap, because it enables them to pay themselves more money, but they shouldn’t get all the say about everything. Oh, and this merger would also enable hedge fund banksters to bleed Albertsons dry as a condition of the merger! Why, it’s like they negotiated this merger in the Bizarro world! So let’s put a stop to it.

The Kairos Fellowship helps you tell big tech corporations like Google and Meta to protect our personal data a lot more vigorously than they do now. Many folks have kinda given up and said there’s just no privacy on the internet, and maybe that sentiment induces folks to put up fewer shirtless photos of themselves on their newsfeed, but it more likely induces them to just give up on protecting their privacy, though corporations have no inherent right to sell your personal data just because you’ve given it to them. Seriously, why must everything be for sale? And not for nothing, but with the end of Roe v. Wade, we sure don’t want corporations selling our personal data to anti-abortion activists.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Labor (or DOL) to crack down on corporate misclassification of their workers. Big corporations be all like all our workers are contractors LOL so they can avoid giving workers health insurance and paid time off – and also so they can avoid paying their legally-mandated half of Social Security and Medicare taxes! Should they be allowed to do that, merely because it’s “clever”? Folks think of a lot of “clever” things I don’t think of, but the reason I don’t think of them is I’m not constantly trying to get over on the rest of the world. And people who are shouldn’t get all the say about everything.

Action: concerning transgender, data privacy, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell the government of Paraguay to legally recognize transgender folks, tell our FTC to protect our data privacy, and tell our Justice Department to break up ticketing monopolies. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Paraguay to recognize transgender folks there. You know how Republicans in America want nobody to play a sport with any folks other than those in the same birth gender? In Paraguay, they’d get their wish on that and many, many other things – trans folks literally can’t get the documentation that would match their gender identity, plus they get banned from protesting, or beaten up when they don’t get banned. Trans folks ain’t hurting nobody other than the testosterone-addled men who want to fuck everyone, so we should all be giving them what they need – which, for many, is the right to be seen and recognized and then left the hell alone.

Fight for the Future helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to protect good Americans’ data privacy as vigorously as possible. Our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) issued pretty good privacy rules in 2016, but then the Republican Congress of 2017 repealed them using the “resolution of disapproval” process, and that’s an evil act for which far too few of them have been punished. Still, we ain’t powerless, especially now that our FTC has decided to weigh in on the matter, and especially now that our FTC isn’t packed with right-wing ideologues who think corporations should police themselves, even though corporations will never police themselves. So let’s get to it.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division to break up Live Nation Entertainment. Still known more popularly as “Ticketmaster” over a decade after Live Nation absorbed it in a 2010 merger, it now dominates over two-thirds of the ticketing and live events market, and that’s reason enough to blow them up. But if you’ve been to any live show lately, I bet you can think of a few other reasons – like huge surprise fees and higher prices that sometimes go up even after you put the ticket in your cart! And Judd Legum at Popular Information describes even worse behavior; you’ll definitely want to blow them up after reading it.

Action: concerning data privacy, worker rights, and drug prices.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the American Data Protection and Privacy Act and the No Tax Breaks for Union Busting Act, and lower prescription drug prices for everyone. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8152, the American Data Protection and Privacy Act. This bill would limit the personal data corporations could collect, and make them let you opt out of targeted advertising (though I’d prefer it to force corporations to make you opt in to such advertising). The bill would also prevent corporations from collecting your Social Security number or transferring your data to another corporation without your express consent. Our FCC issued similar privacy rules in 2020, and then Republicans nullified them the following year; our Congressfolk can help correct that mistake by passing this bill.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8448/S. 4192, the No Tax Breaks for Union Busting Act, which would prevent corporations writing off union-busting activities like forced anti-union meetings and bribing workers not to join unions. While these activities are, strictly speaking, expenses, do normal folks get to write off illegal activities as expenses on their taxes? No, we do not. So corporations shouldn’t get to do it, either. It sure would help if our Senate would also pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act; Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to do that.

Finally, Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower drug prices for everyone. The Inflation Reduction Act helps bring down prices for Medicare recipients – that was all they could get through reconciliation; 60 Senators wouldn’t pass an insulin cap for everyone – and while I don’t begrudge Medicare recipients like right-wingers want me to do, really, we should all get lower drug prices. So let’s keep communicating our will to our Senators; if they do nothing, they’ll still go on the record as opposing our will, and then we’ll more easily be able to send them packing on Election Day.

Action: concerning internet privacy and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, tell our FDA to finally outlaw menthol cigarettes, and tell your Congressfolk to extend health insurance subsidies past the end of the year. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, which would prevent private data collection corporations from selling your personal data to law enforcement without a warrant. I know, getting a warrant, following the Fourth Amendment, how quaint! But there’s a reason we make law enforcement follow laws about investigating individuals – “individuals” includes you and I! – and that reason is you don’t want police officers to have too much power. And no use saying just don’t use the apps that sell your data, because all apps do that, so it’s a lot like saying just don’t breathe in the polluted air if you’re so mad about pollution.

The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to prohibit menthol cigarettes once and for all. You’ve heard people say pot is a gateway drug? It’s not, but menthol cigarettes are a gateway for kids to a life-long bad habit that’ll likely wind up killing them before their time. Menthol cigarettes taste a lot better than the other kind, I’m told, but if they wind up killing you, BFD! Also too, the big tobacco corporations have spent a lot of money trying to addict Black folks to menthol cigarettes, and sadly, it’s worked. Just don’t smoke then, say the right-wingers who do nothing about their rage addiction. When corporations won’t do the right thing, our government has to step in and make them.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies so that good Americans don’t get slammed with massive premium hikes at the end of the year. Joe Manchin says he thinks maybe he can support this, but more likely he’s just playing Lucy with the football to our Charlie Brown again, and anyway how many ways can I say this? Joe Manchin does not fucking matter! He is a pine nut in the batter of eternity! Only the American people matter, and if we rise up and speak with one voice to all of our Reps and Senators about this matter, we will deliver Joe Manchin to the oblivion he so richly deserves, 50th vote in the Senate or not.

Action: concerning climate change, kids' privacy, and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to act on climate change, pass legislation protecting children’s privacy online, and fully fund our IRS so it can go after rich tax cheats . Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to “step up” and fight climate change. Doesn’t matter that Joe Manchin derailed yet another stab at Build Back Better because of his “concerns” over inflation, because duty is duty. Surely our Congress could pass legislation specifically allowing our EPA to regulate climate change emissions, now that our Supreme Court has reversed itself (that part hasn’t been said enough!) and said our laws don’t specifically authorize that. I’d say, in the manner of Chuck Hagel, that if they can’t do that, they should go sell shoes, but they’d probably suck at that, too.

Fairplay helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 3663, the Kids Online Safety Act, and S. 1628, the Children and Teens’ Online Protection and Privacy Protection Act. You know how miserable social media algorithms make adults? Now imagine how miserable they make kids, who literally can’t make adult-level decisions. Both these bills would protect childrens’ privacy better than our laws currently do – Congress passed the original Children Online Privacy and Protection Act in 1998, think anything’s changed since then? – and the Kids Online Safety Act would establish that online websites have a duty of care with regard to children, which sounds like it would take a club to all their hateful algorithms.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the rich pay what they already owe in taxes, by properly funding our IRS once and for all. Brook no BS about how our IRS already has too much power – a fear right-wingers only voice when rich folks’ tax returns get leaked – because, frankly, our IRS doesn’t have too much power, not when they go after poor people before they go after rich people because poor people can’t afford lawyers. And what’s Joe Manchin going to do? Keep whining about inflation? They already owe the money. So we need to collect it.

Action: concerning banksters, privacy, corruption, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Wall Street Looting Act and the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, tell the Biden Administration to remove the DHS Inspector General, and tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation restricting the use of PFAS chemicals. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5648/S. 3022, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. This bill would treat several forms of bankster income as ordinary income, i.e., so that it gets taxed at normal-person rates, rather than the lower rates our government has foolishly set for too much speculative income. The bill would also force bankruptcy proceedings to give higher priority to taking care of a corporation’s employees, so that executives can’t steal all the money from a corporation’s dead husk. Folks who object to the word “looting” don’t understand what looters are. I think even Ayn Rand would call today’s banksters looters.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. You’ve heard that if you’re using a period-tracking app that you should totally stop doing that, now that abortion could soon be illegal in your state (if it’s not already)? Well, that’s just one reason we need the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, because currently third-party data collectors can sell all your data to law enforcement whether you want them to or not, and this bill would put a dead stop to that. The bill would also force our government to follow the 1978 FISA Act in conducting surveillance. And call me old-fashioned, but law enforcement shouldn’t get any data without a damn warrant.

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell President Biden to remove our Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General and replace him with someone who’ll do the job right. Because the accusations against him are mounting – ignoring sexual harassment complaints, wrongfully firing his deputy, and retaliating against whistleblowers, which amounts to a very bad look, especially, you know, for an office that’s supposed to be rooting out corruption in our government! Mr. Cuffari is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, but I’m old enough to remember when the appearance of corruption prompted folks to step aside. We’ve got to get back to that in America.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation restricting PFAS chemicals and holding the corporations that make them accountable. They call PFAS chemicals “forever chemicals” because they’re everywhere and your body can’t break them down, and even worse, at least one corporation that manufactures PFAS chemicals (3M) knew decades ago how bad those chemicals are! If they knew something would hurt us, and they not only kept doing it but lied to us about it, we’ve got to fix that. We can’t just wait for them to get to the Pearly Gates, not when PFAS chemicals make us sick now.

Action: concerning women's health and women's rights.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, tell Google to delete the location data of women who seek or get abortions, and tell Senate Majority Leader Schumer to schedule a vote on a bill that would help ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women’s Health Protection Act. Sam Alito wants the people to vote on this? Then let our Senators vote on a bill that would actually protect the right to abortion all over America, plus it would get rid of the hurdles (ultrasound bills, waiting periods, etc.) that states put in front of women to harass them. Well, worse than harass – you know how much trouble you have getting a day off from your boss? Now try getting two or three or four to jump through all these hoops. Our Senators don’t want to pass this bill. So we gotta blow up their phones and make them shake in their boots.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell Google to stop collecting abortion seekers’ location data, and also delete it from their servers. Even looking up an organization that helps people get abortions can get you in trouble these days, thanks to Google’s thirst for data they can turn into unearned money, as well as law enforcement’s constant quest for ways to get data that don’t involve going before a judge and getting a warrant. And really, we-the-people should have a lot more control over our data than we do; thanks again, Republicans! But, in this reality, we must pressure Google to do more than just try to get milk this catastrophe for good PR like other corporations do.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell Senate Majority Leader Schumer to schedule a vote on H.J.Res. 17/S.J.Res. 1, which would remove the expiration date from the original legislation passing the Equal Rights Amendment, and thus make it part of our Constitution. 38 state legislatures have passed the ERA, after all – a few of them very recently, well after the original legislation’s expiration date which no other Constitutional amendment had! Thus our Senators should be able to pass this bill, remove the expiration date, and finally make the ERA the law of our land. But Sen. Schumer has to call for a vote first. Let's blow up his damn phone about this, too.

Action: concerning murder, data privacy, renters' rights, corruption, and cash bail.

Long story short: tell Brazil to stop allowing the murder of Indigenous folks, tell Google not to build a data center in Saudi Arabia, tell corporate landlords to stop preying on renters, tell our Justice Department to investigate connections between Jared Kushner and Saudi Arabia, and tell governments to end cash bail. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Avaaz helps you tell Brazil to stop allowing corporate developers to rape and murder the indigenous Yanomami people who live in the Amazon rain forest. Hard to believe I had to write that sentence, but I did. The alleged rape and murder of a 12 year-old Yanomami girl and the three-year-old who went missing after getting thrown into a river are probably the stories you've heard, but this all takes place against a backdrop of a Brazilian government who do not care who they hurt as long as they're able to extract as much "wealth" from the Amazon rainforest as possible. That's why we brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR. And, good Brazilians, I wish you well in your efforts to remove this evil government from office later on this year.

Sum of Us helps you tell Google not to build a data center in Saudi Arabia. They must think they're such cosmopolitans! If you're tempted to think well, Google shouldn't have all that personal data anyway, so who cares where they put it, I wouldn't entirely blame you, but ask yourself: have you ever criticized Saudi Arabia's years-long refusal to let women drive? Or their habit of using bone saws to murder journalists? Hell, ever criticize Donald Trump, who once said he wasn't about to go up against a nation whose citizens gave him so much money? I trust you are beginning to see the problem. And again, talk to Republicans about why we don't have good internet privacy protections. (Spoiler alert: they destroyed them.)

Renters Rising helps you tell corporate landlords to stop preying on renters. Specifically, you'll ask for the following: just cause (versus at-will) eviction protections; a 3% cap on rent increases; meet health and safety standards for habitable properties; have a good grievance procedure in place for tenants; and recognize tenants' unions. That all sounds quite reasonable to me! What would the objections be? That landlords just can't make money anymore? Of course they can! They just won't be able to make money without doing their job, which, sadly, is a goal many weak people have these days. Maybe their bankster bosses taught them! Anyway, renters deserve justice too, and what a shame I have to say it.

Win Without War helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate $2 billion in Saudi investments in Jared Kushner's funds, which could be payback for services rendered -- or a pre-payment on services to come, if we're so brain-dead as to elect Mr. Trump President in 2024. Maybe a Trump fatigue operates here, one that might lead you to say what more do I have to do, but that's what people like Donald Trump count on; it's why they spend every day doing as much damage to our civilization as possible, so you get tired of fighting them. Luckily we have a Justice Department that's supposed to get justice on our behalf -- but they won't do it unless we demand it.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell state, local, and federal governments to end cash bail. Mainly because it's an unconstitutional way of putting people in prison before they've had a fair trial, but also because cash bail doesn't work, or else reducing cash bail would result in higher crime rates everywhere it's tried, which, naturally, it hasn't. Don't let the hysterics at Fox News bamboozle you into thinking otherwise with the same footage of the same crimes repeated over and over again. And don't believe the folks who say how can cops do their job? Police officers had better be able to do their job without violating our Constitution.

Action: concerning law and order, drug prices, windfall profits, big ag monopolies, and the Shenandoah.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the 4th Amendment is Not for Sale Act, lower drug prices, pass a windfall profits tax on big oil corporations, and pass the Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act and the Shenandoah Mountain Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. This bill would prevent third-party data-gobblers from selling your personal data to law enforcement; our laws presently only prevent ISPs from selling that info, so we gotta close that loophole. The news hook right now is data-gobblers selling data on everyone who visited a Planned Parenthood for any reason -- and you can see why folks would be a little scared about that -- but fact is data brokers shouldn't be selling your personal data to law enforcement, and law enforcement shouldn't be able to get that data without a warrant. I know, warrants, how quaint.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk, for the umpteenth time, to lower prescription drug prices so good Americans don't go broke buying life-saving drugs. I don't know how many more times I have to talk about diabetics rationing their insulin before they get the picture, but duty is duty and they will get the picture. And how about that: lowering prices as an inflation-fighting tool, since that's literally what it is. Right-wingers call that "price controls" like that's a dirtier phrase than price-gouging. I suspect most Americans would say you want to control prices? What are you waiting for? My EpiPen shouldn't cost $600!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall profits tax on big oil corporations. Gas prices go through the roof, and big oil corporations make record profits -- c'mon, we're not schmucks. I'm old enough to remember when big corporations took the hit in profits rather than pass costs on to their customers, but we're a sick, immoral, and decadent society now, so corporations make us pay. And yeah, I've noticed the smaller gas stations have the lower prices! But let's not have small businesses carry an entire civilization on their backs, OK? Big oil corporations won't do the right thing until we make them.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7827/S. 4245, the Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act, which would set some limits on mergers in the agricultural sector. I'm old enough to remember when "big corporate farms eating up small farms" seemed to be the plot of every Hollywood movie! And it's so, so much worse now! Small farmers confront large monopoly power at almost every turn, and again, we should not ask the small farmer to shoulder responsibility for an entire civilization. Curbing mergers in big ag right now will at least give the small farmer some breathing room. And that's all the small farmer ever asks for.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 3911, the Shenandoah Mountain Act, which would permanently protect some 90,000 acres of the renowned Shenandoah Mountain area. This, again, is simple: we can protect one of the last undeveloped areas of the southern Appalachians, so good Americans and their children and their children's children can enjoy it -- or we can churn it up for energy that will disappear almost as soon as it's unearthed and mines and pipelines that'll spill filth into our drinking water. And no, we shouldn't churn up the area just to "create jobs." Preserving areas also creates jobs, for those who work to preserve it and those who help others enjoy it.

Around the table: in which we identify the *real* extremists.

Surprise, surprise, an Anti-Defamation League study of 450 murders committed by domestic extremists in America (like the Buffalo murders earlier this week) concludes that right-wingers commit about 75% of them. (By their tabulation, Muslim extremists commit 20% and left-wing extremists commit a mere 4%.) "(T)he American political right has a violence problem that has no equivalent on the left," the article says, but that only means right-wingers will simply redefine "murder" until it includes things like not inviting right-wingers to your barbecues or shaming your right-wing father-in-law for watching Tucker Carlson. I've even heard right-wingers call such things "a kind of death"! You know what's "a kind of death"? Death.

Researchers at Brown University and Microsoft AI Health inform us that if every American adult had gotten vaccinated, we could have saved well over 300,000 lives. Against over 1 million dead, that's a sizable amount. An earlier Kaiser study put that number at 234,000 -- by not counting folks who'd died while vaccinated-but-not-boosted -- and I put more persuasive power in that figure, since not getting boosted was more likely not a matter of ideology. Still, that's more than one out of every five deaths. And the other side's argument is all waaaaaaah personal choice you can't tell me what to do stop the steal!

When I hear that "Online data could be used against people seeking abortions if Roe v. Wade falls" -- a perfectly explicable outcome, since most folks turn to the internet for information about reproductive health care! -- I am reminded that the FCC passed pretty good data privacy rules in 2016, but Congressional Republicans nullified them in 2017 with a quickness, because if it's an instance of government helping you, then Republicans must shit on it. Also too, law enforcement can search your cellphones without even getting a warrant because legislators either don't understand technology or go out of their way not to understand it because big campaign donors don't want them to.

Ho hum, Mississippi, the state that aims to end Roe v. Wade via its 15-week anti-abortion law, also just so happens to be the worst state in the Deep South for providing health insurance coverage to low-income women. Medicaid recipients get only 60 days' worth of post-partum care in Mississippi (though the Affordable Care Act allows expansion of that care to one year), though at least one study found that over 80% of post-partum health care costs come after 60 dats. Why, it's like that was the whole idea! I'd look for big corporations to pressure to pull out of Mississippi, but there ain't hardly any there to begin with; Republicans really are going to run that state into the ground, which will hurt all the good folks who live there.

Buried deep in this excellent Steven Rosenfeld piece about Pennsylvania's Republican nominee for Governor, Doug Mastriano is a description of the first Josh Shapiro attack ad against him, and it's like the ad's makers rolled up as much Democrat weakness as humanly possible into one ad, which you don't even know is an anti-Mastriano ad until the end! Look, here's how to attack Doug Mastriano: call him weak for refusing to accept the 2020 election results and doing his damnedest to overturn them. Republicans love wearing Democrat epithets, from "deplorable" all the way to "ultra-MAGA," as badges of honor; let's see Mr. Mastriano work that alchemy with the word "weak." I'd say I hope it makes him melt down in public, except that public melt-downs aren't the career-enders they used to be. Just ask our former screamer-in-chief, Donald Trump.

Finally, maybe the Buffalo shooter could evade any plagiarism charges Tucker Carlson might level against him, but the part of their collaborative work I can't stand is this anti-diversity argument from Mr. Carlson: "Can you think, for example, of other institutions such as, I don’t know, marriage or military units in which the less people have in common, the more cohesive they are?" Ahem: civilization is not a marriage or a military unit; these two institutions are parts of civilization, and insisting that the whole of civilization be exactly like any of its parts is small-minded. Even 15 years ago I thought Tucker Carlson was doing the best he could as a conservative; now I think he was just fronting, and his current fascist-worship was the endgame all along.

Around the table: your smartphone spies on you! And other horrible truths.

Obscure phone-tracking corporation proved its mettle in the burgeoning field of surveillance by spying on NSA and CIA cellphones. When you read, hopefully not for the first time, that "(c)ountless common smartphone apps are constantly harvesting your location and relaying it to advertisers, typically without your knowledge or informed consent," I hope you remember that our FCC enacted some pretty good privacy-protection rules in 2016, only to have 2017's Republican Congress repeal them through the notorious "Resolution of Disapproval" process. I hope you remember that when Republicans pretend to "fight big tech," too. (And buying data may be easier than getting a warrant, but they're using our money to do it, which means we ought to get more say over the whole process.)

Stop me if you've heard this one before: our government hardly knows where all that military aid to Ukraine is really going, raising the possibility that it could "wind up in the hands of other militaries and militias that the US did not intend to arm." If you're thinking this is exclusively a feature of a Biden Administration, I've got three words for you: Osama bin Laden. In Ukraine specifically, this could mean white supremacist jerks who fight alongside good Ukrainians against the Russians now but just wait until after this is all over. The specter of a far right-wing governing coalition across Europe ain't as far off as we'd like, and you can't count on the likes of Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron to stand against it.

When I hear that our Justice Department says conditions at the Parchman state prison in Mississippi violate our Constitution, I shudder to think what those conditions might be -- and what conditions our DOJ has said nothing about! "Mississippi violated the rights of persons incarcerated at Parchman by failing to keep them safe from physical violence and for failing to provide constitutionally adequate mental health care," our DOJ says, but I wish that sounded substantially different from other prisons! Even worse: Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves can do no better in response than to say they've reduced the population at Parchman and they're working toward getting more officers!

So Texas Gov. Greg Abbott spent $4.2 billion in taxpayer money for, ah, "enhanced" truck inspections earlier this month, and guess how many immigrants they caught or drug seizures they made? Zero and zero, respectively. That's per Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, who was trying to put lipstick on this pig by saying Mr. Abbott "successfully persuaded Mexico states (sic) to enhance security on their side of the border." I'm sure that's not why he did it, though. He did it because it created drama. That's the only reason right-wing politicians do anything anymore.

In a related note, I hear that a Republican memo purports to be a "Road Map for Attacking Democrats on Immigration." They say Democrats shouldn't attack Republicans if they want to win the midterms, but why doesn't anyone issue similar warnings to Republicans? I've only been asking this question for at least a decade now. And I've got another question: why would voters who saw through the nakedly racist opportunism of the "caravans" in 2018 fail to see through Republican opportunism about the same thing in 2022? I sincerely hope that after the second week of November we can all say that was a rhetorical question.

Finally, I understand that Barack Obama told Stanford University that he didn't fully realize "how susceptible we had become to lies and conspiracy theories, despite having spent years being a target of disinformation myself." Alternate headline: "Obama Regrets Not Fighting Hard Enough for Civilization."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning racism, slave labor, facial recognition, false advertising, and right-wing media.

Long story short: tell Oregon legislators to end the use of non-unanimous juries, tell your pension fund to pressure Apple to fight slave labor in China, tell our IRS to stop using facial recognition tech, tell our FTC to stop employers from advertising fake pay rates, and tell AT&T to stop funding OAN. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Oregon residents, take note: Color of Change helps you tell your state legislator to pass SB 1511, so that everyone in Oregon convicted of a crime by a non-unanimous jury vote can get a retrial. States have historically used non-unanimous juries for certain criminal cases pretty much so they could put more Black folks in jail, but by 2020, when our Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional (citing the racist origins of the non-unanimous jury therein), Oregon was literally the last state in the union to use them, having even been outclassed by Louisiana, which outlawed them in 2019. Unfortunately, our Court didn't require retrials for those convicted by a non-unanimous jury before their ruling; SB 1511 would fix that, and thus help close a sad chapter in American history.

Sum of Us helps you tell your pension fund to pressure Apple to stop using forced Uyghur labor in China to make its products. More specifically, you'll tell your pension fund to vote for two shareholder resolutions at the next Apple shareholder meeting on March 4. Apple supposedly has systems in place to root out slave labor from its supply chain, but now that journalists have found at least nine of Apple's suppliers rely on Uyghur slave labor in Chinese concentration camps, we have, ah, reason to believe those systems aren't working, so one shareholder resolution would require Apple to account for that. A second resolution would aim at Chinese government requests to remove apps from Apple's app store, and since journalists have used some of these apps to find out about Chinese treatment of Uyghurs, Apple needs to account for that, too.

Fight for the Future helps you tell our IRS to stop using facial recognition or biometric surveillance tools. Facial recognition technology sucks, is racist, and far too frequently results in innocent people getting arrested, but for the purposes of this discussion, those are symptoms of a far bigger problem -- if facial recognition technology can't even get your face right, if it too easily gets flummoxed by a person aging or getting disfigured in an accident, how can it fight identity fraud, which is our IRS's purported reason for using the now-notorious ID.me? ID.me also collects a lot of personal data -- I mean, it works with our IRS! -- meaning the fact that it only shares some of that data with other corporations shouldn't ease your mind. We may fear malice more than incompetence, but let's not allow incompetence to run so rampant it looks like malice.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to outlaw fake pay rate scams. What's a fake pay rate scam? It's when an employer puts out a job listing with a higher pay rate than they have any intention of paying; they also advertise hourly rates as "plus tips" when they actually include tips, plus they advertise managerial jobs that they don't actually have open, and then offer you a lower-responsibility job, hoping to slip that lower pay by you! And folks don't necessarily have the luxury of "just not taking the job" -- if you're on unemployment, and you turn down a job, you don't get your unemployment benefits back. However, all of this falls under "truth in advertising" laws, which our FTC must enforce, so all that remains is for us to tell them to enforce them.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell AT&T to cut all ties with the notorious One America News Network. AT&T owns about two-thirds of DirecTV, which will stop offering OAN this coming April, and while that's a big deal, OAN only exists in the first place thanks to AT&T money, and we have no indication that money train's going to stop rolling. Indeed, AT&T said they wanted a competitor to Fox News, but why should there be more than one right-wing propaganda outlet? Hell, why should there be one? OAN peddles 2020 election lies and COVID misinformation just like the other right-wing "news" channels, and our commitment to freedom of speech does not require us to enable right-wing propaganda to corrupt the minds and souls of good Americans. It doesn't require corporations to fund it, either.

Action: concerning monopolies, bank fees, internet privacy, public lands, and evil podcasts.

Long story short: tell our government to stop bank mergers and curb bank overdraft fees, tell RayBan to ditch social media stalker sunglasses, tell our government to designate the Delaware Water Gap a national park, and tell Apple and Google to deplatform Steve Bannon. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell federal regulators to stop all bank mergers until they can strengthen merger guidelines. What good do mergers do? They make executives richer, but that doesn't qualify as a "good" to anyone but the right-wingers who only care about how well they do. In the meantime, mergers kill jobs, kill competition, and raise prices for everyone, usually in ways that aren't obvious, and because they're not obvious, judges ignore them. And bank mergers are even worse, because they limit your options if you're trying to get a loan to buy a house or start a business, and also because banks don't like going into rural or urban areas. But the folks who live there are people, too! And we all deserve better.

Americans for Financial Reform also helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to stop absurd bank overdraft fees. Because the last damn thing you need, as you're struggling to make ends meet during a pandemic, is a bank charging you ridiculous overdraft fees. These fees drive poorer Americans out of the banking system and puts them at the mercy of pawn shops, check-cashing joints, and payday lenders. And despite the whining of the Price Controls Are Always Evil crowd, an April 2020 poll found 75% of Americans wanted our government to regulate overdraft fees more. Republican respondents dragged that number down, right? Nope -- 76% of Republican respondents wanted more government intervention there, too. (Independents dragged the number down; there's a lesson there, somewhere.)

Sum of Us helps you tell sunglass corporation Ray-Ban to stop making "smart" glasses for Facebook. Why? Because their glasses secretly record people, supposedly to help people "tell stories." You've seen the "stories" function on Facebook? Have you ever seen something so counterintuitive? Particularly after using Facebook's far more intuitive newsfeed for all those years? And they hawk it like it's sliced bread! Anyway, these "smart" glasses look just like sunglasses as they're secretly recording you -- unless you happen to see a small white light on the frame, which you likely won't. And anyway, if you've given the matter any thought, you will probably conclude, as I have done, that there are already too many stories floating around. The world needs good stories, recollected in tranquility rather than taped by stalkers.

Environmental Action helps you tell our government to designate the Delaware Water Gap as a national park. Or, more likely, a "national park and preserve," since our laws don't allow hunting in a national park but do allow it in a preserve (which could be carved out of a national park). The Delaware Water Gap, a creation of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, now gets about as many visitors as the Yellowstone National Park but has about one-ninth the budget, and America strangely doesn't have many national parks east of the Mississippi River; maybe folks think that New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey comprise some urban hellhole, but all these states feature vast swaths of gorgeous and relatively unspoiled land, of which the Delaware Water Gap is just the most famous. So, really, why on Earth not?

Finally, in case you thought Joe Rogan was the only jerk with an undeserved platform, Care2 helps you tell Google and Apple to remove Steve Bannon's podcast from their respective platforms. Mr. Bannon was too much of a jerk for Spotify, which removed him in late 2020 after he said he'd put the heads of Anthony Fauci and Christopher Wray "on pikes" as "a warning to federal bureaucrats." "Joking," right? Mr. Bannon's podcast has since alleged repeatedly that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election (by getting seven million more votes, apparently!) and said "all hell will break loose tomorrow" on January 5, 2021, which I'm sure was just "analysis." Yeah, I used to listen to obnoxious jerks, but then I became a man, and put away childish things. And our big, bold corporations need to do the same thing.

Action: concerning securities fraud, worker rights, social media, data privacy, Presidential appointees, and corporate news.

Long story short: tell our SEC to investigate Donald Trump's latest media organization, tell Starbucks to stop interfering with its workers' unionization efforts, tell our government to investigate Facebook for law-breaking, tell our FTC to protect Americans' data privacy, tell our Senators to confirm two Biden nominees to our FCC, and tell AT&T to stop funding the One America News (sic) Network. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Sum of Us helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to investigate the creation of the "Trump Media and Technology Group." Not because of "politics" or "irrational hatred," but because, frankly, the whole exercise looks like a scam designed to defraud investors. And it's no use shrugging and saying ho ho ho these people deserve to lose their money, because the law should protect all of us, otherwise it's not much of a law, is it? This "Trump Media and Technology Group" merged with a shell corporation, claimed it'd make a gazillion dollars, and then told Trump votaries to invest their life savings -- and voila! The stock price went through the roof, and now they don't have to do any work. Kinda like all his other doings, now that I think about it. So it at least merits an investigation.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Starbucks to stop trying to stamp out its workers' efforts to organize for better pay and working conditions. Buffalo Starbucks workers are trying to unionize as we speak, and Starbucks has responded in exactly the manner you thought they would -- with intimidation, mandatory propaganda meetings, and store closings. I've been in plenty of Starbucks with not enough workers to handle the volume, sp why shouldn't they unionize for better pay and working conditions? Do they not deserve our respect? It wasn't that long ago that Americans looked down on factory workers and their "unearned" prosperity (which was mainly their children's prosperity); now that they're almost all gone we idealize them. Let's not one day tell that sad story about today's workers!

MoveOn and the American Economic Liberties Project help you tell our government to investigate Facebook executives for their potential law-breaking. Which might not be confined to inflating advertising stats and then lying about them to investors, but may also include private discussions to deceive investors, clients, and regulators, as two investor lawsuits allege and which Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen's documents also support. I guess Mr. Zuckerman, who's not even 40 yet, will one day say that he didn't know he was breaking the law because this was the first time he was a billionaire. The Buddhists may smile upon that explanation, but I won't, and our laws shouldn't, either. I mean, fraud is fraud, and if you commit fraud, you should pay the price.

Access Now helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to enact privacy rules that would protect Americans from the greed and venality of social media corporations (among others). You'll recall that our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) enacted pretty good data privacy rules in 2016 -- and that the Republican Congress, apparently unable to tolerate any attempt to tell a corporation not to hurt people, repealed those rules in a "resolution of disapproval," which also forbade our FCC from ever revisiting the issue. But that resolution doesn't apply to our FTC -- different letters! And even the Trump FTC fined Facebook $5 billion for privacy violations, so it has not merely a role in justice but some practice in extracting it. And President Biden's FTC is a vast improvement on Mr. Trump's.

Both Free Press and Fight for the Future help you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's two new FCC nominees. Now our FCC can do its work; previously it had only four Commissioners, guaranteeing 2-2 deadlocks on every conceivable issue; President Biden has essentially appointed Jessica Rosenworcel (whose term would otherwise expire in January) to a full term as FCC Commissioner -- a position she has filled on an acting basis this year -- and former Media Access Project executive director Gigi Sohn to the position left vacant by former FCC Chair Ajit Pai's resignation this past January 20. Without five Commissioners, our FCC can't do very much business, and much business awaits it, chiefly the possibility of net neutrality's reinstatement and the resulting increased ability to stop big telecom corporations from harming consumers. So let's get that done.

Finally, both the Juggernaut Project and Common Cause help you tell AT&T to stop its financial enabling of the right-wing "news" network OAN. As you no doubt know, AT&T actually wanted a new right-wing news network that could compete with Fox News; why on Earth anyone would actually want such a thing is a mystery that will forever befuddle me, but that's why we have the "news" network that constantly yammers on about how Democrats "stole" the 2020 election from Donald Trump by getting seven million more votes. They're no better on any other issue facing Americans today, and even their founder and CEO will tell you, if you put enough liquor in him, that OAN wouldn't survive without AT&T funding. Seems to me there's a starve-the-best mandate waiting to be enacted here. But only if we get in their grills about it.

Action: concerning government spying, voting rights, Social Security, Presidential power, and data privacy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the USA PATRIOT Act; pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and get rid of the filibuster do accomplish these things; and to pass the Social Security 2100 Act, the Protecting Our Democracy Act, and the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Daily Kos and Win Without War help you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the USA PATRIOT Act already. The nefarious Section 215 -- which authorized our National Security Agency (or NSA) to collect metadata on good Americans without a warrant -- may be no more, but our work ain't done, because the entire USA PATRIOT Act is a mistake. And it's a mistake built to repel good-faith attempts to prove it's a mistake -- it allows our government to claim "national security" in court challenges and in response to calls to prove it's worked -- which is the worst kind of mistake. And I won't lie to you: I hated what the "war on terror" did to America and so I want the head of the PATRIOT Act on my mantle. Or is that not bleeding-heart enough of me?

Both Left Action and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. Also, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. And Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to dump the filibuster in order to get them passed, since a Republican filibuster is literally all that stands between these bills and their passage. And we deserve to have them passed -- they'd take campaign financing, gerrymandering, and state efforts to rig their elections all to the mat, and it might not kill them, but it'll leave them bloodied enough for more good Americans to express their will, which is what elections are all about. Elections ain't where the work ends, but it's where the work begins. And all Americans deserve to at least begin that work.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5723, the Social Security 2100 Act. Anyone who bleats about TEH SOSHUL SECURITIEZ RUNNINGZ OUTZ OFZ TEH MONEYZ!!!!! should attend that the Social Security 2100 Act would increase both benefits and revenues -- the former by increasing the size of checks and by calculating inflation in a way that reflects seniors' real costs, the latter by taxing income over $400,000 into the system for the first time. Why the bill puts a "donut hole" between the current cap ($142,800 in annual income) and $400,000 I couldn't say, but this bill will put Social Security on a stronger footing. Not that it's on a bad footing now! That's just something right-wingers say. But all victories need to be maintained, and Social Security is no exception.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5314/S. 2921, the Protecting Our Democracy Act. Perhaps not surprisingly, this bill aims to prevent someone like Donald Trump from putting our democracy through the woodchipper again, as it would explicitly prohibit self-pardons, limit the President's power to declare emergencies like Mr. Trump's sham "national emergency" he used to fund his vanity border wall, and protect our Justice Department from a President's political interference. People still think if the President appoints an Attorney General then that Attorney General should just do his bidding! But people who believe that are cynical, and the cynical shouldn't get very much say about anything in America.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Internet service-providing corporations can't just hand over your private data to law enforcement without a warrant secured from a judge who believes the information secured by the warrant has a better than 50-50 chance of securing a conviction -- but third-party data brokers can hand over your private data to law enforcement, and they do, for, like, money. Which, since it's law enforcement paying the money, is actually your money, since your taxpayer money funds law enforcement! So when your friends and neighbors shrug and say if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear, just remind them that law enforcement misuses their money. Unlawfully and unconstitutionally, I might add.

Action: concerning monopolies, voting rights, data privacy, law and order, and fossil fuel subsidies.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to strike a blow against meat packer monopolies, pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis voting Rights Advancement Act, pass data privacy legislation and the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and end fossil fuel subsidies. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First off, this'll seem a bit inside-baseball, but Matt Stoller writes about monopoly meat-packers causing higher meat prices, and notes that Sens. Grassley (R-IA) and Tester (D-MT) have written a bill with actual bipartisan support, called the 50-14 or "spot market" bill. This bill would require big meat packing corporations to buy half of their meat on the open market -- rather than force all cattle ranchers into contracts that may give ranchers assurance they'll be able to sell their cattle, but also makes it far too easy for meat packers to fix prices. It won't actually break up the monopolies, but it'll give ranchers a lot more breathing space. This bill merits a supportive call to your Congressfolk, and don't be swayed by the arguments against the bill -- as Mr. Stoller demonstrates, they rely on bad arguments and manipulated data.

Both Left Action and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. Never mind that Joe Manchin prefers this bill to the For the People Act, because it's not so different that it doesn't deserve our support. The Freedom to Vote Act would expand your access to the voting booth, clamp down on partisan gerrymandering and dark money, restore voting rights to ex-felons, provide 15 days of early voting across America, enact same-day voter registration, and make Election Day a national holiday, plus it'll clamp down on states' recent attempts to gain the power to overrule the will of the voters in their elections. All of this would better secure voting rights in America, and thus merits our work on its behalf. (Also, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you write a letter to the editor supporting the Freedom to Vote Act.)

Both Daily Kos and People for the American Way help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This bill would amend the Voting Rights Act so that our Justice Department could clamp down on voting law changes from states and localities that have demonstrated a clear record of vote suppression -- and not just states and localities from the South, which was our Supreme Court's objection in Shelby County v. Holder. And since a lot of the states that have changed their voting laws lately just so happen to have a vote suppression record, one would think our Justice Department could and would do something about them. We'll likely have to nix the filibuster to get any voting rights bills passed -- but first, let's demonstrate, unmistakably, that the people want voting rights reform in America.

How to Stop Facebook helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass real data privacy legislation in America. Our Federal Communications Commission enacted pretty good regulations protecting data privacy, but that was back in 2016 -- and our Congress promptly repealed them, via the notorious resolution of disapproval process. But now, with approximately zero Americans left who think data breaches and targeted ads and enabling Nazi wannabes is just the price you pay for staying in touch with those people you had a few laughs with freshman year, Congress should be more amenable to protecting your data, and protecting you from corporate surveillance. But we still have to tell them. (Oh, and don't fall for the calls for a new bureaucracy just to regulate Facebook; that'll just have our government rubber-stamping what Facebook does, and we've already got that.)

In a peripherally-related matter, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. This bill would close a Mack truck-sized loophole in the law, which currently prevents your internet service-providing corporation from selling your personal data to law enforcement -- but which does not prevent the third-party data gobblers that buy your data from your ISPs from re-selling it to law enforcement! And you deserve better than that, even if you have committed a crime that law enforcement should be able to discover. We don't have a Fourth Amendment for nothing, after all -- we have it so that we don't send innocent people to jail by accident, and so we don't create a police state that sends its enemies to jail at will. And we're not as far from that as we'd like to think.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to end fossil fuel subsidies forever. That'll be tough, since the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" includes even more fossil fuel subsidies, but we should still communicate our will. And though the recent California oil spill instructs us as to why we might not want to funnel taxpayer money toward corporations that pollute, you can of course make a more conservative argument against fossil fuel subsidies. Not ALL GUBMINT SPENDINGZ BADZ!!!!!, because that's a reactionary argument -- you can merely argue that the fossil fuels are an entrenched technology and hardly need taxpayer help to survive. Yes, they talk about "facing crises" all the time, but they're BSing you. They don't need your money.

Action: concerning essential services, taxes, credit, divestment, and facial recognition software.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act, tell Democrats to stop coddling corporate lobbyists and raise taxes on the rich and corporations already, tell Congress to ensure we can all get good credit reports, tell General Mills to divest from Israel, and tell Uber and Lyft to stop using facial recognition software on drivers and consumers. 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.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4979, the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act, which would (as its title suggests) provide relief to good Americans behind on their water, electricity, and internet bills. If you read that and think when does it end? -- "it" being "government assistance during a pandemic" -- just remember that a) a lot of them didn't have jobs for a significant period during this pandemic and b) large corporations get to run up considerably larger water/electricity/internet bills without suffering any of the consequences. It can't be only the "little people" who suffer from bills piling up. Not in our America, at least. And yes, internet is an essential service, as evidenced by all the Zoom meetings at our jobs and all the Zoom classes our kids had to do for school this past year-plus.

Daily Kos helps you tell Congressional Democrats to stop listening only to the big corporate lobbyists trying to defend their unearned tax cuts and Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund the Build Back Better Act with higher taxes on the rich and on corporations. Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a "billionaire's income tax." Most of the Democrats have listened to us on these matters, but their majorities in our House and Senate are slim, so it only takes a few (cough Joe Manchin Kyrsten Sinema cough) to stomp their feet and say "no," regardless of what their actual constituents think. No, corporations, and corporate lobbies, are not constituents, not least because they're not people. Call me old-fashioned, but I think people should count more than things. (Oh, and I'm fully aware that the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" didn't get a vote in the House last night, and I have no opinion on that -- rather than get mired in the weeds of Democrat "strategy," we need to press them with our will.)

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure all Americans can get free, accessible, and secure credit reports. What's that, you say? You thought our laws already provided for free annual credit reports from each of the three major credit reporting bureaus? It does, but our laws do not prevent corporations from charging you for that information! Just to illustrate how confusing it all is, the only government-authorized website to get free credit reports is annualcreditreport.com; if a website has the word "free" in it, chances are you'll be forking over money for your "free" reports! Furthermore, some credit reporting corporations -- including two affiliated with two of the big three agencies -- may give you credit scores lenders won't actually use! It's a damn shame we have to use credit reports at all in a civilized society, so let's at least make sure they work for us.

Sum of Us helps you tell General Mills to pull out of Israel over its continued occupation and oppression of Palestine. Hey, divestment worked in South Africa, even though they said it wouldn't! I was one of those who said it wouldn't, that it would hurt the South Africans it intended to help, but actual South African activists put me right: it can't get any worse for us than not having any rights to begin with, they told me. And Palestinians are in the same boat today, as Israel takes their land, tears down their homes, and punishes anyone who speaks out. Sorry, folks, that's apartheid, even though they're doing it out of fear. What, fear should excuse evil? No, it should not. I should also point out that their fear is completely unjustified by the facts -- Palestine can't win a war with Israel, and look at all the other nations in the Middle East totally not coming to Palestine's aid.

Finally, Fight for the Future helps you tell Uber and Lyft to ban facial recognition software for drivers and users. Uber and Lyft have been partnering (Jesus Mary and Joseph "partnering" has got to be one of my least favorite words!) with a corporation called Alfi, which makes tablets for vehicles that scan your face and then show you ads based on what it finds. It even tries to tell how you're feeling to show you ads! You walk in with a "sad face," you might get anti-depressant ads! If you walk in with a scowl, do they show you an ad for Fox News or OANN? And once they've got your face, and all the data that could go with it, what will they do with that information? Anything they want, since very few laws even address biometric data. Maybe, just maybe, you don't want screens in your face guessing what you might buy all the time. It's not so damn much to ask. Hell, I remember when that was everyday life! So tell them no.

Action: concerning voting rights, privacy, law and order, defense spending, cyanide bombs, and plastic recycling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the People's Response Act, and tell your Congressfolk to cut defense spending, ban cyanide bombs, and put responsibility for recycling plastic on its manufacturers, not people. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Public Citizen and People for the American Way help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act, which would do almost all of what the For the People Act would do -- it would make Election Day a national holiday, enact same-day voter registration and 15 days of early voting across America, give ex-felons back their right to vote, and clamp down on partisan gerrymandering and "dark money" campaign financing, plus it would block states from overriding election results that give them a sad. It's basically the For the People Act minus the ethics reforms, which leads one to wonder if all that drama Joe Manchin put us through really worth it. And he could still move the goalposts, as he's done repeatedly on other bills this year. Still, this is America, and what he wants should matter a whole lot less than what we want.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Our Fourth Amendment, you recall, protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures by law enforcement, but currently law enforcement can grab your personal data if they get it from a third-party data broker -- which buys your data from your internet service providing corporation, which latter corporation cannot hand over your data to law enforcement without a warrant. The law protects you from your ISP, then, but not from the corporations your ISP sells your data to. A certain strain of right-winger loves to point to this loophole as proof that government doesn't work and laws don't work, when all this loophole proves is that real security is a lifelong effort. I guess right-wingers don't like work.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4194, the People's Response Act. This bill would create a Division on Community Safety within our Department of Health and Human Services, and this Division would help states and localities stop using our police officers as the Swiss Army knives of our civilization, and instead implement better approaches to community problems. I think police should be serving warrants and making arrests -- I don't even want them getting kittens out of trees, because we have animal control officers to do that. And that's just one area where we already accept an alternative to policing without yelling about "defunding the police." Pass the People's Response Act and we can get our state and local governments to do better in other areas as well.

Both Win Without War and World Beyond War help you tell your Congressfolk to cut defense spending already. Because we already spend more on our military than the next 12 nations combined do! And how much of that is for defense, really, and how much of it is for enriching some defense contractor crony or other? We should also question, given the long-term effects of our meddling (still think our CIA planning a coup against Mr. Mossadegh in 1954 was a good idea?), whether we're really a positive force in foreign affairs. No, it's not "unpatriotic" to say so; in fact, I'd say it is unpatriotic to simply refuse to question yourself, since America is all about doing better, and if you're not asking yourself the hard questions, I sure as hell don't want you in my foxhole. Or anyone else's, for that matter.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban our use of cyanide bombs in the wild. You don't like how land mines kill and maim people 50 years after the war's over, right? Now contemplate a capsule that not only lures wildlife in with a sweet smell, but sprays cyanide around indiscriminately when triggered, indiscriminately enough that it kills any and all wildlife in an area, not just the wildlife our government is trying to kill. It sounds like a developer's dream, actually, though I don't imagine unexploded cyanide bombs will just overlook them. Don't be the one who says this is no big deal because "death is always violent." The mere existence of violence doesn't justify perpetrating any and all kinds of violence on other living creatures. And civilization abhors nihilism.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the big plastic-manufacturing corporations, and not taxpayers, take responsibility for recycling their products. They've got more money, after all! You remember when soda manufacturing corporations started advertising their "shatterproof" bottles in the late '70s? You'd see a big bottle of Pepsi bounce on the floor again and again. We sure didn't know what that would bring to our world -- not just dead animals dying of plastic pollution, not just trash islands forming all over our oceans, but good Americans who now ingest about one credit card of plastic every week just by using the plastic products that are now everywhere. So it can't just be your local sanitation department, paid for by your taxes, doing all the work.

Around the table: concerning big pharma, tax cuts for the rich, sexual harassment, and other evils.

Facebook disables a couple of researchers' accounts (including their data), suggesting their research had violated the privacy of Facebook users -- except that the researchers were studying Facebook advertisers. And when Facebook said a Federal Trade Commission rule about customer privacy necessitated the shutdown, our FTC's acting director called that insinuation "inaccurate," leading us to wonder, again, whether corporate executives really are our "best and brightest," or just have the dumb luck of operating in an economy that rewards failure and stupidity with billions of dollars. The punchline? The researchers were studying how misinformation spreads on Facebook. In that context, one might call their ban suspicious.

President Biden tells Congress to lower drug prices, and specifies letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices as one way to do that. Now that's using the bully pulpit! If only President Obama had done this in 2009 when everyone else wanted to do it, President Biden wouldn't need to do it now. And remember: the right-wing "answer" to Medicare negotiating its own drug prices is Democrats want to control what medicines you get, an argument Democrats should be able to defeat easily if they're willing to get fierce. Of course, if they're not willing to get fierce, then they all deserve to lose all the elections.

ProPublica gives us more from their "Secret IRS Files": "How Much the Ultrawealthy Gained by Shaping Trump's 'Big, Beautiful Tax Cut.'" A mere 82 households reaped $1 billion from the 2017 tax "reform" just in the first year, and Ron Johnson's infamous "pass-through" tax cut, though supposedly for small businesses, yielded 60% of its windfalls to the top 1%, which means wealthy folks and big corporations have gotten subtler about using small businesses as a human shield. By the time you get to the notorious corporate welfare-gobbler the Bechtel Corporation and the big real estate interests who got tens of millions in windfalls, you'll be properly incensed.

Soon-to-be-former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo actually blames "cultural behavioral differences" for his misfortune, and his fellow Italian-Americans give him what-for. As one restaurant owner puts it, "We’re very affectionate people. When we do kiss, we kiss family, we kiss good friends. The only difference is I don’t stick my hand up anybody’s blouse." As an Italian-American, I can also assure you that my elders never taught me that groping was just "affection," either. And while many Americans may find "I didn’t realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn" sympathetic, they'll probably have a lot of trouble seeing grabbing a woman's breasts in that softer light.

Dominion Voting Systems files $1.6 billion defamation lawsuits against right-wing news networks Newsmax and One America News (or OAN) and former Overstock CEO/Trump flunky Patrick Byrne, alleging that the news networks "manufactured, endorsed, repeated, and broadcast a series of verifiably false yet devastating lies about Dominion" and that public figures like Mr. Byrne (who seems like he's trying to out-Mike Lindell Mike Lindell, what makes people want to do that?) aided and abetted this effort. If successful, these lawsuits might actually break Newsmax and OAN, which boo-freaking-hoo. Free markets, pimps! Consequences for evil actions! Conservatives used to be about all that, right?

Finally, although potential 2022 Republican Senate candidate/Trump flunky Herschel Walker has made grim noises about "voter fraud," his own wife appears to have broken the law by voting in Georgia in 2020 despite living in Texas. The couple get a homestead tax exemption on their Texas home but not her Georgia home, and her absentee ballot arrived with a Texas postmark; none of this is a good look. I find her attempt to explain herself quite irritating, but in saner times, I might be inclined to call all of this an honest mistake on her part! People have a lot to manage in their lives, after all! Yes, even rich people! But these are not saner times -- after January 6, they have all forfeited the right to benefit of the doubt.

Action: concerning war, privacy, women's health, whistleblowers, and corporate spying.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the National Security Powers Act, the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act, the Women's Health Protection Act, the Pregnant Workers' Fairness Act, the Whistleblower Protection Improvements Act, and the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale 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.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2391, the National Security Powers Act. S. 2391 would repeal all the authorizations to use military force (or AUMFs) relating to war in the Middle East, give Congress more authority over arms sales to other countries, and reform the National Emergencies Act, presumably so the next dunderhead who wants to build a border wall can't abuse it like the last one did. And if anyone tells you this would hamstring the President's ability to act, tell them that's a feature, not a bug. The President is only supposed to lead armies into battle after Congress declares war, not whenever the President feels like it.

Restore the Fourth helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1628, the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act. S. 1628 would ban targeted advertising to children, require that internet corporations get consent before collecting data from children, allow parents and children to more easily delete personal data from private data brokers, and mandate a whole lot more transparency about this issue than we have now. We have the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, but that became law over 20 years ago, and a lot's happened since then -- it's a lot easier to get targeted ads now, for example. S. 1628 would help update COPPA for modern times. Our kids deserve that, after all.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. The bill would essentially legalize abortion all across the land, in anticipation of our Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, which action would allow the states to regulate abortion again, and would make it illegal for states to restrict access to abortion in the ways they've done it over the last decade. The most recent egregious example? The Texas law that lets literally anyone sue an abortion provider for performing an abortion! Never mind proving standing to sue, or even that harm was done to you! A court will strike that part of the Texas law down for those reasons fairly soon, but why make good Americans wait?

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1065/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would require bosses to make reasonable accommodations for workers who get pregnant -- that means more sit-down assignments wherever possible, more bathroom breaks, no firing of workers just for getting pregnant or refusing to hire workers who are just because they're pregnant. I shudder to think of the "objections" Republicans will throw up against this bill. I suspect they'll mostly be TEH TRIAL LAWYERZ!!!!! and TEH BOSSEZ CAN'TZ DOEZ TEH BOSSINGZ ANYMOREZ!!!!!, both of which will be revealed to be utter horsedoodle to anyone who reads the bill, or to anyone who's ever been fired because their boss wouldn't get them a chair.

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2988, the Whistleblower Protection Improvement Act. Folks who blow the whistle on our government's corruption deserve our admiration, because they risk their careers and their personal lives when they do so; people who think they just live off the fat of a huge reward have obviously never blown the whistle on a damn thing in their lives. H.R. 2988 would better protect whistleblowers from retaliation at their jobs -- even if their boss is our President! -- and would give them more access to jury trials and speed up the process of rewarding them (if their whistleblowing merits it), so they can get on with their lives with minimal placing of sharp objects to their wrists after three years of being completely unable to work, just as a for-example. We need their good works, so we need to protect them.

Finally, 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. H.R. 2378/S. 1265 would prevent third-party data broker corporations from selling your personal information to law enforcement personnel, because selling that personal data willy-nilly like that may be lucrative for people who really should go get a real job, but it contravenes our Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. If law enforcement wants to get you, they should get a warrant first, but buying up big chunks of data from brokers lets police work around that. And they shouldn't get to work around it! If you're tempted to get all thin-blue-line about this, just imagine police harassing you because some web search you did in 2009 raised their antennae.

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.

Around the table: starring our favorite slice of the electorate, the Batshit Insane 25%!

At least Biden Administration Press Secretary Jen Psaki doesn't suffer fools like Newsmax's John Gizzi gladly. Mr. Gizzi says a "private memo" found $1 trillion more spending in the Biden infrastructure plan than the Biden Administration reported, but one request for clarification from Ms. Psaki apparently provoked this slab of word salad: "there’s things there that somebody went through it or is claiming to have gone through it and added it up and came up with $1 trillion more than the president listed." If reporters can barely speak, how can they speak truth to power?

Reuters/Ipsos poll finds more than half of Republicans believe all that rubbish about the 2020 election being "stolen" or the January 6 rioters being liberal protestors "trying to make Trump look bad" instead of the right-wingers you could have found on social media. A little over half of Republicans is pretty close to a quarter of the electorate, which (like many other polling factoids about people believing absurd crap) maps pretty well onto my belief that a quarter of the electorate is batshit insane. I first started to think that after seeing George W. Bush's approvals bottom out at 25%. How innocent those times were.

Big restaurant corporations, including Denny's and McDonald's, publicly oppose a $15/hour minimum wage, but privately tell their investors it won't be "bad for business" at all. McDonald's, at least, has backed off supporting big corporate lobbies' attempts to kill the $15/hour minimum wage proposal, but still, your friends and neighbors might not have heard, so stick a pin in this information next time someone tells you the $15/hour minimum wage is "bad for business." Not everyone you meet is a troll, after all -- you might actually win some converts.

As we contemplate the possibility that your "smart" house might be sharing all kinds of data about your movements and habits with law enforcement, we should note, again, that our FCC passed pretty solid data privacy rules in 2016 -- but the Republican Congress under Donald Trump couldn't nullify them fast enough. We should also note that instead of putting your thermostat on your wi-fi so you can more easily read the outside temperature, maybe you can buy a thermometer and put it outside. You'll have to go outside to read it, but the exercise will do you good.

Apparently a Trump campaign contribution website made it so folks didn't realize they were making weekly donations to Mr. Trump instead of the one-time donations they clearly intended to make. But you'll be pleased to know that too many of his bilked supporters are already making excuses for the Big Man. They say that wasn't Trump, that was WinRed; how does the Smartest Man on Earth fall in with so many swindlers? It makes you think he's not really a great man or something. But for the Batshit Insane 25%, no excuse is too absurd, as long as it keeps the rage gland pumping.

Finally, of course I don't feel sorry for all those Trump Administration workers who can't get work because the job market is, ah, challenging for those folks who worked for the guy who tried to overturn the election -- I mean, if you do evil, you should expect to be ostracized by civilized people! I'll admit, however, that I do feel worse for the lower-profile folks (even former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who might want to go get another degree) than I do for all the far more famous Trumpholes who will make millions in unearned money spewing filth on Fox and Newsmax and OANN over the next few years. See? I do so have a heart.

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 the HEROES Act, our Post Office, labor rights in Mexico, and encryption for Twitter messages.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. Yes, we should tell our Congressfolk that we want unemployment benefits extended past the end of this week, as we did yesterday, but we should also tell our Senators that the HEROES Act already does that. Plus, the HEROES Act would also fund COVID-19 testing and tracing, would fund our Post Office, would help states and localities endure this pandemic a little better, and provides, would extend working family tax credits and repeal a big bazillionaire tax credit, and would also provide another round of stimulus checks to working families. One of the things the bill doesn't do, of course, is fulfill Mob Boss Mitch's wish that big corporations get "blanket immunity" from any lawsuit arising from their mishandling of pandemic-related guidelines. But they already have the money to fight lawsuits; what about our ability to fight corporate neglect? And what about our need for economic sustenance during this pandemic?

Meanwhile, the HEROES Act would extend funding for our Post Office, but (as we've discussed before) the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 caused our Post Office's funding troubles, by forcing our Post Office to fund its pensions 75 years in advance, an absurd mandate our government forces upon no other entity public or private, and one Congress obviously intended to cripple our Post Office. Thus we've been hearing of funding shortfalls for the last decade-plus, when our Post Office had been entirely self-funding since 1982. Thus Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, so that our Post Office can continue to provide the good services we deserve while funding itself. You'd think a conservative would approve of our Post Office funding itself without taxpayer money, but apparently today's "conservatives" only care about converting everything into unearned money for some crony or other. That sound you hear is Russell Kirk spinning in his grave.

In other news, the Mexican government recently detained Susana Prieto Terrazas, a labor lawyer and activist, for three weeks on trumped-up crap; the Big Stick of Bad PR helped get her released, but now her government is planning new trumped-up crap to charge her with, all for trying to organize labor unions against maquiladoras, or foreign-owned factories which generally export their goods to the owning corporation's country of origin. You may be thinking that her plight is tragic but outside the scope of your activism, but actually, it's not! Mexico just signed the USMCA trade deal with Canada and the United States, and one of the things they're now legally-bound to do is stop harassing labor activists like this. Hence Rethink Trade helps you tell your Congressfolk to pressure Mexico into holding up their end of the deal. After all, it is their job now; trade deals can't do better by us if no one will enforce them.

Finally, you may have heard about the hack that breached popular Twitter accounts -- but you may not have heard that the hackers might have been able to get at Twitter users' private direct messages, since Twitter hasn't embraced end-to-end encryption, as other messaging apps have done. And this isn't just about shielding that R-rated direct message to your beloved or that smack-talking thread about your boss from hackers; it's also about journalists and activists who use encryption in their messaging. And not because they're "probably criminals," as Mike Pompeo has said, but because they may be living in countries that'll kill them if they find out what they're saying. Imagine trying to evade rogue police abducting protestors without encrypted messaging! Which is most certainly not something that only happens in other countries! Fight for the Future helps you tell Twitter to help out all its users by implementing end-to-end encryption on direct messages.

Action: concerning good House bills, war with Iran, and internet privacy.

Happy Monday, good citizens! It's time to call your Senators and ask 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. 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; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). Our House of Representatives has assembled a good record of passing legislation that protects voting rights, health care, worker wages, consumer protection, and real internet freedom, and our Senate has done bupkus about all of that. And they won't do anything until they hear from us, in numbers, again and again and again.

Meanwhile, last month our Senate passed S.J.Res. 68, which would prevent our President from waging war on Iran without Congressional approval, and now the House must pass the bill, so we can send it to our President. He'll veto it, but let's make him veto some legislation, particularly legislation that would make him adhere to our Constitution. I said that the House might pass this bill with a quickness, but clearly I forgot that our Congressfolk hate taking up foreign policy-related legislation that might "hamstring" the President in foreign policy, but how many times must I tell these pimps!. Delegating war-making powers to Congress, not our President, is a feature of our Constitution, not a bug! Our Constitution only gives the President the authority to figure out how to win wars Congress has already declared, not the authority to go off all half-cocked. Hence Peace Action West helps you tell your House Reps to restrain our rogue President from unilaterally starting a war with Iran by passing S.J.Res. 68.

Finally, Clearview AI aims to scrape your photos off your Facebook page so it can create the world's biggest facial recognition database -- which should trouble you, since facial recognition a) generally oppresses activists more than it catches actual criminals and b) can't hardly tell black folks apart and it's almost like that's the idea. Besides, they're your photos! You put them on the internet, but that doesn't mean you give permission for big corporations to make your life hell! Besides, Facebook does have privacy settings, the existence of which signal your own intent as to how you want folks to use your photos, and also signal Facebook's duty in protecting them from folks you don't want to see them. Commonsensical, right? You'll be gratified to learn that Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn have all threatened legal action against Clearview for scraping photos from their sites -- but not Facebook, apparently. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to stop Clearview AI from harvesting your private photos for their nefarious ends.

Around the table: more little victories for good Americans, and more shaking my damn head at the bad ones.

11th Circuit Court of Appeals strikes down Florida law preventing felons from voting until they had paid their court-related fines. If you're tempted to say but they should complete their sentence before they get to vote, and the fine is part of their sentence, just know that I'm going to respond that they never should have lost their right to vote in the first place. Rights are rights; they're not privileges, and they don't only belong to people we like. (And yes, the "wealth" of ex-felons is, in fact, pertinent to the case and "exogenous" to their punishment, even when a fine is not precisely exogenous to their punishment.)

The New York Times looks over our President's recent pardons, and sees a pattern -- they all have "connections" to him. As in, "all 11 recipients had an inside connection or were promoted on Fox News," which almost does sound like they're repeating themselves a bit. Of course they're playing right into his hands by suggesting that "his own scalding encounters with investigations since taking office" (like they weren't deserved or something!) plays a role in his "mercy." Also, I wanted the First STEP Act passed, too, but that was a watered-down version of a watered-down version of what I really wanted, and I suspect a lot of folks that bill has left behind -- who are not lucky enough to get on Fox News or have connections within professional conservative circles -- feel the same.

From the "Wow, They're Actually Trying This?" file: surveillance corporation Clearview AI's CEO claims that his attempts to spy on people are protected by the First Amendment. Apparently, scraping someone's private data from the internet and then selling it to someone else is a speech act. But plenty of law already exists (see the fourth- and third-to-last paragraphs at the link above) to suggest that just because you "say" something, you don't automatically get our First Amendment's protections. You know, if common sense didn't already tell you that.

When I read that "(i)f you're having a hard time falling asleep, that sleep tracker on your wrist might be to blame," the first thing I think is I can totally relate! Having all that data was cool at first -- I never assumed there was an absolute one-to-one relationship between the data and the truth, but the worst thing you can do is try to measure up to previous days, wonder what on Earth you did wrong since you didn't have any caffeine after noon, and let that all build up. I accidentally wore my fitness tracker into the shower once, took it off before it suffered any damage, and then said (suddenly, or so it seemed to me at the time) why put it back on? I haven't looked back -- and I have never again wondered whether the amount of deep sleep I got last night fit snugly into the 12-18% range.

Finally, you all knew William Barr wasn't really going to quit over our President's twitterfarting making it "impossible" to do his job, right? Remember what I said at the beginning of this Administration: when Republicans fight each other in public, they're playing us, trying to lull us into a false sense of security about their unity. It's drama, and it's not even good drama. I suppose we can't discount the possibility that Mr. Barr was actually saying that his job is to protect the President from the consequences of his own actions.

Action: concerning surprise medical bills, data privacy, and paid family leave.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation outlawing surprise medical bills. Plenty of folks get them, and they don't get them because "they don't take care of themselves" or because "they don't read the fine print" or because they've screwed up in some other way; they get them because our privatized health insurance system loves exploiting holes in provider networks to deprive you of money. Do folks "deserve" to get billed in the thousands of dollars because their surgeon was in-network but his anesthesiologist wasn't? Or because their hospitals subcontract to out-of-network air ambulance providers? Or because they get life-or-death service (please attend closely the words "life-or-death") at an out-of-network hospital? No, they do not. That is not the "free" market at work, nor is it the work of "makers" as opposed to "takers" and "looters" -- I'm fairly confident, in fact, that were Zombie Ayn Rand to visit us today, she would tell us that the corporations that issue these surprise medical bills are the "looters." If not the "takers"!

Meanwhile, you won't be surprised to learn that our government doesn't regulate location tracking very well, to the point where Google still tracks the location of people who've turned off all the location tracking functions on their phones and computers, so Daily Kos helps you tell our Congressfolk to protect our digital private data a whole lot better than they've been doing. Remember: Congressfolk have done little about this issue not because it's a "hard issue to understand." "Protect my privacy" ain't that damn deep -- it only becomes "deep" when Congressfolk take campaign money from corporations that want to sell your private data, and it only becomes "deep" when law enforcement wants to get location data without going through the trouble of getting a warrant for the information. Certainly don't believe that corporations know this issue better than politicians, because that's a little like saying we should let the fox, not the farmer, run the henhouse.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass meaningful paid family leave legislation, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. By "meaningful legislation" we most certainly do not mean "legislation that would steal from your future Social Security benefits to pay for family medical leave now," like right-wingers would have us do. No, meaningful paid family leave legislation would more closely resemble H.R. 1185/S. 463, the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (or FAMILY) Act. The FAMILY Act would create a national paid family leave program, and when your Tea Party uncle asks HOW WILLZ YOU PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ HA HA HA SNORT STUPIDZ LIBRULZ!!!!!, you can respond that the FAMILY Act would pay for itself with an 0.4% payroll tax -- that's four-tenths of one percent, not "four percent" or "40 percent," "liberal" media! -- and the employer would pay half, meaning someone making $50,000 annually would pay $8.33 monthly. That's not even five cups of coffee at Wawa monthly, and for peace of mind? What an easy choice.

Action: concerning online privacy, flavored e-cigarettes, and shareholder power.

You recall that Congress went to great lengths in 2017 to repeal FCC regulations that would have protected your online privacy? Well, S. 2968, the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act, would help make up for that notorious act, and if you read it online, you'll be able to imagine right-wing heads exploding at some of the bill's subtitles. A "Right to Data Security"? A "Right to Delete"? A "Right to Controls"? Gosh, they'll say, don't rights come with responsibilities? It would be strange for them to say that, since the big telecom corporations actually act irresponsibly, by selling your data willy-nilly, failing to be transparent about it, losing your data to hackers, and not letting you just say no to their sale of your data. But the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act would help fix a lot of that -- yes, I'd make the big telecoms ask you to "opt in" to data sales, rather than force consumers to "opt out" of them, but this bill will do a lot of good. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect your private data by passing the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act.

Meanwhile, you recall that our President announced he was going to ban flavored e-cigarettes, so he could help prevent children from becoming addicted to them? Well, the tobacco lobby got to him, and he backed down. So courageous! So resolute! So masculine! Of course, his votaries probably figure he already did the deed just because he said so, but those of us in what Karl Rove once derisively called the "reality-based community" remember what really happened, and we're all about helping people do the right thing, so Penn PIRG helps you tell our President to restart his effort to ban flavored e-cigarettes. But wait! you might be saying, you also advocate for the legalization of marijuana? Isn't that hypocritical? Well, no -- the key word in all of the above is children. The law doesn't allow children to drink beer or smoke regular cigarettes, so why would we allow them to smoke highly-addictive e-cigarettes? And why would we allow the existence of cigarettes specially flavored to draw children into that habit? Civilized people wouldn't.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to reject its own proposal to take power away from shareholders, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. The SEC's proposal, as you may recall, would require you to own ten times more in shares before you could even introduce a shareholder resolution, and if you're the kind of person who flinches at the idea of buying into a democratic process, no doubt you also flinch at the SEC's proposal. But in an era where our government has largely abdicated its responsibility to govern on the people's behalf, shareholder resolutions are too often that one tool that might induce a corporation to change its behavior, whether that means getting a corporation to adopt more climate-friendly practices or stop discriminatory hiring practices. So naturally the Crony-in-Chief's SEC wants to put a stop to all of that! This Administration hates progress, of any kind, with a passion bordering on insanity. But they don't get all the say in America. We do.

Action: concerning government spying, big telecom fees, and children's online privacy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to reauthorize the notorious Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, which allows our government to hoover up all sorts of data without establishing probable cause or getting a warrant, then Free Press still helps you do that. And Section 215 doesn't just allow the data-vacuuming program even the NSA says it doesn't need anymore -- it also allows our government to collect location data and execute "backdoor searches" on Americans without a warrant. That means, not incidentally, that our government can now spy on political protestors a lot more easily. Why, it's almost like that was the whole idea of the USA PATRIOT Act to begin with! It was a Bush Mobb production, after all, and Mr. Bush famously once said "there should be limits to freedom" after being criticized particularly trenchantly. And now the most thin-skinned human being ever is President.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to force big telecom corporations to be more transparent in their pricing by passing H.R. 1220/S. 510, the TRUE Fees Act, then Consumer Reports still helps you do that. The bill would do a lot of good things: it would force big telecom corporations to include most of their fees in their advertised price and ensure that good Americans can see all the fees and taxes in their bill. The bill would also make big telecom corporations give us at least 21 days' notice before jacking up any fees, and if we don't like it, we can end our contract with those big telecoms without any penalties. The bill would even void forced arbitration clauses in customer contracts! The bad news? Big telecom corporations hate the TRUE Fees Act, and they still hold a lot of sway with politicians. The good news? Most Americans hate big telecom corporations! And it's well past time we got more say about things in America.

Finally, our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) is still mulling whether to weaken the landmark child privacy law, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA. COPPA prevents corporations from targeting ads at children under 13 without parental consent, and big telecom corporations tell you that "technology" has "advanced" to the point where such controls are "quaint." But what they really want, of course, is to be able to hoover up children's data so they can target kids online as quickly as possible, without parental rights as an "obstacle." But parental rights are only an obstacle to big corporations siphoning more money from them, and no big corporation has a "right" to make more money more quickly -- and even if they did, that "right" wouldn't supersede a parent's right to protect their children from mass marketing. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our FTC to reject any plans it might have to weaken children's online privacy laws.

Action: concerning government spying, marketing to children, and clean water.

You may recall that our FISA court revealed that our FBI routinely conducts unauthorized searches of NSA-collected data; we have already told our Congressfolk this week that the NSA shouldn't be collecting that data without a warrant, but we also need to tell Congress to close the "backdoor loophole" that allows our FBI to access the information, as Defending Rights and Dissent helps us do. You know, a lot of good folks labor under the impression that the "grave threats we face" (I just can't help quoting then-Senator Obama explaining why he'd done a 180 on government spying!) are somehow unique to our time, and I could be glib and just say "read a history book," but I'd rather just say that the values that sustain us -- you know, things like courage, doing unto others, speaking truth to power -- are not unique to our time, but have been part of our heritage for uncounted years, and when we abandon those values in the name of "security" or "fighting grave threats," then we die the thousand deaths of the coward. So let's stay on our Congressfolk to help us preserve these values.

Meanwhile, the Children's Online Privacy Act (or COPPA) helps parents protect their children's privacy by restricting the data corporations can harvest from children and limiting how they use it. But naturally the big corporations look at kids as money pots, whose data they can use to empty their parents' pockets faster, and so they're pressuring our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to loosen up COPPA -- and that pressure may be working, as evidenced by our FTC's decision to review the effectiveness of COPPA several years before the law requires it, and one commissioner's statement that the review would "tak(e) care of children and data both," when the law only requires them to help take care of children, data being, as you know, a thing that does not require care. Always they pretend that things are just as (or more) important as people! But they're not, and we don't have to take this lying down: we can let the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood help us tell our FTC to do their legally-mandated job to protect children's privacy from the corporations that would exploit them.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to reject its own proposed rollback of coal ash storage rules, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. "What would be worse than over 100 toxic coal ash storage sites lying in high-risk flood zones?" their latest email missive asks. "Answer: loosening the laws that protect our health and communities from contamination by those sites." Yeah, you knew where that was going, too, didn't you? Coal ash is the byproduct of coal plants -- one might do better calling it coal poop -- and contains carcinogens and other dangerous chemicals. And this coal poop can very easily leech into good Americans' drinking water, as the folks in Roane County, TN and Eden, NC can attest. But then again, clean drinking water is only the bedrock of good health care in America; it's not money or power, which are literally the only things this Administration cares about. Power corrupts, and money only makes you miserable in time, but clean water will always sustain us -- if we will but work to keep it.

Action: concerning banksters, pollution, and privacy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2155, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. You may well be saying to yourself, self, I'd very much like to stop Wall Street looting, too, but would this bill really do that? The answer is yes, S. 2155 would basically take all the joy banksters feel when they suck all the assets out of a corporation -- it would impose a 100 percent tax on all the fees private equity firms impose on a corporation for two years after they buy it, it would make those firms actually take on more of the debt they've assumed rather than simply transfer it back to the corporation they've bought, it would give workers more of a chance to recover what they've lost after their employer goes bankrupt, and it would make private equity firms' doings more transparent. These firms don't just kill big chain stores like Sears and Payless -- they kill local newspapers all over America, too (the Denver Post being the most famous example). And S. 2155 will help us stop them.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 707, 708, and 709 would give the state Attorney General "concurrent jurisdiction" over certain clean air and clean water laws in the state, and thus give our AG the power to initiate investigations into these matters. Given that our Attorney General is supposed to, you know, enforce the law on behalf of the people of the Commonwealth, you would think our AG would be able to do that on his own, but no -- current law mandates that our AG must first get a referral from the state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) or a local district attorney. I have to admit I'm at a loss to explain why the state of Pennsylvania does it that way -- it sounds a lot like a decades-old turf battle won in favor of someone who may not even be alive now, frankly. But we don't need to put up with inter-bureaucratic turf battles, because our Attorney General answers to us. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state Senators to help our state government protect us from pollution by passing SB 707, 708, and 709.

Finally, in the wake of yet another data breach exposing the private data of over 100 million good Americans, Fight for Privacy helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass strong legislation that protects the privacy of good Americans' online information. There's no use saying if you still want privacy, don't put your information online, because putting your information online is basically necessary now, unless you pay for everything with cash and never take out a loan. I will say I continue to be disappointed with our Congressfolk's apparent inability to process the fact that we should be able to opt in to corporate attempts to sell our data to third parties. It wouldn't "break the internet" (as Sen. Toomey infamously put it in 2011), and it wouldn't even be very hard to do -- and it would protect a lot more people from a big bank that somehow decides to put all of its sensitive information on a freaking Amazon cloud server. When will folks realize that "cloud computing" doesn't actually make our lives better? It only makes it easier for big corporations to make big money.

Action: concerning campaign finance reform, data security, and working families.

S.J.Res. 51 would amend our Constitution so that federal and state governments could regulate campaign finance, as they did before our Supreme Court's notorious Citizens United v. FEC decision, which cited "corporate personhood" in striking down many of our campaign finance laws. I bring up those halcyon days of campaign finance regulation because far too many right-wingers get far too much say in America, and they really get their shovels dirty trying to criticize the amendment. ZOMG TEH INCUMBENTZ WILLZ PREVENTS TEH OPPONENTZ FROM RAIZING TEH MONEYZ!!!! is just one of the many things that never happened back in the day when we regulated campaign finance a lot more stringently than we can now thanks to our Supreme Court. ZOMG TEH PREACHURZ WILL BE TEH SILENCEDZ!!!! is, of course, another. People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to do the people's will on campaign finance reform and pass S.J.Res. 51.

Meanwhile, hot on the heels of yet another reported data breach exposing the personal data of over 100 mullion customers, this one at Capital One, Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass vigorous reforms that would help good Americans protect their personal data from hackers and indifferent corporations. These reforms would include stricter enforcement of our laws and harsher penalties for breaking them, as well as a "credit freeze by default" for all Americans, which would automatically freeze your credit at all three credit reporting bureaus until you ask for a freeze to be lifted. A lot of good folks don't go through the trouble of a credit freeze because it can be tedious and confusing, and instead of complaining that folks are lazy and they should just go ahead and do it because it's important, we should ask why it can't be easier. This is the future, after all.

Finally, you may recall that former Administration Labor Secretary Alex Acosta resigned recently, due to the cush plea deal he appears to have negotiated (as a federal prosecutor in Florida in 2008) over the Jeffrey Epstein sex crime case ("the best people!"), but as you surely know by now, they always find someone worse, and so it goes with our President's new nominee to be Secretary of Labor, Eugene Scalia. Yes, he's the son of the late Supreme Court Justice, but more pertinent to his potential new position is his long career helping corporations screw over their workers and advocate against government regulations -- indeed, given that all of this is right up our President's alley, you have to wonder why he didn't pick Mr. Scalia first, instead of Mr. Acosta, who may not have been anti-worker enough for our President's liking, and who certainly wasn't dramatic enough. So CREDO helps you tell your Senators to reject the Scalia nomination.

Action: concerning corporate spying, forest regulations, and immigration.

Have you heard of Sensorvault? Sensorvault is Google's database of location data culled from folks who use Android phones and folks who use iPhones with Google apps installed -- meaning Google has known where you've been at pretty much any time over the last decade. And Sensorvault holds that information indefinitely, meaning that law enforcement can access it at will -- and our legal system has been issuing warrants allowing law enforcement search geographic areas where crimes occurred rather than suspects, which instantly turns those investigations into fishing expeditions. And if you're at a protest just as a crime is occuring a mile away, you could get swept up in that fishing expedition, which would infringe upon your right to free speech. And, ah, you can easily imagine our government concocting "crimes" just to harass a lot of protestors, right? Yes, you can. We need much better laws governing the use of this location data, but for now, CREDO helps you tell Google to shut down Sensorvault, since the Big Stick of Bad PR still works.

Meanwhile, our U.S. Forest Service has proposed rule changes that would allow it to fast-track certain logging projects, and though its supporters cite "analysis paralysis" and "frivolous lawsuits" as obstacles to projects that otherwise wouldn't actually hurt our national forests, I don't think a lawsuit is "frivolous" merely because it might prevent some corporation from making a few million extra dollars, and I also don't think that scientific analysis is really "paralysis." I'm sure some folks can name actual projects that wouldn't cause any damage so-why-make-them-wait, but I would hope we would make such decisions based on the science and not on anecdotes, and in any case we really should be asking the question "what's the rush, then?" There's also the matter of public commenting, which the new rules would curtail and which I consider sacred in a democracy. Hence the Wilderness Society helps you tell our Forest Service to reject its proposal to shield certain projects from public oversight and scientific data.

Finally, in the wake of this Administration's constant hysteria over BS-13 and "caravans" and "people coming to take your jobs" (like the people our President imports to do seasonal workers at his wineries?), Win Without War helps you tell our Department of Defense Inspector General to investigate our Administration's use of soldiers at our Southern border. Just as we shouldn't fear gun violence research, we shouldn't fear an Inspector General investigation into why we need our military when we already have a Border Patrol. And if our Inspector General concludes that we have a military down there in order to spy on activists and journalists and to terrorize people running from another country's catastrophe, well, I hope our Administration is big enough to handle the backlash! (And yes, I made that crack about our President using foreign workers at his own corporations for a reason. If we stop enabling bosses who import workers in order to drive everyone's wages down, we'll be able to help out refugees running from real horrors much better than we do now.)

Action: concerning data security, Arctic drilling, gun research, and cryptocurrency.

Lately our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) has fined Equifax $650-$700 million for failing to secure the private data of almost 150 million Americans, but that's not as big as it sounds -- if you don't believe me, divide the fine by the number of people it hurt! -- and good Americans need more protection than that. Hence H.R. 2545/S. 1336, the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act, would establish an Office of Cybersecurity within our FTC which would regulate data security at credit reporting corporations, would set strict notification requirements for data breaches, and would make penalties for losing consumer personal data a lot steeper. If you're one of those who reflexively respond oh great another bureaucracy, I would remind you that "just letting the corporations who know their stuff do it" clearly ain't working, and that's the world we're already in. Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect consumer data by passing the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the CEOs of BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips to back out of their apparent plans to drill in the Arctic. Drilling in the Arctic has been a fever dream of big oil since time immemorial, but we all know the reasons we shouldn't drill there -- for one, it's much harder to clean up an oil spill which will happen in the Arctic than it is even in the temperate Gulf of Mexico (and you recall how well BP cleaned up that spill, which is to say "not particularly well"). Here are some more reasons: it'll threaten the famous Alaskan sockeye salmon industry, wreck the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, endanger the Native populations of the region, and it won't even give us very much oil. If I, an hourly-paid schmuck, can recite these reasons off the top of my head, then I bet a lot of other people can, too -- and surely these not-very-popular big oil CEOs are acutely aware that There Is-So Such a Thing as Bad PR. If we need to remind them of that with (wait for it!) the Big Stick of Bad PR, hey, we're here to help.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Senate to fund gun violence research by our Centers for Disease Control and our National Institute of Health, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Congress last year passed a spending bill that explicitly authorized gun violence research by these agencies, but naturally they didn't actually give them a dime to do that research; what are they afraid of? I'm no great fan of keeping people from having handguns and rifles -- though I think it should be just as hard to get semi-automatic weapons as automatic weapons -- but there's no harm in researching gun violence scientifically, and our CDC and NIH have sterling reputations, though I imagine our President's trying to change that as we speak. Even the author of the Dickey Amendment that restricted gun violence research in the first place said before he died that he regretted his amendment's effects. I wish that remorse was more contagious in Congress these days, but hey, that's why we're here.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to block Facebook's efforts to create its own damn currency. Yeah, you read that right, and I'm sure Libra will be even more annoying than bitcoin has been over the years. They're selling cryptocurrency as, get this, a way of reaching the "unbanked" citizens of the world. Setting aside that we should never privatize currency, and setting aside, also, that Libra won't help the "unbanked" if they're also "uncomputered," there's a better way to help the "unbanked": stop treating the world as your personal fuckjar. Seriously, when we keep the world's biggest actors from exploiting good folks from other lands, those good folks will have more power to do the things they want to do with their lives, and they won't need Libra or whatever to do it. And an important step toward restraining the world's biggest actors would be to stop "freeing" obnoxious tech CEOs from "burdensome" regulations because they're such great "innovators." Mostly what they innovate is new ways to separate you from your money.

Action: concerning monopolies, ubiquitous advertising, and the minimum wage.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to break up big tech corporations. The House Judiciary Committee is holding hearings on this matter as we speak, so now's as good a time as any to communicate your will. I'm sure some folks out there think this world would be a whole lot bleaker without same-day shipping from Amazon and instant answers to almost any question from Google and the ability to connect with almost anyone on Facebook, but fact is Amazon's crushing of small businesses, Google's on-again, off-again collaboration with the totalitarian government of China, and Facebook's apparent inability to protect your private data (to name just three problems with big tech corporations!) all make this a bleaker world. Besides which, do you really believe the boons big tech have given us simply wouldn't exist without big tech monopolies? Small businesses invented virtually everything of consequence on the internet, then big corporations gobbled them up and acted like we could never live without them. But we can certainly dream better than that.

Meanwhile, a Russian corporation wants to put giant billboards in space. No, really: it wants to launch a bunch of satellites that'll display logos of prominent products three miles above the Earth. Thing is, you can't just "change the channel" if you don't like it (an argument I've long found wanting anyway) -- you look up, and it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it. What, are proponents of this plan really going to say just don't look up at the sky? But then, people say all kinds of stupid crap these days without any apparent self-editing. Let's head off such embarrassment by allowing Penn Environment to help us tell our Congressfolk to outlaw "space billboards." No use retorting that if some other country is going to do it, then why shouldn't we? That's not what being a civilized person is all about -- sometimes, it's about being civilized even when you know you're going to lose, because future generations might learn from you. So let's have them learn the right things, OK?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to give working families a raise by passing H.R. 582/S. 150, the Raise the Wage Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. The Raise the Wage Act would raise the minimum wage in America from $7.25/hour to $15/hour over the next five years, and it would eventually bring minimum wages for tipped and disabled workers into parity with the minimum wage for the rest of us. You won't be surprised to learn that Republicans oppose the bill, given that so few of them know (or remember) what it's like to work three jobs because you have to, but you might be surprised to learn -- oh, forget it, you won't actually be surprised to learn that some corporatist Democrats also oppose the minimum wage. But states and municipalities have been hiking the minimum wage -- without ill effects -- at the behest of their voters for many years now, so it seems, as it too often does, like a lot of politicians are behind the times. But that's why we're here: to bring our representatives up to speed.

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

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

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

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