Thieves in the Temple.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning noncompete agreements and health care.

Long story short: tell our FTC to ban noncompete agreements, tell President Biden not to let 15 million Americans lose their Medicaid coverage, and tell our government to force nursing homes to disclose their ownership. 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 ban noncompete agreements in employment contracts. Noncompete agreements keep workers from getting jobs elsewhere – under the notion that if you get a job with a competitor, you’ll reveal all your former employer’s trade secrets! Of course there are already laws to deal with people who reveal trade secrets, and besides, most workers covered by noncompetes now are truly working class – they’re baristas, janitors, fast food workers, home care workers, and the like; one wonders exactly what their big corporate employers think they'll “reveal.” Of course it’s all venal, and we should fight venality whenever it rears its ugly head.

Roots Action helps you tell President Biden not to let folks who’ve been getting Medicaid due to the COVID emergency lose their health insurance. As Roots Action reminds us, this is yet another problem we wouldn’t have if Medicare covered everyone, like it should! But in the meantime, let’s not let 15 million good Americans lose their Medicaid because the COVID emergency is over (or, perhaps more precisely, “over”). Personal to those who say we can’t help everyone: ah, if we can help billionaires keep more of their unearned wealth, we can help our friends and neighbors get the health care they need – not least because all of us pay for it later if they don’t.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) to force nursing homes to disclose their owner’s identity, not least because we have a lot of bankster-owned nursing homes whose residents die of COVID at a higher rate while their executives make millions of dollars. For speculators like hedge funds, everything exists to be bled to death, but these are our parents and grandparents and friends and neighbors suffering due to the bankster mania to cut all costs to zero, so we should at least know which “private equity” fools we’re dealing with. And if they feel “bullied,” they should take their billion-dollar ball and go home.

Action: concerning health care and worker rights.

Long story short: tell big health insurers to keep covering cancer screenings, tell our Department of Health and Human Services to reduce the price of Xtandi, tell our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to force nursing homes to disclose their ownership, and tell Starbucks to negotiate with its unionized workforce. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell big health insurance corporations to keep covering cancer screenings and other forms of preventive health care at no cost. If you want to reduce costs in the long term, you cover preventive care now, but of course big corporations don’t care about anything but the short term, and now that the most anti-Obama judge in the land has struck down the Affordable Care Act’s preventive care plank, big health insurance corporations may be tempted to stop covering it, particularly if they’ve got another monthly stock price target to meet. Thus we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR once again.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to, ah, reconsider its decision to let Astellas Pharmaceuticals charge $189,000 per dose for its prostate cancer drug, Xtandi. Are you the one who says ah, don’t worry, insurance will cover it? I sure hope not, because even though health insurers will generally cover most of the cost, “most,” here, leaves folks paying about $10,000 per dose, for a life-saving drug. You and I don’t have that kind of money lying around! And guess what else? Taxpayer money helped develop this drug! So we should get more say in this matter.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) to require that nursing home corporations disclose their owners, particularly if those owners are the hedge fund corporations that even Donald Trump once said “get away with murder.” “Get(ting) away with murder” may be a bit too literal in this case, since the science tells us that private equity-owned nursing home residents get worse care than residents at other homes. You’ll ask for stricter reporting requirements as well; CMS seems sympathetic to all of this, but you know how it is – they’ll fold under big corporate pressure unless we deal out some pressure of our own.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell Starbucks’s incoming CEO to stop union-busting and start negotiating with the workers who’ve unionized, as our laws require them to do. Even though workers at over 300 Starbucks locations have unionized over the last year-plus, Starbucks still won’t negotiate with them, still fires organizers, and still drags workers off to anti-union propaganda meetings, and though our government might not punish any of that, all of it is immoral, and all of it makes Starbucks less popular, which means all of it will cost them money over the long term. Shame our Boldest and Brightest Entrepreneurs don’t see the long term as well as the rest of us. So we have to make them.

Around the table: down with right-wing rage!

You need only remember one thing about all of the Murdoch empire’s recent assertions that trans people are causing all the mass shootings now: to paraphrase Neil Gabler, three incidents of chicken pox don’t make an epidemic. Now, the vast super-majority of angry white men mass murdering people? That’s an epidemic! While it’s sad to see right-wingers still doing the just-let-me-tell-you-three-stories shtick all these years later, it’s even sadder that trans hatred will be the gateway drug to right-wing masturbatory rage for some of your friends and neighbors once they suffer a few reversals in life.

Now speaking of actual drugs, our FDA approved naloxone, the drug that can reverse opioid overdoses, for sale over the counter this past week, giving the lie to right-wingers who constantly tell us that our government can’t ever do anything right. And while drug abusers may not have the presence of mind to use such a drug, their loved ones more likely will. No this will not become some “get out of death card” that will “cause more people to become drug addicts.” That’s not how drug addiction works, except in the rage-addled minds of right-wingers.

When I heard that outgoing Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, whom nobody likes, opined before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that Starbucks has never broken our labor laws! – at which point Sen. Sanders reminded him that he was under oath – I wondered if maybe our labor laws were so bad that there was actually a chance he might be right! Alas, even though our labor laws are pretty bad, he was still not right. I guess his next defense will be that he really doesn’t believe Starbucks ever actually broke the law, which is exactly the kind of post-modern sleaze right-wingers only ever tolerate from CEOs. Our best and brightest entrepreneurs, ladies and gentlemen!

Ho hum, a right-wing judge who’s struck down Obamacare before has struck down the law’s mandate that health insurance corporations cover preventative care for free, because what’s a judge for, except to cut down laws that actually help good Americans? Possibly this ruling will go down in flames just like his last one did – though our Supreme Court has gotten a lot worse since then, I’m pretty confident they’ll at least narrow its scope – but it doesn’t matter that an employer’s “conscience” tells them they’d be promoting homosexuality or promiscuity if they covered PrEP, because HIV can infect anyone. Gosh, even Nancy Reagan knew that.

Former Trump Organization employees told New York Times columnist Maggie Haberman that they “were really happy” over the Big Man’s indictment, which is easily the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD! Seriously, if you’ve ever worked for a bad boss – and I’d say the chances are close to 100% that you have! – you know this to be true. That’s before we even consider all the contractors Mr. Trump has stiffed over the years.

Finally, a jury finds Minnesota Republican operative Anton Lazzaro guilty of five counts of sex trafficking minors, plus one count of conspiracy. You can’t help but think it’s always it’s the right-wingers who accuse liberals of sex trafficking kids – but it’s always the right-wingers we find actually sex trafficking kids. There’s a lesson in there, somewhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: featuring foolish right-wingers and wise citizens.

Did a Florida school board really remove a movie about the first six-year-old girl to integrate into a previously all-white school because of one complaint from one parent who has admitted that she hasn’t seen the whole film? Yes, they did. Right-wingers have spent the last couple of decades claiming that liberals are weak, but only right-wingers are so frail they can’t bear to hear that racism exists. Get these people out of your life while you still can. If they can’t handle the most obvious truths about our nation’s history, why would they be there for you when you need them?

From the “Good News About Abortion From Red States” file: a Teton County, Wyoming judge has blocked that state’s abortion ban, ruling that a state constitutional amendment cooked up by right-wingers in 2012 to harness hysteria over the Affordable Care Act actually prevents the state from banning abortion. That amendment declares that Wyoming citizens have “the right to make their own health care decisions,” and though Wyoming legislators claim that abortion isn’t health care, you can guess how persuasive that is. You think right-wingers will start putting the brakes on their drama now that it’s bit them in the ass? I kid, of course – they have nothing to offer the electorate except drama.

When I hear that Republicans ought to get behind Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin because he’d be “a non-hostile alternative to Trump and a compelling centrist challenge to Biden,” I leap to say he’s not a centrist! Do centrists ban books, try to ban abortions, kill mask mandates, repeal protections for transgender kids, or put Andrew Wheeler in charge of regulating air and water? No, they do not. But this article is somehow even worse than its tagline – it acts like Mr. Youngkin should be proud of his ability to talk out of both sides of his mouth, rather than ashamed of it. And this is why people hate our "liberal" media – all they care about is the horserace.

In the wake of yet another school shooting, this one in Nashville, Tennessee, Rep. Tim Burchett (E-TN) says Congress is “not going to fix” the problem and adds that “I don’t see any real role that we could do other than mess things up.” Also, “as a Christian,” he thinks America needs a religious “revival,” one that electing ever more “religious” people to Congress somehow hasn’t achieved! If you took this flatugasm as an honestly-offered assessment, which I wouldn’t advise, you would still have to ask why anyone would want to be part of a body of legislators they profess to hate so much.

Finally, because the news can’t all be bad: Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has announced he’ll “pause” on his plan to kneecap Israel’s judiciary. The Netanyahu plan would reduce judicial review of the nation’s laws and give Parliament added power to overturn Supreme Court decisions, while also giving Mr. Netanyahu final say over judicial appointments, which I’m sure has absolutely nothing to do with his own pending corruption trial. This pause happened only after tens of thousands of good Israelis took to the streets in protest, the nation’s main union called a general strike, and soldiers threatened to avoid reporting for duty. They’ll all still need to work to make that pause permanent, but never let anyone tell you that speaking out doesn’t work.

Around the table: down with Drama Kings!

Good news on abortion rights from another red state, as the Oklahoma Supreme Court rules that the state constitution guarantees a right to an abortion “at any point in the pregnancy” when a doctor finds “with a reasonable degree of certainty” that denying the abortion would “endanger the woman’s life.” It’s a narrow right, to be sure, but it expands the only right offered by state law, which only allows abortion when a woman is in “actual and present danger” of dying. Personal to those who think the doctor’s determination is a loophole women will drive a Mack truck through: ain’t you the folks who say government should never get between doctor and patient? Or did you just mean you, and not “those people”?

University of British Columbia researchers find a way to get rid of the notorious PFAS “forever chemicals” from our water. The UBC process not only promises to get rid of 99% of all PFAS chemicals but obliterate them as well, via “special electrochemical and photochemical techniques”; destroying the chemicals would rid us of the problem of “more highly toxic solid waste that will be another major environmental challenge.” So maybe the big corporations will cajole our EPA into loosening standards well before the technology becomes widely-available? Hey, if I thought of it, I’m sure they did. In the meantime, I wish the UBC researchers the best of luck in solving an extraordinarily difficult problem.

From the “It Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Guy!” file: big advertisers still haven’t returned to Twitter, almost six months after Elon Musk took over, at least in part because they have little confidence Mr. Musk can’t/won’t keep Twitter from becoming, to borrow Mr. Musk’s own phrase, a “free-for-all hellscape” where racists and other bigots run rampant. I think Twitter’s reputation as a not-free-for-all hellscape before Mr. Musk bought it is rather overstated, but let’s not set the bar too low here. And I’m not of the mind that we should just let big corporations eat each other – the law may not recognize Twitter (and other social media sites) as publishers per se, but that’s what they are, and that would make content moderation literally job one at Twitter, regardless of Mr. Musk’s distaste for that task.

Ho hum, now Gov. DeSantis (E-FL) wants to expand Florida’s notorious “Don’t Say Gay” law to all the higher grades as well as the lower ones. Remember when your right-wing friends said “it’s not for all kids, it’s just for the really young ones who hardly understand sexuality anyway”? Now we know that they were either stupid or lying, neither of which is a good look, and anyway we ought to just go with “lying,” since the facts don’t justify giving right-wingers the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, Governor, come get your poll tax, if you have the guts.

Speaking of the Drama Kings, both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have now said that Mr. DeSantis would not be Mr. Trump’s running mate if Mr. Trump secures the Republican Presidential nomination in 2024, which should surprise no one, since both men are residents of Florida and Article II, Section 1 of our Constitution prohibits the President and Vice President from living in the same state. (The 12th Amendment, which largely rewrites the relevant part of Section 1, maintains this prohibition.) So, how about we never speak of this possibility again? No, not even to goad right-wingers into dreaming of the impossible; they do that enough anyway.

Finally, from the “Dystopia is Here Now!” file: clothing corporation Levi Strauss & Co. will use artificial intelligence-generated avatars in order to “increase diversity” among its models! And here you thought diversity was about helping real people get more opportunities to succeed in life, but not to the corporations that would never pay any worker any money if they could get away with it! I have to infer all of that, because Levis says it can’t fulfill its diversity obligations using just real people without explaining why. I mean, it's not like corporations can't find Black actors or models, as you know if you watch almost any TV.

Around the table: the time to call George W. Bush a liar was *always* now.

Michigan looks ready to repeal its notorious “right-to-work” law, a.k.a. the “right to work for less” law, because apparently there are no Kyrsten Sinemas in Michigan’s slim Democratic majorities. Right-to-work laws, as you know, starve unions of funding by enabling union workers to get services without paying dues, and Sonali Kohatkar has a good way of thinking about that: “(i)magine calling AAA and demanding its roadside benefits without paying the auto club’s modest yearly fee.” That’s perfect, right down to the word “modest” – my dues cost me around 35 cents an hour.

Fox News producer sues her employer for coercing her to “take the fall” when testifying in the Dominion defamation suit. She’s also suing over sexist and anti-Semitic commentary at the workplace, which, gosh, that is the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD! You suppose Maria Bartiromo, as notorious a right-wing shill as has worked in the “liberal” media these last few decades, will change her ways now that she’s discovered her employer thought she was utterly disposable? I kid, of course – I mean, she’s no Gretchen Carlson.

I’ll admit I was not hopeful about this Los Angeles Times opinion piece on “how to stop the polarization” in American politics, but the advice dispensed therein isn’t bad – helping right-wingers “communicate ‘what (they) are observing, feeling, and needing” sounds like a full-time job, but I agree that name-calling famous people is a hell of a lot better than name-calling your friends and neighbors, and I think it gives them the space to change their minds. I even think they appreciate being given that space, even if they don’t articulate it that way. I guess I’m still an optimist, then.

Some, ah, distinguished individual called in a bomb threat to a Tuesday hearing on New York Attorney General Letitia James’s $250 million lawsuit against Donald Trump for allegedly inflating real estate asset values. Because take-your-country-back rallies take more work, apparently! This kind of soft terrorism actually makes me think more kindly of hard terrorism – folks who make death threats and bomb threats without intending to back up their words actually rank below mass shooters in my book, meaning they’re pretty much at the bottom of that book.

Jesus Mary and Joseph did Gov. DeSantis (E-FL) actually say he’s different from Donald Trump because his style of leadership includes “no daily drama”? Yes, he really did, and that’s hilarious, because he’s all about the drama! If calling everything you don’t like “woke” and banning books like it’s the 1930s and going after anti-racist education like it’s the 1830s and demanding menstrual records of teenage girls (and this is a not-at-all comprehensive list!) ain’t drama, then what is? Oh, almost forgot: come get your poll tax from me, Governor, if you can.

Finally, two former CIA agents with four decades’ combined experience in intelligence describe at some length how Tha Bush Mobb lied about their findings so they could sell the invasion of Iraq. I feel terrible for these two good Americans, who detail the many, many honest assessments our CIA gave to Tha Bush Mobb only to have them lie about it because they were going into Iraq and damn everyone else. But the Insider is wrong to say that now it’s “time to call George W. Bush a liar,” because that time was the fall of 2002. If you were paying attention and thinking for yourself then, you were calling him a liar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: why we need Hell, part 744.

I hope they’re right that “A Four Day Work Week is Closer Than You Think,” though I hasten to point out that most of the studies done on the matter get done outside the United States, and that those studies tend to concentrate on white-collar work (blue-collar work still exists, you know!). But I also hasten to point out that a four-day work week is also a job creation scheme, since (again, more so in blue-collar jobs) there’s still going to be the same amount of work to do. (In case you were wondering, workers made the same pay for fewer work days in these studies.)

Ho hum, our Fed Reserve Chair, having lately justified bailouts for Silicon Valley Bank because of the “systemic risk” its failure supposedly poses, approved a merger between SVB and Boston Private Bank and Trust by claiming the resulting behemoth posed no “significant risk” to our banking system. Of course now he’s promising a “thorough, transparent, and swift review” of the whole issue, but I presume the resulting review will only be swift. At least we have anti-monopolists at our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for as long as Congress allows us to have that.

French President Macron tries to unilaterally raise that nation’s pension age from 62 to 64 – a matter the good citizens of France have been protesting in the streets for two months now – and as a result faces a no-confidence vote in Parliament. He thought he had a hostage situation ready to spring on them: don’t oppose my will, or you’ll get a Le Pen government! And it may work, but his actual duty – to adhere to the people’s very obvious will – remains undone.

From the “What an Understated Headline” file: ProPublica reports that “Wealthy Executives Make Millions Trading Competitors’ Stock With Remarkable Timing.” I can see why a major news organization would put it that way – the information comes from that leaked trove of IRS files ProPublica acquired in 2021, which won't alone prove to a judge and/or jury that the timing was more than “remarkable” – but we’re not schmucks, and we also realize that stronger laws against insider trading and executives serving on multiple corporate boards would help stop this, ah, remarkable phenomenon. So would not worshiping at the altar of the stock market the way we’ve done for the last 40-odd years.

The Iraq War turns 20 today, and Jon Schwarz at The Intercept asks, of the war’s architects, “Where Are They Now?” Short answer: doing quite well, just like they don’t deserve, even Judith Miller, who I guess is the Useful Idiot of this clown car since her water-carrying couldn’t keep her out of jail. You’ll also learn that Donald Rumsfeld’s last vacation home was once the home of Edward Covey, “notorious for breaking unruly slaves for other farmers,” and that Ms. Miller’s last piece for the New York Times had a hilarious title – hilarious, at least, until you remember how many people it helped kill, maim, or torture.

Finally, and this also risks being a ho-hum, right-wing “activist” who dressed up as Julius Caesar at school board meetings to make some kind of point about transgender kids actually had a long, long history of bad and criminal behavior. Much as I want to say he’s paid his debt to society and that arrests and accusations aren't convictions, I also want to say that his trajectory from armed-standoff-with-cops (for which he served 17 years in the big house) to incoherent transgender protestor suggests that he's spent most of his time on Earth lapping up whatever the right’s dealers of masturbatory rage serve up at the moment. In a civilized society, you have to pay your debts and you have to do better in the future.

Readings for March 1, 2023.

The MIT Technology Review tells us “Everything You Need to Know About the Wild World of Heat Pumps”. “Everything” may include the news that they work better at severely cold temperatures than you’ve heard. And if you’re wondering how you squeeze heat out of 25-degree air, well, long story short: the refrigerant starts out in liquid form, but has a very low boiling point (-15 degrees), so heating it even a little in a heat exchanger (and heating it with 25-degree air is surely heating it a little!) turns it into a gas; then putting that gas through a compressor it makes it considerably hotter, until its temperature reaches 100 degrees, and then it dumps off heat into your house via another heat exchanger, and in doing so turns back into a liquid, and the cycle begins again. And don’t let your right-wing uncle pooh-pooh it because it runs on electricity and thus equals fossil fuels, because that’s really only true in West Virginia (which gets some 97% of its electricity from coal), and you shouldn’t let the perfect murder the good.

Sonali Kohatkar at Znet instructs us that “Tipping Is Not a Reward – It’s an Insult,” and when you consider that tipped employees’ federal minimum wage is much lower than the standard ($2.13/hour, versus $7.25/hour), and that more than two-thirds of tipped workers are women, and that tipped workers are more likely to suffer in poverty than non-tipped workers, you’ll find it hard to disagree. When you find that other cultures think tipping is actually “rude” or “petty,” and you may find it even harder to disagree. And remember that tipping not only allows bosses to pay their workers less, but forces customers to evaluate their workers, when that’s surely a boss’s job. A male customer might decide not to tip a female worker who doesn’t respond positively to their come-on, which does not speak particularly well of tipping as an employee-evaluation tool. (No use responding that a boss could treat a female worker the same, because there are actually laws against that, and there are no laws against bad tipping.) It sure is amazing how much of what’s “just the way things are” in America don’t actually have to be.

Speaking of which: Steven Greenhouse at The Guardian explains how Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s have been able to avoid actual unionization at their stores, despite workers winning all those union elections. Long story short: because our laws don’t punish corporations for engaging in delaying tactics or other forms of union-busting. Naturally, the PRO Act would have fixed that, by giving corporations 120 days to negotiate a contract with a union representing their workers and forcing those negotiations into arbitration if they don’t meet that goal. Of course, even though the PRO Act passed our House, our Senate didn’t bring it up, since Republicans would have filibustered it as a unit. They still should have brought it up, and forced Republicans to go on the record as favoring endless delaying tactics after a successful union vote, a tactic of which I’m pretty sure even a lot of regular Republican voters wouldn’t approve.

Action: concerning noncompete agreements, junk fees, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell our FTC to ban noncompete agreements, tell our CFPB to outlaw credit card junk fees, tell our CFPB to break up Wells Fargo, tell our FTC to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, and tell our government to ensure prisoners also enjoy the benefits of any junk fee bans. 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 ban noncompete clauses in employment contracts. These clauses keep folks from working for any sort of competitor even after they leave a job, but Jesus Mary and Joseph shouldn’t people get to decide that on their own, without having some corporations do it for them? Noncompetes supposedly prevent employees from betraying their old employers’ trade secrets, but guess what? There are already laws against that! And here you thought conservatism was all about shedding unnecessary laws! Turns out that’s a liberal’s job, as usual – and if we speak out, our FTC, which seems already inclined to do our will, might actually do our will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to outlaw credit card junk fees. Our CFPB does actually seem inclined to take action on the matter – their proposed rule would limit credit card late fees to $8, which would cover a bank’s actual costs, rather than whatever phantasmagorial costs they insist require $30 and $50 late fees. But you also know that banksters will be submitting their comments full of bad arguments and half-truths, so we’ve got to be there with the actual truth. And then, perhaps, this particular income-redistribution-upward scheme can die the death it richly deserves. It’s not so damn much to ask.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to break up bankster corporations Wells Fargo, while Inequality Media helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop the proposed Kroger-Albertsons merger. The first alert helps you tell our government to break up a corporation that’s already doing us harm – Wells Fargo has been illegally assessing junk fees and opening accounts folks don’t want for many years now – while the latter action alert helps you stop a corporation from becoming so big it’ll do us harm. A Kroger-Albertsons merger would create the second-biggest grocery corporation in America, which means lost jobs and fewer choices, so let’s not have that.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our government that any program reducing or eliminating junk fees must apply to folks in prison as well. Because they’re otherwise in no position to fight back! I know a lot of people will hear this and say well if they don’t like it they shouldn’t have done the crime, but that’s glib and asinine. Being civilized requires that we avoid cruelty, after all. And when someone injures our civilization, and we demand restitution for that injury, should we keep heaping on additional forms of “restitution” just to look tough? No, we should not. So let’s do our duty as civilized people.

Around the table: cost-cutting your way to prosperity! And other fictions.

Ho hum, Disney plans to lay off 7,000 workers – right as they’re facing union workers agitating for better pay and working conditions. The layoff continues the fiction that “cutting costs” makes your operation more “efficient” and that “efficiency” should “earn” you higher stock prices. Funny how big corporations always treat labor as a “cost,” rather than, you know, as the one thing that keeps them from spiraling into oblivion. But these are, as you know, the fictions big corporations have foisted on us for the last 40 years, and the result is a hollowed-out economy that no longer rewards work. And remember this when you cheer on Disney for “fighting” Ron DeSantis; their “fight” is just as much drama to them as it is to him.

Speaking of the fiction of “cost-cutting” your way to prosperity: doctors at a Florida HCA hospital allege that they face “unsanitary” instruments, roaches in operating rooms, an overloaded Emergency Room, and “anesthesiology errors that resulted in patients waking up while in surgery,” and how’d you like to be that patient? You’ll never guess the rest of the story: management has done nothing about these concerns though they’ve known about them for over a year, and the hospital’s parent corporation is, sigh, “highly profitable” and “its stock is an investor favorite.” Used to be we didn’t expect hospitals to be big money-makers because, you know, they have a purpose higher than mammon, but when you put mammon-worshipers in charge of everything, civilizations crumble and people suffer.

Amazon deforestation fell dramatically in Brazil during the month of January, as Lula’s administration has pledged to end the rainforest destruction that his predecessor, the irredeemable asshole Jair Bolsonaro, foisted on the world. Lula still has an uphill battle, as said asshole predecessor gutted environmental enforcement during his reign of error, and I would also imagine that enforcement is a lot more hazardous than it is here – in Brazil, I would think you’d have a lot more rage-filled developers shooting at you. Nonetheless, I hope we’re able to observe further progress in the years to come.

The Sentencing Project describes why it’s not necessarily good news that the prison population has gone down 25% since 2009. For one thing, that’s 25% over a dozen years, plus a big chunk of that drop came in 2020, as prisons let a lot of folks out so they wouldn’t die of COVID. And considering that we still put more folks in prison than any other country, and that incarceration went up 600 percent between 1980 and 2009, clearly we’ve got a lot of work to do. Decriminalizing pot and moving to a treatment model for drug addiction would sure go a long way toward erasing this stain on our nation.

Ho hum, our “liberal” media still resorts to the same tired tropes when covering Bernie Sanders, in particular his “scowl.” Read the whole thing – if you can name a sin of shallowness, our “liberal” media commits it in covering Mr. Sanders. That reminds me of all the times I had to correct Trump supporters about Bernie’s “yelling” by reminding them that their guy was the Yeller-in-Chief, and of course the problem is broader than that: our “liberal” media lets conservatives throw tantrums they’d put their own kids in time-out for, while reporting on the mildest objections of liberals as evidence of our utter lack of civilization. Maybe liberals should smile more!

Finally, the Indian government has damn near taken over control of the internet there – and big tech corporations (except to some degree Twitter, though I don’t imagine that courage continuing under their new management) have enabled them. I don’t want to hear that big tech corporations should put up with the abuse of “emergency powers” so they can sell ads to the 800 million Indians who use the internet, because the best of us don’t let money dictate every damn decision we make. Also, they said powerful corporations could be a bulwark against a government that abuses its power, and clearly they were wrong. And on purpose, I’m pretty sure.

Readings for February 20, 2023.

Luke Goldstein at The American Prospect describes “How Noncompete Agreements Hamstrung America’s Pandemic Response.” Long story short: noncompete agreements prevented physicians from going where they were most needed during the pandemic, even to pick up extra hours or volunteer. Of course, noncompetes also prevented health care workers from leaving chronically-understaffed workplaces for nearby better ones, which also didn’t help us when a pandemic hit. The lengths to which some corporations will go to enforce noncompete agreements is yet another argument that such agreements shouldn’t exist – and also, possibly, that their executives should spend eternity encircled by fire.

Kari Lydersen at In These Times makes “The Case for Nationalizing the Railroads.” It’s actually a pretty simple case: wherever private corporations fuck shit up, our government should step in, on our behalf and using our taxpayer funds, to fix it. You could make the same case for most of our health care system. And I wouldn’t make too much of the “folly” of giving more power to the “most pro-labor President America’s ever had,” because a) it wouldn’t be his power, but ours and b) private corporations’ mammon-worship has led to workers who can’t get a damn day off and trains that fly off their tracks and hurt and kill people and obviously these two things are intimately related. No, even this Department of Transportation couldn’t do worse than private corporations have already done.

However: the good folks at The Lever remind us that although Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg acts like he can’t do anything about trains derailing and polluting our air and water, actually, he can. Nice how Mr. Buttigieg says the Trump Administration’s repeal of a train-braking rule – a rule his department can bring back, even though it takes time – ties his hands, but he doesn’t mention (for example) that he already has authority under our laws to widen the definition of “high-hazard flammable train” so trains carrying five tankers full of a flammable carcinogen can meet that definition and get more stringent regulation. Our Glorious Elites apparently want the next Democratic President to be someone who can be routinely outclassed by the likes of Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance – though we can’t discount the possibility that the current Democratic President may have given him this job to prevent that from happening.

Robert Reich laments “The Death of Shame,” and though I’ve been doing that for close to two decades now, Our Glorious Elites sure do seem to have even less capacity for feeling shame than they did when I launched this ministry. It doesn’t help that our last President yelled evil, noxious crap at the top of his lungs for years on end, but he wouldn’t have gotten away with it if he didn’t have about a quarter of the electorate cheering him on. In my more generous moments, I locate their evil in actual pain – namely, the pain of Our Glorious Elites slowly and systematically stealing the social contract they worked for and counted on, a contract President Biden has (perhaps too slowly) started to reconstruct. In the meantime, though, they act as shamefully as the politicians who egg them on.

Action: concerning workers' rights, separating families, and cruelty to animals.

Long story short: tell Amazon to negotiate with organized workers already, tell your Congressfolk to outlaw separating families over unpaid foster care bills, and tell our government to outlaw cruel hunting practices. 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 Amazon to negotiate with its labor union already. When evil can’t prevent something from happening, what do they do? They stall, in this case by simply refusing to meet with the union that the workers have already approved to get them better pay, benefits, and working conditions. This is like when Republican Presidents simply delay writing legally-mandated clean air and clean water regulations, because they can’t win the argument on the merits, and they can't simply disregard our laws. And Amazon may think they're Too Big to Fail, but they can’t disregard our laws, either. Particularly if we all let them know we’re watching them.

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation ensuring that states can’t take children away from families over unpaid foster bills. This mainly affects families who become homeless and put their kids in foster care, but that could be any of us but for the grace of God, and anyway why aren’t our taxes paying for temporary foster care? Ask the politicians who’ve been slashing taxes at the behest of their corporate and wealthy masters. I’m sure state and local officials will say well, we need money, too! But great civilizations don’t split up families to collect debts. And great civilizations certainly don’t treat people as a commodity – especially children, who can’t even legally consent to much of what happens to them.

Finally, the Humane Society helps you tell our National Park Service to outlaw cruel hunting practices in Alaska. This is a no-brainer, seriously, and what do right-wingers say in response? That we should “trust hunters” to do what’s right? If you don’t know it’s wrong to kill mother bears in their dens while their cubs watch so you can hang a trophy on your wall, then we shouldn’t “trust” you any more than we “trust” our elected officials to do the right thing. We all have a duty to maintain and strengthen our civilization, and identifying a group of “tough guys” you want to pander to (and if they’re so tough, why do they need pandering?) doesn’t excuse them from that sacred duty.

Readings for February 7, 2023.

James Steinhof at TruthOut tells us that “Buzzfeed’s AI-Produced Content Experiment is a Glimpse Into a Bleak Future.” Once Buzzfeed outsourced some of its more clickbaity works to AI – which doesn’t get sick, doesn’t have families, and doesn’t need to go on vacation to recharge from stress – its stock prices went up, though, really, fuck the stock market that we’ve made into a god. Other corporations will see the promise of “reduced labor costs” – you love having your work described as a “cost,” don’t you? – and hope for a similar goosing of their stock prices. Any teacher can tell that a ChatGPT-produced essay is BS, but our boldest and brightest entrepreneurs will pretend there’s no difference between writing produced by real people and writing produced by a machine that’s guessing at what being a human is like. The question is why we, as civilized people, would tolerate such a thing.

David Sirota at The Lever notes that a private hedge fund industry rag has said, and I quote, that “private equity returns are a major threat to pension plans' ability to pay retirees in 2023.” So there’s the danger to pensions we’ve been hearing about for the last couple of decades! I kid, of course – banksters have been using pension-related hysteria to justify gobbling up public pensions themselves, even though they don’t do any better than other investment firms, though they do charge more on commission. I guess the truly enterprising right-winger would blame the Fed’s interest rate hikes for all of that, since one of the (highly awesome and entertaining!) side effects of those rate hikes has been all the money that hedge funds have lost over the last year or so. But I doubt we’ll see that, not when there are transgender athletes and anti-racist books and litter boxes to whine about.

Finally, the incomparable Matt Stoller explains why a judge ruling against our FTC in its suit against Meta for buying a virtual reality competitor might be a “pyrrhic victory” for Meta. Long story short: “what we have learned is that the judge ruled against the FTC on the facts, but not on the underlying legal theory,” meaning that the Judge did agree that “acquisitions of nascent companies can hurt competition and that companies not currently in a marketplace can still have influence over the marketplace,” but ruled that our FTC simply didn’t make that case well enough. Courts have spent the last 40 years trampling on such theories in antitrust law, even though there’s plenty of precedent for them, so that’s actually a big deal. Folks, this is why we always try to do the right thing – even when we fail, we set an example (or even a precedent!) for those who follow us.

Action: concerning workers' rights and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect workers’ right to organize, reject House efforts to defund the police at our IRS, and tax capital gains at the same rate as wages. 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.

If you’re bummed to hear that the percentage of union-organized workers has hit a historic low – although the raw number of unionized workers did increase by more than 250,000 last year – then you may want to call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, which would make it a lot harder for corporations to intimidate their workers, and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which would make governments let their workers organize. Winning union elections ain’t enough if your boss won’t negotiate and you can’t get our government to make them; both these bills will help these matters.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to reject the House Republicans’ plan to defund the police at our IRS and protect the rich and corporate tax cheats they seem to consider their only real constituents. They say funding our IRS enables them to come after you, but our IRS has only been going after poor people because they don’t have the money to fight rich people and their lawyers! I’d like to think that’s a reason Republicans fell far short of expectations during the midterms. If it’s not, I’m going to be banging this saucepan for a long, long time! And so should you, particularly with your Senators.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk we should tax capital gains at the same rate we tax wages. It’s all income, after all! Tha Bush Mobb’s 2003 tax “reform” spewed forth this particular injustice; they actually wanted you to think investors need more “protection” from taxes than secretaries and bus drivers! They also wanted you to think unrealized assets aren’t income, either. When rich folks got all those low- or no-interest loans, they backed them with unrealized assets! They won’t get more of those loans now, thanks to the Fed’s interest rate hikes, but the injustice of working folks getting taxed harder than rich folks remains. And we should fight that until it’s gone.

Action: concerning labor and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell our FTC to slap down non-compete agreements in employment contracts, tell your Congressfolk to stop accepting donations from the National Restaurant Association (a.k.a. “the other NRA”), and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC already. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you share your experience with non-compete agreements with our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC). No doubt your experience with a non-compete agreement in your employment contract, one that prevents you from taking a higher-paying (or simply better) job with a competitor of your current employer, is not positive, since we know (both from scientific study and common sense) that non-compete agreements drive down wages and make workers less free. And you know big corporations will weigh in with their bogus arguments about “trade secrets” (which entirely different laws deal with!), so our FTC needs to hear from you.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop accepting campaign contributions from the “other” NRA, the National Restaurant Association. They’re yet another “small business association” that exists solely to redistribute worker income upward to executives, and lately they’ve made low-paid food workers take a $15 food safety class and then used that money to fund its own efforts to keep their wages down! And I’ll bet the whippersnapper who came up with that “food safety” scam thinks he’s the smartest person who ever lived, though he may not feel that way when he gets to the Pearly Gates. But if we expose this scam now, we'll save souls in the future -- maybe even his!

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Senators to confirm net neutrality architect Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission. President Biden nominated her again, because she’d do good work for America, and 51 Democratic Senators can more easily ignore the excuses offered by big telecom corporations than 50 could. I know Joe Manchin voiced “doubts” about Ms. Sohn, but I bet Kyrsten Sinema – who opposes net neutrality, because nothing says “maverick” like taking the side of the corporations against virtually every American! – was the real reason Ms. Sohn couldn’t get on our FCC before. Put Ms. Sohn on our FCC and we not only get better telecom policy, we isolate Ms. Sinema further, as she deserves.

Around the table: evil people do evil crap, part 992.

U.N. report says the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica is healing slowly and will likely close completely in 43 years. And if this comes to pass, and I expect it will, right-wingers will immediately demand that we start making chlorofluorocarbons again because “the Earth heals itself,” though the ozone layer would have “healed itself” in large part because we stopped making the chemicals that made holes in it! And think tanks will commission studies with titles like Was Hairspray Really So Bad?

Over 7,000 New York nurses go on strike for better working conditions. I don’t know if they’re saying so, but they’re also probably mad that their bosses make millions of dollars while they handle 20 E.R. patients at once. Remember: every time health care workers have ever organized or struck, plenty of right-wingers said these workers are too important to let organize or strike. The obvious retort: if a worker’s that important, we’d better treat them right! Right-wingers think being just one of 20 E.R. patients per nurse will never happen to them, but it will, when their heroes come for their money, as evil people always do.

Rep. Scott Perry (E-PA) says he won’t recuse himself from any House probes of various January 6 investigations, even though he himself is the subject of several of them. Dig his rhetorical bait-and-switch – pressed about the fact that he’s literally the subject of some investigations, he responds “should everybody in Congress that disagrees with somebody be barred from doing the oversight and investigative powers that Congress has?” "Investigation" and "disagreement" aren't synonyms, Roget. I’m old enough to remember when politicians tried to avoid even the appearance of corruption. Scott Perry won with only 54% of the vote in his district in 2022, so perhaps he shouldn't act so untouchable.

Today, in “Short Story Ideas That Would Have Earned Me a Rap on the Knuckles From My Creating Writing Teacher”: Florida school board bans production of a play about a hundred-year old play in Yiddish that was itself banned from production because it dealt with homosexuality. The Florida government pretends to care about “exposing children to indecency,” but we know what this is about: small people with small minds and small hearts who can’t have all the say about everything anymore and want to inflict endless pain on the rest of us because of it.

Health care experts warn that the recent Ohio outbreak of measles – declared “eliminated” in America as of the year 2000 – won’t be the last. The roots of the Ohio outbreak appears to pre-date COVID anti-vaxxers, however, at least in the Midwest, where anti-vaxxers a) believe lies about the “effects” of the measles vaccine, b) think measles isn't all that bad, which, like, no, and c) still haven’t shaken the disgusting lie that “vaccines cause autism” even though the man who started that lie has been exposed many times over as a fraud. When so many Americans pride themselves on attending the University of Google, we all suffer.

Finally, at least one legal expert thinks Fulton County (GA) District Attorney Fani Willis is “gearing up to indict” Donald Trump after wrapping up the probe into that phone call he made to Georgia’s Secretary of State where he asked why he couldn’t just find him 11,780 more votes. Maybe she is and maybe she’s not, but recall the two giant hurdles to convicting Mr. Trump of anything: one, he’ll never take a plea deal, and two, chances are good that at least one Trumphole will con his way onto the jury. Not that these probabilities should ever deter us from fighting evil.

Readings for January 9, 2023.

Mike Lofgren at Salon reminds us that isolationists like the late Sen. Robert Taft (R-OH), once dubbed “Mr. Republican,” have always been with us. He also reminds us that we shouldn’t think their isolationism sincere, merely because they don’t indulge in anti-Semitism or love of fascism out loud. We have all succumbed to the temptation to think that Republicans Used to Be Better in The Good Old Days – I can’t tell you how many sentences I began with “at least Reagan didn’t” during Tha Bush Mobb’s reign of terror – but we would be wiser to take the 30,000-foot view here. I’ll only add that if Mr. Taft had ever condemned Father Coughlin, it wouldn’t have been useless. Even if he didn’t mean it!

From Julia Rock at The Lever we learn “How Big Pharma Actually Spends Its Massive Profits.” Long story short: “Between 2012 and 2021, the 14 largest publicly-traded pharmaceutical companies spent $747 billion on stock buybacks and dividends — substantially more than the $660 billion they spent on research and development.” So no more of this ZOMG BUT TEH INNOVASHUNZ!!!!! crap! Must I add that the money a corporation spends on research and development can’t be taxed by any government? Because it’s an expense?

Sonali Kohatkar at Raw Story reveals “The Disturbing Truth About How Much Unearned Wealth and Power Has Been Accrued by Elites.” Said disturbing truth is nepotism: “some of the most dramatic success stories began with a parent using their wealth or connections to give their child the upper hand,” she reminds us, and not just our most famous tech zillionaires like Jeff Bezos ($250,000 from his parents) or Mark Zuckerberg ($100,000 loan from his parents), but also Donald Trump – remember how he said, out loud, that his father had given him a “very small loan” of $1 million to jump-start his real estate career? And, thanks to said father’s tax evasion schemes, little Donald had been a millionaire since he was a small child! So no more of this ZOMG BUT THEYZ EARNEDZ ITZ!!!!!! crap. Better to call nepotism an affirmative action program for the well-off.

When Marick Masters at The Conversation wonders if the last year’s surge in union elections and strikes “mark a turning point for organized labor,” I’m tempted to say: only if we make it so! But Mr. Masters does us a great service by pointing out that for all the media coverage of strikes and elections lately, the numbers of these are only a little bit up from the last 40 years – as late as 1980, the year before President Reagan broke the air traffic controllers’ strike, we saw 200 major work stoppages, compared to 20 in 2022. So maybe the pandemic hasn’t driven union membership upward the way we would have liked – or the way the Depression and World War II did. A possible “ace up labor’s sleeve”? More folks like unions and/or want to be in unions than in a very long time. We should work to ensure that doesn’t just mean people tend to like what they don’t have.

Jonathan O’Calllighan at IFL Science evaluates a study suggesting that octopuses are actually aliens from outer space, and finds it wanting. Yes I also got a kick out of that viral video showing an octopus escaping through a crevice in a boat’s deck, but when a scientific paper about an animal counts 33 scientists among its authors but zero zoologists, red flags should go up. And when a study points to “gaps in the evidence” and then fills those gaps with speculation, that isn’t the same as filling them with, you know, evidence. The “we can’t explain it, so it must be aliens” argument may even remind you of “intelligent design.”

Finally, the incomparable Matt Stoller relays some good news for American workers, as our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) has proposed a new rule that would bar “non-compete” agreements in employment contracts, meaning that workers would have more freedom to work where they like, rather than being barred from working for competitors. And of course, with “non-compete” clauses already being unenforceable in at least 12 states and with many actual bosses being fairly sympathetic to the new rule, America’s “free” market votaries are applauding the rule change, right? I kid, of course – they think the “free” market only means “freedom” for overpaid executives, not actual freedom for workers to make more money, and maybe even one day become bosses themselves! (Don’t believe any hype about “employees stealing trade secrets,” either, because other laws cover that.)

Action: concerning campaign finance disclosure, paid sick leave, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell President Biden to force corporate campaign finance disclosure, force railway corporations to give paid sick leave to their workers, and replace Louis DeJoy as USPS Postmaster General. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to force corporations to disclose their campaign spending. A Kevin McCarthy-led House won’t pass campaign finance disclosure legislation, because a Kevin McCarthy-led House will only protect corporations no matter how many good Americans that harms. But President Biden can use power already granted to him by Congress to mandate that corporations contracting with our government need to disclose their campaign spending, and if that winds up including most corporations, well, tough toodles. Ain’t no regular Americans running through a wall for a corporation’s “right” to “free speech.”

Demand Progress helps you tell President Biden to force railway corporations to give their workers paid sick leave. Railway corporations contract with our government, after all, and thus President Biden could make them give their workers paid sick leave. Can he override a union contract that doesn’t give them paid sick leave, even though Congress forced that contract down the workers’ throats? Maybe, maybe not, but let’s at least force that argument to be had in court, rather than just let corporatists have their way, again. Maybe railway workers are so important that we should ensure they have the paid sick leave that helps them do their jobs? It’s a question worth asking!

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to get rid of Postmaster General DeJoy already. We’ve talked about Mr. DeJoy slashing jobs and services and raising prices and how all that’ll hurt the good Americans who rely on our Postal Service for life-saving medications, but we can also talk about expanding services at our Post Office, like the basic banking services that Post Offices offered until the late ‘60s. Bring in more money helping the folks the big banksters don’t want to help and you don’t have to cut services and jobs. Today’s CEOs pretend not to get that, but we do, and our will should trump theirs.

Action: concerning broadband, endangered species, and worker "misclassification."

Long story short: tell our FCC to force big internet telecoms to spell out what we’re paying and what we’re paying for, tell our Department of the Interior to roll back Trump-era damage to the Endangered Species Act, and tell our Department of Labor to end corporate "misclassification" of workers. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to force big telecom corporations to spell out exactly what you’re paying for when you buy their service. Consumer Reports advocates a sort of "broadband nutrition label" that would include such information as the cost of activation and early termination fees, upload and download speeds, and privacy protections, and that'd be a very good place to start. And the only people who could possibly oppose such a thing are a) big telecom CEOs looking to make even more money they haven't earned and b) right-wing government-is-always-bad types; haven’t we let them have enough of the say about everything for one lifetime?

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our Department of the Interior to restore protections offered by the Endangered Species Act. The Trump Administration, as you know, crippled the Act, by forcing Interior to foreground corporate profits, ignore climate change, and slash protections for threatened species (so they don’t become endangered, amirite?) during legally-mandated rulemaking. And sadly, the Biden Administration has dragged its feet on the matter, recently insisting they need another two years to fix the problem. But by writing our Department of Interior, we can at least keep the issue in front of them, even if they’d prefer it goes away on its own.

Finally, Jobs With Justice helps you tell our Department of Labor to stop big corporations from simply classifying their full-time workers as “independent contractors.” They do it so they can deny full-time employees health care benefits, pension benefits, unemployment benefits, and overtime pay – among other rights employees have fought and died to earn! One 2020 study suggested that corporations have “misclassified” somewhere between 10 and 30 percent of all employees as “contractors”; one can raise an eyebrow over the wide range in the finding, but the fact is, one person denied their rights under our laws is too many.

Action: concerning car safety, labor, and methane emissions.

Long story short: tell big corporations to fix big truck and SUV blind spots, tell UPS to hire more unionized workers, and tell our EPA to protect us from methane emissions. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Consumer Reports helps you tell big car manufacturing corporations to fix the front-end blind zones on all their cars. Yes, if you’ve ever driven a pickup truck or an SUV, you may have wondered how you’ll see all those pedestrians who may well be shorter than the front end of your truck. Surely that’s an unintended consequence of big automakers’ efforts to sell big cars to insecure people! But these same big automakers could make a few changes to their trucks and SUVs, like lowering their hoods and pedestrian-detection devices, and they could do this now with the technology we already have, but alas, they don’t. Not until we brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR against them, that is!

More Perfect Union helps you tell UPS to hire more unionized workers so it doesn’t have to hand out so much overtime now. To your right-wing uncle who tells isolated anecdotes about bus drivers doubling their salary with overtime ANDZ THAT’Z NOTZ TEH FAIRZ!!!!, just remind them that the whole reason we insist on people making time-and-a-half for overtime is to force their bosses to hire the right amount of people to do the job. That’s job creation! And it’s not something bosses do – they’d replaces us with mounds of dung if they could! – but something we do, through communicating our will to our elected leaders.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous methane emissions rule possible. You know the story here, too – fossil fuel drilling tends to belch out methane into our air, and methane not only packs a much bigger climate change punch than coal emissions, it represents usable energy that sure ain’t doing anyone any good up in the air. Plus, when corporations drill on public lands, methane leaks also represent royalties the public can’t collect. A whole industry already exists to reduce methane emissions, so it’s not like we’re asking that much of big drilling corporations. No, less money for CEOs ain’t that much to ask.

Action: concerning killer robots, paid sick leave, and campaign finance disclosure.

Long story short: tell the San Francisco government to get rid of its killer robots, and tell President Biden to issue executive orders guaranteeing paid sick leave for railway workers and campaign finance disclosure by federal contractors. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell the San Francisco government not to allow its police to deploy killer robots on their citizens. Incredible that I even have to write that sentence, but duty is duty, no matter where it takes us. The NYPD started using killer robots in 2020, but stopped after public backlash; if New York’s government can be cowed by good people communicating their will, so can San Francisco’s. Even if they think they know better than everyone else! Which is not a liberal character flaw, any more than San Francisco is a “liberal” city; San Francisco is a rich tech bro city, and anyone can think they know better than everyone else. This is America, after all.

The People United helps you tell President Biden to issue an Executive order granting railroad workers paid sick leave. The Obama Administration mandated that for all other federal contractors, but exempted railway workers, so it seems to me there’s ample legal precedent to do it. And even if the presence of a labor contract pre-empts such an Executive Order – I don’t know if that’s true, but it could be, even concerning a legal contract Congress just forced down railway workers’ throats – then let right-wingers sue and overturn it! It’ll just force them to spend money they didn’t earn, it’ll keep the issue in the public eye, and it might well fail. And thus we will have done a good work.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to issue an Executive Order forcing all corporations that contract with our government to disclose their campaign contributions. Right wingers will squeal BUTZ HOWZ WILLZ ANYONEZ MAKEZ ANYZ CONTRIBUSHUNZ IFZ THEYZ CAN’TZ BEZ PRIVATEZ!!!!!, but you shouldn’t be so ashamed of how you spend your money, should you? And anyway, this is taxpayer money big corporations spend trying to elect ass clowns! We deserve to know what they’re up to! And we also deserve to know if big corporations are indulging in actual corruption to feed at the taxpayer trough. Which – at the risk of sounding old-fashioned – they shouldn't.

Around the table: I have seen the future; brother, it is murder.

“Brain-computer interfaces” (or BCIs) might enable soldiers to fight remotely, and might even allow soldiers to “turn off” their fear, but here’s an idea: don’t do any of that! "What might soldiers accomplish if they just weren’t afraid?" is the wrong question to ask, particularly in this era of guerrilla warfare, where hackers will probably win the battle with BCI-enabled soldiers anyway! BCIs have more humane uses (i.e., helping the disabled), and some folks have given the ethics a great deal of thought; if only America had a way of stopping the unethical use of technology, you know, like with laws and such.

An artificial intelligence agent gets good enough at Stratego that it now outranks almost every human on Earth. Machines may not have egos like people do – study any military history and you’ll be amused and/or disgusted by how badly Our Glorious Elites have botched wars just to appease their own egos – but again, how about we don’t leave wars up to machines? I mean, yes, it’s interesting that an AI agent play a game with “imperfect information” so well, but instead of imagining how we could “fight wars better” – again, a dubious notion in the guerrilla warfare era! -- how about we imagine how we can avoid wars better?

Ho hum, right-wingers claim that vaccines kill people with blood clots, naturally by blowing one fact (that the J&J vaccine, accounting for 3% of all vaccine administrations, cause a kind of blood clotting in literally four out of every million doses) way out of proportion, pretending that postmortem blood clots aren’t common, and repeating a whole slew of other debunked claims. Also, too, just because someone dies after getting the vaccine, that doesn’t mean the vaccine killed them. If I shoot a diabetic in the head, no reasonable person would claim he died of diabetes, but right-wingers would make a movie saying exactly that if they thought they could enrage enough people.

Marion County (IN) Superior Court Judge blocks Indiana’s abortion ban – on religious freedom grounds! After all, mainstream Judaism and Islam both authorize it in certain circumstances, so banning abortion more broadly interferes with those folks’ exercise of their First Amendment-guaranteed religious freedom. Will our Supreme Court, with its stated concern for religious freedom, uphold rulings such as these? I kid, of course – nothing matters to the far right wing of our Court except imposing their will on America. Why, I bet they’ll figure out a way to rule that the Jewish/Muslim/other non-Christian women who filed the suit “don’t have standing” to challenge it!

Our Senate has passed the Respect for Marriage Act. The bill they passed wouldn’t compel churches to hold gay weddings, but as long as our government recognizes them, most folks couldn’t care less if churches do. The bill would also repeal the noxious Defense of Marriage Act, confer federal benefits to any gay couple legally married, and force states to recognize marriages legal in other states. However, the bill wouldn’t compel those 35 states that have anti-gay marriage laws on the books – laws those states will enforce if/when our Supreme Court overturns Obergefell v. Hodges – to legalize gay marriage, and that’s a thing that’ll come back to bite us. Verdict: it's progress, but it's not quite justice.

Finally, our Senate has passed a bill that’ll keep railway workers from striking – but also rejected a separate measure that would have given railway workers seven days of paid sick leave, which had (justifiably!) been a sticking point in negotiations. One has to wonder why our House put the seven sick days in a separate bill, one more easily rejected by our Senate, instead of daring right-wing Senators to oppose the whole package because they hate giving workers time off. Sadly, the only answers I can come up with are “cowardice” and “evil," which reduces to "evil" or "evil."

Action: concerning fair contracts for workers, tax cuts for working families, and lower insulin costs for all Americans.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to strike a fairer deal with railway workers, bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, and cap insulin costs for all Americans. 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. Both More Perfect Union and Patriotic Millionaires help you tell your Congressfolk to strike a fairer deal with railway workers, i.e., a deal that gives them more paid time off like all workers deserve. Railway workers are always on call and get one day off a month – one! – so we shouldn’t be forcing a bad contract down their throats. No use arguing that “these workers are too important” to give them more paid time off, because bosses have been using that argument against workers forever. Hospital workers are too important! Teachers are too important! Jesus Mary and Joseph if they’re that important, shouldn’t we make sure we take care of them?

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021 permanent. That expansion put $250 or $300 checks per child every month in working families’ bank accounts, and it sure helped them weather skyrocketing inflation in 2021, but Republicans and Joe Manchin let it expire. If Democrats had run on their vote for (and, ah, their opponents’ vote against) the Child Tax Credit expansion in 2021, I think they’d have kept their House majority and expanded their Senate majority. Still, good works are good works, and bringing back that expansion now would help keep children out of poverty now.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the Medicare $35/month insulin cap to all Americans. Because all Americans deserve it! Don’t let your friends be like Herschel Walker, telling everyone they “gotta eat right” and imagining that’s the answer to diabetics (including the many who’ve had it since birth!) risking death by rationing their insulin! And don’t brook Republican attempts to overturn the protections we got in the Inflation Reduction Act, either! These Republicans are objectively anti-health, objectively pro-sickness, and objectively pro-inflation. And you thought being objectively pro-big donor was bad enough!

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 workers' rights, data privacy, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell our Department of Labor to crack down on bosses misclassifying workers as “contractors,” tell Uber to stop selling customer information to third parties, and tell President Biden to improve our Postal Service. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Labor to crack down on worker misclassification. Corporations like calling their workers “independent contractors” even when those “contractors” come to the office every day and use their facilities to get their work done, and why is that? So they don’t have to cover their health insurance, workers’ compensation insurance, or (even!) pay the employer’s half of the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare. For too long we’ve just assumed that if a corporation calls its workers “contractors” we just have to put up with it. But we don’t! Of course, we need to tell our government that.

Fight for the Future helps you tell Uber not to sell its customers’ ride history to advertisers. Sound innocuous? You know, besides the fact that somebody knows what you’re doing and now wants to sell you something based on that, which is pretty creepy? Now imagine people using Uber to get to church, or a doctor’s office, or an abortion clinic, and I trust you begin to see the problem. And if you’re tempted to retort but it’s just for advertising, remember how many intrusive technologies have entered our lives by being “just for” something else. You may have brought an Alexa into your house so it could play music more easily, but now it’s recording your conversations.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to replace Donald “Lee” Moak on our U.S. Postal Service’s Board of Governors once his term expires at the end of this year. Mr. Biden has shown a disquieting willingness to keep Mr. Moak on the Board, though Mr. Moak has been a key ally of the notorious Postmaster General DeJoy, so we have to get in our President’s grill. Of course, as Public Citizen reminds us, it’s not just about ousting Mr. DeJoy – who has slashed services and raised prices like Americans don’t depend on our Postal Service for life-saving medications or anything – but about improving our Postal Service with services like postal banking.

Around the table: governments politicize protests, and other horrible truths.

Steven Rosenfeld estimates that over 42 million Americans will mail in their ballots this year, a 40 percent increase from the 2018 midterms. More folks getting comfortable with mailing in their ballots is a good thing, but we’ll have the same BS in Pennsylvania and Michigan this year that we had in 2020, where mail-in ballots can’t by law be counted until Election Day, and Republicans will appear to be “winning” races until the mail-in ballots all get counted. If they get counted! As I said last week, I think Doug Mastriano could pull some armed shenanigans in Pennsylvania (i.e., where “election protectors” physically prevent counting of mail-in ballots); think Tudor Dixon might try the same in Michigan?

Sam Biddle and Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept detail how Iran’s government suppresses protest and dissent by controlling the internet. “While disconnecting broad swaths of the population from the web remains a favored blunt instrument of Iranian state censorship,” they write, “the government has far more precise, sophisticated tools available as well,” like SIAM, which Iran uses to disrupt web usage. SIAM slows down connections to the point where the government can break encryption codes and spy on users’ content more easily; couple that with Iran’s notorious human rights record and you can see why good Iranians are protesting – and why they have so much trouble getting the change they need and deserve.

Ho hum, Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) releases relatively-unredacted report detailing how thoroughly the Trump Administration DHS politicized the Portland protests of mid-2020. Because taking video of police putting down protestors for political ads just wasn’t enough! Our DHS tried to compile a dossier on every single Portland protestor, but still collected far too much information on protestors, and when they couldn’t prove (or even reasonably assert) that IT WAZ ALL TEH ANTIFAZ!!!!! they said it anyway. And don’t take comfort that the Trump Administration went about their evil incompetently, because they only aimed to create chaos, and they sure succeeded in that.

ProPublica finds our IRS has “largely abdicated its enforcement responsibilities as churches have become more brazen about publicly backing candidates.” And naturally some of these preachers who are “pushing the envelope” have become quite the drama hounds about it: dig the one who says “(t)he establishment media is coming after me” and “(p)eople of faith are under attack in this country” – where was he when the Bush Administration was harassing Muslims? Cheering it on, I bet! – or the one who says you’re “stupid” and “don’t know what you’re talking about” if you think he violated the law, a line of argument which always persuades folks who think differently!

Speaking of drama: after a union-supporting Starbucks barista in Buffalo says his bosses fired him for wearing a suicide awareness pin at work, Starbucks workers in seven states wear the pin in solidarity. Will Westlake wore the pin to honor a co-worker (and fellow union supporter) who committed suicide; you’d think bosses would pay more attention to what happens in their stores! But if Starbucks bosses can throw this big a tantrum over a pin, how do they expect to run a business? And if you’re thinking this might not be union-related, consider how many baristas say Mr. Westlake helped out their efforts even as his own store voted against unionizing.

Finally, because we need all the reminders we can get that corporate greed causes inflation, Exxon posted the highest profits ever by an American oil corporation for a three-month period, showing $17.9 billion for the third quarter of 2022. Yes, gas prices actually went down in August and September of that quarter, but the Economic Policy Institute instructs us that corporate profits still cause over half of our inflation. Democrats haven’t been talking enough about how corporations stoke inflation, but worse, they’re not talking enough about what they’ve done about it – they’ve curbed monopolies and let Medicare negotiate drug prices, where a Republican government would have just shown us the back of their hand.

Action: concerning endless war, taxing the rich, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal Iraq War authorization, tax billionaires a lot harder, and pass the PRO 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 Win Without War and the Friends Committee on National Legislation help you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF). Yes, it’s still on the books, though the Iraq War has been over for more than a decade and both Presidents Obama and Trump have abused it to launch more unwise and unconstitutional military adventures. No one calls them “wars,” of course, since wars kinda have a bad name now. Why do wars have a bad name now? Why, mainly because of the Iraq War, which the 2002 AUMF authorized, a profoundly evil war George W. Bush and his votaries used to tar all their political opponents as traitors. If you want to stop that from ever happening again, then raise hell about the 2002 AUMF.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire Minimum Income Tax. Billionaires made out a lot better than the rest of us during this pandemic, not because they’re “better people” or because they “worked harder” or because they “contributed more to society,” but because when you start out with billions of dollars, it’s much easier to make billions more, particularly when our civilization acts like “letting the rich do what they want” is not only a good idea but the only idea. A half-century ago we had only one billionaire, and (not coincidentally!) a much fairer America, and the Billionaires Minimum Tax will help us get that America back.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act would outlaw state-level “right to work” laws, which we might better describe as “right to work for less money, fewer benefits, and fewer protections from bosses’ whims” laws, even though I suppose that's not as snappy "Right to work” laws allow workers to work in union shops without paying union dues, but no one who joins a union simply doesn’t know that dues fund the many services a union provides, and not for nothing, but the higher salary workers make when they're in unions tends to outstrip dues. Certainly that's been my experience for a few decades now.

Action: concerning overtime pay, workers' rights, and climate change.

Long story short: tell President Biden to extend overtime pay protections to more American workers, tell Starbucks executives to rehire the workers they illegally fired for organizing, and tell our Department of Transportation to fight climate change as vigorously as possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell President Biden to expand overtime pay protections for millions of Americans. Currently workers making up to $35,000 annually can earn time and a half for every hour worked over 40 hours in a week – former President Trump actually did raise the limit from $23,476 annually while in office, which makes four things he did right in four years – but folks making $35,000 annually doesn’t put you on Easy Street, as anyone making that amount of money already knows, raising the limit to $83,000 (roughly equivalent to the “happiness wage”) would help our working families a lot more.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you demand that Starbucks executives rehire workers they illegally fired for trying to organize unions at the workplace. Starbucks bosses must think they can convince our NLRB that they really fired all those people for improperly disposing of lattes or something, but everyone knows Starbucks treats their workers badly by now, so they’d do better just admitting they were wrong and bringing back the workers they fired. Bosses really do forget where they came from – or, perhaps, they’re ashamed of where they came from, and spend a lifetime trying to cover that up. Whatever! They do evil, and we need to stop them from doing evil.

Finally, the National Campaign for Justice helps you tell our Department of Transportation (or DOT) to enact the most vigorous climate change rules possible. Our DOT has proposed a rule requiring state and local governments to report on climate change emissions on roads and train routes and reduce those emissions; naturally fossil fuel corporations, who already get too much say about everything, stand ready to whine about being made to do anything differently, but remember that when they whine about “jobs” and “mandates” they’re really whining about their executives making less money, and preserving executive pay is no reason to make important decisions.

Action: concerning banksters, government spying, and workers' rights.

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

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5648/S. 3022, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. You know how banksters buy up corporations just to bleed them dry, putting people out of work and depriving others of services they need? The Stop Wall Street Looting Act would fix that, by protecting workers first when corporations go under and ending the hedge fund manager “carried interest” loophole, among other reforms. I know, I know, we’ve agitated for this bill for years, it seems like, and even Democratic Congresses never hold votes on it. But that doesn’t mean we give up – it means we get in their grills more about it.

Demand Progress 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 corporations from selling your personal data to law enforcement. If you think that’s not a problem now, you will when law enforcement uses the data they bought to go on fishing expeditions that ensnare you or someone you love! Because they’ll do that, sooner or later, if only to justify their existence. Demand Progress also points out that our own military has just bought software that will let them monitor some 90% of all internet traffic, and I would hope that nobody thinks our military should spy on us without a warrant.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. Good Americans are organizing for better working conditions like they haven’t done in years, but big corporations still herd them into mandatory anti-union meetings and then threaten the workers they can’t brainwash; the PRO Act would all that a lot harder. If bosses don’t want workers to unionize, they should try doing better by their workers, rather than saying there’s no money. Bosses say “there’s no money” because they take all the money! And that ain’t right when working families are trying to figure out which bill they can get away with not paying this month.

Action: concerning "free" trade, government spying, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Trade Adjustment Assistance program and pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act and the PRO Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Trade Adjustment Assistance program (or TAA). TAA expired this past July 1, but good Americans have lost their jobs to “free” trade agreements that outsource jobs to other nations since then, so they need our help – and if your job gets outsourced one day, you’ll need that help, too. Right-wing criticism of TAA essentially amount to “too many of the wrong people getting too much help,” which surely doesn’t resonate with anyone who's gotten help, and anyway is beside the point – if our government can do it better, they should, but “this could be done better” doesn’t equal “this should not exist,” except, apparently, in the right-wing mind.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Currently our laws prevent your internet service providing corporation (or ISP) from selling your private data to law enforcement – but our laws do not prevent your third-party data-collection corporations (which buy your data from your ISP) from selling your private data to law enforcement! If law enforcement thinks you’ve committed a crime, they should get a warrant from a judge to get your private data, not simply buy it from some corporation that should never even have had it in the first place. Our Founders gave us Fourth Amendment protections from searches and seizures for good reason.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act would make it harder for bosses to prevent their workers from organizing by threatening and propagandizing them – a lot of workers have organized lately! – plus it would nullify notorious “right-to-work” laws at the state level, which you would do better to call “right to work for less” laws. Remember: they say “right-to-work” laws “give you a choice” whether or not to join a union, but if you don’t join a union, you’ll have a lot less choice about everything – pay, benefits, working conditions. So don’t believe the hype.

Action: concerning housing, privacy, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to increase affordable housing funding and pass the Protecting Data at the Border Act, and tell your Senators to pass the PRO 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 Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase funding for affordable housing in America. Why? Because rents are skyrocketing, because a lot of good Americans face eviction, because too many rich folks block too many working families from buying a good home – and because we were a much, much stronger country when we took affordable housing seriously. Don’t brook any rubbish about how folks just need to bootstrap, because when rents shoot up higher than inflation, ain’t no bootstrapping happening. Don’t brook any dumb jokes about “the projects,” either. Racism looks intractable, but to just throw up your hands about it? That’d be un-American.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5524/S. 2957, the Protecting Data at the Border Act. Typically our government has to get a warrant to see your cellphone, but officials have been searching everyone’s cellphones at the border willy-nilly, our Constitution be damned. The Protecting Data at the Border Act would require our law enforcement to get warrants before searching cellphones at the border, and before you protest but they’re not citizens, please do two things: 1) slap yourself, and 2) consider how easily our government could abuse this loophole to harass American citizens at the border, if they, you know, happen to be the “wrong color.”

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. Your right-wing Senators will likely lecture you about giving workers a “choice” to organize, but they ignore the bosses who don’t give them that choice! Bosses make workers’ lives miserable, demanding more for less pay, and then force workers to attend anti-union propaganda meetings and threaten those who organize by telling them they’ll fire them or outsource their job or close their plant. If all that’s OK with your Senator, he’s a monster. If it’s not OK with you, then you’re a decent person, and you ought to give your Senators what-for about it.

Around the table: of dictatorships and monopolies, and the good folks who fight them.

Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept assesses “The Dark Odds Facing Iran’s Brave Protestors.” Protests have followed the state’s murder of a woman for not wearing her hijab in strict accordance with new right-wing government laws, and though we want better for good Iranians, Egyptians and Syrians have failed to capitalize on the Arab Spring because “life under dictatorship had not allowed any alternative institutions to grow that could easily replace the tyrannies now in place”; Iran’s police state has similarly suppressed such institutions. That’s a cautionary tale for those Americans who think crime is the number one issue facing them because they’ve watched the same four or five clips on the TV news for two years now.

Matt Stoller assesses our progress in our fight against monopolies. Long story short: yes, our government loses antitrust cases in court, but has also made progress on right-to-repair, wage-fixing, and price-fixing. Still, “(i)n a highly concentrated economy, losing merger challenges simply shouldn’t happen,” but he also reminds us that we lose before very, very bad judging. Mr. Stoller remains hopeful that lawyers will figure out how to win cases even against bad judges, and that judges aren’t evil per se but “just operating on autopilot with antitrust. And he also reminds us that the “narrative of powerlessness is perhaps the most powerful weapon in the monopolists’ arsenal, because it causes us to give up on self-government itself.” We definitely need to hear that more often! The “phony war” metaphor at the beginning is a bonus.

When I hear that 80% of Americans want a federally-funded paid family/medical leave program, I recall that Newt Gingrich used to say if 70 percent of Americans want something, they should get it, though I bet he would just mouth a bunch of BS about it now and our “liberal” media wouldn’t challenge him on it. I’ll bet most of Joe Manchin’s constituents want a paid family/medical leave program, too, and if he’s scared that his approvals in West Virginia are upside down now that he’s helped bring the Inflation Reduction Act to fruition, I would remind him that his job ain’t just to do his constituents’ will, but to convince them when he’s actually done it.

Ho hum, Nevada’s Republican Secretary of State candidate wants to end mail-in voting because of alleged/nonexistent “voter fraud,” but not only has he voted by mail numerous times, he’s also done it while living in a different state from the one in which he was voting. In a sane, moral, and decent civilization, this news would finish his campaign; in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, he needs only hope he’s worshiped enough at the altar of His Personal Lord and Savior Donald Trump to please the big man’s votaries. Having claimed to be a “victim of election fraud” as the Republican nominee for Nevada’s 4th U.S. House district in 2020 – he lost that race by over 16,000 votes and nearly five percentage points – he may be well on his way toward this goal.

When I hear that Republicans actually plan to campaign on repealing drug-pricing caps passed entirely with Democratic votes – and that they’re using the same horsedoodle arguments about “stifling innovation” and “drug takeover schemes” and “price controls,” phrases that anger far-right partisans and literally no one else – all I can say is that I guess they’re counting on gerrymandering to deliver them the House, because they sure ain’t counting on making winning arguments. The shame of it is that it might work, especially given our well-founded suspicion that Democrats don’t want to win elections as much as they want to raise campaign money.

Finally, how about some good news? Over 270 workers at the Roosevelt Boulevard Home Depot in Philadelphia have filed a petition with our National Labor Relations Board to form a union. Much like Walmart, Home Depot has unusually terrific workers they get to treat like crap because those workers don’t have the opportunity to take their skills somewhere else anymore – which, of course, is because Home Depot has crushed smaller, independent hardware stores everywhere it’s gone. So let’s add “balancing monopoly power” as yet another reason we need more unions.

Action: concerning paid family leave, law and order, and credit reporting reform.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass paid family/medical leave legislation, expand our Supreme Court, and reform our credit reporting system. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass paid family/medical leave legislation. Yes, Our One True Great and Real American President Joe Manchin famously vetoed paid family leave almost a year ago during Build Back Better Act deliberations, and perhaps worse, suggested it was a stupid idea! This is the same fellow who thought families were spending their expanded Child Tax Credit on drugs, so we should take what he says with a grain of salt, but folks who can’t take care of their kids or their parents or themselves without fear of losing their jobs wouldn’t think it’s stupid! And unpaid leave isn’t enough! Since it’s, you know, unpaid. Labor unions demand paid family/medical leave in their contracts for good reason.

Demand Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand our Supreme Court already. I suppose the right-wing answer to that would be just win more elections already, but you can’t fill Supreme Court openings that don’t exist, and right-wing hypocrisy on this matter is legendary – they wouldn’t let Barack Obama fill the opening left by Antonin Scalia’s death, because TEH PEEPULZ SHOULDZ DECIDEZ!!!!, but then filled the opening left by Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death mere weeks before the 2020 election, the people, apparently, be damned. And we have every reason to believe the six-member right-wing majority on the Court’s reign of terror is just beginning – by the time they’re done, nobody will have any rights at all. Unless we get some more liberals up there.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell Congress to reform our credit reporting system in America. They suggest more than a few good reforms, but my favorite one is the public credit scoring entity; that’s bound to work better than the private ones! Remember all those years they said government was stupid and only private corporations knew what they were doing? Yeah, that was a load of horsedoodle – now private credit reporting agencies lie to you about how they’re arriving at their credit scores or simply giving you inaccurate scores, and when private corporations hurt us, our government has to step in on our behalf. Otherwise, why are we paying taxes?

Around the table: right-wingers pretending to be moderates and iconoclasts, part 763.

Politico’s new "contrarian" owner sent out an email to his fellow executives asking them to “pray” for Donald Trump’s re-election in late 2020 – then not only denied he sent it, but once confronted with evidence of the email’s existence said that yeah, he might have meant it “as an ironic, provocative statement.” Because if there’s one thing people love having explained to them, it’s irony! And are his politics “hard to pin down,” really? He loves the Trump tax-cuts-for-the-rich “reform” of 2017, he worries about “cancel culture” and “identity politics,” his response to anti-Semitic attacks is to fly an Israeli flag like there’s literally no other way to show solidarity with Jews – c’mon, I’m not a schmuck.

When I hear that folks experience “crisis fatigue” because of all the news they consume, I feel compelled to ask if we’re experiencing “crisis fatigue” as much as we’re experiencing sensationalism fatigue. I’m sure crisis fatigue is a real thing that real people suffer, but I don’t think the sheer volume of tragedy we read about is the only problem we face when trying to make sense of the world – right-wing news sources, in particular, love ramping up the drama. I’d also like to know if folks who read news experience less crisis fatigue than folks who watch the news.

President Biden endorses a bill in the California state legislature that would help farmworkers organize more easily for better pay and working conditions – a bill California Governor Newsom apparently intends to veto. You’d hate to think Joe Biden endorsed this bill (fairly persuasively, too) merely because he knows Gavin Newsom will veto it, but you can’t rule it out. The good news? It doesn’t matter: when the President endorses a good idea – and letting farmworkers unionize is a good idea, regardless of the cowards who’ll say it’ll “cause inflation” – it makes a difference.

Tamara Pearson at TruthOut charges the corporations building wind farms in Mexico with stealing, dividing, and destroying Indigenous land – in addition to using carbon credits to keep polluting and giving the clean energy they produce to Americans, rather than locals – and, yeah, I’d have to say this is the wrong way to fight climate change. I would also remind everyone (especially certain think tank morons who provide sound bites to the Wall Street Journal) that respecting the rights of Indigenous folks does not mean no one can fight climate change, ever. We need to stop listening to folks who hold such rigid dichotomies, not least because they’re not even being honest about it.

When I hear that Republicans are trying to soften their stances on abortion in the wake of our Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization being unpopular, all I can say is they are too fucking late. Does anyone think that the Democratic Party’s two-year effort to create hard-hat jobs will erase the common stereotype of them as out-of-touch latte-swilling liberals? No, they do not, so Republicans ain’t gonna reinvent themselves as abortion “moderates” in just two months. When you spend four decades screaming at the top of your lungs, you should expect folks’ opinions of you to harden.

Finally, ads about guns featuring Mehmet Oz skeet-shooting sure are funny – go skeet-shooting, and get ready for revolution against the liberal elites! – but Mr. Oz’s apparent endorsement of second-cousin marriage from 2014 should put a couple more nails in the coffin of his Senate campaign. I sure hope John Fetterman – eager to bash Mr. Oz for living in New Jersey or pretending to shop for groceries – bashes him hard for this, because no sane person thinks it’s OK to marry your second or third cousin, even if your resulting children will be much less likely to have hemophilia.

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.

Around the table: the history of the plea bargain, and other surprises.

Does Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp have so much “reason to fear indictment” that he’s avoiding testifying before the Atlanta grand jury investigating Donald Trump’s notorious “find 11,000 votes” phone call? Greg Palast thinks so! “If Trump, as reported, demanded the Governor call a special session of the legislature to de-certify Joe Biden’s victory, and Kemp told him to go fly, then Kemp’s off the hook” – but if Mr. Kemp then “suggested Trump make those calls to the man who did have the power to reject the vote count,” i.e., Secretary of State Raffensberger, he could be in bigger trouble. And Mr. Palast reminds us that SB 202, the notorious election “reform” law, essentially gives Mr. Kemp the power he couldn’t use for Mr. Trump – to decertify Democrat statewide victories. And he’s up for re-election in November, so I imagine he’d use it for himself first – unless he gets indicted before then!

Tom Dannenbaum, Alex DeWaal, and Daniel Maxwell at The Conversation provide a short history of civilian starvation as a war-making tactic, you know, like Ukrainians and Yemeni, among others, are currently suffering. You won’t be pleased to see how often the United States appears in that history, but hey, tough lessons build character, right? As it happens, the Geneva Conventions have prohibited inflicting starvation on an enemy civilian population since the mid-’70s, but I’ll give you one guess which country you call home hasn’t ratified those conventions.

Ho hum, the Wall Street Journal seems to think the best climate change strategy is extracting resources with no regard for the rights of indigenous folks who live on lithium-rich lands. (Lithium is a main ingredient in electric car batteries.) The Journal no doubt wants credit for even thinking climate change is a problem worth solving, but I’m such a churl I’ll only credit them for doing good works, whenever that’s going to happen. Remember: The Man wants you to think you have to choose between treating folks fairly and saving the climate, but even worse than that? They want you to think negotiation simply doesn’t exist as an option. A civilized person would try to reach an agreement with Chile’s indigenous that satisfies everyone, but corporatists won’t be happy unless they win before the game starts. (Also, when folks say things like “Latin America specializes in killing golden geese,” I really want to punch them in the face.)

From Dan Canon at TruthOut we learn that “The Plea Bargain Originated as a Means to Undermine Working Class Solidarity.” Specifically, juries suddenly got powerful in the Northeast in the 1840s, with universal white male suffrage allowing unlanded working-class men to serve on juries, which could not only evaluate evidence but interpret the law; legislators took that latter right away from juries by the 1850s, and then, instead of trying to break the backs of labor unions in court (very difficult with sympathetic jurors!), started cutting deals with individual laborers on trumped-up and/or vague charges like “vagrancy” or “drunk and disorderly.” This is what right-wingers defend when they attack public prosecutors who won’t detain people indefinitely on the smallest charges, or won’t demand bail for a guy caught peeing against a wall.

University of Illinois-Chicago study reverses Alzheimer’s-related memory loss in mice by enabling them to create more neurons. Specifically, the researchers deleted a particular gene within mouse neurons that promotes cell death; one wonders what kind of trouble deleting such a gene might cause long-term, and other studies would need to confirm the results, but this could be a watershed moment for those who suffer from Alzheimer’s (and those who take care of them), and I wish researchers all the best in making process against this horrifying illness.

Finally, President Biden has wiped out $10,000 in student loan debt for folks (or children of folks) making less than $125,000 annually, plus he’ll extend the student loan payment moratorium through the end of 2022. I do wish the $10,000 forgiveness had extended into the future – that would essentially make community college free in America – but, as usual, it’s something. I am highly amused to read folks claiming that these policies would be “inflationary,” when a) cutting $10,000 out of student loan debt won’t do much for folks with much more than that and b) the payment moratorium has been going on since early 2020 anyway. But I guess some folks just think they can fling around the word “inflation” and create an argument without having to do any more work.

Around the table: featuring another winning Democrat ad proposal!

I wish it were more of a surprise that labor union assets have nearly doubled over the last decade as the number of organized workers (as a percentage of the workforce) has declined, but we’ve known at least since Last Exit to Brooklyn that corruption both petty and spiritual can creep in anywhere, including the movement that gave us the eight-hour workday and the weekend. The worst union executives probably think that folks will tolerate anything to hang on to an ever-slimmer reed of labor power, but that ship sailed well before the pandemic hit. The good news: relatively small investments into organizing and strike funds can turn this thing around. I don’t have to tell you the bad news.

I wish it were more of a surprise that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ), who single-handedly killed recent Democratic efforts to get lightly-taxed hedge fund managers to pay more of their fair share, has received almost $1 million in contributions from banksters just in the past year. Nice to hear a Democratic consultant say “there is no universe in which it is politically smart to fight for favorable tax treatment of the wealthiest people in the country,” and if Senator Galaxy Brain is bold enough to ignore virtually all the evidence of the last 15 years, I expect she’ll pay in the 2024 primary, if she doesn’t get a hedge fund lobbying job first.

I wish it were more of a surprise that Rick Scott’s Max Headroom impression from last week was even worse than I had supposed – he actually called $280 billion in Medicare savings a “cut,” which I know isn't your attitude toward getting something good for less money. The surprise there is that Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan pushed back on that twice. But I wish she’d pushed back a little differently on the notion that Medicare paying less for drugs means “(t)here will be lifesaving drugs that seniors will not get” (i.e., it's a tired argument, as we’ll see below). I also wish she’d pushed back on his claim that “companies don't end up paying the taxes. Shareholders pay the taxes. Lower income for the employees paid the taxes. Less investment pays the taxes.” Setting aside that civilized people should never tolerate corporations taking out their higher taxes on everyone else, high corporate tax rates helped create the greatest middle class in history between 1932 and 1980.

Speaking of bad arguments about drug pricing reform, Arthur Allen at Kaiser Health News gives us a little of the history behind the “kills innovation” argument big pharma corporations deploy whenever you try to rein in their evil. Turns out the argument is at least as old as 1906, when our government first forced big drug corporations to list their drugs’ ingredients. Fast-forward 115 years, and drug prices have gone up a staggering 8500 percent over the last dozen years, and big pharma corporations still whine about being made to doing anything that might prevent their executives from gilding the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes.

Finally, what do Republicans plan to do if they win back either House of Congress this year? According to Rep. Chip Roy (E-TX), they’re going to shut down our government on their first day of power and force Democrats to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act! And how does he think that will work, given that Joe Biden will still be President? Make a campaign ad about this, Democrats – if Republicans take back control of the House, they will shut down your government out of pique, which means no air travel, no Social Security checks, no federal small business loans, and no national parks or museums. Show crying babies in that ad.

Around the table: now with at least half good news!

Wonders never cease! Economist Larry Summers says we need to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations “right now” to tamp down inflation, all but calling Joe Manchin’s incessant “concerns” about doing anything that benefits good Americans while inflation’s this high “basically ludicrous.” Of course, he also says we should just raise taxes on the rich and on corporations and then not spend that money on any new programs, and he doesn’t like student loan debt forgiveness either, but hey, baby steps. After all, the man thinks he created the economic boom of the ‘90s, so it may take him a little while longer to come back down to Earth.

Nine folks file class-action lawsuit against the Prince George County, MD prison system, alleging that they were detained for weeks or months even after judges ordered their release. The plaintiffs allege specific injuries – lost employment, being unable to care for family, and, of course, getting COVID – from their unlawful detention. But we do this to far too many good Americans, and we waste taxpayer money to do that, too, all so politicians can pretend to be “tough on crime.” I wish the plaintiffs the best in their efforts to get justice, and not just for themselves.

Dr. Jacob Lentz at Emergency Medicine News says “It’s Time to Ask (depression and anxiety) Patients to Quit Social Media.” You know one of the reasons for that already: social media algorithms prize “engagement” above all else even though we all know assholes get the most engagement. But Dr. Lentz also points out that folks suffering from depression and anxiety can’t watch all their friends put on a show about how great their lives are, no matter how troubled their lives actually are. You’ve heard that you watch everyone else’s performances but only you've witnessed your own failed rehearsals? Now imagine how already depressed folks even get to that understanding with social media addling them.

With a victory in a Cleveland, OH store late last week, Starbucks workers have now won union elections in 200 stores, which, as More Perfect Union noted, is 200 more than workers had eight months ago. Now they have to win actual contracts, a matter upon which Starbucks management has already dragged their feet, but the law doesn’t let them drag their feet forever. I wish them the best in their efforts to secure a better future for themselves. After all, we really missed them in 2020, didn’t we?

Jury finds Steve Bannon guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress, meaning he will serve up to two years in prison, and could it have happened to a nicer guy? Well, I guess now he can have his hands on his weapons full-time! Even in a country-club prison, I suspect he’ll need to.

Finally, thanks in part to your activism, Verizon will drop the notorious One America News (or OAN) network from its FIOS offerings as of July 31. Folks can still stream OAN from several platforms (including Pluto TV, which, quite frankly, has more right-wing news options than a civilized nation should tolerate), but even with evil social media algorithms killing jobs and fomenting rage, it’s a lot easier to find bad TV on your TV than to find it on the internet. Now all we have to worry about is Newsmax, Fox News, Sinclair, The Blaze, The First, and America’s Voice, which last network is almost as overconfidently-titled as One America News.

Action: concerning campaign finance, labor, and pollution.

Long story short: tell big corporations to stop donating to the Republican politicians who tried to overturn the election, tell Dollar General to treat its workers much better, and tell our Interior Department to protect the Boundary Waters. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

In advance of what may be yet another explosive day of testimony from our January 6 Committee, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell big corporations to stop donating to Republican insurrectionists in Congress, That would be the 147 Reps and Senators who refused to certify the election Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden by seven million votes. Remember when they said Mr. Trump earned a “mandate” from the people after he lost the popular vote to Hilllary Clinton by three million votes? Standards! And big corporations made all the right noises about campaign donations after January 6, but their actions give the lie to their words. They need to know we’re watching, and they need to know we’re done.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell Dollar General to stop oppressing workers with low pay and unsafe workplace conditions. You won’t be surprised to learn that more than nine-tenths of Dollar General workers make less than $15/hour while its CEO makes $1.7 million, but its numerous fire code violations, moldy conditions, and deliberate understaffing – which had led at least one OSHA administrator to slam their “blatant and continued disregard for the safety of their employees” – may surprise you. And not for nothing, but AC/heating issues make pandemics like the one we’re in now much worse. So Dollar General needs to get right.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Interior Department to protect the Rainy Rivers Watershed of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness from mining. Because mining equals pollution, even if some four billion tons of nickel and copper sit in and near the Wilderness. One would have to balance that against the probability that mining would pollute the Boundary Waters, but one would also have to balance that against the 150,000 visitors the Wilderness gets every year, people who go there for canoeing, fishing, hiking, and dog-sledding, among other activities. Life ain’t just about churning up the land and making executives rich.

Around the table: concerning pollution, abortion, labor, and Joe Manchin.

Now that our Supreme Court seems determined to gut pretty much any part of our government that actually helps good Americans, Branko Marcetic at In These Times reminds us how well our Environmental Protection Agency has worked over the years. “From dramatically improving air quality and banning cancer-causing substances, to cleaning up toxic sites and making long-poisoned natural attractions habitable again, the EPA has been the worst nightmare for right-wing, anti-government forces: an example of government power working for the benefit of the average person,” he writes. But he doesn’t forget to note that activists have often had to prod our EPA into working for us. And that’s as it should be: a tool is only any good if folks use it, after all.

The so-called National Right to Life Committee has proposed model legislation that would not only make abortion illegal everywhere in America, but would put anyone who helps someone get an abortion in jail. And naturally the bill is just vague enough to ensure that journalists reporting on reproductive issues would get swept up in its nefarious dragnet, meaning it’s also an anti-free speech bill. As more than one observer has noted, we need to understand the right-wing agenda as, ultimately, an anti-free speech agenda – they’ll make everything illegal and if you talk about it, they’ll make you an accomplice.

So how did right-wingers react to the 10-year-old girl who had to travel from Ohio to Indiana to get an abortion because she was six weeks and three days pregnant? By calling it fake news, of course, though they strained not to use that exact term, and naturally Washington Post “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler didn’t do his due diligence, either, which was exactly the cover they all needed. I would not oppose defamation lawsuits against all the right-wing fools who claimed the story wasn’t true only to be proven wrong (and who then labored mightily to cover their tracks without correcting their statements).

Starbucks says it’s closing 16 stores (including a few unionized stores) under the guise of “store safety,” and Starbucks Workers United (the union organizing their workers) files a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. Starbucks execs think they’re clever for closing some non-union stores along with the union stores, but they’ll never escape the bitter irony that store safety issues provoked a lot of the union organizing to begin with! Perhaps these executives imagine someone will write a Mahabharata about their exploits one day, but they’re wrong – no one will remember their names or their evil works in a hundred years, and that’s as it should be. In the moment, of course, we must overcome their evil.

You’ve heard that Joe Manchin has killed the latest iteration of the Democrats’ climate change bill – and that President Biden has rather vocally moved on, though we’ll see if that actually produces any results – but I guess I should note that Mr. Manchin himself has denied killing the bill, saying he just wanted to see what inflation was going to be like and see what the Fed planned to do about it before going further, which sure sounds like every other damn excuse for inaction he’s offered the last 18 months. I normally have no sympathy for Chuck Schumer, but it sure looks like he just decided to cut to the chase already.

Finally, in a related note, Paul Kane at the Washington Post warns that we should “Always listen to Joe Manchin’s public comments, not what others hear in private,” and adds that Democrats “seem to have all made the same mistake: hearing the nice tones that the West Virginia Democrat said in their private meetings, while dismissing his pessimistic comments in public as standard negotiating ploys. Instead, Manchin is the odd politician whose public pronouncements, whether in brief Capitol hallway interviews or in detailed prepared statements, carry more weight than whatever he tells his colleagues in private.” I must say that is an awfully long way of saying he negotiates in bad faith, and I’m not sure letting Rep. Jayapal say essentially the same thing makes up for that.

Around the table: the plain truth about evil.

When I hear that a truck-driving prick in Iowa went well out of his way to hit pro-choice protestors, injuring one, and then got released without charge after questioning by police, I feel compelled to ask how police would have responded to a liberal aiming his car at pro-life protestors. Because I think they would have moved heaven and earth to detain and charge that liberal. I hope I’m wrong, and I also hope my supposition forever remains a thought experiment.

Ho hum, the New York Times runs an article about trans health care that talks only to doctors and not to actual trans people. And it also gives far too much voice to those poor, beleaguered “reasonable” people who think “both sides” are too “extreme,” when only one side passes bathroom laws and examining-children's-genitals laws. And Jesus Mary and Joseph the number of kids who yearn to join an oppressed group so badly they mistakenly think they’re one of them is a grain of sand next to the mountain of kids who say nothing about their trans nature because they’re afraid of being bullied or killed. Sometimes I wish we weren’t so hard-wired for stories.

Whoever runs against Ron DeSantis for Florida Governor had damn well better run ads about his administration’s successful efforts to reduce care at nursing homes. Seriously, the phrase Ron DeSantis will kill your grandma would not be untoward! But Democrats would rather keep pretending they’re impotent as a fund-raising tactic. Of course, going for the throat wins races, and it even raises campaign funds, but most importantly, it stops evil. All we have to do is stand up to evil, and evil will fold. You know why? Because evil is a fucking coward, that’s why.

When I hear corporate executives say they’ll pay for their employees to get abortions, I think they're just trying to get the good PR they can't earn any other way. I'd be happy to be wrong, but when Amazon said it, I said it might be a way to fire employees who don’t get their paperwork exactly right, but it could even be worse – do you really want your boss to know you’ve had an abortion, when a new, more hostile boss could come in at any moment and make your life hell whether it’s legal to do that or not?

Department of Education agrees to cancel $6 billion in student loan debts of 200,000 folks who had sued the department alleging that their institutions of higher learning had misled them. This comes on the heels of our DOE’s decision to cancel all student loan debt for students who had attended the now-defunct-and-for-good-reason Corinthian Colleges – you remember, the for-profit college chain Marco Rubio called a “constituent” as if nobody Corinthian screwed over could have been his constituent? I can say little more, except that this is why we fight!

Finally, Arizona Republican Senate candidate/Trump endorsee Blake Masters has said we need to privatize Social Security, and the comment exists on video. Again, Sen. Kelly would be guilty of political malpractice if he didn’t run ten thousand ads about this. And between this and the fact that Mr. Masters has a face even a mother would punch, can the good citizens of Arizona please declare this guy’s chances of getting elected nil?

Action: concerning Medicare, COVID, workers, guns, pollution, and cruelty.

Long story short: tell our President to fix inflated Medicare premiums and use his Executive powers to fight the COVID pandemic, tell Delta’s CEO to do better by Delta flight attendants, tell Facebook to enforce its gun sale ban, tell our EPA to reject the proposed Pebble Mine project, and tell North Carolina to protect bears from being hunted at bear sanctuaries. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to fix inflated Medicare premiums by rebating overcharges back to seniors. You may recall the issue: Medicare raised its premiums by 15%, the biggest hike in history, largely due to their decision to cover a very unproven and very expensive Alzheimer’s drug; now that Medicare has (under popular pressure, probably including yours) reversed course and will only cover the drug when used in clinical trials, the price hike ain’t necessary. So they should give the money back! They’re claiming it’s too hard, but how hard it is to issue rebate checks? They have no damn excuse and we shouldn’t tolerate it.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to use the powers Congress has already granted him to keep fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Yes, Congress should have already approved another COVID package, but our President sure ain’t helpless — he can use the Defense Production Act to manufacture more Paxlovid, for example, or he can use "march-in" rights to break through the corporate stranglehold on vaccine patents so that more folks worldwide can get the vaccine (more folks worldwide getting vaccinated, of course, means less COVID for us in the future). And those aren’t the only things he can do! He’ll do nothing, of course, if we don’t get on him about it.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Delta’s CEO that you support Delta flight attendants’ efforts to unionize. They’re the only flight attendants who haven’t unionized yet — which may well be why Delta flight attendants have to put up with staffing cuts and forced overtime and illegal shifts and their bosses changing their schedule without notice, sometimes after you’ve already flown a thousand miles and were kinda counting on getting home to pick up your kids from day care. Naturally Delta has responded to the workers’ wishes not by trying to fix the problems, but by trying to stop them from forming a union. If Delta won’t learn, we’ll have to learn ‘em.

Free Press helps you tell Facebook to actually enforce its rules banning gun sales on Facebook pages. Hey, it’s their rule! And currently you have to break that rule 10 times before they even look in your direction, and by then, the kid who could’ve cured cancer might be dead in a bloody heap in his biology class. Facebook also lets folks post “calls to arms” on its site, because free speech I guess, even though demanding that everyone actually take up weapons for your cause isn’t necessarily First Amendment-protected speech. Telling everyone to tell Facebook to actually enforce its own rules and stop actively making the world a worse place? I’m pretty sure that’s First Amendment-protected. And necessary!

Environmental Action helps you tell our EPA to protect Alaska’s Bristol Bay from the notorious Pebble Mine project. Yes, it still walks, despite all the head shots we’ve given it! And not just us, either — even Scott Pruitt’s EPA was none too eager to rubber-stamp copper mining in the Bristol Bay, home to (among other things) the last great wild salmon fishery employing tens of thousands of good Alaskans. And plenty of potential financiers have pulled their support from Pebble Mine as well. And when all that happens, some too-rich dude will stillsay no one likes it, so I’ll make a killing off it! Sadly, that won’t be the only killing going on if our EPA lets this project proceed.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell North Carolina legislators to ban killing bears in bear sanctuaries. Yes, our world is so sick, immoral, and decadent that we have to tell legislators to do that, lest some too-rich dude come along and threaten sanctuary workers’ jobs if they don’t let him bag a trophy. Thinking maybe this was a workaround for a population-control issue at sanctuaries? If so, you were giving the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission too much credit! The Commission said it was about letting hunters hunt more, and also about bear-human conflicts later resolved by (get this) bear-proofing food lockers! Like I said, sick, immoral, and decadent — unless we fight.

Around the table: how to defeat evil, part 355.

Durango, CO mobile home residents band together to fight off a bankster corporation trying to buy the land out from under them — and win. Problem: if you own a mobile home, you may not own the land underneath it, so banksters are buying up those lands in order to extract usurious rents from folks whose homes (despite the name “mobile”) are actually very hard to move. A big help came in the form of a recently-passed Colorado state law mandating that corporations that own trailer park land and want to sell it have to give the mobile home owners a chance to buy it. Other entities (the Colorado Coalition of Manufactured Home Owners, Resident Owned Communities USA, the Elevation Community Land Trust) also help these folks keep their homes where they are.

Congress has flubbed an opportunity to address shipping monopolies in its ocean shipping reform bill, as our House has decided to accept a weaker Senate version of the bill in order to get something done. The Senate bill would still do a considerable amount of good, but I nonetheless feel compelled to ask: is this how Amy Klobuchar casts herself as a “maverick”? There was a good amount of mavericky buzz around her Presidential candidacy for a few weeks in 2020, after all. But like Kyrsten Sinema, she appears not to have learned that a real maverick bucks the elites and supports the people, not the other way around.

Far too many people are asking how something like D.A. Chesa Boudin’s recall could happen in a place as liberal as San Francisco. The article makes some good points — for example, that right-wing big money donors retain a lot of power in California even if they don’t actually win very many elections — but maybe San Francisco just isn’t that liberal! Only libertarian-or-worse tech bros can even afford to live there now! Seriously, though, if Democratic politicians really want to reform our criminal justice system so that it’s not all punish-punish-punish all the time, they need to brand Republican politicians (but not regular Americans!) as hysterical when they whine about crime, and they need to brand their own solutions as “common sense." It’d also help if they’d remind everyone that crime might be up in 2021 over 2020 because in 2020 we were all afraid we were going to die if we even went outside.

Ho hum, Chicago Housing Authority leases out land intended for low-income housing to billionaire soccer owner instead because of course they did. People don’t still argue that sports practice facilities and training offices stimulate our economy, do they? Because helping people find a place to live actually stimulates economies! People who have places to live tend to put down roots and spend money locally; billionaire soccer team owners, on the other hand, hoard their assets and live off of low-interest loans, neither one of which gives you the bang for your buck that helping people find a place to live does. Right-wingers will call that “liberal math,” but I’ll call it common sense. I’ll also call it common sense that if you say you’re going to make apartments livable again, you ought to do it, rather than just sit on it or give it to some big-box retailer.

Chris Brooks at In These Times describes “How Amazon and Starbucks Workers Are Upending the Organizing Rules.” What the labor establishment used to do in a painstaking, incremental manner — and boy has “painstaking and incremental” looked like stagnation for many years, amirite? — today’s young organizers are doing a lot more quickly, and though Mr. Brooks doesn’t discuss it, I can’t help but think the pandemic helped that along, not just by reminding us that life is short, but by giving workers space to look at what they put up with just to have a nickel and a nail to rub together. When they write the history of the 20th and 21st centuries, they'll say unions went dormant in the '80s not just because Ronald Reagan was willing to bury them, but because the unions themselves got ossified, and only new blood could revive them.

Finally, is calling Generation X the “Trumpiest” generation, as Politico does with flimsy anecdotes and even flimsier evidence, the stupidest thing ever said? OK, your average Republican politician says The Stupidest Thing Evah pretty much daily, but how does anyone forget that Generation X’s parents are really the Trumpiest generation? Of course, expanding the definition of “Generation X” so that it also includes the last 10 years of Baby Boomers sure does help you if you’re out to say “Gen X is TEH TRUMPIESTZ!!!!” It also helps to exclude non-whites from your definition of “Generation X.” Seriously, this couldn’t have all just been lazy argument, could it? I’m more likely to suspect malice than mere stupidity these days — and I’m also more likely to describe “just say something provocative” as malice.

Around the table: more thoughts about how bad people kill good ideas.

Researchers in Liberia find that offering a small amount of cash and eight weeks of behavioral therapy to folks at risk of committing crimes actually reduces crime, and now that experiment is coming to Chicago. Although the Chicago program offers job training in place of cash, this is still exactly the kind of thing right-wingers will easily lie about — as opposed to all the things they labor absurdly to lie about now, of course — because we can all imagine a lot of Americans saying well-where’s-mine, as well as what’s-next-giving-them-drugs? and of course so-we’re-giving-crooks-therapy-now? Here’s the thing, though: you can always respond "well, more cops and more guns sure ain’t doing the job, so how about we try something that works?"

When I hear that some 44% of Republicans think mass shootings are just the price of freedom in America, I find that maps pretty well onto my supposition that about a quarter of the American electorate is batshit crazy. These Republicans are just doing what their thought leaders tell them, but it’s still a sad statement, and dare I say an un-American one. I mean, what kind of can-do American just gives up at the thought of mass murders of children? Also, the 56% who don’t believe mass shootings are "just the price of freedom" will still almost certainly vote for insane Republicans just because they're not Democrats, and then guess what? Nothing will get done.

Ever wonder why you don’t remember your own birth or all the milestones (first words, learning to walk) your parents never shut up about? Vanessa LoBue at The Conversation explores the nature of infant memories. Long story short: babies do form memories from the start — they recognize their mother almost right away and remember more faces as the months go on — but they don’t form (or can’t retrieve) autobiographical memories, or stories about themselves, until they’re 2 or 3, possibly because they don’t use language until about that time, or possibly because the hippocampus isn’t fully developed yet.

Again we hear that Social Security will pay all of its planned benefits through 2035, and again our "liberal" media covers this as a catastrophic event, with no apparent memory of the time they said Social Security would be tapped out in 2016, for example. I say "apparent" memory because I actually doubt they really don’t remember; I think they just gin up hysteria about Social Security because it grabs eyeballs and makes them money. I’ll give our "liberal" media some credit for admitting that raising the payroll cap is a way of strengthening Social Security (though I’ll give liberal blogger Atrios more credit for that!), but all these sky-is-falling predictions about pension plans never take into account that the economy grows most of the time.

Starbucks closes an Ithaca, NY store that had unionized, leading the newly-unemployed workers to call for a boycott. I've wondered why Starbucks hadn’t done this already — remember how quickly Walmart closed the Quebec store that unionized in 2007? — but with over 100 stores unionizing, I think Starbucks actually might have acted too late. And anyway, the bigger story here is that the workers at this Ithaca Starbucks went on strike in April after discovering a clogged, maggot-ridden grease trap one morning that management wouldn’t do anything about when informed. Now management is "doing something" by closing the store! That’s not very can-do of them, though, is it? After all, maggots and grease aren’t forever.

Finally, Dan Pfeiffer confronts the question "Why Do Democrats Suck at Messaging?" If you’re like me, though, you already know the answer: as with the song "Why Hip Hop Sucks in ’96," it's the money — as in "big campaign donors pay people to suck at messaging and keep Republicans in office which keeps campaign donations coming, rinse, repeat." Thus the sight of Dan Pfeiffer talking to people with money about this question is truly absurd — I mean, he’s a smart dude, so I don’t get why he doesn’t get how he comes off there. He makes a few good points, but if you don’t start with how big campaign donors infect both parties, you’re not going to get anywhere.

Action: concerning pollution, labor, corruption, conservation, and education.

Long story short: tell our EPA to enact vigorous cross-state pollution rules, tell Dollar General bosses to treat their workers fairly, tell New York’s Governor to keep the Manhattan D.A.’s moribund Trump investigation going, and tell our government to protect the Castner Mountain Range and move more vigorously against predatory for-profit colleges. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Penn Environment helps you tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous cross-state air pollution rule possible. I did not know they call this rule the "Good Neighbor Plan"! That’s actually pretty good messaging — which means, of course, that Democratic politicians just about never describe it that way! Nothing prevents us from describing it that way, of course — of describing states that limit the pollution that travels with the wind to other states as "good neighbors." And the politicians who would fight that rule, and doom kids in downwind states to higher levels of asthma and cancer? OK, I’d call them a lot of things, but "bad neighbors" would do.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Dollar General bosses to start paying their workers fairly and ensure they have safe workplaces. It’s not so damn much to ask! Especially since Dollar General’s CEO makes 934 times what the average Dollar General worker makes! And to those who'd say but what will happen to the low prices we all love at Dollar General? I would respond refer, again, to the CEO making 934 times what the average worker makes! Too many working folks worry about other working folks making "too much" money at their favorite shopping spots. They gotta fight the real enemy.

Daily Kos helps you tell New York Governor Hochul to transfer the now-dormant Manhattan D.A. office’s investigation into the Trump Organization either to the state Attorney General’s office or to another District Attorney within New York state. If the Trump axis pressured Alvin Bragg into abandoning the investigation, then the people need another weapon to hold the powerful accountable. Besides, state courts have already established that she has the legal authority to do it, so she ought to do it. It might help bring law and order back to our great nation.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell President Biden to designate the Castner Mountain Range around the El Paso area as a National Monument. The Castner Range has been a pretty good flood control tool over the years — what’s that? You haven’t heard of much flooding in that area? Well, now you know why! — and its proximity to the Franklin Mountains State Park means we’ll be able to protect a much larger area from pollution. And not for nothing, but the Castner Range is home to numerous sites of archaeological and religious significance to Native American folks; a big part of being conservative, it would seem to me, is conserving areas of historical importance, not rubber-stamping any and all development.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell the Biden Administration to move vigorously against predatory for-profits colleges. The Biden Administration has lately forgiven a few billion dollars in outstanding federally-banked loans used at Corinthian Colleges, and that’s a big deal, but there are other predatory for-profit colleges using federal loans to bilk college students, so our Administration has more work to do. Our government’s record on this hasn’t been good for over a decade now: the Obama Administration enabled too much of this crap, and the Trump Administration enabled far more of it; now we need justice.

Action: concerning free speech, voting rights, oil, corporate NDAs, and OAN.

Long story short: tell Russia to stop oppressing protestors, tell PA state legislators to stop wasting taxpayer money "investigating" the 2020 election, tell California to stop buying Amazon rainforest oil, tell state governments to stop allowing NDAs between legislators and corporations, and tell Verizon to drop OAN like a hot potato. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the Russian government to stop oppressing anti-war protestors. Russia has arrested some 15,000 of them, and this is Vladimir Putin's Russia, not Anton Chekhov's Russia, so "arrest" might well equal "never see the outside world again." Russia has charged some of these protestors with "disseminating false information" and "discrediting" Russian soldiers, which are just the kinds of "charges" snowflake governments come up with when they can't win arguments on the merits. Do we expect Russia to wilt under our express will? No, we do not -- me, I expect them to laugh at us. But do we consider it our duty as human beings to express our will anyway? Yes, we do.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators to stop wasting taxpayer money (i.e., your money) on their sham election "review." They've spent nearly half a mil on this, and guess what they've found? Nothing, of course, in over a year and a half, and they've just extended the "review" for another six months, because that'll make the difference. But no matter how much they look, they ain't gonna find what ain't there. Of course, they don't expect to -- they're merely creating drama. Think maybe good Pennsylvania taxpayers might be sick of their legislature using their money to create more drama? Reader, I think so.

Stand.Earth helps you tell the state of California to stop buying oil from the Amazon rainforest. For a whole lot of reasons! Oil drilling in the Amazon threatens the world's greatest climate change fighter -- they don't call the Amazon rainforest the "lungs of the Earth" for nothing! -- plus it also threatens the numerous Indigenous folks who live there and who spend far too much of their time fighting developers. Don't believe the hype that "gas costs too much in California so we need to get it anywhere we can." That's how evil gets you -- by exploiting you when you're not at your best. They'd do much better expanding public transportation -- yes, even in California! -- so they can be stronger the next time evil strikes.

More Perfect Union helps you tell state governments to stop allowing big corporations to force state legislators to sign non-disclosure agreements. I've been talking about this issue perhaps too abstractly, though I still find the theoretical problem -- of forcing state legislators not to talk about issue with their bosses, their constituents! -- to be rather comical. Fact is, Amazon (the big corporation, this time) has been forcing non-disclosure agreements on politicians in places they've tried to build warehouses. What could Amazon be trying to hide? Tax breaks they don't deserve, their awful record with COVID-19, their general hatred of unionized workers? Whatever it is, folks deserve to know.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell Verizon to stop carrying the notorious One America News Network. DirecTV dumped them this past April, now it's everyone else's turn! How do you know OAN deserves oblivion? Because they sued Rachel Maddow for defamation after she called them "literally paid Russian propaganda" -- and lost. Meanwhile they're the defendant in at least one other defamation suit concerning the lies they spread about the 2020 election that Donald Trump lost by seven million votes. No, it's no "victory" for "free speech" if they still get to spew filth; nothing in our Constitution guarantees a paid platform for your free speech, only protection from your government oppressing you for your speech.

Around the table: in which someone actually proposes saddling all elections with an Electoral College.

This FactCheck article does a pretty good job summarizing our recent baby formula issues. I'm reminded that when you hear "should immigrant babies get formula before American babies?" that a better question would be: so babies don't deserve formula merely because they're immigrants? And if the answer is "well, not before our babies do," then ask why the Greatest Nation on Earth should have to choose. Marcus Aurelius would shake his head at all of that.

Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate wants to bring the Electoral College to Colorado statewide elections! Why a man would think "doing away with the popular vote for statewide elected officials" is a winning message is a bit of a mystery. If he were to somehow succeed in this nefarious plan, I can't say for sure our Supreme Court would strike it down, even though precedent commands it. Perhaps Sam Alito would say one-person-one-vote isn't a deeply-rooted enough right.

An anti-price-gouging bill aimed at oil corporations -- not the Windfall Profits Tax Act, but not a bad bill -- barely passed the House, with four House Democrats joining all Republicans in voting against it. Naturally Democrat anti-bill arguments were all hostage-taking: if we fight price-gouging, what will we do when we need more oil later? Why, you could argue against almost anything that way! If we put this CEO in jail for butchering his secretary and drinking her blood and eating the flesh from her bones, what'll we do when we need his leadership later? Of course, a truly great nation wouldn't need to answer that, because a truly great nation would train its people up into greatness. Clearly we've failed there with folks like Rep. Kathleen Rice, last heard helping to scuttle efforts to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

Hamilton Nolan at In These Times tells us that the Amazon Labor Union victory in Staten Island, NY, requires organizers to recognize that "all of the time unions spend arguing with one another over who has the right to organize which workers, in which industry, at which company is one gargantuan waste of time." You'd think unions would already have thought of that, being on the ropes for the last 40-odd years as the share of union workers in the economy has dwindles from around 33% to around 10%, but then being on the ropes against an economy that seems to grow more diabolical by the day may make you inclined to cling to what you've been doing and tell yourself you just need to do it harder. Still, as Mr. Nolan says, "(b)uilding multi-union coalitions requires unions to recognize the futility of arguing over jurisdiction, and instead do the opposite: combine forces and organize without freaking out over who gets to put their label on the end product."

When I read David Brooks telling us that liberals need to stop looking down on right-wingers and pretending that only they have a monopoly on understanding right and wrong, I am tempted to replace the word "liberal" with the word "right-winger" everywhere in that op-ed and guess what? It works about as well that way; liberals certainly have no monopoly on believing their way is the only way. David Brooks apparently didn't hear any right-wingers calling Iraq war opponents traitors 20 years ago, let alone right-wingers constantly calling liberals weak since time immemorial, and that's the kind of blind spot that'll never help you ingratiate yourself with your new Democrat friends. (And those of us who do not imagine a wall between what Mr. Brooks calls the "moral freedom" ethos and the "you are not your own" ethos won't be persuaded, or even enriched, by the last 36 paragraphs. We certainly won't be convinced that the conservative worldview's "existential()...crisis" is a recent phenomenon. That carcass has been stinking up the joint for years.)

Finally, a right-winger actually tells Congress, under oath, that "places like Washington, D.C." use fetuses to power street lamps. As with right-wing efforts to call everyone who doesn't beat up a gay person a "groomer," I think legal remedies already exist to redress such absurdities. Never mind that she actually said that under oath; anyone can pretend they thought what they said was true as far as they "knew." No, someone with standing to sue needs to sue her -- someone with decision-making power in the D.C. utility grid, perhaps? And no, her saying "places like Washington, D.C." won't give her wiggle room; everyone knows what she meant. Playing whack-a-mole with these lies won't save us, but getting the liars to pay in a court of law might.