Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning hurricanes and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fund FEMA and stop our government from making privatized Medicare plans the default option for new enrollees. 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 National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass immediate disaster funding. They're out of session right now, which is usually a good thing, but as you know, a Category 4 hurricane just slammed Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, and our Federal Emergency Management Agency (or FEMA) has run out of money after Congress stripped $10 billion in the last authorization bill. So, they need to get back to Washington, D.C. with a quickness and help good Americans again. And brook no stupidity about cutting school lunch funding or renewable energy funding to pay for more FEMA funding! We are not hostages in America!

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk not to let the nefarious Project 2025 impose its will on our Medicare benefits. That's right, there's nowhere that Project 2025 doesn't leave its trail of slime, and Project 2025 would (among other "reforms") make privatized Medicare Advantage plans the default option for new Medicare enrollees. If you've read all the news reports about Medicare Advantage plans denying care to our seniors – or, you know, if you're one of those seniors – you will want to get on the horn with your Congressfolk about this, before they decide no one will ever hold them accountable for their evil.

Action: concerning voting rights and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and expand (not repeal!) Medicare drug price negotiation. 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.

People Power United helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The first bill would standardize early and mail-in voting, ban gerrymandering, and force disclosure of big campaign donations, while the latter would give our government the power to investigate and end racist voting practices more vigorously and allow our Justice Department's ability to pre-clear voting law changes in any state or locality that has established a record of vote suppression. Who's against these bills? Self-serving Republicans, and approximately no one else. Must they win again? If we speak out in numbers they can't deny, they'll lose, and we'll win. It's that simple.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate prices for more drugs not fewer. Because "fewer" is the Republicans' preferred position, apparently! Many Republicans are actually running on repealing Medicare's ability to negotiate prices for a few drugs beginning in 2026. Taking such a position, in public, used to end political careers, but not in this sick, immoral, and decadent world; how do we begin to bring a sane, moral, and decent world back? By demanding that Medicare should be able to negotiate the price of any drug, on behalf of both seniors and taxpayers, since that's our tax money they're spending. If we speak out enough, our Congressfolk will heed our will.

Action: concerning Medicare privatization, workplace heat standards, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell New York City's mayor to stop forcing city employees onto Medicare Advantage, tell our Department of Labor to institute its proposed heat standard, and tell our government to reject Postal Service privatization. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Be a Hero helps you tell New York City Mayor Eric Adams to stop forcing city employee retirees to use Medicare Advantage instead of traditional Medicare. Because the only advantage to Medicare "Advantage" is that private health insurance executives make more money while denying more care – and, of course, siphoning off taxpayer funds that could have gone to traditional Medicare! Remember when they said Eric Adams was the future of the Democratic party? Well, this marks him as the same-old same-old. So let's fight him, and protect folks who paid into Medicare all their lives and deserve the best Medicare they can get.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Labor to implement its heat standard rule now. Why now, as fall is upon us? Because the next President might be a whiny, traitorous asshole who will shit all over this rule, just to please bosses who think being cruel to their workers is their "right"! Also too, in some parts of the country (i.e., the South), it's still pretty hot, and Southern workers could use all the help they can get. If you hear anyone say this rule will mainly help illegal immigrants, back away from them, slowly, and maybe stop talking to them. Even if that were true, which it’s not, no living being deserves to die of overwork and heatstroke. As civilized people, we should do better.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our government to reject any effort to privatize our Postal Service. Postmaster General DeJoy, who really needs to be fired and replaced with someone not-evil, has lately said, after he cut services, raised prices, and slashed jobs, that our Postal Service is in a "death spiral"! That is, of course, the nature of power in these times – take over something that works, fuck it all up with your incompetence and greed, and then position yourself as the "only person who can fix these problems." Come to think of it, I've just described the entire George W. Bush Administration. Want to be done with all of that stupidity? Then we've got to get to work.

Action: concerning high drug prices and Congressional corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to lower drug prices and stop playing the stock market. 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.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare drug price negotiation so that good Americans pay less for more drugs. Republicans in Congress have lately said, out loud, that they will repeal Medicare drug price negotiation if they win back the Presidency and both houses of Congress! How a candidate could say I will make you pay more for drugs and therefore probably make you die faster and expect that people will like him I don't know. Of course, so many seats are so gerrymandered that candidates can demand mass murder of foreigners and still win, and it sure doesn't help that Democrats never run ads about such things. Maybe they should. Maybe I should.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban themselves from owning stocks. What's that I hear? You will never get them to do something that will make them less money ha ha ha I snort at your naïveté? And yet quite a few Congressfolk – apparently even they listen to good Americans more than the cynical do! – have been proposing stock bans of varying strength these last few years, and though none have passed, that isn't a cue to throw up our hands and declare defeat, it's a cue to speak out louder. Congressfolk should never own or trade stock! It's an engraved invitation to corruption! Never let cynics tell you that you shouldn't bother doing the right thing. But remember, also, that many cynics (though not the professional ones, of course) guard painful wounds.

Action: concerning government spying, corporate taxes, and debt limit dramas.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect journalists from government spying, raise corporate taxes, and end all debt limit dramas forever. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell Sen. Schumer to bring the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (or PRESS) Act up for a vote. The PRESS Act already passed our House; it would forestall Project 2025's efforts to force journalists to disclose sources. Is there nowhere Project 2025 doesn't leave a trail of slime? And the PRESS Act would also protect ISPs and social media outlets; no matter how stupid or sensationalist our media seems to be, they still need protection from government spying, just as we do.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to cut corporate taxes. But we can also demand that they hike the corporate tax rate to 55%, as it was in the New Deal era, because that high tax rate forced corporations to spend money creating jobs and products. (Expenses aren't taxable profits, after all.) These days we pretend that handing out corporate welfare tax breaks does that, which is like giving kids cookies before they do their homework! If it doesn't work at home, why would it work in our economy?

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Debt Ceiling Reform Act, which would not only end the debt limit "crises" that right-wingers in Congress constantly manufacture, but would protect Social Security and Medicare from such crises. Sadly, we have to do that, because our House Speaker has called Social Security and Medicare "the greatest threat to our national security" (and not right-wing domestic terrorists? Interesting!). But really, enough hostage-taking! Enough drama!

Action: concerning paid sick leave and nutrition programs.

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning junk fees, marijuana convictions, and big pharma greed.

Long story short: tell our CFPB to end junk fees in the mortgage industry, tell your Governor to pardon all marijuana convictions, and tell big pharma corporations to stop suing Medicare over drug price negotiation. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Matt Stoller writes about the “credit bureau cartel” – we had 2000 credit bureaus in America as late as 1970, but now we have three, and they hamstring a lot of business in America, though not as much, even, as FICO scores do, since FICO has a monopoly over credit scoring so it jacks up mortgage-related fees at will. That’s why their profits are soaring while interest rates are still so high that fewer people want to buy houses! Our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has proposed capping junk fees relating to the mortgage industry, and you can leave a comment with them here.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Governor to pardon all marijuana convictions. A lot of right-wing Governors will resist, of course, but not all of them, since they can put their finger to the wind as well as anyone else and find that folks just aren’t as tight-ass about pot as they used to be. And marijuana is legal in enough places now that it seems cruel to keep such folks in jail, plus a pot conviction can doom you to a lifetime of rejection from employers and lenders and renters. Also too, we know that the right concocted the “War on Drugs” to better oppress Black people. Don’t take my word for it: take John Ehrlichman’s!

Finally, Health Care Voices helps you tell big pharma corporations to stop trying to sue Medicare to stop Medicare drug-price negotiation. Yes, big pharma corporations are still suing Medicare so they can force good Americans to pay usurious prices for medications forever, though, seriously, imagine taking that to the Pearly Gates! Yes, St. Peter, I did all I could to make sure people paid more for their life-saving medications, and I bankrupted a lot of people doing that! Always remember when professional haters claim you’re “just jealous” of rich folks that you actually have a lot to be angry about!

Action: concerning Social Security, clean air and water, and intravenous fertilization.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security by taxing the rich more, and pass the End Polluter Welfare Act and the Right to IVF Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect and expand Social Security by taxing the rich a lot harder than we’re doing now. Everything your right-wing uncle loves about America – good-paying jobs and benefits for working families, a neighborhood where you didn’t have to lock your doors at night – came about not because “we let big business innovate” but because we taxed the fuck out of the rich in the middle of the 20th century. And your right-wing uncle loves Social Security, too, even if he professes to “hate” socialism – and we could start taxing income over $168,600 into the system and make it pay out more in benefits. So how about we do all of that?

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Polluter Welfare Act and thus end tax breaks for oil and gas-producing corporations. Your right-wing uncle hates people on welfare, right? Then why doesn’t he hate big oil and gas corporations that get over $17 billion annually in corporate welfare from the taxpayer (including him!) when the three biggest oil and gas corporations in America made $85 billion in profits in 2023? Surely your right-wing uncle can think of better things to do with $17 billion – like, you know, fund infrastructure projects that create jobs. Your right-wing uncle should call his Congressfolk! But we should also do that.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Right to IVF Act, which would (as its title suggests!) protect intra-venous fertilization (or IVF) by establishing a statutory right to IVF access and compelling Medicare, Medicaid, and health insurance corporations to cover IVF. You kinda have to do both, after all – as we are experiencing far more than we deserve right now, a “right” to health care means very little if you can’t actually afford health care. We’d be a lot better off if Medicare provided all of our health insurance needs; then we could apply pressure to keep costs down a lot more effectively than we can now. But this bill will do some good, so we should pass it.

Action: concerning Social Security, public safety, and endangered species.

Long story short: tell the Washington Post to cover Social Security better, tell local governments to start embracing public safety departments over police departments, and tell our government to protect the wildlife in the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Social Security Works helps you tell the Washington Post to correct its reporting about the recent Social Security Trustees report. At the beginning of the week the Post said “Social Security and Medicare will run out of money in just over a decade,” though at the end of the week the Post said “Social Security will not run out of money” as long as payroll taxes come in; I guess that’s better in the aggregate than their normal one-sided hysteria, but they still haven’t corrected the original report, so it’s not good enough, and we’ll never get “good enough” unless we demand it.

VERA helps you tell local governments to embrace the civilian-led public safety department model over the police department model like the one that’s working in Albuquerque. We too often treat police officers like Swiss Army knives, demanding they be armed warriors and social workers at the same time when no one can do such a thing, and then after another incident of preventable police brutality, we say just get them more training when we would do better limiting their tasks to serving warrants and making arrests. No, they shouldn’t even be getting kittens out of trees! We have animal welfare workers for that!

Finally, the Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge from a proposed titanium oxide mine. Our laws grant our government the ability to reserve water for the various species living in the Refuge (which include at least three species protected by the Endangered Species Act), but the proposed mine would threaten water levels there, meaning it would threaten the wildlife there. Brook no chest-beating about how nobody can make any money because of onerous regulations. This is America, the can-do country; if we can’t do things the right way, we deserve annihilation.

Around the table: in which Volkswagen workers have a much better week than Tesla owners.

Good news, everyone: Volkswagen workers at that corporation's Chattanooga, TN plant have voted to join the United Auto Workers union. Workers have lost two elections at this plant before (in 2014 and 2019), but won this one; perhaps that pandemic has reset good Americans’ minds in more ways than one. Of course Tennessee’s politicos opposed unionization; dig Gov. Lee’s blathering that “(w)e’ve seen plants close that made the decision to go union so I hope that’s not what happens here.” Nice job; be a shame if something happened to it! What’s going to happen to it now? Better pay, better benefits, and better working conditions, that’s what. I am pleased to see that right-wing hostage-taking doesn’t always work.

Bad news, everyone: some 30,000 good Americans died waiting for their Social Security disability status to be determined. Did they all die from bureaucratic negligence? Of course not. But one person dying from bureaucratic negligence is too many, and the solution isn’t what right-wingers say it is – LET TEH MARKETZ DO ITZ!!!!!, when ha ha, big corporations will screw you over far worse than your government ever will. No, the solution is to process these claims a lot more quickly, which means more staffing and therefore more funding. Which, no, does not mean more taxes for you. We’ve got millionaires and billionaires we could be taxing a lot harder.

Emergency rooms in deep-red states have been turning pregnant women away since the fall of Roe v. Wade – despite the Emergency Treatment and Medical Labor Act (or EMTALA) making such negligence illegal. Some mothers have lost their babies because of it, which nobody could have predicted! Of course our Supreme Court will strike down EMTALA when they get around to it, intoning, again, that “abortion should be left to the states.” And I’m sure they’ll also be very sorry for all the pain that causes, but everyone who prizes ideology above people says that, and I’m old enough to be very tired of it.

Starbucks fired baristas who were organizing a union, our National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) ordered them to rehire them – and now Starbucks wants our Supreme Court to overturn that decision. Starbucks’s case is absolute horsedoodle – they actually claim they didn’t intimidate the workers because the store unionized anyway and that giving them their jobs back somehow constitutes an “extraordinary remedy.” Sadly, I can see this Court agreeing, and delivering a real pretzel-logic argument to do so. On the bright side, no matter what our Court does, all the money Starbucks lost won’t come back.

Our “liberal” media needs to be a lot less credulous when covering Donald Trump’s so-called “middle-class tax cut” proposals. Increasing the standard deduction and cutting marginal rates for “middle-class households” would be good policy, of course, but Jesus Mary and Joseph a payroll tax cut is not a “middle-class tax cut,” but a big corporate tax cut designed to hurt middle-class folks later in life, when Social Security and Medicare aren’t there for them because the payroll taxes that fund it never got collected. And you know any middle-class tax cuts will only come with another big tax-cut-for-the-rich.

Finally, buried in this account of the massive 4,000 Tesla cybertruck recall because of accelerator pedals that stick to the floor is the news that “Tesla has reportedly stopped development of a cheaper vehicle option so it can focus on self-driving robotaxis.” And this is why we don’t “leave it to the free market” – given the choice of serving the public with cheaper cars and indulging their vanity, the Boldest and Brightest Entrepreneurs who run the “free” market will choose vanity every time, particularly if they’re already so rich that they’ll escape accountability for every evil they do.

Action: concerning voting rights and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and reject any legislation that would create a “fiscal commission” for Social Security and/or Medicare. 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 the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This bill would restore our Justice Department’s ability to pre-clear election law changes from any state or locality that has demonstrated a pattern of vote suppression – which answers our Supreme Court’s ruling that the old pre-clearance formula from the Voting Rights Act discriminated against Southern states. That’s a little like saying laws against burglary discriminate against burglars! Anyway, this bill would actually improve on the Voting Rights Act, so Congress should pass it.

The Alliance for Retired Americans helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any “fiscal commission” legislation for Social Security and/or Medicare. Want to make Social Security better? Start taxing income above $168,600 and then hike benefits! Want to make Medicare better? Tax corporations what they’re paying for private health insurance and then admit all Americans into the system! All of that is much better, than empowering some special “commission” to cut our benefits without the scrutiny of debate. If that was such a great idea, they wouldn’t have to do it while we’re not looking!

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning government shutdowns, price-gouging, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end government shutdowns, fight corporate price-gouging, and protect voting rights. 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.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to end government shutdowns forever, by passing laws eliminating the debt ceiling and authorizing spending to continue at current levels whenever Congress can’t agree on continuing resolutions. Seriously, the only people in America who want government shutdowns are people who worship chaos and drama, and they shouldn’t get all the say about everything, or very much of anything, frankly. And stamping feet and preening about “runaway government debt” in order to cut Social Security and Medicare? Folks who do that should have their own circle of hell.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Shrinkflation Prevention Act, while Inequality Media helps you tell them to pass the Price Gouging Prevention Act. What’s the main cause of inflation? Not supply chain issues, not stimulus checks, not higher wages for workers – it’s corporate greed simple and plain, and these bills would make it harder for corporations to be greedy, as far as giving you less for your buck (the former bill) or raising prices higher than inflation or using inflation as a cover to raise prices when no other cost pressures would cause that (the latter bill). Ignore free market votaries; people matter more than ideology.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The former bill would advance a slew of reforms nationally, including same-day voter registration and fairer redistricting, while the latter bill would allow our Justice Department to strike down new vote restriction laws from any state or locality that has demonstrated a history of vote suppression. These bills would help more good Americans vote; that may not be the Republicans’ goal, but so what? Duty is duty, right is right, and wrong is wrong.

Penny rants for March 11, 2024.

Lucian Truscott IV at Salon informs us that the New York Times/Siena poll showing Donald Trump leading Joe Biden 52-48, ah, has problems, chief among them that its rural voters sample is nearly twice as large as the percentage of rural voters who voted in 2020. But a lot’s changed since then, you say? Sure – Roe v. Wade is dead, Donald Trump attempted a coup, inflation went way up and then came way down and more folks talk about the link between high corporate profits and inflation than they did before, and none of these events should spark rural voters to turn out like that for Donald Trump. And while I’d love to believe that pollsters are simply overcompensating for underestimating Republican turnout in 2020, everyone knows that Americans pay too much attention to polling, so they should be more aware of the effects of their actions. And anyway I don’t think they’re overcompensating – I think they’re trying to create a Trump-Will-Win narrative because that’s what they want. They remember what their ratings were like, and you think Donald Trump will go after monopolies the way Joe Biden has? No, you do not.

Perhaps realizing that a distant third-place finish in this year’s Arizona Senate race will more likely hurt the Republican Senate candidate than the Democratic one, putatively independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has announced she won’t run for re-election this year, explaining: “(c)ompromise is a dirty word. We’ve arrived at that crossroad, and we chose anger and division. I believe in my approach, but it’s not what America wants right now.” Well, no – America doesn’t want her “bipartisan” approach, in which “bipartisanship” means “Democrats giving in to Republicans on everything.” And remember that she, and she alone, nixed higher taxes on the rich in 2021 – “getting to yes” with fellow Democrats being far less important to her, apparently, than “getting to yes” with Republicans – and that she also delayed Medicare drug price negotiation for another year, extracting continued lower taxes for hedge fund managers in exchange for finally letting it happen. So she gave in to banksters, and she let the rich get more tax relief than working families, who also got less relief from high health care costs – who on Earth wants that sort of “compromise”?

Thieves in the Temple will take the rest of the week off, so everyone have a great week, and Republicans: no shenanigans.

Action: concerning voting rights, health care, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect voting rights, let states create their own Medicare-for-All-style health insurance systems, and reject any Social Security/Medicare benefit-cutting commission. 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 the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would give our Justice Department the authority to pre-clear voting rights law changes from any state or locality with a demonstrated history of vote suppression. That would replace the section of the Voting Rights Act our Supreme Court struck down because it supposedly discriminated against Southern states (which then instituted a slew of voting restrictions the next day, which nobody could have predicted!). With this bill, we could act against any state or locality, anywhere in our country, that discriminates for real against certain voters. And that’s a good work worth doing, so we should tell our Congressfolk to do it.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the State-Based Universal Health Care Act. Since our federal government won’t pass Medicare-for-All legislation, perhaps we can get a state to do it; indeed, Canada’s Medicare-for-All-style system started in Saskatchewan. Vermont passed such a system last decade, but then-Democratic Gov. Shumlin abandoned it, citing the “cost.” I’ve gone over how easily we could pay for it many times, but Mr. Shumlin was really just trying to support Hillary Clinton at Bernie Sanders’s expense. This story has a happy ending! Hillary Clinton lost, and Vermonters have sent a Republican to the Governor’s office four times since then! Maybe serving the people is the way to keep power?

Finally, the Alliance for Retired Americans helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose any fiscal commission legislation concerning Social Security and/or Medicare. Because it’s just their way of trying to cut your earned Social Security and/or Medicare benefits without subjecting themselves to very much public scrutiny! Think of that the next time some knuckle-dragger on TV says we have to have the “courage” to cut these benefits, because hiding behind a commission that fast-tracks legislation without proper debate is the very definition of cowardice. If they were so “courageous,” they’d do it through the legislative process we’ve been using for centuries! I’d never want someone like that in my foxhole, and I hope you wouldn't, either.

Action: concerning voting rights, Medicare privatization, and IRS funding.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to restore voting rights, prevent Medicare privatization, and fund our IRS. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore voting rights in America, by passing both the Freedom to Vote Act (which would expand early voting and automatic voter registration, among other good works) and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (which would allow our Justice Department to pre-clear voting law changes from any state or locality which establishes a record of vote suppression, not just Southern ones). If Congress passes these bills, more good Americans will be able to vote – which politicians often don’t like, but they don’t get all the say around here.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any and all efforts to privatize Medicare. Privatized Medicare Advantage has become more and more a yoke around Medicare’s neck over the last few years – or maybe we’re just more aware of it – but we could take all the corporate welfare we’re handing out to private health insurance corporations so they can do a worse job serving seniors than Medicare does, and we could, you know, improve Medicare. I know, I know, insisting that government do things right is so uncool. Call me old-fashioned, then. I’ve been called much worse.

Finally, Demand Progress also helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any and all attempts to cut IRS funding. Right-wingers love asking aren’t you afraid if our IRS has more money, they’ll come after you? But what a stupid question! When our IRS was underfunded, they were only going after working families, because working families can’t hire lawyers as easily as rich folks and corporations can. Now, with our IRS funded much better thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, rich folks and corporations are starting to feel the heat – and Republicans have made cutting IRS funding their line in the sand! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Republicans only care about tax cuts for the rich.

Action: concerning Medicare, monopolies, and stock buybacks.

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning education, taxes, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Counselors Not Criminalization Act, reject attacks on IRS Direct File, and reject attempts to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Counselors Not Criminalization Act, which would, as its title suggests, shift us away from putting more cops in classrooms and toward putting more counselors and nurses on school staffs. Because “more cops” is not the solution to every problem! In fact, it’s kinda insulting to the cops, to constantly put them in situations they can’t handle, rather than the situations they can handle. And personal to folks who tell jokes at the mere mention of “therapy” for children: you’re sad people, and you don’t get all the say about everything.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject Republican attacks on our IRS’s direct file system. Yes, Republicans even hate that! It’s like they hate anything that might make our lives a little easier! Or, more precisely, they care more about big tax preparing corporations skimming money off you than they care about you saving money. Most good Americans don’t have the kind of hifalutin investments that require the assistance of a tax professional, and most civilized nations don’t make their citizens pay to do their taxes, so I think our course of action is clear here.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to create a commission designed to cut your earned Social Security and/or Medicare benefits. Because you didn’t just fight for them – you also worked for them and paid into them! And now they want to create a kind of "death panel" so they can cut benefits “behind closed doors” and force a quick vote on them without any scrutiny by the American people. Why? Because we would torch-and-pitchfork that shit right quick, that’s why! If we let them know we’re on to them and we’ll stop them from taking what’s ours, then we won’t have to resort to torches and pitchforks.

Action: concerning health care and working families.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject Medicare privatization, reject nationwide abortion bans, and reject cuts to services working families need and use. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

Action: concerning monopolies, Social Security, and Medicare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fund our Justice Department’s Antitrust division properly, and tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to destroy Social Security and Medicare. 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: as we speak, Congressional Republicans aim to defund the Biden Administration’s antitrust-fighting efforts, mainly by reducing the Justice Department’s Antitrust division. The end result: our government won’t be able to go after as many monopolists – which right-wingers largely like, since it gives corporations more power to distort markets and hurt good Americans with slashed jobs, higher prices, and worse service. So we need to call our Reps and Senators and tell them to increase the Antitrust Division’s budget, not cut it. Call them regardless of their party, because they all need to hear it.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to create a “fiscal commission” to cut Social Security benefits. Because we already know that’s what it’ll do! We know that because they don’t want to put Social Security benefit cuts before the people, because the people would reject it! So they’re trying to create a “death panel” – gosh, I wish I’d come up with that! – that’ll cut Social Security benefits “behind closed doors” and force Congressfolk to vote on it without even debating it. Sounds like fascism? That’s because it is fascism. And we should always fight fascism.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort at privatizing Medicare. That’s any effort, including the effort Republicans would undertake if Donald Trump becomes President again: automatically enrolling all new Medicare recipients in Medicare Advantage. You know what that means: seniors (and taxpayers!) paying more money for worse care. At least with your government, you can throw the bums out if they screw Medicare up; just try that with these billion-dollar private insurance corporations! So, how about we not turn Medicare into a corporate welfare program?

Around the table: now with one-third good news!

Good news, everyone: our FCC has ruled that AI-generated robocalls are illegal, using authority granted by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which prohibits (among other evils) using artificial voices in solicitations. An AI-generated voice surely is artificial no matter how much it sounds like your mother, or Joe Biden. But every silver lining has a dark cloud: our FCC has assessed over $200 million in TCPA-related fines since 2015, but as of 2019 (when the Wall Street Journal looked into the matter) had collected less than $7,000 of that amount.

Also good news: our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) has told Medicare Advantage insurers they can’t use AI or algorithms to deny coverage to seniors. You’ll read the article and you’ll understand exactly how bad this problem is, but here’s another problem: that Medicare Advantage exists at all! It’s part of right-wingers’ plans to privatize everything, when you’re much better off dealing with your government than you are dealing with a private health insurance corporation that makes money mainly by denying coverage.

Our Congressional Budget Office (or CBO) now estimates that expanded IRS funding will bring in even more tax revenue; they previously predicted our IRS would bring in another $18 billion annually, but now they say the number could be as high as $81 billion, if Congress doesn’t slash their funding (even more) before then. Both numbers would improve matters in America, but please, right-wingers, keep making “defunding the police” your only aim. (Yes, “defunding the police” describes the Republican stance on IRS funding accurately. IRS agents are law enforcement, after all, and anyone who says they’re afraid of them but not regular cops is just lying to you.)

Actual climate scientist wins over $1 million in defamation suit against two right-wingers. The first compared him to Jerry Sandusky, “except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data” – I wonder how many times he delivered that line to his friends and family before he got a laugh – while the second merely called his research “fraudulent,” which I guess is why the second is on the hook for almost all of the money. It’s a good thing scientists can actually prove their research isn't fraudulent – although sooner or later a right-wing judge will just come out and say that facts don’t matter anymore.

FactCheck.org gamely tries to “unravel() misinformation” about the now dead-in-the-water immigration bill. You remember when Sen. Rick Scott (E-FL) misrepresented Medicare drug price negotiation as a benefit cut? Republican objections to the immigration bill are about that stupid. And they’ve made Sen. James Lankford (E-OK) look like a moderate, which he is most definitely not. On the plus side, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) finally said some mean things about Republicans on TV. Gosh, she might be running for re-election after all.

Finally, ex-Republican Stuart Stevens at the New Republic says Democrats should “Just Say” that “Biden Has Been a Great President, and while he is the best President of my lifetime, “great” is a bridge too far for me. I did notice him turning questions about his memory around in order to trumpet his achievements, and I’d like to see him do more of that. As I said long ago, dumping on Trump only takes you so far – and, sadly, I think this remains true even after he tried to overthrow our government. (As an aside, could it be that Joe Biden wanted the special counsel investigating his handling of classified documents to think he was a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”? Hey, pretending to be stupid always works for Republicans, so why not for him?)

Action: concerning health care and Social Security.

Long story short: tell an Ohio prosecutor to drop charges against a woman who miscarried, and tell your Congressfolk to reject any “fiscal commission” for Social Security and preserve the PEPFAR 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.

Moms Rising helps you tell Trumbull County, OH’s prosecutor to drop abuse-of-corpse charges against Brittany Watts. Because she miscarried and then tried to flush the corpse down the toilet, and folks who think that’s funny ought to think about all the times they handled a tragic situation badly. Used to be this kind of thing – charging a woman with a crime because she miscarried – only happened in other countries, but not now! Ha ha ha the future is so awesome! Seriously, miscarriage is a tragedy, not a crime, and folks who think mothers routinely pretend an abortion is a miscarriage must all have penises. Or be them.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any legislation that includes a “fiscal commission” aiming to cut Social Security and medicare benefits. That’s what these “behind closed doors” commissions aim to do, and they need to be “behind closed doors” because you could never cut Social Security in the light of day. Some folks call a Social Security “fiscal commission” a death panel, and good for them, but there’s another name for such a “fiscal commission”: fascist. Because any time you try to limit debate and feedback from the people, you’re being a fascist. End of.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (or PEPFAR), which funds the AIDS fight overseas and which right-wingers in Congress now want to cut, claiming the program – possibly the greatest/only achievement of the George W. Bush Presidency – promotes promiscuity and abortion and Satan and oh STFU right-wingers! That ship sailed once Elton John talked Nancy Reagan into talking Ronald Reagan into funding AIDS research because babies get it now. Elton John is going to heaven, and not just for “Philadelphia Freedom.”

Action: concerning Social Security, Medicare, and the Israel/Palestine war.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any Social Security/Medicare “commission” and demand a cease-fire in the Israel/Palestine war. 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.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to create a Social Security or Medicare commission. Because we all know a better way to describe a Social Security or Medicare “commission” would be a Social Security or Medicare death panel, and unlike the “death panels” right-wingers whined about in 2009, these would be real death panels, dedicated solely to taking food out of our mouths. And the reason they’d create a death panel, instead of just putting things up to a vote? Because we’d stop that damn vote, that’s why! Also because they hate democracy. But mainly because we’d kill that death panel dead!

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a cease-fire in the Israel/Palestine war now. No, I won’t call it the “Israel/Hamas” war, because I know who the real targets of this war are: the good citizens of Palestine. You know, just like the real targets of the October 7 attack were those Israeli citizens who’d be more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause! Yes, this issue is full of suck, but that fact doesn’t justify letting Mr. Netanyahu kill civilians indiscriminately. It’ll take “many more months” to destroy Hamas, he says? What a lie! He wants Hamas around forever! Otherwise, Israeli voters might fire him!

Action: concerning taxes, AI, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand the Child Tax Credit without poison pills, protect American workers from AI, and pass the Affordable Insulin Now 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 bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021 that put $250 and $300 checks per child in working families’ bank accounts. You know, I feel like I don’t need to justify that action any further – fewer kids in poverty, more money for strapped working families, what else needs saying? – but it’s December, which means it’s end-of-year budgeting time, which means Congress will try to pass a bunch of noxious crap they’d never get through without it being an “emergency,” so go ahead and tell your Congressfolk to pass a CTC expansion with no poison pills attached! That means no corporate welfare and no more tax cuts for the rich – do the right thing, and nothing else.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect American workers from the spectre of Artificial Intelligence (or AI). We just watched the Hollywood actors’ union fight management’s attempts to replace them with AI-generated doppelgangers, but that won’t just happen to them – it’ll happen to any American worker who has a CEO who twirls his mustache at the prospect of replacing all his workers (and all their “costs”) with mounds of dung, and “any” includes you and you and you and I. Hell, it’s already happened, for real, at call centers all over the world. You ever try to fix a problem and wind up yelling “operator!” into the phone? Then you know what I’m talking about. Our economy needs more people in it, and fewer “big,” “bold” “entrepreneurs” who live to kill our jobs.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Affordable Insulin Now Act, which would extend the benefit Medicare recipients get – namely, their insulin costs capped at $35/month – to all Americans. What a shame that we have to stop big pharma corporations from charging literally an arm and a leg for insulin, and what a shame we have idiots like Herschel Walker telling us that if we just eat right we won’t have to use insulin, which will definitely not impress anyone born with diabetes (or those who are rationing their insulin while keeping spreadsheets about their calorie intake). And if anyone starts ranting about “price controls,” you have a number of good rebuttals. Like you say “price controls” like it’s a bad thing. Or 1973 called; it wants its right-wing talking points back.

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to toughen child labor laws, extend child care funding, and reject any “debt commission” to cut our earned benefits. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

Action: concerning monopolies, affordable housing, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell our FTC and DOJ to stop the proposed United Health/Amedisys merger, tell state and local officials to make it easier to repurpose empty office buildings as affordable housing, and tell your Congressfolk to allow our Postal Service to offer more services. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) and Department of Justice (or DOJ) to block the proposed United Health/Amedisys merger. If we allow that merger to happen, we would allow a big corporation to take a competitor of the market and become even more powerful, which means the resulting behemoth would have more power to kill jobs, cut services, and raise health care prices which are already too damn high. United Health would absolutely do all of that, because they’re already doing all of that! United Health is just another corporate worshiper of mammon, and worshipers of mammon have had too much say about everything in America for far too long. We won’t be able to change this sad state of affairs, however, unless we speak out in numbers they can’t deny. And our laws require our federal agencies to listen to public comments, so let’s do that.

MoveOn helps you tell state and local officials to make it easier to repurpose office buildings into affordable housing. Too many working families still don’t have an affordable place to live, largely thanks to landlords (who are becoming ever more corporate!) raising rents higher than inflation because they can. On the other hand, we have too many office buildings that’ll never be occupied again now that the pandemic taught us that we can do so much of our work from home without hurting anyone. It’s almost like the solution presents itself! States and localities would have to change zoning and land-use laws in order to help convert office buildings into living spaces, but that’d be easier than waiting for new houses to magically go up. And they’d have to refit those office buildings to make them more livable! But that better not be too tough for a can-do society.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal laws preventing our Postal Service from offering more services, like postal banking. The only reason your Congressperson would oppose such a thing? Oh, you know, “big government is always bad” tell that to Social Security, Medicare, and the interstate highway system or “banks should do all the banking in America” never mind that banks don’t go to a lot of rural and urban areas and local Post Offices can fill that gap or “the Post Office has never made money” though we really shouldn’t evaluate every single thing in the world on its money-making potential. Especially a Constitutionally-mandated service provided to the American people! Seriously, we really don’t want a world where everything is like the private sector, where greed can run free without very much accountability to the people.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning endless war, our earned benefits, and Congressional corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to call for a ceasefire in the Israel/Palestine conflict, reject any Social Security/Medicare/SNAP benefit-cutting commission, and enact a stock-trading ban for members of Congress. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to call for a ceasefire in the Israel/Palestine conflict. Israeli politicians talked big about revenge at the beginning, but we’re a few weeks in now and that big ground campaign hasn’t materialized, though they’ve kept on pounding Gaza with air strikes, which are of course nowhere near as “surgical” as they tell you; why, it’s almost like the whole idea is to kill as many Palestinians as possible without actually damaging Hamas very much! After all, Israelis might not keep Mr. Netanyahu around without an enemy to hate. If that analysis strikes you as a bit Machiavellian, just ask American right-wingers how well actually achieving the goal of overturning Roe v. Wade has worked out for them. A ceasefire wouldn’t just be good for the citizens of Gaza, it’d be bad for a Netanyahu’s government; if you made me pick I’d pick the former, but I sure wouldn’t complain about getting both.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the creation of a commission designed to cut Social Security, Medicare, or food stamp benefits. Because that’s all the “fiscal responsibility” this super hard-right Congress can stomach! Always they want to cut the benefits that don’t actually break budgets but do actually help good Americans, but never do they want to cut defense spending or corporate welfare, and of course raising taxes on the rich and on corporations is verboten among our political “leaders.” You should be aware that some of our erstwhile “centrists,” like Kyrsten Sinema and Mitt Romney, also approve of the notion of cutting our earned benefits “behind closed doors.” But the whole point of America is not to let politicians do anything behind closed doors to begin with, and that’s why we fight.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to prohibit members of Congress from owning stock in any corporation at any time. Don’t like it? Then don’t be a Congressperson! Go be a regular rich person or whatever! Public service means something! Or, at least, it should, and it should also mean something that roughly three out of every four voters, meaning roughly 75%, think we shouldn’t allow Congressfolk to trade in stocks, since they’ll almost certainly have to vote on a matter affecting the corporations they invest in sooner or later. Newt Gingrich once said that if 70% of the American people want something, they should get it. What Rube Goldbergian contraption of an argument would he deploy to get out of that? No doubt it would provoke this response: “so, if 70% of the American people want something, they should get it, except for banning Congressfolk from trading stock?”

Penny rants for October 27, 2023.

When I hear that nearly a quarter of Americans think “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” I again think that about a quarter of our electorate is batshit insane, and these folks have let themselves get led from one manufactured outrage to another over at least the past 20 years. And I think, again, that though three-quarters should be able to outvote one-quarter, we all know that another quarter or our electorate enables the insane quarter, either by imagining any Democrat is far worse or by thinking they can use the crazies to get things done. I’ll admit I’m amused to hear 57% of Republicans say “America’s best days are behind us” when Republicans spent those best days trying to turn them into these days, by setting wealth and corporate power “free” and slashing government spending that actually helped people. Maybe our pollsters should ask Americans how they feel about the disappearance of the 91% tax bracket and the end of big projects like ending poverty (or even just the interstate highway system!) when they ask if America’s on the right or wrong track. It might be illuminating.

From McKay Coppins’s new bio of Mitt Romney we learn that Kyrsten Sinema doesn’t care much about what’ll happen to her if/when she doesn’t get re-elected, because “I can do anything” (though she may be overestimating her career options) and because “I saved the Senate by myself.” Let us recall that she “negotiated” a bipartisan infrastructure bill by giving in to all of Republicans’ major demands, then killed her own party’s signature bill by refusing to raise taxes on the rich or let Medicare negotiate drug prices; then, when these positions became untenable, she permitted a 15% minimum corporate tax and limited Medicare drug price negotiation in exchange for keeping the notorious “carried interest” loophole (which allows banksters to pay a lower tax rate than bus drivers). So, some “savior,” there, and as for “sav(ing) the filibuster,” “save” is a weird word to describe a tool that’s only hurt good Americans for years. And dig her spokeshack comparing Mr. Coppins’ reporting to “a game of telephone.” I’d contemplate a defamation lawsuit if I were him.

We also learn from the Romney bio that the 47% video story apparently sent Mr. Romney into (per David Corn at Mother Jones, the reporter who originally broke the story) “an emotional tailspin and caused him to ponder dropping out of the race.” Hearing that he refused to blame anyone but himself for his troubles might seem refreshing – after all, Donald Trump never seems to take the blame for anything (or pass up an opportunity to blame others for his failures) – but, really, stepping up and taking blame is a basic skill of civilized people, and we should remember that Mitt Romney put himself in a tailspin of depression because he pandered to rich folks about poor folks. And we should also remember that that Republicans have learned nothing from that mistake. And almost certainly on purpose! After all, if you can just run people from one manufactured outrage to another, and thus keep them in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage, you don’t actually have to do anything.

Finally, on that note, meet your new U.S. House Speaker, four-term Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson! That was always the best play for Republicans – to tire everyone out with drama and then elect some relatively-unknown asshole – but this is the future, where Mr. Johnson has left records of his deeds and words all over the internet just like everyone else, and hopefully we all know by now that a soft-spoken asshole is still an asshole. And I said it was their “best” play, not a good play. Every single Republican Rep voted for this fool; folks like Don Bacon and Mike Lawler may have complained enough about their choices to fool their constituents, but what about folks like Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania’s 1st? He voted for the worst person for Speaker every chance he had and didn’t account for it to his constituents, so I suspect the good folks of Montgomery County (who just put a Democrat in the state House for the first time in forever) may not want to keep tolerating this drama.

Action: concerning taxes and Medicare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich, restore the expanded Child Tax Credit, and reject a Medicare trustee nominee with too many ties to private health insurance corporations. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich, including legislation instituting a Billionaire Minimum Income Tax. Remember that Futurama episode featuring wrestling robots, where one of the most hated wrestlers was called the Millionaire? Now it’d be the Billionaire, because billionaires, simply put, make a lot of money off other people’s work and hardly ever pay any taxes. No use arguing that it doesn’t get taxed because it’s not particularly liquid, not just because “wealth on paper” still gets rich folks loans with real money in them, but because they want it that way precisely so that they don’t pay taxes! Yikes, don’t think just because something does happen that it must happen – or should.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore the expanded Child Tax Credit that existed for most of 2021. You remember, the one that delivered $250 and $300 checks per child, per month into working families’ bank accounts? Why, that’s like a campaign ad that writes itself! And, Democrats being so smart they’re dumb, they couldn’t keep that campaign ad going. Note well that the Child Tax Credit expansion did not just get blown on drugs, like Joe Manchin said and yes I will personally make sure he never lives that down, but did in fact cut child poverty in half – and, of course, when it went away, child poverty doubled again. So smart, they’re dumb, I said.

Finally, Be a Hero helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Demetrios Kouzoukas as a Medicare trustee. Because he makes six figures for a private, for-profit health insurance corporation that offers those notorious “Medicare Advantage” plans that siphon off taxpayer money toward bad health care plans! And won’t say whether he’ll stop taking private health insurance money if he works for our public health insurance plan! And don’t believe anyone who says that private health corporation executives know things. The only thing they know how to do is squeeze workers and customers for money, and that’s no skill to brag about.

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, Social Security and Medicare, and food labeling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop enabling Israel’s occupation of Palestine, reject any Social Security/Medicare-cutting commission, and pass the Food Date Labeling 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 Jewish Voice for Peace and Roots Action help you tell your Congressfolk to stop enabling the Israeli occupation of Palestine. No use saying Hamas started it, and not just because it would take forever to unwind the you-started-it thread – it all comes back to one nation having the power to exterminate another, which Israel can do to Palestine mainly because of our support. No less an authority than Amnesty International has declared Israel an “apartheid regime,” and it’s beyond sad to hear Israel’s Defense Minister call Palestinians “human animals” as if no one had ever called Jews that. We don’t want extermination on our conscience, I trust.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to create a “closed door” commission so Congress can cut Social Security and Medicare benefits without oversight by the American people. That’s their whole argument: the cuts “need” to be made, so we have to give Congress more power to do it. But it’s horseshit – all we need do is start taxing income over $160,200 into the system, and we won’t need any “commissions” to make “hard decisions” about our earned benefits. No, they’re not “entitlements”! Our government didn’t give them to us out of the goodness of their hearts; we fought for them, and we’ll keep fighting for them, because you have to fight for the future every day in this life.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Food Date Labeling Act, which would streamline our food labeling system so that we throw away perfectly good food a lot less than we do now. Say goodbye to “sell by,” “freshest on,” and “expires on,” and say hello to “best if used by” and “use by,” the former of which tells you when food starts to deteriorate and the latter of which tells you how long you can eat that food. A staggering 40% of the food we make in America ultimately goes to waste, which in turn means we waste a lot of water and energy, too, not to mention there are starving kids right here in America; the Food Date Labeling Act will help us, as they say, waste not and want not.

Action: concerning internet freedom, Medicare drug price negotiation, the "Fox fee," and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell our FCC to reinstate net neutrality rules, tell our CMS to negotiate the best possible prices for prescription drugs, tell cable corporations to stop paying the “Fox fee,” and tell our government to get rid of Postmaster General DeJoy already. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to restore the most vigorous net neutrality rules possible. Our FCC did that in 2015, with a vital assist from President Obama, but let’s not forget the real heroes of this battle: the millions of Americans, liberal and conservative, who pounded our FCC with public comments endorsing internet freedom. And let’s not forget the real villains, either: the Trump Administration FCC, which saw that rare example of actual bipartisanship among the American people and told us all to go fuck ourselves, putting the wishes of big corporations to throttle and censor and prioritize internet content the way they wanted (and not the way we wanted) above our will. But corporations are things, and not more important than people, so let’s remind our FCC of that.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) to negotiate the best prices possible for drugs. Yes, we got a limited Medicare drug price negotiation plank into the Inflation Reduction Act, but it won’t be worth a damn if our government capitulates to big corporations over price, which is always a danger, so we’ve got to make sure they hear that. They’re certainly hearing from big pharma corporations, which are no doubt telling them that lower prices for consumers means “less innovative” drugs, but Jesus Mary and Joseph that is literally the opposite of how innovation works! Nobody innovates because they have the financial freedom to innovate; they innovate because they must. And our government is still the best tool to force them to innovate.

Common Cause helps you tell your cable corporation to stop paying the “Fox fee” and thus keep the notorious Fox News Channel off our free cable packages. No one – and certainly not a corporation – has a “right” to charge cable corporations an onerous amount of money to get its content across to the masses, and Fox News costs almost as much on your basic cable package as ESPN. How about that: the two media outlets that have done the most damage to our civilization over the last 30 years just so happen to the ones extracting the most money from cable corporations – and therefore you, since you pay cable bills. There’s a lesson in there, somewhere. If we come out in force, cable corporations will have to listen – and you’ll get a break on your cable bills.

Finally, Demand Progress also helps you tell our government to take the steps necessary to oust Louis DeJoy as Postmaster General. That’d require two new members of our USPS Board of Governors, but really, this ain’t tough: Mr. DeJoy has done a bad job. No use arguing he “inherited” a “mess” at our Postal Service, because he made the mess! He cut services, cut jobs, and raised prices, not his predecessors! And certainly no use arguing that our Postal Service was “losing money” because a) Congress fixed the problem that was causing money losses (the absurdly onerous health insurance and pension pre-payment mandate) in the Postal Service Reform Act and b) our Postal Service isn’t supposed to “make money”! It’s supposed to provide services to the American people.

Action: concerning endless war, our earned benefits, and ticket pricing.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs, reject any attempt to create a “behind closed doors” commission to cut Social Security and Medicare, and pass legislation mandating disclosure of real ticket prices. 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.

Upon hearing that Congress plans to replace the notorious 2001 and 2002 Authorizations to Use Military Force (or AUMFS) with yet another AUMF that would authorize yet more military adventures across the planet, you may want to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to repeal the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs, full stop. Don’t brook any hysteria about “terrorists still wanting to hurt us,” because an honest appraisal of American history will tell you that foreign terrorists hurt us after we’ve hurt their countryfolk. An honest appraisal of recent American history will tell you that most actual terrorists are right-wing bigots. Also too, our Constitution reserves war-making power for Congress, not our President. This, too, is not hard.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to create a commission that would meet “behind closed doors” to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits. It’s too important to be left to the people is the sum of the fascist argument favoring putting such cuts to your earned benefits “behind closed doors” and then fast-tracking those cuts through our House and Senate without adequate debate. The only reason anyone would want that? Because they know they’re forcing shit down your throat. Do you want your Congressfolk to force shit down your throat? No, you do not. But word on the street is they’re not hearing enough from us, so we’ve got to fix that right away.

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the TICKET Act, which would force ticket-selling corporations to advertise real ticket prices up-front, rather than do what they do now, which is put a fake ticket price in front of you and then add on all kinds of “handling” fees and “convenience” fees and “fuck you because we can” fees afterward. If we make them do this, then anyone who wants to enter the ticket-selling market – which is currently a monopoly, of course, hence their tendency to hide their real prices – might actually have a chance at competing, and maybe even winning. Remember: monopoly anywhere is a threat to competition anywhere, not least because bad people cite the “good” monopoly to justify the bad ones.

Action: concerning Social Security and Medicare, campaign finance, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to cut Social Security or Medicare “behind closed doors,” tell your Senators to pass a Constitutional amendment allowing us to regulate campaign finance again, and tell your Congressfolk to pass bills restraining big tech monopolies. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits “behind closed doors.” Americans have rejected such anti-democratic practices for “free” trade bills, so why would we accept them for Social Security and Medicare? We would not; our political classes want to do this “behind closed doors” in the vain hope that they can do evil without our knowing it, or that we won’t blame them for doing evil! If you want a handier way to explain what right-wingers want to do to Social Security and Medicare “behind closed doors,” here’s one, courtesy of Social Security Works: death panels. As in, Congress wants to create death panels for Social Security and Medicare. That should help bend them to our will.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass the Democracy for All constitutional amendment, so we can regulate campaign finance again. Citizens United v. FEC might have been our Supreme Court’s most unpopular decision of recent years, until Dobbs v. Jackson in 2022; polls tell us even two-thirds of Republican voters thought our Court got it wrong there, and given that I think corporate “personhood” (the “principle” upon which Citizens United rests) is an offensive fiction, I’m inclined to agree. But we’ll have to amend our Constitution in order to see our will done here, and that means Congress has to do our will first.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, the Open App Markets Act, and the AMERICA Act, so that we can begin to rein in big tech monopolies once and for all. The first bill would prevent big tech corporations from giving out anti-competitive preferences to other businesses on their platforms, the second would prevent big tech corporations from doing same on their app stores, and the third would start to break the stranglehold Google and Facebook have over digital advertising. If a lot of this sounds suspiciously like “net neutrality” to you, I wouldn’t blame you. These bills have quite a few Republican co-sponsors, but if we don’t want their conflicting urge to let corporations do whatever they want to win out, then we have to speak out.

Action: concerning health care.

Long story short: tell our CMS to enact the most vigorous hospital price transparency rule possible, and tell big pharma corporations to stop trying to stop Medicare drug price negotiation. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

U.S. PIRG helps you tell our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) to enact the most vigorous hospital price transparency rule possible. Because the price of health care is too damn high and none of us have any idea how much things are supposed to cost! Big corporations generally won’t try to argue that point, but they’ll whine about “innovation” and “jobs,” which you can always answer by saying the cost of health care is too damn high and we all think you’re gouging us, and look at you not even lifting a finger to prove you’re not! They’ll try to weaken the rules in other ways (like posting “estimates” or posting prices in computer formats you won’t be able to read); U.S. PIRG lists these, and you’ll oppose them when you sign.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell big pharma corporations to stop suing our government over Medicare drug price negotiation. Virtually everyone supports Medicare drug price negotiation – which proves that the American people are smarter than professional cynics want us to think – but big pharma still wants to try to kill it in court, or at least hurt us in doing so. That’s right, I said hurt us – you think our government is getting the money to defend Medicare price negotiation from somewhere other than our taxes? Big pharma would hurt us just to preserve their unearned billions; that’s really all we have to say about it.

Action: concerning monopolies, death panels, and robocalls.

Long story short: tell our DOJ and FTC to make corporations account for their aims when they propose mergers, tell our HHS Department to investigate death panel claims against HCA Healthcare, and tell our FCC to crack down on robocalls and robotexts (and tell our Senate to confirm a full slate of FCC Commissioners). Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Our Department of Justice (or DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) have proposed making big corporations account for their actions more precisely when they propose to buy another corporation. Naturally the big corporatists are whining about how much paperwork they already have to do, which may be enough to tell you that you should support the proposed changes. But as Matt Stoller explains further: big corporations don’t even have to answer questions like why they’re merging or who’s on their board of directors or who their competitors are or how much market share they’re proposing to gobble up, even though the answers to most of these questions would reveal that they’re trying eat their competitors alive and make themselves richer at civilization’s expense. We should at least make them commit such answers to paper; you can read the new proposal here, and you can leave a public comment about it here. Don’t believe the hype that these are “radical” changes, because only whiners would tell you that. Certainly don’t believe anyone who says “but we’ve always done things the way I’d prefer we keep doing them,” because anyone who says that commits the unpardonable sin of mistaking their life experiences for the entirety of human history. And, since corporate lawyers aren’t stupid, I’d say they’re committing that sin on purpose, which makes it twice as bad. Don’t let sin rule America, good peoples!

Care2 helps you tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to investigate allegations that HCA Healthcare has used, guess what, an algorithm to push hospice care on patients who actually stand a decent chance of recovering. Because those patients won’t make them enough money, basically! Right-wingers, that’s what a “death panel” actually looks like! And it’s far, far more likely to come from some private corporation than from our government! Note well that Wall Street banksters love HCA stock, which makes HCA suspicious pretty much automatically, and also that HCA once had to pay a $1.7 billion fine for defrauding Medicaid and Medicare (among other federal health care programs). As if to prove our decadence as a civilization, HCA’s CEO back then is now Florida’s junior Senator, Rick Scott. Let's fight the real evil, gang!

Finally, U.S. PIRG helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to crack down on illegal robocalls/robotexts. I’ve gotten no less than half a dozen of these irritants daily this past week, so I know they’re not doing enough, and so do you, I bet. Aren’t I on a damn do-not-call list? Why, yes, I am! But I guess these crooks just count on doing so much crime that law enforcement can’t catch them all. What a thing to bring to the Pearly Gates when you die! It’d help, of course if our Senate were to confirm a full slate of FCC Commissioners, which Free Press helps you do.

Action: concerning worker safety, Medicare, and animal abuse.

Long story short: tell our government to better protect workers from extreme heat, tell President Biden to better protect seniors from privatized Medicare, and tell world governments to ban any products that come from octopus farming. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Labor to do more to protect good American workers from extreme heat, while Civic Shout helps you tell our Occupational Safety and Health Administration (or OSHA) to do the same. President Biden has already directed our Department of Labor to issue hazard alerts related to the heat, but our DOL could be doing more. And OSHA has yet to issue a standard protecting workers from extreme heat, even though we’ve told them to do that before. Folks are dropping dead in the Texas heat, and going to burn wards in Arizona just for falling on the sidewalk, so ignore the politicians who seem to be objectively pro-heat death.

Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to protect our seniors from the greed of private health insurers who have too many grubby hands in Medicare. President Biden has moved a bit slowly on this matter, which is why we’re getting in his grill about it now. Our government has privatized more and more of Medicare over the last 20 years, even though, frankly, anyone who still thinks government couldn’t do better than private corporations in delivering health care is a fool. At least half of all seniors on Medicare Advantage switch back to traditional Medicare in their last year of life, but we don’t want so many seniors to get out of the claws of private health insurers so late.

Finally, Eko helps you tell world governments to ban any and all products that come from farmed octopuses. You don’t need to have seen an octopus squeeze its way off a boat to know that these creatures deserve better – frankly, we shouldn’t wait for animals to impress us with their intelligence before we treat them better! Octopus farms shine a constant light on animals that obviously prefer darkness, plus these farms kill octopi by putting them in freezing water; think you would like that? No, you would not. Doesn’t matter that some corporation thinks they can make a profit doing this, because profit doesn’t justify torture. I can’t believe I still have to say that.

Action: concerning worker safety, tenants' rights, and drug prices.

Long story short: tell Texas legislators to repeal a worker-killing bill, tell our FHFA to protect tenants from greedy landlords, and tell big pharma CEOs to stop suing over Medicare drug price negotiation. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Care2 helps you tell the Texas state legislature to repeal its just-passed law forbidding localities from mandating water breaks for workers. In the hundred-degree-plus heat, no less! Some “conservatives” these are, telling the cities of Austin and Dallas they’re not allowed to give workers ten-minute water breaks! What happened to smaller communities doing better for their people? I can’t even say big corporations really wanted something like this – honestly, a ban on local ordinances allowing water breaks looks like nothing more than a way to swing their testicles in front of good Texans’ faces, which I guess is all Republicans are about now. What, they’re going to govern? That is to laugh! Unless we get in their grills, that is.

People’s Action helps you tell our Federal Housing Finance Agency (or FHFA) to insure that anyone who receives federal government-backed loan treats their tenants with dignity and respect. That would mean, among other things, less stupidly-high rents, less evicting people on a whim, less discriminating against tenants due to race or sex, and keeping homes and apartments safe to live in. I know some property-owning corporations (and some property-owning people!) will squeal HOWZ CANZ I MAKEZ TEH MONEYZ!!!!! If they can’t make money without treating people right, they deserve poverty. And, at the risk of blasphemy, eternal hellfire. Hey, I’m no coddler.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell big pharma CEOs to drop their absurd lawsuit aiming to prevent Medicare from being able to negotiate some drug prices. Some drugs, and not until 2026! Since that’s all we could get out of that “maverick,” Kyrsten Sinema. Imagine thinking you’re “independent” because you suck up to big corporations even more! But I digress. We should tell big pharma CEOs to drop their stupid lawsuit because the Big Stick of Bad PR works! We know it works because it’s worked in the past! It works better on corporations than on politicians, I’ll grant, and I wish that weren’t so, but we’ll take what we can get – and then go get more of what we deserve.

Action: concerning Medicare, Social Security, worker rights, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to increase Medicare and Social Security funding, protect worker rights, and protect abortion rights. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act, which would help improve Medicare and Social Security funding by taxing income over $400,000 into both systems, applying payroll taxes to investment income, and closing a loophole that hedge fund banksters use to avoid paying into the systems. These are all much, much better ideas than “going behind closed doors” and cutting Medicare and Social Security benefits without the people hearing about it. After all, you worked for it, you fought for it, you paid into it, and you deserve to enjoy your benefits when you get older.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, which would stiffen penalties for corporations that refuse to let their workers collectively bargain for better pay and working conditions. The main problem with labor law in America is corporations can break it without paying for it, but that’d change with the PRO Act, which would make refusing to negotiate with unions, intimidating workers, and propagandizing them in mandatory meetings a lot more costly. And what’s the alternative? Letting corporations get bigger and richer and hoping that wealth will “trickle down” to workers? Hopefully we’ve seen by now that doesn’t work.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to reject a national abortion ban, while UltraViolet helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Abortion Justice Act, which latter bill would keep abortion between a woman and her doctor. Strange how all the right-wingers who demanded that Obamacare stay out of the whole patient-doctor thing are all too ready now to get between women and their doctors. OK, I guess it’s not “strange” per se – the right-wing desire to turn women back into submissive breeders explains the “strangeness” away. It’s still hypocritical, though. Is it too much to ask that hypocrites don’t get all the say about everything?

Action: concerning Medicare, Social Security, drama, and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act, stop Tommy Tuberville’s big military hold drama, and start taxing billionaires a lot harder. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act, which would, as its title suggests, start taxing income over $400,000 into Medicare and Social Security and start taxing investment income into the system as well. The bill would also close certain loopholes that benefit hedge fund managers and fossil fuel corporations so they start paying more. I’ll never express any alarmism over these programs, because I’ve been hearing hysterical alarms about their "impending" "insolvency" all my damn life, but doing these things would help Medicare and Social Security be even better for good Americans. I know it’s Friday, but let’s get in our Congressfolk’s grills about this.

Care2 helps you tell your Senators to lean on Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville and tell him to stop blocking military nominations. He’s doing it, supposedly, because of our military’s policy to help soldiers who need abortions and who live in anti-abortion states with travel expenses, but Jesus Mary and Joseph how about just winning the argument and getting legislation passed? Could he be pulling this crap because he knows he can’t do these things? I kid, of course – this is exactly the kind of thing evil people do when they can’t coerce good people into doing what they want. Your Senators need to know this is evil. Your Senators also need to know that if they let this appalling drama go on, they never get to call themselves “pro-military” again.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to start taxing billionaires a lot harder than we currently do. Ain’t nobody a billionaire through hard work – after all, you’ve done hard work, and plenty of it I bet, and did it ever get you as far as just sucking up to a bankster? No, it did not. And that’s a sad commentary on our civilization. We can start to fix our civilization by reversing our 60-plus years of cutting rich folks’ taxes and start taxing them again. No, they won’t “move overseas,” because even billionaires don’t just up and move whenever they like. No, they won’t “refuse to create jobs,” because they’re already doing that with all the light taxation they enjoy! Stupidity can’t keep winning in America.

Action: concerning immigration, media, and health care.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to expand health care for DACA recipients, tell internet service-providing corporations to drop Fox News, and tell Merck’s CEO to drop his lawsuit against Medicare drug-price negotiation . Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

United We Dream helps you tell the Biden Administration to expand Medicaid and Affordable Care Act eligibility to DACA recipients, i.e., “dreamers.” You could say it comes down to if they’re here, don’t be so damn cruel to them, but it’s even simpler than that: DACA recipients left their home countries as small children because their parents immigrated to America, and we’d be cruel bastards to deny them access to health care simply because of a decision made long ago that they had literally no part in. No use squealing about terrorism, etc., at least not if you’re a proud member of the greatest nation on Earth. So many self-styled “patriots” have so little mercy; I wonder why.

Inequality Media helps you tell your internet service-providing corporation to get the Fox News (sic) Channel off their platforms. Fox News just paid out over three-quarters of a billion dollars to settle a defamation lawsuit, and quickly responded by gutting its hard news division, such as it had one, so even if you knew absolutely nothing about the trail of slime it’s left across the country we love over the last few decades, you would wonder why any cable company would carry a “news” channel that had suffered such a reversal (and responded by resolving to get even worse at news-gathering!). Our First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, but not an audience or a pile of money for that speech, so let’s keep up the pressure until they fold.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell Merck’s CEO to “drop your greedy lawsuit” aiming to end Medicare drug price negotiation before it even starts. Of course it’s even worse than a greedy lawsuit – it’s the very definition of a frivolous lawsuit, one that clogs up the courts and delays justice for all. And it’s filed by a rich corporation! There’s a lesson in there, somewhere. Anyway, don’t brook any cynicism from anyone about how Merck is just trying to protect its profits. Our Declaration of Independence speaks of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and none of that includes a “right” to price-gouge good Americans by overcharging them for the medicines they need to live.

Action: concerning tax cuts for the rich, Social Security, Medicare, and stock buybacks.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject attempts to extend the Trump tax cuts for the rich, tell Democrats to ignore Kevin McCarthy’s Social Security/Medicare benefit-cutting commission, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Reward Work 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 Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject Republican attempts to extend the Trump tax cuts for the rich. Yep, our Republican-held House is trying to extend those tax cuts for the rich, and they’ll pay for it by wiping out renewable energy tax credits, because nothing is more important than “owning the libs.” Seriously, it’s like the first question they ask when they make policy is how can I hurt people? And of course wiping out renewable tax credits won’t pay for all those tax cuts for the rich, thus mere weeks after all that posturing about the deficit, they’re going to try to make those deficits even bigger. And they’ll get whatever they want if we don’t speak out.

Social Security Works helps you tell Democrats to ignore Kevin McCarthy’s Social Security/Medicare commission. Republicans didn’t get Social Security and Medicare benefit cuts in their debt limit “deal,” but Speaker McCarthy has announced he’ll put together a commission that’ll get together “behind closed doors” to cut these benefits. They’ll have to do it “behind closed doors” because everyone will hate them even more if they do it out in the open! Sadly, a few Democrats may want to demonstrate their “seriousness” by joining this commission. We need to get in their grills about that, and if we do, they’ll fold, because weak people always fold in the face of strength.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Reward Work Act, which would ban stock buybacks and let workers elect a third of corporate boards. Stock buybacks let corporations plow their profits into buying stock back from other shareholders, instead of investing in, making their workplaces and their products better; it used to be illegal, because it concentrates corporate power in fewer hands, and the Reward Work Act would make it illegal again. And putting more worker-friendly folks on corporate boards would also help make workplaces better. Republicans pretend to be populists, but if they were populists, they’d support this bill.

Readings for June 19, 2023.

Ho hum, the Washington Post is miffed that the debt ceiling “deal” didn’t do slash Social Security and Medicare benefits like they’ve wanted to do since time immemorial, and all I can say is oh STFU already. The real driver of debt is our continuing failure to tax the rich and corporations as hard as we did in the 1950s; we taxed millionaire income at 91% and corporations at 55% then, but now we do that at 37% and 21%, respectively, and with a lot more loopholes now than then. The Post didn’t go as hard after Medicare, which I suppose is progress, but also didn’t mention that Medicare-for-All would save us about $1.6 trillion annually in health care costs – and that figure comes from the right-wing Mercatus Center, not that they exactly foregrounded it. The one letter-to-the-editor FAIR quotes in its article is worth the price of admission.

Wondering exactly what to say to your right-wing uncle who says the Trump indictment is no big deal? You know, besides I don’t do Flat Earth Society crap? Judd Legum at Popular Information refutes the four main counterarguments of the right, including “Hillary did the same thing” and “Biden did the same thing” (each individual cooperated with our Justice Department, while Mr. Trump, per the indictment, did not, and anyway Mike Pence “did the same thing,” too, except he also cooperated and won’t be charged for what he did). The worst, of course, is “this all sets a dangerous precedent where the party that comes into power just goes after its enemies,” an utterance not merely of cowardice but hubris. After all, if Republicans hadn't acted with such restraint after Bill Clinton’s 1992 election, they might have set a precedent.

Maxwell Strachan at Motherboard writes about a Texas couple who bought a house planning to rent it out via Airbnb, only to be banned by Airbnb for being “closely associated with a person who isn’t allowed to use Airbnb," in this case a homeowner’s parent’s partner, who had two non-violent offenses (one drug-related) in his background. In the couple’s account, Airbnb did a terrible enough job handling (and ultimately denying) their appeal that they suspected that algorithms handled it more than people did. They got Airbnb to reverse their decision after going to the media about it, but in the meantime we witness what happens when we a) don’t strangle monopolies in their crib, b) act like putting people in jail is the only duty a civilization has to perform, and c) let bosses fire all their employees because algorithms don’t call out sick.

Action: concerning taxes, Social Security, Medicare, and stock buybacks.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to tax corporations the rich harder, tell Democrats to boycott Speaker McCarthy’s Social Security/Medicare-cutting commission, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Reward Work 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.

In the wake of this debt limit “deal,” Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to extend the Trump tax cuts for the rich and for corporations, while Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to start taxing billionaires a lot harder if they’re really serious about our national debt. Which they’re not, like ever, but the more we tell them they need to tax the rich and corporations harder, the tougher it’ll be for them to pretend they don’t hear us. I’m old enough to remember when Democrats were too scared to even talk about it, so I know we’ve made progress – and if we keep at it, we’ll make more.

Social Security Works helps you tell Congressional Democrats to boycott Speaker McCarthy’s Social Security/Medicare “reform” commission. He announced it right after getting his debt limit “deal,” and we know why: because we all got in his grill about never, ever cutting Social Security and/or Medicare benefits and as a result he not only didn’t get those cuts, he didn’t even try all that hard for them. But if any Democrats take part in this commission drama, they could make it easier for Congress to cut Social Security and Medicare without input from the American people, and we should never let such a thing happen. So it’s time to get in their grills again.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Reward Work Act, which would absolutely reward work by a) outlawing stock buybacks and b) making corporations put workers on their boards. Thus corporations would (in reverse order) support jobs by hearing more from the people who actually do them and actually investing in those jobs, which they don’t have to do as long as we allow them to plow their profits into consolidating shareholder power into fewer and fewer hands. The way the game is now, all corporate executives care about is making more money for less work, so our government has to step in on our behalf to fix that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: finally they admit greedflation is real! And other miracles.

Apparently the “fringe theory” of “greedflation” is finally “get(ting) its due,” now that even the Wall Street Journal thinks greedflation is real. Of course, nobody who’s been saying it for two years (whose number even includes several members of our “liberal” media) is “fringe” to anyone but a corporatist paid to ignore what’s right in front of their face. I only wonder whether Lael Brainard was being too circumspect in describing a “price-price spiral,” “where companies mark up prices far higher than the increases in their input costs,” because “greedflation” is a much easier way of saying that.

Judges have been slow to accept that they should enforce antitrust law, but Massachusetts U.S. District Court Judge Leo Sorokin not only struck down the American/JetBlue “Alliance,” but excoriated the paid hacks who testified on the “Alliance”’s behalf. If, like me, you think even psychology is a more rigorous science than economics, you’ll find Judge Sorokin’s notes fairly affirming. You may also, like me, find the “economic consulting” gigs Mr. Stoller describes to be a kind of welfare-for-the-rich, a far more pernicious kind of welfare than food stamps could ever be. By the way, bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income would fix it. Imagine a world where it simply didn’t pay to lie about how money works!

Rick Scott thinks he’s so, so funny for saying Florida is “openly hostile” to socialists, though it’s no laughing matter that the actual travel advisories from the NAACP and the Human Rights Campaign that he mocked describe a burgeoning fascist state where you might actually die for being Black or gay, respectively. Also too, imagine being a guy who went to college on the G.I. bill. Now imagine being a guy who ran a hospital that defrauded Medicare and Medicaid so badly they had to pay a $1.7 billion fine. And now imagine being a guy who talks shit about "socialism" all the time. Actually, you don't have to imagine any of that: Rick Scott is all three of those guys! (And anyway, anyone who’s ever driven a car or used a library or called a cop is a socialist.)

I’m a bit perplexed at a Georgia Republican district chair seems to feel personally assaulted by all the globes everywhere that “brainwash” people into thinking the world isn’t flat, not just because people have known the world is round since long before Columbus, but also because globes are actually a lot less common now that we can get planetary images in so many other ways. Globes taught me everything about geography when I was a kid, but getting one in my 40s turned out to be a chore! Oh well, I guess some people never stop whining, and Georgia may finally be becoming a place where a woman like Kandiss Taylor can only get to 49% in a statewide election.

Good news, everyone: Texas Republicans failed to ram through their bill mandating that all state public schools commit the sin of idolatry by posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom. If you were among those who spoke out about this matter, congratulate yourself! Note well, however, that this is only one victory; the forces of religious folly have won plenty of times in Texas in recent years. Also note well that the ACLU’s statement about parental rights is not inconsistent with anything they’ve ever said about teaching Black or gay history in schools: the key phrase in “(p)arents should be able to decide what religious materials their child should learn” is religious materials.

Finally, Rep. Lauren Boebert (E-CO) apparently stonewalled cops after her son called 911 to allege abuse by his father/her soon-to-be-ex-husband, but I don’t celebrate this news at all. I might question the timing of its release (she just announced that she’s filed for divorce, while her son called 911 in December), and I do celebrate some of her other reversals, but I do not celebrate her acting like or being someone who felt she had to keep the family together by herself. And I also don’t blame her for trapping herself in a bad marriage! She married when she was 20, and I was pretty dumb at that age myself.

Action: concerning taxes and debt-limit drama.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and stop cutting services for working families and tax all rich folks’ income the way we tax working families’ income, and tell House Republicans to keep their grubby mitts off our earned benefits in Medicare and Social Security. 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.

Today is Tax Day, so Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on corporations and the rich and stop cutting services for working families. I’m old enough to remember when the top tax rate was 70%; now it’s 37%. Yet Congress still hands out corporate welfare “research and development” tax breaks when we already don’t tax research and development, because they’re expenses. And what drives most of our ballooning deficits? Tax cuts for the rich, that’s what – to the tune of $10 trillion in debt from the Bush and Trump tax cuts alone. So today’s a good day to get in their grills. So’s any day, really, but especially today.

In a related note, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to “tax their money like your work,” meaning tax the rich’s wealth as hard as they tax our work. We just discussed how low income taxes have gotten for the rich, but it’s even worse than that: rich folks make more money than any of us do from dividends and capital gains, which, guess what, have an even lower tax rate. Plus the Estate tax gets more lenient all the time, so that now rich folks can exempt the first $12.9 million from taxes! I think $1 million is more than enough to pass on; any more would deprive heirs of vital character-building opportunities, and we’re all about opportunity here in America.

Finally, Courage for American helps you tell House Republicans to “back off our benefits,” namely Social Security and Medicare benefits. Speaker McCarthy’s said they’re “off the table,” but if five members of his caucus decide they’re not, then he suddenly doesn’t have the votes for a debt-limit resolution, so we can safely ignore that "promise." He’s been putting together a debt-limit resolution lately; who knows if it’ll pass? I feel secure in saying it doesn’t matter if it passes; it only matters that he puts forth a resolution that doesn’t make Republicans look like complete ogres. But let’s forestall all this drama by getting in their grills about this now.

Action: concerning Medicare, Social Security, education, the Estate Tax, and the Biden budget.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any Medicare or Social Security benefit cuts, reject any education funding cuts, reject Estate Tax repeal, and pass the Biden budget 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.

Courage for America helps you tell the Republican House majority to “back off” our earned Medicare and Social Security benefits. They’ve said they won’t cut these benefits, but you know the minute we take our eye off the ball the reaper’s scythe will start slashing, and anyway they don’t need 218 votes to cut benefits – they only need five, as in the number of Republican House Reps who can deprive Mr. McCarthy of a working majority on any bill. I’d bet Our Glorious Elites are counting on that, in fact! Someday there’ll be a price to pay for defying the popular will again and again – but not if we don’t speak our will.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any efforts to cut education funding. They’ll be coming for that as a “deficit-fighting” tool, as well, particularly since right-wingers have done a lot of work seizing that issue back from liberals. They’ve been doing it by whining about having to wear masks and banning books and threatening their fellow citizens at school board meetings, but gosh, what energy! And they probably think that gives them the momentum to cut federal education funding! Well, we cut funding that actually helps good Americans enough. It’s about time we stop hurting each other just to make these alleged philosophical stands.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to repeal the Estate Tax, since Republicans have reintroduced an Estate Tax repeal bill and are still telling the same tall tales about folks losing their family farms over it. Why “tall tales”? Not just because the stories you hear (cough Kristi Noem cough) have, shall we say, holes in them, and not just because even the anti-Estate Tax crowd has never found even one family farm killed by the Estate Tax, but also because big ag monopolies have been killing family farms for 50 years! Blaming the Estate Tax for the death of the family farm is like blaming a mosquito bite for the death of a shooting victim.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Biden budget already. The Biden budget, as you know, would raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, institute a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, raise the stock buyback tax, establish 12 weeks of paid family/medical leave, and re-expand the Child Tax Credit, among many other good works; no use calling it an “aspirational” document when all our Congressfolk have to do is pass it. Is it a perfect budget? No. Will Republicans come up with anything better? Also no. And would it be better than what we’ve got? Absolutely! But not if we don’t speak out.

Penny rants for April 6, 2023: special "centrists still suck" edition!

When I hear that a few “centrist” House Democrats are trying to put together their own debt limit plan with a few “moderate” Republicans, I remember 2005, when a House “centrist” asked Nancy Pelosi when Democrats would offer their own plan to gut Social Security, and Ms. Pelosi shot back “never! How’s never for you?” You know how right-wingers say you should never negotiate with terrorists? Right-wingers negotiate with terrorists all the time when they get in office, of course, because who wouldn’t negotiate with like-minded folks? But the principle is the same: you do not negotiate with people who do not want to negotiate, but who only want drama and hysteria. And if we wind up going into default, everyone knows whose fault it will be – the Republicans who’ve spent the last several decades just saying no to everything. Hate to pile on, but a clean debt limit increase is the “moderate” position here – no one has yet tried to use the debt limit to force expanding Medicare to all Americans, for example, not that I’d ever want to give anyone ideas.

Hard to believe, Harry, but the infamous No Labels group – now as demonstrably far-right organization as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – has raised $70 million so far to promote a third-party Presidential ticket, getting “ballot access” in four states. But strangely, they won’t reveal the names of any of their donors, and their excuse for that – that “agitators and partisan operatives” will bully them, basically, like they don't understand the whole concept of “sunlight” – is a real right-wing excuse. I, for one, am tired of people pretending to be “centrists” so that the pain and suffering of good Americans can never be alleviated. And seriously, while Republicans predominantly run extremists in every office, Democrats haven’t run a Presidential candidate anyone could possibly call as an “extremist” in my lifetime, yet “centrist” “independent” "bipartisan" morons plod on in their both-sides-are-bad absurdity. And look how well-funded this particular gaggle of morons are! For the record, Joe Biden has already earned my vote in 2024, and I’m far more of an “extremist” than he’ll ever be.

Action: concerning drama, banksters, pollution, and abortion.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass a clean debt limit bill, and pass the Secure Viable Banking Act, the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act, and the Global HER Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to sign a discharge petition mandating a vote on a clean debt limit bill, one without any hostage-taking or drama. Seriously, no more drama! is the message our Congressfolk need to hear. They’ll pretend they’re hearing from constituents (or, possibly, “constituents”) about TEH RUNAWAYZ SPENDINGZ!!!!, but they really need to hear this simple message: no more drama! Do your damn job! Stop trying to force evil down good Americans’ throats! Social Security cuts, Medicare cuts – they know they can’t do them without drama. But it we get in their grills, they can’t do it at all.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Secure Viable Banking Act, which would repeal Trump-era banking regulation rollbacks. You know, like the one that increased the amount of rubbish a bank could hold without submitting to stricter regulations. Stricter regulations could have prevented those bank failures (and the resulting bailouts – the fact that taxpayers didn’t pay for them doesn’t make it that much better!), but big bankster CEOs didn’t want them, because waaaaaaaaaaaah. Seriously, that’s the reason – who complains more about fulfilling obligations to society than a bankster?

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act, and though I wince at the phrase “foreign mining” – mining and polluting near sacred San Carlos Apache/protected public land would be just as wrong if an American corporation did it! – the bill would permanently protect the Oak Flat area of the Tonto National Forest, thus ending a shameful chapter in the careers of former Sen. Flake (who once lobbied for the same corporation that wants to mine Oak Flat) and the late Sen. McCain, whose attention to clean air/clean water/religious freedom issues was always erratic. So let’s redeem their souls and protect some sacred public land.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Global HER Act, which would end forever the “global gag rule” that Republican Presidents reinstate the day they take office. I hate having to revisit this issue every time the Presidency changes parties even more than I hate the fact that electing a President from a different party even matters! And the fact is, the global gag rule hurts people all over the world – right-wingers pretend it prevents us from “exporting abortion,” but it actually prevents us from exporting health care to developing nations, since abortion is only one service health care organizations provide. So let’s end this battle once and for all.