Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning health care, monopolies, pollution, and bad cable news channels.

Long story short: tell President Biden to lower prescription drug prices, tell our government to reject a big bankster merger, tell our EPA to ban the herbicide dicamba and require more electric heavy-duty trucks on the road, tell our government to stop flogging "carbon capture" as a climate-change solution, and tell cable corporations to stop carrying the Fox News Channel. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to use his lawful power to lower prescription drug prices. After all, certain Congressdolts said "no" to Medicare negotiating drug prices, and in a Congress with slim margins a few miscreants can always get their way, so let's stop trying to negotiate with them and let's start trying to get President Biden to do the right thing. Specifically, the above-linked petition helps you ask President Biden to use "march-in" rights, granted by the Bayh/Dole Act of 1980, to manufacture cheaper generic drugs. At least 80% of Americans supported Medicare drug price negotiation, and I bet 100% of Americans oppose price-gouging and live-saving medicines breaking their bank accounts, so I would hope Mr. Biden would feel fairly secure in taking action the people need and want. Boy, I'd hate to be wrong about that.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Federal Reserve Bank and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (or OCC) to reject a proposed U.S. Bank/Union Bank merger. Never heard of either one? Well, let's keep it that way! And, in fact, let's break up both those banks so the resulting banks will be even less famous! Fame might be a good reason to buy a book, but it's no reason to choose a bank. And once upon a time, you had a savings and/or checking account at a bank that only had one branch, and because this bank only had one branch, the folks who worked there knew the folks living nearby and could tailor their services to those good folks. Now, big banks expect you to tailor your needs to them. And you deserve better than that! So let's fight this merger.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to ban herbicide dicamba from use on our farms. Dicamba has wreaked enough havoc on farms that don't use it -- it's a notorious drifter! -- that even Republican politicians have restricted its use, but the 2021 growing season saw no less disturbance and disruption than previous growing seasons, which means using it at all threatens farms everywhere. Monsanto figures in this story, of course, first by manufacturing a "better" version of dicamba a few years back and then offering dicamba-resistant crops as a "solution." But these are not solutions to those of us who do not worship mammon! We should treat food as a right rather than a thing to be sold; in the meantime, let's get dangerous chemicals off our farms.

Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell our EPA to start strengthening emissions standards for heavy-duty shipping trucks, with the goal of getting them all electric. Right-wingers will look solely at the goal and say pie in the sky much, liberal? Ha ha ha snort! But no reasonable person says that! Everyone knows it takes time to get internal combustion engines out of commercial trucks, but the need is no less urgent: these trucks comprise about a quarter of all carbon emissions in America, meaning that getting them to pollute less would be, as a famous philosopher once said, a BFD. And not for nothing, but highways more likely run through Black and Brown neighborhoods, exposing those folks to more pollutants than the rest of us. Why, it was almost like that was the whole idea! But we can do better.

Stand.Earth helps you tell our government to stop giving corporate welfare handouts to "carbon capture" corporations. Only when we embrace solar power, electric cars, geothermal heating, and hydroponic farming will we slow our roll toward climate disaster; "solutions" like natural gas, nuclear power, and "carbon capture," where corporations capture the carbon emissions before they hit the air and either store them in the ground or reuse them for other purposes, might make some executive rich, but they won't help us keep our planet. Carbon capture, it turns out, is nowhere near as far along in its development as it would have to be, plus corporations use a lot of the carbon they do capture to dig for oil! What a way of telling good people all over the world to fuck off and die! If you take as kindly to that as I do, give your government what-for.

Finally, Inequality Media Civic Action helps you tell big telecom corporations to stop offering Fox News on their networks. We've made some headway starving the beast that is the One America News Network, but going after Fox News, now the number one source of right-wing rage for over two decades, will, I expect, be harder, even though I presume most of its viewers will find other, better things to obsess about once they can't easily get to Fox News. Now, some folks don't like to do things like this; they call them censorship. But governments censor; when consumers band together against a product they don't like, that's just the churn of civilization. Why, some folks would even call it the free market in action!

Action: concerning big pharma, poisonous pesticides, e-proctoring, Alaska drilling, swim cap bans, and polluting pipelines.

Long story short: tell big pharma CEOs you know their excuses for overcharging us for drugs is utter balderdash, tell Bayer to develop a healthy alternative to Roundup, tell school administrators to stop using racist e-proctoring software, tell our Interior Department to reject an Alaska drilling project, tell the International Swimming Federation to lift its ban on larger swim caps, and tell big banks to pull funding for the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell big pharma CEOs that you know their research-and-development argument for high drug prices is rubbish. There is some value to telling them you're onto their game, after all. Typically, big pharma CEOs tell us they need to charge an arm and a leg, so to speak, for their drugs because that funds research and development of new drugs, but that's a lie! The fact that these same drugs cost a lot less in Canada and Europe should be the first clue, but we now know, thanks to Rep. Carolyn Maloney's office, that big pharma corporations spend a lot more money on stock buybacks and dividends than they do on research and development, and that's before we consider how much they spend on advertising and campaign donations. Why, that's before we consider taxpayer funding! If we want real health care in America, we have to go after big pharma's lies. In my experience, most Americans stand ready to do that.

Penn PIRG helps you tell Bayer to develop a safer alternative to its glyphosate-based weed killer Roundup. Bayer is actually considering doing this as we speak, so bad has been their publicity over its assimilation of the notorious Monsanto and Monsanto's notorious Roundup product, so let's give them a push. And don't worry that we won't be able to eat if we make Bayer do the right thing. This is America, the can-do country; do we really believe that we can't mass-produce food and avoid giving cancer to our people? If we believe that, we make ourselves hostages to evil, and if we do that, we might as well hang it up as a civilization. I won't let us hang it up as a civilization as long as I'm here, and I suspect many people feel the same way. But we have to make our will known.

Ban E-proctoring helps you tell school administrators across America to stop using "eProctoring" software like HonorLock and Proctorio. I bet you already know why! They can't tell black faces apart any better than other facial recognition software, or your Trumphole uncle, can. And yet schools still try to use them! And they're not just racist -- they're also prone to find more cheaters than really exist, by marking virtually any eye movement as "suspicious." Plus these e-proctoring programs collect way, way more data than they really need to do their job (why, it's almost like selling personal data is the whole idea!). Schools would be better off hiring more people to directly monitor more students. Worried where the money would come from? Well, three gazillionaires are trying to go into space as we speak; maybe it could come from one of them?

Environmental Action helps you tell our Interior Department to reject the Trump-era Willow oil drilling project in Alaska's North Slope. President Biden recently declared a moratorium on gas and oil leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but since former President Trump approved the project, the Biden Administration has actually defended it against lawsuits, and you know a future President Trump or President Cotton or President Cruz, wouldn't return the favor! You may not have known that oil drilling projects that far north rely on the stability of permafrost to anchor their equipment. But now that the permafrost is melting at record rates (ah, that would be due to climate change), oil drilling corporations are actually trying to install massive "chillers" to stabilize the ground! They'd be much better off investing in renewables.

Change.org helps you tell the International Swimming Federation to lift its absurd ban on large swim caps. As anyone who's done any competitive swimming will tell you, the large swim cap -- mostly worn by black folks, how about that -- does not confer a competitive advantage when swimming. What would confer a competitive advantage? Shaving your head, that's what! So the notion that a larger cap would benefit a swimmer by containing dreadlocks, weaves, Afros, or just plain lush hair is absurd on its face, so to speak. It's enough to make you think it's just plain racist, a notion the Federation hasn't helped dispel, by claiming the cap doesn't follow "the natural form of the head." Yeah, they said "natural"! Sigh.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell big banks to stop funding the notorious Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. You know the reasons: the tar sands oil it would carry is uniquely dirty, Line 3 would run through several sacred indigenous sites, Enbridge is yet another big fossil fuel corporation that has a lot of pipeline breaches, and of course it runs over the drinking water millions of Americans use. So why tell the big banks to stop funding it? Well, we've told President Biden to stop the project, and since he's indicated that he'll let the project proceed, we'll want to cut off the project at one of its other legs. I mean, if nobody gives Enbridge any money, it can't very well build the pipeline, can it?

Penny Rants for Sunday, December 13, 2020: special "everyone who sucked last year still sucks" edition!

From the "We Kinda Always Knew This, But It's Good to Have Confessions" file: a lengthy Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting investigation finds that Monsanto and BASF introduced their versions of dicamba knowing it would damage competitors' soybean crops, and they released these products because they wanted to eliminate their competitors. It gets better: Monsanto deliberately undertested their dicamba product (since they couldn't control dicamba's drift onto other farms), and when they did test it, they tested it under conditions that were nothing like what actual farmers face every day. BASF even told folks that their dicamba wouldn't necessarily be safe even by applying it strictly according to the label. In a sane and moral society, Monsanto and BASF would be so broken by lawsuits they'd go out of business. In this sick, immoral, and decadent society, however, Republicans claim these failures require more of the "free" market medicine that enabled them in the first place -- and Democrats remain so hypnotized by the "promise" of "technology" that they sit on their hands.

Another day, another reminder that a crap-ton of full-time workers at fast-food and retail corporations don't make enough money to stay off of federal assistance like food stamps and Medicaid, this time from a Government Accountability Office (or GAO) study. And here you thought if you work full-time, you should be able to provide for your family and guide your children to a better future -- let alone be able to provide for your family without having to rely on government assistance. Which you've already paid into with your taxes, so don't blame yourself or imagine you're some kind of leech; that's what they want you to think -- and right-wingers are so quick to say just get a better job like they're not busy trying to outsource all the good American jobs so that American executives can gild the plumbing on their 19th vacation homes. Oh, and here's the kicker: our GAO did this study before the pandemic hit; one can only imagine how much worse it is now, with over 14 million more uninsured and our U-1 unemployment rate still close to 7 percent (the more instructive U-6 rate, which counts part-timers who want to work full-time and unemployed folks who've given up, is 12 percent).

Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post lists every single Republican House Rep and state Attorney General who signed on to that ridiculous Texas lawsuit aiming to overturn our election, saying "they are laying the predicate for a contentious new phase of American democracy, if it can continue to be called that, in which election results -- after appropriate recounts and audits and certifications -- are no longer accepted. Instead, they merely open the door for a second phase of legal and political guerrilla warfare in which no tactic, no lie, no baseless claim is off-limits." Note well that these Republicans' loyalty to our soon-to-be-ex-President will most likely go unrewarded, not just because there'll always be a crazier right-winger to swordfight (just ask Scott Tipton!), but also because it only takes one deviation from Dear Leader's Holy Will to become a permanent outcast (just ask Bill Barr!). I did wonder -- because unlike these Republicans I do have the capacity for shame -- if we bore any blame for talking about Voter ID and Interstate Crosscheck, but no, we don't, not just because we always had evidence, but because we always said vote suppression happened before the vote.

Action: concerning good bills, good labor law, and good agricultural practice.

Let's see how our list is coming! Call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Don't worry that you're putting out your Senators' staffers by asking them to pass a long list of bills they have no intention of passing, because, hey, they're paid to listen to you, and if they don't like getting a long list from you, they can find another job. Hey, they're already well-connected! And, of course, if your Senators don't like it, they can, you know, pass good bills that protect and strengthen things like voting rights, equal rights, public lands, worker wages, and internet freedom.

Our National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) has proposed a rule change that would deny graduate school teaching assistants of their right to organize and collectively bargain! What's their rationale behind this -- you know, besides ALWAYZ HURT TEH WURKURZ!!!!!? They're saying that letting TAs organize would "hurt academic freedom"! Always the right wing whines that you Americans will always let self-interest destroy everything, which is, of course, exactly how the right-wing is! And I guess our Administration has not properly considered all the union laborers in the South who vote Republican because at least they're against abortion. The more pertinent issue, of course, is that our institutions of higher learning exploit grad students, and just because they pay to go there doesn't give them a "right" to use them like wet dishrags. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell our NLRB to reject its plan to prevent grad students from organizing for better pay and better working conditions.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would help farmers reduce their dependence on chemicals like Dicamba, the notorious Monsanto creation that drifts into neighboring farms and hurts other farmers' crops. They'll complain that they just passed a big Farm Bill in 2018, but I suspect the folks who get cancer because of Dicamba-infused crops over the next five years won't find that very sympathetic. We have totally given over food production in America to large corporations that only care about growing crops more "efficiently," by which they mean "they efficiently deliver unearned income to executives." But we all know ways of doing agriculture better, including rotating a diverse set of crops; big ag won't do that, because it doesn't enable them to spray tons of chemical crap on crops, which is, after all, cheaper than doing it right. But "it's cheaper" shouldn't be the number one reason we do things -- and it should never be the reason we avoid doing the right thing. I know, it sounds quaint.

Action: concerning war in Yemen, discrimination, and pollution.

Our President, as you know, has declared yet another of his "national emergencies" so he can sell weapons to the Saudi/UAE coalition that's currently raining down bombs on impoverished Yemenis. What's the "emergency"? Saudi Arabia needs weapons to defend itself from Iran, or something. Iran is now the excuse for everything, apparently. "Where's my tax cut? Iran took it!" (Maybe I shouldn't give our President any ideas.) Since our President has declared an "emergency," Congress can't stop him from selling arms using the Arms Control Act -- but we can tell Congress to simply ban arms sales to the Saudi/UAE war effort with new legislation, which Win Without War helps you do. I've said it before and I'll say it again: a President who needs to declare "emergencies" so he can accomplish unpopular legislative aims isn't a guy who "gets things done;" he's a weak man and a bad leader.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1756, the Preventing Credit Score Discrimination in Auto Insurance Act, would, as its title implies, would prevent car insurance corporations from setting insurance rates based on your credit score, and would prevent credit reporting agencies from furnishing car insurance corporations with that information. And here you thought your auto insurance corporation might raise or lower your rates based on your driving history! But now car insurance corporations charge folks more if they have low credit scores, which sure does seem like a recipe for car insurance corporations not getting paid, but it does trap lower-income folks in a cycle of debt. Too much of our economy seems predicated on punching people in the face when they're down; if you hate that as much as I do, then let CREDO help you tell your Congressfolk to fight financial predators by passing the Preventing Credit Score Discrimination in Auto Insurance Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to ban glyphosate, Just Label It still helps you do that -- but do it quickly, as the EPA's public commenting period on the matter ends tomorrow. Glyphosate was in the news after several juries found Monsanto liable for billions of dollars in damages when folks who routinely used RoundUp (Monsanto's brand-name version of glyphosate) got cancer, and we dump around 250 million gallons of the stuff on our crops annually in America. Note well, also, that Monsanto's genetic engineering projects tend to center around making their crops more resistant to RoundUp, rather than, say, increasing crop yields so farmers can produce more food. Upon hearing that many farmers are already moving away from spraying glyphosate on their crops before harvest, you have to wonder what the EPA's hesitance to ban it would be. And by "you have to wonder," I mean "because corporate welfare."

Action: concerning government spying and carcinogens in food.

Google still gathers location data from users even after they disable location tracking on their phones. And worse, Google says they do it so they can better target advertisements to you! It's like they think buying stuff is the only thing anyone should ever be doing. Of course, we know it's more than ad targeting, because location tracking has become a sort of crutch for law enforcement over the last few years, and law enforcement doesn't need to get your permission to get that info, only Google's. No use saying if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear, either, because our government may decide that some benign doing of yours today (checking out some non-mainstream news website, for example) is a terroristic threat tomorrow. And, really, does any government or corporation deserve to know where we all are at all times? Demand Progress helps you tell Google to stop spying on its users.

Meanwhile, it's been a bad month for Monsanto and their notorious glyphosate herbicide RoundUp -- a jury ordered Monsanto to pay $289 million to a school groundskeeper who developed cancer after using RoundUp, the California Supreme Court wouldn't hear a challenge to glyphosate's inclusion on that state's famous list of carcinogens, and the Environmental Working Group reported finding dangerously high levels of glyphosate in two-thirds of the oat-based children's food products it tested. Gosh, they might be having a tougher time of it than our President, and they don't have a big chunk of the population that'll run through a wall for them like our President does. So Just Label It helps you tell big food-processing corporations General Mills, Kellogg's, and Quaker to make their food products free of glyphosate. Because, really, no one (and certainly not our children) should worry about getting cancer from oatmeal or granola bars.

Action: the Census, the minimum wage, and agricultural poisons.

You've heard that our Administration wants to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census? Well, Common Cause helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 2580, which would prohibit questions about citizenship or immigration status on Census forms. You may well be thinking, what's the big deal? And while actual undocumented immigrants might well duck the Census regardless of whether it asks about their status, other folks -- like folks whose papers will expire in time, or folks whose papers are set for life but who often get mistaken for "illegal immigrants" -- might duck the Census, too, and that will reduce their representation in Congress and the funding that goes to their communities. The Census plays a big part in determining all that, so let's help it achieve an "actual enumeration" of the population, as the Constitution requires.

Meanwhile, Good Jobs Nation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 15/S. 1242, the Raise the Wage Act, which would increase the federal minimum wage to $15/hour over a seven-year period. No, it won't kill jobs, or else we'd see rampant unemployment in areas of the world where minimum wages like these are standard, and we don't. No, it's not too-much-too-soon, because the wage would go up gradually over seven years. And no, it won't kill small businesses, because more highly-paid employees will spend a lot of those extra wages at those same small businesses. If this bill passes, I expect a lot of its good ideas -- including narrowing the gaps between the standard minimum wage and both the tipped minimum wage and the disabled worker minimum wage -- will get stripped out. But let's start negotiating with our demands, rather than what we'll settle for.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state Governor to ban Monsanto's version of the herbicide dicamba that destroys crops on neighboring farms, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. The State Plant Board of Arkansas banned this herbicide for that state's main growing season (though not for the entire growing year), but every state's got farms, and everyone depends on farms for food, and no one deserves to have their livelihood ruined by a pesticide that doesn't stay put where it's supposed to. And Monsanto developed this version of dicamba specifically to work on its own versions of cotton and soybean plants that resist dicamba more! Could they be trying to force farmers to use their products under threat of crop (and livelihood!) destruction? Hey, it's a question worth asking!

Action: with three more ways to fight greedy corporations.

Consumer Reports helps you tell Consumer Financial Protection Bureau acting Director Mick Mulvaney to regulate financial corporations as vigorously as the American people have come to expect. He doesn't give one rat's hind-quarter what you and I think, but it's our duty to tell him anyway. Since taking over the CFPB, Mr. Mulvaney has declared that the agency should be less about regulation and more about advice to consumers, which is precisely not what the American people wanted after banksters nearly destroyed our economy in 2008. That wasn't even 10 years ago, and yet folks like Mr. Mulvaney still spew out their REGULASHUNZ BAD!!!! absurdities like no one can remember back that far. And without the CFPB, which has to date returned almost $12 billion to consumers harmed by financial predators, we would likely never have caught Wells Fargo opening accounts for customers who didn't want them. So let's protect the things that protect us.

Meanwhile, Nestlé still pumps a crapload of water annually (as much as 160 million gallons) out of the San Bernardino National Forest in California -- and their permit to do that expired three decades ago! And the California Water Board finally told Nestlé back in December to stop drawing that water, but of course they haven't, because law and order! That's water belonging to the good people of California, who did recently suffer through a five-year drought, as you may recall -- and Nestlé was drawing water from San Bernardino to sell as bottled water the whole time. Bottled water is a scam, not just because the water from your tap is clean enough, but also because Nestlé pays so little for the water it bottles and charges so much. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell the U.S. Forest Service to enforce the rule of law and prevent Nestlé from siphoning public water from the San Bernardino National Forest.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Monsanto sued the government of Arkansas for banning the use of its dicamba herbicide during the upcoming growing season -- and an Arkansas county circuit court judge threw the lawsuit out. This is good news for vegetable and peanut farmers, whose crops suffered immense damage from the dicamba herbicide drifting from soybean farms over to their farms. Of course, Monsanto thinks the judge's decision causes "irreparable harm" to the corporation that made nearly $8 billion in profit in fiscal 2017. All together now: waaaaaaah! Corporations do seem to love creating proprietary pesticides that only work with proprietary crops, and vice versa, but if you're as annoyed as I am that these efforts to "increase crop yields" seem to do little but increase corporate profits at great expense to small farmers, then Penn PIRG helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf to ban dicamba here in the Keystone State.

Action: poisonous pesticides, and national parks.

Knowing that Arkansas is dominated by Republicans only makes it more heartening that their state government has fought Monsanto's dicamba, a herbicide scientists link to shortness of breath, muscle weakness, and vomiting -- but it's only banned dicamba use during the warmest parts of the year, since dicamba aerosolizes (and makes people sick) far more efficiently in warmer air. Hence Penn PIRG helps you thank the government of Arkansas for its partial ban of dicamba and encourage them to make their ban year-round. Should I bother mentioning that Monsanto manufactured dicamba for use on its own genetically-engineered crops? Yes, I should bother mentioning it again -- especially since Monsanto will no doubt tell you they do what they do to increase yields or end hunger, two goals that seem much too big for them to comprehend. I mean, making money off crops, they get, but doing so in a way that doesn't hurt people they're not anywhere near as good with. It sure is a good thing we're here to help them with that.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration's drill-everywhere-fuck-the-consequences plan continues unabated, as they now plan to sell fossil fuel drilling leases near Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. You may remember stopping fracking in Chaco Canyon back at the end of the Obama years, but, as they say, that was then and this is now, and "now" means nothing so much as big fossil fuel executives making as much money as humanly possible right away. That's Donald Trump for you, though -- he doesn't care about anyone but big boss-men like himself. Naturally, the Chaco park holds thousand-year-old artifacts from the Ancient Pueblo civilization, and good folks belonging to today's Pueblo nation find the area sacred, but again, "religious freedom" only means something to Trumpholes when you're a boss trying to deny women birth control. So CREDO helps you tell the Bureau of Land Management to reject proposed fossil fuel leases near the Chaco park. After all, oil and gas are temporary, but history is forever.

Action: concerning health care, birth control, and food monopolies.

High drug prices are very unpopular, right? Of course they are! So, naturally, President Trump, visionary that he is, wants to replace the disgraced former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price with big pharma CEO Alex Azar -- whom, among other things, oversaw the doubling of insulin prices at Eli Lilly USA over a five-year period. But he's the bigliest person for the job of running Medicaid and Medicare and setting executive branch health care policy! Mr. Azar also served in Tha Bush Mobb's HHS back in the day, but surely that isn't a selling point, not just because you don't want "worked for Tha Bush Mobb" on your résumé, but because the revolving door between our government and big corporations is almost as popular as high drug prices. You know what else is unpopular? Weakened drug safety standards, but guess what Mr. Azar also supports. Hence both Public Citizen and Social Security Works help you tell your Senators to reject Mr. Azar as the next Health and Human Services Secretary.

Meanwhile, in a related note, the National Women's Law Center helps you tell the Trump Administration to rescind its order allowing certain corporations to evade the federal birth control coverage mandate for "religious" (or "moral"!) reasons. As I've been saying for a long time, a boss's "religious beliefs" aren't better than yours or mine, and certainly not more so than their employees, and I also won't abide unctuous pronouncements that they pay the money, they get their say -- I could just as easily argue that the boss's employees pay for their own health care in lost wages, or that the boss's customers pay for employee's health care, either of which would put decision-making power in better hands. And how many times must I tell these pimps! Birth control not only saves all of us money, it prevents abortions. Not too many years ago, a few Republicans remained who would remind us that birth control prevents abortions. And even if they've all lost their elections to rageheads since then, it's no less true.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Justice to reject the proposed Bayer-Monsanto merger, then ActionAid USA still helps you do that. Where to begin with this monstrosity? With the fact that letting Bayer buy it lets Monsanto bury its notorious name? With the merger giving the resulting behemoth a quarter of the world seed market, which could help create a world where a mere three megacorporations control more than three-fifths of that market? With the fact that control of the seed market in fewer corporate hands gives small farmers (whom Monsanto prevents from replanting saved seed year over year, I kid you not) fewer choices? With the fact that seed concentration almost guarantees that multitudinous species of seed will go extinct because they "don't make money"? With the fact that it would make more of these farmers dependent on genetically-modified seed, seed manufactured not to increase yields but to withstand proprietary pesticides? Seriously, I have no idea where to start with this. I guess you can just pick a spot.

Action: fighting drug and seed monopolies, and investigating brutalities.

Word on the street is, with our government only funded through December 9, big pharmaceutical corporations want to get an additional six months of monopoly power over drugs before other corporations can sell them as generics. Naturally, it'll be another hostage situation -- give me a right to more unearned money, or the government gets it! But I'm sure some folks wonder why we make big pharmaceutical corporations relinquish control over their drugs at all, since it's "their property." Of course our legal system has long recognized that property can be regulated for the common good, and it has also long mandated that no one -- not authors, not musicians, not scientists, and certainly not corporations -- should have exclusive rights to their intellectual property forever; we recognize these things because we recognize that too much control of private property by too few actors causes harm to all of us. Thus we can easily establish that too much big pharma control over the drugs it makes (usually with help from our government, and therefore with our help, I feel compelled to point out) causes harm to our society, in the form of higher drug prices impregnable to correction by the free market. Plus, you know, you don't need a book or an album to live, but you might need a drug to live. Hence Social Security Works helps you tell Congress to prevent big pharmaceutical corporations from extending their power over us.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell American and European regulators to stop the proposed Bayer/Monsanto merger, then Sum of Us still helps you do that. Why both? Because Monsanto is an American corporation and Bayer is a German corporation, and thus both our Justice Department and the European Union can essentially veto the proposed merger. Of course you already know that mergers are a bad idea, because they kill jobs, reduce competition, and jack up prices, but you may not know that a Bayer/Monsanto merger would give the resulting behemoth control over 70 percent of the world's cotton seed, as well as a quarter of the total seed market and almost a quarter of the crop-chemical market. Does that sound like a good deal for farmers -- to be forced to deal with so few seed-providers (many of whom will likely mandate, as Monsanto already does, that farmers not save seeds for replanting the following year)? No, it does not. And it also means, not incidentally, that all of Monsanto's genetically-modified seed -- seed modified not to give us healthier food, but to better withstand Monsanto's pesticides -- would continue under a new name that's not nearly as hated as Monsanto's name. So let's not let Monsanto get away with disappearing their nefarious works under a more respected corporate banner.

Finally, Columbus, OH police shot Tyre King, 13, back in mid-September; police apparently wanted to question the boy about an armed robbery involving some $10, but then, according to police testimony. he pulled out a BB gun with a laser sight that looked an awful lot like a real weapon, and thus an officer shot him to death. Yet a week later, an independent medical examiner hired by Mr. King's family said that he was "more likely than not" running away from officers at the time of his shooting. So which is it? If it's the former, we wouldn't even be talking about this, but running from a police officer is not and has never been a death-penalty offense. Sadly, local prosecutor Ron O'Brien has been unwilling to look very deeply into police shootings of local young black men, and this phenomenon, unfortunately, occurs all over America wherever prosecutors have to investigate the police officers who are vital witnesses in other cases. But if we say we must leave police officers completely alone to do their work because we're afraid they won't be able to do their work if we don't, we're being cowards -- civilized people that ensuring that police officers do the right thing by the people they're sworn to serve is hard work, but work that must be done. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell Prosecutor O'Brien to call for an independent investigation of Mr. King's death.

Action: battling ANWR/Arctic drilling and the proposed Bayer/Monsanto merger.

The Senate is contemplating S. 3203, the so-called Alaska Economic Development and Access to Resources Act, which would allow new drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) and the Arctic Ocean. What are the problems with these plans again? Roll call! Drilling for oil in ANWR won't yield very much oil! Drilling for oil in the Arctic is even harder than drilling in the Gulf! ANWR provides clean drinking water to good Alaskans! ANWR is sacred ground to the Gwich'in people! ANWR provides an environment for polar bears and caribou! OK, so it's not as snappy as the Mousketeer roll call, but it is all true -- more economic development in ANWR and the Arctic Ocean will do nothing for good Alaskans, but will make a few oil corporation CEOs a bit richer. Remember the days when Sen. Stevens would wear his Hulk tie to the Senate whenever an ANWR drilling bill came up? Sen. Stevens is gone, God rest him, but his dream of tearing up land all good Alaskans need so that a few CEOs can make a bit more money is, sadly, still with us. So the Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell your Senators to reject ANWR and Arctic Ocean drilling.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Department of Justice to stop the proposed Bayer-Monsanto merger, then CREDO still helps you do that. Allowing Bayer to buy Monsanto will allow Bayer to completely disappear the hated name of Monsanto while still carrying on all the nefarious works that have given Monsanto its bad name -- which include, but are certainly not limited to, crushing farmers who don't adhere to Monsanto's absurdly strict seed contracts and making more and more farmers dependent on toxic pesticides and genetically-modified food. It gets worse: if Bayer gets to buy Monsanto, the resulting behemoth would control 70 percent of the world's cotton seed, and if the equally nefarious Dow-DuPont merger also goes through, the result would be four corporations controlling 90 percent of the world's seeds and crop chemicals, and no power should be that concentrated. The world's food supply depends on diversity and availability, after all -- and corporate power squashes diversity and availability. Civilized people don't put power before food.

Action: fighting slavery, banksters, and monopolies.

As you may know, the government of Uzbekistan forces its good citizens to pick cotton during their annual harvest. Doesn't matter what you do for a living -- you could be a nurse, a teacher, a college student, or a business owner -- you're out there picking cotton 10 hours a day. And while Uzbekistan has improved some work conditions and started to phase out child labor on the cotton fields, they've also cracked down hard on the good Uzbeks who continue to press for an end to the practice. But the President who has enforced this policy for the last 25 years, Islam Karimov, has lately died, which (sad as it may be for the Karimov family) does provide us an opportunity to agitate for the abolition of forced labor. I would invite right-wingers who claim that taxation is slavery and regulations are oppression to look at what's happening in Uzbekistan to see what slavery and oppression are really like. (Or they could work on a Hawaiian fishing boat, but I digress.) Hence the International Labor Rights Foundation helps you tell the Uzbekistan government to end forced labor in that nation.

Meanwhile, H.R. 5983, the so-called Financial CHOICE Act, would give the banksters even more power. Didn't Wells Fargo just get fined nearly $200 million for opening up accounts people didn't want and even charging fees on those unwanted accounts? But Congress's only impulse, it seems, is to keep your government from protecting you from banksters. Hence H.R. 5983 would (among other things!) prevent our government from breaking up too-big-to-fail banks, let retirement investors put their own greed ahead of their clients' needs, gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, repeal the Durbin Amendment limiting the fees businesses pay to banks for debit card use, force all financial regulations to be approved all over again by Congress, and repeal the CEO-to-employee pay rule Dodd-Frank mandates. In other words, H.R. 5983 is an absolute fecal storm, and no amount of lying about "protecting small businesses" (by making them pay higher fees to banks? Really?) can cover that. So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Financial CHOICE Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell American and European governments to reject the proposed Monsanto-Bayer merger, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. Bayer is a German corporation (a real one, unlike so many of today's "foreign" corporations like Burger King, which "moved" merely to avoid paying their fair share of American taxes), so European regulators might have as much to say about it as ours do. Or more; our government just greenlighted Charter/Time-Warner, after all. Who would benefit from one corporation having so much so much say over chemicals and agriculture? Nobody but Bayer's executives. And Monsanto's endless line of GMO seeds that don't deliver healthier food in higher yields but merely withstand its own proprietary pesticides better would continue, to the greater detriment of us all. And let's not even get started on what farmers would have to do to survive under an even bigger big ag conglomerate. I mean, giving farmers, not big corporations, more power over the food supply would be the conservative thing to do.

Around the table: starring Pope Francis I! Also starring banksters and corrupt politicians.

Pope Francis I tells us he thinks the Catholic Church has become too "obsessed" with issues like abortion and gay marriage. I'd say it's not just the Catholic church, but what a breath of fresh air this guy is!

JP Morgan Chase will pay a $950 million fine to settle various civil lawsuits concerning its $6 billion-plus series of "bad bets" last year. That's less than $1 billion out of $6.5 billion in profits for the second quarter alone, but consider that regulators got an admission of wrongdoing out of JP Morgan Chase, and that some criminal investigations over the "London Whale" scandals (and others!) will still move forward. A mere five years after everyone else in America decided banksters were ruining the world, the Obama Administration may be starting to get serious about the matter.

The USDA rules that the contamination of a Washington state farmer's alfalfa with Monsanto Frankenfalfa -- which meant the farmer could not sell his alfalfa in countries that ban GMO foods -- is a "commercial issue" demanding a "marketplace" solution, and thus requiring no governmental intervention. Golly, looks like the "market" has decided that a farmer who gets his seed accidentally tainted with some corporate GMO alfalfa is completely screwed through no fault of his own. It's not like we have governments to prevent such absurdities from happening or anything.

Finally, Derek Pugh lists ten U.S. House Reps who voted to slash food stamps but who also receive farm subsidy money. And on that list, you may find the inimitable Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, whose farm received over $70,000 last year. You remember him? The one who said people who need food stamps "steal" from taxpayers? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that he doesn't think of farm subsidies as "stealing from the taxpayer."

DC Circuit Court of Appeals tosses organic farmers' lawsuit against Monsanto -- but also makes Monsanto promise not to sue farmers whose seed has been inadvertently contaminated with Monsanto Frankenseed for "intellectual property theft." That's not a great victory for us -- how a corporation escapes punishment for "inadvertently" contaminating the world with its Frankenseed and then suing small farmers for "benefiting" from having that seed blow onto their crops is beyond me. Also left unsolved: organic farmers still won't be able to earn a USDA organic certification if Monsanto Frankenseed contaminates their crop -- and Monsanto could still battle each-and-every farmer whose seed they've contaminated in an attempt to "discover" if the contamination was "inadvertent," which litigation would still wreck small farmers while hurting Monsanto's bottom line rather little. Republicans who hate "frivolous lawsuits" might want to turn their attention to what's happening here, maybe? Soon Monsanto takes on the rest of the world, which opposes genetically-modified food and is starting to turn back American wheat at the border. I hope we don't have to learn a painful lesson about who's more powerful then.

Meanwhile, Citizens for Tax Justice reminds us why we need a corporate income tax. Apparently some folks have been saying that, since corporate profits eventually go to shareholders, we should just abolish the corporate income tax and adjust personal income tax rates accordingly. Sounds appetizing, doesn't it? But behold: corporations don't eventually pass on all their profits to individuals -- most of their profits go into tax-exempt entities like pensions and university endowments -- and corporations can also hold onto their profits for years before disbursing them. So, yeah, when you've argued from a completely inaccurate premise, the whole thing pretty much falls apart. Furthermore, most dividends go to high-income individuals anyway, so the corporate tax winds up doing at least some of the work a progressive income tax code should be doing. Of course, dividend taxes shouldn't be lower than income taxes in the first place; even Ronald Reagan said so. But hopefully we've nipped this whole argument in the bud -- though you can't underestimate the "liberal" media's ability to ignore good arguments, since they were still peddling rubbish about the Bush tax cuts and small businesses as late as last December.

Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian reports that the Obama Administration requested, and received, FISA permission to collect phone log data of all Verizon customers. Now Senators from both sides of the aisle have been quick to respond that data-vacuuming program isn't a new one, that they've been briefed on its existence for seven long years now, that it's authorized by Sec. 215 of the PATRIOT Act, and that, in Mr. Chambliss's words, "we have collected significant information on bad guys." I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit on that, and not just because Mr. Chambliss didn't name any "bad guys" or even because "collecting significant information" on bad guys isn't the same as stopping bad guys -- plenty of government officials have testified that all this data-vacuuming we're doing has overwhelmed them with bad intel. When we demand warrants and probable cause, we're not merely protecting the innocent from government oppression -- we're setting a bar that sifts the malcontents from the real terrorists. Demand Progress, the ACLU, and Free Press have the action alerts.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the USDA to halt all field trials of unapproved genetically-modified crops, Organic Consumers still helps you do that. You could get away with planting unapproved GE crops in the field if and only if you could be absolutely sure that none of the Frankenseed will escape the field and find its way onto someone else's field. Given the fact that wind blows seed just about everywhere, and animals carry seed just about everywhere, how likely does that seem? The Frankenwheat found in an Oregon wheat field got field-tested in 15 other states. And Monsanto is now doing open-air field tests of a slightly-different glyphosate-resistant Frankenwheat in North Dakota and Hawaii. The USDA has responded with its best Alfred E. Neumann impression, telling us that the FDA found the Frankenwheat safe in 2004. The FDA in 2004? My God, that was Mr. Bush's FDA! An FDA even worse than Mr. Obama's! Why should I take their word for a damn thing?

The Senate takes up the Farm Bill again this week, and we've already had a win and a loss: a Durbin-Coburn amendment began the hard work of limiting crop insurance subsidies for big corporations, but a Gillibrand amendment that would have restored over $4 billion in food stamps got shot down, with 28 Democrats helping the Republicans do the shooting. And they call that fiscal sanity! But Food and Water Watch helps you email your Senators about amendments to the Farm Bill. Their list is pretty comprehensive; it includes, among others, two Barbara Boxer (D-CA) amendments that would force labeling of genetically-modified food, a Begich (D-AK) amendment that would ban genetically-engineered salmon, a Gillibrand (D-NY) amendment that would tackle antibiotic abuse in factory farm animals, a slew of factory farm-spanking amendments authored by Democrats Tester and Rockefeller as well as Republicans Grassley and Enzi, and a Shaheen (D-NH) amendment limiting crop insurance payouts to $50,000. The big agricultural concerns will try to drown us out, but they're nothing compared to us. After all, we're people.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the Pennsylvania state Senate is actually mulling legislation (SB 975) that would legalize payday loans extracting 300% annual interest. Sigh. They're calling SB 975 a "micro-loan" bill, but if it looks like dung and smells like dung you don't need to eat it because Pennsylvania politicians call it meatloaf. And back in 2002, the state legislature actually passed a tough payday lending law -- one that limited the size of loans to $500, limited fees to $75, and limited interest to 20% for the first $300 and a mere 7.5% for any money over $300. Pennsylvania law also doesn't allow borrowers to take out a second payday loan until they've paid off the first, which keeps them out of an endless cycle of debt brought on by a temporary cash crisis. So why break something that's been working well for over a decade? I'd hate to think it's because the big banksters want to get into the payday loan business, but we can't discount the possibility. Keystone Progress helps you tell your PA state legislators to reject SB 975, and keep our payday loan laws strong.