Thieves in the Temple.

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

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

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

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

Around the table: tales of privatization and corporate welfare, plus slim rays of hope in Appalachia.

Zachery Tracer at Bloomberg explains how Mr. Trump's ending of Obamacare subsidies will actually cost our government more money. Since other health insurance subsidies essentially limit how much folks who use the exchange pay out-of-pocket, our government will wind up paying even more of the cost of the now-higher premiums. Of course, since so many Trump votaries won't actually feel it in their pocketbook, they'll decide it either didn't happen or doesn't matter. I'd call all that clever of Mr. Trump, if I didn't insist that cleverness also work toward some greater good, rather than some selfish evil.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry wants to guarantee profits for coal and nuclear power plants in deregulated energy markets, as long as those plants keep 90 days' worth of fuel on site. Free markets! Seriously, this is a very edifying read -- among other things, it reminds us that cost-benefit analyses usually wind up ignoring most of the real costs, particularly the health care costs -- but it should be quite irritating navigating the excuses the right will offer in defense, from TEH OBAMAZ MADE TEH WARZ ON TEH COALZ!!! to PROTECTINGZ TEH PROFITZ PROTECTZ TEH WORKURZ!!!!! to TEH SUN SETZ TEH WIND DIEZ!!! to WHY DO YOU HATEZ TEH AMURKIAZ!!!!

The subheader on this William D. Hartung piece at The American Conservative reads thusly: "Your tax dollars support troops of defense contractor CEOs." Turns out about half of defense spending "goes directly to private corporations and much of it is then wasted on useless overhead, fat executive salaries, and startling (yet commonplace) cost overruns on weapons systems and other military hardware that, in the end, won’t even perform as promised." And of course the Pentagon doesn't hold them accountable, not when they can't even tell you how many private contractors they've hired. This sure looks like yet another argument against privatization.

In a related note, you no doubt heard that Tesla CEO Elon Musk wants to remake Puerto Rico's entire utility grid into a renewable one, and though your heart may have soared in appreciation, Kate Aronoff at In These Times reminds us that it would likely come with a price -- the privatization of Puerto Rico's power grid. All the standard objections apply: the good citizens of Puerto Rico would have no control over what a private corporation does to them, and such private corporations will do what's good for shareholders before they'll ever do what's good for citizens. And even if you're fairly sanguine about Tesla, remember that Tesla could sell whatever it would own in Puerto Rico at any time -- and to multiple corporations, which would multiply potential problems.

And speaking of Puerto Rico's many other problems, the House has unveiled a Puerto Rico relief plan that contains $16 billion of debt relief -- but for the underfinanced National Flood Insurance Program, not the island. But wait, there's more! The bill would give Puerto Rico, which has already faced a financial crisis due to bankster manipulation and governmental corruption, $5 billion in loans. I bet the House calls giving them grants a "moral hazard;" clearly the real moral hazard of using a crisis to put people deeper in debt is invisible to them.

Finally, Catherine V. Moore at Yes! magazine discusses the various ways local Appalachians have taken to reviving areas where coal corporations use to conduct mountaintop removal mining. Note well that though invasive plant species have proven difficult to remove, and the cost of restoring the soil is steep (putting one foot of topsoil over formerly-mined land costs about $2,400 an acre), Appalachia area is actually fairly temperate, and could certainly support agriculture again. Not to mention a renewable power grid, but that may be a job for the next President.

Action: coal community reclamation, "religious freedom" bills, and police body cameras.

H.R. 1731/S. 738, the RECLAIM Act, has been around in various iterations for the last year; it aims to use money from the Abandoned Mines Land Fund to help historic coal communities clean up their land. Such an effort could actually create jobs, in communities that not only suffer from a lack of work (as coal corporations wind down their operations) but also from air, land, and water polluted by mountaintop coal removal and surface mining. Think maybe these good folks could figure out what to do with their communities if they just had a little help? I think so. But the original RECLAIM Act mandated priority to projects that actually sought input from local communities -- and the current version strips that part out! In other words, the bill now aims to listen as little to the communities actually suffering as possible, possibly so that some Senator's cronies can more easily feed at the public trough. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to support more local community input into the RECLAIM Act.

Meanwhile, the Tennessee state Senate Judiciary Committee has moved SB 1085/HB 1111, the so-called "LGBT Erasure Bill," to the full Senate for a vote, which could happen this week; the bill has already passed out of the state House, meaning the full Senate vote is the last stand before Tennessee formally enshrines the "right" to discriminate against gays and transgendered folk into law. Tennessee stands to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in business revenue if they go through with this, just like North Carolina did, but we need to cut to the heart of the matter: religious folks don't have a right to refuse to serve gays just because they think Jesus told them so. Are they fully aware that one could just as easily claim a "right" to discriminate against blacks because the Bible "said" so? Maybe they are, now that I think about it, but if we wouldn't stand for that when it hurts black folks, we shouldn't stand for it when it hurts gays, either. The Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell the Tennessee state Senate to reject this "LBGT Erasure" bill.

Finally, closer to home, America has witnessed police brutality against black folks like it never has before, thanks to the ubiquity of cellphone cameras, and most folks now support some form of body cameras for police officers. But the Pennsylvania state Senate is mulling SB 560, which would make it virtually impossible for good Pennsylvanians to see body camera footage. You might say, well, if it relates to a criminal investigation, it isn't everyone's business, but this is also the age where one can protect the privacy of the accused and of victims with ease even within video footage, and SB 560 would give law enforcement more rights than they need to deny requests to see body camera footage. I don't believe we can't protect both privacy and the public interest at the same time. If I did, I guess I'd have to move to some police state or something; I mean, this is America. So the ACLU helps you tell your Pennsylvania state Senator to reject SB 560 and preserve the public interest in viewing certain body camera footage.

Action: protecting Medicaid, and fighting pollution in both the Appalachians and Utah's national parks.

Congress is trying to cut Medicaid, because freedom! And Big Gummint! And bootstraps! Seriously, Congress can perhaps go after Medicaid a bit more easily than Medicare, since we all aspire to be seniors one day and thus we'll all need Medicare, whereas too many good Americans still look at Medicaid as something Those People get. But we should avoid thinking of Medicaid as something you get and think of it instead as something we give -- we all pay taxes to fund Medicaid, after all, and any one of us might need to use it someday, since too many good Americans are one catastrophe away from becoming one of "those people." Currently nearly 70 million Americans -- that's right, more than one out of every five of us -- use Medicaid, and that number includes children, mothers, folks with disabilities, and seniors (for whom Medicare doesn't cover everything, particularly nursing home costs). And in a time when the "free" market still ain't providing enough jobs, working families don't need another punch to the gut. So Moms Rising helps you tell Congress to reject cuts to Medicaid.

Meanwhile, H.R. 912, the Appalachian Community Health Emergency Act (or ACHE Act), would ban mountaintop removal coal mining until the Secretary of Health and Human Services certifies that it's safe -- which certification, given what we know of elevated levels of lung cancer and birth defects around areas where mountains have been blown up in this manner, would likely only come from a most unscrupulous HHS Secretary. And in the event a President Scott Walker does install some coal corporation crony as HHS Secretary, H.R. 912 would also require extensive NIH research on the health effects of mountaintop removal mining (since you can never really have too much science), and would mandate that HHS continue to monitor air, noise, soil, and water pollution even after permitting mountaintop removal mining to occur. So if an HHS Secretary fails to do that, they'd be breaking the law. So ignore corporate bellyaching about the "war on coal" and concentrate on the war on human health. CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the ACHE Act, and thus support better health for their constituents.

Finally, speaking of coal, the Alton Coal corporation wants to strip-mine about 2,700 football fields' worth of public land in the great state of Utah, a mere 10 miles from the Bryce Canyon National Park and the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, and thus befoul the air and water around both of these national treasures. Not to mention contribute to escalating carbon emissions, at a time when we're trying to cut them. Do not brook any silliness about how Alton's planned expansion would "create jobs," partly because it won't create very many jobs -- corporations are always trying to do as much as they can with as few workers as they can get away with, and the thing most likely to get "created" by this effort is more money for Alton's CEO -- but also because Bryce Canyon and the Grand Staircase (sounds like a '70s lite-FM band, doesn't it?) already creates jobs, and brings in millions of dollars in tourist revenue and gooses up the incomes of all the folks who live nearby. So the Sierra Club helps you tell the Bureau of Land Management to deny coal-mining permits to Alton Coal.

Action: net neutrality, pollution, and campaign finance.

Ho hum, Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) has introduced a "resolution of disapproval" aiming to nullify the FCC's net neutrality rules. Such resolutions, as you know, supposedly stop the Executive branch from doing something unwarranted or harmful, yet I only ever hear of such resolutions on those rare occasions our government actually does something good for its owners, the American people. It makes one wish Democrats had ever contemplated a "resolution of disapproval" at, well, any damn thing that arrogant monster George W. Bush did. The good news? President Obama would have to sign this resolution of disapproval to make it law. You think even he would 13-dimensional-chess his way into signing a resolution undoing something he specifically and publicly asked an Executive branch agency to do? (And if he did, would right-wingers applaud -- or declare he's just doing that to put us off his real Socialist agenda?) In any case: it doesn't matter what they want, it matters what we want. So Free Press helps you tell Congress to respect the will of the people and reject the anti-net neutrality "resolution of disapproval."

Meanwhile, H.R. 912, the Appalachian Communities Health Emergency Act (or ACHE Act), would mandate that our government study mountaintop removal coal mining and determine whether it poses significant health risks to surrounding communities. H.R. 912 would then empower our government, under the auspices of the Clean Water Act, to prohibit such mining wherever it poses these risks. Sounds rational, right? Of course we know the science has already told us that cancer and birth defects and lung cancer all go up dramatically wherever corporations blow the tops off mountains to get to the coal underneath, but for the right wing, none of this is reasonable, because TEH WAR ON COAL!!!! All their other undeclared wars have gone badly enough that you'd think they'd have learned by now not to see a "war" everywhere but, to paraphrase a famous philosopher, you can't stop right-wingers, you can only hope to contain them, which we do by shaming them for putting corporate money over people's health. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support an end to mountaintop removal mining and the health horrors it brings.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell Chevron's corporate board to stop dropping huge piles of money on state and local elections. The news hook? The city council of Richmond, CA sued Chevron after a Chevron refinery explosion sent 15,000 people -- 15,000 people! -- to local hospitals. And then Chevron responded by spending $3 million on mayoral and city council elections in a happily failed effort to pack those offices with people who wouldn't sue them. What right do we have to tell Chevron how to spend its money, right-wingers ask? The right granted to us by the Constitution's First Amendment, obviously. Thanks to our right-wing Supreme Court, Chevron has a "right" to tell us all to go scratch, but it does not have a right, however, to be insulated from the PR consequences of such decisions, any more than a child who acts out has a "right" to be free from the discipline that would remind them how to act. Is that an unfair comparison? Maybe so -- after all, children are generally a lot more charming than corporations.

Around the table: net neutrality, tax "reform," factory farms, community broadband, and mountaintop removal mining.

Verizon has apparently hatched a plan to get around net neutrality regulations. Long story short: they'd exempt their own data-streaming plan from monthly mobile-user data caps. While such a plan wouldn't slow down or censor data from competing data plans, it's hard to imagine some government agency (even if it's not the FCC) failing to see that as an anti-competitive practice.

Citizens for Tax Justice reminds us that some 20 states are mulling tax reforms right now, and that most of these reforms would push even more of the tax burden onto lower- and middle-class folks. Of course, these are the people who don't contribute buku bucks to politicians. Funny how that works, though not funny, of course, in a humorous way.

A Straight Dope reader wonders if we could feed America without factory farms. The author concludes that we could do that "in theory," since meat production is much less efficient than vegetable/grain production, but probably not in reality, since most people like meat and industrialization tends to make meat cheaper. I do see a lot of straw-man arguing here -- you can oppose factory farms without opposing meat-eating, as I think I've demonstrated repeatedly.

Rural upstate New York town starts a public/private high-speed wireless network using unused UHF TV space. A state grant did much to help get it started (despite the usual Tea Party protests about government doing anything for anybody), and despite unusually big upfront costs (nearly $300 in equipment per household), it'll likely deliver high-speed internet better than the big telecoms -- which aren't rushing to deliver services there anyway.

Finally, the West Virginia government will study the health impacts of mountaintop removal coal mining. Of course, plenty of studies have already connected mountaintop removal mining to birth defects, cardiovascular disease, and lung cancer -- not to mention shortened life expectancy -- but for a Big Coal state government to suggest the science might actually lead to better policy is a big deal, particularly since it took years of citizen organizing to get this far.

Around the table: starving the beast in the Appalachians, and other stories.

Andrew Cockburn suggests that the "mystique of high-value targeting" won't defeat ISIS. Why? If you saw Munich, you already know the answer: take out one target, and another one jumps right in its place, and so it goes with ISIS, which steps up its attacks when a leader dies, to a large degree because they're "invariably and immediately replaced, and almost always by someone (often a relative ready for revenge) younger, more aggressive, and eager to prove himself." We might do better by, oh, I don't know, trying not to control other countries so we can take their resources from them, and then making war on them when we don't get our way. I know it's not as sexy, but it just might work better.

The European Union seems headed in the wrong direction on its net neutrality proposal -- this, after the EU Parliament declared its support for strong net neutrality principles. You'll recognize the demons the EU would set loose -- paid prioritization, actual censorship -- and you'll also recognize the pushback (the "Keep the Internet Open" manifesto signed by youth from 24 different EU countries). I hope they look at what's happened in America so far and realize that they can win.

The battle over solar power in Florida remains interesting, as a group called Conservatives for Energy Freedom is blasting Americans for Prosperity (who else?) for opposing a ballot initiative that would make rooftop solar easier to do in the Sunshine State. When you see the Christian Coalition and the Sierra Club on the same side of something, you might conclude it's actual bipartisanship, not the fake corporate "bipartisanship" the two political parties continually foist upon us.

So Gov. Walker (E-WI) signs the "right-to-work" bill he was so "reluctant" to push, and President Obama slams it. But where was the President when the Employee Free Choice Act was one vote short of breaking a filibuster? Not working the phones, like he was when he was trying to get Ben Bernanke another term at the Fed (or, to his credit, when he was trying to get don't-ask-don't-tell repealed). Meanwhile, Mr. Walker thinks Mr. Obama should look to Wisconsin if he wants to get things done -- a state lagging behind most of the rest of the country in job creation!

Finally, we learn that telling big banks to stop funding mountaintop removal coal-mining is having an impact, as PNC Bank -- only the nation's 7th largest bank, but one of the banks most invested in mountaintop removal -- announces it will no longer fund two coal corporations still practicing mountaintop removal, which effectively ends their involvement in funding the practice. You may remember telling PNC to do that last year. PNC joins otherwise unsavory bankster corporations such as Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo in this refusal. Now that's what I call "starving the beast."

Action: history vs. mining corporations, and big grocers vs. Frankensalmon.

The Sierra Club helps you tell the Army Corps of Engineers to preserve Blair Mountain from corporations that want to use the nefarious, water-polluting method of mining known as mountaintop removal mining from destroying the area. Why? Because Blair Mountain is a tourist attraction in West Virginia, the site of one of the most famous labor marches in American history, where 7,000 coal miners battled coal overlords over low pay and hazardous working conditions back in 1921; they didn't win, but their struggle made future labor struggles a lot easier, and helped secure working folks a better position in American society. As a historical site, of course, Blair Mountain holds a lot of choice archaeological evidence -- entrenchments, buried objects, shell casings, even human remains. Anyway, why the Army Corps of Engineers? Because both the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 and the Clean Water Act give the Army Corps some statutory authority over Blair Mountain, including the authority to stop mining on historical sites. That power is our power, and we should use it wisely, to protect both our heritage and our drinking water.

Meanwhile, more than 60 grocery corporations -- including two of the biggest, Kroger and Safeway -- have committed to banning genetically-modified salmon from their stores, but Costco, which is no slouch as far as grocery sales, has not done so; hence Friends of the Earth helps you tell Costco to refuse to put GMO salmon on their shelves. Why do this, when the FDA hasn't even approved GMO salmon yet? Because the FDA might still approve GMO salmon, despite the attendant problems -- including the salmon being the first-ever genetically-modified animal approved for human consumption -- and getting all the big grocers to say no to the salmon will help ensure that people don't eat it, and demand doesn't rise for it, and we don't one day see GMO chickens and pigs in the supermarket. There really is no benefit from GMO animals other than making big agricultural corporate CEOs rich -- anyone who tells you it's for feeding hungry people isn't telling you that we grow food to be sold more than we grow it to be eaten, and growing food to be sold kinda makes it harder to feed the hungry, since their main obstacle toward eating better is poverty.

Action: safer credit cards, and less mountaintop removal mining.

You've no doubt heard about the massive security breach at Target, where hackers may have stolen personal information from 110 million people; similar though smaller data breaches have also recently occurred at Michaels and Nieman Marcus. How do thieves do this? Well, when you use your credit or debit card at a department store, you use a card reader, and this card reader stores (and encrypts) the data on your credit or debit card for a short while, but thieves use malware that "scrapes" that data from the card reader. All is not lost, though: in other countries, credit and debit cards use embedded microchips, rather than magnetic stripes (which technology is decades old). American retailers and manufacturers have balked at the idea, though, because of the cost of upgrading credit and debit cards and the point-of-sale devices that read them. And yet corporations are flush with profits right now, and surely they don't want another wave of bad PR visited upon them (indeed, Target has already decided to upgrade its readers). So Consumers Union helps you tell American corporations to make our credit and debit cards safe again.

Meanwhile, Sum of Us helps you tell PNC Bank to stop funding corporations that use mountaintop removal mining. "Mountaintop removal" is, of course, a bit of a euphemism: coal corporations blow the tops off of mountains so they can get to the coal goodness below (because it's easier and needs fewer employees than strip-mining, why else?), and in the process they dump toxic carcinogens and heavy metals into the water table of the good folks living in the valleys below, so that kids in Appalachian coal mining areas have much higher incidences of birth defects and rather shorter life spans (not to mention blood-red water coming out of their tap). PNC Bank lends these coal corporations money, and though they said in 2010 they wouldn't fund individual mountaintop removal projects or lend to coal corporations who primarily use mountaintop removal mining, coal corporations have evaded these requirements and continue to get PNC cash. But there's hope: about 25% of PNC shareholders voted last April to call on PNC to look more critically at its coal funding, and as you know, getting 25% of shareholders to agree on something is actually a pretty big deal. So we can get this done.

Congress works on Farm Bill reauthorization this week; they were supposed to reauthorize it last year, but couldn't agree on how much pain they wanted to inflict on America, so the fiscal cliff deal of this past January extended the old Farm Bill for another year. You'd think recent election results would make it harder to do damage with this thing, but both houses of Congress plan to slash food stamps -- the Senate plans some $4 billion in cuts, while the House proposes $20 billion. Last I looked, we were still measuring our annual deficit in trillions, so these cuts will neither accomplish nor demonstrate fiscal responsibility -- but they will hurt some 22 million children who benefit from food stamps. Do our politicos want to rail against the "irresponsibility" and "laziness" of folks who need food stamps? Children comprise almost half the folks on food stamps, and they did nothing to deserve poverty. Hell, given corporations' mania for job-cutting, their parents likely did nothing to deserve it, either. NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, helps you tell Congress not to cut food stamps.

Meanwhile, the Senate takes up S. 601, the Water Resources Development Act, this week, and the bill contains both good works and, well, mischief. The American Rivers link above rates a dozen yet-to-be-considered amendments to S. 601, and you could certainly call your Senators about those. (Postponing flood insurance reform, Sens. Landrieu and Vitter? Didn't your state drown in 2005?). The Sierra Club also helps you tell your Senators to oppose Amendments 846 and 850 from Sen. Manchin (D-WV) that would hamstring the EPA's ability to stop mountaintop removal mining projects from taking a crap in the water table. And American Rivers also helps you tell your Senators to improve Congressional oversight of water-related Army Corps projects. It is our Army, after all; why shouldn't we know what it's doing? Because some fat cat lost money when good Americans got Congress to pull the plug on a bad project? Of course our enemies will translate that last sentence as BECAUSE JOBS THAT'S WHY. But we know better -- our elites only care about their jobs, not ours.