Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning government subversion, working families, and law and order.

Long story short: tell your House Reps to refuse to collaborate with our President-elect's plans to ram his Cabinet nominees through without Senate confirmation, tell your Senators to re-confirm Lauren McFerren to our NLRB and pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Apparently President-elect TFG has been concocting a scheme – one blessed by our Constitution, apparently – to adjourn Congress indefinitely so he can ram his repugnant Cabinet nominees without a Senate vote, and he'd need the help of our House to do that. Could it be that nominating actual piles of dung to important government positions is a bad look? I was starting to think nothing, no matter how disgusting, was a bad look to Americans anymore. Anyway, Bowers News Media helps you tell your House Reps to do their damn jobs and foil TFG's plans to ram his Cabinet through without our scrutiny. (Senators work for us, after all. Right?).

The Labor Force helps you tell your Senators to re-confirm National Labor Relations Board Chair Lauren McFerren now. Why? Because then President-elect TFG won't be able to appoint anyone to our NLRB until 2026! (NLRB members get five-year terms.) And then our NLRB might actually be able to defend working families from corporate predators while TFG sets fire to everything else! Our NLRB recently outlawed "captive meetings," in which employers force employees to sit through anti-union propaganda. I've got a damn job to do, bossman; maybe stop interfering with it? Seems reasonable – to everyone but a boss.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, which would prevent private data brokers from selling our personal data to law enforcement, so that law enforcement can skip getting a warrant for that data. What kind of Kafkaesque hell is this, where our government can use our taxpayer money to buy our data so they can oppress us? It's so Kafkaesque, apparently, that our House has already passed the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act; we only need our Senators to act, and we will get ourselves some breathing room from government oppression. You may have heard that America elected an asshole to the Presidency again, so of course we’re worried about that.

Action: concerning facial recognition, sexual deepfakes, and IRS Direct File.

Long story short: tell state and local governments to ban facial recognition software in schools, tell Google to stop enabling sexual deepfakes, and tell your state Governor to opt in to our IRS’s Direct File program. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Ban Facial Recognition helps you, guess what, tell state and federal governments to ban facial recognition software in schools. Because it sucks! Because one wrong accusation can ruin a kid’s life anymore! Because it can’t tell Black people apart any better than your MAGA hat-wearing uncle can! Because it’s yet another way private corporations collect data on good Americans and sell it to those who shouldn’t have it! Because any trove of data might as well wear a HACK ME sign on it, and that kind of hackery ruins lives! Anyway, let me know if I’m not making myself clear. Many have told me I hold back on my emotions far too much.

Ultraviolet helps you tell Google to stop enabling the spread of sexual deepfakes on the internet. Actual porn stars get exploited enough; now comes the advent of artifically-created sexual images – often of famous people, but it could be you, too, if someone’s mad at you! – made without consent. Gosh, it’s like the future sucks! You thought it’d be all transmats and jetpacks, but it turns out it’s all fake sexual images and AI telling you to jump off a bridge if you’re depressed and banksters repossessing prostethic limbs after slamming patients with surprise medical bills. Anyway, Google’s full of billionaires, so they have the power to stop this crap from happening.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your state governor to opt in to our IRS’s Direct File program. The Direct File program – which lets good Americans file their taxes for free with our IRS, rather than have some middle-man skim a few hundred bucks to do the same – did so well in a dozen states that good Americans in all 50 states can take part next year, if their governor opts in to the program. A lot of right-wing governors will say no, and a lot of right-wing blowhards will pretend this is all TEH BIG BRUTHURZ!!!!! Well, that’s why we communicate our will to our elected leaders – to cut through the drama and hysteria.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning government spying, bankster greed, and service cuts.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and tell your Congressfolk to reject any resolution aiming to repeal the Biden Administration’s fiduciary responsibility rule and restore Victims of Crime Act funding and raise Violence Against Women Act funding. 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.

Free Press helps you tell your Senators to pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, which would prevent our government from buying your personal data from private data-collecting corporations. Because they should only have that data if they get a warrant! This is not difficult! Miraculously, our House actually passed this bill, by a narrow 219-199 margin, but with 123 Republicans and 96 Democrats voting in favor, which makes it a what, folks? An actual bipartisan bill. They talk about “bipartisanship” but they hardly know what it looks like anymore! But we do, and this is a good bill, so we should tell our Senators to stop playing games and pass it.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to repeal the Biden Administration’s fiduciary responsibility rule. Why? Because that rule forces financial advisors to put their customers’ needs first and their own needs second! And why do we need to tell financial advisors to do that? Because they put their own needs first and their customers’ needs second, even though their customers provide all the money! It’s why we call them banksters! But Republicans want to help banksters put themselves first. Doesn’t matter what dumb argument they use to justify that! We must remind them that they work for us, not just their big donors.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore funding under the Victims of Crime Act and also raise funding for programs authorized by the Violence Against Women Act. What aspiring Machiavellian cuts funding for something called the Victims of Crime Act? Seriously, say so-and-so cut Victims of Crime Act funding in a 30-second ad three times, then run that ad repeatedly the last two weeks before Election Day, and so-and-so will lose. As for the Violence Against Women Act, anyone against funding that must be objectively pro-wife-beating. I’d win with that ad, too.

Action: concerning animal cruelty, warrantless spying, and paid family/medical leave.

Long story short: tell California state legislators to pass the OCTO Act, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act and enact a paid family/medical leave program for all Americans. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

California residents, take note: Eko helps you tell your state legislators to pass the Oppose Cruelty to Octopuses (or OCTO) Act, which would ban octopus farming in a state with some 840 miles of coastline (per the Congressional Research Service). Octopi are hella intelligent and hella solitary – know anyone like that? – but octopus farms are as bad as factory farms for chickens, putting octopi in confined spaces until they eat each other out of frustration and misery. If that makes you laugh, navigate away from this page now; it’s not for you. But if you empathize them, and you live in California, maybe help them out a bit.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, which would stop big corporations from selling our personal data to our government without our government getting a warrant first. That’s all we’ve ever demanded – that our government get a damn warrant like they’d been doing for over 200 years, but which in 2001 suddenly wasn’t good enough for an incompetent Executive like George W. Bush. What happens when our government uses our tax money to buy up our personal data without a warrant? Our government gets yet more power to abuse us, that’s what. And we should always fight that.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a national paid family/medical leave program, not least so that mothers – who already have full-time, no-time-off, no-pay jobs as mothers – can actually get time off at their paid jobs so they can take care of themselves and their families. Don’t listen to any WHEREZ WILLZ YOUZ GETZ TEH MONEYZ!!!!! rubbish, either – everyone won’t take off at the same time, and Sen. Gillibrand’s bill proposed to take a mere $8/month from a worker making $50,000 annually. Eight dollars a month! And that’s a moderate approach – you know I’d tax the rich to pay for that.

Action: concerning government spying, the Israel/Palestine war, and postal banking.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop warrantless spying on Americans, end arms sales to Israel, and pass the Postal Banking Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Demand Progress and Free Press help you tell your Congressfolk not to renew Section 702 of the USA PATRIOT Act. Section 702 authorizes our government to collect data on Americans without a warrant, and as we’ve recently learned, Elon Musk’s corporation – X, the Corporation Formerly Known as Twitter – has actually been selling user data to our government; do we really want our tax dollars going to big corporations so our government can spy on us more? No, we do not. But Congress will discuss this very matter this week, so we must communicate our will in numbers they can’t deny.

Demand Progress also helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop selling weapons to Israel. As I said yesterday, a lot of Americans are thinking Israel might be wrong for the first time; their indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians has provoked President Biden – one of the most pro-Israel politicians who ever served – into telling Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu that he may condition future weapons sales on Israel’s human rights conduct, which is good, but Congress ought to force his hand by stopping weapons sales entirely. Ignore folks who say selling weapons incentivizes better behavior, because such statements defy logic.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Postal Banking Act, which would enable our Postal Service to offer basic banking services (checking, savings accounts, small loans) like they used to as late as the late ‘60s. That’ll enable our Postal Service – which receives no taxpayer funding despite our Constitution explicitly making the mail a federal job – to get more revenues, but even more importantly, it’ll help good Americans who live in rural and urban areas where banksters won’t dare go to get basic banking services again. And that’s worth doing.

Action: concerning data privacy and working families.

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

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

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

Action: concerning corporate fraud and monopolies.

Long story short: tell our government to fight monopolies and mergers and make public auditors more proactive. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell the Public Accounting Oversight Board (or PCAOB) to enact the most vigorous rules possible for public corporation auditors. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, enacted in response to the Enron accounting scandal, created the PCAOB to oversee folks who audit publicly-traded corporations for a living, but the PCAOB hasn’t exactly been pro-active in going after fraud, even though it hurts investors. You know investors? That class of people right-wingers say they’re always trying to protect? Well, our PCAOB’s proposal suggests they’re going to be a lot more proactive, and so we should encourage that. Right-wingers will call that “micromanagement” and “nanny state,” but the people who get hurt by corporate fraud will call it something else: justice.

I have a few anti-monopoly action alerts. Demand Progress helps you tell our Justice Department to break up United Health, before it has the power to buy up all the doctors’ practices and surgery centers and overbill Medicare with impunity. Demand Progress also helps you tell our government to stop the proposed Walmart/Vizio merger, so we can also stop Walmart from taking over the flat-screen market and hoovering up all the personal data Vizio has collected on its customers. And More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Reserve to block the proposed Capitol One/Discover merger, to prevent the resulting behemoth from having 400 million customers. That’s too much power! And no corporation should have it.

Around the table: from TikTok bans to bloodbaths.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning monopolies and pollution.

Long story short: tell our government to stop the proposed Walmart/Vizio merger, and tell our EPA to enact the strongest carbon emissions restrictions possible. 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 our Justice Department Antitrust Division to stop the proposed Walmart/Vizio merger. But wait, the right-wing Glaucons are saying, it’s a department store buying a TV company, so what’s the big deal? Well, if you think, as I do, that no corporation should ever own another corporation, you already know the answer, but buying Vizio would not only enable Walmart to get a foothold in an area they can quickly monopolize given their size, but it’d give them access to crap-tons of user data. I don’t particularly want Walmart – or any corporation – to have any of that.

Daily Kos Green helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous carbon emissions restrictions possible. Remember when right-wingers called the Obama carbon emissions restrictions – which didn’t even address existing power plants, like this one does – a “war on coal”? Well, how about the war on air? Or the war on health care, since cleaner air results in reduced health care costs? Big corporations hate our EPA’s proposal, since it’ll hamper their executives’ ability to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. But such fools shouldn’t get all the say in America.

Action: concerning monopolies, music, and data privacy.

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

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

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

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

Around the table: good news about gerrymandering, bad news about corporate spying.

State legislative elections are about to be a little fairer in Wisconsin, as the Republican-dominated legislature voted to adopt Democratic Gov. Evers’s proposed district map, one which nominally gives Republicans a slight edge in holding both chambers, but not with near- or actual supermajorities, as they have now despite generally getting fewer votes than Democrats in the aggregate. Other proposed maps might have given Democrats a greater advantage (and, more to the point, been fairer), but with the end of Roe v. Wade I wonder if Republicans even have the edge observers think they have in the Evers map. I also wonder if a Trump ticket will boost downballot races (as it did in 2020) or be a drag on them.

Kate Wagner at The Nation tells us that the camera that yells at you after you trigger a motion sensor – I’ve experienced the “Hi! You are being recorded!” in my own neighborhood while bicycling, how obnoxious – “is an escalation of an already omnipresent aggression.” “It intrudes into our consciousness, induces paranoia and anger, makes us feel unwelcome in public life, furthers the idea that one’s private property extends beyond the stoop, and suggests that by owning property one has earned the right to curtail the rights of others.” And that prompts another reminder that both property crime and violent crime are half what they were 30 years ago, even if some folks obsess about it even more than they did then.

In a related note, private data-collecting corporation tracked visits to Planned Parenthood and helped anti-abortion groups do ad targeting with the location information – but the corporation apparently told investors it obtained that location information with user consent, which at least one highly-placed officer says isn’t true. Would have been nice to have all that information in the lede! Our SEC might sanction the now-bankrupt corporation for lying to investors – our SEC, you may recall, exists to protect investors from bad actors – while our FTC might sue to keep the now-bankrupt data-collecting corporation from selling off its location data without users’ consent. Note well that a second Trump Administration would pack our SEC and FTC with drama hounds who would “look for ways to partner” with bad actors.

Right-wing Congressdolt tries to get a zinger off on Joe Biden’s immigration policy, but winds up tripping over his own genitalia twice. First he tried to illustrate said immigration policy with a photo of an immigration “caravan” from 2018 – remember who was President in 2018? -- and then tried to pass off a photo of an immigration “caravan” in Mexico as a “caravan” in America. Of course, Rep. Edwards doesn’t care that he got called out for being stupid twice; he only cares that he “got the message out,” no matter how stupid the message was. You may not win converts that way, but you might intimidate the tending-toward-cowardly into submission.

A special election took place in George Santos’s old House district – and despite all the hand-wringing and horserace polling showing the race close, the Democrat won by eight points. I remain tired of hearing how “moderates always win races against crazy people” because, hello, 2016! But look at all the things Republicans and our “liberal” media insisted might propel Ms. Pilip to victory – immigration, crime, Israel, Joe Biden – that didn’t. Eight points is not a close race, abortion still matters, and, perhaps most importantly, Republican politicians all appear to be rage-filled drama hounds. I say “appear to be” because I think they’re all playing. Imagine living a life in which you decide that pretending to be an asshole is the road to power and glory!

Finally, folks are making a big deal about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement of Joe Biden; she also said she’d vote for him in July, so I’m not sure why it’s big news again in February. I will say that her assessment of Joe Biden as “one of the most successful Presidents in modern American history” is entirely accurate, even though that’s not a high bar to clear. I just hope enough good Americans prefer Mr. Biden over an objectively bad human being who pretends to be a rage-addled drama hound because that’s how you get attention in America these days. Yes, I’m saying a vote for Joe Biden is, among other things, a vote against the drama and sensationalism we should all have had enough of by now.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning government spying, voting rights, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Government Surveillance Reform Act and the Youth Voting Rights Act, and also tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security 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.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Government Surveillance Reform Act, which would prevent law enforcement from buying our data from third-party data brokers and would make law enforcement get a warrant whenever they want to search data they’ve already collected from us. Because anything else would be a fishing expedition, conducted to harass and oppress good Americans, and would contravene both the spirit and the letter of our Constitution. Many right-wingers today don’t seem to understand that law enforcement can be used against Americans. But our Founders did, and they were right.

RISE helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Youth Voting Rights Act, which would (among other reforms) require voting booths at colleges and universities and end the sort of residency requirement governments only pass to suppress votes. You hear from right-wingers all the time about how young people don’t know enough about anything to vote, but they always said that about Black folks, too; they were wrong then, and they’re wrong now, not just on the morals but also on the facts. I make fun of young people sometimes, but they do see things we olds don’t anymore, and that’s a good thing.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security. But wait, right-wingers say: Social Security is becoming insolvent! You can’t expand it ha ha ha stupid liberal! If I had a dollar for all the times over the years they said Social Security was becoming insolvent, I could retire right now! It’s 2024, checks are still going out, and frankly we could make Social Security better if we start taxing income above $168,600 into the system and start calculating costs more realistically. It’s not actually hard to do these things – unless your salary depends on your stupidity.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning government spying, voting rights, and judicial ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to rein in government spying, strengthen voting rights, and issue a code of ethics with teeth for our Supreme Court Justices. 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.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Government Surveillance Reform Act, which would, at long last, force federal law enforcement officers to get a fucking warrant before looking at all the information our government collects (or buys from third-party private data-collecting corporations, which the GSRA would also stop). Seriously, get a fucking warrant! It’s all I’ve ever asked! Sorry to drop f-bombs there, but that’s what our government deserves for pretending that what worked for over 200 years suddenly stopped working because 9.11. You’ve noticed no one whines about the “war on terror” anymore, right? That’s because Tha Bush Mobb used it to grift America, and they succeeded, so now everyone can pretend they were never all that big a jerk about it. But I will never forget.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would plug the hole our Supreme Court blew in the Voting Rights Act with their Shelby County v. Holder ruling. Our Supreme Court said the Voting Rights Act unlawfully discriminated against Southern states, but the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would address that objection by ensuring that any state or locality with a record of vote suppression, regardless of their location within the U.S., would come under additional Justice Department scrutiny. So don’t believe the hype that we don’t need to pass this bill because “the South has changed.” Why would they be afraid of additional scrutiny if they’re doing nothing wrong?

Finally, the National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, which would hold our Supreme Court Justices – who have been reported with their hands in all kinds of cookie jars lately – to the same ethics standards to which all other federal judges must adhere. What’s that, you say? You heard that our Supreme Court developed and released a code of ethics just recently, one that broadly resembles the code of ethics for all other federal judges? That is to laugh! Yeah, our Supreme Court put out a voluntary code of ethics a few weeks ago, but it ain’t hard to imagine each and every one of them (not just Sam Alito or Clarence Thomas!) imagining that whatever gift they’re about to receive is the “exception” to all rules. That’s why we have laws, good peoples!

Action: concerning government spying, Medicare for All, and financial predators.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Government Surveillance Reform Act, expand Medicare to include all Americans, and stop trying to injure our CFPB’s ability to protect us from financial predators. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Government Surveillance Reform Act. This bill would do three fairly significant things: it would prevent our FBI from getting your data without a warrant, it would close the loophole law enforcement uses to get your data from private data collecting corporations without a warrant, and it would let more good Americans sue our government for the harm illegal surveillance causes. These would all be unqualified good works for the American people, so our Congressfolk should do them, without pretending crime is always going up. Seriously, if you can’t get a warrant to continue your investigation, then you should really reconsider whether law enforcement is for you. Unless, of course, you want to go live in a fascist country, then Godspeed.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a Medicare-for-All health insurance system. It’s an easy sell! The Koch Brothers said Medicare for All would cost $32 trillion over 10 years, but our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the system we’ve got now will cost $49 trillion over the same period! You can do the math – expanding Medicare to include every American would save $17 trillion over 10 years! I’d say that three times in a 30-second ad. I might also say you’d fund it with a small employer-side payroll tax (“employer-side” meaning, of course, that employees don’t pay it) capturing the money big corporations currently spend on private health insurance. All that’s left are the really desperate arguments.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any legislative riders that would harm our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB)’s ability to protect good Americans from financial predators. The “CFPB Restructuring Rider” would take CFPB authority from its director and hand it over to a five-person commission, and two of the commissioners “must have private sector experience in the provision of consumer financial products and services” – after all, it’s not like those folks would have self-interest or anything! – while the so-called “Small Business Lending Rider” would prevent our CFPB from collecting data on lending to Black-, Brown-, or woman-owned businesses, which just sounds cruel to me. Anyway, these are clearly fall-back positions, so let’s put them on their back permanently.

Thieves in the Temple will take the next week off, so I wish all of you a happy and safe holiday, and we'll be back November 27 or thereabouts.

Action: concerning medical debt, junk fees, and facial recognition.

Long story short: tell PA state legislators to make it easier to escape medical debt, tell our government to break up the Ticketmaster monopoly and end the abusive practice of assessing “junk fees,” and tell states to ban facial recognition software from our schools. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Pennsylvania Health Access Network helps you tell your state Senator to pass legislation helping good Pennsylvanians escape medical debt more easily. Don’t fall for any ball-swinging about how if you didn’t want the crushing debt, you should’ve done things differently, because thanks to banksters and big health insurance corporations anyone can take on medical debt at any time, no matter how many miles they run or how much fiber they eat, and it’s not like you ever have the “option” to just get sicker because you never know which medical practitioner is suddenly not in your network anymore. Our PA House already passed this legislation; now our Senate must act.

MoveOn helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to break up the Ticketmaster monopoly and end their notorious practice of assessing “junk fees.” You know what a junk fee is just by looking at the last ticket you bought and see all the “convenience fees” and “ticket fees” and “delivery fees” and “order fees” and “fuck you we do what we want fees” (did I make that last one up? It sure doesn’t seem like it) that balloon the price of your ticket far beyond what they said it’d cost. And Ticketmaster can get away with that because they basically control the entire ticket market these days. Monopolies only benefit already overpaid corpulent executives; regular folks like us deserve better.

Fight for the Future helps you tell states to ban facial recognition software in our schools. Where does one start with this absurdly shitty idea? With the software’s apparent inability to tell Black folks apart any better than your right-wing uncle does? With all the data this software collects about students that can be monetized and used against them? With the corporate welfare inherent in handing out taxpayer money to private corporations to create bad software? With administrators abandoning any pretense that they’ll simply walk around the school and find out where folks are and what they’re doing? I really don’t know where to start with this one. I know where to end, though: by telling states to kill it dead.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning monopolies, data privacy, and recycling.

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning abortion rights and social media.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to protect federal abortion law, tell online pharmacies to shop sharing abortion-related data with Google, and tell big social media corporations to hold Donald Trump to the same community standards as everyone else. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Justice to challenge, in court, any state abortion ban that violates our federal laws. Our FDA has lately finalized a rule making medication abortions (via mifepristone and misoprostol) more available to good Americans – even though online pharmacies – but of course right-wing state governments want to make medication abortions illegal, which would (at the least) scare a lot of people into not getting the abortions they need because they’ll leave a data trail on the internet. Our Justice Department may not support federal law very vigorously here – unless we demand that they do it.

In a related note, Daily Kos helps you tell online pharmacies that sell abortion pills to stop sharing private patient info with Google. Because that data – whether it’s location data, device data, or unique browser data – could identify folks to local law enforcement personnel, and those personnel could be trying to enforce a state law that federal law pre-empts. Federal law does allow Americans to get mifepristone and misoprostol, after all, and our Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, not our FDA’s authority to regulate those drugs. Remember: if you’re against abortion, then don’t use abortion pills.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell big social media corporations like Twitter and Facebook to hold Donald Trump to the same standards they hold everyone else if they start publishing his nonsense again. Seriously, don’t brook any stridency about “free speech” – do magazine and book publishing corporations publish every manuscript they get because of “free speech”? No, they do not. And ignore Elon Musk’s pretensions – these corporations do actually have community standards, and they’ll hold you or I to them when we cross them but pretend it’s “free speech” when the rich and powerful do it. That’s evil, and we should fight it.

Action: concerning data privacy, internet freedom, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell our FTC to keep law enforcement’s grubby mitts off our private data, tell our Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner, and tell President Biden to remove Donald “Lee” Moak from our USPS Board of Governors. 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 our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop private data-collecting corporations from selling all your private info to law enforcement. If law enforcement wants that information, they should get a warrant from a judge; supporting “convenience” or “efficiency” here is nothing more and nothing less than supporting fascism. Seriously! If law enforcement can just buy your personal data, and look at it whenever they like, what’s to stop them from going on fishing expeditions once they decide you’re an enemy? Hey, were you at George Floyd rallies in 2020? Well, congratulations – now you’re an enemy. It’s way too easy for cops to do that, which is why we restrict their power.

Demand Progress also helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner with a quickness. They’ve been dragging their feet about this nomination for two years, and as a result, our FCC can’t do the work Congress has given them to do – work that not only includes reinstating network neutrality as virtually everyone in America left right and center wants them to do, but also allocating a lot of infrastructure money, since Congress has passed a few of those bills over the last two years, too. Currently our FCC suffers from 2-2 votes caused by not having a fifth Commissioner, and if Gigi Sohn is extraordinarily well-qualified no matter what corporate lobbyists say. So let’s get on this.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell President Biden to replace Donald “Lee” Moak on our USPS Board of Governors, preferably with a nominee who will replace the notorious Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Mr. Moak is one of Mr. DeJoy’s biggest supporters even as he freely admits – because such admissions apparently mean nothing anymore! – that he hardly understands his work on the Board. The only thing he seems to “understand” is that raising prices, slashing jobs, and cutting services in a nation where many Americans rely on our Postal Service for life-saving medicines is somehow a good plan! And that’s why he’s got to go.

Action: concerning treating prisoners like human beings, corporate spying, and chemical disasters.

Long story short: tell the Alabama Department of Corrections to treat prisoners more humanely, tell our government to investigate TikTok’s parent company for illegal spying on Americans, and tell our EPA to protect good Americans from chemical plant disasters. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell the Alabama Department of Corrections to start treating prisoners like human beings again. You need not indulge in any if you can’t do the crime don’t do the time horsedoodle or you sound like you want all prisoners to eat caviar horsedoodle or how is it different from any other prison horsedoodle; all ye need do is consider that our Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Alabama in 2020, saying they violated prisoners’ Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment. That's right, the Trump DOJ did this! So go ahead and assume it must be pretty awful, and act accordingly.

Public Citizen helps you tell our government to investigate potential criminal behavior by TikTok or its parent corporation. ByteDance, the corporation that owns TikTok, stands accused of either tracking locations of particular American citizens or planning to do so – no, not even tracking locations so they could sell more ads, and certainly not tracking them as part of an internal workplace investigation. No, they just wanted to spy on Americans! If we’re not going to tolerate that from our own government, and we shouldn’t, then why would we tolerate it from a corporation? Why would we tolerate it from a foreign corporation? We would not, so let’s not.

Finally, Public Citizen also helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to do everything it can to protect good Americans from chemical disasters. While our EPA’s revised Risk Management Program for chemical plants improves on our existing one, it could still do more, like make chemical plants submit their own risk management plans more quickly than within four years, or requiring backup power on all equipment, or create a third-party anonymous reporting hotline to supplement in-house reporting and whistleblowing. When it’s your neighborhood on fire from a chemical plant, you’ll think these are all good ideas, too, so let’s help ensure we’ll never have to contemplate such things.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning data privacy, political prisoners, and forever chemicals.

Long story short: tell our FTC to protect our data from law enforcement, tell various world government to stop oppressing political opponents, and tell our EPA to protect us from “forever chemicals.” Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to bar law enforcement from buying private data sold by third-party data collecting corporations. Since Congress won’t move on the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, which would accomplish the same end, we must turn to our federal agencies, which also have the power, granted by law, to protect us from law enforcement fishing expeditions. I guess the cops will say how can we do our jobs, just like they do when we try to stop them from killing Black folks when they brandish a cellphone. But your rights and your freedoms matter more than law enforcement’s convenience.

Amnesty International helps you take action on 10 separate cases of world governments oppressing political opponents. Read about their stories (in the internet age, that never takes as long as it seems like it should) and you’ll notice disturbing patters: people protesting peacefully or expressing an opinion that’s different from that nation’s Glorious Elites, then that nation throwing them in jail on trumped-up charges and/or torturing them. It’s a tired, tired story common to snowflake governments, tired enough that you may get tired yourself – or, worse, that cynics may exploit your fatigue. Never let a cynic tell you what to do. Cynicism is evil, its proponents prisoners of evil.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to protect good Americans from PFAS chemicals. Which we call “forever chemicals” for a reason: they’re awfully durable, which must have seemed a positive back in the day, but we now know they’re so durable we can’t get them out of our air and our water – and our bodies. And scientists link PFAS chemicals to cancer, fetal development issues, and other health issues, with folks in Black and Brown communities more affected (since industrial plants more likely exist close to these communities). So we need to tell our EPA to take the most vigorous action possible under the law, not least because we can get them in court if they ignore us.

Finally, I’ve started making campaign donations again – apparently that $200 I gave to Doug Jones in 2020 was a gateway drug! – so in the interest of full disclosure I’ll list them here. Surprise: they’re all Democrats! Because the Republicans are the party of whining and drama and sedition and book banning and spreading COVID and banning birth control and cutting Social Security and Medicare and they ain’t worth my money! So: $100 each to Katie Porter, Matt Cartwright, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Gary Chambers, and Val Demings; $27 to Charles Booker, and $25 each to Tim Ryan, Cheri Beasley, Catherine Cortez Masto, Raphael Warnock (though I’m still deleting all his emails!), and John Fetterman. I'm sure I've missed many worthy candidates (though I urge you to pay more attention to Ms. Perez, in Washington's 3rd House district), and I want all these folks to win their races. But whether they will or not is up to us, and then after Election Day it’s up to us whether they do our will or not.

Action: concerning transgender, data privacy, and monopolies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning corporate taxes, paid family leave, and government spying.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ending Corporate Greed Act, pass paid family leave legislation and legislation protecting abortion rights, and pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7443/S. 3933, the Ending Corporate Greed Act. Sounds ambitious, right? But this bill would tax excess corporate profits at a rate of 95%, “excess profits” being the difference between profits made in a particular year and the average inflation-adjusted profits of the previous five years. That would catch out corporations jacking up prices on good Americans as CEOs gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. If folks call that “punishing success,” remind them, again, that using high inflation as a cover for jacking up prices is not “success.” You might also want to ask them: is evil success?

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore abortion rights and pass paid family leave legislation. Because you can’t exercise your right to an abortion if you can’t get paid time off from work! Just like you couldn’t deal with a COVID infection if you couldn’t get paid time off from work, a truism even Congressional Republicans recognized in 2020. Of course, the Republican plan for abortion is to make it illegal and make it damn near impossible to get if they can’t, and all I can say to that is: you’re against abortion? Then don’t get one. And if you do want one – or, more likely, need one – you should be able to get one without wondering if you’ll still have a job when you get back.

Finally, the ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Our Fourth Amendment, as you know, protects “(t)he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” yet big data-collecting corporations buy your info from the big telecom corporations that provide internet service, and then the big data corporations sell it to law enforcement, which now doesn’t need the Fourth Amendment-prescribed warrant to get your info. At that point, you are no longer “secure,” certainly not in your “papers” or “effects,” so Congress has to plug this loophole with a quickness.

Action: concerning internet privacy and health care.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning monopolies, transparency, drug prices, social media, data collection, and conservation.

Long story short: tell our FTC and DOJ to enact the most vigorous anti-monopoly policies possible, tell our SEC to force big investment corporations to be more transparent, tell President Biden to use all his legal power to lower prescription drug prices, tell big social media corporations to detoxify our news feeds, tell Zoom to stop trying to collect more data on users under the guise of "reading emotions," and tell our Interior Department to restore endangered species protections for gray wolves. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice to enact the most vigorous anti-merger guidelines possible. It's pretty simple: mergers kill competition, kill jobs, and raise prices, as we're seeing with three shipping magnates controlling 80% of the market and dictating terms to the rest of us, as we see when big corporations all but announce they pass on higher costs to good Americans to keep the outrageous profits coming, as we see in a hundred relatively small sectors of the economy (semiconductors, lab supplies, local media) where monopolies become the lynchpins that undo much larger sectors, and as we see when investment funds all but say they're looking to invest in monopolists über alles. All that's evil, so we've gotta fight it, and we've gotta fight it to the death.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission to force big investment corporations to be more transparent about their fees and their performance. Folks liken such transparency to a good nutrition label that helps you avoid foods with too much salt or fat or added sugars, and it's a good analogy; that must be why the banksters hate it so much! Banksters would prefer you just trust them that they can make your investments grow faster than anyone else, when their track record (particularly vis a vis state pension funds!) suggests they not only don't do better than the others but they charge you more than the others. You like to make more money, right? Then you ought to support more transparency from banksters.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to use his already-existing lawful power to lower prescription drug prices for good Americans. When even the New England Journal of Medicine tells you to do it, maybe you ought to listen! You can likely enumerate the ways Mr. Biden could do it -- he could seize patents of taxpayer-funded drugs (i.e., most of them) and let more generic manufacturers make drugs, or he could start investigating price-gouging among drug manufacturing corporations -- but he could also simply immunize our government from patent infringement suits. Hey, drug prices are going up way, way faster than (even today's!) inflation, and people die as a result, so I say do it all, and do it now.

The Kairos Fellowship helps you tell big social media corporations to "fix the feed," which is to say get the hate and lies out of our social media newsfeeds. They can do this in a couple of ways: first, by fixing or getting rid of the algorithms that ensure that obnoxious, hateful crap gets prioritized in your newsfeed; second, by hiring more people in order to monitor obnoxious, hateful crap on social media; and third, by disclosing their efforts in these directions. They'll hate to do all of that, because it's more work for them and more money they'll have to pay other workers! But making a mania of squeezing more money out of less work is more surely the mark of decadence than any celebrity drama you see on TMZ. This mania hurts America, and all civilizations, in every conceivable way, which is why we consecrate our lives to stopping it.

Fight for the Future helps you tell Zoom to stop scrutinizing emotions on Zoom calls. Zoom is, guess what, trying to use AI to read our emotions so they can create yet another datastream they can sell to third-party data brokers, but guess what else? Like facial recognition technology, their emotion-reading technology sucks! I mean, why not use AI to read the bumps on our heads, or better yet, measure our craniums? Facial expressions don't all say one thing or another, as anyone who's ever heard of sarcasm knows, and if they think an algorithm can read us pretty well, I got some everyday jerks that algorithms have helped turn into frothing white supremacists to show them. And not for nothing, but Zoom ain't the only game in town for video conferencing. But we'll try the Big Stick of Bad PR before resorting to boycotts.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Interior Department to restore protections to gray wolves under the Endangered Species Act. The gray wolf may not be endangered per se, but our ESA has never been about waiting until things got dire for a species before stepping in, and with Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana embarking on state-sanctioned, testosterone-addled wolf hunts this year, things are getting pretty near dire, even if our ESA has helped the gray wolf come back from the brink over the last half-century. I mean, there's protecting your cattle, and then there's killing one-fifth of the wolves in your state in a mere two and a half days, as Wisconsin has lately "accomplished." I'm not particularly anti-hunting, but I am anti-stupid, and states are acting dan stupid about wolves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning Social Security, abortion, data privacy, law and order, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security 2100 Act, the Women's Health Protection Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, the People's Response Act, and the Break Free From Plastic Pollution 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.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5723, the Social Security 2100 Act. The Social Security 2100 Act would increase both benefits and revenues, the latter by, as they say, scrapping the cap on the income that can be taxed into Social Security, at least for income over $400,000. Why there should be a donut hole on income between $142,800 (the current cap) and $400,000 annually I couldn't tell you, but taxing income over $400,000 represents progress, and we shouldn't let the perfect murder the good. Let's not let Democratic cowardice ("there's an election coming up -- scary, kids!") murder the good, either, but improving Social Security would be both good and popular, and really, everyone should get behind it. Even Republicans!

The ACLU helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act, which would essentially codify the protections of Roe v. Wade into federal law. And with our Supreme Court apparently willing to bless Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, putting Roe v. Wade into law would be a good and necessary thing! One thing I rarely hear about this topic is that outlawing abortion wouldn't be like outlawing burglary -- anyone can commit a burglary, while only a woman can have an abortion, and ain't no right-wing legislators willing to penalize men for the ill-considered sex that prompted the abortion. I suspect they would enshrine ill-considered sex a Constitutional right, at least for men. But they shouldn't get all the say about everything.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Big data mining corporations are harvesting your internet surfing habits as we speak! And worse than that, those same big data mining corporations will eagerly sell your internet surfing habits to law enforcement! And law enforcement should only be able to get that information with a warrant, which means they think they have a better than 50-50 chance of convicting you of something. The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would prevent big data corporations from selling your personal info willy-nilly to law enforcement. Your internet service-providing corporations can't do it under the law, and neither should these data harvesters. Also, they should get a real job doing real work.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4194, the People's Response Act. I could be wrong about this, but I've long thought "defund the police" a bad slogan describing good ideas -- that we shouldn't turn to our police to solve every conceivable problem, nor should we blithely assume we can simply retrain police to be every other kind of worker we need (the way some folks blithely assume that "just learn to code" is a solution to every economic problem). The People's Response Act would fund better solutions to community problems at the state and local level, so that we don't send in a guy with a gun whenever someone has a problem, because sooner or later, as we have long known, that's going to get someone killed. And whatever else you want from your government, it shouldn't kill you.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2238/S. 984, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, which would, among other things, make big corporations more responsible for their plastic waste, start a national refund program for beverage containers, and set minimum recycled-content standards for products. When all the haters respond by saying but we need plastic for things you stupid liberal ha ha ha snort high five!, you can take comfort in knowing that "breaking free from plastic pollution" is not actually the same thing as "never make anything with plastic again." You might even point it out to them! It won't change their minds, because they're haters, but it might change the minds of other folks who might be listening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning taxes, social media, Saudi Arabia, and various forms of pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, tell our government to regulate Facebook more vigorously, tell your Congressfolk to void President Biden's proposed $500 million deal with Saudi Arabia, pass the Preventing Harmful Exposure to Phthalates Act, and ban cyanide bombs from the wild, and tell our Department of Energy to reject uranium mining. 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 raise all Build Back Better Act funding by raising taxes on the rich and on corporations. If you're an Arizona resident, you'll definitely want to call Sen. Sinema, since she seems to be the one Senate Democrat who opposes raising taxes on the rich and on corporations. Stop me if you've heard this before, but over two-thirds of Arizonans support raising taxes on the rich and on corporations to pay for the Build Back Better Act. As usual, the "inscrutable" "iconoclastic" "maverick" "earns" her reputation by simply defying the will of her own constituents, in favor of the big corporate donors she seems to hobnob with every weekend. That's not very mavericky, frankly! And we shouldn't let her get away with it.

Free Press helps you tell our government to regulate Facebook a lot more vigorously than we currently do. Specifically, you'd urge Congress to pass data privacy and algorithmic abuse laws and tax social media advertising, and you'd ask various Executive branch agencies to crack down on abusive data practices. I've thought a lot lately about what the internet was like before Facebook; I visited at least four different social networks regularly in the mid-2000s, and visited half a dozen blogs and websites regularly for my news, but now we go to Facebook for all of that (and more -- remember Flickr?), and why should we? And why should they get to do whatever they like with our data, and why should they get to use algorithms to mindlessly ensure white supremacists feel less alone in the world? They've become a monopoly, and we know what to do with monopolies. Even if our politicians have forgotten.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to block President Biden's proposed $500 million weapons deal with Saudi Arabia. Yeah, I know, the money is supposedly for helicopter maintenance, but the Saudis ain't using those helicopters for humanitarian airdrops! The ongoing war on Yemen is just one reason to starve this particular beast, and using Saudi Arabia as a "hedge" against Iranian power in the region is not only a dumb idea but an immoral one, since the Saudis don't exactly use their power for good. Besides, if we didn't invade Iraq in 2003 for no damn good reason, we wouldn't need such a hedge against Iranian power! You look back over the last 20 years in particular and you begin to think we really have been conducting foreign policy for the express purpose of making the world worse. But we don't have to put up with what they do in our name.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4963/S. 2669, the Preventing Harmful Exposure to Phthalates Act. Much like the "forever chemical" PFAS, scientists have long linked phthalates to cancer, brain damage, and birth defects, plus they're everywhere in our plastic products and they get into our bodies to wreak havoc there. Our Consumer Product Safety Commission banned phthalates from children's toys back in 2017, which will protect kids a bit, but we all need that kind of protection. Hence the Preventing Harmful Exposure to Phthalates Act would ban phthalates in food packaging products outright and instruct our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to review the products our FDA typically regulates to see where else we can ban them. If you're worried that we won't have as many food prep gloves after this, remember that this is America, the can-do country, and we've adapted to worse.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell Congress to ban our use of cyanide bombs in the wild. You think it's inhumane when land mines planted 50 years ago in a foreign country blow somebody's arm or leg off decades after the war is over? Now consider that cyanide bombs kill pretty indiscriminately as well -- the bombs don't exactly wait until their target animal is near! In fact, the bombs lure animals in with a sweet scent, so they're actually worse than landmines, which don't exactly lure people to them with hundred-dollar bills or promises of free broadband. How we treat animals tells the world what kind of civilization we are. Yes, even if we raise animals for food, we can still treat them in a civilized manner. We should be able to report to future civilizations that we did a pretty good job at it, and getting rid of cyanide bombs is just one way to do that.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Department of Energy not to fund uranium mining. Uranium is, as you know, a radioactive element that too easily finds its way into our drinking water and into the bodies of wildlife. And of course we haven't figured out a way to store the waste yet. These days you'll mostly find uranium in nuclear weapons, nuclear-powered submarines, nuclear power plants, and depleted uranium weapons; stop me if you hear anything you like in that list! Yeah, you'll also find it (in much, much smaller amounts) in wool, silk, stage lighting, photo chemicals, and even more rarely in glass, but ain't no mining corporation looking to make a killing in these markets -- they're looking for the big weapon money! And for these reasons we say no to uranium mining.

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act, tell Democrats to stop coddling corporate lobbyists and raise taxes on the rich and corporations already, tell Congress to ensure we can all get good credit reports, tell General Mills to divest from Israel, and tell Uber and Lyft to stop using facial recognition software on drivers and consumers. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: what to do about dystopia, part 869.

Edward Snowden proposes a two-step response to begin dealing with the dystopia promised by the Pegasus Project: "ban the commercial trade in intrusion software," and hold corporations liable for investing or producing it. If you make it illegal, after all, you can hold people liable for making it. If we do these things, we won't eradicate spyware like Pegasus -- which, as you may recall, can turn on your iPhone's microphones remotely and listen in on what you say -- but we will make it a lot harder for spyware to do damage. As Mr. Snowden suggests, this is the same logic that operates behind vaccination.

In a peripherally-related note, Sara Morrison at Vox explains "how police can get your data -- even if you aren't suspected of a crime." Long story short: they can get it from a third-party data broker (the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would fix that), or they can use "reverse search warrants," which should be illegal. Should we be "happy" that our police don't have access to Pegasus yet? This sorry state of affairs is yet another reason we don't leave important questions to corporations. Trouble is, our legislators think only corporations know anything about anything!

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: ISIS supporters have glommed on to the Trump-friendly social network GETTR, posting videos of beheadings and the like. Well, they always said ISIS understood the social media landscape better than anyone! And they'll find plenty of sympathetic souls among the whiners who've left Facebook and Twitter because their friends shame them for saying obnoxious crap. GETTR's guru shrugs off the ISIS influence, but "free speech" still doesn't cover terroristic threats, nor does a private media corporation have any obligation to publish literally anything.

ICU doctor confesses that what her unvaccinated COVID patients tell her leaves her "surprised, disheartened, but most of all, angry," and who can blame her? You risk death taking care of COVID patients, you endure all the loneliness and all the supply chain shortages, you update your own living will, and now some YouTube University graduate lectures you about how intubation is the real killer? I'd slap a pimp if they did that -- which is yet another reason why I'm not a doctor. My patience with the unvaccinated is short, and I don't even encounter very many of them in my travels.

In a related note, Dartmouth University sociology professor Brooke Harrington writes about the "anti-vaccine con job" and reminds us that folks who've been so thoroughly conned can't just switch on a dime. And I would say the con is significantly longer than "anti-vaccine con job" suggests -- almost 20 years ago, for example, the same damn people all fell for the Iraq War Con Job. Apparently only other right-wingers can reach them, which I guess is good in the short run if it helps us get the upper hand on COVID again, but can they even reach them? Or have decades of right-wing yelling and screaming created a group of Americans who won't listen to anything that doesn't diddle their rage gland?/p>

Finally, California restauranteur Tony Roman hangs sign outside restaurant demanding that potential customers show "proof of being unvaccinated." In that spirit, I'd like some proof that Tony Roman hasn't fucked a goat. I mean, I don't want to associate with goat-fuckers, so I'm entitled to demand official documentation about that fact from other people. See how easy this game is? In the meantime, I urge folks to avoid dining at Basilico's Pasta e Vino in Huntington Beach, not least because for all you know you might run into a goat-fucker.

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the National Security Powers Act, the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act, the Women's Health Protection Act, the Pregnant Workers' Fairness Act, the Whistleblower Protection Improvements Act, and the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, the Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. H.R. 2378/S. 1265 would prevent third-party data broker corporations from selling your personal information to law enforcement personnel, because selling that personal data willy-nilly like that may be lucrative for people who really should go get a real job, but it contravenes our Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. If law enforcement wants to get you, they should get a warrant first, but buying up big chunks of data from brokers lets police work around that. And they shouldn't get to work around it! If you're tempted to get all thin-blue-line about this, just imagine police harassing you because some web search you did in 2009 raised their antennae.

Action: concerning 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?

Action: concerning jobs, education, discrimination, corporate spying, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal," and pass the Counseling Not Criminalization in Schools Act, the Equality Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the Medicare for All Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Today's another good day to tell your Congressfolk you oppose the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" struck between Joe Biden and a cadre of 20 Senators from both parties; Food and Water Action helps you do that because the "deal" would privatize a lot of public infrastructure, although, frankly, there's a lot of good reasons to oppose it. And don't brook any whining about "bipartisanship" from your friends and neighbors: it's far less important that "the two parties work together" than that our government govern well, and if that means the Party of Sedition can't get its way, well, maybe they could try going down the no-sedition path next election! If you're feeling especially ornery, ask your "bipartisan" friends and neighbors how Republicans have improved Joe Biden's American Jobs Plan. Because it sure seems to me the Republican plan is to build a lot less of what we need, privatize things we need to keep public, and pay for it with smoke and mirrors. Really, it's not "just another opinion" if that opinion happens to suck.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4011/S. 2125, the Counseling Not Criminalization in Schools Act. Putting cops in schools hasn't made kids safer -- it certainly hasn't made them safer from cops! -- and this bill would redirect federal funding away from putting cops in schools and toward putting nurses, counselors, and other health professionals in schools so kids can get the help they need, rather than the back of some police officer's hand. Spare the rod, spoil the child, they say, but that doesn't mean only use the rod, either. I sure hope the folks who call this "defunding the police" don't take credit for it we actually make schools get safer because we're actually helping kids do better.

The Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Let's review: the Equality Act would prevent landlords, banks, and employers from discriminating against gay and transgender folk merely on the basis of being gay or transgender. It would do so by adding gay and transgender folks to the list of protected classes in the Civil Rights Act. Note well, whenever someone calls the Equality Act "an assault on religious freedom," that the Civil Rights Act already has a broad exemption for religious organizations, which the Equality Act does not amend. I would hate to think that right-wingers just see religion as mainly a matter of hating gays, transgender folks, and women. If so, they're really missing out.

The Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Your internet service providing corporation can't sell your private data to law enforcement, but it can sell it to a third-party data-hoovering corporation, which can then sell it to law enforcement. Nice work if you can get it! The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would close that loophole, and Congress may be anxious to listen to us on this matter, since no one in America is :"objectively pro-handing over your private data to law enforcement without a warrant." No one except the folks who make money from it, that is. But this is America! They don't get all the say about everything!

Finally, Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. Even good liberals frequently tell me that paying for all that health insurance is going to be very hard. After all, the Mercatus Center says Medicare for All would cost $32 trillion over the next decade! That's a lot of money! What they don't tell you, of course, is that our Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services has predicted that America will spend $49 trillion on health insurance over the same time period -- which means you just have to capture the money that's going to gild the plumbing on some health care CEO's 19th vacation home and redirect it toward Medicare. We can do that with an employer-side payroll tax, in the amount corporations already pay private health insurers, that wouldn't cost workers a penny more. So what are we waiting for again?

Action: concerning jobs, postal banking, facial recognition, corporate welfare, corporate spying, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep defense spending out of the American Jobs Plan, expand postal banking, and pass the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, the End Polluter Welfare Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the Medicare for All Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to contact your Congressfolk, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk not to include any defense spending in the American Jobs Plan. Because our defense department has enough money! And Democrats won't attract any Republican votes by hiding defense spending in the jobs bill! If they got behind a bill written by Mitch McConnell himself they couldn't get enough Republican votes, so they certainly shouldn't try any tricks that will not only backfire on them, but deprive worthy efforts -- like clean water, road and bridge repair, and renewable energy -- of vital funding. Hate to beat a dead horse, but we already spend more on our military than the next 12 nations on the list combined, so we shouldn't enable that state of affairs with an infrastructure bill.

The ACLU helps you tell your Senators to expand postal banking. We've talked at length about the benefits of postal banking -- mainly that it would enable more folks in underbanked rural and urban areas to be able to save money, pay bills, and write checks and money orders. We may not have emphasized quite enough that these are places banksters won't go, because they don't think they can make absurd amounts of money there. So ensure your right-wing friends sheath their let-the-free-market-do-it arguments, because clearly the "free" market ain't doing its job here, and when the "free" market won't do its job, somebody has to. And why not the organization that belongs to us in the first place and offered basic banking services until the late 1960s?

Ban Facial Recognition helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3907/S. 2052, the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, which would prevent both our federal government and local police from using facial recognition technology. I've said enough times that it's lousy technology that can't tell Black folks apart any better than your Trumphole uncle can, but perhaps I haven't said enough that the consequences of using this lousy technology are quite dire for the wrongly accused -- police can arrest you and detain you until the cows come home, because they either don't know or don't care how bad the technology is. And then you've got an arrest on your record, which makes it all the more likely police will target you again. So let's prevent that sort of thing.

The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. Every dollar spent on entrenched fossil fuel technologies that don't need the money but will surely take it and then act like they can't live without it is a dollar that doesn't fund something more useful -- like building out renewable utilities a la the Tennessee Valley Authority. Yes, it still exists, and even though right-wingers have run Tennessee for many years now, they won't touch it, because it works. And does Tennessee have all the problems Texas has in ensuring everyone has enough heat and electricity? No, they do not. There's a solution in there, somewhere. And only the cynical and the self-interested can't see it.

The Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Your internet service providing corporation can't sell your private data to law enforcement, but it can sell it to a third party, which can then sell it to law enforcement. The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would close that loophole, and who wants it to stay open? People who haven't earned their money in some time, that's who. And they'll act like you will be raped and murdered if you tell your Congressfolk to pass this bill. But don't listen to bad people.

Finally, Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. I'm reminded, again, how many good Americans went out and got COVID vaccines without having to worry about whether wherever they were going to get the shot was "in-network" or, indeed, how they were going to pay for the shot; wouldn't it be nice if all health care could be like that? Yes, it would, and expanding Medicare to include all of us would get us into that world -- and out of the world where diabetics ration their insulin, where folks with allergies go without their EpiPens, where folks who get treatment get slammed with surprise medical bills because their surgeon was in-network but their anesthesiologist somehow wasn't. That's a damn nutty world I've just described, and we Americans deserve better.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, health care, discrimination, corporate spying, and antibiotic abuse.

Long story short: tell your state legislators to draw fair, ungerrymandered districts; tell our FDA to revoke its approval of a dangerous drug, tell Michigan state legislators to reject yet another anti-trans bill, tell Amazon to stop spying on good Americans, and tell our FDA to restrict antibiotic abuse on factory farms. 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 and/or state legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting, and have a happy and safe weekend!

Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators draw fair and transparent legislative districts. Which is to say, not the kind of Rorschach-blot legislative districts, the kind that exclude sides of streets and even individual houses, that tend to keep individual legislators in power when they haven't earned it either through good works or superior persuasion. This is one of the things that sucks about the future: given the choice between doing the hard work of earning power or using the computer software that can gerrymander a tailor-made district that'll return you to power without very much effort, legislators typically choose the latter. And we all hate that. But we have to tell them that, and we have to tell them that often.

Public Citizen helps you tell our FDA to revoke its approval of aducanumab, a drug that ostensibly treats Alzheimer's disease. Too many good Americans would quickly respond how dare we hurt the effort to stop Alzheimer's, but we have to consider whether approving a drug that caused brain bleeding and swelling in 40% of clinical trial participants, a drug our FDA's own independent advisory committee told them not to approve, a drug that will cost patients over $50,000 a year to take, might actually hurt the effort to defeat Alzheimer's Disease. Before you do the right thing, you have to get the right thing right.

Change.org helps you tell the Michigan state legislature to reject yet another bill that would mandate that transgender students only play sports in their birth gender. Why do boys become girls again? It sure ain't so they can dominate girls' sports and then hang out with their crew and talk about girls, but that's what right-wingers apparently want you to believe. When transgender folks come out, they risk getting harassed, getting the crap kicked out of them, even getting killed; maybe our politicians should focus a little more on that, and not so much on absurd fantasies about competitiveness in sports.

Media Justice helps you tell Amazon to permanently stop using its power to spy on people. Yeah, Amazon has responded to the Big Stick of Bad PR, but only conditionally: it has renewed a ban on selling facial recognition technology, the kind that can't tell black folks apart any better than your Trumphole uncle can, to law enforcement, but that ban ain't permanent, and even as they announced that ban, it rolled out Sidewalk, a network that would run all manner of data from your Amazon devices into one big spying network. So, clearly, we need to keep at them. Jeff Bezos may be so rich he can blast off into space, but the Big Stick of Bad PR can still bring him back to Earth.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our FDA to set more stringent standards for antibiotic use on factory farms. Specifically, you'd ask our FDA to limit all medically-important antibiotic use on factory farms to 21 days; currently our FDA allows factory farms to use about a third of these antibiotics indefinitely, so Penn PIRG's proposal represents an improvement. Some three million Americans get sick from an antibiotic-resistant superbug every year, and that represents a little less than one in every hundred Americans, and I know you know at least a hundred people, right? So hopefully that drives the point home -- you know, in addition to the prospect that one day the next cut could kill us and all we'll have to show for it is richer corporate executives.

Action: concerning abortion, protecting wildlife, the Estate Tax, polluter welfare, government spying, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell PA state legislators to reject anti-abortion bills, and tell your Congressfolk to pass wildlife corridor legislation, the For the 99.5% Act, the End Polluter Welfare Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the Medicare for All 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 (or state legislators') phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the ACLU helps you tell your state legislators to reject the noxious anti-abortion bills HB 904, HB 1500, and HB 118. HB 904 is one of them-there "fetal heartbeat" bills which are essentially backdoor abortion bans, HB 1500 bans abortion after a Downs Syndrome diagnosis which will only prevent the diagnosis from being made in the first place, and HB 118 would require women who have miscarriages to fill out death certificates and pay to cremate their remains, which is straight-up cruel to grieving women who most certainly didn't "fake" a miscarriage just to have an abortion. Seriously, that last item goes into the pile with "border crisis" and "crime wave" as things that are just bullshit. Anyway, abortion is a right, and one that most Pennsylvanians support, so maybe preening before the extreme right isn't what we pay legislators to do.

Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to introduce and pass legislation creating more wildlife corridors, or overpasses above highways that prevent senseless wildlife deaths. I guess right-wingers will try to make "wildlife corridor" a cuss phrase, like they did with "secular humanism" back in the day and "chain migration" a couple of years ago, but there's no good reason for that. And wildlife corridors don't just save animal lives, they also save human lives, because we have fewer car collisions when animals get their own lane reconnecting their habitats. How about that: what benefits them also benefits us, plus it creates jobs for the folks who build the corridors. Makes you wonder about big-development-über-alles, doesn't it?

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2576/S. 994, the For the 99.5 Percent Act. The For the 99.5% Act would hike Estate Taxes on the wealthy when they die, and when I say "the wealthy" I mean "maybe two out of every thousand Americans," i.e., almost certainly not you or I or almost anyone you know. Do you have less than $3.5 million to your name? Then you will not get hit with the Estate Tax. And don't believe the tall tales about how the Estate Tax ruins family farms, either! Not even when they come from the Governor of South Dakota.

The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. Because big oil and gas drilling operations don't need the money, that's why! Gas is the last cheap fossil fuel, and will probably persist as an industry for at least another generation despite its polluting effects, and oil corporations have made $2 trillion in profits over the last 30 years, so they don't need the money, certainly not more so than the more nascent renewable energy technologies. Certainly don't believe the hype that "oil corporations only make 12 cents a gallon" or whatever -- it's like saying CEOs are underpaid because they only make $3 every time they draw breath. Which is stupid.

The Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. What if we polled good Americans on the question "do you want law enforcement to get your private data when you haven't committed a crime?" I bet most Americans say hell no! to that! Well, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would prevent private data-collection corporations from selling your data to law enforcement willy-nilly; law enforcement should have to get a warrant if they suspect you of a crime. And yes, our Fourth Amendment is supposed to guarantee that they have to do that, but our "law and order" politicians have been chipping away at that right for years. So let's make them stop.

Finally, Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. I was just talking about polling, wasn't I? Well, actual polls have found, for three decades, that most Americans want Medicare to cover everyone in America! And these polls come from big corporations that you would think would have a vested interest in extracting exactly the opposite result! So I think we can trust their reading of the popular will in this instance. It's true that support falls when you start asking about how we'll pay for it. But ask folks if they support Medicare-for-All if we pay for it by capturing the money corporations already pay private insurers and converting that money into an employer-side payroll tax, and I bet support stays the same.