Thieves in the Temple.

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.

Action: concerning privacy, transparency, and pollution.

Long story short: keep Amazon from connecting your smart devices to a larger network, tell our SEC to mandate more transparency for shareholders, tell New York state legislators to ban facial recognition technology, tell our EPA to enact vigorous clean car standards, tell insurance corporations to cut ties with coal, and tell federal regulators to keep corporations from siphoning public water. The following paragraphs contain email/petition tools for each of these alerts. Good hunting!

First things first: The Guardian reports that Amazon customers have less than a week now to opt out of its plan to turn all the "smart" devices in your house into a giant "mesh network" called Amazon Sidewalk, which, as you might imagine, would raise significant privacy and spying concerns. Maybe you don't want your Alexa to be on the same network as your neighbor's Ring, amirite? Per the article, if you have an Alexa or Ring app, you need to disable Sidewalk in that app's settings, but you only have until June 8 (that's this coming Tuesday) to do so, so you might as well get to it.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to tell corporations to be honest with their shareholders, especially in re its actions (or lack thereof) on climate change and workers' rights. Shareholders care about that stuff, after all, and how do I know? Because if you have a pension plan through your employer, you may well be a shareholder! And you have opinions on how you want your money invested. I mean, not everyone's all "just make me the most money"; even those of us who fear poverty in our old age still don't want to destroy the planet or hurt people just to avoid it. And our SEC does work for shareholders, who are also taxpayers, so let's tell them to do the right thing.

Sum of Us helps you tell New York state legislators to ban facial recognition technology there. Because it's bad at its job and can't tell Black people apart any more than your Trumphole uncle can -- and also the state of New York has nearly 20 million residents, making it the third most-populous state after California and Texas, so if New York bans it, facial recognition corporations will have a tougher time working around it, and thus you'll see less of it elsewhere as well. Which is a good thing! The last thing you want in your life is to be hauled away to jail because some POS software thinks you committed a crime. Just ask Nijeer Parks.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous clean car standards possible. The Obama EPA enacted fairly strong standards that helped good Americans spend less on gas and pollute less, but the Trump EPA couldn't wait to undo them, because Obama. Now the Biden EPA gets its chance to undo the Trump EPA's actions, but they'll still need to hear from us, in numbers that can't be denied. I mean that: government agencies can't simply ignore public comments, and where they defy the public, they have to come up with good reasons, lest they get smacked down in court. Hey, it happened routinely to the Trump Administration.

Public Citizen helps you tell big insurance corporations like Lloyds of London, AIG, and Tokio Marine to stop insuring and investing in coal plants. Two dozen other big insurance corporations have washed their hands of coal recently, and for good reason: why insure an industry that's dying, that is actually more expensive, over the life of their plants, than solar and wind are now? I guess Lloyds et al think energy's more reliable if you can churn the ground to get it -- like they've never heard of, you know, battery storage! That means we got to bring out the Big Stick of Bad PR, which makes all corporations run in fear. (Of course, we have to keep wielding it, or they'll come out of hiding and do the wrong thing again.)

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell our U.S. Forest Service to stop BlueTriton from siphoning water out of the San Bernardino National Forest in California. Since California is in a drought, as it often is in summertime, and drought doesn't just mean thirst and agricultural hell, but also wildfires all over the state -- so letting private corporations take water that belongs to the people isn't the smartest idea, is it? Just so happens BlueTriton -- apparently aspiring to be the "new Nestlé," in Sum of Us's words -- has already ignored water regulators' efforts to stop them. It's like they don't understand that those regulators work for us. Thus it's time to flex our power.

Action: concerning antibiotic abuse, recycling, labor, privacy, equality, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell our FDA to fight antibiotic abuse on factory farms, tell Pennsylvania legislators to stop defunding recycling programs, tell your U.S. Senators to pass the PRO Act, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, the Equality 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 find your legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell our FDA to do a better job restricting antibiotic abuse on factory farms. You don't want to live in a world where the next cut could kill you -- I have three cuts on my fingers as we speak -- so you don't want seven of every 10 antibiotics go to, no, not sick people or animals, but nominally healthy animals, and antibiotics all stop working as a result. And our FDA needs to do more than they've thus far proposed -- we clearly can't rely on factory farm veterinarians to voluntarily stand up to their factory farm bosses, for example. Sometimes you have to make people do the right thing.

Penn Environment helps you tell Pennsylvania state legislators not to slash funding for the Commonwealth's Recycling Fund. Hard to believe we have to tell them that, isn't it? But we do -- after all, they've done it four times over the last 12 years, and now some recycling centers won't collect plastic, glass, or paper, even. As a citizen, you do the hard work of separating your refuse so we're not completely surrounded by trash, but PA state legislators can't be bothered to do their part. That's why we get in their grills so they have no choice but to do their part.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. Your right-wing Congressfolk will no doubt respond that of course they believe in protecting workers' rights, but the PRO Act "goes too far." That's BS. How is preventing corporations from forcing workers to attend anti-union meetings "going too far"? How is preventing corporations from retaliating against organizers and whistleblowers "going too far"? How is giving workers (versus their employers) the choice of voting via card check or internet "going too far"? They're not, that's how. So don't believe the hype.

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. Because we shouldn't let third-party data harvesting corporations sell your private info to law enforcement! Law enforcement is supposed to get warrants to look at that, not just buy it from some corporation! And don't brook any silliness about how "there's no privacy on the internet," because that's loser talk -- we should be able to enjoy the internet and feel safe. That's what America's all about, isn't it?

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. When they say "this bill is an unprecedented assault on religious freedom," ask yourself how denying gays and transgender folks loans and jobs and apartments fulfills anyone's "religious freedom." Here I thought religious freedom was about worshiping (or not!) at the church of your choice, not about forcing your beliefs down other folks' throats. In my experience, religion is a lot more than who you hurt.

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. And don't brook any silliness about how "it's too hard" and "it can't be done." You know what was too hard and couldn't be done once? Ending slavery, getting women the vote, raising taxes on the rich, and enacting a minimum wage, among many other things we've done as Americans. And I'm pretty sure that good Americans who get slammed with surprise medical bills don't want to hear about what's too hard and what can't be done. And anyway, the only things worth doing are tough.

Action: concerning jobs, law and order, pregnant workers, privacy, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk about your "red line" for the American Jobs Plan, tell your Congressfolk to oppose military weapons and "qualified immunity" for police officers, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the Medicare for All Act. You can 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 Congressfolks' phone numbers, or use the links in the following paragraphs.

Tired of hearing how "bleak" the prospects are for a "bipartisan" American Jobs Plan? It's bleak enough that we're even negotiating with the supporters of the January 6 insurrection! The Republicans' "red line" is, of course, NO NEW TAXUZ!!!! -- although "use fees" somehow don't count as taxes to them, at least at this moment -- and President Biden's "red line," unfortunately, does not appear to include "the bill must raise taxes on corporations." Want a better red line? The American Jobs Plan must include a 55% tax rate for corporate profits over $1 million, must invest substantially in clean water, renewable energy, and the care economy, and must not include "use fees," which always hit working people harder than they hit rich people. Our red line matter more than their red lines -- if we speak out. (Daily Kos helps you communicate your will in re corporate taxes and renewable energy and the care economy.)

Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3227, the Demilitarizing Local Law Enforcement Act, which would end the notorious 1033 program which funnels surplus military weapons to local police departments. Seriously, if you heard "police get military weapons" in nations like Iran or Russia, you'd find that alarming, wouldn't you? Don't let "but police have it hard" get in the way of you finding that alarming here in America, too, because these weapons don't help police deal with criminals -- they help police put down peaceful protests against their brutality! And don't put the phrase "defund the police" in your counterarguments, either. This is literally not "defunding the police," and attaching any concept that makes you mad to any other concept that makes you mad is not argument worthy of civilized people.

Further along these lines, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to end "qualified immunity" for police officers in America. "Qualified immunity" is the legal doctrine, promulgated by our Supreme Court in Pierson v. Ray, that protects government officials (including police officers) from civil suits over their discretionary actions (i.e., actions not mandated by law), unless the plaintiff can prove those actions violated "clearly-established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known." But in practice, folks trying to get relief from police brutality have to prove something almost exactly the same happened to someone else, and that they got relief, in order to get relief themselves. And judges have used the narrowest excuses to throw cases out -- "your example was about police siccing a dog on a suspect lying down with their hands to the side, but you were sitting down with your hands up, so it's not the same! Too bad!" No, I didn't make that up. We should make it hard to convict people of crimes in America, but we shouldn't make it damn near impossible. "Qualified immunity" does that, and Congress should end it.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1065, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. Too many women in America have to choose between having a baby and having a job, and why should it be like that? If men could get pregnant, you'd best believe bosses would make every conceivable accommodation at the workplace, like assignments with less lifting and more tolerance of bathroom breaks. But too often we assume women have "ulterior motives" for getting pregnant, when, hey, who would get pregnant just to get light duty? Don't believe the hype that the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would "make it impossible for bosses to do their jobs." The bill pointedly does not force bosses to make unreasonable accommodations. When you read bills, you learn things.

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. Our laws already prevent most corporations (including the big telecoms and social media corporations) from selling your information to law enforcement -- but our laws don't prevent the third-party data collecting corporations that buy that data from selling it to law enforcement! Which they do, so if you're a Muslim looking up which direction Mecca's in on your phone, now our government can find out about it, and harass you if they want. There's a reason we demand that law enforcement get warrants to investigate you -- it's for your protection! And we deserve that protection even when big corporations figure out how to work around it. And that's why we have lawmakers.

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. The Medicare for All Act would ensure that all Americans have health insurance, including the 30 million or so who can't get health insurance now, and we could deliver better care more cheaply. How? Well, for one thing, Medicare-for-All won't have a slew of million-dollar executives who need to be paid first. Also, Medicare-for-All will bargain with doctors and hospitals and big pharma corporations with the strength of a 330-million-person-plus pool, and in insurance bargaining, there's always strength in numbers. Don't worry that doctors won't be able to "make money"; doctors still make plenty of money everywhere that governments guarantee that everyone gets health care. So, really, there are no counter-arguments. (Cost isn't one, either; I've shot that zombie in the head many times, most recently last week.)

Action: concerning taxes, voting rights, food safety, polluter welfare, law and order, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk not to be cowardly about raising taxes on the rich, tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Baby Food Safety 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 phone numbers, or use the email/petition links (where applicable) in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Dan Pfeiffer, clearly one of the better political thinkers to emerge from the Obama Administration, argues that Democrats ought to "lean into" tax hikes on corporations, because, and I quote, "(t)he idea that Biden’s proposals to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy are a political liability flies in the face of all of the polling as well as basic common sense." Hear, hear! Voters reward courage; they don't reward "this is the best we could do" or "Republicans wouldn't let us do more," and they sure as hell don't reward "I couldn't do the right thing because I'm in a swing district." You know what "swing" voters crave most from their reps? That they do the right thing! And they'll settle for the "courageous" thing, so you want to do an actual courageous thing before Republicans do the fake courageous thing. So go ahead and call your (Democratic) Reps and Senators and tell them they'll only get to keep their majorities if they do the right thing and raise corporate taxes. You can also tell them, if you're feeling ornery, that you wouldn't want to suspect that they're pretending not to understand this very basic calculus so that they don't offend their big donors. Votes win elections, not cash.

While you've got your Senators on the phone, tell them to pass H.R. 1/S. 1, the For the People Act. The Senate Rules Committee deadlocked on the bill on Tuesday, but Sen. Schumer used his power as Senate Majority Leader to advance the bill to the full Senate anyway, so now's the time to put the pressure on your Senators. They're no doubt hearing from the other side, though I'm not sure what arguments the other side could reasonably advance -- how can they say it's "a solution in search of a problem" when numerous state legislatures have repeatedly demonstrated the problem? How can they argue "record turnout in 2020" when states scurry to pass laws to ensure that turnout doesn't happen again? How can they say "bills like this should be passed in a bipartisan manner" when Republicans have acted in an entirely partisan manner for over a dozen years? Seriously, their arguments are dung. They need to hear that killing gerrymandering dead, disclosing big campaign donors, and ensuring same-day and automatic voter registration are actually pretty popular.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1019, the Baby Food Safety Act. Because baby food sure as hell shouldn't have high levels of lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury in it! And the Baby Food Safety Act would actually set maximum levels for these toxins' presence in baby food, and establish mechanisms for lowering those levels as advancing scientific research would require. Why would we give babies food that might expose them to cancer and brain damage? The more pertinent question might be "why did big food manufacturing corporations do nothing about these things even when they knew about them?" Because a President Trump would let them get away with it no matter what we said, that's why. We have a better chance of influencing a President Biden in our direction, and that's why we need to tell our Congressfolk to pass this bill.

The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. The bill would, as its title suggests, cut some $15 billion annually in subsidies to big polluting corporations (like oil and gas drilling corporations) who hardly need the taxpayer help. And yet they'll fight to the death to keep them! Even as they admit to each other that tax breaks hardly matter in the decisions they make! (Hey, don't take my word for that -- take former Bush Mobb Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's word for it!) And, ah, why are we giving these handouts to polluters when we could be giving more of a hand up to solar and wind and geothermal? These things don't pollute anywhere near as much as fossil fuels do, and it ain't like the sun and the wind and the ground are going anywhere. Unless we destroy them all! How about we do the hard work of not doing that?

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. Big telecom corporations can't sell your personal data to law enforcement -- but they can sell them to private data broker corporations, which can sell your data to law enforcement! The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would close that loophole right quick, which would not only protect your right to privacy on the internet (I never agreed with folks who throw up their hands and say you just don't have any privacy on the internet; it's a species of cynicism), but would also save the taxpayer money! Yes, it would, since it's easier to just buy up a bunch of data ("WE NEEDZ IT TEH NOWZ, SO PAYZ UPZ!!!!!!") than it is to get warrants. Which is why we make law enforcement get warrants.

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. Which would expand Medicare to everyone and (by almost everyone's estimation, though they often don't put it quite like this!) cost less than funneling trillions of dollars into our current health insurance system, the system that slams you with surprise thousand-dollar medical bills all the time and moves doctors in and out of networks all the time. With Medicare for All, we'd have one network, and we'd have the bargaining power with private hospitals and doctors that a 330-million-strong pool would have! Plus we could fund it merely by capturing the money big corporations already pay private health insurers in an employer-side payroll tax (and please note that "employer-side" means "employees don't pay one penny more"). Sounds like a win for the American people all the way around.

Action: concerning taxes, education, birth control, reforestation, privacy, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fund our IRS properly so it can catch more tax cheats; tell your Congressfolk to pass the College for All Act, the EACH Woman Act, the REPLANT 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.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to better fund our Internal Revenue Service so it can catch rich tax cheats. Our IRS estimates that tax evaders cheat us out of $1 trillion every year, and that represents about a quarter of our entire federal budgets most years, so the law and order thing to do, the pro-law enforcement thing to do, would be to give our IRS the funding it needs to make tax cheaters pay up, so we can then properly fund roads, bridges, schools, firefighters, police, et al. And now you know why Republicans stamped their feet so much in the early 2010s about "political bias" at our IRS -- so they could curtail collections, starve our government of money, and make it run so badly that even fascist assholes routinely get elected to federal office now. And if Congress doesn't fund our IRS, just look out for the QAnon/Trumpholes that'll take over Congress in 2022.

Speaking of things better tax collection could pay for, Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2730/S. 1288, the College for All Act, which (among numerous other reforms) would pay for tuition and fees for all students who come from families that make less than $125,000 annually. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the bill's main sponsor, says the money would come from the Tax on Wall Street Speculation Act, which would tax stock trades at half of one percent, bonds at one-tenth of one percent, and derivatives at one-two hundredth of one percent; this bill would raise around $240 billion annually, which, in the context of the $1.2 trillion in wealth billionaires have accumulated during this pandemic, sure ain't too damn much to ask.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2234/S. 1021, the EACH Woman Act. The EACH Woman Act would repeal the notorious Hyde Amendment that prevents federal funds from covering abortions, but abortion is a legal medical procedure, and thus federal funds should cover it. The Hyde Amendment has essentially kept the world the way it was before Roe v. Wade, when rich folks could get abortions and poor folks can't. Right-wingers are always complaining about "how many babies Those People are always having," but then cling to the Hyde Amendment like grim death. It really is like they'd just prefer a world where nobody ever solves any problems and rageheads get to pop off all the time. But we're Americans, and we deserve better than that. And if you're against abortion, don't get one.

And now for the rare Arbor Day-related action alert: Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the REPLANT Act. The REPLANT Act would help reverse deforestation in America by mandating the planting of over a billion trees over the next decade, and if you're thinking of indulging in some hippie-punching over this, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider that trees help purify our air and thus help us stay healthier, 3) consider that trees also trap a lot of carbon dioxide and thus help mitigate the effects of climate change, and 4) a lot of animals use trees to find food and shelter their children. How much of any of that does your average office complex or gas drilling well do? Yeah, that's what I thought.

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. The bill would close the legal loophole that allows big data mining corporations to sell your personal data to law enforcement, a sale which completely circumvents our Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. Big telecom corporations can't sell your personal data to law enforcement, because it's against the law; big data brokers should face the same prohibitions. And if that puts them out of business, well, why do we tolerate a business model that's essentially "make money violating other people's rights"? A sane, moral, and decent society asks these questions; this sick, immoral, and decadent society doesn't ask them anywhere near enough.

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. Expand Medicare to include everyone, pay for it by converting the money big corporations already pay for private insurance into an employer-side payroll tax, and voila! We've solved all health insurance problems without any workers -- or corporations! -- spending a penny more on health insurance, plus we stop leaving 30 million Americans out in the cold. Plus no more surprise bills, no more four-digit deductibles, and no more networks with shifting boundaries. People who want to keep their private insurance? Too bad! You'll just have to settle for much better insurance.

Action: concerning jobs, privacy, health care, corporate welfare, encryption, and Arctic drilling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk what you want from the Biden infrastructure/jobs bill; tell your Congressfolk to support the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, the Medicare for All Act, and the End Polluter Welfare Act; and tell your Congressfolk to support encryption and stop Arctic drilling. 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 contact your Senators -- or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

It's time to be a bit more explicit with what we want from the Biden infrastructure/jobs bill: first, we want real tax hikes on the rich -- the top income rate needs to be 91% and the top corporate rate needs to be 55%, we need to tax investment income equally, we need to cap the mortgage interest deduction so homeowners can still get it but corporations can't game it, and we need to say no to any new sales or use taxes. Second, we want our government to create public renewable energy utilities to compete with the private (and less renewable) utilities -- hey, the Tennessee Valley Authority is still working for its people, and the Republicans there won't touch it! -- and we want fossil fuel workers retrained to build out these new renewable utilities (which sure is better than teaching them to code!). These aren't "impossible" things just because Senate Democrats are wilting under the pressure to raise the corporate tax rate even a little bit! They clearly need some steel in their spine -- and we clearly need to give it to them.

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. This bill would prevent our government from buying location data from your phone and computer apps from "data mining" corporations -- as our government is presently doing from phone apps that tell Muslims which direction Mecca is in. You see what's wrong with that, right? I mean besides the racism? That's right, our government didn't get warrants for that data! When your government wants to investigate you, it's supposed to get a warrant from a judge; buying up data (with your taxpayer money, I feel compelled to add) gets around that. And we shouldn't allow that.

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. Think of health care that covers everyone, with no "networks" for your doctors to slip in and out of, and thus no surprise bills -- that could be Medicare, if we pass H.R. 1976. And when they say how are you gonna pay for it, liberal?, you tell them "we're going to convert the money big corporations already pay private health insurance corporations into an employer-side payroll tax and no one will have to pay a penny more." And when they say "oh yes we will," either repeat the words "employer-side payroll tax" like they're stupid, or congratulate them on their hard-earned cynicism which prevents anything good from ever happening ever.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. The bill would do pretty much what its title says it would do: stop the flow of billions of dollars in taxpayer money into the pockets of big fossil fuel developers. Why do they need handouts, after all? They're well-established technologies which make big money for a handful of corporations. And certainly we should not be funneling taxpayer dollars toward technologies that might well make our planet unlivable within a few generations. We have alternatives like solar and wind that deserve taxpayer assistance more. And we'd only be assisting ourselves in funding them.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to refuse to fund any government effort to undermine encryption. Former Secretary of State Pompeo loudly assumed that anyone who uses encryption in their personal communications must be a criminal, but as usual he's wrong -- journalists often use encryption to talk to sources who might die if someone discovers their identity, and activists often use encryption to avoid getting wrongfully arrested by the state, too. Yeah, I'm sure quite a few aspiring January 6-style terrorists will use encryption as well, but I'm not going to trade liberty for security just to get at them a little more easily.

Finally, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) from fossil fuel development. ANWR has been a political football for over 20 years, and given how little oil will ever come from it and how important the land is to the Native Americans who live there, you have to wonder why. For a long time I supposed that our leaders just thought oil corporation executive salaries were that important, but now I'm starting to wonder if the ANWR "controversy" is just another decades-long attempt by right-wingers to piss off liberals. We can end such a wholly-manufactured drama by permanently protecting ANWR from fossil fuel drilling, and then right-wingers will have to find stupider things to throw fits about.

Action: concerning campaign finance, drug policy, sacrifice zones, child marriage, and facial recognition.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Democracy for All Amendment and the MORE Act and pass legislation outlawing "sacrifice zones," tell the Michigan state legislature to end child marriage, and tell event promotion corporations to reject the use of facial recognition technology. 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 paragraphs below.

People for the American Way helps you tell your House Reps to pass H.J.Res. 1, which would amend our Constitution so that our federal, state, and local governments could regulate campaign financing again. Not that our Supreme Court has tossed all limits on campaign financing, but they've sure made it difficult for regular folks like ourselves to be heard over the din of rich folks' drama. Of course, it goes beyond "having a right to be heard" -- we have an actual First Amendment right to redress grievances with our government, with which the constant flow of money from big corporate donors interferes. Folks with more money don't have more rights, after all -- if they did, they wouldn't be rights, but privileges, and we better not be getting to the point where we call free speech a privilege.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3884/S. 2227, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act. The MORE Act would take pot off of Schedule I, essentially legalizing the drug across our land, and would invest in communities most harmed by the "war on drugs," which, in most cases, will be communities of color. Pot has never belonged on Schedule I with heroin (ask Zombie William S. Burroughs about heroin!), and it's likely less of a "gateway" drug than alcohol, which remains perfectly legal, though we did try amending the Constitution once to ban it and it didn't go well. Basing so much policing around pot isn't going well, either, and I bet a lot of police officers agree, and would look forward to doing more real work.

The Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the notorious practice of "sacrifice zones," wherein our government essentially looks the other way while big corporations put all their pollution in communities of color, hence the term "sacrifice zone." We discussed this a bit yesterday when talking about the Byhalia Connection Pipeline going through communities of color in Nashville. President Biden has lately ordered the creation of a council to study the problem of environmental racism, which may do some good if the people on it are willing to go above-and-beyond, but you have every right to expect that "creating a council" might also result in "doing nothing," as it often does. Putting the force of law behind another front in the fight against racism would do a lot more good.

Change.org helps you tell the Michigan state legislature to make child marriage illegal. You mean child marriage is actually legal somewhere in America? Actually, it's still legal in 46 states! The exceptions are Delaware, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania, at least three of which, ironically enough, right-wingers routinely describe as "liberal" states where "anything goes." But if a child can't consent to have sex with an adult, how can a child marry an adult? And as for laws allowing parental permission for children to marry adults, well, you can see how a child can be exploited that way, I trust. Welcome to episode 87 of my podcast, This Really Ain't That Hard.

Finally, Fight for the Future helps you tell live event producing corporations not to use facial recognition software on concert-goers. "Because it sucks and it's invasive" would be the short answer why, but these corporations are ready with a retort to that: they want to do it to "protect the public from COVID." So, to sum: we can't use a good way of protecting the public from COVID (like having folks carry around those "vaccine passports" to which right-wingers have tried to give a bad name), but we can use a bad way of doing it, one that routinely can't tell folks of color apart any better than your Tea Party uncle and Hoovers up all your data. Is it so much to ask that things not be so stupid?

Action: concerning jobs, media, police brutality, facial recognition, airline refunds, and campaign donations.

Long story short: tell President Biden to show less "flexibility" with Republicans on his infrastructure package, tell your cable provider to stop carrying the Fox News (sic) Channel, tell big corporations to stop funding police foundations, tell Disney to stop using facial recognition software, tell big airline corporations to refund folks who didn't use their tickets in a pandemic, and tell the American Dental Association to stop donating to Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ). I've provided President Biden's phone number below for the first alert, and email/petition links for the others. Good hunting!

Yesterday we learned that President Biden seemed amenable to passing infrastructure/jobs legislation more like Republicans would like. Was he waffling? Was he doing pro forma meetings with Republicans? Was he playing them in yet another game of 19-dimensional chess? The answer doesn't matter. Here's what matters: we call President Biden, at 202.456.1111, and tell him do not pander to Republicans on his signature infrastructure/jobs legislation. This way, we change the story from "what's President Biden going to do?" to what we're going to do. And if enough of us communicate our will to our President, he'll hear it, if for no other reason that some staffer in the White House is going to be sick of all these phone calls. (And if you tell him you want the corporate tax rate to go higher -- say, to 55%, where it was in the '50s -- well, what's the harm in that?)

Consumers United for Fairness helps you tell your cable corporation to stop carrying Fox News. I've said it many times: even if you're not watching Fox News, you're still paying for it, and even if you make the cable company come out and block Fox News, you're still paying for it, and they'll never change their ways until we take away their money, particularly that pile of passive money they get from every cable TV subscriber in America. Seriously, $2 a month per account adds up -- and starving the beast of that $2 a month per account will also add up. Yeah, we finally cut the cord last year, but not everyone will do that, particularly if they like their HGTV and their ESPN and their Comedy Central. We've got the power, so let's use it. (And if anyone bellows TEH FREE SPEECHEZ!!!! at you over this, kindly direct them to the "$2 a month per account" phrase above.)

Sum of Us helps you tell big corporations like Starbucks, Target, and Coca-Cola to stop funding police foundations. Why? Isn't that, like, civic duty or something? Except that police foundations usually get the military weapons and surveillance tech for police departments, which they use to attack protestors and single out folks of color. So it's the opposite of civic duty, actually. And these corporations are trying to appear "woke"! Why, it's enough to make you suspicious of corporate PR! But we've got the Big Stick of Bad PR ourselves, plus the power to stop patronizing these establishments, which even in our monopolistic era ain't as hard as they'd like you to think. So let's do that.

Fight for the Future helps you tell Disney to stop using facial recognition software at their theme parks. Yeah, they say they've started "testing" that software at their Magic Kingdoms, but how much more testing do we need to do? We already know that facial recognition software not only intrudes on our privacy but can't tell Black folks apart any better than your Tea Party uncle can, plus it creates another pile of data most corporations have already proven they can't (or won't!) secure, so hackers can steal it. So it's evil and it's useless -- and useless in a way that makes it more evil. Surely Disney World has more to offer the world than that! And the Big Stick of Bad PR may help them remember that, so let's wield it.

Penn PIRG helps you tell big airline corporations to refund good Americans for all those plane tickets they cancelled in 2020. Too many Americans got vouchers, not refunds, and those vouchers have expiration dates, but the pandemic's still going on, so why should they be punished for continuing to make the right choice? Too often, in this sick, immoral, and decadent civilization, we punish people for doing the right thing and reward them for doing the wrong thing; how about we stop doing that in this instance? If it seems like it might not make that much of a difference to our posterity, rest assured that every time we reward the righteous and punish evil, we make a difference to our posterity. I've seen it happen enough times to know it's worth doing, but every day we must make an example of our good works -- and our good hearts! -- to others. It sure is better than cynicism, I tell you what.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell the American Dental Association to stop donating to Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ). They donate to him, I presume, because he's a dentist! Not just any dentist, either, but a member of the Arizona Dental Association's Hall of Fame! No, really, I'm not kidding. Sadly, Rep. Gosar has made a name for himself for other reasons -- for being one of the ringleaders of the Congressional effort to overturn the 2020 Presidential election (including the attempted coup of January 6!), and for making nice with white supremacists at the America First PAC meeting the next month. Dentistry Hall of Fame or no, this is one character you don't want soiling your good name -- a fact six of his nine siblings have taken to heart by endorsing his opponent in his 2018 and 2020 House races! If they can do it, surely the ADA can, too.

UPDATE. I am sorry to say the White House phone number is not working today; try the White House's contact link instead.

ANOTHER UPDATE. I wish I'd remembered that Fox News actually charges around $2/month in carrier fees to the big cable corporations, not 75¢/month, as it was many years ago; I've corrected the error above.

Around the table: starring our favorite slice of the electorate, the Batshit Insane 25%!

At least Biden Administration Press Secretary Jen Psaki doesn't suffer fools like Newsmax's John Gizzi gladly. Mr. Gizzi says a "private memo" found $1 trillion more spending in the Biden infrastructure plan than the Biden Administration reported, but one request for clarification from Ms. Psaki apparently provoked this slab of word salad: "there’s things there that somebody went through it or is claiming to have gone through it and added it up and came up with $1 trillion more than the president listed." If reporters can barely speak, how can they speak truth to power?

Reuters/Ipsos poll finds more than half of Republicans believe all that rubbish about the 2020 election being "stolen" or the January 6 rioters being liberal protestors "trying to make Trump look bad" instead of the right-wingers you could have found on social media. A little over half of Republicans is pretty close to a quarter of the electorate, which (like many other polling factoids about people believing absurd crap) maps pretty well onto my belief that a quarter of the electorate is batshit insane. I first started to think that after seeing George W. Bush's approvals bottom out at 25%. How innocent those times were.

Big restaurant corporations, including Denny's and McDonald's, publicly oppose a $15/hour minimum wage, but privately tell their investors it won't be "bad for business" at all. McDonald's, at least, has backed off supporting big corporate lobbies' attempts to kill the $15/hour minimum wage proposal, but still, your friends and neighbors might not have heard, so stick a pin in this information next time someone tells you the $15/hour minimum wage is "bad for business." Not everyone you meet is a troll, after all -- you might actually win some converts.

As we contemplate the possibility that your "smart" house might be sharing all kinds of data about your movements and habits with law enforcement, we should note, again, that our FCC passed pretty solid data privacy rules in 2016 -- but the Republican Congress under Donald Trump couldn't nullify them fast enough. We should also note that instead of putting your thermostat on your wi-fi so you can more easily read the outside temperature, maybe you can buy a thermometer and put it outside. You'll have to go outside to read it, but the exercise will do you good.

Apparently a Trump campaign contribution website made it so folks didn't realize they were making weekly donations to Mr. Trump instead of the one-time donations they clearly intended to make. But you'll be pleased to know that too many of his bilked supporters are already making excuses for the Big Man. They say that wasn't Trump, that was WinRed; how does the Smartest Man on Earth fall in with so many swindlers? It makes you think he's not really a great man or something. But for the Batshit Insane 25%, no excuse is too absurd, as long as it keeps the rage gland pumping.

Finally, of course I don't feel sorry for all those Trump Administration workers who can't get work because the job market is, ah, challenging for those folks who worked for the guy who tried to overturn the election -- I mean, if you do evil, you should expect to be ostracized by civilized people! I'll admit, however, that I do feel worse for the lower-profile folks (even former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who might want to go get another degree) than I do for all the far more famous Trumpholes who will make millions in unearned money spewing filth on Fox and Newsmax and OANN over the next few years. See? I do so have a heart.

Action: concerning the attempted coup, MyPillow products, Amazon surveillance, and postal banking.

Despite the compelling case for conviction of Donald Trump our House has made all week, we have every reason to believe our Senators will fail to do their duty and convict our former President. At least, that's the way to bet -- though I'm starting to suspect that the way to bet is actually the opposite of how everyone else bets! In any case, Amnesty International helps you tell Acting Attorney General Wilkinson to investigate the events of January 6. If that seems like an "obsession" to you, quietly navigate away from this page, and go read something on Newsmax or OANN or whatever diddles your rage gland. I'm serious. If Donald Trump's months-long attempt to overturn the 2020 election doesn't obsess you, there's something deeply wrong with you as a citizen. And I suspect a DOJ investigation would turn up more useful information than even the House's impeachment case has done. After all, the House put its case together rather quickly, and I suspect we can learn a lot more by completing a more thorough investigation.

In a peripherally-related note, MoveOn helps you tell big warehouse corporation Costco to get MyPillow products out of its stores. MyPillow's CEO, after all, is Mike Lindell, who has trafficked in absurd "election fraud" theories and tried to goad Donald Trump into declaring martial law so he could overturn the election he lost by seven million votes, the election our cybersecurity chief said was the most secure in American history when he had every motivation to say the opposite. No, Mike Lindell does not have a "First Amendment right" to have his products at Costco locations. Our First Amendment protects him from going to jail merely for his bloviating (though for incitement to violence or terrorist threats, not so much). Our First Amendment does not grant a "right" to be free from the consequences of his actions. And to those who would be "wary" at the "chilling" effect of a Costco ban: you can navigate the fuck away from this page, too. You should be more scared to live in a society where no one pays for the evil they've done.

Meanwhile, Amazon is apparently installing surveillance cameras on their delivery vehicles, ostensibly to watch the drivers, I suppose, but how much surveillance does a corporation need to do on its employees? You don't need a proctoscope to know when a driver's slacking. And I'm old enough to remember when boosting workers' morale solved most workplace problems, but when you treat your workers as moneyjars, I guess morale matters little. And naturally, Amazon's surveillance won't just be on the drivers, it'll be on everything around them, and their recent history suggests they'd just be happy to share whatever their watchful eyes find with police, warrant or not. And if you're tempted to say if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear, consider that an Amazon surveillance camera is also just another thing crooks can hack; how many strangers do you want observing your habits? Hence Fight for the Future helps you tell Amazon to stop making their delivery vehicles into Big Brother.

Finally, as part of our efforts to save our Post Office, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Postal Banking Act (no bill number at this writing), which would allow our U.S. Postal Service to offer basic banking services to good Americans. What's that I hear? Why don't they just go to the bank? Because banks don't like to serve a lot of urban and rural poor areas of America, that's why, which leaves a lot of good Americans with very few options -- like payday lenders! Should anyone have to put up with the choice of 300% death spiral loans or no loans just because they live where banks don't want to go? The Postal Banking Act (which various Congressfolk have introduced in previous Congresses) would offer savings and checking accounts, but would also offer small loans, which might well make payday lenders completely unnecessary. And our Postal Service used to offer these services until the late '60s, and there's no good reason they can't again.

Action: concerning the Electoral College, "stalkerware," and nuclear waste storage.

Feel like abolishing the Electoral College? I bet you do! And not just because two of the last five Presidential election winners actually lost the popular vote, but because, by the evidence, the Electoral College has plainly failed, twice in the last two decades, to do what our Founders intended -- to keep someone completely unfit for office out of office. You'll no doubt hear from folks who say they think the states should have more of a say in politics, but I say you got two Senators. Wyoming gets two Senators, and California gets two Senators, though California has 50 times the population, so why isn't that enough? And you've no doubt heard of all the machinations that could happen if someone doesn't feel like leaving office -- that they could, for example, get sympathetic legislatures to simply declare the results invalid and appoint their own electors, for example. I'll admit this is feeling a lot less like a contested election than it did six months ago, or even one month ago, but let's make this right anyway. Change.org helps you tell Congress to abolish the Electoral College.

Meanwhile, with so much schooling now taking place remotely, thanks to this pandemic and our government's incompetence in handling it, a lot of schools have hastily resorted to test-taking apps that, well, have a lot of problems, like flagging kids for cheating if they look around or talk to themselves, or if the app's facial recognition software misidentifies them. And these apps are surprisingly hungry for your private information -- they want access to all data on your computer and listen in on all your communications. No wonder they call it "stalkerware"! And, hate to pile on, but who gets the shaft from facial recognition software the most? Folks of color, that's who! Yeah, we all know it's tough enough to teach 30 kids in the same room with you, let alone 30 kids from all over town at the same time, but "first, do no harm" ain't just for the Hippocratic Oath, and you can't help but wonder which app developing corporations saw a way into hoovering up all kinds of personal data you wouldn't otherwise let them touch. Hence Fight for the Future helps you tell schools and colleges to ban "stalkerware."

Finally, our Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or NRC) wants to "temporarily" dump radioactive nuclear waste in West Texas, a plan so unpopular that even Texas's far-right Governor opposes it. Possibly he just wants it dumped in some blue state's backyard, but dumping ain't even half the problem -- transporting it from all over the country could expose virtually everyone who lives near ports and train tracks, trains and ships being susceptible to leaks, accidents, and sabotage. Not to pile on, but the area our NRC wants to use is a heavily-Latino neighborhood, and don't folks of color get the shaft enough already? Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our NRC to scuttle its proposal to allow "temporary" nuclear waste storage in West Texas. "Temporary" nuclear waste storage, by the way, is already illegal; chances are this scheme, if our NRC goes through with it, will be struck down in court, but you might not find much comfort in that if you've already had your water table poisoned by an accident in the meantime.

Action: concerning good House bills, working families, and spy drones.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Our Senators have all kinds of dumb ideas about what's important to good Americans, so we've got to be there to remind them of what's really important to us. And we keep reminding them until they get it. Even if it takes a very, very long time.

Meanwhile, our Department of Labor, apparently confused about its mission and legal mandate, plans to let corporations classify more of their workers as "independent contractors," and you know what that means: it means they won't have to pay minimum wage, obey child labor laws, or pay overtime when workers work more than 40 hours in a week. They always say they do it for "jobs," or for the cleaning worker in Detroit or the Grubhub driver in Pittsburgh or home health aide in Columbus, but that's a load of rubbish: they always do it for their rich cronies who whine about having to pay people in more than dung pellets. And, you know, the whole purpose of overtime is to stop corporations from trying to get by on too few workers (who are no doubt overworked!), so certainly we shouldn't give corporations yet another way out of their responsibility to their workers and to the American people. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Labor to scuttle its own proposal that would injure working families further.

Finally, Amazon clearly hasn't had enough of spying on you -- Alexa listens to your private conversations, and Ring enables bad police work, but now Amazon wants to foist upon us the Ring Always Home Cam, a drone that not only flies around your house but spies around your house. Think there might be some domestic abusers who'd use that on their partners? Or homeowners who'd use it on their AirBnB patrons? At this point we're far past if-you've-done-nothing-wrong-you-have-nothing-to-fear. And of course Amazon won't rule out letting the police capture all that drone video; you'd like to think they'd have to get a warrant first, but as you know our politicians haven't been real steadfast about our Fourth Amendment lately. Luckily Amazon has to get permission from our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to sell the drone, and they might find that difficult, since the drone doesn't satisfy FCC privacy protections as mandated by law. Hence Fight for the Future helps you tell our FCC to reject Amazon's proposed sale of its flying spy drones.

Action: concerning good House bills, bad methane regulations, and bad corporate acquisitions.

Happy Tuesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Do I "keep saying the same thing"? Yes, I do, if what I keep saying is the right thing. Let our Senators listen to anyone but their big donors for once, and then I'll count the colors in my garden. Until then, it's hammertime.

Meanwhile, our Administration has formally weakened methane emission regulations, by repealing requirements that oil and gas corporations install the technology that would detect and repair methane leaks. Ugh, one more time: methane packs a much bigger climate-change punch than even coal emissions, leaked methane is a waste of usable energy, and leaked methane also deprives the taxpayer of royalties if said leaking occurs on public lands. But what's all that pollution and waste and lost revenue next to gas drilling corporation executives being able to gild the plumbing on their 19th vacation homes? Seriously, that's all our Administration's new rule does: hand out welfare to corporations and rich people. Like everything else they do! Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Senators to block this Administration's new methane emissions rule. Congress would have to accomplish this by passing a "resolution of disapproval," and you may be tempted to wait until a new President and a new Senate come into office, but I wouldn't count on that, and anyway, our duty is always to do the right thing right now.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to block the proposed sale of DNA-collecting corporation Ancestry to big private equity corporation Blackstone, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Hopefully I've identified the problem with the proposed sale by identifying what each of these corporations does -- it's bad enough that big corporations get their grubby hands so deep in your investments, so you certainly would not want their grubby hands in your private information, and your DNA is as private as it gets. And I do not accept the notion that "you give your DNA to someone to help figure out where you came from and you take your chances." Why must it be like that? Because the internet's a big place? Because the "free" market is sacred? I'm so old-fashioned I only think doing what's right is sacred, and letting big corporations buy your DNA info is wrong. And I've never believed the internet is "too big to civilize," no matter how much Our Glorious Elites want you to believe it. And I always choose civilization over chaos.

Action: concerning financial predators, your private data, and pot legalization.

As states move to cap payday loan rates, yet another "acting" head of an Administration bureau has come up with a scheme to circumvent such caps: it would turn a blind eye to payday lenders as they launder loans through big banks. Such cleverness! Unless you think, as I do, that it's only clever if it does our civilization good. Releasing payday lenders from regulatory "burdens" so they can continue to gouge working Americans with 300% loans ain't good, particularly as tens of millions of Americans still can't regain the jobs they lost due to the pandemic. It's not like payday lenders can't make money at levels like 36% annually -- and frankly I'd set such caps a lot lower than that! -- but our Administration seriously believes that any regulation that actually helps Americans is a profound evil, because only money-making bosses matter. Too harsh? The truth is always harsh, but never too harsh, if you're a grown-up. Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to reject its proposal to let payday lenders circumvent strong protections.

Meanwhile, big private equity corporation Blackstone wants to buy Ancestry, one of the corporations that'll read your DNA to determine your genealogical heritage. And you already see the problem with that, right? It's bad enough that one corporation has all that data and our government can't or won't make laws protecting it from abuse or theft, but having a bankster buy up all that data is like another whole suitcase full of bad. And what would prevent a hedge fund from selling your data to the highest bidder? Certainly not their ethics or morals! I mean, the individuals who run Blackstone will pretend to be shocked, shocked! that anyone would ever think such a thing of them, but they're not stupid. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk and federal regulators to block the proposed Blackstone acquisition of Ancestry. Maybe someone should tell our President that Blackstone's CEO said he was stupid! Of course I don't know if he did -- Blackstone's executives and I don't exactly move in the same circles -- but it's not exactly unlikely, is it? And it seems to get results.

Finally, House Democratic leadership may hold a vote on H.R. 3884, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, later on this month, so Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to legalize pot and start to repair the damage caused by prohibition by passing the MORE Act. Yeah, I used to think legalizing marijuana was a bridge too far -- though I've always felt putting it on Schedule I of the Drug Enforcement Act was ridiculous, since it's nowhere near as dangerous as drugs like heroin -- but then a few states did it on their own, and they didn't exactly fall apart, did they? No, they did not. The MORE Act would remove pot from Drug Enforcement Act scheduling entirely, and would invest more money into rebuilding the communities that have been ravaged by "war on drugs" policing. "Ravaged" isn't too strong a word, not when you have it from Richard Nixon's own counsel, John Ehrlichman, that the "war on drugs" was never really about drugs, but about oppressing anti-war and black protestors without appearing to violate their rights. And that's a legacy we ought to let go.

Action: concerning your right to be free from government spying, corporate spying, and secret police.

Our President has deployed unnamed and unmarked federal officers to certain American cities in order to "contain" "violence" that has been over for weeks and at least partly the work of obvious agents provocateurs -- and the officers sent to "contain" the violence have, of course, restarted the violence. Oh, and they abduct people off the streets and detain them without charge. Pretty un-American, eh? But we are not powerless in these times, though our President would like us to feel that way, hence today we get on the phone with our Reps and Senators and tell them we support three amendments to various appropriations bills. One would make anyone carrying out a "law enforcement action" funded by the Department of Defense to identify themselves and their agency. Another would zero out Commerce/State/Justice funding for any more "responses" to "looting" or "rioting" without a written request from the state or locality, plus it'd also force identification of any officers sent for that purpose. And a third would zero out DHS funding for the above-described "responses." So use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone), and good hunting.

In a completely related note, Stop the Patriot Act helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the notorious USA PATRIOT Act that has dramatically expanded surveillance on American citizens. Yeah, our President's deployment of federal officers who act like they're in a dictatorship and not America does remind us that concentrated spying power is noxious anywhere, especially in our government. As it happens, today marks the four-month anniversary of the expiration of the bill's surveillance powers -- after our President threatened to veto it, no less, possibly because of his belief that our government used it to spy on him and/or his compadres -- and our NSA has maintained for years that it doesn't actually need all the spying powers the PATRIOT Act gives it. Which would make sense, since the more information you have, the more you have to sift through. You'd still like to see our government indulge in less adventurism abroad, but let's prevent our government from indulging in adventurism at home.

Finally, if you've used services like Ancestry and 23 and Me to discover more about your family heritage -- and, hey, I've been tempted myself! -- you may not know that these services can buy, sell, and trade the DNA info you give them without your knowing or your consent. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell our government to enact the most vigorous DNA privacy standards possible. These would include: requiring corporations to get explicit permission from customers before sharing any DNA info with other corporations; securing DNA data from unauthorized access (i.e., hackers); prohibiting the use of DNA data for insurance underwriting purposes; and preventing corporations from charging customers for any of these things, since that, you know, prevents some folks from guarding their personal info, and everyone should be able to do that. Personal to those who would say well just don't use the service then: why must a useful service come with unacceptable risks? Because the "free market" says so? It ain't a "free" market unless we're all free.

Action: concerning good House bills, war with Iran, and internet privacy.

Happy Monday, good citizens! It's time to call your Senators and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). Our House of Representatives has assembled a good record of passing legislation that protects voting rights, health care, worker wages, consumer protection, and real internet freedom, and our Senate has done bupkus about all of that. And they won't do anything until they hear from us, in numbers, again and again and again.

Meanwhile, last month our Senate passed S.J.Res. 68, which would prevent our President from waging war on Iran without Congressional approval, and now the House must pass the bill, so we can send it to our President. He'll veto it, but let's make him veto some legislation, particularly legislation that would make him adhere to our Constitution. I said that the House might pass this bill with a quickness, but clearly I forgot that our Congressfolk hate taking up foreign policy-related legislation that might "hamstring" the President in foreign policy, but how many times must I tell these pimps!. Delegating war-making powers to Congress, not our President, is a feature of our Constitution, not a bug! Our Constitution only gives the President the authority to figure out how to win wars Congress has already declared, not the authority to go off all half-cocked. Hence Peace Action West helps you tell your House Reps to restrain our rogue President from unilaterally starting a war with Iran by passing S.J.Res. 68.

Finally, Clearview AI aims to scrape your photos off your Facebook page so it can create the world's biggest facial recognition database -- which should trouble you, since facial recognition a) generally oppresses activists more than it catches actual criminals and b) can't hardly tell black folks apart and it's almost like that's the idea. Besides, they're your photos! You put them on the internet, but that doesn't mean you give permission for big corporations to make your life hell! Besides, Facebook does have privacy settings, the existence of which signal your own intent as to how you want folks to use your photos, and also signal Facebook's duty in protecting them from folks you don't want to see them. Commonsensical, right? You'll be gratified to learn that Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn have all threatened legal action against Clearview for scraping photos from their sites -- but not Facebook, apparently. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to stop Clearview AI from harvesting your private photos for their nefarious ends.

Around the table: more little victories for good Americans, and more shaking my damn head at the bad ones.

11th Circuit Court of Appeals strikes down Florida law preventing felons from voting until they had paid their court-related fines. If you're tempted to say but they should complete their sentence before they get to vote, and the fine is part of their sentence, just know that I'm going to respond that they never should have lost their right to vote in the first place. Rights are rights; they're not privileges, and they don't only belong to people we like. (And yes, the "wealth" of ex-felons is, in fact, pertinent to the case and "exogenous" to their punishment, even when a fine is not precisely exogenous to their punishment.)

The New York Times looks over our President's recent pardons, and sees a pattern -- they all have "connections" to him. As in, "all 11 recipients had an inside connection or were promoted on Fox News," which almost does sound like they're repeating themselves a bit. Of course they're playing right into his hands by suggesting that "his own scalding encounters with investigations since taking office" (like they weren't deserved or something!) plays a role in his "mercy." Also, I wanted the First STEP Act passed, too, but that was a watered-down version of a watered-down version of what I really wanted, and I suspect a lot of folks that bill has left behind -- who are not lucky enough to get on Fox News or have connections within professional conservative circles -- feel the same.

From the "Wow, They're Actually Trying This?" file: surveillance corporation Clearview AI's CEO claims that his attempts to spy on people are protected by the First Amendment. Apparently, scraping someone's private data from the internet and then selling it to someone else is a speech act. But plenty of law already exists (see the fourth- and third-to-last paragraphs at the link above) to suggest that just because you "say" something, you don't automatically get our First Amendment's protections. You know, if common sense didn't already tell you that.

When I read that "(i)f you're having a hard time falling asleep, that sleep tracker on your wrist might be to blame," the first thing I think is I can totally relate! Having all that data was cool at first -- I never assumed there was an absolute one-to-one relationship between the data and the truth, but the worst thing you can do is try to measure up to previous days, wonder what on Earth you did wrong since you didn't have any caffeine after noon, and let that all build up. I accidentally wore my fitness tracker into the shower once, took it off before it suffered any damage, and then said (suddenly, or so it seemed to me at the time) why put it back on? I haven't looked back -- and I have never again wondered whether the amount of deep sleep I got last night fit snugly into the 12-18% range.

Finally, you all knew William Barr wasn't really going to quit over our President's twitterfarting making it "impossible" to do his job, right? Remember what I said at the beginning of this Administration: when Republicans fight each other in public, they're playing us, trying to lull us into a false sense of security about their unity. It's drama, and it's not even good drama. I suppose we can't discount the possibility that Mr. Barr was actually saying that his job is to protect the President from the consequences of his own actions.

Action: concerning surprise medical bills, data privacy, and paid family leave.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation outlawing surprise medical bills. Plenty of folks get them, and they don't get them because "they don't take care of themselves" or because "they don't read the fine print" or because they've screwed up in some other way; they get them because our privatized health insurance system loves exploiting holes in provider networks to deprive you of money. Do folks "deserve" to get billed in the thousands of dollars because their surgeon was in-network but his anesthesiologist wasn't? Or because their hospitals subcontract to out-of-network air ambulance providers? Or because they get life-or-death service (please attend closely the words "life-or-death") at an out-of-network hospital? No, they do not. That is not the "free" market at work, nor is it the work of "makers" as opposed to "takers" and "looters" -- I'm fairly confident, in fact, that were Zombie Ayn Rand to visit us today, she would tell us that the corporations that issue these surprise medical bills are the "looters." If not the "takers"!

Meanwhile, you won't be surprised to learn that our government doesn't regulate location tracking very well, to the point where Google still tracks the location of people who've turned off all the location tracking functions on their phones and computers, so Daily Kos helps you tell our Congressfolk to protect our digital private data a whole lot better than they've been doing. Remember: Congressfolk have done little about this issue not because it's a "hard issue to understand." "Protect my privacy" ain't that damn deep -- it only becomes "deep" when Congressfolk take campaign money from corporations that want to sell your private data, and it only becomes "deep" when law enforcement wants to get location data without going through the trouble of getting a warrant for the information. Certainly don't believe that corporations know this issue better than politicians, because that's a little like saying we should let the fox, not the farmer, run the henhouse.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass meaningful paid family leave legislation, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. By "meaningful legislation" we most certainly do not mean "legislation that would steal from your future Social Security benefits to pay for family medical leave now," like right-wingers would have us do. No, meaningful paid family leave legislation would more closely resemble H.R. 1185/S. 463, the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (or FAMILY) Act. The FAMILY Act would create a national paid family leave program, and when your Tea Party uncle asks HOW WILLZ YOU PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ HA HA HA SNORT STUPIDZ LIBRULZ!!!!!, you can respond that the FAMILY Act would pay for itself with an 0.4% payroll tax -- that's four-tenths of one percent, not "four percent" or "40 percent," "liberal" media! -- and the employer would pay half, meaning someone making $50,000 annually would pay $8.33 monthly. That's not even five cups of coffee at Wawa monthly, and for peace of mind? What an easy choice.

Action: concerning banksters, pollution, and privacy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2155, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. You may well be saying to yourself, self, I'd very much like to stop Wall Street looting, too, but would this bill really do that? The answer is yes, S. 2155 would basically take all the joy banksters feel when they suck all the assets out of a corporation -- it would impose a 100 percent tax on all the fees private equity firms impose on a corporation for two years after they buy it, it would make those firms actually take on more of the debt they've assumed rather than simply transfer it back to the corporation they've bought, it would give workers more of a chance to recover what they've lost after their employer goes bankrupt, and it would make private equity firms' doings more transparent. These firms don't just kill big chain stores like Sears and Payless -- they kill local newspapers all over America, too (the Denver Post being the most famous example). And S. 2155 will help us stop them.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 707, 708, and 709 would give the state Attorney General "concurrent jurisdiction" over certain clean air and clean water laws in the state, and thus give our AG the power to initiate investigations into these matters. Given that our Attorney General is supposed to, you know, enforce the law on behalf of the people of the Commonwealth, you would think our AG would be able to do that on his own, but no -- current law mandates that our AG must first get a referral from the state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) or a local district attorney. I have to admit I'm at a loss to explain why the state of Pennsylvania does it that way -- it sounds a lot like a decades-old turf battle won in favor of someone who may not even be alive now, frankly. But we don't need to put up with inter-bureaucratic turf battles, because our Attorney General answers to us. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state Senators to help our state government protect us from pollution by passing SB 707, 708, and 709.

Finally, in the wake of yet another data breach exposing the private data of over 100 million good Americans, Fight for Privacy helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass strong legislation that protects the privacy of good Americans' online information. There's no use saying if you still want privacy, don't put your information online, because putting your information online is basically necessary now, unless you pay for everything with cash and never take out a loan. I will say I continue to be disappointed with our Congressfolk's apparent inability to process the fact that we should be able to opt in to corporate attempts to sell our data to third parties. It wouldn't "break the internet" (as Sen. Toomey infamously put it in 2011), and it wouldn't even be very hard to do -- and it would protect a lot more people from a big bank that somehow decides to put all of its sensitive information on a freaking Amazon cloud server. When will folks realize that "cloud computing" doesn't actually make our lives better? It only makes it easier for big corporations to make big money.

Action: concerning banksters, immigration, and privacy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would impose a small financial transaction tax on big Wall Street banksters, then Americans for Tax Fairness would still help you do that. The bills in question are H.R. 1516/S. 647, the Wall Street Tax Act, which would impose a 0.1% tax on financial transactions including stock and derivative trades, and H.R. 2923/S. 1587, the Inclusive Prosperity Act, which would impose a range of taxes (from 0.005% to 0.5%) on same; the highest tax imposed here would be $5 per $1,000 in trades. Folks on the right are calling this a "tax on my 401(k)," as if all financial speculation winds up in pension funds, and as if $5 per $1,000 is onerous -- and as if reducing the number of trades banksters make, which these bills would do, wouldn't actually stabilize markets. Most people understand all of this intuitively -- unless, of course, their salary depends on them not understanding it. But if we get it, we must act.

Meanwhile, I have two private prison-related action alerts for you: in one, Color of Change (among others) helps you tell your Congressfolk to close a loophole that allows private prison corporations to avoid taxes, and in the other, Moms Rising helps you tell two big banking corporations to pull their investments from private prison corporations. Both of these are also concentration camp-related, of course, since this Administration thinks detaining immigrants in inhumane conditions and funneling taxpayer money to corporate cronies is a two-fer. Even the Obama Administration had started getting private prisons out of the immigrant detainment business; the least we can do is hold the folks who work for us (i.e., our government) accountable to us. And certainly private prison corporations deserve no special treatment from our tax code; at least S. 1827, the Ending Tax Breaks for Private Prisons Act, would stop private prison corporations from calling themselves "Real Estate Investment Trusts."

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell three big airline corporations (JetBlue, Delta, and American) to stop using facial scanning technology on their customers. Why? Well, we'll begin with the airlines' explanation: it makes things faster! After all, presenting your boarding pass or your passport (which biometric screening would replace) takes several seconds, and Delta claims that using biometric screening saves a whole nine minutes per flight. Would you want to take "I saved nine minutes per flight" to the Pearly Gates? I didn't think so -- it would display a distinct lack of imagination. The downside, meanwhile, is that we don't have a whole lot of law covering facial scanning, so who knows how long the airlines hold on to the information or which government agency they give it to without a warrant? Yeah, I know the airlines say they don't store the info, but you don't trust corporations more than you trust your government, do you? Of course you don't. So let's not trade liberty for convenience.

Action: concerning the minimum wage, internet privacy, and the DREAM Act.

With a new Democratic House taking power, the Economic Policy Institute (among other groups) help you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Raise the Wage Act. (I have no bill numbers for its current iteration at this writing.) Raising the minimum wage to $15/hour would represent a vast change in working families' fortunes -- the current minimum wage of $7.25/hour actually represents a pay cut from the late 1960s, when the $2/hour minimum wage had over $10/hour in contemporary purchasing power -- and no, it wouldn't kill jobs, not just because minimum wage jobs are often the kind you can't kill, but because "the minimum wage vs. jobs" is the wrong focus. A better focus would be "absurd CEO salaries vs. jobs," since those salaries are the real job-killer in America. The Senate won't pass it, etc., but embarrassing them isn't exactly a vain pursuit, particularly if it instructs future Senates about the people's will.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that the big telecom corporations have been selling your location data to other corporations -- some of which will sell that data to just anybody, including bounty hunters. Thing is, your contract with your cellphone provider may prohibit data sales to "disreputable" folks or corporations, and even the big telecoms admit that they sell too much data to too many unsavory actors! Well, they said that out of fear that our government would regulate them -- a vain fear, since our government repealed FCC privacy regulations last year! -- but since the abuse is still happening, Free Press helps you tell our FCC to stop corporate abuse of our private data. Please do not be the fool who says well just stop using a cellphone then! Everyone uses a cellphone now, and everyone deserves privacy -- I mean, Chief Justice Roberts understands this, and crafts excellent jurisprudence based on that understanding.

Finally, you no doubt recall that our President tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) program last year, and though various federal courts have blocked his efforts, now's as good a time as any to let People for the American Way help you tell Congress to pass a DREAM Act, so that immigrants brought here as children can contribute to America's heritage and one day gain citizenship. Sending immigrants back to nations they don't recognize as home, when they literally had no say in emigrating to America, should strike you as the height of cruelty, but of course our Administration cares about nothing but diddling the rage glands of its votaries, and thus still struts around demanding a brand new border wall before our government starts inspecting food and airplanes again. So when I said "now's as good a time as any" just now, perhaps I was being a bit glib -- now's a damn good time to change the conversation about immigration, even if our President doesn't want to.

Action: concerning health care, redistricting, and surveillance.

Sen. Warren (D-MA) has introduced a bill called the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act (Congress.gov has no bill number as of this writing), which would allow our government to manufacture generic versions of any patented drug. If you call that "socialism," please consider that actual socialism would more likely entail our government manufacturing all the drugs, but Ms. Warren's bill would only allow federal manufacture of generics under certain circumstances, such as absurdly high prices, lack of competition, or shortages, and none of these circumstances are shining examples of free market efficiency, are they? People want our government to protect us from the things that hurt and kill us, and the best our opponents can do is squeal SOSHULIZMZ!!!!! whenever we propose making our government do just that? Thus we should call our Reps and Senators and tell them to support better drug policy by passing the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Fair Districts PA helps you tell your state Assemblyfolk to reform the rules by which they consider legislation. We know these rules need reform, because House state Government Committee Chair Daryl Metcalfe (E-12) seemed to spend the entire spring gutting actually-bipartisan redistricting reform bills in 2018 once they got to his committee -- why, one of those bills had the support of more than half of the House, meaning that, well, if it'd come to a vote, it would have passed! I know right-wingers think (and might even say, since these are interesting times!) that Committee heads should have the power to gut bills at will, because what do us little people know about governing? But if, like me, you think "little people" is a disgusting epithet, and if, like me, you think us "little people" actually do know a lot, you'll find arguments for reform more convincing.

Finally, Amazon aims to get a contract from our Pentagon to build a "weapon of unprecedented surveillance and power," called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure. (Yes, the acronym of that weapon's name is JEDI, which suggests that its namers have literally no idea what Jedis stood for in the Star Wars films.) JEDI would vastly increase our military's ability to share and sift through surveillance information, using "artificial intelligence," which doesn't impress you if you've found, as I have, that autocorrect incorrectly anticipates what you're about to type nearly 100% of the time. And if you're tempted to say if Amazon doesn't build it, someone else will, recall that Amazon has already collected so, so much data on Americans that it could quite easily correlate with DoD surveillance information. Luckily for us, Amazon employees seem to have some sway within their corporation, so Roots Action helps you tell Amazon employees to pressure their management to bow out of the JEDI bidding.

(Posting has been light for a while, and will remain light until the new year. The main reason for that? I'm putting together another Penny Rants volume for release in mid- to late February. I know what you're saying to yourself: self, didn't he just put out a second Penny Rants volume last month? Why, yes, yes I did -- and soon I'll put out a third one, covering the last two very, very interesting years. So be on the lookout for that, and in the meantime, continue to enjoy the holidays and have a safe and happy new year.)

Action: concerning privacy, clean water, and worker rights.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass real reforms defending consumer privacy from big tech corporations. Sadly, the reason we need legislation to accomplish this (and I really wish journalists would mention it a bit more!) is that Congress passed one of its notorious "resolutions of disapproval" repealing FCC privacy rules which would have (among other good works!) forced big corporations to allow consumers to opt in to letting corporations sell their data, rather than forcing consumers to opt out. But big tech corporations like Facebook have been earning themselves a lot of bad PR for their inability/unwillingness to protect their customers' private data (and for employing Nixonian tactics against their critics) -- and corporations like Facebook monopolize their fields, so our government has to step in and curb their power, whether they want to or not. Concentrated power: it's evil everywhere!

Meanwhile, as you may know, the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) proposed banning fracking in the basin of the Delaware River earlier this year, which is good, but also proposed letting corporations dump fracking wastewater in the Basin and draw Basin water out to frack with! Welcome to yet another King-Solomon-actually-splitting-the-baby-in-half "compromise"! I mean, the whole point of banning fracking is to keep pollution out of our water, so if you go ahead and allow fracking-based pollution in water nearly 15 million good Americans drink and wash with, you've kinda missed the point. Still, Pennsylvania Gov. Wolf has one of four votes on the DRBC, so Food and Water Watch helps you tell Gov. Wolf to support a fracking ban with considerably more teeth. Remember, folks: the money you make from polluting water quickly goes away, but clean water lasts forever -- if we maintain it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) not to repeal its "joint-employer standard," then the Economic Policy Institute still helps you do that. Big chain corporations have long claimed that their workers' "real" employer was the particular franchise where they worked; thus workers would have had to redress grievances over pay and scheduling and such with the franchise. Of course any fool can see that's absurd, since franchises obey (or cope with) orders from the top, so the NLRB created a joint-employer standard to help workers redress grievances with their real bosses. Now that Republicans dominate the board, they're trying to scuttle the standard. But don't believe the hype that TEH STANDURDZ HURTZ TEH SMALL BIZNIZZIZ!!!! Your local McDonald's ain't a "small business." Obviously.

Action: concerning data protection, corruption, and mergers.

Remember a year ago, when Equifax announced they'd been hacked, leaving the personal information of almost 150 Americans exposed? What do you suppose Congress has done about the matter since then? Go find an empty sheet of paper and hold it up, and you'll have your answer. Why, they even tried to cap class-action lawsuit awards to protect corporations like Equifax when they expose your data! But S. 2289, the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act, would help protect good Americans from these little Equifax moments, by regulating credit corporations' cybersecurity, mandating annual inspections thereof, and instituting fines for non-compliance. I'd prefer jail time for these clowns instead of fines, but S. 2289 represents a better impulse after data breaches than "let's ensure no corporations get hurt!" Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans' data by supporting S. 2289.

Meanwhile, S. 3357, the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act, would engineer a wide swatch of reforms to our political system; some of these include keeping politicians from going into lobbying after they leave office, keeping lobbyists out of our government, getting more transparency out of Congress and federal contractors, and ensuring that regulations prioritize benefits to the people over benefits to corporations. S. 3357 would also make administrative law judges competitive civil service jobs, just like they used to be before our President reclassified them so he could pack immigration courts with his cronies. These and other reforms in S. 3357 will go some way toward ensuring that our elected officials don't spend all day ignoring the popular will and collecting perks from their big corporate donors. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support public integrity by passing S. 3357.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our FCC to reject the proposed Sprint/T-Mobile merger, then Common Cause still helps you do that. Sprint and T-Mobile would like you to believe that they need to merge in order to better compete with AT&T and Verizon, but Jesus Mary and Joseph get bigger is not the solution to every problem. And that's not even to say these corporations haven't tried other things! But we know for certain that a bigger Sprint/T-Mobile corporation will not bequeath upon our civilization lower prices, more jobs, or better service. Why, gosh, I'm old enough to remember when economists said more competition resulted in lower prices, more jobs, and better service! I'm sure our corporate kingpins find all that "quaint," but they the only thing they're really good at is (everybody now) redistributing income upward from working people to themselves. And we deserve better than that.

Action: concerning government spying and carcinogens in food.

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

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

Action: violence against protestors, internet privacy, and forced arbitration.

The U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights helps you tell your Congressfolk to demand accountability for the Israeli slaughter of over 50 protestors in Gaza earlier this week. No use telling me that these protestors were "no angels," because civilized people don't shoot protestors or treat protestors as soldiers, period. And calling for "accountability" shouldn't send shivers through anyone's spine -- if these protestors truly provoked Israel, then Israel has nothing to worry about! But the government of Israel has, for too long, acted as if accountability is for other people, and our government has, for too long, enabled them. Folks who counter that we must "support Israel" at all costs clearly do not understand the true definition of "support" -- if you truly support Israel, you also stand up to Israel when it does wrong, just as you would to any of your family and friends. (And folks who counter with a sentence beginning with "well, what about" should be adults and learn how to concede points.)

Meanwhile, our Congress repealed FCC internet privacy protections last year with a "resolution of disapproval" -- and then Facebook got in a heapload of trouble for exposing its users' personal data to corporations such as Cambridge Analytica. Nobody could have predicted! So along comes S. 2639, the Customer Online Notification for Stopping Edge-Provider Network Transgressions Act (or CONSENT Act), which would require "edge-provider" corporations like Google and Facebook to get permission from customers to use, sell, or share their personal info. The FCC privacy rules covered internet service providing corporations rather than "edge providers," true, but it should be a no-brainer, at least, to do something about something that was just in the news. Which means what, class? That if Congress doesn't pass it, they have fewer than zero brains. Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect Americans' online privacy by passing S. 2639.

Finally, contractors have sued Amazon for sexual harassment, but guess what? Same as Gretchen Carlson did at Fox News, these contractors have forced arbitration clauses in their contracts. Ms. Carlson was savvy enough to tape her boss's harassment, but she would have had no recourse in court, because Fox also put a forced arbitration clause in her contract, which would have greatly impeded her chance of getting justice. (Ms. Carlson has since become a fierce opponent of forced arbitration; no use complaining that's only because it happened to her, like we're only supposed to learn from thought experiment and never from experience.) Hence Public Citizen helps you tell Amazon's Board of Directors to dump forced arbitration clauses from its employment contracts. You can remind Amazon that it prides itself on being a "progressive" workplace, so it shouldn't keep its workers from getting the justice they deserve in a court of law.

Action: concerning monopolies, credit, clean water, and fair redistricting.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Justice to reject the proposed AT&T/Time Warner merger, then CREDO still helps you do that. AT&T wouldn't be buying Time Warner's cable TV apparatus -- Charter bought that last year, after Comcast bid for it and then withdrew their bid under massive popular pressure. AT&T would be buying Time Warner's entertainment and news holdings, including CNN, HBO, and Warner Brothers, and while a pedant would tell us that AT&T's business is in delivering content and Time Warner's business is in producing content and therefore there's no monopoly possible, we of course know better, particularly if we recall that blocking such mergers if their "effect...may be substantially to lessen competition" has legal precedent in American law. We also know better, I'd hope, to think that an AT&T/Time Warner merger would "create jobs." Our opponents rarely say it anymore, which is an indication that most Americans do know better.

Meanwhile, CREDO also helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 1816, the Freedom from Equifax Exploitation Act, which would give consumers more tools to fight data breaches. The FREE Act (hey, at least it's not a completely tortured acronym) would require credit reporting corporations to provide credit freezes for free, would block corporations from selling your personal information when you have a freeze on your account, and would mandate an additional free credit check for those folks who used their annual free credit check before the Equifax breach. The bill would also refund folks who wound up paying for a credit freeze after the Equifax breach became known; a lot of people, I suspect, panicked and paid for credit freezes, which smells of the kind of corporate exploitation that too many folks call "the free market in action." But conservatives who extolled the virtues of the "free market" in the Reagan years didn't approve of such exploitation, and neither should we.

In other news, the Bureau of Land Management, scarcely two years after enacting regulations that protect clean water from hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a. "fracking") on public lands, now wants to repeal those rules, which, like, sigh. Fracking didn't suddenly become safe over the last two years; so what do you suppose happened? Oh, right -- we elected a President who literally doesn't care about anything but money. Oh, and we also elected a President who seeks to completely erase President Obama from American history by undoing all of his works, even those (like the BLM's fracking rules) that didn't go nearly as far as we wanted, but went further toward protecting us than before. But there's no reason for good Americans to be held hostage to President Trump's insatiable thirst for drama; hence Environmental Action helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to protect us from pollution by abandoning its effort to repeal the fracking regulations it passed in 2015.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislator to pass HB 722/SB 22, which would create an independent commission that would redraw legislative districts more fairly then self-interested legislators tend to do, then Fair Districts PA still helps you do that. HB 722/SB 22, as you recall, has actual bipartisan support in the state legislature, but the relevant committee heads are sitting on the bill and refusing to hold hearings on it, despite their popularity (and despite the feedback they're getting from their constituents). This is America, though, so they can be so ignorant of the popular will for only so long, and now wouldn't be a bad time to start pressuring our legislators again, if for no other reason than that the relevant committee heads can get pressured by their colleagues as well as their constituents. It's a shame it's come to that, but I'm not too proud to use the whatever levers of power are available to me as a citizen.

Around the table: featuring health care scare numbers and tax code silliness.

The quite estimable Harold Meyerson likes Sen. Sanders's Medicare-for-All bill because it doesn't try to do everything at once. He makes a compelling argument for extending Medicare to children and workers 49 and over first -- for example, will right-wingers be very successful calling health care for kids "socialism"? Still, as you know, I prefer opening with what I want and then negotiating -- though of course this bill is way less of a pre-emptive compromise than the Affordable Care Act was.

Republicans respond to the release of the Medicare-for-All bill by pretending it would require $32 trillion in new spending. Over 10 years, of course, though nobody ever says that. Problem with that is that we spent $3.4 trillion on health care spending just last year, which projects to $34 trillion over 10 years -- or, if you account for premiums going up, $49 trillion. So the answer to the question WHERE DOEZ HE COMEZ UP WITH TEH MONEYZ!!!!! is "out of the much larger pile of money we're already going to spend."

The incomparable Bruce Schneier informs us that the only solution to big data breaches like the recent Equifax breach is (drumroll, please) government regulation. The "free market," after all, won't fix it: "The companies that collect and sell our data don't need to keep it secure in order to maintain their market share. They don't have to answer to us, their products. They know it's more profitable to save money on security and weather the occasional bout of bad press after a data loss. Yes, we are the ones who suffer when criminals get our data, or when our private information is exposed to the public, but ultimately why should Equifax care?" Particularly when Target, Yahoo!, et al, haven't suffered in the long term. Regulate and punish them and they'll learn through their suffering.

Another day, another analysis (this one from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy) showing us that the Trump tax cut plan would benefit the rich more than working folks. And no it doesn't deliver them bigger cuts because "they make more money"! Just look at the frickin' charts! And it certainly doesn't matter that President Trump himself says his plan won't deliver huge tax cuts to the rich -- it only matters to him that his votaries believe that, and that they scream it in your face when you try to argue with them. (You're not trying to argue with Trump votaries, though, are you? Don't argue with them; just outvote them.)

Finally, former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore -- who may soon be the Republican nominee for the Senate seat until recently held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions -- said back in February that the 9.11 terrorist attack was "divine punishment." For failing to restrain financial predators with tough laws and regulations, no doubt! I kid, of course. But can Mr. Moore be the next Senator from Alabama? Of course he can! He's a Trumphole even if Mr. Trump is officially pulling for his opponent. It'd be nice if the Democratic candidate, former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones, runs on his successful prosecution of the last two perps of the 1963 Birmingham bombing that killed four black girls. The national party is no doubt giving him the exact opposite advice as we speak.

Action: health care, private data collection, and food labeling.

Today's a good day to call your Senators and tell them not to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. But you can also let Moms Rising help you write a letter-to-the-editor of your local newspaper opposing the Senate's health care "reform" bill, a.k.a. "wealth care," a.k.a. Trumpcare. And you may want to pay attention to what your local Trumpcare-bill supporting Senator is saying. Sen. Pat Toomey, for example, served up a bunch of word salad on Sunday's Face the Nation, trying to put lipstick on the pig of cutting our federal government's share of Medicaid expansion funding from 90% to 57% over seven years, pretending that states won't have to make hard choices affecting good Americans when that happens, saying the "tax credits" are better than those in the House bill like that even merits a participation trophy, and of course claiming that the "free marketplace" creates "wonderful innovation" all over America without giving even one clear example. I'm guessing your right-wing Senator is doing similarly desperate verbal gymnastics.

Meanwhile, AT&T -- the corporation that most happily handed over your call records to Tha Bush Mobb without a warrant -- now does the same for law enforcement organs all over America. And even if you're not an AT&T customer, you probably talk to AT&T customers, which means you're caught up in the dragnet, too. Of course AT&T is more famous these days for saying they won't "sell your personal information to anyone, for any purpose," but they're not selling it to law enforcement! I know getting warrants is quaint and all -- no, I will never let Alberto Gonzales live that down -- but the whole notion of convincing a judge you have a better-than-even chance of securing a conviction before you can investigate someone further protects us from abuse by the state. The Founders were quite keen on not getting abused by the state, you know. Hence Access Now helps you tell AT&T to stop selling our your privacy.

Finally, you won't be surprised to learn that the FDA has decided to delay rules that would revamp food labeling so that restaurants would have to give more nutritional information on the meals they serve, and food processing corporations would have to note such items as added sugar. Why? Oh, you know, BIG GUBMINT BAD!!!!! Or, as the FDA puts it, "(n)umerous stakeholders have informed us that they have significant concerns about their ability to update all their labels by the compliance date due to issues regarding (among other things) the need for upgrades to labeling software, getting nutrition information from suppliers, the number of products that would need new labels and a limited time for the reformulation of products." Gosh, where's their American can-do spirit? And what about the most important "stakeholder" of all, the American citizen, who generally wants more information about what they're eating? Moms Rising helps you tell the FDA to give us the food labeling we deserve.

Around the table: in which Republicans blink, for now.

Senate puts off health care "reform" bill vote until after the July 4 holiday. But don't get complacent: keep calling your Senators and communicating your will. And what's with President Trump's spokeshack saying that Mr. Trump hopes "Republicans would live up to their promise" of passing an Obamacare repeal? Like Mr. Trump never made that promise himself? Way to throw your party under the bus, Dear Leader!

So how was Mitch McConnell putting lipstick on that pig of a bill until yesterday? Why, by completely ignoring that part of the CBO report that says 22 million good Americans will lose their health insurance under the Senate bill, of course! He also pretended tax cuts going mainly to the rich were "middle-class" tax cuts, and he also "confused" rising premium prices and the rising growth rate of premium prices, so he could "accidentally" say the bill will do something about the former when it actually does something about the latter. Punchline? Obamacare has already reduced the growth rate in premiums -- and that's nothing to write home about.

Just to remind you that states aren't the only organs keeping massive amounts of data on good citizens, Cora Currier at The Intercept describes World-Check, a database owned by Thomson Reuters and used by world banks, which lists some two million folks whose alleged ties to crime or terrorism may be quite exaggerated. You might be able to get World-Check to change its data on you, eventually -- if you even know you're on it. And of course Thomson Reuters says it's a "risk assessment" tool, which is just doublespeak for blacklist.

Jeff Bryant at the OurFuture blog explains why "Charter Schools Do Bad Stuff." Long story short: "Because They Can." Long story somewhat longer: private agencies, not public ones, generally "monitor" charter school activities and "hold them accountable." It's bad enough we throw away the taxpayer money on private schools that we should be spending on public schools, but then our local governments don't even hold them accountable, instead outsourcing the job to a private entity. But really, what do charter schools have to fear from the people?

Finally, in a heroic effort, Tasneem Nashrulla at Buzzfeed tabulates recent softball questions Fox News has asked President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Ivanka Trump in the last 24 days. The list is either disheartening or hilarious depending on your level of spiritual advancement, but I'm only going to highlight one example: one talking head asks Mr. Trump if "Republican Senators are doing enough to have your back" on the health care bill, rather than the more pertinent question of whether they, or their President, have got the people's back. You see, for Fox News and for Donald Trump, democracy ain't about you, it's about them. May God have mercy on their immortal souls.

Action: internet privacy, and "bathroom bills."

So let's call President Trump today, between 9am and 4pm EST, at 1.202.456.1111, to tell him to veto S.J.Res. 34, the nefarious anti-internet privacy, pro-hacking bill. Mr. Trump doesn't give one rat's hind-quarter what you think, but duty is duty. You should also know that the whole get-regulatory-parity-with-the-FTC argument is utter rubbish: the FTC has literally no power to regulate the private data management policies of ISPs, and the FCC has literally no power to regulate the private data management policies of internet corporations that aren't ISPs! So the next step, for Republicans, is to remove the classification ISPs as common carriers, supposedly so the FTC can regulate privacy, but which act would just so happen to destroy the FCC's ability to regulate net neutrality! After which the internet will become a corporate junk news-ridden place just like cable news, which will help Republicans steal elections in perpetuity! So you see the stakes here, and you know your duty.

Meanwhile, North Carolina "repealed" its notorious HB 2 "bathroom bill" last week, in concert with that state's new Democratic Governor. I put "repealed" in ironic quotation marks because the new bill, HB 148 (or, as Equality NC has called it, "HB 2.0") reserves the right to regulate multi-occupancy bathrooms to the state government and prevents municipalities from passing (until late 2020) ordinances similar to the Charlotte ordinance to which HB 2 objected -- which means the reactionary state legislature could simply wait out the Democratic Governor and then start this BS all over again with the next guy, who'll undoubtedly make Pat McCrory look like a saint. Hence the ACLU helps you tell the NCAA to keep boycotting North Carolina. The NCAA, as you know, pulled championship game siting out of North Carolina because of HB 2, and said it wouldn't reconsider unless the legislature "fixed" the law by March 30; the NCAA is apparently mulling whether North Carolina's actions really "fix" the law as we speak, and nothing prevents us from giving them our counsel on the matter. Who's gonna stop us? Especially now that we know what gets reactionary legislatures to move? (Since justice for transgendered folks sure doesn't get them to move, amirite?)

Action: internet privacy, affordable prescription drugs, and paid sick leave.

You may know that S.J.Res. 34, which would nullify the FCC's recent internet privacy rules, passed the Senate last week. But that bill still has to clear the House, so now would be a very good time to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or at the bottom of your page, if you're viewing this on a smartphone) to call your Reps and tell them to reject S.J.Res. 34. After all, why should Congress make it harder for you to protect your privacy on the internet? Because that's what S.J.Res. 34 does -- it makes it easier for corporations to sell your private info to third-party data corporations, or to hijack your web searches and send you to some crony's page rather than the page you said you wanted to see, or insert ads into your web surfing based on that information. What part of that sounds like anything the American people would want? And personal to those corporate hacks claiming they want "parity" between FCC and FTC regulations: why not go after FTC rules, then?

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1249/S. 469, the the Affordable and Safe Prescription Drug Importation Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. (Alternately, you could mention it to your Reps while you have them on the phone about H.J.Res. 34, and then call your Senators about it.) The Affordable and Safe Prescription Drug Act would, as you may recall, let good Americans get cheaper prescription drugs from Canada. The reason they're cheaper, of course, is that Canadians get to bargain for cheaper drug prices as a unit, which we can't do. We have long been beset by bad news about skyrocketing drug prices -- even President Trump criticized Martin Shkreli for jacking up the price of life-saving medication Daraprim. Of course, Mr. Trump's since declared that Medicare, which literally can't negotiate drug prices, is the real "price-fixer"! But our job as citizens is to make the President irrelevant by expressing our will, so let's do that.

Finally, H.R. 1516/S. 636, the Healthy Families Act, would require employers to provide 56 hours of paid sick time to their employees (except for businesses with fewer than 15 employees, which would have to provide that amount of unpaid sick time). Of course, despite the parenthetical I just employed, right-wingers will use small businesses as a human shield when they attack the Healthy Families Act, and they'll wring their hands that some $20 million-a-year CEO at a corporation sitting on trillions of dollars in "trapped capital" will simply never be able to afford all that paid sick leave! Of course, more and more CEOs are coming around to the notion that giving out paid sick leave actually saves them money in the long run -- not just in reduced dependence on public assistance programs, but also in less turnover, less "presenteeism" (where you're at work but not really at work), and fewer workplace injuries. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Healthy Families Act.

Action: fighting the oppression of journalists, the sale of private data, and the abuse of animals.

First things first. You may have seen the work of Egyptian photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid, better known as Shawkan, in such outlets as Time and BBC.com, but the Egyptian government has held him in detention for over three years now, torturing him the whole time. Holding a prisoner that long without charges is itself illegal in Egypt, but no matter -- the government finally filed half a dozen charges against him, including possession of a weapon, illegal assembly, murder, and attempted murder, but you could be excused for thinking his real "crime" was documenting the Rabaa massacre, where Egyptian government forces killed at least 800 protestors. Of course, protesting doesn't merit the death penalty, anywhere, at any time -- I wonder how many good Americans will remember that in the coming months and years -- and documenting government oppression doesn't merit criminal charges of any kind, particularly the trumped-up kind. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell the Egyptian government to free Shawkan. Not incidentally, Shawkan has contracted Hepatitis C -- for which he's had a hard time getting medical treatment! -- but the Egyptian government has freed other political prisoners suffering from Hep C. Egypt can't even be consistent in how it oppresses its people! It's hard out there for a pimp.

Meanwhile, closer to home, big telecom corporation AT&T has been selling its analyses of your private call data to law enforcement agencies via its Hemisphere project -- and this is true whether you're an AT&T customer or not! (The chances are pretty good that you call AT&T customers or make calls on AT&T-built infrastructure on occasion.) Naturally AT&T hid what it was doing from, because this is immoral coming and going -- a corporation selling your private data and taxpayer money going to buy it! AT&T adds close to four billion records to its database every day, and no use hoping that law enforcement is taking on much more data than it can handle, because searching for data isn't anywhere near as hard as people might think, and desperate states will go a long way to hurt people (just like Egypt has, above). Hence Access Now helps you tell AT&T to stop selling your private information to law enforcement. No use trying to tell me that we need these kinds of tools to foil terrorists now-more-than-ever. You know what kind of tools foil terrorists? The kind of tools that promote real independence for Americans -- higher-paying jobs, good homes with less debt -- which are exactly the kinds of tools corporations are constantly trying to destroy, because then you'll be less dependent on them.

Finally, Dan McKernan of Chelsea, MI has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell Michigan state Sen. Joe Hune (R-22) and state Rep. Gretchen Driskell (D-52) to fight the continuing abuse of animals at factory farms by opposing HB 5987. HB 5987 would extend the phase-out of battery cages in Michigan by five years, but this phase-out is already a 10-year process, passed by the state legislature seven years ago, and Michigan is the first state in the nation to mandate that factory farms phase out the kinds of cages that force animals into confined spaces for their entire lives -- not so food prices can be lower, mind you, but so factory farm executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Of course HB 5987 has a lot of industry support, and as long as big ag corporations can hold the threat of "less food" or "higher prices" over our heads, bills like HB 5987 will have a good chance of passing. The only things we have going for us, I guess, are our voices, and our tradition as civilized people who hate being needlessly cruel to animals for profit. But I'll take that -- big ag corporations are prisoners of their hunger for money, but we're free people.

Action: clean water, and internet privacy.

So here we are, a mere two and a half weeks from Election Day, and Congress still hasn't funded a response to the water crisis in Flint, MI. What's the rush? After all, good Flint residents have only had lead in their water for 2 1/2 years now! President Obama and Michigan Gov. Snyder have only declared a state of emergency for ten months now! And lead poisoning is only irreversible and poisonous at any amount! Last we heard, Congress didn't fund Flint water infrastructure funding in the bill keeping our government open through December 9, but Congressional leaders promised another vote on that matter during the lame-duck session. Of course, you know Congressional promises aren't worth the toilet paper they're written on -- unless we make them keep their promises, which is why Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass water infrastructure help for Flint and other cities post-haste. Clean water may be the most important health care innovation of the last century, and our leaders have absolutely no business pretending to be leaders if they won't fix what happened in Flint -- and won't prevent it from happening in other cities and towns across America. Really, investing in people is not too much to ask.

Meanwhile, the FCC may vote this week to put the brakes on big corporate ISPs selling our personal and private data without our consent -- but word on the street is that one FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel is on the fence about that. That can't be because big corporate telecoms have been lobbying Congress relentlessly over the last few months, can it? Or because the Senate has refused to consider her renomination to the FCC for a second term, even though President Obama submitted it well over a year ago? Here's the thing: if any of us cave to big corporate money, we teach future generations that greed is OK, and if a nominee bows before Republican pressure in order to get her renomination considered, we teach future generations that it's OK to play stupid playground games in order to get what we want. Why don't corporatists and Republicans ever try to win these arguments on the merits? Could it be because they can't reasonably oppose good Americans having more control over how their ISPs use their personal data? Don't let the haters have all the say about everything: let Free Press help you tell the FCC to do the people's will and allow us to have more control over our internet privacy.

Action: protecting Social Security, and promoting freedom online.

Even the farthest-right Republicans know they can't privatize Social Security -- Mr. Bush tried it, with huge majorities in House and Senate, and couldn't even get a bill considered. But the far right has other ways to hurt the Social Security system we've fought for and paid for, and one of them is to cut the Social Security Administration's budget. Their proposed cuts would furlough employees, close offices, and prevent them from processing claims and fixing problems -- all so they can point to how badly Social Security is working and declare that the markets can do better. Anyone who can remember as far back as 2009, when the stock market crashed to about half its value the previous year, knows that's utter bunk. Hell, anyone who's watched any private corporation take over a government's function and line their pockets at the expense of the taxpayer knows that. But it's never enough to win -- we also must defend our victories, day in and day out, from the forces of evil. So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop trying to cripple the Social Security Administration.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to prevent cable corporations from selling your private info willy-nilly and end the cable corporations' monopoly on set-top boxes, then Free Press still helps you do that. What could possibly be the right's objection to good Americans getting to buy their own set-top boxes, instead of being chained to Comcast's or Charter's set-top box? And what could possibly be the right's objection to preventing cable corporations from misusing your personal information? We may sum up their objection to both thusly: cable corporations are big donors, and they're paying for our re-election. Sure, they tell you that the FCC proposals amount to Big Gummint Run Amok, but sometimes government has to step in to allow freedom to flourish. And these right-wingers have nothing to say about warrantless wiretapping or NSA data-vacuuming -- because it doesn't cost their biggest donors any money. The bad news: word on the street is that the right's empty and desperate arguments are working on at least two FCC Commissioners. But we can be the steel in their spine -- again.

Action: torture, internet privacy, and gay rights.

The CIA has apparently "accidentally" destroyed its copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee torture report from the last Congress. No, it wasn't the only copy in the whole world, but understand that the torture report actually had little chance of seeing the light of day to begin with -- so far our government has only released the report's 700-page executive summary, and a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel has lately ruled that the Freedom of Information Act can't compel disclosure of the other 6,200-plus pages, since the FOIA doesn't apply to "Congressional documents." Hence the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the Defending Dissent Foundation help you tell President Obama to declassify the Senate torture report and ensure that the National Archives and Record Administration preserve it. Let's not pretend that other countries learning that we torture "compromises national security," nor let us suppose the National Archives should only record the good we do -- if we can't accept, and learn from, the evil we do, we have no business aspiring to be the greatest country on Earth.

Meanwhile, the FCC has proposed rules that would give consumers more control over how information internet service providers use, share, or sell their private information. I've heard a lot of reasonable folks say things like you should get used to not having any privacy on the internet, and while they mean to remind you not to be a blithering idiot in public or to avoid scams that sound too good to be true -- both worthwhile reminders no matter how often we get them! -- we should be able to have some privacy on the internet, and we should certainly be able to make big telecom corporations get our permission before doing anything with our private information, and we should get notifications from those corporations whenever that information gets stolen. Of course, big telecoms don't want to do any of this, supposedly because it would "confuse" consumers -- which certainly betrays their very, very low opinion of the people whose money makes their businesses possible. Don't we tend toward believing in folks' capabilities in a free country? Demand Progress helps you tell the FCC to mandate the most vigorous privacy protections possible for consumers on the internet.

Finally, in case you were wondering if the struggle for gay rights is over now that the Supreme Court has legalized gay marriage across the land, recall that many state legislatures have made foster care systems a battleground in their attempts to enshrine a "right" to discriminate against people who offend your "religious" "conscience." Some politicians think that if you don't want LGBTQ parents to foster kids because cooties, you should be allowed to prevent them from doing that -- and if foster parents don't want to foster LGBTQ kids, they should be allowed to do that. Just to make things clear: you have a right to be a bigot -- but you don't have a right to abridge other people's rights with your bigotry, or because of your bigotry. How strange, that folks pass up all the character-building opportunities meeting people unlike them can provide. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell HHS Secretary Burwell to forbid foster care services receiving federal funding from discriminating against LGBTQ kids or parents. I know, the right will call that Big Gummint, just like they never called the PATRIOT Act or warrantless wiretapping Big Gummint, but haters gonna hate, and we don't pander to hate, even if it carries a cross.

Around the table: what "free" trade is really all about, and other horrible truths.

Dean Baker reminds us that the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade pact "has little to do with trade" and more to do with "putting in place a pro-business regulatory structure." You see, tariffs aren't so much a "free trade barrier" anymore, but those pesky clean air and clean water and antitrust and fair use laws are, to the corporatists who drafted the pact -- not that they'll come out and say so, of course, since you'll want to punch them in the nose if they do. Rather, they'll use more scare numbers -- 18,000 OF TEH TARIFFZ DESTROYED!!!!, including the infamous Brunei ski boot tariff, a stain on civilization's honor since time immemorial.

Vulture capitalists -- those extraordinary folks who buy up a nation's defaulted debt for pennies on the dollar in order to extort vast sums governments can't pay without selling off public services -- have reached a "deal" with the new Argentine government. The shame of it is that Argentina actually did pretty well after its 2002 default, mainly by refusing to cave to outlandish creditor demands, but then 2009 hit, you remember that, and then another bad spell helped put a right-wing government in, one more willing to cave to folks like Paul Singer, until recently a Marco Rubio man and now standing to make nearly four times what he "invested." A certain American judge and a certain Obama Administration cabinet agency were also no help to good Argentinians.

In an unexpected development, the Department of Justice has apparently backed down in its fight to get Apple to create a key the FBI can use to unlock any encrypted cell phone. Sadly, not because they realized they were wrong, but because they think they can unlock the phone of the San Bernardino shooter another way -- hopefully a way that protects the privacy of the masses, though I'm not holding my breath. This "other way" might also fail, which means we'll be back to square one. We'll likely know in about two weeks' time.

Annalee Newitz, writing at ArsTechnica, describes Facebook's attempt to "establish an ethnic affinity," though not of course an actual ethnicity, to its users. Not to racially profile, but to make money, and praise the Lord it's only about making money! Also, like so many things in this Brave New World, this sort of marketing isn't opt-in: "(e)ven when a Facebook user says they like #BlackLivesMatter, they don't feel like asking to opt in to an ethnic identity," Ms. Newitz says, "it's just one of many interests that define that person." I wonder what "ethnic affinity" Facebook projects onto my newsfeed's endless stream of death notices and music videos.

Finally, Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall takes us in his wayback machine to the antics of southern California's Wally George, a right-wing TV host who presaged so many right-wing talk radio and cable news blowhards -- and Donald Trump. Helmet hair, limp liberals, wrestling-style bombast, security throwing guests out -- sound familiar? Of course I remember Morton Downey, Jr. gaining a similar following in the late 1980s with a similar act. Happily, "digging right-wing blowhards who yell and scream and throw things, ironically or maybe not" is one of the many childish things I've put away.

Around the table: ranging from insurance-corporate dystopian to a more agrarian utopianism, even in the heart of the city.

Donald Trump wins Republican Presidential primary in South Carolina. Jeb Bush finishes fourth, and then suspends his campaign, suggesting that you can count a bastard out if he gets outshined by an even bigger bastard. One quibble: the suggestion, in the above link and elsewhere, that it's somehow surprising that Mr. Trump's fight with the Pope didn't hurt him with religious voters in South Carolina. I mean, to a lot of these voters, Catholics aren't even Christians, and they get into (or long to get into!) swordfights over Who's More Christian just like Donald Trump did all the time.

Ho hum, President Obama's budget would let corporations "bring back" overseas profits and pay taxes on those profits at far lower rates than they otherwise would. I'd say, "well, it's a good thing Republicans won't even consider Mr. Obama's budget," but it'd be just like Congress to lift out all the bad parts of that budget proposal and pass them. Indeed, Congress has tried to pass this particular dung nugget already. Remember when they called this sort of thing a tax "amnesty," before the nativists made amnesty a bad word. Then it was a tax "holiday," and now it's a "transition tax." Next year they'll call it something even more absurd, like "stimulus" or "job creation."

Abby Jackson, writing in Business Insider, discusses a study provocatively entitled "Are Charter Schools the New Subprime Loans?" Turns out it's only a metaphor -- financial bubbles result from the multiple stakeholders (and their conflicting interests) loans now have, whereas charter school failures often result from the multiple authorizers (and their conflicting interests) they have -- but it's an apt metaphor nonetheless, and suggests solutions in both realms are possible, if our politicians only have the will to do the people's will.

Robert Naiman reminds us that Hillary Clinton, as President Obama's first Secretary of State, "enabled" (his word! My efforts are working!) the coup that ousted President Zelaya from office in 2009. How? By suggesting that, well, maybe a coup didn't really take place (because that's so hard to figure out!) and that the State Department needed to study the matter -- when her own emails reveal that she already knew a coup had taken place. It's hard out there for a pimp. And it's even harder out there for good Hondurans, thanks to Mrs. Clinton.

If you're in the mood for some serious dystopianism, Morgane Remy's got it, as she posits a world where insurance corporations can use all the data the internet collects on you as leverage to "control your lifestyle." No sense arguing that inductive reasoning doesn't have absolute predictive power, because that's not how insurance corporations think -- and I presume if you opt out of the "Internet of Things," insurance corporations will just charge you a lot more for not giving them enough data to work with. Maybe we need single-payer for all kinds of insurance -- it won't make the Big Brother problem go away, but it'll make it more controllable by the people.

Finally, if you're not in a dystopian mood, Jasleena Grewal, writing at Yes! magazine, writes about how a community vegetable garden in the "Banglatown" section of East London can "create a space where people could re-form social networks." A real social network, we are reminded, occurs among folks who live close to each other and run into each other regularly without planning to, and needs a place where folks feel comfortable enough to get to know each other, and the garden not only provides a place for folks of differing backgrounds to speak the "universal language" of growing vegetables, but also allows them to eventually take their plots away from the space and create a new space where they can teach the lessons they've learned to others. I wish the Nomadic Community Garden, and all its offspring, the best of luck.

Around the table: Muslims react to the Paris attacks, and other stories.

Muslims worldwide condemn terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday. Remember this when right-wingers say ZOMG WHY DO TEH MUZLIMZ NEVER CONDEMNZ TEH TERRORIZMZ!!!!!

Hackers reveal that Securus Technologies, which provides phone service to many of our nation's prisons, has been recording phone calls between prisoners and attorneys, meaning they very likely violated attorney-client confidentiality and thus broke the law. Some fools will laugh when they hear this and say, so what, they're just prisoners. I sure hope such folks don't have to revise their opinions by going to jail themselves.

Maine Attorney General sues a Planned Parenthood protestor for protesting too loudly. Both state and federal law guarantee a citizen's right to get legal health services without "disruption," and while Mr. Ingalls's protests can apparently be heard "in the second-floor counseling and examination rooms of the facility," I don't think that alone would meet the bar. But I presume he could be prosecuted if he's violating noise ordinances, since the First Amendment only guarantees a right to speak, not a right to speak at a volume that actually physically interferes with others' speech.

Ain't nothing so bad that Rand Paul can't make it worse: Sen. Paul, in saying that "only certain opinions are acceptable on college campuses," adds that "(i)t’s almost like they’ll put you in prison for challenging the religious dogma on climate change." Mr. Paul would have to prove there's anything particularly "religious" or "dogmatic" about climate change, but more to the point, it is not "almost" like "prison" until colleges start actually detaining students for expressing contrary views. You'd think a "libertarian" would be more sensitive to all of that.

Finally, the notorious House Freedom Caucus apparently plans to draft a Contract On With America II. They think of themselves as "anti-establishment," but make no mistake: their wish list, which includes "overhauling" Social Security and Medicare, repealing the Estate Tax, cutting regulations, cutting corporate taxes, and expanding offshore drilling, is an establishment wet dream. Democrats could run against that by defending Social Security and Medicare, by defending clean air and clean water regulations, and by defending making everyone, including the wealthy and corporations, pay their fair share so we can all have bridges and roads and libraries and firefighters and police officers. I kid, of course -- Democrats don't have the guts to do any of that.

Around the table: starring Ben Carson and Alan Simpson as "Goofus and Gallant."

Boy, I really thought we were done with this "War on Christmas" crap, but apparently we're not: right-wing evangelicals say that coffee corporation Starbucks has, in handing out red coffeecups with no snowflakes, reindeer, or Santas on them, "REMOVED CHRISTMAS from their cups because they hate Jesus" (caps in original). My memory of the stations of the cross isn't airtight, but I don't remember seeing snowflakes, reindeer, or Santa Claus at any of them. 'Tis the season, apparently, for folks to throw tantrums so they can get attention.

Robert Reich reveals "What I Learned on My Red State Book Tour." Spoiler alert: "many of the conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers I met agreed with much of what I had to say, and I agreed with them," which will only surprise folks who believe in "liberal" media stereotypes. Yes, "crony capitalism," "factory farms," "'free' trade," and "too big to fail banks" all meet with broad bipartisan opposition, and this is the precise opposite of what the "liberal" media tells you when they talk about "bipartisanship."

Elias Isquith at Salon interviews New York Times journalist Charlie Savage about how President Obama seemed to change his mind about the "security (sic) state." Mr. Savage points to two main factors: one, Mr. Obama objected to Mr. Bush's warrantless wiretapping because he felt they were lawless, but when Congress rewrote the laws to conform to what Mr. Bush was doing, that objection disappeared. Two, the "underwear bomber" seemed to have put a scare into Mr. Obama. A potential third factor, the "deep state" described by Michael Glennon among others, gets some mention at the end.

Julia Angwin at ProPublica tells us that Vizio "Smart TVs" can "track your viewing habits and share (them) with advertisers," who can then target you on your smartphone. You can opt out, but why should you have to opt out? Really, they should give you the option of opting in, like Samsung and LG smart TVs. Apparently a loophole in the law (specifically, the Video Privacy Protection Act) allows smart TV makers to do this. Don't worry, though -- Congress is always looking out for the consumer and will offer a fix post-haste. I kid, of course.

Ben Carson actually blames "political correctness" for drug addiction. No, that really is the way to read his answer to an admittedly vague John Dickerson question on Face the Nation: people get addicted to drugs because they "lack something," and what do they lack? Contact with other people, as very bright folks have lately said? Well, no -- they lack "the values and principles" that make America great, and since people have apparently replaced that with "political correctness," then political correctness causes drug addiction. Political correctness is an evil, but right-wingers indulge in it all the time (see first paragraph above), and folks who treat it as the worst evil in America are themselves "lacking something."

Finally, former Wyoming Republican Senator Alan Simpson offers an extraordinarily lucid description of some of the real moral crises plaguing this nation. He likes college kids, but says they're being conditioned to be "consumers" rather than citizens, and he uses "class warfare" the way it should be used, against the forces that would make everyone work for less money. I'll admit I never liked Mr. Simpson as a youth -- I thought he was as out there as Newt Gingrich, and maybe he sounds better now because Out There 2015 is hardly visible from Out There 1987. But maybe, just maybe, I wasn't listening to him as well as I should have back then.

Around the table: internet privacy, worker rights, food safety, voting rights, and one audacious hombré from Maine.

New U.N. privacy chief says we need a "Geneva convention" for internet privacy. He's right, though of course we need protection from corporations (which buy and sell our info) as well as governments (which gobble it up to use against you later). Key quotation: "at least Winston (Smith, of George Orwell’s novel 1984) was able to go out in the countryside and go under a tree and expect there wouldn’t be any screen, as it was called. Whereas today there are many parts of the English countryside where there are more cameras than George Orwell could ever have imagined."

National Labor Relations Board rules that its previous definition of "joint employer" wasn't broad enough, raising the possibility that temporary employees and employees of subcontractors and franchises can redress grievances with the parent corporations, rather than the "middle men." Naturally Congressional Republicans have already announced they'll attack this decision through the appropriations process -- because they somehow find it unconscionable to give working families more tools to fight an unnecessarily obscure employer-employee relationship that redistributes worker wealth upward to corporate CEOs.

Consumer Reports finds bacteria resistant to at least two antibiotics in nearly one out of every five samples of ground beef. Sustainably-raised beef fares substantially better as far as antibiotic-resistant bacteria are concerned (though not necessarily other bacteria), but you'll still find it there, likely because you found it somewhere else first. Could we, maybe, you know, stop pumping healthy animals full of antibiotics now? Factory farms aren't so old, after all, that we need to get all Russell Kirk about protecting traditions and such.

You remember the Wichita State scientist who has found that the Republican share of votes seems to increase as precincts get larger in Kansas (and elsewhere)? Well, she's sued the state of Kansas for the hard copies of votes in order to check her data, and Kansas's Secretary of State has asked a judge to block that request. Mr. Kobach is, you might have guessed, a Republican, one who won re-election in 2014 though polls had him on the skids for a moment. But until the data convinces me otherwise, I'll continue to assume Mr. Kobach won mainly because his Democratic opponent didn't offer enough of an alternative.

Finally, Maine Governor Paul LePage says he might challenge Independent Senator Angus King in 2018. Gov. LePage is perhaps hoping (and perhaps in vain) for another three-way election, since those are the only kinds of elections he can win. But while Mr. LePage's gubernatorial term ends in 2018, circumstances might well free him to campaign extensively before then.

Action: the Iran nuke deal, and student privacy.

The Senate will take up the proposed nuclear agreement with Iran when they get back from their month of fundraising their working vacations with their constituents, and the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell them to support the framework of the Iran nuke deal. It's going to be an ugly, ugly battle, full of misinformation and irrelevant information, the latter including ZOMG THEY STILL CHANTZ TEH DEATHZ TO TEH AMERICAZ IN TEH STREETZ!!!!! It doesn't matter how Iran feels about this deal. Hell, it doesn't matter how anyone feels about this deal. It only matters whether this deal will keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and this deal will do that, with its rigorous inspection schedule and the threat of reinstituting economic sanctions against Iran if they violate the agreement. And people who think that only war with Iran will keep us safe are the same people who said Iran should unilaterally give us everything we want as a precondition to negotiations, and people like that don't understand what negotiation is.

Meanwhile, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood joins with the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy to help you tell Congress to enact vigorous legislation to protect kids' privacy in our schools. The vast majority of schools now use cloud services for things like classroom instruction, bus route planning, and testing, which means that a lot of personal student data -- names and addresses, Social Security numbers, test scores, et cetera -- sits out there where hackers and corporations can exploit it. The solutions the CCFC and the PCSP propose? Notifying parents before disclosing (or re-disclosing) any personal student info to third parties outside the school district; complete bans on selling student information and advertising within instructional materials; stronger encryption standards for student info; and vigorous enforcement, including specified punishments for violations. That all sounds common-sensical to me, but Congressional efforts to protect student privacy have been weaker, likely to "protect" big corporate donors. But they ain't the boss of us.

Around the table: in which banksters attack pension funds and property rights.

Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept investigates how banksters have gotten their grubby mitts on our state pension funds. You remember from living in the real world that the most important thing about a pension fund is not that it makes buku bucks, but that it's there when you need it to be, which is why their managers used to invest conservatively. But investing pensions in things like hedge funds don't even make the pension funds more money -- they only make banksters money, through exorbitant fees. At least the provincial government of Quebec instructs us how to do it right.

A Rasmussen poll finds more Americans thinking that private corporations spy on them more than their government does. But that's not an illuminating comparison -- corporations can spy on you to make you see ads and induce you to buy stuff, and in rare instances fire you, but your government can spy on you and put you in jail. And Americans who profess to worry little about government spying often forget that what's lawful today might become "terrorism" tomorrow. In any case, Rasmussen also found that nearly three in four Americans think our government's violated their privacy, which is the result I would have led with.

Noam Scheiber warns us that startups like Uber and TaskRabbit, which connect folks who need tasks done with folks who do them, could wind up turning us all essentially into temp workers. Yes, it is easy to imagine a Dystopian future in which we all get up in the morning worrying about whether some Amazon warehouse will need us to pull orders, or whether some wealthy bankster will need furniture moved. For a more historical perspective, I point you to Echidne of the Snakes, who also reminds us how organizations like Uber transfer risk "downstream" -- i.e., to workers.

Senka Huskic profiles the Southern Essex County (MA) Register of Deeds, John O'Brien, who continues to pursue the fraudulent foreclosure documentation foisted upon us by banksters, long after the Obama Administration settled with the big banks. Mr. O'Brien audited his county's mortgage assignments in 2010, and declared it "a crime scene," and not just because of robosigning. I'm glad he's fighting on, but it is unfortunate that right-wingers, constantly squealing about property rights in other contexts, have been largely quiet about how badly banks have screwed with property rights in America.

Finally, Europe's Parliament calls for breaking up Google. The vote was lopsided but non-binding, as the European Parliament has no jurisdiction over anti-trust matters -- but the European Commission does, and the vote could wave the stick of bad PR against the Commission enough that they act. What would action look like? "(C)hanges in its business practices and even possibly a big fine," the Times says -- so it would look like America's action, plus the changes in business practices and the size of the fine, of course.