Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning monopolies, data privacy, and recycling.

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

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

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 as a news hook, but let’s be frank: in 2017, our government repealed pretty good FCC regulations that protected American’s online privacy, because the economy Big Gubmint light touch campaign donations.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

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

Action: concerning abortion rights and social media.

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell our FTC to keep law enforcement’s grubby mitts off our private data, tell our Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner, and tell President Biden to remove Donald “Lee” Moak from our USPS Board of Governors. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop private data-collecting corporations from selling all your private info to law enforcement. If law enforcement wants that information, they should get a warrant from a judge; supporting “convenience” or “efficiency” here is nothing more and nothing less than supporting fascism. Seriously! If law enforcement can just buy your personal data, and look at it whenever they like, what’s to stop them from going on fishing expeditions once they decide you’re an enemy? Hey, were you at George Floyd rallies in 2020? Well, congratulations – now you’re an enemy. It’s way too easy for cops to do that, which is why we restrict their power.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning transgender, data privacy, and monopolies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning internet privacy and health care.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security 2100 Act, the Women's Health Protection Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, the People's Response Act, and the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, tell our government to regulate Facebook more vigorously, tell your Congressfolk to void President Biden's proposed $500 million deal with Saudi Arabia, pass the Preventing Harmful Exposure to Phthalates Act, and ban cyanide bombs from the wild, and tell our Department of Energy to reject uranium mining. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise all Build Back Better Act funding by raising taxes on the rich and on corporations. If you're an Arizona resident, you'll definitely want to call Sen. Sinema, since she seems to be the one Senate Democrat who opposes raising taxes on the rich and on corporations. Stop me if you've heard this before, but over two-thirds of Arizonans support raising taxes on the rich and on corporations to pay for the Build Back Better Act. As usual, the "inscrutable" "iconoclastic" "maverick" "earns" her reputation by simply defying the will of her own constituents, in favor of the big corporate donors she seems to hobnob with every weekend. That's not very mavericky, frankly! And we shouldn't let her get away with it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your state legislators to draw fair, ungerrymandered districts; tell our FDA to revoke its approval of a dangerous drug, tell Michigan state legislators to reject yet another anti-trans bill, tell Amazon to stop spying on good Americans, and tell our FDA to restrict antibiotic abuse on factory farms. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's and/or state legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting, and have a happy and safe weekend!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell PA state legislators to reject anti-abortion bills, and tell your Congressfolk to pass wildlife corridor legislation, the For the 99.5% Act, the End Polluter Welfare Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the Medicare for All Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's (or state legislators') phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.