Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning the freedom to work, immigration, law and order, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell our FTC to outlaw noncompete clauses, tell the Biden Administration not to bring back Trump-era immigration policies, tell our Justice Department to disclose data about deaths in police custody, and tell our Postal Service to reject the DeJoy privatization plan. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to ban noncompete clauses in employment contracts. “The freedom to change jobs is core to economic liberty and to a competitive, thriving economy.” Who said that, some object of “free” marketeer hero worship? No, it was our own FTC Chair, Lina Khan, and though that does bode well for our efforts, you know that corporations – also somehow the object of “free” marketeer hero worship – will be flooding our FTC with their comments about how they can’t lose trade secrets when they lose employees, even though we already have other laws to deal with that. So we’ve got to show up.

Amnesty International helps you tell the Biden Administration not to bring back the notorious asylum ban and family separation plans. Everyone hated the Trump Administration for doing these things, so why would President Biden bring them back, inflicting cruel and needless hardship on folks who thought they were getting away from all that? Because he’s “moving to the center,” I suppose, though the “center” doesn’t comprise an “average” between right-wing cruelty and left-wing compassion. And anyway, no right-winger will ever support him for it, or acknowledge he did it. Really, there’s no upside here, for President Biden or anyone else. But he’ll do it, unless we get in his grill about it.

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell our Department of Justice to disclose how many good Americans die in police custody. Because the law demands it, that’s why! I don’t care if the police unions don’t like it! If they don’t like it, they can stop killing people in custody! One wonders why anyone dies in custody – I mean, isn’t law enforcement in control at that point? Too often the answer is because cops thought they deserved it, which isn’t very law-and-order of them, nor of us. And to those who think we should just put up with it because crime, I can only say: go live in a real police state.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell our USPS to fire Postmaster DeJoy and reject his 10-year plan to cut services, slash jobs, close Post Offices, and raise prices. Because a plan to cripple our USPS in this manner is also a plan to privatize our USPS! And we should fear that even more with our Postal Service, since our Constitution literally mandates that we keep the mail moving, and right-wingers would love for big corporations to gouge us at the same time they’re “fulfilling” that mandate. It’s all fun and games until a diabetic doesn’t get their insulin because they didn’t sign up for spam emails from some private mail carrier. You know late capitalism, so you know that’ll happen.

Action: concerning drug prices, pollution, law and order, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell other big pharma corporations to lower insulin prices, tell our EPA to enact the strongest soot standards possible, tell President Biden to fire DHS Inspector General Cuffari, and tell our USPS to reject the DeJoy plan to privatize our Post Office. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell big pharma corporations Novo Nordisk and Sanofi to lower their insulin prices in more or less the manner Eli Lilly has lately done. I hate relying on corporate good will to do the right thing, because they’ve been awash in money so long they have no idea what right and wrong is anymore, but I’m not above using the leverage that presents itself, either. The Big Stick of PR has clearly already worked on Eli Lilly – with a vital assist from our FTC’s announcement that they’ll crack down on the Pharmacy Benefit Managers that jack up drug prices as much as big pharma greed does. And we can make it work on other big pharma corporations, too.

Both the Environmental Defense Fund and Penn PIRG help you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous soot standards possible. Power plants create a lot of soot, as you may know, and those fine particulates can really mess with your breathing – and worse, considering that soot carries a lot of toxins and carcinogens in them. You may remember addressing this matter a decade ago; you may even wonder why we’re addressing it again. One answer is because we don’t always get everything we need the first time we fight for something; another answer is because 10 years is a long time to learn a lot more about how pollutants hurt us. And we’re past worrying about how executives will cope, right?

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell President Biden to fire Department of Homeland Security (or DHS) Inspector General Joseph Cuffari already. Mr. Cuffari has become notorious for keeping knowledge of DHS wrongdoing away from Congress – and thus from us, since Congressfolk represent us – and he also interfered with our Congress’s investigation of the January 6 attempted coup, by failing to inform Congress that the Secret Service had deleted certain texts sent on that day, and even preventing his own office from recovering those texts. So, yeah, if a guy interferes with our right to know just to preserve his power and/or prestige, his ass needs to go.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell our U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors to end Postmaster General DeJoy’s plan to privatize our Postal Service. Because that’s what a plan to slash jobs, cut services, and raise prices obviously is! People like Louis DeJoy live to screw things up and then claim “the private sector can do better,” which is like spreading feces all over your walls to justify hiring a cleaning service. But privatizing the delivery of life-saving medicines won’t result in better service or lower prices, because everything they privatize ultimately becomes more expensive – and less accountable to us, since it’s “theirs” now. So let’s keep our Postal Service ours.

Readings for March 6, 2023.

Matt Stoller reminds us that Transportation Secretary Buttigieg actually has a lot of authority to fight mergers like the proposed Jet Blue/Spirit merger. Furthermore, Mr. Buttigieg can, by law, apply a “public interest” standard to mergers (versus the “may substantially lessen competition” standard the Clayton Act sets), which gives him a leg up over our Justice Department; while two more airlines merging in an already low-competition industry sure does seem like it would “substantially lessen competition,” our DOJ would have to get a federal judge to agree – which is, ah, real hit-and-miss even with Democrat-appointed judges – whereas Mr. Buttigieg wouldn’t even have to go to court. In a world where our FCC Chair kept a hedge fund from buying a cable corporation without even having a working majority – and read that, because that’s a great story! – Mr. Buttigieg is rapidly running out of excuses, not to mention time to recover in the public eye before he runs for President or Senate or whatever.

Constance Grady at Vox explains how “Brad Pitt was the only winner of the Aniston-Jolie tabloid battle.” How did he win? Mainly, it seems, by having a penis! Tabloid writers wrote about Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie largely in terms of their motherhood, or lack thereof – Ms. Aniston tried to have a baby with Mr. Pitt but couldn’t, and when she didn’t reveal her infertility issues at the time (maybe because they weren’t any of our damn business!), the tabloids said she “put career over family.” Ms. Jolie, meanwhile, adopted a child early in the 2000s, but even after mothering six children with Mr. Pitt, she found herself back where she started after splitting from him, even facing accusations of having a “white savior complex.” Mr. Pitt, meanwhile, gets kudos as a dad for merely expressing pride in his children, and tabloid writers transcribe word from “sources close to (him)” like Moses handed it down from Mt. Sinai. Ladies and gentlemen, your "liberal" media at work!

ProPublica tells you how you can file your taxes for free with limited interference from some corporation. As you may recall, our IRS must by law offer a “free filing” option for folks with relatively simple returns, but they let their “partner” big tax-prep corporations obscure that option (both in Google searches and on their own websites) so they could still make you pay. Nice work if you can get it! But ProPublica broke that story (as it related to TurboTax) two years ago, and our FTC has since taken action against TurboTax owner Intuit, so now things are a bit easier. Two key points: you have to make less than $73,000 annually to take advantage of this service (though some of our IRS’s corporate partners have more stringent requirements), and you have to start guided tax prep at irs.gov, not at a corporation’s website. It’s not ideal – ideal would be more like our IRS filling out the forms for you for free, since they already have all your info from your employer. But it is better.

Action: concerning taxes, Social Security, and Medicare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the FAIR Tax, lift the Social Security payroll tax cap, and end Medicare privatization. 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 reject the so-called FAIR Tax, which would replace income and corporate taxes with a single, national 30% sales tax. Remember when inflation was 9% not that long ago? Now think of the FAIR Tax as 30% inflation. Better yet, think of it as 60% inflation, since the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy says the tax would have to be that big to make up for all the lost income and corporate tax revenue. Hate to pile on, but rich people who don’t spend as much of their money as you do will make out like bandits. So let’s put yet another stupid idea in the ground.

Demand Progress helps youtell your Congressfolk to lift the payroll tax cap on Social Security, so that Social Security can tax income above $162,000 annually. And Jesus Mary and Joseph no more bullshit about Social Security being an “entitlement” or how it’s “running out of money,” particularly when we can alleviate any future money problems by taxing more of rich folks’ income into the system. With even Joe Manchin making pleasing noises about the concept, we should note that this could be done though budget reconciliation – if not with this House of Clowns, then with a Democratic House starting in 2025. They’ll have to hold onto the Senate, too, but everything worth doing in life is hard.

Finally, People’s Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end Medicare privatization. OK, the way they put it is “tell Congress to stop Medicare profiteers,” but “profiteer” is a good enough word for private health insurance corporations that work through so-called Medicare Advantage, particularly since we’ve heard so many news reports lately of Medicare Advantage not paying for services. Indeed, not only does Medicare “Advantage” kick a lot of sick seniors off their health care plans, but a lot of folks switch back to traditional Medicare in their last year of life. They say “older and wiser” for a reason, apparently! But us younger folk can sure do a better job taking care of our elders.

Action: concerning Medicare privatization, corporate taxes, and price gouging.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to get private corporations out of Medicare and close corporate tax loopholes, and tell our FTC to investigate the egg industry for price-gouging. 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 get private insurance corporations out of Medicare. Tha Bush Mobb opened the door to private corporations taking taxpayer money to deliver worse service than our government – and thus “prove” the right-wing canard that TEH BIG GUBMINTZ DOESN’TZ WORKZ!!!! – and even under President Biden that door’s opened wider, even though higher costs and worse service accompany every privatization scheme. And instead of worrying that your granddad won’t get dental and hearing care, ask yourself why every Medicare recipient doesn’t get dental and hearing care. (Spoiler alert: Kyrsten Sinema wouldn’t allow it in 2021, because bipartisanship!)

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to close corporate tax loopholes. Of course, another way to describe corporate tax loopholes is corporate welfare, since corporations are getting public money for doing not a damn thing. Or for doing what they were going to do anyway! Seriously, corporations need an “incentive” to spend money developing products? What the hell else do they have to do? Yes, I know, corporations have spent the last 40 years doing nothing but whatever raises their stock prices, and some of President Biden’s policies have started to break that nefarious trend. But we still need to tell our Congressfolk that corporate welfare is evil and that they need to fight it.

Finally, Demand Progress also helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to investigate egg-producing corporations for price-gouging. Yes, anywhere you see price spikes like the one you’ve seen for eggs, your first suspicion should be fraud, and here just as elsewhere, the offending corporations are raising prices and garnering record profits. It’s a shame it’s come to that, but I think it’s pretty obvious by now that big corporations are trying to steal all the money they can before President Biden’s FTC, SEC, and DOJ start winning too many antitrust cases. So we the people are not exactly at a disadvantage here – and we need to press our advantages wherever we can.

Action: concerning taxes, Medicare, and the war on Yemen.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to cut taxes for working families, stop handing out welfare to corporations, get rid of privatized Medicare programs, and end our involvement in the war on Yemen. 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: Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, and Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any and all tax cuts for corporations in year-end legislation. This ain’t that damn deep: working families need the extra $250 or $300 per month per child to make ends meet, and corporations don’t need any more welfare handouts from the taxpayer so they can pretend to create jobs while just enabling their executives to buy back stock. Which used to be illegal! Because it concentrated corporate decision-making power in the hands of the few! It’s a shame Congress doesn’t understand these things anymore – which is why we have to make them understand.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to get rid of private insurers within Medicare. Yes, I’m speaking of the so-called “Medicare Advantage” program, which has opened the door to private corporations for two decades now. I’m sure you’ve read the reports of Medicare Advantage overbilling and fraud; right-wingers used to say the private sector can do things more efficiently and cheaply, but Medicare Advantage clearly hasn’t done that with our tax dollars. Don’t be swayed by your friends and neighbors telling you that they know someone with Medicare Advantage and it’s really helped them. Medicare would have helped them the same, only for less money and with less fraud.

Finally, the Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a War Powers Resolution ending our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Which has been going on for over a dozen years now, which hasn’t accomplished the Saudis’ supposed “aim” of a “stable” government, which has pushed millions of good Yemeni to the brink of famine, and which has mainly targeted the same Houthi rebels who are also some of the world’s best fighters of al-Qaeda. Really, no one in their right mind would set out to do any of this! And I hate to pile on, but our Constitution gives Congress, not our President, the power to decide when and where to go to war. So Congress needs to stand up, just like we stand up.

Action: concerning voting rights, treating prisoners like human beings, and immigrant youth.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Election Mail Act and the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act, and pass legislation protecting immigrant youth. 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 S. 4487, the Election Mail Act. The bill would (among other things) require our Postal Service to process all mail-in ballots the same day they get them, to process mail-in ballots free of charge to the voter, and require states to count mail-in ballots postmarked on or by Election Day that arrive up to seven days after Election Day. And if that makes Republicans whine about how we should always know the winner by 8 pm on Election Day, well, tough toodles. Better to make mail-in voting easier for all Americans. And we all have to deal with change, so why should we coddle Republicans in their incessant efforts to avoid dealing with change?

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2489, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act. Big telecom corporations get to charge usurious rates for prisoners to talk to their families, and these big corporations have massive bankster funding behind them – thus explaining why Americans for Financial Reform brings you this action alert. Prisoners who stay in touch with their families are also more likely to stay out of jail once they get out; you can see why banksters invested in big telecom corporations and private prison corporations don’t want that, but again, why should they get all the say about everything?

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation protecting immigrant youth (i.e., “dreamers”) from deportation. To a nation they left when they were very young and therefore not of their own free will and therefore also to a nation they won’t recognize, I feel compelled to mention again. In the meantime, we could keep hoping that reactionary judges (and Justices!) might interpret the law in such a way as to not be cruel bastards – or we could tell our Congressfolk to solve the problem with legislation. And if they don’t, we tell them again until they do. Easier than relying on a right-wing judge, that’s for sure.

Around the table: don't mess with Katie Porter's whiteboard! And other important lessons.

Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) demonstrates via her famous whiteboard that sharp increases in corporate profits drive at least half of our inflation, and at least one TV station fact-checks, and confirms, that finding. Now that one media outlet has spread the word, the forces of evil face more of an uphill battle. But it’s getting late, so this message needs to be in Democrat ads, like, yesterday, and they should couple it with an anti-monopoly message – and they should remind everyone that Republicans are pro-monopoly and will defund all the federal agencies that fight monopolies if they get control of either or both houses of Congress.

Tired of hysterical Republicans squealing about TEH CRIMEZ RATEZ GOINGZ TEH UPZ!!!!!!? Then perhaps Justin Nix at The Conversation can help you help benighted souls make sense of “the crime rate.” Of course, if you’ve noticed politicians talking about “crime going up” and then justifying it by using data showing one crime (like murder or carjacking) going up, you won’t be surprised by anything you read. And if your relatives all think crime is going up because they’ve been watching the same six clips of violent crime on their news programs for years on end, ain’t nothing we can do for them anyway. We minister to the redeemable; the rest we leave to God.

You’ve heard of auto corporations trying to put some of their features (like heated seats) behind a subscription-enabled paywall? Well, New Jersey state legislators are mulling a bill that might make such things illegal, which might make it the most popular legislation ever, since literally any sentient being can foresee a future where your “subscription” to your brakes “lapses” at the worst possible time. But the bill would still allow subscriptions for software services in cars, and big automakers could drive a Mack truck through that loophole. Of course they’re still whining about it: “the bill would significantly impact the ability of automakers to offer consumers the choice of purchasing additional convenience features through a subscription model,” one law firm says. Didn’t know a corporation’s “right” to force an unwanted “choice” upon you was sacrosanct, did you?

Ho hum, Mississippi wants to privatize Jackson’s water system after that city’s residents went without water for much of August and September, but Naomi LaChance at The Lever instructs us that partial privatization has already helped cause the problems Jackson has been having! The state has received some $75 million in federal funding under the 2021 infrastructure law; how much of that money has gone to Jackson, where the water was brown as coffee for a bit? Zero dollars, naturally. This story also has pollution and bankster interference going for it. Says one observer: “If you can’t afford to improve your water system, how could you possibly afford to have profits extracted from your community just to pad the bottom line of a corporation?” It’s a question worth asking!

Armed Arizona “poll watchers” are already “guarding” ballot drop boxes, even accusing certain individuals of being “mules.” I’m glad they’re not calling me that, because my response would be what’s your address so I can serve you with a slander lawsuit? And this is only the beginning! Just wait until Doug Mastriano’s armed thugs try to prevent any mail-in ballots from being counted in Pennsylvania on Election Day. Hey, it’s not like he’s running ads, raising money, doing interviews, or participating in debates, so how else is he going to win?

Finally, Michael Moore, who predicted Donald Trump's 2016 Presidential win, thinks there’ll be a “blue tsunami” at the polls this November. Too many independents watch the news now and decide there’s no use voting because Republicans "have momentum" – or, worse, decide to vote for Republicans because they "have momentum," how perverse! – but Mr. Moore’s analysis maps onto mine; after January 6, liberals ain’t so much afraid of right-wingers as angry at them, and that anger ain’t subsiding anytime soon. And Democratic ads, for all their faults, actually show a lack of fear for once. And like I said, this “movement” toward Republicans among the electorate is based on nothing. Certainly not Republicans’ declaration that they’re going to cut Social Security and Medicare! I mean, who knowingly votes for that?

Action: concerning various forms of corruption.

Long story short: tell Puerto Rico’s government to end its association with the private power corporation that is failing its citizens, tell Pennsylvania state Senators to reject corporatists on the state Public Utilities Commission, and tell President Biden to replace two USPS Commissioners with folks who’ll fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

MoveOn helps you tell the government of Puerto Rico to cancel LUMA Energy’s contract to deliver power there. Given the near-daily outages good Puerto Ricans suffered before Hurricane Fiona plunged them into near-total darkness, I’d say LUMA hasn’t even fulfilled its contract! And yet Puerto Rico’s government, which has until November 30 to renew LUMA’s contract, might well feel like they “have no choice,” despite good Puerto Ricans taking to the streets to protest LUMA’s failures. Don’t they know this is what private corporations do – do such a bad job that they make you feel like you “need” them? Let’s encourage Puerto Rico not to fall into this trap.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Food and Water Watch helps you tell your state Senator to reject Gov. Wolf’s appointment of a pair of corporate cronies to the state Public Utilities Commission. One’s a re-appointment of a Commissioner who tends to come down on the side of private energy corporations more than objectivity demands, while the other has long-standing ties to energy corporations as a lobbyist. Right-wingers love telling you that only people in the industry understand the industry enough to regulate it; hopefully you see that as a pile of dung. They don’t say only burglars understand law enforcement, but their own logic compels them to conclude that.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell President Biden to avoid renominating U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors Commissioner/Trumphole Donald Moak, and Daily Kos helps you tell Mr. Biden to replace both USPS Commissioners with expiring terms and replace them with folks who’ll fire Mr. DeJoy. These Commissioners approve of Mr. DeJoy’s cut services/raise prices/slash jobs plan, especially considering how many good Americans depend on our Post Office for their life-saving medicines. But we won’t get the service we deserve from our Post Office unless we speak out.

Around the table: centrists, right-wingers, and liars still suck, part 833.

Factcheck.org issues an expansive report “Correcting Misinformation About Dr. Fauci,” which has unfortunately proven to be an Augean task. Read the whole thing, since he’s going to be a Republican villain in this year’s midterm elections even though he deserves better – and, more importantly, we deserve better. Even when he said (in February 2020) that “right now” COVID infection risk was “low,” he was, strictly speaking, right – and he’s always acted with more honesty and integrity than all his critics who pretend to mishear what he’s saying or cast aspersions upon his motivations with no evidence other than the rage they want to provoke in others.

Had you been thinking that the Sinemanchin axis hasn’t done much to foil President Biden’s appointees in a 50-50 Senate? Turns out they’ve just been picking their spots, with Sen. Sinema, in particular, personally scuttling the appointment of an Elizabeth Warren ally to head up the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sounds like an unimportant office, right? It’s not: it helps federal regulations get written more quickly and efficiently, so I guess this is another reason corporations call Sen. Sinema “heroic.” Now would be a good time to remind everyone that if she goes into lobbying after her Senate term, as some expect, it won’t be because of her relationships with Democratic Senators, since those are all in flames. It’ll be because of her relationships with Republican Senators. Have you seen her photographed with anyone else? No, you have not. There’s a reason for that.

Ho hum, Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters has been scrubbing his campaign website of any claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election, even though he’s trafficked in such claims plenty of times. That’s what you’d have to do, I guess, if you know (and if I know, I’m sure he knows) that election denialism turns off independent voters. Still, he said it, so Mark Kelly should run ads about it. Note well, also, that Mr. Masters will have a much tougher time “scrubbing” his remarks about privatizing Social Security, which exist on tape, and therefore the internet, and therefore forever.

BFD that more Pennsylvania Republican politicians have endorsed Democratic gubernatorial nominee Josh Shapiro, because Republican voters don’t listen to their “leaders” anymore, not when Dear Leader Trump (or his Chosen One, Doug Mastriano) speaks. These Republicans know that as surely as I do, and they also know that the more outspoken Republican support Mr. Shapiro gets, the more he’ll feel pressured to move rightward. I don’t even think these Republicans would be unhappy if Mr. Mastriano wins! In any case, I hope Mr. Shapiro understands that his high-profile Republican supporters don’t hold many cards here.

Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph now right-wingers are harassing children’s hospitals in at least five cities for supposedly performing gender-affirming surgery on trans teens which they’re not even doing. I’d say have they no shame?, but really, that ship sailed when they started calling everyone who opposed the Iraq war a “traitor.” Just imagine the worst thing a human being can do, and in a few short years (or months!) you’ll see a right-winger proudly doing it. I’m not even anxious to blame social media for spreading lies about children's hospitals, because assholes only care about setting other people off, and it doesn’t matter with what.

Finally, did I say just two days ago that maybe Mehmet Oz’s Senate campaign isn’t going as badly as we all think? Well, scratch that: Mr. Oz tells a radio interviewer, in re recent attacks on the health of his opponent, John Fetterman, that “(t)he campaign’s saying lots of things. My position is – I can only speak to what I’m saying.” Few Americans care about the difference between what dark money groups say and what candidates say, so they sure ain’t gonna care about the difference between what candidates say and what their own campaigns say. And if there really is a difference, then the candidate doesn’t know what he’s doing! It’s his own campaign! These Trumpholes always strut around when things go well and then act so powerless when they screw up; I’m sick of it.

Action: concerning corruption, phone justice, and the right to repair.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to ban stock-trading by Congressfolk and pass the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act and the Fair Repair 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.

Stand Up America helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban Congress from trading in stocks. Time was our Congressfolk avoided even the appearance of corruption, so afraid were they of the people’s wrath; the people’s wrath hasn’t exactly abated over the years, but politicians have gotten very good at two things: changing the definition of “corruption” so that it includes a whole lot less corruption, and redirecting their wrath at undeserving targets. So we need to bring back the America that punished political corruption, and banning Congressional stock trades would help that project immensely. Don’t believe the hype that Congressfolk know better and can police themselves. That kind of hype kills civilizations.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2489, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act. By now you know the drill: prisons contract with big telecoms to charge prisoners exorbitant rates for phone calls to their families, such that they hardly call their families, even though the science tells us that prisoners who regularly contact their families don’t go back to prison nearly as much as prisoners who don’t, or can’t. Why, it’s almost like that’s the whole idea! You see a prisoner, but a private prison sees dollar signs. The Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act would correct this injustice, so we should make Congress pass it.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4006/S. 3830, the Fair Repair Act, which would essentially enshrine the right to repair in our laws again. Too many corporations make their products essentially impossible to repair – except by themselves, at exorbitant prices! – and they claim the info you’d need to repair it is a “trade secret” or some such rubbish, but this is essentially an unfair trade practice, and the Fair Repair Act would force big corporations to make diagnostic, maintenance, and repair equipment and manuals available to independent repair shops. Presumably you recognize the evil the right to repair would fight: monopolization. So let’s fight that.

Action: concerning Medicare, insurrection, and abortion.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to strengthen Medicare instead of funding Medicare “Advantage” and investigate Sen. Ron Johnson’s role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and tell our FDA to make the abortion drug mifepristone widely available. 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 end the Medicare “Advantage” program once and for all. Medicare “Advantage” siphons off Medicare funding to private health insurers, which are more costly and tend to deny care at the most inopportune times, so what’s the “advantage”? It offers vision, dental, and hearing care, which Medicare doesn’t. Well, here’s a better idea: have our Medicare offer vision, dental, and hearing – at a lower cost than some private health insurance corporation trying to insure its executives all have gas in their yachts. Your big campaign donation-sucking Congressfolk won’t like your logic, but keep bringing it to them.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Sen. Ron Johnson’s role in trying to overturn the 2020 election results. He’s gotten himself in the soup lately with the news that his staffers tried to hand a slate of “alternate” (i.e., fake) electors to Vice President Pence. He denied knowing anything about that at first, but then he said, now that he’d had time to think about it, he did know about it and got the list of fake electors from Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) – who, of course, promptly said he hadn’t spoken to Sen. Johnson in at least a decade. Which doesn’t preclude the possibility that Mr. Kelly's office provided Sen. Johnson with the lists! But let’s find out, and then punish the wrongdoers.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell our FDA to lift restrictions on the abortion drug mifepristone, which our FDA declared safe during the first trimester of a pregnancy over 20 years ago, but still lists in its most restricted category – along with fentanyl, among others! – and that’s a move that must have been an effort to pander to the pro-life industry. But mifepristone is much safer than that – in fact, medical studies have long found it to be even safer than Tylenol, a drug nobody thinks twice about taking. Widely-available mifepristone may be the only way for women in red states to get abortions now, so we should help them get it, lest Republicans succeed in turning all of them into mere breeders.

Action: concerning the right to repair, Social Security, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to pass a right to repair bill, tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security, and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC. 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.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn PIRG helps you tell your PA state legislators to pass SB 998, a “right to repair” law which would force corporations that make “electronics and appliances that contain embedded software” to make “information and parts” available to “consumers and independent repair shops.” (All quoted passages are per SB 998’s memorandum.) The bill would also force corporations to “fully disclose any contract provision standing in the way of full repair and reuse,” and while I’d prefer to just make corporations stop “standing in the way of full repair and reuse” – which is a monopolistic practice, after all – this bill will improve matters and deserves to pass.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security benefits by $200/month, and raise the payroll tax ceiling so income over $250,000 can be taxed into the system to pay for it. With bankster Blake Masters actually running on privatizing Social Security in the Arizona Senate race, and with Sen. Lindsey Graham putting privatization on the table like anyone should run to him for advice, you know it’s just a matter of time before our “liberal” media start crying about Social Security running out of money like it never does. Better to get ahead of the drama by demanding more benefits and specifying how you’d (very easily) pay for them.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as our fifth FCC Commissioner. Of course we don’t expect Ms. Sohn, as one of the architects of net neutrality, to get any Republican votes – only Republican voters like net neutrality, not Republican politicians! But a few recalcitrant Democrats are saying they just don’t know whether to vote for her. I don’t know why this is such a hard decision for anyone to make. She had me at “one of the architects of net neutrality.” Apparently she had Joe Biden there, too, because he’s nominated her twice. So our Senators need to do their damn job.

Action: concerning Social Security, payday loans, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security and cap interest rates for all Americans, and tell big corporations to stop donating to Republican insurrectionists. 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 expand Social Security benefits by $200/month and pay for it by raising the payroll tax ceiling, so income over $250,000 can be taxed into the system. With Rep. Larson (D-CT) strangely uninterested in moving his Social Security 2100 Act through his own committee, Sens. Sanders (I-VT) and Warren (D-MA) and Rep. DeFazio (D-OR) have advanced this proposal, and though it leaves a donut hole of income between $147,000 and $250,000, this proposal will improve Social Security’s finances and let our seniors (which will one day include, ahem, all of us) enjoy a more dignified and secure retirement. It’d sure be better than privatizing it! As our stock market proves every time it takes a tumble.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5974/S. 2508, the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act, which would cap all consumer credit at 36%, because our laws cap consumer credit at 36% for our veterans. You see, getting the cap in there for veterans, was always a way of getting a cap on our law books (who would refuse help to vulnerable veterans, after all?), so that one day we could all get a cap, so no one has to suffer the 300% death spiral payday loan ever again. Now I’d make that cap a lot lower! And if I did, banksters could still make money, just not buy-their-own-Congressperson money. But passing this bill will get a cap for everyone, and that’s better than what we’ve got.

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell big corporations such as FedEx and Visa to stop shoveling big campaign donations to any Republican who votes against certifying the 2020 election. Because voting against certifying that election because of all of Donald Trump’s “stop the steal” rubbish makes those 147 Republican politicians the lowest of the low, and they don’t deserve any money, let alone the cush job they have obstructing things the American people tell them to do. Any of these “patriots” voting for Medicare drug price negotiation, for example? No, none of them are. And corporations shouldn’t give them money, particularly after saying they wouldn’t.

Action: concerning pollution, labor, corruption, conservation, and education.

Long story short: tell our EPA to enact vigorous cross-state pollution rules, tell Dollar General bosses to treat their workers fairly, tell New York’s Governor to keep the Manhattan D.A.’s moribund Trump investigation going, and tell our government to protect the Castner Mountain Range and move more vigorously against predatory for-profit colleges. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Penn Environment helps you tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous cross-state air pollution rule possible. I did not know they call this rule the "Good Neighbor Plan"! That’s actually pretty good messaging — which means, of course, that Democratic politicians just about never describe it that way! Nothing prevents us from describing it that way, of course — of describing states that limit the pollution that travels with the wind to other states as "good neighbors." And the politicians who would fight that rule, and doom kids in downwind states to higher levels of asthma and cancer? OK, I’d call them a lot of things, but "bad neighbors" would do.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Dollar General bosses to start paying their workers fairly and ensure they have safe workplaces. It’s not so damn much to ask! Especially since Dollar General’s CEO makes 934 times what the average Dollar General worker makes! And to those who'd say but what will happen to the low prices we all love at Dollar General? I would respond refer, again, to the CEO making 934 times what the average worker makes! Too many working folks worry about other working folks making "too much" money at their favorite shopping spots. They gotta fight the real enemy.

Daily Kos helps you tell New York Governor Hochul to transfer the now-dormant Manhattan D.A. office’s investigation into the Trump Organization either to the state Attorney General’s office or to another District Attorney within New York state. If the Trump axis pressured Alvin Bragg into abandoning the investigation, then the people need another weapon to hold the powerful accountable. Besides, state courts have already established that she has the legal authority to do it, so she ought to do it. It might help bring law and order back to our great nation.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell President Biden to designate the Castner Mountain Range around the El Paso area as a National Monument. The Castner Range has been a pretty good flood control tool over the years — what’s that? You haven’t heard of much flooding in that area? Well, now you know why! — and its proximity to the Franklin Mountains State Park means we’ll be able to protect a much larger area from pollution. And not for nothing, but the Castner Range is home to numerous sites of archaeological and religious significance to Native American folks; a big part of being conservative, it would seem to me, is conserving areas of historical importance, not rubber-stamping any and all development.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell the Biden Administration to move vigorously against predatory for-profits colleges. The Biden Administration has lately forgiven a few billion dollars in outstanding federally-banked loans used at Corinthian Colleges, and that’s a big deal, but there are other predatory for-profit colleges using federal loans to bilk college students, so our Administration has more work to do. Our government’s record on this hasn’t been good for over a decade now: the Obama Administration enabled too much of this crap, and the Trump Administration enabled far more of it; now we need justice.

Action: concerning voting rights, Medicare-for-All, corruption, Social Security, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to secure voting rights, enact a Medicare-for-All health insurance system, ban Congressional stock ownership, reject Andrew Biggs's nomination to our Social Security Advisory Board, and 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.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to protect our right to vote in America. Yeah, they've already refused to pass voting rights reform legislation several times -- or, more precisely, refused to get rid of the filibuster so they can pass it without Republican votes -- but that only means we keep telling them and telling them and telling them until they have no choice but to do our will. Best also to let them know that their love of the filibuster is horseshit. How do we know? Because they had a chance to enact a compromise -- force Senators to actually talk through their filibuster like in the old days -- and they wouldn't do that, either.

National Nurses United helps you tell your Senators to enact a Medicare-for-All health insurance system. Last week I described how Medicare for All would save good Americans money, but I should also describe how the privatized health insurance system costs us money: by putting up bureaucratic roadblocks to care that end up being rationalizations to deny care -- you think anyone in a single-payer country knows what a referral is? -- and also, of course, by jacking up the cost of medicine like (most famously) EpiPen and insulin. These are life-saving drugs, so big corporations can charge whatever they want, and you just have to pay it! Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to do that?

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6678/S. 3631, the Ban on Congressional Stock Ownership Act, which would prevent members of Congress from owning stocks. Back in February, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA), who has on occasion tried to cast herself as someone who's against all these stupid wars we fight, bought somewhere up to $15,000 of Lockheed Martin stock a mere two days before Russia invaded Ukraine, and I would think folks naive if they thought she did that blindly. And she's far from the worst offender in Congress! Now, this bill has actual bipartisan support, but isn't moving very quickly; couldn't be that they're hoping we don't know anything about it, could it? Too late!

Civic Shout helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of one Andrew Biggs to our Social Security Advisory Board. Why? Easy: no one who wants to privatize Social Security should serve on the board of Social Security. Why, putting him on the Social Security Advisory Board would be like putting insurrectionists on the January 6 Committee! You know, for "balance." Just as there is no possible "balance" between freedom and fascism, there is no possible "balance" between Social Security and those who'd privatize it. Every time the stock market dips from now on, just ask a Republican: aren't you glad we didn't privatize Social Security like you wanted to do?

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner already. How do we know she'd do a good job? You know, besides the fact that she worked on our FCC's net neutrality order from 2016? Because the Fraternal Order of Police (who asked them? Big money did!) has campaigned against Ms. Sohn for her support of end-to-end encryption; they're afraid end-to-end encryption will keep them from doing their jobs. Jesus Mary and Joseph all they need to do is get warrants! Encryption won't save criminals from warrants; it could save us from government spying, though. Seems to me we'd want more anti-spying people in our government.

Action: concerning labor, immigration, corruption, cluster bombs, and law and order.

Long story short: tell President Biden to do better by American workers, tell our government to roll back the notorious 287(g) program, tell state legislators to ban non-disclosure agreements between corporations and legislators, tell President Biden to stop our military's use of cluster bombs, tell the Manhattan D.A. to drop murder charges against Tracy McCarter, and tell our DOJ and USPS to investigate Louis DeJoy for corruption. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to use his lawful authority to expand worker power in America. How would he do this? He could raise the overtime floor so more good Americans can get time-and-a-half when they have to work more than 40 hours in a week; he can force federal contractors to give their workers adequate overtime, sick leave, and vacation time; he can issue new workplace safety standards to protect outdoor workers (like farm and construction workers) and warehouse workers, among other things. And he doesn't have to go to One True Great and Real Super-American President Joe Manchin for any of it -- he can just issue Executive Orders, which our laws allow in these matters, and walk away. And then his approvals might finally go back up! People like it when you do good works, after all.

The ACLU helps you tell our government to roll back the notorious 287(g) program, which nominally gives local law enforcement officers the job of federal immigration officials in an effort to combat crime, but which, in practice, leads to totally non-violent and non-criminal brown-skinned folks getting deported for busted taillights or driving without a license. So 287(g), as our government has practiced it the last five years, doesn't reduce crime and doesn't get rid of the "worst" undocumented immigrants! You would also have to ask why we always seem to be in an immigration "crisis" when we already have so many tools at our disposal, and you might have to conclude that right-wingers don't want to stop undocumented immigration, because then how would they create drama and hysteria? Hey, if I see it, I say it.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell state legislators to ban non-disclosure agreements (or NDAs) that legislators sign with corporations. Because it's profoundly undemocratic! Legislators are supposed to account to their constituents, and a non-disclosure agreement interferes with that. Naturally proponents of corporate NDAs say they "protect sensitive negotiations," but why are they sensitive in the first place? Because if you found out that, say, your Mayor was negotiating to outsource parking meters to a big corporation, you'd be mad? Because they were using your money in a way you'd never approve of if they made their deals in the light of day? Doesn't matter how nice people are when they defend these things; evil doesn't need a Snidely Whiplash mustache anymore.

Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to join the Convention on Cluster Munitions and thus ban the use of cluster bombs by our military. Because they're indiscriminate killing machines, that's why! And they don't just kill over large areas, they also kill over time, because a lot of them don't explode right away. Thus good Vietnamese still get injured, maimed, and killed by cluster bombs we dropped there 50 years ago. Hey, that war's been over since 1975; is it sane, moral, or decent that the Vietnam War still kills people? Think of what your life would be like if some enemy nation dropped cluster bombs in your county, and you never knew if one was going to blow you up on the way to Wawa or ShopRite or the movie theater. Sounds awful, doesn't it? So let's not unleash such horrors on other folks.

Color of Change helps you tell the Manhattan District Attorney to drop charges against Tracy McCarter, accused of murdering her ex-husband. Who repeatedly beat her up, and after she left him, which took guts, he got drunk and assaulted her, and she stabbed him to death in self-defense. Somehow the state refused to present a grand jury with evidence of her abuse, saying it wasn't "substantial enough," which is kind of a bass-ackwards way of admitting there was abuse and anyway shouldn't the jury have decided that if they were mulling charging her with murder? The new Manhattan D.A. even declared his support for Mr. McCarter on the campaign trail; guess what he's been doing since then? I mean, besides giving up on prosecuting Donald Trump. That's right, not a word from him about Ms. McCarter. We ought to try to change that.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Justice Department and U.S. Postal Service Inspector General to investigate Postmaster General DeJoy for personally profiting from the COVID tests our USPS delivered to households in January. Don't brook any silliness about he did some good, why shouldn't he personally profit from it? That is the mark of sickness, immorality, and decadence -- you're supposed to do the right thing because it's the right thing; if you benefit from it, how do you really know you're doing the right thing? I mean, anyone can cobble together a system of values based on what's gotten them goodies in the past; how about we put together a system of values that sustains and nourishes a civilization beyond what it does for us? Or is that old-fashioned?

Around the table: how an apology *should* sound! And other truths.

HHS Inspector General finds that private Medicare Advantage plans denied over 80,000 requests for pre-authorization of medical care in 2019, even though Medicare proper would have covered that care. Medicare Advantage also denied payment for claims nearly one-fifth of the time, even though (again) Medicare would have required payment. And how many people give up rather than challenge these denials? Think on all of that when you imagine that privatized Medicare is "better." Privatized Medicare is better for health insurance CEOs, but not for our seniors.

Former white supremacist Evan McLaren -- who, among other things, marched for the wrong side in Charlottesville in 2017 -- disavows his association with white supremacy in a statement published on Substack. We've been burned by others who "left" the movement only to still hate Jews, but Mr. McLaren's statement took my breath away, frankly; I'll quote the last paragraph in its entirety: "I apologize to everyone who was affected in any way by my past activities. The main purpose of this statement, however, is not to apologize. I do not realistically expect to repair my public reputation, to the extent that it meaningfully exists, or to heal rifts with people I have alienated. I don’t hope or expect to be forgiven. My only purpose here is that, on those occasions when someone happens to explore the Internet search results related to my name, they might also find this statement as an indication that, while I was a source of toxic energy and opinions in the past, I am at least not that anymore." Now that's an apology -- no ifs about it! Joe Rogan might do well to study it before his next screw-up.

From the "I Shouldn't Have to Explain This" file: no, California will not "legalize infanticide" by passing AB 2223, because "don't automatically investigate stillbirths" and "never, ever investigate stillbirths" are not the same thing. Of course the right-wingers who created this drama in the first place knew that; they were just hoping you didn't know that. Now you do, and you can move on to more important things, like making sure polluters and financial predators go to jail.

Nick Vachon wonders "Where Are All the 'Pro-Worker' Republicans Now?" after Amazon and Starbucks workers win organizing efforts, but of course he poses the question rhetorically: Marco Rubio's "support" for Amazon workers hinged entirely on Amazon's refusal to sell some of his favorite right-wing books. No, I'm not inferring here; he spelled that out! And I can't help but think he supported the Bessemer, AL Amazon workers because he suspected their effort would fail. I guess there's a limit to how much point-scoring Republicans will try to do against these "woke" corporations. And, frankly, Democrats are little better, what with their deep abiding love of white-collar workers and their utter cowardice in pushing populist (and popular!) solutions. I could help them with that.

Kevin Kuehn and Kevin King at The Conversation discuss teenagers' self-harming behavior and how to combat it. I wouldn't pay too much attention to recent teen self-harming data -- teens were in lockdown for a big chunk of 2020, after all -- but you won't be surprised to learn that "participants reported higher levels of distress right before they self-harmed or thought about suicide, and reported significantly reduced levels of distress immediately following." I mean, you wouldn't do it otherwise! I would suggest that self-harm gives at least some teens the illusion of control over situations over which they otherwise have very little or no control. Remedies for self-harm include more connection with more people (as with drug addicts) and validating feelings that prompt self-harming behavior without validating the behavior itself.

Finally, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) vows to investigate the "origins of COVID," which scientists have already determined, should Republicans win the Senate and he get a Committee Chair. Maybe he should concentrate on winning re-election first! If Charles Booker focuses on insulin prices and Ukraine policy -- two subjects he's discussed a lot already, and two areas where Rand Paul's weak -- Mr. Paul could be in for a big surprise. (No, the fact that Mr. Booker's a Black Lives Matter activist won't be a liability in the state that killed Breonna Taylor.)

Action: concerning law and order, pollution, labor, corruption, and privatization.

Long story short: tell Texas Gov. Abbott to grant Melissa Lucio clemency, tell Citigroup to get out of the Amazon rainforest, tell Verizon to recognize retail worker unions, tell our EPA to cut pollution from trucks and buses, tell our government to investigate Postmaster General DeJoy, and tell BlueTriton to stop taking the public's water. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first: Ultra Violet helps you tell Texas Governor Greg Abbott to grant Melissa Lucio clemency. A jury convicted Ms. Lucio of murdering her two year-old daughter in 2007, but, well, let's just say it's a bad sign for a verdict when five of the original jurors want a do-over because of evidence they didn't get to hear, evidence that included how thoroughly investigators coerced her to confess in the first place. I'm sure some folks would rather just adhere to the original verdict, not out of laziness but out of a sense that we've got rules, but I think they're misguided: one of the ways we protect our civilization is we make damn sure someone's guilty before we do something like kill them, since you can't really take that back. Erring on the side of innocence is a feature of civilization; too many folks think it's a bug.

Stand.Earth helps you tell Citigroup executives to stop funding oil drilling in the Amazon rainforest. Yes, that still happens, and not just because Jair Bolsonaro runs things in Brazil! But Citigroup executives meet today for their Annual General Meeting, so now's as good a time as any to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against them. They've funded oil drilling in the Amazon -- the world's best weapon against climate change, I feel compelled to restate -- to the tune of $40 billion over the years, which doesn't just mean pollution, but also means running roughshod over the rights of indigenous folks who live there. And yeah, it also means collaborating with the aforementioned irredeemable asshole whom I hope Brazilian voters will be able to turn out of office this year. Yeah, I said collaborating. As Rush Limbaugh used to say, words mean things.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg to recognize the Verizon retail workers' union in Washington state. Stop me if you've heard this before, but Verizon made over $4 billion in profits while cutting retail worker pay, which I guess is how they answer the question how do you think I got so rich? Verizon workers also suffer from the chronic understaffing and absurd scheduling practices that plague so many retail workers in America; could that be the reason Starbucks and Amazon workers are trying to unionize? Don't believe the hype that retail jobs are just unstable and workers should know that when they sign up. As if they have much of a choice! And anyway, calling misery "natural" betrays a profound lack of imagination.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to cut pollution from buses and semi-trucks. Again, throwing up your hands and saying they're big vehicles and they're just going to pollute! shows a profound lack of imagination. Semis and buses pump out a quarter of all pollution from vehicals despite comprising only five percent of all vehicles, and if they only get, say six miles to the gallon, wouldn't they be twice as clean if they got 12? This is the kind of imagination that makes good policy! You can't just sit there and say we'll never get them to get 50 miles to the gallon, so let's give up, but right-wingers want you to make that mistake non-stop, because then their paymasters (like big corporations that don't want to buy all new trucks) get everything they want. And why should they?

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Justice and United States Postal Service Inspector General to investigate Postmaster General Louis DeJoy for possible lawbreaking -- specifically, by holding onto investments in the corporation that just so happened to produce all those free COVID tests we got in the mail. No, it's not a matter of using your connections in the business world! For one thing, our government should have made the damn tests themselves, and for another thing, you're not supposed to personally benefit from the decisions you make on behalf of the public. I'm old enough to remember when public servants avoided the appearance of corruption; now they wave it in your face. Waving it in our face should get them punished, but it won't, unless we act.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell BlueTriton CEO Dean Metropoulos to stop taking public water from the drought-addled communities, or, indeed, any communities. BlueTriton, as you likely know by now, used to be Nestlé’s North American water stealing ahem bottling operation last year, but it's time we reminded the world there ain't no putting lipstick on that pig. And why should there be? Why should corporations get to siphon public water and then charge hundreds of times the amount they paid for the water? They call it "preserving a resource," but governments can do that. The most important thing here is that water doesn't go the way of health insurance, higher education, child care, and, hell, rent -- as an essential item that working families can't afford anymore.

Around the table: fighting the good fight, part 865.

You may want to see what some of your fellow Americans are telling our FTC and DOJ about how they want stronger antitrust enforcement. First off: in 2010, our FTC received 32 comments about antitrust enforcement rules; so far they've received over 100 times that amount! Second, a lot of these folks really know their stuff, and a lot of them have suffered serious abuse from their monopolist employers; after reading them, you will not be able to tolerate some corporate lobbyist telling you that most public comments come from people who don't know what they're talking about and only corporations really know what's going on.

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: a whistleblower informs us that privatized Medicare plans are stealing millions of dollars from Medicare (and therefore the taxpayer, i.e., you and I). You may not read anything that surprises you -- OK, the woman who got diagnosed with prostate cancer might surprise you -- but the "aggressive medical record coding" will likely strike you as a euphemism for "inventing diseases so one can overbill for treatment." Remember that if Republicans take control of Congress, they'll refuse to fund going after Medicare fraudsters because "we can't afford it," just like they did last time. Law and order!

Should I have anticipated that a propagandist would one day slap the word FAKE over real video footage of dead war victims, as Russia has done in its war on Ukraine? Maybe, but if I'd put a detail like that in a short story back in the day, my creative writing professor would have rapped my knuckles. If I'd put in details about TV talking heads describing the dead bodies as "actors" or people Ukrainians supposedly killed after the Russians left to make the Russians look bad -- or about the whole "fact-checking" organ that just regurgitates state propaganda -- he'd still have rapped my knuckles, though he might have at least applauded all the effort I put in. The way things are now, I wouldn't even write satire about any of that.

David W. Moore at FAIR advises us not to trust polls on Florida's notorious "Don't Say Gay" law, mainly because pollsters tend to give folks incomplete information about the law when they ask them about it, rather than simply asking them about it. They give really incomplete information about the law, too -- how many Americans would support it if they knew it actually restricted instruction about sex through 12th grade and forced school counselors to rat on kids who tell them they're gay to their parents? I suspect folks don't actually approve of those things regardless of how they feel about gay and trans students.

Ho hum, TV ad claims that illegal ballot harvesting delivered both of Georgia's U.S. Senate seats to Democrats in 2020 -- as a way of attacking incumbent Republican Governor Brian Kemp, whom they see as inadequate to the task of fighting "voter fraud." Even the notorious True the Vote, which lodged the ballot harvesting complaint to which the ad refers, would not say the ballots harvested were themselves fraudulent, but of course that's only because saying so absent evidence would invite a lawsuit they'd almost certainly lose. Still, that doesn't prevent the masturbatory rage machine from churning onward, which I think is the whole point anyway.

Finally, people will give you a lot of reasons Donald Trump endorsed J.D. Vance for the Republican nomination in the Ohio Senate race, but let me be the one to say: don't believe any of it! Donald Trump latched on to J.D. Vance because Mr. Vance was starting to gain ground on Josh Mandel in polls, and with the primary less than three weeks away, Mr. Trump didn't want to get left behind, or be seen endorsing a "loser." I especially don't believe that Mr. Trump was "soured" by the Josh Mandel/Mike Gibbons chest-to-chest moment; the only thing that would have "soured" him about it, I would think, would be that it didn't come to actual blows.

Around the table: containing rather less good news than yesterday (though not none).

Whizy Kim at Vox reminds us that although Google oligarch Eric Schmidt's funding of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy raises ethical concerns, we should also ask why we're not funding that Office with taxpayer money in the first place. I mean, if it works, we should fund it, and be invested not just financially but emotionally in the results. And certainly we should not run to a tech billionaire for money to fund an office that might help make policy affecting him; that isn't just corrupt, it's stupid. Personal to those who say WHEREZ TEH MONEYZ COMINGZ FROMZ!!!!!: it'd come from cracking down on Medicare fraud and rich tax evaders, letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, and raising taxes on millionaire income, just off the top of my head.

I suspect you won't be surprised to hear that the largest-ever ivermectin study found that ivermectin didn't reduce hospitalization or help folks heal any faster from COVID. And thus we are again reminded that the unique American hatred of bullshit also makes Americans more vulnerable to bullshit than we would be if we didn't simply declare anything we didn't like hearing to be bullshit. You know what else would help? If we didn't aspire to be rich above all other things! Because the effort you put into being rich means you put that much less effort into being wise. And wisdom will nourish you through hard times better than riches will.

Brakeyshia Samms at ITEP informs us that racial discrimination in home appraisals is finally getting attention from both the Biden Administration and Congress. You've heard stories, perhaps, of folks who suddenly get better appraisals once they've taken down their Frederick Douglass portraits? The problem is much, much worse than that -- homes in Black or Brown neighborhoods get under-appraised when it's time to sell and over-appraised when it's time to pay taxes, meaning Black and Brown families get slammed coming and going. Remember this when they tell you racism is dead because Thomas Sowell graduated magna cum laude from Harvard all those years ago.

Li Zhou expresses some skepticism that Biden executive actions can rescue Democrats during the midterms, and while I'm similarly skeptical about "energizing the base," I also think Biden executive actions could help if they were about things everyone supports action on, not just the base, and if you look through the CPC's list of (many more than!) 55 actions Mr. Biden could take, you'll see quite a few in there -- particularly those pertaining to reining in insulin prices! I don't think independent voters will spend a lot of time fussing about, say, whether government should have stepped in to make cheaper insulin or force corporations to do same; they'll say Biden did something, and they'll look less unkindly on other Democrats as a result.

And the hits just keep on coming for Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, as he appears to still own at least $100,000 of stock in the corporation that made all those COVID tests our Postal Service sent out. I know some folks will say c'mon, they got the tests out, didn't they? And they probably needed his connections! But America doesn't exactly have a shortage of "people with connections," and we have laws against conflicts of interest for good reason. And why isn't our government manufacturing COVID tests to begin with? I mean, right-wingers would throw tantrums about it, but we sure would have spent less money, and avoided the kinds of conflicts-of-interest that plague public-private "partnerships."

Finally, another day, another reminder that as inflation grips a nation, corporate profits reached yet another all-time high last year. They say the "free" market guarantees that if (hypothetically now!) supply chain issues happen, businesses will simply refuse to raise prices so they can keep their customers, but when you confront the fact that pre-tax corporate profits went up 25% while inflation went up 8%, you can clearly see that the "free" market ain't working. (If all corporations paid the full 21% tax rate, which, like, sure, that 25% number would only go down to 19.75%, which is still a lot higher than 8%.) Also, if you're ever at a street corner with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the "free" market, and the corporate-controlled market, you know which one to ask for directions, because the other three are figments of your imagination.

Around the table: from electric cars to nuclear fears.

Electric cars can't charge houses yet, but Seth Blumsack at The Conversation tells us it's just a matter of time. There are logistic obstacles -- car batteries have to be able to run electricity in both directions, and metering equipment would have to be able to shut off electricity from the grid when folks want to run the house on their cars (which they'd do in a blackout, of course, but also during more expensive peak hours) -- but they're not insurmountable. The bigger obstacle might be keeping the folks who don't have cars from paying more for electricity.

Hard to believe, Harry, but our IRS's privatized debt collection program isn't just bringing in only about half the revenue it expected, it's also underreporting its costs. But wait, there's more! About one in every five targets of this program lives below the poverty line; I don't know about you, but I'd go where the money actually is! This is the third go-round for privatized tax collection, and it didn't work the first two times, either; I'd understand if you said how many more times until they learn? Problem is they already know. P.J. O'Rourke, God rest him, used to say that Republicans aimed to prove government didn't work by running it into the ground.

Ralph Nader, writing at Counterpunch, points out that no Senators asked Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson any questions about corporate power. That includes very, very important questions a Justice will eventually have to rule upon, such as trade agreements' power to nullify American laws (via the notorious investor-state dispute settlement system). But while Republican Senators soiled themselves in public trying to "trap" Judge Jackson somehow, Democrats slip by without asking any really tough questions about the real threat to American freedom: untrammeled corporate power.

Former actual journalist Lara Logan has sunk to the point where she says, out loud, that Darwinism comes from the Jews. "I'm not saying none of it is true," she strains to point out as if we should be grateful for such generosity, "I'm just saying Darwin was hired by someone to come up with a theory -- based on evidence, OK, fine." And by "someone" she means the Rothchilds, who also (according to Rep. Greene) facilitated the creation of a space laser to cause California wildfires. I'm not sure we should call this an anti-Semitic "dog whistle," since everyone can hear it!

Oh crap "St. Louis beer heiress" Trudy Busch Valentine is running for the Democratic nomination in the Missouri U.S. Senate race. They must be thrilled that they can make people think about beer whenever they think about Democrats, but they're still clueless about the fact that people don't want heirs running things! Lucas Kunce merits only one mention in this article, which is better than the other nine ("at least"!) Democrats running for the seat who go nameless, but let's be clear: Lucas Kunce is the Democrat the establishment fears most -- because he's got the best shot at doing good works if he wins.

Finally, how absurd have the pro-Putin arguments gotten? Tucker Carlson suggests we need Vlad the Bad to stand between his nation's Muslim extremists and the nuclear weapons they might steal and fire on America! After all, there'll be "no one running the country" if he's not there! After all, when has a Russian leader ever succeeded another? This is a real Rube Goldberg contraption of an argument, but worse than that, it's hostage-taking -- don't wish for dictators to be powerless, he's saying, or America could die! It's the same kind of reasoning that puts "strongmen" in power in the first place! But we're not hostages -- we're free people.

Action: concerning Medicare, forever chemicals, border walls, war-mongers, methane emissions, and Fox News.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to end a Trump-era Medicare privatization scheme, tell fast-food corporations to get "forever chemicals" out of food wrappers, tell our government to abandon the "digital border wall," tell the Washington Post to stop publishing op-eds by aging war-mongers, tell our EPA to crack down on methane emissions from factory farms, and tell big corporate advertisers to abandon Fox News. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell the Biden Administration to end the Trump-era program that allows private insurers to pay for some Medicare patient care. Without telling them, I might add! C'mon, you know Donald Trump: if it were such a great idea, he'd never STFU about it! He surely wouldn't have hidden it! Sadly, the Biden Administration seems to be doing just that, having (after a public comment period that I'm sure didn't go well for them) renamed the DCE program (for "direct contracting entities") as ACO REACH, and yes that is an acronym. ACO REACH won't be as odious a program as DCE was, but as one observer said, "you don't slap a band-aid on a tumor and call it cured," and whatever they call it, DCE will remain the tumor that threatens to spread the cancer of privatization to all of Medicare.

Consumer Reports helps you tell fast-food corporations Arby's and Nathan's to commit to getting the PFAS chemicals out of their food wrapping. Doesn't matter that you just throw it out when you're done with it, because they don't call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals" for nothing -- you find them in just about everything anymore, they don't break down into safer elements, and scientists have linked them to cancer. And not for nothing, but the longer you let your cheese fries just sit in that wrapper, the more PFAS you'll likely have in your food. Chick-fil-A and Burger King have lately committed to getting the PFAS out of their food wrappers, following McDonald's and Wendy's; now Arby's and Nathan's need to follow suit, lest we one day get to the point where we can't get PFAS chemicals out of our products and our bodies.

Fight for the Future helps you tell our government to abandon plans to form a "digital border wall." That's got to be better than Donald Trump's vanity border wall, right? Not so much -- the "digital" wall relies partly on facial recognition technology, and as we know, facial recognition technology has the hardest time recognizing the non-white faces that would comprise the bulk of would-be immigrants to the U.S. Also, the "digital" border wall uses drones, which I'm sure will never turn on us. If we must have fewer immigrants to the United States, then we must do three things: 1) make all jobs in America good-paying jobs, 2) stop interfering with other nations' efforts to do same, and 3) stop letting corporations make all the decisions in America. That'll make wisdom and compassion much easier.

Win Without War helps you tell the Washington Post to stop running op-eds from discredited war-mongers. The news hook here? On the eve of the possible resuscitation of the Iran nuclear deal, Post ran a John Bolton op-ed, as if Mr. Bolton hadn't orchestrated its destruction by President Trump. Mr. Trump, for his part, delivered perhaps the only guilt-free laugh line of his Presidency the day he said if he'd listened to John Bolton we'd be on World War V by now! He also pushed that war in Iraq, and if you're thinking maybe we should let bygones be bygones after almost 20 years (!), just remember that no one who pushed that disaster paid for their evil works, which included smearing half of America as "traitors." "Forgive and forget" works in our personal lives, but it just enables politicians.

Food and Water Action helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to start cracking down on the climate change emissions coming from factory farms. This was a big joke to right-wing hotheads a decade ago, but farms pump out more than a third of all methane emissions in America, and not through flatulence but through industrial production. Joke'll be on them when they realize that our EPA can-so regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act, and can-so regulate it on factory farms. They won't do it, though, unless we tell them to do it, and given how much factory farms already get away with by threatening higher food prices, our EPA really won't want to do it, unless we get in their grills about it. And we may have to do it more than once, and we may have to do it in court.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Fox News. No, that's not "censorship"! Governments censor, but our First Amendment doesn't guarantee a "right" to be paid by advertisers, just as it doesn't confer protections against activism or criticism. Why, I'd call it "starving the beast," and if Fox News has to get by with MyPillow and Snuggy ads, that's just the churn of civilization. We don't have to tabulate every awful thing Fox News has ever done to deserve shame and shunning, I trust, though demonizing the half of Americans who opposed the Iraq war as "traitors" does stick in my mind. If you want to meet corporate executives halfway, though, I suppose you could tell them they should abandon Fox because Fox sucks up to Vlad the Bad, and that's a bad look these days.

Action: concerning taxes, gas prices, corruption, energy policy, public lands, and saving our Post Office some more.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, tax the windfall profits of oil and gas corporations, prohibit themselves from trading on the stock market, pass legislation promoting renewable energy, pass legislation protecting public lands and rivers, and confirm two USPS Board of Governors nominees so they can fire Postmaster General DeJoy. 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.

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion that put extra $250 and $300 monthly checks into working families' bank accounts. "Don't Take Away Our Monthly Checks," the petition's title reads, and sadly Congress has already done that, because Joe "the Penguin" Manchin said folks spent those checks on drugs, and no, I will neither forget nor forgive that evil lie. And he wonders why no one wants to talk to him these days! In real life, the CTC expansion helped good Americans buy groceries, clothes, and school supplies for their kids, and with so many good Americans still unemployed this time last year, it gave more than a few families breathing room. And now with inflation at almost 8%, wiping out the otherwise impressive gains workers have made in wages over the last year, we should bring it back.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall tax on oil and gas corporations. Gasoline prices have shot up, and big corporations use the Ukraine war as an excuse to do what they were going to do anyway, just as other corporations have used inflation as an excuse to drive other prices up, so we've got to discourage them somehow. Don't listen to your right-wing friends and neighbors when they whine that a windfall tax would "tax success," because, frankly, that demonstrates a very warped view of success. Scientists who develop new vaccines and teachers who help a generation do better are successes, but people who game themselves into a position to price-gouge a nation aren't successes -- they're parasites, and we should deal with them as such.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to prohibit themselves from trading or owning individual stocks. And why should they do that ha ha ha snort say the cynical, but they should do it because it clouds their decision-making and interferes with their oversight duties. If you've got a million bucks invested in a corporation that makes facial recognition software, how likely are you, really, to regulate their lousy racist technology the way you need to? Not likely, one would think. They get so pissy when you don't trust them, but it's not our job, as Americans, to trust them -- it's our job to make them do our will, and hold them accountable when they don't. Making sure they get rich sure doesn't do anything for their bosses, the people.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that makes renewable energy, not fossil fuels, the future of energy in America. The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently issued a rather dire assessment of what we're doing to our planet, but the Russian war on Ukraine has also, I would think, given a lot of good Americans pause about getting fossil fuels from other countries when we've got plenty of sun and wind here at home. Oh, some right-wingers do see this as an opportunity to make our government allow oil and gas drilling everywhere, but oil and gas ain't gonna be around forever, while the sun rises every morning and the wind always comes back. When they said always said oil and gas were more "dependable," they meant that oil and gas delivered executive pay dependably. We gotta do better.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a slew of bills that would help keep our public lands and rivers clean. It ain't just wildlife that depends on clean public lands and rivers, after all -- we depend on them, too, to provide clean water and to give us places to go and explore. And small businesses also depend on public lands and rivers, because folks who come to enjoy them need to buy stuff just like we all do. Do we think bait shops and canoeing services support any old pollution because "it's the price of a free market"? Hopefully we won't find too many big corporations convincing people that we've "gone too far" in protecting land and water from development, because once they pollute public lands and rivers, it's hard to bring them back to health. We should know by now that we're better off solving problems before they start.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell your Senators to confirm two more USPS Board of Governors appointees so they can fire our Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy. Getting the Postal Service Reform Act passed was important, but we've also got to get Mr. DeJoy out, not just for trying to hamper our Postal Service's ability to get votes where they needed to go, and not just for his allegedly corrupt dealings with former Board of Governors member Ron Bloom, whom President Biden sacked. Fact is, Mr. DeJoy has actually tried to convince everyone that slowing down the mail and charging more for worse service were good ideas, and not some sort of pretext to privatize our Post Office. They're bad ideas, in a can-do America that always finds a way. To deliver life-saving medications, I feel compelled to add.

Around the table: the stench of price-gouging is everywhere! And other sad truths.

Somewhat good news, everyone! Our Supreme Court has rejected pleas from Republicans to overturn state Supreme Court-ordered districting maps in both Pennsylvania and North Carolina. While consistent with Justice Alito's refusal to reconsider Pennsylvania state Supreme Court-drawn Congressional map in 2018, it's not good news that four of the nine Justices (including Mr. Alito, of course!) wanted to take the suits, and may want to limit state courts' jurisdiction over legislative redistricting. Even in states which give the courts a role in redistricting by law? I wouldn't put it past them.

Ho hum, gas prices are going up all over America, ostensibly because of Russia, but turns out we only buy 3% of our oil from Russia to begin with! So why are gas prices so high? The economist interviewed in the article makes fairly unconvincing arguments -- if Russia's imports to the Northeast were already down, why are New Jersey gas stations selling gas a few cents above the national average? We learned in 2005 that a state with major oil refineries (in Paulsboro and Elizabeth) shouldn't have that problem. I smell price-gouging here, just as a lot of us do almost everywhere else.

Read Stanislav Markus's explanation of why Russia's oligarchs -- targeted by Western sanctions over Russia's invasion of the Ukraine -- are "a Group of Men Who Won't Be Toppling Putin Anytime Soon" and you'll likely be quite depressed at all the post-Soviet corruption it describes, a matter about which right-wingers have never seemed terribly concerned. The 1990s and 2000s waves of privatization (first of parts of the Soviet state, then of public services) were so irredeemably corrupt it's heartbreaking; this is the same civilization that produced Tolstoy and Chekhov. Anyway, the oligarchs have a lot of money now but no power, by Mr. Putin's design, and the oligarchs who do speak out (Mr. Markus says there'll be more of them) don't play well together.

Idaho state Senate passes an anti-abortion bill modeled on Texas's notorious S.B. 8, though Idaho's bill narrows who can sue -- it specifically allows women who get abortions, the men who impregnated them, and their immediate family members to sue. That difference clearly represents an attempt to circumvent the obvious issue with the Texas law, which is the standing issue, and while I still don't see how a family can have standing to sue over another family member getting an abortion (particularly if they're not parents of a minor!), I can all too easily see the right-wing supermajority on our Supreme Court deciding this (and not the Mississippi or Texas laws) is the back-door abortion ban they've been looking for all their lives.

As I contemplate the way in which the Manhattan District Attorney's investigation into Donald Trump has, in the New York Times's words, "unraveled," I am reminded that rich folks just don't go to prison very often. I've argued with co-workers many times about this -- they see Donald Trump as someone who's so obviously bad at crime that surely anyone with eyes to see can see it. And they're right! He is pretty brazen and awful! But almost anything that happens during the course of an investigation creates an opportunity, and folks with money can exploit those opportunities better than the rest of us can imagine. Cyrus Vance's departure as Manhattan D.A., and his replacement by Alvin Bragg, created just such an opening. We may not learn what happened here until the historians take up the matter.

Finally, ITEP evaluates how much Rick Scott's Get Skinned by the Game plan will cost poorer working families across America. These folks already have "skin in the game" because they pay payroll taxes and Medicare taxes (not to mention state income taxes, property taxes, city wage taxes, and sales taxes), but ITEP's analysis provides even more fodder for Democrat attack ads, if they have the guts to run them. If Democrats were to air ITEP's finding that Mississippi residents could face 50 percent tax hikes under the Scott plan, they might even win a couple of races there. (Hate to pile on, but people's lives are not a "game." Only an irredeemable asshole like Rick Scott would call it a game.)

Action: concerning accountability, Russia, climate change, campaign finance, hunting trophies, and law and order

Long story short: tell our DOJ to investigate and possibly prosecute Donald Trump, tell fossil fuel corporations to abandon their Russian investments, tell our Transportation Department to release a promised climate-change reporting rule, tell state legislators to get private corporation campaign donations out of sheriffs' elections, tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to ban importation of hunting trophies, and tell President Biden to pardon non-violent marijuana offenders. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Common Cause helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate Donald Trump for attempting to subvert the will of the American people after winning the 2020 election. Late last week House January 6 panel lawyers alleged in a California federal court filing that Donald Trump and several of his allies committed crimes as part of their efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and if the January 6 panel has enough evidence to say that, then our Department of Justice has enough reason to hold Mr. Trump accountable. We witnessed a lot of these alleged crimes happening in real time, not just on January 6, of course, but also on January 2, during that alternately begging/threatening phone call to Georgia's Secretary of State. But a lot else happened in the dark, too, which is why we need to shine a light on it.

Sum of Us helps you tell French fossil fuel corporation TotalEnergies to quit investing in Russia, and also to quit fossil fuels. Yeah, it may not do the latter just because we say so, but it's more vulnerable to pressure on the former -- though it stands virtually alone among Western fossil fuel corporations in keeping its investments in Russia, saying that no sanctions have compelled them to divest thus far, and also suggesting that gas drilling is a more "realistic" option for getting off climate change. Set aside the fact that wherever gas drilling wells leak methane, they pack a bigger climate-change punch than coal. Switching to gas is the "reasonable" option only because that's their will to begin with! If they put their capital behind renewables, we'd see a lot more renewable energy right now.

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell Transportation Secretary Buttigieg to release the Biden Administration rule mandating measurement of climate change emissions from our national highway system. "Measurement," too, not mitigation! We've tried to get mitigation passed during the 2021 battles over the Biden agenda, with limited success. But the Trump Administration overturned this rule while in office because of course they did, while the Biden Administration has announced they'll reinstate it. Thing is, they haven't actually done that, hence our efforts to get more out of them than they've delivered thus far. They really ought to, since it could very well wind up in court one day, which never went well for Mr. Trump.

Color of Change helps you tell your state legislators to get private corporation campaign donations out of county sheriffs' elections. You know how politicians always tell you that campaign donations aren't bribes because they're not quid pro quo transactions and anyway of course you can rely on them to separate what's good for them from what's good for the public? They lie about all of that, of course, but county sheriffs have a much harder time lying all of that when some private prison corporation, or some real estate magnate, or some big telecom corporation, fills their campaign coffers. Gosh, what could these actors possibly want? Like, you know, land for a private prison, more arrests to fill those beds, usurious phone rates for prisoners? Win here, and we can one day win everywhere else.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to ban importing elephant trophies under the authority of the Endangered Species Act. Savanna elephants are endangered in Africa, which is, of course, where hunters go get their trophies, and maybe once upon a time we could argue that we must deploy trophy hunting as a necessary evil in regions where elephant populations have overrun human populations, but that time sure in hell ain't now, not when elephants all over Africa are in danger of disappearing in our lifetimes. And not for nothing, but if you've ever seen an elephant mourn its dead, you sure as hell wouldn't parade around your neighborhood with a bloody tusk shouting look what I did! The more we learn of our world, the more responsible we must be, but hey, civilization ain't easy.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell President Biden to pardon non-violent marijuana offenders. He campaigned on doing that, so he ought to start keeping that promise. There will be right-wingers who will say "you're not supposed to pardon people to further political ends." Go ahead and ask them how they felt about George H.W. Bush pardoning a slew of Iran-Contra participants or Bill Clinton pardoning big campaign donors or Donald Trump pardoning Steve Bannon, because those are all examples of "pardoning people to further political ends." Pardoning folks we shouldn't have jailed to begin with? That's just righting wrongs, which is something civilized people always do. And if folks want to call "righting wrongs" "political," then let them get caught with their cynicism hanging out.

Action: concerning Medicare, drug prices, trade waivers, pot sentences, and facial recognition.

Long story short: tell President Biden to end Medicare privatization, lower prescription drug prices, negotiate a more comprehensive TRIPS waiver at the WTO, pardon marijuana-related sentences, and get rid of the notorious ID.me facial recognition technology all across our federal government. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to end the Trump Administration's Medicare privatization scheme. Which was? Medicare paying Direct Contracting Entities (or DCEs) money to cover part of seniors' health care needs, instead of directly reimbursing providers as is the traditional method, and often not telling seniors they were getting care from a DCE instead of Medicare! But President Biden has apparently decided to rename the program instead of end it, even though we all know that no matter how much you promise "transparency" and "accountability," privatization programs always result in taxpayers paying more money for less service. So it's time to tell President Biden you don't approve of him going in the wrong direction on this matter.

Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to use Executive Actions to lower prescription drug prices for Americans. We asked Congress to lower drug prices yesterday, and today we're asking President Biden to do the same, and frankly asking one person to exercise their legal authority to lower drug prices does seem easier than asking 538 to pass decent legislation. And if right-wingers want to whine about "untrammeled executive power" in regards to drug prices everyone in America agrees are too high, then let them whine. The Biden Administration has many tools left at its disposal, from the frequently cited "march-in rights" afforded by the Bayh/Dole Act of 1980 to the "eminent domain for patents" successfully deployed by Tha Bush Mobb, of all Administrations, right after 9.11. So, no excuses.

Wondering how that whole TRIPS waiver thing at the WTO was going? Well, according to Sarah Lazare at In These Times, not as well as it could be -- the Biden Administration has apparently begun negotiating such a waiver by including only COVID-19 vaccines, and excluding tests and treatments. Actually getting the waiver done for COVID-19 vaccines would enable corporations all over the planet to manufacture generic versions of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and that's no small thing, but people are still going to get COVID, and thus the waiver should also cover antiviral treatments and rapid tests. Today you can call President Biden at 1.202.456.1111, but only between 11 am and 3 pm; you can also write him at the White House contact page here, and tell him to broaden the scope of a TRIPS waiver. He negotiates on our behalf, after all.

Progress America helps you tell President Biden to pardon and expunge non-violent marijuana convictions. Hey, he promised! I was a bit surprised to learn that, too, considering how anti-pot he's been his whole life, but hey, if you promise something, you ought to deliver it, even if (especially if!) right-wingers will demonize you for being "soft on crime." These right-wingers don't even care about crime! At all! How do I know? Because they have no righteous anger against banksters and polluters; when they think of criminals, they only see Black people. And having these convictions on your record keeps you from getting jobs, which makes it more likely you'll land up in jail again. So President Biden should get his pardon on regarding by far the least dangerous drug on Schedule I.

Finally, Dump ID.me helps you tell all branches of our federal government to dump the notorious ID.me facial recognition system. We successfully got our IRS to drop plans to use it this tax season, which yay us, but that leaves, basically, the rest of our government to work on, including our Veterans Administration, which uses ID.me and apparently works so poorly that our veterans and their families can't get emergency assistance or disability payments. That's not the good work you'd want to bring to the Pearly Gates! I mean, I could go on about all the wrongful arrests and wrongful denial of unemployment benefits that Black, brown and trans folks have to endure because of facial recognition technology, but maybe facial recognition technology costing you the money you've earned and need to make ends meet resonates a little more broadly.

Around the table: Republicans have an agenda! (Spoiler alert: it sucks.)

When I hear that women fight reactionary forces in Kuwait who call the mere presence of yoga classes an affront to Islam, I can't be too proud that at least American women can go to yoga classes largely unmolested, not least because American women still had to get their husbands' permission to get credit cards during my lifetime. These right-wing drama hounds may say they're "defending the daughters" of Kuwait, but American right-wingers sound no different, and I'm pretty sure they look at how much further Kuwaiti women have to go and wish they could start America from there! I wish the women of Kuwaiti luck, and how about the rest of us stop appeasing assholes?

Sanitation workers in San Diego County win a fairly substantial raise after going on strike for seven weeks with enthusiastic community support. Yes, even though they weren't getting their trash picked up, to the point where the city of Chula Vista actually declared a public health emergency. The new contract did not resolve many of the workers' grievances -- like poorly-maintained garbage trucks, that's a big one -- and I think it'll take many, many more strikes to get those issues resolved, because they don't actually work for the county government, but for Republic, a corporation that collects trash in 40 states and pays its CEO $12 million annually. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's yet another argument against privatization.

Jim Hightower describes "Corporate Profiteers' Pandemic Strategy" thusly: "Gouge Consumers and Blame Joe Biden." "What the GOP bemoans as America’s inflation problem," he writes, "is actually a corporate greed problem" (italics in original, I swear!) because "our economy doesn’t remotely resemble a competitive marketplace." You'll be familiar with the record-profits-but-still-raising-prices-story, but you may be less familiar with corporate monopoly's effects on small businesses, such as the cattle ranchers who get less money for their beef as meat processors charge consumers more. Read to the end so you can do something about all of this, versus just staying angry.

John F. Tooker at The Conversation warns us that we are overusing seeds coated with insecticides. Coating a seed with insecticide? What will they think of next? With neonicotinoid-coated seeds now being planted in just about all corn and cotton fields and about half of soybean fields, the answer to that question is, as always, "whatever allows big ag to hire fewer workers." Pretty soon nobody's going to have the money to buy food! Mr. Tooker isn't anti-neonic per se, but would prefer that farmers use integrated pest management, which I sure hope wouldn't involve introducing any more invasive species (after all, the spotted lanternfly is one of those species that makes neonics useful).

From the "Who Greenlighted This?" file: a bitcoin "mining" corporation rescues a Montana "zombie" coal plant which had operated on only 46 days in 2020, and perhaps not unexpectedly, the climate change emissions skyrocket. "This isn’t helping old ladies from freezing to death," one observer notes, "it’s to enrich a few people while destroying our climate for all of us." So how did Marathon get its gnarled hand around the Hardin plant? Oh, the usual way -- by promising JOBZ!!!! Though we read yesterday about how fossil fuel corporations' job promises typically fall well short. And while wind isn't the zero-sum game coal is, I'd prefer wind turbines power homes and businesses rather than speculative investments. No, I will not call it "currency," because it's not currency. Words mean things, after all.

Finally, Sen. Rick Scott (E-FL) releases an 11-point agenda for Republicans if they take back Congress in 2022, and most of it makes you realize that Mitch McConnell's refusal to issue any agenda makes him the brains of that outfit. I've already got the ad written: "Sir, what would Republicans do about inflation?" "We'll finish the border wall and name it after Trump!" "I see. So what would Republicans do about high prescription drug prices?" "We will make a law saying there are only two genders!" "Don't see how those relate; so what would Republicans do about paid family leave?" "We're going to take critical race theory out of the schools!" "OK, so family, schools, I guess -- what would Republicans do about corporate monopolies?" "We will make private corporations do everything government does!" "Uh huh. Oh, and what's this I hear about Republicans wanting to raise taxes on half of all Americans?"

Around the table: the plundering of public goods, and other evils.

Paul Rosenberg at Salon talks with Donald Cohen, co-author of The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back." You probably know the story pretty well by now -- how "efficiency" means "less service for you," for example -- so if you want to skip ahead to the "How We Can Fight Back" part: one, "debunk the idea that the private sector is always more efficient"; two, point out "the public things that are all around us," not just roads and streetlights, but also clean water, seat belts, and paint without lead; and three, demand more of our politicians than they're used to. My experience is they've lived so long on Easy Street they'll fold under mild pressure from the public. In the meantime, put the book on your Powell's wish list.

Surprise, surprise, Facebook is turning its "fact-checking" powers on memes and posts saying that corporate greed causes inflation. How long before water-makes-you-wet memes get similarly "fact-checked"? And while Agence France-Presse is the oldest state-owned news organ in the world, and a hell of a lot better than some of Facebook's other fact-checkers (cough The Daily Caller cough!), fact is Facebook didn't "correct" anything, but merely offered a counter-opinion and called it a fact. And now that they've done this, they're only helping to spread the corporate-greed-causes-inflation idea even more! You know, kind of like how Maus vaulted to the top of Amazon's best-seller list after that Tennessee school board banned it.

The expanded Child Tax Credit has been gone for almost two months now, and to no one's surprise, the monthly child poverty rate went from 12.1% in December to 17% in January. That's nearly 3.7 million more kids in poverty; put a face to any of them and then consider that Joe Manchin said (or, more likely, parroted what his big donors said) that people just spent their CTC money on drugs! This is just one more data point demolishing that notion -- I mean, if spending CTC money on drugs was that widespread, you wouldn't see child poverty go up almost five points in one month. When will our leaders get any better at leadership?

I'd love to think that yet another substantive investigation into the shaky ethics of Ryan Zinke while he was Secretary of the Interior could scuttle his chances of winning back a Montana House seat (Montana has two House seats now, so he wouldn't be winning back his old one per se), but Montana's state legislature has gerrymandered those two seats pretty well, and Democrats can always snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, as they're so good at doing. Still, I'm old enough to remember when the appearance of corruption ended careers; how about we go back to that?

When I hear that Rep. Billy Long (R-MO) is very, very upset that Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) didn't tell him he would endorse someone else for the 2022 open Senate seat, I'm compelled to say waaaaaaah. Rep. Long's long list of complaints (and his long list of "liberal" media outlets to which he's airing these complaints) can't be a good look to Republican primary voters. But Mr. Hawley's been shrewd here -- his endorsee, Rep. Vicki Hartzler, is a stealth Trumphole, not like Eric Greitens and Mark McCloskey, who are overt Trumpholes but who also have more formerly-closeted skeletons on the rampage. Lucas Kunce could beat her, but as I've said, Democrats are so good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory they'll jam someone "safer" down the throats of good Missourians.

Finally, Pennington, NJ Starbucks worker Sara Mughal describes "How We Turned the Tables On Starbucks Union-Busters." Long story short: Starbucks workers across the land talk with each other and compare notes, and at their mandatory anti-union propaganda meetings they bring a crap-ton of questions so that even the managers get exasperated with answering after a while. They're finding out what I found out a long time ago: our opponents don't have any good arguments! And once you figure that out, the only way they can beat you is to cheat, by, oh, hypothetically now, firing workers for trumped-up wrongdoings.

Action: concerning racism, voting rights, Medicare, defense spending, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell state legislatures to stop trying to erase Black history education, tell states to stop taking voting rights from felons, tell President Biden to end a Trump-era Medicare-privatization scheme, tell Google to stop working with our Pentagon on AI technology, and tell President Biden to cancel student loan debt and release the memo his office prepared on the matter. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell state legislatures to stop trying to "disappear" Black history from their schools' curricula, while People for the American Way helps you tell state legislatures to stop erasing the history of all historically-oppressed Americans. Go ahead and sign both! Now, I don't oppose a school board's right to determine curriculum for its students. Of course they have the right to do that! And we have the right to tell them they're doing it wrong if they're doing it wrong! And we also have the right to tell folks who think patriotism equals denying the evil we've done that patriotism acknowledges that evil, and then works to fight and defeat that evil. Hey, nobody said civilization was easy.

Common Cause helps you tell state legislators to stop taking voting rights away from felons merely because of their past felonies. Rights ain't rights if some folks don't have them! And taking voting rights away from felons, in a society that systematically targets Black and Brown folks, is racist, period, end of. Lately we've seen good folks go back to prison because they didn't know their past conviction made voting illegal for them, and the reason they didn't know? Because some states would rather just put you in jail than tell you you're doing something that could land you in jail! I mean, it sure looks that way. Generally we should err on the side of more people voting rather than fewer. And people who think otherwise know they'd lose a fair fight.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to end the pilot program that delivers Medicare recipients into private health insurance plans without their knowledge or consent. Yes, the Trump Administration really started such a thing, and while it often seems like they were just a bunch of Medicare-haters, they also saw an opportunity to please the banksters who back the Direct Care Entities (or DCEs) that take over part of a senior's medical care. Run that name through your tongue again. Direct care entities -- why take three words to say "carer"? And why use the word "entity," like it's some suddenly-sentient satellite from Star Trek? Because if they told you the truth about what they were doing, you wouldn't go along. And neither should the Biden Administration.

MoveOn helps you tell Google to stop entering into AI tech contracts with our Pentagon. Because they're going to use AI to kill people, that's why, and though our defense mavens will no doubt tell you that using AI will save soldiers' lives, anyone who read Philip K. Dick's "Second Variety" knows what's really going to happen: AI will take over and start killing anyone it likes, for its own damn reasons. And maybe Google shouldn't be putting its billions behind such madness; at least, that's what a large number of Google's employees seem to think. Besides which, I think the best way to save soldiers' lives is not to fight stupid wars. Have we fought any non-stupid wars lately? No, we have not. And if we fight in Iran and the Ukraine as some defense contractors want, that won't change.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to a) release the memo his office prepared detailing his power under the law to cancel student loan debt, and b) cancel the damn student loan debt. It would give breathing room to millions of good Americans who we told go to college so you can get a good job -- millions of Americans who learned they weren't going to realize that promise! President Biden campaigned on forgiving $10,000 per borrower, which ain't a whole lot, but it's something; now he's claiming he can't do that, and sitting on the document that may well say he can do more than that. Joe Biden can be short of compassion at times (as he can be with marijuana law, as well); let's see if we can help him be his best self here.

Action: concerning Congressional corruption, saving our Post Office, climate change, algorithms, and Supreme Court ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, the Postal Service Reform Act, the Future Generations Protection Act, the Algorithmic Accountability Act, and the Supreme Court Ethics 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.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act. This bill would prevent Congressfolk from trading almost any stock while in office, which makes sense -- even if your Congressfolk have no oversight power over the financial sector, they probably have oversight power over another economic sector, and folks trade stocks in pretty much any sector. And n.b. Sen. Burr's massive health care stock sell-off not long after he received an early 2020 briefing revealing how bad the COVID pandemic would be -- at the same time he told his constituents not to worry too much about it! And we don't just note hypocrisy here; how many of his constituents stood pat on their portfolios because of his public advice, while he made over $1 million on more inside info?

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076, the Postal Service Reform Act. The "big," "bold" "entrepreneur" Donald Trump installed as Postmaster General thinks the solution to our Postal Service's troubles is, get this, higher prices and worse service! That'll thrill you to death if you're relying on the mail for your insulin! Of course, his true aim is to privatize our Postal Service, so that prices can be even higher and services can be even worse, but he and his CEO buddies can rake in the dough! The Postal Service Reform Act can help stop this, by removing the yoke Congress placed on its back in 2006, the one that requires our Postal Service to prefund retiree benefits almost a century in advance. Our Postal Service is ours, and we gotta take it back.

Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6168, the Future Generations Protection Act. I'm sure a lot of right-wingers would read H.R. 6168 and declare it "radical," but then they call any necessary act "radical," as part of their program of preventing you from doing anything to make our world better, and preventing new electric plants from emitting greenhouse gases, banning fracking on land and offshore, and banning exports of most domestically-produced oil or gas are all pretty good ideas. Take fracking, for example: is clean water or cheap energy more important? The answer's obvious, but this is America, so we don't even need to pick one or the other if we move to solar and wind. The "problem," I guess, is that gas makes executives richer, but that's a bad reason to make big decisions.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6580, the Algorithmic Accountability Act. This bill would direct our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to regulate "automated decision systems" and the like that big corporations use so they can hire fewer workers and so leaders can evade accountability for their decisions. Oh, sorry, said the quiet part out loud again! Seriously, the bill would require our FTC to oversee a wide range of algorithm-made or algorithm-assisted decisions, with hiring, education, energy bills, health care, and financial services being just a few of them. And yes this is within our FTC's purview! Denying someone a loan or rejecting a job application because computer said no are absolutely matters of trade! They're also matters of morality, of course -- at least, to civilized people.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4766/S. 2512, the Supreme Court Ethics Act, which would impose an ethical code of conduct on our nine Supreme Court Justices, currently the only federal judges who are not covered by such a code. We must not have thought we needed it in the past! After all, these were the best of the best! But we don't think that anymore, more than half having been appointed by men obviously unfit to be President. We also don't think that because Justices Thomas and Barrett have failed to recuse themselves from obvious conflicts-of-interest over the past year. And boy, do Supreme Court Justices blow a gasket when you point out things like this to them! They forget that even though they get appointed by our President to lifetime jobs, they still serve the American people.

Around the table: monopolies still suck, and other truisms.

You know those "parent" groups opposing masks and critical race theory? The chances of them being funded by big dark money groups is actually pretty good. So the next time we see someone who's "just a mom" or "just a dad" getting up and acting all spastic about "kids wearing diapers on their faces," we'd do well to assume some rich school-privatizer might be behind them. And remember that school boards are representative bodies, aiming to, you know, represent parents' will, not give individual, very loud parents all the say about everything. A lot of folks on the right say they just want a voice in the public square when they really want to be the only voice in the public square.

When you confront the awful history of how consolidated farming has become over the last 70 years, you may well be tempted to ask: is there any area where monopolies don't make everything worse? And the answer would be no, there is no area. You may also be tempted to ask what kind of monster looks at a lot of folks farming and call that an "inefficiency" when, really, everyone should be farming. That's not one of the solutions author Zoe Pharo presents, but the others -- among them stopping big ag mergers and creating land trusts -- would do us all some good. Because no one will sit around a campfire one day saying we may not be able to raise crops anymore, but at least food was cheaper for a while, and a few corporate executives got richer!

So why do leisure/hospitality workers seem to be quitting their jobs more than anyone else? Because they get paid in dung pellets, they usually work on nights and weekends, and they constantly have to be nice to everyone, for starters. Now add in the COVID pandemic and its layoffs and furloughs, and having to fight (sometimes physically!) with customers who won't wear masks or get vaccines because they're so much better than the rest of us, and you've got a pretty toxic stew, there. A lot of folks in hospitality go on to get more education (and thus more debt, I fear) or go to work for themselves, which we all ought to do anyway and I wish them luck with that.

Ho hum, our "liberal" media can't stop talking about crime, and can't stop cherrypicking crime stats so we all talk about crime, too. This, even though also this "spike in murders" over the last two years still doesn't meet the standard set by murders between 1970 and 1996, and the answer can't always be "more cops" -- as if "cops" are mere tools we can throw at a problem, and anyway it ought to be "more cops who walk beats," at the very least. And the "awful lot of 'could have's, 'may have's and 'possibly's" author Julie Hollar finds in these arguments just so happen to resemble the could-haves, may-haves, and possiblys you see in right-wing arguments linking immigration with terrorism. Also too, murder is one crime; how are we doing with all the others? Oh, right, all those crime rates have gone down.

Finally, Turkish President/real peach of a man Recep Tayyip Erdogan, confronted with a 36% inflation rate, fired the head of Turkey's statistics agency. Well, I can't wait to see what next month's inflation numbers look like! Seriously, I can think of one guy at Mar-a-Lago who witnessed this and seethed with jealousy, though of course if he becomes President again, he'll do it just so he can declare he single-handedly killed inflation. (The article also tabulates Mr. Erdogan's other recent civil service firings, which I'm sure also makes Mr. Trump jealous.)

Action: concerning Congressional intransigence, bad media, free tax preparation, and pollution.

Long story short: tell President Biden to get with the Executive Orders already, tell all the other cable corporations to keep OAN out of their lineups, tell Spotify to eject Joe Rogan from its service, tell our IRS to make tax filing free for all Americans, and tell the Biden Administration to protect the Chaco Canyon area from fossil fuel drilling. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell President Biden to make 2022 "the year of Executive actions." Sure, right-wingers will cry tyranny whenever he does something the law already allows him to do, but right-wingers cry tyranny every time a liberal disagrees with them, and do they remember our last President? The one who openly admired dictators and constantly joked about how he wished he had their powers? Anyway, the federal firefighters now making $15/hour won't consider their raises an example of "tyranny," and if good Americans can get cheaper prescription drugs and cleaner air and less student loan debt, they won't bemoan that we didn't wait until we got permission from Joe Manchin to get it done, either. Seriously, do good works and people will appreciate it.

You've heard that DirecTV is kicking the nefarious One America News Network (or OAN, or OANN, who cares?) off its lineup this spring, so now MoveOn helps you call Verizon at 1.844.329.6087 and tell them to do the same, and MoveOn also helps you find phone numbers for corporations like Xfinity, Dish, and Spectrum at this website, so you can tell them to keep OAN out of their lineups. OAN doesn't have a constitutional right to a place in cable corporation offerings, for many reasons: 1) it's a thing, and things don't have rights, 2) if OAN were a person, our First Amendment would only protect it from our government -- not from employers, not from customers, and not from activists. When we hear that OAN might not be able to promulgate more 2020 election lies without DirecTV's support, all we can say is: we can only hope!

UltraViolet helps you tell Spotify to get rid of the so-called "Joe Rogan Experience" already. Mr. Rogan's anti-vax nonsense no doubt violates Spotify's own ban on COVID misinformation, but he's also a franchise dealer of other kinds of bullshit, among them white supremacy, xenophobia, and transphobia. Mr. Rogan no doubt imagines himself a free speech martyr, all while trying to deflect criticism by suggesting you shouldn't really take him all that seriously, and no doubt he also imagines that anyone who disagrees with him is trying to censor him; all I can say about all of that is, yes, I also remember being a hormone-addled 15-year-old boy who aspired to the purest cynicism. But I became a man, and put away childish things. And we have no obligation, as a civilization, to enable those who don't -- let alone pay them $100 million a year.

Demand Progress helps you tell our government to offer tax-filing services for free, for everyone. It does seem more than a little absurd that in the richest nation on Earth you generally pay someone to do your taxes, does it not? Actually, our laws obligate our IRS to provide a free tax filing option -- but for the last 20 years our IRS has, er, partnered with private tax prep corporations Intel (which owns TurboTax) and H&R Block, which have, for their part, gone very far out of their way to obscure their free tax prep services even from Google searches. Both corporations have lately dropped out of this program, so what's the holdup? Is our IRS looking for yet another private tax prep corporation to do their job for them? Don't they get that privatization, including "public-private partnerships," means higher prices?

Finally, Pew Environmental Trusts helps you tell Interior Secretary Haaland to protect New Mexico's Chaco Canyon area from gas and oil drilling. The Biden Administration has lately advanced a fairly solid proposal for the Chaco area that would ban new oil and gas drilling leases on all public lands within a ten-mile radius of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico for the next 20 years, a ban praised by the All Pueblo Council of Governors, which represents 20 Pueblo nations in Texas and New Mexico. Of course, at my age, 20-year bans don't seem so imposing anymore -- the 20-year moratorium former Interior Secretary Salazar imposed on uranium mining in the Grand Canyon area is now more than halfway over -- but a 20-year ban can more easily turn into a permanent ban than, say, a zero-year ban. And renewables have gotten a lot cheaper over the last 20 years.

UPDATE. Common Cause also helps you tell AT&T to cut all ties with One America News. AT&T owns about two-thirds of DirecTV, but AT&T money put OAN on the map in the first place, so let's, as they say, starve the beast.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, public water, tax cuts for working families, the war on Yemen, and women's health.

Long story short: tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to reject pro-gerrymandering bills and pass an anti-privatization bill, tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, tell President Biden to get us out of the war on Yemen for-real for-real, and tell your Senators to pass the Women's Health Protection 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.

First things first. Pennsylvania residents, take note: Fair Districts PA advises that you call your state legislators and tell them to reject both HB 38 and HB 2207. We've dealt with HB 38 before; it would make state judicial elections regional, which is essentially a way of gerrymandering state judicial elections, and given that our state Supreme Court consists of mostly Democrats at this moment, it wouldn't be untoward to call HB 38 a sore loser bill. For that matter, calling HB 2207 the same wouldn't be untoward; HB 2207 would replace the state's current, relatively objective redistricting commission with a brand new commission more beholden to the political party in control of the state legislature, which just so happens to be the Republicans. I call this a sore loser bill because Republicans lost to the express will of virtually every good Pennsylvanian that gerrymandering sucks and the politicians need to stop doing it. That's why we need to keep communicating our will.

Staying in the Keystone State, Sum of Us helps you tell your PA state legislator to vote "yea" on HB 527, a bill that would make privatizing public water in Pennsylvania much, much harder. Let me be the bajillionth person to tell you that my water bill has gone up noticeably since I went from a public water system to a privatized one. They say privatizing public works saves the public money, but no one who actually pays a bill believes that rubbish. Mainly privatization allows certain corporate executives to make more money without getting the necessary oversight by our government, which means it's what? That's right, it's yet another scheme that redistributes your hard-earned money upward. The politicians will keep doing that again and again and again, unless we step up and say no. It's that simple.

Today's also as good a day as any to call your Congressfolk and tell them to reinstate the expired Child Tax Credit expansion, which put $250 and $300 checks in the bank accounts of working families for the last six months of 2021. I haven't said this enough, but those checks were per child, meaning a single mom with four children could get as much as $1200 extra per month. So what do people use that money for? According to its recipients, they used it to buy groceries, pay the bills, buy clothes, buy school supplies, and the like. But according to the Penguin, who helped Republicans kill the expansion last month, they used it on drugs! Maybe some moms should show up at Joe Manchin's yacht with their kids in tow so he can explain to them why he blocked extending the CTC expansion!

Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to end all American support for the ongoing Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Mr. Biden has made a lot of positive noises about ending our involvement in Yemen, but hasn't taken a whole lot of positive action, which is a lot more important. We're still giving the effort our intelligence and our logistical support, which shouldn't ease the conscience of anyone who's taking part in these efforts, and we're still selling weapons which wind up getting used there. This war, you'll recall, has pushed Yemen to the brink of famine and deprived us of some of the world's best fighters against al-Qaeda, and Congress has authorized none of that. And can you understand the arcane reasons the Saudi/UAE coalition is waging war on Yemen in the first place? If so, you may be the only one!

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. You may have noticed that not one but two cases currently before our Supreme Court could result in our Court overturning the Roe v. Wade ruling that prevents states from making abortion illegal. No, don't count on Chief Justice Roberts to swing enough justices in the direction of "precedent" and "settled law"; he's more likely been waiting for a big enough right-wing majority on the Court to come along so he can get his way and still look like a precedent-respecting jurist. We can avoid all this drama if our Senate passes the Women's Health Protection Act and enshrines abortion protections in federal law. Nobody wants to see a fetus aborted, but the alternative is turning women into breeders again, and we can't accept that.

Action: concerning Build Back Better, worker rights, drilling near neighborhoods, probation "reform," and prosecuting Bolsonaro.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass a vigorous Build Back Better Act, tell Kellogg's and Starbucks to give their workers fair contracts, tell California to prohibit oil and gas drilling in neighborhoods, tell Pennsylvania state legislators to reject a probation-related bill, and tell the International Criminal Court to prosecute Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. 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 up: let's call our Senators and tell them to pass the Build Back Better Act more or less as the House passed it -- plus let's make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, roll back the Trump tax cuts on corporations and on the top tax bracket, limit SALT repeal to workers making less than $400,000, and let Medicare negotiate drug prices on all its drugs. And enough of inflation as a fear stick! "Government spending more" does not mean "more inflation," no matter how much right-wingers want you to think so! You know what's driving inflation? Corporations charging you more! And brook no BS about "how much the bill will really cost" or whatever rubbish report Sen. Graham cajoled our CBO into creating. Joe Manchin is not stupid enough to "fall for this" -- more likely, they're all acting out the drama that'll enable him to vote against the bill. West Virginia residents can counter this by calling Sen. Manchin and communicating their will. Telling him they're on to the drama wouldn't hurt.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Kellogg's to give their striking workers a fair contract or else you'll continue to boycott their products. They're hiring permanent replacement workers as we speak, but that doesn't mean we should concede defeat, and anyway those replacement workers sure are in for a shock! Kellogg's actual workers are striking right now partly because of the notorious two-tiered salary system one could say is designed to pit worker against worker, but also because of 16-hour work days and forced overtime. Kellogg's last contract offer (which workers overwhelmingly rejected) purported to address the two-tier system, but would only allow 3% of workers at each plant to ascend to the top pay tier annually, meaning workers would have to wait nine years to get the pay they deserve! Keep that in mind when Kellogg's rolls out its propaganda about all the pay increases they offered.

More Perfect Union also helps you tell Starbucks to negotiate fair contracts with its workers in Buffalo who have voted to join a union. Nobody's worried that Starbucks coffees will be too expensive if Starbucks treats its workers fairly, are they? Because that is to laugh! Admittedly today's CEOs are so clueless they might well put that line out, but I've been at so many Starbucks branches that don't hire enough workers to handle the volume, plus Starbucks messes with its workers' schedules just as much as any other non-union corporation. It's well past time we recognized that work is work, that no worker is "worthless" merely because they work a service job. Unions should have led us in this direction a long time ago, frankly! But the time to do the right thing is always now.

Vision CA helps you tell the government of California to stop oil and gas corporations from drilling where good folks live. Gov. Newsom has proposed a 3,200 foot setback for drilling -- meaning corporations couldn't drill within 3,200 feet of homes, schools, and hospitals -- but only to new drilling wells; you would want existing wells to obey the 3,200 foot rule, too, right? After all, they pollute just as much, if not more, than new wells. This is an instance where "grandfathering" bad wells in will hurt people. Also, you'll urge California to ban new permits within setbacks until the rule takes effect, which will have the effect of getting drilling corporations used to the ban, since we care so much about their feelings these days. More important, of course, are the good citizens of California who deserve clean air and clean water.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the ACLU helps you tell your state Senators to reject SB 913, a probation "reform" bill that will, in the ACLU's words, "trade one bad system for another." SB 913 would, on balance, make it easier for folks on probation to get sent to jail, when the whole reason behind probation is to offer an alternative to putting everyone in jail, plus it would make it easier for poor people to be sent to jail, by keeping people on probation indefinitely if they haven't paid restitution. If the words can't do the time, don't do the crimehave formed on your lips, I would hope you'd say that to corporate criminals if you say it to the imaginary Black folks in your head, and besides, keeping people on probation forever until they've paid a fine is a very good way of tripping people up so they go back to jail again, which would be a private prison corporation's wet dream. And they already have too many of their dreams realized at our expense.

Finally, Avaaz helps you tell the International Criminal Court to open a prosecution against Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, not necessarily for all of the awful stuff he's done (a Brazilian Senate committee recommended he be indicted over his mishandling of the COVID pandemic), but particularly for his actions against the Amazon and against the indigenous folks who defend it. The Amazon has lost the equivalent of 3,000 football fields per day during his nefarious rule, and he has encouraged a lot of illegal logging and mining in the Amazon, plus violence against the good folks who live there, all of which may well meet the ICC's "crimes against humanity" standard, particularly when you consider that the Amazon rain forest would be the world's best defense against climate change if we'd just leave it the hell alone. Treating the world like your personal piggy bank should have consequences, but it won't if we don't demand it.

Action: concerning our Postal Service, net neutrality, fair regulation, protecting our democracy, and marijuana legalization.

Long story short: tell your Senators to confirm USPS Board of Governors nominees who will save our Postal Service from Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and confirm President Biden's FCC Commissioner nominees, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Corporate Capture Act, the Protecting Our Democracy Act, and the MORE 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.

Progress America helps you tell your Senators to confirm USPS Board of Governors nominees who will protect our Post Office from its Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy. Who tried to sabotage the 2020 election, as you recall, and who has lately increased prices while cutting service as his "bold" plan to "save" our Post Office, and that sure ain't helping out anyone who gets their life-saving medications through the mail. President Biden hasn't nominated new USPS Governors, but we may as well put our Senators on notice that they work for us -- a fact we need to remind them of fairly frequently! -- and they're supposed to do our will. They're not supposed to put our Postal Service on a path to privatization, because only a few crony corporations want that, and they're not supposed to get all the say about everything in America.

Battle for the Net helps you tell your Senators to confirm both of President Biden's FCC Commissioner nominees. Our Senate Commerce Committee has moved Jessica Rosenworcel's nomination out of committee, but stalled on Gigi Sohn, as at least two Republican Senators, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, have put holds on her nomination because she's "too pro-net neutrality." If Messrs. Tillis and Sullivan actually listened to their constituents, they would confirm Ms. Sohn precisely because she's pro-net neutrality, net neutrality being one of the few issues that actually unites conservatives and liberals. As long as they're only going to listen to big corporations -- literally the only possible "constituents" they might have that oppose net neutrality -- then we're just going to have to be louder.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6107, the Stop Corporate Capture Act. What would the Stop Corporate Capture Act do? It would streamline our regulatory processes by a) keeping out corporate-financed "scientific" studies that aim to undermine clean air, clean water, and product safety regulations, and b) require our government to consider societal benefits a bit more broadly when crafting regulations. Too often Congress gives corporations too much of a say over regulations that are supposed to benefit all of us, not just them, hence the madness over "cost-benefit analyses" that tabulate how much money a regulation will cost a corporation, rather than how much a regulation will help all of us. The Stop Corporate Capture Act will strike a blow against all that, so we should demand it.

Public Citizen also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act. You remember Donald Trump, right? Pretty much a walking advertisement for How to Abuse Presidential Power, amirite? Well, the Protecting Our Democracy Act would right a lot of his wrongs by strengthening Congressional subpoena power, giving whistleblowers more protection against retaliation, and restraining Presidents from abusing their pardon power. The bill would also restrict Presidential emergency declaration power, require Presidential candidates to release a decade's worth of tax returns, and prevent Presidents from profiting from being in office. Certainly the Protecting Our Democracy Act represents an effort to learn from our recent mistakes, and we should encourage that.

Finally, the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3617, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act. The bill would not only remove marijuana from our federal Schedule I, which would essentially make pot legal across the land, and it would expunge previous pot convictions and reinvest in communities harmed by the notorious "war on drugs," which has largely become a war on Black and Brown folks. Hey, the Man's gotta keep them down somehow -- the Man can't always stop them from voting no matter how hard he tries! Pot legalization is yet another issue that, these days, actually unites conservatives and liberals -- the only folks who really want to keep pot illegal are the folks who are already in a state of rage about everything, and they already get too much say in how we run America.

Action: concerning Medicare, methane emissions, pensions, "forever chemicals," Arctic drilling, and "sacrifice zones."

Long story short: tell our government to abandon a long-term plan to privatize Medicare, tell our EPA to cut methane emissions in the most vigorous way possible, tell our Department of Labor to help protect pension plans from climate change, tell REI to get PFAS chemicals out of their products, tell the Biden Administration to reject the proposed Willow drilling project in Alaska and stop a massive drilling lease in Alaska's Cook Inlet, and tell our EPA to stop corporations from using working-class neighborhoods as their dumping grounds. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to scuttle a Trump-era plan to privatize Medicare. This would be the "Direct Contracting" plan, which allows Medicare to assign seniors to private health care plans managed by private corporations and insurers, even if the senior signed up for traditional public Medicare. In other words, Donald Trump told seniors that what they want doesn't matter, which should ring a bell. The fact that the Biden Administration hasn't thrown this program in the trash where it belongs means either they haven't gotten around to cleaning up that particular corner of the Augean stables or they secretly hope nobody notices it. If it's the latter, well, too late! And if enough of us speak out, Medicare will have no choice but to scuttle the program.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to issue the strongest methane emissions-cutting rule possible. We have many good reasons to cut methane emissions -- methane emissions pack a much bigger climate change punch than coal emissions do, methane emissions also represent lost usable energy, and on public lands methane emissions also represent lost royalties for the taxpayer. Also, you know, air pollution; you're going to be breathing the air all your life, after all, and there'll be no gated community to run to if we can't breathe the air. You'll also ask our EPA to ensure that the rule includes older gas and oil drilling plants; too many of the biggest polluters get "grandfathered" out of anti-pollution regulations. Word on the street is the EPA's rule is pretty good, but we've still gotta fight.

The Environmental Defense Fund also helps you tell our Department of Labor to approve a proposed rule to allow retirement funds to take climate change into account when making their decisions. After all, if you don't have a planet to live on, all your 401(k) money won't mean a thing! And the Labor proposal also reflects a reality too often overlooked (or, perhaps more precisely, "overlooked") by our "liberal" media -- that solar and wind have achieved parity of cost with fossil fuels more and more over the years, and sane investors wouldn't want to be caught with all their money in dying industries. Usually that's the thing you don't see until it's too late -- especially when you're obsessed with investing in "stuff that has worked for a long time." And a lot of stuff that has worked for a long time still works! But you've also got to know when to jump ship, and now's the time.

Consumer Reports helps you tell outdoor gear corporation REI to get the PFAS chemicals -- that's right, the "forever chemicals" -- out of their products. My guess is that REI would find that challenging, what with all the PFAS in their jackets and boots and tents and such, but tough toodles, because Americans deserve corporations that can change with the times. America certainly deserves corporations that live up to their "we're so green" PR, and REI certainly pumps out plenty of that. And you can probably recite this from memory by now, but PFAS chemicals are everywhere, and they don't break down, and they easily find their way into our bodies and wreak all kinds of health care havoc there. Getting the PFAS out of even one corner of one industry would be, as a famous philosopher has said, a BFD. So let's help make that happen.

The Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell the Biden Administration to keep ConocoPhillips's notorious Willow project from moving forward, while the Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell the Biden Administration to scuttle plans to offer over a million acres from Cook's Inlet to gas and oil drilling corporations. The American people hardly ever make any money from those sales anyway, given how much say big corporations have in the royalty rates to begin with! And both of these projects will pollute the hell out of Alaska, a land about which we don't know nearly enough to go fiddling about with new drilling projects. Remember when George H.W. Bush said the caribou like the Alaska pipeline, because they brush up against it? Our civilization doesn't appear to have advanced very far from that analysis. Which is one reason we keep fighting Arctic drilling.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our EPA to fight big polluting corporations from creating ever more "sacrifice zones" where good Americans can't live anymore. It's been a matter of popular knowledge for more than two decades -- at least since the time I saw Mystery Science Theatre 3000 reference it in an episode! -- that big polluters love building near communities with lots of Black and Brown folks in them, figuring, I guess, that nobody will miss them and/or that the folks who live there won't organize to fight them. Of course those folks do organize to fight them, but what a big help it would be to have our government standing with them for the first time ever! But they'll only stand with those communities if we demand they stand with them.

UPDATE. I apologize for messing up the link in paragraph 3, and I've now corrected it.

Around the table: monopolies ruin everything, part 834.

In case you were wondering, no, "economic overheating" (read: Big Gummint spending too much) isn't causing higher-than-normal inflation rates, according to Economic Policy Institute director of research Josh Bivens, who points to folks spending less on services you buy "face-to-face" and more on stuff, and spending that much more on stuff makes supply-chain bottlenecks worse. Craig Austin at The Conversation concurs about the role of supply chains, but also announces "Inflation is Here to Stay,". And yet I suspect that a) conquering the pandemic and b) breaking supply chain monopolies will do a great deal to break this inflation spike. The former might not happen very soon, given the immaturity of the still-unvaccinated, and the latter might also take some time, even if Mr. Biden has put the right folks in at the SEC and FTC.

Caleb Nichols at TruthOut explains how "Public-Private Partnerships are Quietly Hollowing Out Our Public Libraries." Are private, for-profit corporations like Library Systems and Services really "improving" library services when they buy them up? Of course not -- they're firing higher-paid union workers, replacing them with badly-trained technicians, and homogenizing a library's holdings, serving localities be damned. Seriously, when you hear the words "public-private partnership," run. Big corporations don't want you as a partner; they want you as a vassal. Or perhaps "vessel" is better -- to them, you're just a delivery device for money.

In this story about how Edward Durr upset long-time New Jersey state Senator/Norcross machinist Stephen Sweeney after exactly zero media coverage of Mr. Durr's many bigoted comments on social media, I was surprised and pleased to see writer Paul Farhi discuss "the state of local news reporting" as the main reason for that lack of coverage. "Years of cutbacks and consolidation" have "left behind 'ghost' newspapers" or "news deserts," particularly in Gloucester and Cumberland counties, which each used to have their own paper but now share a single one (with Salem County, no less). This maps onto what we were just saying about local public libraries; why, it's like consolidation and monopolies ruin every damn thing. (As an aside, I don't accept Mr. Durr's explanation that he said all those things because "I'm a passionate guy." I've been told I'm a passionate guy, too, but I've never called Mohammed or Bob Menendez a "pedophile.")

I have had it up to here with Kyle Rittenhouse crying at his murder trial. I'd put it to him in language he can understand: be a man! Nut up! As more attentive folks than I have pointed out, he's crying only for himself, not for any of the folks he killed -- or even the small businesses he was supposedly there to "help"! -- but right-wingers will lap those tears up, apparently tolerating tears only from those who deserve the trouble they're in. And when a Black woman cries over being turned away at the polls for no good reason of watching her boyfriend get shot by cops for no good reason, watch these folks who lap up Kyle Rittenhouse's tears flex their rage like the drunk, abusive dads too many of them are.

Speaking of whiny-ass babies who cry all the time because the world won't submit to their drama, a right-winger with a bit of an anger management problem has somehow secured a temporary restraining order against an antifascist for the heinous crime of exposing the fact on Twitter that said right-winger was at the January 6 attempted coup. Ironically, California may be the only state that makes it relatively easy for domestic abuse victims to get some breathing space from temporary restraining orders, and that's what Adam Kiefer used against Chad Loder. Meanwhile, law enforcement seems to be ignoring actual harassment by right-wingers against Chad Loder. As I often say, assholes ruin everything.

Finally, when I hear that a PRRI survey found that only 29% of Republicans believe America has changed for the better since the 1950s, I feel compelled to note that the top tax rate during the '50s was 91%, and the corporate tax rate was 55%, and corporations and the rich had many, many fewer loopholes to avoid these tax rates than they do now. But given that many more Republicans thought America had changed for the better during those years Donald Trump was President, one has every right to suspect these Republicans are nostalgic for that time "Black folks knew their place," though back then Congressional Republicans also favored civil rights legislation a lot more than they do now, and more than many of their contemporaries in the Democratic party, as well. Living in a fantasy world must be very hard.

Action: concerning voting rights, social media, prison phone rates, plastic pollution, and worker safety.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, and the Protecting America's Workers 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 Left Action and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. By now you may know that the Freedom to Vote Act would authorize early voting for 15 days in all states, enact same-day voter registration, make Election Day a national holiday, clamp down on partisan gerrymandering, restore ex-felons' voting rights, and restrict dark money campaign contributions; you may not know that it would prevent states from interfering in elections so that a particularly party can "win" elections when their candidates get fewer votes. So ignore the right-wing rubbish about how "states should be allowed to run their own elections." If they're going to run them badly, then our federal government needs to step in.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. I know, Republicans blocked the bill yesterday, but that's one reason we pressure them -- so they know there will be consequences to their actions. Unless they think "voting against me" is a "terrorist act" or something. I wish I were kidding about that! I think we will be there soon! Anyway, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore our Justice Department's ability to stop states and localities with an established record of vote suppression from suppressing the right to vote any further. That's any state and locality with such a record -- you know, for when right-wingers try to tell you "the South has changed." When no one's brought up the South!

Public Citizen also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. Normally I blanche when I see bills with the words "innovation" and "choice" in their title, but this one's pretty good -- it would prevent big online platform corporations from preferencing their own products, or discriminating against others' products, if the result "would materially harm competition on the covered platform." All monopolistic practices, you may notice! I believe Amazon is in court for this stuff as we speak, but I can think of other big tech corporations that should be shaking in their boots, like Facebook and Google. Or how about Apple? You can only use the "uniqueness" of your operating system as an excuse for so long! At least, that's how it should be. So let's make it be.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1541, the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act. S. 1541 would make our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) cap what big telecom corporations can charge prisoners and/or their families for staying in touch over the phone. So that prisoners and their families can afford them! Currently these big telecoms can charge an arm and a leg for these calls, which is not only cruel, but also reduces the possibility that prisoners will stay out of jail once they get out of jail, and I believe every civilized person works toward prisoner rehabilitation. The only ones who don't, I presume, are the private prison corporation lackeys who love "repeat customers." But they're not civilized. But they don't get all the say around here.

Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2238/S. 984, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act. It's not just about us breaking free from plastic pollution, it's also about the world's marine wildlife, who cannot afford well-heeled lobbyists arguing for their protection. The plastic corporations have big lobbies, but the hermit crab has us, and that's going to have to be enough. Besides which, a lot of animals harmed by plastic pollution can find their way to your dinner plate sooner or later, and if you didn't feel the harm before, you will then. And anyway, you probably did feel it before then -- a World Wildlife Fund/University of Australia-Newcastle study famously told us we ingest about a credit card's worth of plastic weekly -- but you just may not have known it. Now you know, and you can act.

Finally, the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2876, the Protecting America’s Workers Act. The bill would strengthen reporting requirements for workplace injuries and stiffen penalties for workplace safety violations, but it would also expand whistleblower protections, particularly for workers who won't undertake obviously dangerous tasks and those who help inspectors find workplace violations. Maybe this bill doesn't excite people, and big corporations will call it a "job-killer," but this is exactly the kind of bill that could help you out a lot if you get hurt at your workplace because of some boss's negligence. And if this bill passes, employers also won't be able to get away with hurting you just because you're a "consultant" or a "contractor" or a "temp," either. So let's get this done.

Action: concerning water privatization, voting rights, debt drama, law and order, and credit reports.

Long story short: tell PA state legislators to block Aqua Pennsylvania's attempts to take over the Chester Water Authority, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, get rid of the stupid debt ceiling forever, pass the Counseling Not Criminalization Act, get rid of qualified immunity for police officers, and ensure good Americans can get credit reports easily and for free. 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 things first. Aqua Pennsylvania, the private water service corporation, wants to take over the publicly-held Chester Water Authority; if they succeed, they'll likely go after the public water services of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh next, which will give them pretty near complete control of Pennsylvania's water. They're basically a monopoly in every municipality they operate, which means what, class? Higher prices for you, that's what! (No, public water isn't a "monopoly," because it belongs to you and thus you have much more control over it.) Pennsylvania's legislature is mulling HB 1936, which would prevent private corporations from buying public water systems unless those systems are in financial distress; I'd prevent it under those circumstances, too, but HB 1936 will improve matters. Thus Sum of Us helps you tell your PA state legislators to support public water.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act, and H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Ignore right-wing rubbish about "letting states run elections," because too many states have recently revealed they want to "run" elections that only Republicans can win. The Freedom to Vote Act would expand your access to the voting booth, clamp down on partisan gerrymandering where politicians choose their voters rather than the other way around, and end states' efforts to meddle in their own elections. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore the Voting Rights Act so our Justice Department can step in and stop states and localities -- and not just Southern ones -- from suppressing the vote. America needs these bills to become law; I'm not sure I can put it any more simply than that.

Democracy for America helps you tell our government to end the absurd debt ceiling threat once and for all. Politicians only ever complain about our national debt when the other party runs things, and so it goes with today's Republicans, who let Donald Trump run up our national debt by nearly $8 trillion (comprising a nearly 40 percent increase) in just four years, but who now imagine we'll buy their gaslighting about how they're the "fiscally responsible" party. They may also imagine they'll be able to extort concessions (privatizing Social Security, cutting Medicare, etc.) in exchange for graciously raising the debt limit, though they haven't actually mentioned any concessions lately. So we need to neutralize the threat, and end the endless hostage-taking. And no, I don't care if President Biden does it on his own. I think most folks would call that leadership, which is a thing we haven't seen from very many Presidents lately.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4011/S. 2125, the Counseling Not Criminalization Act, which would mean fewer police officers and more counselors and nurses in our public schools. Because police officers don't have the skills to stop kids from acting out! And we shouldn't expect that of them! And a couple classes in conflict resolution can't match the abilities of folks who have spent years doing exactly that! Police officers are not Swiss Army knives, after all. If that sounds like "defunding the police" to your right-wing neighbors, then I would have to ask if maybe they care a lot more for "funding the police" than, you know, actually reducing crime. Yesterday's conservatives always said you can't just throw money at a problem; today's "conservatives" yell I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!! every time you try to solve a problem. And boy do I hate yellers.

In a related note, Black Lives Matter helps you tell your Congressfolk to end "qualified immunity" for police officers, so that good Americans can finally get justice for the wrongs police have done to them. And police have done wrongs to them! No amount of I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!! will bring back the Black kids killed for having a toy gun or the Black men killed for pulling out their cellphone. And ending "qualified immunity" won't automatically send police officers to jail, it'll just take away the tool that gives them near-absolute protection from accountability; plaintiffs will still have to prove their case, as they always do. And if your right-wing neighbors tell you "cops can't do their job" without having accountability for the wrong they do, well, ask them how that's conservative. I mean, conservatives always said they were all about accountability.

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell Congress to ensure you can get your credit reports easily and for free. Yes, our government already does provide free credit reports at annualcreditreport.com, but doesn't that website name strike you as a nefarious compromise? As if they went out of their way to let corporations trick you with websites with the word "free" in them? It's always seemed that way to me, that's for sure. So, yeah, we should publicized the fact that annualcreditreport.com is where you go for free credit reports, but we shouldn't let corporations charge you hundreds of dollars or siphon away your private info so they can resell it, either. That's not "the free market" in action; that's corruption in action, and for too long our politicians have just shrugged at corruption and called it "freedom." But if it makes folks less free, how is it freedom?

Action: concerning the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations to pay for the Build Back Better Act, and make sure the Build Back Better Act lets Medicare negotiate drug prices, expands Medicare, funds paid family/medical leave, permanently expands the Child Tax Credit, and addresses climate change. 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 $3.5 trillion for the Build Back Better Act by hiking taxes on the rich and on corporations. Virtually everyone in America wants them to do it, so it shouldn't be such a big lift -- even to the "moderate" Democrats facing stupid Club for Growth ads about the tax hikes. If you're a Congressperson, and you can be swayed by big corporate advertising, then you should resign immediately. The number of folks who actually believe taxing the rich will put people out of work or take money from working families is laughably small, and most of them are rageheads anyway. And they shouldn't get all the say about everything in America.

Daily Kos helps you tell Democrats to ensure the Build Back Better Act allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Which will save the taxpayer at least $450 billion over the next decade! It's a pay-for, not a service we "just can't find the money for." Providing the service also provides the money! Anyway, what day of the Kyrsten Sinema Hostage Crisis are we in now? Has she explained her objection to letting Medicare negotiate drug prices? I kid, of course -- she'll never tell us, because we're the people at the other end of her fuck-off ring. But word on the street is that her actual constituents in Arizona have been giving her an earful about it, so let's all do that with all of our Congressfolk.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to include Medicare expansion in the Build Back Better Act. Specifically, you'll tell them to lower the Medicare eligibility age to 60 and give our seniors vision, dental, and hearing care. It's a bit of a surprise they can't get that now, actually -- unless they get Medicare Advantage, which isn't really Medicare but a private health insurance plan that Medicare funds. Why does Medicare fund a private health insurance plan? Because George W. Bush, that's why. Naturally a prominent "moderate" Democrat opposes expanding Medicare in this way, but this time it's the notorious Joe Manchin of West Virginia (who, as recent reports tell us, also doesn't listen to his constituents). How about making sure all seniors get the "advantage"?

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Like everything we've discussed so far, paid family/medical leave is popular with large majorities of Americans -- so why won't Democrats talk about it? If they'd go on TV and say we're trying to expand Medicare, enact paid family/medical leave, and let Medicare help lower drug prices, "moderate" Democrats would feel pressure to change their stupid tunes. Which I guess answers that question -- Democratic politicians act like "unity" is more important than doing the right thing, but if they don't do the right thing -- and, this is very important, take credit for it -- their unity will mean nothing, because they'll be back in the minority. Oh, and fascists will be the majority. So wakey wakey, House and Senate Democrats!

Both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to include a permanent Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion in the Build Back Better Act. The American Rescue Plan Act included a temporary CTC expansion, which delivers $250 or $300 checks into the bank accounts of working families with children every single month, which is rather like a campaign ad every single month. But you just know the Manchin/Sinema axis waits for Just the Right Moment to demand an end to the CTC expansion expire, because "fiscal responsibility" or something. That's why we need to get in our Congressfolk's grills now -- to make such machinations harder to pull off. And seriously, why should we let Democrats constantly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Again, the alternative is fascism. And that's no alternative.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make large investments in climate change action. I haven't said enough about this, perhaps, but it's a no-brainer: invest in renewable energy and we'll create jobs and beat back the ill effects of climate change. If Democrats don't do it, because fiscal responsibility job killing international competition unity über alles, then, again, they're Ben Simmons standing right under the basket and failing to dunk. The only people who don't like solar power and wind power are a) big fossil fuel corporations and b) the Americans who let right-wingers propagandize them about wind turbines making people sick and solar panels losing their effectiveness to gamma radiation that the Van Allen belt keeps out anyway. And, again, they shouldn't get all the say about everything.

A final word about this issue: don't get caught up in Democratic "negotiations" over these bills -- simply communicate your will, and often. The only folks they're supposed to negotiate with are us. And every time we hear about media pundits and corporate lobbyists opposing higher taxes, lower drug prices, and better policy generally, our politicians and our media insult us. They're supposed to serve us, after all -- and we Americans aren't anywhere near as divided as our politicians and our media would like us to think. As long as they whine about critical race theory, abortion, Dr. Seuss, etc., we look divided. But on everything I've described above, we're not divided. Only they are divided, by their own corruption and venality. And so we've got to get in their grills until we bring them to heel.

Action: concerning evictions, taxes, Medicare, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your state's Governor to distribute eviction assistance funds immediately, and tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, enable Medicare to negotiate drug prices, expand Medicare, and pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement 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.

Once again, Daily Kos helps you tell your state's Governor to get with the eviction assistance funding already. States have been giving it out very, very slowly, ostensibly to stop fraud, but you won't be "pro-fraud" if you suspect that "stopping fraud," in this case, actually means "we never wanted to do this anyway so we won't." States have also contracted out a lot of the rental assistance to third-party corporations, which always slows down the process. Government should do the job itself, that's what I say, and stop privatizing its duties. You may also want to remind your Governor that getting the rental assistance out also helps landlords get their money, if you think they might only view landlords as their constituents. Hey, it happens.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise all of the funding for the Build Back Better Act from higher taxes on rich folks and on corporations. You probably know that late last week, Sen. Sinema (D?-AZ) suddenly said -- not even four days before the vote on her pet "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" in the House! -- that she wouldn't support higher taxes on the rich or on corporations, demonstrating, once again, that her fuck-off ring is really for us. I had thought we'd have to put up with her for six or seven terms just like Max Baucus, but both Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman pulled similar shenanigans during negotiations over the Affordable Care Act in 2009, and they both retired in 2012 with their tails between their legs. Maybe Ms. Sinema, who is not rich despite being a shill for big corporations, goes the same way. In the meantime, we need to remind our Reps and Senators what we want -- and that what we want is more important than what she wants, 50th vote or no.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices. Sen. Sinema's opposition figures here, too, but again, what we want matters -- if we communicate it! And People's Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare so that it covers folks older than 60 (vs. the current eligibility age of 65) and covers eye/ear/nose/throat care. Sen. Manchin figures here, of course, saying he can't support Medicare expansion until we can make it more "solvent." But he also supports Medicare drug price negotiation, which he surely knows would save the taxpayer at least $50 billion annually, meaning more money to get Medicare "fiscally solvent," whatever that actually means to Joe Manchin. It sounds more and more like he just doesn't want this to happen, but again, what he wants matters far less than what we want -- if we speak out.

Both Public Citizen and People for the American Way help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. The For the People Act descended into compromised oblivion, and as you may recall Joe Manchin not only failed to spell out what he didn't like about the For the People Act, but then went and listed reforms he wanted that were all in the For the People Act -- but for all this infernal drama, the Freedom to Vote Act is pretty good, and worth your support. It would not only enact same-day voter registration, 15 days of early voting across America, and voting right restoration for ex-felons, it would clamp down on partisan gerrymandering and address state attempts to give their legislatures the power to overrule the voters' will. We need all of that, so we should demand it, and we should get it.

Finally, 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. I knew H.R. 4 would essentially restore a big part of the Voting Rights Act by creating a new pre-clearance formula that doesn't "discriminate" against Southern states, but still would clamp down on any state or locality that demonstrates a pattern of vote suppression. But I did not know that H.R. 4 would also give our Justice Department the power to clamp down on gerrymandering, if a court finds that particular gerrymandering act to be racist. Gerrymandering is noxious and ubiquitous enough that we need all the tools our Constitution and our laws can give us to fight it. Even if it makes certain incumbent politicians sad.

Action: concerning evictions, corporate lobbying, taxes, paid family leave, and Medicare.

Long story short: tell your state's Governor to distribute eviction assistance funds immediately, and tell your Congressfolk to stop listening to corporate lobbyists, raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, enact paid family/medical leave, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, expand Medicare, and enable Medicare to negotiate drug prices. 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. Daily Kos helps you tell your state's Governor to get to stepping about distributing federal rental assistance funds. With only 11% of these funds distributed so far, and with the federal eviction moratorium ending, I trust the urgency is clear. But it wasn't clear enough to certain American states, which contracted with private corporations to distribute the money, and these corporations, guess what, haven't done a very good job of it, which may have been the whole idea. When governments contract with private corporations that screw up, it's still government's fault. Of course, they're not just screwing over tenants, they're also screwing over the landlords who are trying to get paid, so let your Governor know your will today.

Clearly Congressional Democrats have lost their way with the Build Back Better Act, so it's time to remind them of our will. First, Daily Kos helps you remind your Congressfolk that they work for us, not the big corporate lobbyists who are trying to preserve the Trump tax cuts for their paymasters. A lot of Democrats appear to have forgotten that fighting corporate lobbyists is actually quite popular with voters! Instead they're acting like big corporate lobbyists get a million votes each while everyone else gets zero, so we need to make a pointed statement about their continued appeasement of big corporations. Big corporations don't drive our economy; people do. Big corporations don't make the big changes; people do. And big corporations don't have the power; people do -- if we but exercise that power.

Concurrent with the preceding paragraph, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax the rich and corporations much harder than we currently do in order to pay for the Build Back Better Act. The American people have pretty much spoken about both of these matters, in poll after poll after poll over the years -- nobody falls for the "corporations need to pay less in taxes to create more jobs," especially considering how poorly the Trump Administration sold it. Also, Barack Obama openly campaigned on raising taxes for the rich in 2012 and won re-election, while Republican tax cuts for the rich and for corporations didn't prevent Democrats from taking back the House in 2018. The American people know the score, better than we did during Tha Bush Mobb's rule. Now we need to take the fight to the politicians.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a paid family/medical leave program in the Build Back Better Act. Again, paid family/medical leave is quite popular with folks who work for a living -- the folks who worry about whether they'll get fired if they take a day off to care for a sick parent or child, or if they get sick themselves and don't want to infect their co-workers, and that latter issue has become a bit more pointed thanks to this pandemic, amirite? Of course, people like our Congressfolk -- who can miss votes at will or pretend their attempts to gin up campaign funding is "work" -- generally don't understand how it is for working people. And that's why we get in their grills until we make them understand.

Both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. The Child Tax Credit expansion just started delivering another $250 or $300 check into the bank accounts of working families across America; why would Democrats want that to stop? Out of "fiscal responsibility," no doubt, and why do they feel the need to act like Republicans? Especially when Republicans themselves are just acting? Politicians will say THERE'S NOZ MONEYZ!!!!! whenever we propose doing something good for the American people, but they'll tell us that corporate welfare will "pay for itself." Those Trump tax cuts were supposed to "pay for themselves"; how did that work out? Working families deserve a little breathing space; it sure ain't like their bosses give them that.

Finally, both Daily Kos and Penn PIRG help you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices in the Build Back Better Act. It's a pay-for, no matter how much "moderate" Democrats pretend "we can't afford it." If someone asked you if you could "afford" having more money, you'd think they were stupid. I've written extensively about this lately, so I'll just add one more thing: "moderate" Democrats would have no right to accuse people of "failing to compromise" with them over this matter, because H.R. 3 (the model for the Medicare drug price negotiation plank) is already a compromise, since it wouldn't cover every drug. It's like Joe Manchin coming up with new reasons to sink a bill every time he agrees to something. And we can't let that kind of behavior win in America.

Action: concerning infrastructure, fracking, police, privacy, endangered species, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell our FCC to better protect communication infrastructure, tell the DRBC to ban fracking-related activities from the Delaware River Basin, tell President Biden to demilitarize our police, tell our FTC to punish T-Mobile for its latest data breach, tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to do better at saving red wolves, and tell AT&T to stop funding anti-abortion politicians in Texas. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Free Press helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to better protect our communications infrastructure from the effects of climate change. And if that means issuing new regulations that make corporations build better infrastructure, too bad! Where private corporations refuse to do their job, government must step in, and by the looks of New Orleans's power outage, the private corporations that "manage" New Orleans's electricity ain't doing their job: aside from the loss of phone services (many of which are cable-provided now!), 911 calls didn't get answered for over 12 hours after the storm hit, and since AT&T manages that service in New Orleans, you can hang that on AT&T. But you'd rather be able to hang it on your government, since you can better fight them if they screw up. AT&T executives can wipe their asses with hundred-dollar bills, so they're immune to accountability.

Food and Water Action helps you tell the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) that it should allow no activities related to fracking near the Delaware River. Fracking you can understand, since it would put dangerous chemicals in a river serving citizens of five American states, and indeed the DRBC did ban fracking in the Delaware River watershed last year. But the DRBC might consider letting gas drilling corporations siphon off Delaware River water to use in fracking elsewhere! That's our drinking water, dammit! The DRBC might also decide to let these corporations store or dispose of fracking waste in the Basin, and, again, that's our drinking water, dammit! Calling that a compromise would be like if King Solomon actually split the baby in half, so let's not let that happen.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell President Biden to demilitarize our police. Police don't need tanks and grenade launchers to arrest folks and serve warrants -- they "need" them to put down the good Americans who protest police brutality! I mean, if you want to go by how these military weapons actually get used. President Biden pledged to end the 1033 program that lets local police departments buy surplus weapons from our military -- but then, says word on the street, police unions got in his grill about it and made him back down. That means we have to get in his grill and make him keep his promise to us! Folks who whine that vaccine mandates are "Nazism" really ought to take another look at police officers who walk the streets armed like soldiers.

Free Press helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to punish T-Mobile for its latest data breach, which has potentially exposed the birthdate, driver's license number, and Social Security number of 50 million good Americans to identity thieves. Why, you can rig up a fake identity on one or two of those items, let alone three! And this is the fifth big data breach at T-Mobile in just three years, so we can look forward to another round of apologies and we'll-do-betters from T-Mobile executives -- who will then do nothing, because, as I put it earlier, they can wipe their asses with hundred-dollar bills. But, again, where big corporations won't do their job, our government has to step in and do it, hence we call upon our FTC to hold T-Mobile accountable. Our FTC has good people in charge of it now, but we still must communicate our will.

The Endangered Species Coalition helps you tell our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to do better at saving red wolves, one of the most endangered species on Earth, given that there are only nine of them at present, where there were 130 as recently as 15 years ago. Our laws mandate that our Fish & Wildlife Service look for a place for them to live in peace (where they won't get hunted or hunt other species into endangerment), but word on the street is that they've let themselves be hamstrung by a single well-connected property developer into abandoning their lawful duty. Federal judges have twice told our Fish & Wildlife Service to do its job, and yet they act like our laws mandate that single property developers get a veto over the law whenever they like. That's not very law and order of them, so we should stop it.

Finally, UltraViolet helps you tell AT&T to speak out against the Texas abortion ban and stop funding anti-abortion politicians there. They'll probably stop at doing the first, which is why we're telling them to do both -- PR releases aren't worthless in and of themselves, but they are worthless without action, and they're certainly worthless if AT&T keeps funding the campaigns of the same politicians who enacted the nefarious abortion ban! AT&T will probably retort that they fund those politicians for "economic" reasons, or even that they won't have enough "access" if they don't fund these clowns. But would that be the can-do attitude of the free market? Because it sounds more like "we've got the power and we're not going to use it." But the Big Stick of Bad PR beats any carefully-worded corporate PR release. And we're not afraid to use that.

Action: concerning abortion, financial predators, taxing the rich, Medicare, and tax cuts for working families.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Women's Health Protection Act and the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act, fund the budget reconciliation bill with higher taxes on the rich and on corporations, allow Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices, expand Medicare coverage to include dental, vision, and hearing care, and make the EITC and CTC expansions permanent. 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. Daily Kos, Ultraviolet, and Moms Rising all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. You hate how Texas has basically outlawed abortions, and how our Supreme Court has done nothing to stop them? Then we need to pass the Women's Health Protection Act, which would stop abortion bans at the state level, not to mention all the other roadblocks (the finding of "heartbeats," forced ultrasounds, forced bad medical advice) states love putting up so that women can't take care of themselves. If we don't want our civilization to turn women into breeders again, if we don't want women to be forced to carry fetuses without organs or fetuses that develop problems that threaten the mothers' lives or the fetuses of rapists or abusive partners, then we need to pass the Women's Health Protection Act.

US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2508, the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act. Payday lenders can't prey on our soldiers like they used to, because our laws give our soldiers extra protection, via lower interest rate caps and the like; the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act would extend those protections to everyone in America. Because why not? If it helps our soldiers get back on their feet, it can help anyone else get back on their feet. Payday lenders will hate this, but that's OK, because I hate payday lenders and all their evil works. Forcing people into 300% death spiral loans is not a "living." This is America! Payday lenders should do some real work! They should build something, or serve someone, or make people's lives easier. But seriously, this worship of mammon is going to kill us all.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the rich and corporations pay their fair share of taxes to fund the budget reconciliation bill. Corporations and rich folks don't want to pay as much in taxes, so they should just get their way? Nobody would let you or I get away with that! Certainly they shouldn't get more say about that than the American people do -- Representatives are supposed to represent their constituents, after all, and they're not supposed to let the whining of big corporations and rich folks drown out the will of their constituents. Their constituents tell us, in poll after poll after poll, that corporations and rich folks should pay more. We just have to be loud about that.

Pursuant to the aforementioned reconciliation bill, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to allow Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices in the budget reconciliation bill. After all, if they're going to cave on tax hikes, they're going to need money from somewhere, and letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices is a pay-for. Per the right-wing Mercatus Center, Medicare drug price negotiation would save the taxpayer $84 billion annually, working out to $840 billion over 10 years, and thus working out to about a quarter of the reconciliation bill's $3.5 trillion price tag. That doesn't mean we won't hear from "moderate" Democrats that "we can't afford to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices," but that's stupid, and anyone who repeats it deserves ridicule and shame. And if they're in office, they deserve defeat.

Public Citizen also helps you tell your Congressfolk to include dental, hearing, and vision care in Medicare, and without copays. After all, seniors have ears, eyes, and teeth, too! And they're not all gazillionaires, either! A lot of them live on their Social Security checks, after all! It's unconscionable that we've had Medicare almost 60 years and it's only covered drugs less than 20 years (and, as I said above, we can improve that service dramatically!) and we don't cover ENT care at all. Some fools quickly retort that Medicare Advantage does cover all of that, but Medicare Advantage is private health insurance that sucks taxpayer funding out of Medicare (just as charter schools suck public school funding!), and dental, hearing, and vision care shouldn't be "advantages," they should be services all seniors can get.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC) and Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansions permanent. Because they help working families at lower incomes make ends meet, that's why! The CTC expansion is delivering $250 or $300 checks into bank accounts every month, and the EITC expansion now delivers almost $1,000 more annually into the pockets of workers who make less than $21,000 a year (the cap used to be $16,000/year). These tax cuts don't help banksters who don't need an ounce of help stealing money from us, they help working families. If you have personal experience deciding whether to feed your children or feed yourself, you might want to describe that to your Congressperson. They all have their stupid ideologies, but their stupid ideologies are no match for your real lives.

Around the table: from corporate electric utilities to Democrat weakness.

Thomas M. Hanna at In These Times argues that New Orleans's loss of electricity after Hurricane Ida proves "We Need Public Control of Our Energy Systems." You know, if that Enron BS in California in 2002, or Texas's utter failure to keep the lights on in a snowstorm in 2021, didn't already prove that! Recall that Greg Palast recently characterized what happened in New Orleans last week as something that wouldn't happen in Bangladesh during a monsoon. Mr. Hanna lists yet more of Entergy's sins in New Orleans, and also informs us that Sacramento's publicly-owned electric utility has functioned well through wildfires and worse. (You may remember that Nebraska is the only state in America which uses entirely publicly-owned electric utilities.)

An AP/Univision/Center for Public Integrity story finds that our USPS managers have been stealing wages from mail carriers for years. You may get that Louis DeJoy stink off this story, but this has been going on at least since at least 2005; managers got "disciplined" with things like more training, which, like, how much "training" do you need not to change your workers' time cards? Just so happens 2006 was the year our government mandated that our Postal Service pre-pay retiree benefits 80-odd years in advance, which has pushed our Postal Service almost $200 billion in debt even as it's cut over 140,000 jobs over the last 13 years; gosh, could all of that have something to do with the wage theft they tolerate? Remember: when something goes wrong, look to the bosses first.

Federal judge grants immunity from further prosecution to the Sackler family -- until recently the owners of Purdue Pharma, now widely-hated as the corporation that got everyone hooked on OxyContin -- as part of a bankruptcy settlement. Naturally the Sacklers admit no wrongdoing -- because settlements can't even get that done anymore! -- and though they'll lose Purdue and $4.3 billion as part of the settlement, they'll still get to hold on to over $5 billion and they'll still be one of America's wealthiest families. Law and order! At least our Justice Department plans to seek a stay on the judge's ruling; how vigorously they'll seek it I can't say, but I'm old enough to remember when a Democratic Administration wouldn't even do that, because looking forward economic crisis free markets.

I'm not a fan of headlines like "John Roberts Has Lost Control of the Supreme Court," because why do we assume this? Why do we assume that he's actually been trying to "control" the Court? Why don't we imagine that the chaos we saw over their non-grant of the ACLU's emergency petition to stop the Texas abortion law from going into effect -- a ruling that doesn't even rate as a conservative argument! -- is the desired end result? Yeah, I know he excoriated the ruling in his own opinion, but that could just be part of the drama: he gets to act all principled about precedent, while he also knows our Court has enough far right-wingers now that it doesn't matter.

Finally, Paul Waldman, in writing that "The Harsh Truth of This Moment" is that "Republicans Understand Power" and "Democrats Do Not," has just about summed up the last 40 years of American politics. It's enough to make you think that even when the Democrats passed a COVID relief bill that was actually as good as the HEROES Act of 2020, they were just playing us -- they have no intention of doing anything else that could actually make America a more perfect union, and that bodes ill for the budget reconciliation bill they have to pass this month. I think the American people have something to say about that -- but we have to actually say it.

Action: concerning slavery, vaccines, worker rights, surveillance, public water, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell Hugo Boss to get forced Uyghur labor out of its supply chain, tell our government to get more COVID vaccines out to the rest of the world, protect Amazon workers, and ban neural data exploitation; tell BlueTriton to stop taking Colorado's public water, and tell President Biden to fire USPS Board of Governors member Ron Bloom. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Sum of Us helps you tell luxury clothing corporation Hugo Boss to get the Uyghur forced labor out of its supply chain. Would it be untoward to note that Hugo Boss made its big move in the '30s making and selling Nazi uniforms? Then I guess using half a million Uyghur slaves in East Turkestan is par for the course! Still, the Big Stick of Bad PR works, even against a corporation that used to make Clothing for the Modern Nazi. Personal to those who worry that about the "unintended consequence" of the Uyghurs getting "hurt" by losing their place in the Hugo Boss supply chain: slavery is intolerable everywhere, in every context. I'm reminded of how anti-apartheid South Africans responded to similar arguments about divestment in the '80s: hey, our lives really can't be any worse.

Daily Kos helps you tell the Biden Administration to share COVID vaccine shots all over the world. I mean, if you want to talk about "world leadership," this is where you would focus, right? You'd focus on doing more than everyone else to ensure that we make sure we never have a pandemic like this again, which means making sure everyone on Earth can get a vaccine, since (as we have experienced over the last two months!) newer, deadlier strains of diseases will start among those unprotected by vaccines. "World leadership" has far less to do with protecting intellectual property and ensuring that big pharma corporations make billions of dollars than it has to do with, you know, protecting people. So let's make sure this Administration hears that.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect Amazon workers from all the corporate surveillance their bosses would inflict upon them. Amazon watches its workers' every move, and makes them move ever faster to keep up with production quotas; nobody could have predicted this would result in workplace injuries at double the warehouse industry average! (Let alone delivery drivers peeing in bottles.) There's helping your employees do better, via stick or carrot, and then there's totally subjugating your workers to your absurdly-high expectations, helped along by computer "research," no doubt. Well, let's see a computer lift 40-pound boxes for eight hours. Hell, let's see a boss do it.

Fight for the Future helps you tell our government to ban harvesting of your personal neural data. What on Earth is that, you ask? Some corporations are developing "brain interface technology" that could, one day, do a credible job not only of reading your mind but influencing it; currently corporations have to make do with simply harvesting all the data you leave around on the internet, but I don't want to begin a lot of sentences with "well, at least Facebook and Google didn't" one day. Laws have historically trailed big technological advances -- look how hard it is for them to keep up with social media! -- but there's no particularly good reason for that. If we have the will -- and, of course, if we make our lawmakers have the will -- we can stay ahead.

Environmental Action helps you tell BlueTriton (a.k.a. the Artist Formerly Known as Nestlé Waters North America) to stop siphoning off public waters in Colorado. Public water belongs to the public, after all, and selling it to corporations for a pittance so they can mark it up several thousand percent to sell as bottled water is bad policy. Better to hang on to your public water so the public can use it! You know, by drinking it, or washing with it -- hell, even watering the grass with it would be better! Did I mention that almost half of Colorado currently experiences "extreme" or "exceptional" drought? So giving away public water is an even worse idea in that context. Let's not do that!

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to replace Ron Bloom as USPS Board of Governors Chair. Yes, as a way of firing Postmaster General DeJoy, who would raise prices and cut services and declare that he's done a great job "saving" our Post Office! Problem is, Mr. Bloom is a big DeJoy supporter, which I'm sure has nothing to do with Mr. DeJoy investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a fund run by Mr. Bloom! I'm old enough to remember when even the appearance of corruption made people resign their jobs. We're not in that America anymore, but if we speak out enough, we might one day bring it back.

Action: concerning voting rights, clean water, saving our Post Office, pollution, corruption, and bad nominations.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, remove all lead water pipes in America, pass the Postal Service Reform Act, bring back the "Polluter Pays" tax, pass the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, and reject Rahm Emanuel's nomination as Ambassador to Japan. 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.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Our House passed H.R. 4 last week; now our Senate needs to follow suit, so that the Voting Rights Act can have some teeth again, after our Supreme Court knocked them out in Shelby County v. Holder. Our Court ruled, in that case, that the Voting Rights Act discriminated against Southern states in its pre-clearance formula (solely because more Black folks vote now than they did before the law, a line of reasoning the late Justice Ginsberg likened to throwing out your umbrella merely because it's stopped raining). Our Court also ruled that a pre-clearance formula that didn't discriminate against the South would pass their muster; hence H.R. 4 would subject any state or locality with a record of vote suppression to submit its voting law changes for Justice Department pre-clearance. Republicans will argue we don't need it, but the evidence of your own eyes will say otherwise.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to replace all lead water pipes in America. Just so happens the budget reconciliation blueprint passed by both House and Senate this month could do just that! And that's what we should demand from our Congressfolk -- the removal of all lead pipes. LCV estimates that $45 billion would get it done, and that's, frankly, not much higher than other bills (most famously the WATER Act) have aimed to allot. And when "moderate" Democrats come at you with "we're afraid to tax corporations more due to international competitiveness," you can come right back with so we should tolerate brain damage from lead pipes anywhere in America? Because that is what these irredeemable weaklings really stand for. And it's about time all Americans understood this dark calculus.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. The Postal Service Reform Act would address the real cause of our Postal Service's recent financial troubles -- namely, the mandate to pre-fund retirement benefits for the next 85 years, like literally no other entity, governmental or corporate, has to do. If you had to pre-fund 85 years of retirement funds, hopefully you wouldn't go around wondering why your pockets are empty all the time. Get rid of that absurd mandate, and most of our Postal Service's financial problems will fix themselves, and we won't have to cut services or hike prices (as Postmaster General DeJoy would do) or close Post Offices (as Congressfolk occasionally propose). Why should only stupid ideas get implemented in America?

US PIRG helps you tell your House Reps to reinstate the "polluter pays" tax, so that big polluting corporations have to pay to clean up their messes. You'll recognize the principle, no doubt, from childhood discussions/arguments with your parents: you make the mess, you clean it up. We all accept that as axiomatic these days, yet we don't make corporations pay to clean up their messes, even though their messes are bigger than any pile of dirty clothes you ever left sitting around. We don't make them clean up their messes, I guess, because of "international competitiveness," but seriously, we should tolerate pollution just so a corporation can "compete"? If that's the price of competition, give me cooperation. And maybe these corporations should talk to your mother about cleaning up their messes. If they're lucky, she won't be holding her wooden spoon.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act. The Ban Conflicted Trading Act would prevent Congressfolk from trading in stocks and securities while they're in office. Because doing such a thing would be a conflict of interest the minute you did it, given that you'll likely be voting on issues that would affect your trading, whether you sat on a finance-related Congressional committee or not. Really, that is the standard to which we should hold ourselves -- even the stink of corruption should send us running in the other direction. Some people argue against passing such laws because they're "common sense." In doing so, they ignore the mountains of evidence that trading corrupts politicians, but they also miss the point -- laws like this wouldn't "insult common sense" so much as fight malice.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Rahm Emanuel to be Ambassador to Japan. What is this, a "lifetime achievement" award? If so, Mr. Emanuel's hardly earned it on the merits! He's been pushing corporatism on the Democratic Party for decades, and he marred his tenure as Mayor of Chicago with (among other things!) his aggression toward the city's education system, his cover-up of the Laquan McDonald shooting, and his privatization of city parking services. And after that record of "accomplishment," we'd put him in charge of relating to a nation with over 100 military bases and the third-biggest economy on Earth. Wasn't Michael Jordan available? He's more accomplished, after all.

Around the table: more thoughts on the end of empire.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch -- possibly the world's best reporter on the Middle East -- says "It is Government Weakness, Not Taliban Strength, That Condemns Afghanistan" -- as in the Afghan government's "weakness and unpopularity," which his Afghani contacts describe as "no better than a gang of racketeers gorging themselves on US aid money or on juicy supply and construction contracts." Also, despite the $2 trillion-plus outlay, "Afghan soldiers were often short of food, ammunition, fuel and could not even get defective weapons replaced," in large part because "the American aid money never made it past the sticky fingers of US consultants and security companies." The story won't end here, though, because Afghans don't like the Taliban any better than they like the Americans.

Philippa Rizopoulos at TruthOut reminds us that privatization of Medicaid and Medicare also stands in the way of getting to Medicare-for-All. Medicare Advantage, an "innovation" of George W. Bush, now has over 40 percent of American seniors in its grip, and worse, nearly 70 percent of Medicaid recipients get their care, such as it is, from Medicaid Managed Care Organizations (or MCOs), and these developments don't lead to better care, or even cheaper care. They do lead to shifting networks, reduced benefits, and rejected claims, and they also lead to public programs bearing the burden of private corporations, just like with charter schools. Best to expand Medicare to include everyone, and all care, not least because we'd save money.

Does the fall of Afghanistan into Taliban hands again make you wish we'd "done more"? Here's a reminder from Alice Speri at The Intercept that "(t)he biggest al-Qaeda plot the FBI claimed to have foiled in the years following the 9/11 attacks involved no weapons, no plot, and no al-Qaeda." You say that's not precisely relevant? Perhaps not, but consider that we "did more" for 20 years in Afghanistan, throwing away over $2 trillion to get no further than the status quo, and consider, also, that "doing more" in Iraq helped al-Qaeda establish a presence there they didn't have before, and then helped birth ISIS. Maybe "doing more" shouldn't be our first impulse, particularly at those times we're trying to prove we're "right" about terrorist threats.

Uh oh: Minnesota GOP Chair Jennifer Carnahan faces calls to resign after one of the state party's big donors (and a close friend and fellow podcaster of hers!) gets indicted for sex trafficking. And just as the folks who squeal about "voter fraud" ignore all the Republicans who get caught committing it, the QAnon crowd will promptly ignore this scandal precisely because it implicates Republicans. In each case, you'd think right-wingers would take an opportunity to appear "independent," but they don't -- blunt force is their only strategy, in both argument and action. (And just like the rest of them, Ms. Carnahan issues a statement that's 60% about how badly she thinks she's been treated. That's how you know she's a Trumphole -- everything's a drama, and they're always the star.

In case you were wondering how Fox News's biggest stars were spinning our defeat in Afghanistan, both Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham focus on Afghan refugees, with Mr. Carlson calling them "invaders" coming to "your neighborhood." "Fuck you" was my immediate reaction to this news, but after I'd given the matter more thought, I found myself saying is this the best they can do? America may have stopped being a great power today, and all these clowns can think to do is bash immigrants who ain't even here yet? That'll be a hell of a footnote to the history of this war, if anyone's around to write it.

Finally, I read President Biden's Monday remarks about our withdrawal from Afghanistan, and I note that while his repeated insistence that "one more year, five more years or 20 more years" wouldn't make a difference is absolutely correct, it's also absolutely calculated to impress independent voters (as is his relentless blaming of the Afghan government and military), which might just make up for "the buck stops with me" most emphatically not impressing them. I don't want to bash the guy who actually got us out of a war, but I do also wonder how he didn't get heard about this matter during those eight years he was Vice President.

Action: concerning Cuba, killer drones, farmworkers, public water, equal pay, and communications policy.

Long story short: tell President Biden to end our trade embargo with Cuba and ban killer drones, tell big agriculture corporations to treat their workers better, tell BlueTriton to stop taking public water from California, tell our U.S. Soccer Federation to pay the Women's team as much as the Men's, and tell President Biden to appoint a fifth FCC Commissioner already. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

With people in Cuba taking to the streets in large numbers to protest, at long last, their oppressive regime, Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to end economic sanctions against Cuba. What's that, you say? That would be like rewarding an oppressive regime? No, actually, it would be like rewarding the Cuban people for their courage! It would also be like reversing a stupid, 60-year-old policy that never had the result it supposedly intended. If you're thinking sanctions did have the intended result -- by driving good Cubans into the streets -- consider why that policy should take 60 years to work. Also consider whether this pandemic, not sanctions, have had more of an effect on what Cubans are doing. Also, really? Starve a nation to hurt its government? That's evil! If we do less evil, we'll see less evil in the world. There's a reason leaders who do evil see crises everywhere years after they take power -- because they make the crises happen!

Win Without War also helps you tell President Biden to ban autonomous killer drones. Those last three words are three of the most chilling words in the English language -- drones that can decide for themselves who to kill? Who thought that was a good idea? Someone who thinks they're very clever, no doubt, but they might well find out differently at the Pearly Gates. You can very easily see, I trust, these "killer robots" making their way to law enforcement via the 1033 program, and killing Black folks with impunity? And eventually killing you "by accident"? You can't hold a drone accountable in a court of law, after all. Banning killer drones now is our only shot at stopping these dystopias. Don't be tempted to think it's like "closing the barn door after the horses have run out." They ain't all run out yet, and do we seriously contemplate doing nothing in the face of evil?

Care2 helps you tell big agriculture corporations to give their workers better benefits, including paid time off. The news hook is that folks have to pick fruits and vegetables in temperatures that are, in some areas of our nation, 25 degrees hotter than normal, and working outside while Western wildfires choke people thousands of miles East ain't easy, either, but big ag doesn't care about anything but money, so the big corporations make tens of billions of dollars in profits while their workers get dung pellets, dehydration, illness, and death. It shouldn't be that hard to break off some of their billions for their workers. Don't worry that "food prices will skyrocket" -- labor costs don't have anywhere near the effect on prices big corporations want you to think they have. And certainly don't be tempted to dismiss the whole issue because mostly immigrants work these jobs. They're people, too, after all.

Environmental Action helps you tell BlueTriton (formerly Nestlé Waters North America) to stop siphoning off public water from the San Bernardino Forest. California is having droughts and wildfires again, so letting some big corporation take water from Strawberry Creek so it can sell it as bottled water at an absurdly-high markup sure seems like a bad idea. Not for nothing, but BlueTriton only has a permit to draw out 2.3 million gallons of water annually -- but took out 58 million gallons last year. So this is also a law and order issue. Unless, you know, law and order is only for Black folks. A lot of people sure do use the phrase like that -- and those same people never use it against a corporation, even one that's obviously flouting the law. I'll keep trying to ensure people use that phrase correctly.

Ultraviolet helps you tell our U.S. Soccer Federation to pay the U.S. Women's Team as much as it pays the U.S. Men's Team. For-real for-real? The Women's Team should make more! I mean, if we believe in paying people on merit! The Women's team has won four World Cups and four Olympic Gold medals in the last 30 years, while the Men's team, well, reached the World Cup quarterfinals in 2002, and not for nothing but I hated how they played that year -- anyone can kick the ball far and run fast! It takes talent to slowly and methodically work your way up the field, precisely the thing a lot of Americans find "boring" about the sport. The USSF will retort that men's soccer is "more competitive" (a difficult statement to justify when men play men and women play women) or that men's soccer "makes more money," which only happens because of sexism in the first place and besides, we're all profoundly tired of arguments based on "more money," right? Our USSF just needs to do the right thing.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell President Biden to appoint a fifth FCC Commissioner already. It ain't just about getting net neutrality back, though of course getting net neutrality back would be a big deal -- it's also about ensuring everyone has access to high-speed broadband (particularly during a pandemic!), fighting media consolidation and media monopolies, and helping local media get back up on their feet after years of assuming big corporations know best. Our Federal Communications Commission has a lot of work to do, particularly in a social media-dominated world, and we would not best be served by a series of 2-2 deadlocks resulting in nothing getting done.