Thieves in the Temple.

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.

Around the table: welcome to part 878 of "insane Republicans, spineless Democrats."

John Culhane at Slate instructs us that "Fox News Could Be Sued if Its Anti-Vax Statements Caused People to Die." I accept that his entire argument is valid; the hard part, I'd think, would be finding enough unvaccinated folks who get sick from COVID and who would say "I relied on Fox News to tell me the truth." It's true that at least one Trumphole facing prison for his role in the January 6 coup attempt has said, via his lawyer, that TEH TRUMPZ MADEZ MEZ DO TEH THINGZ!!!!, and that's similar enough. But a lot of these folks, when pressed, will simply deny they were relying on Fox News to tell them the truth, because, well, some folks think it's OK to say just anything when they're cornered.

Lost in all the gags about how his rocketship looked like a giant cock is the fact that "Poverty Wages and Tax Dodges" funded Jeff Bezos's trip to the very edge of space. When you contemplate that, in fact, you might begin to think that the penis-shaped rocketship was a deliberate distraction. No, I wouldn't put it past folks like Jeff Bezos to think of that. And, hate to beat on a dead horse, but our government got us to the moon and back six times, whereas a guy with $200 billion couldn't even get himself out of our atmosphere. And, yeah, I'm as much against the privatization of space as the next guy.

Joe Biden may be a relatively new President, but he sure has taken to drone strikes pretty quickly, most recently in Somalia. And yes, "collective self-defense" sure looks like the kind of legal doctrine that Presidents can use to subvert our Constitutional requirement that they get permission from Congress before conducting military operations. Donald Trump probably faced more pushback from Congress on this matter than any President of the last 70 years, and it still wasn't enough. (Also, in my experience, Mike Lee's protest against the drone strikes signals that our Congress will do nothing. I can't recall Mr. Lee ever taking a stand on principle that he's actually had to follow through on.)

Karen Hao at the MIT Technology Review discusses why reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang think "Facebook Can Never Fix Itself." "Facebook’s problems today are not the product of a company that lost its way," she writes, but are "part of its very design," and surely it doesn't help that, as far as Facebook's decision-making, "growth and revenue trump everything else." And when you have gazillions of dollars, you tend to think you know everything and everyone else knows nothing, when all you really know anything about is redistributing everyone else's income upward to you. I hope I live to see an America that shames and shuns such people.

1,500 union workers stand to lose their jobs at the Morgantown, WV plant owned by big pharmaceutical corporation Viatris, and despite the "prime opportunity for the Democratic-controlled federal government to score points in a red state," our Administration has done bupkus. You'll note that Joe Manchin is also the senior Senator from West Virginia, "the Senate's single most powerful member" by virtue of being the Democratic caucus's 50th vote. His relative inaction couldn't be because his own daughter used to run one of the corporations that merged into Viatris, could it? (Hopefully, when you read Viatris's statement about its job-cutting, you'll be offended by all the big words they use. Optimize this, ass-clowns.)

Finally, Sean Hannity, mere days after saying "it absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated," now says (after all that positive attention he got from liberals) that "I never told anyone to get a vaccine." Calling those two remarks "completely different" would be the height of pedantry, and though I bet some of his votaries would advance that claim, I also bet most of them don't care -- as William S. Burroughs used to say, junkies only want junk. No, I think he ginned up this whole controversy just to create drama, because what else can you do when you can't win arguments on the merits?

Action: concerning the Amazon indigenous, taxes, jobs spending, privatization, chemical safety, and discrimination.

Long story short: tell Brazil's government to protect the rights of indigenous folks from corporate land-rapers, tell your Congressfolk to fund our IRS, fund home and community care, reject the privatization of public assets, and protect us from PFAS chemicals, and tell your Senators to pass the Equality Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: Sum of Us helps you tell Brazil's Congress to reject a bill that would allow the Brazilian government to force indigenous peoples from their lands in the Amazon rain forest so that big corporations can develop it. It's not just that the Amazon rain forest is the greatest carbon capture machine the world has ever seen, it's that people live there, and people are more important than profits, more important than development, and more important than some politician's "legacy." Besides, the indigenous people of the Amazon have been a thorn in Jair Bolsonaro's side since day one of his ignominous reign, and any enemy of Jair Bolsonaro is a friend of mine. And yours.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to fully fund our IRS so it can catch more tax cheats. People who avoid their taxes cheat all of us, after all -- they cheat all of us out of roads, bridges, schools, police officers, firefighters, and libraries. Naturally Republicans have balked at more funding for the IRS as a way of helping to pay for the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" they're continuing to hash out, plus the ProPublica reporting about rich folks' tax evasion has made Republicans more defensive of rich folks than of the rest of us, whom they have cheated. I guess they're objectively pro-crime, then! Why do Democrats not paint them this way every day? Because it would be "uncivil"?

The National Domestic Workers Alliance helps you tell Democratic Senate Majority Leader Schumer to ensure the $400 billion proposal for care infrastructure makes it into the big reconciliation bill Democrats are planning later on this year. Presumably Democrats will pass that without Republican help, so all we need to do now is ensure that Democrats don't eject it from the bill because, oh, gosh, I don't know? Because they like shooting themselves in the foot? Because "bipartisanship"? Because debt and spending and I'M SCARRRREEEEDDDDD!!!!!! OK, maybe I'm being a bit harsh, this time -- our government has never invested this much in home and community care before, prospect of creating a million jobs or not. But if you want to make progress, you have to take big steps. Bigger than Democrats are accustomed to taking, to be sure, but we need to be the spine in their back. At least then they'll have a spine.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk not to let the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" privatize public assets in order to pay for other public assets. President Biden wanted to fund it with higher corporate taxes, but Republicans, being the party of "fiscal responsibility," prefer smoke and mirrors, like "user fees" and selling off some bridges and roads and suchlike in order to pay for others. But we need only look to Chicago's privatized parking meters and Bayonne's privatized water system to see what that bodes for America -- higher prices and worse service. You know, like they're trying to do with our Postal Service. Who voted for that? I don't think even Trump voters voted for that.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3990/S. 2047, the No PFAS in Cosmetics Act. PFAS chemicals, as you may know, are the "forever chemicals" you find in carpeting, cookware, food packaging -- and, eventually, in our drinking water and our bodies, where it might well help give you and/or your loved ones cancer, a weakened immune system, or a learning disability. You also find it in cosmetics, and though you may not wear makeup, someone else does, and they wash it off their face at night, and then guess where it goes? Into your drinking water, and into your body. (Consumer Reports also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act, which would do more about PFAS chemicals generally; the former bill has a better chance of passing, but there's no reason you can't say you support both.)

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. The other side has their people calling their Senators going WAAAAAAAAAAH WHATZ ABOUTZ MY RELIGUZ BELIEFZ!!!!!! and WAAAAAAAAAAAH TEH BOYZ WILLZ BEATZ TEH GURLZ ATZ TEH FIELD HOCKEYZ!!!!!!, so we need to be on the horn with our Senators talking about stopping banks and bosses and landlords from discriminating against gay and transgender folks, which is what the Equality Act is actually about. Republican Senators, in particular, pretend the hysterical opinions count more than yours. But we civilized people must make our will unmistakable.

Action: concerning jobs legislation.

Senate Majority Leader Schumer (D-NY) plans to move jobs legislation this week, so now's a good time to tell (or remind) your Senators what you want from jobs legislation. There'll be a lot of links today, so I'll keep this post relatively short, and of course you can simply use this post to make a list to your Senators in a phone call. First, we want to remind our Senators that we want to do the right thing with jobs legislation, so Daily Kos helps you tell Democrats to go big on jobs legislation, while Food and Water Action helps you tell your Senators to reject any privatization of public services in that legislation.

Next, we move to paying for the legislation, since right-wingers pretend to wring their hands over it and moderates pretend that you can pay for everything with "user fees." Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to make rich folks and corporations pay at least $4 trillion more in taxes over the next 10 years, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Wealth Tax on millionaire and billionaire estates, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a "millionaire's surtax," and the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Polluter Welfare Act, which would free up some more money to pay for the projects we're going to describe in the next paragraph.

Finally, we move to the things we want jobs legislation to do -- things that will actually create jobs for people, even if they don't meet the Republican definition of "real infrastructure." Both Social Security Works and Public Citizen help you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare so that it covers vision, hearing, and dental care and also so that it covers folks from the age of 60, not 65. Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices -- which, since it would free up an extra $85 billion annually, would also count as a "pay-for." The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure renewable energy funding is a big part of jobs legislation. And both the League of Conservation Voters and Penn PIRG help you tell your Congressfolk to invest in getting the lead out of our water pipes. Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that jobs legislation includes funding for home- and community-based care and paid family/medical leave. And Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to include expanded broadband funding.

We should ignore the machinations our politicians have foisted on us -- how much of the legislation should be "bipartisan" and how much not, for example -- and simply communicate our will, in numbers they can't deny. Then we'll start to get what we want. People tell me I'm naive for believing this, but I've seen it happen many times. And when you see it happen even once, you want to see it happen all the time. Certainly as Americans we deserve to have it happen all the time. It's a lot better than politicians selling us out to their big donors like they usually do. But we won't get a thing if we don't speak out, and this is the week we absolutely must speak out, because if we do, we might get the best legislation we've seen in decades.

Good luck, and God bless.

Action: all jobs, all day.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk you want renewable energy, lead-free water pipes, paid family/medical leave, and Medicare drug price negotiation in the American Jobs Plan -- and no military spending! And then tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the wealthy and on corporations to pay for it. 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.

Today would be a good day to call your Congressfolk and tell them you want renewable energy in the American Jobs Plan that President Biden is inexplicably trying to pass in a "bipartisan" manner. Again, it doesn't matter that he wants the two sides to work together; it only matters that your Congressfolk do your will, and the more we keep our eye on the latter item, the better. You may mention that the OFF Fossil Fuels Act, introduced in previous Congresses but not this one, remains a good blueprint for what the American Jobs Plan needs. It would have mandated 80% renewable electricity and 80% zero-emission cars by 2035, and it would also have funded retraining for fossil fuel workers. And not as computer programmers, either! Jesus Mary and Joseph why insist that everyone learn to code when you can retrain the folks who work in coal mines to install solar panels and wind turbines? Of course, Republicans don't think any of that is "real infrastructure" either. But they're a party full of seditionists and whiners, so why do we listen to them?

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in getting the lead out of our drinking water. That is literally an investment in our future, since lead from lead pipes causes brain damage in children, and it would be entirely appropriate to put such investment in the American Jobs Plan that President Biden is inexplicably trying to pass in a "bipartisan" manner. If you want to support specific legislation that would reduce lead in our drinking water, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1376, the GET THE LEAD OUT Act (the acronym isn't as bad as it looks), which would fund lead-free pipes all over America by hiking the number of estates subject to the Estate Tax and closing the "carried interest" loophole that allows hedge fund managers to pay a lower tax rate than bus drivers. Hard to imagine people being against those things. Then again, it's hard to imagine people being against clean water!

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a paid family/medical leave bill. It would be entirely appropriate, etc. to put this in the American Jobs Plan, etc., and though our law does grant 12 weeks of unpaid family/medical leave annually, we're just about the only "wealthy" nation on Earth that doesn't grant paid leave, and as I always say, that's not a thing you want to chant WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. And, you know, our Congressfolk act like they know everything, when all they do is say "that won't work" whenever we tell them what they should do. But that's a damn un-American attitude, if you ask me. Isn't this the can-do nation that always finds a way? And hasn't every bit of progress we've made met with "that won't work" at the beginning? It works just about everywhere on the planet, so it can work here -- if our politicians would just grow a spine.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to include H.R. 3, the Elijah Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act, in the American Jobs Plan. Not just because letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices would, well, lower drug prices across the board, but because it would save the taxpayer money, which means it could well help fund all the other good works we've been talking about, like renewable energy, clean water, paid family/medical leave, and the like. What will Republicans say in response? It's not "real" infrastructure? What a weak response -- they're like the kid you knew in junior high who was always correcting the tiniest grammatical errors you'd make. So, yeah, it would help now to think of that kid growing up to be a Republican Senator, just trying to find a reason, any reason, to piss on whatever the American people want.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any new military spending in the American Jobs Plan. Because they love to hide defense spending wherever they can! And because we already spend more on "defense" than the next 12 nations on that list combined. Why, you'd never know we had an ocean on either side of us! But spending on defense deprives us of spending on clean water, renewable energy, etc., and not because federal spending is a zero-sum game (just ask the folks who passed the 2017 tax "reform"!), but because politicians always use "defense" as an excuse not to spend on the things we actually need. Seriously, we can already destroy the planet 300 times over; what, we won't be safe until it's 400?

Finally, in case you thought I forgot about funding the American Jobs Plan: Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a "millionaire's surtax" that would raise the top tax bracket from 37% to 47%, Inequality.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, and Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the corporate tax rate. Does that all sound too tax-the-rich for you? Well, they've spent the last 40 years demonstrating that they deserve to pay higher taxes! And the smoke-and-mirrors pay-fors Republicans prefer -- user fees which always fall on working people, and "asset recycling" that's just a fancy-schmancy name for "selling off public works to build other public works" -- won't get the job done. Why do we listen to Republicans again? I mean, just six months ago they were trying to literally nullify the 2020 election. When will Democrats learn? When we speak in numbers they can't deny.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning jobs, drug prices, endless war, broadband access, payday loans, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the Biden/Republican infrastructure "deal," tell our President to put the brakes on a rule preventing our government from forcibly lowering drug prices, and tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq war authorization, expand broadband, clamp down on payday lenders, and end the filibuster. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs; for the Biden-related alert, see the second paragraph below.

First things first: tell your Congressfolk to reject the "bipartisan" "infrastructure"/"jobs" "deal" negotiated between 20 Senators and President Biden last week -- either call them or let Food and Water Watch help you email them. No one in America should care if this is something our President wants, or moderates want, or Republicans want; all we should care about is if it's what we want, and I would assert that it's not. And that's not just because Republicans are pretending that the separate reconciliation bill even Joe Manchin wants to do is some kind of "betrayal." It's also because the "deal" would privatize public assets to build other public assets -- that's called "asset recycling," which is just a 10-dollar way of saying "privatization." And if Democrats agree not to do a separate reconciliation bill in order to "keep their word" or appease Republicans, then they deserve to lose their majorities in 2022. Of course, we don't deserve the fascist storm that'll follow, so let's try to head all that off by communicating our will to our Congressfolk in an unmistakable manner.

President Biden plans to move forward with a rule that would prevent our government, for the first time in over 40 years, from seizing drug patents when big pharma corporations charge usurious prices. If you remember Mylan charging hundreds of dollars for EpiPens and numerous corporations charging so much for insulin that diabetics now risk death in rationing the drug, you will scratch your head at the idea that our government should not step in and stop that shit cold, but, sadly, when Joe Biden was a Senator, he worked very, very hard to keep our government from "interfering" in absurdly-high drug prices. Maybe he needs a phone call about this matter! 1.202.456.1111 is the number, and here's the White House contact page. (If I get a separate action alert about this matter -- which seems likely, now! -- I'll share it.)

Win Without War helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 256, which would repeal the nefarious authorization to use military force (or AUMF) in Iraq. Our House passed this bill, and not only that, 49 Republicans voted in its favor! Maybe I shouldn't make too much of that -- a lot of our Best and Brightest didn't do the right thing in 2002 when it really, really mattered, and a lot of the folks who just voted yea on H.R. 256 (Boebert, Gaetz, Gohmert, Gosar, Greene, Issa, Jordan, McClintock, Schweikert) are still clowns, but at least now people like Mob Boss Mitch will have much less room to say well, this isn't bipartisan enough for me to permit to get to a vote. Oh, and if you're upset because "they're doing this to a Democratic President," please step away from this blog, because it ain't for you. And your values ain't shit if they don't inconvenience you once in a while.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1783/S. 745, the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act. And don't brook any nonsense from your Congressfolk about it, either! Broadband internet is an essential service, or does Congress forget how many votes it took or hearings it held over the internet this past year? Certainly you don't forget how much work you did, or how much school your kids did, over the internet this past year! Note well, also, that H.R. 1783/S. 745 would prevent states from pre-empting localities within states from offering their own public broadband! After all, preventing localities from such matters of self-determination has always seemed not particularly conservative to me.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the so-called "Fake Lender" rule promulgated by the Trump Administration. The Senate has already passed a resolution repealing the rule; now the House must follow suit. So what does the "Fake Lender" rule do? It lets payday lenders avoid state caps on interest by letting them essentially launder their loans through out-of-state banks! Woe unto the young buck who came up with that idea! That dude will find himself (do I need to gender-equivocate here? I suspect not!) at the Pearly Gates describing how he helped payday lenders trap even more good Americans in 300% revolving debt, and I think St. Peter's going to give him quite the side-eye. You know what you can take to the Pearly Gates? That you told your Congressfolk to stamp out this idea like the cockroach it is!

Finally, NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby and boy how I have missed saying that! helps you tell your Senators to dump the filibuster into the trash heap of history already. Yes, I supported keeping the filibuster around and making Senators talk through it all the way to the beginning of this year, but I'm done -- our Senators will never do the necessary work of a civilized society until we make them. And they just filibustered the beginning of debate on the For the People Act last week! The beginning of debate! No, I don't want to hear about lessening procedural "choke points" as a "compromise," because the Senate will not do it. If I may borrow a metaphor from Better Call Saul: if a chimp has a machine gun, you don't just hope he'll learn how to use it -- you take it from him.

Action: concerning jobs, taxes, paid leave, and D.C. statehood.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep privatization out of the American Jobs Plan, pass a Wealth Tax, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, enact paid family/medical leave, and make Washington, D.C. our 51st state. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

On the occasion of David Dayen at The American Prospect informing us that a central feature of the "bipartisan" infrastructure bill is the selling off of public services to private corporations in order to build new public services, this would be a good time to call your Congressfolk and tell them no privatization in the American Jobs Plan. When you sell off public works, you get money one time; when you hold on to public works, you get money, in the form of taxes, for as long as you can shepherd them properly. And nobody's still clinging to the notion that the private sector can do public works better, right? I mean, the opposite happens, like, all the time (as Mr. Dayen documents in his article). And once something's private, the people don't own it anymore.

In a related note, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Wealth Tax. We all just witnessed the ProPublica report detailing how little the very richest Americans pay in taxes -- and the Republican response was to say whoever leaked that information to reporters ought to go to jail! That sure is burying the lede! Most of us work a job and get a paycheck, but the very richest individuals don't have to work very hard -- they just let the money they already have do the "work"! But if they have absurd amounts of money, they can buy laws and politicians at will -- and they have! This is why we need to enact a Wealth Tax, and the Wealth Taxes proposed so far raise a lot of money without destroying any estates. Hard to believe, Harry, that anyone would seriously propose selling off public assets to fund new public assets instead of taxing the rich.

In yet another related note, both Americans for Tax Fairness and the Coalition on Human Needs help you tell your Congressfolk to make that Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. Lots of good American working families will be getting the first of their monthly $250 or $300 checks on July 15, and they're going to like it, even if Republicans don't. Even if Congress (foolishly!) let those expanded checks be annual after that, as they're supposed to be in 2022, good Americans with children will continue to reap the benefits of having more breathing space -- when you can meet the bills, you can be better parents. And, you know, it's hard to believe, Harry, that anyone would seriously consider ending these expanded benefits instead of taxing the rich.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact paid family/medical leave for all Americans. We're about the only civilized nation that doesn't have it as a matter of course, and a mere 21% of American workers get paid family/medical leave via their employers, so we've got to fix that. Just so happens that President Biden's American Families Plan would include paid/family medical leave, but we'd do well for ourselves to tell Congress we want paid family/medical leave in advance. You hear how many Republicans talk about how their constituents are talking to them about the 2020 election? Wouldn't it be nice if they'd talk about how their constituents are talking to them about paid family/medical leave? Yes, it would. And we should help them do that.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, which would make Washington, D.C. our 51st state. Because they deserve it! They have more residents than either Vermont or Wyoming and almost as many residents as Alaska and North Dakota, but nobody claims that those four states shouldn't be states. But at present, D.C. has one non-voting member of the U.S. House, and must submit to rule by our federal government -- and can I say that didn't help them very much on January 6? If D.C. had their own National Guard, for example, they could have responded to that uprising a lot more quickly than Donald Trump did. I mean, we do still value self-reliance and self-determination, right? Or do we only do that with areas that aren't majority-Black? I mean, I'd rather think better of my opponents, but they make it so hard.

Around the table: fight the real enemy, part 984.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch tells us that "The Republican Party Has Turned Fascist and Is Now the Most Dangerous Threat in the World," and he's not real hopeful that America will reject them, now that too many state election officials have quit (that's what happens when Trumpholes threaten their lives!) and Republican legislators are giving themselves the power to overturn elections on pretexts even flimsier than Donald Trump's. He almost skips over its alliance with big corporate power in his description of how fascism achieves its ends, but then maybe he was depressed enough.

Harsha Panduranga at the Los Angeles Times explains "Why Biden’s strategy for preventing domestic terrorism could do more harm than good." Long story short: because it's largely a rehash of the Obama-era initiatives that didn't work. In any case, connecting would-be right-wing extremists with "mental health and social services" would do a good deal less about right-wing terrorism than, you know, ending the death grip of corporations on our economy. If we're all working, and working happily, and getting ahead, we're a lot less likely to fall for the Proud Boys and Boogaloo Boys of the world. If we're all working for dung pellets and paying extra for privatized water and getting slammed with surprise medical bills, then we're more likely to become right-wing terrorists.

When I read that a single person in Georgia has personally challenged the right to vote of over 30,000 good folks in Georgia that she's never even met, I feel compelled to ask: how is this legal? How can someone like Pamela Reardon prove she has any standing to sue these folks in a court of law? If two liberals in Wisconsin couldn't prove to our Supreme Court they'd personally been harmed enough by state gerrymandering, how can folks like Ms. Reardon prove they've been harmed by nonexistent voter fraud? (And next time someone tells you that "it's regular folks" who have "serious questions" about the 2020 election, just show them a picture of Ms. Reardon, and remind them that of course right-wing organizations like True the Vote want front people who look like "regular folks.")

Las Vegas Raiders defensive end Carl Nassib comes out as gay, and what a shame right-wing talk radio OG Lester Kinsolving isn't with us anymore so he can put unneeded "comic" emphasis on the word "end," as he did when former Washington tight end Jerry Smith came out to discuss his AIDS diagnosis. Of course, Mr. Smith had been retired for many years at that point, and it's a big deal that Mr. Nassib has come out while he's still in his prime. I'm sure right-wingers on social media are saying he's just doing this so the Raiders won't cut him, though, frankly, that wasn't very likely beforehand, and cynicism isn't even charming in a precocious 13-year-old.

Our Supreme Court has issued more famous rulings lately, but they've also ruled that children working as slaves to make chocolate for American candy corporations can't sue those corporations in American court, because (as Justice Thomas suggests) Nestlé and Cargill outsourced all the torture and abuse to Ivory Coast corporations and then said they didn't know what they were doing. One could argue that a leader should know what those who work for him are doing, and one could also argue that outsourcing itself might be evidence that a corporation aims to avoid accountability for what's done in their supply chain. And yeah, I noticed the former Obama official defending Nestlé and Cargill; I wonder how he sleeps at night.

Finally, as New York's mayoral campaign heats up, Julie Hollar at FAIR reminds us that New York's tabloids would rather you be obsessing about crime than, you know, the prospect of being evicted by your landlord because the pandemic forced you out of work and you haven't been able to afford the exorbitant rent. By the time you run down the actual crime statistics in New York -- which are, guess what, generally lower than normal, and much lower than they were 30 years ago! -- you will be reminded that whenever a politician or a media hack talks about a "crime wave," they're gearing up to lie to you. (That's a reminder for President Biden, too, of course.)

Around the table: private corporations hunting citizens, and other horrors.

Tens of thousands of good Brazilians take to the streets to protest President Bolsonaro's continuing inability/unwillingness to handle the COVID pandemic and to demand his removal from office. I sure wish we'd done that in America -- and given that protesting in America can get you ridiculed but protesting in Brazil can get you shot, I applaud the courage of good Brazilians, and wish them the best in getting that irredeemable asshole out of office. (People say I'm not kind to call him that. Believe me, I am kind to call him that.)

From the "Dystopia Is Here" file: Joseph Cox and Jason Roebler at Vice describe how the creator of an app called Citizen -- which purports to alert its users to crimes in progress, thus "enabling" them to stop them -- stalked an innocent man all night, purportedly for arson, even putting a five-digit bounty on him. Citizen sounds like Nextdoor on meth -- one former employee calls it an "anxiety sweatshop" -- and hopefully you can see how Citizen employees working undercover in major cities can turn into a corporation's private dictatorship. Which, I maintain, would be even worse than a government dictatorship, particularly since it would have the volunteer "assistance" of large numbers of folks who think every suspect is a perp and every perp must be Black.

Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo tells the story of a man detained at a private prison, in solitary confinement, for almost a year, without having his day in court, until the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals finally set him free. He must have been some kind of super-villain, right? You already know the answer to that, I trust: police originally arrested him on "marijuana-related charges." And we all know that in our sick, immoral, and decadent society, the real super-villains always get off scot-free. Sometimes they even get elected President.

Not too many years ago, my great-uncle asked why colleges charged so much; I responded, "because they can." But Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns, and Money gives us a much more exhaustive explanation. Preceded, of course, with a refutation of all the wrong reasons: that public investment in colleges has gone down (it hasn't), that faculty salaries have gone up dramatically (that is to laugh), that the monetary "value" of a college degree has gone up dramatically (that is also to laugh). Which mainly leaves, you guessed it, administrative expenses, which not only include more (and more highly-paid) administrators, but an administrator "class" that moves around from college to college and mainly concerns itself with, you guessed it, making more money. I'm old enough to remember when an education had intrinsic value.

Right-wing garbage merchants claim that Moderna's COVID vaccine has a "secret ingredient," and then try to "prove" their assertion with a safety data sheet that describes the ill effects of chloroform, not the "secret ingredient" in question. It's a little like trying to prove eating beef is dangerous by describing all the ill effects of eating cow dung. And if you decided that this wasn't a mistake but malicious evil -- that there is no way someone promotes this garbage by accident -- well, how could I blame you?

Tierney Sneed at Talking Points Memo catalogues, at great expense to her well-being I would think, the right-wing's mania for election "audits" they all think will return Donald Trump to office. What part of "accept the results" and "get over it" did they not hear? And note well that when even the most sympathetic auditors don't deliver the results right-wingers want, right-wingers just turn on them. Remember when Rush Limbaugh used to say liberalism was easy? He was wrong about that, too: being a right-winger is easy, because you never need to accept something you don't want to.

Action: concerning the Uyghurs, private prisons, the PRO Act, vaccine investment, and police brutality.

Long story short: tell big clothing corporations to stop enabling China in its exploitation of Uyghur Muslims, tell President Biden to cancel private prison contracts, tell your Senators to pass the PRO Act, and tell your Congressfolk to spend new nuke money on vaccine development and pass bills that would curtail police brutality. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Reps' and Senators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below.

Sum of Us helps you tell big clothing corporation Zara to stop using Uyghur forced labor in China to manufacture their products. Nobody should profit from slave labor, and nobody should profit from the Chinese herding hundreds of thousands of Muslims into concentration camps where they get tortured and brainwashed, either. Some folks, most likely trolls, will tell you that opposing Zara's efforts to profit off the Uyghurs actually hurts the Uyghurs, because then the Chinese will take it out on them more, or something. Eject such people from your acquaintance! Wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR against corporations profiting from oppression always pressures the oppressors, and any evil they do because they feel pressure is on them, not you.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell the Biden Administration to cancel all prison and detention center contracts with private corporations. Regardless of how you feel about punishment, etc., getting private corporations out of the imprisoning business will save the taxpayer money and make our government more accountable. Private prisons don't "do the job better for less," they do it worse at more expense, and generally they "solve" their accountability problems with large campaign donations. When we inject the profit motive into a public good, the profit motive overwhelms the public good eventually. And this is all a bad way to rehabilitate prisoners or address immigration issues. We still are serious about these things, aren't we?

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act would repeal state-level "right to work" laws (i.e., "right to work for less" laws!), stop employers from requiring workers to attend anti-union meetings or sign forced arbitration agreements, would stop employers from retaliating against employees (including managers) who blow the whistle on labor law violations, and would let employees determine how to conduct a union election. And how does the other side respond? By saying people shouldn't have to join a union if they don't want to. Most people want to, most of the others will be fine with it once they see the benefits, and we can accommodate the political beliefs of the rest (by keeping dues and political contributions separate, for example).

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2227/S. 982, the Investing Cures Before Missiles (or ICBM) Act. The bill would redirect funding away from new intercontinental ballistic missiles (which is what "ICBM" more traditionally stands for, see what they did there!) and toward an even better COVID vaccine. We spend too much money on missiles; we get too little for what we spend on drugs, of course, but you can make your tax dollar go a lot further on a vaccine than you can on yet another weapon. We already spend more on defense than the next eight nations on that list combined, and yet we still worry we're not safe! It's almost like the two facts are related. You know what makes people safer in this day and age, though? Knowing they're much less likely to die from a virus that doesn't have to kill them.

Finally, if you've missed previous action alerts about police brutality, Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end militarization of local police. The Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act and the Demilitarizing Law Enforcement Act both await House consideration, after all, and don't worry about making your Congressfolk sick of hearing about this from you! They're supposed to get sick of hearing about it, and then they're supposed to do something about it! This note, I realize, is of a piece with the previous one -- just as we're wrong that more missiles will keep us safer as a nation, we're also wrong to think more weapons will keep police safer on our streets. You know what keeps police safer? Knowing their communities better, and positively interacting with their communities more. Tough to quantify in a spreadsheet, I know, but that doesn't make it wrong.

Action: concerning clean water, internet access, facial recognition, social media, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell Pennsylvania state legislators to protect clean water, tell Comcast to stop capping data during a pandemic, tell Uber and Uber Eats to stop using facial recognition on its employees, tell Facebook not to give Donald Trump his account back, and tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. You can find PA state legislator phone numbers using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone), but I've included petition/email links for all five action alerts today.

Penn Environment helps you tell your state assemblyfolk to pass HB 714, which would protect our rivers and streams by preserving forested buffers along our waterways. These buffer zones not only protect our clean water from noxious agricultural runoff, but from the pollution development causes. HB 714 would mandate that at least a 100-foot-wide forested buffer protect all waterways, though some waterways would get a 300-foot buffer; Pennsylvania state legislators tried repeatedly last decade to chip away at these buffers, because capitalism, I guess, but really, a little more protection for our waterways is not so much to ask. Everything you build eventually falls, but clean water is forever -- if you work to keep it.

Consumer Reports helps you tell Comcast to stop putting data caps on its customers and stop charging insane overage fees as well. In my best Jimmy Stewart voice: don't they know there's a pandemic on? Of course, this is Comcast, so I'm sure they do know that more folks are working from home, and attending school from home, than ever before; surely Comcast wouldn't want to be seen as opportunist. Then again, they have monopolies or near-monopolies just about everywhere they operate. Comcast has already shown that the Big Stick of Bad PR can move it -- it delayed rolling out a cap in the northeast after folks brandished that Stick -- but it's still doing this dirty deed in the rest of America, and why should they suffer so Comcast can be richer?

Fight for the Future helps you tell Uber and Uber Eats to stop forcing its employees to submit to facial recognition software. Because facial recognition sucks! It can't tell Black folks apart any better than your right-wing uncle can! Thus it is a very bad way to tell if your drivers are working. Have they never heard of texting customers? I mean, in The Future, there are about a thousand ways to verify if your drivers have made their delivery, and making them snap a selfie of themselves so facial recognition software can fail to recognize them and boot them off the network is a pretty stupid one. As with all stupid ideas, of course, you have to wonder if the stupidity's on purpose. So much failure seems to make so much money nowadays. But that doesn't make it right, nor does it mean we should just tolerate it.

CARE2 helps you tell Facebook not to lift their suspension of Donald Trump's account. Facebook let our former President get away with all sorts of obnoxious behavior, but the attempted coup of January 6 was apparently a bridge too far, and thus Facebook suspended his account. And now they're hoping no one's looking! We can prove them wrong about that. When right-wingers try to frame this as a free speech issue, well, you could respond that Facebook is a publishing house and not a public utility, or you could just point out that Donald Trump is supposedly starting his own social network as we speak, which proves he doesn't even need Facebook! Always they forget about noxious wealth; I wonder why.

Finally, both Public Citizen and Common Cause help you tell our U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. For his attempts to foul up mail-in voting, of course, and for his attempts to cut services and raise prices, and also for his not-so-secret desire to privatize our Post Office, but you need not recall any of that -- you need only recall how bad mail delivery has been over the last few months, and I sure hope you didn't lose any life-saving medications in that mess.

Action: concerning corporate taxes, our Postal Service, Rahm Emanuel, and Georgia elections.

The Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act (no bill number at this writing) is back, and like previous iterations of the bill, it would stop corporations from simply declaring that it made a lot of its profits "overseas," this time by taxing "overseas" profits at the same rate as domestic profits. I put "overseas" in quotation marks because tax haven abuse has become acutely absurd over the years -- corporations reported almost $60 billion in the Cayman Islands in 2017, which happens to be about ten times that nation's entire gross domestic product. The bill would also block those notorious corporate "inversions," in which an American corporation merges with a foreign corporation (think Burger King's 2014 merger with the Canadian corporation Tim Hortons) in order to avoid paying taxes in America. Surely not that many Americans look at Burger King and say attaboy! I think the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators. They'll never see it coming.

While you've got your Reps and Senators on the phone, tell them to pass H.R. 695/S. 145, the USPS Fairness Act. You know how our U.S. Postal Service's recent money problems can all be traced to, no, not "bad products" or "bad service" or "refusal to modernize," but with a Congressional mandate to pre-fund 75 years' worth of retiree benefits, a mandate with which literally no other corporation or federal agency must comply. They say "government doesn't work" and then they go out and prove it, by deliberately screwing it up! Well, the USPS Fairness Act would repeal this mandate, and then our Post Office can better serve the American people, as I know they've tried their damnedest to do, despite all the forces allied against them. And the USPS Fairness Act is an actual bipartisan bill! The Senate's lead sponsor is Steve Freaking Daines of Montana, joined by three other Republicans out of six additional co-sponsors; the House bill counts 40 Republicans among its 254 sponsors, and 254, by the way, is a majority out of 435. This is a no-brainer.

Meanwhile, word on the street says President Biden may nominate Rahm Emanuel as U.S. Ambassador to China or Japan. Mr. Emanuel embodies everything we hate about the Democratic Party -- its weakness in the face of corporate power, and its ruthlessness in hurting people toward that aim. Mr. Emanuel helped the Clinton Administration ram "free" trade deals, racist crime bills, and racist welfare "reform" legislation through Congress in the 1990s, then supported the Iraq War while an actual member of the U.S. House. Then, as Barack Obama's first Chief of Staff, he ensured that real progressive legislation died a horrible death in the House, resulting in the Tea Party revolution of 2010, when Republicans claimed the House; then, as Mayor of Chicago, he closed over four dozen public schools after a teacher's strike, privatized city parking services, and suppressed the police killing of Laquan McDonald. So why would a man with that record deserve power and privilege in our government? Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any efforts to give Rahm Emanuel an Ambassadorship.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the results of Georgia's 2020 election. Yes, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr is investigating the matter as we speak, but given that Republicans run Georgia's government, you may feel less than confident about their ability or willingness to conduct an impartial investigation. Hell, they could even just be tired, just as Mr. Trump surely intended. And Mr. Carr also just so happened to chair a group that exhorted Trump supporters to descend on D.C. on January 6. But even if Mr. Carr suddenly grows a spine, this investigation certainly concerns our Justice Department, since the phone calls we all heard described a President trying to overturn the election results in Georgia as part of his effort to overturn the results of a national election. And if we let him get away with that, what will future Donald Trumps do? Whatever the fuck they please, that's what. And America deserves better than that.

Action: concerning COVID relief, saving our Post Office, private prisons, and Iran.

The House passed a COVID relief bill on Saturday morning; now it's time to tell your Senators to do the same. Tell them they must include the $15/hour minimum wage in the bill, even if it means overruling the Senate Parliamentarian. I don't particularly want to do that, but let's be realistic: Republicans will do it next chance they get, and blame Democrats for it. And we should still work on Sens. Manchin (D?-WV) and Sinema (D?-AZ) about their particular unwillingness to pass the $15/hour minimum wage; their phone numbers are 202.224.3954 and 202.224.4521, respectively. Most Americans want this minimum wage hike, and more than half of Republicans want it, and ain't no way all the Republicans who don't want it all live in Arizona and West Virginia. Sens. Manchin and Sinema should stop adhering to the conventional wisdom on "how to represent a conservative state." You represent a conservative state the same way you represent the will of any other state: by doing the will of its people. And again, ain't no one in America going into the voting booth in 2022 saying thank God Democrats preserved the sanctity of Senate procedure at great cost to all of us!)

While you've got your Senators on the phone, you'll want to tell them to confirm President Biden's three new nominees to the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors. President Biden nominated them not too long after Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told a House Committee to "get used to me," so maybe now we won't have to get "used" to the big-time Republican donor who tried to foul up voting-by-mail and whose solution to all the problems Congress has created for our Post Office over the years is to cut back on delivering mail by air, which will make every day like the most recent holiday season, when packages took as long as a month and a half to get where they were supposed to go. Seriously, saying you can't serve the public because you don't have the money is un-American -- we can stop forcing our Post Office to pre-pay pension and health benefits at a scale we demand of literally no other government agency or corporation, or we can let our Post Office offer banking services again (which Daily Kos helps you do), and people like Louis DeJoy won't have their excuses anymore.

Meanwhile, President Biden has ordered our Justice Department to stop using private prisons, but hasn't ordered our Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) to do so, and our Bureau of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) operates under the auspices of DHS, hence Amnesty International helps you tell DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to release all detained immigrants and stop ICE from using private prisons to detain folks. Private prisons obey the profit motive, after all, and if abusing prisoners makes them more profits, they'll do it! Doesn't matter, necessarily, that private prisons also have to obey government regulations concerning the safety and health of detainees -- private prisons can ignore those regulations and dare our government to stop them, and if someone dies in neglect, well, a government fining a private prison won't bring that person back to life. That person is someone's mother, father, sister, brother, son or daughter, too -- not a faceless warrior in a "caravan." Generally, these folks run from oppression, and we're Americans, so we need to live up to our heritage, not cut it down out of wrath and sloth.

Finally, you've no doubt heard that President Biden proved he's just like all the other Presidents by ordering air strikes against Syria, presumably against Iran-supported militias -- so Win Without War reminds us that, hey, we can avoid firing missiles by rejoining the Iran nuclear deal, which they help you tell Mr. Biden to do! President Biden was Vice President when the Obama Administration negotiated that deal, after all, and it worked -- until President Trump, determined to piss on anything with the Obama name on it, withdrew America from the pact for no good reason. (And then put John Bolton in charge of our NSA, which, in retrospect, may not have been the best way to cure Mr. Trump's jones for war with Iran, since it clearly didn't get us there.) Seriously, war with Iran won't be as easy as war with Iraq was -- Iran has a lot more people to control! -- and war with Iraq, as it turned out, wasn't that easy and gave us ISIS, almost like that was the whole idea. We can avoid such miserable foreign policy choices by going with the diplomacy that's proven to keep Iran from developing nukes, and that's the Iran nuclear deal.

Action: concerning voting rights, new domestic terror legislation, the COUP Act, and saving our Post Office.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Today would be a good day to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (no bill number at this writing). (If you're pressed for time, the Sierra Club also helps you tell your Reps and Senators to pass the For the People Act.) The For the People Act contains a lot of goodies -- campaign finance disclosure, same-day voter registration, automatic voter registration, 15 days of early voting, independent commissions to redraw districts, and an end to those nefarious "address verification forms" that only seem to lead to folks of color getting de-registered -- and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would require any state or locality with a record of vote suppression over the last 25 years to get pre-clearance from our Justice Department before changing their laws. If your friends and neighbors complain, as Mitch McConnell did, that these are "Democrat power grabs," ask them why Republicans should lose if we do better at protecting the vote. If their answers mention "dead voters" or "suitcases in Georgia," remind them not to be so gullible.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the January 6 attempted coup, politicians have said they need new "domestic terror" legislation to help prevent such things from happening again -- but that's the way of the politicians, isn't it? They fuck up, so you have to give up more of your rights. Besides, there'd be a lot less domestic terrorism in America if folks could make ends meet and save some money and build a future and not get slammed by surprise medical bills, but no, the "free market" is "more important" than that. So Demand Progress helps you tell your Reps and Senators that "more domestic terrorism legislation" is not the answer. You may want to avoid saying things like "start using the tools you've got!", because, frankly, I think law enforcement has too many tools with which to "fight terrorism" already -- I would hate to see new legislation make the USA PATRIOT Act seem "not so bad after all." The best way to fight terrorism? Politicians should do their constituents' will rather than try to pull the wool over their eyes all the time. It's not so much to ask, really.

In other news, H.R. 276, the Congressional Oversight of Unjust Policing (or COUP) Act, would establish a Congressional commission and charge it with investigating exactly how Y'all-Qaeda were able to breach our Capitol on January 6. If you're sitting at home snorting that of course they didn't see it coming because the protestors were white! Duh!, rest assured that the COUP Act specifically mandates "an assessment on whether conscious and unconscious bias was a factor in the gross miscalculation of the risk posed by protestors to Members of Congress and staff on that date." If you're sitting at home squealing ANUTHUR BUREAUCRACIEZ!!!!, then ask yourself how you felt about all those Benghazi hearings Republican House Reps held back in the day, and if "that was different," be prepared to explain how. No, wait, I'll explain it: the Benghazi hearings were all about drumming up drama and enraging weak voters. Putting in writing our failures as a nation on January 6, on the other hand, might actually help us do better in advance of the next coup attempt. So People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolks to pass the COUP Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Biden to replace our USPS's Board of Governors with folks who'll actually get our Post Office working the way it should, then MoveOn still helps you do that. "Getting our Post Office working the way it should" includes our USPS Board of Governors firing Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's sorry ass, since he's the one trying to implement all the "innovations" that slow down our mail and make us pay more for it. We deserve a Post Office that runs as well as our postal workers do; indeed, our Constitution actually enumerates this task to our federal government. I still worry that Joe Biden agrees with Mr. DeJoy that we should privatize our Post Office, because "all it does is deliver junk mail" and "people don't write letters anymore, they write emails" or some such. If so, Mr. Biden should be more conscious of the fact that the Post Office literally delivered his 2020 victory, and it did so because we fought Mr. DeJoy tooth and nail to get that done. I wouldn't say it's "uncivil" to remind him of that.

UPDATE. I inadvertently identified the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act with its bill number from last session, and have thus corrected that error in the first paragraph above.

Around the table: in which we contemplate good things happening in America, however that's supposed to feel.

Jeet Heer at The Nation says "Trump's two impeachments are just the start of a long struggle to turn the former president into a pariah," and all I can say is: we can only hope! Next steps, for Mr. Heer, include criminal and civil charges against Mr. Trump and a Congressional investigation (not a 9.11-style "truth commission," necessarily) into the events of January 6; I would say our task, in the meantime, is to shame and shun anyone who still thinks Donald Trump is a God-among-men. For Trump votaries, anything civilized people do will just make him seem more the martyr, but let them see how their lives are when their devotion is all they have left.

There's no point sifting through Sen. Lindsey Graham's latest batch of word salad to figure out exactly how a Republican Congress would get rid of Vice President Harris, but he's correct that Lara Trump has become a viable candidate in the 2022 North Carolina Senate election. Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville has lowered the bar for how stupid you can sound/be and still get elected, so yes, Lara Trump can win -- unless Democrats nominate someone who gives North Carolinians someone to vote for. I think state Sen. Erica Smith is that person; the problem is that national Democrats think anyone but Erica Smith is that person. They should know better -- I mean, the Cal Cunningham disaster was just three months ago, and he didn't lose solely because he couldn't keep it in his pants.

David Frum's latest at The Atlantic, arguing that more democracy would solve our problems much better than continued rule by Our Glorious Elites, is fascinating, not just because he argues that the Founders were wrong about the "fickleness and passion" of the masses, not just because he measures the Federalist Papers against the evidence of the last 15 years and finds it wanting, but because he all but says Our Glorious Elites actually cause all our problems. And in noting how the Senate's refusal to pass climate change or immigration reform legislation led President Obama to issue more regulations -- which President Trump tried to overturn, albeit with little success -- Mr. Frum not only proves his point that the kind of "minority" rule espoused by our Founders actually leads to more instability and chaos, he also remains a conservative in doing so, and generally I prefer folks stay true to themselves.

So why is Mexico's government turning away from renewable energy and toward coal at this relatively late date? It can't be "energy sovereignty," since Mexico gets sun and wind just like everyone else, and when they say renewable energy is "unreliable," they probably mean it doesn't "reliably" make money for someone, and even if in this instance that "someone" is the Mexican taxpayer, we shouldn't necessarily celebrate. It sounds like Mexican President López Obrador (a.k.a. AMLO) either doesn't have the guts to nationalize the largely-privatized renewable energy industry or thinks the Mexican government can't compete with it, and that's not exactly visionary reasoning there.

Finally, you've heard about the wintry storms battering Texas this week? Well, Laura Clawson at Daily Kos notes that President Biden has moved rather swiftly and decisively in this matter, whereas his predecessor "repeatedly delayed disaster aid to parts of the country he didn't think were sufficiently pro-Trump." Turns out that having a President with over half a century of experience in our federal government is not an unqualified evil, and I hope we'll be highlighting many such Goofus and Gallant moments over the next few years. What Trump votaries in Texas are saying right now I can only imagine. Are they blaming Jewish space lasers for the winter weather?

Action: concerning voting rights, banksters, and our Postal Service.

Hard to believe, Harry, but Georgia state legislators want to require their bosses, the voters, to submit two copies of a photo ID in order to vote absentee. So what's wrong with signature matching, then? Signature matching didn't prevent Joe Biden from winning Georgia and Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff from winning the Senate runoffs, that's what. Georgia legislators can talk all they want about how "their constituents feel" that last election wasn't "secure," but, ah, I'll just say it: fuck your feelings. Apparently a state audit finding zero instances of fraud in Georgia absentee ballots just can't stack up next to some weakling's "feelings." So: Gov. Kemp's phone number is 404.656.1776, while Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan's number is 404.463.2478 and House Speaker David Ralston's number is 404.656.5020. Go ahead and call them and tell them to reject the sore loser bill, SB 29. Really! Feel absolutely free to call it that!

Meanwhile, a bankster hedge fund named Melvin Capital Management started short-selling GameStop stock, figuring that the mall-based electronics retailer was a one-handed push away from falling off a cliff -- but then Reddit users started buying up the stock, which drove up the price, which left the hedge fund holding the bag. In other words, regular folks pulled off a glorious piece of resistance against Wall Street hegemony, although you just know banksters will look to stop any future such actions in the next domestic terrorism bill. Strange how they feel "terrorized" by any attempt to keep them from sucking billions of dollars out of corporations like the vampires they are. So now's a good time to call your Reps and Senators (you can find their phone numbers using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page -- or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) and tell them one simple message: no bailouts for Melvin Capital. Because you know their hands are out!

Finally, Change.org helps you tell our Congressfolk to save our U.S. Postal Service. And of course Change.org allows you to write a short message along with signing the petition, and that's an opportunity you shouldn't waste, since so many evil people (cough most of the USPS Board of Governors and the Postmaster General cough) think "saving our Post Office" means privatizing it so some crony or other can get even richer. What should we do to help save our Post Office? Kill all the changes Postmaster General DeJoy proposed; repeal the law requiring our Post Office to prepay an absurd amount of money annually into its pension fund; allow our Post Office to offer basic banking services like check-cashing, bill payment, ATMs, and electronic money transfers. Particularly since in those urban and rural areas where the banksters won't go, good Americans too often find themselves at the mercy of payday lenders. Only a Scrooge McSmallgovernment could oppose any of these things! Which reminds me, someone go ask Rand Paul about them. I'm sure that'll be a laugh.

Action: concerning corruption, pollution, and privatization.

By now you've likely heard that Congress gave our Department of Defense $1 billion to make personal protective equipment (or PPE) to help battle COVID-19 -- and Defense instead spent most of it plugging perceived holes in its budget wholly unrelated to COVID-19. They've apparently spent (among other expenditures) $22 million on propellers from Rolls-Royce and over $13 million making drones, a press release trumpeting the saving of "14 jobs." That's almost a million dollars a job! Could it be that our Administration is trying to prove that government can't do anything right? I kid, of course -- they're absolutely trying to "prove" that, while simultaneously asserting that only this President can "fix" it! But corruption is still corruption, hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate our Pentagon's use or misuse of these funds. And remember: every dollar misspent means fewer masks and gowns for hospital workers working directly with COVID-19 patients.

Meanwhile, our Administration wants to roll back protections against toxic wastewater from coal plants, even though they pump out all kinds of toxins -- including mercury, lead, and arsenic, all linked to cancer, heart disease, diabetes and developmental problems in kids. Clean Air Act regulations restricted emissions from coal smokestacks, so coal corporations started putting the pollution into wastewater and dumped it into our rivers and streams! Then the Obama Administration issued regulations addressing coal wastewater, but now this Administration wants to roll them back. They're probably ready to tell us that this whole story just proves that ALL TEH REGULASHUNZ AREZ TEH USELESSEZ!!!!! -- that "corporations will just find another way to pollute," or something. But what kind of message does that send to our children? "Don't do the right thing, ever, because wrongdoers will find a way to confound you?" U.S. PIRG helps you tell our EPA to reject its own plan to roll back toxic wastewater emissions from coal plants.

Finally, corporations are trying to privatize Pennsylvania's public water systems, but HB 2746 and HB 2597 would require that any proposed sale of our public water to private corporations go before the voters first. And what would private corporations have to fear? If they really can run it better than our government, they shouldn't have any trouble proving it to the voters! Of course they can't, since we all know water privatization means higher prices, worse service, and lost jobs, and that's only in the short run -- in the long run, water privatization means that the people who drink the water lose all control over its maintenance. Our government, after all, is accountable to us, and that remains true even after they fail us; private corporations are only accountable to their shareholders, and executives try their damnedest to avoid even that responsibility. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell your PA state legislators to ensure that we get to vote on whether we sell our water systems.

I'll be taking care of a health issue over the next few days, so posting may be light. Before that happens, I feel compelled to mention that I've received numerous action alerts exhorting us to prevent Republicans from voting on a new Supreme Court justice before Inauguration Day 2021, but I haven't passed any of them along, because I wanted the Senate to vote on Merrick Garland in 2016 and I am not a powermad hypocrite like Mitch McConnell. I know some folks will say I speak from a position of privilege, that I am not one of the folks who stand to lose the most from replacing the last Justice Ginsberg with a reactionary (i.e., folks of color and gay and transgender folks), and thus I have the "luxury" of following the rules. But I say that following the rules isn't actually a luxury even if so many Americans (most of them rich!) act like it is, and I also say that if we say one thing in 2016 because it suits us and then say the opposite in 2020 because it suits us then we become the folks we most hate. And I also say that putting a sympathetic Supreme Court Justice on the court is not the only way to fight for justice; yes, a 6-3 right-wing majority on the Court will suck, but we have dealt with worse as a nation and succeeded. In any case, if I find our President's eventual nominee wanting, I will advocate for our Senators to reject her, and if we do that, and we make our Senators afraid for their jobs, they will comply. It's the only thing that really works in such instances; everything else is a shortcut.

Around the table: in which we shake our damn heads at yet more Presidential drama.

Presidential votaries hinder early voting in Fairfax, VA. Whether or not plaintiffs will be able to hang these folks on Virginia state law (which prohibits political advocacy within 40 feet of a polling place), that doesn't change the fact that confident people don't have to chant and wave flags in front of a polling place. Also, these I'm-not-touching-you games don't do well at persuading others to vote for their candidate. And though we know relentless negative TV advertising depresses turnout, making someone throw up their hands and go home once they've already trekked out to the polling place may be another thing entirely.

Federal agents abduct two Native American protestors at a holy site in the path of our Administration's vanity border wall construction, and hold them without access to a lawyer for almost 24 hours; their detainment (at a private prison over two hours away) includes at least two strip-searches and being "chained at the feet and waists." You know, in case you thought this was only happening to police brutality protestors. Anyone else think the private prison's claim that they couldn't tell the two activists were women is utter horsedoodle -- or worse, was a show they put on for the Administration and/or its votaries?

Shane Burley at TruthOut finds catches T-shirts disappearing from retail site Teespring while far-right groups actually committing violence on the ground still selling their wares. Freedom: it's best when it's completely conditional! And Teespring spokeshacks flat-out lied about it, too, first alleging "copyright violations," then when confronted with evidence to the contrary, admitted it was all about the word "antifa." Using a corporate website to hawk your wares is always fraught with danger, particularly when the corporate types live in fear of offending right-wingers, but don't give a damn about those of us who are actually offended by the noise of Nazi wannabes. So go ahead and boycott their sorry asses. It's not like the internet is a tiny place.

Upon hearing that our President has led his votaries to believe he's actually received a Nobel Peace Prize when he's only been nominated, I feel compelled to note, again, that none of his votaries will verify his assertion; they'll just take it at face value because they want it to be true. And maybe if he gets re-elected, and doesn't actually win it (which sure seems likely!), his votaries will whine about how they "took" it from him! (Also, too, over 200 individuals and 100 groups were nominated this year, so I can't even say it's "an honor to be nominated," as they say about the Oscars.)

While it may not be precisely true that 7th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Amy Coney Barrett -- reportedly at or near the top of our President's short list to replace the late Justice Ginsberg on our Supreme Court -- belongs to an organization that inspired Margaret Atwood's famous novel The Handmaid's Tale (now a Hulu TV series starting Elizabeth Moss), one Facebook meme of Ms. Barrett in a handmaid's headdress might be weapons-grade PR against her. Our President loves to create drama, of course, so he might pick Ms. Barrett precisely because of the uproar it'd create, where a choice like 11th Circuit Judge Barbara Lagoa would more likely fly under the radar.

Finally, speaking of drama, our Justice Department designates three U.S. cities -- New York, Seattle, and Portland (OR) -- as "anarchist jurisdictions," meaning our Administration could deprive them of federal funding. Or try to, anyway -- the only leg our President has to stand on here is a memo he wrote, which, last I looked, isn't law, no matter what he thinks. More likely he just likes using the word "anarchist" as often as he can, to make people think ZOMG TEH CITIEZ AREZ TEH LAWLESSEZ!!!!! Again, our President never talks about "law and order" as it would relate to polluters and banksters.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, Social Security, surprise medical bills, and private prisons.

Congress is off the rest of the month, but we should still call them and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, and reject the suite of Republican-proposed bills known as the HEALS Act. This remains very simple: the HEROES Act extends enhanced unemployment benefits, funds our Post Office, and funds states and localities -- while the HEALS Act gives corporations undeserved immunity from lawsuits filed by the people they hurt and business honchos get to deduct 100% of their meals instead of 50%. Republicans must be very confident they're going to win elections this year for them to go all-in on something as moronic as the HEALS Act. Of course, our "liberal" media is helping them out, by casting Congress's failure to pass another COVID-19 relief bill as either a bipartisan or a Democratic failure. Stone cold truth is that it's a Republican failure -- the Democrats, for once, passed the HEROES Act almost three months ago, and that bill would do what the people want it and need it to do, but Senate Republicans did nothing. And we don't just "get along" with people who do nothing.

And while you have your Congressfolk on the phone, tell them to fight to the death our President's recent Executive Order deferring payroll tax contributions until after the election, because those contributions fund Social Security. Our President has said, out loud, that he'd prefer to "terminate" these contributions and fund Social Security and Medicare from general budgeting, which of course will lead eventually to at least one body of Congress throwing up its hands and saying we just can't afford it anymore! But we should not tolerate the government of the greatest nation on Earth saying we can't "afford" a dignified retirement for all our citizens. No equivocation is possible here -- a large number of politicians and not just Republicans are thrilled that our President is willing to take the PR hit for achieving one of Our Glorious Elites' long-standing goals, the destruction of Social Security. They will not stand up for Social Security unless we stand up for Social Security -- and we must stand up in such numbers that our will cannot be mistaken.

Meanwhile, previous COVID-19 legislation ensured that COVID-19 tests would be free to anyone who needed one -- or so we thought! As we speak, good Americans still get slammed with surprise medical bills ranging from $150 on the low end to $3,000 on the high end. Turns out those bills didn't address the matter of health care facilities partnering with "out of network" facilities to get the tests done, but hey, last I looked, "free" meant "free," not "free unless your local ER is out-of-network," or "free unless this particular ER doctor is out-of-network even though all the others are in-network," or "free unless we're dumb enough to use an out-of-network lab," or "free unless we gouge you by using an out-of-network lab." What do I always say? Incompetence is malice! The stupid-or-evil debate doesn't matter if the end result is evil! Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to end surprise medical billing during this pandemic. Surprise medical bills always make the news, so you'd think ending them would be a bipartisan cause. Alas, only if we make it so.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell TD Bank to divest from notorious private prison corporation GEO Group. TD invested heavily in GEO during the pandemic's early days, and I wouldn't blame you for thinking that's a bit of a head-scratcher there. Did TD Bank think our President's anti-immigrant cruelty was the wave of the future and it was time to get on board? Did they think there was going to be a motherlode in imprisoning folks during a pandemic? Did they fantasize that private prisons would control the pandemic better than everyone else, instead of the obvious truth that they'd do worse than everyone else, since private prisons operate facilities where you can't even pee in private? We may never know! What we do know is that private prisons, despite their relative favor with this President, put immigrant detainees in concentration camps and even if they didn't, they'd still generally do a crap job of spending taxpayer money. What we also know is that the Big Stick of Bad PR works on big corporations. If we wield it, that is.

Action: concerning public schools, pandemic data, and COVID-19 vaccines.

MoveOn helps you tell Congress to prevent our Administration from withholding federal funding from schools that do not fully reopen this fall. You contemplate our President suggesting he might do exactly that last month, and you wonder why he's so anxious to get kids packed like sardines into buildings where they can't possibly socially-distance, and you might well conclude that he's trying to get all those pesky unionized public school teachers killed. I wouldn't put it past him! But if you think that's a bridge too far for him, consider that he might decide to give all that money unused on public schools to private schools, because it's an "emergency." This is why I say incompetence is malice -- people like our President, just like George W. Bush before him, go out of their way to screw up as much as they can so they can prove "government doesn't work," and then they funnel all our taxpayer money to their cronies. But this is America, and we don't have to put up with any of that.

Meanwhile, you may recall that our Administration, faced with rising COVID-19 infections, decided to order health care providers to send all COVID-19-related data to the Department of Health and Human Services rather than the Centers for Disease Control. Presumably our President has decided he can "trust" HHS more than CDC, since the CDC is, by all appearances, actually trying to help Americans during a pandemic, while our President is only trying to help himself get re-elected. Fittingly enough, the numbers we are getting (I use Worldometers to get the latest) are still pretty damning for our President, but you would not be alone in suspecting that HHS might be concealing some information that's even worse than what we're getting. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would make sure all COVID-19 data gets shared with the CDC as well as HHS. I guess if HHS wants to have a pissing match with CDC, I can't really stop them. But I would warn them that we good Americans don't have the same tolerance for drama that we used to. In fact, I would say most of us are profoundly tired of it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk that any COVID-19 vaccine must be available to everyone regardless of their "ability to pay," then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. Rather than asking if individual Americans can "afford" the vaccine, we should ask if we, as a civilization, can afford to let hundreds of thousands of good Americans die merely because they're not banksters! I mean "afford" in the metaphorical sense, of course -- I know some cynic out there stands ready to retort that TEH DEADZ DON'TZ NEEDZ ANY MOREZ OF TEH HEALTHZ CAREZ HA HA HA HA SNORT!!!!!! But you measure the worth of a civilization by how it treats its most needy members -- a civilization that routinely says TO HELLZ WITHZ YOUZ HA HA HA FREE MARKETZ!!!!! may not deserve to endure. And there is also the practical matter of all these folks who would be unvaccinated-because-they're-poor, and thus would be able to keep the various COVID-19 strains going. For Americans of a certain stripe, of course, that's a feature, not a bug. But this is America, and they don't get all the say around here!

Action: concerning public water, paid family leave, and plastic pollution.

H.R. 2, the Invest in America Act, has its strengths, but it also has one glaring, intolerable weakness: it would make privatization of water systems a lot easier. Some folks no doubt believe that private corporations would do a better job than our government would, but the only thing private corporations do better is charge you more for your water. You may well respond well, the lead pollution in Flint's water supply was caused by a government, but a right-wing government caused that -- with an unelected "Emergency Manager," no less! -- and that right-wing government no doubt hoped that the good citizens of Flint (and elsewhere!) would simply throw up their hands and give over their water to private corporations. But the only solution to bad government is good government, not unaccountable and unelected private corporations who care only about their money. Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to take our public water away from us and give it to corporate cronies.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislator to support HB 1739/SB 580, the Family Care Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The Family Care Act would create a paid family/medical leave program in the Commonwealth, one that would pay less than the average wage in Pennsylvania in all cases (the formula in Sec. 305 [a] is a bit complex), but that's better than what we've got, and would allow good Pennsylvanians to take care of themselves or their loved ones and not get kicked out of their house or apartment or have their water or electricity shut off. Really, that's what "insurance" is all about, isn't it? The payroll tax the bill would levy is a little over one half of one percent (and is not "58 percent," "liberal" media! They make "mistakes" like that because they're malicious!), which, for someone making $50,000 annually, would amount to less than $25 monthly. And that's not a whole lot to ask to get all Pennsylvanians the paid family leave we deserve.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to put the brakes on plastic pollution by passing H.R. 5845/S. 3263, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. As Penn Environment's latest email missive puts it, "(n)othing we use for a few minutes should be allowed to pollute our oceans and rivers and threaten wildlife for centuries." And the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act would ban a lot of single-use plastics like polystyrene, and enact a moratorium on new plastic-manufacturing facilities. If the words "job-killing" come to mind when you hear these things, remember that we can create many different kinds of jobs in America, and we need not only create jobs in industries that dump the equivalent of a garbage truck full of trash into our oceans once per minute. At the risk of beating a dead horse, we could choose to create renewable energy jobs, jobs that would reduce trash and pollution, but we don't do that, because (as Ralph Nader used to say) nobody can own the sun. Maybe we could stop putting money at the center of every single thing we do?

Action: concerning unemployment, energy policy, public water, and factory farms.

One of the few good things to come out of the CARES Act was an expansion of unemployment benefits; now guess what our government wants to get rid of ASAP? The benefits expire at the end of July, but given the jones so many of our elected leaders have to "reopen" the economy, we could be back in the middle of an unflattened curve by then. And some of them say it's OK if some folks die if we "reopen" the economy faster! Apparently they do not know the definition of "mammon-worship" anymore. But over 30 million folks are out of work, the official U3 unemployment rate is over 14% (and the real U6 unemployment rate, which also counts the discouraged and underemployed, is almost 23%), and not that many Americans will be rushing into Best Buy even if they all open up tomorrow, so I think we should be prudent and prepare for the likelihood that workers will be unemployed past July. Also, too, when the answer to every question is GOVERNMENT SHOULDZ DO TEH NOTHINGZ!!!!, it's well past time to look at the man in the mirror. The Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the unemployment insurance boost past its original expiration date.

Meanwhile, too many politicians want future pandemic relief legislation to include corporate welfare handouts for big oil and gas corporations, and our Administration has rolled back oil and gas royalty rates on public lands even though that's our damn money! But along comes H.R. 6707/S. 3611, the Resources for Workforce Investments, Not Drilling (or ReWIND) Act, which would keep big fossil fuel corporations from taking funds meant for working families and small businesses, roll back our President's drilling royalty cuts, block new gas and oil leases, and stop banksters from taking over any oil or gas corporations in trouble. The bill would also prevent our Administration from overstocking oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, since seizing resources and directing them to where they're not needed seems to be a pattern with this President. And if right-wingers respond by whining about the bill's "Democrat priorities," they run the risk of suggesting that preventing corruption and mismanagement is only a "Democrat priority." So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to support saner energy policy by passing the ReWIND Act.

In other news, Nestlé plans to siphon off yet another source of public water at pennies a gallon, in order to make absurdly more expensive and not significantly more convenient bottled water -- this time at Ginnie Springs in northwestern Florida, and this though Ginnie Springs is dangerously low, and largely from overpumping. As it happens, the Suwannee River Water Management District has already heeded the thousands of public comments it received on this matter, and has thus denied Nestlé any new permits -- but Nestlé, of course, is taking the matter to court, because, as we know, corporations never ever file frivolous lawsuits! Only injured people ever do that, with the help of mustache-twirling trial lawyers! That's what right-wingers say, anyway. But big corporations don't need to take public water in order to make bottled water; rather, our state, local, and federal governments need to manage water effectively on our behalf and with the tax dollars we pay them. Hence Environmental Action helps you tell Nestlé to abandon its plans to drain Ginnie Springs merely for mammon.

Finally, H.R. 6718/S. 3221, the Farm System Reform Act, would not only ban new factory farms and the expansion of current ones, but would phase out current factory farms over the next 20 years. Factory farms aren't a more efficient way of delivering meat to consumers than small family farms: they're just a more efficient way of clogging up public waters with animal manure, and a more efficient way of redistributing income upward to executives. And they're also a more efficient way of making antibiotics useless, since some seven out of every 10 antibiotics in America still go to nominally healthy feed animals, so they produce more meat and so they better endure the squalid conditions of their imprisonment. To those who would still cite "high food prices" as a reason not to end this sordid state of affairs, we need but ask: how did Americans ever get enough to eat before factory farms came along? We did it through saner farming policy, of course, and not "big ag corporations know best" policy. So Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support better agricultural policy by passing the Farm System Reform Act.

Action: concerning internet freedom, worker safety, and conservation in Pennsylvania.

Battle for the Net helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to reinstate the net neutrality rules it repealed back in 2017. Why now? Because with more Americans working from home and more schoolkids taking classes at home, we are seeing, in real time, why we need our FCC to force internet service providers to treat all of its network traffic with equal importance. FCC Chair Ajit Pai says he's watching to make sure big telecom corporations don't just kick people off, but thanks to his own ideological predilections, he has absolutely no power to make big telecoms treat us all well! He can only beg! And begging big corporations to do the right thing sure is a great look for our government, which exists, after all, to serve us -- better to make big corporations do the right thing, and then punish them if they don't! Because if history has taught us anything, it's taught us that big corporations won't do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do -- but we get much better results if we make them do the right thing.

Meanwhile, you may not know that our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) uses private contractors to staff its call centers! And you may not know that one of them -- a corporation called Maximus, operating a CDC call center in Hattiesburg, MS -- trained 70 newly-hired employees without following physical distancing rules, and surprise, surprise! At least one got infected. And then Maximus didn't provide protecting equipment to its employees, or allow enough of them to work from home though "call center operator" seems like an obvious work-from-home job! I'd call all that irony, except for the nagging sense that irony should be subtler than that. Hence Good Jobs Nation helps you tell CDC Director Robert Redfield to ensure that all workers who answer calls for the CDC be able to keep themselves safe during this pandemic. Not for nothing, but Mr. Redfield could do that a whole lot more easily if our government didn't keep outsourcing vital services to private corporations. Our government's supposed to work for us, after all.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Commonwealth's reactionary state legislature continues taking a reaper's scythe to any government program that might actually benefit people, now with HB 1822,which aims to slash the Environmental Stewardship Fund, the Conservation District Fund, and the Keystone Recreation, Park, and Conservation Fund, and if that seems like "too many funds" to you, consider how much money our state gives away in corporate welfare to gas and coal, and consider how often legislators slash funding for good conservation programs over the years just so they can one day argue "hey, let's get rid of it, no one'll miss it." You'll miss the clean air, clean water, and parks to go hiking, fishing, and hunting in, I can guarantee you that! So let's not be like the proverbial frog in a pot of boiling water who doesn't realize he's cooked until it's too late. HB 1822 has already passed the House but awaits a Senate vote, hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state Senator to protect conservation funding by rejecting HB 1822.

Action: concerning taking care of Americans during a pandemic.

All the trillions of dollars Congress hands out and they still don't protect good Americans who, through no fault of their own but certainly through great fault of their President, don't have jobs and thus can't pay their utility bills. More than a few localities have imposed moratoria on evictions and water shut-offs, but this pandemic is everywhere, so why not protect everyone? And this isn't a matter of giving "handouts" to people who don't deserve it -- like I said, they didn't ask to get laid off! And Congress hasn't had any problem giving out massive handouts to big corporations (under the guise of "helping small businesses," no less!), so maybe it's time to start protecting people. Hence both the Sierra Club and Consumer Reports help you tell your Congressfolk to make sure good Americans don't get their utilities shut off during a pandemic. Consumer Reports makes another good point: as good Detroit residents still have trouble getting their water turned back on, big corporations like Pepsi and Coke were taking public water, selling it, running up far larger unpaid water bills, and getting precisely zero shutoff notices. It's a shame we have to remind the politicians that they work for us, but we'll keep reminding them.

Meanwhile, you know what else good Americans need now that they can't send their kids to school and they're either not working or working from home? Internet access, that's what. I guess right-wingers will say is this going to be yet another thing we just hand out for free? Of course, that formulation describes precisely none of the services our government delivers, since we pay for them, with our tax money. And even though our FCC disagrees, the best way to look at our internet is as a utility, not a content provider (like, say, Facebook), since it supplies the entire community with something it needs -- information. Kids have to go to school over the internet now, for example, and we already charge our various state, local, and federal governments with the task of educating our children, so how can we deny internet service to anyone during a pandemic? Particularly since the internet bill is yet another bill people can't pay when they don't have jobs? Of course, internet service providing corporations tend to be private, and they deserve some competition from state and local governments (i.e., community broadband) on that front, but in the meantime, Battle for the Net helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure all Americans have internet access.

Finally, big food processing corporations have suffered enough work stoppages due to the pandemic that a spokeshack for one of them, Tyson Foods, has come out and said, and I quote, "the food supply chain is breaking." And I know a lot of right-wingers would cite exactly that statement as proof that we just can't give workers paid sick leave right now, but, as usual, the opposite is true: if "the food supply chain is breaking," that's precisely the time to ensure that workers have paid sick leave, so they can take time off, get themselves better, and -- I keep saying this, and I hope people are finally getting it -- not make other people sick. I keep saying this, too: if you fire a worker for being sick, you then have to replace that worker, and you have to find someone willing and able to do the work, and you have to train them to do the work, and a lot of bosses have come around to the notion that it's better for business to just give your workers paid sick time instead of churning them over constantly. And while Tyson sounds the alarm over the food chain breaking, they're not taking care of their own very well, hence MoveOn helps you tell Tyson to give its workers paid sick leave.

Action: concerning physical distancing, our Post Office, and pollution.

It ain't just red state Governors who are reopening their states too early -- it's also Democratic Governor Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, who's planning to loosen physical distancing standards (OK, you know them as "social distancing standards," but I'll keep trying) in the coming weeks, without securing the widespread testing and tracing we need to fully understand the threat we still face. I would hate to think all those stupid right-wing protestors had an outsized say in the conversation yet again! So let Keystone Progress help you push back against stupidity, by helping you tell your Pennsylvania state government to put people before profits and let the science dictate when we start relaxing physical distancing standards. One more thing: we've now had a million confirmed coronavirus cases in America, but we hardly test for it, so we don't know how many we've really had -- unless New York state's finding, that more than one out of every eight of its residents have COVID-19 antibodies, is instructive. I would hate to think we'd have another spike in cases because our leaders don't have the patience we elected them to have.

Meanwhile, a consortium of good government groups (including Progress America, Demand Progress, and Daily Kos) helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest an additional $25 billion in our U.S. Postal Service. I mean, we just pissed away $350 billion in a "small business relief fund" that mostly went to big corporations, and we're pissing away some $150 billion every year in lost revenues thanks to the 2017 tax "reform," so $25 billion ain't that much to ask to keep a good service going, one that helps all Americans. Right-wingers have wanted to privatize our Post Office since time immemorial, and to them every crisis is an opportunity to do evil, but we don't have to put up with that. Nor do we have to put up with our President calling our Post Office "a joke" because it doesn't charge us four times as much! Note well, however, that our President did say there are circumstances under which he'd authorize more funding -- absurd circumstances, to be sure, but I say he just showed us weakness, and it's well past time we attacked when right-wingers are weak.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our EPA to reverse its new, supposedly pandemic-related policy of not enforcing any damn clean air and clean water regulations. Like I said, cynical right-wingers imagine every crisis as an opportunity to do evil, and thus the ones who run our EPA think a pandemic that attacks good Americans' ability to breathe means nothing so much as a time to let big polluting corporations make our air harder to breathe. As a young man, and an aspiring cynic, I suppose I would have found this amusing, but having long rejected cynicism and, hell, having become a man and having put away childish things, I find it all quite disgusting. I wish I could be sure that the worshipers of mammon will find their hell -- or maybe I would simply prefer that they find their hell in this lifetime, so we can all see it, and so future generations can be taught how not to be. In the meantime, I suppose we'll all have to settle for merely doing our duty as best we can.

Penny Rants for Monday, April 27, 2020: special "Our Glorious Elites still suck" edition!

When our President demands that our Post Office "raise the price" of its services "four times" or he won't approve any more funding, you have to remember that our President is demanding that our Post Office raise prices on us! He wants good Americans like you and I to pay more to send a letter though the post! The fact that our Post Office delivers good services so cheaply (despite all of our government's attempts to destroy it, I should add) is what makes it "a joke" to him -- it's just not serious, to him, unless some boss or other can parade his unearned wealth around. Consider, also, that "rais(ing) the price four times" is all that can make private mail-delivery corporations like UPS and FedEx competitive with our USPS -- they handle a fraction of the mail our USPS does, and frankly, they're not that much faster, not anymore. When right-wingers want to mismanage everything into oblivion to prove that "the private sector does it better," you should remember that when they do that, they are taking food out of your mouth. And how do you treat people who do that?

Right-wingers have their excuses for our President's apparent endorsement of injecting/ingesting disinfectants late last week, but they pale before the simple fact that calls about possible exposure to household cleaners more than doubled in New York City the day after. I have long hoped that our President would single-handedly destroy the Presidential bully pulpit merely through his bad behavior, and then folks would never trust what our President says again, as our Founders always intended. But I never imagined people might literally poison themselves first. We'll certainly never look at the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" the same way again. (As an aside, if we take his claim that "I was asking the question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen" at face value -- and when has divining his One True Intent behind his actions led anywhere other than rank absurdity? -- then you must conclude that a guy who would do that "just to see what would happen" is an evil bastard. And how do you treat evil bastards?)

Ryan Grim at The Intercept evaluates new evidence supporting Tara Reade's sexual harassment and assault complaints against then-Sen./now somehow presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden. As Mr. Grim reminds us, "(f)or Baker’s statement (denying that Ms. Reade had ever filed a complaint with Mr. Biden's office about his conduct) to be true, Reade would have had to have lied to her friend, brother, and mother about having complained to Biden’s office. There is no obvious reason Reade would make up a story to those closest to her about the Senate office not taking Biden’s harassment seriously, while at the same time resisting pressure to go to the press." Now might be a good time to remind everyone that Mr. Biden hasn't actually sewn up the nomination yet, and no one's advanced a sexual harassment/assault complaint against Sen. Sanders. (No, complaints of harassment and insensitivity against some of his campaign workers aren't the same thing, even if our "liberal" media did more pearl-clutching about that than they've done about Ms. Reade's accusation.)

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Pat Robertson agrees with a viewer that God sent this pandemic to America as punishment for abortion, gay marriage, and anti-Israel sentiment. Oh, but not just that, his remaining defenders will say -- he also said "we have abused the poor," which most right-wingers consider a duty, not a sin. But listen to Mr. Robertson describe abortion -- "we have taken the life of the innocent, slaughtering them by the tens of millions, children made in the image of God" -- and then listen to him hesitate before saying "we have abused the poor" and then quickly turn to describing how the pandemic has ravaged us, and you might come to one of two conclusions: a) poverty just doesn't get his anger up like abortion does, or b) he threw "we have abused the poor" in there just to stave off criticism that he's just another heartless evangelical. But he's not very good at the latter -- does anyone remember him speaking out about the necessity of fighting climate change in 2006? No? Well, now you know all the good that did -- and maybe (especially since he's a denier again) all the good he intended it to do.

Action: concerning voting-by-mail, our Post Office, tax cuts for the rich, and health care equipment.

America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, helpfully reminds us that voting-by-mail actually has a lot of problems, and that these problems mostly afflict (you guessed it!) poor folks and folks of color. In some states, you need to have a witness co-sign your ballot; in three states you have get a notary to sign it, which costs money, you know? In a lot of states, you also need to mail a copy of your ID with your vote, and we all know how state ID processes tend to deprive poor folks and folks of color of their right to vote. That's before we get to whether or not your ballot ever gets to you, since if you're poor, you tend to move around more, or what happens if you mark an "X" instead of filling in the box entirely and the machine can't read it! Mr. Palast makes a number of good suggestions -- barring witness signatures, barring signature challenges in the absence of a stolen ballot accusation, mailing every voter a ballot -- for a good voting-by-mail bill at the end of his post, so you can call your Reps and Senators and demand that of them.

Of course, we can't make voting-by-mail work for us if we don't have a U.S. Postal Service! Our USPS might run out of money by the end of September, a mere five weeks before Election Day, and it's almost like our President planned it that way! He didn't, of course -- he prefers to let his incompetence create crises that he then exploits for his own glorification, just like George W. Bush used to do, even if Mr. Bush was more civilized about all of that. But we have other reasons to want our Post Office to continue doing its job, mainly that it actually does a very good job despite all of the crippling blows Congress has dealt it over the years, and our Post Office delivers those medicines and medical supplies that must travel through the mail better than all the other options. What, you think UPS will drop your medicine at your door on the cheap? You think FedEx will charge 55 cents to mail your ballot? Privatization doesn't mean "better service," it means "you pay more money." So the Center for American Progress helps you tell our President to drop his opposition to fully-funding our Post Office.

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard about how the pandemic "relief" bill gives more relief to some folks than it does to others, as in an average of $1.7 million of "relief" to folks who own "pass-through corporations," a corporate welfare handout so big that our Joint Committee on Taxation estimates it'll cost us $90 billion this year. And that would be enough to, just as a for-example, fund tuition-free college at state universities and community colleges for an entire year, let alone get us more ventilators, more masks, and more COVID-19 tests. Gosh, remember when Republicans excoriated Democrats for demanding that their "pet projects," like securing the vote during a pandemic, be included in the pandemic relief bill? We should have known, just from the fact of that complaint, that the finished bill would be larded down actual Republican pet projects benefiting their rich donors. Hence Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal this nefarious tax break.

Finally, National Nurses United helps you tell our President to finally start using the authority granted to him by the Defense Production Act to force big corporations to start making the personal protective equipment our health care workers need to keep us well during this pandemic. You know his excuse for not doing it, right? That it would be TEH BIG GUMMINT OPPRESSINGZ TEH PEEPULZ!!!! Yeah, he really said that -- even used the phrase "black helicopters" in saying it. This, from the Administration that has demanded the power to indefinitely detain people while the pandemic keeps our courts from operating! Yeah, that's not Black Helicopter Land; only making corporations do what they should do in times of trouble is Black Helicopter Land. Ronald Reagan used to say that a government that can do anything for you can do anything to you, but the long game he began as President has now resulted in a government that can do anything to you but can't do anything for you! And we do pay taxes, so we deserve to get good services in return. This President pretends not to get that, but he ain't the damn boss of us.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, Social Security, and public water.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and ask them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. Bills that protect voting rights, health care, clean water, worker wages, and public lands (among other good things!) shouldn't have so much trouble passing in the Senate. And the more we demand they pass those bills, the more likely it'll be that they pass. Hey, it's not like Our Glorious Elites or their media enablers want them to pass! So it's up to us.

Meanwhile, our Administration wants to cut Social Security disability insurance, and will take comments on their proposal until January 31, so both Social Security Works and Moms Rising help you tell our Administration to scuttle their proposal. President Reagan tried cutting SSDI benefits for hundreds of thousands of people in the '80s, and helped cause over 20,000 deaths; he ultimately reversed course after public pressure, but that sure didn't help those 20,000-plus dead folk, did it? Our current President no doubt will yell and scream about making sure the people who actually deserve it get what they need, but everyone thinks of "those people" as "undeserving," and when we do that we're generally unaware that other people look at us exactly the same way! And our President's votaries seem to have more serious trouble realizing that these Social Security disability cuts could very easily affect them. And, really, folks who try to convince me SSDI is rife with fraud and abuse love to cite individual stories, but, as Neal Gabler has said, three incidents of chicken pox don't constitute an epidemic.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Suwannee River Water Management District to keep notorious water-bottling corporation Nestlé from pumping out over a million gallons a day from the Ginnie Springs along the Santa Fe River, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. We could go on about the cypress trees and underwater caves and species of turtles at Ginnie Springs, but let's keep it simple: why are we letting private corporations take public water for pennies a gallon so they can sell it for dollars a pint? That's rock-stupid, and it's not the "genius" of the "free market," either, since it requires governmental capitulation in order to work. Clean water is one of the great achievements of the last 150 years, and it does not belong to some corporation like Nestlé; it is our achievement, as a civilization. And it is kind of amusing that the corporate drive to undermine this achievement needs public water to work. Ultimately, though, it also needs public acquiescence to work, and we don't have to give them that.

Action: concerning privatization, pollution, child care, and equal rights.

You may have heard that the Internet Society (or ISOC) plans to sell the Public Interest Registry (or PIR) -- a database containing the names of all .org domains -- to Ethos Capital, a hedge fund management corporation. That should send off alarms, but the results could be even worse than a hedge fund deliberately mismanaging a database in order to extract its value, or even making prices for .org domains go up-up-up: as Mitch Stoltz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes in this very useful primer, selling something of public utility to a private corporation raises a buttload of questions. For example, would authoritarian regimes (ahem!) pay off Ethos to help shut down pesky .orgs that detail those regimes' crimes? Would Ethos cut back on domain name management such that some .orgs that provide lifesaving services can't do it anymore? Luckily, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (or ICANN) has to approve the sale, hence Save .ORG helps you tell ICANN to reject the proposed sale of .org names to a private corporation.

Meanwhile, our EPA wants to weaken rules that prevent power plants from polluting toxic filth into our clean water, because our Administration hates good regulations with a passion bordering on madness. If our EPA gets its way, we'll have more mercury, more lead, and more arsenic in our water, not to mention more dead animals and higher water bills for good Americans -- all so we can hand out more corporate welfare to the dying coal industry. Seriously, the coal industry is dying -- even Murray Energy declared bankruptcy filed for bankruptcy shortly before Halloween -- and it's dying partly because gas is considerably cheaper and partly because renewable energy is starting to achieve cost parity with coal. As Paul O'Neill might say, it's the genius of civilization. But all this Administration cares about is enriching the few remaining coal executives, and they're willing to be objectively pro-pollution in order to achieve this goal. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our EPA to protect our clean water by scuttling its plans to weaken its own regulations.

In other news, it ain't just health care costs and college costs that have skyrocketed over the years -- it's child care costs, too, with a Freddie Mac study finding those costs going up almost 50% over the last quarter-century, and that means a lot in a world where single parents have to juggle working and parenting and two-parent households typically have two paychecks. You may even know someone who gives over their entire paycheck to child care! But H.R. 1364/S. 568, the Child Care for Working Families Act, would (among other good works!) mandate that child care could never cost more than 7% of a family's income, and would also ensure that poor working families can get good child care. Because they're people, too! And also because when we invest in child care, we invest in our future. That's as true when we invest in the poor, because (regardless of what many right-wingers still think) talent crosses lines of race and class. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to give working families the help they need by passing the Child Care for Working Families Act.

Finally, as you may have heard, the Virginia state legislature passed the Equal Rights Amendment, making it the 38th state to have done so. Of course, the original ERA had an expiration date that has long passed, but H.J.Res. 79 would eliminate that date, which means the Equal Rights Amendment could become the law of the land, as it has always deserved to be. Yes, I know, a few of those original 38 states repealed their passage of the ERA, but playing such games of take-backsies may not even pass Constitutional muster, so People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to support equal rights in America by passing H.J.Res. 79. And yes, I can also imagine our Supreme Court (particularly now that it has two younger fresher right-wingers on it!) saying that passing H.J.Res. 79 with anything less than a two-thirds majority would trample on the will of the Congress that passed it, since some Congressfolk surely wouldn't have voted for the ERA without the expiration date. But one might reasonably wonder why we would be more anxious to scrutinize such matters when women's rights are at stake.

Action: concerning war on Iran, actually rehabilitating prisoners, and sane energy policy.

As you know, the House passed a War Powers resolution last week aimed at keeping our President from launching any more military attacks on Iran -- and now word on the street is that it has the votes to pass in the Senate as well. But don't get complacent! The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you call your Senators and tell them to restrain our President's war-happy ways. Yes, our President can veto this resolution, but let's make him do that! And let's not get caught up in exactly how many Republicans will vote the right way this time, not after Sen. Tillis (R-NC) made all that noise about voting for the resolution of disapproval aiming to overturn our President's "national emergency" declaration and then voted against it. Let's also not get caught up in which Republicans (cough Rand Paul cough!) will vote for this resolution precisely because our President will veto it. The whole point of America is not to sit around the TV and game out outcomes like this is Draft Kings or something -- the whole point of America is that citizens must act.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell American county sheriffs to stop eliminating in-person visits between prisoners and their families. Sheriffs like to tell you we don't have the staff (and here you thought privatization would have solved that!) and we're afraid they'll pass drugs to each other (actual translation: we'll find out how many of our staff are peddling drugs) and, perhaps most importantly, we've got this fancy new video service that lets prisoners essentially Face-Time their loved ones at exorbitant expense! When big telecom corporations offer monetary incentives to use their service, you're right to suspect all their excuses, and when you recall that real live contact from family helps prisoners stay out of jail once their sentence is over a lot more than "video conferencing" does, you'll suspect all their excuses even more. I must say when private prisons claim they just can't have real live family visits, they're not exactly conjuring up the Genius of the Free Market. Where's their can-do spirit?

Finally, you no doubt know by now that Australia is on freaking fire -- so much so that normally recalcitrant koala bears will come gulp down any bottled water you bring to them! -- and yet they're still trying to build coal mines there, most notably in central Queensland, where German chemical corporation Siemens plans to provide rail signaling equipment for the proposed Adani coal mine. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Siemens to end its involvement in the Adani coal project. Here you would add your voice to the voices of climate activists in Germany who've been striking every Friday for months; they've been wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR effectively enough that Siemens's CEO has sounded a bit rueful about his involvement in the Adani project -- but he could be jiving us, you know. And yet, if he really is counting on another coal project to get him his 19th vacation home, he should remember that cheap gas is killing coal, and the falling cost of renewables sure ain't helping, either. We can help him get with the times by telling him to abandon coal mining in a burning country.

Action: concerning Social Security, public housing, and our Post Office.

S. 2733, the so-called TRUST Act, would of course create a fast-track process to cut Social Security "behind closed doors," as Sen. Ernst might put it. Because how else can you cut Social Security? The politicians pretend Social Security is going to go belly-up any minute -- I'm old enough to remember when they said it would go belly-up in 2016! -- when actually it'll pay out full benefits until 2037 and we could put it on sounder footing (with expanded benefits!) if we merely taxed income above $132,000 into the system. But that's just impossible, says the "bipartisan" "consensus" among our elected officials, which has little to do with reality as ordinary Americans experience it, and sadly the TRUST Act has four co-sponsors among the Democratic caucus. They keep using that word "bipartisan", but I do not think it means what they think it means. So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject secret Social Security cuts by rejecting the TRUST Act. (Those four Senators are Messrs. Manchin, Sinema, Angus King, and Doug Jones, if you're looking to do more.)

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the infamous Faircloth Amendment, which has stymied the building of public housing for the last two decades. The Faircloth Amendment represents yet another capitulation by nominal Democrat Bill Clinton to the far right; we said Republican moderates were useless the other day, but that's no less true of Democratic ones. And guess what's happened in the meantime? A major housing bubble burst, throwing millions of good Americans out of their homes, and several major American cities (and minor ones -- hello, Berkeley, California, where the $400,000 listings are all empty lots) have become too expensive for folks to live in. Oh, and America has 50 million more people now, and they can't live in tents. Republicans used to say that when the "free" market failed us, government had to step in; now they say "oh, the free market failed you? Well, tough toodles for yoodles!" But we don't need to take that.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors to reject any Postmaster General appointee who aims to privatize the service, then Progress America still helps you do that. Too many right-wingers say PRIVATIZE TEH POST OFFICEZ!!!! as if it will cure all of America's ails; these folks seem unaware (do I mean "unaware"? Perhaps I do!) that our Post Office has taken exactly zero dollars in taxpayer money for operating expenses since 1982 -- or that our Constitution literally mandates the creation and Congressional oversight of a national post office. But, if anything, we should bring our Post Office more under the American people's control. If we did that, we could more easily reinstitute the postal banking service that was a regular feature of our Post Offices until the late 1960s, and that would better serve urban and rural folks banksters don't bother to serve -- certainly it would serve them better than check-cashing joints! But if we privatize our Post Office, that won't ever happen -- and good Americans won't get the services they pay for and deserve.

Action: concerning transparency, privatization, and robocalls.

Our Treasury Department plans to change campaign finance rules so that big political organizations can keep their big-money donors secret! Specifically, Treasury wants to make such campaign finance disclosure mandatory only if the IRS is auditing that particular group. What one has to do with the other I'll never know -- the whole point of disclosure is to shine sunlight on who's trying to buy our democracy, and no it's not about privacy rights, because money isn't speech -- folks who exercise their free speech rights need protection from our government more than folks who exercise an imagined "right" to either bribe elected officials or ensure more bribable people get elected. (My app isn't flagging the word "bribable," and further investigation reveals that it is, in fact, a real word. The more you know!) Anyway, Public Citizen helps you tell our Treasury Department not to change the rules to protect the identity of big money campaign donors. They don't need our government's protection -- we need our government's protection, from them.

Meanwhile, are you using an .org domain for your website? You know, like virtually every good-government website helping you express your will to your Congressfolk? Well, the Internet Society (or ISOC) plans to sell the Public Interest Registry (or PIR) -- which contains the names of all .org domains -- to Ethos Capital, a damn venture capital firm. It's bad enough that they want to privatize the part of the internet where people get together to cooperate on positive change, but to sell it to a damn investment firm, which we have every right to expect will charge usurious rates for .org domains until they all go out of business? I said it a long time ago and it's still true: Our Glorious Elites know they're evil, and they know we know they're evil, so they're going to try to take everything from us, including, apparently, .org domains. After all, banksters won't manage them in our interest -- they'll manage it in theirs. This is why we don't privatize everything! So Save .ORG helps you tell ISOC to abandon its plans to sell off the .org domain name database to vulture capitalists.

Finally, S. 151, the TRACED Act, would enact strong protections against robocalls and call-spoofing; the bill passed the Senate in May, but an improved version passed the House last week, so now it goes back to the Senate for approval -- and since both versions of the bill passed their respective houses nearly unanimously, we might be optimistic about its final passage. Still, duty is duty and complacency is anathema, so Consumer Reports helps you tell your Senators to help protect good Americans from scam artists by passing the TRACED Act. If you're like most Americans, you've lately stopped answering calls from phone numbers you don't recognize because they might be trying to trick you into giving up your Social Security number or a big wad of cash (or both!). The TRACED Act would force big telecom corporations to authenticate phone calls and block scam phone calls, and would also prevent big telecoms from imposing additional fees on good Americans for providing such services. These would be good works, so we should encourage them -- and not just because Congress so rarely does good works.

Around the table: concerning our economy, our public lands and water, and several far more trifling matters.

Your right-wing uncle telling you about wages going up under our President? Well, Dean Baker reminds us that state minimum wage hikes and our Federal Reserve's low interest rates are actually driving recent wage increases. You know that high minimum wages cause wage hikes at the low end, but you may not know that low interest rates have helped drive unemployment down -- and Mr. Baker says that "low rates of unemployment give workers the bargaining power necessary to secure real wage gains." Naturally our President says minimum wages should be lower, though, admittedly, he also thinks interest rates should be lower. But low interest rates have been Fed orthodoxy since 2008, so we can safety say he deserves very little (if any!) of the credit for what gains we're making in this economy.

If you've been following Nestlé's attempts to gobble up as much public water as it can and then sell it as bottled water at an absurdly high profit, you'll be interested to hear that the Michigan state court of appeals has ruled that Osceola Township can block Nestlé from expanding its bottled-water operation within town limits, because bottled water is most emphatically not an "essential public service" or a "public water supply." I was a little surprised that any legal eagles at Nestlé would make such ludicrous claims -- even as part of a see-what-sticks effort -- until I learned that a lower Michigan court had approved them, and I note that the court of appeals also said that a bottled water operation might be "essential" in a place with no water, which I'm pretty sure could be stretched by some judicial activist to mean any of the many areas of desert in America.

Big pharma executives tell OHSU researchers that prices for MS drugs go up so damn much go up purely for profit-making reasons. Also, you can only gouge patients in America, since (to quote one exec) "(i)n the rest of the world, prices decline with duration in the marketplace," and prices never go down because then people would think "we're less effective, (that) we think less of our product." You do hear the quiet part out loud more than you used to even 10 years ago, when it seemed (to me, at least!) we heard the quiet part out loud all the time. Maybe big pharma execs are tired of pretending they're anything but thieves, not that I expect their behavior to change.

From the "How Do They Always Find Someone Even Worse?" file: Interior Secretary David Bernhardt wants to reduce fees oil and gas drilling corporations pay to drill in shallow Gulf of Mexico waters. It's not just the stench of an Interior Secretary lowering fees on corporations for which he used to lobby, or the horror that we could have another Spillageddon in the Gulf like we had in 2010 -- it's the fact that these are our waters and we, the public, deserve to make more money if our government is going to be so foolish as to allow more drilling in the Gulf. It's like they have literally no idea that they're supposed to serve the American people.

U.S. House Rep. Steve Watkins (R-KS) apparently listed a UPS store as his official residence, which just so happens to have had the effect of allowing him to vote in a different Topeka City Council district than the one in which he otherwise would have voted. Has the Fox News Channel "accidentally" identified him as a Democrat yet? After all, ONLY TEH LIBRULZ COMMITZ TEH VOTER FRAUDZ!!!!!

Finally, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) has suspended her campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination, citing a lack of money to keep campaigning. I don't actually think it's correct to say that "she struggled to define a clear rationale for her candidacy" -- actually, I think she was completely successful in "defin(ing) a clear rationale for her candidacy," since that rationale was "I'm here to trick the liberals into thinking I'm going to run this country the way they'd want me to when I'm really going to run it however my big donors tell me to." If I'm right, then it's heartening that Democratic voters have rejected that rationale, at least as far it manifested in her -- and almost two months before the Iowa caucuses, no less!

UPDATE. An alert reader pointed out that I'd gotten our President's position on interest rate cuts entirely wrong; I've corrected the first paragraph above as a result.

Action: concerning voting rights, arbitration fairness, and our Post Office.

H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, may receive a vote in the House as early as today, so 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 call your House Reps and tell them to pass it. As you may recall, our Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, invalidated Sec. 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, saying that forcing Southern states to pre-clear changes in their voting laws with our federal government constituted an undue burden on those states given narrowly-perceived advancements in voting rights in the South. But the Voting Rights Advancement Act would institute a new pre-clearance formula into the Voting Rights Act that would subject any state or locality with a long record of voting rights violations to federal scrutiny. It would, essentially, revive the Voting Rights Act, so let's ensure our House Reps pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Meanwhile, Amtrak has recently inserted a forced arbitration agreement into its tickets, meaning that you wouldn't be able to take Amtrak to court if they crash your train, but you'd have to go before a private arbitrator, and you know how that tends to go. (Remember not to believe the right-wing BS about "average" awards from arbitration cases being higher than class action awards, because the average of all awards to people who lose in arbitration is zero.) Amtrak sure has some chutzpah pushing this on its riders, because its riders are also its owners -- our government still controls Amtrak, and gives Amtrak $2 billion in taxpayer money annually; given the public stake in Amtrak, I wonder if this clause could actually survive in court, particularly given that we can learn the results of a court case, but not a privately-arbitrated case. In the meantime, Public Citizen helps you tell Amtrak to remove forced arbitration clauses from its customer agreements.

Finally, our U.S. Postmaster General will leave office next month, which means our President will get to appoint a new one, and he might decide to appoint someone who favors privatizing our Post Office -- but the USPS Board of Governors can reject such a nominee if they choose, so Progress America helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to reject any attempt to put a privatizer in charge of our Post Office. A lot of right-wingers have a jones for privatizing our Post Office, but we already know why that's a bad idea -- because any privatized Post Office won't operate for our benefit, but for the benefit of some Presidential crony or other. But our Post Office is supposed to serve us, and, not incidentally, our Constitution explicitly mandates that our government ensure mail delivery -- so let's help ensure a Post Office that belongs to us fulfills that mandate.

Action: concerning voting rights, public lands, and immigration.

Monday is list day! So call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Today we add H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act, passed by our House last week, and I'm pleased to see that Moms Rising has provided a contact tool so you can tell Senate Majority Leader McConnell to hold votes on good House-passed bills. Moms Rising adds H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act (which will help out immigrants who moved here as children) and H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act (which would roll back Administration attempts to weaken protections for folks with pre-existing health conditions), and you can add these in your phone call, too. Plus you can add H.R. 1146, H.R. 1644, and H.R. 2513 in the comment section of Moms Rising's contact tool. Seriously, if we do this enough, we can get these bills passed, and we might even give our President pause before he vetoes them.

Meanwhile, our Administration still has this jones for logging and mining in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, so CREDO helps you leave a public comment with our U.S. Forest Service opposing the construction of more roads in the Forest that would allow more logging and mining there. The Tongass, as you probably know, has thousand-year-old trees in it; how many more times in our history will we be able to hold onto thousand-year-old trees, let alone learn the lessons they have to teach us? You may not find that argument persuasive if you think everything exists to be turned into money, as our President does, or if you think everything exists to be ruled over and used by humans, as our Vice-President does. If you're a civilized person, on the other hand, you might actually find it conservative to hold onto some thousand-year-old trees, not to mention the unique wildlife and indigenous humans that also live in the Tongass National Forest. Conservatism isn't all about making some crony money, after all. Or, at least, it shouldn't be.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2415/S. 1243, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. This bill wouldn't get rid of private prisons or punish corporations that import immigrants in order to drive worker wages down, but it would do a lot of positive, necessary, and reasonable things, like force our government to adopt good standards for detention, permit our government to break contracts with private prison corporations that repeatedly violate such standards, and mandate inspections of detainee facilities and investigations of detainee deaths in custody. Show me the person who would oppose such things and I'll show you a flabby thinker who shouldn't get all the say about anything in America. I mean, really, who else would support "no standards for housing detainees" or "holding to private prison contracts even when detainees die" or "sweeping egregious mistakes under the rug"? Because those are the alternatives. And they're not really alternatives -- at least, not to civilized people.

Action: concerning voting rights, law and order, immigration, and endangered species.

Happy Monday, good peoples! You can use the tools in the upper right corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can call them and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And today, we add the recent House-passed bill H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act, which would shine some sunlight on the shell corporations used by banksters, drug kingpins, sex traffickers, tax-evaders, and big campaign donors. With one phone call, you can do something about that, and about voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections. Yes, America is a great country, precisely because of its promise of freedom and justice -- but we must fulfill that promise.

While you've got your phone out, the tools in the upper right corner of this page can also help you find your House Reps' phone numbers, so you can call them and tell them to impeach our President. Why, as I write this, Sen. McConnell (E-KY) is running an ad on Facebook calling the House's impeachment inquiry a "kangaroo court." The House is following rules laid down by Republicans during their impeachment of Mr. Clinton 20 years ago, but attacking the "process" is all you got left when you can't win the argument on the merits. Of course, Mr. McConnell would be one of 100 judges of this impeachment, and it does seem corrupt to attack the "process" of an indictment you'll soon have to try, doesn't it? Let alone raise money for your own re-election over it? It's not quite as offensive as Roger Stone telling us that ZOMG IMPEACHMUNT WILL CAUSEZ TEH CIVIL WARZ!!!!!, but that's not the story you want to take to the Pearly Gates. The story you want to take to the Pearly Gates? How you fought this evil and corrupt President.

In other news, a few big banks still haven't committed to getting out of the whole private-prisons-separating-families business, so Moms Rising helps you tell Citizens Bank, Synovus Bank, First Tennessee Bank, Pinnacle Bank, and Regions, among others, to stop financing private prisons. A large number of well-known banks -- chief among them Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, SunTrust, and PNC -- have pledged to stop financing private prison corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic, which is a big deal, since these banks represent seven out of every eight dollars those two private prison corporations get, and if they can't get financing from big banks, then they'll be hard-pressed to continue operating. Don't be swayed by the right-wing hype that you'd be putting those families in jeopardy by starving the private prison beast of money, because you know what that is, right? A manufactured hostage situation, that's what -- and one our government could rectify simply by doing its own dirty work. And we could fight that more easily.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4348/S. 2491, the PAW and FIN Act, then WildEarth Guardians still helps you do that. The PAW and FIN Act is a clumsy acronym, but don't hold that against it -- the bill would reverse the regulations issued by our Administration that put more endangered and threatened species at risk of annihilation, regulations that force our government to consider the "economic factors" of regulations, which means the money gas and oil drilling corporations would lose if they couldn't drill somewhere. How many times must I tell these pimps! We're not supposed to base all our decisions on whether or not someone loses money! Why, if we did that, we'd have ratified the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" so that foreign investors could overturn our laws whenever they lost money to some clean air or clean water law! And once they drill a species out of existence, it's gone forever -- just like the money they make doing it will, one day, be gone forever. None of this is conservative.

Action: concerning immigration, mandatory minimums, and fossil fuels.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Defense's Inspector General to investigate the militarization of our Southern border. When you hear that our Administration has deployed armed soldiers at our Southern border, you might reasonably ask: are we at war with someone? Our President would no doubt answer "yes," being a member of Our Glorious Elites, and therefore someone who uses the word "war" to mean all kinds of things it does not mean. But we are not at war with Mexico, and U.S. law actually forbids our government from using soldiers to enforce domestic laws. We don't use soldiers to enforce domestic laws because we don't want to become a tinpot dictatorship where people are afraid to be free. I suspect our DoD IG (Inspectors General still display a large amount of independence) will come to the same conclusion we have. But only if we speak out. After all, saying nothing and hoping for the best doesn't work.

Meanwhile, even though our Pennsylvania state Supreme Court overturned mandatory minimums many years ago, word on the street is that our state legislature wants to bring them back, in a four-pack of bills, HB 726, HB 1850, HB 1851, and HB 1852, that would target offenses committed with firearms. I understand that people want to "do something" about guns these days, but this is doing the wrong thing -- we should let judges do their job and decide case-by-case whether possession of a firearm really merits a longer sentence. I've been saying for a while now that we should make it just as hard to get semi-automatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons, and I'd rather support that solution than another set of mandatory minimums that wind up slamming folks of color harder and costing the taxpayer more money -- and feeding into the prison-privatization machine, too. Hence the ACLU helps you tell your PA state legislators to reject more mandatory minimum sentences.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell big media corporations to stop taking advertisements from fossil fuel corporations and their flunkies. Sound harsh? Consider the simple fact that you already know whatever you need to know about fossil fuels -- you know what fuel your car needs and whether your house takes oil heat or gas heat and whether your stove takes electric or gas, for example -- and fossil fuel advertisements typically therefore extol the virtues of particular fossil fuel corporations; is it really too much to ask that ads give us information we can actually use? It's not particularly of issue that such ads tend to lie about fossil fuel corporations' commitment to renewable energy and about the real effects of pollution and climate change, but ads disguised as "news stories" or "opinion pieces"? They're a big deal, and any media outlet worth its salt would reject them out of hand. They don't do it now because they're corrupt, but that's why we're here: to show them a way out of corruption.

Action: concerning detainment, banksters, and wildlife.

Our Administration loves looking "tough" on immigrants, but H.R. 2415/S. 1243, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, would force our government to adopt actual standards for detention that are as good or better than American Bar Association's proposed standards from 2014. The bill would also allow our government to break contracts with private prison corporations that repeatedly violate these standards; I'd prefer never to use private corporations for detainment, but this bill would still improve matters. And the bill would mandate inspections of detainee facilities and investigations of detainee deaths in custody. These are reasonable, even mild, changes -- we should still work to prevent corporations (and "businessmen" like our President cough cough) from importing immigrants solely to drive wages down, and if we should do that, we'll better be able to show mercy to those running from real harm, but this bill will improve lives. So Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to advance the cause of civilization by passing the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act.

Meanwhile, Wells Fargo must have thought they'd done enough PR work to make everyone forget that they opened accounts for customers without their permission, because now they're apparently "forgetting" to close accounts their customers have asked them to close for a few months, which results in negative accounts and significant fees. Nice work if you can get it! Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to investigate Wells Fargo for its alleged wrongdoing. You might be wary of doing so, knowing how thoroughly our current Administration has gutted the CFPB, with the explicit purpose of making it "friendlier" to banksters. Why, that's like a cop saying he wants to be "friendlier" to burglars! And this, from the "law and order" Presidency! But I digress, and anyway, if this wrongdoing is as easy to diagnose as it sounds, our CFPB might want an easy victory to "prove" it's still working on our behalf. That would be cynical of them, but the result would be the same if they weren't so cynical -- money saved for customers, and justice done.

Finally, you know that we designate certain areas of the country as wilderness areas so that we can protect wildlife -- but what about the wildlife that has to migrate in order to survive, but finds highways and buildings in their way? H.R. 2795/S. 1499, the Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act, would provide for endangered and threatened species by protecting new and existing wildlife corridors, a matter that'll become far more important for those species as climate change drives them to move to new habitats. And in the wake of the U.N. report saying that a million plant and animal species are in danger of extinction right now, well, that matter's actually pretty important. Folks who worry that WE'LL NEVER BUILDZ ANYZ OFZ TEH THINGZ EVAHZ AGAINZ!!!!! would do well to ask whether what they really want is never to be bothered by anything other than self-interest. Really, man-in-the-mirror moments such as these can be very instructive. Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect threatened species by passing the Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act.

Action: concerning banksters, whistleblowers, and abortion.

Another year, another attempt to "reform" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by privatizing them, which would effectively end their efforts to help low-income working families own homes. This idea didn't originate with our President, but he's sure glommed onto it, as he seems to glom on to all bad ideas eventually. Of course, privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would not "modernize" them, unless you have a very low opinion of modernity indeed, and it certainly wouldn't "stop another financial meltdown," because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac didn't cause that meltdown to begin with. Bankster greed and hifalutin financial instruments caused the meltdown, and it'll cause another one -- particularly since hedge fund managers (whom our President supposedly hates, but you don't believe that, because it is to laugh) have grabbed themselves a big chunk of both corporations, and are now hoping to fully add them to their casino economy. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop the privatization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Meanwhile, with whistleblowers all in the news these days, S. 2529, the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act, would (as its title suggests) better protect those whistleblowers who expose corruption in the financial services sector of our economy. The bill would clarify that the protections of our laws extend to whistleblowers in commodities and securities (our Supreme Court apparently being unclear about that), would speed up the processing of whistleblower claims, and would beef up funding to the CFTC Consumer Protection Fund. If we'd had stronger whistleblower protections in 2008, the banksters might not have come so close to completely destroying our economy as they did. It's not beating a dead horse to keep reminding you of the 2008 bankster meltdown, since Congress too often seems to forget it happened. The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good American citizens who expose fraud and corruption by passing the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act.

Finally, with an overturning (or, at least, a crippling) of Roe v. Wade within our Supreme Court's grasp, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2975/S. 1645, the Women's Health Protection Act. States have been putting up hurdles to women getting abortions since the Republican wave of 2010, but this bill would prevent states from putting up these hurdles, which include forced ultrasounds, unnecessary tests, medically-inaccurate information, third-trimester abortion bans, forcing women to explain why they want the abortion and denying them if the state doesn't find their explanation "good enough," and absurd physical plant requirements for hospitals (this final item coming up before our Supreme Court shortly, in June Medical Services, LLC v. Gee). Like I said yesterday, rights are rights regardless of how legislatures "feel" about them, and no one makes a man write an essay on why he wants a vasectomy before letting him have one, do they?