Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning financial regulation, tax policy, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep our CFPB as independent as possible, reject any extension of the Trump tax “cuts,” and pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining 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.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any bill that would subject our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to the annual appropriations progress. Congress has long found this method of funding perfectly acceptable for other agencies, so why not now, with our CFPB? Probably because our CFPB has done a lot of good work for us. You’d think that’d mean something to our House Reps, given that they’re supposed to represent us (that’s why we call them “representatives”), but apparently the whining of big donors means more, hence why right-wingers want to defund our CFPB, which is an awful lot like defunding the police, since our CFPB catches financial predators. I’d hate for America to be a land where all you have to do to get what you want is have a lot of money and whine a lot.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to extend the notorious Trump tax “cuts.” I put “cuts” in quotation marks because most Americans didn’t get nearly as much benefit from them as the rich and corporations did. I’d happily make tax cuts for lower brackets permanent, but I would never be a hostage to letting rich folks pay hundreds of thousands of dollars less every year and corporations paying millions of dollars less every year. One percentage point is a lot more money at higher incomes, after all. Politicians pretend not to get that, but we do.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act. Big corporation (foreign or not, I really don’t care) wants to mine for copper on Native American sacred land that also happens to be public land? Why, no, thank you. And I’m not particularly anti-copper – the health care industry found out during the pandemic that getting rid of all those copper tables years ago was a big mistake – but I am anti-pollution and pro-clean water and pro-clean air and pro-respecting actual religious freedoms. I guess, for some people, religious freedom only counts if you’re white – or if you’re Black or Brown but also a Republican. That’s not the America we want to pass on to our children and our children’s children.

Action: concerning medical debt, price-gouging, and Senatorial whining.

Long story short: tell your PA state legislators to fight medical debt and water corporation price-gouging, and tell your Senators to stop letting holds keep our government from doing their work. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 78, the Medical Debt Relief Act would help good Pennsylvanians get out from under their medical debt, by establishing a Medical Debt Relief Program that would buy up and discharge said debt – which is what organizations like RIP Medical Debt – and, before you ask, would expressly prohibit the Pennsylvania state government from collecting on that debt in Sec. 3 (c) (3) (vi). Imagine that, government doing something that actually improves our lives! The Medical Debt Relief Act merits a phone call to your PA House Reps; the Pennsylvania Health Access Network helps you find your PA Rep, as does the OpenStates tool in the upper right-hand corner of this page.

Staying with Pennsylvania politics for a moment, Food and Water Watch helps you tell your state Senators to repeal Act 12, which enables a lot of predatory water and sewer pricing in the Commonwealth. It’s like I keep going out of my way to say “Commonwealth” for a reason – and it’s almost like that reason is that our water belongs to all of us, and we shouldn’t let private corporations gouge us merely because they provide a service. Ideally our government should provide that service – privatizing water and sewer services doesn’t mean better service, but it does mean regular folks pay more for them. So let’s make sure our state Senators understand all of that.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our Senators to ensure they evaluate and confirm Justice Department nominees. Sen. Vance (E-OH) has put a hold on all Justice Department nominees because waaaaaaah, I mean because of the “weaponization” of our Justice Department against Donald Trump, and I have to say he’s not being very conservative here – I mean, a conservative would say if you don’t want to be hounded by law enforcement, don’t do so many crimes! Or do they only say that to Black folks? Anyway, we might want to call our Senators and tell them to get rid of holds entirely. That Tommy Tuberville is also making a mess of things with Defense-related holds.

Action: concerning the debt limit, Oak Flat, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject Republican debt-limit bills and pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act and the Abortion is Health Care Everywhere 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.

You want action alerts against the Republican debt-limit bill? I’ve got ‘em, from Coalition on Human Needs, Moms Rising, and Daily Kos. They’re trying to justify their whole debt-limit drama by cutting services good Americans actually need, which is evil. The Moms Rising alert deals mainly with work requirements for SNAP and Medicaid, and some folks think that’s common-sensical, but they’re wrong: work requirements aren’t a good idea for a program that’s supposed to help you when you don’t have work. And finding and punishing fraud is a separate issue. How about we cut the budget of fighter planes that don’t fight?

The Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act, which would pretty much do what its title says – save the Oak Flat region of the Tonto National Forest from the Rio Tinto mining corporation. Numerous Native Americans consider Oak Flat sacred land – I guess religious conscience only matters when it’s right-wing corporatists not wanting to cover their employees’ birth control! – and the mining would also poison and deplete the water there. Despite Native Americans' heroic efforts in keeping Rio Tinto out, the project still isn’t dead; that’s why we step up, as we have before, and we keep stepping up until our Congressfolk act.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Abortion is Health Care Everywhere Act. Banning anyone who might counsel abortion from providing health care overseas (as the Helms Amendment does) hurts our efforts to get birth control and other health care to other countries, so let’s not let philosophical purity murder what works – and, you know, let’s not let it murder people, too. I suppose right-wingers will try to hide their sexist objective by yelling AMURIKA FIRSTZ!!!!! But unsafe abortions and maternal deaths – which the Helms Amendment surely causes – are an atrocity anywhere.

Action: concerning pollution, the minimum wage, abortion rights, and defense spending.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the TAP American Energy Act, raise the minimum wage to at least $15/hour, pass the EACH Act, and redirect more defense spending toward human needs. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Native Organizers Alliance Action Fund helps you tell your Senators to reject the so-called TAP American Energy Act, which our House passed late last week, and reject any efforts to fast-track dirty energy projects. This bill would defund renewable energy projects, weaken clean air and clean water regulations, and ramp up drilling on public lands; imagine being the politician who actually champions these things! But some Congressfolk have also proposed gutting the National Environmental Policy Act, which gives communities a way to protect themselves from pollution, so we must fight that, too.

The Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour – or more. An astounding 52 million workers make less than $15/hour presently, and they all deserve a raise. Don’t tolerate any foolishness from folks who claim that folks who make less “don’t work hard enough”; in my experience, the folks who claim that made a lot more money when they were working minimum wage jobs. No, really: $2/hour went a lot further in 1969 than $7.25/hour does now. Right-wingers love pretending inflation doesn’t exist – until they want to beat up on Joe Biden.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the EACH Act, which would overturn the notorious Hyde Amendment, which has kept taxpayer money from funding abortions for 40 years. Some folks no doubt think that’s a reasonable compromise, but it’s really not, and not just because Roe v. Wade isn’t there anymore (so there’s literally nothing to “compromise” with!). Folks who have money will always be able to get abortions regardless of whether or not they’re legal, but folks who depend on Medicaid won’t, and as taxpayers we should ensure that everyone can access the safe and effective health care they need. And remember: if you think abortion is immoral, don’t get one.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to spend less on weapons and more on human needs. No, you can’t justify spending literally any amount of money by saying “we have to defend ourselves.” We already spend more money on defense than the next nine nations on that list combined; we’re spending far too much money enriching defense corporation executives and not enough on the things that actually defend and strengthen a civilization – things like education, health care, and housing. If we can’t defend ourselves for less money, maybe we’re not the greatest nation on Earth. Maybe we’re just the most arrogant.

Action: concerning Guantánamo Bay, ivory poaching, and public water.

Long story short: tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay already, tell the British Parliament to include hippo teeth in the UK Ivory Act, and tell the California Water Board to protect good Californians’ water from private corporations. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility already. We’re still holding 35 Muslim men there, and we haven’t charged most of them with a crime; at the risk of beating a dead horse, if they were that dangerous, we should be able to charge them with something. Plus we’ve tortured more than a few of them, which of course means we learned nothing of consequence from them, in addition to staining our national heritage further. Generally, if George W. Bush did it, we should stop doing it. That’s a good rule for life as well as politics. And if Joe Biden wants a foreign policy victory, he could get one here, by doing our will and closing Guantánamo.

Care2 helps you tell the British Parliament to improve the UK Ivory Act – which bans the sale of elephant ivory – by also banning the sale of hippopotamus teeth. Hard to believe, but that’s where the demand has gone, now that most countries ban the sale of elephant ivory. Guess which other species has had a hard time sticking around? That’s right, hippos, who (like elephants) are losing habitat all the time and face poachers. I guess right-wingers who didn’t like the UK Ivory Act would natter on about the “unintended consequences” of the law, i.e,, that it’s spurred poaching of hippo teeth. But that’s horsedoodle. When criminals change their tactics, that doesn't mean we just throw our hands up and walk away; it means our laws have to change as well.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell the California Water Board to stop Blue Triton from siphoning public water out of the San Bernardino National Forest. You know the drill by now: big corporations take public water from us for pennies a gallon, and then resell it as “bottled water” for a lot more than that. A government that allows this is either evil or very, very short-sighted. And all that rain California’s gotten lately doesn’t change the fact that they’re still in a drought (since a drought ain’t over after a few days of flooding any more than climate change is over because it snowed three feet). And the money you get from selling off public water lasts a short time, but public water lasts forever – if we can keep it.

Action: concerning car safety, labor, and methane emissions.

Long story short: tell big corporations to fix big truck and SUV blind spots, tell UPS to hire more unionized workers, and tell our EPA to protect us from methane emissions. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Consumer Reports helps you tell big car manufacturing corporations to fix the front-end blind zones on all their cars. Yes, if you’ve ever driven a pickup truck or an SUV, you may have wondered how you’ll see all those pedestrians who may well be shorter than the front end of your truck. Surely that’s an unintended consequence of big automakers’ efforts to sell big cars to insecure people! But these same big automakers could make a few changes to their trucks and SUVs, like lowering their hoods and pedestrian-detection devices, and they could do this now with the technology we already have, but alas, they don’t. Not until we brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR against them, that is!

More Perfect Union helps you tell UPS to hire more unionized workers so it doesn’t have to hand out so much overtime now. To your right-wing uncle who tells isolated anecdotes about bus drivers doubling their salary with overtime ANDZ THAT’Z NOTZ TEH FAIRZ!!!!, just remind them that the whole reason we insist on people making time-and-a-half for overtime is to force their bosses to hire the right amount of people to do the job. That’s job creation! And it’s not something bosses do – they’d replaces us with mounds of dung if they could! – but something we do, through communicating our will to our elected leaders.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous methane emissions rule possible. You know the story here, too – fossil fuel drilling tends to belch out methane into our air, and methane not only packs a much bigger climate change punch than coal emissions, it represents usable energy that sure ain’t doing anyone any good up in the air. Plus, when corporations drill on public lands, methane leaks also represent royalties the public can’t collect. A whole industry already exists to reduce methane emissions, so it’s not like we’re asking that much of big drilling corporations. No, less money for CEOs ain’t that much to ask.

Action: concerning corporate welfare, tribal lands, and marriage equality.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop handing out corporate welfare and pass the Advancing Tribal Parity on Public Land Act and the Tribal Cultural Areas Protection Act, and tell your Senators to pass the Respect for Marriage 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.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop handing out corporate welfare to big corporate donors like they do every year. We just had a midterm election that was, ah, not as big a win for Republicans as they’d hoped; once they formally organize to lead our House again, they’ll propose all kinds of stupid corporate tax cuts for their big donors, so we need to communicate our will to our Congressfolk, again. Like I said, they do this every year, at the end, when we’re all preoccupied with the holidays, but there’s another reason to deny them this year: corporate profits are driving at least half of the worst-in-40-years inflation we’re suffering. Make sure to tell them that.

The Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8108/S. 4421, the Advancing Tribal Parity on Public Land Act, and H.R. 8109/S. 4423, the Tribal Cultural Areas Protection Act. The former bill would prohibit sale of any public land where a native American nation has treaty or other reserved rights, while the latter would establish a federal system protecting sites of cultural significance to native Americans. That all sounds pretty common-sensical to me; the only people who’d hate it are the big corporate executives who want to turn everything into a mine or a mall. And we’ve already taken enough away from native Americans.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act, which somehow still hasn’t passed our Senate, despite getting 47 Republican yea votes in our House back in July. And sadly the other side’s arguments against it are profoundly disappointing – they won’t say they just don’t want gay and interracial couples to marriage, so they can’t land a punch! One announced that “This Depraved Law Would Allow Pedophiles to Marry Children,” as if there's literally no such thing as consent, as if our laws don’t already prohibit adult-child marriages. So let’s not let bigots have all the say about everything.

Around the table: featuring another winning Democrat ad proposal!

I wish it were more of a surprise that labor union assets have nearly doubled over the last decade as the number of organized workers (as a percentage of the workforce) has declined, but we’ve known at least since Last Exit to Brooklyn that corruption both petty and spiritual can creep in anywhere, including the movement that gave us the eight-hour workday and the weekend. The worst union executives probably think that folks will tolerate anything to hang on to an ever-slimmer reed of labor power, but that ship sailed well before the pandemic hit. The good news: relatively small investments into organizing and strike funds can turn this thing around. I don’t have to tell you the bad news.

I wish it were more of a surprise that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ), who single-handedly killed recent Democratic efforts to get lightly-taxed hedge fund managers to pay more of their fair share, has received almost $1 million in contributions from banksters just in the past year. Nice to hear a Democratic consultant say “there is no universe in which it is politically smart to fight for favorable tax treatment of the wealthiest people in the country,” and if Senator Galaxy Brain is bold enough to ignore virtually all the evidence of the last 15 years, I expect she’ll pay in the 2024 primary, if she doesn’t get a hedge fund lobbying job first.

I wish it were more of a surprise that Rick Scott’s Max Headroom impression from last week was even worse than I had supposed – he actually called $280 billion in Medicare savings a “cut,” which I know isn't your attitude toward getting something good for less money. The surprise there is that Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan pushed back on that twice. But I wish she’d pushed back a little differently on the notion that Medicare paying less for drugs means “(t)here will be lifesaving drugs that seniors will not get” (i.e., it's a tired argument, as we’ll see below). I also wish she’d pushed back on his claim that “companies don't end up paying the taxes. Shareholders pay the taxes. Lower income for the employees paid the taxes. Less investment pays the taxes.” Setting aside that civilized people should never tolerate corporations taking out their higher taxes on everyone else, high corporate tax rates helped create the greatest middle class in history between 1932 and 1980.

Speaking of bad arguments about drug pricing reform, Arthur Allen at Kaiser Health News gives us a little of the history behind the “kills innovation” argument big pharma corporations deploy whenever you try to rein in their evil. Turns out the argument is at least as old as 1906, when our government first forced big drug corporations to list their drugs’ ingredients. Fast-forward 115 years, and drug prices have gone up a staggering 8500 percent over the last dozen years, and big pharma corporations still whine about being made to doing anything that might prevent their executives from gilding the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes.

Finally, what do Republicans plan to do if they win back either House of Congress this year? According to Rep. Chip Roy (E-TX), they’re going to shut down our government on their first day of power and force Democrats to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act! And how does he think that will work, given that Joe Biden will still be President? Make a campaign ad about this, Democrats – if Republicans take back control of the House, they will shut down your government out of pique, which means no air travel, no Social Security checks, no federal small business loans, and no national parks or museums. Show crying babies in that ad.

Action: concerning marriage, lead poisoning, and campaign spending.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, tell our Interior Department to keep lead out of bullets and tackle used to hunt and fish on public lands, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the DISCLOSE Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act. Our House passed it a few weeks ago, but our Senators won’t, unless we get in their grills about it. The Respect for Marriage Act would protect gay and interracial marriage protections from our Supreme Court’s recent thirst for overturning the precedents that protected them in the first place. No, really, Justice Thomas specifically called for our Court to use the Dobbs decision (which overturned Roe v. Wade) to overturn rulings protecting gay and interracial marriage! So when the mustache-twirling villains actually tell us what they’ll do, we have to stop them.

Mobilize 4 Change helps you tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to ban lead from bullets and fishing tackle that Americans use on public lands. Really, is this so much to ask? Not a hunting ban, or a bullet ban, but a lead bullet ban. Any right-winger who complains about this is a whiner, simple and plain. I mean, I think they’re whiners anyway, but I bet everyone thinks the lead-bullets-or-bust crowd are a bunch of whiners. But when we hunt animals with lead bullets or go fishing with lead bait on public land, that lead gets into animals that don’t get hunted, like, apparently, half of all bald eagles. And that lead also gets into the water that we drink and that fish swim in. Seriously, this is a bank shot.

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 443, the DISCLOSE Act, which would force large organizations to disclose their biggest donors, particularly when they run ads about judicial nominations. The bill would also expand prohibitions against foreign financing of campaigns to digital media, in case you were worried the Russians would spend heavily on Facebook ads favoring Republicans this year. I can’t say that’s a dumb worry! Anyway, huge majorities of Americans favor more campaign finance disclosure, so we should get more of what we want for all our trouble, maybe?

Action: concerning taxes, animal abuse, and endless war-making.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to tax big oil corporation windfall profits, pass the Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act, and repeal the 2002 Iraq AUMF. 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.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax big oil corporation windfall profits. Yeah, gas prices have been coming down for about a month – too late for June’s inflation figures, you may notice, but maybe not too late for July’s, which come out on August 10 – but big oil corporations are still making far too much money “dealing with circumstances” that they might better deal with by eating some profit and being good to Americans. Of course, the powerful don’t do that, unless we make them. And then they whine about how “onerous” our laws are! But when we make them do the right thing, we make good things happen. History always shows that.

The Endangered Species Coalition helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7398, the Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act, which would, as its title suggests, make it illegal to conduct a wildlife killing contest on public lands. The bill specifically excludes invasive species, in case your right-wing neighbor was going to launch that objection without reading the bill, as they often do, but a wildlife killing contest strikes me as merely an excuse for testosterone-addled men to be cruel, and we really shouldn’t be giving them more opportunities to do that. Especially on public lands, where protected species don’t all walk around with signs around their necks.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq War Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF). Why bother after all these years? Because Presidents still use it to launch illegal and unconstitutional war efforts, like former President Trump’s assassination of Iranian General Soleimani, and you give a President a weapon like that, they’re going to use it sooner or later. And bad people will use and abuse bad laws, and the 2002 Iraq AUMF is a profoundly bad law that did profound evil. That Mr. Bush ever asked for it, and Congress ever passed it, still deeply offends me, and it’s not the kind of thing you just “let go” of, not if you want to stop it from happening again.

Action: concerning campaign finance, labor, and pollution.

Long story short: tell big corporations to stop donating to the Republican politicians who tried to overturn the election, tell Dollar General to treat its workers much better, and tell our Interior Department to protect the Boundary Waters. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

In advance of what may be yet another explosive day of testimony from our January 6 Committee, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell big corporations to stop donating to Republican insurrectionists in Congress, That would be the 147 Reps and Senators who refused to certify the election Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden by seven million votes. Remember when they said Mr. Trump earned a “mandate” from the people after he lost the popular vote to Hilllary Clinton by three million votes? Standards! And big corporations made all the right noises about campaign donations after January 6, but their actions give the lie to their words. They need to know we’re watching, and they need to know we’re done.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell Dollar General to stop oppressing workers with low pay and unsafe workplace conditions. You won’t be surprised to learn that more than nine-tenths of Dollar General workers make less than $15/hour while its CEO makes $1.7 million, but its numerous fire code violations, moldy conditions, and deliberate understaffing – which had led at least one OSHA administrator to slam their “blatant and continued disregard for the safety of their employees” – may surprise you. And not for nothing, but AC/heating issues make pandemics like the one we’re in now much worse. So Dollar General needs to get right.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Interior Department to protect the Rainy Rivers Watershed of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness from mining. Because mining equals pollution, even if some four billion tons of nickel and copper sit in and near the Wilderness. One would have to balance that against the probability that mining would pollute the Boundary Waters, but one would also have to balance that against the 150,000 visitors the Wilderness gets every year, people who go there for canoeing, fishing, hiking, and dog-sledding, among other activities. Life ain’t just about churning up the land and making executives rich.

Action: concerning law and order, drug prices, windfall profits, big ag monopolies, and the Shenandoah.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the 4th Amendment is Not for Sale Act, lower drug prices, pass a windfall profits tax on big oil corporations, and pass the Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act and the Shenandoah Mountain Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. This bill would prevent third-party data-gobblers from selling your personal data to law enforcement; our laws presently only prevent ISPs from selling that info, so we gotta close that loophole. The news hook right now is data-gobblers selling data on everyone who visited a Planned Parenthood for any reason -- and you can see why folks would be a little scared about that -- but fact is data brokers shouldn't be selling your personal data to law enforcement, and law enforcement shouldn't be able to get that data without a warrant. I know, warrants, how quaint.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk, for the umpteenth time, to lower prescription drug prices so good Americans don't go broke buying life-saving drugs. I don't know how many more times I have to talk about diabetics rationing their insulin before they get the picture, but duty is duty and they will get the picture. And how about that: lowering prices as an inflation-fighting tool, since that's literally what it is. Right-wingers call that "price controls" like that's a dirtier phrase than price-gouging. I suspect most Americans would say you want to control prices? What are you waiting for? My EpiPen shouldn't cost $600!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall profits tax on big oil corporations. Gas prices go through the roof, and big oil corporations make record profits -- c'mon, we're not schmucks. I'm old enough to remember when big corporations took the hit in profits rather than pass costs on to their customers, but we're a sick, immoral, and decadent society now, so corporations make us pay. And yeah, I've noticed the smaller gas stations have the lower prices! But let's not have small businesses carry an entire civilization on their backs, OK? Big oil corporations won't do the right thing until we make them.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7827/S. 4245, the Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act, which would set some limits on mergers in the agricultural sector. I'm old enough to remember when "big corporate farms eating up small farms" seemed to be the plot of every Hollywood movie! And it's so, so much worse now! Small farmers confront large monopoly power at almost every turn, and again, we should not ask the small farmer to shoulder responsibility for an entire civilization. Curbing mergers in big ag right now will at least give the small farmer some breathing room. And that's all the small farmer ever asks for.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 3911, the Shenandoah Mountain Act, which would permanently protect some 90,000 acres of the renowned Shenandoah Mountain area. This, again, is simple: we can protect one of the last undeveloped areas of the southern Appalachians, so good Americans and their children and their children's children can enjoy it -- or we can churn it up for energy that will disappear almost as soon as it's unearthed and mines and pipelines that'll spill filth into our drinking water. And no, we shouldn't churn up the area just to "create jobs." Preserving areas also creates jobs, for those who work to preserve it and those who help others enjoy it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: water is a human right! And other truths.

When I read about indigenous water rights activists traveling all over Mexico to protest corporate "looting" of good Mexicans' water, I feel a little ashamed that I'd never considered that hydroelectric projects could steal water from farmers. I mean, gas fracking corporations stealing water I knew about, but hydro still retains a green sheen that deflects criticism. I'm also reminded that Mexico's constitution literally guarantees the right to water to its citizens, and that corporate use of public water (which all water should be!) violates that right. I wish the water protectors in Mexico luck, especially since Mexico is one of those places where they'll shoot you in front of everyone for defying the will of corporations.

USC report finds that "what the safety net promises" low-income working families "and what it delivers are vastly different." And gives reasons! Some programs simply don't offer help to all those who need it, while others are so riddled with bureaucracy and complicated rules that eligible families simply give up applying, and that's before we get to language barriers, the absence of "a single go-to source of information that clearly and easily communicates what programs a family is eligible for," and, of course, the stigma of being a "welfare queen," which, as we recall, only existed in the darkest imaginations of Ronald Reagan. The good news? Even the Biden Administration seems to get there's a problem, and has taken steps to fix it, though we'll need to take more steps.

When I heard that many good Americans who oppose abortion would still help a friend of family member get one, I wondered if that meant those folks aren't very anti-abortion at all, but just fronting about it. But I should have known better! Not just because anti-abortion folks do set boundaries (only a few would pay for it, but more would help pay for it, almost half would help plan it, and three-quarters would offer "emotional support"), but because we all know from the gay marriage debates that the most rabid anti-gay marriage votary can easily crumble once it's his or her son or daughter who's gay.

I find myself far less impressed than many observers that Joe Manchin's approval rating in West Virginia has shot up over the last year-plus, despite his nefarious trashing of a popular legislative agenda, because the spike in his approvals comes almost entirely from Republicans. And those who would say he's really "got his finger on the pulse of West Virginia" should consider a) whether very many Republicans who approve of him now will vote for him in 2024 if a real Trumphole runs against him or b) whether someone who actually led on Build Back Better, and explained to his right-wing constituents why it'd be good for them instead of constantly cutting it down, could have achieved the same results. Seriously, when they say Joe Manchin "really understands his people," they're kind of cutting down "his people."

When I hear that Elon Musk's proposed purchase of Twitter might well "forc(e) us off a platform that we otherwise find just too hard to quit," I say we can only hope! I used to love my Twitter feed back in the day -- the old 140-character limit sure helped me say more with less! -- but it's always been a damn swamp where you could only stand out by being a prick. And I fear the mass exodus from Twitter won't be big enough, since (as Ms. Marcotte says) too many people think they need it to stay "plugged in" to current events. On one hand, I get that; I get most of my news through email, but I sure haven't left Facebook. On the other hand, anything worth doing is hard, and when do we start punishing trolls with shame and shunning?

Finally, when I hear that Democrats have yet to commit to a unified strategy for the midterm elections, I find I'm more than happy to help! What has unified Democratic government gotten us? an ad could say. The end of the pandemic. Seven million more jobs. The deficit cut by $1 trillion. Wages going up faster than they have in decades. Not a single American soldier lost in Ukraine. And the monopolies that cause inflation getting challenged in court for the first time in decades. And what have Republicans been doing all that time? Burning books. Defending dictators. Making it harder for you to vote. Whining about masks and vaccines. Oh, and this: (cut to January 6 footage). Vote Democrat on November 8. You're welcome again, Democrats.

Action: concerning drug prices, billionaire taxes, labor, forced arbitration, free tax filing, and pollution in public lands.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices, pass a Billionaire's Income Tax, allow Congressional staffers to organize, pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, let working families file with the IRS for free, and pass the Reducing Waste in National Parks 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.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Senators to lower prescription drug prices using the reconciliation process. Since Republicans aren't going to help! Republicans think they're a lock for getting our House and Senate back, so they're just going to prevent anything good from happening, like that doesn't hurt people! You know who else needs to hear this message, though? Democratic Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Bob Menendez of New Jersey, that's who! They're not going to listen to anyone but their own constituents -- or, if they can get away with it, just their big donors! -- but if enough of their colleagues hear it, that might help light a fire under their asses. People like that don't do the right thing until they have to.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire's Income Tax and start taxing wealth the way we tax regular income. Republicans (and Joe Manchin!) will leap forward to tell you that we've never taxed that way, but of course there is a little thing called the Estate Tax, and anyway we need to start taxing these people that way, because they run roughshod over the rest of us. And these billionaires don't ever have to sell the property that makes them wealthy because banks will give them cheap loans to live on! Nice work if you can get it! Now, don't brook any nonsense from House Reps that "it's not worth doing because it won't pass the Senate." Even if it doesn't, it's still worth it to put our Senators on the spot.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation allowing Congressional staffers to organize for better pay and working conditions, specifically by repealing Congress's exemption from our labor laws. Congressional staffers get paid $30,000 to $40,000 annually in one of America's most expensive cities to work 60 to 80-hour weeks -- plus many of them have second jobs! -- and this means that most of the folks who work as staffers are folks who come from wealthy families, and don't we have enough wealth being slung around in Congress? If Congressional staffers can organize for higher pay and shorter work weeks, then more folks from all walks of life will be able to work there, and that would do us a lot better than having Congressional staffers who don't really understand how hard most Americans have it.

Public Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. Public Justice's email missive puts the whole case pretty succinctly: "(f)orced arbitration is rigged...it basically allows big companies to avoid accountability when they do something wrong. And you have no say! If you make a claim, you can’t go to court. You can’t get a fair hearing. And 9 times out of 10, you will lose. And there is nothing you can do about it." Unless you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, that is! Don't believe the hype that "the average arbitration award is x thousand dollars," because if you lose (and you very likely will), your "average award" will be zero dollars. Plus the corporation can sue you back and win! And that's no way to get justice in America.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make tax preparation easy and free for all Americans with relatively simple tax needs. If you work for a living, our government should send you a pre-filled tax form (since they know, from employer-provided W-2 and 1099 forms, how much you make), and indeed our government has the legal authority to do that! So why don't they? Bet you can't guess -- because big tax-filing corporations don't want them to! And as you know from the news, the "deal" they made with our government "mandates" that these corporations provide free tax filing to low-income earners, but good luck finding it, not least because these corporations do their damnedest to steer you away from it! If you don't have investments so complex they look like corruption, you should be able to file your taxes for free.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5533/S. 2960, the Reducing Waste in National Parks Act. Keeping single-use plastics out of our national parks? You mean, we don't do that already? Indeed, we do not. And thus our National Park Service must deal with some 70 million pounds of trash every year, and you can bet that plastic bags and plastic wrap and plastic water bottles make up a sizable chunk of that; a review of Yellowstone National Park nearly a decade ago found that plastic bottles comprised half that park's waste stream. And we didn't know this when we embraced the shatterproof bottle, but plastics have become so ubiquitous that we now ingest about a credit card's worth of plastic some way or other every single week. Talk about unintended consequences!

Around the table: they're banning *math textbooks*! And other absurdities.

When I heard that the Florida Department of Education had rejected 41 math textbooks for various reasons, including "references to critical race theory," I found the tale was so absurd I wondered if media outlets were overplaying it. Apparently they are not! Even though Florida also said they'd rejected the math books for "inclusions of Common Core" and "the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics," I noticed they put their objections to critical race theory first, so I guess this really must be mostly about math books containing word problems about Tony and Aisha taking a train together. Banning math books is weapons-grade PR, of course -- for the Democrat who actually uses it! Don't worry about being civil, gang, because Republicans never do.

You won't be surprised to hear that child care and elder care programs can reduce inflation, even though it's the opposite of the Gospel According to Republicans and Joe Manchin. They're still complaining that those $1,400 checks you got a year ago have caused all this inflation, and not the greed of corporations making record profits. Anyway, child care and elder care both cost an arm and a leg -- because what are you gonna do, not get it? -- and thus subsidizing these things can help working families fight the effects of inflation. No, that won't cause more inflation! Remember: corporate greed causes inflation, and we've got tools against that, like good tax policy and strong antitrust enforcement.

When I hear that "Liberal Cities Are Not Immune to Mounting Attacks on Abortion Rights," I remember that cities are actually pretty diverse, and that while a lot of folks in them vote Democrat mainly because the alternative is untenable, not everyone who does that is pro-choice, and the anti-abortion movement can peel some of those folks off, and in the long run maybe even convert them to Free Marketeers. And sadly, though my world is big enough for a liberal anti-abortion group, the "Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising" hangs out with too many right-wing nutjobs to be that group.

Here's something we should be saying a lot more: "Ron DeSantis loves using very young kids as political props." The phrase "using children" should be weapons-grade PR enough, frankly, particularly when you're surrounding yourself with children as you sign anti-abortion legislation and anti-education legislation. It works the other way for him, too, when you recall that he bullied a group of college students into taking their masks off because wearing them, he said, was "COVID theater." That man sure does know all about theater, that's for sure. But not a whole lot about leadership.

At last someone else sees why Ron Johnson keeps winning Senate elections in Wisconsin -- not just because Democrats prepare for victory so badly, but because Mr. Johnson himself sounds like a jerk on right-wing radio but then seems so nice on his TV ads. Something for everyone! Democrats hammering him on how he personally benefited from the 2017 tax "reform" might work, but Democrats showing off his two-faced nature to everyone might also work. Some folks will secretly root for a guy who "sticks it to the man" by getting himself a tax cut -- this, even though the taxpayer is "the man" here -- but folks like liars a lot less.

Finally, I guess I'm not surprised that President Biden has reopened fossil fuel drilling leases on public lands -- legalese aside, the guy can do very little about the corporate greed that's actually driving inflation, but he has to at least look like he's doing something, though giving out a lease doesn't produce more gas tomorrow. But I am a little surprised (and pleased!) that his Administration raised the royalty rate for drilling on public lands by 50%; oil and gas drilling corporations will whine about having to pay the taxpayer more for the privilege of drilling on public lands (i.e., our lands), and sadly that could well mean that President Biden changes his mind! I sure hope not, though. If we're going to have drilling on public lands, let's at least make some bank. And if the "high price of drilling" scares oil and gas drilling corporations away, well, I'll just have to deal with it.

Action: concerning online privacy, child marriage, law and order, education, public water, and plastic pollution.

Long story short: tell the California legislature to pass a bill protecting children online, tell your Congressfolk to pass a child marriage ban, tell our FBI to investigate Jelani Day's death, tell state governments to teach the history of all Americans and not just white ones, tell BlueTriton's Chair to abandon his public water-stealing ways, and tell our government to stop buying single-use plastics. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will, and 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 Senators' phone numbers, where appropriate.

First things first: Sum of Us helps you tell California legislators to pass AB 2273, the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, which would help keep kids safer online. Specifically, the bill (per its abstract) would set standards for corporations "that creates goods, services, or product features likely to be accessed by children"; these standards would include "considering the best interests of children" at all stages of production and providing clear community and privacy standards, plus the bill would prohibit them from collecting and using kids' personal data. Big tech corporations want to kill the bill, but let's not allow them to have all the say about everything; kids deserve an internet that speaks to their needs, not one that contorts them into "adults" before they're ready, and certainly not one that bombards them with targeted ads before they can handle it.

Change.org helps you tell our Congressfolk to pass a national child marriage ban. Only six out of 50 states have a minimum marriage age of 18, and it doesn't matter that some religions approve of child marriage, because our civilization as a whole does not, because kids can't make adult decisions about consent to sex or marriage, and in any case religious "freedom" doesn't give anyone the "right" to abridge anyone else's rights, which child marriage most certainly does. Also, kids forced into marriage are too young to file for divorce or get into a domestic violence shelter, leaving them no options except abuse and molestation. If we want to earn the mantle of "civilized people," we need to outlaw child marriage; 300,000 children getting married in America between 2000 and 2018 testifies that we need to do better.

Daily Kos helps you tell our FBI to investigate the suspicious death of Jelani Day, a Black graduate student and aspiring doctor who disappeared last August and whose body was found face-down in the Illinois River 60 miles away from his school a week and a half later. That's suspicious enough, but local police declared his death a drowning three weeks after finding him, and claimed to find no evidence of foul play or intoxication, though they found some of his personal items in more than one location a mile away from his car, which had no keys or license plates. Local police have seemed strangely incurious about all of these suspicious events; perhaps our FBI will demonstrate that curiosity this tragedy, and justice, demands. But only if we demand it of them.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell state governments that our schools "must teach American history, not just straight white history." Right-wingers all over America have demanded that schools excise any teaching of American racism that might offend their frail sensibilities; right-wingers have a word for this kind of person (that would be a "snowflake"), but then they rarely demonstrate very much self-awareness. I quarrel, a little, with the petition's metaphor likening these right-wingers to a "squeaky wheel get(ting) the grease." I mean, it is apt, of course, but a better one would be the emptiest wagon makes the loudest noise. Over the decades, right-wingers have embodied this metaphor over and over again with their drama and hysteria. One does tire of it.

Sum of Us helps you tell BlueTriton Chair Dean Metropoulos to stop siphoning off public water everywhere he goes. BlueTriton bought Nestlé's water bottling operation in North America last year and renamed it, but you can't just put lipstick on any old pig, particularly when BlueTriton has kept up the old Nestlé habit of buying up all the public water it can on the cheap so it can put it in bottles and sell it as "spring water" or whatever. Why do we bother petitioning Mr. Metropoulos? I wouldn't blame you for thinking that's a little like petitioning the Riddler or Mr. Freeze, but we petition him to put him on notice that his name may, one day, be mud to future generations. If there are any! I mean, if folks like Mr. Metropoulos get their way, future generations may not have any water to drink unless they're very, very rich!

Finally, the Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our federal government to stop buying single-use plastics. More specifically, you'll ask the General Services Administration, which controls procurement, to prohibit federal agencies from buying these plastic products. Since they pollute the world and cause health problems for so many people and animals! Our federal government is the world's biggest consumer, and if they will stop buying single-use plastic products, then there'll be a lot less demand for them, and then there'll be a lot less of them clogging up landfills and getting into our air and water and bodies. I can already see the headlines on Fox News: Big Government Won't Let Defense Department Buy Bottled Water! But gosh, how did we ever hydrate before bottled water? They hope you don't ask.

Around the table: featuring rich folks' tax avoidance and Democrat weakness.

And now ProPublica lists America's 400 highest earners from 2013-18 and the tax rates they paid. How do they get away with paying so little? Well, thanks to Tha Bush Mobb's 2003 tax "reform," we tax investment income at much lower rate than the rest of income, even though it's all, you know, income. And a lot of rich folks donate stocks, which means they get to deduct the stocks' value from their taxes without even selling it and paying taxes on it. Nice work if you can get it! The 400 highest earners pay an average of 22%, which rate is higher than most other folks -- but most other folks pay more in payroll taxes, and 22% of a small pile ain't the same as 22% of a hundred-times-higher pile, particularly when having 100 times more than the next guy doesn't mean you need 100 times the food and shelter. I'll keep explaining that until all the haters shut up like they should.

Per Politico, Democratic politicians are adopting "firmer postures on law and order." Does this mean Democrats are, at long last, demanding that polluters and banksters get their just desserts when they inflict massive injury on our civilization? I kid, of course -- for too many Democratic politicians, as for too many "liberal" media hacks, "law and order" only ever means "putting more Black folks in jail and then doing the helicopter dance about it." (Also, could it be that we're seeing an "uptick" in crime in 2021 over 2020 because we were in lockdown in 2020? Again, I kid: of course that's the reason. Can't do too much burgling when you're sheltering in place because you're afraid you'll die if you don't.)

Gallup puts six separate climate change solutions to Americans, and found that they approve of all of them by large margins!. More than 70% of Americans approve of tax credits for home installation of clean energy systems, tax breaks for businesses that do same, and higher fuel efficiency standards for autos; as Newt Gingrich would say, if 70% of the people want something, they should get it. Of course, as we know, none of this matters nothing to the crowd that intones about lasting change and the importance of bipartisanship. But that just means we have to get in their grills more. (Even strict methane limits gets 62% approval; remind folks that methane leakage deprives good Americans of both energy and royalties -- when corporations drill for gas on public lands, that is -- and I suspect that number goes way up.)

I wouldn't get too down about polling in Nevada showing Democratic incumbents (including Sen. Cortez-Masto, whom I've always liked) running behind their Republican challengers, not just because it's only April and not just because they still might get actually unelectable challengers, but also because what one observer identifies as a handicap to those incumbents -- that "it is very difficult to convince undecideds to vote for you when they remain undecided despite telling us that they are very interested in voting in this election" -- is, frankly, just as much a handicap to the challengers. The undecideds who are "very interested in voting in this election" have also thus far looked at Adam Laxalt and remained undecided.

Our Justice Department puts a former Republican staffer in jail for 12 years for running a child porn ring; I have a tough stomach for evil, but I found some of the details here nauseating. So why don't we ever hear about liberals getting jail time for child porn? I won't indulge in any further sarcasm about this, lest some stray ragehead pretend such sarcasm confirms his rage.

Finally, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA) lashes out at a reporter asking her about the January 6 attempted coup by saying it only happened "one time"! In other news, we only dropped one H-bomb on Hiroshima. Later she lashed out at coverage of her initial lashing out, accusing our media of fomenting "drama" like she's not a wholesale dealer in drama herself! Between this and her police report on Jimmy Kimmel, I'm sure she thinks she's had a good week. But if her eventual Democratic opponent (who will likely be absurdly well-funded) gets even 35% in her heavily-gerrymandered district in 2022, I'd start putting that district on my watch list.

Action: concerning clean water, forced arbitration, scientific integrity, corruption, and plastic pollution.

Long story short: tell your Philadelphia City Council to replace lead-contaminated drinking fountains, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act and the Scientific Integrity Act, ban members of Congress from trading in defense stocks, investigate corruption allegations against Postmaster General DeJoy, and pass the Reducing Waste in National Parks 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.

Philadelphia residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your City Councilmember to pass Bill # 220221, which would force the city school district to replace all drinking fountains in schools with lead-filtering ones by 2025. That's because a recent study found 98% of Philly school drinking fountains had lead in them, and recall that no amount of lead in drinking water is safe, and that any amount of lead a child ingests can cause brain damage. So doing something about this shouldn't be this difficult, particularly since the American Rescue Plan Act delivered an extra $1.1 billion to Philly public schools and the district would only have to spend (per Penn Environment) around $6 million of that to fix the problem. But politicians won't do the right thing unless we demand it.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. I don't want to downplay the importance of the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act; it is a major piece of legislation, and I don't think I ever described the Affordable Care Act with that phrase. But why not press your advantage? Forced arbitration is unjust in every contract, for every reason -- and if arbitration is so great, why do corporations force you to use it? If you want to band together in a class action suit with other similarly-wronged folks, why should corporations get to stop you? Because they "deserve" more say than you? They don't -- but they'll get it, if we don't speak out.

Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 849, the Scientific Integrity Act. The Scientific Integrity Act would force Executive3 branch agencies to create (and enforce!) a scientific integrity plan that keeps politics out of scientific decisions. After all, we just had President Troll pack EPA scientific boards with corporate polluter hacks, and that's not the kind of thing that free people should have to put up with. The bill would also keep political employees from muddying up scientific data and give whistleblowers more power to expose wrongdoing. Oh, and it ain't just about the EPA: our Food and Drug Administration sure hasn't earned a reputation for sobriety as of late, what with their greasing the skids for the Alzheimer's drug that may not even work. So, yeah, let's put a stop to that kind of thing.

Inequality Media helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban members of Congress from trading in defense stocks. Why can't we cut the defense budget, even though we spend more money than the next 8 nations combined and still never feel secure? It couldn't be because nearly 50 members of Congress have almost $7 million in investments in defense contracting corporations, could it? I'm still appalled how cheaply people can be bought -- yes, $7 million is a lot of money even when divided among 50 individuals, but you know that's a drop in the budget next to our annual defense budget, meaning that defense contracting corporations can purchase a lot of legislative power for their buck. We need to make a world where our leaders avoid even the appearance of evil.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Postmaster General DeJoy for yet another potential conflict-of-interest, this one concerning the free COVID tests our Postal Service delivered to our houses. Turns out Mr. DeJoy owned stock in one of the corporations that supplied COVID testing kits to the public, and didn't divest himself of said stock; some folks no doubt think this is no big deal, but owning stock in a corporation that might get work from our Postal Service while you're running said Postal Service is an invitation to corruption, the kind of thing our laws proscribe precisely because we don't want such corruption to happen. America may be the get-ahead country, but we don't want it to be the get-over country, and that's why we fight corruption.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5533/S. 2960, the Reducing Waste in National Parks Act, which would ban single-use plastics in our national parks. Not just because you don't want to see that while you're hiking or climbing, but because our national parks protect a lot of our clean air and clean water, not to mention ecosystems you don't see anywhere else. And seriously, how many cheap plastic bags do you need at the Sequoia National Park? There are plenty of alternatives to plastic bottles, coffee cups with plastic lids, and take-out containers, and the internet is anxious to tell you all about them. I suppose some folks must oppose a bill like this, but I suspect they're the same folks who think freedom is mainly all about being as obnoxious as possible and preventing others from shunning you for it.

Action: concerning monopolies, drug prices, student loans, internet service, Chaco Canyon, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to investigate whether Amazon lied to Congress about how it uses its monopoly power, tell President Biden to lower drug prices and extend the student loan payment holiday, tell our FCC to require big internet service providing corporations to explain internet charges and speeds clearly to consumers, tell our Interior Department to stop fossil fuel drilling around Chaco Canyon, and tell AT&T to keep its promise to stop contributing to election objectors. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate Amazon for lying under oath to Congress about how it blocks competition. Our House Judiciary Committee has alleged, in a letter to Attorney General Garland, that Amazon obstructed its efforts to discover how it engaged in unlawful anti-competitive practices, which would be like you obstructing a police officer's efforts to learn how you broke into someone else's house and stole their flat-screen. Apparently Amazon's claim that it didn't use data it collected on third-party sellers against them has already succumbed to investigative reporting (which hardly happens anymore!), and our House Judiciary Committee made this letter public, so Mr. Garland can evade further embarrassment by complying with their will, and ours.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to use his lawfully-granted Executive power to lower the price of prescription drugs. What can President Biden do? He can use "march-in rights" granted by the Bayh/Dole Act of 1980 -- which is to say, he can grant the patent license for a drug to another corporation, or even reserve that license for our government, if our government helped fund the patent in the first place, which is usually the case -- or he can declare "eminent domain for patents," and simply assign the patent to a generics manufacturer. The big pharma corporations would whine about either of these things happening, but they'd also fold, because there's nothing they can do. Except, I guess, tell everyone Joe Biden is a tyrant for, ah, lowering drug prices. Yeah, that'll go over well with the American people.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell President Biden to extend the student loan payment pause past May 1. We've said that simply cancelling student loan debt would be the best stimulus we could enact, given that Republicans will block any serious economic stimulus so they can feel important, but given that the average student loan payment (per the Federal Reserve Bank of New York) is $393/month, the payment holiday sure ain't nothing! It amounts to a monthly stimulus that rivals the (now-expired) Child Tax Credit expansion for families with one young child. And to those who say I had to pay my student loans off, so why should they get a holiday? Pick a response: college costs are absurdly high now, we're still getting out of a pandemic, you have a heart of stone.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to force big internet service-providing corporations to give consumers a sort of "nutrition label" which would contain clear information about upload/download speeds, data overage charges, and the fees they prefer to keep hidden. When some right-wing troll asks "why should Big Gummint get involved?" you need only reply have you seen an ad for Comcast etc.? They tell you they're the fastest and you can watch all these fancy TV shows and they never tell you what they're really offering you! Do you remember Xfinity download speeds, or do you remember the Slowskis? Granted, only trolls ask you about Big Gummint in this context anymore -- actual right-wingers hate their ISP as much as you do, and for reasons they can tell their FCC to fix!

Penn Environment helps you tell our Department of the Interior to protect the Chaco Canyon area of New Mexico from drilling and mining corporations. Because it would pollute public lands, kill unique wildlife, and defile an area of religious significance to Native populations. And you've looked outside at the night sky lately, right? And it seems like you see fewer stars in the sky all the time? That's air pollution and light pollution at work, and these things are not at work at Chaco Canyon precisely because we don't drill in there -- drilling rigs would bring massive work lights, which would make the stars invisible to us like it has just about everywhere else. Some things are worth saving, and a night with stars in it is one of them. It shouldn't just be in Van Gogh paintings.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell AT&T to stop delivering campaign contributions to the Republican Congressdolts who voted against election certification on January 6. I wouldn't say they incited the attempted coup on January 6, but I would say they were the "legitimate" arm of that utterly illegitimate movement based on lies and whining. Seriously, it is a whole lot better not to have a President who never, ever stops whining, and thus enables that behavior in his votaries. AT&T must think they've bought some goodwill with us now that they've let their contract with OAN lapse, but if you stop doing one evil so you can keep doing other evils -- and supporting these 147 Congressdolts is evil! -- then you're kinda doing the whole good/evil thing wrong.

Action: concerning taxes, drug prices, paid sick leave, child care, and Oak Flat.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on billionaires, millionaires, and corporations, enact a windfall tax on oil corporations, lower drug prices, pass paid sick leave and child care legislation, and pass the Save Oak Flat Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax on billionaires, while Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a surtax on millionaires and raise corporate taxes. Billionaires made about $2 trillion during this pandemic while we struggled to make ends meet, and a wealth tax (of roughly 2% on wealth over $1 billion) would raise a lot of money. A millionaire surtax would essentially raise the top tax rates on millionaire income by five to eight percentage points, which wouldn't be the 91% rate I want to bring back, but which would do a lot of good. And, of course, we need to tell the 50 Republicans plus Kyrsten Sinema they're wrong about corporate taxes every chance we get. So let's get back to it.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7061/S. 3802, the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act. I didn't know the other day that the bill -- in addition to taxing big oil profits whenever they decide to use inflation or Ukraine (or whatever!) as a cover for hiking the price of gas -- would remit the money it collects from big oil corporations back to working families making less than $150,000 (or, if only one parent works, $112,500), which should help the folks hardest hit by price hikes endure them a little better. Now let's see how many Republicans decide to go on record as voting against taxing big oil corporations and rebating that money back to good Americans. West Virginians, please clog Joe Manchin's phone lines; I don't want him giving those Republicans any more cover.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to, well, lower drug prices for all Americans. The news hook this time? Sen. Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, told Politico that "if we want to reduce drug prices, then we need to do it now," because of "the difficulty of passing something like this in a Republican Congress." In other words, if Republicans win back our House and Senate, they simply won't do it; that's a hell of an admission from the man who'd be Senate Pro Tempore again if Republicans take back the Senate, and it allows his 2022 opponents a campaign angle: if you want to reduce drug prices, replace Charles Grassley with me. Anyway, we already know that Congress won't do a damn thing unless we make it impossible for them not to do it, and that starts with communicating your will to your Reps and Senators until they get it.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund paid family/sick leave. Yes, 50 Republicans and Joe Manchin don't want it, but they're wrong there, too -- why, even a lot of CEOs will tell them that paid sick leave at least gives them some certainty as they deal with employee absenteeism. And the United States is virtually alone in the world in not providing some sort of paid sick leave to working families. Sen. Gillibrand's bills all funded paid sick leave with a tiny payroll tax, amounting to about $8 every month for workers making $50,000 annually; I'd prefer to tax the rich for that as well -- I mean, really, when is Jeff Bezos going to spend $180 billion? You can only go to the edge of space so many times with so many Star Trek actors before it gets old! -- but that should demonstrate how easy it'd be to fund it.

Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass child care legislation much like Senator Murray proposed in recent legislation and President Biden included in the Build Back Better Act. Basically, it would subsidize child care so that working families pay no more than 7% of their income in child care, and that's become a big expense for folks anymore, and you know why? Same reason college and health care have become such a big expense for folks anymore: they can't do without it. This ain't a "free" market at work, this is a captive market at work, and our government has to step in anywhere a captive market develops. What can right-wingers say in response? Don't have kids? Be happy you have jobs? I kid, of course -- right-wingers can't say anything about that, which is why they yammer on so much about critical race theory.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1884/S. 915, the Save Oak Flat Act. You recall former Arizona Sens. Flake and McCain delivering the Oak Flat region of the Tonto National Forest to the big mining corporation for whom Sen. Flake used to work as a lobbyist? The Save Oak Flat Act would reverse that giveaway, and never lease that land to any mining or fossil fuel corporation again, thus protecting Oak Flat from both pollution and desecration, since Oak Flat is also sacred land to the Apache. Sadly, neither of the Democrats who have replaced Messrs. Flake and McCain (Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly) have joined as co-sponsors of the bill. Arizona residents might as well call them both, though I doubt Ms. Sinema will do anything but laugh at them.

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, tax the windfall profits of oil and gas corporations, prohibit themselves from trading on the stock market, pass legislation promoting renewable energy, pass legislation protecting public lands and rivers, and confirm two USPS Board of Governors nominees so they can fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning pollution, worker safety, clean water, and dumping Fox News.

Long story short: tell Brazil to reverse an Amazon-killing rail project, tell our Postal Service to use electric trucks, tell the Biden Administration to protect Chaco Canyon, tell UPS to treat its injured workers better, tell our EPA to get all the lead pipes out of our water, and tell big telecom corporations to stop carrying Fox News in their cable packages. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Sum of Us helps you tell the government of Brazil to reverse course on building the Ferrogrão railway project, which would cut through indigenous lands and destroy nearly a thousand kilometers of Amazon rain forest. Naturally Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro -- who, with Donald Trump out of power, may rank as the world's worst political leader -- doesn't care about indigenous peoples, or about the ancient that do more to fight climate change than perhaps any other spot on Earth, but we care, and frankly we matter more than he does. And, frankly, so do the indigenous people who have heroically fought the Bolsonaro government. At least, in a sane, decent, and moral society, that would be true. But we must work to create and preserve that society every day of our lives. Hence we do it here, regardless of what he or his corporate cronies want.

Penn PIRG helps you tell the Board of Governors of our U.S. Postal Service to change direction on their new fleet of mail trucks and make them all electric instead of gas-guzzling. That'll have a big effect on climate change, since these trucks go all over the country every day. Now some right-wingers will do a victory lap after saying all mail trucks use electricity from coal ha ha ha snort. But even the electric mail trucks that would run in West Virginia (the only state that gets nearly all its energy from coal) won't be pumping tailpipe carbon emissions into our air, and in states that use more renewables, of course, running those trucks will cause even fewer climate emissions. This is progress! Right-wingers want you to let the perfect to murder the good, so that you never do good. We've gotta fight that.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell our Department of the Interior to keep mining and drilling out of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park and its surroundings. By now you may be able to recite the reasons why we'd do that -- mining and drilling pollutes the water, pollution kills wildlife, Chaco has religious significance to nearby Native nations. The Biden Administration has proposed a 20-year ban on new gas and oil leases within a 10-mile radius of Chaco, but we'd like that to extend rather past that, ideally to "forever." I've said it before and I'll say it again: when you blow up land that folks lived on for thousands of years, that land is gone, forever -- and the fuel you'll make from it will be gone almost as quickly, as will the money you make from it. As far as renewable energy, the sun may set and the wind may die, but they always come back.

More Perfect Union helps you tell UPS to stop retaliating against injured workers and start doing right by them. UPS runs a lot of warehouses, as you know, and its workers handle a lot more heavy packages than you or I do, so they get hurt a lot -- and UPS tries to keep them on the job, or catch them in "lies" so they can fire them (if you get asked 50 times exactly what time you got hurt, you think you'll give exactly the same answer 50 times?), or send them to Concentra, a corporate clinic chain that apparently specializes in pushing workers back to work without giving them basic health care like X-rays or MRIs. Not for nothing, but Concentra has close to three dozen complaints on the Better Business Bureau website, where they're ranked one star out of five. UPS needs to do better.

Environmental Action helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to get all the lead pipes out of our water systems. There's money to do that now, thanks to the infrastructure bill Congress passed last year, but our EPA still has to mandate that the lead pipes be gone, or else we risk losing some of that money. There's literally no benefit to having lead pipes in our waterways -- lead leaches out of those pipes and into our water eventually, and there's no safe amount of lead one can imbibe, because any amount of lead can cause brain damage, which then leads to other intractable health problems. You know how you get preventive health care for no additional cost now? Well, we should also get clean water from our government at no additional cost.

Inequality Media helps you tell big cable corporations to take the Fox News Channel off the air. It's not censorship! Censorship is when our government takes something off the air; good Americans joining together to pressure private corporations to take something off the air is just the churn of civilization. And no, Fox doesn't have a First Amendment right to get carried by other big corporations! If folks really want to diddle their rage glands all day, they can go find Fox News on the internet, where big telecoms should deliver all files at the same speed (per net neutrality principles); needless to say, we'd fight algorithms that shove Fox News down your throat. We've got to win civilization every day.

Action: concerning free speech, monopolies, drug prices, pollution, and public lands.

Long story short: tell our government to protect the right to protest, reject a bankster mega-merger, allow generic manufacturing of an anti-prostate cancer drug, ban fracking wastewater use in the Delaware River, and ban oil and gas drilling in or near Chaco Canyon. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Color of Change helps you tell our Department of Justice to protect the right to protest in America. States have passed a slew of laws aiming to put protestors in jail -- or worse, allow people running over protestors to get off scot-free like they didn't just murder someone either because they inconvenienced them or because they want to create drama -- so now our federal government needs to act. And just guess how many of these laws states will ever use to convict the coming caravan of whiny truckers! Luckily for us, when those truckers do come, everyone will see them as the whiny, diaper-loaded brats they are. Protesting a mandate for a vaccine that'll save your life! I swear, these people drink rage juice or something. Anyway, states are going after peaceful folks protesting real injustices, and our DOJ needs to stop that.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Federal Reserve and our Comptroller of the Currency to reject a proposed U.S. Bank/Union Bank merger, which will put over $660 billion in assets under control of one corporation. Our government hasn't rejected a bank merger in 15 years, which has contributed to our loss of 70% of our banks in the last 40 years, which has in turn led to banksters monopolizing markets and raising prices for consumers because they can. You know, like how corporations are stoking the 7.5% inflation rate now? Not only that, but when all the banks are big, they don't go to rural and urban areas, leaving their residents at the mercy of payday lenders and pawn shops. And they deserve better, which is why we must stop this merger, and all that are like it.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to allow other drug corporations to manufacture a generic version of the noted anti-prostate cancer drug Xtandi. Xtandi pills cost $400 per pill (not per bottle or per thousand, per pill), and for some patients that'll amount to nearly $190,000 annually! Plus we pay five times more for it than folks in other countries, and if you were anticipating that the next phrase was going to be all about how taxpayers paid for 100% of the research that brought forth Xtandi, well, you're right! Generic manufacturers could sell Xtandi for as little as $3 a pill and still make a profit, and President Biden does have legal authority to force generic manufacturing of a drug, said authority coming from the Bayh/Dole Act of 1980. This should be a layup, really, so let's get to it.

Food and Water Action helps you tell our Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) to ban fracking waste and use of Delaware River water for fracking. Fracking does use a lot of water, after all, and we've got better uses for it than enriching gas corporations' executives. Yeah, I know, gas is cheaper than most other kinds of energy, but how can we say that's a good thing if we can't drink the water? Go solar and go wind and you might pay more in the short run, but you'll cause less pollution, plus you'll save money in the long run. Our DRBC did ban fracking in the Basin last year, but they did not ban big corporations from drawing water out of the Delaware to go frack somewhere else, and once that water's gone, you don't get it back. And our DRBC's own proposal to keep frackers from taking our water is weak, so let's try to make them do better.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to protect the Chaco Culture National Historical Park from gas and oil drilling. More specifically, you'll ask them to protect Chaco Canyon and the area 10 miles out from it in all directions from gas and oil drilling. We've supported a Chaco Canyon drilling ban because of pollution and because it's holy land to nearby Native populations, but we've got another reason to support it: as drilling and grazing creep ever closer to Chaco Canyon, more and more wildlife flee to the Chaco Canyon area as a refuge, and it's more than a bit cruel to drive wildlife out of an area you drill in and then go drill in the area they've sought refuge. Some would call that the circle of life, but it's not; it's just a circle of money, and money don't last.

Action: concerning monopolies, bank fees, internet privacy, public lands, and evil podcasts.

Long story short: tell our government to stop bank mergers and curb bank overdraft fees, tell RayBan to ditch social media stalker sunglasses, tell our government to designate the Delaware Water Gap a national park, and tell Apple and Google to deplatform Steve Bannon. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell federal regulators to stop all bank mergers until they can strengthen merger guidelines. What good do mergers do? They make executives richer, but that doesn't qualify as a "good" to anyone but the right-wingers who only care about how well they do. In the meantime, mergers kill jobs, kill competition, and raise prices for everyone, usually in ways that aren't obvious, and because they're not obvious, judges ignore them. And bank mergers are even worse, because they limit your options if you're trying to get a loan to buy a house or start a business, and also because banks don't like going into rural or urban areas. But the folks who live there are people, too! And we all deserve better.

Americans for Financial Reform also helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to stop absurd bank overdraft fees. Because the last damn thing you need, as you're struggling to make ends meet during a pandemic, is a bank charging you ridiculous overdraft fees. These fees drive poorer Americans out of the banking system and puts them at the mercy of pawn shops, check-cashing joints, and payday lenders. And despite the whining of the Price Controls Are Always Evil crowd, an April 2020 poll found 75% of Americans wanted our government to regulate overdraft fees more. Republican respondents dragged that number down, right? Nope -- 76% of Republican respondents wanted more government intervention there, too. (Independents dragged the number down; there's a lesson there, somewhere.)

Sum of Us helps you tell sunglass corporation Ray-Ban to stop making "smart" glasses for Facebook. Why? Because their glasses secretly record people, supposedly to help people "tell stories." You've seen the "stories" function on Facebook? Have you ever seen something so counterintuitive? Particularly after using Facebook's far more intuitive newsfeed for all those years? And they hawk it like it's sliced bread! Anyway, these "smart" glasses look just like sunglasses as they're secretly recording you -- unless you happen to see a small white light on the frame, which you likely won't. And anyway, if you've given the matter any thought, you will probably conclude, as I have done, that there are already too many stories floating around. The world needs good stories, recollected in tranquility rather than taped by stalkers.

Environmental Action helps you tell our government to designate the Delaware Water Gap as a national park. Or, more likely, a "national park and preserve," since our laws don't allow hunting in a national park but do allow it in a preserve (which could be carved out of a national park). The Delaware Water Gap, a creation of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, now gets about as many visitors as the Yellowstone National Park but has about one-ninth the budget, and America strangely doesn't have many national parks east of the Mississippi River; maybe folks think that New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey comprise some urban hellhole, but all these states feature vast swaths of gorgeous and relatively unspoiled land, of which the Delaware Water Gap is just the most famous. So, really, why on Earth not?

Finally, in case you thought Joe Rogan was the only jerk with an undeserved platform, Care2 helps you tell Google and Apple to remove Steve Bannon's podcast from their respective platforms. Mr. Bannon was too much of a jerk for Spotify, which removed him in late 2020 after he said he'd put the heads of Anthony Fauci and Christopher Wray "on pikes" as "a warning to federal bureaucrats." "Joking," right? Mr. Bannon's podcast has since alleged repeatedly that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election (by getting seven million more votes, apparently!) and said "all hell will break loose tomorrow" on January 5, 2021, which I'm sure was just "analysis." Yeah, I used to listen to obnoxious jerks, but then I became a man, and put away childish things. And our big, bold corporations need to do the same thing.

Around the table: how we got on the brink of war yet again, and other sad tales.

Puzzled about the buzz over the Ukraine? Bryce Greene at FAIR explains the relevant issues, as well as our "liberal" media's failure to cover them. You won't be surprised to learn that "(t)he backdrop to the 2014 coup (in the Ukraine) and annexation (by Russia, of Crimea) cannot be understood without looking at the U.S. strategy to open Ukrainian markets to foreign investors and give control of its economy to giant multinational corporations." And, guess what, we backed that coup in 2014, and when has doing such a thing ever backfired on us? (Spoiler alert: it's still backfiring on us in Iran!) So, yeah, we helped bollocks all that up, too, and in such a way that our "assistance" would be needed later; couple that with Vladimir Putin's (admittedly quite deserved) unpopularity, and you not only have a "justification" for war, but a stick right-wingers can use to beat Mr. Biden with if he doesn't take us to war. Admittedly the right's love of Mr. Putin is actually getting in the way of them using that stick at present, but in the end, consistency isn't that important to the right.

Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court strikes down state's mail-in voting law as "unconstitutional," though the law will stay in place until the state Supreme Court can hear an appeal. So no, this doesn't mean Donald Trump will be reinstated as President, not just because if he somehow got 20 more electoral votes he still wouldn't have enough to have won the 2020 election, but also because (as our state Supreme Court has already noted) nobody sued and won about this when it would have made a difference. Hilariously, more than a few state legislators who voted for the mail-in law are now suing against its constitutionality! It's like something happened over the last year and a half or so to change their minds so dramatically. (And I do mean "dramatically.")

When I hear that TikTok is a "Time Bomb" "Feeding Us Junk News Non-Stop," I'm reminded that "junk news" is a phrase I've been hearing for at least two decades (and describes a phenomenon that's existed twice as long as that), and that a lot of local newscasts have just given up and paraded a collection of viral videos for years now. I agree that TikTok has so, so much more potential for good, but then again YouTube used to be a lot better for us than it is now, and Twitter certainly never fulfilled its potential. Even Tiktok's algorithms don't seem to be substantially different from other harmful social media (or mainstream media) organs. I guess I was hoping for some new insight, and probably that's my fault.

The headline "Kyrsten Sinema Would Lose 2024 Primary in a Landslide: Poll" actually understates the case a bit. You remember Scott Walker being down five to 10 points in polls to various Democratic challengers less than a year before he won his 2012 recall election? Well, this sure ain't that -- a Data for Progress poll finds her down 58 points, by 74-16, in a hypothetical primary match-up against Rep. Ruben Gallego. Granted, her numbers ain't down that far from just a few months ago, and Ms. Sinema has over a year to recover in the eyes of Arizona Democrats -- if Democrats lose the Senate in 2022, she can make a more compelling case for sticking with her, think that's the plan? -- but a 58-point deficit in a poll like this suggests she'll far more likely be the Joe Lieberman of 2022. She'd appreciate that.

Finally, some good news: our Interior Department has cancelled two mining leases near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, on the grounds that the previous Administration (and stop me if you've heard this one before) didn't do the environmental review required by law and cut our Forest Service out of the decision-making process entirely, also in contravention of the law. The phrase "law and order" leap to mind? It should, or else my life's work has been for nothing. None of this guarantees that the Biden Administration will protect the Boundary Waters on a more permanent basis, but it gives us more of a fighting chance, which is all I ever want. (Only read the whole thing if you're prepared for a mining corporation spokeshack to sound even more moronic than usual.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to reject pro-gerrymandering bills and pass an anti-privatization bill, tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, tell President Biden to get us out of the war on Yemen for-real for-real, and tell your Senators to pass the Women's Health Protection Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning drug prices, clean water, animal abuse, public lands, and family separation.

Long story short: tell our Department of Health and Human Services to allow generic manufacturing of an overly-expensive cancer drug, tell our EPA to get the lead out of our drinking water, tell Facebook to stop allowing illegal endangered wildlife sales, tell our government to keep copper miners out of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, and tell our Department of Homeland Security to reunite families separated at the border. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Social Security Works helps you tell HHS Secretary Becerra to permit generic manufacturing of Xtandi, which its manufacturer currently sells for $400 a pill -- in America, at least! In other nations (including Japan, where Xtandi's manufacturer, Astellas Pharma, has its headquarters), it "only" charges about one-fifth of that, and I put "only" in quotation marks because that's still $80 a pill; allowing a generic of Xtandi would likely cut that price to $3. And our HHS can do that, using the "march-in" rights granted by the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act; most of us would say that our government should take control of a drug if the corporation that manufactures it is charging us an arm and a leg for it. I think we would say that even if Mitch McConnell calls it "socialism" or "communism." So let's do it.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to get the lead out of our drinking water. Just so happens our EPA is mulling this very thing, and for good reason -- basically any exposure to lead also exposes you to brain damage (and the developmental problems that come with it), and the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended a standard of less than one part lead per billion. Yes, that infrastructure bill provides a lot of funding for removing lead pipes, but you would hate for that money to get wasted in the wrong places just because some Congressperson or other had an outsized influence on the matter; if our EPA can contribute solid research telling us where the most lead pipes are, for example, that would help forestall such a tragedy. Wasted money here will be wasted life.

Avaaz helps you tell Facebook to ban sales of illegal endangered wildlife species on its platform. Or, as they put it, "make the illegal wildlife trade extinct" -- which spells MIWTE, so we won't think of putting that on a red hat, but still, it's a worthwhile goal for a civilized people. As we speak, only 7,000 cheetas exist in the wild, but unsavory types have sold over 4,000 more on Facebook! Don't succumb to the temptation to feel sorry for Facebook -- just like most evil people, their whole M.O. is to stoke drama, and if they can get attention for promising to make it better just like every wife-beater does when they're cornered, all the better. Still, the Big Stick of Bad PR can save lives here -- if we but wield it against Facebook. Saying most people oppose animal abuse wouldn't be a reach.

Both Environmental Action and MoveOn help you tell our Bureau of Land Management to protect the famous Boundary Waters Wilderness from copper mining. Copper's an intensely useful mineral -- if our hospital tabletops were still made of copper, we might have had a much easier time with this pandemic! -- but if you get a finite amount of a useful material by permanently damaging an otherwise renewable resource, then you're doing resource management wrong. And the Boundary Waters Wilderness -- so named because it straddles the border between Ontario and Minnesota -- contains over a thousand lakes and over a thousand miles of rivers and streams, and covering as it does around 1,700 square miles (an area bigger than Rhode Island), when pollution gets in one area, it's going to get to the others. We'd want to prevent that.

Finally, the ACLU helps you tell our Department of Homeland Security to reunite families separated at the border. You can amend the ACLU's comment tool as you see fit, but certainly we should demand that the Biden Administration reunify separated families and give them the due process they deserve -- which includes counseling for their suffering and accountability for those who caused it. Family separation was Trump Administration policy, but it's now the Biden Administration's problem to fix, and they ain't going as fast as justice demands. Luckily they're asking the American people to fix it for them, and I'm sure a few rage-heads will write comments I'd prefer not to contemplate, but I suspect the vast majority of Americans don't want families separated no matter where they're from. We were all from somewhere else once, after all.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, pollution, landmines, and Guantánamo.

Long story short: tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to reject a fake gerrymandering reform bill, tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous methane emissions regulations possible and start monitoring factory farm pollution, tell President Biden to keep his promise to outlaw certain landmines and close Guantánamo Bay, and tell our USDA to stop oil trains from rumbling through Utah. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Fair Districts PA informs us that the recently-introduced HB 2207 only pretends to create a citizens' commission for redistricting, in that it give the political parties far too much power over its composition and direction and would actually amend our state constitution to let one party have complete control over the process. They'll call that the voters' will, when gerrymandering Rorschach-blot districts that excise sides of streets and individual houses is the perfect way to subvert the voters' will! They got some cojones, these clowns, but that's all they got. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to find your state legislator's phone number so you can tell them to reject this bill -- unless it includes the Samuelson amendment that would at least give good Pennsylvanians a real independent citizens commission, which would negate all the bill's horrors.

Penn Environment helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous methane emission rules possible. Best to get to stepping, though, since their deadline for comments is Friday. Methane packs a bigger climate change punch than coal, and when big corporations let it leak from their oil or gas drilling facilities, they're not just moving the coastlines uncomfortably closer to you, they're wasting perfectly good energy -- and if they're drilling on public lands, they're also cheating you, the taxpayer, out of royalties. In short, nobody likes methane leaks -- except the big gas and oil corporations that don't want to do their part to keep our planet livable because it means the CEO can't gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home. And they shouldn't get their way about that.

US PIRG helps you tell our EPA to start monitoring factory farm pollution. Which cause the most water pollution in America, and which our EPA pledged to start monitoring 17 years ago; what's the holdup? The holdup, I suspect, is that big ag corporations get even more deference from our government than all the other big corporations to which our government defers -- all these big corporations have to do is dangle the spectre of high food prices and they get whatever they like. Well, we're not hostages in America -- we're free people. And asking our EPA to start monitoring (not even stopping!) factory farm pollution is not so damn much to ask. Rivers of hog poop have a lot of methane in them, too, and too much hog poop makes people sick. Don't people count for anything?

Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to re-ban anti-personnel landmines. Donald Trump lifted this ban during his deleterious four years as President, and President Biden promised he'd undo it, but he hasn't, yet, and it's not like he hasn't had the time -- a stroke of a pen is all it'll take. Put five beers into Donald Trump and I'm sure he'll tell you other countries get to do it so we should too, but the whole point of America is to be the best possible example to other countries. It's like none of these folks in politics remember that -- or, more likely, they think they don't have to earn it anymore. But we must always earn America. And landmines have been known to blow people's legs off 50 years after the war's over, so let's not let cruelty be the example we set for the rest of the world.

Amnesty International helps you tell President Biden to close Guantánamo Bay already. Again, he promised to do this, and it's not like he can't get something done if he puts his mind to it -- like, you know, our withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he should have done a lot better but at least he did it; get us out of this now 20-years-going-on humiliation and he might actually start stacking up some accomplishments. Guantánamo still has almost 40 detainees, held without charge or trial, and if they'd really done something so bad you'd think our government could charge them with something. That tells you they didn't do a damn thing! Someone already stands ready to say if even one terrorist was there it was all worth it, but they'd never say that if they were detained at Guantánamo for years on end. So we can blow them off.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our U.S. Department of Agriculture (or USDA) to revoke permits for an oil railway running through the Ashley National Forest in Utah. Jesus Mary and Joseph what is it about Utah that makes big corporations want to screw with it? Utah has some of the most beautiful country in the world! And this railway won't even dig out the minerals that big corporations often covet in Utah -- but it will ruin wildlife habitat and wetlands there, and for what? If we don't move past oil -- which is more than possible in a world where solar and wind now cost less in some places than fossil fuels -- then we're not going to have a planet left. Why, even those jerks at Fox News who spend all their time laughing at people who want more solar and wind won't have a place to go.

Action: mostly concerning pollution.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to make rapid COVID-19 tests free, designate the Delaware Water Gap a National Park, restore protections for migratory birds, ban mining within the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, charge more money in public royalties for coal mining on public lands, and enact the most vigorous methane emissions regulations possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to make rapid COVID-19 tests free for all Americans. Last week he proposed requiring health insurance corporations to reimburse folks for the cost of these tests, but that's not really the same thing as "just make the tests free," and not just to folks who have no health insurance. If you're buying groceries and paying the bills, you might not also have $20 to plunk down for a COVID-19 test -- which would just be for you, of course; if you have children, you'd want to test them, too, so figure another $20 per child. Now it's adding up, and that's before we get to submitting forms to health insurance corporations! Many times I've had to call my insurer to get them to pay up after they wrongly rejected my claims, so we need to make this easy.

Penn Environment helps you tell the Biden Administration to designate the Delaware Water Gap as a National Park. The Delaware Water Gap is one of America's national treasures, a tribute to the success of the Land and Water Conservation Fund (now permanently authorized and funded thanks to 2020's Great Outdoors Act), and over 4.5 million folks visit the Gap every year. Incredibly, though, we have no national parks in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, or New York -- no, the right word is "incredibly," if you've seen the vast unspoiled lands each of these states have -- so I'd say it's overdue. And becoming a National Park (versus a National Recreation Area, as it is now) means tens of millions of dollars more in federal funding, which means we'll have something even better to leave to future generations.

Environmental Action helps you tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to protect migratory birds from corporate harm. Specifically, you'd ask the Service to roll back the notorious Trump Administration rule "freeing" corporations from facing any accountability for their bird-killing pollution. For such a "law and order" "conservative," Donald Trump sure was all about helping big corporations escape responsibility for their wrongdoing. And the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (which the rule enforces) is over a century old; apparently the Trumpian interpretation of conservatism has nothing to do with "treasuring things that have endured," either. I kid, of course -- the Trumpian interpretation of anything is "whatever induces the most rage in the most people." But that's no way to run a civilization.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to ban mining within the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness watershed for the next two decades. Because it would pollute the water, and for what? Not for jobs, that's for sure -- too many right-wingers justify any and every polluting project by saying it'll employ people, as if non-polluting projects don't employ people. This was, indeed, former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett's excuse for handing out billions of taxpayer money to an ethane cracker plant! But I digress. Our Forest Service concluded, in a 2016 study, that sulfide-ore copper mining would cause irreparable damage to the Boundary Waters; I bet you just can't guess what happened next: the "law and order" "conservative" President said to hell with it, we're leasing anyway. And so we reassert our will.

Penn Environment helps you tell our Interior Department to stop subsidizing coal mining. How does our Interior Department subsidize coal mining? By actually lowering the royalties corporations have to pay for drilling on public lands! You would think our Interior Department would raise those royalties, if for no other reason than to make the taxpayer more money, since royalties do belong to the taxpayer. But our government still doesn't understand the leverage we as taxpayers have. And coal corporations still account for some three-fifths of all carbon emissions, despite providing less than one-quarter of our energy; if they're that bad for America, giving them corporate welfare is even more foolish. If we really want to fight climate change, we need to stop giving out these handouts.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the strongest methane emissions standards possible. Just so happens that cutting methane emissions (which accompany every oil and gas drilling operation in America) would deal perhaps the most efficient blow to climate change, since methane packs an even bigger climate change punch than coal does. And since the methane mitigation industry has been around for at least a decade, brook no HOWZ WILLZ WEZ DOZ TEH THINGZ!!!!! malarkey from big fossil fuel corporations! They're awfully ready with excuses, aren't they? And right-wingers love pretending your actual obstacles are excuses and the excuses of corporations are obstacles. Well, good luck to all of them at the Pearly Gates!

Action: concerning law and order, climate change, clean water, national forests, and right-wing news.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to investigate the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, tell federal agencies to take climate change into account when spending taxpayer money, tell our government to keep radioactive waste off the vaunted Three Rivers, tell our Forest Service to keep logging out of the Tongass National Forest, and tell AT&T to cut off life support for the notorious One America News Network. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

People for the American Way helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. Not because it didn't go our way -- that's just right-wing whiners projecting their inadequacies on us! -- but because we all saw how suspicious it was. Imagine being on trial for murder and watching the judge refuse to let lawyers call victims "victims" but allow lawyers to call them "looters." That same judge allowed Mr. Rittenhouse himself to pick which jurors to send home after both sides rested their cases, and the verdict absurdly expanded "self-defense" to include brats bringing killing machines to protests "just in case." The George Zimmerman verdict sucked, but even that made more sense than this! If our Justice Department investigates this absurdity, we might get some justice down the line, and that's worth the effort.

Progress America helps you tell our government to take climate change into account in its procuring decisions. I mean, you'd want them to go the extra mile to keep our planet livable if it were your money, right? Oh, wait: it is your money. Just so happens President Biden has called for this very thing -- but of course they have to take public comments on that first, and the right-wing whine machine is out in force with their comment-bots and paid crisis actors, so we have to speak up, too. No, "paid crisis actors" is entirely an appropriate thing to call right-wing commenters who take money to leave absurd public comments on matters concerning our government. It's not an appropriate thing to call us, of course -- we do good works for free.

MoveOn helps you tell our government to keep fracking wastewater off the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio Rivers. Those would be the famous "Three Rivers" that lent their name to the Pittsburgh Pirates' home stadium back in the day. Why keep fracking wastewater off the Three Rivers? Because the good citizens of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia depend on these rivers for clean water, and if a fracking wastewater barge sinks or springs a leak, it'll pollute that clean water so good folks can't drink it or wash with it. Seems pretty simple to me! If your snotty libertarian nephew says where will you put the wastewater then ha ha ha snort, just tell him there are a lot of ways to meet our energy needs that don't require fracking. I mean, c'mon, this is America, the can-do country!

Penn Environment helps you tell our U.S. Forest Service to restore protections to the Tongass National Forest so that loggers don't spoil it. The Trump Administration, as you recall, decided to exempt over nine million acres of the Tongass National Forest as it wound down its evil term in office last year, saying that the rule would not cause "major adverse impacts to the recreation, tourism, and fishing industries, while providing benefits to the timber and mining industries, increasing opportunities for community infrastructure, and eliminating unnecessary regulations." Not mentioned: that the thousand-year-old trees of the Tongass trap more carbon than any other area in America. But, hey, as long as timber and mining CEOs get to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home, who cares?

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell AT&T to stop funding the notorious One America News Network. Right-wingers love to talk about "starving the beast," the "beast," in their view, being our government, even though it provides services we need and pay for. Fact is, right-wing media is the beast, and I mean "beast" in the Book of Revelations sense. OANN, like Newsmax, Fox News, and The First, traffics in by far the worst drug in America -- right-wing rage -- and so they're the beast we need to starve. And yeah, I just said right-wing rage is a worse drug than heroin or fentanyl. Heroin and fentanyl destroy lives and families, but right-wing rage destroys civilizations. Take its money away and it'll go down faster than a vampire in a Nevada noon.

Around the table: from bad news about unions to good news about Utah monuments.

Hamilton Nolan at In These Times writes that "In Middle America, Unions and Democrats Are Sleepwalking Into the Grave." At least the latest report finding Democrats losing votes in manufacturing towns, etc., because unions are declining there, etc., comes from Democratic consultants, not in spite of them. Key insight from Mr. Nolan: "the story here is that as traditionally unionized manufacturing jobs disappeared, unions failed to organize the next set of (worse) jobs that rose up to take their place...If the factories leave, and people go work at the Dollar General, then unions need to unionize the Dollar General." Have unions done that? No, they have not. I hope that's not because unions look down on retail workers, but we can't discount the possibility.

William C. Anderson at TruthOut reminds us that "Liberal Pleas for 'Unity' Legitimize the Virulent Politics of the Far Right." "The problem, however, as is always the problem with calls for unity," he writes, "is that unity with white supremacists means death." You no doubt recall all the right-wing cries for "unity" aimed to paper over their role in the January 6 attempted coup? It is funny (and by "funny" I mean "not at all funny") how often calls for "unity" seem to benefit right-wingers. You might go so far as to say you should not trust anyone who calls for "unity," since so many of our fellow Americans really deserve isolation and ostracization more than anything else.

Social scientists find, not surprisingly, that in the wake of Facebook's "mysterious" outage last week, that its users have a love-hate relationship with it -- and reminds us that it was not always this way. Sure was fun in 2008 and 2009 to find all sorts of folks I thought I'd never see or speak to again, but even in the wake of Ms. Haugen's recent testimony, Facebook seems well-nigh essential, particularly to those of us who promote blogs or books against all hope. But I felt like the Golden Age of Connection came well before Facebook -- remember LiveJournal, Tribe, Friendster, Meetup, or, gosh, blogs? -- and quite frankly I wouldn't mind rolling back the clock.

Speaking of Frances Haugen, Matt Stoller reminds us that Ms. Haugen, despite her many good works, doesn't want to break up Facebook, but create a whole new regulatory agency just to handle it, and staff that agency with Silicon Valley types that "know" the industry, which I hope sounds like a terrible idea to you. We need to break up Facebook because, as Mr. Stoller says, "the concentration of power in the hands of a small group is the fundamental political and economic problem with Facebook," and if you're at all familiar with the sites I mentioned in the previous paragraph, then you also know that they only came about because of the "decentralized" internet Facebook has wiped out with its monopoly power. And if a new regulatory agency sounds like "more bureaucracy" to your right-wing friends, know that it also sounds like more bureaucracy to this irredeemable liberal, too. We already have agencies and courts that can slap down monopolies; we don't need to create a whole new agency in order to preserve a monopoly that's hurting our civilization.

You may be surprised to learn that the Pandora Papers have revealed South Dakota as a major tax haven for the "international rich," rivaling places like Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. Why? Because the state has gone way out of its way to shield trust funds from scrutiny by almost anyone, from regulators and foreign governments and even former spouses. You have to wonder where a lot of South Dakota politicians' campaign funding comes from, then! In a sane, moral, and decent society, South Dakota voters would punish their government at the next election, but I suspect they won't, and you know what that means.

Finally, President Biden restores the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments to their original size, i.e., before Donald Trump cut big swaths of them off so he could hand them to developers. You undoubtedly advocated for the return of these monuments to their original sizes, so good for you. Lawsuits will follow, but as much as I doubted Mr. Trump's authority to make those cuts in the first place, I'm even more skeptical that the state of Utah will succeed in any of its lawsuits to claw them back. And, like the Ute Indian Tribal chair quoted extensively in the article, I'm pretty sure the only "peaceful resolution" Utah wants is the one that gives them everything they want.

Action: concerning Medicare, Guantánamo Bay, vaccines, Arctic drilling, public water, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell our government to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, close Guantánamo Bay, prevent big pharma monopolies from stopping worldwide vaccine production, ban Arctic drilling, and stop private corporations from taking water from our public lands, and tell corporations to stop bankrolling the campaigns of Texas state legislators. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. Word on the street is that the House Energy and Commerce Committee, currently marking up the Build Back Better Act, actually doesn't have the votes to pass Medicare drug pricing reform. Virtually everyone thinks Medicare should be able to negotiate drug prices -- everyone, that is, except big pharma corporations, who appear to be getting all the say about everything, yet again. This is why independents vote Republican in the midterms -- because Democrats are too scared to offend their big donors and do big things. And in 2022, it'll be worse, because most of the Republicans running will be out-and-out fascists. The three members of the Committee most opposed to Medicare drug pricing reform are Rep. Schrader (D?-OR), Rep. Rice (D?-NY) and Rep. Peters (D?-CA). If you're a constituent of any of these three, please call them and tell them to do the right thing, not least because the alternative is fascists taking Congress. Call them even if you're not a constituent, though. It's that important. And big pharma ain't anyone's "constituent," so any Rep who treats them like one has pretty much forfeited the right to nitpick about whether any of their callers are constituents.

Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center already. He promised he would, so he ought to keep that promise! As you know, Saturday marked the 20-year anniversary of 9.11, which means almost 20 years of pretending the "terrorists" we've held in Guantánamo Bay without charge and without trial were "too difficult to prosecute, but too dangerous to release," in the Obama Administration's immortal words. It was all a lie, and we have done our civilization incalculable damage since 9.11 -- and if right-wing crybabies get their way, as they far too often do, we'll continue to suffer the fruits of that damage for years to come. That makes it all the more urgent that we close this self-inflicted wound on our national honor.

Rethink Trade helps you tell the Biden Administration to use every tool at their disposal to ensure vaccines can be produced and administered worldwide. Because the alternative is COVID-19 mutating and coming back to bite us in the ass again and again -- recall that scientists first spotted the Delta variant, currently slicing its way through red states, in India. At the point of life-or-death, things like "big pharma's intellectual property rights" don't matter a whole lot -- or, at least, they shouldn't. And "every tool at their disposal" means pushing for an intellectual property waiver from the WTO, of course, but it also means using already-existing legal authority to force big pharma corporations to produce vaccines worldwide. Taxpayer money invested in them, after all -- taxpayers like you and I paid for the Moderna vaccine in its entirety, in fact -- so we get a say in how they're used.

The Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell our government to stop drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR). Opening up ANWR to oil drilling was a key "achievement" of the Trump Administration, but we all know why we would put "achievement" in quotation marks there -- scientists have long told us we're not getting very much oil out of ANWR, and we know that drilling in the Arctic Ocean presents unique problems, like the near-impossibility of cleaning up the inevitable oil spills in near-freezing water. But you know, the will of the Gwich'in Native Americans who live there, and the Porcupine caribou they depend upon, aren't chopped liver, either. Often, the compassionate thing to do is also the pragmatic thing to do -- but too often, the politicians ignore both in favor of whatever pleases some crony or other. You can fight that by leaving a public comment opposing Arctic drilling.

Environmental Action helps you tell our U.S. Forest Service to deny any permit applications to corporations attempting to draw water from our San Bernardino National Forest in California. BlueTriton, formerly Nestlé Waters North America, drew some 58 million gallons of water from Strawberry Creek in the aforementioned San Bernardino National Forest just last year, but at least California wasn't in a state of drought or anything. Oh, wait, they were! And the drought is even worse this year! This, as farmers struggle to water their crops, to the point where they actually use fracking wastewater on them. Hmm, fracking wastewater on crops, private water siphoning -- could it be that preventing the latter could make the former unnecessary? Why, yes, it could -- but only if we speak out in numbers they can't ignore.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop bankrolling the campaigns of Texas's most extreme right-wing legislators. These would be the legislators who passed both SB 1, Texas's notorious anti-voting law, and SB 8, Texas's notorious abortion ban, and if corporations want to do something more than issue PR releases sympathetic to the plight of women, they can, you know, stop bankrolling the campaigns of these politicians. Of course, they may not want to do more than issue sympathetic PR releases, which is why we brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR. (As an aside, don't be too impressed that Salesforce has vowed to relocate any Texas employee who wants to leave because of SB 8. If you're an employee who requests that, your boss has just learned a lot about you, and you're much better off keeping yourself to yourself as much as possible at your job.)

UPDATE. And on cue: Rep. Kathleen Rice (D?-NY) says she cannot support Medicare drug price negotiation because it is "not fiscally responsible." Wondering how saving the taxpayers $84 billion every year is "not fiscally responsible"? Yes, I bet you are, as is any sentient life form on Earth. Her D.C. office number is 202.225.5516. She deserves to lose her re-election bid, and the way Republicans are going, she'll lose it to Zombie Adolf Hitler.

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 taxes, drug prices, human rights, chemical safety, national monuments, and lead poisoning.

Long story short: tell Democrats to raise taxes on the rich, tell your Congressfolk to pass the Lower Drug Prices Now Act and stop selling weapons to Egypt, tell your Senators to pass the PFAS Action Act and reject the so-called Protect Utah’s Rural Economy Act, and tell our EPA to get the lead out of our water pipes. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell Democrats to tax the rich big-time in their upcoming budget reconciliation bill. Because you can talk about the Wealth Tax and the Millionaire Surtax and the like, but sometimes you just have to say tax the rich already! Now some Democrats are already like I can't raise taxes going into an election year! They're wrong: you can raise taxes on rich people who aren't paying enough in taxes whenever you like, because people actually like that -- as long as you defend what you're doing with some fierceness. Some of these Democrats don't know from fierceness, but that's why we're here -- where they lack it, we must give it.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices already. Somehow they couldn't get this done along as part of the Affordable Care Act, but letting Medicare negotiate its own prices was popular then, and it's popular now. Plus it's a revenue raiser! Which is not only common sense -- forcing Medicare to pay higher prices for drugs costs more money, after all -- but is also supported by research. By right-wing research! The Koch-funded Mercatus Center infamously said it would save Medicare over $80 billion annually -- and remember, Mercatus wants Medicare dead.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop selling arms to Egypt, as well as to other countries with notorious human rights records. Just this past February, the Biden Administration approved a $197 million missile sale to Egypt only days after Egypt raided the homes of six relatives of an Egyptian-American activist. Imagine your government raiding the homes of your parents, your brother, your sister, your nephew, your aunt and uncle, and your grandmother! And then imagine some even larger country selling our government $200 million in guns the next day. Seem like a good idea? No, it does not. So let's stop enabling that.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act. The House passed H.R. 2467 last week with 23 Republicans voting for it, some you already know (Brian Fitzpatrick) and some you'd never expect (Matt Gaetz); the bill would direct our EPA to designate PFAS chemicals -- also known as "forever chemicals" because they never seem to break down like other chemicals do! -- as the hazardous substances they clearly are, and would task our EPA with determining whether PFAS chemicals are also toxic pollutants, because that would require regulation under the Clean Water Act, and thus require our EPA to limit their discharge into our water, particularly our drinking water. There had damn well better be 10 Republicans who'll vote for this bill, and I don't want to hear any whining about "nanny states" from any of them.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to reject S. 31, the so-called Protect Utah’s Rural Economy Act. How would S. 31 "protect Utah's rural economy"? By freezing the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments at the size to which Donald Trump shrunk them as President. Really, that's all the bill does. If you remember that Mr. Trump shrunk these monuments only so that mining corporations could dig up those lands, then you'll probably be just as puzzled as I am that anyone could call this "protecting Utah's rural economy." It's rather like letting foxes have free reign over the henhouse and calling that "protecting our chickens." So let's kill this particular slab of stupid.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our EPA to get the lead out of our water pipes. Specifically, you'd ask our EPA to update its Lead and Copper Rule so that it gets lead pipes out of our water systems, since any amount of lead in your water can cause brain damage, particularly to children. Some Republicans probably want that, since it's their best show at ensuring future generations vote for them, but, luckily, they get literally no say in this matter. Well, they could pass a resolution of disapproval later on, but how would that make them look? It'd make them look objectively pro-dirty water and objectively pro-brain damage, and those aren't good looks. This should be a layup for our EPA, but we still have to tell them to go to the rim.

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.

Action: concerning unlawful detention, killer drones, internet freedom, pollution, and public water.

Long story short: tell President Biden to close Guantánamo Bay, ban killer drones, appoint a fifth FCC Commissioner, and reject the proposed Twin Metals mine, and tell BlueTriton to stop taking public water from California. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center and end the nefarious practice of "indefinite detention." To review: Tha Bush Mobb asserted that these were really, really bad people, the baddest of the bad, the Obama Administration said they were "too difficult to prosecute, but too dangerous to release," and then Donald Trump said WE NEEDZ TO MAKE TEH GUANTANAMOZ BIGGERZ!!!! and suggested sending American COVID patients there. In other words, Guantánamo Bay represents nothing but American shame. If I did something that shameful, I'd stop doing it. Maybe that's the difference between Americans and their leaders, in a nutshell.

Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to ban autonomous killer drones. That's right, killer robots! They're not just for sci-fi dystopias anymore! It's bad enough that we have soldiers remotely controlling drones to kill people, but now we've got AI-powered drones that, ah, don't require orders to kill people. They think they're taking the soldiers, and thus the bodybags, out of the war, but they're just making it easier to be an unfeeling killing machine. Drones have killed tens of thousands of folks nowhere near a battlefield; how long before that happens in your neighborhood? And to think Fox News wants you to worry about Black Lives Matter protestors and antifa! You want something to worry about? Worry about drones doing their own thing -- to you.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell President Biden to appoint a fifth FCC Commissioner who'll help reinstate net neutrality as the law of the land. Currently the FCC has only four Commissioners, which means a 2-2 deadlock whenever they decide to act on net neutrality again, which means that until President Biden appoints the fifth Commissioner, big internet providing corporations will be able to slow traffic, block content, and create the notorious "fast lanes" that you don't have the money to buy into. It also means a world where big corporations, not you, control your internet experience. So let's get our President moving.

Penn Environment helps you tell the Biden Administration to reject the proposed Twin Metals mine abutting the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Our Forest Service said the project would cause "irreparable harm" to the wilderness area, but then, you know, we elected a President who only cares about money -- and bosses' money, at that -- which means every evil project went back on the table. Our Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack, has said the Biden Administration hasn't made a decision yet. But if you think the decision not to pollute the most-visited wilderness in America shouldn't be that hard, go ahead and tell them so.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell BlueTriton to stop hoovering up California's public water just so they can make bottled water from it. There is a drought going on in California, after all. By the way, you could call BlueTriton "the Artist Formerly Known as Nestlé Waters North America." Could it be that it changed its name because it took so, so many PR hits for trying to siphon off public water all over America, such that even its successes backfired on it? Why, yes, it could be, and you have yourself to thank for that, if you've made waves about Nestlé's nefarious works over the last decade. All they did about it was change the name, but we're on to them, and we can't, we won't, and we don't stop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning credit errors, internet privacy, methane emissions, social media, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell big credit corporations to fix errors in our credit reports, tell TikTok to stop collecting biometric data, tell our EPA to enact vigorous methane regulations, tell our Bureau of Land Management to keep drillers away from Dinosaur National Park, tell Facebook to ban Donald Trump permanently, and tell President Biden to forgive $50,000 of student loan debt per person. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will. And good hunting!

Consumer Reports helps you tell the big credit reporting corporations to fix errors on their reports and make their reports more transparent and accessible to their customers. Which could be any of us! More than one in three Americans told Consumer Reports that they've found errors in their credit reports, and an error could cost you a job, a house, or a loan, so this ain't nitpicking here. You'll also ask Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion to freeze your credit by default (rather than make you jump through hoops to freeze it, you know what I mean) and making credit reports and credit scores free to access forever. I eagerly await Republicans complaints that this would all be some kind of "job-killing" plan.

Fight for the Future helps you tell big social media corporation TikTok to stop collecting biometric data, like voice and face prints, from its customers. All these newfangled social media contraptions seem to come up with all these newfangled ways to intrude upon your privacy! And it's no use saying this is the future, there's no such thing as privacy, because that's a defeatism a civilized person can't abide. Losing $92 million in a biometric-related lawsuit earlier this year and $5 million to an FTC fine (for collecting children's data, no less!) have apparently taught them the wrong lesson. Perhaps the Big Stick of Bad PR can teach them the right one.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to fashion stronger methane regulations than the ones we've got. For all the good reasons: because methane-mitigation technology has gotten a lot better over the years, because methane packs a climate change punch even worse than coal, because leaking methane into our air is not only pollution but also a waste of energy, and because leaking methane into our air is not only pollution and a waste of energy but also steals taxpayer royalties, since any usable energy found on drilling operations on public lands belongs to us. Congress famously failed to roll back Obama-era methane rules in 2017, but the Trump EPA rolled them back late in 2020; now it's time to roll back the roll-back, and keep pollution and climate change from killing us.

Penn Environment helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to keep oil and gas drilling away from the Dinosaur National Monument. They call it that at least in part because you can find actual dinosaur fossils in the cliff faces! The century-old monument straddling the border between Colorado and Utah isn't just the home of historical wonders, but of two rivers that feed the Colorado River, so if some big corporation goes blasting a mere mile from the edge of the monument, it'll pollute the drinking water used by over 40 million people. It's not worth polluting that much water just so some executive can gild the plumbing on his 19th vacation home. Executives ought to learn to make money off renewable energy. Hell, some already have.

Progress America helps you tell Facebook to ban Donald Trump permanently. Some liberals have publicly worried about the free speech "risk" of doing such a thing, too, but remember that hardly anyone was using Facebook 13 years ago, so we don't actually have to treat it like it's the all-media or something. And Facebook's a private corporation, so it doesn't have to publish everything someone wants, any more than Random House does. We should hold Facebook liable for the slander and terrorist threats it publishes, but that's a different discussion. And besides, who stopped Donald Trump from putting his rantings on a weblog like we did in the old days? Oh, right: he did, because he apparently has no patience. So let's stop coddling him.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to forgive $50,000 of student loan debt per borrower. He's showing an awful lot of reluctance, and I remember when Barack Obama showed this kind of reluctance, it meant he wasn't going to do anything. But don't let that stop you! We need to keep on him, because we're right -- forgiving that much student loan debt would stimulate the hell out of this economy, plus it would show we're actually willing to correct the wrongs we commit as a civilization. What "wrong" was that, you ask? The wrong where we told everyone they should go into massive debt on a college degree so they can get good jobs -- and then took away all the good jobs! Worse than Lucy with a football, we were. So let's do better.

Action: concerning privacy, transparency, and pollution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, voting rights, the filibuster, public lands, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell our government to do the right thing about the Israel/Palestine conflict, tell your Congressfolk to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, write a letter to the editor advocating that we end the Senate filibuster, and tell President Biden to reverse Trump-era land grabs at several national monuments and forgive student loan debt. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolks' phone numbers and/or use the links in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

First things first. MoveOn helps you tell President Biden to call for an immediate ceasefire in the Israel/Palestine conflict and an end to Israeli evictions of Palestinians, while Demand Progress helps you tell our government to stop funding Israeli occupation of Palestine and Avaaz helps you tell world governments to sanction Israel for its actions. You don't need to know "who started it" to support these petitions; you only need to know how it is -- one nation is way more powerful than another, and brutalizes the other. And of course you should also be suspicious when you notice that the violence has buoyed the electoral fortunes of the Israeli Prime Minister who can't win an election outright but somehow stays in power.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Meanwhile, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. You've no doubt heard that New Great and Bounteous One True American President Joe Manchin likes the latter bill but not the former, but who cares? We want both! We want both the bill that would help us end partisan gerrymandering and force big campaign donors out into the light and the bill that would restore the Voting Rights Act! Why should we have to settle just because Joe Manchin's the 50th vote?

Speaking of all of that, Common Cause helps you write a letter to the editor of your local paper advocating that we end the Senate filibuster. I used to advocate for fixing the filibuster, so that the Senators who would use it would actually have to work for it by explaining, at considerable length, why they oppose campaign finance disclosure or ending tax breaks for corporations that outsource jobs overseas (to name just two popular initiatives they've filibustered over the years), but fuck that: Senators have abused this power, so they get nothing from now on, and Mitch McConnell's threats to slow down Senate business to a crawl if they get rid of the filibuster are irrelevant. Remember when Sen. Bunning (R-KY) singlehandedly stopped any further unemployment insurance considerations in 2010? Yeah, he wasn't running for re-election. Anyone who stops a popular bill because he wants a proper quorum to turn on the lights in the Senate building won't get re-elected, either. If we have anything to say about it, that is.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell President Biden to roll back Trump-era land grabs at several national monuments, including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. When Trump votaries contemplated the phrase "drain the swamp," do you think the phrase "by chipping away at national monuments so that gas and oil drillers could pollute it" followed naturally in their minds? I would say not! Folks love their national monuments a lot more than Our Glorious Elites would like you to think, and they're actually not all that emotionally invested in big corporate CEOs making even more money from gas and oil drilling. Tell them "it's for the jobs" and you may get most of them to pause -- but tell them "that's what they want you to think," and then explaining exactly why that's what they want you to think that (i.e., as in the previous sentence above), will win most of them right back. Too bad our "liberal" media never thinks to do that. Hey, we can't do everything. That's why we live in a civilization.

Finally, both the ACLU and Daily Kos help you tell President Biden to cancel at least $50,000 in student loan debt per borrower. You've heard folks say they can't retire because they still have tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt? Well, it's not actually the kind of thing that deserves the response well you should have thought of that before taking on all that debt ha ha ha snort, because our society has been telling everyone for years they have to get a college degree if they want to survive, and when you go telling people that, you either have to deliver on that or make it right if you don't. And forgiving $50,000 in student loan debt will make that right for a lot of people. Personal to those who'd be jealous: go gripe with God about when you were born, and God will you the same thing I will, that every damn thing in the world ain't about you.

Action: concerning worker rights, voting rights, monopolies, and clean air and clean water.

Long story short: tell certain Democratic Senators to get behind the PRO Act already, tell Arizona legislators to reject vote-suppression legislation, tell federal regulators to break up big tech corporations, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat Act and the so-called "FRACK Pack" of pro-clean air and clean water bills. 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. And good hunting!

Word on the street is that three Democratic Senators -- Sens. Sinema (D-AZ), Kelly (D-AZ), and Warner (D-VA) -- have thus far avoided co-sponsoring the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, which our House passed and which even Sen. Manchin (D-WV) and Sen. King (I-ME) have recently co-sponsored. You know what that means, right? Phone numbers! You can contact Sen. Kelly at 202.224.2235, Sen. Warner at 202.224.2023 (or 1.877.676.2759 if you're a Virginia resident) and Sen. Sinema at 202.224.4521. The PRO Act would make it much easier for workers to organize to bargain as a unit for better pay and better working conditions, and who could be against that? Besides the executives who make a lot of money denying workers those things, I mean. But they don't get all the say around here.

Progress America helps you tell Arizona's state Senate to reject a state House-passed bill that would kick 200,000 voters off that state's Permanent Early Voting List. Because Republicans would rather you make a request for an early ballot every damn year, because that's harder than getting one mailed automatically! And for whom would that be most hard? Why, people who can't just go where they like when they like, like seniors, poor folks, rural folks, and folks of color! Naturally Republicans can't claim "fraud" as a reason, because they can't find any (no, the so-called Cyber Ninjas ain't gonna find any, either -- though they might create some!), but they do cite "problems," never mind what they are. The "problem" here, as elsewhere, is that Joe Biden won this state, so let's tell Republicans to stop being sore losers.

Demand Progress helps you tell our federal regulators to break up big tech corporations like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. It's actually a bad thing that Google's become a verb, or that Facebook has driven social media sites like Tribe and Orkut out of existence, or that Amazon controls about half of all online commerce. And I probably didn't say this well enough at the time, but even though the would-be union organizers did a bad job getting Amazon workers together, Amazon still shouldn't be big enough that it can simply crush the best of those efforts. There's only some utility to saying "you should've worked with the landscape as it was" -- if the landscape is that harsh, we also need to change it.

WildEarth Guardians helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 915, the Save Oak Flat Act. S. 915 would repeal that section of the 2015 defense appropriations bill that sold the Oak Flat area of Arizona's Tonto National Forest to Resolution Copper, a notorious mining corporation looking to "develop" that land. Resolution's owner, Rio Tinto, just so happened to once employ then-Sen. Jeff Flake, and also donated big bucks to then-Sen. John McCain. So they got their money's worth! Sadly, the San Carlos Apache, to whom the land is sacred, got bupkus. From the Save Oak Flat Act, they'd get a lot more -- and so would we, since the Save Oak Flat Act would also save our clean air and clean water from over a billion tons of toxic crap.

Finally, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the "FRACK Pack," a suite of bills that would protect our clean air and clean water from the nefarious practice of hydrofracturing, or "fracking." Think it's an accident "fracking" is a cuss word on the 2004 reboot of Battlestar Galactica? I wouldn't dismiss the connection so easily! The bills would, among other good works, force oil and gas corporations to better dispose of hazardous materials, force disclosure of chemicals used in fracking, and authorize our EPA to regulate fracking wells. And I guess the bills' opponents would say it'll "kill jobs." It won't, but what kind of civilization would we be if we continued to insist that we can't have both jobs and clean air and water? No kind of civilization, that's what -- both in that we'd be uncivilized and we'd likely be nonexistent in a few generations. Let's try to avoid these things, shall we?

Action: concerning marketing to children, public lands, and law and order.

Long story short: tell Facebook not to launch an "Instagram for kids," tell our FDA to outlaw flavored tobacco products, tell our President to restore Bears Ears and stop the Byhalia Connection Pipeline, and tell our Justice Department to investigate the alleged crimes of ex-President Trump. The following paragraphs will provide email/petition tools for all of these actions. Good hunting!

Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell Facebook to scrap plans to create an Instagram platform just for children. Because children don't need more attention-diverting, crazy-making internet crap, that's why! Adults can handle it a lot better. You may well be asking yourself, self, didn't they worry about my grandparents reading too many pulp Westerns when they were children? I'm sure they did, but I'm also sure that reading pulp novels is far, far safer than imbibing images far faster than any generation has done before. And giving kids one more way to plug in to the virtual world ain't gonna help them in the real world. So let's tell Facebook to do better by them, rather than prime them to be the good consumer drones of the future.

Progress America helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to ban the sale of flavored tobacco-based products, including e-cigs, menthol cigarettes, and flavored cigars. Again, making these products taste like gummy worm or cotton candy is a way of setting kids up for lung cancer when they're adults; after all, luring adults into smoking now that everyone knows it causes cancer will only go so far. Better to harvest the addicts young, I guess they think, if not say. (And behind closed doors, I'm sure they are saying it.) Seriously, should any product for children be literally addictive?

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell President Biden to restore the famous Bears Ears National Monument to its original size. I guess the courts can one day decide whether the Antiquities Act really gives Presidents the ability to scale down national monuments (Mr. Trump did it, so I lean "no"), but scaling down Bears Ears in the first place was a profound insult to the Native Americans who both pushed for the Monument's creation and took care of it once it was created. Mr. Trump, of course, took about 85% of it away so oil and gas drilling corporations could enrich their executives and befoul the land. I would think anyone would find that offensive.

The Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell President Biden to revoke federal permits for the Byhalia Connection Pipeline. Why? Because it would run through the Memphis Sand Aquifer and thus pollute the drinking water used by good Americans in and around Memphis, TN -- I don't say "potentially pollute" because pipeline leaks are just about a near-certainty, particularly in an age where the corporations that run the pipelines do so with near-impunity. Just so happens the pipeline would run through mostly Black communities as well; you hear enough about that to think that might have been the idea, too. This ain't tough: do more solar and wind and you won't be polluting our air and water so much, particularly in neighborhoods that got it bad enough.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate the various allegations against Donald Trump. I say "allegations" even though we all heard him try to get the Georgia Secretary of State to "find" 11,000 more votes, and we all watched him do a lot of other crap one would think would get you put in jail. If your Trump-loving friend comes at you with "but this is unprecedented!", go back at him with "oh, you wanted a President who'd smash traditions and now you want tradition to protect him?" If you still have Trump-loving friends, of course.

Action: concerning corporate welfare, the right to organize, paid sick leave, and the global gag rule.

Have you heard that Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) told an oil corporation executive, to his face, that he shouldn't lie to her that oil and gas corporations don't get special treatment in our federal tax code? More of our Congressfolk should do that! And they should also do as Rep. Porter did, and list the precise benefits big fossil fuel drillers get from our tax code! Just so happens Rep. Porter has introduced H.R. 1517, the Ending Taxpayer Welfare for Oil and Gas Companies Act, which would (among other good works!) raise royalty rates paid back to the taxpayer by the fossil fuel corporations when they drill on public lands. Too many right-wingers get away with saying we have to lower these royalty rates "to create jobs," but what they're really saying is that we have to bilk the taxpayer out of money we deserve "to create jobs" -- only so the executives can pocket the extra money and not create the jobs! H.R. 1517 merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators today. They'll never see it coming, and we know how well they do with things they don't see coming.

Meanwhile, H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, passed the House earlier this week, not long after Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) exhorted his Republican colleagues to "stop talking about Dr. Seuss, and start working with us on behalf of the American workers," a statement that's as good a springboard to a Senate campaign as any. Only five House Republicans voted in favor of the PRO Act, and you can name four of them (Alaska's Don Young, I'll admit, was a mild surprise), and that doesn't bode well for its passage in the Senate, where Republicans will be able to filibuster the bill. If we make them talk through their filibuster, of course, they might wind up embarrassing themselves! And please understand by "might," I mean "will." So the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Senators to help out American workers by passing the PRO Act. The PRO Act will help workers like those brave Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, AL, organize for better pay and better working conditions, and why shouldn't we help them do that? Because prices might go up a few pennies? Gosh, don't be that person.

In other news, we should celebrate the passage of the American Rescue Plan, but good Americans still don't have paid sick leave and paid family leave, unless, of course, they belong to a union, and their union bargained and won those things -- or if another employer tried to forestall unionization by granting those things to their workers pre-emptively! Seriously, some bosses do treat their workers well out of the goodness of their hearts, but they're rarer than a T-206 Honus Wagner card, so I wouldn't lay money on that happening if I were you. And, hello! There's a pandemic happening, which increases everyone's need for paid sick leave, to take care of both themselves and their families! Hence Moms Rising helps you tell our government we need a national paid sick leave program, post-haste. We're about the only rich country on Earth that doesn't have one, and that's nothing to shout WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. They're going to say there's "no money" to do that, what with this $1.9 trillion bill we just passed, but they're full of soup -- CEOs still make millions of dollars, and corporations make billions in profits, so the politicians can do it if they just have the will.

Finally, H.R. 656/S. 142, the Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights (or HER) Act, would prevent our President from keeping taxpayer aid out of the hands of foreign non-governmental organizations (or NGOs) just because they provide abortion -- if abortion is legal in the United States and legal in the nation(s) the NGOs operate. This is what the "global gag rule" is all about; Republican Presidents institute it early in their terms, while Democratic Presidents rescind it early in theirs. But shouldn't the taxpayer get a say over where their money goes? right-wingers ask. Strange how they never asked that question when Tha Bush Mobb was using my taxpayer money to attack Iraq against my express wishes! But this is why we have representative government -- if every taxpayer had veto power over every spending initiative, nothing would get done, and even worse, we would never learn how to live together in a community or a civilization. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to promote women's health and freedom by passing the Global HER Act.

Around the table: when is an audit not an audit? And other urgent questions.

Steven Rosenfeld reports on Arizona Republicans' efforts to "audit" the 2020 Presidential race, and if I put "audit" in quotation marks it's because -- and stop me if you've heard this before! -- it sure seems like Republicans want unqualified people to perform this task so they'll "find" more "suspicious" activity. If by some miracle they do the audit right and don't get the result they want -- which is exactly what'll happen if they do it right! -- they'll promptly forget they even did it, and demand another one like they never did one in the first place. Hey, I thought of it, and I'm not very good at being evil.

Michelle Nijhuis writes about being "On the Frontlines of the Battle to Preserve the American West." It's a good introduction to land conservation policy in America, and it also recounts her brief 1990 encounter with the scion of the Bundy family (no, not that one), who thought keeping his cattle away from endangered tortoises was just too big a cross for him to bear. The Bundys' career since then has veered rather past "this land is my land" and more toward "if I can't have it, nobody can."

Surprise, surprise, Stockton, CA finds that giving relatively low-income folks an extra $500 a month actually prompts them to get more work. You will not have difficulty explaining this finding: if you get a little breathing room, you're more likely to consider your situation a bit more lucidly, and take calculated risks to make yourself happier, whereas if you're running to stand still, you're more likely to stay in a bad situation because you feel you have no choice. In any case, a basic income sure does sound like a better use of taxpayer money than corporate welfare.

Hard to believe, Harry, but Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) "Decided Pandemic Was Perfect Time to Buy and Not Disclose Stocks," to the tune of $120,000 or less, and while Kelly Loeffler might call that chump change, it's likely more than you or I have at our disposal. Next time someone tells you Dan Crenshaw is a "straight-talker" or something, this will remind you that he's just like all the others.

Here, at last, some polling out of Arizona that might embarrass Kyrsten Sinema, if she's capable of embarrassment: 61% of respondents say it's more important to pass good legislation than to preserve the filibuster -- including 66% of independents and 42% of Republicans -- while only 26% would keep the filibuster at the expense of the legislation. Why, that sounds like actual bipartisanship to me! And, as usual, you only find actual bipartisanship among voters, not politicians. Would it be piling on to note that you can't even sustain a filibuster with 26%? No, it would not.

In a related note, Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg says getting rid of the filibuster would be a "terrible" idea. He says forcing minorities to talk through a filibuster "would be a good way for the minority party to develop new stars and get plenty of TV coverage and the campaign donations that can come from it," but that statement ignores the simple fact that Republicans have no ideas worth hearing and talking for 72 hours in a row would expose that intellectual paucity pretty quickly, particularly in the social media era. And noting that Senators didn't filibuster all that often when they actually did have to talk their way through it actually undercuts his whole argument. I'm beginning to feel like that was a waste of time, and I suspect the good heart of anyone who wastes my time these days.

Finally, at the risk of sounding all inside-baseball, the Democratic National Campaign Committee (or DNCC) will no longer blacklist consultants who work on insurgent campaigns that challenge incumbents in primaries. Wow, this is like something winners would do! Though Rep. Jim Costa (D?-CA) sure sounds less like a winner and more like a whiner in his disagreement. "We're supposed to be a team"? Only when he wins, I guess.

Action: concerning public lands, right-wing media, racism in health care, and saving our Post Office.

Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell President Biden to stop leasing and permitting for coal operations on our public lands. President Biden has lately put a stop to oil and gas drilling on public lands, but he's strangely left coal out, possibly calculating that he can't lose a single vote in a state like Pennsylvania in 2024, but possibly also calculating that coal, as an industry, is going south and doesn't need another punch in the face right now. But I would say building out renewable energy operations on public lands would be a smarter political move, as well as a smarter move generally. If coal corporations are crashing one by one, they hardly represent a threat to the political order, though their displaced workers might. But we can retrain them to rebuild a renewable energy infrastructure a whole lot more easily than we can "teach them to code." Construction and coding are different skills, after all. And if you really want to "build back better," you also have to build back smarter.

Meanwhile, Sum of Us helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Fox News. I'd tell them to stop advertising on Newsmax and OANN, too, but Sum of Us must smell blood in the water. Fox News, as you know, faces a $2.7 billion defamation/disparagement lawsuit from Smartmatic over some of their nefarious "election fraud" claims, a lawsuit that seems to have made right-wing news organs a little less obnoxious generally. Now you may be tempted to say haven't they suffered enough? But the answer is no, they have not suffered enough. From calling Iraq War opponents traitors to fearmongering over immigrants to whining about the deficit to whining about regulations to demanding jackboot lockstep support for police who kill black folks without a trial or even a charge to carrying Donald Trump's water for four years, Fox News has done incalculable damage to our civilization, and the only just punishment for their evil works is annihilation. Advertisers finally pulling out in large numbers might, at last, help us begin that necessary work.

In other news, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 666, the Anti-Racism in Public Health Act. The bill would create a National Center for Racism and a Law Enforcement Violence Prevention Program at our Centers for Disease Control; the latter program would operate within our CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. If your right-wing friends and neighbors protest ZOMG TEH BUREAUCRACIEZ MULTIPLIEZ!!!!!, remind them that corporations have bureaucracies, too, and maybe a bureaucracy dedicated to researching (and ultimately helping to prevent) the health care burdens we all know folks of color bear in America, and the unique amount of violence done to folks of color by our police isn't such a bad bureaucracy after all. Folks of color are less likely to be paid well, less likely to have health insurance, and more likely to live near a landfill, so we ought to do something about that.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Biden to appoint four decent human beings to our United States Postal Service's Board of Governors -- four decent human beings who might then decide to do the only decent thing and fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy -- then MoveOn still helps you do that. Just about every American who gets mail (i.e., every American) can testify, using only their own recent experiences, that he's not doing a good job, but I expect the right-wing media will whine that he's being "targeted" (or "hunted"!) by nefarious forces like us, even though we're really not "nefarious" -- we just want our Post Office to run well, as our Constitution guarantees. If I had a dollar for every lousy boss I've ever had I might not have to work another day, and I suspect most Americans (again, from sad experience) are at least as good at telling a good boss from a bad one as I am. But we certainly shouldn't tolerate bad leadership from our Post Office.

Action: concerning good House bills, election ethics, and drilling on public lands.

Happy Wednesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Remember: don't get discouraged, because that's how they want you to feel. Indeed, the only reason they have the power they do is because so many Americans are discouraged. But when we fight through our discouragement, and we act, we make good things happen.

Meanwhile, People for the American Way helps you tell our Senate Ethics Committee to investigate Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for allegedly trying to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to throw out legally-cast votes in that state. Joe Biden won Georgia by a slim margin, as you know, but Sen. Graham sure seems to have done his part to contribute to all the tall tales about "voter fraud." How did Jaime Harrison raise $100 million and still lose to Mr. Graham by 10 points, huh? Should we take that result as evidence of actual voter fraud in South Carolina? Of course not (we should take it as evidence that Mr. Harrison wasn't such a good candidate!), so let's not imagine that any result we don't like must be "fraud," certainly not without evidence, which Mr. Graham has not provided. Our soon-to-be-ex-President sure does turn everything he touches to dung, doesn't he? Mr. Graham, once upon a time, was the first Senator to condemn the abuses at Abu Ghraib, but now he sucks up to a man he derided not too long ago.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President-elect Biden to keep his promise to ban fossil fuel drilling on public lands, then Wild Earth Guardians still helps you do that. Yes, Mr. Biden did promise to ban fracking and oil drilling on public lands, though not private lands; I suppose he could work around his promise by selling off as much public land as he can to oil and gas drilling corporations, but we'll deal with that if it comes to that. And certainly we should concentrate on renewable energy production, not fossil fuel production that pollutes our air and water. I would advocate that our government get back into the utility business by creating renewable energy utilities that can compete with the privately-held utilities that won't do what's necessary to fight pollution and climate change. Maybe Joe Biden doesn't want to do that; certainly Mitch McConnell doesn't want to do that. But when we make our will unmistakable, it doesn't matter what the politicians want. So let's get to it.

Action: concerning police brutality, media consolidation, and Arctic drilling.

A new Administration comes to power in January, so Grassroots Law helps you tell the Biden-Harris team to do everything they can to stop racist police brutality. Grassroots Law has a good list of demands, and these include reopening police brutality cases left unsolved, ending the 1033 program that sends military weapons to police departments, repeal the Muslim ban and family separation policies, and getting more public defenders and civil rights attorneys involved in our Justice Department's work. A Biden-Harris Administration can accomplish most of this through executive order, without running to Great and Bounteous Real American President Mitch McConnell (or his trusty sidekick, Saint Joe Manchin of the Golden Age of Bipartisanship) for permission. And though Biden-Harris ran on most of this stuff, you know they really don't want to do it if they don't have to. But that's why we make them have to.

Meanwhile, FCC Chair Ajit Pai, who isn't very long for his job, plans to waive media ownership rules so that Fox can gobble up even more properties in the lucrative New York City media market, where Fox already owns two TV stations and the New York Post. And our FCC will only take public comments on this plan until next Friday, December 4, which is what they all do when they know the public will hate what they do. Media consolidation is one of the few issues in America where liberals and conservatives actually agree (i.e., in that they all hate it), so naturally the nominally "conservative" Mr. Pai would do the exact opposite! There's a lesson in there, somewhere. Until they learn it, Free Press helps you tell our FCC not to give out any more corporate welfare handouts to Fox. Fox will probably tell you it just can't compete with Newsmax, OANN, etc. without more handouts, but if it can't compete with those clowns, it deserves to die.

Finally, just about every big banking corporation in America has declared that it won't fund any drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) -- except for Bank of America. Sigh. Of course it's Bank of America! And it'll only take one well-funded (as far as we know!) bankster to ruin a stretch of public land the size of South Carolina. (No, really. Alaska is a really, really big place; people don't get how big it is.) And drilling for oil and gas in ANWR will not only ruin land home to the Gwich'in people and unique species of animals, it won't get us anywhere near as much oil as ANWR drilling proponents would like you to think. And once that oil's burned, and all that money gets spent, there really will be nothing left -- unless we fight to keep what's really important. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell Bank of America to abandon plans to fund Arctic drilling.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act and drilling on public lands.

Today's a good day to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. Why is today a goodday? Because President-elect Biden said on Monday, at a press conference I would otherwise have ignored, that "Congress should come together and pass a COVID relief package like the HEROES Act that the House passed six months ago." Not even "a COVID relief package like the HEROES Act the House passed two months ago," but the much better one, passed back in May. That's a signal, folks! The May version of the HEROES Act spent more money, to be sure, but that's what you do when your economy's in trouble, you can print your own money, and your government won't fall anytime soon -- and not to beat a dead horse, but our government could also tax the rich a lot harder and not have as much debt. And we do need the May HEROES Act, not just because it'd fund testing and tracing, but because it'd help out states and localities that can't just print their own money (or even go into debt to dig out of trouble!).

Meanwhile, Food and Water Watch helps you tell President-elect Biden to ban all fossil fuel extraction on public lands, which would fulfill one of his campaign promises. Wait, you've heard that Joe Biden wouldn't ban fracking? Well, he wouldn't ban fracking on private land, but said he would on public lands, like our national parks and wilderness areas. You'd think we wouldn't be drilling there now, but we are, and not only are we doing that, we're failing to collect the royalties we deserve as taxpayers. I mean, it's not a "job-creation" strategy to make oil and gas drilling corporations pay a pittance to drill on public lands, it's a "take food out of good Americans' mouths" strategy, since those royalties would pay for services we all need. Best in any case to tax the rich a lot harder and keep fossil fuel drillers from polluting our public lands, which are ours, after all.

Finally, our soon-to-be-ex-President, seeing the writing on the wall, is rushing to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) to oil drilling. Now that's a hell of a legacy to take to the pearly gates! Yes, Lord, I did ensure that oil drillers polluted a pristine area so that oil executives could make even more money! No, that's really why he's doing it -- it's not for "jobs," and anyway why wouldn't our government create jobs by building out renewable energy infrastructure, so that the workers who helped build it and thus reduced pollution and helped avoid the more calamitous aspects of climate change can tell future generations I helped do that? Because our soon-to-be-ex-President doesn't care about the future and doesn't care about anything but bosses making more money, that's why. The rest of us can tell our Department of Interior to reject lease sales in the Arctic, as the Alaska Wilderness League helps you do.