Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning the death penalty, monopolies, anti-union propaganda, and abortion.

Long story short: tell Alabama’s Governor to commute Rocky Myers’s death sentence, tell our FTC to block a proposed fertilizer merger, tell Delta to stop subjecting its employees to anti-union propaganda, and tell big corporate pharmacies to dispense abortion drugs. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell Alabama’s Governor to commute Rocky Myers’s death sentence. Because Alabama no longer has a death sentence (Mr. Myers received his in 1994), because his lawyer abandoned him without giving notice and thus prevented Mr. Myers from exercising his right to an appeal, and because the case against him has always suffered from recanted (and possibly coerced) testimony. These aren’t mere “technicalities” – any one of these things should prevent us from killing a man. Yes, even if he’s actually guilty of murder! Maintaining a civilization is hard, as is anything worth doing, and all the folks who claim they’re “tough on crime” ain’t the tiniest bit tough at all. They’re whiners, frankly.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to block the proposed merger of Koch Ag & Energy Solutions/Iowa Fertilizer Company merger. And yes, that’s “Koch” as in “brothers,” but that’s only icing on the cake – the merger would kill jobs and raise prices like all mergers do and would also reduce options for small farmers trying to grow the food we all eat. I know, I know, a foreign chemical corporation owns the Iowa Fertilizer Company now, but where is it written that our only choices are “a foreign corporation owns it” or “the Koch brothers own it”? I’d rather the employees owned it! That’s not outlandish – even Ronald Reagan supported employee-owned corporations.

More Perfect Union also helps you tell Delta Airlines to stop its union-busting tactics. These include (and you won’t find very many surprises on this list) “anti-union videos and leaflets in break rooms, meetings with new hires that discourage unionization, managers telling workers to remove their union pins, and taking union fliers from workers’ personal belongings” but hey, there’s an idea! Let’s stuff every single worker’s backpack with, like, 200 union fliers! You best believe the underpaid flier-confiscation technicians will complain to their bosses right quick, and then maybe join the union effort. In the meantime, why let Delta tilt the playing field even more in their favor?

Daily Kos helps you tell big corporate pharmacies (like Walmart, Costco, and Safeway) to dispense abortion medications. Almost a supermajority of abortions in America now occur via medication, meaning almost a supermajority of abortions in America now can occur, at least in theory, without some idiot screaming in your face that you’re going to hell. It might be better to have legislation mandating pharmacies to do this – particularly since the Comstock Act still sits out there like a bomb waiting for Sam Alito to set it off – but the Big Stick of Bad PR also works, particularly when most people agree with its use, as most Americans will do about abortion drugs.

Yes, I heard that the greatest President of my lifetime just dropped out of the race after being hounded by Democratic leaders and our “liberal” media for the last few weeks. The challenge for us now? Same as it was before: to demand what we deserve from our leaders, and since we Americans are basically a good lot, regardless of how politicians and corporate executives act, we still deserve what our civilization has always promised us, and which the New Deal era came closest to delivering: freedom from want and fear and bigotry, freedom to dream bigger and accomplish bigger, freedom to create and sustain communities, freedom to maintain and nourish a heritage that we can pass down to our children and our children’s children. I’ll fight for all of that to my last breath, and I bet you will, too.

Action: concerning price-gouging, ultra-processed foods, and ALEC.

Long story short: tell our government to stop corporate price-gouging and label ultra-processed foods, and tell Pfizer and FedEx to end their support for ALEC. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to use the Robinson-Patman Act to force big grocery corporations to lower prices. The Robinson-Patman Act outlaws suppliers giving favorable prices to bigger corporations, since that’s a way of giving big corporations more power than small businesses, and you know big corporations use that power to jack up prices. Our government has hardly enforced Robinson-Patman since (sigh) the ‘80s, but that doesn’t mean the law doesn’t exist, and it certainly doesn’t mean the law is “out of step with the times.” Big corporate greed is out of step with the times!

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee to label ultra-processed food as such. Ultra-processed foods – which may include cereals and granola bars (!) in addition to chips, cookies, and other snack foods – now comprise over half of all the foods we eat, and of course scientists link their consumption to higher incidences of heart disease and cancer. Not to mention diabetes! Remember that in ancient times, folks put salt and sugar in foods to mask their spoilage – and now ask yourself if we aren’t doing the same thing with junk foods we’d never eat if they didn’t have all that salt and sugar in them.

Finally, the National Campaign for Justice helps you tell Pfizer and FedEx to stop funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) and reject Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for American tyranny. Big corporations love saying we support ALEC on economic issues, but that’s no better than supporting vote suppression, because ALEC is all about making rich folks richer and poor folks poorer. And Project 2025 (which ALEC now supports) would, among other things, weaponize our Justice Department against Donald Trump’s enemies. How does he have so many enemies? It’s a puzzlement! Anyway, time to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR again!

Around the table: a good week for evil, though not for junk fees.

Our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) passes rules preventing big telecom corporations from throwing a bunch of surprise junk fees in their “all-in” subscription plans. That the FCC’s two Republican Commissioners of course voted against it should remind us that Presidential elections matter – we may find the Biden Administration working a bit too slowly on junk fees for our taste, but there’s no way a second Trump Administration would have done a damn thing about them. And pay no mind to the corporate whining at article’s end – it’s “micromanagement” to make corporations stop lying to us about their prices? Pimps, please.

Hard to believe, Harry, but women are apparently ditching birth control pills after getting bad/wrong advice about them from social media. Even if birth control pills caused weight gain (they don’t) or infertility (ditto), we would do well to stack that up against the very real threat of far more easily getting pregnant and being forced by the state to give birth. Too many folks hear one thing that surprises or impresses them and think they know everything after that; if we weren’t all so susceptible to the sin of pride, we’d make better decisions and we’d suffer a whole lot less.

Ho hum, an educational nonprofit plans to expand its deployment of an AI “teaching assistant” to thousands of students next year. Why, that doesn’t sound at all like part of a plan to replace unionized public school teachers with unpaid robots that never get sick or go on vacation! And Thomas Jefferson is literally the father of American racism, so playing up his alleged hatred of slavery means even less than the on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand argument the AI tool makes. Machines are good at washing clothes and keeping food cold, not teaching kids. But their continued deployment will enable more Americans to congratulate themselves for knowing things when they don't.

Hedge fund corporations move into the autistic services field, and surprise, surprise! Autistic service centers start delivering worse service before closing down en masse. Banksters really do ruin everything – why, they even cause or enable abuse of autistic children, no doubt by breathing down everyone’s neck to CUTZ ALLZ TEH COSTZ!!!!! But let’s not let pass that chains of autistic service corporations shouldn’t exist, either, because the downward pressure to cut-costs-no-matter-who-gets-hurt comes from that direction, too. The solution to most problems in America is small businesses creating jobs, not big corporations creating “efficiency in markets.” I can barely type that phrase without throwing up.

Ho hum, NBC News wonders why the public thinks the crime rate is going up when it’s going down, which is a little like Donald Trump wondering why people think he shouts so much. The public think it’s going up because our “liberal” media always cover it like it’s going up. They’ve done better reporting actual facts about crime lately, but they still cling to local crime stories like grim death, reporting on them repeatedly over days and weeks, showing the same clips over and over again until it’s like all you see on the news is crime. How bad is it? Last week one of my co-workers saw a story about an arrest for a recent SEPTA bus shooting and asked if another shooting had happened. I’m pretty sure that’s a feature, not a bug.

Finally, another day, another right-wing punditoid opining that New York seizing Donald Trump’s property so he can pay off $450 million-plus in civil fraud judgments would “create the greatest victimhood of 2024” and “elect Donald Trump.” My immediate response would have been: so, you’re saying we should not enforce the law? As for “let’s not talk about whether it’s justified or not” – Jesus Mary and Joseph that is literally the only thing we should talk about! Americans hate political “analysis” because they hate having their lives reduced to a horserace, but our “liberal” media punditoids have nothing else to offer.

Action: concerning internet freedom, education, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell our FCC to promote internet freedom, tell school boards to stop lying about climate change, and tell our FTC to stop big fossil fuel corporation mergers. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Battle for the Net helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to reinstate network neutrality, the principle that you, and not some big telecom corporation, should decide where you want to go on our internet. Don’t believe the hype that “net neutrality will lead to higher prices,” because you’ve just spent almost three years watching big corporations raise prices for any damn reason. It’s hard to take someone hostage by threatening to do something you're already doing all the time! And if we bring net neutrality back, that means we can stop big corporations from censoring websites, or from slowing down websites that haven’t paid them tribute. You say they’re doing little of that now, and that may be, but if we don’t make it illegal, sooner or later they’ll do it all the time, and then it’ll be too late.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell state school boards to stop lying to children about climate change. Yes, the right-wing fever that’s swept school boards across America extends even here, as the Texas Board of Education just rejected seven textbooks for including material about climate change. One Texas Republican even said, “America's future generations don't need a leftist agenda brainwashing them in the classroom to hate oil and natural gas.” Imagine that! All common sense and scientific truth is now a “leftist agenda”! If only the leftist agenda were that good! Seriously, there ain’t gonna be any future generations if we let big oil and gas corporations make our planet unlivable. And politicians who are too weak to handle that truth deserve to live on government cheese.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop the proposed Chevron/Hess and Exxon/Pioneer Natural Resources mergers. Because big corporate mergers are always bad! Yes, I said always! So corporate shills on financial cable news shows can call me an “extremist”! Look, they either care about small businesses or they don’t, and letting already too-big fossil fuel corporations get even bigger basically means they don’t. What’s that I hear? Small businesses aren’t going to drill for oil ha ha ha snort? But they’ll have to deal with oil and gas corporations pretty much as a condition of existence, and if those oil and gas corporations are too big, they'll squeeze small businesses with impunity. And that’s un-American. Listen to all my extreme language today!

Action: concerning junk fees, banksters, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell our FTC to outlaw junk fees, tell our Federal Reserve to force banks to have more cash on hand, and tell President Biden to put better people on our USPS Board of Governors. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to enact the most vigorous anti-junk fee rule possible. From concert and airline tickets to utility bills and even rent, good Americans are getting slammed with fees that seem to come in at the last minute, when you’re already emotionally-invested in the sale. Being up-front is a simple principle, right? Yet big corporations can’t stop whining about any effort to actually make them be up-front! WAAAAAH WE CAN’TZ MAKES TEH MONEYZ REGULATORYZ BURDENZ NANNY STATEZ!!!!! All of which put together doesn’t add up to even one-tenth of we deserve to know how much we’re going to pay before we buy something. Don’t corporations have responsibilities anymore? Or is that just for us “little people”?

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Federal Reserve to force banks to increase the amount of capital they have on hand, so that they – and, by extension, we – can weather their bad decisions better. Banksters of course hate the idea that they should actually have real cash money in their vaults, because then how can we take the risks that make us rich, er, grow the economy? They say all of that like it’s not the very reason we demand they have more money on hand! We all lived through the Bankster Armageddon of 2008, and we all know that it wasn’t subprime mortgages that collapsed the economy but banksters’ hifalutin “financial instruments” that “create” “wealth” but destroy jobs and small businesses and lay waste to our livelihoods. So our government needs to make them do better.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell President Biden to replace two expiring terms on our USPS Board of Governors with two folks who’ll fight to make our Postal Service actually better. I mean, of course, as opposed to the rubbish plan promulgated by current Postmaster DeJoy; his “better” involves slashing jobs, cutting services, and charging good Americans more money for the services that are left. That kind of “better” is typical of a corporate executive who doesn’t actually know how to do anything of value. Sound harsh? Tough! I’m right, and corporate America is wrong! “Increasing” “value” for “shareholders” (read: executives) is exactly the kind of thing that kills civilizations, but I don’t actually think our civilization deserves to die. As long as we can keep it, that is.

Around the table: why we shouldn't sleep on a second Trump term as a "lame duck" term, and other lessons.

Thom Hartmann describes, in considerable detail, Republicans’ rightward march to fascism over the last 40-plus years, and I can only add two things: one, that Democrats could very easily link Mr. Trump calling our soldiers “losers” and “suckers” with Tommy Tuberville’s 80 million military holds in campaign ads, and two, it’s not enough to say Donald Trump will be a lame duck if he wins in 2024 (which will be how many Republican voters rationalize voting for him again), because if he can get his votaries to shoot enough people, he’ll be much closer to an America where folks like him can do what they like and no one else can. Which is, of course, the essence of the fascist impulse.

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett has, on at least three occasions, sold millions of dollars in stock shares in which his corporation was trading, which would not only strike virtually anyone as a conflict of interest, but which Mr. Buffett has said out loud would be a conflict of interest. OK, I guess he’ll say that he said he shouldn’t be buying stocks Berkshire buys and he merely sold stocks Berkshire bought, but once you confront that time he boosted Wells Fargo stock on TV right after selling millions of dollars of Wells Fargo stock (or the fact that he’s called for higher income taxes on the rich but not higher investment taxes), that’d seem like hair-splitting. Anyway, so much for “the one billionaire we like”!

The good folks of the Pennridge School District in Bucks County, PA, managed to boot all five Moms for Liberty members from their school board on Election Day, and when I read that “Moms for Liberty, in the end, was a very expensive trap that the Republicans built for themselves,” I can’t help but respond that this trap is merely emblematic of the much larger trap Republicans have built for themselves – all they can do now is create hysterical dramas to win elections in the short term (which doesn’t always work; see “crime, hysteria about”), because once they have power, they either use it to directly hurt people (as the Moms for Liberty-dominated school board did) or create even more hysterical dramas. People hate book banning, after all, and people only “hate” Black/Brown/gay/trans folks because right-wingers want to distract them from the fact that their economic policies have taken their livelihoods and happiness away.

When I hear that “You Have a Right to Know Why a Health Insurer Denied Your Claim,” but “Some Insurers Still Won’t Tell You,” I’m reminded that a big reason we don’t let corporations get so big in the first place is so they can’t break the law with impunity like this. I mean, if the law tells a corporation to stop hurting people, and that corporation simply refuses to stop hurting people, that corporation is injuring our civilization, and deserves to die for it. (I mean, a corporation is a thing, not a person, so calling for its death isn’t “uncivil.” And don’t listen to folks who cry out “if you kill a corporation you’ll kill all the jobs!” Why, corporations spend virtually all their time killing jobs already! Think how many small businesses can start in their absence, doing work that actually helps people, and employing people they can’t regard as mere marks on a ledger the way corporations do.)

You know how Rep. James Comer (E-KY) has been banging his saucepan about a $200,000 loan Jim Biden paid to Joe Biden in between Joe Biden’s terms in the Executive branch? Well, guess what Mr. Comer has in his own past! “According to Kentucky property records, Comer and his own brother have engaged in land swaps related to their family farming business. In one deal — also involving $200,000, as well as a shell company — the more powerful and influential Comer channeled extra money to his brother, seemingly from nothing. Other recent land swaps were quickly followed with new applications for special tax breaks, state records show. All of this, perplexingly, related to the dealings of a family company that appears to have never existed on paper.” Republicans have represented Kentucky’s 1st district since the 1994 wave, but the district actually has more registered Democrats; I presume a lot of these Democrats have been voting Republican for decades without bothering to change their affiliation, but I still see an opportunity for Democrats here. If he were to lose his 2024 re-election bid, Mr. Comer would no doubt whine about “the weaponization of the vote.”

Finally, West Virginia Democratic (?) Senator Joe Manchin won’t run for re-election in 2024, and rather than recount his various follies, let’s just say don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya. And no, I don’t care about the excuse that Mr. Manchin “represented a red state,” because Byron Dorgan represented a red state for 18 years, and he kept winning because he fought “free” trade, corporate crime, and bad media policy; everyone, liberal or conservative, approved of him for these good works. Yeah, I first said that over a dozen years ago, and I guess I’ll just have to keep saying it until our leaders finally learn.

Readings for October 3, 2023.

So you’ve heard that our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) has sued Amazon for monopolistic practices. You already know Amazon’s a monopoly if you’ve ever uttered the phrase “just get it on Amazon,” but our FTC’s complaint is a bit more complex. I’ll try to summarize: Amazon leverages its Prime service to trap small businesses into using its platform exclusively, and because they have nowhere else to go, Amazon can charge them whatever onerous fees they like, fees that now amount to half of Amazon’s revenue. There’s even more to it than that, but note well that it’s not necessarily about customers like us, but rather the customers who use Amazon to help sell their wares. I’m old enough to remember when it seemed like you could cut out all those pesky middlemen like publishers and advertisers and just reach out and find people on the internet. I was naive, of course – not solely because I didn’t fully grasp that there’d be new middlemen like Amazon, but that’s the only reason that’ll help you make this world a better place.

Billy Periggo at Time describes “What the Luddites Can Teach Us About Artificial Intelligence.” Reminding us that the Luddites weren’t anti-machine but anti-exploitation, Mr. Periggo – drawing heavily on Brian Merchant’s new book Blood in the Machine – explains how big corporations will use AI to make films that are plainly inferior to what today’s artists make, just as factory owners in the early Industrial Revolution made goods that were plainly inferior to what the day’s artisans could make. The factory owners ultimately muscled those artisans out of the market despite the Luddites’ best efforts, but it looks like the writers’ union has protected themselves from a similar outcome – for now. In any case, “if new technologies erode wages and increase wealth inequality, it’s a result of a political choice by the owners of that technology, not a result of the inevitable and unstoppable march of progress.”

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, internet freedom, and factory farms.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Palestinian Children & Families Act, reject the STOP CSAM and EARN IT Acts, and pass the Farm System Reform 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.

Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Palestinian Children & Families Act, which would prevent our government from giving aid to Israel if Israel then uses it to detain and torture Palestinians, demolish their homes, or annex their land illegally. This really isn’t so much to ask, and does anyone really want to be the person who says if they need the money to hurt people, we should give it to them? You know, versus let’s make sure our taxpayer money doesn’t do evil? Because Israel is doing evil in Palestine, and if we don't want to remember them as folks who, having had evil done to them, did evil to others, we should pass this bill.

Restore the Fourth helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject both the STOP CSAM and EARN IT Acts, which aim to fight child sex trafficking, but which will more likely prompt ISPs to censor all sexual material. How? ISPs voluntarily make 99% of all reports of child sexual exploitation at present, but passing these bills would require them to get warrants to search their own data (since they’d be acting on our government’s behalf), meaning they’ll simply censor any sexual content on their servers so they don’t have to report at all. More censorship and less law enforcement – what a terrible idea! But if we speak out, we can stop it.

Finally, Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Farm System Reform Act, which would enact a moratorium on new (or expanded) factory farm construction and phase out factory farms completely by 2040. That’s 17 years, which is plenty of time for a big corporation with lots of money to wind their factory farms down! As we discussed yesterday, factory farms pollute our water and crush small farmers with impunity, but those aren’t the only two reasons to oppose them – by cramming too many animals into too small a space and pumping them full of antibiotics, they also help create superbugs. So we’ve got to pass this bill, no matter how much big ag whines about it.

Action: concerning subscriptions, "forever chemicals," and factory farm waste.

Long story short: tell our FTC to make it easier for us to end subscriptions, and tell our EPA to regulate PFAS chemicals and factory farm waste. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to make it far easier for us to cancel subscriptions to services ranging from gyms to streaming services. Our FTC has proposed a “click to cancel” rule, meaning if you sign up for a subscription with a single click on your computer, you should be able to cancel it with one click, too. That’s a great idea, not least because we’ve all kept paying for things we’re not using merely because they’re tough to cancel (over $700 for a gym I stopped using, in my case). But you know big corporations will whine at length about their “right” to unearned money, so we’ve got to make sure our FTC hears us.

The National Resources Defense Council helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous anti-PFAS chemical rule possible. They call them “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down very easily either in our air and water or in our bodies. And kids, especially, need less of this crap in their lives, since scientists have linked PFAS chemicals to developmental issues, as well as cancer and immune suppression. The big plastic corporations whine to our EPA about how hard it is to overhaul their production lines, but they’re sitting on record profits like every other big corporation, and America is a can-do country. So, again, we’ve just got to be louder than them.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell our EPA to stop factory farms from polluting our clean water with their liquid manure. Factory farms produce pig and cow poop by the ton, and that poop overwhelms water tables and makes our water undrinkable; factory farms often store all that poop in lagoons, but all it takes is one big storm to break that lagoon wide open. How often do big storms come along these days? They say “economies of scale” make everything better, but they don’t, and we’ve enabled the big ag corporation at the expense of the small farmer for far too long. If our EPA can get a hold of factory farm waste, we can start bringing big ag to heel.

Action: concerning "free" trade, housing policy, and fuel emissions.

Long story short: tell Indo-Pacific Trade Deal negotiators to put people and planet above profits, share your story about background checks and renting apartments with our CFPB, and tell our EPA and NHTSA to enact the most vigorous fuel emissions standards possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Trade Justice helps you tell Indo-Pacific Trade Deal negotiators to ensure that any trade deal prioritize people and our planet over profits. If you think of the notorious “Trans-Pacific Partnership” when you hear about a proposed Indo-Pacific Trade Deal, I wouldn’t blame you, and frankly, I’d prefer no “free” trade deal at all. But our leaders may finally be listening to us; after all, the USMCA trade deal is a dramatic improvement upon NAFTA – for which both former President Trump and House Democrats deserve credit – and I certainly don’t let the perfect murder the good. Still, we should remain on our guard, so that we don’t let the evil murder the good, either.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your story about background checks and renting apartments to our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB). Our CFPB wants comments about this matter, particularly because we all suspect that landlords use background checks to raise rents, and don’t let folks retort so what, landlords will use any excuse to raise your rent, because the whole point of this particular CFPB rulemaking process is to prevent landlords from using any excuse to raise your rent! And background checks tell us nothing about someone’s ability to pay rent.

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (or NHTSA) to enact the strongest fuel-emission standards possible. Don’t listen to the folks who say all regulations hurt small businesses, because how many small businesses manufacture cars? Exactly. Also, regulations capping fuel emissions result in cars that get more miles to the gallon, pollute less, and cost less to fill up. Who could possibly be against these things? Oh, right, auto manufacturing corporate executives, who don’t want to spend money to make money. They shouldn’t get all the say about this matter – but they will, if we don’t speak up.

Action: concerning debt limit drama, factory farms, and OAN.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end debt limit hostage-taking and pass the Farm System Reform Act, and tell Roku to boot OAN from its streaming TV lineup. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to “end the debt limit game of blackmail” and actually reform the whole system. And not in the way Sen. Hawley (E-MO) would – by simply exempting Social Security and Medicare from the debt limit, which won’t end right-wing hostage-taking – but by either passing the Protect Our CREDIT Act (which would force Congress to disapprove of a Presidential debt limit-lifting by a two-thirds vote) or simply repealing the debt limit altogether. I prefer the latter solution, and that’s what I’ll tell my Congressfolk to do. So a clean debt limit now, repeal it in the future, and enough of the damn drama already.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Farm System Reform Act, which would ban the construction of new factory farms and phase out existing ones by 2040. Don’t be the fool who says but then chicken will cost a million dollars, because big corporations raise prices whenever they feel like it; indeed, we’ve received a Master’s-level education in this truism over the last two years. And factory farms cause or enable a host of other evils, be that antibiotic abuse, animal abuse, or a complete refusal to rotate crops or try new varieties of crops. The worst evil, of course, is the evil factory farms do to the small farmer who’s trying to do the right thing and make a living.

Finally, UltraViolet helps you tell Roku to drop One America News Network (or OAN, or OANN) from its free channel lineup. You may hesitate before this task. We asked big cable corporations to drop OAN, but those were big cable corporations charging us an arm and a leg for their product; if you’re not paying for Roku, then what’s the harm? Here’s the harm: inclusion in a free channel lineup like Roku or Pluto TV gives a channel legitimacy, and invites corporate advertisers to place their wares before their viewers, which entrenches that unearned legitimacy. Anyway, who says we can’t tell Roku what to do? People who believe in private property über alles, and those people should not get all the say about everything.

8 thoughts about the midterms.

1. Again, I wanted humiliation for Republicans – I wanted them to lose a lot of seats in our House and Senate. Still, Democrats will hold the Senate, meaning they’ll get two more years of judges, and by my reckoning they’ll finish with at least 213 House seats (adding in Alaska, Maine’s 2nd, Oregon’s 6th, Colorado’s 8th, New Mexico’s 2nd, and California’s 9th, 21st, 47th, and 49th), with 218 still possible, though unlikely (the best remaining path being through California’s 3rd, 13th, 22nd, and 41st and then Colorado’s 3rd in a recount). The last election like this? 1982, the election that cemented the Reagan Revolution! Democrats picked up over two dozen House seats that year, but with Boll Weevil Southern Democrats pretty much voting with Reagan all the time, Republicans had a working majority in the House then, if not an actual one, and Democrats netted only one Senate seat, reducing the Republicans' actual Senate majority from 54 to 53.

Heartening, in that context, but not for long – Republicans may act humbled now that they didn’t get the electoral sturm und drang they counted on, but if/when they win our House, they’ll promptly forget their humility and act like the fascists they wish they were. Incessant investigations into Hunter Biden, ugly and shameful though that’ll be, might be the best result we can expect from a Republican House. I doubt they’ll successfully defy our will to use the debt limit to force Social Security and Medicare cuts – though they’ll try, and, again, it’ll be ugly and shameful – but they might succeed in defunding our FTC and our SEC and our CFPB and our DOJ’s Antitrust Department; in fact, I bet that’s their real endgame, because the longer Biden Administration actually enforces antitrust law, the worse shape Republicans will be in every election after this one. We’ll be getting on Joe Biden about that! And you know our “liberal” media will pump out ten thousand think-pieces about how the so-called Freedom Caucus “holds Speaker McCarthy hostage.” News flash: Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene are who the Republican Party is now. Kevin McCarthy is their beard. And he likes it that way.

On the other hand, if Democrats do manage to hold our House, we’ll have a lot less drama. And if leadership would read people like Josh Gottheimer the riot act, that sure would be nice.

2. Ballot questions, again, generally made democracy look good – put a question directly to voters and they usually make much better choices than politicians do. Three states enshrined abortion rights in their state constitutions, while a fourth (Kentucky) rejected an effort to make abortion unconstitutional there and a fifth (Montana) rejected an effort to create a massive loophole in abortion rights. Nebraska and Nevada voters raised state minimum wages to $15/hour and $12/hour, respectively; Connecticut and Nevada voters expanded voting rights, while Arizona voters rejected stricter Voter ID requirements; and California overwhelmingly rejected ballot initiatives that would legalize online sports betting and sports betting on tribal lands (and they say people don’t have morals out there!). Pot legalization was a mixed bag – Maryland and Missouri voters said yes, while Arkansas, North Dakota, and South Dakota voters said no – but that’s two more states legalizing pot (and thus lightening police officers’ burdens), and I’m old enough to remember when zero states legalized pot.

3. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez – whom the pundits said wouldn’t win Washington’s 3rd, but what do they know? – has provided the blueprint for how Democrats should win back rural and rust belt areas, much more so than Tim Ryan, it turns out. Unlike the right-wingers who hide behind “small businesses” when they try to cut their corporate paymasters’ taxes, Ms. Perez can tell you how the catalytic converter shortage exposed real supply chain problems (i.e., that big dealerships can muscle small car repair shops out of parts with impunity). She also talks about police reform in a way working folks would relate – stop buying night vision goggles and start paying cops more, she says. And no use saying well, she only beat a Trumphole, because, hey, did Tim Ryan beat his Trumphole opponent? No, he did not.

4. A lot of bad people got re-elected – though if Ron Johnson really sold his soul to the devil for another term as a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, he paid too much – but at least Paul LePage got absolutely buried in his attempt to reclaim the Governor’s mansion in Maine, where (thanks to ranked-choice voting) independent candidates can no longer take enough sane people’s votes away from Democrats. To think Mr. LePage had the cojones to say that folks on the left and the right have just got to start talking to each other again! That’s like Donald Trump saying people in America are too angry! (Actually, Mr. Trump did say Greta Thunberg, who’s a billion times the person he’ll ever be, was “too angry.”)

5. So how did incessant Republican whining about “rising crime rates” resonate with voters? Now it can be told: not very well! It worked especially poorly in Pennsylvania, where state legislators tried to make impeaching Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner (for not doing enough about crime, or something) their October Surprise; that effort fell flat at month’s end, likely because it was always noxious and offensive drama, but if “rising crime” were such a winning issue generally, then how did Pennsylvania Democrats get in position to flip the state legislature’s lower house after entering Election Day 23 seats down?

6. Looks like I’m getting a dozen emails a day from Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia for another few weeks, now that he’ll face Republican Herschel Walker in a runoff. Maybe Republican voters will stay home merely because the race won’t decide Senate control anymore, but maybe they won’t, and if Republicans take our House before then, Democratic voters will be rather more demoralized than they know now. Still, I’d be pleased to see Democrats take this race seriously and win it, not just because Mr. Warnock is a good Senator who deserves to win, but because with 51 seats the party can marginalize Kyrsten Sinema even further. Yes, as we’ve already seen with the Inflation Reduction Act, we’re much better off dealing with Joe Manchin’s old-school corruption than Ms. Sinema’s post-modern corruption. Let her go work for a hedge fund in two years, where she can sell her relationships, no, not with other Democratic Senators, but with Republican ones. You ever see her in a photo with other Democrats? No, you have not – but you’ve seen plenty of photos of her with Republicans. Such a maverick!

7. So whom are we going to war with first – Russia or Florida? Republicans clearly have an even bigger stranglehold over that state than we realized in 2020. Calling Marco Rubio an empty suit would represent a profound insult to empty suits, yet he beat Val Demings by 16 points. And Val Demings was a good candidate! Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis beat Charlie Crist by 20, which should remind us that you don’t run a nice guy against an asshole. Mr. DeSantis’s redistricting antics netted Republicans three more House districts, though even in that he was outpaced by the incompetence of New York Democrats, who netted Republicans four.

8. John Fetterman flipped the only Senate seat to change hands by beating Mehmet Oz 51-47, while Josh Shapiro trounced Doug Mastriano by 16 points in that state’s gubernatorial election; Mr. Oz wasn’t as execrable a candidate as Mr. Mastriano – we’re talking about the difference between a clown and an arsonist here – but I must conclude that Mr. Fetterman’s stroke and subsequent shaky debate performance moved the needle in Mr. Oz’s direction. If we’d gotten to see John Fetterman at his best in this campaign, he might have won by 20 points, and then the pundits, who know nothing about anything of consequence, would have mystified him by saying he’s a “unique” candidate. It’s true that Democrats don’t often run a guy who’s that funny, that smart, that social media-savvy, and that able to relate to working folks, but truth is there are people like John Fetterman all over America, and a lot of them even want to serve the public. Will Democrat consultants notice them now? I kid, of course – if you’re paid to be blind, you’ll stay blind.

Action: concerning discrimination, political spam, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell PayPal to allow Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to use their service, tell Google to scrap its plan to allow political campaigns to fill our email inboxes with junk mail, and tell your USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy already. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell PayPal to stop discriminating against Palestinians in Israeli-occupied areas. PayPal operates in Israeli-occupied Gaza and the West Bank, but only serves Israelis there, which insures that Palestinian small businesses in the occupied areas can hardly operate. I guess PayPal thinks they’re “fighting terrorism,” but so much of the “war on terror” seems to harm regular folks rather than terrorists; why, it’s almost like that’s the whole idea! And we do tend to think of Those Other People as “terrorists,” while blinding ourselves to the evil we do; I think we should avoid doing that here.

Both Win Without War and Civic Shout help you tell Google to scrap its plan to fill our email inboxes with political spam. Our FEC told Google they can do that, so now we have to tell Google how hoppin’ mad that’ll make us if they do that. If you’re on the fence about this, consider that this all started when Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida claimed that Google was automatically sending his fundraising emails to customers’ spam boxes because he's a Republican waaaaaaah – when the whole thing was actually his fault! I hope Val Demings runs a hundred ads saying Marco Rubio filled your email inboxes with spam. You know how good he is on his heels.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy already. Even the reconfigured Board seems to like him, but that only means we tell them again and again and again until they do our will like they’re supposed to. I may not have mentioned enough lately that all of Mr. DeJoy’s plans to slash services, raise prices, and fire workers – for what else does a CEO know how to do except make things worse? – will result in more life-saving medications not getting to Americans who need it, since our USPS delivers most mail-order medications in America. That’s intolerable, and it’s why Mr. DeJoy has to go.

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 whistleblowers, renewables, monopolies, and worker safety.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act and pass the Energy Security and Independence Act of 2022, and tell our federal government to rein in big ag monopolies and protect American workers from heatstroke. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act so that our government doesn’t use it to bludgeon journalists. Specifically, you’d ask your Congressfolk to pass Amendment 617 to the defense authorization bill, authored by Rep. Tlaib (D-MI), and I’m glad someone did the extra reading for Sausage Making 101 by attaching necessary legislation to must-pass bills! Currently our government has too easy a time prosecuting and silencing heroic whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, John Kiriakou, and Daniel Hale; we should make it harder for them to do that. I mean, that could be any of us witnessing evil and having a conscience!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7439/S. 4013, the Energy Security and Independence Act of 2022. This bill would amend the Defense Production Act so that it specifically authorizes our President to invoke it to build renewable energy infrastructure; I don’t think Russia’s war on Ukraine is the biggest reason gas prices went up (that would be “corporate greed”), but it’s really not a far walk from foreign policy disasters to energy supply chains, and instead of staying vulnerable to world events so that big oil executives can keep getting richer, why don’t we ensure we can make more of our own energy here instead?

Food and Water Action helps you tell our U.S. Department of Agriculture (or USDA) to stop big ag corporations from running roughshod over small farmers and ranchers. The Packers and Stockyards Act nominally protects small farmers and ranchers from the ill effects of consolidation and monopolization, but our government hasn’t enforced it for at least the last 40 years, which means small farmers and ranchers now exist at the mercy of meat-packing middlemen. The Reagan Revolution didn’t “set our economy free,” not even from bureaucracy, but it gave middlemen and speculators all the control over our economy; it sure would be nice if our USDA would help a brother out here.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell our Occupational Safety and Health Administration (or OSHA) to pass emergency heat standards for American workers. After all, it’s only going to get hotter from here on in, and we’re already almost halfway into July. I am a little surprised to learn that heat kills more folks than tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods, but should I be? Those weather events get all the ink, but most folks who die of heatstroke hardly know it’s happening to them while it’s happening, and too many of our workplaces think only of the bottom line, and not of their workers’ safety. That’s why we have our government: so it can step in on our behalf when big corporations won’t do the right thing.

Action: concerning baby formula, child care, gas prices, big ag, and "forever chemicals."

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to break up baby formula monopolies, help working families better afford child care, tax big oil windfall profits, break up monopolistic big ag practices, and keep "forever chemicals" off our farmlands. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell Congress to pass legislation ensuring we never get this short on baby formula again. Right-wingers tell us we're here because we have too many regulations gumming up the works, but that's ridiculous -- we're short on baby formula because four big corporations control the entire market, and a food safety issue at one of them has emptied our shelves. Thus we tell our Congressfolk to break up corporate monopolies; after all, as our President says, capitalism without competition is exploitation, and the only "efficiency" we really "gain" from monopolies is the efficient redistribution of income upward from workers to executives. I'd rather have babies not starve myself.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation expanding preschool and helping working families afford child care. It is a bit breathtaking that legislation about child care specifically has floated around for years, but now our President has embraced it, and the only reasons it hasn't passed, basically, are a) the opposition of Republicans and b) the Joe Manchin Drama Machine. But child care costs have plagued families for decades -- like health care, corporations charge what they want because they can! -- and families need relief now. Expanding preschool can also help deliver that relief; after all, if kids are in preschool, they're not in some private child care service. See? Big Gummint helps sometimes.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a big oil corporation windfall tax. As I've said, anyone who can't see the link between record profits and record-high gas prices by now simply doesn't want to see it. And folks (including Democratic politicians!) who claim that taxing unearned profits of oil corporations will "decrease the supply of oil" are all but saying not only that oil corporations have all the power, but that they should have all the power. It's rhetorical hostage-taking: don't make oil corporations pay their share of taxes, or the gas supply gets it! And if you're pro-freedom, you don't take that from anyone.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4421/S. 2332, the Farm System Reform Act, which would ban new factory farms, split up existing factory farms into smaller operations, and end the stranglehold middlemen have over meat production and sales. Yeah, this is a theme with us -- bigger is badder -- and it's a theme because bigness infects every part of our economy, and most Americans, be they liberal or conservative, oppose concentrated power. Right-wingers give lip service to small businesses, but they aim to give all of our power to large corporations. Because that keeps the big campaign donations coming! But we outnumber them, so we must overpower them.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep PFAS chemicals off our farmlands. You can find PFAS chemicals -- which scientists link to certain cancers, birth defects, and immune system issues -- in firefighting foam, fast-food packaging, waterproof jackets, and non-stick saucepans, but you can also find them in agricultural wastewater treatments, meaning you can also find them in our food, water, feed animals, and agricultural workers. They call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals" because our bodies can't break them down; they should call them everywhere chemicals too! Odd how the more "efficient" they make our food-producing apparatus, the less healthy it becomes.

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.

Around the table: featuring evil government officials and Russian heroes.

Ho hum, Donald Trump's Homeland Security agency expected violence on January 6, but didn't tell anyone who could do anything about it. Oh, they told each other to be careful, but otherwise lol-ed each other in texts. This unconscionable failure came not too many months after HHS's Intelligence and Analysis head, Brian Murphy, quit and filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that his superiors at DHS were pressuring him to downplay reports of right-wing terror and play up fantasies about left-wing terror. Now would be a good time to note that if Donald Trump becomes President again in 2024, he has said he will push to have absolute authority to fire people like Brian Murphy merely for blowing the whistle on wrongdoing.

Josh Boak at the Associated Press asks "Two years into COVID, was $800B payroll aid plan worth it?" And answers that "just 23% to 34% of PPP dollars went to workers who would have lost jobs, at a cost of as much as $258,000 per job retained," and that "most of the benefits accrued to the affluent," which I'm sure was a complete accident! Seriously, the AP report does its best to be even-handed, but as a famous philosopher used to say, there's just no there there -- reports that the Biden Administration made it a little nicer to Black and Brown folks shouldn't convince you otherwise. Having banksters run the program was a stupid idea; how many small businesses do banksters know anymore? The original legislation contended that Ruth's Chris Steak House was a "small business," after all!

You might hate Spotify for its absurdly low musician royalties and its enabling of Joe Rogan, but here's another reason to hate it: it invests in artificial intelligence tools on the battlefield, and regardless of how you feel about war, I hope you don't imagine that AI "saves lives," for Philip K. Dick exploded that supposition in "Second Variety" almost 70 years ago. Also, Spotify hosts plenty of podcasts that generally make war seem like a fun video game and specifically advance the cause of drones and robotics on the battlefield, which see previous sentence.

Hard to believe, Harry, but today's battles over book banning are a lot like the 1980s battles over book banning, and I guess when Jerry Falwell didn't actually spew racial epithets, he probably caught a lot of folks off-guard. Today's "critical race theory" may be yesterday's "secular humanism," which I guess suggests how far we've come if our enemies are more willing to spell out what they hate. It also suggests the utter emptiness of right-wing arguments, which I wish meant more; desperate people fight ugly, true, but they only beat civilized folks when civilized folks aren't sure of themselves, which illustrates, if it needed it, that post-modernism has its limits.

Cal Winslow at Counterpunch profiles Will Smith, a prodigious offensive line talent who played only two years of professional football in the early '60s because racism. Yeah, when the Raiders' legendary/notorious owner, Al Davis, won't pay you what he pays the other starting guard who happens to be white, you can say "because racism." Will Smith had a tough time even getting as far as he did, surviving Southern segregation and its only slightly-less oppressive Northern flavor -- his Michigan coaches benched him because he was serious with a white woman, whom he eventually married and started a family with, and crowds everywhere shouted racial epithets at him, until he silenced them with his play. No teams contacted him after the Raiders let him go; he made a pretty good career in education after that. Thus endeth a lesson you now cannot receive in many public schools across America because waaaaaaaaaah!

Finally, journalist Marina Ovsyannikova goes on Russian TV to protest the war against Ukraine, not long after releasing a video detailing her shame at having propagandized on Russia's behalf for so many years. "Only we have the power to stop all this madness," she said in that video. "Go to the protests. Don’t be afraid of anything. They can’t imprison us all." Indeed, they cannot! And even if they decide to shoot them all, it'll take more than 10 generations to wash out that stain. She's a hero, and so are all the Russians who have already taken to the streets to protest this war; we would welcome them into our hearts and communities even as we would ostracize Vlad the Bad forever.

Around the table: concerning the Ukraine, inflation, transgender folks, social media, and a heartland business that's doing it right.

Angus Roxburgh at The Guardian argues that sanctions against Russia for invading the Ukraine should target Mr. Putin's advisors, not his funders, because targeting the billionaires hasn't worked, and targeting those members of Russia's legislature or Mr. Putin's council who actually advise him -- and who "love to swan around on yachts, ski slopes and fine hotels in the west, posting pictures of themselves on Instagram" -- would hurt more. This is such a good idea you have to wonder why Western nations haven't done it already, and I shudder to think that the answer might be "because we need Vladimir Putin around to distract you from our doings."

Since Facebook is "fact-checking" the assertion that corporate greed causes a large part of inflation, here's a mainstream media report entitled "Rising Fuel Prices and Corporate Profits -- Not Wages -- Are Chiefly to Blame for Inflation." OK, they put corporate profits second, but baby steps! This is our "liberal" media, after all! But let's quote: "If higher worker pay was truly the main driver of prices, it follows that more labor-intensive service sectors of the economy would be seeing the largest jump in consumer prices. Yet the inflation picture today shows the exact opposite: price increases for goods are outstripping services by a factor of three." And if energy price hikes add only two percentage points to inflation, and labor costs add next to nothing, well, that leaves five and a half points to attribute to corporate profits.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered the state's child protective services agency to investigate any child who's had any sort of "sex change" procedure as possible "child abuse." That extends only as far as hormone therapies and puberty blockers; our laws already prohibit more invasive surgical procedures, but naturally Texas is "focusing" on that, too. You know what would be really cynical? If Gov. Abbott trumpeted this order so he could survive a primary challenge against someone even further right than he -- then reminded everyone in the primary that the agency didn't actually investigate any children on this basis during the general election. See? I'm not actually a knuckle-dragging ogre like the liberals say! Except, of course, that the threat of investigation still exists, and can, in fact, be carried out if too many rage-addled right-wingers notice that "nothing's being done." If Beto O'Rourke can't prepare for that, he deserves to lose. Hey, I'm just a schmuck on the internet and I can game it out; this is his job.

Ho hum, Donald Trump's new social network, the daringly-named Truth Social, is not only suffering from technical glitches that have bloated its waitlist to 500,000 folks, but has already booted people off its network for perceived offenses despite billing itself as a "free speech" haven. Of course Mr. Trump probably looks at the waitlist and says "look at all the people who want to join!" And as I've always said, you can kick anyone you want off your privately-held network, but maybe you should slow your roll on the "free speech" pity party if you're going to do that. Hilariously, Truth Social has received a number of five-star reviews from folks who not only haven't used it, but say they're still having trouble getting on it! Maybe these folks really think the Deep State is keeping them from signing on, but you know who else reviews something without having used it? A troll. And their Personal Lord and Savior is the greatest troll of them all.

So how does a "Century-Old Small-Time Retailer" in West Virginia "Survive() Walmart," per John W. Miller at The Daily Yonder? By "realiz(ing) we’d have to sell higher quality products, put a premium on service and also develop relationships with everybody in town," per Ruttenberg's owner/manager, and yes you're "more likely to pay $100 than $25 for a pair of work boots, but they’ll last longer, and that transaction will keep money in the community and feed a relationship with the family selling you the shoe." As for "developing relationships," that's mostly about learning all your customers' names and asking how they're doing; how odd, that the solution to all the problems hyper-mechanized efficiency causes is always people.

Finally, leave it to Donald Trump to call the Russian invasion of the Ukraine "smart," in the sense that "he’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions." You know, in the sense that making all that money without paying any taxes (as he has frequently been accused of doing) was also "smart," as he suggested in the second Presidential debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016. The more cynical among us probably agree with Mr. Trump, but cynicism is evil, and more to the point, let's see if the cynics call it "smart" when Mr. Putin drags down his entire regime by fighting a guerrilla war in the Ukraine for however long he stays invested in that. So proud of their "learning" in "the School of Hard Knocks," some people are. (Hate to pile on, but his bringing up the "rigged election" to Laura Ingraham provokes me to ask: if this guy was Teh Greatest President Evah, as he has so often said, how come he couldn't "rig" his own re-election? How does someone so great constantly get tripped up by his enemies?)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning Yemen, algorithms, labor, small businesses, antibiotics, and Presidential misbehavior.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end our involvement in the war on Yemen, hold corporations accountable for their algorithms, pass strong labor legislation, protect small online businesses, make antibiotics strong again, and investigate former President Trump's removal of official documents to his private residence. 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.

Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end all American support for the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Specifically you'll ask that your Reps support a War Powers resolution aiming to end our involvement there; it'd be nice if our government would only go to war when Congress specifically authorizes it, as used to happen in the old days, but in the meantime, I'd take a War Powers resolution. 16 million good Yemeni sit on the edge of famine, and for what? Because the Saudis don't like the Houthis? The Houthis are some of the world's best at fighting al-Qaeda, but then so were the Kurds, and we sure sold them out to an even more odious dictator. How about if we stop making foreign policy decisions that constantly put us on the wrong side of decency? Our Founders didn't think that was too much to ask.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6580/S. 3572, the Algorithmic Accountability Act. A CEO's only job is, literally, to make decisions, but now lazy CEOs farm out their decision-making to algorithms, and it ain't just about Facebook algorithms automatically creating groups that let racists find each other much more easily than if they had to put some work into it -- it's also about algorithms charging some people higher prices, hence the recent controversy over Tinder, which was apparently charging older daters more money -- on the precept they'll swipe left more frequently than younger folks more mesmerized by appearances? It's a question worth asking! "Personalized pricing," Tinder called it, but "personalized price gouging" might be a better name, and we should fight that.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act passed our House almost a year ago, and given all the good things it would do -- it would stop corporations from trying to make all their employees into "contractors," it would stop employers from forcing their workers to sit through anti-union propaganda, it would outlaw forced arbitration in union contracts, it would prohibit corporate retaliation against whistleblowers, and it would give workers more choice in how they would vote for unionization -- it's hard to see how a sane, moral, and decent Senate would oppose it. We must conclude, therefore, that our Senate is not sane, moral, or decent. So we must make them so, by communicating our will until they can't deny it anymore.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the inclusion of the SHOP SAFE Act in larger trade legislation. What would the SHOP SAFE Act do? In the name of "protecting intellectual property," it would force online small businesses to jump through additional hoops about the products they sell, to make sure they're not "counterfeit" -- and then subject those small businesses to abuse anyway, since the internet marketplaces that host them will use, you guessed it, algorithms to detect "counterfeit" items, and they'll be just as good at that as facial recognition software is at telling Black folks apart. Politicians constantly talk about "protecting small businesses," and then they go and pull shit like this. Unless we stop them.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3932/S. 2076, the PASTEUR Act. The PASTEUR Act would fund development of new antibiotics, which we need mainly because we've abused the ones we've got so badly that superbugs rise up all over the world. Yes, "abuse" is the right word there -- we give seven out of every 10 antibiotics to nominally healthy farm animals so they can endure squalid conditions in family farms, instead of, you know, sick people or sick animals. The result? The world is full of superbugs! Also, too, exposure to COVID leaves folks vulnerable to another, bacterial infection -- which means hospitals treat all of their COVID patients with antibiotics out of an abundance of caution, thus antibiotics become less effective. Creating new antibiotics will give us a little more breathing space, at least.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate former President Trump's removal of some 15 boxes of Presidential records from our White House to his Mar-a-Lago residence. It's almost comic how often this man implicates himself law-breaking, but our failure to hold him to account for his many sins is no laughing matter at all. Anyway, the Presidential Records Act of 1978 doesn't let you just take any old document home, and not just because some of them might be classified "Top Secret," as they were with Mr. Trump. Why, you might be hiding something the American people deserve to know! It's almost comic how little respect Donald Trump shows to the people, but the fact that so many Americans think he's their Personal Lord and Savior is no laughing matter at all.

Around the table: from wrong-headed protestors in Canada to wrong-headed American economists.

When I hear that truckers in Canada are "snarling traffic, disrupting business and residential neighborhoods and leading the police to compare the demonstrations to a 'siege' on the nation’s democracy," I wonder if these protestors would have responded to liberal protestors who also clog city streets, albeit just with their bodies, by demanding the "right" to run them down. Of course I don't disapprove of the truckers' tactics, but we all have a duty to protest the real wrongs in our society, and vaccine mandates ain't one of those. Anyone who protests them, when so many worse things that cause actual harm are going on, is a crybaby. That's true no matter how many hard hats they own./p>

Militia members take over a northern California county board of supervisors, after county residents spend nearly two years acting like snowflakes about the county's not-even-all-that-restrictive COVID-19 restrictions. Why Carlos Zapata isn't in jail for the threats he made in 2020 I couldn't say -- except to suggest that maybe the "Reagan Republican" recently deposed in a recall, Leonard Moty, didn't understand that he and his kind were always a gateway drug to this kind of thing. (And Patrick Jones is yet another far-right-winger who says "we want to return to a county where we grew up" without wanting the high tax rates on the rich that were once a feature of every county where folks like him grew up.)

When I hear that Bank of America is refusing to forgive certain small business PPP loans -- even blocking those businesses from getting relief from our Small Business Administration -- I'm tempted to ask how did Bank of America get the power to screw over small businesses like this? Except, of course, that I already know that Republicans controlled the Presidency and the Senate when they passed the CARES Act, which created the so-called Paycheck Protection Program. I also know that even though Democrats wouldn't have done that much better if they controlled everything, "not much better" might be the difference between being in business or being in the poorhouse for at least a few small businesses. Also too, I doubt Tom Brady had this problem.

When confronted with the news that a right-wing pastor in Tennessee actually put together a well-attended book-burning ceremony, the only advice I can offer to Democrats is 1) get video, 2) put it in every Democratic election ad, and 3) say "this is who you vote for when you vote Republican!" Seriously, we're in trouble if book-burning isn't politically toxic to those who do it. (Actually, the right-wing pastor who ran this book-burning has created a lot of drama over the last few years, not limited to 2020 election BS and COVID denialism. If you vote Republican, you're voting for all of that, too! Tolerate no "I'm voting for lower taxes and better judges" rubbish from your friends and neighbors!)

From Julie L. Holcomb at The Conversation we learn "How 18th Century Quakers Led a Boycott of Sugar to Protest Against Slavery." Yes, even good Americans in the 18th century understood that the sugar industry not only enslaved its own workers (who typically died three years after starting work in that brutal trade), but enabled the spread of slavery everywhere else. And we sure ain't the first people ever to link consumption and morals, for the Quakers did that hundreds of years ago; in this, as in so many other things, we stand on the shoulders of giants.

Finally, Larry Summers "predicts" that high inflation will keep on going throughout the year, and I say "predicts" because most of us know by now not only that much of this inflation is corporate price-gouging (when corporate profits are as high as they are, that's kind of a tell!), but that corporations are price-gouging in response to Joe Biden's rather aggressive actions against monopoly power, which makes Mr. Summers's "prediction" more of a threat delivered on behalf of his corporate cronies. But in that context, his "prediction" that inflation won't fall below 3 percent by the end of 2022 would be a rather specific threat to pass along, since if inflation falls to, say, 4 percent, I think Democrats will benefit at the ballot box in November. Perhaps the corporations are a bit afraid Mr. Biden might succeed. Perhaps they should be. But they'll only have reason to be if we fight monopoly power, too.

Around the table: monopolies ruin everything, part 834.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning labor, pollution, immigration, law and order, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell Kellogg's CEO to treat his workers right, tell our EPA to ban corporate PFAS dumping, tell the Biden Administration to stop all deportations to Haiti, tell our Justice Department to stop Minnesota police form torturing Line 3 protestors, and tell big corporations to stop donating to January 6 coup enablers in Congress. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell Kellogg CEO Steven Cahillane to treat Kellogg's workers right and give them the contract they deserve. That would be a contract which doesn't mandate 12-hour days seven days a week -- if someone made you work that schedule, you'd go on strike, too. Nabisco and Frito-Lay workers have also gone on strike this year, with varying results, but if we make enough noise in the direction of Kellogg's CEO, their workers will more likely get a better contract out of it. It's not like Kellogg's doesn't have the money, either -- like most big corporations (and, ah, almost no small businesses!), Kellogg has cleaned up during the pandemic; maybe its executives ought to reward the folks most responsible for their success, i.e., their workers?

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to ban corporate dumping of PFAS chemicals into our air and water. We call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals" for good reason -- they don't break down and they get into everything, not just our air and water but also our bodies. What happens to them once they get in our bodies? Please refer to the phrase "they don't break down." And scientists link PFAS exposure to cancer, thyroid disease, and liver damage, among other things. Our EPA hasn't yet created any standards for restricting PFAS dumping by big corporations, but they are taking public comments about the matter; now's the time for us to tell our EPA what to do. Remember: if we say nothing, our EPA can ignore us, but if we all speak out, we'll create a paper trail our EPA won't be able to ignore without getting their asses handed to them in court.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell the Biden Administration to stop deporting Haitian immigrants. You no doubt think of Border Patrol agents in cowboy hats on horseback corralling Haitian refugees with whips when you contemplate this matter; why, even Joe Biden denounced it! Yet he continues the same policies that caused that mess -- namely, the Title 42 policy allowing our President to deport pretty much anyone for pandemic-related reasons, though we all know the real threat to our health has lately come from tantrum-throwers in red states. Jesus Mary and Joseph we were down to 9,000 cases a day in June! And immigrants have been coming the whole time, as Fox News will happily tell you, so it ain't them. Not for nothing, but Haitians have just had a Presidential assassination and an earthquake, so mercy ain't weakness here.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our President to nix the notorious Enbridge Line 3 pipeline, and tell our Justice Department to stop police torture of protestors at the pipeline. You should know it's torture just from the phrase police use to describe what they're doing to protestors -- "pain compliance." What, they thought more syllables would disguise their intent? You know the story with Line 3 -- another oil pipeline run by a corporation with a bad pipeline safety record, which means that pipe will eventually crack and contaminate a water table upon which good Americans depend. "Good Americans" here includes the indigenous folks who put their bodies on the line against the pipeline. Hey, the Lakota sure were right about Dakota Access; why do we fail to listen?

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell big corporations like GM and UPS to stop giving campaign donations to the 147 Congressional Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election and thus helped enable the January 6 attempted coup. Remember when big corporations said they were done giving money to politicians like that? That sure didn't last! Corporations act like they have no choice, when having billions of dollars means nothing but choices. And their campaign largesse could have far more dire consequences this time, as the Republicans who retake Congress in 2022 will learn that trying to overthrow a duly-elected government is no impediment to victory! Corporations have a moderate Democrat as President, and Democratic Congressional majorities are too slim to really rock the corporate boat -- but no, that's not enough for them. It's well past enough for me, I tell you what.

Around the table: notes on COVID, Afghanistan, monopolies, mandates, and the Senate's biggest drama hound.

Remember all that BS about how Obamacare would create "death panels"? Well, thanks to right-wingers refusing to wear masks and get vaccinated, now we have them at hospitals in northern Idaho, and may soon have them in Washington state, as well, as good Idahoans try to figure out where to get urgent health care. Best quotation, from a guy whose heart surgery keeps getting put off: "My heart is failing without intervention. I can’t walk a block without stopping. But their choice (to not get vaccinated) just negated my urgent need." We should put it more or less like that to everyone who whines about "my personal choice." And given how hard it is for people to change their minds, especially when they're dead wrong, we'll have to do it numerous times.

America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, makes the most compelling case yet that we shouldn't have left Afghanistan. Of course, he's up against people like Lindsey Graham, who never met a war he didn't like, but I'll admit his argument gave me pause. Long story short: he argues that the Taliban are irredeemable fascists like the Nazis were, and that we kept them at bay in Afghanistan with a mere 3,000 troops. Some things are worth going to war over, and I never assumed Afghans simply didn't want to fight, but I still don't think we would have done enough good there if we had stayed, even if we had stayed another hundred years.

Matt Stoller explains "Why a Monopolized Economy Leads to Inflation and Shortages." If you recall how WalMart has killed small businesses all over America and how Amazon has killed smaller book store chains like B. Dalton's and Encore -- let alone have tried to find toilet paper at the supermarket in the past year! -- you'll already be sympathetic to his argument at the beginning, when he describes how Uber and Lyft killed the D.C. taxi industry. But it goes deeper, not just to economists so obsessed with inflation they're blind to shortages, but to corporations concentrating entire chunks of the supply chain (video tape in Japan, semiconductors in Taiwan) in the name of "efficiency." And it goes deeper than that; reading Mr. Stoller is a real education in how corporations manipulate our economy. (How about a law banning loss-leading from corporations worth over $1 million?)

Maggie Astor at the New York Times reminds us that "Vaccination Mandates Are an American Tradition. So Is the Backlash." At the turn of the 20th century, parents fought smallpox vaccine mandates by burning their own arms to mimic smallpox scars, like a bunch of G. Gordon Liddys, and parents actually did fight the child vaccination mandates of the 1970s that few folks complain about today (though they didn't fight the polio vaccine, partly because a non-profit made it and partly because no government mandated it). Nonetheless, "one thing distinguishes today’s anti-vaccination protesters from those of the past. The opposition was always political. It wasn’t always partisan." That's what makes folks like me so much less sympathetic to the other side.

Finally, it shouldn't be news by now that Joe Manchin is trying so desperately to be the center of the world again, but it might do some good to note that he's incorrect to say, in re the budget reconciliation bill, that "(w)e don't have the need to rush into this and get it done within one week because there's some deadline we're meeting." In point of fact, Congress must pass the reconciliation bill by September 30, per reconciliation bill instructions passed earlier this year, and though that may not literally be "within one week," of course people like Joe Manchin will drag this out to the last damn minute because power is a hell of a drug. And if they cause it to fail, that just affirms their power! But if the bill fails, Joe Manchin will only have that power for another year until Republican fascists take back the Senate and another Republican fascist beats him by 20 points at the polls in 2024, so I hope he enjoys it.

Action: concerning worker rights, taxes, farming, social media, voting rights, and nuclear weapons.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the PRO Act, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, pass the Farm Systems Reform Act, the Algorithmic Justice and Online Transparency Act, the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and stop funding new nuclear weapons. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act would repeal state-level "right to work" laws, stop employers from requiring workers to attend anti-union meetings or sign forced arbitration agreements, would stop employers from retaliating against employees (including managers) who blow the whistle on labor law violations, and would let employees determine how to conduct a union election. You didn't know that from your right-wing Congressfolk, did you? They'll tell you that the bill would injure "your right not to join a union," but that's not what "right-to-work" laws are all about: they're about employers choosing for you not to join a union! And that's not the same thing.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. Those $250 or $300 checks have started coming, and since I'm not an evil bastard, I have trouble imagining how the right will portray this as an "evil" -- they could call it "fiscally-irresponsible," but we all know by now that Republicans only care about "fiscal responsibility" when the other party control Congress and the Presidency. But then I realized they could call it "buying votes"! They never call it "buying votes" when Republicans cut corporate taxes and taxes on rich folks -- though, by the evidence of the 2018 elections, that stratagem doesn't buy as many votes as it used to! Anyway, all Democrats need do in response is cut ads portraying fat-cat Republicans taking your $300 checks right out of your hands, and then the "vote-buying" accusation would become irrelevant.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4421/S. 2332, the Farm System Reform Act. One of the biggest problem with farms is how big factory farms are -- they use their outsized influence to make us less safe, thanks to their antibiotic abuse (which helps create superbugs) and the pollution they unleash upon local water tables. But the Farm System Reform Act would ban construction of new factory farms and expansion of existing ones, plus it would close down the existing ones by 2040. How will we get our food, then? Through the multitudinous smaller farmers who will better be able to thrive, now that factory farms aren't in their way. Remember: the "problem" isn't government -- it's the big corporation.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3611/S. 1896, the Algorithmic Justice and Online Platform Transparency Act. Even President Biden has lately lamented how easily social media corporations can disseminate lies, but this bill would help put a stop to that -- first by requiring a crap-ton of transparency from social media corporations about their algorithmic processes and their content moderation practices (including whether people or machines do the moderating!), and then by making certain online practices illegal if said practices violate a user's civil rights (including their voting rights). The bill doesn't outlaw algorithms (which I'd happily do! I don't care if it makes cat videos harder to find!), but I bet the social media corporations will whine about being made to disclose exactly how they use them, in plain language. They can cry into all their hundred-dollar bills.

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. Plus Daily Kos helps you sign up to call West Virginians and urge them to urge their Senator, Joe Manchin, to vote for 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. If you want to end gerrymandering, dark money, and racist vote suppression, you want these bills to pass. It doesn't matter that Republicans (and Joe Manchin!) make up stories about the "harms" these bills would do. You're right, and they're wrong. It's that simple.

Finally, Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop funding nuclear weapons. Are we so afraid some other nation will come up with a more efficient way of destroying the planet? Our current stockpile of nuclear weapons dopes that quite well, thank you very much! And once you've got the planet-destroying weapon, you don't really need to tweak it. Defense contracting corporations will claim that you do, but consider what they get out of it if we swallow their line of poop: money. They get money out of it. Lots and lots of money. I'm so old-fashioned I don't think money is a very good reason to do anything -- particularly if it's my hard-earned taxpayer money becoming someone else's corporate welfare. So don't believe the hype. After all, it ain't called "hype" because it's true!

Around the table: how *not* to treat Republicans, part 438.

Big pharma corporations have started running ads blasting efforts to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, and boy oh boy are they stinking pieces of dung. Letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices would "stifle innovation," "keep you from getting the COVID vaccine," "kill jobs," and "institute government price controls." The first three are just stupid, but the fourth is old stupid -- think anyone under 30 seriously gets wigged out by "price controls"? Actually, when people hear "government price controls" today, particularly in the context of absurdly expensive drugs, they're more likely to say at last!

From the "So Much for the Tolerant Left" file: the New York Times scolds gay pride activists for refusing to let police officers march with them this year, by and large ignoring the fact that police have a long history of beating up gay folks. They don't seem to understand that the abused have had enough of being told to reach out to their abusers. And gay folks aren't the only ones who feel that way these days. January 6 broke a lot of us.

Study finds strong correlation between stimulus payments over the last year and a sharp rise in business start-ups -- particularly in the Black community. And the fact is you could cover most business startup costs with any one of these three stimulus checks and still have a lot of cash left over. Enhanced unemployment benefits no doubt also played a role. But at least one economist cautions against thinking the sharp rise in Black start-ups is a good thing, finding that businesses started up out of necessity (i.e., strictly because of lost employment) rose sharply in the Black community in 2020.

This has been a slow-motion train wreck for a while now: Kansas state Rep. Mark Samsel got caught on video preaching to students about (among other topics) God, masturbation, and suicide while substitute teaching, on the same day police say he physically abused at least one student. We've all had bad days at work, I suppose, but maybe not so bad we shoved one kid against the wall and kicked another one in the crotch, all while threatening "the wrath of God." Your Republican party, ladies and gentlemen! The party of patience, prudence, civility, and order!

When I hear that Sens. Manchin (D?-WV) and Sinema (D?-AZ) actually "pleaded" with Republicans to drop their opposition to the January 6 commission bill in which they got almost every silly thing they asked for in negotiations with Democrats, I can't help but hope they've decided to do this so visibly in order to give them cover for getting rid of the filibuster later. See? We tried to work with these guys, but you just can't!. But then Mr. Manchin said later he wouldn't get rid of the filibuster over the January 6 commission, and anyway, "pleading" with the Party of Sedition is always a bad look.

Finally, speaking of January 6, Gladys Sicknick -- mother of Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick, who died in the line of duty during the January 6 attempted coup -- wants to meet with all 50 Republican Senators to convince them to support the aforementioned commission bill, though so far only 14 have expressed interest in meeting with her (or have met with her). I doubt even she will convince them to do the right thing -- and I also think that in the coming months she will be the target of right-wing hatred she never dreamed of before -- but she might shame them in the eyes of even more Americans, and we should all be shaming Republicans as much as possible.

Around the table: in which we confront completely-unsurprising findings about wages and taxes.

Uh oh: researchers allege that Florida has been undercounting its COVID deaths. Florida has officially lost 30,000 good Americans to COVID, but researchers say it should be more like 35,000, as Florida has undercounted deaths of folks with co-morbidities, although if you shoot a diabetic in the head, no one says they died of diabetes. Anyway, maybe this is why Florida law enforcement raided Rebekah Jones's house a few months ago, although it still seems to me that governing well is far easier than figuring out how to get re-elected doing as little as possible.

Fearing a "tsunami" of evictions at the end of this pandemic, Boston renters are forming tenants' unions to bargain with their landlords. And why not? Why wouldn't any good conservative prefer a tenants' union to the heavy hand of Big Gummint regulation and Big Gummint law-making and Big Gummint handouts? Oh, wait -- because, in these times, "conservatism" is only about manufacturing rage and protecting absurdly high wealth über alles. I must've forgotten which decade we're in.

Per Eleanor J. Bader at TruthOut, "Colleges Are Using COVID as a Pretext to Make Draconian Cuts to the Humanities." Of course they go after the humanities because they don't "make money," and of course you can see the gnarled hand of ALEC behind some of these efforts. But a civilization that only cares about mammon won't be a civilization for long, and as my 18th Century English Poetry professor used to say, you're going to spend your whole life inside your head, and you want that to be a well-furnished place.

New York state Comptroller data informs us that if our minimum wage went up as fast as Wall Street bankster bonuses, it'd be $44/hour. Should we tell Kyrsten Sinema? Perhaps we should, but she's been a tool of Wall Street since the 2008 meltdown, odd as that will sound to future historians. In a completely unrelated development, a Grinnell College study finds that out of every dollar in big corporate tax cuts, somewhere between 15 and 19 cents winds up in a CEO's pocket. This is, of course, despite politicians telling us that corporate tax cuts lead to more jobs, never mind that we had both a 55% corporate tax rate and full employment in the '50s.

A Good Jobs First study finds that corporate tax breaks at the state level cost public schools at least $2.37 billion in 2019. I'm glad they note, at the beginning of the report's summary, that this figure represents a 13 percent increase over the previous year and thus "came during the pre-pandemic period of economic prosperity." Stick a pin in that for next time the politicians say "the economy's bad, so we should cut corporate taxes" -- or, for that matter, "the economy's good, so we should cut corporate taxes." For the politicians, it's never a bad time to shift more of our tax burden from corporations to individuals and small businesses.

I was about to say I felt sorry for the couple who had Donald Trump crash their wedding at Mar-a-Lago and do his WAAAAAAAAH ME ME ME ME ME act, but then I realized that you take that risk when you decide to get married at Mar-a-Lago. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the happy couple expected him to show up, or even hoped he would. I wouldn't even be surprised to learn they paid extra for the experience! After all, if you're getting married at Mar-a-Lago, you're not working within a budget like the rest of us are.

Finally, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), facing sex trafficking charges, goes on the Tucker Carlson show (nice to be able to get that venue last minute!) and actually makes things significantly worse for himself, trying to debunk accusations that haven't yet been made and trying to draw Mr. Carlson himself into his story. When I first heard about this, I supposed the QAnon crowd would say Mr. Gaetz schlepped that 17-year-old girl around the country because he was fighting the deep-state child-sex ring undercover -- and, sadly, I was right.

Action: concerning COVID relief, accountability, and pollution.

So, Joe Biden gets inaugurated President today, and he's released a broad outline of a COVID-related stimulus plan, which has much to recommend it, and much that needs improvement. So go ahead and read all about it, and then use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and call your Reps and Senators and tell them what you think. On the plus side: a $15/hour minimum wage, expanded tax credits for working families, 14 weeks of paid family leave for folks dealing with closed schools, $160 billion for expanded testing and vaccination, and $350 billion for states and localities (that's in addition to education funding). On the minus side: stimulus checks need to be $2,000, not $1,400; enhanced unemployment insurance needs to be $600 monthly, not $400; and money earmarked for small businesses had better not turn into corporate welfare this time. I don't know how they'll fund it, but go ahead and tell them to fund it by raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy (while keeping tax cuts for working folks, since those are the ones that'll expire soon!).

Meanwhile, you can tell your Senators (while you have them on the phone about the Biden stimulus plan) to convict Donald Trump on our House's impeachment charges and ensure he'll never able to run for any kind of elective office again. Mitch McConnell has said lately that his Republican colleagues' vote will be a "vote of conscience," but really they should convict on the strength of the case against him, and that crime did go down in broad daylight, after all. Now, quite a few Republican Senators may vote to acquit because (as some of their House colleagues told reporters last week) they're literally afraid Mr. Trump's followers will kill them and/or their families. Now, anyone who'd kill or threaten a Senator or their family members should be locked up, obviously, but if you want to be a legislator, you have to do the right thing, and doing the right thing takes guts. Your job title is "Senator," not "Senator except for impeachment votes against politicians with insane followers." You don't see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez run for the hills after all the death threats and rape threats she gets, do you?

I really hope to wind down with coup-related action alerts soon, but here's one more: both Free Press and Daily Kos help you tell big corporations to stop donating to the 147 Congressfolk who voted to overturn the 2020 Presidential election results. This Gang of 147 didn't vote to overturn their own election results, you may have noticed! As it happens, Amazon, Facebook, Comcast, and Google all decided to "pause" their campaign contributions in the wake of the January 6 attempted coup, but we need a little bit more from them than that: we need them to stop contributing to them, and we need to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against them, a stick which we know well will hurt. Do you worry that Republicans will just find someone worse, and big corporations will just give money to them? Then you turn the Big Stick of Bad PR on them again until they relent. Besides, Republicans are going to have a hard time recovering from the PR black eye they've deservedly gotten over this coup attempt. And ain't no Nelson Rockefellers coming to rescue them.

Finally, Data for Progress helps you tell soon-to-be-President Biden to issue an Executive Order mandating that our federal government buy more sustainable and made-in-America goods. He can do this without having to run to The One American Super-President Mitch McConnell or The One Great Hope for Moderation and Unity Joe Manchin, and most people will appreciate it. Government's going to buy American? About time! And only rageheads don't like the idea of sustainable production. Now, Data for Progress sells this initiative as a way to fight climate change, which it is (no, really, buying American means less energy expended to send goods across the globe), but frankly it's a good initiative for other reasons, too. For example, buying more American goods helps save American jobs, and buying more sustainable goods means less pollution. And our government's going to have its work cut out for it, as you know, so the more American jobs we save, and the less we pollute in getting America restarted, the better.

Action: concerning our election.

So, we're almost two weeks after Election Day, and our current and soon-to-be-ex-President is still trying to stop our federal courts to stop states from certifying their election results over horseshit voter fraud claims and horseshit claims of electioneering impropriety. Pardon my French, but I've no patience for his drama, nor that of his Republican enablers. Sen. McConnell told us the day after Election Day 2016 to "accept the results," but this time he sure was quick to assert our soon-to-be-ex-President's right to file all the frivolous lawsuits he wants after losing by five and a half million votes. And while we'd all love to think he can't just sue his way to victory here -- after all, he's sued plenty of small businesses he's stiffed into just throwing up their hands, but suing Wisconsin into flipping 20,000-plus votes, for example, is a rather bigger lift -- winning lawsuits and flipping votes may not be his goal: his goal, as many keen observers have said, may well be to stall the states from certifying their vote totals so that state legislators will have to take over and select the electors he wants. Everyone's on a deadline, after all, particularly the December 14 deadline when the Electoral College meets. And you know what'll help persuade those legislators to buck the obvious will of the American people? All these rallies where right-wingers demand that our President be re-elected because it's what they want, the rest of us be damned. With rage-filled right-wingers, of course, there'll likely be violence sooner or later, and violence tends to influence legislators far more than we should ever allow.

So here's where things stand now: as the link above reminds us, Republicans control the state legislatures of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, five states Mr. Biden won this election -- and a lot of these politicians were, like our President, telling a bunch of stories about people they know who heard things about dead people voting and the like. Things may be changing: a few days ago, state legislative leaders from four of these states (all save Georgia) said they wouldn't "intervene" in elector selection, although at least one (Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers) has left open the possibility that "some type of fraud -- which I haven't heard of" could change their minds. Suffice it to say that a "box from Alice" full of votes for our soon-to-be-ex-President won't turn up in Arizona -- but the right-wing fever dreams of machines switching millions of votes will continue, and as we approach the Electoral College deadline, the likelihood of Confederate flag-waving caravans of pickup trucks rolling through peaceful neighborhoods and demanding action-or-else will grow.

So our task today is to remind the leaders of these state legislatures of the promises they've made, promises we expect them to keep even when violence hits us. After all, they're getting a lot of phone calls from right-wing crybabies, so we've got to make sure we're heard, too. Here are their phone numbers:

Arizona House Speaker Russell "Rusty" Bowers: 602.926.3128.

Arizona Senate Majority Leader Rick Gray: 602.926.5413.

Georgia House Speaker David Ralston: 404.656.5020.

Georgia Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan: 404.463.2478.

Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield: 517.373.2629.

Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey: 517.373.5932.

Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutler: 717.783.6424.

Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman: 717.787.1377.

Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos: 608.266.9171.

Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald: 608.266.5660.

Your message can go something like this: "I call today to urge you to do your part to ensure that our Electoral College expresses the will of the people in this election, as your own state laws require. I am encouraged to hear less loose talk of so-called fraud and so-called impropriety during this election, but I am also aware that many right-wingers fantasize about doing violence, and may in fact do violence, in support of their preferred candidate, and when that time comes, I urge you to remember to do the job your laws command you to do, regardless of what pressure partisans may exert from the outside."

There is one other thing we must consider when talking to these folks: they all saw what we saw -- our soon-to-be-ex-President outperformed the polling, and did seem to drag a lot of House and Senate candidates upward to victory, against the pundits' expectations. At least in the short term, Republicans may come to different conclusions about that data -- some will say it "proves" that our current President "deserves" re-election regardless of the vote tally saying he doesn't, while others will say it proves that the "movement," such as it is, that our current President has galvanized will endure and requires "respect." I say that people who are wrong about everything and feel nothing but rage deserve no respect regardless of how much they whine in public, but a lot of folks will make different calculations than I will, and we have to prepare ourselves for that, not just today, but every day.

So good luck, and God bless.

UPDATE. Got some full phone mailboxes, so I'm going to add some email addresses here:

Georgia House Speaker David Ralston: [email protected].

Georgia Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan: [email protected].

Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield: [email protected].

Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey: [email protected].

Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald: [email protected].

I was able to leave a voicemail with everyone else (very few legislative staffers are answering the phone these days due to COVID). Also, the 888 number for Speaker Vos apparently doesn't work outside of his district, so I removed it.

Action: the HEROES Act yea, the HEALS Act nay.

Today we have one simple task: to call our Senators and tell them to pass the HEROES Act and reject the HEALS Act.

It's one simple task because the choice is simple: the HEROES Act, which has already passed the House and which would actually help a lot of good Americans get through this pandemic -- or the HEALS Act, actually a suite comprising 10 different bills, which is a steaming piece of dung. The HEALS Act's centerpiece -- a provision that would not only effectively give big corporations immunity from lawsuits when they reopen so stupidly that they cause you to get sick and die, but would let them sue workers who demand safety from said illness and death -- is noxious enough. But the bill would actively injure the American people in other ways: it would slash enhanced unemployment benefits by $400/week, it would create a commission to cut Social Security benefits "behind closed doors," and it would funnel $25 billion of your money to defense contractor corporations so they can continue to flush money down the toilet on planes that don't work. The bill would also continue the Paycheck Protection Program, which has become a notorious corporate welfare mill, with minimal additional restraints on the PPP continuing to hand out taxpayer money to big corporations. And of course the bill would also do negative damage, as it would allocate exactly zero dollars to our upcoming election, our Post Office, our states and localities, and our public schools they're so hot to reopen so they all become COVID hotspots.

But in the meantime, the HEROES Act would -- at the risk of turning this into a Goofus and Gallant strip -- help fund our states and localities, help fund our Post Office, extend unemployment benefits as they are through the end of January, and it would do all that without the stupid "corporate immunity" or "cut Social Security behind closed doors" or "hand out even more corporate welfare to defense contractor" provisions. The HEROES Act would also expand certain working family tax cuts and repeal a big bankster tax-cut-for-the-rich that "somehow" made it into the CARES Act. It would also cut working families another stimulus check -- a more sizable one than the CARES Act did, and also a more sizable one than the HEALS Act would. It would extend and expand national moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures; the HEALS Act would let the current, more limited moratoriums on these things expire immediately. And, not for nothing, but the HEROES Act's COVID-19 testing and tracing provisions are better than those of the HEALS Act. Our President loves bragging about the number of tests we've done, but America has over 330 million inhabitants, so bragging about how you've done more tests than, say, Luxembourg is just empty bragging. I chose Luxembourg for a reason, of course: that nation performs over five times as many tests per million inhabitants as we do, and they have noticeably fewer cases per million and deaths per million, too. (If your right-wing uncle says it's easier for Luxembourg because they're smaller, just remind him that great nations don't make excuses.)

I hate to make it seem to cut-and-dried, but it is: the HEROES Act is a good bill, and the HEALS Act is a bad one. I wish Republicans were less of a clown car than they are -- it seems to me it would be quite easy to create a conservative COVID-19 relief bill, one that would (for example) actually protect mom-and-pop shops instead of pretending nationwide restaurant chains with hundreds of employees are "small businesses." But they are a clown car -- indeed, one would better conclude that Republicans saw this ongoing pandemic as yet another opportunity to convert trillions more of our hard-earned taxpayer dollars into corporate welfare handouts for their cronies, as well as an opportunity to destroy even more of the institutions (like our public schools and our Post Office) that actually sustain a civilization through hard times like these. Needless to say, these actions demand that we issue them not merely a decisive defeat at the polls this year, but a humiliating one, one that discourages any of their kind from ever holding office again. In the meantime, we tell our Senators today to pass the HEROES Act and reject the HEALS Act; as always, you can find your Senators' phone numbers using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone), and you may have to call their local numbers if you can't reach their D.C. number. Good luck, and God bless.

Action: concerning law and order, small businesses, and public lands.

You heard about the string of "suicides" last month, where black men just happened to be found hanging in trees? Change.org helps you tell Morristown, NJ police to reopen an investigation into the death of Amani Kildea found hanging from a tree an hour from his home, whose death they ruled a suicide. Mr. Kildea, all of 20 years old, apparently aspired to join law enforcement one day, and what a bitter irony it would be if police officers lynched him! We don't know that they did, but the thought has occurred, even though I know police officers who would stop their fellows from lynching someone. And this has happened before. Some people say "every time we gave blacks something in the '60s they rioted," but that's not true in almost any sense -- setting aside that recognizing their rights would be a hell of a way to describe a "gift," the actual timeline was usually a) law got passed, b) police killed black man, c) folks rioted. Hopefully an investigation into Mr. Kildea's death would help break that wheel.

Meanwhile, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our government to ensure that taxpayer money meant to go to small businesses actually goes to small businesses. It's a shame we have to tell our government to do the thing it already said it was doing, but we got a lot of stories this week about big corporations getting CARES Act money intended for small businesses, and we haven't heard nearly as much about the (at least) 66,000 small businesses that have permanently closed since the beginning of this pandemic. Of course, our government has pretended, for a very long time, that everything it does for big corporations it does for small businesses. It wasn't that long ago that Republicans were telling us that taxes shouldn't go up on rich people because of "the effect it'd have on small businesses," though that was total BS. Big corporations have been using small businesses as a human shield for decades now -- often to avoid regulations that would never hit small businesses as much as they hit big corporations! At least we're on to them, and at least we can communicate to the politicians that we're on to them.

Finally, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness covers a million acres of northern Minnesota and receives more visits than any other wilderness area in America. You know what's coming, right? Of course a big mining conglomerate wants to mine copper and nickel there, hence H.R. 5598, the Boundary Waters Wilderness Protection and Pollution Prevention Act, which would withdraw nearly a quarter of the Boundary Waters Wilderness from mining leases and only allow similar kinds of development if they don't pollute the land, water, or air in the area. That's the most important thing about public lands, after all -- that they're clean enough for good Americans to enjoy for generations to come, not whether they can be converted into money that'll get spent faster than you can say "don't drink the water." You'd think "most-visited wilderness in America" would carry some weight with our government, but apparently not -- at least, not if we don't speak out! Hence Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect public lands by passing the Boundary Waters Wilderness Protection and Pollution Prevention Act.

Action: concerning product safety and various law and order matters.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to prevent police from using "less lethal" weaponry on protestors. "Less lethal" means, I suppose, that we have no right to get upset unless police use "lethal" weapons? So if you've ever lost an eye to a rubber bullet, or lost your hearing to a stun grenade, or gotten burnt by tear gas, you should be sitting at home saying "at least it wasn't a lethal weapon"? And those who get skull fractures and die from tear gas cartridges can't testify to the "lack of lethality" of these weapons. Cold would be the heart that would say that protestors deserve such treatment! Of course, that heart could mask its own coldness by simply equating protestors with looters, even though now -- in an era where everyone carries around an HD camera in their pocket! -- we know a lot of looters are agents provocateurs, and we know the violence at protests flows mainly in one direction. Spoiler alert: in the protestors' direction, not the police's.

Meanwhile, another day, another Presidential nominee who'll favor big corporations over her true bosses, the American people: one Nancy Beck, former chemical industry lobbyist, now EPA toxicologist ensuring that chemical safety regulations favor her former employers, and now, perhaps, chair of our Consumer Product Safety Commission. She's figured prominently in our EPA's efforts to do as little as humanly possible about PFAS chemicals, which you may better know as "forever chemicals" because virtually everyone has them in their bloodstream, and scientists have linked them to cancer and birth defects, so of course she should head up the CPSC, whose name, after all, doesn't have the words "product" or "safety" in it, right? Oh, wait. So the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Nancy Beck to our CPSC, lest we one day realize that our President has spent years not complaining about her, which is (as with Messrs. Mnuchin, Ross, and DeVos) is the surest sign that someone does not have a soul.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop corporations from abusing COVID-19 relief, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Remember when our President and our Treasury Secretary promised there'd be "oversight" into how $500 billion of taxpayer money was disbursed as "paycheck protection"? And then remember when our President replaced one of the Inspectors General who would have actually overseen the program (and likely done a good job at it)? And then remember when big, big corporations like Perkins and Ruth's Chris Steak House got caught taking money always intended for small businesses and the resulting PR storms forced them to give the money back? And then remember when Mr. Mnuchin, who wears glasses so people don't punch him in the face, said the information about which corporations got COVID-19 relief was too "proprietary" and "confidential" to be released? All sounds like a corporate welfare scam, doesn't it? And it's a scam we must stop.

Action: concerning good House bills and good farm policy.

Happy Thursday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to protect voting rights, internet freedom, secure pensions, higher wages, and many other good things by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. I wouldn't blame you for thinking we're doing no good, since it's been almost a year and a half for some of these bills. But these bills are good works on issues from voting rights to internet freedom to the minimum wage, and we can't stop fighting for them until we win.

Meanwhile, H.R. 6718/S. 3221, the Farm System Reform Act, would achieve its stated aim by banning new factory farm construction and the expansion of existing factory farms, plus it would phase out current factory farms over the next 20 years. Factory farms have created many evils -- we've gone into two of them, pollution and antibiotic abuse, at some length over the years. But you know what else factory farms have done? They've helped make the small family farmer almost nonexistent in America! Factory farms can scale down expenses and scale up profits better than any small farmer can, but to what end? So that America becomes dependent on miserable animals, dung-filled waterways, and rampant antibiotic-resistant superbugs just to have relatively inexpensive chicken parm? So that a few big ag executives can dictate policy to the American people, policy that'll benefit them a lot more than it benefits us? Big factory farms aren't just bad for our health, our air and water, and our small farmers: they're bad for democracy. So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to support saner agricultural policy in America by passing the Farm System Reform Act.

Action: helping small businesses yea, enabling financial predators nay.

Our House passed the HEROES Act late last week, and though it's a good bill offering real relief to those impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, we can do more. Hence H.R. 6918, the Paycheck Recovery Act, would deliver actual help to small businesses (which the bill defines as having fewer than 20 employees, not "fewer than 500 at any one location" like the CARES Act) and guarantee continuing paychecks to those businesses' employees who make less than $90,000 who have lost their jobs during this pandemic. Close to 40 million Americans have now lost their job, and if I were a betting man I'd say most of them make less than $90,000. The assistance would end once the unemployment rate stays below seven percent for three months in a row. Oh, and no small business receiving assistance under this bill would be able to use the money for stock buybacks, executive bonuses, or payments to shareholders. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to help out small businesses and their employees by passing the Paycheck Recovery Act.

Meanwhile, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our government that, as they put it, "(a) pandemic is no time to gut the rules meant to keep consumers safe from financial scams." OK, there's never a good time to do that, but doing it now is just another gut-punch for good Americans, and this Administration is contemplating plenty of evil along these lines: they're trying to gut rules restricting predatory payday lenders, they're trying to lift rules on the kind of speculative trading that almost destroyed our economy in 2008, and they're trying to roll back rules that make banks invest in the communities in which they do business. Who told them that redlining and banksters and 300% payday loans are all popular? The self-interested fools who think whatever's good for them is good for America, and the idiots who have somehow dominated all debate on economic policy for the better part of the last half-century. I long for a land where hurting working people isn't the only policy choice, but first, let's stop the hurt as best we can.

Action: concerning social media, antibiotic abuse, and pollution.

Twitter has lately declared it won't take money for political advertising, which is interesting, I suppose, but Free Press helps you tell Twitter that they might be better off banning white supremacists from their website. Thanks to our First Amendment, our government can't put you in jail merely for being a racist (though it can if you, you know, beat up black folks), but nothing in our First Amendment says "social media must allow Nazi wannabes to spew filth in public," just as our First Amendment doesn't force publishing houses to accept every single manuscript they receive, or force shopping centers to allow everyone who wants to set up shop there to do so. I would actually be perfectly OK with them using Twitter to get together in private, but Twitter doesn't really differentiate between "public" and "private" very well, and that's Twitter's fault, not theirs, mine, or our First Amendment's. Certainly Nazi wannabes don't need a damn megaphone going off in everyone's ears all the damn time. It's not as if only one person can have First Amendment rights at a time, after all.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Federal Drug Administration (or FDA) to stop factory farms from using antibiotics on feed animals for any purpose other than illness, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. In recent years, our FDA has mandated more veterinary oversight over antibiotic use on factory farms, which is better, but the stakes really are life-or-death for the rest of us here -- when factory farms use antibiotics on nominally healthy feed animals in order to a) fatten them up and b) allow them to endure squalid conditions more easily, then the end result might well be superbugs that resist any antibiotics, and thus a world where the next cut on your finger could kill you. None of that is alarmism, and all of that is simple logic. And if you're that worried that big factory farm corporations will collapse and we won't be able to buy any meat, find a small farmer to fill that need. They still exist, and if you find them, you can help other people find them, too -- and you can help them find more customers.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration to stop its efforts to rescind California's stronger car emissions standards, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. This ain't that damn deep: the only benefits anyone will get from rolling back California's standards are a) big auto CEOs won't have to spend more money making their cars run more efficiently and b) you might -- I said might! -- pay less for a car when you buy it. Now let's list the benefits we get from the California standards: more efficient cars, less gas burnt up, fewer emissions befouling our air, and lower gas bills. (Since California is a big market, automakers tend to avoid building separate cars for different states.) Does "paying a little less for a car" outweigh "paying less for gas the entire time you own that car"? I say it does not, and that's before we reconsider the other benefits listed above. And memo to right-wingers: what happened to "states' rights" as a conservative value? Or was that only ever about slavery?

Around the table: concerning public banking, internet freedom, our IRS's priorities, our President's options, and small farmers.

State of California enacts public banking legislation. If I were the author of this article, I might not have run from noting that the only other public bank in America is in North Dakota right to TEH CRITICZ SAYZ!!!! in paragraph six, at least not without noting that North Dakota survived the end of the fracking bubble mostly because it has a public bank which even that state's Republican-dominated government has made no move to dismantle. And dig the fool comparing public banking to the DMV (dude, 1985 just called, it wants its right-wing propaganda back) and saying public banking "just doesn't work," as if he's oblivious to the fact that private banks nearly destroyed this economy not that long ago.

In case you were wondering why the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the FCC's nefarious net neutrality repeal: the judges agreed that the FCC had "broad authority" to reclassify (or, perhaps, re-reclassify) broadband services as "information services" as long as they could come up with a convincing argument to do so. But I still suspect a lawsuit challenging the FCC's process in soliciting public comments would succeed, and this Buzzfeed report, in part describing efforts to jam the FCC's inboxes with fake anti-net neutrality comments, could provide plenty of ammo toward that effort.

ProPublica finally hears back from the IRS on why it targets poor folks disproportionately vis a vis rich folks, and you won't like the answer: it's too expensive to target rich folks. On one hand, thanks, Republicans who gin up BS scandals to justify cutting IRS funding, and thanks also, Democrats, for going along with Republican drama! On the other hand, the IRS should know that great reward only follows great risk. And Democrats who run campaign ads on how the IRS goes after poor people oh never mind these are Democrats we're talking about.

Austin Sarat at The Conversation asks the horrifying question: "Could President Trump be impeached and convicted – but also reelected?" His answer: yes, since our Constitution is silent on the matter of what a man removed from office could do afterward -- specifically deferring that question to the Senate, in the course of its trial of the House's impeachment. My answer: yes, if Democrats spend 2020 doing victory laps and don't stand for anything regular Americans want. You know, kinda like they did in 2016.

Finally, I'm as displeased as anyone else that our Agriculture Secretary told Wisconsin dairy farmers that small dairy farms may not be able to survive in a world dominated by factory farms -- seriously, a dairy farmer about to cut his own wrists doesn't want to hear that our economy doesn't guarantee him a livelihood! -- but I am puzzled that Secretary Perdue seems to think the rise of big ag corporations is a relatively recent development, as if Hollywood didn't make half a dozen films about this very subject all at once in the mid-'80s. I feel compelled to note, of course, that his pessimism about small farmers is a bit odd, coming as it does from a public servant who has some power to protect small farmers from oblivion. Such pessimism certainly isn't part of the American can-do spirit.

Action: concerning campaign finance disclosure, factory farm waste, PFAS chemicals, and food safety.

California actually passed strong campaign finance disclosure legislation in 2017, but that law didn't cover everything -- it still lets big donors push out mass text messages without revealing themselves, and it also hides the big donors behind massive petitioning efforts. But AB 201 and SB 47 would close these loopholes, so the California Clean Money Action Fund helps you tell California state legislators to do more to expose big campaign donors by passing these bills. AB 201 would force candidates to put their names on text messages and PACs to put committee names or URLs leading to disclosure info; SB 47 would require petition gatherers to disclose the top three donors of that petition before soliciting a signature. We're looking at a few hundred million text messages and over two dozen ballot initiatives (in 2018) that require more sunlight, so this isn't a "solution looking for a problem" -- you know, like Voter ID or Interstate Crosscheck.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3844, the Farmer Fairness Act, would at least address this issue as it related to factory farm waste. As it is now, big ag corporations have gamed the system so that the small farmers who own the animals on factory farms take all the blame for the waste on big factory farms, while the big ag corporations make off with all the profit! But the Farmer Fairness Act would "require all persons exercising substantial operational control over the concentrated animal feeding operation," which would include anyone who "exercises any control over the activities, operation, or management of a concentrated animal feeding operation." Hence both small farmer and big factory farm would be on the hook for polluting nearby rivers and streams with their animal waste. Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight big ag domination of small farmers by passing the Farmer Fairness Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would better address the clean-up of ubiquitous and poisonous PFAS chemicals, then the Union of Concerned Scientists still helps you do that. Specifically, you'd tell your Congressfolk to support provisions of the must-pass defense authorization bill that would better track PFAS contamination and better coordinate PFAS cleanup efforts; this is a big deal -- not just because scientists have linked PFAS chemicals to cancer, thyroid disease, and liver damage, not just because you can find PFAS chemicals in so many commonplace items ranging from nonstick saucepans to food packaging, but also because firefighting foam is a major source of PFAS chemicals, and our soldiers do put out a lot of fires. So, for once, let's pass some defense spending that helps all of us, and not just some defense contracting corporation's CEO.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop our Administration's plans to reduce safety inspections at pork processing plants, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. What on Earth has possessed our last two Administrations to try to mess with meat inspections? Do they not know that food poisoning always gets into the news? It seems like the best of our politicians listen too much to big agricultural corporations like they know everything, when mostly what they know is how to redistribute income upward from consumers (and farmers!) to themselves. Some "expertise," that. Of course, the worst of our politicians only pretend to be that stupid, but actually mean to make their big ag cronies richer and damn the consequences for everyone else. Oh, well, I guess Americans are only the people who eat the food. Seriously, we deserve better, from both our food processing corporations and our politicians.

Action: concerning monopolies, ubiquitous advertising, and the minimum wage.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to break up big tech corporations. The House Judiciary Committee is holding hearings on this matter as we speak, so now's as good a time as any to communicate your will. I'm sure some folks out there think this world would be a whole lot bleaker without same-day shipping from Amazon and instant answers to almost any question from Google and the ability to connect with almost anyone on Facebook, but fact is Amazon's crushing of small businesses, Google's on-again, off-again collaboration with the totalitarian government of China, and Facebook's apparent inability to protect your private data (to name just three problems with big tech corporations!) all make this a bleaker world. Besides which, do you really believe the boons big tech have given us simply wouldn't exist without big tech monopolies? Small businesses invented virtually everything of consequence on the internet, then big corporations gobbled them up and acted like we could never live without them. But we can certainly dream better than that.

Meanwhile, a Russian corporation wants to put giant billboards in space. No, really: it wants to launch a bunch of satellites that'll display logos of prominent products three miles above the Earth. Thing is, you can't just "change the channel" if you don't like it (an argument I've long found wanting anyway) -- you look up, and it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it. What, are proponents of this plan really going to say just don't look up at the sky? But then, people say all kinds of stupid crap these days without any apparent self-editing. Let's head off such embarrassment by allowing Penn Environment to help us tell our Congressfolk to outlaw "space billboards." No use retorting that if some other country is going to do it, then why shouldn't we? That's not what being a civilized person is all about -- sometimes, it's about being civilized even when you know you're going to lose, because future generations might learn from you. So let's have them learn the right things, OK?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to give working families a raise by passing H.R. 582/S. 150, the Raise the Wage Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. The Raise the Wage Act would raise the minimum wage in America from $7.25/hour to $15/hour over the next five years, and it would eventually bring minimum wages for tipped and disabled workers into parity with the minimum wage for the rest of us. You won't be surprised to learn that Republicans oppose the bill, given that so few of them know (or remember) what it's like to work three jobs because you have to, but you might be surprised to learn -- oh, forget it, you won't actually be surprised to learn that some corporatist Democrats also oppose the minimum wage. But states and municipalities have been hiking the minimum wage -- without ill effects -- at the behest of their voters for many years now, so it seems, as it too often does, like a lot of politicians are behind the times. But that's why we're here: to bring our representatives up to speed.

Action: concerning trademarks, national forests, and bad leadership.

Big construction equipment corporation Caterpillar has actually asked the U.S. Trademark Office to remove trademark registrations that have the word "cat" in them, particularly that of Cat and Cloud Coffee of Santa Cruz, CA! Where do we begin with this? With the implication that anyone would ever confuse the maker of asphalt pavers and backhoe loaders with a freaking coffeeshop? With the notion that any apparel sold by a coffee shop could possibly be confused with any apparel sold by Caterpillar? Folks, this is what happens when we, as a civilization, decide that corporations should police themselves because they know their businesses best -- instead of innovating new products and processes, as a heavily-regulated civilization would force them to do, they just look for ever-more convoluted ways to make money without working, like frivolous patent requests. Hence Change.org helps you tell Caterpillar to stop bullying small businesses and stop acting like the world's biggest trademark troll.

Meanwhile, our Administration is totally hot to open up Alaska's Tongass National Forest to logging corporations -- thousand year-old ecosystems apparently being a profound insult to our Administration's ongoing program of inculcating short-term thinking into every governmental decision process -- but H.R. 2491, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, would revoke the U.S. Department of Agriculture's power to grant exemptions to the famous "Roadless Rule," which, as you may know, keeps roads and the associated development out of national forests. Of course big corporations would like to have roads in national forests, because that would make it a lot easier to extract the natural resources from national forests -- and, ah, to ruin national forests with their pollution, though big corporations will never admit they've ruined a forest even after they cut the last tree down. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect national forests and (as Penn Environment says) "keep wild areas wild" by passing the Roadless Area Conservation Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject our Administration's nomination of Barry Myers to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (or NOAA), then a consortium of good government groups (including CREDO and People for the American Way) still helps you do that. Mr. Myers used to own AccuWeather (more on that in a minute!), and as its owner constantly banged his saucepan to privatize our National Weather Service, and now our President wants to put him in charge of the National Weather Service? Also, when Mr. Myers divested from AccuWeather, he sold his ownership stock at cut-rate prices to family members; does that seem on the up-and-up to you? And the numerous sexual harassment claims filed by AccuWeather employees during Mr. Myers's tenure there -- claims that resulted in a six-figure fine assessed by our government -- also call Mr. Myers's leadership abilities into question generally. NOAA administrator is a leadership position, after all.

Action: concerning government spying, internet freedom, paycheck fairness, and the minimum wage.

We learned last week that (per the House Minority Leader's own national security advisor) our National Security Agency (or NSA) hasn't used the PATRIOT Act's Section 215 bulk phone data-collection program in six months. And the result of this serious inaction was a cascade of nesting 9.11-size terrorist attacks, right? Well, not exactly -- particularly since the Section 215 program has actually never thwarted a terrorist attack, which you wouldn't find surprising if you thought about the whole needle-in-a-million-haystacks nature of combing through all those phone records. Rep. McCarthy's spokeshack quickly said that his co-worker doesn't speak for Congress or the President, but that wasn't exactly a denial, and the program has, frankly, always been an invasion of privacy as well as an offense to law and order. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to promote freedom by letting the Section 215 bulk data-collection program expire.

Meanwhile, you've been hearing about all those fake net neutrality bills various Congressfolk have been flogging, the ones that would pretend to restore net neutrality while still letting big telecom corporations censor and throttle your data, but the Save the Internet Act (for which Congress.gov has no bill number at this writing) would repeal the FCC's net neutrality repeal of 2017, prevent them from just issuing another one just like it, and restore the 2015 Open Internet order that codified strong network neutrality principles into law. Don't believe the haters who say well, the internet ain't that much different than it was before, is it? Nobody expected the big telecoms to start censoring your favorite websites the day after the net neutrality repeal became law; freedom dies in degrees, because otherwise folks would notice its absence. Hence both Free Press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save the Internet Act.

In other news, the House may vote on H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, early this week; the Paycheck Fairness Act would toughen penalties for employers that pay their female workers less than their male workers without having a bona fide good reason (like differing skill levels, education, or experience). I thought for a moment I should just type that whole sentence again, in case someone wants to leap in with EVERYONEZ IZ TEH DIFFERENTZ!!!!!, but really, there's no need -- trolls are gonna troll no matter what you do. The Paycheck Fairness Act would also add some more teeth to the Fair Labor Standards Act by preventing employers from using wage history as a criterion for considering employment, and I trust you can see why: because employers can keep women underpaid by refusing to hire them based on their long history of being underpaid! So Moms Rising helps you tell your House Reps to help close the wage gap between women and men by passing the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to help working families by passing H.R. 582/S. 150, the Raise the Wage Act, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. The Raise the Wage Act would, as its title suggests, raise the minimum wage to $15/hour from its current $7.25/hour over the next five years, and would raise the minimum wage for tipped and disabled workers to the same level as all other workers after six years. After all, you wouldn't want employers to suddenly convert all their workers to "tipped" workers (or even figure out how to call them "disabled"!) merely to avoid the minimum wage. Hey, if I thought of it, I'm sure they have. Don't consider that a reason not to pass the Raise the Wage Act, because then you would hold yourself hostage to whatever imagined emergency opponents could come up with next. And anyone who thinks these wages would be "onerous" for small businesses clearly can't imagine workers spending their extra wages at small businesses.

Around the table: tales of corporate welfare and political folly.

Amazon scraps plans to build a second headquarters in Queens after facing fierce backlash over its planned collection of some $3 million in corporate welfare in order to build there. Folks who support the growth of Amazon's tentacles seem to have a hard time understanding that giving the biggest, richest corporation on the planet more money so they'll build there is the height of absurdity. Also, too, Amazon kills small businesses wherever it goes, so why would you want it in your hometown? Because you literally can't imagine a way to "create jobs" besides giving the rich even more money?

In a related note, Amazon doubled its profits to over $11 billion in 2018 and paid zero dollars in income taxes. Because of the aforementioned corporate welfare and executive stock option tax breaks, which argues for outlawing stock options as well as anything else does. Also, too, why do corporations need all these tax breaks when they don't pay taxes on their expenses to begin with? They don't pay taxes on the money they pay workers, either, because it's an expense, for frack's sake. If we taxed them as hard as we did in the '50s, they'd create jobs right quick.

Not even a full calendar day goes by before our President says, out loud, to reporters, that "I didn't need to do this" ("this" being "declare a national emergency over his vanity border wall") but "I would rather do it much faster." I can't even see Chief Justice Roberts rubber-stamping this reasoning -- I mean, if you don't "need" to declare an "emergency," how is it an "emergency"? Of course, you have to consider that maybe our President wants this effort to fail, so he can keep diddling the rage glands of his votaries all the way to re-election. No, his votaries won't remember that he shot himself in the foot, although that is always the risk when you "shoot from the hip." Or, you know, from wherever.

This may surprise you: McClatchy interviews with over 30 Democratic strategists reveals widespread fear that a Joe Biden Presidential campaign would fail, with one saying he'd be "a significantly weaker candidate than Hillary." Naturally, some Biden dead-enders see such widespread fear as evidence he'd be a great candidate! There's an elephant in this room, of course: being Barack Obama's Vice President for two terms makes him part of the problem, that problem being power rotating between malicious Republicans and weak Democrats, and a lot of voters are fed up with all of that. It'll be quite the learning experience for quite a few Democrats, not just Mr. Biden, when primary voters won't simply flock to "the candidate who can win." I mean, look where voting for "the candidate who can win" got America in 2016. (Hate to pile on, but maybe the reason Evan Bayh lost in Indiana in 2016 isn't that Democrats can't "bring back voters who haven’t backed Democrats in years," but that voters are generally sick of frauds like Evan Bayh.)

Finally, South Bend, IN Mayor Pete Buttigieg -- who, like 293 others, is running for the Democratic nomination for President -- says the epithet "socialist" has "lost its ability to be used as a kill switch on debate" and says folks today would rather know if a potential solution works than whether or not it's "socialist." I'd like to think he's right about all of that, but he definitely won't be right if we don't point out -- every single time it happens -- that folks throw the word "socialist" around when they can't win arguments on the merits.

Around the table: the computer is to blame! And other follies.

Philadelphia City Council passes a vigorous fair scheduling law, mandating that larger employers give workers 10 days' notice of their upcoming work schedule. This bill takes aim at the many big chains operating in the city, not small businesses -- unless folks think a "small business" has 30 stores and 250 employees. Hopefully our NLRB gets the message we've been sending them about not letting big corporations pretend to be small businesses by pretending their franchises are independent "small businesses."

Wells Fargo improperly denies loan modification requests to almost 900 people, forecloses on nearly 550 of them, and then blames a "computer glitch" for all the trouble. This all sounds eerily like that scam where you fall behind on your mortgage payments, your bankster says they might be able to modify your mortgage, and while you're waiting for their decision, they take your home from you. Well, Wells Fargo tried blaming its employees in their account-opening scam, so now they're blaming their computers. And they say corporations don't learn from their mistakes!

Study finds that between 65,000 and 115,000 New York City residents would be pushed into poverty if our Administration forges ahead with its plan to widen the definition of "public charge" to include just about anyone who ever got public assistance, ever. These would be the folks who would avoid getting assistance via food stamps or Medicaid so that their later attempts at, say, securing a green card wouldn't go awry. But this story has a happy ending: our Presidents' many votaries get to diddle their rage glands over TEH IMMIGRANTZ GETTINGZ ALL TEH THINGZ!!!!!

Anthropologists warn us to avoid stereotyping Amish attitudes toward our environment. We might be tempted to think of them as natural environmentalists because they "live simply" or "live in nature," but Amish folks tend to regard nature as "a manifestation of God’s handiwork, created for the benefit of humans," and as something "temporary" and not necessarily to be regulated by our government. Even the most "temporary" of things could last lifetimes, of course, and the Amish man who pooh-poohs biodiversity by saying the Amish "privilege humans" posits the only alternative as "we should just open the doors and let in all the flies," when surely Creation offers us more diverse options than that. It sure does seem they're taking it in the ear from Big Ag corporations as much as every other small farmer, though.

Finally, in case you were wondering why Vice President Pence's Chief of Staff, Nick Ayers, declined to take the same job with our President Who's So Desperate to Finally Once and For All Get Rid of John Kelly, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reminds us that Mr. Ayers is a very wealthy man who made most of his millions in dark money advertising. If Mr. Ayers has indeed rejected our President's job offer so he can run a dark money group ostensibly dedicated to our President's re-election, as at least one news outlet has said, I guess that would explain our President's relatively sanguine public reaction, for whom does the grifter admire but another grifter?

Action: concerning monopolies and conservation.

Freedom from Big Tech helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission to start breaking up big tech monopolies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Why? Because they have too much power! You remember Orkut, Tribe, MySpace, and Friendster? Now they're either gone or mere husks of their former selves, because Facebook dominates all. You remember search engines like Momma and Ask Jeeves? Well, Google stomps all over them, too. And Amazon didn't just muscle B. Dalton, Encore, and Waldenbooks out of strip malls all over America, they sentenced uncountable small businesses to oblivion. How many times must I tell these pimps! Small businesses are more accountable to the communities they serve than any big corporation, and they innovate more, too -- which is why big corporations constantly buy small businesses out. But the bigger they get, the more they impose their will upon us, and we have every right to demand that our government -- which works on our behalf, ideally! -- put a stop to that.

Meanwhile, Free Press helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission to reject the proposed Sprint/T-Mobile merger. You know the reasons to reject it: mergers kill jobs, raise prices, give consumers fewer choices, and concentrate power in fewer hands; the fact that neither one of these corporations planning to merge is AT&T or Verizon doesn't change any of that. We have, incidentally, another reason to reject the merger: that it might cut off access to smaller carriers that use the bigger carriers' lines, since the resulting bigger corporation can more easily push around smaller carriers. For example, Consumer Cellular -- you've seen their ads; they give inexpensive phone plans to folks over 50, and they even offer flip phones! -- uses T-Mobile's lines; you think the behemoth resulting from a Sprint/T-Mobile merger will give Consumer a better deal? Maybe that sounds like a first-world problem -- until you can't afford phone service.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which has given us such historic outdoors landmarks as the Delaware Water Gap and the Appalachian Trail. LWCF funding expires in just a few weeks, and Congress probably hopes you don't realize the LWCF is there -- and certainly we can't count on our President suddenly reminding us it's there, since the LWCF is about preserving the past for future generations and I just named two things our President doesn't give one rat's hind quarter about. But the LWCF dedicates certain offshore gas and drilling fees toward the task of buying up and preserving historic lands, and when it last expired in 2015, Congress only extended it for three years, despite initially authorizing it for 25 and then renewing it for another 25. Yes, that's another data point suggesting Congress really has gotten a lot worse over time. But we made them reauthorize it before, and we can do it again -- if we act.

(Oh, and in case you were wondering why posting has been relatively light lately, I'm working on the second Penny Rants volume, which will cover the years 2013-2016. I'll put that out in mid-October, and then I'll get to work on the third Penny Rants volume, which will cover 2017 and 2018; that'll be out in mid-January. I'll do some live shows to celebrate those two releases; I'll share more details about those as I get them. But, you know, save the dates, such as they are -- and thank you for reading, and for being good citizens.)

Around the table: strange days indeed!

Senate Budget Committee advances tax "reform" plan by the narrowest possible margin -- but some Senators want to add a "trigger" that would end certain tax cuts if the cuts don't produce a certain amount of economic growth, and that's becoming a sticking point for other Senators. That is, of course, if the whole thing isn't a manufactured drama to begin with, since that's what most Republican "infighting" is. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who's been telling everyone he won't vote for the bill, voted in favor of it, because of course he did.

In a related note, Minnesota becomes the first state to run out of money for its Children's Health Insurance Program -- you know, the program Congress was supposed to reauthorize back on September 30. Of course, our Congress has been too busy trying to pass health care and tax "reform" bills that mainly help corporations and hurt good Americans to worry about, you know, helping children not get sick. (Really, does this whole mess deserve more than a good shot of sarcasm?)

Jesus Mary and Joseph even far-right wingers want the FCC to keep net neutrality as it is, knowing, as well as the rest of us, that a level playing field gives everyone the best chance to advance their ideas. Still, as much of an adherent of the parable of the Prodigal Son as I am, you have to wonder where that Blaze commenter was when the founder of The Blaze was almost single-handedly keeping the anti-net neutrality movement alive just eight short years ago with all of his damn lies about it.

Retired Marine General Lee Busby jumps into Alabama Senate race as a write-in. He once served under Mr. Trump's current Chief of Staff, which would lead one to think he's running with Mr. Trump's secret approval. But the election's in two weeks, which is plenty of time for folks to figure out that he's not, in fact, running "straight up the middle," given that he wants to repeal Obamacare and pass the Republican tax "reform" bill. But this may yet rate as the best thing to happen to Doug Jones's campaign -- if enough of Roy Moore's voters are the dead-enders I think they are, Mr. Busby might not even get a plurality. (And if that race needs an independent candidate, why can't it be Charles Barkley?)

Finally, toward the end of Dave Lindorff's wry lament that he's now a "foreign agent" thanks to the journalistic work he's done for the Russian-funded TV network RT, he reminds us that "if we want to really look for foreign agents at work in our country, look no further than the CEOs, presidents and board chairs of some of American’s largest companies." The above-noted tax "reform" plan, perhaps not coincidentally, would slash corporate tax rates and would never tax corporate profits "made overseas" again, which will lead to even more widespread corporate tax avoidance in America, and thus a larger part of the tax burden upon working families and small businesses. And no one among Our Glorious Elites seems to find this state of affairs unpatriotic.

Around the table: public banking, religious oppression, immigration reform, Presidential cowardice, and armchair diagnoses.

The incomparable David Dayen, writing at In These Times, describes growing activism on behalf of the creation of "public banks," which "would leverage tax revenue to make low-interest loans for local public works projects, small businesses, affordable housing and student loans, spurring economic growth while saving people -- and the government -- money." Don't believe bankster hype that this would be "socialism" (Tea Partiers and Occupiers both seem to love it, and the one thriving public bank in America is the Bank of North Dakota), and certainly don't believe bankster hype that public banks would "risk" taxpayers' money -- you know, like banksters already do with taxpayers' money whenever a "public/private partnership" forms.

The Russian supreme court bans Jehovah's Witnesses from operating there. Because, apparently, they're "extremists" -- or, more precisely, because they showed "signs" of extremist activity, the word "signs" emanating from the Russian Justice Ministry's own mouthpiece. In case you were wondering, Russia's bottomless hatred of Jehovah's Witnesses has been going on for decades -- Communist Russia hated all religions, but really had it in for the Witnesses; now contemporary gangster-capitalist Russia likes the big orthodox religions, but really has it in for the Witnesses. I wouldn't blame you if that didn't seem a whole lot like progress to you.

Executive Orders or not, I don't particularly think President Trump would really reform the H-1B visa program, but the Economic Policy Institute reminds us that the H-1B program needs reforming. Sens. Grassley (R-IA) and Sanders (I-VT) tried a decade ago to prevent corporations that had recently laid off workers from filing H-1B requests, and good for them, because it ain't racist to point out that corporations use H-1B visas to drive wages down for all Americans. I don't think Mr. Trump really has this in mind, though I would be happy to be wrong about that.

Trump Administration moves civil servant off her current assignment after right-wing news outlets whine about her "loyalty" to Mr. Trump. Turns out Ms. Nowrouzzadeh helped work on the Iran nuclear deal, and I'm sure opposition coming from outlets like Breitbart has nothing at all to do with her Iranian ancestry. How nice to see right-wing media outlets acting just as badly in Republican times as they do in Democrat times. And what did President Big Balls do? Bow to them, just like Mr. Obama used to. How about we stop enabling the whining brats, you know, like adults would do?

Finally, several psychiatrists at a Yale University conference warn that President Trump has a "dangerous mental illness" and is unfit to be President. I've long said that Mr. Trump isn't crazy, he's just a jerk, and these folks haven't changed my mind -- none of them have actually put Mr. Trump into analysis, and yet of course they say there's "too much at stake" to remain silent. Then call him a jerk! Making him into a mental patient not only insults the folks who struggle with mental illnesses, it doesn't help us deal with him.

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

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

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

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

Around the table: Presidential tantrums and small business truths.

Ho hum, Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post finds over a dozen claims made by President Trump at his recent Florida rally to be utter crap. Mr. Trump takes credit for jobs corporations were already bringing back, he pretends refugees come here "unvetted" when their vetting actually takes years, he pretends statistical outliers in Arizona and Chicago are trends -- if Mr. Obama had done these things, the flaming-dog-poop crowd would be howling. (And note well that he misses an opportunity to praise his Vice President for an actual decline in Obamacare premiums in Indiana, where Mr. Pence was until lately Governor. Think that's an accident?)

Dean Baker at TruthOut views a Congressional plan to deny states the right to allow private-sector workers to join public pension funds as "More Republican Handouts to the Rich." Mr. Baker has had pretty incredible message discipline recently, and he's right that most Republican policy initiatives seek only to redistribute income upward to their rich cronies. Sadly, the Obama Administration Labor Department's ERISA ruling enables Republicans to look like they're protecting worker retirement security, which makes you question Democrat motives, if not Democrat common sense.

Two Huffington Post writers make a point after my own heart: that while the President "distracts the public with his angry tweets," Congressional Republicans are rolling back federal regulations with the Congressional Review Act. Funny how that works, eh? It has long seemed to me that the CRA might actually be unconstitutional -- agencies have to write regulations to fit specific legislative aims, after all, and what if Congress strikes a rule that actually does that? In the meantime, we should again question Democrat smarts/motives if they finalize so many regulations within the 60-day window within which Congress can pass a CRA resolution.

Upwards of three Seattle-area restaurants institute a "minimum wage surcharge," apparently a reaction to Seattle's new $15/hour minimum wage. Because, as we know, these are the only three restaurants in the entire area! Plus, if they're not collecting sales taxes on their little surcharges, they're also breaking state law. It's enough to make you think that accepting the people's will, which clearly supports a decent minimum wage, is much better than throwing a tantrum about it.

Finally, we learn that a veterinarian co-op can help small business vets overcome a great many obstacles. Larger, corporate veterinary chains can pay less for supplies and machinery in bulk, but co-ops can give independent vets a lot of that bargaining power, too. Co-ops can also provide educational opportunities and a sense of community (that last item helped along by social networking, which, again, suggests that social media have gotten a bad rap in the "fake news" era). I wish them the best of luck.

Around the table: student loans, hiring freezes, Executive Orders, legislative agendas, Holocaust statements, and online privacy.

The Center for Media and Democracy finds that Betsy DeVos does have some education experience after all -- she's invested in a student loan debt-collection agency that, of course, has lately failed to secure a government contract, possibly because of numerous consumer complaints against it. So, yeah, we'd want someone invested in that in charge of regulating that! It's also good to be reminded, though, that "a largely bipartisan consensus around 'education reform'" has enabled Betsy DeVos's ascension to begin with, and that our "liberal" media still enable this "bipartisan consensus," one built on the three-decade-plus-old lie that public schools are failing us.

Richard Eskow asks "Who'll Get Shafted" by President Trump's federal worker hiring freeze, and finds, unsurprisingly, that mostly regular folks will get the shaft. Social Security recipients will get shafted by not having enough workers to help them through their issues, workers will get hurt by having fewer OSHA inspectors, and veterans will get hurt by hiring freezes at the Veterans Administration (strangely not part of Mr. Trump's big military exemption) -- but small businesses will also be hurt by the stagnating demand the hiring freeze will bring about, and when the EPA doesn't have the people to keep air and water clean, everyone will be hurt. (Yes, there's also a "public safety" exemption to the freeze, but I doubt a Trump EPA Administrator would ever pressure Mr. Big about it.)

Speaking of Mr. Big, a lot of Mr. Trump's notorious Executive Orders may "run aground," simply because he didn't consult any of the agencies that would be affected by them. That raises the possibility that these Orders would conflict with existing, settled law. But, hey, nobody but George W. Bush is better at profiting off failure than Donald Trump! If his immigration-related Executive Orders, for example, wind up dying a quick death at the hands of some federal appeals court, and then terrorists launch a 9.11-sized attack on American soil, Donald Trump can blame all those "liberal" federal judges (most of whom were appointed by Republicans, but never mind). C'mon, if I could figure that out, I'm sure Mr. Trump's braintrust has already mooted it.

But in case you thought Donald Trump wasn't the only Republicans planning to wreak havoc wherever he can, Paul Ryan's House also has an, er, ambitious agenda, to unfold over 200 days, apparently, because Donald Trump really likes it when you try to go one bigger on him. He'd approve of most-if-not-all of this agenda -- Obamacare repeal, tax cuts for the rich and corporations, strangling good regulations in their cribs, a corporate welfare infrastructure program -- even if most of the American people wouldn't, which is the more pertinent question, really. Why does Paul Ryan want more methane in our air, anyway?

If George W. Bush had simply forgotten to mention Jews during his Holocaust Remembrance Day statement, as Mr. Trump did on Friday, you might have chalked it up to stupidity, though Mr. Bush wasn't stupid, and anyway Mr. Bush was far too attentive to folks' feelings to have ever have made that mistake. Not too many folks think of Donald Trump as stupid, of course -- they're more likely to think of him as mean, which isn't a good look for a President, and they're also more likely to think of him as a racist, given his multitudinous you-call-it-politically-incorrect-I-call-it-being-an-asshole statements about various minorities. Also, too, Steve Bannon probably wrote that statement, and Steve Bannon's not exactly Nobel Peace Prize-winning material.

Finally, Julia Angwin at ProPublica discusses "How to Protect Your Digital Privacy in the Era of Public Shaming." I'm a bit put off by the title, merely because I don't think shaming people who injure our communities is a bad thing, but what is a bad thing is people throwing bricks through your window because you criticized the President. That isn't shaming; that's vandalism. Anyway, make your passwords longer, update your software, use encryption, opt out of data brokers, get rid of ancient data, and other things. (Also, Ms. Angwin provides a link to this site advising you on surviving online harassment, which might be in your future if you're planning to speak out against this evil Administration; there's plenty of good advice there, too.)

Around the table: "rich people can't be corrupt," and other moronic ideas that in a sane and moral society I wouldn't have to spend any time refuting.

Mike Whitney at Counterpunch explains why the Federal Reserve raising interest rates again is a bad idea. If you've been following Michael Hudson's work over the last few years, the story won't be unfamiliar to you: corporations are borrowing record amounts of money -- mostly for stock buybacks and shareholder payouts, versus, you know, creating jobs and making stuff -- and thus have very little cash-on-hand for when things go bad. You see where this is going: if the Fed raises rates, banksters will make even more money from corporate debt -- while banks that might lend to small businesses that might actually get the economy going again will be even less likely to do so. Heckuva job, Our Glorious Elites!

The incomparable Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone sees a lot of parallels between the WMD-in-Iraq story and the Russians-hacked-the-election story. Chiefly, stories alleging Russian interference in the Presidential election have very little evidence behind them -- and much of that evidence comes from our government! Who, as we know, is very trustworthy about these things, just as they were when they "confirmed" Ahmed Chalabi's allegations about Saddam Hussein! Of course, as you know, accusing Russia of "hacking" the election lets the "liberal" media hide the real hackers -- the state Republican governments that worked overtime to keep black folks from voting.

Of course, despite those efforts at vote suppression, voters in four states approved minimum wage hikes on Election Day, but corporations and their lobbyists are doing their damndest to block the wage hikes. Not just with lawsuits, but with flat-out refusals to enforce the law (that is Gov. LePage's main job in Maine, is it not?) and with, sadly, ballot initiatives that make voter ballot initiatives harder in the future, like the Amendment 71 that Colorado voters passed on November 8. Of course, if you're trying to block the will of the voters, you've just told everyone you can't win arguments on the merits. Let's make sure that means more than it currently does.

Jonathan Chait finds CNBC talking head Larry Kudlow saying rich people can't be corrupt, because they have "no need to steal or engage in corruption." Because, as we know, people only act based on their actual needs, and never on their perceived ones! I'd quarrel with Mr. Kudlow's definition of Mr. Trump's cronies as "successful" people, too -- anyone can be successful at making too much money, because doing so only requires a) sucking up to the right people and b) the complete absence of a moral compass. But Jonas Salk will always be more successful than Donald Trump, because Mr. Salk helped cure polio. (Kudos to Mr. Chait for reminding folks than Ayn Rand, who once called Ronald Reagan "the representative of the worst kind of conservatism," would more likely call Mr. Kudlow's heroes looters than makers.)

Finally, Adam Johnson at FAIR reminds us that the "liberal" media was wrong for reporting that a Drexel professor literally called for "white genocide." Racists use the term "white genocide" to mean -- surprise, surprise! -- a variety of things that are not actually genocide, like multicultural studies and interracial dating. And yet I'm puzzled over how Mr. Ciccariello-Maher's utterance is supposed to be funny in the first place -- it's the kind of thing you might say to a small group of people in your living room who already get you, but it's not the kind of thing you say to the whole world, and though, yes, the racists who whine about "white genocide" should be mocked, and no, the "liberal" media should not let fucking Breitbart be their assignment editor, we all need to think through the whole concept of an appropriate audience before we open our mouths.