Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning government spying, corporate taxes, and debt limit dramas.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect journalists from government spying, raise corporate taxes, and end all debt limit dramas forever. 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 Sen. Schumer to bring the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (or PRESS) Act up for a vote. The PRESS Act already passed our House; it would forestall Project 2025's efforts to force journalists to disclose sources. Is there nowhere Project 2025 doesn't leave a trail of slime? And the PRESS Act would also protect ISPs and social media outlets; no matter how stupid or sensationalist our media seems to be, they still need protection from government spying, just as we do.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to cut corporate taxes. But we can also demand that they hike the corporate tax rate to 55%, as it was in the New Deal era, because that high tax rate forced corporations to spend money creating jobs and products. (Expenses aren't taxable profits, after all.) These days we pretend that handing out corporate welfare tax breaks does that, which is like giving kids cookies before they do their homework! If it doesn't work at home, why would it work in our economy?

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Debt Ceiling Reform Act, which would not only end the debt limit "crises" that right-wingers in Congress constantly manufacture, but would protect Social Security and Medicare from such crises. Sadly, we have to do that, because our House Speaker has called Social Security and Medicare "the greatest threat to our national security" (and not right-wing domestic terrorists? Interesting!). But really, enough hostage-taking! Enough drama!

Action: concerning paid sick leave and nutrition programs.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to enact real paid/family medical leave and invest better in food stamps and senior nutritional programs. 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.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact real paid sick/family leave legislation. What did we learn during the pandemic? That everyone needs access to our internet, for one thing, but also that everyone needs paid sick leave, which only a little more than one in four American workers now have. It should be four in four! It’s four in four in almost every other highly-developed nation on Earth! And it would cost an extraordinarily small amount of money! The Gillibrand bill from previous sessions would have funded it with a very small payroll tax amounting to about $8/month for someone making $50,000 annually, but I’d just as soon tax the rich. (Accidentally typed “tax the reich” there for a moment; how telling.)

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk not to cut food stamp benefits so they can increase big ag subsidies. Yes, Congress is really considering doing that – literally stealing from the poor and giving to the rich! Because that’s what farm subsidies have become: welfare for big ag corporations. And it helps make our kids fat! The price of Pepsi has literally not changed, even when adjusting for inflation, in over 40 years; if we subsidized fruits and vegetables the way we subsidize corn, we’d have a lot less childhood obesity, and a lot less diabetes. Thus those who think food stamps are some kind of “moral hazard” would have to concede that handing out corporate welfare to big ag concerns is a far worse moral hazard.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep investing in nutritional programs for seniors like Meals on Wheels. This is yet another program that would spend a little bit of money to do a lot of good, so naturally right-wingers hate it. Clearly they prefer programs that spend a lot of money and only do big corporate executives any good, like the F-35 “fighter” plane. Right-wingers also like saying they’ve got Social Security and Medicare, what more do they want? Two reasons that’s horseshit: one, Social Security and Medicare don’t cover everything, and two, right-wingers are constantly trying to kill the programs they say seniors are lucky to have! So enough with horseshit.

Action: concerning safe elections, Social Security, and IRS funding.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect election workers, expand Social Security, and fully fund our IRS. 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.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Election Worker and Polling Place Protection Act, which would, as you might imagine, stiffen penalties for threatening or causing harm to election workers and polling places. Shame we even have to pass such a bill! But we now live in a nation where whiny-ass sore losers threaten the lives and livelihoods of election workers who counted the votes in an election Their Personal Lord and Savior lost. I think the people who threaten election workers over Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss are the lowest of the low – and not least because they generally don’t even have the guts to carry out their threats. So it’s time to get all law-and-order on them.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect and expand Social Security by taxing the rich harder. At present, income over $168,600 doesn’t get taxed into the system at all! But if we did that, we could actually shore up the trust fund in the long term – not that I really expect the trust fund to ever fall short, but whatever – and we could also expand benefits so good Americans can enjoy their much-deserved retirement more. At least our “liberal” media isn’t giving so much oxygen to the ZOMG YOU MUSTZ CUTZ ALL TEH BENEFITZ!!!!!! crowd. That happens when you demand more justice! Now we just have to keep following through until Congress does our will.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop trying to scale back IRS funding. The Inflation Reduction Act expanded IRS funding, as you know, but Republicans have pretended that’s some kind of existential threat or something – if they can come for rich folks, they can come for you ha ha ha ha our IRS has only been coming after us because they didn’t have the money to fight rich people’s lawyers! The good news? Republicans made our IRS an election issue in 2022, and it didn’t work out for them, much like whining about crime and immigration didn’t work out for them. Still, we need to put them on notice, since they’ll pretend we don’t matter the first chance they get.

Action: concerning Social Security, clean air and water, and intravenous fertilization.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security by taxing the rich more, and pass the End Polluter Welfare Act and the Right to IVF Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect and expand Social Security by taxing the rich a lot harder than we’re doing now. Everything your right-wing uncle loves about America – good-paying jobs and benefits for working families, a neighborhood where you didn’t have to lock your doors at night – came about not because “we let big business innovate” but because we taxed the fuck out of the rich in the middle of the 20th century. And your right-wing uncle loves Social Security, too, even if he professes to “hate” socialism – and we could start taxing income over $168,600 into the system and make it pay out more in benefits. So how about we do all of that?

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Polluter Welfare Act and thus end tax breaks for oil and gas-producing corporations. Your right-wing uncle hates people on welfare, right? Then why doesn’t he hate big oil and gas corporations that get over $17 billion annually in corporate welfare from the taxpayer (including him!) when the three biggest oil and gas corporations in America made $85 billion in profits in 2023? Surely your right-wing uncle can think of better things to do with $17 billion – like, you know, fund infrastructure projects that create jobs. Your right-wing uncle should call his Congressfolk! But we should also do that.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Right to IVF Act, which would (as its title suggests!) protect intra-venous fertilization (or IVF) by establishing a statutory right to IVF access and compelling Medicare, Medicaid, and health insurance corporations to cover IVF. You kinda have to do both, after all – as we are experiencing far more than we deserve right now, a “right” to health care means very little if you can’t actually afford health care. We’d be a lot better off if Medicare provided all of our health insurance needs; then we could apply pressure to keep costs down a lot more effectively than we can now. But this bill will do some good, so we should pass it.

Action: concerning Social Security, public safety, and endangered species.

Long story short: tell the Washington Post to cover Social Security better, tell local governments to start embracing public safety departments over police departments, and tell our government to protect the wildlife in the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Social Security Works helps you tell the Washington Post to correct its reporting about the recent Social Security Trustees report. At the beginning of the week the Post said “Social Security and Medicare will run out of money in just over a decade,” though at the end of the week the Post said “Social Security will not run out of money” as long as payroll taxes come in; I guess that’s better in the aggregate than their normal one-sided hysteria, but they still haven’t corrected the original report, so it’s not good enough, and we’ll never get “good enough” unless we demand it.

VERA helps you tell local governments to embrace the civilian-led public safety department model over the police department model like the one that’s working in Albuquerque. We too often treat police officers like Swiss Army knives, demanding they be armed warriors and social workers at the same time when no one can do such a thing, and then after another incident of preventable police brutality, we say just get them more training when we would do better limiting their tasks to serving warrants and making arrests. No, they shouldn’t even be getting kittens out of trees! We have animal welfare workers for that!

Finally, the Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge from a proposed titanium oxide mine. Our laws grant our government the ability to reserve water for the various species living in the Refuge (which include at least three species protected by the Endangered Species Act), but the proposed mine would threaten water levels there, meaning it would threaten the wildlife there. Brook no chest-beating about how nobody can make any money because of onerous regulations. This is America, the can-do country; if we can’t do things the right way, we deserve annihilation.

Action: concerning Social Security, inflation, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to make rich folks pay their fair share into Social Security, pass the Shrinkflation Prevention Act, and repeal the Comstock Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to make millionaires and billionaires pay more of their fair share of Social Security taxes, so we can expand the trust fund’s life and even expand benefits. Our “liberal” media will be all Henny-Penny over the latest Social Security trustees report, but I’m old enough to remember when Social Security was supposed to run out of money in 2016. Long story short, it hasn’t. But folks don’t pay into the system on income over $168,600, and if we want Social Security to be even better, we have to start making them do that. Really, it won’t hurt them.

Patriotic Millionaires also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Shrinkflation Prevention Act, and thus allow our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to go after corporations that shrink package sizes or quantities as a “deceptive trade practice.” Paper towels now cost almost 35% more than they did five years ago – but almost a third of that price hike comes from corporations making the rolls and packages smaller! Pass the Shrinkflation Prevention Act and we can get our FTC to stop it – which won’t have much effect in the short run, but will in the long run, once corporations realize it’ll cost them to play packaging tricks on us.

Finally, UltraViolet helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Comstock Act, a law over 150 years old that would prevent our Postal Service from delivering any abortion-related material (including mifepristone, misopropol, and birth control pills) through the mail – but a law also made a dead letter by our Second Circuit Court of Appeals almost 80 years ago, when they ruled the Comstock Act couldn’t be enforced against any material a doctor specifically ordered. Think our Supreme Court will respect that? I kid, of course – now they’ll get all literal about the law, and to hell with a woman’s rights, or even a doctor’s rights! Hence we must communicate our will to our Congressfolk until they bend to it.

Action: concerning health care, Social Security, and taxing the rich.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Comstock Act, make Social Security better, and pass the Ultra Millionaire Tax Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Comstock Act, which literally prohibits our Postal Service from mailing anything abortion-related. As you might expect, it’s a very old law, one so old that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals essentially neutered it in 1936 (ruling that if a doctor orders any abortion-related material, then our Postal Service can’t simply refuse to send it). Think today’s Supreme Court will adhere to that 88-year-old precedent? I kid, of course. Hence we tell our Congressfolk to repeal the law – and work to remove them if they don’t.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to “scrap the cap” (preventing income over $168,600 from being taxes into the system) and expand Social Security benefits. People say blogs are useless, but they’re dead wrong, not just because blogs were the only media outlets that would air dissent about the Iraq War back in 2002 and 2003, but because the push to expand Social Security started on Duncan “Atrios” Black’s famous blog, Eschaton, about 10 years ago. And if we worked for it, paid for it, fought for it, and deserve to enjoy it when we get old, then why can’t it be better?

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ultra Millionaire Tax Act, which would not only impose a wealth tax on folks worth more than $50 million, but would give our IRS more funds to go after those who try to avoid the tax. The tax itself wouldn’t be very big – a 2% tax on wealth more than $50 million but less than $1 billion, and 3% on wealth above that – but that kind of money could fund all kinds of good services that our government could provide. It wouldn’t even put these rich folks out! And believe me, I’d put them out a lot more if it were only up to me. But I don’t let the perfect murder the good, and the Ultra Millionaire Tax Act is good.

Around the table: in which Volkswagen workers have a much better week than Tesla owners.

Good news, everyone: Volkswagen workers at that corporation's Chattanooga, TN plant have voted to join the United Auto Workers union. Workers have lost two elections at this plant before (in 2014 and 2019), but won this one; perhaps that pandemic has reset good Americans’ minds in more ways than one. Of course Tennessee’s politicos opposed unionization; dig Gov. Lee’s blathering that “(w)e’ve seen plants close that made the decision to go union so I hope that’s not what happens here.” Nice job; be a shame if something happened to it! What’s going to happen to it now? Better pay, better benefits, and better working conditions, that’s what. I am pleased to see that right-wing hostage-taking doesn’t always work.

Bad news, everyone: some 30,000 good Americans died waiting for their Social Security disability status to be determined. Did they all die from bureaucratic negligence? Of course not. But one person dying from bureaucratic negligence is too many, and the solution isn’t what right-wingers say it is – LET TEH MARKETZ DO ITZ!!!!!, when ha ha, big corporations will screw you over far worse than your government ever will. No, the solution is to process these claims a lot more quickly, which means more staffing and therefore more funding. Which, no, does not mean more taxes for you. We’ve got millionaires and billionaires we could be taxing a lot harder.

Emergency rooms in deep-red states have been turning pregnant women away since the fall of Roe v. Wade – despite the Emergency Treatment and Medical Labor Act (or EMTALA) making such negligence illegal. Some mothers have lost their babies because of it, which nobody could have predicted! Of course our Supreme Court will strike down EMTALA when they get around to it, intoning, again, that “abortion should be left to the states.” And I’m sure they’ll also be very sorry for all the pain that causes, but everyone who prizes ideology above people says that, and I’m old enough to be very tired of it.

Starbucks fired baristas who were organizing a union, our National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) ordered them to rehire them – and now Starbucks wants our Supreme Court to overturn that decision. Starbucks’s case is absolute horsedoodle – they actually claim they didn’t intimidate the workers because the store unionized anyway and that giving them their jobs back somehow constitutes an “extraordinary remedy.” Sadly, I can see this Court agreeing, and delivering a real pretzel-logic argument to do so. On the bright side, no matter what our Court does, all the money Starbucks lost won’t come back.

Our “liberal” media needs to be a lot less credulous when covering Donald Trump’s so-called “middle-class tax cut” proposals. Increasing the standard deduction and cutting marginal rates for “middle-class households” would be good policy, of course, but Jesus Mary and Joseph a payroll tax cut is not a “middle-class tax cut,” but a big corporate tax cut designed to hurt middle-class folks later in life, when Social Security and Medicare aren’t there for them because the payroll taxes that fund it never got collected. And you know any middle-class tax cuts will only come with another big tax-cut-for-the-rich.

Finally, buried in this account of the massive 4,000 Tesla cybertruck recall because of accelerator pedals that stick to the floor is the news that “Tesla has reportedly stopped development of a cheaper vehicle option so it can focus on self-driving robotaxis.” And this is why we don’t “leave it to the free market” – given the choice of serving the public with cheaper cars and indulging their vanity, the Boldest and Brightest Entrepreneurs who run the “free” market will choose vanity every time, particularly if they’re already so rich that they’ll escape accountability for every evil they do.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, junk fees, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to end gerrymandering, and tell your Congressfolk to protect us from junk fees and expand Social Security. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators to pass the Fair Districts Amendment, which would help us finish off gerrymandering once and for all. The bill would take redistricting away from self-interested politicians and give it to an independent redistricting commission of 11 folks randomly selected from among qualified Pennsylvanians. We’re all tired of representatives choosing their voters with Rorschach blot-shaped districts that exclude individual blocks and even individual houses; the Fair Districts Amendment would help us put an end to all that.

Our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) just cut credit card late fees to $8, but objectively pro-junk fee House Republicans want to stop that, so Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to repeal the CFPB anti-junk fee rule. Hard to believe that any Republican thinks “make Americans keep paying onerous fees" is a political winner, let alone a moral or practical one; it’s like they want Democrat attack ads – or they know those attack ads aren’t coming, because Democrat weakness. We can make all that a null issue by communicating our will in numbers no one deny.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security. We can ensure we all have dignified retirements by finally taxing income over $168,600 into Social Security, but Republican “solutions” all start and finish with cutting benefits. Again, how is “taking food out of Grandma’s mouth” a political winner, let alone a moral or practical one? Democrats, stop out-thinking yourselves – or, perhaps more precisely, stop serving the same corporate paymasters Republicans do and making it look like you’re just out-thinking yourselves. I crafted a sample pro-Social Security ad in the first paragraph here. You’re welcome, Democrats.

Action: concerning voting rights and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and reject any legislation that would create a “fiscal commission” for Social Security and/or Medicare. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This bill would restore our Justice Department’s ability to pre-clear election law changes from any state or locality that has demonstrated a pattern of vote suppression – which answers our Supreme Court’s ruling that the old pre-clearance formula from the Voting Rights Act discriminated against Southern states. That’s a little like saying laws against burglary discriminate against burglars! Anyway, this bill would actually improve on the Voting Rights Act, so Congress should pass it.

The Alliance for Retired Americans helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any “fiscal commission” legislation for Social Security and/or Medicare. Want to make Social Security better? Start taxing income above $168,600 and then hike benefits! Want to make Medicare better? Tax corporations what they’re paying for private health insurance and then admit all Americans into the system! All of that is much better, than empowering some special “commission” to cut our benefits without the scrutiny of debate. If that was such a great idea, they wouldn’t have to do it while we’re not looking!

Action: concerning government shutdowns, price-gouging, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end government shutdowns, fight corporate price-gouging, and protect voting rights. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to end government shutdowns forever, by passing laws eliminating the debt ceiling and authorizing spending to continue at current levels whenever Congress can’t agree on continuing resolutions. Seriously, the only people in America who want government shutdowns are people who worship chaos and drama, and they shouldn’t get all the say about everything, or very much of anything, frankly. And stamping feet and preening about “runaway government debt” in order to cut Social Security and Medicare? Folks who do that should have their own circle of hell.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Shrinkflation Prevention Act, while Inequality Media helps you tell them to pass the Price Gouging Prevention Act. What’s the main cause of inflation? Not supply chain issues, not stimulus checks, not higher wages for workers – it’s corporate greed simple and plain, and these bills would make it harder for corporations to be greedy, as far as giving you less for your buck (the former bill) or raising prices higher than inflation or using inflation as a cover to raise prices when no other cost pressures would cause that (the latter bill). Ignore free market votaries; people matter more than ideology.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The former bill would advance a slew of reforms nationally, including same-day voter registration and fairer redistricting, while the latter bill would allow our Justice Department to strike down new vote restriction laws from any state or locality that has demonstrated a history of vote suppression. These bills would help more good Americans vote; that may not be the Republicans’ goal, but so what? Duty is duty, right is right, and wrong is wrong.

Action: concerning voting rights, health care, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect voting rights, let states create their own Medicare-for-All-style health insurance systems, and reject any Social Security/Medicare benefit-cutting commission. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would give our Justice Department the authority to pre-clear voting rights law changes from any state or locality with a demonstrated history of vote suppression. That would replace the section of the Voting Rights Act our Supreme Court struck down because it supposedly discriminated against Southern states (which then instituted a slew of voting restrictions the next day, which nobody could have predicted!). With this bill, we could act against any state or locality, anywhere in our country, that discriminates for real against certain voters. And that’s a good work worth doing, so we should tell our Congressfolk to do it.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the State-Based Universal Health Care Act. Since our federal government won’t pass Medicare-for-All legislation, perhaps we can get a state to do it; indeed, Canada’s Medicare-for-All-style system started in Saskatchewan. Vermont passed such a system last decade, but then-Democratic Gov. Shumlin abandoned it, citing the “cost.” I’ve gone over how easily we could pay for it many times, but Mr. Shumlin was really just trying to support Hillary Clinton at Bernie Sanders’s expense. This story has a happy ending! Hillary Clinton lost, and Vermonters have sent a Republican to the Governor’s office four times since then! Maybe serving the people is the way to keep power?

Finally, the Alliance for Retired Americans helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose any fiscal commission legislation concerning Social Security and/or Medicare. Because it’s just their way of trying to cut your earned Social Security and/or Medicare benefits without subjecting themselves to very much public scrutiny! Think of that the next time some knuckle-dragger on TV says we have to have the “courage” to cut these benefits, because hiding behind a commission that fast-tracks legislation without proper debate is the very definition of cowardice. If they were so “courageous,” they’d do it through the legislative process we’ve been using for centuries! I’d never want someone like that in my foxhole, and I hope you wouldn't, either.

Action: concerning right-wing drama, worker safety, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell Missouri state House leadership to kill an anti-trans bill, tell Florida’s Governor to veto legislation that would hurt worker safety, and tell your Congressfolk to tax millionaire and billionaire income into Social Security. 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.

In Missouri, HB 2885 would make teachers register as sex offenders if they support a trans kid’s transition in any way – which would end their career as school teachers, of course. However you feel about transgender folks, supporting a trans kid is not in the same class as soliciting a minor for sex or using child porn. Gosh, what if terms like “sex offender” actually meant something again? Missouri House Speaker Dean Plocher’s phone number is 573.751.1544; Missouri Republican House Floor Leader Jonathan Patterson’s number is 573.751.0907. You know what you gotta do: tell them to end this manufactured drama before they embarrass themselves.

Meanwhile, the Florida state legislature actually wants to prevent localities from protecting workers from extreme heat. How conservative of them! The smallest unit of government knows best, they say – until those smallest units of government defy the will of big corporations that don’t care about workers dying from heatstroke, because worshiping mammon is more important than taking care of other people. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell Gov. DeSantis to veto this legislation when it gets to his desk. Yeah, it’s a long shot, but with his Presidential run lying in the deep grave, perhaps we can get him to do the right thing. For once!

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to make millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share of taxes into our Social Security system. You know that income over $168,600 doesn’t get taxed into the system, but you may not know that several already-introduced bills would address this issue – the Social Security Expansion Act and the Social Security 2100 Act would tax income over $250,000 and $400,000, respectively. Better to point our Congressfolk to good bills that already exist than let them come up with some BS bill that doesn’t do what they say it does!

Action: concerning government spying, “free” trade, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject warrantless government spying, make “free” trade deals work for us and not just for rich folks, and make millionaires and billionaires pay more into Social Security. 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 reject any bill that would reauthorize Section 702 of the USA PATRIOT Act. Section 702 authorizes warrantless data collection, and it’s been a bedrock principle of America since the Founders that if our government wants to get info on someone, they have to get a warrant. House Republicans hilariously failed to reauthorize it in a special session earlier this month, so let’s save them some embarrassment, if that’s possible, by reminding them that we shouldn’t give our government overly-broad power to spy on us because of terrorist attacks – most of which come from home-grown right-wingers anyway.

Global Trade Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to remove the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (or ISDS) system from the Central American Free Trade Agreement (or CAFTA). Because rich folks will use ISDS to nullify our laws, by claiming that any laws we pass protecting our air, water, or workers “cause” investors to lose money. That’s mammon-worship, of course, and a civilization that enthrones money like that deserves to die. Gosh, I sure hope that’s not us! But if we want to defeat the mammon-worshipers, and help our civilization survive, we need to speak out.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to make millionaires and billionaires pay more of their fair share into our Social Security system. Income over $168,600 doesn’t get taxed into Social Security, meaning that someone who makes $1 million doesn’t get taxed on the last $831,400; as they say, that’s a lot of cabbage! And that wouldn’t mean millionaires get way more out of Social Security than we do, but that we could alldo better in our old age! Which makes sense, since we worked for it our whole lives, and deserve to have it when we retire.

Action: concerning education, taxes, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Counselors Not Criminalization Act, reject attacks on IRS Direct File, and reject attempts to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits. 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.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Counselors Not Criminalization Act, which would, as its title suggests, shift us away from putting more cops in classrooms and toward putting more counselors and nurses on school staffs. Because “more cops” is not the solution to every problem! In fact, it’s kinda insulting to the cops, to constantly put them in situations they can’t handle, rather than the situations they can handle. And personal to folks who tell jokes at the mere mention of “therapy” for children: you’re sad people, and you don’t get all the say about everything.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject Republican attacks on our IRS’s direct file system. Yes, Republicans even hate that! It’s like they hate anything that might make our lives a little easier! Or, more precisely, they care more about big tax preparing corporations skimming money off you than they care about you saving money. Most good Americans don’t have the kind of hifalutin investments that require the assistance of a tax professional, and most civilized nations don’t make their citizens pay to do their taxes, so I think our course of action is clear here.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to create a commission designed to cut your earned Social Security and/or Medicare benefits. Because you didn’t just fight for them – you also worked for them and paid into them! And now they want to create a kind of "death panel" so they can cut benefits “behind closed doors” and force a quick vote on them without any scrutiny by the American people. Why? Because we would torch-and-pitchfork that shit right quick, that’s why! If we let them know we’re on to them and we’ll stop them from taking what’s ours, then we won’t have to resort to torches and pitchforks.

Action: concerning voting rights, stock buybacks, and SSI asset limits.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Inclusive Democracy Act, the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, and the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination 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.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Inclusive Democracy Act, which would end felony disenfranchisement across America. You know who wants to keep folks with felony convictions from voting? Folks who know our justice system is biased against Black and Brown folks and want to keep them from voting, folks who know that if everyone could vote they’d never win elections, and folks who want to look “tough on crime.” Now those are usually all the same folks! But a right only works if a) everyone has it and b) we enforce it. And a civilization only works if folks have rights.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, which would increase the tax on stock buybacks – passed in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 – from 1% to 4%. The 1% tax hasn’t discouraged rich executives from using corporate profits to concentrate nominally public stock in fewer hands, which is why it needs to go up. I really don’t want taxes to be onerous on anyone! I just know they have to be, on some people, or they’ll create a dystopian hellscape where they live in gated communities while we slave away just to pay our bills.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act, which would raise SSI recipients’ asset limits have so they can have real breathing room. Currently SSI recipients can’t have more than $2,000 in total assets, but you know how many emergencies can steal two grand from you just like that, and that limit hasn’t gone up in over 30 years though inflation has gone up nearly 150% over that time. And if we’d indexed the limits to inflation in the ‘60s, the limits would be even higher than the bill would make them! So we know what we need to do.

Action: concerning government spying, asset limits, and internet privacy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end warrantless government spying, give SSI recipients the breathing room they deserve, and protect our privacy online. 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 reject any attempt to expand Section 702 of the USA PATRIOT Act. That’s the section that lets our government spy on us without getting a warrant first; if they’d get a warrant first, we wouldn’t object. It’s that simple! But our government can’t even be bothered to do the thing they’ve been doing for over 200 years, and of course our House has lately tried to hold a “secret session” to discuss this very topic. Why? Because if they talked about crushing our freedoms in public, we’d object! Congressfolk can’t hide behind the “war on terror,” either. Everyone knows by now that most terror in America is home-grown.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act, which would update the asset limits for SSI recipients for the first time in decades. Because $2,000 ain’t hardly anything anymore! You can burn through $2,000 in a New York minute! And note well that if SSI asset limits had been indexed to inflation in the first place, they’d be about where the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act puts them: $10,000 for single folks (and $20,000 for married couples). So definitely don’t let right-wingers BS you with slippery-slope arguments.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass vigorous online privacy legislation that protects good Americans from private data-collecting corporations, including social media corporations. Recall that our FCC enacted good online privacy rules in 2016 – rules that would have prevented big corporations from collecting and selling your data unless you opted in to that, which was much better than letting corporations letting you opt out of it – but of course Republicans couldn’t wait to repeal them in 2017. Have they changed their minds? Ha ha ha they don’t have minds, they just do what their big donors tell them to do. Unless, of course, we speak out.

Action: concerning monopolies, Social Security, and Medicare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fund our Justice Department’s Antitrust division properly, and tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to destroy Social Security and Medicare. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: as we speak, Congressional Republicans aim to defund the Biden Administration’s antitrust-fighting efforts, mainly by reducing the Justice Department’s Antitrust division. The end result: our government won’t be able to go after as many monopolists – which right-wingers largely like, since it gives corporations more power to distort markets and hurt good Americans with slashed jobs, higher prices, and worse service. So we need to call our Reps and Senators and tell them to increase the Antitrust Division’s budget, not cut it. Call them regardless of their party, because they all need to hear it.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to create a “fiscal commission” to cut Social Security benefits. Because we already know that’s what it’ll do! We know that because they don’t want to put Social Security benefit cuts before the people, because the people would reject it! So they’re trying to create a “death panel” – gosh, I wish I’d come up with that! – that’ll cut Social Security benefits “behind closed doors” and force Congressfolk to vote on it without even debating it. Sounds like fascism? That’s because it is fascism. And we should always fight fascism.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort at privatizing Medicare. That’s any effort, including the effort Republicans would undertake if Donald Trump becomes President again: automatically enrolling all new Medicare recipients in Medicare Advantage. You know what that means: seniors (and taxpayers!) paying more money for worse care. At least with your government, you can throw the bums out if they screw Medicare up; just try that with these billion-dollar private insurance corporations! So, how about we not turn Medicare into a corporate welfare program?

Action: concerning government spying, voting rights, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Government Surveillance Reform Act and the Youth Voting Rights Act, and also tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security benefits. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Government Surveillance Reform Act, which would prevent law enforcement from buying our data from third-party data brokers and would make law enforcement get a warrant whenever they want to search data they’ve already collected from us. Because anything else would be a fishing expedition, conducted to harass and oppress good Americans, and would contravene both the spirit and the letter of our Constitution. Many right-wingers today don’t seem to understand that law enforcement can be used against Americans. But our Founders did, and they were right.

RISE helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Youth Voting Rights Act, which would (among other reforms) require voting booths at colleges and universities and end the sort of residency requirement governments only pass to suppress votes. You hear from right-wingers all the time about how young people don’t know enough about anything to vote, but they always said that about Black folks, too; they were wrong then, and they’re wrong now, not just on the morals but also on the facts. I make fun of young people sometimes, but they do see things we olds don’t anymore, and that’s a good thing.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security. But wait, right-wingers say: Social Security is becoming insolvent! You can’t expand it ha ha ha stupid liberal! If I had a dollar for all the times over the years they said Social Security was becoming insolvent, I could retire right now! It’s 2024, checks are still going out, and frankly we could make Social Security better if we start taxing income above $168,600 into the system and start calculating costs more realistically. It’s not actually hard to do these things – unless your salary depends on your stupidity.

Action: concerning child labor, homelessness, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell big chocolate corporations to stop relying on child labor, tell states to stop ticketing the homeless for public sleeping, and tell your Senators to reject the nomination of an aspiring Social Security privatizer to a Social Security advisory board. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Senators’ phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell big chocolate corporations Hershey’s, Nestle, and Mars to get the child labor out of their supply chains. Two-thirds of all cocoa comes from Africa, where over two million children do back-breaking cocoa-harvesting. What’s that, you say? You heard these corporations pledged to end their involvement in child labor back in 2005 so why are we talking about it now? Because they have failed to keep their promises, that’s why – kids are still out there, not getting to be kids. I sure hope it doesn’t matter to anyone that they’re foreign kids.

Care2 helps you tell American states to stop giving out tickets to homeless folks for sleeping in public spaces. For sleeping! Everyone should know by now that the best way to fight homelessness – you know, besides bringing back the 91% tax bracket that would curtail the rich’s ability to help create more homeless people – is to put homeless people into inexpensive homes, because that’s actually cheaper than constantly providing emergent services. But ticketing people who can’t pay tickets to begin with? Only people who love swinging their dicks around do that, and they shouldn’t get all the say about everything.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Andrew Biggs to our Social Security Advisory Board. Because Mr. Biggs has worked to privatize Social Security, advocated for raising the retirement age, advocated for reducing the benefits you’ve worked for, fought for, and paid into your whole life, and supported Donald Trump’s attempt to defund Social Security in 2020. Would you put a burglar in charge of law enforcement? No, you would not. So let’s not put a guy who’d wreck Social Security in a position to advise our government on how to preserve Social Security. I mean, duh.

Action: concerning Social Security, AI porn, and affordable internet.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act and the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act, and also tell your Congressfolk to renew the Affordable Connectivity Program. 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 Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act. Currently folks with a mere $2,000 in assets can’t get SSI benefits; you know how fast you can blow through $2,000, right? SSI limits literally haven’t gone up in over 30 years, though inflation has gone up almost 146% over that time. I don’t expect that argument to convince the folks who squeal STOP ALLZ TEH FRAUDZ NO MATTURZ TEH COSTZ!!!! But I don’t expect any reasonable arguments to convince haters, and I also don’t want haters to keep getting all the say about everything.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act. You’ve heard about people using AI to create pornographic images of Taylor Swift, right? Discerning consent among actors who actually make porn films is dicey enough; now imagine having porn of you, that you didn’t make, out there for everyone to see, with most folks either bad at telling what’s fake or unwilling to simply disbelieve anything they see. You’d hate to see people use AI just to make women’s lives worse; the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act will help put a stop to that.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to renew the Affordable Connectivity Program already. The Affordable Connectivity Program (or ACP) helps poor working families (including folks who receive Medicaid or food stamps) with $30/month ($75/month for folks living on tribal lands) to help afford internet. You’ve looked at your own internet bill, right? So you know that we could actually do more! But right-wingers want to end the program, claiming that internet access isn’t essential. Imagine saying crap like that not long after a year-plus of kids all having to go to school online! Again, let’s not let the haters get all the say about everything.

Action: concerning endless war, Social Security, and law and order.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop unconstitutional war-making on Yemen, stop trying to cut Social Security benefits, and stop trying to cut IRS funding. 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.

Just Foreign Policy helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop the Biden Administration’s unconstitutional war-making in Yemen. Which even our President himself says isn’t working! We’re already far too involved in one Middle East war, but only a madman then says I know! Let’s start another one! America is far too involved in the Saudi/UAE campaign against Yemen, and don’t go hoping Donald Trump will stop that if he gets re-elected, since he did nothing about it the first time. Not for nothing, but it seems like the big powers just hate people who fight al-Qaeda well, as the Houthis do. Ask the Kurds about that! If you can.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose the creation of any “fiscal commission” aiming to cut Social Security benefits, while Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security benefits. Word on the street is they’re going to try to attach the “Commission” to must-pass budget legislation, but I’d rather have a government shutdown than cut our earned Social Security benefits! And no, if you want to cut Social Security, you’re not “brave” – you’re a corporate shill, which is another way of saying “coward.” Jesus Mary and Joseph if you can’t fight big money, what damn good are you?

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any further IRS funding cuts. Republicans got some funding cuts as part of the debt limit “deal” last year, but IRS funding still went up bigly, meaning that our IRS has been able to catch more rich tax cheats. Cutting IRS funding will actually increase deficits, since every extra dollar spent on enforcement brings in another $22 in revenue, yet Republicans, who serve no master but mammon, still want more cuts. They want it so bad they’re going to defund the police! And that’s what this is, just for tax cheats.

Action: concerning Social Security, taxing the rich, and workers’ rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to strengthen Social Security, start taxing wealth, and better protect workers’ right to organize. 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 expand Social Security benefits, not cut them. They pretend they can go “behind closed doors” to create their Death Panels to secretly cut Social Security benefits, but expanding Social Security benefits is something they actually can do, by raising the cap on income taxed into the Social Security system, as Civic Shout helps you tell them to do. Currently income over $168,600 doesn’t get taxed into Social Security at all, meaning Elon Musk would be done paying his annual Social Security taxes literally four minutes into the year. So let’s do something about that.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Oppose Limitless Inequality Growth and Reverse Community Harms (or OLIGARCH) Act, which would at long last start taxing wealth in America. The OLIGARCH Act would create four tax brackets for wealth, the highest of which would assess an 8% tax on wealth over 1,000,000 times the median household wealth. Rich folks will act like it’s a 100% tax on everything they have – Donald Trump said as much in 2019, with little correction from our “liberal” media – but don’t believe their hype. This tax will do nothing but good.

Finally, Cedar Key Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the PRO Act. You’ve heard about Starbucks workers joining unions – but you haven’t heard about any contracts they’ve signed. Why might that be? Why, it might well be because Starbucks simply won’t talk to these workers, because our laws don’t punish corporations when they do that. The PRO Act would start to fix that problem, plus it would outlaw state-level right-to-work-for-less laws and coercive anti-union propaganda meetings. These would be good works, and we should encourage our Congressfolk to do them. But they won’t, unless we speak up.

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, Social Security, and workers’ rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to investigate human rights abuses in Gaza, reject any attempt to cut Social Security benefits, and stop trying to dump on exploited workers. 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.

Just Foreign Policy helps you tell your Congressfolk to demand that our State Department investigate human rights abuses by Israel in Palestine. They shouldn’t be hard to find! Israel spent weeks indiscriminately firing missiles into Gaza before putting boots on the ground “looking” for Hamas, and now you can’t drink the water in Gaza and Israeli soldiers say things on video like “there are no innocent civilians in Gaza,” which probably reminds you of, you know, everyone who’s ever dehumanized an enemy. All of this, so Mr. Netanyahu can win another election when his current governing coalition collapses in six months or so. Seriously, Italy’s a more stable government now!

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to create a Social Security “commission.” Most politicians talk about the “crises” that “demand” we cut Social Security benefits for the good Americans who earned them – what a bunch of cowards these politicians sound like! (Of course, they’re liars, not cowards, and a liar is many orders of magnitude worse than a coward.) But why not tell them to expand Social Security funding instead? Billionaires have enough money to wipe their asses with these days, so it’s not like “we’re broke.” I mean, you and I may be, but America’s most certainly not.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.J.Res. 98, which would overturn a Biden Administration rule that protects working families. The rule would stop corporations from abusing their employees’ “joint employer” status; if you don’t already know what happens with that, you can probably guess by the name – a “joint employer” will spend all its time passing the buck from one to to the other so no one ever has to deal with a worker grievance or bargain with employees in good faith. The rule is a good work, but of course Republicans have to shit on it. So let’s not let them do that.

Action: concerning health care and Social Security.

Long story short: tell an Ohio prosecutor to drop charges against a woman who miscarried, and tell your Congressfolk to reject any “fiscal commission” for Social Security and preserve the PEPFAR program. 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.

Moms Rising helps you tell Trumbull County, OH’s prosecutor to drop abuse-of-corpse charges against Brittany Watts. Because she miscarried and then tried to flush the corpse down the toilet, and folks who think that’s funny ought to think about all the times they handled a tragic situation badly. Used to be this kind of thing – charging a woman with a crime because she miscarried – only happened in other countries, but not now! Ha ha ha the future is so awesome! Seriously, miscarriage is a tragedy, not a crime, and folks who think mothers routinely pretend an abortion is a miscarriage must all have penises. Or be them.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any legislation that includes a “fiscal commission” aiming to cut Social Security and medicare benefits. That’s what these “behind closed doors” commissions aim to do, and they need to be “behind closed doors” because you could never cut Social Security in the light of day. Some folks call a Social Security “fiscal commission” a death panel, and good for them, but there’s another name for such a “fiscal commission”: fascist. Because any time you try to limit debate and feedback from the people, you’re being a fascist. End of.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (or PEPFAR), which funds the AIDS fight overseas and which right-wingers in Congress now want to cut, claiming the program – possibly the greatest/only achievement of the George W. Bush Presidency – promotes promiscuity and abortion and Satan and oh STFU right-wingers! That ship sailed once Elton John talked Nancy Reagan into talking Ronald Reagan into funding AIDS research because babies get it now. Elton John is going to heaven, and not just for “Philadelphia Freedom.”

Action: concerning Social Security, Medicare, and the Israel/Palestine war.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any Social Security/Medicare “commission” and demand a cease-fire in the Israel/Palestine war. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to create a Social Security or Medicare commission. Because we all know a better way to describe a Social Security or Medicare “commission” would be a Social Security or Medicare death panel, and unlike the “death panels” right-wingers whined about in 2009, these would be real death panels, dedicated solely to taking food out of our mouths. And the reason they’d create a death panel, instead of just putting things up to a vote? Because we’d stop that damn vote, that’s why! Also because they hate democracy. But mainly because we’d kill that death panel dead!

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a cease-fire in the Israel/Palestine war now. No, I won’t call it the “Israel/Hamas” war, because I know who the real targets of this war are: the good citizens of Palestine. You know, just like the real targets of the October 7 attack were those Israeli citizens who’d be more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause! Yes, this issue is full of suck, but that fact doesn’t justify letting Mr. Netanyahu kill civilians indiscriminately. It’ll take “many more months” to destroy Hamas, he says? What a lie! He wants Hamas around forever! Otherwise, Israeli voters might fire him!

Action: concerning Social Security, government spying, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any Social Security death panels, curb unlawful government spying on Americans, and help states start their own Medicare-for-All-style health insurance systems. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk that you will tolerate no “behind closed doors” death panels for Social Security. Because if the American people wanted you to do it, you wouldn’t have to do it “behind closed doors”! Yet House Speaker Johnson, who clearly doesn’t understand the whole concept of representing your constituents even though his job title is “Representative,” still thinks he can get a closed door Social Security commission to cut your earned benefits without any debate or anyone watching. Too late! We’re already watching! These Republican clowns have no idea how close they are to losing everywhere, no matter how they’ve managed to gerrymander their districts. I’m not kidding; people are tired of their BS. So we’ve got to keep speaking out.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act, and also reject the so-called FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act. Too often these matters are like Goofus and Gallant strips, with Gallant striving to prevent our FBI from searching our communications without a damn warrant and keep private data collectors from selling our data to law enforcement, while Goofus thinks we’ll tolerate our government getting our data even more easily without a warrant. Our House could be voting on these bills today, so the time to act, even more so than usual, is now. After all, nobody wants to give up their Constitutional rights merely because politicians are always complaining about crime or terrorism.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the State-Based Universal Health Care Act, which (as its title implies) would help individual states create their own Medicare-for-All-style health insurance programs, through getting waivers more easily and securing federal funding to cover 95 percent of its residents within five years. Admittedly getting Medicare-for-All done at the federal level remains an uphill climb, but recall that Canada’s Medicare-for-All-style health insurance system – the one that delivers better care for less money than ours does – started in Saskatchewan. Remember also that Vermont aimed to create such a system until its Democratic Governor got cold feet, citing the “cost.” There was a cost, all right – Vermont’s had a Republican Governor since then. There’s a lesson there, somewhere.

Action: concerning child labor, child care, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to toughen child labor laws, extend child care funding, and reject any “debt commission” to cut our earned benefits. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Child Labor Act. In the wake of child labor violations almost doubling over the last year, and Iowa actually passing a law to allow more child labor that violates federal law, the Stop Child Labor Act would increase penalties for violations, allow our government to put repeat offenders in jail, and let children seek compensation for the harm done to them. This is basic law-and-order stuff here, and let’s be honest: do we want our kids to have real childhoods like we always say we do, or do we want them to grow up in sweatshops? We can’t have both.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the emergency child care stabilization funding first offered during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yeah, the pandemic is over (or, more precisely, “over”), but some three million-plus kids will lose access to child care if we don’t extend the funding, and I don’t know about you, but if it only costs $16 billion (out of some $6 trillion in total federal outlays) to get these kids the care they need, I do it without blinking. Congressional monsters may not feel the same way, but they’re supposed to do our will, not beat their chests about whom they hurt. Personal to folks who say just have one parent stay home: you’ve never done any household budgeting, have you?

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to use a “debt commission” to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or food stamp benefits. That’s right, food stamps too! Nobody lives like Elon Musk on food stamps, and anyone, including me or you, might need them some day. And that’s right, Medicaid too! Medicaid is actually pretty popular, though it also has an unearned reputation as Something Only Those People Get. Social Security and Medicare I trust I don’t have to defend once again. But we have to defend them from our own leaders! And if we do, we’ll win.

Action: concerning monopolies, affordable housing, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell our FTC and DOJ to stop the proposed United Health/Amedisys merger, tell state and local officials to make it easier to repurpose empty office buildings as affordable housing, and tell your Congressfolk to allow our Postal Service to offer more services. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) and Department of Justice (or DOJ) to block the proposed United Health/Amedisys merger. If we allow that merger to happen, we would allow a big corporation to take a competitor of the market and become even more powerful, which means the resulting behemoth would have more power to kill jobs, cut services, and raise health care prices which are already too damn high. United Health would absolutely do all of that, because they’re already doing all of that! United Health is just another corporate worshiper of mammon, and worshipers of mammon have had too much say about everything in America for far too long. We won’t be able to change this sad state of affairs, however, unless we speak out in numbers they can’t deny. And our laws require our federal agencies to listen to public comments, so let’s do that.

MoveOn helps you tell state and local officials to make it easier to repurpose office buildings into affordable housing. Too many working families still don’t have an affordable place to live, largely thanks to landlords (who are becoming ever more corporate!) raising rents higher than inflation because they can. On the other hand, we have too many office buildings that’ll never be occupied again now that the pandemic taught us that we can do so much of our work from home without hurting anyone. It’s almost like the solution presents itself! States and localities would have to change zoning and land-use laws in order to help convert office buildings into living spaces, but that’d be easier than waiting for new houses to magically go up. And they’d have to refit those office buildings to make them more livable! But that better not be too tough for a can-do society.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal laws preventing our Postal Service from offering more services, like postal banking. The only reason your Congressperson would oppose such a thing? Oh, you know, “big government is always bad” tell that to Social Security, Medicare, and the interstate highway system or “banks should do all the banking in America” never mind that banks don’t go to a lot of rural and urban areas and local Post Offices can fill that gap or “the Post Office has never made money” though we really shouldn’t evaluate every single thing in the world on its money-making potential. Especially a Constitutionally-mandated service provided to the American people! Seriously, we really don’t want a world where everything is like the private sector, where greed can run free without very much accountability to the people.

Action: concerning endless war, our earned benefits, and Congressional corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to call for a ceasefire in the Israel/Palestine conflict, reject any Social Security/Medicare/SNAP benefit-cutting commission, and enact a stock-trading ban for members of Congress. 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 call for a ceasefire in the Israel/Palestine conflict. Israeli politicians talked big about revenge at the beginning, but we’re a few weeks in now and that big ground campaign hasn’t materialized, though they’ve kept on pounding Gaza with air strikes, which are of course nowhere near as “surgical” as they tell you; why, it’s almost like the whole idea is to kill as many Palestinians as possible without actually damaging Hamas very much! After all, Israelis might not keep Mr. Netanyahu around without an enemy to hate. If that analysis strikes you as a bit Machiavellian, just ask American right-wingers how well actually achieving the goal of overturning Roe v. Wade has worked out for them. A ceasefire wouldn’t just be good for the citizens of Gaza, it’d be bad for a Netanyahu’s government; if you made me pick I’d pick the former, but I sure wouldn’t complain about getting both.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the creation of a commission designed to cut Social Security, Medicare, or food stamp benefits. Because that’s all the “fiscal responsibility” this super hard-right Congress can stomach! Always they want to cut the benefits that don’t actually break budgets but do actually help good Americans, but never do they want to cut defense spending or corporate welfare, and of course raising taxes on the rich and on corporations is verboten among our political “leaders.” You should be aware that some of our erstwhile “centrists,” like Kyrsten Sinema and Mitt Romney, also approve of the notion of cutting our earned benefits “behind closed doors.” But the whole point of America is not to let politicians do anything behind closed doors to begin with, and that’s why we fight.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to prohibit members of Congress from owning stock in any corporation at any time. Don’t like it? Then don’t be a Congressperson! Go be a regular rich person or whatever! Public service means something! Or, at least, it should, and it should also mean something that roughly three out of every four voters, meaning roughly 75%, think we shouldn’t allow Congressfolk to trade in stocks, since they’ll almost certainly have to vote on a matter affecting the corporations they invest in sooner or later. Newt Gingrich once said that if 70% of the American people want something, they should get it. What Rube Goldbergian contraption of an argument would he deploy to get out of that? No doubt it would provoke this response: “so, if 70% of the American people want something, they should get it, except for banning Congressfolk from trading stock?”

Action: concerning Social Security, saving our Postal Service, workers' rights, and school lunch debt.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act, let our Postal Service offer more services, pass the PRO Act, and pass the School Lunch Debt Cancellation 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.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act. Currently, folks who get SSI benefits, who most assuredly do not get rich from their maximum monthly payments of $914 per month, can’t have more than $2,000 in savings (and just $3,000 for couples) or they’ll lose their benefits. Presumably, I don’t have to tell you how quickly you can go through $914, or how easily you can lose $2,000 (or $3,000) to the slightest mishap. The SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act would at least raise those limits to $10,000 per person (and $20,000 per couple, thus eliminating the “couple penalty”) and would also exclude retirement benefits from calculating those limits. Let right-wingers whine about fraud or “people getting free stuff.” Standing up to cruelty is a basic skill of civilized people.

Save the Post Office helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would permit our Postal Service to offer more services. The Postal Service Reform Act allows our Postal Service to offer limited fishing hunting licensing services, but they could do so much more, particularly for otherwise underserved rural communities – they could offer basic banking services, obviously, but they could also offer vehicle charging, parking lot wi-fi, grocery delivery, and checking on seniors. Now, about that last item, you just know right-wingers would love to squeal TEH BIG BROTHURZ CHECKINGZ ONZ TEH SENYURZ!!!!! Just remember that these are the same people who willingly bought Alexas and cellphones, and thus allowed private corporations to spy on them pretty much with impunity. I’m so sick of right-wingers yelling “big gummint” whenever we might get our government to do good things.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, which would outlaw most corporate union-busting and give teeth to law enforcement when it goes after such corporate interference with worker organizing. You might even say that folks who oppose the PRO Act are objectively pro-defunding the police, or objectively anti-law and order. If folks come at you with unions make workplaces worse when you tell them they should support the PRO Act, come right back at them with so you think it’s OK for corporations to force their workers to sit through anti-union propaganda when they’ve got work to do? And if they respond it’s their money ha ha ha snort, ask them how shareholders should feel about them pissing it down the drain on anti-union propaganda, which is very expensive.

Finally, RISE helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the School Lunch Debt Cancellation Act, which would pay off the over $250 million of school lunch debt “accumulated” by good Americans. I put “accumulated” in quotation marks for many good reasons: one, our taxes should pay for school lunches, so nobody goes hungry, and two, it’s bad enough we blame adults for their poverty before we ever blame their bosses for refusing to pay them enough, but how bad is it, then, that we blame children for their parents’ poverty? I mean, you’d have to be a special kind of cruel to do that. Sadly, quite a few educators are that cruel, going so far as to publicly shame kids who don’t get caught up on the school lunch debt they shouldn’t even have to begin with. If we did more for those kids, we’d certainly give those educators a chance to be better versions of themselves.

Action: concerning Social Security, corruption, and housing.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject all efforts to cut Social Security, tell Sen. Menendez to resign already, and tell your Congressfolk to increase housing funding. 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 reject all right-wing efforts to cut Social Security benefits or raise the retirement age. Because people already work long enough for executives who hate them! And when right-wingers say we have to go “behind closed doors” to cut Social Security benefits, they’re really saying I hate democracy. I mean, there was a reason Bush the Lesser couldn’t even get a Republican-dominated House and Senate to vote on privatizing Social Security in 2005 – and that was because the people wouldn’t stand for it. Using a government shutdown as leverage to cut our earned benefits isn’t really any better – it’s still hostage-taking, and it’s still fascist. But these drama hounds will do it if we don’t speak out in numbers they can’t mistake.

Win Without War helps you tell Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) to resign his Senate seat. He’s entitled to try to prove his innocence in court, but no law compels us to put up with him as a U.S. Senator any longer, because no one has a “right” to a Senate seat. This is a hard thing to explain to some people, as we were all reminded during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination. And the indictments keep coming for Sen. Menendez, the latest one for conspiring to act as a foreign agent for Egypt. But Mr. Menendez acts like his constituents are rallying around him, although at present he’s polling around five percent in the Democratic Senate primary for 2024. So it wouldn’t kill him to actually show some leadership and resign.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase, not cut, housing funding. Perhaps our Congressfolk don’t know this because they live such sheltered lives, but rent is out of control in America now, thanks in part to the corporation with the monopoly on software that "suggests" rental prices, which means that federal housing assistance has to keep going up just to keep pace. I guess that doesn’t matter to the Republicans who can’t even find a new House speaker, since they think any government funding that actually helps people is evil. But they matter a whole lot less than we do, and the more we act like it, the more we’ll get out of our government to begin with.

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, Social Security and Medicare, and food labeling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop enabling Israel’s occupation of Palestine, reject any Social Security/Medicare-cutting commission, and pass the Food Date Labeling Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Jewish Voice for Peace and Roots Action help you tell your Congressfolk to stop enabling the Israeli occupation of Palestine. No use saying Hamas started it, and not just because it would take forever to unwind the you-started-it thread – it all comes back to one nation having the power to exterminate another, which Israel can do to Palestine mainly because of our support. No less an authority than Amnesty International has declared Israel an “apartheid regime,” and it’s beyond sad to hear Israel’s Defense Minister call Palestinians “human animals” as if no one had ever called Jews that. We don’t want extermination on our conscience, I trust.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to create a “closed door” commission so Congress can cut Social Security and Medicare benefits without oversight by the American people. That’s their whole argument: the cuts “need” to be made, so we have to give Congress more power to do it. But it’s horseshit – all we need do is start taxing income over $160,200 into the system, and we won’t need any “commissions” to make “hard decisions” about our earned benefits. No, they’re not “entitlements”! Our government didn’t give them to us out of the goodness of their hearts; we fought for them, and we’ll keep fighting for them, because you have to fight for the future every day in this life.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Food Date Labeling Act, which would streamline our food labeling system so that we throw away perfectly good food a lot less than we do now. Say goodbye to “sell by,” “freshest on,” and “expires on,” and say hello to “best if used by” and “use by,” the former of which tells you when food starts to deteriorate and the latter of which tells you how long you can eat that food. A staggering 40% of the food we make in America ultimately goes to waste, which in turn means we waste a lot of water and energy, too, not to mention there are starving kids right here in America; the Food Date Labeling Act will help us, as they say, waste not and want not.

Action: concerning endless war, our earned benefits, and ticket pricing.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs, reject any attempt to create a “behind closed doors” commission to cut Social Security and Medicare, and pass legislation mandating disclosure of real ticket prices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Upon hearing that Congress plans to replace the notorious 2001 and 2002 Authorizations to Use Military Force (or AUMFS) with yet another AUMF that would authorize yet more military adventures across the planet, you may want to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to repeal the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs, full stop. Don’t brook any hysteria about “terrorists still wanting to hurt us,” because an honest appraisal of American history will tell you that foreign terrorists hurt us after we’ve hurt their countryfolk. An honest appraisal of recent American history will tell you that most actual terrorists are right-wing bigots. Also too, our Constitution reserves war-making power for Congress, not our President. This, too, is not hard.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to create a commission that would meet “behind closed doors” to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits. It’s too important to be left to the people is the sum of the fascist argument favoring putting such cuts to your earned benefits “behind closed doors” and then fast-tracking those cuts through our House and Senate without adequate debate. The only reason anyone would want that? Because they know they’re forcing shit down your throat. Do you want your Congressfolk to force shit down your throat? No, you do not. But word on the street is they’re not hearing enough from us, so we’ve got to fix that right away.

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the TICKET Act, which would force ticket-selling corporations to advertise real ticket prices up-front, rather than do what they do now, which is put a fake ticket price in front of you and then add on all kinds of “handling” fees and “convenience” fees and “fuck you because we can” fees afterward. If we make them do this, then anyone who wants to enter the ticket-selling market – which is currently a monopoly, of course, hence their tendency to hide their real prices – might actually have a chance at competing, and maybe even winning. Remember: monopoly anywhere is a threat to competition anywhere, not least because bad people cite the “good” monopoly to justify the bad ones.

Action: concerning Social Security and Medicare, campaign finance, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to cut Social Security or Medicare “behind closed doors,” tell your Senators to pass a Constitutional amendment allowing us to regulate campaign finance again, and tell your Congressfolk to pass bills restraining big tech monopolies. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits “behind closed doors.” Americans have rejected such anti-democratic practices for “free” trade bills, so why would we accept them for Social Security and Medicare? We would not; our political classes want to do this “behind closed doors” in the vain hope that they can do evil without our knowing it, or that we won’t blame them for doing evil! If you want a handier way to explain what right-wingers want to do to Social Security and Medicare “behind closed doors,” here’s one, courtesy of Social Security Works: death panels. As in, Congress wants to create death panels for Social Security and Medicare. That should help bend them to our will.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass the Democracy for All constitutional amendment, so we can regulate campaign finance again. Citizens United v. FEC might have been our Supreme Court’s most unpopular decision of recent years, until Dobbs v. Jackson in 2022; polls tell us even two-thirds of Republican voters thought our Court got it wrong there, and given that I think corporate “personhood” (the “principle” upon which Citizens United rests) is an offensive fiction, I’m inclined to agree. But we’ll have to amend our Constitution in order to see our will done here, and that means Congress has to do our will first.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, the Open App Markets Act, and the AMERICA Act, so that we can begin to rein in big tech monopolies once and for all. The first bill would prevent big tech corporations from giving out anti-competitive preferences to other businesses on their platforms, the second would prevent big tech corporations from doing same on their app stores, and the third would start to break the stranglehold Google and Facebook have over digital advertising. If a lot of this sounds suspiciously like “net neutrality” to you, I wouldn’t blame you. These bills have quite a few Republican co-sponsors, but if we don’t want their conflicting urge to let corporations do whatever they want to win out, then we have to speak out.

Action: concerning Social Security and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to cut Social Security benefits “behind closed doors” or cut IRS funding, and to bring back the 2021 Child Tax Credit expansion. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to create a Social Security commission that would meet “behind closed doors” to cut Social Security benefits for future retirees like us. If they have to “meet behind closed doors,” that means they want to do something we wouldn’t tolerate, and we wouldn’t tolerate cutting the benefits we worked for, fought for, and deserve to enjoy when we retire. Again, all they have to do is the thing they absolutely won’t do because of their rich donors – tax higher incomes. No “behind closed doors” rubbish, though. That’s the mark of a coward, and it’s also the mark of a fascist. But I repeat myself.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to gut increased IRS funding. Because it’s working exactly the way we intended it to work! Our IRS has answered more than two million more calls than in previous years and has already harvested $38 million from rich tax cheats, and given there’s a lot more fraud out there than that, their continued efforts should yield more bounteous results in the future. Don’t fall for the lie that our IRS will use that money to go after poor people, because news flash! They were already doing that precisely because they were underfunded! Jesus Mary and Joseph I hate stupid arguments.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021, which put $250 or $300 checks every month, per child in working families’ bank accounts. Child poverty more than doubled the year after 50 Republican Senators and Joe Manchin let it expire and let’s make sure we get those villains in the right order, so we should bring that back, so kids can eat and be clothed and other things they have every right to expect of their childhood. Again, brook no lies about “families using those checks to buy drugs,” at least not in the absence of evidence. Any sentence beginning “you just know” is not evidence.

Action: concerning workers' rights, Social Security, and school lunches.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the PRO Act, tell Republicans you will not stand for raising the Social Security retirement age, and tell your Congressfolk to make school lunches free for all children in America. 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 to tell your Congressfolk to pass the PRO Act, so that corporations won’t be able to walk all over workers trying to organize for better pay and working conditions quite as much as they are now. Folks could only oppose the PRO Act if they think “right-to-work” means something other than “right-to-work-for-less,” or if they think it’s perfectly OK for bosses to simply refuse to negotiate with workers who’ve already voted to organize. And why should such folks get all of the say about everything? Hell, why should they get invites to our cookouts?

Social Security Works helps you tell Republicans we will not permit them to raise the Social Security retirement age. That’s the big solution of “sane” Republicans like Nikki Haley and Tim Scott – none of them will, for example, start to tax income over $160,200 into the system, which would alleviate the shortfalls that are always a few decades off because right-wingers love to cry about “imminent” Social Security “insolvency.” They do it so you’ll be demoralized and fight them less, but don’t let them gaslight you into inaction!

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk that school lunches ought to be free for all children in America. What’s that you say? You mean they’re not already free? By God, what do our taxes pay for, then? Those are all legit questions, but school lunches actually cost money, which fewer Americans have now after half a century of our “leaders” sucking up to big corporate power, so now the especially small minds in government resort to lunch shaming in order to get working families to pony up overdue school lunch bills. No civilization should put up with that – and no civilization should let it get that bad, either.

Action: concerning Medicare, Social Security, worker rights, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to increase Medicare and Social Security funding, protect worker rights, and protect abortion rights. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act, which would help improve Medicare and Social Security funding by taxing income over $400,000 into both systems, applying payroll taxes to investment income, and closing a loophole that hedge fund banksters use to avoid paying into the systems. These are all much, much better ideas than “going behind closed doors” and cutting Medicare and Social Security benefits without the people hearing about it. After all, you worked for it, you fought for it, you paid into it, and you deserve to enjoy your benefits when you get older.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, which would stiffen penalties for corporations that refuse to let their workers collectively bargain for better pay and working conditions. The main problem with labor law in America is corporations can break it without paying for it, but that’d change with the PRO Act, which would make refusing to negotiate with unions, intimidating workers, and propagandizing them in mandatory meetings a lot more costly. And what’s the alternative? Letting corporations get bigger and richer and hoping that wealth will “trickle down” to workers? Hopefully we’ve seen by now that doesn’t work.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to reject a national abortion ban, while UltraViolet helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Abortion Justice Act, which latter bill would keep abortion between a woman and her doctor. Strange how all the right-wingers who demanded that Obamacare stay out of the whole patient-doctor thing are all too ready now to get between women and their doctors. OK, I guess it’s not “strange” per se – the right-wing desire to turn women back into submissive breeders explains the “strangeness” away. It’s still hypocritical, though. Is it too much to ask that hypocrites don’t get all the say about everything?

Action: concerning Medicare, Social Security, drama, and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act, stop Tommy Tuberville’s big military hold drama, and start taxing billionaires a lot harder. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act, which would, as its title suggests, start taxing income over $400,000 into Medicare and Social Security and start taxing investment income into the system as well. The bill would also close certain loopholes that benefit hedge fund managers and fossil fuel corporations so they start paying more. I’ll never express any alarmism over these programs, because I’ve been hearing hysterical alarms about their "impending" "insolvency" all my damn life, but doing these things would help Medicare and Social Security be even better for good Americans. I know it’s Friday, but let’s get in our Congressfolk’s grills about this.

Care2 helps you tell your Senators to lean on Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville and tell him to stop blocking military nominations. He’s doing it, supposedly, because of our military’s policy to help soldiers who need abortions and who live in anti-abortion states with travel expenses, but Jesus Mary and Joseph how about just winning the argument and getting legislation passed? Could he be pulling this crap because he knows he can’t do these things? I kid, of course – this is exactly the kind of thing evil people do when they can’t coerce good people into doing what they want. Your Senators need to know this is evil. Your Senators also need to know that if they let this appalling drama go on, they never get to call themselves “pro-military” again.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to start taxing billionaires a lot harder than we currently do. Ain’t nobody a billionaire through hard work – after all, you’ve done hard work, and plenty of it I bet, and did it ever get you as far as just sucking up to a bankster? No, it did not. And that’s a sad commentary on our civilization. We can start to fix our civilization by reversing our 60-plus years of cutting rich folks’ taxes and start taxing them again. No, they won’t “move overseas,” because even billionaires don’t just up and move whenever they like. No, they won’t “refuse to create jobs,” because they’re already doing that with all the light taxation they enjoy! Stupidity can’t keep winning in America.

Action: concerning taxes, Social Security, and Supreme Court ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject Republican tax “reform” plans, boycott Kevin McCarthy’s Social Security-cutting Commission, and pass Supreme Court ethics legislation. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Americans for Tax Fairness and Public Citizen help you tell your Congressfolk to reject the latest tax scam coming out of the House Ways and Means Committee, which, sigh, provides massive tax breaks to foreign investors and maybe $40 a year in tax breaks to you and I. Why, that smells like the first Bush Mobb tax cut, doesn’t it? Aside from that $300 check I kept returning, I pocketed $60 from that in 2001 and in 2002, even though the “average” tax cut was supposedly around $1,800 annually; I wonder who got the rest of it! I kid, of course – Republicans love cutting your taxes a little so they can cut their big donors’ taxes a lot. We don’t have to put up with that, of course, so how about we not?

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to boycott Kevin McCarthy’s Commission to Slash Social Security Behind Closed Doors Without Any Input From the American People. OK, he’s not calling it that, but that’s what it is, and just as we made Social Security and Medicare benefit cuts too toxic for Congress to consider during the debt limit “debate,” we need to make it toxic for any of our Congressfolk to take part in this clown show of a “commission.” Too many politicians pretend they’re “serious” because they’ll cut someone else’s earned benefits, but they’re not. Actual serious people keep their damn promises, and so should our Congressfolk.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell your Senators to enact new ethics standards for our Supreme Court. We’ve listed plenty of reasons to make our Supreme Court Justices adhere to the same ethics standards every other federal judge has to follow – we’ve lately been reminded of another one, involving the late Justice Ginsburg – but all we need say now is: did you see that shitshow that was the end of their term? If they didn’t pal around with so many rich folks giving them so many gifts, they wouldn’t have issued two of the worst rulings of the new millennium 10 days ago. They claim they’re “incorruptible,” but we know they’re human, so we still need laws to protect us from them.

Action: concerning tax cuts for the rich, Social Security, Medicare, and stock buybacks.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject attempts to extend the Trump tax cuts for the rich, tell Democrats to ignore Kevin McCarthy’s Social Security/Medicare benefit-cutting commission, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Reward Work Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject Republican attempts to extend the Trump tax cuts for the rich. Yep, our Republican-held House is trying to extend those tax cuts for the rich, and they’ll pay for it by wiping out renewable energy tax credits, because nothing is more important than “owning the libs.” Seriously, it’s like the first question they ask when they make policy is how can I hurt people? And of course wiping out renewable tax credits won’t pay for all those tax cuts for the rich, thus mere weeks after all that posturing about the deficit, they’re going to try to make those deficits even bigger. And they’ll get whatever they want if we don’t speak out.

Social Security Works helps you tell Democrats to ignore Kevin McCarthy’s Social Security/Medicare commission. Republicans didn’t get Social Security and Medicare benefit cuts in their debt limit “deal,” but Speaker McCarthy has announced he’ll put together a commission that’ll get together “behind closed doors” to cut these benefits. They’ll have to do it “behind closed doors” because everyone will hate them even more if they do it out in the open! Sadly, a few Democrats may want to demonstrate their “seriousness” by joining this commission. We need to get in their grills about that, and if we do, they’ll fold, because weak people always fold in the face of strength.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Reward Work Act, which would ban stock buybacks and let workers elect a third of corporate boards. Stock buybacks let corporations plow their profits into buying stock back from other shareholders, instead of investing in, making their workplaces and their products better; it used to be illegal, because it concentrates corporate power in fewer hands, and the Reward Work Act would make it illegal again. And putting more worker-friendly folks on corporate boards would also help make workplaces better. Republicans pretend to be populists, but if they were populists, they’d support this bill.

Readings for June 19, 2023.

Ho hum, the Washington Post is miffed that the debt ceiling “deal” didn’t do slash Social Security and Medicare benefits like they’ve wanted to do since time immemorial, and all I can say is oh STFU already. The real driver of debt is our continuing failure to tax the rich and corporations as hard as we did in the 1950s; we taxed millionaire income at 91% and corporations at 55% then, but now we do that at 37% and 21%, respectively, and with a lot more loopholes now than then. The Post didn’t go as hard after Medicare, which I suppose is progress, but also didn’t mention that Medicare-for-All would save us about $1.6 trillion annually in health care costs – and that figure comes from the right-wing Mercatus Center, not that they exactly foregrounded it. The one letter-to-the-editor FAIR quotes in its article is worth the price of admission.

Wondering exactly what to say to your right-wing uncle who says the Trump indictment is no big deal? You know, besides I don’t do Flat Earth Society crap? Judd Legum at Popular Information refutes the four main counterarguments of the right, including “Hillary did the same thing” and “Biden did the same thing” (each individual cooperated with our Justice Department, while Mr. Trump, per the indictment, did not, and anyway Mike Pence “did the same thing,” too, except he also cooperated and won’t be charged for what he did). The worst, of course, is “this all sets a dangerous precedent where the party that comes into power just goes after its enemies,” an utterance not merely of cowardice but hubris. After all, if Republicans hadn't acted with such restraint after Bill Clinton’s 1992 election, they might have set a precedent.

Maxwell Strachan at Motherboard writes about a Texas couple who bought a house planning to rent it out via Airbnb, only to be banned by Airbnb for being “closely associated with a person who isn’t allowed to use Airbnb," in this case a homeowner’s parent’s partner, who had two non-violent offenses (one drug-related) in his background. In the couple’s account, Airbnb did a terrible enough job handling (and ultimately denying) their appeal that they suspected that algorithms handled it more than people did. They got Airbnb to reverse their decision after going to the media about it, but in the meantime we witness what happens when we a) don’t strangle monopolies in their crib, b) act like putting people in jail is the only duty a civilization has to perform, and c) let bosses fire all their employees because algorithms don’t call out sick.

Action: concerning taxes, Social Security, Medicare, and stock buybacks.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to tax corporations the rich harder, tell Democrats to boycott Speaker McCarthy’s Social Security/Medicare-cutting commission, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Reward Work 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.

In the wake of this debt limit “deal,” Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to extend the Trump tax cuts for the rich and for corporations, while Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to start taxing billionaires a lot harder if they’re really serious about our national debt. Which they’re not, like ever, but the more we tell them they need to tax the rich and corporations harder, the tougher it’ll be for them to pretend they don’t hear us. I’m old enough to remember when Democrats were too scared to even talk about it, so I know we’ve made progress – and if we keep at it, we’ll make more.

Social Security Works helps you tell Congressional Democrats to boycott Speaker McCarthy’s Social Security/Medicare “reform” commission. He announced it right after getting his debt limit “deal,” and we know why: because we all got in his grill about never, ever cutting Social Security and/or Medicare benefits and as a result he not only didn’t get those cuts, he didn’t even try all that hard for them. But if any Democrats take part in this commission drama, they could make it easier for Congress to cut Social Security and Medicare without input from the American people, and we should never let such a thing happen. So it’s time to get in their grills again.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Reward Work Act, which would absolutely reward work by a) outlawing stock buybacks and b) making corporations put workers on their boards. Thus corporations would (in reverse order) support jobs by hearing more from the people who actually do them and actually investing in those jobs, which they don’t have to do as long as we allow them to plow their profits into consolidating shareholder power into fewer and fewer hands. The way the game is now, all corporate executives care about is making more money for less work, so our government has to step in on our behalf to fix that.

Action: concerning taxes and debt-limit drama.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and stop cutting services for working families and tax all rich folks’ income the way we tax working families’ income, and tell House Republicans to keep their grubby mitts off our earned benefits in Medicare and Social Security. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Today is Tax Day, so Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on corporations and the rich and stop cutting services for working families. I’m old enough to remember when the top tax rate was 70%; now it’s 37%. Yet Congress still hands out corporate welfare “research and development” tax breaks when we already don’t tax research and development, because they’re expenses. And what drives most of our ballooning deficits? Tax cuts for the rich, that’s what – to the tune of $10 trillion in debt from the Bush and Trump tax cuts alone. So today’s a good day to get in their grills. So’s any day, really, but especially today.

In a related note, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to “tax their money like your work,” meaning tax the rich’s wealth as hard as they tax our work. We just discussed how low income taxes have gotten for the rich, but it’s even worse than that: rich folks make more money than any of us do from dividends and capital gains, which, guess what, have an even lower tax rate. Plus the Estate tax gets more lenient all the time, so that now rich folks can exempt the first $12.9 million from taxes! I think $1 million is more than enough to pass on; any more would deprive heirs of vital character-building opportunities, and we’re all about opportunity here in America.

Finally, Courage for American helps you tell House Republicans to “back off our benefits,” namely Social Security and Medicare benefits. Speaker McCarthy’s said they’re “off the table,” but if five members of his caucus decide they’re not, then he suddenly doesn’t have the votes for a debt-limit resolution, so we can safely ignore that "promise." He’s been putting together a debt-limit resolution lately; who knows if it’ll pass? I feel secure in saying it doesn’t matter if it passes; it only matters that he puts forth a resolution that doesn’t make Republicans look like complete ogres. But let’s forestall all this drama by getting in their grills about this now.

Action: concerning Medicare, Social Security, education, the Estate Tax, and the Biden budget.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any Medicare or Social Security benefit cuts, reject any education funding cuts, reject Estate Tax repeal, and pass the Biden budget already. 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.

Courage for America helps you tell the Republican House majority to “back off” our earned Medicare and Social Security benefits. They’ve said they won’t cut these benefits, but you know the minute we take our eye off the ball the reaper’s scythe will start slashing, and anyway they don’t need 218 votes to cut benefits – they only need five, as in the number of Republican House Reps who can deprive Mr. McCarthy of a working majority on any bill. I’d bet Our Glorious Elites are counting on that, in fact! Someday there’ll be a price to pay for defying the popular will again and again – but not if we don’t speak our will.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any efforts to cut education funding. They’ll be coming for that as a “deficit-fighting” tool, as well, particularly since right-wingers have done a lot of work seizing that issue back from liberals. They’ve been doing it by whining about having to wear masks and banning books and threatening their fellow citizens at school board meetings, but gosh, what energy! And they probably think that gives them the momentum to cut federal education funding! Well, we cut funding that actually helps good Americans enough. It’s about time we stop hurting each other just to make these alleged philosophical stands.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to repeal the Estate Tax, since Republicans have reintroduced an Estate Tax repeal bill and are still telling the same tall tales about folks losing their family farms over it. Why “tall tales”? Not just because the stories you hear (cough Kristi Noem cough) have, shall we say, holes in them, and not just because even the anti-Estate Tax crowd has never found even one family farm killed by the Estate Tax, but also because big ag monopolies have been killing family farms for 50 years! Blaming the Estate Tax for the death of the family farm is like blaming a mosquito bite for the death of a shooting victim.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Biden budget already. The Biden budget, as you know, would raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, institute a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, raise the stock buyback tax, establish 12 weeks of paid family/medical leave, and re-expand the Child Tax Credit, among many other good works; no use calling it an “aspirational” document when all our Congressfolk have to do is pass it. Is it a perfect budget? No. Will Republicans come up with anything better? Also no. And would it be better than what we’ve got? Absolutely! But not if we don’t speak out.

Penny rants for April 6, 2023: special "centrists still suck" edition!

When I hear that a few “centrist” House Democrats are trying to put together their own debt limit plan with a few “moderate” Republicans, I remember 2005, when a House “centrist” asked Nancy Pelosi when Democrats would offer their own plan to gut Social Security, and Ms. Pelosi shot back “never! How’s never for you?” You know how right-wingers say you should never negotiate with terrorists? Right-wingers negotiate with terrorists all the time when they get in office, of course, because who wouldn’t negotiate with like-minded folks? But the principle is the same: you do not negotiate with people who do not want to negotiate, but who only want drama and hysteria. And if we wind up going into default, everyone knows whose fault it will be – the Republicans who’ve spent the last several decades just saying no to everything. Hate to pile on, but a clean debt limit increase is the “moderate” position here – no one has yet tried to use the debt limit to force expanding Medicare to all Americans, for example, not that I’d ever want to give anyone ideas.

Hard to believe, Harry, but the infamous No Labels group – now as demonstrably far-right organization as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – has raised $70 million so far to promote a third-party Presidential ticket, getting “ballot access” in four states. But strangely, they won’t reveal the names of any of their donors, and their excuse for that – that “agitators and partisan operatives” will bully them, basically, like they don't understand the whole concept of “sunlight” – is a real right-wing excuse. I, for one, am tired of people pretending to be “centrists” so that the pain and suffering of good Americans can never be alleviated. And seriously, while Republicans predominantly run extremists in every office, Democrats haven’t run a Presidential candidate anyone could possibly call as an “extremist” in my lifetime, yet “centrist” “independent” "bipartisan" morons plod on in their both-sides-are-bad absurdity. And look how well-funded this particular gaggle of morons are! For the record, Joe Biden has already earned my vote in 2024, and I’m far more of an “extremist” than he’ll ever be.

Action: concerning drama, banksters, pollution, and abortion.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass a clean debt limit bill, and pass the Secure Viable Banking Act, the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act, and the Global HER Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to sign a discharge petition mandating a vote on a clean debt limit bill, one without any hostage-taking or drama. Seriously, no more drama! is the message our Congressfolk need to hear. They’ll pretend they’re hearing from constituents (or, possibly, “constituents”) about TEH RUNAWAYZ SPENDINGZ!!!!, but they really need to hear this simple message: no more drama! Do your damn job! Stop trying to force evil down good Americans’ throats! Social Security cuts, Medicare cuts – they know they can’t do them without drama. But it we get in their grills, they can’t do it at all.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Secure Viable Banking Act, which would repeal Trump-era banking regulation rollbacks. You know, like the one that increased the amount of rubbish a bank could hold without submitting to stricter regulations. Stricter regulations could have prevented those bank failures (and the resulting bailouts – the fact that taxpayers didn’t pay for them doesn’t make it that much better!), but big bankster CEOs didn’t want them, because waaaaaaaaaaaah. Seriously, that’s the reason – who complains more about fulfilling obligations to society than a bankster?

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act, and though I wince at the phrase “foreign mining” – mining and polluting near sacred San Carlos Apache/protected public land would be just as wrong if an American corporation did it! – the bill would permanently protect the Oak Flat area of the Tonto National Forest, thus ending a shameful chapter in the careers of former Sen. Flake (who once lobbied for the same corporation that wants to mine Oak Flat) and the late Sen. McCain, whose attention to clean air/clean water/religious freedom issues was always erratic. So let’s redeem their souls and protect some sacred public land.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Global HER Act, which would end forever the “global gag rule” that Republican Presidents reinstate the day they take office. I hate having to revisit this issue every time the Presidency changes parties even more than I hate the fact that electing a President from a different party even matters! And the fact is, the global gag rule hurts people all over the world – right-wingers pretend it prevents us from “exporting abortion,” but it actually prevents us from exporting health care to developing nations, since abortion is only one service health care organizations provide. So let’s end this battle once and for all.

Action: concerning free speech, endless wars, tax cuts for the rich, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell Florida legislators to reject an anti-free speech bill,and tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq War AUMF, repeal the Trump tax cuts for the rich, and pass the Social Security Expansion 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.

Free Press helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject SB 1316, which would require any blogger who writes about Gov. DeSantis or state legislators register with the state or face heavy fines. Can you say "poll tax," boys and girls? And how do they justify such a thing? By saying all we want to know is who our enemies are? Here’s who your enemies are, Florida: everyone who thinks for themselves. And that’s most of us in America. I’m serious; no more than a quarter of Americans are mindless drones lapping up whatever right-wingers spew forth. They get a lot more media coverage than we do, but to quote a famous philosopher: they do not surround us; we surround them. So let’s remind everyone of that.

The American Friends Service Committee helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that “authorized” the Iraq War. And while the 2002 AUMF, like the 2001 AUMF that enabled all kinds of madness in the “war on terror,” is worse than a wad of used toilet paper, every President since Bush the Lesser has used it to justify all manner of extra-legal military adventures – think Obama in Libya and Syria and Trump in Iran and Syria. We can’t bring back dead soldiers or dead Iraqis, or those whom ISIS has exterminated, but perhaps we can begin to earn their forgiveness by repealing the 2002 AUMF.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Trump tax-cuts-for-the-rich, which would include the tax cuts in the top tax brackets and the massive cut in the corporate tax rate. Republicans are doing the helicopter dance about “deficits” and “debts,” but they all voted for the Trump tax cuts, which helped make trillion-dollar deficits in America the norm. So if they won’t force the rich to pay more in taxes now – you know, because DEFICITZ BADZ!!!!!! – then why should we listen to them about a damn thing? And if Democrats won’t have guts, we’ve got to have it for them.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act. When right-wingers play offense, what do we do? Play offense! Nobody roots for the team running the prevent defense at the end of the game! And taxing rich folks to pay for expanded Social Security benefits is actually quite popular, as you would imagine, given that most Americans, as I’ve said, are pretty smart. What are right-wingers going to do, pretend that taxing the rich is dumb? Taxing the rich, more than anything else, made ours the greatest middle class in history after World War II. So take no BS about this matter.

Action: concerning child labor, health care, immigration, and product safety.

Long story short: tell Iowa state legislators to reject a bill that would loosen child labor laws, and tell your Congressfolk to defend Medicaid and CHIP and pass the DREAM Act and the Sunshine in Product Safety 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.

Care2 helps you tell Iowa state legislators to reject Senate File 167, which would loosen child labor laws so that corporations could put 14-17-year-olds to work in such carefree childhood vocations as demolition, mining, and meatpacking. Perhaps even worse, the bill would let corporations off the hook in civil suits for any kids they neglected, sickened, injured, or killed at the workplace! Because trial lawyers bad! No: putting kids to work in dangerous occupations is bad, though maybe it’s not as snappy a bumper sticker slogan. Look, either children are the future, or they’re just another workforce for fat-cat bosses to use and discard. They ain’t both. And if we have any say about it, they ain’t the latter.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to defend both Medicaid and the Childrens’ Health Insurance Program (or CHIP) from Congressional debt-limit hostage-takers. Maybe they won’t get Social Security and Medicare cuts and then again maybe they will, but we need to put them on notice about Medicaid and CHIP as well. Medicaid is less popular than Social Security and Medicare, because of the absurd perception that it only helps lazy people, but it’s no less important than any of the other programs they’ve taken so much flak about cutting. And Republicans already let CHIP expire once, so they don’t care about kids, and why should they keep getting away with that?

The Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk pass the DREAM Act, which, as you no doubt remember, would help immigrant children whose legal standing in America has lapsed, but who’ve met certain standards of service and education, to remain in America (and keep contributing to American culture) rather than get deported back to the countries they’ve never known. Because that’s cruel! And to those who reflexively respond AMURKIA FIRSTZ!!!! to everything because they can’t argue their way out of a paper bag: the DREAM Act would help, at most, some 1.9 million folks out of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in America, so this is not so damn much to ask.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Sunshine in Product Safety Act, which would let our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) warn the American public about dangerous products without having to get permission from the corporation that manufactured the dangerous product first. Yes, you read that right! Currently we can’t spread the word about dangerous products lest we hurt some corporation’s fee-fees! That’s because Congress amended the Consumer Product Safety Act to give corporations an effective veto over product safety announcements in 1981. Still we deal with the bitter fruits of the Reagan Revolution. This is why we fight.

Action: concerning taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called “FAIR” Tax, any extension of the Trump tax-cuts-for-the-rich, and any attempt to repeal the additional IRS funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, and tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire’s Mininum Income Tax. 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 reject any attempt to pass the so-called “FAIR” Tax, which would replace our income, corporate, payroll, and Estate taxes with a single 30% sales tax, which would be like immediate 30% inflation. And given all our talk about Social Security lately, we should note that, in addition to the 893 other reasons we should reject the “FAIR” Tax, it’ll eventually cause Social Security to fail. You remember the “FAIR” Tax would replace the payroll tax, which funds Social Security, and with ITEP telling us the rate would have to be more like 60% to raise the same money, well, you see where that’s going. Kill this beast before it kills us.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to make the Trump tax cuts permanent. The “FAIR” Tax, in addition to all its other evils, would represent a massive tax cut for the rich, and so do the Trump tax cuts, where that 2.6-point cut at the top end represents hundreds of thousands of dollars for many, many undeserving rich. But I have good news for you: the Trump tax cuts didn’t keep Democrats from taking our House back in 2018, so don’t get spooked by any “they’re coming for your tax cuts” BS. Did you even notice you got a tax cut? It’s entirely possible you didn’t. You sure didn’t get a couple hundred grand like some folks did!

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any efforts to repeal the additional IRS funding provided by the Inflation Reduction Act. No, our IRS isn’t coming for your money! At least, not more than it was when it was underfunded and understaffed and only went after the folks who filled out their Earned Income Tax Credit or Child Tax Credit wrong. Now our IRS has the money to go after rich folks, and I have more good news for you: Republicans’ fearmongering over IRS funding didn’t exactly deliver the sturm und drang electoral showing they were counting on in 2022. So don’t believe their hype here, either.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, one that’ll actually get at the massive amounts of wealth billionaires hoard and never pay taxes on because they don’t actually sell off those assets. Don’t believe anyone who tells you billionaires deserve to keep what they got! These clowns trip over their own penis in public every day! And not for nothing, but even if our Supreme Court eventually strikes it down – and since it’s something that’d actually help people, they’re no doubt masturbating over that opportunity as we speak – that’ll be just another nail in the coffin of their reputation.