Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: with more dire warnings about mistakes good people still make.

Matt Stoller tells us "How Joe Biden Engineered Apple's New Air Pods," which can, with a software update, also be used as actual hearing aids. The hate-blind will guffaw with joyless laughter at that statement, but the Biden Administration did in fact force our Food and Drug Administration, via Executive Order, to approve over-the-counter hearing aids for folks with moderate hearing loss after our FDA spent years dragging their feet (and defying our laws) on that matter. Getting hearing aids without prescriptions also breaks up the collusion between health insurance corporations, hearing aid manufacturing corporations, and hearing specialists, since most folks can adjust their hearing aids with their smartphones these days. They say the politicians don't do good things for people any more, but Joe Biden does. So of course our "liberal" media ran him out.

I am not actually sure that the Trump tax "reform" "led to a $20 billion reduction in charitable giving within a year." The evidence: that "Americans who stopped itemizing their tax deductions gave less to charity in 2018 than they otherwise would have," but if only 30% of Americans itemized their deductions before that, what of the 70% of taxpayers who weren't itemizing their deductions in the first place? We don't learn. Also, charitable giving has gone up and down over the last six years, and ended up $35 billion higher in 2023 than in 2017. The expanded standard deduction is one of the few good things about the Trump tax "reform," and though we ought to allow more working families to deduct their charitable deductions more easily, the "finding" described above isn't a reason for that. So file this under "The Flesh is Willing, But…"

Some red states – namely Nebraska, Missouri, and Alaska – will put paid family/medical leave before the voters in 2024. I suspect that voters in all three states will handily approve paid family/medical leave, since voters are generally better human beings than their representatives – but those representatives, in at least two of those states, will try their damnedest to overturn the express will of the people, and may even succeed. (I give Alaska politicians more credit than those of Nebraska and Missouri. Especially Missouri. What a political cesspool! They should all be turned out of office!)

So now we hear that the individual who first posted about "immigrants eating pets" on Facebook "was simply repeating a story she had heard from a neighbor," "who’d heard it themselves from a friend, who’d heard it from someone else" Jesus Mary and Joseph I can't even. This rumor enabled domestic terror threats against the government of Springfield, OH, which, last I looked, was composed of people, despite what right-wingers want you to think. And while I'm tempted to say people should just STFU until they know what they're talking about, I don't even believe the rumor-spreader's story. I think she knew full well what she was doing, because Trumpholes don't get the benefit of the doubt anymore. How can they, after all these years?

When I hear that Democrat politicos are salivating at all the attack ads they can run against Donald Trump just using clips from his disastrous recent debate, all I can say is: have these fuckers learned nothing from 2016? Because I remember watching negative ad after negative ad in 2016 and thinking too many independents were going to throw up their hands and stay home because "everyone's so negative," and that's what happened, and Donald Trump got elected. Democrats have lately been running ads that focus on issues and solutions; they've even run some funny ads. They need to keep doing that, so people see the difference between them and Republicans, whose ads will all be shouting at the top of their lungs about crime and immigration because what else have they got?

Finally, I feel compelled to warn you, yet again, about stories of right-wingers fighting each other over that immigrants-eating-pets fake news: just like with the recent Marjorie Taylor Greene/Laura Loomer "fight," remember that right-wingers occasionally disagree with other right-wingers just to look "sane" or "independent" every so often, so they can bring it up next time you accurately call them insane or a jackboot lockstep marcher. So don't ever get sucked in by the drama! And don't start a lot of sentences with "even so-and-so thinks." That's how they get you to normalize them, and we should never, ever, ever normalize these awful people.

Action: concerning rich tax evasion, corrupt judges, and vote suppression.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the OLIGARCH Act and the High Court Gift Ban Act and reject the SAVE 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 pass the OLIGARCH Act, which would create a four-bracket wealth tax (the brackets would be 2%, 4%, 6%, and 8%) on homes with at least 1,000 times the median wealth in America. So brook no silliness about how this would be a "100% tax" (like Donald Trump said in 2020), because the four brackets are right there, and none of them would even come close to breaking a billionaire. Why, Elon Musk could still spend $45 million a month trying to elect Donald Trump President! That's a hell of a lot of money to piss away, by the way. If I had $45,000< I could do a hell of a lot more good than he's doing with all his money!

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the High Court Gift Ban Act, which would ban gifts over $50 to our Supreme Court Justices (and limit aggregate gifts to $100 annually). After all the luxury vacations our Justices have gotten from billionaires over the years (which we've only learned about lately!), you'd think they'd know better than to say how dare you say we can't be impartial! You may remember that all it took to get Bank of Amerikkka clerks to foreclose on more homes were $25 cash gifts and Bed, Bath, and Beyond gift cards. So we've got to put some guardrails on our Supreme Court Justices.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to reject the so-called SAVE Act, which purports to be a bill protecting us from the scourge of undocumented immigrants voting – for the record, that's been illegal since anyone can remember, and no one can even prove it's happening – but would also turbocharge right-wing efforts to throw people off the voting rolls for the heinous crime of being Black or Brown (and therefore, in their minds, a Democrat voter). Look, if Republicans want people to vote for them, then maybe they should offer something other than hysteria and drama. It ain't that damn deep.

Action: concerning hedge funds, health care, and worker organizing.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, the Right to Contraception Act, and the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) 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.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. You like that, banksters? Just wait until you all get to Ayn Rand Heaven and she calls you looters, too! Not just her, of course, but the good Americans who work at Red Lobster, as well. The Stop Wall Street Looting Act would force banksters to take care of workers first during bankruptcy proceedings, stiffen penalties when they break the law, and prohibit dividend payouts from an “acquired asset” for two years. Oh, the bill would also treat “carried interest” as income — you know, like it actually is — and thus end that particular tax-cut-for-the-rich. So, yeah, Congress should do all of that, because it’s the right thing to do.

Both UltraViolet and the National Women’s Law Center help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Right to Contraception Act. Because Clarence Thomas explicitly said our Supreme Court will be coming for that! The Right to Contraception Act would generally prevent governments and corporations from impeding anyone’s access to contraception, and would only allow said governments and corporations to defend such an impediment only on the grounds that it actually doesn’t impede access to contraception. In other words, it wouldn’t let them claim BUT OURZ RELIGIZZ CONSHENCEZ!!!!! After all, your conscience is for you, not for everyone else. Why is it so hard for wannabe fascists to understand that? Oh, wait, that question answers itself.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the PRO Act. You recall how Mercedes workers told us that they were constantly being pulled into anti-union propaganda meetings (“hey, we’re a family here!”) during that unsuccessful union drive? And how Oregon Labcorp workers reported (during their successful union drive) that they, too, got pulled into these propaganda meetings – and they really resented it because they were already understaffed and overworked? Well, the PRO Act would put a stop to a lot of these shenanigans, and let workers unionize, if they want, on a more level playing field. Level playing fields are sort of why we’re America, right?

Action: concerning stock buybacks, corporate welfare, wind power, and tax cuts for the rich.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, and the NOW Act, and tell your Congressfolk to let the worst parts of the 2017 Trump tax “reform” expire. 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.

Inequality Media helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, which would raise the 1% stock buyback tax (enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022) with a 4% tax, which would, I would think, be at least four times as effective in discouraging stock buybacks, which used to be illegal, because they concentrated shareholder power in fewer and fewer hands, but now are as big a blot on our economy as the hedge fund or the monthly stock report. You know it’s always the folks who already have too much money (i.e., executives) who buy back the most stock, but the Stock Buyback Accountability Act would help make shareholders relevant again.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, which would restore the 35% corporate tax rate, close loopholes that allow corporations to move money overseas and outsource our jobs, and end, once and for all, the practice of using a Cayman Islands P.O. Box as a “headquarters.” Every year, too many big corporations pay literally nothing in taxes – or, worse, suck tax money out of our very pockets. That’s money that could pay for cops, libraries, and bridges! But the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act would help us get that money for the public investment we deserve, so we should do it.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Nonrestrictive Offshore Wind (or NOW) Act, which would repeal the law (passed, sadly, in the Inflation Reduction Act) mandating that wind power leases can only occur after our government has handed out an offshore oil drilling lease. Hey, it was what Joe Manchin would let happen in 2022! And I’m sure more than a few Americans are still so timid about these “new” renewable energy sources that they don’t mind their development being so closely tied to the further development of “established” energies. But renewables have been around for decades, and really, we don’t need training wheels to use them anymore.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires also helps you tell your Congressfolk to let the worst parts of the 2017 Trump tax “reform” law expire. That would, sadly, not include the corporate tax rate cut from 35% to 21% (which is why we need the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act described above) but it would include the big tax cuts for the top income tax brackets and the pass-through deductions that somehow only benefit the already-too-rich. Don’t expect a second Trump term to do anything but give bosses more unearned goodies; best that we take action now, and at least reveal to our Congressfolk a will they will have to work to ignore.

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 taxing the rich.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and reject any tax policy that hurts good Americans so Congress won’t raise taxes on the rich. 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 OLIGARCH Act, which would assess a 2%, 4%, or 6% tax on wealth exceeding median household wealth by between 1,000 and 1,000,000 times. Look at those three numbers again and understand this would not be a 100% TAX!!!!!! on wealth, as Donald Trump has said. If all these wealth tax bills have spun your head around a bit, know that telling your Congressfolk we want to tax the rich a lot harder than we do now always benefits us, regardless of what banner that desire might be flying at a particular moment.

In a similar vein, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any regressive tax policy that only makes already-rich folks richer – like cutting services any of us might need one day to avoid raising taxes on the rich, or cutting IRS funding so that rich folks can get away with more tax evasion. Or keeping the corporate tax rate so low! Americans for Tax Fairness’s tool helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to “at least 28%,” but why stop there? In the ‘50s, it was 55%, and it helped create the greatest middle class in history, so maybe say that instead!

Action: concerning monopolies, saving our Postal Service, and taxing the rich.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Subsidizing Mergers Act, the Postal Banking Act, and 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.

The Stop Subsidizing Mergers Act would, as its title suggests, end tax-free mergers involving corporations that bring in over $500 million over three years. Currently shareholders don’t pay taxes on their newly-enhanced-by-the-merger stock at the time of the merger; they only pay it when they sell the stock, which might be never (or when the stock is lower, which means less tax revenue!), and anyway too many rich folks hide behind their hifalutin financial instruments as a way of avoiding their duty to pay their taxes. This bill merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Postal Banking Act, which would enable our Post Offices to offer basic banking services like small loans and checking and savings accounts. Not only would that enable our Postal Service to make more money – and since our taxes don’t fund our USPS, that’s a big deal – but it would enable some seven million Americans who live in areas banksters won’t touch to do better than the payday lenders and check-cashing joints they’re currently stuck with. Our USPS used to offer basic banking, and they should again.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ultra-Millionaire Act, which would tax any household or trust an additional 2% on net worth over $50 million and then 3% on net worth over $1 billion. This bill would not raise taxes on literally 99.95% of Americans, so don’t brook any stupidity from the right about it. When a similar proposal came up in 2020, Donald Trump simply called it a 100% tax (you do see the numbers “2%” and “3%, I trust!), and that’s how far right-wingers will go to try to get you to oppose it. But you and I will never be worth $50 million. You know why? Because we won’t hurt people to get it. Everyone with that money did.

Penny rants for March 11, 2024.

Lucian Truscott IV at Salon informs us that the New York Times/Siena poll showing Donald Trump leading Joe Biden 52-48, ah, has problems, chief among them that its rural voters sample is nearly twice as large as the percentage of rural voters who voted in 2020. But a lot’s changed since then, you say? Sure – Roe v. Wade is dead, Donald Trump attempted a coup, inflation went way up and then came way down and more folks talk about the link between high corporate profits and inflation than they did before, and none of these events should spark rural voters to turn out like that for Donald Trump. And while I’d love to believe that pollsters are simply overcompensating for underestimating Republican turnout in 2020, everyone knows that Americans pay too much attention to polling, so they should be more aware of the effects of their actions. And anyway I don’t think they’re overcompensating – I think they’re trying to create a Trump-Will-Win narrative because that’s what they want. They remember what their ratings were like, and you think Donald Trump will go after monopolies the way Joe Biden has? No, you do not.

Perhaps realizing that a distant third-place finish in this year’s Arizona Senate race will more likely hurt the Republican Senate candidate than the Democratic one, putatively independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has announced she won’t run for re-election this year, explaining: “(c)ompromise is a dirty word. We’ve arrived at that crossroad, and we chose anger and division. I believe in my approach, but it’s not what America wants right now.” Well, no – America doesn’t want her “bipartisan” approach, in which “bipartisanship” means “Democrats giving in to Republicans on everything.” And remember that she, and she alone, nixed higher taxes on the rich in 2021 – “getting to yes” with fellow Democrats being far less important to her, apparently, than “getting to yes” with Republicans – and that she also delayed Medicare drug price negotiation for another year, extracting continued lower taxes for hedge fund managers in exchange for finally letting it happen. So she gave in to banksters, and she let the rich get more tax relief than working families, who also got less relief from high health care costs – who on Earth wants that sort of “compromise”?

Thieves in the Temple will take the rest of the week off, so everyone have a great week, and Republicans: no shenanigans.

Action: concerning voting rights, Medicare privatization, and IRS funding.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to restore voting rights, prevent Medicare privatization, and 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.

The Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore voting rights in America, by passing both the Freedom to Vote Act (which would expand early voting and automatic voter registration, among other good works) and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (which would allow our Justice Department to pre-clear voting law changes from any state or locality which establishes a record of vote suppression, not just Southern ones). If Congress passes these bills, more good Americans will be able to vote – which politicians often don’t like, but they don’t get all the say around here.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any and all efforts to privatize Medicare. Privatized Medicare Advantage has become more and more a yoke around Medicare’s neck over the last few years – or maybe we’re just more aware of it – but we could take all the corporate welfare we’re handing out to private health insurance corporations so they can do a worse job serving seniors than Medicare does, and we could, you know, improve Medicare. I know, I know, insisting that government do things right is so uncool. Call me old-fashioned, then. I’ve been called much worse.

Finally, Demand Progress also helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any and all attempts to cut IRS funding. Right-wingers love asking aren’t you afraid if our IRS has more money, they’ll come after you? But what a stupid question! When our IRS was underfunded, they were only going after working families, because working families can’t hire lawyers as easily as rich folks and corporations can. Now, with our IRS funded much better thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, rich folks and corporations are starting to feel the heat – and Republicans have made cutting IRS funding their line in the sand! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Republicans only care about tax cuts for the rich.

Action: concerning health care and working families.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject Medicare privatization, reject nationwide abortion bans, and reject cuts to services working families need and use. 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 plan to privatize Medicare. Because they’ve been talking about that – 0ut loud, too, like it wouldn’t be the most unpopular thing ever. You know what happens when private corporations take over government functions – they start out well, then they gradually start costing more money (which generally gets delivered upward to their executives), then they don’t even provide better services for the extra expense. That third stage is where we are with the notorious Medicare Advantage! So we remind our Congressfolk that what belongs to us must stay with us.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any nationwide abortion ban. Donald Trump supports a 16-week national ban – ha ha, he thinks that’s a “deal,” maybe he should ask Glenn Youngkin how well his proposed 15-week ban worked out for him – but, at the risk of sounding old-fashioned, abortion decisions should always be left between a woman and her doctor. Don’t right-wingers support leaving health care decisions between an American and their doctor? Or is that only when they’re fabricating lies about the Affordable Care Act? And not for nothing, but a national abortion bans would affect working families the most.

Finally, Coalition on Human Needs helps you demand that Congress reject any attempt to “cut deficits” on the backs of working families. It’s always the same damn thing with Republicans: squeal about the deficit whenever Democrats have any power after saying nothing about it when they run up deficits, and then demand cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, et cetera. Why not cut deficits by raising taxes on wealthy folks and corporations? Ha ha ha ha! Because they think wealthy folks and corporations are better than us little people! One day soon they’ll just come out and say so.

Action: concerning taxes, public transportation, and asylum rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop cutting IRS funding, better fund public transportation, and establish asylum-seeking as a human right. 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 Patriotic Millionaires and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to stop with the cutting IRS funding drama. When you hear that every dollar our IRS invests in auditing taxpayers above the 90th percentile brings in twelve dollars of revenue, you understand that cutting IRS funding doesn’t actually save money, but costs money, and you also understand that efforts to defund our IRS (which we might also call defunding the police) are really efforts to give the rich more tax cuts. Shame these “fiscal hawks” Republicans pretend not to understand any of that. But then, we’re better than they are, and it’s well past time for that to actually mean something.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stronger Communities Through Better Transit Act, which would, as its title suggests, invest $80 billion into our public transportation systems over the next four years. That would be $80 billion out of a projected $20 trillion in total federal spending, so don’t let anyone get all where-you-gonna-find-the-money about this. Better bus and rail transportation not only means less pollution, fewer carbon emissions, and cleaner air and water, it also means fewer temporarily insane people driving cars on our roadways. Your children and your children’s children will thank you for both.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to affirm seeking asylum as a fundamental human right. It’s a shame we have to tell Congressfolk to exercise basic compassion and mercy! But we have far too many drama hounds running around acting like asylees are all drug-runners, terrorists, and job-takers, when asylees are actually running from terror in their home countries. You’d like a place to go if you had no place to go, wouldn’t you? And the thing about rights is they occasionally interfere with your desire to do whatever diddles your rage gland. But that’s what they’re supposed to do! They’re supposed to outlast the fevers of the day!

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.

Around the table: our sick, immoral, and decadent culture, part 876.

Back in late December Reuters published an excellent investigation of all the problems Tesla cars have been having – which the corporation has known about, and has been blaming on drivers. Ha ha ha it’s your fault your front right suspension has completely collapsed while you were driving! But we make the best cars! And come on, give us some room to grow, we haven’t been around for 400 years like Ford! This could only happen in an America where shareholder wealth is more important than customers’ lives.

French researchers find that hydroxychloroquine may have killed almost 17,000 folks, in six countries (Italy, Belgium, France, Turkey, Spain, and the United States) over a period of four months (March to July 2020) at pandemic’s beginning. One is tempted to say that must be a very small percentage of folks who died from COVID (the U.S. reached 2,000 deaths almost every day in April of 2020, for example), but you won’t find that reassuring if it happened to someone you love. What a hoot it was to have our President tell people to take it, saying “what do you have to lose?”

Americans for Tax Fairness study finds that Americans worth $100 million and up are holding an astounding $8.5 trillion in untaxed wealth. How is this possible? Because most ultra-rich wealth isn’t exactly liquid – it consists of unsold (or “unrealized”) real estate and hifalutin investments, which rich folks then use as collateral to take out low-interest loans to subsidize their lives (apparently adding five points to the prime interest rate didn’t stamp out these low-interest loans as I’d hoped). Thrilling that efforts to tap into this untaxed wealth “have virtually no support among Republicans.” Remember that if Donald Trump tries to run to Joe Biden’s left, because he’s shameless enough to do that.

When I hear that ISIS has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack on an Iranian ceremony (commemorating the Revolutionary Guard commander assassinated by President Trump in 2019), I am reminded that every fundamentalist thinks his fundamentalist forebears are sellouts. Remember when young right-wingers took shots at William F. Buckley, Jr., after he came out against the Iraq War? Like any of those little snot-noses would have been anything without him! Anyway, think the Tha Bush Mobb gamed out a member of the “Axis of Evil” finding itself in the crosshairs of a terrorist threat midwifed by the Iraq war? Of course they did! The “war on terror” is just the gift that keeps on giving! And it’s well past time we broke this wheel.

With the completely shocking news that FAA officials have ordered the grounding of over 170 Boeing 737 Max 9 jetliners after a window blew out on one of its planes while it was in the air, let’s take the wayback machine to 2019, when two Boeing 737 Max planed crashed in five months. You may not be surprised by the story’s critical elements: shareholder wealth being more important than customers’ lives, banksters running out engineers and making absurd demands of them because love of money. Yes, engineers should run more of America than they do. Certainly banksters shouldn’t! Banksters ruin everything!

You already know that Republican Presidential candidate Nikki Haley has lately omitted slavery while listing Civil War causes – but you may not know that she managed to deploy the phrase “I had Black friends growing up” in explaining that omission. Her larger point, apparently, was that slavery was so obvious it didn’t need to be mentioned. Of course describing slavery in the passive voice, i.e., “(i)t is a very talked about thing,” reveals that Nikki Haley fears offending assholes. Never fear offending assholes! Assholes live to be offended, and if you don’t offend them, they’ll just pretend you did!

Finally, Donald Trump actually claims that we could have “negotiated” the Civil War rather than fight it. Of course we should not “negotiate” enslaving Black men, women, and children – and that was why we fought the Civil War; just read President Lincoln’s private letters, in which he won’t STFU about how much he hates slavery and how happy he’ll be when it’s gone – but we should also remember that The Dealmaker only makes deals that benefit him, and he’d prefer making deals that benefit only him. Sadly, he’ll probably have the sense to skip over the next rhetorical step – World War II is something that could have been negotiated! You’d never have heard of Franklin Delano Roosevelt! – and just blame Teh Libruls for the Holocaust.

Action: concerning banksters, bombing civilians, and executive pay.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to close bankster tax loopholes, stop using taxpayer money to bomb Palestinian civilians, and curb excessive CEO pay. 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 Ending the Carried Interest Loophole Act. You know how banksters pay a lower tax rate than nurses and bus drivers? That’s because our laws allow them to declare the money they make managing other people’s accounts as investment income, and, as you know, our laws have taxed investment income at a lower rate than regular working families’ income since Tha Bush Mobb’s notorious second tax “reform” law. I always say income is income, but I know a few like-minded folks would want the first few grand of investment income taxed at a relatively low rate, as a way of encouraging working families to invest more. But not millions of dollars! That’s just getting over, and we shouldn’t allow rich people to get over.

MoveOn helps you tell our government to stop funding Israel’s bombing of civilians in Palestine with our tax dollars. Key phrase is “of civilians” – no one wants Hamas to flourish, but Israel’s mostly bombing civilians in Gaza, and that’s exactly the sort of thing helps Hamas flourish! I’d say it’s almost like that’s the whole idea but I’m pretty sure it is the whole idea. Imagine being Benjamin Netanyahu, finishing first in nail-biter elections but having to cobble together coalitions that collapse every year, which means more nail-biter elections. If your hold on power is that tenuous, what do you need most? An enemy. Or, you know, good works that make people want to vote for you. Anyway, we don’t need to support mass murder of civilians with our hard-earned money.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to do more to curb excessive CEO pay, particularly in the health insurance industry. Health insurance premiums outstrip inflation (yes, even 2021-22 inflation!) every year by absurd amounts, and what’s one big reason for that? The 10 highest-paid health insurance corporation CEOs earning over a billion dollars between them last year, that’s what! But do they earn that money with better services and better care? That is to laugh! We can curb CEO pay in lots of ways, like bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income. And if they call that “class warfare,” just remind them that their high costs wage actual class warfare on us every day of our lives. All so they can make more money than they’ll ever spend, money they can’t take to the Pearly Gates.

Action: concerning child labor, banksters, and billionaires.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Child Labor Act, the Ending the Carried Interest Loophole Act, and the Billionaire’s 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.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Child Labor Act. What’s that, you say? There are already child labor laws on the books, so why do we need more? Partly because some state legislatures have loosened their own child labor laws, inexplicably – I mean, seriously, why do you do that if you’re concerned about winning elections? – but also because corporations flout those laws without getting appropriately punished. The Stop Child Labor Act would stiffen penalties for corporations that exploit our children, plus it would let kids sue those corporations over the harm done to them. So let right-wingers squeal TEH TRIAL LAWYURZ!!!!! at that development. They’ll be even lonelier than they are now.

Patriotic Millionaires also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ending the Carried Interest Loophole Act, which would, as its title suggests, get rid of the tax loophole that lets hedge fund banksters pay a lower tax rate than working families. This has been an anvil around our necks for years now, but of course Kyrsten Sinema, back when she was the 50th vote in our Senate last year, just had to demand keeping that loophole around as tribute for passing the Inflation Reduction Act! She’s a walnut in the batter of eternity, of course, but if we made people vote on this bill – and then, and this is important, ran ads against folks who voted against it – we might finally slay this fat and lazy dragon once and for all. And that’s worth the effort.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire’s Income Tax, which would not convert billionaires into paupers, as right-wingers pretend – indeed, it wouldn’t even tax wealth under $1 billion, and if you can’t make it on $999,999,999, then you're a clown who deserves no one's attention. But the bill would raise over $500 billion in revenues over the next decade; think of anything we might do with $500 billion over 10 years? Like, maybe, expand the Child Tax Credit so more working families can have more breathing room? Hey, that’s just one thing we could do! And if we don’t make the rich pay more and working folks pay less, we’ll never get anything done in America. Taxing the rich was good enough for our grandparents, and it’s good enough for us.

Action: concerning taxes, AI, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand the Child Tax Credit without poison pills, protect American workers from AI, and pass the Affordable Insulin Now 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 bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021 that put $250 and $300 checks per child in working families’ bank accounts. You know, I feel like I don’t need to justify that action any further – fewer kids in poverty, more money for strapped working families, what else needs saying? – but it’s December, which means it’s end-of-year budgeting time, which means Congress will try to pass a bunch of noxious crap they’d never get through without it being an “emergency,” so go ahead and tell your Congressfolk to pass a CTC expansion with no poison pills attached! That means no corporate welfare and no more tax cuts for the rich – do the right thing, and nothing else.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect American workers from the spectre of Artificial Intelligence (or AI). We just watched the Hollywood actors’ union fight management’s attempts to replace them with AI-generated doppelgangers, but that won’t just happen to them – it’ll happen to any American worker who has a CEO who twirls his mustache at the prospect of replacing all his workers (and all their “costs”) with mounds of dung, and “any” includes you and you and you and I. Hell, it’s already happened, for real, at call centers all over the world. You ever try to fix a problem and wind up yelling “operator!” into the phone? Then you know what I’m talking about. Our economy needs more people in it, and fewer “big,” “bold” “entrepreneurs” who live to kill our jobs.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Affordable Insulin Now Act, which would extend the benefit Medicare recipients get – namely, their insulin costs capped at $35/month – to all Americans. What a shame that we have to stop big pharma corporations from charging literally an arm and a leg for insulin, and what a shame we have idiots like Herschel Walker telling us that if we just eat right we won’t have to use insulin, which will definitely not impress anyone born with diabetes (or those who are rationing their insulin while keeping spreadsheets about their calorie intake). And if anyone starts ranting about “price controls,” you have a number of good rebuttals. Like you say “price controls” like it’s a bad thing. Or 1973 called; it wants its right-wing talking points back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning health care, taxes, and executive pay.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act, the OLIGARCH Act, and the RECOUP 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.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act, which would give our government the power to manufacture generic drugs wherever name-brand drugs are too expensive for good Americans to afford. Specifically, the bill would create an Office of Drug Manufacturing within our Department of Health and Human Services, and would keep drug corporation lobbyists or senior executives of such corporations that’ve broken our laws out of that department; the Office would be able to manufacture any drugs for which patents have expired, if big pharma corporations can’t produce enough of them (like what happened with Ozempic last year!) or if big pharma corporations are simply charging too much for them. This would make health care cheaper, and anyone who cries SOSHULIZMZ!!!! should really stop driving our roads if they don’t want to be hypocrites.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the OLIGARCH Act, which would establish tax rates on wealth based on median household wealth in America ($121,700 as of 2019, per our Federal Reserve), ranging from two percent on household wealth 1,000 to 10,000 times median household wealth to eight percent on household wealth 1,000,000 times median household wealth. At present, this tax would only affect folks worth over $121.7 million, and two percent of that figure would still leave those folks with a lot of money, so don’t believe the hype that it’d actually be much worse. Certainly don’t believe any slippery-slope BS that it’d eventually be 100% (a cursory examination of our history will tell you how hard it is to raise taxes on the rich). People with no arguments will say anything, but they shouldn’t win.

Finally, Take On Wall Street helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the RECOUP Act, which would literally recoup the sales of stocks and other assets that bankster executives make right before their banks crash. This just happened with both the Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank failures, so it’s not a solution in search of a problem. And don’t think of this as a punishment for things CEOs might have done; think of it as a punishment for being a bad boss. Really, you don’t have to prove that they maliciously drove their bank off the edge and cashed out before everyone else knew what was happening. I mean, that would be the way to bet! But this is a bill that would punish incompetence. Folks don’t argue they have a “right” to be incompetent if it hurts other people, do they? I guess they do. But they shouldn’t, and they certainly shouldn’t get all the say about everything.

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?”

Penny rants for October 27, 2023.

When I hear that nearly a quarter of Americans think “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” I again think that about a quarter of our electorate is batshit insane, and these folks have let themselves get led from one manufactured outrage to another over at least the past 20 years. And I think, again, that though three-quarters should be able to outvote one-quarter, we all know that another quarter or our electorate enables the insane quarter, either by imagining any Democrat is far worse or by thinking they can use the crazies to get things done. I’ll admit I’m amused to hear 57% of Republicans say “America’s best days are behind us” when Republicans spent those best days trying to turn them into these days, by setting wealth and corporate power “free” and slashing government spending that actually helped people. Maybe our pollsters should ask Americans how they feel about the disappearance of the 91% tax bracket and the end of big projects like ending poverty (or even just the interstate highway system!) when they ask if America’s on the right or wrong track. It might be illuminating.

From McKay Coppins’s new bio of Mitt Romney we learn that Kyrsten Sinema doesn’t care much about what’ll happen to her if/when she doesn’t get re-elected, because “I can do anything” (though she may be overestimating her career options) and because “I saved the Senate by myself.” Let us recall that she “negotiated” a bipartisan infrastructure bill by giving in to all of Republicans’ major demands, then killed her own party’s signature bill by refusing to raise taxes on the rich or let Medicare negotiate drug prices; then, when these positions became untenable, she permitted a 15% minimum corporate tax and limited Medicare drug price negotiation in exchange for keeping the notorious “carried interest” loophole (which allows banksters to pay a lower tax rate than bus drivers). So, some “savior,” there, and as for “sav(ing) the filibuster,” “save” is a weird word to describe a tool that’s only hurt good Americans for years. And dig her spokeshack comparing Mr. Coppins’ reporting to “a game of telephone.” I’d contemplate a defamation lawsuit if I were him.

We also learn from the Romney bio that the 47% video story apparently sent Mr. Romney into (per David Corn at Mother Jones, the reporter who originally broke the story) “an emotional tailspin and caused him to ponder dropping out of the race.” Hearing that he refused to blame anyone but himself for his troubles might seem refreshing – after all, Donald Trump never seems to take the blame for anything (or pass up an opportunity to blame others for his failures) – but, really, stepping up and taking blame is a basic skill of civilized people, and we should remember that Mitt Romney put himself in a tailspin of depression because he pandered to rich folks about poor folks. And we should also remember that that Republicans have learned nothing from that mistake. And almost certainly on purpose! After all, if you can just run people from one manufactured outrage to another, and thus keep them in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage, you don’t actually have to do anything.

Finally, on that note, meet your new U.S. House Speaker, four-term Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson! That was always the best play for Republicans – to tire everyone out with drama and then elect some relatively-unknown asshole – but this is the future, where Mr. Johnson has left records of his deeds and words all over the internet just like everyone else, and hopefully we all know by now that a soft-spoken asshole is still an asshole. And I said it was their “best” play, not a good play. Every single Republican Rep voted for this fool; folks like Don Bacon and Mike Lawler may have complained enough about their choices to fool their constituents, but what about folks like Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania’s 1st? He voted for the worst person for Speaker every chance he had and didn’t account for it to his constituents, so I suspect the good folks of Montgomery County (who just put a Democrat in the state House for the first time in forever) may not want to keep tolerating this drama.

Action: concerning taxes and Medicare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich, restore the expanded Child Tax Credit, and reject a Medicare trustee nominee with too many ties to private health insurance corporations. 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 raise taxes on the rich, including legislation instituting a Billionaire Minimum Income Tax. Remember that Futurama episode featuring wrestling robots, where one of the most hated wrestlers was called the Millionaire? Now it’d be the Billionaire, because billionaires, simply put, make a lot of money off other people’s work and hardly ever pay any taxes. No use arguing that it doesn’t get taxed because it’s not particularly liquid, not just because “wealth on paper” still gets rich folks loans with real money in them, but because they want it that way precisely so that they don’t pay taxes! Yikes, don’t think just because something does happen that it must happen – or should.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore the expanded Child Tax Credit that existed for most of 2021. You remember, the one that delivered $250 and $300 checks per child, per month into working families’ bank accounts? Why, that’s like a campaign ad that writes itself! And, Democrats being so smart they’re dumb, they couldn’t keep that campaign ad going. Note well that the Child Tax Credit expansion did not just get blown on drugs, like Joe Manchin said and yes I will personally make sure he never lives that down, but did in fact cut child poverty in half – and, of course, when it went away, child poverty doubled again. So smart, they’re dumb, I said.

Finally, Be a Hero helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Demetrios Kouzoukas as a Medicare trustee. Because he makes six figures for a private, for-profit health insurance corporation that offers those notorious “Medicare Advantage” plans that siphon off taxpayer money toward bad health care plans! And won’t say whether he’ll stop taking private health insurance money if he works for our public health insurance plan! And don’t believe anyone who says that private health corporation executives know things. The only thing they know how to do is squeeze workers and customers for money, and that’s no skill to brag about.

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep our CFPB as independent as possible, reject any extension of the Trump tax “cuts,” and pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

Action: concerning 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 taxes and budgets.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations and pass a clean budget bill without poison-pill dramas. 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.

While House Republicans stage ever-more absurd and obscene dramas about deficits and debt, we can call our Reps and tell them to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations! Hey, if you care about deficits and debt so much, you’d raise taxes on the very folks who can most easily afford it – not regular folks like us who struggle just to make ends meet. The 91% tax bracket on millionaire income and the 55% tax bracket on corporate profits helped create the greatest middle class ever back in the New Deal era, and if we bring them back, we can bring that middle class back again. Worry not that it’ll kill jobs, because bosses do that anyway when we give them too much freedom! They only create jobs when we force them to, and high taxation is one of the best tools we have to force them to do the right thing. So let’s do it.

In the meantime, Public Citizen helps you tell your Reps to pass a clean budget, mercifully free of far right-wing fever dreams and hostage crises. They think they have us over a barrel, because they have to pass something in 12 days or our government shuts down, but that’s never how it is – we have them over a barrel, because a government shutdown sure ain’t gonna reflect well on House Republicans, and neither would a bill larded down with poison pills that would never pass on their own. So let’s exercise our power and make them do the right thing.

Action: concerning government spying, animal abuse, and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the Cooper Davis Act and pass Canyon’s Law and the FATCAT 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 Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose the Cooper Davis Act, which would force internet service-providing corporations to report to our Attorney General regarding substance abuse violations. I got a better idea: how about our government get warrants for that information? And I got an even better idea: how about we stop putting drug users in jail and start getting them the help they need instead? Sure, we’d have to start seeing drug users as patients and not criminals, and ending the war on drugs also means less racism. But I’m all for enabling our personal growth as a nation – just not by giving law enforcement more weapons to bludgeon us with.

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass Canyon’s Law and outlaw the use of cyanide bombs to kill animals on our public lands. Because cyanide bombs are absolutely heinous! They result in a slow, painful, and torturous death for anyone nearby, and n.b. that pronoun – cyanide bombs don’t just kill animals that prey on livestock, they can also kill any animal who happens to be nearby, and they can also kill any human being who happens to be nearby. In fact, the bill’s authors have named their bill after an Idaho boy who almost died from cyanide bomb exposure. Could it be that just throwing hurt and pain around isn’t the only way to solve problems?

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Fueling Alternative Transportation with a Carbon Aviation Tax (or FATCAT) Act. Again, the acronym isn’t as unwieldy as you might have expected! Believe it or not, folks with their own jets actually pay less in fuel taxes than folks who fly commercial flights (i.e., you and I), but the FATCAT Act would increase that tax eightfold (from 22 cents per gallon to $1.95 per gallon) and end exemptions for oil exploration and logging. Oil and logging CEOs hardly need the handout, after all! And given how oil tax breaks helps foster the right-wing movement that eventually destroyed the New Deal, perhaps we should be more careful about that.

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 health care, medical debt, education, and taxes.

Long story short: tell PA state Senators to keep preventive health care cost-free and help good Pennsylvanians shed their medical debt, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the College for All Act and reject the so-called Tax Cuts for Working Families 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.

Pennsylvania residents, take note of some good news for once: the state House has passed HB 1050, which would insure that good Pennsylvanians can continue to get preventive health care cost-free, as well as HB 78, which would help good Pennsylvanians get rid of their medical debt. Generally if you don’t get medical treatment, you don’t get well, so don’t listen to anyone who tells you that folks with a lot of medical debt are somehow “deadbeats.” And cost-free preventive health care reduces health care costs down the line, regardless of the bleating of the “religious” “freedom” crowd. Now these bills go to the state Senate, so the Pennsylvania Health Access Network helps you tell your state Senators to keep preventive health care free and ensure that medical debt doesn’t cripple the good citizens of the Commonwealth.

RISE helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the College for All Act, which would make community colleges tuition-free and public colleges tuition-free for families making under $125,000 a year. Some people will never listen to anything about how college shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg, but they should know that public colleges were once, in fact, free in California until the late 1960s. They should also remember that college never cost so damn much as it does now. And if you’re susceptible to propaganda about Starbucks baristas with Gender Studies degrees, note well that public community colleges, which actually do a good job at vocational training, are the freest colleges under this legislation.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to vote against the so-called Tax Cuts for Working Families Act, which would extend the Trump tax cuts for the rich. We’ve been trying to get real tax cuts for working families for years – like that massive Child Tax Credit expansion that put $250 or $300 checks in working family bank accounts. That was $250 or $300 per child, too! But the Republican plan is always the same: throw crumbs to working families, but cut rich people’s taxes by tens of thousands of dollars, and that’s what this latest bill would do. The good news is most Americans don’t buy their BS anymore, or else Democrats would have a lot fewer seats in our House and Senate. Still, we’ve got to get in their grills.

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, stock buybacks, and sacred lands.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to tax the rich and corporations harder and pass the Reward Work Act and the Ruby Mountains Protection Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

You’ve heard about the debt limit deal President Biden and Speaker McCarthy negotiated, but Demand Progress still helps you tell your Congressfolk to get rid of the private jet tax deduction from the 2017 Trump tax “reform,” while Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. As they consider this deal, we need to remind them of what their real priority should be: making sure folks with enough money to ruin the world pay their fair share of taxes so we can all have health care and roads and bridges and cops. If nothing else, they’ll more likely remember next time – and if they don’t, we’ll remind them again.

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 all corporate boards. If you’re not seeing right away how that would “reward work,” recall that quite a few corporations (Bed, Bath and Beyond most recently) have gone belly-up after using their profits to buy back stock rather than, you know, pay workers, develop new products, or improve their operations. Stock buybacks, in short, don’t “reward work,” they reward wealth. And getting more workers on corporate boards will also help keep executives from doing only what’s best for them – which will also reward work. So let’s get this done.

Finally, the Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ruby Mountains Protection Act, which would permanently protect the Ruby Mountains of Nevada – a sacred land to certain Shoshone nations – from oil and gas drilling. The energy you extract from the ground will get used up eventually, and the money big corporate executives make from oil and gas drilling will get used up eventually, but sacred lands are forever, if you can keep them. And the Shoshone have already prevented our government from drilling for oil and gas in the Ruby Mountains in 2019, so we know this can be done; our Congressfolk just have to have the will to do it. And they won’t, unless we express our will in numbers they can’t deny.

Around the table: finally they admit greedflation is real! And other miracles.

Apparently the “fringe theory” of “greedflation” is finally “get(ting) its due,” now that even the Wall Street Journal thinks greedflation is real. Of course, nobody who’s been saying it for two years (whose number even includes several members of our “liberal” media) is “fringe” to anyone but a corporatist paid to ignore what’s right in front of their face. I only wonder whether Lael Brainard was being too circumspect in describing a “price-price spiral,” “where companies mark up prices far higher than the increases in their input costs,” because “greedflation” is a much easier way of saying that.

Judges have been slow to accept that they should enforce antitrust law, but Massachusetts U.S. District Court Judge Leo Sorokin not only struck down the American/JetBlue “Alliance,” but excoriated the paid hacks who testified on the “Alliance”’s behalf. If, like me, you think even psychology is a more rigorous science than economics, you’ll find Judge Sorokin’s notes fairly affirming. You may also, like me, find the “economic consulting” gigs Mr. Stoller describes to be a kind of welfare-for-the-rich, a far more pernicious kind of welfare than food stamps could ever be. By the way, bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income would fix it. Imagine a world where it simply didn’t pay to lie about how money works!

Rick Scott thinks he’s so, so funny for saying Florida is “openly hostile” to socialists, though it’s no laughing matter that the actual travel advisories from the NAACP and the Human Rights Campaign that he mocked describe a burgeoning fascist state where you might actually die for being Black or gay, respectively. Also too, imagine being a guy who went to college on the G.I. bill. Now imagine being a guy who ran a hospital that defrauded Medicare and Medicaid so badly they had to pay a $1.7 billion fine. And now imagine being a guy who talks shit about "socialism" all the time. Actually, you don't have to imagine any of that: Rick Scott is all three of those guys! (And anyway, anyone who’s ever driven a car or used a library or called a cop is a socialist.)

I’m a bit perplexed at a Georgia Republican district chair seems to feel personally assaulted by all the globes everywhere that “brainwash” people into thinking the world isn’t flat, not just because people have known the world is round since long before Columbus, but also because globes are actually a lot less common now that we can get planetary images in so many other ways. Globes taught me everything about geography when I was a kid, but getting one in my 40s turned out to be a chore! Oh well, I guess some people never stop whining, and Georgia may finally be becoming a place where a woman like Kandiss Taylor can only get to 49% in a statewide election.

Good news, everyone: Texas Republicans failed to ram through their bill mandating that all state public schools commit the sin of idolatry by posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom. If you were among those who spoke out about this matter, congratulate yourself! Note well, however, that this is only one victory; the forces of religious folly have won plenty of times in Texas in recent years. Also note well that the ACLU’s statement about parental rights is not inconsistent with anything they’ve ever said about teaching Black or gay history in schools: the key phrase in “(p)arents should be able to decide what religious materials their child should learn” is religious materials.

Finally, Rep. Lauren Boebert (E-CO) apparently stonewalled cops after her son called 911 to allege abuse by his father/her soon-to-be-ex-husband, but I don’t celebrate this news at all. I might question the timing of its release (she just announced that she’s filed for divorce, while her son called 911 in December), and I do celebrate some of her other reversals, but I do not celebrate her acting like or being someone who felt she had to keep the family together by herself. And I also don’t blame her for trapping herself in a bad marriage! She married when she was 20, and I was pretty dumb at that age myself.

Action: concerning taxes, drug policy, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, pass the RESTORE Act, and pass Medicare for All 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.

Tired of this debt limit drama already? Then let Americans for Tax Fairness help you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations if they insist on having this drama. Our media love to pretend that Republicans taking power just means an automatic debt limit crisis like that isn’t evil, and our media also love to pretend the only two choices we have are default or let Kevin McCarthy’s Band of Horribles cut all kinds of services that people need and none of the corporate welfare their rich donors eat up like Halloween candy. But those aren’t our only choices. They will be, however, if we don’t get in our Congressfolks’ grills about this drama.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the RESTORE Act, which would repeal the ban on food stamps for folks with drug convictions. When are we going to get tired of swinging our balls about crime? When is the punishment given by a judge going to be punishment enough? We heap punishment upon punishment upon criminals when every additional punishment we heap upon them makes it less likely we’ll be able to rehabilitate them into functioning members of society – and more likely they’ll go back to prison. Rehabilitation is the duty of a civilized people, but endless, unquenchable revenge hollows out our souls and makes us uncivilized.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass Medicare-for-All legislation. Most Americans like the idea of expanding Medicare to include everyone, until some fool tells them ZOMG THEYZ WILLZ RAISEZ TEH TAXUZ!!!! But you don’t need to raise taxes on good Americans to pay for Medicare for All – you need only institute an employer-side payroll tax (that means only the employer, not the employee, pays it) which would capture all the money corporations are already paying on overly-expensive private health insurance. So, you’ll pay nothing extra, and your boss won’t pay any more, and we'll be able to cover everyone – what’s not to like?

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.

Action: concerning banking regulation, health care, junk fees, and stock buybacks.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the TABS Act, reject any proposed cuts to Medicaid and CHIP, and pass the Junk Fees Prevention Act and the Stock Buyback Accountability Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Taking Account of Bureaucrats’ Spending (or TABS) Act, which would replace our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s independent funding mechanism – a mechanism good enough for other banking regulators – with the whim of Congressional funding. You’d think with all these bank failures, our Congressfolk would understand that we actually need a strong CFPB, but up is down in their world. I’m sure they’ll use this as a bargaining chip in debt limit “negotiations”; they might even succeed. But to hell with what they want, because they’re supposed to negotiate with us.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any proposed cuts to Medicaid or the Childrens’ Health Insurance Program (or CHIP). Again, to hell with what the deficit peacocks want! Medicaid and CHIP help a lot of good Americans, and they sure in hell ain’t breaking our budget’s back. Now, throwaway defense spending and low taxes on the rich? Those things are breaking our budget’s back. But Medicaid and CHIP are popular across the political spectrum, probably because even right-wingers have to use it! If you come to rely on something, you’ll hate the politicians who take it away, and you’ll punish them. Right, Sam Alito?

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Junk Fee Prevention Act, which would vastly reduce the harm junk fees – like ticket fees, airline fees, and “early termination” fees – cause good Americans. Who likes junk fees that far outstrip whatever expense a corporation incurs to fix a problem or make something convenient? Nobody but the people who collect those fees, that’s who! And they ain’t a majority of a damn thing in America! OK, they may be a majority of bad people, but let’s not deal civilization yet another body blow because a majority of bad people demanded it. I have a feeling our descendants would not want that to be our epitaph.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, which would quadruple the stock buyback tax that only corporations will ever have to pay. Stock buybacks used to be illegal, and for good reason – not only do they concentrate corporate power in a few hands (and concentrated power in a few hands should concern all Americans regardless of ideological predisposition), but corporations tend to spend more on stock buybacks than on, you know, new equipment. Everyone needs to buy that every once in a while! And if they won’t do the right thing, then our government’s gotta step in on our behalf. This ain’t hard.

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 taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise capital gains taxes on the rich, pass a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, raise Medicare taxes on income over $400,000, and pass the Stock Buyback Accountability 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 Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy breaks down all the tax provisions President Biden has proposed in his budget, and they’re pretty good – the worst I can say about them is they don’t go far enough, but that’s still a lot better than, say, the positively poisonous “FAIR” Tax. One especially worthy item in the Biden budget is the proposal that would tax capital gains as income for folks making over $1 million annually. That would protect small homeowners while going after rich tax cheats, and if you can do both at once, it’s a good idea. You can call your Congressfolk and tell them to enact that, or to pass the Biden budget as a whole (which Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you do); either action would do us all good.

Care2 helps you tell Congress to pass President Biden’s proposal for a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax. I’ve suggested that his proposal would resemble Sen. Warren’s, which imposed a very small wealth tax on large estates, but actually our President’s proposal would impose a minimum 25% tax on households worth over $100 million, and would include unrealized assets (i.e., stocks and properties those households haven’t sold yet) in that calculation. And by demanding such a tax during a time of debt-limit hostage-taking, we’ll tell our Representatives that we won’t stand for more austerity drama. Personal to pedants stuck on the “$100 million” figure: you’re not one of them, either, so maybe don’t defend them?

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to support President Biden’s proposal to raise Medicare taxes on income over $400,000. Currently rich folks pay 3.8 percent in Medicare taxes on their income, but President Biden would raise that to 5 percent, again, only on income over $400,000, which, again, almost certainly ain’t you or I. In fact, that number represents only one out of every 50 taxpayers – go to most parties and you won’t see literally anyone there who’d pay more money (and again, only on that part of their income over $400,000) in Medicare taxes. And it would help keep Medicare solvent, so let’s do it.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act. Stock buybacks used to be illegal, because they concentrated corporate power in a few hands, rather than dispersing it among a multitude of shareholders, and if you’ve watched corporations ruin America over the last few decades, you know that “corporation” and “concentrated power” are two terms you should never read in the same sentence. This bill would quadruple the tax on stock buybacks, which would help discourage stock buybacks and thus help break this concentration. So let’s help do that.

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.

Action: concerning Social Security, refugees, banksters, and the minimum wage.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act and the Afghan Adjustment Act, reject the TABS Act, and raise the minimum wage. 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 Civic Shout and Social Security Works help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act, which would ensure that income over $250,000 gets taxed into the system for the first time. Yes, currently Social Security doesn’t tax income over $160,200 annually, meaning that only working people pay into the system; the fat-cat class is exempt! I suppose right-wingers would argue that since they don’t need Social Security they shouldn’t have to pay into it, but that’s exactly the sort of everyone-for-themselves masturbation that’s gotten this country into the trouble it’s in. Rich folks need to pay more into Social Security, for the good of all Americans.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would help some 78,000 Afghan refugees living in America to get legal immigrant status. I can already hear the right-wingers saying when are we going to provide for our own people? As if a great nation has to choose! And, you know, as if giving legal status to a refugee really injures someone else. I didn’t ask for Tha Bush Mobb to invade Afghanistan, nor did I ask the Obama and Trump Administrations to stay there, so I also didn’t ask for tens of thousands of Afghan refugees. But I’m not an evil bastard, either, so I’ll still demand we take care of them, because that’s what great nations – and great civilizations – do.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Taking Account of Bureaucrats’ Spending (or TABS) Act, which would repeal our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB)’s independent funding mechanism, and instead subject it to the whim of Congressional funding. Other banking regulators have independent funding mechanisms, so why not our CFPB? Because banksters hate our CFPB, and Republicans live to suck up to their bankster overlords, that’s why. This may all be moot, since our Supreme Court obviously has the long knives out for our CFPB. But we should still tell our Reps how we really feel about their drama.

Finally, the Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour or more, since $15/hour has been a calling card for so long that inflation’s outrun it a bit. Don’t brook any right-wingers telling you good luck getting that through this Congress ha ha ha snort. Congress passed a minimum wage hike in 2007 why? Because they wanted to? Because Democrats had impregnable majorities in either House? No, because we demanded it. And don’t brook any where’s it going to stop? hysteria from right-wingers, either. That’s a loser’s argument. It’s going to stop when we get justice. Which is what they’re really afraid of.

Around the table: where there's no safe space for fascists, corporatists, and whiners.

Terrorists have apparently poisoned at least 50 girls’ schools in Iran over the last six months, sickening at least 400 girls, and I hope the attackers get the justice they deserve, even if they come from Iran’s fundamentalist government, as some folks suppose. And can you blame them for supposing? In the meantime, the mere notion of farther-right activists in Iran who oppose educating girls gives that government some quite-undeserved breathing space – look, they say, something to distinguish us from the Taliban! Of course, distinguishing between flavors of fascism for purposes other than scholarship is offensive, more suited to the likes of Richard Spencer than to civilized people.

At least one legal expert thinks Fox News might really be in the soup after Rupert Murdoch’s recent admission that he knew Fox peddled a lot of election-denialism crap though he didn’t believe it – and that they might even be in the soup for more than the $1.6 billion Dominion’s asking in their now-famous defamation lawsuit. Fox can throw all the fecal matter against the wall they want – “our executives didn’t specifically order it,” “ZOMG TEH FIRSTZ AMENDMENTZ WILLZ DIEZ!!!!!” – but few would lament Fox News finally getting some of the karmic blowback it’s long deserved. Its votaries, of course, will just slog on, their persecution complex intensified, and if we’re very lucky, they won’t blow up any voting machines.

Ho hum, former Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) has rejoined the bankster industry from whence he came in 2010. After spending a dozen years defending the notorious “carried interest loophole” (which allows hedge fund managers to pay a lower tax rate than just about everyone you know) from widespread public opposition, he has joined, dig this, a hedge fund corporate board, which is a step up from becoming a lobbyist, lately the more common landing spot for ex-Senators. At least this won’t be the job Kyrsten Sinema gets in 2025, since Mr. Toomey’s a considerably more accomplished shiller than she is. Yes, I know she’d be upset to hear that.

I shouldn’t be spending any damn time on this matter, but no we have not recently “concluded” that COVID came from a lab accident. Rather, another federal agency has issued a “low confidence” report asserting that COVID more likely came from a lab accident than from exposure from an animal; the very phrase “low confidence” should not inspire your confidence, but some folks either don’t read or only read what they want to read. Note well, also, that the Energy Department’s “low confidence” report didn’t prompt any of the four other agencies that have reported about the matter to change their conclusions. Personal to those already typing “BUT TEH DEEPZ STATEZ!!!!!” in response: when you’re in a hole, stop digging.

Good for Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, who runs an online service that gets abortion medication to those who need it. She operates from the Netherlands, which, as you might imagine, makes it a bit more difficult for right-wing drama kings in American state legislatures to get at them, and I wouldn’t hold out hope for a Republican President, either, since he’s going to be an incompetent drama king, too. Yes, even if their name’s not Trump! Anyway, this is all very simple: if you’re against abortion, don’t get one. I wish more pro-life folks followed that advice, instead of telling their doctor they’re going to hell for giving them the abortion they asked for.

Eli Lilly announced it would cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $35/month, and though I, too, am happy to say this proves that shame works, Matt Stoller reminds us that our FTC also had a lot to do with Eli Lilly’s new cap, by declaring in June that it would start going after the Pharmacy Benefit Managers (or PBMs) that probably do even more to jack up drug prices than even big pharma does. (Basically, PBMs demand bribes in order to make drugs available to health insurance corporations, and the bribes are really big now.) Remember this the next time your right-wing uncle tells you that government doesn’t work. It does – if we make it work.

Finally, when I hear that Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (E-GA) has literally demanded a “safe space” where right-wingers don’t have to listen to liberals anymore, I’m reminded that this isn’t a new tack at all: Nazi wannabes were demanding the exact same thing, using the exact same words, as long ago as 2016, and of course at the same time as they slammed liberals for demanding actual safe spaces for people who actually suffer from actual discrimination, and not just the shame and shunning of the community for bad behavior. These right-wingers probably think they’re satirists, too, but then a lot of awful people hide behind “satire.”

Action: concerning voting rights, taxes, and paid family/medical leave.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, reject the “FAIR” Tax, pass the Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, and pass legislation creating a paid family/medical leave system. 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 John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This bill would let our government stop states and localities with a history of vote suppression from changing their laws so they can suppress votes even more – which, you may recall, our government could do until our Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. Our Court said it unfairly targeted Southern states, but the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act would explicitly state that our Justice Department could scrutinize any state or locality that suppresses votes. Nobody should vote against this bill, but we still need to get in our Congressfolks’ grills about it.

Both Moms Rising and Daily Kos help tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to pass the so-called “FAIR” Tax, which would replace all income, corporate, payroll, and Estate taxes with a single, 30% sales tax. That would be like 30% inflation on everything you buy! Care to imagine how big your rent or mortgage would be? And when you remember that payroll taxes fund Social Security and Medicare, you might think paying 30% more for a gallon of milk would be a bad way to fund that. We need to get back to taxing the rich and corporations, not least so they can’t control us anymore, but the “FAIR” Tax only takes us in the opposite direction, toward more misery and chaos. If we speak out, we can kill it in its crib.

Speaking of taxing the rich, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, which would ensure that the richest Americans pay at least 20% of their wealth every year, and if that seems like a lot, remember that they’re billionaires and they’ll still have a lot left over. You’ve gotten by on a lot less than a billionaire, I guarantee you that, but while the pandemic might have cost you your job, billionaires somehow only got richer! As I’ve said, we need to limit the amount of damage billionaires do to our civilization, and the Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax will help us start to do that again. But not if we don’t fight for it.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation granting paid family/medical leave for all Americans. Because only six other countries on Earth don’t have it! Those other countries, by the way, are the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Nauru, Tonga, and Papua New Guinea – yes, even Russia offers paid family/medical leave! We could get this done through budget reconciliation, but we won’t have a chance at that unless we communicate our will to our Reps and Senators in numbers they can’t deny. Don’t let folks tell you it would “cost too much.” You know what costs too much? Workers coming in sick or worried about their sick loved ones because they can’t get a day off!

Action: concerning Social Security, taxes, representation, and conversion "therapy."

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security, reject any Trump tax cut extension, make our House of Representatives larger, and ban conversion “therapy.” 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 pass the Social Security Expansion Act, which would tax income over $250,000 into the system for the first time, and would not only expand benefits by over $2,000 annually, but would start counting inflation the way it actually affects seniors, who can’t just switch to cheaper drugs or cheaper health care the way younger folks can (and who, ah, don’t buy a whole lot of fancy clothes or iPhones or TVs, either). Used to be half of America’s seniors lived in poverty; now 10% do, thanks to Social Security. That’s why right-wingers hate it. But they don’t get all the say about everything.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to extend the Trump tax “reform.” The income tax bracket cuts of that “reform” expire at the end of 2025, but while you may have saved, say, $1,500 annually from that tax “reform,” rich folks have saved several hundreds of thousands of dollars more, so when we say the Trump tax “reform” mainly benefited the rich, we’re not lying. Or being “jealous” – Jesus Mary and Joseph if money mattered that much to me I’d have more of it than a hundred Donald Trumps. Anyway, the rich need to pay more, and most Americans agree, so we should reject any extension of their unearned tax cuts.

The Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to make our House of Representatives larger. This won’t “grow bureaucracy,” because when our House legislated about the matter, over 110 years ago, America had about one-quarter the population it has now, so yeah, more House Reps would actually serve good Americans better. And you’ve seen the size of some of these districts, right? I don’t just mean huge single-district states like Wyoming and the Dakotas, either – try imagining the task of visiting all of Arizona’s 2nd district, which at over 20,000 square miles is larger than nine states and D.C. So yeah, we actually do need more House Reps.

Finally, Cedar Key Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act, which would, for once and for all, outlaw “conversion therapy,” the horrific snake-oil method by which folks purport to turn gay folks straight. “Conversion therapy” “works” through such “methods” as having gay folks re-enact childhood sexual abuse while not wearing any clothes, which our Surgeon General derided as unscientific two decades ago. So it’s actually not so great that 20 American states have banned the practice since then; something like that should be banned everywhere. The Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act would do that – but only if we speak out about it.

Action: concerning immigration, food stamps, college for all, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell Texas state legislators to reject an anti-immigrant bill, and tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to cut food stamps and pass the College for All Act and 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.

First things first: Free and Fair Democracy helps you tell Texas state legislators to reject the notorious SB 147, which would prevent immigrants from owning homes in that state. Always they say we gotta do something about foreigners owning American land, but this bill doesn’t even target Chinese corporations! No, it targets regular folks, who are just trying to make a go of it like the rest of us. SB 147’s sponsor, no doubt reveling in all the attention, says she’ll amend the bill to exempt immigrants who’ve actually gone through the system (including dual citizens). I’ve got another way to protect those good people: strangle this damn bill, and any like it, in its crib.

Republicans want to cut food stamps again, so you may want to call your Reps and Senators and tell them NFW. With apologies to Bill Maher, I propose a new rule: you don’t get to complain about high inflation and then cut food stamps! That may be even worse than complaining about inflation and then rejecting the Child Tax Credit expansion that put hundreds of dollars in working families’ bank accounts every month in 2021. Food stamps may have a bad name thanks to right-wing propaganda, but any of us might need them someday, and it’s cruel to take away something that helps working families deal with still-too-high prices. So we need to get in their grills about this right away.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the College for All Act. Don’t think of this as being about TEH FREE STUFFZ FORZ TEH YOUNGZ PEEPULZ!!!!! Think of it as being about restoring the reality of 60 years ago, when state colleges were generally free for state residents; that’s just one thing that helped build the greatest middle class in world history. Of course, right-wingers said the last thing you want is an educated working class, and so Our Glorious Elites have spent the last few decades making higher ed unaffordable. But we need to fix that, so we can, dare I say, make America educated again.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act, which would at long last tax millionaire income into the system and expand benefits for everyone. Our Glorious Elites pretend that cutting Social Security is the “bold” move, but you don’t cut a program that everyone likes and that works well because of large budget deficits caused largely by Republican tax cuts for the rich – you expand that program! Cutting Social Security because blah blah get mandatory spending under control bullshit bullshit – isn’t “bold” so much as it’s stupid. And we have a duty, as Americans, not to tolerate stupidity.

Action: concerning taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject to so-called “FAIR” tax, institute a billionaire’s income tax, and tax excessive corporate profits. 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 any effort to ram the so-called “FAIR” Tax down our throats. Democrats should be running a thousand attack ads saying instead of making the rich and corporations pay their fair share of taxes, Republicans want to make you pay 30% inflation on everything you buy! They could also say 60% inflation, since the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy says we’ll need to institute that big a tax to make up for all the lost income, corporate, and estate taxes – all of which the “FAIR” Tax would repeal. Still, you could say all that to your House Rep. It’s all true.

Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a billionaire’s minimum income tax. Which would not be a “100% tax” or whatever BS Donald Trump said that time, but a 2% tax on billionaire wealth. Really, this is the least they should do! We should be taxing the hell out of income over a million dollars so we don’t have obnoxious billionaires to begin with! And with fewer billionaires, we’ll have more millionaires, and we sure as hell will have more successful small businesses. All these things help a civilization! So we ought to fight for them, by first making the rich pay more of their fair share.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax excessive corporate profits. When you have the highest inflation in 40 years and record corporate profits at the same time, you don’t need to be a Fulbright Scholar to see the connection. And a windfall corporate profits tax would allow us to impose a surcharge on all this corporate price-gouging, simply by measuring current profits against average profits for the last five years (or, possibly, by simply assessing a 4% surcharge on corporate profits, since inflation’s generally been around 2% and is now over 6%). However we do it, we’ve got to show CEOs that greed has consequences.

Action: concerning workers' rights, separating families, and cruelty to animals.

Long story short: tell Amazon to negotiate with organized workers already, tell your Congressfolk to outlaw separating families over unpaid foster care bills, and tell our government to outlaw cruel hunting practices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell Amazon to negotiate with its labor union already. When evil can’t prevent something from happening, what do they do? They stall, in this case by simply refusing to meet with the union that the workers have already approved to get them better pay, benefits, and working conditions. This is like when Republican Presidents simply delay writing legally-mandated clean air and clean water regulations, because they can’t win the argument on the merits, and they can't simply disregard our laws. And Amazon may think they're Too Big to Fail, but they can’t disregard our laws, either. Particularly if we all let them know we’re watching them.

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation ensuring that states can’t take children away from families over unpaid foster bills. This mainly affects families who become homeless and put their kids in foster care, but that could be any of us but for the grace of God, and anyway why aren’t our taxes paying for temporary foster care? Ask the politicians who’ve been slashing taxes at the behest of their corporate and wealthy masters. I’m sure state and local officials will say well, we need money, too! But great civilizations don’t split up families to collect debts. And great civilizations certainly don’t treat people as a commodity – especially children, who can’t even legally consent to much of what happens to them.

Finally, the Humane Society helps you tell our National Park Service to outlaw cruel hunting practices in Alaska. This is a no-brainer, seriously, and what do right-wingers say in response? That we should “trust hunters” to do what’s right? If you don’t know it’s wrong to kill mother bears in their dens while their cubs watch so you can hang a trophy on your wall, then we shouldn’t “trust” you any more than we “trust” our elected officials to do the right thing. We all have a duty to maintain and strengthen our civilization, and identifying a group of “tough guys” you want to pander to (and if they’re so tough, why do they need pandering?) doesn’t excuse them from that sacred duty.

Action: concerning taxes, Social Security, and Medicare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the FAIR Tax, lift the Social Security payroll tax cap, and end Medicare privatization. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

Action: concerning workers' rights and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect workers’ right to organize, reject House efforts to defund the police at our IRS, and tax capital gains at the same rate as wages. 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.

If you’re bummed to hear that the percentage of union-organized workers has hit a historic low – although the raw number of unionized workers did increase by more than 250,000 last year – then you may want to call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, which would make it a lot harder for corporations to intimidate their workers, and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which would make governments let their workers organize. Winning union elections ain’t enough if your boss won’t negotiate and you can’t get our government to make them; both these bills will help these matters.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to reject the House Republicans’ plan to defund the police at our IRS and protect the rich and corporate tax cheats they seem to consider their only real constituents. They say funding our IRS enables them to come after you, but our IRS has only been going after poor people because they don’t have the money to fight rich people and their lawyers! I’d like to think that’s a reason Republicans fell far short of expectations during the midterms. If it’s not, I’m going to be banging this saucepan for a long, long time! And so should you, particularly with your Senators.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk we should tax capital gains at the same rate we tax wages. It’s all income, after all! Tha Bush Mobb’s 2003 tax “reform” spewed forth this particular injustice; they actually wanted you to think investors need more “protection” from taxes than secretaries and bus drivers! They also wanted you to think unrealized assets aren’t income, either. When rich folks got all those low- or no-interest loans, they backed them with unrealized assets! They won’t get more of those loans now, thanks to the Fed’s interest rate hikes, but the injustice of working folks getting taxed harder than rich folks remains. And we should fight that until it’s gone.

Readings for January 30, 2023.

Stephan Weller and Tessa Conroy at The Conversation remind us that the inflation rate doesn’t tabulate rural price hikes – and find that inflation may be worse in rural areas. Among their findings: rural folks can’t just walk places like city folks can, meaning inflated car expenses hit them harder, and since rural folks don’t eat out as much, hikes in grocery prices also hit them harder. Housing costs in rural areas are lower, though, and rural folks more likely own their homes, insulating them from recent rental price madness. Our CPI ought to pay more attention to rural folks, obviously, and not just because that’s the kind of thing right-wingers exploit.

Good news out of Niger, as that nation has reduced the number of women who die due to post-birth bleeding by more than half. But you may notice that one of the big reasons they’re able to do that is that they use the drug misoprostol to reduce hemorrhaging. Health care professionals also use misoprostol, as you may know, in medication abortions, meaning the next time we elect a Republican to the Presidency, he’ll cut off money to any organization that uses or promotes misoprostol abroad, which means more women in Africa will bleed to death after giving birth. It wouldn’t be uncivil to shove that fact in the face of any “pro-lifer” you know. (The process for reducing post-partum hemorrhaging also involves using a condom, though not as a prophylactic; right-wingers will squeal about that, too, and we’ll have to clean up after that.)

Finally, you already knew this, but the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy informs us that the so-called FAIR Tax would “Shift Federal Taxes from the Wealthy to the Rest of Us.” As we discussed last week, you’d pay a higher tax rate under the FAIR Tax than you would even if you made $182,000 annually, but you can also see where it’d actually benefit folks making in the high six-figures, and not just because making 10 times the money doesn’t mean you have 10 times the expenses (and a national sales tax targets spending, not income). Also, “replacing all the taxes” also means no Child Tax Credit or Earned Income Tax Credit for working families. Sure, the FAIR Tax promises rebates for working families making under $30,000 annually, but they’d have to apply for those rebates, and they’ve got enough on their plate already. Again, it shouldn’t be tough for Democrats to accuse every Republican who votes for the FAIR Tax as “voting for higher taxes.”