Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: more notes about various kinds of corruption.

Independent media outlet unmasks a senior Twitter editor as a British psyops agent -- but our "liberal" media largely ignore the story. You'd think our media would be more interested that a government spy, whose specialty is influencing how people think, was that deeply embedded in a social media corporation that influences how people think, but no, and I doubt it's because some media organ no one ever heard of (which hopefully will change!) broke the story. More likely it's because our "liberal" media do not take their duties seriously, and are just looking to fill space between adverts and move up the corporate ladder. Hey, I like to think the best of people, but some people make it awfully hard.

Jeff Ernsthausen and Justin Elliot at ProPublica describe how Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert managed to get "opportunity zone" tax breaks for his properties in Detroit even though they're not in particularly distressed areas of the city. You'll be depressed to learn that getting these tax breaks is mostly about who you know, and even if Mr. Gilbert or his cronies didn't actually break any laws, the result -- money intended to spur investment in poorer communities gets diverted to already-wealthy developers -- is unmistakably corrupt and evil. And of course the way the 2017 tax "reform" sets up these "opportunity zones" is remarkably free of oversight and disclosure, and therefore accountability. Don't right-wingers say they're all about accountability? Oh, they mean accountability for you, not for them.

U.S. Magistrate Judge holds Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in contempt of court for "show(ing) only minimal efforts to comply" with a court order preventing it from collecting more Corinthian College loans. Which is worse: the DOE spokeshack who plays the but-we-didn't-mean-any-harm card, or the one who said, probably rolling his eyes, that "(w)e acknowledged that servicers made unacceptable mistakes," never mind the unacceptable mistakes committed by DOE? Your law and order Administration, ladies and gentlemen!

You may have heard that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been having dinner with a lot of right-wing blowhards lately, but The Intercept checks around and finds that, despite a stated desire to "meet() new people and hear() from a wide range of viewpoints" that Mr. Zuckerberg says drives his dinners with the likes of Tucker Carlson and L. Brent Bozell III, , he hasn't actually broken bread with any liberals. Dig the it's called learning! BS at the end of his twittergasm! I gotta say, these days, when I read about someone rich or famous, normally my first response is gosh, what a fucking asshole.

Bobby Lewis at The Guardian watches 44 months of the Fox News Channel so you don't have to. And also so that you can fully understand that Fox News "poisons" people, which, like, I've seen happen. I've long said that Fox and Friends is the worst program on Fox News, not just because it's so baldly stupid, but because the hosts all pretend to be regular folks. You can take comfort in knowing that most of the regular folks you know are better informed than this. No, really. Don't judge by the guy eating 10 eggs at the Wisconsin diner, who'll blame his next heart attack on socialism.

Another day, another Bernie-can't-win-Iowa article in which voters act like they're trying to predict the winner, not be the winner. Seriously, when you say you're "unsure" how Medicare-for-All "plays in small-town Iowa" (set aside that it actually plays pretty well!) and you wonder if the things he proposes are "achievable things," you're doing democracy wrong -- gosh, if you're a small town voter and you like Medicare-for-All, you can actually make Medicare-for-All seem less impossible by supporting candidates who might actually pass it! This horserace mentality too many voters still have is going to get us all killed one day.

Finally, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) tells reporters that "(i)f Turkey was planning on coming into northern Syria and trying to ethnically cleanse the Kurds, and U.S. troops were caught in the middle, I am not completely convinced that it was a bad idea to get them out of harm's way." I guess that sounded better in his head, though seriously, America afraid of a big bad Turkish invasion? He acts like we're up against Suleiman the Magnificent instead of some two-bit dictator/Presidential man-crush. As an aside, maybe Beto O'Rourke could run ads about this in a 2020 Senate race.

Around the table: from Kentucky to Syria, and guess where we find more hope?

Hazard (KY) job program helps give recovering drug addicts work, pay, and "a sense of purpose" as they help build affordable housing. "Research is starting to show what advocates have known anecdotally: having a job makes a significant difference in long-term addiction recovery," but try getting a job without skills, or with a criminal record. The program helps half a dozen folks annually gain construction skills and get jobs; maybe a few of our billionaires could break off some of their largesse and fund more programs like these, particularly in rural areas like Hazard? Or do we have to tax them harder to get it done? It's a question worth pondering.

Ho hum, our "liberal" media repeatedly insinuates that Messrs. Sanders, Warren, and Biden for being "too old to be President." Mr. Sanders's heart attack is obviously worth contemplating when deciding whom to vote for in a Democratic primary, but writing off all septuagenarians as physically and mentally unable to do the job is an awfully convenient argument given that the Democratic nominee will almost certainly be one of three septuagenarians. Maybe the one who takes selfies for four hours after a rally? And our "liberal" media never seem to mention the 73-year-old who currently occupies the Oval Office. Maybe that's because he constantly acts like a spoiled brat.

Also ho hum, Republican megadonor/notorious "America Firster" still manages to get H1-B visas for foreign workers even as our President cracks down on said H1-B visas. Of course, our President also uses undocumented immigrants wherever he can, and his votaries excuse that, because BUILDZ TEH WALLZ!!!!!. When Charles Baudelaire said that genius was the ability to hold two disparate ideas in the mind at one time, I don't think he was actually describing hypocrites or their enablers.

Uh oh: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has apparently violated a court order preventing her office from going after some indebted Corinthian College students, and could face jail time. You'll remember Corinthian College as the for-profit college chain that went under in 2015, but not without putting a lot of its students in a big debt hole first; the Obama Administration set up a program to help some of them get loan forgiveness, but this Administration's Education Department has virtually (and unlawfully) shut down the program, resulting in students incorrectly getting billed for loans and even getting their wages or tax refunds garnished. Again: you can't just skimp on your duty under the law just because you don't want to do it, or because you don't believe it's your duty under the law.

Finally, I've been loathe to go after our President for pulling out of Syria, since I'm no fan of our presence in the Middle East, but I find it hard to believe that our only two choices were "stay in Syria indefinitely" or "let the Turks kill all the Kurds," especially with this supposedly uniquely talented "deal-maker" in charge. Naturally our President has opened himself to charges of corruption, given that he has, well, business in Turkey that he doesn't have with the Kurds. One sad part of all of this is that now even more of our descendants will say this is the way the world is and there's no sense in trying to change it. We can help avert that catastrophe by making this President into the poster child for How Not to Be.

Around the table: a potentially-major Presidential miscalculation, and other items.

House Democrats propose requiring a three-fifths majority to raise tax rates on the bottom 80 percent of taxpayers. Maybe this proposal makes raising taxes on higher incomes easier and maybe it doesn't, but anyway I'd prefer not to change House rules concerning majority votes for certain legislative aims, even if I agree with those aims (and I surely agree that working folks shouldn't pay more taxes). I'd prefer they reductions in middle-class tax rates with top tax-bracket income hikes, and then (since most Americans would support that program) just keep explaining past the haters and their lies.

Our Administration is mulling actually delivering an enemy of Turkish President Erdogan into his hands. Well, I guess we now know why Mr. Erdogan threw the Saudis under the bus over Mr. Khashoggi's murder. The good news? "Career officials" at three federal agencies were "furious" over the idea. The bad news? There are fewer "career officials" in our government than there used to be. And our President fist-bumped Mr. Erdogan not too long ago -- over his authoritarian tendencies, no less! I wonder how he'll feel about that if Mr. Erdogan persists in his requests.

ProPublica finds our Administration doing its damnedest to funnel Veterans Administration money toward private care for our veterans. Private health care is, of course, more expensive than single-payer health care (which our Veterans' Administration is), and the VA's well-covered problems in recent years started with Congressional sequestration dramas. This is how they win: they squeal TEH GUVMINT DOESN'T WORKZ!!!!! and then run our government badly to prove their point. I'm really surprised more members of our "liberal" media aren't on to this oh no wait I'm actually not surprised.

Speaking of our "liberal" media, FAIR catches them pretending they have no responsibility in reflexively trumpeting our President's squealing about caravans of foreigners coming to destroy us. Actually, their editorial pages exposed our President's racist game while it was going on, but their news pages covered it like it was real news! And then after the midterms, their editorial pages covered the caravan controversy like "everyone knew" it was BS! If I were more generous, perhaps I'd posit this schizophrenia as an improvement in media coverage -- over, you know, merely treating racism as something that "deserves a hearing." But I yearn for truth from our media, not coverage that's merely marginally better than awful.

I suppose it makes sense that our President would find Sean Hannity a suck-up who asks "dumb" questions, since the kind of loyalty he demands from everyone else seems to sicken him. You might even suppose (as the article's author does) that he keeps calling on CNN's Jim Acosta because he loves drama. But you might also suppose that reports of "discord" within our President's inner circle are also drama, and thus worth very little of our time. Still, I have to point this out occasionally, just as vaccines have to have a little bit of the disease they're fighting in them so they can teach your body what to fight.

Finally, Heather Digby Parton at Salon may have hit on something big here: that our President may be undercutting his obvious "Discredit Everybody Until Nobody Believes Anything Anymore" strategy by being completely untrustworthy himself. Indeed, this isn't a new strategy -- candidates always fill the air with BS so that more independent-minded voters throw up their hands and stay home on Election Day. But given the highest midterm turnout in 52 years earlier this month, we also have evidence that his strategy is not working. So when's that terrorist attack coming?

Action: government oppression, offshore drilling, and bad media.

The government of Turkey sure has been on a roll lately, purging itself of thousands of workers President Erdogan has deemed insufficiently loyal after an apparent attempted coup in 2016, and arresting and detaining many more private citizens, including 10 human rights workers at a meeting at a hotel near Istanbul about a month ago. Among these detainees is an Avaaz staff member named Özlem, and Avaaz helps you call for her release. Also among them is Idil Eser, head of Amnesty International's Turkish branch, and Amnesty International helps you call for her release as well. If you can put a face to Turkey's oppression, you make it that much harder for Turkey to oppress folks. If you can put a relatively prestigious face (like Ms. Eser's) on Turkey's reign of terror, you can certainly move the needle a bit. But if you can also put a relatively unknown face (like Özlem's) on it, you can remind good folks all over the world that folks like them get caught up in government oppression, too. We might also find it useful to remind President Trump (whose Administration has, surprisingly, condemned the arrests, instead of ignoring them) that the Big Stick of Bad PR can come his way if he gets ideas.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration wants to open our coasts to offshore drilling again, apparently thinking we've all forgotten the Spillageddon in the Gulf a mere seven years ago, a spill that made British Petroleum look like the most heartless corporation in the world (in a contest that always has a lot of entrants!) and devastated the local economies of Louisiana and Florida for years to come. But, you know, some oil or gas CEO needs to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home, so to hell with what the people need! Naturally the Department of the Interior will only take comments on the offshore drilling plan for another six days, so Food and Water Watch helps you tell our government to protect our water and our livelihoods and stop new offshore drilling. No use arguing this is about "American energy independence" -- real American energy independence would begin with expanding renewable energy sources like solar and wind. Trouble is, that program would also grant us independence from oil and gas CEOs getting all the say about everything, and we can't have that in the greatest democratic experiment in Earth's history!

Finally, Media Matters helps you tell major corporations to stop advertising on Sean Hannity's Fox News show. While it's true that Mr. Hannity's program has morphed from a garden variety right-wing hackfest into a full-blown Trump TV operation, basically we should be encouraging corporate advertisers to run away from his program because of everything he's ever said. (OK, he hasn't been as bad on gays as other right-winger blowhards, but that's nothing to take to the Pearly Gates.) And just to review: the First Amendment protects you from your government; it does not protect you from your employer or from your advertisers, and it certainly does not protect you from activists, critics, or customers. I say this not just to pre-empt charges that a campaign targeting Mr. Hannity's advertisers somehow "oppresses" him, but to pre-empt corporate attempts to expand this "right" into a weapon they could wield against, say, a disgruntled customer's negative online review of their product, or even a customer's desire to buy a competitor's product, or no product. When our politicians constantly whine about the First Amendment when someone criticizes them, these things are not so hard to imagine.

Around the table: governments torturing citizens, banksters exploiting prisoners, and Donald Trump.

Amnesty Internation announces they have "credible evidence" that the Turkish government is cracking down on the Turkish people with arbitrary detainment, torture, and rape. That followed President Erdogan's emergency declaration, which followed the "suspension" of some 50,000 civil servants, the detainment of almost 1,000 judges and prosecutors, and the suspension of over 2,700 more judges. Also, too, they detained 60 schoolkids for treason. Arresting kids for treason! You might say Mr. Erdogan's actions are explicable, given the apparent coup attempt in mid-July, but I'd just say a leader who feels he must go to such lengths to restore "order" is no kind of leader at all. Not that he was a peach to begin with, of course.

Arun Gupta at The Nation describes the latest (legal!) scam perpetrated in the prison system: they take the prisoners' cash and give them ATM cards when they get out -- ATM cards that are larded with hidden fees. Anyone else think law enforcement will get money from banksters to arrest people on bogus charges, take their money, and given them fee-laden ATM cards when they put them back on the street that night? Of course, prisoners who serve longer sentences get this done to them, too. Don't be the fool who says who cares? They shouldn't have done anything wrong! After all, you might spend a night, or a year, in the clink someday -- maybe for something you can't even imagine could be a crime now! -- and then you'll see what it's like to keep paying after you thought you were done paying.

Republican Vice Presidential candidate Mike Pence tells right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt, apparently with a straight face, that "name-calling" has no "place in public life," all because President Obama called Donald Trump a demagogue. Examples of Donald Trump's own name-calling are, of course, easily accessible, apparently, to everyone except Mike Pence (and Hugh Hewitt, who didn't question Mr. Pence on "name-calling" any further). But I wouldn't presume (as the Politico writer does) that this is Messrs. Trump and Pence "getting tangled up in mixed messaging on tactics." I'm pretty sure the "mixed messaging" is the tactic -- being a Republican (let alone a Trump votary!) requires exactly this sort of mental disconnect all the time.

Finally, speaking of Mr. Trump, what to make of his declaration at an Ohio rally that "I'm afraid the election's gonna be rigged, I have to be honest"? That he's not so confident in Voter ID laws delivering him unearned victories in Wisconsin and North Carolina after all? That he's trying to gin up anger and resentment among votaries who can't possibly see how he could have lost? Or that, like a baseball manager in last place by mid-May complaining about injuries, he's just getting his excuses ready? Number three sounds the most reasonable, but I bet it's number two. Then again, with Donald Trump, it's always number two.

UPDATE. I originally identified Mr. Erdogan as the Prime Minister of Turkey, a position he held until 2014; he is now that nation's President. I've corrected the error.

Around the table: terrorism brings out the *worst* in Our Glorious Elites! And other stories.

Frank Barat, writing in Counterpunch, tells us some hard truths about the terrorist attacks in Brussels. You don't need to be completely against prisons (as some of my compatriots on the left and right are!) to remember that the OGs of ISIS all met in Iraqi internment camps. And it's funny that Turkish Kurds, who are actually beating ISIS on the ground, can't get any help from Our Glorious Elites. But you better believe they'll fight like hell to be able to break into your phones whenever they want.

Zack Cartwright, writing at USUncut, finds "Five Outrageous Examples of Voter Suppression in the Arizona Primary." You'll recognize number one -- the absurdly long lines of voters in Maricopa County, which for some reason opened less than one-third the polling locations they opened in 2012 -- from the long lines you saw in the more, ah, urban areas of Ohio during the 2004 Presidential elections. You'll also be very surprised to learn that the more Hispanic areas of Maricopa County hardly had any polling locations open at all. The other three examples aren't any better.

Adam Johnson, writing at FAIR, finds a litany of Bush Mobb-era pro-torture punditoids "suddenly concerned with human rights" now that President Obama has visited Cuba. These include the coiner of the phrase "enhanced interrogation" and a "putative liberal" who "had not once tweeted out the words 'human rights'" in 6,000 twitterings until President Obama went to Cuba. I'm pretty sure that if a Republican President had gone to Cuba, they'd have made fools of themselves giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Ho hum, banksters are fighting the notion of a financial transaction tax (a.k.a. the "Robin Hood tax"). In other news, burglars don't think laws against burglary are necessary. And what is the banksters' reasoning? That it would prevent them from redistributing more money upward to themselves "weaken markets and hurt small investors." Always the big guy takes the little guy hostage when you try to take the big guy's unearned goodies! And the banksters "weaken markets" much better than any government ever could, with their hifalutin financial "instruments" that have nothing to do with loaning money to build businesses, create jobs, and improve processes.

Finally, Newsweek reminds us that Joseph E. Schmitz, who has actually been named as a "foreign policy advisor" by Donald Trump himself, had to quit as Defense Department inspector general in 2005, amid allegations (mainly from Iowa Republican Senator Charles Grassley) that (among other things!) he blocked investigations into Iraq and Afghanistan contractors. In other words, he was too corrupt even for Tha Bush Mobb -- so of course he's now he's a Trump advisor! Another fun fact: Mr. Schmitz's father was expelled by the John Birch Society -- for his extremism.

Action: free speech for Turkey, and justice for Nabisco workers.

Earlier this month, the Turkish government took over the Zaman newspaper, which had been critical of the Erdogan government; that government had taken over Zaman because -- stop me if you've heard this story before! -- of alleged ties with "terrorists." Zaman also closely affiliated itself with a political opponent of Mr. Erdogan, and I guess that's all you need to be considered a "terrorist" there. Imagine a President Trump wresting the Washington Post away from Jeff Bezos after an investigation into Trump Administration corruption! Perhaps not coincidentally, a Turkish TV network that had been reporting on the government's ongoing crackdown against the Kurds in the southeast also went dark around the same time. A government deriving its power from the will of the people, and acting in accordance with that will, would not need to silence its media, not even in the name of "fighting terrorism," which is everyone's excuse for wrongdoing these days. So Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell your Congressfolk to speak out against abuses of power by the Turkish government. Just because they're an ally (whatever that means anymore!) doesn't mean we should ignore the evil they do.

Meanwhile, Mondelēz, which owns Nabisco, plans to fire 600 good folks in Chicago who make snack foods including Oreo cookies -- you like Oreos, right? Though only in moderation, of course -- and move production of those foods out of the country. That should boost the popularity of Oreos! You know what else would boost their popularity? The nation learning that Mondelēz's CEO made over $21 million in 2014 -- which represented a $6 million pay hike, because gosh, she must have made more cookies than anyone else in human history! -- and then demanded that the Chicago workers eat massive pay and benefit cuts. But this is just one of the ways big corporations redistribute worker income upward to their executives. And a sizable portion of the American public -- including even those folks who know something's being done to their American dream -- think it's just human nature for a CEO to act selfishly, without regard for the good works of his or her employees. Hence Jobs with Justice helps you tell Mondelēz to keep its workers and their works in Chicago, and stop exploiting foreign workers by paying them a lot less to do the same work. I suppose the corporation will reply by testifying to its "concern" for workers. But they already testify with their actions.

Action: Syrian peace talks, and saner pork production.

Syrian Kurds can't get into Saudi Arabia-led peace talks regarding the future of their country, even though they fight ISIS harder than almost anyone. Why? Apparently because the Turkish government doesn't want them there, apparently. If you know the autocrat who runs Turkey, you must ask: why does he get veto power over anything? And the whole point of peace talks is to talk to people you don't want to talk to, so you can all live together. Hence Just Foreign Policy helps you tell our government to demand a place for Syrian Kurds at any peace negotiation. Some folks -- folks who don't just want to come out and say they don't want to talk to any Middle Easterners, I suspect -- will complain that if we insist on Syrian Kurds' participation in the peace process, it'll gum up the process. Well, peace is hard. And maintaining peace is hard. But making war all the time, with other people's children, and then calling other people "traitors" when they criticize your stupidity? That's too easy. Civilized people need to stop doing that.

Meanwhile, the group Compassion Over Killing has started a petition on Change.org helping you tell the USDA and Hormel to end their participation in a "pilot" program aiming to allow pork-producing corporations to speed up their pig slaughter lines and do so with less oversight by our government. Less oversight by our government means less oversight by us, and I put "pilot" in quotation marks for a reason -- obviously, both big agriculture corporations and our government are hot to declare this program a success whether it actually is a success or not. Which, by the way, it won't be -- as you know either from watching the video or, ah, doing any kind of real work, the faster the slaughter line, the more abuse workers will heap upon the slaughtered, simply because the pressure to produce is too great. And the less we-the-people can inspect what they're doing, the less we'll know about the food we eat -- which, in this case, will have more pus and feces in it than safe food would have. And who will deny we have a right to know?

Action: freedom of the press, TV drug ads, and postal banking.

Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell our President and Congress to pressure Turkey to free two journalists who reported on allegations of arms smuggling by the Turkish National Intelligence Organization to Syrian rebels. A Turkish court charged Messrs. Dündar and Gül with spying and "divulging state secrets" last week for reporting published in Cumhuriyet back in May, and given that Reporters Without Borders ranks Turkey a mere 149th out of 180 nations in press freedom, it's not difficult to surmise that the Turkish government won't be treating the two men particularly well in detention. What does Turkey have to fear, you have to wonder? It can't be that folks will think they're trying to topple Assad, a leader perhaps not even beloved by his own mother. Perhaps they're afraid folks will find out they're helping ISIS, and not even deliberately, either -- when arms go to war zones, they all too frequently don't wind up where they're supposed to. Whatever the reason, the good citizens of Turkey deserve to know what their government's up to.

Meanwhile, Denise Kinney, of Gig Harbor, WA, has started a Change.org petition which helps you tell Congress to ban advertising of pharmaceutical drugs on TV. Big pharmaceutical corporations spend more then $4 billion annually on drugs, and you better believe they cite that as yet another reason your drugs have to cost so much. Further, the only other nation that allows such drug ads on TV is New Zealand, and the American Medical Association has called for a ban on such ads. I'm not the sort of fellow who reflexively defers to experts; I'm not even the sort of fellow who's afraid to find out about health-related matters on his own. But I'm old enough to remember when you simply didn't see TV ads about specific drugs, and I also see the problem in constantly urging consumers to tell their doctors to try them out on drugs that may not work and may actually do them harm. And I keep coming back to all that money spent on advertising and wonder why it can't be spent on research -- and I keep thinking Big Pharma would rather they, and not your doctor, controlled what drugs you get.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the U.S. Postmaster General to institute postal banking services like check-cashing, bill-paying, and fee-free ATMs, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. Why should the U.S. Post Office provide these services? Because they're damn good at what they do, that's why -- no, they're only losing money because Congress mandated that they pre-fund their pension fund 85 years in advance, a requirement Congress makes of precisely zero corporations or other federal entities -- and because banksters, who always whine about "unfair" competition from the government, don't actually want to go into urban and rural areas that need banking services. But post offices can provide good, basic banking services, and thus prevent urban and rural communities from falling prey to payday lenders and their death-spiral of debt. Best of all, the Postmaster General doesn't need permission from Congress or the President to start basic banking services. Still, she could certainly use our encouragement, and we certainly shouldn't be parsimonious about giving it.

Protests in Turkey may have disappared from "liberal" media news coverage, but the crackdowns have, er, not disappeared from the lives of good Turkish citizens -- lawyers get arrested just as they're about to read statements condemning the violence, doctors get detained as they're about to treat folks injured by tear gas or water cannons, good folks get hurt or sent to prison for no damn good reason other than opposing their government's actions. You have to wonder what the government is so afraid of. So Amnesty International helps you tell the Turkish government to stop beating up on its people just for disagreeing with them. As I mentioned before, the current government of Turkey has been in power for over 11 years, never coming close to losing its huge parliamentary majorities despite never getting more than 50% of the vote in an election. (Parliamentary elections can be weird, to folks used to observing U.S. elections.) Maybe the U.S. official response has been so muted because they're Our Bastards. But I'm such a sanctimonious purist that I hate all bastards.

Speaking of bastards, check out the pathetic wife-beater who went to the school where his wife taught and put it in lockdown -- and also the pathetic school system that promptly fired her because of the pathetic crap her pathetic husband pulled. You may be surprised to learn, however, that only six states -- six! -- prevent a school from firing someone because of the consequences of their domestic abuse. This is most emphatically not a matter of "excusing wrong-doing" -- it's a matter of making sure we punish the right people for their wrong-doing. The pathetic loser who pursued his wife into school got jail time, but what did his wife do wrong? "She married the loser" is not a good answer, since most of us have gone out with folks who turned out to be bad for us and most of us let that go on longer than we should have. Thankfully, H.R. 1229, the Security and Financial Empowerment Act, would correct the workplace discrimination problem, among others; you can read about it here, and phone your Reps and Senators afterward if you like. They'll never see it coming.