Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning foreclosures, junk fees, and Twitter.

Long story short: tell our VA to help veterans stay in their homes, tell our FTC to fight junk fees, and tell big corporations to abandon Twitter. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Veterans Administration (or VA) to prevent veterans from being foreclosed out of their homes. Our VA allowed veterans to defer mortgage payments during the pandemic – you remember when unemployment was 14%? – but now our VA is telling veterans either to pony up five figures or refinance their homes post-haste, though they’d be refinancing at much higher interest rates now. Hence at least four Senators have asked our VA to extend the mortgage-deferment program and pause all VA loan foreclosures, which sure seems like kindness to me. I guess some folks would rather throw veterans out on the streets when it sure wasn’t their fault a pandemic slammed into America. But I think a capitalist system that benefits the rich more than it benefits anyone else can take the hit.

More Perfect Union also helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to enact the most vigorous anti-junk fee rule possible. Our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) is also working on an anti-junk fee rule, but out FTC’s purview is broader (i.e., not just the banking industry), so their rule could do even more good – but only if we speak out. And this ought to be a lay-up! No one likes finding out that the good or service they bought actually costs more than they thought it was going to cost, after all, and no use saying that’s just how things are, get used to it, not when you don’t actually have to get used to it, since no law of physics or morals compels us to accept any abuse a corporation heaps upon us in the name of TEH FREE MARKETZ!!!!! People before markets!

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Twitter, or X, or whatever; plenty of corporations have stopped advertising on Twitter, but not all corporations, and no corporations should help fund a hellscape where assholes can bully the disadvantaged and then claim DISCRIMINASHUNZ!!!! whenever someone stands up to them. Beware of hostage-taking in opposing arguments! Plenty of disadvantaged folks still use Twitter or X or whatever, they’ll say, and they’ve spent years building audiences and making connections there, so boycotts only hurt them! But I suspect these disadvantaged folks would say the same thing anti-apartheid activists said in the late ‘80s: “seriously, you’re worried about things getting worse for us?”

Around the table: the corruption, it burns!

Ho hum, our “liberal” media cherry-picks data to “prove” that folks move right as they grow older, particularly the New York Times’s Nate Cohn, who concluded that based merely on 2012 and 2020 Presidential elections, never mind any election that happened inbetween. “To call it superficial is to be kind,” writes David W. Moore, in what must have been painful understatement. Anyway, people don’t get “conservative” as they get older, they get civilized – imagining all that drinking you did in your 20s as evidence you were “liberal” and all those stop signs you don’t roll through anymore as evidence you’ve become “conservative” would be absurdly simple-minded. Why, it’s almost as simple-minded as imagining that Joe Biden is the liberalest liberal ever merely because he happens to be President. Seriously, though, the whole article’s pretty good; you should read it.

If you want to read something truly depressing, read Phil Jones’s account of how big tech corporations use refugees all over the world as a kind of slave labor force to power their big machines. If, like me, you think great empires always rely on slave labor (and if, like me, you think that’s an abomination unto the Lord), you won’t be surprised or pleased to see big corporations using unemployed Palestinians and folks in Ugandan and Lebanese refugee camps to (among other things) teach algorithms how to recognize cats in photos – and paying them dung pellets for it, because who are they going to complain to? Don’t let your neighbors argue that at least they’re not the Uyghurs! Pointing out slave labor somewhere to excuse slave labor somewhere else is, what’s the word I’m looking for? Oh, yeah: evil.

You may be pleased to hear that Kenya has reduced teen pregnancies by close to 40 percent over just the last four years, and you may also be pleased to learn that they’ve done that largely with more education for girls, though more punishment for rapists and molesters would also be nice. But why do I suspect American right-wingers won’t find this to be good news? Because the more teen pregnancy rates fall, the less they can complain about the immorality of (Black) folks? Because education, for them, is just an excuse to throw some white supremacist tantrum? Because they’re all about controlling other people? I kid, of course – all these reasons are true!

U.S. District Judge rules that West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice can’t simply avoid providing financial information in a lawsuit just because he’s running for Senate in 2024 and the information might be used against him. They all act like they want to be public servants, but then they act like they can’t take any punches whatsoever; no one has a “right” to avoid scrutiny, let alone criticism. And I can’t even say for sure he’d be a worse public servant than Joe Manchin, the man he’d likely run against once Mr. Manchin is done pretending he’s running for President because the moment demands him. I actually typed all that without convulsing in laughter.

Finally, I wish I were more surprised to hear that Moms for Liberty book-banning types often have deep ties to groups like the Proud Boys. That’s right, “Moms” wanting to ban books are using violent thugs who call themselves “Boys” as their brownshirts, because we are cursed to live in Interesting Times! I’m not upset that one source for this article came out after they all turned on her, because we don’t learn everything through thought experiment. Note well, though, that one Moms for Liberty member who got Gender Queer banned in Fascist Florida thanked her “friend Jacob Engels, who is part of the LGB community and also a reporter” for his help; she didn’t mention he was a Proud Boy. Every time they talk about some "friend," remember that every fascist is someone’s friend.

Action: concerning broadband, endangered species, and worker "misclassification."

Long story short: tell our FCC to force big internet telecoms to spell out what we’re paying and what we’re paying for, tell our Department of the Interior to roll back Trump-era damage to the Endangered Species Act, and tell our Department of Labor to end corporate "misclassification" of workers. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to force big telecom corporations to spell out exactly what you’re paying for when you buy their service. Consumer Reports advocates a sort of "broadband nutrition label" that would include such information as the cost of activation and early termination fees, upload and download speeds, and privacy protections, and that'd be a very good place to start. And the only people who could possibly oppose such a thing are a) big telecom CEOs looking to make even more money they haven't earned and b) right-wing government-is-always-bad types; haven’t we let them have enough of the say about everything for one lifetime?

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our Department of the Interior to restore protections offered by the Endangered Species Act. The Trump Administration, as you know, crippled the Act, by forcing Interior to foreground corporate profits, ignore climate change, and slash protections for threatened species (so they don’t become endangered, amirite?) during legally-mandated rulemaking. And sadly, the Biden Administration has dragged its feet on the matter, recently insisting they need another two years to fix the problem. But by writing our Department of Interior, we can at least keep the issue in front of them, even if they’d prefer it goes away on its own.

Finally, Jobs With Justice helps you tell our Department of Labor to stop big corporations from simply classifying their full-time workers as “independent contractors.” They do it so they can deny full-time employees health care benefits, pension benefits, unemployment benefits, and overtime pay – among other rights employees have fought and died to earn! One 2020 study suggested that corporations have “misclassified” somewhere between 10 and 30 percent of all employees as “contractors”; one can raise an eyebrow over the wide range in the finding, but the fact is, one person denied their rights under our laws is too many.

Action: concerning racism, slave labor, facial recognition, false advertising, and right-wing media.

Long story short: tell Oregon legislators to end the use of non-unanimous juries, tell your pension fund to pressure Apple to fight slave labor in China, tell our IRS to stop using facial recognition tech, tell our FTC to stop employers from advertising fake pay rates, and tell AT&T to stop funding OAN. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Oregon residents, take note: Color of Change helps you tell your state legislator to pass SB 1511, so that everyone in Oregon convicted of a crime by a non-unanimous jury vote can get a retrial. States have historically used non-unanimous juries for certain criminal cases pretty much so they could put more Black folks in jail, but by 2020, when our Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional (citing the racist origins of the non-unanimous jury therein), Oregon was literally the last state in the union to use them, having even been outclassed by Louisiana, which outlawed them in 2019. Unfortunately, our Court didn't require retrials for those convicted by a non-unanimous jury before their ruling; SB 1511 would fix that, and thus help close a sad chapter in American history.

Sum of Us helps you tell your pension fund to pressure Apple to stop using forced Uyghur labor in China to make its products. More specifically, you'll tell your pension fund to vote for two shareholder resolutions at the next Apple shareholder meeting on March 4. Apple supposedly has systems in place to root out slave labor from its supply chain, but now that journalists have found at least nine of Apple's suppliers rely on Uyghur slave labor in Chinese concentration camps, we have, ah, reason to believe those systems aren't working, so one shareholder resolution would require Apple to account for that. A second resolution would aim at Chinese government requests to remove apps from Apple's app store, and since journalists have used some of these apps to find out about Chinese treatment of Uyghurs, Apple needs to account for that, too.

Fight for the Future helps you tell our IRS to stop using facial recognition or biometric surveillance tools. Facial recognition technology sucks, is racist, and far too frequently results in innocent people getting arrested, but for the purposes of this discussion, those are symptoms of a far bigger problem -- if facial recognition technology can't even get your face right, if it too easily gets flummoxed by a person aging or getting disfigured in an accident, how can it fight identity fraud, which is our IRS's purported reason for using the now-notorious ID.me? ID.me also collects a lot of personal data -- I mean, it works with our IRS! -- meaning the fact that it only shares some of that data with other corporations shouldn't ease your mind. We may fear malice more than incompetence, but let's not allow incompetence to run so rampant it looks like malice.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to outlaw fake pay rate scams. What's a fake pay rate scam? It's when an employer puts out a job listing with a higher pay rate than they have any intention of paying; they also advertise hourly rates as "plus tips" when they actually include tips, plus they advertise managerial jobs that they don't actually have open, and then offer you a lower-responsibility job, hoping to slip that lower pay by you! And folks don't necessarily have the luxury of "just not taking the job" -- if you're on unemployment, and you turn down a job, you don't get your unemployment benefits back. However, all of this falls under "truth in advertising" laws, which our FTC must enforce, so all that remains is for us to tell them to enforce them.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell AT&T to cut all ties with the notorious One America News Network. AT&T owns about two-thirds of DirecTV, which will stop offering OAN this coming April, and while that's a big deal, OAN only exists in the first place thanks to AT&T money, and we have no indication that money train's going to stop rolling. Indeed, AT&T said they wanted a competitor to Fox News, but why should there be more than one right-wing propaganda outlet? Hell, why should there be one? OAN peddles 2020 election lies and COVID misinformation just like the other right-wing "news" channels, and our commitment to freedom of speech does not require us to enable right-wing propaganda to corrupt the minds and souls of good Americans. It doesn't require corporations to fund it, either.

Around the table: the stupid, it burns!

Good news, everyone! President Biden signs executive order raising the minimum wage to $15/hour for around 70,000 federal workers. This should be an easy sell for President Biden; the workers affected include firefighters and Veterans Administration housekeepers and food service workers. Then again, giving tens of millions more good Americans $15/hour should have been an easy sell for Congressional Democrats; instead, the enduring image we'll have of that effort is that of the Joker's giddy thumbs-down.

The Biden Administration has also put out an unexpectedly strong rule clamping down on surprise medical bills -- but Democrats and Republicans are joining together to try to undermine it. Bipartisanship! It still sucks! They're acting like the Biden Administration overstepped its legal authority in mandating that insurance corporations and health care providers use median in-network rates for procedures to settle billing disputes, but really they're just mad that TEH GUBMINT IZ SETTINGZ TEH PRICEZ!!!!! Some people say the words "price controls" like they're cuss words, but I bet a lot of Americans would be perfectly happy with our government forcing big corporations to lower health care prices.

Students have been walking out of their abjectly unsafe schools all over America the past few weeks, and I applaud these kids' courage, but I wish it weren't necessary. It's one thing to justify President Biden's relative inaction by pointing to "American individualism" or even the tantrums right-wingers have thrown about masks and vaccine mandates, but fact is he hasn't used all the tools the law already grants him -- you'd think he'd at least use the Defense Production Act to make masks and tests, and while I know Joe Manchin killed both expanded unemployment benefits and paid sick leave, Joe Biden could have argued for them as part of a real pandemic response. He'll wind up having done better at this than Donald Trump, but that sure ain't worth writing home about.

When I hear that the big car corporations are trying to delay Massachusetts' new right-to-repair law for a few years -- a law which would, among other things, keep the big automakers from essentially dictating to you where you can get your car fixed -- all I can say is the law already gave the big automakers two years to start complying with it, and I have to assume that the problem isn't that it's so hard to comply with the law (this is America, the can-do country, after all), but that the big corporations sat on their asses for two years and didn't even try to get ready to comply with the law, and that's something no law-and-order adherent should abide.

Senate Republicans filibustered voting rights legislation last week -- with the critical assistance of the Penguin and the Joker, who wouldn't even force Republicans to earn their filibuster by talking through it like they did in the old days -- but you wouldn't know it from all the passive voice our "liberal" media uses in its headlines. But I'll be honest: when I see our "liberal" media deciding to focus on "Democratic infighting" as if literally half of our Senate didn't block the bill, I realize that I need this reminder, too. Yeah, Manchinema is a persistent annoyance, and their careers as Senators will suffer for it, but I'll try to do a better job not simply ignoring the obstruction of Republicans, since, you know, they could just do their constituents' will and vote for the damn bills.

Finally, of course Mitch McConnell knew exactly what he was saying when he said we don't need voting rights reforms because "African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans." He meant for Trumpholes to hear him say Black folks aren't "real" Americans, and he also knew a lot of folks would defend him on the basis of what he obviously "meant." At some point, though, you can really only trust what folks actually say. And not for nothing, but his subsequent defenses have been lame -- anyone can say they've got Black friends, too.

Around the table: more notes on pollution, racism, and health care.

Sharon Lerner at The Intercept explains how big corporations and weak regulators get dangerous chemicals approved by our government. If a corporation demands that our EPA declare their chemical is safe right-fucking-now, aren't they telling us that it's really not safe? And when more and more chemical approval cases suddenly become high-priority "hair on fire" cases, doesn't that make the word "priority" pretty close to meaningless? If your workplace worked like that, you'd call bullshit. (As an aside, some corporate hacks even threaten EPA workers with lawsuits. Do I dare I call them frivolous lawsuits? Yes, I do dare!)

Surprise, surprise, states that ended enhanced unemployment benefits didn't prompt very many people to get jobs. And you don't live like a king on unemployment benefits, enhanced or not, so gosh, maybe folks really just don't want to go back to bad jobs so they can be paid in dung pellets and suffer endless abuse from bosses and customers. Sure, fear of COVID and caring for relatives with COVID might be factors, but I doubt they're deal-breakers. Wouldn't a free marketeer look at this data and suggest that employers make their jobs more attractive if they want to fill more positions? I kid, of course -- no "free" marketeer ever blames a corporation for not doing enough.

When I read that African asylum seekers have an even tougher time at American concentration camps than other folks do -- and Frances Madeson's report is truly horrifying -- I am reminded that we have a long history of truly awful immigration policy. Remember when we used to give gasoline baths to poor (not well-off) Mexican immigrants at the border? The Nazis picked up on that! I guess right-wingers will call me a purveyor of critical race theory for even noting any of this. And I'll call them a bunch of whiny diaper-loaded brats who are too weak to handle the hard work of maintaining a civilization, so I guess that's at least a draw.

Hey, speaking of critical race theory, Olivia Riggio at FAIR notes that right-wingers have "manufactured" all kinds of meanings of the term. I guess they're not quite as embarrassing as that Alabama lawmaker, but why do we bother telling the difference between the mound of dung the flies have found and the mound of dung they haven't found yet? Even the right-wingers who try harder still basically insist that one counter-example destroys all trends, which is still pretty damn stupid. No, one college professor fantasizing about shooting white people doesn't obliterate the fact of police exterminating Black folks for centuries. No, one Black man getting two doctorates doesn't obliterate the racism that means other Black folks get none. And no, you're certainly not "the real racist" for pointing out the real racism. Gosh, no matter how many head shots you give these zombies, they keep getting back up. It's almost like Our Glorious Elites benefit from that or something.

Did Florida Governor Ron DeSantis really say that his state's "hospitals are open for business"? Yes, he really did say that. Politicians constantly use the phrase "open for business" as if it's an amulet that'll keep them out of trouble; is it too much to ask that Mr. DeSantis has finally put a stake through that phrase's heart? As we speak, Florida routinely leads the nation in daily new cases, and Charlie Crist just led Ron DeSantis in a poll. If Mr. Crist deploys the phrase "our hospitals are open for business" in his ads, he might just win. I hope Mr. Crist isn't too "nice" for that. Perhaps he should ask John Bel Edwards how well being nasty to people who deserve it can work for you.

Finally, New York Attorney General Letitia James issues report finding that Gov. Andrew Cuomo has sexually harassed "multiple" women. Please, please, don't take Andrew Cuomo away from us! said no liberal ever.

Around the table: our leaders are irredeemably evil, part 737.

Here's something else you may not have known about the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" President Biden reached with Republicans late last week: it could reduce unemployment benefits in the name of "fighting fraud." I mean, God forbid we pay for an infrastructure bill by taxing some of the unearned hundreds of billions the richest Americans have squeezed out of us during this pandemic. Frankly I don't know how a state can fine people who have merely been accused, not convicted of unemployment fraud, but the ramblings of Sen. Shaheen (D-NH) on the matter don't exactly inspire confidence.

Josmar Trujillo at FAIR reminds us that our "liberal" media love creating fear about crime by hyping individual horrible stories and arguing about shadows. Crime is down since the 1970s, bail hasn't been reformed very much, and police haven't been defunded, but our "liberal" media don't care about the facts -- what are facts, after all, in the face of fear? Just remember: if someone says anything like "crime wave" in a totally unironic way, they're full of soup. (As an aside, I wouldn't use a phrase like "the corrupt poisonous fruits of BLM’s work," as Laura Ingraham does; the plural of "fruit," in this context, is "fruit, but worse, "fruit" really only requires one modifier -- "poisonous" would be the better one, I guess, but using two modifiers there just makes you dramatic.)

ProPublica keeps bringing it with their recent report that billionaire Peter Thiel has somehow stashed some $5 billion in his Roth IRA. Though Roth IRAs have historically limited the income of their holders as well as the contributions they could make, at least a dozen gazillionaires hold at least $20 million each in their Roths, mainly by taking advantage of tricks working families have no access to, like buying startup stock for pennies on the dollar and watching the value of that stock shoot up inside the Roth. Nice work if you can get it! You'll be pleased to know that Bush the Lesser made all of this worse during his second term in office.

Big telecoms have two more days to implement phone number-verification technology that aims to vastly reduce the number of scam calls you get on your phone. But many big telecoms have already implemented the STIR/SHAKEN caller ID technology, so if you haven't seen relief already, you might not. Plus, our FCC gave smaller telecoms (those with under 100,000 subscribers) an additional two years to implement the STIR/SHAKEN technology, and even if our FCC moves that deadline to next year, guess where scammers will be concentrating more of their efforts. You know what might make all this meaningless eventually? All the folks of my generation and younger who now won't answer the phone every time it rings because we're tired of all the scam calls!

Ho hum, Tucker Carlson wants you to think the January 6 coup attempt was an FBI-led "false flag" operation, and he's not only confused federal agents with "unindicted co-conspirators" in right-wing reporting (if you're a federal agent running a sting, you're by definition not conspiring, obviously!) but also cited, as evidence, the FBI stings that entrapped plenty of Muslims during the "war on terror" era. We all worry about law enforcement "creating" terrorists, but I suspect Mr. Carlson's concern about that subject is a relatively recent phenomenon, and though I generally don't blame people for coming to the truth only when it affects them personally, I do blame them for coming to the truth merely to broadcast another self-serving untruth.

Finally, Florida Gov. DeSantis signs a bill that would actually require the state to survey college students and faculty on their political beliefs. I firmly expect this law will die a horrible, humiliating death in court one day, though we may see a lot of fine educational talent abandon the state of Florida over the next few years in the meantime. But I myself have considered possibly going back to college in Florida just so I can be documented saying that Ron DeSantis is an irredeemable asshole.

Around the table: of "labor shortages" and "trust issues."

Biden Administration withdraws Trumphole "public charge" proposal that could have prevented three million good Americans from getting food stamps. Not a big lift, admittedly, since a federal judge first blocked the rule and then tossed it completely, but perhaps the Biden Administration thought it might be a good time to remind everyone that the American Rescue Plan (for which exactly zero Republicans voted) expanded food stamps for families of four by $100 a month. That's the kind of thing people remember come election time -- versus, you know, the 2009 Making Work Pay tax cut that was literally designed not to be noticed.

The Economic Policy Institute's Heidi Shierholz urges Republicans not to "Ignore the Evidence on 'Labor Shortages,'" and while such urging might seem like a waste of time, the rest of us, at least, can parse the evidence she offers and be reminded that a) if unemployment insurance were really "killing jobs," you wouldn't see faster job growth in low-wage professions than you do in higher-wage professions, b) wage increases in the leisure/hospitality sector come in a sector that's still so poorly-paid you couldn't reasonably expect it to drive wages sky-high anywhere else, and c) they told a similar story in the Obama era, that workers just didn't have the skills employers were looking for, but the unemployment rate ultimately went down to 3.5% before the pandemic without a national job-training program, so we know that's bunkum. Also d) why do we listen to Republicans about anything, ever?

Republicans have used the ProPublica report on wealthy folks' tax evasion -- a report buttressed by personal info apparently leaked by someone within our IRS -- to claim, just like they did in 2013, that the American people should have "trust issues" with our IRS. I guess that's one way of trying to make chicken shit into chicken salad, but even in a nation of "temporarily-embarrassed millionaires," as Will Rogers put it, most Americans have been not-rich for far too long to think our IRS is really going to leak their personal info. Republicans are either being absurdly optimistic or are gaslighting everyone -- oh, why am I bothering, of course they're gaslighting, because when you're wrong all the time and you won't fix your wrongness with better policy proposals, what else can you do?

Upon hearing, in considerably more detail than before, that "Trump-Inspired Death Threats Are Terrorizing Election Workers," all I can say is we should throw all these people making these threats in jail! No matter what their "feelings" are about the 2020 election! Wouldn't that be law and order of us? After all, it's a lot less than what they'd want to do to us, merely for speaking our minds. And I'm sick of folks in their "Fuck Your Feelings" T-shirts suddenly demanding that we attend their "feelings." The chickens really are coming home to roost in America. (Go ahead and read the whole thing, if you're in the mood to be profoundly disgusted with right-wing weaklings.)

The Kaiser Family Foundation gives us some of the reasons folks are still "vaccine-hesitant," and though some of them don't seem hard to overcome (maybe we could do something about vaccines being unavailable where some folks get their health care?), some of them also seem rather piddling (if airlines require it, you'll get it? Well, your hesitancy is clearly based on deep consideration of the issues, then!). And surprise, surprise! The "definitely not" groups consists mostly of white Republicans, though most of them are between 30 and 49, which doesn't bode well for our future.

Finally, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich declares his candidacy for 2022 U.S. Senate race for the seat currently held by Democrat Mark Kelly. As recently as late December, this would have been a major get for Republicans -- he's already won statewide twice, he toes the party line on immigration, and he's enthusiastically joined in all those useless fights over the Affordable Care Act and "religious" "freedom." But now, having been judged by Donald Trump to be not enthusiastic enough about the Arizona "fraudit," I doubt he makes it to the general election. In fact, it's entirely possible Arizona Republicans will nominate a rabid raccoon to face Sen. Kelly.

Action: concerning jobs, taxes, unemployment, our Post Office, immigration, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to divert the Child Tax Credit expansion to fund the American Jobs Plan and to prevent state Governors from prematurely ending extended unemployment benefits, tell our Post Office to reject Postmaster General DeJoy's plan to cut services and raise prices, tell President Biden to end yet another racist Trump-era immigration practice, and tell Senate Democrats, again, to end the filibuster. 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. Good hunting!

You know the latest Republican "counter-proposal" on the American Jobs Plan aims to repurpose unspent American Rescue Plan money -- but what you may not have realized is that "including unspent funds from the American Rescue Plan in the American Jobs Plan would repeal the Child Tax Credit Expansion that delivers $250 or $300 checks to working families every month for the next year. The fact they even proposed that shows how tone-deaf they are -- and how much confidence they have that it'll ultimately mean nothing in 2022. They might be right about 2022; these are Democrats we're talking about, after all, the same ones who are strangely not bringing up Republican involvement in January 6 every single day. So, yeah, repealing the CTC expansion should be an easy campaign ad for Democrats -- just show one hand passing a $250 check to another hand twelve times, and then show a Republican politician intercepting them all -- but, again, these are Democrats we're talking about. Which is why we need to get on the phone with our Reps and Senators and tell them no to repealing the CTC expansion. If Democrats allow that to happen, they deserve to lose their majorities in 2022. And the American democratic experiment will likely be dead at that point.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop Governors in nearly half of American states from ending expanded unemployment benefits prematurely. Those expanded benefits expire at the end of September anyway; what's the hurry? Especially considering we still have over 6% official unemployment (the more telling U6 figure, which counts folks who've given up looking for work and folks who want to work more hours, stands at 9.9%)? The "hurry" is that Republican politicians want to look like they're "doing something," and as we should know from decades of watching this happen, politicians who look like they're "doing something," even something abominable, always have the political advantage. This is why we constantly tell Democrats to actually do something. Will they listen? If enough of us speak out, they'll have to.

Progress America helps you tell our Postal Regulatory Commission to reject Postmaster General DeJoy's proposal to raise prices and cut services. I keep putting it like that because it should be obvious what a bad idea that is. Do you remember being dissatisfied with our Post Office's performance before the pandemic? I don't, and I used it all the time! They did extremely well considering all the pressure our government puts on them -- taxes haven't funded our Post Office since the early '80s, and our laws mandate that our Post Office prefund its employee benefit plans over 80 years in advance, which no other entity has to do. But, sure, let's believe the Trumphole who came in and said he had to "get tough." "We have to raise prices and cut services"? How un-American is that?

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to end the Trump-era policy that used COVID as a pretext to expel asylum seekers without due process. "Always the wrong solution for the wrong reason" should have been Donald Trump's campaign slogan. Why is it wrong to kick asylum seekers out because they might have COVID? Because you can treat COVID, that's why! At least, you can if you have the slightest amount of competence; of course, when Mike "Let's Start an HIV Mini-epidemic in Rural Indiana Counties" Pence as your COVID policy leader, you don't have competence. It's also wrong because if someone really has COVID, you're sending them back to a country that probably can't treat COVID as well as we can, where they'll infect a lot more of their fellow citizens -- which also makes it more likely COVID will survive and mutate into versions that'll infect us again. Of course, for Stephen Miller, all that was probably a feature, not a bug. But if racism and bad leadership makes all your policy for you, then you're doing policy wrong.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Democratic Senators, once again, to end the Senate filibuster. Because they say it actually impedes bipartisanship, and they're right! Back when the Senate filibuster wasn't so easily invoked -- Senators used to have to talk for 48 or 72 hours to stop a bill, but now Senators just say they're not going to end debate, and then they go off to dinner or the theater or wherever, which actually ends debate! -- Senators would more likely support bills, knowing that'd give them a chance to shape it more like they wanted it. Now Senators filibuster bills that require campaign finance disclosure and prevent big corporations from taking tax breaks after they outsource jobs. You'd think, given how popular both those things are, Senators would risk losing elections doing that. But they don't, because the filibuster is too painless and too easy to use, so much so that Sen. Manchin (D?-WV) won't consider ending it even though his friends on the other side of the aisle just humiliated him by filibustering the January 6 commission bill. But that's why we remind them of our will.

Around the table: I'm not even sure I can call it *good* news, part 677.

Restaurant workers across America go on a wage strike and say they won't go back to work until they get paid a living wage, and I say good for them! Everyone in America wants to go back to eating in a restaurant again, so workers might as well use their leverage! Note well that if unemployment really pays better than restaurant work, maybe instead of demanding our government stop making unemployment benefits better or imagining workers are "lazy" for not wanting to work their asses off for dung pellets, we should demand that restaurant work pay more. It's what a free market would demand, is it not?

Just when I thought I'd permanently soured on social media, along comes Payal Dhar at Yes! magazine to remind us that "Social Media (Has) Become() a Lifeline During India’s COVID Crisis." In a sane, moral, and decent society, you shouldn't have to take to Twitter just to find an oxygen cylinder, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, well, at least you can actually do that and find someone who gives a crap. Hopefully these horror stories remind us that social media is actually pretty good at connecting people, although the corporations running them would prefer that we spend all our time distracting people.

Actual election observer informs us that some 75,000 Republican voters in Maricopa and Pima counties in Arizona did not vote for Donald Trump in 2020, even though they voted mostly Republican in other races. The big story, I guess, is that Joe Biden won Arizona largely because Donald Trump lost it -- recall that Mr. Biden's margin of victory there was around 10,000 votes -- but the data also suggests that a little over 6% of Republican voters wouldn't vote for Mr. Trump, meaning roughly 3% of the electorate in Arizona could have voted for some other Republican for President. Perhaps not coincidentally, anti-Trump Republican Michael Wood, despite his best efforts, got 3% of the vote in Texas's 6th House district. Now I wouldn't call my thesis scientific fact, but I'd say it's strong enough to advise Democrats, yet again, to stop fantasizing about getting large numbers of Republicans to vote for them, and instead inspire, with good works, liberals and independents who'd otherwise stay home.

When I hear that our "liberal" media is also bad at covering border issues, if not quite as bad as right-wing news organs hyping a "border crisis," I stand ready with a proposal: next time we hear of a "border crisis," or a "caravan," or whatever, we should ignore it, because it's utter bullshit. In America, we do actually have the armed forces to respond to an actual ground invasion, not to mention the intelligence personnel to discover it's coming before it gets here. But what's actually happening at the border ain't that, so let's refuse to feed the right-wing drama machine.

I did not know that former Trump spokeshack Jason Miller had been accused not merely of cheating on his wife, but of slipping an abortion pill to his mistress, which nearly caused her death. I guess he thinks, like his former boss, that "rules are for little people." And I bet no cable news "personality" will ask him about it, because then he'll throw a fit and never go on their show again, like losing "access" to that particular "source" of "news" would be such a bad thing. Oh, no, no more Jason Miller on the TVzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Finally, alleged "libertarian" Charles Koch has funded efforts to clamp down on protests -- not just the ones that'd criminalize protests around "critical infrastructure," which you'd figure he'd support, but also the bills that let you off scot-free if you run over a protestor. Thus does a decade of talk about the importance of criminal justice reform prove utterly meaningless. Remember: never listen to a guy who has always acted like "rules are for little people."

Action: concerning unemployment, taxes, police brutality, Arctic drilling, and the minimum wage.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to save unemployment benefits, make the CTC expansion permanent, pass police reform legislation, end "qualified immunity" for police officers, ban Arctic drilling, 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 (where applicable), or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Moms Rising helps you tell Congress to save unemployment benefits from the 20-plus state Governors who are trying to end it. Because the "generous" benefits are "keeping people from looking for work"! They hope you don't think that if jobs aren't paying more than unemployment benefits -- on which no one lives like a corporate CEO! -- then maybe the jobs should just pay more. You know, like they would in a free market! The economy's not "roaring back," either -- perhaps, as Atrios suggested a few weeks ago, Our Glorious Elites thought the April job figures would be a lot better than they were and just plunged ahead with the story they wanted to tell anyway! But we're past the point where we have patience with stupidity, right?

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the American Rescue Plan's Child Tax Credit expansion permanent. That may be a lot of capitalized words all at once, so I'll put it more plainly: the expansion means anyone with children under 6 gets a $300 check every month, and anyone with children between 6 and 17 gets $250. Monthly three-digit checks for folks with kids -- what an idea! And one that got by me in all the coverage of the American Rescue Plan, which suggests maybe Democrats should, you know, run on that in 2022. Though they barely mentioned it in 2021! It's like they're ashamed of their good works! But we're not -- and we're going to keep on them to do more good works.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1280, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Specifically, you'll demand that your Senators pass a bill that would cut off the flow of military weapons to police departments, ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants, raise use of force standards in police departments, and reform the "qualified immunity" doctrine (which see next paragraph). Maybe Republicans can attack "that Democrat special interest bill" that bears George Floyd's name, but see if they'll defend chokeholds, or tear gas for protestors, or no-knock warrants, or police getting off scot-free for killing people. I would imagine that these would be tougher to defend.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to end "qualified immunity" for police officers. As I said last week, it should be hard to convict someone of a crime -- even someone who pisses you off! -- but the "qualified immunity" doctrine, in practice, is a "get out of jail free" card for police officers who commit evil deeds. Folks who tell me how can they do their jobs with all of this pressure? need to ask themselves one question: should a person who commits a crime like murder get off just because they're a police officer? It's not "all this pressure" to hold people accountable for their wrongdoing. And, sadly, police officers need to be perfect. It's one reason why I think they should have less to do.

Environmental Action helps you tell your Senators to permanently protect the ANWR (or Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) from fossil fuel drilling. The 2017 tax "reform" included a provision opening up ANWR for drilling (indeed, it may have been the only reason Lisa Murkowski voted for it), but the 2021 lease sale didn't produce very many bidders, which means that our decades-long agitation has made big corporations loathe to go into ANWR, but I'd much prefer that the force of law kept them out. Scientists have been saying for decades that we're just not going to get very much oil out of ANWR, which would make it unnecessary to list all the other reasons (stopping pollution, preserving Native American culture, protecting endangered species) we'd have to stop drilling in a freaking national wildlife refuge. I mean, what else do they need "refuge" from? Aliens?

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass a bill raising the federal minimum wage to $15/hour. You've no doubt heard some of our older morons in politics and media say things like I only made $2/hour; what's wrong with that? Generally they made $2/hour 50 years ago; $2 in 1971 dollars is $13.19 today, thanks to a little thing called inflation that apparently only exists when right-wingers want to fear-monger about federal spending. Raising the minimum wage won't cause runaway inflation, or else a Big Mac in Denmark, where McDonald's workers make more than $22/hour, wouldn't cost roughly the same as it does here. And you know what else? Big restaurant corporations have already told investors that a $15/hour minimum wage won't hurt their business -- and if they were simply lying to their investors, there'd be consequences.

Action: concerning January 6, the Estate Tax, unemployment, pollution, and vote suppression.

Long story short: tell Democrats to hold January 6 hearings without Republican help or support, tell your Congressfolk to pass the For the 99.5% Act, tell states to stop using facial recognition software in unemployment applications, tell our EPA to roll back the Trump-era rule forbidding states from setting stricter car emissions standards, and tell Pepsi to stop funneling money to vote suppressors. 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 (where applicable), or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting, and have a happy weekend!

Consumers United for Fairness helps you tell Democrats to go ahead and hold hearings on the January 6 attempted coup without Republicans. 35 Republican House Reps actually voted for the independent commission legislation, but if we don't get 10 Republican votes in the Senate for it (hey, go ahead and call them, what could it hurt?), then Democrats should just move ahead. Are they afraid of being called "partisan" for it? Then they should all lose their next elections! Because they don't have the courage to do the job! Do the right thing, then worry about Republican hurt fee-fees. Bunch of damn brats, Republicans are. And it's about time Democrats stopped acting afraid of them. (I'm aware that the word "acting" implies this might all be one big drama. The only way to counter that is to be real with your Reps and Senators.)

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2576/S. 994, the For the 99.5 Percent Act. What would the For the 99.5% Act do? It would institute five Estate Tax brackets, ranging from 39% at the low end ($750,000 to $3.5 million) to 65% at the high end (over $1 billion). We all just witnessed billionaire wealth increase over $1 trillion during this pandemic, so it ain't like they ain't got the money. And one more time: this bill will kill exactly zero family farms! Too many good liberals still let this zombie lie live in their head, but even the organizations plugging this lie can't find a single example of a family farm lost to the Estate Tax! Next time you're in a room with 200 people, please understand that the For the 99.5% Act would only ever tax approximately one of them.

Fight for the Future helps you tell states to stop using facial recognition software on good Americans trying to file for unemployment. Because facial recognition sucks! It can't tell Black folks apart any better than your Trumphole uncle can! And just as higher walls tend to be confounded by taller ladders, some scam artists have, no joke, resorted to 3D-printed face masks in order to confound the software, meaning the supposed fraud prevention measure has actually become a fraud creation measure. And, you know, submitting to software that makes everything worse also makes your wait for unemployment benefits longer! Just at the moment you really can't have any of that! So go ahead and deploy the winning argument against the officials trying to hurt you.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reverse the Trump Administration's rule preventing states from setting stricter auto emissions standards than our federal government does. If you're the kind of person who says f'ing California and their f'ing emissions standards making me work harder, then you're not the kind of person who says f'ing car manufacturers and their f'ing inefficient cars making me pay more for f'ing gas, and not just because the latter describes a real problem real Americans face. Seriously, we have to stop putting corporate executive whining on the same level as actual problems. No one says they don't have a right to complain, but they also don't have a "right" to get their way whenever they complain. No amount of money can buy you a right.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell PepsiCo to stop donating to organizations and candidates who help suppress votes. Corporations can talk all they want about how "the right to vote is a cornerstone of American democracy," as a Pepsi spokeshack has said, but actually putting your money where your mouth is? That's another thing entirely. Pepsi gave half a mil to the reactionary U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 2020, and said Chamber is leading the charge against H.R. 1, the For the People Act, a bill some two-thirds of Americans actually support in numerous polls. Their spokeshacks will say they only give to the Chamber for economic reasons, which is to laugh -- not just because it's actually kind of insulting to think we'll like the reactionary Chamber's economic agenda, but because the Chamber can spend its donations how it likes, and Pepsi knows that. So enough stupid crap from corporations.

Around the table: cryptocurrency and other mysteries explained!

Robert Verbruggen at the National Review compares the trend of Republican-run states refusing enhanced unemployment benefits to those years Republican-run states refused the Medicaid expansion. In that they're both unpopular? Why, no! He thinks refusing enhanced unemployment benefits is an "opportunity" for Republicans! That's cynical horserace-speak, of course, but it also ignores the plain reality that folks notice when they're making less money. He can't even bring himself to evaluate the possibility that employers can't find workers because they won't pay more, and says on two occasions that he wished the research was better, which does beg the question then why even write the article? Almost refreshing, it is, to find so-smart-they're-dumb types somewhere other than the Democratic Party.

Ho hum, Republican Congressdolts are still promoting the Big Gummint relief they all voted against. This ain't a matter of simply informing your constituents what help our government offers, as one spokeshack hilariously tries to spin it, but a matter of bragging about it like you didn't do your damnedest to kill it, as Rep. Malliotakis (R-NY) does in calling one slice of that bill an "achievement()" of hers even though she, like every other Republican in Congress, voted "nay." Just wait until they run re-election ads talking about the things the American Rescue Plan did (and, if we're lucky, the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan) like they voted for any of them! I hope Democrats have the minimal courage to point that out; otherwise, they may find a Republican House that refuses to certify a 2024 Biden landslide.

President Biden announces he'll support waiving COVID-19 vaccine patents so more people can get vaccinated, and the big pharma corporations respond with their usual assholery, with one CEO saying the move will "disadvantage patients by undermining existing incentives to develop vaccines and therapeutics for future pandemics," by which I guess she means she's smarter than you because she knows more big words than you and can string together endless prepositional phrases. I kid, of course -- the waiver really won't "undermine existing incentives," not just because it'd be an emergency waiver that would end when the pandemic ends, but also because the primary "existing incentive" -- dead people don't spend money on health care -- ain't going away.

Julie Hollar at FAIR instructs us that "In Media Framing, Trans Kids Are Problems to Be Solved -- Not People With Rights." Which means a) not letting very many trans people speak, even in stories that purport to be about them, and b) swamping trans people beneath a "debate" that's all about the drama. When I read that our "liberal" media finds trans issues "vexing," I'm reminded how often they used to present AIDS as an issue that mainly affected heteros struggling with how to feel about it, rather than the folks suffering and dying from it.

Bank of England Governor says that cryptocurrency has "no intrinsic value" and that folks who invest it in should be "prepared to lose all (their) money." Don't understand cryptocurrency? That's because they don't want you to understand it! In a world where we can use an ATM almost anywhere on Earth and can pay bills without writing and mailing checks, it's hard to see why a thing like cryptocurrency needs to exist. Except, of course, so some people can con other people out of their real money.

Finally, the lawyer for one of the January 6 seditionists has advanced the argument that his role in the attempted coup was really kinda Fox News's fault, because his client did almost nothing but watch Fox News for the previous six months. I actually don't think "watching Fox News non-stop" is an addiction, certainly not the way, say, alcoholism is, so my response to all that would be ah, no, asshole, you're on your own. I mean, we can't just stop blaming people who do evil merely because Satan whispered repeatedly in their ear.

Around the table: drama and not even *good* drama, part 876.

When I hear that the state of Montana will no longer offer the enhanced unemployment benefits after June 27 because "(n)early every sector in our economy faces a labor shortage," per Gov. Gianforte, I feel compelled to ask: is no one considering the possibility that folks won't get jobs because the jobs don't pay enough? You don't live like a king on unemployment benefits, but trying to pay people in dung pellets ain't gonna move a lot of behinds. And gosh, can our "liberal" media maybe consider this in their reporting? It wasn't that long ago that "offer workers more money" was a strategy corporations would moot out loud.

Right-wing organization continues its "audit" of Maricopa County (AZ) 2020 election votes, applying some very strange practices that could well be part of an effort to lie that the Democrats somehow stole the election. Earlier an Arizona Republic reporter caught them with blue pens (which can change ballots) in the auditorium where they're conducting the "audit," and the UV rays they're casting on ballots could erase marks as well; in any case, maybe we should look for fraud on the other side, since the worst President in American history somehow finished within half a percentage point of Mr. Biden in Arizona. (We have since learned that they're using UV rays to find bamboo in mail-in ballots. Get it, bamboo? Because China? People who would yell at you for calling them "racist" are yukking it up at that one.)

From Judd Legum at Popular Information we learn that even without Donald Trump, right-wing news sites (or perhaps "news" sites!) are absolutely crushing on Facebook. By my count, a mere six of the top 15 news sites getting the most Facebook "engagements" (clicks, likes, shares, etc.) are either center or center-left; the rest are hard right, and if you've never heard of The Daily Wire or Western Journal or Rumble, I wouldn't blame you. I provide this public service announcement in case anyone you know still thinks Facebook is actually censoring right-wingers.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch says "Britain Risks Cementing in Power a Corrupt and Incompetent Government (i.e., Boris Johnson's) in Undeserved Gratitude for the Vaccine." And if you're thinking "no one's thanking Donald Trump for the vaccine in America," remember also that he's out of office; Mr. Johnson's term doesn't end until 2024, which, sadly, leaves plenty of time for good Britons to get used to him, particularly since Labour has replaced Mr. Corbyn with yet another moderate. (If Scotland gains independence before then -- not probable, admittedly -- Labour will be even deeper in the muck.)

Finally, in yet another reminder that if you've come to today's conservative movement for calm, sober, adult thought, you've come to the wrong place, Tucker Carlson slammed House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy for failing to disclose a living arrangement with noted right-wing consultant Frank Luntz -- without mentioning that Mr. Luntz once employed Mr. Carlson's brother Buckley, and their working relationship apparently did not end well. So, he sucks up to Donald Trump by slamming Kevin McCarthy and settles a personal score with Frank Luntz? Sounds like a win-win! For Tucker Carlson, of course; not for anyone else. No truth to the rumor, by the way, that he has four other brothers named Chumley, Badges, Charles Maurras, and Taz.

Action: concerning health care, the Estate Tax, D.C. statehood, unemployment insurance, and antibiotic abuse.

Long story short: Tell your House Reps to pass the Medicare for All Act, the For the 99.8 Percent Act, and the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, and also tell your House Reps to make unemployment insurance better and stop antibiotic abuse on factory farms. 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 House Reps' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links provided in each paragraph below.

H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act, would expand Medicare to include every American citizen, so that good Americans will never be at the mercy of lousy care and shifting networks and surprise medical bills ever again. Polls have told us that more than half of Americans want Medicare to cover everyone -- and since big media outlets and/or big corporations conduct these polls, you'd kind of expect them to say the opposite of what they say! -- and lately support numbers have been more like 60%. You may also have heard that "most people like their private health insurance," but I propose one of two possible reasons for that phenomenon: 1) people occasionally get tired of thinking about things that corporations deliberately make more obtuse, and 2) most people aren't using their health insurance at any given moment! Medicare4AllNow and Black Lives Matter provide petitions.

The For the 99.8 Percent Act (no bill number at this writing) would expand the Estate Tax, which has taken a lot of undeserved hits over the last 20 years. I'm old enough to remember when the debate over the Estate Tax (remember the "Death Tax"? Like most of us will ever pay it when we die!) was the stupidest debate in politics; needless to say, other debates have surpassed it. The For the 99.8 Percent Act would hike taxes on billionaire estates to 77% (of that part of the estate over $1 billion, that is), and if you're planning to leave an estate smaller than $3 million, you won't be paying any more money than before. But all those folks who've been profiting off this pandemic? Yeah, they'll be contributing more to water mains and rebuilt bridges than they thought. Roots Action provides an email tool.

H.R. 51/S. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, would admit Washington, D.C., as our 51st state. Republican arguments against it boil down to one thing: ZOMG TWO MORE DEMOCRATZ SENATORZ!!!!! Remember in the 1930s, when Republicans opposed Hawaii statehood because the people seemed too foreign and they'd just keep sending Democrats to Congress? No, you don't, because Democrats actually opposed the admission of Hawaii because the people seemed too foreign, and Republicans dominated the state back then! Better to focus, then, on how how 85% of its residents want statehood, or how D.C. could have defended itself from the January 6 attempted coup if it had its own National Guard like all states do. Both People for the American Way and the Progressive Reform Network provide petitions.

The Center for Popular Democracy helps you tell your Congressfolk to reform our unemployment insurance system. I'll admit I haven't given this matter a lot of thought, and not just because Republicans are constantly out to destroy what we've got -- why should unemployment be limited only to those who get fired, versus, say, those who quit their jobs because they're getting used like wet dishrags (and can prove it)? And if you remember how Rick Scott screwed up Florida's unemployment application system so badly that even Ron DeSantis kvetched about it, you might be more inclined to have one national system, too. And why shouldn't lower-wage workers get a higher percentage of their missing income? There's a lot to think about here.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to limit antibiotic abuse on factory farms. Seems we've been telling them to do this forever, and I'll admit it's a little depressing that just about everyone except factory farms wants them to stop doing this, and yet very little ever changes. Not nothing, mind you, but if we keep giving more than two-thirds of our antibiotics to nominally healthy feed animals, then diseases will adapt and we'll wind up in a world where the next cut could kill us. And when we do, we won't be saying well, at least we moved slowly and deliberately to protect the profits of our factory farms! Some people love talking about how we liberals "coddle" everyone, but nobody in America gets coddled like big corporations do. And we've got to stop.

Action: concerning COVID relief, endangered species, paycheck fairness, and corruption investigations.

Our House may vote on the Senate-passed COVID relief bill as early as today, so now's the best time to call your House Reps and tell them to pass it. (The Senate amended the bill somewhat, and stripped out the $15/hour minimum wage at our Senate Parliamentarian's direction, so our House has to vote on it again.) Now it's not quite the bill our House passed the first time, and even without our Senate Parliamentarian's ruling, I'm pretty sure Sens. Manchin and Sinema would still have acted like they got 81 million votes for President and Vice-President and shot it down. But the bill still does a lot of good works, and I don't just mean stimulus checks, an unemployment benefit expansion running for most of the rest of the year, and actual assistance for states, localities, and folks who can't pay their rent and utilities. I also mean expanded food stamps and expanded EITC and CTC tax credits, which latter item will result (per the Coalition on Human Needs) in the equivalent of a 29% raise for the bottom 20% of working families. And I also mean help for multiemployer pension plans and tax-free student loan relief through 2025. These are all good works, and worth your support; now's not the time to let the perfect murder the good.

Meanwhile, President Biden's rolled back a lot of former President Trump's noxious Executive Orders, but he hasn't rolled back endangered species-related orders yet, so WildEarth Guardians helps you tell our President to use his power to protect endangered species. Specifically, you'd ask President Biden to roll back Trumpian orders allowing developers to injure more endangered species' habitats, tell federal agencies to take climate change into account when listing endangered species and protecting habitats, and instruct our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to be more proactive in evaluating endangered species generally. I'm not sure what objections reasonable folks could have to any of these, unless "I want big fossil fuel CEOs to make more money" counts as a "reasonable objection." (Spoiler alert: it does not.) You'll also advocate that Mr. Biden work to pass the PAW and FIN Act into law, once Congress re-introduces that bill; the PAW and FIN Act, as you may remember, would prohibit our government from considering "economic factors" of endangered-species regulations, since, as you know, when an endangered species dies, it's gone forever, and squeezing money out of a species' death is an offense before God. I mean, doesn't it sound like one?

In other news, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7/S. 205, the Paycheck Fairness Act. As you know, the Paycheck Fairness Act would give women more tools to fight the pay inequities that have, sadly, become their lot in life -- Census data from 2018 tell us that women still make 82 cents for every dollar a man makes, and that number should be one dollar for every dollar a man makes. No use complaining that qualifications and experience account for the gap, not when bosses go out of their way to deny women the chance to demonstrate those qualifications and accumulate that experience in the first place! Seriously, don't describe the world as if it's the only world that could possibly exist. And don't believe the hype that the bill would make it illegal to pay women differently for having fewer qualifications, because Sec. 3(a) of the bill directly refutes that claim. Certainly don't believe the hype that the bill would be a "boon for trial lawyers," as if the phrase "trial lawyer" is some kind of epithet, like "big corporate CEO." If big corporations would just do the right thing in the first place, as our parents all taught us to do, then we wouldn't need so many trial lawyers, would we?

Finally, MoveOn helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate allegations that former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao abused her office for private gain. Is this a mere attempt at political retaliation against Mitch McConnell's wife? No, it is not, or else we wouldn't have a 44-page report from a federal Inspector General detailing allegations that Ms. Chao used her office to promote her father's shipping corporation, the Foremost Group. Certainly they were Foremost on her mind! The IG report alleges that she used the Transportation Department to update her father's Wikipedia page, promote his public appearances, and even arrange a trip for him and her sister to China. Possibly we'll find that she did nothing wrong (or, more likely, that she was clever about not actually breaking the law), but the previous Administration (which, ah, employed her as Treasury Secretary) didn't even try to investigate the IG's findings. Also, you know, let things like these go and they'll keep happening. Personal to those morons who'd retort THENZ LETZ INVESTIGATEZ TEH HUNTERZ BIDENZ!!!!!!: uh, that's already happening. Most of us have found that paying attention to the world is the best way to learn about it.

Around the table: it's the COVID relief bill follies!

Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) flexes his muscle as the One True Great American President of Bipartisanship by spending 10 hours securing cuts to enhanced unemployment benefits in the COVID relief bill. Mr. Manchin will lose his 2024 re-election effort by 20 points no matter what he does, but I'm gobsmacked that more politicians don't see that cutting unemployment benefits is a stupid political calculation, particularly for a Democrat, from whom voters (for better and worse) expect more. I had hoped he'd be satisfied with Neera Tanden's head on a plate, but I was wrong. I'm starting to think my optimism is a fault, not a strength.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) brought a chocolate cake to the Senate -- supposedly to help out staffers who'd been up all night working on the relief bill -- before nixing Sen. Sanders's amendment to put the $15/hour minimum wage back in the bill. She may not have literally said "let them eat cake," but gosh, what a bad look, and I find her story wanting, too -- is cake what you want when you've been up working all night? Does nobody do chicken and waffles in D.C. anymore? (In a related note, I hope the sight of her incomprehensibly swaggering thumbs-down vote to that $15/hour minimum wage amendment launches a thousand memes. You have to have the presence of mind not to look like that when you're denying higher pay to over 40 percent of American workers. Hate to pile on, but Kyrsten Sinema is supposedly one of the Democrats' most disciplined messagers.)

Olivia Goldhill at STAT catches Florida's government giving COVID vaccines meant for rural black residents to rich white ones. No, you can't explain this away by saying "black people hate vaccines," not when black folks make up 18% of Palm Beach County but only 4% of vaccine recipients; go ahead and blame Gov. DeSantis's decision to let the Publix supermarket chain (whose owners donate bigly to his campaigns, naturally) administer the vaccines, because guess which supermarket chain doesn't have stores in places like Pahokee and Belle Glade. Also, he apparently decided not to tell any locals the vaccinations were happening.

From John Logan at TruthOut we learn that Amazon spends $10,000 daily just on consultants who help them keep unions out of their warehouses. Gosh, they're rolling in money during this pandemic, more than just about any other corporation; can't they do something better with all that money? See, when we say "corporations should make as much money as possible because they'll do more good," we have to remember that if you give them too much money, they'll spend it consolidating their power, and that's why we taxed them at 55% during the Eisenhower years. And don't believe Amazon's PR hype. We've delivered millions of meals to people in need! Meaning, gosh, every person who lost their job because of the pandemic got maybe one sandwich? (As an aside, dig the union-busting consultant who claims unions "demonize consultants," like it's some kind of big lift for Americans to demonize consultants.)

Kentucky state legislators, knowing the state's Governor is a Democrat and sensing that Sen. McConnell might not be in the best of health, are scrambling to change state laws so that if Mr. McConnell retires or dies, his seat can easily stay in Republican hands. They say none of that has anything to do with it, of course, but we're not schmucks, and it's telling that "letting good Kentuckians fill the seat via a special election" is lower on their wish list than making Gov. Beshear pick from a list of three Republican names. What do they have to be afraid of? That Charles Booker might actually win a Senate race in the state that killed Breonna Taylor? (As an aside, I'm pretty sure Nick Storm thoroughly enjoyed writing that Mr. McConnell recovered from polio as a youth "with his mother's persistence.")

Finally, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, now the biggest asshole among world chiefs-of-state with Donald Trump out of power, tells his citizens to "stop whining" about things like spikes in cases and record death numbers and lack of vaccines. Even worse, he says "we need a solution" to the pandemic with no apparent awareness that maybe good Brazilians are looking to their fucking President to lead them toward a "solution." At any rate, we must remind too many folks that there is in fact a profound difference between whining about things like "cancel culture" and "whining" about your own government -- which belongs to you and should work on your behalf -- leaving you to die.

Action: concerning COVID relief, higher taxes on the rich, and *a la carte* cable packaging.

Our House votes on the COVID relief bill as early as today, so get on the horn with your House Reps and tell them to pass it. You can find your Reps' phone numbers, as always, by using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're viewing this page on a cellphone, the bottom of this page). I've gone over all the good things this bill would do if passed, and I'm not going to give too much space to Republican plaints that they weren't consulted enough on it ("you say that like it's a bad thing!"), or that it's "too big" ("you don't pull a baby out of a fire gradually!") or that it consists of a "progressive wish list" (again, "you say that like it's a bad thing!"). Instead, I'll note that the bill is extremely popular, with a Morning Consult/Politico poll finding that 76% of Americans support it, and -- are you listening, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema? -- 60% of Republicans support it. There's that bipartisanship everyone in Washington says they're looking for! And Congress should follow our lead. (Don't be dispirited by the Senate parliamentarian's ruling against the inclusion of the $15/hour minimum wage hike in the budget reconciliation process. Your will is still your will, and your Reps need to hear from you that you, like most Americans, want that minimum wage hike.)

While you have your House Reps on the phone, you can tell them to stop being "hesitant" about raising taxes on the rich or rolling back the more nefarious parts of the Trump tax "reform." Then call your Senators and tell them the same thing. Seriously, in the article to which I've linked above, Democrats recycle all the stupid and offensive arguments for not raising taxes on the rich and on corporations -- Joe Manchin said it'd be "ridiculous" to raise taxes during a pandemic (though, to be fair, he walked that back somewhat later on), while Jon Tester said it'd be dangerous to do while unemployment is so high -- this just three years after complaining that the Trump tax "reform" would put us in the hole for decades! When is the right time to do the right thing, Sen. Tester? If these clowns don't raise taxes on corporations and the rich, they're going to lose their slim majorities in 2022, end of story. People generally don't love paying taxes, of course, but they also don't love folks who don't pay their fair share.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk you don't want to pay for evil cable channels like Fox News just so you can watch cable channels you like, like the Food Network. Those of you who've attended this blog for the last 16 years know what we're talking about, even if Free Press, for whatever reason, won't spell it out: we're talking about a la carte cable packaging, where you can pay for the channels you like and you don't have to subsidize the channels you don't like. As you know, folks pay about $2 a month for Fox News, which is actually a fairly high monthly price; now imagine what would happen if, say, 10 million Americans decided not to pay for Fox News. There goes Tucker Carlson's and Sean Hannity's annual salaries in a mere two and a half months! Yeah, Fox would fire all their straight news reporters first (however many of those are left!), but the only language evil news corporations understand is the language of money, and hey, I'm all about talking to people in the language they understand. So let's get to it.

Action: concerning COVID relief, the minimum wage, judicial gerrymandering, and right-wing Constitutional conventions.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Today's a good day to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to pass a vigorous COVID relief bill. Vox has a pretty good summary of what's presently in the bill our House is writing, which includes $1400 checks for folks making under $75,000, $400 in weekly expanded unemployment benefits through August 29, and a $15/hour minimum wage. And in addition to funding more testing and tracing and funding the states, localities, public transportation, and other entities that have suffered from reduced tax revenues during this pandemic, the bill would also expand COBRA subsidies through September, expand Affordable Care Act subsidies, and expand working-family tax credits like the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit. And say only two things to folks who worry that a $15/hour minimum wage would "shock the economy": one, the bill gradually increases the minimum wage and won't reach $15/hour for several years, and two, we've spent so much time talking about essential workers during a pandemic that we ought to start paying them like they're essential.

Speaking of the minimum wage, you might also want to call Sens. Manchin (D-WV) and Sinema (D-AZ) and tell them to support the $15/hour minimum wage. (Phone numbers are 202.224.3954 and 202.224.4521, respectively.) Yeah, they "represent conservative states," but if they actually talked to the people they represent, as is their job; Sens. Manchin and Sinema might find a lot more support for the higher minimum wage than the phrase "conservative state" suggests. After all, polls tell us a majority of Republican voters want both the $15/hour minimum wage and the COVID bill passed via budget reconciliation, so it ain't us who are "out of touch." And too many of my fellow liberals keep misreading the politics, too! We can't coddle these Senators "to keep the majority." No one's going to vote Democrat in 2022 because "they sacrificed doing the right thing to doing it the right way." But a whole lot of people will vote Republican in 2022 because "Democrats had all the power and didn't do anything." We've seen this time and time again; how many more times must we see it?

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your PA state legislators to reject the "sore loser" judicial gerrymandering bill, HB 38, then Common Cause still helps you do that. Why "sore loser"? Because PA Republicans are mad that our state Supreme Court has mostly Democrats on it, and want to create "judicial districts" so they can get more Republicans on the Court. Period. If they wanted them on the Court so badly, they should have won all those 2015 Court elections they and their paymasters spent so damn much money on! Our activism against HB 38 has had positive effects: the House Judiciary Committee passed it, but narrowly, and now the state Senate Majority Leader says HB 38 won't pass the full legislature soon enough to get on the ballot by the May primary election. (HB 38, if it passes, would put the question of amending our state Constitution to mandate the creation of "judicial districts" on the ballot.) But HB 38 might make it through the legislature in time for the November election, and this is (to quote a phrase right-wingers love!) one baby we should strangle in its crib.

Finally, right-wing special interest groups (like ALEC!) want to stage an Article V Constitutional convention, which two-thirds of state legislatures could call and then use to pass a slew of anti-freedom constitutional amendments as soon as three-quarters of state legislatures ratify them. 34 state legislatures would have to call the convention; now guess how many state legislatures Republicans currently hold? That's right, 31, which is three states short, but with Republicans controlling the gerrymandering, ahem, redistricting process for the next decade, they may have their 34 with a quickness. They'd need 38 to enact the proposed amendments, but Article V gives no guidance as to how to conduct this convention, so you can only imagine how bad it'd get -- they'd make it "unconstitutional" to stop corporations from polluting, or stop vote suppression, or raise taxes on the rich, or even have Medicare or Social Security. Hence Common Cause helps you tell state legislators you oppose an Article V convention. They'll try to do this while no one's looking, so let's let them know we see them.

Action: concerning COVID relief, police in schools, and corporate donations to sore losers.

So President Biden met with the 10 Republican "moderates" who proposed a COVID relief package less than one third the size of his proposal, and so we ask: these are the moderates of the party lowballing Mr. Biden? (One might also wonder how Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas can be a "moderate" and a co-founder of the Senate Tea Party Caucus, but I digress.) So go ahead and call your Reps and Senators and tell them what you want from a COVID relief package: more funding for testing and tracing, $2,000 checks every month (versus one $1,000 check from the moderates), funding for states and localities (versus nothing), a $15/hour minimum wage (ditto), paid family leave (ditto), and higher enhanced unemployment benefits (you get the picture). You might also mention rolling back the CARES Act's hedge fund tax cut and raising taxes on corporations and millionaire income. Remember: people want good government more than "bipartisan" government, and nobody wants to "unify" with people who hurt them.

Meanwhile, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Counseling Not Criminalization Act. This bill (which has no House or Senate bill numbers as of this writing) came up in the last Congress, too; it would replace police officers (who too often attack school children) with counselors and nurses (who can deal with a child's problems more appropriately). I mean none of that to slight police officers; I often say that we shouldn't use cops as the Swiss Army knives of our civilization, and that we shouldn't run to them with every conceivable request for assistance from the state -- and we certainly shouldn't do that after we've trained them to be ready to be violent at a moment's notice! Cops patrol schools for only two reasons: 1) someone well-meaning sees them as a natural solution to a discipline problem, and 2) someone cynical sees them as a way to prove a fake toughness. So let's get police out of schools, and let's get people in there who we've actually trained to help kids do better.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big corporations to stop financing the political campaigns of the politicians who tried to overturn the 2020 election, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Big corporate campaign donations are already unpopular, so big corporate donations to politicians who tried to overturn the election because they're a bunch of big whiny babies should be even more unpopular -- but only if we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR. 147 Congressional Republicans aided and abetted the attempted coup on our Capitol, and it doesn't matter how many of them voted the way they did because they were afraid not to -- if they can be threatened into submission that easily, they shouldn't be in Congress to begin with. And no, wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR isn't "the same" as threatening Congressfolk with violence. The former is civilized behavior, but threats aren't. It's shameful we even have to explain that.

Action: concerning COVID relief, impeachment, the filibuster, and another polluting pipeline.

The Biden Administration apparently wants to get the American Rescue Plan through Congress badly enough that they put Vice President Harris on TV in Arizona and West Virginia (from which recalcitrant "moderate" Senators Sinema and Manchin hail) to plug the plan. Hence you may want to call your Reps and Senators (you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page -- or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone -- to find their phone numbers) and tell them how you feel about the plan. You may want to tell them that you want to keep the American Rescue Plan's $15/hour minimum wage, paid family leave, expanded funding for testing and vaccination, and expanded funding to states and localities, plus you'd add $2,000 checks every month and higher enhanced unemployment benefits, and you'd pay for it by repealing the CARES Act's massive hedge fund tax cut, plus a 55% tax on corporate profits and capital gains over $1 million and a 91% tax on income over $1 million. Hey, they're only supposed to negotiate with us!

While you've got your Senators on the phone, go ahead and tell them to convict Donald Trump of the incitement impeachment charge, and punish him by barring him from ever running for office again. Hey, actions have consequences! Or were conservatives lying every time they ever told us that? We're told we won't get very many Republican votes to convict, but duty is duty, and I don't just mean our duty to express our will, I mean the Senators' duty to do their job! You may be thinking that the failure of President Andrew Johnson's impeachment in the 1860s was "not that big a deal," but nothing could be further from the truth! When the Senate failed (by one vote!) to remove President Johnson, they signaled that America was done working to heal the damage caused by slavery; not long thereafter, Jim Crow flourished in the South, which meant another hundred years of direct damage to black folks in America. Surely our Senators don't want to be on the wrong side of history yet again.

Meanwhile, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to end the filibuster now. As you know, I've said for many years that we need to reform the filibuster, by making Senators actually hold the floor and talk for 30 hours like Jimmy Stewart does in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, rather than simply signal their intention not to cut off debate and promptly go out to dinner or the theater. I don't regret saying that -- I was telling the truth as best I understood it at the time. But Republicans have abused the filibuster over the last dozen years or so, such that even the mildest reforms proposed by Barack Obama as President couldn't pass simply because Republicans still had 47 or 45 or 41 Senators, and (this is important!) because Republicans acted as a body in doing so, and because our "liberal" media did such a bad job covering these matters, no Republican Senator ever suffered for their obstruction. Actions have consequences, after all -- but Republican Senators won't suffer them unless we abolish the filibuster.

Finally, President Biden reversed former President Trump's Executive Order allowing further construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which effectively killed it, and no, I will not entertain yowling about TEH NINETIEZ THOUSANDZ OFZ TEH JOBZ LOSTZ!!!!!, because building pipelines that pollute our water table is not the only way to create jobs. Why, building out a national renewable energy grid would create a lot of jobs! But I digress, perhaps. The Enbridge Line 3 pipeline in northern Minnesota would, if completed, spur many similar concerns about clean water and pipeline safety -- why, it was a mere 10 years ago that an Enbridge pipeline ruptured and caused the largest inland oil spill ever in America, ensuring that 40 square miles of the Kalamazoo watershed would be, ah, flavored with oil. Hence both Daily Kos and 350 Local Group Network help you tell President Biden to put an end to the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline as well. Hate to pile on, but Native American groups also oppose Line 3; maybe they get a say, too?

Action: concerning COVID relief and concentration camps.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a "robust" COVID-19 relief bill. You may want to edit their email, given that our more cowardly Congressfolk are whining about the deficit, which they never do when contemplating corporate welfare handouts, but always do when contemplating serving actual bosses, the American people. But hey, we're all about solutions, too. So you can go ahead and tell them that you want $2,000 checks every month until the pandemic's been over for three months, plus enhanced unemployment benefits, plus a $15/hour minimum wage -- and that you would help pay for it by repealing the CARES Act's massive hedge fund tax cut, plus a 55% tax on corporate profits and capital gains over $1 million and a 91% tax on income over $1 million. They say liberals never ask how we're going to pay for things, so go ahead and prove them wrong.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden's been very, very busy issuing Executive Orders just to undo the damage of all of Donald Trump's Executive Orders -- but he has thus far failed to get rid of the Trumpian concentration camps full of asylum-seekers and other immigrant families. You may well find yourself hesitating at the thought, not because you want people in concentration camps, but because it takes time to fix things right. But even if we set aside our conviction that justice must be done now, I think such concerns would be misplaced -- these concentration camps are dirty and overcrowded, and that's before we get to the fact that we're still in the middle of a pandemic that shows no signs of abating; you might well conclude, then, that releasing the folks in ICE camps isn't just the right thing to do, but the pragmatic thing to do. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell President Biden to release families from ICE concentration camps immediately.

Action: concerning COVID relief, accountability, and pollution.

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, Administration incompetence, and our "liberal" media.

You've heard, perhaps, that Congress is thisclose to passing a COVID relief deal -- and you've likely also heard that this "deal" will contain no money for states and localities and stimulus and unemployment relief amounting to half of what we got under the CARES Act, while bringing back all of the CARES Act's corporate welfare. Here's what we should do in response: call our Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act! Now that was a stimulus bill, and our House passed it seven months ago (remember that the next time you hear your right-wing uncle cry that TEH DIMOCRATZ AREZ HOLDINGZ UPZ TEH BILLZ!!!!), and the HEROES Act would fund states and localities, fund COVID testing and tracing, fund unemployment benefits at the level of the CARES Act, repeal the big hedge fund manager tax cut given out by the CARES Act, and give working Americans bigger stimulus checks than the CARES Act. Bigger than whatever this Congress tries to pass this week, too! So don't think you just have to take whatever Congress dishes out, and certainly don't act like you do.

Meanwhile, you've likely also heard that states are getting many, many fewer doses of the Pfizer vaccine than they thought they were getting, and our Administration, being the very embodiment of leadership and accountability, apologized for getting that wrong. Nah, I kid -- this Administration has not accounted for itself to the states, but our HHS Secretary has blamed Pfizer for the foul-up, which naturally they deny, saying they have millions of doses ready to go but have heard nothing from our Administration, whose nominal head seems to spend most of his time on Twitter savaging fellow Republicans and spreading even more lies about "voter fraud." This, as more Americans die from COVID each day than died from the 9/11 attacks, which were, as I recall, a Damascus moment for a whole generation of right-wingers! Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our Administration to get its act together and get folks the vaccines they need. Yeah, I know, this Administration doesn't ever seem to listen when we tell them to do their damn job, but they ignore us in the hope we'll go away. But after they're gone, we'll still be here.

Finally, you may have heard, from our "liberal" media, that Venezuela has fallen upon economic hard times -- but you may not have heard, from our "liberal" media, that one of the main reasons good Venezuelans have it so bad is that our government has imposed sanctions upon them for years! One of FAIR's recent email missives catches the New York Times doing this very thing earlier this month, describing how Venezuela's midterm elections went yet again for the United Socialist Party to which Messrs. Chavez and Maduro belong (again, after opposition parties boycotted the election; maybe our Republican party will start getting similar ideas in America?) and describing the "deep economic challenges" Venezuela faces without mentioning American sanctions as one of them. Make no mistake: just as our "liberal" media seemed sanguine toward Brazil's irredeemable asshole of a President because he'd be "good for business," they hate folks like Mr. Maduro because they won't turn over their economies to multinational corporations. The link above helps you encourage the Times to correct the record.

Penny Rants for Sunday, December 13, 2020: special "everyone who sucked last year still sucks" edition!

From the "We Kinda Always Knew This, But It's Good to Have Confessions" file: a lengthy Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting investigation finds that Monsanto and BASF introduced their versions of dicamba knowing it would damage competitors' soybean crops, and they released these products because they wanted to eliminate their competitors. It gets better: Monsanto deliberately undertested their dicamba product (since they couldn't control dicamba's drift onto other farms), and when they did test it, they tested it under conditions that were nothing like what actual farmers face every day. BASF even told folks that their dicamba wouldn't necessarily be safe even by applying it strictly according to the label. In a sane and moral society, Monsanto and BASF would be so broken by lawsuits they'd go out of business. In this sick, immoral, and decadent society, however, Republicans claim these failures require more of the "free" market medicine that enabled them in the first place -- and Democrats remain so hypnotized by the "promise" of "technology" that they sit on their hands.

Another day, another reminder that a crap-ton of full-time workers at fast-food and retail corporations don't make enough money to stay off of federal assistance like food stamps and Medicaid, this time from a Government Accountability Office (or GAO) study. And here you thought if you work full-time, you should be able to provide for your family and guide your children to a better future -- let alone be able to provide for your family without having to rely on government assistance. Which you've already paid into with your taxes, so don't blame yourself or imagine you're some kind of leech; that's what they want you to think -- and right-wingers are so quick to say just get a better job like they're not busy trying to outsource all the good American jobs so that American executives can gild the plumbing on their 19th vacation homes. Oh, and here's the kicker: our GAO did this study before the pandemic hit; one can only imagine how much worse it is now, with over 14 million more uninsured and our U-1 unemployment rate still close to 7 percent (the more instructive U-6 rate, which counts part-timers who want to work full-time and unemployed folks who've given up, is 12 percent).

Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post lists every single Republican House Rep and state Attorney General who signed on to that ridiculous Texas lawsuit aiming to overturn our election, saying "they are laying the predicate for a contentious new phase of American democracy, if it can continue to be called that, in which election results -- after appropriate recounts and audits and certifications -- are no longer accepted. Instead, they merely open the door for a second phase of legal and political guerrilla warfare in which no tactic, no lie, no baseless claim is off-limits." Note well that these Republicans' loyalty to our soon-to-be-ex-President will most likely go unrewarded, not just because there'll always be a crazier right-winger to swordfight (just ask Scott Tipton!), but also because it only takes one deviation from Dear Leader's Holy Will to become a permanent outcast (just ask Bill Barr!). I did wonder -- because unlike these Republicans I do have the capacity for shame -- if we bore any blame for talking about Voter ID and Interstate Crosscheck, but no, we don't, not just because we always had evidence, but because we always said vote suppression happened before the vote.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, fuel efficiency, and police in schools.

Today's as good a day as any to call your Senators and demand they pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. Tolerate none of this "skinny" stimulus bill crap from Republicans! All they would do is funnel our money down the gullets of their corporate cronies like they did with the CARES Act. Yeah, you got $1,200 from that (didn't you?), but that doesn't balance out big corporations like Ruth's Chris Steak House disguising themselves as "small businesses" to feed at the taxpayer trough. What would America get along with a bigger stimulus check from the HEROES Act? Funding for COVID-19 testing and tracing, funding for enhanced unemployment benefits, funding for states and localities, and funding for our Post Office, among other good works. What would Republicans want? Bigger tax breaks for three-martini lunches and blanket immunity for corporations from lawsuits when they expose good Americans to COVID. I wish I were making that up. Their priorities really are horsedoodle -- which is why we get up in their grills with our priorities.

Meanwhile, perhaps after reviewing last month's election results, the General Motors corporation has withdrawn its support for our soon-to-be-ex-President's proposal that would weaken EPA fuel efficiency standards, so now the Sierra Club helps you tell big car manufacturing corporations Toyota and Fiat-Chrysler to abandon their support for weakened standards as well. Cleaner cars mean what, good Americans? They mean cleaner air, obviously, but they also mean lower gas bills, as cars go further on a gallon of gas. Weakening those standards might mean cheaper cars -- and it might not! -- but whatever you save on car-buying day you'll give up over the years as it belches out more filth into our air. But shouldn't we get a choice? I can already hear right-wingers say. Silly right-wingers! With weaker standards you won't have a choice -- big corporations tweak their fuel efficiency now and then, but if we really want to save our planet, we're have to make them do more.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7848/S. 4360, the Counselors Not Criminalization Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Long story short, the bill would help get police officers out of schools and help get counselors, nurses, and social workers back in. You don't need to remember viral videos of cops bodyslamming students to support this bill -- you need only know that school districts that hire more counselors, nursers, and social workers see better attendance, higher grades, and fewer disciplinary incidents. Putting police officers in schools does not, in fact, "scare kids straight," as we would know if we took a minute to remember what we were like as students. World was our oyster back then, and nobody was going to tell us what to do! Seriously, I've said it before and I'll say it again: we must stop acting like "more cops" is the solution to every problem. Certainly "more people trained to deal with children" is the solution to problems children have.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, voting rights, and pollution.

You've heard that Senate Republicans want to pass a half-trillion dollar "skinny" COVID-19 relief bill this week? Well, who cares what they want? They should be doing what we want! So let's call them and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. Our House passed the HEROES Act five months ago, and that bill would (among other good works) fund COVID-19 testing and tracing, fund struggling states and localities, fund enhanced unemployment benefits, and issue another round of stimulus checks to good Americans. The Senate Republican bill, of course, would fund rather less-enhanced unemployment benefits and refill the so-called Paycheck Protection Program, which should call the Corporate Welfare Slush Fund given how little it's helped small businesses (its reason for being!) and how much it's helped certain entities pretend they employ people only to spend our money on things like yachts, strippers, and Gucci jewelry. Seriously, Senators, it's well past time to stop pretending to do right by working families and actually do right by working families.

Meanwhile, a private security corporation named Atlas Aegis is actually trying to get military veterans to "guard" Minnesota polling places, which I must presume means they want to "guard" voting booths from voters and their democracy cooties. Of course, even though the consent decree keeping the political parties from "monitoring" polling places expired before the 2018 elections, our state governments, working on their citizens' behalf, still get more say about what you can do at a polling place than any group of wannabe Proud Boys. Minnesota's Attorney General, to his credit, has already told Atlas Aegis to cut out this scheme, but wouldn't it be better if we all said something about it? After all, a politician's statement, no matter how agreeable, really means nothing without the people's backing. Hence Win Without War helps you tell your state government to enforce its laws and keep private security forces away from our polling places. After all, if folks wear official-looking (and military-looking) uniforms around our polling places, some voters will be confused -- and intimidated. And that's evil.

In other news, we're having a lot of trouble getting our Senate to pass, well, any good legislation, but in particular our Senate has not taken up H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act, which would limit our exposure to the toxic "forever chemical" PFAS, which is, like, everywhere. So it might be time to go pressure some private corporations to rely less on PFAS chemicals. Would that the Big Stick of Bad PR affected our elected officials the way it affects big corporations! Anyway, Penn PIRG helps you tell big fast food chain corporation McDonald's to stop using PFAS chemicals in their packaging. Because when folks throw away a million Big Mac containers a day, that's a lot of PFAS that can leech into our water, or get into our air if it's incinerated. Don't suffer the fools who complain that Big Macs will cost 80 bazillion dollars if we make them use better packaging, or that the already-suffering McDonald's workers will suffer more. Making your workers suffer, after all, is a choice. And where's that American can-do spirit that says McDonald's can find a way to use food packaging that doesn't pollute our air and water?

Finally, as many big banks divest from fossil fuel development projects, TD Bank still shovels billions of dollars into them, including the notoriously foul tar sands pipelines. But we were just talking about the Big Stick of Bad PR, right? So Sum of Us helps you tell TD Bank to stop investing in polluting fossil fuel projects. It's really well past time for the big banks to fund renewable energy projects, and don't suffer the fool who says that stuff doesn't make any money or that stuff isn't reliable, and not just because our taxpayer money subsidizes fossil fuel development. Think about it: if you were going to design an energy source from scratch, why would you design one that churns the ground and pumps filth into our air and water? You would design systems that cause the least amount of trouble, wouldn't you? And when you consider that renewable energy sources cause far less pollution and earth-churning than fossil fuels, wouldn't they seem more reliable? The only reason fossil fuels are "reliable" is we've chosen to do things that way. Why can't we choose better once we learn better?

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, gerrymandering, public water, and public lands.

It's Monday, so it's time to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. I know, negotiations over a new COVID-19 stimulus bill are supposedly on again (though by the time you read this, they may be off again!), but there's no damn need to "negotiate" a good stimulus bill, because the HEROES Act is already a good stimulus bill, and our House passed it five months ago. Republicans didn't want it, of course, because it didn't include three martini lunch tax breaks and blanket immunity for corporations that injure people during the pandemic. Now some analysts have detected weakness in our President's recent vacillating, and if that's true, now's the time to strike, and tell our Senators to pass a bill that funds COVID-19 testing and tracing, funds enhanced unemployment benefits, funds our Post Office, and cuts another stimulus check for working families. (And if our President's merely playing us, guess what? Now is still the time to strike, because now is always the time to strike.)

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Fair Districts PA helps you demand that your state Senators vote on SB 1242, the Legislative and Congressional Redistricting Act (or LACRA), which would make redistricting fairer in Pennsylvania. No, it wouldn't establish an independent commission to handle redistricting, but it would prevent redistricting plans from favoring particular candidates or parties and keep newly-redrawn districts from ignoring town and county boundaries, and it would do these things redistricting of both state legislative districts and U.S. House districts. You'll also want to contact Rep. Everett and House Speaker Cutler and demand they hold a vote on HB 2638, the House version of LACRA. The legislature will adjourn in less than two weeks, and it sure looks like they're trying to run out the clock. They may want to consider whether Democrats might reclaim both state Houses after Election Day. Stranger things have happened, after all. Hell, stranger things will have likely happened between the time I've written this sentence and the time you read it.

In other news, the notorious Nestlé is at it again, this time trying to keep paying a pittance to suck up public water from Ruby Mountain Springs in Chaffee County (CO), to the tune of 65 million gallons annually. But county officials will actually hold a public meeting about the matter in less than two weeks, and the good citizens of Chaffee County need to know we've got their back, hence Sum of Us helps you tell Chaffee County officials to keep public water for the public and reject Nestlé's application to keep sucking them dry. Colorado, like much of the West, suffers from increasing drought, which means they can't just keep giving water away to private corporations who then bottle it and resell it at an absurd profit. That ain't "job creation," that's getting played. The good news? Our efforts in other parts of the country to stem the tide of public water giveaways, while they haven't always worked, have called attention to the problem, and have taught people who've forgotten that public water is our water. So let's keep fighting.

Finally, our Administration has lately advanced a final rule proposal that would allow logging in Alaska's Tongass National Forest, so the Sierra Club helps you tell our Administration, one more time, to reject logging in the Tongass. Getting logging corporations into an area that would cut down thousand year-old trees represents some kind of totem to this Administration -- if we can get loggers in here, they think, we can get them in anywhere -- but that kind of short-term thinking will obliterate this country and its good example to the world. We preserve thousand year-old trees because we experience awe at history and nature; this President apparently only experiences awe when he sees a plunging neckline. Also, but the Sierra Club's latest email missive says logging in the Tongass "turn(s) a climate solution into a climate problem," and they're absolutely right -- the more trees we have, the more carbon we capture. And that's just one thing trees do. And how long does money last, anyway?

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, our Post Office, Arctic drilling, and corporate welfare.

Happy Monday, good Americans! Now would be a good time to call your Senators (whose phone numbers you can find using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, and H.R. 8015, the Delivering for America Act. At this writing, 122 days have passed since our House passed the HEROES Act, even though the HEROES Act would do everything a decent COVID-19 relief bill should do, like fund testing and tracing, extend enhanced unemployment benefits, and issue another round of stimulus checks. But, alas, Republicans hold our Senate, and the only thing Mob Boss Mitch McConnell knows how to do is stamp his foot and say no. The Delivering for America Act, which would roll back the changes our Postmaster General made to wreck our Post Office, has been awaiting a Senate vote for a somewhat shorter length of time, but this is no less shameful, considering the 2020 election could be at stake. So keep calling your Senators, because shame is all that'll get them to act. No, it works; I've seen it work before.

Meanwhile, opening ANWR to oil drilling was one of the "accomplishments" of the 2017 tax "reform," and our President has lately announced plans to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR). But bad politicians have been trying to open up ANWR to oil drilling corporations for decades, and at this writing five of America's six largest banks have said they won't fund any drilling efforts there. Whether that's because drilling on public lands is rather unpopular or because the big banks know there won't be enough oil in ANWR to justify the effort, I couldn't say. I can say, however, that the notorious Bank of America is the big bank that has not said they won't fund drilling efforts in ANWR, hence the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell Bank of America to reject the funding of Arctic oil drilling projects. Not just for the caribou or for the Gwich'in people, but also for the waste of effort -- it's just not worth destroying ANWR just so a few oil corporation executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Believe me, that's all that's going to come from ANWR drilling. Well, that and pollution and disruption of ancestral homelands.

Finally, H.R. 7781, the End Polluter Welfare Act, would increase royalties for drilling on public lands, prevent our government from offering "royalty relief" to big drilling corporations, repeal liability limits when oil and gas drillers pollute our lands, end new federally-funded fossil fuel research, stop internationally-sourced funding from going to fossil fuel projects in America, and get rid of a bunch of "tax incentives" toward fossil fuel development -- among many, many other things. Seriously, giving fossil fuel corporations welfare handouts would be a little like giving the New York Yankees extra money every year so that they can "stay competitive." Fossil fuel subsidies currently outstrip renewable subsidies by about 2 to 1; this, when renewable energy actually needs taxpayer help precisely because the fossil fuel corporations are so big they can stamp out alternatives. And if you've attended the fact that our West Coast is presently on fire, you know we need those alternatives post-haste. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support sane energy policy by passing the End Polluter Welfare Act.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act and social media.

Word on the street is that Sen. McConnell (E-KY) plans to start voting on his "skinny" COVID-19 relief bill -- so now's a pretty good time to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. There's no need to humor Republicans who want to look like they're "doing something" about tens of millions unemployed and a thousand-plus deaths every single day from COVID-19 -- they can just pass the HEROES Act, which our House passed almost four months ago and which would extend enhanced unemployment benefits, expand COVID-19 testing and tracing, help out states and localities suffering from a shrinking tax base, fund our Post Office so it can better handle all the votes-by-mail it's going to have to deliver, and issue another round of checks bigger than the ones we got from the CARES Act. Really, there's no need to reinvent the wheel here; our House already passed the HEROES Act, and all our Senators have to do is pass it. Then our President has to sign it! But let's take this one step at a time.

You remember the Burmese military's genocide of its Rohingya Muslim population? All that village-burning, murder, and rape, plus 800,000 refugees fleeing to Bangladesh? Facebook played a big role in helping folks spread lies about and threats at the Rohingya while all that was going on -- and now won't hand over information that the Republic of Gambia has filed suit in our federal courts to get. Facebook must think they're too big for the Republic of Gambia! Or, perhaps, Facebook thinks its own apologies about enabling the genocide are enough, apologies I'm sure the families of the dead find very persuasive. Actually, Facebook claims the requests are too broad -- why, they're making requests for info all the way back to 2012! When, ah, the Burmese military also killed a lot of Rohingya. These killers said what they wanted to do out loud on Facebook, so the Republic of Gambia might be able to nail them in court -- but only if we speak out! So Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to stop enabling the ongoing coverup of genocide in Burma.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, our Post Office, DACA, bad public servants, and taxing the rich.

Congress comes back to work today, so take a minute to boo them, and then get on the phone with your Senators and tell them to pass both H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, and H.R. 8015, the Delivering for America Act. You've heard that "Democrats blocked the Republican pandemic stimulus bill"? Well, that sure ain't the whole story, since our House passed the HEROES Act, a pretty good pandemic stimulus bill, over three months ago. It funds testing and tracing, extends enhanced unemployment benefits, and issues another round of stimulus checks, among other good works -- but it doesn't make three-martini lunches fully tax-deductible, which is apparently a sticking point with Republicans. I wish I were kidding about that! Our House has also passed the Delivering for America Act, which would reverse all the stupid changes our new Postmaster General has made to our Post Office so it'll run a lot worse than it currently does. If Senate Republicans won't do the work we've called them to do, well, we've got to keep calling them -- for as long as it takes. Tools for finding your Senators' phone numbers are, as always, in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page).

Meanwhile, our Supreme Court struck down our President's clumsily unlawful attempt to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) program -- hate to pile on, but our Court called our President's actions "arbitrary and capricious," and it must have pained the notoriously literal John Roberts to say that -- but our U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (or USCIS) still won't accept new DACA applicants, in open defiance of our Court's ruling. How likely is it that our Administration just can't find any folks who came here as children who just don't meet DACA's criteria? Our USCIS also plans to renew existing DACA statuses for only one year instead of two, just to make DREAMers' lives harder. They already wouldn't recognize the countries to which they'd be deported, and had literally no choice in coming here, so I guess our Administration says what's a little more cruelty? Hence the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our Administration to stop defying the rule of law and accept DACA applicants again. Shame we have to tell this Administration to follow the law, but such is our lot in life.

On a related topic, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf to be that department's permanent Secretary. As "permanent" as such things are with this Administration, amirite? Our President loves circumventing the rule of law by appointing "acting" department heads -- and according to our Government Accountability Office (or GAO), he doesn't even do it lawfully, bypassing less "loyal" civil servants to elevate the ones he wants. And this is quite telling, since Republicans have held the Senate during this entire Administration, and have eagerly rubber-stamped his judicial nominees, for example. But Mr. Wolf has thoroughly demonstrated his unworthiness for the job over the last nine-plus months, perhaps most notably by sending unmarked and armed officers to protests and abducting protestors off the street. Perhaps one day he'll find out what everyone else finds out -- that slavish loyalty to our President rarely goes unpunished. But why wait? His spiritual arc is no more important than anyone else's, and certainly no more important than the people's will, which we ought to express posthaste.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8020/S. 4490, the Make Billionaires Pay Act, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. We all know by now that the biggest "winners" of this pandemic have been billionaires, whose wealth has grown by at least $732 billion over the last six months, and while you may be tempted to say right-place-right-time about Jeff Bezos (since ordering stuff online has become even more of a lifeline for good Americans than it was before), fact is billionaires don't need that damn much money. No, they don't "create jobs" with that money -- they hoard that money! Just like you or I would do! That's why we have laws to compel them to part with some of that money, and the Make Billionaires Pay Act would hardly make any of them destitute -- it'd put a 60% tax of billionaire wealth earned since March, which would leave 40%, and as we know, 40% of a crapload is still a crapload. The bill would redirect the money toward good Americans' out-of-pocket health care expenses -- which we know have shot up, because tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs (and thus any health insurance they might have had). So let's get to it.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, our Post Office, and endangered species.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now would be a good time to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, and to reject the suite of bills the Republicans call the HEALS Act. The American people continue to clamor for relief from the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting recession, and the HEROES Act (which our House passed over three months ago!) would give a lot of that relief, not just in extended unemployment benefits and additional stimulus checks but also in the form of COVID-19 testing and tracing. Also, the HEROES Act would extend a moratorium on evictions, since putting people out on the street could cause more COVID-19 spikes. Republican proposals, meanwhile, would attack Social Security, hand out more corporate welfare, and expand three-martini lunch tax breaks; it's safe to say the American people aren't clamoring for these. Don't get hung up on "Democrats and Republicans negotiating an agreement." We're suppose to tell them what we want and they're supposed to do it, and how can Senators negotiate, anyway, without hearing our counsel?

While you have your Senators on the phone, you can also tell them to pass H.R. 8015, the Delivering for America Act, which would roll back the many changes Postmaster General DeJoy has made to U.S. Postal Service operations, changes which have resulted not only in mail delivery delays but also fears that our Post Office won't be able to handle an influx of votes-by-mail, since a lot of folks would rather not risk dying of COVID-19 at the ballot box. Some folks say we're "snowflakes" for wanting to vote without dying of an awful disease! But these folks get their own "courage" largely by getting drunk with denial and rage, so why listen to them? The Delivering for America Act also delivers emergency funding for our Post Office, which still suffers under the Congressional mandate to pre-fund its health and pension benefits 75 years in advance. Those who want our Post Office to run "like a corporation" should note that no corporation in America has do to that! (If you want an email contact tool for this alert, Penn PIRG provides one.)

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration to reject its latest plan to weaken endangered species protections, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. As you may recall, our Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed removing species from protections against development if they relocate to a new habitat. Thing is, a species might be endangered precisely because we've developed too much of its natural habitat already, meaning that in order to save the species we have to relocate it to a larger area; thus our FWS would essentially penalizing endangered species for living in a place we've basically overrun, and then prevent them from getting re-established elsewhere! I really do wish folks would use their cleverness to do good things. One could hope that a federal judge will see the inherent contradiction in this rule, and find that it prevents proper enforcement of the Endangered Species Act -- but we've got to help a judge see it with our public comments.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, racism, police surveillance, and fuel efficiency.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, and reject the suite of bills known as the HEALS Act. It ain't that damn hard, really: the HEROES Act would fund expanded unemployment benefits, would fund our Post Office, would fund COVID-19 testing and tracing, would fund public education, would fund the states and localities hit hard by this pandemic, and would issue another round of stimulus checks that would exceed the ones we got from the CARES Act. Plus, the HEROES Act would expand working family tax breaks and repeal the gazillionaire tax break that "somehow" made it into the CARES Act. And what would the HEALS Act do? Speed up Congress's ability to cut your Social Security benefits, expand the three-martini lunch tax break, fund considerably less-expanded unemployment benefits, and immunize corporations from lawsuits when they injure or kill good Americans like you and I. I think our duty as Americans is quite clear here, even if our leaders mean to mystify it.

Meanwhile, a Kenowah, WI police officer shot Jake Blake seven times in the back this past Sunday, so Color of Change helps you tell state and local decision-makers to fire the officer who shot Mr. Blake. All ye need ask yourself is this one question: does anyone deserve the death penalty before being charged with a crime? If the answer is "yes," you might want to see a therapist about your anger management issues. And if the answer is "no," then no amount of propaganda concerning "everything happened so quickly" or "what was he doing out there?" matters. If a police officer kills a person without due process of law, well, victims can't exactly get do-overs, can they? Too many police officers get do-overs after killing Americans, particularly Americans of color, but the victims can't. It's that damn simple. Admit no "Jake Blake was no angel" in your conversations about this matter. Admit no "but how many arrests did he have on his record," either. Clearly I have been far too kind toward my opponents about these matters; that stops now.

In other news, Cancel Ring helps you tell big online retail corporation Amazon to end its numerous "partnerships" with local police departments. These "partnerships" entail Amazon helping police departments collect Ring doorbell footage without warrants, a weapon our police too readily turns on protestors and folks of color. If they were trying to catch burglars, you'd still make them get a warrant, or at least you would in a sane, moral, and decent society, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, Amazon just helps police get all the information they want, law and order be damned. No, it is "law and order" to ensure that all Americans, even the guilty ones, get Fourth Amendment protections guaranteed by our Constitution. Those who watch TV news channels that have been replaying the same footage of looting for the last two months may not see how untrammeled police power might actually threaten their freedom. But I always wonder why someone would be happy remaining in a state of rage all the time. I mean, they get tired, don't they?

Finally, our EPA is still trying to roll back fuel efficiency standards because ANYTHINGZ TEH OBUMMERZ DIDZ IZ TEH BADZ!!!!! And worse, big auto manufacturing corporations are rolling back their own support for said standards! Remember when the Obama standards came with the endorsement of big automakers? Well, apparently their word didn't mean much. Who'da thunk it? Seriously, don't let anyone come at you with "you were naive to believe the big automakers," because either this is a civilized society in which your word means something, or it's not. Too many Americans will shrug and say it isn't once you spring that trap on them, and then you will know that doing right is less important to them than "owning the libs" or "being on the winning team." And they'll have to take that to the Pearly Gates one day! Anyway, the Sierra Club helps you tell big auto manufacturing corporations GM and Toyota to drop their support for this Administration's pro-pollution, anti-fuel efficiency policy. Their executives will have to answer at the Pearly Gates, too; maybe they'll take that to heart.

UPDATE. I did not realize that Mr. Blake was still alive. Which is excellent news! Hence I've changed one word in the second paragraph above. (Not the rest of it, though -- I'm pretty sure that when you shoot a guy seven times, you're trying to kill him.)

Action: concerning our Post Office, another coal mine, and another proposed tax cut for the rich.

You've heard our media say that Postmaster General DeJoy is "suspending" all those "operational changes" that slowed the mail and threatened our Election? Not so fast! He said he'd "suspend" plans to move equipment around but said nothing about equipment already moved, and "suspending" the changes isn't rolling back the changes. As they say, when someone shows you who they are, you ought to believe them, and the man who is still financially invested in a corporation that alternately competes with our Post Office and does contract work for our Post Office shouldn't be leading our Post Office. I'm old enough to remember when folks actually tried to avoid even the appearance of evil, but too many of us are too cynical anymore to demand even that much from our leaders. For those of us who believe cynicism is evil, Progress America helps you tell Postmaster General DeJoy to restore the 600-plus mail sorting machines already removed, and then resign. It'd be nice, for once to be able to say someone resigned in shame.

Meanwhile, most big insurance corporations (including Liberty Mutual and AIG) have shunned the proposed Carmichael mine that would further befoul Australia's Great Barrier Reef -- but British insurance corporation Aon has not. Nearly 30 million tons of coal already go through the Reef, and one accident could destroy one of the world's oldest wonders, so why do our leaders continue to reject wind and solar? Apparently because, as Ralph Nader used to say, you can't own the sun, though you can own the infrastructure that collects wind and solar power and converts it to electricity, and you'd think that'd be enough for big corporations. They tell us they're our best and boldest visionaries, but their only apparent "vision" is obliterating our history and our heritage so they can redistribute more of your money upwards to themselves. Anyway, the Big Stick of Bad PR still operates, if we wield it, so Sum of Us helps you tell Aon to protect our world's treasures and scuttle its plans to insure the notorious Carmichael mine.

Finally, with over 30 million good Americans either unemployed or underemployed thanks to our government's absolutely miserable response to this pandemic, what's our President's new great idea? Cutting the capital gains tax rate from 20% to 15%, of course, though this would deliver yet another massive tax cut mostly to rich folks. Capital gains ain't just about real estate, of course, but also about stocks and bonds, meaning rich folks already pay a lower tax rate on their stock sales than working Americans do on income above $53,325. And there's no good reason for that: stocks and real estate aren't "better" than the work the rest of us do. Hence Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to not only reject the capital gains tax cut proposal, but raise the rate to ensure that folks pay the same tax rate on their investments as the rest of us pay on our wages. The stock market doesn't make the economy go, after all: our work does.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, our Post Office, infrastructure, and health care.

It's Monday, so it's time to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, and reject the suite of bills Republicans call the HEALS Act. It really is as simple as a Goofus and Gallant strip: the HEROES Act would fund our Post Office, fund unemployment benefits, fund COVID-19 testing and tracing, fund localities and states, and issue another round of (bigger) stimulus checks -- while the HEALS Act would make three-martini lunches fully tax-deductible, immunize corporations from lawsuits when they kill people, and make it a lot easier for Congress to cut our Social Security benefits. Don't worry that the two parties are "negotiating" over what a final COVID relief bill would look like, because the HEROES Act is what that bill should look like. Besides, we don't have to negotiate with them -- they have to negotiate with us. You might call that naive, but I've seen it work enough times to want it to work all the time -- and we can make it work all the time by speaking out all the time.

Speaking of our Post Office, MoveOn helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to remove its new Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy. I guess his defenders will say he's a "logistics executive" who's "shaking up" our Post Office, but we all know logistics employees, not executives, have all the expertise, and cutting off overtime, slowing mail delivery, embarking on a mass firing spree, removing mail sorting machines, and moving blue mailboxes around all look less like "shaking things up" and more like "sowing chaos for our drama king President." And yet there are more even pressing reasons to remove Mr. DeJoy: he still owns a considerable stake in his former corporation, which feeds extensively on taxpayer funds including USPS contracts, and recently bought stock options in Amazon, which uses our USPS a lot but which is also trying to establish itself as a USPS competitor. Adding corruption to incompetence is a tried-and-true formula for our President, but we don't have to put up with it.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act. What does the Moving Forward Act do? It would (among other things) extend this year's infrastructure funding for another year, extend several other transportation- and safety-related funds for the next five years, establish a fund to rebuild transportation infrastructure in rural areas, strengthen safety rules across all modes of transportation, and fund the rebuilding of lead-lined water infrastructure. Here's a sad note: despite the obvious need for infrastructure funding, and the bill's concentration on rural areas and clean water, H.R. 2 got exactly three Republican votes, one of whom was a Democrat until late last year. If the big media pundits got a hold of this information, they'd whine about the bill's lack of "bipartisan" appeal. Sane people, of course, would retort that Republicans have no interest in governing, and thus no "bipartisan" appeal can work with them. And that's why we step in.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to fully fund our Indian Health Service, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. I'm sure I don't have to say don't they know there's a pandemic on? -- especially since the Navajo Nation, in particular, had it worse than New York state three months back, and you remember how bad New York state had it. But I may have to address folks who, while not particularly bigoted, may wonder "why we're still doing stuff for the Indians." Because obliterating Native cultures might take hundreds of years to redress, that's why. "But I didn't have anything to do with that," such folks might respond. I could respond in a number of ways -- "it's not all about you," "your relative lack of culpability doesn't fix the problem I just described" -- but how about we just say America is a great nation, capable of undoing the harm it inflicts upon the undeserving.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, Social Security, surprise medical bills, and private prisons.

Congress is off the rest of the month, but we should still call them and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, and reject the suite of Republican-proposed bills known as the HEALS Act. This remains very simple: the HEROES Act extends enhanced unemployment benefits, funds our Post Office, and funds states and localities -- while the HEALS Act gives corporations undeserved immunity from lawsuits filed by the people they hurt and business honchos get to deduct 100% of their meals instead of 50%. Republicans must be very confident they're going to win elections this year for them to go all-in on something as moronic as the HEALS Act. Of course, our "liberal" media is helping them out, by casting Congress's failure to pass another COVID-19 relief bill as either a bipartisan or a Democratic failure. Stone cold truth is that it's a Republican failure -- the Democrats, for once, passed the HEROES Act almost three months ago, and that bill would do what the people want it and need it to do, but Senate Republicans did nothing. And we don't just "get along" with people who do nothing.

And while you have your Congressfolk on the phone, tell them to fight to the death our President's recent Executive Order deferring payroll tax contributions until after the election, because those contributions fund Social Security. Our President has said, out loud, that he'd prefer to "terminate" these contributions and fund Social Security and Medicare from general budgeting, which of course will lead eventually to at least one body of Congress throwing up its hands and saying we just can't afford it anymore! But we should not tolerate the government of the greatest nation on Earth saying we can't "afford" a dignified retirement for all our citizens. No equivocation is possible here -- a large number of politicians and not just Republicans are thrilled that our President is willing to take the PR hit for achieving one of Our Glorious Elites' long-standing goals, the destruction of Social Security. They will not stand up for Social Security unless we stand up for Social Security -- and we must stand up in such numbers that our will cannot be mistaken.

Meanwhile, previous COVID-19 legislation ensured that COVID-19 tests would be free to anyone who needed one -- or so we thought! As we speak, good Americans still get slammed with surprise medical bills ranging from $150 on the low end to $3,000 on the high end. Turns out those bills didn't address the matter of health care facilities partnering with "out of network" facilities to get the tests done, but hey, last I looked, "free" meant "free," not "free unless your local ER is out-of-network," or "free unless this particular ER doctor is out-of-network even though all the others are in-network," or "free unless we're dumb enough to use an out-of-network lab," or "free unless we gouge you by using an out-of-network lab." What do I always say? Incompetence is malice! The stupid-or-evil debate doesn't matter if the end result is evil! Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to end surprise medical billing during this pandemic. Surprise medical bills always make the news, so you'd think ending them would be a bipartisan cause. Alas, only if we make it so.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell TD Bank to divest from notorious private prison corporation GEO Group. TD invested heavily in GEO during the pandemic's early days, and I wouldn't blame you for thinking that's a bit of a head-scratcher there. Did TD Bank think our President's anti-immigrant cruelty was the wave of the future and it was time to get on board? Did they think there was going to be a motherlode in imprisoning folks during a pandemic? Did they fantasize that private prisons would control the pandemic better than everyone else, instead of the obvious truth that they'd do worse than everyone else, since private prisons operate facilities where you can't even pee in private? We may never know! What we do know is that private prisons, despite their relative favor with this President, put immigrant detainees in concentration camps and even if they didn't, they'd still generally do a crap job of spending taxpayer money. What we also know is that the Big Stick of Bad PR works on big corporations. If we wield it, that is.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning corporate immunity, Democrat weakness, and abortion.

We've talked about what a good COVID-19 relief bill should and shouldn't have, but one item on the Republican wish list requires more scrutiny: immunity for corporations from lawsuits after they force their workers back to work before it's safe or otherwise expose them and their customers to COVID-19. Because when Mitch McConnell contemplates this pandemic, his first thought, apparently, isn't "help the people" but HELPZ TEH CORPORASHUNZ!!!!!! Seriously, the proposal they've unveiled looks calculated to crash and burn in negotiations with Democrats -- except these are Democrats we're talking about, who think "bipartisanship" is all about giving in to Republicans. If we raise our voices, though, they won't have any choice but to follow us -- see how our President's pet payroll tax cuts are already off the table? We did that. Hence a group of good government groups helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject corporate immunity in any future COVID-19 relief bill.

Speaking of weakling Democrats pre-emptively conceding to Republicans, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said earlier this week that his party could be flexible on the exact amount of the unemployment benefit extension, saying "it's not $600 or bust." And they wonder why they keep getting rolled! Look, here's Negotiation 101: ask for more than you want, and you increase the chances of getting what you want. Republicans understand this well enough; it's one reason they've been able to push the center ever further right in America. Really, everyone understands this -- except for Democrats. Unless, of course, they're merely pretending to be stupid so we don't think they're evil. In any case, one thing they do understand is a complete inability to call their big donors because we've tied up their phone lines telling them to work for us on this issue. Toward that end, you can find Rep. Hoyer's contact numbers here. Hell, I'd demand $1,000 a month in extra benefits for the unemployed just because I'm so damn sick of Democrat weakness.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2975/S. 1645, the Women's Health Protection Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. You no doubt recall the multitudinous anti-abortion laws states have passed over the last decade, ranging from forcing women to get ultrasounds before getting abortions to closing down abortion clinics that don't meet absurd health "standards." Our Supreme Court struck down Louisiana's clinic closure law, but not with any particular enthusiasm for women's rights -- Chief Justice Roberts all but said the decision came down to precedent and little else. But abortion is a right, and laws seeking to derail women from exercising that right are simply wrong. And I'd err on the side of caution when considering when and whether a fetus is a person -- but I don't get to dictate to others how they ought to feel about that, and frankly I feel even worse about turning women into breeders, which outlawing abortion will do.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, our Post Office, labor rights in Mexico, and encryption for Twitter messages.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. Yes, we should tell our Congressfolk that we want unemployment benefits extended past the end of this week, as we did yesterday, but we should also tell our Senators that the HEROES Act already does that. Plus, the HEROES Act would also fund COVID-19 testing and tracing, would fund our Post Office, would help states and localities endure this pandemic a little better, and provides, would extend working family tax credits and repeal a big bazillionaire tax credit, and would also provide another round of stimulus checks to working families. One of the things the bill doesn't do, of course, is fulfill Mob Boss Mitch's wish that big corporations get "blanket immunity" from any lawsuit arising from their mishandling of pandemic-related guidelines. But they already have the money to fight lawsuits; what about our ability to fight corporate neglect? And what about our need for economic sustenance during this pandemic?

Meanwhile, the HEROES Act would extend funding for our Post Office, but (as we've discussed before) the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 caused our Post Office's funding troubles, by forcing our Post Office to fund its pensions 75 years in advance, an absurd mandate our government forces upon no other entity public or private, and one Congress obviously intended to cripple our Post Office. Thus we've been hearing of funding shortfalls for the last decade-plus, when our Post Office had been entirely self-funding since 1982. Thus Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, so that our Post Office can continue to provide the good services we deserve while funding itself. You'd think a conservative would approve of our Post Office funding itself without taxpayer money, but apparently today's "conservatives" only care about converting everything into unearned money for some crony or other. That sound you hear is Russell Kirk spinning in his grave.

In other news, the Mexican government recently detained Susana Prieto Terrazas, a labor lawyer and activist, for three weeks on trumped-up crap; the Big Stick of Bad PR helped get her released, but now her government is planning new trumped-up crap to charge her with, all for trying to organize labor unions against maquiladoras, or foreign-owned factories which generally export their goods to the owning corporation's country of origin. You may be thinking that her plight is tragic but outside the scope of your activism, but actually, it's not! Mexico just signed the USMCA trade deal with Canada and the United States, and one of the things they're now legally-bound to do is stop harassing labor activists like this. Hence Rethink Trade helps you tell your Congressfolk to pressure Mexico into holding up their end of the deal. After all, it is their job now; trade deals can't do better by us if no one will enforce them.

Finally, you may have heard about the hack that breached popular Twitter accounts -- but you may not have heard that the hackers might have been able to get at Twitter users' private direct messages, since Twitter hasn't embraced end-to-end encryption, as other messaging apps have done. And this isn't just about shielding that R-rated direct message to your beloved or that smack-talking thread about your boss from hackers; it's also about journalists and activists who use encryption in their messaging. And not because they're "probably criminals," as Mike Pompeo has said, but because they may be living in countries that'll kill them if they find out what they're saying. Imagine trying to evade rogue police abducting protestors without encrypted messaging! Which is most certainly not something that only happens in other countries! Fight for the Future helps you tell Twitter to help out all its users by implementing end-to-end encryption on direct messages.

Action: concerning health care data, unemployment benefits, concentration camps, and Muslim bans.

As you've no doubt heard, our Administration ordered American hospitals to send their data directly to the Department of Health and Human Services instead of the Centers for Disease Control, where they'd been sending it. What's the difference? Why, the public can view the CDC's data, but not HHS's data! Which will of course be managed by a private corporation from Pennsylvania which of course received a noncompetitive contract for the data and whose CEO of course has donated to Republican politicians! It's a two-fer: they hide data from the public and funnel taxpayer money (i.e., your money) to a crony corporation! Hence MoveOn helps you tell your Congressfolk to prevent our Administration from playing a shell game with vital health data in the middle of a pandemic. Our CDC makes our President look bad because CDC scientists know what they're doing and our President doesn't. But we're Americans, dammit, and we don't have to take that. Particularly since it could be a matter of life and death.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make sure they extend expanded unemployment benefits past July 25. That's right, those benefits expire in less than a week, and for a minute there Congress seemed happy looking more at the 6 million jobs created the last two months and less at the almost-40 million jobs lost the previous three. But if you possess the ability to subtract a one-digit number from a two-digit number, then you know why good Americans still need those benefits. The HEROES Act would already extend them, and we'll tell our Senators to pass that bill tomorrow, but in the meantime, they should hear from us, loud and clear, that we want the unemployment benefits extended -- without the nonsense about how "lazy" unemployment benefits supposedly make people, and certainly without the poison pills Mob Boss Mitch loves attaching to must-pass legislation. Oh, and not for nothing, but this pandemic's getting worse.

In other news, Sign Here Now helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate our Bureau of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) for its response to COVID-19 in its concentration camps. We might reasonably expect such an investigation to conclude that it's no better than our Administration's disastrous COVID-19 response generally, but our Congressfolk should still investigate on our behalf. True, learning that ICE is wantonly spraying cleaning chemicals on immigrant and refugee detainees, for example, won't move any of our President's votaries -- who generally interpret any cruelty toward non-white folks as "toughness" and any perceived slight against white folks as "bullying" -- but learning about such things may move good Americans who already have a lot to think about in their lives. Personal to those who claim anyone who opposes cruelty to immigrants and refugees in concentration camps must ipso facto support "open borders": God doesn't like trolls.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. To review: the NO BAN Act would not only reverse our President's notorious and nefarious Muslim ban (i.e., his travel ban on six Muslim-majority nations, with North Korea and Venezuela thrown in solely so he could claim he didn't base his ban on religion), it would prevent future Presidents from enacting similar bans in the future. If you're still thinking that maybe keeping Muslims out of America is a way of reducing terrorism, please remember that a) we've got plenty of domestic terrorists who we can't just keep out of their own country and b) if we stopped interfering in Middle Eastern affairs, then we'd go much, much farther toward reducing the possibility that Muslims will fly another plane into another building. Also, appeals to fear are always wrong.

Action: concerning Social Security, defense spending, and our Post Office.

One of the consequences of nearly 40 million Americans losing their jobs during a pandemic? They'll pay less into Social Security this year, and thus get fewer benefits when they retire. But H.R. 7499, the Social Security COVID-19 Correction and Equity Act, would help improve that situation by increasing benefits by 2% across the board, increasing the "special minimum benefit," and expanding benefits for (among other vulnerable folks) grandparents who are raising grandchildren. So, to sum: politicians like Sen. Ernst of Iowa would get Congress "behind closed doors" to cut Social Security benefits, and politicians like Sen. Rubio would rob Social Security benefits to pay for paid family leave -- while others, like Connecticut's Rep. Larson, would put Social Security on a sounder financial footing while increasing benefits. Gosh, I wonder which approach is better? Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect working families' retirement by passing the Social Security COVID-19 Correction and Equity Act.

Meanwhile, the Sanders-Markey-Warren amendment to the defense authorization bill would divert $74 billion away from defense spending and toward investing in communities with a high poverty rate. I hate to sound like a broken record (full disclosure: I do not actually care whether I sound like a broken record), but we already spend more on defense than the next eight countries combined, and for what? For foreign soldiers to use improvised explosives to flummox our efforts? Too many folks think power is all about whom you can hurt, but it's really all about whom you can help, and civilizations that don't get that die. And they deserve to die! We've been going backwards for almost my entire lifetime, and if we keep going down this path, we'll eventually join Babylon and Assyria and all those other nations history classes barely cover anymore. We can take a small step toward avoiding this collapse by letting Win Without War help us tell our Senators to invest less in weapons systems and more in people.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our U.S. Postal Service. You'll be telling your Senators to do this again tomorrow when you tell them to pass the HEROES Act, but our Congressfolk often need extra reminding about what's important. Our Post Office performs essential services for its owners, the American people -- and will be particularly important this coming Election Day, when a lot of good Americans are going to be mailing their votes in for the first time, so as to avoid getting COVID-19 from waiting in line for hours on end. (Have you seen that meme on Facebook that goes "I wait in line for Walmart, etc., so why shouldn't I wait in line to vote?" Stupidest. Argument. Ever. Like COVID-19 isn't even happening! Have I mentioned how much I hate stupidity?) Of course right-wingers like our President want to privatize our Post Office, which would be an utter disaster, as privatization efforts are. Tell your Congressfolk to save our Post Office, and we can avoid such a disaster.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, Russian bounties, and corporate welfare.

Happy Tuesday, good folks! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. Your Senators do not need to reinvent the wheel here -- the HEROES Act already would extend unemployment benefits, already would give extra funding to states and municipalities, already would fund our Post Office through the end of the year, already would fund contract tracing so we can track the spread of COVID-19 better, already would expand working family tax cuts, already would repeal one big hedge-fund manager tax cut, and already would provide another stimulus checks to folks making less than six figures (plus it'd be a bigger check than the one the CARES Act cut for you). Our economy may have added close to five million jobs in June, but we still have over 11 percent U3 unemployment (18 percent by the more informative U6 rate, which picks up data the U3 rate doesn't), and the spike in COVID-19 cases lately, well, doesn't exactly predict continued expansion. So let's make sure our Senators do the right thing.

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard that Russian officials paid bounties to Afghan rebels for killing American soldiers -- and, of course, our intelligence agencies told our President this in a Presidential Daily Briefing several months ago, which is most assuredly not called that because it's a thousand pages long and full of irrelevant data. It sure does seem like our President has a blind spot when it comes to Russia, but still, you'd think he'd be angrier about a foreign nation paying people to kill our soldiers. Alas, he expends all his anger these days on liberals who "shame" right-wingers for their bad behavior. Gosh, we finally get it through our heads that we're not too good for shaming and we're still wrong! It's like right-wingers will never be happy with us! Anyway, Secure Families Initiative helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate the matter and punish the wrongdoers. We shouldn't fight wars like the Afghanistan war in the first place, but we shouldn't tolerate this offense, either.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop corporations' abuse of the CARES Act's small business relief fund by passing H.R. 7076/S. 3855, the CORE Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Imagine our government establishing a "Paycheck Protection Program," ostensibly to help small businesses continue to meet payroll during this pandemic, but then essentially giving away $500 billion of our money to banksters, which then handed out big chunks of taxpayer cash to their big corporate cronies. But wait, there's more! Now imagine our President getting rid of all the Inspectors General who might have actually overseen this program so it didn't become a big corporate welfare trough, and then imagine our government asserting that the people can't see which corporations got PPP money because such information is "proprietary" and "confidential." Sadly, you don't even have to imagine it -- it all happened. So we must stop it.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, Juneteenth as a national holiday, misspent tax money, and government spying.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Today's as good a day as any to call your U.S. Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. The HEROES Act is that rarest of animals, actually good stimulus legislation that would actually help states and localities survive the absence of tax revenues these past few months, and fund our Post Office so it can continue to do the good work it does, and extend enhanced unemployment benefits for the tens of millions of Americans who will very likely still need it after it expires at the end of July, and repeal another odious tax-cut-for-the-rich that was accidentally-yeah-sure passed in the CARES Act, and provide bigger stimulus checks for good Americans making less than six figures than the CARES Act did. Of course Republicans want to include "blanket immunity" from lawsuits for corporations that open up in defiance of state and federal guidelines. If that doesn't get your goat, just say the words "blanket immunity" in the same voice that South African diplomat said "diplomatic immunity" in Lethal Weapon II. Say it over and over again in your head. Then make the call.

Meanwhile, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to make June 19 -- popularly known as "Juneteenth" and commemorating the day Union soldiers took over the last Confederate slave state -- a national holiday. Please don't be the whitesplainer who says BUT TEH DELAWAREZ AND TEH KENTUCKIEZ STILLZ HAD TEH SLAVEZ UNTILZ TEH DECEMBURZ!!!!!, because June 19, 1865 was the last day anyone could say maybe slavery's not really going to end in America, and really, who are we to argue with the millions of black folks who have been celebrating Juneteenth for over 150 years? Now, plenty of Americans would oppose the idea of a Juneteenth national holiday out of "patriotism" or something -- why do we always celebrate what America does wrong? they might say. I don't look at it that way, of course -- I look at it as a way of celebrating making a wrong right, which is more an American tradition than pretending you never did anything wrong in the first place. I'd say it's more patriotic, too.

In other news, it ain't just "small business" money this government seems to have aggressively misappropriated lately -- it's also over $100 milllion Congress directed to be spent on "consumables and medical care" for immigrant children held in various detainment centers, but which Customs and Border Protection (or CBP) spent instead on such "consumables and medical care" as all-terrain vehicles and computer upgrades. And I guarantee you the very same people who squealed like pigs about SOLYNDRA!!!! will shrug about this corruption. They might even say IT'Z ONLYZ TEH HUNDREDZ MILLYUNZ!!!!, and it's true that $100 million ain't much in the context of over $4 trillion in federal spending, but for any immigrant who got denied health care and died because someone at CBP spent money intended for their care on a motorcycle, it would be literally everything. Years ago I'd have said that even the most anti-immigrant American would blanch at such a state of affairs, but not now. Hence the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to punish CBP for redirecting money meant for immigrant health care.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop our government from being able to spy on our internet activity without a warrant, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. The WAR ON TERRURZ!!!!! crowd can carefully attend the three words "without a warrant" before getting their shorts in a bunch -- if our government can convince a judge they've got a better-than-50% chance of getting a conviction if they look at an American citizen's browser history, then they get to look at that history. Trouble is, governments aren't doing the work required to get to that level! Sympathetic folks on the right who try to explain the warrantless spying power they oppose tend to imagine that folks who want that power are merely trying to "do something" about terrorism. I'm not going to say they're wrong -- in fact, I'm sure they're right about at least some individual bureaucrats -- but I'm also going to go after warrantless-spying efforts as if they're just doing it because they enjoy doing evil, because they are doing evil, regardless of their good intentions.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, Chaco Canyon, the quality of mercy, and working families.

If you've missed previous opportunities to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, then you can still use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Senators' phone numbers. I know, it's been weeks since the House passed that bill, and all kinds of other things are happening right now, but guess what? No law or social more compels you to attend only one thing at a time, and to the exclusion of all other things! Our Glorious Elites pretend only one thing at a time could possibly matter to anyone, but we're still seeing over 20,000 cases of coronavirus every day, and a crapload of good Americans will still need unemployment benefits after the end of July, and we still need to fund a Post Office past the end of September, and states and localities still deserve assistance thanks to all the reduced revenues of this recession, and at least one big tax-cut-for-the-rich still deserves repeal and oblivion, and another round of increased stimulus checks for all of us sure wouldn't hurt, so get on the stick and communicate your will to your Senators before they imagine you've forgotten all about the hard work they still need to do.

Meanwhile, our Interior Secretary has actually extended a comment period concerning opening up the Greater Chaco Region of New Mexico to even more fracking. And you know what that means! It means he didn't get enough pro-pollution comments from the fracking lobby! I mean, this Administration never wants to hear more from the American people, since good Americans generally oppose all the things this Administration does! Even the 2017 tax "reform" suffered from so much opposition from the people that they could barely pass the damn thing! And that cost Democrats exactly nothing in the 2018 midterm elections -- this, after Our Glorious Elites have been saying for years that opposing "tax cuts" is "political poison"! But I digress. Food and Water Action helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to halt its plans to drill for gas in the Greater Chaco Region. Why? Well, not just because drilling tends to pollute our air and water (and, of course, drillers will pay less in royalties to us because that's how our 46% President wants it!) -- the Greater Chaco Region also includes land sacred to the Navajo. Our Administration cares so much about religion -- just not when it's Native American religion!

In other news, Willie Simmons committed a $9 robbery back in the 1980s -- and has served 37 years for it! How did this happen? Mr. Simmons had three other offenses (all nonviolent, naturally) on his record, and thus got a life sentence under Alabama's "habitual offender" law. I don't need to tell you that Mr. Simmons served our country in the Army or that drug addiction may have figured in his "crime spree" -- I need only reiterate, with the italics hammer, that he's serving a life sentence for stealing nine freaking dollars. If you know any supposed devil's-advocates who'll say if you can't do the time don't do the crime or he should've gotten a lawyer to help with his appeals, just ask them: is it fair to give someone life in prison for stealing nine dollars? Any answer other than "no" -- and that most definitely includes "no, but" -- deserves no further engagement; just let your little Glaucon go with God, because God might be their only friend at the end of the line. In the meantime, let's try to do some damn justice and tell Alabama Gov. Ivey to commute Mr. Simmons's sentence, as Change.org helps you do.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Walmart to give its workers a seat on its corporate board, then United for Respect still helps you do that. Because why the hell not? Are other CEOs the only people who know anything about running a corporation? Actually, given how badly so many corporations do at anything other than redistributing worker income upward to executives, I suspect most CEOs know just about nothing about running a corporation! And, in my lengthy experience as a worker bee, I've found that the people who actually do the work know more about how to do the work than the folks who bloviate all day about "the challenges ahead," which are always challenges for you, not for them! In any case, Walmart's situation is unique, and not just because it smashes any unionization effort with a frightening malice -- Walmart has been making a crap-ton of profits during this pandemic, but its executives have been dragging their feet ensuring their workers are safe at a store where it's almost impossible to socially-distance. So let's help our sisters and brothers help themselves! That's what a conservative would do, right?

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, law and order, and public lands.

If you've missed previous opportunities to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (or HEROES) Act, well, now's as good a time as any! Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Senators' phone numbers; you might want to program all of your Senators' phone numbers (including their local ones) into your cellphone. No, seriously, sometimes I make 10 calls before anyone answers the phone, and that's when there's no pandemic! While you have them on the phone, you might also want to tell them to reject any effort to give "blanket immunity" from lawsuits to corporations relating to the pandemic, since that's the only thing Mitch McConnell seems to want to do. If it's truly a "frivolous" lawsuit, it'll die in court; what's the big deal? And be sure to mention all the good things the HEROES Act would do, like help fund states and localities, fund our Post Office, extend higher unemployment benefits, expand working family tax cuts, repeal a big hedge fund manager tax cut, and issue another round of (bigger) stimulus checks.

Meanwhile, the law nominally lets us sue public officials, including police officers, when they trample over our rights, but our Supreme Court has spent the last half-century-plus blowing a Mack truck-sized hole in the law in creating the doctrine of "qualified immunity," whereby courts can throw out lawsuits against government officials merely because the court hasn't heard such a case before, which sure takes "respecting precedent" to an unwarranted extreme. But H.R. 7085, the Ending Qualified Immunity Act, would prevent courts from dismissing cases against police officers after divining their' "good faith" or "reasonable" belief that their unlawful conduct was lawful, and it would also prevent them from throwing out cases merely because the defendants allege that "rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution or laws were not clearly established at the time of their deprivation by the defendant," since, actually, they are. Should we excuse evil merely because of good intentions? Of course not. Hence both Public Citizen and Defending Rights and Dissent both help you tell your Congressfolk to restore law and order by passing the Ending Qualified Immunity Act.

Finally, S. 3422, the Great American Outdoors Act, would not only fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund but would also establish a National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund to help preserve our public lands. That's been a bigger deal to a lot of good Americans these last few months, as public parks are now often the only places still open if you feel like getting out of the house. As we all do! A man could look at the list of 59 Senators (out of 100) co-sponsoring this bill and be heartened that 15 of them are Republicans; 15 plus 47 in the Democratic caucus equals a filibuster-proof majority in favor of the bill! But alas, it's not a veto-proof majority, and if Mob Boss Mitch doesn't bring the bill up for a vote then it'll get zero votes, so Penn Environment helps you tell your Senators to support our public lands by passing the Great American Outdoors Act. Our President didn't veto the bill permanently establishing the Land and Water Conservation Act, but then again, the Senate passed that bill 92-8 and the House passed it 363-62. We might need those kinds of numbers again, and we won't get them if we sit on our hands.

Action: concerning good pandemic legislation.

Stop me if you've heard this story before: our House passed H.R. 6800, the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (or HEROES) Act, and since it would help states and localities, fund our Post Office, extend higher unemployment benefits, expand working family tax cuts while repealing a big hedge fund manager tax cut, and issue another round of (bigger) stimulus checks, it better resembles a real pandemic relief bill than the corporate-welfare-larded CARES Act. So naturally our Senate says they won't ever pass it -- and instead they'll concentrate on ensuring that big corporations get immunity from lawsuits for opening their doors before they're supposed to. But if we all call our Senators and demand that they pass the HEROES Act, we'll stand a better chance of success; tying up their phone lines is something they notice, after all. Tools for finding your Senators' phone numbers are in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone).

Meanwhile, no law prevents you from specifically telling your Senators to reject the McConnell plan to give out said "blanket immunity" to corporations over COVID-19 issues, as Public Citizen helps you do. (You can add that to your phone call above, if you like.) I mention this mainly because Public Citizen frames the issue in a way I'd neglected to do thus far: around your "right to sue," or, more specifically, your right to redress grievances, in court, against those who harm you. The tort "reform" crowd loves to trick you with isolated stories about the lamest lawsuits they can find -- and the punchline of most of these stories is that the lawsuits failed, or that judges reduced the largest awards! Which means they're not even good stories! But isolated anecdotes ain't science, particularly in a nation where corporations file the vast majority of all lawsuits, and isolated anecdotes certainly don't prove that the harm done to you wasn't real. So when they talk about "frivolous" lawsuits, just remember they're trying to hurt you.

Finally, continuing with our CARES Act corporate welfare them, Daily Kos helps you demand that our Congress impose criminal penalties for corporate CEOs who misuse CARES Act funding. CARES Act funding was, allegedly, supposed to keep good Americans working and reward corporations that kept good Americans working. Admittedly that's not the way I'd do it -- yes, I would mandate that our government create work for out-of-work Americans because hello! 39 million Americans unemployed in two months! But I digress. Sen. Warren (D-MA) asked Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin if he could ensure that corporations receiving CARES Act money will keep even one American working, or if he could ensure that executives who file false information about who they're helping could be held liable -- and of course he couldn't, because he belongs to the Administration That Only Cares About Bosses. So, yeah, we need to make some noise about that.

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

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

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

Action: concerning good pandemic legislation, medical supplies, stock trading, and drilling royalties.

The House passed H.R. 6800, the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (or HEROES) Act, last Friday night, but the Republican-held Senate has described the bill as "dead on arrival," even though (as a pair of ITEP analyses instructs us) the HEROES Act is a lot more like a good pandemic relief bill than the CARES Act. The HEROES Act provides help for states and localities, extends unemployment insurance, expands the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC), funds our Post Office through an election during which they'll be quite busy, repeals a particularly noxious tax-cut-for-the-rich, and expands direct payments to Americans making less than six figures. So now would be a good time to call your Senators and demand they pass the HEROES Act -- not least so that we render irrelevant Republican "priorities" like a payroll tax-cut-for-the-rich and "blanket immunity" for corporations that open too early. Senators should only find their constituents' will relevant, but let's not give them the excuse that we never communicated that will.

Meanwhile, we've all seen how our President likes to hijack medical supplies, to the point where hospitals have marked trucks containing medical supplies as food trucks so the feds wouldn't take them. But now comes S. 3627, the Medical Supply Transparency and Delivery Act, which would help bring an end to this Wild West state of affairs by requiring our government to coordinate requests for medical supplies from states and localities, establish fair pricing for these supplies, and communicate with states and localities a whole hell of a lot better than they've been doing. Don't suppose we shouldn't leave such matters to our federal government, particularly this one, but COVID-19 doesn't respect state boundaries, as all those too-early-reopening red states are finding out as we speak, amirite? So Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to help get medical supplies where they're needed by passing the Medical Supply Transparency and Delivery Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to ban stock trading by members of Congress, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. We've long heard that our leaders don't need to follow the rules because they can be trusted to do the right thing, but that's un-American, if I may be blunt -- our duty as Americans demands that we never "trust" our leaders, but always hold them to the high standards that come with their leadership positions! Of course, with our current President apparently running a months-long seminar in How Not to Lead, I guess it's easy to see how we got confused. But with the FBI now formally investigating Sen. Burr's massive stock dump after he received a briefing on how bad COVID-19 was about to be, and with too many other members of Congress (roll call! Kelly Loeffler! James Inhofe! Dianne Feinstein! Donna Shalala!) under public scrutiny for doing similar things, we should now have enough evidence that we can't trust our leaders to place our interests above their own.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Interior Secretary to stop cutting the royalties that oil and gas corporations must pay to drill on public lands, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. One fine day -- preferably after we support renewable energy much better than we currently do -- we won't allow any pollution on public lands! But until then, they shouldn't pay less to the taxpayer (i.e., you) for the privilege! That's right, when gas and oil corporations get to drill on the land that belongs to the American people, they have to pay the American people for the privilege -- which means if our government rolls back drilling royalties, they are taking food out of your mouth. No, I think that's a perfectly valid way of seeing it -- your money pays for the services you need and deserve, and when you have less money (as you would, if our Administration continues to get its way on this matter), you get fewer services or worse services. And you're an American! So you don't have to put up with that.

Action: concerning better pandemic relief legislation and better energy policy.

H.R. 6800, the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (or HEROES) Act, would provide another $3 trillion in pandemic relief, and it would do a lot more good than the CARES Act did, since it would provide $500 billion in state and local assistance and $200 billion to front-line essential workers, extend unemployment benefits and student loan debt relief, fund more COVID-19 testing and tracing, give additional help to farmers and low-income renters, bolster both our Post Office and our election security, and provide another round of direct payments to Americans ($1,200 each, for up to five household members). And yet it could be better! So Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to include the Paycheck Guarantee Act in the bill, so that good Americans making up to $100,000 annually can continue to get paid and keep their health insurance coverage even after they've been laid off. And since Senate Republicans have already said they won't vote on it, you can call your Senators and tell them they should pass it. They'll never see it coming.

Of course, Senate Republicans have fixated on blanket immunity against lawsuits for corporations as pandemic "relief," though that won't resonate with a lot of good Americans, who are more likely to be a plaintiff than a defendant. Really, only a few Americans get their shorts in a bunch over TEH FRIVOLOUX LAWSUITZ!!!! But all Republicans can think about, in the middle of a pandemic that's put over 30 million good Americans out of work, is protecting big corporations from their own wrongdoing, particularly if they reopen before state/local/federal guidelines say they can. And this ain't about corporations losing lawsuits and going under -- they've got enough well-paid lawyers and it's already hard to prove wrongdoing because the Founders designed our justice system to protect the innocent. No, this is all about the hassle of fighting lawsuits, since politicians seem to care more about a rich man's hassle than a poor man's misery. But People for the American Way help you tell your Congressfolk to reject "blanket immunity" for corporations. (Alternately, you could add this to the end of your phone call to your Senators.)

Finally, this pandemic continues to show us the necessity of having clean air and a livable planet -- or so I would hope! So the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to put funding for renewable energy ahead of funding for fossil fuels, for once. Your Tea Party uncle might tell you that things like the Green New Deal are a way of sending us back to the 1800s -- you know, those halcyon days when everyone powered their washing machines and flat-screen TVs with solar panels and wind turbines! But most folks, across the political spectrum, think renewable energy will improve on our current system and promote self-reliance. And your average renewable energy setup will cause a lot less pollution than burning coal, gas, and oil does, which means cleaner air, which means more breathable air, which means less asthma and lung disease, which means fewer good Americans placed at the mercy of a COVID-19 pandemic. It also means less spending on health care -- which means renewable energy isn't just the environmentally-conscious option but also the fiscally-responsible option. How odd that more "moderate" politicians don't talk this way.

Action: concerning unemployment, energy policy, public water, and factory farms.

One of the few good things to come out of the CARES Act was an expansion of unemployment benefits; now guess what our government wants to get rid of ASAP? The benefits expire at the end of July, but given the jones so many of our elected leaders have to "reopen" the economy, we could be back in the middle of an unflattened curve by then. And some of them say it's OK if some folks die if we "reopen" the economy faster! Apparently they do not know the definition of "mammon-worship" anymore. But over 30 million folks are out of work, the official U3 unemployment rate is over 14% (and the real U6 unemployment rate, which also counts the discouraged and underemployed, is almost 23%), and not that many Americans will be rushing into Best Buy even if they all open up tomorrow, so I think we should be prudent and prepare for the likelihood that workers will be unemployed past July. Also, too, when the answer to every question is GOVERNMENT SHOULDZ DO TEH NOTHINGZ!!!!, it's well past time to look at the man in the mirror. The Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the unemployment insurance boost past its original expiration date.

Meanwhile, too many politicians want future pandemic relief legislation to include corporate welfare handouts for big oil and gas corporations, and our Administration has rolled back oil and gas royalty rates on public lands even though that's our damn money! But along comes H.R. 6707/S. 3611, the Resources for Workforce Investments, Not Drilling (or ReWIND) Act, which would keep big fossil fuel corporations from taking funds meant for working families and small businesses, roll back our President's drilling royalty cuts, block new gas and oil leases, and stop banksters from taking over any oil or gas corporations in trouble. The bill would also prevent our Administration from overstocking oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, since seizing resources and directing them to where they're not needed seems to be a pattern with this President. And if right-wingers respond by whining about the bill's "Democrat priorities," they run the risk of suggesting that preventing corruption and mismanagement is only a "Democrat priority." So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to support saner energy policy by passing the ReWIND Act.

In other news, Nestlé plans to siphon off yet another source of public water at pennies a gallon, in order to make absurdly more expensive and not significantly more convenient bottled water -- this time at Ginnie Springs in northwestern Florida, and this though Ginnie Springs is dangerously low, and largely from overpumping. As it happens, the Suwannee River Water Management District has already heeded the thousands of public comments it received on this matter, and has thus denied Nestlé any new permits -- but Nestlé, of course, is taking the matter to court, because, as we know, corporations never ever file frivolous lawsuits! Only injured people ever do that, with the help of mustache-twirling trial lawyers! That's what right-wingers say, anyway. But big corporations don't need to take public water in order to make bottled water; rather, our state, local, and federal governments need to manage water effectively on our behalf and with the tax dollars we pay them. Hence Environmental Action helps you tell Nestlé to abandon its plans to drain Ginnie Springs merely for mammon.

Finally, H.R. 6718/S. 3221, the Farm System Reform Act, would not only ban new factory farms and the expansion of current ones, but would phase out current factory farms over the next 20 years. Factory farms aren't a more efficient way of delivering meat to consumers than small family farms: they're just a more efficient way of clogging up public waters with animal manure, and a more efficient way of redistributing income upward to executives. And they're also a more efficient way of making antibiotics useless, since some seven out of every 10 antibiotics in America still go to nominally healthy feed animals, so they produce more meat and so they better endure the squalid conditions of their imprisonment. To those who would still cite "high food prices" as a reason not to end this sordid state of affairs, we need but ask: how did Americans ever get enough to eat before factory farms came along? We did it through saner farming policy, of course, and not "big ag corporations know best" policy. So Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support better agricultural policy by passing the Farm System Reform Act.