Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning “free” trade, cruelty to animals, and cruelty in credit reports.

Long story short: tell our government to make fair trade deals, protect elephants from trophy hunting, and keep medical debt out of credit reports. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell the Biden Administration you don’t want their proposed Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (or APEP) to be like all those “free” trade deals of years gone by. Yes, the Biden Administration is actually taking comments on it! And if they didn’t want to hear from us, they shouldn’t have asked us to speak. Among the things you’ll ask an APEP to do: get rid of the investor-state dispute settlement (or ISDS) systems that put money before law and order, and raise labor and climate standards in Latin American nations. The main reason our big corporations relocate there, of course, is so they can pay workers in dung pellets and make them work like slaves! So we’ve got to fight that, same as we fight cruelty everywhere.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to ban all imports of trophy Amboseli-West Kilimanjaro elephants. Because they deserve better than to be hunted to death for sport! And if we ban their import, we can dry up the market for it in Africa! And who hunts an African elephant? Not someone who needs food or shelter, that’s for sure! No, it’s always some no-work-doing bazillionaire who’s never had to struggle to earn a damn thing in his life. Putting down an elephant in its reproductive peak just because it has hundred-pound tusks is damn sure not a way to earn the respect of anyone who matters. Yet, because money, it’ll still happen – unless we tell our government to make sure it doesn’t happen.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to follow through with their plan to ban credit reporting corporations from using medical debt in their scores. There’s more to this, of course, than just preventing your credit score from taking a hit just because you got hit by a car or got cancer: our CFPB’s proposed rule would also ban debt collectors from using medical devices as collateral – I mean, folks want to keep using their wheelchairs and prosthetic arms, right? And not for nothing, but a lot of medical debt reporting is just plain wrong, and why should someone else’s mistake literally cost you an arm and a leg? “Money” is not an adequate reason, for that or anything else.

Action: concerning immigration, junk fees, grizzly bears, antibiotic abuse, wage slavery, and the notorious OAN.

Long story short: tell President Biden to end the notorious Title 42 program, tell our CFPB to end bankster "junk fees," tell our Interior Department to protect grizzly bears, tell our FDA to root out antibiotic abuse from factory farms, tell Wendy's to do better by the farmworkers in its supply chain, and tell AT&T to sever all ties with the notorious OAN. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Moms Rising helps you tell President Biden to end the Title 42 program that Donald Trump put in place so he could turn more refugees away. I know they said their Title 42 program was a health care thing, designed to keep COVID out of the United States, but what a crock of shit that was! How much COVID came from Mexico, or Honduras, or anywhere else a "caravan" supposedly came from? Now how much COVID came from a quarter of Americans refusing to get vaccinated in an elephantine hissy fit over Their Guy losing the 2020 election? Yeah, sure was a good thing we kept Mexicans out for "health care" reasons. Title 42 only allows our government to send refugees back without even the hearings our laws guarantee them. As civilized people, we demand better from their leaders as well as ourselves. So let's get to the demanding.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to stop the "junk fees" bank love to impose on working families. You can name overdraft fees as a "junk fee" -- do you really put a bank out that much when you make a math error? -- but our CFPB also wants to hear from you about "fees for things people believed were covered by the baseline price of a product or service," "unexpected fees for a product or service," "fees that seemed too high for the purported service," and "fees where it was unclear why they were charged." Banksters do come up with creative ways to steal your money! And of course they do it the most to working families and seniors. Our CFPB will fight for us -- but only if we demand it.

Change.org helps you tell our Department of the Interior to reject any plans it might have to remove Endangered Species Act protections for grizzly bears. We've been working to help improve grizzly bear numbers for almost 50 years -- yes, good works do occasionally take a very long time. But grizzly bears still only number around 1,200 in the United States (a far cry from 200 years ago, when their numbers were more like 50,000, not that we'd be trying to get back there, necessarily), and when the Governors of Montana and Wyoming talk about revoking protections for grizzlies, they don't foreground "tyrannical federal mandates" or "protecting other animals" or "we got wells to dig!" -- they foreground trophy hunting. It's like they're trying to be soulless! And soulless people shouldn't get all the say about everything.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to eliminate antibiotic abuse on factory farms. We've been telling them for a long time, and it's not like they've done nothing, but the need remains. Two out of every three antibiotics in America go not to sick people or sick animals, but to nominally healthy feed animals, partly to make them "meatier" and partly to help them better endure the squalid conditions at factory farms. And what does antibiotic overuse help create? Superbugs, which took over a million lives worldwide in 2019, which was less than 2% of the 58 million folks total who died that year, but we could see 10 million annually by 2050, per a U.K. government study from 2014. And if a superbug gets you, the number that'll really matter will be 100% of you.

Daily Kos helps you tell fast-food corporation Wendy's to join the Fair Food program, which roots out the wage slavery and unsafe work conditions on farms supplying food to fast-food corporations. Every other big fast-food corporation has joined the Fair Food program, so Wendy's needs to step up its game, lest farmworkers march on Wendy's board chair Nelson Peltz's huge Palm Beach, CA mansion in the next few weeks and brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR against him. Imagine him having a gathering there; and then imagine him and his fellow travelers all laughing at the "little people" who think they can make a difference against his awesome power. Then imagine us winning, because his power is less like a machine gun and more like an anvil around his ankle.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell AT&T to cut off all ties with the notorious One America News Network (or OAN, or OANN). DirecTV dropped OAN from its lineup staring next month, and AT&T owns most of DirecTV, but OAN wouldn't exist without AT&T money to begin with, so starving the OAN beast of a platform isn't quite enough if you're still feeding it. OAN has, of course, filed a hilarious lawsuit against AT&T just for doing what it did, even suggesting that if they don't get an audience fed hand-to-mouth they have no free speech, though dozens of 2000s bloggers got big audiences without big corporate sugar daddy money. To think OAN says that with a straight face and still calls itself "conservative." C'mon, OAN, bootstrap up! Prove you don't need the corporate welfare!

Action: concerning prison slavery, fraudulent fees, and methane pollution.

Color of Change helps you tell the state of California to stop exploiting prison workers (who make as little as $1/day!) to fight wildfires. I have nothing to say to folks who think of prison workers as a giant pool of people they can use and abuse as they like, but to folks who wonder how California will ever make ends meet if they spend all more money paying prisoners to do the back-breaking work of fighting wildfires, I have this to say: your wonderment is a hostage situation -- don't pay prisoners what their work is actually worth, or we'll all burn up!. Too often we imagine that the world around us is the only world that can be, but we can bring back a world where states tax rich folks hard and stop funneling taxpayer money to crony corporations. At that point we'll actually find it a lot easier to do the right thing, but let's tell California to do the right thing anyway. Doing the right thing builds character, after all.

Meanwhile, Comcast has lately agreed to refund well over half a million dollars to Massachusetts customers who signed long-term cable contracts only to find themselves slammed with fancy-sounding fees that inflated their bills up to 40% above advertised prices. And when they realized they'd been had and tried to cancel their cable, Comcast slammed them again with a $200 "early termination" fee! Nice work if you can get it! And since it's absurd to think Comcast would only try this in Massachusetts, Consumer Reports helps you ask your state Attorney General to investigate whether cable corporations' add-on fees in your state amount to a fraudulent price hike. We imagine America as some kind of "free" market Wild West, but we must insist on laws (and law enforcement) that won't let corporations pull this kind of bait-and-switch on us. Indeed, things like this used to be a law-and-order issues for conservatives. I wonder what changed.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reject its proposed plan to weaken its own methane emissions standards, then both the Sierra Club and the Union of Concerned Scientists still help you do that. You probably know the drill by now: oil and gas drilling corporations leak methane the way some folks leak gossip, methane emissions pack a far larger climate change punch than even coal emissions do, and when corporations ventilate methane into our air willy-nilly from drilling projects on public lands, they're also cheating American taxpayers out of royalties (since methane is a usable energy source, and, you know, public lands belong to the public). Always it seems like our Administration's EPA cares more about protecting polluters than protecting good Americans from polluters. But luckily, we are always here to remind them whom they are really pledged to protect.

Around the table: featuring more of our President's lies, and more of the right's misdirections.

In ten brutal paragraphs, Jeffrey St. Clair lays out the horrible devastation in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria, and (of course) slams our President's absurd claims about how great his Administration handled it. Close to 5,000 dead, not "16," and our President never says who issues those rave reviews of his "performance" Jesus Mary and Joseph why is everything a damn performance anymore? Anyway, it really is well past time for Puerto Rican statehood -- I mean, given the number of times we've all had to tell people Puerto Rico is part of America, you know, maybe we should drive the point home.

Reed Richardson at FAIR reminds us that the whole "anonymous" kerfluffle just so happened to occur right around the time our Administration committed to further military involvement in Syria, which supports the hypothesis that our Administration, which loves drama, perpetrated the "anonymous" op-ed in the New York Times as a false flag operation. How do the libertarian-inflected folk who voted for our President because he promised a new-different-better foreign policy feel now, I wonder? Well, I don't wonder that much, because that was always a slim reed to hold onto.

Nicholas Powers at TruthOut reminds us that "Nike Uses Liberal Multiculturalism to Hide Abuse" -- specifically, abuse of the workers, in low pay and unsafe working conditions, who make Nike shoes. I've been obsessing lately over Hillary Clinton's suggestion during her campaign that we shouldn't break up the big banks because that won't solve racism or sexism or homophobia (gosh, I wonder why she lost!), and Mr. Powers's observations map pretty well onto that. (I do think he's overstating the effect 3D printing has on "making fully automated factories possible." 3D printers make knickknacks now, and get zero scrutiny from product safety regulators.)

Here's little-reported dung nugget from our President's August 30 Indiana rally: he slammed wind power, hitting on every last "problem" wind power supposedly has. In order: no, turbines don't kill that many birds; no, it's not the end of the world when the wind doesn't below because every form of energy has the occasional supply issue, and no "wind turbine syndrome" is not a thing, which anyone who's spent time in an actually noisy place already knows. He's taken all the crap-with-crap-sauce arguments fossil fuel PR hacks put out over the years and dumped them all in one paragraph! Our President really is everything wrong with our civilization in one person.

Finally, from the "I'm Pointing This Out So You'll Ignore It in the Future" file: long-time Republican donor Sean Klarman urges everyone to vote Democrat in the upcoming midterms, because "democracy is at stake," but you no doubt remember how many right-wingers urged you to vote for Mrs. Clinton in 2016 because democracy was at stake, so I hope you can forgive me for thinking this is a) just another attempt at corralling you into their game, instead of making them play our game, or b) ratfuckery from a big right-wing donor.

Action: genocide, wage slavery, and child care.

CREDO helps you tell the Nobel Prize Committee to pressure Burmese First Counsellor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to stop the genocide of the Rohingya. Ain't no bad PR like the bad PR of having "Nobel Peace Prize laureate" and "genocide" in the same sentence about you, and though we know the Burmese military still holds a lot of power there, being the fracking Nobel Peace Prize winner does give you more leverage than she's thus far used -- she's called the genocide a "quarrel." A quarrel with a glandular problem, maybe! And just because the Muslim Rohingya people are a minority in Buddhist-majority Burma doesn't mean they deserve to have their villages burned, their houses bombed, their boys beheaded, their girls raped, their families burned alive. No, they don't even deserve these things because this round of military action began after an attack by Rohingya militants. I know "massive retaliation" is newly-popular thanks in large part to our windbag-in-chief, but seriously, do we judge all white people by James Fields? No, we do not.

Meanwhile, the Spanish clothing corporation Zara -- one of the corporations owned by Inditex, which is the world's biggest clothing retailer even if its wares are more popular overseas than here -- has come under well-deserved fire lately for failing to pay some of its Istanbul factory workers. They've shorted 150 of these workers over 650,000 euros, or over $750,000. Thus, in a masterful stroke of activism, some Istanbul shoppers have been getting a message sewn into their clothing -- "I made this item you are going to buy, but I didn't get paid for it." You could add some force message multiplication, so to speak, by allowing Sum of Us to help you tell Inditex to pay its workers already. They apparently committed to starting a "hardship fund," which would more accurately be called a "hardship-we-caused fund," and then didn't actually pay any workers with it, so clearly they need some more bad PR so they stop pretending paying your workers is harder than it really is, particularly when they made $5 billion in profits last year.

Finally, H.R. 3773/S. 1806, the Child Care for Working Families Act, would expand federal coverage of child care so that lower- and middle-class working families would pay no more than 7% of their combined income on child care, and it would also deliver better training and more pay to child care workers, who likely have children of their own. The bill would also expand Head Start programs so they can provide full-day, year-round programming, and would help parents get child care during non-traditional hours, since a lot of parents work non-traditional hours. With infant care costs (for example) now exceeding average college tuition costs in 30 states, child care is getting to be like health care and college education in that it costs a crapload of money because what are you going to do, not pay for it? And being a hostage to high-cost necessities ain't what being an American is all about! Hence the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by supporting the Child Care for Working Families Act.

Around the table: in which we contemplate a tale of burner phones and dead cats.

Trump Administration abandons effort to defend FCC rules capping prison phone rates from multiple lawsuits. FCC Chair Ajit Pai not only uses anecdotal evidence (that someone could stuff a burner phone into a dead cat and throw it over a prison wall!) to defend his inaction, but uses anecdotal evidence that actually obliterates his argument (lower phone rates would, I would think, obviate the need to use dead cats to smuggle burner phones). Anyway, letting corporations charge usurious phone rates because prisoners and their families literally can't do better isn't the definition of "free market conservatism," no matter how many of today's "conservatives" confuse their ancient philosophy with "letting corporations do whatever they want."

Five transgendered American soldiers sue our government over President Trump's declaration on Twitter that "the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military." It's possible the lawsuit gets thrown because Mr. Trump hasn't apparently lifted a finger to actually enforce this declaration, but his whining about the "cost" of health care for transgendered soldiers when it costs more to send Mr. Trump on the taxpayer dime to Mar-a-Lago every weekend would support the plaintiffs' "arbitrary and capricious" claim.

California farmers are losing money, and letting some of their crops rot, apparently due to the lack of migrant workers available to pick the crops. Let's not tacitly accept the notion that only-a-migrant-worker-would-pick-strawberries, though -- instead, let's ask whether maybe folks who would pick fruit (and Americans aren't as loathe to do dirty work as Our Glorious Elites are!) might have a little more leverage now when it comes to getting better pay and working conditions. No use complaining that higher wages cause higher prices when, ah, not having enough workers to pick the fruit already causes higher prices.

Let's not obsess too much over a Democrat's 54-44 win in an Iowa House special election on Tuesday -- President Trump took this district by over 20 points, but it was still a Democrat hold (the previous state Rep died in office earlier this year) and turnout just eclipsed 40%. It is good that the ZOMG TEH TRANZ PEEPULZ WILL USEZ TEH BATHROOMZ!!!! hysteria didn't work here (and could have caused a backlash, for all we know!), just as it didn't get North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory re-elected. The better lesson to learn? Social wedge issues all the way up to abortion won't work against Democrats who can convince people they won't sell them out to Our Glorious Elites -- but Democrats won't try this in large numbers, either out of weakness or out of a desire to keep that Glorious Elite campaign cash coming.

Finally, I've been churning over President Trump's continued refusal to denounce or even acknowledge last week's bombing at a Minnesota mosque, and I've concluded (not that this was a difficult analysis to undertake) that his silence is a dog whistle to his votaries. I've also concluded that when he does denounce the attack, as I'm sure he'll do soon, that act will be another dog whistle to his votaries, as in I tried to ignore a matter that certainly doesn't concern you, but look what PC culture made me do! Of course, I'm sure Mr. Bannon is counseling continued silence, but I bet Mr. Trump knows what's best for those poor beleaguered racists.

Action: health care, paid family leave, and wage slavery.

So the Senate dropped its health care bill yesterday, and early reports indicate it's just as bad as we thought it would be: it makes some subsidies to poorer working families a little better than the House bill would, but it would cut Medicaid even more than the House bill would, and it would still substantially weaken the Obamacare ban on denying coverage for pre-existing conditions and still let insurers charge seniors a lot more than they can now -- and, of course, it would still repeal most of the taxes-on-the-rich that fund Obamacare programs. Remember that they're trying to cut taxes for the rich now so they can cut taxes for the rich even more later on and still comply with Senate rules. So today, also, would be a good day to 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 Senators to tell them to reject the Senate's health care "reform" bill. You might tell them to support H.R. 676 -- which would establish a Medicare-for-All, single-payer health care system in America -- while you have them on the phone.

Meanwhile, some folks try to tell you the one saving grace of the Trump budget (and after all, why would you ever need more than one?) is its boutique paid family leave plan, but don't believe that hype, either -- the Trump plan would only let new parents take the leave, and since it doesn't actually commit new funds to the plan, it would essentially force states to pay for it, likely by cutting unemployment benefits for other folks. Conservatives would call that an unfunded mandate; if you don't hear any of today's "conservatives" calling it that, well, you can assume they're not actually conservative. Around one in seven American workers gets paid family leave, and we are, as you know, the only industrialized nation on Earth that doesn't mandate it by law to new parents; that's not a good reason to start chanting WE'RE NUMBER ONE! So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Trump budget and its "smokescreen" of a family leave plan -- and pass a real budget, that reflects America's real priorities, and a real paid family leave plan that doesn't leave working families behind.

Finally, the Follow the Thread Campaign has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell five big retail corporations to disclose information about where they source their clothing. Most of the clothing you buy at big-box retailers, as you know, gets manufactured overseas, quite often in factories that treat their workers badly -- certainly you recall the Rana Plaza disaster in 2013, in which the collapse of a garment factory killed over a thousand Bangladeshi workers and injured 2,000 more, and you may also recall two factory fires in Pakistan and Bangladesh in 2012 that killed 350 garment workers. All of these disasters came about because of lax safety standards, and all of them prompted many of the corporations that source from these factories to pledge to improve those standards. Still, some fools will tell you that improved safety for foreign workers means higher prices for you. Can they find this alleged truism in Newton's laws? Of course not -- it's just another way to avoid talking about runaway executive pay, the real reason your prices would go up.

Around the table: modern-day wage slavery in California, and other sad tales.

Anthony DiMaggio at Counterpunch argues that we've been overestimating economic populism as a factor in President Trump's support -- and thus underestimating factors such as racism, xenophobia, and "the elitist class war against the middle class and poor." Studies find Trump voters aren't poorer, more unemployed, or more from Rust Belt regions, while other studies show sexism and racism to be better predictors of Trump support, and still other studies find a disproportionate percentage of Trump supporters being well off. And when they say 70 percent of Trump voters don't have a college education, you can always remind them that the rate nationally is 71 percent.

U.S. Supreme Court will hear appeal of a District Court decision striking down Wisconsin's most recent redistricting map as unconstitutionally partisan. Justice Kennedy has long said he'd like to evaluate a standard that deals with partisan redistricting, but that doesn't mean he'll approve of the standard advanced by the original plaintiffs, nor does his joining the majority issuing a stay of the District Court's decision suggest which way he'll rule. One thing, though: if too many Wisconsin Republican legislators said out loud that they were trying to use the redistricting process to ensure permanent or durable Republican majorities, rather than respond to citizens' needs, that could piss off John Roberts.

Brett Murphy at USA Today looks at how California port trucking corporations force drivers into becoming "modern-day indentured servant(s)." Basically, these corporations turn their mostly immigrant truckers into independent contractors who "work toward" "owning" their truck, and then use their truckers' indebtedness to force them to work 16- and 20-hour days for little pay. And if they miss work for any reason, they seize their truck, and all the money they've paid toward it! Corporate hacks have their litany of excuses -- abuses are rare, drivers are lazy, unions make trouble, it's so hard to make money anymore. I suppose once major retail corporations start bowing to public pressure to stop taking advantage of this situation, we'll also hear you don't want your prices to go up, do you?

This New York Times article describing how Mr. Trump's business ties with Saudi Arabia and the UAE (and his lack of business ties with Qatar) are influencing his Middle East policy quotes Mr. Trump as saying Saudi citizens "buy apartments from me," spending "$40 million, $50 million" and then asking rhetorically "Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much." He and his votaries imagine he's just shooting-from-the-hip, but he's actually confessing that his own business ties (and not so much the people's will!) will set American policy, and confessing your wrongdoing as if it's nothing doesn't make it nothing. It sure doesn't make it "not wrongdoing."

Finally, Jon Schwarz at The Intercept alerts us to an actual historical mini-series on the History Channel called "America's War on Drugs" -- and notes that it's "the first time U.S. television has ever told the core truth about one of the most important issues of the past 50 years," i.e., that "the war on drugs has always been a pointless sham." It's not just a sham because President Nixon essentially created the "war on drugs" as a way of discrediting black and hippie protestors, but because of our own government's well-documented collusion with various drug cartels. Still, as Mr. Schwarz says, it's a big deal that it's on TV -- and not sequestered on a pay channel, even!

Around the table: Turkey's President is *even worse* than ours, and other lessons.

Turkey blocks access to Wikipedia, citing it as a "security threat." What a big baby this President Erdogan is. Waaaaaah! Wikipedia article on me has picture of cockroach instead of a picture of me! Waaaaaaaah! I sure hope Mr. Trump doesn't get any ideas -- though if he does, I expect a holy righteous fury to rise up spontaneously from the American people, at which point we'll know if this whole democratic experiment of ours works.

Reed Richardson at FAIR describes "100 Days of Media Hoping for a New, Improved Trump." Remember when the "liberal" media said he "became" President the night he addressed Congress without shouting at them, or the day he fired nearly five dozen missiles at a Syrian airbase the Syrians had already mostly cleared out? Good times! Of course, the media's job, like the citizen's job, isn't to "hope" for a better President, but to make Donald Trump be a better President.

Ho hum, Chinese workers making Ivanka Trump's very expensive clothes get paid around $1 an hour. No use complaining that Chinese workers don't make very much money generally, because Ms. Trump is sure making a big profit using cheaper workers, instead of American workers she'd have to pay at least seven times as much. In short, we're much better off making hay of this than we are of Melania Trump's immigration status, because this really tells us who the Trumps are.

Even the New York Times tells us that "Trump Tax Plan Would Shift Trillions From U.S. Coffers to the Richest." Doesn't matter that he didn't release details, because we all know who always benefits from slashing corporate taxes and estate taxes and Obamacare taxes and capital gains taxes and alternative minimum taxes, and we all remember that Tha Bush Mobb's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts didn't exactly goose up job creation or economic growth.

Finally, speaking of economic growth, guess what else Mr. Trump can take credit for? A 2017 first-quarter GDP growth rate of a mere 0.7%. Not that Mr. Obama's GDP growth rates were the cat's pajamas, but Mr. Obama didn't walk around like he had the biggest balls on Earth, either. I presume Mr. Trump will do what any ball-swinger does, and blame his predecessor (as his Commerce Secretary has already done), even though Mr. Obama was only in office for the first 20 days of the quarter.

Action: worker safety in Bangladesh, and protection from payday lenders in America.

The Tampaco Foils factory burned down in Bangladesh last month, killing upwards of 34 workers; so which multinational corporations housed wage slaves here? The answer: Nestlé and British American Tobacco. You recall the Rana Plaza fire in Bangladesh in 2013, which killed over one thousand workers -- and you recall the subsequent world outcry that ultimately prompted over 80 corporations to sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, a legally-binding agreement mandating better factory safety standards. Well, Nestlé and British American Tobacco were not two of those 80-plus signatories, so now they get to feel the Big Stick of Bad PR, as Sum of Us helps you tell Nestlé and British American Tobacco to compensate the Tampaco Foils victims and their families, and make their factories safe, so this doesn't happen again. Personal to those who still value "low prices" over human lives: everyone everywhere deserves to work, to make something of themselves, and contribute to their communities. No corporate bottom line is more important than that.

Meanwhile, the deadline for public comments to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's new payday lending rules is tomorrow, so Stop Payday Predators still helps you tell the CFPB to enact the most vigorous payday lending rules possible. The CFPB's proposals sure are better than nothing, which is what we had before, and you may recall Saul Alinsky's maxim that if you start out with nothing and end up with something, you win. But -- and this is the part that supposed Alinskyite Barack Obama has never seemed to get -- you get more if you demand more, and you should never worry about "alienating" the other side when the other side only seems bent on fighting any good work anyone else tries to do. Banksters have done nothing but complain about the CFPB's new rules, and their hacks in Congress have spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to kill them. But think about this: they're defending payday lenders and car title lenders who have concocted a product that does little other than push people further and further into debt. They have no leg to stand on -- so we have every right, and every reason, to press our advantage.

Around the table: *Star Trek* as a beacon of optimism -- and all the contemporary corruption and venality that stands in its way.

Donald Trump's sizable, illegal 2013 donation to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi -- right before Ms. Bondi declined to join other state Attorneys General in investigating Trump University -- is finally getting significant coverage in the "liberal" media, and now we learn that Mr. Trump also hosted a fundraiser for Ms. Bondi during her 2014 re-election effort. No use telling me that she might not have understood all the details of the Trump University case before taking the cash, because if there was even a chance she would have to investigate him, she should have refused the donation. And, remember, Donald Trump is the fellow who said "when you give" to politicians, "they do whatever the hell you want them to do." (As an aside, why does Mr. Trump's campaign manager think repeating the word "concierge" in the context of State Department dealings with the Clinton Foundation will resonate at all, with anybody?)

I was honestly surprised to read this: LSU-educated judges in Louisiana tend to hand out harsher sentences to juveniles after LSU loses a football game. That may well be because I'm not a Southerner -- the study's authors found not one surprised individual in Baton Rouge after sharing their findings. Still, they're judges! In case you were wondering, the judges studied tended to be white, male, and Democrat, while the offenders tended to be black; that doesn't prove a racial animus on the judges' part, but what does that matter if it portends a racist result?

AP reporters Martha Mendoza and Margie Mason describe the horrors endured by foreign boat workers supporting Hawaii's fishing industry. Some 700 foreign workers, mostly from Southeast Asia, make less than a dollar an hour and are confined to their boats for years at a time; in other words, they're wage slaves -- and, naturally, they're good fishermen whose catch fetches high prices. I was sad to learn that the late Daniel Inouye, a liberal lion of the U.S. Senate for almost half a century, originally pushed for the legal loopholes that allow this wage slavery, and that current liberal lion Sen. Mazie Hirono seems more preoccupied with security than wage slavery. In any case, Costco and Whole Foods customers, in particular, may want to ask where their fish comes from.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in a joint action with the city of Los Angeles, orders Wells Fargo to pay $185 million in penalties and refunds, as restitution for a number of consumer abuses including opening accounts for consumers without their permission. Oh, but Wells Fargo employees didn't just open these unwanted accounts to meet sales quotas -- they also transferred funds from those customers' other accounts without telling them, which not only meant customers didn't know they were short on cash, but also meant customers incurred fees and penalties without knowing it. For something they didn't want and didn't ask for, I feel compelled to repeat with the Italics Hammer. But please, right-wingers, tell us again how the CFPB represents nothing more than a "bureaucratic" "nanny" oppressing those poor banksters.

Finally, on the occasion of the 50th (!) anniversary of the initial broadcast of Star Trek, Charlie Jane Anders at Wired invites us to imagine a world where Star Trek never existed -- where, for example, George Lucas didn't have Star Trek to interact with as he was putting Star Wars together, or '80s and '90s TV sci-fi didn't enjoy the resurgence it did because of Next Generation. Star Trek's main achievement? That it was the first sci-fi TV show to depict "space exploration as a serious endeavor, one undertaken by a crew of professionals," and combined "1930s pulp space opera with the rising tide of social criticism in 1960s sci-fi novels." The original Star Trek (and its three TV successors) also came from a confident America, one sure it could provide a better world for its descendants than it inherited; its world had moved past greed, racism, even money. But in today's America, we run to stand still, and not coincidentally J.J. Abrams's Star Trek films show a Federation on its heels.

Around the table: from the "alt-right" to the latest Donald Trump "best-seller."

FAIR's Jim Naureckas takes us on a "guided tour" of the so-called "alt-right." Long story short: they're not just racist, but they're also not conservative -- I mean, do "rebellion" and "mischief" and "blasphemy" strike you as conservative values? Also, as quicker minds than mine have pointed out, the white supremacists' stated desire to be called "alt-right" smacks of political correctness. I mean, normally I call people whatever they want to be called, but not so much when they're being hypocrites.

Apple CEO Tim Cook says he won't bring back any of the $200 billion Apple holds offshore until the corporate tax system becomes more "fair." Of course, Apple doesn't move money offshore because it "has to" -- it moves money offshore because it can. And you can't even buy Mr. Cook's claim that "we sell stuff all over the world," when even a Senate committee tells us that Apple shifts its U.S.-earned profits offshore, and to Ireland, where its "subsidiary" won't pay any taxes at all. How do you know when CEOs are lying? When their mouths are open.

Speaking of Apple, China Labor Watch finds employee exploitation still runs rampant at Apple's Foxconn and Pegatron factories, where iPhones get made. It's actually worse at Pegatron, and you can't help but wonder if that's because the Foxconn facilities got all the attention earlier this decade. But Apple said they'd fix all this! That's why you can't trust corporations to just "do the right thing" -- you have to make them do the right thing.

National Labor Relations Board rules that temp employees can organize and bargain collectively for better wages and working conditions. Previously, corporations got over by claiming that their temp employees were only employed by their temp agency, but the NLRB ruled that temp workers are jointly employed by both their temp agency and the corporation for which they're actually doing the work, and thus can bargain with both employers jointly. If you're still stuck on the idea that temp workers work for temp agencies, remember that temp agencies and the corporations they staff work jointly on how those workers get paid, what work they'll do, and what the working conditions will be.

Finally, Donald Trump gets caught using campaign donations to buy up thousands of copies of his own book, so he can say it's a best-seller and spend none of his own money for it. It's a win-win! Except if you gave money to the Trump campaign, of course. It's not illegal, of course, to buy up copies of your own book to drive up book sales -- though, seriously, how many people have that kind of money? -- but it is illegal to do it with campaign funds. But don't worry -- Donald Trump will "fix" that, and all those other pesky laws civilizations depend on to restrain the unscrupulous, once he's President.

Around the table: lessons about law enforcement, looking to saviors, and the bottomless folly of the "liberal" media.

Heard of those FBI "Shared Responsibility Committees" purportedly designed to get social service help to would-be terrorists before they become terrorists? A letter obtained by The Intercept suggests that these committees are little more than a way for the FBI to get more informants. Folks may never confide in their clergy, their teachers, or their social workers again. And, as a Muslim advocate says with admirable understatment, "it’s not clear why an agency tasked with arresting people would also be handling community interventions." Then again, since these committee members get zero legal protections, I'm not sure how many will ever join such a committee.

John Laurits, writing at Nation of Change, suggests that Bernie Sanders has a much wider path to the Democratic Presidential nomination than most folks think. But never mind the noise Sanders supporters might make at the convention if the delegate total is close enough, which it may well be. The more interesting question is: what concessions would Mr. Sanders have to make to superdelegates to secure the nomination? And, given that he won't be working with a filibuster-proof Senate majority and very likely won't have a Democratic House majority, either, how many of these concessions would he make freely?

USA Today interviews Nike CEO Phil Knight, without highlighting the overseas worker abuses that made him and his corporation famous back in the 90s -- worker abuses he may be prepared to repeat, given Nike's recent announcement that it wouldn't allow the Worker Rights Consortium to monitor its factories anymore. Instead, they let him spew forth about how "free" trade "always" works (for whom?) and how America is losing its "entrepreneurial edge." Those gosh-darn Americans, so unwilling to pay wage slaves in dung pellets to make non-essential and overly-expensive consumer products!

Hedrick Smith, writing at the Our Future blog, warns us that most of the big SuperPAC money will be spent "down-ballot" on House and Senate races rather than the Presidential race. I've been thinking for a while now that most folks simply place too much energy in the Presidential race, when Our Glorious Elites know that where the right has made gains the past few years, they've made those gains at the state level. Aside from setting a good example, I am somewhat at a loss as how to convince folks to realize that the other 1,460 days of a Presidential term matter more than Election Day.

Finally, TruthOut takes us in the wayback machine to 1934, when an avowed Socialist ran for Governor of California as a Democrat -- and Our Glorious Elites cut him down. Possibly when folks warn of the onslaught of negative advertising that will befall Bernie Sanders if he becomes the nominee, they're thinking of what happened to Upton Sinclair: quotes from his novels taken out of context and used to prove his "communism" and "atheism," newsreels interviewing "real people" shown at move houses all around the state, and a steady drumbeat of fearmongering about unemployed folks moving from all over to California. Worse, the Democratic establishment, state and national, obstructed Mr. Sinclair. Worse, he compromised with them. So what's the lesson? Believe in yourself, not some savior -- or realize that you are a savior.

Action: cleaner water for Flint, and a better life for chocolate workers.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell Congress to help Flint, MI through its water crisis. Flint's unelected "Emergency Manager," you recall, decided to save a few bucks by forcing Flint to stop drawing its drinking water from the relatively well-managed Detroit water supply and draw it from the thoroughly-polluted Flint River instead, without realizing, apparently, that the water-treatment chemicals used to clean up the Flint River water would corrode Flint's ancient lead pipes. The Obama Administration has declared a federal state of emergency in Flint, but Congress has dragged its feet funding any halfway-decent solution to an urgent problem. Over 8,500 children under age six in Flint have now been exposed to toxic levels of lead, and will almost certainly experience the developmental problems scientists commonly associate with lead poisoning, the kinds of problems that did, after all, lead us to ban lead in gasoline and paint all those years ago. Now it's in people's water, and those people can't wait.

Meanwhile, the International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell chocolate-manufacturing corporation Godiva to get rid of the child labor and low wages from its supply chain. Chocolatiers get about 60% of their cocoa from two places -- Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire -- and farmers there have to feed their families on $2/day. While Godiva has talked a better sustainability game lately, it remains too much like most big corporations these days: valuing scale over quality, caring about delivering money to executives and shareholders rather than improving products and processes, let alone improving lives. And fair trade chocolatiers are proving you can do these things, by committing long-term to cocoa farmers, paying them fairly for what they grow, and getting children out of a life of burning fields and spraying dangerous chemicals and into school, where they can get a shot a better future. Everyone deserves a shot at a better future, after all -- even if that throws a wrench into the income-redistribution-upward schemes of the super-rich.

Action: wage slavery, and voting rights.

With Christmas day nearly upon us, CREDO helps you tell four American multinational corporations to use their vast power to improve wages and working conditions for the Chinese wage slaves who make the toys they sell. These are the toys that will appear under millions of Christmas trees this year, and who really wants their happiness to derive from the sorrow of millions of fellow human beings? No one, that's who -- not even the CEOs of big toy-selling corporations, who believe they must do what they do in order to maintain advantages over their competitors. Their behavior remains absurd in a world where we're all conscious of our eventual death, but in the meantime the workers who make these toys can't make ends meet even after they put in their 12-hour work shifts six days every week, just like American workers in the days before the New Deal, and the point of running a successful business isn't about finding new people to exploit. And no treating Chinese workers better wouldn't automatically mean higher prices -- it could just as easily mean the end of endless stock buybacks by corporate executives. If they get up some moral courage, that is.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Justice to investigate Alabama's slew of DMV closures, which could affect the ability of half a million good Alabamans to meet the state's very strict Voter ID law, then People for the American Way still helps you do that. The state's Governor and legislature claim that the DMV closures -(which will leave over 30 counties without a single Division of Motor Vehicles, almost half of these in the state's "Black Belt") are a result of "budgetary troubles," but that's utter crap -- states with "budgetary troubles" typically pretend there's just no way to raise taxes on the wealthy and the corporate, when the wealthy and the corporate typically have very light tax burdens in these states. And you have to wonder why "budgetary troubles" never seem to result in cuts in corporate welfare handouts, but always seem to result in good citizens having to drive hours out of their way -- generally on weekdays, so they have to sacrifice a day's pay, or their jobs -- just to comply with a Voter ID law purporting to address non-existent "voter fraud."

Around the table: "free" trade, propaganda videos, privatized care, lost jobs, and foolish gun owners.

If your heart has swelled that Republicans are now saying that the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" probably won't pass Congress in 2016, Dave Johnson at the Campaign for America's Future warns you that Republicans are really mad that the TPP doesn't cause even more chaos and destruction. The main sticking point for Republicans these days? That the TPP doesn't allow tobacco corporations to use "investor-state tribunals" to nullify anti-smoking laws. When some Republican goes on about how much he hates the TPP but won't tell you exactly why he hates it, remember that the reason he hates it is most likely because it's not evil enough.

FAIR asserts that "Credulous Reporting of Deceptive Propaganda Made Planned Parenthood Attack Inevitable." I won't go that far -- assholes like Robert Dear are always one pathetic excuse away from going off -- but this is the place to draw a line from the ACORN video to the Shirley Sherrod video to the NPR fundraiser video to the Planned Parenthood videos, and it's also the place to wonder how so many "elite" "journalists," all at least as trained in semiotics as I am, somehow didn't understand that editing a video creates an entirely new video.

Heather Vogell at ProPublica describes how private corporations caring for the disabled bend politicians to their will, particularly when someone's died under their care. She tells a sad tale -- children dying of neglect and abuse, facilities using restraint techniques outlawed in other countries over a century ago, campaign money coincidentally popping up when states attempt reforms. Remember when someone tells you that the rich need more money to create jobs that the rich are just as likely, if not more likely, to use their unearned largesse as hush money when they foul up.

You knew WalMart's forays into China displaced good American jobs, but here comes the Economic Policy Institute to try and determine how many: over 400,000 jobs between 2001 and 2013, and that's a "conservative" estimate. EPI says over three-quarters of those were manufacturing jobs, which of course they were, since Chinese wage slaves get paid in dung pellets to do what Americans used to do for a wage they could live on, support a family on, and send kids to college on. Keep in mind, also, that WalMart's just one corporation -- overall, "(t)he growing goods trade deficit with China displaced 3.2 million U.S. jobs in the United States between 2001 and 2013." That's a drag of 20,000 lost jobs every month. Is this a good time to remind you that China's only one country?

Finally, Charlie Renville, of Fargo, ND, wants his son's principal fired because his high school, enforcing school policy, wouldn't print a photo of his son with his favorite rifle in its yearbook. Even better, the dad says "so begins the fight for freedom." "Begins"? Such drama -- too many Americans want to be mentioned in the same breath as Frederick Douglass without actually doing any of the hard work of being Frederick Douglass. And "(t)he rifle is a rifle he built and it is his favorite rifle"? Should I get Zombie Gilbert and Sullivan to put that to music? Let's never mention this fool again.

Around the table: the dangers of the passive voice, the complexities of the sneaker market, and other conundrums.

U.S. bombs hospital in Afghanistan, killing over 20 people and wounding at least 35 more, and the "liberal" media falls all over itself to avoid saying our government did it. Three things: one, saying "stuff happens during wartime" is one thing, and saying "stuff happened during wartime and no one is responsible" is another thing entirely. Two, as FAIR's hilarious headline suggests, you should always look at sentence structure -- if the "liberal" media is using the passive voice, you have every right to suspect they're covering something up. Three, the "human shield" argument is bogus, or the "liberal" media would have deployed it earlier.

Alec MacGillis at ProPublica asks if the gun lobby's power is "overstated." They'd run through a wall for their beliefs and others wouldn't, but Mr. MacGillis points to certain inarguable factors (narrowing demographics of pro-gun folks, for one). Yet I'm reminded of how no one can verify the "Rush Limbaugh has 20 million listeners" statement either -- if the gun lobby's power is overstated, the fact that our "liberal" media constantly does the overstating surely helps create that power.

Ho hum, Joshua Holland at The Nation finds that the right alienates more than just Hispanics with their anti-immigration cant. Less than half of immigrants these days come from Hispanic nations, African immigrants to the U.S. double every decade, and one in five immigrants would be folks we would call "white" immigrants, from Canada and Europe. But regardless of demographic trends, the right will still have an outsized voice, especially during midterms, as long as Democrats continue to do nothing about anything while in power. It's almost like that's the idea.

Former NBA star Stephon Marbury re-releases his $15 sneakers, saying that his Starburys are just as good as $200 Air Jordans and that Michael Jordan has been "robbing the hood." The message might be muted, though: I'm not sure I'd base my pitch on how cheaply I can make the stuff I sell, not when most folks now know that people who make slave-wages make those shoes. Kids today don't care about Stephon Marbury, either -- partly because he plays in China these days, but mainly because the "liberal" media trains everyone to think sensationally.

Finally, Daily Kos's Markos Moulitsas writes again about right-wingers blowing a gasket at the release of the Tesla Model X. Right-wingers still rant about Tesla getting taxpayer money while ignoring the subsidies other auto corporations get, and they still go on about electricity coming from coal when the Tesla Model X will use electricity far more efficiently than other cars use gas. And though I try to think the best of people, I bet the guy who says he's also opposed to oil subsidies never even calls his Congressperson about it.

Around the table: who *else* gets rich off of our bloated prison system, and other stories.

Who makes money off all the people we put in prison? A lot of people, actually -- folks who run corporations that supply food, phone service, and health care to prisoners, but also corporations that use prison labor to process food, package computer accessories, and make clothing. Some corporations even use prisoners as telemarketers in call centers! Cheap services and wage slavery make buku bucks for greedy CEOs, so you can see why it's like pulling teeth to reform our drug and sentencing laws.

Another day, another study blowing a hole in the myth that tax cuts for corporations creates jobs. The Center for Effective Government found that -- get your surprised face ready -- the 14 corporations with the lowest effective tax rate all either created very few jobs from 2008-2012 or hemorrhaged jobs, while the 14 corporations with the highest effective tax rates almost all created jobs during that same period, with nine of the latter group creating more jobs than the corporation that created the most jobs in the former. Seriously, if the tax cut clown car were right, the more highly-taxed corporations should be creating fewer jobs than the more lightly-taxed ones.

"KKK Was Terrorizing America Decades Before Islamic State Appeared," writes Julia Craven at the Huffington Post. A horrifying and detailed history follows. Folks who claim that reminding good citizens about these atrocities is "un-American" need to explain how admitting your wrongdoings and working to fix them is "un-American."

Two animal-rights activists challenge the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2006 on constitutional grounds. The defendants contend that our government has never defined "terrorism" to include non-violent acts (against people, presumably), and though I have my own concerns about releasing animals who've never lived in the wild into the wild, I've always thought people "terrorized" by what animal rights activists do are weaklings who certainly do not deserve to be coddled by the law. How is a burglary conviction (which these two men have already served) not enough in this case?

Finally, the normally respectable Warren Buffett says Sen. Warren should be "less angry" toward the wealthy and even suggests she "get(s) too violent" with her opponents. I don't think the charge of sexism passes muster in this instance, not because Mr. Buffett is better than the average bankster, but because the pro-bankster forces have lately accused everyone who opposes them of excessive anger, as if they should expect something less than anger when they crash our economy in acts of greed.

Action: humane working conditions, wind power, and accountability for retirement planners.

Qatar will host the World Cup in 2022, which should mean all kinds of job-creating construction -- except that corporations are taking advantage of Qatar's "guest worker" program, in which folks come from nearby countries with the hope of making a better life, and then get their passports taken away and are made to slave away in 120 degree heat with little or no food or water. And this has been going on for a while -- 2014 saw the deaths of over 180 workers in some World Cup-related project or other. Luckily, we can apply pressure, not just to Qatar's government, but to the American corporation overseeing much of the World Cup-related construction: CH2M Hill, whose CEO lives in Colorado. CH2M Hill blames the worker abuse the government of Qatar and local contractors there, but if CH2M Hill's leaders didn't know Qatar was a wage slave zone, then I'm Benedict Cumberbatch. (Full disclosure: I am not Benedict Cumberbatch.) So Avaaz helps you tell CH2M Hill and Qatar's government to treat Qatar's guest workers a lot better. Personal to those who say, well, those workers took their chances: is abusing workers ever OK?

Meanwhile, the Cape Wind offshore wind farm, long delayed by wealthy folks on the Cape who claim that the gotta-squint-to-see-it wind farm constitutes an eyesore, has met another obstacle: the nearly two dozen lawsuits against it over the years have helped cause Cape Wind to miss crucial financing and construction deadlines, which prompted National Grid to cancel its power-purchase agreement (or PPA) with the wind farm. National Grid would have bought half of Cape Wind's power, but no longer; without utility corporations to buy Cape Wind's power, Cape Wind has rather less chance of succeeding. And if the numerous lawsuits against Cape Wind seem a little odd to you, consider that one of the driving forces behind the Alliance for Nantucket Sound, which has filed many of the suits, is none other than Bill Koch -- that's right, of those Kochs -- which tells me it's not an "eyesore" issue at all, but an issue of a coal guy not wanting any competition from a power source he can't control. You know what that makes these lawsuits? Frivolous lawsuits, that's what. Hence CREDO helps you tell National Grid to get back on board with the Cape Wind project.

Finally, some good news: the Department of Labor has decided it will require all financial advisors to put customers' interests ahead of their own when giving retirement account advice. You'd think that'd be common sense, but common sense is the bitter enemy of the financial sector today, which cares about money and nothing else. And already the banksters are advocating against it: too many financial planners will lose their jobs, they say, as if no one else -- hell, maybe even some honest people! -- could possibly rise up to fill the resulting void. Banksters argue for the "genius of the free market" and the "creative destruction" it supposedly works upon economies when anyone else is on the receiving end, but let banksters themselves be the target of actual free market justice, and they whine like diaper-loaded brats until they get their handouts and bailouts. Well, perhaps that's unfair: diaper-loaded brats can eventually get their diapers changed, but banksters will still be banksters, demanding taxpayer handouts and giving nothing back to civilization. So Public Citizen helps you support a vigorous fiduciary responsibility rule for retirement planners.

Action: the "war on terror," for-profit colleges, and "free" trade.

28 classified pages of the 9.11 Commission report have been in the news lately, as convicted terror-plotter Zacarias Moussaoui has lately said that he met with highly-placed Saudi Arabian government officials in the run-up to 9.11, but given that Mr. Moussaoui's jury didn't give him the death penalty because they didn't think he was that deeply-involved in 9.11, you'd be right to take his claims with a grain of salt. Former Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee during those early years, might be a better source; he says the 28 classified pages show considerable Saudi involvement in funding the 9.11 terrorists. Besides, even the Saudi government wants the pages released, claiming it will exonerate them. I expect they're right, though I also expect it won't exonerate numerous Saudi bajillionaires, which is probably why Mr. Bush classified the documents in the first place. Roots Action helps you tell our government to declassify the 28 pages relating to 9.11 terrorist funding.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk, "no college bailouts!" What does that mean? Congressional Republicans plan to roll back the meager efforts President Obama and Congressional Democrats have made to ensure that for-profit colleges don't get federal money if they don't really help their students get jobs. These colleges can cost quadruple what community colleges cost, and its graduates tend to leave for-profit schools with, on average, $13,000 more in debt than other college graduates. And, well, that's if they even graduate; most of them don't, but still have huge student loans to pay. It gets worse: because up is down and down is up in our economy anymore, these colleges have become tremendously profitable for their executives and their investors, even though they plainly don't work -- and (I told you it gets worse) some 90% of their revenues come from federal student loan programs. And that's why CREDO calls the Republican plan a "bailout" -- because it is one, and as civilized people we should not tolerate it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to reject "free" trade deals like the TPP, and also to reject "fast-tracking" of said "free" trade deals, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. President Obama has begun to address the concerns of "free" trade opponents -- in this interview with Vox, he says "we can't rely on the old trading regime" that has cost us so many jobs, so we need to create a "new" regime that improves labor and environmental standards across the globe. While that's an improvement on what nominally liberal politicians used to say -- that people should be happy with the cheap toys and clothes they're getting -- it still doesn't explain why negotiations need to be secret or why the TPP requires a fast voting process with little debate and no amendments. And from what we do know about the TPP from leaks, "higher labor or environmental standards" in Vietnam will be able to be nullified the moment the investor-state tribunals get a complaint from a corporation feeling "deprived" at having to pay people more or make them work somewhere other than a deathtrap.

Action: compensation for sweatshop victims, medical marijuana for soldiers, and relief from mandatory minimums.

You may recall the horrible Rana Plaza sweatshop building collapse in Bangladesh that killed over a thousand people. The U.N. has since helped set up a corporate accountability and victim compensation plan known as "the Arrangement," which helps victims and their families get justice through a claims process and a trust fund to which anyone can donate, and "anyone" certainly includes the clothing corporations who used Rana Plaza to manufacture their wares. At least five such corporations have donated to the fund, but Italian clothing corporation Benetton has not. And there's a major PR hook to be exploited here: Milan fashion week starts in less than two weeks, and if enough of us sign this petition from Avaaz, demanding that Benetton help compensate those who suffered and died in a sweatshop in their supply chain, they could be mighty embarrassed during Milan fashion week, as they should be right now for failing to step up. Benetton tells us their duty is over, because they made a charitable donation. But compensation isn't charity.

Meanwhile, the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell Congress to support H.R. 667, the Veterans Equal Access Act, which would ensure that those soldiers who need medical marijuana could get it, at least in states where it's already legal. Note well the phrase "in states where it's already legal," lest right-wingers get their shorts in a bunch over ZOMG OBAMA TEH DIKTATUR MAKEZ TEH TROOPS ALL ADDICTEDZ!!!!! Citing marijuana's status as a super-awful-dangerous Schedule I drug is equally irrelevant, as, again, some states have determined that's just not true in some cases (or, in Colorado, in all cases), and our federal government has not successfully overriden these determinations. Certainly if pot helps soldiers with PTSD manage their conditions to the point where they can function in and contribute to our society again, there's no good reason to deny them what could help them. And as in yesterday's birth control action alert, there's certainly no reason to deny our troops what we wouldn't deny to ourselves.

Finally, H.R. 706/S. 353, the Justice Safety Valve Act, is back, thanks to House co-sponsors Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Bobby Scott (D-VA), as well as Senate co-sponsors Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Rand Paul (R-KY). The bill would allow judges to give sentences shorter than mandatory minimum sentences "to prevent an unjust sentence" and to avoid conflicting with other laws governing imposition of sentences. The bill would also require judges to submit their reasoning for the shorter sentence in writing and would allow both parties involved in the original criminal proceeding a chance to respond to the judge's intent. So the bill blows a hole in the mandatory minimum regime, but allows all concerned parties to have a say in the process. Mandatory minimum sentencing has caught too many nonviolent criminals in its web, and has kept them in jail not just at great cost to the taxpayer, but also at great cost to those who could have rehabilitated themselves and rejoined free society sooner. So Families Against Mandatory Minimums helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Justice Safety Valve Act.

Action: "free" trade, the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve, and children's health insurance.

Another year, another well-received State of the Union address from President Obama -- but why, in the middle of all that welcome talk about hiking capital gains taxes and closing corporate tax loopholes, did he assert that "free" trade deals would open foreign markets for American goods? Newsflash: our trade deficits with our "free" trade deal "partners" always go way up -- meaning we buy way more of their stuff than they buy of ours. Does that sound like a way of creating jobs here? "Free" trade deals outsource American jobs to foreigners in no position to demand good pay, and they don't create markets for American goods, but instead make America the dumping ground for goods cheaply made by those same wage-slave foreigners. This is why these "free" trade deals also subjugate our environmental and labor laws to "investor-state tribunals": so that cheap goods that would violate those laws can still flood our markets. And here's the kicker: everyone knows this, be they liberal or conservative. So let's all get together for some real bipartisanship, shall we? Both Public Citizen and Friends of the Earth help you tell Congress to reject "free" trade deals and "fast track" proposals.

Meanwhile, we have expanded Republican majorities in Congress now, as you know, which means the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, or ANWR, is less safe than it was last month. And yet H.R. 239, the Udall-Eisenhower Arctic Wilderness Act, is an actual bipartisan bill, because its two sponsors so-far include one Democrat (Jared Huffman of California) and one Republican (Mike Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania). H.R. 239 would designate the Coastal Plain of the Arctic Refuge a wilderness area, protecting it from any oil drilling for all eternity. Why do we stop drillers from going into the Arctic? Well, as Shell's numerous adventures there remind us, we don't know how to drill well enough to avoid catastrophe, and even Arctic drilling supporters have never proven we'll ever get very much oil out of ANWR, or very much price relief at the pump -- all of which tells me ANWR drilling is a scam to make a few oil executives rich. The Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell your House Rep to support H.R. 239, and protect at least part of ANWR from oil drillers forever.

Meanwhile, Congress has to renew the Childrens' Health Insurance Program (or CHIP) by September 30 or six million children will lose health insurance coverage. CHIP has helped cut the rate of uninsured among children in half during the 17 years it's operated, and it works the way conservatives would want it to work -- by giving block grants to states and letting them determine how best to spend the money. In other words, reauthorization should be fairly uncontroversial -- but then extending unemployment insurance and raising the debt limit were fairly uncontroversial until a few years ago, and reallocating Social Security trust funds to the disability fund was also fairly uncontroversial until a few weeks ago. So there's no telling what horrible things Republicans will do to get more power -- and while putting a fairly popular program in jeopardy wouldn't seem like a path to more power, weakling Democrats need to learn that, in the long run, an evil vision always defeats no vision. So MoveOn helps you tell your House Reps to stand up for CHIP.

Around the table: meet Peter Shumlin, perfecting the art of Democrat weakness! And other stories.

Absolutely horrifying news from Vermont: Gov. Peter Shumlin has scrapped Vermont's plan to institute a single-payer health care plan by 2017, citing its cost, naturally. A state income tax rate of up to 9.5%, by Ford! Is he aware that some New Jersey residents already pay that much? And why does he shrink from an 11% payroll tax hike when corporations are already likely paying 20% of their workers' salary on health insurance? And did Mr. Shumlin ever calculate the boom in tax revenues that would happen when businesses and corporations relocate to Vermont, knowing health insurance would actually cost less for them? Oh, well -- "it is not the right time for Vermont" will surely be remembered alongside Mr. Churchill's "this was their finest hour." Typical Democrat weakness.

Ho hum, the Federal Reserve allows banksters to hold on to their private equity and hedge fund investments for two more years. You may recall that the "Volcker Rule" would prevent banks from holding various kinds of securities so that they, you know, act like banks, but banks got the reprieve after complaining that they'd have to sell these securities at "discount" prices to comply with the rule. Jesus Mary and Joseph what is the difference between being really rich and really really rich? At least Paul Volcker himself gets the best word, if not the last word.

Surprise, surprise, the "liberal" media uses the controversy over banking regulations to call Democratic populists "demanding and disruptive" and laud the "can-do desires of establishment Democrats." What the latter group "can do," of course, is sell out the popular will to the banksters, as if "governing" means ignoring your constituents, whose interests you're supposed to represent. When we see Congress trying to steal Social Security and Medicare for their corporate paymasters, the "liberal" media will call that "mature governing," and when Elizabeth Warren fights it, at least one "liberal" media figure (who wants to bet on whom it will be?) will drop the b-word on her.

Patrolmen's Benevolent Association President blames "those that incited violence on the street under the guise of protest" for the cold-blooded murder of two cops sitting in their patrol car. I guess it's too much to ask for a public figure to blame, oh, I don't know, the shooter, who did not carry a protest sign or break off from a crowd of protestors. The next fool who utters something like this will probably just up and call protestors "terrorists," and then we'll have to slay that zombie lie, over and over again. At least we'll be on the side of righteousness when we do.

Gallup poll finds President Obama's approval rating at its highest level in over half a year. But does author Justin Sink really think Mr. Obama's actions on behalf of that noxious spending bill might be a factor in his rise? Why can't it be because he's lately refused to let Republicans kick sand in his face for the first time in six years? People do respond to folks who don't back down, after all, even when they don't agree with them.

Finally, Ralph Nader, America's Greatest Citizen, reminds us that "Toys from Abusive Chinese Factories Bring No Holiday Cheer." You're likely familiar with most of the details already, but perhaps not this observation from China Labor Watch: "Many toy companies divide their toy orders among dozens or hundreds of factories...Toy companies will also use this as a basis for avoiding responsibility for poor labor conditions. For example, if CLW uncovers labor rights violations at a Disney supplier factory in China, Disney might respond that it only maintains a small number of orders in the plant and is unable to influence the factory’s behavior." Buy local and buy small, folks, and put the Christ back in Christmas.

Action: methane pollution, overtime pay, and "free" trade.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell the EPA and President Obama to regulate methane pollution from the oil and gas industry. Currently the EPA does not regulate methane pollution, which accounts for less than one-tenth of all the pollution we spew into the air but is, pound for pound, much worse for the climate than carbon dioxide, which must be why the methane mitigation industry (which seals leaks from gas drilling wells) is taking off in America. Oil and gas corporations won't like it, and I'll bet they'll cite falling oil prices as a reason for government inaction -- as if anyone who actually buys gas could possibly find that reasoning sympathetic, particularly if they know that oil prices were that high in the first place mainly because of speculation, or if they remember that people bashed Mr. Obama when oil prices were high, as well. And no you are not a hypocrite if you're trying to ban fracking and ask the EPA to regulate a by-product of fracking -- you're merely trying to fight for the common good on every front.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama has directed the Department of Labor to revise and simplify overtime pay rules. I'm old enough to remember when overtime was a big deal -- specifically, in 2003, when Tha Bush Mobb's Labor Department tried to make it harder for workers to get overtime, and America's Congressfolk were so bombarded by letters from their constituents that they actually voted against the Bush rules in legislation. Tha Bush Mobb's Senate lackey, Bill Frist, eventually folded the overtime rules into (get your surprised face ready) end-of-year omnibus spending legislation, but we'd made our point rather emphatically, and now we have a chance to get some real work done. Overtime rules currently cap the salary at which people can get overtime at a mere $23,000 annually (which, to be fair, Tha Bush Mobb Labor Department actually raised, from $8,000 annually); Moms Rising helps you tell the Department of Labor to raise that cap to $69,000 annually. No this won't "kill jobs" -- actually, it would force corporations to hire more people, so they pay less overtime, and this is one of the reasons we have overtime to begin with.

Finally, we recently passed the 21st anniversary of the Clinton-era North America Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, though a better name would be SHAFTYA, because that's what it's done, both to American workers whose jobs got magically changed into Mexican ones, and also to Mexican workers who found themselves trapped as wage slaves in American corporations. And our current Democratic President, having apparently learned nothing from the last one, still pushes the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" and its attempts to subjugate American law to the whim of "investor-state tribunals" who will always come down on the side of some corporation's "right" to pay its workers in dung pellets and dump poisonous crap in our air and water. The TPP has, as you know, received rather little coverage from the "liberal" media, and even less critical coverage. Why? Because they fear our anger, that's why -- which we can make manifest by letting Public Citizen help us tell our Congressfolk to reject "free" trade agreements like the TPP that make a mockery of the rule of law.

Around the table: how do the fools survive?

Patrick Cockburn sees, in ISIS, "the Birth of a Terrifying New State" and a "counter-revolutionary caliphate," one that could take over all of Iraq and Syria. Not because "we didn't do enough to stop it," but because, frankly, we did too much -- when foreign nations interfere in your affairs for decades on end (and that includes helping install the hated Saddam Hussein), the locals remember forever, and so would we, if it were us. Bush's Folly could wind up allying us with Iran against ISIS -- which irony wouldn't be unprecedented in human history, I suppose.

International Franchise Association sues Seattle over its phased-in $15/hour minimum wage, claiming unfair treatment because the law classifies franchises as big businesses and thus requires them to phase in the money faster. Maybe Mr. Clement's assertion that the law violates the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause could work in the IFA's favor, but folks who think we should treat big businesses exactly as we'd treat small businesses confuse symmetry with fairness, and no reasonable person should think the nearest McDonald's is a "small business" just because its owners have driven a Mack truck through a loophole in the law.

The great-granchildren of Anna Short Harrington, who played Aunt Jemima in Quaker Oats promotional materials for decades, have filed a class-action lawsuit against Quaker Oats and three affiliated corporations, saying they exploited Ms. Harrington and thus cheated her descendents of royalties for over 60 years. Good luck to them -- you know Quaker's going to lose (though maybe not pay $2 billion plus punitives) because all their PR hacks can think of to say is "(p)eople associate The Aunt Jemima Brand with warmth, hospitality and comfort, and we stand by this heritage as well as the ways in which we do business." Warmth, hospitality, and comfort -- all things we associate with wage theft.

Federal investigators find a "a systematic breakdown" in how two Virginia schools "employed restraints and seclusions" -- as in, one of them used "last-resort" disciplinary tactics on nearly 40 percent of its students. Those ready to squeal that TODAYZ KIDZ ARE OUTZ UV TEH CONTROLZ!!!!! would need to explain how using "last-resort" tactics nearly half the time isn't an indication that the school has no idea how to keep its students focused and in line.

Finally, Standard and Poor's becomes the second national ratings agency to downgrade the Kansas's credit (from AA+ to AA). They follow Moody's, which downgraded Kansas in April. Both agencies cite the Kansas government's unwillingness to cut spending as well as its mania for cutting taxes, noting that Kansas's tax cuts will actually become steeper after 2015. While it's tempting to dump on Sam Brownback some more -- after all, these tax cuts are all part of his big "experiment" -- I doubt future Kansas Republicans will abandon their tax-cutting mania; they'll just argue that Mr. Brownback somehow did it wrong, because of his Brownbacky Brownbackness, I guess, and then try it again once they get the chance. I'd be happy to be wrong about that. But I doubt I am.

Action: voting rights, and slave labor.

Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on S. 1945, the Voting Rights Amendment Act, began this week; as you recall, the Voting Rights Amendment Act would strengthen the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court weakened in Shelby County v. Holder last year, by creating a new preclearance formula for states and municipalities that routinely violate their citizens' voting rights (rather than use a preclearance formula for the same Southern states in apparent perpetuity, which was the Court's objection to the Voting Rights Act). The Court may have dealt the Voting Rights Act a blow, but the Voting Rights Amendment Act stands to make the Voting Rights Act stronger, if anything -- when any state or municipality could be subject to having its voting laws "pre-cleared" by the Department of Justice, then every state and municipality, in theory, will be on their toes, where they should be. Congress has, frankly, moved pretty slowly on this very important issue -- much slower than the Republican-dominated Congress of 2006 did when they reauthorized the Voting Rights Act by fairly substantial margins -- but we can do something about that, of course, and thus People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Voting Rights Amendment Act.

Earlier this month the Guardian found that Costco, Carrefour, and WalMart all sold shrimp produced by actual slave labor. Specifically, the corporation that sells shrimp to these and other major retailers, Thai corporation Charoen Pokphand (CP) Foods, buys feed for its shrimp from suppliers using slave labor on boats. Laborers who've managed to escape from these suppliers testify to torture, beatings, and executions, as well as 20-hour work days and forced ingestion of methamphetamines to keep going. You've heard of "the high cost of low prices"? Well, this is about as good an example of it as you're going to get. Slavery is unfortunately a-feature-not-a-bug of Thailand's seafood industry, to the point where some observers think the industry would collapse without it. But Anti-Slavery International's Project Issara promises to eradicate slavery within Thai export industries, by prodding the big name brands that buy slave-made products to root out the rot in their supply chains. Don't get the idea you'll be hurting Thai workers by helping that push -- from slavery, there ain't nowhere to go but up. Sum of Us helps you pressure Costco, Carrefour, and WalMart to do more to get rid of slave-made shrimp.

Action: "free" trade, women in Afghanistan, and working families.

Word on the street is that the corporations who'd benefit most from the Trans-Pacific Trade "Partnership" -- that is, the ones that would get to not only break our environmental, labor, and product safety laws, but sit in judgment over them -- want to give the President fast-track authority to put the "free" trade deal in place, without Congressional approval. You may recall that Congress (over the loud protests of alleged liberal Rahm Emanuel, then a U.S. Representative from Illinois) allowed Presidential fast-track authority to lapse in 2007, which at least helped delay approval of the nefarious Columbia and Panama "free" trade "deals" by four years. Why do we want this miserable excuse for a Congress involved? Because Congress is supposed to represent our will, and forcing "free" trade deals to get Congressional approval at least gives us a fighting chance of stopping a monstrosity that will eventually make us all slaves to large corporations. And a fighting chance is all I ask. Both Public Citizen and CREDO help you tell your Congressfolk to say no to Presidential fast-track authority.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan continues to be an absolutely wretched place for women to live, as its Parliament is actually mulling a bill that would greatly aid abusers of women, by banning relatives from testifying against each other in court. Real family values-type stuff, that! If you're at all familiar with domestic violence cases -- even the ones that don't involve a family ganging up on you and torturing you because you won't prostitute yourself, which was Sahar Gul's life until recently -- you know that a lot of cases don't get very far without the testimony of relatives, since they're generally the only ones in any position to confirm abuse claims. So one can only presume that the Afghan government would impose an otherwise completely arbitrary standard on court testimony so it can continue to turn a blind eye to how some of its citizens still treat women. Thus Avaaz helps you tell the Upper House of the Afghan Parliament to reject the "gag rule" bill passed by the Lower House. The Upper House might respond positively; it has in the past. But that's no reason to be complacent.

Finally, Making Change at Walmart joins with Daily Kos to help you tell WalMart to stop firing striking workers and pay them a living wage. Four of the ten richest folks in America come from the Walton family, and WalMart made nearly $16 billion in profits in 2011, but many of its workers have to rely on taxpayer-funded programs including food stamps and Medicaid -- which means, folks, that you're paying WalMart workers, too! That should dispel the glow of perpetually low prices, if the continued wage-slavery of Chinese workers making all that cheap crap hasn't dispelled that glow already. WalMart has also disciplined or fired more than 70 workers for the crime of going on strike for decent wages, when retaliating against workers who agitate for better conditions is illegal; WalMart might be able to buy their way out of trouble there, though that's yet another reason not to let big corporations get that big in the first place. And paying workers a living wage is, of course, one way we prevent corporations from getting so big they run roughshod over us -- if we have more power, they have less.

First things first. Ex-McDonald's employee Natalie Gunshannon has sued a McDonald's franchise owner, saying the owner paid her and several other employees not with a paycheck, not even with cash, but with a debit card. And this debit card -- provided by JP Morgan/Chase -- came with usage fees. Ms. Gunshannon would have had to pay 75¢ every time she used the card online, $1.50 every time she withdrew money from an ATM, and $5 every time she withdrew money from her bank -- and these fees might have put her and her co-workers under minimum wage. Even the pro-payroll debit card source quoted in the above link seemed annoyed that Ms. Gunshannon's card came with fees, and that the debit card was her only option for payment. Would any of that sit well with you? There's no use telling me that "businesses save money if they can hand out debit cards," like businesses are the boss of us. Sum of Us helps you tell McDonald's to stop forcing its employees to accept debit cards as payment.

Meanwhile, Sens. Feinstein (D-CA), Collins (R-ME), Reed (D-RI), Boxer (D-CA) and Cantwell (D-WA) have introduced S. 1256, the Preventing Antibiotic Resistance Act, which aims to curb antibiotic overuse in feed animals. As you know, America uses about 80% of its antibiotics on non-sick feed animals living in cramped, filthy conditions in factory farms, thus making more and more bacteria impervious to antibiotics. Of course the factory farms have balked, saying they can't make money if we stop the flow of antibiotics to their animals, and of course they're wrong -- they'd make money, but their executives wouldn't be able to gild their plumbing anymore, while we all could actually be safer from superbugs. S. 1256 is almost identical to Rep. Slaughter's bill, H.R. 1150, but S. 1256 also requires veterinarians prescribing antibiotics to maintain an appropriate doctor-patient relationship with their animals, which can't be easy if you're prescribing to thousands of hogs at once. So don't be cowed (as it were) by any right-wing howls of BUREAUKRATZ PAPERWORKZ KILLZ THA JOBZ!!!!! Call your Senators about S. 1256, and they won't see it coming.

Earlier this week, low-paid workers at Washington, DC landmarks went on strike, and have called on President Obama to force federal contractors to pay a living wage to these workers; Daily Kos helps you aid their efforts. Mr. Obama can do this with an executive order, without the need for further action from Congress, though they'll screech AMERIKUN CEEZZARRR!!!! at him if he does it. Let them look like Scrooges, that's what I say. We're talking two million workers here, working at places like Union Station and the Smithsonian, all of them making less than $12/hr and many of them making minimum wage and/or getting no health benefits; even WalMart doesn't employ a million folks making so little money. Of course, our government should also move to get rid of the private contractors. Perhaps this is the first step in doing that.

Meanwhile, the Senate continues mulling the Farm Bill, and Sen. Boxer (D-CA) will introduce an amendment that would force the big agricultural corporations to label any food containing genetically-modified ingredients -- much like the ballot question that failed in California last year, or the ballot question that Washington state will take up this year, or the GE-labeling bills passed (but not yet made law) in Vermont and Hawaii. The amendment is S.A. 1025 to S. 954, and it has five other Senate sponsors, one of whom -- Ms. Murkowski of Alaska -- is a Republican. But if your Congressfolk stand against this amendment, remind them that nothing about free-market ideology should compel consumers to be ignorant. Also remind them that they stand against 90 percent of the American people. Just Label It helps you support the Boxer amendment.

Speaking of the Farm Bill, Sen. Merkley (D-OR) has introduced an amendment that would strip away the notorious provision from the last continuing resolution letting large agricultural corporations plant genetically-modified seed while the EPA evaluates the safety of the seed, even if a judge has ordered that the corporation stop planting the seed. This provision flies in the face of common sense: if we haven't determined a seed is safe, and a judge has told you not to plant it, you don't plant it. The provision popularly known as the "Monsanto Protection Act" will expire, with the continuing resolution, in about four months. But that's at least four months too long to violate our rights not to eat unsafe crap, and at least four months too long to subvert law and order in America. So CREDO helps you tell your Senators to eliminate the "Monsanto Protection Act."

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Bureau of Land Management to ban fracking on federal lands, the Sierra Club helps you do that. The BLM's proposals for fracking on federal lands don't compel gas drillers to secure fracking waste, stop using diesel fuel, drill far away from houses and schools, or disclose the toxic chemicals they use. Why, it's almost like the gas drilling corporations had more of the President's ear than we did! Does Mr. Obama still imagine that listening to gas drilling corporations whine about regulations, and doing their bidding, will get them off his back? They will never get off his back -- or, more to the point, our back, unless we fight them. And we're in a good position, because no one really favors drinking poisoned water or breathing poisoned air.

H.R. 129, the Return to Prudent Banking Act, would prohibit banks from investment advising or brokering (and would prohibit securities firms from banking). This would resemble the system we had before the Gramm-Bliley-Leach Act repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. Why break up banks this way? Because banks set themselves up (and, more importantly, set you up) for major conflicts of interest if they hold deposits and invest money. H.R. 129 would also prevent most securities firm employees from serving on bank boards, and would require the Executive branch to account to Congress for any exception it makes to the above rules. Opponents of Glass-Steagall like to claim our banks can't compete against other banks unless they're "diversified." But keeping folks' money safe is more important than competition. And if you can't make money doing right by your customers, what good are you? Change.org helps you tell Congress to restore the Glass-Steagall wall.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the EPA to protect Appalachian mountain streams from mountaintop removal mining. Why? Because quite a few coal mining corporations blow up mountaintops to get at the coal underneath, and they pollute valley streams in the process -- streams that provide drinking water for Appalachian residents. The EPA did write voluntary water quality standards during Mr. Obama's first term, but note the word "voluntary." Opponents of the standards just want their rich coal donors to get richer ahem tell us that regulations make energy prices go up -- that the coal mining corporations will just pass along the cost to consumers. First off, is that behavior we'd tolerate from children, or from each other? Second off, cheap energy doesn't mean jack if you can't drink the water befouled by the process that made your energy cheaper. If you can't drink the water, you can't be healthy, and if you can't be healthy, you can't be free. End of.

In other news, H.R. 1844/S. 878, the Arbitration Fairness Act, still awaits action in Congress. Here's the meat of it, from Sec. 3(a) of S. 878: "Notwithstanding any other provision of this title, no predispute arbitration agreement shall be valid or enforceable if it requires arbitration of an employment dispute, consumer dispute, antitrust dispute, or civil rights dispute." Your cell phone provider probably put a forced arbitration clause in your contract without you knowing it, meaning you can't settle your dispute with them in a court of law, but in an arbitration hearing they pay for (and the arbitrators know where their bread is buttered). And your employer might have done the same thing. But Congress originally conceived of arbitration as way of resolving disputes between corporations; successive Supreme Court decisions have expanded that concept. So Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Arbitration Fairness Act. Don't corporations get to avoid accountability enough already?

Finally, as the death toll from the Rana Plaza catastrophe in Bangladesh rises above 800, Avaaz helps you tell the big garment stores to demand better fire and safety standards from their suppliers, or "risk fatal damage to your brand image." That's not a threat, that's a law of physics -- bad PR already does damage corporations would rather not try to repair; social media just brings people together to voice their opposition more quickly than ever before. And our corporations have a lot of power to change things, as Calvin Klein has already recognized. Of course the WalMarts of the world still complain about stronger safety standards not being "financially feasible." But the keep prices low mantra doesn't convince us -- not as long as folks have to get burned and crushed to death so prices can remain low. And aren't our entrepreneurs supposed to be our best and brightest? If so, why are they so unimaginative that they can't bring us safe manufacturing and low prices?

The BBC's Jane Wakefield wonders if the next industrial revolution will be a "makers" revolution. Don't anyone go thinking this is about Ayn Rand -- it's just about folks being able to use 3-D printers, along with crowdsourcing and internet research, to be able to manufacture, at least on a small scale, things that could change how we view the world. Could be exciting, and I'm pleased that big corporations are pooping themselves at the thought, but call me when 3-D printers are able to make washable underwear or oven-safe plates.

Not that you didn't already suspect this, but a number of reputable sources find our Ongoing Economic Armageddon at least partly behind increases in suicide rates for Americans aged 35 to 64. I don't know that putting banksters in jail would lower the rate all that much, not that we shouldn't do that for other reasons. (The question of why baby boomers have a higher suicide rate generally is worth pursuing separately. I won't admit because they're spoiled as an answer.)

Reuters informs us that one reason garment industry tycoons in Bangladesh, the world's number two garment exporter, can treat their workers so badly is that these tycoons make up about ten percent of that nation's Parliament. One activist suggests that well over half of Parliament has some kind of tie to the garment industry. Remember all that bulldada last year about how we should have a President with "business experience"? Well, this is kinda the dark side of that.

Harold Meyerson (writing at The American Prospect) notes that one provision of the Affordable Care Act -- making employers of more than 50 pay for health insurance for any employee working 30 hours or more per week -- has already induced some employers (which include state and local governments) to cut their workers' hours to around 29 per week. There'll be a safety net of sorts (state or federal health care exchanges) for those folks, but still, lost hours means lost money. We should have a single-payer health care system to get around this problem, maybe? (Mr. Meyerson gets there, of course, noting that it's rather "arbitrary" to have a system where you almost have to get health care through your job.)

Ohio Tea Party leaders say they're so disgusted with Republicans that they might start fielding candidates of their own. "It remains uncertain," the Dispatch tells us, "just how much the Ohio GOP and its candidates could be hurt by an insurrection because it is difficult to assess the true strength of tea party groups." Well, of course it's "difficult to assess" the strength of groups called into being by corporate money and made up largely of folks who can barely articulate a coherent thought.

Finally, dig the pissing match Catholic League President Bill Donohue starts on Larry King Live over whether the boys molested by Catholic priests were "prepubescent" or not. Remember, gang: no ground is too small to claim, and no pitched battle too petty to fight, when you're always wrong about everything. And those kids were too young to consent to sex, regardless of what exact point oh, forget it, it's Bill Donohue.

President Obama again said that the Guantánamo Bay detention camp "needs to be closed." Well, that only took a massive hunger strike among detainees. No, really: Mr. Obama said "I don't want these people to die," which would have been rather more poignant if some detainees hadn't already died well after they were supposed to be released. You remember how his last attempt to close Gitmo went down: Mr. Obama declared, in the early days of his term, that he would close Guantánamo within a year, and then Congress -- dominated by Democrats at the time, you may recall -- stamped their feet about housing "terrorists" (though, of course, they were only detainees) in their "backyards," despite the fact that several protesting Senators represented states already housing convicted terrorists in maximum security prisons. Still, when a judge says a detainee can go home, and our government doesn't get him home, whose fault is that? Amnesty International helps you tell our government to end the Gitmo ignominy.

Meanwhile, you no doubt heard about the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh last week, which killed over 360 garment workers. And you no doubt remember the November fire at the Tazreen garment factory, also in Bangladesh, which killed 112 workers. And, of course, you know that both these factories manufacture clothing that shows up in big American stores like WalMart, JC Penney, and Sears. You may even recall that a WalMart safety officer told a meeting of global retailers and government officials that making safety improvements in foreign sweatshops would not be "financial feasible." Not "financially feasible" to have (for example) fire extinguishers that actually work! And they wonder why we hate them! But Tarzeen factory survivor Sumi Abedin helps you tell the big retailers to improve safety everywhere along their supply chain. Nobody who buys clothes wants other folks' blood on them -- and no corporation wants bad PR, either.

Hate to go on about recent tragedies, but 15 folks are now dead (and 200 are injured) thanks to the explosion two weeks ago at West Fertilizers of West, TX. You may remember that West Fertilizers failed to disclose to the Department of Homeland Security (sic) that it housed over 1,300 times the amount of ammonium nitrate the law required them to disclose, but you may not know that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (or OSHA) had last inspected West Fertilizers in 1985. 1985! We still had a 50% tax bracket that year! Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our President and our Congress to ensure OSHA has the tools it needs to do its job. Like more inspectors, you know, and steeper fines for corporations that kill people through their own negligence. But especially more inspectors. Seems like the answer to most of our problems today is to create more jobs. But not "job terrorists," no matter what the punditoids at Fox News tells you.

Finally, the Governor of Tennessee seems poised to sign SB 1248/HB 1191, another "Ag-Gag" bill aiming to prevent activists, journalists, and whistleblowers from taking photos or videos of animal abuse at factory farms. SB 1248/HB 1191 would criminalize anyone who waits more than two full days to turn over photos and videos of animal abuse. Does that sound fairly positive? Not so fast: it's tough to establish a pattern of abuse over months or years when the state forces you to turn over your evidence within 48 hours of discovering it. And if you've witnessed animal abuse in the past, now you wouldn't be able to come forward, lest the state regard you as a criminal for not telling them within 48 hours. And, you know, you don't trust your government to do the right thing -- you make your government do the right thing, by producing the argument your government can't ignore. SB 1248/HB 1191 would prevent good Tennesseans from doing that. So the ACLU helps you tell Governor Haslam to reject the "Ag-Gag" bill.

Republicans are very serious about convincing Americans they're not the same old Republicans who hate everything. Case in point: they're voting on the Ryan budget in the House this week -- the budget that blows up Medicare, the one that gives more big tax cuts to the rich, the one that cuts good social programs to the bone. Yup, sure looks like they've turned over a new leaf to me. NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, helps you tell your House Rep to vote "no" on the Ryan budget and "yes" on the Congressional Progressive Caucus budget, a.k.a. the "Back to Work" budget, which would do a lot of terrific things, like taxing Wall Street speculation, hiking taxes on millionaire and billionaire income to over 45%, treating investment income the same as dividend income, cutting corporate deductions for moving jobs overseas, and letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices. Also, the "Back to Work" budget would simultaneously invest $2 trillion in three years and cut the deficit. If you invest in people, and not some CEO's gilded plumbing, you can do both.

Meanwhile, Moms Rising helps you tell the Obama Administration's Department of Labor to extend minimum wage and overtime protections to home health care workers. Yes, these laws currently exclude these workers, though they do some of the hardest work anyone could do, which you know if you've ever taken care of a very sick relative. Now home health care CEOs claim that if we gave minimum wage and overtime to home health care workers, it would kill their business. Let me put this succinctly: if giving your workers minimum protections will kill your business, then your business deserves to die. And letting home health care workers make minimum wage and overtime will not only result in better care for sick folk, it'll result in fewer workers having to resort to public assistance programs like food stamps. Don't the folks who complain about people on public assistance all the time want fewer people on public assistance? Or do they prefer to dream that they, too, could make a lot of money exploiting other people? I prefer to believe the best of Americans, but some people make that so hard.

You don't have to take my word for it that the Zombie Ryan budget would turn Medicare into a voucher program, cut useful social spending to the bone, and cut taxes for the super-wealthy so they can not pump it into the economy -- you can also take the word of the Progressive States Network, which compares the Ryan budget to the far superior "Back to Work" budget promoted by the House Progressive Caucus. Or you can view this chart from the National Priorities Project, comparing the Ryan Budget, the "Back to Work" budget, and the Senate Democrats' budget. Or you can read Citizens for Tax Justice's report also comparing the aforementioned three budgets. I think you might have enough information to call your Reps and Senators and tell them a) to oppose the Ryan budget and b) to pass something more like the "Back to Work" budget. Because, hey, we're all about solutions around here!

Meanwhile, after over 100,000 good Americans told the White House that we want to be able to free our cell phones from our networks if we're unhappy with the service we're getting, and the White House agreed, Senators have introduced a few bills toward that end -- S. 467, Ron Wyden's Wireless Device Independence Act, and S. 517, the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act, which has seven sponsors. But neither bill is ideal. Mr. Wyden's bill is better, but it only deals with cell phones in the context of copyright law, and S. 517 merely restores the pre-January status quo for another year, during which the Librarian of Congress will decide whether to restore the prohibition or not. So Free Press helps you tell Congress what you want regarding your cell phones and your freedom. Strangely, the Free Press action tool doesn't include the words "network neutrality" -- but you can easily rectify that problem in your comments. (The FCC's weak net neutrality rules from 2010 don't cover wireless networks at all.)

Remember when Pennsylvania chocolatier Hershey tricked foreign students on a federal cultural exchange program into becoming wage slaves? Looks like a couple of McDonald's franchises (also in Pennsylvania, imagine that) just got caught doing something similar. McDonald's packed students from Latin America and Asia eight to a room and then forced them to work as long as 25 hours at a stretch without overtime, threatening them with deportation if they quit. And the students paid $3,000 apiece for the honor! Needless to say, the students got fed up with that state of affairs and, with the help of the National Guestworkers Alliance, staged a surprise strike on March 6. That got the parent company's attention -- they fired the franchisee who organized the exchange program, Andy Cheung, and he sure seems like a real piece of work -- but we might as well strike while the iron is hot. Sum of Us helps you tell McDonald's to pay the guest workers back and ensure their guest worker programs don't go this awry again.