Thieves in the Temple.

Penny rants for October 25, 2023.

When I hear that a New Jersey state Senator, aptly named Ed Durr, said on Facebook a few years ago that “(a) woman does have a choice. Keep her legs closed!” and that state Democrats are using his words to tar other state Republicans, I am reminded that Mr. Durr spent around $300 to unseat a putative titan of the state Senate (Stephen Sweeney) in 2021 and that nobody covered all the stupid and obnoxious crap he said on social media before that until after the election. When I then hear that Republicans promise to “support women and teens facing unexpected or unwanted pregnancies” and “lift them up and help them and their families with access to adoption services, health care, financial and food assistance, counseling and treatment, and family planning” (as Idaho Gov. Brad Little has said in justifying his state’s abortion ban), I am not surprised to hear that Idaho Republicans cut funding for all that stuff almost on cue – and I’d prefer to see Democrat ads about that kind of hypocrisy, instead of the more sensational stuff that should have simply ended Mr. Durr’s campaign two years ago, but instead made him into the Democrats’ Useful Idiot almost like that was the whole idea.

When you hear that Texas Republicans are stalling gerrymandering-related lawsuits – and thus preserving their otherwise-unearned legislative majorities – by claiming all sorts of “privileges,” including lawyer-client privilege and “legislative privilege,” you may well wonder why privileges, even Constitutionally-established ones, always seem to outweigh rights in America. And when you hear that “legislative privilege” aims to protect the privacy of legislative debates, you may reasonably wonder why legislators’ “privacy” is more important than our right to know what legislators are doing, putatively on our behalf. Because they’ll be more honest with each other if we don’t know what they’re saying? Ah, they know how that sounds, right? And if someone defends Texas Republicans because “citizens won’t understand how private deliberations work and will overreact,” you only need ask why leaders don’t prevent such overreaction from happening before it starts. That’s what leaders do, after all, even in a world where our “liberal” media know nothing about anything and sensationalize everything. Sadly, today’s leaders work harder at excusing their failure to lead than at, you know, leading.

The good people at Popular Information offer another reminder that hysterical media reports about “crime waves” and “America in chaos” stand in conflict with the facts. Property crime may be up this year, but violent crime and murders are down, and both property crime and violent crime are half (or less!) of what they were in 1991, even though whining about it from our political class seems to have doubled over that time. Meanwhile, wage theft (which politicians never talk about for some reason!) outpaces property crime, and don’t even get me started on polluters and banksters. Seriously, I’m beyond fed up with tough-on-crime posturing. Politicians swing their balls about crime because they have literally nothing else to offer voters, and the only consolation is that it doesn’t work as well as it used to, or else Pennsylvania wouldn’t have been a wave year for Democrats in 2022. Hate to pile on, but when Vivek Ramaswamy says we need to institutionalize more people – which, I hate to say, we probably do – just remember that if he’s elected President, there’s no way in hell he’d ever actually do it, because how can you keep people in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage if you actually help make their lives better? Whenever you think of tough-on-crime politicians, think of the hate monster from “Day of the Dove.” Then they’ll make perfect sense.

Readings for March 28, 2023: special "algorithms suck!" edition.

You know, this just can’t be said enough: when you hear that Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg shouldn’t go after Donald Trump because of TEH SKYROCKETINGZ CRIMEZ!!!!, you have to understand that crime is not, in fact, skyrocketing. A lot of right-wingers seem to prefer to say “skyrocketing crime rate” without even backing it up, as if the mere fact of its utterance makes it true, but shootings, murders, rape, burglary, robbery, and grand larceny are all down, and while felonies overall are up, they’ve been higher. And even that is an incomplete picture of crime – our “liberal” media never means water pollution or wage theft when they discuss crime, let alone corporate crime. I hope if I say these things enough, they’ll take, but given how careless our “liberal” media are, I won’t hold my breath.

Matt Stoller describes “the monopolies behind the Adderall shortage.” . Long story short: the big pharma wholesalers that sell drugs to pharmacies are, basically, too big to run, and of course only three of them control 85% of the market! For years the wholesalers sold large amounts of controlled substances (of which Adderall is one) to obvious organized crime fronts; when they got caught, and settled with several state Attorneys General, they stopped selling controlled substances to pharmacies that raised “red flags,” but not only did the wholesalers create overly broad red flags (simply increasing demand for controlled substances is one of them!), but they also use (wait for it) algorithms to create arbitrary and hard drug-selling caps, all of which means the wholesalers don’t know their customers (the pharmacies) very well, if at all. Hence “too big to run,” and it gets worse: because of their market power, the big wholesalers force pharmacies into exclusive contracts that the pharmacies can’t even read, which keeps pharmacies from finding a non-corrupt wholesaler. I think the states did the best they could, but this sounds like a job for Big Government!

You really won’t like this one: ProPublica catches big health insurance corporation Cigna having doctors reject insurance claims without even looking at them! Cigna, of course, says that’s not true, but doctors who’ve worked there say it is, and, gosh, whom do I believe – the corporation that never admits wrongdoing, or the worker whose testimony implicates them in wrongdoing? I kid, of course – I’ll take the latter, any day. What tool does Cigna use to reject all these claims? I hesitate to tell you the answer, but it rhymes with “Blaise Pascalgorithm.” Whomever came up with this roborejection process has apparently saved Cigna over $2 million annually from folks who would rather just pay a few hundred dollars than try to navigate some labyrinthine bureaucracy over the phone. But it’s possible to save $2 million and still lose your soul.

Around the table: from corporate electric utilities to Democrat weakness.

Thomas M. Hanna at In These Times argues that New Orleans's loss of electricity after Hurricane Ida proves "We Need Public Control of Our Energy Systems." You know, if that Enron BS in California in 2002, or Texas's utter failure to keep the lights on in a snowstorm in 2021, didn't already prove that! Recall that Greg Palast recently characterized what happened in New Orleans last week as something that wouldn't happen in Bangladesh during a monsoon. Mr. Hanna lists yet more of Entergy's sins in New Orleans, and also informs us that Sacramento's publicly-owned electric utility has functioned well through wildfires and worse. (You may remember that Nebraska is the only state in America which uses entirely publicly-owned electric utilities.)

An AP/Univision/Center for Public Integrity story finds that our USPS managers have been stealing wages from mail carriers for years. You may get that Louis DeJoy stink off this story, but this has been going on at least since at least 2005; managers got "disciplined" with things like more training, which, like, how much "training" do you need not to change your workers' time cards? Just so happens 2006 was the year our government mandated that our Postal Service pre-pay retiree benefits 80-odd years in advance, which has pushed our Postal Service almost $200 billion in debt even as it's cut over 140,000 jobs over the last 13 years; gosh, could all of that have something to do with the wage theft they tolerate? Remember: when something goes wrong, look to the bosses first.

Federal judge grants immunity from further prosecution to the Sackler family -- until recently the owners of Purdue Pharma, now widely-hated as the corporation that got everyone hooked on OxyContin -- as part of a bankruptcy settlement. Naturally the Sacklers admit no wrongdoing -- because settlements can't even get that done anymore! -- and though they'll lose Purdue and $4.3 billion as part of the settlement, they'll still get to hold on to over $5 billion and they'll still be one of America's wealthiest families. Law and order! At least our Justice Department plans to seek a stay on the judge's ruling; how vigorously they'll seek it I can't say, but I'm old enough to remember when a Democratic Administration wouldn't even do that, because looking forward economic crisis free markets.

I'm not a fan of headlines like "John Roberts Has Lost Control of the Supreme Court," because why do we assume this? Why do we assume that he's actually been trying to "control" the Court? Why don't we imagine that the chaos we saw over their non-grant of the ACLU's emergency petition to stop the Texas abortion law from going into effect -- a ruling that doesn't even rate as a conservative argument! -- is the desired end result? Yeah, I know he excoriated the ruling in his own opinion, but that could just be part of the drama: he gets to act all principled about precedent, while he also knows our Court has enough far right-wingers now that it doesn't matter.

Finally, Paul Waldman, in writing that "The Harsh Truth of This Moment" is that "Republicans Understand Power" and "Democrats Do Not," has just about summed up the last 40 years of American politics. It's enough to make you think that even when the Democrats passed a COVID relief bill that was actually as good as the HEROES Act of 2020, they were just playing us -- they have no intention of doing anything else that could actually make America a more perfect union, and that bodes ill for the budget reconciliation bill they have to pass this month. I think the American people have something to say about that -- but we have to actually say it.

Around the table: bad people acting badly, part 922.

Massive data leak reveals that authoritarian governments have been using surveillance tech called Pegasus to spy on lawyers, journalists, and human rights activists. Naturally NSO, the corporation that makes Pegasus, insists it's only for terrorists and criminals (like, for example, a recently-murdered Mexican journalist?) and that it thoroughly vets its customers (like, for example, Hungary's ultra right-wing government?). Pegasus can extract emails, photos, and messages, plus it can turn on your microphone and camera and secretly record you; you won't be safe if you have an iPhone, or (even) if you use a good messaging app like Signal. Chances are very good you will be accidentally targeted, and chances are also very good you will be "accidentally" targeted.

Police arrest 100 protestors during the Women's Moral Monday March on Washington (D.C.), demanding, among other good works, the passage of the For the People Act and the restoration of the Voting Rights Act. They arrested them for obstructing First Street; imagine if right-wing governments got their way everywhere and some Trumphole could simply run them over without facing any criminal charges! Next time our "liberal" media insists that the For the People Act is "dead" because of the "politics," remember that people are putting their bodies on the line out there.

Greg Palast, America's Last Journalist, gives us a better history of Haiti in the wake of their President's assassination than our "liberal" media has. Contemporary "liberal" media accounts intone unctuously about Haiti's history of dictatorship and political upheaval, but the Western world (including us!) never forgave Haitians for winning independence from France in the early 1800s, and making Haiti pay French slaveowners for their "loss of property" is an evil we may never repair. Unexpected word choice there, "repair"? Maybe because I meant for you to think of the word reparations.

Matthew Yglesias thinks we should take a couple of steps to get more people vaccinated, like prod our FDA to formally approve the vaccines (right now they have Emergency Use Authorization) and tempt the recalcitrant with cash prizes. I think he's utterly wrong about the first item -- right-wingers aren't sincere when they say they won't get it because it's "not really approved"! -- but giving out cash prizes is an excellent idea. You remember how many banksters could get their workers to go along with all that robosigning just by giving out gift cards? It's demoralizing how easily some people can be bought! But if we can get them to vaccinate just by giving them $50 to blow at Bed, Bath, and Beyond, I won't shake my head too much.

Ho hum, "Shoplifting is Big News" to our "liberal" media but "Stealing Millions From Workers is Not," according to Steven Keehner at FAIR. Specifically, they couldn't get enough of a 21-second video of a guy cramming items from Walgreens into a garbage bag and then biking away, but they couldn't say very much at all about a wage theft lawsuit against, you guessed it, Walgreens resulting in a $4.5 million settlement. Again, we are reminded that stories about "crime waves" aren't just ginned-up drama, but they cover up real crime waves that damage us a lot more. You have to wonder why that is.

Finally, I'm sure some folks look at Sean Hannity suddenly telling everyone they have to get COVID vaccines and say "good on him for getting his people to get vaccinated" or even "I'm glad he's finally seen the light," but I won't do any of those things. "Just like we've been saying, please take COVID seriously"? That's some motherfucking gall, right there, coming from a guy who's been saying the exact opposite of "take COVID seriously" for the better part of a year, all so he could glorify his Personal Lord and Savior, Donald Trump. And most of the rest of his "news" channel has lately been doing the same thing -- telling you to get the vaccine and pretending they've been telling you that all along! They have no shame, and as such they deserve oblivion -- their names forgotten, their deeds unthinkable.

Around the table: in which we find the American people courageous, and the politicians cowardly and the media personalities decadent, as usual.

Surprise, surprise: a Politico/Morning Consult poll finds support for the American Jobs Plan actually ticks up when you mention the price tag. So if Americans aren't scared of spending a lot of money to make America greater, why are the politicians? Because the big corporations get in their ear all the time and drown us out, that's why. We just have to be louder. We'll do that shortly.

Facebook keeps Donald Trump banned from its platform -- but says the ban should never have been permanent and will revisit the matter in six months. Naturally right-wingers who don't read are whining about it, and if Facebook were a public utility, they might have a point. Of course I said might, and of course they'd never support actually making Facebook a public utility, and in any case Facebook is really a publishing house, even if loopholes in the law permit them to evade the responsibility publishing houses have. And publishing houses don't have to publish you! Otherwise they could never reject a manuscript, no matter how awful! Anyway, Donald Trump just started a blog, so nobody's trampling his rights.

President Biden rescinds Trump-era rule that would have allowed big corporations to classify more of their gig workers as "independent contractors." We should treat gig workers as employees, so they can earn a decent wage and enjoy overtime and worker safety protections; no 11th Commandment mandates otherwise. And if the stocks of pseudo-corporations like Uber and Lyft take a bit of a tumble, who cares? No one puts a gun to your head and forces you to be a shareholder. And no one has a "right" to get rich quick in the stock market. Gosh, I'm old enough to remember when "get rich quick" was something nasty you'd say.

A Public Integrity/AP/Univision report reveals that employers who steal your wages rarely get punished. And repeat offenders don't get punished that often, either, though, you know, you'd think they would. No, a prosecutor shouldn't use past offenses to mislead juries into convicting people of current crimes, but Jesus Mary and Joseph if you've been told not to steal your employee's wages, then you should be punished harder for doing it again and again. Biggest total non-surprise: if you're Black or Brown, you're more likely to get shafted.

When I read that "The Real History of Anglo-Saxons Undermines Racists’ Theories," I say well, of course history undermines racist theory, not just because the Anglo-Saxons were actually quite diverse, but because history always undermines ideology, and "racist theory" isn't theory per se, but merely the articulation of rage. I also say, gosh, what an understated headline, and not in a good way -- strikes me as a way of being "fair" to racist rageheads, not a way of saying you won't let them get under your skin. If you got all the facts, go ahead and flaunt them, that's what I say.

Finally, Tucker Carlson says that if colleges require their students to get the COVID vaccine, that means (due to some not-fully-articulated slippery-slope reasoning, I have to assume) that "(t)hey will have total power over your body and your mind forever." "(T)otal power," "forever," achieved through a single vaccine? Gosh, dramatic much? Right-wingers really have completely morphed into their worst stereotypes of liberals.

Action: concerning health care, immigration, fossil fuel funding, D.C. statehood, paycheck fairness, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare for All Act, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, the D.C. Admission Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act -- and tell them to reject the so-called Fair Access to Banking Act and revoke permits for the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. As Paul Craig Roberts, the father of Reaganomics, said many years ago, when the private sector screws up this badly (high prices, bad service, surprise bills, etc.) then our government has to step in. And Medicare works pretty damn well for our elderly, despite the fact that it's basically a high-risk pool which should constantly fail. Think how much better Medicare would work with all these healthy people in it! (How to pay for it? Easy: assess an employer-side payroll tax at about the amount they're already paying for private health insurance. They act like it just can't be done because they don't have the will to do it. Luckily, we do.)

Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2222, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act. What makes a great nation? Treating all people with the dignity and respect they deserve, and much as right-wingers want you to believe that everyone who wants to come here is a murdering raping drug-dealer, most of the folks who want to come here are a) good people and b) running from actual murdering raping drug-dealers. So H.R. 2222 would repeal mandatory detention for immigrants, prohibit solitary confinement, end our government's use of private prisons they refuse to hold to account, and ensuring all detainees get a hearing before an immigration judge. It really is well past time our government acted as civilized as we do.

Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 563, the so-called Fair Access to Banking Act. The bill would compel big banking corporations to fund the fossil fuel corporations they've avoided funding for the last couple of years, under popular pressure, of course. Ain't it just like a Republican to loudly insist that the "free" market is always right until it hits big fossil fuel donors? And then they make the "free" market do what they want! How conservative of them! And they've got some nerve talking about banks "discriminating" against fossil fuel corporations. Major anti-discrimination legislation (the Equality Act) stands before them and all they do is tell hysterical lies about it.

The Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 51/S. 51, the D.C. Admission Act. You know the arguments against D.C. statehood suck when Mob Boss Mitch calls statehood for D.C. "pure socialism." What does that even mean? (And how does it differ from "impure socialism"?) Statehood would actually increase Washington, D.C.'s independence -- it could get vaccine supplies a lot more easily, which is a big deal these days, and it could create its own National Guard, which it sure could have used on January 6! Don't brook any silliness about how "the Founders didn't want D.C. to be a state," lest we use that argument against Idaho, which achieved statehood in 1890, long after all the Founders were dead.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act. Because women deserve to make as much as men for the same work, dammit! Why do people resist this idea? (OK, I know why, but all the reasons are stupid.) Despite the Equal Pay Act of 1963, women still don't make a dollar for every dollar a man makes for doing the same work, but the Paycheck Fairness Act would make it easier for women to find out their bosses are paying them too little and then do something about it. And when Republicans tell you this bill will "just help out the trial lawyers," tell them we'd need fewer trial lawyers if bosses didn't try to get away with wage theft.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to introduce and pass legislation that would revoke all permits for Enbridge's notorious Line 3 pipeline. Line 3 would carry almost a million barrels of tar sands oil daily from southwestern Canada under the Mississippi River to northern Wisconsin. Does running an oil pipeline under the Mississippi sound like a good idea to you? Particularly when you recall that an Endbridge pipeline rupture in 2010 polluted some 40 square miles of the Kalamazoo watershed? Fuel burns once, but clean water is forever -- if we work to keep it.

Action: concerning taxing the rich, clean water, demilitarizing our police, paycheck fairness, corporate taxes, and whistleblower rewards.

Long story short: Tell your House Reps to pass the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, the WATER Act, the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act; also tell your Congressfolk to close big corporate tax loopholes and strengthen whistleblower rewards. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to get your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition links provided below.

H.R. 1459/S. 510, the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, would assess a tax on wealth over $50 million for the first time in America -- households and trusts worth more than $50 million would pay 2% on all their assets over $50 million (meaning the tax would leave their first $50 million alone -- but you know they'll whine about it nonetheless!) and then 3% on assets over $1 billion. Sen. Warren (D-MA) says it'll raise $300 billion annually, and given that billionaires alone have amassed another $1.3 trillion in wealth over this last pandemic year, really, this wealth tax ain't too much to ask of people who should be paying 91% of their income to Uncle Sam. The Americans for Tax Fairness Action Fund provides a petition.

H.R. 1352/S. 916, the WATER Act, would start rebuilding our water infrastructure, which would represent a solid investment in one of our most important natural resources, clean water, without which, it's safe to say, we'd have no decent health care in America at all. You can't wash or bathe or disinfect or sterilize with polluted water, after all! Not to mention getting the lead out of all our water pipes will create a lot of jobs for people! I guess Republicans will retort TEH DEFICITZ!!!!!!, but they didn't give one rat's hind quarter about when they were cutting taxes for the rich and for corporations, and whiners always have excuses to avoid doing the right thing. Food and Water Watch provides an email contact tool.

H.R. 1694, the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act, would limit transfer of military equipment from our Department of Defense to local police departments. I've said this many times: you don't need a drone or a grenade launcher to find murderers and drug dealers -- but you do "need" these things, apparently, to put down protests about your own brutality. Particularly if you're Donald Trump and you want to do a photo-op in front of a church with a Bible in your hand! Seriously, the fact that that moment didn't make 75 million Americans turn against him is our shame as Americans, although admittedly it's more their shame as Trump votaries. And just as we shouldn't try to turn police officers into social workers, we shouldn't turn them into soldiers, either. Restore the Fourth provides the email tool.

H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, now awaits a full House vote; the bill would, like its previous iterations, give women more tools to fight paycheck discrimination, which (despite the Equal Pay Act of 1965) still runs rampant in America, such that women make about 81 cents for every dollar a man makes, when it really should be a dollar for a dollar. The Paycheck Fairness Act would, among other things, prevent employers from disciplining workers for discussing their pay, since that's usually the only way employees find out they're getting shafted. I bet Republicans defend the "free speech" right of bosses to tell their employees what they can't talk about, but do we really want employers to be able to make their employees accomplices in their wage theft? Daily Kos provides the petition.

Did you know that big corporations can pay large amounts of money in class action settlements when they hurt people -- and then turn around and deduct those settlements from their taxes? Yes, this really happens, and it sure hampers us from being a law-and-order nation now, doesn't it? We generally regard punishments as more effective if they hurt, and don't think it's OK because the injured parties are still getting their money, because when corporations get to use their wrongdoing as an excuse to skimp on what they owe on their taxes, we all become injured parties, because that's money that ain't paying cops and ain't keeping the libraries running. So that $26 billion big pharmaceuticals are planning to pay for keeping good Americans addicted to opioids will wind up being yet another windfall -- for them. Penn PIRG provides the email tool, if you don't call your Congressfolk.

Finally, the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your House Reps to strengthen the whistleblower protections in the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement (or FIRREA) Act. Currently the law caps whistleblower rewards, which means more whistleblowers won't come forward, and the CARES Act just gave away a couple trillion bucks of our hard-earned taxpayer money -- quite a lot of "small business" money went to national restaurant chains! -- so we've got a more immediate incentive to root out corruption. Don't let your Tea Party uncle describe whistleblowing as a "way for scammers to make money," because whistleblowers go through absolute hell for years while the courts evaluate their complaint -- they usually never work in the same field again, and more than a few don't work at all. They deserve our support.

Around the table: the wheel turns.

I've been remiss in noting that we've scored a major foreign policy victory lately, after President Biden ended all logistical and military support for "offensive operations in the war in Yemen." It doesn't end the war, by any stretch of the imagination, but it does end our unconstitutional involvement therein. And with the UAE also making noises about getting out of this mess, we may one day be able to say we actually used our immense power for good -- by not using our immense power for evil.

One day after Smarmatic files its massive defamation lawsuit against Fox News and several of its "personalities" including Lou Dobbs, the Fox Business Channel cancels Mr. Dobbs's show. As you know, Mr. Dobbs passed along "election fraud" lies on his show like they were hot potatoes; Fox News pretends they planned this cancellation all along, but we know better, for the demises of Roger Ailes and a certain legendary 8pm blowhard remind us that nothing gets Fox News to move like a lawsuit. To think there was a time (the summer of 2008, to be precise) when it looked like Lou Dobbs could go either way! Then Barack Obama became President, and Mr. Dobbs got on the birther train, and that dream died.

On the occasion of Jeff Bezos stepping down as Amazon CEO, FAIR finds our "liberal" media too anxious to lionize him without mentioning that our Federal Trade Commission just caught Amazon stealing tips from delivery drivers and forced them to cough up nearly $62 million as restitution. We're generally too quick to call executives "self-made," not just because they generally get ahead on the backs of their workers, but because they too often get ahead by cheating those workers, as evidenced by the FTC settlement.

In a peripherally-related note, our National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) has ruled that Amazon can't require workers at its Bessemer, Alabama warehouse to vote in-person at a union election, which means workers can vote by mail. This increases chances that the Bessemer workers will vote in favor of organizing, and lest we attribute this ruling to Joe Biden's election, fairness forces me to concede that our NLRB has consistently ruled in favor of voting-by-mail in union elections throughout this pandemic, which began, contra what Fox News would like you to believe, under President Trump. As a side note, Amazon's union-busting tactics will piss you off -- even "stay friendly" looks less like an exhortation to workplace civility than a threat.

My Pillow CEO/martial law enthusiast Mike Lindell produces a two-hour documentary, confidently titled Absolute Proof, which is chock full of bogus "election fraud" claims. And apparently One America News Network has been running it a lot -- but with a disclaimer at the beginning saying this is all Mr. Lindell's "opinion." I doubt that disclaimer will save them from lawsuits, but at least we can observe the difference between the big bully on the block and the upstart -- when Fox News gets sued, they fire people, but if OANN got sued, they'd probably have to shut down.

Finally, what to make of the news that Rep. Lauren Boebert (Q-CO) paid off almost $20,000 in unpaid insurance-related liens on her infamous restaurant just a few weeks after claiming a little over $20,000 in campaign-related "mileage reimbursements." I suppose it is remotely possible these two events are completely unrelated, but I'd be a schmuck to accept that notion at face value, and the whole thing makes me think (once again!) that, even with the most strident right-wingers, the grift really is the point.

Around the table: concerning automation, corruption, wage theft, tax cuts for the rich, more tax cuts for the rich, and rogue ICE agents.

With all the anti-worker hysteria of ZOMG TEH AUTOMATIONZ WILL KILLZ ALL TEH JOBZ!!!!!, Neil Irwin at the New York Times highlights a number of very reasonable solutions we could implement to prevent such a job-ocalypse. These do not include a universal basic income, which right-wingers will use to destroy Medicare and Social Security -- they include work-sharing programs, codifying "maximum employment" policies in law, and shortening monopoly protections for trademarks and patents. But they should also include bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income, which really is the thing that will prevent executives from throwing living-breathing workers under the bus for their not-very-well-working machines.

Ho hum, Florida Gov. Rick Scott's decision to issue "emergency contracts" for hurricane cleanup will cost Florida taxpayers at least $28 million more than if he'd relied on existing contracts for hurricane cleanup. I am, of course, reminded of Florida Republican U.S. House Rep. Carlos Curbelo instructing us last August that doing hurricane cleanup the right way saves more money than doing it the quick way, but Gov. Scott spent valuable time and money doing the whole rebidding process over again. Why, that's something you'd do if you were trying to help out your cronies, not protect taxpayers from "special interests"! The POGO general counsel's statement that Mr. Scott's decision did not reflect "good business sense" should be a Democrat campaign ad, but then again, these are Democrats we're talking about.

Sam Pizzigati wonders why big corporations, which can afford not to commit wage theft, still do so. Decline in unions yes, attacks on regulation certainly, but also the simple fact that "(t)he outrageously generous rewards that have become so commonplace in Corporate America give the executives who run our top corporations an ongoing — and almost irresistible — incentive to behave outrageously." Best way to fight the problem at its source? "(E)nd" "eye-popping CEO pay packages." At the risk of beating a dead horse, bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income would be the best way to do that -- certainly better than the so-convoluted-they-must-be-designed-to-fail ways center-right Democrats have come up with over the years.

Remember when tax "reform" supporters in the White House claimed that their tax-cuts-for-the-rich-and-for-corporations would put an extra $4,000 in every family's bank account? Well, it's fair to ask where that "$4,000 Raise" went, as Leo Gerard does. Wages actually went down 0.1% for non-supervisory workers from May of last year to May of this year once you factor in inflation -- and I think you would only "forget" to factor in inflation when you're trying to lie about economic policy! -- while less than five percent of American workers got raises or bonuses. Most of that tax-cut largesse, as you probably recall, goes toward executive stock buybacks and higher dividends for shareholders. I may have mentioned this before, but you could run a lot of good ads along the "Where's My Tax Cut?" meme -- you could even send out bloodhounds to find it, like Mitch McConnell did in those ads for his first Senate campaign back in the day. But again, Democrats would have to run these ads, and they wouldn't be civil.

Greg LeRoy at CityLab informs us that workers at Amazon's second headquarters, wherever they build it, will very likely be paying their state taxes directly to their employer, since whichever states "wins" the bid to host HQ2 will be giving massive corporate welfare handouts to Amazon. Where is the state that will stand its ground and say no, you clowns already get to deduct your expenses, so further "deductions" would be immoral, since it would cheat present and future generations of the services they pay for with their taxes? I don't know, since 18 of 50 states are in the running, and maybe the other 32 would like to be, but can't be, for various reasons, possibly including that Amazon would consider a lot of those states "flyover country."

Finally, ICE agents detain 62-year-old man who has permanent resident status and has been in America for literally almost half a century -- over an 18-year-old domestic violence complaint for which the man had already completed probation and anger management. Even if you want to spend valuable time and money combing through all these records for the "bad" immigrants -- hell, even if you want to assert that domestic violence should carry a worse sentence than that! -- you have to respect our nation's traditions and laws enough to leave people alone who have already paid their debt to society as mandated by the court that convicted them. Then again, for a lot of Americans, generally the ones who complain about "law and order" the most, there really is no law and order; there is only whatever satisfies their prejudice and their rage.

Action: voting rights, wage theft, and internet freedom.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the idea of stationing armed Secret Service folks at polling places, then CREDO still helps you do that. Yes, the Homeland (sic) Security (sic) appropriations bill that came out of the House actually lets our government do that; the Senate could strip the provision from the bill, and thus prevent our government from intimidating voters. Sadly, some people actually do support such voter intimidation, and they're more likely to just come out and say that they're trying to keep the wrong people from voting. It does not seem to occur to these folks that once Democrats get the Presidency back, as they inevitably will, they'll be able to deploy armed personnel at the voting booth, too, and keep their perceived enemies from voting. Maybe they think the Rapture, or an American President-for-Life, will happen first.

Meanwhile, Good Jobs Nation helps you tell Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti to stop wage theft from truck drivers in his fair city. Port of L.A. trucking corporations pilfer about $850 million from truck drivers annually, from truck drivers who do not exactly swim in money to begin with. Mr. Garcetti might run for President in 2020, and none other than George Will plumped him up in a recent editorial, so you have every right to imagine that Mr. Garcetti is just another let's-all-get-along Democrat who'll let big corporations hurt whomever they like. Of course, if that's not really him --and I do prefer to believe the best about people! -- he could prove it by telling corporations to stop turning their employees into "independent contractors," which is their main tactic for stealing wages. After all, what good is power if you're not going to use it?

Finally, the FCC may have killed federal net neutrality regulations, but some two dozen city mayors have signed a pledge to refuse to do any municipal business with internet service-providing corporations unless they treat all their network traffic the same -- and, you know, a lot of people live in cities, enough that the Verizons and Comcasts of the world might find it too difficult to have one set of rules for urban areas and another for rural areas. Hence Free Press and a few other good-government organizations help you tell your city's Mayor to pledge not to do any of their city's business with corporations that won't protect our internet freedom. They can ignore our will and cause us pain all they want, but they'll have to answer to us -- whether that's in a court of law or the marketplace. And that's the way it ought to be in America.

Around the table: featuring the new face of the anti-Estate Tax movement and one of the many faces of the Trump deportation machine.

In Retro Report's "What History Can Teach Us About Mass Killings," we learn about folks in the 18th century Malaysian archipelago who would run amok, killing dozens of folks due to perceived indignities. And we also learn how the Malaysians eventually stopped the problem: by recognizing this behavior as a mental illness, by depriving the "amoker" of a "dramatic death," and by focusing on matters other than the amoker's grievances (which even the "liberal" media seems to get at times, by occasionally focusing coverage on the victims and not the shooter). Total time of video: 4 minutes, 7 seconds.

Department of Labor proposes rule rolling back regulations restricting "tip pooling" at workplaces, which would aim to distribute tips more evenly among many workers -- but the rule "forgets" to require that bosses actually distribute this money to their workers! Even if this evil rule were to provoke an 8-1 Supreme Court decision striking it down, I still imagine Justice Gorsuch opining in a dissent that of course our government didn't really intend to let bosses steal tips, so there was no reason for the Court to even hear the suit! Seriously, when I get action alerts about this, you'll get action alerts. President Trump don't care about nobody but other bosses; everyone else is shit to him.

Ho hum, Rep. Kristi Noem's story about how the Estate Tax hammered her family after her father's tragic farm accident has, in Chuck Collins's words, "oddities." Like how the Estate Tax doesn't actually apply when one spouse passes an estate down to another, or that the law at the time of her father's death would have allowed her mother to defer estate taxes for five years, or how Ms. Noem's family farm made millions of dollars in farm subsidies in the two decades after her father's death. Other matters also require explanation.

"Father of the Internet" tells FCC, on the eve of its nefarious plan to abolish internet freedom for good Americans, that they "don't understand how the internet works." But of course the FCC Commissioners understand how the internet works -- they just don't want it to work for people anymore; rather, they want it to work for their corporate cronies. These days, Occam's Razor compels us to point to malice rather than incompetence as the main reason things happen. In any case, you suppose the FCC rejected the 43-page comment signed by 200 internet pioneers because it "added no new facts" or made no "serious" legal argument?

Finally, and this is a real bummer, our government deports a Mexican couple who have a) lived in the U.S. for 30 years and b) raised three children, two of whom have graduated college. All so President Trump and his votaries can swing their balls at everyone. The good news? The more stories we see like this on the news, the closer Mr. Trump's approvals will reach their floor of 25%, and maybe even a milquetoast Democrat -- you know, like the one Democrats will do their dammdest to nominate! -- could beat him then.

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: and now, for another exciting round of "When's That Terrorist Attack Coming?"

It's been a while since I've reminded everyone that the secondary reason Hillary Clinton lost (i.e., after "because centrists don't inspire anybody") was widespread voter suppression at the state level, so here's Greg Palast to write about Voter ID laws and the Interstate Crosscheck database on the occasion of Mr. Trump creating a "Voter Integrity Commission." I wonder how many folks named Kris Kobach are on voter rolls across this great land of ours. I mean, any of them could be voting twice on Election Day, right? That is the logic behind Mr. Kobach's Interstate Crosscheck, which helps unscrupulous state officials deregister folks with similar names -- and they don't even check middle names!

Janine Jackson at FAIR reminds us that "Big Media Need to Fight for the Right to Protest." Even in these times, that's a big hope, but let us contemplate not just the recent arrest of a journalist at the West Virginia courthouse for the nefarious crime of asking HHS Secretary Price the same question a couple of times, and the conviction of a Code Pink activist for laughing, but also the dozens of folks still being charged with Rioting While Wearing Black on Mr. Trump's inauguration day.

From the Economic Policy Institute we learn that wage theft deprives minimum-wage workers of $15 billion annually. That's just minimum-wage workers, too! Now right-wingers will quickly respond TAHT PROVEZ TEH MINIMUM WAGEZ DON'TZ WORKZ!!!!!, a logic they never used back when abortion was illegal. Also, too, that's $15 billion that would likely have gone right back into the economy, and kept a lot of minimum wage workers from utilizing state and federal welfare programs, meaning that preventing wage theft also saves the taxpayer money.

Surprise, surprise, the Dakota Access pipeline springs its first leak, dumping out 84 gallons of crude oil in South Dakota. And it happened over a month ago! And it's not even lugging large amounts of oil yet! And dig the state environmental scientist calling it a "release"! But then, who cares about clean drinking water for 17 million heartland Americans? President Trump demands tribute!

Finally, speaking of The Great Man, there he is suggesting that maybe we shouldn't have press conferences anymore because it's impossible for his spokeshacks to achieve "perfect accuracy." I'd be more sympathetic if the "liberal" media were hitting his Administration on rounding errors, but over the reason Mr. Trump sent his bodyguard to fire Mr. Comey? Waaaaaaah! That's our President -- so much stronger than those loser liberals, yet too weak to account to a largely pliant national press. So when's that terrorist attack coming?

Around the table: tabulating important developments for working families.

Victoria Law at TruthOut tells us why the Department of Justice's decision to end its contracts with private prison corporations doesn't actually "end" private prisons, even at the federal level. The DOJ's decision has no influence on the Department of Homeland (sic) Security, which does a lot more business with private contractors than DOJ does -- now housing over 60 percent of its immigrant detainees with private corporations, including the Corrections Corporation of America, which was about to go belly-up before DHS started handing out these contracts. The DOJ statement that private prisons "simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs and resources" is worth repeating, but their reform remains a very small one.

California residents will vote this fall on Proposition 61, which would prevent state agencies from paying more for prescription drugs than the Veterans Administration does. Why is this important? Because the VA, unlike Medicare, can actually negotiate drug prices, and thus pays less for the drugs veterans need than Medicare and most state Medicaid agencies. If Prop 61 passes, California would become the first state to put a cap on drug prices -- and California, as you know, is a pretty big economy with a lot of people in it. The good news? Polling shows supermajority support for Prop 61. The bad news? That probably won't be true after big pharmaceutical corporations spend hundreds of millions of dollars fearmongering the people about it.

Richard Eskow at the OurFuture blog finds the "Fix the Debt" crowd is back to their old tricks. These include fearmongering and restricting options. An example of the former is the TV ad depicting disappearing bridges and teachers, as if the CEOs behind "Fix the Debt" don't already accomplish such disappearances with their income-redistribution-upward schemes, and an example of the latter is a "handy" calculator tool with which you can "figure out" how to "fix" Social Security which naturally makes you jump through hoops to actually try to raise revenues rather than merely cut benefits. At some point, such desperate arguments have to backfire on its progenitors. Doesn't it?

Northern California District Judge allows wage-theft lawsuit against McDonald's to proceed, even though McDonald's argues that franchise owners are responsible for any wage theft. I'm not thrilled with the "ostensible agency theory" (seems to me corporations either do right or wrong whether plaintiffs believe they are or not), but I'm far less thrilled with the whole point of the franchise model -- to avoid responsibility for wrongdoing, even if you're forcing franchise owners to do wrong.

Finally, domestic workers win important protections in Illinois with the passage of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. The bill essentially amends four other Illinois state laws so that domestic workers can enjoy their protections, which now include a minimum wage, sexual harassment and discrimination protections, and a day of rest out of every seven. I'll confess I'm a bit shocked that Gov. Rauner, as insensitive a man as has ever been elected Governor, signed the bill; perhaps he knows a lot of domestic workers.

Around the table: the Senate drops the ball on email privacy, and other stories.

Senate Judiciary Committee tables consideration of a Senate version of the Email Privacy Act after other Senators try to weigh it down with loopholes for law enforcement. Just like we told them not to do earlier this week! And, naturally, the bill got scuttled for BS reasons -- Sen. Cornyn wanted to attach an amendment expanding warrantless use of National Security Letters, because any old amendment to any old thing is OK these days, and a few government agencies protested that they'd be hamstrung since they don't have the authority to issue warrants in the first place, though these agencies do have the authority to issue subpoenas, which -- guess what! -- they hardly ever use. Don't worry, though; we'll be back.

USA Today investigation finds hundreds of folks who allege that Donald Trump never paid them for work performed. I suppose it's remotely possible that, as Mr. Trump says, these hundreds of contractors and mechanics and service providers just did a bad job -- we don't learn how many similar folks he has paid on time (though we don't have to take his daughter's word on that, either), nor do we know how much other moguls stiff their contractors. But some of the details -- wage theft settlements, going nuclear in lawsuits, failing to pay his own lawyers, criticizing contractors and then trying to hire them again -- are hard to ignore. And even Hillary Clinton should be able to boil all of this down into a devastating laugh line -- and if she manages to work "small businesses" into her routine, I'll be quite impressed.

MergerWatch issues report finding that states perform very little oversight over hospital mergers. I'm sure there are times when mergers do actually serve the public, but I'm also sure it's not true nearly as often as big hospital chains assimilate small local hospitals. When you find that services like neonatal intensive care get downsized pretty much because they're expensive, you won't be happy. And -- surprise, surprise! -- when religious hospital chains become the only game in town, you can't get some services at all, because they put the "conscience" of some executive over the conscience of patients.

Sam Pizzigati, writing in U.S. News and World Report, says we should stop waiting for shareholders to restrain executive pay and act on our own. I wasn't "waiting" for that per se -- I've always held that shareholder power is but one tool with which we might restrain runaway CEO pay -- but I, too, have been disappointed in shareholder power over the years. It'd be hard to underestimate citizens' disgust at runaway CEO pay, once they learn how bad it is -- recall that the Harvard Business Review reported last year that Americans think the CEO-to-worker ratio should be around 7:1, and think it's around 30:1 -- when it's actually well over 300:1.

Finally, Matt Taibbi also thinks the Democrats will "learn all the wrong lessons" from the Sanders campaign. Why? Because Democrats, like the rest of Washington, live in "a kind of incestuous myopia" where they only talk to each other, and (importantly) they, like the rest of Washington, abhor the people. When phones start ringing, we learn, staffers tune in to Fox News to figure out why. Clearly they need to be hearing more from us and less from rageheads. We'll keep working on that.

Action: the "war on terror," wage theft, and corporate tax avoidance.

Did you know our Department of Defense has been supporting Syrian Kurds fighting ISIS -- but our CIA has been supporting groups that have attacked those Kurds? It'd be funny, if it weren't murderously incompetent. (No, whether it's malicious or not, it's still incompetent.) Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell Congress to stop funding groups that attack Syrian Kurds. Even with a Republican-held Congress determined to do nothing until after the election, this is not as tall an order as it sounds -- CIA spending on jihadist attacks on Kurds is, as it happens, not a tremendously popular idea in Congress, and even the establishment "paper of record," the New York Times, now sounds open to the idea of Kurdish self-rule within Syria. It's hard to underestimate the significance of that pronouncement, even if the Times is pretty sure nothing will come of it -- when have they ever complained, for example, about how European powers drew African borders during the colonial era? So let's make this tall order into the people's order.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4763/S. 2697, the Wage Theft Prevention and Wage Recovery Act, then Fight for 15 helps you do that. Most employees experience wage theft in dribs and drabs -- tips not distributed, overtime hours counted as straight time, straight time hours disappearing from paychecks. But these dribs and drabs add up to real money for the corporate CEOs who put pressure on managers to get the work done "any way they can," rather than putting managers in position to do the best job they can, as is a CEO's duty. And they also add up to real money for workers weighing how much they can get away with not paying on their electric bill so they can pay their water bill. Sadly, our laws currently let corporations reimbursing workers they've stolen from at minimum wage, no matter what workers actually make -- and that's virtually an incentive to cheat. As any good conservative would tell you, we don't need our government giving corporations an incentive to bad behavior.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Obama's Treasury Department to close the loophole that allows corporations to become "foreign" corporations and evade their fair share of taxes, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. How did the Treasury Department get this power, you ask? Shouldn't Congress fix this loophole? Of course Congress should fix this loophole, but they have little enthusiasm for such tasks even when Democrats are running things. And Treasury got this power to make corporate inversion rules the same way the Executive branch always gets power from Congress: because Congress delegated it to the Executive branch through legislation. So if President Obama actually uses that power, that doesn't make him an AMURIKAN CAESAR!!!!! like Republicans always say he is. And where were they when George W. Bush was warrantlessly wiretapping American citizens? Cheering him on and calling his critics traitors, like always. Apparently Presidents are only "dictators" when they do something for the American people.

Action: wage theft, and pay discrimination.

H.R. 4763/S. 2697, the Wage Theft Prevention and Wage Recovery Act, would stiffen penalties for employers who steal pay from their workers, and would update laws to help workers recover that pay. Workers lose some $8.6 billion through wage theft annually, and wage theft can take many forms, from the obvious (paying less than the minimum wage, withholding tips, "forgetting" to pay overtime, making workers work off the clock) to the subtle (misclassifying employees as "independent contractors" or "overtime-exempt"). And while wage theft hits low-income workers the hardest (with about one in four paid less than minimum wage and three in four improperly denied overtime pay annually, according to at least one study from 2009), it can hit anyone, really. But our current laws only require employers who steal wages to compensate the workers they've stolen from at minimum wage, which is very much like an incentive to steal, and it is not our government's purpose to encourage lawlessness. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight wage theft.

Meanwhile, the National Women's Law Center helps you tell the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (or EEOC) to intensify its efforts to increase pay rate transparency, so that we can all better fight wage discrimination, whether based on sex, race, or other factors. Why? I'll let the NWLC's email missive explain: "Lilly Ledbetter is famous today for the equal pay bill that bears her name. But when she worked at a Goodyear Tire plant, she had no idea she was being paid unfairly -- until she was slipped an anonymous note. The fight against pay discrimination cannot rely on slipped notes." Certainly it would be better if the fight against pay discrimination relied on good data! Large employers must report to the EEOC the number of women folks of color they employ in various positions; now the EEOC has proposed making those employers report on those workers' pay, as well. Naturally big corporations don't want to do it, because paperwork and red tape and Big Gummint, but you're right to wonder if they have something to hide. Remember that if they do, they're hiding it from us.