Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning health care, redistricting, and surveillance.

Sen. Warren (D-MA) has introduced a bill called the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act (Congress.gov has no bill number as of this writing), which would allow our government to manufacture generic versions of any patented drug. If you call that "socialism," please consider that actual socialism would more likely entail our government manufacturing all the drugs, but Ms. Warren's bill would only allow federal manufacture of generics under certain circumstances, such as absurdly high prices, lack of competition, or shortages, and none of these circumstances are shining examples of free market efficiency, are they? People want our government to protect us from the things that hurt and kill us, and the best our opponents can do is squeal SOSHULIZMZ!!!!! whenever we propose making our government do just that? Thus we should call our Reps and Senators and tell them to support better drug policy by passing the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Fair Districts PA helps you tell your state Assemblyfolk to reform the rules by which they consider legislation. We know these rules need reform, because House state Government Committee Chair Daryl Metcalfe (E-12) seemed to spend the entire spring gutting actually-bipartisan redistricting reform bills in 2018 once they got to his committee -- why, one of those bills had the support of more than half of the House, meaning that, well, if it'd come to a vote, it would have passed! I know right-wingers think (and might even say, since these are interesting times!) that Committee heads should have the power to gut bills at will, because what do us little people know about governing? But if, like me, you think "little people" is a disgusting epithet, and if, like me, you think us "little people" actually do know a lot, you'll find arguments for reform more convincing.

Finally, Amazon aims to get a contract from our Pentagon to build a "weapon of unprecedented surveillance and power," called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure. (Yes, the acronym of that weapon's name is JEDI, which suggests that its namers have literally no idea what Jedis stood for in the Star Wars films.) JEDI would vastly increase our military's ability to share and sift through surveillance information, using "artificial intelligence," which doesn't impress you if you've found, as I have, that autocorrect incorrectly anticipates what you're about to type nearly 100% of the time. And if you're tempted to say if Amazon doesn't build it, someone else will, recall that Amazon has already collected so, so much data on Americans that it could quite easily correlate with DoD surveillance information. Luckily for us, Amazon employees seem to have some sway within their corporation, so Roots Action helps you tell Amazon employees to pressure their management to bow out of the JEDI bidding.

(Posting has been light for a while, and will remain light until the new year. The main reason for that? I'm putting together another Penny Rants volume for release in mid- to late February. I know what you're saying to yourself: self, didn't he just put out a second Penny Rants volume last month? Why, yes, yes I did -- and soon I'll put out a third one, covering the last two very, very interesting years. So be on the lookout for that, and in the meantime, continue to enjoy the holidays and have a safe and happy new year.)

Penny rants for Sunday, December 23, 2018: concerning veterans' health care, right-wing drama, and "political correctness."

You remember when long wait times at the Veterans Administration were all over the news? And you remember how right-wingers said privatizing the VA would solve the problem? Well, surprise, surprise, a ProPublica/Politifact investigation finds the privatized part of the VA hemorrhaging money and subjecting our veterans to, guess what, longer wait times. Well, that's what happens when private health insurance corporations charge close to $300 for referrals! And dig one of the privatizers suggesting you calculate their overhead using "an average cost" rather than total costs! You know, like right-wingers tell you to calculate the benefits from their tax-cuts-for-the-rich based on an "average tax cut" that sure ain't making its way into your bank account. Maybe we should spend less on corporate welfare and more on soldiers' health care? Maybe we should stop making our soldiers fight stupid wars so they won't need so much health care in the first place? If you think these are big asks, well, that's not the attitude that abolished slavery.

You may have heard that our President has stopped following Ann Coulter on Twitter after she criticized him for (momentarily!) caving on his desired border wall funding, and you may have also heard that our President's beloved Fox and Friends hosts slammed him for announcing that our military will pull out of Syria, so before we go any further, let's all take a deep breath and remind ourselves that this is all drama, and bad drama at that. I mean, these aren't the kind of pissing matches that even make for good reality show drama, if such a thing can be said to exist. Right-wingers stage these "disagreements" to look "independent," so that when you accuse them of marching in jackboot lockstep agreement, as they do, they can point to that one time one of them yelled at another and hope you momentarily forget that one counterexample doesn't obliterate all trends. And, really, how "independent" can you be if you're coming at our President because he's not nativist enough, or not enough of a warmongerer?

"Liberal" media poll finds a majority of Americans oppose our nation becoming more "politically correct." So Americans oppose right-wingers constantly having swordfights over who's more conservative, or Nazi wannabes demanding "safe spaces" for their racism or demanding that everyone call them "white nationalists" instead of racists? Apparently not -- Americans believe that "there are too many things people can't say anymore," presumably about women and people of color, since the article insists that Democrats had better heed this poll. But folks losing their jobs over what they say at work is not exactly a new thing, since our First Amendment protects you from your government and not so much from your employer, and if folks really feel oppressed at the prospect of being shamed by their fellow-Americans, all I can say is waaaaaaaaaah. And I can't shake the feeling that if this poll had asked if Americans should be more sensitive to what other Americans go through just because they're women or people of color, it would have found a majority favored that, too.

Action: concerning health care, nativism, and pollution.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support real health insurance reform in America by passing legislation expanding Medicare to all Americans. The health insurance industry won't like it, of course, but they've bollocksed up health care so badly in America that tens of millions of Americans still don't have health insurance, meaning they skip visits to the doctor because they can't pay for them, meaning some of them die. And if a single-payer health insurance system brings down health care costs everywhere else in the world, there's no reason it won't do the same here. Oh, I know there are "reasons," but they aren't good reasons -- whining about TEH 34 TRILLYUNZ!!!! a Medicare-for-All system would cost over the next decade, for example, makes no sense in a nation where we're going to spend $49 trillion on health care costs over the next decade. So let's take control of our health care system and get better results for less.

Meanwhile, Win Without War helps you tell your Senators to reject our Administration's nomination of Heather Nauert as U.N. Ambassador. I mean, if we labored to keep John Bolton out of that job, why would we want Heather Nauert? And should a nominee's main qualification be that she makes her predecessor look better? Ms. Nauert used to work for Fox News, where she (surprise!) routinely attacked immigrants and Muslims, and she's spent the last 18 months as a State Department spokeshack. Clearly our President has fast-tracked her because he likes how she talks! But, frankly, we shouldn't be sending nativists or nativist-wannabes to the U.N. I mean, that seems self-evident, doesn't it? Maybe our Senators will grill her and expose her unfitness for the job, but they didn't exactly stop Ms. DeVos's nomination; is it too much to ask that our Senators at least expose their unfitness for their own jobs if they can't stop this nomination?

Finally, with the impending resignation of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Senators to demand a new Interior Secretary who will actually protect public lands and not rush to sell them off to big corporations. As seems to happen a lot with this Administration, Mr. Zinke got a lot of notoriety for his taxpayer-funded trips and his profligate spending (remember the $140,000 door? Good times!), but he also did more palpable harm as Interior Secretary, by scaling back national monuments, auctioning off public lands to corporate polluters, and rolling back protections for threatened species. And his number two man, former fossil fuel lobbyist David Bernhardt, sure as hell won't do any better, even if he doesn't literally ride into his first day on the job on a horse, like Mr. Zinke did. Mr. Bernhardt has never met a regulation he didn't consider a burden, and that's not the attitude that'll protect our public lands.

Action: concerning mandatory minimums, conservation, and William Barr.

Given that Senate Majority Leader McConnell (E-KY) has graciously allowed the Senate to vote on S. 3649, the FIRST STEP Act, now's a very good time to let the Drug Policy Alliance help you tell your Reps and Senators to support criminal justice reform by passing it. S. 3649 isn't everything we want, etc., but it would reduce some mandatory minimums, expand the "safety valve" for judges to grant sentences below mandatory minimums, and prevent prosecutors from heaping on longer sentences for firearm possession during first offenses. All of these things will help us actually rehabilitate prisoners (which is what civilized people do!), rather than simply heap more punishments on people in the vain hope that we'll look tougher. Sen. Cotton (E-AK) will try to sabotage the bill with amendments that would gut the bill, because he's so "tough," I guess. But how about regular Americans have a say here, rather than just law-and-order peacocks?

Meanwhile, Congress has also let the Land and Water Conservation Fund expire, as of September 30, so Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to support conservation efforts by reauthorizing the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Do not brook any absurd complaints from your Congressfolk about "fiscal responsibility" or hysterical hand-wringing about how it'll be "paid for," because it's their job to know that taxes don't actually fund the LWCF; royalties from oil and gas drilling do. They can't believe that "fiscal responsibility" is all about letting oil and gas drilling corporations get away with paying less money in royalties to the American taxpayer, can they? Well, our Congressfolk do believe a lot of strange things -- one of them apparently being that you can just let popular and well-running programs expire without suffering any consequences. They sure are lucky we're here to remind them of the consequences.

Finally, our President has nominated former George H.W. Bush-era Attorney General William Barr to succeed former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and if you're thinking a Bush-era Attorney General would be an improvement over Mr. Sessions or Mr. Whittaker, well, William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut reminds you that Mr. Barr did not exactly do yeoman work for the senior Mr. Bush. And he not only comes from an era that prescribed more punishment as the solution to every criminal justice problem, he's never left it! Even worse, he has long been an adherent of the notion that the President Must Always Be Obeyed, just like Supreme Court Justices Alito and Kavanaugh. Gosh, listen to such men and you'd never know our Founders rebelled against exactly the sort of fellow who thought he was right all the time and everyone had to bend to his will! So the Drug Policy Alliance helps youtell your Senators to reject the nomination of Mr. Barr as Attorney General.

Around the table: another net neutrality death, another Republican pretending to be human, and other sideshows.

You probably didn't hear about this, but the FCC just reclassified text messaging as a Title I "information service" versus a Title II "communications service," meaning that big telephone corporations will now be able to censor, block, or throttle your text messages if they like. Naturally the FCC claims it's all about preventing "spam," but that's utter BS, because what are they doing about the actual problem of spam phone calls? And don't think this won't happen to you, because corporations have been blocking text messages from political activist groups while screaming "controversy" for years now.

Color me unimpressed that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) now makes the same complaints about the 2017 tax "reform" that the rest of us do -- particularly that it enables stock buybacks over worker raises. He voted for the damn thing, after all, and all he did at the time was turn the bill's 15-percentage-point corporate tax rate cut into a 14-point cut. And his proposed solutions (taxing stock buybacks at the dividend tax rate! Instead of, heaven forfend, outlawing stock buybacks like we did until 1982!) sound positively Clintonian in their capacity to a) lull voters to sleep and b) utterly fail to solve the problem. Marco Rubio: he gives empty suits a bad name.

So what's the worst thing about outgoing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signing legislation to curb the power of the incoming Democrat Governor and Attorney General? That state Republicans will get even more power to nullify clean air and clean water regulations? That early voting will get curtailed again even though courts have struck similar efforts down before? That Mr. Walker resorted to a Venn diagram to "prove" the bill doesn't hurt the incoming Governor all that much? That it lets state Republican legislators waste taxpayer money on private lawyers when they get sued? Or that Gov. Walker made sure he gave $28 million more in corporate welfare to Kimberly-Clark (which has, as you know, already laid off about one out of every eight of its workers in February, and after getting all that corporate welfare from the federal tax "reform" bill, no less) the day before signing a bill that would have prevented him from doing that? It's hard to know where to start. Indeed, it's almost like that's the idea.

William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut surveys some of the recent damage this Administration has done to veterans and refugees and concludes that it all "serves only as yet another bowlful of blood spooned to Trump’s execrable base." But, sadly, this base has been around for decades -- you remember all those "war on terror" voters and Tea Partiers and "Regulation Nation" teeth-gnashers and "All Lives Matter" squealers? Well, these are all the same people. And what really made them? A government of malicious Republicans and weak Democrats that funnels taxpayer money to its cronies and does little other than give us the back of its hand. Really, given how terrible our government has been over the last 40-odd years, we should take credit as Americans for not having more crazy people.

I have to dig into my "Stuff I Should Never Bother With" file to note that when right-wingers are passing around memes on social media attributing a quotation to Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) that she did not say because that quotation's been around since before she was born, they're admitting that they can't beat you any other way than by just lying about you. The good news? Right-wingers have apparently decided they can't beat Ms. Ocasio-Cortez any other way than to lie about her before she has even served one minute in Congress.

Finally, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke will, per one of our President's ubiquitous tweets, be leaving his post at the end of the year. Naturally he says he just can't "justify spending thousands of dollars defending myself and my family against false allegations," which I presume include the half-dozen open investigations of his work and conduct, including one referred to our Justice Department. Well, he rode into Interior on a horse, and it looks like he's going out a horse's ass. (And seriously, does our President really not understand that bad actions attract bad press?)

Around the table: in which even the good news is bad news (and some of the bad news is, at least, indifferent news).

Federal District Court Judge declares the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional -- but denies the state of Texas's request for an injunction, meaning that his declaration has, essentially, no legal force at present. Why, you might be tempted to call that drama! In the unlikely event our Supreme Court upholds this decision -- four Justices won't, and it's probably occurred to Chief Justice Roberts that a mandate tax that's currently zero could conceivably be raised by Congress tomorrow and thus render the decision nonsensical -- there's still Medicare-for-All, you know, which makes all these legal questions moot. Unless the five hard right-wingers on our Supreme Court now think Medicare is unconstitutional, that is.

On the other hand, this is probably a nothingburger, too: House passes a new Farm Bill with an irrelevant legislative rider preventing the House from taking up a War Powers resolution relating to the war on Yemen -- one day before the Senate, in a 56-41 vote, approves a War Powers resolution aiming to stop our involvement in that war. OK, maybe not a complete nothingburger, since even getting the Senate to express disapproval of our continued involvement in the Saudi/UAE war against Yemen has taken years, but it does anger a man that our "leaders" constantly shit all over everything. And I sure hope anyone running against the Senators who changed their votes for this Senate resolution will note that they only voted for it when it wouldn't make a difference.

Ho hum, Frank Clemente at the Our Future blog reminds us that "The GOP Tax Bill is Creating Jobs -- Just Not in the U.S." The 2017 tax "reform" "charges corporations just half the tax rate on foreign profits that it charges on domestic earnings" and thus "(i)t’s hard to imagine a stronger lure for corporations to pack up their plant and equipment and ship them offshore." I might not have been so understated. As an aside, it's always good to be reminded that our Administration did explicitly promise that every family would get a $4,000 raise from the tax "reform," and that corporations have spent 117 times as much money on stock buybacks as on worker pay raises.

Chalmers University of Technology study suggests that growing organic food will actually exacerbate climate change. How? Because organic farming doesn't pump out the same yields as conventional farming, thus requiring more land, leading to deforestation, which vastly increases carbon emissions. Sounds reasonable, right? But the study's authors seem to imagine a world in which a) any government would mandate that all farming be done organically and b) only large producers will do any farming. I can't imagine that folks who grow their own food organically won't be helping reduce climate change simply by relying less on industrial farming for their food needs. And those who complain that we'll never make that world? Well, that's not the attitude that ended slavery.

From the "No, Somebody Actually Does Gotta Say It" file: Benjamin Barber at Facing South reminds us that the ongoing imbroglio over the election in North Carolina's 9th U.S. House district reveals that the real "election fraud" threat seems to come from the right-wingers who whine about it the most. Unreturned absentee ballots that just so happen to come disproportionately from counties with larger minority populations -- gosh, who woulda thunk it? But please, right-wingers, keep using that Interstate Crosscheck database that unconstitutionally deregisters voters without checking if voters with the same first and last names in different states even have the same middle names.

Finally, after Sen. McConnell (E-KY) finally allows a vote on a criminal justice reform bill, Carl Hulse at the New York Times gazes in apparent open-mouthed wonder at just how many actors had to pressure Mr. McConnell to hold a vote on the bill. Your jaw will hit the floor, too, when you read that Mr. McConnell actually brought up Willie Horton back in 2016 in the process of telling his caucus the bill wouldn't come up then. Let's avoid calling Mr. McConnell a "law-and-order Republican," though -- recall how he moved mountains to get Don Blankenship's coal corporation off the hook after it polluted the drinking water of 27,000 good Kentuckians with a massive slurry spill, and you'll be reminded that, for our leaders, "law and order" is only for us "little people."

Around the table: Jesus Mary and Joseph not another "unity ticket," and other absurdities.

Our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau caught Wells Fargo charging much higher fees to students than its competitors -- and then promptly buried the report. Because how can we ever punish usurers and create jobs at the same time? Seriously, this is what our Administration thinks -- or wants you to think.

ProPublica and The Atlantic describe how eight years of Congressional budget-cutting has "gutted" our Internal Revenue Service. If you're of the mind that this is a good thing, you must be alright with corporations refusing to pay what they owe, and you must also be alright with working families paying more for roads and bridges and cops and libraries, since that's what happens when the folks at the top don't pay their fair share. What do you call a liberal? A conservative who just bottomed out over a pothole.

Kara Mannor at TruthOut reminds us that the Americans with Disabilities Act (or ADA) is not the legacy of the late President George H.W. Bush (who signed it into law) but rather the legacy of all the activists who fought for it. You could say the same of just about every good thing we've ever done as Americans -- that the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, for example, aren't a Lyndon Johnson "legacy" but a legacy of those who fought for them. Read the whole article, though, which takes us all the way back to that time, 90 years ago, when governments tended to classify disabled folks as "unemployable."

The government of Egypt is apparently trying to stop the sale of yellow vests, so they don't have a yellow vest protest movement like other nations do now. Well, it's a good thing there are literally no other articles of clothing that could possibly be repurposed into a mass movement against neoliberal economic policy! A government that must resort to banning yellow vests is a government that's lost all the arguments on the merits. And maybe, you know, not giving people the back of your hand all the time is a better way of forestalling protests.

Fast food corporation McDonald's pledges to curb antibiotic abuse in its beef by 2020. And a crapload of spokeshacks rush forward to say "but we don't want to stop using antibiotics on sick animals," when literally no one in America has called for that. But that's what people do when they've lost the argument -- they don't just invent opponents, they invent opposing arguments. And when four out of every five antibiotics in America go to nominally healthy feed animals to make them meatier and help them endure squalid living conditions, we know it's not an issue of "treating sick animals" per se.

Finally, I saved the biggest slab of stupid for last: no no no we should not fantasize about Joe Biden running on a "unity ticket" with Mitt Freaking Romney or any of the other far right-wingers our media calls "moderates" merely because they don't actually drag their knuckles on the ground. How many times must I tell these pimps! A ticket with a centrist Democrat and a right-wing Republican is not a unity ticket -- it leaves out the majority of Americans who want Medicare-for-All health insurance, protection from financial predators, and cleaner air and water. And sacrifices all of that to the altar of "entitlement reform," though our author (an advisor to at least five famous Republican politicians, how about that!) has the sense not to call it that. (Hate to pile on, but Ralph Nader is only from the "lunatic fringe" if you think product safety is the "lunatic fringe," and in no way shape or form was Jerry Brown a "front-runner" for the 1992 Democratic Presidential nomination.)

Action: concerning factory farm waste and high drug prices.

Factory farms sure do pump out the pollution, as anyone who drives by one with the windows down can tell you, but of course our Administration's EPA would like to exempt factory farms from having to report the toxic emissions from their waste. If you're saying well of course animal poop has toxic emissions!, you'll want to consider that factory farms pack a lot of animals into a very small space, which of course concentrates both animal waste and the toxic emissions therefrom, such that factory farm workers occasionally die if they spend too much time in a confined space with too much manure. Ask yourself: should anyone die from breathing in too much poop smell? And don't the folks who live nearby deserve to know what they're breathing? The Sierra Club helps you tell our EPA to require that factory farms disclose the pollution they pump into our air.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that the price of insulin has gone up about 1,000 percent over the last 25 years, to the point where diabetics are actually rationing their insulin (which, you know, results in death for some diabetics!), so Emily Phelps has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell Novo Nordisk, one of the worst offenders among insulin-selling corporations, lower the price of its insulin. You know the drill: insulin is a life-saving medicine and thus its price absolutely positively shouldn't go up 64% over four years when inflation as a whole has only gone up seven percent during that time. Novo Nordisk has actually pledged to limit their insulin price-inflation to single digits annually, but then they raised the price of insulin six percent in just two months. I guess greed is a hard habit to break. Novo Nordisk sure is lucky to have folks like us around to help them break it.

Around the table: the computer is to blame! And other follies.

Philadelphia City Council passes a vigorous fair scheduling law, mandating that larger employers give workers 10 days' notice of their upcoming work schedule. This bill takes aim at the many big chains operating in the city, not small businesses -- unless folks think a "small business" has 30 stores and 250 employees. Hopefully our NLRB gets the message we've been sending them about not letting big corporations pretend to be small businesses by pretending their franchises are independent "small businesses."

Wells Fargo improperly denies loan modification requests to almost 900 people, forecloses on nearly 550 of them, and then blames a "computer glitch" for all the trouble. This all sounds eerily like that scam where you fall behind on your mortgage payments, your bankster says they might be able to modify your mortgage, and while you're waiting for their decision, they take your home from you. Well, Wells Fargo tried blaming its employees in their account-opening scam, so now they're blaming their computers. And they say corporations don't learn from their mistakes!

Study finds that between 65,000 and 115,000 New York City residents would be pushed into poverty if our Administration forges ahead with its plan to widen the definition of "public charge" to include just about anyone who ever got public assistance, ever. These would be the folks who would avoid getting assistance via food stamps or Medicaid so that their later attempts at, say, securing a green card wouldn't go awry. But this story has a happy ending: our Presidents' many votaries get to diddle their rage glands over TEH IMMIGRANTZ GETTINGZ ALL TEH THINGZ!!!!!

Anthropologists warn us to avoid stereotyping Amish attitudes toward our environment. We might be tempted to think of them as natural environmentalists because they "live simply" or "live in nature," but Amish folks tend to regard nature as "a manifestation of God’s handiwork, created for the benefit of humans," and as something "temporary" and not necessarily to be regulated by our government. Even the most "temporary" of things could last lifetimes, of course, and the Amish man who pooh-poohs biodiversity by saying the Amish "privilege humans" posits the only alternative as "we should just open the doors and let in all the flies," when surely Creation offers us more diverse options than that. It sure does seem they're taking it in the ear from Big Ag corporations as much as every other small farmer, though.

Finally, in case you were wondering why Vice President Pence's Chief of Staff, Nick Ayers, declined to take the same job with our President Who's So Desperate to Finally Once and For All Get Rid of John Kelly, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reminds us that Mr. Ayers is a very wealthy man who made most of his millions in dark money advertising. If Mr. Ayers has indeed rejected our President's job offer so he can run a dark money group ostensibly dedicated to our President's re-election, as at least one news outlet has said, I guess that would explain our President's relatively sanguine public reaction, for whom does the grifter admire but another grifter?

Action: concerning free speech and pollution.

Google is, as we speak, trying to put together a search engine that'll let China block its citizens from searching for information about human rights abuses! What is the Chinese government afraid of? That their citizens will discover their government throws dissidents in jail on BS charges and detains hundreds of thousands of Muslims in "re-education camps"? I know what Google's afraid of, though: the Big Stick of Bad PR, which you can help wield, as Sum of Us helps you tell Google to abandon its plans to help the Chinese government censor its citizens' web searches. This ain't small potatoes stuff: information now travels faster than it ever has, and though Will Rogers might protest that this only means lies travel faster than they ever have, I prefer a world in which we have more of a fighting chance to learn the truth. And I want good Chinese citizens to have that fighting chance, too.

Meanwhile, our Administration has announced plans to gut Obama-era standards limiting carbon pollution from newly-constructed coal plants, not long after announcing plans to gut Obama-era standards limiting methane emissions from oil and gas drilling corporations. Remember when we fought to get carbon emissions standards applied to already-existing power plants, not just new ones? Well, it's a new day, one where our EPA doesn't care about the air you breathe and the water you drink; they now only care about ensuring that executives of dying industries (and coal surely is dying) keep raking in unearned dough. Hence the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our EPA to reject its own plans to put polluters first. When will we have a government that values its real bosses, the American people, more than it values corporate bosses? Only when we demand it and fight for it.

Action: concerning free speech and climate change.

It's the holiday season here in America, and what does that mean? It means Congress will try to attach all manner of offensive legislation to must-pass budgeting bills, that's what! And by attaching the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, Congress aims to do some truly bipartisan evil! Here as elsewhere, of course, "bipartisan" doesn't mean "broadly popular or useful," but just some fecal slab elites from both parties happen to support. The Israel Anti-Boycott Act, as you may recall, would (in its own words!) "prohibit() any U.S. person engaged interstate or foreign commerce" from participating in any foreign- or international organization-led boycott against Israel. That should strike you as unconstitutional, and it should also strike you as unpopular, since they're trying to sneak it through without debate. So the Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject making the Israel Anti-Boycott Act a part of year-end spending legislation.

Meanwhile, our Administration released its National Climate Assessment last Friday, an Assessment which said that doing nothing about climate change would cost good Americans half a trillion dollars annually in health care costs and storm rebuilding costs and the like. And how much coverage did our major news networks give it? Rather little -- but hey, it's not like it related to our survival as a species or anything. It's all about 75-degree Christmases! You can almost sympathize with our major news organs' unwillingness to face something that could cause the annihilation of humanity, except that, well, our major news organs are supposed to lead. And you know, back in the day, we wouldn't be sitting around moping about climate change -- we would be resolving to kick its ass. So Public Citizen helps you tell the big news corporations to cover climate change a whole lot better than they've been doing.

Action: concerning war on Yemen, spoof phone calls, and law and order.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation sponsors a toll-free number, 1.833.STOP.WAR (or 1.833.786.7927), with which you may call your Senators and tell them to pass S.J.Res. 54, which would end our participation in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen (and thus also the near-famine conditions therein). CIA chief Gina Haspel did brief a few Senators on the CIA's findings in re the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khasshogi, and, well, let's just say even our Republican Senators were loathe to toe the Administration line that there's no "smoking gun" linking the Saudi crown prince to the murder (Sen. Graham even said there was a "smoking saw," referring to the bone saw that carved up Mr. Khasshogi's body). Still, even the most welcome Republican skepticism doesn't translate into action very often -- Sen. Corker (R-TN) still says he might go for an amendment that would essentially gut the bill and turn it into something else. A phone call to your Senators could help forestall such a catastrophe.

Meanwhile, did you know professional phone spammers are able to "spoof" phone numbers to make it look like your bank or your utility provider is calling you? You can easily imagine the problems that would cause! But this is America, where we find solutions to problems, and thus Consumer Reports helps you tell our FCC to require phone corporations to implement technology that would confirm a call actually comes from the number it claims to come from. I'm old enough to remember when Michael Powell's FCC loosened media consolidation rules but also let folks move their phone number from one service provider to another for the first time; is it too much to ask that our current FCC also have a vestige of real conservatism left in them? I mean, fighting ripoff artists used to be a conservative cause. Sadly, today's "conservatives" tend to defend the ripoff artists -- and that's why we fight.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Greyhound Buses to stop letting Border Patrol agents to board their buses and search passengers without a warrant, then Color of Change still helps you do that. This is all pretty simple: produce the warrant, and Greyhound should cooperate, but if you can't get a warrant because you're going on a fishing expedition, nobody has the obligation to enable you. When law enforcement says it's too tough to catch criminals, we should remind them that our Founders deliberately created a Constitution that made it tough to catch criminals. Depriving someone of their freedom or their property, after all, is really something we ought to make sure we get right. Of course, folks who live in a state of euphoric rage over TEH ILLEGULZ TAKINGZ TEH JOBZ AND KILLINGZ TEH PEEPULZ!!!! are not necessarily receptive to this message. But our ministry isn't for them -- it's for the reasonable. And the reasonable outnumber the crazy in America.

Around the table: in which we begin to calculate what public schools lose to corporate welfare.

Our Administration declares its goal of ending subsidies for electric cars and renewable energy. This Administration's severe animus toward renewable energy stands in stark opposition to the people's will -- regular Americans probably support renewable energy to about the same degree they opposed "free" trade agreements in 2016, and how did this President come to power? By opposing "free" trade agreements. The good news? That suggests that the next President could easily come to power by bear-hugging renewable energy.

A Good Jobs First study estimates that public schools across America lose nearly $2 billion annually to "economic development tax incentives granted to corporations," i.e., i.e., corporate welfare. The bad news? The real number is almost certainly higher, as more than a few state and local governments are not following the law and reporting their corporate property tax breaks -- which, as you know, directly affect public school funding like all other property taxes do. The good news? At least we know what we know. Hell, some enterprising Democrat might even use it in campaign ads. A man can dream.

Washington head coach Jay Gruden, who has now lost two quarterbacks to broken legs this year, says he's not likely to sign former 49ers QB/police brutality protestor Colin Kaepernick, suggesting he might have been more inclined to sign Mr. Kaepernick if it were week one and if his "skill set" were a bit different. How do we know that's utter BS? Because Mr. Gruden's current starting QB has been there a month -- and, perhaps more importantly, because his current starting QB is Mark Freaking Sanchez Who Has No Skill Set. Q.E.D., pimps!

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is apparently "laying the groundwork to launch a bigger Presidential campaign than his first," which is an awful lot like saying he didn't win the primary in 2016 because raising over $200 million didn't make him big enough. Mr. Sanders has been going around the country stumping for other candidates and debating anyone who'll take him on, so another Presidential run sure wouldn't be a shock. I just hope by "bigger" he doesn't mean "with a lot more Democratic consultants," because no one snatches defeat from the jaws of victory like the Democrat consultant class.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has told "close allies" he will not run for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2020. I had fallen asleep even before the part where he followed up two terms as Governor with a tenure at Bain Capital. You remember Bain Capital, that stick Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney over the head with in 2012? And Mr. Patrick's supporters, by the way, are dead wrong that his background as a prosecutor and a businessman would "blunt some Republican attacks." We now have 16 years of data telling us that no amount of pretending to be (or being like) a right-winger ever blunts attacks from right-wingers.

Action: concerning trade, forced arbitration, and endangered species.

Canada, Mexico, and the United States signed the USMCA trade deal late last week -- but still has to be ratified by our House and Senate to take effect. The USMCA has its good points -- namely it's near-obliteration of the "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) system, which nullifies our laws and bleeds taxpayer money -- but it also has its bad points (namely its corporate welfare for Big Pharma and its weak enforcement mechanisms for labor and environmental standards), so Public Citizen helps you tell your Reps and Senators to demand improvements to the USMCA before approving it. I must say I'm quite pleased to hear no one in Congress demanding a "fast-track" process for trade deals, since "fast-track" processes tend to cut the people out of the process by cutting Congressional debate out of the process. And really, what are "fast-trackers" going to do? Say we need to sign the USMCA now for national security purposes?

Meanwhile, H.R. 7109/S. 3615, the Restoring Justice for Workers Act, would amend both the National Labor Relations Act and the Federal Arbitration Act to prohibit "predispute" forced arbitration agreements between employers and employees -- to which more than half of all employees must now submit! -- as well as class action or collective action bans. The bill would also prohibit retaliation against employees who won't enter into arbitration agreements with their employers. Bosses like to tell you arbitration is better for employees than class action suits (spoiler alert: they're wrong), but then why do they feel they have to force you into arbitration as a condition of employment, or force you to waive your right to a class action lawsuit? I mean, that's awfully suspicious, isn't it? So the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Reps and Senators to support the Restoring Justice for Workers Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Reps and Senators not to screw around with the Endangered Species Act, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. Various Congressdolts have proposed "reforms" that would, in essence, gut the Endangered Species Act, "reforms" which have included forcing our government to rescue endangered species in a mere five years (why, it took 40 to save the bald eagle), mandating a full vote of Congress to even designate a species as endangered, and allowing Governors to nullify endangered species designations. But it ain't just Congress: our current Administration wants to introduce more economics into the whole process. Because mammon is everything to our President and his corporate cronies! They should be ashamed of themselves -- and, more to the point, we should shame them, whether we think it'll do any good or not.

Action: concerning nuclear weapons, climate change, and self-driving cars.

Our President has declared he'll withdraw our nation from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (or INF) Treaty, which was one of the signal foreign policy achievements of President Reagan's second term. Observers disagree as to whether our President can actually pull us out; the Senate did ratify the treaty, which makes it American law. But here's one thing we can more easily agree on: whining about other nations getting to "do" weapons is no reason to abandon international treaties that actually help keep us safe. And here's another thing we can more easily agree on: either House of Congress can simply refuse to fund the "doing" of intermediate nukes. Don't get too hopeful now that one of those Houses will be in Democratic hands in January; you know how Democrats like to prove they can be just as "tough" in foreign policy as right-wingers. So Roots Action helps you tell your Reps and Senators to refuse to fund intermediate nukes.

Finally, in the wake of our Administration's National Climate Assessment concluding that, basically, climate change will wipe us out unless we act, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to take serious action on climate change. Their actions could include, but would not be limited to, the OFF Fossil Fuels Act (current bill number: H.R. 3671) or the 100 By 50 Act (S. 987), both of which would begin the work of weaning us off fossil fuels, while helping fossil fuel workers retrain to work on the new power grid. Don't believe our President's various dismissals of his Administration's NCA -- for example, retorting that our water and air are cleaner than ever a) underscores how unsuccessful his efforts to gut clean air and clean water regulations have been and b) actually has nothing to do with climate change! And certainly don't embrace cynicism and fatalism, because these are not the attitudes that ended slavery.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject S. 1885, the AV START Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. S. 1885 would let corporations sell self-driving cars without meeting federal safety standards and would prevent states from passing their own laws regulating self-driving cars; given that self-driving cars have killed two people and injured another this year, do either of these things sound like good ideas to you? I'll tell you what they do sound like: they sound like corporate welfare given to self-driving car manufacturers that haven't done the work to ensure their products are safe for people. Why, it's like our government is picking winners and losers with the AV START Act. And the losers? Folks who don't want to get run over by self-driving cars. Seems like our government always wants to make us the losers. And that's why we fight.

Around the table: why local food is better, and other lessons.

Helena Norberg-Hodge reminds us that "Unlike a Globalized Food System, Local Food Won’t Destroy the Environment." Think of all the things we wouldn't be doing if we grew all our food locally -- things like seed extinction, monoculture farming, antibiotic abuse, factory farm pollution, high-fructose corn syrup subsidies, and crops genetically modified to better withstand resist proprietary pesticides, to name just a few. It's enough to make you think that the only thing Big Food does "efficiently" is delivery money into executive bank accounts.

"N.J. Attorney General to Cops: Stop Working With ICE" is a misleading headline, because ICE can, you know, get a warrant and thus earn the cooperation from police that such warrants mandate. Of course that subtlety seems lost on the ICE deputy director who squeals about "public safety" and issues ominous warnings that ICE will just have to arrest more people, which will "inevitably" result in "collateral arrests." What's preventing ICE from just getting warrants again? I sure hope it's not the Bush Mobb-era notion that warrants are "quaint."

When you hear that our government takes upwards of 10 years to process workers' claims for nuclear contamination compensation largely because nuclear labs don't necessarily document problems the way they're supposed to, you may feel compelled to ask: is this what folks mean when they demand small government? Because this is what we get when we demand small government, and no use telling me you just know some of these claims are BS -- if you had a comp claim that you knew other people were telling their friends "must be" BS, how would you feel? (Note well, also, that Tha Bush Mobb dragged its feet on giving these workers justice wherever they could.)

While our government's Office of Special Counsel tells federal workers they'd best not talk about resisting or impeaching our President while they're on the clock -- and the worst I'll say about that is that maybe the OSC takes their interpretation a bit too far -- that very same OSC found that half a dozen Administration officials, including our deputy press secretary, violated the Hatch Act, but let them all off with warnings. Who thinks OSC will be similarly-restrained with rank-and-file federal workers talking about impeaching our President? Not me -- this Administration, like so many others, thinks law and order is for "little people" like us.

Goldman Sachs analysts ask, in re gene therapy treatments, "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?" That's very unfortunate wording right there, but if a treatment obliterates a sector of the health care economy, that doesn't mean it's evil; surely no one would wish to have leprosy or smallpox back as part of a perverse "job-creation program" because they once kept doctors and caregivers busy. (Oh, and Gilead's sales of their miracle Hep C drug could also be falling because now more people know how expensive it is and how noxious a corporation Gilead is.)

Finally, House Democrats forge ahead with their Leviathan of a voting rights/campaign finance reform/anti-corruption bill. And now that they've apparently purged attempts to simply repeal Supreme Court decisions without actually amending our Constitution, now I'm wondering if H.R. 1's pack-everything-in-one-bill might actually be the right approach. Any Republican who votes against it can be portrayed in campaign ads as "anti-voting rights" or "anti-campaign finance reform" or "pro-corruption." I mean, we're still relying on Democrats to run those ads, but at least they'll put Republicans on the spot. (Of course, when Republicans whine that we're trying to do too much at once, we can respond, paraphrasing William Lloyd Garrison, that you don't pull a baby out of a fire gradually.)

UPDATE. I really should have checked the date on that Goldman-Sachs article referenced in the fifth paragraph above -- not only is it from April, but I wrote about it then (and rather less generously than I did above, I think). I still think the insight contained therein is worth keeping.

Around the table: can we green and grow our economy at the same time? Of course we can! And other lessons.

Dean Baker says we can-so green our economy and grow our economy at the same time. Maybe we should abandon the growth ideology and maybe we shouldn't, but we certainly shouldn't refuse to consider solutions that might better bring about a renewable power grid because they also fit in with virtually everyone's notion that economies should grow; doing so would be a textbook example of letting the perfect murder the good. And Mr. Baker reminds us that economic growth doesn't necessarily depend on increased resource use -- advances in software, education, and health care, for example, create economic growth without necessarily burning more fossil fuels, and since folks do plenty of things that spur economic growth but don't depend on increased fossil fuel use, we can't even conclude that limiting our access to fossil fuels would grind our economy to a halt.

Some big health insurance corporations have taken to refusing to pay ER bills if they feel they don't "meet the definition of an emergency," in one big health insurer's words. No, this isn't the way to reduce ER abuse, particularly since people only take their kids to the ER for the sniffles when they a) don't have health insurance and b) can't get to other options like urgent care clinics. You know what would curb ER abuse? A Medicare-for-All system covering all of us, that's what. And where are the conservatives who would denounce insurance corporations for interfering with the judgment of individuals? (At least Brittany Cloyd's story had a happy ending, because she fought her insurer until she won. Might she want to run for public office?)

New York state Attorney General finds that state hospitals are charging sexual assault survivors for rape kits. Which is actually already illegal! You know, I think there's a solution to this problem, let me see if I can think of it -- hold on, still thinking -- oh, right: a Medicare-for-All system that covers all of us, and of course covers the cost of rape kits like any civilized nation would do. (To think that collection agents actually came after some of these women for the money! This is what happens when we decide the work of a civilized, striving people is just too hard and we "simplify things" by chasing exclusively after money.)

In other dismal health insurance news, the number of uninsured children in America actually ticks up for the first time in at least a decade. I figured that Congress's allowing CHIP to lapse at the end of September 2017 had to be a big reason why, but our Administration has been screwing around with health care policy in plenty of other ways, particularly where immigrants are concerned. (C'mon, if you're going to depend on their labor, you can't deny them or their kids health care. That's just cruel.) Let me guess our President's reactions: TEH FAKE NEWS IT'S TEH DUMOCRATZ' FAULTZ!!!!!

Finally, contractors seem to be bilking FEMA and good Puerto Ricans for rebuilding and repairs in the wake of Hurricane Maria. I wouldn't expect our President to ride to Puerto Rico's rescue, however, since he himself seems to have made a mint during the 1990s with that extortionate All County Building Supply & Maintenance contracting markup scheme. So, though it'd be easy for him to say "I can get a better deal," more likely we'll hear TEH FAKE NEWS IT'S TEH DUMOCRATZ' FAULTZ!!!!! here, too.