Thieves in the Temple.

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning pollution, government spying, police foundations, and bad media.

On the occasion of yet more wildfires in California, MoveOn helps you tell California Gov. Newsom to stop approving new drilling and fracking leases in the Golden State. A lot of folks say there ain't a dime's worth of difference between Democrats and Republicans, and while that's not exactly true, it doesn't exactly help that California's Democratic Governor, nominally an environmentalist, lets all this oil and gas drilling happen, when making climate change worse is an obvious side effect. Having no clean water is another obvious side effect, since hydrofracturing uses a lot of water -- in a state that frequently experiences drought, no less! In a state already appropriating a lot of water for agricultural uses, no less! So, to sum: the solution to burning lungs, brown sky, ashes falling like rain, and so little water they tell you not to flush the toilet is what? More oil and gas drilling? How about more solar and wind, eh? Last I looked, California got plenty of sun, and you might as well use the resources at hand, rather than dig for more just so a few fossil fuel executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes.

Meanwhile, as good Americans continue to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake by Kenosha, WI police -- and as said police seemed strangely uninterested in the militia member who shot several protestors in the middle of the week -- M Power Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect protestors from FBI surveillance, intimidation, and criminalization. We've told our FBI not to do these things many times, but obviously they think admitting that right-wingers commit terrorist acts is a good enough reason to let them continue to harass black protestors, like they've been doing since time immemorial. But admitting that right-wingers commit terrorism -- you know, like the thing I described in the first sentence of this paragraph! -- is not some great gift to us (it's rather like saying water is wet), and I'm old enough to remember when right-wingers threw a hissy fit over our DHS saying the same thing during the first Obama term. And if you'll refer to the first sentence of this paragraph again, you'll wonder why law enforcement spies on black protestors but seems so helpless when some kid kills a few of them. People have rights even if you don't like them, after all.

And while we're on this subject: if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big corporations to stop funding police foundations, then Police Piggy Bank still helps you do that. It's well past time that police foundations came under some scrutiny -- and it's also well past time the corporations that fund them came under some scrutiny, since these corporations are now falling all over themselves to say how much they love black folks. We-the-people have little-to-no oversight over police foundations, since they're private; certainly we don't have the oversight we have over public police budgets! And police foundations don't typically use this money to have barbecues with the good folks in their neighborhoods -- they more typically use it to buy military weapons they then use on the good folks protesting their atrocities. At least big corporations can be swayed by the Big Stick of Bad PR. Yes, even if they've said "black lives matter" out loud! Anyone can say black lives matter, but it takes hard work to make black lives matter -- or, for a start, to make corporations stop funding police who act like black lives don't matter.

And finally: Free Press helps you tell the Fox News Channel to fire Tucker Carlson. His presentation of Kyle Rittenhouse as a victim after he shot three Kenosha protestors (killing two) may be the last straw, but really, he's been leaving a trail of slime for a long time, most vividly in his almost pornographic reuse of looting and rioting footage over the last few months. He employed this tactic again in his Wednesday night "report," one late night TV show writer Brian Parise describes at length in a public post on his Facebook page. Go find it; it's quite illuminating. Mr. Carlson didn't mention Jacob Blake (i.e., the black man whose shooting by police stoked the protests!) in his report, though you'd think that would provide much-needed context -- but he did show the same clip of a man kicking a fence three times, as well as a black woman hitting a white woman in a church 800 miles away, whenever that happened. Sadly, what he does isn't uncommon -- watch a lengthy news report about anything and you'll see the same clips being used over and over. The difference? Generally they don't push a pro-murder perspective.

Well, this has been a busy week. I remain optimistic, however, that our efforts will, one day, deliver a lot less drama and a lot more peace and quiet.

Action: concerning Social Security, endangered species, the right to repair, and pollution.

You know our President has tried to delay the collection of the employee-side payroll taxes that pay for Social Security, and you know he's said out loud that he wants to permanently repeal that tax, thus depriving Social Security of its funding -- but you may not know that Social Security Chief Actuary Stephen Goss has said that Social Security would be out of money by 2023 if we made this payroll tax cut permanent! Which means Mr. Goss will be getting a lot of death threats this week from our President's votaries. But this is one Social Security-will-be-out-of-money prediction you can count on, because, well, when you zero out a revenue source that pays for a program, you won't be able to pay for that program anymore. Cue the Arthur Laffer Clown Car, claiming that zeroing out revenues increases revenues! Of course, we shouldn't let the greediest and stupidest among us make all the decisions in America -- which is what happens when we keep silent. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any legislation that would permanently end the Social Security payroll tax. We earned Social Security, dammit.

Meanwhile, another day, another Administration attempt to gut the Endangered Species Act by rewriting the rules so that it's a lot harder to protect endangered species from oblivion. I shouldn't have to say why that's a good thing, right? I mean, when a species is gone, it ain't coming back -- just like the fuel we dig up from the ground will one day be gone, and then where will we be? Not reproducing species from fossils in amber, that's for sure! Seriously, this is a world where we have renewable sources of energy, like solar, wind, and geothermal, and we could make these our main sources of energy if Our Glorious Elites would just get with the program, but instead our Administration proposes to redefine "habitat" downward to make endangered species virtually homeless, and thus subject them to the mercy of our madness for development! Hence Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to withdraw its proposed rule changes that would hamper our ability to protect endangered species under the law.

In other news, H.R. 7956/S. 4473, the Critical Medical Infrastructure Right-to-Repair Act, would compel corporations that make critical hospital equipment (think ventilators!) to release the information that would allow third-party repair techs at hospitals to fix them. And just to head off industry propaganda, our FDA found in 2018 that third-party technicians are just as good as manufacturer-authorized techs in fixing medical equipment. You'd think our FDA might have said the opposite, so that executives in the medical equipment field could continue to restrict "proprietary" information, but they did not. And while I don't believe in trade secrets über alles, we're not even talking about releasing trade secrets that could lead competitors to reverse-engineer products -- we're talking about releasing spare parts, service diagrams, and diagnostic software that could help save lives. Hence US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to make fixing machines and saving lives easier by passing the Critical Medical Infrastructure Right-to-Repair Act.

Finally, Samsung, of all corporations, is mulling investing in the proposed Vung Ang 2 coal plant, even though its builders would put it in the same fishing village that saw its livelihood wiped out by the notorious Formosa steel plant spill of 2016! And things ain't much better four years later, which you would figure, knowing that the Formosa disaster contaminated 20 miles of coastline with cyanide. A couple of big corporations have already pulled out of Vung Ang 2, and Samsung has already changed its mind about investing in the proposed Adani Carmichael coal plant that would further befoul the Great Barrier Reef, so we know the Big Stick of Bad PR can sway them. But only if we wield it! Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Samsung to pull out of the proposed Vung Ang 2 coal plant. If Samsung winds up staying with Vung Ang 2, I would have to at least wonder if they pulled out of Adani Carmichael because that plant might have affected the air and water of mostly white people, whereas Vung Ang 2 would affect the air and water of mostly non-white people. I mean, I like to think the best, even of big corporations, but too often they make that hard.

Action: concerning good House bills, taxing the rich, pollution, and health care data.

Happy Wednesday, good people! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. These bills promote voting rights, internet freedom, public lands, and consumer safety, among so many other good things, so our Senators have no excuse to ignore them. And ignore them they will, unless we make that impossible.

Meanwhile, you've heard about how well Jeff Bezos, Marc Zuckerberg, et al have been doing during this pandemic, even though you and I struggle to make ends meet? Well, S. 4490, the Make Billionaires Pay Act, would impose a one-time 60% tax on skyrocketing billionaire wealth, and would direct the proceeds toward Medicare so it can cover the out-of-pocket health care costs of all Americans for the next calendar year. The total take from this tax -- according to the bill's original sponsor, Sen. Sanders (I-VT) -- would be close to $422 billion, and would still leave said billionaires a little over $310 billion of their windfall during the pandemic, so brook no silliness from right-wingers about how extortionate this bill would supposedly be. Frankly, leaving them over $300 billion is extraordinarily generous -- I'd want to tax them until they stop acting like they're the only people who ever mattered. The 91% tax bracket sure did curb a lot of insanity in the old days, and we need only look to our whiny baby of a President to understand the damage the absence of the 91% tax bracket has done. Anyway, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to strike a blow for fair taxation by passing the Make Billionaires Pay Act.

In other news, our EPA has proposed new smog regulations that -- wait for it -- make literally zero improvements on the smog standard we already have, even though said smog standard is now inadequate to the amount of air pollution (and the resulting health care costs) we now face, and (this part is really important!) even though the law mandates that our EPA revise our smog standards every few years to adapt to changes in our atmosphere and in our scientific knowledge! It's beyond asking "how likely is it that our smog problem is exactly the same as it was five years ago?" and on toward asking "how likely is it that we now think smog is exactly as harmful as it was five years ago?" So, yeah, this is another pro-pollution "environmental" "regulatory" effort that will likely die a cold death in court -- but not if we don't weigh in with public comments! Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our EPA to do its damn job and enact more vigorous smog standards. In 2015, our EPA lowered the standard from 75 ppm to 70 ppm; now we want them to lower it to 60 ppm, and if big polluting corporations whine about it, we can just remind them that they're bold and can rise to new challenges. You know, the way Americans do.

Finally, if your head is still spinning from all the which-data-is-the-right-data drama that our President and his votaries like to foist upon us, then you'll be interested to know that H.R. 6585/S. 3850, the Equitable Data Collection and Disclosure on COVID-19 Act, would not only mandate that our CDC and our Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services publish daily updates on COVID-19 cases, testing, and treatment, but would also force these agencies to publish that data by race and ethnicity, among other categories (and would require our Indian Health Service to collect COVID-19 data for the populations it serves). We all know -- well, those of us who've thought about it for a minute and who aren't addled by devotion to this particular President -- that COVID-19 disproportionately hunts down poor folks and folks of color, and that's a damn shame. We also know that this President questions the data like he has a vested interest in the data being wrong or something, and his votaries like to muddle the waters with abject falsehoods. So the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to support accurate medical reporting by passing the Equitable Data Collection and Disclosure on COVID-19 Act.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning our Post Office, facial recognition technology, vaccine profiteering, and our national parks.

Our House passed H.R. 8015, the Delivering for America Act, on Saturday after convening a rare August session; the bill would roll back the many changes Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has made to U.S. Postal Service operations, and would prevent him from making any more changes -- particularly those that result, and have resulted, in mail delivery delays -- until we get COVID-19 under control. Now's a good time to call your Senators and tell them to pass the Delivering for America Act. What reasonable objection they could have I could not say -- surely they wouldn't say it's "not Congress's place" to tell the Postmaster General how to run our Post Office? I hope not, but these are, as they say, interesting times; used to be folks would say outlandish things to get attention and then apologize to get more attention, but now they just say outlandish things and then say more outlandish things to get double the attention. I suppose our Senators could point to our President's threatened veto, but Congress can override vetoes, so really, they have no excuses.

Meanwhile, our Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) has lately contracted with Clearview AI for facial recognition technology, which we know tends to do a bad job of telling folks of color apart and thus get some 60-year naturalized citizen deported one day (if it hasn't happened already!). But Sens. Markey (D-MA) and Merkley (D-OR) have introduced S. 3284, the Ethical Use of Facial Recognition Act, which would ban the use of facial recognition technology until further legislation mandated by the bill establishes sound legal boundaries for its use. So few Americans seem to understand the whole concept of boundaries anymore -- folks tend to act like every issue in life is either-or; we can either have facial recognition technology or IMMIGRANTZ CRIMEZ RAMPAGEZ!!!!!! Of course, we can manage technological advancement so that it doesn't cause us harm; this is, in fact, one of the crucial challenges of maintaining a civilization. I know, how old-fashioned of me. Anyway, Ban Facial Recognition helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban facial recognition technology until such time as we can actually use it for good.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to prevent big pharma corporations from profiteering off any new COVID-19 vaccine, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Too many Americans (our President included) think of things like randomized double-blind tests as "bureaucracy." They're not -- they're how we get good science that actually helps people. Of course, for a big pharma corporation, the need to get a vaccine right -- which is to say, a vaccine that works, and without life-threatening side effects -- impedes the insane drive to profits. If we lived in a sane, moral, and decent society, big pharma corporations that made billions of dollars from rushed, bad vaccines would withdraw in deserved shame and humiliation, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, these same corporations assume they have a "right" to get away with it. Making us a sane, moral, and decent society has, admittedly, been a crap-ton of work, but if we can keep big pharma corporations from profiteering off pandemic vaccines, we will make that work easier.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2491/S. 1311, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. The Roadless Area Conservation Act would (deep breath) tell our Administration that they can't actually just ignore the Roadless Rule in promoting development in federal lands (sigh). It's a shame we have to do that, but these are bold thinkers in this Administration. Wait, my attempt to make "bold" into a cuss word during Tha Bush Mobb years didn't take hold ? Well, we can't all have six-figure promotional budgets. Anyway, our Administration wants to (I'm paraphrasing here) ignore the Roadless Rule, but legally, mainly so they can drill in Alaska's Tongass National Forest, the world's biggest intact temperate rainforest, where the trees are centuries (or millenia!) old and some of the animals there can't be found anywhere else. But yeah, let's churn yet another national park into fuel that'll just get burned up and pollute our air and water. That's real conservative of these fools.

Action: concerning foreign policy and "conversion" "therapy."

H.R. 8050, the Israeli Annexation Non-Recognition Act, would prevent our government from recognizing or aiding Israel's ongoing annexation of the West Bank. Yeah, I know, they've "paused" their annexation plans, but just like Mr. DeJoy's "suspension" of changes to our Post Office, this "pause" is meaningless, since annexation is so far along already. And we know Israel would have a much tougher time annexing the West Bank if we didn't send them so much of our taxpayer money. Folks who interpret my position as "anti-Israeli security" should consider, again (I mean, I feel like I've said this a hundred times!) whether Israel guarantees its security through its ongoing occupation of Palestine, or jeopardizes it. And folks who look at H.R. 8050's sponsor list and say ZOMG ITZ TEH SQUADZ!!!!! need to stop imagining politics as team sports. Your team is America, people! And we can absolutely be a friend to Israel and stand up to apartheid at the same time. Hence Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 8050.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to ban "conversion" "therapy" across our great land, then Change.org still helps you do that. What is "conversion" "therapy" and why do I put it in obviously ironic quotation marks? Because it purports to change gay folks into straight folks, which is impossible, and it purports to do so through "therapies" that include re-enacting past sexual abuses and "exercises" involving nudity and intimate touching. Surely its proponents can see why such "therapy" so often leads to depression and suicide for the "converted"? Alas, many do not -- many only see their own hatred of gays, their own self-hatred, or their own need for attention and drama. I suspect many of those who do find that changing is a lot like turning around a cruise ship. But there's hope for such people. You know why? Because changing into someone who doesn't live to hurt others is much, much easier than turning gay folks into straight folks.

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning freedom of the press and water shutoffs.

In the wake of the arrest of Des Moines Register reporter Andrea Sahouri at a Black Lives Matter protest in late May, Amnesty International helps you tell Iowa state prosecutors to drop all charges against Ms. Sahouri. They've charged her with "interference with official acts" and "failure to disperse," and dragged their feet providing evidence against her, arguing that her case was too "low-priority" (since the charges are misdemeanors) for them to provide, say, body-camera evidence they couldn't even say for sure existed although Des Moines police officers have had to wear body cameras for three years now. Which only goes to show you that they don't do things like this, necessarily, to establish a precedent for sending journalists to prison, though I'm sure they think that's gravy. They do it so that journalists who want to do actual journalism that actually speaks truth to power will throw up their hands and say it's not worth it. I mean, can you imagine police arresting, say, Chuck Todd? No, you cannot -- speaking truth to power is obviously the farthest thing from his mind.

Meanwhile, Food and Water Action helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 4362, the Emergency Water is a Human Right Act, which would (among other good works) establish a national moratorium on water shutoffs while this pandemic is still raging. There is no need to include S. 4362 as part of COVID-19 relief bill "negotiations," really -- our Senators can just pass the bill, send it to our House, and then our House can pass it, and then our President can sign it. If your right-wing uncle wonders out loud why we're still letting people get water for free, remind him that there's a pandemic going on, and people can't wash their hands, or their dishes, or their houses, with water they don't have. In other words, we're not just doing it for people who, through no fault of their own, can't work and therefore can't get paid and can't pay the bills -- we're doing it for all of us, since any of us can run into someone who's had their water shutoff and get a debilitating disease from them that might kill us. And why should we let that happen? To satisfy someone's "philosophy"?

Action: concerning voting rights, phony recycling, and Social Security.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Has our House passed all these good bills because they know our Senate won't pass them and our President won't sign them? It's quite possible! Would such cowardice matter if our Senate and our President bow to our will? Of course not! But if we don't communicate that will, it'll be a moot point.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: some state legislators want to, ah, innovate on the definition of "recycling" so that it includes things that are patently not recycling -- like converting single-use plastics into oil or fuel -- and this would mean big corporations could claim that facilities dedicated to that purpose are "recycling" facilities. Recycling ain't just about decreasing pollution (which converting single-use plastics into fuel decidedly does not do) or reducing trash (ditto, since pollution is trash), it's also about getting utility out of trash, and if fuel burns once and is gone, well, that's about as "single-use" as you can get. Even if we could agree that corporations should do it -- as opposed to, say, solar or wind, which won't increase demand for single-use plastics! -- they shouldn't get goodies from our government for doing it, and we certainly shouldn't murder the definition of "recycling" just so they can get those goodies. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your PA state legislators to protect our air and water by rejecting HB 1808.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop our President's raid on Social Security funding which he calls a "tax cut," then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. We shouldn't regard his obsession with cutting payroll taxes as something unique to him; rather, we should regard it as part of the right's obsession with destroying Social Security by hook or by crook. The fact that he's taken it up only demonstrates that he's one of Our Glorious Elites -- not their enemy, as a lot of his votaries fantasize. Now, I think folks generally understand that taxes pay for services we may all use -- and all of us want to live long enough to collect Social Security. Unfortunately, too many of our media "personalities" act like they don't understand it, and you can catch people off-guard if you repeat lies with conviction, and if no other media personalities call them on their lies right there and then. This is how lies get spread in America -- not just because of malicious people, but because of the cowards who don't stand up to them. But we are neither of these, and we will keep fighting.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning Social Security, government spying, and bad media outlets.

As you know, our President signed an Executive Order late last week directing employers not to collect that half of the payroll tax workers owe -- the tax that funds Social Security and, to a lesser degree, Medicare -- through the end of the calendar year. They call it a "stimulus," but we know what it really is: a first step toward eradicating the payroll tax entirely and leaving Social Security and Medicare funding up to the whims of whichever party controls Congress and the White House. We don't know that merely because we suspect it -- we know it because our President has said so, out loud. And of course it's not a tax cut per se, since you'll still owe that money at the end of the year. He issued those Executive Orders late last week (and not earlier, when it would have received more attention from our media) for one reason: to look like he's "doing something." I get tired of leaders constantly looking like they're "doing something"; maybe they ought to just do something? Well, we'll do something, by demanding that Congress fight this Executive Order, as Demand Progress helps you do.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell our FBI to stop spying on black protestors. What do they expect to find, looting? We now know that a lot of these looters aren't "blacks burning down their own neighborhoods," but white agents provocateurs who get their jollies breaking stuff and blaming other people for it. How many work for our government, I wonder? It's a question worth asking! In the meantime, our FBI spies on black protestors for one reason only: because they think their free speech threatens their power. Well, maybe it is a threat, to their power to run roughshod over any Americans they like, but our FBI doesn't deserve that power any more than our hapless President does when he deploys his brownshirts to big cities. "Law and order" hotheads always complain more about black folks than about, say, corporations dumping filth into our air and water. They'll never see that the latter is a legitimate law-and-order concern, but we do.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on the Fox News Channel entirely. They might profess to find that notion counterintuitive, as Fox News has lately started outdrawing even the traditional over-the-air networks in ratings (not just the other cable news outlets) between 8 pm and 11 pm. But frankly that's overblown -- the over-the-air networks don't run very much of consequence during the summer, Fox News always gets ratings bumps during Presidential election seasons, the over-the-air nightly newscasts are doing a lot better than they have for some time, and Fox's flagship shows are only drawing about as much as a certain loofa-lover's show did back in the day. Besides, Fox News peddles hatred and stupidity; why would a corporation want to support that with its money? All Fox News does is condition its viewers to react to every tiny or imaginary slight with bottomless, inarticulate rage, and no corporation should enable that program with its advertising dollars.

Action: concerning health care, climate change, and drug policy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government that a COVID-19 vaccine should be available to anyone regardless of how well-off they are financially, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. Specifically, you'll tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7296, the Make Medication Affordable by Preventing Pandemic Price Gouging Act, and H.R. 7288, the Taxpayer Research and Coronavirus Knowledge Act, which would, taken together, prevent big pharma corporations from charging you an arm and a leg so you can get a COVID-19 vaccine. This ain't Big Gummint running roughshod over your rights, this is our government protecting our investments -- our government spent most of the money ever spent on coronavirus research before the pandemic, and our taxpayer money has gone into almost all of the more promising COVID-19 vaccine candidates, so don't we get some say over whether we get gouged or not? This Administration pretends we don't, but we know better.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the destruction of the Amazon rain forest. They call the Amazon "the lungs of the world," thanks to its unparalleled ability to contain carbon emissions and produce oxygen, but the Brazilian government -- led by Jair Bolsonaro, one of our more disgusting Glorious Elites and as a result a man our President obviously aspires to be more like -- has been encouraging developers to set large swaths of it on fire. Of course, American corporations are hip-deep in all of that, but that means we're hip-deep in all of that, too, because where would American corporations be without our consumer dollars? Well, looks like we have a lot of power to change things here, too -- even in the Amazon/Facebook era, our choices aren't "spend money with big corporations or don't buy stuff at all." And in the Amazon/Facebook era, the Big Stick of Bad PR packs a big hurt. But only if we wield it.

Finally, the House Judiciary Committee has lately passed H.R. 3884, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, and that means it can get a full House vote next month. The MORE Act would legalize pot by removing it from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, and tax its sale and using that money to help communities hit hardest by our now half-century-long obsession with putting down communities of color under the guise of being "tough on crime." I want those communities to recover, and would happily invest my tax dollars for that purpose, but I'm not thrilled with the proposed 5% sales tax -- it'll hit working families harder, and I would rather tax the profits of the entity making and/or selling the pot, like we do with everything else. Still, as the Libertarians will tell you, a lot of racist policing will end once marijuana is legal. Hence Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your House Reps to pass the MORE Act, with objections like the one I've noted above, if you like.

Action: concerning corporate divestment from police foundations, social media "fact-checking," and online abuse.

Color of Change helps you tell big corporations such as Amazon, Target, Starbucks, and Comcast to divest from police foundations. Police foundations are a two-pronged menace: they fund our burgeoning police state, and they show up state, local and federal governments for failing to fund police in the first place! If we're going to have police -- and ideally, as I've said before, we will have them doing far fewer jobs -- then we ought to fund them properly, and not use tricks like asset forfeiture, the 1033 program, and police foundations to paper over that lack of funding. Police foundations, being private non-profits, also fund police departments with very little or no public oversight, which means police departments can spy on citizens and fire rubber bullets on protestors without anyone accountable to the people having actually signed off on that! Which also gives our worst public servants an unearned sense of relief, I suppose. Need I mention that corporate influence on police is a) undesirable and b) no substitute for making corporations pay their share of taxes? The only people who should be influencing police are the people police officers serve. So it's time to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR again.

Meanwhile, Facebook somehow seems to outsource its third-party fact-checking function to the worst far right-wing "news" organs, and The Daily Caller (founded by Tucker Carlson because of course it was) is just one of them. Guess what else The Daily Caller does? It tries to raise money for our President's re-election effort! Think Snopes, Factcheck.org, or PolitiFact are raising money for Joe Biden right now? (If you responded OF COURSEZ TEH LIBRUL MEDIAZ DOEZ TEH THINGZ!!!!, please navigate away from this page. And maybe see a therapist about your rage issues.) I take issue with outsourcing your fact-checking function to some big media corporation to begin with -- millions of people are looking for jobs as we speak, and my experience tells me most of them have much better BS detectors than they get credit for having! -- and I also take issue with isolating "fact-checking" as if it's some special function of a news organ rather than that news organ's reason for existence. Nonetheless, I don't want obviously biased news organ telling me what a fact is. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to stop using The Daily Caller as a "fact-checker."

Finally, YouTube has decided (as of the end of September) to remove the feature that enables users to add features such as closed captioning and translated subtitles to videos; this Community Contributions feature sure is a fresh breath of 2007, when (regardless of whatever else was going on in the world!) it seemed like any of us could use the internet as a force for good, even if that good was merely helping deaf folks and foreign-language speakers enjoy the same videos we're all enjoying. But Google (YouTube's owner, sigh) claims it's removing the feature because it "was rarely used and had problems with spam/abuse," and I figured spam and abuse would be the real reason, but you know how you counter spam and abuse? You be like Wikipedia and you hire enough people to effectively monitor the feature for spam and abuse! Just like, you know, if you want to do fact-checking, you hire enough people to check the facts, not outsource it to some corporation or throw up your hands at how hard it is. Anyway, Change.org helps you tell Google not to remove the Community Contributions feature from YouTube. If you like, you can tell them to manage it better, too.

Action: concerning good House bills, law and order, and birth control.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Our House has passed a lot of good bills that fight discrimination, vote suppression, and corporate greed; our Senate has responded by ignoring them. Our duty is clear: we either guide them out of their ignorance, or hold them accountable for it at the polls. We'd prefer the former, but we're ready to do the latter.

Meanwhile, Moms Rising helps you tell the Pittsburgh (PA) public school system to get police out of their schools. I've been saying for a while now that we use police like they're the Swiss Army knives of our civilization, and though some folks have been calling for expanding their training so they can handle all their multitudinous tasks better, I would prefer that we just use police officers for very specific purposes -- serving warrants, making arrests, and investigating crimes. We should not be sending them out to solve domestic disputes, talk folks off ledges, or "scare kids straight." Seriously, any school district that needs police officers to control kids' bad behavior needs a new spine. And the best part? Having police officers in schools doesn't do schools (or our children) any good, since a police officer's training (and therefore intuition) is to respond to situations with violence; having the right number of counselors, nurses, and psychologists does do schools (and our children) a lot of good. They said the future would be all about relatable skills, and they were right! It's the mark of a civilization that grows and makes progress. We ought to make this that civilization, wherever we can.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7861, which would repeal the Helms Amendment and make it legal for foreign aid to be used for abortion care. No one in the world wants more abortions, but making abortions illegal (or impossible to get, which making them illegal doesn't necessarily do) would let civilizations force women into breeder roles, and the right to abortion is the best tool we have to avoid that sorry state of affairs. The Helms Amendment has, since 1973, prohibited any foreign aid from going to abortions, and I shudder to think at all the women all over the world who haven't been able to make a better life for themselves because of it. And by "a better life" I don't merely mean a life where women can make a decision that's best for their family -- I mean a life where women don't get routinely raped, often as children, and whose resulting pregnancies become merely another way for men to control them, because that's the reality in a lot of the world today, and the Helms Amendment pretends that reality doesn't exist. Want to make abortions disappear from our planet? Support birth control, at no cost, for anyone who needs it. Right-wing swordfighters can't even do that anymore.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning public schools, pandemic data, and COVID-19 vaccines.

MoveOn helps you tell Congress to prevent our Administration from withholding federal funding from schools that do not fully reopen this fall. You contemplate our President suggesting he might do exactly that last month, and you wonder why he's so anxious to get kids packed like sardines into buildings where they can't possibly socially-distance, and you might well conclude that he's trying to get all those pesky unionized public school teachers killed. I wouldn't put it past him! But if you think that's a bridge too far for him, consider that he might decide to give all that money unused on public schools to private schools, because it's an "emergency." This is why I say incompetence is malice -- people like our President, just like George W. Bush before him, go out of their way to screw up as much as they can so they can prove "government doesn't work," and then they funnel all our taxpayer money to their cronies. But this is America, and we don't have to put up with any of that.

Meanwhile, you may recall that our Administration, faced with rising COVID-19 infections, decided to order health care providers to send all COVID-19-related data to the Department of Health and Human Services rather than the Centers for Disease Control. Presumably our President has decided he can "trust" HHS more than CDC, since the CDC is, by all appearances, actually trying to help Americans during a pandemic, while our President is only trying to help himself get re-elected. Fittingly enough, the numbers we are getting (I use Worldometers to get the latest) are still pretty damning for our President, but you would not be alone in suspecting that HHS might be concealing some information that's even worse than what we're getting. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would make sure all COVID-19 data gets shared with the CDC as well as HHS. I guess if HHS wants to have a pissing match with CDC, I can't really stop them. But I would warn them that we good Americans don't have the same tolerance for drama that we used to. In fact, I would say most of us are profoundly tired of it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk that any COVID-19 vaccine must be available to everyone regardless of their "ability to pay," then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. Rather than asking if individual Americans can "afford" the vaccine, we should ask if we, as a civilization, can afford to let hundreds of thousands of good Americans die merely because they're not banksters! I mean "afford" in the metaphorical sense, of course -- I know some cynic out there stands ready to retort that TEH DEADZ DON'TZ NEEDZ ANY MOREZ OF TEH HEALTHZ CAREZ HA HA HA HA SNORT!!!!!! But you measure the worth of a civilization by how it treats its most needy members -- a civilization that routinely says TO HELLZ WITHZ YOUZ HA HA HA FREE MARKETZ!!!!! may not deserve to endure. And there is also the practical matter of all these folks who would be unvaccinated-because-they're-poor, and thus would be able to keep the various COVID-19 strains going. For Americans of a certain stripe, of course, that's a feature, not a bug. But this is America, and they don't get all the say around here!

Action: concerning good House bills, plastic pollution, and healthy food.

Happy Wednesday, good folks! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. This week we add H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act, which finally passed the House last week. Our Senate has no business sitting on bills that fight discrimination and promote voting rights, internet freedom, and working families. And if we tell them enough, they'll learn it one day.

Meanwhile, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (or TCEQ) has proposed rules on regulating plastics so they don't wind up in our water, and surprise, surprise! They're not good enough -- everyone wants to keep Coke bottles out of rivers, but the TCEQ would do nothing about microplastics, which also wind up in our water and too often also wind up in our bloodstream, causing or exacerbating all manner of health problems. The TCEQ apparently did not take health care problems into account; only "environmental" problems, as if environmental problems somehow don't cause health care problems. The TCEQ, like any agency wishing a "smooth" relationship with the corporations it supposedly regulates, would give plastic manufacturing corporations another year to comply with the rules. And if people suffer for it, too bad! They must be sacrificed so that regulators and corporations can get along better! Seriously, government agencies should cultivate an adversarial relationship with the corporations they regulate; maybe then they'll do their job. So Public Citizen helps you tell the TCEQ to regulate plastics in water much more vigorously than they've thus far proposed.

Finally, our Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee -- which helps our Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services put together the Dietary Guidelines for Americans every five years -- has recommended that the Guidelines for 2020-25 advise that we limit added sugars and address how we grow food so we can actually have an agricultural sector in the coming decades. These are absolutely necessary recommendations! And of course there's no guarantee that this Administration will follow them. Word on the street, of course, is that our President -- with advice from former Bush Mobber John "The Crusher" Yoo -- has read our Supreme Court's DACA ruling (which went against him, you recall) as permission to do whatever he wants until someone sues him under the Administrative Procedure Act. And if you responded by saying I thought he was doing that already!, you win a prize, but consider that he now may feel even less constrained by the rules and norms of civilization than he did before, and consider, also, that he loves junk food and he thinks planning for the future (which "not eating sugar today" most certainly is) is for "losers." Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our government to adhere to the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee's recommendations.

Action: concerning government spying, pollution, food safety, and fracking.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to reauthorize the notorious USA PATRIOT Act, then the aptly-named Stop the Patriot Act still helps you do that. It sure seems like every Congressperson except Russ Feingold, Ron Paul, and Barbara Less voted for the PATRIOT Act in the immediate aftermath of 9.11, but the PATRIOT Act hasn't made us safer -- it's just made our government more likely to spy on us. What makes us safer, then? Treating people like they're not obstacles to your own wealth, obviously. That's human nature, you say? Don't justify your cowardice with a low opinion of humanity, I say. And you'll notice that our President now calls antifascist activists "terrorists," though I think they only people they "terrorize" are our President and his most racist followers. Well, we said the "war on terror" would become a tool to attack whichever group of Americans some President or other doesn't like, and we were right! (No, this country is not "on fire," Fox News viewers. Go outside on occasion. And wear a mask when you do.)

Meanwhile, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) is once again daring not to live up to its name, let alone its mandate, by deciding that perchlorate winding up in our drinking water is not a big deal. The other places you commonly find perchlorate? Rocket fuel and explosives. But if you're thinking "well, people overstated the problem with that chemical from Agent Orange years ago," rest assured that scientists have a) found perchlorate in all but five American states and b) have found perchlorate disrupts thyroid function and brain development in children and fetuses. And, not for nothing, but our EPA used to find perchlorate in excess of 15 ppm to be unsafe, and our FDA still does, so what happened? We elected an Administration that thinks all regulations that actually help people must be destroyed, that's what happened. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our clean water from the ill effects of perchlorate. Laws can overrule regulations, after all.

In other news, did you know that our Food Safety and Inspection Service (or FSIS) has granted almost 20 waivers to big corporations that want to speed up their meat processing? And that these waivers allow pork processing plants to monitor inspections on their own and chicken processing plants to let nearly three chickens per second go by? Don't they know that food poisoning always makes the news? Would our government think it's OK to let high school students test themselves, or let auto corporations speed up their inspections? And don't they know there's a pandemic going on? Do they only care about big corporate profits? I mean, only caring about big corporate profits is not conservative; it's corporatist, and that's a descriptor you don't want to take to the Pearly Gates. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to force our federal food inspectors to do their real job, which is to keep our food safe.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Governor Wolf sure picked the worst time to sign HB 732, with all its corporate welfare handouts to the fracking industry, because the Attorney General's Statewide Grand Jury investigation into fracking pollution was full of PR black eyes -- like literally "nauseating" air quality, black sludges in toilets, chronic illnesses for folks living near wells, pets dying, and farm animals giving birth to deformed or dead offspring. And that's before we get to irredeemably polluted water tables and the climate change gut-punch delivered by methane emissions from fracking wells. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell Gov. Wolf to suspend all new gas drilling permits until he can put in some more vigorous health and clean air and water protections. Fracking ain't that popular outside of fracking CEOs and their politician lackeys, you know. And no parent ever says fracking may have stunted my child's development, but at least some CEOs got to get even richer!

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

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

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

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

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