Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning workers' rights and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect workers’ right to organize, reject House efforts to defund the police at our IRS, and tax capital gains at the same rate as wages. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

If you’re bummed to hear that the percentage of union-organized workers has hit a historic low – although the raw number of unionized workers did increase by more than 250,000 last year – then you may want to call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, which would make it a lot harder for corporations to intimidate their workers, and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which would make governments let their workers organize. Winning union elections ain’t enough if your boss won’t negotiate and you can’t get our government to make them; both these bills will help these matters.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to reject the House Republicans’ plan to defund the police at our IRS and protect the rich and corporate tax cheats they seem to consider their only real constituents. They say funding our IRS enables them to come after you, but our IRS has only been going after poor people because they don’t have the money to fight rich people and their lawyers! I’d like to think that’s a reason Republicans fell far short of expectations during the midterms. If it’s not, I’m going to be banging this saucepan for a long, long time! And so should you, particularly with your Senators.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk we should tax capital gains at the same rate we tax wages. It’s all income, after all! Tha Bush Mobb’s 2003 tax “reform” spewed forth this particular injustice; they actually wanted you to think investors need more “protection” from taxes than secretaries and bus drivers! They also wanted you to think unrealized assets aren’t income, either. When rich folks got all those low- or no-interest loans, they backed them with unrealized assets! They won’t get more of those loans now, thanks to the Fed’s interest rate hikes, but the injustice of working folks getting taxed harder than rich folks remains. And we should fight that until it’s gone.

Readings for January 30, 2023.

Stephan Weller and Tessa Conroy at The Conversation remind us that the inflation rate doesn’t tabulate rural price hikes – and find that inflation may be worse in rural areas. Among their findings: rural folks can’t just walk places like city folks can, meaning inflated car expenses hit them harder, and since rural folks don’t eat out as much, hikes in grocery prices also hit them harder. Housing costs in rural areas are lower, though, and rural folks more likely own their homes, insulating them from recent rental price madness. Our CPI ought to pay more attention to rural folks, obviously, and not just because that’s the kind of thing right-wingers exploit.

Good news out of Niger, as that nation has reduced the number of women who die due to post-birth bleeding by more than half. But you may notice that one of the big reasons they’re able to do that is that they use the drug misoprostol to reduce hemorrhaging. Health care professionals also use misoprostol, as you may know, in medication abortions, meaning the next time we elect a Republican to the Presidency, he’ll cut off money to any organization that uses or promotes misoprostol abroad, which means more women in Africa will bleed to death after giving birth. It wouldn’t be uncivil to shove that fact in the face of any “pro-lifer” you know. (The process for reducing post-partum hemorrhaging also involves using a condom, though not as a prophylactic; right-wingers will squeal about that, too, and we’ll have to clean up after that.)

Finally, you already knew this, but the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy informs us that the so-called FAIR Tax would “Shift Federal Taxes from the Wealthy to the Rest of Us.” As we discussed last week, you’d pay a higher tax rate under the FAIR Tax than you would even if you made $182,000 annually, but you can also see where it’d actually benefit folks making in the high six-figures, and not just because making 10 times the money doesn’t mean you have 10 times the expenses (and a national sales tax targets spending, not income). Also, “replacing all the taxes” also means no Child Tax Credit or Earned Income Tax Credit for working families. Sure, the FAIR Tax promises rebates for working families making under $30,000 annually, but they’d have to apply for those rebates, and they’ve got enough on their plate already. Again, it shouldn’t be tough for Democrats to accuse every Republican who votes for the FAIR Tax as “voting for higher taxes.”

Action: concerning law and order, debt limit drama, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell Alabama’s Governor to commute Rocky Myers’s death sentence, tell President Biden to hold the line against Republican debt-limit drama, and tell our Justice Department to go after states that try to make abortion drugs illegal. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. Amnesty International helps you tell Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey to commute Rocky Myers’s death sentence. Mr. Myers has been on death row for the murder of his neighbor since 1994, but his conviction has, well, more than a few problems – slim-to-none evidence actually links him to the murder and the evidence that does has inconsistencies and the taint of possible cop coercion, plus he’s been diagnosed as intellectually-disabled since he was 11 and his state-appointed appeals lawyer basically abandoned him. Oh, but there’s more: the judge in his case overruled the jury in giving him a death sentence, which is now illegal in Alabama. This shouldn’t be tough! Unless you’re trying to look “tough,” I guess.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to keep holding the line against Republican debt ceiling hostage-taking. He’s been holding the line against this particular drama so far, but we’ll need to keep reminding him that we don’t want Republicans to crash the economy so they can get spending cuts they’re not even willing to spell out. The only people who want the chaos and disorder that comes with Republican hostage-taking are Our Glorious Elites, who have no memory of what real work is like, if they ever even did it in the first place. And (as evidenced, I would think, by the word “elites”) they sure ain’t a majority of Americans, so they shouldn’t get all the say about everything.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell our Justice Department to challenge, in court, all state abortion bans that contravene federal law. Because they have a good argument – namely, that federal law invests in our Food and Drug Administration the authority to determine good Americans’ access to abortion drugs (which have proven to be safe enough to use at home) one can get through online or brick-and-mortar pharmacies, so states don’t actually have the right to ban such drugs. Remember: if you’re against abortion, don’t have one. You may have heard that a lot of pro-life women don’t even adhere to this dictum.

Around the table: and the hits just keep on coming!

New Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva accuses former President Jair Bolsonaro of genocide against the Yanomami indigenous people of the Amazon rain forest. Mr. Bolsonaro’s madness for development – legal, illegal, who cares? – may not rise to the level of genocide, though the folks who set up illegal mining operations and who knew what effect their pollution would have on the Yanomami might not be able to shield themselves so well from the law. Maybe Mr. Bolsonaro was stupid enough to incriminate himself – as so many seem to be these days! – but generally I prefer charging the folks who did the evil and shaming the folks who enabled it. Even when those enablers are irredeemable assholes, as Mr. Bolsonaro surely is.

From the “We’re Still Dealing With This BS?” file: Factcheck.org reminds us that, no, Magic Johnson didn’t get HIV from a vaccine. Sadly, the tenuous chain of events that make up this particular theory – “(t)he first commercially available hepatitis B vaccine used an antigen derived from plasma from individuals with chronic hepatitis B infection, and gay men – who were also at high risk of HIV infection – were known to have donated plasma for the effort Hep B vaccines” – appeals to the kind of fellow who loves to defend his arguments by saying “you just know.” Hep B vaccine manufacturers did a pretty thorough job deactivating any HIV found in their vaccines, but that fact doesn’t make the cynical feel as good about themselves.

The more I read about what Mother Jones calls, in a glorious understatement, George Santos’s “seemingly endless series of political mysteries,” the more I wonder how he’s going to argue that his district’s voters should give him another term. I mean, I’m sure he’ll take credit for all kinds of things he had nothing to do with, just like his idol Donald Trump did, but how will he convince people to re-elect him? By calling his opponent a Communist? By saying they got me like Jesus? That might play in other parts of the country, but not Long Island.

When I hear that Rep. Harriet Hageman (E-WY) has called land conservation “a plot to control and kill people,” I am reminded of that time an American Prospect blogger, lamenting then-Sen. Santorum’s comments about gay marriage, said that if you wanted to find a liberal who said something offensive you had to go to some obscure tenured professor, but if you wanted it from a right-winger, you only needed to find the #3 man in Republican Senate leadership. And 18 years later, the only thing that’ll end Rep. Hageman’s career is a right-winger even nutter than she.

Finally, Paul Pelosi’s accused attacker, David DePape, calls into a Bay Area newsroom to “apologize to everyone” that “I didn’t get more of them,” “them” being all those liberals he says are destroying individual liberties in America. For a brief moment it was actually refreshing that folks wouldn’t do all the pro forma apologizes our media seem to like, but now you wish some people would do any spiritual work at all. I can’t explain how “I didn’t get more of them” squares with that not-guilty plea.

Action: concerning labor and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell our FTC to slap down non-compete agreements in employment contracts, tell your Congressfolk to stop accepting donations from the National Restaurant Association (a.k.a. “the other NRA”), and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC already. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you share your experience with non-compete agreements with our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC). No doubt your experience with a non-compete agreement in your employment contract, one that prevents you from taking a higher-paying (or simply better) job with a competitor of your current employer, is not positive, since we know (both from scientific study and common sense) that non-compete agreements drive down wages and make workers less free. And you know big corporations will weigh in with their bogus arguments about “trade secrets” (which entirely different laws deal with!), so our FTC needs to hear from you.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop accepting campaign contributions from the “other” NRA, the National Restaurant Association. They’re yet another “small business association” that exists solely to redistribute worker income upward to executives, and lately they’ve made low-paid food workers take a $15 food safety class and then used that money to fund its own efforts to keep their wages down! And I’ll bet the whippersnapper who came up with that “food safety” scam thinks he’s the smartest person who ever lived, though he may not feel that way when he gets to the Pearly Gates. But if we expose this scam now, we'll save souls in the future -- maybe even his!

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Senators to confirm net neutrality architect Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission. President Biden nominated her again, because she’d do good work for America, and 51 Democratic Senators can more easily ignore the excuses offered by big telecom corporations than 50 could. I know Joe Manchin voiced “doubts” about Ms. Sohn, but I bet Kyrsten Sinema – who opposes net neutrality, because nothing says “maverick” like taking the side of the corporations against virtually every American! – was the real reason Ms. Sohn couldn’t get on our FCC before. Put Ms. Sohn on our FCC and we not only get better telecom policy, we isolate Ms. Sinema further, as she deserves.

Action: concerning abortion rights and social media.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to protect federal abortion law, tell online pharmacies to shop sharing abortion-related data with Google, and tell big social media corporations to hold Donald Trump to the same community standards as everyone else. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Justice to challenge, in court, any state abortion ban that violates our federal laws. Our FDA has lately finalized a rule making medication abortions (via mifepristone and misoprostol) more available to good Americans – even though online pharmacies – but of course right-wing state governments want to make medication abortions illegal, which would (at the least) scare a lot of people into not getting the abortions they need because they’ll leave a data trail on the internet. Our Justice Department may not support federal law very vigorously here – unless we demand that they do it.

In a related note, Daily Kos helps you tell online pharmacies that sell abortion pills to stop sharing private patient info with Google. Because that data – whether it’s location data, device data, or unique browser data – could identify folks to local law enforcement personnel, and those personnel could be trying to enforce a state law that federal law pre-empts. Federal law does allow Americans to get mifepristone and misoprostol, after all, and our Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, not our FDA’s authority to regulate those drugs. Remember: if you’re against abortion, then don’t use abortion pills.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell big social media corporations like Twitter and Facebook to hold Donald Trump to the same standards they hold everyone else if they start publishing his nonsense again. Seriously, don’t brook any stridency about “free speech” – do magazine and book publishing corporations publish every manuscript they get because of “free speech”? No, they do not. And ignore Elon Musk’s pretensions – these corporations do actually have community standards, and they’ll hold you or I to them when we cross them but pretend it’s “free speech” when the rich and powerful do it. That’s evil, and we should fight it.

Action: concerning student loan debt and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to let student debt be discharged via bankruptcy, stop scam political action committees, and undo the harm caused by the Citizens United decision. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to let student loan debt be discharged via bankruptcy. Since the late ‘90s it’s been almost prohibitively difficult to do that, and not long after that college started to become almost prohibitively expensive; think there might be a connection there? I’d be a schmuck if I didn’t! So when you hear that young folks ought to just buckle up and pay their debts, remember that colleges have made all those debts much, much larger than they’ve ever been, and the least we can do to free people from a life of servitude (yes, college is that expensive now!) is let them get rid of their debts through bankruptcy after a decade.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Scam PACs Act. Some Political Action Committees (or PACs) exist just to steal money from seniors and veterans and redistribute that income to PAC executives, believe it or not. (OK, it’s not actually that hard to believe.) But the Stop Scam PACs Act – sponsored by Reps. Porter (D-CA) and Crenshaw (R-TX) during the last Congress – would amend the Federal Election Campaign Act so our government can go after anyone (not just folks who’ve committed actual fraud) who misrepresents themselves so they can steal money from vulnerable Americans. That’d be a big help to those folks, and we should help them.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would undo the evil effects of our Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC ruling and start reigning in campaign finance again. I know – the Republicans in charge of our House now would never do that, and the minority Republicans in our Senate would filibuster any legislation that somehow made it out of our House. But our will is our will, and almost no one in America, conservative or liberal, thinks unrestrained campaign financing is a good thing. When they don’t listen, we just keep telling them, because we’re right.

Action: concerning the debt ceiling, hedge funds, and taxes.

Long story short: tell President Biden to hold the line on a clean debt ceiling increase, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act and reject Republican efforts to defund the police at our IRS. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to reject Republican hostage-taking and demand a clean debt ceiling increase. Republicans want to force Social Security and Medicare cuts, and they surely have other irredeemable evils in mind, but they don’t get to do any of that just because they have a tiny majority in our House. President Biden has held the line so far, and good for him, but he needs to stay strong, which means we need to remind him to stay strong. Even Barack Obama wouldn’t negotiate with Republicans the second time they tried to take our government hostage in 2013, and Joe Biden was there for all of that, but we still must keep expressing our will.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act, which would (as its title suggests!) ban hedge funds from buying up so many American homes that actual Americans can’t buy them or live in them themselves. And when good Americans can’t buy a home, they also can’t bind themselves to our communities in a way that nourishes those communities. So don’t brook any “free” market silliness. Hedge funds shouldn’t get to do whatever they want – they should serve American communities, and when they keep houses out of good Americans’ hands so they can gamble with them (and with our economy!), they don’t serve us at all.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Republican plan to defund the police at our IRS. Or, as one email missive put it: “why are Republicans helping criminals?” Too many Americans secretly cheer rich tax cheats, presumably because they'd like to be that rich, but tax cheats are criminals, and the richest of them cheat all of us. When rich folks don’t pay the millions (or billions!) in taxes they owe, that means less money to fix roads, less money to fund schools, and less money to keep our air and water clean. Among other things! So we need to stop this latest effort to serve mammon.

Action: concerning education and voting rights.

Long story short: tell Florida to teach the AP African-American studies course, tell North Dakota to stop targeting gay and trans books in book bans, and tell Pennsylvania to reject proposed sore loser constitutional amendments. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your state legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Organize For helps you tell the Florida state Board of Education to let high schools there teach African-American studies. The AP African-American Studies program may be new, but that doesn’t mean it “significantly lacks educational value,” as Gov. DeSantis says. And don’t take it for granted that Florida already teaches the Black experience, not just because Florida Republicans have created a lot of education drama lately, but because a lot of Floridian crybabies pretend to be “offended” when someone points out the South embraced slavery and Jim Crow with both arms. But facts are facts, and Americans face them.

North Dakota residents, take note: state legislators want to throw librarians in jail if they don’t remove “sexually-explicit” books from public school libraries. And “sexually-explicit” includes any book about gay or trans issues, though those books aren’t “sexually explicit” just because of their subject matter. Another way of putting it: sexuality isn’t “explicit,” let alone “obscene,” merely because it’s different from yours, and certainly not if you’re not actually watching it. So Openstates.org helps North Dakota residents find their state legislators. And remember we have a word for book banning efforts that target folks oppressed due to race or sexuality, and that word is fascist.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause still helps you tell your state house Reps to reject the Republican suite of sore loser constitutional amendments that would enshrine Voter ID in our state constitution – remember when Tom Corbett’s government couldn’t make Voter ID work, even before our state Supreme Court struck it down? – and put the state’s (Republican) Auditor General in charge of elections. That latter item, especially, isn’t just sore loser thinking but short-term thinking – what if a Democrat wins the Auditor General race in 2024? Then Republicans will amend our state constitution again, I guess. You’ve heard that power without wisdom is evil? Republicans prove it every day.

Action: concerning price-gouging and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop big oil price-gouging and reject the so-called FAIR Tax. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to penalize big oil corporations for price-gouging. It ain’t tough math: high inflation plus high profits at the same time equal big corporations taking advantage of us. I always thought gas prices shooting up at the same time as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a cover, too. It’s amazing how, even 20 years ago, even conservative economics would have caught this rather intimate relationship between high inflation and high profits, but today's right-wingers don’t care about facts, only about drama. And our “liberal” media has coddled them for too long. But that’s why we step up.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to pass the so-called FAIR Tax. The so-called FAIR Tax would replace our income, corporate, and payroll taxes with a national sales tax, one they used to call a “23% tax” although it was always a 30% tax. 30 cents on the dollar is 30%, you see, but 30 is 23% of $1.30, and 23 is less than 30, so it sounds better! But it’s not how we’ve done math for thousands of years, and when most folks realize they’re paying a lower tax rate right now – even the 24% bracket extends all the way up to $182,100 in income for single folks – they won’t go for a 30% sales tax. But we’ve got to make folks realize that, and we have to put our Congressfolk on notice.

Action: concerning pollution, forced arbitration, and renters' rights.

Long story short: tell our EPA to enact stronger soot standards, tell the New York Times to get rid of forced arbitration clauses for subscribers, and tell Connecticut state legislators to do more to keep rents down. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous soot standards possible. Our EPA last updated the standards about a decade ago, and set those standards a bit higher than scientists would have liked; the Trump Administration, of course, ignored calls to tighten the standard in 2019, but perhaps this EPA will listen a little more closely. Tighter standards ain’t a whole lot to ask, especially since soot particles are so small they can go right to your bloodstream, and wreak all kinds of havoc, including asthma, COPD, Parkinson’s, dementia. So if big polluting corporations whine, let’s remind them that America is a can-do country.

Public Citizen helps you tell the New York Times to stop forcing its subscribers into arbitration. You’re an American, so if you’ve got a problem with the Times, you should be able to address that problem in a court of law, not some “arbitration” “court” that’ll almost certainly rule against you. And you should be able to band together with your fellow Americans in a class-action suit, too. Forced arbitration is easier and cheaper for the Times, but you can’t place a high-enough price on lost rights. Don’t believe the right-wing hype that average arbitration awards are bigger than average class action awards. What’ll your “average” be after you lose? Zero.

Finally, Cap the Rent CT helps you tell the Connecticut state legislature to start protecting renters more. Rent in Connecticut has gone up 20%, on average, and in some areas has gone up 40%; have we had 20% inflation over the last two years? No, but just as corporations have hidden their record profits in our high inflation just because they can, landlords have jacked up rent prices beyond what their increased costs require, just because they can. Cap the Rent helps you ask for (among other things) a 3% cap on rent hikes and expanded Good Cause protections (so landlords can’t just throw you out without a good reason). Hard to believe anyone would oppose such things, but that’s we speak out: so they don’t.

Action: concerning debt ceiling drama, high drug prices, and defunding the police.

Long story short: tell President Biden to demand a clean debt ceiling increase, and tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to jack up prices on life-saving medicines or defund the police at our IRS . Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to demand a clean debt ceiling increase from Congress, one that doesn’t cave to Republican attempts to take us all hostage. “Clean” means no Social Security cuts, no Medicare cuts, and no cuts to our CFPB, SEC, FTC, or DOJ Antitrust Division, all of which are doing great work attacking the monopolies that crush our civilization. We should win this fight, not just because Democrats control the White House and the Senate, not just because attempts at hostage-taking should always be met with maximum force, but because not even Barack Obama would negotiate with Republicans over the debt ceiling a decade ago.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any Republican attempt to roll back the drug price caps in the Inflation Reduction Act. Shame we have to tell our Congressfolk “don’t jack up prices on life-saving medicines,” but here we are – the Republican Party of George W. Bush and Donald Trump and In That Order, who do unconscionable evil, then gaslight you and call you traitor when you fight them. Whomever votes to raise prices on life-saving medicines should lose their next election. It’d help if Democrats nominate candidates who’ll actually fight for their constituents, and not be the Next Iteration of Pete Buttigieg.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject Republican efforts to defund our police at our Internal Revenue Service. Doesn’t sound so populist when you put it like that, does it? And that’s exactly what Republicans want to do – they want to literally defund the police who catch the rich tax cheats who are their true masters. Oh, sure, they say ZOMG TEH IRSZ IZ COMINGZ AFTURZ YOUZ!!!!!, but that’s horsedoodle – our IRS hasn’t had the money to go after anyone but poor folks for years. Republican fake populism clearly didn’t work for them in the midterms, so let’s not let it work now, when everything counts.

Action: concerning sore losers, junk fees, and insurrectionist lawmakers.

Long story short: tell Pennsylvania state legislators to reject sore loser constitutional amendments, tell our FTC to fight the junk fees that seem ubiquitous in our society, and tell your Congressfolk to investigate legislators who may have committed insurrection against our government. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislator to reject Republican sore loser constitutional amendments that would enshrine Voter ID in our constitution and take election-running authority away from the Commonwealth’s counties and give it to the just-so-happens-to-be-Republican state Auditor General. When Democrats re-took the lower house by one seat, we thought we'd be done with this, but a) one of them died and b) two others resigned to take U.S. House seats; hence we have a problem. But we deal with that problem, as usual, by communicating our will to our state lawmakers until they do our will.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to fight the kind of death-by-a-thousand-cuts junk fees we have to put up with in our cable bills, our ticket sales, and our hotel bills, among so, so many other places. After all, disguising the real cost of your product is illegal. Of course right-wingers say the “free” market will provide a solution, but you know what happens in the sort of “free” market they ram down our throats? Big corporations gobble up other corporations until they have no competitors, meaning you have no actual choice to find another provider for your service, and they can just keep charging you junk fees out the wazoo until you die. And as civilized people, we don’t have to put up with that.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate legislators who may have aided the attempted coup of January 6, 2021 against our government. One new Rep – Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin’s 3rd, bet Ron Kind feels great about retiring now – was there on January 6, and Paul Gosar of Arizona’s 9th, a man so beloved by his own family that they've cut ads urging citizens to vote against him, was allegedly hip-deep in insurrection planning. There are others, including the North Carolina state Rep who tried to erase his own social media posts putting him at the Capitol’s door at the moment crybabies breached it, and our Constitution does prohibit insurrectionists from holding office, so let’s get to it.

Action: concerning Guantánamo Bay, ivory poaching, and public water.

Long story short: tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay already, tell the British Parliament to include hippo teeth in the UK Ivory Act, and tell the California Water Board to protect good Californians’ water from private corporations. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility already. We’re still holding 35 Muslim men there, and we haven’t charged most of them with a crime; at the risk of beating a dead horse, if they were that dangerous, we should be able to charge them with something. Plus we’ve tortured more than a few of them, which of course means we learned nothing of consequence from them, in addition to staining our national heritage further. Generally, if George W. Bush did it, we should stop doing it. That’s a good rule for life as well as politics. And if Joe Biden wants a foreign policy victory, he could get one here, by doing our will and closing Guantánamo.

Care2 helps you tell the British Parliament to improve the UK Ivory Act – which bans the sale of elephant ivory – by also banning the sale of hippopotamus teeth. Hard to believe, but that’s where the demand has gone, now that most countries ban the sale of elephant ivory. Guess which other species has had a hard time sticking around? That’s right, hippos, who (like elephants) are losing habitat all the time and face poachers. I guess right-wingers who didn’t like the UK Ivory Act would natter on about the “unintended consequences” of the law, i.e,, that it’s spurred poaching of hippo teeth. But that’s horsedoodle. When criminals change their tactics, that doesn't mean we just throw our hands up and walk away; it means our laws have to change as well.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell the California Water Board to stop Blue Triton from siphoning public water out of the San Bernardino National Forest. You know the drill by now: big corporations take public water from us for pennies a gallon, and then resell it as “bottled water” for a lot more than that. A government that allows this is either evil or very, very short-sighted. And all that rain California’s gotten lately doesn’t change the fact that they’re still in a drought (since a drought ain’t over after a few days of flooding any more than climate change is over because it snowed three feet). And the money you get from selling off public water lasts a short time, but public water lasts forever – if we can keep it.

Action: concerning methane emissions, screen time, and sales taxes.

Long story short: tell our EPA to issue the strongest methane regulations possible, tell our FTC to keep big tech corporations from manipulating children into staying online forever, and tell 22 states to stop levying sales tax on menstrual products. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The National Resources Defense Council helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to issue the strongest methane regulations possible. Our EPA has lately issued a proposal that updates their 2021 proposal, and that’s good, but it doesn’t go far enough – it could limit flaring and leakage from storage tanks more vigorously, to name two issues. Methane leakage is so prevalent in gas drilling that it's birthed an entire industry (the “methane mitigation” industry) to combat it. And it packs a climate change punch that’s 80 times worse than coal emissions, which are still pretty bad. Accommodating gas drilling corporations ain’t worth it if we don’t have a planet to live on.

Fairplay helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to ban website/app design that manipulates kids into spending more time online. Asvirtually every scientist not directly in the employ of a big tech corporations would tell you, kids don’t need to be spending all that time in front of screens, and they certainly don’t need apps and programs that reward them for spending more time onscreen. Too often we imagine ourselves so helpless in the face of evil. We should react to the news that big corporations manipulate children into spending all their time onscreen not with “well, that’s just the ‘free’ market at work, what can you do?” with “so stop them.” Children are our future, after all.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell 22 states to stop charging sales taxes on menstrual products. I’m not a fan of sales taxes anyway – they hurt working people harder than rich folks – but I’m even less of a fan of sales taxes on essential items, which is why states tend not to assess sales taxes on groceries, though not “luxury” items like coffee. If you’ve ever started bleeding uncontrollably out of your vagina without any warning, then you know that a tampon is not a “luxury” item. For most men, I’m sure it’s a matter of not thinking, though in my experience that statement doesn’t make women feel any better. But if the result is sexist, the intent matters little, and if it’s sexist, we need to fix it.

Action: concerning taxes, voting rights, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell your Senators to block the House’s efforts to defund our IRS, tell Pennsylvania state legislators to reject vote-suppressing constitutional amendments, and tell our Justice Department to investigate the Ticketmaster monopoly. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Senators to reject the House-passed bill which would defund our IRS of most of the money the Inflation Reduction Act provided. Republicans have been flogging the ZOMG TEH IRS WILL COMEZ FOR TEH YOUZ!!!! lie for years; how’d that work out for them on Election Day? Well, they lost ground in our Senate, and barely won our House, so, ah, not well. And that money would help our IRS go after rich tax cheats; our IRS already goes after poor tax cheats because they’re easy pickings. So let’s not tolerate any more defund-the-police craziness from Republicans.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the ACLU helps you tell your state legislators to reject proposed constitutional amendments that would enshrine Voter ID – which we know amounts to voter suppression against seniors and minorities – and take election oversight away from Pennsylvania’s counties and put it in the hands of the auditor general. Who, let’s check, just so happens to be a Republican right now! What a coincidence! Our legislature must pass such amendments in consecutive terms before they can go before the voters, and our Governor has no part in this process, so we Pennsylvanians had better get in our legislators’ grills right now if we want to stop them from doing this noxious crap.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division to investigate the Live Nation/Ticketmaster monopoly. The Obama DOJ actually said the 2010 Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger would give us “robust competition,” which is a real head-scratcher, and not just because the resulting merger has actually given us sky-high ticket prices, junk fees, and crappy service. When one corporation controls so much of the market, where will you go when that corporation (for example) changes ticket prices once they’re in your basket or assesses fees that increase prices by 75%? Nowhere, that’s where, and that’s why we need to break up Ticketmaster.

Around the table: evil people do evil crap, part 992.

U.N. report says the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica is healing slowly and will likely close completely in 43 years. And if this comes to pass, and I expect it will, right-wingers will immediately demand that we start making chlorofluorocarbons again because “the Earth heals itself,” though the ozone layer would have “healed itself” in large part because we stopped making the chemicals that made holes in it! And think tanks will commission studies with titles like Was Hairspray Really So Bad?

Over 7,000 New York nurses go on strike for better working conditions. I don’t know if they’re saying so, but they’re also probably mad that their bosses make millions of dollars while they handle 20 E.R. patients at once. Remember: every time health care workers have ever organized or struck, plenty of right-wingers said these workers are too important to let organize or strike. The obvious retort: if a worker’s that important, we’d better treat them right! Right-wingers think being just one of 20 E.R. patients per nurse will never happen to them, but it will, when their heroes come for their money, as evil people always do.

Rep. Scott Perry (E-PA) says he won’t recuse himself from any House probes of various January 6 investigations, even though he himself is the subject of several of them. Dig his rhetorical bait-and-switch – pressed about the fact that he’s literally the subject of some investigations, he responds “should everybody in Congress that disagrees with somebody be barred from doing the oversight and investigative powers that Congress has?” "Investigation" and "disagreement" aren't synonyms, Roget. I’m old enough to remember when politicians tried to avoid even the appearance of corruption. Scott Perry won with only 54% of the vote in his district in 2022, so perhaps he shouldn't act so untouchable.

Today, in “Short Story Ideas That Would Have Earned Me a Rap on the Knuckles From My Creating Writing Teacher”: Florida school board bans production of a play about a hundred-year old play in Yiddish that was itself banned from production because it dealt with homosexuality. The Florida government pretends to care about “exposing children to indecency,” but we know what this is about: small people with small minds and small hearts who can’t have all the say about everything anymore and want to inflict endless pain on the rest of us because of it.

Health care experts warn that the recent Ohio outbreak of measles – declared “eliminated” in America as of the year 2000 – won’t be the last. The roots of the Ohio outbreak appears to pre-date COVID anti-vaxxers, however, at least in the Midwest, where anti-vaxxers a) believe lies about the “effects” of the measles vaccine, b) think measles isn't all that bad, which, like, no, and c) still haven’t shaken the disgusting lie that “vaccines cause autism” even though the man who started that lie has been exposed many times over as a fraud. When so many Americans pride themselves on attending the University of Google, we all suffer.

Finally, at least one legal expert thinks Fulton County (GA) District Attorney Fani Willis is “gearing up to indict” Donald Trump after wrapping up the probe into that phone call he made to Georgia’s Secretary of State where he asked why he couldn’t just find him 11,780 more votes. Maybe she is and maybe she’s not, but recall the two giant hurdles to convicting Mr. Trump of anything: one, he’ll never take a plea deal, and two, chances are good that at least one Trumphole will con his way onto the jury. Not that these probabilities should ever deter us from fighting evil.

Action: concerning the minimum wage, Congressional ethics, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell New York’s Governor to raise that state’s minimum wage to $20/hour, tell your Congressfolk to expel George Santos, and tell President Biden to get with the firing of Postmaster General DeJoy already. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

More Perfect Union helps you tell New York Governor Hochul to get on board with raising the state’s minimum wage to $20/hour (and New York City’s minimum wage to $21.25/hour). I can already hear the right-wingers shout WHENZ WILLZ ITZ ENDZ!!!!!, but we first started calling for a $15/hour minimum wage a decade ago, and it still ain’t quite there in New York state. And ain’t nobody’s food and rent prices got lower during that time! I bet we’ll eventually see legal action against today’s landlords for price-fixing, now that President Biden’s made that a thing our government does again. In the meantime, workers need a way to keep their heads above water.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expel Rep. George Santos (R-NY). New York Democrats should have beaten this guy, but they didn’t, so now it’s up to us. Mr. Santos has done so badly that I even doubt he’s gay! Normally when someone says they’re gay, I figure they know themselves better than I do, even when it’s a guy who was married to a woman as recently as 2018 – being gay still gets you beat up in much of America, after all! But now that we know that he’s almost completely fabricated the rest of his life’s story, I don’t even trust him on the one thing I’d be inclined to trust him on. I bet a lot of his constituents feel the same, and they deserve better.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell President Biden to fire Postmaster General DeJoy and expand postal services. After all, Mr. DeJoy tried to sabotage the 2020 election, and has cut jobs and cut services – including the delivery of life-saving medicines – while raising prices. Your typical, post-Reagan CEO pretends the only way to fix budget problems is to cut services, but a bold entrepreneur might say that bringing back basic banking services (which our Postal Service provided until the late ‘60s) might bring in more dough. But the right has folks thinking bold means stupid. Thankfully, we’re not stupid.

Around the table: now *everyone* wants to be an insurrectionist!

I don’t necessarily think that the January 6, 2021 attempted coup in America inspired Bolsonaro supporters’ attempted coup in Brazil this past Sunday – most of the world has seen more coups than we have! – but I do think that when crybabies attempt a coup in the United States, then other crybabies across the planet become more emboldened. Also, while President Biden’s condemnation of the Brazil attack is far from worthless, I really needed to see more from him when Myanmar’s crybaby military staged a successful coup because they didn’t like the results of the 2020 election there.

I’m pleased that a British corporation has developed a tractor that runs on the methane found in cow dung, but I’d still like to know more about how well it works and how pricey it’ll be – I mean, if small farmers can’t buy it, then what’s the point? And that’s exactly what’ll happen if someone like Elon Musk gets his hands on it! The Bible says the love of money is the root of all evil, and I hate to see that proven so often.

Surprise, surprise, a Florida teacher trying to ban every book in sight gets described as racist and homophobic by her own students. One of this teacher’s crusades has a book about Wilma Randolph in its sights, because she thinks it’ll make white kids ashamed; now I wasn’t that spiritually-advanced as a youth, but I never made the world that much about me back then. Strange that grown-ups do – especially the ones in charge of educating kids.

When I hear that the government of Iran hanged two anti-hijab protestors – supposedly for murdering an Iranian cop, though both protestors said before their deaths that the government tortured them into confessing to that crime – I can only say this is a day ending in “y” in a fascist regime, and that when American fascists dream of the America they want, this is what they see. I do wonder if American fascists will they call their brethren in nations like Iran their “mud brothers,” as they called the 9.11 hijackers back in the day.

Finally, the South Carolina Supreme Court has struck down that state’s six-week abortion ban, saying, essentially, that the six-week ban doesn’t give women enough time to even find out she’s pregnant, let alone “take reasonable steps” to end her pregnancy. But the ruling puts a 22-week ban back in place; that ban only has exceptions for the life of the mother and the non-viability of the fetus. Why, it’s like we didn’t just spend an entire summer learning about all the reasons a woman might need an abortion.

Action: concerning insurrection, ethics, and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to ban Donald Trump from elective office and reject any effort to weaken the Office of Congressional Ethics, and tell President Biden to keep fighting for an expanded Child Tax Credit. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban Donald Trump from holding elective office again as our 14th Amendment demands. Y’all know I’ve been a stickler for the proper definition of “treason,” but “insurrection” and “rebellion” describe what Mr. Trump did pretty well, frankly. And if you’re still thinking maybe Mr. Trump was just a selfish dolt who blundered into January 6, recall that Mr. Trump knew he’d lost the election, and goaded people to storm the Capitol anyway. Also, seriously, enough with crybabies already. Yes, especially crybabies with guns!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempts to weaken the Office of Congressional Ethics. They tried this crap in 2017, and we stopped it, so we can stop it again, even though clearly Republicans are counting on the chaos of the Speaker voting imbrogio to wear us out. We the people need to show our power to our elected “leaders” every minute of every day; our duty as Americans lasts forever, and we don’t get a vacation from it. But calling your Congressfolk ain’t hard and doesn’t take very long. And the work we do, the work of maintaining a civilization, is the most important work a human being can do.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell President Biden to keep working to get the expanded Child Tax Credit back. This may be a cynical time, with plenty of cynical people, but what a President says still matters. You know this because George W. Bush almost single-handedly made climate change denialism mainstream back in the day. You also know it because local poison control centers fielded so many calls about bleach killing COVID in the days after Donald Trump mused clumsily about it. And if President Biden keeps talking about the Child Tax Credit expansion keeping millions of kids out of poverty, that’ll make our job easier. And, after all, that’s his job!

Finally: I’ll continue to provide action alert links, but with Republicans in charge of our House now, I really think the best thing to do is to call them with our will and clog up their phone lines so they get it. Some of them will whine about it just like they did in 2017, but let’s have them whine in public, so we know who might be easiest to turn out of office in 2022.

UPDATE. Sadly, our House didn't listen to us, and basically gutted the Office of Congressional Ethics earlier today. Naturally George Santos, arguably the most ethics-challenged individual elected to Congress in recent history, said it was "fantastic," while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has an actual ethics complaint still to be resolved, called it "disturbing." That's a Goofus and Gallant strip right there, though I guess it would pain Mr. Santos not to be Gallant here. Anyway, today we flush it, and tomorrow we get up and go again.

Readings for January 9, 2023.

Mike Lofgren at Salon reminds us that isolationists like the late Sen. Robert Taft (R-OH), once dubbed “Mr. Republican,” have always been with us. He also reminds us that we shouldn’t think their isolationism sincere, merely because they don’t indulge in anti-Semitism or love of fascism out loud. We have all succumbed to the temptation to think that Republicans Used to Be Better in The Good Old Days – I can’t tell you how many sentences I began with “at least Reagan didn’t” during Tha Bush Mobb’s reign of terror – but we would be wiser to take the 30,000-foot view here. I’ll only add that if Mr. Taft had ever condemned Father Coughlin, it wouldn’t have been useless. Even if he didn’t mean it!

From Julia Rock at The Lever we learn “How Big Pharma Actually Spends Its Massive Profits.” Long story short: “Between 2012 and 2021, the 14 largest publicly-traded pharmaceutical companies spent $747 billion on stock buybacks and dividends — substantially more than the $660 billion they spent on research and development.” So no more of this ZOMG BUT TEH INNOVASHUNZ!!!!! crap! Must I add that the money a corporation spends on research and development can’t be taxed by any government? Because it’s an expense?

Sonali Kohatkar at Raw Story reveals “The Disturbing Truth About How Much Unearned Wealth and Power Has Been Accrued by Elites.” Said disturbing truth is nepotism: “some of the most dramatic success stories began with a parent using their wealth or connections to give their child the upper hand,” she reminds us, and not just our most famous tech zillionaires like Jeff Bezos ($250,000 from his parents) or Mark Zuckerberg ($100,000 loan from his parents), but also Donald Trump – remember how he said, out loud, that his father had given him a “very small loan” of $1 million to jump-start his real estate career? And, thanks to said father’s tax evasion schemes, little Donald had been a millionaire since he was a small child! So no more of this ZOMG BUT THEYZ EARNEDZ ITZ!!!!!! crap. Better to call nepotism an affirmative action program for the well-off.

When Marick Masters at The Conversation wonders if the last year’s surge in union elections and strikes “mark a turning point for organized labor,” I’m tempted to say: only if we make it so! But Mr. Masters does us a great service by pointing out that for all the media coverage of strikes and elections lately, the numbers of these are only a little bit up from the last 40 years – as late as 1980, the year before President Reagan broke the air traffic controllers’ strike, we saw 200 major work stoppages, compared to 20 in 2022. So maybe the pandemic hasn’t driven union membership upward the way we would have liked – or the way the Depression and World War II did. A possible “ace up labor’s sleeve”? More folks like unions and/or want to be in unions than in a very long time. We should work to ensure that doesn’t just mean people tend to like what they don’t have.

Jonathan O’Calllighan at IFL Science evaluates a study suggesting that octopuses are actually aliens from outer space, and finds it wanting. Yes I also got a kick out of that viral video showing an octopus escaping through a crevice in a boat’s deck, but when a scientific paper about an animal counts 33 scientists among its authors but zero zoologists, red flags should go up. And when a study points to “gaps in the evidence” and then fills those gaps with speculation, that isn’t the same as filling them with, you know, evidence. The “we can’t explain it, so it must be aliens” argument may even remind you of “intelligent design.”

Finally, the incomparable Matt Stoller relays some good news for American workers, as our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) has proposed a new rule that would bar “non-compete” agreements in employment contracts, meaning that workers would have more freedom to work where they like, rather than being barred from working for competitors. And of course, with “non-compete” clauses already being unenforceable in at least 12 states and with many actual bosses being fairly sympathetic to the new rule, America’s “free” market votaries are applauding the rule change, right? I kid, of course – they think the “free” market only means “freedom” for overpaid executives, not actual freedom for workers to make more money, and maybe even one day become bosses themselves! (Don’t believe any hype about “employees stealing trade secrets,” either, because other laws cover that.)

Action: concerning taxes, ethics, and drama.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any efforts to defund our IRS or weaken our Office of Congressional Ethics, and tell your Democratic House Rep not to help Republicans out of the Speaker-vote mess they’ve made. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

I hadn’t intended to post this week, but I’ve got a few particularly timely alerts, so I’ll share them. You can combine all three of these into a single phone call if you like.

First off, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to defund our IRS. You might as well say “Republicans are defunding the police,” because our IRS goes after folks who cheat on their taxes, and when someone cheats on their taxes, they’re breaking our laws. Don’t believe the hype that our IRS will use the expanded funding from the Inflation Reduction Act to “go after you.” Newsflash: our IRS has only been going after low-income earners for years, because they haven’t had the money to fight rich tax-evaders and their armies of lawyers. Beat this defund-the-police effort back, and our IRS can catch some rich tax cheats for once.

Second, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose any effort to weaken the Office of Congressional Ethics. Yeah, they tried this crap back in 2017, and we the people most certainly rose to the occasion, pounding our Congressfolks’ phone lines until even then-President-elect Trump backed us. I don’t know what it is about Republicans that they try to kill ethics watchdogs every time they seize power in our House – they couldn’t be that anxious to save George Santos’s bacon, could they? What a glorious shitshow that has been! – but whatever the reason, it’s stupid, and we need to tell them to stop.

Third, if your House Rep is a Democrat, call them and say “do not help” – as in, do not help Republicans find their way out of the Speaker-vote drama they've earned and deserve. How heartening to watch Kevin McCarthy totally debase himself so he can be Speaker, only to have his hopes crushed by folks even worse than he is! But you may have heard rumors that Democrats might somehow help Mr. McCarthy win, and starting tomorrow you’ll hear prattling from our “liberal” media that Democrats have to step in and help Republicans solve the problems they’ve caused. They’d be missing the most important thing, which is that Republicans never help you when you need it. I may seem un-Christian about this, but then sometimes kindness resembles meanness.