Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning voting rights and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and reject any legislation that would create a “fiscal commission” for Social Security and/or Medicare. 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.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This bill would restore our Justice Department’s ability to pre-clear election law changes from any state or locality that has demonstrated a pattern of vote suppression – which answers our Supreme Court’s ruling that the old pre-clearance formula from the Voting Rights Act discriminated against Southern states. That’s a little like saying laws against burglary discriminate against burglars! Anyway, this bill would actually improve on the Voting Rights Act, so Congress should pass it.

The Alliance for Retired Americans helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any “fiscal commission” legislation for Social Security and/or Medicare. Want to make Social Security better? Start taxing income above $168,600 and then hike benefits! Want to make Medicare better? Tax corporations what they’re paying for private health insurance and then admit all Americans into the system! All of that is much better, than empowering some special “commission” to cut our benefits without the scrutiny of debate. If that was such a great idea, they wouldn’t have to do it while we’re not looking!

Action: concerning corporate fraud and monopolies.

Long story short: tell our government to fight monopolies and mergers and make public auditors more proactive. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell the Public Accounting Oversight Board (or PCAOB) to enact the most vigorous rules possible for public corporation auditors. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, enacted in response to the Enron accounting scandal, created the PCAOB to oversee folks who audit publicly-traded corporations for a living, but the PCAOB hasn’t exactly been pro-active in going after fraud, even though it hurts investors. You know investors? That class of people right-wingers say they’re always trying to protect? Well, our PCAOB’s proposal suggests they’re going to be a lot more proactive, and so we should encourage that. Right-wingers will call that “micromanagement” and “nanny state,” but the people who get hurt by corporate fraud will call it something else: justice.

I have a few anti-monopoly action alerts. Demand Progress helps you tell our Justice Department to break up United Health, before it has the power to buy up all the doctors’ practices and surgery centers and overbill Medicare with impunity. Demand Progress also helps you tell our government to stop the proposed Walmart/Vizio merger, so we can also stop Walmart from taking over the flat-screen market and hoovering up all the personal data Vizio has collected on its customers. And More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Reserve to block the proposed Capitol One/Discover merger, to prevent the resulting behemoth from having 400 million customers. That’s too much power! And no corporation should have it.

Action: concerning election workers and Native American lands.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect election workers and sacred Native American lands. 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.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Election Worker and Polling Place Protection Act, which would enact criminal penalties for folks who harass, intimidate, and threaten election workers when their guy loses. Let me be clear: the folks who went after workers like Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman (and all the good Americans who quit being election workers after the 2020 election) aren’t just assholes, they’re whiners, and frankly, being a whiner is worse, and I’m sick of folks getting their way by whining. And if we don’t put people in jail when they threaten election workers, then why do we even have laws?

The Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act, which would once again protect the famous Oak Flat region in Arizona from being polluted by big copper mining corporations. Oak Flat already sits within federally-protected land, and that’s a phrase that should mean a lot more than it apparently does, otherwise we wouldn’t need this bill. You know another phrase that should mean more than it does? Religious freedom, not as in right-wingers’ “right” to tell you what to do and think, but as in protecting lands sacred to Native Americans.

Action: concerning monopolies and food allergens.

Long story short: tell our government to stop corporate health care monopolies, and tell our FDA to redo allergen labeling standards. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you leave a public comment about corporate health care monopolies with several federal agencies. (The link goes right to our government’s comment page.) More Perfect Union suggests this comment: “I am glad to see the government recognize the problems presented by consolidation in health care industries, particularly emergency rooms. Private equity firms often prioritize profits over patient care and worker safety, leading to higher costs, reduced quality of service, and increased risks for both patients and healthcare workers. I urge you to consider implementing policies that would limit or restrict the ability of private equity firms to acquire and operate emergency rooms. This could include stricter regulations on mergers and acquisitions in the healthcare industry, as well as greater transparency and accountability requirements for these firms. Thank you.” But More Perfect Union also reminds us that our federal agencies will take your comment more seriously if you personalize it, by telling them about yourself (i.e., where you live or what you do for a living) and perhaps by describing a time when you or your family had to struggle with an understaffed emergency room. But even the sample comment provided above will remind our Administration that lots of folks hate it when our government just lets banksters do whatever they like. So good luck, and God bless.

The Center for Scientific Integrity helps you tell our Food and Drug Agency (or FDA) to make allergen labels on food make sense again. Basically, our FDA lets too many corporations get away with ignoring small amounts of allergens in food, when some folks literally can’t just “ignore” it, or they’ll get very sick or even die. You don’t want labeling standards to kill people! Also, in a truly Kafkaesque loophole, some corporations intentionally add allergens to food, because that’s easier than doing the work of preventing allergen cross-contamination. They’ll say it’s because “regulations are onerous,” but I’ll say it’s because they’re greedy and they don’t care about us. You can amend the Center for Scientific Integrity’s sample comment to say so if you like.

Action: concerning paid leave and “free” trade.

Long story short: tell Pennsylvania state legislators to enact real paid family/medical leave, and tell all state legislators to pressure the Biden Administration into getting investor-state dispute settlement systems out of trade deals. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Moms Rising helps you tell your PA state legislators to pass the Family Care Act, which would provide at least 12 weeks of paid time off every year, so we can take care of ourselves and our families. Sound like a recipe for entitled, lazy workers? Well, this is the post-COVID era; nobody’s killing themselves at their jobs anymore after 50 years of get-rich-quick schemers running (and ruining) everything. Sound too expensive? Well, Kirsten Gillibrand’s national plan would have cost a worker making $50,000 annually a mere $8/month. Most folks’ co-pays are more than that!

Global Trade Watch helps you tell your state legislators to call on the Biden Administration to get the notorious investor-state dispute settlement (or ISDS) systems out of all “free” trade deals. ISDS systems allow investors to claim that our clean air/clean water/worker safety laws “hurt” them financially, and thus allow them to essentially nullify those laws, and there ain’t no sincere law-and-order advocate in America who’d put up with that. After all, we don’t go through all the trouble of building a civilization so wealthy whiners can tear it down.

Around the table: a good week for evil, though not for junk fees.

Our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) passes rules preventing big telecom corporations from throwing a bunch of surprise junk fees in their “all-in” subscription plans. That the FCC’s two Republican Commissioners of course voted against it should remind us that Presidential elections matter – we may find the Biden Administration working a bit too slowly on junk fees for our taste, but there’s no way a second Trump Administration would have done a damn thing about them. And pay no mind to the corporate whining at article’s end – it’s “micromanagement” to make corporations stop lying to us about their prices? Pimps, please.

Hard to believe, Harry, but women are apparently ditching birth control pills after getting bad/wrong advice about them from social media. Even if birth control pills caused weight gain (they don’t) or infertility (ditto), we would do well to stack that up against the very real threat of far more easily getting pregnant and being forced by the state to give birth. Too many folks hear one thing that surprises or impresses them and think they know everything after that; if we weren’t all so susceptible to the sin of pride, we’d make better decisions and we’d suffer a whole lot less.

Ho hum, an educational nonprofit plans to expand its deployment of an AI “teaching assistant” to thousands of students next year. Why, that doesn’t sound at all like part of a plan to replace unionized public school teachers with unpaid robots that never get sick or go on vacation! And Thomas Jefferson is literally the father of American racism, so playing up his alleged hatred of slavery means even less than the on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand argument the AI tool makes. Machines are good at washing clothes and keeping food cold, not teaching kids. But their continued deployment will enable more Americans to congratulate themselves for knowing things when they don't.

Hedge fund corporations move into the autistic services field, and surprise, surprise! Autistic service centers start delivering worse service before closing down en masse. Banksters really do ruin everything – why, they even cause or enable abuse of autistic children, no doubt by breathing down everyone’s neck to CUTZ ALLZ TEH COSTZ!!!!! But let’s not let pass that chains of autistic service corporations shouldn’t exist, either, because the downward pressure to cut-costs-no-matter-who-gets-hurt comes from that direction, too. The solution to most problems in America is small businesses creating jobs, not big corporations creating “efficiency in markets.” I can barely type that phrase without throwing up.

Ho hum, NBC News wonders why the public thinks the crime rate is going up when it’s going down, which is a little like Donald Trump wondering why people think he shouts so much. The public think it’s going up because our “liberal” media always cover it like it’s going up. They’ve done better reporting actual facts about crime lately, but they still cling to local crime stories like grim death, reporting on them repeatedly over days and weeks, showing the same clips over and over again until it’s like all you see on the news is crime. How bad is it? Last week one of my co-workers saw a story about an arrest for a recent SEPTA bus shooting and asked if another shooting had happened. I’m pretty sure that’s a feature, not a bug.

Finally, another day, another right-wing punditoid opining that New York seizing Donald Trump’s property so he can pay off $450 million-plus in civil fraud judgments would “create the greatest victimhood of 2024” and “elect Donald Trump.” My immediate response would have been: so, you’re saying we should not enforce the law? As for “let’s not talk about whether it’s justified or not” – Jesus Mary and Joseph that is literally the only thing we should talk about! Americans hate political “analysis” because they hate having their lives reduced to a horserace, but our “liberal” media punditoids have nothing else to offer.

Action: concerning campaign finance, child labor, and abortion.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to close the floodgates of corporate campaign spending, make corporations pay harder when they break child labor law, and reject any national abortion ban. 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.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to overturn our Supreme Court’s nefarious Citizens United v. FEC decision and pass the DISCLOSE Act. In Citizens United, our Supreme Court justified flooding political campaigns with even more corporate money by saying, essentially, hey, Congress can still pass a law forcing corporations to disclose their campaign spending. 12 long years later, Congress has not done that, but the DISCLOSE Act would force a lot of corporate spending into the light. So would amending our Constitution to let us limit campaign spending again. So let’s get to stepping.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Child Labor Act, so that the many, many corporations currently trying to replace higher-paid workers with actual children can face stiffer penalties. Yes, child labor is already illegal across America! But corporations can decide to go ahead and break the law anyway because they won’t have to pay too much for it. The Stop Child Labor Act would effectively take that choice away from them, and it should! As I’ve said before, either our children are our future or they’re just another source of cheap labor, but they’re not both.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any and all national abortion bans. That’s no ban, period – no 15-week ban like Mr. Trump reportedly supports, which is also the proposal that helped Democrats reclaim Virginia’s lower state house. And no, “no abortion ban” is not “extreme”! How can the majority position in America be “extreme”? Funny how often right-wingers say that. And what happened to keeping health care decisions between a woman and her doctor? Don’t right-wingers support that? Oh, right – they only support that when they’re trying to keep our government from regulating health insurance corporations at all.

Action: concerning monopolies, stock buybacks, and cruelty to immigrants.

Long story short: tell our government to break up United Health, force corporations to disclose stock buybacks, and stop putting would-be immigrants in solitary confinement. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Justice Department to break up United Health, which now owns so many surgery centers and doctors’ practices that one might almost think they’re trying to gain control over all of health care! And we have laws against that, even if the Biden Administration is the first Administration to enforce them in almost 50 years. If United Health gets enough power, they’ll be able to jack up health care prices on everyone, and no corporation should have such power. Did I mention that United Health faces accusations of overbilling Medicare? Another way of putting that would be “stealing from the taxpayer,” i.e., you.

Take On Wall Street helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to propose a vigorous stock buyback disclosure rule, so that everyone can see which big corporations are actually investing in their products and which are just concentrating power in fewer and richer hands. Our SEC has already proposed such a rule, but our Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals – the one overrun with Trumpholes – struck it down. Still, why should our SEC give up? Surely we can enact a rule that protects good Americans and passes muster with appeals courts. We’re the can-do country, after all. Or we’d better be.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell the Biden Administration to end solitary confinement in ICE detention centers. Mr. Biden has actually ratcheted up solitary for would-be immigrants, and why? To prove he’s “tougher on immigration” than Donald Trump? How many times must I tell these pimps! Right-wingers will never reward liberals for appeasing them! And treating people like human beings always strengthens a civilization, no matter how many isolated anecdotes about “taking advantage of the system” right-wingers advance. Civilization had better be more than a sum of outrage-inducing anecdotes.

Action: concerning government shutdowns, price-gouging, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end government shutdowns, fight corporate price-gouging, and protect voting rights. 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.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to end government shutdowns forever, by passing laws eliminating the debt ceiling and authorizing spending to continue at current levels whenever Congress can’t agree on continuing resolutions. Seriously, the only people in America who want government shutdowns are people who worship chaos and drama, and they shouldn’t get all the say about everything, or very much of anything, frankly. And stamping feet and preening about “runaway government debt” in order to cut Social Security and Medicare? Folks who do that should have their own circle of hell.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Shrinkflation Prevention Act, while Inequality Media helps you tell them to pass the Price Gouging Prevention Act. What’s the main cause of inflation? Not supply chain issues, not stimulus checks, not higher wages for workers – it’s corporate greed simple and plain, and these bills would make it harder for corporations to be greedy, as far as giving you less for your buck (the former bill) or raising prices higher than inflation or using inflation as a cover to raise prices when no other cost pressures would cause that (the latter bill). Ignore free market votaries; people matter more than ideology.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The former bill would advance a slew of reforms nationally, including same-day voter registration and fairer redistricting, while the latter bill would allow our Justice Department to strike down new vote restriction laws from any state or locality that has demonstrated a history of vote suppression. These bills would help more good Americans vote; that may not be the Republicans’ goal, but so what? Duty is duty, right is right, and wrong is wrong.

Action: concerning Boeing, Israel, and AI deepfakes.

Long story short: tell our government to nationalize Boeing and stop selling weapons to Israel, and tell big tech corporations to stop people from using AI to hurt other people. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell the Biden Administration to nationalize Boeing. That’s right, our government should just take ownership of Boeing, because how could our government possibly run that corporation worse? Boeing used to care about building good planes, but now all they care about is making money, and if anyone shouts TEH SOSHULIZMZ!!!!! at this idea, kindly remind them that American taxpayers (via the Department of Defense) are already Boeing’s biggest customer and thus deserve more say in how it operates. Also maybe remind them that they drove roads and drank tap water and used electricity and breathed clean air today.

Demand Progress helps you tell the Biden Administration to stop selling arms to Israel as long as they’re committing genocide in Palestine. I actually think President Biden has handled this whole thing about as well as one can – especially given that he’s one of our most pro-Israel Presidents ever – but you don’t let up when you get some of what you want, you demand more. Hey, it always works for right-wingers! And our pressure has (finally!) driven a wedge between American politicians and the reflexively pro-Israel lobby, and has even prompted Sen. Schumer to condemn Mr. Netanyahu, so again, we need to keep up the pressure.

Finally, Ultraviolet helps you tell big tech corporations to stop people from using AI to create non-consensual deepfakes and thus harm other people. Is the genie out of the bottle here? Hell no! It should be laughably easy to limit folks’ access to AI apps, or to certain AI app functions, so it should be laughably easy to limit the harm AI apps can do. And not for nothing, but women bear the brunt of that harm, with their images used non-consensually in over 95% of all internet deepfakes. So don’t brook any folly from tech bros who call themselves “founders” and “indispensable men” but act all helpless when asked to stop the harm their products cause.

Action: concerning drug prices, affordable internet, and gun lawsuits.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to oppose anti-Medicare drug price negotiation bills, extend the Affordable Connectivity Program, and repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. 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. Courtesy Helen Santoro at The Lever, we learn that several big pharma-aligned House Democrats have proposed limiting Medicare drug price negotiation. It’s like they’re saying if 90% of us support something, then we should all just go fuck ourselves! So let’s call our Congressfolk and tell them to oppose the ORPHAN Cures Act, the MINI Act, and the EPIC Act, and let’s also tell them to stop pretending we must either have price-gouging or no cures at all! That is, of course, a rhetorical hostage situation. And any politician who believes we should pay more for life-saving drugs deserves defeat. That certainly includes Donald Trump!

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Affordable Connectivity Program Extension Act, which would extend the Affordable Connectivity Program Congress created during the pandemic, so that more working families can afford internet. You remember how all our kids had to go to school online for a year or so? Well, we would be cruel to make it harder for some people to afford the internet connectivity they might one day need just to go to school again. I mean, we’ve already got cable corporations to be cruel to working families by charging whatever they like! Certainly our government doesn’t need to heap more cruelty on top of cruelty.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which prevents gun corporations from being sued not just for their role in enabling daily mass murders, but also for the gun safety issues they cause. Why do big gun corporations need this kind of protection from the marketplace? If we extended that to, say, cars or cribs, people would recognize that as an offense to civilization right away. But guns? Too many people want to hold guns more sacred than people, and that’s also an offense to civilization. And, look, truly frivolous lawsuits lose, but gun corporations don’t deserve the privilege of not having to deal with lawsuits.

Around the table: from TikTok bans to bloodbaths.

Matt Stoller describes why “The TikTok Problem Is Not What You Think.” The article has a lot of great info (particularly on the Biden-led sea change in data privacy protection), but long story short: foreign corporations shouldn’t have so much personal data on American citizens, particularly when those corporations align so closely with obviously authoritarian governments, and TikTok abuses its users just as badly as Facebook does. Also, note well that China happily keeps American internet platforms out of their country and tries to control what foreigners say about China – just say something about Tianenmen Square in a TikTok video if you don’t believe me! No, I don’t want Steve Mnuchin owning TikTok either, but even that’s better than China controlling it.

Do people really not get that the Florida teenagers who used AI to create deepfake nudes of their classmates committed child abuse and child porn? People also really don’t get that the perps are too young to go to jail, but certainly they’re not too young to be shamed, and if they never get into their first-choice colleges as a result of their actions, I won’t shed a tear. In any case, might this be more proof that AI development is moving too fast with too little governmental oversight? Why, yes, I think it might! Don’t brook any nonsense like government doesn’t know enough about AI to oversee it, because that’d be like arguing that only banksters know enough to regulate banks.

From Johanna Richlin at The Conversation we learn that vaccine-skeptical mothers learned to be that way at least in part from all their bad experiences in the health care system. I’m reminded that 17th century poet John Dryden frequently aimed his ire at doctors, and of course we should empathize with women describing a health care system that injures them – you’ve heard that doctors will more likely tell women (especially Black and Brown women) that they’re just bellyaching? And yes, the mammon-worship endemic to our health care industry hurts us all. But what of the evil actors (i.e., Tucker Carlson, Andrew Wakefield, all the YouTube “influencers” who’ve hurt a lot of people but whom history will never remember) who have exploited this landscape?

Ho hum, ”liberal” media journalists actually read Robert Hur’s interview with President Biden over classified documents and suddenly discover that their initial reports on the investigation might have been a little overheated. We have all learned by now, I would hope, that reading is a good way to understand writing, but even after all these years of Donald Trump inflicting chaos and abuse upon good Americans, too many “liberal” media journalists still either cut corners or prefer sensationalism. Happily for Joe Biden, he delivered a State of the Union address earlier this month in which he did not appear to be the addled granddad our “liberal” media would seem to prefer.

Hard to believe, Harry, Special Counsel Jack Smith apparently put a Stephen Miller amicus brief about the Trump classified documents indictment through the woodchipper last week. In Mr. Smith’s telling, Mr. Miller apparently believes that “if a person illegally carries a firearm into a NARA facility or forcibly threatens a NARA employee,” then “NARA (would be) powerless to report that criminal conduct to the FBI,” and would have to “engage in notice-and-comment rule making to promulgate a regulation authorizing it to make such a referral.” But of course Mr. Miller doesn’t even intend to create a legal “precedent”, but merely to (in Steve Bannon’s immortal phrase) “flood the zone with shit” so the wheels of justice can slow down and maybe Donald Trump can win re-election before getting convicted of a crime.

Finally, I can’t wait to hear how right-wingers try to justify Donald Trump saying at an Ohio rally that there’ll be a “bloodbath” if he doesn’t get elected in 2024. Oh, he’s only joking (then explain how bloodbaths are funny!) and oh he’s only describing what will happen if he loses (it’s a good thing no one in human history has ever tried to influence history by pretending to predict it!). Seriously, though, if Trumpholes think Saturdays at the shooting range have prepared them for Civil War, they’re going to be very disappointed. The only people in America actually prepared to wage civil war are our soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of them just want the damn headaches to stop.

Penny rants for March 11, 2024.

Lucian Truscott IV at Salon informs us that the New York Times/Siena poll showing Donald Trump leading Joe Biden 52-48, ah, has problems, chief among them that its rural voters sample is nearly twice as large as the percentage of rural voters who voted in 2020. But a lot’s changed since then, you say? Sure – Roe v. Wade is dead, Donald Trump attempted a coup, inflation went way up and then came way down and more folks talk about the link between high corporate profits and inflation than they did before, and none of these events should spark rural voters to turn out like that for Donald Trump. And while I’d love to believe that pollsters are simply overcompensating for underestimating Republican turnout in 2020, everyone knows that Americans pay too much attention to polling, so they should be more aware of the effects of their actions. And anyway I don’t think they’re overcompensating – I think they’re trying to create a Trump-Will-Win narrative because that’s what they want. They remember what their ratings were like, and you think Donald Trump will go after monopolies the way Joe Biden has? No, you do not.

Perhaps realizing that a distant third-place finish in this year’s Arizona Senate race will more likely hurt the Republican Senate candidate than the Democratic one, putatively independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has announced she won’t run for re-election this year, explaining: “(c)ompromise is a dirty word. We’ve arrived at that crossroad, and we chose anger and division. I believe in my approach, but it’s not what America wants right now.” Well, no – America doesn’t want her “bipartisan” approach, in which “bipartisanship” means “Democrats giving in to Republicans on everything.” And remember that she, and she alone, nixed higher taxes on the rich in 2021 – “getting to yes” with fellow Democrats being far less important to her, apparently, than “getting to yes” with Republicans – and that she also delayed Medicare drug price negotiation for another year, extracting continued lower taxes for hedge fund managers in exchange for finally letting it happen. So she gave in to banksters, and she let the rich get more tax relief than working families, who also got less relief from high health care costs – who on Earth wants that sort of “compromise”?

Thieves in the Temple will take the rest of the week off, so everyone have a great week, and Republicans: no shenanigans.

Action: concerning monopolies and pollution.

Long story short: tell our government to stop the proposed Walmart/Vizio merger, and tell our EPA to enact the strongest carbon emissions restrictions possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) and our Justice Department Antitrust Division to stop the proposed Walmart/Vizio merger. But wait, the right-wing Glaucons are saying, it’s a department store buying a TV company, so what’s the big deal? Well, if you think, as I do, that no corporation should ever own another corporation, you already know the answer, but buying Vizio would not only enable Walmart to get a foothold in an area they can quickly monopolize given their size, but it’d give them access to crap-tons of user data. I don’t particularly want Walmart – or any corporation – to have any of that.

Daily Kos Green helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous carbon emissions restrictions possible. Remember when right-wingers called the Obama carbon emissions restrictions – which didn’t even address existing power plants, like this one does – a “war on coal”? Well, how about the war on air? Or the war on health care, since cleaner air results in reduced health care costs? Big corporations hate our EPA’s proposal, since it’ll hamper their executives’ ability to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. But such fools shouldn’t get all the say in America.

Action: concerning voting rights, health care, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect voting rights, let states create their own Medicare-for-All-style health insurance systems, and reject any Social Security/Medicare benefit-cutting commission. 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.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would give our Justice Department the authority to pre-clear voting rights law changes from any state or locality with a demonstrated history of vote suppression. That would replace the section of the Voting Rights Act our Supreme Court struck down because it supposedly discriminated against Southern states (which then instituted a slew of voting restrictions the next day, which nobody could have predicted!). With this bill, we could act against any state or locality, anywhere in our country, that discriminates for real against certain voters. And that’s a good work worth doing, so we should tell our Congressfolk to do it.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the State-Based Universal Health Care Act. Since our federal government won’t pass Medicare-for-All legislation, perhaps we can get a state to do it; indeed, Canada’s Medicare-for-All-style system started in Saskatchewan. Vermont passed such a system last decade, but then-Democratic Gov. Shumlin abandoned it, citing the “cost.” I’ve gone over how easily we could pay for it many times, but Mr. Shumlin was really just trying to support Hillary Clinton at Bernie Sanders’s expense. This story has a happy ending! Hillary Clinton lost, and Vermonters have sent a Republican to the Governor’s office four times since then! Maybe serving the people is the way to keep power?

Finally, the Alliance for Retired Americans helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose any fiscal commission legislation concerning Social Security and/or Medicare. Because it’s just their way of trying to cut your earned Social Security and/or Medicare benefits without subjecting themselves to very much public scrutiny! Think of that the next time some knuckle-dragger on TV says we have to have the “courage” to cut these benefits, because hiding behind a commission that fast-tracks legislation without proper debate is the very definition of cowardice. If they were so “courageous,” they’d do it through the legislative process we’ve been using for centuries! I’d never want someone like that in my foxhole, and I hope you wouldn't, either.

Action: concerning monopolies, music, and data privacy.

Long story short: tell our government to block the proposed Capitol One/Discover merger, tell country music stations to play Beyoncé’s obviously-country songs, and tell our government to investigate online retailers’ privacy violations. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Reserve to block the proposed Capitol One/Discover merger. If we let Capitol One buy Discover, that’ll be one less credit card out there, and we need more credit card providers, not fewer! That’s so good credit card corporations can stay good – after all, if you can just buy another corporation, why would you make your corporation deliver good service? That’s before we get to all the good Americans who’ll lose their jobs if we let these two corporations merge. No, there’ll be no “increased market efficiency” coming from this merger – unless we count the “efficiency” of redistributing more income upward to undeserving executives.

MoveOn helps you tell country music stations to start playing Beyoncé’s country songs. I’m old enough to remember Hot Chocolate and the Specials, but since the early ‘80s big radio corporations have resegregated music, until now an estimable artist like Mickey Guyton has become Country’s One Black Friend. But let’s not just pick on country – even Eric Clapton says he’d be nowhere without Robert Johnson, but let’s see a classic rock station (whose One Black Friend is Jimi Hendrix) program that reality. If we can get Beyoncé’s country songs on country stations, we can start bringing these walls down again.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell our government to investigate online retailers’ violations of our data privacy. Wonder how an upstart corporation like Temu can offer relatively expensive items for a buck? Certainly they’re trying to predatory-price their way to the top, just like Amazon did – but Temu can also collect data on its customers and sell it for buku-bucks, even more so than Amazon could at its inception. And some good Americans have found their personal financial info out there after giving it to Temu. So, once again, we need our government to step in and protect us from financial predators.

Action: concerning antitrust funding, paid family/medical leave, and book banning.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to increase antitrust funding, pass real paid family/medical leave, and pass the Books Save Lives Act. 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: Matt Stoller reports that Congress plans to reduce funding for our Justice Department’s Antitrust Division – and also plans to prevent Antitrust from collecting any fees from corporate mergers. I can’t blame Jim Jordan for this, because Democratic Sen. Shaheen wrote the legislation; yes, she’d fund Antitrust a lot more than Jim Jordan would, but we need to call our Reps and Senators and tell them to increase Antitrust funding, and not to destroy the merger fee funding mechanism. Fighting monopolies is Joe Biden’s greatest contribution to the world; corporations know it, and so do their lackeys in Congress, which is why they’re trying to destroy it. They can’t win.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass real paid family and medical leave. Congressdolts know paid family and medical leave is popular, but they don’t really want to do it, so they’ve been dressing up crap policies as good policies, and we shouldn’t let them do that. The paid family/medical plan advanced by Sen. Gillibrand in recent years, which would fund 13 weeks of paid family/medical leave for all full-time workers with a tiny payroll tax, is the minimum we should accept, and though her proposed payroll tax would cost a mere $8 a month for a worker making $50,000 annually, I’d prefer to fund it by (surprise, surprise) taxing the rich like we used to. It’s OK to say so.

Finally, Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Books Save Lives Act, which would counter book-banning hysteria with federal force. When busybodies in your neighborhood raise their hackles about Black, Brown, gay, and trans books, the Books Save Lives Act would fight back by mandating that public school libraries carry books about/by “underrepresented communities” – and would make book-banning efforts into discrimination cases as well. Because that’s what they are! How many Moms for Liberty-types have been going after white male books? Tess of the d’Urbervilles was controversial, after all – and all the whining about it basically drove Thomas Hardy out of the novel-writing business, which was a profound loss to humanity.

Action: concerning right-wing drama, worker safety, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell Missouri state House leadership to kill an anti-trans bill, tell Florida’s Governor to veto legislation that would hurt worker safety, and tell your Congressfolk to tax millionaire and billionaire income into Social Security. 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.

In Missouri, HB 2885 would make teachers register as sex offenders if they support a trans kid’s transition in any way – which would end their career as school teachers, of course. However you feel about transgender folks, supporting a trans kid is not in the same class as soliciting a minor for sex or using child porn. Gosh, what if terms like “sex offender” actually meant something again? Missouri House Speaker Dean Plocher’s phone number is 573.751.1544; Missouri Republican House Floor Leader Jonathan Patterson’s number is 573.751.0907. You know what you gotta do: tell them to end this manufactured drama before they embarrass themselves.

Meanwhile, the Florida state legislature actually wants to prevent localities from protecting workers from extreme heat. How conservative of them! The smallest unit of government knows best, they say – until those smallest units of government defy the will of big corporations that don’t care about workers dying from heatstroke, because worshiping mammon is more important than taking care of other people. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell Gov. DeSantis to veto this legislation when it gets to his desk. Yeah, it’s a long shot, but with his Presidential run lying in the deep grave, perhaps we can get him to do the right thing. For once!

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to make millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share of taxes into our Social Security system. You know that income over $168,600 doesn’t get taxed into the system, but you may not know that several already-introduced bills would address this issue – the Social Security Expansion Act and the Social Security 2100 Act would tax income over $250,000 and $400,000, respectively. Better to point our Congressfolk to good bills that already exist than let them come up with some BS bill that doesn’t do what they say it does!

Around the table: with jewels of good news struggling to rise above the muck of bad news.

Big coffee corporation Starbucks and Starbucks Workers United announce a “foundational framework” for contract negotiations, with Starbucks finally extending credit card tipping to unionized stores (as it had for non-union stores, which I’m pretty sure is illegal). Could this framework be a PR ploy on Starbucks’ part? Perhaps. But it would never have happened without workers’ agitation for fair collective bargaining, and it also wouldn’t have happened without consumer boycotts and Starbucks’ losing almost 2% of its value on one December day alone. And unionized Starbucks stores might be the thing that breaks the dam for the rest of America’s working families.

Ho hum, Donald Trump keeps talking about a “migrant crime wave” that doesn’t actually exist, as actual data affirms what common sense already tells us – that immigrants without papers commit less crime, because they have an obvious incentive not to have a run-in with police! Naturally a Trump campaign spokeshack alleges that “Democrat cities purposefully do not document when crimes are committed by illegal immigrants,” and, well, that’s a defamation lawsuit waiting to happen! Of course, Mr. Trump has a lot of experience being sued for that.

Study confirms that reported COVID-19 vaccine side effects exist and are rare, but social media drama hounds tend to leave out the part that they’re rare. The vaccine that had more pronounced side effects – the J&J vaccine, associated with neurological problems and blood clotting disorders – you can’t even get in America anymore, and that sure does resemble how civilization is supposed to work. Anyway, I’ll take a one in 1.75 million chance of acute brain or spinal inflammation over the considerably higher possibility that COVID would kill me painfully. Also, ignore people who write entire phrases in capital letters.

Gallup poll finds that Americans think “immigration” is the top problem facing them right now, and I guess it’s good that it’s not inflation, but note well that Gallup didn’t offer extremism as one of the choices, and behold! A Reuters/Ipsos poll ranks extremism at the top, above immigration. Anyway, if 25% of the electorate is bat-guano insane, the results of both polls on immigration (28% and 18%, respectively) suggest that all Republicans' yammering about the border isn’t working so well, even if our “liberal” media, which doesn’t talk to regular Americans, seems to think it is. Yet fools like Rep. Suozzi (D?-NY) say crap like this: “The best politician is the politician who says what the people are thinking already. If the number one thing on people’s minds is the border crisis, you’ve got to talk about the border crisis, and you’ve got to talk about how to solve it.” Sure, people just happen to be thinking about the “border crisis,” and Republican hysteria over it, and credulous “liberal” media coverage of it, have nothing to do with it.

Ho hum, Rep. Maria Salazar (E-FL) takes credit for children’s hospital funding in a bill she voted against. I doubt her explanation – she "made sure" the goodies got in the bill, but she voted against it because it was “fiscally irresponsible” – will resonate very broadly with the electorate in her toss-up district, and her real calculation (I got the funding and I also got the attention for voting against it! I’m such a player!) will only appeal to the cynical, who are not as numerous as our “liberal” media want us to think — I mean, cynicism requires deep commitment, and most of us are just trying to get through the day with a little bit of dignity. I’d run an ad depicting a voter falling asleep as someone describes Ms. Salazar's labyrinthine scheme, and then add a voice-over saying can you believe how politicians are these days?

Finally, “Mob Boss” Mitch McConnell (E-KY) will step down as Republican Senate leader at the end of 2024, and will leave the Senate when his term is up in 2026. I want to say don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya, but that doesn't take his evil seriously enough – all he ever did as Senate Republican leader was kill good ideas dead, and in so doing hurt good Americans, all so Republicans could have more power to do even more harm to good Americans; I doubt St. Peter smiles upon any of these works at the Pearly Gates. And while I hesitate to quarrel with folks when they say the nearness of death informs their decisions, I know why he’s really retiring: because January 6 showed him that the world had left him behind. Republicans are all about naked brutality from now on; they have no use for Mitch McConnell’s brand of evil anymore.

Action: concerning abortion rights, election workers, and corporate “personhood."

Long story short: tell your PA state legislators to protect abortion rights, and tell your Congressfolk to protect election workers and overturn Citizens United. 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: Moms Rising helps you tell your state legislators to enshrine abortion rights in our state constitution. Because you can’t just count on our state Supreme Court to protect them! I mean, as currently constituted, they would if they could, but replace two Democrats with Republicans and that’ll change right quick. Explicitly put abortion rights in our state constitution and everyone who wants to ban it will have a much tougher time doing so. And not for nothing, but anti-abortion laws mainly prevent poor folks from getting abortions, not rich folks. That’s not fair, and we ought to put a stop to that.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Election Worker Protection Act, which would, as its title suggests, protect our election workers from terroristic threats much better than our laws currently do. Shame we have to do that, but we do, now that so many good American election workers resigned over the last few years because Trumpholes threatened them – or, in the case of one Arizona election worker, poisoned their dogs. If you poison someone’s innocent animals because they wouldn’t ensure your preferred candidate won, you’re a special kind of evil. But the Election Worker Protection Act would help prevent such atrocities.

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment overturning our Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United v. FEC ruling and let America regulate campaign finance again. Citizens United, you may recall, told us that corporate campaign spending is free speech because corporations are people. I know the whole “corporations are people” thing is 150 years old, but Jesus Mary and Joseph the idea beggared belief then and it beggars belief now. A corporation is a person like my chair is a person, and money ain’t “speech,” either. It’s money!