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Action: concerning Senate intransigence, Social Security, government oppression, and pregnant workers.
Happy Tuesday! It's time to call your Senators and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. This week we add H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act, which passed the House last week and would restrict the use of cancer-linked chemicals you can't get out of your drinking water. But the other bills are good, too -- they would (among other things!) protect voting rights, protect health care, give workers a raise, and make real internet freedom the law of the land again. So let's get cracking.
Meanwhile, our Administration has proposed rule changes that would strip Social Security benefits from hundreds of thousands of Americans with disabilities, but I should be fair and note that Republicans have been trying to destroy that part of Social Security dealing with disability and survivor benefits for years now, this even though our former Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, paid for his college education with Social Security survivor benefits. He must figure he's one of the deserving ones! But then that's how they do it -- they tell you that you of course deserve benefits, but those other people don't. And then they tell a few stories about people cheating to get benefits -- true stories or not, what's the difference? -- and count on you not to remember that millions of Americans get these benefits and if they were all cheating, surely we'd be hearing that, and not isolated anecdotes. Hence Social Security Works helps you tell our Administration to scuttle its cruel plan to deprive good Americans of the Social Security disability benefits they deserve.
In other news, Google gets a lot of flak, and deservedly so, for failing to stand up to the totalitarian tendencies of the Chinese government, but Apple also deserves a lot of flak for capitulating to Chinese government demands to remove hundreds of apps and block hundreds of virtual private networks (or VPNs), even though these apps and VPNs help good Chinese citizens avoid getting censored or detained for their human rights activities. Apple will tell us that they can't get business in China unless they follow the Chinese government's rules, but is the business worth getting if you have to sell your soul to do it? Apple will also tell us that shutting the Chinese out of products they want because of their evil government is cruel, but a) Chinese citizens can do, and are doing, something about that government and b) Apple isn't a hostage here! Apple made nearly $63 billion in profits in just one quarter last year, so they've got some weight to throw around. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Apple to stop coddling the Chinese government and stand up for human rights.
Finally, H.R. 2694, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, got through the House Education and Labor Committee with no trouble and now faces a full vote in the House, so the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your House Reps to support pregnant women at the workplace by passing the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would force employers to make reasonable accommodations for their pregnant workers and would prevent employers from punishing workers for getting pregnant, whether by refusing to hiring them, forcing them to go on leave, or impose unnecessary conditions on their employment. If your Tea Party uncle exclaims in response ZOMG HOW CANZ ANYONEZ RUNZ TEH BUSINESSEZ!!!!!!, just recite the previous sentence to them again, filled, as it is, with words like "reasonable" and "unnecessary" that pre-empt such complaints. Remind him, also, that bosses should already be doing the things the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would require them to do -- and that when bosses won't do the right thing, the law has to make them do it.
Posted at 09:07 AM in action, Arctic drilling, chemical safety, clean water, discrimination, gay rights, government spying, health care, immigration, internet freedom, minimum wage, net neutrality, paycheck fairness, pregnant workers, public lands, racism, Social Security, transgender, transparency, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning Senate intransigence, Mississippi prisons, and impeachment.
Happy Monday! Today you can call your Senators and ask them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. These bills have all passed the House, and would (among other things!) protect voting rights, fight discrimination, raise the minimum wage, protect immigrants, protect our public lands, reinstate real internet freedom, and help good Americans get better health care -- but Mob Boss Mitch won't let any of them come to a vote, because (and I quote) "I get to decide what we vote on." He's wrong -- we tell our Senators what they want, and if we tell them enough times, they do it.
Meanwhile, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate prison conditions in Mississippi. It's so bad in Mississippi prisons that it's even made the news! Our "liberal" media, of course, would rather talk about celebrities than about brown drinking water and no air conditioning in prisons, but human beings are suffering and dying, and no it doesn't matter that they're criminals! Jesus Mary and Joseph rights are for all people, and mercy is for all people, and a civilization that treats its prisoners well is a strong one, and a civilization that treats them badly is a weak one. Yes, that is the opposite of what the "tough on crime" crowd has been telling you all these years, but they were always weaklings, preying on our various insecurities. Hate to pile on, but no "rehabilitation" will happen if you can't breathe or eat healthy food or drink clean water. And folks who would call that "prisoners living the high life" really need to start with the man in the mirror.
Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Senators to conduct a fair impeachment trial. That would include documents and witnesses, of course, and you'll never guess what then-Rep./now-Sen. Lindsey Graham said back in 1999, when he was anxious to remove a Democratic President: "in every trial that there's ever been in the Senate, regarding impeachment, witnesses were called," and not calling them against President Clinton would have "basically chang(ed) impeachment." But wait, there's more! "You can have three days of lawyers talking to each other on both sides...but when you have a witness who was there, who was engaged in it, who was in the middle of it telling you about what they were doing and why, that's a totally different case, and it's the difference between getting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." Maybe he'll explain this flip-flop -- or, after the manner of his new Personal Lord and Savior, he'll say you're an idiot for noticing it.
Posted at 04:07 AM in action, Arctic drilling, big pharma, clean water, discrimination, gay rights, health care, immigration, internet freedom, law and order, minimum wage, net neutrality, paycheck fairness, public lands, the Grand Canyon, transgender, transparency, treating prisoners like human beings, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning voting rights, health care, discrimination, internet freedom, and a host of other issues.
Happy New Year, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. All you need do in your phone call is tell your Senators to pass these bills -- you need not explain your will, you only need deliver it, and in my experience Congressional staffers don't make a habit of challenging your will; it's their job to pass your will to your Senators. Nonetheless, I'll explain in some detail why we should pass these bills, since (also in my experience) we feel better when we call if we have more to say than we have to.
H.R. 1, the For the People Act, would allow national automatic voter registration, require disclosure of large campaign contributions, create a public campaign financing system, make Election Day a national holiday, and mandate that states use nonpartisan commissions to draw up districts -- all things we've been fighting for in other bills over the years. Automatic voter registration, in particular, would automatically register a lot of folks when they move, since they'll have to change their driver's license (if they have one) when they move, and that will help counter state efforts to de-register people they "suspect" have moved. Not too many Americans actually favor "more big money campaign ads" or "more secret corporate involvement in political campaigns" -- most Americans, in fact, will tell you these things are evil. It often seems like the only people who don't think they're evil, in fact, are the ones who rely on secret corporate campaign donations to survive at the polls. But why should they get all the say about everything? Is that the world we would have made?
H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Act, isn't perfect, but our agitation for a better bill prompted some members of Congress to demand (and get) improvements; H.R. 3, as passed by the House, would allow Medicare to negotiate prices and upwards of 25 brand-name drugs that don't have any competition from generic drugs. H.R. 3 would also cap such drug prices at either the average drug price of six other developed nations or (if that info isn't available, i.e., because a drug is only available in America) 85% of the current American drug prices. If the Senate wants to amend the bill so that it lets Medicare negotiate for all drugs on the market, well, I won't complain -- indeed, bills from Sens. Sanders (I-VT) and Warren (D-MA) would be considerably more comprehensive than H.R. 3. But I don't let the perfect murder the good, either, so H.R. 3 deserves your support. Remember that when Senators say the "free market" should be allowed to work its will, it's OK to remind them that the market's "will" is apparently for good Americans to die because they can't afford insulin for their diabetes or an EpiPen for anaphylactic shock.
H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, would plug the hole our Supreme Court blew in the Voting Rights Act in its Shelby County v. Holder ruling. Our Court said that singling out Southern states for pre-clearance of state-level voting law changes was unfair to them, but our Court also said that a different pre-clearance formula that didn't single out Southern states would likely pass their muster. Hence H.R. 4 would subject any state or locality with a demonstrated history of voting rights violations to federal pre-clearance, which would only "single out" Southern states if they're the ones doing the most vote suppression! Sadly, vote suppression is a national sport now, reaching as far north as Wisconsin (where folks of color somehow get targeted by de-registration efforts far more than white folks) and Michigan (where Interstate Crosscheck may have delivered that state's electoral votes to our President in 2016). Luckily, the Voting Rights Advancement Act would give us the tools to stop it.
H.R. 5, the Equality Act, would amend the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act (among other laws) to extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folk -- who can still get fired, denied housing, and denied credit just because of who they are and whom they love. You may be pleased to know that a lot of folks who don't like gays and don't have gay friends aren't necessarily in favor of firing them, denying them housing, and denying them credit just because they're gay or transgender! And that includes some of our President's most devoted supporters! Really, it's only the proverbial loudest wagons of our political discourse who insist that gay and transgender folk should remain second-class citizens forever; most Americans really are live-and-let-live types who don't want to get too involved with regulating other folks' genitals and what they do with them. Our laws should honor our best natures as Americans, and the Equality Act would do that, by giving gay and transgender folks the same tools to redress grievances that other historically-aggrieved classes have.
H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act, would reverse our President's executive order revoking the DACA (or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program which allows immigrants brought here as children (and therefore against their will) can continue to stay here if they contribute to American society. Seems like a fairly uncontroversial idea, right? Not for our President or his most nativist votaries, who would happily send immigrants back to countries they don't recognize, as long as it gives them an opportunity to stay enraged at something. Rage is a hell of a drug, as I'm sure you've figured out by now -- you can never get enough of it, and thus the worst of Our Glorious Elites move the rage-addled around from one manufactured outrage to another. Raging against childhood arrivals by saying THEY'RE TEH ILLEGULZ AND TEH ILLEGULZ MUST TEH GOEZ!!!! is not actually very "law and order" of them -- childhood arrivals, as I've said, had literally no choice in coming to America, and removing them just so you can indulge in rage is cruel. It'll bite you in the ass, too, but that won't help any of these immigrants in the meantime.
H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act would give women more tools to fight pay discrimination. H.R. 7 would outlaw clauses in employment contracts that prevent workers from talking about their pay, and would prevent retaliation against employees who do talk about their pay -- and these are important, since talking about your pay is usually how you find out you're being shafted. The bill would still allow employers to pay men and women differently based on bona fide factors like, you know, skill levels and qualifications, but would restrict employers' ability to manufacture a "bona fide factor" after the fact. And the bill would also stiffen penalties for discriminating against women workers. It's hard to actually argue against these things, since no one wants to be called "objectively pro-paycheck discrimination," so its opponents yell about "trial lawyers" -- how hysterically lazy! -- and "what about when men are more qualified than women?", which, hey, re-read the third sentence of this paragraph if that's you or someone you know. When someone yells something like that about a bill, you're right to question whether they've read it or understood it.
H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, would raise our minimum wage from $7.25/hour to $15/hour gradually over the next six years -- yeah, I made sure to put those last six words there, for all the haters who say IT'S TOO TEH FASTZ!!!!! -- and would increase that minimum wage every year thereafter in accordance with the rise in the median hourly wage. The bill would also hike the minimum wages for tipped workers and disabled workers gradually and close the gap between these and the regular minimum wage. The arguments against this bill might give a lot of people pause, but they fall apart upon closer (or, indeed, any) analysis. Fast food workers make $20/hour in Denmark, but that hasn't resulted in $20 Big Macs there -- Big Macs cost around $5.50 there, which ain't that much more than they cost here. And that CBO study that said a higher minimum wage would kill half a million jobs? Actually, that study said job losses could range from zero to a million jobs lost, that range represents jobs lost over 10 years, and the economy already needs to make a million jobs roughly every seven months just to keep up with population growth, so let's not go in for hysteria.
H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act, would roll back an Administration guidance issued in October of 2018 which actually weakened the Affordable Care Act's guarantee that health insurance corporations couldn't deny you health insurance (and therefore health care) because of your pre-existing health conditions. The Administration's guidance allows sub-standard health insurance programs to operate legally in the United States, even if they discriminate against folks with pre-existing conditions, a nefarious practice the Affordable Care Act would have ended (even if the ACA has dozens of other flaws which we have already discussed at length). The Administration's guidance was never about delivering "really great health care" to Americans; it's about letting health insurance corporations flout the law, and of course it's also about taking a crap over a Barack Obama legislative achievement because Mr. Obama made fun of the President that one time. Really, I'm pretty sure that's what it was -- and if it's not, it's likely something about as petty, and Americans deserve better than to be held hostage to a President's pettiness.
H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, would keep oil and gas drilling corporations out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) by repealing that part of the 2017 tax "reform" that authorized oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. H.R. 1146 would also impose inspection fees on corporations that drill offshore so that our government can actually fund these inspections. You know all the good reasons we shouldn't drill in the Arctic: because there's not that much oil to be drilled there, because it would threaten Alaska's salmon industry, because it would threaten local indigenous populations and wildlife, and because cleaning up a spill in the frigid Arctic is many times harder than cleaning up one in a more temperate region. What's the reason we would drill up there (aside from getting Sen. Murkowski of Alaska to vote on a tax "reform" bill she might have voted against)? Oh, you know, to make some crony oil or gas CEO rich. That's really all of it -- they'll say it's "jobs," but what of the actual jobs in the salmon industry that'll go away after the next oil spill?
H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act, would permanently withdraw over a million acres of Grand Canyon-area land from any drilling or mining considerations. It's a bit stunning that we would even consider drilling around the Grand Canyon -- I mean, you've been to the Grand Canyon, right? -- but uranium mining corporations have had a jones to do that for decades, and our President of course has a jones to give them whatever they want, since public lands exist merely for exploitation in his mind. This, even though uranium mining would inevitably pollute the Colorado River upon which citizens of five American states depend for clean water! The bill would also protect any additional land in the Grand Canyon area that our government acquires after the bill becomes law. So, to sum: we could preserve a national treasure and protect the drinking water used by tens of millions of Americans -- orwe could make a few corporate CEOs even richer. It's not much of a choice, really, though Our Glorious Elites do keep choosing wrong.
H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, would reverse the FCC's 2017 net neutrality repeal and reinstate the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order, which originally encoded the principle of net neutrality in law. All the bills I've listed have earned a lot of popular support, but none more so than the Save the Internet Act -- which makes this Administration's (and Mr. McConnell's) flouting of the popular will all the more offensive. Net neutrality guarantees that internet service-providing corporations deliver all files to your computer at the same speed and with the same priority, which does not amount to TEH BIG GUMMINT CONTROLZ TEH INTERNETZ!!!!, but our government preventing big corporations from controlling the internet, so that you can determine where you want to go and what you want to see on the internet, rather than having big corporations force you to watch Miley Cyrus twerking videos before visiting your favorite weblogs (ahem!). Yeah, they haven't tried that yet, but they will; they're not stupid enough to make your freedoms disappear all at once. And this is about your freedom, which will always be more important than some corporation's "freedom" to make more money doing less work.
H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act, would force corporations to disclose their "beneficial owners" -- that is, the folks who create the corporations and, presumably, benefit financially from their existence -- and that would force banksters, terrorists, tax-evaders, sex traffickers, drug money launderers, and big campaign donors (who all use shell corporations to hide their wrongdoing) out into the light, and if they can't stand the light, well, that's the price of operating too long in the dark. According to a Global Financial Integrity study from 2014, America is the second-easiest nation on Earth to start an anonymous corporation -- behind only Kenya, where there just ain't as much money. Right-wingers will tell you that forcing such transparency would be Big Gummint spying on people -- and where are they when our government actually spies on us? Being outraged at football players kneeling, probably! -- but they would have to explain why revealing the beneficiaries of corporate crime should be guarded by the law.
H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act, would mandate voter-verified paper ballots for federal elections, which is a big deal, since (as we saw in Mississippi earlier this year) a lot of electronic voting machines don't let you vote for the candidate for whom you want to vote! H.R. 2722 would also fund state efforts to update their voting systems, which you know some states "forget" to do in their black and brown neighborhoods. And H.R. 2722 would prohibit states and localities from connecting their voting machines to our internet, and that's also a big deal! After all, any fool can see that connecting voting machines to the internet is a profoundly stupid idea. I would say connecting your thermostat or your house lights to the internet is also a profoundly stupid idea, but as bad having your house hacked would be, having our democracy hacked would be even worse. Hacking our democracy has been in the news a lot the past few years, after all -- and not as much as it should have been in the years before that! A lot of times the most advanced technology is not at all the best technology.
Finally (cue cheers from convention crowd!), H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act, incorporates most of the TRUE Fees Act, which would not only force big telecom corporations to reveal all the fees they like to hide in your cable or cellphone bill, but would force them to give you formal notice of these fees and would give you the right to cancel your contract with these big telecoms if you don't like the fees they give you. H.R. 5035 would not outlaw forced arbitration agreements in big telecom contracts, as the actual TRUE Fees Act would have done, and that's a backward step, but, as I've said, I don't let the perfect murder the good, and H.R. 5035 is good, because it will keep big telecom corporations from giving you surprises in your cable and cellphone bills. And we will one day bring about comprehensive arbitration reform, because just as the only people standing in the way of fee transparency are the big telecoms that no one likes, the only people standing in our way or arbitration reform are the corporate flunkies whom no one likes. Yeah, weakling politicians "like" them, I suppose, but all I want is a fighting chance.
If you've been reading with an open mind, you probably see that all of these bills would do good things that would improve our laws and our civilization -- and if you attend the ludicrous arguments opposing them, some of which I've touched on above, you'll likely be more convinced of that, not less. Most ludicrous, perhaps, is the reflexive smearing of many or all of these bills as "socialism." You know that words mean things, and you may also suspect that a lot of folks throw the word "socialism" at anything they don't like and hope it sticks because they can't win the argument on the merits. Nonetheless, ask yourself: is securing the vote, and protecting the vote, "socialism" -- or is it merely common sense? Is preventing cruelty to gay, transgender, and immigrant folk "socialism," or is it common sense? Are protecting internet freedom, lowering drug prices, and protecting good Americans with pre-existing health conditions "socialism," or are they merely common sense? I think all of these things are common sense, and I hope that knowledge will steel your spine as you talk to your Senators today.
Good luck, and God bless.
Posted at 04:24 AM in "socialism", action, big pharma, campaign finance, campaign spending disclosure, gay rights, health care, immigration, internet freedom, jobs, law and order, Medicare, minimum wage, net neutrality, paycheck fairness, public lands, racism, redistricting, sexism, transgender, transparency, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Around the table: why our media ignores the Afghanistan papers, and other hard truths.
Alex Shephard at The New Republic wonders "Why the Media Is Ignoring the Afghanistan Papers." Short answer: "everyone is to blame, which means no one has much of an interest in keeping the story alive." Somewhat longer answer: our media's thirst for partisan conflict makes coverage of "bipartisan failure" harder. Also, too, our President spews forth so much drama that "more complex stories, like the situation in Afghanistan, are often buried in favor of the political equivalent of sports sideline reporting." Mr. Shephard may be too nice to spell it out, but I also think we've become so cynical, all of us, that when we hear evidence that our government knew it was bollocksing up Afghanistan, we're proud of saying "and you're surprised?" As Americans, we deserve a better government than that, meaning we deserve actual surprise at such things.
This is really good news: the ACLU of Kansas has managed to shut down that state's notorious Interstate Crosscheck program, meaning it won't operate in the 2020 elections. That doesn't mean the ACLU has killed it dead, since it used a rather arcane argument to do so (that Interstate Crosscheck didn't keep voter data secure, of all things), and a lot of states still have previous Interstate Crosscheck databases and might use them to purge more voters. And the notorious Kris Kobach might create new purge lists himself -- though he's also running for Senate in 2020, and running a vote suppression operation while running for Senate might actually make him lose. Yes, even to a Democrat! Hell, he did it a year ago.
Ho hum, the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy studies corporate tax avoidance during the first year after the 2017 tax "reform" that dramatically cut the corporate tax rate, and finds over 350 Fortune 500 corporations paying, on average, a little over half the new 21% rate. That tax "reform" cut the tax rate (from 35% to 21%) without closing corporate tax loopholes, but that shouldn't surprise us when our nominally "liberal" politicians' position is "cut the tax rate, but close the loopholes." An actual liberal position would be "tax the corporations harder and stop giving them welfare handouts." And then you might have actual compromise in America again. Maybe even actual bipartisanship!
Scientists point to another driver of climate change: inefficient energy grids. These energy losses -- caused by (among other things) bad wiring, poor and/or corrupt management, or natural disasters -- emit almost as much carbon as heavy trucks do, which is saying something. Getting energy corporations to upgrade their infrastructure, of course, is like pulling teeth -- they always want a welfare handout or six just to do the thing they should already be doing, the thing we would simply make them do if our lawmakers didn't all have spines of jelly.
Finally, Republicans are jumping up and down about New Jersey House Rep. Jeff Van Drew's announcement that he'll switch to the Republican party shortly, but the part of America not responding to that news with "Jeff Van Who?" is probably responding "he was a Democrat?" And how precious he is, complaining that impeachment isn't "bipartisan" enough -- has he been awake the last couple of decades? I suspect he'll lose the 2020 Republican primary in New Jersey's 2nd -- he may not even come in second! -- and then a year or two later he'll imagine the Democrats are desperate enough to take him back, and he'll be wrong, all of which will make him (as Mario Cuomo might say) just another walnut in the batter of eternity.
Posted at 03:12 AM in "bipartisanship", Afghanistan, around the table, climate change, corporate taxes, corporate welfare, Democrat weakness, drama, tax cuts for the rich, taxes, the "liberal" media, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning voting rights, health care, and pollution (among other issues).
Happy Monday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And this week we add H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act -- a better bill now, thanks in large part to your pressure -- and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act, which would shine a light on those big telecom fees and taxes you find in your cable and cellphone bills. These are all good bills, advancing (among other causes) voting rights, consumer protections, and better health care policy, and your Senators have no excuse for rejecting them. No, TEH CREEPINGZ SOSHULIZMZ!!!!! is not an excuse.
Color of Change helps you tell Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) to reject attempts by Formosa Plastics to build a giant petrochemical plant in an almost-50% black community. Why? Because Formosa's plants tend to pollute more than virtually every other plant in America. Because this particular Formosa plant would emit ethylene oxide, which a 2016 EPA study found causes cancer even with "limited" exposure. Because big corporations have this nasty habit of plopping down their dirtiest plants in neighborhoods of color. Because the area where they'd build is already well-known as "Cancer Alley." Because Formosa has already paid Texas residents $50 million for illegally dumping pollutants in their communities. And because Gov. Bel Edwards -- fresh off a re-election more improbable than his first election in 2015 -- has demonstrated a willingness in the past to reward big polluting corporations even whey they don't follow the law. Hey, he doesn't have to run again, so maybe he should try not enabling big polluting corporations, particularly when they practice environmental racism.
If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reject its own proposal to weaken coal ash storage regulations, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. Our President's votaries like to think he's "gotten rid of burdensome regulations," though we know he really hasn't -- courts keep striking his regulatory changes down, because you can't just do whatever you feel like doing when you run a government! But the next time your War on Terror/Tea Party deficit hawk/Regulation Nation/Blue Lives Matter/anti-immigration-but-not-a-white-supremacist-I-swear uncle says our President has "gotten rid of burdensome regulations," feel free to ask if allowing big coal corporations to avoid closing their unlined coal-ash ponds that leak into our water tables is more "burdensome" to big coal corporations than water pollution is to, you know, the rest of us. I know the good citizens of Roane County, TN and Eden, NC -- to name the scenes of two infamous coal ash pond spills -- would tell you which is more of a burden.
Posted at 04:11 AM in "socialism", "war on terror", action, Arctic drilling, big pharma, clean water, coal ash, discrimination, gay rights, health care, immigration, internet freedom, minimum wage, net neutrality, paycheck fairness, pollution, public lands, racism, regulations serving people, sexism, the Grand Canyon, transgender, transparency, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning good policy, the war on Yemen, and torture.
The list is back! It's time once again to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And this week we're proud to add H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, which passed the full House on Friday afternoon. Why have all these good bills piled up? Because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (E-KY) won't bring them up for a vote; didn't know we elected Mitch McConnell Dictator-for-Life, did you? So let's tell our Senators to fight for voting rights, equal rights, public lands, internet freedom, and so much more -- and let's stay in their grills until they bend to our will.
Meanwhile, word on the street is that Democrats will abandon efforts to pass a defense spending bill amendment that would end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Sigh. And I bet Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), Chair of the House Armed Services Committee, runs on proposing the amendment, even as he prevents its passage so it can actually do some damn good! And it would do a considerable amount of good -- it would get us out of yet another undeclared war, it would bring more good Yemeni back from the brink of starvation, and it would save more Houthi rebels for the fight against al-Qaeda that they're good at. Sometimes you think we get involved in these messes just so we can make everything worse. Ah, who am I kidding -- of course we're in Yemen to create chaos, just like Iraq! Rep. Smith's office number is 202.225.8901; his Armed Service Committee office number is 202.225.4151. These numbers are courtesy Just Foreign Policy; good luck finding phone numbers at his own House website, because they seem pretty well-hidden.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to release the full 7,000-page torture report to the American people, then Win Without War still helps you do that. There's no "looking forward, not backward" (in Mr. Obama's infamous phrase) when our CIA tortured at least 100 men in "black site" operations, and though Congress has released a 500-page summary of the report, they haven't released the whole enchilada, which hamstrings our effort to ensure this never happens again. The cynical will ask whom among our good Americans will read the full 7,000-page report -- and sadly, too many of our "liberal" media will ask the very same question, though the answer should be that they will read it, and report on its contents and its meaning. That is journalism, after all, and if too many contemporary "journalists" call it a day after they've trolled through Twitter for cruel and obnoxious crap uttered by fools who deserve their anonymity, that doesn't change their obligations to our Republic and our civilization.
Posted at 04:52 AM in "war on terror", action, Arctic drilling, discrimination, equal rights, gay rights, health care, immigration, internet freedom, net neutrality, public lands, the "liberal" media, the Grand Canyon, torture, transgender, transparency, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Around the table: concerning our economy, our public lands and water, and several far more trifling matters.
Your right-wing uncle telling you about wages going up under our President? Well, Dean Baker reminds us that state minimum wage hikes and our Federal Reserve's low interest rates are actually driving recent wage increases. You know that high minimum wages cause wage hikes at the low end, but you may not know that low interest rates have helped drive unemployment down -- and Mr. Baker says that "low rates of unemployment give workers the bargaining power necessary to secure real wage gains." Naturally our President says minimum wages should be lower, though, admittedly, he also thinks interest rates should be lower. But low interest rates have been Fed orthodoxy since 2008, so we can safety say he deserves very little (if any!) of the credit for what gains we're making in this economy.
If you've been following Nestlé's attempts to gobble up as much public water as it can and then sell it as bottled water at an absurdly high profit, you'll be interested to hear that the Michigan state court of appeals has ruled that Osceola Township can block Nestlé from expanding its bottled-water operation within town limits, because bottled water is most emphatically not an "essential public service" or a "public water supply." I was a little surprised that any legal eagles at Nestlé would make such ludicrous claims -- even as part of a see-what-sticks effort -- until I learned that a lower Michigan court had approved them, and I note that the court of appeals also said that a bottled water operation might be "essential" in a place with no water, which I'm pretty sure could be stretched by some judicial activist to mean any of the many areas of desert in America.
Big pharma executives tell OHSU researchers that prices for MS drugs go up so damn much go up purely for profit-making reasons. Also, you can only gouge patients in America, since (to quote one exec) "(i)n the rest of the world, prices decline with duration in the marketplace," and prices never go down because then people would think "we're less effective, (that) we think less of our product." You do hear the quiet part out loud more than you used to even 10 years ago, when it seemed (to me, at least!) we heard the quiet part out loud all the time. Maybe big pharma execs are tired of pretending they're anything but thieves, not that I expect their behavior to change.
From the "How Do They Always Find Someone Even Worse?" file: Interior Secretary David Bernhardt wants to reduce fees oil and gas drilling corporations pay to drill in shallow Gulf of Mexico waters. It's not just the stench of an Interior Secretary lowering fees on corporations for which he used to lobby, or the horror that we could have another Spillageddon in the Gulf like we had in 2010 -- it's the fact that these are our waters and we, the public, deserve to make more money if our government is going to be so foolish as to allow more drilling in the Gulf. It's like they have literally no idea that they're supposed to serve the American people.
U.S. House Rep. Steve Watkins (R-KS) apparently listed a UPS store as his official residence, which just so happens to have had the effect of allowing him to vote in a different Topeka City Council district than the one in which he otherwise would have voted. Has the Fox News Channel "accidentally" identified him as a Democrat yet? After all, ONLY TEH LIBRULZ COMMITZ TEH VOTER FRAUDZ!!!!!
Finally, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) has suspended her campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination, citing a lack of money to keep campaigning. I don't actually think it's correct to say that "she struggled to define a clear rationale for her candidacy" -- actually, I think she was completely successful in "defin(ing) a clear rationale for her candidacy," since that rationale was "I'm here to trick the liberals into thinking I'm going to run this country the way they'd want me to when I'm really going to run it however my big donors tell me to." If I'm right, then it's heartening that Democratic voters have rejected that rationale, at least as far it manifested in her -- and almost two months before the Iowa caucuses, no less!
UPDATE. An alert reader pointed out that I'd gotten our President's position on interest rate cuts entirely wrong; I've corrected the first paragraph above as a result.
Posted at 04:49 AM in around the table, big pharma, Democrat weakness, gas drilling, health care, law and order, minimum wage, oil, privatization, public lands, unemployment, voting rights, working families | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning voting rights, arbitration fairness, and our Post Office.
H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, may receive a vote in the House as early as today, so 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 call your House Reps and tell them to pass it. As you may recall, our Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, invalidated Sec. 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, saying that forcing Southern states to pre-clear changes in their voting laws with our federal government constituted an undue burden on those states given narrowly-perceived advancements in voting rights in the South. But the Voting Rights Advancement Act would institute a new pre-clearance formula into the Voting Rights Act that would subject any state or locality with a long record of voting rights violations to federal scrutiny. It would, essentially, revive the Voting Rights Act, so let's ensure our House Reps pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Meanwhile, Amtrak has recently inserted a forced arbitration agreement into its tickets, meaning that you wouldn't be able to take Amtrak to court if they crash your train, but you'd have to go before a private arbitrator, and you know how that tends to go. (Remember not to believe the right-wing BS about "average" awards from arbitration cases being higher than class action awards, because the average of all awards to people who lose in arbitration is zero.) Amtrak sure has some chutzpah pushing this on its riders, because its riders are also its owners -- our government still controls Amtrak, and gives Amtrak $2 billion in taxpayer money annually; given the public stake in Amtrak, I wonder if this clause could actually survive in court, particularly given that we can learn the results of a court case, but not a privately-arbitrated case. In the meantime, Public Citizen helps you tell Amtrak to remove forced arbitration clauses from its customer agreements.
Finally, our U.S. Postmaster General will leave office next month, which means our President will get to appoint a new one, and he might decide to appoint someone who favors privatizing our Post Office -- but the USPS Board of Governors can reject such a nominee if they choose, so Progress America helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to reject any attempt to put a privatizer in charge of our Post Office. A lot of right-wingers have a jones for privatizing our Post Office, but we already know why that's a bad idea -- because any privatized Post Office won't operate for our benefit, but for the benefit of some Presidential crony or other. But our Post Office is supposed to serve us, and, not incidentally, our Constitution explicitly mandates that our government ensure mail delivery -- so let's help ensure a Post Office that belongs to us fulfills that mandate.
Posted at 04:03 AM in action, arbitration fairness, privatization, save our Post Office, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning voting rights, "free" trade, Social Security, and the Equal Rights Amendment.
Happy Monday, good peoples! Now go ahead and call your Senators and tell them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Don't worry that it's a long list; your Senators could always have prevented our phone calls by passing the bills! Especially since they're good bills strengthening voting rights, fighting discrimination, raising the minimum wage, protecting good Americans from predatory health insurance corporations, protecting public lands, and insuring internet freedom -- among other good works. And don't worry that our President would veto these bills, because we ought to make him veto them.
Meanwhile, you may have heard that Democrats are almost ready to come to agreement with our President on his USMCA trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, which would replace the nefarious NAFTA, and while the USMCA does represent an improvement as it stands -- it would roll back the notorious investor-state dispute (or ISDS) settlement system with Canada and drastically curtail its use with Mexico -- it could be better, in that it could have better labor and clean air/clean water standards, and in that it doesn't need to sacrifice good Americans' health care before the altar of corporate intellectual property by letting big pharma corporations hold onto their exclusive rights for even longer than they do now. Hence Public Citizen helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them not to pass the USMCA until we can fix its problems. Please add, in your phone call, that you will not give up our gains regarding the ISDS system in exchange for better labor/health care/clean air and clean water standards, because the ISDS system nullifies our laws and outsources our jobs.
In other news, remember when Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) -- in a move which suggests she doesn't think she's in any danger of losing her 2020 re-election bid -- told Iowa residents that what we need to let Congress meet "behind closed doors" to "fix" Social Security? Well, S. 2733, the so-called TRUST Act, would let "rescue committees" meet behind closed doors on any federal program the Treasury Secretary deems necessary, and consider any legislation that comes out of these committees in an "expedited" manner, meaning very little debate and very little opportunity to amend. That should sound to you like a way of doing something very bad very quickly, which is how folks who want to do bad things have to do them these days. Hence Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject "secret" legislation considered "behind closed doors" by rejecting the TRUST Act. If a bill can't stand sunlight, it doesn't deserve to become law, period. And I'm old enough to remember when the Social Security trust fund was supposed to run out in 2016, so let's not let hysteria rule our world, OK?
Finally, you remember that when Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment back in the '70s, they put a deadline on its ratification by the states? Well, H.J.Res. 79 would essentially remove that deadline (by stating that the ERA "shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution whenever ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States"). 35 (of the necessary 38) states ratified the ERA before the original 1979 deadline; two more states have passed the ERA since 2017, with Virginia perhaps mulling the issue once Democrats formally take control of both legislative houses early next year. However, five states also rescinded their ratifications before the 1979 deadline, and our courts haven't concluded whether those states could do that under our Constitution or not -- mainly because the deadline had already passed. How this Supreme Court would resolve these questions we don't yet know, but in the meantime, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight for women's rights by removing the deadline on the original passage of the ERA.
Posted at 04:24 AM in "free" trade, action, Arctic drilling, big pharma, clean air, clean water, discrimination, equal rights, gay rights, health care, immigration, internet freedom, labor, law and order, minimum wage, net neutrality, paycheck fairness, public lands, sexism, Social Security, the Grand Canyon, transgender, transparency, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Around the table: time for another exciting installment of "who's the real snowflake?"
From Carol Anderson at The Guardian we learn about "Five Ways the Republicans Will Crack Down on Voting Rights in 2020," and though I'm annoyed again to hear not one mention of the notorious Interstate Crosscheck database of people with similar names, which I would argue delivered Michigan's electoral votes to our President in 2016, it's good to be reminded of the crap Texas tried to pull earlier this year (ZOMG WE HAVE TEH 95,000 NON-CITIZUNZ WHO ARE TEH REGISTURD TO VOTEZ!!!!), because they (and other states) will certainly try to pull it again. I'd be happier if they made such outlandish allegations after the voters turned them out of office.
We are reminded by Alan McLeod at FAIR that for our "liberal" media, "The Bolivian Coup Is Not a Coup -- Because US Wanted It to Happen." Generally when the military forces you out, that's a coup, but as you recall from our "liberal" media's absurdly horrible coverage of the Venezuelan "coup" that actually failed to force out Mr. Maduro, a "coup" only happens to folks we like; if protestors manage to bring down Chile's President Piñera, they'll call that a coup. It brings back memories of the Obama Administration pondering, Hamlet-like, over the definition of the word "coup" back when the Honduran military orchestrated a coup against President Zelaya in 2009.
As amusing as it is to hear right-wingers wonder why anyone would think Administration Senior Advisor Stephen Miller is a white nationalist merely because he wouldn't shut up about being a white nationalist in hundreds of emails to Breitbart, it's even more amusing to hear Breitbart try to gaslight everyone into thinking this is all about politicos pitching ideas to journalists. It happens all the time, they say -- but I bet not very many politicos go on about their deep appreciation of Mein Kampf. (Seriously, ever try reading that? It's almost absurdly turgid -- get from one end of a sentence to the other without re-reading and you'll be halfway to Catholic sainthood.)
After alleging vague "irregularities" in Election Day voting that he said were "corroborated" (though he didn't say by whom), Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin finally concedes his Election Day loss to his opponent, Attorney General Andy Beshear. Kentucky state law doesn't allow gubernatorial candidates to call for a recount, but does allow them to call for a recanvass (or a recount of the vote total); the recanvass conducted by the state yesterday found exactly one additional vote, which is kind of hilarious. And thus we are reminded that you can't just be an asshole to everyone forever and never suffer any consequences. One hopes we are reminded of this lesson again this time next year.
However, about that: former two-term Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has changed his mind and has decided he wants to run for President in 2020 after all. Oh, splendid, another Democrat who'd lose. I said this before, but it bears repeating: Mr. Patrick imagines his background as a prosecutor and a businessman insulates him from Republican criticism, but nothing insulates you from Republican criticism. If Jesus H. Christ himself ran for President, today's Republicans would call him a dirty hippie and a swarthy foreigner.
Finally, from the "Somehow Not a 'Kids in the Hall' sketch" file: our President's like-named son writes a book called Triggered about how liberals are supposedly triggered by everything, then won't answer questions about it at a California book-signing event, and winds up running away from right-wing hecklers who want to ask him questions about immigration. All together now: what a snowflake. And, you know, if you're afraid to take questions because "the left" will "twist your words," why not, oh, I don't know, articulate your points well enough to be plainly understood by anyone who will listen honestly?
Posted at 03:55 AM in around the table, Democrat weakness, immigration, racism, the "liberal" media, voting rights, waaaaah! | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning good bills, good labor law, and good agricultural practice.
Let's see how our list is coming! Call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Don't worry that you're putting out your Senators' staffers by asking them to pass a long list of bills they have no intention of passing, because, hey, they're paid to listen to you, and if they don't like getting a long list from you, they can find another job. Hey, they're already well-connected! And, of course, if your Senators don't like it, they can, you know, pass good bills that protect and strengthen things like voting rights, equal rights, public lands, worker wages, and internet freedom.
Our National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) has proposed a rule change that would deny graduate school teaching assistants of their right to organize and collectively bargain! What's their rationale behind this -- you know, besides ALWAYZ HURT TEH WURKURZ!!!!!? They're saying that letting TAs organize would "hurt academic freedom"! Always the right wing whines that you Americans will always let self-interest destroy everything, which is, of course, exactly how the right-wing is! And I guess our Administration has not properly considered all the union laborers in the South who vote Republican because at least they're against abortion. The more pertinent issue, of course, is that our institutions of higher learning exploit grad students, and just because they pay to go there doesn't give them a "right" to use them like wet dishrags. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell our NLRB to reject its plan to prevent grad students from organizing for better pay and better working conditions.
Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would help farmers reduce their dependence on chemicals like Dicamba, the notorious Monsanto creation that drifts into neighboring farms and hurts other farmers' crops. They'll complain that they just passed a big Farm Bill in 2018, but I suspect the folks who get cancer because of Dicamba-infused crops over the next five years won't find that very sympathetic. We have totally given over food production in America to large corporations that only care about growing crops more "efficiently," by which they mean "they efficiently deliver unearned income to executives." But we all know ways of doing agriculture better, including rotating a diverse set of crops; big ag won't do that, because it doesn't enable them to spray tons of chemical crap on crops, which is, after all, cheaper than doing it right. But "it's cheaper" shouldn't be the number one reason we do things -- and it should never be the reason we avoid doing the right thing. I know, it sounds quaint.
Posted at 04:39 AM in action, big ag, equal rights, gay rights, health care, immigration, internet freedom, labor, minimum wage, Monsanto, net neutrality, paycheck fairness, public lands, transgender, transparency, voting rights, waaaaah!, working families | Permalink | Comments (0)
Our annual Election Day exhortation.
Today is Election Day, which means you ought to go out and vote, if you haven't done so already. If you have any trouble voting, of course, you should call 1.866.OUR.VOTE (or if, like me, you hate mnemonic devices for remembering phone numbers, 1.866.687.8683). (You can also text "Our Vote" to 97779, or visit 1.866.OUR.VOTE's website here.)
What would be a good reason to call 1.866.OUR.VOTE? Being told you can't vote if you have unpaid parking tickets or child support, or getting challenged by official-looking people (or people with guns, even!) who don't have any actual authority to challenge voters, or getting a flyer on your windshield telling you Election Day is on Wednesday for people like you wink-wink. But what if you show up at the polls and the election worker says they can't find your registration? Well, you might be a victim of lousy recordkeeping, or you might be a victim of the notorious Interstate Crosscheck database, which, as you know, helps nefarious state governments deregister voters with the same name as voters in other states, though most names are, as you know, quite common (and Interstate Crosscheck doesn't check middle names or Social Security numbers!) That'd be a damn good reason to call 1.866.OUR.VOTE. Now, if you find yourself deregistered when you know you've done nothing wrong, your disgust will be palpable and righteous, and you may just want to throw up your hands and say to hell with these clowns and then go home. But before you do that, remember that this is exactly what they want you to do. It's the same reason they saturate the airwaves with negative ads the days before Election Day: because they want you to stay home out of disgust, so you won't vote against their cronies. Don't let them manipulate you, and don't let them win. Make the call to 1.866.OUR.VOTE, describe your problem to them, and let them help you take the next step.
Remember, also, that if the corporatists and the racists and the woman-haters win, they'll be just as unpopular tomorrow as they were today -- they will have no mandate, and they will have us to deal with! We'll be calling and writing our Reps and Senators every day, and challenging them at the few townhalls they'll hold, and bird-dogging them at the few public events at which they'll show their faces, because we know that our duty to our country doesn't end today, but begins today. Voting happens one day out of the year, and then Our Glorious Elites want us to sit on our hands the rest of the time, but we can confound their expectations, and their nefarious aims, by expressing our will to our representatives every day after today. And this blog will continue to help you do that, as it has done since 2005.
So good luck today, and God bless.
Posted at 05:05 AM in action, activism, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning voting rights, public lands, and immigration.
Monday is list day! So call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Today we add H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act, passed by our House last week, and I'm pleased to see that Moms Rising has provided a contact tool so you can tell Senate Majority Leader McConnell to hold votes on good House-passed bills. Moms Rising adds H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act (which will help out immigrants who moved here as children) and H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act (which would roll back Administration attempts to weaken protections for folks with pre-existing health conditions), and you can add these in your phone call, too. Plus you can add H.R. 1146, H.R. 1644, and H.R. 2513 in the comment section of Moms Rising's contact tool. Seriously, if we do this enough, we can get these bills passed, and we might even give our President pause before he vetoes them.
Meanwhile, our Administration still has this jones for logging and mining in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, so CREDO helps you leave a public comment with our U.S. Forest Service opposing the construction of more roads in the Forest that would allow more logging and mining there. The Tongass, as you probably know, has thousand-year-old trees in it; how many more times in our history will we be able to hold onto thousand-year-old trees, let alone learn the lessons they have to teach us? You may not find that argument persuasive if you think everything exists to be turned into money, as our President does, or if you think everything exists to be ruled over and used by humans, as our Vice-President does. If you're a civilized person, on the other hand, you might actually find it conservative to hold onto some thousand-year-old trees, not to mention the unique wildlife and indigenous humans that also live in the Tongass National Forest. Conservatism isn't all about making some crony money, after all. Or, at least, it shouldn't be.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2415/S. 1243, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. This bill wouldn't get rid of private prisons or punish corporations that import immigrants in order to drive worker wages down, but it would do a lot of positive, necessary, and reasonable things, like force our government to adopt good standards for detention, permit our government to break contracts with private prison corporations that repeatedly violate such standards, and mandate inspections of detainee facilities and investigations of detainee deaths in custody. Show me the person who would oppose such things and I'll show you a flabby thinker who shouldn't get all the say about anything in America. I mean, really, who else would support "no standards for housing detainees" or "holding to private prison contracts even when detainees die" or "sweeping egregious mistakes under the rug"? Because those are the alternatives. And they're not really alternatives -- at least, not to civilized people.
Posted at 04:20 AM in action, actual conservatism, discrimination, equal rights, gay rights, health care, immigration, internet freedom, minimum wage, net neutrality, privatization, public lands, the Grand Canyon, transgender, transparency, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning voting rights, facial recognition, youth incarceration, and cash bail.
Pennsylvania legislators are mulling SB 421, which would enact a number of necessary voting reforms at the state level: it would fund new state voting machines that would actually leave a paper trail; it would move the state voter registration deadline from 30 days before an election to 15; it would extend the deadline for absentee ballots from 5 pm on the Friday before the election to 8 pm on Election Day; and it would allow any voter to vote by mail for the first time. None of these sound particularly sexy, I suppose, and we've fought for more vigorous reforms in Pennsylvania before (i.e., same-day voter registration), but this bill will improve good Pennsylvanians' access to the voting booth, and nothing prevents us from fighting for more vigorous reforms later. And by "later" I might well mean "the day after the bill passes"! Legislators imagine they can earn reprieves from the voters' will, but they can't, ever, because doing the people's will is their job. So both Common Cause and the ACLU help you tell your PA state legislators to support voting rights by passing SB 421.
Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell big corporations Hilton and Unilever to stop using facial recognition technology in their hiring. This facial recognition technology is actually worse than the Rekogition technology developed by Amazon, which has a tough time telling black folks apart -- the HireVue AI system Hilton and Unilever use purports to analyze diction, facial movement, and speaking voice to tell bosses whom they should hire, but as a science, well, it's about as good as those 300-question "integrity tests" they used to give out in the '80s. Job interviews are highly stressful and artificial situations, after all, so you're not learning much about an applicant if you put the tone of their voice and their eye movements under a microscope -- except that interviews make them nervous, which, like, no shit, Sherlock. Hate to pile on, but the development of this technology represents yet another confession by managerial types that they don't know how to do their job. Seriously, if you need another AI "breakthrough" to help you hire good workers, maybe the problem's you!
In other news, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk and state Governors to stop the practice of putting kids in jail. You hear people say how kids are so much worse than they used to be, but your parents and grandparents said the same thing, and good kids (who comprise the vast, vast majority of children!) don't get a whole lot of ink from our sensationalist media. And all of that's not even the point! Here's the point: civilized people understand that kids can't make adult decisions, so those kids who go so far haywire that they commit rape or murder represent a profound failure of all their adult caretakers (their parents, their teachers, their community leaders), and what they need most from the adults in their lives is help. You know what they don't need? Being thrown in adult jail with prisoners who'll prey on them physically, emotionally, and sexually. That doesn't help them; it only helps tough-on-crime cowards feel better about themselves. And that feeling doesn't last, either, so they keep looking for opportunities to "be tough." It's a damn vicious cycle, and we should break it.
Finally, speaking of tough-on-crime cowardice, Daily Kos helps you tell your local district attorneys to end cash bail. We know why: it hurts the poor, it wastes taxpayer money, people don't flee over nuisance crimes, and cash bail makes the accused pay for alleged crimes when we should only make the convicted pay for actual crimes. Yes, I hear some police officers say they feel hamstrung by the absence of cash bail, but police officers tend to see bad people everywhere because they tend to deal with people at their worst, so maybe we should take their resistance with a grain of salt on that basis. And maybe we should also examine the experience of our own work lives! We all tend to resist any change to our procedures at work, even if they're good changes. And then, once they work, we tend to forget we ever resisted them! Would it be piling on to mention that slashing cash bail offenses in Philadelphia is actually working? No, it would not.
UPDATE. SB 421 is now Pennsylvania law, as Gov. Wolf signed the bill on October 31. Kudos to you if you pressured your state legislators to pass this bill.
Posted at 10:15 AM in action, jobs, law and order, poverty, taxes, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning civil rights, impeachment, and law and order.
First things first: use the tools in the upper right corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can call them and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Yeah, I know, there's an impeachment effort going on, and we'll get to that, but our House has already worked to pass good legislation supporting voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections, and your Senators should work to pass this legislation, too. And if our President vetoes all of it, as I'm sure he would, then let him be accountable for it. It comes with the job, after all. Too often we excuse the inaction, or the bad actions, of our leaders. Let's stop doing that.
Meanwhile, you can use the aforementioned tools on this page to find phone numbers for your House Reps, too, so you can call them and tell them to impeach our President for his wrongdoing. Don't call your Senators, though. They're supposed to try the impeachment. It's annoying to hear some of our Senators currently running for President call for impeachment, because that's rather like a judge demanding an indictment. But other Senators get their role wrong, too: Sen. Alexander said last week that though what our President did was "inappropriate," an impeachment proceeding would "only divide the country further." At least Mr. Alexander wasn't Administration crony Roger Stone, who said that impeachment would bring about "a spasm of violence and insurrection in this country like you've never seen" and that "a politician who votes for it will be endangering their own life." I don't know about you, but when evil people try to scare me into doing the wrong thing, that only makes me twice as resolved to do the right thing. Which is to call my Rep and tell them to impeach this arrogant, ignorant, unprincipled, sorry excuse for a President.
In a related note, Daily Kos helps you tell our Congressfolk to hold Administration officials who ignore their subpoenas in contempt. Like me, you probably thought the law-and-order issues were pretty cut-and-dried, but apparently not! Apparently if our 46% President believes he can't be touched while in office, or that the impeachment proceeding against him is somehow "illegitimate," he can direct his underlings to defy legal writs to show up in court and testify! Actually, he can't do that, or else anyone could simply refuse to comply with the law, but Democrats in the House seem to be answering his defiance with a shrug, and though you might argue that we could interpret this collective shrug as a shrug of confidence, well, come on, these are Democrats we're talking about -- they're either weak, or they're actively collaborating with evil while merely appearing weak. But that's why we're here: to provide the steel in their spine so they can do the right thing.
Posted at 04:24 AM in action, Arctic drilling, Democrat weakness, equal rights, gay rights, internet freedom, law and order, minimum wage, net neutrality, paycheck fairness, public lands, sexism, transgender, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning Senate intransigence, impeachment, and Social Security.
Happy Monday, good peoples! It's time, once again, to call your Senator and tell them to support voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And none of them get to play the well-the-bills-aren't-getting-voted-on card, because they could use the prestige of their offices -- that which remains, at least -- and publicly pressure Mr. McConnell into holding a vote on the bill. Of course, none of them really want to do that, since he's making himself look bad on their behalf, knowing that if he allows a vote on these bills and they all vote against them, they'll look bad. But again: their 13-dimensional chess games don't matter; only our will matters.
After that, you may want to get your House Reps on the phone and demand that they support an impeachment inquiry against our President. I haven't advocated for his impeachment up until now, partly because the President I really wanted impeached (that would be Bush the Lesser) did worse, partly because I didn't want the Russia investigation to distract us from our duties as citizens, and partly because, well, I wanted him to twist in the wind until his own vanity and ignorance buried him. But when a man admits to trying to leverage foreign aid into a foreign investigation of a political opponent, then Congress would be derelict in its duty if they did not impeach. The fact that he's tried to un-admit it in the following days means nothing. Really, though, impeachment is too good for him. Whatever happens to him, one thing must happen: I want our descendants to point to this man and say see this guy? Don't be him. If you're gonna be like him, you deserve to be alone until death.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 860/S. 629, the Social Security 2100 Act, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. The Social Security 2100 Act would accomplish much of what we've been trying to accomplish for years: it would put Social Security on sounder financial footing (not that you should believe any hysteria about the "cost" of "entitlements"!) by expanding the income that can be taxed into the system, and although I think it's actually rather odd to exempt income between $132,900 and $400,000, that's still a big improvement. The bill would also expand benefits to ensure our seniors have a more dignified retirement, and would index future cost-of-living increases to a measure of inflation that would actually reflect the bills seniors face -- and not the stupid "chained CPI," which would assume that if a price rises too high, folks will just switch to something else! Seniors have fixed costs (like medicine) they can't just "switch" their way out of! So let's pass the Social Security 2100 Act and treat our seniors better.
Posted at 03:55 AM in action, Arctic drilling, discrimination, equal rights, gay rights, internet freedom, law and order, minimum wage, net neutrality, paycheck fairness, Social Security, taxes, transgender, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning Senate intransigence, trade agreements, and surprise hotel fees
It's Monday, which means it's the day we call our Senators and tell them to support voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Senators' phone numbers. We give Mob Boss Mitch a lot of guff, and justifiably so, for refusing to even hold votes on any of this legislation because he thinks he's the boss of us and he knows better than us, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Democrats might have passed all these bills because they knew they wouldn't pass and it would make them look good without actually accomplishing anything. But their 13-dimensional chess games don't matter; only our will matters.
Meanwhile, Public Citizen helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them not to vote on the USMCA trade agreement (a.k.a. "NAFTA 2.0") until our Administration fixes it. Specifically, you'll ask them to ensure our Administration gets rid of the corporate welfare for big pharma and improves the labor/environmental standards, and I think you should also make a point of saying that you want the changes to the investor/state dispute settlement (or ISDS) system either kept or made even better, because the USMCA isn't all bad just because the President who negotiated it is an irredeemable asshole. If they renegotiated the deal to get rid of the corporate welfare and the lax standards but also put back the ISDS system that enables foreign investors to nullify our laws and allows corporations to outsource our jobs, I'd say that's an even worse deal. So be sure you communicate your will precisely to your Congressfolk. They just love "mishearing" you, or telling you their pile of crap is exactly the meatloaf you asked for.
Finally, if you're fed up with surprise fees in your hotel bills -- fees that bleed almost $3 billion a year out of our bank accounts -- then Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4489, the Hotel Advertising Transparency Act of 2019. H.R. 4489 -- per one of its sponsors, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) -- "would require the prices regularly advertised by hotels and online travel agencies to include all mandatory fees that will be charged to a consumer, excluding taxes." Hence they won't be able to hide their "WiFi fees" and their "in-room safe fees" and their "resort fees" and even their "towel fees" (I know, right?) in their "low" prices. Gosh, how long before they start charging "bed fees" and "wall fees" and "floor fees" and "no secret camera behind your mirror fees"? Hotels have largely concocted these hidden fees in response to the pressure of winning in online comparison shopping, which only proves (as if we needed more proof!) that the future ain't all it's cracked up to be.
Posted at 03:56 AM in "free" trade, action, Arctic drilling, big pharma, corporate welfare, equal rights, gay rights, internet freedom, law and order, minimum wage, net neutrality, paycheck fairness, public lands, transgender, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning Senate intransigence and war with Iran.
If you've missed previous opportunities to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act, well, you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Senators' phone numbers. Regardless of what they say, it is absolutely your Senators' job to be supporting voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections. Don't be thrown off by Mob Boss Mitch's recent embrace of $250 million in federal funding for secure elections, either. The SAFE act would provide more than that, plus it would mandate paper ballots, which would be a lot better than having our votes simply disappear into the ether. Though some Senators would want them to disappear.
Meanwhile, with ramped-up saber rattling over Iran in the news lately, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure the recent must-pass defense bill explicitly forbids our President from waging war in Iran without Congressional approval. I know, our President fired long-time Iran war-monger John Bolton, and told Lindsey Graham to stop trying to push him into a war he doesn't want, but that's all drama -- our President (who still loves another Iran war-monger, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo) could merely be waiting until Iran does something, or possibly "does something." Don't tolerate the folks who whimper that "we don't want to tie the President's hands" by forcing him to go to Congress for a war declaration as our Constitution requires. How many times must I tell these pimps! Congress is supposed to tie the President's hands in exactly this manner, so that our President doesn't haul us off to war after war after war. This is one of the reasons we broke away from King George III, for Christ's sake!
Posted at 03:48 AM in action, Arctic drilling, discrimination, equal rights, gay rights, internet freedom, Iran, law and order, minimum wage, net neutrality, paycheck fairness, public lands, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning campaign finance disclosure, factory farm waste, PFAS chemicals, and food safety.
California actually passed strong campaign finance disclosure legislation in 2017, but that law didn't cover everything -- it still lets big donors push out mass text messages without revealing themselves, and it also hides the big donors behind massive petitioning efforts. But AB 201 and SB 47 would close these loopholes, so the California Clean Money Action Fund helps you tell California state legislators to do more to expose big campaign donors by passing these bills. AB 201 would force candidates to put their names on text messages and PACs to put committee names or URLs leading to disclosure info; SB 47 would require petition gatherers to disclose the top three donors of that petition before soliciting a signature. We're looking at a few hundred million text messages and over two dozen ballot initiatives (in 2018) that require more sunlight, so this isn't a "solution looking for a problem" -- you know, like Voter ID or Interstate Crosscheck.
Meanwhile, H.R. 3844, the Farmer Fairness Act, would at least address this issue as it related to factory farm waste. As it is now, big ag corporations have gamed the system so that the small farmers who own the animals on factory farms take all the blame for the waste on big factory farms, while the big ag corporations make off with all the profit! But the Farmer Fairness Act would "require all persons exercising substantial operational control over the concentrated animal feeding operation," which would include anyone who "exercises any control over the activities, operation, or management of a concentrated animal feeding operation." Hence both small farmer and big factory farm would be on the hook for polluting nearby rivers and streams with their animal waste. Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight big ag domination of small farmers by passing the Farmer Fairness Act.
In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would better address the clean-up of ubiquitous and poisonous PFAS chemicals, then the Union of Concerned Scientists still helps you do that. Specifically, you'd tell your Congressfolk to support provisions of the must-pass defense authorization bill that would better track PFAS contamination and better coordinate PFAS cleanup efforts; this is a big deal -- not just because scientists have linked PFAS chemicals to cancer, thyroid disease, and liver damage, not just because you can find PFAS chemicals in so many commonplace items ranging from nonstick saucepans to food packaging, but also because firefighting foam is a major source of PFAS chemicals, and our soldiers do put out a lot of fires. So, for once, let's pass some defense spending that helps all of us, and not just some defense contracting corporation's CEO.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop our Administration's plans to reduce safety inspections at pork processing plants, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. What on Earth has possessed our last two Administrations to try to mess with meat inspections? Do they not know that food poisoning always gets into the news? It seems like the best of our politicians listen too much to big agricultural corporations like they know everything, when mostly what they know is how to redistribute income upward from consumers (and farmers!) to themselves. Some "expertise," that. Of course, the worst of our politicians only pretend to be that stupid, but actually mean to make their big ag cronies richer and damn the consequences for everyone else. Oh, well, I guess Americans are only the people who eat the food. Seriously, we deserve better, from both our food processing corporations and our politicians.
Posted at 04:19 AM in action, big ag, campaign finance, campaign spending disclosure, chemical safety, clean water, factory farm waste, food safety, health care, income redistribution, small businesses, soldiers, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, internet freedom, and secure elections.
It's Monday, so it's time to call your Senators once again and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. You can find your Senators' phone numbers using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or the bottom of this page if you're on a cellphone; and you can find Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell's phone numbers here, though you'll have to scroll down a bit to find them. I mention Mob Boss Mitch, of course, because our House has passed all of these bills, but our Senate hasn't, because Mr. McConnell won't allow any votes on them. Didn't know that was how democracy worked, did you? Anyway, you don't have to tell your Senators why they should pass these bills, unless you really want to -- their staffers are there to take down your will, not argue with you about it. But I'm going to go ahead and describe the bills (and the paltry arguments against them) in some detail, since I haven't in a while, and I want you to get to the phone with the most confidence you can have. If you do, they'll sense that, and if enough of us call them, they'll bend to our will.
H.R. 1, the For the People Act, includes a lot of terrific initiatives -- it would allow national automatic voter registration, require disclosure of large campaign contributions, create a public campaign financing system, make Election Day a national holiday, and mandate that states use nonpartisan commissions to draw up districts. All of these things have large support across the ideological spectrum, and their opposites (making it harder to vote or register to vote, letting state legislators carve out Rorschach-blot fiefdoms, letting corporations spend whatever they want to elect their lackeys) don't. What did Mob Boss Mitch have to say about the For the People Act? He called it "a Democrat power grab," which every right-winger in America would call whining if a liberal said something similar. And if a man equates more access to voting with Democrats getting more power, he might want to think about how maybe Republicans aren't convincing enough people to vote for them. That'd be pull-yourselves-up-by-your-bootstraps thinking, wouldn't it? So your Senators have no excuse to oppose the For the People Act. That's going to be a theme in the next several paragraphs.
H.R. 5, the Equality Act, would amend the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act (among other laws) to extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folk, who can still get fired, denied housing, and denied credit just because of who they are and whom they love. The objections to the Equality Act are truly ludicrous and, frankly, reminiscent of racist objections to fair housing laws in the 1960s -- haters say they'll be "forced" to hire gay or transgender folk when the truth is the law would force them not to discriminate against them merely because they're gay or transgender, and folks who can't tell the difference between these things may not be cut out for the hard work of civilization. But wait, there's more! Haters pretend employers will be prevented from firing gay or transgender folk for good reasons, which they won't, and that male athletes will get sex changes in droves to compete and dominate in women's sports leagues, which, like, can you see such athletes hanging out with their crew after doing something like that? I mean, duh. The haters are not only wrong, they're stupidly wrong. That's also going to be a theme in the next several paragraphs.
H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, is not a "boon to trial lawyers" as its opponents say, but merely a bill that would give women more tools to fight pay discrimination. The bill would outlaw clauses in employment contracts that prevent workers from talking about their pay, and would prevent retaliation against employees who do talk about their pay -- and these are important, since talking about your pay is usually how you find out you're being shafted. The bill would still allow employers to pay men and women differently based on bona fide factors like, you know, skill levels and qualifications, but would restrict employers' ability to manufacture a "bona fide factor" merely based on salary. You know, of course he's more qualified, I pay him more, QED? The bill would also stiffen penalties for discriminating against women workers. And somehow all those good things get translated into BUT TEH TRIALZ LAWYERZ!!!!! in the right-wing mind, as if the words "trial lawyers" are a magic spell that transforms all bad arguments into good ones. Ranting about "trial lawyers" is just playing team sports, but our real duty as citizens is to do good works.
H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, would raise our minimum wage from $7.25/hour to $15/hour gradually over the next six years -- yeah, I made sure to put those last six words there, for all the haters who say IT'S TOO TEH FASTZ!!!!! -- and would increase that minimum wage every year thereafter in accordance with the rise in the median hourly wage, so that maybe we'll never have to hear again how some 70-year-old made $2/hour when they were starting out and what's wrong with kids today? When they made $2/hour, it had the buying power of $12-$15/hour, which is, as you see, higher than our current minimum wage. The bill would also hike the minimum wages for tipped workers and disabled workers gradually and close the gap between these and the regular minimum wage -- because you don't think big corporations will try to convert everyone into a tipped or disabled employee just to avoid paying them more? Dear reader, they will. So don't brook these complaints, or any scare numbers about "jobs lost" that either won't actually happen or would amount to a drop in the bucket of monthly job creation numbers, and certainly wouldn't compare with all the good folks a higher minimum wage would bring out of poverty.
H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, would reverse the FCC's 2017 net neutrality repeal and reinstate the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order which originally encoded the principle of net neutrality in law. Net neutrality, as you know, dictates that internet service-providing corporations should deliver all files to your computer at the same speed and with the same priority -- and this principle alone has made the internet the greatest information-sharing source of all time. But the corporatists at the FCC hated that, because it meant you had the power to determine where you wanted to go on the internet, and corporations had less power to herd you into junk news ghettoes like they do so easily on TV or in print. So don't brook, for example, Justice Kavanaugh's argument that corporations have a First Amendment "right" to restrict whatever internet traffic they like, as if we somehow don't have First Amendment rights to visit whatever website we want! Net neutrality used to be a principle that enjoyed bipartisan support among politicians -- and it still enjoys broad, bipartisan support among regular Americans like ourselves. So, again, our Senators have no excuse not to support this bill.
H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act, would mandate voter-verified paper ballots for federal elections. This is a big deal, since (as we just saw in Mississippi) a lot of electronic voting machines don't let you vote for the person for whom you want to vote! Sometimes, when you've been doing something a certain way for hundreds of years, a machine actually can't do it better! Voter-verified paper ballots won't stop unscrupulous politicians from creating boxes of fake ballots, I suppose, but if you want to do that, you have to get a lot of other people to buy in, and only one of them needs to snitch to make your "victory" illegitimate. And you can steal votes a lot more easily with software, particularly when it's developed by some private corporation that'll fire any "snitch" who speaks out about its flaws. The bill would also fund state efforts to update their voting systems, which you know some states "forget" to do in their black and brown neighborhoods. As with H.R. 1, the For the People Act, you have to wonder why Mob Boss Mitch thinks it's just not worth it to make sure everyone can vote. What could he be afraid of?
Speaking of Mob Boss Mitch, he talks a lot these days about "bills we can pass," and acts like taking votes on bills that "can't pass" are a "waste of time." You know that's all rubbish -- even if these bills fail to pass the Senate, forcing your Senators to go on the record against voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, internet freedom, and secure elections is certainly worthwhile. But I want you to really think about Mob Boss Mitch's words, and measure the sheer contempt for the popular will they betray: nothing is worth doing unless a group of Senators pass a bill the President will sign. That's nowhere near the way it should work! How should it work? Absent a legitimate Constitutional concern -- and not just the bogus "concerns" of big donors passed off as "legitimate" concerns -- our Reps and Senators should pass the bills we tell them to pass, and the President should sign the bills we tell him to sign. We cannot rest until we have a system that works this way -- and when we get that system, we cannot rest in our duty to conserve that system for future generations, who will then have to work to keep it. But when we can do that, we'll have the "more perfect union" of which President Lincoln dreamed.
Posted at 10:23 AM in action, activism, actual conservatism, campaign finance, campaign spending disclosure, equal pay, equal rights, free speech, gay rights, internet freedom, jobs, minimum wage, net neutrality, paycheck fairness, racism, redistricting, transgender, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Around the table: from economic blues to voting machine foul-ups.
Dean Baker thinks that though "The Economy Looks Grim for Workers," it "Might Not Bring Recession." Why not? Because very few sectors of the economy (housing construction, auto sales) are big enough to take the economy down by themselves anymore, and I bet banksters tell us this is why we should let them run everything! After all, that time the banksters took down the economy by themselves was so long ago! I still suspect the economy might take a dive merely because it's been in recovery so long (even if, as Mr. Baker suggests, we might better put "recovery" in quotation marks), but Mr. Baker's thesis is certainly more convincing than reading the tea leaves of inverted yield curves on T-bonds.
Nate Silver says Joe Biden doesn't have an enthusiasm problem so much as an "Iowa problem," and though I think we really ought to describe the difference between enthusiasm for beating a hated incumbent from enthusiasm for electing a new one, I do recall John McCain also having a similar problem in 2008 (he finished fourth in the Iowa caucuses that January), and then over the next few months Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney basically split the not-McCain vote so that Mr. McCain won the nomination; I suppose you could see Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren playing the Huckabee/Romney parts in a similar drama. But all that's not a good sign for Joe Biden, either -- John McCain lost the 2008 general, after all, and you probably remember that back in 2000 John McCain was the upstart who made people excited to vote for him, and when has Joe Biden ever been that?
181 CEOs sign a Business Roundtable resolution proclaiming that they can't just worry about delivering more money to shareholders anymore, and that they also have to worry about workers and our climate, among other things, but Tom Conway at OurFuture reminds us that they're just pulling a stunt and that we will need to "force" them to really clean up their act. I've long said that forcing CEOs to pay a 91% tax on income over a million bucks and forcing their corporations to pay a 55% tax rate will bring them back into the fold of civilized people, but the other reforms Mr. Conway cites in paragraphs 25 and 27 will also help. (Note well, also, that these corporations declaring that they have to do more for our communities don't pay a whole lot of taxes to begin with.)
Jesus Mary and Joseph Jon Ossoff is thinking of running for Senate. Mr. Ossoff rode that boatload of funding for the 2017 Georgia 6th House special election all the way to 48%, just as I figured he would -- he was, after all, another center-right Democrat who said an awful lot about right-sizing regulations and bringing high-tech jobs to the region and very little about his major accomplishment in life (his production of an al-Jazeera report exposing ISIS sex slavery). And a Black Lives Matter activist wound up winning Georgia's 6th in 2018, proving, again, that "raising a lot of money" is nowhere near as important as "inspire people to vote for you."
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gets the Queen to close Parliament for most of the two months before the U.K. has to exit the European Union at the end of October, precisely so they can't stop the no-deal Brexit Mr. Johnson seems to desire. They call it "coup-like," but I see this as abject desperation on Mr. Johnson's part, and people do understand that British elections aren't like American Presidential elections, right? Mr. Johnson's position depends on a) his party's electoral fortunes or b) his ability to form a coalition government if the Tories don't get more than half the seats in the House of Commons, so people "liking" Boris Johnson means rather little if they don't also like his party, the same party that can't seem to hammer out a deal to gracefully exit the EU. And if expected food/fuel/medicine shortages materialize, then how does he win after everyone saw him go out of his way to bring them about? He won't be running against Joe Biden, after all.
Finally, Mississippi voters went to the polls earlier this week to vote in primaries for various statewide offices, and voters in upwards of nine counties reported that they tried to vote for one Republican gubernatorial candidate but got their vote switched to another, who just so happens to be the state's sitting Lieutenant Governor. And that's why we need paper ballots -- ballot counters would have to alter them or "lose" them to steal an election, and most of them would pause before doing that, but nobody feels guilty when a "faulty" machine does it for them.
Posted at 03:54 AM in around the table, banksters, campaign finance, corporate taxes, Democrat weakness, executive pay, tax cuts for the rich, taxes, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning Senate intransigence and public lands.
It's a new week, so it's time once again to call your Senators and tell them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Why would your Senators be afraid of bills that support voting rights, civil rights, fair pay, better pay, internet freedom, and secure elections? I mean, these are all popular things. Of course their leader, "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell, won't allow the bills to come to a vote, because (and I quote) "I get to decide what we vote on." But when we flood our Senators' phone lines with calls demanding votes on these bills, Mitch McConnell's opinion won't mean a damn thing, and his power will disappear. After all, his power isn't rooted in good works, and (despite appearances!) that's the only sustainable power there is.
Meanwhile, with the Amazon rainforest literally on fire as we speak, CREDO helps you tell big private equity corporation BlackRock to stop investing in the Amazon's destruction. How is BlackRock investing in the Amazon's destruction? By putting its money into the logging, mining, and big ag corporations that are deforesting the Amazon -- and thus, not incidentally, injuring the Amazon's ability to sequester the carbon dioxide that causes climate change. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and give off oxygen -- you'd think more big corporations and big investors would respect that simple truth, but the only "truth" they respect is the money that'll do them no good at the Pearly Gates. Still, with the burning Amazon all over the TV news, maybe we can make BlackRock feel the Big Stick of Bad PR. (Hate to pile on -- OK, I really don't -- but BlackRock also invests in the destruction of the indigenous folks who live in and protect the Amazon. How about that -- folks who live in a place are actually invested in protecting it! It's like an actual conservative value or something.)
Finally, H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, would delete that section of the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that authorizes oil and gas drilling leases in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve (or ANWR). The New York Times recently reported that our Administration said we'd get about 40 times more money out of drilling in ANWR than we're actually going to get over the next decade, but that's not news to those of us who've been following the issue since Tha Bush Mobb tried to drill the hell out of these public lands, and seriously, what kind of public servant would be persuaded by the promise of a mere one-half of one percent of our annual federal budget, and over 10 years? The kind who only listens to big donors, that's who, and that's who passed that damn tax "reform" in the first place. But we can at least rectify the injury done to our public lands by telling our House Reps to pass H.R. 1146, as the Alaska Wilderness League helps us do.
Posted at 04:38 AM in action, actual conservatism, Arctic drilling, climate change, equal rights, gay rights, internet freedom, minimum wage, net neutrality, oil, public lands, taxes, transgender, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Around the table: featuring the horrible truth about "free" trade.
Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals rules that the state of Colorado violated the U.S. Constitution when it replaced three electors who planned not to vote for Hillary Clinton, though she won the state's popular vote. I think they ruled correctly -- and that's why we need to get rid of the Electoral College! I'm a little surprised and ashamed that it hadn't occurred to me until today that our President could win re-election regardless of his share of the popular vote, if enough electors simply buck the will of their state's electorate. If Democrats were more street-smart, they'd make the Electoral College a big campaign issue. They're not, of course, so they won't.
The incomparable Dean Baker reminds us that, contra what our President says, "China Did Not Trick the U.S. -- Trade Negotiators Served Corporate Interests." "Both Republican and Democratic administrations signed trade deals that made it easy to manufacture goods in China and other countries, and then export them back to the United States," he writes, meaning corporations could take advantage of "low-cost labor there" and "low-cost supply chains" so they could destroy their competitors and make a mint. Thus "the trade deficit was the result of their efforts to increase their profits," and American working families "lost 3.4 million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2007." In other words, the trade deficit with China is a feature of American policy, not a bug. The fact that it gives our President opportunity to grandstand about foreigners "taking advantage" of America is just icing on the cake, and our corporate overlords are nowhere near as upset about such grandstanding as they'd like you to think.
Department of Energy study finds the price of building wind farms lower than the price of building a natural gas plant. And natural gas was the "cheap" fossil fuel! Some caveats apply -- renewable energy tax credits might disappear, for one -- but note well that if our President calls all of this TEH FAKE NEWZ!!!! that his own Department of Energy said it. He does appoint "the best people" to his government, right? (But as much as he rants about "piles of dead birds," I'm sure he'll also tout the fact that three states that now get 30% of their power from wind -- Kansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma -- all voted for him in 2016. Why? Because while you're trying to make sense of his chaos, he just makes more chaos. And yes, I could have written that sentence about George W. Bush in 2004, too.)
Rutgers University study finds that roughly one out of every thousand black men will die during an encounter with police. Sadly, right-wingers will twist this around to SEE YOU ARE TOO TEH SAFEZ 99.9% DON'T DIEZ!!!!!, without telling you that black men and boys are 2.5 times more likely to die during police contacts than white men and boys. They'll also probably twist this around to say black men and boys are five times more likely to kill themselves than get killed by police, without mentioning, that, hello, nobody should worry about whether the next time they talk to a cop will be their last.
Finally, our President claims that Jews who vote Democrat exhibit "either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty." Presumably he means "disloyalty" to Israel, but suggesting you're disloyal to a foreign country if you oppose our President or his party is no less offensive than suggesting you're disloyal to this one. And, ah, could it be that Jewish voters went harder for Democratic Congressional candidates in 2018 than they did for Hillary Clinton in 2016 at least in part because more of them fear they'll be killed by the very same white supremacists our President has emboldened? Anyway, no President should conflate himself with our country and call his opponents "disloyal." This is a grown man acting like this.
Posted at 04:14 AM in "free" trade, around the table, Democrat weakness, gas drilling, labor, law and order, racism, renewable energy, voting rights, waaaaah!, wind power | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning Senate intransigence and sane drug policy.
If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass six good House-passed bills that "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell won't even allow them to vote on, well, you can still call them and demand both that they vote on it and that they pass it. We need to call them, because if we don't, these Senators can always say "well, I didn't hear about it from my constituents," and we should never let them use that excuse -- particularly during the month of August, when they're all in their home states meeting with constituents, at least nominally. You better believe their big donors are trying to get their attention this month! The six bills in question, as you may recall, are H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Anyone who opposes voting rights, civil rights, fair pay, better pay, internet freedom, and secure elections doesn't deserve to be a Senator anyway.
Meanwhile, H.R. 1456/S. 597, the Marijuana Justice Act, would not only remove pot from federal scheduling (which would essentially legalize pot), but would withhold federal funding for prisons in states that haven't legalized it and have arrested a disproportionate number of folks of color for pot-related offenses. The bill would also expunge federal convictions for pot-related offenses and establish a Community Reinvestment Fund to help communities ravaged by the notorious "war on drugs." We spend too much time and money chasing after pot-smokers when they do about as much damage as drunkards do, and you no doubt recall how our effort at banning alcohol went. Of course, we also spend so much time and money chasing after pot-smokers because our government thought it was a great way to oppress civil rights protestors! Don't just take my word for it, though -- take the word of President Nixon's domestic policy guru/Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichmann! Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact saner drug policy by passing the Marijuana Justice Act.
Posted at 04:30 AM in action, drugs, equal rights, gay rights, minimum wage, paycheck fairness, transgender, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning good House bills and a bad Senate bill.
It's Monday, so it's time once again to call our Senators and tell them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. The House passed all these bills, but the Senate won't even vote on them, because Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell (E-KY) won't even hold a vote on any of them. He even calls himself the "Grim Reaper" now! Who but an insane person would be proud of the fact that they refuse to pass legislation promoting voting rights, civil rights, equal pay for women, a higher minimum wage, freedom from corporate interference on the internet, and safe and secure elections? Seriously, let that be your meditation object as you call your Senators. You'd think a few of them would want to go on the record supporting the things I've listed above, but too many of them think of politics as nothing more than team sports -- a profound offense to those of us who call America our team.
In the wake of a mass murder apparently perpetrated by someone who really, really hated immigrants, Republicans have responded swiftly -- with legislation that would further injure immigrants! Yay priorities! S. 1494, the so-called Secure and Protect Act, would (among other nefarious works) impose an unnecessarily high screening standard on potential aslyees, essentially prevent Central American refugees from even getting asylum in the U.S., and deny immigrants due process by subjecting them to abnormally fast "rocket docket" hearings. Naturally, Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called a Committee vote on the bill without even letting Democratic members speak on it, which is what you do when you're really confident in your bill. And aslyees and refugees are actually the least likely people to commit terrorism, because, you know, they're fleeing terrorism in their home countries. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to resist this persistent posturing about immigration by rejecting the so-called Secure and Protect Act.
Posted at 04:24 AM in action, equal pay, equal rights, gay rights, immigration, internet freedom, minimum wage, net neutrality, paycheck fairness, transgender, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Around the table: Joe Biden revises his career yet again, and other dramas.
Jesus Mary and Joseph now Joe Biden is trying to convince us he opposed the Iraq war and "was as outspoken as much as anyone at all in Congress," including, I presume, Barbara Lee, Bob Graham, and Ron Paul. Sooner or later even deaf, dumb, and blind infants will tire of Mr. Biden's attempts to revise his 40 years of professional capitulation to the right. And this is why he'll lose in 2020.
Alan McLeod at FAIR catches cable news channels suggesting that if you can't afford that vacation, you could just put it on a credit card! Remember when our Administration was telling folks furloughed over our President's vanity border wall tantrum that they could just take out a loan to make ends meet? This is what we get when we enable a bankster class that does no work other than converting other people's debt into their wealth.
Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upholds North Dakota law insisting that voters all have a residential street address in order to have Voter ID (and therefore to vote) -- though around 20 percent of the Native American population actually don't have these street addresses. Which our own Supreme Court will be anxious to overturn citing the "undue burden" standard in Planned Parenthood v. Casey! I kid, of course -- these Justices are very, ah, selective about their precedents.
Former #1 overall NHL draft pick Joe Murphy, who carved out a solid 15-year career as a second-line winger, is now 51, homeless on the streets of Kenora, Ontario, and showing symptoms of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (or CTE). We know football is bad for the human brain, but I bet one day we find out that hockey is even worse -- the game's effects on its players' brains hidden by the anonymity that's more likely to be their lot once they stop playing and return to their Canadian hinterland hometowns, as they tend to do.
In case you were tempted to argue that recent mass shootings mean we should give our FBI "more tools" to stop them, Chip Gibbons at In These Times reminds us that not only is the FBI more obsessed with "black identity extremists" than white racist terrorists, but it already has "extraordinary tools" that it's just not using against white racists. In other words, our FBI would rather use its vast powers against good Americans than use those powers to protect us. And naturally Joe Biden would pass a "domestic terrorism" law to respond to mass shootings, which surely wouldn't have the same ill effects as all that anti-crime legislation he's enthusiastically pushed over the years.
Finally, why does our President give a thumbs-up for the camera as he's taking a picture with an infant orphaned by the El Paso shooting? To get us to talk about that, and to get embroiled in yet another one of his dramas, that's why -- and, unfortunately, fighting drama means calling attention to the fact that it is drama. Think of it as a periodic vaccination. Also, think of what our President might not want you to find out as you're obsessing over his latest drama -- like, just as a for-example, that he still uses undocumented immigrant labor while he rails against undocumented immigrants.
Posted at 03:02 AM in "war on terror", around the table, banksters, debt, Democrat weakness, drama, health care, immigration, Iraq, law and order, racism, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning good bills, soldier pensions, and mass shootings.
That stack of good House-passed bills keeps piling up on Mitch McConnell's desk, and he doesn't care what you think about that, but that's OK, because we don't care what he thinks! Go ahead and call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act. Mob Boss Mitch ain't the boss of your Senators, after all -- you are. People say I'm naive for thinking we can get Republican Senators to pass bills supporting voting rights, civil rights, internet freedom, better paychecks, and secure elections. But what would they hate even more than passing these bills? Being humiliated and jobless, that's what, and if enough of us speak up, they'll either bow to our will or be humiliated and jobless. Having the better arguments ain't enough -- we also have to deploy them, in force.
Meanwhile, our Supreme Court gave our President the green light to appropriate some Defense Department funds for his vanity border wall, and then the Pentagon announced late last week that it would divert almost $225 million in military pension funds toward the wall. Taking from our troops' retirement to keep drama going -- how utterly despicable! I wonder how our President's votaries will explain it away. Perhaps they'll say it's only $224 million, which I'm sure will comfort our retired soldiers as they make ends meet. Or they'll say they're taking a lot more from real defense spending, so shutup or he's cutting money for weapons we don't even use, and that's a good thing -- but neither of these arguments can magically convert taking pension money into a good thing. Our President's phone number is 1.215.456.2011. He doesn't care what you and I think, but he's also sensitive to bad PR, so doing our duty might actually yield a result here.
Finally, on the heels of yet another mass shooting perpetrated by yet another white supremacist asshole, too many of our politicians are offering "thoughts and prayers" again, apparently having completely forgotten the backlash they got over their "thoughts and prayers" last year. Hence Greyroots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to get to work and pass some common-sense gun control legislation for once. Since I oppose very much control of handguns and hunting rifles, I'm going to use Greyroots' contact tool to specify the common-sense legislation I want -- legislation that would amend the National Firearms Act to make it just as hard for folks to get semi-automatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons. And all that bill did was get tommy guns off our streets. Our main job as civilized people is to fix problems without resorting to violence; if we don't commit to that, we'll never have enough weapons for the resulting apocalypse anyway.
Posted at 05:00 AM in action, discrimination, equal rights, gay rights, guns, immigration, internet freedom, minimum wage, net neutrality, paycheck fairness, pensions, racism, soldiers, transgender, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning Senate intransigence, robocalls, copyrights, and immigration.
It's Monday again, so let's call our Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. And this week we add to that list H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act, which would (among other good works) mandate paper ballots for federal elections. The House has passed all these bills, but Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell still refuses to hold a vote on any of them. Still, we have a voice, and we believe that secure elections, voting rights, civil rights for gay and transgender folk, paycheck fairness for women, higher wages for working families, and internet freedom for all Americans are all good things that our Senators should support, particularly if they want to remain Senators. You can find tools for finding your Senators' phone numbers in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone).
Meanwhile, both House and Senate have passed anti-robocall bills, but they didn't pass the same bill, so now House and Senate must conference out a bill that can go to our President, and you know how that can go -- for example, a lot of the worst parts in that 2017 tax "reform" bill somehow found their way into that bill during the House/Senate conference! -- so Consumer Reports helps you tell your Reps and Senators to agree upon the most vigorous anti-robocall bill possible. A conference bill should, for example, ensure that big telecom corporations give you free tools to end all those "spoofed" calls that pretend to be from your bank or our IRS or even your own damn number, and it should also crack down on international scam call rings. Remember: our Reps and Senators would be nothing without us, so they had better do our will here, not some big donor's will. I mean, nobody likes robocalls except scam artists and other people nobody wants to talk to on the phone. Surely Congress can hit a bank-shot layup?
In other news, H.R. 2426/S. 1273, the CASE Act, purports to streamline the process by which folks can redress copyright violations, but that ain't as good as it sounds -- by taking copyright-related claims out of our courts and creating a separate office within the U.S. Copyright Office to evaluate them, the CASE Act will open the floodgates for copyright trolls to slap copyrights on everything they can find so they can harvest settlements from the unsuspecting. If you think you won't be affected because you don't violate copyrights, ask yourself: have you ever shared a meme on Facebook or Twitter? If the answer is "yes," then it will affect you, once folks slap copyrights on everything in sight, knowing they'll get a quick hearing from the U.S. Copyright Office rather than letting the wheels of justice in our courts grind slow. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect us from copyright trolls by rejecting the SAFE Act.
Finally, we've been trying to get Greyhound to stop letting Border Patrol agents on their buses willy-nilly, but they don't care what you think, so the ACLU helps you tell Greyhound's owner, FirstGroup plc, to stop Greyhound from letting Border Patrol agents on their buses unless they have a warrant or are at an actual CBP checkpoint. Of course if CBP or ICE agents have a warrant, or the bus is passing through a CBP checkpoint, agents can get on board and search, but the CBP has been searching buses without warrants and declaring that pretty much anywhere is now a "checkpoint," and they've also taken plenty of folks of color off buses without having any real suspicion that they're undocumented immigrants. Again, Greyhound has demonstrated that it doesn't care about any of that, so we have to alert their owners to what they're doing. In a sane, decent, and moral society I wouldn't ever have to say this, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society I often have to, so I will: law and order don't exist just to give us whatever results we want.
Posted at 04:30 AM in action, copyrights, discrimination, equal rights, gay rights, immigration, internet freedom, law and order, minimum wage, net neutrality, paycheck fairness, robocalls, transgender, voting rights, working families | Permalink | Comments (0)
Around the table: the dark side of mindfulness, explained! Plus the usual "liberal" media foolery.
Zachary Siegel at The Nation interviews Ron Purser, whose new book McMindfulness examines "examines how spiritual practices and self-care became tools for corporate compliance." Well, when corporations place all the emphasis on "how you can deal with stress at your job," they not only erase their own responsibility for the stress they cause at your job through their terrible management, they condition you to "be content with injustice and inequalities that pervade society." Really, you're a lot less stressed when you have sick days, money in your savings account, and access to health care. That's not to say you shouldn't do deep breathing every once in a while -- indeed, I give this advice to my trolls often! -- but all this emphasis on coping keeps us from remaking our world into one that doesn't demand so damn much coping.
You know all those polls that just ask people if they consider themselves conservative, moderate, or liberal? Well, Jim Naureckas at FAIR, in making a larger point about what certain classes of voters want, links to a Pew Research Center poll that actually evaluates whether you're conservative, moderate, or liberal by your actual stands on actual issues. And what do we learn? That "56 percent of self-identified 'moderates' picked mostly liberal policies, as did 30 percent of 'conservatives' and 21 percent of those who said they were 'very conservative.'" I'd have framed Pew's issues differently -- they include no allusion to taxes on the rich, for example, and the liberal position on clean air/clean water regulations is less that the "costs are worth it" and more that they save money in health care costs -- but I think Pew's findings better correlate with our lived experience than the let's-all-get-along-with-evil-corporatists pablum our media generally serves up.
Mike Ludwig at TruthOut reminds us that making folks with felony convictions pay fines before getting their voting rights back is a "modern-day poll tax.". No, saying so does not amount to "letting people off the hook before they've paid their debt to society," because a) your voting rights should never be taken away in the first place and b) the quality of mercy demands that we take ability to pay into account when giving a sentence. Prisoners make absurdly little money while incarcerated, and while they're in prison they get gouged by medical appointments, phone calls, and high-priced goods in commissaries. Lawmakers would understand all of that, if they weren't so preoccupied with swinging their balls in our faces.
Ho hum, MSNBC (or, as Jeffery St. Clair calls it, "MSDNC") makes blatant errors in its apparent zeal to tamp down excitement about the Bernie Sanders campaign. Putting him third in a chart when he ranks second (or fourth when he ranks third) is Fox News-level BS, of course, but when Chuck Todd tells us Mr. Sanders lost five points in a poll when he actually gained five, or another program simply tacks on three points to Mr. Biden's showing in a poll just so it can put him in first, well, that's the kind of thing George Orwell warned us about. So, to sum: the same people who constantly tell us TEH BERNIEZ CAN'TZ TEH WINZ!!!!! have to fudge the data or lie about the data to make it seem like he "can't win," which should raise anyone's suspicions.
Finally, another day, another flatugasm from our President about how Barack Obama should be the one getting investigated, not him, for his "book deal" or something. Here's the thing, though: "(f)rom day one, they've looked into everything we've done" is exactly how democracy is supposed to work! They work for us, and they're supposed to check the power of the Executive branch! Is there no one in his Administration who can tell him how he sounds? Or are they all telling him that since he sounds like his most self-pitying votaries, it's OK? It's certainly enough to make you miss the crude artistry of Mr. Nixon, who famously said that he was OK with the media putting him under a microscope, but not a proctoscope.
Posted at 08:13 AM in actual conservatism, around the table, clean air, clean water, health care, law and order, paid sick leave, tax cuts for the rich, taxes, the "liberal" media, voting rights, waaaaah! | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning Senate intransigence, net neutrality, humane immigration policy, and voting rights.
If you've missed previous opportunities to call your Senators to tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, well, it's not too late, because Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell still refuses to hold a vote on any of these House-passed bills, since "I get to decide what we vote on," like the voters made him Sultan-with-Absolute-Power or something. And now you can add H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, which our House passed late last week. So, we've got bills that promote voting rights, civil rights for gay and transgender folk, paycheck fairness for women who don't get paid the same way men do, internet freedom for all Americans, and a $15/hour minimum wage by 2025; these are all good things, and our Senators should support them. 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 Senators' phone numbers. You may have to call local numbers; I've found the D.C. numbers hardly work anymore, for whatever reason.
While you've got your Senators on the phone: the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals may rule this week on our FCC's so-called "Restoring Internet Freedom" rule from 2017 -- the rule that repealed the 2015 Open Internet Order that made net neutrality the law of the land -- and if it strikes the 2017 net neutrality repeal down, the big telecom corporations will be in your Reps' and Senators' ears with a quickness, trying to get bogus "net neutrality" legislation passed so that big telecoms will still be able to block and slow down the websites you want to see. So tell your Senators that, if the D.C. Circuit rules against the 2017 net neutrality repeal, you want them to leave the 2015 Open Internet order as-is and reject any bill the big telecoms push. Big telecoms are among the least popular corporations in America because of their monopolist practices and lousy service -- but our politicians love them, because they give lots of money to political campaigns, so politicians would prefer to do their will, rather than ours. That just means we have to make our will unmistakeable. (Be sure to call your House Reps afterward.)
In other news, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight our Administration's monstrous behavior in re immigrants by passing H.R. 2203, the Homeland Security Improvement Act, and H.R. 3239, the Humanitarian Standards for Individuals in Customs and Border Protection Custody Act. H.R. 2203 would (among other good works) create a National Commission to investigate the inhumane practices conducted by our Administration and would prohibit family separation of would-be immigrants except under extreme circumstances (i.e., if the parents are abusing the children). H.R. 3239 would (among other good works) spell out food/water/shelter requirements for detainees -- you recall that this Administration told the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that no law actually compels them to provide soap to detainee children! -- and would establish procedures for our Homeland Security Inspector General and our Government Accounting Office to oversee our Administration's detainment practices. Our House could vote on both these bills any day now (they both passed out of committee last week), so let's make sure we communicate our will to our Reps.
Finally, Daily Kos helps you demand that state governments restore all voting rights to formerly-incarcerated citizens without making them pay fines or fees. Let's not get stuck in the weeds over whether you should pay all your debts to society in addition to serving your sentence before you get your right to vote back, because you should never lose your right to vote in the first place. I don't care if you're a murderer, a child molester, or a corporate criminal -- you should never lose your right to vote. I put "corporate criminal" in there, of course, just to remind everyone why certain state politicians pressed to force felons to lose their voting rights in the first place -- because of racism! Politicians know that our justice system mainly puts folks of color in prison, at much higher numbers than white folks and usually for much smaller crimes than the kind big corporate executives get away with, hence taking away their voting rights is a way of keeping them down even when they're out of prison. So let's not let racism rule our lives.
Posted at 04:39 AM in action, campaign finance, gay rights, immigration, internet freedom, law and order, minimum wage, monopolies, net neutrality, paycheck fairness, racism, transgender, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning Senate obstruction, our President's tax returns, and protections for working families.
Today's another good day to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. (You can find your Senators' phone numbers using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page -- or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page.) Why is Mob Boss Mitch blocking them from a Senate vote? Because he doesn't want his members to go on record opposing voting rights, internet freedom, tools for workers to rectify pay gaps, and civil rights for gay and transgender folk. He also doesn't want our President to go on record as opposing these things, once he vetoes the bills. If this all sounds like the opposite of courage to you, well, you're not alone. And if House Democrats don't run thousands of ads in 2020 touting their votes in favor of these bills, that'll be the opposite of courage, too.
Meanwhile, now that the state of New York has passed a bill mandating that the state comply with Congressional requests to turn over tax returns on state residents, CREDO helps you tell House Democrats to actually request our President's tax returns. House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-MA) has been strangely slow in making that request, but that's why we're here: to remind our Congressfolk of our will. And though our President's apologists call this "Presidential harassment" -- a phrase that sure does sound like whining! -- fact is we have plenty of probable cause to start an investigation into his tax returns, beginning with his own refusal to release them and continuing on through New York Times reporting on our President's massive alleged tax fraud. And if we nail him for tax fraud, what will his apologists say? That it's OK for our President to cheat on his taxes? Well, perhaps I shouldn't tempt fate with these fools.
Finally, H.R. 2474/S. 1306, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (or PRO Act), would, as its title suggests, give workers tools with which to organize and collectively bargain for better pay and working conditions. Specifically, the PRO Act would stiffen penalties for employers who interfere with employee organizing efforts (including votes!), and close a lot of current loopholes in our labor laws, which corporations have been driving Mack trucks through lately. You remember how our Supreme Court ruled that Kentucky nurses could be classified as "supervisors" on hysterically flimsy pretexts? Well, the PRO Act would fix that. You remember how FedEx classified all its drivers as "independent contractors" just so they could avoid paying health insurance and also so they could make their drivers pay for their own trucks? The PRO Act would fix that, too. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the PRO Act.
Posted at 04:41 AM in action, Democrat weakness, discrimination, equal rights, gay rights, internet freedom, labor, law and order, net neutrality, paycheck fairness, sexism, taxes, transgender, voting rights, working families | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning unconstitutional war, Senate obstruction, and working families.
The House plans to vote on amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act today, so now's the time to call your House Reps (using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page, if you're viewing it on a computer, or the bottom of this page if you're on a cellphone) and tell them to vote in favor of a) the Khanna amendment that would prevent our President from participating in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, and b) the Khanna-Gaetz amendment that would prevent our President from waging war on Iran without Congressional authorization. Just Foreign Policy also advises us not only to tell our Congressfolk to vote in favor of these amendments, but also to tell them to push for a recorded vote. Congressfolk would prefer to pass these amendments "en bloc" via voice vote -- which tells everyone how many folks voted in favor of an amendment but not which way individual Congressfolk voted. But how can we hold our representatives accountable for what they do if we don't know how they vote?
Once you're off the phone with your House Reps, you can call your Senators and tell them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. We've discussed these bills at some length; they would, respectively, protect voting rights more vigorously, extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folks, give working folks more tools to fight pay discrimination, and reinstate the FCC's 2015 pro-net neutrality order as the law of the land. Of course Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell won't bring these House-passed bills up for a vote, because (and I quote) "I get to decide what we vote on." By his actions, we know that Mr. McConnell believes the American people should not challenge the "right" of Our Glorious Elites to run (and ruin!) everything. If that belief sounds singularly un-American to you, then you would want to reassert your power as an American by communicating your will to your Senators.
Finally, H.R. 2474/S. 1306, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, would (as its title suggests!) enhance workers' ability to protect themselves via collective bargaining on wages and working conditions. Specifically, the bill would make it harder for corporations to reclassify employees as "independent contractors," would clarify the National Labor Relations Act's definition of "supervisor" to prevent corporations from pretending their employees are "supervisors" when they're really not, and would stiffen penalties for many offenses corporations perpetrate against working folk. Right-wingers would complain that working folks don't have a "right" to organize, but these are the same folks who argue that bosses have the right to do whatever they like regardless of whom it hurts, so how much credibility do they have? People for the American Way (among other groups) helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act.
Posted at 04:54 AM in action, equal rights, gay rights, internet freedom, Iran, labor, law and order, net neutrality, paycheck fairness, transgender, voting rights, working families | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning law and order, immigration, and various good bills Mob Boss Mitch won't even bring up for a Senate vote.
First things first. Late last year, five-months-pregnant Marshae Jones started a fight with another woman, who then shot Ms. Jones in the stomach, killing her unborn baby -- but now the state has indicted Mr. Jones for manslaughter and let the actual shooter go free! Their reasoning: the would-be mother "initiated and continued the fight" with the shooter. Hopefully you'll recognize that as utter horsedoodle, since, hopefully, you never got away with anything as a kid by saying "he started it!" Call me old-fashioned, but I would charge the shooter for the shooting, in part because I accept our responsibility, as civilized people, not to respond to every provocation we get -- let alone with force! Hence Change.org helps you tell the Pleasant Grove police department to dismiss the charges on Ms. Jones and charger her shooter instead.
Meanwhile, hundreds of workers at the Boston furniture corporation Wayfair walked out last week in protest of their employer's furnishing of our Administration's border concentration camps for immigrant children, so Sum of Us helps you tell Wayfair's CEO to stop selling furniture to these camps. Now, you might be saying, I hate what our Administration's doing as much as the next guy, but don't these kids need beds to sleep in? But you should recognize that as a rhetorical hostage situation! You're not cramming these kids into squalid rooms, and you're not going before federal courts arguing that you don't have to give these kids soap because the law doesn't spell that out; our Administration is doing all that, and corporations like Wayfair are helping them. So if you bring the Big Stick of Bad PR upon corporations like Wayfair, you might help end our Administration's family separation policy, which will only help these kids.
Finally, your Senators are home this week, so go ahead and call them and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. Long story short, since I've been telling the long story on these bills for months now: H.R. 1 would better protect our voting rights and make gerrymandering harder; the Equality Act would extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folks, the Paycheck Fairness Act would help folks get equal pay for equal work, and the Save the Internet Act would restore internet freedom for people, not for corporations. I know, I know, Mob Boss Mitch says the Senate won't vote on these bills because (and I quote) "I get to decide what we vote on," but pressuring our Senators to pass these good bills is still our duty as Americans. And, you know, all Mitch McConnell has been doing for a dozen years is blocking good legislation. I shudder to think that's what he's taking to the Pearly Gates.
Posted at 04:10 AM in action, discrimination, equal pay, equal rights, immigration, internet freedom, law and order, net neutrality, redistricting, voting rights, working families | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning voting rights, pollution, and taxes.
People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4/S. 561, the Voting Rights Advancement Act. I know, the For the People Act passed the House, but Mob Boss Mitch won't let the Senate vote on it, so it's time for Plan B, which is "squeeze the politicians on the specifics." The Voting Rights Advancement Act would plug the holes our Supreme Court blew out of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder -- and would do so in a way that doesn't "single out" Southern states (our Court's main problem with the Voting Rights Act) but would "single out" any state or locality with an established, demonstrable record of voting rights violations. Republicans have been opposing voting rights reforms for-freaking-ever; why, it's almost like they're afraid people won't vote them into office unless they have a few dozen ways to suppress the vote! And of course vote suppression makes it more difficult to punish politicians who suppress the vote -- but this is a democracy, and we can still speak out in force, so we can still make it right.
Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would keep ubiquitous PFAS chemicals out of our food and water. PFAS chemicals appear in just about everything, from firefighting foam to food wrappers; the Sierra Club calls them "forever chemicals," because they're just about indestructible. If you're thinking maybe you like "indestructible," recall that indestructible chemicals don't break down into more harmless chemicals, and that PFAS chemicals increase your risk of kidney damage, thyroid problems, and cancer. Also, the FDA's found them in foods ranging from sweet potato to chocolate cake, and over 100 cities have found them in their water supply. So, yeah, it's well past time we did something about all of that. Various Congressfolk have introduced over 20 bills that would address the problem, and now we've got to get Congress to move them, so they can become law and protect us from serious health care problems.
Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to impose a financial transaction tax on Wall Street banksters. A few bills in Congress would do that: H.R. 1516/S. 647, the Wall Street Tax Act, would impose a 0.1% tax (that's one-tenth of one percent, not "one percent" or "10 percent," "liberal" media!) on financial transactions including stock and derivative trades, and H.R. 2923/S. 1587, the Inclusive Prosperity Act, would impose a range of taxes, from 0.005% to 0.5% -- none of which are "five percent" or "50 percent," though, again, our "liberal" media will report it as such by "mistake." Seriously, a financial transaction tax (which supporters often call a "Robin Hood Tax") is fairly popular across the board -- with everyone, it seems, except politicians. And politicians have betrayed us in the past -- remember when candidate Obama supported it, only to be "talked out of it" by Larry Summers once he became President? We can prevent that from happening again only by communicating our will to our Congressfolk until they do our will.
Posted at 04:15 AM in action, banksters, chemical safety, clean water, health care, pollution, Robin Hood tax, taxes, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning war on Iran and Senate intransigence.
You see how late last week our President prepared a military strike on Iran, only to call it off at the last minute because he suddenly decided it wasn't "proportionate" to take 150 lives over an unmanned spy drone shot down over the Strait of Hormuz? So Presidential, right? Ah, no -- I don't have documentary evidence that he concocted the whole scheme to make himself look better, but I'm also not a schmuck, and our Founders didn't create a Constitution expressly designed to reign in executive powers so we could give our President the benefit of the doubt. So our task is the same today as it was yesterday -- to stop yet another stupid war with another nation that's not just going to roll over while we try occupying it for the next 20 years. So now's the time to call your Congressfolk and tell them to use their power stop the march to war with Iran. Tools for finding your Congressfolk's phone numbers are, as always, in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone).
While you've got your Senators on the phone, you can also tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. Mob Boss Mitch says the Senate won't vote on these bills because and I quote "I get to decide what we vote on," but pressure your Senators enough and they'll cave, because the only thing they really fear is the voters turning them out of office. Yes, I wish we could turn bad politicians out of office more easily, but H.R. 1 would make that task easier by protecting our voting rights. The Equality Act would extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folks, the Paycheck Fairness Act would help folks get equal pay for equal work, and the Save the Internet Act would restore our internet freedom. Don't let folks say supporting the President against Iran is more important -- our opponents can't win arguments, so all they do is create drama. But, as free people, we don't let drama dictate what we do.
Posted at 04:09 AM in action, discrimination, drama, equal rights, internet freedom, Iran, net neutrality, paycheck fairness, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning good legislation, bad corporate behavior, and war with Iran.
Congress reconvenes today, so today's a good day to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find your Senators' phone numbers so you can call them and tell them to pass tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, H.R. 5, the Equality Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. And if you want to tell Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to hold votes on all these bills, you can find his phone numbers at the bottom of this page. Why do we keep telling the Senate to pass bills they don't want to pass? Partly because they're all good bills that would (respectively) better secure our voting rights, expand civil rights protections to gays and transgender folk, and restore our internet freedom. But we also keep doing it because it gives us a way to hold our Senators to account, and because communicating your will over and over again is the only way to get things done.
Meanwhile, Peruvian indigenous farmer Máxima Acuña de Chaupe has, for several years now, fought the world's largest gold mining corporation, Newmont Mining, which wants to build an open-pit gold mine on land she owns, and has been sending thugs to her house to beat her up and bust up her house in an attempt to convince her to move. If you know someone who would respond "well she should just move somewhere else and farm there," remind them, gently or otherwise, that people farm everywhere, and a lot of folks farm because they wouldn't otherwise eat. Remind them, also, that no big corporation has a "right" to harass people off their land, and remind them that Newmont mines gold. Gold! Like we're all in Deadwood or something! Anyway, Sum of Us helps you tell Newmont to stop taking people's land by beating up its owners; Sum of Us will deliver your signature to Newmont's annual meeting tomorrow.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to pass H.R. 2354/S. 1039 and thus prevent our President from marching us off to war with Iran, then both CREDO and the Friends Committee on National Legislation still help you do that. Don't believe the hype that our President really doesn't want war with Iran, because warmongers always say "I don't want to fight a war" so that when they start a war, you're more likely to believe them when they say "I had no choice." Of course nobody put a gun to our President's head and made him replace his NSA chief with a man who's seemingly spent a lifetime trying to start a war with Iran, and nobody put a gun to his head and made him withdraw from an Iran nuclear deal that was accomplishing its goal, either. Certainly don't believe the hype that he hired John Bolton so he could "keep his enemies closer." You know a better way to neutralize your enemies? Don't put them in power in the first place.
Posted at 04:10 AM in action, equal rights, gay rights, internet freedom, Iran, law and order, net neutrality, transgender, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning disaster relief, abortion, and voting rights.
Our Senate finally passed a $19.1 billion disaster relief package for Puerto Rico, which is still suffering from the effects of Hurricane Maria -- but when our House tried to pass it on a voice vote, which must be unanimous, one House Rep, Charles "Chip" Roy of Texas's 21st district, said no, due to "concerns" about "securing the border," which is now apparently a reason to block any legislation. (Kentucky's incorrigible Thomas Massey thwarted a second attempt yesterday.) Anyway, all is not lost: small pro forma sessions will continue this week, and then all of Congress returns on Monday, at which point they can pass the bill with a simple majority. Hence you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Reps' phone numbers and call them to tell them to pass disaster relief legislation. You may want to call their home district office numbers, since that's where most of them are.
Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell six big corporations to stop donating to the politicians who've enacted all these abortion bans across America. These big corporations will likely tell you that they gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to these politicians because of their "pro-business" views, not because of their hatred of women, but if the end result is near-total abortion bans in six states, then they're merely enabling woman-haters. And too many of these corporations have been positioning themselves as "pro-woman" lately, so it's well past time for them to walk the walk. Roe v. Wade is still the law of the land, and clear majorities now support legal abortion and Roe v. Wade, and what's the best way to fight abortion anyway? Birth control -- which right-wing politicians now also believe to be an unconscionable evil. But though these politicians remain stubbornly immune to the Big Stick of Bad PR, corporations are. So let's wield it.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to end the nefarious practice of keeping felons from voting, then Common Cause still helps you do that. My beliefs are pretty straightforward: prisoners should have the right to vote, not just once they've paid their debt to society and earned back their freedom, but also while they're behind bars. Giving prisoners the vote would curtail another nefarious vote suppression practice: the practice of packing non-voting prisoners into a district so that they can't vote but still count as residents of that district! If that reminds you of the Constitution's nefarious three-fifths rule during the years slavery was legal, well, you're not alone. And if prisoners could vote, the state would have less incentive to imprison the people it wants to silence -- an urge that, sadly, usually expresses itself as racial profiling. So let's stand up to all of that.
Posted at 04:11 AM in action, birth control, immigration, racism, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning trade, banksters, pollution, and voting rights.
Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to remove corporate welfare for big pharma from the recently-negotiated USMCA trade agreement. Folks call the USMCA "NAFTA 2.0," but it deserves better than that, since it vastly curtails the use of the "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) system that nullifies our laws and outsources our jobs. Unfortunately, the USMCA also extends monopoly patent protections for big pharma corporations (for drugs they couldn't have made without government funding, no less!), which keeps generic drugs off the market and thus keeps drug prices high. In an era where EpiPens cost as much as $600 a dose, where hedge fund managers drive up the price of drugs by 700% or more, where drugs sell for $1,700 a dose when they sell for $8 a dose in Australia, and where insulin costs so much that diabetics risk death by rationing it, our trade deals shouldn't make all that worse. So let's get Congress to fix it.
Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans from financial predators by passing the Loan Shark Prevention Act. The bill would, as you may know, set a maximum interest rate of 15% on "any extension of credit" -- unless the state in which the borrower lives sets a lower maximum rate -- and would explicitly prevent concocting fees to evade the 15% cap. Now, a 15% cap would just so happen to kill the payday lending industry, but let its defenders on both sides of the aisle make fools of themselves justifying the 300% interest rates on short-term loans that wreck soldiers' lives. As I've said, I'd set much lower limits on car loans (2%), mortgages (3%), and personal loans (6%), but the 15% cap would make credit card debt more manageable. And caps such as these don't destroy industries, though they may prevent such industries from buying more corporate welfare through campaign donations. What a shame that would be!
In other news, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban PFAS chemicals from our products. I'm sure PFAS chemicals seemed like a wonder material once upon a time, but now they're everywhere, from Teflon pans to fast-food wrappers to fire-fighting foam to rain gear to popcorn bags to dental floss, and chances are you've got it in your bloodstream as we speak, because PFAS never breaks down. And scientists have linked PFAS chemicals to cancer, kidney damage, thyroid problems, and child developmental issues. This isn't a situation where you can just avoid bad stuff, because PFAS is, basically, everywhere and in everything. Some 20 bills currently under consideration in the House and Senate would address PFAS chemicals; now we just have to impress upon our Congressfolk the urgency of the problem. Don't be one of those who'd say "well, what are we going to make our dental floss out of now?" America is a can-do country, after all.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1/S. 949, the For the People Act, then People for the American Way still helps you do that, and if you want to call Sen. "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell and tell him directly to allow a vote on the bill, then his Senate website provides phone numbers if you scroll all the way down. Don't imagine that the House flipping back to Democrats this past November means "the people have overcome" all the voting rights issues. Democratic candidates got more votes than Republicans in Wisconsin state legislature races in 2018, yet Republican legislators still hold almost two-thirds of that state's seats, and that's because Republicans have aggressively gerrymandered the state. The For the People Act would fix that, by making states use independent commissions, and not self-interested legislators, to redraw Congressional districts. The For the People Act would enact reforms in voting rights and campaign finance, too. So let's keep on 'em.
Posted at 03:48 AM in "free" trade, action, banksters, big pharma, campaign finance, campaign spending disclosure, corporate welfare, health care, law and order, pollution, redistricting, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning health care, voting rights, and worker pay.
If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. You may have read Paul Krugman's recent New York Times column stating (among other things!) that although it "(c)ould" be true that Medicare-for-All will result in better health care, and that we'd pay less in taxes to support it than we're currently paying in premiums, these would be hard to sell to the American people. And indeed, when folks confront the loss of their private insurance and how we're going to pay for that, support does fall off. But Medicare-for-All wouldn't poll well in the first place if folks were that emotionally-invested in their private health insurance; their support wavers not because they really think their insurer's doing a great job, but out of fear of the unknown. And we don't let that keep us from doing the right thing, do we?
Meanwhile, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to allow folks serving time in prison to be able to vote. No, letting prisoners vote won't turn prison into a "country club" (seriously, people say that to you whenever you argue that a civilization should treat prisoners better!), but it will prevent some fairly serious problems. One, our government won't be able to put people in jail just to prevent them from voting! I wouldn't argue they're doing that now -- I presume that putting folks in jail, particularly black and brown folks, is an end in itself, and our government looks at their inability to vote as icing on the cake -- but if I thought of it, you know they have. Two, denying prisoners the vote lets governments pack Congressional districts with large numbers of people who can't get proper representation! Sadly, state governments are already doing that. So let's put a stop to it.
Finally, CREDO helps you tell our government to give back pay to federal contractors during the government shutdown over our President's vanity border wall earlier this year. Federal employees got back pay, of course, but our government contracts a lot of work out to private corporations, and those workers didn't get back pay, though it wasn't their fault, or their employers' fault, that they didn't work. And a lot of these workers work low-paid jobs as cafeteria workers, security guards, and janitors. Which doesn't make their work any less important! And they have bills to pay just like the rest of us! Of course, our government shouldn't be contracting this work out to private corporations, and not just because these little government shutdowns leave them out in the cold. But we ought to do right by them while they're working for us, although our President is the kind of person who high-fives himself for sticking it to people who work for him.
Posted at 04:22 AM in action, government shutdown, health care, immigration, Medicare-for-All health insurance, privatization, racism, redistricting, treating prisoners like human beings, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning voting rights, torture, pollution, and social media.
If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1/S. 949, the For the People Act, then People for the American Way still helps you do that. After all, if you've been watching this space, you've very likely already advocated for most of the things this bill would do, like redistricting reform, automatic voter registration, campaign finance disclosure for large donors, and public campaign financing. You've also very likely fought efforts to remove voters from voting rolls for no good reason other than that they might vote against the kind of politician who'd like less people to vote, and the For the People Act does something about that, too. Plus it'd make Election Day a national holiday and keeps House Reps from serving on for-profit boards. Who could oppose such things? The Republicans who parade their hatred of all that's good, that's who. And that's why we need the For the People Act.
Meanwhile, H.R. 2407's title, the Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act, will set off some rageheads right off the bat -- you'll hear them say how dare you call it an occupation! as if that's the worst thing a human being could possibly do. Or as if it's anti-Semitic! But criticizing Israel's actions in Palestine is not in-and-of-itself "anti-Semitic," and nor are attempts to induce better behavior from Israel. And even if you think people criticize Israel too much, you should be put off by reports of Israeli soldiers separating Palestinian children from their families and torturing them while in detention. These things may not create terrorists, but they do create broken people, and we can't keep creating broken people and calling ourselves civilized. Hence Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose cruel treatment of Palestinian children by passing H.R. 2407.
In other news, S. 1187, the Safe School Meals for Kids Act, would phase out food tainted by the ubiquitous pesticide chlorpyrifos from our school lunch programs. Scientists have linked chlorpyrifos to numerous neurological and developmental disorders, and indeed our EPA banned chlorpyrifos from home use almost 20 years ago. Yet our Administration drags its feet on imposing a broader ban, even though our courts have mandated it, and even though kids who eat fruits and vegetables sprayed with chlorpyrifos -- which they likely are, since big ag corporations spray about 10 million pounds of it on crops every year -- may well be getting 140 times what our EPA has considered safe exposure. After all, cutting pollution doesn't make executives richer! Where our Administration won't act, perhaps our Congressfolk will -- but not unless we act. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep kids safe from pollution by passing the Safe School Meals for Kids Act.
Finally, Roots Action helps you tell Facebook to stop with its bogus attempts at "fact-checking." You'd think we'd be happy that Facebook is actually checking facts, since so much BS gets spread around there, but they've partnered with decidedly-non-objective outlets like CheckYourFact.com -- a Koch brothers-funded project of the Tucker Carlson-created The Daily Caller -- and the right-wing Weekly Standard. That can't be an accident, could it? Nor could it be an accident that Facebook actually purged pages (including ZeroHedge) because the previously unknown website PropOrNot smeared them as pro-Russian propaganda hounds right after the 2016 election? It never occurred to them to seek out the decidedly non-liberal FactCheck.org? But all we need from Facebook, really, is an end to speech that our First Amendment doesn't protect, like terroristic threats. We certainly don't need "fact-checking" that's worse than the Wild West.
Posted at 04:29 AM in action, campaign finance, campaign spending disclosure, food safety, free speech, Israel, Palestine, pollution, redistricting, social media, torture, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning Medicare-for-All, the For the People Act, and internet freedom.
The House of Representatives has begun to hold hearings on H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, and they've taken some well-deserved flack for inviting a mere one Medicare-for-All supporter to testify at these hearings, but that's something we can counteract, by letting Public Citizen help us tell our House Reps to get health care for all Americans by supporting the Medicare-for-All Act. We spend more money, on crappier health care, than any other highly-developed nation, and tens of millions of Americans still don't have health insurance -- but heaven forfend we pass a bill that even right-wing think tank Mercatus Center says will save us money, because SOSHULIZM!!!!! Seriously, if you talked only to politicians and their "liberal" media enablers, you'd think Americans don't like Medicare-for-All. But if you talk to real Americans who live outside the Beltway, you'd find a nation full of people who've had it up to here with how badly private health insurance corporations have bollocksed everything up.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. H.R. 1 would enact a suite of necessary reforms for which we've already agitated in our support for other bills; these reforms include automatic voter registration, national same-day voter registration, national early voting, prohibitions on various forms of vote suppression, state redistricting reform commissions, campaign finance disclosure for large donors, and public campaign financing -- among many others! Why would someone oppose these reforms? Perhaps because they worry that they'll start losing elections if we pass these reforms -- so it may be no coincidence that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has said the bill won't come up for a vote in the Senate because, and I quote, "I get to decide what we vote on." It's well past time to make him irrelevent, and H.R. 1 is one way to do that.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to restore internet freedom by passing H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, then the Electronic Frontier Foundation still helps you do that. The Save the Internet would restore your internet freedom by wiping out the FCC's 2017 net neutrality repeal and reinstating the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order that codified net neutrality protections into law, and thus allowed you, good citizen, to go where you want to go on the internet, rather than have your favorite websites blocked and throttled by big telecom corporations. But what's that, you say? The FCC called their 2017 net neutrality repeal the "Restoring Internet Freedom" order? Yeah, they meant the "freedom" of corporations to block, censor, and slow down websites, which means they get more freedom than you do, again. As Americans, we don't need to put up with that.
Posted at 04:06 AM in "socialism", action, campaign finance, campaign spending disclosure, health care, internet freedom, Medicare-for-All health insurance, net neutrality, redistricting, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Action: concerning voting rights, clean water, and paycheck fairness.
Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk and state legislators stop denying prisoners the right to vote. Why? Because denying prisoners the right to vote gives governments the power to deny the vote to whomever they can throw in jail. Could it be a coincidence that America not only incarcerates more people than any other nation on Earth, but incarcerates a disproportionate number of Americans of color? Even if it is actually coincidence, there's no denying that the result is racist. And there's another problem: the census counts prisoners for the purpose of apportioning Congressional districts, which means the unscrupulous can pack prisoners into rural districts and deny them a voice in those districts! If you're inclined to retort that we've always denied prisoners the right to vote, please re-read the previous four sentences, in which I explain why that's a bad idea. And maybe slap yourself.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to reject the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska's Bristol Bay area, then the Alaska Wilderness League still helps you do that. You probably thought this was all over when Scott Pruitt's EPA announced its own lack of support for the mine, didn't you? But that only meant Pebble Mine supporters would try to get their foot in another door, hence the Army Corps of Engineers' public commenting period. You already know that Pebble Mine would not only pollute Bristol Bay waters, but kill the world-renowned sockeye salmon industry that thrives there -- which means, not incidentally, that Pebble Mine would also be a job-killer. But you probably also know that Pebble Mine is also the kind of project that might not ever get built, but will enable someone to bilk someone else out of a lot of money. Your comment could help stop all of that.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 7/S. 270, the Paycheck Fairness Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The House passed its version last month, with only seven Republican votes -- to think that only seven Republican House Reps can use this vote to tout themselves as moderates! In the Senate, of course, it's worse -- Republicans hold 53 of 100 seats, and of those, I can see two who would vote for the bill. That doesn't mean we give up, though -- it means we inform them of our will, again and again and again. And the Paycheck Fairness Act would make it easier for women to find out their bosses are paying them less than their male counterparts for no good reason. You'd think that'd be a conservative solution -- you know, to give good Americans tools to help themselves. Of course, today's Republicans are reactionaries, not conservatives. But that's just another reason to keep fighting.
Posted at 04:24 AM in action, actual conservatism, clean water, equal pay, jobs, paycheck fairness, racism, sexism, treating prisoners like human beings, voting rights | Permalink | Comments (0)
Around the table: how quickly Wall Street bonuses outpace the minimum wage, and other horrible truths.
Sen. Sanders says folks in prison should be able to vote, and gets an earful from center and right. Opponents center and right whine WHAT ABOUT TEH MURDURURZ ANDZ TEH TERRORIZTZ!!!!!, but they say that only to provoke rage in people. If folks in prison can vote, our government won't be able to throw people into prison to keep them from voting them out. Note well that the "war on drugs" mainly throws black and brown folks into prison, and you'll begin to see what that means.
Aimee Picchi at CBS News notes that if the minimum wage had grown at the same rate as Wall Street bonuses have grown since 1985, it'd be $33.51/hour today. And minimum wage workers do so much more for America than banksters do! No use whining that the minimum wage has gone up 116% since 1985, not just because it ignores Wall Street bonuses going up about 1,000 percent over the same time, but because inflation has gone up over 136% during that time. Something's tricking down, but it sure ain't wealth.
Fox News's Andrew Napolitano says that not only did our President obstruct justice numerous times during the Mueller investigation, his obstruction is also "immoral," because his obstruction didn't even "save a human life or to preserve human freedom" but merely "to save him from the consequences of his own behavior." Naturally Fox News relegated these insights to the internet, like all cable news corporations do when they don't want to rock the boat, but Mr. Napolitano's condemnation is still worth hearing -- and repeating.
You recall that deal that prohibits the IRS from offering free filing services to good Americans as long as private corporations like TurboTax offer the service? Well, it seems that Intuit (TurboTax's parent corporation) has inserted code on TurboTax's website that keeps Google from helping you find that free service!. So, in short: TurboTax has an agreement to keep the IRS from offering free filing services to taxpayers, says it'll offer the service instead, and then keeps you from seeing it in search engines. Nice work if you can get it! (Sadly for those who insist the "free" market must be allowed to solve every problem, H&R Block is doing the same thing.)
We learn from Motherboard that Twitter doesn't ban white supremacists from its platform the way it bans ISIS from its platform because the algorithms it uses to ban ISIS only catch a few peaceful Arabic-language sites, while a white supremacist ban would catch more than a few Republican politicians. And? You have a First Amendment right not to be put in jail by your government, but you do not have a First Amendment right to use Twitter, and if you think Twitter's banning you for no good reason, you have to prove it. I think right-wingers get so angry about the prospect of Twitter banning them because they can't prove it. I just wish their anger didn't scare Twitter into weakness. (And, ah, one more time: Twitter should hire people to moderate their boards instead of counting on computer software to do that. Hiring people is job creation, after all, and if Twitter can't pay people to do that very important work, then maybe Twitter shouldn't survive. Why is it always left to the liberal to be the hardass these days?)
Finally, George Goehl at The Guardian says something that should be fairly obvious in America: that if Democrats would fight big ag factory farms and all the pollution they cause, they'd win back rural voters. Of course, Democrats are counting on all that factory farm donation money, so they won't do something that might actually win back rural voters -- they'll go on pretending to be Republicans-lite about crime and drugs and immigration and "right-sizing regulations," which hasn't ever fooled anyone, really.
Posted at 03:57 AM in around the table, banksters, big ag, clean air, clean water, factory farm waste, free speech, law and order, minimum wage, pollution, social media, taxes, the "liberal" media, treating prisoners like human beings, twitter, voting rights, waaaaah! | Permalink | Comments (0)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl