Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning voting rights, social media, prison phone rates, plastic pollution, and worker safety.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, and the Protecting America's Workers Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Left Action and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. By now you may know that the Freedom to Vote Act would authorize early voting for 15 days in all states, enact same-day voter registration, make Election Day a national holiday, clamp down on partisan gerrymandering, restore ex-felons' voting rights, and restrict dark money campaign contributions; you may not know that it would prevent states from interfering in elections so that a particularly party can "win" elections when their candidates get fewer votes. So ignore the right-wing rubbish about how "states should be allowed to run their own elections." If they're going to run them badly, then our federal government needs to step in.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. I know, Republicans blocked the bill yesterday, but that's one reason we pressure them -- so they know there will be consequences to their actions. Unless they think "voting against me" is a "terrorist act" or something. I wish I were kidding about that! I think we will be there soon! Anyway, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore our Justice Department's ability to stop states and localities with an established record of vote suppression from suppressing the right to vote any further. That's any state and locality with such a record -- you know, for when right-wingers try to tell you "the South has changed." When no one's brought up the South!

Public Citizen also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. Normally I blanche when I see bills with the words "innovation" and "choice" in their title, but this one's pretty good -- it would prevent big online platform corporations from preferencing their own products, or discriminating against others' products, if the result "would materially harm competition on the covered platform." All monopolistic practices, you may notice! I believe Amazon is in court for this stuff as we speak, but I can think of other big tech corporations that should be shaking in their boots, like Facebook and Google. Or how about Apple? You can only use the "uniqueness" of your operating system as an excuse for so long! At least, that's how it should be. So let's make it be.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1541, the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act. S. 1541 would make our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) cap what big telecom corporations can charge prisoners and/or their families for staying in touch over the phone. So that prisoners and their families can afford them! Currently these big telecoms can charge an arm and a leg for these calls, which is not only cruel, but also reduces the possibility that prisoners will stay out of jail once they get out of jail, and I believe every civilized person works toward prisoner rehabilitation. The only ones who don't, I presume, are the private prison corporation lackeys who love "repeat customers." But they're not civilized. But they don't get all the say around here.

Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2238/S. 984, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act. It's not just about us breaking free from plastic pollution, it's also about the world's marine wildlife, who cannot afford well-heeled lobbyists arguing for their protection. The plastic corporations have big lobbies, but the hermit crab has us, and that's going to have to be enough. Besides which, a lot of animals harmed by plastic pollution can find their way to your dinner plate sooner or later, and if you didn't feel the harm before, you will then. And anyway, you probably did feel it before then -- a World Wildlife Fund/University of Australia-Newcastle study famously told us we ingest about a credit card's worth of plastic weekly -- but you just may not have known it. Now you know, and you can act.

Finally, the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2876, the Protecting America’s Workers Act. The bill would strengthen reporting requirements for workplace injuries and stiffen penalties for workplace safety violations, but it would also expand whistleblower protections, particularly for workers who won't undertake obviously dangerous tasks and those who help inspectors find workplace violations. Maybe this bill doesn't excite people, and big corporations will call it a "job-killer," but this is exactly the kind of bill that could help you out a lot if you get hurt at your workplace because of some boss's negligence. And if this bill passes, employers also won't be able to get away with hurting you just because you're a "consultant" or a "contractor" or a "temp," either. So let's get this done.

Action: concerning worker rights, education, and Chaco Canyon.

A few years ago, our National Labor Relations Board made it easier for workers to hold parent corporations accountable for wrongdoing -- which meant, among other things, that fast-food corporations couldn't pretend their franchises were completely independent actors. Of course, the Presidency has changed parties since then, meaning that a whole new NLRB is in town, meaning they're trying to repeal the joint-employer standard as we speak, because RULEZ ARE TEH BADZ!!!!!! Repealing the joint employer standard wouldn't just hit fast-food employees, of course -- it'd also hit temp workers, since a lot of corporations love using temp workers instead of hiring full-time workers like their forbearers did. But our NLRB still by law must take public comments on its proposal, hence Jobs With Justice helps you tell our NLRB to reject its own proposal to repeal the joint-employer standard. Of course, I don't think a corporation should ever own another corporation, particularly for the purpose of evading its responsibilities under the law. But that's another fight, for another day.

Meanwhile, you know that our schools face funding crises -- largely because of our failure to tax rich people hard enough and our willingness to continue indulging the charter school scam, but I digress -- and this makes schools more vulnerable to corporate money. Case in point: McDonald's sponsors McTeacher's Nights, during which our teachers serve junk food to students. I bet it's rather popular with the kids, as they say, but our children don't need any help from our schools choosing to eat 1200-calorie meals that'll contribute to obesity and all the health care problems that go with it. But wait, there's more! Putting teachers behind the food counter also denies work and pay to McDonald's own workers (who make rather less than teachers), and, as it happens, the schools don't get a whole lot of money out of these events. Hence Corporate Accountability helps you tell McDonald's to stop with the exploitation of schools and teachers already and end their McTeacher's Nights. The Big Stick of Bad PR can find all bad actors eventually, if we will but wield it.

Finally, our Administration still has a jones for drilling for gas and oil in the Chaco Canyon area of New Mexico, despite the damage oil and gas drilling does to our clean water, despite the thousand-year-old Anasazi ruins and roadways and rock engravings revered by Pueblo and Navajo -- that latter item suggesting, again, that for this Administration, your heritage only matters if you're white. Our government has, over the years, leased most of the public land outside Chaco Culture National Historical Park for gas and oil drilling, but not the land inside the park -- even our current Interior Secretary seems a little cowed by all the public pressure against drilling inside the park. And there's no reason not to keep up that pressure, particularly since our Interior Secretary is eyeing the midterms just like all the rest of us are. (Note: we'll continue fighting the way we fight regardless of the results.) So Food and Water Action helps you tell our Interior Department to reject gas and oil drilling leases in the Chaco Culture National Historical Park.

Around the table: from the "alt-right" to the latest Donald Trump "best-seller."

FAIR's Jim Naureckas takes us on a "guided tour" of the so-called "alt-right." Long story short: they're not just racist, but they're also not conservative -- I mean, do "rebellion" and "mischief" and "blasphemy" strike you as conservative values? Also, as quicker minds than mine have pointed out, the white supremacists' stated desire to be called "alt-right" smacks of political correctness. I mean, normally I call people whatever they want to be called, but not so much when they're being hypocrites.

Apple CEO Tim Cook says he won't bring back any of the $200 billion Apple holds offshore until the corporate tax system becomes more "fair." Of course, Apple doesn't move money offshore because it "has to" -- it moves money offshore because it can. And you can't even buy Mr. Cook's claim that "we sell stuff all over the world," when even a Senate committee tells us that Apple shifts its U.S.-earned profits offshore, and to Ireland, where its "subsidiary" won't pay any taxes at all. How do you know when CEOs are lying? When their mouths are open.

Speaking of Apple, China Labor Watch finds employee exploitation still runs rampant at Apple's Foxconn and Pegatron factories, where iPhones get made. It's actually worse at Pegatron, and you can't help but wonder if that's because the Foxconn facilities got all the attention earlier this decade. But Apple said they'd fix all this! That's why you can't trust corporations to just "do the right thing" -- you have to make them do the right thing.

National Labor Relations Board rules that temp employees can organize and bargain collectively for better wages and working conditions. Previously, corporations got over by claiming that their temp employees were only employed by their temp agency, but the NLRB ruled that temp workers are jointly employed by both their temp agency and the corporation for which they're actually doing the work, and thus can bargain with both employers jointly. If you're still stuck on the idea that temp workers work for temp agencies, remember that temp agencies and the corporations they staff work jointly on how those workers get paid, what work they'll do, and what the working conditions will be.

Finally, Donald Trump gets caught using campaign donations to buy up thousands of copies of his own book, so he can say it's a best-seller and spend none of his own money for it. It's a win-win! Except if you gave money to the Trump campaign, of course. It's not illegal, of course, to buy up copies of your own book to drive up book sales -- though, seriously, how many people have that kind of money? -- but it is illegal to do it with campaign funds. But don't worry -- Donald Trump will "fix" that, and all those other pesky laws civilizations depend on to restrain the unscrupulous, once he's President.

Around the table: Virginia's DMV turns the state into a debtors' prison, and other stories.

Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept reminds us that we shouldn't let the terrorist attack in Nice prompt us to "Give ISIS What It's Asking For," i.e., a world divided against itself. You know, kinda like we gave Osama bin Laden what he was asking for after 9.11 -- not just withdrawing American troops from Saudi Arabia (his only actual demand, if I remember correctly), but all the injuries we did to ourselves afterward, like the PATRIOT Act and the Department of Homeland Security and the Iraq war. If your impulse, upon reading the first sentence above, was to respond well, naturally a guy named Hussain would say that, please do two things: 1) slap yourself, and 2) stop reading this blog. (You would also have the option of repeating step 1 as often as necessary before proceeding to step 2.).

Charlottesville (VA) Legal Aid Justice Center files class-action lawsuit against the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles, alleging that its system of automatically suspending drivers' licenses for unpaid minor infractions not only violates "the Constitution’s “fundamental principles of due process and equal protection," but has turned the state into a sort of debtors' prison. Before you laugh, consider not only that the fines are automatic (aren't judges supposed to set sentences in America?), but also that about one out of every six Virginia residents currently have suspended licenses -- meaning, if you live in Virginia, this could be you if you work a minimum-wage job and get caught with a busted tail-light in a state with inadequate public transportation, and you may be out of a job soon, and thus unable to pay your ever-increasing debt, et cetera. Wow, it's like the state is a payday lender or something.

As Donald Trump accepts the Republican Party's Presidential nomination this week, Justin Talbot Zorn at the Huffington Post wonders why Mr. Trump, supposedly so anti-"free" trade, chose a "free trade cheerleader" as his running mate. But I think he gives Mr. Trump too much credit for actually meaning what he says this one time, for his stance on trade, too, "has been subject to negotiation and revision" -- Mr. Trump said not long ago that he supports "free" trade, as long as it's a good trade deal, when we can all cite numerous reasons why the last dozen or so "free" trade deals are fundamentally evil. I bet President Trump's first yuge and byootiful trade deal will look just about exactly like the TPP he now professes to hate -- and I also bet he lies about it.

It gets worse, of course: Mr. Trump actually excused new running mate Mike Pence for his pro-Iraq war vote, while explicitly saying Hillary Clinton shouldn't be excused for hers. So now Mr. Trump has openly embraced hypocrisy as a way of making hard decisions, but then so have many of his votaries, who must do ever-more complicated intellectual gymnastics in order to keep the faith. Am I the only one who notices, by the way, that saying Mike Pence was "misled" about Iraq doesn't exactly endorse Mr. Pence's leadership ability? Does no one remember the time George Romney once had to quit the Presidential race in embarrassment after saying he felt like the military had "brainwashed" him regarding the Vietnam war?

Finally, some good news: the National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) rules that temporary workers may bargain collectively along with permanent workers regardless of the wishes of either the temp workers' employer or the permanent workers' employer. And if your Tea Party uncle cries TEH OBAMA AND HIS BUREAUCRATZ IZ TEH AMURIKAN CAESARZ!!!!!!, you can go ahead and remind him that this decision actually restores the status quo as it existed before the NLRB under an actual aspiring Caesar, George W. Bush, reversed it. Dig, also, the corporate lobbies weighing in that this NLRB ruling would "sow uncertainty and conflict." Want some cheese with that whine, American Staffing Association? Or will you cry into hundred-dollar bills?

Around the table: the political correctness of right-wingers, and other stories.

Surprise, surprise, a lot of the businesses blasting the North Carolina government for its pro-discrimination law HB 2 gave big bucks to the politicians who made it possible. More precisely, these businesses gave millions of dollars to two D.C.-based organizations, including the Republican Governors Association, that then funneled that money to the North Carolina Republicans who brought about this monstrosity. Perhaps that's why it doesn't seem to occur to them that they helped enable the very thing they now denounce.

In a peripherally-related note, Ian Millhiser at Think Progress suggests that the Mississippi "religious liberty" law may die an ugly death at the hands of the Supreme Court. Why? Because the Court ruled, in Romer v. Evans, that Colorado's notoriously anti-gay Amendment 2 "singl(es) out a certain class of citizens for disfavored legal status," and Mississippi's HB 1523 does the same, granting "an unambiguous permission slip to engage in discrimination" that "religious" folks can use against "a certain class of citizens," and only that class of citizens -- namely LGBT folks. Question for far-right evangelicals: does sending a trans girl home until she comes back to school dressed as a boy sound remotely like a way to win hearts and minds for Christ? Or does it sound more like a way to act out about the world not being exactly the way you'd like it to be?

In case you were letting your guard down about this economic "recovery" of ours, the incomparable David Dayen tells us a Princeton/Harvard study on the "1099 economy" -- composed mainly of temp, on-call, freelance, and contract workers, but also of independent contractors -- grew from 10 percent of the workforce in 2005 to almost 16 percent today. Some right-winger, somewhere, will try to sell this as a boon of "freedom" and "independence," but it's not -- these workers get no health care, no workers comp, no overtime, no paid leave, and now there are 9 million more of them than there were a decade ago. So this development "certainly informs this anti-establishment, anti-business-as-usual political moment." One answer: multi-employer benefit plans.

Sarah Anderson has a good idea: framing the "financial speculation tax" as a "Wall Street sales tax," as in, "if we have to pay sales taxes, why doesn't Wall Street?" The "financial speculation tax," the "financial transaction tax," and even the "Robin Hood tax" haven't caught fire, so maybe the "Wall Street sales tax" will. I hesitate only because I oppose sales taxes generally, but this "sales tax" wouldn't even be like the sales taxes we put up with -- it would hit higher-income traders using computers harder, because they make more trades, often hundreds in a day. Now I'm thinking the "Wall Street sales tax" should be higher than 1 percent. After all, you and I pay over 8 percent on average.

Finally, Florida Gov. Rick Scott reveals his improbably thin skin by saying the woman who chewed him out at a Gainesville Starbucks "refused to Pledge Allegiance to the flag." No, that's a quotation, dropped in clearly to provoke his more rage-addled supporters. Apparently, in her previous life as a city commissioner, Ms. Jennings rose to say the pledge at meetings but did not always recite it. Gosh, and they say liberals are the Thought Police? They say liberals are politically correct? (As an aside, "one statement, inexplicable" was a pretty funny lede. Kudos to writer Jason Silverstein!)

Around the table: various sillinesses concerning the deficit, Syria, federal contracting, and the "war on terror," plus a short summary of the Donald Trump Problem.

C. Robert Gibson at Occupy.com reminds us that, with Fed interest rates still near zero percent, we could be spending more money rebuilding our infrastructure. I maintain that the perfect tonic to right-wing squealing about Teh Deficit is to pay for infrastructure with a 91% tax bracket on millionaire income, just like in the old days, and though right-wingers will continue to squeal, they'll only be defending the super-rich when they do.

FAIR reminds us that when we hear "liberal" media pleas to DO SOMETHING!!!!! about Syrian refugees, they tend to forget (or, more precisely, "forget") that America is already "doing something" in Syria -- like funding Syrian rebels to the tune of $1 billion annually. And, of course, noting that we're already "doing something" in Syria opens us up to charges of doing the wrong or ineffective thing in Syria, which is a much more difficult thing to cover than the myth that we're doing nothing. Still, doing the difficult thing builds character.

PR Watch finds one of the world's largest temp agencies (Manpower, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and you can bet they heart Scott Walker and he hearts them back) agitating against President Obama's recent executive order requiring our government to take labor violations into account when awarding federal contracts. Specifically, PR Watch finds that a Manpower executive just so happens to sit on the board of a trade association advocating against the Obama order -- and Manpower has accumulated over $13 million in fines and settlements so far this millenium, while vacuuming up over $10 million in federal contracts just since 2013. Nope, nothing to see here.

And now, from the "actual frivolous lawsuits" file: two Montana state Senators sue to stop two Native American nations from taking over the Kerr Dam, because it could lead to terrorist attacks. No, really: because "the Turkish government and Turkish-American organizations have looked to establish business and cultural exchanges with Native Americans," and Turks are Muslim, there could be terrorists in there, and THE DAMN GOES BOOM! But please, right-wingers, tell me again how class-action lawsuits are inherently "frivolous."

Finally, I said I wasn't going to talk about Donald Trump anymore, but he's demonstrated enough staying power at the top of Republican Presidential polls even after saying all that racist and sexist crap that I feel compelled to weigh in. Mr. Trump's populism is certainly ironic (coming, as it does, from a billionaire), but it also appears unmediated -- that is, he sounds like he's talking off the top of his head. What consultant would have advised him to say, for example, that hedge-fund managers "get away with murder"? But this is a man who would never have gotten so rich back in the day when we taxed the rich hard and regulated markets for the common good, and his populism is all attitude. And I think his act is just the latest establishment Republican ploy to regain the Presidency -- sure, establishment Republicans sound like they hate him, but when have they ever told you the truth?

Around the table: from prisoners getting fleeced to ALEC getting isolated.

Daniel Wagner at the Center for Public Integrity describes the new frontier in separating money from prisoners and their families. Some private corporations now charge exorbitant fees for "handling" prisoners' money -- virtually guaranteeing that prisoners stay in debt -- at a time when governments are shifting more of the prisoners' day-to-day costs onto families. Making a prisoner's family buy his or her toilet paper doesn't sound particularly conducive to rehabilitation, nor does holding their money orders hostage so they'll switch to a fee-heavy, online system. This might change when a judge comes out and says that punishing prisoners and their families beyond what the prisoner's sentence actually mandates is unconstitutional.

Laura Gottesdeiner at al Jazeera describes in a lengthy report how the latest boom in North Dakota's boom-and-bust oil cycle has resulted in polluted local farmlands. The main culprit: a wastewater known as "saltwater" (because it's actually much, much saltier than the oceanwater we normally think of as "salt water") that, when it leaks, sterilizes land and poisons animals. I don't expect oil drilling CEOs to care very much, but I hope the oil workers putting in 80-hour work weeks are attending this matter -- unless they think the food they're going to eat is always just going to come from some faraway place.

Slovakian firm wants to convert billboards into housing for the homeless. The don't-help-until-it's-an-emergency model we use to deal with the homeless in America has turned out to be far more costly than, say, Utah's and Charlotte's programs that simply put the homeless up in spare housing, but I feel compelled to note that most American billboards are higher off the ground than they are in Slovakia. I'd hate to think something like that would sink a project like this, but it might. I'd be happy to be wrong.

California Gov. Jerry Brown signs bill that would hold corporations responsible for acts of negligence against temp workers committed by their employment contractors. The law makes some unreasonable exemptions (the trucking industry?) alongside reasonable ones (businesses with fewer than five temp workers almost certainly aren't packing temp workers like sardines into trucks or levying "fees" so onerous they amount to wage theft), but this is a big deal for an often-abused segment of the workforce -- though I do worry that the Supreme Court will one day rule that of course corporations can't be held responsible for what their contractors do, in a land where so many corporations use contractors in the first place precisely because they don't want to be held accountable for the wrong they do their workers.

Finally, we learn about some other corporations that have also abandoned ties with ALEC, as big tech corporations like Google and Facebook have lately done. You may be surprised to find News Corp. among them -- until you remember that the former News Corporation split off into 21st Century Fox and News Corp. in 2013, and the new News Corp. only owns a few newspapers (like the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal) in America. The bigger surprise might be the inveterate right-wing corporation Overstock.com, but Overstock only worked with ALEC for a year anyway. That leaves oil corporation Occidental as the most notable corporation splitting from ALEC -- because hearing an oil corporation express concern that it might be linked with climate change deniers is actually news, in a world where we're used to hearing about oil corporations funding climate change deniers.

Around the table: tiny homes for the homeless, some protections for temp workers in California, and other items.

Portland, OR plans to build tiny houses for homeless folks on government-owned land. Perhaps they, too, have read studies finding it cheaper to put the homeless in homes than to provide services on a continual-emergency basis. In any case, the 16-by-12 homes would cost about $20,000 and serve two homeless folks each, and Portland's efforts follow in the footsteps of the cities of Austin, TX and Charlotte, NC, as well as the state of Utah.

Online retailer Accessory Outlet apparently charges customers $250 if they complain or even threaten to complain about the service they receive. Read the article to see how much worse it gets; their terms of service, naturally, also provide (if that's the word) for forced arbitration of disputes. In an economy that no longer rewards work, I can see how the provide-bad-service-then-collect-fees-for-breach-of-terms-of-sale model would have struck someone as a winning idea. Someone utterly without morals or ethics, that is.

FAIR asks the right question when you read about how social media "silence" debate boo hoo: "if social media silence debate, what do corporate media do?" And yes, MSNBC firing Phil Donahue over his anti-Iraq war views does considerably more to "silence debate" than liberals deciding not to talk to their right-wing friends about politics anymore, which latter item is what the "liberal" media means, apparently, by "silencing debate." And gosh, how did people of opposing political views ever negotiate their differences before Facebook came along?

Australian model Meaghan Kausman lashes out at "crazy" modeling industry after discovering one of her employers had photoshopped an image of her in a swimsuit to make her look a lot thinner. "Crazy" is the right word for how it looks to reasonable people, at least, people who are acquainted with how women's bodies actually look. But I shudder to think what the haters are writing about Ms. Kausman.

California state legislature passes bill giving temporary workers some protections from injuries and lost wages. The California Chamber of Commerce opposed the bill, of course, saying it would "discourage further growth" yadda yadda yadda, but the bill has a slew of exclusions, not just for businesses with fewer than 25 employees, but also for "trucking and cable companies in most circumstances," per ProPublica. For big corporate lobbies, one must ask: how much is enough?

Finally, Thom Hartmann asks how BMW and Mercedes could be doing so well if paying workers more will destroy all businesses, as right-wingers are constantly saying. German autoworkers, it turns out, are all unionized -- there's no "right-to-work" state within Germany to which big auto corporations might retreat -- and the German constitution also mandates worker participation in a corporation's operations via works councils. And how has Germany's economy weathered Our Ongoing Economic Armageddon again?