A cornerstone of California’s Republican gubernatorial candidate and billionaire Meg Whitman’s economic platform, is elimination of California’s capital gains tax. If elected and able to abolish the tax that mainly benefits the mega wealthy, Whitman could net some $40 million during a four-year term as governor, according a new report. Now that’s making money the old fashioned Republican way—tax breaks for the super rich.

As campaigns and volunteers hone their final electoral messages, the best flier I’ve seen asks a simple question — “Will They Get What They’re Paying For?”

In a lame attempt to shift the public’s focus on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s use of contributions from foreign corporations and other overseas entities to fund its U.S. political activities, the Chamber claims the AFL-CIO does the same. Wrong!

Building Bridges: Your Community and Labor Report, National Edition
– Produced by Ken Nash and Mimi Rosenberg

Building Bridges: Your Community and Labor Report, National Edition
Produced by Ken Nash and Mimi Rosenberg

Fox News’ Glenn Beck, assuming the role of 21st Century Marie Antoinette, leads a pack of royalist Republicans who have spent the summer mocking, vilifying and denigrating the nation’s 14.5 million unemployed workers. It is the moneyed class smacking down the working class in an attempt to disempower and disenfranchise them. But the unemployed are mad as hell and aren’t taking it any more. The Union of the Unemployed and Working America are organizing the jobless to vote this fall and to demand help from lawmakers. They’re not out to behead Beck and the royalist Republicans, just dethrone them.

Originally posted on Citizen Orange.

The “DREAM Now Series: Letters to Barack Obama” is a social media campaign that launched Monday, July 19, to underscore the urgent need to pass the DREAM Act. The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, S. 729, would help tens of thousands of young people, American in all but paperwork, to earn legal status, provided they graduate from U.S. high schools, have good moral character, and complete either two years of college or military service.  With broader comprehensive immigration reform stuck in partisan gridlock, the time is now for the White House and Congress to step up and pass the DREAM Act!

A lot has happened as we complete the third week of the DREAM Now Series.  The DREAM Act picked up two new co-sponsors in the U.S. House: Mike Thompson (D-CA-1) and Chellie Pingree (D-ME-1).  Two extremely important and influential organizations have also come out strongly in support of passing the DREAM Act as a downpayment on comprehensive immigration reform: the Center for American Progress and the AFL-CIO.  Finally, a major victory was won in Arizona where the deportation of Marlen Moreno was deferred.  Please express support for the above in anyway possible.  It has all helped build a lot of momentum for passing the DREAM Act, this year. 

Just was we have been busy moving the DREAM Act forward, though, nativists have been busy undermining it.

A new study about Internet regulation and job losses is part of a desperate strategy to spread fear and obscure the facts about Nat Neutrality, and pave the way for carrier control over online content.

This is the first of three parts of an interview with Baldemar Velasquez, President and Founder of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee. In Part One, Mr. Velasquez describes the biggest challenges and abuses farm workers face in the U.S., and what it was like for his family to work in America’s agricultural sector. Cross posted from Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet.

More info on the new progressive ‘One Nation’ coalition and a liberals’ Oct. 2 March on Washington