Month: October 2010

In recent days, Meg Whitman’s campaign has been trying to convince anyone who will listen that the polls are wrong because she has used her unlimited resources to buy a superior get out the vote operation that’s going to shock the prognosticators. Just one problem with that…there’s already a massive, sophisticated GOTV operation under way to defeat her.

That operation is powered by the energy of tens of thousands of union volunteers who are embarking on restless days and sleepless nights through Election Day to get the word out to millions of voters. If Whitman's ace in the hole is to beat Jerry Brown with a ground operation, she might consider a Plan B.

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Kamala Harris is the clear choice to succeed Jerry Brown as Attorney General. There’s no doubt that Harris is a true Main Street candidate, and the fact that Karl Rove and his shady corporate front groups are spending more than a million dollars on deceptive attack ads targeting her only reinforces the fact that she’s the right choice for California.

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by Raj Jayadev

I used to temp for GOP California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina. It was 1999 and she was the CEO of Hewlett-Packard; I was putting together laserjet printers in one of HP’s San Jose assembly plants. I don’t remember her ever coming to our plant, but watching her now run on a platform of being a creator of “quality” jobs, makes me wish she had stepped inside our factory. If she had, she would have seen that sub-livable wages, no health benefits and no job security do not match many workers' definition of quality “jobs for Americans.”

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One of the worse things that could happen next Wednesday would be for Californians to wake up and find out they’re having a “Meg Moment”—the awful realization that you should have voted, but didn’t.  

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by Rebecca Greenberg

We come from all walks of life. Some of us are students, some are workers, and some are jobless. Some of us are laden with student debt. Some of us work to support our children, some work to support our parents. Some of us have had to postpone starting a family, and some of us have had to move back in with our parents just to make ends meet. But we all have one thing in common — we are the young voters of California. And it’s time for us to flex our muscle at the polls, take control of California’s future and fight off the right wing’s attempt at a hostile corporate takeover of our state.

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and his opponent David Harmer. Before Saturday’s debate even began, it was clear which candidate had the grassroots energy behind him. Hundreds of loyal McNerney supporters gathered outside prior to the debate in the pouring rain to wave signs and show their support for  McNerney before his first live showdown with Harmer.

McNerney turned in a strong performance, confirming that he is the best candidate to represent the district in the US Congress. Focusing on his accomplishments and his plans for the 11th district, McNerney came across as intelligent, compassionate and forward-thinking.

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The corporate donors to Proposition 26 — including major players in the tobacco, alcohol, soda and oil industries — have poured millions of dollars into Prop. 26. At first glance, Prop 26 doesn’t read like an initiative that multi-national corporations would care much about. The initiative broadens the definition of a tax to include fees—which would raise the votes required to approve a fee from a majority to two-thirds at the state and local level.

So why do these companies care about Prop 26? It turns out that the fees that Prop 26 targets are the fees that oil, tobacco, alcohol and hazardous waste companies have to pay for the pollution and damage they cause to our air and water. Proposition 26 would make it harder to impose those fees, effectively shifting the burden of paying for the costs created by polluters to taxpayers like you and me.

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California appropriately treats all income the same for tax purposes, whether earned by wages, salaries, interest, dividends, rent or capital gains. Meg Whitman would continue to tax all income except capital gains. Her proposal to eliminate the tax on capital gains says, in effect, that your income is taxed and mine is not. 

We estimated, using proxies for her wealth and her investments, that she would save between $8 million and $40 million by eliminating the tax on her capital income over four years. That’s a wide range, but her failure to release her tax returns means that we can only estimate the savings, of which $8 million is a very low end.

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We want real people to have a voice in this campaign. That’s why today SEIU launched a series of online commercials supporting Jerry Brown for governor, featuring three Californians who share our vision for Rebuilding California for our children and grandchildren.

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It’s long past time for the Chamber of Commerce to take ”U.S.” out of its formal name. Because calling itself the “U.S.” Chamber of Commerce implies it backs the interests of job creation in the United States. And proof emerges again that it does not. 

While funding $75 million in political ads to attack the jobs record of lawmakers who support creating good jobs in this country, the Chamber is pushing to send jobs overseas to outsourcing companies that are funding its political attack ads.

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