Month: October 2012

Latinos are among the fastest growing groups of the electorate. About 5 million more Latino voters are eligible to vote this year than in 2008 —  but historically, voter turnout among Latinos hasn’t been particularly strong. In 2008, only 50% of eligible Latino voters showed up to the polls (according to the LA Times). But that’s all going to change this year in California, as more and more Latinos are discovering what’s really at stake in the upcoming election if Prop 32 becomes law.

Yesterday, the Los Angeles Latino community united in Mariachi Plaza to kick off a host of Latino community events across the state to oppose the fraudulent Prop 32. Labor and elected leaders and activists spoke out against the engañosa (deceiving) measure, vowing to stop those behind Prop 32, including Big Oil, Wall St. and secretive out-of-state Super PACs run by the oil billionaire Koch Brothers and George Bush’s Karl Rove, from taking away their voices.

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When the Koch Brothers tried to undo California's landmark global warming law with Prop 23, Labor united with environmental advocates, scientists and academics to stop them, because we all share the same vision for California’s clean and green economic future. Now, two years later, those same clean-energy advocates are once again uniting with California’s working families to stop the Kochs – this time by defeating Prop 32.

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Not surprisingly, the deceptively named “Stop Special Interest Money” Act is now being funded by an equally deceptively named front group, the Small Business Action Committee (SBAC), which has dropped millions into Prop 32, the ballot measure that leading newspapers call “a fraud,” “a cynical ploy” and “a deceptive sham”  because it would silence the voices of workers while giving corporate special interests even more power and influence.

The average voter might very well assume SBAC is actually made up of small businesses. But if you visit their website, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any reference to a single real-life small business. If you read their “Small Business Heroes” section, you’ll find a laundry list of Republican political flacks and right-wing ideologues – but you won’t find a single local business owner or mom-and-pop shop. In fact, there’s no mention of any actual small businesses anywhere on their website.

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The notorious right-wing ideologues David and Charles Koch are some of the biggest spenders in American politics, dropping millions upon millions to buy elections and influence politicians all across the country. So why would they suddenly throw $4 million into a proposition that claims to “stop special interest money” from flooding politics?

Simple — because they know it’s a sham and that will silence the voice of workers while giving more power to corporate special interests. And this is exactly what the Koch brothers want. If they succeed in silencing our voice, the floodgates will open up even wider for billionaires like them to spend without limits and push their “greed agenda”– with the sole purpose of putting even more money into their loaded bank accounts, at the expense of our education, our jobs, our communities and our economy.

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and Kevin Rudiger

Yesterday in Los Angeles, in a historic step for the US labor movement, nearly 100 Walmart workers went on strike in Los Angeles. For more than a year, Walmart workers have been coming together from across the country through the worker-led organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) to make change at Walmart. They have been calling on the company to address issues with understaffing, scheduling, benefits, wages and, above all, a basic sense of respect in the workplace.

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President Obama this week designated the home and burial site of the legendary United Farm Workers (UFW) leader, César Chávez, a national monument. Known as La Paz, short for Nuestra Senora Reina de la Paz, or Our Leady Queen of Peace, the site is in Kenne, Calif.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says the designation is a “fitting tribute for a man whose campaign for civil rights and respect for workers struggling in the shadows broke new ground and left an indelible mark on the pages of American history.”

 

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California’s teachers have witnessed firsthand the impact of what $20 billion in cuts to our educational system looks like, and it isn’t pretty. Overcrowded classrooms. Outdated textbooks. 30,000 less teachers. Fewer school days. These are the current-day realities of what was once a world-class education system.

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in the auto insurance industry. And its billionaire chairman, George Joseph, is spending a fortune on Proposition 33 to make it easier to manipulate the marketplace and cherry pick the customers it wants, while raising rates for millions of Californians, including motorists with perfect driving records.

This isn't the company's first attempt to rig the insurance market in its favor. In 2010, Mercury spent $16 million on Proposition 17, but voters said no. Prop 33 on the November ballot is a re-run of Prop 17, with a modest facelift.

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Journalist John Nichols covers the battle over workers’ rights in Wisconsin from an insider’s prospective. And I’m not talking DC insider. I’m talking about a Wisconsin insider. Long before he became the Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine and a regular commentator on MSNBC, John was born and raised in Kenosha, WI; a 5th-generation Wisconsinite and a member of two unions, the National Writers Union/UAW and the Newspaper Guild. So when he was reporting on the fight for union rights in Madison, he wasn’t just covering it. He was living it. He has arguably provided the most extensive, insightful and engaging chronicle of what happened in Wisconsin – and it’s quite different from the story we all saw on the news.

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