Most of all, it's urgent that you support low-wage workers, oppose militarized police, the war on Gaza, defend voter rights, plan for 2014 races now, oppose austerity, support the 'Moral Mondays' in North Carolina, the fight for the Green New Deal, a just immigration policy and the Congressional Progressive Caucus' 'Back to Work Budget'! We're doing more than ever, and have big plans. So pay your dues, make a donation and become a sustainer. Do it Now! Check the link at the bottom...

Oct 18, 2014 - The fight for a $15 minimum hourly wage escalated in the streets of New York City Oct 17 with several hundred union and community allies demanding the right to organize and a living wage.

The two largest retail workers' unions joined forces in support of organizing drives at Walmart, a campaign supported by the UFCW and Zara's, a national women's clothing store chain, where workers are organizing a union of the RWDSU.

The march in midtown Manhattan stopped at Zara's across from Bloomingdale's Dept Store whose workers are represented by RWDSU and delivered petitions to management in support of the union campaign.

The protesters then marched to the Park Avenue address of Alice Walton, heiress to the Walmart fortune - worth an estimated $35 billion. In front of Walton's posh penthouse building, protesters chanted, "Alice, Alice, You Can't Hide - We Can See Your Greedy Side."

A delegation attempted to deliver 1,600 signatures on a petition in support of Walmart workers. Then in planned civil disobedience several workers and supporters sat in the street until they were taken away by police.

The campaign now is gearing up for another Black Friday protest at Walmart stores around the country on Nov. 28, the biggest shopping day of the year "to hold Walmart and the Walton family publicly accountable for their poor treatment of Walmart workers!"...(Click title for more)

    Some 56 percent of Americans say the government is prepared to handle Ebola, including 61 percent of Democrats. But that number is flipped on its head when you ask Tea Party voters: 57 percent of them say the government is not prepared, as do 54 percent of rural voters. So two core components of the GOP red-state base coalition don't trust the federal government, in the person of President Obama, to keep them safe-and there's some political opportunity for Republicans in those numbers. When Texas Sen. Ted Cruz continues to insist "I remain concerned that we don't see sufficient seriousness on the part of the federal government about protecting the American public," those are the voters he's talking to.

Protesters gather on the St. Louis University campus after a march through the streets of St. Louis. CREDIT: AP/Charles Rex Arbogast

Voters lining up in Long Beach, NY

Oct 12, 2014 - Senator Elizabeth Warren scarcely requires an introduction. She is the single most exciting Democrat currently on the national stage.

Her differentness from the rest of the political profession is stark and obvious. It extends from her straightforward clarity on economic issues to the energetic way she talks. I met her several years ago when she was taking time out from her job teaching at Harvard to run the Congressional Oversight Panel, which was charged with supervising how the bank bailout money was spent. I discovered on that occasion not only that we agreed on many points of policy, but that she came originally from Oklahoma, the state immediately south of the one where I grew up, and also that high school debate had been as important for her as it had been for me.

In the years since then, Professor Warren helped to launch the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which will probably be remembered as one of the few lasting achievements of the Obama Administration); she wrote a memoir, A Fighting Chance; and she was elected to the United States Senate from Massachusetts.

This interview was condensed and lightly edited.

That's the question that lies at the heart of whether our democracy will survive. The system is rigged. And now that I've been in Washington and seen it up close and personal, I just see new ways in which that happens. But we have to stop and back up, and you have to kind of get the right diagnosis of the problem, to see how it is that-it goes well beyond campaign contributions. That's a huge part of it. But it's more than that. It's the armies of lobbyists and lawyers who are always at the table, who are always there to make sure that in every decision that gets made, their clients' tender fannies are well protected. And when that happens - not just once, not just twice, but thousands of times a week - the system just gradually tilts further and further. There is no one at the table...I shouldn't say there's no one. I don't want to overstate. You don't have to go into hyperbole. But there are very few people at the decision-making table to argue for minimum-wage workers. Very few people.

Yeah. Why aren't they out there spending? In the context when people talk about "get a lobbyist," the big financial institutions spent more than a million dollars a day for more than a year during the financial reform debates. And my understanding is, their spending has ratcheted up again. My insight about that, about exactly that point, [is] in the book [A Fighting Chance], in the second chapter, which is when my eyes first get opened to the political system. Here I am, I'm studying what's happening to the American family, and just year by year by year, I'm watching America's middle class get hammered. They just keep sliding further down. The data get worse every year that I keep pulling this data. Bankruptcy is the last hope to right their lives for those who have been hit by serious medical problems, job losses, a divorce, a death in the family - that accounts for about 90 percent of the people who file for bankruptcy. Those four causes, or those three if you combine divorce and death. So, how could America, how could Congress adopt a bankruptcy bill that lets credit card companies squeeze those families harder?

When they finally adopted it was 2005. But the point was, it started back in - actually it started in 1995, the effort [to change the bankruptcy laws]. And that's when I got involved with the Bankruptcy Commission. When, first, [commission chairman] Mike Synar came to me, and then Mike Synar died. It was just awful. And Brady Williamson [the replacement chairman] came to me. But what I saw during that process is, this was not an independent panel that could kind of sit and think through the [problem]: "Let's take a look at what the numbers show about what's happening to the families. Let's take some testimony, get some people in here who have been through bankruptcy, and some creditors who have lost money in bankruptcy, and let's figure out some places where we could make some sensible recommendations to Congress." That wasn't what it turned out to be at all.

And what they wanted. I tried as hard as I could, and there were almost no bankrupt families who were ever even heard from. And you stop and think about it - why would that be so? Well, first of all, to show up to something like that, you've got to know about it and you've got to take a day off from work. Who's going to do that? These are families who are under enormous stress and deeply humiliated about what had happened to them. They had to make a public declaration that they were losers in the great American economic game.

Hardworking people. People who work hard. That's what you want to remember. Not just people who kind of occasionally show up.

I have at least two thoughts around that and we should explore both of them. One of them is that we need to do a better job of talking about issues. And I know that sounds boring and dull as dishwater, but it's true. The differences between voting for two candidates should be really clear to every voter and it should be clear in terms of, who votes to raise the minimum wage and who doesn't. Who votes to lower the interest rate on student loans and who doesn't. Who votes to make sure women can't get fired for asking how much a guy is making for doing the same job, and who doesn't. There are these core differences that are about equality and opportunity. It can't be that we don't make a clear distinction. If we fail to make that distinction, then shame on us. That is my bottom line on this.

You know, during the Senate race that I was in - I mean, I was a first-time candidate, I'd never done this before - the thing that scared me the most was that the race wouldn't be about the core differences between my opponent and me. I wanted people to understand where I stood on investments in the future, investments in education and research that help us build a future. Where I stood on the minimum wage and equal pay. And where he stood on the other side. The point was not to blur the differences and to run to some mythical middle where we agreed with each other. The point was to say that, here are really big differences between the two of us. Voters have a chance to make a choice.

We're the only ones fighting back. Right now, on financial reform, the Republicans are trying to roll back the financial reforms of Dodd-Frank. In fact, Mitch McConnell has announced that if he gets the majority in the Senate, his first objective is to repeal healthcare and his second is to roll back the financial reforms, and in particular to target the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau - the one agency that's out there for American families, the one that has returned more than four billion dollars to families who got cheated by big financial institutions. That's in just three years.

So, Democrats have not done all that they should, but at least we're out there fighting for the right things. We're fighting and I think trying to pull in the right direction. So if the question is, hold us to a higher standard, man, I'm there. You're right. [If] you want to criticize and say, "you should do more!," the answer is: Yes, we should! You bet! We should be stronger. We should be tougher. But understand the difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party right now. It's pulling as hard and fast as it can in the opposite direction. ...(Click title for more)

    For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury New investigation has found.

    The drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the "crack" capital of hte world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.'s gangs to buy automatic weapons.

    "I think it's fair to take a look at the story objectively and say that it could have been better edited, it could have been packaged better, it would have been less inflammatory. ... But these are all kind of minor things compared to the bigger picture, which is that he documented for the first time in the history of U.S. media how CIA complicity with Central American drug traffickers had actually impacted the sale of drugs north of the border in a very detailed, accurate story. And that's, I think, the take-away here."...(Click title for more)

Solidarity, Carl Davidson, CCDS