Viewpoint

Capitalist democracy sucks as a method of change. Yet people in the U.S. must probably exhaust it as an avenue before they look to other more severe methods of change.

Support the Comprehensive Immigration Reform for for America's Security and Prosperity Act of 2009. Luis Guiterriez (D-Illinois) has introduced a progressive  bill that constructively addresses long-standing immigration issues in a just and humane manner.

Thanks to Kim Geron

We often see the dramatic increase in inequality in the U.S. as an inevitable consequence of outside forces such as globalization and technology. John Schmitt of the Center for Economic and Policy Research describes and argues that inequality was part of the policy of political elites to drive back workers, people of color, women, the environmental movement and other progressive social movements in the decades previous to the 70's.

The report is attached.

In 2001, the state of California shut down a factory at which the workers ? mostly Chinese immigrant women who did not speak English ? had not been paid in months. In the years since, these workers have not only had to struggle against their former employers to demand the wages they earned and never received, but they were also sold out by the Department of Labor, which settled with the factory owners and agreed not to pursue the remainder of the workers? wages. (See previous articles .)