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In signing a bill that will raise California's minimum wage to $10 an hour by 2016, Gov. Jerry brown said it was his “moral responsibility” to give Californians a chance to earn a living wage.

The red-green coalition government in Norway, whose political platform when it took power in 2005 was called the most progressive in Europe, experienced a bitter defeat in the country's parliamentary election on 9 September. A coalition of four centre-right and right-wing parties, including a right-wing populist party, gained a solid majority and are now negotiating the political platform for a new government.

Progressives supported Prop 30 to send more money to schools but now the funds are headed to prisons. How could this happen - and can it be stopped?

"We have to change the way we're doing business in a significant way to get out of the crisis we find ourselves in," says Trumka. "But this crisis also offers us ample and tremendous opportunity."

Cleaning and concessions workers in federal buildings will protest their taxpayer-funded poverty jobs. Those planning to strike include workers who serve food or wash floors at Union Station (owned by the Department of Transportation), Smithsonian Museums (owned by the federal Smithsonian Institution), and the Ronald Reagan Building and Old Post Office (owned by the General Services Administration).

The right to be left alone; Verizon's plans for the Internet; The rise of social commerce; Journalistic ethics?; Internet mavens talk money & politics, Culture, commerce, online shopping, politics, money, corruption

Overall, American families are paying an annual $6,000 subsidy to corporations that have doubled their profits and cut their taxes in half in ten years while cutting 2.9 million jobs in the U.S. and adding almost as many jobs overseas.

Nobody wants there to be trouble, “but sometimes something has to be stirred up and this is something that needs immediate attention.”: Lillian Jones of Fargo