The most fundamental difference in how Democrats and Republicans view middle class Americans revealed itself inadvertently in speeches during the second night of the convention in Denver.

The keynote speaker, former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, started it, and Sen. Hillary Clinton, kept it up - that...

The Democratic Party paid homage at its convention Monday night to a Kennedy scion whose family values demand public service and who believed it was his duty as a senator to speak for the voiceless, not champion the causes of the already powerful.

The film clip...

While some want to paint this year's presidential race in black and white, for middle class America, it's all about the green.

Greenbacks.

Team colors are clearly visible: The Republicans' -- green and gold. That's obvious when their nominee, John McCain,...

In May, when immigration officials raided the kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa and hauled out 389 undocumented workers, the news was all about immigration violations, but now the focus is on the employer, Agriprocessors Inc.
That's because it turns out that while purportedly giving ritual consideration to...

In the free for all 21st, it all sounds terrific -- free markets, free trade and free commerce. But really, it's lies, traderous lies and statistics.

The "d" in trader is deliberate. This is about the sleight of hand billed as free trade.

We're constantly told it's a win-win....

The Government Accountability Office reported to Congress this week that, under the Bush administration, the Labor Department determined that what amounted to a 21st century case of slavery was just fine with the U.S. government.

A Labor Department investigator told the slave, a night attendant at an...

Here everybody has a neighbor
Everybody has a friend
Everybody has a reason to begin again
Bruce Springsteen -- "Long Walk Home"

Sen. Barack Obama yesterday asked 4,500 delegates and observers at the convention of the United Steelworkers in Las Vegas to help him give America...

Today, in Las Vegas, a town where jackpots are sought and fortunes are lost, Derek Simpson, general secretary of the UK-based international union, Unite the Union (Amicus Section) and I together staked everything on a worthy cause -- working men and women world wide.

We signed an...

After a year in which the majority of Americans suffered the effects of recession, including tens of thousands who lost jobs because of rising unemployment, hundreds of thousands who lost homes in the subprime mortgage crisis and millions who lost their shirts because of unrelenting gas price hikes, Merrill Lynch...

"The Toxic Trader," a drama featuring an evil puppet, premiered last Tuesday in a special election-day staging outside U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith's district office in Portland, Oregon.

Toxic Trader. Yes, the double entendre is deliberate. The street theater is intended to hold free traders like Smith and presumptive Republican...

In the heart of Pennsylvania, while the media still relentlessly plagued Senators Obama and Clinton about flag pins and memory lapses just before the primary, a machine at an ArcelorMital plant in Steelton crushed Roger H. Prichard to death. He was 58.

It was April 18, three days before...

Let me tell you a story about three truck drivers from East Liberty, Ohio. It's a true American tale of valor and perseverance. And it's symbolic of the past seven years of Bush administration attempts to stamp out the labor movement while slashing taxes, oversight and regulation on corporations.

The...

As the Senate moves to consider the wholly inadequate stimulus package passed by the House -- zip for the jobless, no increase in food stamps, squat for the nation's crumbling infrastructure -- it's useful to consider how the country has come to find itself in the current economic mess.

China is where 80 percent of Santa's toys are made. That's where his suits are sewn too, the last American one having been tailored at Halco, just outside Pittsburgh in May. The 70 Halco workers who once stitched Santa's fuzzy red and whites got the boot.

They joined half...

In memorial to the 15 workers who died and to the 180 who were injured in an explosion and fire on March 23, 2005 at the BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, the United Steelworkers last week formally issued a Call to Safety to the oil industry.

The USW, which...

Though beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, injury is not. A bloodied nose, a foreclosed home, the loss of health insurance are all clearly harmful events.

For a paper-making company like NewPage Corp. of Dayton, Ohio, the loss of 20 percent of its business - especially to...

The United Steelworkers and the Empire State Consumer Association are seeking the recall of the Chinese-made, cadmium-laden, possibly-fatal "Sassy Chic" bracelet, sold at Dollar Tree stores. And the USW union is, again, seeking the recall of Nancy Nord, the acting chair of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, only this...

On Oct. 30, Sandra Suarez quit her job in Washington as Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's special envoy to get his Free Trade Agreement through Congress because, she told him in her letter, it won't pass, which might be news to some Bush administration officials who are still...

It hasn't been easy, but Nancy "No Action" Nord has become the symbol of toxic trade, an odd position for the acting chairman of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Yet, she's truly earned the warning red circle and slash over her image and the demands for her...

Within 24 hours this week, two different consumer watchdog groups gave the American public completely contradictory information about home lead test kits.

President George W. Bush's Consumer Product Safety Commission told us to throw away those untrustworthy kits, sit on our hands and blindly trust the government to...