The League of Women Voters has withdrawn its sponsorship from a planned US Senate debate on October 22nd because Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins is not being allowed to participate. Democrats Hillary Clinton and Republican John Spencer are the only candidates invited by WABC.

The Working Families Party in Rensselaer County fends off take over attempt by Republicans

Unions need to offer a vision of how a just society should be organized. We need to organize for real solutions like fair trade, national health insurance, labor law reform, internal union democratic reforms to re-engage the rank and file, and a multi-year, multi-trillion dollar public works program to create millions of new jobs building an ecologically sustainable infrastructure for our future.

A new report by the Fiscal Policy Institute found that real wages for most New York workers are not yet back to where they were in 2002, even with reasonably strong growth in total output and worker productivity. The report also finds that the recovery of jobs and wages since mid-2003 has been very uneven across the state's three "super-regions": New York City; Eastern New York (the downstate suburbs, the Hudson Valley and the Capital Region); and Western and Northern New York (the upstate area that extends from Utica west to Buffalo, including the Southern Tier and North Country).

The "model" rule for the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative to curb global warming in the northeast has now been adopted and sent on to the individual states for adoption. However, while environmental groups praise the proposal, the actual reductions fall far short of real need. In addition, a number of key problems still remain, including the acutioning off of the carbon permits, the exemption of manufacturers who produce their own power (e.g., Kodak) and how out-of-state offsets are handled.