The Connecticut School Shooting this morning is the final nail in the coffin of this national tragedy of escalating gun violence. The Citizens must act, because our national leaders are showing no leadership. . Our national leaders must stand up to the gun lobby and not just ignore the latest escalation in this brutal and random gun violence. Ending the gun show loophole, creating manifests of the mentally ill who own guns, etc. must be implemented.

Have you ever been a patient or had a love one admitted to Alta Bates? Have you ever delivered a baby at Alta Bates? If you SUPPORT your local community hospital then please come out and support our 8th strike against Sutter Health's Cutbacks to BOTH the community and the nurses on: Monday Dec 24th, 2012 2450 Ashby Ave in Berkeley, CA 7am-3pm. Please bring a canned food item or a new toy to those in need that will be donated following our picket line. Key concession demands at various Sutter hospitals (partial list): •Eliminating paid sick leave, effectively forcing nurses to work when ill, exposing already frail and vulnerable patients to further infection. •Forcing RNs to work in hospital areas for which they do not have appropriate clinical expertise, again a safety risk for patients. •Huge increases in nurses’ out-of-pocket costs for health coverage for themselves and family members. •Limits on the ability of charge nurses, who make clinical assignments for nurses, to address staffing shortages, subjecting patients to the danger of unsafe staffing. •Forcing RNs to work overtime, exposing patients to care from fatigued nurses who are more prone to making medical errors. •Cutting the rest time between shifts to 6 hours, an unsafe precedent for patients and the hospital workforce. •Eliminating all health coverage for nurses who work less than 30 hours per week and slashing the pay in lieu of benefits for all non-benefited nurses.-- 435 RNs and 31 Techs would lose all health coverage at Alta Bates Summit, and 100 RNs at Eden and San Leandro. •Reduced pregnancy and family medical leave, undermining RN families. Sutter does not need to make these drastic cuts: •Sutter has accumulated nearly $4.2 billion in profits since 2005, according to its own audited financial statements. •Sutter is among the wealthiest hospital chains in the U.S. – and has the highest net patient revenue per employees among U.S. hospital systems, according to a Modern Healthcare survey •Sutter paid 28 top executives more than $1 million in compensation, an agregate $46.7 million in 2010 alone, by far the most lavish spending on executives among all California hospital systems. •Sutter is presently building a massive new, 300,000 square foot administrative office center in Roseville, another sign of its expansive wealth, and spending away from the bedside. •Sutter is spending tens of millions of dollars on a questionable computerized electronic medical system, Epic Systems, the same controversial system that has been charged with putting patients at risk at Contra Costa County’s correctional facility Sutter’s record of abandoning communities and patients (partial list): •End breast cancer screening for women with disabilities and most bone marrow transplant services for cancer patients at Alta Bates Summit in Oakland and Berkeley. •Stop providing psychiatric services under contract with Sacramento County for more than 225 Sacramento children. •Close acute rehabilitation services, skilled nursing care, and psychiatric services, and substantially downgrade nursery care for sick children at Eden Hospital in Castro Valley. •Sharply cut psychiatric care at Herrick Hospital in Berkeley. •Close a birthing center at Sutter Auburn Faith, forcing new mothers and families to travel up to 75 miles for obstetrics care, while giving a $1 million gift to the Sacramento Kings

Bank of America agreed in 2008 to phase out loans to coal companies that fund Mountaintop Removal. However, they underwrote "loans to companies that are responsible for 40% of all the mountaintop removal coal that was mined in 2010” (iLoveMountains.org). Mountaintop Removal is dangerous to communities that live near mountains. Bank of America needs to make active measures to follow through and defund Mountaintop Removal!

Walmart is another example of a large American corporation that outsources to other countries and makes large profits in the USA, but still does not pay their own employees the competitive wages or offer long-term benefits so that these employees can live above the poverty level.

Alot of my family and friends work at walmart supposedly part-time only thing is they work a lot of sparatic hours, they are always on call or are being called in. With hours being forwarded to the next pay period, pre-scheduled work days are cut all in an effort i believe to deny even a decent weeks pay much less over-time. Thats not fair to the employee or their families.

To urge South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley to appoint Stephen Colbert to fill the State's soon-to-be vacant U. S. Senate seat.

When we bought our house, we were both employed. Now we have suffered three bouts of unemployment, one ongoing, and are having difficulty making our monthly mortgage payment. In 2010, we attempted to get Wells Fargo to agree to a loan modification and ended up in an automated loop of harassing phone calls from a system that only acknowledges two statuses: in default or paying on time. We got calls every day from Wells Fargo, ostensibly to collect on our defaulted loan. When the poor call-center workers would verify our identity and could open our computer file, they would see that we have always paid the full amount, on time, and couldn't understand why the system had called us. Supervisors were phantoms that never returned our calls. We got nowhere. We work hard, though we don't earn as much as we used to. We pay our taxes and our mortgage, always on time. We are running out of money. We are not eligible for the Federal programs that have helped some families retain their homes and avoid default. We also don't qualify to refinance because our mortgage is "underwater." We don't want to walk away from our home. We have a life here with friends and neighbors we love. We just want a fair deal, like the people who are eligible for the government relief programs. Ironically, our taxes contribute to the very government relief programs for which we are not eligible. Our mortgage note is owned by a private investor and serviced by Wells Fargo, which refuses to lower our interest rate to the current market rate. The lowered rate would reduce our monthly payment by nearly $400 a month! That's all we ask. Sign this petition and help us get Wells Fargo to lower our rate!

Wall Street, banks, multinational corporations etc. and their CEO's are not held accountable to the same laws that the rest of us must abide by. Their illegal activities do cost lives as well as livelihoods, homes, jobs and more. We must take action to demand that the American 'Justice' system hold them accountable - not simply with token fines but with jail time.

Macy's is keeping its stores open for 67 hrs continuously leading up to Christmas, forcing many employees to forsake their holiday...all for the sake of commercialism and corporate greed.

The billions of dollars that corporation move to offshore accounts to keep from paying taxes.

We need a contests to name a CEO of the year. A company leader that does real good in the community or the Country and a prize in the form of a grant to be given to a favorite charity of that CEO. We need to make generosity and civic concern more popular. Greed is shameful and we need to make that more public as well.

too much money wasted in trying to influence elections, total campaign spending from all sources should be no more than what the office salary is for one year.