House Republicans are proceeding with plans that would force a government shutdown, despite the fact that America's working families overwhelmingly disapprove of their tactics.  In a CBS/New York Times poll last week, 80% of respondents said that it would be unacceptable for lawmakers to threaten a shutdown to achieve their goals, yet that's exactly what Republicans are doing.

The media are covering Washington’s latest fiscal crisis basically as a spectacle—the way local news now covers traffic accidents, crime scenes and big storms.   But there is a reality underneath the spectacle—the decisions that are made and not made in Washington over the next few weeks will affect what happens in the lives of all of us.  Here are some basic facts that can help make sense of all the craziness.

A bill (H.R. 2374) set for a vote in the House Tuesday would delay and could ultimately thwart the Department of Labor’s effort to protect workers’ retirement security. The DOL wants to close loopholes and update the rule that protects workers from deceptive or abusive practices whenever they seek investment advice about their retirement savings

Call Congress at 1-888-912-5898, ask for your representative’s office, and urge him or her to protect workers’ retirement security and oppose H.R. 2374.

The widely respected Pew Charitable Trusts is engaged in a major ongoing campaign with right-wing Enron billionaire John Arnold to undercut public pensions across the country, writes David Sirota in a report released Thursday for the Institute for America's Future. According to Sirota, Pew positions itself as a nonpartisan organization dedicated to the public interest, but when it comes to pensions, Pew has taken an extreme position and allied itself with conservative activists bent on undoing public pension programs across the country to protect corporate subsidies.

Once again, we stand poised on the precipice of economic calamity because the Republican-led House is intent on creating crises to push their agenda.  Unfortunately, too many pundits add to Americans' cynicism by trying to find a way to blame both sides. This week, The Washington Post tried by saying that Democrats hope Republicans will fight to shut down the federal government in hopes of gaining advantage when people figure out the Republicans are to blame.  Playing to cynics also plays well in portraying this as a school yard fight, which, in the age of reality TV and voyeurism, is a sales pitch. It however does no one well if the experts and thought leaders do not play honest umpires to call the balls and strikes as they see them.

Federal workers employed by contractors at low wages to operate concessions and clean federal buildings walked off the job today to urge President Barack Obama to use his executive authority to establish a living wage requirement for contractors that do business with the government.

Today, low-wage workers employed by federal contractors are striking. @barackobama could give them a #livingwage with the stroke of a pen.

— Economic Policy Inst (@EconomicPolicy) September 25, 2013

This week, the Transport Workers (TWU) union is hosting its 24th Constitutional Convention in Las Vegas.

Check out all the video highlights from the TWU Convention here, and watch the video in the post from TWU about its wins for workers in recent years. 

Delano Wingfield makes $9 an hour working in the Union Station food court in Washington, D.C. And it's really hard to get by. 

“Right now, it’s actually like really tight…” Wingfield told Salon's Josh Eidelson. “Most of my money is on bills and rent.”

Wingfield and other cleaning and concessions workers plan to walk off their jobs in federal buildings Wednesday, Eidelson reports, and march on the White House, demanding fair wages and better working conditions. 

Across the country, for-profit companies are privatizing our schools, roads, prisons, drinking water and, sometimes, even the government itself. 

Today, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), publishers of the award-winning ALECexposed.org, launched OutsourcingAmericaExposed.org, a resource that functions like a Wikipedia page, devoted to helping taxpayers identify the corporations seeking to privatize public services in their communities. 

The AFGE local union that represents 2,100 federal workers at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)—the federal agency that enforces the Civil Rights Act and the other laws barring workplace discrimination—has urged Congress to avoid a government shutdown.