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To help protect their schools from California's unrelenting budget crisis, some communities are voting to pay more property taxes to preserve teacher jobs, smaller class sizes and electives such as art and music.

So far this year, more than 20 districts have held elections for school parcel taxes, which are levied on individual parcels of property, and at least 16 have approved them. More districts are trying to place such measures on the ballot later this year.

But the tax measures, which require a two-thirds majority to pass, are mostly winning approval in smaller, wealthier districts, according to education experts, raising worries about growing inequality between schools in rich and poor communities.

WASHINGTON - July 7 - The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Georgia and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (Lawyers' Committee) filed a motion late yesterday in a Washington, D.C. federal court to intervene in a challenge to the Voting Rights Act brought by the state of Georgia. The civil rights coalition is defending the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Act and challenging the state's flawed and racially discriminatory voter-registration practices.

Section 5 has protected racial and language minorities' access to voting across the South and the nation since 1965 and requires some states with a history of discrimination in voting procedures to submit new procedures for federal review before they are implemented.

In an August 2 Los Angeles Times story, writer Tom Hamburger from the Times Washington Bureau reports that business and conservative groups are preparing to spend significant sums of money to defeat Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections.  Recent rulings by the Supreme Court allow unlimited spending by corporations and unions for some electioneering activities.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest collection point for corporate contributions, has increased its spending for the congressional election in November from $35 million in 2008 to a projected $75 million this year. Officials say it may go even higher.

Fox News and its boss, Roger Ailes, along with Karl Rove and unlimited corporate campaign contributions, pose an enormous threat to President Barack Obama and Democratic candidates this fall.

Although they may not be working in tandem, they pursue common goals: Republicans winning control of Congress in 2010, defeating Obama two years later and restoring conservative business-first Republican policies.

To understand Fox’s importance, think of it as a political campaign rather than a news operation.

On July 15, BP managed to finally seal its broken Macondo wellhead and stop the oil that had been hemorrhaging into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days. The very next week, as I was driving up the Florida coast, locals kept pointing out to me where cleanup workers were packing up and pulling out. From Crawfordville through to Carrabelle, and Port St. Joe to Pensacola, the booms were disappearing, the crew tents folded up and removed from beaches.

The well had been capped, after all. The gusher had stopped. Game over. Everyone can go home, right?

Not even close. If all goes according to plan, the relief well should provide a more permanent fix. But that hasn’t been the nature of this disaster. Every time BP thought it had the solution, something somehow went wrong. At the time of this writing, at least one oil seep had sprung in the ocean floor near the well as the pressure from the plug found other releases; methane, too, looked to be leaking. And BP was, once again, dodging the government’s requests for more monitoring.

Professor Drew Westen wrote an article on Huffington Post about the coming election that gained the attention of Professor George Lakoff. Westen’s article is called: What Created the Populist Explosion and How Democrats Can Avoid the Shrapnel in November.

Outside groups supporting Republican candidates in House and Senate races across the country have been swamping their Democratic-leaning counterparts on television since early August as the midterm election season has begun heating up.

Driving the disparity in the ad wars has been an array of Republican-oriented organizations that are set up so they can accept donations of unlimited size from individuals and corporations without having to disclose them. The situation raises the possibility that a relatively small cadre of deep-pocketed donors, unknown to the general public, is shaping the battle for Congress in the early going.

Riki Ott, PhD, Executive Director of Ultimate Civics and member of Move to Amend, has been nominated as one of Huffington Post’s “Ultimate Game Changers.” The award honors people who make significant contributions to the way we look at the world and the way we live in it. Ott has spent the past five months in the Gulf of Mexico responding to to BP’s Deepwater Horizon
disaster.

“I arrived in the Gulf of Mexico on May 3 with two goals: to coach Gulf residents on what to anticipate so they could prepare proper responses to BP’s disaster, and to gain a foothold in the Deep South for future organizing work with the democracy movement.”

Interest groups are spending five times as much on the 2010 congressional elections as they did on the last midterms, and they are more secretive than ever about where that money is coming from.

The $80 million spent so far by groups outside the Democratic and Republican parties dwarfs the $16 million spent at this point for the 2006 midterms. In that election, the vast majority of money - more than 90 percent - was disclosed along with donors' identities. This year, that figure has fallen to less than half of the total, according to data analyzed by The Washington Post.

The trends amount to a spending frenzy conducted largely in the shadows.

WASHINGTON - A new report by People For the American Way profiles the work of nine organizations that are funneling money, in many cases from undisclosed donors, to help elect pro-corporate candidates in the 2010 elections. Many of the groups originated in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections. Others were already established, but have been thriving in a system that allows them to take unlimited corporate money without disclosing their donors.

Unchecked corporate power is a serious threat to the country's, and the planet's, future. I applaud the effort of two citizens, Laird and Robin Monohan, to draw attention to the ghastly absurdity known as "corporate personhood," which a Supreme Court ruling last January advanced.

Move To Amend recently issued a press release about the brothers' cross-country effort.

Prudential Financial sent in a $2 million donation last year as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce kicked off a national advertising campaign to weaken the historic rewrite of the nation’s financial regulations.

Dow Chemical delivered $1.7 million to the chamber last year as the group took a leading role in aggressively fighting proposed rules that would impose tighter security requirements on chemical facilities.

Four years ago, Warren Buffett, the third richest man on the planet, said, "Of course there is a class war, but it's my class, the rich class, that is waging the war, and we're winning."

This mid-term election in the United States is a front of the class war. Business interests and the wealthy have declared war against anything that dares to impose controls on them, limit their activities or touch their fortunes, and they say so, explicitly and openly.

The vast majority of funds that are invested in what is already the most expensive mid-term election in history (it is expected to exceed, perhaps by far, 3.5 billion dollars) comes from billionaire donors, companies and groups representing the wealthy class.

Like the wizard telling the people of Oz to "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain," Karl Rove used media appearances at the close of the 2010 midterm campaign to dismiss President Obama's complaints that Republican consultants, led by the former White House political czar, were distorting Senate and House races across the country with a flood of money—hundreds of millions of dollars—from multinational corporations and billionaire conservatives into Senate and House races. "Obama looks weirdly disconnected—and slightly obsessive—when he talks so much about the Chamber of Commerce, Ed Gillespie and me," Rove mused. "The president has already wasted one-quarter of the campaign's final four weeks on this sideshow."

One week ago, immediately prior to the votes on the tax cut deal reached between President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans, the independent group Crossroads GPS ran $400,000 worth of issue advertisements in twelve congressional districts calling for the Democrats who occupied them to support full extension of all of the Bush-era tax cuts. Crossroads GPS, a nonprofit created by Republican operatives in the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, was giving the American public a sneak peek at the next torrent of political ads.  

The year 2010 will not be remembered as a halcyon year for progressives. But in such years the truest believers and battlers stand out all the more clearly, and patterns are set for the victories of the years to come. Here, then, are the Most Valuable Progressives of 2010: