Our friends at Brave New Films recently launched a new campaign called The War On Greed in order to shed some light on a particularly insidious enemy of the middle class, namely the private equity buyout industry, which buys out companies, strips them of their assets, fires workers and reduces benefits for those that remain before selling them off at a profit. Not only that, the executives who benefit most from this practice are able to exploit a tax loophole that allows them to pay capital gains rates of 15% on much of their income as opposed to the 35% the average worker might pay.

Brave New Films has put a face on that industry, exposing the excesses of KKR president and CEO Henry Kravis (read more about the campaign against Kravis HERE), who makes in the neighborhood of $51,000 an hour, far more than the yearly income of many of the workers at the companies he so cavalierly acquires and strips to the bone.

To correspond with the Martin Luther King holiday tomorrow, Brave New Films has produced one of their excellent short films to remind us that King's dream was not only for racial and societal equality but it was a fight for economic equality as well, more specifically, a fight for the middle class and the pursuit of the American dream.

Watch it:

The outrageous economic inequality that exists in America has been addressed on the campaign trail by the Democratic candidates, in particular, Barack Obama spoke of executives who make "more in an hour than their secretaries do in a year" at the townhall I attended in Las Vegas last weekend. Our candidates get the problem and I believe are committed to reversing the widening income disparity that has only grown under this Republican administration, but we must hold them to their words. So, along with the video, Brave New Films is asking you to sign a petition demanding the Democratic candidates pledge to close the loophole that allows these destroyers of the middle class to pay less as a percentage of their income in taxes than the average worker does. The petition reads as follows:

Dear presidential candidates,

Buyout industry executives with multi-million dollar incomes have been exploiting a tax loophole that allows them to pay a lesser tax percentage rate than most of the workers in the companies they manage.  This is a disgrace!

Make a pledge, if elected, that you will work to close the buyout industry's tax loopholes.

Please join The War On Greed and sign the petition HERE.