is offered in today’s Boston Globe by Robert Kuttner in his op-ed piece Head in the sand. I suggest taking some time to glance at it. I will offer a very few selections and then list the topics he included.
the intro
Domestically, the president might have responded to the 9/11 attacks by calling for equality of sacrifice, as presidents have done in every other wartime emergency. Instead, our president pushed through a succession of upscale tax cuts and urged people to go out and shop.
In the parallel universe, the American leader is serious about securing our country. Here, it fell to the opposition party to demand that something as basic as airline security not be left to private, minimum-wage contractors. Nearly three years after 9/11, America’s ports and other vital infrastructure are still sitting ducks. While the Department of Homeland Security played Keystone Kops with color-coded alerts that seemed suspiciously timed to alarm the public in an election year, the different agencies that were merged into one are still working on how to communicate with each other.
In that other universe, the president surely would have enlisted America’s allies to combat terrorism. Had war between the United States and Iraq come, it would have come with the full participation of the world community, so that Iraq’s reconstruction and the burden of keeping it secure would have been broadly shared instead of falling upon American taxpayers and GIs.
One can imagine a whole to-do list of the president’s national priorities:
The things he describes in detail are as follows:
Repairing American democracy.
Fixing our retirement system.
Keeping America healthy.
Dealing with global climate change.
Saving the economy.
Giving every child a chance.
Using science to the fullest.
Kuttner’s conclusion is
The poet e.e. cummings wrote, at the end of a fine poem lamenting the condition of humankind, ”Listen, there’s a hell of a good universe next door. Let’s go.” We, alas, don’t have that option. We have to bring sanity to the world we are living in.
Read the article. While the points in bold above should be clear, his explanations of what he means on each point are “right on.”
Compulsory IQ tests for world leaders and controlling the religious right.
describes health expenses of Americans as the major cause of people going bankcrupt. Hard working people are losing their homes because a family member gets ill. In the meantime American insurance companies and drug companies are getting rich from the misery of citizens. And who does the US president protect? He protects the credit card companies by making bankcruptcy more punative for debtors.
is going to end up biting them in the ass, hard. I would be willing to bet that more of their own constituency will be hurt by the change in bankrupcy laws than ours.
middle class. How long will they take it? Good, hard-working people, trying to keep their families together, are losing their homes in his ‘ownership society.’
We need law to enable: healthcare portability; national healthcare plan*s*; reduction in administrative costs; eliminating plan administrators; conforming data sets nationally (being worked on now).
BushCo’s approach is “don’t raise the drawbridge, lower the river.” We can change that.
if people won’t vote their economic interests?
In order for this policy to hurt the Republicans, we’d have to convince the conservatives who were hurt by these new bankruptcy laws that voting for better financial legislation is more important than looking like tough-boy hotshots in Iraq.
It’s one thing to forgo a promiss of better financial conditions and another completely to loose what have already earned/gained.
Please don’t missunderstand, I don’t support the change in bankrupcy laws, but now that they are here, they present an area of probable friction between the wealthy republicans and religious factions of the party.
I didn’t think you were supporting the change in the bankrupcy lays, but I was confused about why it would help us.
Chris Rabb over at Afro-Netizen asked the right question. On a panel of bloggers at the recent “Take Back America” conference he asked if anyone could define “progressive”. Short answer: no. [check out his blog].
I suspect if you asked people to prioritize that list, it would change with each post. If you asked for basic “progressive” principles, the list would probably change completely, or at least be restated. For my own sanity, I think of issues in cabinet terms: state, defense, education, etc.
I’ve also read clearly defined positions on “issues of the day” by writers here that are better-written than those on party/org pages. Being inclined toward minimizing click-time, I’d suggest trying to nail down those definitions here. (Helps that the Trib is a reflective, rather than reactionary space.) RootsTalk comes close in terms of design.
One example of the difference between “progressive” and “democrat”: the former support a “living wage” the latter “minimum wage”. The list goes on. Chris Rabb asked the right question at the right time: what is progressive?
I think most of us know intuitively what progressive is, it is just hard to verbalize, esp. since we are the inclusive party, we don’t want anyone to be left out, so we start breaking things down into finer and finer catagories, gay rights, rights for various ethnicities, women’s rights.
What it all comes down to is human rights, but so many groups have been excluded from this one group that we struggle to add them back in.
Let’s operate “as if” all groups are in. Let’s say progressives are the pro-people party. That means you are already a member, we take it for granted, it is the opposition who have the burden of proving why someone should not be included rather than us having to prove why someone should.
It’s a subtle shift in focus, the acting “as if” exercise. So often we are on the defensive, because the right acts so sure of themselves. They take it for granted. Let’s take it for granted that the justness of our position needs no explanation. Those who would deny human rights are wrong, Period. Give them no attention, brush them off, laugh at their absurd positions.
Anything that obstructs being pro-people is not progressive.
We understand that different groups have different specific needs, but it all boils down to addressing these individual needs in service of the larger pro-people principle.
We are for life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and for eradicating barriers that stand in the way of anyone of us obtaining those things. We are for listening to and respecting and acting upon the specific cases in service to the greater good.
Surely there must be asentence ot two that could describe this greater good.
Sorry I’m not thinking of it right now, but there are many creative people here, someone will have a phrase or two. Maybe we could all try to think of some phrases.
Imagine what America might be like if our top officials were addressing the genuine challenges that confront us.
This sentence says it all! Just think what the $203 billiion, that’s BILLION, could have done in a positive manner inside the US. vs. going for guns and bombs to kill people and make a few corporations here a lot of big bucks.
Thanks, teacherken, for bringing this us. I guess. In some ways, it’s just another wound from this war, thinking what might have been.
Will the people who supported Bush and this war ever wake up?
of the $203 billion was spent repairing our voting equipment, properly publicizing our polling stations, and educating the public about their civic duty to be informed about their nation and world.
That alone might insure the proper allocation of the remainder of the $203 billion.