Author: The Opportunity Agenda

In the days just before and after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 80th birthday, I had the opportunity to visit two places that are integral to his modern day legacy: Washington, DC and the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.  As I witnessed the inauguration of Barack Obama as the nation’s 44th president, I thought of Dr. King’s admonition, in his 1963 I Have a Dream Speech, that “we cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.”  Despite some continuing problems at the ballot box, this was an election about which Dr. King could be truly satisfied; African Americans turned out in record numbers to elect the nation’s first African-American president.

In the same speech, Dr. King reminded the nation that “when the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the `unalienable Rights’ of `Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.'”

For anyone who’s visited the Gulf Coast recently, it is obvious that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as the people of the Lower Ninth Ward–overwhelmingly poor and African-American–are concerned.  The world witnessed in 2005 how our government left the region’s people to drown in their homes and suffer unspeakable conditions in the New Orleans Convention Center and Superdome.  More than three years later, that abandonment continues.

While tourist haunts like the French Quarter appear fully restored, low-income African-American neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth remain decimated.  According to Oxfam America, for example, there are no plans to replace or repair almost half of the affordable apartments that were destroyed by the flooding and storms.  And “despite the real need,” Oxfam reports, “more than 30,000 low-income homeowners are ineligible for rebuilding assistance and tens of thousands more have not received the level of assistance needed to rebuild their homes.”  Workers, so important to the rebuilding of neighborhoods and the economy, can find neither decent housing nor living wages.  Hospitals, public housing, and schools in the neediest communities remain shuttered or demolished.

Almost immediately after Hurricane Katrina, the Bush Administration ignored or removed the legal guarantees that could have protected displaced residents and workers.  The Occupational Safety and Health Administration waived the enforcement of key health and safety regulations in hurricane-affected areas; the administration waived Davis-Bacon Act provisions requiring federal contractors to pay prevailing wages.  Gulf Coast contractors were exempted from key civil rights laws.  And, as Advocates for Environmental Human Rights has pointed out, federal law governing responses to national disasters continues to fall far short of international human rights standards that are touted by the US as the proper approach for other nations.  Contrary to international requirements, our government has neither recognized nor upheld the right of displaced residents to return to their homes and neighborhoods.

In Dr. King’s speech from the Lincoln Memorial, he “refuse[d] to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt…[or] that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.”  In this remarkable moment, so full of hope and promise,  one cannot help but share Dr. King’s belief.  

As President Obama moves ahead with an economic recovery package that may exceed $1 trillion, the first shovel should break ground in the Lower Ninth Ward, creating jobs, and housing, and schools, and hospitals, and hope where they are all so desperately needed.  And the human rights and opportunity protections that Dr. King fought for should flow back to the Gulf Coast like a mighty stream.  I can think of no greater sign of change in America, and no greater embodiment of Dr. King’s legacy, than to bring justice home to the Lower Ninth Ward.

Read more at www.opportunityagenda.org/blog

It’s hard to overstate the transformative moment that we’re in as a nation and, particularly, as progressives. In just a few years, we’ve gone from the high point of conservative power to a stunning rejection of conservative federal leadership and the historic election of a progressive African-American president.

But the electoral sea change is just part of the extraordinary national moment. The financial meltdown and slide toward deep recession have crystallized Americans’ anger over deteriorating economic security, stagnant mobility, growing inequality, and policies of isolation instead of connection. Americans are ready for a new social compact and a transformed relationship between the people and our government. They are calling for a new era of big ideas and different values than we’ve seen over most of the past three decades.

The electorate has shown an unprecedented willingness to overcome racial and ethnic barriers to take on daunting shared challenges. Young people, people of color, and low-income people turned out to register and vote in unprecedented numbers that bode well for a far more participatory and egalitarian democracy going forward.

Even before this year’s remarkable events, opinion research showed a historic, progressive shift in Americans’ views on issues that (not coincidentally) were barely mentioned in the election. Perhaps most striking is the shift on criminal justice and problems of addiction, where the U.S. public has moved broadly to support rehabilitation and treatment over incarceration and retribution, as well as assistance and integration for people emerging from prison.

But an unprecedented opportunity for progressive values and ideas is not the same as victory for a progressive social and policy vision. The stark challenges of rising inequality, faltering security, and broken systems of health care, immigration, and criminal justice are the same on November 5 as they were on November 4. What’s changed is only the chance for transformative change.

History shows that progressives could easily blow this opportunity, just as conservatives blew their transformative moments after the 1994 elections and the attacks of September 11, 2001. A few principles can help progressives move from opportunity to realization in ways that profoundly benefit our country.

Remember the Values that Got You Here
The headlines of Barack Obama’s story this year were, of course, Change and the Hope it brings for a better day. But two important values gave substance to that message. They were Community–the idea that we’re all in it together and have a common responsibility to uphold the common good–and Opportunity–the profoundly American idea that we all deserve a fair chance to achieve our full potential.

Obama and other progressive candidates returned to those values again and again, including with the Democratic Convention’s theme of “Fulfilling America’s Promise.” But long before either party had chosen its nominee, progressive groups around the country were elevating those values as the ones that would usher in a new political era.

That work included the Campaign for Community Values, which sponsored the Heartland Presidential Forum in Iowa ahead of the caucuses and coordinated thousands of community organizers throughout the country around a shared, non-partisan Community message. That effort, in turn, connected with a movement elevating Opportunity as a unifying and much-needed theme in our political and policy discourse. The Center for Community Change, The Opportunity Agenda, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and other leaders of these efforts connected with large numbers of state and local groups, engaging millions of Americans to tell a new story.

The values of Community and Opportunity, and the movements behind them, have concrete policy implications. They stand for guaranteed, affordable health care for every person in our nation, as well as knocking down barriers to quality care in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. Community and Opportunity mean combining a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s 13 million undocumented immigrants with living wage jobs and workplace protections for native-born and immigrant workers alike. They mean education for a 21st Century world and economy, from quality public schools to expanded college access, to job retraining, to a new commitment to equal educational opportunity.

Progressives will need to continue promoting the values of Community and Opportunity in our political discourse while insisting on policies that uphold those values.

Don’t Confuse Party with Progress
A significant number of progressives will take up residence this January in Congress and the White House. But it would be a grave mistake to confuse the large Democratic majority with a progressive majority. The expanded Democratic majority includes conservatives and centrists as well as progressives, with differences that will surface quickly after inauguration day.

Obama himself has progressive instincts, but has surrounded himself with a fairly centrist crowd of advisors, particularly on economic issues, since gaining the nomination. Instead of declaring victory, progressives will have to press the new administration and Congress to fulfill an agenda that lives up to today’s moment and challenges.

That includes reminding the leadership at every turn that it was progressive values, issues and constituencies that forced the change in Washington: Latinos appalled by anti-immigrant fervor; African-Americans stung by the Hurricane Katrina fiasco and an abandonment of civil rights and social justice policy; an active anti-war movement; Hillary health care voters; and a rising tide of young people demanding a fair shot at the American Dream. Even non-ideological “bread and butter” voters in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio favored a progressive message of Opportunity and Community over warmed-over conservative fear and culture-war tactics disguised as William Ayers, Reverend Wright, tax-baiting, and Socialism.

Just as important, this is a time to nurture a new crop of progressive Republicans–younger pols who are Republican because of upbringing or geography, but who hold center-left views and values, particularly on the environment, poverty, health care, immigration, living wages, and criminal justice. Younger evangelicals are a growing part of this group. A progressive movement that engages with, but remains independent of, the Democratic party can build a powerful new coalition.

Listen
The difference between delivering on a mandate and fatally overreaching is remembering to listen to the people. That’s less a matter of adhering rigidly to polls than of engaging the public and understanding their hopes and dreams, as well as their concerns. There’s plenty of room for taking courageous, even unpopular positions. But that requires leadership in tune with the public. As with Johnson and Civil Rights, FDR and the New Deal, some steps forward require educating the public and connecting progress to the good of the nation.

Progressive community organizers and networks like the Gamaliel Foundation and the Center for Community Change are crucial to that listening and empowerment process. As a former organizer himself, the new President understands that role, but may need to be reminded of its continued importance to his success.

Think Big but Practical
For more than a decade, progressives have resigned themselves to defensive battles and incremental victories at the federal level. It’s a new day, but the old tunnel vision may be hard to shake. Now is the time to promote big solutions to the daunting problems facing the country. Certainly, guaranteed affordable health care for all and immigration reform are crucial, but the times also demand broad investment in job creation and training, clean energy, transportation infrastructure, education, and in shoring up faltering homeownership. Initiatives like the Apollo Alliance show that integrating those investments can further enhance shared prosperity.

Tackle the Tough Issues
Obama has shown a talent for talking about tough issues, from race to guns to abortion. During the election, however, he largely argued that we can agree to disagree on those issues while focusing on common ground. As president, he will need to pursue specific, often controversial solutions.

Many will say that, having elected an African-American president, the U.S. has overcome its race problem. As he has in the past, Obama will correctly say that it’s not that simple; that while his election marks an incredible milestone in the progress we’ve made as a nation, we still have miles to go. But he must go beyond those words, and pursue a human rights agenda for the 21st Century; one that expands opportunity for everyone while addressing contemporary bias and knocking down persistent racial barriers to equal opportunity.

The progressive advocacy community will have a corresponding responsibility to acknowledge the progress and changes we’ve seen, and to pursue efforts that foster equal opportunity while expanding opportunity for all Americans. Ideas like “targeted universalism” and “democratic merit” touted by john powell and Lani Guinier will be important to tomorrow’s Community and Opportunity policies.

Read more at The State of Opportunity.

President-elect Barack Obama has renewed our hope as Americans that the promise of opportunity is revitalized, alive and well. But in order to secure his own legacy as the first great president of the 21st Century, and one of the greats in American history, he will need a grand undertaking equivalent to Abraham Lincoln’s saving of the Union or Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Amidst the current economic downturn, it would appear clear what the momentous challenge and chance for long-lived admiration will be for an Obama Administration, and it is health care.  Not small bore reforms of existing programs or expansions around the margins of the popular State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) or Medicare, but a truly revolutionary sea change in the compact that the American government and their people share in relation to the health of the populace.
As Steve Coll of The New Yorker comments:

The next Presidency has within its reach at least two generation-spanning causes: the need to jump-start a new energy economy, and, in so doing, help to contain climate change; and the need to enact a plan to provide quality health care to all Americans, and, in so doing, complete the project of social insurance that Roosevelt described in 1935. Each of these projects is urgent, but it is health-care reform that speaks more directly to the economic and human dimensions of the present downturn.

The accumulating failures in the country’s health-care system are a cause of profound weakness in the American economy; unaddressed, this weakness will exacerbate the coming recession and crimp its aftermath. A large number of the country’s housing foreclosures in recent years appear to be related to medical problems and health-care expenses. American businesses often can’t afford to hire as many employees as they would like because of rising health-insurance costs; employees often can’t afford to quit to chase their better-mousetrap dreams because they can’t risk going without coverage. Add to this the system’s moral failings: about twenty-two thousand people die in this country annually because they lack health insurance. That is more than the number of Americans who are murdered in a year.

As my health law professor once said, it is inaccurate to call what we have in the United States currently a “health care system,” as there is nothing systematic or logically organized about it; it is, rather, more accurate to call what we have the “health care industry.”  And therein lies a core, fundamental problem with the way that many Americans are pushed into thinking and talking about their health care; it is common in the advocacy, policy, and newsmaker worlds to hear about “health care consumers.”  Health care, as one participant in the presidential town hall debate commented, is often thought of as a commodity in this country.  But this is not a cheeseburger or a new raincoat that we are talking about; this is our health, the key to our economic security and ability to access the American Dream of boundless opportunity that President-elect Obama represents.  Health, as President-elect Obama and the great lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy, have both stated, is a fundamental right of Americans.

Without a guarantee to our right to health care, and the opportunity for good health that follows, many Americans are in danger of losing their jobs, and as Coll points out and as I have pointed out here before, their homes (up to 7 out of 10 foreclosures are caused in part by medical crises).  Surely, if human rights apply as much here in the United States as much as it does abroad, the human right to the opportunity to meet the most basic needs for ourselves and our families–housing, feeding, and clothing ourselves–must be guaranteed.  This is not only about 46 million uninsured Americans who cannot afford to purchase health care as “consumers,” or about the 25 million underinsured Americans who, despite paying premiums, are at constant risk of bankruptcy should catastrophe or tragedy strike.  This is about health writ large: the health of our American community, the health of the American economy, and, not the least of all, the health of the American Dream.

And, as it turns out, this is also about the health of the Obama legacy, and whether in that pantheon of the great American presidents, his name and memory will join the likes of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt.

Cross-posted at The State of Opportunity Blog.

Last week the Bush administration announced a renewed push to clamp down on undocumented workers.  Specifically, the rule would ask a federal judge to lift an injunction on the “no-match” rule.

The rule protects businesses from failing to respond to so-called “no match” letters sent out by the Social Security Administration stating that the number provided by an employee does not match the information in their database.  This may indicate the worker is undocumented but many are the result of clerical errors including, for example, women not updating last names after marriage.

Judge Charles R. Breyer last year warned that the plan would have “staggering” and “sever” effects on workers and businesses.  It’s reasons such as this that have brought together not just traditional groups working for immigrant rights, such as the ACLU, but also the AFL-CIO, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Particularly amidst the recent sharp economic downturn, business leaders are concerned about the Bush administration’s plan.  If this effort to lift the injunction against the “no-match” rule is successful, the government would ask up to 140,000 employers to check the social security numbers of 8.7 million workers.  Businesses must resolve discrepancies within 90 days or fire the workers.

Angela Amador, the Chamber’s director of immigration policy is concerned about the costs of complying with this rule.  The Chamber’s objections “[have] been about the cost of a badly thought out rule and the cost on legitimate businesses following all the rules and complying with it.”

Groups such as the ACLU and the National Immigration Law Center are concerned that the plan would lead to racial profiling, discrimination, and the firing of people based on clerical errors.  They argue the Bush administration should work instead towards fixing the flawed database.

Cross posted at The State of Opportunity.

In the second presidential debate, moderator Tom Brokaw asked the candidates whether health care is a privilege, a responsibility, or a right. John McCain answered privilege, while Barack Obama said that health care is a right. With nearly 46 million Americans uninsured, and millions more unable to meet their medical expenses despite having insurance, the notion of an American right to health care seems far from today’s reality. But a human right to health care is deeply rooted in our national history and values, and is broadly supported by the American people. It is an idea whose time has come.

After leading our country out of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt voiced the connection between health care and the Founding Fathers’ vision of inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In his 1944 State of the Union address, Roosevelt explained that Americans have come to embrace a “second bill of rights” alongside the civil liberties set out in the Constitution. Those rights, FDR declared, include “the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.”

Four years later, the US played a leading role in creating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration states that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including … medical care and necessary social services.”

With the onset of the Cold War, the US shied away from applying economic human rights like the right to health care here at home. But some states have tried to keep the idea alive. New York State’s Constitution recognizes a right to systems that protect public health. And just this year, Connecticut passed legislation declaring that “equal enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is a human right and a priority of the state.”

A national opinion survey conducted by The Opportunity Agenda last year shows overwhelming public support for the idea that health care is a right. When asked whether access to health care should be considered a human right, a whopping 89% of Americans said yes, with 72% “strongly” holding that view.

For Americans, the right to health care is not only about personal health and economic security, but also about our shared values as a nation, including fairness, dignity, and opportunity for all. When asked why they support human rights, Americans’ most popular responses are “because it is important to treat people fairly and with dignity,” and “because America was founded on Thomas Jefferson’s belief that we all have rights that no government should take away.”

What would it mean for our nation to treat health care as a right instead of merely a privilege or solely a responsibility? Protecting the right to health care is less about the means of delivery than it is about results for everyday people. It means that any approach must realistically guarantee all Americans affordable, quality care, irrespective of where they live, what their health history is, what job they have, or whether they get laid off. It means that, unlike in our current system, the racial background of patients and neighborhoods should not influence the siting of hospitals and clinics, or the quality of care. And it means that neither insurance companies, nor HMOs, nor government bureaucrats get to decide whether Americans can get basic, necessary care.

To be sure, protecting the right to health care will require financial investment and sacrifice. But that investment will pay off many times over down the road. We’ll save lives among the 18,000 Americans who die every year for lack of health coverage. We’ll stave off bankruptcies from among the half of filings that stem from medical expenses. And we’ll save countless dollars as families who get preventative care avoid costly emergency room visits.

The 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is just 6 weeks away, on December 10, a month after Election Day. That’s a perfect time for a new president and Congress to renew our human rights legacy by guaranteeing affordable, quality health care for all.

Are we "consuming" health care or realizing our "rights?"  The American public is ready for a new conversation; in fact, the conversation has already begun.  Are you speaking the right language to be a part of this new discussion?

In the second presidential debate last evening, Tom Brokaw asked of the two candidates a follow-up question, stemming from one woman’s question of whether health care should be treated as a commodity.  Both candidates demurred from the initial inquiry, but Brokaw pressed them on his own follow-up: "Is health care in America a privilege, a right, or a responsibility?"  What caused many of us who have been following both campaigns and their proposed health care policies to sit up in our seats was Sen. Obama’s answer, "Well, I think it should be a right for every American."  The reason to take notice isn’t that a politician answered a question directly, impressive though that is, but the much more important reason is the re-framing of an issue long discussed on both sides as a consumer good.

Talking about health care and the opportunity for good health as a right, rather than a commodity, privilege, or responsibility, is something that advocates have shied away from, for a myriad of reasons.  But poll after poll, we find that most Americans far and near all believe that health care is a right, with a majority holding health care to be a human right.  Nationally, 72 percent of Americans strongly believe that health care "should be considered a human right.”  In New York state, fully 89 percent of New Yorkers believe that health care should be a right for all New Yorkers, with 70 percent believing that the government (federal, 41%; state and local, 28%) “mainly responsible for ensuring that everyone in New York gets the health care that they need.”  Likewise, over 90 percent of Connecticut residents believe that everyone in the state deserves a right to health care.

And now, in the midst of both a presidential election and a financial crisis, we have yet more evidence that the "right to health care" language works.  During the debate, the now-infamous CNN focus group armed with real-time dial rating tools found that the line describing health care as "a right for every American" was one of his strongest of the evening.  As reported by Alternet, “When Obama discussed health care as a right for all Americans, his numbers were through the roof. At one point, female respondents were dialing in at 100 percent approval.”

If that, along with all of the previous polling, is not enough to convince you that now is the time to start talking about health care as a right, consider that the financial crisis, and the loss of Americans’ economic security, itself stems from health care concerns, something I wrote about last week.  But this week I give you a fresh example: a new article in Health Matrix, a scholarly health journal, reports that medical crises (and the resulting bills) are a cause of up to 7 out of 10 of all home foreclosures:

Our evidence suggests that medical disruptions are a major contributor to mortgage default, often striking in combination with other factors. Half of all respondents (49%) indicated that their foreclosure was caused in part by a medical problem, including illness or injuries (32%), unmanageable medical bills (23%), lost work due to a medical problem (27%), or caring for sick family members (14%). We also examined objective indicia of medical disruptions in the previous two years, including those respondents paying more than $2,000 of medical bills out of pocket (37%), those losing two or more weeks of work because of injury or illness (30%), those currently disabled and unable to work (8%), and those who used their home equity to pay medical bills (13%). Altogether, we found that about 7 in 10 of our respondents either self-reported a medical cause of foreclosure, or experienced one of these indicia of medical disruptions in the years before foreclosure.

Approaching health as a human right is powerful because it reflects our, and the American public’s values.  It is also preferable to using a consumer approach for a number of reasons.  When health is framed as a consumer good that each of us must purchase at market rates, we reinforce a competitive, individualistic mindset, and suggest that people who lack quality health care are simply poor economic competitors.  In terms of the current home foreclosure crisis, this plays into the right-wing frame that the crisis is the fault of irresponsible borrowers, a far cry from the reality where most homeowners facing foreclosure have been struck by family medical misfortune or catastrophe.   Building broad, winning support for equal access to quality health care and for addressing health disparities requires a new frame of health care as a common resource that’s stronger and fairer when we’re all in it together:  a system that works for everyone when everyone’s included and that is our right to expect and demand.

Originally posted at The State of Opportunity Blog.

As Congress considered the bailout of Wall Street, there appears to have been little focus in the debate on the underlying causes of the larger economic situation that the United States is in.  Our current predicament is not just about mortgages or the undercapitalization of the financial sector; it is also very much about the shift in priorities in this country over the last thirty years.  We have come a long way from the idea of The Great Society, a productive national community that not only took care of itself, but grows consistently stronger for having done so.  In the New York Times this past weekend, Ezekiel Emanuel, chair of bioethics at the National Institutes for Health, argues that in some ways, the current crisis is a symptom of "chronic problems," specifically the continued unfulfillment of our human right to health care:

[S]olving the deep problem of the economy cannot be done without solving the health care mess. Economic, tax and health care policy are inextricably linked. Middle-class incomes have hardly grown in 30 or more years (except for five years in the 1990s when health care costs were moderated), budget deficits are escalating and will only worsen and investment in education and other engines of long-term economic growth are declining.

These problems are all driven by health care. Rather than go to wage increases, almost all of the growth in workers’ productivity has been swallowed up by rising health care costs.

Basic economic security cannot exist without good health, and without a foundation of economic security, our efforts to aspire to be a better nation–one that fulfills the interconnected promises of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness–are in danger of proving futile.  As President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his 1944 State of the Union address, “we have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”

It’s been a big week for equality, as Congress has passed two major pieces of legislation that move the country in the direction of equal access for all Americans regardless of disability.

The major headline which you have probably heard about is the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments. These amendments restore the spirit of the original Americans with Disabilities Act, which had come under fire from Supreme Court rulings that put people with disabilities in a Catch-22 situation. As explained by Cristóbal Joshua Alex of the National Campaign to Restore Civil Rights:

In one case after another, the Supreme Court whittled away at the landmark Americans with Disabilities Actby ignoring Congressional intent and narrowly interpreting the definition of disability. [. . .] This created a Catch-22 situation: if a person is able to limit the effect of having a disability, say by taking medication or using a medical device, that person would no longer be covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act and employers were free to discriminate at will. The result has been devastating. Plaintiffs lose 97% of employment-related cases under the ADA.

The absurdity played out in courtrooms across the country where judges, following the Supreme Court precedent, ruled that people with epilepsy, cancer, muscular dystrophy, mental retardation and even
blindness were not “disabled” under the ADA. But, as the bill’s sponsor, Congressman Steny Hoyer points out, the ADA is not about disability, it’s about the prevention of wrongful and unlawful discrimination.

The Amendments passed by an almost unheard of unanimous voice vote in both the House and the Senate. The impressive victory was a result of all stakeholders in the process, business, labor, and advocates for people with disabilities, recognizing that they were all part of the same community and could find common ground to restore the anti-discrimination protections of the law. When we unite around common American Values such as fairness and dignity, we can find commonalities with those who we might usually think of as our adversaries.

More good news came yesterday with the news that the Congress has also passed a long sought-after mental health parity bill that requires health insurers to treat mental health coverage on equal terms with physical health coverage.  The legislation passed in the Senate as part of a larger renewable energy bill by a vote of 93-2, and in the House by a vote of 376-47.  In the words of some of the Senators key to the passage of the legislation:

“This bill provides mental health parity for about 113 million Americans who work for employers with 50 employees or more,” said Mr. Domenici, who has a daughter with schizophrenia.
“No longer will people with mental illness have their mental health coverage treated differently than their coverage for other illnesses like cancer, heart disease and diabetes.”

With this bill, said Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, “we are eliminating the stigma and affirming the dignity” of people with mental illness.

Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, said, “Mental illness will no longer take a back seat to physical illness.”

Mental health parity was one of the signature issues of the late progressive champion, Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, who died tragically in a small plane crash while campaigning for re-election in 2002. His work, and those who have continued it, demonstrate that equality, opportunity, and dignity are American, not partisan, goals.

Taking another look at "New Progressive Voices," a collection of essays outlining a new long-term, progressive vision for America, today we turn to our Executive Director, Alan Jenkins’, contribution.

The piece paints a bleak picture.  Alan outlines many of the problems facing regular Americans today.  Many people are having trouble getting a job that pays a living wage, paying for health care, and getting their children into quality schools.  Tying this together with the present high rates of incarceration, all signs point to a general lack of opportunity in America.

In keeping with goals of this essay collection Alan’s essay, "The Promise of Opportunity," strives to give concrete solutions to these communal ills.  Alan’s essay suggests making "opportunity" a metric by which to consider the viability of federal programs:

As with the environmental impact statements currently required under the National Environmental Policy Act, the relevant agency would require the submission of information and collect and analyze relevant data to determine the positive and negative impacts of the proposed federally funded project. Here, however, the inquiry would focus on the ways in which the project would expand or constrict opportunity in affected geographic areas and whether the project would promote equal opportunity or deepen patterns of inequality.

While the measures of opportunity would differ in different circumstances, the inquiry would typically include whether the project would create or eliminate jobs, expand or constrict access to health care services, schools, and nutritious food stores, foster or extinguish affordable housing and small business development. At the same time, [these Opportunity Impact Statements (OIS)] would assess the equity of the project’s burdens and benefits, such as whether it would serve a diversity of underserved populations, create jobs accessible to the affected regions, serve diverse linguistic and cultural communities, balance necessary health and safety burdens fairly across neighborhoods, and foster integration over segregation.

To read the full article, click here.

The Opportunity Agenda is pleased to help announce, on behalf of the Progressive Ideas Network, the release of a new collection of essays outlining a new long-term vision for America.

"New Progressive Voices: Values and Policy for the 21st Century" brings together leaders from a wide array of organizations, of different backgrounds, to present a bold, progressive agenda for America’s future.  Integral to the project is a commitment, not to just presenting a new direction, but also realistic approaches to solving our collective problems.

From the collection’s introduction:

In recent decades, progressivism has faltered. It was conservatives who developed and moved the big ideas, while progressives triangulated, tweaked, and tinkered. Since the 1960s, progressives have been running on the fumes of the New Deal and Great Society, confining themselves largely to narrow issue silos and poll-tested phrases and positions. Content to play defense in many of the major political battles of the day, they have all too often been cowed into submission by the vitality and confidence of the other side.

Now that is changing. Instead of obsessing about what we are against, progressives have begun to think about what we’re for — to prepare once again to play our role as agents of bold ideas and political and social transformation. Finding new confidence and imagination, we have begun to renew our intellectual capital. The essays in this volume draw on that new store of capital to sketch the outlines of a progressive agenda for 21st-century America.

Our own Executive Director, Alan Jenkins, contributed an essay to the collection.  You can read "The Promise of Opportunity" here.

Read more from The Opportunity Agenda here.