Richard Brenneman - And like the familiar 12-step programs, it's about curing an addiction, the addiction to neoliberal policies that have brought us levels of inequality unparalleled since the Gilded Age.
The program is simple, and harkens back to the age of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal:
Rebuild crumbling infrastructure
Transform energy systems away from fossil fuels
Economic reforms to benefit workers
Eliminate curbs on union recruiting and membership
Raise the federal minimum wage
Equal pay for women
Trade policy reform
Affordable college education and child care
Big bank breakups
Provide healthcare for all as in the other industrialized nations
Expand Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and nutrition programs
Tax reform
3 comments:
If you add in "Slash military spending," I would sign on.
hey Bernie - how about campaign finance reform, military spending and Palestine?
Depending on how Bernie phrases it, the catastrophic emergency is to stop the drilling (abolish fossil fuel extraction)and how you do that is by abolishing private money in campaigns. What he hasn't learned from FDR is you have to go right at the Court's jugular, threaten its legitimacy and you can only do that by getting a Congress that will attack, under Art. 1. If you take FDR in March 1937 as the benchmark in the ongoing civil war against the economic royalists, you could say that the New Deal has been not just defeated, but routed. Bernie's strategy should be a five year plan to get a progressive Congress and Executive to attack the Court. If for instance HRC is the only Democrat who could win, then a radical Congress pledged to abolish money in politics would force her hand. Such a movement could, if necessary, dump Hillary in 2020, but more likely she would go whatever way the wind blows. Sanders, as a candidate who can't win, is counterproductive because the next two justices appointed have to be in agreement with Breyer's McCutcheon dissent, or else the planet turns into a sauna.
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