Obama’s mandate for change

[IndianaGreen]

OPINION: Obama’s mandate for change

Author: Norman Markowitz
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 11/21/08 16:55

For the people who elected Obama and the increased Democratic majority, “Change We Can Believe In” isn’t about bailouts for corporations and banks. It isn't about wearing American flag pins on your lapel while the military budget continues to escalate and bankers and corporate CEOs wine and dine. “Change We Can Believe In” isn’t about a spruced-up version of trickle-down theory or the same policies behind a fresh face in the White House.

It is about reversing and repealing the policies that have led to both the immediate financial crisis and looming global depression. It is about ending the post-World-War-II policies that led to the long-term stagnation and decline of the labor movement. It is about creating a national public health care program more than 50 years after it was established in other major industrial nations, and handling a national debt which has increased 10 times since Ronald Reagan became president in 1981.

A “single payer” national health system — known as “socialized medicine” in the rest of the developed world — should be an essential part of the change that the core constituencies which elected Obama desperately need. Britain serves as an important political lesson for strategists. After the Labor Party established Britain’s National Health Service after World War II, supposedly conservative workers and low-income people under religious and other influences who tended to support the Conservatives were much more likely to vote for the Labor Party when health care, social welfare, education and pro-working-class policies were enacted by labor-supported governments.

In addition, passing the Employee Free Choice Act to make joining a union easier and to expand the base of union voters who supported Obama by nearly 50 points on Nov. 4 seems only logical. It would also provide a massive boost for working families struggling with stagnant incomes, high health care costs, retirement costs and job insecurity.

The best way to win over the portion of the working class in the South or the West that supported McCain and the Republicans is to create important new public programs and improve the social safety net. National health care, significantly higher minimum wages, support for trade union organizing and aid to education should all be on the agenda. These programs will improve the quality of our lives directly, giving us greater security and establishing the social-economic changes that will bring reluctant voters into the Obama coalition. That is how progress works.

http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/14047/

[DJ13]

1. K&R!

Nice post.

[OhioBlue]

2. This article compliments what I heard Senator Sherrod Brown

say shortly before the election. He said we have a chance to bring in a new wave of Progressive Governance, a chance to change the direction of our Country.

[thenam]

3. Great article.

But the center-right Democrats on this site won't like the source of the article, that's for damn sure :D