[VITE1]

A little info on the current progressiver agenda.

.

A Progressive Agenda for President Obama




Here is what President Obama should do to help the country and fight against a Republican take over of Congress. He must first declare a moratorium on any healthcare premium increases. While we wait for most of his healthcare reform to go into effect, insurance companies are jacking up their premiums and making a mockery of the idea of containing costs. These increases, sometimes over 30%, are killing businesses and hurting citizens. Meanwhile, another eight million people have joined the ranks of the uninsured this year.

The President should also impose a moratorium on foreclosures, and he must push for a new system to help people stay in their homes. The government has to oversee the re-negotiation of bad mortgages, and bankruptcy courts should be empowered to help keep people in their homes. A million people are now losing their houses each year, and the president has to make this a top priority.

Obama also needs to institute a job creation plan that will immediately fund a million jobs to rebuild America. These jobs have to be visible, and Obama should stress that instead of giving away $700 billion to the wealthiest Americans by continuing the Bush tax cuts, he will use the money to put Americans to work. He also needs to stress that the more people who are employed, the more we can pump up our economy through increased demand.

To help quell the deficit hawks, President Obama can get rid of most of the Bush tax cuts, and he should propose a plan to reduce our military budget by a significant amount. Part of this reduction can be related to decreasing our troops in Europe and Japan and drawing down our presence in Afghanastan.

Obama also needs to defend social security and medicare, and he can do this by showing how they are currently well funded, and by proposing to increase the amount that high earners pay into the plan. Instead of only taxing the first $106,000 of earnings, all earnings should be taxed at the 6% rate, and this should include wealth gained by capital gains. In fact, the best way to wean America off of its Wall Street gambling habit is to tax capital gains at the same rate as general income. Not only will this help to bring down the deficit, but it will also work to reduce the power and influence of financial institutions.

Obama should also stop the current move to demonize teachers, tenure, and unions by showing how most American public schools are doing a good job. The problem is that we have some very low performing schools that need to be restructured, and this can be done in conjunction with unions, but it will also require increased funding for schools in low-income areas.

Finally, Obama needs to come up with an economic strategy that protects American jobs. This could be done through a combination of subsidies for green technology companies and a tax for corporations that shift jobs abroad. Currently, China is not only making its good inexpensive by devaluing its own currency, but it is subsidizing its green businesses. In order to compete in this global economy, we shouldn't join the race to the bottom; instead, we need to grow jobs that offer fair wages and benefits.

If Obama promotes this type of progressive agenda, he will be able to bring back the people who supported him in the 2008 election. However, if the president fails to tackle these pressing issues, he will not only sink the Democrats, but he will also send the country in the wrong direction

Bob Samuels: A Progressive Agenda for President Obama

Coupled with this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward%E2%80%93Piven_strategy

The strategy

Cloward and Piven’s article is focused on forcing the Democratic Party, which in 1966 controlled the presidency and both houses of the United States Congress, to take federal action to help the poor. They stated that full enrollment of those eligible for welfare “would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments” that would “deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas.”[3] They wrote:



“

The ultimate objective of this strategy—to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income—will be questioned by some. Because the ideal of individual social and economic mobility has deep roots, even activists seem reluctant to call for national programs to eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income.[3]

”


Michael Reisch and Janice Andrews wrote that Cloward and Piven "proposed to create a crisis in the current welfare system – by exploiting the gap between welfare law and practice – that would ultimately bring about its collapse and replace it with a system of guaranteed annual income. They hoped to accomplish this end by informing the poor of their rights to welfare assistance, encouraging them to apply for benefits and, in effect, overloading an already overburdened bureaucracy."[4]