What's A Left Populist Agenda?
by digby
It's not a sexy as Glenn Beck and his Black Robed Regiment of Christian Reconstructionists (just don't call them Mullahs ...) but this rally scheduled for next month in DC is just a teensy bit more relevant to our current problems. It's called One America, Working Together.
Here's the agenda:
Provide immediate relief for those who are currently unemployed
* Extend jobless benefits, COBRA, mortgage assistance, and other initiatives for those currently out of work.
* Target help for populations and communities in the greatest need
Provide immediate action to stimulate job growth and consumer demand
* Provide aid to states and cities – including direct job creation at local levels – especially in education, health care, social services and first-responder workforces
* Increase the ability of small businesses to obtain loans
* Fund infrastructure investment that spurs economic growth and clean energy enterprises
Provide a fair chance for everyone to succeed and advance in the workplace
* Everyone who works in America should have the right to join with their co-workers to have a voice on the job
* Pay all workers wages that allow them to support their families
* Increase and index the minimum wage
* Close all pay gaps
* End all forms of workplace discrimination
* Protect, honor, fully apply, and expand equal opportunity and diverse business inclusion practices
* Make every job a good and safe job
* Provide paid sick days and paid family leave for all workers
Refocus Our Nation’s Fiscal Priorities
* End the foreclosure epidemic and save the homes of America’s families
* Reform bankruptcy laws to protect families and working people
* Prioritize affordable housing for all
* Protect and strengthen Social Security and Medicare
* Repair private pension systems
* Complete the promise of health care reform, including the public option
* Provide greater national investment in new jobs, improved infrastructure, and education instead of increased military spending
Improve consumer protections
* Prohibit and punish predatory lending and mortgage scams
* Increase watchdog powers of institutions, including the Consumer Financial Protection Agency
* Avoid taxpayer bailouts of financial institutions deemed “too big to fail”
That's called liberal populism folks. It's an agenda that would probably appeal to a whole lot of people if they only knew about it.
Unfortunately, I'm unable to go to the march. But I hope that some of you can make it in my stead. Especially after just reading this:
Sylmar, Calif., as distant geographically from downtown L.A.’s Skid Row as you can get and remain within Los Angeles County, is visually too a sea change from Skid Row’s piss-stained concrete pavement. Hard up against the Angeles National Forest, the rugged ridgeline of the San Gabriel Mountains spreads majestically from east to west along the horizon, and here on a recent summer afternoon a breeze fragrant with citrus cools a crowd of people who sit quietly beneath the shade of churchyard trees. But this is no church picnic. There is no Frisbee being tossed around, no music being played; no one has prepared his or her favorite potato salad to share. They are here to get a box full of donated food from the First Baptist Church food pantry, a situation with which many of them have only recently become familiarized, and an overwhelming sense of apprehension prevails among the crowd, some 200 strong, akin to that among displaced persons in the aftermath of a building fire. They know this is not the normal order of things and fear the future.
A horseman wearing a white straw Stetson trots past astride a palomino and waves lazily, his hat contrasting strongly with his skin, and a scene straight out of Steinbeck is complete. He is brown, a campesino like the wiry, muscled young men in work clothes speaking quietly in Spanish among themselves in the bread line. There are mothers, too, trying to keep their place while controlling kids, a thin man with a military posture in GI desert boots, and a few sullen and obese cholo types sporting shaved heads and the “M13” inked into forearms displaying allegiance to the Mexican Mafia street gang. There’s also a clean-cut man with a pink face, the clean-shaven face of a banker.
Turns out he is a banker. A hedge-funder formerly with Bear Stearns, Matt, 39, lost his last job some two years ago. He is a soft-spoken man who used to buy and sell companies, and today he has no qualms with the bread line. “There’s no stigma attached to this anymore,” explains the Navy vet, who has simply given up on the idea of getting a job anytime soon. “I’m starting my own business. I take consulting work when I can, and I’m jettisoning my house.” (“You can’t be self-employed for this Obama mortgage refinancing, so I’m screwed,” he adds.)
In the meantime, his unemployment checks stopped coming, far short of the 99 weeks that lawmakers babbled about during the recent congressional vote on extending benefits to the long-term unemployed. For the past five months, Matt has been joining his 74-year-old father, Frank, a retired L.A. Unified School District teacher who took an unexpected financial hit, for weekly trips to the church pantry...
“No one complains at the necessity of feeding the horse when he’s not working,” John Steinbeck noted in “The Grapes of Wrath,” describing the madness of starving people amid the agricultural bounty of California during the Great Depression. This time around the people are being fed—for now anyway.
I wonder if that guy's voting for the Democrats?
You can sign up for information about the march at the link.
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