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Time for a Main Street Contract for the American People
The ongoing battles in the streets and capitols in Madison, Columbus, Lansing, Indianapolis, and other American cities make it clear that the lines are no longer just drawn, they are exposed.
There are two Americas. One where Wall Street gets bailouts, and another where public schools and safety net programs get slashed.
Where the wealthy elite get tax cuts extended and estate taxes removed, while working people see their retirement plans, health coverage, pay, and bargaining rights gutted. Where people who rob banks go to prison, but bankers who rob people get bonuses and bail outs.
The lesson the uprisings can be heard in the voices ringing out from the hundreds of thousands marching in the snow, sleeping in the Capitols, and jamming the streets.
It wasn't public workers or high school students or single mothers on Medicaid who plundered public treasuries or caused the meltdown on Wall Street. Talk of shared sacrifice is hollow when all the blame and concessions are forced on working families and those who can afford it the least.
The attack on collective bargaining and unions was always part of a larger game for politicians like Scott Walker, other governors, many in Congress, and their legion of corporate sponsors, to escalate the transfer of our nation's wealth and resources to the bankers and the other elites.
Our challenge as a nation - the vast majority of Americans who built this country and strive to sustain it - is to transform the story line of who is to blame for this crisis, and how to solve it. And to change, once and for all, our priorities to become a more just society.
Nurses in particular know this well. Their voices are heard in every community, their social responsibility profound. Their refrain is 'we brought you into the world, now we are going to fight for you, for your quality of life, for your children, for our future.'
It's time for a Main Street Contract for the American People.
Every American should be entitled to:
• Jobs at living wages, with a new national policy based on re-investing in America.
• A good, affordable education.
• Guaranteed healthcare for all.
• A secure retirement, with the ability to retire in dignity.
• Decent shelter and protection from hunger.
• The right to collectively organize.
• A just taxation system where corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share.
• Restoring the promise of our founding - life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all.
If it sounds like the Second Bill of Rights envisioned by President Franklin Roosevelt, that's just a reminder of how far we as a nation still have to go, how far our democracy has been hijacked and corrupted, and how imbalanced our priorities have become.
The American people, not Wall Street, deserve their own economic renewal package. It's time to reclaim our country. And we will.
61 Comments so far
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"THE SEVEN COMMANDMENTS
1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
2. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
3. No animal shall wear clothes.
4. No animal shall sleep in a bed.
5. No animal shall drink alcohol.
6. No animal shall kill any other animal.
7. All animals are equal."
- George Orwell, Animal Farm, Ch. 2
If I may, I would offer modifications to this new bill of rights, which does nothing to supplant capitalism.
Make it equal pay for all, ie, true equality
Free education for any and all
These would eliminate the need to collectively organize and equalize taxation (collective contribution).
See poem Paper, Scissors, stone by Wayman about wage equality:
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2009/04/22
Thank you, JMALH.
copied and saved
What we have now is the REepubican contract on Americans. WE are the enemy and they force contributions, withholding taxes for the USG, to fund their war on Americans. With this dynamic, which most American won't acknowledge due to chosen ignorance, because Americans have been instilled with mindlessness, the inability and/or to know to discern thoughts from facts. Mindlessness is institutionalized by the government, business and the pretend christians[biblical harlots]giving it legitimacy and disseminated through the MSM especially TV. You have to realize that these criminal elites treat us with scorn, derision, hubris and the American taxpayers for for their atrocities and abuses and then re-elect these criminals.
Rose Ann, you are spot on. It was a nurse that fished the fat out of the fire in our County during the Lesser Depression of the 30's. I transcribed quill and ink Common Council Minutes for the City of Clintonville onto database in 1997. I started with the year 1906 and ended with the year 1936. It was very instructive for this young mother of 4 forced to work 20 hours per week for as little as $42/mo in food stamps. What blew my mind was how heartless and immoral the Poor Committee (1916-1936) were when it came to parsing out $ to the poor. And how completely overwhelmed even they were by 1932. They kept saying, "Prosperity is just around the corner" while trying to avoid typhus from the congestion of transients urinating in the public parks creeks. This was only an issue because they consistently declined taxes to build a public sewer system. And they refuse to build facilities for the increased demand in "campers", stating if they made those hobos feel welcome they would only be overwhelmed by even more. Of course it hadn't started with transients but with the cities own homeless that had been denied help at every appeal by the Poor Committee. On and on and on. Finally, they turned to that "dirty Socialist" public health nurse, Mrs. Roberts who was based 30 miles away in Waupaca as a last resort. They wanted to prove her wrong because they had tried nothing and were all out of ideas. The town fathers were planning on using her to buy time until that vaunted prosperity showed up then throw her back to ignominy. Well, that "interfering" woman showed them. She demanded carte blanche with a budget of $35,000 and turned the county around.
I found it ironic to be learning of this woman as a result of Clinton's punishment of the poor policy enactments. I learned of the origins of the social contract that I had contributed to, that was being dismantled just as my family needed it. And it's been downhill ever since. And whenever I would bring up Mrs. Roberts, who saved the county from bankruptcy with the political class I was exposed to in my "internship", not one of them knew who she was. Ironic because some of the very Republican implementers of welfare to work were direct beneficiaries of Mrs Roberts work as children and youth themselves. I know because they were listed by name in the lists from the poor committee submissions to Mrs Roberts that she approved. It's always the same with the greedsters.
I name out the local politicians that gleefully pitched the poor off the rolls from '97 on, as Republicans, which happens to be true in my county, as it is solidly red, Boss Hogg territory but I can never forget it was Clinton and his CFR/DLC committee ilk that initiated and passed what no Republican up to that point had been able to do. That's when I decided the duopoly party system was just two sides of the same coin.
On December 6, 2010 Obama did what no Republican had been able to do when he took credit for "negotiating" a "temporary payroll tax holiday" that requires the Social Security program to borrow money for the first time in its history.
This action marked the beginning of the end for Social Security.
67 for retirement. This isn't a crime by itself? I'm 56 and here in Canada people are retiring at my age. But me, the recent immigrant from America, dependent upon U.S. Social Security, will have to wait until I'm 67. Will they allow me to work in Canada at that age? I may be the oldest worker here.
Americans take far too much sitting down. If 67 isn't too old to wait, why not 70? Or 75? Eventually, no one in America will LIVE long enough to retire and WalMart will have all the low paid greeters it will ever need.
Just had thought on naming a new national party to strike back at the corporate fascists in power - if there ever is such a level of organization - and I hope there is - instead of calling it the People's Party as someone may have suggested or mentioned n one of the Common Dreams articles it could be the Main Street Party. It doesn't seem to have any of the oleaginous stigma years of propaganda have deposited on some of our most cherished terminology and it has an ever so subtle counterbalance to one of the components of the the party in power (Wall Street).
NET MINNOW: Fascinating post. Thank you for sharing it. It sounds like the basis for a book or documentary. Great stuff!
We have an implicit assumption in our Constitution right now, not the old generic saw of, "promoting the general welfare" We know that our government gives only lip service to that concept. I'm talking about the Right that all politicians Democrat or Republican give obeisance to: The right of corporations to earn as much money as possible. The implicit contract that our politicians have made assumes that if corporations prosper all the other rights alluded to in this article will take care of themselves. If that is not true it creates a real conundrum for all those pols who fall all over themselves stating what good capitalists they are. That will have to change before something like FDR's second bill of rights will emerge. Maybe a depression will do it.
Your "implicit contract" is sometimes called the "trickle-down" theory, which was described by Hubert Humphrey as saying "If you feed the horses, the birds will eventually get something to eat."
I cannot share Rose Ann DeMoro's optimism. This sociopathic corporatocracy is very good at convincing people that such a contract would be tantamount to that great evil, socialism. The fema camps await those inclined to disagree.
You are trapped by your own thinking. They've convinced you! Dissent and skepticism are the true American values. It's time to be American.
Who cares? You do what is right whether you are optimistic or not. You fight back for your own dignity and survival, and that of millions of others, regardless of the odds. It is not as though there is an alternative.
You are worried about the "sociopathic corporatocracy" convincing others of things. They have you convinced to give up. Maybe that is where you should put your attention.
I do fight back, through my teaching. The dean at the community college I work at has informed me that my student evaluations were poor, but has refused to let me see them. I have a feeling some of the little fascists went to the dean because I suggested that maybe torture is not a good thing and maybe thinking killing Iraqis is fun is a sick thought. Just making little suggestions. I have a feeling I won't be working there anymore.
Of course you have to fight back. Just feeling a bit misanthropic today.
Elizabet H.
Keep fighting the good fight.
You have a lot of nerve offering that response as a solution to anything. Do you honestly believe that a smile can put food on the table of millions of disenfranchised Americans? Are they poor because they didn't smile enough? Tell that to the beggar sleeping on a grate - would you dare? How can you face yourself? What arrogant, callous tripe!
RED: Your post was equivalent to shooting at a daisy. I remember reading somewhere that attitude had a bearing on who survived the Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany. Sure, we need food, and of course we want meaningful work that's fairly compensated in a land that is not at the mercy of corporate trespassers.
However, if a poster brings up the power of feeling positive, that in no way diminishes the heavy subject matter most of us face here in thread after thread.
Please, a little kindness...
Elizabeth: Since you shared with the forum some of the engaging topics you brought to your students (along with some of their reactions), I always wondered if there'd be any backlash given the cultural repression of the present era.
So few radical or truly honest voices are allowed in media, and universities have also fallen under thrall to the unstated wishes of conservatives. It may only be a matter of time before bona fide witch-hunts begin. The way someone like Bradley Manning is being treated, added to the now casual acceptance of torture AS state policy, with the Supreme Court granting corporations the right to essentially purchase election results. Everywhere we turn there's no room for redress and justice is like a blind lady without a cane.
I believe the universe arcs towards justice, but it can be a painstakingly slow process. Good luck. You did the right thing sparking TRUTH in the minds of your students.
I had a vice principal pull a stunt on me in my early teaching days. Years later I was invited to a fancy party at a pent house that belonged to the parents of one of my former students. The young girl's mother told me I had the greatest influence on her daughter's education... and she was then studying journalism at a top university. We never know the impact we might have on others. It's vital that we follow our instincts in courageously doing what we know to be good and worthy..
>>I believe the universe arcs towards justice, but it can be a painstakingly slow process. Good luck. You did the right thing sparking TRUTH in the minds of your students.
Patience.
Place yourself in the shoes of a person following the stars 8000 years ago. In order to measure the movement by the Star of a fraction of a degree in the night sky a Stone circle is built. The person will likely be dead before that star moves a fraction in the night sky.
But he dutifully records his findings and the person following him picks up the work and carries on.
We as individuals can not change the world on our own. We each of us do our small part and someone that comes after us does their small part and so on. The first person to look to the stars and wondered if they in fact MOVED at all in the night sky was every bit as important as the one that came 2000 years later and knew it the case.
Elizabeth: We all feel misanthropic at times. It is people like you that give me faith in my fellow man. Paul
Even as the corporate-owned politicians in Wisconsin and other states are ramming through legislation by any means (legal or not), that accelerates the destruction of the working class, there are still a large percentage of workers who applaud these actions. They have bought into the corporate lie that claims unions and a living wage for teachers are somehow bad for workers. It makes me throw up my hands in despair.
“You will never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public” – PT Barnum Or (HL Mencken)
Tom: Never under-estimate the covert power of a film's sound track. If emotions weren't manipulated by specific types of musical cues, you can be sure, no studio would pay to include them.
Your argument fails to take into account the vast, powerful, and EXPENSIVE PR systems being used to manufacture what you're too naively taking for consent. Do you think those devils, the Koch Brothers, would spend any % of their fortune on astro-truf groups if they didn't have a vested interest in deluding enough minds to make it appear as if some really viewed the world the way they do? "Oh please, master, let me lick your boots..." C'mon. It is true that not everyone can process a complex, nuanced argument, but if the BASIC facts were made known (with respect to WHERE U.S. tax dollars are going), maybe those deluded Tea Baggers would be able to see the Light and act accordingly.
PR is a huge business, and 90% of TV is designed to program the masses. There's never been a more successful social engineering experiment on record, apart from the purges executed by the "holy" church to ensure that no voice contrary to that of its own self-proclaimed divine authority had a chance to pose a rival argument.
In many ways, mass consciousness is being recycled back to that era.
It's too late. We are no longer citizens. We are shareholders. We will depend on the cprporations not the Constitution.
Hoa Binh
Everything must be fine with the majority in Wisconsin. The majority voted into office the current junta.
The majority of people are stupid, lazy and greedy. Nothing will change.
Do you still believe that how people vote makes any difference?
The majority of your posts are elitist and condescending, and far too many progressives and liberals share your lazy, stupid and greedy position. What could be more intellectually lazy than blaming the working class people? What could be more stupid than thinking that elections change things? What could be more greedy than taking your own advantages for granted - the advantages that afford you the luxury of sitting around perfecting your beliefs and then denigrating others who are struggling to survive and can't do that for not having attained your level of perfection?
That is the biggest obstacle to anything changing. You. Stupid, lazy and greedy.
The majority of the American people may be greedy because they are constantly propagandized to reinforce that. Most of what's on television celebrates the outcomes of being greedy, even sentimentalizes it as when people get all weepy when Undercover Boss or the Secret Millionaire or Oprah gives a bunch of stuff to some supposedly deserving person who cries on camera on cue.
They can hardly be blamed for being greedy because there is no widespread counterprogramming, few publicized examples of "another way."
The American people are certainly not lazy. Americans work hard and ask for and receive less time off than their European counterparts. Americans are so not lazy that workplace cultures condition them to be workaholics, to devote way too much of their time and mindspace to getting their jobs done. Take their jobs away and many end up not knowing what to do with themselves.
So it isn't fair to call them lazy.
And, contrary to how it seems, Americans are not stupid. One of my heroes (I only have four: George Carlin, Kurt Vonnegut, Frank Zappa, and the one I am quoting -- I'm looking for a female to add to the list; right now Naomi Kline is top of the list of leading contenders) Gore Vidal said the American people are not stupid, they're ignorant. The difference there is that people who are stupid are what they are and not much can be done about them; they're stupid and they'll stay that way. Ignorant people can be educated. Often they'll resist because people don't like having their beliefs and world view challenged and disrupted, but it can be done.
To dismiss them as lazy, greedy, and stupid is to underestimate their potential, dangerous in these time where appealing to that potential and getting them to see the error of their previous ways is the only viable path to the possibility of survival.
If everything was "fine with the majority in Wisconsin," all this demonstrating would not be happening. Events these past weeks have given me the first glimmers of hope (and I distrust hope) that I've had in many years. Maybe there's a chance things could change for the better. I hope (there I go again) so.
Gore Vidal said the American people are not stupid, they're ignorant.
Sure, with some it's willful, but the u.s. citizenry has been lied to their whole lives, including lies of omission.
Example: I now live in Wisconsin and the other evening we were hanging around a friend's shop. I called John Muir the pride of Wisconsin. Blank stares. None, not one, in the room of native Badgers knew who Muir was, let alone from a farm just 50 miles away. Are they stupid? Not hardly. They just didn't know.
Actually, you can make people stupider through education. For instance, learning more than one language, a much easier task at an early age, increases intelligence. We know that after a certain age, a child can no longer learn to use a language at all, as in feral children. Our educational system, where most children are taught very little in their first years in school, seems designed to dumb us down. Every student I've ever talked to who came to the US from another country--any country--while in grade school has remarked on how dumbed down our educational system is.
Total agreement here Liz.
The real curriculum is submission.
It starts before getting to a desk.
The bell rings and the kids are told get in line and be quiet.
"The American people, not Wall Street, deserve their own economic renewal package. It's time to reclaim our country. And we will."
One thing to remember is that the idea of "country" means nothing anymore to the corporate oligarchy that controls our government. Oh, they will be the first to wrap themselves in the flag and utter the patriotic platitudes whenever it is time to send the military overseas to protect corporate interests or seize raw materials from native peoples. However, the idea of "country" means no more to these corporations than it did to the imperialists who plundered Africa in the nineteenth century for ivory, diamonds and other resources.
We have become the new Africa, and multinational corporations see us as a resource they need to become even wealthier than they already are.
The only people who still cling to the idea of "country" as the common heritage, culture and institutions that unite us are the working middle class--the very people the corporate oligarchs are seeking to destroy. The sinews that hold a "country" together are teachers, police officers, firefighters, public servants and other working class people. Once they are denied any kind of meaningful voice in the political process (i.e. Wisconsin), the commons is gone.
Strip mining, mountaintop removals, natural gas extraction that releases flammable residues into community drinking water, cancer clusters caused by toxic corporate dumping--the list is virtually endless. This is the legacy of multinational corporations that have no respect whatsoever for "country."
Note for example what happened in the Gulf of Mexico. BP destroyed the ecosystem and walked away from the ruins with nary a backwards glance. Furthermore, our own government, which should be protecting our "country," was complicit in allowing BP to avoid any real accountability for this environmental disaster.
This is precisely what the corporate oligarchs want: a nation so crippled by their naked power grab that it cannot protect itself from even the most ruinous assaults on our environment and our democratic institutions.
Yes, it is time to stand up to these corporate monsters who have destroyed "countries" throughout human history. And it is the working middle class that must restore any sense of "country."
Sadly, most of our political leaders are complicit in the dismantling of America. The ones who are not, and they are few in number, seem to have taken the position, "Show me the way, and I will lead."
(Sorry, I rambled a bit.)
As Harold Wilson, British prime minister and party leader for Labor in Wilson's glory days once said "All God's children need a social contract," which is what a a Febrary combined party and TUC union document called for. We should be so lucky on this issue today in the USA.
OLD GUY: Your post spoke eloquently for me. Thank you. The levels of waste, fraud, incompetence, dishonesty, and callous levels of indifference to human lives (as well as The Sacred), are a ticking moral time bomb. There are days I can't even believe what's actually taking place...
I remember viewing a Twilight Zone where the entire premise was an individual questioning if everything taking place in the outer realm was really his own projection. In some ways, I almost wish that were the case given the rampant levels of destruction... so much coming apart so quickly, with such vast levels of suffering to go along with it all. To wrap your mind (or heart) around the families living in tents in Haiti, or those left homeless from bombs in Iraq, or floods in Pakistan, or this latest horror in Japan. It makes the very Being quake as very serious events have begun... perhaps the intent is a pruning of the population. Maybe this is the only way Mother Nature can preserve what remains of Her living systems?
Unless like Two Americas, you have written off elections as Powers That Be sustaining b.s. (and there's a good case that can be made for the rightness of that point of view), the only way elections could ever become meaningful is if Americans could be made to see what a stupid swindle the Two Party System, with its fake staged conflicts, is. The European Parlimentary system, which I don't completely understand, has countries with several parties representing different "interests," and they are represented, to my understanding, on the basis of what percentage of the vote they win so there are, in the legislatures, a number of parties that have to make real deals, not staged fake compromises, to get things done.
Of course, Europe's once highly praised economy is falling apart too, but that's because the whole world economy is crashing and burning thanks to our global thieving banker friends.
I remember BeforKids suggesting that we form a new party, Main Street Party, with that kind of platform in mind. I would go further so as to suggest that we combine the Green, Socialist, and Peace and Freedom parties into this united MAIN STREET PARTY. The label, MAIN STREET, would also be good in neutralizing the anti-socialism, anti-labor, anti-environmental, anti-peace madness so that more voters would stop judging candidates by party labels but instead by the content such as their positions on issues and their background where relevant to governing.
Great idea but without a charismatic person to front the movement, someone so exciting the media would be unable to ignore him or her, forming the Main Street Party would go the way of all other well meaning attempts to get a third party going.
Of course, someone charismatic enough to be the leader of the party is someone who should be automatically distrusted. Nevertheless, that's what's needed to really get a party started.
The problem with this nation is people judging almost anything by the cover more than the content as they have been trained and conditioned into doing. Starting with JFK, maybe Eisenhower, the charisma contest has become a bigger disease election after election. Voting for charisma only to get put to tears and anger never dies down. I suppose charisma could be used to get the movement started faster. However, relying on charisma to sustain must be avoided. Unfortunately, once it starts, it becomes harder to stop or avoid. :(
Absolutely true, but this is celebrity America and without a personality, nothing resembling a new party can happen. Admittedly the search of Progressive Digital Jesus is probably futile, but I still think that's what is needed. I agree with your :(
The people have to become their own Mass media.
This happens in part by making the established mass media irrelevant. Make "we the people" that celebrity. Easier said then done but no amount of protests or election campaigns with celebrity spokespersons are going to rid of us the "Establishment".
Some people think that they will be like those celebs so I am not sure how we can make people their celebrity selves.
Hey, I hear that Charlie Sheen has lots of free time these days! ;)
The mass media? Charismatic celebrities? Partisan electoral politics?
That is not going to get it PP. Please consider what I am saying.
I always consider what you say. I'd ask you to do likewise, but that probably stretches the limit.
It worked for Raygun, Clinton, and Obama and their ilk at our expense of course.
After watching the protests in Madison, and hearing about them in my native state of Michigan (I now live in Louisiana), I've been frustrated beyond reasoning about what's going on in this country. Now our esteemed governor, Bobby Jindal, has put forth his proposed budget. Nothing surprising, but it has tipped me over into wanting to do SOMETHING tangible to register my displeasure. Jindal wants to sell the state prisons, reduce state worker positions, make state workers pay more into their retirement (as if they don't already have the highest contribution rate in the country), AND NOT ADJUST THE BENEFITS TO CORPORATIONS. He already sold off one of the state prisons without needing any excuse - he just went ahead and did it. My husband is a recently retired state worker and we're fed up with the direction this state (and country) is taking. We voted for Obama and feel as though we were lied to. I think the idea of a Main Street Party is fantastic. I'm not sure what to do to make it happen, but you can bet that for the first time in our lives, we're going to be at our state capitol to protest what's going on here.
What more can we do? (I'm asking this in all seriousness.) How do we bring about a new party that supports the working people of this country? If the Tea Party could spring into being, why can't this happen? (Of course, the TP was quickly appropriated by "grassroots" groups like the Koch brothers, which I don't want to see happen again.)
So what's the first step?
To answer your question, the first step is obviously debatable but here is what I think might work. Stand out as a party with a non-political appeal but the obvious problem is waking people out of being conditionally addicted to the poison known as politics.
P.S.: The Tea Party was funded by Wall $treet so that is not a good role model. Most third parties hardly get much in the way of funding let alone a fair chance to be heard by the voters.
Newt had the contract on America and now I agree we need a contract for America. But in my view, that will never happen without a mass mobilization and the American citizens, like in Wisconsin,demanding that the military,dictator budget no longer be sacrosanct. The Repugs like Koch quisling, Walker and his ilk are just a microcosm of the problem. The evil Republicans in Congress are half correct we they say the U.S.Government is broke but they conveniently leave out the real reasons, and that is: The U.S. Congress has allocated trillions of $ for the military, in 725 military bases around the world; two egregious wars; to prop up evil dictators, banksters and the Empire of American hegemony. We have plenty of $. It is like your Father is spending all his money on gambling and alcohol so when you tell him you are hungry and ask him for some grocery $ he tells you, sorry son, we are broke! .
Excellent analogy!