A response to your appearance on Meet the Press from this past weekend.
Dear Markos,
Earlier this week, on Meet the Press, you were asked what the top three issues are and what your position on them would be. You avoided answering that question and in my opinion you passed up a golden opportunity to illustrate that the left does have a clear vision of what we want in America that it is far better than the right wing’s vision we have seen unfold over the last 27 years since Reagan.
I understand what you were trying to do in avoiding the question and trying to be a unifier, but in my opinion the time has passed for playing nice and the kid gloves need to come off. The DLC’s position has always been that the Democrats need to move to the right in order to win elections and that it complete crap!
We do not have to lower ourselves to the level of the attack dogs in the right wing in order to win. All we have to do is stand proudly and state what we believe loudly for all to hear! We have to stop running from the label "liberal" and start embracing it proudly! We are this generation's representatives of a long tradition of proud liberals ranging from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to FDR and Martin Luther King Jr. We need to stand up for that heritage!
This is what I would have answered if I were in your position earlier this week:
Issue #1. - Public Financing of Elections
This is the single most important reform that we must make because no other reforms will be possible until it is done.
Lobbying is essentially legalized bribery and has given special interest groups more access to and more influence over our politicians then We the People now have. Very often these special interest groups represent multi-national corporations with no stake in anything except their own profits. Why should they enjoy greater access to and influence over our elected representatives than the very people they are supposed to be representing?
This is not a new problem. "Campaign finance reform" has been an issue for decades yet despite several attempts at "reform" the problem of corporate control of our government is worse than ever. We now have corporate lobbyists literally writing our laws.
The politicians in Washington represent the people that pay to get them in office. They always will. The only solution therefore is to do away with private donations altogether and go to public financing of elections. It is already working very well in places it has been enacted, like Portland, Oregon.
Because the political process has gotten so far removed from the hands of the people, we are now seeing an unprecedented rise in the power of the Executive Branch. The President is claiming that he has the power to declare himself above the law and can ignore subpoenas and order his underlings to break the law by ignoring subpoenas as well. Because of this situation lifelong Republican conservatives like Bruce Fein and Paul Craig Roberts, both in the Reagan administration, are calling for the impeachment of both Bush and Cheney. Bruce Fein points out that Bush is wielding more power than King George III ever dared claim he had when we rebelled against him to form this great nation.
Issue #2 - Universal Health Care
America remains the only industrialized nation in the world without some form of universal health care. We have 47 million Americans with no health insurance and last year we had 18,000 Americans die from preventable conditions because of a lack of health care coverage.
Anyone who has no insurance or has at least seen the movie "Sicko" knows that the sheer injustice and immorality of our current profit-driven system is an outrage.
The Republicans claim we do not have the money for universal health care but that is only if we continue to spend more on our military then every other industrialized nation in the world combined. We have plenty of money, and if we roll back the Bush and Reagan tax cuts for the wealthy we will not only be able to give health care to all Americans but we can also start rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure at the same time.
Issue #3 - National Security
America is not more secure when we invade and occupy a sovereign nation, we are less secure.
Our meddling in the operation of foreign governments is a prime reason for the increasing levels of anger at America and terrorism against American interests worldwide.
America gained a lot of respect when we rebuilt Europe and Japan after World War 2. That was because despite beating the Germans and dropping two nukes on the Japanese we left those countries better off than they were before the war, which is why neither of them has invaded anyone else since then.
If you give someone a job, they aren’t likely to shoot at you. The reason the insurgency is dragging on in Iraq, besides the presence of our troops, is because the unemployment rate there continues to hover at 50%. If there unemployment rate in America was 50% we would have an insurgency here too!
The largest construction project in Iraq is the U.S. military base, er... "embassy" and there isn’t a single Iraqi working on it. Instead of following the proven model of the Marshall Plan, we brought in labor from Sri Lanka because it is cheaper. That is precisely the kind of right wing economic policy that has destroyed America’s manufacturing base and is damaging our national security today.
Last week we saw another example of the consequences of right wing economic policies on our national security when the stock market crashed just because the French decided to stop buying some of our debt.
The right wing’s idea of running this country has been nothing but "borrow and spend". This is a direct threat to our national security. (especially at a time when we are occupying two foreign nations virtually by ourselves.) The Fed had to dump over $31 billion of our tax dollars into the market in order to bail it out. What is going to happen if China decides to stop buying our debt? How many times can the proponents of the non-existent "free market" turn to big government to bail them out? Eventually this ponzi scheme the right winger have been running is going to implode and We, the American people, are going to be left holding the bag while the rich leave America for their villas in Europe with no more concern than when they left New Orleans to fend for itself after hurricane Katrina.
Because of the right wing’s insistence of cutting revenue and borrowing the money to finance our occupations of two foreign nations and because of their delusion that taxes are a "burden" instead of the cost of living in a civilized society, we are seeing our nation crumbling before our eyes. In the last few weeks alone we have witnessed steam pipes exploding in Manhattan, natural gas tanks exploding in Texas and bridges collapsing in California and Minnesota. We need to start countering the right’s talk of "tax relief" by talking about our "Return On Investment" from our taxes. Right now we do not see any return from our tax dollars and that needs to change!
Are you angry yet?
If you do not feel a white hot rage at the state of affairs in this country, then I submit you are not paying enough attention.
If you feel the rage that I feel then we need to join together in standing up for our beliefs and shouting them at the top of our lungs where ever and when ever the opportunity presents itself.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Kyle Pominville
blogger, activist, patriot, and barstool philosopher.