OUR TIME HAS COME
Borosage, Robert L.
Our Time Has Come BY ROBERT L. BOROSAGE The civil-rights movement freed the South from apartheid. The women's movement opened new vistas for the majority of the population. The environmental...
...Fair taxes...
...their children suffer both their poverty and their absence...
...The end of the Cold War offers the opportunity to redefine the U.S...
...Environmental degradation is now a clear and present danger...
...Democracy and liberty...
...Any progressive program must include a commitment to international law and peacekeeping institutions, to fundamental human rights, both political and economic, to sustainable development in the North as well as the South...
...For the next decade, this transformation will provide work that helps improve our lives...
...They pay more in taxes and get less in services...
...Working people, who suffer the worst ravages of environmental poisoning in their workplaces and neighborhoods, will support a program to rebuild America...
...This means election reform—same-day voter registration, and election finance reform, including free media time, spending limits, and at least matching Federal funding...
...Water systems, waste disposal, sewage—all are dangerous to our health...
...We need to invest energy and imagination in building an international system to keep the peace...
...Our schools are in ruin...
...But we can cut the military budget by 50 per cent and still have the most powerful military in the world...
...Progressives must call for a program to rebuild America...
...our airports dangerously crowded...
...But most poor people work every day they can...
...A bridge falls in the United States every other day...
...Finally, no national program can succeed without global efforts to place boundaries on transnational corporations and banks before unfettered speculation once again leads to global depression...
...The President wants to spend the peace dividend on the military...
...Real security...
...The rich are richer and pay less in taxes, while most Americans are being squeezed and pay more in taxes...
...For thirty years, progressive citizen movements have transformed America...
...Yet, if George Bush wins re-election, the country will have had conservative Republican Presidents for twenty-four of the last twenty-eight years...
...Robert L. Borosage, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, was an issues adviser to Jesse L. Jackson's 1988 Presidential campaign...
...Our roads are a shambles...
...our mass transit a joke...
...Americans don't like welfare—even people on welfare would rather have a job...
...A national health-care plan is a first priority...
...It means empowering worker organization, putting the law on the side of those who would build unions, not those who would bust them...
...Supply-side economics is collapsing...
...role in the world...
...The Cold War is over...
...11 Global engagement...
...The bills are coming due, and the thievery is clear...
...even General Motors can't afford our current system...
...Progressives should recapture the cause of democracy and liberty...
...We can make the same cut in five years and gain $750 million to $1 trillion...
...military intervention...
...The environmental movement altered the way we see the world...
...It requires new commitment—public and private—to community organizing and community economic planning and enterprise...
...From a woman's right to choose to everyone's right to freedom of speech and association, sexual preference, and privacy, progressives should proudly rally to expand the scope of liberty from government intrusion...
...So progressives must rally support to give every child a fair start—prenatal care, infant nutrition, Head Start, day care, stimulating schools, and a college education for any student who deserves one...
...The bills are coming due, and the thievery is becoming clear...
...Let George Bush explain why tax cuts for the rich are good for the economy and tax cuts for workers are irresponsible...
...Some themes for a political agenda for progressives: ¶ Reinvest in America...
...We can cut the military budget by 50 per cent in ten years and save about $500 billion...
...Progressives should demand that the peace dividend be used not to clean up the mess of the 1980s but to invest in our real security—making our economy strong, cleaning up our environment, and ensuring that our children get educated...
...What we have built from the ground up, they have fought from the top down...
...Supply-side economics is collapsing...
...Thus, the progressive agenda must seek to revitalize democracy...
...Second, make government responsive to the people so it will hold private interests accountable to the law...
...The American people are furious about government spending—and they should be...
...Invest in people...
...Progressives should demand a government that provides basic services to people...
...Now the Administration is trying to convince Congress to make working families pick up the bill—$500 billion or more—for the speculative orgy the rich had in pillaging the savings-and-loan system...
...The peace movement saved us from wreaking even more havoc on ourselves and others...
...First, get government out of our private lives...
...The crisis in the Persian Gulf illustrates both the promise of collective international action against aggression and the perils of reflexive unilateral U.S...
...We can usher in a new era of progressive reform...
...We can now usher in a new era of progressive reform—if the same energy that transformed the country from below now unites to nominate and elect a President and Congress committed to a progressive agenda...
...Now our time has come...
...To make this country (and the world) safe for the environment will require public investment to help develop new systems of energy and production, mass transport, new housing and living arrangements...
...Fair taxes on the rich and the corporations—with a special surcharge for the savings-and-loan mess-should be combined with a phased reduction in regressive payroll taxes on working people...
...Many in Congress accept that the peace dividend has been lost in the sands of Saudi Arabia and the scams of the savings-and-loans...
...Over the last decade, an unholy alliance of conservative Republicans and Democrats on the make have conspired to raise Social Security taxes on working people while cutting income taxes on the rich...
...We must challenge the Administration's desire to police the world...
...These programs will cost money—but as study after study has shown, it costs much more not to have them...
Vol. 54 • November 1990 • No. 11
