TIME TO TURN OUR ENERGIES INWARD
Heuvel, Katrina Vanden
Time to Turn Our Energies Inward BY KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL Since 1985,1 have spent several months a year in Moscow, where citizens and politicians alike are absorbed in intense and sometimes...
...A public access drive should be launched to make an abundance of modern communication technologies available to citizens...
...Katrina vanden Heuvel is an editor-at-large of The Nation...
...East-West coexistence should be combined with North-South cooperation, respect for self-determination, and adherence to international law...
...For the first time in decades, American thinking is unfettered by the big C's of Capitalism and Communism...
...The real question is not who won the Cold War, but which society will be the "victor" now that it is over...
...Developments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have shown that...
...Too much of what passes for serious political discourse here is superficial, limited to an exceedingly narrow range of views, and obscuring the fact that many of our political institutions are in deep trouble...
...More of the tax burden should be shifted from low-and middle-income Americans to the wealthy...
...We should work to ensure that superpower cooperation is not detrimental to the Third World...
...We need to use communications technology more effectively as a tool of public education and policy change...
...As a result, we have a unique opportunity to fight for a radically new security policy...
...Workers and their families are entitled to job-based health insurance provided by employers, and Medicaid should be expanded to cover the remaining uninsured who are unemployed...
...We must counter those who have used the Persian Gulf crisis as an argument against cutting our bloated military budget...
...Time to Turn Our Energies Inward BY KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL Since 1985,1 have spent several months a year in Moscow, where citizens and politicians alike are absorbed in intense and sometimes brutally candid debates about fundamental political issues and priorities...
...Prisons have become a dumping ground for our most serious social and economic problems, while cost-effective alternatives to incarceration are considered politically risky...
...Can we say the same about our politics...
...The progressive community can no longer ignore the criminal-justice crisis...
...Although the Soviet Union is beset by economic and social problems exceeding ours, its political leadership, intellectuals, and citizens have at least undertaken an extraordinary effort to understand and find solutions to those problems...
...We need to work more closely with progressive student activists, who are committed to lasting, imaginative, and effective citizen action...
...How can the United States advise the Soviet Union about how to solve its problems when we're the only advanced industrialized country that does not provide its workers with some type of job-guaranteed leave for parents with newborns...
...Can we at last seize the opportunity presented by the end of the Cold War to turn our energies inward and address priorities that have been neglected too long...
...Our health-care crisis today is even more serious than the one that led to the enactment of Medicare twenty-five years ago...
...And all the while, we need to remember that change no longer takes a long time...
...One lesson we should draw from the confrontation with Iraq is that we'd be more secure today if we had spent less money on building MX missiles and B-2 bombers and more on building up our energy independence...
...A new tax bracket for higher-income Americans should be created, and corporate taxes, which dropped dramatically in the 1980s, should be raised...
...While Chinese and Eastern European students dominate the news, the surge of political activism among American students has gone virtually unreported...
...We need to begin such debates in our own country...
...Reproductive rights must be protected...
...All too often "get tough" anticrime policy feeds on communities' fear and anger without making a dent in crime...
...In this changed ideological climate, America must live up to a more comprehensive and caring definition of human rights—one that includes economic, political, social, and health rights...
...To take a recent example, during the last year politicians and pundits have spent more time gloating about how the West "won" the Cold War than calculating the political and economic costs of that "victory...
...She is co-author of "Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev's Reformers" and editor of the forthcoming anthology, "The Nation: 1865-1990...
Vol. 54 • November 1990 • No. 11
