Look, folks, we can win this thing. As the Irish rugby coach once put it, "We need to spread out and stick together."
We know what we have to do: Inspire the Democratic party's coalition of women, working people, the young, African Americans and Hispanics to register, knock on doors and vote on November 8.
Why should they care? Because President Hillary Clinton will be a change agent!
- She will create millions of good new jobs for working people, rebuilding and innovating America.
- She will increase the minimum wage.
- She will attack and reduce student debt and make college education affordable.
- She will create a public option in healthcare.
- She will reverse global warming
- She will hold banks like Wells Fargo accountable for cheating millions of ordinary Americans.
- She will create a majority on the Supreme Court that protects basic rights and reverses the evil Citizens United decision
Trump will do none of these things. He isn't even lying about doing them. He just wants to give tax breaks to the very rich and to developers and eviscerate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which discovered Wells Fargo was bilking ordinary Americans..
As the Washington Post said, Trump's economic plans are hooey. He is a conman and a liar and most of the media have moved away from false equivalence. Time Magazine nailed it last week: Trump's Economic Plan Is Magical Thinking.
Young people are now organizing for Hillary as they realize that a racist lying President Trump is a possiblity
However, Trump can still play the NY TImes:. This was their naive headline on his bogus economic plan: Trump Vows to Create 25 Million Jobs if Elected, but Offers Few Details.
Vows to Create!! 25 Million New Jobs! Which part of his anatomy did he pull that number from? Is that also where his tax returns are hidden?
How about this headline instead: Trump Lies Again about his Economic Plans
Its still the economy stupid, but this time the working class are not buying the argument that the elites know best and that globalization and shareholder value are good for them. There have been too many jobs lost and wages slashed in the name of shareholder value and trade deals. The training programs to compensate for trade deals were slashed by Republicans in Congress who then blame Government for being useless!
I don't think I've ever disagreed with the redoubtable Fareed Zakaria but his recent article in the Washington Post that "this election is not about the economy" lends too much credence to Trump's faux populism and not enough credence to the transforming power of social justice economics as championed by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, much of whose original research has informed Hillary Clinton's policies. In the past 25 years, mainstream economics has become captive of a particularly brutal and cruel version of capitalism, where shareholders take all and consumer demand declines as consumers/workers are squeezed. In addition , innovation is directed by tax incentives to the replacement of human work with machines, without any thought as to how we are going to employ humans in purposeful work. INET provides a platform for brilliant economists like Nobel prize winner Joe Stiglitz and Barry Eichengreen to advance policies that fight the growing inequality in America.
Bernie Sanders understood all this and brought some balance back to our political/economic discourse by making it legitimate to expect affordable education and free healthcare and decent wages. We now have a unique opportunity to elect Hillary Clinton in coalition with Sanders, as Chair of the Senate Budget Committee, and Elizabeth Warren, Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, to create real change to benefit working people of all ideologies.
Hillary Clinton has excellent plans to put Americans back to work rebuilding the country's roads, bridges, airports and railroads. Over the next few weeks she will tell that transforming story alongside working class heroes like Bruce Springsteen.
And we will stand with her, knocking on doors, talking to strangers and friends, organizing on campus and in the workplace, and making telephone calls to battleground states.
We are not scared by Donald Trump, but the prospect of President Donald Trump is real scary. Let's not have to tell our kids we let it happen because we didn't make a difference over the next 7 weeks.
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September 19, 2016
