Saturday Night Owls: A people’s agenda for a better economy and a better nation

Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week

25 DAYS UNTIL JOE BIDEN AND KAMALA HARRIS TAKE THE OATH OF OFFICE

Erik Gunn at The Progressive writes—A People’s Agenda for a Better Nation. The Poor People’s Campaign and Congressional Progressive Caucus team up to chart a course for the future:

“Everything you hear tonight resonates with the call of our deepest moral values to establish justice and promote the general welfare, and our deepest religious values to love our neighbors and to lift from the bottom. And everything here, we are willing to fight and push for, because it is not about compromise. It is about deciding the future of this nation will be compromised if we don’t do at least the things that are here in this people’s agenda.”

With those words on December 21, the Reverend William Barber II, the nation’s most prominent progressive preacher, lent his moral authority to a sweeping agenda for governance as the Congressional Progressive Caucus unveiled its priorities for the first six months of the new year. […]

The Progressive Caucus agenda is the product of more than three dozen participating activist groups, including the Poor People’s Campaign, said caucus chair U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal, (Democrat of Washington). Jayapal called it an agenda “that puts people first, centering poor and working people of all races, who have been left out and left behind.” […]

The seven-point platform is both a fundamental and ambitious list, ranging from specific policies to broad, aspirational goals:

• COVID-19 relief that “meets the scale of the crisis” and directly addresses the pandemic’s disproportionate harm to Black, Indigenous, people of color and “other vulnerable communities”;
• Programs to put people back to work, with a focus on moving the economy to clean, renewable energy—but also restoring and expanding worker rights, including union rights;
• Ensuring health care for all;
• Defending and expanding voting rights—including proposals to end gerrymandering and rein in corporate money in electoral campaigns;
• Attacking institutional racism and white supremacy;
• Turning away from militarism and “endless wars” in favor of a commitment to peaceful diplomacy;
• Rejecting corporate greed and ending corporate monopoly. […]

THREE OTHER ARTICLES WORTH READING

• The Year That Labor Hung On By Its Fingertips, by Hamilton Nolan. Disasters, missed opportunities, and a few bright spots in 2020.  
• The Best Punishment for a Horrible Year, by Conor Friedersdorf. No one will miss 2020.  
• Biden’s Climate Team Is a Bigger Deal for Cities Than Any Cabinet Appointment, by Alissa Walker. Headed by this new White House team, the mandate to reduce emissions is likely to be authentic, sustained, and delivered within a framework that moves beyond pledges into action — in many ways, the first coordinated climate response U.S. cities have seen. The mayors will no longer have an excuse.  

TOP COMMENTS • RESCUED DIARIES

QUOTATION

“The crash did not cause the Depression: that was part of a far broader malaise. What it did was expose the weaknesses that underpinned the confidence and optimism of the 1920s – poor distribution of income, a weak banking structure and insufficient regulations, the economy’s dependence on new consumer goods, the over-extension of industry and the Government’s blind belief that promoting business interests would make America uniformly prosperous.”           ~~Lucy Moore, Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties, 2010

TWEET OF THE DAY

Blast from the Past

On this date at Daily Kos in 2008—Rick Warren Doubles Down, Accuses Critics of Christophobia:

Rick Warren is doubling down and accusing his critics of “hate-speech” and “Christophobia.”

Rachel Maddow has the video, and takes Warren to task for the hypocrisy of saying that it’s unfair to call his views hateful while simultaneously accusing his critics of hate speech. Moreover, as Rachel notes, Warren flat-out lies about his comments comparing gay marriage to pedophilia and incest.

Setting aside Warren’s role as inaugural invocation speaker (for a brief moment), I don’t think there’s any way to defend what he is now saying. I accept the proposition that it’s possible to disagree on the issue of gay marriage without calling someone names.

But there’s really no comparison between gay marriage and incest or pedophilia, and if Warren thinks they are equivalent, he’s either a fan of incest and pedophilia, or he has serious problem with gay people. And calling his critics “Christophobes” just makes matters worse.

A simple apology from Warren for having made the comparison probably would have made this whole controversy go away. But now he’s doubling down, and it’s just making matters worse.

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