Stated Quite Simply !

.... from Susan S. Pastin on SUN 7 MAR on Buzzflash....

Programs such as Social Security and Medicare built the American middle class – and solutions such as health care reform, banking reform, consumer protection, and freeing our politics from the stranglehold of big money that will save us now.

Instead of tearing down our country, we ought to be building it up.

We should rebuild our manufacturing base, based on clean energy, high-speed trains, bio-medical research, and other 21st century endeavors. We should promote research and development. We should promote small business and American innovation.

We must rebuild our infrastructure – not just our roads and bridges, but our schools and homes which need to become energy-efficient. We should end our addiction to oil and gas as soon as we can, with clean solar and wind energy.

We need health care reform now. Having to stay in a bad job because you, your spouse or your kid needs medical care is a modern day form of slavery, not freedom!

We need to promote lending by small and large banks – and break up the so-called “too big to fail” banks. We need a real Consumer Financial Productions Protection Agency. We need real, not fake, reform.

The American Dream is under attack. And this is the fight of our generation. It is a fight Americans have been fighting since our Revolution – a fight to make equal opportunity a reality, not an empty slogan.

Lose this fight, and we lose our country to a bunch of over-pampered plutocrats. We lose opportunities for ourselves and our children to succeed.

Politicians too timid to fight for solutions to our serious national problems, such as some Blue Dog Democrats, do not deserve our support. And we must throw out of office politicians directly working against our general welfare – unfortunately, that includes all Congressional and Senate Republicans, who are marching in lock-step with the GOP bully boys determined to oppose any Obama program.

People move forward both as groups and as individuals. But right now the American middle class is moving backward, not forward. Over-pampered plutocrats don’t need unemployment compensation, but plenty of us in the middle class have had to rely on it just to pay the bills and help our families to survive. Wall Street bankers don’t need union protections or a jobs program – but millions of us regular Americans do.

Look around. We all know that real unemployment is above 16 percent when you count people only partially-employed. We need our banks, large and small, to lend to small businesses to create new jobs.

We need to address the needs of the majority of Americans, not the privileged few.

*****