Middle Class Must Organize to Take Back America from the Rich
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A recent Pew Foundation poll shows 53 percent of Americans believe government is helping Wall Street and the rich, while only 3 percent believe it is helping the middle class. Those figures are not a coincidence, but reflect what is really happening in our political system today, says Jacob Hacker.
Hacker spoke yesterday evening at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., in a book event that featured introductory remarks by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. Hacker, co-author of “Winner-Take-All Politics,” said the nation’s wealthiest people and Big Business colluded with conservative ideologues in the late 1970s to hijack the political process and change government regulatory and tax policies.
By concentrating large amounts of resources and money in political action groups and lobbying, they changed the political climate in Washington, causing every Congress and president, Democrat and Republican, to adapt. As a result, taxes for the wealthiest Americans were cut, deregulation took hold in a big way and unions still face major obstacles getting legislation passed.
Health Care ‘Co-Ops’: Strategy for Killing Real Health Care Reform
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U.S. House and Senate health care reform bills that have won committee approval contain a public health insurance option as a vital component and that, says a new report released this morning, “is considerable cause for celebration.”
The report’s author, Yale University professor Jacob S. Hacker, also warns that efforts to push health care cooperatives, which recently have been floated as an alternative to a public option, are meant
“to kill the public plan and, with it, the prospect of an effective competitor to consolidated insurance companies that have too often failed to provide affordable health security.”
The report, commissioned by the Institute for America’s Future, details how a strong public health insurance plan is critical to successfully achieving the goals of health reform—lower costs, higher quality and guaranteed health security for all Americans.
Time to Think Big, Push for Progressive Government Action
President Obama’s economic stimulus package is just the beginning of a long-overdue public investment in rebuilding our nation’s economy. And now is the time to seek broad solutions—to think big about what can be done.
Today at the Thinking Big/Thinking Forward conference, hundreds of progressives took the first steps to building a movement to coalesce public support for a more activist, progressive government to rebuild our nation’s economy.
The one-day conference in Washington, D.C., was co-sponsored by The American Prospect, Institute for America’s Future, Demos, and the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
Public Plan Choice Needed in Health Care Reform
This is the first in a series of occasional articles looking at health care reform proposals from a wide range of groups and experts.
The incoming Obama administration is still developing a comprehensive plan to address a broad range of health care concerns. The AFL-CIO has not endorsed a specific plan but has called for one that secures high-quality health care for all.
The AFL-CIO has endorsed certain concepts that any plan should be built around. One of those key elements is the creation of a public health care insurance plan as an option for workers and families who either have private insurance coverage or no coverage at all.
