A Credo for Progressives, from Elizabeth Warren's keynote speech at NN14

Credo. Latin for I Believe. It struck me as I was listening to Senator Warren's speech, particularly when she identified the campaigns of 2014 and 2106 as fights about values, that the litany of values she identified could stand as our marching orders, and even as a shibboleth of sorts. In case you haven't seen the speech, here it is:

Now, the ten values and causes, with a bit of explanation. Some of this material has been diaried about here, and I'll link the ones I think do a better job than I can to explain each value/cause.

1) The re-regulation of Wall Street: A lot of us scratched our heads when Bill Clinton signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (1933), which prohibited commercial banks from participating in the investment business, in 1999. At least one commentator, James Rickards, believes that repeal caused the financial crisis of 2008. Congress was able to pass the Dodd-Frank Act, which Paul Krugman wrote about on Sunday, an article which xaxnar diaried, concluding that

We can use the successes of Dodd-Frank to date to argue for more of the same. It's all about establishing forward momentum and taking the initiative away from the other side for a change.

No, it's not enough, and Senator Warren has proposed the restoration of Glass-Steagall to decouple the commercial banks and the investment banks once and for all.

2) Science: If it isn't clear at this point that the Republicans don't believe in science as it applies at least to climate change and to evolution. I'm not sure what I need to say about this. Here's Katrina Vanden Heuvel in the Washington Post from October 2011, riffing on some of the areas where prominent Republicans reject science:

The contempt with which the party views reason is staggering. Republicans have become proudly and unquestionably anti-science. (It is their litmus test, though they would probably reject the science behind litmus paper.)

and here's a link to an excellent book by Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (2005) which has not lost any of its salience in the past nine years.

3) Net Neutrality: At this point, we have an ongoing skirmish over the issue of keeping a single-track Internet, and it's still pending. Senator Warren is a strong critic of the FCC Net Neutrailty plan, and, for a review of the issues, here's Joan McCarter from May 2014 .

4) Raising the Minimum Wage: Really, what advocate of the working class can oppose that? It's currently languishing at $7.25 an hour, where it's been since July 2009. Naturally, the Republicans oppose this because it might cost the 1% something (and that means, they think, a drop in what the 1% will contribute to Republican campaigns). This is something the Obama administration has been working on, but at this point it's an issue for local governments.

And here are Richard Trumka and Christine Owens on the subject:

A recent national survey conducted for the National Employment Law Project by Hart Research Associates finds that 80% of the public -- including 62% of Republicans -- support a minimum wage increase. Just 25% think that raising America's wage floor would cost jobs, a view that's also falling out of favor with economists. Raising the minimum wage does not result in job losses, respected academic research shows, even during bad economic times.

It's a moral issue too. From Reverend Barber's agenda for North Carolina:

Securing prolabor antipoverty policies that ensure economic sustainability.

Quod erat disputandum.

5) Solving the Problem of Student Debt: More axiomatic stuff. We can't -- and we shouldn't -- have a generation whose initial task after graduation is to pay off the debt it accumulated getting ready to enter the work force. If I REALLY want to be cynical about this, I could describe this as the 1% perpetuating an underclass by making sure all these students who are the first in their families to go to college never get ahead, but I think this is more one of those incidental benefits to the 1%. This is one of Senator Warren's core issues. The Republicans, of course don't want to upset the nice arrangements the banks have made on these, so this is one of the points that should define us.

6) Retirement with Dignity: This, of course, is the attempt to divert funds from Social Security and Medicare, in the same way that charter schools divert money from municipal and state school funds. You may remember that after the 2004 election, George W. Bush announced that he had gained political capital from his victory, and, to that end, in his next SOTU address he

declared that Social Security was "headed for bankruptcy." As a remedy, he outlined a proposal for younger workers to divert some of their payroll tax contributions to the program into private accounts, where people could invest in a "conservative mix of bonds and stock funds." He argued that these personal accounts could deliver a higher rate of return than what Social Security offers.

More money for the banks and for Republican coffers from privatization. Now, it's being argued that the assault on the New Deal and Great Society measures is over. I don't think we're out of the woods on this yet, and this is an issue that most assuredly defines the difference between progressives and the people to the right of us.

7) Equal Pay for Equal Work: Another fairness issue. The Lillie Ledbetter Act didn't quite achieve what people expected. It established the principle that people in the same workplace should be paid the same wage for doing the same work, but it didn't have an enforcement mechanism. Here's the ACLU on the subject:

The Paycheck Fairness Act will help secure equal pay for equal work for all Americans. The bill would update the Equal Pay Act of 1963, a law that has not been able to achieve its promise of closing the wage gap because of limited enforcement tools and inadequate remedies.

And, predictably,

On Wednesday [April 9 2014], Senate Republicans blocked—for the third time—the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill proposing to close the pay gap between men and women.

Why? According to the same article, the Equal Pay Act was a smokescreen to distract from the failures (um, right) of Obamacare. Do I really need to say more about this?

8) Equal means Equal: For women. For LGBT people. For EVERYONE. Because the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees it. Our opponents? Here's Reverend Barber again:

The reality is, the greatest myth of our time is that extremist policies only hurt a small subset of people such as people of color, or women, or poor, or the LGBT community, when in fact they hurt us all.

So we need the kind of coalition where educational advocates stand for education, but they also stand up for LGBT rights.

Where health care advocates stand up for health care, but they also stand up for labor rights.

Where labor rights people yes stand for labor rights, but they also stand up for civil rights.  

Why?  Because we understand that these tea party type extremists, they are against us all.

The same people that fight labor rights, they fight women's rights.

And the same people that fight women's rights fight LGBT rights.

And the same people that fight LGBT rights fight working rights.

And the same people that fight workers' rights they fight healthcare rights.

And the same people that fight healthcare rights they fight immigrants' rights.

if they are together and we're not together who's the fool?

9) Fixing the Immigration Situation: The Senate has passeda comprehensive immigration reform bill with the support of some of the less rabid Republicans. The House Republicans refuse to let that bill come to the floor. Why? Here's the real reason, courtesy of the Brookings Institution:

House Republicans aren’t motivated by true conservatism. Rather, they represent constituencies haunted by anxiety associated with the perception that they’re "losing their country" to immigrants from south of the border.

It's part of a culture war INSIDE the party. This is a divide candidates can RUN on. I cant find any clearer example of what progressivism should be about

10) Corporations Aren't People: From howstuffworks.com:

There's a term that describes a situation when a court makes something out of nothing: It's called legal fiction. This jargon refers to the law's ability to decree that something that's not necessarily true is true. It's somewhat like a person in a discussion agreeing to accept an opinion as fact for the sake of argument in order to move the discussion along. Legal fiction helps to move proceedings along.

snip

But in order to determine the legality of business proceedings, the legal fiction of treating a corporation as an artificial person was created.

I probably don't need to tell you that the current Supreme Court hasn't ONLY confirmed that money is speech, corporations now apparently have religious beliefs as well.

So that's what we believe in. I'm perfectly happy with these values as marching orders, I just wish they could be expressed in one or two sentences.