Texas Longhorns with newborn calf in Bluebonnets

Texas Longhorns with newborn calf in Bluebonnets

Please note I have a new phone number...

512-517-2708

Alan Maki

Alan Maki
Doing research at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas

It's time to claim our Peace Dividend

It's time to claim our Peace Dividend

We need to beat swords into plowshares.

We need to beat swords into plowshares.

A program for real change...

http://peaceandsocialjustice.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-progressive-program-for-real-change.html


What we need is a "21st Century Full Employment Act for Peace and Prosperity" which would make it a mandatory requirement that the president and Congress attain and maintain full employment.


"Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens"

- Ben Franklin

Let's talk...

Let's talk...

Monday, January 3, 2011

Primary Obama and unite around a people's agenda for real change

I don't think we should get hung up too much on "who" the candidates are to get rid of Obama. As working people who are liberals, progressives and leftists we need to be advancing an alternative to Wall Street's agenda of war abroad and austerity at home; an agenda that places human need before war and corporate greed; we need to create jobs by putting people to work solving the problems of people and society--- pay for it all with the "peace dividend" coming from ending these dirty wars, taxing the rich and taxing Wall Street profits.




There are two really pressing needs the American people have right now:



1. Acceess to health care



2. Child care



With National Public Health Care and National Public Child Care systems we put ten-million and three-million people to work. Combine this with restarting WPA to maintain and upgrade our infrastructure and the CCC to see to it that our forests are adequate for future needs and we have a full-employment economy.



Taking such an alternative agenda into our neighborhoods, schools and places of employment we develop the kind of liberal-progressive-left movement from which leaders will come forward who will become our candidates for public office.



This is a bunch of crap having to rely on well-heeled "professional" politicians to support who don't even have the common human decency to step forward to run when they know it is the right thing to do.



Let's concern ourselves with re-building the historic liberal-progressive-left coalition around an alternative agenda and then we have a solid block of voters with votes that we can at least "bargain" with.



The agenda I have proposed is not something I just thought up out of thin air; it is the result of talking face-to-face with thousands of people and it is actually part of the unfinished agenda from the New Deal that Frances Perkins advocated--- peace, health care, child care, jobs for all.



Any candidate who can't support this kind of agenda does not deserve the votes of liberals, progressives or the left and as a group/coalition we shouldn't give in to supporting candidates based upon "promises" to support reforms like EFCA which we have all now clearly seen was used as a gimmick by these Wall Street politicians to divide the working class which is mainly very liberal, quite progressive with a growing left wing.



I don't see why we shouldn't be pushing the only candidate who has a chance to defeat Obama on this short notice in the 2012 Primary--- Hillary Clinton with the understanding that we are supporting her in the Primary with one clear purpose: defeat Obama; as we tell her we are walking in the General Election unless she agrees to our alternative agenda.



Let's get real here; no Democrat--- not anyone of them--- can win a Primary or General Election without the votes of liberals, progressives and the left... all bring very important things into the political process; number one of which is a desire for peace and re-ordering the priorities of this country away from war and military spending and towards meeting the needs of the people.