What Progressives Want

By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News

29 November 20

 

ortune 500 News loves to try to define what Progressives want. Voters always gravitate to Progressive policies, and that makes them a good vehicle with which corporate pundits can define and steer public opinion. But it really isn’t so complicated. Let’s have a look at what Progressives want, vintage 2020-2021.

Voting Rights Reform

Nothing changes without voting rights. It’s the gateway to reform and progress across the political spectrum. The Fortune 500 crowd and their Washington enablers well understand this, and that is why there are and always have been such elaborate and shameless efforts to suppress voting rights. Fix voting rights first, and the other agenda items will follow.

Progressives are unified behind the issue of voting rights reform.

Climate Change and the Environment

To say that climate change is a disaster understates the threat. Climate change is causing an ever-growing series of disasters all around the world. From raging wildfires to massive floods and storms of biblical proportion, the effects are severe and accelerating.

Progressives clearly want to be part of a global effort to combat climate change and protect the natural environment.

Healthcare/Medicare for All

Sounds redundant, but for-profit corporate healthcare still maintains its stranglehold on the US healthcare system, with no end in sight. Obamacare was a noble effort and is certainly better than what came before, but it’s no match for Medicare.

Obamacare has helped a great deal, but it does nothing to mitigate the healthcare industry’s profiteering, and it’s dying a death by a thousand paper cuts. Congress, the executive branch, and the courts all continue to chip away at its underpinnings.

Medicare has none of those problems. It’s a rock-solid 55-year-old LBJ-era institution. It has the infrastructure and the staying power to withstand challenges from all detractors. So then why not just go with Medicare? It’s the profits, stupid.

If people had the option to sign up for Medicare, they would — and the market would put the for-profit-healthcare-industry out of business without a single stroke of legislation. That’s why neither Republicans nor Democrats will allow for the expansion of Medicare. Their healthcare industry benefactors will not allow it.

Healthcare/Medicare for All is a bedrock Progressive issue.

Police Reform

How many deaths will it take? Policing in America is too violent. Each year in the US police kill roughly a thousand people. That’s bad for communities, bad for the police officers involved, bad for the rule of law, and most-importantly, totally unnecessary.

Progressives are committed to pressing for police reform.

An End to US Militarism and Colonialism

US foreign policy has been rooted in militarism for nearly two centuries. True diplomacy has been nothing more than a caged exhibit down at the State Department for decades.

Progressives want America to be a social, environmental, and economic partner with the rest of the world, not an enforcer and intimidator of other nations. Mitigation of catastrophic military undertakings has been a defining and uniting theme for the Progressive movement from its inception.

Human Rights

A lack of respect for basic human dignity has been at the root of every misguided episode in mankind’s history. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, in a real and tangible sense, is what Progressives want for all members of the extended human family.

It is attainable.

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Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.