Election over! What a night! America says: "Obama, we trust you better to lead us out of this wretched valley of inequality and poverty and paralysis of political institutions. But -- the status quo stalemate in place since the Republican 2010 House takeover must end. The current fragile rate of employment improvement is not enough!"
For working people the election resets the ground rules for dealing with the next big "class" collision approaching us at high speed: the fiscal cliff challenge. Because of sequestration legislation passed last summer to avoid default on US debts, Congress is allegedly mandated to make big across the board cuts, both military and non-military, unless they come to agreement on a comprehensive plan to manage the deficit.
Boehner and Obama came close to a deal roughly modelled on the Simpson-Bowles commission. Eric Cantor, shop steward for the Tea-baggers and Republican House Majority Leader sabotaged that deal. In the new Congress any deal in the Senate will probably need 3 Republican votes to block a filibuster. In addition Boehner will have to have the mojo to put the big squeeze on the tea party.
Now, there are corporate, blue-dog, and other forces encouraging a resumption of the big Obama-Boehner deal. The problem with that deal is that it puts social security, medicare and medicaid on "the bargaining table" of the "big deal", and thus, at risk!. It also puts taxes on the wealthy on the table which the tea-baggers and Norquist nixed the last time around.
Not least of concern, there is the question of who is at the bargaining table?? Is Rich Trumka there? Will Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and John Lewis --- the most respected and incorruptible voices in Congress -- be there? Will single-payer extensions of the Affordable Health Care Act, as in Vermont, be on the table? Will Latino, African American, womens and other constituencies deeply affected by threatened cuts and loss of rights be heard. Will youth have a voice? The answer to that question lies in the readiness of the majority who braved the long lines and ideological barrages to re-elect the President to further demonstrate their will.
The president was right, in his remarks early Wednesday morning, to alert his decisive, but narrow majority, coalition of support to be on call for further service in the art of self-government. We need the power and feeling of the occupy movement and scientific organization of the labor and Obama campaigns ground operations to send a powerful and united message that further austerity on the backs of workers will undermine, not improve, the prospects for recovery from this depression.
The coming battle needs to put the debt question in proper perspective. There is no alternative to greater taxation of the rich. Period. If making access to education, health care, and retirement part of expanded rights --- that's the name our constitution gives "entitlements" --- is what the far right likes to call "dragging the country into European - style 'socialism'" --- so be it. The disaster of 2008 has been traced by all sober observers to the excesses of unregulated and unfettered speculation on Wall Street. The scale of their operations however makes them too big to fail without serious destabilizing harm to all of society, which, led to partial nationalization of the resulting debt
What I do not understand is why more of the cosmopolitan factions of financial and multinational corporations, as well as many entrepreneurial minded professionals and small business constituencies do not outright endorse this direction. If healthcare, opportunities of your children for access to quality education, a dignified retirement are more or less socialized, the barriers to entry would be removed for thousands, even millions, of innovators.
But, bottom line -- its not time to lay down the sword and shield of political battle. Occupy proved that action can change a national conversation. We need to get in the way of the obstacles to the voices of working people being heard across this land as the showdown on taxes --- and all of its side-effects aimed at social security and medicare and medicaid --- approaches the "fiscal cliff".
Perhaps approaching catastrophe can focus our minds, and remind us that the right of self-government indeed includes a mandatory requirement to participate and advance the common interests and aspirations that constitute the mandate of this election.
To the Streets!
