DEFENDING THE AMERICAN DREAM:

After decades of center-right control of government that recklessly deregulated Wall Street, stagnated middle class wages, decimated job growth, and left tens of millions of Americans without health care, progressives have put themselves to work rebuking the conservative vision of America by rebuilding the American Dream.


Last night, conservatives in the Senate prevented the passage of a bill that would provide states "critical aid that would keep firefighters, police officers and teachers employed." During the Bush administration, conservatives continually stifled efforts to prevent wage discrimination against women. President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act during his first month in office, expanding and ensuring women's right to equal pay for equal work. While Bush's Labor Secretary Elaine Chao spent eight years "walking away from [the department's] regulatory function across a range of issues, including wage and hour law and workplace safety," Obama's Labor Secretary Hilda Solis has lobbyists for big business squirming due to her "aggressive moves to boost enforcement and crack down on businesses that violate workplace safety rules." While progressives fought vigorously to expand health coverage to 32 million people, conservatives took the insurance industry's side. Shortly after the Affordable Care Act legislation passed without a single Republican vote, the GOP immediately began talking about repealing it. Speaking at the America's Future Now! conference last week, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) summed up the contrast between progressive and conservative ideology this way: "When we see somebody who's unemployed, we want them to have a job; when we someone who is homeless, we want that person to get a home; when you look at it deep down, we're following a 3,000 year old imperative, one that every just society has known for three millenia, and that's very simple: it's to feed the hungry, to shelter the homeless, and to heal the sick. That's what we believe in. Now the other side really has an entirely different point of view. The other side wants to have you solve all your own problems even if they're beyond your ability to solve them. They want us to be like atoms bouncing off each other in the void rather than like human beings."