[Peace-discuss] Healthcare, guaranteed jobs, minimum income, housing - no; money for banks - yes

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Obama's grand tour, as was only to be expected, is a vast propaganda operation 
for ongoing American polices (including what some saw as the real test -- the 
Czech-Polish US missiles).  This administration simply does with lying and 
misdirection what the last did with callow openness.  Neither is "a decent 
respect for the opinions of mankind."  What those policies would and wouldn't be 
under a Democratic administration was seen clearly by some before the election. 
The following is from Howard Zinn, a year ago.  --CGE]


...Today, we can be sure that the Democratic Party, unless it faces a popular 
upsurge, will not move off center. The two leading Presidential candidates have 
made it clear that if elected, they will not bring an immediate end to the Iraq 
War, or institute a system of free health care for all.

They offer no radical change from the status quo.

They do not propose what the present desperation of people cries out for: a 
government guarantee of jobs to everyone who needs one, a minimum income for 
every household, housing relief to everyone who faces eviction or foreclosure.

They do not suggest the deep cuts in the military budget or the radical changes 
in the tax system that would free billions, even trillions, for social programs 
to transform the way we live.

None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has broken with its 
historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only 
when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the 
Sixties. We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will 
even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist 
greed and militarism...


Full article at <http://www.progressive.org/mag_zinn0308>.