UNITED STATES: Activists Move Against Right-Wing Agenda

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

WASHINGTON, Jul 17 1996 (IPS) - Declaring that “those who got us into this fix are not likely to lead us out,” more than 100 prominent U.S. community, labour, environmental, and civil rights activists launched the ‘Campaign for America’s Future’ here Wednesday.

America’s Future is both a campaign and an organisation. It “will insist that the question of falling wages and rising insecurity be placed at the centre of our national debate,” according to its mission statement, ‘Taking Back Our Future’.

This, because “economic insecurity, moral vacuity, and political scandal” are the defining characteristics of the United States today, in the mission statement’s words.

“This growing anxiety is a product of the continued failure to address the changing economy that is producing growing inequality and insecurity, an economy in which more and more Americans work harder and longer for less,” the statement says.

By its own admission, however, the Campaign has yet to work out a full agenda and specific policy recommendations. These, the founders say, should emerge from a four-year public discussion of the issues. The first priority will be to train the U.S. political spotlight on the lot of working people, say Campaign co-directors Robert Borosage and Roger Hickey.

In this election year, the campaign’s founders also are seeking to mobilise public opinion against “the threats posed by the radical Gingrich Congress,” a reference to the Republican Congressional majority elected in 1994 and led by Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich.

“When Newt Gingrich’s supporters in Congress are attacking clean water laws at the same time (as) they are trying to pass legislation to undermine unions, facing a common enemy tends to bring us together,” according to Mark Childress of the Environmental Working Group.

Other Campaign members include such bodies as the American Federation of Labour/Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL- CIO), the Labour-backed Economic Policy Institute, and the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think-tank.

Beyond the elections, the Campaign’s goals are broad. It will seek ways to raise workers’ wages and hold corporations accountable to their employees and the communities in which they operate.

It will promote ways of cutting “corporate welfare,” meaning the direct and indirect incentives and subsidies that corporations receive from the public sector. It will seek to renew “America’s social contract” by ensuring universal health care, for example, and to establish a smaller, more cost-effective defence budget.

The organisation also seeks to change the way in which trade policy is made. “The choice is not between ‘free trade and protectionism’ — the former does not exist in the modern world; the latter offers no solution,” according to a Campaign statement. Again, the details have yet to be worked out.

“For 20 years, citizens have watched as misguided policies and entrenched money politics have failed working people,” said Borosage.

“Americans are realising that if we want to put our country back on track for a more promising and secure future, we’re going to have to do it ourselves,” he added.

“If we can ignite a new political majority, we need not surrender Washington to unaccountable corporations and their innumerable lobbyists. We can make this government work for working people again,” according to Borosage.