From Campaign for America’s Future: http://blog.ourfuture.org/20130122/jobs-and-economic-justice-will-we-lead-or-be-lulled-by-the-speech
By Richard Eskow
January 22, 2013
The President gave a terrific speech. But if great speeches could heal our economic wounds, if they could repair the ever-increasing gap between the rich and the rest of us, if they could re-open the closing doors of opportunity for the young, the African-American, the Hispanic, and the graying members of our workforce, we’d be living in a different country today.
We must never forget that in a democracy it’s the people, not their elected officials, who lead. This speech leaves progressive Americans, and that great American majority that agrees with them on economic issues, with a choice:
Will we be pacified with rhetoric, or will we demand – and take – action? Will we lead?
Words
The speech included stirring, if vague, statements about economic fairness. “Our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it,” said the President. “We believe that America’s prosperity must rest upon the broad shoulders of a rising middle class.”
That’s certainly true, for all the reasons laid out by economist Joseph Stiglitz his New York Times op-ed of last week. But the President offered no specifics about the growing wealth inequality that has allowed the wealthiest to take more and more of the national income while the rest of the nation. That inequality is truly stunning, and (as polls have shown) is far worse than the American people realize.
This was an opportunity to teach the American people. It was an opportunity to make the case for government job creation, to talk about the need for good jobs at good wages.
It was not taken.
Continue reading at: http://blog.ourfuture.org/20130122/jobs-and-economic-justice-will-we-lead-or-be-lulled-by-the-speech
