A round up of stories today about opportunity in America, pulled from a variety of nonprofits, race and immigration blogs, and mainstream media outlets. Cross posted at State of Opportunity, a blog about human rights and the American Dream.
- Alan Jenkins' newest piece is live on TomPaine.com. Entitled 'A Real Values Debate,' the opinion begins:
"Progressives have long been criticized for talking issues and constituencies at the expense of vision and values. Linguist George Lakoff has argued for years that progressives have ceded the moral high ground to their detriment. And Thomas Frank has documented how conservatives tell a larger story that connects with working people at a values level, even while undermining their economic interests.
That critique has never been fully accurate. The continuing human rights movements led by people of color, women, gay people, and immigrants have always been rooted in the values of freedom, equality, dignity and opportunity. As Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights has said, "there's a reason why Martin Luther King Jr.'s greatest speech was not called 'I have a complaint.'" The modern environmental movement, too, speaks not only of our individual interests but also of our moral responsibility as stewards of the earth and its inhabitants.
But it is also true that progressive political discourse has increasingly moved away from a discussion of shared national values and toward a patchwork of issues and narrow policy fixes. That dynamic has certainly played out this presidential election season, with last month's "Values Voters Summit" priming candidates' commitment to conservative values while progressives largely haggled over the details of policy proposals.
But that's about to change. On December 1, a coalition of Iowa social justice groups will host the Heartland Presidential Forum: Community Values in Action, in Des Moines, Iowa. Just four weeks before the Iowa caucuses, it will be a presidential forum focused not on specific issues, but on progressive vision and values."
- The Inteligenta Indiĝena Indigenismo Novaĵoservo blog has reposted a Crooks and Liars piece about a Washington state assisted living facility that is evicting its residents that are on Medicaid. Unlike other states, Washington does not have a law to protect its vulnerable senior citizens against such decisions by profit-minded nursing home corporations.
- Prometheus 6 has posted about a New York Times article on the increasing presence of international medical crews providing health services in the US to the 47 million people without medical insurance, or 15 percent of the American population. One such service known as Remote Area Medical, or RAM, works most often in "Guyana, India, Tanzania and Haiti," but has been noted for their expeditions in rural Virginia, where members of the community have begun lining up at 3am in order to be seen by medical workers.
- In election news, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is proposing a plan to make community colleges free of cost for American high school graduates, a move that would greatly increase opportunities for many of our young people. Meanwhile, Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani has indicated his support for a 'virtual' border fence run by high tech surveillance, a policy which would not address the need for more comprehensive reform of our immigration and trade policies.
"Human rights are defined, most notably in the U.S. Bill of Rights. They are defined because the Founding Fathers realized that if they were not defined, they would be more likely to be abrogated or lost entirely. The Founding Fathers understood the temptation on the part of governments to give and remove human rights arbitrarily, because they had experienced such things before the Revolutionary War -- in the Stamp Act, in the quartering of British soldiers on American households, and in illegal searches and seizures, in no taxation without representation. They recognized that although British Law customarily acknowledged various human rights, it was essential to name, codify, and write them down to make it less likely that they could be taken away."