An Open Letter to Markos Moulitsas Zúniga

Earlier this week, on Meet the Press, you were asked what the top three issues are and what your position on them would be. You avoided answering that question and in my opinion you passed up a golden opportunity to illustrate that the left does have a clear vision of what we want in America that it is far better than the right wing’s vision we have seen unfold over the last 27 years since Reagan.

I understand what you were trying to do in avoiding the question and trying to be a unifier, but in my opinion the time has passed for playing nice and the kid gloves need to come off. The DLC’s position has always been that the Democrats need to move to the right in order to win elections and that it complete crap!

We do not have to lower ourselves to the level of the attack dogs in the right wing in order to win. All we have to do is stand proudly and state what we believe loudly for all to hear! We have to stop running from the label “liberal” and start embracing it! We are this generation's representatives in a long tradition of proud liberals ranging from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to FDR and Martin Luther King Jr. We need to stand up for that heritage!

This is what I would have answered if I were in your position earlier this week:

This is the single most important reform that we must make because no other reforms will be possible until it is done.

Lobbying is essentially legalized bribery and has given special interest groups more access to and more influence over our politicians then We the People now have. Very often these special interest groups represent multi-national corporations with no stake in anything except their own profits. Why should they enjoy greater access to and influence over our elected representatives than the very people they are supposed to be representing?

This is not a new problem. “Campaign finance reform” has been an issue for decades yet despite several attempts at “reform” the problem of corporate control of our government is worse than ever. We now have corporate lobbyists literally writing our laws.

The politicians in Washington represent the people that pay to get them in office. They always will. The only solution therefore is to do away with private donations altogether and go to public financing of elections. It is already working very well in places it has been enacted, like Portland, Oregon.

Because the political process has gotten so far removed from the hands of the people, we are now seeing an unprecedented rise in the power of the Executive Branch. The President is claiming that he has the power to declare himself above the law and can ignore subpoenas and order his underlings to break the law by ignoring subpoenas as well. Because of this situation lifelong Republican conservatives like Bruce Fein and Paul Craig Roberts, both in the Reagan administration, are calling for the impeachment of both Bush and Cheney. Bruce Fein points out that Bush is wielding more power than King George III ever dared claim he had when we rebelled against him to form this great nation.

America remains the only industrialized nation in the world without some form of universal health care. We have 47 million Americans with no health insurance and last year we had 18,000 Americans die from preventable conditions because of a lack of health care coverage.

Anyone who has no insurance or has at least seen the movie “Sicko” knows that the sheer injustice and immorality of our current profit-driven system is an outrage.

The Republicans claim we do not have the money for universal health care but that is only if we continue to spend more on our military then every other industrialized nation in the world combined. We have plenty of money, and if we roll back the Bush and Reagan tax cuts for the wealthy we will not only be able to give health care to all Americans but we can also start rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure at the same time.