The Wild Reed: Marianne Williamson’s Economic Bill of Rights

Author and Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson recently appeared on The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow where she talked about her candidacy and, in particular, her recently launched “21st Century Economic Bill of Rights,” a 10-point plan that offers a “vision for a moral economy.”

On her official campaign website, Marianne says the following about her Economic Bill of Rights.

Economists go on television day after day and tell us the economy is basically doing well, when in fact, this begs the question: doing well for whom? . . . America’s economy is not doing well for the 1 in 4 Americans who carry medical debt, or have to work two or three jobs to make ends meet, or struggle to feed their children. In fact, the rate of poverty in America is higher than in any other advanced democracy. The plight of the poor, the near-poor, and the afraid of becoming poor, is a national crisis largely ignored by the political elite in this country. Tweaking things here and tweaking things there might disturb the monster of economic despair; but it does not slay it.

Some level of economic anxiety is now a feature, not a bug, of the American experience. According to a recent CNBC poll, 70 per cent of Americans report feeling financially stressed. People’s job or career choices are too often determined not by a natural passion or proclivity, but by their need for health care benefits, enough money for child care, or an ability to pay off their college or medical debt. Quite simply, that is not the way to have an abundant or a prosperous life.

Such factors accumulate and result in a life riddled with lost opportunity.

I am running for president to address that – not just the symptoms, but also the causes, of this era of American despair. When you do, you see a great big elephant sitting on the coffee table in America’s living room. That elephant is our need for fundamental economic reform.

People are not struggling because one party has failed and the other might do better. Not at all. People are struggling because the entire political system over the last fifty years has left millions of people behind, creating and countenancing the destruction of America’s middle class. Forces of economic royalism that have sucked the majority of America’s financial resources into the hands of one per cent of Americans are headquartered in both political parties, and the Democrats will win in 2024 – as well as for the foreseeable future – by reclaiming its traditional values as the party that tells those forces to get the hell out.

I am a Democrat because I was raised to believe that the Democratic Party is the party of the people. That is not, however, a fact universally acknowledged by American voters today, and that is the fundamental threat to our party’s success. We will win in 2024 by becoming once again the party of unequivocal advocacy for the working people of the United States.

I see the Declaration of Independence as America’s mission statement. As with any individual or group, the principles of a mission statement are the set of commitments on which we stand. It’s in constant reference to what President John Adams called America’s First Principles that we find our North Star. Staying true to that vision, we move forward. When we ignore it or abandon it, we falter.

We are faltering now, and for just that reason.

We have allowed the economics of corporate greed to overpower the principles as well as the promise of the Declaration of Independence, and it is the responsibility of our generation to rescue them.

The Declaration of Independence lays out America’s social contract, namely that government is here for its people – and not the other way around. All men are endowed with certain inalienable rights and governments are instituted to secure those rights – the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Now, over two hundred years later, we need to ask ourselves whether government is or is not doing that job. For millions of Americans, the answer would be a resounding no. In the words of Franklin Roosevelt, “a necessitous man is not a free man.” A person dying from lack of health care due to an insurance company’s incalcitrance is hardly guaranteed the right to life. A child raised in a domestic war zone is not at liberty to play safely in her front yard. A person having to work two or three jobs to make ends meet; or struggling to feed their children; or being poisoned by environmental toxins spewed into their neighborhood because it’s a “sacrifice zone,” are hardly free to pursue happiness.

Make no mistake about it. Those are not hypotheticals; they are the lived realities of millions of Americans. Economic hardship is a form of modern oppression, in part underlying every single social problem in our midst, from incarceration to depression to addiction. There is no overstating the deleterious effects of chronic economic pain on our society – simply because of the effect it has on people’s lives – that the poor, the near poor, and the afraid-of-becoming poor now make up a majority of American citizens. For the 60 per cent of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, the fear of economic disaster is never far from one’s mind.

We all know this. The time has come to say it. And it’s time to do something about it.

The Wild Reed

Thursday, June 08, 2023

Marianne Williamson’s Economic Bill of Rights

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