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Focused Read 3-5 minutes
“ … Obama dismissed
the notion that the Republicans had captured the issue of inequality.
“The Republicans don’t care about that issue,” he said.
“There’s no pretense that anything that they’re putting
forward, any congressional proposals that are going to come forward,
will reduce inequality. . . . What I do concern myself
with, and the Democratic Party is going to have to concern itself
with, is the fact that the confluence of globalization and technology
is making the gap between rich and poor, the mismatch in power
between capital and labor, greater all the time. And that’s true
globally.
“The
prescription that some offer, which is stop trade, reduce global
integration, I don’t think is going to work,” he went on. “If
that’s not going to work, then we’re going to have to redesign
the social compact in some fairly fundamental ways over the next
twenty years. And I know how to build a bridge to that new social
compact. It begins with all the things we’ve talked about in the
past—early-childhood education, continuous learning, job training,
a basic social safety net, expanding the earned-income tax credit,
investments in infrastructure—which, by definition, aren’t
shipped overseas. All of those things accelerate growth, give you
more of a runway. But at some point, when the problem is not just
Uber but driverless Uber, when radiologists are losing their jobs to
A.I., then we’re going to have to figure out how do we maintain a
cohesive society and a cohesive democracy in which productivity and
wealth generation are not automatically linked to how many hours you
put in, where the links between production and distribution are
broken, in some sense. Because I can sit in my office, do a bunch of
stuff, send it out over the Internet, and suddenly I just made a
couple of million bucks, and the person who’s looking after my kid
while I’m doing that has no leverage to get paid more than ten
bucks an hour.”
The sense that, on the
level of politics and policy, there was work to be done (“I know
how to build a bridge to that new social compact”) infused the
post-Presidential role that he sketched for himself. “I’ll be
fifty-five when I leave”—he knocked on a wooden end
table—“assuming that I get a couple more decades of good health,
at least, then I think both Michelle and I are interested in creating
platforms that train, empower, network, boost the next generation of
leadership. And I think that, whatever shape my Presidential center
takes, I’m less interested in a building and campaign posters and
Michelle’s dresses, although I think it’s fair to say that
Michelle’s dresses will be the biggest draw by a huge margin. But
what we’ll be most interested in is programming that helps the next
Michelle Obama or the next Barack Obama, who right now is sitting out
there and has no idea how to make their ideals live, isn’t quite
sure what to do—to give them resources and ways to think about
social change.” … “
You can read the story
here
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Focused Thought
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Focused Action
You
can share the President's “Mic Drop” Tweet here
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Direct source information for Democrats:
The Democratic Party Website
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Thank you for Networking for Democrats today!
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Remember 2018...
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Curated by Gail Mountain, Network For #StrongerTogether ! is not affiliated with The Democratic Party in any capacity. This is an independent blog and the hope is you will, at a glance, learn more about the Democratic Party and you will, with a click or two, also take action on its behalf daily!
( You can also find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/GKMTNtwits )
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