Looking for some hope that the commons might soon emerge as a campaign issue in the next election?
Well take a look at this video of Elizabeth Warren at a campaign appearance in her race for the Massachusetts Senate seat once held by Ted Kennedy.
Warren, who came to prominence as passionate champion of middle-class Americans suffrering from the financial crash and subsequent corporate bail-outs, offers an eloquent explanation of how the commons works.
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own,” she declares. “Nobody. You built a factory out there, good for you, but I want to be clear—you moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of the police forces and fire forces the rest of us paid for.”
She also offers a brilliantly vivid explanation for how we got into this budget mess, and it’s not greedy grandmas on Social Security to blame.
The problem is that we spent “one trillion dollars on tax cuts for the rich. Two trillion dollars with two wars that we put on a credit card for our children and grandchildren to pay off. And we got into this for one trillion with a Medicare drug program was A) not paid for, and B) was 40 percent more expensive than it needed to be because it was a giveaway to the drug companies.
“Part of the way you fix this problem is not to do those things,” she notes.
For more information on Elizabeth Warren, see “www.ElizabethWarren.com”:http://www.ElizabethWarren.com