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Advocating a platform that both protects and expands freedoms, the Democratic nominee has donned the mantle of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
On Tuesday evening October 29, 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at the Ellipse, supplanting—with unifying oratory— Donald Trump’s divisive rhetoric that prompted an attack on the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. Advocating a platform that both protects and expands freedoms, Harris has donned the mantle of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
During the 2024 Democratic National Convention, most media interpreted the repetition of “freedom” as a reclamation of that word from the Republican Party. But what I heard was FDR’s "Four Freedoms Speech," and I still do. That speech was President Roosevelt’s State of the Union address presented to a joint session of Congress on January 6, 1941. Yes, precisely 80 years prior to Donald Trump’s Outrage on the Ellipse and inside the selfsame Capitol Building where MAGA followers tried violently to usurp power. In addition to defining democratic freedoms, Roosevelt denounced dictatorial tyranny in his address, making his words from that January 6th resonate today as a rebuttal to Trumpism.
Before naming freedoms that unite and protect people, Roosevelt painted a picture of the irrational fears that divide. Unlike most State of the Union Addresses, FDR concentrated not on the internal condition of our union but on threats to all democracies. The President broadened his framework because he spoke at a dire moment: Hitler had conquered most of continental Europe and was terrorizing England. In the speech, Roosevelt never names Hitler and Nazism or Mussolini and Fascism but speaks of “dictators” and “tyranny,” making his warnings easily applicable to our own time.
Roosevelt emphasized that dictators succeed by attacking “…the democratic way of life …[with] poisonous propaganda to destroy unity and promote discord,” a prescient portrait of Trump’s language. Autocrats do not offer policies for debate in a public forum; instead, they fill their audience with fear. “Fear” already had a prominent position in Roosevelt’s rhetoric. He had powerfully laid claim to that word in his first Inaugural on March 4, 1933 when he proclaimed that “…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror….” In 1933, fear resulted from the Great Depression—a fear of unemployment, of homelessness, of starvation, of bank failure. By 1941, that fear had extended to “…assailants [of democratic life] still on the march.” Fear remains today, and Trump uses it to promote a mythic past with restricted liberties, which provides a narrative to the MAGA mythology.
FDR realized that fear obstructs progress and, in his January 6th, 1941 address, cautioned that it “… paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Paralyzes!
FDR spoke from intimate experience of how paralysis limits motion. As an antidote, FDR prescribed expanding freedoms. His 1941 State of the Union defined four broad and basic human rights, now known as Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear.While FDR’s first two Freedoms were established in the First Amendment, the latter two, “from want” and “from fear,” evoked either the expansions granted by his New Deal (such as Work Projects, Unemployment Insurance, and Social Security, all of which alleviated both want and fear) or FDR’s intentions for further augmentation (such as increased medical coverage, job opportunity, and pay equity). Roosevelt believed his “vision [was not for] a distant millennium… [but] attainable in [his] own time….” Part of what makes his address painfully relevant today is that many of Roosevelt’s goals for further rights remain unfulfilled in this new millennium.
Kamala Harris has now revived those goals. Her policies heed FDR’s warning against tyranny by amplifying his call to expand liberties. Like President Roosevelt, Vice President Harris believes in democratic progress.
On January 6, 1941, Roosevelt described American history as “…a perpetual peaceful revolution … adjusting itself to changing conditions … [as] today’s best is not good enough for tomorrow.” But now we must recognize that 1941’s tomorrow is today. Harris’s enlarged Freedom from Want includes freedom for reproductive health, home ownership, and caregiving, while her aspirations to protect Americans from gun violence, climate change, and voter suppression fall under Freedom from Fear. Kamala Harris could lead our democracy towards a better tomorrow if we the people show up for our “…rendezvous with destiny,” as FDR also once said. To give her that opportunity, it's up to us to elect her—along with a Democratic Congress—on November 5, 2024.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Labor Secretary Frances Perkins saved millions of seniors from the poorhouse. Now, Kamala Harris has a plan to save them from another form of institutionalized care, the nursing home.
Kamala Harris has a plan to expand Medicare to include home care. If Harris is elected president and signs her plan into law, it will be life-changing for millions of seniors and people with disabilities. Importantly, it builds upon President Franklin Roosevelt’s vision for a New Deal for the American people.
Vice President Harris should get enormous praise for her groundbreaking proposal. Long-term care is a looming challenge that’s barely getting discussed. Harris recognizes this challenge and is offering an important solution: Medicare At Home.
Harris’s Medicare At Home plan would expand economic security by creating a new universal benefit, in the grand tradition of President Franklin Roosevelt and his visionary Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins.
In 1934, President Roosevelt considered adopting a comprehensive cradle-to-grave program of economic security. Ultimately, he decided to start more slowly and incrementally with what became the Social Security Act of 1935, which, among many other achievements, created Social Security and unemployment insurance. He recognized that Social Security was too important to risk failure by beginning too ambitiously.
A decade later, in 1944, having just been elected for the fourth time, FDR built on this legacy by calling for an economic bill of rights in his State of the Union address. This so-called Second Bill of Rights would give every American the right to comprehensive economic security, including a first–rate education; guaranteed employment at a living wage – “enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation”; a decent home; “adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health”; as well as “adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.”
He understood, as Vice President Harris does, that people want the right, the ability, and the assistance necessary to age in place, with dignity and independence. In a capitalist system like ours, where working families are dependent on wages, economic security requires insurance against the loss of those wages, which Social Security and Unemployment Insurance provide. That is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Economic security and a decent and dignified life also require getting the care you need, including home care.
Medicare provides health care to Americans over age 65 and people with disabilities, but it has a huge gap: Long-term care. Most people think that Medicare covers long-term care, only to face a devastating shock when they (or a loved one) are in need of care.
Long-term care costs around $100,000 per year, so almost no one can afford it. Currently, the only program that covers long-term care is Medicaid. But unlike Medicare, which is universal, Medicaid is means-tested. As a result, seniors and people with disabilities are forced to “spend down” all of their assets, including property, before they can qualify for long-term care through Medicaid.
Sometimes, people must even divorce their loving spouses in order to qualify for long-term care coverage. And even then, after breaking up families and depleting their nest eggs, they may wind up in a dehumanizing corporate nursing home that exists to exploit patients for profit, because that’s still all they can afford.
In one heartbreaking instance, physicist Leon Lederman was forced to sell his Nobel Prize medal for $765,000 to pay for his care — and he still ultimately wound up in a nursing home.
Medicaid was not enacted as a long-term care program, but that is what it has become by default. And because it was not structured to be a long-term care program, it forces middle class seniors to bankrupt themselves so that they can receive care. It forces seniors and people with disabilities into nursing homes when they are healthy enough to remain at home.
This is a system that is fundamentally broken in this country. But Kamala Harris’s new plan for a universal Medicare At Home benefit would finally begin to change all that.
Those who have responsibilities for aging parents are also often caring for young children. Many other Americans are caring for a spouse while also dealing with their own health challenges. Kamala Harris’s Medicare At Home plan would benefit the entire family. It would empower seniors and people with disabilities who are healthy enough to age in place but can’t afford the care they need to remain at home.
Before the creation of Social Security, it was routine for parents to live with their adult children. Those who did not have children, or whose children were unable or unwilling to care for them, were forced into poorhouses.
FDR and Frances Perkins saved millions of seniors from the poorhouse. Now, Kamala Harris has a plan to save them from another form of institutionalized care, the nursing home.
Her plan is completely affordable because the Biden-Harris administration finally stopped letting Big Pharma rip Americans off. Kamala Harris would pay for this new Medicare At Home benefit, along with adding vision and hearing coverage to Medicare, with the savings from Medicare negotiating lower prescription drug prices. Big Pharma will continue to profit, just not at unconscionably exorbitant rates.
Seniors get to pay lower prescription drug prices, and also receive new hearing, vision, and home care benefits. And the so-called sandwich generation will have more time and resources. Moreover, states will benefit because the proposal will reduce their hard-pressed budgets, which are heavily burdened today by the long-term care costs funded by Medicaid. Harris’s proposal is a win-win for everyone (except for Big Pharma CEOs).
Kamala Harris’s Medicare at Home plan is a big step toward fulfilling Medicare’s promise of a simple, universal benefit. When she signs it into law, it will bring us far closer to the grand vision of full economic security first imagined by President Roosevelt and Secretary Perkins.
After 50 years of class war from above and concerted efforts to suppress the working class, the great majority of Americans still crave—and deserve—an economy built for working people. Now we have to fight for it.
With Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, we now have the 2024 Democratic Party ticket—and we clearly recognize that more than that ticket is on the November ballot. But where is the vision to inspire and propel our energies and actions? It’s in our history and our deepest yearnings—and now is the time to make it manifest.
You wouldn’t know it from listening to the corporate media or, for that matter, to Democratic politicians’ campaign speeches and ads, but this year marks the 80th anniversary of President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union message calling for an Economic Bill of Rights for All Americans. This was a speech that inspired the labor movement and progressive organizations to launch major campaigns to try to secure it.
True, they did not realize that vision. The opposition of the corporations, the wealthy, and the right was too strong. But the vision and aspirations did not die. And even now, after 50 years of class war from above and concerted efforts to suppress the working class, polling reveals that the great majority of Americans still aspire to renew the revolutionary promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and secure the makings of a second bill of rights. So, it’s up to us—progressives and labor unionists today—to reinvigorate and renew the struggle.
In that spirit, Alan Minsky of Progressive Democrats of America and I, with input from Nina Turner, authored a series of pieces for Common Dreams (here, here, and here) to both remind Americans of their own history and to lay out an updated version of FDR’s vision, that is, a 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights—a bill of rights that has garnered very promising support. Not only have prominent progressive political figures taken it up, but also the nation’s most dynamic labor voice, Association of Flight Attendants-CWA president Sara Nelson. Moreover, leading the way in trying to get the Democratic Party to embrace it, the Massachusetts and West Virginia state parties have adopted it as part of their platforms.
To enhance the developing campaign—and give the story even greater color—comic-book creator Matt Strackbein (aka The Letterhack) suggested to me that we produce a comic not only to recount the 80-year struggle for an Economic Bill of Rights, but also to project how we today might actually realize it.
So here it is. We hope you find these words and images compelling. Enjoy and please share widely!
