State Services, Budget, Revenue

Melissa Bourque explains why we should stand up for the rights of all families and oppose Reach Up caps. The House Human Services and Budget committees had a close vote to impose lifetime limits on Reach Up participants, mostly children and single moms. This would mean families get kicked off of necessary programs after an arbitrary time limit. We should be discussing how to create policy that puts people first, not how to destroy the little we have to support our communities.

Brittany Nevins of the Vermont Workers Center and Ben Johnson, President of the Vermont AFL-CIO discuss the Put People First movement's huge legislative kick off and agenda.This is what democracy looks like!

Sarah Launderville, director of the Vermont Center for Independent Living & Darya Marchenkova of the Vermont Workers Center discuss the Put People First Movement's unified agenda. A unified, diverse, and growing movement of organizations called Put People First believes Vermont can and must protect and fulfill the human rights of all its people, while ensuring a healthy and livable environment.

Mark Dudzic, co-author of Labor Party Time? Not Yet discusses the substantial organizing initiative in the mid-1990s by a group of progressive unions and labor activists to build a labor party - making an important contribution to understanding our history and guiding our future efforts at independent political action. "We would be hard-pressed to identify a period of U.S. history where the need for a labor-based political party was greater than it is now.

Prof. William Black explains the fiscal cliff narrative is an effort to begin unraveling the social safety net — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps... The focus on a tiny increase in revenues from the wealthy is a distraction (watch my left hand, while all the magic is taking place in the right hand) while the giveaways are massive in return. He argues that this can only come from a a Democratic president, because it's toxic for any national-level Republican candidate.