DEFENDING THE AMERICAN DREAM Owning your own home, sending your children to college, feeling secure about your retirement after a lifetime of hard work—that’s the American Dream. But for the vast majority of us, it’s growing out of reach.
DMI uses the lens of today’s middle-class squeeze to call for good jobs, affordable education and health care, a strong labor movement, progressive immigration policy—things that not only strengthen the middle class, but allow low-income families to advance.
We focus on making policymakers accountable, and we explain the issues at stake in ways that make sense not just to politicians, but to those working people whose lives these issues affect.
Here’s the debate in terms of the DMI’s mission statement:
The Lieberman-Warner proposal would lock in a future that guarantees that energy entrepeneurship and job creation will happen outside of our borders. Power over power will be controlled solely by entities accountable not to citizens, but to hedge funds and foreign investors. The middle class of America will become a memory, as people lose control over how to raise their families, where to live, and how to spend the money they earn.
However, we can support legislation that puts responsibility, opportunity, and community at the core of legislation that fights global warming. By making polluters pay, investing in advanced green collar jobs, and supporting healthy communities by giving them power over the energy they use, we can rebuild the American dream to be sustainable for generations to come.
Small Business
Small businesses and entrepeneurs drive the American economy and build the American Dream. The Lieberman-Warner proposal is a step in the right direction for protecting the atmosphere, but with a Devil’s bargain of protecting polluters and hedge fund profiteers. Climate change legislation must not only address the problem of global warming emissions, but must support a future of economic opportunity. It should follow the principle of making polluters pay, and use those funds to invest in green technologies, green collar jobs, and to decentralize the power grid to unlock the potential of energy entrepeneurship.