Students For Change hits up the Obama town hall at UNO in New Orleans
While some celebrated and some sulked over President Obama's dazzling-fast Big Easy swing-through, STUDENTS FOR CHANGE, a New Orleans pressure group, sought to engage the president in meaningful dialogue. While some celebrated and some sulked over President Obama's dazzling-fast Big Easy swing-through, STUDENTS FOR CHANGE, a New Orleans pressure group, sought to engage the president in meaningful dialogue.
Hundreds of people waited in line at UNO this morning for the privilege and honor of being granted an audience with the president. STUDENTS FOR CHANGE was there, its reps canvassing the line, passing out over 500 very well-received fliers to town hall ticket-holders with potential questions for El Presidente. Will he be asked these questions? Will he answer them? Only time will tell!
Perhaps YOU will encounter the elusive Obama as he slips between meetings with Goldman Sachs lobbyists and feelgood smile-for-the-camera photo ops. If you do, be sure and ask him something important. Attached is the STUDENTS FOR CHANGE list of suggested questions; hope this helps!
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SOME SAMPLE QUESTIONS YOU COULD ASK PRESIDENT OBAMA
"I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it."
- Franklin Roosevelt regarding changes demanded by middle-class Americans during the Great Depression
ON THE ECONOMY:
Elizabeth Warren, the head of the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP, has shown that since the 1960s middle class families have gone from needing a single earner in the household to needing 2 workers in a household, and have gone from savings accounts to living with piles of mounting debt, while the top 0.01% has increased its share of wealth by 600% during that time. How are you going to stop this destruction of the middle class in America?
Each serious recession in the last 100 years has taken longer than the one before it to restore jobs to pre-recession levels. Our “jobless recovery” is no recovery at all. When will you ignore corporate interests and restructure the banking system so that we can begin a real recovery?
CAMPAIGN REFORM:
How are you going to get corporate money out of politics so that politicians once again have to listen to voters instead of political funders? When money equals power, our democracy has become a joke. I know you have to go to a fundraiser in San Francisco after this, but I wish you had more time to spend with voters here whose voices should matter just as much as those fundraisers do.
Will you ban corporate lobbyists from lobbying the government to restore the principal of one man, one voice that is essential to democracy?
PRISONS:
MIT Professor Noam Chomsky is one of the most highly-regarded intellectuals of this century, and is the 8th most cited author in all of history. So why was Noam Chomsky’s book Interventions banned from Guantanamo Bay?
Prisons in America have become a huge business. The crime rate in the US has declined by 25% in the past 20 years, yet the incarcerated population has grown from 858,600 to 2,293,000 people. Will you end private prisons, which give prison companies a financial incentive to lobby for longer sentences, and end prison labor for private companies, in which corporations can pay inmates pennies an hour, taking away jobs from other Americans by using what is essentially a form of slave labor?
EDUCATION:
FDR said “Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.” We can see the effect of cuts in education with the rise of Fox News in the US, so if education is the most important part of democracy, why are colleges in the U.S. not free like they are in parts of Europe? Also, will you pass a student loan amnesty bill that would free our generation from a lifetime spent paying off debt?
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Contact STUDENTS FOR CHANGE: neworleansstudents@gmail.com