The TUC's new slogan 'a future that works' sets a profound challenge. Austerity and rapid deficit reduction is failing in its own terms but even at its best it is short-sighted muddle-through politics with no vision of a new economic model.

President Obama has offered a plan with 4 trillion dollars in debt reduction over a decade with two and a half dollars of spending reductions for every one dollar of revenue increases and tight controls on future spending. It's the kind of balanced approach proposed by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission.

Agriculture is now a motorized food industry the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.

When they call the slightest spending reductions 'painful' we will say 'If government spending prevents pain why are we suffering so much of it?' And 'If you want to experience real pain just stay on the track we are on.'

I've always been a strong supporter of environmental protection and initiatives in that area. But I'm willing to set priorities. If we have to make reductions in one place we'll have to-in order to increase another place I'm willing to do that.

In Philadelphia our public safety poverty reduction health and economic development all start with education. We can't grow the middle class if we don't give our kids the tools they need to innovate and invent.