AlterNet asked dozens of writers, experts and activists on key issues to write about where the country needs to go, and the priorities for Barack Obama’s early days in office. The following is the first in a series of articles AlterNet will be running this week.

Dahlia Lithwick, contributing editor at Newsweek and senior editor at Slate:

Hit “control+ alt + delete” on the Rule of Law. Literally restart the whole system like its 2000 again. That means: Close Guantanamo and either try or release the remaining prisoners in real tribunals. Renounce water-boarding. Re-assert that the Geneva Conventions still matter. Do away with the Patriot Act reforms that allowed abuse ranging from “national security letters” to terrorizing librarians. Restore FISA. Stop using the “state secrets” to shield judicial scrutiny into government wrongdoing. Ditto for blanket claims of executive privilege for anyone who’s ever muttered a word to the president. Stop with the cryptic and deceptive signing statements. Stop snipe hunting vote fraud.

A lot of new “law” was invented over the past eight years. But legal?

Not so much.

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Antonia Juhasz, author, The Tyranny of Oil: the World’s Most Powerful Industry — And What We Must Do To Stop It (HarperCollins Publishers, October 7, 2008).

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To President Elect Obama:

Be Bold. Take on Big Oil and undo the disastrously failed economic, military, energy, and deregulatory policies of the past. Big Oil has guided public policy down a disastrous road, standing as an obstacle to the fulfillment of critical social movements against war, a failing economy, and global warming. Renounce and undo the use of the U.S. military as an oil protective force beginning with immediately and unequivocally ending the Iraq war. Make the reintroduction of regulation, enforcement, and taxation of this industry from the production, refining, marketing, transport, to the disposal of its products a vital heart of your administration. Reintroduce the moratoriums on offshore drilling and shale oil development. Fully and finally close the “Enron Loophole” and consider whether it is appropriate to trade a good as fundamental as crude on futures exchanges. Rather than “cap and trade” pollution, ban it through regulation. Eliminate industry subsidies, collect royalties, implement a windfall profits tax, increase gasoline taxes, and increase corporate taxation broadly to help Americans reduce consumption of all oil products by using this money to fund a massive public works program (ala the WPA) in clean sustainable local public transportation and to fund local sustainable green energy alternatives. Reform lobbying, conflict of interest, and campaign finance laws to remove the stain of Big Oil’s money from our democracy and fully embrace the Separation of Oil and State. Lead the world by example by making diplomacy, cooperation, negotiation, and international law — not war — the center of our international energy plan.

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Dean Baker, Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

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President Obama is coming into office at a time of great risks and enormous opportunity. He can turn the current economic crisis to his advantage by extending national health care insurance as the centerpiece of a major economic stimulus package. Offering generous tax credits to businesses that don’t already insure their workers (along with matching credits to businesses that improve their coverage) will quickly extend coverage to the vast majority of people who are not already covered.

The extension of health care coverage should be accompanied by an opening up of a Medicare-type program to the whole country. This is important both because it will make it very easy for small businesses to simply opt for the Medicare program instead of spending hours comparing the details of various plans and also because a Medicare-type program will provide a mechanism to restrain costs.

President Obama has a huge agenda to fill his terms in office, but if he succeeds in providing universal health coverage, he will have qualitatively changed peoples’ lives in a way that will always be remembered.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/106106/