Progressive voters have been persistently challenging the Presidential candidates and other political leaders on the issues we care about most this election year. As just one example, we saw the power of mobilization when we organized our outrage over the FISA debacle and demanded that the candidates resist the Bush Administration’s attempts to grant blind amnesty to corporations that violated our Constitutional rights. Our coordinated efforts around the FISA issue reminded Congress that progressives care about holding corporations accountable, and will hold representatives accountable too.

But the corporate lobby is busy sending out a message of its own. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue said the Chamber will “build a grass-roots business organization so strong that when it bites you in the butt, you bleed,” to oppose “anti-corporate and populist rhetoric from candidates for the presidency.” The corporate lobby wants progressive leadership “gone from power for at least 40 years,” and are aggressively lobbying around a key set of issues, including so-called tort “reforms” to accomplish this.

Tort “reforms”—a misnomer since they actually deform our legal rights—are anti-populist policies that take away our Constitutional right to take big corporations to court when they’ve injured us through negligence or reckless business practices. These “reforms” include: setting arbitrary limits on how much malpractice victims can recover for their injuries; eliminating consumer state claims against companies that sell harmful pharmaceuticals, contaminated foods, and other dangerous products; and appointing judges with a pro-corporate bias to the bench. They are pointedly asking the candidates of all parties whether they are for or against this corporate agenda.

With the corporate right-wing working tirelessly on its agenda, mission critical for the progressive community is to engage all the candidates about the competing people-centered interests that affect our daily lives, economic security, health, and safety. Our economy’s precarious condition is one of the highest and most obvious priorities right now. This is true for Americans who face foreclosure from the sub-prime lending mess. It is also true for those of us who will ever pump gas; who care about home property values in increasingly abandoned and neglected neighborhoods; who want healthy and affordable choices as consumers; who want legal protections regarding our employment and health care; and who generally feel that the government is more concerned with bailing out big corporations than with protecting hardworking Americans against victimization by corporate greed.

Now, that laundry list of frustrations seems like a lot to talk about. But it can pretty much be boiled down to one simple question to ask each and every candidate: What specific policies will you support to curb rampantly expanding corporate power, which has left regular Americans economically vulnerable, deprived of adequate legal protections, and wary about our government’s ability to protect the public’s health and welfare?

And if they need a little nudging, here are six more specific questions to ask the candidates, which are in part derived from a report we released about what isn’t being talked about in Election ‘08:

1. How will you make sure that all people, regardless of income, have the resources to fight for their legal rights related to their basic human needs, like their need for housing and healthcare?

2. Corporations can force individuals to take disputes against them to a private proceeding that is not a real court and does not provide the protections of real courts. Corporations sneak arbitration “agreements” into consumer and employment contracts because they know these private arbitrators are tied to corporate purse strings. Will you help Americans hold negligent or fraudulent corporations accountable by removing this loophole?

3. How will you crack down on federal agencies that, with courts’ approval, protect corporations from strong state consumer protection laws through weak federal regulations? (For example our High Court’s ruling in Riegel v. Medtronic allowed a defective device maker regulated by the FDA to avoid state claims).

4. Will you help prevent another Firestone Tire debacle, by preventing corporations from using secret court settlements to hide their misdeeds from the public?

5. How will your health care plan protect victims of preventable medical errors and negligence and ensure that they are adequately compensated for preventable injuries?

6. How will you protect American insurance policyholders against insurance companies that wrongfully deny their claims? (For example the story of this young girl who ultimately died because she was denied care until it was too late to save her).

Good leaders will follow, and Senators Clinton and Obama have both recognized that our country’s leadership needs to be listening to regular Americans and not just the corporations that pour big money into lobbying Congress. So progressive voters have a special opportunity here to shape election dialogue around the agenda that we feel is most important to us. In this opportune moment we have the great responsibility to make sure that issues the candidates haven’t been discussing, but which urgently require national attention, get discussed.

By asking our own questions and articulating our own vision for how we want our government to function, what we want to do about corporate power in our lives, and what sorts of legal protections we value for ourselves, we can also parse out just how well the candidates’ populist sentiments translate into practical, common sense policies to fulfill that vision. I wish New Yorkers could have organized effectively to do this in time for our primary. But thankfully, Pennsylvanians still have the chance to do this service to the progressive voting public.