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Platform
Richard's commentary on the Ten
Key Values (Word)
Long-term Platform
Planks Prioritized
Platform Priorities explained (PDF)
Letter to Jim Himes, July 9, 2008
(PDF)
Open letter to Jim Himes, January 2, 2008
(PDF)
•
Nuclear disarmament:
The explosion of 400 nuclear weapons could lead to
irreversible climate change and "nuclear winter," ending
all human life on earth. We need to complete the
process of multilateral disarmament as envisioned at the
end of the Cold War.
(PDF)
•
Global warming: Global warming is lethal. Several
factors—loss of rainforests, collapse of glaciers in
Greenland and Antarctica, exacerbation of El Niño—may
make exponential heat spikes that will cause drought so
severe that no one can survive it, flooding great enough
to wipe out vast coastal areas and whole nations,
horrific storms, sudden freezes, and such chaotically
unpredictable weather that no agriculture can succeed.
We need to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and establish a
National Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
(PDF)
• Domestic
and international finance: Abolish the Federal
Reserve Bank—Congress has no right to alienate its
powers to a private corporation. Dismantle the
International Monetary Fund (IMF)—its "Structural
Adjustment Programs" increase poverty in recipient
countries. Drastically reform the World Bank—its
decisions should be made by democratic vote, not based
on amount of money invested. The IMF should be replaced
with an International Credit Union, as John Maynard
Keynes originally proposed at the 1944 Bretton Woods
conference. Ban currency speculation—currency value
should be set by purchasing power parity.
(PDF)
•
Foreign policy: We should comply strictly with all
the provisions of international law we created but now
disavow. We should comply with the United Nations
Charter, the Nuremberg rules, the Geneva Accords, the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the 1996
International Court of Justice opinion that nuclear
weapons are illegal. We should fully fund the UN, help
it reform so it can function, and behave as a normal
law-abiding nation—which Article 6 of our Constitution
says we are supposed to be. We must shut down Guantanamo
Bay detention camp and the School of the Americas
(a.k.a. Western Hemisphere Institute for Security
Cooperation). All people who have engaged in torture or
given instruction in it should be identified and tried.
The budget for these institutions should be redirected
to the Peace Corps, which should be increased in size at
least tenfold and devoted to providing clean drinking
water, sanitation, minimally adequate food, shelter,
education, and public health to everyone on earth who
lacks it. (PDF)
• Taxes:
Restore taxation on corporations and wealthy
individuals to the levels of the Kennedy Administration,
if not to the levels during World War II. (PDF)
•
Health care: There's
nothing wrong with the Canadian single-payer plan—the
vast majority of Canadian citizens are happy with it,
including the doctors. (PDF)
•
Criminal justice:
We need to end the race and class injustice of
the failed "War on Drugs" and reduce our bloated prison
population. Instead of incarcerating our young
people for nonviolent drug offenses, we need
to recognize drug abuse as a public health issue and
treat it as such. We need a process of legalization,
decriminalization, and regulation as appropriate for
each abused substance. (PDF)
•
Immigration: As
Adam Smith said, a market economy cannot work for the
general benefit unless the labor market is as open to
movement as the market in goods and capital. Until we
can raise living standards in other countries to a
tolerable level (see Foreign policy
above), we must allow workers to pursue job
opportunities wherever they exist.
• Jobs:
We can make jobs the way FDR did in 1932. We need a new
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), this time hiring
people to retrofit and insulate buildings to be
self-sufficient in energy. The services should
be available to everyone at cost the way the GI Bill
made housing available to veterans after World War II.
This new CCC will for the first time implement the
Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act by employing all
people who can work—at a minimum wage of $15/hour or
better.
•
Energy: The new CCC will give
homeowners the means to create solar power, wind power,
geothermal power, hydropower, and hydrogen power on an
affordable basis for everyone by issuing loans which can
be paid off by reselling energy to the electric grids.
This will reduce energy monopolies of all types to a
minimum. We must phase out fossil fuel-burning power
plants, which contribute to global warming, as well
as nuclear power plants, which create radiation threats
that persist for thousands of years.
(PDF)
• Sustainable economy: We
need an economy based on sustainable consumption of
resources. Read "Do We Really Want to Try to Own the
World?" (HTML),
"What's Your Consumption Factor?" (HTML)
and "Jared Diamond and the Consumption Factor" (HTML)
•
Education: Eliminate property tax as a
basis for education and replace it with progressive
income tax. Congress should overrule San Antonio v.
Rodriguez and recognize education as a right under the
Constitution (by amendment if necessary). Performance
mandates that are not matched by funds (like "No Child
Left Behind") should be illegal. (PDF)
•
Constitutional restoration: The current Congress and
Administration have violated a number of our
Constitutional rights. The new Congress must act to
restore these rights (PDF)
•
Constitutional reform: We need an Article 5
Constitutional Convention to fix the undemocratic
problem of the Senate (PDF). We
should also consider transitioning to a parliamentary
system with proportional representation instead of our
anti-democratic "winner take all" electoral system. Read
more (HTML)
• Electoral
reform: At the state level, legislators need to
enact Instant Runoff Voting or range voting to eliminate
the "spoiler effect" in multi-candidate races. The
Vermont legislature this year approved Instant Runoff
Voting in national races. Richard will join Howard Dean
in urging Connecticut and other states to follow this
lead. Read more (HTML)
• Equal
access to legal justice: Repeal the Clinton-era
legislation restricting the scope of the Legal Services
Corporation and increase funding to the level Canada has
long had per qualifying person.
• Individual
rights: The Bill of Rights should be strictly
upheld for individuals, not for corporations.
Corporations are not persons, but artificial entities
created for public as well as private purposes.
• Same-sex
marriage: Repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.
To deprive a person
of the right to marry is as oppressive as to deprive a
person of the right to own property, to travel, to
drive, to vote, or to contract. Read Richard's thoughts
on gay marriage (PDF)
• Workers'
rights: The right to unionize should be
strictly enforced in all workplaces. Any person who
gathers complaints of workers should be protected from
retaliation even before a union has been certified. It
should be illegal for a CEO's remuneration to be greater
than ten times the remuneration of the least-paid
employee. A rising tide should lift all boats, not just
the captain.
• Agriculture:
To protect struggling family farms, public funding of
big agribusiness should be ended.
• Transportation:
Place a moratorium on federal highway widening and
redirect funds to mass transit, bicycle, and pedestrian
programs. Raise Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE)
standards on all new vehicles and provide incentives for
hydrogen, electric, non-food-crop biofuel, and hybrid
technologies. Read more (HTML)
•
Puerto Rico, Guam, and other territories: Our
treatment of Puerto Rico is 19th Century style
imperialism undertaken purely for the sake of
geopolitical military advantage with no regard for the
rights and needs of the local inhabitants. Consistent
with the Declaration of Independence, the USA should
hold no territories as colonies or protectorates that
have no voice in Congress. Territories should be placed
under the auspices of the UN so that, after 5 to 10
years in which all sides have adequate time and
resources to debate in public, a meaningful referendum
can be held on independence or statehood. Read more:
English (PDF)
Spanish (PDF)
•
Iran: US-Iranian relations have
steadily deteriorated in recent years. To address this
problem and to prevent a military crisis, Richard
co-founded the American Iranian Friendship Committee in
2004. Read Richard's positions on Iran (PDF)
More supporting documents
Human
Rights Record of United States in 2007 (HTML)
Human Rights Watch World
Report 2007: United States (HTML)
Waterboarding is Torture (PDF) |
