Think twice about helping the Green Party get their power. You might regret it. (Yes, i believe Gore would be better than
any green president.)
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>From
www.greenparty.org
Congress never enacted an Economic Bill of Rights. The Greens call for federal legislation to implement a contemporary Economic Bill of Rights, including:
1. Guaranteed Basic Income-Universal Social Security: Build into the progressive income tax a Universal Social Security system to provide a guaranteed minimum income sufficient to maintain a modest standard of living. Everyone will receive a Basic Income Grant, paid in monthly installments like current Social Security. This income will be included in the income tax base, so that everyone will receive a basic income floor, but the cost of providing it to those who do not need it will be recovered through the progressive income tax. Universal Social Security will combine entitlement universalism with tax universalism, thus avoiding the political isolation of means-tested programs and the fiscal irresponsibility of entitlement universalism regardless of need. Universal Social Security will replace the existing Social Security system and the stingy, punitive, and intrusive welfare program, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. In 2000, the Guaranteed Basic Income should be $26,000 a year for a family of four ($500 a week), with $3250 adjustments for more or fewer family members ($62.50/week). This would bring families to above a realistic poverty line. The official poverty line in 1999 was $17,000 for a family of four. However, if it were adjusted for the high increases in the costs of housing and energy since the poverty line formula was created in 1959, the poverty line would be about 150% higher, or about $26,000.
2. Jobs for All: Official unemployment figures count less than half of the unemployed. In reality, 33% of the American work force is unemployed or under-employed if we count all the unemployed plus part-timers looking for full-time work. The Greens call for jobs for all through public works and a shorter work week. Private jobs are good, but public jobs are necessary for full employment.
3. Living Wages: More than 30 million full-time workers' incomes are below the poverty line. A job should lift a worker's family above the poverty line. Raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage-at least $12.50 an hour, indexed to the cost of living.
4. A 30-Hour Work Week-6-Hour Day, No Cut in Pay: Cut the standard work week to 30 hours with no loss in pay for the bottom 80% of the pay scale. An immediate cut in the work week to 30 hours will increase full-time jobs by 33% and increase workers' free time by 25%.
5.Social Dividends: Establish a Social Dividend system to pay workers a "second paycheck" to enable them to receive 40 hours pay for 30 hours work. The burden of paying the hours not worked will not fall on particular enterprises, but on society as a whole through progressive taxes on income and wealth. The Social Dividend represents each worker's share of social productivity gains. Workers would be paid the Social Dividend at their current wage rate, up to the 80th percentile on the pay scale. Labor productivity has increased 33% since 1973, but average weekly wages have declined 12%. Workers should start getting their fair share of increased labor productivity as a Social Dividend. A full-time minimum wage worker at $12.50/hour would earn $19,500 a year in wages and $6,500 in social dividends, for $26,000 a year, or a modest standard of living at 150% of the current poverty line for a family of four. The labor productivity of American workers has doubled since World War II. Had we channeled these productivity gains into leisure instead of higher production and income (mostly for the upper reaches of the income spectrum), we would now have a 20-hour work week. Future productivity growth should be used to reduce working hours further rather than channeling productivity growth into higher production. For reasons of ecological sustainability, we do not need more overall consumption of resources, just a fairer distribution of what we already produce.
6. Health Care: Enact a single-payer National Health Program to provide free medical and dental care for all, federally-financed and community-controlled by locally elected boards. It will provide universal coverage, comprehensive benefits, a single class of quality care for all, complete freedom of choice among health care providers, and real cost containment through the efficiencies of a single public payer and overall budget limits instead of the micro-management by for-profit insurance companies of every clinical encounter.
7. Child Care: Establish a nationwide system of federally-financed, community-based child care as part of the public school system and modeled after Head Start, available voluntarily and free to all who need it.
8. Education: Provide free, quality public education from preschool through graduate school at public institutions. Use federal revenue sharing to equalize funding of public schools.
9. Housing: Everyone household should have the right to decent housing that costs no more than 25% of their income. To achieve this goal, invest $25 billion annually over the next 10 years in state and local non-profit housing providers, including rental and home ownership assistance, fair housing enforcement, and the building and renovation of affordable public housing, cooperative housing, and owner-occupied houses by non-profit community-based organizations. Pay for this program by capping the federal tax deductions for mortgage interest, capital gains, and local property taxes for the wealthiest 20%, who receive 75% of these homeowner tax breaks (over $100 billion a year).
10. Recreation: Invest public funds so that every community has ready access to quality public parks, sports and arts facilities, libraries, and community centers.
11. Legal Representation: Legal aid and public defender programs, never sufficiently funded, have been gutted over the last two decades. Restore funding to levels that enable all people to have access to competent legal representation.
12. Labor Unions: Restore workers' right to organize democratic labor unions. Enact comprehensive labor law reforms, including automatic union recognition upon majority card check, speedy union elections, speedy procedures and strong penalties for employers who violate labor laws, legalization of minority union membership and activity, binding arbitration for first contracts at union request, expanding cover of the Fair Labor Standards Act to include farmworkers and workfare workers, a ban on exploiting prison labor to provide goods and services sold to the public, and repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 which outlawed or severely restricted labor's basic organizing tools: strikes, boycotts, and pickets.
13. Industrial and Commercial Democracy: Workers and consumers should have the right to participate in governing the businesses they use as workers and consumers. Enact federal policies to provide financial and technical assistance for voluntary conversions of businesses to democratic worker, consumer, and/or public ownership. Of the 22.5 million non-farm businesses in the US in 1995, just 500 controlled 70% of output. The 300 largest global corporations now own nearly 50% of the productive assets of the world. Enact a program of mandatory conversions of Big Business to worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, or to public enterprises on a municipal, regional, or national scale, choosing the democratic form and human scale most appropriate for the industry concerned. Democratize existing public authorities and enterprises.
14. Financial Democracy: In 1997, 173 banks (1.9% of all US banks) held 73.9 all banks assets. This dangerous concentration of financial capital has undermined government monetary policies and shifted resources from productive to speculative investment. The Financial Services Modernization Act will make matters worse by breaking the barrier between commercial and investment banking. We need a Financial Democracy Act that will break up the big banks into democratic public community and regional banks, repeal interstate banking, restore the barrier between commercial and investment banking, extend community reinvestment standards to the entire financial industry, prohibit bank loans for financial speculation, place a 100% reserve requirement on demand deposits to restore control of the money supply to government, and democratize the Federal Reserve System. Take monetary policy out the hands of the private bankers who now select Federal Reserve officers and put it under the control of our elected government. Strengthen the regional development mission of the regional Federal Reserve Banks and direct them to target investments and loan guarantees to promote key policy objectives, such as high-wage employment, worker and community ownership, conversion to ecological technologies, and inner city reconstruction.
15. Fair Markets: Concentrated market power and free appropriation of our common wealth of natural capital are distorting market prices, rendering them unfair to workers and consumers and not reflective of ecological costs. Corporate industrial, commercial, and financial oligopolies are exploiting consumers and taxpayers through their concentrated assets and market shares and their power to force corporate welfare subsidies from government. The 1990s saw the biggest corporate merger mania in history, with the value of mergers growing by about 50% almost every year. Big Business must be cut down to size. Any firm with a market share over 10% should be broken up into smaller firms, with workers and communities having the first option to acquire the new smaller firms, unless the large firm can justify its size as in the public interest in a public regulator proceeding. Corporate welfare must be eliminated. The ecological costs of products must be incorporated into their prices through ecological taxes on land use, resource extraction, and pollution. Government should record and publish the current and dated labor time for goods and services. This labor time accounting will establish the average labor time required of each product. These labor values will serve as shadow prices against which to judge the fairness of actual market prices.
16. Fair Trade: Oppose chauvinistic protectionism as well as corporate-managed "free" trade. Withdraw from corporate-managed trade agreements, including the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization. Corporate-managed trade is leveling down labor and environmental standards. Establish an internationalist social tariff system that will equalize trade by accounting for the differences in wages, social benefits, environmental regulations, and political and labor rights. Social tariff revenues will go to an international fund for financing democratic, ecologically-sustainable economic development in countries with lower wages, social benefits, and environmental protections. The social tariff system will level up wages, benefits, regulations, and labor and political rights among nations.
17. Sustainable Farms: Reform farm price supports to cover the costs of production plus a decent income for family farmers and farmworker cooperatives. Break up corporate agribusiness and create new family farms and farmworker cooperatives through a homesteading program linked to land reform based on acreage limitations and residency requirements. Subsidize farmers' transition to organic agriculture while natural systems of soil fertility and pest control are being restored.
18. Sustainable Economy: The human economy is a subsystem of the larger ecosystem. Future generations should have the right to enjoy the same ecosystem services that sustain life today. The present economy is running at an enormous ecological deficit. This destruction of natural capital must be reversed. Enact federal polices to finance and require conversion of the economy to renewable, ecological systems of production. A fully sustainable economy requires ecological production based on the sustainable use of energy and materials from renewable sources, zero emissions of synthetic chemicals, and emissions of biodegradable biological wastes in amounts that can be assimilated by local ecosystems without disrupting them. The transition to a sustainable economy based on ecological production requires goals and timetables for phasing out synthetic chemicals and the investment of currently used nonrenewable energy and materials in the development of self-reproducing renewable energy and materials.
19. Progressive and Ecological Taxes: Taxes must be scaled to ability to pay through progressive, graduated rates that place low taxes on low income people and higher taxes on higher income people. Taxes must also encourage the conservation and restoration of the natural environment, the ecological capital that is the foundation of the human economy. Shift taxes from regressive payroll, sales, and excise taxes to (1) progressive income and wealth taxes and (2) ecological taxes on pollution, resource extraction, and the use of our common wealth of natural capital (land sites according to land value; timber and grazing lands; ocean and freshwater resources, oil and minerals, electromagnetic spectrum, satellite orbital zones).
20. World Peace--A Global Green Deal: Nobody's economic rights are secure when billions around the world are in need and the economies around the world are running at an ecological deficit. This polarization of wealth and destruction of natural capital is setting the stage for wars over increasingly scarce resources. As the wealthiest nation on Earth, the US can initiate a Global Green Deal that shares that wealth in order to provide assistance to other countries in the creation of a sustainable economy globally that meets everyone's basic material needs. First, the US should finance universal access to primary education, adequate food, clean water and sanitation, preventive health care, and family planning services for every human being on Earth. According to the 1999 UN Development Report, it would take only an additional $40 billion to meet these basic human needs globally, an amount that is only 13% the US military budget. Second, the US, now spending half of the world's military expenditures by itself, should demilitarize its economy and reinvest the Peace Dividend in financing and technical assistance that helps to environmentally retrofit all of human civilization with renewable, ecological systems of production.
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~USP
"[Even if there would be] few tears shed if and when the Second Amendment is held to guarantee nothing more than the state National Guard, this would simply show that the Founders were right when they feared that some future generation might wish to abandon liberties that they considered essential, and so sought to protect those liberties in a Bill of Rights. We may tolerate the abridgement of property rights and the elimination of a right to bear arms; but we should not pretend that these are not reductions of rights." -- Justice Scalia 1998
