Tax and Spend. A high level of public goods and services is essential to a civilized society in the 21st century. That means high-quality schools and free tuition at top-flight public universities. It means state-funded health insurance that pays for the full range of people’s needs including birth control, abortion, and alternatives to conventional medicine. It means universal public child care and after-school programs. To afford these and other necessary social benefits we must revive progressive taxation while ending corporate welfare and tax giveaways to the rich.
Raise the Minimum Wage to at least $8 an hour and peg it to the regional cost of living. Extend unemployment compensation to 39 weeks.
Support the Right to Organize. Repeal the provision of the Taylor Law forbidding public employees to strike. Pass a law prohibiting employers from interfering with unionizing efforts by threatening or intimidating employees. Support collective bargaining rights for free-lance workers.
A Guaranteed Income must replace our bankrupt welfare system. Single mothers need economic independence, not pressure to get married.
Cut Working Hours to 6 hours a day, 30 a week, and mandate paid parental leave and sabbaticals. Let’s stop working ourselves to death. Ease the conflict between paid work and the “second shift.”
Repeal the Rockefeller Drug Laws, whose draconian sentences have decimated black and Latino communities and destroyed the households of single mothers convicted of low-level nonviolent drug offenses. Legalize marijuana and decriminalize the use of other drugs.
Support Reproductive Freedom. Require employers’ health insurance plans to cover abortion as well as contraception. Prohibit the merging of secular hospitals with religious institutions that won’t offer women full reproductive health services.
Outlaw Anti-Gay Discrimination. Amend the New York State civil rights law to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. Recognize the right to marry regardless of gender as well as equal domestic partnership and parental benefits for those, homosexual or heterosexual, who choose not to marry.
Close Indian Point. Nuclear power plants are ecologically unsound as well as a target for terrorists. Reorient energy policy toward conservation and renewable energy sources. Avoid California’s mistakes: reregulate the utility companies.
Mandate Responsible Land Use. Regulate development; subsidize affordable housing; protect the watershed; grant tax credits for organic farming to revitalize local economies.
Democratize State Government, now an autocracy run by the governor and two legislative leaders. Institute public financing of all political campaigns, instant runoffs, and proportional representation to increase the viability and influence of minor parties.
Abolish the Death Penalty as every other liberal democracy has done. Capital punishment is highly arbitrary, discriminates against poor and black defendants who cannot afford an adequate defense, and by the nature of an imperfect justice system is bound to kill innocent people.
Support Democracy Post-September 11. Oppose the invocation of national security as an excuse to impose austerity, increase corporate welfare, curtail civil liberties, discriminate against immigrants, and mobilize a permanent war machine. Fear of terrorism cannot be allowed to subvert democracy. In these dangerous times, it is all the more important that we stand unequivocally for economic and social equality, freedom, and democratic government.
