One of the three parties' candidates, the has released their platform. Here is an outline of it:
An Economic Bill of Rights
Right to Work - Full Employment Program
-Full employment is accomplished through a Full Employment Program that uses a community-based direct employment initiative that will be nationally funded, locally controlled, and democratically protected against conflicts of interest and pay-to-play influence.
-The jobs provided through this program will include jobs that improve our environment, like clean manufacturing, organic agriculture, public transportation and clean renewable energy. It also includes jobs that provide urgently needed social infrastructure – for public education, health care, child care, elder care, youth programs, and arts and culture.
Right to Health Care
- Medicare for All - Single Payer Health Care
Right to Education
-Tuition-free, quality public education from pre-school through college at public institutions
-Forgiveness of student loan debt left over from the current era of unaffordable college education
Right to Housing
-Immediate halt to all foreclosures and evictions
-The Creation of a federal bank with local branches to take over homes with distressed mortgages and either restructure the mortgages to affordable levels, or if the occupants cannot afford a mortgage, rent homes to the occupants
-Expand rental and home ownership assistance, create ample public housing, and capital grants to non-profit developers of affordable housing until all people can obtain decent housing at no more than 25% of their income
Workers' Rights
-The right to organize a union at work without fear of firing or reprisal
-The right to fair trade policies
Right to Utilities
-The right to accessible and affordable utilities – heat, electricity, phone, internet, and public transportation – which will be made available to all through democratically run, publicly owned utilities that operate at cost, not for profit.
-Right to proper taxation
-Taxation that is distributed in proportion to ability to pay
-Make any corporate tax subsidies transparent by putting these subsidies in public budgets where they can be scrutinized, not hidden as tax breaks in complicated tax codes
Transition to a Green Economy
-Provide grants and low-interest loans to grow green businesses and cooperatives, with an emphasis on small, locally-based companies that keep the wealth created by local labor circulating in the community rather than being drained off to enrich absentee investors. These types of businesses provide a solid foundation for our prosperity – a prosperity that will not be offshored, outsourced or downsized, and that will be unaffected by the collapse of foreign credit markets.
-This Green Transition Program will also redirect research money from fossil fuels and other dead-end industries toward for research in wind, solar and geothermal. We will invest in research in sustainable, nontoxic materials, closed-loop cycles that eliminate waste and pollution, as well as organic agriculture, permaculture, and sustainable forestry.
Reboot of the Financial Sector
- Democratize monetary policy to bring about public control of the money supply and credit creation. This means we’ll nationalize the private bank-dominated Federal Reserve Banks and place them under a Monetary Authority within the Treasury Department, along the lines proposed in the National Emergency Employment Defense – or NEED - Act of 2011 (HR 2990), sponsored by Representatives Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers.
- Break up the oversized banks that are “too big to fail.”
- End taxpayer-funded bailouts for banks, insurers, and other financial companies
- Use the FDIC resolution process for failed banks to reopen them as public banks where possible after failed loans and underlying assets are auctioned off
- Adequately regulate all financial derivatives and require them to be traded on open exchanges
- Restore the Glass-Steagall separation of depository commercial banks from speculative investment banks
- Establish a 90% tax on bonuses for bailed out bankers
- Support the formation of federal, state, and municipal public-owned banks that function as non-profit utilities.
Election Reform - Voter Bill of Rights
- Replace partisan oversight of elections with non-partisan election commissions
- Celebrate our democratic aspirations by making Election Day a national holiday.
- Bring simplified, safe same-day voter registration to the nation so that no qualified voter is barred from the polls.
- Do away with so-called “winner take all” elections in which the “winner” does not have the support of most of the voters, and replace that system with instant runoff voting and proportional representation, systems most advanced countries now use to good effect.
- Replace big money control of elections with full public financing and free and equal access to the airwaves.
- Guarantee equal access to the ballot and to the debates to all qualified candidates.
- Abolish the Electoral College and implement direct election of the President.
- Restore the vote to ex-offenders who’ve paid their debt to society.
- Enact Statehood for the District of Columbia so that those Americans have representation in Congress and full rights to self rule like the rest of us.
