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A Democratic Manifesto

January 21, 2006 at 1:34 am · Filed under Fog Fact Of The Week

A Manifesto

As I blog along I get to hear critiques from the Right. One of the standard plaints is that the Democrats – and the liberals – don’t have a platform. We don’t have ideas. We don’t have programs.
They’re right. John Kerry made only one thing clear in the 2004 election campaign, that there was nothing he, or the party, was clear about. I get emails from him still. I begin to read them, just in case he’s finally hired a writer who can write clear, unvacillating prose. Alas, he has not. Senator Clinton continues to give straddling a bad name. No other leader has yet come forth. Howard Dean is not afraid to take a discernable position, but the DNC has yet to produce a clear set of program notes for their party.
Which leaves it for regular people to do. Perhaps that’s how it should be. Trickle up politics.
Here’s my shot at it.

Some Basic Principles
I was riding in a taxi in Washington, DC yesterday. The cabs in DC are friendly jalopies and the drivers are all from faraway places. This one was from Somalia. His accent was quite thick. I asked him how he liked it here. He said, “You have to eat and you need law and order,” and he went on, “If you have a warlord on every corner and they are going to shoot you, you have to leave,” making it clear why he was here instead of Somalia.
That’s a pretty good place to start.

Safety.
That means National Security. We don’t want angry foreigners flying planes into the World Trade Center.
That means law and order. We don’t want home grown wackos blowing up federal buildings. We want our homes to be safe, our streets to be safe, our schools to be safe.

Work.
Everybody should be able to get some kind of job. Anybody who works deserves a living wage. And appropriate benefits.
Those who can’t work – because they’re children or too old or ill or disabled or because there are no jobs available – still need to eat. And live in tolerable conditions. We need to continue to make sure that happens.
Those who have worked and have earned social security, health care and pensions, deserve to get what they have earned. We need to protect that.

Business.
The Democratic Party is the party of business.
Here’s a really bizarre statistic for you. The Dow Jones average today is almost exactly where it was the day George Bush came into office. If you take inflation into account that means over the course of five years it’s gone down about 8%. From the time Bill Clinton came into office and the time he left, the Dow went up 320%.
The Republican Party is good for Enron types. It’s good for people who want short term windfall profits – oil, pharmaceuticals and big government contractors like Halliburton. It’s good for people who don’t work but inherit money and live off of dividends and capital gains while they sip daquiris in Palm Beach. But it’s not good for business.

Government.
Government is necessary. It’s good for a lot of things. Indeed it does many things better than business can: defend the country, wage war, reinforce the levees when the hurricanes are coming, rebuild countries, provide infrastructure and education, save business from its own excesses and much, much more.
We believe in doing those things well. The Republicans believe in only doing them some way that someone profits from them. Which is why they do them so badly.

Religion.
We believe in religion. Faith. Spirituality.
This country was founded in large part by people who wanted freedom to worship their own way. We know from them – and from current events - that when religion and government mix, the first thing that happens is that someone else’s right to worship is oppressed.
The best thing that government can do for religion is stay out of it.

A Platform

1. The War on Terror:
Osama bin Laden has been at large for longer than it took us to defeat Hitler and Hirohito put together. That’s a disgrace. Let’s do what’s necessary to get him and his gang and put them on trial. Preferably in New York.
As we have learned in Iraq, just killing people and throwing people in prisons, often the wrong people, does not stop terrorists. It increases them.
There are no terrorists who are trying to create a world that’s a better place for terrorists.
There are a variety of different groups who employ terror. It’s time to figure out who they are and why they’re fighting. Then we can develop a variety of strategies to change the conditions that cause them to kill, subvert them if that will work, arrest and try them, and if it is necessary to go to war to stop them, to do it in a way that works.

2. Simple Good Government.
We will appoint qualified people. The kind of people who will reinforce the levees when the hurricanes are coming. The kind of people who will make sure our troops have enough armor when they go to war. The kind of people who will stop Enron when they’re artificially stopping the production of electricity in order to jack up the price.

3. Save Social Security.
Fortunately, it won’t take much.
Here’s one way. Right now, people and their employers both stop paying in after the first $90,000 in earnings. So someone who makes $10,000,000 a year makes no contributions on $9,910,000 of their income. If we eliminate the cap social security is saved. Billionaires will weep, but how many Lambroghinis can anyone drive at once?

4. Balance the Budget.
When conservatives were conservatives they always wanted to balance the budget. Now that they’re in office they want to loot the future by running up debts.
Anyone who has ever paid credit card interest knows that the higher your interest payments are the less you can actually buy. That’s true of government too. If we owe less, we pay less interest and we get more goods and services for our tax dollars. Only liberals understand this.

5. Invest in Infrastructure.
That’s the better way to stimulate the economy.
Every business operates on invisible subsidies: roads, railways, airports, security, communications, an educated work force, civil and criminal justice systems, breathable air, potable water, sensible regulations, objective information, regulated banking, uniform accounting standards, trustworthy stock, bond and commodity markets.
Investment in infrastructure has a multiplier effect. If you build a road the workers and the builders go spend their money. That employs more people. Who spend their money. The businesses who use the road get their goods to market quicker and cheaper. Each time the money goes around, taxes are collected.
Investment in infrastructure stays in America. Invest in giving a tax break to a billionaire and he’s as likely to stick his money in company that hides its money offshore as one that uses it here.

6. Create a real energy policy.
Invading Iraq is not a sound energy policy. All the oil in Alaska’s Artic National Wildlife Refuge will supply the US for less than a year and a half. That’s not much help.
It’s time for real investment in alternative energy and conservation.

7. Save General Motors.
General Motors can’t compete with foreign automakers because of health care costs.
Americans spend more than twice what other industrialized countries spend, per capita, and get a lot less for it.
We’re #1 in spending, #37 in overall health care performance.
Only 40% of Americans like their health care system. Everything we thought we would dislike about any form of national health, we got with HMOs and insurance companies. It’s time to try something new.

8. Save Medicare.
Unlike Social Security, Medicare really is in trouble. Cynical people even think that the last Medicare bill was designed to enrich the pharmaceutical companies and bankrupt the system, all with just one bill.
A national health system would save Medicare. Along with General Motors and many other companies and the health benefits of millions of workers and retirees.

9. Build America.
It’s time to rethink unlimited free trade and globalization.
Do we want a country of millionaire lawyers and entertainers and everyone else works at Wal-Mart and Burger King? Or do we want a country full of good jobs where people make a good living creating things we need and can afford to invest in their retirement and their children?

10. Education.
Every dollar we spend making sure kids can read is ten dollars we won’t spend ten years later on prisons.
Every dollar we spend making sure kids can read and write, do math and science, is of benefit to American business and American society as a whole.
Sports, art and music should be available to every student in grade school and high school.
A college education should be available and affordable to anyone who will work at it.
America actually spends quite a lot on education as compared to other countries, but, as with health care, we get less for it. We have to figure out why. And try a thousand experiments, if need be, to do better.

11. The Environment.
I want to breath clean air. I want to drink pure water. I bet you do too.
I want to preserve the wild places and as many species as possible. I bet you do too.

12. End George Bush’s War.
Americans don’t cut and run.
But when we have been misled and conned into a war that was never actually authorized, we know how to take responsibility for what went wrong, change our own government and then try to make things right.
Let’s do the heroic and responsible thing. Get out. Bring the world in. Maybe through the UN. Maybe with a Central Asian coalition. Let’s actually rebuild the country. Especially the things we destroyed.

1. Job #1: Get tough on Terrorists. The people who attacked America have not been brought to justice. Let’s go out and get them, wherever they are, and put them in front of judges and juries in New York and Washington, D.C. Let the world watch them as their crimes are paraded, again, for all the world to see.
2. Job #2: Defeat terrorism. Terrorists are not interested in terror for the sake of terror. There are lots of different groups with lots of different goals who use terror in the belief that they are using it for a cause. Those causes need to be understood. Then dealt with individually. Not by giving in. But by meeting them, subverting them or offering alternatives. In the meantime, terrorists should be investigated, pursued, arrested and charged. Everywhere in the world.
3. Simple good government.
4. Save Social Security. Social Security can be saved without privatizing it. Right now, after someone makes more than $XX,000, they stop contributing. Raise the cap. Or eliminate it all together.
5. Balance the budget. Anyone who has ever paid interest on a credit card knows, the more you pay in interest, the less you actually buy. The budget can be balanced. The Democrats did it under Bill Clinton. That stimulated the economy and created jobs.
6. Create a real energy policy. The United States should be the leader in alternative energies, in conservation and energy technologies. The whole world has the same problem. We want to export solutions, not end up buying them from others.
7. Save General Motors. GM is in trouble because of health care costs. Lots of American companies are in trouble because of health cares costs. Lots of people can’t afford health care. Why? Because we spend more than twice as much for half the care as any other western country.
8. Save Medicare. Unlike Social Security, Medicare really is in trouble. Why? Because the Republican Medicare bill was designed to bankrupt the system. If not the entire goverment.
9. Stimulate the economy: invest in infrastructure. All businesses operate on invisible subsidies: roads, rail, airports, security, communications, an educated work force, legal systems that enforce contracts fairly, criminal justice systems that keep order, breathable air, usable water, sensible regulations, objective information, trustworthy stock, bond and commodity markets, honest banks and uniform accounting standards. Investment in infrastructure has a multiplier effect.
10. Invest in the future: education. Every kid should be able to get a good education. Even difficult kids. Especially difficult kids. Every dollar we spend on special education today is ten dollars we save in prisons tomorrow. Schools should have sports programs and art and bands. Like they used to.
11. Tax Reform: Republican tax policies that we have now are written for – and by – people collecting checks while they sip pina coladas on the deck. People who work for a living, in shops, in offices and in their own small businesses are paying the bills for the coupon clippers and stock manipulators and insider traders.
12. End George Bush’s War. Let’s make it absolutely clear, the invasion of Iraq was George Bush’s war. It was not America’s war. Americans don’t cut and run, but they are willing to admit to a bad leader’s mistake and clean up after him. Bush lied to sell the war. Congress never authorized him to go to war. They authorized him to go to war if Iraq could not be disarmed by peaceful means. Not if Saddam Hussein refused to resign. In fact, Iraq was disarmed, inspectors were on the ground, with full access. So he was not authorized to invade.
13. America for Americans: It’s time to rethink globalization. Globalization has become a way for corporations to make more and people to make less. For people not merely to make less but to lose their pensions and health care in the name of corporations competing with prison labor in China. We need to figure out how to make things in America. How to keep jobs here.