My Own Party

Recent election politics and travels have renewed my interest in armchair political theorizing. I believe that America is a formerly great nation that has lost its way. We have become complacent, arrogant, and corrupt. Our worldwide reputation is dangerously poor. But there is still greatness within us. What we need is a grassroots revolution.
 
Currently, we are in the midst of a political pendulum shift. The Democrats will win the upcoming election handily, as the Republicans face key retirements and are forced to differentiate themselves from an unpopular, incompetent, and corrupt outgoing president. Still it is not enough. The Democrats and Republicans are in fact barely distinguishable. Both are almost equally corrupt and complacent, beholden mostly to large donations of the wealthy and the well-connected, especially in the form of the powerful corporate lobby. Neither party has shown much interest in courageous, innovative reform. In fact the duopoly is most interested in simply maintaining its mutual power.
 
I believe the voters are becoming more and more disenchanted by the powers that be and the lack of real choices before them. The Information Age has lowered the threshold for relatively minor candidates to spread their message and raise money. Furthermore we live in an era when voters increasingly support a more open, activist, and direct democracy in the form of the referendum process and growing distaste for the Electoral College. A well-placed blow, focusing first on election and campaign reform, could capitalize on these trends and the arrogant complacence of the two-party duopoly to usher in a new era of American democracy.
 
Americans want to believe in the greatness and goodness of America, and quite rightly so. We have been woefully underserved by our politicians. The next great American leader will show us how to believe in ourselves once again, not simply out of arrogance or the moral equivalent of wishful thinking, but from sound humanitarian policy and the politics of integrity.
 
I propose a political platform that is primarily humanitarian in its loyalties and progressive in its outlook. I submit the question is not about more government or less government, but better government. I want a government that does more good and less harm. My priorities are good governance, education, environment, research, social well-being, tolerance, international community, and human progress in general. My adversaries are the political forces of privilege, corporate self-interest, xenophobia, and religious fundamentalism.
 
My Humanist-Progressive platform goes a little something like this:

1. Democracy First
1. Eliminate the Electoral College.
2. Create instant-runoff voting that replaces primaries with ranked votes. Suppose you get three votes for each position. Your top vote gets three points, your second gets two points, and your third vote gets one point. This would eliminate the rationale of not “wasting” your vote on a supposedly unelectable candidate and loosen the stranglehold of the Republican-Democrat duopoly.
3. Reform Supreme Court nomination system. Justices serve on a rotating system so that one is nominated per presidential term. Exceptional retirements are replaced by special election.
4. Restore and maintain checks and balances.
2. Clean Government
1. Reform campaign finance.
2. Eliminate or drastically limit corporate lobbying and finance of politics.
3. Eliminate earmarks.
4. Simplify citizens’ interaction with government, including tax code.
5. Create a politically independent office or department for promoting transparency in government and exposing corruption.
3. Enlightened Capitalism
1. Balance the budget and reduce the national debt, which has grown so large it threatens long-term economic growth.
2. Reform and eliminate subsidies (e.g. the Farm Bill).
3. Eliminate protectionist policies, which ultimately slow growth.
4. Reform immigration from a pro-immigration stance. Immigrants are exceptionally motivated and flexible workers, and migration generally benefits both and rich and poor economies in the long term. Legalize most immigrants with guest worker program, etc. Further analyze net economic cost or benefit of migration and adjust taxes and benefits for non-citizen immigrants accordingly.
5. Increase the reach and rigor of environmental, labor, and humanitarian standards to encompass the implications of global trade.
4. Enlightened Socialism
1. Prioritize and reform public education. Reform school funding with equal funding for all students, regardless of local wealth. Test vigorously every subject, every year. Develop minimal (can be augmented by states) national curriculum with corresponding national tests. Maintain national database used to evaluate the detailed year-by-year performance. Increase teacher quality dramatically. Raise standards for teachers to become fully-qualified. Raise pay scales and augment pay for difficult-to-fill positions, such as math and science subjects, as well as rural and inner-urban school locations. Base pay increase on performance, comparing incoming to outgoing test data of students. Set goal of recruiting 70% of new teachers from the top 30% of college graduates within 10 years.
2. Socialize health care. Eliminate private HMO’s and provide the same standard of health care coverage for all citizens. Make health care professionals, like teachers, employees of the state.
3. Raise the tax rates of the wealthy. Slow and reverse the growing gap between the wealthy and poor. Raise inheritance tax, encouraging the most wealthy 5 percent of citizens to donate the vast majority of their wealth to non-profits before death.
4. Reduce cash-equivalent welfare hand-outs in favor or food stamps, health care, education, housing and transportation subsidies, anti-poverty organizations, and the like.
5. Human Rights and Civil Liberties
1. Eliminate all gray areas of torture and issue apologies and reparations. Eliminate Guantanemo Bay and generally restore humanitarian laws to protect the rights of prisoners and foreigners.
2. Strengthen human rights and promote civil liberties generally. Support controversial libertarian interests quietly, keeping the big picture in mind.
3. Tend to the bigger issues of race, poverty, and justice. Make the issue of black men in prison a topic of national debate.
6. Internationalism and Foreign Policy
1. Rejoin the international community. Promote international goodwill with increased aid and disciplined, multilateral diplomacy. Promote international cooperation through the U.N.
2. Slash the size of the military to levels comparable to other developed nations. Remove troops stationed abroad.
3. Strengthen restrictions on declaring war and apologize for unilateral actions. Seek a multilateral, responsible withdrawal from the Middle East.
4. Eliminate the CIA and reorganize legitimate intelligence activities. Outlaw meddling in foreign politics in the name of security.
5. Eliminate favoritism in our foreign policy. Our international concern is not to promote American corporations or our particular brand of capitalism, but rather the good of humanity. Eliminate pro-Israel bias in favor of balanced two-state system for Palestine and Israel.
6. Seek to be a diplomatic leader in the end civil warfare. Favor segmentation of previous political borders as a way to end fighting. Support moderates who seek peace. Actively support U.N. action to prevent genocide.
7. Encourage foreign governments to maintain credible democratic and human rights records.
8. Prioritize national security around the spread of nuclear weapons to the hands of non-state entities. Sign and promote treaty outlawing first use of nuclear weapons. Create more effective, rigorous systems to monitor the development of nuclear weapons and the movement of radioactive materials.
7. Environmentalism
1. Regulate carbon emissions with market flexibility using carbon trading system. Eliminate ethanol subsidies in favor of technologies that actually reduce carbon emissions.
2. Raise environmental standards generally. Sign and rigorously enforce all environmental treaties.
3. Promote medium-to-high density development and mass transportation systems. Raise automobile, parking, and gasoline taxes to reflect true costs of automobile use.
4. Promote research and manufacture of “green” technologies. Promote energy conservation and clean power sources.
5. Increase funding of National Park Service and move authority over National Forests from Department of Agriculture to Park Service, changing emphasis from production to conservation and recreation.
8. Research
1. Award generous cash prizes to stimulate desired research advances, from clean energy to military technology to health care. Make research a significant budgeting priority, with the goal of leading the world as far-and-away the most technologically advanced economy. Encourage both theoretical and practical research, bridging the gap between the theoretically possible and the economically viable.
2. Emphasize military research over personnel. Research state-of-the-art military technology, together with rapid-response production, considering complete production span from raw materials to finished product.
9. Secular Government
1. Make religion a matter of private choice only. Remove all artifacts of religion from government. The lack of religion in government does not imply the lack of religion privately, whereas the mention of God necessarily implies the endorsement of a particular religion over another.
2. Dismantle restrictions against research and civil liberties that are based primarily upon fundamentalist religious objections. Promote a political ethic where religion is not a legitimate argument for or against any law.
10. Public Works
1. Fund ambitious public works, such as clean energy, innovative development and conservation designs, and improved public transport.
2. Build national system of high-speed rail, possibly including ultra-high speed vacuum-tube mag-lev trains operating at near-zero friction and thus superior to airplanes in speed, convenience, efficiency, and environmental friendliness. Increase rail capacity and efficiency (including freight) generally.
3. Increase NASA funding and create national space program mandate.
   

So what do you think, friends? Can I count on your vote someday?