crossposted @ Demspeak, dKos, and Rockridge
Here is a winning Progressive Platform:
Public Safety Should Not be Funded Through Charity.
Firefighters, First Responders, and Police Officers are integral parts of our communities. They ensure the safety of our families and neighbors. Progressives believe that it is unacceptable for these vital services to be funded through charitable giving and volunteerism. Progressives believe that fully funded, professional public safety is a wise investment for a strong community.
Access to Healthcare Should be Guaranteed to All Citizens.
Progressives believe that no child should go without medical care because their parents cannot afford a trip to the doctor; no citizen should be financially ruined by out of control health care costs; decisions for medical treatment should be made by doctors, not by accountants.
Progressives believe that freemarket ideology fails miserably when it comes to healthcare. What would you pay to save your life? Do you think that insurance companies don’t know the answer to that question? When a customer is willing to pay everything for a product, the laws of the market no longer apply.
Progressives will deliver healthcare to all citizens, not through the market, but through collective strength, shared responsibility and democratic self determination. Universal access to healthcare is a necessity for a strong community.
Public Transportation Should Be Supported and Enhanced.
Progressives believe that public transportation is a service that benefits all citizens. It saves time, reduces traffic and helps connect us to our community. Progressives will deliver safe, reliable, efficient public transportation in order to give citizens additional transportation options. Strong communities must have citizens that are free to travel.
Corporate Welfare Should Be Stopped.
Progressives believe that corporations are an integral part of America, but that they should not be given special treatment over and above that of citizens. At present, many profitable corporations get tax refunds and bear no tax liability at all despite making tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. This is absolutely unacceptable. Progressives believe that corporations must be responsible tax payers and contribute their fair share to the wellbeing of our country.
Strong communities must have strong, healthy local business. Progressives believe that the best support we can give local business is to put an end to the special treatment currently being given to large corporations.
Full Time Work Should Pay Enough to Raise a Family.
Progressives believe that work is much more than a commodity. It is not a simple transaction. Full time work is a contribution to our community. Janitors ensure a clean environment, restaurant employees ensure that we can enjoy an evening out, store clerks, burger-flippers, garbage men, landscapers, salesmen, office personnel; all of these people are integral parts of our society.
Anyone who works full time deserves to have the ability to provide for their family. Progressives will work to bring back the ability of a family to be supported by a single wage earner.Providing children the opportunity to be raised in their home, by their parents, will help build strong communities.
Distributed Power Generation and Efficiency Will Help Families Become Self Sufficient.
Progressives believe that renewable energy is our future and that future starts today. Millions of jobs can be created by changing our focus from 19th century burning technology to 21st century renewable power. This renewable revolution can be started by helping residences shift to renewable sources of energy. Solar panels, windmills, passive solar homes, and efficiency improvements could enable families to produce their own power. This could save thousands of dollars per year for an average family, and would serve to jumpstart the shift to a clean energy America.
A renewable energy boom will create strong communities by breathing life back into abandoned manufacturing facilities across the country, and by helping American families provide their own power; empowering people through employment and self sufficiency.
Progressives Believe in Security Through Community.
Progressives believe that in today’s interconnected world that the only way to be secure is through community. No one nation can be secure as an island, and surely cannot be secure as an international bully. We need our neighbors to be our friends, to watch our backs, to help us protect ourselves, and in turn we will help them protect themselves.
Today, our country nakedly seeks our own self interest, often at the expense of many in the global community. We call ourselves Global Cop, but only act in our own selfish interests. What kind of cop seeks his own self interest over that of his community?
We need to abandon the Global Cop role and instead pursue the role of Global Problem Solver. A problem solver can act in his own interests and still solve problems for people. If we are really helping the world, the world community will understand that our interests will come into play, and as long as the rest of the community is benefitting we should be respected.
Progressives Believe in Supporting People and Communities.
Progressives believe that life is about more than chasing dollars. Our family, friends and neighbors’ wellbeing is important as well. We believe that supporting real live people creates strong communities.
Ensuring that corporations cannot roll over local business simply because they have bought a senator, because they get preferential treatment, or because they have the financial ability to do so will help ensure that community will remain healthy.
Making sure that people have access to fully staffed professional public safety ensures that the members of the community are protected and safe. Ensuring that a full time wage can raise a family helps create stability. Protection, safety and stability are necessary for a strong community.
Progressives put people first. People are more important than private interests. When private interests harm people, progressives will act on behalf of the people. We will help the people build strong communities so they can stand on their own against powerful private interests.
This is all great stuff. We need to paint a vision of promoting the common good for all of us rather than a Republican dog-eat-dog world where a few grow rich and most fall farther and farther behind.
Republicans try and tell us responsible people take care of themselves. We need to correct that lie:
As we develop a progressive platform, we need to make sure that it is logically consistent within itself and that the programs we propose are mutually reinforcing; only in this way will we achieve major success. If our energy policy, for example, promotes environmental degradation or our environmental policy causes job loss, our successes will be limited and short-term. All our policies must work together as part of an overall progressive worldview. This has been the (evil) genius of the republican party in the last 25 years, and if we do not follow that example we will squander the opportunities we are about to gain from the implosion of the Bush administration.
The best way to do this is to identify even deeper core principles that our specific policies are applications of in specific circumstances. The two sentences I put in blockquote above are a step in the right direction, but I am sure we can brainstorm a more complete set of fundamental values.
These will provide the worldview which will be the philosophical and moral underpinning for the specific policies such as those proposed in Meteor Blades’ energy proposals on the site today.
Soon it will be time to recreate the world. We need a sound foundation upon which to build, friends; let’s start working on it together.
Ever get the feeling that people are more interested in complaining that there is no agenda than actually working on one. Have a slogan contest, good response. Initiate a discussion on whether framing is bullshit or ambrosia and you can’t beat them away with a stick. But try to get a discussion about what we should really do, its you and Maytag repairman.
I will print it off and respond soon.
In the meantime, if you just can’t get enough of this kind of thing, check out our project at
http://west-tc-politics.tripod.com/ncwa.html .
We will be discussing this at a presentation in about 3 weeks and would like to use yours as example. OK?
Yeah I get that feeling a lot. Maytag Repairman…that’s slick, I think of the ‘invisible man’.
Most of my blogging is on topics like this, my own thoughts, carefully written, forward looking, and there is zero interest.
Please do discuss this. I find that it attacks several major Conservative pillars in a way that they simply cannot defend.
Please take a look here at how I think this shakes out in debate.
I will check out that site.
Later,
Ron
Here is the one I wanted you to see.
The other one is interesting as well, but…
Yeah, thought I had seen this before. Read it and cruised by it in my rush to join battle on behalf of the Lakovians. Which raises a point.
How do we engage this community in a discussion about the substance. (Tough to divert them when a brawl is going on. Excuse me sir, is this a private fight, or can anyone join it?)
Just thinking out loud, but wondering if a diary challenging this community and others on this issue would provide the necessary bait to get their considerable brain power turned to producing more effective product. Throw a little heat in with the light.
For example, if you look at Luntz’s playbook for the Cutthroat Convervatives and Newt Gingrich’s site, you will find all kinds of helpful tools to include in a local or national politician’s speech spreading the gospel of the Holy Right Wing Church of America. (Of course in the process Luntz’s and Newt’s particular slant gets used – spreading and reinforcing their worldview.)
Where is the similar resource for Democrats and liberals/progressives? Candidates and campaigns don’t have time to digest 20 page white papers and make them into effective messages. The Cutthroat Convervatives have, with their money and long-view strategy, developed a host of think tanks and websites that do just that. We on the other hand pride ourselves as having the brains and the blogs, yet it all seems to be in the basic research stage – not in the applied research that helps bring the ideas to market.
Give some more thought to that. Lets see if we can come up with a diary to get some of these horses in the traces instead of just running wild.
This platform flat out attacks every plank of Republicanism (and centrist Democratism) that is killing our country and our ability to check this trainwreck:
* Professional Public Safety – attacks the Republican government is bad frame and lays the foundation for federal investment in local infrastructure, something that is terribly necessary. Let them say that we don’t need public safety in these days of terror, natural disaster, and other fearmongering arguments.
Medicine by doctors, not accountants – first off, it points out the inherent weakness in the market as a delivery mechanism for healthcare, which very few Democrats are willing to do. It draws a clear distinction from Republican freemarketeer disease care.
All of these issues are diametrically opposed to Republican ideology.
Can’t you just hear them trying to refute any of these points?
Attacking funding for first responders would be irresponsible now, no? Especially when we are paying tenfold the amount to support 2 foreign countries that are about the size of California or Texas.
Defending accountants and insurance companies control of medicine and the ability of the market to protect ALL Americans health is a sure loser as well. We have major companies drowning under health care costs as we have 40 million of our fellow Americans unprotected.
Fighting public transportation might be a bit of a battle, but I am betting that in today’s energy and traffic climate that we can win that one too.
Defending the corporation’s unfair advantages including the ability to write legislation, regulate themselves, and escape accountability for negligent or fraudulent behavior should be a sure loser as well. Tying it to the fact that they pay little taxes compared to little old you and me should shift supporting deadbeat taxpayers to the corporation where it belongs.
Attacking working Americans and their ability to provide for their families is a loser. It draws the ‘living wage’ into the debate in a way that all people can relate to. Let them say that families should not be able to care for their children.
Let them attack renewable energy in order to protect their corporate sponsors. Peak Oil is here, and it is time to shrug off the ‘reduce dependence on foreign oil’ argument in favor of one that really addresses our problems. Let them be the force that keeps our factories shuttered and allows them to dilapidate.
Let them defend their ‘go it alone’ mentality, their isolationist relationship to the world. Let them defend perpetual war.
I think that this is a fairly holistic platform, especially when compared to things like ‘lockbox’, ‘reduce dependency on foreign oil’, ‘pollution credits’, etc.
WTF did Kerry run on again? Being tougher than Bush? At least he could have went after being smarter.
This is pretty good stuff, I believe, better than anything I have heard from any candidates. It is well framed to address the current structural and political advantages that the Republicans currently hold, and well framed in terms of progressive values.
I tried to rustle up some input for you over at the Froggy Bottom Cafe, but it seems that everyone only has indictments on the mind at the moment. Hopefully once the anticipation dies down we can try with more success.
Thanks!
I appreciate it.
I was thinking of adding a Regulatory Revolving door plank as well. …just a little more time.
ron
It is a pleasure to recommend it.
Thanks.
I hope I am still here in the morning…