The Common plank

I like Hillary. I like Bernie Sanders. I like Elizabeth Warren. I really don't give a hoot who is at the top of the ticket as long as there is an army of supporters, a movement, behind them. We have a list of priorities we need to fight for. The GOP have declared war on us. Their war to make Obama seem ineffectual is being effective because we've let ourselves delude ourselves that this is a war against Obama, against Black people, against some of us, and not a war against all of us. The GOP is warring on working people in this country and for the sake of domination by a narrow class of oligarchs. Yes we can delude ourselves that the issues are abortion, or gays getting married, or any of the other fake issues that have many Salt of the Earth folks worked up. But the Right Wing is after them too. But what I like the most are that we have a list of proposals! I especially like this version of the list because it is a list of concrete steps:

This is a follow on to the post Fielding Candidates: [http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2015/04/fielding-candidates.html] and A Unified Plank: http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-unified-plank.html

I would add; update our water and sewer works, invest in both recycling water and desalinating water for cities by oceans, and other suggestions (See my post on "Demanding Infrastructure")

Vets

After every photo op, they cut funds to help returning vets, especially wounded warriors.

Right to Life

Yes, they push abolition of the right of women to have access to an Obstetrician/Gynecologists on the slogan of fighting abortion and protecting the rights of the unborn. But they also are cutting access to those services for well-care of potential babies, and cutting programs like WIC and similar that make it possible for mothers to keep their babies alive after they are born. Essentially they are criminalizing poverty. You find the rich women who have the time to stand in line and form a gauntlet at abortion clinics take off to have abortions with private doctors. These people aren't pro-life, they are criminalizing being a poor mother and they seem to be aiming at creating an underground economy so they can fill up the jails with doctors, quacks, women and children. That isn't Right to life that is bringing back the coat hanger! They are not right to life, or they wouldn't couple their fight against abortion with calls for death to the living.

Positive Goals

We need a positive agenda. That agenda starts with Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sander's 12 points. It makes even more sense in his list of 11 above, but this is the more abstract version:

building Our Roads

Mitigating and Reversing Climate Change

Creating Jobs

Protecting Unions

Raising the Wage

Pay Equity

Making Trade Work for Workers

Cutting College Costs

Breaking Up Big Banks

Bringing Health Care to All

Ending Poverty

Stopping Tax Dodging Corporations

I want us to push this. To unite around it. I will not vote for a candidate who will not support the Common Plank. We need to take over the Democratic Party and make it a National, State, County and Town/City party once again. We can do this. But it will take work and involvement. Complaining about how the system is rigged, the Kochs, our corrupt media won't solve the problem. To solve the problem we must develop our own media, work together and make the legislature and our democracy bottom up. If we do that, then all the negative ads and Bait And Switch arguments won't sway us.

Ralph Nader's "unstoppable has this list:

Twenty-Five Proposed Redirections and Reforms Through Convergent Action

1. Require that the Department of Defense (DOD) budget be audited annually, and disclose all government budgets. Secrecy destroys accountability.
2. Establish rigorous procedures to evaluate the claims of businesses looking for a government handout which would end most corporate welfare and bailouts.
3. Promote efficiency in government contracting and government spending.
4. Adjust the minimum wage to inflation.
5. Introduce specific forms of taxation reform as well as push to regain uncollected taxes.
6. Break up the “Too Big to Fail” banks.
7. Expand contributions to charity, using them to increase jobs and drawing on available “dead money.”
8. Allow taxpayers the standing to sue, especially immunized governments and corporations.
9. Further direct democracy—initiative, referendum, and recall, for starters.
10. Push community self-reliance.
11. Clear away the obstacles to a competitive electoral process.
12. Defend and extend civil liberties.
13. Enhance civic skills and experience for students.
14. End unconstitutional wars and enforce Article 1, section 8, of the Declaration of War Act.
15. Revise trade agreements to protect US sovereignty, and resume full congressional deliberations, ending fast track.
16. Protect children from commercialism and its physical and mental exploitation and harm.
17. Control more of the commons that we already own.
18. End corporate personhood.
19. Get tough on corporate crime, providing penalties and enforcement budgets.
20. Ramp up investor power by strengthening investor-protection laws and by creating a penny brigade to pay for an investor watchdog agency.
21. Oppose the patenting of life forms, including human genes.
22. End the ineffective war on drugs.
23. Push for environmentalism.
24. Reform health care.
25. Create convergent institutions

* List is excerpted from Chapter 4, Page 65 of UNSTOPPABLE [https://nader.org/books/unstoppable].