2. The ESRA -- Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment will:
A. Overturn the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision and go further -- banning all private monies in national elections, funding the major candidates with federal funding, setting a limit on how much can be spent, requiring media to give equal and free time to all major candidates (and more to minor candidates), ban any advertising for candidates in the last four months before primaries and then before elections, and essentially remove the burden on candidates to raise money while providing them with a way to get their message out.
B. Require any large corporation to get a new corporate charter every five years, only granted to those that can prove a satisfactory history of environmental and social responsibility to a jury of ordinary citizens (thus getting around the problem that "regulatory agencies" get filled with people representing the interests of the very industries or corporations that they are supposed to be regulating).
C. Require schools to teach both theory and practice of environmental sustainability at appropriate grade level from kindergarten through college, and graduate or professional schools.
3. Medicare for Everyone -- eliminate private health care insurance companies and provide low cost pharmaceuticals for everyone who needs them. Lower the compensation of doctors while giving free tuition and full living-expenses support to students studying medicine, nursing, dentistry, chiropractic care, psychotherapy, and alternative and complementary approaches to health care.
4. Provide full employment for everyone willing to work -- and develop their skills to work on rebuilding cities and basic infrastructure, developing ecologically sustainable transportation and sources of energy, providing home care for the aged and better student-teacher ratios for our schools, and developing community coops for child care, elder care, and support for families.
5. Break up the large banks and investment companies to sizes in which it would be possible for them to fail without destroying the rest of the economy.
6. Build a National Bank that provides, in accord with Biblical law, "no interest loans" to anyone who is going to use it in socially valuable ways (expanding valuable small businesses, funds for start ups of new ventures, funds for education and mortgages, and funds for other socially needed projects--and let the loan recipients give time each week to a valuable social project to be decided by their own local communities.
7. Prohibit any firm from paying salary income, benefits and bonuses any employee a sum more than twenty times the lowest paid employee in that firm or in any firm with which that firm has contracts or subcontracts. And require all corporate management personnel to work five hours a week in care for the poorest people in their region of the country, to be decided by a council of poor people.
8. Change the goal of education so that it no longer focuses only on competing in the international markets, but also and equally on teaching young people how to be nurturing and caring for others, nonviolence and non-violent communication skills, kindness, generosity, ethical and ecological responsibility, caring for infants and children and for the elderly, and how to cooperate with others in joint projects aimed at the well-being of the larger communities in which they live.
9. Bring to justice all those involved in or providing governmental legitimation for torture or involved in lying us into wars or military adventures. Open up all the private records of these past misdeeds. Eliminate all spying on American citizens.
Well, this should give us a good set of principles around which to organize a campaign inside the Democratic Party to challenge Obama and the Blue Dog Democrats. If we can run such a campaign with a spirit of genuine love and caring for each other and for everyone on the planet, recognize the ultimate unity of all being, affirm the good in those with whom we disagree politically, and act with grace, humility and a spirit of generosity and open-heartedness, we could dramatically change the dynamics of American politics.
That spirit is what could make a primary challenge a strengthening, not weakening of any candidate. Those who want liberals and progressives to "play dead" warn us that any challenge from the Right will be portrayed as extremist and ridiculous and likely to lead to the election of someone more to the Right than Obama -- just look at how Kennedy's run against Carter created the election of Ronald Reagan. A more likely explanation: Carter's wimpyness during his term in office. Riding into office on the wave of the end of the war in Vietnam and a growing perception that the war had either been an ethical mistake or a wild misreading of the realities on the ground. Instead, he seemed to place himself above the fray, not really so involved or willing to create a middle path toward peace. His administration's embrace of the Shah of Iran was a disaster -- because when the Islamic revolution took place, the US should have acknowledged that it had made a mistake in not fully understanding that the depth of religious aspirations in Iran would lead people living under a dictatorship to embrace a spiritual or religious path that speaks not only to the immediate political situation but also to the ongoing spiritual trauma it has been to live under the fear of the Shah. No wonder, then, that Carter was helpless when the US Embassy was taken over by Iranian students, taking hundreds of hostages. Perceived as an elitist and ineffective, Carter was certain to lose until he changed his public persona, and Kennedy's primary challenge has very little impact on the outcome of the 1980 election.
The more those in power rant against primarying Obama and the Blue Dogs, the more you can see we've hit a nerve. We usually get the outcomes sought by at least one section or other of America's ruling elites. But a campaign that could mobilize and unite the liberal and progressive forces without the risk taken by the Greens and other allies of being blamed for causing the loss of the liberal candidate. So are we going to allow this threat, for which there isn't a shred of contemporary evidence, anything less than the voluntary self-disempowerment that makes everyone else say: "if they dis-empower themselves so much by never embracing a shared world view, and can't get it together to either create a serious political party or a serious challenge within the party they are already in, imagine how ineffective they would be should we ever elect them to power." Other than a credible electoral threat for 2012 primaries, 2012 would bring further bad news and irrelevance not only to liberals and progressives, but to the "centrists" as well. Just as the Tea Party didn't succeed in winning all of the contests where they challenged establishment Republicans, but nevertheless through the threat of future primary challenges they have wielded great power already inside the Republican Party. If progressives succeed in making a coherent challenge to Obama, they will certainly pull the Democrats toward greater integrity, no longer attempting to be all things to everyone.
To make all this happen we will need a buy in from major liberal and progressive organizations, major funding, and a serious commitment from you, the readers. If you are up for it, let me know at rabbilerner (at) tikkun (dot) org. First step: please join the Network of Spiritual Progressives at SpiritualProgressives.org (though we will not be the organization running a campaign -- no non profit can do that, though we can put out ideas about why it is necessary, and that idea-spreading is the key first step in making such a challenge possible. We at Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives have no intention of owning this idea -- we want it to be shared by all progressives and liberals who are not content with having their ideas disrespected and ignored by the Democrats who push for our monies and support. And I'll report to you regularly on how this effort is going -- at Tikkun.org
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