The Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club is composed of East Bay progressive individuals working together to renew and invigorate the Democratic Party.

Our goals are to:

1. BUILD A GRASSROOTS MOVEMENT for progressive change.

2. Transform the Democratic Party to make it a consistent vehicle for the articulation and mobilization of populist and progressive values and political power; and

3. ELECT DEMOCRATS TO ALL OFFICES up and down the ballot and end the right wing stranglehold of our government in Congress.

We invite you to read our vision statement, platform, position papers. bylaws, and policies and procedures.

We invite you to participate in our working committees and events.

We hope you'll join us. Please contact us at the address below, or use our web form for more information.

A Democratic Renewal Platform for the United States: Renew Democracy

Introduction
1. Protect and Renew the Commons
2. Renew Democracy
3. Build Economic and Tax Justice
4. Create a Marshall Plan for America
5. Preserve, Protect and Restore Our Environment
6. Provide Health Care for All
7. Stimulate a Renaissance in Public Education
8. Restore Peace and Respect for Our Nation in the World

Introduction

The Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club believes it is time to articulate a new, bold and progressive vision for our nation in the face of policies of the Bush administration that threaten our jobs, our health care, the quality of our environment, our civil liberties, our progress towards racial justice and social reconciliation, our economic security, our reproductive freedom and our children’s future.

Most recently the Bush administration has cynically used their opposition to extending the right to marry to gays and lesbians as a way to further polarize the country for short-term electoral gain, when what is needed are ways to bring us together as an American community.

While some elected Democrats have been heroic in their strong opposition to the Bush agenda too often the leadership of our party has been vacillating in their opposition, and offered only weak alternatives to the extreme neoconservative programs of the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress.

Therefore we offer the following comprehensive eight-point Democratic Renewal Platform. The platform offers a clear alternative vision of what America can be at its best, as well as be the basis for the renewal of the Democratic party as a strong force for social justice, for true democracy, for real security, for revitalized communities, and for peace in the world.

Our nation’s most valuable assets are the things we share in common: gifts of nature like oceans, wild animals, the air, water; the sum of all human knowledge and experience, including science and culture; and a range of more material public assets such as parks, libraries, education systems, publicly-owned municipal utility systems, the Internet, the airwaves. We call this array of common resources: “the Commons.” They are humanity’s common wealth and without them we could not breathe, drink, or create. We all benefit when we have a rich variety of such common goods, and when we work together as a nation in local communities to preserve them, protect them from private greed or exploitation, and extend them where feasible. Our assets are being looted, sold off, “privatized,” under-funded or neglected. Our public health, our future, the nation’s economy are at risk. We must start noticing. We must call attention to what is being done. And above all, we must reverse this process.

2. Renew Democracy

The election of 2000 was only a symptom. The U.S. has become increasingly undemocratic through new kinds of electoral gerrymandering and the legal corporate bribery of the current campaign finance system. The voices of poor people, working people, and minorities are often not heard. The Wellstone Club supports public financing of electoral campaigns at all levels, with reasonable limitations on the total spent per campaign, consistent with existing Supreme Court rulings. The public airwaves should be made available free of charge to candidates for public office for defined periods. A verifiable paper trail should be required of all ballots cast electronically. All elections should use instant run-off voting to enable political minorities to participate fully. We call for the abolition of the Electoral College as anachronistic and undemocratic to be replaced by election of the President by direct popular vote. Also we call for a national discussion about ways to redress unequal Senate representation (for example California has the same number of senators as Wyoming). We support effective sunshine laws at all levels of government. [Top]

3. Build Economic and Tax Justice

The lives of working Americans grow increasingly hard. Even those who consider themselves middle class are one paycheck, one layoff notice, or one major illness away from financial disaster. Personal bankruptcies were at an all-time high of 1.6 million households in 2003. During the Bush administration, the gap between rich and poor in the United States, already large, has widened so that it is now the largest in all Western industrial societies, while the administration’s foreign adventures and tax cuts for the rich are bankrupting our economy. Too many corporate leaders are wallowing in corruption, cheating stockholders in a range of swindles, accepting huge salaries and stock grants for themselves, while cutting wages, benefits and jobs. We need sensible regulation of our markets and securities industries so they work to everyone’s benefit.

The Bush tax cuts have loaded our children with a future of devastating debt. To put our country on sound economic footing once more we should repeal all of the Bush tax cuts except the child tax credit, which should be expanded and targeted particularly to low and moderate income families. We should close individual and corporate tax loopholes and move to a strongly progressive tax structure, based on fairness and the ability to pay. Income from labor must not be taxed higher than income from investments or inheritance. We must protect Social Security and ensure that all Americans have retirement security with fully portable pensions and health insurance.

We must raise the federal minimum wage and create a living wage floor for communities with high costs of living. We should reform labor laws and enforcement to protect the right of workers to unionize—particularly those at low-wage employers such as Wal-Mart. [Top]

4. Create a Marshall Plan for America

We helped rebuild Europe. We rebuilt our own country after the Depression. It is time to rebuild America and to begin to reverse our country’s growing public squalor, poverty, and economic decline. While ever increasing amounts of our national wealth are invested abroad, our domestic industries become increasingly obsolete, and fewer good jobs are created here at home. It is time to invest in America—to massively retool our infrastructure and manufacturing sector. We need a Green Industrial Revolution that will prepare our economy for the 21st century. This will require a serious commitment of resources and creativity.

We must move to renewable energy sources, efficient and rapid mass transportation, and use of new energy-efficient and pollution-free materials and technologies. We must rebuild decaying public facilities: schools, roads, bridges, sewer systems, and power grids. We must construct livable low-cost housing and help renew shattered communities. Government can stimulate private initiatives through subsidies and investment and tax incentives and, where needed, extend and modernize public and municipal utility and transportation systems. The government should also find ways to use the untapped talents and energies of the unemployed to address public needs and services that are not well served by the market system. [Top]

5. Preserve, Protect and Restore Our Environment

It is urgent that we learn to be much more sensitive and careful with our air, the oceans, wildlife, wilderness, rivers, and streams and even the very soil underfoot, or we will leave our children only a poisonous wasteland. We call for intensive public education about the environment: Where we stand. What we need to do. Already our neglect of global warming dooms us to melting ice caps, rising oceans, more extreme weather patterns, a major species die-off and dangerous tropical diseases invading temperate climes. We can stop destroying the natural environment and even improve living standards if we learn to manufacture without toxins; to build future recycling into the original design of products; and to design cities, suburbs, buildings, autos, mass transit systems, appliances and everything else to be maximally energy-efficient.

For fisheries, sustainable harvest policies can protect sea-life. We can move away from polluting factory farming. We can design trade policies that support poorer countries in protecting their rainforests and other vital resources. We can be good global citizens by ratifying and working to strengthen the Kyoto Accords to cut greenhouse gas emissions. We need enhanced research on energy efficiency and renewable energy sources such as wind and photo-voltaics. We also need appropriate tax and other inducements to make it profitable for private enterprise to invest in environmentally friendly practices. When appropriate we need tough and fair enforcement against serious polluters. [Top]

6. Provide Health Care for All

Health care is a right that must be guaranteed to all. We must join the other nations of the industrialized world and provide universal health insurance coverage to all our people, regardless of employment status, prior medical condition or income. We call for a government-funded single payer health care program. This program should include high-quality and accessible medical, mental health and dental care, widespread education in how to live a healthy life, genuine prescription drug coverage, preventive medicine and choice of caregivers, while protecting the privacy of the physician-patient relationship. Health insurance should no longer be linked to employment, particularly given the instability of today’s job market.

Our proposal will provide more choices for workers, more flexibility for small businesses, more fairness for all businesses, and less cause for labor unrest. Funding will be provided through a combination of an equitable new payroll tax, government funds already allocated to health care, administrative savings (resulting from the administrative simplicity of a single payer system), existing Medicare trust fund payroll taxes, savings from more efficient use of medical facilities (fewer emergency room visits), better regulation of drug company charges, fair hospital and physician charges, and a rollback of the Bush tax cuts for wealthy Americans. [Top]

7. Stimulate a Renaissance in Public Education.

Strong public education builds thoughtful citizens and skilled workers. It is a key to social mobility. We must invest in small classes, improved teacher pay, outreach to communities and parents, early childhood education, and lifelong learning opportunities. We must protect our public schools, the bulwark of democracy. We must move away from excessive dependence on punitive standardized testing and threats of voucher programs. Schools with many poor children, immigrants and racial minorities need extra resources and attention; they should not be punished for low scores. In higher education, we must increase funding for student financial aid, especially Pell grants. To further open up opportunities for poor and working class students, we must explore ways to help states work with community college systems to facilitate transfer into four-year colleges using the (now-threatened) California Master Plan for Higher Education as a model. [Top]

8. Restore Peace and Respect for Our Nation in the World

September 11 brought two catastrophes to America’s shores. The first was the death and destruction inflicted on our nation; the second was the use of this tragedy by the Bush administration to further its aggressive right-wing agenda. The American people were drawn into the war in Iraq under false pretenses. We were misled about weapons of mass destruction and about the danger posed by Saddam Hussein. Having turned its back on the counsel of the world community, the Bush administration plunged our nation into an unnecessary war, and has left us mired in a bloody and costly occupation.

After destroying Iraq’s physical and administrative infrastructure, the US does have an obligation to help that nation get back on its feet. However, our government has lost the trust of the Iraqi people, and only an international effort led by the United Nations will be able to successfully manage the rebuilding of Iraq and guide its transition to full sovereignty.

Real security and the defeat of terrorism require the cooperation of the international community. Our government’s disdain for the UN and our unilateralist foreign policy undermines the capacity of that community to work in concert. A peaceful world can only be built upon a strong foundation of international institutions. We must work to bolster the UN and we should participate in the International Criminal Court. As part of a world-wide nuclear non-proliferation initiative we should drastically cut our own weapons stockpile.

Our present military budget is greater than that of the ten next largest military powers combined. We cannot and need not carry such a burden. We should gradually drop our spending to about 60 percent of its current level. The savings (about $200 billion a year) could be used for sustainable international development aid as well as domestic programs and national debt reduction. Even then, the US military will be by far the world's most powerful. To be truly secure in today’s world the United States must turn away from the arrogant aspirations of empire and global dominance sought by the Bush administration. Instead we should pursue a policy of collective security based on mutual respect, international cooperation, and the rule of law. [Top]