Established in 1944 to share the vision of an America which offered its people freedom and equal opportunities in life, today’s Liberal Party of New York sees those needs to be more relevant than ever. But the challenges of our society and the World are far different and so this essential re-founding Statement of Purpose attempts to share a different vision for the same goals.
For more than one hundred years the World has seen America as the land of freedom and opportunity. Immigrants continue to come to this country to be free and for the chance to make a better life.
Americans believe in the promise of freedom and equal opportunity for all and still fight to make it a reality.
The perfect expression of this spirit is found in two historic documents: the Bill of Rights in our founding Constitution and the GI Bill of Rights, legislation that followed World War II. Both established America as the land of freedom: from religious prosecution, for free speech, the right to gather in public, the right to freely petition the government against perceived wrongs, and later such opportunities as a free education and job training, decent housing at affordable prices, improved hospital care, help in forming a business and finding job assistance.
The Liberal Party was formed to support all of these promises in the most direct way possible – with policies that would eventually become legislation and then law…not only in New York State but across America. All areas of freedom and equal opportunity were included – from the right to an education, to academic freedom, fair labor and the right to form and belong to a union, fair rent laws, civil and human rights and the right of women to choose.
These laws and many others from the 1950s made America a liberal nation and the 20th Century became the American Century. Now in the middle of the first quarter of the 21st Century, we live in different circumstances – strongly influenced by a Global Marketplace and a global communications social network which links the World as never before in its history.
CHANGES
America is no longer a producing nation; neither our financial nor human capital is spent on manufacturing or the industrial focus that made us the most productive and powerful nation in history. Within the global and communication marketplace the nature of work has changed; the focus of our attention has turned to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Our middle class, the world’s first and longest standing, has slowly slipped away hurt by the power of big business to control the economy and political agenda and by the loss of work that used to exist in our factories and industries but no longer does.
Our system of public education is failing to educate our young and so cannot prepare them for present or future employment or to become knowledgeable responsible citizens in our society. It fails students, teachers and those who know enough to understand how the system has destroyed itself.
Our health care system which now provides assistance in the form of health insurance to more Americans than ever, is still significantly deficient in the quality of care offered and continuously damaged by runaway costs that defy control and are subject to fraud.
Our immigration policies once a haven for those struggling against all forms of human brutality, are now crippled by political forces within the nation. The ensuing chaos and confusion has become a reason for a new wave of Americans to see immigration as a cause: the new fight for civil and human rights.
Our workforce is essentially no longer unionized. Unions represent barely 13% of our workers. They have increasingly become corporations in their own right – more concerned about their own wants than the wants and needs of their workers.
Fair rent laws exist in fewer and fewer of our New York neighborhoods. As high rise housing booms across the city, fewer and fewer of those apartments truly represent ‘affordable housing’ and this housing is rarely surrounded by the small business and transportation needs that produce strong, sustainable communities.
The concept of a living wage becomes more difficult to put into effect as various elements in our society seek jobs that neither represent their educational nor employment levels thus forcing a competition for those jobs that never before existed. As the computer age intrudes on what has classically been known as the retail field, price and wage pressures are felt by employer and employee alike. The result too often presages a Walmart economy that Americans increasingly see as limiting and oppressive.
The idea of good government can exist only if it is free of the overwhelming influence of money. The very concept of good government is under increasing pressure as Supreme Court rulings and powerful financial forces combine to all but obliterate a chance for bipartisan government – one which sets the environment in which good government can flourish.
Recognizing these changes, the Liberal Party sees the need to advance the rights of equal opportunity beyond the local and national needs we addressed in the last century to a global interface. We present the recommendations in this Global Equal Opportunity Bill as a guidepost to living and prospering within these and other changing circumstances.
EDUCATION
Today, education must not only prepare our people for job opportunities in America, it must ready our young people for the Global Marketplace. Because America is no longer a world class producer of goods, countries like China, India and Brazil have assumed that role, many of our best and brightest young people may have to emigrate to fulfill their potential and they must have the education to do so.
Our public education system today does not do that or any other job. Significant changes to it – free of political interference, curricula magic bullets and a self-protective, destructive bureaucracy – must be made now.
It is now universally acknowledged that the self-selection and preparation of our teachers are severely limiting. Plainly put, new teachers stepping into a classroom are unprepared to do the job and receive little or no further professional development. They and their more senior colleagues are leaving the system in unprecedented numbers driven away by the demands for endless testing with scores affecting teacher evaluations and ratings, by the continuous introduction of curricula without proper teacher preparation and by an awareness of their own weaknesses and failures. Every teacher understands his or her strengths and knows where help is needed. No such assistance is available.
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The Liberal Party recommends:
o) the introduction of a thoroughly professional, mandated, independently designed system of advanced teacher training focused on the needs and weaknesses of each teacher now in the system. Teachers will remain in the program, which will be offered at no cost, until needs are met and skills strengthened to levels of success.
o) a new strategy for selecting and training teachers be initiated now. Only students in the top half of their graduating high school class are eligible to enter a School of Education. Should they do so, half the cost of their tuition will be waived. If they drop out before completion full tuition will be reinstated.
o) The teacher training curriculum in Schools of Education must now be redesigned to feature two full years of daily intern work (student teaching) in local school classrooms. No teaching certificate will be granted a graduate unless those intern years are completed and receive an independently judged review and recommendation.
o) The curriculum in elementary and secondary schools must include four years of study in one of several major languages and cultures of China, India and Brazil, the world’s leading industrial and agricultural producers.
o) New York City schools must develop and seriously promote a new system of High-Tech Academies, schools that focus on direct-to-career needs rather than college readiness. While schools like these exist in one form or other in the present system, they are not widely promoted and no major effort is made to offer them to those students who need and would welcome that kind of non-academic-work preparation. There is little or no evidence that existing schools offer breakthrough techniques to make them either desired or as effective as they could be.
HEALTHCARE
The American healthcare system provides inadequate health care, is the most expensive in the World and is rife with fraud.
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The Liberal Party recommends that urgent care centers staffed by ER specialists and primary care physicians and nurses be established throughout New York City and in cities across the State which depend upon hospital emergency rooms to provide primary care thereby causing long delays and subpar care. These centers could be part of the existing hospital system, or established by no-profit providers or when necessary, by those working on a for profit basis.
They must all meet independently reviewed standards of care.
To equalize the care provided to Medicaid patients who are unable to afford quality care, the Liberal Party recommends that standards for Medicaid be redesigned to meet Medicare standards and that a continuous effort to monitor Medicaid be established to significantly and permanently reduce the multimillion dollar instances of fraud that severely limit and threaten to destroy the Medicaid system.
IMMIGRATION
Americans accept that we are the land of immigrants because our immigrant links still exist in many instances. As such we accept that America has hugely benefitted from immigration just as immigrants have benefitted by being here – whether their immigration was legal or not.
Those admissions have not stopped a significant change in attitude by Americans living in many areas across the country – in border states or not.
The fury unleashed by the stated desire to deport 11 million Americans into a system of “return” that is incomprehensible in human terms and fueled by the recent historical flight of children from Central America , cannot submerge the truest of American values: we are what freedom means.
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The Liberal Party recommends that all steps be taken to provide the fair treatment of immigrants today in ways that have made this country what it is and what it means.
That genuine issues of border control that cannot be ignored should not be permitted to blind or alter our fundamental values as the freest nation on Earth.
We must recognize the issue of immigration in the 21st Century as one of basic civil and human rights and must navigate our legislation and laws to treat it as we have successfully treated earlier challenges.
JOB TRAINING
As the nature of work changes, the Liberal Party sees the need for a two-tier system of job training which does not now exist.
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The Liberal Party recommends:
o) a new approach to the re-training of young graduates and adults who no longer have job prospects that once were available. A good deal of the work available in the STEM fields can be offered to those who qualify and every opportunity should be made to locate and recruit those who desire skills training at the highest levels.
o) management training that would be applicable to many fields should be offered in a variety of settings
o) Re-training in the trades and training in sales up to management levels should be made available.
AFFORDABLE HOUSING
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The Liberal Party recommends that:
o) affordable housing should be built across the city in all boroughs based on a plan unlike that used in Manhattan. This essentially rental housing should be built as self-sustaining and not be a tiny part of massive high-rise housing that is being built at this time.
o) reasonable scale can be designed into a borough-wide housing program and with it links to mass transit and to essential neighborhood shopping. Rather than building housing on available properties on the basis of sales or rental capabilities, this housing should be part of planned communities throughout the boroughs which include various forms of mass transportation and necessary retail stores to form complete self-sustaining community life. Models exist to make this kind of planning a reality.
A LIVING WAGE
Despite the myth (regularly debunked by facts which show otherwise) that a rising minimum wage destroys small business growth and job opportunities alike, there is every reason to believe that rising wages put stress where stress need not be.
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The Liberal Party recommends:
o) a two tier-system of minimum wage increases – one designed for the older worker with family responsibilities and one for the younger workers seeking a place in the working community. This system will be employed in those businesses with high labor intensive involvement and low profit margin histories.
o) minimum wage increases to reflect the pressures of an ever-increasing cost of living; the same kind of increases reflected in social security payments to meet rising living costs.
GOOD GOVERNMENT
One of the ground-breaking reasons for the establishment of a full-time third party in the New York electoral process – it’s first -was the Liberal Party’s approach to the two major parties. It pledged to make an openly corrupt Democratic Party – honest; and an openly anti-worker, big business supported Republican Party less committed to big business domination…and more open to people’s needs.
Today money dominates politics in much the same way it dominated it at the very beginning of the 20th Century. Recent Supreme Court decisions have approved that domination as it exists today.
Despite those decisions, money, a corrupting influence that has produced charges that our nation’s government has been purchased, will continue to play its decisive role in government until Americans approve a new system of representative government.
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The Liberal Party recommends:
o) the introduction through a Constitutional Amendment if necessary, of term limits for all national office positions in the Congress of the US. If term limits can exist for the President of the US it should now exist for members of the Senate and House of Representatives.
o) term limits will essentially change the status of all elected officials making it difficult but not impossible for individuals to make holding elective office a career/job choice, thus making them susceptible to the need for money and the desire to satisfy those who would offer it.
o) with the opportunity to hold elective office limited by law, it will be impossible for money to make the difference it now does in the writing of legislation and laws. When what was a lifetime job of career politician is severely limited, those in it will no longer depend on it as a source of income and they will no longer be vulnerable as they are now to maintaining their standard of living through gifts from those who would literally buy their votes.
This updated Statement of Purpose should help the public understand what the Liberal Party is today…no longer the Liberal Party of 1944 or of 2002, for that matter.
Changes in our Statement of Purpose don’t necessarily guarantee our political behavior. Evidence of those changes will only come through the behavior itself.
We believe that the principles of good government should come first for a political party…before ideology, ideas or policies.
The Liberal Party is working to again become an influence in the lives of Americans not only in New York State but across the country as well. In this time of corruption and control, of wars across the World there is still much to be done to continue the liberalization of our economy and our society. We did it before. We will do it again.
“the stated desire to deport 11 million Americans”
Isn’t that an oxymoron?