Expanding on Bernie Sanders’ New Year’s Resolution – a robust progressive agenda

From a recent email from Bernie Sanders with this byline: “Yes. In the wealthiest country on earth let us Make America Healthy Again.”, I extracted these headline proposals.

• Medicare for All.
• Lower the cost of prescription drugs.
• Paid Family and Medical Leave.
• Reform the food industry.
• Raise the minimum wage to a living wage.
• Lower the work week to 32 hours with no loss of pay.
• Combat the epidemic of loneliness, isolation and mental illness.
• Address climate change and the environmental crisis.
• Create a high-quality public education system

These are a good start, and I recognize that they are not the total of Sanders’ agenda. Nevertheless, here are a few more from my perspective. For more than fifty years, the rich and corporations have arranged society and the economy to benefit themselves. It is time to arrange our affairs for the bottom 90% of the population.

• Build a politics around a different ethos:
  “The difference between a Western settler mindset of, I have rights and an indigenous mindset of I have an obligation… Instead of thinking that I am born with rights, I choose to think that I was born with obligations to serve past, present, and future generations, and the planet herself.”¹
• End all political donations by corporations to candidates, parties, and interest groups. Money does not equal speech. Corporations are not human beings with the rights of human beings. They are creatures invented for limited economic purposes.  We should also limit individual contributions by human beings to $1,000 and prohibit anonymous contributions.
• Close the paid lobbying industry in Washington.
• All companies, publicly traded or private, with sales of over $1 million per year must publicly report their audited results and real ownership.
• End secret shell corporations and secret banking.
• End the financialization of corporations. Stock buybacks should cease. The ratio of top management pay (including all benefits and bonuses in any form, including stock options) to average hourly worker’s pay and benefits should be capped at 25 to 1 (the ratio was 25 to 1 in the 1950s, a boom time for the economy). This rule applies to every type of corporation, including for-profit, non-profit, and public entities.
• Dismantle the speculative finance sector. Return to Glass-Steagall rules separating commercial banking from investment banking. No more derivatives, hedge funds, and all the other gambling that has no productive function in the real economy. If money people want to gamble, let them set up private markets that do not have government bailout protections or expose people outside of these private markets to their risks.
• Develop an approach to the financial extraction strategies of Private Equity firms to end their destructive practices. Make them produce value in products and services rather than just extract money.
• End government subsidies to energy companies
• Make corporations more responsible for their actions and inactions, particularly in the areas of external costs to society, pollution, worker health, health consequences of their products, etc.
• Comprehensive anti-trust action to bring competitive capitalism back to life
• Return employment to a full-time, permanent workforce model. End contingent, 1099 employment as a business strategy. Essentially, return to the rules that worked from roughly 1940 to 1980. This would apply to higher education, nonprofits, government entities, and the private sector. To provide flexibility, rules can be developed to allow entities to employ part-time, temporary employees as a small portion of their total workforce.
• Work to achieve unionization of 40% or more of the public and private workforce
• Living wage is set regionally and indexed to inflation automatically. Include ALL workers in this scheme, including farm workers, domestic labor, retail, higher education teachers (adjunct professors), etc.
• Use Federal spending to ensure that everyone who wants or needs a job has one. These jobs should focus on large societal needs the private sector does not meet.²
• Provide a living income to temporarily or permanently disabled individuals.
• Increase the retirement benefits from Social Security to make it a livable retirement system for everyone. Fund this by ending income caps.
• End tax breaks for the rich and corporations. Make the tax burdens proportional to the income and assets of individual and business taxpayers. A truly progressive tax system. Those with more resources provide a higher level of support.
• Actively work to eliminate billionaires. No democratic, equitable, and sustainable society should produce billionaires. Eliminate transgenerational transfers of wealth over $1 million to any individual.
• Healthcare should be a right. For-profit healthcare should be eliminated — essentially, Medicare for all. The system can be modeled on the robust universal healthcare systems currently available in every developed country except the US.
• The government should build housing for the bottom 50% of the population – end segregated housing. 2024 began with 770,000 people homeless.
• End exclusionary single-family suburban zoning.
• Universal free daycare and early childhood education. Head Start for all.
• Fund primary and secondary public education from general state taxes, not real estate taxes. Make funding equal for all students in a state. Reintegrate charter schools into the public education system. Look to countries like The Netherlands for models of supporting a range of educational styles while maintaining standards.
• Restore public funding for public higher education. Broaden post-secondary education to encompass the skills required for trades.  Make public higher education tuition-free.
• Fully fund public legal defenders, end cash bail, shorten prison sentences – end our status as Number 1 in incarceration in the developed world.
• Foster community development that is not car-centric but mass transit-centric. Do not support further suburban and exurban sprawl.
• End anonymity on the web and in the public domain. Ensure that every person creating content of every kind is concretely identifiable, including those creating corporate content on the web. Introduce communication transparency so that people can be held accountable for what they say and do in public. This includes AI and AI-derived information. Humans should know when they are in the presence of an AI device or AI-produced creation and know exactly who controls the AI system involved. Support a general principle of visibility and accountability in society.
• Demilitarize the Federal budget. Bring our per capita spending into line with our global competitors. End the cycle of US interventions around the world. Repatriate US military personnel and close the more than 750 military, CIA, DEA, and other departments’ bases outside the US.
• Establish a national research campaign to develop and market alternatives to or alternative production methods for the four most energy-intensive elements of modern life: steel, cement, plastics, and fertilizer.³
• Launch a national conversation about developing a vision for a sustainable, equitable, no-growth economy.

1. This quote is attributed to indigenous Cherokee elder, Stan Rushworth The quote became popularized on social media in various forms, most recently in Sep 2020.
2. Attention must be paid not to exceed the capacity of any sector of the economy because that would provoke inflation.
3. See Smil, Vaclav. How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future. UK: Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2022.