National Reform and Local Action

National

One of the key developments of the past 40 years was the dismantling of FDR's New Deal, stripping taxpayers of essential protections and shifting the country's wealth to business elites. Ordinary citizens vastly outnumber those invested in keeping the American people powerless. Together, we can start the process of reclaiming and re-imagining the policies enacted by the New Deal, demanding passage of national legislation that will:

• Take big money out of politics. Let's have public elections funded by public monies.
• Create living wage, green jobs for Americans that cannot be outsourced. If American companies will not create these jobs, then it should be the role of the federal government to do so, just like President Roosevelt did with the Works Progress Administration.
• Restore a progressive taxation system by ending tax cuts for the richest 1% of the population and subsidies for giant corporations.
• Break up banks that are too big to fail, and restore the Glass-Steagall Act.
• Prosecute those responsible for the financial crisis created on Wall Street.
• Downsize the Military Industrial Complex and re-allocate these taxpayer dollars to places where we need it most: education, health care, and green job creation.
• Preserve, protect and expand Social Security and Medicare, by creating a national pension system to replace 401ks and IRAs, and Enact Medicare For All.
• Pass pro-union legislation allowing all American workers to easily join unions, and protecting workers against management intimidation.
• Launch a Marshall Plan for local, green, resilient economies.
• Provide tax incentives and subsidies for worker-run cooperative businesses.
• End home foreclosures now.

It's far better to dream big than to subside into disillusionment and hopelessness, disempowering ourselves. Even taking a single step toward one of these objectives will help. Multiply a single step by millions, and people power can change the world.

Local

Think globally, act locally: the work you do in your own community will make a visible difference to you and your neighbors. The results will ripple out across the country, inspiring others. There is growing grassroots activism against big power and big money in cities and counties across the U.S. Here are some ways to invest your own citizen energy locally:

• Protect your own assets: move your money in banks "too big to fail" to non-profit, member owned credit unions.
• Preserve, protect, and restore local communities by buying locally grown food, patronizing local businesses instead of Wal-Marts, and building local green businesses with local money. Support organizations building local economies.
• Mobilize! Encourage your church, synagogue, mosque, union, PTA to use the resources on this site to help your community understand what is happening to our economy, and what we can do to make it work for all of us, as well as for the planet.
• Learn how to start your own worker owned cooperative.
• Learn about the risks involved in 401k and 403B plans.
• Join your union at work. If there is no union, learn how to organize one.