IIRON

Values & Platform

Values:

1. Economic justice: The economy should provide opportunity for all and should benefit the many rather than the few.

2. Protect the Common Good: Some goods and services must be publicly funded and administered democratically for the sake of the common good. The common good must be protected from the profit motives of corporations. This includes:

• Health care
• Criminal justice
• Police, Fire, Emergency Services and Public Safety
• The Military
• Education
• Infrastructure
• Elections
• Social Security

3. Protect democracy: Our self- governance as a democratic society should be based upon the concept of one person -one vote and not on the principle of who can raise or contribute the most money. Corporations are not persons and should not have the political power of human persons.

4. Living Wage Work & Worker Rights: Everyone who is willing and able to work should be able to work with a salary or wages that can sustain a family. No one who works should be poor or lacking in basic needs. Workers have the right to organize themselves into unions and bargain collectively for wages, benefits and working conditions.

5. Environmental Protection: A healthy environment is the fundamental need of the human race and all living things. No system or right of property supersedes our basic obligation to protect the commons of our natural environment.

IIRON’s National Platform For  A New Economy

1. Rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, by increasing infrastructure  investment by $1.2 Trillion over the next 5 years, creating over 5.52 million jobs in each year of the program.
2. Debt Forgiveness:
   1. The banks should reduce all underwater mortgages to their current appraised value and reduce interest rates to 3%.
   2. The banks should accept repayment of all student loan principal without interest. The government should impose caps on tuition.
   3. Pay Day lenders, often financed by big banks, charge usurious interest rates. Interest rates on loans should be capped at 36%.
   4. The banking industry has pushed credit onto consumers in a totally irresponsible manner. The big banks should allow a 2-year holiday during which consumers can pay back their current consumer debt without interest.
3. Bank Regulation and Accountability: Congress should reinstate the Glass Steagall Act, impose caps on interest rates and bank fees and strengthen the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.
4. End corporate welfare: no more Wall Street bailouts; no more subsidies to fossil fuel industry, private prison industry, big agriculture and military contractors.
5. Create fairness in taxation by recreating a progressive income tax system that served us well during our greatest period of economic strength in the 1950’s and 1960’s, including a  90% top tax bracket for the wealthiest 1%, end special treatment for the capital gains tax, raise corporate tax rates and enact a financial speculation tax on stock trading..
6. Create a sustainable future in which the planet and the human race can survive:  Invest in green infrastructure (transit and rail) and renewable energy; end fossil fuel subsidies; impose a carbon tax.
7. Enact a Medicare For All Health Care System.
8. Enact EFCA to ensure workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively.
9. Protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid without any reductions of benefits or additional restrictions on eligibility.

10. Reinvest in our k-12 public education system and in affordable college education for all through tuition caps, student grants, and interest free loans.

11. Pass a constitutional amendment stripping corporations of personhood status and establish a system for 100% public financing of all elections. Prohibit private corporations with any government business from lobbying the government.

12. Seize by eminent domain any bank owned property that has been vacant for longer than 9 months. Create and fund an affordable housing land trust to repair these homes and rent or sell them at affordable prices.