This is a living document, the contents of which will evolve. We hope the spirit of common cause will guide us toward establishing a foundation built from our ability to agree, rather than our penchant for argument.

Fifty-one percent of eligible voters participated in the last presidential election. Increasing cynicism and apathy are infecting our citizenry and undermining the viability of our democracy. To reestablish confidence in our electoral process, we call for:

1. Public financing of campaigns.
2. The declaration of Election Day as a national holiday.
3. Instant voter registration.
4. The revision of the Electoral College to reflect the popular vote.
5. Publicly owned and managed open source code for voting machines.
6. Ensuring that all voting machines are secure from outside tampering, and are publicly owned and managed.
7. Supporting Senate Bill 1980, which requires any voting system used in federal election to produce a voter-verified paper ballot.
8. Instant Runoff Voting.
9. Providing free television and radio time for candidates.
10. Guaranteed media access for candidates.

Our democratic ideals and freedoms are being undermined as decisions fundamental to the future direction of our society are made more and more often with an eye toward the bottom line, rather than the welfare of people and the planet. Corporations are created by State governments through the chartering process. As such, corporations must be subordinate, public entities that cannot usurp the authority which the sovereign people have delegated to the three branches of government.

1. The rights of citizens are reserved for human beings.
2. Corporations lack the authority to deny people's inalienable rights, including their right to a republican form of government, and public officials lack the authority to empower corporations to deny those rights.
3. We reject the concept of "Corporate Personhood," and support legislation and litigation to challenge this linchpin obstacle to a functional democracy.
4. To ensure the sovereignty of the citizenry and the maintenance of the balance of powers, corporations, due to their lack of accountability to either international treaties or Congress, must be barred from creating private armies, and our government must be prohibited from soliciting their services in a military capacity.
5. Civil service jobs should not be outsourced to the private sector.

References:
The Humboldt Coalition for Community Rights, a group of local citizens in Humboldt County, California, has proposed legislation designed to keep Corporations out of local political campaigns.

The Humboldt County Ordinance to Protect Our Right to Fair Elections and Local Democracy will prohibit outside corporations from participating in Humboldt County elections.

Click here to read about their campaign.

We are gravely concerned about the Bush administration's disregard for the Constitution and Bill of Rights. We call for the repeal of the so-called "USA PATRIOT ACT I," including the Security Enhancing Act. We further call for the passage of the "Benjamin Franklin, True Patriot Act" and enforcement and expansion of the Freedom of Information Act. The following must be implemented:

1. Access to counsel, writ of habeas corpus, and due process.
2. No further use of "Free Speech Zones," used to curtail and marginalize dissent.
3. No further use of "No fly lists," and other forms of intimidation.
4. Termination of FBI infiltration of church, libraries, and political organizations.
5. No further use of indefinite detentions without charges.
6. No further use of Military Tribunals.
7. No further use of "Enemy Combatant" status.
8. No more infringements upon attorney-client privilege.

America must provide equal opportunity to all, and strongly affirm the separation of Church and State as a cornerstone of our democracy. This requires protection against discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, physical ability, sexual orientation, and gender identification. We call on the Democratic Party to:

1. Strongly support Affirmative Action as a way of helping to ensure that all individuals in our society have an equal opportunity to succeed.
2. Guarantee women's agency for their own bodies by repealing the "Unborn Victims of Violence Act," and the partial-birth abortion bill, and providing for universal access to safe, legal abortion, birth control, and sex education.
3. Amend the Americans with Disability Act to ensure the coverage that was intended, prior to restrictive rulings.
4. Fully fund the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
5. Legislate Equal Pay for Equal Work.
6. Prohibit public funding of faith-based charities and schools.
7. Repeal state and federal "Defense of Marriage" Acts.
8. Provide "civil unions" for all, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. Until the establishment of civil union as the convention for state recognition of all couples, and to the extent that the possession of a "marriage" or a marriage license is synonymous with advantage, no couple should be denied access to license for marriage or recognition of their marital status, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identification. We firmly oppose any Constitutional Amendment denying the right of same-sex marriage.

We recognize that the best way to prevent crime is to provide an adequate safety net for our nation's poor. To ensure that "justice" is returned to our criminal justice system, we must transform it from purely punitive to one based upon a set of restorative principles. It must be "justice for all," equally applied regardless of gender or race, for white-collar as well as blue-collar crimes. To these ends we must:

1. Abolish the death penalty.
2. End the so-called War on Drugs. (Treat addiction, educate for public health, and regulate intoxicants.)
3. Bring an end to mandatory and determinate sentencing, with the immediate removal of nonviolent crimes from "strikes lists."
4. Support community policing and Civilian Oversight Boards.
5. Stop racial profiling.
6. Support the Brady Bill, the Assault Weapons Ban, and close the Gun Show Loophole.
7. Focus on crime prevention, rehabilitation of offenders, and drug, alcohol, and mental health treatment.
8. Provide a wide array of transition services to returning ex-offenders, including job training, housing, health care, and on-going drug and mental health treatment, in order to reduce recidivism.
9. Create partnerships between corrections departments and communities to ensure safety.
10. Call on governments to automatically restore full, unconditional voting rights to ex-offenders.

It is the responsibility of Congress to require public access to a diverse range of media voices and messages, in order to participate fully in our communities' shared social, cultural, and political life. We support the protection of content diversity and press freedom through:

1. Strengthening media ownership regulations, and creating incentives to encourage local and minority ownership.
2. Increased public funding for public broadcasting, and the establishment of public trusts to support independent production of documentary films and noncommercial news programming.
3. Promoting the broadest possible diversity of media ownership and opposing concentration and conglomeration as a centermost principle in licensing all modes of broadcast and public media operations.
4. Legislating protection from tracking of intimidating dissent or criticism of government figures or policies.
5. Reinstituting the fairness doctrine.

The health of our society and democracy are relative to the vitality of our educational, cultural, intellectual, and scientific national dialogue. We should:

1. Repeal the "No Child Left Behind Act."
2. Fund Headstart and pass the Universal Pre-Kindergarten Act, which provides funding to states to establish universal pre-kindergarten programs that build on existing federal and state pre-kindergarten initiatives.
3. Ensure high-quality universal education for all from preschool through college as a critical component of a thriving democracy. Substantially increase financial aid to students and federal support to community colleges, technical schools, apprenticeship programs, and colleges.
4. Adjust college loans for graduates who choose public service careers.
5. Support arts and culture through grants for after-school youth programs.
6. Increase public support of cultural development, which is a vital component of democracy. Funding without political censorship should support the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
7. Remove religious and political doctrine from influence over federally funded scientific research.
8. Remove military and corporate advantage as a primary goal of federally funded scientific research. Military funded research should be restricted to military applications, and the proportion of funds for civilian research should be increased so that scientific research that is basic or has as its primary purpose to benefit civilian applications will receive funds independent of the Departments of Defense or Homeland Security.
9. Oppose charter schools that take away funding from public schools to give to private ventures.

To insure the health and well being of all women and families regardless of income or race, we must commit resources to:

1. Prevent unintended pregnancies by promoting responsible sex education, family planning, and healthy childbearing.
2. Secure the access to abortion, and reproductive health.
3. Reaffirm our commitment to the Supreme Court's decision in Roe vs. Wade.

To ensure that the United States immigration policy reflects the highest standards of human rights while protecting national security, we require that it be reviewed against the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and revised according to its principles. In particular, it should reflect Articles 13, 14, and 15, which protect the rights of people to travel, protect those seeking asylum from persecution, and prohibit the arbitrary denial of citizenship. Furthermore:

1. We oppose President Bush's "Guest Worker" plan, which would formalize the status of most undocumented immigrants as a permanent underclass, and as economic pawns deprived of any meaningful voice in the decisions and processes that determine their destiny.
2. We support providing a safe and sure path to permanent legal status, and ultimately citizenship, for all of the 812 million undocumented immigrants who reside in the U.S., which must include full respect for their civil, political, economic, and social rights, both within and beyond the workplace.
3. We support the USA Family Act, which offers a clear path to immigrants toward legal resident status and gives work permits to those illegal immigrants and their families living in the country since the year 2000.
4. Persons who have been culturally naturalized should be granted the option of becoming a citizen and not be forcibly deported.

We believe that the federal budget should reflect the values of equality and justice, peace and security, and health and welfare of present and future generations. Instead, we have a budget that will burden our children and grandchildren with enormous debt, a weakened infrastructure, and unprecedented military spending. We propose a budget that prioritizes domestic and international programs that address human needs, the environment, and the common good. To that end we must:

1. Support progressive tax policies which create fairness for the middle class and require the wealthy to pay their proportionate share. The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy must be repealed.
2. Increase the earned income tax credits for the poor.
3. End corporate welfare, close corporate tax loopholes, and eliminate offshore tax shelters.
4. Increase the number of IRS auditors focused on corporations.
5. Reduce the federal debt while adequately funding non-military government services.

Health care is a fundamental human right and should be guaranteed through a federally funded, single-payer, comprehensive national health care system. Current health care expenditures, if consolidated and redirected into a single-payer federal system, would create adequate funding to provide health care for every American and stimulate job growth by removing an onerous requirements on small businesses. This system must include:

1. Promotion of mental as well as physical health, complementary alternative medical as well as traditional medical and dental care.
2. Federal funds to all states for public health preventive services and drug and alcohol treatment.
3. Increased funding to AIDS Assistance Programs, both nationally and internationally, that are mandated to provide the most effective treatment to the greatest number.
4. The requirement that pharmaceutical companies benefiting from federal research dollars be contractually required to provide affordable drugs for the public good.
5. Repeal of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003.

Given the choice between more prisons, more police, and an overly burdened judiciary versus a viable social safety net, we believe that our compassion and our responsibility compels us to care for those least able to take care of themselves, and to decriminalize poverty. We must therefore:

1. Increase funding for education and training programs.
2. Increase funding for child care.
3. Increase funding for low income housing.
4. Support a parent or guardian who chooses to stay at home in the early years of their children's lives.
5. Support fairness in lending practices.
6. Support HR 40, calling for an official investigation of the ongoing social and economic impacts of slavery on African Americans, to explore potential redress.

All Americans deserve adequate healthy, quality housing. Toward that end we must pass the National Housing Trust Fund Act and:

1. Create 1.5 million new housing units over the next decade for low-income renters and owners.
2. Produce new, affordable, and environmentally sustainable housing that is small and simple.
3. Preserve existing federally assisted housing.
4. Rehabilitate existing private-market affordable housing.

To ensure that we meet our social responsibility towards our elderly so that they may live in security and dignity:

1. Forbid Congress from stealing from or privatizing the Social Security Trust Fund.
2. Expand the Social Security System into a full national pension system which would eliminate the need for private, government, or union pensions.
3. Remove the tax cap on income.
4. Simplify and accelerate access to disability benefits.

We are committed to insuring the dignity of working men and women, strengthening our economy by renewed emphasis on full employment with living wage jobs, and vigorously enforcing current labor laws, in particular, the National Labor Relations Act and OSHA. To that end we must:

1. Create growth policies founded on environmental sustainability and keeping jobs local whenever possible.
2. Protect workers' rights to organize, free from fear and intimidation.
3. Ensure that all workers have safe and secure workplaces, with hazard reduction a primary goal; we endorse the Employee Choice Act of 2003.
4. Repeal the Taft-Hartley Act.
5. Strictly enforce child labor laws and anti-discrimination laws, and protect immigrants, in particular, from coerced labor.
6. Increase the federal minimum wage to a living wage, so that food stamps and other government services stop being indirect subsidies to low-wage paying employers.
7. Prevent rollbacks in workers' benefits, including taking funds from the Railroad Retirement Trust fund by amending the Staggers Rail Act of 1978.
8. Promote labor rights internationally through public education and mobilization, research, litigation, legislation, and collaboration with labor, government, and business groups.
9. Focus on the needs of farm workers by legislating worker health and safety and minimum standards housing, providing continuity of health care as workers migrate, and furnishing bilingual education for migrant children.

The Democratic Party affirms its commitment to the security, health, and well-being of the men and women in the armed forces, both during and after service. We therefore support the following policy steps:

1. Reverse the $204 million cut from Impact Aid, a program that supports the education of service members' children.
2. Repeal the 2004 Congressional $25 billion budget cuts to veteran's health care and benefit programs.
3. Provide full and mandatory funding for VA healthcare.
4. Perform baseline testing of soldiers and follow-up testing for depleted uranium exposure, and provide treatment and compensation to those whose health have been compromised by these weapons.
5. Make available treatment for Post Traumatic Stress to service men and women severely impacted emotionally.
6. Fully fund soldier reintegration programs to better prepare our troops for civilian life after combat.
7. Increase funding and oversight of VA hospitals to ensure quality healthcare to our service men and women.
8. Streamline process in acquiring all veterans' benefits.
9. Disband the Veterans' Benefits Disability Commission, formed in 2003, charted to determine whether a disability or death of a service member should be compensated, i.e. to gut VA benefits.

References:

New Bonus Army

The security of the United States exists only in relation to the security of our fellow nations. We must recognize and address the stress that global disparities in wealth, and American exceptionalism, place on our own security. We therefore support the following national security postures:

1. Uphold international law, leading by example.
2. Abandon the doctrine of preemption.
3. Participate in multilateral efforts to prevent and resolve violent conflict.
4. Work to democratize the UN.
5. Establish a cabinet-level Department of Peace to establish non-violence as an organizing principle in both domestic and international affairs.
6. Stop supporting repressive regimes that violate human rights including such countries as Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, and Colombia.
7. Enhanced inspection regimes and regional security arrangements.
8. Reduce dependence on foreign oil, and promote long-term energy security through greater investment in sustainable and renewable alternatives.
9. Normalize relations with Cuba.
10. Combat global warming to reduce the threat of civil instability caused by ecological crises.

References:
The Global & Strategic Issues page at the website Defense in the National Interest is a great resource for progressive insights from those intimate with nation security and military history & apparatus.

Check out In Search of a Sensible Grand Strategy by Chuck Spinney and Gary Hart

The U.S. must lead an effort to stem violence and terrorism by example. We therefore support these disarmament steps to discourage proliferation and to create lasting security.

1. Sign and enforce the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
2. Work towards disarmament and the elimination of nuclear weapons and chemical and biological stockpiles.
3. Sign the Child Soldier Treaty and the Land Mines Treaty, and commit ourselves to no longer use depleted uranium weaponry.
4. Work to eliminate our dependence on the military and the manufacture of weapons for providing employment.
5. Reduce, by example, the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons.
6. Stop conventional arms trade.
7. Rejoin treaty regimes such as the ABM treaty.
8. Abandon plans to build a so-called missile shield.
9. Prohibit the introduction of weapons into outer space.
10. Abide by the principles of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and stop development of new nuclear weapons.

The problems with the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex transcend party affiliation and date back to WWII. The distribution of military contracts to literally hundreds of Congressional Districts around the country provide a disincentive for setting appropriate strategic goals, discernment of security priorities, and the enforcement of fiscal oversight. Instead, artificial inflation, budget overruns, and the procurement of obsolete weapons systems drain the public coffers and impede the ability of the government to provide for the public good.

We will never be able to synthesize a coherent defense strategy until we reform finance and accounting information at the Pentagon. Two recent audits concluded that current Department of Defense accounting practices cannot track a relationship between money given to the Department and the products and services coming out of the Department. These audits further conclude that the Defense Department's accounting systems do not satisfy the statutory requirements of the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 and violate the letter and subvert the intent of the Accountability and Appropriations Clauses of the Constitution, which assign the power of the purse to Congress.

1. Fund the "War on Terrorism" with supplemental appropriations.
2. Freeze the Pentagon core budget until Congress and the Pentagon can abide by the Constitution and demonstrate accountability for taxpayer money spent.

References:
This plank was developed under the consultation of veteran and retired Pentagon analyst Franklin "Chuck" Spinney, who was featured on PBS' NOW with Bill Moyers, on 8-1-03.
The Backbone Campaign would like to thank Mr. Spinney for his patient and generous help.
Click here to listen our Conversation with the Cabinet with Chuck Spinney and Dennis Kucinich
Mr. Spinney's Testimony before Congress June 4, 2002
Defense in the National Interest Homepage
The Korb Report
SUMMARY:
Without diminishing America's ability to fight extremists, America can save $60 billion mostly by eliminating Cold War-era weapons systems designed to thwart the former Soviet Union's weapons and programs that are not useful in defending our country from extremists or the other threats we now face.
added link: The Korb Report PDF

Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities

To ensure and rekindle respect of democratic principles worldwide, the United States must first demonstrate cooperative participation with the United Nations and renounce the pattern of pressuring and manipulating UN member countries to our will. We define terrorism as targeting civilians for political purposes. We call for more diligent endorsement and enforcement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, support of and joining the International Criminal Court, and an active commitment to putting teeth into treaties that further human and species-wide preservation.

1. End the Occupation of Iraq, for the sake of the people whose unnamed and uncounted victims are murdered every day.
2. Demonstrate our own commitment to human rights and international law by pressing formal charges against and applying due process toward, or immediately releasing, the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
3. Focus on the plight of women in Afghanistan, Iraq, and around the world. Women around the world are not safe from violence, isolation, and lack of human rights.
4. Stop the support of Israel's occupation and terrorism of the Palestinian Territories, for the sake of the people who were promised a roadmap to peace and have been given in its place a wall, which steals thousands of acres of land and requires them to live in humiliation and poverty.
5. Hold Palestinian terrorist organizations accountable for their actions and demand due process for those perpetrating terrorism.
6. Create multinational pressure to stop the oppression and violation of the people of Chechnya, Burma, Kashmir, Sudan, Somalia, and all countries whose sufferings are ignored by any voice of international law.
7. Sign the UN International Bill of Children's Rights.

As a tool for good will, our foreign aid must reflect a commitment to the world's poor. By decreasing the gap between ourselves and the rest of the world while promoting true democratic values, we call for all foreign aid to be contingent upon certification of the recipient country's adherence to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

1. Emphasize the need for human rights certification from the three countries which receive the most U.S. aid: Israel, Egypt, and Colombia.
2. Focus foreign assistance on human and environmental needs, rather than military.
3. Support the integration of peace building and conflict prevention into development programs.
4. Increase the percentage of our budget that goes to proven, effective development programs that directly improve the lives of the world's poorest, reaching 0.7% of GNP target as promised in the Millennium Development goals.
5. Abandon practices that exploit underdeveloped countries for our own market advantage.
6. Fulfill our financial obligations to international relief organizations such as the United Nations World Food Program and the World Health Organization.
7. Provide debt relief to all developing nations so they can move toward self-sufficiency and democracy.
8. Demonstrate more than verbal resolve to fight the spread of AIDS/HIV by meeting our commitment to the Global Fund to fight TB, AIDS, and Malaria.
9. We support global access to family planning resources in order to create a sustainable population

We reject the secret negotiation of international trade agreements, dominated by transnational corporate attorneys and lobbying groups, or by the economic muscle of "developed" countries. Instead, we support truly democratic, transparent, participatory, and grassroots processes of development agreements, such as those modeled by the Hemispheric Social Alliance, arising from the Peoples' Summits. These agreements must be based upon the following principles:

1. Trade and investment should not be ends in themselves, but rather the instruments for achieving just and sustainable development.
2. Citizens must have the right participate in the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of transnational social and economic policies that affect them.
3. The central goals of these policies should be to promote economic sovereignty, social welfare, and reduced inequality at all levels.
4. A common framework for all such policies should be the protection of human rights; environmental protection; gender, labor, and immigrant rights; publicly financed education, health care, and other services; local and regional food security; the right to strengthen domestic markets to meet domestic needs; and the intellectual property rights of indigenous knowledge and protection of traditional farming communities.
5. Dispute resolution and enforcement mechanisms should focus on reducing inequalities and be based on fair and democratic processes.

In accordance with these principles, we support the efforts of grassroots democratic movements to shut down international lending institutions, such as the World Bank and IMF, that promote corporate profits, and to create alternative grassroots-controlled lending institutions to promote global justice. We also support grassroots campaigns, such as those initiated by Global Exchange, that promote fair trade movements as an important solution to the sweatshop crisis. Finally, the United States should take a leadership role in international campaigns to root out the growing slave trade.

To ensure the long-term health of both our rural and urban communities, we must commit ourselves to stemming the tide of degeneration of both infrastructure and culture.

1. Rural Revitalization
   • Redirect farming subsidies to family farms.
   • Eliminate all subsidies to corporate farming.
   • Implement incentive programs to develop point-of-use food production.
   • Repeal the Right to Farm Act.
   • Increase funding toward rural education systems.
   • Adopt regulations to protect small-town businesses from predatory corporations like Wal-Mart.
   • Establish education and support structures for organic and sustainable farming practices.
   • Invest in rural cultural development.
2. Urban Revitalization
   • Adopt city planning regulations that limit urban sprawl.
   • Invest in mass transit projects.
   • Equalize education funding to combat inferior schools.
   • Develop arts and cultural programs to attract greater commerce.
   • Implement recycling programs in every city.
   • Increase investment in city parks and green space.
   • Pass the Wild Sky Wilderness Act.

Signing the Kyoto Accords must be a first step toward demonstrating to the world the commitment of the United States to reducing global warming in international partnership. Beyond this, we must:

1. Strengthen the Clean Air Act to curb power plant emissions, including carbon dioxide, which is the major contributor to global warming.
2. Use modern technologies and stronger laws to reduce automobile emissions.
3. Avoid loopholes in the implementation of the protocol, such as the trading of "credits."

We support the adoption and implementation of the plan developed by New Apollo Alliance as one of multiple means for addressing both the energy and job crises. Their plan is designed to create 3.3 million new jobs and achieve energy independence within ten years. It includes these elements:

1. Promote Advanced Technology and Hybrid Cars: Begin today to provide incentives for converting domestic assembly lines to manufacture highly efficient cars and transitioning the fleet to American-made advanced technology vehicles, thus increasing consumer choice and strengthening the U.S. auto industry.
2. Invest in More Efficient Factories: Make innovative use of the tax code and economic development systems to promote more efficient and profitable manufacturing while saving energy through environmental retrofits, improved boiler operations, and industrial cogeneration of electricity, thus retaining jobs by investing in plants and workers.
3. Encourage High Performance Building: Increase investment in construction of "green buildings" and energy-efficient homes and offices through innovative financing and incentives, improved building operations, and updated codes and standards, thereby helping working families, businesses, and government realize substantial cost savings.
4. Increase Use of Energy-Efficient Appliances: Drive a new generation of highly efficient manufactured goods into widespread use, without driving jobs overseas, by linking higher energy standards to consumer and manufacturing incentives that increase demand for new durable goods and increase investment in U.S. factories.
5. Modernize Electrical Infrastructure: Deploy the best available technology, like scrubbers, to existing plants, thereby protecting jobs and the environment. Research new technology to capture and sequester carbon and improve transmission for distributed renewable generation.
6. Expand Renewable Energy Development: Diversify energy sources by promoting existing technologies in solar, biomass, and wind, while setting ambitious but achievable goals for increasing renewable generation and promoting state and local policy innovations that link clean energy and jobs.
7. Improve Transportation Options: Increase mobility, job access, and transportation choice by investing in effective multimodal networks including bicycle, local bus and rail transit, regional high-speed rail, and magnetic levitation rail projects.
8. Reinvest in Smart Urban Growth: Revitalize urban centers to promote strong cities and good jobs, by rebuilding and upgrading local infrastructure including road maintenance, bridge repair, and water and waste water systems, by expanding redevelopment of idled urban "Brownfield" lands, and by improving metropolitan planning and governance.
9. Plan for a Hydrogen Future: Invest in long-term research and development of hydrogen fuel cell technology, and deploy the infrastructure to support hydrogen powered cars and distributed electricity generation using stationary fuel cells, to create jobs in the industries of the future.
10. Preserve Regulatory Protections: Encourage balanced growth and investment through regulation that ensures energy diversity and system reliability, that protects workers and the environment, that rewards consumers, and that establishes a fair framework for emerging technologies.

References:
Please see the Apollo Alliance's Ten Point Plan, click here.
Click here to Listen to our Conversation with the Cabinet call with Dr. Daniel answering questions from energy activists from around the country.
Climate Solutions, Real Solutions to Global Warming, a Washington State based organization with legistaive resources, check out their e-newsletter.
League of Convervation Voters.
Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL).
Efficiency Vermont
Native Wind Powering America, Inc. has initiated the Energy Independence Day Campaign where demand is created for tribally owned and produced utility scale renewable wind energy.

In the coming years it will become increasingly vital to ensure protection of the earth's water supply, following these principles:

1. Access to an adequate supply of drinking water of a quality that meets or exceeds the standards established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the protection of human health should be as thoroughly guaranteed for the inhabitants of all other countries as it is for citizens of the United States.
2. Safe drinking water should not be provided for humans at the expense of the ecosystems from which it is obtained.
3. All water should be considered to be forever in the public domain.
4. It is the duty of each nation to provide accessible, affordable drinking water to its peoples.
5. There should be public ownership of drinking water systems, subject to municipal control.
6. Wealthy nations shall provide poor nations with the means to obtain water for survival.
7. Water privatization shall not be a condition of debt restructuring, loan renewal, or loan forgiveness.
8. Governments shall use their powers to prevent private aggregation of water rights.

Environmental pollution has gone from nuisance to threat. We must invest in the transition to a sustainable economy. That requires:

1. Full federal funding and cleanup of all nuclear waste repositories, using the latest technologies to prevent further harm to the environment and to workers, and full funding to meet the health care needs of all workers and down-winders affected by nuclear toxic contamination.
2. Investment in renewable energy, to make these alternatives cost competitive.
3. Enforcement of laws against toxic waste dumping, requiring polluters to pay to clean the waste that they create.
4. Reversal of current policy on introducing new chemicals to the environment, so that they are proven nontoxic prior to release into the environment.
5. Reduction of the use of herbicides and pesticides for the protection of the environment, farmers, and farm workers.
6. Creation of taxes and other incentives to favor sustainable businesses that conserve energy and/or utilize technologies that prevent pollution. The Superfund tax should be reinstated to continue the cleanup of hazardous waste sites at the expense of polluters instead of the general public.
7. The reinstatement and vigorous enforcement of environmental protections reversed or weakened by the Bush administration, including the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts.
8. A moratorium on any new incinerators that burn municipal solid waste, sewage, non-biological medical waste, and toxic waste, and a rapid shutdown of existing incinerators that do so.
9. No exportation of toxic, hazardous, or radioactive waste, or exportation of chemicals prohibited in the United States.
10. Fair and equitable policies related to the disposal sites for toxic waste. Environmental justice demands that poor communities, minority, and underrepresented communities not bear an unfair burden when it comes to disposal of toxic wastes.

We must have planning and incentives to preserve and protect our wilderness, protect vital rain forests and wetlands, preserve agricultural lands, and curb suburban sprawl. In addition, we must promote:

1. Individual and governmental efforts to reduce residential and business waste and promote the reuse and recycling of materials, with continued development of recycled-material markets that meet strict environmental and worker health standards.
2. Manufacturer deposits on computers and television sets, together with a safe recycling program by such manufacturers to remove toxic materials from our landfills and from third world countries that lack the technology and resources to safely recycle them.
3. Protection of environmentally sensitive areas like wetlands and wilderness by emphasizing the protection of entire watersheds and ecosystems.