Pete Seeger to Winter Soldiers
February 24th, 2008

Long-term Platform Planks Prioritized

• Health care: There's nothing wrong with the Canadian single-payer plan—the vast majority of Canadian citizens are happy with it, including the doctors.

• Jobs: We can make jobs the way FDR did in 1932, this time by hiring people to do insulation, solar power, wind power, geothermal, retrofitting, and so on, and making it available to everyone at cost the way the GI bill made housing available to veterans after World War II.

• Foreign policy: We should comply strictly with all the provisions of international law we created but now disavow. We should comply with the United Nations Charter, the Nuremberg rules, the Geneva Accords, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the 1996 International Court of Justice opinion that nuclear weapons are illegal, and fully fund the UN, help it reform so it can function, and behave as a normal law-abiding nation—which Article 6 of our Constitution says we are supposed to be.

• Global warming: Global warming is lethal. Several factors—loss of rainforests, collapse of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, exacerbation of El Niño—may make exponential heat spikes that will cause drought so severe that no one can survive it, flooding great enough to wipe out vast coastal areas and whole nations, horrific storms, sudden freezes, and such chaotically unpredictable weather that no agriculture can succeed. We need to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and establish a National Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

• Constitutional reform: We need an Article 5 Constitutional Convention to fix the undemocratic problem of the Senate (PDF)

• Sustainable economy: We need an economy based on sustainable consumption of resources. Read "What's Your Consumption Factor?" (HTML) and "Jared Diamond and the Consumption Factor" (HTML)

Positions in Response to Current Controversies

• Puerto Rico: Our treatment of Puerto Rico is 19th Century style imperialism undertaken purely for the sake of geopolitical military advantage with no regard for the rights and needs of Puerto Ricans at all. The UN should oversee Puerto Rico's independence for five years until the Puerto Rican educational system can present all sides fairly so that a meaningful referendum on independence can be held. Read more: English (PDF) Spanish (PDF)

Human Rights Record of United States in 2007 (HTML)

Waterboarding is Torture (PDF)

Gay Marriage: (PDF)