Volunteers for a Better America

As citizens, we share broad progressive democratic values, and we join together to help this nation fulfill its promise as a democratic egalitarian society that respects liberty and justice for all. We believe that we should have a stronger voice in government, at the local, state and national level, through the voting booth and through participation in policy decisions.

We hope to accomplish through this group goals that we cannot accomplish through our membership in other organizations. We know that we cannot be all things to all people, and we recognize that we will disagree among ourselves on many specifics. We will therefore make decisions through consensus to select specific projects that reflect the values that we share.

In broad terms, the fundamental principles that underlie any project we take on or position that we espouse are the following:

• That all people should have equal access to the basic necessities of food, shelter, clothing and medical treatment

• That all people should have equal opportunity to participate in the civic society through education, jobs, the ability to join in social and religious organizations of their choosing

• That all people should have equal rights to participate in the political society through communication processes that provide truthful and complete information about the issues at stake and voting processes that respect individual autonomy by counting each vote equally

In specific terms, we recognize that there are innumerable problems in the implementation of these principles and that those problems are particularly acute in some areas. We believe that the most important problems in our country can be categorized under the following general topics:

• fiscal resources

  • withdrawal of government-supported safety nets, instituted in the 20th century to protect the poor, the elderly and dependents, as in the current efforts to privatize Social Security and to cut back on benefits available through Medicare and Medicaid

  • increasing national debt to fund military enterprises,

  • tax policies that encourage outsourcing of business and provide generous incentive subsidies to various special interests that may not be within the best interests of the nation’s people (oil exploration, agribusiness, etc.),

  • tax cuts that provide enormous benefits to the wealthiest classes of taxpayers (estate tax repeal, cuts in rates on highest income taxpayers) while burdening ordinary Americans and future generations with financing those cuts through spending reductions (especially to safety net programs) and increased national debt

• environmental resources:

  • failure to enforce environmental protections;

  • capture of government overseers by regulated industries;

  • failure to incorporate scientific advancements into appropriate restrictions on private activities

  • withdrawal from the international community’s efforts to deal with lasting effects of industrial society on fragile ecosystems

• information resources:

  • increasing concentration of media ownership in a few corporate giants

  • proliferation of misrepresentation and distortion, financed by taxpayer dollars, as in the government’s hiring of supposedly independent journalist Armstrong Williams

• foreign relations:

  • a unilateralist and aggressive view of the role of the US in the affairs of other countries

  • substitution of military power for diplomatic negotiation

  • inadequate support of the international community through the United Nations

• electoral justice:

  • increasing lack of accountability of voting apparatus to ensure that votes are actually recorded and counted

  • increasing use of legislatures to gerrymander districts and disenfranchise members of minority groups

• separation of church and state:

  • increasing confusion of the lines between religious beliefs/actions and state policies/actions

  • siphoning off of taxpayer funding from government programs that benefit people of all faiths (or no faith) to “faith-based initiatives” and vouchers for private schools

  • use of religious language to justify unilateralist and militaristic responses to developments in the world

We understand that we cannot take action on all of these fronts, but we believe that we can make a difference in the future development of policies and in the informed selection of leaders to carry out those policies. We hereby commit ourselves to an activist agenda to work together on these issues.