Rise Up Platform

I. Purpose

This document outlines a bold agenda that a very progressive governor and legislature, the next “Fighting Bob” La Follettes, could achieve in two terms in office–eight years. The visionary reforms contained here are drawn from the ideas of Citizen Action Organizing Co-op members and board members across the state.

This platform was approved by the Citizen Action Board and members at the December 8, 2017 Annual Meeting.

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Environment: Safeguard Wisconsin citizens from environment-related risks to health, safety, and well-being, and secure our natural resources to support a resilient, prosperous, and sustainable economy.

1. Restructure economic relations between democratic government, corporations, employers, and workers to achieve a full employment, living wage economy in which racial, gender, and regional disparities in income and opportunity are eradicated.
2. Uphold and consistently enforce the Polluter Pays Principle to protect Wisconsin’s environment and to create a level playing field for environmentally responsible businesses.
3. Enforce a transition to a low-carbon economy less reliant on fossils fuels.
4. Transition from an extractive, “take-make-dump” economy to a more prosperous and resilient circular economy by dramatically increasing use of renewable and recyclable resources while reducing the consumption of raw materials and cutting emission and material losses.

Justice System Reform: End system of mass incarceration and biased policing, and instead invest in harm reduction, restorative justice, and mental health treatment. Strengthen and protect our state and federal constitutional rights to a fair, impartial, and nonpartisan judiciary.

1. Establish due process of criminal and civil law.
2. Restore public trust and confidence in the courts.
3. Guarantee equal rights across the gender spectrum in housing, employment, public accommodations, and education.
4. Create a juvenile and a criminal justice system that protects the public through equitable and rational practices, and that relies less on policing and incarceration than on intervention, treatment, and rehabilitation.
5. Reduce the incarceration rate by half within four years and create alternatives to prison for all nonviolent offenders.

Democracy: Shift power back to the people, and away from the corporate and big money interests, by creating a vibrant democracy where voting rights are dramatically expanded, elections are owned by voters, and the public interest is the major driver of public policy.

1. Expand voting rights.
2. Establish a fair process for drawing election maps that restores power to the voters to choose their elected officials.
3. End the domination of corporate money in elections.
4. Election integrity: Ensure the accuracy and integrity of our elections by keeping a paper record of every vote (which must be visible to each voter) and requiring random public audits.
5. Ethics: Close the revolving door between government and corporations it is supposed to regulate.
6. Expand the role of the people in lawmaking.

Immigrant Rights: Stop the criminalization of communities of color by establishing that everyone in the United States, regardless of their immigration status or criminal record, has the same fundamental human and constitutional rights.

Just Tax Policy: Create a fair, equitable, and progressive tax system that generates the revenue needed to guarantee the full promise of American life to everyone.

III. The Citizen Action Progressive Platform

A) A World Class Education for Everyone

Goal: Give each generation the education they need to succeed in an ever-changing world. Guarantee and fund a world class education for everyone from preschool through college. This includes apprenticeships, internships, and all forms of continuing education and training needed to adapt to a rapidly changing economy. We will fight for strong public schools for all zip codes, universally accessible public technical colleges, and universities with equitable outcomes for each and every student regardless of race, gender, sexual preference, or ability.

1. Raise the guarantee of public education in Wisconsin from 12th grade to 16th grade by providing free public university, technical college, and junior college tuition (and other expenses for low income students). Also guarantee free college and technical college education for all workers who want to transition to new professions and careers.
2. Set in motion a massive expansion of public college education access that puts Wisconsin on a course to achieve a dramatic increase in the college attainment rate for two-year or four-year degrees (it is now 41% in Wisconsin).
3. Include accountability and transparency measures that make it possible to control hyperinflation in the cost of public colleges and universities.
4. Guarantee that every child gets the start they need by:
   • Fully funding universal high-quality childcare with certified early education professionals, run by local school districts.
   • Fully funding public preschool starting at age three for all children.
   • Fully funding all-day four-year-old kindergarten in every public school district.
5. Guarantee real equality of educational opportunity for every Wisconsin family regardless of the zip code in which they live:
   1. Create a fair and sufficiently resourced public school funding formula.
   2. Attract the next generation of great educators into the profession by guaranteeing every public school in Wisconsin the resources to:
      1. Raise starting salaries to hire the highest quality beginning educators;
      2. Fund salary steps for educators who commit themselves to the profession by getting the training and certifications to become master teachers.
   3. Limit charter schools to those authorized by democratically accountable public-school districts. Phase out voucher schools and non-instrumentality charter schools within eight years. Create a process for voucher schools to become public schools or charters authorized and governed by local school districts. In the meantime, require voucher and charter schools to meet the same transparency, accountability, and teacher certification requirements as public schools. Also require these schools to accept and fully accommodate all children, including special needs kids.
   4. Guarantee a class size of no more than 22 students per class in every public school with a qualified and certified teacher.
   5. End “test and punish” approach to education. Replace standardized testing with comprehensive evaluations that assess what is needed to help schools and students succeed and consider poverty and other relevant challenges faced by teachers and students in urban, suburban, and rural schools. Place a greater emphasis on each student’s individual needs.
   6. To address the disparate impact of school discipline procedures on students of color, implement programs for restorative justice that advocate for peer-based justice programs, while limiting the number of police liaisons at schools.
   7. Set a goal of doubling the number of educators of color in all grades. Include a robust program to assist students of color in becoming educators.
   8. Guarantee one school mental health counselor per every 250 students and institute trauma-informed mental health programs for every public school.
6. Union rights: restore full collective bargaining rights so that educators, who are at the heart of our education system, have a strong voice in our schools.

B) Health Care

Goal: Establish health care as a fundamental human right guaranteed by our democratic government.

1. Set a vision to achieve Medicare for All in Wisconsin, and in the U.S., by moving away from corporate health care to a progressively more public system.
   1. Immediately launch a robust public option through BadgerCare that includes all public employees, and where all Wisconsinites who lack high quality employer-sponsored health coverage and all private employers can buy affordable coverage.
   2. Expand the power of democratic government to regulate rapidly rising medical costs, starting with measures to crack down on pharmaceutical price gouging and establishing a commission to cap excessive medication prices (tied to actual costs and reasonable profit margins).
   3. Transition to BadgerCare for All, funded through progressive taxation, to become universal in stages, to guarantee that everyone in Wisconsin has high quality health coverage.
   4. Empower BadgerCare Public Option and once established BadgerCare for All, as the largest payers, to actively negotiate prices with drug corporations, hospitals, clinics, physician practices, and other elements of the healthcare industry to provide high quality healthcare at a sustainable cost.
2. Guarantee comprehensive health care including the full spectrum of acute and chronic health services, preventive care, mental health, women’s health, substance use treatment, dental, and evidence-based alternative treatments.
   1. Address opioid addiction and all other substance (drug and alcohol) use as a public health crisis by providing universal access to robust prevention and treatment services for all Wisconsin residents.
   2. Guarantee access to the full range of women’s health services to women and girls of all ages and income levels, including the choice to terminate a pregnancy, affordable and easily accessible contraception, and reproductive and sex education. Also end discriminatory attacks on women’s health care providers, including Planned Parenthood.
   3. Establish and fund a universal mental health and wellness program for all citizens.
   4. Make major investments in public health services and infrastructure to promote a robust response to community health needs, emphasize prevention and management of disease, and dramatically reduce health disparities.
   5. Build a health system that addresses economic, racial, and gender disparities in health status and outcomes.
   6. Begin to build towards a system of universal long term care and community based supports.
3. Create good jobs in health care. Quality health care is directly linked to quality jobs—jobs that provide fair pay for skilled work, adequate staffing levels, safe working conditions and good training. Workforce development and job security are integral components to patient safety and quality of care. we must ensure that a living wage and dignity in the workplace are extended to the entire health care workforce.

C) Just, Sustainable, and Prosperous Economy

Goal: Create a fair, equitable and resilient economy and avert a global climate catastrophe.

1. Restructure economic relations between democratic government, corporations, employers, and workers to achieve a full-employment, living wage economy in which racial, gender, and regional disparities in income and opportunity are eradicated.
   1. A fair economy is dependent on the freedom of every worker to join together with fellow workers to form a union. But for most workers, it is nearly impossible to form or join a union. It is not possible to expand opportunity without strong unions that give workers a real voice in the economy.
      1. Restore the right to join a union for every worker in America, regardless of employer, industry, or region.
      2. Use all of the levers of government spending and economic policy to encourage the growth of unions.
   2. Use government leverage to guarantee that all jobs are living wage jobs with benefits for all full-time workers by:
      1. Raising the wage floor through a $15 minimum wage (in 2017 dollars) indexed to inflation.
      2. Providing refundable tax credits that bridge any continuing gaps between full time wages and a living wage.

• Changing the terms of global trade to end race-to-the-bottom policies and practices, and encourage living wages in the U.S. and in all nations.

1. Correcting abuses in contingent and “gig” economies by guaranteeing all workers the full rights of employees.
2. Stopping the use of government policy to rig the economy in favor of multinational corporations and against small business and democratic economic innovations such as co-ops.

1. Encourage sustainable practices.
2. Prevent the external costs of corporate activity from being shifted onto the community by requiring corporations to pay for the full environmental impact of their operations.
3. Establish robust supports and protections which guarantee that everyone who wants full-time work with benefits can attain and retain such employment, by:
   1. Investing to scale in labor intensive sectors that are needed in the 21st Century (for example, education, community health, renewable energy).
   2. Focusing investments in cities and rural areas with acute shortages of family-supporting jobs.

• Creating a large-scale transitional jobs program to employ and prepare all those that cannot currently obtain work in the private sector.

1. Making robust investments in social infrastructure needed to support employment of people left out of the private economy, such as formerly incarcerated people, people with mental health issues, and those with histories of substance use;
2. Establishing the supports that most people need to retain quality full time jobs, including:
   1. Freedom to organize a union;
   2. Universal high-quality affordable child care;
   3. Guaranteed sick days and paid leave;
   4. Robust and reliable public transit to get people to jobs;
   5. Sufficient affordable housing in all areas to guarantee that no one involuntarily pays more than 30% of their income for housing;
   6. Guaranteed food security during all transitions in life.
3. Eradicate racial, gender, and regional disparities in employment and income, by:
   1. Making equity goals an explicit and measurable outcome for every government program or investment where job creation is a stated purpose or goal, and building a system to track progress in real time to inform policy development and adjustments;
   2. Establishing hiring halls and apprenticeship programs in the service sector and other currently low-income occupations, targeted to reach low-income minority communities, women, and depressed rural areas at the scale necessary to connect a high percentage of workers with quality job opportunities;

• Establishing career pathways for low-income workers, particularly in sectors that receive large infrastructure investments for building a low-carbon economy;

1. Broadening the definition of infrastructure to include human social infrastructure, like health and child services professions and other currently low-wage professions with high concentrations of women and minorities, and make them gateway jobs for people left out of the current economy;
2. Create a Paid Family Leave program, funded through progressive taxation, to provide financial support to parents and caretakers of children who are newborn, ill, or need other short term care.
3. Initiate a paradigm shift from an “extraction economy” based on the exploitation of resources, workers, and communities, to a “circular or regenerative economy” which incentivizes the preservation and reuse of natural resources to prevent a climate genocide; and develop and sustain the community, human, and natural capital needed to support prosperous and resilient communities.
   1. Make massive investment to create thousands of new jobs in employment intensive fields of energy efficiency and local renewable energy generation.
      1. Use as beachhead for the creation of a jobs strategy for economically depressed urban and rural areas.
      2. Create financing mechanisms that enable state and local governments, individuals, co-ops, and businesses to make larger expenditures, taking advantage of the fact that energy conservation investments on average pay for themselves in three years.

• Use leverage to advantage small-scale, locally owned, renewable energy generation over monopoly control by large corporate utilities and the importation of energy from other states or countries.

1. Invest in professions that have a high social return and support economic opportunity and resilient communities (such as child care, home care, substance use prevention and treatment, mental health service providers, education, tutors and mentors for at-risk kids, mass transit, community health work, advanced communication infrastructure such as rural broadband in neglected areas), and make these jobs living wage jobs with career ladders to jobs in allied professions.
2. Use our democratic government to shift our economy away from extractive exploitation of natural resources, people, and communities, by:
   1. Taxing fossil fuel extraction and use based on its full environmental and health impact while holding working families financially harmless;
   2. Enacting and enforcing robust financial regulations that prevent Wall Street and mega-banks from exploiting individuals and communities;

• Promoting democratic access to financial capital for individuals and small businesses;

1. Ending housing exploitation of low-income people and communities of color by effectively banning ongoing housing discrimination and by guaranteeing affordable housing in all urban and rural areas;
2. Cutting off direct governmental investments and federal, state, and local tax incentives for large corporations that extract profits by engaging in environmentally and/or socially destructive practices (such as outsourcing jobs, abandoning urban and rural communities, polluting air and water) and all forms of predatory financial exploitation, including but not limited to payday lending, housing segregation, and substandard for-profit colleges.
3. Use public investment leverage to encourage development of more democratic economic organizations such as co-ops and employee-owned businesses.

D) Environment

Goal: Protect, conserve, and enhance Wisconsin’s natural resources. Safeguard Wisconsin citizens from environment-related risks to health, safety, and well-being, and secure our natural resources to support a resilient, prosperous, and sustainable economy.

1. Restore the power of Wisconsin government to secure the right of every person to the clean and safe environment needed for health, safety, and well being. To this end:
   1. Require the state of Wisconsin to act as trustee of our natural resources by embodying the Public Trust Doctrine into law. Extend the doctrine to all of the state’s natural capital: its water, its air, its ecosystems, and its climate;
   2. Fund scientists and personnel in the DNR at the scale necessary to study and implement needed regulations;
   3. Reinstate the power of the Natural Resources Board to choose the Secretary of the DNR;
   4. Restore the Wisconsin Public Intervenor Office as an independent watchdog agency charged with intervening when necessary to protect public rights in the water and other natural resources;
   5. Require the DNR to regulate high-capacity wells and consider cumulative effects of wells in a proximity;
   6. Require DNR to regulate Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and prohibit any that threaten water quality
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   7. Pass strong new laws to regulate all activities that risk the impairment or pollution of our water, and which shift the burden of proof to those who seek to undertake such activities;
   8. Give local municipalities the right to enact additional water policy protections;
   9. Enact strong wetland protections;
   10. Fully fund education for farmers on sustainable farming practices.
2. Uphold and consistently enforce the Polluter Pays Principle to protect Wisconsin’s environment and to create a level playing field for environmentally responsible businesses.
3. Enforce a transition to a low-carbon economy less reliant on fossil fuels, by:
   1. Committing to rapidly transitioning to a 100% renewable energy system by enacting a renewable energy standard requiring that 50% of Wisconsin’s electricity be produced from renewable energy sources (wind, solar, geothermal, sustainable biogas, sustainable biomass) by 2030, and providing regulatory flexibility to enable municipalities to pursue more stringent renewable energy and low-carbon economy goals;
   2. Aggressively pursuing and enabling energy efficiency improvements across the residential, governmental, agricultural, commercial, and industrial sectors;
   3. Accelerating the transition to a clean economy, and help meet our climate goals via policies that impose carbon fees. Use these fees to subsidize alternative sustainable energy and dramatic increases in energy efficiency;
   4. Requiring the Wisconsin Public Service Commission (PSC) to prioritize energy efficiency and renewable energy opportunities (including support to expand distributed renewable energy) when planning for future energy needs, prior to authorizing construction of any new fossil fuel power plants. Also restructure representation on the PSC to represent the public interest;
   5. Setting residential, commercial, and industrial energy rates to keep rates affordable, particularly for low-income households, and to promote energy efficiency and conservation and investment in distributed renewable energy production;
   6. Promoting and enabling economically competitive low-carbon farming practices including no-till farming, and farm-based distributed energy production including solar, wind, and biogas;
   7. Pursuing water conservation and water reuse to seize energy efficiency opportunities at the water-energy nexus;
   8. Allowing for sustainable biogas to be inserted into natural gas distribution systems.

1. Transition from an extractive, “take-make-dump” economy to a more prosperous and resilient circular economy by dramatically increasing use of renewable and recyclable resources while reducing the consumption of raw materials and cutting emission and material losses. Some important steps for this shift include:
   1. Communicating the need to transition to a circular or regenerative economy, not only as an environmental necessity but also as an economic and job-creation opportunity;
   2. Providing incentives and safeguards to enable and support forward-thinking companies and farmers adopting new business models, as well as to protect and transition other economic actors disrupted by these changes;
   3. Adopting policy incentives and regulations that decouple economic output from resource use;
   4. Adopting policy incentives and regulations that promote the conservation of materials and return wastes to the economy as raw materials;
   5. Shifting some taxation from traditional sources (i.e., wages) to resource waste, polluting emissions, and other activities that damage the environment;
   6. Creating financing mechanisms for government, individuals, co-ops and other democratic economic formations, and businesses to finance projects used to address challenges created by the transition away from fossil fuels.
   7. Identifying areas of material resource use where Wisconsin’s assets offer particularly strong opportunities for Wisconsin to lead and for the Wisconsin environment and job growth to benefit.
   8. Developing Wisconsin as a hub for the reuse, recycling, and reprocessing of resources across the agricultural and manufacturing sectors.

E) Justice System Reform

Goal: End system of mass incarceration and biased policing, and instead invest in harm reduction, restorative justice, and mental health treatment. Dramatically change the direction of criminal justice policy to recognize the link between poverty, racial exclusion, violence, and trauma. Strengthen and protect our state and federal constitutional rights to a fair, impartial, and nonpartisan judiciary and ensure an independent and co-equal judicial branch.

1. Establish due process of criminal and civil law:
   1. Provide lawyers for all defendants facing the loss of liberty or property who cannot afford to hire a lawyer;
   2. Provide lawyers for all defendants facing eviction who cannot afford to hire one.
2. Restore public trust and confidence in the courts, by:
   1. Creating recusal rules for all judges and justices in all courts, requiring self-removal for conflicts;
   2. Imposing the same fundraising and campaign rules on the judicial branch as executive and legislative branches;
   3. Creating a merit selection process for judges to remove partisanship and re-election considerations from judicial decision making.
3. Guarantee equal rights across the gender spectrum in housing, employment, public accommodations, and education.
4. Create a juvenile and a criminal justice system that protects the public through equitable and rational practices, and that relies less on policing and incarceration than on intervention, treatment, and rehabilitation:
   1. Legalize, regulate, and tax medical and recreational marijuana;
   2. Create accountable process for eliminating racial inequalities at every level of the criminal justice system from who is stopped by police, who is charged by prosecutors, all the way up to who is convicted and how much time is served;
   3. Establish juvenile court, not adult court, jurisdiction over persons 17 years of age and younger and move away from a juvenile corrections system based on flawed institutions such as Lincoln Hills;
   4. Recognize the effects of adverse childhood experiences and respond with trauma-informed care and programming;
   5. Create a system to address offenders with mental illness which focusses on public health rather than criminal punishment, and fund intervention and ongoing treatment programs;
   6. Adequately fund community supervision and community resources for all diversion courts and programs;
   7. Eliminate rule violations as a ground for revocation of parole, probation, and other community supervision and replace with community-supporting and offender-supporting alternatives to revocation;
   8. Explore adoption of restorative justice practices, starting in juvenile stages of offenses;
   9. Ban use of prison labor which is used to enrich for-profit corporations while also allowing rehabilitative workforce development programs (not menial labor) that benefit prisoners by improving jobs skills;
   10. Eliminate incarceration based on the inability to pay a fine.
5. Reduce the incarceration rate by half within eight years and create alternatives to prison for all nonviolent offenders:
   1. Repeal mandatory minimum sentencing schemes;
   2. Reduce the maximum sentences for all offenses to pre-“Truth in Sentencing” penalties;
   3. Reduce or commute all sentences currently being served to pre-“Truth in Sentencing” penalties;
   4. Reinstate time off for rehabilitation efforts/good behavior;
   5. Reinstate and utilize the Parole Board;
   6. Reinstate and utilize the Pardon Advisory Board;
   7. Require the Executive Branch to exercise its discretion to grant pardons and commute sentences;
   8. Require the Judicial Branch to exercise its discretion to reduce sentences – no motion for sentence reduction may be denied without a hearing;
   9. Offer treatment involvement diversion programs in all case types and for all addictions, including alcoholism in OWI cases;
   10. Expand procedures for the expungement of criminal records;
6. Discount prior records of over-policed populations when imposing and reviewing sentences.

F) Democracy

Goal: Shift power back to the people, and away from the corporate and big money interests, by creating a vibrant democracy where voting rights are dramatically expanded, elections are owned by voters, and the public interest is the major driver of public policy. Restore the power of democracy to expand the sphere of social, economic, racial, gender, and environmental justice.

1. Expand voting rights. Create a democracy where 100% of voters have full access to the ballot box, and racial and economic barriers to voting are eliminated. Make it easier to vote by ending all unnecessary voting restrictions which disenfranchise people of color and low-income, English-as-a-second language, elderly, and young Americans. End the practice of disenfranchising felons and those currently incarcerated and guarantee the right to vote for everyone 18 years or older, which can never be taken away. Eliminate outdated voter registration requirements and replace with automatic registration of all voters, including automatic updates for people who move or change their names. Hold elections on weekends, or make voting day a public holiday, expand early voting to three weeks before the election at a large number of locations, and institute full-scale voting by mail. Replace the current primary system with instant runoff voting to ensure the candidate with the most overall public support is elected.
2. Establish a fair process for drawing election maps that restores power to the voters to choose their elected officials. Institute an independent nonpartisan system for drawing legislative districts at all levels (based on the Iowa model) that also ensures equal representation of communities of color. Promote local control and citizen input at every level of the map drawing process, and ensure that all people in prisons be counted in their home communities during apportionment––not in the communities where the prisons are located.
3. End domination of corporate money in elections.
   1. Create a public financing system, which matches small donations, with sufficient resources to run an effective campaign without dependence on large donors and sufficient to withstand dark money attacks.
   2. Wisconsin should pass a resolution indicating it would join other states in amending the Constitution to overturn Citizens United and Buckley v. Valeo doctrine that “money is speech.”
   3. Wisconsin should enact a “Citizen’s Right to Know” law that requires all political “issue ads” to include a full listing of all donors to the organization making the claims in the ad. In addition, full financial reporting for such ads which includes the amounts donated and their original sources, not only the last organization money passed through, will be maintained by the Wisconsin Election Commission.
   4. Outlaw collusion between candidates, Super PACs, and other dark money groups.
   5. Require media corporations to provide free advertising time to all political candidates during elections and create a state version of the equal time rule.
   6. Revamp election law enforcement by creating an independent and nonpartisan enforcement agency with independent funding and investigation capacity.
   7. Election integrity: Ensure the accuracy and integrity of our elections by keeping a paper record of every vote (which must be visible to each voter) and requiring random public audits based on hand counts of paper ballots and records. Ban elected officials at all levels from working for or having any ownership stake in companies that design, manufacture, or maintain voting equipment.
4. Ethics: Close the revolving door between elected officials, staff, and administrative officials and corporations they are supposed to regulate. Ban all lobbying by government contractors and recently retired elected officials. Prohibit elected officials and government employees from using inside information to enrich themselves. Require elected officials to disclose all investments in enterprises potentially impacted by legislation and to recuse themselves from introducing or voting on any legislation that might affect those businesses.
5. Expand the role of the people in lawmaking:
   1. Amend the Wisconsin Constitution to allow voters to veto state legislation (only immediately after a law’s passage) through a referendum process similar to the Ohio model.
   2. Repeal state laws that preempt the local power of cities and counties to create higher employment standards such as minimum wages, living wages, prevailing wage, union rights, and paid sick days; environmental standards such as clean water protections, and renewable energy and energy efficiency standards; or the right to determine the structure of local governments.

G) Immigrant Rights

Goal: Stop the criminalization of communities of color by establishing that everyone in the United States, regardless of their immigration status or criminal record, has the same fundamental human and constitutional rights. To achieve this, establish and strengthen the rights of all immigrants regardless of status, create a right for families to stay together, and establish a reasonable path to citizenship and permanent status.

As interim steps before this goal can be fully achieved:

1. Pass state law guaranteeing the right of local governments to become sanctuary cities and other mechanisms for not aiding and abetting unjust federal immigration policies;
2. End discrimination in the issuing of driving licences based on immigrations status;
3. Remove barriers to voting which disproportionately target people of color communities;
4. Expand BadgerCare to all residents in Wisconsin regardless of legal status;
5. Address the root causes of mass migration and economic inequality by supporting fair and equitable trade policies that give people the option of earning living wages anywhere in the world;
6. Expand multi-lingual education statewide.

H) Just Tax Policy

Goal: Create a fair and equitable tax system that generates the revenue needed to guarantee the full promise of American life to everyone. This tax system should be progressive, asking those who benefit the most in our economic system to pay a much higher share of their income in order to dramatically expand opportunity for those who are currently denied access to the American Dream.

1. Series of reforms to make the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share;
2. Surtax on multimillionaires and billionaires to make sure they pay their fair share;
3. Restore fair inheritance taxation to multi-million dollar estates;
4. Ensure millionaires no longer can pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries;
5. Tax all investment income at the same rate as ordinary earned income;
6. Dramatically expand enforcement against tax evasion by the wealthy and by large corporations to assure they pay their fair share back to the community.