The Just Economy Pledge
for National Recovery & Reinvention
#justeconomy
The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and racial justice protests in the middle of it underscored economic and social fractures that were there all along. Inequality isn’t simply about how much stuff you have. It’s about life and death.
America needs to recover – not only from a pandemic, but from an economic system and a culture that has from its beginning valued some lives over others. We need to rebuild and revive devastated communities, shore up and regain trust in essential institutions and systems, and when we do we need to create a new normal that is unlike the old. The old normal wasn’t built for everyone. It was indefensible.
America needs a new reality rooted in a just economy.
America should not only promise but deliver to all Americans opportunities to build wealth and live well. That isn’t a radical goal, just a restatement of the very first principle from the nation’s founding:
We hold these truths to be self-evident ...
Black lives matter. Women and girls, immigrants, essential workers, Latino, Asian, gay, transgender, indigenous, rural, urban, suburban, old and poor people matter. A just economy, formulated and perpetually recalibrated to ensure public benefits and individual achievements, should sustain, celebrate and embolden all.
This is a starting point: a set of principles upon which public sector policies and private sector practices should be organized and evaluated.
This is also an open letter to leaders and a commitment to ourselves and our children. Together, we pledge to …
- End all forms of discrimination and inequality in business and community life.
- Advance equitable and inclusive access to credit, capital, jobs, housing, health, education, knowledge, financial security and personal well-being.
- Embrace truth and science, confront history, invest to repair injustice and reinvent the future.
Together, we urge government, business, nonprofit, faith and philanthropic leaders, and informed, empowered individuals everywhere, to imagine and create a just economy.
Build it upon these principles:
Make Upward Mobility Attainable For All.
How? Ensure everyone has access to loans, insurance, homes, investments and financial services free of racial, gender, ethnic, geographic, age and other forms of bias and discrimination. Encourage rigorous private sector practices to end discrimination in business. Ensure inclusive investments, leadership and hiring in new and small businesses. Set fair and sound tax rates to meet the nation’s financial commitments and the needs of future generations. Reject, reveal and punish corruption.
Everyone Deserves A Comfortable And Affordable Home.
How? End homelessness. Enforce fair lending and fair housing laws. Ensure lenders, capital markets and local regulations provide equitable access to affordable homes for owners and renters in safe, livable, and inclusive communities.
Everyone Deserves A Fair Shot At Financial Security.
How? Root out systemic racism and socio-economic biases and disparities in financial services, housing, education, business, healthcare, employment, elections, criminal justice and law enforcement. Repair history, ensure an equitable future. Past injustices explain but do not excuse why descendants of enslaved Africans, as well as Native Americans, hold and pass on to their children a slim fraction of the wealth held by descendants of white European immigrants. Or why in 2020 women earned, on average, 82 cents for every dollar earned by men. End the racial wealth divide. End the gender pay gap.
Life Is Local. A Nation Thrives Only When Its Local Communities Thrive.
How? Ensure knowledge, innovation and capital flow fairly to individuals in all communities. End geographic disparities and repair historic injustices that systematically concentrated wealth in some communities and blocked it from others. End the digital divide. Ensure everyone, everywhere, has affordable access to digital data networks and devices to use them.
Ensure Everyone Earns Enough To Pay For Life’s Necessities.
How? Ensure a living wage for all work. Work to thrive, not to survive. Decouple basic needs from employment. Strengthen and reinvent the social safety net. Expand and improve government programs to fully eliminate food and housing insecurity and to meet other basic needs. Enact a minimum basic income, regardless of employment, to pay for basic necessities.
Ensure Universal Access To Great Healthcare.
How? End racial and geographic disparities in access to healthcare and in health outcomes, including lifespans and maternal childbirth deaths. Ensure a healthy and sustainable environment with clean air and water, access to nutritious food, clean and renewable energy and greenspaces. Solve preventable causes of death, including pollution and gun violence. Ensure all have paid time off for illnesses, childcare after a birth or adoption and for family care and mental health. Ensure a strong, coordinated national public health system.
Ensure All Children Have Access To Great Public Schools.
How? End disparities and segregation in school funding. End the use of loans and the burden of debt for education at all levels, from preschool through graduate, trade and professional school. Demolish the schools-to-prisons pipeline. Prioritize investments in education and communities over military spending.
Ensure Individuals Own Their Personal Data, Control Who Has Access To It And Are Treated Fairly By Anyone Who Does.
How? Strengthen and enforce laws to eliminate intentional and implicit digital discrimination. Enforce antitrust laws to ensure no company controls digital data or markets.
America Has The Highest Incarceration Rate Of All Industrialized Nations. New Goal: The Lowest Rate.
How? Create real pathways for re-entry, education and full participation in community life after prison. Demilitarize and drive racism out of policing and law enforcement, abolish prisons for profit, end bail systems, court and jail fees and inequities in penalties that disproportionately favor the rich and punish the poor.
A Just Economy Requires A Trusted, Inclusive And Accessible Democracy.
How? End racist and political manipulation of elections and voting. Guarantee no-wait voting for all voters in all elections. Strengthen and celebrate participation in democracy, punish suppression of voting rights and ensure sound, trusted voting systems.
Democracy Requires Informed Citizenship.
How? Ensure transparency and access to public records and data. Tell the truth. Teach it in schools. Require it from government and business leaders, seek and respect it from scientists. Champion freedom of the press. Invest to sustain robust, independent, inclusive and resilient local journalism.
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