The Platform of the Independence Party of New York

The Preamble

The Central Mission

The Restoration of Democratic Choice and Electoral Accountability

The Restoration of Fiscal Solvency And Budgetary Sanity

Strengthen the Family Structure: Welfare

Strengthen the Family Structure: Education

The Problem of Crime

The So-Called "Social Issues"

Other Issues

"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just power from the Consent of the Governed."

"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Political Liberty: "The state or condition of those who have the right effectually to share in framing and conducting their government."

"The right to participate in determining the form, choosing the officials, making the laws, and carrying on the functions of one's government."

Members of Congress and the state legislatures, through wanton abuse of their authority and power, "effectually" deny citizens their right "to choose" their own representative in 90 percent and more of the legislative districts in the United States, where incumbents are virtually unchallenged.

Have they not violated the Constitution, both the meaning and intent, by abrogating the "privileges and immunities" of the citizens of the United States?

Have they not deprived us of our political "liberty" as effectively as any dictator, king, or tyrant could accomplish?

Does it matter that the incumbents have insured their own electoral invulnerability through guile, duplicity, and manipulation, rather than by force?

The Platform of the Independence Party of New York

Today, however, the condition of our democracy is tragically flawed. The incumbents of both political parties have manipulated every resource at their disposal to all but eliminate electoral choice in the United States; and they have, in the process, converted the state and federal budgets into a gigantic payoff system for the interests and organizations that contribute to their campaigns. The result is a frustrated and angry public; a public that has no place to express this anger because the electoral system is rigged to guarantee the re-election of the incumbents in office.

The incumbents of both parties have collaborated to subvert our political liberty to serve their own ambition for pensions, privileges, and perks. ln the process of paying off those who contribute massively to their campaigns, they have erected a mountain of public debt which will eventually crash down upon the lives of our children and grandchildren, crushing the value out of a democracy that ten generations of Americans have struggled and died to preserve.

The platform that follows is directed at the restoration both of our political liberty and of fiscal and economic solvency for our children. Unlike the incumbents of both parties, we not only welcome electoral competition, we cherish it. We not only espouse the virtue of fiscal conservatism and responsibility, we will actually practice it with spending and taxes. We not only desire political and electoral reform, we will support these reforms as the core of our effort to restore choice and accountability. And, we will support only those candidates who are committed to the reforms we seek as a party.

The maintenance of our democracy requires a price of each of us. We will retain democracy for our children only as much as our own willingness to sacrifice for it.

The Central Mission

• To restore democratic choice and electoral accountability.
• To put an end to budget deficits, unfunded pension liabilities, and other underfunded long-term liabilities.
• To create a modern budgetary process that uses professionally acceptable accounting standards and accrual accounting, avoiding mandates, understated liabilities, and off-line budgeting.
• To diminish the pervasive and pernicious role of campaign contributions in buying access to legislative decision making and in promoting claims to public money.
• To promote public policies that are more directly consistent with the desires and needs of the public:
  • In welfare, where Americans want a system that discourages teenage pregnancy, encourages work, and encourages families to stay together.
  • ln education, where Americans want to promote improvements that move us toward a world class education system.
  • In crime, where Americans want a system that keeps violent felons off the street, and which promotes more creative alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent criminals.
  • In taxation and spending, where Americans want solutions that do not require continually increasing the burden of taxation on Americans and do not require continually expanding the scope of government activity.

In effect, our current two party system has proved a monumental failure in the most essential public function it performs -- the representation of what Americans want from their government.

© 1996 by the Independence Party of New York State.
Send comments via Email to indepen@frontiernet.net
Formatted for Internet access by Dave Ketchum. It is the complete text of the original, reformatted for presentation via Internet, but with the word "Fusion" deleted, and with some editing of punctuation, spelling, and grammar.