Ras Baraka: Don’t Count Out the Progressives

OPINION

Hidden in plain sight of Tuesday’s election results is strong, numerical evidence that the progressive wing of New Jersey’s Democratic party is not only alive and well, but formidable and motivated to move our state in a direction guided by equitable solutions to the state’s most stubborn problems.

The two most progressive candidates, Steve Fulop and myself, together got 36.5% of the votes, enough to have won the election.

Without any Democratic Party backing, money, and resources, my campaign won handily in two of the state’s most populous counties, Essex and Union, and we came close in Passaic. Not incidentally, these counties are home to three of New Jersey’s four biggest cities, where the inequities of our society are most visible and its victims endure the most pain.

• End school segregation by consolidating districts which will save millions in administrative costs also.
• Reduce taxes for families earning $90,000 or less, which would benefit half the of New Jersey families.
• Add a 2% tax increase to those earning over $10 million, which would raise $2 billion to invest in our communities.
• Restore corporate taxes on businesses with $1 million more in profits.
• Attack the wealth gap. Reverse tax cuts for the wealthy which cost the state $15 billion in revenue.
• Fight for our health care consumers by using ‘reference pricing’ to pay hospitals and doctors up to $150 percent of Medicaid payments for treatment and services, rather than let them set exorbitant prices.
• Expand Medicaid to include housing, nutrition, transportation and childcare to ensure healthier conditions for our people.
• Work  toward a statewide universal healthcare system and Medicaid for all.
• Declare an housing shortage emergency.
• Increase housing supply through effort like inclusionary zoning, which allows for more multifamily homes and accessory dwelling units on single-family lots.
• Make down payment subsidies available to lift people  into homeownership, which will stabilize our neighborhoods.
• Insist on statewide rent control.
• Stop LLCs from buying up large swaths of residential properties and artificially inflating the price of homes.
• Use landbanks to allow redevelopment of fallow properties.
• Create public banks for reinvestment in the community and including in Black, brown and female owned businesses.
• Increase minimum wage.
• Make community college free.
• Reinvest in public transportation for city-to-city transit in New Jersey, especially along work corridors.

These ideas are not wild dreams. Neither is protecting our immigrant community from unlawful search and seizure and other Constitutional violations, or rising up to stop the encroaching Trump authoritarianism in its tracks. They are within our collective reach as a society that stresses health and livable wages for all and knows creating pathways to homeownership and generational wealth is good for the economy and good for everybody. The wide coalition of progressive organizations that backed my campaign know this. They are the men and women of this state who do the work, and they’re tired of how hard they must struggle to have their work pay off. They are the people who value the freedoms guaranteed by our democracy, such as the right to gather and petition the government without threat of arrest.