Sign on to this petition if you support an Economic Bill of Rights for our country now-- as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt so clearly articulated in his January 11, 1944 State of the Union address: "a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all— regardless of station, race, or creed" (Michael Moore included footage of this in his "Capitalism: A Love Story").

FDR: "Among these are the right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation; the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; the right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; the right of every family to a decent home; the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; the right to a good education."
[FDRHeritage.org/bill_of_rights.htm]

See these four for background information (also more below):

"Now Is the Time for an Economic Bill of Rights" by Ellen Brown [11/11/11]
http://www.truth-out.org/time-economic-bill-rights/1320938466

"FDR: The Second Bill of Rights" by Robert Borosage [1/11/11]
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2011010211/fdr-second-bill-rights

"Economic Rights, Then and Now: January 11th, 2010 Marks the 66th Anniversary of FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights" by Susan Feiner [1/11/10]
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2010/0110feiner.html

"FDR's Unfinished 'Second Bill of Rights' – and Why We Need it Now" by Dale Tarvis [12/14/06]
http://www.apj.us/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=130&Itemid

Kudos to the new burgeoning OccupyPoughkeepsie.org movement for voting at a General Assembly in January 2012 to endorse FDR's Economic Bill of Rights (see 1/25/12 issue of Occupy Poughkeepsie Journal)-- sign on to this petition and pass it along to all you know to make sure that more and more political organizations, elected officials, and candidates for all levels of office here-- especially here in the Hudson Valley (and across the U.S.) truly honor the legacy of FDR and Eleanor!

[White House: (202) 456-1111; Congressional switchboard: (202) 224-3121]

Joel Tyner
Five-term Dutchess County Legislator (Clinton/Rhinebeck)
Democratic Candidate for Congress, 20th c.d
JoelforCongress.org
DutchessDemocracy.blogspot.om
324 Browns Pond Road
Staatsburg, NY 12580
joeltyner@earthlink.net
(845) 444-0599/(845) 876-2488

[also see NewDeal20.org for much more on all this]

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From http://www.truth-out.org/time-economic-bill-rights/1320938466 ...

Now Is the Time for an Economic Bill of Rights
Friday 11 November 2011
by: Ellen Brown, Truthout | News Analysis

Henry Ford said, "It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."

We are beginning to understand, and Occupy Wall Street looks like the beginning of the revolution.

We are beginning to understand that our money is created, not by the government, but by banks. Many authorities have confirmed this, including the Federal Reserve itself. The only money the government creates today are coins, which compose less than one ten-thousandth of the money supply. Federal Reserve Notes, or dollar bills, are issued by Federal Reserve banks, all 12 of which are owned by the private banks in their district. Most of our money comes into circulation as bank loans, and it comes with an interest charge attached.

According to Margrit Kennedy, a German researcher who has studied this issue extensively, interest now composes 40 percent of the cost of everything we buy. We don't see it on the sales slips, but interest is exacted at every stage of production. Suppliers need to take out loans to pay for labor and materials before they have a product to sell.

For government projects, Kennedy found that the average cost of interest is 50 percent. If the government owned the banks, it could keep the interest and get these projects at half price. That means governments - state and federal - could double the number of projects they could afford, without costing the taxpayers a single penny more than we are paying now.

This opens up exciting possibilities. Federal and state governments could fund all sorts of things we think we can't afford now, simply by owning their own banks. They could fund something Franklin D. Roosevelt and Martin Luther King dreamt of - an Economic Bill of Rights.

A Vision for Tomorrow

In his first inaugural address in 1933, Roosevelt criticized the sort of near-sighted Wall Street greed that precipitated the Great Depression. He said, "They only know the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and where there is no vision the people perish."

Roosevelt's own vision reached its sharpest focus in 1944, when he called for a Second Bill of Rights. He said:

    This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights.... They were our rights to life and liberty.

    As our nation has grown in size and stature, however - as our industrial economy expanded - these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

He then enumerated the economic rights he thought needed to be added to the Bill of Rights. They included:

    The right to a job;

    The right to earn enough to pay for food and clothing;

    The right of businessmen to be free of unfair competition and domination by monopolies;

    The right to a decent home;

    The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to enjoy good health;

    The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

    The right to a good education.

Times have changed since the first Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution in 1791. When the country was founded, people could stake out some land, build a house on it, farm it and be self-sufficient. The Great Depression saw people turned out of their homes and living in the streets - a phenomenon we are seeing again today. Few people now own their own homes. Even if you have signed a mortgage, you will be in debt peonage to the bank for 30 years or so before you can claim the home as your own.

Health needs have changed, too. In 1791, foods were natural and nutrient rich, and outdoor exercise was built into the lifestyle. Degenerative diseases such as cancer and heart disease were rare. Today, health insurance for some people can cost as much as rent.

Then there are college loans, which collectively now exceed a trillion dollars, more even than credit card debt. Students are coming out of universities not just without jobs, but carrying a debt of $20,000 or so on their backs. For medical students and other post-graduate students, it can be $100,000 or more. Again, that's as much as a mortgage, with no house to show for it. The justification for incurring these debts was supposed to be that the students would get better jobs when they graduated, but now jobs are scarce.

After World War II, the GI Bill provided returning servicemen with free college tuition, as well as cheap home loans and business loans. It was called "the GI Bill of Rights." Studies have shown that the GI Bill paid for itself seven times over and is one of the most lucrative investments the government ever made.

The government could do that again - without increasing taxes or the federal debt. It could do it by recovering the power to create money from Wall Street and the financial services industry, which now claim a whopping 40 percent of everything we buy.

An Updated Constitution for a New Millennium

Banks acquired the power to create money by default when Congress declined to claim it at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The Constitution says only that "Congress shall have the power to coin money [and] regulate the power thereof." The founders left out not just paper money, but checkbook money, credit card money, money market funds, and other forms of exchange that make up the money supply today. All of them are created by private financial institutions, and they all come into the economy as loans with interest attached.

Governments - state and federal - could bypass the interest tab by setting up their own publicly owned banks. Banking would become a public utility, a tool for promoting productivity and trade rather than for extracting wealth from the debtor class.

Congress could go further: it could reclaim the power to issue money from the banks and fund its budget directly. It could do this, in fact, without changing any laws. Congress is empowered to "coin money," and the Constitution sets no limit on the face amount of the coins. Congress could issue a few one-trillion dollar coins, deposit them in an account and start writing checks.

The Fed's own figures show that the money supply has shrunk by $3 trillion since 2008. That sum could be spent into the economy without inflating prices. Three trillion dollars could go a long way toward providing the jobs and social services necessary to fulfill an Economic Bill of Rights. Guaranteeing employment to anyone willing and able to work would increase gross domestic product, allowing the money supply to expand even further without inflating prices, since supply and demand would increase together.

Modernizing the Bill of Rights

As Bob Dylan said, "The times they are a-changin'." Revolutionary times call for revolutionary solutions and an updated social contract. Apple and Microsoft update their programs every year. We are trying to fit a highly complex, modern monetary scheme into a constitutional framework that is 200 years old.

After President Roosevelt died in 1945, his vision for an Economic Bill of Rights was kept alive by Martin Luther King. "True compassion," King declared, "is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

King, too, has now passed away, but his vision has been carried on by a variety of money reform groups. The government as "employer of last resort," guaranteeing a living wage to anyone who wants to work, is a basic platform of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). An MMT web site declares that by "[e]nding the enormous unearned profits acquired by the means of the privatization of our sovereign currency ... [i]t is possible to have truly full employment without causing inflation."

What was sufficient for a simple agrarian economy does not provide an adequate framework for freedom and democracy today. We need an Economic Bill of Rights, and we need to end the privatization of the national currency. Only when the privilege of creating the national money supply is returned to the people can we have a government that is truly of the people, by the people and for the people.

Ellen is an attorney and the author of eleven books, including Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free. Her websites are webofdebt.com and ellenbrown.com.  She is also chairman of the Public Banking Institute.

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From http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2011010211/fdr-second-bill-rights ...

FDR: The Second Bill of Rights

By Robert Borosage

January 11, 2011 - 11:59pm ET

How does America dig out of the hole we are in? Surely the focus must be on first principles: how do we recreate an economy that works for working people? With the right talking about a return to the principles of the Constitution, it is worth remembering how Americans thought about first principles coming out of the last great economic calamity.

January 11 is the 67th anniversary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's historic 1944 State of the Union address that put forth an Economic Bill of Rights for all Americans. (Michael Moore presented it to modern audiences in his "Capitalism: A Love Story.")

Roosevelt spoke as the Great War was drawing to a close. Attention was turning to the transition to peace, with widespread fears about whether the economy would revert to the depression that only the mobilization for war brought to an end. An entire nation had mobilized and sacrificed for war; what would peacetime bring?

Roosevelt argued that the sacrifices made in war demanded a strategy not only for "a lasting peace," but for "an American standard of living higher than ever before known" -- and one that was as widely shared as the wartime sacrifices were:

    We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people -- whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth -- is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

Roosevelt presented the second Bill of Rights not as a new idea, but as"self evident," something that "we have accepted."

His argument was simple and clear. The Republic was built under the protection of certain inalienable rights -- "among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures." They were our rights to life and liberty.

But as the nation grew and the industrial economy expanded, these political rights "proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness," the promise made in the Declaration of Independence.

We had learned that economic security was essential to political freedom and to peace. "Necessitous men are not free men," Roosevelt taught. "People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made." True individual freedom cannot exist, Roosevelt argued, without "economic security and independence."

    In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all -- regardless of station, race, or creed.

"Among these rights" -- Roosevelt did not pretend to be comprehensive -- were:

        * The right to a useful and remunerative job...
        * The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
        * The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
        * The right of every family to a decent home;
        * The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
        * The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
        * The right to a good education.

    All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

    America's own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our citizens.

Roosevelt died before the war ended, but the country continued down the course he had set. The GI Bill opened the doors of education and training for a generation, and helped make homes affordable. Social Security was strengthened, and continues to provide a minimal level of security for retirees, widows, orphaned children and the disabled. America ran close to a full employment economy, while empowering workers to form unions and capture a fair share of increased productivity and profits. With unions at 30 percent of the workforce, their wage agreements helped set the standard for non-union employers, helping to build a broad middle class that was the marvel of the world. The minimum wage was raised to put a floor on payment for work. The Veteran's Administration provided socialized medicine for veterans, but the guarantee adequate medical care for all was blocked under Truman, and stymied until the historic reform passed under Barack Obama last year.

After Roosevelt's death, his wife, Eleanor, led the drive to get the United Nations to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and later the economic rights were codified in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. By 2003, 142 nations had ratified this covenant, but not the United States. Here it was entangled in the bitter domestic politics of the Cold War and torpedoed by Senators intent on defending segregation.

Now as we struggle to emerge from the worst economic decline since the Great Depression, we would benefit from returning to Roosevelt's principles and vision.

Once more our economy is sapped by extreme inequality, with the wealthiest 1 percent controlling as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, and capturing fully two-thirds of the income growth of the five years before the financial collapse. Fifty million people go without health insurance, while health reform is under assault. The minimum wage has lost more than one-fourth of its value since 1968. Unions are down to less than 9 percent of the private workforce. Wages for most Americans haven't kept up with prices even when the economy was growing. The size and concentration of the big banks -- now with assets at 60 percent of GDP (up from 17 percent in 1995) -- threaten our economy and our democracy.

The shared miseries of the Great Depression and the shared sacrifices of the Great War led many Americans to embrace the idea that basic economic rights are essential to freedom. In the wake of the worst economic downturn since that depression, we would be wise to revive Roosevelt's call once more.