The Upstate Jobs Party – For a Smart, Sustainable Future

We all want the freedoms of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

It’s what the American Dream is built on. But many of us are either angry or discouraged about the state of our country.

America was founded on the principles of representative democracy and meritocracy, but today those systems are broken. Too many of us are not well represented by our elected officials. We feel the evidence in our own lives, and see it in the lives of our neighbors around us.

We all know the system is broken.

• We look at our financial situations and see our incomes and net worth in decline. Asset and income inequality in America today is the highest in the industrialized world. We see the distortion of the economy with rigged incentives and onerous regulations that concentrate wealth and decision-making in a smaller and smaller loop of elites that protects big business and lowers access to risk capital for startup entrepreneurs.

• We look at the election cycles and see the dominant two-party system dictating who we get to vote for. Our options are career politicians who protect themselves through voter restriction, gerrymandering, cultivating lobbyists and corporate welfare for their donors.

• We look at our eroding access to the courts whether through mandatory arbitration even to open a bank account or rent a car, prohibition from bankruptcy court protection for student loans, inefficient legal protection for the poor, and elected officials’ refusal to execute their duty to maintain a fully staffed court system.

It is no exaggeration to say that the American middle class has lost equity in the economy, lost equity in the democracy and lost equity in the law itself.

It is beyond the capacity and against the self interest of our current political parties to fix this broken system.

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What is the Upstate Jobs Party?