Issues

The Hip Hop Caucus issues agenda defines twelve key policy areas for 2009/2010. Under each issue area we list the policy changes that we have identified as imperative to creating the change we envision for our country.

Our purpose in establishing our issues agenda is to put forth a comprehensive solution that will:

1. Provide opportunity and access for America’s urban communities

2. Fundamentally strengthen our economy while participating fairly in the global economy

3. Put us on an environmentally sustainable path


Click to jump to any of the twelve issue areas:

Climate Justice and Clean Energy | Criminal Justice | Economic Prosperity | Education | Health Care | Housing | Livability of Cities | Media Reform | Peace and Security | Poverty and Helping Families | Rights for New Americans | Voting Rights and Election Reform


Climate Justice and Clean Energy

  • Cut Global Warming Pollution
  • End our Dependence on Dirty Energy
  • Invest in a Clean Energy Economy
  • Convert our Manufacturing Centers into Clean Technology Leaders

Criminal Justice

  • Reduce Recidivism by Providing Ex-Offender Support
  • Provide adequate public representation for Juvenile Offenders
  • Decent care and conditions during periods of incarceration of Juvenile offenders
  • Drug Sentencing Reform: Eliminate the Crack/Cocaine Sentencing Disparity by reducing Crack sentencing laws to that of Powder sentencing laws
  • End Racial Profiling
  • End the Death Penalty
  • Civilian Oversight and Review of Police Practices

Reversal of policies that have established the "School to Prison Pipeline":

  • Reform “Zero Tolerance” and other school discipline tactics that require court involvement and Juvenile Detention for minor offenses
  • End policing of school hallways
  • Remove barriers to re-entry into traditional schools from the Juvenile Justice system
  • Keep youth out of the adult criminal justice system

Economic Prosperity

  • Support Job Creation
  • Enhance Workforce Training
  • Improve Access to Jobs
  • Invest in a Skilled Clean Technologies Workforce ("Green Jobs")
  • Ensure the freedom of workers to form Unions and bargain
  • Increase Access to Capital for Underserved Businesses
  • Strengthen Core Transportation Infrastructure

Trade and Industrial Revitalization:

  • Remove Incentives to Ship Jobs Oversees
  • Reward the creation of good jobs in the United States
  • Assist Displaced Workers
  • Support Equitable and Sustainable Development Abroad

Education

  • Support teachers in urban schools
  • A living wage, as a minimum, for all education support professionals
  • Adequate, equitable, and sustainable funding for schools; Making taxes fair; Funding targeted to schools with the highest concentrations of poverty
  • Smaller class sizes to improve student achievement
  • Expand early childhood education
  • Mandatory full-day kindergarten
  • Making High School graduation a national priority by investing in dropout prevention programs
  • Stop government funded abstinence only sex education programs
  • Expand targeted programs that support special needs students and schools - such as English Language Acquisition, Impact Aid, rural schools and American Indian education

Access to Higher Education:

  • Simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA)
  • Increase Support for the Pell Grant
  • Increase Undergraduate & Graduate Student Aid
  • Make Student Loans Manageable

Health Care

Single Payer Medicare for All:

  • Access to healthcare for everyone
  • If you are unemployed, or lose or change your job, your health coverage goes with you
  • One level of comprehensive care for everyone
  • A single payer system that encourages preventive care
  • Individual choice of physician
  • End insurance industry interference with care; No denial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions or cancellation of policies for "unreported" health problems
  • Reduce administrative waste
  • The public sets the policies and administers the system, through public oversight

Housing

  • Fund new housing vouchers and other measures to prevent homelessness, as the number of homeless families rise due to the worsening economic crisis
  • Lower interest payments by creating a universal mortgage interest tax credit
  • Increase the supply of affordable housing throughout our metropolitan regions
  • Expand the supply of federally assisted low income housing units and/or federal resources for affordable housing and/or access to housing by extremely low income people
  • Green our 6 million existing units of affordable rental housing

Federal Commitment to Public Housing:

  • Preserve existing safe, high quality public housing
  • Provide housing agencies with the full amount of funding they need for adequate upkeep and operation of public housing developments
  • Provide added resources to rehabilitate developments and establish a new process to allocate those resources efficiently

Livability of Cities

Foster Healthy and Sustainable Communities:

  • Increase community-level decision-making over the planning and governance of cities, with transparency and accountability, including the protection of the right to public information
  • Prevent the cycle of de-valorization and revalorization of land, homes and neighborhoods (which leads to gentrification), by consistently serving “underserved” communities with the benefits of transportation, infrastructure and services afforded to other communities
  • Use innovative measures to dramatically improve efficiency of new and existing buildings
  • Require polluters to pay for the cleanup of contaminated sites they have created
  • Promote smart growth principles in the building of new communities

Media Reform

  • Stop Big Media Consolidation and promote diverse, local ownership and a free press
  • Provide for a viable public media that creates more opportunities for different voices to be heard
  • Expand minority ownership of media outlets
  • Ensure a free and open Internet based on the principles of Net Neutrality
  • Close the digital divide by establishing affordable Internet for everyone via nationwide access to high-speed Internet, increased choice in providers, and continued innovation.

Peace and Security

  • End U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan
  • Establish comprehensive U.S. foreign policy grounded in true partnerships with the foreign governments and civil society on peace, justice, security, and development
  • Create a Nuclear Weapons Free World: Stop the spread of Nuclear Weapons; End the testing and pursuit of new warheads; Eliminate existing stockpiles
  • De-fund AFRICOM
  • Return the many roles and responsibilities to the State Department that were transferred to the Department of Defense under the Bush Administration
  • Allocate Homeland Security funds to our cities based on risk
  • Prepare effective emergency response plans for our cities
  • Safeguard our mass public transportation

Poverty and Helping Families

  • Increase the minimum wage
  • Help low-income workers enter the job market
  • Encourage responsible lending institutions to make small consumer loans
  • Cap outlandish interest rates on payday loans and improve disclosure
  • Provide a tax cut for working families
  • Expand the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit
  • Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit
  • Extend paid sick days to all workers
  • Expand the Family and Medical Leave Act
  • Encourage states to adopt paid leave
  • Protect against caregiver discrimination
  • Expand flexible work arrangements
  • Expand high-quality after school opportunities
  • Support domestic violence prevention efforts
  • Fund support services for fathers and their families
  • Remove some government penalties on married families; crack down on men avoiding child support payments; ensure that support payments go to families instead of state bureaucracies

Rights for New Americans

  • Establish immigration policy that is consistent with humanitarian values, and recognizes the dignity of all people
  • De-criminalize immigration offenses, which have traditionally been civil offenses
  • Take "securing the borders" through militarization off the table
  • Ban state and local government anti-immigrant laws, as they do not override national immigration law
  • Prevent state and local government law enforcement from enforcing immigration law, which is the federal government’s role
  • Protect all those who commit to working in this country from exploitation; Federal labor and employment laws generally apply to all employees regardless of an individuals' immigration status
  • End the practice of automatic deportation of immigrants for minor infractions without due process and the constitutional right to a day in court
  • Provide access to education and health care for undocumented children

Voting Rights and Election Reform

  • Institute automatic voter registration, pre-registration, Election Day Registration and online registration, nationwide
  • Register eligible High School students to vote as part of civic education on Constitution day
  • Establish lifetime registration so that voters only have to register to vote once in their lifetimes and have that registration automatically follow them as they move
  • State governments ensure full implementation of the National Voter Registration Act (also known as the Motor Voter law) especially public agency requirements
  • Elect the President with the National Popular Vote
  • Outlaw deceptive practices (the intentional dissemination of false or misleading information about the voting process) that suppress voting and skew election results, which are usually targeted at people of color and communities of color
  • Give DC the Vote
  • Promote, defend and strengthen publicly funded campaigns (also known as Clean Elections or Fair Elections) at the local, state, and federal levels
  • Restore the voting rights of formerly incarcerated people

Electronic voting machines:

  • Require that all existing and new Electronic voting machines have a voter-verified paper audit trail
  • Require all systems undergo better testing, maintenance, and independent certification
  • Audit a statistically significant percentage of machines in each election
  • Make the process for testing and certification open, and allow and computer security experts access to the voting machine computer codes to strengthen the security of the systems and prevent tampering
  • Ensure that the National Institute for Standards and Technology has sufficient funding for setting standards for certification of voting systems
  • Require strict conflict-of-interest and nonpartisan guidelines for both elections officials and the companies who sell voting equipment, including voting machines and voter database systems