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TOM ALLON: A NEW LIBERAL PARTY
New York needs a political party of ideas and ideals to offset the extremes of right and left put on the Democrats and Republicans by the Conservative and Working Families parties. This new political party would give moderate Democrats and Republicans and genuine independents a vehicle for nominating and electing good government candidates in local and statewide elections.
New Yorkers yearn for well thought out policies committed to promoting growth, a level playing field of opportunity and the transformation of careerist politicians supported by special interest protections into a system where people again enter politics to serve rather than to have a career. The idea of electing the best and most qualified good government candidates used to be the hallmark and was the defining mission of liberalism and the Liberal Party.
Instead what we've seen in the past 25 years has been a political system (locally and nationally) which has become institutionalized so that politicians are more interested in themselves than in their constituents; no longer interested in principles and a commitment to ideas but governed by a descent into political brokerage and careerism. The Liberal Party we've known got caught in that descent - joining a system it was established to oppose.
But we can return to representing those who believe in freedom, justice, fairness and equal opportunity and this is the pledge I undertake on behalf of a new Liberal Party.
We cannot make progress permanent without reforming our current political process. We must return to honest budgeting without the fiscal 'tricks' that hide reality. We must implement campaign finance reform and independent redistricting which no longer protects incumbents into life-long jobs.
We can insure that elections are meaningful, fair and competitive. This mission will become the guiding beacon of the new Liberal Party.
I am committed to transforming the party not only into a ballot line for my mayoral candidacy in 2013 but into a permanent ballot line restoration in the statewide election in 2014.
Our activities will be an effort at redemption and renewal. The old Liberal Party at its zenith. worked to make a corrupt Democratic Party regime honest and an all-powerful Big Business-led Republican Party more moderate. Liberal Party founders like unionists Alex Rose and David Dubinsky, clergyman Reinhold Niebuhr and philosopher John Dewey joined by academics, citizen activists and small businessmen were the first to build a respected and enduring third party in New York State.
Then sadly after thirty years of idea and principle-based policy writing, the Liberal Party underwent a series of leadership changes, turned its back on ideas and ideals and became exactly like the political vehicles it once opposed. That Liberal Party lost its belief system, the respect of many of its enrollees as well as its opponents and ultimately, after 63 consecutive years, its permanent place on the ballot.
Today there is a need for a new Liberal Party dedicated to reforming a political system based on the corrupting influence of special interest money which is designed to keep politicians in place forever.
This new party will again stand for something - for individual liberty and equal opportunity, for marriage equality and an end to gender discrimination and continually, for a woman's right to choose. Our goal is to work ceaselessly for a permanent end to the dysfunction of State government helping Governor Andrew Cuomo do the job he has successfully begun and has pledged to complete. He knows he needs a statewide political organization to help him complete his mission and he'll know he will find it in the new Liberal Party.
No longer will elected officials who pledge their commitments to fiscal and campaign reforms and to independent redistricting feel free to ignore those promises without facing opposition on the ballot from candidates outspokenly committed to those ideals. The new Liberal Party will find and support those opposition candidates looking outside traditional careerist politicians, and instead nurturing bold candidates from business, academic, philanthropic, community and media backgrounds.
An endorsement from the new Liberal Party will again mean what it once meant: the political equivalent of a Good Housekeeping seal of approval for good, clean government.
On substance, the new Liberal Party will again pursue policies and programs that reflect the needs of citizens across all economic and ethnic populations. Its efforts in the 1940's, 50's and 60's helped establish America as a liberal nation, the most productive and powerful in the history of the world.
In an era when pragmatism guides our President and probably his opposition in November, the new Liberal Party rejects the idea that the public is only interested in something that works - no matter what that something is. Despite the twists and turns often influenced by money, we recognize in the voices from the right - the Tea Party and the voices from the left - the Occupy Movement - the genuine yearning of Americans for programs based on a belief in justice, fairness and equal opportunity; the genuineness of their need for what is meaningful and workable.
In New York, we see the need for an excellence in education that does not now exist; for a mass transportation system that will meet the challenges of a growing city eager to return to prosperity through immigration from abroad and migration from within our nation. It is essential to this growth that New York's government can facilitate individual opportunity through innovation and creativity.
We must find both the discipline and ingenuity to cut the fat out of city and state budgets without causing undue harm to those who work for us. We must invest smartly in education, economic development and public safety with monies that too often now go to slush funds and elective protection.
These feats of efficient governmental engineering must be supported by a principled political architecture.
I pledge to carry the blue-belled banner of the old Liberal Party into a new era of a Liberal Party which can draw a plan to meet the needs of our people. This vision will lead candidates and the voting public to a genuine alternative which both major parties have reflexively thwarted in the past. This mission is devoted to offering voters an independent, positive choice.
The new Liberal Party begins this quest today.
TOM ALLON ON THE MAYORALTY
I am running for Mayor to counter the failure of the Democratic and Republican parties to provide ideas and substance that can stimulate, manage and sustain the city's growth.
While the last two Mayors of New York forged fusion administrations which have produced policies that cracked the back of crime, provided professionally manager services and prevented the sort of fiscal irresponsibility which plagues many of America's cities and our own State in Albany, prior to Andrew Cuomo's promise, I see no such landscape before us today.
I am running in the Democratic Mayoral primary, but I am most proud to be the endorsed candidate of a new Liberal Party. The new Liberal Party is dedicated to creating a political vehicle which serves as a countervailing force to the major parties' mush of torpor, greed and protecting the status quo.
It is said that the old Liberal Party was formed to end the corruption of the Democratic machine and to moderate the Big Business influence on the Republican Party. Today, a new Liberal Party represents ideals free of the two parties' special interest corruption. The City Council's chronic member-item scandal is but one powerful symbol of a deep-seated careerism dedicated to keeping elected officials in office for as long as possible and then playing musical chairs in our present political system.
I run for Mayor with a purposeful agenda put forward to voters who clearly understand and welcome much-needed change:
First, we need to reorder and refocus our approach to education. It is an acknowledged fact that 3 of every four of our high school graduates need remedial work before they can even enter a community college. That failure to educate goes well beyond the need for politically-arranged teacher evaluations developed to gain a Federal grant; well beyond teacher scapegoating; well beyond teaching to the test which severely limits teaching and bores our students to death; well beyond two separate school systems - public and charter schools working often in the same building and certainly in the same neighborhoods, but avoiding each other like the plague and well beyond the fact that we must reinstate excellent, pertinent vocational training into our system.
The only thing that counts is that teachers are trained to reach and teach each student in a classroom.
Once the system had a truly professional Mentoring Program to help every teacher be the best that he/she could be. Once, a struggling teacher knew where to find help. We will have such a program again. Once, School Principals could evaluate each teacher and knew their strengths and weaknesses without a Federally-mandated evaluation program essentially based on test scores and providing no help to teachers at all. Do we have such Principals today? Are they being allowed to do their job?
Second, pension reform that is fair to public service workers and the taxpayers can be designed and instituted.
Prior to the three Bloomberg-Quinn administrations, pension costs were about 2.5% of the city's annual budget - roughly one billion in a $40 billion dollar budget. Today those costs have risen to 12% of the city's budget - $8 billion in a $65 billion budget. This is unsustainable and must be remedied. Our next Mayor must never leave the bully pulpit on pension reform and be trusted enough by the unions and public advocates to make the adjustments needed.
Third, we must bring ingenuity to economic development and job creation. We must create hundreds of thousands of jobs by enacting tax incentives for new business owners and to reinstate another boom in real estate development. We can create public-private partnerships to nurture new industries in bio-tech, light manufacturing and green energy. In higher education, which is the city's second largest industry to healthcare, we must bring industry, technology and expertise together to develop job-creating laboratories that work.
Fourth, I will work with the world's experts to develop alternative types of transportation to and within the city to help our growing borough populations maximize their productive energies. Elevated light rail, rapid bus transit, cabs with handicapped accessibility will all make coming and going to work a less demanding experience.
The MTA must be returned to the city's control so that we can keep fares down without sacrificing service.
All of these ideas will bear fruit if we can level the playing field of opportunity in New York City with policies that sustain all families. That achievement will move the entire city towards a sustained prosperity and growth.
We cannot make genuine progress unless we have fundamental reforms. If we return to honest budgeting without deceptive fiscal tricks, adopt campaign finance and independent redistricting reforms so that incumbents cannot make their jobs a lifetime career, fresh blood will come into our politics bringing with it the ideas and ideals we need.
I ask voters to keep an open mind and a new focus on my candidacy and those of the others to see whether we are addressing their needs, rather than our own ambitions. The stakes are too high for politics as usual.
UPDATE
COMING BACK
CHANGES
It is undeniable that a political party without a candidate is no party at all. It is rather like a retail store that's open for business but without anything to sell.
In these years of being what the NY State Election Law calls a non-ballot party, the Liberal Party has been a party of policies and ideas but only one candidate since the 2002 Governor's race when Andrew Cuomo walked away from his first bid for that job. In 2005, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg carried the Liberal Party Liberty Bell on his ballot for his first reelection. We had no interest in his third term.
But something has changed and because of the change, we are coming back.
The change is Tom Allon, educator, journalist, publisher and businessman who has become the Liberal Party's candidate for Mayor in the 2013 mayoralty election. Mr. Allon, born, raised and educated in New York will run in the Democratic Party primary for the job - but win or lose he will be our candidate in the general election.
As we said in the Wall St Journal article that announced the decision, we think it's important that Mr. Allon and the Liberal Party "start early so that we have the time to introduce Tom and his ideas to the public and work with him to rebuild the meaning of a new Liberal Party" to New Yorkers long familiar with the name but negatively impacted by the image developed over the past 20 years.
After receiving his degrees from Cornell and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, Tom began teaching English and journalism at Stuyvesant High School. He went on to become the editor and publisher of the local West Side Spirit and then became publisher of Manhattan's largest community weekly, Our Town.
Today he is the President and CEO of Manhattan Media, the largest hyper-local media company in the Tri-state area with publications such as AVENUE Magazine and Dan's Papers. Tom had been the executive vice-president of News Communications, a company which owned 23 newspapers in NYC's boroughs. He was involved in the start-up of the successful Capital Hill daily, The Hill.
Tom helped create two successful public high schools - the Eleanor Roosevelt and the Frank McCourt High Schools.
He has been on the advisory boards of the West Side Crime Prevention program and the Broadway Mall Association and was president of the New York Press Association in 2008.
He knows education, media, business and government and his policies and programs will reflect that knowledge.
Tom told the Wall St. Journal: I can help rebuild the Liberal Party from the bottom up - it's a party that has a proud history going back many, many years. It's a great banner to be able to polish up and to re-establish and rebrand for the 21st Century. The word liberal, which is used so pejoratively in our culture right now, has a rich history and a rich meaning to it.
One of our first jobs together will be to seek and find candidates for local, statewide and Congressional races this year as well as a team of legislators and city officials to run with Tom in 2013. We'll be looking for candidates who recognize that despite some important first steps, Andrew Cuomo will need legislative help to truly overturn the institutional thinking that has made the NY State Legislature the most dysfunctional in the nation.
Part of further 21st Century change coming to the Liberal Party will be less splashy but important - we are preparing a Facebook page so that new and old friends in New York State - and across the country - will be able to reach out and we can reach right back.
Martin I. Hassner
Executive Director
Website Managing Editor
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