1. To create an enduring society, we must devise a system of production and commerce where every act is sustainable and restorative. We believe that all business has a social contract with society and the environment (in effect a fiduciary responsibility), and that socially responsible business and shareholder democracy can be models of prospering, successful business.
2. We call for an economic system that is based on a combination of private businesses, decentralized democratic cooperatives, publicly owned enterprises, and alternative economic structures, all of which put human and ecological needs alongside profits to measure success, and are accountable to the communities in which they function.
3. Community-based economics constitutes an alternative to both corporate capitalism and state socialism. It is very much in keeping with the Greens' valuation of diversity and decentralization.
4. Recognition of limits is central to a Green economic orientation.  The drive to accumulate power and wealth must become recognized for what it is, a pernicious characteristic of a civilization headed, ever more rapidly, in a pathological direction.  Greens advocate that economic relations become more direct, more cooperative, and more egalitarian.
5. Humanizing economic relations is just one aspect of our broader objective: to consciously and deliberately (albeit gradually) shift toward a different way of life characterized by sustainability, regionalization, a more harmonious balance between the natural ecosphere and the human-made technosphere, and a revival of community life.
6. Greens support a major redesign of commerce. We endorse true-cost pricing. We support production that eliminates waste. In natural systems, everything is a meal for something else. Everything recycles; there is no waste. We need to mimic natural systems in the way we manufacture and produce things. Consumables need to be designed to be thrown into a compost heap and/or eaten, for example. Durable goods would be designed in closed-loop systems, ultimately to be disassembled and reassembled. Toxics would be safeguarded and could have markers identifying them as belonging, in perpetuity, to their makers.
7. We need to remake commerce to encourage diversity and variety, responding to the enormous complexity of global and local conditions. Big business is not about appropriateness and adaptability, but about power and market control. Greens support small business, responsible stakeholder capitalism, and broad and diverse forms of economic cooperation. Economic diversity is more responsive than big business to the needs of diverse human populations. Sustaining our quality of life, eco-nomic prosperity, environmental health, and long-term survival demands that we adopt new ways of doing business.
8. Greens support a definition of sustainability where we openly examine the economy as a part of the ecosystem, not as an isolated subset in which nothing but resources come in and products and waste go out and never the economy and the real world shall meet.

B. RE-ASSERTING LOCAL CITIZEN CONTROL OVER CORPORATIONS

1. Currently, corporations possess more rights and freedoms than natural human persons do. Through a series of judicial rulings, and by virtue of their ability to control governments and economies by virtue of wealth, corporations have judicially rewritten our constitution and have emerged as unaccountable, unelected governments. The Greens, therefore, support all reforms that seek to supplant governmental regulation of corporations with communities that seek to define corporations. In the interim, Greens support measures that hold executives and officers of corporations directly liable for harm that results from their decisions. Corporate crime may be one area where mandatory sentences are an appropriate form of punishment.
2. In the late 19th century, however, corporations claimed special protections under the Constitution. Large companies used legal power to assert legal authority over what to make and how to make it, to move money, influence elections, bend governments to their will. They insisted that once formed, corporations might operate forever, with the privilege of limited liability and freedom from community or worker interference in business judgments.
3. It is inappropriate for investment and production decisions that can shape our communities and lives to be made essentially from afar, in boardrooms, closed-door regulatory agencies, and prohibitively expensive courtrooms that are not accountable to the social and community harm that their decisions may create. Therefore, we call for open-ness in the decision-making process, guided by the principle, what affects all, should be decided by all.
4. It is unacceptable to have the level of influence now being exerted by corporate interests over the public interest. We challenge the propriety and equity of corporate welfare in the form of tax breaks, subsidies, payments, grants, bailouts, giveaways, unenforced laws and regulations; and historic, continuing access to our vast public resources, including millions of acres of land, forests, mineral resources, intellectual property rights, and government-created research.
5. We call for revisiting what one Supreme Court Justice called, when referring to the history of constitutional law, the history of the impact of the modern corporation upon the American scene. We believe that corporations are neither inevitable nor always appropriate. Judicial and legislative decisions that have made it possible for big business to stay beyond the reach of democracy need to be re-examined.
6. Legal doctrines must be continually revised in recognition of the changing needs of an active, democratic citizenry. Huge multi-national corporations are artificial creations, not natural persons uniquely sheltered under constitutional protections. It is time to support local government and state government attempts to define corporations and to prevent these entities from exercising democratic rights which are uniquely possessed by the citizens of the United States.

C. LIVABLE INCOME

1. We affirm the importance of access to a livable income.
2. Job banks and other innovative training and employment programs that bring together the private and public sectors must become state and local priorities. People who are unable to find decent work in the private sector should have options through publicly funded opportunities.
3. Workforce development programs must aim at moving people out of poverty; a living wage campaign and living wage standard will go a long way toward achieving this goal.
4. We urge that local debate be held and broad public mandate be sought regarding (fiscal and monetary) economic strategies and policies as they impact wages. This debate is long overdue. The growing inequities in income and wealth between rich and poor; unprecedented discrepancies in salary and benefits between corporate top executives and line workers; loss of dignity from the lives of the young and middle-class. Each is a symptom of decisions made by policy-makers far removed from the concerns of ordinary workers trying to keep up.
5. Today, executive pay is on average is more 520 times the income of the entry-level workers is the same firms. Due to the exponentially increasing inequality of wealth, and the inability of the market maintain fair income distribution, we propose that all workers are guaranteed a minimum profit sharing percentage. This would ensure that workers are rewarded for their hard work, and it would also prevent corporate executives from siphoning large portions of company resources to themselves and their cronies at the expense of workers. This guaranteed profit sharing percentage would be based on the total number of workers in the firm, and distribution would be guaranteed on a yearly basis, but by no means limited to such a time period.

D. COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT

1. Reforms to allow communities to have influence in their economic future should be implemented, including:
2. Locally owned small businesses, which are more accessible to community concerns.
3. Local production and consumption where possible.
4. Consumer co-ops, credit unions, incubators, micro-loan funds, local currencies, and other institutions that help communities develop economic projects.
5. Allowing municipalities to approve or disapprove large economic projects case-by-case based on environmental impacts, local ownership, community reinvestment, wage levels, and working conditions.
6. Allowing communities to set environmental, human rights, health and safety standards higher than federal or state minimums.
7. We support a state program of investing in the commons; to rebuild the infrastructure of communities; to repair and improve transportation lines between cities; and to protect and restore the environment.
8. We endorse direct democracy through town meetings, which express a community's wishes on economic decision-making directly to local institutions and organizations.

E. SMALL BUSINESS AND JOB CREATION

1. Greens support an economic program that combats concentration and abuse of economic power. We support many different initiatives for forming successful, small enterprises that together can become an engine (and sustainable model) of job creation, prosperity and progress.
2. Access to capital is often an essential need in growing a business. There should be a comprehensive set of approaches to making loans available to small business at rates competitive to those offered big business. Financial institutions unfairly favor large corporations and the wealthy when determining how to work their loan portfolios.
3. Government needs to reform current lending practices. We support disclosure laws, anti-redlining laws, and a general openness on the part of the private sector as to what criteria are used in making lending decisions. As lending institutions have obligations to the health of their local communities, we oppose arbitrary or discriminatory practices that act to deny small business access to credit and expansion capital. We oppose disinvestment practices, in which lending and financial institutions move money deposited in local communities out of those same communities, in effect often damaging the best interests of their customers and community.
4. The present tax system acts to discourage small business, as it encourages waste, discourages conservation, and rewards consumption. Big business has used insider access to dominate the federal tax code. The tax system needs a major overhaul, to get it up and running in a way that favors the legitimate and critical needs of the small business community. Retention of capital, through retained earnings, efficiencies, and savings, is central to small business remaining competitive. Current tax policies often act to unfairly penalize small business.
5. Government should reduce wherever possible unnecessary restrictions, fees, and red tape. In particular, the Paper Simplification Act should be seen as a way to benefit small business and it should be improved in response to the needs of small businesses.
6. Overall we believe that State government must pay more attention to putting forward policies that work on behalf of small business, and break their cycle of excessive welfare for big business.
7. State and local government should encourage where appropriate businesses that especially benefit the community. Economic development initiatives should include citizen and community input. The type and size of businesses provided incentives (tax, loans, bonds, etc.) should be the result of local community participation.
8. Pension funds, the result of workers' investments, should be examined as additional sources of capital for small business. Definitions of fiscally prudent need to be broadened within acceptable margins of safety to include investments beyond the current practices (and a credit rating system) almost exclusively benefiting large corporations. Investment managers need to be given discretionary powers to channel these monies, now in the trillions of dollars, into productive small and mid-sized businesses at the local level.
9. Insurance costs need to be brought down by means of active engagement with the insurance industry. Insurance pools, for example, of the kind offered businesses in the association Business for Social Responsibility, need to be expanded.
10. One-stop offices should be set-up by government to assist individuals who want to change careers, or go into business for the first time.
11. Home-based businesses and neighborhood-based businesses need to be assisted by forward-looking planning, not hurt by out-of-date zoning ordinances. Telecommuting and home offices should be aided, not hindered, by government.

F. RURAL DEVELOPMENT

1. Economic development in rural areas spans many agencies of government, but eventually comes back to prospering, healthy farms and ranch lands. Recreation, local business, schools and education, health care and energy availability - all are necessary to support diversified, successful rural economies.
2. Rural development policy should begin with the local people. Family farms are the backbone of a sustainable rural economy. They are more likely than corporate agribusiness to follow ecological practices that enrich the land; to use labor-intensive rather than energy-intensive farming methods, and to support agricultural biodiversity. Because of their smaller scale and production methods, they are more likely to produce food products that are healthier for consumers. State and local governments should provide financial assistance to small farmers to help them compete against agribusiness, cooperative ventures to broaden markets of local producers and state assisted product marketing efforts and rural development banks.

G. BANKING FOR PEOPLE

1. We support a broad program of reform in the banking and savings and loan industry that acts to ensure that their commonwealth obligations to serve all communities are met. We understand that the present system is skewed to service first and foremost large businesses, transnational corporations and wealthy individuals. Since lending institutions are chartered by the state to serve the best interests of communities, the privileges that come with being given power at the center of commerce carry special responsibilities.
2. The government should take serious steps to ensure that low- and moderate-income persons and communities, as well as small business, have access to banking services, affordable loans and small-business supporting capital.
3. We support the extension of the Community Reinvestment Act and its key performance data provisions to provide public and timely information on the extent of housing loans, small business loans, loans to minority-owned enterprises, investments in community development projects and affordable housing.
4. We believe the legislature should act to charter community development banks, which would be capitalized with public funds and work to meet the credit needs of local communities.

H. INSURANCE REFORM

1. We endorse wide ranging insurance industry regulation to reduce the cost of insurance by reducing its special-interest protections; collusion and over-pricing; and excessive industry-wide practices that too often injure the interests of the insured when they¹re most vulnerable and in need.
2. We call for actions at the federal and state level to rein in bad faith insurance actions including the standard practice of attempting legal avoidance of obligations, and the current widespread practice of price fixing.
3. We support federal law that acts to make policies transportable from job to job and seeks to prevent insurance companies¹ rejection of applicants for prior conditions. This is a move in the right direction but in no way addresses the scope of the problem, whether in health insurance, life insurance, business, liability, auto or crop insurance.
4. We support initiatives in secondary insurance markets that work to expand credit for economic development in inner cities; affordable housing and home ownership among the poor; transitional farming to sustainable agriculture; and for rural development maintaining family farms.
5. In the absence of a federal single payer insurance program, the Utah government should initiate and subsidize the creation of non-profit insurance industry in all major areas; auto, life, home, dental, travel, etc. The presence of such companies would drive down the prices of the for-profit insurance providers and force them to provide a better service for a greater value, and would assist in an eventual movement towards the creation of a national single payer system all insurance areas.

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