Louis Flores

A bottom-up paradigm for a new social compact.

When people live in poverty, they cannot access their Constitutional and civil rights, much less their civil liberties. The Declaration of Independence, which eventually led to the foundation of the U.S. Government, admitted that all Americans are born with the natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Government can't take back that promise. Since there is a substantive public interest in a representative democracy for the Government to promote citizens' participation in their own governance, the Government began to engage in helping its citizens to access their rights and liberties. After centuries of slavery and other systemic forms of discrimination and oppression, and prompted by revolutionary social movements, the Government finally began passing laws, enacting programmes, and promulgating policies to help Americans access their Constitutional rights, civil rights, and civil liberties. This campaign is premised on holding the Government accountable to fulfilling its promise to help their citizens to thrive : By creating more opportunities for equality.

Abraham Maslow was a renowned New York psychologist and college professor. He developed a hierarchy of needs, which informs the values that guides the Louis Flores 2025 campaign. The political platform of this campaign is organised into categories that follow Dr. Maslow's teachings.

Basic Needs

Housing. The New York City Council can no longer ignore the Government's responsibility to ensure that every New York has ready access to affordable housing. The Government must also stop turning its back to civil rights violations taking place daily in and out of the City's housing court system. Because of the homelessness crisis, the Government must improve the living conditions in all homeless shelters and make it easier for the homeless to move out of the shelter system.

The time has come for the Government to admit that gentrification is not a housing plan, but a displacement plan. We can and must do better.

The Louis Flores 2025 campaign emerged out of the fight to save public housing from demolition and privatisation, and this campaign's platform will roll-up to ensure that all New Yorkers are housed and live free of landlord harassment in their living spaces. Once more, the Government must embrace its unique role to provide low-cost housing to people living on low- or fixed-incomes.

Food. The New York City Council can no longer ignore how the Eric Adams administration deliberately makes it difficult for people living in poverty to apply for SNAP. Government policy must also support cornerstone community institutions, which distribute and provide nutrition to New Yorkers. Finally, the Government must ensure that the nutritional assistance that is reaching New Yorkers is non-GMO or organic, especially for children and senior citizens.

Safety. The New York City Council must take the lead to ensure that citizens don't live in fear of police brutality, political oppression, and officer-committed homicide.

Strategic, public assets. The New York City Council should take the lead in safeguarding strategic, public assets, like public housing and public charity hospitals, instead of selling them out to private-sector real estate developers.

Without shelter, nutrition, and safety, people's lives become destabalised, preventing them from focusing on accessing their rights under the Government.

Psychological Needs

Healthcare. The New York City Council must take the lead in making sure that New Yorkers can access truly affordable health care. For example, New Yorkers should not be worse-off financially when they get off Medicaid after they get a private-sector job and move to private health insurance.

Since the Coronavirus pandemic ("COVID-19") is not over, and other pandemics are on the horizon, like the Highly-pathogenic avian influenza ("HPAI"), the New York City Council must step up oversight of and improve transparency around weekly variant surveillance reports. Publishing and implementing the Government responsiveness and readiness plans for responding to these pandemics is critical for keeping New Yorkers safe and healthy.

Family planning. The New York City Council must take a lead to provide New Yorkers with the privacy to make all basic decisions about their relationships, including planning for their families. No Government body subject to New York City Council oversight should be allowed to infringe on these natural rights.

Civil rights. The New York City Council must take the lead on ensuring that all New Yorkers experience equal civil rights. For example, the mandate and jurisdiction of the Council's Committee on Civil and Human Rights must be enlarged to include oversight of the City's housing courts, the political oppression used by the New York Police Department, and the use of tax revenue taken from New Yorkers by the Federal Government to pay for wars in Europe and the Middle East, the latter which involves funding the génocide of Palestinians. All forms of racism, discrimination, and opporession are not being addressed, and Municipal civil rights oversight bodies, which have failed, must either be rehabilitated or replaced.

Self-Fulfillment Needs

Education. The New York Council must take the lead to end racial segregration in public schools and to make the City University of New York ("CUNY") free of charge. Providing New Yorkers with the ability to seek professional, undergraduate, and post-graduate education will be empowering. The Government must also end discrimination within the CUNY system by providing on-campus housing for all of CUNY's component schools. A school like Medgar Evers College must provide its students with a rich residential life experience, and that must involve the option to live in dormitories on-campus.

Job training. The New York City Council must take the lead to provide New Yorkers with job training and career change assistance, including in the arts. New York is the Nation's financial center and its largest metropolis. It is also one of two focal points in the Nation's entertainment industry.

Regulate the economy. The New York City Council must take the lead to re-regulate the free market economy to end abuses of labour and to end speculation in land and capital. For example, since the Federal and State Governments have abdicated their responsibility to fairly tax the rich, the Municipal Government must take steps to institute a progressive tax regime on the corporations, billionaires, and millionaires operating or living in the five boroughs.

Anti-corruption. The real estate industry and Wall Street exercise too much influence over Government. There is a way for the New York City Council to step-up anti-corruption policies. As the next Councilmember, I promise to weed out conflicts of interest in Community Boards, and the first change I will make, with the power of appointment, is to name an Assistant U.S. Attorney from the S.D.N.Y. public corrupton unit as the chair of Manhattan Community Board 4. There must be a firm stop placed to the casual way that the appearances of each of conflicts of interest, the role of money in politics, and alleged corruption pervert Government, particularly in respect of land use review matters.

Municipal investigation into sects and cults. Given the eye-opening trial that exposed the NXIVM cult, the New York City Council must take a leading role to investigate human potential development groups and cult-like sex harems operating in New York City.

Helping our labour pool develop new educational, vocational, and occupational skills will improve our educated workforce and drive economic growth. When New Yorkers seek job and occupational opportunities that best interest them, and when they are richly compensated for those jobs and occupations, in return, our citizens will experience fulfilment in their lives. Furthermore, market regulation and anti-corruption measures will permit the Government to focus on helping citizens thrive, instead of being a doormat to the 1 per cent. Taking human trafficking more seriously will also end the coërced or forced bondage of women.

A new social compact

We live in a society that is a collection of our lived, life experiences. As Mayor David Dinkins (D-New York City) said during his inauguration speech, "I see New York as a gorgeous mosaic of race and religious faith, of national origin and sexual orientation, of individuals whose families arrived yesterday and generations ago, coming through Ellis Island or Kennedy Airport or on buses bound for the Port Authority." We must honour our families, friends, and neighbours. When the Government ensures that we all have opportunities to reach a level of fulfilment in our lives, that is when the Government can deliver on its promise that humans can access their natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.