
Our goal is to RESTORE DEMOCRACY, REFORM CAPITALISM, and INVEST IN OUR FUTURE with our grassroots campaign.
Why? The establishment has failed us.
On one side, establishment Democrats at the “top” have failed to connect with us – Missouri’s voters. They continue to embrace top-down management where decisions are made in back rooms by a handful of people. And worse, they reject accountability for not living out values of truth, transparency, and trust. This just isn’t democracy.
On the other side, we have Republicans like Senator Roy Blunt. He’s taken so much money from millionaires, billionaires, and corporations. Who’s he really working for?
What are any of these people doing for us? Missouri, we all deserve better.
I’m Timothy Shepard and I’m a progressive Missouri citizen. I’m an activist. I’ve risked my career to do what was right for people nobody was standing up for. I am running to unseat Roy Blunt in the United States Senate. I am running to provide us all a new, better way forward.
Here’s what I’m running to do:
Restore Democracy
I remember learning about representative democracy in my civics class. It’s what the United States was intended to be. Candidates are elected to serve and represent their communities in order for the people to have a voice.
Today, representative democracy is simply an illusion. What we actually have is a system where the money is in charge. Too often, politicians are recruited by the highest bidder. They are incentivized to serve special interests and work against the voters who elect them. Operating in this system prioritizes top corporations and the elite before the needs of everyday Americans.
Our current system is not set up for citizen-aligned candidates, like myself, who decide to run for office. Instead, establishment elites meet in private to decide who they want you to support. They back their candidate financially in an attempt to shut down voter aligned candidates from even primarying, forcing their chosen candidate on the people.
This top-down approach has resulted in the last three democratic cycles suffering enormous double-digit losses. Voter turnout has been suppressed due to this well-intended yet misaligned arrogance. This is not how democracy works.
I was not recruited. I was not asked to run; rather I was MOVED to run by the horror of anarchy and tribalism that plagues our land.
I was compelled to public service when I realized our current leadership is no reflection of us. Our current leadership does not share our stories and struggles. They have never lived a day in the life of we, the people.
It is time for us to restore democracy and bring back PEOPLE-UP representation; not out of touch, top-down elites who think they know what’s best.
If you believe in a true representative democracy where ALL people have an equal voice, join our grassroots movement today.
JUSTICE REFORM
We need to end mass incarceration, promote equity, and increase participation in our representative democracy. The laws that regularly feed teenagers into the prison system need to go. In order to restore democracy, we need to fix our most un-democratic systems and laws.
VOTING RIGHTS
We need to make it easier for all citizens to vote. Many people aren’t represented because of laws and systems to suppress their vote. In order to restore democracy, we all must be represented.
CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM
Representative democracy starts locally and builds up to the state and national level. Ordinary Americans deserve to have their voice matter. Instead, corporations, the super-rich, PACs, and dark money are flooding into our political system in record amounts. The average American has almost no say. To restore democracy we need to fix our broken campaign finance system.
LGBTQ & BIPOC EQUALITY
The Declaration of Independence boldly states “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” We have to restore democracy and get back to this foundational truth.
BIPOC stands for Black, Indigenous, People of Color.
REPRODUCTIVE & ANATOMICAL FREEDOM
Government has no role in dictating anyone’s anatomical or biological decisions. We restore democracy by allowing citizens to make choices only they should make.
PROGRESSIVE FOREIGN POLICY
Democracy and free-trade provide global security and prosperity for all people. Who doesn’t want that?
LEGALIZE MARIJUANA
Criminalizing marijuana is a major contributing factor to mass incarceration and disproportionately affects the poor and communities of color. It’s funded the rise of the dangerous drug cartels as they battled for market share. Legalizing marijuana will allow us to combat more serious issues like dangerous drugs and sex trafficking while raising billions of dollars in new tax revenue. This ensures that we aren’t imprisoning peaceful and law-abiding citizens so we can restore democracy.
GUN SENSE
Every day, more than 100 people in the United States are killed with guns. Our society lives under the constant threat of gun violence tearing apart our lives at our schools, churches, concerts, and more. I strongly support gun sense legislation to help make our country a safer place. This means I support common sense reform to help keep us safe.
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Reform Capitalism
The anti-progressive movement likes to label we progressives as anti-capitalists. The truth is – we want an economy that works for ALL Americans. Capitalism in America has been corrupted by predatory monopolies who have undue influence on our political systems, and have built fortunes on the back of under-waged workers. The idle and passive accumulation of capital by the super-wealthy is, by nature, anti-capitalist. Functioning capitalism depends on the flow of this capital throughout the depth and breadth of our economic system. When we reform capitalism, we will put the capital to work by increasing wages and investing in our future.
Tim supports legislation that embraces the idea that we have enough.
BREAK UP AG MONOPOLIES, HELP LOCAL FARMERS
We need to break the stranglehold grip that big monopolist agriculture has on our farmers. Too many CAFO’s and multi-national farms pose a threat to our local mom and pop farmers. I stand for our farmers and will support legislation that fosters innovative new ways to help young people enter agriculture. We need to ensure that our food supply stays under the sovereign control of Missouri and American families. Big Ag poses a threat to the livelihood of American farmers and agri-tourism. We need to break the stranglehold of the agricultural monopolies. We must ensure our rural areas have the federal government’s investment and the policy in place to ensure Mainstreet Missouri soars again.
EQUALIZE THE PLAYING FIELD
We need to ensure small and medium-sized businesses have the tools and backing to compete. We must reform capitalism to focus on growth and fostering entrepreneurship. The government SHOULD NOT continue to pick winners and losers among corporate titans at the expense of the little guys.
FAIR AND FREE TRADE
Protectionism limits economic opportunities at home and makes us less secure. We need to reform capitalism and embrace fair and free trade to ensure American farmers and producers are able to participate and gain market share in the global economy. It’s also an important tool in our arsenal against global bad players, bringing democracy-loving countries into our economic orbit and building on the integration model that has ensured global peace for the latter half of the 20th century.
BUST THE TRUST
Break Up Monopolies/Too Big to Fail. Some of our most successful companies have become too big to fail and over the past two decades brought our economy to its knees multiple times. Consolidation in the name of competitiveness concentrates market power in too few people’s hands. We need to reform capitalism to ensure small and medium-sized businesses are able to gain a foothold in our economy and hold our largest companies accountable to ensure they are not incentivized to rig the system against all of us.
FAIR WAGES
Make minimum wage, a living wage. The bottom quartile of income earners in our country has not shared in the upside of wealth creation for decades. We need to revisit policies that have caused this inequality and ensure that the upside is distributed across all income levels.
FAIR TAXES
Those at the top need to pay their fair share. Warren Buffett is famously on record saying it’s morally incomprehensible that he pays a lower percentage of his income than his secretary.
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Invest in our Future.
We need to invest in our future. We can no longer afford to defer investment in our existing infrastructure, the good thing is doing so will create millions of new high paying jobs. Rural America has been left out of the information economy, we are going to fix that. And our manufacturing has been decimated by technological progress over the past few decades, but we have a new wave of innovation in sustainable sciences that will create tens of millions of new high paying union jobs all across our state and nation.
We must invest in our future prosperity in the form of education. Including early childhood education, after-school programs, vocational and workplace readiness training, and post-secondary education; we need to unleash American talent from debt to build a prosperous future.
TAKE CARE OF OUR VETERANS
Our enlisted troops and officer corps devote their lives to us, we need to invest in our future by taking better care of our military families, enhanced return to civilian life services, better wages for active-duty military, and more robust pension plans for those returning, especially for our troop’s dependants.
RURAL INFRASTRUCTURE & BROADBAND
The information economy has left behind rural America. We must invest in our future by expanding access to high-speed internet nationwide and investing in the roads and innovative financing to help our next generation of farmers compete against agricultural giants.
EDUCATION FOR ALL
We need robust early childhood education, after-school care, workforce readiness training, and vocational training. So many Americans with liabilities also need special resources in their education, we need to ensure we equip American families with what they need to help navigate every challenge. We also must evaluate a plan to guarantee American competitiveness. We need to invest in our future and ensure Americans pursuing higher education at our public universities graduate without crippling debt.
MENTAL HEALTHCARE
We have a poverty problem in America, one key driver of this is driven by a lack of understanding and acceptance of mental health. We must invest in proper guidance for employers to provide reasonable workplace accommodations, civilian social workers to complement policing and properly handle mental health emergencies, and anti-poverty programs for those who can’t just pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
STRENGTHEN SOCIAL SECURITY
For Americans who live on social security, we know that while it’s better than nothing, we need to do more to ensure those who depend on it don’t have to live in poverty. Social security remittances should be evaluated to the same standard as a living wage.
GREEN JOBS
We need to ensure that America leads the world in sustainable sciences so that we don’t fall behind, doing so will create tens of millions of high-paying union jobs and ensure we lead the world for the next century.
HEALTHCARE GUARUNTEE
Nobody should go without healthcare in the wealthiest country in the world. Investing now so that every American is covered will help us reduce the cost of our healthcare system overall by getting people access to primary and preventative care. While also preventing families from sliding into poverty for health-related reasons.
REBUILD AMERICA’S ROADS, SEWERS, POWER SYSTEMS, & MORE
In the 20th century, America built an infrastructure that was the envy of the world, this foundation enabled us to become the wealthiest nation on earth. We must invest in maintaining and expanding this system to maintain our competitiveness for centuries to come.
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Join Our Grassroots Movement.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
-Margaret Mead