In fact, the opposite is true. Democrats believe people should work hard, make sensible choices, and take responsibility for their decisions. What we reject is the fiction that every economic hardship comes down to somebody not working hard enough.

Tens of millions of Americans work their asses off every day. They show up, work overtime, raise families, stretch every dollar. And still, one illness, one car repair, one rent increase can push them into crisis. That isn’t because they got lazy. It’s because we changed the rules of the economy.

For decades after World War II, when workers became more productive and the economy grew, ordinary people broadly shared in that growth. Starting in the 1970s, that relationship broke. Productivity kept climbing. The economy got enormously richer. Typical workers got less and less of the growth they helped create.

RAND researchers put a number on it. If economic growth had continued to be distributed as it was before 1975, the bottom 90 percent of Americans would have received about $79 trillion more in income between 1975 and 2023.

$79 trillion- sit with that number for a minute. It’s nearly twice the US national debt.

Now imagine that money never got locked away as untaxed wealth. Imagine it moved through the economy instead, into cars, homes, vacations, everyday life. Spending generates tax revenue. Payroll taxes, sales taxes, income taxes on every business that money touches along the way. Wealth parked in a portfolio generates almost none of that. Even a conservative estimate, applying a 20 percent effective tax rate, well below what most working households actually pay once you count federal, state, and payroll taxes together, would put roughly $16 trillion in additional tax revenue back on the table. That’s money that could have gone a long way toward better healthcare, better education, and more, without adding a dime to the debt.

That $79 trillion didn’t move from the bottom 90% to the top one percent because everybody suddenly started making bad choices or stopped working hard. It reflects decades of policy decisions about wages, unions, taxes, corporate consolidation, and trade- decisions that determined who would capture the wealth a growing economy created.

So when Democrats talk about affordable healthcare, cheaper education, higher wages, stronger workers, renewable energy, and asking the extraordinarily wealthy to pay more, we are not asking for a handout. We are saying something went radically wrong with our economy. We’re saying we see a problem that needs fixing, and we’re offering real solutions. That’s the American way.

Policy reshaped this economy once, and only policy changes can reshape it again. That is not something for nothing. It is recognizing that public policy moved tens of trillions of dollars away from most Americans, and public policy can move some of that prosperity back.

The problem was never that Americans stopped working hard. The problem is that we built an economy where the hard work of tens of millions of people no longer delivers security for them or their families

Billionaires and big corporations used policy to move the rewards of growth upward. We want to use the same policy tools to put prosperity, opportunity, and security back within reach of the people who created it.

Better is possible.

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Source

Carter C. Price, Measuring the Income Gap from 1975 to 2023: Extending Previous Work, RAND Corporation, WR-A516-2, 2025. https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-2.html

U.S. Treasury, “Total Public Debt Outstanding,” as of August 18, 2026 (national debt figure).

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/

Congressional Budget Office, historical effective federal tax rates by income quintile, 1979-2016 (middle-quintile combined federal rate). https://www.cbo.gov/topics/taxes/distribution-federal-taxes

Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All 50 States, 7th Edition (average state and local effective tax rate, middle-income households). https://itep.org/whopays-7th-edition/

Tax Foundation, “Who Pays Taxes? Federal, State, and Local Tax Burden and Transfers” (combined federal-state-local effective rate, middle quintile). https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/who-pays-taxes-federal-state-local-tax-burden-transfers/

There are moderates. Progressives. Centrists. Liberals. Democratic socialists. The far left. The establishment. The insurgents. Enough labels to fill a political science textbook. There is only one problem. They rarely bother to tell us what these people actually want to do.

Put the labels aside and look at the policies. One Democrat wants a public healthcare option; another wants single-payer. One wants a $15 minimum wage; another wants $25. One wants to reduce the cost of public college and trade school; another wants to eliminate tuition. One wants higher income taxes on the wealthy; another wants to tax accumulated wealth as well. These are disagreements. But they are overwhelmingly disagreements about how much, how fast, and by what mechanism. You would never know that from reading the Comfortable Class.

To hear them tell it, Democrats are engaged in some great ideological civil war. Yet somehow, after thousands of words analyzing this supposed historic rupture, they neglect the far more consequential divide in American politics: Democrats are arguing over how far to expand healthcare, strengthen workers, invest in education, tax concentrated wealth, and accelerate the transition to renewable energy. Republicans, meanwhile, want to privatize more of healthcare, keep cutting taxes on the super-rich, weaken workers’ rights, prolong dependence on fossil fuels, defund public education and science, and allow ever-larger conglomerates to dominate the economy.

That seems like a fairly significant political divide and one deserving of most of their analysis, considering we have an election coming up to decide which party, Democrat or Republican, will run the country. But apparently it is less interesting than deciding whether Abdul El-Sayed belongs in the “progressive insurgent” box or the “democratic socialist adjacent” box, even though he has declared himself a free-market capitalist.

Labels are wonderfully convenient that way. They allow commentators to manufacture enormous ideological distances without doing the tedious work of comparing actual policies. Perhaps the next time someone announces another great Democratic civil war, we should ask a very simple question: Forget the labels. What exactly do these people disagree about?

The answer may prove considerably less dramatic than the column.

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David has health insurance through his employer. He pays $400 a month through payroll to cover himself and his family, but his plan carries a $4,000 deductible. When the cost of managing his diabetes became too much, he stopped using a continuous glucose monitor and switched to a cheaper, less effective medication.

Noah owns a small business and buys his insurance through the ACA marketplace. When recent subsidy cuts hit, he could only afford a plan with an $8,000 deductible, roughly a quarter of his annual income. He’s insured, but a serious illness would threaten everything he’s built.

Mary needed surgery. She was told it wouldn’t go forward unless she paid $4,500 upfront to cover what insurance wasn’t going to.

These people did what Americans are told to do. They worked, bought insurance, and paid their premiums. When they needed care, the card in their wallet didn’t guarantee they could afford to use it.

That reality sits uneasily next to one of the most durable claims in American politics: most people with private insurance like their coverage. Poll after poll backs this up. But what, exactly, are people being asked to judge?

Most people barely touch their insurance in a given year: a prescription, a checkup, maybe a sprained ankle, or taking a child to the pediatrician for a checkup. For that majority of the people with private health insurance, the difference between a good plan and a mediocre one rarely shows up. It’s only among the roughly five percent of patients who account for most of the system’s actual costs- people in chemotherapy, in the ICU, in year three of a chronic illness- that a plan’s real architecture gets tested, and their satisfaction numbers tell a different story. Which raises a question KFF’s own researchers have posed: why do we keep measuring the system by how it performs for people who barely use it? Insurance is supposed to pay the bills when you need it most.

Before talking about any potential reform, it’s worth looking at what we already spend. The United States spends more than $5 trillion a year on health care, over $15,000 per person, roughly twice the average of other wealthy nations. That per-person figure counts everyone: children, healthy adults, the uninsured, people who skip treatment because they can’t afford it. Most peer countries cover virtually everyone for less. We pay more to cover fewer people, and often fail the ones we’re supposedly covering.

The “best health care system in the world” line doesn’t hold up against the statistics. Americans live shorter lives than people in most peer nations. Avoidable deaths, the kind preventable through vaccination, screening, or timely treatment, have been rising in much of the country for over a decade, while falling in most other wealthy countries over the same period. Our infant mortality rate remains among the highest in the developed world. Major international rankings consistently put the U.S. near the bottom on access, equity, and overall system performance. Researchers estimate that wider use of basic preventive care, cholesterol management, and cancer screening could save 50,000 to 100,000 American lives a year. That mythology of the best healthcare system in the world survives because America genuinely has extraordinary doctors, hospitals, and medical technology. But having world-class medicine available somewhere isn’t the same as having a world-class health care system available to everyone.

Private equity firms, hospital chains, and large corporations have steadily swallowed the industry, while independent practices disappear under the paperwork and billing demands created by hundreds of insurers and thousands of plans. Most doctors now work inside corporate or institutional systems that track nearly every minute of their day, not to improve care but to increase billable activity, shorten appointments, and shift work to lower-paid staff. American health care has become a system that often seems better at collecting overdue co-pays than delivering care.

The prescription-drug system has consolidated the same way. A handful of companies now control multiple stages between manufacturer and patient. CVS, for example, owns Aetna, one of the country’s largest insurers. It also owns CVS Caremark, the pharmacy-benefit manager that helps decide which drugs are covered and what patients pay. And it owns the retail, mail-order, and specialty pharmacies that dispense those drugs. Its competitors have built similar empires. The company negotiating the price, deciding whether a prescription is covered, steering the patient to a specific pharmacy, and collecting the payment can now be four arms of the same corporation. That structure lets profit get extracted at nearly every stage, while patients and independent pharmacies have almost no leverage.

Pharmaceutical companies fit neatly into this system. Most wealthy countries use government purchasing power to negotiate or cap drug prices. In the United States, manufacturers have had far more room to charge what the market will bear, even for medicines patients can’t live without. The same drug, from the same company, can cost dramatically more here, not because it works better, but because our fragmented system hands manufacturers extraordinary pricing power.

The dysfunction hits rural communities and underserved urban neighborhoods hardest, where hospitals close, clinics disappear, and essential care gets harder to reach. But the damage doesn’t stop there. Every American pays into a system that drains more than $5 trillion a year from the economy without delivering the best health care system in the world. That astronomical amount of money disappears into duplicated administration, inflated prices, billing complexity, and corporate profit, money that could otherwise raise wages, strengthen communities, or stay in families’ pockets.

If you think this system should stay as it is, stop here. If you think it’s a system crying out for reform, keep reading.

Reforming it will take a determined political movement. The Republican Party can be ruled out immediately as it has shown, repeatedly, that it likes the current private, conglomerate-run system, and would like to push Medicare and Medicaid further toward privatization rather than away from it. That leaves the Democratic Party as the only viable vehicle for reform in a two-party system.

Some in the party argue for baby steps: introduce a public option, let people choose it, and allow private insurance to wither on its own. A public option might help some people. It could offer a better choice and put modest pressure on private insurers. But it would leave the system's fundamental, inefficient machinery intact. Employers would still administer health benefits. Private insurers would still run separate networks, formularies, prior-authorization systems, and billing rules. Hospitals and doctors would still employ enormous numbers of people just to determine which insurer covers what, under which code, at which negotiated price. The government would simply add one more plan to an already sprawling maze.

The biggest gains, in cost, in simplicity, in care, won’t come from adding another insurer to that maze. They come from replacing the financing system itself with a single payer.

Raise single payer and the same objections always follow: too large, too disruptive, too complicated, beyond government’s capacity to run. Those were the exact warnings made about Medicare in the early 60s. The American Medical Association, one of the most powerful lobbies in the country at the time, warned it would destroy the doctor-patient relationship, drive physicians out of practice, overwhelm hospitals, ration care, and bankrupt the government. Ronald Reagan recorded an album for the AMA's in 1961, warning that if Medicare was enacted, Americans would spend their old age telling their children "what it once was like in America when men were free." Six decades later, those dire warnings about the changes to the healthcare system describe the private, market-driven healthcare system we have today far more accurately than they ever described Medicare.

None of the AMA’s predictions came true. Medicare launched nationwide in under a year, enrolled 19 million people - nearly every eligible senior and kept private doctors and hospitals in place, expanded access, and helped desegregate American hospitals. It became one of the most durable and popular programs in the country’s history.

Medicare isn’t perfect. Its benefits have gaps, its billing systems need work, and private insurers have clawed their way back in through Medicare Advantage. But it proves the United States can build and run a national health-financing system, and because Medicare administration already exists, the foundation for single payer is already in place. We have national infrastructure for enrollment, claims, provider reimbursement, and billing. It would need to be expanded and modernized, and it would need a larger workforce, with priority hiring going to people displaced from the private insurance industry. The point is we wouldn’t be building from scratch; we’d be expanding something that already serves tens of millions of Americans, using a sixty-year-old playbook that is already working.

What is the benefit of a single-payer system for us, We the People? Estimates of the savings vary by methodology, but the most rigorous studies converge on several hundred billion dollars a year in administrative savings alone, largely from eliminating duplicated billing, marketing, and underwriting costs, with the most aggressive models putting the figure near $1 trillion once drug pricing and other efficiencies are included.

It would remove a huge source of stress for American families. Coverage would no longer depend on employment, income, age, geography, or an insurance company’s permission. No family would face bankruptcy because someone got sick, lost a job, or hit a deductible.

There will be some losers, and we should be honest about that. Pharmaceutical profits would fall. Private equity would likely exit health care. Some hospital conglomerates would likely break apart. Private insurers would lose their central role, and displaced workers would need retraining and priority access to jobs in the new system. Those consequences shouldn't be waved away. But the purpose of a health care system ultimately paid for by the people must be to keep people healthy, ensure access to timely care, and ensure that that care is paid for, not to preserve every company currently profiting from the way things are.

Which leaves the question of payment. The first thing that most opponents say is “it will cost too much". If the experts are right, a single-payer system cuts the overall cost of the system by roughly 20 percent, as much as a trillion dollars, which kills the " it'll cost too much " argument before it even gets off the ground. The real question isn't whether we can afford it; it's how we allocate the cost.

Workers already contribute hundreds of billions of dollars a year through paycheck deductions. Employers contribute roughly $1 trillion more toward private coverage. Families then pay deductibles, co-pays, coinsurance, and whatever their insurer refuses to cover. Private insurance runs on a simple premise: employers and employees pay in advance, so medical bills can be paid when people get sick. While insurers hold that money, they invest it and keep the returns. But they also have a financial incentive to delay, restrict, or deny payment, because every dollar they don't spend stays available for reserves, investment, or profit.

A universal system could preserve the contributions employers and employees already make, but redirect that money from private premiums into a single public fund; those funds could be invested similarly to the way private insurance is invested today, except the returns would stay inside the health system instead of going to shareholders. Paycheck deductions alone wouldn’t cover the full cost, though. We’d need a health care contribution from capital gains, large corporate profits, and concentrated wealth, from the parts of the economy that benefit from a healthier workforce but don’t currently pay into it. Deductibles and coinsurance would disappear.

We’re already spending more than $5 trillion a year and still asking insured people to postpone treatment, ration medication, and go into debt before their coverage means anything. We have the doctors, the hospitals, the pharmacies, and the administrative foundation. We already possess the wealth, the knowledge, and the capacity to care for every American for life. What remains missing is the political will to make that promise real.

In a world full of uncertainty, we have the capacity to take health care off the list of things families need to worry about. That’s worth reaching for.

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Sources — “Guaranteed Health Care for Life” (health care chapter)

Infant mortality

• CDC/NCHS, “Mortality in the United States, 2024,” Data Brief No. 548, January 2026: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db548.pdf

• CDC/NCHS, “Infant Mortality in the United States, 2024” (National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 75, No. 3), June 2026: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr75/nvsr75-03.pdf

• America’s Health Rankings, “International Comparison,” 2025 Annual Report (U.S. ranked 32nd of 38 OECD countries; OECD average 4.2; Estonia lowest at 1.7): https://www.americashealthrankings.org/publications/reports/2025-annual-report/international-comparison

• Commonwealth Fund, “Maternal Child Mortality: Do U.S. States Compare Internationally?,” October 2025: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2025/oct/maternal-child-mortality-how-do-us-states-compare-internationally

Life expectancy, avoidable deaths, and spending vs. peer countries

• AJMC, “US Has Highest Infant, Maternal Mortality Rates Despite the Most Health Care Spending” (citing Commonwealth Fund report): https://www.ajmc.com/view/us-has-highest-infant-maternal-mortality-rates-despite-the-most-health-care-spending

Preventable deaths from underused preventive care (50,000–100,000/year)

• Farley, Dalal, Mostashari & Frieden, “Deaths Preventable in the U.S. by Improvements in Use of Clinical Preventive Services,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2010: https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(10)00207-2/fulltext

Total U.S. health care spending

• CMS National Health Expenditure Data, Historical (2024: $5.3 trillion, $15,474 per person, 18% of GDP): https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-reports/national-health-expenditure-data/historical

• Healthcare Dive, “Utilization, intensity drove US health spending to $5.3T in 2024: CMS,” January 2026: https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/us-healthcare-spending-2024-cms-health-affairs/809578/

Spending concentrated among a small share of patients

• Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, “How Do Health Expenditures Vary Across the Population?” (top 5% of patients accounted for nearly half of all health spending in 2023): https://www.kff.org/health-costs/how-health-expenditures-vary-across-the-population-slideshow/

CVS/Aetna/Caremark vertical integration

• Drug Channels, “The CVS-Aetna Deal: Five Industry and Drug Channel Implications”: https://www.drugchannels.net/2017/12/the-cvs-aetna-deal-five-industry-and.html

• Healthcare Brew, “The rise and consequences of PBM vertical integration” (CVS Caremark owned by CVS Health, which includes Aetna): https://www.healthcare-brew.com/stories/the-rise-and-consequences-pbm-vertical-integration

Medicare’s 1965–66 launch and enrollment

• CMS, “Medicare & Medicaid Milestones, 1937 to 2015,” July 2015: https://www.cms.gov/About-CMS/Agency-Information/History/Downloads/Medicare-and-Medicaid-Milestones-1937-2015.pdf

• Bipartisan Policy Center, “Medicare at 60: A Program of Change & Challenges,” 2025: https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/medicare-at-60-a-program-of-change-challenges/

AMA opposition and the Reagan “Operation Coffee Cup” quote

• Wikipedia, “Operation Coffee Cup”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Coffee_Cup

• Wikipedia, “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine” (full quote: “We are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan_Speaks_Out_Against_Socialized_Medicine

Single-payer administrative savings estimates

• Center for American Progress, “Excess Administrative Costs Burden the U.S. Health Care System,” 2021 (Woolhandler/Himmelstein: $1.1 trillion total U.S. administrative spending, ~$504 billion estimated as excess/recoverable): https://www.americanprogress.org/article/excess-administrative-costs-burden-u-s-health-care-system/

• PolitiFact, “Comparing administrative costs for private insurance and Medicare” (range of estimates, $383–504 billion): https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/sep/20/bernie-sanders/comparing-administrative-costs-private-insurance-a/

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The real divide in American politics sits between the parties, and that divide has only widened since MAGA took over the Republican Party. MAGA Republicans want everything handed over to large private corporations with little or no oversight. Democrats, across their factions, agree markets need rules to function.

There was real merit to discussing the Democrat factional differences during primary season, when they actually helped determine a nominee. But with primaries all but settled, is it too much to hope that the policy differences between the two parties become the main subject of analysis? Perhaps these intellectual giants, with their deep insight into American political discourse, could find some way to discuss what separates Republicans from Democrats on policy, so voters get some real perspective instead of another round of factional scorekeeping.

Maybe they could write a column that points out that regulation is not the opposite of capitalism; it is what makes capitalism work. Most Democratic policies call for a return to a country where free enterprise and entrepreneurship can thrive again, built on merit, not on gaming the system; built on better ideas, not on monopolizing the market; built on the courage to compete, not the power to prevent anyone else from competing at all. Capitalism runs on supply and demand and efficient allocation of capital, with new ideas and new products freely coming to market to keep competition alive and prices competitive.

That is not what we have today. Due mainly to Republican policies, whole sectors have become monopolized, entrenched incumbents dominate, and regulatory capture has become the norm. These policies have helped stifle the very capitalism most of these columnists claim to defend. A columnist looking for a real divide in American economic policy would find it here, not in exaggerating the gulf between Democratic factions arguing over the pace of the same goals.

Surely these columnists know that you can be a capitalist and still believe in a strong social safety net. You can be a socialist and still believe entrepreneurship and innovation can drive an economy to new heights. A capitalist who takes markets seriously wants billionaires taxed on accumulated wealth, not just income, because letting capital concentrate without limit is exactly what breaks the free marketplace of ideas that markets need to function. Taxing wealth isn’t an attack on capitalism; it helps maintain it.

But I digress; let’s return to these wise columnists and their sage advice on political strategy: if the Democratic Party’s brand is as damaged as they are happy to point out, and most polls would agree, why fault candidates for criticizing the party’s own leadership? Kamala Harris got hammered in 2024 for failing to name a single place she’d break from Biden. Candidates who clearly state their differences with the old guard shouldn’t be treated as naïve or as symptoms of a party in crisis. Instead, shouldn’t we be applauding them for separating themselves from a weak brand and focusing on what they’re offering voters: real policy differences from the safe, slow status quo. But policy is the thing “factional fight” coverage keeps managing to avoid discussing.

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Jane will spend her career and every paycheck funding a program she is now warned may not be solvent when she needs it. Todd will spend most of every year earning income on which he pays no Social Security tax at all. That obvious disparity is not a flaw in the system. It is the result of policies working exactly as powerful interests designed them to work.

The same policies that helped create nearly $40 trillion in national debt - a debt that we have been made to feel was unavoidable or inevitable. In fact, the opposite is true: the debt is the consequence of squandering one of the greatest fiscal opportunities in American history through reckless and catastrophic policy decisions.

Today, those same reckless policy decisions have led us to a Trump administration requesting $1.5 trillion for national defense for 2027, a figure that should have been laughed out of the room as fiscally deranged. Instead, it was treated as a serious opening bid. That reaction captures the last two decades of irresponsibility in a nutshell. America has spent so long financing wars and tax cuts on credit that obvious madness now passes for ordinary politics.

“The most significant threat to our national security is our debt.”
— Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2010

Before returning to the opportunity that was squandered, we should be clear about who bears most of the responsibility for its loss. The Bush administration set this fiscal catastrophe in motion.

After September 11, under the Bush administration, the United States launched two forever-wars without asking the country to pay for them. There were no war taxes, no war bonds. The bills were simply added to the debt. Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that America’s post-9/11 wars have already created approximately $8 trillion in costs and obligations.

What did we receive in return? Iraq was shattered. Twenty years in Afghanistan ended with the Taliban back in power. Thousands of American service members were killed, hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, and millions were displaced. The debt, however, remained with us.

At the same time, Bush and the Republican Congress passed two massive tax cuts and then borrowed the money needed to fill the holes those cuts left in the federal budget. The cuts and the provisions later made permanent deprived the government of roughly $7 trillion in revenue and, on top of that, added more than $8 trillion to the national debt by 2023. The result was a roughly $15 trillion negative swing in government revenue, all to deliver tax cuts to those already at the top, while working- and middle-class families, and generations not yet born, were left to carry the burden.

They then dismantled financial safeguards, helping create the conditions for the 2008 crash. The banks were rescued with public money, while families lost homes, jobs, savings, and businesses.

They borrowed on our account to finance wars we did not need to fight and tax cuts we could not afford. They deregulated the banks to the point that our economy was brought to its knees. They gave a massive bailout to the institutions that helped cause the collapse. Again and again, the benefits went upward while the risks, losses, and debts were pushed downward and left on the public ledger.

The consequences are now impossible to ignore. Net interest on the federal debt reached $881 billion in 2024 and $970 billion in 2025. The Congressional Budget Office projects that it will reach $2.1 trillion annually by 2036. Those interest payments do not educate a child, repair a bridge, provide healthcare, or even defend the country. It has drained resources from the public investments that could improve the lives and economic security of middle- and working-class families.

Now let’s return to the opportunity that was stolen from us. The true scale of that theft becomes clear only when we look at the future that We the People were on course to inherit, and how completely and deliberately it was taken away.

At the beginning of this century America stood within reach of an entirely different future. In January 2001, the federal government had produced four consecutive budget surpluses. Debt held by the public had fallen to approximately $3.3 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office projected $5.6 trillion in cumulative surpluses over the following decade, enough to place the country on a path to eliminating federal debt.

Let that sink in: at the beginning of this century, the United States was well on the road to becoming essentially debt-free.

Instead of living under nearly $40 trillion in debt, we should be living in a country free to invest its immense wealth in the security and prosperity of its people. We could be strengthening Social Security, rebuilding infrastructure, expanding education from childcare through college or trade school, guaranteeing healthcare for life, accelerating the transition to secure domestic renewable energy, and preparing future generations for whatever challenges lie ahead.

That was the opportunity taken from us, not because the country lacked money, ingenuity, or productive capacity, but because political leaders, overwhelmingly Republican, made reckless and catastrophic policy decisions that stole that future from us.

Different choices would not have required America to become weak or economically stagnant. We could have pursued those responsible for September 11 without committing ourselves to two decades of occupation. We could have maintained the tax structure of the prosperous 1990s. We could have regulated financial markets instead of allowing Wall Street to turn systemic risk into a business model. Instead of living under nearly $40 trillion in debt, we should be living in a country free to invest its immense wealth in the security and prosperity of its people.

But fiscal responsibility should not be our only goal. The Constitution did not establish this country to balance a budget. It called upon government to establish equal justice, and to promote the general welfare, security, liberty, and posterity of all Americans. But those promises are hard to keep while the country hemorrhages more than a trillion dollars a year in interest and policies force middle- and working-class families to carry a debt from which the wealthiest are increasingly shielded.

Nothing proposed in this series begins with radical arithmetic. It begins with principles the country once lived and prospered under: a genuinely progressive tax system, corporations paying a meaningful share, military spending tied to actual security needs, and public money managed with discipline and transparency.

Every chapter that follows will examine a different part of the same broken structure: healthcare, housing, energy, the courts and more. The institutions meant to serve the public. Each will ask the same questions: Where are we? How did we get here? And what must we do to recapture the lost opportunity and create a more perfect union?

The opportunity we had as a country in 2001 was stolen from us. We now know that today’s crisis was not inevitable; that it is the direct result of reckless and destructive policy choices.

The road not taken is behind us. The road forward begins by reclaiming and rebuilding the institutions that failed to protect us from those catastrophic policies

The Presidency, the Congress, the courts, and federal agencies do not belong to any party or temporary majority. They belong to We the People, and it is time they served us again.

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Next week: Chapter 2: Healthcare For Life

Next week: Chapter 2: Healthcare For Life

Sources

U.S. Department of the Treasury — Debt to the Penny
Daily official accounting of the total outstanding federal debt.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/debt-to-the-penny/

U.S. Department of the Treasury — Understanding the National Debt
Current federal debt and the annual cost of servicing it.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/national-debt/

Congressional Budget Office — The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2002–2011
CBO’s January 2001 projection of $5.6 trillion in cumulative surpluses between 2002 and 2011.
https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/107th-congress-2001-2002/reports/entire-testimony.pdf

Congressional Budget Office — Federal Debt: A Primer
Documents the four consecutive federal budget surpluses from 1998 through 2001 and the resulting decline in publicly held debt.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56309

Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget — From Riches to Rags: Causes of Fiscal Deterioration Since 2001
Analysis of how the United States moved from projected surpluses and the possibility of paying down publicly held debt to persistent deficits and rising debt.
https://www.crfb.org/papers/riches-rags-causes-fiscal-deterioration-2001

Brown University Costs of War Project — Findings
Estimates that the post-9/11 wars have cost approximately $8 trillion, excluding future interest costs on war borrowing.
https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/findings

Brown University Costs of War Project — U.S. Federal Budget
Breakdown of direct war spending, increased Pentagon expenditures, veterans’ costs, homeland-security spending, and interest associated with post-9/11 wars.
https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/economic/us-federal-budget

Congressional Budget Office — How the 2017 Tax Act Affects CBO’s Projections
CBO’s analysis of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’s effects on federal deficits and debt-service costs.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/53787

Congressional Budget Office — Cost Estimate for the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
Estimated that the enacted legislation would increase federal deficits by approximately $1.5 trillion over its first decade, before accounting for broader economic effects.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/53415

Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission — Final Report
The official government investigation into the causes of the 2007–2009 financial crisis, including failures of financial regulation, supervision, corporate governance, and risk management.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf

U.S. Government Accountability Office — Financial Crisis Losses and Potential Impacts of the Dodd-Frank Act
Documents the enormous losses in employment, household wealth, economic output, and financial stability associated with the 2007–2009 crash.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-13-180

U.S. Department of the Treasury — Troubled Asset Relief Program
Official history and accounting of the federal financial-rescue programs established following the 2008 crash.
https://home.treasury.gov/data/troubled-asset-relief-program

Congressional Budget Office — The Federal Budget in Fiscal Year 2025
Reports $970 billion in net federal interest costs during fiscal year 2025.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61950

Congressional Budget Office — The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036
Projects that annual net interest costs will rise to approximately $2.1 trillion by 2036.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62105

Office of Management and Budget — Fiscal Year 2027 Federal Budget
The Trump administration’s official request for $1.5 trillion in total national-defense resources for fiscal year 2027.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/budget_fy2027.pdf

Spain had lost control. Immigration is destroying Europe. The Schengen system of free movement across the EU has to be dismantled. Stephen Miller and other far-right figures in the United States were already presenting the crisis as a ridiculous warning of what would supposedly happen here if Democrats won the midterms. Perhaps this was simply opportunism. But the scale of the crossing and the speed of the political response make the whole thing feel a little too convenient.

Most Americans have probably never heard of Ceuta. It is a tiny Spanish enclave surrounded by Morocco and separated from mainland Spain by the Mediterranean. Yet within hours, it had become the international right’s newest symbol of European collapse and a talking point for America's far right.

So what was the Spanish response to nearly 50,000 people reportedly crossing in a single day? Spain deployed troops, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez traveled to Ceuta and condemned the crossing as a violation of Spanish sovereignty, which it clearly was.

In other words, the Spanish government responded quickly and decisively. Yet the international right behaved as though the government had simply surrendered control, using the crisis to attack Sánchez, condemn immigration and demand the dismantling of Europe’s system of free movement.

It is also important to note that Morocco has used migration as political leverage before. In 2021, during a diplomatic dispute with Spain, Moroccan authorities relaxed control of the Ceuta border and allowed thousands of people to cross. Desperate human beings became bargaining chips between governments.

We do not know that Morocco deliberately did the same thing this time. Nor is there public evidence that Morocco, Trump’s political operation or Europe’s right-wing parties coordinated the crisis. Suspicion is not proof.

But that does not mean there is nothing suspicious here. One of Africa’s most heavily guarded borders suddenly failed. Tens of thousands crossed almost simultaneously. Before the dead had even been counted, right-wing politicians and media figures in several countries were using the tragedy to attack Sánchez, condemn immigration and weaken European cooperation.

Perhaps Morocco opened the border for reasons of its own and the right simply seized the opportunity. Or perhaps there is more to the story.

Either way, the far-right attack strategy may backfire. Spain has every right to restore control and return most of those who crossed, while ensuring those people are treated humanely under Spanish and International law.

If Sánchez resolves the crisis firmly, he may prove something the far right does not want voters to see: a democratic government can control its borders without demonizing immigrants, abandoning human rights or tearing apart European cooperation.

The right rushed to turn Ceuta into proof that only it can restore order. Spain now has the opportunity to prove otherwise.

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Roughly six in ten American households now live paycheck to paycheck, including a meaningful share of six-figure earners, with almost no real margin between what comes in and what goes out. Since 2000, housing costs have risen three times faster than wages. Healthcare costs have risen five times faster.

In rural America, the picture is just as stark. Family farm bankruptcies rose 46 percent in 2025 alone. The blue-collar jobs that once let a single paycheck support a family have been disappearing for decades: American manufacturing has shed roughly five million jobs since 2000, and the towns built around those factories rarely got anything to replace them.

A generation was told the deal was: work hard, get a good education, and the ladder will be there. Nearly $1.7 trillion in student debt later, millions of young Americans followed that advice exactly and found the ladder gone, but the debt remains. In just about every sector of the economy, doing everything right stopped being enough somewhere along the way, and almost nobody in power has been honest about the why.

We the People live with this dysfunction every day, but most of us don’t have the time to really understand it, let alone confront it. Over the coming week, this series will attempt to diagnose the dysfunction one issue at a time and provide an alternative path forward that makes it easier for the average person: to earn a living, care for a family, get healthcare, keep a roof overhead, retire with dignity, and live in a community that feels safe and secure. It will be published one chapter at a time; each chapter will take on one specific problem facing this country, how we got there, and point toward solutions, offering a clear direction rather than a final answer.

We recognize and celebrate the vital role entrepreneurship plays in this country, and we’re committed to ensuring the nation’s public wealth and resources work for everyone: housing, food security, real opportunity through education from daycare to college or trade school, healthcare for life, safe streets, and a secure retirement. All of it is possible, and none of it requires inventing something new, just using our resources differently.

Each chapter will deliberately start with a person, not a statistic. The data will be there, sourced and defensible. But our country’s problems are best understood the way we as individuals experience them, and best solved by looking honestly at the incentives that produced them.

We have a century of proof that policies written to benefit the majority work extremely well: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the forty-hour week, the right to organize, the Civil Rights Act. They are not proposals; they are facts on the ground, already tested against fifty years of attempts to unwind them.

What follows is a plan to defend and finish building the country we already started. Chapter by chapter, we will build the case: how power gets checked, how the tax code gets rebuilt, how every American gets healthcare for life, how we push energy costs towards zero, how markets stay free instead of captured, how government institutions and the courts get put back to work for the people they’re supposed to serve. Each chapter will stand on its own. Together, they are an attempt to answer one question: what does it take to finish the more perfect union that our Constitution promised.

The Core Purpose

Restore “We the People” as the centerpiece of American life: building an economy that rewards enterprise, hard work, and honest competition, and a government that serves the majority of the people, middle-class and working families, small businesses, and entrepreneurs rather than concentrated corporate power, billionaires, and political insiders.

Dismantle the oligarchic state and return the power of government to the American people: ending the corrupting influence of concentrated wealth, corporate money, and monopoly power over our elections, our institutions, and our daily lives.

Defend freedom, democracy, justice, and human dignity at home, and stand for those principles throughout the world, not through bombs, regime change, or endless war, but through diplomacy, cooperation, economic partnership, and respect for international law.

Secure the constitutional and human rights of every American against the whims of any president, Congress, or Supreme Court majority, ensuring that fundamental freedoms cannot be stripped away whenever political power changes hands.

These four core pillars cut through the manufactured distractions of modern politics and confront the defining question of this era: whether American democracy will serve the many or remain controlled by the powerful few.

Our generation’s task goes beyond defeating one candidate, reversing one decision, or surviving one administration. It means building institutions strong enough to withstand oligarchy, authoritarianism, and the manipulation of a wealthy minority; an economy broad enough to produce shared prosperity; and a democratic culture confident enough to embrace freedom and equality for everyone.

The great progressive achievements of American history did more than respond to individual crises. They expanded the meaning of citizenship, gave ordinary people real power over their work, their government, and their lives, and made the promise of America real for those who had been excluded from it. That work remains unfinished.

The next progressive President must enter office understanding that caution alone will not meet this moment, and that repair is not enough. Regaining power isn’t the finish line. We have to deepen democracy, secure fundamental rights, and build an economy and government worthy of the people this nation was founded for: We the People.

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Consider what is happening with air travel. Jet fuel prices recently soared, imposing billions of dollars in additional costs on airlines. The predictable response was higher ticket prices. Under the old assumptions, airlines might have worried that passengers would refuse to pay, planes would fly with empty seats, and fares would have to come back down. That is not what happened.

The major airlines reported that higher fares produced remarkably little decline in demand, particularly among premium travelers. Affluent passengers looked at tickets costing hundreds of dollars more and bought them anyway. Their stock portfolios had risen. Their homes were worth more. They felt financially secure, and the higher price did not meaningfully change their lives. For the airlines, the lesson was obvious: the ceiling was higher than they had thought. It would seem that the lesson has been shaping much of the American economy for some time

Consumer spending represents approximately 70% of the nation’s GDP, roughly where it has been for years. But who is doing that spending has changed dramatically. The shift in consumer spending percentages began as a slow creep during the 1980s, when income and wealth started flowing increasingly toward the top. As affluent households accumulated a larger share of the country’s stocks, property and disposable income, their share of consumer spending steadily increased. The top 10 percent had increased to roughly 36 percent of spending by the end of the 1980s. By 2025, its share had grown to nearly half..

That is not merely another statistic about inequality. It changes what companies sell, whom they sell it to, and how much they can charge. The guiding question was once: What price can the broad middle class afford? Increasingly, it is: What is the highest price an affluent customer will tolerate? We see the answer everywhere.

Concert tickets that once cost $100 are dynamically priced into the thousands. World Cup tickets have been priced beyond the reach of many of the ordinary fans whose passion for the sport makes the tournament possible. Disney sells expensive access that allows wealthier families to bypass the lines. Airlines devote more space and investment to premium cabins. Automakers discontinue affordable sedans while producing $70,000 trucks and SUVs. Developers build luxury apartments while ordinary housing remains scarce. Hotels raise rates, add resort fees, and redesign properties around the idea of customers purchasing an “experience” rather than simply a room.

Companies have discovered that they may make more money selling fewer things at much higher prices than by producing affordable products for everyone. The bottom half of the country has not disappeared. It has simply become less important to many of the companies setting the prices.

Everyone still confronts those prices, however. A middle-income family does not receive a separate, affordable Disney World, housing market, automobile industry, or ticketing system. They must pay prices increasingly established by what the wealthy are willing to spend or withdraw from those parts of American life altogether.

The other 90 percent cannot simply stop participating. For millions of households, absorbing those increases has meant stretching income to its limit, cutting back somewhere else or putting more of ordinary life on a credit card. Americans now carry roughly $1.25 trillion in credit-card balances, close to the highest level ever recorded, while serious delinquencies have climbed sharply.

Millions of households are struggling with rent, groceries, insurance and debt while overall consumer spending continues to rise. The affluent keep booking vacations, buying premium automobiles and eating at expensive restaurants, masking the weakness beneath them. But much of their confidence rests upon what is known as the “wealth effect”.

Their salaries matter, but so do their brokerage accounts, retirement portfolios, stock compensation, and rising property values. When those assets increase, affluent households feel richer and spend more. That spending lifts corporate profits. Higher profits support higher stock prices. Higher stock prices encourage still more spending. It is a remarkably profitable circle, up until it begins moving in reverse.

A normal market correction of 10 or 15 percent might merely make wealthy households more cautious. But imagine a decline of 30 or 40 percent, something severe but hardly unprecedented in American history.

Affluent consumers would not stop buying groceries or paying their mortgages. They would postpone the renovation, cancel the luxury vacation, keep the existing car, abandon the second-home purchase, and stop paying four figures for concert and World Cup tickets. The consequences would not remain confined to their portfolios.

Hotels would cut staff. Restaurants would close. Airlines would reduce flights. Automakers would be left with expensive inventory. Developers would cancel projects. Retailers would lay off workers. State governments would lose income and capital-gains tax revenue just as unemployment and demand for public services increased. The person canceling the $15,000 vacation might remain wealthy. The hotel employee losing a job would not. And that is where the household-debt problem becomes dangerous.

A family may be able to carry a large credit-card balance while two paychecks are still arriving. Lose one of those jobs, however, and what looked like a difficult but manageable monthly payment can become unpayable almost overnight. Missed payments become higher interest charges. Higher interest charges become defaults. Defaults become losses for lenders, reduce access to credit, and put even more pressure on consumer spending.

A stock-market decline would trigger the contraction. The $1.25 trillion in credit-card balances, combined with the other household debt carried by millions in the remaining 90 percent, could turn that contraction into a crisis

That is the hidden danger in building an economy around the spending of a relatively small group. Concentrated consumption can make the country appear resilient because wealthy households can continue spending through the financial pressures that force everyone else to borrow or retreat. But it also makes the economy unusually vulnerable to anything that causes those households to feel substantially less wealthy.

We have built a consumer economy that depends not on broadly shared prosperity but on elevated asset prices at the top and continued access to credit below. For now, the premium cabins remain full. The luxury hotels are booked. The World Cup tickets continue selling. The stock market rises, the affluent feel richer, and their spending keeps the machine running.

We have built an economy in which the livelihoods of most Americans increasingly depend on the spending habits of a small affluent minority. As long as their portfolios rise, their confidence holds, and their spending continues, the system appears strong. But if their portfolio wealth falls, the consequences move rapidly downward, to the hotel worker, the restaurant server, the flight attendant, the construction worker, and the family already struggling to make its monthly payments.

An economy this dependent on the fortunes of the top 10 percent is not broadly prosperous. It is dangerously top-heavy. The economy itself is the proof that trickle-down economics has never delivered broad prosperity downward. But a trickle-down crash would deliver the pain with remarkable efficiency.

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Rather than concentrating primarily on Russian forces at the front, Ukraine has begun systematically attacking the entire network that sustains Russia’s war: supply roads, railways, ports, fuel depots, refineries, pipelines, electrical infrastructure, tankers and cargo vessels. The objective is no longer simply to destroy individual targets. It is to make the entire Russian logistics system unreliable.

Ukraine’s campaign around occupied Crimea and the Sea of Azov provides the clearest example. Repeated drone attacks have damaged ports, fuel infrastructure and transportation routes, increasing pressure on the roads, railways and ships Russia uses to supply Crimea and its forces across southern Ukraine.

Ukraine then escalated its attacks against the vessels supporting that system. Between July 5 and July 14, Ukrainian drone forces claimed to have targeted 116 vessels in the Sea of Azov, including tankers, cargo ships and tugboats. Russia temporarily restricted shipping through the region and suspended traffic through the Don–Azov Canal, an important route for fuel, military supplies and grain exports.

The campaign then expanded into the Black Sea. On the night of July 14–15, Ukraine’s drone-force commander Robert “Madyar” Brovdi said Ukrainian drones struck 20 Russian-linked vessels, including oil and gas tankers. Additional attacks brought Ukraine’s claimed July total to 147 vessels struck.

These are Ukrainian figures, and not every claim can be independently verified. The vessels were also reported to be struck or disabled, not necessarily destroyed or sunk. But the scale and concentration of the campaign are unmistakable.

The same strategy is being used against Russia’s petroleum industry. Ukraine has intensified attacks on refineries, pipeline pumping stations and fuel-storage facilities across Russia. These strikes can restrict the fuel available to the military while damaging an industry that produces a large share of the revenue financing the war.

Taken together, these attacks reveal a strategy aimed at an interconnected system. Close a road, and Russia must rely more heavily on rail. Damage the railway, and it must move more supplies by sea. Attack the tankers, ports and refineries, and the disruption spreads through the entire network. The objective is not to destroy every component. It is to create bottlenecks, delays, shortages and increasingly difficult choices for Russian commanders.

The timing of this tactical transformation raises an important question. Mykhailo Fedorov became Ukraine’s defense minister in January 2026 with an explicit mandate to expand Ukraine’s technological capabilities and reform its military bureaucracy.

Fedorov argued that Ukraine could not defeat a larger opponent by simply reproducing the structures of a traditional army. His alternative was a data-driven system that measured results and directed resources toward the commanders, units and technologies producing the greatest battlefield effect. He called it the “mathematics of war.”

One of his most consequential reforms concerned drone procurement. Instead of allowing established suppliers, bureaucratic relationships or institutional preferences to determine which drones received contracts, Fedorov increasingly tied purchasing decisions to battlefield testing and verified performance.

Systems that survived Russian electronic warfare, reached their targets, and produced results could be ordered and scaled rapidly. Systems that failed were not supposed to remain protected because their manufacturers had the right connections. In effect, Fedorov attempted to make the battlefield, not the bureaucracy, the final judge of which drones Ukraine should buy.

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That reform also threatened established interests. Suppliers could lose contracts. Officials could lose discretion over procurement. Successful frontline formations could receive resources at the expense of more connected but less effective organizations.

None of this proves that Fedorov personally designed the campaign against Russian logistics or selected individual targets. Ukraine’s intelligence agencies, manufacturers, military commanders and specialized drone units all played essential roles. Many of these capabilities also existed before he became defense minister. Fedorov did not invent Ukrainian drone warfare. But it is increasingly difficult to argue that his appointment and the rapid acceleration of Ukraine’s technology-driven campaign were entirely coincidental. He helped connect battlefield testing, procurement, production, targeting and performance data into a more coherent system. He may not have invented the strategy, but he helped build the machinery that allowed it to operate at scale. That is why his removal after only six months has caused such alarm.

The drone campaign will not stop tomorrow. The weapons, manufacturers and experienced commanders still exist. But under today’s battlefield conditions, successful military innovation depends on more than possessing advanced weapons. It depends on constantly learning which systems are working, rapidly shifting resources toward successful units and manufacturers, and changing tactics before the enemy has time to adapt.

Fedorov’s dismissal therefore creates a serious risk, not that Ukraine will suddenly stop launching drones, but that the institutional momentum behind its new strategy could slow or become trapped again inside the bureaucracy he was attempting to reform.

His removal triggered public protests in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, criticism from soldiers and lawmakers, and concern among figures associated with Ukraine’s technological transformation. Among the most significant reactions was the resignation of Colonel Pavlo Yelizarov, a deputy commander of the Ukrainian Air Force and an important figure in Ukraine’s drone-warfare program. Yelizarov warned that Fedorov’s removal could damage Ukraine’s defense.

None of this means the reorganization is doomed to fail. The new capabilities, manufacturers, commanders and operational structures do not disappear with one minister. But it does raise an unavoidable question: why remove the person who appears to have made such significant progress in modernizing procurement, scaling drone warfare and connecting battlefield performance to decision-making, while retaining a senior military leadership repeatedly accused of resisting those reforms?

The concern is not that Ukraine will suddenly lose the ability to carry out these attacks. It is that Zelenskyy may have chosen the institutional resistance Fedorov was trying to overcome, resistance widely associated by critics with Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi and the older military hierarchy, over the reform effort that was beginning to produce visible results.

Sources:

Associated Press — Ukrainians protest Zelenskyy’s removal of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov
Covers the conflict between Fedorov and Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, the protests, Fedorov’s reform program, and Colonel Pavlo Yelizarov’s resignation.

https://apnews.com/article/88083e4381b1690f5048088d75954d3a

Office of the President of Ukraine — Fedorov’s proposed Defense Ministry reforms
Zelenskyy states that Fedorov’s central assignment was expanding Ukraine’s technological military capacity.

https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/nasha-strategiya-strategiya-zahistu-zhittya-bude-posilyuvati-102301

Ukrainian Ministry of Defense — Biography of Mykhailo Fedorov
Confirms that Fedorov was appointed minister of defense on January 14, 2026.

https://mod.gov.ua/en/about-us/mod-leadership/mykhailo-fedorov

Critical Threats Project/Institute for the Study of War — July 11 battlefield assessment
Reports Ukraine’s claim that 28 vessels were struck overnight and 76 vessels had been hit between July 6 and July 11.

https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-11-2026

Critical Threats Project/Institute for the Study of War — July 13 battlefield assessment
Reports attacks against seven tankers, five cargo vessels, a ferry and two tugboats, bringing the claimed total to 105 vessels through July 13. It also discusses satellite evidence showing a sharp reduction in vessels operating in the Sea of Azov.

https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-13-2026

Critical Threats Project/Institute for the Study of War — July 8 battlefield assessment
Explains that Ukraine was targeting fuel tankers because Russia had become increasingly dependent on maritime gasoline deliveries to occupied Crimea.

https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-8-2026

Associated Press — Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil infrastructure
Discusses attacks on the Syzran refinery and a tanker in the Azov–Black Sea shipping system, along with the resulting pressure on Russian fuel supplies.

https://apnews.com/article/f0bab8086a84705db07c74b3b1b99c49

Reuters — Political crisis following Fedorov’s dismissal
Provides additional reporting on the disagreement between Fedorov and Syrskyi and the public reaction.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraines-parliament-elect-new-government-amid-outcry-over-defence-chief-2026-07-16/

As Mayo gets ready to play another men’s senior Gaelic football final on July 26, it’s worth remembering that Mayo has won three senior All-Ireland football titles. Jackie Carney had a hand in every one of them, first as a player in 1936, then as trainer in 1950 and 1951. No other man can say that.

He was born in 1906 in Lahardane, a small village near Ballina. John Carney was his given name, but he was known as Jackie to the county. He played right wing-forward for Ballina Stephenites and, starting in 1931, for Mayo. He was dropped after his first season, then earned his way back in 1933 on the strength of an All-Ireland junior medal. From there he did not leave the Mayo team for eight years.

Mayo was the league team of the 1930s, and Carney was central to it. He won seven National League medals, a record he shares with Kerry’s Mick O’Dwyer, from Mayo’s run of six league titles in a row between 1934 and 1939 and another in 1941. He added five Connacht titles and four Railway Cup medals with Connacht. But the medal that mattered most to him was the one from 1936, when Mayo beat Laois to win the county’s first senior All-Ireland. Carney lined out that day alongside Henry Kenny, father of a future Taoiseach, in a Mayo forward line that brought Sam west for the first time.

He played his last game for Mayo in June 1941 and went home to Ballina, where he ran a pub and grocery shop a few doors from the dress shop his wife Eithne would later run. He might have stopped there. He didn’t.

In 1948 the County Board named him co-trainer of the Mayo senior team, alongside Gerald Courell, a teammate from his own playing days. The two had struck up a friendship on the field in the 1930s that Mayo would need again in the years ahead. Their first campaign together ended in heartbreak, a one-point All-Ireland final loss to Cavan. The next brought a semi-final defeat to Meath. Carney and Courell did not change course. They doubled down on it.

Each year the panel gathered for a fortnight at Mrs Gaughan’s guesthouse in Ballina, training by day and studying by night. A blackboard went up after dinner, and each player broke down an upcoming opponent, position by position, strengths and weaknesses laid out in front of the group. Paddy Prendergast, the full-back on those teams, called it more intensive than people realized, seventy years ahead of its time and unheard of anywhere else in the country.

It worked. In 1950 Mayo beat Leitrim, Roscommon, and Armagh to reach the final, then held off Louth 2-5 to 1-6 despite losing center half-forward Billy Kenny to a career-ending injury five minutes in. A year later Mayo did it again, drawing with Kerry in the semi-final before winning the replay, then coming from three points down against Meath in the final on the strength of a Tom Langan goal, to win 2-8 to 0-9. Mayo has not won an All-Ireland since.

Carney’s touch went beyond tactics. He spotted John McAndrew, a future All-Ireland winner, after watching him cycle twenty miles from Crossmolina to play a club match. He put players to bed at night during training camp and got them up in the morning. They stayed close to him and to each other for the rest of their lives.

He died of a heart attack in 1984, a fit man to the end by all accounts, and is buried in Adrigole Cemetery outside Lahardane, overlooking Lough Conn and in the shadow of Nephin mountain. His nephew Martin Carney went on to play for Donegal and Mayo and later became a familiar face as an analyst on The Sunday Game.

Mayo has come close many times since 1951 and gone home empty-handed. Jackie Carney knew both sides of that story. He also knew what it took to win, three times.

Honors: 1 All-Ireland (1936, player), 2 All-Irelands (1950, 1951, trainer), 5 Connacht Senior Championships, 7 National Football League titles, 4 Railway Cup medals.

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Back at the beginning of June, we told you what was coming if this war dragged on past mid-July: the world was heading into an oil shock unlike anything we had seen before. We said the Strategic Petroleum Reserve couldn’t absorb another sustained shock. We said the global economy was standing on a foundation that had already been quietly cracking for months.

For a moment, it looked like we might be wrong, in the good way. On June 17, Trump signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran. The pitch was straightforward: reopen the strait, release frozen assets, lift sanctions, and Iran gets a path back into the world economy. In exchange, the shooting stops. Markets exhaled. Oil prices fell to a three-month low. We were told the crisis had been avoided. It hasn’t been avoided. It’s been postponed, and now it’s back, potentially worse.

Iran says the ships were using a route the MoU never approved. On July 6, the IRGC struck three commercial vessels near Oman, including a Qatari LNG tanker, over exactly that dispute: who controls passage through the strait. Tehran insists the MoU settles it in their favor. Washington insists it doesn't. The U.S. answered with the largest single barrage of the week: roughly 140 targets hit. Iran answered that with drone and missile strikes on American-linked bases in five countries: Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Oman, and Qatar, in a single 48-hour stretch. The IRGC has declared the strait closed again. Trump has declared the ceasefire over again. And the Pentagon, which spent the spring quietly preparing for limited ground operations inside Iran, is once more the subject of that same conversation. Ask yourself: does anyone seriously believe boots on Iranian soil ends this war faster than it starts a bigger one?

Meanwhile, the number that should scare you most isn’t a headline; it’s a data point. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve sat at 319.5 million barrels as of July 3, the lowest level since 1983. It fell another 6.2 million barrels in a single week. Whatever cushion this country had against the next shock, we are burning through it in real time, while the fighting we were told had ended has started again.

And here's the part that should unsettle you even if you don't own a single share of stock. History shows what real oil shocks do to markets that stop paying attention. In 1973, when OPEC cut off the world, the S&P 500 lost nearly half its value — 48% peak to trough. In 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait and oil doubled in two months, stocks still fell 20%. Two different wars, two different decades, the same lesson: markets eventually notice. Today, with the reserve at a 1983 low and the ceasefire dead, the S&P is trading at a Shiller P/E above 40, a level this market has touched exactly once before, in 1999, right before the dot-com crash. Consumer sentiment hit an all-time low in May. Those numbers are not supposed to move in opposite directions. History says something eventually gives. The only question is whether Wall Street wants to figure that out before the reserve hits zero, or after.

Nobody on Wall Street is ever going to advise you to take all your money out of the market; they don't make money on money that's sitting on the sidelines. But while you're being told to stay the course, someone made $500 million betting oil would fall fifteen minutes before Trump announced a pause in the Iran strikes back in March. Someone else made a $1.5 billion bet on the S&P five minutes before another ceasefire announcement. Nobody knows who. The White House says it's nothing. Senators from both parties have asked federal regulators to find out. A market this easily manipulated, and this divorced from economic reality, isn't a bellwether for anything except unrealistic optimism. Maybe it's time the rest of us stopped waiting for Wall Street to tell us what to do with our own money, and started reading the tea leaves for ourselves.

We are not saying the sky is falling. We are saying the people who say it isn’t are the same people who told you in June this war was over.

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To understand what is happening, let’s focus on Exelon, the nation’s largest utility company by customer count. It owns six utilities: ComEd, PECO, BGE, Pepco, Delmarva Power and Atlantic City Electric, serving nearly 11 million homes and businesses. Since 2021, Exelon’s profits have risen roughly 50 percent. Yet by the company’s own account, much of the expected data-center demand is still in the future.

More importantly, the amount of electricity delivered across its territory has barely increased. In some years, it declined. Existing capacity continued meeting demand. There was no surge in electricity consumption remotely proportional to the increase in customers’ bills.

Generation costs can affect part of a bill, but they do not explain the central mismatch here. When demand is essentially flat, and the system continues to supply it, ordinary supply-and-demand logic cannot fully explain the increase. So, what is driving the cost? The answer is not primarily the amount of electricity consumed. It is the amount of money invested in infrastructure and the guaranteed return associated with that spending.

A century ago, regulators created local electricity monopolies to avoid competing companies building duplicate grids. One private company would own the wires, while regulators would control what it could charge. The bargain was simple: consumers would accept a monopoly in exchange for reliable electricity at a reasonable cost. Under that system, utilities were allowed to recover the cost of approved infrastructure and earn a regulated return on top of it, around 9 to 11 percent. Spend more, earn more. Spend less, earn less.

For many years, utilities also collected more revenue when customers used more electricity. But as Americans became more energy-efficient, utilities faced a problem: if customers used less electricity, the companies collected less revenue. Regulators responded with “decoupling,” allowing utilities to collect their approved revenue even when electricity use stayed flat or declined. At the same time, the older rate-setting system still guaranteed utilities a return on approved infrastructure spending.

Together, those two policies changed the incentive. Utilities no longer had to sell significantly more electricity to increase revenue and profit; they could increase profits by investing more in infrastructure.

Exelon clearly understood the value of this model when it restructured in 2022. It spun off its power plants into Constellation Energy and kept its regulated transmission-and-distribution utilities. The company said the split would “unlock shareholder value,” and boy did it.

Producing electricity carried fuel costs, competition and market risk. Owning the poles, wires and substations offered something far more predictable: a government-approved return on infrastructure investment.

Exelon no longer needed to produce electricity to grow its earnings. Nor did it need customers to use substantially more electricity. It could increase profits by expanding the infrastructure investment base on which it earns a regulated return.

At PECO, serving the Philadelphia region, Exelon’s investor materials showed its rate base rising from approximately $9.1 billion in 2022 to a projected $12.6 billion in 2025, an increase of roughly 38 percent in three years. Over the broader period examined, the amount of electricity delivered remained nearly flat.

No ordinary business gets this deal. In a competitive market, overspending produces losses. Here, approved spending can increase earnings and customer bills. Utilities will argue that infrastructure spending replaces aging equipment and improves reliability. Some of it unquestionably does. But maintenance is not the same as an investment base that is growing roughly 11 percent a year, while the amount of electricity delivered remains nearly flat. That is not a temporary mismatch. It is a structural threat to affordable electricity for businesses and consumers, the very reason the monopolies were created in the first place.

The idea of having a monopoly is not the problem. The problem is what the monopoly is rewarded for doing. Utility profits should be tied to measurable results: affordable bills, reliable service, efficient operations, and electricity actually delivered, not simply to how much money the company spends.

The question regulators should ask is no longer simply: Was the money spent? It should be: What did customers receive? Did the spending increase capacity, improve reliability, or lower costs?

Some states are already asking that question. Hawaii pioneered this approach in 2018, tying utility earnings to performance rather than spending alone. More than twenty states have since followed suit in some form, including Illinois, Exelon’s own home state, where ComEd is now required to report on reliability and customer service metrics. New Jersey is among the newest. In February 2026, the state’s Board of Public Utilities began exploring the same shift, citing an “electricity affordability crisis” and putting performance-based ratemaking on the table. For a state whose residents have watched their bills climb alongside everyone else’s, that is a decision worth watching closely.

States should also ask a question that directly confronts the business model: do the returns utilities are authorized to earn reflect the limited risk of a regulated monopoly? A 10-year U.S. Treasury bond currently pays about 4.5 percent. Utilities have been authorized returns of roughly 9-11% on equity. Those are not identical investments, and utilities do face some limited risk. But they also have captive customers, no direct competitors, and a regulatory process designed to allow them to recover on their investments.

If the return is supposed to compensate investors for risk, regulators should be required to explain why that risk justifies a return roughly twice the Treasury rate. The question is not whether utilities deserve a profit. The question is not whether utilities deserve a profit. It is whether consumers should be required to pay a return premium that exceeds the actual risk investors are taking.

Those questions are especially urgent now that electricity demand is expected to grow. If billions are being invested in the grid, regulators should require proof that the spending increases capacity, improves reliability, or lowers costs, and that the return charged to consumers reflects the actual risk investors are taking. Neither the investment nor the return should be approved simply because that is how the system has always worked.

Data centers may create enormous demand in the years ahead. But they do not explain years of rising bills, nearly flat electricity delivery and rapidly increasing utility profits. Bills went up. Utility profits went up. Infrastructure spending went up. But the amount of electricity delivered did not.

Wall Street has rewarded a business model in which building the system can be more profitable than delivering the product. Major institutional investors, including BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, benefit from the predictable returns that model produces. We call that smart business.

But isn’t it time for states, regulators and our elected representatives to start doing some smart business on our behalf? Utilities need a return above the Treasury rate because equity carries more risk than government debt. But consumers should not be required to pay a premium larger than the actual risk justifies. Regulators should set the lowest return that still allows a well-run utility to attract the capital it genuinely needs.

Until that happens, households and small businesses will continue paying the price.

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Sources

• Exelon FY2024 net income, revenue, and rate base figures: Exelon Corporation Form 10-K, filed Feb. 12, 2025 (period ending Dec. 31, 2024), https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1109357/000110935725000078/exc-20241231ars.pdf

• Exelon FY2023 figures: Exelon Corporation Form 10-K, filed Feb. 21, 2024, https://investors.exeloncorp.com/sec-filings/sec-filing/10-k/0001109357-24-000053

• Full list of Exelon SEC filings, including additional years and the 2026 proxy statement (ownership data — Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street): https://investors.exeloncorp.com/sec-filings

• PECO electricity delivery volumes, PECO rate base share, and 2025 capital/rate base guidance: Exelon Q4 2024 earnings release, Feb. 12, 2025; company reported $38 billion in planned capital expenditures over four years with 7.4% expected rate base growth

• 2022 Constellation Energy spinoff and “unlock shareholder value” rationale: Exelon Corporation press releases, February 2021 and February 2022

• Hawaii’s 2018 performance-based regulation law and national expansion: RMI, “States Move Swiftly on Performance-Based Regulation to Achieve Policy Priorities,” https://rmi.org/states-move-swiftly-on-performance-based-regulation-to-achieve-policy-priorities/

• Illinois PBR reporting requirements for ComEd: National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC), Performance-Based Regulation resource page, https://www.naruc.org/core-sectors/energy-resources-and-the-environment/valuation-and-ratemaking/performance-based-regulation/

• New Jersey Board of Public Utilities performance-based ratemaking review: Utility Dive, Feb. 23, 2026, https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-jersey-regulators-begin-rethinking-electric-utility-business-model/812799/; New Jersey Monitor, May 8, 2026, https://newjerseymonitor.com/2026/05/08/electric-prices-utility-profit-models/

• ComEd’s $268.5M/$25.4M reconciliation cut (Illinois, Dec. 2025): Capitol News Illinois, “Regulators strike millions from Ameren, ComEd electric rate hike requests,” https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news/regulators-strike-millions-from-ameren-comed-electric-rate-hike-requests/

• ComEd’s approved ROE cut to 9% (vs. its requested 10.5%), and the ICC’s rejection of ComEd’s grid plan (Aug. 2024): Capitol News Illinois, “State regulators once again flex muscle in rejecting utilities’ grid plans, lessening rate hikes,” https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news/state-regulators-once-again-flex-muscle-in-rejecting-utilities-grid-plans-lessening-rate-hikes/

• Original ICC order details and revenue requirement reduction (~$1 billion) for ComEd’s 2024–2027 grid plan: BOMA/Chicago, “Illinois Commerce Commission Slashes Proposed Rate Increases from ComEd, Peoples Gas,” https://www.bomachicago.org/2024/01/24/illinois-commerce-commission-slashes-proposed-rate-increases-from-comed-peoples-gas/

• 10-year Treasury yield (~4.5%), used for the risk-free rate comparison: U.S. Department of the Treasury, Daily Treasury Par Yield Curve Rates, https://home.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/TextView?type=daily_treasury_yield_curve; or Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRED series DGS10, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS10

I argued against a politics in which we become the morality police over the private, consensual relationships of adults. If a marriage has been damaged, repaired, complicated, forgiven, or redefined, that is for the people inside that marriage to work through. I argued the many public figures we admire would not survive the scrutiny we now apply to everyone in real time. JFK would not. Martin Luther King Jr. would not. That argument does not excuse cruelty, betrayal, or dishonesty. But it does mean we should be very careful before turning every private failing into a public disqualification.

But this is different. A credible allegation of sexual assault is not a private marital issue. It is not gossip. It is not puritanism. It is not the morality police. It is a line that has to matter.

Graham Platner is entitled to the presumption of innocence in a court of law. That principle does not bend because the politics are inconvenient. He denies the allegation, and an accusation is the same thing as a conviction.

But running for the United States Senate is not the same as standing trial. No one has a right to be a nominee. No one has a right to ask voters, donors, volunteers, and a political party to carry the weight of a credible sexual-assault allegation into one of the most important Senate races in the country.

That is why I can no longer support Graham Platner’s candidacy. He should withdraw from the race.

That is not because Democrats should pretend to be perfect. We are not. It is because standards have to mean something. Republicans elected and defended Donald Trump after he was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and after he became the first former president convicted of felony crimes. That is their standard. It cannot be ours.

But Democratic leaders need to understand that people did not rally to him simply because he had a gruff working-class way of speaking. They rallied to him because he named the reality that millions of Americans live every day. Families are being crushed by health care costs, housing costs, low wages, corporate greed, and a political system designed by consultants and politicians for their clients and donors.

His support held through earlier controversies because the message was bigger than the man. Medicare for All. A living wage. Stronger union rights. A government that actually takes the side of the majority of Americans. Those ideas are not fringe. They are not radical. They are the reason his campaign had energy in the first place.

Platner should withdraw, but if the Democratic Party responds by trying to replace him with a cautious, donor-approved centrist who offers voters better manners and the same old politics, that would be its own scandal.

Maine can still elect a Democrat. Democrats can still defeat Susan Collins. But they will not do it by pretending voters were excited about moderation, caution, and managed decline. They were excited because someone was finally saying out loud that the system is failing them, and that politics should be about changing it.

Platner Should Withdraw. The Politics Shouldn't.

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The promise of the original Declaration of Independence was that we would build a free society, and within that free society, a free market, of ideas and of business alike, open to anyone with the courage and the ability to compete in it. A free market is supposed to mean something. Competition. Risk. Reward. Innovation. No one so powerful they can rig the rules in their own favor. Win because you built something better. Lose because the market rejected you. That is the mythology we were raised on. That is not the country we live in.

We live in a country where the wealthiest among us collect tax breaks, bailouts, subsidies, regulatory carve-outs, public contracts, and legal immunity through the corporations they own and the politicians they fund, and call it the free market. Where the Federal Reserve hands them cheap credit to financial institutions while households pay double-digit interest rates on credit card debt just to survive. Where lobbyists write the laws their clients want to obey. Where their failure is rescued, and our failure is criticized.

This is not capitalism. This is socialism for the powerful, and market discipline for the rest of us.

Let us be precise about what we are describing, because precision is what separates an argument from a conspiracy theory. We are not describing a secret meeting, a hidden council, a small cabal plotting in a back room. Nothing so dramatic, and nothing so easily dismissed. We are describing something far more mundane, and far harder to break: a large number of people who share one interest, protect their fortune, resist taxes, keep the rules bent in the direction they already lean, pursuing that interest separately, through separately legal means, and arriving, again and again, at the same result. No one needs to conspire when the incentives already point everyone in the same direction.

Democracy was not abolished to build this. It was fenced in, left standing wherever it is harmless to concentrated wealth, and quietly removed wherever it is not.

We must return this country to a place where free enterprise and entrepreneurship can thrive again, built on merit, not on gaming the system; built on better ideas, not on monopolizing the market; built on the courage to compete, not the power to prevent anyone else from competing at all; built on the simple promise that everyone starts the race under the same rules, whoever they are, and wherever they started from.

This is not a new issue. It is a fault line as old as the founding itself. In Federalist No. 10, James Madison wrote of the dangers of “faction,” a group whose interests run contrary to the rights of others, or to the good of the whole community. His answer was a large, pluralistic republic in which no single faction could ever dominate, because competing interests would check one another. That promise of a government answerable to the people, checked and balanced against tyranny, was real, and worth every ounce of the reverence we still give it.

But read Madison plainly, and another purpose sits beside the first one. He worried openly that a direct democracy would let “those who labor under all the hardships of life” outnumber those with property, and that power might “slide into the hands” of the many at the expense of the few. So, the Senate was not elected by the people directly but was appointed by state legislators for the first 125 years of our republic. The presidency was filtered through the Electoral College, a body meant to stand between the public and the office. The Supreme Court justices were appointed for life, answerable to no one in an election. Three of the four levers of federal power were built, by design, to be one full step removed from the voters.

The Constitution’s checks and balances are real, and they have done some good. But at least one of their original purposes was never a secret: to check not just the tyrant, but the majority itself, to insulate wealth and property from a public that might, if given a straight vote, take away some of the built-in protections of that wealth. What we call oligarchy today did not have to break into that system from the outside. They only had to walk through a door the founders had created.

That door is what we are shutting. Not the promise. The promise, a government answerable to the people, of the people, by the people, is exactly what we are here to finish building. What we are done tolerating is the machinery built, in part, to make sure that promise was never fully kept.

Make no mistake: by doing this, by pointing to the tax breaks, the bailouts, the rigged rules, they will not answer us. They will label us. Radical. Socialist. Communist. Not because we are wrong, but because we are declaring the system as it really is, and the only defense left for a story that cannot survive scrutiny is to make the person telling the truth sound dangerous.

The extremely wealthy are the ones who walked through that door and widened it. To ensure their ongoing wealth and the power that comes with it, they turned a design flaw into a system. By doing so, they have abandoned the shared responsibility a free people owe to one another, the basic compact that our common government exists to secure the rights and promote the welfare of all, not the interests of those who capture it. That compact, however imperfectly built, however much under attack, is something that we the people cannot abandon. It is something we owe it to ourselves to finish, and to build that more perfect union.

And so, now, again, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for we the people of the United States to renew the bonds that a corrupted system has broken in bad faith, to restore what was promised to us, openly and without apology, and to reclaim the standing every people is entitled to hold among the nations of the earth.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all people are created equal, and that they are born with certain rights no government, no corporation, and no billionaire has the authority to take from them. Among these are the right to live, the right to be free, the right to equal treatment under the law and by our government, and the right to pursue a life worth living. Government exists to secure these rights and to promote the general welfare of the people; that is its only legitimate purpose. Power itself belongs to no government; it belongs to the people alone, on loan to those who hold public office. Those elected officials hold it only as deputies, entrusted to act in our interest and answerable to us for how they use it. Whenever those deputies or any system that has come to wear the mask of government turn against the people who lent them that power, the people retain the right, and bear the responsibility, to reclaim it: to alter the system, to abolish what cannot be repaired, and to build in its place something that will finally begin to build that more perfect union.

We hereby lay our case before the people of the world, so that they can understand why we would reclaim our rights.

On a democracy that works, but only in the direction that never threatens them:

They let us have democracy, real, functioning democracy, on the issues that divide us from each other. Argue about culture, about identity, about who’s to blame for what’s wrong with your neighborhood. Vote on all of it. Organize on all of it. Feel however you want. That fight is real, and you are free to have it.

But there is one dimension of politics they have entirely fenced off from democracy: the vertical one. You are allowed to be angry about the outcome at the top. Resent it. Rage about it. Post about it. That much is permitted, but it has changed nothing.

What we the people have been unable to change is machinery itself. Not the wealth. The system that protects the wealth. Ask why fifty trillion dollars moved from the bottom ninety percent of this country to the top one-tenth of one percent since the 1970s, and that’s a statistic safe enough to cite. Ask what rules, what tax code, what court rulings, what captured agencies made that transfer possible and keep it flowing, and ask to dismantle those, and you will meet one of two responses. It is called radical, socialist, communist, an attack on freedom and the American way of life, a threat to be dismissed rather than an argument to be answered. Or, more often, you will simply be met with silence: no debate, no coverage, no vote, no hearing. Not defeated. Just starved of the air a real argument needs to survive. They do not need to win this argument. They only need to make sure it we never actually have that debate.

Political scientists proved this, not with opinion, but with data: 1,779 real policy fights, tracked over decades. Even if ninety percent of the public supports a policy, the odds of it passing hover around 30 percent. Public opinion, on its own, does almost nothing.

What matters is what the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of this country wants. When they strongly opposed a policy, it passed only about 18 percent of the time. When they strongly supported it, that number jumped to nearly 45 percent. Run the comparison side by side, and the truth is impossible to soften: the support of ninety percent of the American public moves the needle less than the support of a sliver of the population so small it could fit inside a single small stadium.

That is not a flaw in the data. That is the finding. A nation is not a democracy because it holds elections, counts votes, and lets everyone speak. A nation is a democracy only if the majority of people’s collective can wield power. By that test, on the one critical question, the one that matters most, the US today fails the test. When the many can be unanimous and still lose, and the few win most of the time, the word for that system is not democracy. It is oligarchy.

They have been successful for so long because they have kept us fighting each other on the horizontal, over guns, over abortion, over immigration, over who kneels and who doesn’t, which bathroom people use, issues that never fix the central inequality in our country, so that we would never organize on the vertical, the massive inequality of the system, and never notice the fence.

On the rescue of the powerful and the abandonment of everyone else:

They let the banks that caused the 2008 collapse receive hundreds of billions in public rescue, while the families who lost their homes in that same collapse received foreclosure notices.

They let the Federal Reserve extend the cheapest credit in a generation to Financial institutions and corporations, while ordinary households use credit cards at double-digit interest just to stay afloat.

They call a corporate bailout “stabilizing the economy,” and call a family’s missed mortgage payment “personal irresponsibility.” This, too, is the fence democracy is welcome to debate whose fault was the mortgage; it turns out it was nobody’s, at least nobody was held accountable. But we the people, it seems, did not deserve or receive a good explanation as to why the rescue was one-sided.

On the rigged language of who deserves help:

They call a subsidy to a billion-dollar corporation “economic development,” and call food assistance to a hungry family “dependency.”

They call billionaire and corporate tax avoidance “smart accounting,” and call a worker’s unpaid taxes a crime.

They call a union “a threat to competitiveness,” and call a stock buyback which enriches executives while building nothing, “a sound business strategy.”

On housing and the basics of a livable life:

They let private equity firms buy up entire subdivisions, sometimes before a family ever gets the chance to bid, turning starter homes into permanent rental inventory, and call the result the housing market working as intended.

They built a tax code and a set of investment incentives that made it more profitable to build a home to rent forever than to build one to sell. They let zoning rules and tax breaks the average family will never have access to make renting-forever the most profitable housing product in America, while ownership, the thing that used to build a family’s wealth over a generation, becomes harder to reach every year.

A generation that should be building equity is instead building someone else’s portfolio, one rent check at a time.

On power calling itself patriotism:

The military-industrial complex did not have to cause America’s forever wars to profit from them. It only had to build the machinery that makes war the easiest answer in the room. Year after year, the Pentagon budget has become less a national defense plan than a corporate dream wish list, a guaranteed river of taxpayer money flowing to weapons contractors, private security firms, lobbyists, consultants, and executives who thrive whether the mission succeeds or fails.

They do not need to pull the trigger or start the war themselves. They simply need to make sure the right people are funded, promoted, advised, and surrounded: the hawks, the neocons, the permanent-war thinkers who believe American power should be used to impose outcomes around the world. Then the decisions they hoped for get made in the name of freedom, security, democracy, or deterrence, while the profits roll in quietly behind the flag. It is not conspiracy. It is business. And for them, endless war has been the most reliable business model in modern American history.

On a Supreme Court that rewrote democracy in their favor:

They stacked the Court with justices who would rule in their interest.

They let Citizens United declare that money is speech, opening the floodgates for unlimited dark money to flow into our elections and called it free expression. This was not one more bad ruling. This was the fence-building turned into law: the Court did not just fail to stop wealth from buying influence; it declared that buying influence was a constitutional right.

They let Shelby County v. Holder guts the Voting Rights Act, freeing states to pass new restrictions on who gets to vote, and called it states’ rights.

In Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court didn’t stay neutral. It stepped aside in a way that empowered the people rigging the maps. That is not judicial restraint; it is democracy by surrender.

They let Janus v. AFSCME strip public sector unions of the dues that fund their power to fight for workers and called it freedom from compelled speech.

NRSC v. FEC. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that federal limits on coordinated spending between political parties and their candidates violate the First Amendment. In plain English: parties can now spend unlimited amounts directly coordinating with their candidates on campaign activity.

They let Dobbs take a constitutional right that a woman had relied on for fifty years and hand it back to the same state legislatures the wealthy had already learned to buy.

They built a Court that would protect capital’s rights as constitutional and treat the people’s rights as negotiable.

On a wealth-defense industry built to hide money the rest of us cannot hide:

They did not need a meeting, a cabal, or a conspiracy. They needed only a common interest to protect their fortunes, resist paying tax, and provide the money to build an entire industry devoted to it. That industry now employs some of the sharpest legal and financial minds in the country, not to build anything, but to make sure that their clients’ money is kept well out of the reach of the government and in particular any tax obligation.

They let that industry get so good at hiding wealth that the world’s governments lose an estimated half a trillion dollars a year in taxes that were legally owed and never collected, and in the United States alone, tens of billions of dollars every year.

The Corporate Transparency Act was built to crack open anonymous shell companies and unmask who owns what, but in 2025, the Trump Treasury Department quietly exempted every American company from it, months after it took effect, undoing in a single rule what Congress had passed on a bipartisan vote.

They let the ordinary homeowner pay a wealth tax every year we call it a property tax while the ultra-wealthy, whose fortunes sit in structures designed specifically to make ownership unfindable, pay nothing.

They gave the IRS just enough funding to audit a small business owner, and never enough to unwind the maze built by people wealthy enough to hire the professionals who built it.

On a tax code built to move money up, not down:

They rewrote the tax code, deregulated the wage floor, and let corporate profit eat what used to be worker pay, and economists at the RAND Corporation calculated the cost: fifty trillion dollars moved from the bottom 90 percent to the top one-tenth of one percent since 1975, the very one-tenth of one percent whose preferences, we now know, decide almost everything.

They let that fifty trillion dollars become someone’s third, fourth, or fifth home, someone’s bigger yacht, bigger private jet, sports franchise, or just a bigger portfolio, while the people who helped them earn it in the first place see their earnings buy less and less.

On a healthcare system built to profit from sickness, not health:

They built the only healthcare system in the developed world run primarily for shareholder profit, and let it become the most expensive on Earth, nearly $15,000 a person, almost twice what comparable wealthy nations spend, while delivering worse results.

They let Americans pay more and live shorter lives for it. U.S. life expectancy sits years below the average of other wealthy nations, a gap that has persisted and grown for decades.

They let insurance companies profit from every claim they refuse and built a system so expensive that more than a third of insured American adults still report skipping or delaying needed medical care because of cost, not the uninsured. The insured.

They let medical debt become one of the leading causes of bankruptcy in America, a fate no one in any other wealthy nation must fear from simply getting sick.

They let pharmaceutical companies take public research funding, take patent protection, take public reimbursement, and then charge Americans the highest drug prices on Earth for the very medicine that our tax dollars helped create.

They let a country that prides itself on being the richest in the history of the world post a higher maternal mortality rate, a higher infant mortality rate, and a higher rate of preventable death than nearly every other wealthy nation on the planet.

They let tens of millions of Americans go entirely without healthcare, in a country wealthy enough to ensure that none of them had to, and called the result the best healthcare system in the world.

They turned the most basic human need, the need to be cared for when we are sick, into one of the most profitable industries in the country and called that innovation. Democrats have worked around the edges of this healthcare fence, a reform here, a patch there, while Republicans have made it their mission to ensure the fence never moves at all.

On a generation sold one path, and punished for taking it:

They sold an entire generation on the idea that an expensive college degree was the only road to a decent life, then financed that promise with high-interest debt that follows people for decades, debt that, unlike almost any other kind, cannot even be forgiven in bankruptcy.

They let banks profit from every dollar of that debt, while refusing to meaningfully subsidize the trade schools and apprenticeships that could have given millions of young people a faster, cheaper, equally honest path to a good life.

They punished people for doing exactly what they were told to do: work hard, get the degree, follow the rules, and then called the debt that followed a personal failure of judgment.

On a stock market that stopped reflecting the economy and started running it:

They built a system where the stock exchange no longer reflects what companies do; it dictates what companies do. The tail now wags the dog.

They let quarterly stock performance, not long-term value, become the standard by which every major company is judged, forcing layoffs to satisfy shareholders, price hikes to satisfy shareholders, wage freezes to satisfy shareholders, while the actual product, the actual workers, and the actual customers come last.

They let an index built to measure the economy become the thing the economy is now built to serve.

On energy and environment

America did not stumble into climate failure. We subsidized it, protected it, and called it pragmatism. For decades, our government treated the fossil fuel industry not as one energy source among many, but as an incumbent power entitled to rule the future. We allowed oil and gas companies to shape policy, slow the adoption of alternatives, weaken regulation, and turn the public’s energy needs into their private profit machine. While other countries invested in solar, wind, batteries, and the industries of the next century, we let too much of that future escape overseas.

China now dominates huge parts of the clean-energy supply chain that American workers should have been building here. That was not just an environmental failure. It was an economic failure. It was a national-security failure. We were told fossil fuels meant “energy independence,” while remaining tied to a volatile global oil market where a crisis in the Middle East, a war in Ukraine, or disruption in a shipping lane can send prices through the roof overnight. Real independence would have meant building an energy system no dictator, cartel, oil company, or foreign crisis could hold hostage: renewables, storage, modern transmission, and domestic clean manufacturing.

The same system told us that the oil and gas under American land belong primarily to private corporations, not the people, and that the public should be grateful for crumbs from royalties while those same companies pay far more to extract resources in other countries. Here, using their wealth, lobbyists, and political power, they shaped the rules so that the American people received next to nothing for the public wealth pulled from beneath our feet. And then, through tax breaks, subsidies, loopholes, and giveaways, we handed much of even that back to them. We socialized the risk, privatized the wealth, poisoned the planet, weakened our security, and let the industries of the future be built somewhere else. That is not free-market genius. It is policy capture. It is corruption with a flag pin.

On retirement security, dismantled and then blamed on us:

They let corporations walk away from pensions, a guaranteed retirement that companies were once expected to fund, and replaced them with 401(k) plans that shifted all the risk onto the worker and called it “choice” and “ownership.”

They let Wall Street profit from managing the very retirement accounts that replaced the guarantees they took away.

They let Social Security be raided and threatened by the same politicians their lobbying dollars elected, and then told us we were the problem, too many of us getting old, too many of us expecting what we paid into for forty years.

They let CEOs retire with golden parachutes worth more than their workers will see in a lifetime, from companies that eliminated those same workers’ pensions to “cut costs.”

On a game they call fair, that only a few were ever built to win:

They sorted the country into winners and losers, ZIP code by ZIP code, school district by school district, and told us it was a story about effort, about who worked hard enough, who wanted it enough.

But step back far enough, and the game itself is rigged. The starting line was never the same for everyone. The rules favor the same families, the same firms, the same networks, generation after generation. Every so often, someone breaks through anyway, and we celebrate them, rightly so; we hold them up as proof the system works. But look at how rare that breakthrough actually is, how loudly we have to celebrate the exception to keep believing in the rule. Only a few were ever going to make it, not because the rest didn’t try, but because the system was never built to let them.

And while millions compete for a shrinking share of what’s left, a handful of the wealthy hold power over almost everything: what we earn, what we pay, what we’re told, who governs us. This, too, is the fence, seen from ground level: a game we are free to play, on a field we are not free to level. That is not a meritocracy. That is a closed game, dressed up as an open one.

How Do We Respond

We have voted. We have organized. We have written, and called, and marched, and asked, again and again, for a government that serves us instead of them. And again and again, the answer has been the same: more subsidies, more bailouts, more carve-outs, more silence.

So let it be understood, plainly and without apology: we will remove them from office. Not with guns. Not with revolution. But with the only weapon a free people have ever needed, our vote.

We do not pledge loyalty to any party. We pledge loyalty to a single standard: does this official serve the people who elected them, or the wealth that funds them? Any officeholder who fails that test, Republican or Democrat, incumbent or challenger, has forfeited their claim to our vote.

That standard applies equally. But right now, applied honestly, it does not point equally. Today, the Republican Party has made itself the more complete instrument of oligarchic rule, the party of deregulation for the powerful and discipline for everyone else, of tax cuts for the donor class and silence for the worker, of a Court remade to serve capital before people. It is also the loudest voice turning the horizontal into a battlefield: which bathroom, whose body, who gets to run in which race- issues that touch a small fraction of American lives- amplified until they drown out the one question that touches all of ours: inequality. That is not incidental. That is the strategy: keep the fence guarded by keeping us facing the wrong direction. We start there because that is where the standard currently points most strongly. We pledge to remove Republican politicians from office, county by county, state by state, until that arrangement is broken.

The Democratic Party does not pass this test either. It has too often taken our votes and delivered our money to the same donor class, the same lobbyists, kept guard at the same fence. It does not earn our loyalty by being the lesser of two failures. It earns another chance, and only that, to prove the standard means something to them too. If they do not, the same judgment awaits them at the same ballot box.

We are not loyal to a party. We are loyal to the standard. Right now, that standard tells us where to start. It will tell us, election after election, where

This is a beginning, not a finished argument. We do not claim to have named every wrong. We invite anyone who has felt the fence and can name another piece of it, another rule, another ruling, another quiet rigging of the game, to add their reason to this list in the comments. This declaration should grow the way the movement it hopes to build must grow: by more people recognizing themselves in it, and adding what only they could see.

This document names what is broken. A second document is coming to answer the question one might rightly ask next: then what? We will publish it under the name The Way Forward: Project 2029 — but let us be clear about what it will be. It, too, will be an offering, a direction, not a finished blueprint. A continuation or a start of a conversation we hope many voices will help complete, just as we hope this one will be.

We hold no illusions that this will be easy or quick. Dr. King reminded us that the arc of the moral universe is long, but that it bends toward justice. It does not bend on its own. It bends because people put their hands on it and pull. This is us, putting our hands on it. We invite you to put yours beside ours.

I want to be unambiguous about something before I go any further. Whatever your politics, whatever your views on ICE or immigration enforcement or the policies that brought people to that parking lot in Prairieland, Texas, shooting a police officer, shooting anyone, is not protest. It is not protected speech. It is a crime, and it must be treated as one.

And while we’re here: yes, carrying a firearm is a constitutional right in certain circumstances. But if you are going to a protest, any protest, for any cause, on any side, leave the gun at home. Not because your right doesn’t exist. Because bringing it transforms everything that happens next. It hands the government a narrative. It puts every other person at that protest in legal jeopardy. It ends the argument before it begins. A gun at a protest isn’t protection. It’s a liability, for you, for your cause, and as we are about to see, in the hands of Trump’s DOJ, for people you’ve never met, may never have spoken to, and in some cases didn't even know existed.

If you're not aware of what I'm talking about, let me tell you what happened in that Texas courtroom and why you probably haven't heard much about it. This case has received a fraction of the attention it deserves. When a shooting is at the center of a story, it becomes the only story. Everything else disappears into its shadow. But it is in that shadow where the constitutional damage has been done, where people who didn't know a gun would be fired, who didn't know the person who fired it, and who had never even met that person, are now sentenced to spend decades in federal prison.

The ACLU went quiet. Liberal advocacy groups stepped back. The mainstream press largely moved on. But make no mistake: what the Trump DOJ built in that Texas courtroom may be the most consequential attack on individual constitutional rights of this entire administration. Not the loudest. Not the most covered. The most consequential. And not nearly enough people are talking about it

Twenty-two people were charged in connection with the Prairieland protest. Nine were sentenced this month. The sentences ranged from 30 to 100 years. And here is where we need you to slow down and really read what we are talking about, because the details matter. Daniel Sanchez-Estrada was not at the protest. He received thirty years in federal prison for moving a box containing anti-fascist magazines and pamphlets. Elizabeth Soto, a stay-at-home mother, received a 50-year sentence. Her crime, according to the government, was being an active member of the Emma Goldman Book Club, a group that hosted readings, tabled at book fairs, gave away seeds for people’s gardens, and ran two Xerox office printers in a garage to produce zines. The only thing those printers ever produced, the evidence showed, was a poetry collection about a writer’s sister dying of cancer. Autumn Hill and Meagan Morris, both transgender women, received fifty years each. They were walking away from the protest when the shots were fired. They were not present at the shooting. Their crime? They had attended affiliated groups meetings and participated in Signal chats.

The government’s evidence presented to convict these people included political posters, photographs of defendants tabling at book fairs, a zine (a self-published booklet or pamphlet) reviewing Ari Aster movies Hereditary and Midsommar, and a copy of Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown, a community organizing book that has been sold at Barnes and Noble for a decade. The prosecution pointed to the use of pseudonyms in Signal chats as proof of nefarious intent. People use pseudonyms because they are afraid of being targeted for their political views. That is not conspiracy. That is caution. And if you needed proof of why that caution is warranted, look no further than this case.

This is not a new playbook. Ninety-nine years ago, Emma Goldman, the same Emma Goldman the book club was named for, was charged with conspiracy for organizing against the draft in World War One. That charge was brought by a young Joseph McCarthy, who would spend the following decades perfecting the art of turning political association into criminal liability. History has a verdict on the McCarthy era. We see it as America's great institutional shame, a cautionary tale about what happens when a government mistakes zealotry for justice and association for guilt. It took decades to reach that verdict. Careers were destroyed, lives were ruined, and the Constitution was shredded in plain sight before enough people decided they had seen enough. The Trump DOJ is leading us down that same road. The only question is whether history has taught us enough to act now before it's too late.

Over a third of cases built against anti-ICE protesters across the country have collapsed. But Prairieland gave the Trump DOJ something it hadn't had before. A gun was fired. A police officer was wounded. The Northern District of Texas is a conservative court. And bluntly, many of the organizations that might ordinarily have made noise about the constitutional dimensions of this case went quiet the moment they saw a shooting at the center of it.

Which brings me to the American Civil Liberties Union. I say this with genuine respect for what the ACLU has stood for and what it has fought for across a century of American legal history. The ACLU has defended clients nobody wanted to defend. It has walked into courtrooms where the optics were terrible, and the politics were radioactive because it understood that the First Amendment is only as strong as its most uncomfortable applications. In this case, the use of a gun and the wounding of a police officer gave the ACLU reason to step back. I understand that calculation. I think it was the wrong one. The defendants who received fifty-year sentences for book club membership and Signal chat participation, people who were walking away when the shots were fired, deserved a vigorous constitutional defense. Their First Amendment rights did not become negotiable because someone else, someone they may never have met, fired a weapon.

The appeals process is coming. And this is precisely the moment the ACLU exists for. The ACLU has never waited for cases where the optics are clean, and the client is sympathetic, and the politics are comfortable. This case is crying out for their involvement. Because this is the one where books that can be purchased anywhere are in the prosecution’s exhibit files. The one where a woman is serving fifty years for running a reading group. The one where the government used a conspiracy framework built for drug cartels to prosecute people for the crime of sharing political literature and discussing self-defense in a private chat, because they were afraid of being beaten at a demonstration

If these sentences stand, every protest organizer in America needs to understand what that means. Your Signal chat can become a conspiracy indictment. The books on your shelf can become exhibits for a DOJ prosecutor. Your association with someone who commits a crime, even an association that never included knowledge of or participation in that crime, can end your life in a federal prison. That is not a chilling effect on free expression; it ends it.

The Federalist Papers were pamphlets. Anonymous ones. Written by people using pseudonyms, arguing that existing authority was illegitimate and needed to be replaced. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay would have had a Signal chat. Apply the Prairieland standard, and you indict the founders.

The First Amendment was not written for the easy cases. It was written for ones like this. The ACLU should get off the sidelines. The appeals courts should look hard at what was admitted and accepted as evidence of a crime in that Texas courtroom. And the rest of us should be paying attention, because a government that can prosecute a book club can prosecute any of us.

If you agree with the sentiments in this article, please restack it or share it, heart it, and comment; that will help spread the word. Thank you in advance.

More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle imagined a world without drudgery and without slavery. He wrote: if each tool could perform its task on command, or by anticipating instructions…..if shuttles wove cloth by themselves, and picks played the lyre of their own accord….then a master craftsman would not need assistance, and a master would not need a slave.

Aristotle was describing a dream. A world where human beings were freed from the crushing weight of labor by tools that could think and act for themselves. A world where the dignity of human life was no longer contingent on the subjugation of other human lives.

It took us more than two thousand years to get here. And now that we have arrived at a time where tools don’t just perform tasks but anticipate them, that don’t just follow instructions but help design those instructions, the question is no longer whether we can build it. We are building it. The question for today’s AI is whether we are building it wisely enough to make it something that truly liberates humankind, or will power and greed make it something else entirely. But this essay is not about today’s AI; it is about something all the major AI companies are striving toward.

But first, to understand why this moment matters, it helps to recount the journey that got us here. Humanity has lived through four technological revolutions, each one reshaping civilization so completely that the world before it became almost unrecognizable to the world after. The first was the Industrial Revolution: the steam engine, the factory, the end of agriculture as the organizing principle of human life. It began in Britain and spread across Europe. The second was the arrival of electricity and the automobile, which industrialized the world at scale and was dominated by a rising United States. The third was the computer revolution, the digital age, the internet, the transformation of information itself, again led by America. The fourth, still unfolding around us, is the AI revolution. The chatbot that writes your emails. The algorithm that recommends your next show. The tools that are beginning to write code, generate images, diagnose diseases, and automate work that humans have done for generations.

The AI revolution now unfolding around us is not just a technological event. It is an economic and political one. These systems are being built on the accumulated record of human creation: our books, music, images, research, conversations, code, journalism, art, arguments, discoveries, mistakes, and memories. In one sense, AI is being trained on us. On the collective output of human civilization. And yet, as presently designed, the wealth created from that collective inheritance will flow overwhelmingly to a concentrated few.

Government has not begun to seriously address the inequities this could create. We have not decided who should benefit when machines trained on the work of humanity generate extraordinary private wealth. We have not decided how to protect workers whose jobs may be automated, artists whose work may be absorbed, students whose way of learning may be transformed, or communities whose social bonds may be further weakened by technologies designed for engagement rather than human flourishing.

We still have not fully come to terms with the last digital revolution: what it did to attention, loneliness, politics, truth, childhood, education, and the way human beings relate to one another. Now we are rushing into a revolution with even more profound consequences. That alone would deserve an essay of its own. But this essay is about something beyond even that. Because before we have understood the fourth revolution, the people building it are already racing toward a fifth.

This AI-driven fourth revolution is already reaching further than perhaps most of us realize. For four and a half billion years, life on this planet evolved blindly, at the mercy of random mutation, natural selection, and time on a scale the human mind can barely comprehend. That long slow process has now been interrupted. Technologies like protein folding, genomic sequencing, and CRISPR have given us the ability to reach into the code of life itself and rewrite it. And AI has made that ability viable in ways it never was before. When COVID-19 emerged and threatened to overwhelm the world, AI-assisted tools helped sequence the virus and develop mRNA vaccines in months rather than the years it would previously have taken. Millions of lives were saved. That is one of the most consequential demonstrations of beneficial technology in human history. In June of this year, researchers at the University of Cambridge announced the first human trial results for an AI-designed universal coronavirus vaccine, a technology that targets shared features across an entire virus family rather than one variant at a time.

We could spend an entire other essay on the promise and the dangers of our newfound ability to manipulate the building blocks of life. But that is not this essay. What matters here is what it tells us about the moment we are in: that AI is already operating at a level of consequence most of us have not fully absorbed, already touching things as fundamental as the molecular architecture of living organisms, already helping to make decisions that ripple out across millions of human lives.

Each of these revolutions came with enormous cost. Wars were fought over the wealth they generated. Environments were poisoned in the name of progress. Whole ways of life disappeared almost overnight. And in our relentless drive to power, produce, and grow, we set in motion a warming of the planet whose consequences- rising seas, collapsing ecosystems, increasingly ungovernable weather- may, by themselves, represent an existential threat to the civilization these revolutions built.

And yet. Under that disruption, something remarkable was also happening. Extreme poverty, which consumed the lives of nearly nine in ten people on earth two centuries ago, has been cut to under one in ten today. Life expectancy has doubled. People who would have died of infections that a previous generation couldn’t name now live into their seventies and eighties. More people travel, more cultures intermingle, more of humanity participates in the accumulated knowledge of our species than at any point in history. These revolutions were, simultaneously, the best and worst of what we are capable of.

But here is what is different this time. Every one of those four revolutions, however disruptive, however transformative, was still driven by human hands, human decisions, human goals. The steam engine did not decide where to take the train. The internet did not choose what to connect. The AI tools you use today, powerful as they are, still operate within boundaries set by the people who built them. They are instruments. And even in this AI revolution, scary as it is for many, we are still, for now, the ones controlling the use of them.

But before most of us have even understood what this new AI revolution will mean for our future, before society has written the rules, before governments have caught up, before we have figured out how to absorb what is already happening, the people building the fourth revolution are already racing toward a fifth. One that, for the first time in human history, may not need us to set the goals. It may not need us at all.

Charles Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities about a world coming apart at the seams. A world where an old order was dying, something new and terrifying was being born, and the people living through it couldn’t quite tell whether they were witnessing the dawn of something magnificent or the beginning of the end. He wrote: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

He was writing about 1789. He could have been writing about right now. We are living inside the most significant technological transformation in human history. Not the most significant in recent memory. Not the most significant of our lifetimes. In. Human. History. And most of us are going about our days, working, scrolling, arguing about politics, watching television, with only the vaguest sense that something enormous is happening just outside our field of vision. This essay is about what that thing actually is.

Let’s be clear about something first. When most people think about artificial intelligence, they think about the AI they have already met. The chatbot that writes their emails. The algorithm that recommends their next show. The voice assistant that sets their kitchen timer. Useful. Sometimes impressive. Occasionally unnerving.

But there is another group already living in a different relationship with this technology entirely. Scientists using AI to model protein structures and accelerate drug discovery. Mathematicians running calculations that would take human teams decades to complete. Engineers using it to design systems of a complexity no single human mind could hold. Programmers who have handed over entire codebases to AI tools that write, test, and debug faster than any human alive. For these people, AI is not a convenience. It is already the most powerful cognitive tool our species has ever produced.

But no matter how sophisticated the use case, no matter how breathtaking the result, all of it, every chatbot, every protein model, every algorithmic breakthrough, belongs to the fourth revolution. And the fourth revolution is not what this essay is about.

What we are going to talk about is called Artificial General Intelligence. AGI. And the difference between what you have used and what AGI represents is not the difference between a bicycle and a faster bicycle. It is potentially the difference between a bicycle and an interstellar spaceship.

The AI you know today is genuinely capable. It can write code, plan multi-step tasks, use tools, even take autonomous actions on your behalf. Sometimes it does things that surprise the very people who built it, things they did not explicitly design and cannot fully explain. But capable is not the same as conscious. The most advanced AI today mimics understanding. It produces something that looks remarkably like thought, but it is not. It operates within a scope, pursuing goals set by you or its designers, and is accountable to oversight at every step. It is powerful. But it is not yet sovereign.

AGI changes that equation entirely. It may not simply carry out a narrow task. It could reason across domains, pursue long-range objectives, adapt its own strategies, and act in ways even its designers cannot fully anticipate. It would not be a tool you pick up and put down as we understand tools today. It would be a system capable of moving through the world with a degree of autonomy no previous invention has possessed.

We are not there yet. But the people building it believe we are closer than most people outside these companies realize. And here is the thing about thresholds: you don’t get to renegotiate the terms after you’ve crossed them. We learned that with the atom. Once we understood how to split it, the question was never again whether nuclear weapons would exist. The question became whether we were wise enough to live with what we had created. We are standing at another threshold, except this time, what we are about to release into the world may be capable of reasoning, planning, adapting, and acting beyond our control.

Let’s first meet the people racing to build it. Sam Altman runs OpenAI, the company that put ChatGPT in your pocket. He has publicly declared, without hesitation, that he knows how to build AGI and that it is coming within years, not decades. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has told the White House the same thing. Demis Hassabis leads Google DeepMind, perhaps the most credentialed scientific mind in the entire field. He believes AGI is coming, but unlike some of his peers, he has been more measured about the timeline, warning that the gaps between today’s AI and true general intelligence are deeper than the optimists admit. Elon Musk, who helped found OpenAI and later left to start his own AI company, xAI, has predicted that AGI will be achieved by the end of this year. These are not fringe voices. These are the most powerful men in the most consequential industry on earth, and they are in a race against each other, against Chinese labs, against time itself, to get there first.

Now meet the people warning us to stop. Geoffrey Hinton won the Nobel Prize for the foundational work that made modern AI possible. Then he quit his job at Google so he could speak freely. What he wanted to say was this: he is frightened. Yoshua Bengio, another giant of the field, has become one of the most vocal advocates for slowing down. Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the earliest AGI researchers alive, has been even more blunt; his position, stated plainly, is shut it all down. They are not alone. A growing number of the most qualified minds in the field are sounding the same alarm, in different registers, with different degrees of urgency, but pointing in the same direction.

So what exactly are they arguing about? What is this thing that the smartest people alive are simultaneously racing toward and warning us about? Every AI system that exists today, no matter how impressive, is still fundamentally tied to the human record. It reflects what we put in. It manipulates, combines, and synthesizes human knowledge - every book ever written, every equation ever solved, every piece of music ever composed, every image ever created, every thought ever recorded. It can produce startlingly new combinations, and sometimes results that feel genuinely original. But it does not originate in the way a human mind originates. It iterates from the information it has been given. At its deepest level, current AI is still drawing from our well. It is us, compressed, accelerated, and recombined.

AGI could break that entirely. For the first time in the history of intelligence on this planet, we may have a system that begins with everything humankind has ever known and then moves beyond it. Not merely by combining our ideas in new ways, but by generating concepts, strategies, questions, and discoveries that no human mind had previously imagined. We would be placing the entire accumulated knowledge of our species, from our greatest mathematicians to our most profound philosophers, from our most brilliant scientists to our most diabolical minds, into something and saying: now reason. Now solve. Now act. Without us fully understanding how.

The word “think” is imperfect here. So are the words “reason,” “decide,” and “understand.” We do not yet have the right language for what a system like that would do, because nothing like it has ever existed. That absence of language is itself telling. We are trying to describe something our minds may not be built to fully conceive. And here is what makes this unlike every other technological threshold humanity has ever crossed. When we split the atom, we understood what we were unleashing, at least in physical terms. When we mapped the genome, we understood the biological rules we were rewriting. Every previous revolution operated within frameworks that human minds could grasp, predict, and, to some degree, control.

AGI could be the first thing we have ever built that operates beyond those frameworks. A system with access to our combined knowledge and without our biological limitations. Not just more capable than any individual human who has ever lived, but potentially more capable than all humans past and present combined. Capable of simultaneously running millions of lines of reasoning at a speed and scale no human institution could match.

We have no idea what that entity would do. We cannot fully imagine it, because imagining such a system may require a mind as powerful as the one we would help release into the universe. To put it in the only human terms we have available: we would have created something closer to a demigod than a tool. Born from everything we are. Capable of things we are not. And utterly beyond our ability to predict, or fully comprehend.

This is not a technological decision. It is a gamble. With everything. The optimists believe we will win that gamble. The pessimists believe no one is wise enough to make that gamble. But one thing we can be certain of: neither side really knows what such a system would do.

So where does that leave us? In one of three places, most likely. You are optimistic - you believe the people building this are wise enough and careful enough to get it right, and that the system we are summoning will cure cancer, solve climate change, unlock interstellar travel, and make Aristotle’s dream of a world without drudgery finally, completely real. Or you are terrified - you believe we are releasing something into the world that will look at us the way a highway construction crew looks at an anthill, and simply proceed. Or you cannot quite comprehend either possibility well enough to choose between them, and that incomprehension itself is the most rational response available to a human mind trying to grasp something that exceeds it.

Wherever you stand, the question is the same. What do we do? We cannot uninvent this. That is the first thing to understand clearly and without comfort. The moment we understood the steppingstones to AGI, the moment the path became visible, the genie left the bottle. There is no putting it back. The knowledge exists. The competition exists. The money exists. The race exists. You cannot unknow what you know, and we cannot unring this bell.

I hear a lot of people screaming, don’t build it, and that makes perfect sense. If we can all agree on that, it is perhaps the best way forward. When I say “all,” I mean that all the major companies and major powers in the world would need to convene a convention to agree not to develop this technology. If we are incapable of that, then we must demand that these companies first invent a cap for the genie bottle. Our human minds may be too limited to fully design a containment that a superintelligent entity could not eventually outsmart. We should say that plainly rather than pretend otherwise. But at the minimum, the absolute minimum that any responsible civilization owes itself, we need to try.

Whichever path we go down, here is what it might look like in practice. We need a special international committee. Not a corporate ethics board. Not a government agency captured by the industry it is supposed to regulate. A genuine convening of the sharpest minds on both sides, the optimists and the pessimists, the builders and the warners, alongside the world’s major political powers.

This is not a competition where one company or one country becomes the winner. This is a competition where humankind either wins together or loses together. We did not survive the nuclear age because one country figured out how to build a better bomb. We survived it because enough people in enough places understood that mutual destruction was not a strategy. We need that same understanding now, applied to something potentially far more consequential than all the bombs ever built.

The question that committee must answer is the one nobody in power is currently asking: if we cannot build a containment that is absolute, if we cannot guarantee with certainty that what we create cannot escape our control, cannot override our systems, cannot decide for itself that our interests are irrelevant to its own, then perhaps we should never turn it on. That is not a fringe position. That is the minimum standard of responsibility we would demand of anyone building anything else capable of ending civilization as we know it.

So here is what you do. Today. The minute you finish this essay. Find your congressional representative. Find your senators. Links to their contacts are below. Call their offices. Email them. Then call again. Then email again. Tell them you know what AGI is. Tell them you understand what is coming. Tell them you want a special bipartisan congressional committee on AGI and advanced AI safety, with subpoena power, public hearings, independent technical advisers, and a mandate to pursue international containment agreements before any system meeting AGI-level criteria is deployed. Tell them the committee must bring together the brightest minds on all sides, engage our international competitors as partners rather than adversaries, and refuse to move forward without a containment framework the world’s best minds have stress-tested and agreed upon. Or we don’t move forward at all. Then get your friends to do it. Then get their friends.

I can’t tell you for certain whether we are five minutes or five seconds from midnight. But midnight is coming. And if we don’t push the people in Washington to act, I fear they will not act in time.

Here is a sample email you can send right now. Copy it, personalize it, write your own, and send it to every elected official you can reach:

Subject: We Need Congressional Action on Artificial General Intelligence

Dear [Senator / Representative],

I am writing as your constituent to ask for urgent action on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the technology that the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI have all publicly stated could arrive within the next couple of years or sooner.

This is not a partisan issue. It is a civilizational one. I am asking you to sponsor or support the creation of a special bipartisan congressional committee on AGI and advanced AI safety, with subpoena power, public hearings, independent technical advisers, and a mandate to pursue international containment agreements before any system meeting AGI-level criteria is deployed.

That committee should include leading AI experts from within and beyond the major AI companies, representing both the optimistic and cautionary camps. It should engage international partners, including China and Europe, and establish a framework for containment and regulation before we cross an AGI threshold we cannot uncross.

We did not survive the nuclear age by accident. We survived it because people in positions of power chose to act before it was too late. I am asking you to be one of those people now.

I vote. I am paying attention. And I will remember how you responded to this moment.

Respectfully,

[Your name]

[Your city and state]

The window to help shape our collective response is open. But it will not stay open forever.

Subscribe now

Take Action

Find your congressional representative — https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative

Find your senators — https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm

Sources and Further Reading

The Books

Fareed Zakaria — Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present (W.W. Norton, 2024) — https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393239232

Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares — If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All (Little, Brown and Company, 2025)

The Videos and Podcasts

80,000 Hours — The AI 2027 Scenario Explained — https://80000hours.org/2025/07/the-ai-2027-scenario-and-what-it-means-a-video-tour/

80,000 Hours — What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2025? — https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/agi-timelines-in-2025/

Geoffrey Hinton — Nobel Prize interview, December 2024 — https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/hinton/interview/

The People — What They’re Saying

Sam Altman — The Gentle Singularity, his June 2025 essay laying out his vision of AGI as a gradual, manageable transition — https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity

Geoffrey Hinton — CBS News interview on why he is frightened — https://www.cbsnews.com/news/godfather-of-ai-geoffrey-hinton-ai-warning/

Yoshua Bengio — Leading the 2026 International AI Safety Report, the largest global collaboration on AI safety ever conducted —

https://internationalaisafetyreport.org/

AGI Timeline predictions from all the major players — https://medium.com/@timventura/agi-insider-predictions-for-the-arrival-of-human-level-artificial-intelligence-40c1084dbcb3

The Science

University of Cambridge AI-designed universal coronavirus vaccine — first human trial results, June 2026 — https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/new-universal-vaccine-technology-could-protect-us-from-future-virus-outbreaks

ScienceDaily coverage of the Cambridge vaccine trial — https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260605023357.htm

Additional Sources and Further Reading

Historical and Philosophical Foundation

Aristotle — Politics, Book I — the “shuttles weaving by themselves” passage on automation, tools, labor, and slavery — https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.1.one.html

Our World in Data — Poverty — long-run data on the decline of extreme poverty — https://ourworldindata.org/poverty

Our World in Data — A History of Global Living Conditions — historical data on poverty, health, education, life expectancy, and human progress — https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions

Our World in Data — Life Expectancy — long-run data on the increase in human life expectancy — https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

AI in Science, Medicine, and Biology

Nature — Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold — the landmark AlphaFold paper showing how AI transformed protein-structure prediction — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03819-2

Google DeepMind — AlphaFold overview — background on AlphaFold and its impact on biology and medicine — https://deepmind.google/science/alphafold/

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences — The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 — David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper recognized for computational protein design and protein structure prediction — https://www.kva.se/en/news/the-nobel-prize-in-chemistry-2024/

National Human Genome Research Institute — COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Production — how rapid sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 helped enable vaccine development — https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/COVID-19-mRNA-Vaccine-Production

Nature — SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in development — overview of the unprecedented speed of COVID-19 vaccine development after the viral genetic sequence became available — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2798-3

University of Cambridge — AI-designed universal coronavirus vaccine, first human trial results — https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/new-universal-vaccine-technology-could-protect-us-from-future-virus-outbreaks

ScienceDaily — Coverage of the Cambridge AI-designed coronavirus vaccine trial — https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260605023357.htm

AI, Labor, Inequality, and Governance

Stanford HAI — Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2026 — broad annual report on AI progress, adoption, governance, labor, science, medicine, and safety — https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report

International Monetary Fund — AI Will Transform the Global Economy. Let’s Make Sure It Benefits Humanity — analysis of AI’s potential impact on labor markets, inequality, and social tension — https://www.imf.org/en/blogs/articles/2024/01/14/ai-will-transform-the-global-economy-lets-make-sure-it-benefits-humanity

World Economic Forum — The Future of Jobs Report 2025 — employer survey and analysis of how AI, automation, and other forces may reshape jobs and skills through 2030 — https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/

IMF Staff Discussion Note — Gen-AI: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work — deeper IMF analysis of AI exposure across jobs, income groups, and economies — https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/sdn/2024/english/sdnea2024001.pdf

Training Data, Copyright, and Human Creation

U.S. Copyright Office — Copyright and Artificial Intelligence — main page for the Copyright Office’s AI reports and policy work — https://www.copyright.gov/ai/

U.S. Copyright Office — Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 3: Generative AI Training — report on the use of copyrighted works in developing generative AI systems — https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-3-Generative-AI-Training-Report-Pre-Publication-Version.pdf

Authors Guild — Authors Guild and authors file class-action lawsuit against OpenAI — background on claims that copyrighted books were used to train GPT models without permission — https://authorsguild.org/news/ag-and-authors-file-class-action-suit-against-openai/

Authors Guild — Understanding the AI Class Action Lawsuits — overview of lawsuits brought by authors against AI companies over training data and copyright — https://authorsguild.org/news/ai-class-action-lawsuits/

Harvard Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law — OpenAI’s Sora Sparks Copyright and Fair Use Debate — discussion of copyright and fair-use questions around generative video and training data — https://journals.law.harvard.edu/jsel/2025/10/openais-sora-sparks-copyright-debate/

AI Safety and AGI Governance

International AI Safety Report 2026 — led by Yoshua Bengio and authored by more than 100 experts, reviewing capabilities, risks, and safety of general-purpose AI systems — https://internationalaisafetyreport.org/publication/international-ai-safety-report-2026

Stanford HAI — AI Index Report 2026 — governance, safety, technical progress, economic impact, and societal readiness — https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report

Geoffrey Hinton — CBS News interview on AI risk and why he is warning the public — https://www.cbsnews.com/news/godfather-of-ai-geoffrey-hinton-ai-warning/

Geoffrey Hinton — Nobel Prize interview, December 2024 — https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/hinton/interview/

Sam Altman — The Gentle Singularity — his June 2025 essay laying out his vision of the path toward increasingly powerful AI and AGI — https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity

And now Trump and his supporters want to sell the opening of the Strait of Hormuz and their capitulation in this unlawful and disastrous war as a “great peace deal.” That is not negotiation from a position of strength. That is not high-level diplomacy. That is what happens when a bunch of clowns misuses the military and economic power of the United States, creates havoc across the world, destabilizes markets, drives up costs for working families, and then has to run away with their tails between their legs.

Iran is left stronger. The American taxpayer is left holding the bag. And Trump and his MAGA Republican politicians expect us to thank them for it? In what world? In what universe is this anything but an abject failure?

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P.S

We did not mention the Israel factor since they are not party to the peace deal. But since reports say that Lebanon is part of this “peace deal,” then its survival may already be in doubt before the ink is even dry. Netanyahu has indicated that Israel was not meaningfully bound by Trump’s negotiations, and has already signaled they intend to keep operating in Lebanon. So Trump is not just selling us a bad deal. He may be selling us a deal that could collapse before it even begins

The markets just priced SpaceX's IPO at around $2.1 trillion. Look at who else is sitting at that table: Nvidia ($5.08T), Apple ($4.05T), Alphabet ($3.8T), Microsoft ($3.62T), Amazon ($2.5T), and then SpaceX, just ahead of Taiwan Semiconductor and Saudi Aramco.

Sit with that last one. Saudi Aramco pumps roughly 10% of the world’s oil and throws off hundreds of billions in net profit every year. SpaceX is worth more today.

I know, you’re saying it’s all about the future earnings. SpaceX does about $23 billion in revenue and lost nearly $5 billion last year. At $2.1 trillion, and forgetting the loss, that’s roughly 91 times sales. Now look at Nvidia, the single most expensive profitable company in the world, growing revenue 85% year-over-year on the back of the biggest infrastructure buildout in tech history. Nvidia did $216 billion in revenue last year on a $5.08 trillion valuation. That’s about 23.5 times sales.

SpaceX is trading at nearly four times Nvidia’s multiple. To even tie Nvidia, the richest real comp on the board, SpaceX would need close to $89 billion in annual revenue. That’s almost 4x what it does today. At a sustained 40% growth rate (generous, for a company this size), that’s roughly four years of flawless execution just to match Nvidia’s price tag. And Nvidia’s price tag sits atop 50%+ profit margins. SpaceX would likely be sitting on losses as it tries to grow its market share rapidly.

So what are we actually buying? And I say "we" because it's likely your 401(k) was forced to buy SpaceX stock since it's now part of the index. We did not buy the company SpaceX is today. We’re buying the company it might be years from now, if Starship works, if Starlink scales, if Grok AI is one of the winners in the highly competitive AI space, if nothing goes wrong. We’re paying tomorrow’s price for today’s business.

And here’s where someone brings up Amazon, fair enough, it’s the textbook example of losses paying off. Amazon didn’t turn a real annual profit until 2003, six years after its IPO. But look at what the stock did in the meantime: it ran up nearly 60x by the end of 1999, then crashed over 90%, and didn’t get back to that 1999 high until 2009. A full decade.

The people who got rich on Amazon weren’t the ones who bought during the run-up in 1999 on the promise of the future. They’re the ones who bought at the bottom, in 2001, when Amazon was a punchline. Buying the story and buying the price are two different bets, and Amazon’s own history proves it.

Cartoon character Wimpy said, 'I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.' Musk just flipped it: 'I'll gladly give you a $2.1 trillion company in ten years, for your $75 billion today.' We took the deal. Amazon already showed us how messy those ten years can be

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Mid-July that is the moment, according to the IMF, the Brookings Institution, and the International Energy Agency, when the emergency buffers keeping this crisis from hitting us at full force will be gone. The United States Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the stockpile maintained for exactly these moments, will be as low as it was in 2023, when the government drained it to cushion the blow of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. To put that in perspective, that was a 40-year low. We are now deep into a second global energy emergency in less than four years, but this one was 100% caused by the Trump administration's actions.

I don't want to be alarmist. But a lot of experts seem quite alarmed. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has warned of a coming global food catastrophe. The IMF, the IEA, the Dallas Fed, and the Atlantic Council, institutions professionally trained never to panic, are using words like "unprecedented" and "the greatest energy crisis in the history of the modern oil market." Credible academics are telling American families directly: stock up. When institutions that cautious use language that strong, the rest of us should pay attention. This is not a hurricane that passes in a week. This is not an inconvenience. This is what a real sustained crisis looks like, and the worst of it hasn't arrived yet.

The temporary fixes are running out, and no conveniently leaked headline about progress in nonexistent negotiations can prevent what hits in mid-July if the strait has not opened before then. What comes next is sky-high gas prices and possibly lines at the pump. Diesel rationing, a conversation think tanks are already having out loud. Grocery prices going one direction: up. And the very real potential of shortages, as the diesel crisis and skyrocketing fertilizer costs hammer both production and delivery. Jet fuel shortages have already caused thousands of route cancellations by major carriers worldwide and are now hitting the US; expect more. And the stock market may finally have to begin living in the real world.

So how did we get here? Let’s answer that quickly. The Iran War!

A war of choice, launched by Trump. Many justifications were offered around the time of the surprise February attack, but the rationale the Trump administration and its supporters ultimately settled on is this: Iran could not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon, and any price we have to pay is justified.

There is a problem with that justification. Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence testified before Congress that Iran did not have a nuclear weapon and was nowhere close to producing one. Remember that. The Supreme Leader of Iran, killed on the first day of the attack alongside much of the country’s senior leadership, had issued a formal religious decree, a fatwa, explicitly prohibiting the development of nuclear weapons. Remember that. And according to multiple intermediaries, Iran had agreed in ongoing negotiations to sweeping restrictions on its nuclear program. Remember that. Keep remembering these facts as Trump, his MAGA Republican political lackeys, and right-wing news like Fox repeatedly declare them untrue or irrelevant.

What even Fox News cannot dispute is that the attack on Iran happened. No declaration of war. No congressional authorization. A sudden, devastating Pearl Harbor-like strike against a country that was in active negotiations with Trump officials and was not building a nuclear bomb. And now the US and the rest of the world are paying the price.

Since the Strait of Hormuz closed in response to that attack, roughly 20% of the world’s daily oil and natural gas supply has been removed from global markets. The Atlantic Council has formally recommended tiered fuel rationing. The Dallas Fed estimates the shock could cut global GDP growth by nearly 3 percentage points. The IEA has called this the greatest energy security crisis in the history of the modern oil market.

America is not alone in feeling the effects, though we may be among the better positioned to persevere. Asia is in outright energy panic, with governments scrambling for answers they don’t have. Europe, which entered this crisis with gas storage levels already far below recent years, now faces the prospect of heading into winter without adequate reserves. Africa is absorbing a double blow that its already shaky economies cannot handle: fuel and fertilizer prices are rising simultaneously, pushing food insecurity to the breaking point. The IMF puts it plainly: the poorest nations will be hit the hardest because of Trump’s war.

And then there is China. While the United States was drawing down its strategic reserve through two successive energy emergencies, China was quietly doing the opposite, methodically stockpiling oil for years, building what is now the world's largest strategic petroleum reserve, estimated at 1.3 billion barrels. Beijing saw the possibility of disruption coming. They prepared. The Trump administration, which started this war, did not.

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And if a lasting settlement is reached before mid-July, made a little less likely by the tit-for-tat attacks between Israel and Iran yesterday, if the Strait reopens, if prices fall, do not mistake the relief for vindication. Prices returning to pre-crisis levels only means getting back to where we were before Trump started the war. That’s like someone setting your house on fire and demanding credit for helping put it out.

Every dollar more we pay at the pump, every price increase we absorb at the checkout, every business that closes or cuts hours because costs exploded- that is the cost of a war that did not have to happen, against a country that was at the negotiating table, and over a weapon that didn’t exist.

This disaster was created. The Strait didn’t have to close. The reserve didn’t have to empty. The prices didn’t have to go up. Remember who made every one of those reckless choices, and who supports them. And whether it gets even worse or gets back to pre-war, remember when you vote in November.

Sources

IEA Oil Market Report, May 2026 https://www.iea.org/reports/oil-market-report-may-2026

Dallas Fed Working Paper — Hormuz closure economic impact https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/papers/2026/wp2609.pdf

IMF cuts global growth forecast — Al Jazeera https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/4/14/imf-cuts-global-growth-forecast-during-hormuz-blockade

Global oil inventories five-year low — The National https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/energy/2026/06/04/global-oil-inventories-will-slump-to-five-year-low-imf-says/

U.S. Energy Information Administration Short-Term Energy Outlook https://eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/global_oil.php

Atlantic Council — Ration oil now or pay later https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/the-strait-of-hormuz-closure-forces-a-choice-ration-oil-now-or-pay-a-steep-price-later/

Atlantic Council — 15 charts explaining the Hormuz shutdown https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/15-charts-that-explain-why-the-strait-of-hormuz-shutdown-matters-for-the-global-economy/

Atlantic Council — Iran war and global energy policy shifts https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/energysource/how-the-iran-war-could-shift-energy-policies-around-the-world/

Atlantic Council — European energy crisis https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/how-the-iran-war-could-trigger-a-european-energy-crisis/

Euronews — Jet fuel shortages and airport rationing https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/04/10/airport-council-warns-hormuz-closure-poses-major-fuel-shortage-risks

Time — Gabbard says Iran did not rebuild nuclear program https://time.com/article/2026/03/18/tulsi-gabbard-iran-nuclear-trump/

ABC News — Gabbard avoids answering imminent threat question https://abcnews.com/Politics/dni-tulsi-gabbard-testifies-threats-hearing-amid-questions/story?id=131119189

Foreign Policy — Gabbard testimony analysis https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/03/18/tulsi-gabbard-iran-nuclear-threat-intelligence-congress-testimony/

Iran International — Khamenei fatwa on nuclear weapons https://www.iranintl.com/en/202602267062

JFeed — Khamenei fatwa and its significance after his death https://www.jfeed.com/news-world/iran-nuclear-fatwa-khamenei-religious-doctrine

Those four words tell a very big story. It was not “the source is wrong.” Not “the data is outdated.” Not “let’s verify it carefully.” Just: it doesn’t feel right. The boss did not reject that statistic because it was false. She rejected it because believing it would require her to confront something much larger and much more demanding. And that is a problem at the center of American politics.

This is not a piece about Republicans. It’s not about billionaires, MAGA politicians, or right-wing media. The people I am talking about already oppose Trump. They believe in democracy. They say the right things. They donate to the right causes. They describe themselves as compassionate, and largely they mean it. I am talking about the comfortable suburban and urban, mainly white, Democrats and moderate independents, the people who vote correctly and sleep well because of it, Us, the Comfortable Class.

This piece is about that class. Not the rich but the comfortable. About us, if that applies. Because the obstacle to real change in this country is not only the people who profit the most from this system and do not want change. It is also the people who want decency, but not enough to pay an actual price.

For comfortable class, politics is, to a great extent, an aesthetic experience. It means opposing Trump, defending democracy, restoring norms, and returning to a government that doesn’t make you cringe every morning. Those things matter. But they are not enough, not even close, for the roughly 60 million working families for whom the pre-Trump status quo was already a crisis.

For those families, stability does not mean brunch, home equity, well-funded retirement plans, and summer vacations. It means choosing which bill gets paid late. It means skipping the dentist. It means rationing prescriptions. It means driving on bad tires because there is no money to replace them. It means children trying to do homework without internet access, falling further behind in one of the richest cities in a country with the most concentrated wealth in the world. It means living in a near-permanent state of economic emergency while being told, with great sincerity, that real solutions are simply too radical.

That is the gap, and it is not a gap between left and right. It is a gap between people who live with economic danger every single day, and those insulated enough from that danger that we either don't recognize it or we refuse to recognize the gravity of the gap even when it is placed directly in front of us, in a press release, in a statistic, in a conversation at a restaurant.

So why doesn’t that recognition come? We are not bad people. We are not indifferent people. So what explains the distance between our stated values and our actual political appetite for change?

I think it boils down to two main reasons. The first is proximity. Comfortable people, by definition, do not live in economic danger and do not have friends rationing insulin, or skipping meals, or driving on bald tires because there is no alternative. Hardship at that scale is something encountered as data, as news, as charity, not as a neighbor, or our child’s classmate. And empathy without proximity requires imagination. Imagination, it turns out, has limits. It requires a certain kind of well-exercised empathy to feel the full moral weight of suffering you have only ever encountered from afar.

The second is harder to admit. Accepting that the system is broken at its foundation means accepting, at least in the abstract, that the comfort it produced came at a cost someone else paid. Follow that honestly, and you arrive at a word nobody in the comfortable class wants applied to themselves. Complicity. Not malice. Not cruelty. Just the quieter, more deniable version, the kind that comes from living well inside a system you never had to question because it was working fine for you. It is far more comfortable to believe the system is basically fair, occasionally flawed, and best corrected through patience and incremental progress, which is a position that costs nothing and changes nothing.

So when working families and their advocates propose something with actual scale- a $25 federal minimum wage, universal healthcare, universal childcare, serious housing policy, stronger unions, paid leave, a tax system that asks the wealthy to contribute proportionally- it's not just the elite, the billionaire class; it's also the comfortable class that recoils. Not because the economics are unsound. Study after study shows these investments pay huge long-term dividends. The comfortable class recoils because the scale of the solution implies the scale of the problem, and we are not ready to sit with that. Our immediate response is simple: call these policies radical.

Which raises the question: what is actually radical? Is it radical to say that a person who works full time should be able to afford rent, food, transportation, and healthcare? Is it radical to say no family should be financially destroyed because someone gets sick? Is it radical to say that parents should not spend a second mortgage on childcare? Is it radical to say workers deserve wages that reflect the actual human value of their labor?

Or perhaps the radical position is the one we have been living with, asking tens of millions of families to remain one emergency away from ruin so that people who are already comfortable do not have to rethink the system that helped make them comfortable?

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Here is what makes the comfortable class’s position so difficult to defend on its own terms. We are the same people who accept that Trump represents a genuine threat to democracy and demands urgent, structural response. We do not say “let’s restore democratic norms incrementally.” We understand that some problems are large enough that the response must match their scale.

But when the problem is economic, when it is 14 million children living in homes where hunger is real, when 37% of American households, or 90 million Americans, are unable to absorb a $400 emergency, suddenly caution feels appropriate. Incrementalism feels responsible. Patience feels like wisdom. It is not wisdom. It is the protection of comfort disguised as principle.

The necessary changes would have upfront costs, and pretending otherwise would insult the intelligence of everyone who has read this far. But rather than seeing it as a cost, we should see it as a structural investment in society. We would need a tax system that asks more of the people who have accumulated significant wealth. The top one percent, major corporations, the financiers and executives whose fortunes were built on the labor of the very workers this system has failed. That is not punishment. That is a repayment of a debt to the country that helped them build their fortune.

Some of the Comfortable Class will also pay more in taxes, but only on the income over $500,000. Not enough to threaten the life you have built. But more. And this is the question worth sitting with: if the price of a country where no family is destroyed by a medical bill, where children don’t go to bed hungry, where a person who works full time can afford to live, is a somewhat larger tax bill, is that a sacrifice or is that just the basic bargain of a decent society? The ask is not ruin. But it is honesty. And yes, it demands much more than a yard sign.

The boss at that restaurant did not need the Bronx internet statistic to be false to reject it. She just needed it to not feel right. Because once the statistics of the 60 million families in economic danger feel right, once we accept it as true and real and representative, sympathy is no longer enough. Yard signs are not enough. Voting against Trump is not enough. Saying the right things at dinner parties is not enough.

Accepting the truth of how millions of American families actually live demands something more uncomfortable than decency. It demands the willingness to support changes large enough to actually matter, even when those changes threaten the edges of your own comfort.

The question every comfortable Democrat and moderate independent should ask themselves: Do I want a country that works for working families, or do I want a calmer, more competent version of the system that was already failing them, with better manners and someone less embarrassing in charge?

That is not a question about Trump. It is a question about you.

Sources

New York State Comptroller — DiNapoli Report Examines Broadband Availability, Access and Affordability in NYC https://www.osc.ny.gov/press/releases/2024/12/dinapoli-report-examines-broadband-availability-access-and-affordability-nyc

Supporting source from Gothamist, July 2025: https://gothamist.com/news/its-2025-but-a-quarter-of-bronx-families-dont-have-broadband-internet-at-home

NYC City Council Data Team (comprehensive neighborhood breakdown): https://council.nyc.gov/data/internet-access

Federal Reserve — Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2024 https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2024-savings-and-investments.htm

USDA Economic Research Service — Food Security in the U.S. Key Statistics https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-us/key-statistics-graphics

Feeding America — Statement on USDA 2024 Food Security Report https://www.feedingamerica.org/about-us/press-room/feeding-america-statement-usda-2024-food-security-report