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India’s Cockroach Movement Shows How to Fight Autocracy and the Testocracy
How a leaked high-stakes exam exposed capitalism’s broken promise—and why standardized testing keeps igniting struggle.
Aug 07, 2026
They called them cockroaches.
It was meant to reduce them—to make millions of young people seem small enough to squish and contemptible enough that no one would mourn their extermination.
But instead of crushing them, the insult only made them multiply.
Every blow from a police lathi—a long, heavy club used by Indian police—brought more bodies into the streets. Every attempt to scatter them revealed how many there were. What authorities dismissed as an infestation became an uprising powerful enough to drive India’s education minister from office and deliver one of the sharpest popular rebukes yet to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rule.
When the questions themselves go up for sale, it is not only the examination that is compromised. The promise collapses with it.
At the center of the revolt was a test that promised merit and delivered betrayal.
India’s National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test, or NEET, determines admission to undergraduate medical programs. More than 2 million young people took the examination, often after their families had sacrificed for years to pay for specialized coaching. The test presents itself as an impartial judge: Everyone receives the same questions, the same clock, and the same numerical verdict.
Then the questions were leaked and reportedly sold in advance.
Young people told to outstudy one another discovered that some contestants might simply have purchased the finish line. The test promised an even starting line, but the marketplace had filled some lanes with hurdles and cleared others for the wealthy.
Their fury grew into weeks of mass protest that forced Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign on July 25, 2026.
The movement took its name from a remark by Chief Justice Surya Kant comparing unemployed young people to “cockroaches” and “parasites.” Abhijeet Dipke, a Dalit activist from one of India’s historically oppressed caste communities, seized the slur and sent it crawling back toward those in power. “What if all cockroaches came together?” he asked online.
From that question emerged the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)—a name that mocked Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.
The great Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy celebrated the CJP members as “young roaches riding in on the rain,” as protesters poured into Delhi beneath the monsoon skies. Their numbers were formidable, but so was their irreverence. When police aimed water cannons at them, young people dared the officers to turn them on—then danced in the spray. The state brought water cannons into the streets to produce fear. The protesters transformed the streets into a stage and danced in the spray.
In a Democracy Now! interview, Roy described a movement alive with “mockery and humor,” “dancing,” and “singing”—a rebellion defined by “exuberance.” Protesters joked that fleeing police lathi attacks was helping them maintain their running streaks on Strava, a fitness-tracking app. They turned footage of the chases into video-game parodies and posted mock influencer-style “get ready with me” videos and “fit checks” featuring helmets, goggles, and homemade protective gear. One demonstrator held a placard declaring, “Every joke is a tiny revolution.”
That creative humor—an intelligence no standardized test could measure—was not an escape from struggle, but rather one of the movement’s weapons. They met contempt with laughter, intimidation with choreography, and isolation with an expanding circle of solidarity.
The uprising forced Modi to announce a national task force to overhaul the examination system, while the government proposed stronger penalties for exam fraud. The Cockroach Janta Party also secured commitments to compensate families of students who died by suicide amid the crisis and withdraw criminal cases against protesters.
While no single event explains a suicide, movement leaders linked the deaths to the despair produced by a system that made one examination appear capable of determining an entire life—then revealed that the exam could be bought.
Near the main protest site in New Delhi, students erupted in celebration. Dipke reportedly fell to his knees, raised his fist, and declared, “We have done it.” He called the result “a victory for the people of India” and “a defeat for the dictator.”
But the government did not accept defeat quietly. The movement called off its demonstrations after officials agreed to its central demands, including withdrawing criminal cases against protesters.
Within days, however, the Cockroach Janta Party reported that students and protesters were again being detained and arrested in several states. Movement leaders accused the government of violating the agreement and threatened to return to the streets.
The government subsequently announced that most Delhi protesters would face no further action. But organizers warned that closing proceedings was not the same as formally withdrawing the cases—and that the movement would resume if the government again broke its promises.
The government had retreated—but only far enough to gather itself for another attack. After officials agreed to withdraw cases against protesters and promised that no punitive action would follow, authorities began detaining and arresting students across several states, with Muslim and Dalit participants reportedly among those singled out. At least 100 people were arrested, many on stringent non-bailable charges, as the movement accused the government of backtracking on its agreement. By then, however, the students had done more than expose an examination leak. They had opened a crack in the façade of the system itself.
Why would a compromised examination provoke an uprising powerful enough to force out a cabinet minister—and frighten the government into trying to seal that crack through repression? Because a high-stakes test is never merely a collection of questions. It is a promise about how society works. It tells young people that wealth, caste, language, and power do not matter—that the future belongs to whoever studies hard.
When the questions themselves go up for sale, it is not only the examination that is compromised. The promise collapses with it.
Whether in India or across the world in the United States, standardized testing is one of capitalism’s most effective laundering machines. It takes a dirty hierarchy built through unequal access to wealth and education, scrubs away its history, and returns the result stamped with a single word: merit.
The Testocracy
Every high-stakes testing system tells young people some version of the same story: Work hard, follow the rules, outstudy everyone else, and a high score will make the future yours.
For the millions of students taking NEET in India, that promise carries enormous weight. The examination is presented as the great objective referee, capable of determining who deserves entry into medical school. It supposedly does not care about a student’s family income, caste, gender, language, region, or access to private coaching. Everyone receives the same questions, the same time limit, and a score that appears to settle who is prepared to advance.
But a society does not become equal merely because it administers the same test to people who have been given profoundly unequal lives.
These scandals expose corruption, but they also reveal a deeper fiction: that a standardized examination can transform unequal access to wealth, schooling, language, and preparation into a neutral ranking of merit.
Some NEET applicants attend well-funded schools and spend years in expensive private coaching programs. Others learn in overcrowded classrooms, study in regional languages, work after school, care for siblings, or worry about whether their families can afford another year of preparation. “Everywhere you look, you can see the desperation of young people in this country,” Shree Kumar Verma, a 19-year-old NEET student studying in Kota—the center of India’s exam-coaching industry—told The Guardian. “Being at Kota is either going to bring you success or totally break you down; it’s all or nothing here.” Some students enter the testing center trained specifically to defeat NEET. Others arrive carrying every burden that caste, poverty, geography, and educational inequality have already placed on their backs.
Standardized tests convert these unequal conditions into a clean numerical hierarchy and then present the result as a neutral measure of individual merit. This is the central function of what I call the testocracy: a social class of elites that uses standardized testing to make inequality appear earned.
The NEET leak laid bare the crudest form of class privilege: Students with enough money or the right connections could allegedly purchase the questions outright. It was corruption in a form no one could mistake.
The scandal has a close parallel in the United States. In 2019, federal prosecutors exposed Operation Varsity Blues, a sprawling college admissions scheme in which wealthy parents paid consultant William “Rick” Singer to fraudulently secure places for their children at selective universities. Some arranged for stand-ins to take the SAT or ACT or paid corrupt proctors to change answers after the exams. Others bribed college coaches to designate their children as recruited athletes, sometimes fabricating athletic résumés and staging photographs of students participating in sports they did not actually play.
The scandal provoked outrage because wealthy families had purchased test scores and admissions outcomes outright. But affluent families routinely buy educational advantages that remain perfectly legal: elite schools, private tutoring, test preparation, admissions consultants, and access to universities that favor donors and children of alumni.
The comparison with NEET is striking. In both scandals, public outrage erupts when wealth abandons even the pretense of fairness and simply buys access to education and opportunity.
These scandals expose corruption, but they also reveal a deeper fiction: that a standardized examination can transform unequal access to wealth, schooling, language, and preparation into a neutral ranking of merit.
Testing as a Tool of Colonialism and White Supremacy
The camouflage of inherited advantage as individual merit is not an accidental flaw. It is rooted in the white supremacist, colonial, and eugenic history of standardized testing—a system designed to translate racial and imperial hierarchies into the seemingly neutral language of scores.
British colonial rule imposed a standardized examination system on India, reorganizing education around centralized curricula, externally controlled tests, and official credentials. Historian Jana Tschurenev describes the resulting culture as centered on “memorisation, examination, and technocratic management.” British authorities expanded schooling not to achieve equality, but to prepare most colonized people for subordinate positions while opening a narrow path to government employment and elite credentials.
A decisive turn came with Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Indian Education. Macaulay admitted that he knew neither Sanskrit nor Arabic, yet declared that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” His contempt expressed the racist logic of British policy, which treated European knowledge as universal and Indian intellectual traditions as inferior. Whatever opportunities English education later offered some people excluded by India’s caste hierarchies, the colonial policy itself was designed to elevate the language and culture of the rulers. Mastery of that culture became increasingly essential to credentials, employment, and social advancement.
Wood’s Despatch of 1854 further centralized the system. The universities established in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras in 1857 were modeled after the University of London and operated largely as examining and affiliating institutions, prescribing curricula, administering tests, and conferring degrees. Teaching became organized around examinations controlled by colonial authorities.
The Indian Civil Service (ICS) examination made the colonial function of testing especially clear. Indians could formally compete to enter the elite administrative corps that governed their country, but the examination was held only in London and structured around subjects associated with elite British schooling. British officials argued that the examination should secure candidates trained in the “highest and best form of English education”—a principle they said would be sacrificed if the test were also offered in India.
The effective exclusion of most Indian candidates became an early nationalist cause. At its founding meeting in 1885, the Indian National Congress demanded that the exam also be offered in India. The dispute exposed the contradiction of colonial meritocracy: Britain proclaimed an open competition while designing it to reward those with the wealth to travel to Britain and the greatest access to the colonizer’s language, schools, and culture.
A related system of race and class sorting developed in the United States, and the use of standardized tests gave that hierarchy the appearance of objective measurement. As Rethinking Schools has written:
Standardized tests first entered the public schools in the 1920s, pushed by eugenicists whose pseudoscience promoted the "natural superiority" of wealthy, white, US-born males. High-stakes standardized tests have disguised class and race privilege as merit ever since.
Beginning during World War I, psychologists administered the Army Alpha and Beta intelligence tests to more than 1.7 million military recruits. The tests sorted soldiers and were then used to make sweeping claims about the intelligence of entire racial and national groups.
Eugenicist psychologist Carl Brigham drew on the Army test results in his 1923 book, A Study of American Intelligence, to promote the supposed superiority of “Nordic” people and the inferiority of Black people and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Warning that “the decline of American intelligence” would accelerate “owing to the presence here of the negro,” he called for public action to prevent what he described as racial deterioration. Three years later, Brigham helped develop the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), turning a system shaped by military classification and eugenics into a gatekeeper for higher education.
By the 1920s, standardized tests were also sorting millions of children into academic, remedial, and vocational tracks. They disproportionately directed white and affluent students toward universities and professional careers while steering Black, immigrant, working-class, and disabled children toward lower-paid positions in a racially stratified economy. Testing was essential for reproducing hierarchy and making it appear deserved.
Black intellectuals organized an early counterattack against this racist testing regime. Reflecting on the rapid spread of psychological testing after World War I, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote:
It was not until I was long out of school and indeed after the [First] World War that there came the hurried use of the new technique of psychological tests, which were quickly adjusted so as to put black folk absolutely beyond the possibility of civilization.
Du Bois was part of a larger movement of Black scholars challenging the tests’ methods, assumptions, and political uses. In 1924, educator Horace Mann Bond systematically dismantled Brigham’s claims, exposing the supposed science behind intelligence testing as an instrument of “propaganda and encouragement for prejudice.” Bond urged Black intellectuals to understand how the tests were constructed and used so they could resist efforts to portray Black people as incapable of exercising the full rights of citizenship.
Du Bois and Bond understood that the tests converted the consequences of segregation, poverty, and unequal schooling into supposed evidence of Black inferiority. The state denied Black children equal resources, measured the predictable results, and then used their scores to restrict access to advanced education and professional work.
The colonial testing system in India and the eugenic testing system in the United States were not identical. But both converted the language, culture, and advantages of dominant groups into supposedly universal measures of merit.
The openly colonial and eugenic language eventually became less acceptable, but the sorting machinery survived. “Racial fitness” became “aptitude.” Assertions of British and white superiority became supposedly universal “standards.” Claims about racial differences in intelligence became claims about an “achievement gap.” This year marks the SAT’s 100th anniversary—a century after its creation by eugenicists, it is still used to rank and sort young people for unequal opportunities.
When Exams Cause Eruptions
High-stakes tests become politically explosive because they ask young people to place their faith in a promise our economic and political system cannot keep.
Capitalism produces enough wealth to house, feed, clothe, and educate everyone, but concentrates that wealth at the top. Education is celebrated as the “great equalizer,” yet schools operate within—and help reproduce—this unequal order. Education may help some individuals move within the hierarchy, but it cannot abolish a hierarchy the economy depends on. Standardized tests manage this contradiction by ranking young people, rationing scarce opportunities and presenting the results as merit rather than economic design.
When a test carrying the weight of a young person’s future is exposed as corrupt, arbitrary, or rigged, the promise of meritocracy can collapse into rebellion. In India, a leaked medical entrance examination sent masses of young people into the streets. In the United States, resistance to high-stakes testing grew into what organizers called the Education Spring. Though these movements confronted different systems, both revealed how supposedly neutral exams ration opportunity, discipline educators, and disguise inequality.
The protesters unlearned the lesson the testocracy had taught them. They had been told to view millions of other students as competitors standing between them and their futures. In struggle, they discovered one another as comrades.
I learned something about resisting the testocracy at Garfield High School in Seattle. In January 2013, teachers voted to refuse to administer the district-mandated Measures of Academic Progress test, known as the MAP. We were not opposed to assessing students. We opposed a test disconnected from much of our curriculum, costly in time and resources, and increasingly used to rank teachers rather than improve learning.
When the district threatened us with a 10-day suspension without pay, students and parents joined the struggle. Families opted out, students urged classmates to refuse the exam, and educators at other schools joined the boycott. By the end of the school year, the boycott forced the district to end the required use of the MAP in Seattle high schools.
The boycott became one of the brightest sparks of the Education Spring, the largest revolt against standardized testing in US history. The uprising carried the critique of Occupy Wall Street into public schools. Occupy had exposed how the wealthiest 1% manipulated political and economic institutions; the Education Spring challenged the use of testing, austerity, and privatization to reorganize education around corporate interests.
Across the country, hundreds of thousands of families opted out of state exams; students organized walkouts; and educators challenged testing mandates through resolutions, rallies, and boycotts. In New York alone, more than 200,000 students refused the state’s Common Core exams in 2015. The Garfield teachers did not create this movement alone, but our refusal helped spread a dangerous question: What if we simply stop cooperating?
The Education Spring and the NEET revolt both erupted because high-stakes tests compress vast social conflicts into a single score. An exam can determine whether a student graduates, enters medical school, receives a scholarship, or is shut out of a profession. It can also rank schools, punish educators, and justify closures. Resistance has since helped push a growing number of states to abandon standardized exams as high school graduation requirements.
Standardized tests become detonators because they promise fairness while making life-altering decisions among people never given equal opportunities. When that promise collapses—through leaked questions, racial disparities, corporate profiteering, or educationally useless exams—the test reveals itself as more than an assessment. It becomes a symbol of the system deciding who advances and who is left behind.
The testocracy tells young people they must defeat one another for access to a scarce future. Resistance begins when they recognize that the real obstacle is not the person sitting beside them, but the system forcing them to compete for what should be a right.
The Test We Must Pass
The Cockroach Movement did more than expose a corrupted examination. It exposed a society that tells young people their futures depend on defeating one another while the wealthy purchase every imaginable advantage—and sometimes the answers themselves.
A fairer NEET would matter. But no perfectly guarded test can make an unequal society just. India remains scarred by poverty, caste oppression, concentrated wealth, and repression. The United States is likewise defined by mass poverty amid extraordinary wealth, racial inequality, and attacks on dissent.
A fairer competition for scarcity does not end scarcity. A cleaner testocracy remains a testocracy.
The cockroaches have come together. The rest of us must decide whether we will keep competing for our assigned places in an unjust world—or join them in creating one in which every child has the chance to flourish.
But struggle is the greatest teacher. Young people who entered the streets demanding a fair exam learned that the corruption ran deeper than a leaked test. They learned how wealth and power shape the institutions governing their lives—and that institutions presented as immovable can be forced to retreat.
The Cockroach Movement did not end that repression. But it showed that even a government accustomed to surviving mass dissent can be forced to concede.
Most important, the protesters unlearned the lesson the testocracy had taught them. They had been told to view millions of other students as competitors standing between them and their futures. In struggle, they discovered one another as comrades. Their power did not come from defeating the student beside them, but from uniting in solidarity.
The government called them cockroaches because it believed they were small, disposable, and easy to crush. But cockroaches are legendary survivors, said to be capable of outliving even a nuclear apocalypse. These young people came through the monsoon rain, danced beneath the water cannons, and transformed an insult into a warning: The powerful may build the machinery of destruction, but those they despise may yet survive them.
Power wants the isolated student hunched over a standardized test, stomach knotted and nerves frayed, believing every failure belongs to them alone. It fears the moment that student looks up, sees millions carrying the same burden, and realizes that the failure belongs to the system.
The cockroaches have come together. The rest of us must decide whether we will keep competing for our assigned places in an unjust world—or join them in creating one in which every child has the chance to flourish.
That is the test our movements must pass.
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Noting ‘Trillions Within Reach,’ Campaigners Demand Justice at UN's Global Tax Treaty Talks
A Greenpeace representative urged governments to recognize the "once-in-a-generation opportunity to make those most responsible for the climate, nature, and inequality crises we are facing pay their share.”
Aug 04, 2026
As world governments meet at the United Nations for another round of negotiations on a first-of-its-kind "Global Tax Treaty," economic justice campaigners are urging them to think big or risk leaving on the table trillions of dollars that could help alleviate global inequality and the climate crisis.
The fifth round of negotiations for the treaty began in New York on Monday, with countries ironing out its language line by line as they seek a global framework to more fairly tax the rich and multinational corporations and crack down on tax avoidance.
Jenny Ricks, the general secretary of the Fight Inequality Alliance—a global coalition of anti-inequality groups—said the framework, which was first conceived in 2022 at the urging of poorer nations in Africa, "aims to make global tax governance more inclusive, transparent, and equitable, shifting it away from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and giving the global majority a genuine say in rules that have long been set by wealthy states."
The first drafts of the proposed tax convention were released in late July in advance of this month's negotiations. Advocates at Greenpeace International, however, argue that they contain many gaps that fail to adequately tax fossil fuel companies driving the climate crisis or other multinational corporations and extremely wealthy individuals.
In a briefing document released to media organizations, Greenpeace argued that the text lacks clear language linking taxation to sustainable development, despite it being demanded by 24 countries, and that it lacks provisions requiring polluters to bear the public cost of environmental damage.
The group also criticized the weakening of an article covering taxes on high-net-worth individuals, the lack of a minimum tax on multinational profits, and the absence of specific rules for taxing extractive industries such as oil, gas, and mining.
The oil and gas industry, the group pointed out, is in the midst of a boom, with companies reporting record profits as President Donald Trump's war against Iran drives global oil prices higher.
"The money is right there," said Nina Stros, Greenpeace International's global senior policy expert. "It is about time governments recognized this once-in-a-generation opportunity to make those most responsible for the climate, nature, and inequality crises we are facing pay their share, and reclaim trillions of dollars to invest in our shared future.”
An open letter from Tax and Fiscal Justice Asia, a group of over 50 civil society organizations across 13 Asian countries, emphasized many of the same concerns that the conference could end up merely affirming broad principles without creating concrete rules.
They said representatives of Asian nations at the negotiating table needed to push for a shift in taxing power away from wealthy countries where corporate headquarters are located and toward poorer ones where much of the workforce and resources are concentrated. They also argued for a move away from regressive consumption taxes that disproportionately fall on lower-income people.
"The majority of states in Asia were among the 125 states that voted in November 2023 to adopt a resolution for a UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation (UNFCITC)," the letter said. "The vote has brought forth a historic opportunity to leave behind unjust systems and build a new global tax architecture."
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Scores Dead Trying to Reach Ceuta and Still the Wrong Questions
Once again, people have lost their lives at Europe’s border, and once again, the real question remains unanswered.
Aug 04, 2026
Last week, at least 72 people died while attempting to reach the Spanish exclave of Ceuta from Morocco. Around 60,000 people made it into Ceuta, many of them by sea, others by climbing over border fences. Within just a few days, however, most of them had already returned to Morocco.
Both Morocco and Ceuta are located in Africa. But politically, Ceuta, like Melilla, belongs to Spain and therefore to the European Union. Europe’s response to the unprecedented influx into the exclave has been almost unanimous. What happened has been described as a “threat to Europe’s security.” Some have even called it an “attack” or an “invasion.” Europe’s external borders, we are told, must be better protected.
Twenty-two of the European Union’s 27 member states have now signed an open letter initiated by Italy’s far-right government under Giorgia Meloni, criticizing Spain’s migration policy and calling for stricter security measures at Europe’s borders. Italy has further suspended its Schengen agreement with Spain. That this is little more than political posturing is evident from the fact that Ceuta is not part of the Schengen Area in the first place.
While Europe appears quick to agree on yet more repression, the 72 lives irreversibly lost have become an afterthought. Most of those who died had most of their lives still ahead of them and hoped for a better future. Instead, they found death on what they believed was the path toward that future. As right-leaning governments across Europe compete with one another in increasingly alarmist security rhetoric, the fundamental question is largely ignored: Why does a young person take such enormous risks in order to reach Europe?
People flee war, violence, persecution, poverty, and the hopelessness that arises when there is little prospect of a safe and dignified life. Border fences cannot deter those who see no viable future where they are, but merely make their journeys more dangerous and more deadly. One can debate at length the respective roles played by colonialism and other historical injustices on the one hand, and current political failures on the other, in creating global inequality. But this does not change the fact that a young person in Morocco, facing high youth unemployment and low wages, has every reason to perceive their situation as profoundly unjust when compared with life in much of Europe.
This inequality is not an abstract concept. In a world where everyone is connected to everyone else, and our planet, in many ways, has become a global village, it is experienced directly. People see how others live on their phone screens every day.
Nineteen-year-old Nok in Thailand can watch in real time as Moritz, her age and from Munich, spontaneously buys a flight ticket to Bangkok and spends six months travelling through Southeast Asia to “find himself.” A comparable journey to Europe is out of reach for Nok, given her limited financial means and the enormous difficulty of obtaining a Schengen visa, and it will remain an impossibility in the foreseeable future.
“Come through legal channels,” Europe tells migrants. Kwame in Ghana wants nothing more than to do exactly that. He successfully applies for a master’s program in Germany, spends months of his time and a considerable amount of money on language tests, certifications, translations, and other documents he needs for his visa application, and saves the required funds for his living expenses in Germany. Yet when he requests an appointment at the German Embassy in Accra, he learns that the waiting time is six to twelve months. He will miss the start of his program. Whether his admission will still be valid the following year remains uncertain.
Amina is eight years old and lives in Sudan. For months, there has been little to no schooling in her region. The healthcare system has largely collapsed. While her parents struggle every day to find enough food and clean water, many children in Europe take education, healthcare, and security for granted.
José is 24 years old and works twelve hours a day in a textile factory in Honduras for a wage that barely allows him to survive. The clothes he sews are later sold in Europe, often for more money than he earns in an entire week.
Nok, Kwame, Amina, and José had no control over where they were born. Neither did Moritz. Yet the consequences of this accident of birth could hardly be more different. It may be easier to demand higher fences, but as long as such extreme inequalities in security, prosperity, and future opportunities exist between different regions of the world, people will continue trying to overcome those fences.
The challenges of migration cannot be solved by sealing oneself off. They require an honest debate about how the global order can be made fairer. This is not simply a matter of extending humanitarian compassion as a voluntary gesture; it is a question of how much inequality can be morally justified when it is based largely on the accident of where someone happens to be born.
If Europe wants to prevent images like those from Ceuta in the future, it must address the root causes of migration more decisively — among other things through fairer trade relations, greater commitment to development cooperation, and the expansion of legal migration pathways. Paradoxically, the opposite trend can often be observed today. Many European countries, for example, have significantly reduced their development aid budgets in recent years — a sign of the growing influence of populism, which prioritizes short-term political gains over long-term solutions. Ultimately, such policies harm not only people in countries of origin, but Europe itself as well.
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Piketty Offers a Vision for Sharing What We Have Left, But How Do We Convince the 1%?
It’s inspiring to see the World Inequality Lab researchers directly engage in the post-growth debate with a grand vision of global economic convergence. We can only hope it spurs a peaceful mass citizens’ movement to overcome the inevitable opposition of the ultra rich.
Jul 21, 2026
At the World Inequality Conference in June, the renowned economist Thomas Piketty and a team of 45 researchers from the World Inequality Lab unveiled the Global Justice Report. It’s a highly impressive and eloquent proposal to achieve "equality and prosperity within planetary boundaries" by the end of the century. Based on a fully quantified road map derived from extensive macroeconomic analysis, the 135-page report sets forth an ambitious vision: to construct a global economy that shares global wealth and achieves high well-being for all while rapidly decarbonizing energy systems, thereby maintaining emissions within the relatively safe limits of 1.8°C.
This hopeful outlook provides a welcome antidote to our times, in which the world is already reeling from climate breakdown, geo-economic confrontation, and a widening structural economic divide.
The core aim of the proposal is to achieve full income convergence across all countries by 2100, centered around a target level of €5,000 (about $5,700) per month for every person. To achieve this, the bottom 50% of humanity need to increase their global wealth share from 2-30%. The top 0.001%, in contrast, would see their wealth fall from 6% to 0.05%—a "striking redistribution," to quote the report, which would essentially abolish the billionaire class.
A Global Justice Fund serves to administer this immense effort at international economic sharing, financed by a global wealth tax and a top income tax levied on the richest 1% of the world’s population. Some of the revenue raised would go into a World Sovereign Fund, which is projected to accumulate assets equivalent to 60% of world GDP and replace tax revenue as the main source of financing. Country dividends are designed to be distributed on an equal per-capita basis, therefore providing more resources to poorer than richer countries and vastly more resources than currently allocated to development aid. These funds also come with strong conditionalities in terms of climate investments, inequality targets, and health and education expenditures.
A Vision of Sufficiency
The main novelty of the report is to put the concept of sufficiency at the center of its analysis, rightly arguing that we cannot stay within a 2°C carbon budget if the entire human population adopts a rich-world lifestyle of high private consumption. Sufficiency, as the report defines it, therefore requires more than halving average working time to 1,000 hours, roughly the equivalent of a two-and-a-half-day standard week.
This needs to be accompanied by a significant shift from material to immaterial sectors, such as health and education, which in turn would help refocus the economy toward low-consumption activities. A substantial change in food habits and reduced meat consumption could also allow for a strict deforestation ban, freeing up arable land while scaling down high-emitting agricultural practices. At the same time, sufficiency in production and consumption patterns must be combined with rapid decarbonization of the energy system, as spurred and enabled by the Global Justice Fund.
All this can read, at times, as a wish list of sustainability concepts and policies long espoused by environmental thinkers. But the work of the Global Justice Project is far wider in scope than Piketty’s best-selling tome, Capital in the 21st Century, which famously used vast historical and economic data to argue the case for a progressive global tax on wealth. Back in 2015, we at Share the World's Resources and others criticized the book for failing to take seriously the ecological limits to growth and planetary boundaries. So it’s inspiring to see the World Inequality Lab authors directly engaging in this debate, fully denouncing the rhetoric of "green growth" that assumes we can address environmental challenges by indefinitely increasing the size of the pie without reducing inequality, consuming less, or sharing resources globally.
Sharing Environmental Space
Their new report argues that technology alone is not enough to achieve rapid decarbonization. They acknowledge that to manage the green transition globally within a strict carbon budget, it will be necessary for today’s richest countries to radically downscale their resource and energy demands with near-zero growth in GDP. This will clear the ecological and carbon space needed for poorer countries of the Global South to continue growing their economies, enabling a fast energy transition while guaranteeing essential public services and a decent standard of living to all people.
It is hardly a novel framing of the issue, but the report emphasizes how their Sustainable Convergence Scenario entails a form of "class-based reparatory justice," in that the very rich—who have benefited the most from fossil-based global economic growth in recent decades—will primarily fund the Global Justice Platform. What’s more, the proposal is somewhat aligned with the concept of climate equity, and effectively translates the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" into quantitative policies for addressing climate change.
Another strength of the report is how it connects macroeconomic and environmental projections directly to questions of international institutional reform. It centrally highlights the need for a broader overhaul and democratization of the global economic and monetary system, including the reconstitution of the International Monetary Fund into a United Nations Central Bank that issues its own reserve currency. This would eliminate the exorbitant privilege of the US dollar and other major currencies that can borrow at much lower rates, ending a massive reverse redistribution of wealth from Global South countries to the Global North.
All other international institutions would be governed by strict rules and equal voting rights, further eradicating the special privileges and veto powers of dominant nations. A new international order would include the reform of World Trade Organisation rules and a reset of dispute settlement mechanisms. And the large financial resources allocated to the Global Justice Fund would de facto underwrite a major restructuring of the entire UN system, strengthening its many agencies, human rights protections and international laws.
From Plutocracy to Democracy
As the report affirms, these proposals to transform global governance from "plutocracy to democracy" are closely related to many other existing frameworks and initiatives. The Bridgetown Initiative in 2022, for example, also stresses the complementary role of global wealth taxation and international monetary reform. The UN Tax Convention process also focuses on democratizing the international tax system and curbing illicit financial flows, while the G20 initiatives led by Brazil and South Africa also champion global wealth taxes to fund climate policies and green energy transitions.
There are numerous other networks and organizations that aim toward similar tax and governance reforms, such as the work of Progressive International with their Program of Action on the Construction of a New International Economic Order. The Stiglitz Commission of 2010 and Brandt Commission of 1980 are gladly cited by the Global Justice Report as complementary discussions surrounding the reform of the international monetary and reserve system.
Above all, the report authors deservedly mention the Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth—a major project coordinated by the former UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Olivier De Schutter, that puts forward an exhaustive policy toolkit for building a global economy with human rights and ecological justice at its core. Thomas Piketty and many other prominent economists have put their names to this plan, which is one of the most comprehensive policy documents of recent years to define "living well within planetary boundaries" through increased South-South cooperation, reparative climate finance, and support for universal social protection floors. De Schutter’s pioneering proposal for a Global Fund for Social Protection is arguably a less utopian prospect for closing chronic financing gaps in low-income countries, building upon existing structures like the UN’s International Labour Organisation, and seeking more immediately viable sources of international financing.
The operative question, as always, is how the political conditions will arise to implement these policies as an alternative to the far-right techno-authoritarian vision being championed by reactionary political elites and their billionaire supporters. It’s certainly true, as Piketty and his team write in a Guardian op-ed, that technical impossibility is not what is standing in the way but rather “the absence of a shared vision of social progress, at once concrete and radical.” And both the Piketty and De Schutter road maps make clear that formidable forces will oppose any socioeconomic shift toward global sustainable convergence, with the fiercest resistance coming from the ultra rich.
Both reports also briefly outline the need to build countervailing power from the grassroots, explicitly supporting collective action from progressive political parties, labor unions, and civil society organisations. The Global Justice Report even gives its conclusion the subtitle: "A global citizen movement for social justice," and it modestly proffers its analysis to the broader collective mobilization that is already (if all too slowly) advancing at the world scale. So whatever limitations and shortcomings these reports may contain, we can only hope they spur the massive groundswell of popular support that is urgently needed to share the world’s finite resources before it’s too late.
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Restoring Our Nation’s Soul From Mass Delusions
The present leadership in Washington has moved aggressively and efficiently—and with venality and myopia—to lay waste to our noble aspirations and our natural endowments. What can we do about it?
Jul 19, 2026
Has mass delusion overtaken America’s collective consciousness and eaten into its soul? Rather than “America the Beautiful," are we becoming “America the Delusional”? The question sprang from speculating that many of my fellow citizens might agree with statements that expertise and evidence have clearly undercut. Would a majority think there was truth in them?
After reading these statements, ask yourself if my concern is warranted.
- Technology will protect us from the ill effects of climate disruption.
- Next generation Americans will be able to maintain the standard of living they have now.
- The Earth will provide sufficient food and shelter for a population exceeding 8.3 billion.
- Vigorous enforcement of national borders and deportation of illegal migrants will stem mass migration in the US and across the globe.
- Fatal shootings in America will decrease as guns become more widely available.
- The US dollar will remain the world’s dominant currency.
- Black people and other minorities are narrowing the economic gap with white people.
- The US President is the world’s most powerful government leader.
- American universities and research centers will continue to be regarded as the best in the world.
- The American diet is comparatively as healthy as that of other developed nations.
Having enumerated them, I pondered the toxic effect of such delusions on the soul of our nation. That Washington has mounted a ceaseless campaign of disinformation, on everything from the Iran War to voting integrity to the Reflecting Pool, only adds potency to the poison.
A nation’s soul, writes Gary Kowalski, is its “capacity for valor and visionary change.” Valor springs from confronting fear or pain with firmness and a realistic sense of one’s challenges. Visioning similarly involves the courage and wisdom to chart one’s future course with both creativity and a realistic take on present circumstances.
Nourishing the soul of this nation for 250 years has been its idealistic aspirations and its remarkable natural endowment. Mount Rushmore is a fit representation. All four leaders depicted there exhibited valor and vision on behalf of America’s unique assets, both prior to and during their presidency.
In contrast, the present leadership in Washington has moved aggressively and efficiently—and with venality and myopia—to lay waste to our noble aspirations and our natural endowments.
Our soul is on “life support.” Democratic self-governance and equality of economic opportunity, two pillars of national aspiration, are evaporating month by month. Calculated governmental action—and inaction—are accelerating the arrival of climate-related disasters and diminishing our natural capital.
Despite a grim present, future restoration of the nation’s soul is possible. It begins with each of us accepting in large part the unreality of the contentions listed above and helping leaders and their constituents chart a course within that frame. Whatever form our civic engagement takes, seeing ourselves as unabashed truth seekers is essential. Valorous action and visionary change derive from a firm grasp on what is real, not what is fanciful.
Motivated and supported by allies, we can make a difference. All it would require is each of us focusing on a delusion or two, and through writing, advocacy, or group action, promoting clear-eyed resilience over wishful thinking. Project Soul Restoration begins individually, takes root locally, then spreads regionally and nationally.
Break the mold. Take on the mantle of “influencer” on behalf of the nation’s soul!
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Game Changers: Building an Economy that Works for Working Americans
There is an arsenal of bold policies out there to embrace that will “defeat fascism, preserve democracy, and help create a greener, stronger and fairer economy for American workers.”
Jul 13, 2026
The United States is a plutocracy. Its economy works for the wealthy and powerful at the expense of working people. It is a broken politico-economic system in need of major repairs, but as leading progressive economist Gerald Epstein points out in the interview that follows, there is indeed an arsenal of bold policies to “defeat fascism, preserve democracy, and help create a greener, stronger and fairer economy for American workers.” Epstein is professor of economics and a founding co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
C.J. Polychroniou: It’s often been said that progressives are good in offering stinging critiques of the status quo and even making appealing policy proposals, but there is still a short supply of game changing strategies. I take it that this is the aim of Game Changers: Economic Polices for a Working America, an exciting new project from the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. You conceived of the project and serve as its director, so tell us more about it. Why now the launching of such a project, what are the major issues covered, and what do you hope will be achieved?
Gerald Epstein: I launched the Game Changers project, along with my colleagues James Boyce of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Juliet Schor of Boston College, because of the emerging perception that progressives in the United States could not gain political power and defeat the fascists and MAGA simply by leveling criticisms and epithets against Trump and his associates. Working people in the United States are hurting and angry after decades of neoliberal economic policies implemented, with some exceptions, by both Republican and Democratic administrations. Looking for answers to their legitimate problems, many American voters either simply sit out elections, or pull the lever for extreme candidates that seek to manipulate them by identifying scapegoats—such as immigrants—as the source of their problems.So, we launched Game Changers to be a positive source of real answers to real problems facing working Americans. The idea is to offer activists, political candidates, and government officials with policy ideas that bridge the gulf between the transformative and the practical, ideas that can envisage the way to an economy that is fairer, greener, more productive and more democratic. These are ideas, we believe, that are also practical enough to offer hope to those who want to help to mobilize the political forces that can help bring them into fruition.
Importantly, though, we are not intending to offer a comprehensive program for the American left. We felt that would be presumptuous for us to do and beyond our competence and standing. Ours is more of a menu of ideas that can be picked up by those who need them and who want to mobilize on their behalf.
We geared the timing of this project so that the policy ideas would be ready by the Congressional elections in November of 2026. In fact, we are launching policy proposals this month of July 2026. They can be found at https://gamechangerspolicy.org. Some of these ideas might be taken up by candidates. If they win, they might be taken up when they serve in Congress. Some of these ideas may percolate and emerge in future campaigns and legislative actions, as well as be taken up by progressive organizations. That is our hope, anyway.
The Game Changers project consists of 9 teams of experts and practitioners, (about 45 people in total) working on a range of subjects: Care, Finance and Financial Regulation, Health Care, Housing, Immigration, Macroeconomics, Trade and Labor, and Work and Jobs. All in all, these teams have developed about 25 different policy proposals.
The range of policies is striking. They include: “The Wealth of Welcome: Immigration Reform that Works for America”; “America’s Workers Deserve a Four-Day Week”; A Universal Basic Income for Children”; “Medicare for All”; “Polluters Pay - The Extreme Weather Superfund”; “Democratize North American Trade”; “Housing as a Human Right”; “National Rent Control”; “Public Banking”; “No More Bailouts”. (For the whole list, see GameChangersPolicy.org).
C.J. Polychroniou: Since the project is about advancing progressive economic alternatives to the problems and challenges facing the US economy, one would assume that the economists invited to be part of the project represent a common tradition in the discipline. If so, how would you define this tradition, and is it important that there is a consensus among them as to what constitutes progressive economic policies over key issues? We know that the Left has always been divided over ideology and policymaking. It is divided over the scope of government intervention in capitalist economies, and there is even disagreement over several specific issues, such as the Universal Basic Income, how to reduce inequality, and how to combat the climate crisis.
Gerald Epstein: What unites the economists and other experts involved in Game Changers is a commitment to defeat fascism, preserve democracy, and help create a greener, stronger and fairer economy for American workers. We did not invite experts based on a theoretical, methodological or ideological litmus test. Indeed, I would say that is one of the strengths of our project. The left often has great difficulties uniting sufficiently to engage in practical tasks like winning elections, or even achieving small practical goals, because they are riven by ideological, theoretical or methodological differences. We are not subject to that problem. Big egos are also a problem in politics -left, right and center and, for sure, in academia. Thankfully, we have avoided that problem as well. For us, the litmus test was a commitment to the ideals of Game Changers, expertise in their subject areas, and, for the most part, a willingness to volunteer their time.
C.J. Polychroniou: The 1930s posed the biggest and most severe challenge in US economic history. The New Deal was a response to the calamity of the Great Depression and reshaped the United States in a major and profound way. But the New Deal ultimately gave way to the neoliberal order and the results have been nothing but catastrophic for working-class people. Is the US today in a similar state of affairs as it was in the 1930s in the sense that the system is badly broken? Is this the message behind the launching of Game Changers? If so, can different issues still be addressed separately or does the entire system need restructuring before anything meaningful can be done?
Gerald Epstein: You are certainly correct that the neoliberal order wreaked havoc on America’s workers, but now things are even worse. In the U.S. we are facing a particularly pernicious form of capitalism, an authoritarian, and profoundly corrupt version that is dominated by a self-seeking Presidential family and a lethal coalition of techno-fossil-fuel-financialized capitalists. While our specific issues and policy proposals stand on their own terms, we see them as part of a broader vision of what our economy needs to overcome this lethal form of capitalism. The antidote is to recognize the equal dignity of every human being and working to guarantee their right to economic security, the opportunity to thrive, a livable planet, a world free of racism, and democratic governance of our lives, societies and economies.
More specifically, Game Changers is posing a set of policies to help defeat this form of capitalism by “changing the game”, based on three principles.
Changing the game means (1) investing in each other, through public provisioning of care, health care and other critical services; (2) securing our future by, for example, breaking the power of the fossil fuel capitalists and addressing climate change; and (3) righting the rules, by ending reckless and predatory financial practices, changing tax policies so that the super-rich have less wealth and contribute a bigger share for the operations of our government, preventing capitalists from firing workers arbitrarily and without just cause.
At one level, these, of course, are not revolutionary demands in a traditional sense. But if widely implemented, they would bring about a revolutionary improvement in the lives of working people, not only in the short term but in the longer term as well.
C. J. Polychroniou: In your view, what are the most pressing issues facing today the US economy and working-class people?
Gerald Epstein: While the US economy’s productivity has grown significantly over the last 40 years, the standard of living of American workers has, for the most part, barely budged. This is especially true if one includes American workers’ ability to acquire many of the most important basics of life: housing, time and the wherewithal to care for children, family members and their communities; a sustainable environment in the face of climate change and degradation; quality health care and education; and dignity, respect and a voice in their workplace. American capitalists, especially but not exclusively those on Wall Street, engage in speculative and extractive activities, rather than investing in socially productive assets for the future. Even when a new technology is developed that could improve workers’ lives, such as AI, these are weaponized by big capitalists in their efforts to control and extract wealth from American workers. We have a bailout economy, whereby Wall Street financiers undertake highly risky investments, grab the rewards, and when these threaten themselves and the economy, they get bailed out by the government. All of this has led to an obscene level of income and wealth inequality. And we have a political economic system where those at the top use xenophobia, and racial and ethnic baiting and oppression to try to divide and conquer America’s workers in order to stay in control.
At Game Changers, we are trying to do our small part to help overturn this immoral and destructive system.
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Democrats Rally Around ‘Affordability,’ But ‘Precarity’ Is a Better Slogan
Americans need something more ambitious and less transitory than relief at the checkout counter.
Jul 09, 2026
Janeese George’s recent victory in the Washington, DC, mayoral primary and wins by progressive Democrats in New York and Colorado last week are signs that Zohran Mamdani's election was not a one-off, and that populist, “eat the rich” messaging is effective across a broad swath of voters. But as the US heads toward midterm elections, Democrats are having a hard time finding a partywide motto with similar resonance. Since last fall, they have been focusing on “affordability” because the slogan resonates with working-class voters; their main message is that things are too expensive and that the cause is unchecked corporate greed.
But here’s the problem with focusing on affordability: It addresses poor and working-class Americans as consumers rather than as workers. It ignores the stagnant hiring environment and Americans’ widespread anxiety about getting and keeping jobs. And it fails to differentiate between short-run price pressures, such as the ones created by the war in Iran, and prolonged economic trends. Campaigning on affordability could leave Democrats laser-focused on unclogging temporary economic bottlenecks without a strategy for the long term. And affordability candidates must contend with the awkward fact that, by some measures, US wages have actually outpaced inflation. Some big-ticket items, including college tuition and airfare, are more affordable now than they were a decade ago.
If Democrats want to win this fall, promising to curb inflation and pinning the blame for high prices on corporate greed is not enough. Candidates should instead focus on precarity, the sense that American jobs and the future are hanging by a thread. I am a historian who studies how the economic concepts we use shape the politics we pursue. I have also seen firsthand how low-paying, precarious work and short-term contracts have engulfed higher education and how precarity has become a rallying cry for student workers and contingent faculty seeking to unionize.
If Democrats want to win this fall, promising to curb inflation and pinning the blame for high prices on corporate greed is not enough.
Precarity has great sloganeering potential. It names a phenomenon that straddles the working and the middle classes. More importantly, precarity messaging could help Democrats connect with younger voters, who are not yet fretting about childcare or housing prices but are very much worried about artificial intelligence, automation, and the lack of entry-level jobs.
Precarity sets in the moment someone begins thinking about entering the workforce. High schoolers and college students across the country ask themselves, “Will there be jobs for me? What can I add to the new A.I. economy?” Affordability rhetoric cannot answer these pressing questions. But running on an anti-precarity agenda would give Democrats the opportunity to lay out bold plans for working- and middle-class Americans, including strengthening safety nets for recent graduates, bankrolling programs that train young Americans for the many well-paying blue-collar jobs that go unfilled, and retraining workers when occupational demand shifts.
They should also capitalize on labor unions’ popularity, which has in the past decade returned to historic highs. Expanding workers’ collective bargaining rights should be a core part of the Democrats’ midterm platform. Only by empowering labor unions and strengthening worker protections will elected officials be able to deliver on eliminating precarity. Unfortunately, the Democrats’ other major campaign slogan, “abundance,” has drawn opposition from workers’ groups. Unions are wary that the push to cut red tape and supercharge new housing and infrastructure construction could come at the cost of hard-won wage and training standards.
Widespread unionization can eliminate bottlenecks and lower prices by ensuring that workers are better coordinated and trained, helping to avoid the accidents, delays, and manpower shortages that cause construction prices to soar. Lawmakers hoping to deliver on promises of abundance should start by creating stable jobs and secure futures for the workers who are expected to build new houses and energy infrastructure.
Of course, Democratic candidates do not have to choose between campaigning on increasing affordability or eliminating precarity. These are complementary messages, and they point to related problems. So far, however, Democratic pollsters have yet to fully test a worker-centered slogan and battleplan. Americans need something more ambitious and less transitory than relief at the checkout counter. Prices go up and down, but secure and satisfying jobs can last years, if not decades.
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An Open Letter to NATO: The False Promise of Militarized Security
NATO’s leaders would do well to remember that true security is not measured in the size of an arsenal, but in the strength of the societies it claims to protect.
Jul 08, 2026
As NATO convenes once again to double down on military spending, arms production, and the logic of deterrence through superior firepower—this despite the alliance’s own members having repeatedly used force in violation of international law in recent years, in Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Libya, Syria, and the open-ended War on Terror—it is worth asking: What kind of security are we actually buying?
These interventions, often justified under the guise of humanitarianism or collective defense, have in practice destabilized entire regions, fueled insurgencies, and visited immense suffering upon some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. The result is a perverse paradox of an alliance that presents itself as the guardian of a rules-based order but has, through its own actions, undermined that very order, deepening the insecurity it claims to combat.
The record is unambiguous: Militarized security is reactive, not preventive. It treats symptoms—territorial disputes, insurgencies, great-power rivalry—while ignoring root causes such as inequality, resource scarcity, political exclusion, and the erosion of trust in institutions. The post-1945 era, for all its flaws, demonstrated that stability is not the product of arms races, but of norms, institutions, and the rule of law.
The relative peace among liberal democracies, the decline in international armed conflicts, and the gradual expansion of human rights all occurred not because states built bigger arsenals, but because they built stronger frameworks for cooperation. International organizations—including the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the International Labor Organization, and the International Court of Justice—have encouraged cooperation and stability, while aircraft carriers or hypersonic missiles have mainly spread terror and destruction. Yet as NATO attempts to expand its influence these very institutions of social cooperation are under attack by the same NATO member states who have cut funding and even withdrawn from the organizations in some cases.
What we require is a legal framework that serves as the foundation for a truly equitable international community—one that enforces cooperation over competition, shared development over extraction, and the rights of all people over the privileges of a few.
The opportunity cost of this militarized approach urged by NATO is staggering. The combined military expenditure of NATO members now exceeds $1.3 trillion annually according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The UN Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Reports indicates this is a figure that dwarfs the estimated $40 billion needed to close the global gaps in education, healthcare, and food security.
For the price of a single nuclear-powered submarine, a nation could fund universal pre-kindergarten for its entire population for a year. For the cost of a new fighter jet squadron, it could eliminate malaria in an entire region. These are not moral abstractions; they are strategic failures.
Study after study has shown that spending on healthcare, education, and renewable energy generates far greater economic multipliers in terms of job creation and GDP growth than equivalent spending on defense. Military expenditure distorts economies, prioritizing a narrow industrial base of contractors and exporters over diversified, sustainable development. It exacerbates inequality by funneling public resources into capital-intensive sectors that benefit elites, while social services—hospitals, schools, public transit—suffer from chronic underfunding. When citizens see their tax dollars funding bombs rather than bridges, cynicism replaces civic engagement, and the very legitimacy of a country’s governance is undermined.
International law, which has been a strong impetus to cooperation in the world and which can provide fundamental rules of fairness, has been used as an instrument to promote militarization and violence in the world by the wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world.
The path forward demands a radical reimagining of international law—not as it is currently wielded by powerful states to justify intervention, enforce economic dependency, or entrench global hierarchies, but as a tool for genuine equity, cooperation, and shared prosperity.
Today, international law is too often a weapon of the strong, invoked selectively to punish adversaries while ignoring the transgressions of allies. This is not the international law we need. What we require is a legal framework that serves as the foundation for a truly equitable international community—one that enforces cooperation over competition, shared development over extraction, and the rights of all people over the privileges of a few.
Such a system must prioritize binding agreements on climate change to ensure our natural environment is protected not as a luxury but as a fundamental right. A fair international legal system would mandate fair trade practices that prevent the exploitation of weaker economies, and it would guarantee economic rights—food, water, education, healthcare—as inalienable entitlements for every human being, not as charities doled out at the discretion of the wealthy. A rejuvenated international law would also hold all states, regardless of power, accountable to the same standards, ending the hypocrisy that allows some nations to flout norms with impunity while others are punished for far lesser offenses.
The argument for participatory governance is not merely moral but strategic. States that involve all their citizens in a meaningful way in the governance of their country are less likely to engage in external conflict because their leaders are accountable to electorates who bear the costs of war. But this participation must be substantive, not procedural. Holding elections means little if economic inequality allows elites to dominate policy, if media concentration distorts public discourse, or if voter suppression silences marginalized groups. True participation requires deliberative assemblies, workplace unionization, digital direct democracy, and local autonomy. When people feel ownership over their government, they are less susceptible to the siren song of populist demagogues and the xenophobic chants of nationalists.
The post-2008 austerity consensus has been a disaster for global stability. Neoliberalism’s core assumption—that unregulated competition drives progress—ignores the fact that markets produce winners and losers, and that losers, when abandoned, turn to extremism. The rise of far-right parties, the spread of extremist movements, and the surge in gang violence are all, in no insignificant part, responses to economic despair.
A global fair deal must prioritize universal basic services as human rights, not commodities. It must invest in green industrial policy to create high-wage, low-carbon jobs. It must cancel the crushing debts of the Global South and replace free trade with fair trade, ensuring that corporations cannot exploit weak regulations in developing States. And it must tax extreme wealth to fund the end of extreme poverty. These are not socialist or communist ideas; they are merely common sense policies.
Yet NATO’s current trajectory assumes that security is a zero-sum game, where one state’s gain is another’s loss. This ignores that the greatest threats of our time—climate change, pandemics, nuclear proliferation—respect no borders. Even China and the United States, despite their rivalry, have cooperated on climate accords and pandemic response when it served their interests. The Montreal Protocol succeeded because states realized ozone depletion threatened them all. Collective security, properly structured, can work. The question is not whether cooperation is possible, but whether we have the will to pursue it. NATO does not answer this challenge, but seeks to exploit it by setting people against each other in the name of militarization.
We have a choice. We can continue down the path of militarized security, where trillions are spent on weapons that guarantee mutual destruction, where inequality festers, and where the logic of competition ensures that no one is ever truly safe. Or we can invest in a future where no child goes hungry, no family lacks healthcare, and no nation lives in fear of another—a future where international law serves as an equalizer, ensuring that the rights and dignity of all people are upheld, and that our shared planet is preserved for generations to come. The former is the path of barbarism. The latter is the path of civilization.
NATO’s leaders would do well to remember that true security is not measured in the size of an arsenal, but in the strength of the societies it claims to protect—and that those societies are far weaker when their most vulnerable members are abandoned to the consequences of unchecked militarism.
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Fire Any Financial Advisor Who Tells You to Utilize a Trump Account
To be clear, take the $1K that Trump wants to give newborn kids—I mean, why not? But never put another dime in an account like this.
Jul 07, 2026
I’m serious, and this is not just my disgust with everything Trump. There is no good reason for the overwhelming majority of people in the country to ever put a dollar in a Trump account for their kids.
To be clear, I’m not in favor of tax-sheltered accounts in general. They strike me mostly as a very inefficient way to accomplish public goals, in this case making education more affordable. The more efficient route would be to have more public funds go to support public colleges and community colleges.
The tax-sheltered account route also favors higher-income people. Over a quarter of households owe no income tax, meaning they would get no benefit whatsoever from putting money in a tax-sheltered account. Another 20 percent are in the 10 percent bracket, meaning the account would just save them just 10 cents on every dollar invested. By contrast, the highest income households save 37 cents on every dollar invested in a tax-sheltered account.
In addition, tax-sheltered accounts put a lot of money in the hands of the financial industry. Tens of billions of dollars go to the people and companies who administer these accounts, creating a pointless layer of wasteful bureaucracy.
To be fair, the Trump accounts limit fees to 0.1 percent of assets, far lower than is charged by many accounts. This is an important point. People can get low-cost funds in other accounts also. Stock index funds generally have the lowest fees, and most people would be wise to take advantage of them. People will tell you that they will beat the market, but most won’t, and you’ll just end up wasting money in higher fees and trading costs.
But that has nothing to do with individuals’ decisions on where to put their money. For better or worse, Trump accounts exist. The question is whether people will be helping their kids by putting money into them. And, as I said above, the answer for almost everyone is no.
The main reason is that we already have 529 accounts for the purpose of saving for a kid’s education. The big difference between the accounts for this purpose is that it is possible to withdraw money from a 529 account, if it’s needed, where it is not possible to withdraw money from a Trump account for any reason, until the kid turns 18.
People do pay a penalty for taking money out of a 529 early, but at least they can have access to it if they need it. And unexpected events do happen. People can lose a job, have serious medical expenses, or get divorced. These and other unanticipated situations can require people to dip into whatever savings they have. With a 529 plan, they can use the money if they really need it. With a Trump account, they are out of luck.
It is important to recognize that withdrawals for non-education purposes are fairly common. A recent study by Vanguard found that 2 percent of accounts had an unqualified withdrawal in an average year. If an account is open on average for 20 years, this would mean that 40 percent of accounts have an unqualified withdrawal. People don’t expect bad things to happen, but they do.
Also, since the penalty is based only on the earnings portion of the 529 plan, not the whole sum in the plan, in most cases it is likely to be small. Suppose someone pulls $5K out of a 529 plan, where earnings are currently 40 percent of the money in the plan. That means they would pay taxes on $2,000, plus a penalty of 10 percent. If they are in the 10 percent bracket, their taxes would be $200, and their penalty would $200. If they were in the zero bracket, say because they had lost their job, they would only pay the $200 penalty. That compares to being unable to touch their money at all in a Trump account. (The money in a 529 is not taxable at all if used for educational purposes. The earnings in a Trump account are taxable.)
It’s also worth mentioning that it’s not even possible to change asset allocations in a Trump account. Suppose your kid is 17, one year too young to make a withdrawal. If you’re worried there is an AI bubble likely to burst, and you would rather have your money in Treasury bonds, you’re out of luck. Trump accounts won’t let you make the switch; you have to go down with Elon Musk and the rest of the market.
The silliest argument given by proponents of Trump accounts is that they can be rolled over into an IRA to allow for lifelong wealth accumulation. So can the money in 529 accounts, up to a ceiling of $35,000.
The Trump gang makes a big issue of the $35,000 ceiling, but this is something only elite types with lots of money would care about. Very few people ever accumulate more than $35,000 in a 529 account, and the vast majority of people who do will find some education-related expense that would reduce the value of the account to less than $35,000. Remember, even food and housing can count as education-related expenses.
But let’s say someone ends up with an amount over $35,000 that they can’t use for education-related expenses. Suppose they have $40,000 that they want to roll over into an IRA. In this situation they would have to pay a 10 percent penalty on the amount over $35,000. That would be $500 on the $5,000 difference.
They would also have to pay taxes on the $5,000. The beneficiary is the one receiving the money, so they would be paying the tax. Since they are just beginning their working career, they likely have a relatively low income. This means they will almost certainly be in the 10 percent or 15 percent tax bracket, and quite possibly the zero bracket.
So, this is the bad scenario that Trump account proponents say it is important to avoid, and therefore skip a 529 and put your money in a Trump account instead? That seems pretty whacky, and why you need to fire your financial adviser if they suggest putting money in a Trump account.
To be clear, take the $1K that Trump wants to give newborn kids. It would be a much better use of tax dollars if we provided food and medical care to kids from low-income families than giving out $1K checks to millions of families that don’t need it. But you aren’t going to change the policy by turning down the money. If it bothers you, donate the money to a good cause, but do take the money and don’t ever put another penny in a Trump account.
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Are We Willing to Actually Tax Billionaires or Only Willing to Talk About It?
The question before us in California is not complicated. Are we going to stand with the three million people—our friends and neighbors—about to lose their health care, or with the billionaire class that would rather we looked away?
Jul 03, 2026
There are more billionaires in my district and the surrounding area than almost any other Member of Congress. Within fifty miles of my district sits nearly a third of the entire American stock market—over $20 trillion in value—and five companies worth more than a trillion dollars each. For years, I have fought for fairness in our tax policy. If America has been good to you, you must do good for America.
There are 938 billionaires in America. Together they are worth $8.2 trillion. The bill I wrote with Bernie Sanders asks them for 5 percent every year.
This is a simple tax on wealth. Every year, this tax evaluates the total value of a billionaire’s holdings, their stock, their companies, their real estate, and taxes 5 percent of it. Not their income, which they have arranged to be almost nothing. The wealth itself. The same way a family pays property tax on a house whether or not they sell it. We conduct this assessment on individual’s estates already when they die.
This billionaire wealth tax will raise $4.4 trillion over a decade. This is enough to establish a $60,000 salary floor for every public school teacher in America, cap child care at 7 percent of a family’s income, and restore the $1 trillion stripped from Medicaid and the ACA, with a $3,000 check left over for every household under $150,000.
The California Fight
California legislators have proposed a state tax to target similar excessive wealth. A proposition on the November ballot would levy a one-time 5 percent tax on the wealth of the state’s 250 billionaires. Accrued over 5 years, it would raise $100 billion to save health care for 3 million Californians. I am backing it.
Opposing these landmark taxes, Governor Newsom has suggested a “minimum income tax”. The focus of this tax is billionaires’ reported income, as well as the loans they take out to live on. An income tax, not a wealth tax. That is the problem. Newsom goes after that income, but billionaires have very little. Most take no salary at all. They borrow against their stock, live on the loans, and pass the fortune to their children without ever selling a share. The wealth underneath goes untouched.
Bernie and I tax the wealth itself, and our bill raises $4.4 trillion. Newsom’s tax on these borrowed assets only raises 1/44th of that. That’s why the tech oligarchs support Newsom’s proposal. They hope they can trick folks into making the issue go away.
Same billionaires, forty-four times the revenue from Bernie and I’s proposal compared to Newsom’s.
Tax what they own, not what they report.
No Capital Flight
I was criticized for the bill, as well as my support of California’s proposed Billionaire Tax. Many said that the wealth flight from California would devastate our economy. They were wrong. In Q1 of 2026, California received more venture capital investment than the rest of the country combined. Then the billionaires spent millions propping up my primary challenger. He received 6 percent of the vote.
Tax over $50 million
And the tax should not stop at billionaires, it must reach centimillionaires. The tax has to reach all fortunes $50 million and up, and one already does. Every year it has been introduced, I have cosponsored the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act. It starts at $50 million: 2 percent a year on wealth above that line, And it reaches the money inside irrevocable trusts, taxed to the grantor who set them up. Moving a fortune into a trust should not take it off the books from a wealth tax.
Wealth Taxes are the Moral Test of Our Time
Supporters are right to call the fight in California the reverse Proposition 13 of our generation. In 1978, California voted for Prop 13 to cap property taxes, and that anti-tax revolt carried Ronald Reagan to the presidency two years later. This is that revolt in reverse: instead of capping taxes on property, we are taxing the extreme wealth at the top. This is a philosophical fight, and California is the test case for the nation.
So the question is not complicated. Are we going to stand with the three million Californians about to lose their health care, or with the billionaire class that would rather we looked away? Are we the party of working people, or just the party of the donor class? Are we going to return to the party of FDR, or keep telling ourselves we need to do what the donors want?
Are we willing to tax extreme wealth, or only willing to talk about it?
I know my answer. We cannot have a nation where 938 people grow $1.5 trillion richer in a year while a teacher in my district takes a second job to cover rent.
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