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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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