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We Must Keep a Progressive Vision of the Future Alive in the Trump Era
We need a progressive agenda that addresses the many crises that working families face and points us forward to a better life for all.
Jan 20, 2025
Inauguration day is here, a day that many of us have dreaded.
Our opposition to President Donald Trump is based not only on our profound disagreement with him on most of the important issues facing our country but, even more importantly, the lies, fear mongering, bigotry, and xenophobia which underlay those policies. Democracy flourishes where differences of opinion are respected and debated. Democracy is severely undermined under the barrage of bigotry, hate, and disinformation that Trump and many of his acolytes propagate.
Further, as Trump returns to the presidency, there is deep frustration with the inability of the Democratic Party to provide a clear alternative to Trumpism. It appears that most Democrats have learned little or nothing from the recent disastrous elections. It's just not good enough to critique Trump and right-wing Republicans. That's been done for the last 10 years. You have to stand FOR something. You have to provide an alternative to a status quo economy and political system which is just not working for the average American.
We must oppose them as if we were fighting for our children, for future generations, for democracy, and for the very well-being of our planet—because that is precisely what is at stake.
This is the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and major advances in technology can make us even wealthier. There is no rational reason why 60% of Americans should live paycheck to paycheck or why we have massive and growing income and wealth inequality. There is no rational reason why we are the only major country not to guarantee healthcare for all, and why we pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. There is no rational reason as to why 800,000 Americans are homeless and millions of others spend more than half of their limited income to put a roof over their heads. There is no rational reason why 25% of seniors in America are trying to survive on $15,000 a year or less, why we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any wealthy nation, why young people leave college deeply in debt, or why childcare is unaffordable for millions of families.
We can do better. We must do better. But, in order to effectively move forward, we need to explain to the American people the role that Oligarchy and corporate greed have played in destroying working class lives in this country. We need a progressive agenda that addresses the many crises that working families face and points us forward to a better life for all.
Short-term, as Trump comes into office, we must call his bluff. In the recent campaign he ran as an anti-establishment populist prepared to take on the political class and act on behalf of working families. Well, let us hold him to his words and demand that he do just that. If not, we must expose him for the fraud that he is.
During his campaigns Trump has said that the pharmaceutical companies are "getting away with murder" and that he wanted to lower the cost of prescription drugs in this country. If that is true, we should be willing to work with him to make that happen. We have made some good progress under former President Joe Biden in this area, but much more needs to be done. If Trump is unwilling to stand up to the power of the pharmaceutical industry, we must make that clear.
At a time when many financially strapped Americans are paying 20 or 30% interest rates on their credit cards, President Trump stated that he wants to cap credit card interest rates at 10%. I agree and will soon be introducing legislation to do just that. Let's see if he supports that bill.
Trump has rightfully pointed out that disastrous trade agreements like NAFTA and PNTR with China have cost us millions of good-paying American jobs as corporations shut down manufacturing in this country and moved abroad to find cheap labor. As someone who strongly opposed those agreements I look forward to working with him on new trade policies that will protect American workers and create good paying jobs in our country. Is he serious about this issue? Let's find out.
Some of Trump's nominees have also made important points. Trump's nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says that food corporations are "poisoning" our young people with highly processed foods that are causing obesity, heart disease, and other serious health problems. Is Trump willing to take on the greed of major food corporations that are making record breaking profits? I doubt it, but let's give him the opportunity.
Trump's Labor Secretary nominee Lori Chavez-DeRemer has been supportive of the PRO Act, which would protect a worker's right to join a union and bargain for better pay, benefits, and working conditions. She is right. Workers must have the right to join a union without illegal interference by their bosses. Will the Trump administration stand up to corporate interests and work with us to pass the PRO Act into law? Stay tuned.
No one denies that we must end waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government. Elon Musk, for example, is correct when he points out that the Pentagon has failed seven audits and cannot fully account for its budget of over $800 billion. We must make the Defense Department far more efficient. If we do that we can save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year and cut defense spending.
While we should be prepared to work with the Trump administration in areas where we can find agreement, we must also be prepared to vigorously oppose them in the many areas where they are not only wrong, but are bringing forth extremely dangerous policy.
We must vigorously oppose Trump, his multi-billionaire cabinet, and Republicans in Congress when they try to pass massive tax breaks for the rich while cutting Medicaid and other public health benefits desperately needed by working families.
We will oppose them when they try to privatize or cut Social Security, the Veterans Administration, Medicare, public education, the postal service, and other important public agencies.
We will oppose them when they try to repeal the Affordable Care Act and take away healthcare from millions of Americans.
We will oppose them when they represent the needs of the fossil fuel industry and try to rollback climate protections that put at risk the very habitability of our planet for future generations.
We will oppose them when they try to further take away the rights of women to make healthcare decisions about their own bodies.
If there were ever a time when progressives need to make their voices heard, this is that time.
We must oppose them as if we were fighting for our children, for future generations, for democracy, and for the very well-being of our planet—because that is precisely what is at stake.
Let us not forget that Republican margins in the House and Senate are very slim. If we mobilize effectively we CAN stop some of their worst proposals. It was not that long ago, for example, that people making their voices heard all across the country saved the Affordable Care Act from Trump and a Republican majority.
It is also critically important that we never stop fighting for our vision for the future—one in which we have a government that works for all of its people, and not just a wealthy few.
Can we, one day, create an economic system based on the principles of justice, not greed? Yes, we can.
Can we transform a rigged and corrupt political system and create a vibrant democracy based on one person, one vote? Yes, we can.
Can we make healthcare a human right as we establish a system designed to keep us healthy and extend our life-expectancy, not one based on the profit needs of insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry? Yes, we can.
Can we, in the wealthiest country on Earth, provide free quality public education and job training for all from childcare to graduate school? Yes, we can.
Can we combat climate change and protect the very habitability of our planet for future generations, and create millions of jobs in the process? Yes, we can.
Can we make certain that artificial intelligence and other exploding technologies are used to improve the quality of life for working people, and not just make the billionaire class even richer. Yes, we can.
And even though we are not going to succeed in achieving that vision in the immediate future with Trump as president and Republicans controlling Congress, it is imperative that vision be maintained and that we continue to fight for it.
Let's not kid ourselves. This is one of the most pivotal and difficult moments in the history of our country. What happens in the next few years will impact this country and the world for decades. Despair is not an option. We must aggressively educate and organize and go forward together.
Thank you for standing with me in that fight.
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What Donald Trump Has Revealed About Our Country
Now is the time for assessing the assets of the citizenry and putting them to work.
Jan 19, 2025
The rise of Donald Trump from a widely publicized, if failed, business boss to a two-term president has taught us a great deal about our society. He will teach us even more as his dictatorial regime, starting January 20, 2025, further unravels what is left of the civilized norms, our democratic institutions, and the purported rule of law.
Democracy and the rule of law rest for their proper functioning on countervailing checks and balances and institutions that further a just society. Look at how these bulwarks of democracy have enfeebled themselves to permit the ascension of Trump and Trumpism operating above the law and securing a hard autocracy that is slouching toward fascism.
1. The utter failure of Congress to safeguard and use its exclusive constitutional authorities vis-à-vis the executive branch is shameful. These include the declare war clause, the appropriations power, confirmation, information duties, critical oversight of the executive and judicial branches, and the responsibility to provide wide access to the citizenry from whom it receives its delegated power by “We the People.”
The decline of Congress into a rubber stamp has reached a disgraceful depth where it will not enforce its subpoenas (over 125 congressional subpoenas during Trump’s first term were defied with impunity) and will do nothing to curb rampant violations of statutes, the Constitution, and treaties by administrations of both parties.
However, Trump’s defiance of Congress and his usurpation of Congressional authority have been more overt, brazen, and daily than his predecessors, including active and regular obstruction of justice by his White House.
2. The crumbling of the Democratic Party, the sole opposition to Trump’s GOP in an enforced two-party duopoly, has had a decadeslong history of decay. For over 50 years, the Democratic Party has allowed campaign money to increasingly erode its fealty to working families, distancing itself ever more from the working class—the base of FDR’s repeated electoral victories. This has debased the recruitment of party leaders to levels below mediocrity.
These “leaders” managed to turn a national party into a regional party abandoning half the country (the red states) including six mountain and prairie states that used to have Democratic senators. It is hard to win national elections for the presidency and workable majorities in Congress with such a decisive handicap.
This ditch that the party dug for itself has led to scapegoating its losses onto the tiny Green Party while telling its doubting voters that they have nowhere to go. “Don’t you know how bad the Republicans are?” goes the immolating refrain.
3. The labor unions—weakened by job-exporting corporate globalization, automation, and weak, entrenched leadership have tied unconditionally its fortunes to the corporate Democratic Party which gives workers little or nothing in return. No labor law reform to facilitate organization, no real push for a livable wage, no rigorous regulation of workplace health and safety, and little protection against corporate theft of private pensions. Lately, the AFL-CIO unions have been further inhibited by more of their members becoming Republican voters. Labor leaders have not developed a counter strategy.
4. The legal profession, its bar associations, and law schools—ideally the first responders against lawlessness—have been compromised by lucrative corporate clientele and the prospects of such riches. We have tested these institutions with repeated challenges to step up against government illegalities, to no avail. To say they are AWOL is to engage in impermissible understatement.
5. The organized church has traditionally been the custodians of the norms and standards that bind members of society together. The “Golden Rule” is one of the greatest precepts ever dedicated to guide human and institutional interactions. The Ten Commandments have served a similar secular purpose to the extent they are observed. Trump as the worst destroyer of norms in American history has chronically violated these principles in his personal, business, and political careers.
When I asked the National Council of Churches why they don’t take the kinds of stands they took during the civil rights period in the 1960s, their reply was that they were deterred from such positions by the sizable minority of evangelical churches within their membership. Compare this to the approach of the Courageous Baptist Jimmy Carter!
6. The citizenry, as the ultimate savior of a just, practicing democracy, has been neglected and exploited by corporate power and indifference. There is a toll exacted on people who were never given a civic education and civic experience in elementary and secondary school. The citizenry pays the price of powerlessness when up against abusive treatment from corporate employers and corporate lobbyists. These same corporations envelop people in consuming spectator sports, mass corporate entertainment on their screens, and now fingertip addictions to various forms of gambling—not exactly the preconditions for a thriving town hall turnout or a smart voting citizenry doing their pre-election homework.
Couple these dulling interfaces with the desperate daily effort of many people to pay their bills, the constant indebtedness, so many chronic illnesses, and the drain of home healthcare in the only Western country without universal health insurance, and one sees how little discretionary time or self-regard is left to perform civic duties.
What local and national citizen advocacy groups there are in the fields of action are impeded by being largely ignored by the mass media and excluded by elected and appointed officials (See The Incommunicados report at incommunicadoswatch.org).
Now is the time for assessing the assets of the citizenry and putting them to work. We still have the sovereign power, still out-number the opponents of democracy by a wide margin, still can rise to control those 535 members of Congress who can be summoned to citizen-shaped town meetings, still can see one percent of really active citizenry representing majority opinion, often liberal and conservative coalitions, turning tide after tide in Congress and much more.
For operating details, strategies, and success stories, I can only refer you to three of my books: Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, Breaking Through Power: It’s Easier Than We Think, and Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People. (In addition, also see the unprecedented 2016 Constitution Hall proceedings at BreakingThroughPower.org).
Yes, friends, like other worthwhile endeavors, an operating democracy takes work, but when it works its blessings are very impressive.
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'We Must Be Bolder': Faiz Shakir Enters Race for DNC Chair
"We will have learned nothing about the last four years if we proceed as normal with a failing Democratic brand."
Jan 17, 2025
Longtime progressive strategist Faiz Shakir, who managed Sen. Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign, announced his late entry into the race for Democratic National Committee chair earlier this week, expressing frustration with what he described as the current crop of candidates' apparent "lack of vision and conviction for what to do to restore a deeply damaged Democratic brand."
"As I have listened to our candidates, I sense a constrained, status-quo style of thinking," Shakir wrote in a Medium post. "We cannot expect working-class audiences to see us any differently if we are not offering anything new or substantive to attract their support."
Shakir's decision to join the race comes two weeks before DNC's hundreds of members are set to vote on who will lead the organization in the wake of the disastrous 2024 elections, which saw Republicans win a trifecta at the federal level and Democrats continue to hemorrhage working-class support.
Shakir, the founder of More Perfect Union—a progressive media organization whose mission is to help build working-class power—said he's come away from recent DNC candidate forums and conversations with the view that "we wrongly perceive a powerlessness about the role of chair, confining it merely to being some kind of pass-through financial vehicle to distribute funds to various other entities."
"The grandest reforms I've heard so far revolve around procedural, internal changes to budgeting and consultant work, and we offer pablum around national war rooms and permanent campaigns that have no substance guiding them, deferring critical judgment about what to actually say and do to some other place and time or persons," Shakir wrote in his Medium post. "We must be bolder than that!"
"If we learned anything from our last four years, it should be that we must break some norms and get more compelling, interesting, and dynamic to win," he added. "We can't continue to defer critical political judgments to a donor class or some other outside actors. To be a multiracial working-class party, we must prove we are on their side in the fight against corporate greed."
Shakir, who previously served as a senior adviser to former Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, said he envisions a DNC that is "an organizing army" that backs workers in their fight against corporate abuses; "its own powerful media outlet" that features "working-class heroes taking on corporate greed" and airs "educational pieces about the aims and ambitions of the Silicon swamp surrounding [President-elect Donald] Trump; and a body that "actively involves the grassroots in surfacing interesting policy ideas and building civic organization around community service, faith, sports, culture, and entertainment."
"Most importantly," he wrote, "we have to strategically pick big fights with the elite and selfish oligarchs now entering government 'service' not just to decry their looting but to paint the picture of how we would wield power in a very different way."
Shakir joins a field in which two candidates—Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler and Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chair Ken Martin—are widely seen as the frontrunners. But the race has so far lacked the kind of enthusiasm that Shakir argues is badly needed.
As Politicoreported Sunday, there has been "little daylight" between the DNC chair candidates and the contest has had "all the excitement of watching a euchre tournament, full of Midwestern niceness befitting its two frontrunners but short on big ideas or disagreements over how to salvage their fortunes."
In an interview with The Associated Press, Shakir said that it is "almost like we've moved on and not even deliberated or grasped what were the challenges."
"We will have learned nothing about the last four years," he warned, "if we proceed as normal with a failing Democratic brand."
Shakir's candidacy quickly received the backing of Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA.
"I am proud to endorse Faiz Shakir as chair of the Democratic National Committee," Nelson wrote in a social media post. "Faiz not only has the right working-class credibility, vision, and insight for this moment, but he also has the vast experience needed to operate and rebuild the DNC."
"The party is at a critical moment, and we need to embrace changing [the] status quo," Nelson added. "Faiz's vision and conviction is clear: use the authority and resources of the DNC to build power for working people—the promise of America. He is the leader the party needs at this moment."
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