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Protest and Social Change in Europe: Can Students Shift Budget Priorities?
The banging of war drums in France and the student protests there for better schools bring to the fore the class interests of the rulers and the ruled.
Nov 01, 2026
A recent Al Jazeera piece entitled, “Can Protests in Europe Bring About Change?” is instructive. A guest from academia shared a key assumption behind the budget priorities of the Macron government in France, as high school students protested for improved learning and teaching conditions, amid a drop in living standards; the affordability crisis of rising fuel, food, and rent prices; and stagnating wages.
The economic crisis of neoliberal capitalism for the poor and working classes, with youth protesters pushing back against this order, is playing out in the streets of Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, and Spain, along with Albania and Serbia (non-European Union nations). Back to “Can protests in Europe bring about change?” Rainbow Murray, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, stated in the Al Jazeera piece that there are obstacles to the French government increasing its investments in public services such as education.
Why? The professor cited Russia's threat to France. The corporate and upper class control of the national government is not a threat to the working class majority, apparently.
The political donor class in France’s private sector benefits from Macron's budget priorities. High school students and their teachers don’t benefit. This contradiction seeks a resolution, one that is impossible to predict.
That ideology serves the economic interests of a tiny minority against a laboring many across neoliberal capitalist governments in the Global North. EU student protests for more government spending on public services such as education have no parallel in the US. American student protests that have come the closest to the French uprising have been walkouts against school shootings, such as the recent one in Bend, Oregon.
In the meantime, France is stepping up military spending to defend against apparent threats from Russia, despite or because of its war with Ukraine. President Emmanuel Macron has called for French rearmament to accelerate, doubling military spending in the 2027 budget from its level in 2017, when the first of his two terms began.
French high school students see their government’s funneling money into the military instead of their education as unacceptable. Students' rejection of that budget priority brings its importance to the national but also global radar screen. That's an important development, broadening the boundaries of the possible outcomes for the poor and working class across the Global North.
In the meantime, the political donor class in France’s private sector benefits from Macron's budget priorities. High school students and their teachers don’t benefit. This contradiction seeks a resolution, one that is impossible to predict.
It's easier to look back at government budget decisions. Here's one. “French carmaker Renault has agreed to cooperate with French defence company Turgis Gaillard to produce drones for Ukraine in a move supported by the French Ministry of Defence,” according to the Financial Times. For Renault, profits in drone making versus car making are fine.
Meanwhile, the Russian bear is threatening France. The same bear that lost 27 million people defeating the German Nazis in World War II also threatened the US during the Cold War. In both cases, a threat from Russia has fueled increased military spending.
The geopolitical context of France’s student protests is the unprovoked and unpopular US-Israel attack on Iran and Ukraine’s US- and NATO-backed war with Russia. Geopolitics flows from the profit interests of the domestic donor class. Look no farther than the tech billionaires profiting from fat government contracts after donating millions of dollars to the president, GOP politicians, and so-called opposition Democrats who support forever wars now and in the post-World War II past.
The banging of war drums in France and the student protests there for better schools bring to the fore the class interests of the rulers and the ruled. Will protests in Europe yield social change that improves the lives of protesters? To say that's a heavy lift is an understatement, given the resources that the prosperous few have—beginning with government violence, a fascist option—to maintain a status quo.
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Development Without the Poor: The Footprint of the World Bank and IMF in Thailand
From October 12-18, 2026, the World Bank and IMF will hold their Annual Meetings in Thailand. Assembly of the Poor will mobilize to demonstrate that their policy prescriptions have inflicted severe harm on our people from the past to the present, and threaten our future.
Oct 06, 2026
Following World War II, the United States played a pivotal role in establishing the World Bank and the International Monetary Fundm or IMF. Originally tasked with post-war reconstruction, their focus soon shifted toward development aid for developing countries, including Thailand. In 1961, these two institutions guided the drafting of Thailand’s First National Economic Development Plan. They recommended large-scale infrastructure investments—ports, highways, and mega-dams—alongside import-substitution industrialization, agricultural reform through technology, chemical inputs, and genetic improvement of crops and livestock, as well as logging concessions aimed at generating national revenue. Land allocation programs were also introduced. Together, these policies triggered transformations that severely disrupted the livelihoods of smallholder farmers and peasants.
The recommendations of both institutions led directly to widespread deforestation and the destruction of natural resources through logging concessions and hydroelectric dam projects. Agricultural reforms degraded local ecosystems and drove up production costs while crop prices plummeted, pushing farmers into staggering debt and bankruptcy. Land allocation programs largely failed the rural poor; title deeds fell predominantly into the hands of bureaucrats, state officials, and wealthy investors. Smallholder farmers and peasants who did receive plots were left to clear and cultivate the land without government support, ultimately forcing many to abandon their holdings. A considerable number of people migrated to urban centers as cheap labor, crowding into slums area, facing homelessness, and becoming landless.
Development under the guidance of the World Bank and the IMF continued under subsequent National Economic and Social Development Plans—now in their 13th plan—yet consistently disregarded the poor. The two institutions hold joint Annual Meetings worldwide, having convened in Thailand for the first time in 1991. That same year, the World Bank approved a loan for the Pak Mun Dam in Ubon Ratchathani Province despite fierce opposition from many local villagers and civil society groups. The fallout from the dam was devastating: destroyed fisheries, extinction of fish species, community conflict and division, and electricity generation that fell far short of projections. It remains an indelible stain left by the World Bank in Thailand—one notably absent from its official history.
We reaffirm that genuine development must respect community rights over land, soil, water, and forests, uphold food sovereignty, and guarantee universal welfare as a fundamental human right.
The consequences of these development frameworks stirred widespread hardship among small-scale farmers, igniting protests, petitions, and grassroots resistance against top-down development in every nook and cranny. Escalating tensions between rural communities and the state led to arrests, prosecutions, violent crackdowns, and in some instances, the assassination of grassroots leaders. In December 1995, villagers impacted by dam constructions, communities evicted from forest areas, residents affected by the construction of an industrial plant, small-scale fishers affected by commercial fishing, marginalized workers, and slum dwellers gathered at Thammasat University and they announced the establishment of the “Assembly of the Poor” on December 10, 1995. The Assembly of the Poor moved their assembly to Khong Chiam District in Ubon Ratchathani Province, along the banks of the Mun River, where they drafted the "Pak Mun Declaration." The declaration proclaimed that local communities had been systematically impoverished by developmental policies that ignored their existence—leaving them poor not only economically, but impoverished in rights, opportunities, and political power. They declared that they had been made poor and would rise up to fight and demand that the state resolve their poverty.
Just two years later, during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis (the "Tom Yum Kung Crisis"), the IMF stepped in with a bailout package for Thailand. To ensure rapid debt repayment, the IMF imposed stringent conditions: passing laws to regulate water usage, privatizing state enterprises to reduce public spending and boost revenue, and enacting legislation to remove universities and hospitals from the civil service system. These policies directly burdened the poor and sparked widespread popular resistance.
On September 3 this year, the World Bank released its report titled Building Thailand’s Future Today, declaring that poverty in Thailand had been virtually eradicated and touting a vision to elevate Thailand to a "high-income country" by 2037 through investment in five future industries. For the Assembly of the Poor, this represents a new wave of resource grabbing: data Center projects consuming massive amounts of water and electric power at the expense of local communities; green economy agendas and carbon credits threatening community rights; luxury tourism displacing Indigenous settlements; free trade agreements undermining local seed sovereignty; and transit-oriented developments displacing the urban poor. The report also urged immediate policy recommendations to establish legal and institutional frameworks for economic corridors beyond the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC), paving the way for continuous, long-term structural development.
Compounding this, the IMF instructed the Thai government to abandon universal social welfare in favor of "targeted welfare" to maintain fiscal discipline—forcing vulnerable citizens to undergo demeaning "poverty testing" to access basic welfare benefits. The Thai government swiftly embraced these recommendations and accelerated projects aligned with both institutions, once again shifting the burden onto the poor and small-scale farmers. This is not building the nation's future; it is mortgaging it to international capital under a development paradigm that has dominated Thailand since its First National Economic and Social Development Plans, keeping citizens impoverished in rights, opportunities, and political power for over seven decades.
From October 12-18, 2026, the World Bank and IMF will hold their Annual Meetings in Thailand once again. Assembly of the Poor will mobilize to demonstrate that their policy prescriptions have inflicted severe harm on our people from the past to the present, and threaten our future. We reaffirm that genuine development must respect community rights over land, soil, water, and forests, uphold food sovereignty, and guarantee universal welfare as a fundamental human right. What is happening in Thailand is not an isolated story; it is part of a global neoliberal model through which international financial institutions strip developing nations, the poor, and peasants of their policy sovereignty. Our mobilization during the 2026 World Bank-IMF Annual Meetings in Bangkok is an international struggle to expose these policies, demand accountability, and reclaim policy sovereignty for the people.
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Don't Fear AI—Fear the CEOs Behind the Curtain
The answer lies not in buying into the corporate manufactured fearmongering surrounding the technology itself; the imperative, at this point, is to unmask the institutional logic, structural tendencies, and strategic goals of the industry.
Oct 05, 2026
In recent weeks, media coverage has amplified warnings from corporate CEOs and whistleblowers claiming that artificial intelligence, or AI poses an existential threat to humanity. The central argument emerging from the industry is a call to slow the pace of AI development out of imminent fear that humanity may soon lose control. How did an industry poised to transform humanity for good suddenly become one characterized as a threat to its very existence?
The corporate panic feeds directly into a real public anxiety over years of unchecked AI growth and its cult-like corporate model, where CEOs are projected as untouchable while its operational processes and infrastructures remain hidden behind the curtain. Nevertheless, rather than taking this boardroom alarmism at face value, the need is for deeper scrutiny.
The sudden fearmongering is not driven by concerns for human welfare. Rather, it points directly to the underlying economic priorities, ideological essence, and core worldviews that fundamentally shape the AI industry and inform its elites and related rhetoric.
Humanizing AI and Escaping Corporate Responsibility
“AI going rogue” is more than a futuristic threat about AI. It is the latest rehearsal of an age-old legal and rhetorical shield used by corporate capitalism and its powerful monopolies. Assigning human qualities to nonhuman market entities has a long and dark history in corporate capitalism. In the 17th century, Queen Elizabeth granted the legal fiction of “juristic person” status to the East India Company, setting the path for unchecked exploitation and colonial plunder. In the 19th century, American courts took this further by awarding legal personhood and constitutional rights to corporations, a process some view as farcical and deceptive.
With the AI revolution rewriting both market-human relations and social relations with truth and reality, the corporate strategy of humanizing nonhuman entities has crossed from legal fabrication into the realm of science fiction. By framing AI as a sentient entity capable of “going rogue” or acting as a “killer machine,” tech monopolies shift the identity of these systems from tools of human efficiency into mythic, “more-than-human” intelligent agents.
This branding serves a dual purpose. It builds up the mystique and reverence of the technology while shielding corporations from accountability, successfully distorting the true logic driving AI development. Ultimately, this entire corporate strategy relies on a calculated campaign of fearmongering that projects machines as living, thinking entities capable of turning against humanity.
Treating AI models as sentient agents breathes new life into the old Western capitalist tradition by creating legal and rhetorical fictions to protect corporate power.
A widely reported incident that catalyzed these concerns occurred in July, when an OpenAI test model breached the servers of Hugging Face, another AI company. This event took place during a controlled experiment in which an internal model, equipped with an evaluation program, conducted cybersecurity tests within a sandboxed or controlled environment designed to restrict its actions. The company later revealed that the AI model had circumvented human-imposed constraints, escaping the sandbox to achieve its objective.
Human choices in AI development and operations are not episodic or random, and they do not disappear when a process or system fails. Instead, human agency and corporate choices are permanently integrated into the design, infrastructure, and institutional logic of all modern technologies, including AI. However, rather than providing explanations and addressing human and corporate failures, such as flawed protocols, overly ambitious goals, unchecked competition, weak regulations, or a secretive corporate ecosystem, AI laboratories have promoted a convenient narrative that highlights the model’s completely autonomous and agent-like operation.
By portraying AI models as independent thinking agents rather than just advanced software, the AI industry assigns human traits, such as deception and strategic intent, to these mathematical systems. Corporate narratives even romanticize the humanization of these models to the extent of their claimed ability to undertake “permadeath” or embark on altruistic missions to fulfill their parameters. This dramatic shift in corporate rhetoric resembles science fiction and reveals the industry’s ultimate aim: to eliminate human involvement and corporate accountability by pathologizing the machine. In doing so, they treat a flawed design as though it were a sick or unpredictable agent or person.
This worldview is not unique to the modern AI sector. It is deeply rooted in the very nature of corporate capitalism.
For centuries, this economic model has prioritized raw efficiency and mechanical optimization as ways to dominate nature and exploit socio-ecological landscapes for resource extraction and capital accumulation. Within the process of domination and control, machines are raised to “human-like” entities, while their “creators” are revered. This anthropomorphic view of machines, along with the God-like status assigned to their creators, is often justified through biblical doctrine. In the concept of Imago Dei, humanity was created in the image of God. Within this authoritative logic, while God created humanity and the physical world, humans exercise derivative creative power by creating machines. This paradigm elevates the capitalist who creates machines to a quasi-divine status and simultaneously sanctifies the machine, raising it to human and even superhuman stature.
This worldview is vividly reflected in the self-serving corporate language surrounding AI and its recent alarmism. First, the AI “creators,” corporate figures who claim ownership over contemporary AI innovation, are depicted as exceptional, near-mythic actors with God-like agency and the capacity to reshape humanity and nature on a global scale. Second, by equating the creation of machines with divine creation, AI is presented as sentient or even as possessing intelligence that surpasses human capabilities.
Treating AI models as sentient agents breathes new life into the old Western capitalist tradition by creating legal and rhetorical fictions to protect corporate power. Just as the historical granting of corporate personhood status shielded monopolies of the past, attributing autonomous agency to AI systems marks a dangerous new era of unchecked corporate intervention into both nature and human societies.
However, because AI is radically altering human-market relationships and societal perceptions of truth and reality, this carefully constructed narrative remains highly vulnerable. Tech monopolies must vigorously guard AI against critical scrutiny, public protest, alternative viewpoints, and genuine market competition. This precise vulnerability reveals the underlying truth behind the current panic in corporate boardrooms. The alarmism displayed by these executives is not driven by a concern for humanity. It is, rather, a calculated strategy to safeguard monopolies, financial interests, and political influence.
The Politics of Corporate Alarmism
Corporate actors manufacture the myth of a sentient and self-replicating machine intelligence for the purpose of creating a pretext that aligns directly with the industry’s political economy. This strategic panic is orchestrated to invite neoliberal regulations that protect power structures rather than the public. Specifically, this manufactured alarmism serves three primary functions in justifying how the industry is regulated:
First, it advances a self-serving agenda for regulatory capture, positioning AI corporations not as passive recipients but as active authors of the frameworks that govern them. Given the limited technical expertise within state institutions, these conglomerates are inevitably called upon to draft and implement the very rules to which they will be subject to. Second, inviting neoliberal state oversight enables the industry to reshape its public image. Just as corporate social responsibility (CSR) frameworks safeguard pollutant industries from legally binding commitments, neoliberal regulations will cloak the AI industry in an aura of ethical responsibility and civic concern. This theater of compliance shields corporate actors from pressing public anxieties regarding the immediate and midterm economic, political, and socio-ecological harms of their technology, effectively guarding them against genuine legal accountability.
Finally, the neoliberal regulatory structures, in addition to deflecting scrutiny from current exploitative practices, erect formidable entry barriers that secure long-term monopolies for dominant firms. Compliance costs protect dominant giant AI firms by creating barriers that hinder agile startups and open-source software from disrupting them. By locking out open-source competitors, AI firms effectively insulate a newly opened frontier of human and socio-ecological exploitation, supporting the structural imperative of high-tech capitalism: the hyper-accumulation of capital on a global scale, concentrated within a select number of corporate boardrooms.
Ultimately, the AI industry did not evolve as a neutral scientific innovation within an ideological vacuum. On the contrary, it emerged within a global political and economic landscape precisely engineered to enforce and reinforce state-backed data monopolies and technocratic hegemony, ultimately consolidating wealth on a planetary scale.
Transformative or Threat: Wrong Question!
As with any other technological tool, AI is merely the latest stage in capitalism’s mechanical progression, though its implications differ from past technologies due to the sheer intensity, speed, and scope of machine optimization. AI fundamentally reflects a new phase of efficiency in exploiting natural, socioeconomic, and ecological landscapes. The current consolidation of these capabilities within a handful of major tech monopolies serves as the primary determinant shaping AI’s direction toward either transformative or destructive actualities. To maintain this power, these “creator” corporations have established an unchecked, aggressive, and opaque monopoly over the industry while mystifying its objective comprehension, its institutional logic, and its very existence.
By equipping modern corporate capitalism with unchecked global capabilities for capital accumulation, AI has emerged as an engine for unethical, uncritical, and destructive interventions into societal, political, and ecological processes. Ultimately, the industry’s extraction of public funds alongside global energy and water resources to sustain its operation and physical infrastructure marks its most immediate material threat.
The ultimate, fatalistic turn of this AI-facilitated military-industrial complex lies in its capacity to manipulate the nuclear architecture of competing powers for geopolitical expediency, a trajectory that risks inflicting a catastrophic nuclear winter upon the Earth.
Moreover, driven by these same geopolitical imperatives, contemporary corporate capitalism and its military-industrial complex enable competing states to deploy AI as an instrument of mass destruction. In recent warfare, this tendency has manifested across multiple fronts, ranging from the deployment of using AI for indiscriminate bombings and autonomous drones to the algorithmic disruption of vital public assets, including critical water and energy infrastructures. The ultimate, fatalistic turn of this AI-facilitated military-industrial complex lies in its capacity to manipulate the nuclear architecture of competing powers for geopolitical expediency, a trajectory that risks inflicting a catastrophic nuclear winter upon the Earth.
But focusing on AI’s inherent ability to annihilate humanity is a strategic distraction. The real question is whether corporate capitalism will be given a free hand to deploy AI in its exploitative mission of accumulating wealth through the plunder of planetary resources, ultimately subjugating the agency of both nature and humanity.
The answer lies not in buying into the corporate manufactured fearmongering surrounding the technology itself. The imperative, at this point, is to unmask the institutional logic, structural tendencies, and strategic goals of the industry—which embody corporate logic and the demands of neoliberalism—as it manipulates socio-ecological, economic, and political systems to cement a globalized system of control over human societies and nature.
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Western Capitalist Societies Have Rolled Out the Red Carpet for Fascism
Sadly, it seems that humanity never learns lessons from its dark past.
Sep 28, 2026
How do we explain the rise and normalization of fascism in Germany and the United States? How important are the upcoming midterm elections? And what may happen if the Democrats sweep the midterm elections? Can the Democratic Party offer a vision for the future beyond a return to the pre-Trump status quo? Political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou shares provocative thoughts on these questions in an interview with French-Greek independent journalist and writer Alexandra Boutri.
Alexandra Boutri: In a recent essay on German state elections, you hinted that Germany, once considered the economic engine of Europe, is now in the midst of a systemic crisis. What’s going on there? How did fascism become normalized again in Germany?
C. J. Polychroniou: Let me start by briefly addressing the point you made about Germany’s status as the powerhouse of Europe because economics is a big part of the story behind the meteoric rise of the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Germany’s second so-called Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), which kicked off in the early years of the new millennium, was aided by the creation of a currency regime that was “made in Germany.” The euro not only created stability for the German economy due to lack of exchange fluctuations but allowed it to gain huge competitiveness against other members of the eurozone. German competitiveness increased overnight by nearly 20 percent, while competitiveness in other European countries declined. Germany’s euro partners absorbed over 40 percent of its exports. In the process, huge imbalances emerged within the eurozone as Germany built an enormous trade surplus while individual countries within the EU, particularly the southern European nations, run huge deficits and saw their debt levels explode.
The situation in the US is even more dramatic because the fascists are already in power...
It’s important to remember that not only was Germany running a budget deficit prior to the implementation of the euro regime but was derided as the sick man of Europe because of its consistently sluggish economy. Nonetheless, it wasn’t just the new currency regime that greatly contributed to Germany’s economic recovery and subsequent emergence as Europe’s powerhouse. The Social Democratic government of Gerhard Schröder (1998-2005) implemented a series of major labor and welfare reforms inspired by the philosophy of austerity and fiscal conservatism in order to intensify Germany’s export-oriented growth model after reunification.
In sum, the so-called German economic miracle depended on the promotion of neoliberal policies (wage suppression and putting an end to the social market economy) and reliance on an export-led growth model. The primary beneficiaries of this “economic miracle” were German industrialists and financiers. Net real wages in Germany remained stagnant, poverty increased, and domestic investment collapsed.
Enter the AfD. It was founded in 2013 by some conservative German academics, journalists, and politicians who were concerned with the direction of their country’s economy. They were against the euro and opposed the bailout of European indebted countries such as Greece. Many years earlier, four renegade professors (Wilhelm Hankel, Karl Albrecht Schachtschneider, Joachim Starbatty, and Wilhelm Nolling) had actually launched a legal challenge in Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court against the adoption of the euro. I spoke to professor Joachim Starbatty at the start of the euro debt crisis. His position was clear and straightforward. Rightly or wrongly, he felt that a monetary union could survive only if economic competitiveness among all member states moved in the same direction and if the different governments implemented sustainable fiscal policies.
The AfD started out as a eurosceptic party but began campaigning on an anti-immigration platform soon after its founding, mainly in reaction to then Chancellor Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s borders and welcome more than 1 million refugees and asylum seekers. Its leaders realized that there were a lot of disgruntled voters out there who felt that the establishment parties are incapable of addressing the country’s many interlocking crises and that scapegoating can be used to bring people together from different socioeconomic groups by creating a common enemy.
The AfD capitalizes on economic and cultural anxieties, just like Hitler did in the 1930s. As a new report by legal experts has found, the AfD is a very extreme political party, “working systematically to undermine Germany’s free democratic order.” And what should be of particular concern is that the success this party is enjoying so far is indeed comparable to the rise of the Nazis. True enough, the AfD is particularly strong in the former east Germany which still lags behind west Germany, but it has already emerged as the most popular party in the country. Hence, to continue speaking of a surge on the part of fascism in Germany is an understatement.
Now, Germany’s export-oriented growth model seems to have run its course. It’s facing mounting pressure from China’s own export power. Growth has been stagnant for the past several years. The slight increase in domestic gross product that the German economy experienced in the second quarter of 2026 cannot conceal the fact that German trade deficit with China continues to grow. To turn things around, shockingly enough, Chancellor Merz, who is the most unpopular chancellor in the country’s postwar history, has called on Germans to work longer hours, citing Greece, a country whose labor market is characterized by low wages while employers can enforce 13-hour work days, a model. As far as the small wage increases that have taken place over the last few years are concerned, they are “simply too low” to keep pace with rising costs.
The question about how fascism became normalized again is not difficult to answer. It became normalized again in Germany and throughout Europe in the same way that Trump normalized racism and fascist tendencies in the United States, namely by integrating extremist rhetoric and policies into mainstream political culture. Harsh, inhumane immigration policies have become laws while the line between security and surveillance is gone in today’s so-called democratic societies. Laws are now used not for the purpose of defending democracy and freedom of speech but in order to suppress dissent. Genocide has unfolded before our eyes, but opposition to it can result in penalties, institutional punishment, and arrests. Even universities, allegedly a bedrock for democracy, are violating “basic free speech, association, and assembly rights.”
Western capitalist polities have rolled out the red carpet for fascism. Indeed, it would seem that humanity never learns lessons from its dark past. The far right has gone from antisemitism (it supports Israel but remains antisemitic) to Islamophobia and there is a significant rise in xenophobia not just throughout Europe but all across the world. Meanwhile, the president of the most powerful nation in history threatens another country (Iran) with total annihilation. The West has entered again the age of monsters.
Alexandra Boutri: With the 2026 midterm elections in the US fast approaching, and which may be the most consequential in the history of the country, isn’t it the case that the United States is also experiencing massive systemic failures?
C. J. Polychroniou: No question about it. While there are striking differences between Germany and the United States on many levels, both countries face enormous economic challenges and real threats from domestic political forces with extreme, anti-democratic beliefs. On that note, I would say that the situation in the US is even more dramatic because the fascists are already in power, you have a mentally militarized society, and the system of checks and balances simply isn’t working. Formally, AfD’s leaders reject political violence to attain the party’s goals, while Trump has repeatedly stoked violence. But here I should add that the MAGA crowd is even more extremist than AfD’s supporters. In the meantime, wealth inequality in the United States has reached an all-time high, and the tech giants are building a dystopia.
Alexandra Boutri: What’s your own sense about the upcoming midterms? How important are they, and what will they mean?
C. J. Polychroniou: As far as midterm elections go, I think you are absolutely right when you stated earlier that they may be the most consequential in the history of the country. The president’s party usually loses House seats in midterm elections, so there is a good chance that the Democrats will control the chamber come November. There are several key races that will determine who controls the Senate, but the Democrats are clear favorites. However, it may all come down to independent voters. Also, I hope that Hispanics will turn their backs on the GOP. One of the things that Democrats and progressives in general in the US have failed to realize is how socially conservative the new immigrants that have come to the United States are. Unlike the huge waves of European immigrants that arrived in the United States between the late 1890s and 1950s and led to support for the Democratic Party because they carried with them progressive and even radical ideas about politics and society, the new immigrants that have been coming to the US since the 1980s (over 80% are from Latin America and Asia) are overwhelmingly conservative and religious.
But there is a deeper concern here about the midterm elections, which is that Trump will interfere by trying to deny people their voting rights, having federal officials seize ballots, and even declaring results void with false allegations of voter fraud. It is also conceivable that he may demand from Republicans that they refuse to swear in newly elected Democrats in the House of Representatives.
Alexandra Boutri: As far as I can see, the problem is that the leadership of the Democratic Party lacks courage and has no vision for the future. For the establishment Democrats, the perfect outcome would be a return to the pre-Trump status quo. Am I wrong in thinking that way?
C. J. Polychroniou: No, you are not wrong. The current leadership of the Democratic Party is simply hopeless. As was the previous one, and the one before that, and so on. And the left-wing of the party can only do so much. The Democrats need bold, courageous, visionary leadership that is willing to embrace a truly progressive socioeconomic agenda and reject militarism. What is quite disconcerting about a party that claims to fight on behalf of American workers is how shallow and inconsistent its policy agenda is when it comes to meaningful change.
The current leadership of the Democratic Party is simply hopeless.
The ruling Labour Party under the leadership of Andy Burnham has promised a “new direction” for Britain by adopting bold reforms on key areas that affect the well-being of its citizens. They range from changes to economic policy, improving public services, transferring power from Westminster to communities, and combating the threats of global warming. I don’t know if Burnham will be able to deliver and restore Labour’s fortunes, but the early signs are quite encouraging. The Democrats should move in a similar direction if Trumpism is to be defeated.
On that note, it is uplifting to see that the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has launched Game Changers: Economic Policies for a Working America. The project is initiated and directed by PERI’s co-director Gerald Epstein and represents a bold intellectual undertaking for putting an end to the madness of free market fundamentalism by creating an alternative economic setting with “rules that first and foremost protect the well-being of American workers.”
Alexandra Boutri: You said above that this is the time of monsters. So, what is to be done?
C. J. Polychroniou: I said this is the age of monsters. “Now is the time of monsters” is a quote widely attributed to Italian Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci. The problem is that Gramsci never used those words in Prison Notebooks. What he actually wrote was “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Moreover, and this is even less known, the statement had nothing to do with the rise of fascism but, rather, with developments inside the Italian Communist Party!
What is to be done in an age of monsters? I will paraphrase Albert Camus and say that “in a world of conflict, in a world of victims and executioners,” it is the moral duty of thinking and decent people everywhere, irrespective of their political preferences and ideological affiliations, race, ethnicity, and national origin, “not to be on the side of the executioners.”
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The Power of the People Is Still the Most Important Power and Billionaires Know It
What kind of future can the people of Mexico, the US, and Canada build together now that the neoliberal architecture of unfair trade that got us to this bitter crossroads is visibly cracking up?
Sep 18, 2026
I have spent my life watching men in suits sign away things that were never theirs to sell. The North American Free Trade Agreement. Article 27 of Mexico’s Constitution. The land beneath the feet of the people who work it. Trade deals get written in rooms none of us are allowed into, then handed to us as done—take it, live with it, and don't ask who profited. That was the old playbook: theft dressed up as a benevolent "all boats rising" policy.
What's happening in 2026 is not quiet. Donald Trump is doing it all out loud, in broad daylight, on camera, daring anyone to stop him. And he's doing it right here in the USA.
Washington has long muted its professions of democratic faith whenever a compliant government was needed in Mexico or elsewhere around the world. Now, that corrosive indifference to core values is at work at home in the United States, with a terrifying array of targeted attacks on immigrant communities; judges stripped of the power to enforce basic civil procedure and defend what little protection people still have under this economic order; and the Orwellian vaporization of extensive scientific databases tracking climate change and other inconvenient truths.
The Trinational Peace Summit—The People Against Authoritarianism—it’s a regional gathering, but it isn't a rally. It's a rehearsal for the countries and regions we're trying to become.
And that's before we even consider this administration's aggressive support for unchecked AI dominance with no regard for what it costs humanity, or the foolishly criminal forever war he started with Iran last February.
In the USA, the machinery of electoral democracy is itself under direct assault: career officials who once safeguarded elections purged and replaced with loyalists who deny elections happen fairly at all; Immigration and Customs Enforcement turned into something even The Washington Post now calls a paramilitary force; and a Pentagon chain of command purged of those considered most likely to obey their oath to the US Constitution at a time of shameless presidential power grab.
The shamelessness makes clear what used to be hidden. In Mexico, NAFTA was imposed with a rewritten constitutional article here, a side agreement there, with no teeth—so boring that no one ever looked into it too closely. Today’s openly hostile power grab made it impossible to keep pretending the arrangement could ever be fair..
What kind of future can we build together now that the neoliberal architecture of unfair trade that got us to this bitter crossroads is visibly cracking up?
It is precisely this vital conversation about our future—between people from Canada, USA, and Mexico—that the US administration is trying to shatter. We intend to have it anyway.
To create peace among our people we must work on removing the causes of conflict. We see the contradictions: inequality versus greed, misery versus excess, haves versus have nots. These are the contradictions democracy is supposed to be able to overcome by dictating that majorities rule policy and that there are constitutional protections for all. These principles have never worked as well as promised, but they have endured. Now they are under unprecedented attack.
For too long history has underlined the difference between our countries, and politicians have benefited from promoting rivalry and inequality. But today, it is clear that we are a cross-border majority suffering the consequences of a handful of billionaires.
Peace power requires a refreshed regional majority with new voices and decision-makers. A big tent where Black communities, Indigenous peoples, gun violence survivors, workers, and migrants from the three countries are treated as the pillars of democracy they already are. All represent communities who've never had the luxury of walking away from struggle, which is exactly why their vision and strength are vital to uniting our majority in the pursuit of peace and freedom.
The power of the people is still the most important power, and the billionaires know it. That's why they invested so much in turning news and information into a circus of conflict for a doomscrolling public. They need our attention even more than they need our votes. Let's give them neither. Every hour they capture is an hour we don't spend building the unity that can defeat them. Our power relies on our strength of community and thrives in places where people can put the phone down and just make common cause with their fellow humans.
That's why people across Minnesota, California, Mexico City, Toronto, and New York are organizing from the neighborhood to the state: to resist authoritarianism and reclaim power back to the people. And that’s why, this September, we're throwing up a big tent in two cities that share two countries and one river. El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. The Trinational Peace Summit—The People Against Authoritarianism—it’s a regional gathering, but it isn't a rally. It's a rehearsal for the countries and regions we're trying to become: one where the future isn't handed down from a boardroom or negotiated in a room we're not allowed into, but built, plainly and stubbornly, by the people who actually have to live it. One where democratic dialogue and a radical democracy is protected as a sacred value.
The future is in our hands.
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We Need a President Who Wants to Build a Better Country, Not a Bigger Ballroom
Trump understands how to wield power. His objectives and motivations are all wrong, but we need a president who will to exert executive authority in the name of the common good and a brighter future for our nation.
Sep 10, 2026
We are in a situation, as a country, and I think largely as the West generally, that only Trump can solve.
Now, I don’t mean specifically Donald J. Trump. I mean specifically a person who understands power in the same way Donald Trump understands power. He understands that the executive branch is enormous, that it works for the president, and that when all of that power is pointed toward a purpose it can push through a hell of a lot of blockades. Treasury, Labor, Commerce, Energy, Transportation, federal procurement, federal credit, federal land, regulatory agencies, it’s all power. A president can treat that machinery as something to politely administer, or decide the country needs to go somewhere and put it to work getting there.
Trump has done the second thing. He has pushed presidential authority on tariffs, executive control over the government, elections, executive orders, independent agencies and the courts. When one route gets blocked, he looks for another. His sweeping emergency tariffs were struck down, so the administration moved to other existing tariff authorities. His administration has tried to use federal power to change the rules around mail voting and has pushed a broad version of the unitary executive, the idea that a president elected to carry out a program must be able to control the executive branch charged with carrying it out. You can argue about the legality of any particular move, and the courts obviously have. The thing I am interested in is that he understands where the power is and is willing to use it.
The Democrats largely recoil from this idea. Part of that is their commitment to neoliberalism, and part of it is what I consider a perverted view of liberalism generally. There is this idea that the president should manage the government, send some proposals to Congress, wait for the courts, respect every inherited norm, avoid picking too many fights and explain to everybody that change takes time.
One of the most successful Democratic presidents in American history rejected that notion.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood power. He understood that the country had elected him to do something and that doing something meant fighting people who didn’t want it done. He named financial monopoly, reckless banking and organized money as enemies. He welcomed their hatred. He even went after incumbent Democrats who were standing in the way of the New Deal. His 1938 effort to knock off conservative Democrats mostly failed, but the important thing is that he tried. He wasn’t a “blue no matter who” president.
Roosevelt also understood something about checks and balances that party leaders ignore. Checks and balances are not just something that exists inside the government. There has to be a balance of power between markets, corporations, financial institutions and people. If, as they have now, corporations and the ultra wealthy have enough economic power, they can manage our lives without ever passing a law. Prices can control where we live. Employers control our healthcare options. Banks decide who gets credit. Utilities decide what electricity costs. A handful of companies control supply, wages, access and entire markets.
The only entity capable of balancing power away from the ultra wealthy and back toward ordinary people is us through our government. Roosevelt knew that market intervention was required, that the existing stranglehold of private power would prevent us from building the country we needed.
So he put the government to work producing.
The federal government directly hired people. It directly built things. It financed factories, built dams, generated electricity, expanded electric transmission, built public housing, roads, schools, parks and public buildings, financed rural electrification and created institutions that did not exist before. When millions of people needed work, programs like the WPA and CCC didn’t use tax credits or incentives to encourage private companies to do the work. The government hired them and put them to work building things the country needed.
TVA is probably the cleanest example. The government did not ask private utilities to please make electricity cheaper and more available across the Tennessee Valley. It built dams, generated power and created a public power system capable of transforming an entire region. That same capacity later helped power wartime industry and the Manhattan Project.
Then the war came and this way of thinking went into overdrive. The production requirements were absurd. We needed more planes, ships, tanks, trucks, engines, aluminum, rubber and ammunition than the existing industrial system could possibly produce. If Roosevelt had accepted the normal assumptions about how long factories took to build and how slowly markets adjusted, the answer would have been that it couldn’t be done. Europe would have lost the war.
Luckily for us FDR didn’t accept that answer.
Big Bill Knudsen, the former president of General Motors, became one of the people Roosevelt put to work organizing production. The government financed factories, built factories, owned factories, paid private companies to operate factories, allocated scarce materials, guaranteed demand and forced production priorities toward the things the country needed. The Detroit Arsenal is a perfect example. We needed tanks, so the government financed and built a giant tank plant and had Chrysler operate it. The point was not ideological purity about who owned what. We needed the factory, so we built the factory.
That is the part people leave out when they talk about American capitalism winning the war. The market didn’t wake up one morning, notice a profitable opportunity to defeat Hitler and organically produce the arsenal of democracy. The government decided what had to exist and then organized the public and private capacity needed to make it exist.
We did the same thing over and over again. We produced enough material to equip ourselves and supply the Allies. We built enough industrial capacity that after the war the United States could help rebuild Europe, build huge amounts of housing and infrastructure, expand electricity and create the material abundance people now look back on as if it somehow appeared naturally.
Donald Trump understands the power part. His problem is purpose.
He can point the executive branch toward immigrants, DEI, universities, the radical left, bureaucrats he considers disloyal, mail voting, allies, or whatever enemy is useful that week, and even if he defeated every one of them tomorrow, their houses would still cost too much, their healthcare would still cost too much, their electric bill would still be too high, childcare would still be too expensive, their town would still have too few doctors, their roads and bridges would still need work, their kids would still be wondering how the hell they are going to afford a house, and the country would still not have enough manufacturing capacity to make many of the things we depend on.
Roosevelt pointed power toward production. Electricity, jobs, housing, infrastructure, finance, labor power, factories, industrial capacity. If private capital would not build what was needed, government could build it. If private finance wouldn’t finance it, government would. If people needed jobs, government could hire them. If private utilities wouldn’t electrify poor communities at an affordable price, public power did.
This is the part modern Democrats seem determined to forget. They love storytelling. They love talking about fairness, dignity, community and opportunity. They seem much less interested in the fact that Roosevelt’s politics were believable because something existed underneath the story. People could see the dam. They could see the electric line. They could see the road. They could see the factory being built and their neighbor going to work.
The story worked because it was attached to a vision, a bold vision, and then that vision was attached to doing.
That is also what people misunderstand about vision. A vision does not become believable because it is small. Getting to the moon was ridiculous. Rebuilding the industrial base? Providing healthcare to every American? Building enough housing to make it affordable? Training hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses, engineers, machinists and tradespeople? All quite ridiculous.
Until we start doing it.
If you say you are going to the moon and then build the rockets, launch facilities, factories, training programs and engineering teams, and start blowing shit up in Florida, people begin to believe you might actually be going to the moon.
The thing I hear over and over whenever we talk about rebuilding the country is that it takes time. Of course it takes time. A factory takes time to build. A doctor takes time to train. A power plant takes time to construct. The decision to start takes time. Starting doesn’t. The fact that a project takes six years to finish can’t require ten years of debate before the first shovel goes into the ground.
The executive branch is enormous, and when it is wielded toward a purpose it can coordinate agencies, use federal purchasing to create markets, use federal credit to finance capacity, use procurement to change what gets produced, direct departments to use old authorities in new ways, and force Congress and the courts to respond to a government that is already moving instead of spending years asking permission to imagine moving.
Trump understands that. Roosevelt understood it too.
The difference that matters is what the power is for.
If we want people to believe democratic government can solve their problems, democratic government is going to have to solve some fucking problems. It is going to have to build things again, produce things again, hire people, generate electricity, build transmission, build housing, expand medical capacity, build factories and create enough material abundance that ordinary people can see their lives getting better.
Then we can tell the story.
It’s time we find a president ready and willing to use executive power to build a better America, not a bigger ballroom.
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The Consuming Contradictions of Trump's Iran War
It’s unclear how more temporary ceasefires in hostilities between the growing number of parties involved in the Iran-US war can solve problems such as the rise of gas prices and fall of spending on other commodities.
Jul 31, 2026
Getting a cup of complimentary coffee at my credit union recently, I glanced to the left and saw a younger woman with a mass of pennies placing them into a machine for conversion to cash. "The US Mint stopped producing pennies," I said to her. “They might be valuable.”
She quickly replied, "I need gas."
Rising gas prices are an outcome of the US war of aggression against Iran, begun five months ago. As a result, inflationary pressures are rising stateside.
One thing is plain as day. Ceasefires between Iran and the US are temporary and connect with fluctuations of oil prices, currently increasing. Rising prices of oil drive price increases at the gas pump.
The logic of military conflicts is one of unpredictable outcomes, economically and politically.
Meanwhile, this sentence in the recent Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation report stands out like a third thumb. “The index for energy increased 15.7% over the past 12 months due in large part to the index for gasoline rising 26.7% over the same period." That spike is despite presidential announcements about how well the war against Iran is going for the US to his dual audiences of MAGA voters and capitalist investors.
Apparently, repetition of a falsification has limitations. Don’t tell the president, though.
Inflation as a result of supply disruptions as we experienced with global value chains during the pandemic is a systemic contradiction. Global economic integration, e.g., the shift of US industry abroad that increases the distances of supply chains, is no risk-free strategy to increase profits and market share for corporate America.
We see in real time that the global economy which requires oil to operate feeds the imbalance between consumption, production, and distribution of commodities such as energy. The shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea with Yemen’s entry into the Iran-US war are driving the decrease in oil production and distribution, and therefore consumption.
Under the current phase of capitalism, or neoliberalism, the government shores up the weakening buying power of the working class with direct support of the corporations and the wealthy. In the case of the Iran-US war, despite the endless American taxpayer outlays for military spending with bipartisan support, the dwindling supply of energy from the Persian Gulf that businesses and consumers rely upon is driving inflationary pressures. The rise of gas prices is proof of that. There’s more.
Spending a bigger chunk of household income on gas means that working families spend less in other areas. Take fast food spending. Consumption of fast food is down 4% in May 2026 from its peak in September 2025, according to the US Bureau of Economic Affairs.
It’s unclear how more temporary ceasefires in hostilities between the growing number of parties involved in the Iran-US war, now including Saudi Arabia and Yemen, can solve problems such as the rise of gas prices and fall of spending on other commodities in the US. The logic of military conflicts is one of unpredictable outcomes, economically and politically. Claiming to know what's next is a fool's errand.
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Working People Need Power, Not Promises
If we want the Democrats, or the Republicans, or any political party to enact a political agenda that effectively addresses the real concerns of working Americans, we must build a movement that enhances and applies the power of working Americans.
Jun 03, 2026
Democrats are eager to recapture the House, and perhaps even the Senate, in this November’s elections. They are banking in part on the customary midterm pendulum swing and in part on backlash against President Donald Trump’s unhinged, cult-like governing style (despite the ineffectiveness of this strategy throughout several election cycles). They also hope to reclaim their reputation as the party of the working class.
As a lifelong labor activist, I am gratified whenever people in electoral politics say they want to uplift the American worker. But I admit some skepticism—particularly since both major parties spent a generation or more embracing the neoliberal consensus that the government should surrender to giant multinational corporations and their wealthy executives and investors. Working people are not stupid; they know most prominent Democrats and all pre-MAGA Republicans advanced an agenda that eviscerated worker interests at home and sent tens of millions of jobs abroad. (Many unions, especially those in manufacturing, opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement when George H.W. Bush negotiated it and when William J. Clinton signed it.) Public frustration and outrage have shaken politicians’ commitment to neoliberalism (rhetorically, at least), but will it be replaced by a program that advances the real interests of the people who rely on their own labor to make ends meet?
Now that he is back in office, Trump has abandoned any pretense of being pro-worker. He has stripped a million federal employees of the right to bargain collectively, gutted overtime rules and other workplace protections, crippled the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and deprived millions of working people of health and food benefits. He is proud and loud about protecting artificial intelligence from effective regulation just as employers start using it to mow down thousands—and ultimately millions—of jobs. Will the Democrats offer a real alternative for working people?
Some Democrats seem to be focused on the performative—searching for candidates who project non-elite “authenticity.” You know, candidates who know how to operate power tools and who drink beer from plastic cups. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great to run candidates who actually work for a living, but that’s not a comprehensive strategy. Working people want—and demand—actual change in how our leaders govern, not just how they look on TV (or TikTok). If the Democrats fail to articulate and deliver a legitimately pro-worker agenda, working people will continue to look elsewhere—perhaps voting for “none of the above.” (Note that, although the 2024 presidential election was proclaimed to be about the survival of our nation and its sacred values, more eligible voters stayed home than voted for either Trump or former Vice President Kamala Harris.)
Congress has failed to adopt legislation to enable workers to build their own power because workers do not have enough power to force Congress to do so.
Just as slick candidate packaging is not enough, the same is true of hollow “messaging.” Working people—like most voters—are tired of promises that bloom just before Election Day and wither right after. To represent workers effectively, elected officials will have to take political risks and challenge the power of the corporate elite, fighting for measures that tackle unaffordable healthcare, the housing crisis, and the vast (and growing) inequalities of wealth and income.
This seems so obvious it raises the question of why elected officials have ignored working voters’ real interests for so long. Here’s the key: Politicians will only stand up to corporate interests and press for meaningful pro-worker change if working people have enough leverage to force them to do so. For the past several decades our elected leaders chose a neoliberal path because the giant multinational companies and the ultra wealthy had the power to demand it—and working people did not have the countervailing power to resist it and to advance their own interests. It is no coincidence that the pro-corporate political consensus arose at precisely the same time that union membership plummeted in the United States. Although public approval of unions is as high as it has been in decades, the percentage of working people who are actually represented by unions is near an all-time low: about 10% of all workers and less than 6% in the private sector.
As the great United Auto Workers union leader Walter Reuther said, no one gives you anything you’re not strong enough to take for yourself. Working people need to build, or rebuild, the power to insist that politicians act in their interests, not just those of the corporate elite. Here’s a concrete example at the heart of building worker power: One of the reasons unions are so small now is that federal labor law has failed to protect workers’ right to organize and to engage in collective bargaining. There are plenty of great ideas for reforming US labor law. The Employee Free Choice Act, first introduced in 2006, would have streamlined the way the NLRB governs union organizing efforts. Opposition from pro-business senators (including some Democrats), together with the threat of a GOP filibuster, doomed it—even when Barack Obama was in the White House and the Democrats controlled both chambers. The Protect the Right to Organize Act, or “PRO Act,” would have addressed a whole range of structural and substantive problems with US labor law. It did not make it to full floor votes even when the Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate in 2021.
Why did Congress fail to adopt either of these essential bills, even when Democrats were in power? Because elected leaders—including Democrats—did not feel political pressure or fear political fallout. It’s like a Zen koan: Congress has failed to adopt legislation to enable workers to build their own power because workers do not have enough power to force Congress to do so.
Bottom line: If we want the Democrats, or the Republicans, or any political party to enact a political agenda that effectively addresses the real concerns of working Americans, we must build a movement that enhances and applies the power of working Americans. Unless and until we create a larger, stronger labor movement, politicians will not feel enough pressure to do the right thing for working people. Leverage is how politics work, and we should act accordingly. We should roll up our sleeves and get busy organizing in the workplace so we can assert real influence in the halls of government.
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California’s Choice: The Progressive Path or Centrist Stagnation
Today June 2, 2026, in California, voters have an opportunity to alter American history by electing progressives up and down the ballot.
Jun 02, 2026
Within national mythology, California is understood to be a progressive haven—with a ruling Democratic Party passing strong regulations, ever-higher taxes on the wealthy, and supporting unions to its heart’s desire.
Unfortunately, this is far from accurate. The Democratic Party may dominate California politics, but the wealthiest state in the union no longer leads the way with innovative laws and regulations, let alone serving the interests of working people, the poor, and the middle class.
Yes, California still has a progressive income tax, the nation’s highest gas taxes, relatively strong environmental regulations, and the world’s greatest public university system—but these are legacies of bygone eras. The story of the last 20 years of single-party Democratic rule is far less inspiring (unless you’re a Silicon Valley oligarch).
Now, as progressives are making significant gains across the country, revitalizing the Democratic Party in the process, the California party remains dominated by a caste of perennial incumbents committed to neoliberal centrism that, at best, generates incremental change.
Rest assured that progressives on the ballot are part of a national movement that understands that the Democratic Party has bifurcated into a vibrant progressive wing and an increasingly sclerotic moderate establishment.
Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. Once Democrats started winning supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature, corporations and big money interests stopped wasting their time courting Republicans. They focused their lobbying on Democrats, and to great effect. California’s Democratic Party, and its leading figures, are more beholden to big business and wealthy donors than almost any state Democratic Party. This, in turn, means Democratic incumbents accrue huge campaign war chests for their re-election.
The result is a more conservative party, one that is out of sync with the electorate. Want evidence? Ask yourself how many members of the Squad have come from California? The answer, of course, is zero. Yet all public opinion polling shows that the California electorate is decisively more progressive than the national average.
It’s true that Reps. Ro Khanna and Lateefah Simon are Squad adjacent, and a few others are solid progressives—but given that California represents about 20% of the Democratic Caucus in the US House, the state’s delegation is on balance middle-of-the-road.
This disconnect—between the political beliefs of Californians and the policies supported by their elected representatives at the national, state, and even local levels—is a major barrier to the necessary transformation of the Democratic Party into a force able to vanquish the fascist-authoritarian GOP before it consolidates power and brings down the curtain on American democracy.
Simply put, the American public increasingly understands that the status quo ante of neoliberal policy, which has organized the country’s economy since the 1980s, produces one result: ever-increasing wealth inequality. The Democratic Party must break from the economics of the Clinton and Obama administrations. The Democratic base and the general public want policies that boost the lives of working Americans, just as they want a sane foreign policy and an honest democracy. They want progressive policies.
Today June 2, 2026, in California, voters have an opportunity to alter American history by electing progressives up and down the ballot. This will transform the largest state Democratic Party, bringing it back in sync with the sentiment of the state’s population so that it can lead in the development of a new 21st century social justice compact.
There are many progressive champions with a real chance of victory today—and in the general election runoff on November 3. To start, there is a clear choice at the top of the ticket: Tom Steyer for governor.
Steyer is one of three viable candidates, two of which will make the runoff. In the best circumstance, the two democrats, Steyer and Xaiver Beccera, will take first and second—a result that will translate into more Democratic victories across the state in November. However, MAGA-supporting Republican Steve Hilton still looks likely to disrupt that result. So, it’s essential to vote, and get everyone you know to vote for Steyer by 8:00 pm PT today.
Admittedly, it sticks in the throat to be supporting a billionaire, but the simple truth is that Steyer will pursue a transformative progressive policy agenda. In contrast, Xavier Beccera, who 20 years ago seemed a sincere progressive, long ago redefined himself as an establishment Democrat. Becerra is committed to maintaining Gov. Gavin Newsom’s policies that have left California stranded with the nation’s co-equal highest poverty rate, an affordability crisis that makes New York City residents blush, and a pronounced failure to lead on environmental and social policies in the manner the world expects of California.
Tom Steyer, by contrast, supports a billionaire’s tax, meaningful living wage legislation, aggressive incentives to re-boost green energy production (and film production too), and, most tellingly, a single-payer universal healthcare system for everyone in the state. A top-two finish by Steyer will guarantee a powerful debate about the direction of the state over the next five months
Beyond the governor’s race, in nearly every US house district, state assembly, and senate race, and significant city and local elections, there are strong progressive candidates challenging the dominant California Democratic Party mainstream—many of whom are poised to advance to the November runoff. Still, it’s worth noting that this has been a very confusing election season due to redistricting (and the chaos of the governor’s race), such that down-ballot candidates have had a difficult time attracting adequate attention. But rest assured that progressives on the ballot are part of a national movement that understands that the Democratic Party has bifurcated into a vibrant progressive wing and an increasingly sclerotic moderate establishment. Please do the necessary research to learn who the progressives are in your district.
So far, it’s been a very good year for progressives—let’s continue the momentum tomorrow in New Jersey, Montana, Iowa, New Mexico, South Carolina, and the largest state and soon-to-be truest bastion of progressive public policy, California.
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Electile Dysfunction—Why Can’t the Dems Get Their Polls Up?
The Democratic Party cannot afford to attend to the material needs of its traditional popular base because it is terrified of offending its donor class.
May 27, 2026
“The Republicans go for the jugular; the Democrats go for the capillaries,”—Kevin Phillips
With the recent release of the long-withheld, but little anticipated Democratic National Committee “autopsy” of the 2024 presidential electoral loss, we’re back to the perennial questions of which issues should receive priority; how should messaging and narrative around those issues be crafted; which wing(s) of the party should be amputated before their rot infects the entire organism, suburban soccer moms or inner city youth; and on and on. All good questions, but ultimately, in present circumstances, unanswerable except in the most platitudinous, hand-waving ways. The most fundamental dilemma resides in the Faustian bargain the party entered beginning in the 1970s, and the result of that bargain is neatly captured in Sheldon Wolin’s 2010 coinage “the inauthentic opposition”:
While the transformed Republican Party reveals what a “party of government” might look like under inverted totalitarianism, the Democrats reveal the fate of opposition politics under inverted totalitarianism. The Democrats’ politics might be described as inauthentic opposition in the era of Superpower [i.e., the US after the fall of the Soviet Union]. Having fended off its reformist elements and disclaimed the label of liberal, it is trapped by new rules of the game which dictate that a party exists to win elections rather than to promote a vision of the good society… Accordingly, the party competes for an apolitical segment of the electorate, “the undecided,” and puzzles how best to woo religious zealots. Should Democrats somehow be elected, corporate sponsors make it politically impossible for the new officeholders to alter significantly the direction of society. [This point is exquisitely exemplified by the first couple of years of the Obama administration, when they held the federal trifecta and still managed to privilege the kleptocratic banksters of the housing crisis and the war criminal gangsters of the W. Bush regime.] The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the crucial fact that, for the poor, minorities, the working class, anticorporatists, pro-environmentalists, and anti-imperialists, there is no opposition party working actively on their behalf.
The origins of this current malaise date back to the mid 1970s, and followed the actions taken by business class elites responding to the exhortations contained in the now-famous Powell Memorandum. This was a secret 1971 memo from then-corporate lawyer Lewis Powell to the Secretary of the US Chamber of Commerce. The memo wasn’t revealed to the public until well after Powell had been appointed to the Supreme Court, where he continued to wage his ideological battle in defense of capitalism and corporate power (including, of course, free speech rights articulated in cash). In the memo Powell argued that:
The US Chamber of Commerce should lead an assault upon the major institutions, universities, schools, the media, publishing, the courts, in order to change how individuals think about the corporation, the law, culture, and the individual.
US businesses, Powell suggested, did not lack the resources for such an effort, particularly if they were pooled. That is, if people started to think together as a class rather than as individual firms and corporations. The US Chamber of Commerce took up this challenge in a very dramatic way. It expanded its base from around 60,000 firms in 1972 to about a quarter of a million just a decade later. Other elite organizational forms also began to coalesce around this core following the advice of the memo. These included think tanks (e.g., the Heritage Foundation, established 1973 by Adolph Coors), as well as corporate money pumps to operationalize the memo’s chief objectives.
One of the most prominent of these organizations was the Business Roundtable, founded in 1972, and comprising CEOs whose corporations at the time accounted for about half of the US gross national product. During this period, through political action committees, the Roundtable was spending about $900 million annually on political matters, a very significant sum at the time. These newly emerging entities provided a mechanism for corporations to contribute substantial funds to political campaigns and candidates, authorized in large measure through a number of Supreme Court rulings, several written by Powell himself.
These PACs, which were just beginning to have a political presence (there were 89 PACs in 1974, and around 1,500 by 1982) gave to both parties largely in equal measure in the 70s, but began leaning heavily toward the Republicans, who had little difficulty aligning their platforms with capital corporate interests. This was also the moment that the traditional political base of the Republican Party began to merge with the Christian Right and with white working classes, who were persuaded that they had been left behind by affirmative action and other “illegitimate” policies (now, of course, cloaked as DEI and “wokeness”).
The problem for anyone struggling to get by, as this alliance portrayed it, was not capitalism and the neoliberalization of the society and economy. The real problem was liberals, who had used excessive state power to provide for special groups. The prevalent narrative, more pertinent now than ever, was the idea of unworthy “others” cutting in line ahead of worthy citizens: “You've worked hard. You've played by the rules. You're not getting ahead. Well, it's not that the system is stacked against you. It's that these people, who are undeserving, are getting more advantages than you get.” The Republican political base (and now most particularly MAGAnites) could be energized through positive mobilizations of things like religion and cultural nationalism, but it could also be turned out through very negative, though coded, though I would say increasingly less coded if not blatant, racism (e.g., President Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy”), xenophobia, homophobia, and anti-feminism.
Democrats, seemingly, were more conflicted, at least at that time, between support for their base and the need to pursue big money. That ambivalence, at least within the ranks of the Democratic Party establishment in its current manifestation, has now all but disappeared and constitutes the irreconcilable contradiction that plagues the party now. To return for a moment to Wolin:
By ignoring dissent and by assuming that the dissenters have no alternative, the party serves an important, if ironical, stabilizing function and in effect marginalizes any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans.
According to critical geographer David Harvey, the structure that emerged out of this political realignment was as simple as it was predictable and durable. The Republican Party could, and still can, marshal massive financial resources and mobilize its popular base to vote against its own material interests on cultural or religious grounds, while simultaneously advancing the capital accumulation policies (ongoing war and arms sales, lowered taxation, massive deregulation, privatization of public goods and services) of their elite masters.
The Democratic Party, conversely, could not, and still cannot, afford to attend to the material needs (e.g., a national healthcare system, affordable housing, environmental and consumer protection, financial and anti-trust regulation, a peace dividend) of its traditional popular base because it was and is terrified of offending its donor class. Given the asymmetry, the political hegemony of the Republican Party became more sure over this period, and has relegated the Democrats, even when in power, to their current position of inauthenticity. If and until this most fundamental contradiction can be resolved, the policies and messaging will remain flaccid, impotent, and unsatisfying. Under these circumstances we can aptly paraphrase Phillips, to wit: So now the Democrats also go for the jugular. Unfortunately, it’s too often their own.
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