An American Buyback

Lets end stock buybacks and start reclaiming what was ours/

Last Thursday I told you about a new organization I’m launching called A Fight Worth Having. Going forward it will be the publisher of America’s Undoing (New website coming), so keep an eye on your inboxes. If you see anything from Corbin Trent at America’s Undoing or A Fight Worth Having, open it. And reply, even one word to this one right now will keep us landing in your inbox and not your spam folder. It matters more than you think.

Now, I want to go deeper into what we’re building and why.

The problems stacking up on working people in this country are not mysteries. Housing costs are out of control. Groceries cost more than they did. Healthcare costs more than it did and covers less. We are dropping bombs sometimes on children. We are kidnapping foreign leaders. We are running up debt and have next to nothing to show for it. We continue to export carnage to maintain an American system that delivers less and less to the actual people who live here. The American dream is now something only the top twenty percent can afford. And AI is coming for them like the white-collar jobs in much the same way offshoring came for the factory worker, fast and with no serious plan from anyone in power to do a anything about it. We all saw how that went.

None of this happened by accident. And the Democratic Party, as it exists right now, is not ready to fix it. The voters are ready. The ideas are there. The leadership isn’t.

The only way to change that is to change who’s leading the Democratic Party and our nation. Changing who leads this party is harder than it sounds. It is not just money, though the money is real and the numbers from last week's piece make that plain. It is also social.

Most people drawn to politics are genuinely likable people who enjoy being liked. They want to connect, to build relationships, to find common ground. Those are not bad qualities. But what we need right now is something rarer. We need people who can sit across from colleagues they genuinely like, people they think are basically on their side, and tell them that what they are doing is not good enough and that they intend to do something about it. Most people will not do that. The ones who will are the people we are looking for.

I think about Zohran Mamdani a lot when I think about this. He won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City decisively. He has the right agenda and real mandate and 50,000 volunteers who knocked a million doors. He is also spending his political capital trying to get along with Kathy Hochul and protect Hakeem Jeffries from a primary challenge. I understand the instinct. I have watched it up close with AOC. You cannot make yourself small enough or reasonable enough to become acceptable to people whose entire operation depends on things staying basically as they are. The only leverage that works is making them afraid of what happens if they don’t change. Zohran had the people to do that. He took a different route. I wrote about this last August.

The questions we will be asking every candidate we consider supporting aim to answer one question, “Are you ready to take on power?”

A Fight Worth Having is a super PAC. We are going to raise money and spend it in congressional races on behalf of candidates who are ready to do the hard things. We are building what I think of as a filtration process to figure out who those people are.

Here is what we are looking for.

A willingness to challenge Democratic leadership. Not just Republican villains, which costs nothing, but the people inside their own party who are protecting the system. Enemies of change come in two varieties, foreign and domestic, and the domestic ones are harder to fight because you used to think they were on your side.

A willingness to unify. To treat their race as part of something bigger than their district. To stand alongside candidates from other states and other districts around a shared mission and mean it. We have never done this at scale on our side. We are going to try.

A willingness to endorse each other in primaries even when it costs them something personally. To put the agenda above their own political comfort. Most people will not do this either.

A commitment to taking back what has been sold off or stolen. Our hospitals. Our clinics. Our patents. The generational investments built with public money and handed to private interests by paid-off politicians. We want it back.

A serious reckoning with AI. The disruption is coming whether we are ready or not. The question is who owns the productivity on the other side of it. If it is a handful of tech oligarchs, you get a permanent underclass. If it belongs to the public, you get something closer to a country worth living in. We built roads and bridges and power grids as public infrastructure because some things are too important to leave in private hands. AI is that. Instead of stock buybacks for shareholders, we need nation buybacks. We need to buy back the productive capacity of this country and put the ownership where it belongs, with the people.

Those are the filters. We are not going to find many candidates who will clear all of them. That is the point.

The first push two efforts are launching very soon. First we will try to build candidate unity around a big idea. Second, we are getting into a congressional race where there is one clear visionary.

We are building out something bigger around the question of what Democratic leadership should actually look like and whether the people currently providing it are willing to do what is required. When it launches you will know exactly what we are asking and exactly how you can help.

Go to AFightWorthHaving.com and sign up. There are going to be a lot of ways to help, from replying to an email or sharing a post, to showing up at an event, making a donation, or making some noise. We will tell you what we need when we need it and why it matters. Reply to this one and tell me what you think.

Corbin