As a baby boomer, born in 1950, I've reaped the benefits of the kind of New Deal economy you propose. Reagan was the turning point in 1980 when he convinced people that government bureaucrats were incompetent and everything needed to be privatized. And we could pay less taxes as a reward. The result, 45 years later, is extreme inequality and a billionaire class that controls the government.
Regan started it Clinton ran with it the Bush's and obama continued it
Bill Clinton sold over 200 years of American Innovations and Manufacturing when he removed the Tariffs then entered America into the WTO and pushed for China's entrance
19 Facts About The Deindustrialization Of America That Will Make You Weep
While your critique is correct about the distribution of power away from the public and governance, to corporations and wealthy shareholders, there is an error in your thinking. We do not have the capacity for unlimited growth. We cannot have it all. The wealthy have way too much of a pie that is shrinking, not growing. The only growth on the ledger is based on a fallacy, that drawing down natural capital does not shrink the available capital. It does. We have gotten ahead of the ability of natural resources to regenerate, things like forests, fisheries, and soils. These have limits, and we have already exceeded them. What does this mean? We can and should have a "New Deal" program that taxes the rich heavily and spends on health care, education, natural resource regeneration, and a switch to alternative energy. These are necessities. However, we have to learn to do more with less. We cannot grow in a way that draws down the ability of life's essentials to stay healthy. We need clean water, clean air, fertile and chemically free soils, regenerating forests that capture and store carbon, and more. Expecting growth to cover the felt needs of those raised on Amazon, Apple and Google will kill the planet just as much as Trump's over the top corruption. This is the reality. The problem, if you espouse this position (realistic as it is) you will never get elected because it denies the legitimacy of the American myth.
In fact both you and the author are correct. He preaches the need for change, and change will come. You argue that the powers that be- the Political Class, the Intelligence Community (The Deep State), the Wall Street Financiers and the Tech Bro Billionaires- will never willingly accede to oversight and diminishment of wealth and power and you are right, because change will come.
We currently live in a system that has been rigged with the assistance of and under the direction of these four power bases over the last 80 years. They combined to take out JFK, Martin and Bobby and there’s strong evidence that the CIA also staged a quiet coup by creating WaterGate to stop Nixon from trying to promote peace by connecting with China. Since Nixon the country has deteriorated in its quality of life, in its democratic ideals and in the notion that the voter has any control.
We will not vote our way out of this debacle.
However, the Second Law of Political Dynamics suggests that everything that goes up must come down, and we are watching that occur in real time. With a sovereign debt crisis driving governments worldwide to overspend combined with a financial sector grasping at AI to carry the stock market and truly sketchy investment vehicles and practices to undercut the market, and as Trump prepares a Western Hemisphere sealed bastion while disrupting oil flow and dismissing an economically castrated EU itching to take on Russia, the likelihood of failure on the part of The Big Four increases daily.
And in the Big Four's likely failure, there springs hope. Hope in the possibility of building anew at the local level utilizing Brother Trent’s notion of community action.
Unless we start questioning the System instead of individual leaders or Presidents, who are, essentially "the messengers", the game will continue. Obama was a good example.
You grew up in a post Reagan America that has been blighted and corrupted with the idea that government is bad. When I was a child in the 50's and 60's I was taught that government was our tool to make our country and our world better. I remember reading a book called, "The US Means Us." I loved that idea, still do. We need to un-colonize our minds so that we can use this tool to remake our country into a place that actually promotes the general welfare and defends the people from individual and corporate predators. Thank you for your brilliant ideas and steadfast actions.
You are always spot on in your commentaries. Thank you for your insight and your honesty. I just pray it is not already too late. I am not being pessimistic here, it's just the fact that the powers that be have extracted so much from us over the past 40nyears; there's just not much left to give. That was their plan and we helped them achieve it. I'm an old woman; I'll be OK the rest of my few days; but I do so worry about my great grandchildren and I pray every day that someone like you; many someone's like you; change things around, for them, before it is too late.
In the late 80s I worked on a public employee union election in California, the state had a quarter million employees then. Something we heard over and over from state employees was that when they were growing up, working for the state was considered a great thing. You got good pay and good benefits but also dignity; people respected state workers because they valued what their tax dollars were providing them. But that changed. After Reagan and his famous Madison Ave ad men convinced first Californians, then the rest of the country, that government was the problem, that it was the reason for so many of America’s problems, working for the ‘state’ became a stain on your reputation. Can’t underestimate the power of a compelling narrative, especially when there’s no counter narrative or a less convincing one.
I grew up in those years when we believed the government could do things! I was 13 when we landed on the Moon! The Interstate Highway System was built along with all the things you mentioned.
The current government just wants to destroy government and privatize everything.
I think I read that there are other states attempting to do something like this - which they sure as heck SHOULD be. Really interesting articles & I enjoyed this judge's rulings and reactions. Thank you for this.
I'll pass it along - there needs to be awareness that this kind of takeover CAN be prevented.
Corbin, it might help when talking about public ownership to suggest projects that the Federal government could build, such as an Interstate Electricity System that would replace much of our current system, or do the same for a high speed rail system, showing how much it would cost, how many people would be employed, and even where and who would be served. I tried to do something like this at GreenNewDealPlan.com, but I’m sure you have access to much more knowledgeable people. It would make your ideas much more concrete and understandable, it seems to me. Give it a try
There is no magic knight to come to the rescue. The people who want power rise up and take it. Frederick Douglass got it right: Power never willingly yields.
I was blessed to have been raised NOT in Tennessee, from the sound of it. I've visited, and it's beautiful, with nice people, but what an ugly history. Not unlike mine, but at least I grew up in wilderness with my head on straight. You are right, and blessings to you for getting straight! I'm reminded of Dylan's great line: "Money doesn't talk, it swears". Let's transform the economy, from rewriting corporate charters and governance to creating public finance.
What you’re naming about power feels central. Not as an abstract idea, but as something that determines whether systems serve people or extract from them.
From my perspective, this isn’t just about bringing the public back in, it’s about rebalancing how we organize the economy so that essential systems are guided by collective need, not profit alone. We’ve seen what happens when that balance is lost.
I also feel the clarity in what you’re pointing to. This isn’t theoretical. We’ve done this before. The question is whether there’s the will to do it again, in a way that reflects the conditions we’re in now.
And it does feel like that shift is part of a larger transition already underway. Not fully formed, but moving in that direction.
Capitalism is built on three lies plus trust in the Almighty (no, really). The truth is...
1. There is no such thing as a free market. Every market has regulations, otherwise it could not function. This is why companies spend so much money lobbying to change the regulations in their favor.
2. Even if there were a free market, there is no reason to believe that it would optimize anything, let alone efficiency. This is something that (a) was made up out of whole cloth by Milton Friedman and his acolytes and (b) can be easily disproven with high school level mathematics.
3. Even if it did optimize anything, there is no reason to believe it optimizes something desirable. A traffic jam is a free market in individual commute choices.
And the best part: When Adam Smith first created capitalism's creation myth that a free market was a Good Thing, it was because he believed that the "invisible hand of Providence" would make everything right and ensure that wealth would be distributed fairly (and if somebody was starving, clearly that was God's will because nothing could happen that wasn't). And by Providence he meant God. This is easy to verify, by the way, as Smith only mentions the invisible hand twice.
And then Friedman came along and substituted the market for Providence, an act of faith that has even less empirical support than the free market.
If you want to imagine a successful America, think about what America would look like in ten years if we did the single smartest thing we could do, and nationalized the Amazon marketplace. Said everyone could sell there, everyone could have thier fulfillment handled in the same ways as now, but now all the profit goes toward paying to make the system work. Encourage other countries (except China, which already did it) to set up thier own national marketplaces, backed by logistic systems and national post offices.
Make it an actually fair and equal place for every business to compete on the strength if thier products, rather than the toy of an oligarch who builds rockets to get past thier insecurities.
If we went back to the good old days of producing public goods that worked and stopped letting red states fuck things up to prove that conservatism isn't a dead philosophy, we could actually be a shining city on a hill.
Only two things are stopping us, conservatives, and oligarchs. The French has a similar problem once, they solved it.
The Reagan administration and the K street project crippled the gains of a society that saw the Federal Government as a legitimate and powerful force for good. The give away to “Beltway bandits” successfully introduced bottom line profits as a substitute for governmental service. What had been handled by genuine “civil servants” has become a shell game to keep upping the bottom line. The inconvenience of reorganizing back to actual public service (where you KNOW what services cost and they are done by specialized, salaried government employees) will be a slog. And that, coupled with the calamitous interruptions needed to update basic infrastructure (sewage and water, as well as roads and bridges), will be a very tough sell to our spoiled and disengaged citizenry. The American spirit was forged in time of scarcity and by citizens with far more realistic expectations from normal life. (Dust bowls and bread lines.). We lost the ability to distinguish needs from wants and that turned us into children. It remains to be seen if there is the national will to grow up. Because THAT is what will be required.
Our health care system is in the hands of the selfish & the greedy. It’s not a care system any longer. It’s a profit extraction system run, by & large by so-called Private Equity.
I’m not sure even a Single Payer system would or could solve this dilemma. Tho it’d be a good start.
As a baby boomer, born in 1950, I've reaped the benefits of the kind of New Deal economy you propose. Reagan was the turning point in 1980 when he convinced people that government bureaucrats were incompetent and everything needed to be privatized. And we could pay less taxes as a reward. The result, 45 years later, is extreme inequality and a billionaire class that controls the government.
Regan started it Clinton ran with it the Bush's and obama continued it
Bill Clinton sold over 200 years of American Innovations and Manufacturing when he removed the Tariffs then entered America into the WTO and pushed for China's entrance
19 Facts About The Deindustrialization Of America That Will Make You Weep
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1002135628
While your critique is correct about the distribution of power away from the public and governance, to corporations and wealthy shareholders, there is an error in your thinking. We do not have the capacity for unlimited growth. We cannot have it all. The wealthy have way too much of a pie that is shrinking, not growing. The only growth on the ledger is based on a fallacy, that drawing down natural capital does not shrink the available capital. It does. We have gotten ahead of the ability of natural resources to regenerate, things like forests, fisheries, and soils. These have limits, and we have already exceeded them. What does this mean? We can and should have a "New Deal" program that taxes the rich heavily and spends on health care, education, natural resource regeneration, and a switch to alternative energy. These are necessities. However, we have to learn to do more with less. We cannot grow in a way that draws down the ability of life's essentials to stay healthy. We need clean water, clean air, fertile and chemically free soils, regenerating forests that capture and store carbon, and more. Expecting growth to cover the felt needs of those raised on Amazon, Apple and Google will kill the planet just as much as Trump's over the top corruption. This is the reality. The problem, if you espouse this position (realistic as it is) you will never get elected because it denies the legitimacy of the American myth.
In fact both you and the author are correct. He preaches the need for change, and change will come. You argue that the powers that be- the Political Class, the Intelligence Community (The Deep State), the Wall Street Financiers and the Tech Bro Billionaires- will never willingly accede to oversight and diminishment of wealth and power and you are right, because change will come.
We currently live in a system that has been rigged with the assistance of and under the direction of these four power bases over the last 80 years. They combined to take out JFK, Martin and Bobby and there’s strong evidence that the CIA also staged a quiet coup by creating WaterGate to stop Nixon from trying to promote peace by connecting with China. Since Nixon the country has deteriorated in its quality of life, in its democratic ideals and in the notion that the voter has any control.
We will not vote our way out of this debacle.
However, the Second Law of Political Dynamics suggests that everything that goes up must come down, and we are watching that occur in real time. With a sovereign debt crisis driving governments worldwide to overspend combined with a financial sector grasping at AI to carry the stock market and truly sketchy investment vehicles and practices to undercut the market, and as Trump prepares a Western Hemisphere sealed bastion while disrupting oil flow and dismissing an economically castrated EU itching to take on Russia, the likelihood of failure on the part of The Big Four increases daily.
And in the Big Four's likely failure, there springs hope. Hope in the possibility of building anew at the local level utilizing Brother Trent’s notion of community action.
Nekto has been repeating this as a parrot for awhile. The last comment was 4/22/2026 on the https://www.americasundoing.com/p/to-war-or-not-to-war article. Maybe you find that comment useful.
Bill Clinton did this to America he took over 200 years of American Innovations and Manufacturing to China slave wages when he removed the Tariffs
19 Facts About The Deindustrialization Of America That Will Make You Weep
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1002135628
Unless we start questioning the System instead of individual leaders or Presidents, who are, essentially "the messengers", the game will continue. Obama was a good example.
Dear Corbin,
You grew up in a post Reagan America that has been blighted and corrupted with the idea that government is bad. When I was a child in the 50's and 60's I was taught that government was our tool to make our country and our world better. I remember reading a book called, "The US Means Us." I loved that idea, still do. We need to un-colonize our minds so that we can use this tool to remake our country into a place that actually promotes the general welfare and defends the people from individual and corporate predators. Thank you for your brilliant ideas and steadfast actions.
Yes! And I think the Minnesotans have given us the key word to focus on going forward to create something good: NEIGHBOR.
You are always spot on in your commentaries. Thank you for your insight and your honesty. I just pray it is not already too late. I am not being pessimistic here, it's just the fact that the powers that be have extracted so much from us over the past 40nyears; there's just not much left to give. That was their plan and we helped them achieve it. I'm an old woman; I'll be OK the rest of my few days; but I do so worry about my great grandchildren and I pray every day that someone like you; many someone's like you; change things around, for them, before it is too late.
In the late 80s I worked on a public employee union election in California, the state had a quarter million employees then. Something we heard over and over from state employees was that when they were growing up, working for the state was considered a great thing. You got good pay and good benefits but also dignity; people respected state workers because they valued what their tax dollars were providing them. But that changed. After Reagan and his famous Madison Ave ad men convinced first Californians, then the rest of the country, that government was the problem, that it was the reason for so many of America’s problems, working for the ‘state’ became a stain on your reputation. Can’t underestimate the power of a compelling narrative, especially when there’s no counter narrative or a less convincing one.
I grew up in those years when we believed the government could do things! I was 13 when we landed on the Moon! The Interstate Highway System was built along with all the things you mentioned.
The current government just wants to destroy government and privatize everything.
Such a tragic waste!
Thought you might be interested in this happening in Oregon: https://lincolnchronicle.org/oregons-law-to-stop-corporate-control-of-medicine-faces-first-major-legal-test/
Everyone should be interested in how corporate control of medicine is increasing all over the country! Very interesting article.
This is a follow-up to the previous article: https://lincolnchronicle.org/watershed-moment-for-oregon-states-landmark-corporate-medicine-law-passes-first-major-test/
I think I read that there are other states attempting to do something like this - which they sure as heck SHOULD be. Really interesting articles & I enjoyed this judge's rulings and reactions. Thank you for this.
I'll pass it along - there needs to be awareness that this kind of takeover CAN be prevented.
Corbin, it might help when talking about public ownership to suggest projects that the Federal government could build, such as an Interstate Electricity System that would replace much of our current system, or do the same for a high speed rail system, showing how much it would cost, how many people would be employed, and even where and who would be served. I tried to do something like this at GreenNewDealPlan.com, but I’m sure you have access to much more knowledgeable people. It would make your ideas much more concrete and understandable, it seems to me. Give it a try
There is no magic knight to come to the rescue. The people who want power rise up and take it. Frederick Douglass got it right: Power never willingly yields.
I was blessed to have been raised NOT in Tennessee, from the sound of it. I've visited, and it's beautiful, with nice people, but what an ugly history. Not unlike mine, but at least I grew up in wilderness with my head on straight. You are right, and blessings to you for getting straight! I'm reminded of Dylan's great line: "Money doesn't talk, it swears". Let's transform the economy, from rewriting corporate charters and governance to creating public finance.
Thank you Corbin.
What you’re naming about power feels central. Not as an abstract idea, but as something that determines whether systems serve people or extract from them.
From my perspective, this isn’t just about bringing the public back in, it’s about rebalancing how we organize the economy so that essential systems are guided by collective need, not profit alone. We’ve seen what happens when that balance is lost.
I also feel the clarity in what you’re pointing to. This isn’t theoretical. We’ve done this before. The question is whether there’s the will to do it again, in a way that reflects the conditions we’re in now.
And it does feel like that shift is part of a larger transition already underway. Not fully formed, but moving in that direction.
Capitalism is built on three lies plus trust in the Almighty (no, really). The truth is...
1. There is no such thing as a free market. Every market has regulations, otherwise it could not function. This is why companies spend so much money lobbying to change the regulations in their favor.
2. Even if there were a free market, there is no reason to believe that it would optimize anything, let alone efficiency. This is something that (a) was made up out of whole cloth by Milton Friedman and his acolytes and (b) can be easily disproven with high school level mathematics.
3. Even if it did optimize anything, there is no reason to believe it optimizes something desirable. A traffic jam is a free market in individual commute choices.
And the best part: When Adam Smith first created capitalism's creation myth that a free market was a Good Thing, it was because he believed that the "invisible hand of Providence" would make everything right and ensure that wealth would be distributed fairly (and if somebody was starving, clearly that was God's will because nothing could happen that wasn't). And by Providence he meant God. This is easy to verify, by the way, as Smith only mentions the invisible hand twice.
And then Friedman came along and substituted the market for Providence, an act of faith that has even less empirical support than the free market.
If you want to imagine a successful America, think about what America would look like in ten years if we did the single smartest thing we could do, and nationalized the Amazon marketplace. Said everyone could sell there, everyone could have thier fulfillment handled in the same ways as now, but now all the profit goes toward paying to make the system work. Encourage other countries (except China, which already did it) to set up thier own national marketplaces, backed by logistic systems and national post offices.
Make it an actually fair and equal place for every business to compete on the strength if thier products, rather than the toy of an oligarch who builds rockets to get past thier insecurities.
If we went back to the good old days of producing public goods that worked and stopped letting red states fuck things up to prove that conservatism isn't a dead philosophy, we could actually be a shining city on a hill.
Only two things are stopping us, conservatives, and oligarchs. The French has a similar problem once, they solved it.
The Reagan administration and the K street project crippled the gains of a society that saw the Federal Government as a legitimate and powerful force for good. The give away to “Beltway bandits” successfully introduced bottom line profits as a substitute for governmental service. What had been handled by genuine “civil servants” has become a shell game to keep upping the bottom line. The inconvenience of reorganizing back to actual public service (where you KNOW what services cost and they are done by specialized, salaried government employees) will be a slog. And that, coupled with the calamitous interruptions needed to update basic infrastructure (sewage and water, as well as roads and bridges), will be a very tough sell to our spoiled and disengaged citizenry. The American spirit was forged in time of scarcity and by citizens with far more realistic expectations from normal life. (Dust bowls and bread lines.). We lost the ability to distinguish needs from wants and that turned us into children. It remains to be seen if there is the national will to grow up. Because THAT is what will be required.
Just remember Andrew Carnegie and his libraries
Well said Corbin.
Our health care system is in the hands of the selfish & the greedy. It’s not a care system any longer. It’s a profit extraction system run, by & large by so-called Private Equity.
I’m not sure even a Single Payer system would or could solve this dilemma. Tho it’d be a good start.
Resist
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