Super appreciated the comment about how it's difficult to comprehend the collapse of certain infrastructures because for most people, life is going on. Yes, life is going on, but it's now "hollow." And hollow inside is a good description of the people who turn to authoritarianism to handle their fear, anger, and hate. Quite frankly, it feels like gaslighting on a grand scale.
And thank you, Corbin, for devoting yourself to being as we should all be: In service to each other. Win or lose, your efforts are not in vain.
Corbin, I really appreciate you naming the ownership question so directly. The part that stayed with me was not just the critique of reactive politics, but the structural point about where money flows and who owns the underlying systems. That is a conversation we do not have nearly enough.
The New Deal examples you referenced were not simply bold investments. They were institutional redesigns. Public utilities, rural electrification, regional development authorities. These were not temporary spending programs. They shifted who controlled infrastructure and how value circulated in communities. That is fundamentally different from taxing at the top and redistributing into systems that remain privately consolidated.
If we are serious about competing with oligarchic power, the conversation likely has to move toward economic democracy in tangible ways. Public options in delivery, worker ownership models, regional public banks, cooperative energy systems, municipally controlled healthcare infrastructure. Not as ideology, but as practical architecture that changes incentives and increases supply.
I also agree with you that vision matters. People rarely mobilize around being anti something. They mobilize around something they can picture and believe will materially improve their lives. But that vision also has to feel administratively credible. It has to answer how it works, who governs it, how it scales, and how it remains accountable.
The opportunity right now is not only rhetorical courage. It is designing systems that are democratic by structure, where ownership, governance, and benefit are aligned. I am glad you are bringing the ownership conversation forward.
So, I scrolled through the Mission for America, and there is much there I agree with. However, two red flags, and one glaring omission.
The two red flags are the attempt to reintroduce nuclear power as a major component of the energy mix, and the introduction of atmospheric engineering as a cooling strategy.
Not one word about nuclear waste. To suggest this can be ‘solved’ is, to me, as absurd as the fossil fuels/plastics industry saying their products can be recycled. And no one can know with any certainty whether any ‘engineering’ of the atmosphere will be effective; it might be detrimental long term. The same could be said of geothermal drilling. The fracking earthquakes are a reality.
The omission, unless I missed it, is in the creation of industrial hemp as a major player. It’s as green as it gets, and could replace much of the fossil fuel based components, from plastics to housing.
After your last recommendation, I took a long look at Mission for America. That is a comprehensive plan and certainly the right track. As an advocate for a Job Guarantee, I would love to see that in there, but the first step is to use the power of public money to get unemployment down to 1-2% (and that's a real number, not the bogus U-3 they feed us in the mainstream media), and that is in their plan. The Job Guarantee is designed to create a hard floor under which no person falls involuntarily- essentially, it puts teeth into the minimum wage laws. So it picks up those for whom the initial public investment doesn't work for one reason or another, and creates true zero percent unemployment. It is very popular in polling: predistributive, universal, and fair.
Actually, in economic terms the US of A is arguably the most "socialist" country in the world when it comes to one particular section of the economy: The Military-Industrial complex. And that fact is extremely well known, although hardly anybody ever mentions it including, I'm sorry to say, Corbin. Indeed the media blackout of this subject is positively Orwellian, see for example https://scheerpost.com/2026/02/10/seth-harp-speaks-on-new-york-times-spiking-us-foreign-policy-interview-with-ross-douthat/
In 2019, I went to Istanbul on a business trip. Erdogan had already made the authoritarian changes to their society. I didn’t know what to expect going there, but the thing that struck me was exactly what Corbin pointed out. Everyone just doing their normal everyday thing.
At dinner one night, the people I was meeting with were ok criticizing the government, but not before that paranoid look over their shoulder. That hit me hard.
Now is the time to stay strong and not accept this as the new normal.
Thanks for your ideas and leadership. I started looking at the Green New Deal and its lofty aims on mission for america website. I noticed "capitalism" wasn't mentioned. I think -- in line with what you have talked about: the restructuring of some of our basics here in the US -- that we should do something more "nuts and bolts" to start the change, e.g. give some kind of tax credits or financial incentives to Employee-owned Corporations. Rather than throw the babies out with the bathwater, change the bathwater and save the babies. Put a new spin on "making a profit". Thanks again for your important voice.
I think we have to have a crash or event of some sort to get to the other side of this insanity. Republicans are preparing for it, the cunning fuckers, and Democrats really are not, being who they are. But we need to keep trying and hope there's an opportunity and somehow we manage to make use of it.
My Trump voting son-in-law visited me last weekend. He's a hard working generous sales guy with a college degree whose whole perception of American politics was formed over 30 years by listening to Rush Limbaugh when he was on the road. During his recent visit I learned that at 67 he's still working full time and isn't enrolled in Medicare because his younger wife and their early 20s kids still need coverage through his company insurance. When I compared my Medicare coverage to his he realized how poor and expensive his own policy is. When explained that Medicare for All would allow him to retire and his family to get better more preventative health care through MFA he seemed stunned. When I said we would all have better care if the middle men and brokers were taken out of the health care system he truly had an ah ha moment. Dems need to have just one simple message to talk about: Medicare for All.
The Democrats by and large were sold to Corporatist interests in the 90s by the Clintons. All those boomers with fat pocketbooks need to be rousted out, but the Democratic party has become just a cynical self-perpetuating money machine. The Republicans did the opposite, went from a cynical self-replicating money machine to being plagued with people who stood for things, or rather stood AGAINST things. And let’s be honest, when AOC voted to break the rail worker strike, she joined the pathway. We need people with principles that surpass party.
Excellent article. Insights and solutions. You’ve hit the nail on the head. I would add that America also needs to spend more on really educating our kids, not just indoctrinating them with “we’re #1”.
Denial is the enemy Anaconda is every room. It will eat you whole unless you lie to yourself. That is the Big Lie. Nothing to see here. Trust me, the check's in the mail. Greatest Show on Earth. Listen to that Siren Bondi. Wow! Screaming at the top of its lungs, scorn, contempt, gaslighting, Newspeak, outright defiance. The Big Lie. Denial. Epstein? Never heard of him. Only a million times. A million mentions of TFG in the Epstein log. Never heard of him. Denial. Of course brown people are criminals. Just look at them, they are not white. Gotta be white to be good. Here's the thing Corbin. The Denial Lie is contagious, because it avoids the circular firing squad. Anyone and everyone can be accused of Something. Most litigious society on Earth. So many Laws. Why? Because there are so many Lies.. Deny everything. Challenge everything. Admit nothing. Evidence????? Fake. Epstein? Fake. Avarice? Fake. Massive Theft? Fake. Even the fake stuff is Fake. Bondi? The stock market is at $50k right now. Is that fake? Does it actually have any meaning for the bottom 80 percent who have little or no stock? No. Means nothing except lower wages and higher prices. But life goes on. Until it doesn't. Denial. The BiG Lie.
I've started reading the Mission for America summary document (77 pages); I'm maybe 20% in, so I can't comment in any sort of comprehensive way. I do plan to read the entire summary and the individual mission proposals (as they come out). Here are my initial impressions...
The general idea is great: make a comprehensive 10 year plan that has specific, actionable and ambitious goals as well as blueprints for the necessary structures to achieve these goals. It is my hope that each mission proposal will be grounded in reality and based on the best expert advice out there and will include an explanation of the potential issues or downsides of each proposal and how those will be addressed. For now, many thanks to everyone who worked hard on this.
One initial concern is: the entire set of documents looks like it may be 1000-2000 pages and it is obviously written for policy wonks (I'm not complaining about the writing). We definitely need to get the details of any proposals out there. But most people will not read it - that's just a reality, no disrespect to the authors or the citizenry. So we will also need something which explains the mission in a way that most people can understand and appreciate without having to do so much dense reading. Maybe infographics to illustrate things like overview of each mission, benefits, relationship to other missions. Maybe also some stories - something easy and engaging to read that shows how peoples' lives will change if these proposals are implemented. Maybe some animated cartoons (Jetson's type stuff)?
Another concern is that we not create sacrifice zones. Reducing unhelpful regulation is very welcome but let's not write local communities out of the discussion either. For example, if we replace a dirty, air-polluting power plant with a loud, noise-polluting data center then we are not doing it right. Sacrifice zones are bad whether created by the right or the left. All projects should be designed so that they are welcomed by local communities.
More generally, I am so far not seeing anything about how the public will interface with these projects to ensure that they really are good for people and their communities. This new world we are building should be consistent with progressive values: decentralized, flattened power structures; everyone's voice heard and concerns taken seriously; everyone is at the table, no one on the menu.
Finally, projects will hopefully be structured in such a way that they can evolve as needed as we learn more. I'm a little concerned at what sounds (in the summary document) a bit like building a bunch of green hydrogen facilities before we know if that is the correct solution. Hopefully a selection of pilot projects could help determine the best solution before we build a bunch of infrastructure that proves to have been useless? I know there is balance to be struck because there is some urgency in the transition to clean energy, I just hope we do our best to strike the right balance. And I hope lots of research is supported, too.
Thanks to everyone who worked on this. It seems like a good start.
I agree with Corbin. The way to begin to heal our American society and its people is through a massive shift towards public works. That means funded by taxes and operated by the government. A government redesigned to represent people, not corporations.
Public education-pre-school through post-high school.
Public energy.
Public communications, including cellphone service, internet and social media.
Public health care means national health service that is free to everyone and eliminates insurance altogether.
Public housing that builds millions of affordable units across the country.
Publicly built infrastructure that supports small family farms to get their products to market.
Publicly built infrastructure banking that is transparent and fair; that will charge fair rates of interest; that will never evict anyone from their homes or take away a small family farms due to falling behind on the mortgage.
Public services that are protected from meddling by political forces provides superior quality and would create tens of millions of good paying jobs with good benefits doing work that feels fulfilling and valuable.
Super appreciated the comment about how it's difficult to comprehend the collapse of certain infrastructures because for most people, life is going on. Yes, life is going on, but it's now "hollow." And hollow inside is a good description of the people who turn to authoritarianism to handle their fear, anger, and hate. Quite frankly, it feels like gaslighting on a grand scale.
And thank you, Corbin, for devoting yourself to being as we should all be: In service to each other. Win or lose, your efforts are not in vain.
Corbin, I really appreciate you naming the ownership question so directly. The part that stayed with me was not just the critique of reactive politics, but the structural point about where money flows and who owns the underlying systems. That is a conversation we do not have nearly enough.
The New Deal examples you referenced were not simply bold investments. They were institutional redesigns. Public utilities, rural electrification, regional development authorities. These were not temporary spending programs. They shifted who controlled infrastructure and how value circulated in communities. That is fundamentally different from taxing at the top and redistributing into systems that remain privately consolidated.
If we are serious about competing with oligarchic power, the conversation likely has to move toward economic democracy in tangible ways. Public options in delivery, worker ownership models, regional public banks, cooperative energy systems, municipally controlled healthcare infrastructure. Not as ideology, but as practical architecture that changes incentives and increases supply.
I also agree with you that vision matters. People rarely mobilize around being anti something. They mobilize around something they can picture and believe will materially improve their lives. But that vision also has to feel administratively credible. It has to answer how it works, who governs it, how it scales, and how it remains accountable.
The opportunity right now is not only rhetorical courage. It is designing systems that are democratic by structure, where ownership, governance, and benefit are aligned. I am glad you are bringing the ownership conversation forward.
So, I scrolled through the Mission for America, and there is much there I agree with. However, two red flags, and one glaring omission.
The two red flags are the attempt to reintroduce nuclear power as a major component of the energy mix, and the introduction of atmospheric engineering as a cooling strategy.
Not one word about nuclear waste. To suggest this can be ‘solved’ is, to me, as absurd as the fossil fuels/plastics industry saying their products can be recycled. And no one can know with any certainty whether any ‘engineering’ of the atmosphere will be effective; it might be detrimental long term. The same could be said of geothermal drilling. The fracking earthquakes are a reality.
The omission, unless I missed it, is in the creation of industrial hemp as a major player. It’s as green as it gets, and could replace much of the fossil fuel based components, from plastics to housing.
After your last recommendation, I took a long look at Mission for America. That is a comprehensive plan and certainly the right track. As an advocate for a Job Guarantee, I would love to see that in there, but the first step is to use the power of public money to get unemployment down to 1-2% (and that's a real number, not the bogus U-3 they feed us in the mainstream media), and that is in their plan. The Job Guarantee is designed to create a hard floor under which no person falls involuntarily- essentially, it puts teeth into the minimum wage laws. So it picks up those for whom the initial public investment doesn't work for one reason or another, and creates true zero percent unemployment. It is very popular in polling: predistributive, universal, and fair.
Onward.
Corbin, We need your voice everywhere! Thank you!
Actually, in economic terms the US of A is arguably the most "socialist" country in the world when it comes to one particular section of the economy: The Military-Industrial complex. And that fact is extremely well known, although hardly anybody ever mentions it including, I'm sorry to say, Corbin. Indeed the media blackout of this subject is positively Orwellian, see for example https://scheerpost.com/2026/02/10/seth-harp-speaks-on-new-york-times-spiking-us-foreign-policy-interview-with-ross-douthat/
In 2019, I went to Istanbul on a business trip. Erdogan had already made the authoritarian changes to their society. I didn’t know what to expect going there, but the thing that struck me was exactly what Corbin pointed out. Everyone just doing their normal everyday thing.
At dinner one night, the people I was meeting with were ok criticizing the government, but not before that paranoid look over their shoulder. That hit me hard.
Now is the time to stay strong and not accept this as the new normal.
Thanks for your ideas and leadership. I started looking at the Green New Deal and its lofty aims on mission for america website. I noticed "capitalism" wasn't mentioned. I think -- in line with what you have talked about: the restructuring of some of our basics here in the US -- that we should do something more "nuts and bolts" to start the change, e.g. give some kind of tax credits or financial incentives to Employee-owned Corporations. Rather than throw the babies out with the bathwater, change the bathwater and save the babies. Put a new spin on "making a profit". Thanks again for your important voice.
I think we have to have a crash or event of some sort to get to the other side of this insanity. Republicans are preparing for it, the cunning fuckers, and Democrats really are not, being who they are. But we need to keep trying and hope there's an opportunity and somehow we manage to make use of it.
My Trump voting son-in-law visited me last weekend. He's a hard working generous sales guy with a college degree whose whole perception of American politics was formed over 30 years by listening to Rush Limbaugh when he was on the road. During his recent visit I learned that at 67 he's still working full time and isn't enrolled in Medicare because his younger wife and their early 20s kids still need coverage through his company insurance. When I compared my Medicare coverage to his he realized how poor and expensive his own policy is. When explained that Medicare for All would allow him to retire and his family to get better more preventative health care through MFA he seemed stunned. When I said we would all have better care if the middle men and brokers were taken out of the health care system he truly had an ah ha moment. Dems need to have just one simple message to talk about: Medicare for All.
The Democrats by and large were sold to Corporatist interests in the 90s by the Clintons. All those boomers with fat pocketbooks need to be rousted out, but the Democratic party has become just a cynical self-perpetuating money machine. The Republicans did the opposite, went from a cynical self-replicating money machine to being plagued with people who stood for things, or rather stood AGAINST things. And let’s be honest, when AOC voted to break the rail worker strike, she joined the pathway. We need people with principles that surpass party.
why don't democrats call a press conference and tell the truth to counter the lies with the same intensity
Excellent article. Insights and solutions. You’ve hit the nail on the head. I would add that America also needs to spend more on really educating our kids, not just indoctrinating them with “we’re #1”.
Denial is the enemy Anaconda is every room. It will eat you whole unless you lie to yourself. That is the Big Lie. Nothing to see here. Trust me, the check's in the mail. Greatest Show on Earth. Listen to that Siren Bondi. Wow! Screaming at the top of its lungs, scorn, contempt, gaslighting, Newspeak, outright defiance. The Big Lie. Denial. Epstein? Never heard of him. Only a million times. A million mentions of TFG in the Epstein log. Never heard of him. Denial. Of course brown people are criminals. Just look at them, they are not white. Gotta be white to be good. Here's the thing Corbin. The Denial Lie is contagious, because it avoids the circular firing squad. Anyone and everyone can be accused of Something. Most litigious society on Earth. So many Laws. Why? Because there are so many Lies.. Deny everything. Challenge everything. Admit nothing. Evidence????? Fake. Epstein? Fake. Avarice? Fake. Massive Theft? Fake. Even the fake stuff is Fake. Bondi? The stock market is at $50k right now. Is that fake? Does it actually have any meaning for the bottom 80 percent who have little or no stock? No. Means nothing except lower wages and higher prices. But life goes on. Until it doesn't. Denial. The BiG Lie.
I've started reading the Mission for America summary document (77 pages); I'm maybe 20% in, so I can't comment in any sort of comprehensive way. I do plan to read the entire summary and the individual mission proposals (as they come out). Here are my initial impressions...
The general idea is great: make a comprehensive 10 year plan that has specific, actionable and ambitious goals as well as blueprints for the necessary structures to achieve these goals. It is my hope that each mission proposal will be grounded in reality and based on the best expert advice out there and will include an explanation of the potential issues or downsides of each proposal and how those will be addressed. For now, many thanks to everyone who worked hard on this.
One initial concern is: the entire set of documents looks like it may be 1000-2000 pages and it is obviously written for policy wonks (I'm not complaining about the writing). We definitely need to get the details of any proposals out there. But most people will not read it - that's just a reality, no disrespect to the authors or the citizenry. So we will also need something which explains the mission in a way that most people can understand and appreciate without having to do so much dense reading. Maybe infographics to illustrate things like overview of each mission, benefits, relationship to other missions. Maybe also some stories - something easy and engaging to read that shows how peoples' lives will change if these proposals are implemented. Maybe some animated cartoons (Jetson's type stuff)?
Another concern is that we not create sacrifice zones. Reducing unhelpful regulation is very welcome but let's not write local communities out of the discussion either. For example, if we replace a dirty, air-polluting power plant with a loud, noise-polluting data center then we are not doing it right. Sacrifice zones are bad whether created by the right or the left. All projects should be designed so that they are welcomed by local communities.
More generally, I am so far not seeing anything about how the public will interface with these projects to ensure that they really are good for people and their communities. This new world we are building should be consistent with progressive values: decentralized, flattened power structures; everyone's voice heard and concerns taken seriously; everyone is at the table, no one on the menu.
Finally, projects will hopefully be structured in such a way that they can evolve as needed as we learn more. I'm a little concerned at what sounds (in the summary document) a bit like building a bunch of green hydrogen facilities before we know if that is the correct solution. Hopefully a selection of pilot projects could help determine the best solution before we build a bunch of infrastructure that proves to have been useless? I know there is balance to be struck because there is some urgency in the transition to clean energy, I just hope we do our best to strike the right balance. And I hope lots of research is supported, too.
Thanks to everyone who worked on this. It seems like a good start.
I agree with Corbin. The way to begin to heal our American society and its people is through a massive shift towards public works. That means funded by taxes and operated by the government. A government redesigned to represent people, not corporations.
Public education-pre-school through post-high school.
Public energy.
Public communications, including cellphone service, internet and social media.
Public health care means national health service that is free to everyone and eliminates insurance altogether.
Public housing that builds millions of affordable units across the country.
Publicly built infrastructure that supports small family farms to get their products to market.
Publicly built infrastructure banking that is transparent and fair; that will charge fair rates of interest; that will never evict anyone from their homes or take away a small family farms due to falling behind on the mortgage.
Public services that are protected from meddling by political forces provides superior quality and would create tens of millions of good paying jobs with good benefits doing work that feels fulfilling and valuable.