Wow, this is great! I love all of it! I could really get excited about this. Dare we call it Project 2026?
Suggestions for additions:
1) Be more explicit about stating that you want to get money out of politics. You've got some stuff in there (like ending Citizen's United), but the legalized bribery is the root cause of much of the problem and the root needs to be ripped out. More forcefully stating that would be useful.
2) More transparency, fewer documents to be labeled as secret. I suspect most things that are kept secret are so because they embarrass somebody. "Sunshine is the best medicine".
3) Bring back the equal time doctrine that reagan killed. Free air time for vetted candidates.
4) Require that corporations show public benefit to be able to renew their corporate charter like they were originally required to do.
5) Prohibt corporations from owning other corporations - like they were originally as well.
6) Internet should be treated and ISPs regulated as a utility like electricity and gas.
7) State corporations are not people and money is not free speech so campaign contributions can be regulated
8) Public financing for elections so that non-rich people can more easily participate.
9) Whistleblower protection. Too many whistleblowers have been subjected to retaliation. The retaliators should go to prison.
10) Implement Kucinich's idea of a Department of Peace possibly to rename the pentagon.
11) Eliminate the our role (usually the CIA) in interfering in other countries. End our empire.
12) End our so-called War on Drugs.
13) Invest in mental health and rehab for drug addicts.
14) Implement restorative justice instead of retribution (Scandanavian countries)
15) More support for struggling families, lunches in schools, daycare, etc.
16) Bring back the voter rights legislation that trump & co killed. You have a bit about this but should be expanded
Yes, all good. However, over maybe 10-12 items it can sound like liberal whining. I invite you to do a second draft. Consider which basket of items 50 or more newspapers would run in tehir Sunday Opinion sections.
@corbintrent These additions are fantastic for the most part. Please update your plan with the best ones and then let us post and share this plan with the world. I'd love to post it on my blog as a concrete path forward. It's obviously not enough to just say what we are against but have actual plans for what to do instead. I've never read a doc with such a clear and actionable path. After adding most of the suggestions by Paul Kinzleman it could really go somewhere!
If I were king of the world, I'd implement all of them, but we should be cautious and take input from people on the right and be reticent to include stuff they strongly oppose. We need people on the right to push with us together if this is to have any chance. As long as the left fights with the right, we will get nowhere.
I would agree except for the overton window effect. At this point centrist ideas appear left leaning and left ideas see left wing insanity to the general populous. It not's by mistake either. while its not a full coordinated conspiracy of course, it is many very wealthy people each taking small independent actions that add up to weaponizing the conservative's emotional and spiritual instincts in way that makes them think they are doing what's right rather than realize they are cementing in the oligarchic system. It's really sad
Yes, sadly, I place the blame at the foot of the mainstream media. They're in the business of making money by grabbing eyeballs. News is not news. The only mainstream 'news' I watch is on Comedy Central.
Paul, these are great and seem compatible with Corbin's piece. However there are so many ideas, perhaps they can be added as an Appendix. We dont want the main piece to become a mosh pit of good ideas. My vision is for Corbin to produce a document which 50 or more newspapers will reproduce in their Sunday opinion section.
I just wanted to throw out all the ideas I could think of and I figured he'd pick and choose the ones he liked to include. But you're right, the more ideas there are on a platform, the smaller the group might be that buys into it. I didn't mention the topic of guns, that's probably one of the most polarizing ones. The right (especially as trump continues to demolish our democracy) might even be able to sign on if we make sure the ideas are populist. I walk mornings with a trump supporter, loves everything he's done in these past months, thinks his trade strategy is genius, but we can agree on things like ending legalized bribery, housing the homeless, etc. So yes, if people who are trump supporters contribute ideas we might get them on board too, especially as the country descends more into chaos.
I think it’s all great, however without delivering swift and unequivocal justice to the people who did this to our country, I doubt if any of it will come to pass. What would have happened if we would have given the German Nazis a slap on the wrist, allowed them to continue exist, and tried to create a better world with them still functioning?
I know that’s a rhetorical question, but I can’t help observing that our county has a long sordid history of slapping fascist oppressors on the wrist. We give Confederates a slap on the wrist, allowing them to set up Jim Crow, lynchings, Tulsa massacres, sharecropping, convict leasing, all to the enrichment of one slice of the population in the North, Midwest, Plains, and West as well as the South. And now our government is basically a criminal enterprise and we wonder why.
Doug, you are not wrong. I invite you to consider the widest possible circulation Corbin's piece could have. Not all progressive ideas make Corbin's piece stronger as a piece of journalism.
And continuing up to present day. Bush administration lies about WMD and the need for decades of unnecessary war, Trump 1.0 children in cages, January 6. On and on…
Exactly what did happen after our civil war when we didn't even give the leaders of the South a "slap on the wrist." They changed their verbiage and continued their racist activities.
Exactly! And will we make the same mistake again? Very likely.
I say it over and over on here. You don’t get to implement your policies unless you win. (Something the right knows full well.) And winning doesn’t just mean winning an election.
I read the whole thing. Support the whole thing. If there are gaps in your proposal, I cannot find them and they can likely wait for implementaion. The problem will be getting all potential voters (whether they've excercised that priviledge or not) to be aware that what you offer is possible and preferable to what we now have. And have them vote accordingly before our ship of state crashes on the rocks just ahead.
Please, keep writing.
(I'm a poor and retired senior type, else I'd subscribe.)
I am a long time advocate of Medicare for All, and am now a member of National Single Payer, a group of like-minded people. Here is the link to our website:
What we have come to realize is that it is too late for Medicare for All (which simply replaces the for-profit insurance companies with a government-run insurer like Medicare). The reason it's too late is because of the complete privatization of Medicaid and almost complete privatization of Medicare that is now happening as I write this. There are now almost no private practices left in the US. Almost all medical practices have now been taken over by the for-profit Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). So now almost all medical practitioners are essentially employees of for-profit ACOs.
SO...... what we are now doing is putting together a "Model Bill" for a National Community-Based Healthcare Service, which means the entire system will be run bottom up, instead of top down. There will be NO PROFIT allowed anywhere in the system. All facilities will be owned by the government, and all medical practitioners will be employed by the government.
Healthcare administration will be done by local community elected Boards of individuals. Each Board will in turn elect one or more of its members to be on District Boards, who in turn elect Regional Boards, who in turn elect the National Board. These Boards will NOT be under the control of the President or presidential appointees.
I hope you will join us to find out more about what we are proposing. We hope to have it completed within a few months. Here is the email address for Ana Malinow, who coordinates our group. If you email her, I am sure she would love to speak with you, and send you a link to join us at our next meeting this week Wed. 09/10/25: < anamalinow@gmail.com >
This sounds like an NHS-type model (UK's national health system) which I also favor but which is currently having lots of problems in the UK. Hopefully the system you are designing takes this into account and is structured to attempt to avoid these problems?
The reason the NHS is having problems in the UK is the same reason we are seeing here.... ever since Thatcher (there) and Reagan (here) the politicians in both the US and UK have been hell-bent on privatizing everything in sight, so the NHS has been consistently and increasingly underfunded to the point where now (just like the VA here) it is barely able to function at all.
Yes, totally agree. I think NHS is fundamentally a good model. We have the same thing going on here with our postal service: a small number of people attempting to make it perform badly in order to generate a will to privatize. And Medicare. Any public option is likely to be attacked relentlessly if the privatization of it can profit someone.
So my point is, if there is a way to build a new system with some protections against this happening that would be good to do. It's not like the forces for privatization are going to roll over and give up.
I wondered if the NSP group is building a structure with safeguards against this and other sorts of attacks, because we know that even if we manage to put a public option in place for health care (or anything else) it will immediately be attacked by the people who would prefer to be able to extract immense wealth from it rather than provide a useful service to ordinary Americans.
Yes, a public option would never work because it would still allow our corporate-owned elected officials to sabotage it by finding numerous ways to divert money from it into the for-profits' coffers.
Your concerns are the same ones we have and are why(in addition to declaring at the outset that there will be NO profiting allowed) our system will also be totally separate from the Executive branch and will be built from the bottom up via the local election of a Community Board in each community nationwide. Then one or two of the Board members from each community in a district will become a District Board, and some of those will make up a Regional Board, and then the same for a National Board.
Sounds good. See if you can get economist Richard Wolff to comment on your plan. If he has no quibbles, then you really have something which can build momentum
He's my favorite economist!!! I don't know how to get the plan to him. I am not very tech or internet savvy. If you know how to reach him, please let me know.
Thank you for the link, but it turns out to be one I have been to before, and I am not finding any way to send an attachment or contact him. It has only links to set up a speaking engagement for him or to invite him to be on a TV or radio program. It does say he is on Facebook, so I will give that a try.
I love this. However, for me, the omission of anything addressing environmental collapse and the responsibility to safeguard nature and natural systems was glaring. The assault on nature and climate catastrophe are central to the problems of our time.
Agree, Cindy. It's missing, conspicuous by its absence. Can you draft a plank on this? Lots of versions of what's missing online. Also use Google Chrome AI. Send me a copy too HealingToolbox atttg male c-o=m
I have proposed a completely new Criminal Justice System. Currently, our definition of justice is no more than a game, where one attorney is paid to convince a jury that the accused is guilty, and another attorney is paid to do the exact opposite. Prosecutors who "win" are rewarded by being re-elected and attaining celebrity status, which, in turn allows them to advance to higher
offices with higher pay.
Defense attorneys who "win" also become celebrities and are paid huge sums by defendants who are either independently wealthy or who are members of organized crime. Thus, our system foregoes anything resembling a quest for the truth, in favor of a model of adversarial competition, which automatically generates a two-tiered track... one for the very wealthy and another for everyone else.
Defendants who are not able to pay massive fees are simply out of luck and are far more likely to be found guilty, whether or not they have actually committed a crime.
The measures I propose will not only help eliminate our current system's inherent incentive for attorneys to use whatever "legally approved" misleading tricks they can get away with (which is innately reprehensible, and also reduces the role of the judge to that of an authoritarian referee or umpire). These measures will completely transform our current system, and will eliminate the
"gamesmanship" and its all or nothing competition.
Is there some way to attach a file here or send a file to you? My proposal is about 8 pages long.
Unfortunately, I have great difficulty with the Google Doc. method/format. I find it confusing to use, and I also have poor vision. That's why I have requested some way to send an email with the Word file attached.
Regrettably, I have to disagree that getting the "right people" elected will be all that we need to do. My gut feeling is that remedy passed a long time ago--about 15 years, to be more exact. After Citizens United, the entire thing went downhill rapidly. The remedy, and the reckoning, will not be pretty; and it must happen before any of this can be implemented.
A. A strict code of ethics shall be required for all elected and appointed officials throughout the entire United States government, including federal, state, county, city, and neighborhood governments, as well as for all publicly or privately owned businesses, cooperatives, and corporations.
B. The code shall include strict prohibition of any form of bribery, including immediate (or promise of future) donations or gifts of money, material objects, services or favors, and offers of employment for the official or any family member, significant other, or close friend of the official.
C. The code shall include the prohibition of the President, the Vice President, and any member of the President's Cabinet or Presidential Advisors as well as any Member of Congress, and any member of these officials' immediate family to engage in any stock trading from at least one year prior to becoming a Representative until at least 5 years after leaving office.
D. The code shall include the complete transparency of all branches of government at all times. The people of the United States of America have the right to know at all times what their government is doing with their tax money and in their name. This right shall be inviolate! This means that all actions, documents, and communications of the FBI and CIA shall be recorded and preserved at the time they are generated, and shall be made public within 2 years of their initiation, including all clandestine or covert activities and communications both domestic and foreign.
E. The code shall include making the U.S. Military answer directly to the U.S. House of Representatives at all times. No member of the Executive Branch of Government, including the President and Vice President, shall ever unilaterally declare war, initiate military invasions or attacks of any sort on a foreign nation, state, or territory, or send weapons or other military aid, including monetary aid, to any foreign nation or to operatives in any foreign nation or state, without first obtaining explicit approval via a super-majority vote by the House of Representatives.
F. This code shall be strictly applied to each member of every branch of the United States Government, including the President, Vice President, every member of the House, every member of the Judiciary, every member of the DOJ, every member of the Criminal Justice System, every member of the Supreme Court of the United States, and every member of the U.S. Military.
G. The U.S.A shall never initiate military force or invasion of any foreign nation or state. If attacked by a foreign military, the President shall have the right to take defensive military actions to defend the U.S.A.
H. The U.S.A. shall immediately begin cutting back on the number of U.S. military bases around the world and shall engage in negotiations with all other nations that have nuclear bombs, missiles, and arms, to begin the process of eliminating all military weapons (especially nuclear weapons) on Earth, in Earth's skies and oceans, and in outer space.
And I believe that we need to change the structure of our government:
The U.S. Senate has always been a major problem. It functions too much like a "House of the minority". The Senate gives far too much power to the minority by giving equal power to every state regardless of its population. California currently has 66 times the population of Wyoming. Yet, in the Senate, both states have only 2 Senators. So, in the Senate, the vote of every person living in Wyoming counts 66 times more than the vote of any person living in California. Eliminating this state-based representation may “feel" weird, but that is only because we are so used to it. In reality it is a massive impediment to the U.S. ever becoming a true democracy. Here's what I propose:
1. The U.S. Congress shall consist of one legislative body, the U.S. House of Representatives, which shall retain all its current duties and responsibilities and shall also hereafter shoulder all the duties and responsibilities previously held by the Senate.
a. The House shall be proportionally representative, and shall be enlarged to provide 2 representatives for every 600,000 citizens of the USA.
b. All Representatives shall be elected by democratically-run, ranked choice (single transferable vote) majority rule elections using the Hare quota.
2. The U.S. House of Representatives shall be elected via the division of the entire population of the United States into districts. Each district shall contain roughly 600,000 citizens.
a. Representative districts shall be determined by the geographic area needed to include roughly 600,000 citizens regardless of the borders between the member states of the United States.
b. Congress shall decide the district borders, with the advice of nonpartisan experts and computer programs designed to determine how to draw the district lines to avoid diluting the predominate ethnic and/or racial minority votes … whatever the predominate ethnic and/or racial minority in that geographic area turns out to be (Asian, African, Black, Caucasian, Hispanic, Indonesian, Japanese, Jewish, Korean, Muslim, Native American, Palestinian, Polynesian, etc.) as well as to avoid the dilution of the voting power of the predominant political minority of that area (left leaning or right leaning).
c. District borders shall be decided via a three-fourths majority vote of the entire Congress.
3. All forms of gerrymandering shall be entirely prohibited, and this prohibition shall be strictly enforced by federal, state, and local elected boards (comprised of equal numbers of members from both the left and right sides of the political spectrum) whose primary duty shall be to oversee all elections to ensure fairness.
4. The District of Columbia shall immediately officially become a state of the USA, with all the rights and privileges of every other state, including representation and voting rights equal to that of every other state of the USA.
5. All territories and holdings of the USA shall immediately be given the opportunity to officially become a state of the USA with the same rights of representation and voting as that of every other state of the USA.
6. The U.S. Supreme Court shall be elected via a national, exclusively publicly funded, majority rule, ranked choice, popular vote. The U.S. Supreme Court shall consist of 13 Justices with staggered, overlapping terms. Each term shall run for 10 years. Each candidate running for a seat as a Supreme Court Justice shall be 35 to 65 years of age and shall have a minimum of 10 years experience as a licensed, actively practicing courtroom attorney and/or judge. No Justice shall serve for more than one term.
7. All new legislation, policies, treaties, and contracts (including the wording of the U.S. Constitution, every state constitution, every piece of legislation at any level of government, and all contracts shall have a readability score of 80 or more on the Flesch-Kincaid grade system* so that the average literate citizen over the age of 12 shall be able to understand all legal documents. All existing laws, policies, treaties, and contracts shall be translated so that they meet this same standard.
8. In the event that any law is considered to be unfair by a significant number of U.S. citizens, they shall have the right to petition for a nationwide vote (if it is a federal law) or a statewide vote (if it is a state law) or a countywide vote (if it is a county law or ordinance) or a citywide vote (if it is a city law or ordinance) or a neighborhood-wide vote (if it is a neighborhood rule or ordinance) for the purpose of repealing or changing that law, ordinance, or rule. Such petitioning shall be made easy for citizens to utilize and shall not have rules applied to the petition signature gathering that make it hard for citizens to reach the number of signatures # required to get the law, ordinance, or rule on the ballot.
Any party which does nothing for its constituents will not keep getting elected forever. The problem, in my view, is not to get people to stop voting for bad parties, but to offer a good party which sufficient numbers of people will vote for. This platform seems to be an effort in that direction. If such a party were to get elected and were able to implement policies that actually help people then those people would presumably vote for that party some more in subsequent elections. The challenge seems to be to get past the stranglehold of the two party system we have where we keep bouncing back and forth hoping that one of the parties will do something for ordinary people or voting for the 'lesser evil'.
The bottom 80% is fleeing the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party does not care about them or represent their interests but instead keeps telling them they should be happy because the economy is great while they are having trouble affording groceries or health insurance or child care or other essentials.
Some who flee the Democratic Party have been attracted to Trump as the outsider who will shake things up. Once they see that the shake up is going to make things even worse for them, they will be less eager to vote for him or the GOP again. Once they see that hatred and cruelty toward disfavored groups does not, in fact, fix anything for everyone else, then only the true haters will stay and hopefully that is a very small percentage.
If this platform can be crafted to embrace those human essentials that both ordinary conservatives and liberals want and need, and if the platform can be shared with enough people and candidates recruited and funded then it seems to me there is hope for getting representatives elected to carry out the platform. The primary win of Mamdani in NYC is evidence of this, to take one recent example.
Have a problem with Part II action 2. We’re not going to build our way out of the housing crisis. The infrastructure exists. Most people don’t need the square footage they’re living in. Take those 10,000 square foot mansions and cut them up into a dozen affordable units.
FOLLOW THE MONEY -- Fixing almost any national problem with policies that serve the working class rather than the investor class will almost certainly face fierce opposition. But that to me defines where to start: political corruption and priorities that put profit over people. Let's see if the people will vote against that.
But know the opposition will come through for-profit news outlets and social media. Getting a short, powerful, and understandable message out, above the noise that will be thrown at it, will be the biggest challenge, I think.
I hear little these days about how total healthcare cost go beyond insurance premiums and is spread in a way that consumers don’t really know how much they or the nation is paying. Without that, they don't know how single-payer reengineering of our healthcare system could collectively save the nation well over $2 trillion per year.
That conservative estimate is based on a detailed healthcare spending update from Health Affairs. It says we in the U.S. spent 18% of GDP last year (2024) on health care. That was $5.25 trillion, but we didn’t get our money’s worth and instead have had worse outcomes and average longevity. On an individual basis, those trillions amount to over $15,600 per capita, or $60K for a household of four., and the costs keep rising faster than incomes. See https://mhealthtalk.com/healthcare-spending-update-outlook/.
I believe voters would support a national single-payer system if they knew how much they and their families would save, so speak in their language. I also think they can understand they'd have more employment opportunities if employers didn’t have to pay their insurance as a way to keep them from leaving. Without that expense, and with workers being healthier and more productive, employers could afford to pay higher wages. They'd need to, because it would be easier for the workers to look elsewhere for better opportunities. The whole U.S. economy would benefit as a result, rising all boats.
If voters truly understood how companies and politicians are incentivized to put profits and power over people, they’d demand the sort of reengineering I’ve been writing about. Check out the related articles at the bottom the one I referenced above.
There are many related issues that also contribute to improved longevity and better lifestyles. One that I’ve written about is gun safety, which should be reframed as a public health issue.
Wow, this is great! I love all of it! I could really get excited about this. Dare we call it Project 2026?
Suggestions for additions:
1) Be more explicit about stating that you want to get money out of politics. You've got some stuff in there (like ending Citizen's United), but the legalized bribery is the root cause of much of the problem and the root needs to be ripped out. More forcefully stating that would be useful.
2) More transparency, fewer documents to be labeled as secret. I suspect most things that are kept secret are so because they embarrass somebody. "Sunshine is the best medicine".
3) Bring back the equal time doctrine that reagan killed. Free air time for vetted candidates.
4) Require that corporations show public benefit to be able to renew their corporate charter like they were originally required to do.
5) Prohibt corporations from owning other corporations - like they were originally as well.
6) Internet should be treated and ISPs regulated as a utility like electricity and gas.
7) State corporations are not people and money is not free speech so campaign contributions can be regulated
8) Public financing for elections so that non-rich people can more easily participate.
9) Whistleblower protection. Too many whistleblowers have been subjected to retaliation. The retaliators should go to prison.
10) Implement Kucinich's idea of a Department of Peace possibly to rename the pentagon.
11) Eliminate the our role (usually the CIA) in interfering in other countries. End our empire.
12) End our so-called War on Drugs.
13) Invest in mental health and rehab for drug addicts.
14) Implement restorative justice instead of retribution (Scandanavian countries)
15) More support for struggling families, lunches in schools, daycare, etc.
16) Bring back the voter rights legislation that trump & co killed. You have a bit about this but should be expanded
Additional ideas:
17) End privatization of public functions like prisons
18) Severely limit hedge fund wholesale buying of houses
19) Increase corporate taxes and severely limit stock buy-backs
20) Immigration reform - temporary work permits
21) Congress start overruling supreme court using Article 3 section 2
22) Impeach the 4 perjurers now sitting on the court (thomas and trump's 3 minions)
23) End the bribery of the supreme court judges (as thomas and alito have done)
24) Force the pentagon to get a completed audit
25) End our boycotts of countries we don't like - Cuba and Venezuela
26) End stupid Daylight Savings Time tho that pales in comparison to everything else
Yes, all good. However, over maybe 10-12 items it can sound like liberal whining. I invite you to do a second draft. Consider which basket of items 50 or more newspapers would run in tehir Sunday Opinion sections.
@corbintrent These additions are fantastic for the most part. Please update your plan with the best ones and then let us post and share this plan with the world. I'd love to post it on my blog as a concrete path forward. It's obviously not enough to just say what we are against but have actual plans for what to do instead. I've never read a doc with such a clear and actionable path. After adding most of the suggestions by Paul Kinzleman it could really go somewhere!
If I were king of the world, I'd implement all of them, but we should be cautious and take input from people on the right and be reticent to include stuff they strongly oppose. We need people on the right to push with us together if this is to have any chance. As long as the left fights with the right, we will get nowhere.
I would agree except for the overton window effect. At this point centrist ideas appear left leaning and left ideas see left wing insanity to the general populous. It not's by mistake either. while its not a full coordinated conspiracy of course, it is many very wealthy people each taking small independent actions that add up to weaponizing the conservative's emotional and spiritual instincts in way that makes them think they are doing what's right rather than realize they are cementing in the oligarchic system. It's really sad
Yes, sadly, I place the blame at the foot of the mainstream media. They're in the business of making money by grabbing eyeballs. News is not news. The only mainstream 'news' I watch is on Comedy Central.
yeah npr is ok but not perfect by any means. John stewart and john oliver are the only real truth tellers. every other news org is blatantly bs
Paul, these are great and seem compatible with Corbin's piece. However there are so many ideas, perhaps they can be added as an Appendix. We dont want the main piece to become a mosh pit of good ideas. My vision is for Corbin to produce a document which 50 or more newspapers will reproduce in their Sunday opinion section.
I just wanted to throw out all the ideas I could think of and I figured he'd pick and choose the ones he liked to include. But you're right, the more ideas there are on a platform, the smaller the group might be that buys into it. I didn't mention the topic of guns, that's probably one of the most polarizing ones. The right (especially as trump continues to demolish our democracy) might even be able to sign on if we make sure the ideas are populist. I walk mornings with a trump supporter, loves everything he's done in these past months, thinks his trade strategy is genius, but we can agree on things like ending legalized bribery, housing the homeless, etc. So yes, if people who are trump supporters contribute ideas we might get them on board too, especially as the country descends more into chaos.
I think it’s all great, however without delivering swift and unequivocal justice to the people who did this to our country, I doubt if any of it will come to pass. What would have happened if we would have given the German Nazis a slap on the wrist, allowed them to continue exist, and tried to create a better world with them still functioning?
I know that’s a rhetorical question, but I can’t help observing that our county has a long sordid history of slapping fascist oppressors on the wrist. We give Confederates a slap on the wrist, allowing them to set up Jim Crow, lynchings, Tulsa massacres, sharecropping, convict leasing, all to the enrichment of one slice of the population in the North, Midwest, Plains, and West as well as the South. And now our government is basically a criminal enterprise and we wonder why.
Doug, you are not wrong. I invite you to consider the widest possible circulation Corbin's piece could have. Not all progressive ideas make Corbin's piece stronger as a piece of journalism.
And continuing up to present day. Bush administration lies about WMD and the need for decades of unnecessary war, Trump 1.0 children in cages, January 6. On and on…
My proposal for accountability.
https://open.substack.com/pub/douglascarlton/p/they-must-be-held-to-account-we-arent?r=1tl5sg&utm_medium=ios
Exactly what did happen after our civil war when we didn't even give the leaders of the South a "slap on the wrist." They changed their verbiage and continued their racist activities.
Exactly! And will we make the same mistake again? Very likely.
I say it over and over on here. You don’t get to implement your policies unless you win. (Something the right knows full well.) And winning doesn’t just mean winning an election.
Mr. T.,
I read the whole thing. Support the whole thing. If there are gaps in your proposal, I cannot find them and they can likely wait for implementaion. The problem will be getting all potential voters (whether they've excercised that priviledge or not) to be aware that what you offer is possible and preferable to what we now have. And have them vote accordingly before our ship of state crashes on the rocks just ahead.
Please, keep writing.
(I'm a poor and retired senior type, else I'd subscribe.)
I am a long time advocate of Medicare for All, and am now a member of National Single Payer, a group of like-minded people. Here is the link to our website:
https://nationalsinglepayer.com/
What we have come to realize is that it is too late for Medicare for All (which simply replaces the for-profit insurance companies with a government-run insurer like Medicare). The reason it's too late is because of the complete privatization of Medicaid and almost complete privatization of Medicare that is now happening as I write this. There are now almost no private practices left in the US. Almost all medical practices have now been taken over by the for-profit Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). So now almost all medical practitioners are essentially employees of for-profit ACOs.
SO...... what we are now doing is putting together a "Model Bill" for a National Community-Based Healthcare Service, which means the entire system will be run bottom up, instead of top down. There will be NO PROFIT allowed anywhere in the system. All facilities will be owned by the government, and all medical practitioners will be employed by the government.
Healthcare administration will be done by local community elected Boards of individuals. Each Board will in turn elect one or more of its members to be on District Boards, who in turn elect Regional Boards, who in turn elect the National Board. These Boards will NOT be under the control of the President or presidential appointees.
I hope you will join us to find out more about what we are proposing. We hope to have it completed within a few months. Here is the email address for Ana Malinow, who coordinates our group. If you email her, I am sure she would love to speak with you, and send you a link to join us at our next meeting this week Wed. 09/10/25: < anamalinow@gmail.com >
This sounds like an NHS-type model (UK's national health system) which I also favor but which is currently having lots of problems in the UK. Hopefully the system you are designing takes this into account and is structured to attempt to avoid these problems?
The reason the NHS is having problems in the UK is the same reason we are seeing here.... ever since Thatcher (there) and Reagan (here) the politicians in both the US and UK have been hell-bent on privatizing everything in sight, so the NHS has been consistently and increasingly underfunded to the point where now (just like the VA here) it is barely able to function at all.
Yes, totally agree. I think NHS is fundamentally a good model. We have the same thing going on here with our postal service: a small number of people attempting to make it perform badly in order to generate a will to privatize. And Medicare. Any public option is likely to be attacked relentlessly if the privatization of it can profit someone.
So my point is, if there is a way to build a new system with some protections against this happening that would be good to do. It's not like the forces for privatization are going to roll over and give up.
I wondered if the NSP group is building a structure with safeguards against this and other sorts of attacks, because we know that even if we manage to put a public option in place for health care (or anything else) it will immediately be attacked by the people who would prefer to be able to extract immense wealth from it rather than provide a useful service to ordinary Americans.
Yes, a public option would never work because it would still allow our corporate-owned elected officials to sabotage it by finding numerous ways to divert money from it into the for-profits' coffers.
Your concerns are the same ones we have and are why(in addition to declaring at the outset that there will be NO profiting allowed) our system will also be totally separate from the Executive branch and will be built from the bottom up via the local election of a Community Board in each community nationwide. Then one or two of the Board members from each community in a district will become a District Board, and some of those will make up a Regional Board, and then the same for a National Board.
Sounds good. See if you can get economist Richard Wolff to comment on your plan. If he has no quibbles, then you really have something which can build momentum
He's my favorite economist!!! I don't know how to get the plan to him. I am not very tech or internet savvy. If you know how to reach him, please let me know.
https://www.rdwolff.com/contact3
Expect to reach his staff first, not him personally first.
Thank you for the link, but it turns out to be one I have been to before, and I am not finding any way to send an attachment or contact him. It has only links to set up a speaking engagement for him or to invite him to be on a TV or radio program. It does say he is on Facebook, so I will give that a try.
Lee, try this URL https://www.democracyatwork.info/contactus
Thanks Bruce, I sent a message at that site asking if there is any way to send him files to get his feedback and input... so we'll see???
I love this. However, for me, the omission of anything addressing environmental collapse and the responsibility to safeguard nature and natural systems was glaring. The assault on nature and climate catastrophe are central to the problems of our time.
+1 hard to imagine leaving this out. Platform already exists. Could potentially be tweaked, but this is a great start: https://greennewdealnetwork.org/green-new-deal/
Agree, Cindy. It's missing, conspicuous by its absence. Can you draft a plank on this? Lots of versions of what's missing online. Also use Google Chrome AI. Send me a copy too HealingToolbox atttg male c-o=m
I have proposed a completely new Criminal Justice System. Currently, our definition of justice is no more than a game, where one attorney is paid to convince a jury that the accused is guilty, and another attorney is paid to do the exact opposite. Prosecutors who "win" are rewarded by being re-elected and attaining celebrity status, which, in turn allows them to advance to higher
offices with higher pay.
Defense attorneys who "win" also become celebrities and are paid huge sums by defendants who are either independently wealthy or who are members of organized crime. Thus, our system foregoes anything resembling a quest for the truth, in favor of a model of adversarial competition, which automatically generates a two-tiered track... one for the very wealthy and another for everyone else.
Defendants who are not able to pay massive fees are simply out of luck and are far more likely to be found guilty, whether or not they have actually committed a crime.
The measures I propose will not only help eliminate our current system's inherent incentive for attorneys to use whatever "legally approved" misleading tricks they can get away with (which is innately reprehensible, and also reduces the role of the judge to that of an authoritarian referee or umpire). These measures will completely transform our current system, and will eliminate the
"gamesmanship" and its all or nothing competition.
Is there some way to attach a file here or send a file to you? My proposal is about 8 pages long.
Lee, do what Corbin did. Post your piece as a Google Doc. post the link here in Comments. Those interested can click to it.
Unfortunately, I have great difficulty with the Google Doc. method/format. I find it confusing to use, and I also have poor vision. That's why I have requested some way to send an email with the Word file attached.
This is terrific but the only way it is going to happen is if we get the right people elected. That is the hard part.
Regrettably, I have to disagree that getting the "right people" elected will be all that we need to do. My gut feeling is that remedy passed a long time ago--about 15 years, to be more exact. After Citizens United, the entire thing went downhill rapidly. The remedy, and the reckoning, will not be pretty; and it must happen before any of this can be implemented.
I also think we need a Nationwide Code of Ethics:
A. A strict code of ethics shall be required for all elected and appointed officials throughout the entire United States government, including federal, state, county, city, and neighborhood governments, as well as for all publicly or privately owned businesses, cooperatives, and corporations.
B. The code shall include strict prohibition of any form of bribery, including immediate (or promise of future) donations or gifts of money, material objects, services or favors, and offers of employment for the official or any family member, significant other, or close friend of the official.
C. The code shall include the prohibition of the President, the Vice President, and any member of the President's Cabinet or Presidential Advisors as well as any Member of Congress, and any member of these officials' immediate family to engage in any stock trading from at least one year prior to becoming a Representative until at least 5 years after leaving office.
D. The code shall include the complete transparency of all branches of government at all times. The people of the United States of America have the right to know at all times what their government is doing with their tax money and in their name. This right shall be inviolate! This means that all actions, documents, and communications of the FBI and CIA shall be recorded and preserved at the time they are generated, and shall be made public within 2 years of their initiation, including all clandestine or covert activities and communications both domestic and foreign.
E. The code shall include making the U.S. Military answer directly to the U.S. House of Representatives at all times. No member of the Executive Branch of Government, including the President and Vice President, shall ever unilaterally declare war, initiate military invasions or attacks of any sort on a foreign nation, state, or territory, or send weapons or other military aid, including monetary aid, to any foreign nation or to operatives in any foreign nation or state, without first obtaining explicit approval via a super-majority vote by the House of Representatives.
F. This code shall be strictly applied to each member of every branch of the United States Government, including the President, Vice President, every member of the House, every member of the Judiciary, every member of the DOJ, every member of the Criminal Justice System, every member of the Supreme Court of the United States, and every member of the U.S. Military.
G. The U.S.A shall never initiate military force or invasion of any foreign nation or state. If attacked by a foreign military, the President shall have the right to take defensive military actions to defend the U.S.A.
H. The U.S.A. shall immediately begin cutting back on the number of U.S. military bases around the world and shall engage in negotiations with all other nations that have nuclear bombs, missiles, and arms, to begin the process of eliminating all military weapons (especially nuclear weapons) on Earth, in Earth's skies and oceans, and in outer space.
And I believe that we need to change the structure of our government:
The U.S. Senate has always been a major problem. It functions too much like a "House of the minority". The Senate gives far too much power to the minority by giving equal power to every state regardless of its population. California currently has 66 times the population of Wyoming. Yet, in the Senate, both states have only 2 Senators. So, in the Senate, the vote of every person living in Wyoming counts 66 times more than the vote of any person living in California. Eliminating this state-based representation may “feel" weird, but that is only because we are so used to it. In reality it is a massive impediment to the U.S. ever becoming a true democracy. Here's what I propose:
1. The U.S. Congress shall consist of one legislative body, the U.S. House of Representatives, which shall retain all its current duties and responsibilities and shall also hereafter shoulder all the duties and responsibilities previously held by the Senate.
a. The House shall be proportionally representative, and shall be enlarged to provide 2 representatives for every 600,000 citizens of the USA.
b. All Representatives shall be elected by democratically-run, ranked choice (single transferable vote) majority rule elections using the Hare quota.
2. The U.S. House of Representatives shall be elected via the division of the entire population of the United States into districts. Each district shall contain roughly 600,000 citizens.
a. Representative districts shall be determined by the geographic area needed to include roughly 600,000 citizens regardless of the borders between the member states of the United States.
b. Congress shall decide the district borders, with the advice of nonpartisan experts and computer programs designed to determine how to draw the district lines to avoid diluting the predominate ethnic and/or racial minority votes … whatever the predominate ethnic and/or racial minority in that geographic area turns out to be (Asian, African, Black, Caucasian, Hispanic, Indonesian, Japanese, Jewish, Korean, Muslim, Native American, Palestinian, Polynesian, etc.) as well as to avoid the dilution of the voting power of the predominant political minority of that area (left leaning or right leaning).
c. District borders shall be decided via a three-fourths majority vote of the entire Congress.
3. All forms of gerrymandering shall be entirely prohibited, and this prohibition shall be strictly enforced by federal, state, and local elected boards (comprised of equal numbers of members from both the left and right sides of the political spectrum) whose primary duty shall be to oversee all elections to ensure fairness.
4. The District of Columbia shall immediately officially become a state of the USA, with all the rights and privileges of every other state, including representation and voting rights equal to that of every other state of the USA.
5. All territories and holdings of the USA shall immediately be given the opportunity to officially become a state of the USA with the same rights of representation and voting as that of every other state of the USA.
6. The U.S. Supreme Court shall be elected via a national, exclusively publicly funded, majority rule, ranked choice, popular vote. The U.S. Supreme Court shall consist of 13 Justices with staggered, overlapping terms. Each term shall run for 10 years. Each candidate running for a seat as a Supreme Court Justice shall be 35 to 65 years of age and shall have a minimum of 10 years experience as a licensed, actively practicing courtroom attorney and/or judge. No Justice shall serve for more than one term.
7. All new legislation, policies, treaties, and contracts (including the wording of the U.S. Constitution, every state constitution, every piece of legislation at any level of government, and all contracts shall have a readability score of 80 or more on the Flesch-Kincaid grade system* so that the average literate citizen over the age of 12 shall be able to understand all legal documents. All existing laws, policies, treaties, and contracts shall be translated so that they meet this same standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch–Kincaid_readability_tests
8. In the event that any law is considered to be unfair by a significant number of U.S. citizens, they shall have the right to petition for a nationwide vote (if it is a federal law) or a statewide vote (if it is a state law) or a countywide vote (if it is a county law or ordinance) or a citywide vote (if it is a city law or ordinance) or a neighborhood-wide vote (if it is a neighborhood rule or ordinance) for the purpose of repealing or changing that law, ordinance, or rule. Such petitioning shall be made easy for citizens to utilize and shall not have rules applied to the petition signature gathering that make it hard for citizens to reach the number of signatures # required to get the law, ordinance, or rule on the ballot.
Thank you for all that you say and do but, how do we get the Maga Republicans out of office? And rid of them for good?
Any party which does nothing for its constituents will not keep getting elected forever. The problem, in my view, is not to get people to stop voting for bad parties, but to offer a good party which sufficient numbers of people will vote for. This platform seems to be an effort in that direction. If such a party were to get elected and were able to implement policies that actually help people then those people would presumably vote for that party some more in subsequent elections. The challenge seems to be to get past the stranglehold of the two party system we have where we keep bouncing back and forth hoping that one of the parties will do something for ordinary people or voting for the 'lesser evil'.
The bottom 80% is fleeing the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party does not care about them or represent their interests but instead keeps telling them they should be happy because the economy is great while they are having trouble affording groceries or health insurance or child care or other essentials.
Some who flee the Democratic Party have been attracted to Trump as the outsider who will shake things up. Once they see that the shake up is going to make things even worse for them, they will be less eager to vote for him or the GOP again. Once they see that hatred and cruelty toward disfavored groups does not, in fact, fix anything for everyone else, then only the true haters will stay and hopefully that is a very small percentage.
If this platform can be crafted to embrace those human essentials that both ordinary conservatives and liberals want and need, and if the platform can be shared with enough people and candidates recruited and funded then it seems to me there is hope for getting representatives elected to carry out the platform. The primary win of Mamdani in NYC is evidence of this, to take one recent example.
Have a problem with Part II action 2. We’re not going to build our way out of the housing crisis. The infrastructure exists. Most people don’t need the square footage they’re living in. Take those 10,000 square foot mansions and cut them up into a dozen affordable units.
Where can I find the Mission for America ?
Thank you! This gives me something concrete to share with like-minded friends. Also like some of the thoughts from Paul Kinzelman below.
I think this is great, but don't forget the climate. Without that we've got nothing.
FOLLOW THE MONEY -- Fixing almost any national problem with policies that serve the working class rather than the investor class will almost certainly face fierce opposition. But that to me defines where to start: political corruption and priorities that put profit over people. Let's see if the people will vote against that.
But know the opposition will come through for-profit news outlets and social media. Getting a short, powerful, and understandable message out, above the noise that will be thrown at it, will be the biggest challenge, I think.
I hear little these days about how total healthcare cost go beyond insurance premiums and is spread in a way that consumers don’t really know how much they or the nation is paying. Without that, they don't know how single-payer reengineering of our healthcare system could collectively save the nation well over $2 trillion per year.
That conservative estimate is based on a detailed healthcare spending update from Health Affairs. It says we in the U.S. spent 18% of GDP last year (2024) on health care. That was $5.25 trillion, but we didn’t get our money’s worth and instead have had worse outcomes and average longevity. On an individual basis, those trillions amount to over $15,600 per capita, or $60K for a household of four., and the costs keep rising faster than incomes. See https://mhealthtalk.com/healthcare-spending-update-outlook/.
I believe voters would support a national single-payer system if they knew how much they and their families would save, so speak in their language. I also think they can understand they'd have more employment opportunities if employers didn’t have to pay their insurance as a way to keep them from leaving. Without that expense, and with workers being healthier and more productive, employers could afford to pay higher wages. They'd need to, because it would be easier for the workers to look elsewhere for better opportunities. The whole U.S. economy would benefit as a result, rising all boats.
If voters truly understood how companies and politicians are incentivized to put profits and power over people, they’d demand the sort of reengineering I’ve been writing about. Check out the related articles at the bottom the one I referenced above.
There are many related issues that also contribute to improved longevity and better lifestyles. One that I’ve written about is gun safety, which should be reframed as a public health issue.