Democracy in the Cross Hairs:

We now have powerful technology that makes a cooperative economy capable of providing life, leisure and learning for everyone.

Democracy in the Cross Hairs:

Fighting to Win

Trump has raised $500 million to win the 2026 midterm elections.¹ Losing would give the Democrats leverage to investigate Trump’s effort to build a fascist state. Among these efforts are orders for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to capture and deport workers without due process, and a budget that pays for a billionaire tax cut with healthcare money for 17 million Americans.²

We can’t count on the Democrats to save what is left of our democracy because they are paid by the same billionaires that support Trump. Most telling is that the Democrats criticize Trump relentlessly, but have no workable plan to stop fascism.

The Jeffrey Epstein scandal proves that the Democrats and Republicans will protect their crimes at our expense. Epstein was a convicted child sex offender who arranged sex for celebrities, billionaires and political leaders from both parties, including Presidents Trump and Clinton. Neither party want the damning evidence made public, including crimes that ruined the lives of countless children.³

How did we get here? History has turned and the future now belongs to all of us, especially the 99% of people who are forced to work for a living, or face massive debt, homelessness or are not allowed to work at all. Computers, artificial intelligence and robots are destroying 11,000 years in the control of private property over the means of sustaining life.

Work is becoming mostly automated. This forces us to choose to build an economy based on cooperation, or else to perish. This is as it was during the several hundred thousand years of human history prior to private property. Human survival then depended upon cooperation and sharing.⁴

The difference between now and then is we now have powerful technology that makes a cooperative economy capable of providing life, leisure and learning for everyone. A world where human needs are satisfied on an expanding scale. To achieve this requires a political party led by knowledge and a strategy to win. Second, the party must win political power from the billionaire ruling class and their twin parties of privilege. This is possible because working class is the overwhelming majority, and because humans share an instinct to cooperate.⁵

Footnotes

1. https://www.axios.com/2025/05/27/trump-5-steps-gop-house-2026
2. https://theconversation.com/how-17m-americans-enrolled-in-medicaid-and-aca-plans-could-lose-their-health-insurance-by-2034-260664
3. https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/trump-epstein-and-the-deep-state
4. Sarah Hrdy (2024, Princeton) Father time: A natural history of men and babies.
5. Rutger Bregman (2019; Little, Brown and Co.) Humankind: A hopeful history.