I want to begin today with a few words from Jon Ossoff, fighting to retain his Georgia Senate seat:
“We’re bound together by the same great national spirit that passed civil rights laws, defeated fascism, and landed men on the moon …… This is what small men like Donald Trump and JD Vance and Stephen Miller will never understand. That our national greatness flows not through our blood or our genes, but through our ideas.”
When I think about the talent on the Democratic bench, Jon often springs to mind. He’s not an ‘in your face’ politician. He’s a strategic thinker, something Democrats desperately need in this moment, as they struggle to articulate a vision and a sense of ambition for a fairer society where government serves the many, not the few.
His approach to leadership is a breath of fresh air; he understands the importance of nuance, as he demonstrates in his stance on Israel. He gets that geopolitics is not black and white, as demonstrated by his statement on July 30th, 2025, on Israel:
“I do not believe the United States Senate should acquiesce without objection to the extreme mass deprivation of civilians in Gaza, including the intolerable starvation of children, that have resulted from the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.”
He is, in my view, a rare breed in political circles. He DOES NOT take money from AIPAC; indeed, they have actively spent money on ad campaigns attacking him for his position on limiting arms sales to Israel. It’s somewhat disconcerting to see the AIPAC Tracker misrepresent the fact that he has NOT taken donations from AIPAC.
For the record, he last took Israel lobby money in 2020 from J Street. For clarification, J Street are indeed a pro-Israel PAC. However, the PAC operates exclusively within the progressive and moderate Democratic space, frequently endorsing candidates who support a diplomatic approach and Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, while opposing those who seek to severely limit or end all military support for Israel. This lines up with Ossoff’s voting record on supporting defensive arms sales for patriot interceptors, etc.
As far as I can tell, despite the AIPAC tracker entry, someone is treating JStreet as AIPAC, and that is INCORRECT. It’s is an Israeli liberal advocacy group that promotes a two-state solution, frequently criticises Israeli settlement expansion, and advocates for Palestinian rights. I would also add that no AIPAC contributions show up for the Senator on OpenSecrets.
As opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg noted in the New York Times in a recent piece:
“…he’s a Jewish critic of Israel who, as much as anyone in politics today, has the potential to bridge the Democratic Party’s agonising divide over Zionism”
In this new polarised world of populist partisan politics, he is a man who understands exactly what America faces through a clear, unambiguous lens. I have included his full speech in Atlanta in the hope that you can see what I can see.
I was struck when he said:
It feels like every day the depravity deepens, the chaos accelerates, and deep down, maybe you fear whether our republic, now in our 250th year, can survive it all?
It’s not an unusual statement to make, and I know for sure from my readers' comments that people resonate with it. He nailed some critical points that reflect the truth of where we are in this moment. In Ossoff’s words,
This is the cruellest and most arrogant group of people who have ever ascended to high office in the United States. And their cruelty and their arrogance are matched only by their incompetence.
He continues:
Prices are up, jobs are going away, Medicaid and school lunches are slashed, nursing homes are getting defunded. If you're Steve Bannon and your pitch, your pitch was Trump for the forgotten man and woman, how do you sell any of this?
There are so many sobering yet hopeful tones in Jon’s message that I chose to include it in today’s piece because I am sold on his willingness to be bold in building a vision for a better tomorrow. He’s not frightened to attack Trump, and his focus on self-enrichment and corruption is, in my view, a winning message.
I have said many times that trust in politicians is at an all-time low, and it’s not difficult to understand why. I am not shrinking from my calls for a ‘people first’ revolution within the Democratic Party. However, the pragmatist in me understands that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and change takes time and a clear strategy. Unfortunately, the latter seems sadly lacking, so the result is, you have a small number of representatives who understand the imperative of ‘people first’ politics. Sadly, this is not enough to effect the much-needed change, which is very frustrating for a base and army of activists who know exactly what’s needed but are up against a wall of self-interest when it comes to central leadership.
I simply don’t have an answer for how to instigate the required change, because it seems few are listening to the visionary voices in the room for fear of ‘rockin’ the boat’. For change to take place, there has to be a recognition at the top that there’s a problem. I simply don’t believe Schumer, Jeffreys and the Democratic leadership don’t know there’s a problem; they would have to be fools not to see it. Frustratingly, they have instead decided to bet the house on the fact that they don’t have to try to make a case for a better tomorrow, because they are of the firm belief that the American people will conclude that anything is better than Trump.
The true tragedy is that there has NEVER been a better time to deliver transformative change than now, but for that to happen, bold, audacious leadership is required, and that’s currently absent. To continue to make the point is pointless. All America can do right now is hope for free and fair elections. Good luck with that given Trump’s response to the LA Mayoral race. Where we are right now is living proof that current resistance has proved ineffective and all but impotent. Trump has managed to dominate the messaging space by controlling the media. The engine of dissent, in the form of independent media, is now scraping for crumbs to fund its work because there is no longer money in telling the truth. Believe me, I'm a testament to that, and this provides a massive win to Trump.
I've spoken and written about it before: the moment Trump came back into the White House, Democrats should have been ready to hit the ground running with a strategic plan. After all, they didn’t have to guess what would happen; it was all documented in Project 2025. They had access to the Trump blueprint for power, and they chose to do nothing but say ‘We told you so’. That’s not a solution; it makes them part of the problem. Take it from me, when an organisation like the Heritage Foundation has four years to plan a strategy for Trump’s ascension back to power, you ignore it at your peril. Their coalition of the cruel and the greedy provided limitless funding to create an airtight strategy to dismantle every political norm and do as Adolf Hitler did in Germany in the 1930s, use the tools democracy provided to oversee its murder.
Democrats and America itself were totally unprepared for the shock and awe assault on the foundations on which the nation was built and governed. Russell Vought will go down in history as the man who turned the world’s policeman into a pariah state in 18 months, aided and abetted by a Republican controlled Congress and Supreme Court complicit in the dismantling of democracy and the rule of law.
The US does not find itself where it is just because of Trump; it is because of decades of political neglect born out of legislators selling their souls to corporate America. The triggers for revolution have evolved over the years as the rich have manipulated society into accepting that extreme wealth inequality is the inevitable consequence of securing the basic means of survival. The next step is to consider what the term ‘basic means of survival’ means.
Currently, close to 36 million people in the US live below the poverty line, which represents about 10.6% of the population. These are very simplified figures, but they do help explain the basic costs of eradicating poverty, which should surely be the very baseline on which to build a fairer society. However, it’s important to understand the structural failings in the system before you can even begin to address them, yet governments of all stripes have refused to address the basic underlying causes of poverty in the US as the wealth gap continues to grow exponentially.
I want to make clear that leaving people to live in poverty is a choice, NOT an economic necessity for progress. We can discuss all day why people find themselves living in poverty, but rest assured, NOBODY makes a conscious choice to not be able to feed themselves or their family, and to suggest they do is frankly absurd. The fundamental responsibility of any government is to protect its citizens and to provide help in times of need. We often hear from the laughingly labelled fiscally responsible conservatives that America can’t afford to support those that can’t support themselves. Yet it seems every societal problem can only be resolved with taxpayer-funded subsidies in the form of tax cuts for the rich.
Before I return to my central point, I just want to point out without fear of contradiction that there has NEVER, and I really do mean NEVER, been a tax cut for the rich that has EVER paid for itself. Republicans can never find money to raise the poor out of poverty, but they can make the case that it’s essential to BORROW money to give tax cuts to the rich. Corporate welfare that will NEVER provide a return on investment for taxpayers who ultimately have to pick up the tab for the interest payments on the out-of-control national debt. (currently standing at over one trillion dollars every year and growing) The fairytale sold to the people is that tax cuts for the rich deliver economic growth, resulting in wealth trickling down the economic food chain. It is a long-debunked fallacy. We’ll examine this in more detail in the next post in this series.
Returning to my point, we first have to address a few key issues. What I’d like to do is draw on the thoughts of Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur. He was the first non-family investor in Amazon and is the host of the Pitchfork Economics podcast. I cannot recommend his work highly enough. I rarely stumble into the thoughts of someone with whom my thinking so closely aligns. To this end, I want to conclude this piece with his words, as we explore the implications of his thinking together in the next post of this series. As a teaser for those who think the sole solution to the economic tyranny we are being forced to endure is to tax the rich, the picture is far more complex, I’m afraid. Take a listen to the clip below.
I have sadly come to the conclusion that my constant striving to break even to fund my writing here is a pointless exercise. After the elation of three months of breaking even, alas, that comfort now appears to have come to an end. To the die-hards who continue to make up my paid subscriber base, you have no idea what a difference your contributions continue to make. I am and will remain forever grateful for the help each and every one of you provides. I said at the outset of this journey that this is not about money; it’s about keeping my work FREE to everyone, and rest assured that will never change. I am very proud to have built a community here with free access to facts and a pursuit of the truth. Providing independent reporting and commentary has never been more important than it is today, because without it, we are left floating on an ocean of lies and misdirection.
It has become an intensely competitive space as we all vie for subscribers' generosity. To that I say, long may it continue, because the larger the resource, the better the people will be served, in the hope that the truth gap will diminish, as should the wealth gap.
I am a paid subscriber because you always provide ample evidence to support your analysis. I look forward to your insights because YOU MAKE IT MAKE SENSE!
The problem (and embarrassment) with Substack is that paying each writer individually would be more expensive than many of us could manage, even if they are well worth the expense and deserve the support. Suppose one reads ten authors per day, at $5.00 each per month each. That totals $50.00 per month, or $600.00 per year. We read in Substack about inflation; the cost of gas, groceries, and housing; and the difficulty of changing this with Trump and his fools in office, backed by the do-nothing Republicans in Congress with a partisan Supreme Court allowing their crimes. Not everyone has that $600.00.
I sometimes wish that like-minded authors would band together into single publications, and wonder if an increased volume of sales of these collected subscriptions could offset the hypothetical loss of each author not receiving the entire $5.00 that they well deserve and many of us want to give. Ironically, the premier platform for discussing Democracy is ill suited to being funded by subscriptions to its own writings.
There used to be these things called newspapers, despite that some changed to a fully electronic format for distribution. They offered many writers for prices that — sound familiar? — many saw as too high, yet that were in expensive in comparison, yet vastly lower priced on a per-author basis.