America should build things again, and we the people should own what we build.
The New York Times recently reported that four conservative operatives spent the Biden years quietly building the legal and regulatory infrastructure to kill the federal government’s ability to fight climate change. Russell Vought. Jeffrey Clark. Mandy Gunasekara. Jonathan Brightbill. They drafted executive orders. They got Heritage Foundation money. They solicited white papers from friendly scientists. They built the whole thing in secret so nobody could stop them before it was done.
Now they’re about to revoke the endangerment finding, the scientific determination that has underpinned every federal climate regulation since 2009. Myron Ebell, who’s been attacking climate science for damn near three decades, told the Times they were “pretty close to total victory.” He’s not wrong. They didn’t tweak the rules. They removed the foundation the rules were built on. Any future administration that wants to regulate greenhouse gases has to start from nothing. Four people did that. Four people and a plan and some think tank money and 16 years of patience.
I love Bernie Sanders. Let me just say that. He is the reason I got into politics. My first political job was on the Sanders campaign. I cofounded Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats because of what he started. I am a Bernie stan and will be until the day I die.
But when Bernie says we need to overturn Citizens United, I need him to finish that thought. Because overturning Citizens United requires a constitutional amendment. Two-thirds of both chambers of Congress, or a convention of states. Supermajorities in the House and Senate. Dealing with a Supreme Court that is openly hostile to everything we believe in. These are massive generational undertakings, and nobody on our side is building the infrastructure to accomplish any of them. The crowd cheers because the idea is right. Then everybody goes home and nothing gets built.
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Build a wall. Round up immigrants. Drill, baby, drill. These are terrible ideas. But they are simple. The mechanism is obvious. Overturning Citizens United is not that. Taxing the rich is not that. They’re bumper stickers with no engine under the hood.
And even if we solved that last problem, even if we got the supermajority and taxed every billionaire in America, we’d still be stuck. Because where does the money go?
Take healthcare. The progressive answer is Medicare for All. Tax the rich, pump that money into the healthcare system. I support Medicare for All. But the system already gets nearly $6 trillion a year. Six trillion dollars. We have fewer hospitals per capita than we did in the 1970s. We pay the highest drug prices on earth for medicines our tax dollars helped develop. Insurance companies deny 30 percent of claims as a matter of routine, just Tuesday for them. The system is corrupted and produces godawful results for what it costs. You pump more money into a broken machine, and the machine’s owners get richer. That’s it. You just make the rig more profitable.
And that’s the whole problem with the progressive framework right now. It’s circular. Tax the billionaires, sure; bring in the money. But then we pump it into a financialized healthcare system that doesn’t produce health. Into a housing market that doesn’t produce affordable housing. Into an education system that saddles kids with debt and doesn’t produce the workforce we need. The money goes in and comes right back out into the pockets of the people extracting wealth from these systems. Tax, spend, extract, repeat. And every few years the other party gets in and reverses the tax part anyway. That’s not a plan. That’s a hamster wheel.
The right wants to tear everything down. The mainstream left wants to pump more money into the wreckage. And almost nobody is talking about building something that actually works.
We’ve done it before.
America should build things again, and we the people should own what we build.
Build the public competitor. At scale. A public energy company that produces and sells clean energy. A public AI lab so the most transformative technology in human history isn’t owned by three billionaires. Public pharmaceutical manufacturing so we stop paying the most in the world for drugs we funded. Public hospitals that actually deliver care instead of extracting from communities.
The Reconstruction Finance Corporation built companies during and after World War II. Government-owned and government-operated. Government-owned and contractor-operated. The RFC didn’t need to tax its way to solvency first. It built productive capacity, and productive capacity generates wealth. That’s how you actually get out of debt. Not by cutting, not by taxing and cycling money through broken systems. By building things that produce value. The biggest problem with our debt, national, personal and corporate, isn’t the size of it. It’s that we put the dumbest, least productive shit imaginable on this massive credit card. The way out is to start putting productive investments on it instead.
And look, we’re already spending the money. We just let private guys keep the wealth. Elon Musk is becoming the richest human in history on government contracts and government subsidies and government IP, shooting rockets into space with our money. We don’t let him own a nuclear weapon. Why are we letting him keep all the upside from publicly funded work? Why isn’t NASA doing that for the American people?
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My friend and former colleague Saikat Chakrabarti, the architect of the Green New Deal, is building a framework for this kind of public-scale construction through something called Mission for America. Saikat gets it. He gets that the progressive movement needs a fundamentally different approach. Not fighting over how to split up what the billionaires have. Building our own capacity to produce the things this country actually needs.
The right built their demolition plan during the Biden years. They were building while we were taking victory laps. The Trump years are our building years. The right had a construction plan for demolition. We need a construction plan for construction. You either built the thing already or you didn’t. It’s time to build ours.
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