Enough already with the Democrats’ confused disarray in responding to Tyrant Trump’s vicious, illegal destruction of critical federal programs for all Americans so as to favor the insatiable greed and power of the Super-rich and giant corporations. The plutocrats are demanding more tax escapes, corporate welfare, and green lights for lawlessness.
No more excuses for the failing Democratic Party and its contracting out of electoral campaigns to profiteering corporate-conflicted political/media consulting firms
Progressive Congressional Democrats like Al Green, Elizabeth Warren, and Independent Bernie Sanders know exactly what needs to be done to Stop Dangerous Donald and Marauding Musk from their lawless, fascistic overthrow of our government and our Constitution.
First and foremost, House and Senate Democrats can hold UNOFFICIAL public hearings on Capitol Hill, highlighting an all-time winning agenda supported by the citizenry and opposed by the Trumpsters. These are the long-overdue, immensely needed, and widely popular programs abandoned by the corporate Democrats who allowed the disastrous loss last November to the most corrupt, cruel, bigoted, and greedy GOP since its founding in 1854.
To see what I and Mark Green and two dozen civic leaders urged the Democrats to AUTHENTICALLY adopt in 2022 and 2024 (see winningamerica.net and my 2024 book titled Let’s Start the Revolution and The Inflection Election by Mark Green). The following are the election winners:
- Raise the frozen $7.25 federal minimum wage to at least $15 per hour. (Twenty-five million workers would get a long-earned raise.)
- Raise Social Security benefits, frozen for nearly 50 years for over 65 million retirees. Pay for this by lifting the income cap on the social security tax for the rich and super-rich (now at just $176,100).
- Restore the child tax credit by sending $300 a month to over 60 million children, cutting child poverty nearly in half.
- Pay for this and other necessities by raising taxes on the severely undertaxed rich, super-rich, and giant corporations (over half of which pay no federal income taxes). Eighty-five percent of Americans support this tax fairness reform.
- Crack down on corporate crooks and swindlers eating away at the income of hard-pressed workers. We are talking big money stolen from consumers and workers. The polling support for this LAW AND ORDER reform is huge.
There are many more pro-people reforms shelved by the Democrats and their mendacious for-profit consultants. But these initiatives are the “Big Five” that draw overwhelming support from liberal and conservative voters, from Red and Blue States. An unstoppable coalition of political power over their legislators. (See my 2015 book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State.)
The second parallel wave of UNOFFICIAL hearings could strongly rebut and reject dictator Trump’s cruel and mostly illegal Executive Order Dictates. In her largely feeble and dull response to Trump’s lengthy lying, deceptive, and distracting propaganda show before the U.S. Congress, Senator Elissa Slotkin used the weak words “reckless” and “chaotic” to describe Trump’s lying boasts. She should have called Trump “criminally insane” and “knowingly homicidal.” Trump’s vicious actions are harming many Americans and desperately poor people abroad.
The Trump/Musk Axis of Evil is knowingly leaving Americans defenseless by strip-mining programs dealing with pandemics, climate violence, toxic pollutants, unsafe air and surface transportation, and contaminated food, water, and air here at home. Abroad, cutting the lifelines of AIDS medicines, food supplements to near-starving children, and other emergency American help, long supported by previous Republican and Democratic Presidents, brings arrogant glee to these GOP gangsters. One new, obsolete aircraft carrier costs taxpayers more than the vital work of dismantled federal agencies.
Senator Schumer’s choice of Senator Slotkin (D-MI) to present the Party’s response shows that he has not learned anything from his self-inflicted losses to the GOP. It would have been far more popular and persuasive to have Senator Sanders or Senator Warren make the specific, devastating case against the vengeful, scapegoating, egomaniacal, delusional Trump.
Slotkin, a former CIA employee, used her 10 minutes of fame to be self-promoting and repeated the vague affirmations behind “the middle class” (of course, no mention of the vast poor), “national security,” and “economic security.” Like so many of the Democratic politicians, she just couldn’t get herself to be specific, as with the aforementioned Big Five, which, after all, are just updates of the successful New Deal policies under Roosevelt and Truman.
Letters decrying another lost opportunity for the Democrats to unmask the Trump Dump rising in Washington, DC poured into the newspapers. The Washington Post published many of them. One writer wanted this to be said: “Resign, Mr. President, Resign and you’ll hear a thunderous ovation.” A long-time Republican, Grant Grissom, took this a broader step forward by paying for a full-page ad in the New York Times on March 2, 2025, titled “A PLEA FOR DONALD TRUMP TO RESIGN” and presented cogent reasons for not waiting for Impeachment. (Grant Grissom: trumptimetoresign@gmail.com).
To conclude where I began: Democrats hold regular UNOFFICIAL hearings, which will get good mass media coverage and reach millions of registered voters who are increasingly indignant over what is being taken from them. If the Democrats stand with the fast-growing resistance by the people, they can stop the Trump madness and save what is left of our democracy.
By Ralph Nader
March 7, 2025