A lightly edited transcript is available here. We covered many things, including:

§ the difference, as Carl sees it, between a more bottom-up, rank-and-file, independent union like the UE, and the more top-down, officer-dominated unions in the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations;

§ the role of rank-and-file—what Carl called “distributed”—union organizing in winning collective bargaining rights for workers who want to be in a union but aren’t;

§ the assistance that the UE’s Emergency Workers’ Organizing Committee (EWOC) can provide anyone who wants to organize a union at their workplace;

§ the recent success the UE has had with its approach, especially among younger workers in higher education; and, finally,

§ the importance of and prospects for independent political action by the US labor movement, which is the only labor movement in a democratic country everywhere else in the world without its own independent labor or social democratic political party.

There is much more to say about all these things, but I shall leave most of them aside for now. You are invited to listen to the show or scan its edited transcript for more of our conversation.

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Instead, I will comment on just one of the topics we discussed: Will the overall circumstances of the US labor movement and American working families change if the Democrats return to power?

For some, yes; but not for all. A little, sure; but not enough. Because neither party is deeply and truly loyal to their working-class voters. On the contrary, they are all message and no follow-through. They march to the beat of their donors, not their voters.

This is not to say that Democratic victories won’t send a message and aren’t to be wished for. The Trump administration has launched unnecessary wars against its own people as well as other nations, taking the lives of thousands and disrupting the lives of millions more.

Even so, some people continue to defend the administration’s unlawful actions as unfortunate excesses and keep insisting that we have never been better off or headed in a better direction. Well, crypto-fanatics and AI insiders, maybe. But everyone else? Not so fast!

So, I will be voting Democratic in a couple of weeks, and I hope everyone else does, too, except where it makes sense to do otherwise. For example, in Nebraska, where one can vote for the independent trade union candidate, Dan Osborn. Or in Idaho, where one can vote for Todd Achilles.

As for me, it will be Democrats all the way down, except in a local race where I have an opportunity to register my dislike of one-party rule by voting for the only Republican candidate competing for one of two open seats on our town council, all of which are otherwise held by Democrats!

But voting for Democratic candidates and hoping for a refreshing Blue Wave to turn back the toxic Red Tide does not mean thinking the Democratic Party will either turn the country around or deliver on its promises.

Even if the Democrats control Congress, they won’t pass the PRO Act or anything else of real consequence. They have had numerous chances to do so and didn’t. They also won’t do anything they haven’t already tried to raise wages or provide affordable healthcare, housing, education, or transportation.

Are they the best we can do? The economy we have works reasonably well for some of us. But what about the rest of us? What about the millions who are currently under-paid, over-worked, and one illness or layoff away from catastrophe? We need liberty and justice for all, not just for some.

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And don’t say, I’m dreaming! If we can build machines that mimic human speech, we can have an economy that provides without fear or favor a decent standard of living for all!

We need as much policy focus on a real economy that enables people to provide and care for one another as we have on the money economy that forces people into an endless competitive scramble to pick each other’s pocket.

We need both. Either one without the other is not enough. A functioning real economy that meets needs is an essential counterbalance to the money economy that fuels our search for miraculous machines. By all means, innovate. But by no means, impoverish.

The only way to have what we need is to build a movement for structural and not just cosmetic change.

For one thing, we need a government for the people, which requires a government by the people.

There are enough millionaires in Congress! We need more people there who know what it takes to feed, cloth, shelter, house, and care for people. Folks who know what it’s like to get dirty at work—and I don’t mean unethical; I mean covered in grime.

We need working people in every city hall, council chamber, state house, and legislature in the country. And we need them to put their heads together with others of the best and brightest to figure out what it takes actually to ensure “liberty and justice for all.”

Then we need them to do it.

We will only get there when the unions like the UE, and also churches, co-ops, neighborhoods, community-based organizations, and progressive non-profits stop waiting for the parties of the moneyed classes to do something for the people, and challenge the Money Power for control.

People Power, not Money Power! Read Les Leopold, We Need a Party of Our Own! (2026), and his Substack column, “Wall Streets’s War on Workers: We Need a Party of Our Own.” And stay tuned.

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Working people build democracy by organizing to exercise power. In Episode 10 of Liberty and Justice For All, former UE General President Carl Rosen explains how member-led unions can challenge corporate domination, improve workers’ lives, and cultivate an independent working-class political movement. The conversation connects workplace organizing with the larger struggle against billionaire influence, predatory finance, and an economy that rewards ownership while devaluing labor.

• Union democracy puts workers in charge. Rosen describes UE’s workplace-centered structure, where local officers generally work alongside the people they represent and live under the contracts they negotiate.

• Organizing turns frustration into collective power. He explains how UE and the Democratic Socialists of America developed the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee to help workers organize from the bottom up.

• Graduate workers demonstrate what solidarity can accomplish. Rosen reports that UE organized bargaining units covering more than 30,000 workers in roughly two years, then secured contracts that improved their working conditions.

• Technology should improve lives and serve the public. The discussion challenges corporate control of AI and asks who should benefit from knowledge and labor that workers and society produce.

• Working people need lasting political power. The participants explore independent political organization, Medicare for All, higher wages, public investment, and democratic reforms that could confront concentrated wealth.

The episode delivers a clear message: despair serves those who already hold power. Workers who organize can win improvements today while developing the skills, confidence, and solidarity needed to reshape society.

MMT is both complicated and controversial If you ask Google if MMT is widely accepted, it will tell you, no. But regardless of controversy, MMT has been “embraced by progressive political groups, climate activists, and left-leaning policymakers.”

The reason they have done so is that proponents of MMT argue that conventional economists are wrong to insist that governments cannot “spend forward”—i.e., spend money, even a lot of money, without having an immediate revenue stream to pay for it.

And the position of MMT on government spending is of vital importance. If we are going to ensure that those who are hungry have a meal, those who are unhoused have a place to live, those who want to learn a place to go to school, those who want a job a place to work, and so on, the government is definitely going to have to spend forward!

This week’s show doesn’t sort out all the thorny issues, but it’s a start. (For those who are interested, there is a Wikipedia entry on some of them that provides links to different contributions to the discussion.)

According to the conventional wisdom, households, governments, and corporations can only responsibly operate on a pay-as-you-go basis. How much they can spend is limited to how much they earn or collect in taxes.

Of course, they also can borrow. Households that are investing in their education or (you should excuse the expression!) “human capital development” can borrow large sums on a pay-you-later basis because years of schooling correlate with higher incomes: the more years in school, on average, the more earnings later.

Governments, too, can safely borrow money, even large sums of money. But if they borrow too much, more than they can easily repay, or even if they spend what they borrow in undesirable or unproductive ways, they can find themselves on the ropes and bad things can happen, like runaway inflation or an impoverished private sector.

And corporations can borrow. Indeed, since the mid-1990s, in one technological boom after another, new companies have lived on nothing but borrowed money for anywhere from 2 years to nearly 20 before they started to turn a profit. Again, just ask Google.

But there is one group of corporations that not only spend what they earn or borrow, but also create new money on demand, more or less out of thin air. They are, of course, banks, which both make and sell money! Money is their product and service. (How this process works is discussed in the conversation below, so I won’t go over it in much detail here.)

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About all this, both MMT theorists and conventional economists agree. Where they differ is that MMT also argues that sovereign governments are like banks. Not only can sovereign governments borrow money to the degree they are judged credit-worthy. They can also create new money, again on demand and out of thin air, by writing checks to themselves or others as required.

This is one of MMT’s most important insights. But it does not mean that either banks or sovereign governments can create all the new money they want without limit. Their ability to create money depends upon their standing with their customers and constituents. A bad bank that makes bad loans will sooner or later go out of business, and a bad government that does bad things will sooner or later be dismissed or overthrown.

Also, not all governments are sovereign money creators. In the US, state governments are barred by the Constitution from issuing currency, and in Europe only 21 of the 27 members of the European Union use the Euros from the European Central Bank instead of issuing their own. (The six who do not use Euros are Czechia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Sweden.)

But the banks and sovereign governments that can and do issue currency—create money—are not at all like households or other companies or governments that can’t or don’t. To do the things they think need doing and people want done, they can create the money required.

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We only scratch the surface of the issues raised by these matters here. But the following are two of the most important points.

First, the sovereign debt of the federal government is not a bad thing. On the contrary, it is a necessary and good thing. If the government didn’t go into debt by lending money to Federal Reserve banks, it could not ensure an adequate supply of the money we need to pay our bills, and we would be dependent solely on barter or the banks.^#

Second, there is always enough money to do the things we need to do. Money is basically a promise that we will show up when we have to show up and do what we have to do. But because it is money, it shows up for us and can enlist others to do what needs to be done if we are not available or able.

In other words, when our government or elected officials say we can’t afford to assure jobs, healthcare, education, housing, and food to all our citizens, they are really saying either that they don’t know how to assure everyone such things, or they don’t want to.

Which brings us back to “Liberty and Justice for All.” Our purpose with this show is to explore the ways in which we can do such things. The reason we wanted to talk about Modern Money Theory is to clear the decks of one common objection: that we have the only prosperity we can afford.

No, we don’t. A more egalitarian and shared prosperity is possible!

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^# Some people think we would be better off with only private market money, like gold or some other commodity, or bank-created money, like their lines of credit. In fact, the US had such a system after Andrew Jackson vetoed the re-chartering of the Second Bank of the United States in 1832 and until the Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913. The repeated financial crises and bank failures during this period convinced most people, including rich bankers like J. P. Morgan, that the federal government needed to get into the business of issuing currency, if only so that it could play a larger role in managing the money supply and influencing the going rate of interest. Another weed patch and for another time.

• Public money should serve public needs. Wray argues that a government issuing its own sovereign currency faces different constraints than a household. Claims that America simply cannot afford useful public investment obscure choices about whose needs government prioritizes.

• Real resources set real limits. Labor, skills, materials, productive capacity, and environmental sustainability matter. Wray explains that spending beyond available capacity can produce shortages and inflation; creating money cannot automatically create the resources society needs.

• A job guarantee would strengthen workers’ bargaining power. A permanent public employment option offering useful work, decent wages, and benefits would give workers an alternative to unemployment and force private employers to compete for their labor.

• Unions and public institutions can challenge concentrated wealth. The conversation connects stronger labor organizations, financial regulation, and public alternatives to a more equitable economy. Wray argues that healthcare and education should serve human needs rather than operate as profit-driven industries.

• Economic success requires more than rising profits. The discussion identifies availability, affordability, and sustainability as essential tests of economic policy. Higher living standards, less inequality, and a livable planet should guide public decisions.

The episode makes a forceful progressive case: unemployment and deprivation should never pass as unavoidable features of economic life. A democratic society can organize its monetary system and public institutions to expand workers’ freedom, meet shared needs, and curb plutocratic power.

A lightly edited, machine-generated transcript of the October 8 episode of Liberty and Justice for All, “Columbus Day: Indigenous History, Land, and Power” is attached here.

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Going forward, we will be following this general format. Every Thursday at 2 PM Central, a new episode will air on KPFT Houston and will be simultaneously distributed on Substack and other platforms.

Each week. I will also post a lightly edited version of the machine-generated transcript of the show to my Substack of the same name, of which this is the first. (Over the next few weeks, if just for the record, I will also back fill the transcripts with comments of earlier episodes.)

This episode is also the first in a regular series on the meaning of various national holidays which we will do over the course of the year. Expect reflections on Thanksgiving, New Year’s/Emancipation Day, President’s Day, May 1 Juneteenth, and Labor Day, among others, as the year proceeds.

This week in this space, I will restrict myself to offering an eclectic list of books about the history and continuing traditions of the first people to settle the Americas, long before Columbus stumbled on the continents in 1492, together with a couple of general books on the history of Italian immigrants in the US.

As we discuss below, Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day is an appropriate occasion to remember the contributions of both those who were here before and those who came after.

Among the books on the history of indigenous America that have most influenced me, I would include:

• Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of American History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023.

• Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018.

• Colin G. Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

• V. F. Cordova, How It Is: The Philosophy of V. F. Cordova. K.D. Moore, et al., eds. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2007.

• William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England New York: Hill & Wang, 1983.

• Pekka Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America. New York: Liveright, 2022.

• Margaret D. Jacobs, After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America’s Stolen Lands. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021.

• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

• Patty Krawec, Bad Indians Book Club, Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2025.

• Anthony F. C. Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca. New York: Knopf, 1972.

• Robert Allen Warrior, Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Traditions. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

• Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

I have not read as widely in Italian-American history as I have in the history of the first Americans and welcome suggestions from readers and listeners.

For a general overview, I can recommend Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale, La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), which is available on the Internet Archive.

And for a rich and detailed history of Italian American radicalism and trade unionism in New York City, see Jennifer Guglielmo, Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

If you have other suggestions in either category, please add them to the comments below.

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Episode 0008 of Liberty and Justice For All challenges the comforting myths surrounding Columbus Day and asks whose history the nation chooses to celebrate. The discussion connects colonization, Indigenous resistance, land ownership, and economic power while arguing that honest history should strengthen solidarity and the capacity to change society.

• Challenge the “discovery” narrative. Calling an inhabited continent a discovery erases the peoples who already lived there and sidelines their experiences of conquest and dispossession.

• Recognize Indigenous resistance and survival. The hosts reject portrayals of Indigenous peoples as passive victims or vanished civilizations, emphasizing their agency and continuing presence.

• Examine ownership and economic power. The conversation distinguishes different systems of land rights and questions an economic order that rewards selfishness while weakening collective obligations.

• Make remembrance meaningful. Indigenous Peoples Day and land acknowledgments should encourage learning, respect for living communities, and responsibility toward the earth.

• Teach history that supports action. Michael Merrill credits Howard Zinn with challenging conventional narratives but argues that an emphasis on defeat can obscure victories and discourage working people from organizing.

The episode calls for public holidays that encourage honest reflection. A society committed to liberty and justice must confront dispossession, recognize survival, and draw strength from the struggles that make change possible.

Wyoming’s working people deserve more than corporate promises and politicians who cut the services their families need. On Liberty and Justice For All, United Steelworkers Local 13214 president Marshal Cummings joins Michael Merrill and Egberto Willies to connect workplace organizing with the struggle for political representation. The third-generation trona miner describes how union solidarity protects workers—and why that same collective strength must reach beyond the bargaining table.

• Union power delivers concrete gains. Cummings credits collective bargaining with stronger wages, benefits, retirement security, and enforceable safety protections. His experience at union and nonunion mines challenges the claim that workers can rely on management’s goodwill.

• Workers possess the knowledge to lead. Through the worker trainer program, miners teach one another how to identify hazards, organize coworkers, and demand solutions. Cummings traces his silica-safety advocacy from a workplace sticker campaign to participation in the federal rulemaking process.

• Corporate loyalty offers no guarantee of protection. Cummings recounts his father’s struggle to obtain an insurance benefit after decades of service. The story underscores the unequal power workers face when they must confront corporate systems alone.

• Public services belong at the center of working-class politics. Cummings criticizes Wyoming’s austerity agenda and describes the strain families face from unaffordable housing and limited access to healthcare. He also questions a data-center expansion strategy that could threaten water resources and workers’ livelihoods.

• Labor’s next challenge is political organization. Discussing his disqualified independent candidacy, Cummings calls for workers to build their own political strength. Merrill proposes extending worker-to-worker education into political training that helps people develop an agenda, organize neighbors, and hold representatives accountable.

The conversation makes a forceful case for democracy rooted in working people’s experience. Safer workplaces, strong public services, and accountable government require the same foundation: organized people willing to exercise power together.

Working people need a politics that delivers economic security and the power to shape their lives. On Liberty and Justice For All, Erica Etelson and Anthony Flaccavento of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative join Jared Abbott of the Center for Working-Class Politics to explore how progressives can reconnect with rural and working-class communities. The discussion links effective communication to a larger challenge: building a movement capable of confronting corporate control.

• Kitchen-table economics can break through partisan barriers. Etelson and Abbott describe research showing that messages about wages, everyday costs, corporate responsibility, and corruption outperformed other Democratic messages tested. Their findings point toward a politics grounded in people’s material needs.

• Rebuilding trust requires delivering on promises. The panel challenges Democrats to match economic populist language with policies that improve people’s lives. Communities that have endured disinvestment need tangible results and lasting commitments.

• The Rural New Deal connects countryside and city. Flaccavento explains how right-to-repair protections, fairer agricultural markets, stronger antitrust enforcement, and action against private equity can address shared sources of economic insecurity.

• Local organizing makes solidarity concrete. Through Community Works and organizing around hospitals, transportation, and other community concerns, residents can solve problems together. Repeated, useful action creates relationships that campaign advertising cannot purchase.

• Workers need independent power. The conversation connects stronger unions, political education, grassroots organizations, and electoral action. Michael Merrill presses the central demand: workers must gain enough power to reject bad deals and secure a greater share of the wealth they create.

Bridging the political divide requires confronting the economic forces that squeeze communities across geography. The progressive opportunity lies in connecting shared struggles, delivering visible improvements, and building a durable movement that puts working people in charge of their future.

The second half of today’s episode, “Who Owns Democracy? Rewriting the Rules of Wealth, Rights, and Working-Class Power,” focused on the Constitution, whether it primarily benefits the rich and powerful, which is generally Egberto’s view (though I don’t want to put words in his mouth!) Or is it, as Frederick Douglass described it in his celebrated July 5, 1852, address to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” His answer: “a glorious liberty document,” which is generally my view.

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But before we got there, we spent the first half hour on a challenge that Egberto had posed at the end of last week’s show. I had spent much of the show defending the position that redistributing power is more important than redistributing wealth. Of course, doing one requires doing the other. But, I argued, we spend too much time worrying about how much to tax the wealthy and not enough on how to make them less and us more powerful.

To which Egberto responded, “Wasn’t the income and wealth of the super rich unfairly obtained, and isn’t a large tax penalty on them to take some of it back the right thing to do?”

My position on the question was that trying to impose penalties on people for past actions, which were not clearly criminal but merely took advantage of existing loopholes and opportunities, is a distraction from what we should be doing: revising the game to make it fairer, getting rid of the loopholes, changing the structure of opportunities, etc.

We went at the issue for the first half hour and discussed, among other things, the alternative merits of blame-fixing—who is good and who is bad—as opposed to problem-solving—what is right and what is wrong?

I leave it to readers and listeners to decide the issue for themselves. (In addition to the video and audio, there is supposed to be a lightly edited transcript of the hour, which makes for much easier and clear reading, somewhere on the site, though I’m not sure where! I promise to get to the bottom of that and make sure the transcript is prominently displayed near each recording. We are committed to producing a clean, more considered copy of each episode.)

From there, as I noted, we turned to the Constitution, which was ratified on September 17, 1787, when the popular referendum of ninth of the thirteen states to vote in favor and created a new federal government of at least those nine. The other four would soon join, as would Vermont, and the states were officially “united.”

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Egberto took the position that the Constitution was a deeply flawed document, which compromised with slavery and was a retreat rather than an advance for the cause of freedom. I agreed that in the drafting of the document, the abolitionist delegates had to agree to compromise language with the enslaving delegates in three places in particular:

• the representation for the enslaved population at three-fifths its number (the enslavers wanted the enslaved represented in full, the abolitionists not at all);

• a 20-year delay before the federal government could abolish the international slave trade (the enslavers didn’t want the government to have the power at all, the abolitionists agreed to a 20-year delay); and

• a clause subjecting those “bound to service” to return if captured (the enslavers wanted fugitives treated as criminals, the abolitionists refused).

But, I argued the abolitionists did not give in on the central question: whether slavery—the owning of people—was a legitimate form of property that the new government was duty bound to respect.

On this point, a majority of the delegates to the constitutional convention held firm. They refused to recognize the legitimacy of slave property, agreeing only to allow the people of each state to decide the issue for themselves.

They would not agree, as the enslavers asked them to do, to require states in which slavery had been abolished to treat owning a personas a legitimate a property right, if recognized as such by another state.

As a result, the so-called “fugitive slave clause” refused to declare an enslaved person as subject to return, saying only that “No Person held to Service or Labour in one State … escaping into another, shall … be discharged from such Service or Labour.”

There is a waffle there, of course. The anti-slavery delegates agreed to read “held to” as “under contract to perform” and applying to indentured servants and others who had agreed to work for a term of one or more years, while the pro-slavery delegates read it to include those they held as chattel slaves, as if they, too, were merely contract labors for life and, also, supposedly, their children!

But this was as far as the majority would go. They refused explicitly to declare the enslaved as subject to return, leaving it a provision open to interpretation; and they refused to declare anyone escaping from their “labor or service” a criminal whom the public authorities in other states were required to extradite—capture and return—as they would any other felon. All they would agree to the weaker provision that IF “the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due” could find and prove their claim to them, THEN they “shall be delivered up.”

It was not a morally high-minded position. It allowed the enslavers room to maneuver. But it was not what the enslavers wanted, as they proved when they forced through the accurately named Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 as part of the so-called Compromise of 1850, which ought to have been called the Capitulation of 1850.

They thought the compromise necessary if the stronger federal government desired by all the delegates was to be created.

The new nation was surrounded by three of the most powerful, belligerent, and expansionist natons in the world at the time—Great Britain, France, and Spain. Did they sacrifice the freedom of the enslaved on the alter of their own safety?

What they did can be viewed that way. But it can also be viewed as a choice they felt they had to make to protect the still fragile plant of freedom that was only just beginning to sprout.

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The “fugitive slave clause” was a compromise. So, too, was the three-fifths provision, which gave the slavery states disproportionate representation in Congress. Something they had insisted on as otherwise vulnerable minority! An advantage, which they lost again as the country added more and more people and free states, which drove the enslavers to repeated war and ultimately secession.

All stories for another time! Here I wish only to note that the case for the anti-slavery Constitution is not something I just made up. On the contrary, it had been made before, by Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the entire Republican Party at the time, for reasons that we discuss at length in the episode.

It is often said that the Civil War was not started to end slavery but to save the Union. The truth of the matter, however, is that the Union which the North fought to save was the anti-slavery Union of the anti-slavery Constitution, which they argued was the true union and the only one worth saving!

Egberto and my discussion ranged far and wide from these issues, encompassing the revolutionary war, the modern civil rights or Black freedom struggles, and the run-up to the Civil War. Check it out!

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This episode asks who controls wealth, rights, and democracy—and concludes that working people must reclaim the power to write society’s rules. Michael Merrill and Egberto Willies move from wealth inequality and the myth of meritocracy to the Constitution, abolition, civil rights, labor organizing, and an independent working-class political voice.

• Extreme wealth reflects rules designed by and for powerful interests—not superior effort, productivity, or moral worth.

• Lasting economic reform requires changing who holds political power and writes the rules, not merely condemning yesterday’s winners.

• Frederick Douglass viewed the Constitution as a potential weapon against slavery, demonstrating why organized political action must accompany moral conviction.

• Rights survive when people exercise their obligations to one another and build enough collective power to defend freedom.

• Unions and independent working-class politics allow ordinary people to speak and act for themselves instead of relying on wealthy interests.

Democracy will always remain contested and messy. The answer is neither authoritarian order nor passive faith in elites. Working people must organize, build solidarity, exercise their freedom, and force public institutions to serve everyone.

This episode of Liberty and Justice For All asks Americans to reclaim both their history and their economic power. Michael Merrill and Egberto Willies debate how the nation should judge its founders, arguing that the country must confront their failures without surrendering the universal promises embedded in the Declaration and Constitution. That historical discussion becomes a bridge to the present: a functioning democracy requires civic knowledge, an engaged public, and an economy whose rules distribute power more fairly, rather than allowing concentrated capital to dominate workers, small businesses, housing, and public policy.

• Americans must take ownership of their history. The founders failed profoundly to extend their stated ideals to everyone, but abandoning those ideals allows the forces of exclusion to claim ownership of the American tradition. The better strategy is to demand fulfillment of the universal promise of liberty and justice.

• Democracy requires civic literacy. The discussion argues that citizens should possess a basic understanding of American history, democratic institutions, and civic responsibility. Civic rituals and education can reinforce a democratic culture without requiring everyone to become a historian.

• Economic inequality reflects power, not simply merit. The episode challenges the assumption that market outcomes automatically represent what people “earn.” Workers often receive what their bargaining power allows, while owners of capital enjoy far greater leverage.

• Changing the rules matters more than preserving concentrated privilege. The conversation explores private equity, financialization, small-business consolidation, and a system in which capital can effectively “go on strike” while workers and small businesses lack comparable freedom. Fairer rules could redistribute economic power without destroying productive enterprise.

• Real transformation requires democratic control over economic institutions. The hosts disagree over whether redistributing wealth or redistributing power deserves priority, but they agree that institutions must be restructured so government, workers, and communities serve the public interest rather than concentrated private wealth.

America does not need to surrender its democratic story to plutocrats, reactionaries, or romanticized versions of the past. It must claim the unfinished promise of liberty and justice, teach citizens how democracy works, and rewrite economic rules so that workers and communities possess meaningful power. As the episode emphasizes, revolutionary change need not mean violence; the New Deal, the civil rights movement, the labor movement, and the women’s movement transformed America by changing laws, institutions, and expectations.

The KPFT station manager’s report to the station board about its fall schedule described “Liberty and Justice for All” as “a show about the promise of American democracy,” so that seems a good place to start. What is “the promise of American democracy”?

The nation’s founding documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—lay that promise out quite clearly:

BECAUSE every human being is “created equal,” with “unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,”

THEREFORE, “We the people” … to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

That’s the promise. In short, “Liberty and Justice for All.”.

Of course, though people disagree about how much and for whom, the reality has so far fallen short of the promise. On this point, most people agree. Where they more often disagree is on how much progress has been made and for whom.

Generally speaking, the country has been on an upward, improving, trajectory for most of its history, for most of its people. But they didn’t get better without a struggle; and there is no guarantee that things will always get better.

In fact, they have been known to get worse and can easily get worse again. The need to keep getting better is as strong now, despite the nation’s gains, as it ever was. Indeed, we seem to be in the middle of a “things are getting worse” period, when a great many people are worried about how things are going.

Characteristically, we don’t agree on what’s wrong. Everybody has their favorite candidate. But there does seem to be a consensus that SOMETHING is wrong and needs to be fixed.

By my count, we have faced similar crises as a nation at least three times before, but emerged each time stronger and better, at least for a while. I am thinking, of course, of the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the New Deal.

And we can emerge from the current crisis better and stronger. But only if we face the storm, figure out what’s wrong, and work together to do something about it. We can’t just complain about our problems. We have to do something about them. I see that as the focus of our show.

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What are our problems? How is the promise of American democracy falling short today? And for whom?

I see two areas of special concern. The first is the growing gap between the richest Americans and the rest, Have Mores and the Have Lesses. The second is the growing cruelty, polarization, and dysfunction of our politics.

Here is one measure of the growing gap between the Have Mores and the Have Lesses.

In 1980, the average income of the top 1 percent of American households, after all taxes are deducted and all transfer payments have been added, was 7 times larger than the overall average household income for the whole country.

In 2020, however, it was 14 times larger.

In other words, the average household income of the top 1 percent grew twice as fast over that period than the average household income for the whole population.

And the story is the same for each quintile. The average household income of the top 1 percent was 19 times larger than the bottom 20 percent of households in 1980, and 35 times larger in 2020. For the second quintile, the multiples are 12 for 1980 and 25 for 2020. For the middle, they are 8 for 1980 and 19 for 2020. For the fourth, 6 and 14; and for the highest, 3 and 6.

In other words, every quintile is worse off relative to the top 1 percent by at least a factor of 2.

Another way to put the point is to say, that if the rewards of the economy’s rising productivity over that 40 years had been distributed in the same proportion as they were in 1980, then the average household income in every quintile would be twice as high.

Of course, the opposite would be true for the top 1 percent. To raise the income of everyone else, their income would have to decline by slightly more than half. But before we cry to much about their loss, let’s observe that even with that decline, the top 1 percent would still make twice as much in 2020 as they did in 1980, and still multiples more than the average of every other quintile.

Why are the top 1 percent doing so much better now than they once did? We will have to talk about that. But it is my position that they are not doing so much better because they are twice as smart or work twice as hard now as they did in 1980.

No. I think they are doing so much better because they have used their positional advantage at the top of the financial system to capture more of the gains the system as a whole is producing.

I call them the Money Power. And if we are going to restore the American promise to every American, we need to rein it in, just as Americans figured out how to rein in the Royal Power, the Slave Power, and the Corporate Power, which in earlier generations denied the American promise to others.

Which brings back to our political problem. We won’t be able to rein in—I intentionally do not say “abolish”—the Money Power until we have restored functionality and effectiveness to our political system.

As long as our politics remain dysfunctional, the Money Power has nothing to worry about. I imagine the Money Power even likes the way the game is going. The monied classes are certainly benefitting from it! We have to fix our politics, if we are going to fix our economy.

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How do we fix our politics?

First, I see a representation gap. Neither of the established parties speaks clearly for or on behalf of the working classes. Both of them are dominated by the monied interests, and they have been since at least the mid-1960 s, if not before.

I agree completely with my colleague, Les Leopold, that the billionaires currently have two parties and the people need one of their own. We will be talking about that.

I also agree that there is a “governability gap.” By which I mean, the system as currently constituted is not delivering good government. Indeed, many say it delivers more bad government than good!

We will also be looking at that. But I want to declare my own interest in this discussion from the outset. I do not share the conviction of many that fixing the government requires amending the Constitution.

On this point, I agree with those who say, to paraphrase John Adams, that the US Constitution has given us an imperfect form of government, but every alternative on offer is worse.

Fortunately, we can fix what is wrong with the government without amending the Constitution.

Take the Electoral College. It has become increasingly unrepresentative. But the problem is the Electoral College itself. The problem is its unrepresentative nature. Repeal the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act, expand the number of representatives in the House, and you fix two problems at once: the unrepresentative nature of the House AND the unrepresentative nature of the Electoral College.

There are similar reforms to the Senate and the Supreme Court that would make both bodies more responsive to “we the people,” which I hope we will discuss.

Granted, the Senate is a tough one! It has been called the most undemocratic legislative body in the democratic world. But just because the problem is hard doesn’t mean there isn’t a solution. I think I see one, and we will invite others here at some point to talk about.

That’s enough for today. I am looking forward to the conversation and welcome comments, criticisms, and suggestions.

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Episode 3 of Liberty and Justice For All tackles the contradiction at the heart of the American experiment: a nation founded on sweeping promises of liberty and equality while simultaneously tolerating slavery, exclusion, colonial power, and economic exploitation. Michael Merrill and Egberto Willies examine Thomas Jefferson not simply as hero or villain, but as a window into the unresolved tension between democratic ideals and lived reality. The discussion then moves from the founding era into the present, connecting racial and gender exclusion, environmental destruction, corporate power, labor rights, and working-class solidarity.

• America’s promise looks different from outside its borders. The conversation begins with childhood memories of Panama and the Canal Zone, where the United States appeared as a beacon even while stark inequalities existed between Americans and Panamanians.

• Jefferson embodies America’s founding contradiction. The episode wrestles with how a man associated with equality and democratic government could simultaneously enslave human beings and participate in a system that denied those ideals to millions. The disagreement centers on whether history should judge intentions, circumstances, deeds—or all three.

• Democracy has always involved a fight over who gets included. The discussion challenges the mythology of an instantly democratic America and instead presents democracy as an evolving struggle over political power, citizenship, race, gender, property, and participation. Jefferson’s democratic impulses existed alongside profound exclusions.

• Today’s injustices force the same moral questions on the current generation. Fossil-fuel dependence, environmental destruction, corporate exploitation, and inequality raise a provocative question: What practices tolerated today will future generations look back upon and ask, “How could they allow that?” The conversation argues that people retain agency to challenge those systems rather than simply accept them.

• Working-class solidarity offers a path forward. The episode ultimately rejects attempts to divide workers by race, gender, or geography. It argues that Appalachia, the barrios, the ghettos, and workers everywhere share material interests that become politically powerful when people recognize their common struggle against concentrated economic power.

America’s democratic promise remains unfinished because democracy never advances automatically. Ordinary people, abolitionists, workers, organizers, women, racial minorities, and movements have always forced the country closer to its professed ideals. The progressive task remains the same: confront historical truth without surrendering democratic possibility, dismantle divisions manufactured from above, and build enough solidarity from below to make liberty and justice genuinely universal.

This episode of Liberty and Justice For All asks a foundational question: What does the promise of American democracy actually mean? The discussion argues that the country’s founding ideals cannot simply celebrate individual wealth or abstract freedom. Democracy must deliver liberty, political equality, economic opportunity, and justice broadly enough to include everyone. The program traces the recurring American struggle against concentrated power—from monarchy and slavery to corporations and today’s increasingly dominant “money power.”

• The American promise extends beyond wealth. The episode identifies “liberty and justice for all” as a political and moral promise that cannot coexist with unlimited accumulation when that accumulation undermines the freedom and power of others.

• American history reflects an ongoing struggle against concentrated power. Royal power gave way to slave power, then corporate power, while the modern challenge increasingly comes from what the discussion calls money power.

• Capitalism requires democratic restraints. The conversation does not argue for abolishing capitalists. Instead, it makes the case for preventing concentrated wealth from granting a small group disproportionate authority over everyone else.

• Political power matters as much as wealth distribution. The discussion emphasizes that changing economic outcomes ultimately requires changing who possesses the political power to write rules, structure taxation, and determine how prosperity gets distributed.

• Democracy remains unfinished work. The episode concludes that liberty and justice are currently failing to reach everyone and argues that the democratic alternative needs stronger organization, leadership, and public participation.

The progressive lesson is straightforward: democracy cannot remain merely a promise written into founding documents. Ordinary people must possess enough economic and political power to make those words real. Liberty without economic security becomes hollow, justice without equality becomes selective, and democracy without organized popular power eventually becomes government by wealth.

The inaugural episode of Liberty and Justice For All establishes a mission that reaches beyond the usual partisan shouting match. The program argues that American politics needs a reset grounded in “first principles”: the democratic values the country claims to honor but has repeatedly failed to extend equally to everyone. Rather than treating liberty, equality, justice, labor rights, and democracy as empty slogans, the show intends to examine what those ideals actually require in practice.

• America needs a political reset. Michael Merrill argues that both major parties have wandered away from foundational democratic principles and that the country needs a more constructive conversation about where it came from, where it should go, and how it gets there.

• Liberty and justice must genuinely apply to everyone. The show frames American history as an unfinished struggle to turn the promises of freedom and equality into lived reality for enslaved people, workers, tenants, artisans, and everyone historically excluded from full participation.

• Working people must become participants, not spectators. Merrill’s experience in worker education emphasizes empowering workers to teach, organize, question authority, and share their own expertise rather than remain passive recipients of knowledge handed down from elites.

• Democracy must make sense to ordinary people. The conversation rejects a politics designed mainly by credentialed insiders. Its democratic standard is straightforward: public ideas and institutions must work for the people who actually labor, consume, organize, and live under them.

• The Pledge of Allegiance becomes a starting point, not an exercise in nationalism. The hosts intend to examine the meaning behind familiar words such as liberty and justice and ask whether America actually fulfills the promise citizens routinely pledge themselves to uphold.

Liberty and Justice For All begins with a decidedly democratic proposition: patriotism should demand accountability, not obedience. If America claims liberty, equality, democracy, and justice as its principles, those promises must extend to workers and ordinary people rather than remain privileges reserved for the wealthy and powerful. The series intends to recover those ideals and turn them into a practical agenda for democratic renewal.

Welcome to “Liberty and Justice for All,” the Substack home of KPFT ‘s weekly radio hour of the same name, which airs Thursdays at 2 PM Central.

The show is co-hosted (that’s me), currently a Research Fellow at Rutgers LEARN (Labor Education Action Research Network); by , co-founder and executive director of The Labor Institute; and by , who also produces “Politics Done Right” on KPFT, as well as “Egberto Off the Record” and “Reality Check” with on Substack. It got started after Les and I had been talking to Egberto, who has followed Les’s column, “Wall Street’s War on Workers,” now subtitled, “Why We Need a Party of Our Own,” on Substack and Common Dreams.

I am going to be taking the lead on the radio show for now, together with Egberto, while Les concentrates on his column, which we will occasionally feature on the show, and whatever his next book project becomes!

KPFT’s program notes describe “Liberty and Justice for All” as focused on “the promise of American democracy,” and Egberto and I share our initial views on this theme in the first programs.

But I am also entering the project with a larger purpose in mind, which I want to share and invite comments upon right off the bat. We need an American civic religion revival, a political Great Awakening, and there is nobody to make one but all of us!

I think nearly everyone agrees that American politics is broken. The question is: what can we do to fix it? The first thing we can do is start talking about solutions and not just the problems.

And I don’t just mean band-aids. I mean real, far-reaching, and meaningful fixes.

A lot of the conversation about fixing our politics focuses on messaging. The idea seems to be that if our side has the right message, it can win. Should it be more conservative? Should it be more centrist? Should it be more populist? That is what everybody is asking themselves.

The problem with this conversation, as I see it, is that it is too often circular. What is the right message? Too often the answer is, whatever message can win! Which gets us exactly nowhere. Winning is only the first step. Essential, to be sure. But what will we do if we win?

Nobody runs on a platform that says, “We will make things worse for you!” They run on, “We will make things better for you!”

But how do they propose to do that? That is the question. Make us safer. How? Make us healthier. How? Make us richer. How?

Those are the things we must talk about. And we need to get into the weeds. Find all the right messages you want. At the end of the day, what people remember is what the messengers did: Whom did they protect? What did they provide? Where did they make things better?

So, what are we going to do? “Liberty and Justice for All” is currently guided by the following initial assumptions.

First, we are not going to fix American politics by being against America. We can criticize it. But we have to do so from a standpoint of love, not hate. Otherwise, it will seem to most people that we criticize to make the country worse, not better.

We need to take back our history from those who tell it as either a story of relentless, unrelenting hate, as too much of the left does, or as a contemporary excuse for cruelty and hate today, as too much of the right does.

The American story is not just about expropriation, enslavement, exploitation, and oppression. It is also a story about cooperation, abolition, equality, and justice. To focus on one side but not the other is neither to tell the whole story nor to learn from it what it can teach.

Second, we are not going to fix what’s wrong with the American economy by simply fine-tuning its parts. The American economy needs more than a tune-up. It needs an overhaul.

But that does not mean getting rid of what works. It means getting rid of what’s broken. So, what’s broken?

What’s broken is that the economy is not run by and in the interests of all of us. On the contrary, it is run by and in the interests of only some of us.

Which some? Follow the money. The average income of every fifth of income earners, from the bottom to the top, has doubled since 1980. That’s the good news. But the average income of the Top 1 Percent, the richest of the rich, quadrupled over that same period.

That’s the bad news. If the Top One Percent (let’s call it “The Moneyed Class”) had done no better than the rest of us (let’s call us “The Middle Class and Working Classes”), then the average income of all of us would be even higher.

Of course, none of us are average. All of us are somewhere on the spectrum, and what happens to the average does not necessarily happen to any of us. And many of us are now worse off than we were, certainly than we would have been, if the economy worked for all of us and not just for some of us.

“Liberty and Justice for All” will address both of these facts. That all of us are worse off now than we might have been if the economy had been run for all, but some of us are actually worse off than we were and certainly worse off than our parents.

Third, and for now, lastly, we will only be able to fix what’s wrong with the economy if we first fix what is wrong with our politics. If our politics aren’t working, we can’t get our economy working.

What’s wrong with our economy is pretty much the same thing that is wrong with our politics. The US Constitution established a democratic government.

It explicitly declares that the rights of “the people” are not limited to those “enumerated” in the Constitution (Amendment IX). On the contrary, “We, the people” retain all our rights, natural or human, whether or not the Constitution mentions them.

The Constitution also specifically reserves “all the powers not delegated to the United States …, nor prohibited by it to the States, … to the States respectively, or to the people” (Amendment X).

The problem is that political power has become as unevenly distributed as money.

The government, federal, state, and local, are bigger now and expected to do more than it has ever done. But the benefits of government are not evenly distributed. Most of it goes to those who already have the most and need the least, rather than to those who have the least and need the most.

How do we fix that? How do we ensure that the benefits of government are distributed in proportion to need, not greed?

Some argue that we can only fix our politics by changing or amending the Constitution. I am not convinced. There is much about what is wrong with our politics that we can fix without amending the Constitution.

Take the Electoral College, in which urban voters are under-represented and rural voters are over-represented. Eliminating the Electoral College would eliminate the problem

But it would create others. The Electoral College geographically distributes the presidential contest in ways that ensure at least some attention is paid to rural areas and that attention is not monopolized by the more populous urban areas.

There are ways to make the Electoral College less representative AND ensure presidential candidates have to get into the country, at least some of the time. The best way to do so is to enlarge the House of Representatives, which would make both it and the Electoral College more representative.

These are the kinds of things we will be talking about on “Liberty and Justice for All.” Please join us.

Les Leopold uses Bruce Springsteen’s working-class politics to make a larger point: no celebrity can substitute for organized power.

In “The Boss and Me,” Leopold tells the story of asking Bruce Springsteen to write a preface or endorsement for his book, The Billionaires Have Two Parties — We Need a Party of Our Own. The request grew out of Springsteen’s public statement that America needs an effective alternative party or a Democratic Party leader who can speak to the majority. Leopold connects that comment to decades of shared working-class struggle, especially the 1985 fight by 3M workers in Freehold, New Jersey, Springsteen’s hometown, against a plant shutdown.

• Leopold saw Springsteen’s call for an alternative party as confirmation of his own argument that working people need independent political power outside the billionaire-dominated two-party system.

• The article recalls the 1985 3M shutdown campaign, where union leader Stanley Fischer sought Springsteen’s support and helped turn a local plant closing into a national and international labor story.

• Springsteen’s involvement gave the 3M workers a powerful cultural amplifier, including a New York Times ad and a benefit concert that drew broader attention to corporate abandonment.

• Leopold highlights the remarkable solidarity between mostly white New Jersey workers and Black South African 3M workers under apartheid, showing that class struggle can cross borders when workers recognize a shared enemy.

• The article ends with a sober but important lesson: even a Springsteen preface would help, but there is no shortcut to building a durable working-class political movement.

The progressive conclusion is clear: celebrity support can amplify a cause, but working people cannot wait for famous rescuers. Real change requires organizing, solidarity, independent political infrastructure, and a workers’ movement bold enough to challenge both corporate parties. Springsteen may lend his voice, but the people must build the power

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Les Leopold’s article argues that the working class has turned away from the Democratic and liberal establishment because too many liberal institutions preach solidarity while practicing disposability. He begins with Oberlin College’s 2020 layoffs of unionized food service and maintenance workers, using that betrayal as a metaphor for a broader political crisis: elites talk about inclusion, community, and shared sacrifice, but when budgets tighten, workers get sacrificed while administrators, donors, consultants, and corporate-aligned interests remain protected. Leopold ties that hypocrisy to the collapse of Democratic strength across the Midwest, where mass layoffs, deindustrialization, NAFTA, and job insecurity have left deep political scars.

• Oberlin College’s layoffs exposed how elite liberal institutions can abandon blue-collar workers while maintaining a public language of care, community, and justice.

• Leopold argues that mass layoffs are not just economic events; they are political radicalizers that push workers away from the Democratic establishment.

• His research found that as county mass layoff rates rose, Democratic vote share fell between 1996 and 2020, especially across the crumbling “Blue Wall” states.

• The article cites a YouGov survey of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin showing broad negative views of Democrats and strong rural support for an independent working-class political formation.

• Leopold argues that Democrats cannot rebuild trust with slogans like “opportunity society”; they must put job security, federal job guarantees, and working-class candidates at the center of politics.

The progressive conclusion is unavoidable: working people need material security, not liberal branding. A party that protects donors, consultants, and corporate comfort while asking workers to absorb the pain will continue losing the very people it claims to represent. The answer is not technocratic messaging. It is working-class power, job guarantees, union strength, anti-corporate politics, and candidates who know what it means to live under economic insecurity.

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Veterans sit at the center of America’s democratic crisis.

Les Leopold reviews Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon’s Courage or Complicity: How Veterans are Responding to the Assault on Democracy as a necessary examination of how veterans, shaped by war, service, trauma, solidarity, and neglect, can either help defend democracy or become tools of authoritarian politics. The article places veterans within the long arc of U.S. militarism, working-class sacrifice, VA privatization threats, and the fight for a politics that honors veterans with material support rather than empty flag-waving.

• Leopold frames U.S. history after World War II as a near-continuous cycle of wars, interventions, proxy conflicts, and military campaigns that relied heavily on working-class Americans.

• The review stresses that veterans are not politically monolithic: many have drifted right, but many others have become labor leaders, working-class candidates, antiwar voices, and defenders of democracy.

• Early and Gordon argue that the Veterans Administration remains a model of single-payer care and solidarity, which makes Republican privatization schemes especially dangerous.

• The article highlights the painful contradictions veterans face: society praises their service while too often abandoning them to PTSD, suicide, homelessness, incarceration, underfunded services, and political exploitation.

• Leopold invokes Major General Smedley Butler’s transformation from imperial enforcer to critic of capitalism and war as a warning and an invitation for today’s veterans to question militarism, empire, and authoritarianism.

The progressive takeaway is direct: veterans deserve more than patriotic slogans. They deserve healthcare, housing, dignity, democracy, and a political home that does not use them for wars abroad or authoritarian projects at home. Their culture of solidarity can become a democratic force, but only if progressives organize with them, respect them, and fight for the material conditions they were promised.

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For too long, working people have been told to settle for a political system that answers to billionaires, corporate lobbyists, and party consultants. Les Leopold demolishes the tired argument that an independent working-class party would merely act as a spoiler. In district after district where Democrats lose by overwhelming margins, there is nothing left to spoil. The real danger is continuing to force workers to choose between two parties funded by the same wealthy interests. Leopold argues that the path forward requires building an independent political movement rooted in labor, economic justice, and grassroots organizing.

• The spoiler argument has become a political excuse rather than a strategic reality.

• In more than 130 congressional districts, Democrats lose by margins so large that independent candidates cannot meaningfully divide the vote.

• Working-class voters support progressive policies such as Medicare for All, stronger unions, higher wages, and anti-monopoly reforms.

• Historical third parties helped lay the groundwork for transformative reforms later adopted during the New Deal.

• Building an independent party offers workers a vehicle that answers to people rather than billionaire donors.

America does not suffer from a shortage of progressive ideas. It suffers from a political structure captured by concentrated wealth. When both major parties depend on the same donor class, working people remain trapped in a system designed to protect profits instead of people. Leopold’s argument is both practical and urgent: build political power where the Democratic Party has already retreated, organize around the economic interests of ordinary Americans, and create a party that belongs to workers themselves. That is not a protest vote. It is the foundation for a democratic renewal capable of challenging oligarchy and restoring government to the people.

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