Progressive candidates should be winning landslide victories over corporatist Republicans and replacing corporate Democrats on the merits of an authentic people-first agenda and legislation that makes big corporations and their government toadies our servants, not our masters. If progressive candidates fail to deliver, they, too, should be replaced.

Voters, have a civic duty beyond casting a ballot or staying home in despair to impress upon the candidates what must be done—and how to meet the long-neglected necessities of the citizenry, especially the families and children and workers, so long deprived of overdue changes and reforms. For example, a majority or supermajority view the following as immediate “kitchen-table” needs.

1. “Affordability” is about more than high prices and interest rates. It is also about too many people having too little income and government doing too little to crack down on corporate crooks who drain consumers’ hard-earned dollars and savings in both Red and Blue States.

Passage of legislation to raise the minimum wage from a frozen federal $7.25 per hour to a living wage, will give tens of millions of workers a long-overdue raise.

2. Cracking down on the fleecing, cheating, and outright theft from consumers and workers can come from “law and order” criminal law enforcement and civil actions by the wrongfully injured plaintiffs. This enforcement has the backing of over 85% of the people who despise the double standard of justice, which they see every day.

3. Reverse the huge tax cuts, escapes, and evasions by large corporations and the super-wealthy like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg (see the October 2026 Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy report: After Two Rounds of Trump Tax Cuts, Corporate America Paid Less Than Ever in 2025) to the levels of the prosperous Nineteen Sixties. End huge corporate welfare outlays for the giant corporate freeloaders paid for by taxpayers and the massive billing fraud paid by patients and shoppers.

These restorations and prosecutions, supported by huge majorities of left-right voters, will more than pay for full Medicare for all, everybody in, nobody out, a real child tax credit, child care, maternal and family sick leave, and lots of public infrastructure projects, which will create good jobs in communities everywhere.

Don’t we need more of the money already extracted from taxpayers sent back home? How about the runaway, bloated, unaudited military budget and its giant corporate monopolistic military contractors like Lockheed Martin and its F-22 budget buster, or General Dynamics, the sole endless builder of the doomsday Trident submarines? Multiple nuclear warheads from only one of these subs can destroy 200 cities in the world within an hour. How many have Trump, Biden, and Obama, commissioned?

Read President Eisenhower’s Cross of Iron speech to newspaper editors in April 1953 to see how many schools, hospitals, bridges, etc. can be built by reducing gigantic military waste and corporate/Empire extravaganzas. (See speech.)

How about this? Who’s talking about raising Social Security benefits, unchanged since 1971, by raising the individual income cap, now $184,000 for Social Security taxes? Trillionaire Musk, the bosses of the subsidized oil and gas giants, the big bankers and health insurance giants, and the executives of the giant hospital chains, who make at least two million a month, paid Social Security taxes on only the first $184,000 of their income. In 2022, two hundred Democrats supported Congressman John Larson’s bill, the Social Security 2100 Act (H.R. 9519), which would expand benefits and strengthen the program’s finances by requiring higher-income Americans to contribute more.

Unfortunately, corporatist Speaker Nancy Pelosi blocked a vote on the House floor on a measure........

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