Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix, 1830. Oil on canvas. Louvre. Public Domain.

Prologue

Michelle Goldberg, Opinion Columnist for the New York Times, says the November 4, 2026 “election was an epic repudiation of the president, but it was also a democratic rebuke of Silicon Valley by voters who felt their ability to write their own destinies slipping away.” She quoted James Talarico, Democratic Senator-elect from Texas, saying: “The reason poverty exists in the wealthiest country on earth is not because we can’t feed the poor. It’s because we can’t satisfy the rich. But what we can do is tax trillionaires out of existence…. Elon Musk wants our land… He wants our water. He wants our tax dollars. He wants his very own personal United States senator.”

Goldberg also talked to another courageous politician from Michigan, Will Lawrence, who does not mince words. He said that the tech oligarchs “are dramatically unpopular… If we want to be a [Democratic] party of the working class, these [tech oligarchs] are the Rockefellers and Carnegies of our day. These are the richest and most powerful people who are accustomed to operating with complete impunity, and they need to be brought to heel.”

Tech plutocrats

True. The tech plutocrats are also supporting and developing Artificial Intelligence threatening this and other societies. But the American voters said enough. “Voters on Tuesday slammed the brakes on [AI] data centers and swept in governors and legislators who have promised to protect individuals from threats posed by artificial intelligence… over the past two years… fears escalated over the safety of advanced [AI] models, the technology’s risks of obliterating jobs and even existential threats of A.I.’s ability to end humanity.”

Tech plutocrats, however, have been “sucking up to the president” and behave with complete impunity as if they own the country. AI to them is a money machine and means to control people, enable the state and those with plenty of money to fight wars and gain personal autocratic powers. They definitely must “be brought to heel.”

The same billionaires are funding / purchasing most Democratic and Republican politicians, not exactly respecting democracy and the rule of law. This corrupting practice is more prevalent with the same-minded Republicans because Republicans are in general more affluent than Democrats. If the newly minted Democratic members of Congress have the virtues of Democracy as guiding principles, they can slow-down the fall of America and help their country regain the respect of the world.

Peace better than war

The victorious return of the Democratic party to power also means peace rather than war. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University put it like this: “The election was a decisive rejection of Trump’s war on Iran and its staggering costs at home. While savoring their victory and the historic opportunity to restore America’s constitutional order, the Democrats should take the anti-war message of the election to heart, because they suffered the same verdict two years ago, when voters rejected the Biden administration’s wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Last week Israeli voters rejected Netanyahu’s reckless wars, and European voters are also rejecting parties that prolong the Ukraine War. The message of voters is the same everywhere: diplomacy is safer, more effective, and trillions of dollars cheaper than war.”

I agree. The election is for the country’s return to constitutional and democratic government and a repudiation of ceaseless wars. The Congressional democrats ought to shut off money for wars. They could also reshape NATO into a peace-building global institution whose responsibilities ought to include the following. Remove American nuclear weapons from Turkey; ordering Turkey out of Cyprus. Ordering Turkey to stop its threatening moves in the Aegean Sea. In other words, the European Union and the US ought to warn Turkey to leave Greece alone. The Aegean islands are Greek. Turkey has no right to teach its children that the Aegean is their blue homeland. Indeed, the US ought to fulfill Marco Rubio’s October 7, 2026 eloquent promises and connections he made between Greeks and Americans. And, finally, fund NATO, in cooperation with China, India, Russia and the European Union, to help the world fight climate chaos by building the infrastructure for the transition from fossil fuels to solar and wind technologies. The warming of the planet is, next to nuclear weapons, an existential danger to humanity.

Democratic Congressional priorities

Priority number one: get money out of politics; number two, reform or abolish the Supreme Court; number three, tax the very wealthy in order to reduce the gap between rich and poor and spend most of the enormous wealth of the billionaires to clean up the pollution of the environment — plastics, garbage, chemicals. Phase out fossil fuels and animal farms in order to transition the country to solar energy and develop appropriate technologies for wind energy. Cleaning up the environmental and public health mess that the Trump administration exacerbated by almost shutting down the US Environmental Protection Agency should also be very high in the agenda of the new Democratic Congress.

Money in politics is the heart of darkness. It institutionalizes corruption. Those with lots of money, like the billionaires, legally bribe politicians. “If you support the building of data centers, I will fund your election,” that sort of thing. Thus elected politicians serve not the public interest but the private claims of their funders. Such a “legal” arrangement nullifies democracy. The government becomes plutocratic. Plutocracy, the rule of those who have wealth, is the worst form of government.

The Supreme Court has the wrong name. If it’s supreme, it is above the law, therefore it’s illegal. Its name should change to National High Court. Its judges should be called judges, not justices. No human being can become justice, a virtue of perfection and civilization. The judges of the high court ought to be elected for no more than 8 years. Appointing judges for life comes with hubris and corruption.

The US Environmental Protection Agency is the best political idea of America. I worked for the EPA for 25 years. Unfortunately, the plutocrats did not like anyone, much less a government agency to order them to pollute less or at all. This is especially true with those who own agribusiness that routinely pollute the land, the drinking water and the food grown on the land with war chemicals like neurotoxic organophosphates and carbamates or carcinogens. They drafted the laws that are so ridden with ambiguity that allow toxins under the wrong names of pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, rodenticides, etc. All these poisons are biocides. They kill all life. With that legal trap, it’s difficult to impossible to employ science in defense of human and environmental health. I go into more detail in my 2014 book, Poison Spring.

The new Democratic Congress ought to rewrite the pesticides law known as FIFRA (Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act). The US EPA should have its own laboratories and accept no study in support of a new chemical done by private laboratory. This is because of the chronic corruption of private laboratories licensed by the government to do their own and companies’ studies. No lobbyists should be allowed to visit the EPA and its scientists.

The new EPA ought to try to convince farmers to stop using toxins in the raising of food. It should encourage farmers to enroll in agroecological science training for the transition. Congress ought to restore the laws that the Trump EPA ignores.

Epilogue

Another major responsibility of the Democratic Congress is to force the Executive Branch to rejoin the country to the Paris Accord of 2015 on climate change. And along with that, appropriate and fund the infrastructure for the phase out of fossil fuels and animal farms. Why animal farms? Because they are a major source of carbon dioxide and methane, gases responsible for increasing the temperature of the planet. Such steps ought to facilitate the transition of the country from fossil fuels to the energy of the Sun and wind.

Congress should also fund the teaching of environmental, agricultural and climate sciences in elementary schools and high schools and universities. Only people who are literate about the environment (land, agriculture, water, the atmosphere) that gives us life will protect that precious environment.