Photograph by Towfiqu Barbhuiya

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Getting rid of Trump will not be enough

Dear Friends

From my point of view, making real change in America means making some serious changes to how we govern ourselves.

We need more than a change of presidents, or a change in which one of our two fractured political parties is at the helm. We need a change in who government works for, and how we hold that government accountable.

Part of why I feel this way comes from a man who helped teach me what to do with my own life.

My sensei, Dr. James Tanaka, was the most accomplished human being I ever knew. But before I tell you what he accomplished, there’s something you should know about what America did to him.

At eight years old, he and his family were removed from their farm in California and confined in a horse stall at Santa Anita Racetrack. They were later sent to the incarceration camp at Rohwer, Arkansas. They had done nothing wrong. They were imprisoned because they were Japanese American.

Think about that child, and then consider what he went on to give this country.

He held a doctorate in physical education, was a retired Air Force colonel and C-5 pilot, a college professor, a gymnastics coach, and an eighth-degree black belt in Kodokan judo. He had taught martial arts to Green Beret and Army Ranger instructors, Air Force Academy cadets, combat controllers, and law enforcement officers. Somehow, he also found time to teach judo and body conditioning at Solano Community College, where I had the privilege of studying with him from 1981 to 1985.

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The country that confined him as a child later benefited from his service, knowledge, discipline, and generosity. That doesn’t excuse what was done to him. He shouldn’t have had to become an extraordinary man to deserve decent treatment as a child.

When I say America needs to examine itself, this is part of what I mean. Patriotism should leave room for an honest accounting of what our country has done, and a determination not to do it again. His life gives me reason to admire what a person can contribute to this country. His childhood gives me reason to question a system that could treat him that way in the first place.

Patriotism should leave room for an honest accounting of what our country has done

For more than forty years, I’ve repeated something he told me: “Japan has a society of focus. America has a society of distraction.” That was his observation, not a claim that every person in either country fits the description. But it has stayed with me.

Sometimes he would see me in the hall or in the Veterans’ Office, where I worked part-time. He’d smile, tap his watch, and call out, “Dave, do something.”

If you never heard of him, perhaps it’s because he was more interested in making a contribution than becoming known for it. He died in August 2021, but that voice is still with me.

“Do something” didn’t mean stay busy enough to avoid thinking. To me, it means pay attention to what you’re doing with your life. Recognize where you can learn something, make something, help somebody, or change something that needs changing. Then act.

Rest and entertainment have a place in a good life. But there’s a difference between enjoying a distraction and making distraction your way of life. We need to ask ourselves whether the things occupying our attention serve a purpose, or keep us from finding one.

Focused effort can produce a flower arrangement or a brick house. It can also produce greater understanding, a stronger relationship, or the courage to reconsider something we’ve believed for years. The point isn’t that every moment must be productive. It’s that our lives should be ours to direct, rather than something that passes while our attention is always somewhere else.

That applies to politics too. Complaining about billionaires and politicians won’t be enough if we never examine our own habits, question the messages we accept, or make time to act together. We can’t keep waiting until after the next election, the next season, or whatever else has our attention. The time to look at our own lives is now.

I can still see him smiling and tapping his watch.

“Dave, do something.”

What I took from his example was simple. Pay attention. Try to do good. Try not to do harm. Serve the people in front of you. Discern, and decide. That’s the standard I want to apply to my own life, and to the government acting in our names. The rest is noise.

“Japan has a society of focus. America has a society of distraction.”

For me, part of doing something is putting these ideas forward. They aren’t his political program. They’re my conclusions, and my responsibility to explain.

I believe we should move toward a social democracy, with a more parliamentary form of government. Not a dictatorship with a different economic slogan. Not government ownership of every hardware store. A democratic system that protects individual rights, allows private enterprise, and puts public needs ahead of private fortunes. My starting point is that essential services should serve the public, and working people should have substantially more power over the decisions affecting their lives.

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That must start with campaign financing. A different form of government won’t accomplish much if the same money keeps buying the people running it.

AdImpact put political advertising for the 2026 midterm cycle at nearly $12 billion. That’s an enormous investment in telling us who deserves our trust, usually by explaining why the other candidate belongs in prison. By the end of June 2026 alone, congressional candidates had reported raising $2.8 billion, while PACs reported $8.3 billion in receipts. Those aren’t final election totals, and advertising spending isn’t an additional amount to pile on top. But they show the scale of the financial machinery surrounding our supposedly representative government.

Working people shouldn’t have to outbid billionaires to be represented. In an age of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison, that’s a contest the rest of us will keep losing unless we unite to change the rules. Publicly financed elections, enforceable restrictions on political money, and full disclosure of who’s paying for influence would be a start. Real oversight with real consequences. Apparently, “government of the people” needs a clarification about which people.

Congress should be an institution of public service, not a fortune-building apparatus. That means enforceable restrictions on personal enrichment, conflicts of interest, and the revolving door into lucrative jobs with the industries members were supposed to regulate. I’m open to term limits, but replacing the politicians won’t help if the same money keeps buying their replacements. Holding public office shouldn’t be an investment strategy or an extended job interview with your future employer.

But getting the money under control is only part of the job. We also need a government whose continued authority depends on its ability to govern responsibly, not merely its ability to survive until the next election, and that survival should depend on how well they’ve served the people.

Congress should be an institution of public service, not a fortune-building apparatus.

We’re told we have constitutional safeguards. We do, but they have limits. The 25th Amendment addresses presidential inability, not ordinary political failure or disagreement over policy. Its involuntary process requires the Vice President to act together with a majority of the Cabinet, or with a majority of an alternative body established by Congress. Congress can provide a substitute for the Cabinet. It cannot bypass the Vice President. If the President contests the determination and the dispute continues, keeping the Vice President in charge ultimately requires two-thirds of both houses of Congress.

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The current administration shows exactly where that safeguard can fail. Trump has stacked the Vice Presidency and Cabinet with people chosen for loyalty to him, not independence from him or national interests. Those are the very people the 25th Amendment relies on to act if he becomes unable to discharge his duties. If the Vice President won’t participate, the involuntary process cannot begin. Creating an alternative body wouldn’t solve that problem, because the Vice President would still have to act with it.

You don’t have to repeal a constitutional safeguard to neutralize it. You can fill the positions responsible for activating it with people who will refuse to use it. That’s the danger of making personal loyalty the qualification for public office. The emergency brake is still there, but the people within reach of it owe their jobs to the driver.

That is part of my argument for a parliamentary system. I want a separate mechanism for political accountability, one that allows a government to be replaced when it loses legislative confidence, without having to establish presidential inability. In a parliamentary system, the government must retain the confidence of the elected legislature to remain in office. Losing that support is a political question, not a medical diagnosis.

I’d favor a safeguard like Germany’s constructive vote of no confidence, in which legislators must agree on a replacement leader to remove the existing one. If you’re going to throw out the driver, somebody else has to be ready to steer. I would pair that with proportional representation, so voters could support parties that actually reflect their views instead of being told, once again, to choose the less repugnant of two relatively similar fates.

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But meaningful choices require an informed public. We badly need education about the political and economic alternatives, what they actually mean, how they work, and where they fall short. People deserve enough understanding to make a judgment, not just a label to cheer or fear. That kind of education seems almost anathema to the purposes of partisan media on both sides. Explaining an opposing idea fairly risks letting the audience think for itself. Apparently, that’s not the preferred business model.

We need to hear competing ideas explained honestly, including their costs and limitations. Tell us what social democracy would involve. Explain proportional representation and parliamentary government. Give the present system the same scrutiny. Defending an arrangement should require more than pointing out that we’re already stuck with it.

A parliamentary majority can protect a bad leader too. Changing the structure won’t manufacture integrity. That’s why I also want independent courts, a free press, enforceable ethics rules, and civil liberties that don’t disappear when the government finds them inconvenient. The point is to make accountability more practical, not to give a different group unchecked power.

And accountability ought to produce something more useful than a fresh set of campaign slogans.

Health care should be a public service, not a profit center built around what desperate people will pay. Being sick shouldn’t make you a business opportunity.

That means strengthening the FDA and giving it the funding, staff, and legal authority to oversee the entire process, from a drug’s earliest research through clinical trials, approval, manufacturing, marketing, and continued monitoring after it reaches patients. As part of that expanded mandate, require transparent accounting of development costs and public research support, with enforceable oversight of pricing. Drug prices should reflect reasonable and justifiable costs, not how much can be extracted from people who need medicine to stay alive. Oversight with the power to investigate, demand corrective action, and impose meaningful penalties. Asking nicely isn’t regulation.

Health care should be a public service, not a profit center

Education should serve students, not turn them into revenue streams or interchangeable worker bees. Its purpose should be to identify where each child struggles and provide the help needed to overcome those difficulties, while recognizing their strengths and helping them develop those abilities. The goal should be a person equipped to find a contented, self-supporting, and contributing place in society, not just somebody trained to fill a slot in an employer’s organization chart.

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We should stop organizing education around the needs of yesterday’s industrial economy and start organizing it around the children in front of us. Preparing them for the world their grandparents worked in isn’t exactly a forward-looking strategy.

Public higher education and vocational training should be available according to interest and aptitude, not family wealth or willingness to accept decades of debt. Pay teachers fairly, give them the resources to teach well, and keep administrative salaries within a reasonable multiple of what educators earn.

CSU lists its chancellor’s base salary at $795,000. An NFL rookie kicker kept on the regular roster for a full season earns a minimum base salary of $885,000, even if he’s the backup sitting on the bench. The kicker makes more. Where is our focus as a society?

I enjoy football, but that comparison says something about our priorities. We can find the money for somebody to stand ready to kick a football. When it comes to education, suddenly everybody’s worried about the cost. Market value isn’t the same thing as public value, and public policy shouldn’t pretend that it is.

The same principle applies to housing and public utilities. People need homes to live in, not just assets for somebody else to trade. Stop privatizing essential utilities as profit centers. Water, gas, and electricity should be operated for reliable public service, not maximum extraction from customers who have nowhere else to go. “What the market will bear” is a particularly ugly standard when the customer can’t reasonably do without the product.

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A social democracy should strengthen workers’ bargaining power, support collective bargaining, and give employees more say in the businesses their labor sustains. Democracy shouldn’t become an embarrassing suggestion the moment we walk into work.

Put public money into the things that make a country worth living in. Restore our streets, roads, bridges, and public buildings. Rebuild public health and mental health services.

With Cuba, end the broad economic embargo

My goal would be to cut military spending in half and withdraw our forward-deployed troops, except for those needed to maintain a small number of strategically located major forward bases. Put more effort into making friends than making enemies. Our foreign policy should respect other countries’ customs, cultures, and religions, not treat them as obstacles to getting our way through checkbook or gunboat diplomacy.

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We should apply our democratic principles beyond our own borders. With Cuba, end the broad economic embargo and build a normal relationship between sovereign neighbors. I can oppose political repression and oppose punishing ordinary Cubans at the same time. Close the prison at Guantánamo, then negotiate an orderly withdrawal from the naval base and return control of the land to Cuba.

For Puerto Rico, full equality and a fair, binding choice about its future. My preference is statehood if Puerto Ricans choose it. Until then, equitable federal funding and benefits. Fair treatment shouldn’t have to wait, and funding doesn’t replace a voice and a vote.

Getting rid of Trump isn’t enough. Neither is electing Democrats who offer a kinder version of the same arrangement. I want a government that working people can influence without buying access, that can be replaced when it loses the support needed to govern, and that treats the necessities of life as public responsibilities rather than opportunities for extraction.

If Americans really want things to change for the better, we’re going to have to reconsider our reflexive aversion to anything called socialism. That aversion didn’t develop in a vacuum. Wealthy business interests have financed organized efforts to discredit socialism and defend private economic power for more than a century. The National Civic Federation, founded in 1900, explicitly worked to counter socialism and growing labor militancy. Later, the National Association of Manufacturers mounted extensive publicity campaigns promoting its preferred version of free enterprise and opposing the expansion of government’s economic role.

This wasn’t just a few businessmen expressing an opinion over lunch. Business leaders hired public relations professionals to sell their economic philosophy through organized persuasion campaigns. The manufacturers’ association’s “American Way” campaign was one expression of that effort. The public was being sold a view of how society should work by people with a considerable financial interest in its acceptance.

That doesn’t mean every criticism of socialism is manufactured or every public program is sound. It means we should recognize the sales pitch before mistaking it for our own independent judgment. We should ask whether a proposal improves people’s lives, protects their freedom, and gives them a meaningful voice, not whether somebody can frighten us by attaching a label to it.

I’m not asking Americans to surrender their judgment. I’m asking them to exercise it. Private profit isn’t proof that something works, and public ownership isn’t proof that it doesn’t. Neither deserves a free pass.

The people doing well under the present arrangement have every reason to tell us the alternatives are dangerous. The rest of us ought to ask: dangerous to whom?

Dave Blazer

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Dave Blazer is a retired financial securities industry manager and technical expert with a life long interest in Asian philosophy and martial arts. He is also a struggling left handed Blues Guitarist. He served as a cryptographic and systems management technician in the U.S. Navy for nine years, and attended the Dominican College of San Rafael, CA. He was involved with the securities industry for nearly 30 years.