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Second Thought argues that billionaire success and a decent life for everyone else can’t coexist, because the fortunes a...
10/22/2026

Second Thought argues that billionaire success and a decent life for everyone else can’t coexist, because the fortunes at the top are built from resources, power, and influence taken from the rest of us. With inequality now worse than the Gilded Age, the video takes apart the myth of the benevolent job creator and shows what it means to live in a country where a tiny class holds this much and answers to no one.

10 minutes | Second Thought argues that billionaire success and a decent life for everyone else can’t coexist, because the fortunes at the top are built from resources, power, and influence taken from the rest of us. With inequality now worse than the Gilded Age, the video takes apart the myth of ...

One of few silver linings of these dark Trump times is that much of what had been hidden has now been exposed.I’m referr...
10/22/2026

One of few silver linings of these dark Trump times is that much of what had been hidden has now been exposed.

I’m referring specifically to where the power lies in our system—power to decide how most Americans live and work. This exposure is having a huge effect on American attitudes. It may even lead to a fundamental political realignment along with major reforms.

To summarize: America hates the billionaire barons of Big Tech.

Let me start with some historic context, then discuss how this affects the most pressing issues in the 2026 campaign, and finally suggest some likely outcomes.

I. The First Gilded Age’s Robber Barons and the Second Gilded Age’s Billionaire Barons of Big Tech

The first Gilded Age, which stretched from the late 1870s to around 1900, featured “robber barons” who lived like kings while corrupting the federal and state governments with bribes to get whatever they wanted from pliant legislators.

Today’s second Gilded Age is led by the billionaire barons of Big Tech, who are similarly living like kings while corrupting our democracy.

Just three billionaires have donated more than $600 million to Republican candidates in the 2026 midterms, an all-time record.

One of them—Elon Musk—sank more than a quarter of a billion dollars into getting Trump elected in 2024 and is sinking even more into the 2026 midterms.

In return, Trump has allowed Musk to extend his monopoly on satellite communications, financed largely by taxpayers—even giving him the power to disable Ukraine intelligence. Trump also allowed Musk’s DOGE to rampage through federal databases and gather information on every American.

Larry Ellison and his son, David, defanged CBS News and its flagship “60 Minutes” and kicked Trump critic and satirist Stephen Colbert off the air. In return, Trump has greenlit the Ellisons’ acquisition of a media empire stretching from Paramount to CNN, CBS and CBS News, TBS, TNT, MTV, Comedy Central, BET, Discovery, HBO, and TikTok.

Jeff Bezos gave Melania Trump a $40 million licensing fee for a puff documentary about her (with about $28 million going directly to her) and another $35 million for marketing the movie dud. Bezos also destroyed the integrity of the editorial page of The Washington Post by barring it from endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024 and from writing anything negative about capitalism under Trump.

In return, Trump has given Bezos and his Amazon carte blanche to monopolize online retailing along with federal contracts to provide cloud infrastructure for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the National Security Agency (NSA).

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund and $25 million to Trump’s White House ballroom fundraising campaign, and he gave Trump personally a custom engraved glass and 24-karat gold base plaque. In return, Trump has given Cook and Apple critical exemptions from Trump’s sweeping tariffs, allowing them to import electronic components from China.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, also helped finance Trump’s inauguration and his ballroom, gave Trump $25 million to settle his lawsuit against Meta for suspending him from its platforms after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, rolled back content moderation and fact-checking on his platforms, and brought Trump loyalists into Meta’s leadership.

In return, Trump went along with Zuckerberg and Meta’s wish not to have a federal AI regulator but to rely on “self-policing” and to pressure European and other countries not to impose taxes on digital services.

II. The Billionaire Barons and AI

The billionaire barons of Big Tech are now investing more than $1 trillion of other people’s money and debt—along with taxpayer-financed subsidies—into AI. (Last year’s giant Trump-Republican tax cut featured major tax breaks for Big Tech, helping drive a big decrease in corporate tax payments even as AI spending soars.)

The billionaire barons are thereby exposing the US economy to the largest gamble since Wall Street’s wanton betting led to the 2008 financial crisis—threatening tens of millions of jobs, putting energy-guzzling data centers all around the nation, and posing a non-negligible threat to the survival of the human species.

The barons are also hastening climate change through the data centers’ exponential energy and water demands, along with the expansion and resurrection of fossil fuel infrastructure to power AI.

Tech giants’ self-reported greenhouse gas emissions have surged. Meta’s emissions jumped over 60 percent, Google’s rose nearly 50 percent, Amazon’s increased by 33 percent, and Microsoft’s by more than 23 percent—almost entirely driven by building and expanding data centers.

The billionaire barons of Big Tech are also among the biggest beneficiaries of Trump’s war in Iran, through their ownership of advanced AI.

Peter Theil’s Palantir is powering the US military's targeting and data operations through its Maven Smart System platform, which processes massive streams of satellite, drone, and intelligence data.

Billionaires Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf, and Trae Stephens are behind Anduril, which provides major counter-drone defense systems used to intercept Iran’s low-cost Shahed drones. Billionaires Larry Page’s and Sergey Brin’s Google—along with billionaire Sam Altman’s OpenAI and billionaires Eric Schmidt and Dario Amodei’s Anthropic—are providing advance AI models and technology for military planning, intelligence, and counter-drone operations.

III. Will History Rhyme?

By the first decade of the 20th century, Americans had had enough of the brazen inequalities and corruption that characterized the first Gilded Age. A wave of reforms—antitrust laws, progressive taxation, pure food and drug regulation, bans on corporate political activities—blocked much of what the robber barons had been doing.

Then, after the Great Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, the nation ensured that the barons could no longer wreak havoc on America. Labor laws, securities laws, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, the 40-hour workweek, and additional taxes on high incomes were enacted, laying the basis for the prosperity of the post-World War II era.

Are we on the precipice of another age of reform?

Perhaps. A new Politico poll shows that Americans are fed up with the billionaire robber barons of Big Tech—and Republicans are likely to take most of the political blame on Election Day.

The top tax priorities for voters, according to the poll, are hiking taxes on billionaires and curbing tax breaks for big companies.

Nearly half of respondents—47 percent—called Republicans the party of tech tax breaks, more than double the 21 percent who said the same for Democrats. Voters are also far more likely to want candidates who propose stripping away tax incentives for the data centers needed to fuel the AI boom.

About a fifth of respondents said that ending those tax breaks would be among their most important tax issues in the midterms (only 1 in 10 wanted to offer new preferences for data centers).

A majority of respondents thought that tech chief executives have been secretive about the potential risks of AI, while a plurality of Americans believe both that the risks of artificial intelligence development outweigh the benefits and that the government should strictly regulate AI.

It’s impossible to know whether the upcoming midterms elections will reflect these sentiments or, even if they do, whether these sentiments will find their way into subsequent legislation.

But—given the polls, and also what I’m hearing informally from around the nation—it seems likely to me that high on the nation’s emerging progressive agenda will be busting up Big Tech monopolies, getting big money out of our politics, enacting a wealth tax, putting guardrails around AI, seeking to reverse climate change, and preventing billionaires from creating and owning media empires.

I can’t say precisely when we’ll see these enacted, but I’m confident we will see them. America hates the billionaire barons of Big Tech, with good reason.

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Robert Reich is professor emeritus of public policy at Berkeley and former US secretary of labor. His latest book is the No. 1 New York Times best-seller, "Coming Up Short."

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"What if the solutions to building a better future already exist?How to Live on Earth is an ambitious feature documentar...
10/22/2026

"What if the solutions to building a better future already exist?

How to Live on Earth is an ambitious feature documentary that explores how humanity can build a safe and thriving future by working with nature, not against it.

Presented by Benedict Cumberbatch, the film presents the ultimate hack, showing what becomes possible when we team up with nature to solve our greatest challenges.

Heart-warming, entertaining and energising, the film presents a hopeful vision of a future within reach – one in which nature thrives, and so do we."

97 minutes | What if the solutions to building a better future already exist? How to Live on Earth is an ambitious feature documentary that explores how humanity can build a safe and thriving future by working with nature, not against it. Presented by Benedict Cumberbatch, the film presents the ulti...

Trump is setting in motion a series of events to invalidate and coerce the outcome of the midterms. If he succeeds, the ...
10/21/2026

Trump is setting in motion a series of events to invalidate and coerce the outcome of the midterms. If he succeeds, the iron doors of fascism will slam shut. -- Chris Hedges

32 minutes | Trump is setting in motion a series of events to invalidate and coerce the outcome of the midterms. If he succeeds, the iron doors of fascism will slam shut. Support my independent journalism at Substack: https://chrishedges.substack.com/ Follow The Chris Hedges Report on social media:....

In the highlands of Pernambuco, Brazil, the Xukuru do Ororubá Indigenous people are bringing a damaged landscape back to...
10/21/2026

In the highlands of Pernambuco, Brazil, the Xukuru do Ororubá Indigenous people are bringing a damaged landscape back to life.

After generations of colonization, land occupation, deforestation, and intensive agriculture, their ancestral territory had suffered profound ecological damage. Forests had diminished, wildlife had disappeared, and springs had been compromised.

Through the Jupago Kreká Sacred Agriculture Collective, the community is combining ancestral knowledge, traditional agriculture, and forest restoration to regenerate its territory. According to the community, approximately 360 hectares are undergoing restoration, 14 springs are recovering, and wildlife is returning to previously degraded areas. Their work includes recovering ancestral seeds, cultivating medicinal plants, and passing traditional ecological knowledge to younger generations. For the Xukuru, protecting biodiversity is inseparable from protecting culture, livelihoods, and territorial rights.

As governments gather in Yerevan, Armenia, from October 19-30 for the 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (C*D COP17), their experience offers a reminder that biodiversity depends on the rights of the people who have protected and restored it for generations.

Yet there are growing concerns that hard-won protections for Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant peoples, and local communities could be weakened during negotiations. Rather than recognizing and strengthening the conservation work these communities are already leading, as demonstrated by the Xukuru's restoration efforts, governments risk undermining the territorial rights and community governance that make these efforts possible.

Conservation Cannot Come at the Expense of Communities
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Governments will undertake their first collective review of progress toward implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in 2022. The framework includes conserving at least 30% of the world's land and waters by 2030. But achieving this target is not simply a matter of expanding protected areas. It also requires addressing who has the authority to govern the lands and ecosystems on which biodiversity depends.

For too long, conservation policies have treated Indigenous peoples and local communities as obstacles rather than rights holders and essential partners. This approach has too often resulted in exclusion, displacement, and restrictions on traditional ways of life.

The Xukuru people's restoration efforts demonstrate why recognizing Indigenous-led conservation matters. Communities are already protecting and restoring biodiversity through their traditional knowledge and management practices, yet their contributions are not always formally recognized in conservation policies. Governments must ensure that Indigenous and Traditional Territories are recognized as conservation areas in their own right, rather than treated as secondary to conventional protected areas.

Hard-Won Rights Are Not Negotiating Chips
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The Global Biodiversity Framework includes commitments to respecting the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities, achieved through years of advocacy by Indigenous leaders, community organizations, and allies.

Yet these protections could be diluted through negotiating language on the voluntary guidelines to achieve the Goal 2 and 3 of the Global Kunming Framework. Replacing a commitment that governments should act with language saying they may act weakens accountability. Treating Indigenous and Traditional Territories as merely complementary to conventional protected areas risks marginalizing community governance. Diluting references to free, prior, and informed consent threatens communities' ability to make decisions about their lands.

That is why the Rights and Resources Initiative and its partners have issued an open letter to C*D negotiators calling on governments to stop the rollback of hard-won rights protections at C*D COP17.

Through the campaign, the coalition has outlined 10 demands, including stronger recognition of Indigenous and Traditional Territories; protection of free, prior, and informed consent; direct access to biodiversity finance; and meaningful recognition and participation of Afro-descendant peoples.

Furthermore, digital sequence information (DSI) draws on vast amounts of genetic information derived from forests and other ecosystems that have long been protected, managed, and conserved by Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant peoples, and local communities. Yet the growing use of DSI risks disconnecting genetic information from the traditional knowledge, practices, and stewardship systems that have enabled communities to sustainably use, manage, and conserve these genetic resources.

The fact that the Cali Fund, a fund designed to share the benefits from the use of genetic data, is not yet fully operational, combined with inadequate mechanisms to ensure the traceability of genetic resource data, puts at risk the principles of fairness, equity, and justice that should guide the global use of genetic information. Ultimately, this raises a fundamental question: Will genetic information be governed primarily for profit, or for life?

C*D COP17 must advance the financing arrangements necessary to make the Cali Fund fully operational, while strengthening community governance over data related to genetic resources and respecting collective rights. Governments must also ensure that Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant peoples, and local communities receive a fair and equitable share of the benefits generated from the use of genetic information derived from biodiversity. The Cali Fund, as a global mechanism for benefit sharing, should recognize and uphold their rights and provide meaningful opportunities for communities to access funding directly.

C*D COP17 must build on commitments to recognize Afro-descendant peoples in global biodiversity governance. Through , RRI and its partners are calling on governments to uphold C*D Decision 16/6, which recognizes the contributions of people of African descent to biodiversity conservation, and ensure that recognition translates into meaningful participation in decisions affecting their territories and livelihoods.

Governments must also advance the C*D's Gender Plan of Action, ensuring women can participate in biodiversity decision-making and access resources. Women in the Xukuru community play a central role in preserving traditional medicinal knowledge and passing ancestral practices to future generations.

C*D COP17 Must Move Forward, Not Backward
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As an environmental lawyer who has worked for more than two decades at the intersection of conservation, public policy, and Indigenous rights, I have seen how easily ambitious environmental commitments lose their meaning when governments fail to translate them into enforceable protections.

Millions of communities are still waiting for their daily efforts to protect ecosystems, water sources, and genetic resources to be fully recognized and respected.

In many cases, their stewardship has proven highly effective in conserving biodiversity, including in comparison with nationally designated protected areas managed by governments, with some areas managed by communities proving six times lower deforestation than national protected areas. The lack of recognition impacts lives of communities because of restrictions on the use of natural resources, by generating conflicts for land use, and by reducing the possibility to access to financing.

C*D COP17 is an opportunity to move beyond conservation models that separate nature from people. Governments must defend rights already recognized in international agreements, strengthen community-led governance, and ensure biodiversity finance reaches those doing the work.

There can be no lasting victory for nature if it comes at the expense of the rights of the people who protect it.

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Carla Cardenas is director of Latin America at the Rights and Resources Initiative.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

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Metanoia Films has released a documentary in association with Films For Action: Plutocracy: Divide et Impera (Divide and...
10/20/2026

Metanoia Films has released a documentary in association with Films For Action: Plutocracy: Divide et Impera (Divide and Rule). It’s the first entry of a multi-part series directed by filmmaker Scott Noble.

The movie assembles a rich historical mosaic which examines the constitutional roots of democratic elitism in the United States, the subsequent emergence of the labor movement during industrialization, and the various schemes employed by private capital to sabotage popular mobilization.

Plutocracy is available online and can be viewed free of charge. Your author, who helped to edit the script, would deem the film time well spent.

To grasp the movie’s salience viewers need look no further than a trial currently unfolding in West Virginia where federal prosecutors have indicted coal entrepreneur Don Blankenship of both violating numerous safety regulations and conspiring to hide said violations. Back in 2010 an underground explosion killed twenty nine miners working for Blankenship. It’s the worst mining disaster in more than four decades.

Those familiar with the history of the American labor movement will tell you that this sort of tragedy is hardly an isolated incident. For example in December of 1907 an explosion in a West Virginia coal mine owned by the Fairmount Corporation killed over 360 workers. Indeed, during the first fifty years of the coal industry accident rates in the United States were so high that more workers were crippled and killed than in any battle of the American Civil War.

Such hazards weren’t restricted to coal mines either. Across the expanding industrial landscape American workers faced potentially fatal threats on a daily basis, toiling long hours for low wages. Records archived by the Interstate Commerce Commission show that in the year 1899 approximately 22,000 railroad workers were killed or seriously injured. At the Homestead Steel works factory in Pittsburgh roughly 1 out of every 11 steel workers died while on the job, frequently due to lack of sleep.

During this period business interests leveraged their financial resources to purchase influence with the corrupt political machines that thrived in large urban centers. Payoffs became so routine that financiers like Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould were obliged to meet in secret to negotiate bribe caps. And when ordinary people finally began to push for better working conditions the political machines deployed their police forces on behalf of their corporate paymasters to crack down on public dissent and violently discipline protesters.

The collective experience of workers in the late 1800s with business leaders, politicians, and police gave rise to some of the first attempts to organize. Yet events portrayed in Plutocracy highlight that business leaders and their institutions were already organized. The powers that be implemented a whole series of strategies to undermine the nascent efforts of labor.

For instance, they wielded divide and conquer tactics to pit workers against each other based on race, ethnicity, and skill level. Industrialists understood all too well the threat posed by unified multi-racial groups like “the Triple Alliance”. Hence executives strove to kindle racial tension and fragment unions whenever possible, using their contacts in the press to disparage strikers and publish outright racist fabrications about “mobs of brutal Negro strikers… beating up all who attempted to interfere with them.” In fact, it can be argued that the fear of class solidarity served as impetus for racial segregation in the South.

The success of this technique has serious implications for modern society. Identity politics have largely supplanted class analysis, often increasing divisions. Journalist Matt Taibbi astutely captures this dynamic: “cultural civil war, you can have that no matter how broke you are.”

Plutocracy distinguishes itself by projecting American history through the prism of class consciousness, and in doing so achieves remarkable clarity.

Then there’s the matter of mercenaries. When push came to shove and protests broke out the captains of industry invariably fell back on brute force. Which is to say that they recruited private security forces to step in and play dirty: infiltrate unions as spies, stage false flag operations to justify harassment, and assault striking workers. These agents were enlisted from outfits like the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and the Thiel Detective Service.

If workers somehow succeeded in overpowering the hired armies of capital, as workers did during the Homestead Strike of 1892 or the Battle of Blair Mountain (the single largest armed uprising in the United States since the Civil War), business leaders would pull out their trump card and request the assistance of government troops. Though this didn’t always guarantee victory. In certain cases, like during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, there were isolated instances where state militias refused to fire on strikers.

Director Scott Noble has channeled his passion and energy into what’s basically a public service. Noble applies his trademark unorthodox style which blends rare antique media together with contemporary film footage to create a powerful experience that conveys vital information in a compelling format. Enlightening yet also easy to digest, particularly for a mobile device generation that’s accustomed to streaming online videos.

The news stories of people dropping from heat exhaustion and heart attacks in dot-com warehouses are a sign of things to come. In the absence of an ideological alternative to market fundamentalism society is left with a myopic worldview that demands infinite growth from a finite planet. In other words, expect the remnants of the New Deal era to be eliminated by self-valorizing executives and their quest for economic efficiencies. Their policy initiatives will be augmented by a phalanx of media outlets geared towards manufacturing consent, a global surveillance apparatus, and militarized police.

If Plutocracy offers a lesson it’s this: history reveals that the business elite and their political intermediaries in government only made genuine concessions when labor forced them to.

As Franklin Roosevelt allegedly told activists during his tenure as President “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.” Witness the decade-spanning trend of growing inequality and the gradual demise of unions. A dysfunctional political system where billionaires conduct shadow primaries. These developments do not bode well for the average worker. Hence it’s likely that the harrowing clashes of the labor movement will eventually be fought all over again.

Plutocracy distills the nature of past struggles and provides counsel on routes that can lead to progress.

Watch the film via the link in comments.

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Bill Blunden is a journalist whose current areas of inquiry include information security, anti-forensics, and institutional analysis. He is the author of several books, including “The Rootkit Arsenal” and“Behold a Pale Farce: Cyberwar, Threat Inflation, and the Malware-Industrial Complex.” Bill is the lead investigator at Below Gotham Labs and a member of the California State University Employees Union, Chapter 305.

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The war in Ukraine can be ended permanently on terms that protect Ukraine's statehood, meet Russia's security concerns, ...
10/20/2026

The war in Ukraine can be ended permanently on terms that protect Ukraine's statehood, meet Russia's security concerns, and lay the foundation for a durable European security order.

As another round of negotiations gears up in Norway, I propose a settlement concluded as a single package, signed by Ukraine and Russia, adopted by a vote of the United Nations Security Council under Chapter VII of the Charter, and guaranteed jointly by the five permanent members of the Council together with other states that choose to join.

The proposal rests on the principle of indivisible security set out in the Helsinki Final Act and the Charter of Paris.

The package would have four core commitments.

The first is Ukraine's permanent neutrality, adopted in a constitutional law on the model of Austria's law of 1955, which would return Ukraine to the founding choice of its Declaration of State Sovereignty of 1990. Ukraine would join no military alliance and host no foreign bases or forces, whether of NATO, the European Union, their member states, or Russia. Neutrality would not mean disarmament, and Ukraine would retain armed forces for its own defense.

The second is that Ukraine would pursue its candidacy for membership in the European Union as a permanently neutral state, with a neutrality protocol in its accession treaty on the model of Ireland's, and Russia would affirm that Ukraine's membership in the EU is consistent with Russia's security.

The third is an armistice line drawn along the line of contact on the date of signature. Each side would exercise de facto jurisdiction on its side of the line, neither would recognize the other's territorial claims, and both would renounce force in any future adjustment. This formula is compatible with both countries' constitutions, which bar or severely restrict the cession of territory.

The fourth is the end of NATO enlargement eastward. At signature the North Atlantic Council would declare that NATO will not admit Ukraine or other new members in Eastern Europe or the South Caucasus, withdrawing the Bucharest pledge of 2008.

The settlement would take effect as a permanent end of hostilities on signature, not as a temporary ceasefire, and its provisions would be implemented in stages under international verification. No element would be negotiated in isolation, and no party would be asked to make a concession in advance of signature.

The territorial arrangements are designed to address the concerns and claims of both sides. Ukrainian forces would withdraw from the part of Donetsk region that Ukraine now controls, which would become a demilitarized special zone. Russian forces would not enter it, the existing local civil administration would continue to function, and its final status would be left to negotiation. Russia would withdraw from the areas it holds in Dnipropetrovsk region and from the Kinburn Spit. A Northern Security Zone would be demilitarized on both sides of the Russian-Ukrainian border, and Russian forces would leave the areas they hold in Kharkiv and Sumy regions as Ukrainian forces withdraw from their side. The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant would remain under Russian control with IAEA safety oversight and would sell an agreed share of its electricity to Ukraine at cost.

A demilitarized belt would run along both sides of the armistice line, with heavy weapons and long-range strike systems withdrawn to agreed distances, and mutual ceilings on forces would apply in the border regions on both sides. In the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, commercial navigation would be free for all Ukrainian and Russian ports, and attacks on shipping and ports would be prohibited.

The settlement in Ukraine should also begin the repair of European security as a whole. NATO and Russia would agree on a moratorium on ground-launched intermediate-range missiles in Europe, refrain from deploying nuclear weapons in any additional state, and restore the NATO-Russia Council. Normal diplomatic relations would be restored on both sides. The parties would convene the first summit of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe since 2010 to entrust the OSCE with monitoring the settlement, verifying arms limits, and overseeing the provisions on rights.

Questions of language, education, culture, and religion would be resolved according to European standards, with the Russian language treated on the same basis as Ukraine's other minority languages, and Russia would accept the same obligations toward Ukrainian speakers and religious communities on its side of the line. All obligations concerning extremism and incitement would be mutual and monitored by the OSCE. Prisoners of war would be exchanged on an all-for-all basis, detained civilians released, and separated children reunited with their families.

Sanctions would be lifted during 2027. Russia's immobilized sovereign assets would also be released, and private property seized or immobilized on both sides would be restored. An international reconstruction fund administered by the European Investment Bank would finance reconstruction on both sides of the line, with contributions from all parties, Russia included, in a common effort rather than as reparations. Gas transit through Ukraine could resume wherever there are willing buyers, without any commitment by the European Union to purchase Russian gas.

A report of serious violation by an OSCE monitoring mission of unarmed observers from states outside NATO would trigger consultations among the guarantors and referral to the Security Council. Ukraine would lift martial law and hold elections under OSCE observation, and the newly elected Verkhovna Rada would ratify the settlement and adopt the constitutional law on neutrality, while the Russian Federal Assembly would ratify it at the same stage.

This proposed settlement addresses the causes of the war rather than only its symptoms.

Europe has been largely absent from the design of the peace. By putting forward such a framework, European governments can take the lead in building Europe’s indivisible security and help end a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and carries a continuing risk of confrontation between nuclear powers.

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Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of "A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism" (2020). Other books include: "Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable" (2017) and "The Age of Sustainable Development," (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

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