LABOR & COUNTRY CHAPTER I - OHIO 2035

Working People Stick Together

My fellow citizens I need your help. More than ever, working people need beacons of leadership throughout our republic to remind them of their own power to stoke the imagination around self-governance once more. I've been waking up almost every night at three a.m. forcing myself to get out of bed to write. To not do so would only mean staring up at the ceiling, feeling my rumbling guts tumble around as I continue playing the injustices of the day on repeat in my head.

Jayland Walker, coldly executed by four policemen while completely disarmed. Illegal, gerrymandered maps force fed to our citizens against our own will and laws. Thinking about the anger, and distraught citizens unable to grieve because they live in fear after gun violence plagues the newspapers as a daily occurrence. An ocean of negative kinetic energy crashing into the collective soul of our populous drowning under a barrage of reinforced fear propaganda.

I watch what's left of the Bernie Sanders movement dissipate into memory as I have been walking my small hobby farm in the early morning silence, wondering what will come next of the fever working people had, so transfixed on a righteous goal a few years earlier. Watching a Democratic Party I cannot recognize clog the government tuned airwaves, beaming out comfortable tunes of servitude to the masses, when I know rebellion to be the call of the moment to raise a voice for the voiceless.

The vivid dreams continue about the possibilities of building a robust economy and exciting future in Ohio. A dream that becomes more vivid still now that we are moving to onshore more productive capacity to our own lands. Though I want to help build, I am troubled that severe corruption, and that my own people's apathy will continue to be used against them by so-called conservative men that act instead like authoritarian children.

It is highly corrosive to the body politic, to our fellow citizens, and to our shared collective future to watch men of significant power wield it so unjustly. They know the national Democratic Party has abandoned our people in the Midwest, and the leaders within our state do little to inspire the imagination. It is the same thing in Missouri. It is the same thing in Indiana. It is the same thing in West Virginia. It is the same thing in Iowa, where their leaders appear brazen enough to throw children into the slaughterhouse, while defunding their libraries.

Ohio sent a very particular message last election in 2022 that we will not put up with money raining down so desperately, while rich coastal elites have little sense of decency to move the abandoned hearts of our people. A party and leadership class that can hardly be bothered to look my people in the eye in a time of need after a train derailment, whether too feeble or disinterested. I cannot ask my people to vote for this party with this leadership. I cannot ask them to vote for the other. So, I am asking for help building something new.

I write with my hands trembling, not in anger or fear, but with excitement knowing that if I can excite even one citizen to their own significant power I will have succeeded in mission. Well, to be truthful, a little fear. I am ready to risk it all so workers might reimagine their own power. Lordy, I'm sure once all the three letter agencies hear about some poor citizen from Ohio running for president, they're going to book it from the Kennedy estates right over! Still, I write before the family and small farm awake. Before the bosses and the meetings and emails flood in. My heart calls me to bear witness. Here is a dream of the future.

In the year 2035 Ohio has become a new beacon for competitive American manufacturing. The seemingly endless dilapidated buildings and factories that spilled over our landscape began to be replaced by state-of-the-art manufacturing hubs, providing work and family services over sprawling campuses with beautiful integrated parks and ponds. Workers finally began to demand better investment in their direct communities and lives after the COVID 19 pandemic, forcing leaders to scramble for plans that improved working standards and wages, acting as a reinforcement fearing to lose them altogether.

A renewed focus on healthy families allows for easy to access to medical and childcare. Ohio became a leader in medical billing and transparency as the citizens finally threw up their hands and demanded every major service a hospital provides be available in a handy dandy brochure with top emergency procedures plastered to the wall for the folks that might be in a little more of a hurry.

New childcare cooperatives have popped up that allow for more direct profit-sharing opportunities, increasing wages, and positive work environments, all while raising the standards of care for our children the country over. These cooperatives are made to be better integrated into school systems, particularly high schools, allowing for early experience with children, all while keeping capital local and increasing the workforce.

As a battle-hardened people with a population sucked dry due to poor governance, we slowly began to rebuild, removing decaying eyesores from our land where the twentieth century victims of NAFTA and globalism were finally laid to rest. Now, strong supply chain advantages out of Dayton are magnified as its newly integrated into a full service international logistic and information hub, focused on real time handling information used by both man and robot working in harmony to deliver the hungry American consumer experience closer to home.

Using Dayton's six-hour proximity to more than half the population, newly integrated material and additive manufacturing chains sprinkle our communities throughout the buckeye state with much needed economic activity. A renewed effort to clean up the Ohio river has bears fruit as our cross-river brethren in Kentucky and West Virginia join in novel river activities to create new pockets of economic activity. All the extractors have been banished from our public lands and parks, ensuring a wondrous environment for generations to come for working class families.

The minds of our people become a self-generating hive communicating about new opportunities to serve and make products with localism as a primary driver and focus. This is backed with abundant and cheap energy and topped off with mixed with state-of-the-art additive manufacturing capabilities.

Ohio surges forward from the pack, innovating into the creation of the best damn welding and building robots in the Midwest, built out of Cleveland and Miamisburg respectively. This allows our brothers and sisters to build AirStream trailers with a newfound efficiency at their headquarters out in Jackson Center. Once again, regular citizens can afford to buy them brand new! Marietta and Parkersburg join in with new hospitality opportunities on the river, and emerging material markets in hemp and bamboo that can be easily grown and processed locally for a more direct manufacturing pipeline able to predict confluences of productive capacity that can compete with cheap labor globally.

This only continues to build out on a strong agricultural backbone with high end, integrated systems providing them real time information about their crops to better let farmers handle austere weather conditions and changes to soil chemistry. Cover cropping continues to be integrated helping with erosion and providing the data needed for a robust national movement when data reveals significant crop yield improvements. This combined with integrated vertical farming provide unique abilities to keep interesting vegetables and locally owned and operated food markets for foods that would otherwise be too expensive to import.

Columbus continues to explode in growth brought by a new legion of technologists helping to build out world class digital business infrastructures, while an abundance of amenities continues rocketing out, just a two-hour trip from most places in the state. This also allows for new technologies in biomedical and AI to flourish with local colleges with focused pipelines in STEM directly translated into jobs in the local communities bolstering American competitive advantage in key fields of computing and biological sciences.

On the education front, 'Future School' & 'Ready@18', have reshaped the way Ohioans think of school integrating more physical learning, direct adult engagement, and students teaching students into a focused program. The eradication of charter schools was celebrated the state over, allowing the citizens to collective to pull back every single damn penny attempted to be removed from our local communities.

With a renewed purpose and vision, most new jobs created in the marketplace and available in the area all fall under the 'Ready@18' framework ensuring immediate capabilities for the youth to begin to contribute and achieve financial independence immediately after high school. As soon as a critical employer arrives, skill sets will be validated or integrated into new programs focused on heavily used skills in the area and always looking forward.

A robust natural gas backbone across the country is continued to be built with the shared understanding that it is a bridge fuel and will replace what was left of coal factories. This provides electricity for many allowing citizens to attack the carbon emission component and maintain cheap and abundant energy the country over.

However, all over the nation, batteries and nuclear energy continue to rule the roost for new capital investment as a unified people moved to a dedicated purpose finally found the ability to gain energy independence. Aptly named, 'fission vision', a national project nearly eliminated the carbon footprint the country over. With battery technology from the Mahoning valley down through an electrified Honda plant, additive manufacturing of primarily battery-based products in Ohio continues to find new and innovative products to mostly sell to rich Californians forced into the battery revolution kicking and screaming!

Nuclear fission energy has found its way into new technologies across the planet after the battery revolution found itself unable to keep up with the ravenous demand of both the American and global consumer. With both significant human and capital costs proving too much for a steep jump without significant technological advances, additional new opportunities would lead to nuclear power plants being built in brand new, gargantuan factories designed to build full reactor plants on an assembly line, a new crown jewel of new mass production and energy independence.

A hesitant populous with rigorous outreach and complete transparency redeveloped a partnership allowing for a new nuclear fission age. Able to use the bridge fuel of natural gas and a concerted effort from a newly unified climate movement, the United States was able to double its nuclear capacity in just ten years! Worries about the exorbitant prices of building, maintaining, and operating nuclear power plants were put to rest as the country came together to develop streamlined building and compliance standards pushing the price to build and maintain reactors to new lows. New novel applications in trucking and shipping continue to push fission technology to smaller footprints allowing for new power to compliment the growing battery arsenal.

This focused journey and newly harnessed energy and purpose leads to a cohesive strategy used to set Ohio apart from other manufacturers the world over: net zero manufacturing. Utilizing local nuclear energy for primary purposes, battery backups, and natural gas as a short stop emergency fuel should the others fail or need maintenance, we can build the future while leading the globe forward toward a more sustainable path.

With this economic activity and newfound stability within our communities, the icy strains between neighbors and institutions begin to thaw. Excitement and positivity run amok about the shared future pushing past the wounds of an anger, long misplaced. Once again, the nation looks to the 'heart of it all' for leadership into the next chapter of the unknown. I hope we will write it together.