We Can Right the Wrongs of the Past with New Globalism

And Onshore Jobs and Globalize Investments into an American Future

For decades, multinational corporations have shipped American manufacturing overseas, hollowing out once-thriving industrial towns. This trend of outsourcing labor is the main reason why xenophobic animosity, anti-immigrant sentiments, and protectionist instincts are commonplace in our society today.

In the decades since, the backlash has taken shape in the form of Trumpist populism. And let's be honest — it's okay to be angry. It's okay to grieve the loss of good-paying jobs, thriving communities, and the dignity that came with them. Much of that pain was caused by corporate C-suite executives chasing cheap labor in countries like China, which is, to this day, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, by far.

But here's the hard truth: we can't un-globalize the economy. We can't go back in time. Tariffs and trade wars haven't worked — they've only caused further damage by creating huge distortions in the economy and angering our allies around the world.

But what if we could use globalization to our benefit instead of to our detriment?

The Great Societal Bond Fund

The Great Societal Bond Fund is a policy idea that transforms public investment into a global opportunity. The U.S. government already issues countless loans to serve the public good: small business loans, student loans, infrastructure financing, farm loans, and more. So the proposal is to aggregate the loans into a new kind of high-yield bond fund — one that anyone in the world can invest in.

Investors around the world already trade U.S. Treasury and municipal bonds. So this would be just another American bond fund, but with a twist — the bonds cannot be sold directly. The brokerages would keep track of the cost basis of the investments, and over a period of time, the principal of the investments would be liquidated back into the investor's settlement fund, plus interest. We could have short-term, intermediate-term, and long-term options. In this way, it's a high-yield bond fund that acts like a loan, so as to preserve our economic resilience and ensure long-term, stable funding for the American people. It's more than just an investment that boasts an interest rate higher than the best CDs on the market. It's a vote of confidence — a way to finally put global capital to work rebuilding American prosperity, all while improving the U.S. government's declining credit rating.

The Great Societal Bond Fund is a comprehensive civic investment vehicle — a diversified blend of high-yield public-interest bonds that support everything from climate infrastructure and biotech research to domestic manufacturing, rural broadband, and small business lending.

Different investors have different priorities. Whether those priorities lean toward climate resilience, national security, rural revitalization, public health, education, or small business growth, the fund includes bonds that align with a range of values. Investors can choose to hold the full diversified fund or allocate specifically to the categories they believe in most. On the whole, this makes the Great Societal Bond Fund a unified platform for investors — domestic or global — to contribute to the public good, earn stable returns, and strengthen the American economy from across the political spectrum.

The Bond Portfolio

A Diversified Platform for Public-Interest Investing

The Great Societal Bond Fund aggregates government-backed loans across seven categories, each addressing a distinct public-interest domain. Together, they form a diversified portfolio that generates sustainable returns while rebuilding American infrastructure, industry, and institutions.

• Infrastructure Bonds - Loans to states and municipalities to fund large-scale hard infrastructure projects like highways, tunnels, bridges, and airport terminals. Repaid through toll revenue, user fees, and local infrastructure levies.
• Energy Infrastructure Bonds - Loans to local governments, public utilities, and housing authorities to finance energy-efficiency retrofits, community solar installations, grid modernization, and electrification projects. Repaid through energy cost savings and infrastructure usage fees.
• Health Infrastructure Bonds - Loans to nonprofit hospitals, rural health centers, and state Medicaid programs to expand facilities, upgrade equipment, and improve access. Repaid through public health reimbursements and operational surpluses.
• Education & Innovation Bonds - Student loans (especially income-share or capped-repayment loans), research grants converted into long-term financing, and R&D investment into climate, biotech, and advanced manufacturing startups. Repaid via graduate income or licensing revenue.
• Rural Development Bonds - Loans to farmers and rural cooperatives for equipment upgrades, crop storage, irrigation, and broadband deployment. Repaid through agriculture revenue and federal rural development assistance.
• Small Business Bonds - Loans to under-capitalized but high-potential small businesses — especially domestic manufacturers in regions hit hard by offshoring, businesses in urban cores, minority-owned enterprises, and clean-tech manufacturers. Repaid through business revenue with government loan guarantees.
• Defense & Security Bonds - Loans to the Department of Defense and defense contractors for domestic production of military equipment, cybersecurity upgrades, and veteran facilities. Repaid via federal procurement budgets over time.

The Green Square Deal

A Proposal to Restore the Industrial Midwest to its Former Glory

It's no coincidence that China is the number one producer of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, by far. It's because the CEOs of large corporations shipped manufacturing to China. (The jobs could have been shipped anywhere in the world, but China happened to have the cheapest labor at the time.) But we can revitalize industrial America with a large domestic green infrastructure project.

This policy would honor the legacy of President Theodore Roosevelt, the Bull Moose Progressive Republican who took on the corrupted corporate Republican Party machine and fought for a Square Deal in the early 1900's — that is, a deal that is fair and square for the people, not the corporate monopolies.

As we've seen with the tariffs, we can't un-globalize the economy. But we can channel that anger to rebuild our society instead of engaging in trade wars with our allies around the world. It is possible to stand up for the large swaths of Americans who are economically disadvantaged due to recent macroeconomic trends — the globalization of the economy — in addition to those who were historically oppressed for surface-level identitarian reasons.