Millions will march Saturday against tyranny. They’ll return home Sunday. And Monday morning, the kleptocrats will still be looting.
Patrick Lovell understands the gap between protest and power. The filmmaker spent years documenting how 2008’s financial crisis was engineered theft—$71 trillion in backdoor bailouts flowing to the architects of fraud while American families lost everything. Zero bankers imprisoned. The con never ended; it gave us Donald Trump.
Now Lovell has assembled what he calls the New Untouchables: former federal prosecutors and regulators who actually put elite criminals behind bars. These aren’t theorists—they secured 7,000 convictions during the savings and loan crisis with a fraction of the resources available today. They know how to dismantle corruption because they’ve done it.
Their proposal, the Clean New Deal, does something movements rarely achieve: it names the disease. Not partisanship. Not ideology. Corruption.
Autocrats don’t emerge from nowhere. They grow out of institutional rot. Trump’s shell companies, Wall Street’s derivatives casino, the Supreme Court’s dark money pipeline—the common thread isn’t left versus right. It’s impunity. The law stopped applying upward. Justice became a commodity for purchase. Democracy became a brand name on an empty system.
Anti-corruption must become America’s organizing principle because it’s the one issue that transcends tribe. If corruption remains the operating system, every other reform fails. You can’t rebuild healthcare when insurance lobbyists write legislation. You can’t address climate change when fossil fuel executives control energy policy. You can’t restore voting rights when dark money owns state legislatures.
The Clean New Deal targets corruption’s infrastructure. Restore Glass-Steagall’s separation of commercial and investment banking—repealed in 1999 by the same Phil Gramm who mentored Russell Vought. For seventy years, that law prevented banks from gambling with depositor money. Its death opened the path to 2008’s collapse and every pump-and-dump scheme since.
Overturn Citizens United. Dark money isn’t free speech—it’s legalized bribery that poisons every democratic institution. When corruption becomes legal, even good people get compromised.
End qualified immunity, judicial immunity, presidential immunity. These legal fictions place power above accountability. Pack the Supreme Court to break the Roberts Court stranglehold. Ban congressional insider trading. Each reform answers a simple question: who is above the law?
Working with the Government Accountability Project, Lovell has access to over 2,000 federal whistleblowers—Justice Department attorneys, FBI investigators, agency professionals who watched the system rot from within. The strategy bypasses corrupted federal institutions entirely: use state legislatures and their subpoena power to create evidentiary records that federal corruption can’t suppress.
Some proposals face obstacles. A constitutional convention in this climate invites chaos. But the framework succeeds by diagnosing what decades of political combat obscured: American democracy is drowning in legalized theft masquerading as capitalism.
The movement needs both energy and architecture. Saturday provides the former—millions demonstrating that resistance exists. What comes Monday requires the latter: professionals who know how to investigate financial crime, prosecute RICO enterprises, and rebuild regulatory systems that actually regulate.
Corruption is democracy’s climate change. It warms the soil until nothing honest can grow. Forty years of organized looting—from Iran-Contra’s cocaine-funded operations through 2008’s bailout heist to Trump’s crypto billions—didn’t happen by accident. It was engineered by people who understood systems and how to manipulate them.
Reversing that requires equivalent sophistication applied toward democracy instead of its destruction. The New Untouchables represent institutional memory. They know what criminal enterprises look like at scale and how to dismantle them. Combined with thousands of whistleblowers holding evidence, they form the skeleton of an accountability system operating outside captured federal institutions.
The Clean New Deal offers something movements rarely provide: professionals who know how to fly the plane. Right now, drunks are in the cockpit and the descent is steep. Marching proves resistance exists. Replacing the pilots with people who know how to land safely requires technical competence married to moral force.
No Kings will be a show of numbers. The Clean New Deal is a show of structure. One is energy; the other is direction. Together they could become what America needs—not another burst of outrage, but a campaign for clean power in the truest sense.
“No Kings. No Thieves. No Tyrants” because you can’t save democracy while tolerating the constant theft of the money it its coffers.
The Clean New Deal framework is available at thecleannewdeal.org. The Con documentary series streams free at thecon.tv.
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