Dear Representative Ocasio-Cortez,

You have spent your career saying the economy should work for the people who actually work in it. I spent nine years building one that does.

Liana Banyan is a cooperative commerce platform — three commercial websites with a constitutionally locked Cost+20% margin that sustainably funds sixteen charitable initiatives across food security, healthcare access, education, financial inclusion, civic engagement, and crisis response. Creators keep 83.3% of every transaction. Workers own the platform. Membership costs five dollars a year. No venture capital. No shareholders extracting value. No exit strategy — because the point is not to sell it, it is to sustain it.

I am not writing to ask for money. I am not writing to ask for an endorsement. I am writing because Initiative #15 — Power to the People, our Political Expedition — needs a leader who understands that civic participation and economic participation are the same fight, and you have been making that argument louder and more effectively than anyone in American public life.

WHAT POWER TO THE PEOPLE IS

The Political Expedition is not a PAC. It is not partisan infrastructure dressed up in cooperative language. It is civic engagement built on a cooperative backbone — voter education, community organizing, and political participation tools funded by the same margin that funds our food security and healthcare initiatives. The goal is not to tell people how to vote. The goal is to make participation so accessible and so well-supported that not participating becomes the harder choice.

When I was a teenager, I won second place in a VFW essay contest writing about democracy using Mortimer Adler’s Six Great Ideas. The title was “Democracy: The Vanguard of Freedom.” I have been thinking about civic structure ever since — through enlisted Army Infantry service at sixteen, through Officer Candidate School, through two decades of building systems, through raising eight children in a country where the tools of participation keep getting harder to reach for the people who need them most.

This initiative exists because democracy is a muscle. Use it or lose it. And too many people have been told their arm does not count.

WHY YOU

You bartended. You organized. You ran. You won. And then you used the platform not to accumulate power but to demonstrate that ordinary people can wield it. That story matters — not because it is unique to you, but because the cooperative is designed to make it ordinary.

Every member of Liana Banyan can start a business for five dollars. Every worker earns governance rights through contribution. Every initiative is led by a council that elects its own representative to the Board of Directors. The structure you have been arguing for in legislation, we encoded into an operating agreement.

I call myself a Patriotic Interdependentalist. Not left. Not right. Forward together. Interdependence is not collectivism — it preserves individual agency while recognizing that none of us built anything alone. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you.” That is scripture, and it is also economics.

Your audience needs to see that this is not charity. It is structure. It is not a handout. It is a hand in — everyone contributing, everyone benefiting, everyone governing.

THE OFFER

I am offering you the Door-Opening Crown for Power to the People — the First Seat on the Political Expedition Council. The Crown holder leads the initiative, sets standards for civic engagement programming, breaks ties, and holds a seat on the Steering Committee that governs all sixteen initiatives. As the council grows, its members elect their own Board representative. In the early days, that representative would likely be you.

This is not a figurehead position. The council does real work: voter education tools, community organizing frameworks, civic participation infrastructure — all funded sustainably by cooperative commerce, not by donation cycles that dry up after election years.

One Crown. One Offer. No one else is receiving this letter for this role.

If you are not interested, I would be grateful for a referral — someone in civic engagement who understands that participation infrastructure matters more than any single campaign.

There is a walkthrough at LianaBanyan.com/RedCarpet. No scheduling, no pitch deck, no salesman.

Help each other help ourselves.

As You Wish.

With shared purpose,

Jonathan Jones Founder & General Manager, Liana Banyan Corporation