“I’m going to Saudi Arabia. I made a deal with Saudi Arabia. I’d usually go to the U.K. first. Last time I went to Saudi Arabia they put up $450 billion. I said well, this time they’ve gotten richer, we’ve all gotten older so I said I’ll go if you pay $1 trillion to American companies, meaning the purchase over a four-year period of $ 1 trillion and they’ve agreed to do that. So, I’m going to be going there. I have a great relationship with them, and they’ve been very nice but they’re going to be spending a lot of money to American companies for buying military equipment and a lot of other things.” – President Donald Trump, 7th March 2025.

What is the true importance of the US-Saudi relationship in the global economy? It’s based on the two things that make the economy go round – money and oil.

The United States–Saudi “petrodollar” arrangement has underpinned American economic and military power for nearly five decades. In essence, oil exports from Saudi Arabia (and later OPEC broadly) have been priced in U.S. dollars since the 1974, ensuring a constant global demand for the dollar and U.S. Treasury assets. This monetary system forms the hidden backbone of a web of consequences – from U.S. imperialism and geopolitical maneuvering to environmental degradation and extreme wealth accumulation. Today, roughly 80% of global oil transactions are still conducted in USD, illustrating the petrodollar system’s enduring influence. Below, we analyze the historical origins of the petrodollar, explain how this monetary system became a root cause linking finance to geopolitics and ecological crisis, and discuss proposed alternatives like Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) that could break the cycle.

Background

In the aftermath of World War II, the Bretton Woods system (1944) established the U.S. dollar as the world’s anchor currency, pegged to gold, which cemented U.S. economic dominance. However, by 1971 the U.S. faced mounting trade deficits and dwindling gold reserves, as countries sought to trade USD for gold they didn’t have, US President Nixon ended dollar convertibility to gold – a move that threatened the dollar’s supremacy. The solution emerged via oil: in 1974, one year after the oil crisis, Washington and Riyadh struck a pivotal deal (kept secret until 2016) that ensured Saudi oil would be priced exclusively in dollars. In return, the U.S. provided military protection and lucrative arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and Saudi leaders would recycle their oil revenues into U.S. Treasuries and American investments. This U.S.–Saudi arrangement laid the foundation of the petrodollar system, firmly tying the world’s most traded commodity (oil) to the American currency.

The timing was crucial. The 1973 oil embargo had quadrupled oil prices from about $3 to $12 a barrel, sparking a global energy crisis. The U.S. sought to tame this “oil weapon” by binding oil exports to the dollar – thereby turning petrodollars into a pillar of U.S. financial might. By the late 1970s, most OPEC producers followed suit in trading oil for USD, and surplus petrodollars were funnelled into Western banks and U.S. debt. This recycling of oil revenues back into American markets propped up U.S. budget deficits and helped finance Cold War expenditures. In effect, oil-exporting nations accepted dollars (often investing them in the US) in exchange for security guarantees and access to American goods and technology. The long-term implications were profound: the dollar became the default currency for global oil trade, bolstering its reserve currency status and enabling the U.S. to maintain economic and military pre-eminence “almost as a matter of course”. This petrodollar order has remained largely intact through the present, anchoring U.S. dominance in the world economy.

2. The Monetary System as the Root Cause

The petrodollar system entrenched the U.S. dollar’s global monetary hegemony, allowing the United States to exert outsized influence without the typical constraints faced by other nations. Because countries worldwide need dollars to buy oil, they hold vast USD reserves and invest in U.S. assets (like Treasury bonds), which funds U.S. deficits and keeps American interest rates lower than they otherwise would be. In practical terms, this means the U.S. can run the printing presses – or more accurately, expand money supply – to finance government spending (military, infrastructure, etc.) without triggering hyperinflation, as the excess dollars are absorbed abroad to settle trade and reserve needs. This unique privilege, often dubbed “exorbitant privilege,” roots many subsequent geopolitical and economic dynamics.

More broadly, the modern money creation process itself is a key structural driver. In most advanced economies, money is created predominantly by private banks issuing loans, not by governments minting cash. About 97% of money in circulation is created by commercial banks when they extend credit (e.g. granting loans), whereas only ~3% is physical cash from central banks. Debt-based money comes with a built-in growth imperative: banks lend money into existence with an obligation to be repaid with interest, meaning total debt continually exceeds the money available to repay it. New loans must constantly be created so borrowers can obtain the funds needed to pay interest on yesterday’s loans. If this expansion falters, the result is a contraction – loan defaults, bankruptcies, and recession – since under our interest-bearing system “an expanding amount of loans are needed to keep the system running smoothly” and avoid a cascading collapse.

Jem Bendell , author of Breaking Together, refers to this phenomenon as the “Monetary Growth Imperative,” wherein the economy “must expand whether society wishes it to or not” just to service the debt overhead. In other words, continual GDP growth is structurally required to sustain the monetary system.

This dynamic has fostered a financialized economy where speculation often outranks production. With easy credit and abundant petrodollars sloshing through global markets, capital tends to chase quick returns via financial instruments rather than long-term productive investment. Private banks, seeking secure profits, create money disproportionately for assets like real estate and stocks (fuelling price bubbles) instead of lending to manufacturing or local businesses. As a result, we see huge asset bubbles that benefit the mega-rich but relatively underfunded productive sectors. The monetary system’s incentives thus tilt toward Wall Street over Main Street – leveraging debt to amplify wealth for those at the top. Additionally, the constant need to avoid contraction pressures governments to prioritize policies that stimulate growth (often measured as rising GDP) above all else, sometimes at the expense of social or environmental considerations. In sum, the petrodollar-reinforced debt-money system creates self-perpetuating cycles: the U.S. can flood the world with dollars to sustain its dominance, and globally the pursuit of dollar profits drives speculative finance and a growth-at-all-costs mentality. This underlies many downstream effects from military interventionism to ecological overshoot.

3. Imperialism and Geopolitics

Control over the international monetary system, anchored by the petrodollar, has directly enabled U.S. imperial reach and the expansion of its military–industrial complex. Since foreign governments must hold dollars, they effectively help finance U.S. deficit spending – including the Pentagon’s budget – by purchasing U.S. treasuries. This recycling of petrodollars allowed America to run “guns and butter” policies (funding warfare and domestic programs simultaneously) without bankrupting itself. Petrodollar inflows have explicitly financed U.S. weapons exports and military aid, especially in the Middle East. For instance, petrodollar-rich Gulf states like Saudi Arabia have spent hundreds of billions on American arms over the years, funnelling their oil proceeds back into U.S. defence contractors. This symbiosis solidified a regional security architecture with the U.S. as the guarantor – protecting friendly oil monarchies in exchange for their loyalty to the dollar system.

The U.S. has likewise used its monetary and military might to suppress challenges to this order. During the Cold War, pan-Arabist and socialist-leaning movements in the Middle East – which aimed to unite Arab states or pursue independent economic policies – were seen as threats to U.S. “vital economic interests” (i.e. access to oil on U.S. terms. The Eisenhower Doctrine (1957) explicitly targeted Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and other Arab nationalists, seeking to fracture Arab unity and keep pro-Western regimes in power. This strategy “sowed divisions within Arab ranks, triggering a fierce Arab Cold War” and undermined any concerted effort by oil-producing nations to chart an autonomous course. Later, when individual leaders attempted to bypass the petrodollar system, they often met harsh reprisals. Notably, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein switched to selling oil in euros in 2000, and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi proposed a gold-backed African currency – moves that preceded U.S.-led military interventions that removed them from power, summed up in the infamous video of Hillary Clinton reacting to Gaddafi’s killing  “We came, we saw, he died”. While many factors were at play in those conflicts, the message was clear: the U.S. would not tolerate challenges to dollar dominance in oil markets.

U.S. alliances in the region further reflect petrodollar geopolitics. Israel’s role as a key American ally (and military foothold) in the Middle East has been heavily financed by U.S. dollars – the U.S. currently has provided Israel with over $250bn since 1959, with unprecedented military-aid being sent to Israel since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, in excess of more than $20bn. This support, partly enabled by America’s fiscal freedom under the petrodollar system, ensures Israel’s qualitative military edge and U.S. influence over the region’s political trajectory. Conversely, oil-rich countries that resist U.S. hegemony (Iran, Venezuela) have been isolated via sanctions that leverage the dollar’s centrality in global finance. More recently, the U.S. has been able to commit extraordinary sums to distant conflicts – for example, Congress approved $175 billion+ in aid to Ukraine since 2022 – with relatively little immediate economic fallout at home. This level of expenditure (unthinkable for most countries) is buoyed by the dollar’s reserve status and the Federal Reserve’s capacity to create money that the world will absorb. In short, the petrodollar-backed monetary order acts as a force multiplier for U.S. imperial strategy: it finances a global network of hundreds of overseas bases and proxy engagements, and it gives Washington a powerful economic weapon (control of dollar-based transactions) to reward allies and punish adversaries. The result is a geopolitical landscape where U.S. military supremacy and currency supremacy reinforce each other, often at the expense of smaller nations’ sovereignty.

In fact, it is the debt-based monetary system that has trapped many developing nations in a cycle of borrowing and export dependency, often enforced by international financial institutions and trade agreements. Under the current system, countries in the Global South are pressured to extract and export commodities (oil, minerals, cash crops) to earn the foreign currency needed to service debts and pay for imports – effectively subsidizing affluent lifestyles elsewhere at the cost of local ecosystems. Indeed, our “debt-based monetary system” creates a built-in incentive for “world export warfare”, where nations must compete for export markets to try to obtain debt-free income. This wealth transfer occurs through different mechanisms, primarily debt and price differentials in international trade resulting in unequal exchange, which, according to a 2022 paper from Hickel et al, between 1990-2015 alone, resulted in a wealth drain from the South totaling $242 trillion, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP.

4. Environmental and Economic Consequences

This debt-fuelled, growth-obsessed petrodollar system has also driven environmental destruction and locked in a fossil-fuel-dependent global economy. The arrangement implicitly incentivizes high oil consumption: oil exporting nations earn dollars and invest in growth, while oil-importing countries need growth to afford expanding energy imports. Consequently, the world’s energy and economic structures have been slow to change. As of 2022, about 80% of global primary energy still comes from fossil fuels, a statistic tied to the petrodollar era’s legacy. There is a well-documented 1:1 coupling between global GDP and global energy use, particularly fossil fuel use . In effect, economic growth has meant burning more oil, gas, and coal, leading to rising carbon emissions. Under the current system, if we “don’t keep the global economy growing by at least 3% per year, it plunges into crisis,” doubling the economy’s size every ~20 years. This exponential growth mandate collides with the reality of a finite planet. It translates into ever-expanding extraction of natural resources and ever-expanding waste (greenhouse gases, pollution), because efficiency improvements alone have not stopped total resource use from climbing, due to Jevon’s paradox and the growth-paradigm.

Critically, the monetary growth imperative undermines efforts to transition to sustainability. As Bendell observes, our debt-based monetary system “does not allow a steady-state economy” – it literally “prevents effective climate change mitigation…without monetary reform” Governments are pressured to maximize short-term GDP (to service debts and maintain employment), often prioritizing elite accumulation through inflating asset prices, destructive economic expansion and consumerism over conservation. The petrodollar system reinforces this by promoting fossil-fuelled development; countries that grow faster (with high energy use) accumulate more dollars, while those that try to curb fossil fuels risk economic stagnation under current metrics. Meanwhile, oil-rich states have had little incentive to diversify away from hydrocarbons as long as oil revenue secures their geopolitical standing. The result is a vicious cycle: debt drives growth, growth drives fossil fuel combustion, and fossil fuels exacerbate climate change and ecological harm. As one commentator put it, “American empire is inextricably linked with fossil fuels, and to mitigate climate change, it must come to an end”. In other words, genuine environmental solutions require confronting the political-economic system that maintains fossil dominance.

The petrodollar link also explains the slow global response to climate change. U.S. policymakers (and other major oil stakeholders) have often been reluctant to fully embrace decarbonization, not only due to oil industry lobbying but because a shift away from oil threatens the basis of the dollar-centric order. A world less dependent on oil could erode the automatic demand for USD, undermining U.S. financial power. Indeed, analysts note that if renewable energy and electrification significantly reduce oil trade in the coming decades, it “could eventually lead to a reduction in petrodollar flows” and weaken the dollar’s global standing. Thus the climate crisis and the petrodollar system are intertwined challenges. The very same debt-growth engine that boosted GDP (and elite wealth) in the 20th century is now pushing the planet toward ecological breakdown, by making perpetual expansion the condition for economic stability. Breaking this cycle is essential not only for environmental reasons but to free economies from what Jason Hickel calls “the logic of endless growth” that defies planetary limits.

5. Alternative Solutions and MMT

Addressing these deeply interlinked issues requires rethinking the monetary system itself. A range of economists and scholars have proposed solutions to remove the growth imperative and make finance serve people and planet rather than the elite few. One approach is to shift from privately controlled, debt-based money creation to democratically managed money that can be directed toward public purposes. Instead of relying on commercial banks to create money (and channel it into speculation or property bubbles), the state could create and spend new money directly into the real economy, funding useful projects like renewable energy, public infrastructure, healthcare, and education. Such a system of sovereign money (sometimes called “green quantitative easing” or public banking) would inject liquidity where it’s needed for social and environmental goals, rather than inflating huge asset bubbles that only benefit the mega-rich. The money supply could grow or contract in a controlled way to meet societal needs, without the destructive necessity of ever-increasing debt. Notably, the proposal is not for the government to print limitless cash, but to replace interest-bearing bank loans with debt-free public spending as the primary way new money enters circulation. This idea harkens back to thinkers like Samir Amin, who advocated “delinking” developing economies from the dictates of Western finance in order to pursue self-determined development. By reclaiming monetary sovereignty – whether through nationalizing credit creation or regional alternatives to the dollar system – countries could invest in long-term prosperity and sustainability without being trapped by dollar-denominated debt and growth-at-any-cost policies.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) offers another lens for solutions, especially for advanced economies like the U.S. and those with their own currencies. MMT economists (e.g. Stephanie Kelton , Fadhel Kaboub فاضل قابوب ) argue that a sovereign government cannot “run out of money” in its own fiat currency the way a household or business can. As Kelton puts it, for a country that issues its own currency, there is never a danger of debt spiralling out of control, because it can always create money to service its obligations. The real limits are not financial but resource-based – inflation will only arise if government spending pushes total demand beyond the economy’s productive capacity (labour, materials, technology). This perspective suggests that scarce funding is not the barrier to tackling issues like poverty, infrastructure, or climate change; what’s needed is political will and careful management of real resources. For example, using an MMT framework, the U.S. or any currency issuing country could finance a Green New Deal – mass investments in clean energy, transit, and green jobs – by issuing currency, without needing to tax or borrow first, as long as idle resources (unemployed labour, etc.) are put to work. Far from causing runaway inflation, such spending would increase productive output and sustainability, and any inflationary pressure can be managed via taxation or other tools. Importantly, MMT also highlights that monetarily sovereign governments don’t need petrodollar recycling or foreign loans to fund themselves; their spending is constrained by what’s available to buy in their own currency, not by foreign exchange. This undercuts the rationale for maintaining structures like the petrodollar – if the U.S. can afford to invest in renewable energy and social programs without Saudi petrodollar recycling, it might reduce the strategic obsession with oil-based dollar supremacy.

Leading voices have emerged to champion these ideas. Economist Fadhel Kaboub, for instance, emphasizes that developing nations can use MMT principles to achieve monetary sovereignty and resilience, rather than depending on IMF loans or dollar reserves. He points to strategies such as building domestic food and energy systems to reduce import dependence and denominating debts in local currency, so that Global South countries can escape the trap of dollar-denominated debt that forces austerity. Jason Hickel, from a “degrowth” and global justice perspective, likewise calls for moving beyond GDP growth as the measure of success and financing a fair economic transformation (especially in the Global South) through public-led investment and technology transfer. Dr. Steve Keen and David Graeber have both called for modern debt-jubilees, to liberate ourselves from this unpayable debt cycle that has dictated and limited human societies for millennia. Their work suggests cancelling odious debts, taxing or expropriating the excess wealth of elites, and redirecting resources toward climate mitigation, adaptation, and human wellbeing – all of which would be easier under a redesigned monetary regime that isn’t predicated on private profit. Even scholars of collapse like Jem Bendell argue that monetary reform is central to any hope of mitigating climate catastrophe; as he bluntly states, without altering how money is created and allocated, societies “will be prevented from effective climate change mitigation” and from adapting to coming disruptions. In summary, these alternative paradigms (sovereign money, MMT, degrowth) converge on a key point: freeing the economy from the tyranny of the petrodollar and debt-driven growth would enable humanity to prioritize ecological stability and equitable development. By reclaiming the monetary commons for public good, we could break the cycle of imperial warfare, environmental exploitation, and elite enrichment that the current system produces.

Conclusion

The U.S.–Saudi petrodollar deal of the 1970s created a self-reinforcing cycle that has shaped global politics, economics, and the environment in far-reaching ways. It tethered the world’s monetary order to fossil fuels and U.S. military might, allowing American elites to amass wealth and power under the guise of “maintaining liquidity” for global trade. The consequences – imperial interventions, entrenched petro-states, financial crises, and climate change – are not isolated problems but different facets of a singular system. Understanding the monetary root cause clarifies why efforts to address issues like endless wars or carbon emissions often hit a wall: the prevailing system is built to expand itself, not to prioritize peace or planetary limits. However, as we have seen, this system is not immutable. History is now at an inflection point where the petrodollar’s dominance is being quietly challenged. China, Russia, and other nations are experimenting with oil trade in other currencies, and U.S. financial sanctions on rivals have spurred talk of de-dollarization. At the same time, the imperative of climate action is pushing the world toward renewable energy, which in the long run will weaken the oil-dollar nexus. These trends suggest that the petrodollar system’s grip may loosen in the coming years.

Yet simply replacing the U.S. dollar with another currency for oil trade would not automatically dissolve the deeper problems – it might just shift the locus of power. The more fundamental change advocated by the thinkers cited above is to redesign how money works and what it serves. By moving to a post-petrodollar era of cooperative monetary policy, debt-free public investment, and truly sustainable economics, it becomes possible to address the interconnected crises at their source. That means breaking the feedback loop of oil, dollars, and weapons, and instead using monetary tools to foster global justice and ecological balance. In conclusion, the petrodollar deal was not just a quirky historical pact – it has been the linchpin of an entire world-system of U.S. hegemony, elite enrichment, and fossil-fuelled growth that turbocharged the ‘great acceleration’ that has pushed the global economy far outside what our planet can sustainably support. Recognizing that the monetary system lies at the root of imperialism and environmental breakdown is the first step toward imagining new systems that prioritize peace, shared prosperity, and a liveable planet. The challenges are immense, but so are the possibilities if money creation and resource allocation are reclaimed for the common good. The downfall of the petrodollar need not be a crisis; it could be an opportunity to chart a different course for both the global economy and Earth’s future.

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Among the Republican voters experiencing buyer’s remorse are more than a few military veterans who chose Trump over Harris by a margin of 65 to 34%, according to some exit polls.

Their shock and dismay surfaced in DC this month during the legislative conference of the reliably conservative and hawkish Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), which has 1.4 million members.

In the run-up to that annual event, VFW national commander Al Lipphardt, urged his members to “march forth” and “engage with lawmakers” to “stop the bleeding” at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

Thanks to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) , the VA now faces disruption of its benefit claims handling, healthcare delivery, data security,critical medical research, and stable employment for 100,000 former service members.

The VFW’s resulting Capitol Hill visit on March 4 was not exactly the second coming of the militant march on Washington, in 1932, by 30,000 jobless World War 1 vets. During that confrontation, leaders of the VFW and American Legion provided political cover for Herbert Hoover, the conservative Republican president who ignored veteran unemployment (and, like Trump, championed small government).

Now, the VFW’s condemnation of Trump’s mass firing of vets is such a welcome break with past Veteran Service Organization (VSO) subservience to the White House that even VSO critics are impressed. Iraq war vet and VFW life member Kris Goldsmithcalls it “historic” and “nothing short of extraordinary.”

Bleeding Gets Worse, Not Better

Nevertheless, as Goldsmith argues, it will take a lot more than issuing press statements, presenting hearing testimony, and politely lobbying legislators to stop the further “bleeding” that will result from a VA “reorganization” first reported March 5.

According to an internal memo, Trump’s new VA Secretary Doug Collins intends to cut 80,000 more jobs—contrary to his confirmation hearing testimony before the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee (SVAC) on Jan. 21.

On that occasion, the ex-Congressman from Georgia assured his former Capitol Hill colleagues that “we’re not going to sacrifice veterans’ benefits to do a budget.” This helped the right-wing Air Force Reserve chaplain get confirmed, with virtually no SVAC opposition, and by a 77 to 23 Senate vote in his favor.

Despite the leaked document from VA headquarters, President Trump insists that he will still “take good care of our veterans” and wants to keep the total number losing their federal jobs “as small as possible.” Meanwhile, he boasted of “having great success at slimming down our government,” which was a major focus of his State of the Union address.

During that 100-minute rant and ramble, Trump didn’t mention  veterans or Collins even once, despite his various shout-outs to cops, fire-fighters, border patrol officers and other cabinet members.

As part of the Democrats’ response to what Senator Tim Kane calls a “war on veterans,” Kane and others in Trump’s audience brought along guests who served in the military. All were just fired by the VA and other federal agencies, where vets comprise about 30% of the workforce.

When one dismissed Forest Service worker, Iraq war vet Jacob Bushno, approached his Congressman back home for help–he got no response from Mike Bost, the Republican chair of the House Veterans Affairs Committee. Instead, Bushno heard from the office of Senator Tammy Duckworth, the Illinois Democrat and former Army helicopter pilot who became a double amputee when she was shot down in Iraq.

Noting that Republicans like Bost always wrap themselves in the flag, Bushno told The Times that “he hadn’t seen any patriotism out of them since this has been going down.”

“Why Is This Happening to Us?”

This emerging rift between right-wing Republicans and one part of their electoral base can be further deepened through more grassroots activism by veterans and their organizations, VA care givers and their patients, federal worker unions, and even their often  unreliable Democratic allies.

On February 19, there was plenty of blue state outrage on display when members and friends of the Federal Unionists Network (FUN) protested DOGE in rallies from the Left Coast to New York City, where1,000 people gathered in Lower Manhattan’s Foley Square to hear speakers like longtime VA defender, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Outside a Tesla dealership in San Francisco, Army veteran and VA patient Ricardo Ortiz told a crowd of 300 about the struggle of working-class vets to create a healthcare system, based on public provision of care, not for-profit medical treatment. That achievement is now at risk, he warned, because of bi-partisan efforts to privatize the VA-run Veterans Health Administration.

Now many red state victims of the Trump-Musk purge are speaking out as well, taking their personal stories to media outlets and public meetings around the country. Army veteran Nelson Feliz, Sr. lost his job in the first wave of VA lay-offs, which Collins claimed would “not negatively impact VA healthcare, benefits, or beneficiaries.”

“We’ve been betrayed,” Feliz told Channel 2 News in Atlanta. “I was a first sergeant. My job was to take care of troops, making sure they were paid, fed, and slept. Why is this happening to us? I’ve been here too long for this to be happening.”

Both Bushno, the now unemployed National Forest Service worker in Illinois, and Feliz were among the 6,000 vets affected by the dismissal of 20,000 federal workers still in probationary status. In Bushno’s case, he was let go seven days before his one-year probationary period ended, a decision he is appealing. Feliz was fired despite having been a VA employee for more than 12 years!

He recently started a new position but had not completed the required probationary period for that. The “Notice of Termination” he received, via email, stated that “the agency finds, based on your performance, you have not demonstrated that your further employment would be in the public interest.” This and other indiscriminate dismissals have been the subject of an on-going legal challenge by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the progressive veterans’ group, Common Defense, and other plaintiffs.

Town Hall Confrontations

AFGE local union leaders like Rebecca Reinhold, vice-president  of Local 85 at the VA in Leavenworth, Kansas, have been taking the fight directly to Republican members of Congress–when they dare to show up for constituent meetings in their districts. This is already a risky decision, for many, due to growing popular anger about impending Medicaid and/or Medicare cuts.

In Reinhold’s recent video-taped confrontation with U.S. Rep. Mark Alford at a town hall gathering, she reminded Alford that her 1,200 members provide critical services.  “We make sure veterans are cared for from the moment they become a veteran,” she said. “But you want to cut my job.” In response, Alford insisted there would be “appropriate funds for veterans” and that any VA cuts “would not affect services” because ”we’re going to make sure veterans are supported.”

In Oakley, Kansas, U.S. Senator Roger Marshall abruptly ended an already contentious town hall meeting when local resident Chuck Nunn questioned the wisdom of laying off so many veterans. His concern was shared by another member of the crowd who declared, “I’m not a Democrat, but I’m worried about the veterans.” Marshall did not respond to either comment and left the room hurriedly, amid jeers and boos.

In other House member encounters with voters in the southwest recently, it was the same story. Veteran Louis Smith drew approving applause from an East Texas audience when he warned Congressman Pete Sessions that “the guy from South Africa is not doing you any good — he’s hurting you more than he’s helping.”

U.S. Rep Stephanie Bice from Oklahoma heard, during a telephone town hall, from a self-identified Republican and former Army officer, who demanded to know how “some college whiz kids with a computer terminal in Washington, D.C…. have determined that it’s OK to cut veterans benefits?”

“Get Used To It?”

And those skirmishes were before Secretary Collins doubled down on the bad news contained in the leaked memo from his chief of staff, Christopher Syrek, who comes to the VA from KPMG, a corporate consulting firm specializing in out-sourcing strategies.

In a March 5 video statement, Collins pledged his fealty to further elimination of “waste and bureaucracy.” He claimed, of course, that VA healthcare delivery would not be disrupted because no “mission critical positions” would be impacted. “We’ll be making major changes, so get used to it,” he said.

In response, SVAC Ranking Member, Senator Richard Blumenthal,  displayed some buyer’s remorse of his own. He accused Collins of planning job cuts to “roll back the PACT Act”—which expanded health care access to nearly a million post-9/11 veterans–and impeding the agency’s “ability to meet increased demand in order to justify privatizing VA”

Just two months ago, Blumenthal and his fellow veteran on the committee, Ruben Gallego from Arizona, were among the 22 Senate Democrats voting to confirm Collins, along with longtime VA privatization foe Bernie Sanders (I-VT.) As their penance for that misguided display of VA-related bi-partisanship on Capitol Hill, they will hopefully be holding their own town meetings soon to rally their own distressed constituents, who once donned military uniforms but are now feeling very double-crossed by Chaplain Collins.

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As the South Korean Constitutional Court’s impeachment trial of President Yoon Suk Yeol heads toward its finish, a second trial has opened at the Seoul District Court, in which the president is charged with the crime of insurrection. As I reported in January, substantial evidence points to Yoon’s intention to unleash a campaign of mass repression under martial law. Recently, startling new evidence has emerged that paints a much darker picture of Yoon’s plan.

Investigators discovered a notebook kept by former military intelligence chief Roh Sang-won, who is widely regarded as the architect of martial law. The notebook contains instructions that Roh reportedly wrote down as dictated by his fellow conspirator, Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun. There is suspicion that Kim wrote the notes, although handwriting analysis is inconclusive. It is a distinction without a difference in that the two worked closely together at drafting the plan for military rule, and the contents of the notebook represented agreed-upon procedures. Indeed, Kim repeatedly instructed military officers that Roh’s orders were his orders. It was an ongoing collaboration, as Roh visited Kim’s home 22 times from September up through the night martial law was declared. Kim even provided Roh with his chauffeured car to pass through the checkpoint to his residential compound.

Until recently, few details of Roh’s notebook’s contents had been publicly revealed, but South Korean media have now gained access to the entire text. It was known that Martial Law Command had organized two arrest teams to hunt down and seize fourteen prominent people whom Yoon loathed, and bundle them off to a detention center. Among these high-priority targets were former South Korean President Moon Jae-in and the current leader of the opposition Democratic Party, Lee Jae-myung, who is regarded as the main challenger to Yoon. In his martial law speech, Yoon singled out the Democratic Party’s majority in the National Assembly as one of his motivations for imposing military rule.

What the newly disclosed information reveals is that around 500 people and organizations were targets for arrest in the early days of martial law. The intended victims were assigned to categories A through D, signifying the importance assigned to their capture. The arrest list included prominent politicians and lawmakers, as well as Buddhist and Christian religious leaders, entertainment celebrities, judges, trade unionists, police chiefs, various types of officials, and even former South Korean National soccer team coach Cha Bum-geun. Up to 200 media figures were listed for “primary collection” in the first round of abductions.

In addition to named individuals, entire categories of people were identified for repression, so the intended number of victims in the first wave of arrests was likely to be far higher than the reported 500. The targeted organizations included the Catholic Priests’ Association for Justice, Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, Korean Federation of Teachers’ Associations, Lawyers for a Democratic Society, “all left-wing judges,” and “left-wing entertainers.” As a welcoming gesture for arrestees, the notebook had a reference to hiring gangster thugs to use their fists “to crush the leftist bastards.”

The goal was to wipe out the opposition. As phrased in Roh’s notebook, once military rule is established, “eliminate the sprouts to eradicate the root” and “continuously cut off the sprouts” to “collapse all leftist forces in preparation for the next presidential election.” The South Korean constitution limits presidents to a single five-year term. Nevertheless, martial law planners envisioned at least three terms for Yoon under military rule, with pre-ordained electoral outcomes in his favor. The elimination of the opposition would see to that.

Martial law planners had a permanent solution in mind for the prisoners, who were to be taken to “collection centers” located on islands in the West Sea and along South Korea’s fortified northern border. Their fate, quite simply, was to be murdered. “It is difficult to avoid investigation when using domestic personnel,” Roh wrote. “We need professionals.” To carry out that task, seven to eight special agents who are “good at shooting and bombing” would be needed. Roh selected a few special forces soldiers and undercover agents for the assignment, who were to be supplemented by contractors, reservists, and volunteers. “Confirmation kill is necessary,” it was emphasized. In other words, no one should survive.

Various methods were contemplated regarding how to “dispose” of the prisoners. One option was to install explosives in the barracks and then blow them up once the prisoners were inside. Another was to attack the barracks with grenades or set them on fire. There was also a plan to sink transport ships taking the abductees to their island destinations. Explosives would be placed in the engine room or hold. Martial law personnel would disembark at Silmido Island, send the ships on their way to Yeonpyeong Island, and then detonate the explosives “at an appropriate location.” Since a transmitter may not be an effective means, it was noted that time bombs were preferred. The explosives would need to be powerful enough to ensure that “no evidence should remain as debris.” Other approaches included an apparent plan to poison food and water or use chemical agents against “an entire prison cell.”

There was a recognized need to “destroy the evidence” after the “killing,” or better yet, misdirect responsibility, under the heading, “taking action in the North.” Among the alternatives mentioned were “outsourcing torpedo attacks,” hiring foreign Chinese contractors to sink the ships, or informally reaching out to North Korea, with the open question of “what to offer the North” in exchange for its participation. What could be more delusional than to imagine that North Korea would be willing to assist the hostile Yoon to murder hundreds or thousands of his opponents? Even more dismaying, considering that the point would be to direct world blame onto the North. A less fanciful option would be to send transport ships over the Northern Limit Line into disputed waters claimed by both Koreas in hopes of “provoking the North to attack,” or failing to elicit a response, then “sinking ships before the North captures them for trespassing, etc.”

Once the martial law regime became fully entrenched, the plan was to formalize ongoing repression with a legal veneer. This would be accomplished by establishing a special investigation headquarters staffed by regular and military police and counterintelligence agents. The organization would be responsible for expediting the arrest and trial of people labeled as leftists. Slated to operate for as long as one year, its mission was to process and sentence prisoners on an industrial scale to “the death penalty or life imprisonment.” The 500 individuals and organizations listed by name would comprise the first batch of victims, to be followed by many more in what was to be an ongoing campaign of mass repression to, as Yoon put it in his martial law speech, “eradicate” his opponents.

Those who attempted to flee or hide would have been systematically hunted down and abducted. A ban on citizens leaving the country was planned to eliminate one avenue for escape. Thought was also given to electronic means for hunting people. The Capital Defense Command contacted ride-sharing companies last August, asking to be granted access to their data in a so-called “wartime situation,” such as identification of customers and real-time tracking location. It should be noted that the Capital Defense Command participated in planning Yoon’s military takeover and played a key role in Yoon’s attack on the National Assembly. One company, Socar, conducted an internal review and rejected the request based on the lack of legal justification. How other ride-sharing companies responded is not publicly known. Whether any agreed to cooperate or not, the result would have likely been the same, as the military could have seized control over electronic tracking capabilities.

Martial Law Command attached great importance to crushing dissent and resistance. The martial law decree outlawed all political parties and activities, rallies, and demonstrations, warning that violators would be punished. It was expected that substantial numbers of ordinary citizens would raise their voices in protest and need to be imprisoned. But where to find room to house them all? From March to May last year, the 7^th Airborne Brigade visited prisons in North Jeolla Province, requesting facility blueprints and permission to film. It is almost certain that other brigades were making similar requests at other prisons throughout South Korea. The information was intended to help plan to “free up space” to imprison thousands of protestors “through a large-scale amnesty” for convicts.

Information control was a key component in planning. The martial law decree issued on the night of December 3 declared, “All media and publications are subject to the control of Martial Law Command.” As a first step, Yoon handed orders to Minister of Security and Public Administration Lee Sang-min, instructing him to block the offices and shut off the power and water at media companies critical of his rule. The action was to be coordinated through the National Police Agency and National Fire Agency. According to the testimony of the commissioner of the latter organization, “Cutting off water and electricity is not something that we can do, so we didn’t take any measures.” Whether he was telling the truth or time had run out before action could be taken before martial law was lifted, had Yoon prevailed, these media outlets were destined to be shut down. With domination imposed over media across the political spectrum, the Korean people would have only been exposed to information provided or vetted by the military.

Yoon’s plan for martial law collapsed when thousands of citizens rushed to the National Assembly to resist efforts by soldiers to block lawmakers from entering the building and voting to lift martial law. Under the constitution, a president must respect the outcome of that vote. Yoon’s response, instead, was to try and organize a second martial law. By then, it was too late for him, as news broadcasts announcing the result of the vote had deflated support among lower levels of the military for his coup. South Korea had evaded disaster by the narrowest of margins, but it is not out of danger yet. In his final speech to the Constitutional Court, Yoon came across as unhinged, soft-pedaling the seriousness of his martial law plan and accusing the opposition and labor unions of working together with North Korea to threaten national security. With that mindset, Yoon seems likely to launch another martial law if the court does not confirm his impeachment.

There is every sign that Yoon believes he can return to active duty as president even if his impeachment is upheld. Imagining that he can be swept back to office by his supporters, Yoon’s public messages have mobilized right-wing extremists to threaten violence on his behalf in the event of his impeachment. Yoon has not been alone in inciting violence. YouTube fanatics are actively whipping up emotions, as is former Defense Minister and martial law planner Kim Yong-hyun, as he issues messages from his prison cell. Kim provided a statement to be read aloud at a recent rally, in which he accused the opposition of colluding with China and North Korea. Kim even supplied chants for the crowd, including a call to punish the constitutional court judges and the message, “The enemy has stolen our president. Let’s rescue him with our own hands.” If Yoon is impeached, powerful forces are bent on returning him to power through violent means. South Korea sits atop a political volcano, with its future balancing on Yoon’s fate.

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Archaeologist and scholar Giorgio Buccellati’s book At the Origins of Politics describes how Mesopotamia’s urban revolution in the late fourth millennium BC shaped a new mentality. The segmentation and specialization of industrial production required written recordkeeping, standardization of weights and measures, and surveying and allocation of land planning. This inherent logic of handicraft production and its related organization of trade and market exchange, especially with the palace and temple institutions, led to new forms of social interaction, with the state and its laws and religion consolidating the new managerial hierarchies.

I met Buccellati in 1994 at the first of what would become a decade-long series of Harvard-based colloquia to compile an economic history of the Bronze Age Near Eastern origins of money and interest, land tenure, and its public obligations. Since these innovations were shaped largely by relations with the temples and palaces, our group started by focusing on just what it meant to be public or private.

It was fairly clear what “privatization” meant, but calling the palace or temples “public” was problematic. Royal price schedules for grain, silver, and other key commodities applied only to transactions with these large institutions, which were corporately distinct from the rest of the economy where prices were free to vary. Hammurabi’s laws focused on the relations between the palatial sector and the family-based economy on the land, which followed its own common law tradition for wergild-like personal offenses and other legal problems not involving the palace. How far beyond the palace did the state extend?

Buccellati’s paper focused on a broader philosophical idea of “public” as referring to the overall system of social and economic organization: “The dichotomy between public and private is coterminous with the origin of the city.”1 As he points out in At the Origins of Politics: “The increased size of the settlements created a critical mass, whereby face-to-face association no longer was possible among each member of the social group.” The relationship was political. “On the etymological level, the terms ‘urbanism’ and ‘politics’ are equivalent, given that they both derive from the word for ‘city’ in Latin and Greek respectively.” His term “state-city” emphasizes the overall political and administrative context.

He views industrialization as the economic dimension of the urban revolution that occurred in the late fourth millennium BC. The scale and social complexity of mining (or trading for metal) and metallurgy, beer-making, and weaving involved increasingly impersonal relationships as industrial organizations created products beyond the ability of individuals to make by themselves. The evolution was from direct personal contact to being part of a long, specialized chain.

Describing this takeoff as the first Axial Age, Buccellati explains how economic and social relations had been transformed over the 50,000-year evolution from small Paleolithic groups to urban industrial production, trade, and property relations. The technology and administration of production transformed the character of labor and what Buccellati calls para-perceptual thought. The moral principles of mutual aid, group solidarity, protection of the needy, and basic rights to means of self-support were retained from pre-urban practice but were administered on the state level.

“The state was never able to eliminate or even ignore the people… political ideology became a way for the leadership to justify itself in front of the base,” bolstered by religious attitudes to popularize an “Ideology of Control… the ideology of command, of leadership not necessarily based on coercive means.” Even in the face of “ever-increasing gaps in prestige and economic ability,” the rhetoric of kingship promoted “a sense of solidarity that transcends the limit of reciprocal face-to-face recognition.”

For the king, the aim was to make “submission not just tolerable but actually desirable.” That enabled Mesopotamian rule to be personal and indeed dynastic. “The king was not just the most powerful private individual; he embodied a distinct organism.” Kings were described as serving heaven, as reflected in Hammurapi’s stele depicting him presenting his laws to the god of justice, Shamash (or in some interpretations, receiving them from Shamash).

“The private model was thus superimposed from scratch on the public one,” merging the state and religion as every new king pointed to his ancestors as if this meant continuity of the law. The principle of kings being hereditary was accepted “without ever being formulated in theoretical terms.”

From Living in a State of Nature to a Stratified Managerial Order

Buccellati describes production as evolving from interpersonal and small scale to institutional and large scale. He describes how Paleolithic hunters and gatherers met their needs by using what they found in nature. They napped flints to make spear points and cutting tools, and wove plant fibers to make clothing, baskets, and other artifacts, but these materials were as they found them. And personal wealth took the form of shells or other objects found in nature. However, the increasing complexity of industrial organization transformed the character of producers in that they ceased to have face-to-face relations with the users of the objects they made. Products evolved increasingly beyond objects found in nature, and also beyond the ability of single individuals to make them as they required chains of transformation via metallurgy and manufacturing.

Although Buccellati does not focus on land tenure, money, and credit in this volume, his analytic schema of the transition from “nature” to man-made institutional structures suggests how land and credit relations evolved along similar lines, from informal and spontaneous to formal and standardized. If there was an archaic relationship with the land, it was for an Indigenous tribe to claim territory as belonging to itself for hunting and gathering and for ceremonial or religious functions.

Most exchange was domestic, taking the form of reciprocal gifts, often of the same food types simply as a means of binding groups together in the spirit of mutual aid. But artifacts were traded among Indigenous communities already in the Ice Age, from one tribal group to another, sometimes passed along over long distances.

Gathering places for such exchange existed already in the Ice Age, often at river crossings or natural meeting points. These would have been seasonal sites, with chieftains responsible for keeping the lunisolar calendar to time when to travel to such spots. If anything, such gathering places were the opposite of the later city that Buccellati describes. The idea was to prevent any one group from dominating others or restricting territorial control. The result was akin to the amphictyonic centers of classical antiquity, neutral zones set aside from political cities and rivalries, with careful equality of participants as a condition for amicable relations.

Deities often were trees, woods, or natural rock formations such as those that survived in Germanic religion into the first millennium of our era, and Japan’s Shinto religion. Lunar and solar deities were part of an astronomical cosmology reflecting the rhythms of nature. By the Bronze Age, gods took on the role of patrons of social authority and justice as urbanization transformed the natural environment.

Technology enabled the production of new shapes and “artifacts that have no analogy in nature.” Mud bricks became standardized to build walls. “Stone is no longer seen as an adaptation of pre-existing forms” but was shaped to produce new building structures. Fire played an important role in controlling the environment, not only to cook food but also to bake mud bricks and harden ceramics, and to refine metal from ores and make alloys such as bronze to produce tools, weapons, and other implements. The potter’s wheel and spindles for weaving were developed, and a managerial class came into being as manufacturing such products required increasingly complex organization, from producers and traders to armies.

The Neolithic agricultural revolution saw the standardization of land, allotted to community members in lots sufficient to support their families, with proportional obligations attached—obliging their holders to serve in the army and provide seasonal corvée labor on communal building projects.

These obligations were what defined land tenure rights. That created a strict relationship with the emerging urban centers that transformed “the village as it existed in prehistory… in the sense of autonomous villages that found an end in themselves. … Agricultural or manufactured production did not have as its end point the village, but rather and especially the urban markets.” Rural villages became part of the city, and local conflicts were settled by traveling urban judges.

Monetization of Exchange Between the Rural and Urban Centers

Money evolved as part of the valuation dimension of exchange. Anthropologists studying surviving Indigenous communities have found that artifacts typically are valued for their rarity or lineage of ownership. In archaic times such objects were often buried with their wearers, having become part of their personal identity. In time, they took a proto-monetary signification of esteem. But it was in southern Mesopotamia that money became formalized as a measure of valuation, simultaneously for domestic agrarian and industrial exchange—mainly for grain and wool—and for foreign trade. In both cases, the palace and temples played a key role. A standardized measure of value was needed for the economy’s own industrial and institutional functioning, not merely for personal decoration and status.

Foreign trade was necessary to obtain raw materials not found in the region’s river-deposited soil. Copper and tin were the key metals that were needed, the alloy of which gave its name to the Bronze Age (3500-1200 BC), but silver was adopted as the main measure of value for palace transactions and those of entrepreneurs, presumably because of its role in religious symbolism. Silver and other commodities were obtained by a mercantile class of entrepreneurs, whose major customers were the palace and temples, which also supplied most of the textiles being exported.

The largest categories of debts and fiscal obligations were inter-sectoral, owed by citizens on the land and mercantile entrepreneurs to the palace sector and its temples. The seasonal character of agriculture made credit necessary to bridge the gap between planting and harvesting, to be paid on the threshing floor when the crop was in. Grain served as the main domestic agrarian measure of value and the medium for paying agrarian debts.

The palace and temples integrated their economic accounts by setting the silver mina and shekel that denominated the value of commodities obtained in foreign trade (and consignments of what was exchanged for them) as equal to corresponding measures of grain, while dividing the relevant measures into 60ths to facilitate the allocation of food and raw materials based on the 30-day administrative month used by the large institutions.

The resulting monetary system of account-keeping for credit and fiscal collection was part of a broader economic context in which standardized weights and measures were used to quantify and calculate the various magnitudes of the inputs required by the large institutions for producing commodities in their workshops, along with the amounts of the charges, fees, and rents payable to the institutions and fiscal collectors.

The surplus grain rent paid to the large institutions supported dependent labor in the weaving and handicraft workshops. Commodities no longer were made by individual craftpersons known to the users, but by many, whose identities were institutional and hence collective and impersonal as far as the buyers or users were concerned. The workforce consisted largely of war widows and orphans, and also slaves captured from the mountains surrounding Mesopotamia. (A typical word for slave was “mountain girl.”)

The textiles woven by this labor were consigned to merchants to act as intermediaries between the large institutions or the growing class of private estate holders and foreign purchasers. Interest charges (usually equal to the original loan value for consignments of five years) served as a means for consigners and backers to obtain their share of the gain that merchants were expected to make on their trade.

Bucellati shows how the urban revolution’s “evolutionary process in motion” to transform society and with it “the very nature of human existence.” The development of writing, for instance, had a deep effect in transforming thought processes, much as the creation of languages had served to “externalize thought.” It enabled the communication of ideas to others without having to rely on memory.

Originally used by the eighth millennium BC to oversee and quantify trade and exchange transactions, it came to be used for accounting and credit, and increasingly to preserve, arrange and order thoughts, public announcements, treaties, poetry, and laws. The written word became a new medium for thought. Buccellati describes this “reification of thought” as part of the “removal from nature.” That was part of the evolving uniformity that spread from the production of commodities to shape the overall social order.

Debt Strains Lead Rulers to Protect Their Economies From Polarizing

Industry and entrepreneurial foreign trade concentrated control and wealth in the hands of managers and “big men.” Their economic gains caused a wealthy class to emerge, initially within the large institutions, with credit being used to pry labor away from palace control. Creditor claims on indebted cultivators accumulated, largely at the institutional level of landholders, merchant-creditors, and also ale-women, whose customers ran up tabs for their beer, to be settled at “payday” on the threshing floor when crops were harvested.

It was inevitable that strains would develop as a result of the rising role of credit and debt relations, especially in times of flooding or crop failure. As rent and other payment arrears and interest charges mounted up, private lending (often by royal or temple officials acting on their own account) became the major initial way to obtain the labor of debtors, by requiring them to work off their debts. That prevented cultivators from performing the stipulated corvée and military service that they owed in exchange for their land tenure rights.

The result was a threefold conflict: first, creditors against debtors; second, creditors against the palace over the appropriation of labor via debt bondage; and third, the assertion of creditor power against traditional communal moral ideas of equity and mutual aid. Archaic communities traditionally sought to minimize economic inequality, perceiving much personal wealth as being achieved by exploiting others, above all by indebting them. By the third millennium, indebted cultivators faced the threat of being disenfranchised, losing their personal freedom and self-support land through foreclosure.

As Buccellati observed in our 1994 colloquium royal protection of homesteaders, canceling the overgrowth of personal debt resulted “more from a concern for the public domain than as a phenomenon of privatization.” Rulers from the third millennium BC onward protected palace claims on the labor of their citizens from being disrupted by debt strains of the type to which subsequent Western civilization has succumbed. Sumerian rulers made sure that these strains would not be permanent because that would have been at the expense of the palace’s own requirements for corvée and military service from agrarian debtors.

Buccellati pertinently notes that three main considerations shaped Near Eastern public laws: “the concept of rules, the sense of justice, [and] the decisive moments in resolving conflict.” Hammurapi’s “code” was simply a collection of judgments, but his andurarum proclamations were enforced by the courts to cancel personal debts (but not mercantile debts), liberate bondservants (but not slaves), and redistribute self-support land (but not townhouses) that had been forfeited to creditors or sold under economic duress. These Clean Slates were the most basic royal administrative acts of Mesopotamian rulers from Sumerian times onward. They were the moral pillar of the state.

The Mesopotamian State Solved the Debt Problem That Western Civilization Has Not

Buccellati sees the transformation of production, economic control, and ways of perceiving and thinking about one’s place in society as progressing toward a geopolitical peak with the Assyrian Empire. What enabled and made this sustained achievement so successful were royal laws to regularly restore economic balance on a system-wide level. Clean Slate proclamations prevented a creditor oligarchy from emerging to rival palace claims on the labor and crop surpluses of citizens on the land. In this respect, the distinction between financial and industrial gain-seeking—and the socially destructive character of usury and creditor self-interest—was recognized already in the third millennium BC in the Hymn to Shamash, the Akkadian god of justice (lines 103-106):

What happens to the loan shark who invests his resources at the (highest) interest rate?
He will lose his purse just as he tries to get the most out of it.
But he who invests in the long term will convert one measure of silver into three.
He pleases Shamash and will enrich his life.2

Buccellati rightly states that “We are the heirs of Mesopotamian perception and political experience.” Modern civilization, however, has retrogressed from the Bronze Age Mesopotamian achievement of avoiding deepening financial and economic imbalance. He notes that modern society defines property as being alienable, but in the West securing property rights always has entailed the “right” to forfeit it to creditors or sell under duress—irreversibly. That has been the case ever since Near Eastern commercial and credit practices were brought to the Aegean and Mediterranean lands in the first millennium BC.

The West has adopted the basic economic practices invented in the fourth and third millennia BC, but not the economically protective measures that rulers took to annul the buildup of creditor claims to reverse the increase in debt bondage and loss of land by debtors. That decontextualization is what in my view makes the West “Western.”

Bronze Age Near Eastern practice was so different from the Western worldview that most modern historians resist recognizing and appreciating the relevance of the region’s takeoff in the fourth and third millennia BC. Indeed, today’s anti-state economic ideology denies that money and industrial enterprise could have been innovated by what Buccellati calls the state, that is, the palatial authority.

This ideology obscures a great question posed for the West: How is it that Near Eastern “divine kingship” achieved what Western democracy has failed to do: check the emergence of a creditor rent-seeking oligarchy, which in classical antiquity would strip the Greek, Italian, and other populations of their means of self-support that had formed the basis of economic liberty for the first 3,000 years of the Mesopotamian takeoff that this book so comprehensively describes.

Notes.

1. Buccellati, Giorgio, “The Role of Socio-Political Factors in the Emergence of ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Domains in Early Mesopotamia,” in Hudson, Michael and Levine, Baruch (eds.), Privatization in the Ancient Near East and Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass: Peabody Museum [Harvard], 1996):131.

2. In Giorgio Buccellati, “When on High the Heavens…”: Mesopotamian Religion and Spirituality with Reference to the Biblical World (London, 2024):194, citing Reiner, Erica, Your Thwarts in Pieces, Your Mooring Rope Cut: Poetry from Babylonia and Assyria (Ann Arbor, 1985): 68-84, and W.G. Lambert, W.G., Babylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford, 1960): 122-138.

This text is adapted from Michael Hudson’s foreword to At the Origins of Politics by Giorgio Buccellati, and this excerpt was produced by Human Bridges.

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Why does American society remain so deeply implicated in the enslavement of Black Americans? Slavery was never abolished in the United States, and today it enjoys widespread support among both Republicans and Democrats. Almost 800,000 people are subject to the conditions of prison slavery, but this estimate is almost certainly low, as the lack of reliable data means that it “excludes people confined in local jails or detention centers, juvenile correctional facilities, and immigration detention facilities.” This system, supported and perpetuated by both halves of the ruling class, is an extension of the country’s history of racism and chattel slavery, a way to reinstitute slavery within a legal framework that loudly insists it has been abolished.

The new slavery is a shameful mark on our country’s pretenses to respect for human rights and the dignity of every human being, the latest chapter in a story of race-based hierarchy and domination. When slavery was formally abolished, a major loophole was left in place, one that would help race-based slavery survive to the present day. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, inscribes the Emancipation Proclamation’s abolition of slavery into the country’s supreme source of law, but it does not contemplate a total end to slavery within the nation’s borders. Rather the amendment carves out a fateful exception to the prohibition of slavery:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction [emphasis added].

Slavery is perfectly legal and permissible as long as the enslaved are deemed criminals, which allows prisons to completely dispense with any protections for prison workers. It goes without saying that this exception to the general rule against slavery creates a major incentive to criminalize the mere existence of Black Americans, to use the criminal justice system to create a permanent pool of free labor. If prison slavery is not, on its own, the primary cause of the mass incarceration crisis besieging Black bodies, then billions of dollars’ worth of free labor every year nonetheless remains a powerful force in the service of a racist, two-tier system of “justice.” And indeed this incentive problem has done its work within the American social system, propelling and insulating a system of mass incarceration that recalls and recreates the race-based slavery that so deeply defines the country’s history.

All available evidence shows that the longer one spends in prison, the more likely they are to end up back in the system after they’re back in society. But here is “the great irony of our American criminal justice system.” Today, we imprison huge numbers of people and the prison sentences have grown longer—“thus our system of mass incarceration all but assures high rates of recidivism.” The scale of mass incarceration in the United States is “unparalleled historically” and the shame of the country on the global stage as an egregious violation of accepted human rights. Today, some 2 million people are held in America’s prisons and jails (the majority, about 1.2 million of them, in the prisons), and they live in some of the harshest conditions of abuse and neglect. The data on the country’s sadistic penchant for mass incarceration are startling: in 1972, the rate of imprisonment was about 93 people per 100,000, but by 2009, it was seven times that number, and in the decade between 1985 and 1995, the prison population grew by an average of 8 percentage points every year. Black Americans are highly over-represented in the contemporary prison system; last spring, the Prison Policy Initiative found that “the national incarceration rate of Black people is six times the rate of white people” (emphasis in original). As we shall see, once they are locked up, Black people are far more likely to be subjected to inhumane treatment and even to conditions regarded as torture under international human rights law.

The criminalization of Black existence is a time-honored tradition in the United States. After the formal abolition of slavery, the policing, court, and prison systems have become the primary means through which Black Americans are deprived of their freedom and relegated to second-class political and economic status. Voting in California this past fall saw voters reject Proposition 6, which would have eliminated a provision in the state’s constitution that permits involuntary servitude as punishment of incarcerated people. It would also have prevented the state from continuing to discipline those in prisons who refuse to work. It seems that America’s voters, even in blue states, remain enthusiastic about slavery.

Those enslaved in America’s prisons “are paid very little (between 13 and 52 cents an hour on average)—if at all—and are excluded from the basic rights and protections afforded to most workers.” Many U.S. states offer no compensation at all for work undertaken while in prison. These are the people who do some of the most dangerous and unpleasant work there is, from fighting massive forest fires and processing poultry to disposing of biohazardous waste, often without appropriate safety equipment, having been stripped of even the most minimal legal protections.

Totally captive and vulnerable, American prisoners are subject to a form of super-exploitation—they can be forced to do anything for any or no pay. They have no right to refuse work. But every year they produce more than $11 billion in economic value through the goods they help to manufacture and the services they provide. Those who do refuse to work under these slavery conditions are subject to severe punishment, often torture, as in the case of solidary confinement. The United Nations has said that indefinite or prolonged solitary confinement of longer than 15 days is a form of torture and thus a violation of international law. More than 3 of every 4 prisoners report that refusals to work are met with additional punishments such as “solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence, and loss of family visitation, or the inability to pay for basic life necessities like bath soap.”

In 2022, the ACLU and the University of Chicago Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic released a report detailing the findings of one of the most comprehensive studies of the U.S. prison system to date. Their study gives us one of the clearest pictures we have of the massive human rights crisis ongoing in the country’s prisons, combining a thoroughgoing review of government data with surveys and interviews of over 100 prison workers (in California, Illinois, and Louisiana) and “65 interviews with key stakeholders including experts, formerly incarcerated individuals, representatives of advocacy organizations, academics, and leaders of reentry organizations across the country.” The investigation spanned a period from 2018 to 2022 and involved Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in all 50 states. The study reveals that more than 4 out of 5 enslaved prison laborers work on “general prison maintenance, which subsidizes the cost of our bloated prison system,” meaning that the captive are forced to prop up their own enslavement.

Today, many states require all of their government bodies to purchase things like “furniture, cleaning supplies, printed materials, and uniforms” from the prison system. The ways in which the political class speaks of those enslaved in America’s prisons follows in an unbroken current of racist rhetorical strategies popular throughout the country’s history. The forced labor to which they are subjected is for their own good, instructing and edifying them, providing them a point of access to the superior white, Western mind and its culture. Though it is frequently advanced with the language of dignity and rehabilitation, this rationale is fatally undermined by the best evidence we have from inside the country’s prisons. Prison laborers report that the contemporary slavery to which they are subjected serves in fact to “degrade, dehumanize and further cripple incarcerated workers,” according to Global Human Rights Clinic Fellow and lecturer Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat.

Degradation and dehumanization are fundamental features of this system. In February 2024, both the DOJ Office of the Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office released comprehensive reports on the connected crises of widespread preventable death and continued, pervasive overreliance on solitary confinement. The Inspector General’s report looked at four types of preventable deaths: suicide, homicide, accident, and unknown factors. Over an 8-year period covered by the report, 344 people fell into one of these categories. The report shares its finding that “a combination of recurring policy violations and operational failures contributed to inmate suicides, which accounted for just over half of the 344 inmate deaths we reviewed.” Many of the policy violations and operational failures involved the subject of the GAO report, which was the follow-up on an earlier study that resulted in a number of recommendations. Last year’s report confirmed that the Bureau of Prisons had failed to deliver on “54 of the 87 recommendations from two prior studies on improving restrictive housing practices.” The GAO report also observed the startling racial disparities in the use of restrictive housing. Though they were 38 percent of the total Bureau of Prisons population, Black prisoners were 59 percent of the restrictive housing placements; whites were 58 percent of the total population and 35 percent of these placements. The connection between solitary confinement and the most severe mental health issues is clear in the available data, as more than half of the inmates who committed suicide were in solitary confinement at the time. It is hardly a coincidence that the brutality of this system is today at its worst for Black people in the South. A January 2025 report from the Economic Policy Institute points out that in the South “incarceration rates are the highest, prison wages are lowest, and forced labor arrangements bear the most striking resemblances to past forms of convict leasing and debt peonage.” The report shows that states in the American South “incarcerate people at the highest rates in the world.” If we treated U.S. states as countries for the purposes of the global ranking, 30 of them (plus the U.S. as a country) would find a place at the top of the global incarceration rate list. Only El Salvador tops several Southern states, and only El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan “rank higher or alongside these 30 states” in the world.

Proper maintenance of the prison labor pool has become a major public policy priority, and it is often the rationale for avoiding measurable improvements to prison conditions. As a 2023 note in the Harvard Law Review pointed out, then-Attorney General of California Kamala Harris “met heavy criticism” for advancing this kind of reasoning as a way to fight in court against the enforcement of the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown v. Plata. Against all of the available evidence, California argued that overcrowding was not in fact the source of the constitutional violation. As Justice Kennedy pointed out at oral argument, “Overcrowding is of course always the cause.” While prisoners were sitting in their own feces and dying in record numbers, Harris and her office were insistent that extreme levels of overcrowding in the country’s largest (by population and economy) and richest state should not be directly addressed. California prisoners were commiting suicide at a rate twice that of the national average.

The factual record in the case also clearly demonstrated that alternatives to prison were both more effective at reducing recidivism and less expensive. Harris and her office “filed motions that were condemned by judges and legal experts as obstructionist, bad-faith, and nonsensical, at one point even suggesting that the Supreme Court lacked the jurisdiction to order a reduction in California’s prison population.” For Kamala Harris, as for the rest of the political class, upholding the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment was less important than maintaining a proper stock of slaves to fight fires and perform other brutal and dangerous jobs. The example of California here underscores just how easy it has been for the “progressive” quarters of the U.S. political establishment to forsake the clearest and most egregious constitutional and human rights violations with no real criticism from their supporters. Understanding these contemporary political realities requires that we confront American history.

Very few among white society in the South accepted either their defeat in the war or the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment as the final word on whether Black people were their rightful slaves. Without some system of labor super-exploitation, the entire social order and way of life would be upended. And although this was of course the real demand of abolition, that would not stand. Capital, dependent on free labor, had to find a way to replace the productive capacity of the freed slaves. A tidal wave of new legal and social strictures came in the wake of the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment, calculated to reinstate the second-class status of the Black population and concomitantly the exploitative economic system associated with it. New Black Codes imposed a comprehensive and draconian system of control and punishment for the crime of being Black on Southern soil. A form of racial capitalism continued from the slave economy.

Vagrancy laws were used to drive Southern Blacks both into low or unpaid work or else into the prisons, where slavery remained and remains perfectly legal. A complex new system of convict leasing arose in the place of traditional chattel slavery during reconstruction, with discipline and authority enforce brutally through “gang rapes, beatings and harassment of weaker cons,” through ranks of sub-bosses and “trusty shooters” who could be relied upon to eliminate noncompliant prisoners. W.E.B. Du Bois summarizes this state of affairs in his 1935 book Black Reconstruction: “The whole criminal system came to be used as a method of keeping Negroes at work and intimidating them. Consequently, there began to be a demand for jails and penitentiaries beyond the natural demand due to the rise of crime.” As Du Bois points out, prior to formal emancipation, Southern prisons held comparatively few people, the overwhelming majority of whom were white.

As the celebrated historian Gerald Horne put it, “They linked race and class. It’s not as if our ancestors were brought to these shores because people didn’t like us, because people despised us. They were brought to these shores for profit, to be an unpaid working class.” Contemporary elite discourse in the United States has largely attempted to understand slavery without reference to its class component, as an expression of racial hatred in an economic vacuum. Hubert Harrison wrote similarly that Black Americans “form a group that is more essentially proletarian than any other American group,” “brought here with the very definite understanding that they were to be ruthlessly exploited.”

It is impossible to understand lynching as an accepted cultural spectacle without confronting the question of economic class as the defining aspect of American racism. As even the lowest of the low in white society could partake in the sadistic killing of Black people, this dark ritual buttressed the rigid hierarchical structure of society at the time. Lynchings were the crystallized, concentrated expression of the brutal violence at the heart of the social order, which constructed whiteness in terms of the ability to dispose of Black bodies arbitrarily and at will. This expression of whiteness preempted the possibility of poor whites discovering their class solidarity with enslaved Blacks.

The perpetuation of slavery on American soil gives the lie to the ridiculous, ahistorical idea that the American economic system is something even somewhat like a “free market,” based on robust protection of individual liberty and rights. The capitalist system requires that there be masses of people who can be absorbed into a system of violent, programmatized deprivation. American capitalism continues to be predicated on domination and exploitation, the most severe forms of which still include forms of race-based slavery that, like their antecedents, are treated as legal and legitimate within our class hierarchy.

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I usually try to write a piece weekly, but last week I simply couldn’t find words. Not for lack of them, no, just the opposite. I suffered the presence of a verbal diarrhea absolutely impossible to present in a linear written fashion. And who would want to come across a written piece like that? It sounds like something that should be quarantined; it’s just as nasty and unhinged as it sounds.

It struck me that this is exactly where the current administration wants our head-space to be. They want to continue with a seeming never-ending onslaught of dismal news so it’s impossible to truly attack any one of the factors. They rely on that part of our brain that freezes rather than fights. The sad fact is that it’s been very effective. You’d really never know a coup has taken place if you were to talk to most Americans. They are getting progressively angrier, even in red state strongholds, but you’d be hard pressed to find more than 1 out of 10 who even have an inkling that perhaps a business coup has occurred with Musk, Thiel, Yarvin and Vance at the helm.

It is heartening to see the town halls in red areas exhibit raw anger towards the feckless yes men, however. Republican politicians have brazenly appeared, only to exhibit shock that the locals are restless. The grifter politicians typically howl and leave the meetings early, lest they have to answer for their repugnant behavior. Places like Georgia, Kansas, Idaho—they have all been witness to a growing resentment in these town halls. It’s quite sad that so many individuals in these areas don’t really care about injustice until it hits home, but we will take what we can get.

The demonization of federal workers, the dismantling of the VA, airlines now feeling like a scary way to travel, the shutting down of agricultural subsidy and grants.…..it’s all rolling downhill with accumulating speed. Even the most obtuse are starting to realize they are going to be caught in that snowball. It’s just beginning.

The dismantling of Medicaid will be a real eye opener for the numerous families who have elderly family members in long term care. A majority of this care in America is paid for by Medicaid and if the funding is shut down, untold numbers of family members will likely be booted out of the nursing home. Now the techno-feudalists will be fine with this, of course. They probably think the wimmin-folk can simply stay home and take on the care of these individuals, but of course our economy requires pretty much everyone to work at least one full-time job. I’m not sure who is supposed to take care of elderly family members with dementia in the home, but perhaps this is all just part of the broader eugenics movement that this current crop of oligarchs seems to be so enchanted with. These are the situations that will wake even your most hardcore rural Trump backer, because you see, this will actually affect them. The trick will be keeping these angry people from lashing out at all the wrong people.

Other notable situations that will finally fall on the radar of the traditional “conservatives” in rural areas will be the shock they experience when they try to do a vacation in a National Park this year. Most likely they won’t even be able to get in due to the mass firings of the workers tasked with keeping these natural wonders protected and open for visitors. Of course, the eventual plan will be reopening these places as Grand Canyon Trump Plaza and the cost will be prohibitively large to gain entry. That seems to be the deal—the broligarchs take over and Trump is their leader in name only—but he gets to profit wildly off the federal copper stripping. How about a nice escalator down to the bottom of the canyon with a golf course irrigated by the Colorado? If you think I’m joking, I most certainly am not. Look at the deranged AI Trump put out in regard to his Gaza plans. It’s ludicrous and hideous, and we unfortunately live in a time when both of those characteristics are winning out.

In much the same manner of deconstruction and privatization, they want to make education more expensive and limited for the working class. The public schools are to be defunded and replaced with reactionary Evangelical madrassas style learning. All this will do is to limit our pool of educated individuals. The next great thinker will not obtain the education needed to fulfill their potential. In effect they are making sure their wealthy class is the only one that will be in leadership positions–ever. This creates a class stratification that will only enhance the undeserving nepo-babies. Every accusation is a confession and their railing about DEI is beyond ironic when we see how they are trying to unfairly select only for rich white men. This is them selecting for hemophilia in the Russian Court with these techniques.

I have been considering what one can do in this environment. We all have only so many hours of the day, what with trying to simply exist and all. That said, I do think we can look to history for some ideas on how to proceed. The great anarchist thinkers of the past have given us clear indications what it means to be human and what inherent rights we all need to think of as our baselines. Of course, the word anarchy is pretty much a non-starter to use with the “normies”. We need to pull in vast numbers of individuals who don’t have the ability to parse out the semantics of it all. I think we need to start referring to the basic tenet of mutual aid as the topic and let the word anarchy go. They were able to subvert it and 95% of the population thinks it means trashing things with aggressive abandon. We want the opposite of that, clearly. We need to be as clear eyed as they are in terms of getting what we want and how to go about it.

If we are to think in terms of mutual aid, there are definitely current local groups practicing these behaviors under that term, but they are overwhelmingly leftist college town creations (not that there is anything wrong with that). In this world of disintegrating federal power, it will come down to locals to take care of each other and to build something of worth from the ground up on a much larger scale, however. “Mutual aid” is a great term to even bring in the conservatives. I live in a red state and they are idiotically obsessed with someone getting something for nothing. This is quite ironic because rural areas are typically over-represented in their need for programs like Medicaid that keep their critical access facilities open, but they simply don’t get it. They are all brave yeoman farmers, not taking in any assistance from others (except for all those programs that do keep them afloat). But that said, the concept of mutual assistance is valid, and they will understand it.

I think the Democrats need to be gone of course, they are simply time and money wasters, but something like a Mutual Aid party might be an excellent replacement. Not necessarily to run for office in likely hacked elections, but to make life better on the ground locally for citizens. Unified groups with similar goals……. obviously, again—these ideas are nothing new, but expanding them into population groups who have previously identified as Republican or Democrat certainly is a new direction.

This is just a seed, and we all need to begin to think out what we can do locally to enact these needed changes and to simply help one another during the current very planned out dark times. If we all keep trying to drink in the news from that fire hydrant and slap aimlessly at the terrible policies, we won’t accomplish much of anything, and that is by design. Yes, we can keep fighting them, but the major goal should be working out how we can survive locally. For this reason, it’s going to be up to us to bring the concept of mutual aid to a wider audience and to flesh out what this will look like going forward.

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“Nearly every federal agency in the US government could fall under the scrutiny of DOGE”. With these words on Fox News on February 7th, Donald Trump outlined the scope of DOGE – the Department of Government Efficiency – his administration’s planned overhaul of federal institutions, with Elon Musk at its helm. Within days, the administration has moved to consolidate control over key security apparatus, with the Senate confirming former Democrat turned Trump loyalist Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and Kash Patel, author of “Government Gangsters,” as FBI director[1]. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy characterized these developments as “the most serious constitutional crisis the country has faced certainly since Watergate,” warning of a “billionaire takeover of government.”[2]

Yet this radical transformation of American governance, far from being an impromptu imitative, represents the culmination of nearly a century of meticulously laid groundwork by conservative elites. Drawing from the previously unexplored McCune archives at Columbia University (NY), this investigation reveals how, since the 1930s, a powerful alliance of industrialists, conservative foundations, and far-right ideologues has progressively worked to infiltrate institutions, reshape governmental structures, and neutralize democratic opposition.

Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 marks the culmination of this counter-revolutionary project, with an unprecedented offensive aimed at dismantling the traditional federal administration in favor of a streamlined structure populated by his loyalists. Recent analyses have begun to grapple with this transformation of American governance from different angles. In their February 2025 Foreign Affairs piece “The Path to American Authoritarianism” Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way notably highlight how the Heritage Foundation has invested millions to prepare “an army of up to 54’000 loyalists to fill government positions.”[3] While their analysis astutely identifies mechanisms of state capture, it perhaps underestimates how wealth concentration and corporate influence have historically enabled rather than resisted democratic erosion. Similarly, Mike Brock’s investigation “The Plot Against America” (February 2025) reveals how contemporary tech elites are working to shift power “from democratic institutions to technical systems controlled by a small elite.”[4] Yet these vital contemporary accounts capture only the latest chapter of a much longer historical process, one whose roots stretch back nearly a century.

Wesley McCune’s work provides an indispensable historical record of Trump’s actual counterrevolution effort, through his founding of Group Research Inc. (GRI) in 1962. Prior to establishing GRI, he had served in several government agencies and as assistant to both the Secretary of Agriculture and President Truman (1945-1952). Under his leadership, the GRI compiled the largest documentary collection ever assembled on conservative networks and their funding[5]. These archives expose, through thousands of pages of evidence, how the conservative and fundamentalist Christian right methodically worked to infiltrate institutions, reshape governmental structures, and neutralize democratic opposition – prefiguring with remarkable accuracy the very transformation we are witnessing today[6].

A strategy Decades in the Making

The roots of this counter-revolution can be traced back to the 1930s. In reaction to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, influential industry captains from the banking, chemical, and steel sectors perceived state intervention as an existential threat. Their opposition crystallized around major figures: Alfred P. Sloan (president of General Motors) and Irénée DuPont (Arms and Powder manufacture), who became the principal architects of the “American Liberty League” in August 1934[7]. Their design was unequivocal: they promoted a model, inspired by fascisms in Europe, where the United States would be governed according to a corporatist and non-democratic logic, under the guise of “deregulating” the economy[8].

This vision quickly found concrete expression in an attempted coup that presaged the League’s formal establishment[9]. In his testimony before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee during a secret executive session in New York City on November 20, 1934, General Smedley Butler exposed what became known as the “Business Plot” – a failed conspiracy by wealthy industrialists to overthrow President Roosevelt. The plotters, who ironically styled themselves as a “Society to maintain the Constitution”, had envisioned installing a “Secretary of General Affairs” who would effectively usurp the President’s executive powers under the guise of administrative efficiency[10]. While the coup attempt failed, these same industrialists quickly redirected their efforts toward institutional capture, manifesting their financial power in the creation of numerous foundations aimed at implementing their vision of societal restructuring[11].

The post-war period ushered in an acceleration of this program[12]. A network of entrepreneurial foundations – Mellon, Scaife, Lilly and Richardson, Olin, supported by the DuPont and Koch dynasties – orchestrated an unprecedented effort to undermine the federal state structure, operating under the cover of Cold War anti-communist polices initiated immediately after the war[13]. These foundations established and solely funded dozens of political and research institutes, enabling them to obtain intellectual legitimacy for their political-economic vision[14]. This influence remains pervasive today through these still-active institutions and their successors, as illustrated by Timothy Mellon’s $50 million support to Trump’s Super PAC, revealed by the press in 2024[15].

This design first materialized through the creation of the American Enterprise Association (AEA) in 1943, which would later become the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in 1962. That same year, the AEI spawned one of its key affiliates: the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at Georgetown University (Washington)[16]. A decade later, the Heritage Foundation (1973) emerged, backed by resources from the J. Coors conglomerate, the Scaife Family Trust, the Noble Foundation, and the John M. Olin Fund.

The far-right John Birch Society (JBS), founded in 1958, served as a catalyst for the radicalization of the conservative base by cultivating populism as an essential ingredient of this long-planned revolution[17]. As historian Matthew Dallek’s work demonstrates, the JBS through its media network and forums led by Fred Schwartz and Clarence Manion (The Manion Forum), would find its contemporary echo in Alex Jones “Infowars” channel, an early Trump supporter. This progression shows how extremism became increasingly mainstream within conservative circles[18]. These networks successfully nurtured and sustained an ultranationalist momentum built on victimhood narratives that aligned with white nationalist and supremacist ideologies. This movement laid the groundwork for what would become the “Moral Majority” in 1979, founded by televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr., which achieved a powerful synthesis of conservative political activism and religious fundamentalism in their shared opposition to Democratic progressive policies.

An essential component of this strategy, very early on, involved creating civic institutions capable of shaping future leaders through youth movements. The Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), associated with William F. Buckley and the JBS, established itself as both an ideological training ground and a vector for conservative activism. Operating within cultural institutions, colleges, universities, and public spaces, the YAF conducted numerous campaigns and demonstrations, drawing inspiration from their intellectual mentors Friedrich Hayek and his successor Milton Friedman[19].

From Nixon to Reagan: The Rise of the Conservative Power

The conservative movement’s ascendancy, which would give rise to the New Right, underwent a decisive evolution in the 1960s. While Barry Goldwater (1964) and George Wallace’s (1968) presidential bids failed, it was Richard Nixon, a former Goldwater supporter, who ultimately emerged as the movement’s hope for establishing a bulwark against the left. During this period, conservatives innovated their communication methods, particularly through direct mail techniques, pioneered by Richard Viguerie, former executive secretary of the YAF.

Direct mail became the New Right’s central organizing tool, proving to be a formidable instrument for both mobilization and fundraising. Viguerie deployed it to structure a network of conservative donors and raise funds for multiple organizations: the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), Paul Weyrich’s Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, and Senator Jesse Helms’ Congressional Club. Prefiguring modern targeting algorithms, this system channeled resources toward emblematic conservative causes: school prayer, campaigns against gay rights and abortion, opposition to progressive cultural policies, and support for armed guerilla movements. In the 1990s and 2000s, these same networks would serve as vectors for attacks against Bill Clinton and later Barack Obama, becoming efficient conduits for spreading conspiracy theories about both presidents.

Under Nixon’s presidency, and with the patronage of his Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, the movement’s key figures steadily infiltrated high offices. Among these key appointments were David Abshire, who would later direct CSIS (1983-1986), William Baroody Jr. who led AEI (1978-1987), and Ed Feulner who headed the Heritage Foundation (1977-2013, then 2017-2018). Mr. Feulner would later join Trump’s transition team in 2016, helping shape the “America First” foreign policy agenda[20].

Following setbacks in direct political action after the Vietnam war policy failures, conservative forces reoriented their approach by strengthening their ideological apparatus. The social context proved propitious: mounting pressure from civil rights and abortion rights movements fostered an effective synthesis between ultraconservative political factions and Christian religious groups, united in their opposition to what they perceived as a “Marxist drift” threatening America’s soul.  This period marked what some observers would later identify as the beginning of parliamentary democracy’s decline in America, though few recognized it at the time.

William J. Baroody, who alongside Milton Friedman had orchestrated Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign, became a leading advocate for subordinating democratic processes to capitalist imperatives during this period of social upheaval. The movement achieved its first major success by supporting Ronald Reagan’s bid for the California governorship, which served as both testing ground and steppingstone to the presidency. Joseph Coors, the Heritage Foundation’s principal donor, became Reagan’s personal advisor. Soon after, entire segments of the Californian State bureaucracy were targeted for privatization, beginning with the electricity market – a process that effectively delegated substantial state prerogative to business interests.

This vision of a large-scale culture war found its definitive expression in Baroody’s pivotal address to the Business Council in Virginia in October 1972:

“To the extent that public opinion is hostile to business, one can expect – at minimum – that the public policy climate will make their operation increasingly difficult, and in some cases, compromise their survival. One can go further and assert that, to the extent public opinion is hostile to the institutional framework of a free society, there is then genuine cause for concern about the very viability of that free society.”Adding further: “In this war of the minds of men – and it is an unrelenting war – at stake is the institutional framework of the free society itself.” Baroody concluding: “In brief, America’s free society and economy cannot survive…if you fail to recognize the imperative necessity to begin mustering, in the media and in the Nation’s educational institutions, the necessary resources to counter the propaganda supremacy now held by the adversaries of our free enterprise system – a supremacy I regret to say, all-to-often sponsored and subsidized by the very industries and companies that are under attack.”[21]

Convinced of society’s vulnerability to “internal enemies,” these actors believed businesses must intervene forcefully to shape public opinion in favor of “market freedom”. Simultaneously, New Right conservatives worked to institutionalize surveillance and repression of movements deemed subversive. They built upon the precedent of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), active between 1938 and 1975, where Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had cut their political teeth[22]. After HUAC’s decline, this approach of public tribunals and presumption of guilt continued through the Senate internal Security Subcommittee, amplified by the alarmist rhetoric of pseudo-patriotic movements, such as the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD). These organizations systematically cultivated a climate of paranoia regarding communist and Marxist subversion, which would prove instrumental in legitimizing increasingly stringent security and anti-terrorist policies in the public eye – patterns that are being deployed as of this writing in the early days of the new Trump Administration, in the systematic dismantling of so-called diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) programs across federal institutions, including the purging of high-ranking military officials under manufactured pretexts, most notably the dismissal of Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Charles Q. Brown.

Through expanded direct mail campaigns and sophisticated media strategies, these organizations evolved into vectors of political paranoia promoting conspiracy theories that would help legitimize draconian security and anti-terrorist policies across American society. This deliberately fostered climate of fear facilitated the adoption of the Huston Plan, a sweeping covert program of surveillance, infiltration, harassment, and intimidation targeting political opponents.

Tom Charles Huston, an experienced figure and leader in the YAF, developed this blueprint under Richard Nixon’s aegis. While its exposure during the Watergate scandal (1972-1974) temporarily halted its implementation, it marked an intensification of executive power, with the FBI functioning essentially as a political police force, drawing troubling parallels to the German Gestapo[23]. The unprecedented nature of this development was captured by historian Frank J. Donner who noted that “For the first time in our history a chief executive had expressly authorized a political police structure with a range of powers in conflict not only with established law but with the provision of the Fourth Amendment as well.”[24]

Despite a brief post-Watergate setback, the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations embraced and empowered these organizations, viewing them as vital to their power structure. A telling symbol of this entrenchment emerged when Richard Mellon Scaife secured a position on the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy (USACPD), overseeing the United States Information Agency (USIA), the body responsible for American strategic communication and propaganda abroad.

Strategic think tanks, particularly the CSIS, emerged as the primary architects of “terrorism” studies, mobilizing public opinion through research that predominantly reflected U.S. strategic interests. Their work proved instrumental in garnering public acceptance for expanded “national security” policies and shaping the judicial framework of the anti-terrorism apparatus. Under Reagan’s two terms (1981-1988), surveillance and control became further institutionalized, notably through Executive Order E.O. 12333 (Dec. 4, 1981), which authorized extensive information gathering and enforcement measures against U.S. citizens deemed antagonistic to national security interests[25].

The Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) functioned both as precursor and prototype for ideological youth movements, emerging despite the haunting memory of Hitler’s Jugend experiment. Over two generations, the YAF methodically prepared the ground for this revolution, claiming to restore moral order[26]. Their campaign exerted mounting pressure on media outlets and academic institutions while challenging the right of free speech. Trump’s campaigns (2016, 2024) benefited substantially from their active support networks.

Over two decades, the conservative movement, guided by its most radical elements, gained momentum through unprecedented support from the US Chamber of Commerce, JBS and American Legion, and an extended network of paramilitary factions – the later proliferating due to continuous U.S. military engagements abroad. Under the banner of the “Moral Majority”, an alliance solidified between the Christian nationalist and libertarian politicians[27]. During a political action seminar in Dallas, Texas, in August 1980, Paul Weyrich articulated their vision: “We are talking about Christianizing America. We are simply talking about spreading the gospel in a political context,” This declaration would find its echo in Trump’s 2016 campaign promise that “Christianity would have power”[28].

Toward the end of Reagan’s presidency, hardliners within the Heritage Foundation grew disillusioned with his failure to fully implement their “institutional reform program” (known as Mandate I and II) and what they saw as his betrayal of their vision to remake America great again. In response, they adopted a more subtle approach: rather than focusing solely on capturing the presidency, they would systematically transform government from within, targeting both lower-level offices and high courts to achieve a fundamental redistribution of power through strategic redistricting.

This transformation accelerated under Newt Gingrich, founder of the “Conservative Opportunity Society” (COS) in 1983, who ascended to Speaker of the House following the Republican takeover of the lower Chamber of Congress in 1994 – their first such victory since the interwar period. In 1989, Gingrich declared before Congress: “Liberals have declared open war against our constitutional system of government.”[29] Yet this accusation masked his own agenda ; he was actively orchestrating precisely what he accused his opponents of doing – launching an all-out assault on democratic institutions, methodically preparing the ground for a leader who would embrace this monumental task, accepting the risk, that had nothing to lose : Donald Trump.

Gingrich emerged as one of Trump’s most steadfast and influential though behind-the-scenes supporters well before his first presidential bid[30]. His 2022 book titled “Defeating Big Government Socialism, Saving America’s Future” reveals the persistence of these long-standing themes: “If the United States loses its patriotic commitment to being a united nation, there is a real danger that our enemies will manipulate and finance radical Marxist factions to tear our country apart and leave us defenseless.”[31] As a historian-turned ideologue, Gingrich serves a vital bridge between the New Right and Trump’s movement, frequently articulating Trump’s positions through his platform on Fox News. Eric Trump acknowledged this role in his preface to Gingrich’s 2017 book about Donald Trump, noting: “Newt was able to perfectly articulate my father’s beliefs.”[32]

Historian Julian E. Zelizer draws a compelling parallel between Gingrich and Joseph McCarthy, observing: “His virulent political style became the echo chamber of the Republican Party.”[33] However, Zelitzer identifies a crucial distinction: while McCarthy was ultimately marginalized for his excesses, Gingrich succeeded in embedding his ideas within mainstream conservative thought. He championed some of the most extreme policies that Trump would later adopt, including the constructing of a wall between Texas and Mexico. More broadly, Gingrich’s ascendance coincided with conservative forces’ readiness to flex their institutional muscle – no longer content to merely defend the system but determined to bring it down.

The Heritage Foundation’s influence extended well beyond U.S. borders. The GRI archives reveal how, beginning in the 1970s, it channeled funds to far-right groups and organizations across Europe that shared its anti-welfare state stance and free-market absolutism. This transnational network encompassed the Institute for European Defense and Strategic Studies (IEDSS), the International Freedom Fund Establishment (IFFE), the Hanns Seidel Foundation in Germany, and the Club de l’Horloge in France (renamed “Le Carrefour de l’Horloge” in 2015), which aligned closely with the far-right National Front party[34].

During the first decade of the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) launched September 20, 2001, these networks mobilized their full resources. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) emerged as a particular nexus of hawkish influence, bringing together figures such as Richard Perle, who presided over the quasi-governmental Defense Policy Board; Irving Kristol, the architect of neoconservatism; Michael Ledeen, a former Reagan advisor advocating military action against Iran; and John Bolton, who personified the fusion between hardline conservatives and the neoconservative interventionist agenda[35].

Under George W. Bush’s presidency (2001-2009), the interweaving of business interests, lobbyists, industry-funded think tanks, and the Republican Party reached unprecedented level of complexity[36]. The military sphere became a particularly fertile ground for ideological propaganda. The return of ROTC programs to college campuses, all over the U.S. signaled conservative foundations growing capacity to leverage military education for advancing their worldview and their conviction that democratic institutions had failed. The military’s “Operation Paperback” which distributed books to the troops included many of them from New Right’s rank, such as Mark R. Levin, President of the Legal Foundation, whose “Plunder and Deceit, Big Government’s exploitation of young people and the future” (2015) aspired to generate  a “new civil rights movement, one that will foster liberty and prosperity and cease the exploitation of young people by statist masterminds.”[37]

The emergence and ferment of the Tea Party movement in February 2009 signaled a decisive shift in the conservative takeover of the Republican Party (GOP), exploiting the aftermath of the financial crisis to prepare the way for their chosen standard-bearer, Donald Trump. The governing circles of these foundations identified him as uniquely capable of executing their long-awaited rupture with the established order. Within the movement’s religious base, many viewed his ascendance through a messianic lens, perceiving him as divinely ordained to lead not just America but the World[38].

Trump’s explicit embrace of the “America First” movement’s heritage – characterized by historians as profoundly pro-fascist – came during his landmark speech at the Center for the National Interest (Washington D.C.) on April 27, 2016[39]. While his first term served as a trial run for this new doctrine of integral nationalism, his return to power in January 2025 initiated the fulfilment of long-held ambitions:  rejecting international law, withdrawing from multilateral treaties, and reorienting U.S. foreign policy toward aggressive economic warfare while marginalizing traditional allies.

Project 2025: The institutionalization of an Authoritarian Model

Project 2025, dubbed the “mandate for leadership”, emerged as the blueprint for Trump’s return to power, despite early attempts by some campaign advisers to distance themselves from its extreme implications[40]. This imitative marks the culmination of the conservative counter-revolution[41]. Most appointees to key positions in the new administration maintain direct or indirect ties to the Heritage Foundation and its affiliates[42].

 This “New Mandate”, heir to previous versions from 1980, 1984, and 1988 took concrete form upon Trump’s inauguration last January. His administration, with Elon Musk’s support and advice, has promptly begun purging institutional opposition through mass dismissal of civil servants, wielding existing legal mechanisms to suspend democratic institutions and procedures by simple executive order, neutralizing remaining checks and balances. While ignoring congressional budget prerogatives and judicial independence, the administration has realized McCune’s dire predictions: “The first victims of these measures,” he wrote, “are minorities, union movements, and proponents of multiculturalism.”

The first cornerstone of this transformation centers on the wholesale removal of senior civil servants, replaced by hand-picked loyalists, coupled with the dismantling of agencies and offices dedicated to social services, education, environmental protection, and international aid like USAID – a pillar of U.S. international development policy since its creation under John F. Kennedy, with roots in earlier progressive efforts such as the New Deal and the Marshall Plan (ERP programs). This foundational component manifests through a cascade of recent executive orders targeting federal-level Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (D.E.I.) programs, especially affecting cultural and educational institutions.

Within this comprehensive unfolding offensive, higher education stands as a priority target of the radical right. Trump explicitly declared his intention to “take back” universities from “Marxist maniacs,” while his Vice-President J.D. Vance openly branded them as “enemies”. A position reflecting both his venture capital background and his longstanding alliance with Silicon Valley power brokers, such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk[43]. In echoing Baroody and Gingrich’s martial previous rhetoric, Project 2025 envisions establishing an “American Academy,” marketed as a free and “strictly non-political” online university, funded through dramatic increase in taxes on existing university endowments[44]. This initiative serves a dual purpose: weakening traditional institutions while creating an alternative under strict ideological control.

The second cornerstone of this design implements expansive deportation measures targeting resident aliens labeled as “criminal illegal,” while simultaneously advancing the criminalization of opposition groups. Internal security agencies, particularly Homeland Security’s ICE, established in response of 9/11 and subsequent antiterror policies, are being transformed into auxiliary forces supporting the FBI and CIA, now operating from shared databases powered by algorithms and AI from major U.S. technology companies. In February 2025, ICE launched an unprecedented surveillance program aimed at monitoring “negative sentiment” about the agency across social media platforms, using artificial intelligence to identify and track not just threats but any form of criticism, while collecting extensive personal data on targeted individuals[45].

True to their historical role documented by the GRI, the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and Federalist Society continue to provide the intellectual framework and support for these measures[46]. A persistent tension between state control and deregulation remains visible in their arbitration between institutional repression and privatization of state functions. The paradox is striking: these organizations now advocate for forms of political authoritarianism that mirror exactly what they once accused their enemies of promoting.

The systematic implementation of this New Right counter-revolutionary “master plan” follows patterns reminiscent of, especially Nazi Germany between 1934 and 1939. By combining the systematic erosion of checks and balances, criminalizing political opposition, and institutional reorganization based on loyalty criteria according to loyalty criteria, the current administration materializes a model that Wesley McCune identify as an underlying tendency in American society as early as the 1950s.

The fate of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in February 2025 illustrates the apparent contradiction – but the underlying logic of this institutional transformation. Created under Reagan in 1983 and historically supported by the Republican establishment, the organization found itself abruptly cut off from Treasury funds following Elon Musk’s attacks branding it an “evil organization that needs to be dissolved,” The telling silence of traditional Republican figures, including those serving on its board like Senator Todd Young, suggests this dismantling is part of a broader strategy : the intent to transfer traditional American public diplomacy functions to private actors, particularly tech giants[47]. This reconfiguration, far from being a mere “purge” marks a potential transition from institutional soft power to a model where American influence abroad will increasingly be exercised through social media and digital platforms – giving precedence to private corporations over pseudo-government agencies.

The GRI archives holds a Congressional session report from 1953, at the height of McCarthy-era anti-communist fervor, analyzing factors behind fascism’s emergence and its potential presence in the U.S. According to experts at the time, the key factors weren’t those typically highlighted in Western textbooks, but rather the deliberate creation of a “corporatist state” through “social demagogy” capable of gradually subverting republican institutions[48]. A 1965 Group Research Inc. report issued a prescient warning: “One of the most dangerous aspects of fascism is that it advances in small steps, under the pretext of efficiency and reform.”[49]

That same year, historian Richard Hofstadter, in his seminal essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, offered a crucial insight into this dynamic, noting that “a fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is the imitation of the enemy.” He observed how this “paranoid disposition” serves to “mobilize into action chiefly by social conflicts that involve ultimate schemes of values and that bring fundamental fears and hatreds, rather than negotiable interests, into political action.” His analysis of what he termed the “pseudo-conservatives”, particularly the Goldwaterites, precisely anticipated the rhetorical and mobilization patterns that would later define Trump’s MAGA movement[50].

A Decisive Turning Point for American Democracy

The possibility of the collapse of democratic institutions results from a long process. From the first organized attempt to seize power by force in 1933, to the current mandate given to E. Musk and his Department of Government efficiency (DOGE), a consistent pattern emerges: the systematic use of private wealth and corporate efficiency models to restructure federal governance, ultimately preparing the ground for oligarchic rule.

The positioning of Russell T. Vought to head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a U.S, executive agency responsible for developing the federal budget, overseeing agency performance, and ensuring regulatory and fiscal efficiency, illustrate the uncompromising nature of their strategy. As one of the main “Project 2025” architects, Vought’s statement about federal civil servants reveals their stark worldview: “We want them to wake up in the morning not wanting to go to work because they are increasingly seen as the bad guys.”[51] exemplifying their simplistic division of the world is divided between the “good guys” and “bad apples”.

The designation of loyalists to key security positions further exemplifies this transformation of federal institutions. The Senate’s confirmation of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and Kash Patel as FBI director demonstrates how personal loyalty has become the primary qualification for leadership roles in critical agencies. Both nominees openly embraced Trump’s vision of a politicized civil service, with Patel’s 2023 memoir “Government Gangsters” explicitly targeting supposed “deep state” opponents and including an appendix listing potential “conspirators” within the executive branch. Their appointments signal a decisive shift toward using federal law enforcement and intelligence capabilities to target political opposition[52].

This echoed Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts’ own words shortly before Trump re-election in July 2024: “We are experiencing the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left permits.”

This revolutionary rhetoric is not new. As early as the 1960s, Murray N. Rothbard, a leading figure of libertarianism, has already laid the groundwork for this radical vision. While the official historiography of the New Right, as presented by Justin Raimondo, tends to portray Rothbard’s approach as a pragmatic evolution beyond Ayn Rand’s romantism, a closer examination reveals a more calculated strategy[53]. Rothbard, who saw himself as an “extreme-rightist,” deliberately sought to co-opt revolutionary language and tactics from the left. His creation of the review “Left and Right” in 1964 and his attempts to infiltrate the antiwar movement were part of a broader strategy to reframe libertarians as “true revolutionaries.” By the 1990s, Rothbard had identified social democracy as the main enemy, more dangerous than communism in his view because it combined socialism with the “appealing virtues of democracy and freedom of inquiry.” This strategic shift prefigured the current assault on democratic institutions under the banner of “liberty”[54].

More than just a resurgence of radical conservatism, 2025 marks the culmination of a strategy methodically constructed over nearly a century. Far from the singular genius-entrepreneur he claims to embody, Trump appears instead as tool of the same Corporate elites that have driven this conservative ascendence since its inception. This is evidenced by oil baron Harold Hamm’s role, CEO of Continental Resources, who orchestrated a billion-dollar fundraising effort from oil magnates supporting Trump’s candidacy – thus perpetuating the historical alliance between the radical libertarian right and corporate tycoons first documented by the GRI in the 1930s[55].

This convergence of traditional conservative networks with tech power brokers has been meticulously detailed in Mike Brock’s recent analysis of the New Right’s technological aspirations. Building on James Pogue’s groundbreaking investigation of the National Conservative Conference (NatCon) and Max Chafkin’s prescient work “The Contrarian” (2021) on Elon Musk and Peter Thiel’s pursuit of political power, Brock reveals how Bitcoin and other technological innovations have become vehicles for implementing long-held libertarian ambitions, particularly Friedrich Hayek’s vision of private entities challenging government control of currency[56]. Though extensive reporting on figures like Curtis Yarvin and Balaji Srivasan, these investigations expose how Silicon Valley’s libertarian wing has increasingly aligned with the New Right power structures, advocating what Yarvin terms a “National CEO” model of governance. This technological dimension adds a powerful new vector to the historical conservative project of dismantling democratic institutions, one that promises to accelerate and amplify their longstanding agenda through unprecedented technological capabilities.

Now that technological means, including AI, provide extraordinary opportunities to reshape American society more rapidly and profoundly, we witness an accelerating convergence between the conservative circles, tech giants, and military leaders within a new bold and undisputed military-industrial-technological complex[57].

The accumulated financial and technological resources, combined with the U.S. military might, now fuel renewed hegemonic ambitions, manifesting in territorial claims from the Panama Canal to Greenland, reminiscent of 19^thcentury imperial expansion. A week after Trump unilaterally declared the Gulf of Mexico would henceforth be known as The Gulf of America, major search engines had already implemented this change. Yet, when the Associated Pressrefused to adopt the new designation in defense of its editorial independence, the administration’s response was swift: barring its reporters from White House events – a direct challenge to press freedom and clear violation of First Amendment’s right of free speech[58]. Trump’s new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr, has been ordered to investigate traditional “liberal” media such as ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and NPR. The Defense Department has thrown such mainstream media outlets as The New York Times, NBC News and NPR out of their work spaces at the Pentagon, replacing them by conservative outlets.

Preserved at Columbia University’s rare books section, the documentary collection assembled by Wesley McCune and his team, provide unique evidence of this transformation, tracking payments and contributions between key actors through a detailed paper trail – particularly valuable now that most of this history has been scrubbed from the websites for institutions like the AEI, Heritage Foundation, and YAF. The fruit of thirty years of meticulous journalistic investigation into ultraconservative networks illuminates, with disturbing accuracy, the mechanisms driving today’s dismantling of democratic institutions.

As democratic societies face this systematic and powerful offensive, some might argue we are merely witnessing the final chapter of parliamentary democracy’s long decline – a process that should have been recognized far earlier. A fundamental question emerges: what forces can still mobilize the resources and energy necessary to counter this systematic and formidable offensive on democratic freedoms, particularly when citizens struggle to see through the carefully constructed narratives that have obscured these actors’ fundamentally anti-democratic intentions, under the guise of a fight for individual liberty? The GRI archives stand as both warning and guide, reminding us that the preservation of democratic governance requires not just vigilance but active engagement with the historical record that exposes the true nature of this decades-long transformation.

Notes.

[1] German Loez and Lyna Bentahar, “Two Loyalists for Trump” in The New York Times, February 12, 2025

[2] “Daily Show”, Democracy Now, 10.02.2025

[3] Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, “The Path to American Authoritarism” in Foreign Affairs, February 11, 2025,

[4] Mike Brock, “The Plot Against America, How a dangerous Ideology born from the Libertarian Movement stands Ready to Seize America” on Substack, February 8, 2025.

[5] This archival collection consists of 512 boxes, housed at Columbia University (New York). The inventory is available on the internet Archive: https://findingaids.library.columbia.edu/ead/nnc-rb/ldpd_5010936. Below, in the footnotes are references to GRI boxes used for this article.

[6] GRI, box 12

[7] The American Liberty League is an American political organization founded in 1934, whose announced objectives was: “to combat radicalism, to teach the necessity of respect for the rights of persons and property, and generally to foster free private enterprise.” Heavy contributors to the American Liberty League included the Pitcairn family (Pittsburgh plate Glass), Andrew W. Mellon Associates, Rockefeller Associates, E.F. Associates, William S. Knudsen (General Motors), and the Pew family (Sun Oil Associates). J. Howard Pew, longtime friend and supporter of Robert Welch, who later founded the John Birch Society. Other directors of the league included Al Smith and John J. Raskob.

[8] GRI, box 126, folder fascism

[9] See Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House, New York, Hawthorne Books, 1973.

[10] Ibid. pp. 139, 151, 155

[11] Documents from the GRI archives establish that in November 1937, representatives of Hitler’s regime and seven major American industrialists met to develop agreements for international monopolies “The Nazis have made a fifth column pact with seven influential Americans,” In Fact, no 92, Vol. V, No. 14, July 13, 1942, edited by George Seldes, GRI, box 126, folder fascism

[12] While these arrangements would ultimately be derailed by the war, historian Anthony C. Sutton’s groundbreaking research has extensively documented the persistence of business connections between American industrialists and Nazi Germany well beyond the 1930s. uncovering evidence of technological transfers, financial arrangements, and strategic partnerships, see Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, San Pedro Ca., GSG Publishers, 2002

[13] The Lilly Foundation was established from the pharmaceutical fortune of Eli Lilly, and the Richardson Foundation is based on the Vick Chemical Co, see GRI, box 12, folder AEI.

[14] At the time, the Mellon family controlled the oil company Gulf Oil and the aluminium company Alcoa, as well as the bank of the same name – Mellon Bank ; they alsoheld capital in numerous other companies listed in the Fortune 500 index.

[15] Shane Goldmacher and Theodore Schleifer, “Timothy Mellon, Secretive Donor, Gives $50 Million to Pro-Trump group” in The New York Times, June 20, 2024

[16] The CSIS Center published the proceedings of its first conference, held in January 1962, in the form of a 1,021-pages book titled : National Security : Political, Military, and Economic Strategies for the Decade Ahead.

[17] Harry L. Bradley, chairman of the board of Allen-Bradley Co., was both a trustee of the AEA since 1957 and influential in the forums of the John Birch Society, such as American Opinion.

[18] Matthew Dallek, Birchers, How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, New York, Basic Books, 2022.

[19] GRI, box 161, folder Heritage Foundation. The Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) would later be renamed Young America’s Foundation in 1969, while maitaining its original student branch.

[20] Paul Weyrich in addition to being considered one of the founders of the Heritage Foundation, was also the strategist of the “New Right”. He chaired the “Coalition for America,” an umbrella for all conservative organizations.

[21] Baroody, William J., “The Corporate Role in the Decade ahead.” Remarks presented at The Business Council, Hot Springs, Virginia, October 20, 1972, dans GRI box 12, folder AEI.

[22] Dissolved in 1975, its functions were transferred to the Judicial Committee of the House of Representatives.

[23] Brian Gluck, War at Home, covert action against U.S. activists and what we can do about it, Boston, South End Press, 1989.

[24] Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance, The Aims and Methods of America’s Polticial Intelligence System, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1980, P.266

[25] GRI, box 47, Business Advisory Council

[26] GRI, box 341, folder YAF

[27] In 1979, The Religious Roundtable formalized the alliance between the leaders of the New Right and those of the Religious Right.

[28] Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the power and the glory, New York, Harper Collins, 2023

[29] Newt Gingrich, Message to Fellow Citizens, on “The Deepest Crisis America Has Ever Faced in Our 200-Year-History,” May 23, 1989, U.S. Congress

[30] In 2023, he published with Joe Gaylord, March to the Majority : The Real Story of the Republican Revolution, New York, Center Street.

[31] A work in which Gingrich, tracing the alleged links between “Wokism” and “Marxism” warns of the disappearance of Christianity in the United States due to the rise of socialists, whom he associates with communists.

[32] Newt Gingrich, Understanding Trump, New York, Center Street (Hachette Book Group), 2017.

[33] Julian E. Zelitzer, Burining Down the House, Newt Gingrich and the rise of the New Republican Party, New York, Penguin, 2020, p.302

[34] GRI, box 160. Folder Heritage Foundation 1988-

[35] The AEI board of directors included, among others, figures such as Lee Raymond, Chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil, and William Stavropoulos, Chairman of Dow Chemical.

[36] John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General from February 2, 2001, to February 3, 2005, is a member of the Council for National Policy (CNP), founded in 1981. The CNP has nearly 500 members, bringing together political figures, business leaders, and conservative activists to discuss political strategy. Historian Journalist Joe Conason describes it as the “Central Committee of the Religious Right,” cited in David Cole, Justice at War, New York Review of Books ed. 2008, p.8

[37] Mark R. Levin, Plunder and Deceit, Big Governement’s exploitation of Young People and the Future, New York, Threshold Editions, 2015.

[38] Mike Hixenbaugh, “evangelical leaders celebrate Trump’s victory as a prophecy fulfilled”, NBC News, 7 novembre 2024 ; see also Tim Alberta, op. cit.

[39] Jason Stanley, Les ressorts du fascisme, Eliot Edition, 2022 (édition anglaise 2018), p.22 ; the Center for the National Interest is a think tank founded by Richard Nixon in 1994.

[40] One of the authors of this political manifest is Donald Devine, who published a book in 2004 titled In Defense of the West, which became a mandatory course textbook in several conservative U.S. Universities.

[41] GRI, box 160, Folder Heritage, see in particular the Group Research Report, “The Right Works on an Agenda for the 1990s,” Vol. 29, No. 2, March-April 1990.

[42] Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, op cit.

[43] Max Chafkin, op. cit.

[44] Patel, Vimal et Sharon Otterman, “Colleges Wonder if They Will be “the Enemy” Under Trump” in The New York Times, November 12, 2024

[45] Sam Biddle, “ICE Wants to Know if You’re Posting Negative Things About it Online”, The Intercept, February 11, 2025.

[46] “Inside the Heritage Foundation’s Plans for Institutionalizing trumpism” in New York Times, 2024

[47] Kine, Phelim, “Elon Musk’s attacks on a group long backed by GOP prompt Republican Shrugs” in Politico, February 13, 2025

[48] Exerpt from the Congressional Record, Appendix, July 30, 1953 in GRI, box 126, folder fascism

[49] GRI, box 126, folder fascism

[50] Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, New York, Vintage Books, 2008 (1965), p.32, p.39.

[51] Rappeport, Alan, “The Senate confirms Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget.” in The New York Times, February 8, 2025

[52] German Lopez and Lyna Bentahar, op. cit.

[53] Justin Raimondo, Reclaiming the American Right, The lost legacy of the conservative movement, Wilmington, Delaware, ISI Books, 2008, pp.251-260.

[54] During this decade Charles and David Koch provided this new brand of libertarianism with their Wealth, financing new insititutes such as the Cato Institute, and many magazines, and Student organizations, such as the Student for a Libertarian Society (SDS).

[55] Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow, “This oil tycoon brings in millions for Trump, and may set his agenda” in The Washington Post, August 13, 2024

[56] James Pogue, “Inside the New Right, where Peter Thiel is placing his biggest Bets” in Vanity Fair, April 20, 2022 ; Max Chafkin, The Contrarian, Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of power, New York Penguin, 2021

[57] Valentine Faure, “Comment la droite tech américaine a pris le pouvoir” in Le Monde, 15.11.2024, sur : https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2024/11/15/comment-la-droite-tech-americaine-a-pris-le-pouvoir_6395657_3210.html

[58] Rhian Lubin, “Trump accused of violating First Amendement after AP reporter barred from event over “Gulf of America’s renaming” in The Independent, February, 12, 2025

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Language matters. Aside from its immediate impact on our perception of great political events, including war, language also defines our understanding of these events throughout history, thereby shaping our relationship with the past, the present, and the future.

As Arab leaders are mobilizing to prevent any attempt to displace the Palestinian population of war-stricken Gaza – and the occupied West Bank for that matter – I couldn’t help but reflect on language: when did we stop referencing the ‘Arab-Israeli conflict,’ and substitute that with the ‘Palestinian-Israeli conflict’?

Aside from the obvious problem that military occupations should not be described as ‘conflicts’ – a neutral term that creates a moral equivalence – the removal of ‘Arabs’ from the ‘conflict’ has greatly worsened matters, not only for Palestinians, but Arabs themselves.

Before we talk about these repercussions, that of swapping words and altering phrases, it is important to dig deeper: when exactly was the term ‘Arab’ removed? And equally important, why was it added in the first place?

The League of Arab States was established in March 1945, over three years before the establishment of Israel. A main cause of that newly found Arab unity was Palestine, then under British colonial ‘mandate.’ Not only did the few independent Arab states understand the centrality of Palestine to their collective security and political identities, but they perceived Palestine as the single most critical issue for all Arab nations – independent or otherwise.

That affinity grew stronger with time, and the Arab League summits always reflected the fact that Arab peoples and governments, despite conflicts, rebellions, upheavals, and divisions, were always united in a singular value: the liberation of Palestine.

The spiritual significance of Palestine grew hand in hand with its political and strategic significance to the Arabs, thus the injection of the religious component to that relationship.

The arson attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque in August 1969 was the main catalyst behind the establishment of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) later that year. In 2011, it was renamed the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, though Palestine remained the central topic of Muslim dialogue.

Still, the ‘conflict’ remained ‘Arab,’ as Arab countries were the ones who bore the brunt of it, engaged in its wars, suffered its defeats, but also shared its moments of triumph.

The Arab military defeat in June 1967 to the Israeli army, backed by the United States and other powerful western powers, was a watershed moment. Humiliated and angry, Arab nations declared their famous “Three No’s” at the Khartoum Summit in August-September of that same year. All the ‘no’s’ centered on the idea that there will be no peace, negotiations, or recognition of Israel while Palestinians are held captive.

That strong stance, however, didn’t survive the test of time. Disunity among Arab nations rose to the surface, and such terms as Al-‘Am al-Qawmi al-‘Arabi – the Arab national security – often focused on Palestine, splintered into new conceptions surrounding the interests of nation-states.

The Camp David Accords signed between Egypt and Israel in 1979 deepened Arab divisions – and marginalized Palestine further – though, in actuality, it didn’t invent them.

It was around these times that western media, then academia, began coining new terms regarding Palestine. The ‘Arab’ was dropped, in favor of ‘Palestinian’. That simple change was earth-shattering, as Arabs, Palestinians, and people around the world began making new associations with the political discourse pertaining to Palestine. The isolation of Palestine had thus crossed that of physical sieges and military occupation, into the realm of language.

Palestinians fought hard to win their rightful and deserved position as the guardians of their own struggle. Though the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was established at the behest of Egypt in the First Arab Summit in Cairo of 1964, Palestinians, under the leadership of Fatah’s Yasser Arafat, were given the helm in 1969.

Five years later, in the Arab Summit in Rabat (1974), the PLO was collectively perceived as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” later to be granted observer status at the United Nations.

Ideally, a truly independent Palestinian leadership needed to be embraced by a collective and unified Arab position, aiding it in the difficult, and often bloody, process of liberation. Events that followed, however, attested to a far less ideal trajectory: Arab and Palestinian divisions weakened the position of both, splintering their energies, resources, and political decisions.

But history is not destined to follow the same pattern. Though historical experiences may appear to replicate themselves, the wheel of history can be channeled to move in the right direction.

Gaza, and the great injustice resulting from the destruction of the Israeli war in the Strip, is once more being a catalyst for Arab dialogue, and, if there is enough will, unity.

Though Palestinians have demonstrated that their sumud – steadfastness – is enough to repel all stratagems aimed at their very destruction, Arab nations must reclaim their position as the first line of solidarity and support for the Palestinian people, not only for the sake of Palestine itself but also for the sake of all Arab nations.

Unity is now key to recentering the just cause of Palestine, so that language may, once more, shift, injecting the ‘Arab’ component as a critical word in a struggle for freedom that should concern all Arab and Muslim nations, and in fact, the whole world.

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Rebuilding from California’s recent wildfires will cost more than a quarter of a trillion dollars — an unprecedented amount. The estimated damage from Hurricane Helene in the Southeast is almost as much, on the order of $250 billion.

Who will pay for that damage? It’s a question plaguing localities around the country as climate change makes these disasters increasingly common.

Some states are landing on a straightforward answer: fossil fuel companies.

The idea is inspired by the “superfunds” used to clean up industrial accidents and toxic waste. The Superfund program goes back to 1980, when Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA). The law fined polluters to finance the clean up of toxic spills.

Thanks to the hard work of groups such as the Vermont Public Interest Research Group and Vermont Natural Resources Council, Vermont recently became the first state to establish a climate superfund in May 2024.

Months later, New York followed suit, again in response to pressure from environmental groups. Both bills require oil and gas companies to pay billions into a fund designated for climate-related cleanup and rebuilding.

Now California is considering a similar law in the wake of its disastrous wildfires. Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey may take up the idea as well.

It’s an idea whose time has come, especially now that states are less able to rely on the federal government. The Trump administration is disabling government agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with major cuts and putting conditions on other aid.

At the recent Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference, Trump aide Ric Grenell unabashedly endorsed “squeezing” California’s federal funds unless they “get rid of the California Coastal Commission.” (Trump apparently hates the commission, the Fresno Bee explains, because it prevents “wealthy people from turning public beaches into private enclaves.”)

Fossil fuel companies — the lead perpetrators of climate disasters — spent more than $450 million to elect their favored candidates, including Trump. In return, Trump has promised to speed up oil and gas permits and stacked his cabinet with oil-friendly executives.

Why should taxpayers have to foot the bill to clean up the destruction wrought by this industry, one of the most profitable the world has ever known? As a spokesperson for New York Governor Kathy Hochul said, “corporate polluters should pay for the wreckage caused by the climate crisis — not every day New Yorkers.”

Not surprisingly, 22 Republican-led states disagree. They’ve sued to block New York’s law and protect oil and gas profits at the expense of ordinary people. They have no answer for the question of who pays for recovery from climate disasters or helps people reeling from one disaster after another.

Fossil fuel companies can think of paying into a climate superfund as the cost of doing business. If they’re in the business of extracting and selling a fuel that destroys the planet, it’s only fair they pay to clean up the damage.

And the public agrees. Data For Progress found more than 80 percent of voters support holding fossil fuel companies responsible for the impact of carbon emissions.

To be fair, a climate superfund is a “downstream” solution to the climate crisis, one that seeks to raise the costs to perpetrators. A climate superfund can pay to rebuild homes, but it cannot replace priceless family heirlooms or undo the trauma of surviving a disaster. Most of all, it cannot bring back lives lost. It is only one tool in a multi-pronged tool box to end the climate crisis.

Upstream solutions centering the prevention of climate change — that is, reducing carbon emissions at their source — must be at the center of our fight if humanity is to survive. But in the meantime, fossil fuel polluters should pay.

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Musk and Trump: A morbid spectacle

The spectacle of two billionaires – let’s call them M’ump — wanting more and more money and power is mortifying. No matter how much they have, it’s not enough. Their press conference in the Oval Office a couple of weeks ago — an old man slumped at the Resolute Desk, and a younger one posing, strutting and spouting inanities — could have been filmed in a crack house. Their addiction was showing. How many viewers averted their eyes in embarrassment?

M’ump has a disease, many psychologists argue, called “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” (NPD). The narcissist, according to well recognized symptomology, strives to demonstrate his superiority. He insists he is smarter, stronger, funnier, and better at sex than anyone else. He wants to be richer and more powerful too, and sometimes – as in the case of M’ump – he is. But that superiority produces no lasting satisfaction. To get his narcissistic fix, he must diminish, even destroy others, the better to affirm himself. At war with the world, he is a stranger to love, except self-love. But without a regular dose of adoration or fear, even that emotion is cribbed. When a person with NPD is furnished weapons or powerful institutions, he becomes dangerous, even deadly. Driven by motives both apparent and obscure, M’ump has forced hundreds of thousands into hiding or onto unemployment lines. His narcissistic impulses may soon kill thousand and endanger millions.

M’ump seems like an alien from Mars, but in fact, he is familiar, or at least his characteristic mentality is — greed. Everybody knows someone greedy; we’re greedy ourselves sometimes. The difference between us and M’ump is the duration and scale of avarice: M’ump is always and colossally greedy — morbidly greedy. But recognition of his greed – and its political foundation — may offer us a way to challenge it. Precisely because we instinctively revile greed, we can organize to stop it. Our slogan is simple: “Greed kills.”

Cultural and religious aversion to greed

Abhorrence of greed is as universal as the incest taboo. Among foragers (“hunter-gatherers) – whose mode of living prevailed for 90% of human history — sharing was the norm and hoarding punished by ostracism or other sanctions. (There are only a few surviving foraging communities.) But even in intensely hierarchical, pre-capitalist societies, reciprocity or “guest-friendship” – what the ancient Greeks called xenia (ξενία) – was the rule. Strangers must be greeted with gifts of food, drink, lodging, and even entertainment such as story-telling or song. They in turn must be courteous and reciprocate as hosts whenever they can.

Violation of the principle of xenia can lead to violence, even war. The Homeric epic begins with just such a breach: Paris, Menelaus’s guest at Sparta, kidnaps Helen to begin the Trojan war. In the end, Paris is killed, Troy is destroyed, and Helen is returned. There are multiple instances of xenia in the Odyssey and Iliad, including theoxenia, when a host welcomes a stranger who turns out to be a god. There’s a well-known example of theoxenia in Ovid’s Metamorphosis (8 C.E.). Disguised as peasants, Zeus and Hermes travel to Phrygia where they are repeatedly denied hospice. At the home of Philemon and Baucis however, they are greeted warmly and invited to share a meal. After revealing their divinity, they instruct the elderly couple to leave their home so they can destroy the

city with a flood while not harming them. After the water receded, a temple appears where the couple’s home had been, and Philemon and Baucis are granted their wish to become its caretakers.

The sin of the biblical inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah is usually understood to be lust. But according to early Rabbinic or Talmudic scholars (> 6^th century C.E.), their chief offense against God was greed — failure to extend hospitality to strangers. The Babylonian Talmud lists seven sins that if committed, bring on the plague of leprosy. One of them was “envy,” which encompassed greed and covetousness, prohibited by the tenth commandment of the Decalogue of Moses. Still today, the idea of welcoming strangers into one’s home survives among Jews in the ritual of Passover. It’s considered a mitzvah to welcome anyone who’s hungry to the feast, gentiles as well as Jews. At the conclusion of the seder, a door is opened and a glass of wine poured to accommodate the prophet Elijah, harbinger of the Messiah. The ritual is a re-enactment of theoxenia: a god disguised as a mortal stranger is welcomed into the home and given succor. Any Jew today who begins the Passover seder with the benediction “this is the bread of our affliction, let all who are hungry come and eat,” but reject immigrants, is a hypocrite and a shanda (שָׁנדע).

Xenia is also central to Christian teaching. Jesus washed the feet of his disciples (including Judas), fed a multitude, and offered shelter to the poor, sick, lost and homeless. The Apostle Paul admonished Christ’s followers to “pursue hospitality” (Romans 12:13). The 4^th century Julian the Hospitaller, patron saint of hospitality, renounced wealth and vain pursuits (especially hunting) to create a hospice for sick or weary pilgrims. St. Francis of Assisi ministered to the poor and the sick, and even extended xenia to animals and the inanimate world, “brother sun” and “sister moon.” The current fury against immigrants among white evangelicals is thus in profound opposition to longstanding doctrine in all Christian denominations. Anyone who builds walls to keep out immigrants, according to the current Pope Francis, “is not Christian.” He also said: “Greed is a sickness of the heart, not of the wallet.”

Capitalist greed: Adam Smith and Karl Marx

The two greatest theorists of capitalism also believed greed was bad, though for different reasons. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith argued that self-interest among tradesmen and manufacturers was to be applauded because it spurred over-production, abundance, low prices and general prosperity. (This would later be called supply-side or trickle-down economics.) But in Wealth and his earlier book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) Smith also tempered this viewpoint. Because we live in community with others, we have an obligation to protect the general welfare. Smith writes: “When the happiness or misery of others depends in any respect upon our conduct, we dare not, as self-love might suggest to us, prefer the interest of one to that of many”. Moreover, greed is eventually checked by public outrage, while fairness is validated by approbation. People prefer to truck with generous traders than greedy ones. A good capitalist is ethical, he claimed.

Historical evidence suggests otherwise. The textile manufacturers of early 19^th C. Britain, the robber barons of early 20^th C. America, and the pharmaceutical manufacturers, oil giants, online retailers, hedge fund traders, and social media executives of today became immensely rich by exploiting employees, abusing customers, and degrading the very climate. There are thousands of other examples of greedy businessmen who are wildly successful. Elon Musk is the world’s richest man because he has fought off unions, layed off masses of workers, and soiled the internet with hatred and lies. He gives little to charity. Trump has become the most powerful person in the world by cheating creditors, lying to customers, abusing women, and attacking the weakest and most vulnerable people – migrants and asylum seekers. He too is uncharitable. Greed is universally regarded as evil, but it pays. Karl Marx explained why.

Marx was capitalism’s greatest admirer, but also its most trenchant critic. He recognized that modern trade and manufacturing created enormous wealth and the material basis for a society of abundance and mutuality – but only if capitalism was eventually superseded. The system’s fundamental feature – the production and exchange of commodities for the sake of profit — was also an agent of moral degradation. Capitalist production

“has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it—when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc. . . . In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having.”

This exaltation of the “sense of having” – we may call it greed – has destroyed our relationships with others, deranged our sensibilities, and even diminished our physical pleasures. Marx wrote this in 1844, well before his magnum opus, Capital (1867). In the latter work, he recognized more clearly that it wasn’t greed per se that drove the capitalist, but the requirement to increase profits to compete with other capitalists. Under conditions of capitalist competition, Frederick Engels wrote in 1877:

“The bare factual possibility of [the capitalist] extending his sphere of production, becomes transformed, for him, into a compulsory law. The enormous expansive force of modern industry…appears now before our eyes as a qualitative and quantitative need to expand which laughs at all resistance.”

Greed or the desire to accumulate, according to Marx and Engels, was not a bug in the system of capitalist production, but its key feature. And what’s true at the individual level, is true at the system level: A functioning, capitalist economy must always be growing. “Accumulate, accumulate!” Marx wrote in Capital: “That is Moses and the prophets!” ​But because production is a social enterprise – think factory floor, department store or warehouse – workers can join and resist their alienation and exploitation. They can fight a system of rationalized greed. Capitalism, the argument goes, spawns its own gravediggers. (But when?)

Erich Von Stroheim’s Greed (1924)

Greed is a film classic and a polemic against avarice. Its creator, Erich von Stroheim, wrote the screenplay (based upon a popular novel by Frank Norris) produced the film, directed it, and even hand color-tinted some of the frames. He was given near complete creative independence by his studio boss, Abe Lehr at the Goldwyn Company, but overplayed his hand. The film went way over budget and ran nearly six hours; the plan was to show it in

theatres on consecutive days with intermissions. When Irving Thalberg replaced Lehr as studio head just prior to the film’s release, he demanded it be drastically cut – it was reduced to just two hours with lots of titles inserted to ensure continuity. That’s the version best known today. In 1999, a nearly four-hour version was constructed using recovered stills.

http://Erich von Stroheim, Dir., Greed, 1924. (Screen shot)

The film was formally innovative. Von Stroheim deployed montage, derived from Sergei Eisenstein, chiaroscuro, as seen in Robert Weine’s Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), and deep focus, found in F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). That the director’s cinematic lexicon came in part from horror films was not coincidental. Greed was a kind of horror film: The female protagonist, named Trina Sieppe (played by ZaSu Pitts), changes from blushing bride to grotesque miser, and her husband John McTeague (Gilbert Gowland) from dentist to double murderer. They are each vampiric, and Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1899) and its film adaptation by Murnau are each recalled.

But if the film is avant-garde in style and subject, its politics are more rear facing. Though it’s possible to find in the film a critique of the gross, economic inequalities engendered by contemporary capitalism (the “Roaring ‘20s”), the film is more plausibly a throwback to pre-Marxist critiques of wealth, such as by Thomas Carlyle. In the first chapter of Past and Present (1843) titled “Midas,” Carlyle writes:

“Laissez-faire, Supply-and-demand — one begins to be weary of all that. Leave all to egoism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of applause: — it is the Gospel of Despair!”

That last phrase, “Gospel of Despair” would have been a good subtitle for Greed. Trina wins $5000 in a lottery but is miserable, vowing never to spend a penny of it. Her slow-witted husband McTeague tolerates her avarice, until he loses his job as a dentist because of the treachery of his former friend Marcus Schouler (Jean Hersholt) who exposes to authorities McTeague’s lack of professional credentials. After that, McTeague grows impatient, and then desperate for money. When Trina refuses to part with any, he kills her and flees their home in San Francisco for the wilderness, ultimately crossing Death Valley by mule. That’s where he meets Marcus, who wants to capture his former friend to collect a bounty, as well as the $5,000 in gold that McTeague took from his wife. In the climactic scene, the two fight until Marcus is killed. But in the struggle, McTeague’s last canteen of water is destroyed, and he becomes handcuffed to Marcus. The last shot of the film is of a parched desert with slumped figures in the distant background, one dead, the other awaiting death’s deliverance.

The specific, capitalist character of modern greed is nowhere to be seen in the film. In 1924, the richest man in the world was John D. Rockefeller, a billionaire monopolist, whose worth equaled almost 3% of U.S. gross domestic product. If the film were true to modern greed, Trina would have used some of her fortune to bribe a city official so that her husband could have stayed in business as a dentist. She’d then have expanded the practice, bought out rivals and established a monopoly in San Francisco. With accumulated profits, she would have purchased the companies that make dental equipment. Finally, having achieved vertical and horizontal integration and a vast fortune, she would have established the Sieppe/McTeague Foundation to cleanse her reputation by giving money to arts organizations, hospitals and universities.

Understanding M’ump

Two-headed M’ump has no antipathy to greed. He’s a pathological narcissist who endangers democracy with his impulsivity. But to understand this better, M’ump must now be disambiguated.

Donald Trump is a real estate developer born of a Brooklyn developer, Fred Trump. The latter succeeded by stealth, craft, glad-handing, and graft; he lined the pockets of Democratic Party machers and was rewarded with planning approvals, zoning variances, and tax write-offs. The son’s initial triumph, the acquisition and refurbishment of the old Commodore Hotel on East 42^nd Street, was made possible by Fred’s connections, party machine donations, and the help of mob lawyer Roy Cohn, Senator Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel during the Army-McCarthy hearings.

Trump lacked his father’s savvy. In Manhattan in the 1980s, he was a bull in a China shop. His vulgarity, promiscuity and ostentation, his cooperation with mob bosses from the Genovese and Gambino crime families, and general air of hucksterism, turned off politicians and investors. Long time New York mayor Ed Koch said: “I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue was notarized,” and called him “greedy, greedy, greedy.” Trump’s deals in the 1990s to develop casinos, airlines, hotels and yachts were all flops, leading to six commercial bankruptcies. But by dint of luck and prevarication, Donald landed a job as host of a new TV series, “The Apprentice.” Over the course of his 14 years on the program, he made over $200 hundred million. Combined with the $413 million he received from his father over the years, he was by the time of his first presidential campaign in 2016, a very rich man.

But if Trump’s actual business moxie is mythical, his self-identification as a successful real estate entrepreneur is real. And like the hedgehog, he understands one big thing: that speculation in land is a potential source of wealth, and that the purchase of low value residences or businesses, and their re-sale as higher value ones is his purpose in life. In recent years, rent has supplanted arbitrage as his main income source, especially the franchising of the Trump name. Rent, Marx observed in Capital, vol. III, is an unusual source of value for three reasons:

“In the first place, by the preponderant influence exerted here by location…. And secondly, by the palpable and complete passiveness of the owner, whose sole activity consists…in exploiting the progress of social development, toward which he contributes nothing and for which he risks nothing, unlike the industrial capitalist; and finally by the…shameless exploitation of poverty, for poverty is more lucrative for house-rent than the mines of Potosi ever were for Spain.”

Trump’s attitude toward governance is that of the developer and rent-seeker. He wants to seize Gaza, move out the beleaguered Palestinians, and lease the cleared land for a new Riviera. He wants Ukraine to promise him a portion of the value of its natural resources (rent) in exchange for not abandoning them to the predations of Russia. He wants the Panama Canal so he can collect rent from it, and Greenland to lease out its mineral rights. He admires the U.S. fossil fuel and mining industries not just because they maim and kill millions (Trump enjoys the spectacle of ruthlessness in others) but because they are the most successful rent-seeking enterprises in the history of the world. Renewable energy does not generate ground rent to nearly the same extent; in fact, distributed solar (rooftops) creates almost none – Trump loathes it. Trump’s greed is thus both old school and up-to-the-moment, but it always involves the “shameless exploitation of poverty.”

Musk’s greed takes a different form. He’s an industrialist and more recently, a social media and tech tycoon. Except for their narcissism and greed, he and Trump have little in common. Musk made his money from automobile manufacturing, like Henry Ford 120 years before, but with this difference: He invented nothing, and was supported for years by subsidies from the federal government ($465 million in 2010), consumer tax rebates on electric cars, and tax credits paid by U.S. car manufacturers who fail to sell the federally mandated number of low-emission vehicles. In addition, Musk benefitted from quantitative easing during and just after the pandemic. When in 2020, the U.S. Federal Reserve bought $700 billion in assets to boost market liquidity, it increased share prices in nearly all sectors. The value of Elon Musk’s shares in Tesla increased in a single year from $25 billion to $150 billion. Since that time, the ongoing asset bubble – plus market optimism from Trump’s support — has multiplied Musk’s worth by three, even as sales of Teslas have slumped badly. In addition, the U.S. space program has now largely been privatized, enabling Musk’s SpaceX to collect billions more in profit, even while blowing up at least half a dozen rockets in the process. (A public agency like NASA wouldn’t be allowed so many failures.) Internal share trading has now made SpaceX the most valuable private start-up company ( a “unicorn”) in the world.

Musk is also a rentier, or what some call a “neo-feudal” capitalist. His platform X, formerly Twitter, makes most of its money by data licensing (selling or renting user information for AI training) and ads (renting eyeballs to advertisers). X users are thus “serfs”, providing value without being paid. That makes Musk lord of the manner, and he acts it – strutting, preening, boasting, and goading others to ravage and pillage. The spectacle of the world’s richest man gleefully firing probationary workers making $35,000 per year is gross. He wants more and more and will part with nothing. He is like Trina in Greed; Trump may in time tire of his antics and become McTeague.

Greed kills

I have called the spectacle of M’ump mortifying, embarrassing and gross. But in fact, it’s worse; it’s deadly. Last week, The New York Times published a story about M’ump’s dismantling of USAID. Counterpunch readers are likely aware of the organization’s serious limitations: that most of the funding goes to a small number of intermediary organizations that purchase U.S. not local supplies and foodstuffs; that USAID has in the past been complicit in U.S. terror, and that its impact on global health and welfare over the life of the organization (founded during the Kennedy administration) has been negligible. And yet: programs in Sudan and Nigeria to fend off malnutrition, and in Kenya to treat tuberculosis and H.I.V. have been halted. Polio may return to the places it has been eliminated. In Afghanistan, an online women’s university has been shut down since late January. In Indonesia, initiatives to treat malaria and H.I.V. have ended. And so on.

In the U.S., funding to monitor toxic chemicals in the air and water and protect drinking water from sewage and agricultural run-off have been frozen or rescinded. Disaster relief has been stopped. The poorest communities in the country – white and Black, rural and urban, red states and blue states – are the worst impacted, but everyone suffers (and thousands will die) from diminished air quality and additional toxins in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. In nearly every culture and religion, individual greed is considered a sin or perhaps a mental illness. At the scale it is practiced by Trump and Musk, it’s nothing less than murder.

 

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There’s something spectacular about seeing the face of a newborn. Maybe this is partly because of some personal nostalgia, a reminder of when I first held my own kids in my arms. But there’s more. Perhaps in the case of Valentina, the baby I was about to meet, it was because she was born in a shelter for migrants, far away from her parents’ home in Guerrero. Or perhaps it was because she represented hope; at least that’s what her father, José, told me a week ago during my interview with him at the Casa de la Misericordia y de Todas las Naciones, located in Nogales, Sonora. Since 2020, the Casa has housed asylum seekers, who can stay for months as they go through the long bureaucratic process to get a hearing with the U.S. government. When I finished the interview with José in one of the shelter’s dormitories, where he and his family had been staying for almost a year, he asked me if I wanted to see Valentina, who was born February 4. She was the first newborn at the shelter since Donald Trump’s inauguration.

I had come to the border that day because I was curious about the aftermath of the Trump inauguration from the perspective of the Mexican side of the border. The Casa is located on the far southeastern edge of the city, and it took us nearly 40 minutes to get there through heavy traffic from the international boundary line. I came with Pastor Randy Mayer, of the Good Shepherd United Church of Christ in southern Arizona, who brings food to the shelter every week. From the vantage point of the window, the border city of nearly 400,000 people—and 100 maquiladoras—seemed to grind on as usual. When I later interviewed José, he told me that he had worked at one of those maquilas for a month when they first arrived, a U.S. aerospace company called Carlisle that made wiring cables for airplanes. José said he and his family initially “didn’t think we were going to come here,” and it became a serious option only after the death threats got intense. José had been working for the Mexican military in Veracruz when a criminal group (“malandros” was the word he used in Spanish) tried to recruit him. He returned to the small farming community in Guerrero where he was grew up, thinking that the change in location would solve the problem. But the threats from the malandros kept coming. They called his wife, Graciela, and told her that if José didn’t work with them (what they wanted him to do specifically, José didn’t reveal), they were going to come for the family. When José, Graciela, and at the time their three children came to Nogales, they ran into the border and its difficult, cumbersome asylum system. After struggling to make ends meet while working at the maquila and renting an apartment, the family came to live at the Casa.

As we drove across town, we passed the tent encampment recently built on a sports complex by the Mexican government to receive deportees, through a program called México Te Abraza. This shelter was mostly empty, according to Sister Alma Angélica Macías Mejía, the director of the Casa de la Misericordia. The day before, there had been seven deportations, she told me—information she got from Mexican immigration. Daily deportations were way down from the year before, when there were at least 100 a day, with numbers sometimes spiking to 600 or 700, Macías Mejía told me. “Entre el dicho y el hecho hay mucho trecho,” she said, referring to Trump’s bravado as “all talk no action,” before reminding me how many deportations happened under Democratic presidents like Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton. But when I asked, she agreed that this could change quickly, especially as a $175 billion border and immigration enforcement package made its way through the U.S. Congress.

I also did not see an increased presence of military, which I expected after Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum announced the deployment of 10,000 troops to the border, though I saw Guardia Nacional soldiers in desert camo at the ports of entry. When we arrived to the Casa, Macías Mejía made clear that the biggest impact since the inauguration was neither the deployment of additional troops nor the arrival of thousands of deportees. By far the biggest issue was a bureaucratic one: the cancellation of the CBP One app.

Not that the app was great, but it was the only way asylum seekers had to get an appointment. And it took a long time to get an appointment, usually 10 months, if not more. Longer—José mentioned—than it takes for a baby to enter and leave the womb. José’s family applied every single day (you have to do it separately for each member of your family), and they never received an appointment, even as the death threats loomed. There were many problems with the app; for example, it would give you only one minute to fill in your information, including taking or scanning photos of all the applicants, before the window closed.

When Trump took office on January 20, José and his family had been at the shelter for nine months, as had many of the other 120 or so people staying there. At 10 a.m. that day, Macías Mejía said she was out in front of the parking lot in front of the main office of the Casa when a woman approached her and said that her phone wasn’t working. She couldn’t get in to see her appointment. Then another person arrived with the same problem. Then came the avalanche. Another woman came with tears in her eyes. She was the encargada (head) of the kitchen. She said, “Madre, they canceled my appointment.” Macías Mejía said, “What?” “I received an email that said they canceled my appointment.” The loss of an appointment after months and months of waiting, months and months of dealing with a frustrating app, months and months living in a place you don’t know, with little to no money, with an uncertain future—to lose that appointment was crushing. There were four families, 15 people, with appointments on January 21, 22, 24, and 28. Macías Mejía knew the exact dates. There were others with appointments in February and March.

People started arriving from all the corners of the shelter, which is a complex with many buildings and dormitories. “You could see the burdens they were carrying on their bodies,” Macías Mejía said, describing people trudging up the hill.

“It was as if they were carrying a dead loved one,” she said. “It was as if people’s hopes died right there.”

A spontaneous meeting took place with the 120 people who were staying at the Casa, by the large wood-burning oven outside the comedor, the shelter’s cafeteria. Macías Mejía said she didn’t know what to do. But she knew they needed a place to process what was going on. “We aren’t the problem,” Macías Mejía remembered saying to everyone. She told me it was necessary to see the problem from a distance, but it was difficult because the situation was so intense.

“The tempest is not always here,” Macías Mejía said, trying to cultivate hope. “After the storm comes the calm. And the rainbow. The colors of life.” She told me it was significant that they met by the oven. There was something about the oven. It was where people from all over the planet who stayed at the Casa baked the bread of their heritage. It was also a place designed to warm things up, warm each other up. It was a place to settle down. “And we weren’t going to make any decisions,” she said. “In difficult moments, you don’t move, you wait for things to settle. And only then would decisions be made.”

During my interview with José, I asked him how things were going with their newborn. His face relaxed. “In reality,” he said, “the child took away the anxiety we were feeling. Instead, there was an intense feeling of happiness. Our problems, at least for a little bit, evaporated.”

Then he asked me, “Do you want to see her?” I felt honored.

As we walked down the hall, I thought about how José’s family didn’t lose their appointment, because they never had one to begin with. And now, after the CBP One cancellation, there was no longer any way for them to apply. Trump said he was going to reinstate the Migrant Protection Protocols(Remain in Mexico), but that still hadn’t happened. Between 30 and 40 people left. According to Macías Mejía, many were prepared to come back if necessary. One family went to Ciudad Juárez, to be closer to their son who was in Texas. Others went to find work to pay off their debts, often loans to make the trip north. Lawyers told the people whose appointments were canceled to make sure they had proof. If rights groups succeed in appealingTrump’s executive order, things might move fast, even from day to night.

José stopped in front of the closed door of their room and told his wife, Graciela, that we were about to enter. At first it felt a little strange going into their room, their space. But this feeling quickly dissipated when Graciela walked toward me beaming, Valentina swaddled in her arms. There were several bunk beds around the small room, where I imagined the family had been sleeping since April. Graciela removed the blanket, revealing Valentina’s soft, vulnerable face, her eyes squinting in from the streaming sunshine coming through the window, and her remarkable head of wild black hair. I looked up from Valentina to José, who was beaming now as well. After I left, and contemplated the day, and what was happening on the border, what I kept remembering was simply Valentina’s face. Maybe nothing better explained what was really going on.

This first appeared on The Border Chronicles.

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Rational people should share a sense of amazement that virtually all European political “leaders” and Western professional commentators appear to view with shock and horror the possibility that the United States and Russia, the two major nuclear powers with the capacity to destroy human life, might have correct and cooperative, rather than hostile, relations.

One can understand why those financially and/or professionally invested in the for-profit Hate, Fear and War Industry, with its existential need for enemies and threats, would view a world at peace as unthinkable, but why should anyone else do so?

In my youth, the era of “détente” between the United States and the Soviet Union was widely welcomed as an excellent development.

Why should “détente” today be castigated as the ultimate evil of simple minds — “appeasement”?

Another source of rational amazement should be the apparently unanimous belief among European political “leaders” that, if relations between the United States and Russia were no longer to be hostile, so that the United States would no longer see any need for the military support of European “allies” or vassal states, European military spending would need to be significantly increased.

Why? To counter what military threat?

It should be clear that, with the possible exception of the current NATO/Russia proxy war, the wars in which European countries have become directly or indirectly involved in this century — against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Palestine, none of which posed any conceivable threat to Europe but all of which were perceived as enemies by the United States and/or Israel — involved them because of their relationship as “allies” or vassal states of the United States, a relationship which has dragged them into unnecessary wars rather than protected them from war.

Even the current war in Ukraine was not provoked and perpetuated in defense of any consistent Western principle (https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/02/24/the-territorial-integrity-of-states-vs-the-self-determination-of-peoples) or any genuine European interest but, rather, in furtherance of the decades-long American quest for “full-spectrum dominance” of mankind and the planet.

If European countries were no longer allied with a Russia-hating United States, why would Russia, which in three years of fighting has been unable even to occupy all the territory of the four Russophone-majority oblasts which it formally annexed in September 2022, have any conceivable incentive to attack a NATO country or even a post-NATO European country?

Rationally, if European countries were to achieve independence from American domination and control, whether by their own initiative or by having independence thrust upon them, and, as a result, have no identifiable enemies, real or imagined, they should be able to significantly decrease their military spending and consecrate their freed-up resources to trying to improve the quality of life for their own people.

Has the world gone mad? Or have I?

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I think that Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have been misinformed. I don’t disagree with their shutting down USAID, but I think it’s rather small fry.  There are much, much bigger fish to fry if you want to really save U.S. government money that is being wasted in programs that are mischievously justified as aid to the poor people of the world.

Elon, hear me out:  if you walk northwest from your headquarters at the Eisenhower Executive Building along Pennsylvania Avenue, you’ll come after one long block upon two ugly buildings squatting beside each other. One is the World Bank. The other is the International Monetary Fund (IMF). You can actually just walk in and demand to look at their books since they are extensions of the U.S. government. And you would have a very good reason to do so, since these are two of the most questionable and controversial institutions directly or indirectly funded with U.S. taxpayers’ money.

Let me start with the World Bank, which is located at 1818 H St NW.  This institution has so-called development projects throughout the Global South, otherwise known as developing countries. This agency says that its mission is to end poverty in the developing world. To fulfill this goal, its lending has risen from nearly $55 billion in 2015 to $117.5 billion in 2024. Yet, despite this massive increase, the Bank admits that global poverty reduction “has slowed to a near standstill, with 2020-2030 set to be a lost decade.” Some 3.5 billion people, or 44 percent of the globe, remain poor, after decades of massive World Bank lending. And a major part of the reason is that World Bank programs have created poverty instead of alleviating it.

Living in Luxury While “Fighting Poverty”

To manage its operations, the Bank’s full-time staff rose from nearly 12,000 in 2015 to over 13,000 in 2023.  These figures are just the tip of the iceberg. If one includes all employees—permanent, non-permanent, contractual, part-time—throughout the world, the Bank employs close to 41,000 people. The vast majority, 26,000, or 63 percent, work out of the World Bank headquarters in Washington, DC, and only 3,200 are located in Africa, where most people in extreme poverty live.

The Bank’s economists and top administrators are among the highest paid financial functionaries in the world, which explains the reason why the Bank is a major cause of the brain drain from developing countries: a great number of highly trained economists from developing countries prefer to work at the Bank instead of their home countries, with some going straight from Ivy League or British graduate schools to Washington, DC.  Many within the Bank and the International Monetary Fund complain about the “South Asian Mafia” that they claim controls employment opportunities for economists and higher-level staff in the two organizations.

The World Bank has come under fire for the billions it has spent supporting fossil-fuel projects throughout the Third World that have contributed to global warming and to mega-dam projects that have displaced millions. The Bank, along with the Fund, has also gained notoriety for imposing “structural adjustment” programs guided by the radical principles  of the “Washington Consensus” that are designed to promote globalization but have, instead, increased poverty and deepened inequality.  The reason World Bank projects and programs don’t work or create exactly the opposite of their intended goals is because they are based on questionable propositions built on little or no empirical evidence. An assessment made a few years ago by an all-star team of renowned economists led by Princeton’s Angus Deaton, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics, was damning:

[The] panel had substantial criticisms of the way that the research was used to proselytize on behalf of Bank policy, often without taking a balanced view, and without expressing appropriate skepticism. Internal research that is favorable to Bank positions was given great prominence, and unfavorable research ignored. In these cases, we believe that there was a serious failure of checks and balances that should have separated advocacy and research. The panel endorses the right of the Bank to strongly defend and advocate its own policies. But when the Bank leadership selectively appeals to relatively new and untested research as hard evidence that thes preferred policies work, it lends unwarranted confidence to the Bank’s prescriptions. Placing fragile selected new research results on a pedestal invites later recrimination that undermines the credibility and usefulness of all Bank research.

The Bank’s refusal to acknowledge real-world refutations of its pro-globalization advocacy and its unbalanced, one-sided research led to justifiable rejection of its advice by the people who were suffering from the policies it was implementing, confessed Paul Collier, head of the Bank’s Research Development Department of the Bank from 1998 to 2003:

The profession has been unprofessional, fearful that any criticism would strengthen populism, so that little work has been done on the downsides of these different processes [of globalization]. Yet the downsides were apparent to ordinary citizens, and the effect of economists appearing to dismiss them has resulted in widespread refusal of people to listen to “experts.” For my profession to re-establish credibility we must provide a more balanced analysis, in which the downsides are acknowledged and properly evaluated with a view to designing policy responses that address them. The profession may be better served by mea culpa than by further indignant defenses of globalization.

Despite the high rate of failure of its lending programs acknowledged in internal World Bank assessments, the World Bank administrative budget that supports the high salaries of its economists and other high-level staff just keeps growing. The World Bank (IBRD/IDA) administrative budget was approved at $3.5 billion for FY25, a sizable rise from the $3.1 billion authorized for FY 2024, with no convincing reason at all.

The IMF and the Art of Worsening Financial Crises

The International Monetary Fund, whose address is 700 19^th St NW, is the World Bank’s sister agency.  It has a full-time staff of 3,100, supported by a budget of $1.5 billion. The IMF’s economists are paid even higher than those at the World Bank, and they evoke more fear, hatred, and contempt than the Bank.

The IMF has an equally controversial history. It has a record of coming in to supposedly assist developing economies in crisis, only to make things worse. Its greatest debacle and scandal was its performance during the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98, when the so-called “tiger economies “of the East and Southeast Asia were destabilized by the massive inflows and outflows of foreign portfolio investment.

The Fund was heavily criticized on three counts. First, it had encouraged the governments of the region to eliminate capital controls, thus provoking uncontrolled capital flows. Second, it assembled multi-billion dollar “rescue packages” that went to rescue not the people suffering from the crisis but to compensate the foreign financial speculators that had lost millions in dubious speculative ventures, thus encouraging “moral hazard,” or irresponsible investing. Third, its measures to stabilize the damaged economies intensified the crisis, since instead of encouraging government spending to counteract the collapse of private sector, it told the governments to radically cut spending, leading to a “procyclical” negative synergy that ended in deep recession.

In just a few weeks, one million people in Thailand and 22 million in Indonesia fell below the poverty line. The only country that contained the crisis was Malaysia, which refused to follow the Fund’s dictates and imposed capital and currency controls

So disastrous were the IMF’s interventions that George Schultz, President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the Treasury, called for its abolition for encouraging moral hazard, and prominent economists like Jagdish Bhagwati and Jeffrey Sachs accused it of provoking global macroeconomic instability. Indeed, a rare conservative-liberal alliance in the U.S. Congress came within a hair’s breath of denying the IMF a $14.5 billion replenishment.

Eventually, the Fund was forced to admit that the “thrust of fiscal policy…turned out to be substantially different…because the original assumptions for economic growth, capital flows, and exchange rates…were proved drastically wrong.” But things were never the same again. The IMF was so reviled for its performance that Asian governments developed IMF-phobia, swearing never again to ask the IMF for rescue even in the most dire circumstances. For instance, after paying off what Thailand owed the IMF, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra declared the country “liberated” from the Fund in 2004.

Instead of learning from its debacle during the Asian Financial Crisis, the IMF stumbled into another fiasco more than a decade later, during the Global Financial Crisis. It allowed itself to be hijacked by Germany, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank to provide billions of public money to rescue German financial institutions and investors that had engaged in an orgy of irresponsible lending to Greece to the tune of 25 billion euros. To get the so-called rescue funds, the Greek government, like the Asian governments previously, was forced to adopt severe austerity measures that drove unemployment up to 28 percent and condemned the Greek economy to permanent stagnation, only to turn the money it was ostensibly receiving over to the German banks.

Not surprisingly, so long as the IMF is there, the big international banks will assume that they will be bailed out for making irresponsible loans.

The U.S. and the Bretton Woods Twins: Fiction and Fact

There is a fiction that the IMF and World Bank are multilateral institutions that are owned by their many member governments. The reality is that the United States controls both institutions, with a 17.4 percent share of total quotas at the Fund and 15.8 per cent share of voting power at the Bank.  These shares give the U.S. government a veto power over any policy change. But the truth is that U.S. power is not limited to its being able to veto policy decisions it does not like. No country would dare oppose a move by the United States to radically cut the administrative budgets (by, say, 75 percent initially) and the number of personnel in the two organizations (to 600 personnel each, as in the case of USAID) if it wanted to do so. All it needs to do to get its way is to threaten to withhold its contributions to the two organizations. I can guarantee that immediately the interest rate at which the Bank borrows in international capital markets would leap upward, paralyzing its lending operations.

The IMF and the World Bank are monuments to misguided economic thinking and policies that have brought much misery to the peoples of the Global South. They are institutions that no longer serve any purpose except to perpetuate and enlarge themselves. If Elon Musk and Donald Trump are really serious about radically downsizing bloated bureaucracies, they could not have better targets than the Bretton Woods twins.

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Only half-jokingly, I often say that the reason that I am involved in medical education is to be able to say to students, “You don’t know who Paul Farmer is? Well, he’s just the greatest international rock star of bringing health care to the poor.”

In his public pronouncements about how he thinks about the October 7, 2023 Al Aqsa Flood operation – Norman Finkelstein says that with Noam Chomsky out of commission, he is forced to reason morally and ethically on his own. Indeed, I feel much the same way about Chomsky myself. I also feel that way about Paul Farmer. In my being-in-the-world as a health practitioner, Farmer has served as a moral compass. Since his passing in February 2022, I feel that I am forced to reason morally and ethically on my own. I do, however, believe that we can keep our friends with us by continuing to engage with them.

When I was a resident at Cook County Hospital in Chicago in the late 1980s, my patients with HIV/AIDS would inevitably die, mostly of opportunistic infections. With the advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy, announced in 1996, HIV/AIDS became a treatable condition. The antiretrovirals don’t cure you of the virus, but as long as you take the medications every day, the virus is suppressed. The problem was that most of the people with HIV/AIDS lived in developing countries, and the new therapy (with proprietary medications) cost on the order of $13,000 per year. The administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), in Congressional testimony in 2001, specifically opposed antiretroviral treatment for Africans because, he claimed, “They do not use western means for telling time. They use the sun. These drugs have to be administered during a certain sequence of time during the day – and when you say take it at 10:00, people will say, what do you mean by 10:00?”

Farmer, having built a hospital in Central Haiti, managed to beg, borrow, and steal the antivirals from Harvard hospitals. He hired community health workers (accompagnateurs) to deliver the medications on a daily basis (directly-observed therapy). At the 2002 International AIDS Conference, he presented the successful results of the Haiti Partners in Health program. At the time, only Brazil had a national antiretroviral program.

Farmer was also invited to the White House by Anthony Fauci to present the Partners in Health findings. Subsequently, at his January 2003 State of the Union address, George W. Bush announced the Presidential Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to provide antiretroviral therapy for people living with HIV/AIDS in low-income countries. Of note, during this address Bush also essentially announced the invasion of Iraq, which would start in March 2003.

While the new Trump administration has halted a substantial proportion of foreign aid assistance, much of it funneled through the USAID – apparently PEPFAR falls under the humanitarian waiver announced by Secretary of State Rubio in January. Some PEPFAR programs such as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) will be restricted, however. Moreover, the funding for the health care workforce that delivers the antiretrovirals has been cut. We must keep in mind that interruptions of even a few days of antiretroviral therapy can have dire consequences. (You don’t die of opportunistic infections right away, but the remaining HIV virus in the body becomes resistant, so the first-line antiretrovirals don’t work any more.)

Undoubtedly Paul would have been saddened by the current situation. After all, he believed in health as a human right, and that all humans must be included “under the rubric ‘human.’” Probably mustering all his charisma, he managed to convince the government bureaucrats of this (not so radical) notion.

In late 2009 I was in Boston for a medical meeting, and I met Paul over dinner. He happened to be staying at a hotel north of Harvard Square. I arrived and told the front desk person that I was there to meet Dr. Farmer. He came downstairs after a while and apologetically said, “Sorry, I was on the phone with Bill.” At the time, Paul was serving in a volunteer role as the United Nations Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti, under Bill Clinton.

Over dinner, Paul told me that he had been reading about the FDR administration. He was inspired by the ideal of public, meaning government, service. By this time, Paul had moved his family and his work to Rwanda. Rather than focusing on a charity, as he had initially done in Haiti – Farmer was working with the post-genocide government to improve public services for health.

He told me of how the Obama administration, specifically the Hillary Clinton State Department, had wanted to nominate him to become the administrator of USAID. In preparation for his Senate confirmation hearings, he had brought two bags of his books and papers to the State Department – so that staffers could comb through them for anything that might be construed as disqualifying by unfriendly Senators. For example, in his early books about Haiti, he had recounted how, in response to cases of African swine fever, in 1981-83 the Haitian Kreyol pigs were exterminated. With USAID funds, they were replaced with Iowa porkers, which were unsuited to the Haitian environs and quickly died off – leading to economic disaster for the Haitian peasantry. (See “When the Clintons Did Haiti,” on the Clinton administration’s USAID population control program in Haiti during the 1990s.) The geographically broad and historically deep context, as Farmer was wont to say, was to view Haiti as a Latin American country, in the colonial and neo-colonial orbit of the U.S. The Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier regimes were continually backed by the U.S.

Seemingly changing the subject, Paul asked if I had read the recent Jane Mayer piece in The New Yorker (The Predator War, 19 Oct 2009) about the White House CIA drone program. No, I hadn’t. By the time of that article in late 2009, Obama had launched as many drone strikes on Pakistan as had the George W. Bush administration during its last three years. It came out later that this was a regularly scheduled weekly Tuesday morning appointment for Obama, to choose who would be extrajudicially killed by drone. Paul asked, “Did you know that the administrator of the USAID is on the National Security Council?” No, I hadn’t known that.

“I just couldn’t be a part of that,” said Paul.

Sure, Paul Farmer would have been an unparalleled public servant. After all, one of his mottoes was “to move resources from where they are to where they are not.” Under him, there probably would have been fewer incompetent screw-ups like the pig extermination episode.  But he had no illusions about the role of the U.S. in the world. He asked about one international relations journal, “Would that be the journal for war criminals, or is that the one for budding war criminals?” In the end, he just couldn’t be a part of that.

Yeah, Paul was buddies with Bill. But being invited to be buddies with Hillary and Barack, too? He could tell that his acquiescence was being sought for some nefarious ends. He could tell that he was being set up as a patsy for the deep state.

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There is one common reason for the collapse of democracy: capitalist society has outlived its strength. The national and international antagonisms which break out in it destroy the democratic structure just as world antagonisms are destroying the democratic structure of the League of Nations. Where the progressive class shows itself unable to seize power so as to-reconstruct society on the basis of socialism, capitalism in its agony can only preserve its existence by using the most brutal, anti-cultural methods, the extreme expression of which is Fascism. That historic fact appears in Hitler’s victory

– Leon Trotsky, March 1933, written on the occasion of Hitler’s victory

We are in an intensely good guys/bad guys cultural mindset. I describe it as a cultural imaginary because how we see our enemies is more of how we imagine them than how we’ve experienced them. We don’t hang with those living differently than we do so we have little firsthand knowledge. But we read, listen and see representations of what we do not have firsthand knowledge. But it’s a passionate seeing and hearing in that we are already responding within a space in which everything is already tagged. There’s no neutral position outside anything because we are always already positioned in mind and heart someplace.

Right now, there’s a contesting of narratives going on at an intense level but one that has sidelined the classic Capital vs. Labor struggle, as well as another chapter of the Civil Rights movement that was heating up after George Floyd, as well as the Reaganomics of the Chicago school of economics, as well, and the neo-liberal regime change policies of the G. W. Bush circle. These have all been overwritten and vacated by our pro and con Donald J. Trump cultural imaginary.

Whether you choose to be somewhere else, if you are in the U.S. right now, you are in a place Trump is creating for you. By a flurry of executive orders, he is upending the world you knew.

Those who believe that ask how has a personality ascended to the U.S. presidency twice without offering any credentials beyond destructive and vindictive intentions? He hasn’t written a Mein Kampf, or opposed Marx with National Socialism. There’s no “Quotations from Chairman Mao.” No Little Red Book. MAGA is a campaign slogan, like Obama’s ‘Yes, we can,” neither a political ideology. But he is effectively trying to replace a Constitutional balance of powers with himself. Autocracy, not electoral democracy.

Those who hold that Trump is turning the world right side up after the ruinous Biden presidency as he did after the ruinous Obama presidency, do not cherish a balance of powers or the Constitution that grounds such. It’s all led to a “woke” and DEI desecration of traditional American social and moral values. Trump is the strong man who can act decisively and quickly to destroy degenerate values and bring back the greatness of America. Savior, not megalomaniac.

The results of this Presidential election reveal that more voters frame Trump as their champion than as an emissary from Hell. But his victory goes deeper. It signifies that a way of knowing and a way of being in the world have become rigidly dualistic. In a way this fits the zero sum game of capitalism, as well as the antagonism of moral categories. On the level of political strategy, you can observe that Trump has adhered to a time honored strategy to reach enough voters to win an election. Remember, the clash of opposing narratives is a clash of opposing ways in which the world appears. To change your opponent’s mind is to change the world as they know it and live in it.

Here Trump has won and every stripe of Democrat has lost. Good guys and bad guys.

The clash going on follows what film critics called “the classic realist” formula: John Wayne is the good guy and the bad guy is the guy he beats up. Wayne wants to do something good for the folks, maybe save them; the bad guys aren’t Christians or honest but degenerate. When evil is knocking righteousness, and Wayne, out the door, and it seems as if everything is so corrupt that all hope is gone, the good guy returns, takes over and crushes his enemies. Obama, Trump declared, “has been the most ignorant president in our history. . . the world is a mess.” Note that “the good guy” ready to save the day dog whistles the racism that he judges appealing. Obama has put us on the tracks, a perilous moment. Barak HOSSAIN Obama. Donald J. to the rescue.  Out of the same play book in the 2024 election. Here, the bad guy, “Sleepy Joe,” led us to inflation and illegal alien peril, along with his administration of stupid people. Kamala Harris “cackled while the economy burned.” Another low tag: women cackle.

The most successful proven way of narrating, of passionate acceptance by the greatest number of folks of what is represented follows this formula. Trump is not the first politico to brand who the good and bad guys are but his is an all rules and protocols barred play, one in which he pitches low and dirty but finds welcoming targets. If Trump pitched what we weren’t already in a place to receive, he wouldn’t be president. There was nothing in him that wasn’t reflected in us. Something Americans have to reckon with after Trump is gone.

What we have is Tammany Hall low ball but not in the back room. What’s startling about Trump, among a lot, is how open he is top exposing his Id to us. AI: “Id: a part of the mind that is unconscious and impulsive, and is driven by the need for immediate gratification.” Freud tells us life is a long struggle to keep the Id in check. Trump doesn’t or can’t or won’t. Ditto Musk. But once again, Americans know the Id. We can’t play the ingenue. Trump arrived and succeeded with his mean, low ball because the country was already positioned to welcome him.

When you get away from the naïve realist formula of setting up good and bad and intimate that neither what is good or evil/true or false is not transparently clear but seen “through a glass darkly,” you lose the majority. When you go even further and cast doubts by undermining our narrating ways, then you are denying the autonomy of the individual to shape an airtight story of what is and what is going on for themselves. If you, however, can stick a “fake news narrative” on your opponents while sanctifying your own narrative, then you’ve gotten the “naïve realism” formula to work for you. You’ve unsettled any sure sense of what truth is, which Trump needs to do to dismiss rational grounded indictments against him, but you’ve immediately allayed that trepidation with the presence of yourself, Truth as Trump. Trump has done that.

In Hitler’s rise to power, he had to tarnish his chief antagonists, the Communists, who were tarnishing him. It was a fight Hitler won by convincing enough Germans that the Communists would make them puppets of the Soviet Union. One political ideology clashed with another. The clash now between Liberals and MAGAS, or the Radical Left vs. the Voice of the People, or, the will of President Trump vs. all who oppose him is a clash of passions, not ideologies. “The Enemy Within” is within the “Deep State.” The Enemy within that Deep State is a radical, progressive, liberal, “woke,” DEI propagandistic Democratic Party.

That’s a mouthful. But it’s the successfully imprinted villain/bad guy/enemy in which Democrats are keeping President Trump from making America great again. Greater again. And the Democrats here are no Trotskys able to interpret the rise of Trump. That failure, after 16 years of Democratic presidencies, is clearly the case for the reasons Trotsky gave in 1933: “Where the progressive class shows itself unable to seize power so as to reconstruct society on the basis of socialism, capitalism in its agony can only preserve its existence by using the most brutal, anti-cultural methods, the extreme expression of which is Fascism.”

Passionate attacks on “woke,” DEI, critical race theory, LGBTQIA2S+ and so on feed at the trough the imaginary passion creates. They burn out or as expressed in Ecclesiastes and so are fated as a “striving after wind.” The offense against Democrats fades with Trump’s demise but the lack of offense on the Democrat’s part holds them in the place they are now, namely, a place where they cannot escape the role of the “Enemy Within” that Trump has tarred them with.

Rather than move toward a socialism, the Social Democrat Bernie kind for a start, in order to nip the anti-democratic splurge Trump has triggered for megalomaniacal “reasons,” some Democrats, hopefully not a majority, are strategizing on how to salvage “woke” and DEI and so on. This is a party that has leaned into an oligarchy creating capitalism, substituted agendas which do not affect root causes of oligarchic wealth divide, and, what most affects the 2026 Congressional elections, is imprinted as “the bad guy” within the imaginaries of those who will soon discover that no relief is to be found in Market Rule of Trump Rule. A truly sad situation.

National socialism, the political ideology of Nazism, pops up now and then, as in  the U.S. now, but both fascism and Nazism include a strong central government as well as a strong central leader. What we have going on with Trump/Musk is a hollowing out of the Federal government so that, in Trump’s case, he can do whatever he wants without facing power to stop him. He wants to replace a strong central government with himself. How what’s left of government can serve its constituency and keep him from facing Stalin’s end is not a consequence total self-absorption can consider.

Musk simply and criminally wants to cut off the heads of anything in government that can interfere with his multi-billionaire making ways. He too may face an angry mob. Trump relies upon his own megalomaniacal illusions to inspire his MAGA cult. He sees himself as invincible. Perhaps immortal. Musk’s Plutus image, Greek god of wealth, armors him from the hard struggles of ordinary life. His power wielding presence in a democracy under attack is also truly sad.

When a man, whose mission is solely to rule like an autocrat and to enjoy making opponents suffer and others kiss his ring, dies, that mission dies with him. If along the way he immiserates the lives of about half of those who voted for him, and they realize the villain is not the “woke” crowd, will the liberal, left wing Democrats become their new heroes? Are the Democrats to engineer the escape from Trump? Or will some new rough beast slouch toward Bethlehem to be born? “I would conjecture that it will take a long time and a firm stance away from and not leaning into Market Rule before Democrats wash out what Trump has brushed them with.

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It’s going to take a very brave judge to stop Elon Musk and the Trump-created DOGE at this point. And I doubt that judge is going to appear anytime soon. Which means that, ultimately, this saga won’t be resolved until it works its way through levels of court proceedings, appeals, and perhaps even lands before the Supreme Court.

Let’s back up for a moment. Legal experts have been sounding the alarm for months, arguing that DOGE’s actions—many of which seem to operate in a legal gray area—may actually be outright illegal. Critics have pointed to potential violations of the Privacy Act, the Internal Revenue Code, and the Federal Information Security Modernization Act. Some go further, arguing that DOGE’s aggressive overreach—such as forcing the removal of federal employees, claiming the power to dissolve agencies, and even seizing funds authorized by Congress—flies in the face of Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution. In short, there’s a growing consensus that what we’re witnessing is nothing less than a constitutional crisis in the making.

Yet, despite these concerns, there seems to be little appetite from the totality of lawmakers—at least those who wield real power—to pump the brakes. When House Democrats tried to subpoena Musk over DOGE’s activities on February 5, 2025, Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform shut them down. That lack of congressional oversight has forced outside organizations to step in. Just two days later, the ACLU filed Freedom of Information Act requests with more than 40 federal agencies, hoping to uncover whether DOGE has gained unauthorized access to sensitive personal and financial data.

The most high-profile legal battle thus far is Gribbon v. Musk, a class-action lawsuit filed on February 12, 2025. The plaintiffs, which include taxpayers, federal employees, and benefit recipients, argue that DOGE’s access to their personal and financial data violates their rights and entitles them to compensation. The lawsuit specifically challenges whether DOGE, a quasi-governmental entity established under executive authority, has the legal right to bypass existing privacy laws and access government databases without oversight. Attorneys for the plaintiffs have artfully pointed out that DOGE’s structure lacks transparency and its leadership—headed by Musk and key allies like Scott Bessent—operates outside traditional government accountability measures.

Another significant challenge to DOGE’s authority comes from the USAID controversy. When DOGE ordered the agency’s closure and placed 2,200 employees on administrative leave, the American Foreign Service Association and the American Federation of Government Employees fought back. On February 6, these labor unions filed a lawsuit arguing that the executive branch lacks unilateral authority to dismantle a congressionally funded agency. Judge Carl J. Nichols issued a temporary restraining order on February 7, preventing the shutdown from proceeding, and later extended the freeze through February 21. The case raises broader questions about whether DOGE’s consolidation of power represents a direct challenge to the separation of powers doctrine enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

Adding to the legal chaos, DOGE has set its powerful jaws on the Internal Revenue Service’s Integrated Data Retrieval System, a database containing highly sensitive taxpayer information. Sources indicate that the IRS, under pressure from the White House, is preparing to grant a DOGE employee access to this system under the justification of investigating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Critics argue that allowing DOGE this level of access without clear legal safeguards represents an unprecedented violation of taxpayer privacy rights. The IRS has remained largely silent on the matter, but leaked internal emails suggest growing unease within the agency about the legal implications of complying with DOGE’s demands.

Meanwhile, in a separate lawsuit filed on February 17, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan held a hearing regarding a request to block Musk from influencing federal agencies through DOGE. The lawsuit, brought by a coalition of civil liberties groups, alleges that Musk is using DOGE to execute policies without congressional approval, effectively consolidating executive power in ways that circumvent legal norms. Judge Chutkan, while expressing skepticism about granting an immediate restraining order, acknowledged the broader concerns about DOGE’s secrecy and the speed at which it has exerted influence over multiple government agencies.

The legal landscape surrounding DOGE is further complicated by the ideological divide in the judiciary—and this is where things get super-complicated.

Some conservative judges appear hesitant to challenge DOGE’s actions, seeing them as an extension of executive authority that aligns with their broader vision of deregulation and government restructuring. Others, particularly those appointed in prior administrations, have expressed deep concern over what they view as blatant overreach. The upcoming rulings in these cases could set major precedents for executive power and data privacy in the digital age.

At this point, the only thing that’s clear is that Elon Musk and DOGE are pushing the limits of executive power in ways we haven’t seen before. The legal battles are mounting, but so far, no judge has stepped up to put a stop to it. And unless one does soon, more courts—and possibly even the Supreme Court—will be left to clean up the mess. 

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The dispersal of radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima-Daiichi reactor disaster site to the Pacific Ocean is “in line with international safety standards” according to a task force set up by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear power advocacy program, in a December 24, 2024 report.

Ever since the Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, first proposed pumping wastewater left from cooling Fukushima’s three hot piles of melted reactor fuel into the Pacific, the IAEA has supported, encouraged, and endorsed the plan, in spite of its own formal published guidelines which advise against it.

In June 2023, Dr. Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, published a scathing critique of the IAEA’s approval, finding the oceanic pollution violates essential provisions of the agency’s own General Safety Guide.

The IAEA’s first 2023 report on the dumping scheme said the plan was “consistent” with its standards, and it claimed even before the first major release of the radioactive water that it would have a “negligible radiological impact to people and the environment.” Now the IAEA’s onsite laboratory in Japan has analyzed the first ten discharges that have been conducted between August 2023 and October 2024, Nuclear Engineering International reported.

The bulk of the radioactivity in the wastewater being pumped into the ocean is from tritium, the radioactive form of hydrogen, and carbon-14, neither of which can be filtered from water they contaminate. However, analyses of 1.3 million tons of waste coolant now stored in tanks shows a complex mix of other highly radioactive isotopes, including strontium-90, cesium-134 and -137, cobalt-60, americium, technetium, and even tellurium-127. In 2018, Tepco apologized for the failure of its giant filter system to separate all the materials it promised to, and has said it would repeatedly re-filter the contaminated water to try and remove 62 different reactor-borne isotopes before dumping it into the world’s largest ocean.

IAEA approval is license to copy bad actors

Japan’s oceanic radioactive pollution was supposed to have been banned with the 1972 Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter. This monumental international law against disposing of hazardous and radioactive wastes at sea prohibits dumping “from vessels, aircraft, platforms or other man-made structures.”

Yet the use of major undersea pipelines at Fukushima-Daiichi in Japan, at La Hague in France, and at Sellafield in the UK have been granted exemptions — as if the massive pumping systems were not “man-made.” On a yearly basis, the La Hague plutonium processing system discharges some 1.4 million barrels worth of liquid radioactive waste into the North Sea, Greenpeace reports.And the UK’s Sellafield site pumps 24 million barrels of radioactive liquids into Irish Sea every year.

When the IAEA says that Japan’s ocean dumping is “in line with international safety standards,” this is the globalized radioactive polluting that is being referenced and endorsed.

Radioactive soil to be spread nationwide as construction fill

In spite of obvious risks to workers who handle it and the threat of surface water contamination caused by rain runoff and winds, the Japanese government has approved plans to allow 14-million metric tons of radioactive soil — and 300,000 metric tons of radioactive ash from incinerators — to be used in public works projects like road and railway construction, and even agriculture “nationwide,” according to the international news reports.

The government calls the plan “recycling,” and it’s been consistently opposed by critics who point to federal regulations that forbid any use of radioactive materials that are contaminated with more than 100 becquerels of cesium-137 per kilogram (Bq/kg). Waste that’s “hotter” must be disposed of as radioactive waste.

Yet the government intends to allow the use of soil (scraped from thousands of square kilometers that were hit with fallout from the three meltdowns) containing up to 8,000 Bq/kg of cesium, 80 times the federal limit. Radioactive cesium was spewed in large quantities from the triple meltdowns of March 2011 and it persists in the environment for up to 300 years. (Mountain forests in the fallout zones west of Fukushima cannot have topsoil removed and so remain contaminated with cesium which is spread downhill by heavy rains.)

Watchdogs with the Citizens Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo point out that government rules would be violated if the 8000 Bq/Kg limit is allowed. Yumiko Fuseya wrote in CNIC’s newsletter, “Despite the Nuclear Reactor Regulation Act stating that only waste of 100 Bq/kg (becquerels/kilogram) or less can be recycled, [the plan says] ‘removed soil’ of up to 8,000 Bq/kg can be recycled, and this is a double standard.”

Fuseya complained that Japan’s Ministry of Environment, “claims that ‘disposal’ includes ‘recycling,’ even though Article 41 of the Act on Special Measures Concerning the Handling of Materials Contaminated by Radiation does not include ‘recycling.’

The daily Yomiuri Shimbun reported December 5 that about 75% of some 14 million tons of bagged soil has a radioactive cesium count of 8,000 becquerels or less per kilogram.

CNIC also reports that the government has conducted hair-raising agricultural experiments in Fukushima Prefecture, such as growing and harvesting cucumbers and radishes “in fields where the [contaminated] soil has been covered with normal soil.”

Just as the International Atomic Energy Agency has approved of dispersing contaminated wastewater into the Pacific Ocean, the agency last September gave final approval to Japan’s plan for using the radioactive soil and fly ash (now piled in 14 million 1-tonne bags) for public works projects, saying that the scheme is “consistent with IAEA safety standards.”

Ongoing earthquakes & aftershocks

As if accidents with wastewater pumping, Pacific Ocean poisoning with radioactive wastewater, and spreading millions of tons of cesium-tainted soil around the public commons weren’t hazardous enough, routine earthquakes and their aftershocks off northeast Japan relentlessly rock the Fukushima disaster site and threaten to crack open giant tanks now holding 1.3 million tons of highly radioactive wastewater. Relentlessly frequent quakes also endanger the means of water cooling the 880 tons of molten reactor fuel (or ‘corium’) still thermally hot and radioactively unreachable somewhere beneath the three smashed reactors.

On January 23, after a 5.2 magnitude quake hit the Fukushima Prefecture’s Aizu area, the government warned of possible aftershocks and urged people to “stay vigilant” against landslides and avalanches. Last April 4, a 6.1 magnitude quake rattled Fukushima’s coastline just 47 miles off the site of the three meltdowns — far closer than the super quake of March 2011, the biggest in Japan’s recorded history, which was 80 miles offshore.

Clean-up workers increasingly fear contamination

Following a string of clean-up related radiation accidents at the devastated station, Tepco workers have grown more concerned about their safety. The daily Asahi Shimbun reports that a Tepco survey its workers found that over 40 percent of the workforce was worried about jobsite “radiation issues.” Of this group, 52% said “physical contamination” was their main concern, seven percentage points higher than its 2023 survey. Tepco said that the repetition of exposure accidents on site have likely increased workers’ worries.

In October 2024, two workers were hospitalized after being splashed with highly radioactive liquid wastes bursting from a hose that disconnected inside a wastewater treatment building. And in February 2024, about 5.5 cubic meters, or 5.5 metric tonnes, of highly radioactive liquid waste gushed from the a “cesium absorption apparatus” in an incinerator building before a worker noted it and closed a valve.

The Citizens Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo keeps close track of the routine accidents taking place at Fukushima and across Japan’s nuclear industry here.

New documentary: “Unfogging Fukushima”

The China Global Television Network (CGTN) has produced an English language documentary on the three simultaneous reactor meltdowns and their massive radioactive releases which premiered December 31, 2024.

The network announced the debut noting, “Despite extensive efforts over the past 13 years, problems such as discharging nuclear-contaminated water into the sea still exist. CGTN visited the worst-hit area, measured nuclear radiation, and investigated the truth behind the enduring consequences of the accident.” The film is available here.

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A $trillion is a steep climb. How does a kid driven to school in a Rolls Royce and inheriting merely $millions become a $trillionaire? In 2011 Musk’s net worth was south of $1 billion. It bumped along at that level until Covid five years back and then rocketed up into the dozens of billion en route to hundreds of billions. And with the Trump 2024 campaign and now presidency seeing its 2nd stage launch past the half $trillion mark.

The post 2008 financial shock, by necessity, required governments create massive piles of cash to sustain the economy, especially if they were not going to bail out holders of home mortgages. Turning cash over to finance kept the economy humming, but without much boost to middle-class incomes, it mostly launched asset prices ever higher, thus Musk, et al., seeing their fortunes rise. Covid provided the next big fuel (money) injection powering asset prices ever higher and once again Musk was a principal beneficiary.

Now that this two-stage burn has finished, a massive infusion of energy (money) is required for the 3^rd stage burn propelling Musk truly to the stars as the world’s first $trillionaire. Like space the vastness of this amount of cash is hard to grasp. But imagine having a $million to  spend annually. At this rate it would take fully a million years to get rid of it.

Having established the size of such a fortune, the question rises, how can one person get it? This $trillion sum is so vast that one can’t merely add this much value to the economy to get it. But there are “ores” of cash representing fortunes that can be moved from the public’s balance sheet to Musk and other owners of paper wealth. In short, the Mother of All Privatizations (MOAP).

1) Asset prices (Much of Musk’s wealth is comprised of asset): Assets, from equities, to crypto, to property and more, have risen well over inflation and economic growth the past 4 decades. In short, this is what the French economist Thomas Piketty simply characterized as the problem of r>g (rate of returns on investments being above the underlying rate of economic growth). This alchemy in recent decades has been achieved by “mining” labor (domestic and foreign) by paying them (both in wages and social supports) less than the underlying rate of economic growth. Ergo, the growth disproportionately is upward distributed largely through asset price increases.

As with any mining operation, new “ores” need to be found as ones are spent, and in the US Social Security and Medicare are the motherlode.

2) Tax cuts: Tax cuts increase asset prices. Cutting Social Security (whose present and future deficits from previous raids on past SS surpluses to pay for tax cuts to make government deficits from the general budget smaller than they otherwise would be) reduces general government liabilities (obligations), therefore enabling bigger tax cuts on income, capital gains, etc. Cutting Medicare benefits has the same impact on the general budget, thus leading to lower taxes for the wealthy AND freed capital otherwise going to social expenditures now available for investment or increasing asset prices. Cutting Social Security and/or privatizing it in part or whole, creates further cash that will push up asset prices. But this is a one off. Once done there are no further big “ores” to mine.

The above freed capital will go chiefly to asset prices vs investment, as constrained consumption by broad majorities of the population leads enterprises to place money into assets as limited growth of consumer markets discourages investments in new production.

3) Government spending on Musk products. Trump already declared his intention to increase spending on the US government “Space Force” (militarization of space) in addition to other space expeditions and bases (e.g., orbital stations, stations on Moon and Mars). Obviously, Musk is positioned to take windfall gains from supplying these efforts. Yet, the above must be squared with the Trump Administration’s overall goal to reduce government spending. These spending cuts will come from many sources, but by far the largest pools of cash are in Social Security and Medicare.

You might ask, “instead of these big cuts, why doesn’t the government just borrow more as the US has done since the 1980s? Trump’s view (and likely right) is that the US has reached its limit to borrow (have foreigners buy Treasury Bills, etc.). Therefore, to keep interest rates down (both for business and government) the US must reduce borrowing. They don’t so much predict the end of the US reserve currency system so much as it having reached its limits, with likely some contraction. But maintaining it requires lower government deficits and Social Security and Medicare are the biggest items on the government’s balance sheet.

4) Lastly, while less impacting Musk personally, throwing hundreds of thousands if not millions of public sector workers out work will lead to massive downward pressure on private sector wages. This will drive down payrolls for US businesses while also delivering lower taxes, seeing them win twice at the expense of labor.

In short, Musk is about to go “where no man has gone before” to become the world’s first trillionaire. Getting their requires a MOAP in part or in whole of your Social Security and Medicare, thus ending the last and largest legacy of the New Deal. Will you let him?

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In a deeply disturbing and unprecedented move, the U.S. has begun transferring immigrant detainees to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. They’re being held without access to their lawyers and families.

President Trump has ordered up to 30,000 “high-priority” migrants to be imprisoned there as part of his larger mass deportation and detention campaign.

Trump claims these migrants are the “worst criminal aliens threatening the American people.” But recent investigations of those detainees have already challenged this narrative. And a large percentage of immigrants arrested in the U.S. have no criminal record.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time our government has invoked “national security” to deny marginalized communities their basic human rights. President George W. Bush created the infamous military prison at Guantánamo during the “War on Terror” to hold what his administration called the “worst of the worst.”

The prison has since become synonymous with indefinite detention — 15 people still remain there today, over 20 years later. Notorious for its brutality and lawlessness, Guantánamo should be shut down, not expanded.

Of the 780 Muslim men and boys imprisoned there since January 2002, the vast majority have been held without charge or trial. Most were abducted and sold to the U.S. for bounty and “had no relationship whatsoever with the events that took place on 9/11,” reported the UN’s independent expert in 2023, who reiterated the global call to close Guantánamo.

The Bush administration designed the prison to circumvent the Constitution and the 1949 Geneva Conventions, refusing to treat the prisoners as either POWs or civilians. This legal fiction resulted in a range of human rights violations, including torture.

But the Constitution — and international law — still applies wherever the U.S. government operates. All prisoners, including immigrants, are still entitled to humane treatment, legal counsel, and due process.

“Never before have people been taken from U.S. soil and sent to Guantánamo, and then denied access to lawyers and the outside world,” said Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney in the ACLU case challenging Trump’s executive order.

However, the U.S. does have a sordid history of detaining migrants captured elsewhere at the base. As legal scholar Jeffrey S. Kahn points out, the U.S. has detained Haitians at Guantánamo on and off since the 1970s.

In the 1990s, thousands of Haitian refugees fleeing persecution following a military coup were captured at sea. The U.S. held them in horrific conditions at Guantánamo so they couldn’t reach U.S. shores to seek asylum — which is a fundamental human right long enshrined under U.S. law.

Shrouded in secrecy, the U.S. continues to capture and detain asylum seekers fleeing Haiti, Cuba, and other Caribbean countries at Guantánamo. Last fall, the International Refugee Assistance Project reported that refugee families are kept in a dilapidated building with mold and sewage problems, suffer from a lack of medical care, and are “detained indefinitely in prison-like conditions without access to the outside world.”

Trump’s order would take these abuses to a horrifying new level.

Currently, the base’s existing immigration detention facility can hold up 120 people. Expanding it to 30,000 will require enormous resources. The “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo already costs an estimated $540 million annually, making it one of the most expensive prisons in the world.

Then there are the moral costs.

The mass deportation and detention of asylum seekers is not only unlawful but cruel — and not a real immigration solution. Instead, our government should prioritize meaningful immigration reform that recognizes the dignity of all people.

We should also shut down the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo once and for all — and pursue accountability for its decades of abuses. Otherwise, it will only continue to expand. “I can attest to the facility’s capacity for cruelty,” warned Mansoor Adayfi, who was subjected to torture and endured nearly 15 years at the prison.

Guantánamo’s legacy of injustice must end.

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Paul McCartney heard rumors of the wild goings-on in the Haight and visited on April 4, 1967. At the Fillmore Auditorium, he listened to a rehearsal by the Jefferson Airplane. At Marty Balin’s and Jack Casady’s apartment and along with his girlfriend at the time, Jane Asher, he played an acetate (a type of phonograph) of The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s” album, which would be released later that year. Thousands of others flocked to the Haight, once a largely Black neighborhood, for the music, the drugs, and the revolution that was promoted by the Diggers, who named themselves after 17^th century English dissidents. Gerard Winstanley and his Digger comrades aimed to turn the world upside down would probably have felt at home in the Haight in 1967 when the great American counterculture was “busy being born” to borrow the words from Bob Dylan’s ballad  “It’s All Right, Ma (I’m only bleeding).”

How counter was the counterculture?  And if you were alive then and there how counter was your own personal culture? Not sure? You might be able to decide on your own when the Counterculture Museum opens this spring on the corner of Haight and Ashbury in the neighborhood where hippies and their friends reigned supreme for about two years in the late 1960s.

Then disaster struck. Bad drugs. Bad health. Bad cops. Paradise rarely lasts long, not for Diggers or hippies. But the melodies from that time and place have played on and on. Dozens of books have been written about that era including Charles Perry’s brilliant The Haight Ashbury that comes with an introduction by Grateful Dead member Bob Weir who says, “We weren’t all stoned all the time. But we were all artists, musicians, and freaks all the time.”

The Haight staged a comeback in the 1990s, largely because of the efforts of gay men. Today it is a vital San Francisco neighborhood with Amoeba, a gigantic record store, Gus’s, an excellent grocery, two cannabis dispensaries, a post office, a few decent cafes and restaurants, and dozens of shops and boutiques selling tie-dyed T-shirts, hoodies and sneakers. It also attracts a great many tourists who want to imbibe the magic of the hippie era, buy rolling papers, roaches, posters and R. Crumb Comic books.

Estelle and Jerry Cimino, a husband and wife team and the founders of the Counterculture Museum—they are also the founders of the Beat Museum in North Beach —plan to give as much if not more space to the anti-war and civil rights movements as they do to the “youth culture” of the Sixties that created communes, staged rock festivals, made marijuana a commodity, and went on overland journeys to India to seek gurus in ashrams.

 That decision to blend the movement and the counterculture might surprise and even shock veterans and historians of the Sixties. After all, they were two separate entities from about 1967 to 1972. In those  heady days, Yippies tangled with members of SDS, Abbie Hoffman battled Tom Hayden of the Red Family and Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, who once called Abbie “a thorn in her side.” Abbie called her “Bernie” much to her distress.  At the time, the rivalries and clashes seemed as significant as the divisions in 1917 and 1918 between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks or those between American anarchists and American members of the US Communist Party during the 1930s and 1940s.

In the fall of 1970— five months or so after the National Guard shot and killed four students at Kent State and police shot and killed two and injured twelve students at Jackson State—I joined a small delegation that traveled from New York to Algeria to meet with Eldridge Cleaver and Timothy Leary, both living there in exile with the pipe dream of creating a new organization that would appeal to Black Panthers, Yippies, members of SDS, as well as psychedelic warriors who belonged to the League for Spiritual Discovery.

The other members of the delegation were Marty Kenner, Brian Flannigan, Anita Hoffman, Jennifer Dohrn and Stew Albert.  In the background in Algiers were Kathleen Cleaver, Eldridge’s wife, and several young Panthers who had fled the US rather than go on trial and go to jail. In the elegant Panther embassy, in-between visits from the North Korean Ambassador, the young Panthers listened to Motown, smoked dope and danced. I danced and smoked with them. I also dropped acid with Leary and watched a visiting Russian volleyball team trounced an Algerian team.

Anita Hoffman represented Abbie who was not allowed to leave the US; that was an order from Judge Julius Hoffman who presided over the Chicago Conspiracy trial. Marty Kenner represented Panther support groups, Stew Albert spoke for his pal, Jerry Rubin, Jennifer Dohrn conveyed the sentiments of her sister, Bernardine and Brian Flannigan, who had been arrested during the “Days of Rage” in October 1969, expressed the anger of the quintessential street fighting man.

I had a singular objective. Bernardine asked me to meet with Eldridge and tell him in confidence that Leary was untrustworthy, that he had blabbed to reporters and acid heads, gave away secrets about the Weather Underground, and named the names of people who helped him escape from Lompoc Prison and also aided and abetted his flight from the US.                                                                                 Eldridge taped my conversation with him and held an AK-47 (a gift of the North Korean Ambassador to Algeria) in his lap the whole time we talked. He overreacted to the information I delivered and put Leary and his wife Rosemary under house arrest. The members of the delegation were confined to Eldridge’s pad, which was different from the Panther Embassy and also different from the house in the hills where Eldridge lived with Kathleen.

Don Cox, the Panther Field Marshall gave us a tour of Algiers and described the history of the Algerian liberation movement. On one occasion we enjoyed a sumptuous seafood dinner, while a couple of CIA agents kept their eyes trained on us.

One afternoon, in the pad, I wrote a press release in which I quoted Eldridge, who called for armed struggle, and Leary who wanted cosmic voyagers to travel to outer space. Not surprisingly they couldn’t agree on anything. Also, not surprisingly they both returned to the US, surrendered to the authorities and made deals that kept them from long prison terms.                                                                                  That fall, I flew from Algiers to Paris, reencountered with Abbie and met pseudo French Yippies —pseudo because they were living at home with their parents. I also roamed the Left Bank with Jean-Jacques Lebel, a French Beat, a translator, and a surrealist. We looked for trouble that never arrived. The young French Yuppies seemed to have the best of two worlds. They defied older generations, rioted in the streets and came home to eat their mothers’ gourmet cooking.                                                                                         My favorite person from that time was Bernadette Devlin, the Irish revolutionary who was fond of saying of the British, “kick them when they’re down.” Nasty but oh so satisfying.

At home in New York I wrote an account of Leary and Cleaver in Algeria. Paul Krassner published it in The Realist under the title, “Eldridge & Tim, Kathleen & Rosemary” and with an illustration that depicted the two couples in bed together in a spoof of the movie, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice that capitalized on and reflected some of the sexual politics of that era.

I don’t expect the Counterculture Museum to offer exhibits that will highlight the fiasco in Algeria or the odd position of the French Yuppies who were both in and out of the global counterculture. The Ciminos emphasize unity not disunity, hope not despair, creativity not self-destruction and positive gains not loses. That’s surely the best tact to take especially since they want to attract visitors and inspire them.

The counterculture that sprang up in the Haight Ashbury is worth remembering and celebrating, especially because the Ciminos will connect it to the movements of the past and political causes of today.

Estelle describes the museum as though it’s a beloved child. “The Counterculture Museum will celebrate the vibrant legacy of Haight-Ashbury by preserving art, activism, and creative expression that once defined the neighborhood. Far from being a relic of the past, counterculture continues to shape music, fashion, social movements and the spirit of independent thinking,” she says.

Estelle adds, “By bringing history to life through exhibitions, events, movies and storytelling, the museum hopes to strengthen the community, enrich the cultural fabric of Haight-Ashbury, and support local merchants by drawing visitors eager to experience the authentic, enduring impact of the counterculture movements.”

It’s worth remembering because as far as I can see there are few if any genuine countercultures today in the US. Journalists and reporters who write about them seem to assume that they’re dead and buried.

In a recent article published in The New Yorker about the documentary filmmakers, Albert and David Maysles, and editor and director, Charlotte Zwerin, journalist Michael Schulman notes that the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway in December 1969  marked “a death knell for the counterculture.” Indeed, it seemed to be the flip side of Woodstock. Ever since then cultural critics have held funerals and burials for the counterculture though in the 1970s the counterculture spread from  New York’s Lower East side and San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury to the countryside where it put down rural roots.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s in the aftermath of the bloodbaths at Kent and Jackson state I wrote two contradictory pieces about the counterculture: one of them titled “Children of Imperialism” which largely denounced youth culture and the other “New Morning which was issued as a communiqué by the Weather Underground and that herald the arrival of youth culture. Some Black Panthers described it as a betrayal of Third World Liberation struggles.

At that time I thought that the Weather Underground needed a base and a constituency; hippies seemed the only potential allies around, especially since the organization had given up on the white working class. But I could also see that hippies and freaks had adopted some of the racist notions of their parents. They idealized American Indians and Third World peasants and saw themselves as active consumers buying and selling drugs, music, and even rebellion which was framed as a commodity.

Perhaps the Counterculture Museum will convert millennials and members of Generation Z to the cause of rebellion and resistance today but it will be an uphill battle. “We seem to be going backward,” Estelle says, thinking of Trump and company. But she and Jerry Cimino are not giving up their culture war

“It’s important to educate young people about the past so they understand that positive change can happen today just like it did in the 1960s and 1970s,” she says. Jerry adds that the counterculture of the 1960s happened because “the boomers reached critical mass and because their coming coincided with the arrival of global electronic mass media.” Today technology seems more reactionary than ever before, especially when it’s in the hands of autocrats like Elon Musk and his minions.

If the Ciminos wanted help with their museum they could do no better than turn to Stannous Flouride who has lived in the Haight for 43 years and who gives popular walking tours in the neighborhood wearing a black leather jacket and an ancient button that screams “Yippie!”    “City Hall hated the hippies,” Flouride says. “Mayor Joe Alioto wanted to destroy them, so he canceled services to the neighborhood, like garbage removal, which prompted the Diggers to organize a ‘clean-in.’ The Diggers fed thousands of kids and provided the spiritual and political backbone for the hippies.”

If Flouride were creating a counterculture museum he says he’d feature the Diggers, The Panthers, jazz, rock, the January 1967 “Human Be-in” and the “Summer of Love.” He adds “there is really no counterculture here as there was in the Sixties.” He adds, “The only remaining counterculture is hip hop which appeals to both young whites and young Blacks.”

If I wanted to revive a slogan from the Sixties and put it back in circulation it might be, “The spirit of the people is greater than the Man’s technology.” It was greater in Vietnam and it can be greater around the world again. Get off your phones and your laptops. Go into the streets and make as much noise as you can.

If the Counterculture Museum succeeds it will send visitors into the streets of the Haight and beyond. It will turn into its opposite, not a museum with artifacts but a cradle of resistance and rebellion with ideas and tools for insurrections. After all, museums are usually repositories of the past, and as such they are innately conservative and rarely innovative. It’s time to bring about a cultural revolution in the world of the counterculture.

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