Critics variously argue that it anoints stablecoins as the equivalent of “programmable” central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), that it lacks strong consumer protections, and that government centralization destroys the independence of the cryptocurrency market. Proponents say the rapidly expanding stablecoin market not only provides a faster and cheaper payments system but can serve as a major funding source to help alleviate the federal debt crisis, which is poised to destroy the economy if not checked, and that the stablecoin market has gotten so large that without regulation, we may have to bail it out when it becomes a multitrillion dollar industry that is “too big to fail.”

For most people, however, the whole subject of stablecoins is a mystery, so this article will attempt to throw some light on it. It will also explore some historical use cases demonstrating how the government might incorporate stablecoins into a broader program for escaping the debt crisis altogether.

Stablecoin Mania

The cryptocurrency craze began with Bitcoin in 2008. Conceived as a decentralized alternative to government-issued currency, Bitcoin uses blockchain technology — a transparent, tamper-resistant ledger that all users can view and verify — to facilitate peer-to-peer transactions without relying on banks or payment intermediaries. But to be widely accepted, a currency must have a stable value, and Bitcoin’s value has vacillated wildly. Stablecoins were devised to solve that problem. They are cryptocurrencies that are backed by safe assets (e.g., short-term U.S. Treasuries). Supposedly, holders of stablecoins can redeem the coins at par and at will for cash, just like demand deposits and money market funds.

Stablecoin use has exploded in recent years. As of March 2025, their total market capitalization reached $232 billion, a 45-fold increase since December 2019. Projections suggest this figure could hit $400 billion by year-end and as much as $2.8 trillion by 2028. Stablecoins Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC) dominate the market, holding 86% of it. In 2024, stablecoins processed $27.6 trillion in transfer volume (the total value of stablecoin transactions recorded on blockchains), surpassing the combined volume of Visa and Mastercard. Daily volumes could hit $300 billion in 2025.

Stablecoins are said to be transforming cross-border payments, remittances and DeFi (decentralized finance). They offer faster, cheaper transactions and are used in 71% of cross-border payments in Latin America. In crypto markets, stablecoins account for 60–80% of trading volume on major exchanges. Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa lead retail and professional-sized stablecoin transfers, with over 40% year-over-year growth. Major banks and fintechs are also integrating stablecoins or have started stablecoin initiatives, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Stripe, JPMorgan, PayPal and Société Générale.

Despite their name, however, stablecoins are not entirely stable. They have faced liquidity crises and transparency issues and are vulnerable to runs. Hence the need for regulation. The GENIUS Act of 2025, signed July 18, 2025, requires stablecoin issuers to be banks or approved nonbanks, to maintain 1:1 reserves in safe assets (e.g., U.S. Treasuries, cash) that are audited monthly, and to comply with KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) rules.

The “Backdoor CBDC” Issue

Was the intent of the Act to create a “backdoor CBDC”? The concern of critical commentators is with privacy and “programmability” — the ability of the issuer to program a digital currency in order to control or block its use.

Skeptics of the backdoor CBDCs theory note that President Trump signed an executive order banning CBDCs in January, citing privacy and economic stability concerns, and that stablecoins are not centrally issued but have many private issuers globally. Any digital currency is “programmable” unless specifically protected against it, and most of our currency is already digital, created on the ledgers of banks when they make loans.

It has been argued that programming the use of deposits could actually be done more easily with our existing network of banks than with globally scattered stablecoin issuers, just by sending the banks orders in automated messages by API. (An API, or “application programming interface,” is “a set of rules or protocols that enables software applications to communicate with each other to exchange data, features and functionality.”) In a July 22 Substack post titled “Has Brazil Invented the Future of Money?”, former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes:

[T]he government can access private bank records under certain circumstances and certainly has the technological ability to watch every financial move you make. The only thing that keeps it from doing so is the law, specifically the Right to Financial Privacy Act. If we ever do create a CBDC, it will surely involve comparable privacy protection.

Krugman suggests that it is really the banks that are afraid of CBDCs, because people will withdraw their funds from their private bank accounts in favor of their central bank accounts, cutting out the banker middlemen and their much higher fees. He points to Brazil, which has a CBDC-like system called Pix – a sort of publicly-run Zelle in which transactions settle in three seconds on average, versus two days for debit cards and 28 days for credit cards; and the Brazilian authorities have set a requirement that Pix be free for individuals. It is used by 93% of Brazilian adults, compared to a mere 2% of Americans using cryptocurrencies for trade.

Financial commentator Mark Goodwin contended in a recent interview on the Corbett Report that a programmable currency issued by a private stablecoin company could actually be more dangerous than a CBDC. Some of these companies aren’t even domiciled in the United States, and they are not subject to Federal Reserve control. In a July 26 podcast, macroeconomic historian Miles Harris explained that risk like this:

In the GENIUS era, private stablecoin issuers function as offshore central banks. Liquidity creation occurs outside the Fed’s control, but the underlying collateral—U.S. debt—remains on public books. This creates a governance gap: liquidity is generated by private actors driven by profit, not monetary stability, yet systemic risk returns to the public sector if things unravel. During the Bretton Woods era, confidence in the dollar was theoretically anchored to gold. Today, no such backstop exists. The Anti-CBDC Act prohibits the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC), leaving no public digital dollar to counterbalance private stablecoins.

To explain all that might take another article, but in any case the GENIUS Act has passed and is a done deal. Whether or not we approve, we now need to consider its ramifications. Its main purpose seems to be to salvage the federal bond market, which is in perilous straits.

Propping Up the Bond Market and the Dollar 

The rapidly expanding stablecoin market is projected to be able to fill the void left by disenchanted governments that are dumping Treasuries and “dedollarizing” in response to Western sanctions and U.S. tariffs. According to Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), who sponsored the GENIUS Act, it could lead to stablecoin issuers becoming the “world’s largest holders of U.S. Treasuries by 2030.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says stablecoins are a strategic tool to “lock in dollar supremacy.” As financial commentator Lyn Alden observes, when residents of countries with unstable currencies (such as Argentina) purchase U.S. stablecoins to protect their savings from runaway inflation, the stablecoin issuer uses the local currency of the purchaser to buy U.S. Treasuries. In effect, the local currency has been converted to U.S. currency. That is also true for other institutional uses of stablecoins.

The problem with privately-issued money, however, is that untrustworthy issuers are subject to destabilizing bank runs; and that has been true for centuries. Gaining the confidence of users requires regulation to establish the stability and liquidity of the stablecoins, and hence the need for the GENIUS Act.

How Lincoln Solved His Debt Crisis

In a 2023 research paper titled “Taming Wildcat Stablecoins,” Professors Gary B. Gorton and Jeffery Y. Zhang compared stablecoin issuers to the private “wildcat banks” that issued their own paper currencies as banknotes during the Free Banking Era before the Civil War. Private state-chartered banks issued their own paper banknotes, which were thinly capitalized and of uncertain reliability and exchangeability. Bank runs were common. The problem was solved through the National Bank Acts of 1863 and 1864.

The Acts sought to stabilize a very chaotic system of private currencies by encouraging banks to acquire national bank charters that would allow them to issue a uniform national bank currency. To ensure its uniformity and stability, the banks were required to back their National Bank Notes 1 to 1 with federal bonds or precious metal coins deposited with the U.S. Treasury. This pool of liquidity — the forerunner of today’s central bank “reserves” — not only stabilized the currency against runs but helped fund the war effort and created a market for federal debt.

It helped, but the bonds purchased by the banks were not sufficient to fund the government’s needs. British-backed bankers were demanding 24–36% interest on loans — usurious terms that risked “recolonizing” the U.S. through debt. President Lincoln avoided that crippling debt by reverting to the funding mechanism of the American colonists – government-issued paper money. Under the Legal Tender Act of 1862, the Treasury issued $450 million in U.S. Notes or Greenbacks — fiat currency spent directly into the economy for soldiers, supplies and contracts.

These innovations allowed Lincoln’s government to bypass foreign lenders, fund the Civil War, and preserve the country from colonization by debt. A similar approach could arguably solve the government’s debt crisis today.

Fast Forward to 2025

The United States now grapples with a $36.72 trillion federal debt and an interest burden projected to be $952 billion for 2025, consuming 18.4% of federal revenues. The debt to GDP ratio is an unsustainable 124%. Neither raising taxes nor slashing the federal budget will solve what is essentially a math problem: the debt-at-interest is growing faster than the economy itself.

The GENIUS Act, requiring stablecoins to be backed by U.S. Treasuries, follows the same funding model as the National Bank Acts, and it has the same limitations as a funding model. Stablecoins can bolster the market for U.S. debt, but they won’t tame the voracious interest monster that is consuming the federal budget. President Lincoln largely met his funding crisis with currency issued directly by the Treasury, and President Trump could do the same.

This would have to be done, however, through the Treasury, not the Federal Reserve. The Fed can only issue “bank reserves” and is not allowed to fund the federal debt by buying Treasuries directly from the government. It must buy them on the open market, with reserves injected into the reserve accounts of the banks of the sellers. The banks then credit the sellers’ deposit accounts with dollars, but the dollars go to the sellers, not to the Treasury; and the interest on the bonds goes to the banks, due to the Fed’s controversial policy of paying interest on the banks’ reserves.

Today, this interest paid to the banks is actually greater than the interest the Fed earns on the bonds it buys from them, resulting in a negative balance in its portfolio. In a recent interview on Fox News Business, Treasury Secretary Bessent said the Fed was “losing $1 billion a year because of a mismatch in the bond portfolio from the short-term rates.” In 2023, this loss amounted to $114 billion; and it actually accrues to the Treasury, since the Fed is required to rebate its profits to the Treasury after deducting its costs. The Fed has now amassed a negative balance that will take years to pay off.

Thus Federal Reserve purchases of federal securities through “quantitative easing” won’t solve the debt problem. Treasury-issued currency, on the other hand, is legal and constitutional, as established by Lincoln’s Greenbacks and the subsequent legal tender cases of the Supreme Court; and it could actually solve the debt crisis.

Dealing with the Inflation Question

Printing the whole $37 trillion needed to pay off the federal debt would no doubt be inflationary, and Congress would consider it a bridge too far in any case. But the Treasury could print enough to cover the interest on the debt, or to buy the debt as it comes due, or to cover the budget deficit.

The risk, of course, is that an out-of-control Congress will run the presses as a “magic money tree” to fund all of its pet projects; but limits could be put on these expenditures. They could be required to be “productive,” adding to GDP, lowering the debt to GDP ratio to manageable levels. The German government did this in the 1930s with Mefo bills, avoiding speculative exploitation of the funds by issuing them as payment for specific industrial output.

The People’s Bank of China has hugely increased the money supply of that country without creating price inflation. Prices have been kept stable by increasing supply (GDP) along with demand (money). (For details, see my earlier article here.) Increasing the country’s GDP has been facilitated by China Development Bank, the world’s largest development bank, which has funded massive infrastructure and development across the country.

HR 4052, The National Infrastructure Bank Act of 2023, is currently before Congress and has 48 co-sponsors. Like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation that pulled the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression, the bank is designed to be a source of off-budget financing, without adding new costs to the federal budget. It follows the model of the First U.S. Bank established by Alexander Hamilton. Capitalization is to be with debt-for-equity swaps: Treasuries held by the public will be traded for shares in the bank, paying 2% over the interest earned on the Treasuries. For more information, see the Coalition for a National Infrastructure Bank’s website.

At the local level, state-owned banks could do something similar. Currently our only state-owned bank is the Bank of North Dakota, but it is a very successful model that not only funds state infrastructure and development but generates income for the state and acts as a “mini-Fed” for local banks. For more information, see the Public Banking Institute website.

The GENIUS Act can stabilize the bond market, but it is only a stopgap measure, buying time in the battle against an ever-growing debt. To escape altogether, as Lincoln’s government did, Congress needs to issue some of its own “sovereign” money. If issued for productive purposes in a sustainable way, this money could arguably fuel the economy without reliance on federal debt markets at all.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ellen Brown.

On 2 November 2008, the New York Times Magazine headlined “Questions for James K. Galbraith: The Populist,” which was an “Interview by Deborah Solomon” of the prominent liberal economist and son of John Kenneth Galbraith. She asked him, “There are at least 15,000 professional economists in this country, and you’re saying only two or three of them foresaw the mortgage crisis” which had brought on the second Great Depression?

He answered: “Ten or twelve would be closer than two or three.”

She very appropriately followed up immediately with “What does this say about the field of economics, which claims to be a science?”

He didn’t answer by straight-out saying that economics isn’t any more of a science than physics was before Galileo, or than biology was before Darwin. He didn’t proceed to explain that the very idea of a Nobel Prize in Economics was based upon a lie which alleged that economics was the first field to become scientific within all of the “social sciences,” when, in fact, there weren’t yet any social sciences, none yet at all. But he came close to admitting these things, when he said: “It’s an enormous blot on the reputation of the profession. There are thousands of economists. Most of them teach. And most of them teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless.” His term “useless” was a euphemism for false. His term “blot” was a euphemism for “nullification.”

On 9 January 2009, economist Jeff Madrick headlined at The Daily Beast, “How the Entire Economics Profession Failed,” and he opened:

At the annual meeting of American Economists, most everyone refused to admit their failures to prepare or warn about the second worst crisis of the century.

I could find no shame in the halls of the San Francisco Hilton, the location at the annual meeting of American economists. Mainstream economists from major universities dominate the meetings, and some of them are the anointed cream of the crop, including former Clinton, Bush and even Reagan advisers.

There was no session on the schedule about how the vast majority of economists should deal with their failure to anticipate or even seriously warn about the possibility that the second worst economic crisis of the last hundred years was imminent.

I heard no calls to reform educational curricula because of a crisis so threatening and surprising that it undermines, at least if the academicians were honest, the key assumptions of the economic theory currently being taught. …

I found no one fundamentally changing his or her mind about the value of economics, economists, or their work.”

He observed a scandalous profession of quacks who are satisfied to remain quacks. The public possesses faith in them because it possesses faith in the “invisible hand” of God, and everyone is taught to believe in that from the crib. In no way is it science.

In a science, when facts prove that the theory is false, the theory gets replaced, it’s no longer taught. In a scholarly field, however, that’s not so — proven-false theory continues being taught. In economics, the proven-false theory continued being taught, and still continues today to be taught. This demonstrates that economics is still a religion or some other type of philosophy, not yet any sort of science.

Mankind is still coming out of the Dark Ages. The Bible is still being viewed as history, not as myth (which it is), not as some sort of religious or even political propaganda. It makes a difference — a huge difference: the difference between truth and falsehood.

The Dutch economist Dirk J. Bezemer, at Groningen University, posted on 16 June 2009 a soon-classic paper, “‘No One Saw This Coming’: Understanding Financial Crisis Through Accounting Models,” in which he surveyed the work of 12 economists who did see it (the economic collapse of 2008) coming; and he found there that they had all used accounting or “Flow of Funds” models, instead of the standard microeconomic theory. (In other words: they accounted for, instead of ignored, debts.) From 2005 through 2007, these accounting-based economists had published specific and accurate predictions of what would happen: Dean Baker, Wynne Godley, Fred Harrison, Michael Hudson, Eric Janszen, Stephen (“Steve”) Keen, Jakob B. Madsen, Jens K. Sorensen, Kurt Richebaecher, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, and Robert Shiller.

He should have added several others. Paul Krugman, wrote a NYT column on 12 August 2005 headlined “Safe as Houses” and he said “Houses aren’t safe at all” and that they would likely decline in price. On 25 August 2006, he bannered “Housing Gets Ugly” and concluded “It’s hard to see how we can avoid a serious slowdown.” Bezemer should also have included Merrill Lynch’s Chief North American Economist, David A. Rosenberg, whose The Market Economist article “Rosie’s Housing Call August 2004” on 6 August 2004 already concluded, “The housing sector has entered a ‘bubble’ phase,” and who presented a series of graphs showing it. Bezemer should also have included Satyajit Das, about whom TheStreet had headlined on 21 September 21 2007, “The Credit Crisis Could Be Just Beginning.” He should certainly have included Ann Pettifor, whose 2003 The Real World Economic Outlook, and her masterpiece the 2006 The Coming First World Debt Crisis, predicted exactly what happened and why. Her next book, the 2009 The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Bankers, was almost a masterpiece, but it failed to present any alternative to the existing microeconomic theory — as if microeconomic theory isn’t a necessary part of economic theory. Another great economist he should have mentioned was Charles Hugh Smith, who had been accurately predicting since at least 2005 the sequence of events that culminated in the 2008 collapse. And Bezemer should especially have listed the BIS’s chief economist, William White, regarding whom Germany’s Spiegel headlined on 8 July 2009, “Global Banking Economist Warned of Coming Crisis.” (It is about but doesn’t mention nor link to https://www.bis.org/publ/work147.pdf.) White had been at war against the policies of America’s Fed chief Alan Greenspan ever since 1998, and especially since 2003, but the world’s aristocrats muzzled White’s view and promoted Greenspan’s instead. (The economics profession have always been propagandists for the super-rich.) Bezemer should also have listed Charles R. Morris, who in 2007 told his publisher Peter Osnos that the crash would start in Summer 2008, which was basically correct. Moreover, James K. Galbraith had written for years saying that a demand-led depression would result, such as in his American Prospect “How the Economists Got It Wrong,” 30 November 2002; and “Bankers Versus Base,” 15 April 2004, and culminating finally in his 2008 The Predator State, which blamed the aristocracy in the strongest possible terms for the maelstrom to come. Bezemer should also have listed Barry Ritholtz, who, in his “Recession Predictor,” on 18 August 2005, noted the optimistic view of establishment economists and then said, “I disagree … due to Psychology of consumers.” He noted “consumer debt, not as a percentage of GDP, but relative to net asset wealth,” and also declining “median personal income,” as pointing toward a crash from this mounting debt-overload. Then, on 31 May 2006, he headlined “Recent Housing Data: Charts & Analysis,” and opened: “It has long been our view that Real Estate is the prime driver of this economy, and its eventual cooling will be a major crimp in GDP, durable goods, and consumer spending.” Bezemer should also have listed both Paul Kasriel and Asha Bangalore at Northern Trust. Kasriel headlined on 22 May 2007, “US Economy May Wake Up Without Consumers’ Prodding?” and said it wouldn’t happen – and consumers were too much in debt. Then on 8 August 2007, he bannered: “US Economic Growth in Domestic Final Demand,” and said that “the housing recession is … spreading to other parts of the economy.” On 25 May 2006, Bangalore headlined “Housing Market Is Cooling Down, No Doubts About It.” and that was one of two Asha Bangalore articles which were central to Ritholtz’s 31 May 2006 article showing that all of the main indicators pointed to a plunge in house-prices that had started in March 2005; so, by May 2006, it was already clear from the relevant data, that a huge economic crash was comning soon. Another whom Bezemer should have listed was L. Randall Wray, whose 2005 Levy Economics Institute article, “The Ownership Society: Social Security Is Only the Beginning” asserted that it was being published “at the peak of what appears to be a real estate bubble.” Bezemer should also have listed Paul B. Farrell, columnist at marketwatch.com, who saw practically all the correct signs, in his 26 June 2005 “Global Megabubble? You Decide. Real Estate Is Only Tip of Iceberg; or Is It?”; and his 17 July 2005 “Best Strategies to Beat the Megabubble: Real Estate Bubble Could Trigger Global Economic Meltdown”; and his 9 January 2006 “Meltdown in 2006? Cast Your Vote”; and 15 May 2006 “Party Time (Until Real Estate Collapses)”; and his 21 August 2006 “Tipping Point Pops Bubble, Triggers Bear: Ten Warnings the Economy, Markets Have Pushed into Danger Zone”; and his 30 July 2007 “You Pick: Which of 20 Tipping Points Ignites Long Bear Market?” Farrell’s commentaries also highlighted the same reform-recommendations that most of the others did, such as Baker, Keen, Pettifor, Galbraith, Ritholtz, and Wray; such as break up the mega-banks, and stiffen regulation of financial institutions. However, the vast majority of academically respected economists disagreed with all of this and were wildly wrong in their predictions, and in their analyses. The Nobel Committee should have withdrawn their previous awards in economics to still-practicing economists (except to Krugman who did win a Nobel) and re-assigned them to these 25 economists, who showed that they had really deserved it.

And there was another: economicpredictions.org tracked four economists who predicted correctly the 2008 crash: Dean Baker, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, and Med Jones, the latter of whom had actually the best overall record regarding the predictions that were tracked there.

And still others should also be on the list: for example, Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider headlined on 21 November 2012, “The Genius Who Invented Economics Blogging Reveals How He Got Everything Right And What’s Coming Next” and he interviewed Bill McBride, who had started his calculated riskblog in January 2005. So I looked in the archives there at December 2005, and noticed December 28th, “Looking Forward: 2006 Top Economic Stories.” He started there with four trends that he expected everyone to think of, and then listed another five that weren’t so easy, including “Housing Slowdown. In my opinion, the Housing Bubble was the top economic story of 2005, but I expect the slowdown to be a form of Chinese water torture. Sales for both existing and new homes will probably fall next year from the records set in 2005. And median prices will probably increase slightly, with declines in the more ‘heated markets.’” McBride also had predicted that the economic rebound would start in 2009, and he was now, in 2012, predicting a strong 2013. Probably Joe Weisenthal was right in calling McBride a “Genius.”

And also, Mike Whitney at InformationClearinghouse.info and other sites, headlined on 20 November 2006, “Housing Bubble Smack-Down,” and he nailed the credit-boom and Fed easy-money policy as the cause of the housing bubble and the source of an imminent crash.

Furthermore, Ian Welsh headlined on 28 November 2007, “Looking Forward At the Consequences of This Bubble Bursting,” and listed 10 features of the crash to come, of which 7 actually happened.

In addition, Gail Tverberg, an actuary, headlined on 9 January 2008 “Peak Oil and the Financial Markets: A Forecast for 2008,” and provided the most detailed of all the prescient descriptions of the collapse that would happen that year.

Furthermore, Gary Shilling’s January 2007 Insight newsletter listed “12 investment themes” which described perfectly what subsequently happened, starting with “The housing bubble has burst.”

And the individual investing blogger Jesse Colombo started noticing the housing bubble even as early as 6 September 2004, blogging at his stock-market-crash.net “The Housing Bubble” and documenting that it would happen (“Here is the evidence that we are in a massive housing bubble:”) and what the economic impact was going to be. Then on 7 February 2006 he headlined “The Coming Crash!” and said “Based on today’s overvalued housing prices, a 20 percent crash is certainly in the cards.”

Also: Stephanie Pomboy of MacroMavens issued an analysis and appropriate graphs on 7 December 2007, headlined “When Animals Attack” and predicting imminently a huge economic crash.

In alphabetical order, they are: Dean Baker, Asha Bangalore, Jesse Colombo, Satyajit Das, Paul B. Farrell, James K. Galbraith, Wynne Godley, Fred Harrison, Michael Hudson, Eric Janszen, Med Jones, Paul Kasriel, Steve Keen, Paul Krugman, Jakob B. Madsen, Bill McBride, Charles R. Morris, Ann Pettifor, Stehanie Pomboy, Kurt Richebaeker, Barry Ritholtz, David A. Rosenberg, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, Robert Shiller, Gary Shilling, Charles Hugh Smith, Jens K. Sorensen, Gail Tverberg, Ian Welsh, William White, Mike Whitney, L. Randall Wray.

Thus, at least 33 economists were contenders as having been worth their salt as economic professionals. One can say that only 33 economists predicted the 2008 collapse, or that only 33 economists predicted accurately or reasonably accurately the collapse. However, some of those 33 were’t actually professional economists. So, some of the world’s 33 best economists aren’t even professional economists, as accepted in that rotten profession.

So, the few honest and open-eyed economists (these 33, at least) tried to warn the world. Did the economics profession honor them for their having foretold the 2008 collapse? Did President Barack Obama hire them, and fire the incompetents he had previously hired for his Council of Economic Advisers? Did the Nobel Committee acknowledge that it had given Nobel Economics Prizes to the wrong people, including people such as the conservative Milton Friedman whose works were instrumental in causing the 2008 crash? Also complicit in causing the 2008 crash was the multiple-award-winning liberal economist Lawrence Summers, who largely agreed with Friedman but was nonetheless called a liberal. Evidently, the world was too corrupt for any of these 33 to reach such heights of power or of authority. Like Galbraith had said at the close of his 2002 “How the Economists Got It Wrong“: “Being right doesn’t count for much in this club.” If anything, being right means being excluded from such posts. In an authentically scientific field, the performance of one’s predictions (their accuracy) is the chief (if not SOLE) determinant of one’s reputation and honor amongst the profession, but that’s actually not the way things yet are in any of the social “sciences,” including economics; they’re all just witch-doctory, not yet real science. The fraudulence of these fields is just ghastly. In fact, as Steve Keen scandalously noted in Chapter 7 of his 2001 Debunking Economics: “As this book shows, economics [theory] is replete with logical inconsistencies.” In any science, illogic is the surest sign of non-science, but it is common and accepted in the social ‘sciences’, including economics. The economics profession itself is garbage, a bad joke, instead of any science at all.

These 33 were actually only candidates for being scientific economists, but I have found the predictions of some of them to have been very wrong on some subsequent matters of economic performance. For example, the best-known of the 33, Paul Krugman, is a “military Keynesian” — a liberal neoconservative (and military Keynesianism is empirically VERY discredited: false worldwide, and false even in the country that champions it, the U.S.) — and he is unfavorable toward the poor, and favorable toward the rich; so, he is acceptable to the Establishment.) Perhaps a few of these 33 economists (perhaps half of whom aren’t even members of the economics profession) ARE scientific (in their underlying economic beliefs — their operating economic theory) if a scientific economics means that it’s based upon a scientific theory of economics — a theory that is derived not from any opinions but only from the relevant empirical data. Although virtually all of the 33 are basically some sort of Keynesian, even that (Keynes’s theory) isn’t a full-fledged theory of economics (it has many vagaries, and it has no microeconomics). The economics profession is still a field of philosophy, instead of a field of science.

The last chapter of my America’s Empire of Evil presents what I believe to be the first-ever scientific theory of economics, a theory that replaces all of microeconomic theory (including a micro that’s integrated with its macro) and is consistent with Keynes in macroeconomic theory; and all of which theory is derived and documented from only the relevant empirical economic data — NOT from anyone’s opinions. The economics profession think that replacing existing economic theory isn’t necessary after the crash of 2008, but I think it clearly IS necessary (because — as that chapter of my book shows — all of the relevant empirical economic data CONTRADICT the existing economic theory, ESPECIALLY the existing microeconomic theory).

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

In a recent op-ed for the New York Times (3/10/23), the economist and longtime Times columnist Paul Krugman gave readers “a pro tip”:

Anyone who makes alarmist claims about debt by talking about trillions of dollars as opposed to, say, percentages of gross domestic product, is engaged in scare tactics, not serious discussion.

It would be great if his own paper would listen to him.

Republican hostage-taking

Things you don’t need to know about the debt, according to the New York Times (5/2/23): how big it is compared to the US economy, or to other nations’ debt burdens.

Instead, the Times has been engaged in outright fearmongering over the size of the US federal debt over the past several months. This at the same time that the Republican Party has taken the economy hostage, in order to exact wildly unpopular cuts to government programs.

In a rerun of Obama-era fights, Republicans are using their majority in the House to refuse to raise the debt ceiling. As the Times (5/2/23) has acknowledged:

Lifting the debt limit does not actually authorize any new spending—in fact, it simply allows the United States to spend money on programs that have already been authorized by Congress.

Failing to raise the ceiling risks default, which could potentially bring economic disaster, and also appears to directly violate the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which states, “The validity of the public debt of the United States…shall not be questioned.”

In the midst of this political battle, with one party using unconstitutional methods and the threat of economic catastrophe to try to kick people off social programs, a responsible paper of record might want to avoid mindlessly promoting a key premise of the economic terrorists: that government debt is a serious problem that we should be very concerned about.

That’s a lot of money, huh?

For the New York Times (3/9/23), Joe Biden is trying to “recapture the more centrist identity that long defined him” by being “increasingly focused on deficit reduction.”

But who said the Times was responsible? In April, over a third of the articles that the paper ran as part of its coverage of the political battle over the debt limit featured the scary raw number for the US federal debt: $31 trillion. Only one included reference to debt as a percentage of GDP. The story was similar in March, when five of 14 articles referenced the raw number or projections for that number, and only two articles mentioned the debt-to-GDP figure, or projections for that figure.

Some pieces that did not include the $31 trillion number nevertheless repeatedly alluded to the addition of trillions to the debt. In one case, the Times (3/9/23) described Biden as

cast[ing] himself as a new-generation Franklin D. Roosevelt pressing for a modern-day New Deal, with large-scale spending on climate change, social welfare programs and student debt relief that will add trillions of dollars to the national debt in years to come.

In another (3/31/23), it referenced

the tax cuts signed by President Donald J. Trump in 2017, which his administration said would pay for themselves, but which independent evidence showed added trillions to the national debt.

No context was provided for what “trillions” more in debt actually means. Basically all the reader gets is, That’s a lot of money, huh?–plus the insinuation, Probably not great, don’t you think? This approach may balance both sides—Hey, they’re both blowing a hole in the budget!—but it’s far from Krugman’s benchmark for responsible reporting.

‘No good, hard governance anymore’

The New York Times (4/18/23) is nostalgic for the days when Republicans asserted that “benefit cuts to Social Security and Medicare [are] absolutely vital to the nation’s future.”

The piece, by Jonathan Weisman, was littered with debt-scolding, with the subhead reading, “After a decade of rising deficits and soaring debt, the top White House contenders, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, show little interest in battling over the nation’s finances.” It quoted fiscal hawks, who variously lamented that “there is no good, hard governance anymore,” and that “it’s clearly good politics to recast yourself as the defender of Social Security and Medicare. It’s just bad for the country.”

Curiously, no policy expert opposed to gutting the federal budget made an appearance.

Even in the one April article (4/21/23) that discussed debt as a percentage of GDP, the framing was designed to stoke fear:

Even if the entire estimated savings from the [Republican spending] plan came to pass, it would still leave the nation a decade from now with total debt that was larger than the annual output of the economy—a level that [House Speaker Kevin] McCarthy and other Republicans have frequently labeled a crisis.

No debt crisis in sight

Paul Krugman (New York Times, 5/4/23): “Creating a global depression because we’re afraid of looking silly would be utterly irresponsible.”

Whether that level of debt is actually a crisis was not up for discussion. Maybe the Times thinks that’s besides the point. But without such a discussion, readers can easily leave with the assumption that government debt is a serious problem, and with the notion that something drastic must be done, and soon.

As Krugman (5/4/23) has put it, though, “What’s odd about this potential crisis is that it has nothing to do with excessive debt.” In the same op-ed (3/10/23) cited above, he elaborated:

If we do look at debt as a percentage of GDP, it’s indeed high, but not outside ranges that other countries have managed without crisis…. Britain spent large parts of both the 19th and 20th centuries with debt well above current US levels, but without experiencing a severe debt crisis.

Likewise, if we look at American public debt over time, we see that it is still below the record levels it reached in the 1940s. It’s projected to bump past the domestic record by 2028, but there’s little reason to think that will lead to a crisis, besides one ginned up by the right for obviously political reasons. Writing in February (Project Syndicate, 2/9/23) of the projected rise in debt levels over the next decade, Barry Eichengreen, a Berkeley economist who recently co-authored the book In Defense of Public Debt, observed:

This increase is by no means catastrophic…. Cutting essential public programs now to address a debt problem that won’t even begin to materialize for a decade would be shooting ourselves in the foot.

In any case, the debt-to-GDP ratio could easily be stabilized or reduced by raising taxes and controlling healthcare costs, as Krugman recommends.

The federal debt is set for a gradual rise over the next decade, not exactly the uncontrolled explosion that some are warning of.

‘Ticking time bomb’?

The New York Times (5/8/23) says a solution to the debt ceiling crisis will “most likely include the partial reversal of legislative victories won during Mr. Biden’s first two years,” because asserting that the debt ceiling is unconstitutional risks “financial volatility.”

The New York Times editorial board, interestingly, has taken a different approach to describing the federal debt than the paper’s reporters, writing in a recent editorial (5/8/23), “The federal debt totals about $24.6 trillion, equal to roughly 94% of the nation’s gross domestic product, a high level by historical standards.”

It’s notable that the actual number for debt as a percentage of GDP showed up here, given that it didn’t even show up in the one April article featured in the Times’ database of debt limit coverage that referenced the measure. But perhaps more significant is that the Times chopped down the raw figure for the federal debt from the one that has shown up repeatedly in the paper’s news articles. One article (4/21/23) last month, for instance, had opened:

Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California has repeatedly said that he and his fellow House Republicans are refusing to raise the nation’s borrowing limit, and risking economic catastrophe, to force a reckoning on America’s $31 trillion national debt.

“Without exaggeration, America’s debt is a ticking time bomb that will detonate unless we take serious, responsible action,” he said this week.

Now we hear from the Times editorial board that the debt is not $31 trillion, but $24.6 trillion. It turns out that both numbers are correct—the difference is that the first is the one used to determine the legal debt limit, while the second number excludes debt that the government owes to itself, which gives a better sense of the actual debt burden. It would be reasonable to cite either one, or both, in a discussion of the debt limit. Even-handed coverage might cite both numbers equally. The approach of the Times news section, however, is to constantly elevate the larger number, the one that lends itself to more effective fearmongering.

The point is not that people would get such a better sense of the scale of the debt if they read $24.6 trillion rather than $31 trillion. It’s that there’s clearly a more and a less responsible way of presenting the size of the debt. The way the Times editorial presents it doesn’t give all the context you would need if you wanted to inform your readership of what’s going on with the debt, and whether it’s sustainable. But it’s worlds apart from an article that opens with a massive number and no context, followed by an unchallenged description of the debt as “a ticking time bomb.”

‘Ruling out cuts’ to safety net

The New York Times (4/21/23) chides the Republican Party for its “lowering of ambitions” in not calling for even deeper cuts in spending.

Unfortunately, the Times’ news section has often preferred to throw out big numbers without context rather than giving a fuller picture to its readers. Times reporter Jim Tankersley has been a prime offender here. In the same April piece (4/21/23) that opened with the $31 trillion figure, Tankersley followed up McCarthy’s description of the debt as a “ticking time bomb” with the line, “But the bill Mr. McCarthy introduced on Wednesday would only modestly change the nation’s debt trajectory.” Further down, he continued that the spending cuts proposed by McCarthy

are a far cry from Republicans’ promises, after they won control of the House in November, to balance the budget in 10 years. That lowering of ambitions is partly the product of Republican leaders’ ruling out any cuts to the fast-rising costs of Social Security or Medicare, bowing to an onslaught of political attacks from Mr. Biden.

Notice the framing here: The costs of Social Security and Medicare are “fast-rising.” And a political opponent’s attacks are preventing Republicans from going after those costs.

Unmentioned? The costs of Social Security and Medicare are not unsustainable. According to Congressional Budget Office data from February, Social Security is fairly paltry in comparison to similar programs in many European countries—5.1% of GDP in 2023, versus 14.8% of GDP in spending on public pensions in France in 2019. The projected level of spending for Social Security by 2050? 6.4% of GDP. Gasp!

Medicare costs, meanwhile, are projected to rise from 3.1% to 5.4% of GDP over the same period. One way of viewing this: The combined cost of the two programs in 2050 doesn’t even match the cost of the French government’s public pension system in 2019 (relative to each country’s economic output).

Moreover, Biden’s defense of these programs is certainly tying Republicans’ hands, but so is public opinion. Medicare and Social Security are, and have historically been, incredibly popular (FAIR.org, 4/12/23). There’s a reason why both programs are known as third rails in American politics. Why not acknowledge that this is not a simple matter of red versus blue, but the US public versus those who would take away their retirement benefits?

‘Fiscal responsibility’

The New York Times (2/15/23) reported that “some were dismayed” that Biden did not heed the “sober warnings from the experts” by calling for cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Perhaps because Tankersley is quite fond of peddling concern over the costs of these programs. An article of his published in February (2/15/23), towards the start of the current round of debt ceiling drama, for example, bore the headline, “As Lawmakers Spar Over Social Security, Its Costs Are Rising Fast.” Its second paragraph read:

Mr. Biden has effectively steered a debate about fiscal responsibility away from two cherished safety-net programs for seniors [Social Security and Medicare], just as those plans are poised for a decade of rapid spending growth.

Noting that Republicans have agreed not to touch these programs during negotiations over the debt limit, Tankersley observed that the “debate will exclude the primary spending-side drivers of future federal debt and deficits.” He went on to present some dizzying statistics meant to impress the size of the spending on readers without actually informing them of much of anything:

On Wednesday, the budget office predicted Social Security spending would grow by two-thirds over the coming decade. That’s more than double the expected growth rate for spending on the military and on domestic programs like education and environmental protection….

Medicare is a smaller program but poised to grow even faster, at three times the rate of military and other discretionary spending over the next decade, according to the May forecasts.

The cost of these programs as a percentage of GDP was nowhere to be found.

Tankersley then pointed out that Obama agreed with the fiscal hawks in his 2011 State of the Union Address when he called for a bipartisan solution to Social Security (read: cuts to Social Security). The piece continued:

Some were dismayed that Mr. Biden—and Republican lawmakers—did not follow a similar path at his own State of the Union this month. “The sober warnings from the experts is quite a contrast to the gleeful cheers from bipartisan policymakers at the State of the Union for doing nothing,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which advocates federal debt reduction.

Was a progressive expert brought in to balance the budget hawk? Of course not. That would give the views of the majority of the public far too much representation.

A new path forward

A New York Times graphic (5/8/23) helpfully shows how much of the discretionary budget would have to be cut under the Republican plan.

Articles in the New York Times’ news section haven’t uniformly conformed to debt-scolding. A recent article (5/8/23) outlined in detail the severe and unpopular cuts that the Republican spending proposal would require, and even included a graph showing recent trends and future projections for public debt as a percentage of GDP. An earlier piece (3/6/23) did something similar, and even provided a longer time frame for the debt-to-GDP graph, though little additional context was included.

What would be great to see from the Times going forward, as the US approaches the X-date when the government can no longer delay dealing with the debt limit and may in fact default, would be far more serious reporting that provides readers with the context necessary to evaluate debt and spending figures. And to be clear, this would involve more than just giving debt as a percentage of GDP; that’s not some magical number that tells you all you need to know, though mentioning it is more useful than saying $31 trillion over and over.

The paper’s history doesn’t offer much hope, but it’s encouraging that its editorial board, in sharp contrast to the board of close rival the Washington Post (FAIR.org, 2/24/23), has refrained from an all-out assault on social spending in recent months, as is the fact that one of the paper’s core columnists has remained clear-eyed on this issue. At the end of the day, Times reporters probably don’t want to be remembered for having enabled Republican hostage-taking, so maybe they should start writing like it.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter: @NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

The post NYT Fearmongers Debt as GOP Holds Economy Hostage appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Conor Smyth.

The Disastrous Russian Depression Resulting from Western supervised “Shock Therapy.”

The magnitude of this economic catastrophe was spelled out tersely in a recent essay by Paul Krugman who wondered whether many Americans are aware of the enormous disaster it was for Russia. Krugman is quite accurate in describing it – but not in identifying its cause.

The graph below shows what happened to Russia beginning in the early 1990s as a result of the economic policies that were put in place under the guidance of U.S. advisors, the economist Jeffrey Sachs, perhaps the foremost among them. Sachs describes his contribution here. These policies drive an economy abruptly from a centrally planned economy with price controls to an economy where prices are determined by the market. This process is often described as “shock therapy.”

The plot shown above is from the World Bank (The link is here.) in accord with the standards set by the World Bank under the policies of Creative Commons.

The plot shows that, upon the onset of “shock therapy” in 1991, the economy of Russia crumbled to 57% of its level in 1989, a decline of 43%! By comparison the U.S. economy in the Great Depression of the 1930s fell to 70% of its pre-Depression level, a decline of 30%. The life expectancy dropped by roughly 4 years in Russia during that period. Poverty and hopelessness became the norm. From my experience, few Americans know of this, and fewer still understand its magnitude.

“Shock Therapy” Applied to Poland Did Not Result in Prolonged Depression. Why?

The data for Poland are also shown for comparison in the chart above. Why? Because “shock therapy” was also carried out in Poland beginning two years earlier than Russia, in 1989. A glance at the graph above shows the striking difference between the two and the graph below reinforces that view. Below the real GDP’s for both Russia and Poland normalized to a value of 100 for the first year of their transitions to a market economy are shown in a 2001 IMF staff paper by Gerard Roland, “Ten Years After…Transition and Economics.” (China is also included by Roland. One lesson is that China moved to a market economy without “shock therapy,” did so with astonishing success and without putting itself at the mercy of the largesse of the U.S.)

Roland, Gérard. “Ten Years after … Transition and Economics.” IMF Staff Papers 48 (2001): 29–52. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4621689. Figure 1. Cited by Krugman here.

It is immediately clear that Poland went through a brief downturn lasting two years but recovered quickly, unlike Russia which continued in a slump for 16 years. Why the difference between the two? A big part of the answer is provided by economist Jeffrey Sachs who was in the forefront of advisors for the transitions in both countries and hence is a man who knows whereof he speaks. As Sachs put it in an interview here on DemocracyNow!, he was present during a “controlled experiment” where he could observe what led to such different outcomes. He says:

I had a controlled experiment, because I was economic adviser both to Poland and to the Soviet Union in the last year of President Gorbachev and to President Yeltsin in the first two years of Russian independence, 1992, ’93. My job was finance, to actually help Russia find a way to address, as you (the interviewer, Juan Gonzalez) described it, a massive financial crisis. And my basic recommendation in Poland, and then in Soviet Union and in Russia, was: To avoid a societal crisis and a geopolitical crisis, the rich Western world should help to tamp down this extraordinary financial crisis that was taking place with the breakdown of the former Soviet Union.

Well, interestingly, in the case of Poland, I made a series of very specific recommendations, and they were all accepted by the U.S. government — creating a stabilization fund, canceling part of Poland’s debts, allowing many financial maneuvers to get Poland out of the difficulty. And, you know, I patted myself on the back. ‘Oh, look at this!’

I make a recommendation, and one of them, for a billion dollars, stabilization fund, was accepted within eight hours by the White House. So, I thought, ‘Pretty good.’

Then came the analogous appeal on behalf of, first, Gorbachev, in the final days, and then President Yeltsin. Everything I recommended, which was on the same basis of economic dynamics, was rejected flat out by the White House. I didn’t understand it, I have to tell you, at the time. I said, ‘But it worked in Poland.’ And they’d stare at me blankly. In fact, an acting secretary of state in 1992 said, ‘Professor Sachs, it doesn’t even matter whether I agree with you or not. It’s not going to happen.’

And it took me, actually, quite a while to understand the underlying geopolitics. Those were exactly the days of Cheney and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and what became the Project for the New American Century, meaning for the continuation of American hegemony. I didn’t see it at the moment, because I was thinking as an economist, how to help overcome a financial crisis. But the unipolar politics was taking shape, and it was devastating. Of course, it left Russia in a massive financial crisis that led to a lot of instability that had its own implications for years to come.

But even more than that, what these people were planning, early on, despite explicit promises to Gorbachev and Yeltsin, was the expansion of NATO. And Clinton started the expansion of NATO with the three countries of Central Europe — Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic — and then George W. Bush Jr. added seven countries — Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the three Baltic states — but right up against Russia…

The Neocons at Work, Carrying Out “The Wolfowitz Doctrine,” the Latest Expression of the Post-WWII U.S. Drive for Total Global Domination.

It is quite clear that the goal of the United States was not to help Russia but to bring it down, and Sachs correctly links that to the US quest for global hegemony first set forth in the months before Pearl Harbor and reiterated by the neocons who are now its champions. Among them Sachs mentions Paul Wolfowitz whose “doctrine” sums up the goals of the post-Soviet era with the words:

Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.

We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.

What better way to achieve this goal than to reduce the economy of Russia to a basket case? Sachs draws a direct line from the Great Russian Depression of the 1990’s and early 2000’s to the expansion of NATO, the U.S. backed coup of a duly elected President in Ukraine in 2014 and on to the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine, also designed to “weaken” Russia. The hand of the US was at work every step of the way.

NYT’s Krugman Fails to Discuss the Hand of the US in the Great Russian Depression – not part of the Narrative That’s Fit to Print.

In his article Krugman describes the difference in outcomes between Poland and Russia but he does not describe different factors that distinguish the two countries and might serve as causes of the different outcomes. Sachs points out one such cause which he witnessed firsthand.

Krugman makes no mention of Sachs’s experience which Sachs himself has discussed repeatedly in interviews (like the one quoted for example, here) and in various written accounts going back to 1993 and a lengthy account in 2012 wherein he describes the lack of aid from the West as his “greatest frustration.” Sachs’s account is no secret and certainly a competent economist would know of it.

Certainly there were other factors contributing to this tragedy which Sachs himself discusses here. But there is no doubt that the actions of the US and the West were critical factors in the Great Russian Depression. An understanding of this goes a long way in making sense of events leading up to the present moment of U.S. proxy war in Ukraine and the brutal sanctions imposed on Russia. This understanding, however, does not fit the narrative to which the NYT confines itself – and its readers.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John V. Walsh.

The Disastrous Russian Depression Resulting from Western supervised “Shock Therapy.”

The magnitude of this economic catastrophe was spelled out tersely in a recent essay by Paul Krugman who wondered whether many Americans are aware of the enormous disaster it was for Russia. Krugman is quite accurate in describing it – but not in identifying its cause.

The graph below shows what happened to Russia beginning in the early 1990s as a result of the economic policies that were put in place under the guidance of U.S. advisors, the economist Jeffrey Sachs, perhaps the foremost among them. Sachs describes his contribution here. These policies drive an economy abruptly from a centrally planned economy with price controls to an economy where prices are determined by the market. This process is often described as “shock therapy.”

The plot shown above is from the World Bank (The link is here.) in accord with the standards set by the World Bank under the policies of Creative Commons.

The plot shows that, upon the onset of “shock therapy” in 1991, the economy of Russia crumbled to 57% of its level in 1989, a decline of 43%! By comparison the U.S. economy in the Great Depression of the 1930s fell to 70% of its pre-Depression level, a decline of 30%. The life expectancy dropped by roughly 4 years in Russia during that period. Poverty and hopelessness became the norm. From my experience, few Americans know of this, and fewer still understand its magnitude.

“Shock Therapy” Applied to Poland Did Not Result in Prolonged Depression. Why?

The data for Poland are also shown for comparison in the chart above. Why? Because “shock therapy” was also carried out in Poland beginning two years earlier than Russia, in 1989. A glance at the graph above shows the striking difference between the two and the graph below reinforces that view. Below the real GDP’s for both Russia and Poland normalized to a value of 100 for the first year of their transitions to a market economy are shown in a 2001 IMF staff paper by Gerard Roland, “Ten Years After…Transition and Economics.” (China is also included by Roland. One lesson is that China moved to a market economy without “shock therapy,” did so with astonishing success and without putting itself at the mercy of the largesse of the U.S.)

Roland, Gérard. “Ten Years after … Transition and Economics.” IMF Staff Papers 48 (2001): 29–52. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4621689. Figure 1. Cited by Krugman here.

It is immediately clear that Poland went through a brief downturn lasting two years but recovered quickly, unlike Russia which continued in a slump for 16 years. Why the difference between the two? A big part of the answer is provided by economist Jeffrey Sachs who was in the forefront of advisors for the transitions in both countries and hence is a man who knows whereof he speaks. As Sachs put it in an interview here on DemocracyNow!, he was present during a “controlled experiment” where he could observe what led to such different outcomes. He says:

I had a controlled experiment, because I was economic adviser both to Poland and to the Soviet Union in the last year of President Gorbachev and to President Yeltsin in the first two years of Russian independence, 1992, ’93. My job was finance, to actually help Russia find a way to address, as you (the interviewer, Juan Gonzalez) described it, a massive financial crisis. And my basic recommendation in Poland, and then in Soviet Union and in Russia, was: To avoid a societal crisis and a geopolitical crisis, the rich Western world should help to tamp down this extraordinary financial crisis that was taking place with the breakdown of the former Soviet Union.

Well, interestingly, in the case of Poland, I made a series of very specific recommendations, and they were all accepted by the U.S. government — creating a stabilization fund, canceling part of Poland’s debts, allowing many financial maneuvers to get Poland out of the difficulty. And, you know, I patted myself on the back. ‘Oh, look at this!’

I make a recommendation, and one of them, for a billion dollars, stabilization fund, was accepted within eight hours by the White House. So, I thought, ‘Pretty good.’

Then came the analogous appeal on behalf of, first, Gorbachev, in the final days, and then President Yeltsin. Everything I recommended, which was on the same basis of economic dynamics, was rejected flat out by the White House. I didn’t understand it, I have to tell you, at the time. I said, ‘But it worked in Poland.’ And they’d stare at me blankly. In fact, an acting secretary of state in 1992 said, ‘Professor Sachs, it doesn’t even matter whether I agree with you or not. It’s not going to happen.’

And it took me, actually, quite a while to understand the underlying geopolitics. Those were exactly the days of Cheney and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and what became the Project for the New American Century, meaning for the continuation of American hegemony. I didn’t see it at the moment, because I was thinking as an economist, how to help overcome a financial crisis. But the unipolar politics was taking shape, and it was devastating. Of course, it left Russia in a massive financial crisis that led to a lot of instability that had its own implications for years to come.

But even more than that, what these people were planning, early on, despite explicit promises to Gorbachev and Yeltsin, was the expansion of NATO. And Clinton started the expansion of NATO with the three countries of Central Europe — Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic — and then George W. Bush Jr. added seven countries — Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the three Baltic states — but right up against Russia…

The Neocons at Work, Carrying Out “The Wolfowitz Doctrine,” the Latest Expression of the Post-WWII U.S. Drive for Total Global Domination.

It is quite clear that the goal of the United States was not to help Russia but to bring it down, and Sachs correctly links that to the US quest for global hegemony first set forth in the months before Pearl Harbor and reiterated by the neocons who are now its champions. Among them Sachs mentions Paul Wolfowitz whose “doctrine” sums up the goals of the post-Soviet era with the words:

Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.

We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.

What better way to achieve this goal than to reduce the economy of Russia to a basket case? Sachs draws a direct line from the Great Russian Depression of the 1990’s and early 2000’s to the expansion of NATO, the U.S. backed coup of a duly elected President in Ukraine in 2014 and on to the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine, also designed to “weaken” Russia. The hand of the US was at work every step of the way.

NYT’s Krugman Fails to Discuss the Hand of the US in the Great Russian Depression – not part of the Narrative That’s Fit to Print.

In his article Krugman describes the difference in outcomes between Poland and Russia but he does not describe different factors that distinguish the two countries and might serve as causes of the different outcomes. Sachs points out one such cause which he witnessed firsthand.

Krugman makes no mention of Sachs’s experience which Sachs himself has discussed repeatedly in interviews (like the one quoted for example, here) and in various written accounts going back to 1993 and a lengthy account in 2012 wherein he describes the lack of aid from the West as his “greatest frustration.” Sachs’s account is no secret and certainly a competent economist would know of it.

Certainly there were other factors contributing to this tragedy which Sachs himself discusses here. But there is no doubt that the actions of the US and the West were critical factors in the Great Russian Depression. An understanding of this goes a long way in making sense of events leading up to the present moment of U.S. proxy war in Ukraine and the brutal sanctions imposed on Russia. This understanding, however, does not fit the narrative to which the NYT confines itself – and its readers.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John V. Walsh.

Bitcoin, invented during the financial crisis in 2008, is free from the central authority of governments and banks. In its 12 years of existence, the technology, with its unique feature of censorship resistance and permissionless use, has allowed people to store value securely and transact with one another freely in a way that is unprecedented in human history.

Born and raised on the internet, Bitcoin is stateless money that is now even considered to be the best candidate for the world reserve currency. Some see the significance of this innovation and its impact that goes beyond finance. Billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones, who became bullish on Bitcoin in 2020 remarked, “A bet on Bitcoin is a bet on human ingenuity”.

The issues that we are now facing, from poverty and climate change to conflicts among nations and human rights abuses are global, and cannot be resolved by any one country. In this article I will argue how Bitcoin is a gift for humanity that can help ordinary people around the world to work together collaboratively to meet those challenges, and is perfect money that can guide us into the next stage of our civilization.

Rejection of Nature’s God

The roots of the problems that now confront humanity have to do with our modern world’s loss of its connection to nature. We now have created a highly technological civilization and our way of life has become out of tune with the natural world.

Society’s separation from nature is traced back to the birth of the modern nation-state. The major events that broke civilization’s harmony with nature took place in the continent of North America when European settlers encountered Indigenous peoples. Back then, a true meeting of cultures did not occur. The possibility of creating a civilization through dialogue, by opening and integrating other perspectives did not happen.

Led by the God-ordained manifest destiny, European colonists crusaded toward the westward expansion. They destroyed the life of the indigenous people and their culture and they declared nature dead. Philosopher Jacob Needleman (2002) elucidated how in their conquest of the land, men who were influenced by Enlightenment ideas failed to understand the indigenous culture that “was resting on a different state of consciousness than does our modern civilization” (p.202), one that was more deeply connected to the earth.

This placed America in the trajectory of its development away from the original vision that lived in the land. At the time of the revolt against the British monarchy, Thomas Jefferson acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence that the separation of 13 colonies from Great Britain was entitled by “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”. In their assault on nature, founders of the constitutional republic betrayed the ideals that inspired their own independence, and denied the source of legitimacy that granted them their sovereign existence.

American monotheism

In America, the New World, that promised to liberate people from the arbitrary power of the King, a force of monarchy – the political system based upon the rule of a single figure has quietly persisted. In establishing the US constitutional republic, there was recognition of the importance of the state’s ability to function independently, free from church’s influence. This was articulated by Jefferson’s concept of a “wall of separation” between church and state, and was placed in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, as the premise of religious freedom that prohibits the government from either advancing or hindering religion.

Despite this safeguard against the creation of a church-state, the European colonists’ unconscious bias against the indigenous people’s way of life and a relationship to the land that was radically different from theirs, influenced the establishment of a predominant religion in America.

Jungian psychotherapist Rafael López-Pedraza (1990) noted how the Bible has become a basis of religious belief of Westerns and described its essence as “monotheism: the worship of one God, and the jealousy and wrath of that God if any other is worshipped” (p. 29). To the frame of mind shaped by Judeo-Christian tradition, Native American tribes’ animistic worldview that regards all things –animate and inanimate possessing a living spirit as an embodiment of the divine was considered primitive and inferior.

This European’s one-sided beliefs and attitudes, without having been carefully examined, formed a religion of American monotheism. The federal government worked to enforce this national religion by confining Native Americans to reservations, banning them from practicing their worship of nature, ceremonial dances, and rituals that were deeply woven into their everyday life. In the name of assimilation, their children were put in boarding schools and those First Nation people were made to adopt European cultural values including conversion into Christianity.

The doctrine of materialism

One god that has now occupied America denounces the supernatural world that underlies the natural world. It preaches the doctrine of materialism – a belief that only the things that can be perceived through external senses exist, and denies the reality beyond physical.

The republic, under monotheistic persuasion has charted a path of development that stands in opposition to nature and measures its progress through the advancement of physical comfort. In this, money became an instrument for the ruling elites to maintain their exclusive control over people’s choices of faith.

The US dollar that was declared as legal tender by government decree, with the symbol of the Eye of Providence watching over humanity began to circulate across the nation. Later, through the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, private corporations took the power to create money away from the government.

Central banks have become the overlord to remake the world according to its own image. Economists, with the idea of unlimited growth and the concept of gross domestic product (GDP), began their evangelism to promote a materialistic view of the world.

The invention of GDP

The GDP was created as a common denominator to assess the health of the nation’s economy. It is defined as “the total monetary or market value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country’s borders in a specific time period.” This concept has transformed economics into empirical science.

Physician and activist Vandana Shiva spoke how the GDP was invented during the war as a part of the war machine, and was used by economists as a weapon to support war economy. She explained how the GDP which was called the “Manhattan Project” of economics, creates a very artificial production boundary that says “If you produce what you consume you don’t produce”.

Shiva noted how nature produces and consumes in an amazing cycle that sustains life, yet according to this arbitrary defined growth measure that excludes economic activities such as services and goods for personal consumption, this nature’s regeneration is treated as non-production.

The GDP as a key concept in economics was used to create a Pyramid Ponzi scheme that extracts from nature, turning it into lifeless objects to increase the material wealth of those on the top. It is a system of enslavement, in which people are deprived of their ability to produce for themselves and be self-reliant. Instead, they are made to depend on large corporations to deliver the goods and services that they need.

Creation of model citizen

This plunder economy has been accelerated by 21st century consumer capitalism. The state sponsored orthodoxy of materialism denied the internal life of man, making people find value and meaning outside of themselves. Through sales marketing with advertising and branding, big business found a way to create in people a desire for consumption, and manufacture a need for mass production.

Through Hollywood, celebrities became idols for people’s worship. With their glamour, they presented to the public the myth of American Dream that promises everyone equal opportunities to achieve a materially affluent lifestyle. One by one, people were lured into the market, and began to look for meaning through material acquisition.

This abstract concept of the GDP that now drives this consumer economy has been used to set a standard for a model citizen. Now the market sends a message; ‘the more one engages in mindless consumption, the more one contributes to the increase of the GDP and becomes virtuous’.

Guided by the invisible hand of this engineered market that incentivizes passivity and obedience, people were made to chase after products striving to become good citizens, to be accepted and be recognized as being valuable.

Petrodollar hegemony

While keeping people insulated in a bubble of consumer culture, the US government under the thumb of private corporations carried on their missionary work around the globe to advance the dominance of their single-minded faith. In 1933, the US abandoned the gold standard for domestic transactions. Then, through the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944, the dollar was accepted as the international currency for most trade.

What appeared to be the final victory of supremacy of matter over nature came in 1971 when President Nixon severed the final link between the dollar and gold, by ending international convertibility of the dollar to gold. All those developments led to the creation of the petrodollar, a hegemony of one currency backed up by the military, which was acknowledged by Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman’s telling comment that US fiat currency is “backed by men with guns”.

The all-seeing eye of the godhead that floats at the top of the currency index has a limited vision. It can only see a mechanistic view of the future, and aims to create a world of machines that enslave humanity. In its own self-righteous American exceptionalism, one nation under a single god acts as if it is the absolute moral authority of the world.

Crisis of the Western view of the world

With an abstract sense of moralism that creates a duality of evil and good, the US empire projects external enemies. By creating the axis of evil with lies of weapons of mass destruction, the nation with the most powerful military power spreads fear and hatred, keeping the world under a perpetual state of war.

With an edict of “You’re either with us or against us”, the superpower state divides the world, coercing all to accept the doctrine of War on Terror. They demonize countries that challenge their petrodollar moral superiority and ostracize them from the international community, subjecting them to sanctions and military invasion.

In ways other than outright violence, this tyrannical god weaponizes finance against innocent people. Calling it “Jihadi of banking”, Max Keiser, a host of a popular show that reports on finance explained how the heads of central banks commit fraud and blow up the economy. He described that they are trained in madrasa of Ivy League schools, and they misinterpret Adam Smith and use it instead of the Koran as a religious pretext to commit “financial terrorism”. They lower interest rates for investors, allowing large companies to take away jobs and people’s livelihood, and destroy the whole economy.

As the expansion of West’s single vision of the world became destructive, its extractive war economy now meets the earth’s finite reality. As the end game for their money printing nears and world leaders frantically try to reset the system to bail out their god, Bitcoin has begun to shine a light on a new path where the materialistically driven civilization reaches its limit.

Separation of money and state

The invention of Bitcoin made the separation of money and state for the first time possible in history. This ended the oligarchy’s monopoly of faith that denied people an access to a true nature of reality, and freed people from the moral insanity that has turned the world upside down.

This breakthrough in computer science revived Nature’s God that has been made to disappear from our society. Bitcoin is money backed by nature. While fiat money is debt-based and subject to printing at will through ‘fractional reserve lending’, Bitcoin is a new asset class and as a digital gold, it has intrinsic value derived from energy that is required for computational work, in a way no different than the energy used to dig gold from the ground.

Unlike the US dollar that infinitely expands through the money printing press, Bitcoin with its fixed monetary supply of 21 M has a built-in scarcity being tied to real resources. In the article “Bitcoin and thermodynamics”, author Kunt Svanholm described Bitcoin as a battery, one that was the best ever invented. He noted how Bitcoin “offers a way of converting energy into a small part of a specific number”. He describes it like a kind of “mathematical battery” and how it converts electricity into digital scarcity”, which “then can be programmed to express value”.

The world’s truly free market

At the heart of creation of this mathematical battery is Bitcoin mining. It is a broadcast math competition engaged by a network of computers (called miners) around the world with clear rules including the total number of bitcoin created and a predictable issuance rate. In a decentralized network where rules are applied to everyone equally, miners use their precious resources (harnessing computational power) to engage in Proof of Work- a process of solving difficult mathematical problems.

With economic incentives that align everyone’s self interest and make the rewards for playing by the rules higher than the value of attacking the network, it incentivizes all to act honestly and follow the rules of consensus. Every 10 minutes, a math problem is solved and whoever solves the problem first wins a fixed number of bitcoins. This process creates bitcoin, clears transactions, and most importantly provides the security of a system.

The creator of Bitcoin known by the pseudonymous name Satoshi Nakamoto used bitcoin as a token of value and with a combination of cryptographic hash functions and game theory created the world’s first truly free market. While economists with their modern monetary policy insulated the market from any feedback, Bitcoin regulates itself algorithmically and enables organic price discovery.

The market adjusts mining difficulty according to demand with a tight feedback loop that resets every 2 weeks. It is programmed to regulate and maintain the rate of bitcoin creation, and corresponds more naturally with the demand and supply of the market, creating efficiency in the market. This brings an alternative to the existing model of economy based on the idea of infinite growth that creates a destructive cycle of endless consumption.

Nature’s economic standard

Bitcoin introduces a new economic standard that is different from a gold standard or any other economic models that came before. Mathematics that is enlivened through imagination reunites matter that has fallen from its original source.

With Bitcoin, money becomes energy. At the kernel of Bitcoin capital is the production of the mathematical battery. It is based on non-material consumption in the form of energy and this process is facilitated by nature’s act of giving.

Nature provides abundantly. With her selfless love, she both produces and consumes to regenerate energies. Bitcoin invites us to participate in an economy in a manner such that we all live up to this nature’s standard of altruism.

The genesis of Bitcoin was Satoshi’s generous act of releasing the open source protocol online and making it freely available to anyone in the world. In responding to this act of altruism developers around the world brought their skills and intelligence to work on Bitcoin. Miners began contributing their precious resources to build a network.

This creates a new model of economy based on reciprocity, in which everyone makes a contribution to the network through voluntarily sharing his or her labor, time and resources and mutually benefit from each other’s gifts.

Individual sovereignty

Bitcoin, with its new economic standard, now frees us from the orthodoxy of materialistic economics and its scientific dogma of infinite growth that keeps people as passive consumers in the global debt Ponzi scheme. Globalization has created a race to the bottom where transnational corporations that do not have allegiance to any nations have abandoned workers, by shipping jobs and manufacturing bases overseas, and lowering costs with cheap labor to maximize their own profit.

As people become indentured servants being exploited in corporate feudalism, Bitcoin restores the sovereignty of people and nations, allowing them to claim their power to actively engage in economy on their terms. The ecosystem fueling innovation and entrepreneurship has created opportunities for people to exit from this autocratic fiat control system that keeps them in slavery and steals from their labor. Many are able to walk away from 9-5 jobs and start up their own businesses to create values and share with one another through trade.

Now, through a network of free and sovereign individuals around the world, Nature’s God begins to reveal itself as the supreme judge of the world. New economic activities that are emerging around this technology are creating a currency of revolt like a Tsunami against a warmongering god, whose legitimacy is backed by violence.

The “survival of the fittest” brutal mining market, channeling energies that have been funneled into weapons manufacturers, begins to defund the Pentagon and move a global society into building peace. From Iran to Kazakhstan and Russia, nation-states have now joined the Bitcoin mining race, accelerating the non-violent destruction of the military industrial complex. The hash power generated largely by renewable energies, being subordinated to the laws of thermodynamics began to secure sanctity of life for all beings.

Perfect money for humanity

Founders of nation-state treaded the path of developing a civilization that was divorced from nature. Modern man has become estranged from the world that birthed him. But this separation was necessary. The act of rebellion against Nature’s God was the right entitled by Laws of Nature, granted to everyone in order for each of us to become independent and free.

Now, through Bitcoin’s computer programming language, nature that has become silent begins to speak again. Each 10 minutes, through distributing accountability across the network, the heart of Bitcoin performs checks and balances of power keeping a harmony among all living beings.

The Internet of Money transcending borders protects people of all nations from resource wars, exploitation and dictatorship. Bitcoin surrounding us everywhere 24/7 can guard us against hyperinflation, theft and wealth confiscation, helping us steward this precious planet for the Seven Generations to come.

For so long, we have tried to compete and outsmart nature. Now, the pristine protocol of Bitcoin calls us to become a co-creator with Mother Nature and invest in her wisdom to engineer a new civilization. As the old fiat world begins to collapse, Bitcoin now provides a superior form of money that is secure, censorship-resistant, and self-sustaining. It is perfect money for humanity, for we are a part of the divine nature and that we are all Bitcoin.

This article was posted on Monday, March 15th, 2021 at 1:06pm and is filed under Bitcoin, Currency, Economy/Economics, Free Market.

This article originally appeared on Salon.

The impeachment of Donald Trump appears to be a crisis without a history, at least a history that illuminates, not just comparisons with other presidential impeachments, but a history that provides historical lessons regarding its relationship to a previous age of tyranny that ushered in horrors associated with a fascist politics in the 1930s.  In the age of Trump, history is now used to divert and elude the most serious questions to be raised about the impeachment crisis. The legacy of earlier presidential impeachments, which include Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, provide a comparative historical context for analysis and criticism. And while Trump’s impeachment is often defined as a more serious constitutional crisis given his attempt to use the power of the presidency to advance his personal political agenda, it is a crisis that willfully ignores the conditions that gave rise to Trump’s presidency along with its recurring pattern of authoritarian behavior, policies, and practices.  One result is that the impeachment process with its abundance of political theater and insipid media coverage treats Trump’s crimes as the endpoint of an abuse of power and an illegal act, rather than as a political action that is symptomatic of a long legacy of conditions that have led to the United States’ slide into the abyss of authoritarianism.

What is often ignored in the mainstream media is that Trump’s impeachment battle is part of the wider historical and global struggle taking place over democracy and can be seen, as Larry Diamond points out, in Trump’s attack on “the independence of the courts, the business community, the media, civil society, universities and sensitive state institutions like the civil service, the intelligence agencies and the police.” Trump’s crimes far exceed what is stated in the impeachment documents and include not only endless lies, threats and flirtation with extralegal violence but also his attack on the press as the “enemy of the people.” In addition, there is his use of Twitter to spew out verbal grenades that explode in an array of racial hatred and panics aimed at his critics and those groups who do not fit into his white nationalist view of citizenship and who should inhabit the public sphere.  As the bully-in chief, he weaponizes language into a tool of hatred and in doing so transforms politics into a spectacularized theater of bigotry, humiliations, and violence. Ralph Nader argues that Trump’s most distinguishing impeachable offenses reside in his “abuses of the public trust” which range from his “obsessive pathological lying and falsifications” (over 15,000 since January 21, 2017) to his “endless racism and bigotry in words and deeds,” his support for voter suppression, and his “incitement of violence on more than one occasion.”

According to Nader, not only has Trump shredded and violated the Constitution, undermined its critical separation of power, and “illegally ordered his staff or ex-staff to ignore Congressional subpoenas to testify and provide documents, he has also ignored Congress’ right to declare war by inciting an unlawful crisis with Iran. There is a lesson to be learned here regarding how history is reproduced in the present. Trump’s killing of a high-ranking Iranian general “based on thin evidence with an eye towards domestic politics” mimics, if not recalls,  an older period in history when Hitler, following the crisis produced by the Reichstag fire, seized upon the ensuing fear, terror, and war fever to further consolidate his power. For Trump, pushing the United States to the edge of war through a military strike not only draws attention away from the impeachment process and his ongoing crimes and misdeeds, but suggests, as Elizabeth Warren points out, that he will do “whatever he can to advance the interests of Donald Trump.” Trump’s haphazard decision to threaten a war with Iran also puts Americans at risk of terrorist attacks and undermines previous efforts to roll back Iran’s nuclear program.  Moreover, Trump’s war fever is also a self-serving fascistic affirmation of his toxic hyper-masculinity and his admiration for military power and authoritarian displays generally associated with demagogues who use such displays as a tool to produce respect among their followers.

The politics of invisibility and the language of violence

Undoubtedly there have been serious political debates regarding the impeachment of Trump, but they have not gone far enough. The debates have focused mostly on issues such as the inadequacy of the Democrats’ efforts to impeach, arguments regarding whether the impeachment charges go far enough, and the more favorable view that the impeachment process, however limited, is necessary to stop Trump from using the resources of the government to influence other governments to interfere in American elections for his own personal and political gains.

There are also more extreme views largely coming from Trump and his supporters. Some have argued that the impeachment process is pure theater — a staged theatrical hoax; Others such as Sens. Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell have claimed that the process is rigged, and is an attempt on the part of the Democrats to win favor in the 2020 elections. Trump himself has angrily dismissed the impeachment process as corrupt, and claimed, among other things, that he is the victim of a socialist plot. It gets worse as Trump continues to produce a well-worn pattern of threats against his critics. He and his allies frequently respond to congressional Democrats involved in the hearing by weaponizing language, turning it into a vehicle of threats and intimidation. For instance, he has stated that House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff “should be arrested for treason.” In addition, Trump suggested that Schiff should “be violently punished” in a manner of justice displayed by dictatorships such as Guatemala. Jean Spanbauer, a Trump supporter, mused on line that “Shifty Shiff (sp) needs to be hung.” There is more at work here than the indiscriminate insult or infantile mocking. Language in this instance operates in the interest of violence, functioning so as to divert and punish. According to Victor Klemperer, an expert on Nazi Germany, this type of language has a precedent in the Third Reich in which it operated “as part of a linguistic malignant disease designed to spread the poison of mass seduction [and] destroy the intellect which defies it.”As Ishaan Tharoor observes, “the use of such volatile and dehumanizing language in the current moment is not innocent and often leads to violence. He writes:

There are immediate consequences to such demagoguery, not least in the form of far-right terrorist attacks and violence carried out by people inflamed by this sort of rhetoric. But there’s also a long-term toll, one that’s more imperceptible, yet no less corrosive, to the body politic. It’s the kind of erosion on display in places such as Hungary, Poland and Turkey, where majoritarian, nationalist politicians have steadily undermined democratic institutions and the liberal norms they’re supposed to uphold.

Political theater in the age of relentless lies

Within the current crop of competing discourses analyzing the impeachment, the Democrats present themselves as the “last line of defense between constitutional democracy and tyranny” while Republicans repeat conspiracy theories and accuse the Democrats of producing a show trial whose purpose is the ultimate reversal of Trump’s 2016 election to the presidency. The Republicans have been particularly egregious and have used the hearings to badger witnesses, and showcase their “emotive hand-wringing, faux exasperation and yelling,” all the while making outlandish claims that turn the hearings into a “propaganda circus.”  In some cases, more insightful commentary has been produced, such as comments from legendary journalist Bill Moyers, who views the impeachment hearings as a potential site for a lesson in civic education. For Moyers, the value of the impeachment proceedings lie in that making visible “things you would never know otherwise.” Bringing the concept of civic education to understanding the impeachment process is crucial, but what people learn from such events is limited by what is actually revealed both within and outside of the hearings.  In this case, Trump’s impeachment process in the House was reduced to a political spectacle and served to undermine reason and informed judgment while promoting a steady stream of the performative diversions produced through a regimen of ignorance, self-serving lies and the triumph of illusion.

Unfortunately, the mainstream 24/7 news cycle, with its relentless torrid of dramatic sound bites, did its best to turn the House impeachment hearings into political theater by largely focusing on the political risks Democrats faced by conducting the hearings. In addition, they mostly adhered to the empty tactic of providing balance while avoiding any attempt to tell the truth about a present that has collapsed into a disdain for human rights, enacts cruelty as an act of patriotism, justifies oppression in the name of national security, views undocumented immigrants as disposable, allows elections to be bought by the highest bidder, demonizes and threatens critics and regards the truth as a liability.

Beyond the two-party system

What is missing from mainstream and conservative discussions regarding Trump’s impeachment is that both Democrats and Republicans share an unwillingness to address a range of social and political issues that brought Trump to power. These include illegal wars, state sanctioned torture, the creation of black sites, economic policies that promote massive inequality and mass incarceration, an attack on public goods, and racist policies that undermine the very democracy. Both parties in different ways claim they are protecting the Constitution, whether in the service of defending Trump or attempting to remove him from office. As Andrew Bacevich argues, it must be remembered that it was the “Democratic members of the Senate and House [who] over the past decade and more [gave] presidents a free hand to wage war however they saw fit [and]cannot be described as anything but cowardly. It was after all, President Obama who pioneered the role of assassin-in-chief to which Trump has now laid claim.” Both parties have aided and abetted in different degrees elements associated with a totalitarian state — these include political corruption, unwarranted state surveillance, support for a bloated military machine, the rise of white nationalism, the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a ruling elite, increased support for policies that promote the concentration of the media in few hands and a willingness to corroborate with a government that is controlled by narrow financial interests. All of these issues are largely absent from the questions and issues raised around the impeachment process and the conditions that made it necessary. Democracy may be in crisis, but there is little or no indication from the media, ruling elite or established politicians that the impeachment crisis is more than a free-standing event and should be analyzed within a more comprehensive politics that flushes out the mobilizing passions of a fascist politics that has led to the Trump presidency and its reign of corruption, lawlessness and abuse of power.

What must be rejected is the notion that the impeachment process signals a crisis rooted in a power struggle between the two established political parties, one of whom is at the forefront of the resistance to the growing authoritarianism accelerated by the Trump regime. While there are significant political and ideological differences between both parties, especially given the fact that the Republican Party has been taken over by ideological extremists, these differences neither criticize nor condemn the ideological and economic foundations of a toxic neoliberal capitalism that has become increasingly more dangerous at home and abroad. For instance, both parties share in defending existing power structures and the most basic rudiments of the corporate and surveillance state.

Vichy Republicans without apology

While the Republican and Democratic Party share a fundamental commitment to the ideology and institutional structures of neoliberal capitalism, the Republican Party is far more extreme in its critique of the American press, judiciary, dissent and labor unions, and its support for reversing environmental protection laws. Moreover, as Paul Krugman has argued, the Republican Party under Trump has become “a party of sycophants” that turns a blind eye to Trump’s use of his office for personal gain; and who with their cult like following compare their leader to Jesus Christ.

Ken Burns, the acclaimed filmmaker, columnist George Will and Krugman, among others, have labeled Trump’s loyal party followers “Vichy Republicans,” referring to the war-era collaborationist Vichy government of France — run by cowardly French sympathizers and appeasers who gave their faithful loyalty  to their Nazi occupiers. In similar fashion, Trump’s Republican Party has bought into the script of ultra-nationalism, turned a blind eye to Trump’s racism, unchecked fantasies of power and his sanctioning of state violence at home and abroad.

This is a party that has chosen to look away in the face of Trump’s lies, crimes and repeated acts of corruption. Not only have they refused to take an impartial look at the impeachment inquiry, they have pledged to support Trump at all costs and have done everything possible to muddle the public discourse by floating conspiracy theories, calling the proceedings a hoax,  and attacking the character of witnesses. This is a party that has been more than willing to engage in a Faustian bargain with incipient authoritarianism.

If the Republican Party once stood for basic principles such as small government, family values, fiscal soundness and national security, that is no longer true. Instead its most paranoid and racist elements now control the party. The Republican Party’s move to the right intensified in the 1990s under the influence of Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove, and later with the rise of Sarah Palin and the defeat of the centrist Mitt Romney in 2012.

Today, the Republican Party almost unilaterally has become a party of white supremacists, blood-and-soil nationalists and political corruption who activate white panic, voter suppression, and define citizenship in racial terms. Moreover, they support through either fear or blind loyalty Trump’s ideological policies, race baiting and dangerous foreign policy strategies, regardless of the excesses and ongoing assault on the country’s democratic institutions. This includes race baiting, a racist campaign strategy, caging children, savage attacks on undocumented immigrants, devaluing critics by calling them treasonous, slashing of social provisions such as food stamps, serial lying, and a reckless assassination made on impulse that brought the U.S. and Iran to the brink of war.

Theodor W. Adorno argued in “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” that “the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive.” This is particularly evident in the debilitating pronouncements of William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, regarding his defense of unchecked executive authority, which he believes should be unburdened by any sense of political and moral accountability. Tamsin Shaw is right in suggesting that Barr bears a close resemblance to Carl Schmitt, “the notorious … ‘crown jurist’ of the Third Reich.” Barr places the president above the law, defined as a kind of unitary sovereign. In addition, he appears to relish in his role as a craven defender of Trump, all the while justifying a notion of blind executive authority in the face of Trump’s endless lies, racist policies and lawlessness that echo the dark era of the 1920s and ’30s.

Barr’s attacks on the FBI and the Justice Department’s inspector general, and his threat to remove police protection from black communities who are not loyal to Trump, are at odds with any viable notion of defending the truth and “the most basic tenets of equality and justice.” Moreover, Barr provides legal and ideological cover for Trump’s dangerous lackeys, such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Lindsey Graham. McConnell publicly denounces the impeachment process and as an unabashed defender of Trump states that he will work hand in hand with the Trump administration on the impeachment process. In addition, Graham has stated that he has already made up his mind about Trump committing a criminal conspiracy, which he dismisses,  and will do everything he can to make impeachment “die quickly” in the Senate.

Acquiescence to Trump has become a defining feature of the Republican Party in spite of his celebration of demagogues such as Kim Jong-un, whom he called a “real leader” and overtly fascist leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines. Paul Krugman goes so far as to claim that modern conservatives live inside a cult and are “turning into government by the worst and dumbest.” At the same time, he makes it clear that there is more than a massive degree of stupidity at work in the Trump administration, there are also the dark clouds of authoritarianism which extend far beyond the political career of Donald Trump. Krugman writes: “For whatever may happen to Donald Trump, his party has turned its back on democracy. And that should terrify you. The fact is that the G.O.P., as currently constituted, is willing to do whatever it takes to seize and hold power.” The impeachment hearings further reinforce an image of a party that in the face of egregious crimes by the president either remain mute or overtly support him in a show of ideological certainty or what Robert Jay Lifton calls an act of “absolute purification” and a cult-like totalizing vision that reproduces a politics of “malignant normality.”

Goldman Sachs Democrats

Neither political party offers a substantive challenge to the military-industrial complex, or views capitalism as the enemy of democracy if not the planet itself. In different ways, both parties have hollowed out democratic institutions and cozied up to dictators. In addition, neither party historically used the impeachment process to indict George W. Bush for launching an illegal war in Iraq, or for that matter George H.W. Bush for illegally kidnapping, jailing, and torturing what he indiscriminately labeled as “enemy combatants.” Nor was Obama charged with a war crime when he “gave the executive branch of the government the right to act as judge, jury and executioner in assassinating U.S. citizens, starting with the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, and, two weeks later, his 16-year-old son?” There is more at work here than acts of bad faith, there is also a thread of moral hypocrisy and a flight from social responsibility on the part of both parties.

One indication of a collusion between both parties is obvious in the fact that as the Democrats were railing against Trump’s abuse of power, they approved the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act, which are deeply reactionary laws that attack individual privacy and civil liberties, while criminalizing protest in the interest of national security. Moreover, they have given Trump $1.4 billion for his wall, and supported a $738 billion bloated military budget.

In the current moment, with a possible war with Iran still in the making, the ongoing anti-democratic actions of a deeply authoritarian Trump government, and the refusal of both political parties and the established press to address the deeper economic and political crisis facing the United States, it is crucial to analyze the current crisis of governance in a broader context that analyzes fascism as a possible wave of the future. The contemporary elements of tyranny at work in the United States point to not only a crisis of leadership and the rise of demagogues such as Trump on the domestic and global stages, but also the conditions and crisis that produce “the discontent of millions of people, facing economic instability, climate insecurity, mass migrations, technological change, cultural shifts around gender and race—people who in turn seem all too willing to embrace the politics of fear and blame.”

The age of crisis and apocalyptic prophecies

We live in an age of relentless crisis — an age marked by the collapse of civic culture, ethical values and democratic institutions that serve the public good. Language now operates in the service of violence and ignorance has become a national ideal. Religious fundamentalism, white supremacy, and economic tyranny now inform each other giving rise to an updated recurrence of fascist politics. This is an age in which apocalyptic prophecies replace thoughtfulness and sustained acts of social responsibility. In this age of crisis, right-wing populist regimes fuel conspiracy theories, normalize lying as a way to degrade public discourse, elevate emotion over reason as a way to legitimate a culture of cruelty, and society experiences its own pleasure through the need for vengeance and the imposition of brutality and injury upon those minorities considered disposable.

The impeachment process speaks not only to Trump’s ongoing criminal behavior and pernicious policies, it also points to a mass crisis of civic literacy and the inability of the public to understand how society has broken apart, become more cruel and receded from the language of critique, hope and the social imagination. A culture of withdrawal, privatization and immediacy reinforces an indifference to public life, the suffering of others and what Hannah Arendt once called “the ruin of our categories of thought and standards of judgment.”

The space of traditional politics and a media driven culture are marked by an ongoing culture of diversion and disappearance and no longer provide the language for understanding the totality of the crisis that has produced both Trump and the impeachment process. In the absence of a comprehensive politics capable of defining the related parts and threads that point to a society in crisis, violence, especially as related to the joining of a predatory neoliberalism and a fascist politics of white supremacy, becomes the regulative principle of everyday life.

Evidence of the distinctive nature of today’s crisis on both a national and global level can be glimpsed in the political and cultural forces that shaped President Trump’s impeachment, the Brexit fiasco, and the rise of authoritarian demagogues in Brazil, Turkey and Hungary, among other countries. This is a general crisis whose roots lie in the rise of global neoliberalism with its embrace of finance capital, massive inequities in wealth and power, the rise of the racial punishing state, systemic state violence and the creation of an age of precarity and uncertainty. This is a crisis produced, in part, through a full-scale attack on the welfare state, labor and public goods. Under such circumstances, democracy has become thinner and the social sphere and social contract no longer occupy an important place in Trump’s America.

As Nancy Fraser points out, “these forces have been grinding away at our social order for quite some time” and constitute not only a crisis of politics and economics, which is highly visible, but also a crisis of ideas which is not so visible. Put differently, the crisis of politics has not been matched by a crisis of ideas. Instead, as the global economy has unraveled, the backlash against the so-called political elites and established forms of liberal governance has produced movements for popular sovereignty that lack the crucial call for equal rights and social justice.  The current historical crisis not only refigures the social sphere as a site of commercialism and infantilism, but also redefines matters of individual and social agency through the mediation of images in which self-alienation is reinforced within a culture of immediacy, disappearance and a flight from any sense of social responsibility.

Hard and soft “disimagination machines”

The crisis of politics is now matched by a mainstream and corporate controlled digital media and screen culture that produces political theater, heightens ignorance, fractured narratives and racial hysteria. At the same time, it authorizes and produces a culture of sensationalism designed to increase ratings and profits at the expense of truth, undermine a complex rendering of the related nature of social problems and suppress a culture of dissent and informed judgments.

We live in an age in which theater and the spectacle of performance empty politics of any moral substance and contribute to the revival of an updated version of fascist politics. Politics is now leaden with bombast, words strung together to shock, numb the mind, and images overwrought with self-serving sense of riotousness and anger. What is distinct about this historical period, especially under the Trump regime, is what Susan Sontag has called a form of aesthetic fascism with its contempt of “all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic.”

One distinctive element of the current moment is the rise of hard and soft disimagination machines. The hard disimagination machines, such as Fox News, conservative talk radio and Breitbart News, function as overt and unapologetic propaganda machines that trade in nativism, misrepresentation and racist hysteria, all wrapped in the cloak of a regressive view of patriotism. As Joel Bleifuss points out, Fox News in particular, is “blatant in its contempt for the truth, and engages nightly in the “ritual of burying the truth in ‘memory holes’ and spinning a new version of reality [that keeps] the spirit of 1984… alive and well…. This, the most-watched cable news network, functions in its fealty to Trump like a real-world Ministry of Truth from George Orwell’s 1984, where bureaucrats “rectify” the historical record to conform to Big Brother’s decrees.”

Trump’s fascist politics and fantasies of racial purity could not succeed without the disimagination machines, pedagogical apparatuses and the practitioners needed to make his “vision not just real by grotesquely normal.” What Trump makes clear is that the weaponization of language into a discourse of racism and hate is deeply indebted to a politics of forgetting and is a crucial tool in the battle to undermine historical consciousness and memory itself.

The soft disimagination machines or liberal mainstream media such as “NBC Nightly News,” MSNBC and the established press function largely to cater to Trump’s Twitter universe, celebrity culture, and the cutthroat ethos of the market, all the while isolating social issues, individualizing social problems, and making the workings of power superficially visible. Politics as a spectacle saturates the senses with noise, cheap melodrama, lies and buffoonery. This is not to suggest that the spectacle that now shapes politics as pure theater is meant merely to entertain and distract. On the contrary, the current spectacle, most recently evident in the impeachment hearings in the Congress, function largely to separate the past from a politics that in its current form has turned deadly in its attack on the values and institutions crucial to a functioning democracy. In this instance, echoes of a fascist past remain hidden, invisible beneath the histrionic shouting and disinformation campaigns that rail against “fake news,” which is a euphemism for dissent, holding power accountable and an oppositional media. A flair for the overly dramatic eliminates the distinction between fact and fiction, lies and the truth.

Under such circumstances, the spectacle functions as part of a culture of distraction, division and fragmentation, all the while refusing to pose the question of how the United States shares elements of a fascist politics that connects it to a number of other authoritarian countries such as Brazil, Turkey, Hungary and Poland, which have embraced a form of fascist aesthetics and politics that combines a cruel culture of neoliberal austerity with the discourses of hate, nativism and racism. Political theater in its current form, especially with respect to the impeachment process, embraces elements of a fascist past and in doing so creates a form of self-sabotage in which the public largely refuses to “pose the question why Hitler and Nazi Germany continue to exert such a grip on modern life.”

Forgetting history and the legitimation of white supremacy

Another lesson to be learned from the absence of history, or what it means to even have a history in the discourse surrounding the impeachment hearings, is not only how ignorance gets normalized but also how the absence of critical thought allows us to forget that we are moral subjects capable of changing the world around us. The impeachment of Donald Trump is a crisis in need of being fully confronted both historically and in terms of a comprehensive politics that allows us to learn from alarming signs coming from the Trump administration. Such a crisis contains elements of a past that suggest we cannot look away or give in to the current assault on the past as a measure of intellectual respectability.

History offers a model to learn something from earlier turns towards authoritarianism making it more difficult to assume that fascism is merely a relic of the past. Memories of terror are not only present in the white supremacist parade of hate and bigotry that took place in Charlottesville in which violence was enacted in the name of “blood and soil” but also in the current white house which is home to white supremacists such as Stephen Miller, who is a high-level adviser to Trump and is viewed by many as the architect of his draconian immigration policies.

Recently, more than 900 of Miller’s emails were leaked by former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh. Among the trove of emails, Miller commented on and provided reference to white nationalist websites such as VDARE and celebrated the racist novel, “The Camp of the Saints.” He “also reportedly espoused conspiracy theories about immigration, backed racist immigration policies introduced by President Calvin Coolidge that were praised by Adolf Hitler, and deployed slang popular in white nationalist circles to reference immigration.” Judd Legum argues that Miller also “obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols after Dylann Roof’s murderous rampage.”

In spite of a barrage of calls from a number of politicians calling for Miller’s removal from the White House, Trump held firm, reinforcing the widely accepted notion that Trump is a white nationalist entirely comfortable with white supremacist ideology. This is not surprising, since Trump brought the language of white nationalism into the White House and mainstream politics. Of course, removing Miller would not change much. Miller is not the main white supremacist in the Trump administration. Nor can his presence hide the fact that white supremacy has been a staple of the Republican Party for decades, evident in the history of and contemporary presence of high-profile Republican politicians such as Strom Thurmond, Jeff Sessions, Steve King, Tom Tancredo and Dana Rohrabacher.

Moreover, the long legacy of white supremacy in the United States should not undercut the distinctiveness of Donald Trump’s white supremacist views, which he wears like a badge of honor while escalating and normalizing white supremacist sensibilities, practices and policies unlike any president in modern times. His scapegoating of minorities and demonization of politicians, athletes and other critics of color reflects more than a divide-and-rule strategy, it is an updated strategy for mainstreaming the death-haunted elements of fascism.

In addition, Trump has consistently waged war on the “lying media” and elevated the spurious notion of fake news to the level of a common-sense assumption. The latter derogatory term has a strong resemblance to Hitler’s demonization of Lügenpresse — the lying press. Rick Noack states that “The defamatory word was most frequently used in Nazi Germany. Today, it is a common slogan among those branded as representing the “ugly Germany”: members of xenophobic, right-wing groups. This Nazi slur has also been used by some of Trump’s followers.”

Trump has legitimated a culture of lying, cruelty and a collapse of social responsibility. In doing so, he has furthered the process of making people superfluous and disposable all the while producing a fog of ignorance which gives contemporary credence to Hannah Arendt’s claim in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” that “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exists.”

Conclusion

The historian David Blight has written that Trump’s “greatest threat to our society and to our democracy is not necessarily his authoritarianism, but his essential ignorance — of history, of policy, of political process, of the Constitution.” Blight is only partly right, in that the greatest threat to our society is a collective ignorance that legitimates forms of organized forgetting, modes of social amnesia, and the death of civic literacy.

Under the Trump regime, historical amnesia is used as a weapon of (mis)education, politics, and power.  The notion that the past is a burden that must be forgotten is a centerpiece of authoritarian regimes, one that allows public memory to wither and the threads of fascism to become normalized. While some critics eschew the comparison of Trump with the Nazi era, it is crucial to recognize the alarming signs in this administration that echo a fascist politics of the past. As Jonathan Freedland points out, “the signs are there, if only we can bear to look.” Rejecting the Trump-Nazi comparison makes it easier to believe that we have nothing to learn from history and to take comfort in the assumption that it cannot happen once again. No democracy can survive without an informed and educated citizenry.

The lessons of impeachment far exceed its stated limited aims as a form of civic education. It not only ignores the most serious of Trump’s crimes, it fails to examine a number of political threads that together constitute elements common to a global crisis in democracy. The impeachment process, when viewed as part of a broader crisis of democracy, cannot be analyzed and removed from the connecting ideological, economic and cultural threads that weave through often isolated issues such as white nationalism, the rise of a Republican Party dominated by right-wing extremists, the collapse of the two-party system, and the ascent of a corporate-controlled media as a disimagination machine and corrosive system of power.

Crucial to any politics of resistance is the necessity to analyze Trump’s use of politics as a spectacle and how to address it not in splendid isolation but as a form of diversion and political theater, but also as part of a more comprehensive political project in which updated forms of authoritarianism and contemporary versions of fascism are being mobilized and gaining traction both in the United States and across the globe. Federico Mayor, the former director general of UNESCO, once stated that “You cannot expect anything from uneducated citizens except unstable democracy.” In the current historical moment and age of Trump, it might be more appropriate to say that from a society in which ignorance is a virtue and civic literacy and education are viewed as a liability, you cannot expect anything but fascism.

As Bernie Sanders emerged as a threat to Hillary Clinton’s presidential nomination in 2016, media began liberally tossing around articles equating Sanders and Donald Trump (FAIR.org, 4/15/16, 12/9/16). These typically acknowledged that the comparison seemed far-fetched, but pointed in their defense to some version of a “remarkable amount of policy convergence” (Atlantic, 1/6/16)—which included shared positions like opposition to trade agreements, protecting Social Security, opposing big money in politics, and opposing foreign military intervention—or to the two candidates’ reliance on “angry white men” for their base of support.

No journalist in their right mind would attempt an argument about a policy convergence between Sanders and Trump today, given Trump’s reversal on virtually every one of those original populist stances. And as for those “angry white men,” polls have shown that Sanders’ supporters are more female and less white than those of any other Democratic candidate—and much more so than Trump supporters. If they were an absurd stretch in 2016, then, efforts to make a Sanders/Trump equivalence today are even more desperate and disingenuous.

And yet they are experiencing a renaissance, as Sanders creeps toward the top of the Democratic primary polls in early-voting states.

The trope received its earliest notable rehabilitation in April, when Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank (4/2/19) announced “Bernie Sanders’s emergence as the Donald Trump of the left.” Both have “a flair for demagoguery,” Milbank declared. He accused Sanders of sporting “the angry, unbending politics of Trumpism” and filling his speeches with “Trumpian flourishes”:

Sanders himself remains untouchable, in a Trumpian way. Claims of mistreatment by male staffers from women who worked on his 2016 campaign? Yawn. His resistance to releasing his tax returns? Whatever. The idea that Democrats need a unifying figure to lure disaffected Trump voters in key states? Never mind.

Sanders isn’t Trump in the race-baiting, lender-cheating, fact-avoiding, porn-actress-paying, Putin-loving sense. But their styles are similar: shouting and unsmiling, anti-establishment and anti-media, absolutely convinced of their own correctness, attacking boogeymen (the “1 percent” and CEOs in Sanders’s case, instead of immigrants and minorities), offering impractical promises with vague details, lacking nuance and nostalgic for the past.

CNN (4/3/19) had Milbank on to discuss the column, where he called the candidates’ “blame” tactics “the same idea. ‘Those people’ are responsible for your problems. This is really powerful stuff.” A longtime Clinton aide piggybacked off Milbank’s column, telling the Washington Post (4/15/19) that Sanders’ “tone in general is too Trumplike. It’s based on anger.”

That Sanders apologized for the mistreatment and took active steps to change his 2020 campaign? Yawn. That he released 10 years of tax returns less than two weeks after Milbank’s column was published (and approximately three months before Biden did)? Whatever. The idea that Democrats need a mobilizing force rather than an uninspiring defender of the status quo to drive voter turnout in swing states? Never mind.

Milbank quietly tries to erase the gaping difference between Sanders’ and Trump’s anti-establishment (or “anti-media”) stances, or between Trump’s racist and xenophobic attacks on marginalized groups and Sanders’ structural attacks on neoliberal institutions. In Milbank’s world—a world many of his colleagues appear to inhabit as well—CEOs and billionaires bear as little responsibility for “your problems” (which might include inequality, wage stagnation, underemployment, unaffordable healthcare and education, and climate change) as do “immigrants and minorities.”

The only sense in which Sanders and Trump are alike (beyond extremely superficial similarities sometimes pointed to, like their unruly hair or New York accent) is that they appeal to very real undercurrents of discontent in this country—but they do so in very different ways, to very different effect. Trump is perhaps the epitome of a demagogue; he lies and plays on prejudices, scapegoating marginalized groups, enriching himself and undermining the country’s political system. Sanders critiques the institutions that drive inequality and calls for a revitalization of democracy, in which ordinary people’s needs come before corporate interests. Both are presented as equally objectionable by corporate journalists, who repeatedly counsel a retreat to the safety of the “center” (FAIR.org, 7/2/19)—a place that they are unwilling to recognize has helped produce that discontent.

Those journalists revived the Trump/Sanders equivalence over the summer at the point when Sanders dared suggest that the Washington Post and New York Times are not “great supporters” of his, and that this could have something to do with his repeatedly calling out Amazon for paying no taxes. NPR (All Things Considered, 8/13/19) accused Sanders of “echoing the president’s language,” while on CNN (8/13/19), USA Today‘s Kirsten Powers accused him of using Trump’s “playbook” and CNN’s Poppy Harlow warned ominously, “This seems like a really dangerous line, continued accusations against the media with no basis in fact or evidence provided.” In a Boston Herald column (8/18/19) declaring it was “Time for Bernie to Bow Out With Dignity,” Froma Harrop wrote: “The parallels between Trump and Sanders blaming liberal news sources for their setbacks are pretty glaring.”

Except, of course, that they’re not. As we pointed out at the time (FAIR.org, 8/15/19), there is in fact plenty of evidence of media’s bias against Sanders, and their embarrassingly uncritical coverage of Amazon. Sanders’ critique is far from a conspiracy theory or anti-journalist smear, as many suggested—it’s a critique of the influence of corporate ownership and sponsorship on big media outlets, where journalists with Sanders-like perspectives are almost invariably weeded out early in their careers.

Recently, though, the tarring of Sanders as Trumpian has amped up.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (1/20/20) lashed out at Sanders for a supposed “flat-out lie” about Joe Biden’s record on Social Security cuts. Sanders’ “smear” interprets a video of Biden agreeing with Paul Ryan on Social Security cuts as serious rather than as sarcastic, as Biden later claimed it to be. Regardless of how you interpret that moment, it is followed by Biden saying that Social Security “still needs adjustments”—politician-speak for cuts. Even if you take Biden at his word on the sarcasm, that comment—and his decades-long record in the Senate—make it clear that the Sanders campaign’s case against Biden on Social Security is sound (FAIR.org, 1/22/20). But for Krugman:

This is bad; it is, indeed, almost Trumpian. The last thing we need is another president who demonizes and lies about anyone who disagrees with him, and can’t admit ever being wrong.

The Miami Herald‘s Andres Oppenheimer took it a step further (1/15/20), writing: “Sanders’ trade isolationism and Trump’s anti-immigration ravings are two sides of the same coin—cheap populism. On the trade side, Sanders is worse than Trump.” To Oppenheimer, Sanders’ “assertion that large numbers of US jobs would be lost” through the USMCA are “as misleading as Trump’s absurd claims that most undocumented immigrants from Mexico are criminals and rapists.”

Sometimes the analogy is slightly more subtle, as in the New York Times editorial board’s explanation (1/19/19) of why it rejected Sanders in its Democratic primary endorsement: “We see little advantage to exchanging one over-promising, divisive figure in Washington for another.”

In the board’s interview with Sanders (1/13/20), board member Nick Fox questioned Sanders about his suggestion that he would be “organizer in chief,” achieving his agenda by mobilizing a movement: “I’m wondering how you flying around the country in 2021 rallying the people would be different than what Donald Trump has been doing.”

While more serious observers recognize a difference between Sanders’ plan to stump for his agenda, which follows historical tradition, and Trump’s penchant for hollow ego-stroking rallies (which does not), the Times paints Trump and Sanders as interchangeable demagogues.

Hillary Clinton has jumped into the fray, in her recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter (1/21/19) in which she accused “the Bernie campaign” of “having gone after Elizabeth [Warren] with a very personal attack on her.” It’s a remarkably disingenuous way to characterize the situation, in which Warren was quoted (CNN, 1/13/20) accusing Sanders of dismissing the possibility of a woman defeating Trump, to which Sanders responded with a forceful denial. But Clinton used that framing to make a new Trump parallel, this one based on treatment of women (and, perhaps, opponents):

I just think people need to pay attention because we want, hopefully, to elect a president who’s going to try to bring us together, and not either turn a blind eye, or actually reward the kind of insulting, attacking, demeaning, degrading behavior that we’ve seen from this current administration.

The Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin (1/21/19) cited that interview in a column about Sanders’ “attack machine,” in which Rubin charged Sanders with “present[ing] himself as an honest, pure idealist while playing Trumpian politics.” Her evidence, beyond Clinton’s characterizations of Sanders and of “the culture around him,” consisted of an op-ed (Guardian, 1/20/20) by a Sanders supporter that called Biden “corrupt” (which Rubin acknowledged Sanders apologized for) and “yet another blowup over Sanders’ honesty, his attempt to insinuate that Biden favored Social Security cuts.”

Journalists from outlets like the Post, Times and CNN know that the great majority of their readers and viewers harbor strong feelings of antipathy and fear toward Trump, so tarring Sanders with the same brush as Trump on any grounds is a tactic clearly intended to discredit Sanders among the anti-Trump public.

The real trouble is that most in the establishment media—and the centrist political elite like Clinton, Barack Obama and their allies—fear left populism more than they do right populism. For them, replacing Trump with Sanders would not end the nightmare begun with Trump’s inauguration, it would simply begin a new and more frightening chapter of it. If under Trump, our democratic and social institutions are endangered by authoritarianism, xenophobia and racism, at least our economic ones are protected, so that Wall Street can continue its upward march, corporate profits can continue unabated, and journalists can marvel at the robust economy.

Sanders, on the other hand, seeks to shore up those democratic and social institutions by reining in the corporate ones. For our country’s most influential media outlets, which have thrived under the Trump administration, it’s clear which one is the greater threat.

Every time the United States does something vicious, stupid or both, a great chorus erupts from the American choir: “This is not who we are.” The sound is defiant, heroic and ridiculous, like hearing “Ode to Joy” sung by a thousand synthetic, smart-speaker voices and backed by an orchestra of slide whistles. Marx famously wrote that Hegel, in observing that “all great historic facts and personages recur twice,” nevertheless “forgot to add: ‘Once as tragedy, and again as farce.’” Neither man, it turns out, anticipated our capacity for making the same simultaneously panicked and lazy turn around the goldfish bowl over and over again, forgetting each time more of the brief journey we’ve just made.

One such vicious stupidity was the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, on the orders of Donald Trump. Soleimani had long been a thorn in the side of the U.S., imperiling its ambitions for its conquered Iraqi client state and the ungovernable semi-protectorate in Afghanistan—this despite the fact that Iran and the U.S. should have been, and sometimes were, allies of convenience in what pundits like to call “the region.” Like the U.S., Iran wants quiescent, stable and relatively demilitarized neighbors on its borders. But America’s psychotic foreign policy establishment has never forgiven Tehran for the 1979 revolution, which removed the Western-friendly shah from power, and for failing to bow to American hegemony in the decades since.

More justifiably, Iran has never forgiven the United States for the CIA-engineered coup of 1953, for backing Saddam Hussein during the brutal Iran-Iraq war, for decades of sanctions and isolation, and for George Bush—speaking words written by current “Never Trump” grifter David Frum—surprisingly and insultingly naming Iran in the so-called axis of evil at a time when tensions between the two nations appeared to be dying down.

In the aftermath of the assassination, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman rushed to assure his readers and likely himself that Trump’s bullying violence represented a fundamental break with American history. While America once had “a special leadership position, one that sometimes involved playing a role in reshaping other countries’ political systems,” he argued, Trump “has never shown any sign of understanding why America used to be special.”

America, Krugman contends, “was something more than a big country throwing its weight around. We always stood for something larger.”

You’ve heard this song before, and I’ll spare you the purple prose. Before Trump, America stood for a rules-based international order. And while we accidentally bumbled our way into killing millions of Vietnamese and Koreans, conquered Haiti and Puerto Rico, toppled (at one point or another) most of the governments in South America, occupied the Philippines, waged genocidal wars against Native Americans and fought for decades in the heart of the Islamic world, we are, and have always been, the good guys. At least until a febrile real estate conman with a short attention span and nasty temper fumbled his way into the White House and stopped mouthing the comforting pieties that we all expect from a president.

Trump’s amorality has produced a kind of crude honesty, one that cuts against the complaint that the president is a liar. In truth, he’s what is known as a “bullshitter”—the distinction, according to the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt’s pithy little essay-turned-book, “On Bullshit,” being that the liar lies instrumentally, actively trying to conceal a truth that he understands to be true, while the bullshitter operates from a place of unconcern for truth. A bullshitter does not (and maybe cannot) distinguish truth from falsehood at all.

In this regard, in both words and actions, Trump can sometimes lie truthfully. The week after the assassination crisis, he went on Fox News and claimed that Saudi Arabia had paid the U.S. $1 billion for more troops in the Middle East, and that South Korea would pay another $500 million. These actual sums and transactions are almost certainly pure fantasy, a byproduct of the president’s frequent confabulations of half-remembered comments from programs on that very same Fox News. Yet they capture the rapacious nature of the U.S. and its globe-spanning empire.

In certain quarters, the president’s tall tale was received with outrage and dismay. “He sells the troops,” tweeted libertarian Rep. Justin Amash, I-Mich. Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu retweeted his colleague, and added his own lament:

Dear @realDonaldTrump: I served on active duty in the United States military. We are not mercenaries. We are not bargaining chips. We don’t deploy for money.

Our troops exist to protect the Constitution and the national security of the United States. Get it?#SaturdayThoughts https://t.co/yGCimg10cy

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) January 11, 2020

These are noble sentiments that have the disadvantage of being completely wrong. American forces have acted to secure commercial interests since Thomas Jefferson decided to fight the “Barbary pirates.” “War,” as American Gen. Smedley Butler indelibly observed, “is a racket.” If American fighting rarely involves an explicit pecuniary quid pro quo, then it is nevertheless inextricably tied up with the interests of capital, foreign and domestic.

As for the Constitution, was it lost in Iraq? I can imagine how one might honestly believe that American troops are not an explicitly mercenary force, but the idea that the U.S. fights wars to protect its founding document or its national security is utterly and tragically belied by every American military action since World War II—not to mention most of those preceding it. If we are unable to wean ourselves from these noble delusions, in which we are always the tragic heroes defeated by the same curiously repetitive mistakes, then Donald Trump, and the inevitable future Donald Trumps, will never stop having an advantage. You can’t defeat dishonesty with better versions of untruth.

“We have always tried,” Krugman complained, “to behave as no more than first among equals.” It is not exactly a lie, but it’s bullshit.