“The world has fallen out of love with democracy"

Chilling new documentary on Russian dissident journalist Dmitri Muratov exposes the worldwide threats to democracy and media freedom.

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On Tuesday, September 26 PBS showed a documentary on their Frontline series called “Putin vs. the Press,” though it’s not a story of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attack on all independent media outlets but one newspaper, and one individual, in particular. The newspaper is Novaya Gazeta (“New Gazette”) and the individual is its editor/publisher, Dmitry Muratov. Muratov co-won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize with Maria Ressa, a journalist from the Philippines who likewise defied a dictatorial and corrupt government to report the truth about it to her readers. In his acceptance speech, Muratov said these depressing words: “The world has fallen out of love with democracy. The world has begun to turn toward dictatorship. In my country, and not only there, it is popular to think that politicians who avoid bloodshed are weak, while threatening the world with war is the duty of true patriots.” Even the United States, long considered the world’s bastion of republican government, is undergoing a long-term embrace of dictatorship; the Republican Party has virtually abandoned democracy as a long-term goal or a short-term practice. Donald Trump’s 2024 Presidential campaign is on a major roll, not despite but because of its openly dictatorial character, It seems like nothing will break his hold on the overwhelming majority of his party, and as he himself has boasted, every new criminal indictment against him just strengthens his hand politically and reinforces his absolute rule over his party.

Novaya Gazeta was founded in 1993 with seed money from the Nobel Prize scholarship awarded to former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev, who tried and ultimately failed to break Russia’s long-time record of authoritarianism. Gorbachev wanted a mixed economy for the Soviet Union and an end to the forcible repression of political dissent. He saw a free press as crucial to the latter and he backed Muratov’s enterprise as one way to ensure that future Russian governments would face legitimate criticism from an independent media. Muratov recalled during the show that he had got interested in journalism in particular after two star players on a Russian hockey team had brusquely refused his request for autographs. His mom complained to the local state-owned newspaper and they ran a story that resulted in Dmitry receiving signed photos of the two hockey players in the mail. Unfortunately, Vladimir Putin took over as Russia’s president at the end of 1999 and immediately declared war on the free press, punishing newspapers and other media outlets that dared criticize him with threats, denials of licenses needed to publish, and worse. During the show Muratov notes he’s been to the funerals of at least six of his best reporters, all assassinated – he thinks – by Russian goon squads associated with Putin and in some cases directly working for him. “Igor Domnikov was the first,” Muratov said on the program. “He was a brilliant guy. He was killed by bandits for his series of investigations. Yuri Shchekochikhin, my closest friend and an outstanding journalist. He was poisoned. Anna Politkovskaya. She made it to Chechnya, disobeying all orders. And I was on vacation at the time. Of course, I blame myself terribly for this. I should also mention Nastya Baburova and Stas Markelov. Natasha Estemirova, who was Anya Politkovskaya’s main collaborator on Chechnya. Their portraits hang on the walls right above the table where we meet and I see them many times a day. I’m ashamed of myself, but not the newspaper.”

Things got even worse for Muratov in 2022 when Russia launched its invasion of and war against Ukraine. If I were in Russia I could be arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison for writing the above sentence because Putin and his puppet legislature, the Duma, has literally made it a crime to call Russia’s attack on Ukraine a “war” or an “invasion” instead of the Russian government’s preferred euphemism, a “special military operation.” For years Muratov had gone up to the limits of Putin’s censorship without actually crossing the line – there’s footage of him asking Putin about his designations of certain individuals, including journalists, as “foreign agents” without any due process or right to appeal. Muratov once even asked Putin at one of the president’s press conferences, “I still have a question about ‘foreign agents.’ This law has no judgment. There is no court there. You are declared a ‘foreign agent.’ There is no evidence. There is no sentence. You are just branded a criminal. Let me remind you of our favorite childhood book. This is exactly what happened to Milady in The Three Musketeers. But when Milady was beheaded at dawn, she was at least finally read the sentence.” Putin replied, “First of all, I would like to congratulate you on being awarded the Nobel Prize. So, your concern about ‘foreign agents.’ I’m not going to beat around the bush. You said there was no verdict. You’re right, there really isn’t one. Milady was sentenced and her head was cut off. But no one is cutting anything off here.” Muratov also lost a key protector when Mikhail Gorbachev died of natural causes in August 2022 at age 91, cutting off one of the few remaining disincentives for Putin to mess with him directly.

During the early 2020’s Muratov was more or less freely allowed to travel outside Russia – a privilege the Russian state in its various authoritarian regimes (the Tsarist Empire, the Soviet Union, now) hasn’t always allowed its citizens.. In this documentary he’s shown in Oslo, in Riga (the capital of Latvia, one of the Baltic republics Joseph Stalin forcibly annexed to Russia in 1940 and whose departure in the 1980’s started the chain of events that led ultimately to the Soviet Union’s disintegration) and even in New York, where he went to witness the auctioning off of his Nobel Prize medal to benefit Ukrainian refugees. His trip to Riga was particularly consequential because he was there ostensibly to be a judge at a documentary film festival, but really to supervise the evacuation of many Novaya Gazeta staff members, including young journalist Roman Anin, to Riga to publish an edition in exile there. Muratov took great pains to maintain the idea that the version published in Riga had no connection to his old one from Moscow, but after the film festival was over he returned to Moscow despite the warnings from Anin and others in his circle that this wasn’t a good idea. “I came to Novaya Gazeta in 2006 when I was 19 years old,” Anin said in this documentary. “He’s like my second father. People think that his job is to be the chief editor, but his job is to save people, and he has always been like that. I’m afraid that something might happen to him. I wouldn’t go [back to Russia] … [b]ecause I know that they most likely will arrest me. I know that nobody survives Russian prison, or at least there is a very small chance that you can survive Russian prison. And he knows all of that, and despite that he goes back.” When Muratov went back he got red paint laced with acetone, which burned his eyes and nearly blinded him, thrown at him in his train car. The Russian authorities identified his assailant but, all too predictably, did nothing. Muratov’s own reporters were able not only to identify him but document his connections to the Russian secret police.

Ultimately, on September 1, 2023, Muratov was officially declared a “foreign agent” by the Putin government for “promoting anti-Russian views.” It’s not clear just what the consequences of being declared a “foreign agent” are – whether it’s like the apartheid South African government’s practice of “banning” certain individuals, including forbidding them to be named or mentioned in the media, or it goes farther than that. But it’s certain that Putin has an ultra-low threshold of tolerance for dissent, including sending out hit people to assassinate those he considers “enemies of Russia” even in other countries. Muratov himself equated being declared a “foreign agent” with being called an “enemy of the people.” No sooner had Muratov returned to Russia that two of his reporters, Elena Milashina and Sasha Nemov, were seized by agents of the pro-Russian government in Chechnya. “They were severely injured, beaten,” he said. “Sasha Nemov and Elena Milashina were taken right after the flight [from Russia to Chechnya. Attackers] threw the driver out, put them in a car, took them to be tortured. [They had liquid iodine thrown on them and were repeatedly beaten with hard plastic sticks.] The people who did this, it was an armed group of 10-12 people. They knew what plane, on what flight, at night by Utair they would arrive in Grozny. This means that these people had access to the passenger flight booking system. To me, this shows that these people represent the authorities of the Chechen Republic.” “Putin vs. the Press” is an inspiring tale of resistance but also an extremely depressing program that shows how easily the virus of authoritarianism can infect even a country like our own which has traditionally taken its status as a republic for granted. Given the current state of American political affairs – with Donald Trump dominating the Republican polls and running neck-and-neck with Joe Biden in the 2024 Presidential election, and radical-Right House Republicans threatening to shut down the U.S. government and demanding an end to U.S. military aid to Ukraine as part of their price for keeping it open – Russia’s present could well be America’s future.

Doug Porter. Endorses Monica Montgomery-Steppe for Supervisor – and So Do My Husband and I

For the last few weeks I have been inundated with mailers and hit pieces in the special election to replace Nathan Fletcher as Fourth District San Diego County Supervisor. I have long admired San Diego City Councilmember Monica Montgomery-Steppe and have regretted the fact that I didn't have the chance to vote for her … until now. The mailers for Montgomery-Steppe in the current campaign have been positive, extolling her virtues and the things she's done for the people of San Diego. The mailers against her have been filled with veiled racist innuendi; the subliminal message, especially from the San Diego Police Officers' Association, is, "Monica Montgomery-Steppe is Black, and we all know all Black people want to 'defund the police.'" I didn't know who Janessa Goldbeck was before this campaign started, but even though the Police Officers' Association's campaign for her is nominally "independent," by refusing to disavow it she's essentially endorsing a racist attack on her African-American opponent, and she and her supporters (including the San Diego Democrats for Equality) should be ashamed of themselves. I just got this e-mail this morning from Doug Porter at Words & Deeds and he makes the case far better than I could about why Monica Montgomery-Steppe is the ONLY progressive choice in this election.

I Voted for Monica Montgomery-Steppe for Supervisor and You Should, Too

by Doug Porter • August 3, 2023

August 15 is the final date for the ongoing election to replace Nathan Fletcher on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors. If you live in District 4 (and most San Diego city residents do), consider it a moral imperative to mail, drop off, or vote in person for Council member Monica Montgomery-Steppe in the next two weeks.

This special election really is something special. Over the decades, we’ve seen plenty of candidates for local office disappoint when it comes to voting on issues that make a difference.

It’s funny - not funny - when issues of importance come up for consideration and those who ran for office spouting the bravado of being “for the people” cast their vote for causes supported by forces whose agenda includes “otherizing” much of the local citizenry.

When it comes to law and order, San Diego politicians are mostly weak in the knees in the face of any suggestion that might be interpreted as not being supportive enough of the law enforcement industrial complex.

For those of you unfamiliar with the inner workings of city government it may come as a surprise to learn that our police department, whose budget has never been cut, and whose officers got away with defying a common sense mandate for COVID vaccines, is in my opinion, on a “slow strike.”

While homeless encampments in all kinds of places are dismantled, the SDPD couldn’t take on an “unauthorized” rave under a freeway bridge recently. A phalanx of thirty or so officers showed up at city hall this week to support street cameras and license plate readers. And, in what has to be the ultimate middle finger waved at the public, the Chief of Police was photographed with a disfigured US flag in the background (banned by the LAPD) known to be used as a battle flag displayed by extremists like the ones who marched in Charlottesville in 2017.

Their ineffectiveness has been attributed to a shortage of personnel. That’s an excuse, and excuses are for losers. The best spin anybody can put on what’s happening is that officers are disillusioned by what wannabe authoritarians in politics call wokeness.

A few watered-down reforms have been enacted at the state government level. The policy of more prisons equals less crime is no longer in vogue. And pesky reporters keep finding things like bias, jail deaths, and the use of excessive force to share with the public.

Lest you think I’m making things up, today’s Union-Tribune editorial speaks to the shameful steamrolling of the Privacy Advisory Board as the city considered installing 500-ish street light surveillance cameras and license plate readers.

A year ago, the City Council unanimously approved establishing a new Privacy Advisory Board to assess the use and community impact of 300-plus city surveillance technologies, especially those used by police. The impetus for the board’s creation was the shock and anger that greeted the 2019 revelation that the network of about 3,000 cameras on streetlights the city had installed three years earlier — supposedly to monitor traffic and parking patterns — were actually sophisticated surveillance tools with cameras and microphones

So the cops lied by omission before, and dared anybody to oppose, monitor, or regulate a more robust technology. I know the arguments about surveillance technology and even agree on its value in disrupting the actions of street criminals. I also know the SDPD’s history, and think that anybody who trusts them on these sorts of issues is naive.

As a City Council member, Montgomery-Steppe has survived the subterfuge of those who think their sworn status obligates them to oppose or weaken changes and/or reforms that would make them accountable for their actions.

She’s played by the rules, been unfailingly polite, and open to dialogue. Montgomery-Steppe has persisted in seeking a better way to keep San Diegans safe and secure. She passed on an opportunity to go negative on the snails pace roll out of Prop B’s citizen police oversight in a recent interview.

"This is what changing a system looks like. This is what community governance looks like. Sometimes we have good community partners who are willing to help us move things along, sometimes we don't .... I am not thinking about my personal instant gratification and what the media's going to say about me. I'm thinking about 10 and 15 years from now, how can we stand up this board and give it a foundation upon which it can build?"

Now it’s payback time. Not that she did anything wrong. It’s just that reformers are a danger to the established order and must be vanquished. It is, of course, their First Amendment right to engage in the political process. And, as we have learned with the most recent indictment of the former president, their right to lie is also protected.

That constitutional protection doesn’t make what local gendarmes and prosecutors are doing right or ethical. But we should already know from past experience, those topics are of little concern to those types. Various law enforcement related Independent Expenditure Committees have spent more than $100,000 to oppose Montgomery-Steppe with misleading and malicious propaganda. They’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars in support of the other Democrat in the contest, who they believe will bend to their will.

Three pages prior to today’s U-T editorial on SD technology adoption, see the headline: Richard Fischer, disgraced sheriff’s deputy jailed for sexual misconduct, released months early.

This is the same offender –after being sentenced to 44 months in jail– who was released ‘accidentally’ after serving only 5 months. Now he’s out again, proving that, when it comes to rapists, some cops are more equal than your ordinary sex offender,

So it’s not just the SDPD playing games with justice, it’s also the County Sheriffs. With Montgomery-Steppe as supervisor, we can all feel better knowing there’s somebody keeping watch on county cops.

We San Diegans have the opportunity to put a person of integrity on the County Board of Supervisors, whose power of the purse can dictate a better life for all San Diegans.

I voted. Have you?

***

Short Snips About the Candidates… Although Supervisor elections are technically non-partisan, they’re not.

The Democrats who have declared their candidacy are:

San Diego City Council Member Monica Montgomery-Steppe–

Website - Facebook

Two quick facts you need to know about Montgomery-Steppe.

She is a progressive and pragmatic Black woman who beat the local establishment’s choice, then-incumbent Council person Myrtle Cole in 2018.

The police unions in San Diego are scared to death about her desire for oversight and ability to wade through the copaganda to see the bigger picture about law and order.

Montgomery-Steppe: “Violence is not biological. It has not been solved with over-policing, and it has not been solved with more funding, and until we address the root causes of violence and crime, we will continue seeing the exact same issues in our city and in our systems.”

***

Vet Voice Foundation CEO Janessa Goldbeck

Website - Facebook

She’s an out and proud Ex-Marine who served during the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era. Her first venture into electoral politics was a losing effort to replace Congresswoman Susan Davis.

Her candidacy is supported by a passel of big name Democrats, like Rep. Scott Peters. Unfortunately, she’s also going to be the beneficiary of a smear campaign funded by the law enforcement establishment. Will they (as an independent entity) say her Democratic opponent is supported by a global Jewish conspiracy (code word: George Soros)? Who knows? They’ve dipped their toes in that water before. Her claims of innocence (the Independent Expenditure excuse) ring hollow.

***

There are also two Republicans vying for D4 Supervisor.

Re-Open San Diego founder Amy Reichert

Website - Facebook

Reichert was soundly defeated (64.6% to 25.4%) by Nathan Fletcher in 2022. Her claim to fame was/is the assertion that voters supported her “common sense” approach to changing the direction of San Diego.

The fact that TV station KUSI has a crush on her should tell voters all they need to know about her stances.

***

Medically retired Marine veteran Paul McQuigg

Website & Facebook Not Available

He works for the Census bureau, collecting economic data. He thinks we are already in a recession, despite declining unemployment and inflation and an ascending stock market. (Reference: Dude, Where’s My Recession? by Paul Krugman)

His first suggestion in a Union-Tribune interview is a 500-bed inpatient psychiatric/drug abuse hospital dedicated to the homeless population in the county. Great stuff. Except what are those homeless humans supposed to do for the three to six years it takes to build a facility?

NBC News Documentary on J. Robert Oppenheimer Timed to Promote the Feature Film About Him – But It's Well Worth Seeing Anyway

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, July 21) at 10 MS-NBC showed a new documentary on J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the first atomic bomb, called To End All War – reflecting Oppenheimer’s optimistic and forlorn hope that the use of nuclear weapons would render war so frightening that it would become obsolete. The appearance of this documentary was an example of synergistic marketing at its most blatant: it premiered on the same day as Christopher Nolan’s dramatic film Oppenheimer (starring Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer and Emily Blunt as his wife Kitty) opened in theatres. It was brought to us by a news network of NBC, which is part of Comcast – as is Universal, the studio that produced the Nolan film. There have been innumerable documentaries, as well as fiction films, about J. Robert Oppenheimer and his work on the first atomic bomb – as well as his controversial refusal to work on the hydrogen bomb and the jihad against him in the early 1950’s led by Dr. Edward Teller, who took on the H-bomb project and denounced Oppenheimer as a Communist and a traitor for having opposed the H-bomb program. In fact, the first documentary on the Manhattan Engineering District (the code-name for the A-bomb program, though it colloquially entered American history as the “Manhattan Project”) was a March of Time episode from 1946, just a year after the first A-bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, which Oppenheimer in one of his many references to religion and spirituality called “Trinity” after a poem by John Donne mentioning the Holy Trinity of Christianity (odd since Oppenheimer was Jewish, at least by ancestry), which reproduced that test and featured Oppenheimer playing himself. Quite a few films were made about the Manhattan Project while Oppenheimer was still alive (he died in 1967 of cancer of the esophagus, the same disease that had killed Humphrey Bogart a decade earlier, and like Bogart, Oppenheimer almost certainly got it from his constant tobacco use), as well as more than one dramatic feature (including the 1989 film Fat Man and Little Boy, which starred Dwight Schultz as Oppenheimer and Paul Newman as General Leslie Groves, the man the Army put in charge as overall administrator of the Manhattan Project; the title came from the two different bombs made at Alamogordo, the smaller one used on Hiroshima and the larger one dropped on Nagasaki). There have also been a number of other movies called The Manhattan Project, ranging from a 1986 teen comedy with Christopher Collet and John Lithgow in which a teenage scientific prodigy builds a working A-bomb and then has to figure out how to disarm it to a 2022 “inspirational” movie about a man dying of terminal cancer who wants to kill himself before nature takes its course.

As presented here, J. Robert Oppenheimer lived a pretty tortured life, in which his “Rosebud” moment appears to have been being literally locked in a giant ice chest by bullies at summer camp in his boyhood. He grew up to be a physics student but did poorly at experimental science; when he discovered theoretical physics, he found his calling because then he could just think and work out equations all day without getting into the messy grind of actually having to make things work. So when word got around the physics community that Oppenheimer had been chosen as the Manhattan Project’s scientific director, his colleagues joked, “He couldn’t run a hot-dog stand.” Oppenheimer is also shown as a man who wasn’t especially political until the Great Depression hit when he was a junior physics professor at Berkeley in 1929, when he was 25 years old. He was shocked at the effect the Depression was having on his students, including one who literally had to live on cat food because that was all he could afford. (This was actually more common than a lot of people realize: in the 1960’s the U.S. Department of Agriculture passed a regulation requiring pet-food companies to make their products fit for human consumption because in the days before food stamps, a lot of people were feeding themselves pet food to survive.) This inspired Oppenheimer to become decidedly Left-wing in his politics; though there’s no evidence that he actually joined the Communist Party, U.S.A. (and if there were, surely the U.S. government investigators leading the postwar witch hunt against him would have found it and publicized it to justify what they did to him!), his brother was a CPUSA member and so was his girlfriend, Jean Tatlock, whom he dated in the late 1930’s and visited at least once during the early 1940’s, when he was working on the Manhattan Project and married to Kitty Puening Harrison, who was already on her third husband when she and Oppenheimer started a sexual relationship and conceived their first child, Peter. (She got a quickie divorce from Mexico and married Oppenheimer six months before Peter’s birth.) This two-hour documentary devotes as much running time to Oppenheimer’s post-war activities, including his forlorn hopes for the international control of atomic energy and his opposition to the congealing Cold War consensus that the Soviet Union was as implacable an enemy and as clear and present a danger to the peace of the world as Nazi Germany had been.

Like many of the other scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer had rationalized his research and development of a weapon of mass destruction on the basis that Hitler and his scientists were almost certainly working on one – after all, the basic research documenting atomic fission had all been done in Germany – and the U.S. and its allies needed to build the bomb and do it first before the Nazis could. Ironically, the main reason (at least in my reading of the historical evidence) the Nazis didn’t get the bomb was that Werner Heisenberg, the physicist in charge of the Nazis’ bomb program, made a huge scientific error; his calculation of the amount of fissile material which would be needed to set off a chain reaction and an atomic explosion was about 1,000 times greater than the true amount, and on that basis Heisenberg reported to Hitler and his Nazi colleagues that a nuclear weapon would be too big to be practical. It also didn’t help that the Nazis had driven out many of the top German physicists and other scientists because so many of them were Jews, and Hitler and his colleagues had publicly denounced atomic research as “Jewish physics” and essentially ordered it, if not banned, at least heavily restricted. I love the fact that the Nazis’ racism helped keep them from developing the atomic bomb! Oddly, Oppenheimer didn’t share the reluctance of some of his Manhattan Project colleagues about using the bomb against Japan once the Nazis were definitively defeated in May 1945; he argued not only for using it but for using it against cities instead of doing a demonstration blast over a relatively uninhabited area of Japan, and apparently his thinking was that he wanted to demonstrate the sheer awfulness of the A-bomb to make sure that its first two uses would also be the last. (That’s been true so far, but who knows how much longer? Already Vladimir Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons in his war against Ukraine, especially if the U.S. and its NATO allies send in active-duty forces to fight Russians in Ukraine or cross another of Putin’s ambiguous and frequently changing “red lines.”)

At the same time the show described a contentious meeting between Oppenheimer and President Harry Truman at the White House in October 1945, at which Truman asked Oppenheimer how soon the Soviet Union would have the bomb. Oppenheimer was noncommittal but said it would be within a few years, and Truman said, “Never!” (In fact, the Soviets did have the A-bomb in 1949, sparking yet another witch hunt throughout the U.S. government to look for the spies that allegedly “stole” it for them – when more sober-minded critics, including most of the nuclear scientists themselves, said that the Soviets would have discovered the bomb anyway because the only “secret” was whether or not it would work, and the U.S. had already demonstrated that. Ironically enough, the head of the Soviet bomb program would also run afoul of his country’s political police and become a dissident: Andrei Sakharov.) Then Oppenheimer told Truman, “I have blood on my hands,” and what Oppenheimer apparently intended as a statement of humility just enraged the President; he abruptly ended the meeting and told a staff member, “Get that crybaby scientist out of my office and don’t let me see him again.” The last 40 minutes or so of the Oppenheimer documentary deal with the bizarre proceeding by which the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), then in charge of both nuclear weapons and nuclear power (the highly-touted, overhyped program by which scientists who’d felt guilty over developing the worst, most potentially destructive weapon of all time tried to atone by figuring out a way to use nuclear technology for humanity’s benefit – though I remain as committed an opponent of nuclear power as I am of nuclear war because the technology is just too damned unforgiving of the inevitable natural accidents or human errors, as demonstrated at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, etc.), stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance.

The proceeding was full of dirty tricks on the part of the government, including bugging the offices of Oppenheimer’s attorneys so the prosecution knew what the defense was going to say before they said it. According to this documentary, the attack on Oppenheimer had the desired “chilling effect” on other scientists, including any who might have otherwise been tempted to speak out against the H-bomb itself or the nuclear tests that dominated the news in the early 1960’s and spewed huge amounts of dangerously radioactive material in their wake until President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had a mutual attack of good sense and negotiated a limited test-ban treaty in 1963. Ironically, Oppenheimer’s security clearance was restored, but not until 2022 – 55 years after his death and far too late to do either him or the cause of rational debate about nuclear energy any good. Oppenheimer remains a fascinating historical figure precisely due to his contradictions: as one of the few scientists (along with Isaac Newton, René Descartes and Blaise Pascal) who took religion seriously, he seems to have been obsessed not only with the effects of his actions (good and bad) on humanity but their meaning in the broader cosmos, and he never won the Nobel Prize for physics even though as early as the 1930’s he was propounding scientific ideas, including the positron and the black hole, that would later be taken up by other theoretical physicists, many of whom did win the Nobel. Christopher Nolan’s movie was based on a biography of Oppenheimer called American Prometheus – one of whose authors, Kai Bird, was interviewed for this documentary – and of course that couldn’t help but make me think of a classic novel whose author also referred to her central character as “the modern Prometheus” – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Richard Engel's New Documentary on the Wagner Group and Its Threat to the World

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, July 7) at 10 MS-NBC showed an intriguing documentary on Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner Group, the paramilitary organization he assembled in Russia with the support of Vladimir Putin and built up over the years into a huge private army with its own income streams, mainly from taking over gold and precious-gem mines in the Central African Republic and other African countries. The show was called Revolt from Within: The Rise of Wagner, and though this wasn’t mentioned here other sources I’ve read said that “Wagner” was indeed named for the German composer Richard Wagner. Wagner the composer was a musical genius; he was also an anti-Semite who wrote a bizarre essay called “Judaism in Music” in 1850 and was Hitler’s favorite composer. Apparently Hitler’s admiration for him was what led Prigozhin and Wagner’s original founder, Dmitri Utkin, to name their private army after him, whereas those of us who love Wagner’s music but loathe his racism have either to accept or forgive that about him the way Thomas Jefferson is one of my favorite figures in American history even though he owned 300 slaves. According to the Wikipedia page on Wagner, it started in 2014 by Utkin and Prigozhin, but Revolt from Within host and NBC foreign correspondent Richard Engel traced their origins farther back than that, to the slow disintegration of the Soviet Union in the 1980’s. According to Engel, by the 1980’s Russian organized crime had essentially taken over St. Petersburg (or, as it was then still called, “Leningrad”), and Prigozhin rose from petty thievery to become an official in the so-called “Russian Mafia.” He also attracted the attention of Vladimir Putin, then a minor official in the Russian intelligence service assigned to his native St. Petersburg.

When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991 Putin rose to mayor of St. Petersburg and then to the presidency of the Russian Federation, and Prigozhin formed a catering company that serviced Putin’s official dinners – an indication of the high level of trust Putin had in Prigozhin that he would eat what Prigozhin and his staff prepared without having it tasted first. This led to Prigozhin acquiring the nickname “Putin’s Chef.” As president of Russia, Putin found the Wagner Group useful, first in carrying out his intervention in the civil war in Syria (2015-2018), where Putin wanted to keep dictator Bashir al-Assad in power (which he did) and he sent Wagner forces to avoid the potential political consequences of using actual Russian military people. Putin’s next assignment for Wagner was the Central African Republic, where they provided security for president Faustin-Archange Touadéra and other top C.A.R. officials. They also took over a flourishing gold mine and drove out or killed the indigenous workers, and Engel interviewed one woman whose husband, along with seven other miners, was killed by Wagner people and buried in a mass grave. Taking over that gold mine and other mining operations in the C.A.R. gave Wagner an independent funding stream, from which they raked in billions of dollars, besides the subsidies they were getting from Putin’s government. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and their advance bogged down in the face of unexpectedly fierce Ukrainian resistance, Putin called in Wagner – which had already fought in Ukraine on Russia’s side in Crimea and the separatist Donbas region in the east – and Wagner agreed. Wagner launched a campaign to capture the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut in late September 2022.

According to the Wagner Wikipedia page, before that it had sent in commandos to assassinate Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelensky and decapitate Ukraine’s leadership, but Zelensky and the other targets survived. Engel said Wagner targeted Bakhmut despite its lack of strategic importance because obliterating it would be a powerful marketing tool for Wagner to ally itself with authoritarian governments around the world. They succeeded in reducing Bakhmut to rubble – the images of the almost totally destroyed Bakhmut, with the dead bodies of children, other innocent civilians and soldiers littering the streets, are some of the most powerful moments in this film – but Prigozhin later claimed that his enemies in the official Russian Ministry of Defense, including Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, overall commander of Russia’s so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine, were deliberately sabotaging Wagner’s forces and getting them killed by refusing to supply them enough ammunition. Prigozhin made this claim on June 23, 2023 and then marched his forces into Russia, taking over the city of Rostov-on-Don where Russia’s general staff is headquartered and from which Russia’s war against Ukraine is being commanded. He then marched his forces towards Moscow, only just days after Prigozhin’s attempted rebellion started, it ended abruptly. The official word was that Alexander Lukashenko, president of neighboring Belarus (formerly Byelorussia) and a hard-core Putin ally, had brokered a deal by which Prigozhin would be given asylum in Belarus and Wagner soldiers would be invited to join the regular Russian military.

At this point no one outside Russia knows just where Prigozhin is, whether Putin is living up to whatever promises were made to Prigozhin to get him to stand down, or whether Prigozhin’s mutiny, coup attempt, rebellion or whatever it was is still going on. Given what we know about how Vladimir Putin treats his real or perceived enemies – including sending assassins to target them wherever they are in the world (he had a dissident scientist fatally poisoned with plutonium after he and his daughter had fled to presumed safety in Britain) – it’s hard to imagine that Prigozhin is long for this world, if indeed he’s still alive as of this writing. But Prigozhin’s brief success at directly challenging Putin has shaken the perception of invincibility on which his power, like that of most dictators, rests. As Russian émigré Masha Gessen wrote in the June 26 New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/prigozhin-showed-russians-that-they-have-a-choice), “Some things that shocked Western observers, such as Prigozhin’s statement that the war in Ukraine was started under false pretenses, will probably easily vanish from consciousness. The specifics of what he said matter little. What’s important is that he tapped into a reservoir of bitter suspicion: Russians always suspect that they are being lied to, yet they have no choice but to support those who lie to them. Prigozhin gave them a choice, by driving tanks through the streets of Rostov.” The good news is that Prigozhin’s bizarre temper tantrum might actually start the unraveling of Putin’s regime; the bad news is it might lead to something even more authoritarian and brutal, either Prigozhin himself (or someone like him) assuming control of Russia and running an even nastier dictatorship than Putin’s, or the entire country degenerating into chaos and civil war, leading to the grim possibility of a nuclear-armed nation with various factions having access to the nukes and threatening to use them.

The Debt Ceiling: Republicans Get 90 Percent of What They Want

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

“Leverage is the key. When I have something you want, and you feel like you need to have it, then you can’t get it anywhere else.”
– U.S. Congressmember Andy Biggs (R-Arizona), https://apnews.com/article/zooey-zephyr-freedom-caucus-republicans-fc3de20bb1f4ea4deba6d33bd20cdf31

“I understand the different leverage points that you would have under Article II of the Constitution. I studied that a lot becoming Governor about Florida’s Constitution, and you’ve got to know how to use your leverage to advance what you’re trying to accomplish.”
– Governor and Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis (R-Florida), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqTp1Ob46n0

“Leverage” is a big word among Republican politicians these days. The modern-day Republican Party is pushing an agenda far out of tune with what the majority of Americans actually want, including heavy-duty restrictions on abortion, virtually no restrictions on gun ownership, draconian measures against Queer Americans in general and Trans Americans in particular, keeping Donald Trump’s huge tax giveaways to the rich in place, and eviscerating what there is of a social safety net in this country. Rather than push these policies in normal political ways, Republicans are actively looking for loopholes in America’s nominal “democracy” so they can impose their will on people whether the people want what they have to offer or not.

The recent manufactured “crisis” over America’s debt ceiling, which ended May 31 and June 1 when both houses of Congress passed a so-called “compromise” that gave Republicans about 90 percent of what they wanted, is a case in point. The debt ceiling itself is a disgusting relic of a bygone era (it was originally instituted in 1917 over concerns that the U.S. would run up a budget deficit fighting World War I) that periodically requires the Congress and the President to have another vote on whether to pay back debt the government has already incurred, rung up and spent in the normal budget process. Its weaponization is a phenomenon of the modern-day Republican Party’s refusal to trust its priorities to the normal budget process (if there is such a thing anymore, since as some Republican Congressmembers pointed out it’s been decades since the U.S. actually passed a formal budget instead of funding the government through so-called “continuing resolutions”) and instead quite literally to hold the U.S. and world economies hostage to make demands they couldn’t get through under regular Congressional order.

The final phase of the negotiations over the U.S. debt ceiling started on April 26, when House Speaker Kevin McCarthy pushed through his caucus a bill he called the “Limit, Save, Grow Act” (https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/27/white-house-regroups-mccarthy-debt-ceiling-success-00094273). As U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) said in a commentary in the British newspaper Guardian on why he voted against the final “compromise” (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/02/bernie-sanders-debt-ceiling-bill), “The original debt ceiling legislation that Republicans passed in the House would have, over a 10-year period, decimated the already inadequate social safety net of our country and made savage cuts to programs that working families, the children, the sick, the elderly and the poor desperately needed.”

A more moderate member of the Senate Democratic Caucus, Bob Casey (D-Pennsylvania), told the Politico Web site after “Limit, Save, Grow” passed, “Most Americans want Republicans to take action to avoid default. They don’t want the price of that to be throwing a million people off Meals on Wheels.” Like President Joe Biden, Casey called on the House of Representatives to pass a “clean” debt ceiling bill instead of holding the full faith and credit of the American government hostage. “After that’s done, on a bill that should be about [the debt ceiling] and nothing else, you can have lots of discussions about appropriations level,” Casey said.

But throughout the process, McCarthy insisted that as House Speaker he would not allow the House to vote on a “clean” debt ceiling bill – and he had the power to make sure of it. House Democrats circulated a so-called “discharge petition” to force a vote on a “clean” bill, but in addition to the 213 House Democrats they would have needed at least five Republicans – and McCarthy’s hold on his own caucus was so strong that that was five more Republicans than the Democrats actually got.

Underestimated by Democrats because of the arduous process by which he got elected Speaker in the first place – it took 15 ballots over four days and McCarthy had to make substantial compromises with the farthest Right-wingers in his caucus to get the votes – McCarthy actually outplayed Biden at every turn. He made it clear that he wouldn’t allow the House to vote on a “clean” debt ceiling, and he did just that. McCarthy was able to keep the final negotiations on the so-called “compromise” just between himself and Biden. Biden had wanted House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate leaders Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell to be at the table, but McCarthy said no – it would be just McCarthy, Biden and people on their staffs – and he won.

What’s more, McCarthy was able to set the terms of the narrative on Republican-friendly domain. By being maddeningly vague as to just what Republicans wanted to cut to bring down total government spending, McCarthy was able to keep the debate focused on, “Does the federal government spend too much?” – an issue on which Republicans have a huge advantage in popular support – rather than on specific programs people actually want, need and favor, where Democrats tend to have the advantage. McCarthy protested throughout the process that Biden didn’t meet with him for 97 days after February 1, when the two had a preliminary confab at the White House, and after a while he sounded like a teenage girl whining that the Big Man on Campus wouldn’t ask her to the prom – but ultimately he got his prom date with Biden.

As for the final “compromise” bill, H.R. 3746 – known, in a typical piece of Orwellian Newspeak and “doublethink” from today’s Republicans, as the “Fiscal Responsibility Act” (when it was pushed through by some of the most blatant fiscal irresponsibilities of all time) – the best thing that can be said about it is it could have been a lot worse. As New Yorker columnist John Cassidy wrote on May 30 (https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-debt-ceiling-deal-could-be-a-lot-worse), “At the G.O.P. side’s insistence, the agreement will introduce work requirements for needy adults in their fifties who receive federal food assistance, and it will stiffen existing work requirements for needy families who receive cash assistance. Republicans claim that these provisions will save the country money, but the sums involved are relatively trivial in a 6.3-trillion-dollar budget, and the effect on the lives of some of the neediest Americans could be devastating. The deal also claws back some twenty billion dollars in funding that Congress had previously allotted to the Internal Revenue Service for a crackdown on tax evasion, particularly by the wealthy.”

But Cassidy added that the “compromise” at least avoids some of the truly horrendous provisions of “Limit, Save, Grow.” “House Republicans were also demanding work requirements for Medicaid, the federal health-care program for poor individuals and families, and the debt-ceiling bill that they passed in April would have rescinded all eighty billion dollars of additional I.R.S. funding from last year’s Inflation Reduction Act,” Cassidy wrote. “The White House fended off these demands, but the fact remains that it reached an agreement that targets spending programs for poor people but doesn’t ask anything of the rich – and, by the way, also exempts the vast Pentagon budget from any cuts. Evidently, the White House decided that, in order to secure a deal, it had to give McCarthy some red meat for his MAGA-heavy caucus. … In today’s G.O.P., making life harder for poor people is something to celebrate, whereas going after rich tax evaders is simply unacceptable.”

In addition, the final deal contains something blandly referred to as “permitting reform” that will spell the virtual death of any effective environmental regulation in the U.S. It vastly restricts the ability of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the federal courts to block various projects for mining coal, drilling oil and tapping other environmentally destructive sources of energy. The “Fiscal Responsibility Act” even contains a specific go-ahead for one particular project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which will cut through West Virginia and into Virginia. President Biden agreed to push this particular energy project in exchange for Senator Joe Manchin’s (D-West Virginia) vote last year for his so-called “Inflation Reduction Act,” the big bill passed over unanimous Republican opposition that embodied most of Biden’s domestic agenda, or at least the part of it he could get through a divided Congress hamstrung by divisions within his own party.

The pipeline is supported by both of West Virginia’s Senators, Manchin and Republican Shelly Moore Capito, but no one bothered to run it by Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat who was Hillary Clinton’s running mate in 2016. Kaine complained not only that the pipeline was an environmental disaster, it would also dispossess thousands of farmers in Appalachian Virginia whose families have worked these lands for generations. And he questioned the precedent this sets that any well-heeled energy company can lobby Congress for a blanket exemption to all environmental reviews for a specific project and make a mockery of the EPA by doing so. Kaine said he would make a motion on the Senate floor to strip the blanket approval of Mountain Valley from the bill, but his amendment – like those of U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) and others pushing a so-called “conservative alternative” to an already pretty Right-wing bill – ran afoul of the fast-track process Senate leaders Schumer and McConnell had agreed on to make sure the bill passed the Senate in identical form to the House version.

Progressive economist James K. Galbraith published a commentary on the deal on The Nation’s Web site May 30 that discussed what a sweeping triumph the deal was for Republicans (https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/debt-ceiling-deal/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%205.30.2023&utm_term=daily): “It spares the military, veterans, Social Security, and Medicare, focusing cuts and caps on non-defense, discretionary spending – which, as the Center for American Progress has explained, includes many of the most ‘essential programs.’ Those cuts accumulate, and – as population grows and prices rise – they will be steep. True, the spending caps apply for only two years, but then the debt ceiling will come up again, and they will likely be renewed. The precedent has been set. Speaker McCarthy is right: the cuts are historic. The deal means austerity for the long term. It is a huge Republican win.”

We Didn’t Need to Be Here

The debate over the debt ceiling was replete with missed opportunities for the Democrats to avoid the confrontation altogether. As a May 24 New York Post editorial (https://nypost.com/2023/05/24/on-debt-ceiling-its-not-biden-vs-the-gop-but-biden-vs-the-voters/) stated, “Democrats could’ve moved to pass a no-strings ceiling-lifter last year, while they still controlled Congress: They knew the issue was coming.” Instead they chose to use their political capital to pass the so-called “Respect for Marriage Act” to protect the rights of married same-sex couples against potential attack by the U.S. Supreme Court. As one-half of a married same-sex couple, I’m grateful that they did that – but quite frankly I would rather they had either eliminated the debt ceiling altogether or did what the only other country in the world that does this to itself, Denmark, did and raised it so high it would never be reached. Instead President Biden stupidly rejected this and said it would be “irresponsible” to get rid of the debt limit altogether.

Another alternative might have been to cite the provision of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed in 1868 after the U.S. Civil War, effectively to declare the debt limit unconstitutional. The relevant clause reads, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” The clause was put into the Constitution to prevent the Southern states, once they were readmitted to the Union, from refusing to allow payment of the war debt incurred by the Union in suppressing their rebellion.

But Biden’s chance to invoke the Fourteenth Amendment to pay America’s debts anyway despite the hostage-taking by House Republicans would have taken much longer-term planning than it got. It would almost certainly have been delayed, and probably reversed, by the Right-wing judges who, thanks to Donald Trump’s and Mitch McConnell’s success in packing the Federal judiciary in general and the U.S. Supreme Court in particular, hold the balance of power in determining American constitutional law. Besides, the person who would have had actually to pay America’s bills in case the debt ceiling hadn’t been raised and America had been in default, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, publicly questioned whether she’d have had the right to do that under the Fourteenth Amendment.

James K. Galbraith’s Nation column offered more alternatives a truly imaginative President could have used to defuse the debt ceiling crisis and take the House Republicans’ leverage away. “It could have issued the platinum coin,” he wrote. “The claim that the Supreme Court might have blocked it has been rebutted by Phillip Diehl, a former director of the Mint, who drafted the enabling legislation. He said as head of the Mint, ‘The fact that it can have a trillion-dollar denomination on it was absolutely part of the intent.’ Or Treasury could have issued perpetual bonds, called ‘consols,’ not covered by the ceiling because they have no principal to repay. It could (probably) have issued premium bonds. It could have asked the Federal Reserve to clear Treasury checks with a zero-interest, unsecured line of credit. It could, finally, have let some checks bounce, if it came to that, and relied on the big bankers, not to mention the outraged public, to whip Congress into line. There was no chance that a default ‘crisis’ would fail to resolve in a few hours, at most.”

The Democrats could have seized on other opportunities afforded them by Kevin McCarthy’s craven desire to become House Speaker, whatever the cost. A few moderate Democrats could have crossed over and voted for him in January 2023, sparing him the horrible deals he had to make with the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) and other far-Right Republicans to become Speaker. Instead the House Democrats remained resolutely united behind their own leader, Hakeem Jeffries, and every time they went on TV and boasted that their caucus was united, I yelled at the TV, “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” A Speaker McCarthy elected with bipartisan votes would also have not had to give in to the terrible “motion to vacate” rule by which only one House member can force a vote on whether he can remain Speaker – and it would just take a majority vote to remove him.

But this never happened because of the bizarre, stupid, hidebound “traditions” by which the House governs itself that give virtually absolute power to the majority party, whichever one it is. This nearly threatened to short-circuit the ultimate “compromise” even before it could get to the House floor when Democrats voted en masse against the so-called “rule” under which it would be considered, debated and voted on. With a number of Republican representatives also voting against the rule, it squeaked through only after 52 House Democrats changed their votes from “no” to “yes” to allow the rule to pass. The final vote in the House to pass the bill was 314 in favor, 117 opposed – but 164 of the “yes” votes were Democrats and only 149 were Republicans. In the Senate the vote was even more lopsided: 63 to 36 in all, with 46 Democrats and only 17 Republicans voting "yes" while 31 Republicans, four Democrats and Bernie Sanders (a nominal independent who caucuses with the Democrats) voting "no." So this bill full of Republican priorities relied on the votes of Democrats to pass!

The “Bipartisan” Traditionalist

President Biden said and did none of the things that could have short-circuited the debt ceiling crisis because he’s a profoundly unimaginative man, bound by the rules of decency and decorum as he learned them in his 36 years in the Senate (1973 to 2009) and his subsequent eight years as Barack Obama’s Vice-President. Early on in the Biden Presidency I wrote that there seemed to be two Joe Bidens, the progressive tribune anxious to use the full powers of his office to address the growing inequalities in wealth and income, safeguard the environment and in particular take on human-caused climate change; and the moderate anxious to get along with everybody and preserve his “bipartisan” image.

As long as Democrats controlled both houses of Congress – however barely and hamstrung as they were by the loathsome 60-vote threshold for the Senate to do almost anything – progressive Biden had at least a fighting chance against moderate Biden. Once the Republicans gained control of the House in the 2022 midterms and served notice that they were going to hold raising the debt ceiling hostage for a sweeping attack on Biden’s agenda, moderate Biden took over and negotiated a truly ghastly deal whose only saving grace was that, as John Cassidy said, it could have been even worse.

As New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker said on the June 2 episode of the PBS series Washington Week (https://www.pbs.org/video/washington-week-full-episode-june-2-2023-z55tvb/), “I think what [the final deal] tells us is that President Biden, of course, has now been able to burnish his reputation for bipartisanship. This is important to him. It’s part of his identity, his political identity. It’s part of his case for re-election next year. I’m the adult in the room at a time of lots of fractious fighting among the parties. It doesn’t necessarily match the desires and priorities of his own party. A lot of his House Democrats would have preferred he’d be more of a fighter, less of a compromiser. But for him, you saw him tonight give that speech in which he made clear that his priority is being seen as somebody who rises above the partisanship in the nation’s interest.”

That’s just the problem with Biden, wrote James K. Galbraith: “The president did not want to fight. He did not want to defend any principle. He did not want to use the powers he had to protect and defend the American people. He did not want to stand with Democrats in Congress or his constituents in the Democratic Party. He wanted to be seen sitting, side by side, with the Republican Speaker of the House. He wanted to get the plaudits of the pundit class for ‘compromise’ and for reaching a ‘bipartisan’ deal. Well, the President has what he wants. The Speaker has what he wants. Let them defend the consequences.”

The speech Peter Baker was referring to was Biden’s conciliatory message from the Oval Office on June 2 in which he paid tribute to Speaker McCarthy and presented the deal as one fair to both sides. McCarthy had sung a quite different tune in his own speech just after the House passed the final bill May 31. McCarthy was full of truculence and insistence that the “Fiscal Responsibility Act” was just the first step. Republicans, he said, were quite proud of the fact that for the first time in decades, the federal government would spend less this year than it did the year before. And he and his colleagues in the House Republican leadership who were standing with him on the podium announced their determination to pursue further cutbacks in American government spending, no matter what the cost to people’s lives and livelihoods.

Among the specific issues McCarthy pledged to keep pursuing is ending the Biden administration’s attempts to boost Internal Revenue Service funding, further gutting the nation’s environmental laws, and more cutbacks in social services in general, including imposing work requirements for Medicaid recipients. If the same political alignment of today remains after the 2024 election – Biden wins a second term but the Republicans keep control of the House – you can bet there will be a repeat of this year’s economic brinksmanship as soon as the deal’s suspension of the debt ceiling expires in January 2025. Republicans have found that holding the U.S. and world economies hostage in exchange for dramatic cutbacks in social-service spending and sweeping policy changes in other areas works.

As Jonathan Chait wrote in New York magazine (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/05/debt-ceiling-deal-who-won-biden-mccarthy-republicans-hostage-extortion.html), “What will happen the next time a Democratic president needs a Republican House to lift the debt ceiling? There is no reason the ransom demand will be small. … The next round of demands will likely cut deeper into anti-poverty programs that were spared this time. Or possibly, Republicans will creatively demand concessions on immigration, abortion, or any other social issue that has seized their imagination at the moment.”

If the Democrats once again gain control of both houses of Congress, one of their first and strongest priorities should be simply to abolish the debt ceiling so they can no longer be victimized by this sort of blackmail. Until then, Republicans’ success in humiliating Biden and forcing him to negotiate with them despite Biden’s initial refusal to do so (his ultimate course reminded me of the way Ronald Reagan used to insist, “We do not negotiate with terrorists,” while he and his administration were negotiating with terrorists) will wreak untold havoc on the U.S. – and the world – for generations to come. As Jonathan Chait wrote in the above-cited article, “When you are holding a gun to the head of the global economy, and both sides understand the president has no option but to pay off the hostage-takers, there’s no natural limit to the size of the ransom.”

The Debt Ceiling: House Republicans Hold the World's Economy Hostage

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On April 17, 2023, Kevin McCarthy, Speaker of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, served notice on the American people of just what he and his House Republican colleagues will demand in exchange for raising America’s debt ceiling. Until 1994, when the Republicans gained their first House majority in 40 years, raising the debt ceiling as needed was a strictly mechanical exercise. Most people didn’t know the debt ceiling – a resolution the U.S. obliges itself to extend periodically to pay for money it’s already spent – even existed. But over the last 30 years, whenever Republicans have held control of one or both houses of Congress while the President was a Democrat, it’s become a highly controversial and contentious issue.

Contrary to popular misconceptions, raising the debt ceiling does not put the U.S. further into debt. It merely gives the U.S. Treasury Department permission to pay the bills for debt we’ve already incurred. Not raising the debt ceiling would be like you unilaterally deciding you aren’t going to pay your credit-card bills. Banks and other financial institutions don’t take kindly to that sort of thing, and neither would the U.S.’s creditors. (In most discussions about the national debt very few people mention whom and what we owe the debt to, but it’s basic economics that every time there is a debtor, there is a creditor.)

The U.S. is in a particularly powerful position to sink the world’s economy if it decides to stop paying its bills, because the U.S. dollar is the world’s reserve currency. That means that anything which causes creditors and other nations to doubt the soundness of the U.S. dollar will hurt the world’s economy more than it would if the European Union, Britain, Japan or another country did it. But the United States and the world economy are both being held hostage by a group of about 20 or so radical-Right Republicans with deep Libertarian ideological roots who are threatening to refuse to raise the debt ceiling unless the Democrats who still control the Presidency and the Senate agree to deep cuts in domestic spending.

Not that there’s a lot of room to cut the federal budget, particularly in the major ways the Republican Right wants to. Given the posture of both major parties towards the U.S. military – even though, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a conservative group of deficit hawks, the U.S. spends 40 percent of the total world’s defense budget, more than that of the next 10 nations combined (https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2023/04/the-united-states-spends-more-on-defense-than-the-next-10-countries-combined#:~:text=April%2024%2C%202023-,The%20United%20States%20Spends%20More%20on%20Defense%20than%20the%20Next,Peace%20Research%20Institute%20(SIPRI).) – America’s bloated defense budget is off limits. And, despite the long-standing desire of many Congressional Republicans either drastically to cut Social Security and Medicare or eliminate them altogether, President Joe Biden artfully tricked them during last February’s State of the Union address into a public pledge to keep those programs intact, at least for now.

So, with the three biggest expenditures the U.S. government has off the table, Republicans are wracking their little pea-brains looking for other things to cut. Among their suggestions are cutting the administrative budgets for Social Security and Medicare, as well as the Internal Revenue Service – even though the 2023 tax season went far smoother than usual because President Biden and a Democratic Congress raised the number of IRS agents, thereby cutting wait times on the phone from half an hour to five minutes. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has warned that defunding the IRS would actually increase the budget deficit, because it would enable more people who underpay their taxes, accidentally or deliberately, to get away with it.

The Republican plan to raise the debt ceiling – which McCarthy grandly calls the “Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023” (H.R. 2811) – aims to roll back discretionary government spending to 2022 levels. It would prevent President Biden from rolling back student loan debt (an executive order currently tied up in court after a number of Republican state attorneys general filed suit to stop it) and it would impose work requirements on recipients of food stamps, Medicaid and the so-called “Temporary Assistance to Needy Families” (TANF) program enacted by Democratic President Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress in 1996.

It would also repeal most of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed last year by President Biden and a Democratic Congress, and would specifically eliminate unspent COVID-19 relief funds and anything to do with fighting human-caused climate change. And it would vastly restrict the administration’s ability to block oil drilling or coal mining on federal lands. What’s more, the debt ceiling extension would last for only one year – so the two major parties would have to fight this out all over again just as the 2024 Presidential election campaign, for which Biden has already announced his candidacy for re-election, is heating up.

Too “Draconian” – Or Not Draconian Enough?

President Biden and other Democrats have, predictably, already denounced H.,R. 2811 and its precursor, a budget plan introduced in March 2023 by the ultra-Right House Freedom Caucus. In a statement released on March 20 (https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/03/20/five-alarm-fire-the-house-freedom-caucus-extreme-budget-proposal-endangers-public-safety/), the White House called the Republican budget plan a ‘FIVE-ALARM FIRE” (in all caps). They said it would slash public safety programs and make life worse for working-class and middle-class poeple while funding big tax breaks for the rich. “In fact, their tax cuts would be so expensive that their deep and harmful cuts would not reduce the deficit,” the White House’s “FIVE-ALARM FIRE” statement said.. White House officials have called the Republican budget proposals “draconian” and have argued that in order to meet the Republicans’ goals to reduce federal spending without cutting the military, Social Security or Medicare, they would have to get rid of the entire rest of the federal budget.

But while Biden and the Democrats are calling the GOP budget planks “draconian,” Kevin McCarthy is having problems from Congressmembers of his own party who don’t think they’re draconian enough. In a frightening dispatch released by Reuters April 18 (https://www.axios.com/2023/04/18/republicans-mccarthy-debt-ceiling-deal), various Republican House members questioned McCarthy’s plan and called for more extreme measures. One unnamed Republican Congressmember told Reuters reporters Andrew Solender and Juliegrace Brufke that the threat of a national default was “the single biggest point of leverage that will exist in these two years."

Other Republican House members were willing to allow the Reuters reporters to use their names, but said things equally outrageous. “I think that they should go further. ... I am in favor of very aggressive cuts," said Right-wing Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL).

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), who unsuccessfully challenged McCarthy in the election for Speaker, said McCarthy's proposal to keep non-discretionary,, non-defense spending at 2022 levels is a "long ways away" from what he wants, which is to bring it down to 2020 levels before the COVID-19 pandemic. "I’m not at the table,” Biggs told Reuters. “And I get it, McCarthy’s pissed that I ran against him, so I don’t get invited to any of these deals. But I think it’s unfortunate that he doesn’t want to hear from everybody.”

House Republicans like Reps. Tim Burchett (R-TN) and Eric Burlison (R-MO) are skeptical of raising the debt ceiling on principle. "I just didn't run for Congress to raise the debt ceiling," Burlison told Reuters..”It’s not something I’m excited about. … I really want to see some real restraints and fiscal cuts, not just promises.”

President Biden met with McCarthy one time in February but since then has refused to negotiate with the Republican House leader. Biden’s position is that the House should do its job and pass a “clean” bill to lift the debt ceiling, without any preconditions, and then negotiate spending issues later as part of the normal budget process. But McCarthy has already declared that a non-starter. In his April 17 speech before the New York Stock Exchange – a significant locale because it’s the business home of the investors and financiers who would be among the biggest losers if the U.S. actually defaults on its debts – he said, “A no-strings-attached debt limit increase will not pass.”

What Are the Republicans After?

Ask most Republican politicians, especially those on the far Right of their party, what book has most influenced their political outlooks and beliefs, and they will generally tell you the Bible. Ask them what book besides the Bible has most influenced them, and most will say the 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged is a long book with an apocalyptic plot line in which the world’s biggest and most powerful capitalists withdraw from the global economy and form a secret state of their own. Without them, the world’s economy collapses and their leader, John Galt, serves notice on the population, “If you want an industrial society, you will have to have it on our terms.”

The last time Republicans in Congress threatened to force the U.S. to default on its debts, I wrote that they basically seemed to be trying to replicate the ending of Atlas Shrugged in real life. Rand’s immensely popular novel gave rise to Libertarianism, a political philosophy that holds that there are only three proper functions of government: a military, to protect the nation and its property owners from foreign threats; law enforcement, to protect people with property from the attempts of people without it to take it; and a court system, to adjudicate disputes between people with property as well as to punish criminals, who in Libertarian ideology are defined as anyone who relies in whole or in part on government for their survival.

It’s not clear just how many of the radical-Right House Republicans are hard-core Libertarian ideologues who hope that their refusal to raise the U.S. debt ceiling will bring about a global economic apocalypse and therefore end all those pesky social programs they don’t believe should exist. It’s not even clear that most of them have thought out the consequences of the U.S. failing to pay off its debts at all. But we’ve seen far-Right Congressmembers like Marlorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado repeat over and over, like meditation students clinging to their mantras, that as Boebert told Fox News host Sean Hannity during the epic struggle over Kevin McCarthy’s effort to become Speaker of the House, “We’ve got to stop spending money we don’t have,” with a ferocity and grim determination that even put off a sympathetic interviewer like Hannity.

How We Got Here: The Failure of the “Red Tsunami”

One reason we are facing the potential of a worldwide economic crisis is that, contrary to the predictions of virtually every U.S. political analyst (including me), the widely expected “Red Tsunami” – a pro-Republican avalanche of such devastating proportions the Democrats would barely be left with a foothold in Congress – didn’t happen. The Democrats actually picked up a seat in the U.S. Senate and lost their House majority by only six seats. In a country whose political system was more rational than ours, that might have led both major parties to move to the center and avoid potentially world-shattering economic cataclysms.

Unfortunately, the United States has neither a parliamentary system, proportional representation nor any of the other fail-safe mechanisms other countries have. The combination of single-member legislative districts, the two-party duopoly that creates, and the House of Representatives’ tradition of absolute majority control ensures that the safety valves electorates have in most of the world’s democracies don’t exist here. Once the people have voted a party in, they don’t have any recourse for at least the next two years. Even the recall, a highly controversial process by which voters in certain U.S. states to get rid of a public official and replace them with someone at least theoretically better able to represent them, doesn’t exist at the federal level.

This has led to the absurd spectacle of George Santos, one of the four New York Republicans who unseated Democrats in key upstate districts President Joe Biden had easily won in 2020, clinging to office even as the web of lies he told about himself has unraveled completely. There’s something weird and pathetic about the spectacle of Santos essentially giving the finger to the growing number of people – including the Republican party leaders of Nassau County, where he’s from – who want him to resign. As long as Kevin McCarthy needs Santos’s vote – which he does – McCarthy will protect him and there won’t be any way the people in Santos’s district can get rid of him until 2024.

One grim irony of the Democrats doing so much better than they were expected to in the 2022 midterm elections is the small size of McCarthy’s majority actually gave the farthest-Right crazies in his party more power. Though the Constitution specifies that the House Speaker is elected by the entire membership, in practice the majority party selects the Speaker without any input from the minority. In normal Speaker elections the majority party caucuses behind closed doors and selects the new Speaker privately before taking the floor and electing them in public. Not this time: for the first time in exactly 100 years this year’s Speaker election went past a single ballot. In fact, it took 15 ballots before Kevin McCarthy got the votes he needed – and he only got them because a few bitter-enders like Boebert agreed to vote “present” on the last ballot and thereby reduced the number of votes McCarthy needed to 215 – three votes short of an actual majority.

In exchange for the votes he needed to become Speaker, McCarthy had basically to subcontract the entire governance of the U.S. to the far-Right crazies in his party. Among the more bizarre things he needed to give in on was the so-called “motion to vacate,” which as CNN reported on December 13, 2022 – less than a month before McCarthy’s election after four harrowing days and 15 ballots (https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/13/politics/house-speaker-gop-motion-to-vacate/index.html) – means that just one House Republican (or Democrat) can move at any time to remove him from the job. McCarthy is undoubtedly well aware that even without the “motion to vacate” rule in place, the last House Speaker who negotiated a deal with the Democrats over raising the debt ceiling, John Boehner, was driven from office by Right-wing Freedom Caucus members who hadn’t thought his deal did enough to bring down government spending.

As Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) told CNN last December, “There’s a reason [the motion to vacate] already got debated. You can’t govern with a gun to your head, and that is what they are asking for. It makes us highly unstable, and it lays out the potential too for Democrats to take advantage of this and create absolute chaos.” Advocates for the ”motion to vacate” compared it to the ability of a corporate board of directors to fire a chief executive officer (CEO) – but CEO’s generally have contractual protections. A corporate board that wants to fire a CEO before their contract is up generally has to spend millions of dollars to buy them out. The “motion to vacate” carries with it no comparable penalties.

The radical Right of the Republican House Caucus got far more out of McCarthy than just the “motion to vacate.” They got seats on hugely important House committees. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had been removed from all committee assignments in the last Democratically-controlled House for physically threatening other members and calling for the execution of certain prominent Democrats, now serves on the Homeland Security Committee. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), who’s so demented virtually his entire family endorsed against him when he first ran for Congress in 2020, was put back on the Natural Resources Committee.

Since I wrote the first draft of this article last January, the dimensions of the deal McCarthy cut with the craziest members of the House Republican Caucus to become Speaker have become even more apparent. McCarthy not only appointed Jim Jordan (R-OH) chair of the House Judiciary Committee, he gave Jordan a subcommittee to investigate the so-called “weaponization” of the federal government against Republicans and conservatives in general, and former President Donald Trump in particular. Jordan organized a rare “field trip” of the House Judiciary Committee to New York City, ostensibly to investigate the rising crime rate (which is actually declining; one MS-NBC host noted that there are five cities in Jordan’s home state of Ohio, including Mansfield in his own district, which have higher murder rates per capita than New York) but really to embarrass Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for having sought and received an indictment against Trump.

McCarthy also unilaterally gave thousands of hours of House surveillance footage of the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol to then-Fox News prime time host Tucker Carlson – much to the disgust of the U.S. Capitol Police, who worried the airing of such footage would reveal the plans they have to evacuate Congressmembers and their staffs in case there’s another attack on the Capitol. McCarthy’s apparent intention in giving this footage to Carlson was so Carlson would produce a series of videos claiming that the January 6, 2021 riot was no big deal – but Carlson’s tenure at Fox ended ignominiously on April 24 after he’d done just one five-minute segment based on this footage.

Ultimately, Biden Will Have to Cave

In refusing so far to negotiate with Kevin McCarthy and the House Republicans – including the ultra-Right crazies he depends on to keep him in power – President Biden has morality and principle on his side. Biden has said it is the responsibility of Congress to raise the debt ceiling periodically as necessitated by the amount of federal spending they have already approved in the budget. He has argued passionately that it’s irresponsible for either major party to hold the U.S. and world economies hostage for a few transitory political gains. And he’s right about the probable outcomes of the deep budget cuts the Republicans want – worse times for ordinary Americans, huge tax breaks for the already super-rich, fewer resources to ensure public safety, and an accelerating global environmental crisis that within 100 to 200 years is likely to make Earth uninhabitable for humans.

But as the late, great trial lawyer Louis Nizer once wrote, “When a theory collides with a fact, the result is a disaster.” Biden has the theory on his side, but McCarthy has the facts. With the House firmly under Republican control – albeit by a slender majority – the simple fact is that no extension of the federal debt ceiling can pass the House without McCarthy’s approval. As Speaker, McCarthy controls the House’s agenda, and he has the power to prevent a “clean” debt-ceiling bill from ever going through simply by refusing to allow it to be voted on.

The only way around McCarthy’s ironclad control of the House’s agenda is something called a “discharge petition,” in which a majority of House members request a chance to vote on something the Speaker has decided not to let them vote on. But that is a lot easier said than done. MS-NBC host Lawrence O’Donnell, who worked for years on the staff of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York) and therefore knows a lot about the arcana of legislative rules, obtained a copy of the House rules for a discharge petition and said he couldn’t make heads or tails of them.

Previous fights over the debt ceiling have ended at least partly because the major Republican donors – the ultra-rich people who would stand to lose the most if the U.S. actually defaulted – have threatened to stop donating campaign money to the party or its members if they jeopardized the U.S.’s credit rating. But this may not be as effective as it once was. For one thing, a lot of big Republican donors have themselves drunk Ayn Rand’s Libertarian Kool-Aid and are looking forward to a sort of Atlas Shrugged apocalypse. They aren’t worried about losing their own money because Rand in her novels frequently had her super-capitalist heroes lose all their money – only to gain it all back, and more, because they were just so overwhelmingly superior to the rest of humanity.

Besides, ever since Donald Trump emerged as the Republican favorite for the 2016 Presidential nomination, modern-day Republicans have made a fetish out of attacking so-called “corporate elites” and proclaiming themselves as champions of “the little guy” against anonymous, faceless corporate bureaucracies. Ever since the modern-day political alignment emerged between 1968 and 1980, the Republican Party has been an uneasy but surprisingly durable coalition between Libertarian capitalists who want government to keep out of their own business, and hyper-Right Christian activists who want a huge, interventionist government that actively decides for people whom they can have sex with, how they can deal with the consequences – good and bad – therefrom, what books they may read and whether they can travel.

For most of the last 62 years the Libertarian Right had had the upper hand in this coalition. Not anymore. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s holy war against his state’s largest private employer, the Walt Disney Corporation, over their opposition to his “Don’t Say Gay” bill (driven by Queer and Queer-friendly Disney employees who pressured the company to take a stand on the legislation) essentially signaled to the American capitalist elite that they’ve created a monster. Governments in Florida and other Republican-controlled states are moving aggressively to limit the freedom of employers as well as individual employees to live their lives as they want to – and the same Republican true believers who want an intrusive Big Government policing people’s private sex lives may not stop at bringing down the world’s economy just because a few corporate fat-cats tell them not to.

So ultimately Biden will cave. He will have to. Maybe he’ll win some tweaks in the GOP’s economic proposals that will somewhat soften the blows. But he knows that ultimately he will have to agree to a Republican budget plan that will eviscerate many of the policies and programs he wanted to be President to create or protect in the first place. The other possibility is that, despite the public statements of both Biden and McCarthy that neither wants to see the U.S. default on its obligations, it may happen anyway. The classic example in history of a destructive event no one really wanted is World War I; the countries that blundered their way into this war either thought it would never happen or expected a quick victory for one side or the other. Instead the war hideously dragged on for over four years and left wanton carnage in its wake.

Besides, if the U,S. actually defaults on its debts and sends the global economy crashing, U.S. voters will take it out on Biden and the Democrats. That’s what they did in 1932, when Republican President Herbert Hoover was almost universally blamed for the 1929 stock market crash and the ensuing Great Depression because they occurred on his watch. Even though he had little to do with it – and Hoover actually began the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) and some of the other big-government programs his successor, Franklin Roosevelt, got credit for – the homeless encampments of the 1930’s were bitterly nicknamed “Hoovervilles.” The result of the economic collapse of the 1930’s was a long period of Democratic control of the country – and the likely result of an economic collapse under Biden’s watch would be a similarly extended period of total dominance by Republicans.

PBS "Frontline" Documentary "Age of Easy Money" Shows Perils in Relying On the Federal Reserve to Make Economic Policy

r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (March 14) at 9 I watched a PBS Frontline documentary called “Age of Easy Money” on the “streaming” channel, since it was scheduled to begin at 10 p.m. but I wanted to be able to watch it an hour earlier so there’d be nothing in the way of my husband Charles and I watching the Stephen Colbert show once he got back from work at 10:45 p.m. I think “Age of Easy Money” was produced before the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in early March, but they stuck an introductory tag in the program to cover it. The main focus of the program was in the Federal Reserve in general and its chair, Jerome “Jay” Powell – a Donald Trump appointee whom Joe Biden inexplicably reappointed in late 2022 as his term was about to expire – in particular. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 by an act of Congress and signed into law by then newly elected President Woodrow Wilson. Its main purposes were to stabilize the U.S. currency and maintain economic growth, including both low unemployment and low inflation. Only it was set up in such a way that bankers would be in charge of it, and bankers in general prefer low inflation to low unemployment because they don’t want their loans repaid in dollars that aren’t worth as much as they were when they lent them in the first place. In order to avoid the perception that the Fed (as it’s universally nicknamed) would be a tool of the political branches of government – heaven forfend that the government actually have a hand in running the economy! – the Fed was deliberately insulated from political pressure as much as possible, Though its president would be appointed by the President of the United States, the Fed president’s term was deliberately staggered so it didn’t expire until two years after the presidential election, so the new President couldn’t immediately install his own person as head of the Fed.

What’s more, instead of being a part of the U.S. Treasury Department so the Fed’s monetary policies could be coordinated with the rest of the government’s fiscal policies, presenting the quite frequent situation of the administrative branches and the Fed pursuing policies at cross-purposes with each other. The Frontline documentary began with the 2008 economic crisis, though the Fed’s power to undermine the decisions of the political branches of government is an old problem. In the late 1970’s then-Fed chair Paul Volcker ran such a tight ship on monetary policies, making interest rates so high he virtually strangled the U.S. economy. According to Garry Wills, historian and Presidential biographer, Volcker’s tight-money policies made it virtually impossible for Jimmy Carter to win re-election and handed the country over to Ronald Reagan and the extreme Right, with consequences we’ve been suffering ever since. After the 2008 economic collapse, the Fed invented something called “quantitative easing,” in which the Fed would not only buy the mortgage-backed securities whose downfall had tanked the U.S. economy in the first place, they would buy U.S. Treasury bonds and other financial instruments from private banks. The idea was that the Fed would flood the banking system with cheap money, which the banks would then use to make loans that would stimulate economic growth by actually investing in goods and services. Instead the banks used the money to buy more securities, which they then sold back to the Fed, making quick and easy profits without doing anything and without having to take the risks of actually loaning money to invest in economic production. The show begins with the annual conference of world central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming in August, and the 2022 speech by Jerome Powell.

It seems that this has become an annual ritual in which, because the U.S. economy is the world’s largest and the U.S. dollar is the world’s reserve currency (a fact that has shielded us from the consequences of our overall economic stupidity for decades), central bankers, government officials and the rest of the world waits with bated breath for what the Fed chair says about his upcoming economic policies. In August 2022 Powell said he was committed to reducing the inflation rate to 2 percent (the Fed’s official target) by continuing to raise interest rates after a decade of historically low ones, no matter how much “pain” – a word he repeatedly used – this caused to the rest of the economy. Since the “pain” would involve throwing millions of people out of work and a long-term dampening of economic growth, quite likely driving both the U.S. and the world economy into a recession (or even, as one particularly pessimistic interviewee on the program suggested, a depression) and doing to President Biden’s re-election chances what Paul Volcker did to Jimmy Carter’s. In between the show focused on the reaction of private investors, especially Wall Street, to any hint from the Fed that they were going to stop the age of easy money by jacking up interest rates. On at least two occasions between 2010 and 2020, hints from the Fed that they were going to hike interest rates and thereby choke off the flow of easy money led to massive drops in stock prices.

Just as the Fed had responded in 2008 to the economic crisis by flooding the banks with new capital, only to find that they were using it either to buy more securities to sell to the Fed or just pocketing the money themselves in the form of higher salaries and bonuses for their top executives, so in the late 2010’s corporate leaders took advantage of low interest rates to borrow money not to increase their productive capacity and put more people to work. Rather, they borrowed money to invest in buybacks of their own stock, with the idea of not only consolidating more and more corporate ownership into their own hands but also jacking up the price of their companies’ stock, since according to the law of supply and demand, every time you decrease the supply of something (whether canned goods or stock shares), their price goes up. One of the worst phenomena of late-stage capitalism has been the obsession with stock prices as the measure of how much a company is worth. I remember reading a book on recent financial history in which the disastrous merger of America Online and Time Warner was discussed, and the part that stuck with me was when a Time Warner board member asked why, when his company would be contributing 85 percent of the combined firm’s total revenue, their shareholders would be getting only 45 percent of the combined company’s stock. The answer he got was that AOL’s “market cap” was that much higher than Time Warner’s.

“Market cap” – short for “market capitalization” – is a ridiculous measure of a company’s value that has become all the rage in recent decades. It simply means the total number of stock shares in a company multiplied by the price of its stock per share, Reliance on “market cap” as the measure of how well a company is doing means encouraging its managers to do whatever it takes to bid the stock price up, including making highly speculative investments that will cause “bubbles” in the stock price per share. Of course, I couldn’t help but watch “Age of Easy Money” through my life-long anti-capitalist lens, and there was a reference in the program to Aesop’s fable of the frog and the scorpion – the scorpion convinces the frog to take it across the river,the frog is reluctant because he’s afraid the scorpion will bite and kill him, the scorpion says I wouldn’t do that because then we’d both die, then the scorpion takes in the frog’s back, they start across the river and midway over the scorpion stings the frog. The frog asks why the scorpion did that and doomed them both to drown, and the scorpion says, “I couldn’t help it – it’s just my nature!” It’s accordingly in the nature of capitalists to do absolutely stupid short-term things in pursuit of an immediate profit no matter what that does to the economy long-term. The only way to control them is by effective government regulation.

In this case, the political branches of government and the Fed should have come together to ensure that loose money would be used in a socially productive fashion. They could have put controls on the cash the Fed flooded the private banks with in 2008 and again in the late 2010’s so it would have been used for the kinds of productive, job-creating investments the Fed wanted to encourage. Instead, with a Republican Party so in thrall to the maxims of laissez-faire capitalism and a Democratic Party that has largely abandoned the working class in pursuit of big-money corporate donors, no solutions that might have actually reined in the power of private businesses to do what’s in their nature were politically possible. “Age of Easy Money” ends with Mohamed El-Erian, president of Queens’ College, Cambridge and chief economic adviser to the hedge fund Allianz, taking the political system to task for not addressing the real problems with the American economy: “The world of easy money went way too far. Way, way too far. Let's do the other stuff that's needed. The stuff that really promotes genuine, durable, inclusive growth and not this stuff that creates artificial growth. We are capable of producing that. None of that is in the hands of the Fed. They don't invest in infrastructure. They can't reform the tax system. They can't help labor retraining. This is a political problem.”

The story of the American economic and political system over the last 15 years is replete with missed opportunities, including one specifically mentioned in “Age of Easy Money” – the failure to address America’s crumbling infrastructure during the Trump administration, when interest rates were historically low and the costs of borrowing money to repair it would have been quite cheap. Instead Trump’s repeated declarations of “Infrastructure Week” became a recurring nationwide joke and it was left for President Biden actually to steer an infrastructure bill through Congress. But to me one of the worst missed opportunities was the rise of the Right-wing pseudo-populist “Tea Party” movement in 2010. Instead of a mass anti-capitalist movement we got a revenge-driven campaign of hate for alleged “elites” that handed control of Congress to the anti-labor, openly pro-capitalist Republicans and set the stage for the anger-fueled campaign of Donald Trump and the hatred, mostly directed against women, people of color and Queer people, that has dominated our politics ever since.

MS-NBC Documentary "Ukraine's Secret Resistance": A Moving Tale of Courage – and Torture

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On February 24 at 7 and 10 p.m., MS-NBC showed a quite remarkable documentary called Ukraine’s Secret Resistance, hosted by NBC News foreign correspondent Richard Engel and featuring profiles of four individuals who became part of the partisan resistance in Kherson, Ukraine’s second-largest city and one of the earliest targets for the Russian invasion of Ukraine (which started one year ago yesterday) because it lies only 25 miles from Ukraine’s border with Russia. The show profiled four resisters: Vladyslav “Vlad” Nebolstup, Nastya Burlak, Mykhailo Kuanov and a 17-year-old identified only as “Sergei.” Their stories of resistance eerily paralleled the ones we’ve heard of people similarly organizing resistance networks against Nazi occupatioin during World War II, though with a few modern features. Vlad was a car-parts salesman, Nastya a bartender, and Mykhailo a cab driver,and the three of them originally became involved in resistance activities when they traveled around Kherson and looked for the Russian encampments. They were specifically interested in where the Russian troops were staying and storing their heavy equipment. The show didn’t come right out and say Vlad and Nastya were a couple, but it certainly hinted at a romantic interest between them; they recalled how she would make him drinks when he came into the bar where she worked. When the Russians captured Kherson, Nastya’s bar became one of their favorite hangouts. They talked a lot and drank a lot, and Nastya picked up information about what they were saying and passed it on to Ukraine’s official intelligence service. Nastya also reported that the Russian soldiers in her bar were nasty and frequently brutal – one waiter even found himself arrested because the Russian soldier he was waiting on didn’t think the service was fast enough. She said the Russians drank all manner of hard liquors, including whiskey (one wonders if they were taking advantage of being in Ukraine to have drinks they couldn’t get back home instead of being stuck with vodka all the time).

Eventually Vlad crossed the line from just collecting intelligence to killing a Russian soldier; he recalled the incident as he fingered the knife with which he did the killing. He sneaked up behind the Russian with his knife and grabbed him from behind – the Russian was listening to music on earbuds and so he didn’t hear Vlad coming even though, as Vlad grimly joked, he’s a big man and therefore not all that good at sneaking up behind someone silently. Vlad plunged the knife into the Russian’s back and the Russian felt toe knife go in, he turned to face Vlad, and the two wrestled briefly before the Russian finally succumbed to Vlad’s wounds. Richard Engel asked if Vlad had any guilt feelings about the killing, and Vlad said no: the Russians had invaded their country, they didn’t belong in Ukraine, and therefore he felt justified in killing one of them. (At the same time it occurred to me that the Russian he killed was probably a draftee and didn’t want to be in Ukraine aqny more than the Ukrainians wanted him there.) In some ways Sergei’s story was the saddest: unlike the others,who were in their 20’s, Sergei was only 17 when oe got involved with the resistance, and after a few missions he was captured by the Russians. Sergei was held in a makeshift warehouse the Russians had converted into a prison and torture center, and after a few days of torture he “broke” and gave the Russians the information they wanted, including the names and addresses of fellow resisters. One grim irony is that Sergei himself had been ratted out by another resister whom the Russians had already captured and tortured.

Sergei, alone of the four Engel profiled, insisted that his real name not be used and he be shot in shadow so his face couldn’t be recognized. He’s also the only one of the four who isn’t still living in Kherson. While the other three stayed in the city after Ukrainian forces retook Kherson in November 2022, Sergei moved to Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital (which Russians have steadily bombed since the war started but where life is still relatively normal; it’s like the difference between living in London and living in Paris during World War II), and he’s still traumatized by having yielded to torture and giving the Russians the information they wanted – which meant he subjected his friends to the same abuse he suffered himself. Today he’s a “broken” man in more ways than one; he told Engel he doesn’t know how he’s going to pay his rent in Kyiv,, and though he was an aspiring musician before the war started he doesn’t seem to have taken that up again – and it’s possible he can’t, since one of the things the Russians did to him when they held him was break all his fingers. He also said that one reason he moved from Kherson to Kyiv was none of his old friends would speak to him again, and he wanted to be in a place where no one knew him and therefore he wouldn't be hated as a man who broke down and compromised the resistance.

One comes away from Engel’s documentary impressed by the sheer courage and commitment of the Ukrainians – it’s the sort of story that makes you wonder whether you’d have had the guts to do what they did – and also the sheer meanness of occupiers everywhere. Among the things the Russians did during the nine months they controlled Kherson was jackhammer emblems of Ukraine from all the public buildings and order that all public schools should teach their students in Russian. It’s been clear from the get-go that Vladimir Putin’s long-term ambition in Ukraine is not only to subjugate the Ukrainian people but obliterate any idea that Ukraine was ever an independent state or anything other than an integral part of Russia. Though Putin’s army has not (at least so far) set up extermination centers the way Hitler’s did, the war against Ukraine (or, as Putin euphemistically calls it, a “special military operation”; his captive legislature has made it a felony, punishable by a 15-year prison sentence, to call the war a “war”) still constitutes a genocide.