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.

The Interblob (Ten Years Later)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013, 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

AUTHOR’S NOTE, 2023: I’m reposting this article from 10 years ago because it seems to me to make an important point about the rise of what I call “the Interblob” – the extent to which the Internet has taken over virtually every cultural or social interaction between people. Since I wrote the initial article 10 years ago things have only gotten worse. The demise of local TV listings in newspapers was partially reversed shortly after I wrote this piece – the Los Angeles Times went back to publishing TV listings but only over half a page of their Calendar section, no longer a full page – only to kill them off completely and definitively when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Since I wrote the original piece, the availability of music and movies for home use has become even more dependent on the Internet. When I wrote the original article physical CD copies had already largely been replaced by Internet downloads. Now even downloads have themselves been replaced by the evil, vile, contemptible practice of so-called “streaming,” which systematically short-changes creative artists both artistically and financially. Mariah Carey has complained that every time someone streams her song “All I Want for Christmas” she gets only – get this – one-sixteenth of a penny in royalties. She’s lucky enough that she started her career in the age of physical media and therefore made a lot of money before the onset of the “streaming” plague. Now in the “streaming” era, it’s impossible to get rich on record sales alone, and artists have to tour constantly and charge humongous ticket prices to profit off their creativity and their fame.

I recently started a new job in downtown San Diego, and that means for the last three weeks I’ve been witnessing the slow death of an old friend. No, I don’t mean a human being. I’m referring to the huge building in front of Horton Plaza that used to house San Diego’s outlet of the long-defunct Planet Hollywood restaurant chain and, more importantly to my point of view, the Sam Goody’s record, video, electronics and entertainment store. It’s being torn down to make way for a so-called “expansion” of Horton Plaza Park that, judging from the artists’ renderings of what it’s supposed to look like, is a typical San Diego public project: spectacularly ugly, offering no continuity with the original park and looking more like an industrial park’s patio than a community gathering center. But that’s another story.

No, the topic today is why Sam Goody’s had to die — and as someone who literally spent thousands of dollars there over the years, I feel like I’m entitled to mourn its passing. It’s the same phenomenon that killed Sam Goody’s most direct competitors, Tower Records and Wherehouse. It’s what killed the Borders bookstore chain and has put Barnes and Noble on its last legs — after those operations themselves ran over hundreds of independent bookstore owners and put them out of business. It’s a phenomenon that’s running roughshod over our culture, our economics and our daily lives, driving us apart from each other and forcing us to relate electronically instead of physically.

It’s the Internet — or, as I’m increasingly calling this malevolent side of it, the Interblob. This isn’t to say there aren’t a lot of positive aspects to the Internet. For one thing, it’s enabled voices that can’t or won’t find their way in print, on radio or to TV a way to get themselves heard. It’s created outlets for media content, including the ones you’re reading this on, that would otherwise not exist. And purely from a practical point of view, the Internet has been of invaluable help to me as a fact-checker. Details in an article I used to have to spend hours in a library combing through books and periodicals to nail down are now available to me online within minutes. It’s made me a more accurate, and therefore a better, journalist.

But, like the Blob in the 1958 sci-fi camp-classic film — a huge piece of protoplasmic jelly from outer space that devoured everything in its path and grew to massive proportions — the Internet has devoured virtually every competing source of information, entertainment or culture. And that’s not all. It’s transformed such basic functions of modern life as the search for a job or the pursuit of a relationship. It’s remolding us all into widgets in an increasingly computerized world in which it’s not altogether clear whether the machines are serving us or we are serving them.

Though virtually no science-fiction writer in the pre-Internet era imagined anything like it — if they wrote about computers at all, it was usually about bigger and better mainframes than the ones from the 1950’s and 1960’s — the Interblob is absorbing more and more aspects of human life. Seemingly nothing in its path is safe — not only bookstores and record stores but newspapers, magazines, even the post office.

Want to look in the newspaper and see what’s on television tonight? Too bad. A month ago the Los Angeles Times announced that they’re discontinuing their prime-time TV listings and put in one of those all-too-familiar snippy notices saying that from then on that information would only be available — you guessed it — on their Web site.

Want to look at a newspaper at all? Too bad. Thanks to the Interblob, newspaper publishers are shrinking their print editions and charging more money for less content. They’re trying to get people to pay for online content but they’re having difficulty finding a way to do that in a manner that’s both fair to consumers and lucrative enough to sustain the expense of news-gathering. Most “news” on the Interblob vampirically sucks the blood out of mainstream media content and merely offers a gloss of opinion or “spin.”

Indeed, the Interblob is so extensively remodeling the rules of journalism that within a decade or two it will essentially cease to be a profession. With the demise of big print newspapers and the dumbing-down of broadcast news in the YouTube era, newsrooms around the country are being dismantled. Professional reporters are being replaced by Internet “stringers” who are paid pittances — when they are paid at all — for tiny stories. Reporters are being turned into digital sweatshop workers being given piece rates for how many “posts” they can get up by ever-quicker deadlines.

In May 2012, according to an article by Ryan Chittum in the March/April 2013 Columbia Journalism Review, the New Orleans Times-Picayune cut its frequency from daily to three times a week — making New Orleans the first major U.S. city, but no doubt not the last, not to have a daily paper at all. The paper’s owner, Advance Publications, laid off half the newsroom staff and replaced the fired reporters with “younger digital natives who could be paid much less … They would be told to write search-engine-optimized posts for the Web multiple times a day, and not to worry about print deadlines.” Under the lash of a corporate manager who had decided that print was dying and the Interblob was the future, they pulled this on a paper whose long-form multi-part investigative reports had earned it national acclaim — and in a city where up to one-third of the population is too poor to have Internet access at all.

Want to buy books at a bookstore? Tough luck. Want to buy CD’s or LP’s at a record store? Too bad. Want the thrill of browsing and discovering an item you didn’t know existed but absolutely fascinates you when you hold it in your hand, and buying it in that spectacular rush of knowing that your life will no longer be complete until you’ve read or listened to it? Forget it. Under the rule of the Interblob, browsing has been replaced by so-called “customized recommendations,” items Web sites offer you based on predictable patterns from what you’ve bought there before. The opportunity for the unexpected discovery has been replaced by an electromechanical feedback loop that circumscribes your taste and timidly sends you where you’ve already gone before.

Indeed, under the Interblob even the opportunity actually to hold a book or a recording in your hand is rapidly vanishing. Audio CD’s are being replaced by “downloads” and books are becoming “e-books” read on that pestilence of devices with cutesy-poo names: Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, Sony’s Libria (later the Reader) and Apple’s iPad. Amazon’s Web site claims that they now sell more books as Kindle files than they do as actual ink-on-paper books — as if that’s something to be proud of. What’s more, when you “buy” an e-book you don’t actually own it; you merely get a license to use it for as long as the company allows you to. Early Kindle users found that out the hard way when copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 suddenly disappeared from their devices due to a squabble between Amazon and Orwell’s print publishers. With the usual tone-deafness of modern corporations, nobody at Amazon gave a thought as to how it would look when their faceless authoritarian bureaucracy pulled their customers’ access to two famous books exposing the vicious, arbitrary power of faceless authoritarian bureaucracies.

Want to go to the library and read books the old-fashioned way without having to pay for them? Don’t hold your breath. Even though the new San Diego Public Library downtown was sold largely on the promise that thousands of books currently locked away in storage would at last be visible on the shelves and available for checkout, more recently the people running the library have said they’re just going to throw out a lot of those books rather than take the trouble to move them. Why? Once again, the Interblob: people running libraries these says see them primarily as places for people to access the Internet. The Interblob is also destroying the postal service; thanks at least partly due to the shift by corporate marketers from junk paper mail to junk e-mail, their volume has dropped so much that they’re canceling Saturday mail deliveries. Not Saturday package deliveries, though — not when those who still order stuff from Amazon and its competitors in tangible paper form rather than as e-book files are waiting for their deliveries. The United States Postal Service is charging more and more for less and less service — and we’ve all seen how well that worked for the newspaper industry.

But the Interblob isn’t stopping its carnivorous activities just on the cultural front. You want a job? Good luck finding one in the old-fashioned ways like state employment development postings and classified ads. Today not only are the job openings themselves advertised online, you need to send your résumé out online as well and hope the computers don’t screen you out even before it’s seen by a human being. You want a date? Bars and social organizations are cutting back or going out of business as that sort of human interaction, too, gets taken over by the Interblob. People can flirt with each other for months or even years online before they actually meet — go “FTF” (face-to-face), in the modern lingo — and because it’s so easy to edit or fake a computer profile, complete with a photo that’s either ancient, someone else’s or heavily Photoshopped, Interblob dating is even riskier than old-fashioned dating in terms of being lied to, ripped off or otherwise used.

The Interblob isn’t just killing old-fashioned ideals of journalism and culture; it’s also contributing to the ever-greater social stratification of the U.S. and the world. Many areas of the U.S. don’t have Internet access at all. Others don’t have broadband, which as the Internet progresses technically is virtually essential. Thanks to America’s long tradition of turning new media technologies over to private corporations who exploit their customers for maximum profits from minimal service, the nation which invented the Internet has a lower percentage of its population online than virtually every other developed country in the world. Even South Korea has a higher percentage of broadband users in its population than we do.

By now the swollen power of corporations and the super-rich in the U.S. is so great, and so far beyond effective political or social challenge, that virtually every new development in technological or social interaction is going to make the rich even richer and everyone else even poorer. The Interblob is no exception. So much of your ability to access the Internet is dependent on your financial status — whether you have the money for a state-of-the-art connection and a computer to do it justice — that the Interblob is creating a society of information-haves and information-have-nots. If you’re too poor to afford your own computer and broadband connection, once again, tough: you’re relegated to whatever jobs you can find and apply for in your grudgingly doled-out 15 minutes online at a public library.

As the Interblob kills professional journalism and replaces it with so-called “citizen bloggers” — volunteers and poorly paid pieceworkers grabbing whatever little tidbits of information they can and lacking either the skills or the budgets to pry information out of the powers that be that don’t want you to know what they’re up to — we’ll become even more socially stratified. Instead of a time when cheap newspapers and free radio and TV enabled even relatively poor citizens to be well informed about what was going on around them, in the future of the Interblob your ability to follow the political, economic and social events that shape your lives will be directly determined by your income. America’s rising trend towards inequality of income and opportunity predates the Internet — real wages have been declining steadily for 40 years — but as the Internet morphs into the Interblob, it’s only going to get worse.

And if it’s bad now, it’ll only get worse later on. How will future historians and biographers assess our age? When he did his classic documentary The Civil War Ken Burns had paper letters and photographs to draw on to give his film visual interest and bring the drama of the war home in an incredibly intimate way. A future Ken Burns trying to do a similar reconstruction of the 21st century will literally have nothing. The e-mails, text messages, tweets and blog posts of our time will have long since disappeared into evanescence. So will the digital photos we’re all so industriously shooting with our smartphones. Computerized media are so impermanent that even movie studios, which are increasingly shooting their films with digital equipment, still transfer the final results to film so they can be archived. And the technologies to play computer movies, recordings or books change so rapidly files only two to five years old become useless. The Interblob is destroying the very idea of culture as something permanent. E-products are usable only as long as the corporations that ultimately own them allow you to use them, and when they’re used up they literally vanish, disappearing into digital ether at the stroke of a key — either from you or the corporation that decides you’ve had them long enough.

What can you do about the Interblob? About the only thing is personal resistance. Vote with your pocketbook; find that corner bookstore that’s held on through the rise and fall of Barnes and Noble and Borders, or the independent record store that’s survived the decimation of Tower, Wherehouse and Goody’s, and patronize it. You might not be able to get the latest best-sellers but you’ll still find fascinating stuff to read and listen to. Keep and maintain subscriptions to the paper editions of your favorite newspapers and magazines. Socialize with real people in coffeehouses and bars instead of evanescent presences in the digital world. When you encounter one of those hateful “voicemail” systems— whose inventor, I think, deserves to rot in the nastiest and most painful circle of hell — use whatever shrinking options are left to insist on speaking to an actual human being. You’re not going to be able to stop the Interblob, but like the Luddites and the original French saboteurs — workers who threw their wooden shoes (sabots) into the machines to protest the automation that was destroying their jobs — you can at least slow it down a little.

As the Sam Goody’s building on Broadway between Third and Fourth becomes an historical memory, I’ll cling to the nostalgia of all the fascinating music I bought there. Things you wouldn’t expect in a mass-market record store, like a long-lost 1953 recording of Verdi’s Aïda with John Barbirolli conducting and Maria Callas in the title role. Love, Gloom, Cash, Love, the last recording of the woefully neglected and underrated jazz pianist Herbie Nichols. Yoko Ono’s album Blueprint for a Sunrise. An overwhelming performance of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung from the 1951 Bayreuth festival. A two-CD collection called From Gershwin’s Time that was exactly what its title said: historical recordings of George Gershwin’s music made when he was still alive. Maybe I would have found these things browsing online, but I didn’t. I bought real, physical, tangible copies and gave the money for them to an in-the-flesh sales clerk I could talk to, often getting surprising insights about what I’d just purchased.

As the Interblob consumes all other forms of human interactions, the opportunities for much of what makes life worth living — from the chance to advance yourself career-wise to the experience of unusual or unfamiliar culture — will either shrink or simply disappear. We’re being told that all this is “inevitable,” that it’s the price of technological change and we’ll be better off when we’ve eliminated all those pesky old remnants of pre-Interblob culture like books, CD’s, newspapers and coffeehouses. But permit me to disagree and to long for the days when companies paid people to answer their phones instead of having machines do it, when you could read the news of the day on paper instead of having to log on to a computer and absorb it online, and when a book was a book was a book, and once you knew how to read a book 10, 50, 100, 200 or even 500 years old was as accessible and as permanent as one published yesterday.

Tyre Nichols: A Black Man Killed by Black Cops in Memphis, Tennessee

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Like most of the rest of America, I was shocked by what I saw on the news on Friday, January 27. Though the incident they were covering had happened nearly threw weeks before – 29-year-old African-American Tyre (pronounced “Tye-ree”) Nichols was brutally beaten by five Memphis Police Department officers on January 7 and died from his injuries three days later – January 27 was the day the city of Memphis released body-camera and surveillance footage of the savage attack on Nichols.

Tyre Nichols was a 29-year-old Black man who worked for FedEx and whose hobbies were nature photography and skateboarding. On the evening of January 7, at about 8:25 p.m., he was pulled over, allegedly for “reckless driving” – an infraction that, as one MS-NBC commentator noted, is entirely subjective. Speeding, running a red light or making an illegal turn are all traffic offenses readily visible and documentable. “Reckless driving” basically means “driving in a way the police officer watching you doesn’t approve of.”

Nichols pulled over when the officers approached him, and at first he behaved politely. He didn’t panic; he spoke to the officers in calm, measured tones and attempted to answer their questions as best he could. Something must have set them off, though, because Nichols found himself first being forcibly pulled out of his vehicle and then forced to the ground. Officers gave him contradictory instructions. Put your hands up! Put your hands down! Lie on your stomach! Lie on your back!

At one point during the encounter Nichols seems to have realized his life was literally at stake if he stayed there with the police relentlessly abusing him, so he tried to run away. The cops hunted him down and, if anything, his attempt to escape seemed to have riled them up even more. The cops took turns beating Nichols and kicking him, in the words of one person watching the tape, as if he were a football. At times some of the officers held Nichols and sat him up so their brothers in blue could punch him. At least two emergency medical technicians from the Memphis Fire Department watched the later stages of the encounter and did nothing to try to help Nichols.

The Sting of the SCORPION

Nichols’ death was especially shocking because Memphis, Tennessee had tried to do at least some things right. Their current police chief, Cerelyn “C. J.” Davis, is a Black woman, though the city’s mayor, Jim Strickland, is a white man. Memphis has at least attempted to reform the ways its police officers are trained, including so-called “de-escalation” classes on how to defuse street confrontations without violence or anger. D

avis has said at least some of the right things since Nichols’ killing. "As we continue to try to build trust with our community, this is a very, very heavy cross to bear -- not just for our department but for departments across the country," she stated. "Building trust is a day-by-day interaction between every traffic stop, every encounter with the community. We all have to be responsible for that and it's going to be difficult in the days to come."

But Memphis has also done bad things in its attempts to get a handle on street crime. All five police officers who attacked Nichols were members of the so-called “SCORPION” unit, supposedly an elite force within the police department set up to combat gang activity. Like the USA PATRIOT Act and the radical anti-AIDS organization ACT UP, SCORPION was first given an acronym and only later did they put together a name it would stand for: “Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods.”

The SCORPION unit was announced in October 2021 and launched a month later. At the time, Memphis assistant police chief Sean Jones told a reporter for a local Memphis TV news program that the unit would focus on drugs, gangs and ahto thefts. "It's important to us that each member of the community feels they can go to the grocery store or live in their house without their house being shot or shooting frequently occurring on the streets and on the roadways," Jones said in November 2021.

But the SCORPION unit’s aggressive tactics alienated members of the community they were supposedly protecting and serving. As a former Mmephis police officer told CBS News anonymously on January 28 (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tyre-nichols-former-memphis-police-officer-scorpion-unit/), members of SCORPION – including Demetrius Haley, one of the five officers involved in Nichols’ killing, whom the former officer interviewed knew especially well – believed in a “proactive” style of policing in which, if you didn’t confront the alleged “bad guys” aggressively, you weren’t doing your job.

"We deal with very bad people,”the officer told CBS..”There are fights and foot chases but we all have an understanding when it's time to stop." Unfortunately for Nichols, his family and the cause of decent law enforcement in general, the five police officers who killed him – Haley, Tadarrius Bean, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr. and Justin Smith – didn’t get the message about knowing when it was time to stop.

Black-on-Black Police Violence

Nichols’ death also scrambles the usual racial script about these incidents because not only was he African-American, so were the five officers who physically attacked and brutalized him, and left him for dead. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Previous generations of would-be police reformers pushed for police dep-artments to hire more officers of color on the theory that this would make the departments more responsive to communities of color.

It hasn’t worked out that way. As Wesley Lowery, author of a book on police relations with the Black community called They Can’t Kill Us All, said on the January 27 edition of the PBS-TV program Washington Week (https://www.pbs.org/weta/washingtonweek/video/2023/01/washington-week-full-episode-jan-27-2023), “I have friends who say this to their kids when they have the talk, right, that when you see a police officer, they are not white or Black, they are blue. And police will often say that themselves, meaning something a little different. But in this case, what we saw here were agents of the state enacting severe violence against a man who, again, from what we can tell, did not seem to be posing much of a threat to them.”

The killing of Tyre Nichols is just one of a number of recent incidents that don’t fit neatly into either racist or anti-racist scripts of what “normal” encounters are like. Almost no one who talked about the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis two years ago mentioned that not only was the Minneapolis police chief a Black man, only two of the four officers involved in Floyd’s killing were white. The other two were Asian. And in the recent mass murders of Asian-Americans in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay, California, not only were the victims Asian, so were the alleged shooters.

A number of people have suggested that the Memphis Police Department and Shelby County district attorney Steve Mulroy wouldn’t have moved as quickly against Nichols’ alleged murderers if they’d been white cops instead of Black ones. They’ve already been fired from the department and formally charged with second-degree murder and other crimes. In a January 26 press conference, Mulroy said, "We want justice for Tyre Nichols. … The world is watching us and we need to show the world what lessons we can learn from this tragedy."

But the iast time the nation was riveted on a case of police brutality, the killing of George Floyd in 2020, nothing much changed. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed the House of Representatives but died in the Senate, yet another victim of the insane 60-vote threshold of the filibuster. This time, though President Joe Biden has called on Congress to pass it again, it probably won’t even get through the House now that Republicans are back in control after the 2022 midterms.

A few local police departments, including Memphis’s, tried to institute “reforms,” but the biggest political result of the furor over Floyd’s murder was negative. Calls to “defund the police” were readily seized on by Right-wing politicians who used them to scare voters to death and lead them to oppose any significant rethought of just how we do policing in the U.S.

Indeed, one of the things I found most startling about the debate over American policing in the wake of George Floyd’s murder was the assertion by anti-racist activists that the origin of modern professional policing lay in the patrols organized by Southern state government and plantation owners to hunt down runaway slaves. At first I thought this was just anti-racist hyperbole, but then I did a little more reading and found it was absolutely true.

So one of the functions of professional police since the U.S. first started making police work a source of paid employment has been to set and enforce limits on the autonomy of African-Americans. And that has remained true even as more Black police officers have been hired.

The Toxicity of “Police Culture”

One of the most important aspects of Wesley Lowery’s Washington Week comment is that “when you see a police officer, they are not white or Black, they are blue.” It’s a measure of the persistence of what has been called “police culture,” a series of habits and assumptions that have been baked into American law enforcement for decades and that has proven significantly resistant to change.

“Police culture” essentially divides the world into two categories: cops and crooks. While it pays lip service to the idea that most people are neither cops nor crooks – just ordinary law-abiding citizens trying to do their jobs, make their livings and use whatever free time they have for legitimate entertainment – all too often police interactions with other people are based on an assumption that you have to “prove” you are law-abiding in order to persuade the cops to leave you alone.

Lowery also mentioned “the talk,” the conversation virtually all Black parents, especially middle- and upper-class Black parents, have to tell their children just how they should react when a police officer stops them for any reason, The idea behind “the talk” is if you just act deferentially enough to the officer, show your I.D. when asked to, speak in a soft-spoken manner, avoid doing anything that the officer even remotely might perceive as a threat, he or she will let you go and won’t put you on the “bad ‘N’-word” category deserving of arrest or worse.

One of the saddest TV news reports I saw was the one in which a professor nf African-American studies at Princeton University told a host on MS-NBC that what most horrified him about the death of Tyre Nichols was the fact that Nichols had done everything young Blacks are told to do in “the talk.” He was soft-spoken and didn’t challenge the officers who stopped him. The professor on MS-NBC said with profound sadness and regret that nothing he’d told his own son about how to handle an interaction with police would have saved him, any more than it saved Tyre Nichols.

One of the biggest mistakes the Memphis Police Department made whent hey set up the SCORPION unit was to staff it largely with police officers who had previously worked as corrections officers in jails or prisons. If you’re a prison guard, it’s all too true that everyone you interact with is either a fellow officer or a criminal. I suspect that locks people into a mindset that reinforces the already toxic aspect of police culture that assumes everybody is either a cop or a crook.

People have bemoaned the seeming lack of efficacy of attempts to train police officers to de-escalate the situations and reduce or eliminate the use of force. That’s just another way police culture reinforces and reproduces itself. All too many officers have recalled being teamed up in their first days on the job with older officers who’ve told them, “Forget all that bullshit they taught you in the Academy. Here’s how the world really works.” No matter how much training we give new recruits to the job to “de-escalate” situations, no matter how much we try to educate them in restraint, the old-boy network of police departments everywhere undoes it. So does the military-style ranks with which almost all police departments are organized.

One of the people who got interviewed on MS-NBC ini the wake of the Nichols killing was Libertarian author Radley Balko, who in 2914 published a book called Rise of the Warrior Cop. He told the story of how certain progressive police chiefs tried to get rid of the military-style ranks – and had to back down when their officers strongly rebelled. I remember seeing Balko interviewed on MS-NBC in the wake of the George Floyd killing in 2020, and I immediately ordered his book.

It was fascinating reading Rise of the Warripor Cop during the 2020 Presidential campaign because one of the biggest villains in his book was Joe Biden. Balko described how Biden pushed many “tough-on-crime” bills through the U.S. Senate and into law,often taking more hard-line positions than Republicans. Balko was especially critical of Biden for championing so-called “no-knock searches” in alleged drug cases, not only calling them a violation of the Fourth Amendment but telling all too many stories of innocent people getting killed, beaten or having their homes destroyed based on “no-knock” searches onflimsy or nonexistent evidence.

Ironically in light of more recent events, Biden’s justification at the time was that the Democrats couldn’t afford, politically, to have the Republicans own the “crime” issue and portray themselves as the “law and order” party. Once Biden ran first for vice-president no Barack Obama’s ticket and then for President on his own, he moved left onthe crime issue in order to gain support from Black primary voters – and this nearly cost him the general election and sliced the Democratic House majority from 40 seats to five as Republicans eagerly and gleefully poinced on calls to “defund the police” and made it seem like Democrats wanted to get rid of police forces entirely.

Only a tiny handful of people who said “defund the police” actually meant eliminating 100 percent of police funding. Most of them were calling to redirect money going to law enforcement and spend it instead on social programs,mental-health counseling and projects aimed at reducing the income gap between whites and people of color. But the Republican fear campaign, which produced TV commercials showing people calling 911 and getting no response at all, carried the day and the U.S. blew its most recent chance to rethink how we do domestic law enforcement.

The “Duty to Aid”: Not an Option

One of the most intriguing criticisms of the Memphis police assault on Tyre Nichols and his resulting death is the people who are saying that the police had a duty to help Nichols once they’d incapacitated him.This seems to have been one of the reasons not only for the Memphis Police Department firing the five officers involved in the attack on Nichols but the Memphis Fire Department letting go the two EMT’s who patiently stood there and didn’t do anything to stop the assault on Nichols. They just waitd until his police assailants were done with him.

But those who suggest that police officers and firefighters on the scene could have exercised a “duty to aid” and tried to stop the horrendous attack on Nichols files in the face of how hierarchical organizations and systems work. Faced with a choice between remaining true to the brotherhood (there’s a reason why the U.S.’s largest police union is called “Fraternal Order of Police’) and defying it, just about any police or fire officers will go with the brotherhood every time.

The talk about whether the Memphis police and fire officials should have tried to stop what was happening to Nichols reminded me of the stories I’ve read of what happened to Nazi concentration-camp guards who tried to call out their colleagues for the inhumanity of their treatment of prisoners. Squeamish guards who felt guilty and complained about what they were doing to the inmates were often told,”If you don’t like what we’re doing, we can always put you on the other side.” The idea of being tumbled all the way down the racial scale, from Aryan Übermensch to doomed under-class Untermensch, was enough to keep nearly all people in line and on board with the Nazis’ evil.

What happened to Tyre Nichols has been called a “lynching,” but in fact it’s worse than that. Lynching meant the wanton murder of (mostly) Black people by private citizens, while official law enforcement looked the other way and quietly condoned it. What happened to Tyre Nichols was the law-enforcement system itself going haywire and enforcing street “justice” on a young Black man who did nothing illegal and posed no threat to anyone.

In some respects, America is a giant concentration camp for Black people in particular. Black Americans are constantly being reminded that they have no rights white people, especially whites in positions of authority, are obliged to respect. Their rights to life,liberty and the pursuit of happiness an be snatched away any time the white establishment or its representatives feel like it, and Blacks who are admitted into the “club” of law enforcement face a double pressure to prove they’re “one of us”or face retribution themselves.

That’s the real reason for the otherwise inexplicable fact that Tyre Nichols was done in by people who, at least superficially, looked like him. Throughout American history, Blacks who tried to rise above the station white America had decreed for them have been slapped down hard. Ad Blacks who gain a certain degree of power and privilege in the system by becoming police officers or even Presidents (there’s a reason why the Secret Service reported more threats against Barack Obama than any other President, before or since) are constantly being put on notice that it can be snatched away from them at any time.