Joe Biden Promised Change.

He
Hasn’t Delivered.
BY
BRANKO MARCETIC
From immigration and foreign policy to the pandemic and
climate, Joe Biden promised a break with the policies of the
Donald Trump era. What we've mostly gotten, however, is a
change in rhetoric and the status quo in substance.

President Joe Biden speaks during the United States Conference of Mayors in
Washington on January 21, 2022. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)

What was the point of Joe Biden’s presidency?

When he was running for president, there was a platter of rationales.

Progressive groups insisted Biden really was planning a transformational
program to fix the country’s many long-simmering ills. Television talking
heads told us he would turn around the deadly pandemic with a science- and
expert-based approach quite unlike Donald Trump’s. For many, just getting
rid of Trump was enough, with the added hope of simply erasing the last four
years of policy and continuing on as before. Biden himself pitched his
presidency in quasi-mystical terms, as if electing him alone would serve as a
kind of nationwide exorcism of all the cruelty and bigotry of the Trump years.

Well, none of that happened. One year in, the most striking thing about
Biden’s presidency, given the various threads of anti-Trumpism
that powered his win, is the fundamental continuity between the two
administrations in nearly every field of policy. Just as striking is how few are
aware of this, with both die-hard blue and red voters convinced Biden’s White
House is the antithesis of Trump’s, and an almost radical experiment in left-
wing governance.

After a year, Biden can take credit for a resounding economic recovery. But
just as under both Trump and Biden’s former boss Barack Obama, the spoils
of that economy remain unevenly shared, with the underlying conditions that
fed Trump’s rise fundamentally unchanged, true to the pledge Biden made to
his core constituency of elite donors more than two years ago. Having entered
the White House well-placed to make the kind of transformational change the
country is desperate for, the president quickly fell sway to his most self-
defeating impulses, with his conservatism squandering the opportunity in front
of him.

A Very Trumpian Presidency

For a president that seems to perennially lose control of the narrative, Biden
kicked his term off with a canny public relations move. Pairing lofty
Rooseveltian rhetoric and a flurry of exciting-sounding executive orders with
a co-option of progressive pressure groups and liberal commentators, Biden
took only a few days to firmly set in the public mind that he was leading a
bold, New Deal–style transformation of American life and politics.

In reality, many of the orders either just walked back Trump actions or
were carefully crafted to be conditional and loophole-ridden. But for the army
of newly politicized voters Trump’s 2016 win had activated, it signaled that it
was safe to stop paying attention again, with the media consumption that had
reached new heights under Trump swiftly plunging across the board.

Some worthy but marginal tweaks aside, US policy under Biden has headed
substantially in the same direction Trump set it to.
As a result, few are aware that, some worthy but marginal tweaks aside, US
policy under Biden has headed substantially in the same direction Trump set it
to. This was maybe most dramatic in immigration, where Trump’s actions had
provoked the most sustained, passionate, and vocal outcry. While soaking up
positive press for reversing some of Trump’s most high-profile outrages,
Biden kept in place others that were widely denounced as cruel, racist, and
even fascist and white supremacist: the “Remain in Mexico” policy that
condemned asylum seekers to violence and other danger while they waited for
a decision; the Title 42 measure that’s effectively (and illegally) ended asylum
at the southern border, and which Biden has used to expel more people than
Trump; and the ongoing caging of migrant children.

Despite officially “pausing” construction of Trump’s border wall — the most

visceral, outrage-inducing symbol of Trump’s immigration vision — Biden
has, in reality, kept on building it, and will be passing it on to the next
Republican president to finish the job. While deportations have slowed,
Americans who have spent their whole lives in the United States are still
being banished to “homelands” they never knew, and for relatively minor
crimes. At one point, Biden even attempted to keep Trump’s record-low
refugee cap of fifteen thousand, having to reverse course upon a rare instance
of backlash. He’s doubled that number since, in a similarly rare instance of
following through on a campaign promise.

On press freedoms, Biden’s inconsequential rhetorical shift from Trump has

distracted from notable policy overlap. Biden continued and saw through
the prosecution of a drone whistleblower that Trump had started, and
stubbornly continues to torture and prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange, an action that, if similarly seen through, will make publishers and
journalists on US soil and around the world fair game for imprisonment if
they reveal US government secrets. He also quietly intensified a Trump-era
effort to seize reporters’ records, even putting out a gag order on New York
Times top brass to keep the effort under wraps, only reversing course and
ruling it out once reporters exposed it. A highly disciplined set of operatives,
the administration has walled the president off from the press and
maintains tight control on what information gets out.

One relative bright spot has been foreign policy. What might end up being the
most important and long-lasting Biden measure is the US withdrawal from
Afghanistan, a genuinely politically courageous act that earned him a major
black eye. US airstrikes around the globe have plunged 54 percent under
Biden, too, giving the Middle East and North Africa a much-needed respite
from endless US bombing. The president has also for the most
part resisted the hawkish demands of the press corps and national security
establishment when it comes to Russia, though his refusal to limit NATO
expansion to Russia’s borders — the root of the current Ukraine crisis —
shows how limited the definition of “restraint” is in the context of
Washington.

In fact, the dearth of upsides mostly underscores how little foreign policy has
changed from the previous four years. Biden has kept up Trump’s intensified
blockade on Cuba and maintained his deadly sanctions on Venezuela, and his
refusal to pull back from his predecessor’s sanctions on Iran has both
poisoned negotiations over reentering the nuclear deal and brought hardliners
to power in the country, hurting prospects for a renewed agreement. If you
add his vindictive sanctions on Afghanistan, currently causing mass starvation
among the people he and Washington claimed to be fighting for, Biden is
currently driving humanitarian catastrophes in no less than four countries.

Biden’s pledge to end Trump’s friendliness with autocrats has gone

predictably unfulfilled, unsurprising since the only notable thing about
Trump’s approach was how much outrage it garnered for what was routine US
foreign policy. Biden broke his promise to punish the Saudi crown prince for
his assassination of a Washington Post columnist and dissident, continued US
military cooperation with the brutal Egyptian dictatorship, and despite a
headline-grabbing executive order, hasn’t stopped giving vital support to the
Saudi-led genocidal war in Yemen. And for all the talk of restoring trust with
US allies, those allies have, amusingly, complained there’s little difference in
Biden’s unilateral decision-making from the kind that elicited establishment
outrage at Trump.

Biden is currently driving humanitarian catastrophes in no less than four

countries.
As usual, the only thing that’s changed is the rhetoric, suddenly peppered with
paeans to democracy, largely as a jab at China, with which Biden has
enthusiastically pursued Trump’s new Cold War. Hostility to China, once
interpreted as a clever strategy for selling Biden’s domestic agenda, turns out
to have been an end in itself for this administration, with
Biden pushing nuclear proliferation in the South Pacific, passing a record,
budget-busting giveaway to the military-industrial complex, and facilitating
what could end up a new Red Scare aimed at Asian immigrants. Meanwhile,
even with troops out of Afghanistan, the wasteful and counterproductive US
“war on terror” shows no sign of ending more than twenty years after it began.

In fact, Biden has used the January 6 Capitol riot to bring this war on terror
home, launching a domestic anti-terrorism strategy that’s officially directed at
far-right extremists but is quietly taking aim at left-leaning protesters and
activists. The Capitol Police were rewarded for their staggering security
failure by being expanded into a national anti-terror force immune to public
record requests, the FBI has doubled its number of domestic terrorism agents
and, consequently, its caseload, and there is talk of more government spying
powers and a domestic terrorism statute to come. These will be a major gift to
whichever right-wing authoritarian takes power next, with the inflammatory,
divisive Trump never mustering the popular legitimacy to expand his powers
of repression while in office.

After a summer of breathtaking violence against protesters and journalists

outraged at yet another police murder, Biden has funneled yet more
money and military equipment to law enforcement around the country
while quietly shelving the meager police accountability reforms he promised.
Police continue to murder people in extraordinarily high numbers, and mass
protest is certain to break out yet again — with the police now even better
equipped to brutally suppress it.

The public corruption that both fed into Trump’s rise and which he took to
new, brazen heights has carried on unchecked. The Democratic Party
is still raising large amounts of money and staffing key posts from business
interests, while major campaign promises that threaten those interests — the
public health insurance option chief among them — have simply never been
spoken of since the election. While the president can’t even bring himself to
take a position on whether or not lawmakers should be trading stocks while
they legislate, his son has suddenly become a best-selling painter, to the horror
of government ethics experts.

Meanwhile, the administration pilfered the ranks of Wall Street, big

tech, military contractors, industrial agriculture, and the rest of corporate
America to staff his administration. Among such appointees is Jeff Zients, the
man in charge of the federal pandemic response, who came out of Mitt
Romney’s vulture capitalist firm Bain Capital and once advised CEOs, “The
social contract is never coming back, and your employees know it.”

American Carnage
Maybe nothing was more important to Biden’s victory than the pandemic and
Trump’s disastrous handling of it, with his own advisor calling it “the best
thing that ever happened to him.” So it’s here the vanishingly small gap
between the two administrations has been especially marked.

After resting his campaign on rejecting Trump’s disastrous vaccine-only

pandemic response, Biden turned around and adopted what was in some ways
an even more aggressive version of it. Some laudatory politically risky
measures like vaccine mandates aside, the administration
has comprehensively failed to fulfill the very pandemic strategy it campaigned
on.

While a short-term stay-at-home order is still the most effective proven way to
halt the spread of the virus, there were many ways short of it the
administration could have mustered to mitigate the effects. Yet on basics like
data collection, contact tracing, testing, protective equipment, worker
protection, and school resourcing, the United States continues to woefully lag
behind other developed countries, making a mockery of Biden’s often
deployed clichés about the limitlessness of American possibility.

After resting his campaign on rejecting Trump’s disastrous vaccine-only

pandemic response, Biden turned around and adopted an even more aggressive
version of it.
The administration has been single-mindedly devoted to vaccines as a silver
bullet at the expense of a proactive, comprehensive mitigation plan. After
criticizing Trump for being stingy with the Defense Production Act (DPA), a
Government Accountability Office assessment this year found Biden neither
developed a plan to use the law for medical supplies (masks, ventilators, and
the like) in the future nor placed a single priority-rated contract for such
medical supplies — and placed fewer of them for testing than Trump. As late
as December, when more than a thousand Americans were dying a day,
Biden’s chief medical advisor, Anthony Fauci, explicitly ruled out invoking
the DPA to make more tests.

Worried it would undermine the impetus for vaccines and create a mask
shortage, Biden officials rejected an expert proposal in October for a “testing
surge” to cope with the coming winter and resisted calls to supply Americans
with N95 masks. In the ensuing, predictable holiday shortages that left
Americans even in large, wealthy cities unable to find tests, administration
officials resorted to actions that read like a parody of ineffectual, do-nothing
neoliberalism.

The vice president instructed people to simply “Google ‘COVID test near
me’” to access them, a practical impossibility in vast, largely poor swaths of
the country. It ordered insurers not to provide but reimburse people for tests,
and in a country where nearly 30 million are uninsured. As the nation
prepared to enter another death-filled winter, Zients scolded the unvaccinated
and told them they’d be rewarded with death and sickness — unconscionable,
and particularly so given their ranks are made up of millions of people of
color, whom Biden’s team spent two years treating as a political prop when it
suited its interests.

All the while, the administration has spread exactly the kind of
misinformation and politicized health advice that was once the cornerstone of
liberal critiques of Trump’s pandemic response. Early on, to widespread
media applause, Biden falsely told millions of CNN viewers that kids rarely
contracted the virus and couldn’t pass it on to their parents.
He declared “independence” from the virus just as a new, more virulent strain
began taking hold, and rolled out sudden, confusing changes in public health
guidance with little consultation with leaders. He kept Fauci in place as the
face and voice of the federal response, despite the fact that he’d discredited
himself in the eyes of all but the most ardent Democratic partisans.

But what might be Biden’s greatest pandemic failure is his steadfast refusal to
put public health ahead of corporate profits. In a move typical of this
administration, Biden’s highly publicized May decision to back an intellectual
property waiver on the vaccines — and so allow largely unvaccinated poor
countries to make their own versions of the vaccines on the cheap — has in
practice meant nothing, with the administration declining to actually push for
the measure behind closed doors. The resulting massive pool of the world’s
unvaccinated produced the Omicron variant that’s currently tearing through
the United States and the world.

In practice this has meant a staggering scale of suffering virtually unknown

elsewhere in the developed world. The administration’s inaction has pushed
an already severely strained health sector to the brink, with record-
high COVID hospitalizations putting at least three-quarters of states’ hospitals
to 80 percent ICU capacity or beyond. Basic services like garbage
collection, schools, and various emergency services have broken down around
the country under the weight of mass infection. Businesses, too,
are facing staff shortages and uncertainty nationwide — ironic given this
hands-off approach is supposed to be for their benefit. More people have now
died from the virus under Biden than under Trump, and double the total
Biden said last year was grounds for the resignation of a sitting president.

The Buck Stops at the Next Guy

But Biden’s greatest failure is his failure to act on the climate crisis at what
may be the last political chance to do so this decade. It’s in fact worse than
this, because Biden has, like his predecessor, actually worked to accelerate the
disaster, all while misleadingly assuring the public it takes the threat seriously.
That most people are unaware of this is a testament to the PR operation of
Biden’s early days. Executive orders on climate that merely reverted things to
the Obama-era status quo — re-cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline,
reentering the Paris Climate Accords that few countries abided by in practice
— were sold as bold new moves. Exciting-sounding measures, like
those ordering federal agencies to address Trump-era actions that clash with
“environmental justice,” or mandating a “government-wide approach” to
lower climate pollution and conserve biodiversity, turned out to mean little
when the cameras stopped rolling, with the administration moving to weaken
and eliminate protections for endangered species by the end of the year.

More people have now died from COVID under Biden than under Trump, and
double the total Biden said last year was grounds for the resignation of a sitting
president.
Biden’s pause on new oil and gas leases, the most concrete climate measure
he took in those early days, was carefully calibrated to sound as far-reaching
as possible while doing the least he could get away with. A fossil fuel industry
that had plenty of leases but feared a clampdown on drilling
permits celebrated the decision, and was positively ecstatic as Biden
proceeded to approve more permits than Trump had in any of his first three
years.

Once the inevitable court challenge struck down the pause, Biden returned
from the UN climate summit in Glasgow, where he’d told attendees he was
“working overtime to show that our climate commitment is action, not
words,” and then promptly held the largest oil and gas lease sale in US
history, auctioning off more than 80 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico. The
administration’s rationale was that it was legally bound to do so, something it
later admitted in court wasn’t actually true.

Production on the leases will begin in around seven to ten years’ time, the
exact period human civilization needs to be well on the way to radically
scaling back fossil fuel emissions to prevent disaster, at which point it’s
estimated to lock in the equivalent of a year’s worth of emissions of 130 coal-
fired power plants. The administration resorted to bald-faced climate denial to
justify this, asserting that increasingly alarming scientific warnings about the
consequences of the failure to curb emissions “does not present sufficient
cause” to rethink the sale.

Meanwhile, Biden has backed several pipeline projects that entirely cancel out
the benefits of redoing Obama’s Keystone cancellation. The president
has steadfastly refused to cancel the permit for Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline in
Minnesota, and undermined Michigan’s Democratic governor by continuing
to back its Line 5 pipeline, advancing the company’s scheme to create an
unbroken path of Canadian tar-sands oil — some of the dirtiest, most pollutive
fossil fuels on Earth — from Alberta to the Gulf, the very thing that made
Keystone so controversial. It’s only a matter of time before the spill-prone
company poisons a vast swath of land and water sources, protest over which
federal forces have met with dangerous crowd-control tactics.

This could have been partly offset by Biden’s climate spending legislation,
which, while not remotely on the scale of what the crisis demands,
had important provisions for at least getting the ball rolling. But true to his
history, Biden’s obsession with striking a deal, any deal, with corporate-
controlled Republican elites derailed his entire legislative agenda. The
prospects for future climate legislation in Biden’s term now look dim, and his
decision to double down on Trump’s new Cold War with China threatens to
not just undermine global cooperation on the crisis but fuel that crisis through
record spending on the US military, a climate polluter worse than many
countries.

As the United States enters the second year of the world’s pivotal decade for
arresting the crisis, with scientists warning of a “code red for humanity” and a
“ghastly future of mass extinction” if governments fail, Biden’s response has
been worse than nothing. If the climate crisis was treated by the political and
media establishment with anything remotely approaching the seriousness it
calls for, this would be one of the scandals of the century. Unless something
drastically changes, the “eyes of history” Biden has spoken about will view
him less like Franklin D. Roosevelt and more like one of the string of little-
remembered presidents who failed to stop, and even sped up, the national
crisis over slavery.
A Halting Activist Government
Ironically, Biden’s biggest divergence from his predecessor has been in the
area probably most ignored by the outrage-mongers of the Trump years:
economic policy. Yet even here, the results have been remarkably limited,
given the scale of suffering and disruption the country has lived through.

At this stage, other than the Afghanistan withdrawal, the positive legacy of
Biden’s presidency is most defined by the nearly $2 trillion American Rescue
Plan, the part pandemic response, part economic stimulus package he signed
all the way back in March. While establishing no permanent new program, the
bill — more than twice as large as Obama’s stimulus twelve years earlier — is
rightly credited, along with the vaccine rollout, with rebounding the US
economy, lowering poverty rates, and inadvertently transforming the nature of
the economy for a while, with the infusion of government financial support
facilitating the “Great Resignation” and helping temporarily shift the balance
of power from employers to workers.

Biden returned from the UN climate summit in Glasgow and then promptly held
the largest oil and gas lease sale in US history.
The bill’s impact was somewhat weakened by delegating relief payouts to the
states, an approach not taken when it came to pandemic-era financial support
for businesses, that deprived millions of support by forcing them to navigate
unwieldy and overwhelmed state systems. Still, its passage was the high-water
mark of this administration so far, with the law attracting broad support across
party lines, rare in the post-Trump era, and all made possible by Biden’s
decision to do several un-Biden-like things: put deficit concerns aside and
eschew bipartisan dealmaking in favor of urgent action to deliver for the
American people. All this made it doubly inexplicable that he then rejected
this strategy as he moved on to the legislative centerpiece of his presidency,
opting instead to repeat the exact mistakes of the previous administration he’d
served in, with much the same results.

His own limitations as a leader only further hampered his agenda. By October,
a chronically absent Biden had done a mere three town halls, all of them on
CNN, and, by the end of the year, by far the fewest press conferences and
interviews of the last six presidents in their first year. Only Ronald Reagan,
who was shot and hospitalized, did fewer interviews, and, even then, only
three less, and he still managed to do double the number of Biden’s press
conferences — a deliberate strategy by the White House, which feared the
president’s tendency to misspeak. With polls consistently showing the public
didn’t even know what was in the Build Back Better bill, it was left to Bernie
Sanders and various Democrats to travel the country to rally support for it,
while Biden spent anywhere between 89 and 101 days at home in Delaware.
The president simply left his bully pulpit sitting empty.

The resulting death of the Build Back Better bill — a smorgasbord of human
investment and social safety net expansions meant to cement Biden’s
presidential legacy — has led to a collective memory wipe of the stark limits
of the president’s ambitions to begin with. The aforementioned public option
was never even considered, and Biden refused to fight for a $15 minimum
wage, one of his core and most broadly popular campaign
promises, falsely claiming he couldn’t pass it through budget reconciliation.
The tax hikes he offered were not even a return to the Obama-era status quo,
setting corporate rates at the level put forward by the 2012 GOP ticket, and
led to fierce (and ultimately fatal) business opposition to the bill anyway. And
its universal childcare provisions were highly flawed and surprisingly
regressive.

Meanwhile, the legislation it was sacrificed for, the bipartisan infrastructure

bill, is far from what it’s been sold as. While its trillion-dollar size is a further
thumb in the eye of deficit scolds, it’s less than half the investment shortfall in
US infrastructure, and part of its funding comes from a privatization
scheme that would let Wall Street gouge the public with more road tolls and
other user fees — not much different from Trump’s own infrastructure
proposal, which was widely denounced at the time.

Antitrust enforcement is one area that could prove a bright spot.

Genuine bipartisan support, combined with Biden’s appointment of key posts
to actual progressives instead of corporate representatives, could see some real
action in the near future to dismantle the monopoly power that dominates
Americans’ lives and picks their pockets. How much will happen in the next
year, when the midterm elections dominate, and how far it will offset the steep
cost rises that long predate the current supply chain crunch remains to be seen.

But more often than not, the claims that Biden has ushered in an era of bold
and unapologetic activist government haven’t matched reality. Enormous
pressure has often been required to force the administration to take basic, even
politically beneficial actions like fighting for the eviction ban, extending the
pause on student loan repayments, and sending COVID tests to US
households. The last is a run-of-the-mill policy in many countries, which the
White House nevertheless publicly mocked as a laughable fantasy, before an
outcry forced its hand.

Biden still hasn’t cancelled student loan debt, even in the highly limited form
that he promised. In fact, despite being stymied in Congress, Biden has so far
mostly declined to use the bewildering array of extraordinary executive
powers at his disposal, including using patent seizure to lower drug
prices, rescheduling marijuana as a less dangerous narcotic, and temporarily
extending Medicare to those exposed to COVID. In fact, the administration is
still carrying on a Trump-era program that aims to privatize Medicare, to little
outrage or attention.

Equally overstated is this administration’s pro-worker bias. After winning

plaudits for backing Amazon workers trying to unionize, Biden has largely
been invisible in labor fights since. Under pressure on extended
unemployment insurance from big business and the Right, Biden
buckled, allowing governors to end extended unemployment insurance early,
and steadfastly ruling out a similar future stimulus, just as government tax and
spending policy is tipped to have a negative fiscal impact on growth for the
foreseeable future.

The ‘eyes of history’ Biden has spoken about will view him less like Franklin D.
Roosevelt and more like one of the little-remembered presidents who failed to
stop the national crisis over slavery.
What’s astonishing is that, apart from the child tax credit — a powerful but
temporary measure Biden failed to extend — Biden’s program on economic
security has largely leaned on marquee Trump policies from the pandemic era:
stimulus checks, unemployment insurance, the eviction ban, rental assistance,
and the student loan repayment pause. With all the immense power of the
modern US presidency, his administration has been content to follow Trump’s
lead, dragging its feet on even invoking the DPA to force companies to
produce the semiconductor chips whose shortage has led to a spike in car
prices. Even Biden’s much-touted rejection of deficit concerns began under
Trump’s final year.

In hindsight, Biden’s actions around the American Rescue Plan have proved
to be the exception to his presidency, and his maneuvering around the Georgia
Senate elections just before taking office have proved far more indicative of
the way he would govern. During that episode, Biden had to be dragged
kicking and screaming to support the stimulus checks that he
had never backed while campaigning against Trump, and which proved to be
the key to the Democrats’ Senate victories that allowed Biden to govern at all.
And once it was said and done, he played semantic games to needlessly cut
the size of the checks, breaking a clear campaign promise,
and disillusioning party activists who had knocked feverishly on doors to get
him his congressional majority.

A Man for a Different Moment

Scouring Biden’s entire political history before the 2020 primaries, I did not
like what I found. I saw not only the ritual corruption and betrayal of working
people that characterizes the modern Democratic Party, but a man with a
history of poor judgement, a consistent inability to stand up to those who
opposed him (on the Right, anyway), a deep skepticism that public institutions
could or even should take action for the common good, and someone for
whom progress could only be measured by how few federal dollars were
spent. In other words, precisely the wrong kind of leader for this moment.
For a few brief months in early 2020, I was pleased to see that I might actually
wind up wrong. But ever since the passage of the March stimulus bill, Biden
has made wrong choice after wrong choice, sadly typical of the modern
Democratic Party and Biden himself, with dire results for both. His approval
rating is in the doldrums, with Democratic voters alone giving him high
marks. He’s presided over a startling and rare reversal in party identification
in the GOP’s favor, just as the Democrats head into an already historically
unfavorable set of midterm elections. And his own party has begun openly
complaining about a president who’s absent and detached from the bruising
electoral battle to come. Most worrying for them, with Biden continuing
Trump policies in everything from immigration and climate to foreign policy
and the pandemic, Democrats have given up their ability to morally blackmail
disillusioned left-of-center voters.

The tragedy is that after spurning left-wing policy priorities and choosing an
insider, accommodationist governing strategy that the Left has decried from
the beginning, Biden has failed in a way that is already being seized upon to
further marginalize the social democratic movement he already defeated in the
primaries. MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough blames Biden for being “too far
left” and uncompromising, and the Washington Post casts his avoidable
missteps as a case of “liberal campaign promises” having “collided with
reality.” Though Biden’s agenda has been either markedly right-wing or
shaped by corporate interests, the idea that he’s in thrall to progressives has
subsequently been internalized by voters.

Biden’s presidency will never reach the heady heights of the first half of this
last year, but it’s still salvageable. It all rests on whether he can change and be
a different leader, one who rallies the public, not CEOs and political elites,
who confronts power rather than partners with it, and who abandons his
ongoing conservative hesitancy to use the full might of the US executive
branch. For a brief moment, Biden proved he could leave behind some of his
worst instincts. The question is if he ever really wanted to.
Getting Karl Marx and Friedrich
Nietzsche Talking
BY
MATT MCMANUS
Karl Marx believed in the self-emancipation of the working
class, while Friedrich Nietzsche had nothing but disdain for
the masses. But a provocative new book claims the two
thinkers can be read together to develop a socialism for
today.

Jonas Ceika's new book compares the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche. (Wikimedia
Commons)
Review of How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and
Marx for the 21st- Century Left by Jonas Ceika (Repeater, 2021)

What could Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche possibly have in common?

Marx dedicated himself to analyzing the relations of domination that emerged

under capitalism in the hope that a future socialist society would promote the
free development of all. Nietzsche claimed that “every elevation of the type
‘man,’ has been the work of an aristocratic society and so it will always be.”
Marx famously dedicated himself to a critique of political economy. Nietzsche
focused his energies on culture and religious morality. Sure, both were great
critics of the modern world. But isn’t the urge by some to see Marx and
Nietzsche get into bed together doomed?
Jonas Ceika, creator of the popular YouTube channel CCK Philosophy,
disagrees. His new book, How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle:
Nietzsche and Marx for the 21st-Century Left, makes the bold claim that Marx
and Nietzsche can be used to “bring out what is already present in the other,
but perhaps overlooked, hidden, or even placed in the background.” Not so
much a synthesis of Marx and Nietzsche as a side-by-side reading, Ceika’s
book tries to show how latent but under-theorized insights can be made
explicit by studying the pair in tandem.

It is a stimulating argument, and Ceika’s book, though not without serious

problems, is an excellent read that deserves a wide audience.

Getting Marx and Nietzsche Into Bed

Together
Ceika devotes a healthy majority of his book to fostering the seeds of anti-
capitalist critique in Nietzsche’s vast oeuvre. Throughout the book, Marx acts
more as a gravitational pull than an actual presence — tugging on Nietzsche,
trying to move him left, while preserving the core lessons of his insights.

This is an inherently fraught enterprise. As Ceika himself acknowledges, there

is a long history of conservative and far-right figures celebrating Nietzsche for
his strident elitism and anti-egalitarianism. Critical theorists like Domenico
Losurdo and Hugo Drochon have cautioned that any effort to fit Nietzsche’s
political convictions into a left-wing mold are bound to run up against his
antidemocratic views. Here is Nietzsche in 1889, lamenting that the

working-man has been declared fit for military service; he has been granted the right of
combination, and of voting: can it be wondered at that he already regards his condition
as one of distress (expressed morally, as an injustice)? But, again I ask, what do people
want? If they desire a certain end, then they should desire the means thereto. If they will
have slaves, then it is madness to educate them to be masters.

Any theorizing about what Nietzsche has to offer socialism will therefore
require some analytical flexibility. Of course, interpretation needn’t favor
scholarly fidelity over creative acuity. Innovative left-wing thinkers have
often appropriated deep insights from the Right. Marx himself drew much
theoretical inspiration from Hegel, a consummate conservative.

But if we are going to engage in a selective reading of Nietzsche, we should

acknowledge that that is the project. After all, Nietzsche continually insists
that we not misunderstand him.

Nietzschean Socialism?
Ceika proves the viability of his reading through the sweep and power of his
interpretation. How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle is packed with
exciting insights and provocations. The book is such a bevy of riches I will
limit myself to highlighting two key takeaways.

The first: Ceika uses Nietzsche to remind us that socialists’ aspiration

shouldn’t be establishing strict equality along all metrics, but instead securing
the conditions for human flourishing. As Ceika points out, Marx shares
Nietzsche’s wariness of viewing equality as an end in itself, since the
immeasurable differences between people means that treating everyone the
same means treating some people far better or worse than others. A person
with mobility issues who is unable to enjoy places that aren’t handicap-
accessible is unlikely to be consoled if someone tells them the space is equally
available to everyone.

There is another danger to the “strict equality” trap: a politics of crude

resentment that proposes social leveling for its own sake, cutting down the
rich even if it would do little to help the poor. Ceika is right that Nietzsche
was astute in criticizing this kind of “ressentiment” — the jealous urge to take
from another whether it benefits you or not — and reminding us that a
democratic socialist future would ultimately liberate the rich from social
alienation as well as the poor. (Though liberating the latter is of course the
primary motivation.) Here one might complement Ceika’s argument by noting
it is often conservatives that are most animated by ressentiment: consider the
bitterness with which some opponents resist the “free college” demand,
fuming: “I worked hard to pay my tuition, so it’s not fair that others don’t
have to.”

Socialists’ aspiration shouldn’t be establishing strict equality along all metrics

but instead securing the conditions for human flourishing.
A second key point in How to Philosophize is that Nietzsche provides an
account of the aesthetic dimension of life that hardened Marxists sometimes
miss. Marx and Nietzsche were both historical materialists when examining
social and political issues, but not moral materialists in thinking that the only
point of life was accumulation and production to satiate desire.

Both shared the conviction that capitalism narrowed the soul of humanity to
nihilistic pursuits. While they had different analytical strengths — Marx
showed how capitalism shaped human relations and culture, while Nietzsche
often provided deeper accounts of that culture and its psychological effects —
each hoped for a future where human beings could pursue deeper and more
life-affirming projects. On this point we see Ceika at his best: productively
using the distance between Marx and Nietzsche to generate novel insights.

The Interesting and the Just

There is a lot to like in Ceika’s book, and his “Nietzschean socialism” is an
important theoretical contribution. But his book is not without its flaws. The
most important one: his relentless opposition to invoking justice or morality.

Ceika’s stance is very much in keeping with Nietzsche and at least some
Marxists, for whom any gesture toward the normative constitutes a failure of
political nerve. But without rooting his politics in some conception of justice,
Ceika can at best offer aesthetic reasons for why we should prefer his kind of
society to another.

This points to one of the pitfalls of a purely aestheticized left politics:

capitalism comes to be criticized less for the injustice and misery it induces
and more for its vulgarity or tedium; radicalism is reduced to a countercultural
aesthetic, its primary appeal the thrill of a world remade anew. This is a
serious mistake. After all, as Walter Benjamin pointed out long ago, fascism’s
primary pitch was how “entertaining” it was.

The heart of radical politics isn’t the interesting but the just. And if one finds
that ethical language off-putting, it is worth remembering the distinction
between moralism — the kind of Helen Lovejoy tendency to scream, “Won’t
someone please think of the children!” when Cardi B’s pro-sex anthem
“WAP” comes on — and deep moral conviction.

In a society where everyone had what they needed to lead a flourishing life,
many people would undoubtedly develop deeper sides to themselves. But
others would not. In fact, if one’s primary aim is to produce and empower the
most interesting kinds of people, it isn’t clear that Nietzsche is wrong to favor
a sort of aristocratic perfectionism. Society’s resources could be organized to
foster an elite, who would in turn use other people in their projects of “great
politics,” at once dangerous and life affirming.

Socialists, of course, view this vision of society as a nightmare. They insist

everyone should have a genuinely equal opportunity to flourish, not just
because it would produce more interesting people but because it would be
more just and fair. There would be something morally noxious about
sweatshop workers being paid pennies to work fifteen hours a day without
bathroom breaks, even if it turned out that some of them preferred to use their
higher pay and leisure time to sit around and watch TV. The same could be
said about permitting exploitation because it granted elites the resources to
pursue aesthetically astounding enterprises.

So, in the end, I think the strongest argument for Ceika’s Nietzschean
socialism is the one he is wary of making: that a world where all were able to
pursue a life of flourishing — however they understand it — would be a more
just world than the one we live in now. It would also be one where the infinite
potentials of human existence were unlocked, rather than deadened by the
weight of poverty and domination. We should be doing all we can to bring
that world into being — not just because it would be more aesthetically
pleasing, but because it’s the right thing to do.
Cryptocurrency Is a Giant Ponzi
Scheme
BY
SOHALE ANDRUS MORTAZAVI
Cryptocurrency is not merely a bad investment or
speculative bubble. It’s worse than that: it’s a full-on fraud.

Tether prices listed on the Kraken website. (Tiffany Hagler-Geard / Bloomberg via

Getty Images)

Cryptocurrency is a scam.

All of it, full stop — not just the latest pump-and-dump “shitcoin” schemes, in

which fraudsters hype a little-known cryptocurrency before dumping it in
unison, or “rug pulls,” in which a new cryptocurrency’s developers abandon
the project and run off with investor funds. All cryptocurrency and the
industry as a whole are built atop market manipulation without which they
could not exist at scale.

This should surprise no one who understands how cryptocurrency works.

Blockchains are, at their core, simply append-only spreadsheets maintained
across decentralized “peer-to-peer” networks, not unlike those used for
torrenting pirated files. Just as torrents allow users to share files directly,
cryptocurrency blockchains allow users to maintain a shared ledger of
financial transactions without the need of a central server or managing
authority. Users are thus able to make direct online transactions with one
another as if they were trading cash.

This, we are told, is revolutionary. But making unmediated online transactions

securely in a trustless environment in this way is not without costs.
Cryptocurrency blockchains generally don’t allow previously verified
transactions to be deleted or altered. The data is immutable. Updates are added
by chaining a new “block” of transaction data to the chain of existing blocks.

But to ensure the integrity of the blockchain, the network needs a way to trust
that new blocks are accurate. Popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum,
and Dogecoin all employ a “proof of work” consensus method for verifying
updates to the blockchain. Without getting overly technical, this mechanism
allows blockchain users — known as “miners” in this context — to compete
for the right to verify and add the next block by being the first to solve an
incredibly complex math puzzle.

The point of this process is to make adding new blocks so difficult that
meddling with the blockchain is prohibitively expensive. Though the correct
answer to these puzzles can be easily verified by anyone on the network,
actually being the first to find the answer requires an enormous amount of
processing power — and thus electricity — and outcompeting the rest of the
network is impractical.

For their troubles, miners collect a reward for being the first to verify the next
block. The Bitcoin blockchain adds a new block every ten minutes, and the
block reward is currently 6.25 newly minted bitcoins, worth nearly a half
million dollars at Bitcoin’s last all-time high. Competition for block rewards
has led to a computing power arms race as prices have risen. Mining bitcoins
on a personal computer is no longer feasible. The majority of cryptocurrency
mining is now conducted in commercial mining farms, essentially huge
warehouses running thousands of high-powered computer processors day and
night. The electricity expended mining Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is
rapidly approaching 1 percent of global usage, which is famously greater than
the total electricity consumption of many smaller developed nations.

Given that cryptocurrencies don’t produce anything of material value, this

enormous waste of resources renders the whole enterprise a negative-sum
game. Investors can only cash out by selling their coins to other investors —
but only after the miners and various cryptocurrency service providers take
the house’s rake. In other words, investors cannot — in the aggregate — cash
out for even what they put in, as cryptocurrencies are inefficient by design.

This makes them a poor and costly form of currency and absolutely ludicrous
as a long-term investment. We could dismiss them as a doomed experiment in
the “greater fool” theory of investing, in which investors attempt to profit on
overvalued or even worthless assets by selling them on to the next “greater
fool” — think of it as gambling on a high-stakes game of musical chairs — if
the rising price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were simply a function
of demand.

This isn’t the case. Price manipulation plays as much or more of a role than
demand in driving prices higher.

The Central Bank of Crypto

This isn’t some big secret. In a widely circulated 2017 paper, researchers
attributed over half of the then-recent rise in Bitcoin’s price to purchases made
by a single entity on Bitfinex, a cryptocurrency exchange headquartered in
Hong Kong and registered in the Virgin Islands. These purchases were timed
to buoy the price of Bitcoin during market downturns in a way that so strongly
indicated market manipulation, the authors found it inconceivable that such
trading patterns could occur by happenstance.

Critically, these purchases were not made with dollars, but with Tether,
another type of cryptocurrency known as a “stablecoin” because its price is
pegged to the dollar so that one tether is always worth one dollar. Many
offshore cryptocurrency exchanges lack access to traditional banking,
presumably because banks deem doing business with them too risky. Bitfinex,
which shares a parent company and executive team with Tether Ltd (the issuer
of its namesake cryptocurrency), struggled to find US banking partners after
Wells Fargo abruptly stopped processing wire transfers between the
exchange’s Taiwanese banks and their American customers in 2017 without
giving reason.

This was a problem. Without traditional banking relationships for issuing wire
transfers, exchanges cannot easily facilitate trades between buyers and sellers
on their platforms — someone has to pass cash between buyers and sellers.
Stablecoins solve this problem by standing in for actual real dollars. They
allow cryptocurrency markets to maintain ample liquidity — the ease with
which assets can be converted into cash — without actually having to have
cash on hand.

Tether has become integral to the functioning of global crypto markets.

The majority of Bitcoin trades are now conducted in Tether, 70 percent by
volume. By comparison, only 8 percent of trade volume is conducted in real
dollars, with the remainder being other crypto-to-crypto pairs. Many industry
skeptics, and even proponents, see this as a systemic risk and ticking time
bomb. The whole system relies on traders actually being able to exchange
tethers for real cash or — far more commonly in practice — other traditional
cryptocurrencies that can be sold for cash on banked exchanges like Coinbase
or Gemini, both headquartered in the United States.

Should faith in Tether falter, we could see its peg to the dollar collapse in a
flash. This would be a doomsday scenario for crypto markets, with investors
holding or trading crypto assets on unbanked exchanges unable to “cash” out,
since there was never any cash there to begin with, only stablecoins. This
would almost certainly cause a liquidity crisis on banked exchanges as well,
as investors rush to cash out their crypto anywhere possible amid cratering
prices, and banked exchanges processing far less volume would almost
certainly not be able to pick up the slack.

There is no reason to have any faith in Tether. Tether’s peg to the dollar was
initially predicated on the claim that the digital currency was fully backed by
actual cash reserves — a dollar held in reserve for every tether issued —
though this was later shown to be a lie. The company has since continuously
revised down claims about how much cash they keep in reserve. Their latest
public attestation on the matter, from March of last year, claimed to be
holding only 3 percent of their reserves in cash. The rest was held in “cash
equivalents,” mostly commercial paper — essentially IOUs from corporations
that may or may not exist, given that reputable actors trading in commercial
paper don’t appear to be doing any business with Tether.

While even these modest claims about their reserves may be a lie, as Tether
has never undergone an external audit, none of this really matters, since
Tether’s own terms of service make it clear that they do not guarantee the
redemption of their digital tokens for cash. Should the market suddenly lose
faith in Tether and exchanges become unable or unwilling to exchange them
one for one with dollars or the respective amount of cryptocurrency, Tether
accepts no obligation to use whatever reserves they may or may not have to
buy back tethers.

And in practice, Tether rarely buys back or “burns” their tokens (sending the
tokens to a receive-only wallet so as to remove them from circulation and
decrease the supply, in an attempt to raise the price), as one would expect if
the purpose was simply to provide market liquidity as claimed. If that were the
case, we would expect the overall supply of Tether to closely track daily
crypto trading volumes. Exchanges would only keep enough Tether on hand
to cover trading volume and presumably sell off or redeem excess Tethers for
cash when fewer people are actively trading crypto.

Instead, the Tether supply has been growing exponentially for years,
exploding during crypto market bull runs and continuing straight through
years-long downturns. There are now over 78 billion tethers in circulation and
rising, about 95 percent of which was issued since the latest cryptocurrency
bull market started in early 2020.

Cryptocurrency is not merely a bad investment or speculative bubble, but

something more akin to a decentralized Ponzi scheme.
There is no conceivable universe in which cryptocurrency exchanges should
need an exponentially expanding supply of stablecoins to facilitate daily
trading. The explosion in stablecoins and the suspicious timing of market buys
outlined in the 2017 paper suggest — as a 2019 class-action lawsuit alleges —
that iFinex, the parent company of Tether and Bitfinex, is printing tethers
from thin air and using them to buy up Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in
order to create artificial scarcity and drive prices higher.

Tether has effectively become the central bank of crypto. Like central banks,
they ensure liquidity in the market and even engage in quantitative easing —
the practice of central banks buying up financial assets in order to stimulate
the economy and stabilize financial markets. The difference is that central
banks, at least in theory, operate in the public good and try to maintain healthy
levels of inflation that encourage capital investment. By comparison, private
companies issuing stablecoins are indiscriminately inflating cryptocurrency
prices so that they can be dumped on unsuspecting investors.

This renders cryptocurrency not merely a bad investment or speculative

bubble but something more akin to a decentralized Ponzi scheme. New
investors are being lured in under the pretense that speculation is driving
prices when market manipulation is doing the heavy lifting.

This can’t go on forever. Unbacked stablecoins can and are being used to
inflate the “spot price” — the latest trading price — of cryptocurrencies to
levels totally disconnected from reality. But the electricity costs of running
and securing blockchains is very real. If cryptocurrency markets cannot keep
luring in enough new money to cover the growing costs of mining, the scheme
will become unworkable and financially insolvent.

No one knows exactly how this would shake out, but we know that investors
will never be able to realize the gains they have made on paper. The
cryptocurrency market’s oft-touted $2 trillion market cap, calculated by
multiplying existing coins by the latest spot price, is a meaningless figure.
Nowhere near that much has actually been invested into cryptocurrencies, and
nowhere near that much will ever come out of them.
In fact, investors won’t — on average — be able to cash out for even as much
as they put in. Much of that money went to cryptocurrency mining.
Recent analysis shows that around $25 billion and growing has already gone
to Bitcoin miners, who, by best estimates, are now spending $1 billion just on
electricity every month, possibly more.

That money is gone forever, having been converted to carbon and released
into the atmosphere — making cryptocurrencies even worse than traditional
Ponzi schemes. Most of the money lost in Bernie Madoff’s infamous Ponzi
was eventually clawed back and returned to investors. Much of the money put
into cryptocurrency, even if courts could trace back tangled webs of semi-
anonymous cryptocurrency transactions, can never be recuperated.

Regulatory Failure
Ponzi schemes of this scale typically target other financial firms, banks, elite
institutions, and other wealthy investors. Cryptocurrency, by comparison, is
the people’s Ponzi. Cryptocurrency exchanges with user-friendly interfaces, as
well as financial services companies like Square and PayPal, allow retail
investors with few assets and little financial literacy to buy cryptocurrency on
their smartphones.

The minimum purchase on Coinbase is only $2. On Robinhood, it’s a buck. A

recent Pew survey found that one in three adults under thirty have bought or
used cryptocurrency. It is everyday working people who will suffer most
when their savings inevitably evaporate overnight.

Regulators and policymakers have been slow to protect the public. Ponzi
schemes can remain solvent for years while flying under the radar of law
enforcement and regulators. Madoff ran his hedge fund as a Ponzi for at least
seventeen years. While the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) failed
to heed multiple warnings from an industry whistleblower for seven years,
regulators acted quickly once Madoff was turned in by his own children. He
was, after all, defrauding the wealthy, bankers, celebrities, and elites.
Large Ponzi schemes typically target other financial firms, banks, elite
institutions, and other wealthy investors. Cryptocurrency, by comparison, is the
people’s Ponzi.
The cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme has its own whistleblowers, but they’re
hardly necessary. Tether is built atop and hosted on other public blockchains,
predominantly Ethereum and Tron at the moment. Every time Tether prints
another round of stablecoins, now by the hundreds of millions or billions at a
time (always in suspiciously round numbers), sometimes several times a
week, literally anyone can see. There are Twitter bots analyzing
cryptocurrency blockchains and posting large or suspicious transfers of new
stablecoins that make this as easy as clicking follow. Tether is cooking the
books right out in the open. Skeptics have been pointing this out for years, but
regulators and policymakers did virtually nothing until cryptocurrency went
mainstream and wildly overvalued cryptocurrency companies began posing a
risk to traditional financial markets.

Their response is a case of too little too late. The SEC and US Commodity
Futures Trading Commission subpoenaed Tether and Bitfinex in 2017. In
2018, the Justice Department launched a broad probe into cryptocurrency
price manipulation and quickly homed in on Tether. Tether was
ultimately fined $41 million for lying about their reserves, among other
wrongdoings, and also settled a suit with the New York attorney general for
$18.5 million for the same reason. But these actions are a slap on the wrist
given the level of fraud and have not slowed down Tether’s money printer in
the least.

Meanwhile, regulators haven’t even tried to stop cryptocurrency from

infecting broader financial markets. The SEC let Coinbase go public in April,
and several other US-based cryptocurrency exchanges, including Kraken and
Gemini, are planning to do the same. The first cryptocurrency futures ETFs
have debuted in recent months, giving traditional investors indirect exposure
to cryptocurrency by investing in a range of cryptocurrency companies.
Fidelity Investments also launched a spot cryptocurrency ETF in Canada that
would actually hold cryptocurrencies, which would allow investors to make
direct investments in cryptocurrency on the same platform where they manage
retirement savings; Fidelity is seeking the green light from US regulators to
allow Americans the same direct access.

While a few listed companies, most notably Tesla and MicroStrategy, have
taken multibillion-dollar gambles on cryptocurrency with company money,
most of these companies are simply offering custodial or transactional
services rather than investing into cryptocurrencies themselves. They are
operating parasitically, profiting off investments into the crypto Ponzi while
rushing toward IPOs before the whole thing collapses.

These companies hold precious little cryptocurrency themselves and thus little
risk. Even MicroStrategy, though initially spending $250 million in company
money on Bitcoin in August 2020 while the CEO shilled crypto on Twitter,
proceeded to raise billions more in repeated rounds of fundraising.

Policymakers have done little to curb any of this. Even those paying attention
to problems with unregulated stablecoins seem hell-bent on trying to preserve
the wider cryptocurrency industry. A recent report from the Biden
administration assesses the risk of stablecoins without investigating their
primary role in market manipulation. SEC chair Gary Gensler wants to
regulate stablecoins as either securities or money market mutual funds
accounts. The STABLE Act, a bill languishing in Congress since last year,
would require stablecoins be fully backed and regulate issuers and anyone
offering related services.

These efforts are as insufficient as they are misguided. Governments won’t be

able to keep unregulated stablecoins from being traded on exchanges
operating outside their jurisdiction. Tether is not the only stablecoin game in
town. Tether has printed more than $8 billion in stablecoins since November.
Meanwhile, South Korean crypto firm Terraform Labs, which few people
have even heard of, minted another $8 billion of their own stablecoin
(TerraUSD). There are others behaving similarly. Shut these operations down
and there’s nothing to stop them or a copycat from setting up shop elsewhere.

The problem extends beyond unregulated exchanges and issuers. Coinbase

also has its own stablecoin pegged to the dollar, USDC, managed by partner
company Circle, which is also looking to go public with an SPAC deal that
would exempt it from the scrutiny of a traditional IPO. There are now 45
billion USDC stablecoins in circulation, most of them issued since 2020, just
like with Tether. Coinbase and Circle also lied about their stablecoin being
fully backed by cash when in fact reserves are mostly composed of yet more
mysterious commercial paper, which is less liquid and far riskier. As Amy
Castor, who has long reported on cryptocurrencies, put it, “Despite efforts to
distance itself from Tether, Circle is starting to look more and more like a
similar scheme, only with a different critter on the wildcat banknotes.”

Ban Them All

Going after fly-by-night stablecoin issuers will devolve into a hopeless game
of whack-a-mole. The only real solution is to ban the trade of private
cryptocurrencies entirely. We cannot stop foreign actors from issuing
unbacked stablecoins and manipulating crypto prices on unregulated
exchanges. But we can make it illegal to sell cryptocurrencies on banked
exchanges, such as Coinbase, operating entirely legally while they cash people
out of the Ponzi scheme.

This would, of course, kill off cryptocurrency almost entirely, relegating it

back to an oddity of the tech enthusiast. No one should shed a tear.
Cryptocurrencies have virtually no legal use case. They’re great for
facilitating ransomware, laundering money, distributing narcotics and child
porn, running Ponzi schemes, and… not much else. They fail as currencies
due to high transaction costs. They fail as “digital gold” or a “store of value”
because they consume ludicrous amounts of energy to run what is essentially a
glorified spreadsheet.

China already banned cryptocurrencies entirely, and India and Pakistan are

poised to do the same. Other countries have also made moves to prohibit or
constrain cryptocurrencies, but Western liberal democracies are notably
permissive. This is in no small part due to aggressive industry lobbying, which
includes hiring former financial regulators and compliance officers into the
industry to influence policymakers.
The only real solution is to ban the trade of private cryptocurrencies entirely.
Among their ranks is Brian Brooks, who was the chief legal officer at
Coinbase before serving as acting Comptroller of the Currency in the Trump
administration. Now CEO of blockchain mining company Bitfury, which is
also purportedly looking to go public, Brooks joined other crypto CEOs to
testify before the House in December. Predictably, they oppose meaningful
stablecoin regulation, as they understand that it would kill the industry and
render their companies worthless.

These people and everyone else in the cryptocurrency industry are complicit
in the Ponzi scheme and actively misleading the public. They understand that
fraud is the engine driving their industry and fueling their profits — and that is
perhaps the most damning indictment of private cryptocurrencies and the
industry surrounding them.

The 2008 financial crisis made clear why the financial sector must be brought
under public control. Cryptocurrency and “decentralized finance” aren’t
special — they’re just more of the same privatization and deregulation
masquerading as high-tech “solutions” we’ve seen in other industries.
Unregulated, privatized financial markets pose the same risks to the public
whether or not they are “on the blockchain.”

In the case of cryptocurrency, regulation is an existential risk precisely

because regulatory loopholes and fraud are the only reason the industry
appears profitable despite being wholly unproductive and a waste of energy
resources. The same applies to private cryptocurrencies as a whole. The
longer governments take to ban them, the worse normal people will be hurt.

Workers Are Trying to

“Democratize Starbucks”
AN INTERVIEW WITH
 JASPER BOOTH-HODGES
After the successful union drive at several Starbucks stores
in Buffalo, New York, more Starbucks workers around the
country are interested in unionizing. The latest: Chicago
Starbucks workers have filed for a union election.

One of Starbucks' coffee shops in Chicago, Illinois. (Scott Olson / Getty Images)

Michael Stipe

INTERVIEW BY

Kit Ginzky

Following the successful unionization votes at two Starbucks stores in

Buffalo, New York, a wave of organizing has emerged in shops from coast to
coast. Currently, workers at twenty-eight Starbucks shops across fourteen
different states are in the process of holding union elections through the
National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). This wave of organizing is being led
by millennial and zoomer workers, many of whom were inspired by
the grassroots organizing of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns.

While Starbucks maintains a public reputation as a progressive company with

some of the best benefits available to workers in the service industry, workers
report increasing costs and a decline in quality over the last several years. The
company has waged an intense union-busting campaign in an attempt to
prevent workers, or “partners” in corporate lingo, from gaining power in the
workplace. Starbucks workers disagree.
Jasper Booth-Hodges is a member of the Organizing Committee at Starbucks
#2827, which is located on Chicago’s South Side. Workers in his store feel
that the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the company’s lack of regard for
their safety on the job. Despite the high level of exposure they face in the
workplace, and the company’s record-breaking profits in 2021, Starbucks
workers have not received hazard pay since May 2020.

Shortly after the store filed their petition with the NLRB, Booth-Hodges spoke
with Kit Ginzky for Jacobin about what it has been like to work at Starbucks
during the COVID-19 pandemic, and why workers are organizing a union to
transform their workplace.

KG

Do you have a sense of what it was like to work at Starbucks

before the pandemic?
JBH
I came in, did a bunch of training, and then COVID started. But I’ve had a lot
of friends over the years who worked for Starbucks — it’s like a rite of
passage for being gay, you know? You’ve got to work at Starbucks at some
point. I’ve also been a customer for a long time, and by the time I started
working there, I already knew all the drink recipes from the app. It just made
sense.

I’ve worked at other jobs at the same level, so I knew the benefits were better
than a lot of comparable jobs. I worked for Panera for about three years, and
one of my supervisors there left and went to work at Starbucks. She was
immediately getting paid a lot more, had all these better benefits, and I knew
that they had the tuition benefits at Arizona State University [ASU]. That’s
why I work at Starbucks now, I go to ASU.

KG
Have the benefits changed at all during the pandemic?

JBH
Their initial response to the pandemic was pretty good. They closed the stores,
sent us all home with pay, and when they brought us back, they gave us an
extra $3 an hour catastrophe pay. But they stopped that around June 2020.
They were just like, “Alright, you’re on your own, back to work.”

Originally, when they started closing stores, they gave us the option to work.
That was when they brought in the catastrophe pay: “You can go home and
take PTO, or you can work, and we’ll give you an extra $3 an hour.” That was
reasonable. Then they ended up closing all the stores, so we were all home
with pay. When we came back, we still had that extra $3 an hour for a month
or so, but then they dropped it. Obviously, the pandemic is still not over, but it
was definitely bad back then — there were no vaccines, cases were rising, and
the abuse we were taking from customers was getting so much worse.

KG
What have customers been like during the pandemic?
JBH
Our cafe is actually closed right now. We’re grab-and-go, so you can come in
to order and pick up your drinks, but then you have to leave. Before they did
that, there were a couple of fights that broke out and issues with customers not
wanting to comply with COVID precautions. It’s been better than having to
fight with every other person, but there are still issues.

KG
In general, have customers been more demanding during the
pandemic?

JBH
We love our regular customers, they’re great. Even the ones who are really
particular about stuff, we love those people. But ever since the beginning of
COVID, a lot of customers have been so aggressive about restrictions, limited
hours, and product shortages. We’ve been out of so much stuff for so long, but
people are still coming in and asking for the same stuff and yelling at us when
we don’t have it. When I first started, the customers in general were more
understanding. None of that was what we signed up for [working at
Starbucks].

KG
What are the actual job tasks that you did sign up for?

JBH
A big part of it is obviously about making the drinks, getting the recipes right.
Then, Starbucks has this policy of “making the moment right for the
customers.” To an extent, sure, you obviously want people to leave happy. But
more with Starbucks than anywhere else I’ve worked, customers know and
expect that if they throw a big enough tantrum, they’ll get whatever they want.
There are people who make TikToks like, “Oh, I’m gonna say I wanted it iced
at the window, so I can get a free drink at Starbucks,” and we just have to do
it. A one-off experience doesn’t make it a problem, but it’s almost like they’ve
trained a level of entitlement into the customers.

I worked at Great Wolf Lodge for three years, and then at Panera for three
years. There were always people like that, but it’s another level at Starbucks.
People walk in and expect us to know what they want without telling us, and
they get so angry if anything is not exactly the way they want it. The
pandemic makes everything worse because everybody is more on edge.

And there is another thing — the Honey Citrus Mint Tea, which was called
“the Medicine Ball.” We can’t call it a medicine ball because it has no
medicine in it, but it’s become very clear to us that a lot of people think this
drink will cure COVID. I’ve heard from partners at other stores that customers
will come through the drive thru and say, “I just tested positive, so I’m
coming to get my Medicine Ball.” That’s a terrible safety hazard for partners
because people will literally come in when they’re sick and expose us if they
think this drink is going to help them. It’s tea with steamed lemonade from
concentrate and honey syrup — it’s not going to cure COVID.
At this point, it genuinely feels like having this drink on the menu is a safety
hazard.

KG
Are you able to do anything to protect yourself when customers
are making you feel unsafe?

JBH
I think we are technically allowed to refuse service to people, but I have never
seen someone refuse service to a customer without repercussions. The
company will go to great lengths to always take the side of the customer,
never the partners. They say that they care about us, but their actions show
otherwise.

The benefits might be better than a lot of comparable jobs, but a lot of those
employers are starting to step up. Chipotle now has tuition reimbursement
because Starbucks has raised the standard for these things. And it’s like, okay,
if Starbucks sees itself as an industry leader, then they should not just do
things in this performative way.

KG
Do you find it difficult to qualify for the benefits that are
available?
JBH
I haven’t experienced as much of a loss of hours, but I’ve definitely seen
people struggle to qualify. They did lower the average hours that you need to
achieve benefits by a little bit during the pandemic. But so many people still
haven’t been able to hit that mark.

KG
How many hours a week is it?

JBH
Twenty hours a week is the average you have to hit for the audit period — I
think it’s every six months or so. But there’s also a total number of hours.
Your total average hours for that period has to be over 520, but during the
pandemic, they lowered it. I usually get close to forty hours, so even when my
hours are cut, I’m still getting twenty-five to thirty and that still makes me
eligible for benefits. But for people who typically work twenty to twenty-five
hours a week, if they’re getting ten to fifteen, they might lose eligibility.

KG
Do most of your coworkers depend on these benefits?

JBH
A lot of them do. Because we’re right near campus, some are University of
Chicago students and they’re not necessarily using all of the benefits. But I
use it for ASU, and another partner in my store is starting at ASU. A lot of
partners have kids and need the insurance. It’s good insurance, but the rates
have been going up. It’s still cheaper than any other company I’ve worked for,
but it’s getting up there.

Sometimes we’re not able to access all the benefits. I tried to sign up for Lyra
[a platform through which Starbucks claims to provide ten free therapy
sessions] back in 2020, but I was never able to get in touch with anybody and
eventually I ended up getting therapy another way.

KG
What is management like at the 55th Street store?

JBH
Our manager is not an unkind person. But there’s this way the company
operates where managers have an enormous amount of pressure on them.
With all the stuff they have on their plate, it makes it so hard for them to keep
that mindset of like, “Hey, my baristas and shift leads are human beings with
lives.” Every competent store manager that I’ve met, their life revolves around
Starbucks. Because of that, they’re unable to see that not all of us feel that
way.

KG
How does this impact the workplace?

JBH
There have been a lot of issues with communication. My roommate submitted
his availability, and he has classes at a certain time. But with every schedule,
he was getting shifts that were not completely outside of his availability, but
close enough that he wasn’t going to be able to get to class on time. The other
partners were good about getting him out when he needed to, but it got to the
point where it was just like, “Okay, if I can’t get scheduled correctly, I’m just
not going to work these days at all.” She always wanted us to fill out the paper
availability sheets instead of doing them online, and we realized it was
because if we did it online, the system wouldn’t allow her to schedule us
outside of our hours. It’s little shady stuff like that, and it adds up.

KG
Are scheduling issues a common complaint in your store?

JBH
There have been so many problems. Frequently, there are gaps in the
schedule, and we’re just expected to stay late or come in early to provide
coverage. Many of us don’t mind picking up extra hours for more pay, but it
shouldn’t be our responsibility to change our schedules without notice.
There’s a frustrating expectation that we’re always going to stay late and fix
any issues, which shouldn’t be our responsibility.

KG
Is there overtime if you work more than forty hours?

JBH
Yeah. Also, because of the Fair Work Week, if you stay more than fifteen
minutes past your time, they’ve got to pay the penalty hour. Because of that,
they try to be really strict about making sure people leave on time and don’t
stay late. At the same time, if they don’t schedule enough people, they’re
going to expect you to stay late anyway. We’re supposed to keep in mind that
they don’t want us to give us the extra pay — we’re supposed to stick to our
schedule, unless they didn’t schedule appropriately, and then we have to fix it.

KG
Have you had enough coverage during the pandemic?

JBH
At closing, they’ve struggled a lot. They’ll sometimes get afternoon rushes
between in-store and mobile orders, and if there are only three people working
in the store, it’s just too much to do. In the morning, we typically have enough
people, but it is still the bare minimum to keep things running.

KG
With everyone working in such a small space together, have there
been concerns about COVID transmission?

JBH
I’m really surprised that my store hasn’t had a big problem with that. We had
one person who did end up getting COVID, but that happened during the
winter break when a lot of students weren’t here, and then our store ended up
closing for a while due to some maintenance issues. None of us were going
into the store anyway, so that just kind of worked out for us.

KG
Do you get paid when the store is closed?

JBH
That was a big issue. When they initially closed the store, they said we
weren’t getting catastrophe pay. We either had to use sick time, or we could
go work at another store and make up hours. Our manager  called me to say
the store was going to be closed, and she told me I could go work at the one
on 53rd or at 71st. I needed to get paid, so I said I would go work at 53rd. I
worked a couple of days over there, but then when she did payroll, my
manager let me know that we ultimately got catastrophe pay for all those days
the store was closed. So it’s like, “Okay, you’re telling us that we would have
gotten paid anyway?” We essentially worked for free.

KG
Was this the incident that really sparked your organizing?

JBH
I’ve been following what’s been going on in Buffalo, pretty much since that
started. As it started gaining traction, I reached out to them. I had no idea what
I was doing. I’d never done anything like this before. After I reached out to
them, they got me in touch with Workers United here, and then I went and
met with an organizer named Pete DeMay. We talked about it, he gave me
some cards, and gave me the rundown of what I needed to do.
KG
How many workers are in the bargaining unit of your store?

JBH
About twenty.

KG
And you filed for a union election?

JBH
We filed with the Labor Board last Friday.

KG
Do you know when the election will take place?

JBH
Once we have our hearing in a few weeks, the election should be four to eight
weeks out from there, most likely closer to eight weeks.

KG
You’re thinking it’ll be a vote by mail?

JBH
Yeah, that’s how it went in Buffalo. With the COVID restrictions, they’re
going to mail us the ballots, and we mail them back in. Based on what
happened in Buffalo, they had a live stream where they counted the votes, and
then we knew right away. That’s what we’re expecting to happen here.

KG
How did you start organizing the shop?

JBH
I just started talking to my coworkers and asking them about it. I talked to my
roommates first, because three of the four people that live in my apartment
work at that Starbucks. I started with us, and then started talking to the people
I was working with, bringing more people into it. I was getting
overwhelmingly positive responses from everybody. Some people had
questions or didn’t really know what it entailed, but once I explained stuff,
they were like, “Yeah, I definitely support this.”
During that period, things were also getting rocky with management. We had
the maintenance issue where the store was closed, and we weren’t sure if we
were getting paid or not. We did end up with the catastrophe pay, but they
stopped it after a week, so we all had to start working at other stores anyway.
Now the store at 71st is closed, so they’re working at our store and our store is
overstaffed. We have three or four extra people from 71st almost every day.

KG
Do you think that that’s part of a response to your upcoming
election? Are they trying to expand the voter roll for your store?

JBH
It’s hard to say, because it seems like a very similar tactic to what was
happening in Buffalo. But at the same time, I know that 71st has some
maintenance issues they’re resolving. I definitely don’t think it’s unrelated,
but at the same time, I know that there are other genuine reasons for what
they’re doing.

KG
What do you say to coworkers when you’re speaking to them
about forming the union?

JBH
The biggest thing I say is that it’s a way for us to have protection from
retaliation from management, protection from the customers getting out of
hand. That’s the thing — even if Starbucks’ pay and benefits tend to be a little
higher than similar job levels, the difference is the level of work that they
expect from us.

KG
What has your contact with other unionizing Starbucks workers
been like?

JBH
I don’t want to say too much, because we know that corporate is trying to
learn as much about our organizing strategies as they can. But we have a
wonderful, supportive community of partners who are working together to
democratize Starbucks, create a just and fair workplace, and to have a seat at
the table as true partners. There is a lot of solidarity across the country and the
city, and it’s been a big help — especially because many of us are doing this
for the first time.

KG
How many stores in Chicago have filed so far?

JBH
As of right now, it’s us, Logan Square, and Randolph and Wabash. And then
there’s one in La Grange, which is technically a suburb.

KG
Do you anticipate that there will be more soon?

JBH
Yeah, I definitely do. I can’t say where, though.

KG
Has there been any retaliation since your filing?

JBH
We filed last week, so nothing’s really come of it yet. We haven’t had our
stores bombarded with managers. We have all the partners from 71st in there,
but there hasn’t really been the onslaught of [anti-union management
response] that happened immediately in Buffalo. We’re all still kind of
waiting for it to happen.

KG
You don’t have Starbucks executive Rossann Williams sweeping
the floor yet?

JBH
No, Rosann hasn’t shown her face here yet. But our regional director did
come into a meeting with us when our store was closed. She and our district
manager had a meeting with us about the maintenance issues that were going
on. That just seemed really sketchy to me, because that was before we filed,
but our regional director doesn’t care about this problem that we’re having in
the store. She’s trying to suss out some other stuff.

KG
Has management acted differently since the filing?

JBH
I think they’re in the phase where they’re trying to be nice and apologetic. In
general, corporate is signaling, “If you have an issue, you can come and talk
to us about it. You don’t have to unionize.”

KG
How have customers reacted to the news?

JBH
We’ve gotten a lot of community support already, with people coming in
asking us how they can support us. I’ve been telling people to keep coming in
and showing us support. When things do get ugly, we’re going to need all the
motivation and support we can get. Some partners are nervous about
retaliation, which is understandable. I just tell them that a union is the only
way we can protect ourselves from that treatment. Without a union,
management can do whatever they want to us.

KG
I’ve heard that in other unionizing stores, management will
suddenly start enforcing the dress code in a way that seems to
target the people who they think are the organizers, or to get
strict about other minor disciplinary infractions. Is that something
you’re concerned about?

JBH
It is something that partners in other stores have struggled with. I’ve been
making a point to do everything entirely by the book. I walk to work, and I
open, so I get there early to make sure I’m not late, but then I just end up
standing out in the cold waiting for the shift to start. I’ve been wearing
everything correctly, making sure I don’t step a toe out of line.

KG
What can the neighborhood do to support you?

JBH
We’ve been asking people to come in and order drinks with “Union Strong”
or “Union Yes” as the name. Wear union gear, if you have it, when you come
in. But most of all, just voice your support. A lot of stores were asking people
to come in and stay, but because our cafe is closed, we can’t really do that.
But people can support us by keeping that traffic coming in and keeping the
business up.

We need to show them that it’s something the community wants as well as
something that partners want. That’s always been the thing that Starbucks
cares about — what their customers think. If people are showing us support by
spending their money, Starbucks’ number one priority is making money, but
also showing that this is something that really matters to them. A lot of our
regulars are union workers. We have a lot of people who work for the post
office who come in. I’ve talked to a lot of our regular customers who are just
over the moon for us. There’s been a lot of positive support from the
community, so I’m just hoping that momentum keeps up. Because that’s
going to really make a difference for us.

Biden’s Escalation With Russia

Over Ukraine Is a Terrible Idea
AN INTERVIEW WITH
RICHARD SAKWA
Western governments are being called on to send more
weapons to Ukraine — an arms buildup that will only
escalate a potentially disastrous conflict. What we really
need is a comprehensive peace settlement for the region.
Ukrainian combat training center staff and US Army mentors watch as BMP-IIs from
the First Battalion, Twenty-Eighth Mechanized Infantry Brigade engage targets during a
live-fire training exercise at the Yavoriv Combat Training Center, near Yavoriv,
Ukraine, on March 16, 2017. (Seventh Army Training Command / Flickr)
INTERVIEW BY

David Broder
In recent weeks, Western media have turned to well-worn analogies from the
1930s to explain the stakes of a potential “hot war” between Ukraine and
Russia. The need to avoid “appeasing” the Kremlin is taken to justify
increased military aid to Ukraine, while the question of the country’s right to
join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is routinely cast as a
matter of national survival.

Professor Richard Sakwa, author of Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the

Borderland, paints a more complicated picture of Ukrainian-Russian relations.
His analysis emphasizes a long-standing opposition within Ukrainian society
between forces upholding a “pluralist” idea of the country and its relations
with its neighbors, and nationalist movements committed to NATO
membership and breaking ties with Russia.

The Maidan protests of 2014, the armed conflict in the Donbass region, and
the Russian annexation of the Crimea each appear to have harshened these
divides. Yet Ukrainians have expressed support for processes like the Minsk II
agreement and Normandy Format talks as well as candidates committed to de-
escalation — including current president Volodymyr Zelensky upon his
election in 2019. Yet, in Sakwa’s words, in Ukraine a raucous hard-right
minority has “held policy hostage” — an impasse that has also allowed hard-
liners in Moscow to gain strength.

Jacobin’s David Broder interviewed Sakwa about the roots of the current
tensions and the prospects of peaceful resolution.
DB

In Western media, Ukraine is often near-totally defined by its

antagonism with Russia; a Times headline cited a general saying
“Ukrainians are ready to tear apart Russians with their bare
hands.” Especially after the 2008 NATO summit, it’s also assumed
that Ukrainians want to join NATO, but Russia is stopping it. What
evidence is there for that?

RS
This goes much further back even than NATO’s 2008 Bucharest summit,
which invited both Georgia and Ukraine to ultimately join. It’s the way that
Ukrainian policy was defined for a long time in terms of the so-called
European choice — which itself was highly contested, with poll after poll
showing that the Ukrainian public is divided. It’s wobbled a bit over the years,
but basically the western part, what we would call the Galician element, really
wants to not just join the West, but to tear up all ties with Russia.

Postcolonialism, if that model can be used in this case, assumes a hybridity

after you’ve been colonized, like at the linguistic and cultural levels, whereas
the cultural separatists believe that it’s post-colonial with a hyphen, that you
have to expunge all former links. But the southern and eastern parts of the
country are more inclined to maintain close links with Russia. In a way, there
is a basis to Vladimir Putin saying that Russians and Ukrainians are one
people in terms of culture, history, intermarriage and so on. He never said that
they should be one state — and that’s a fundamental difference.

I traveled through the Donbass in 2008, and you’d see painted on buildings
everywhere, “No to NATO.” Whereas now we’ve seen the WikiLeaks State
Department documents, published in 2010–11, showing endless messages
from the US ambassador in Kiev saying ultimately people wanted NATO.
This was a fanciful and artificial idea from the beginning, assuming that the
choice was simple and unequivocally toward the West. Russia was then
framed as holding Ukraine back geopolitically, developmentally, and above
all in terms of democracy.

It’s a much more complex situation, as opinion polls even today show. Gerard
Toal and his colleagues have shown that an astonishingly high proportion —
30 or 40 percent of the population, even with Crimea and Donbass not
included — want close relations with Russia. Some even want to join the
Eurasian Economic Union. So, this is what Zbigniew Brzezinski, and earlier
and above all, Samuel Huntington, described as a cleft country, a divided
country. So, it’s wrong to assume that they have opted unequivocally for
NATO. But this choice has been imposed since the emergence of the
neonationalist government in February 2014 after the Maidan events.

DB
From Volodymyr Ishchenko’s analysis of this polling divide, we
get the impression that, while in the 1990s, support for joining
NATO was very low, this has risen, and it’s easy to imagine that
the 2014 war would harden antagonisms. Yet Volodymyr
Zelensky’s election in 2019 was widely seen as expressing a
popular will to cool tensions: in that election, pro-Maidan forces
lost support, while he spoke of upholding Minsk II. Why hasn’t
that played out in practice?

RS
Yes, Zelensky was elected as the peace candidate. But I’d go further and say
when Petro Poroshenko was elected in May 2014, he was also putting himself
forward as the peace candidate — people also elected him seeing him as an
oligarch with close ties with Russia and so on. Yet neither of them could go
forward with cooling tensions.

In December 2019, the Normandy Format met with Germany, Ukraine,

Russia, and France, and Zelensky’s chief of staff tried to go forward with that
process. Yet even while they were meeting, people were mobilizing in the
Maidan saying that they wouldn’t accept any negotiation or any
implementation of the Minsk II agreement if it involved giving any autonomy
to the Donbass.
So, the first factor is that there’s a very highly mobilized, radicalized minority
within Ukraine, which holds policy hostage. Second, this minority — though
there’s a silence about some of its more odious extremes — is supported
geopolitically by the Western powers, by what I call the Atlantic power
system. It’s not just NATO, but, scandalously in my view, the European
Union, which really hasn’t upheld its own principles.

Zelensky has been even worse than Poroshenko in undermining Russian-

language cultural and media institutions in Ukraine and for pushing a distorted
view of history. So, in a sense, external and internal factors have coalesced.
But despite all that, opinion polls show Ukrainians are still divided, although
there has been a coalescence in favor of defending Ukrainian state
sovereignty.

In fact, Ukrainians in general are a very peace-loving people. That’s why it’s
so catastrophic that now we’re talking about war and conflict. But all this is
part of a bigger picture, a second cold war. If it is indeed a genuine cold war,
then we need to learn how to manage conflict. I’m arguing that today we’re in
a slow-motion Cuban missile crisis. In October 1962, it was resolved
peacefully. Jupiter missiles were taken out of Turkey, and the Soviet Union
removed its missiles, and the United States promised not to invade Cuba.

That is ultimately what Putin wants, and Boris Yeltsin before him, and before
that, Mikhail Gorbachev always argued the expansion of the Atlantic military
security system to Russia’s borders was unacceptable. So, this question has
been dragging on for thirty years now. Putin said in his 2018 State of the
Nation speech, “You didn’t listen to us then, so listen to us now” — when he
announced hypersonic missiles and so on. That’s the background to where we
are today.

But ultimately, society is internally divided within Ukraine. There’s a huge

peace contingent, yet the worst elements of the Ukrainian polity are
exacerbated by Western support for short-term geopolitical advantage. Even
not long ago, Ukraine was committed to neutrality. If Ireland can be neutral, if
Austria can be neutral, if Finland can be neutral, then why can’t Ukraine,
especially since there’s a large constituency for it within Ukraine itself? This
was, after all, official Ukrainian policy until the neonationalist seizure of
power in 2014.

DB
Some coverage emphasizes Mikhail Gorbachev’s remarks that the
eastward expansion of NATO was never discussed at the end of
the Cold War, i.e., to deny the Russian government claim that
“promises were made but not kept.” But they perhaps miss his
wider point, i.e., the post—Cold War expansion didn’t include
Russia and seemed directed against it. How seriously should we
take the proposal raised by Gorbachev, and indeed both Yeltsin
and Putin after him, of some sort of “greater Europe” including
Russia, as an alternative to this second cold war?

RS
Absolutely so. It isn’t just Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin who all advanced
this idea. It’s, of course, a Gaullist idea that ultimately Europe needs to take
control of its own destiny. François Mitterrand also talked about a
confederation of Europe.

Gorbachev made a misleading statement that there had been no promises not
to enlarge NATO, but no one quite understands why. All the National Security
Archive documents published in 2017 show that dozens of Western leaders
said that NATO would not expand beyond the united Germany. That is
unequivocal. That’s part of the extraordinary propaganda war we’re engaged
in now, when Western scholars and politicians say there was no promise.

But ultimately, two peace orders were on offer at the end of the Cold War,
both good ones. There was the Western one, “Europe whole and free.” But the
“common European home” one was based on the idea of a transformation. It
wasn’t even that NATO enlargement, as such, was so bad, but that it took
place without an adequate framework in which the security interests of Russia
could be taken into account.
A “common European home” is the only way forward. People may mock it
now, but I don’t. And there’s plenty of people within Russia who argue this as
well — liberals and even some conservatives. There’s the question of what
form it would take. Gorbachev and others really wanted the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to become the major security
body, with a Security Council acting like a regional United Nations, which
would have resolved the issue. Then, NATO could have expanded. In many
ways, some of the arguments in favor are quite good. NATO stops small states
from going to war with each other, and hopefully it will continue to prevent
Turkey and Greece coming into conflict.

Domestic public opinion in Russia is not militantly readying for war — it’s
absolutely the opposite.
But Russia has to be made part of the security order in some way or another,
and that’s what has not happened. There was the NATO-Russia Permanent
Joint Council of 1997, and then the NATO-Russia Council of 2002, but these
were what I call mitigation measures, not actually solving the question.
Undoubtedly, since 2018, Putin and his team — his hard-liners — have said,
“Enough of this, we can’t trust the West, they’re moving at the border.” And
it’s not just NATO: it’s the anti-ballistic missile installations being built in
both Romania and Poland, and the MK-41 Aegis Ashore. So, when there’s
endless provocations, what Moscow would consider military exercises — B-
52 bombers flying along the border that can carry nuclear bombs, warships in
the Black Sea endlessly — common sense says that ultimately there’ll be a
pushback. And what’s so frightening today in this second cold war is that very
few in the West really understand how high the stakes are.

DB
We’ve said Ukraine isn’t a monolith, but certain forces want to
push tensions with Russia for their own reasons. But something
similar might be said of Russia itself. Beyond Alexei Navalny —
with his comments in Time accusing the West of playing into
Putin’s hands, but also calling for the West to stop “appeasing”
him — there’s also opposition forces that criticize Putin but not
from a pro-Western perspective. What store should we put by the
idea that Putin is making these demands to manage the domestic
political situation, rallying the population around the spectacle of
conflict — or, as some say, even trying to push up gas prices?

RS
One of the more disturbing elements today is that liberals in Russia try to
compensate for their domestic weakness by leveraging Western support,
which only weakens them at home. Opinion polls show only 1-2 percent
support for Navalny, when he was at liberty, and even today despite the huge
publicity. So, liberals are locked in this death spiral where they get cast in all
this dreadful Cold War language as “Fifth Columnists” and “diversionaries,”
whereas of course most of them are not, wanting to see more constitutional
rights, democracy, and so on. That’s the dangerous game they’re playing with
the West.

But domestic public opinion in Russia is not militantly readying for war —
it’s absolutely the opposite. The same is true in Ukraine, by the way; it’s only
the Western population that seems to have whipped itself up into a frenzy
now. Ukrainians are peaceful and so are Russians.

But the substantive point, which Western commentators endlessly make, that
Putin is engaged in saber-rattling to divert from sagging domestic popularity,
is completely false. His popularity has dipped, but it’s still at stellar levels (65
percent support) for someone who’s been in power for twenty years. I’m not a
hard-line offensive realist of the John Mearsheimer sort, arguing that domestic
politics has no input into foreign policy and security making, though I’m
sympathetic to his argument.

Basically, the hard-liners in Moscow have said, ‘Enough is enough: we’ve been
taken as fools by the West, we really need to start pushing back.’
I’ve always defended a “factional” view of Russian politics: there are very
powerful, different tendencies, all the way up from society to the divided elite.
And as far as I understand it, since autumn 2019, the so-called pragmatists
within the Kremlin and the ruling elite have lost their position. Basically, the
hard-liners have said, “Enough is enough: we’ve been taken as fools by the
West, we really need to start pushing back.” Unfortunately, part of that was
squeezing the domestic opposition as well, which I think is — as it was in the
Soviet times — a huge self-inflicted blow. This internal repression doesn’t
help the credibility of Russia’s foreign policy actions. These could be quite
sensible in the way we’ve been saying — there’s a clear security issue there.
But that’s undermined, for example, by the attempts to close [human-rights
watchdog] Memorial. For me, the existence of Memorial, while it could
continue working in a more or less normal manner, was a symbol that
ultimately there was still a level of pluralism and openness. But since autumn
2019, the government has been pushing back quite dramatically against that.

DB
British media coverage often centers on our responsibility not to
“appease” Putin. We also have this World War II analogy in
German politics, with its Green Party foreign minister, Annalena
Baerbock, saying Berlin has a duty to protect these states for
“historical reasons.” The idea that small countries like the Baltic
states should be able to choose for themselves, and not be left
defenseless, which Putin is effectively arguing for, sounds
appealing at a certain level. But clearly there’s also a problem
with this analogy insofar as it reimports into Western politics a
trope that demonizes all critics, or those who aren’t hard-line
supporters of the arms buildup, as latter-day “appeasers.”

RS
The tendency you mention is even worse than it was in the first Cold War,
because back then there was at least some diversity and debate. I’ve
mentioned De Gaulle’s France, and within West Germany, there was
the Ostpolitik line of change through engagement, beginning even in the early
1960s. What’s so shocking today is that there are so few voices in opposition.
Instead, we have this endless trumpeting of the unity of the Atlantic powers.
Unity is only a good thing if it’s united around a sensible policy, not if it’s an
echo chamber of false analysis talking about plucky little Ukraine facing up to
Russia as a revisionist power. Germany is to be commended to its approach to
history, but there’s nothing more dangerous than misapplying that to a
different historical moment. Any idea of talking about engagement — classic
German policy — and even the pushing forward of Nord Stream 2 is
considered “appeasement” of Russia.

This is a complete misunderstanding of where we are today. Putin does not

wish to recreate a Soviet empire. Our defense minister in Britain, Ben
Wallace, said this week that Putin is an ethnonationalist. This couldn’t be
more mistaken: Russia today has at least 150 major nationalities. Putin has
been condemning ethnonationalism endlessly: it would tear the country apart.
So, if Western politicians get the basic things wrong, they’ll also get the big
geopolitical things wrong.

So, my view is that this present situation is far more dangerous because
there’s just a few brave souls out there who are condemning it. I’m delighted
to see the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft has developed; there’s a
few people in the United States, shockingly few in the United Kingdom —
and I think the tide has turned in Germany too, especially with the Greens,
who are just Clintonian liberal interventionists of the worst order — Cold War
hawks.

This endless reductio ad Hitlerum is just nonsense.

Foreign policy should always be a balance between interests and values. If
Russia was just willy-nilly wanting to invade and suppress Ukrainian
democracy, then I’d be the first to support Ukraine. But that’s not what we’re
talking about. Putin’s so-called revisionism is not of an Adolf Hitler sort. This
endless, even implicit, reductio ad Hitlerum is just nonsense in this case.
When Putin came to power, he even said Russia would join NATO. The elite
and the leaders in Russia are rational. They’re not trying to recreate an empire.
They’re simply saying, “Look, our back is to the wall. Listen to us.”

The solution is very simple: neutrality for Ukraine. No one is taking it over.
Putin has supported the Minsk II agreement, which is a framework for the
return of the Donbass to Ukrainian sovereignty. So, where is the empire in
that? Today, there are 2.5 million people in the Donbass with their own views.
Putin initially mobilized because Ukraine has 100,000 troops also on the
border, with the Turkish drone missiles that showed their efficacy in the
second Nagorno-Karabakh war last year between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
So, there was genuine alarm in Moscow that they could do what Croatia did in
Operation Storm, in attacking the Serbian enclaves way back in the mid-
1990s. It’s a complicated situation, but the basic lines are fairly simple and
clear.

DB
Earlier, you compared this situation to a “Cuban Missile Crisis in
slow motion.” In that case, there was a sort of mutually
acceptable face-saving through de-escalation on both sides. Is
that the likely outcome here: another round of the Normandy talks
or of the Minsk agreements?

RS
There’s talk of a new Joe Biden–Vladimir Putin summit, possibly as early as
this coming week, which I very much welcome. And negotiations are
important in all of this. My view is it’s 50-50. I think people haven’t
understood that we were lucky in October 1962 because we had basically
sensible leaders, above all Jack Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and back
channels and so on. I think there’s almost none of this now and that we’re
closer to a genuine conflict. The West and, of course, the British are just
blundering in there, adding fuel to the flames; even the Germans are not
giving overflight permission for British forces and equipment flying to
Ukraine.

I think it could go either way. The Russians can’t just stand down now
without anything, and the West is offering almost nothing. At the margins,
they are engaging, which is good. Making some minor offers — also good.
But this isn’t on the necessary scale. The Russians are now saying we need to
go back to the Gorbachev agenda of sorting out a European peace order.

You mentioned that each country can make their choice; but the other half of
the peace order established in 1990 was that security is indivisible. The
Russians are saying, “Guys, where’s our security? We’ve been left on the
outside.”
Now we’re closer to war. I don’t think that means an occupation of Ukraine.
More probably, it would mean long-distance artillery, air strikes, and so on to
try to degrade Ukrainian forces and get the West into serious negotiations. So
far, they’ve been going through the motions, but there has to be some sort of
declaration. The Cuban crisis was resolved by concessions so both sides could
save face. Today, we need not just face-saving, but substantive moves.

NFTs Are, Quite Simply, Bullshit

BY
LUKE SAVAGE
NFTs are emblematic of capitalism’s growing retreat from
productive activity — and the wealthy’s desire to extend
their dominion into the digital ether. They’re worse than
useless.

People walk by a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT billboard in Times Square in New York
City. (Noam Galai / Getty Images)
Sometimes a single image or episode capturing triumph, tragedy, or disaster
sums up the spirit of a moment better than prose ever could. In pondering the
most iconic frames in American history, several obvious candidates come to
mind: the flag raising on Iwo Jima; the beaming face of a relaxed John F.
Kennedy seconds before he met an assassin’s bullet; Neil Armstrong moved
to tears in the cockpit of Apollo 11 following communion with the infinite on
the surface of the Moon. Though it may never be elevated to the same
illustrious perch, it’s difficult to think of anything quite so evocative or
emblematic of our own stupendously stupid time than this week’s sublimely
bizarre segment of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon featuring Paris
Hilton.

True to the genre, most of the conversation between Hilton and Fallon is
classic late-night schtick, the kind of mindlessly innocuous banter you idly
catch out of one eye while falling asleep or stumble upon after giving up on
Netflix for the third time in two hours. Things then quickly take a turn for the
weird when Fallon asks about Hilton’s NFT hobby (Hilton, incidentally an
early pioneer in the postmodern commodification of the self, is currently
ranked at #7 in Forbes’ NFT Top 50), and the two carry out what can only be
described as a sort of a scripted infomercial somewhere between low-effort
celebrity ad read and probable hostage video.

As vaguely dystopian mad libs go, “Paris Hilton Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT”
is already about as emblematically 2022 as it gets. Channeled through Hilton
and Fallon’s hilariously strained delivery, however — watch the clip for
yourself and you’ll see it’s easy enough to imagine that the host is taking his
cues from masked gunmen holding placards just off screen — the whole thing
soon passes into an entirely new realm of the bizarre. Here’s a short sample:

FALLON: [Since you were last on the show] Forbes has named you one of the top 50
most influential people in the NFT space, so congrats on that.

HILTON: Thank you, I’m so proud. I love being a part of this community and being a
voice and sharing my platform and just getting the word out there. Cause I think it’s just
such an incredible thing to be a part of.

FALLON: Yeah, I jumped in.

HILTON: I know, I heard. I’m so happy I taught you what they were.

FALLON: You did, you taught me what’s up and then I bought an ape.

HILTON: I got an ape too, because I saw you on the show with Beeple and he said you
got on MoonPay so I went and I copied you and did the same thing.

There’s plenty more in this vein, the two showing off their respective ape
JPEGs before Hilton announces an Oprah-style giveaway for the blockchain
era and gifts everyone in the audience with her latest NFT, declaring the
moment “iconic” as the show cuts to break.

Non-Fungible Bullshit
Beginning at some point in 2021, the Non-Fungible Token — the latest
cryptocurrency-adjacent fad to sweep the nation — was suddenly everywhere.
As if by way of some unknowable alchemic process, it seemed, people were
somehow turning a profit by trading thoroughly unremarkable clip art images
while others were inexplicably shelling out big to claim their title deeds.

NFTS are the latest symptom of a decadent and increasingly post-democratic

consensus resting on little more than predatory rent-seeking and boundless
commodification.
Celebrities and social media influencers can’t shut up about
them. From Serena Williams and Logan Paul to Matt Damon and William
Shatner, the NFT craze quickly transcended generations and swept up an
eclectic cavalcade of the rich and famous in its wake. (Jimmy Fallon,
incidentally, spent more than $200,000 on the Bored Ape NFT that now
graces his Twitter profile.) Beeple, name-dropped by Paris Hilton in her
Fallon segment, fetched more than $3.5 million in an NFT auction. Ape NFTs
have been “stolen” in digital heists. One B-list reality star has even gotten in
the action by monetizing her own farts (these NFTs, incidentally, come with
the tagline: “Be part of history with the first ever generative Fart Jar NFT
collection — Imagine the smell!”)

If you’re not already immersed in this glorified Pokémon card ponzi scheme,
it’s all a little perplexing, and you may be wondering what any of it actually
means. In essence, an NFT gives you exclusive ownership over a digital
object of some kind (images, songs, tweets, and virtually anything else can be
turned into an NFT).

On its face, buying one can be a bit like buying an original artwork, though
with digital usage rights and stored on a blockchain. You can’t, in other
words, actually hold it in your hands like a poster or painting. The NFT
market being a kind of property rights Wild West, some have been converted
into tokens without their author’s knowledge or consent. Still more incredibly,
the original media object almost always remains totally accessible to anyone
online — essentially rendering the whole premise of exclusivity moot (except
in the abstract sense of “bragging rights”).

In a word, NFTs are bullshit. And, like most forms of bullshit in America —
think WeWork, the Fyre Festival, or any number of other venture capital-
hatched disruption rackets — they’ve come packaged in a phony populist
language of community and an even phonier rhetoric of innovation.

Like cryptocurrency, it’s hard to make a case for their actual use value and,
like the very dumbest Silicon Valley startups and multilevel marketing
scams, they’re best understood as speculative investments in which a
privileged few can wring money from something of no redeeming social
benefit. The majority, in fact, are about as useful as trash. As Vulture’s
Rebecca Alter put it, most NFTs “are about as valuable as a QR code on a
Coke bottle cap that sends you to a dead link to an mp3 download.”

Value in any recognizable sense, suffice it to say, is not really the point.

The NFT boom, fittingly enough, has coincided quite directly with a period of
particularly grotesque collective hardship and surging inequality. As both a
threat to public health and an historic economic disruption, the COVID era
has been an extraordinarily difficult time for many working and middle class
Americans, but a veritable land of milk and honey for its corporate overlords
and lumpen bourgeoisie.

Like most forms of bullshit in America, NFTs have come packaged in a phony
populist language of community and an even phonier rhetoric of innovation.
Events of recent years have been the best occasion in decades to reimagine the
fundamentals of American society and transform the economy into something
other than a handful of hedge funds and tech monopolies sitting on top of each
other inside a trench coat. Instead, the country’s bipartisan ruling class opted
to greet mass death with a dollop of inadequate and temporary social
protections while its criminally undertaxed ultrarich were left to seek out
novel ways of profiting from their own money and new totems of their elite
status.

Nothing has been more symbolic of this trajectory than NFTs, the latest
symptom of a decadent and increasingly post-democratic consensus resting on
little more than predatory rent-seeking and boundless commodification. As
the New Republic’s Jacob Silverman put it last year:

NFTs reflect a view of the world in which anything can be monetized, even if its value
is entirely specious. Having exhausted traditional investments like property and stocks
— as well as boutique services like concierge doctors or privileged access to the
COVID-19 vaccine — the country’s idle elites are now seeking to expand their financial
footprint to cover, well, anything to which they wish to lay claim. . . .  It’s the
financialization of everything, with practically anything eligible to be tokenized,
chopped up into tranches, converted into securities that intrepid day traders could buy
and sell.

In effect, a political economy that has eschewed even the thinnest notions of
social contract or public good in its elevation of the market — along with a
manufacturing base that once actually built things — is laying the groundwork
for a new and more expansive kind of post-materialist commodification.

In this latest incarnation of our second gilded age, speculative bubbles based
in the digital ether will help affix an ersatz sheen of innovation and progress to
a top-heavy economy structurally incapable of delivering the real kinds. As
digital commodities, NFTs thus signal the ongoing descent of capitalism into
pure simulacrum and the growing remove of its greatest beneficiaries from
anything even resembling productive activity.

As a civilizational metaphor on the other hand, they’re perhaps the perfect

symbol of a political order so dismally unjust and a regressive culture so
thoroughly exhausted that even the rich people brandishing them on late-night
TV struggle to do so with any conviction.
Why Are Politicians and Media
Fanning the Flames of War Panic
in Ukraine?
BY
BRANKO MARCETIC
Washington officials have been terrifying the world with
warnings of an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine. But
everyone else in a position to know seems pretty sure there
isn’t one coming.
Joe Biden speaking with supporters at a town hall hosted by the Iowa Asian and Latino
Coalition at Plumbers and Steamfitters Local 33 in Des Moines, Iowa, on August 8,
2019. (Gage Skidmore / Flickr)
Our winter issue is coming soon in print and online. Subscribe at a special
rate and don’t miss it.
When Debts Become Unpayable, They Should Be Forgiven
Michael Hudson
Jeremy Corbyn: Climate Crisis Is a Class Issue
Jeremy Corbyn
Fassbinder and the Red Army Faction
Meagan Day
R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe Talks to Jacobin
Michael Stipe
The world has been gripped for the past two months by the Ukraine crisis,
with Moscow seemingly poised to invade Ukraine at any moment, and US
officials calling for war — even nuclear strikes — in response. Washington
has been flooding the former Soviet republic with weapons and other military
aid ever since, with $200 million worth starting to arrive this week, and
Democratic lawmakers are now scrambling to send another $500 million of
military aid on top of that. It’s one of several measures meant to deter or, in
the worst-case scenario, defend against a Russian invasion that’s been sold as
“imminent” since the start of December.

With so much excitement happening, you’d be forgiven for missing the

serious doubt that such an invasion is even going to happen. While politicians
and media in the United States, UK, and other North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) countries have been hyping the prospect of war,
officials inside of Ukraine — the country being potentially invaded — have
been telling people a different story.

Just yesterday, the split led to a minor diplomatic rift after a phone
call between Joe Biden and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, which
Kyiv signaled in advance it would use to ask Washington to tamp down the
rhetoric. While what exactly was said remains a point of dispute, the
substance is that Biden believes a Russian invasion could come in February,
while Zelensky holds that it’s far from clear and that the Russian threat is
“dangerous but ambiguous.”

This isn’t new. Last week, just hours before Biden told the White House press
corps he thought Russian president Vladimir Putin would “move in” because
he “has to do something,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky
was urging his people to “take a deep breath” and “calm down,” assuring them
things were “under control.”

“The risks have not just existed for a day, and they have not become bigger.
The only thing that has become bigger is the hype around them,” he said,
adding that media should strive to “be methods of mass information and not
mass hysteria.” Later, after Washington and the UK evacuated their Ukrainian
embassies, Zelensky thanked Charles Michel, president of the European
Council, and leaders of European Union countries for not following suit.

Zelensky is not the only Ukrainian official to strike this note. In the same call,
Ukraine’s foreign minister told Michel the evacuations were “premature and a
display of excessive caution.” He later told reporters that the number of
Russian troops amassed “is insufficient for a full-scale offensive along the
entire Ukrainian border,” and that they “lack some important military
indicators and systems to conduct such a large full-scale offensive.”

“We can say 100 times a day invasion is imminent, but this doesn’t change the
situation on the ground,” he insisted.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s defense minister earlier told the country’s parliament

that “as of today, there are no grounds to believe” an invasion is imminent,
adding, “No need to have your bags packed.” The secretary of the National
Security and Defense Council, roughly the Ukrainian equivalent of the US
president’s National Security Council, has similarly played down the need for
panic, telling the BBC that “if something is not there, it is not necessary to say
that it is,” and refusing to affirm the US media portrayal of an imminent
Russian invasion, saying that “the threat from Russia to our country always
exists” — even charging that such panic-mongering helps Putin’s
machinations in Ukraine.

In other words, we have Ukraine’s president, its foreign and defense ministers,
and a top national security official all urging calm, while denying there’s
sufficient evidence to expect a coming Russian invasion, contrary to the tidal
wave of messaging from US officials and the press. Of course, you could
dismiss this as a country’s leadership playing down a threat they know is real
to prevent panic and disorder. But they’re not the only ones saying it.

Earlier this week, the Center for Defense Strategies — a think tank headed by
a former Ukrainian defense minister and on whose board sit a variety of other
defense and diplomatic officials from both Ukraine and the United States
— published an analysis of the risks of a Russian invasion. Its conclusion?
That “a full-scale invasion capturing most or all of Ukraine in the near future
seems unlikely,” citing the insufficient number of Russian troops and a
number of other indicators, including the lack of mobilization of medical
infrastructure and strategic military units. (There have been some more troop
movements since then).

European governments have said likewise. The EU’s top

diplomat accused Washington and Westminster of “dramatizing” the situation,
saying that the EU would not evacuate its embassy “because we do not know
any specific reasons.” The Dutch embassy in Kyiv similarly told
the Telegraph it saw “no reason” to do so, while a French official said they’d
“observed the same movements” but “cannot deduce from all this that an
offensive is imminent.” And just today, Germany’s spy chief also contradicted
the Washington line, telling Reuters he “believe[s] that the decision to attack
has not yet been made.”

So, what exactly is going on here? There are any number of scenarios. It could
be, as some analysts speculate, that Zelensky has manipulated the situation to
gain a flood of military aid and advance his push to enter NATO, and now,
having gotten part of what he wanted and with the situation escalating, he’s
pulling back. Perhaps Washington really is privy to information others aren’t
and acting on that basis, or perhaps the Biden administration is
overcompensating for the president’s earlier rhetorical flub. Maybe Putin
really is planning to invade, or maybe he’s just engineered a crisis to bring
Washington to the negotiating table, shore up Russia’s great power status, or
both.

Whatever the case, there are clearly good reasons to treat with some caution
the panic-mongering around this issue that’s endemic to US politicians and
the media, both of which have deep financial and institutional ties to the
military-industrial complex that stands to profit from increased tensions. And
all of this makes the current Democratic rush to flood Ukraine with hundreds
of millions of dollars in military assistance and even preemptively sanction
Russia, a strategically and diplomatically self-defeating move, appear rash and
overzealous — or worse, a ploy to funnel more money to war industry donors.
Through it all, there’s no thought given to the potential long-term implications
of flooding a country filled with neo-Nazi militias — some of them integrated
into its military and law enforcement, and who have trained and inspired
violent far-right extremists in the West — with weapons, training, and other
support. Together with Biden still refusing to negotiate over limiting NATO’s
expansion, an imminent Russian invasion may not be certain now, but
Washington may well be planting the seeds for future conflict.

Over the holidays, I watched the documentary Saving Capitalism, which

features Robert Reich's vision of how to save our economic system. While the
film could have been called "out of touch" when it was released in 2017, in this
3rd year of Covid pandemic I would describe it as absolute bologna. 

Monarchy had sincere critics who pleaded with the King to save his kingdom by
[Reich’s words] “changing the rules," by making the monarchy "work for the
people." Feudalism and slavery had the same sorts of critics who pleaded with
lords and masters to "treat" serfs and slaves far better as necessary to save
their systems. Colonists in British North America pleaded with King George III to
treat colonies better to save the empire.

Reich does this for US capitalism today, but he takes such criticisms an
important step further: he explicitly appeals for active mass political intervention
to save capitalism by changing its rules. When Washington, Jefferson et al
likewise called for mass political intervention back in 1774, they had come to a
different goal. They did not seek to save King George - a feudal residual - or the
British empire. They sought and made a revolution against them.

But Reich is wrong when he says "nobody is listening" to the mass

dissatisfaction with capitalism. Everyone is listening but they draw different
conclusions. One response is the rise of Donald Trump and a reactionary
tradition that seeks political gain by fake symbolic gestures to mass
dissatisfaction while it shores up the system: it is saving capitalism in its way.
Another response is to use the government to correct the worst abuses that
breed mass dissatisfaction; here we find Buffett's tax reforms, Biden's Build
Back Better plan, etc. These are all efforts to save capitalism by making careful
accommodations to mass grievances while shoring up the system. Reich
criticizes the inadequate level and extent of most accommodations proposed to
date by fellow Democrats to his right. He wants to go much further in such
accommodations.
History is full of examples where all such critics failed to save what they had
hoped to save. We know that because monarchy, feudalism and slavery barely
exist any more. Perhaps their declines were postponed by listening to their
critics on a few occasions. But eventually, all fell when the movement to save
shifted and became a movement to surpass, when it became revolutionary.

Thus the question in the US today has already moved beyond Reich's
framework. It is no longer whether US capitalism can be saved and how best to
do that. It is: why save a system that works this way and resists basic needed
changes demanded by today's political realities and by those who seek to save
the system? 

In the spirit of Washington and Jefferson (and important others), the issue today
has become different and is captured in three short sentences. System change
is long overdue to come to the front of our agenda. We can do better than the
capitalist system just as those before us knew they could do better than
monarchy, slavery, feudalism, etc. The key task today is to work out the broad
outlines of a better system and the best strategy to get us there.

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