Liberal institutions, including universities, traditionally surrender without a fight to the dictates of autocrats. Ours are no exception.

Chris Hedges
March 24 2025

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I was not surprised when Columbia University’s interim president Katrina Armstrong caved to the demands of the Trump administration. She agreed to ban face masks or face coverings, prohibit protests in academic buildings and create an internal security force of 36 New York City Police officers empowered to “remove individuals from campus and/or arrest them when appropriate.” She has also surrendered the autonomy of academic departments, as demanded by the Trump administration, by appointing a new senior vice provost to “review” the university’s department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies.

Elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Columbia or Yale, were created to train and perpetuate the plutocracy. They are not and never have been centers of cutting-edge intellectual thought or hospitable to dissidents and radicals. They cloak themselves in the veneer of moral probity and intellectualism but cravenly serve political and economic power. This is their nature. Don’t expect it to change, even as we fall headlong into authoritarianism.

Armstrong, like most of the heads of our universities, is fruitlessly humiliating herself. She would, I expect, happily make space on her office wall to hang an oversized portrait of the president. But what she does not know, and what history has taught us, is that no appeasement is sufficient with autocrats. She, and the rest of the liberal elites, groveling abjectly in an attempt to accommodate their new masters, will be steadily replaced or dominated by buffoonish goons such as those seeded throughout the Trump administration.

The Department of Education has warned 60 colleges and universities that they could face “potential enforcement actions,” if they do not comply with federal civil rights law that protects students from discrimination based on race or nationality, which includes antisemitism. Columbia, stripped of $400 million in federal grants, is desperately trying to restore the funding. I doubt it will work. Those mounting these assaults against universities intend to turn them into indoctrination machines. The so-called campaign against antisemitism is simply a cynical tool being used to achieve that end.

The warning follows an open letter signed by 200 faculty members on Feb. 3 urging Columbia University implement measures to “protect Jewish students.” Amongst their demands are the removal of Professor Joseph Massad who teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at the university and beginning a Title VI investigation against him, that the university adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of Israel with racism against Jews, and the university hire tenured pro-Israel faculty.

These institutions of privilege — I attended Harvard and have taught at Columbia and Princeton — have always been complicit in the crimes of their times. They did not, until the world around them changed, speak out against the slaughter of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the crushing of labor and socialist organizations at the turn of the twentieth century and the purging of institutions, including the academy, during the Red Scare in the 1920s and 1930s, and later the witch hunts under McCarthyism. They turnedon their students protesting the war in Vietnam in the 1960s as viciously as they are turning on them now.

Many of the dregs of the Trump administration are products of these elite academic institutions. I can assure you their children will also attend these schools despite their public denunciations. Rep. Elise Stefanik, who humiliated in congressional hearings the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, graduated from Harvard. Vice President JD Vance graduated from Yale Law School. Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth went to Princeton University and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who has ordered a review of grants to universities from his agency over allegations of antisemitism — graduated from Harvard.

Professor Katherine Franke, who taught at Columbia Law School for 25 years, recently lost her position at the university for defending Columbia students’ right to protest in favor of a ceasefire of the Israeli slaughter in Gaza and for Columbia University to divest from Israel. She also condemned the spraying of pro-Palestinian protesters on the campus with a toxic chemical that left students hospitalized.

“Part of why I think Colombia was such an easy target — and it’s not just Columbia, I think this is true for Harvard, for Yale, for the elite universities — is that the boards of trustees are no longer made up of people who are involved in education — committed to the educational mission, in some way professionally or otherwise — see themselves as custodians of the special role that the academy plays in a democracy,” she told me.

“Instead, they are hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, corporate lawyers and in our case, arms manufacturers as well.” She went on:

“And they see that responsibility is to protect only the endowment. I often describe Columbia — which is the largest residential landlord in New York City — as a real estate holding operation that has a side hustle of teaching classes. It has evolved over time into just a business that enjoys nonprofit status. And so when the pressure started here, there were no voices on the boards of trustees to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we have to be the front line of resistance.’ Or at a minimum, we have to defend our academic mission.’ When I was sitting in my living room watching [former] president Minouche Shafik testify before that House committee…I was upset because they mentioned me, but more importantly, the fact that president Shafik did not even begin to defend Columbia, its faculty, its students, our project, our history of being one of the premier universities in the world. Instead, she groveled before a bully. And we all know that when you grovel before a bully, it encourages the bully. And that’s exactly what’s happened here up until today, where they’re still negotiating with the Trump administration on terms that the administration has set. And this university, I think, will never be the same if it survives at all.”

You can see my interview with Professor Franke here.

Universities and colleges across the country have shut down free speech and squandered their academic integrity. They have brutalized, arrested, suspended and expelled faculty, administrators and students that decry the genocide. They have called police to their campuses — in the case of Columbia three times — to arrest students, often charging them with trespassing. Following the lead of their authoritarian masters they subjected students to internal surveillance. Columbia University, out front on the repression of its students, banned Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace a month after Israel’s genocide in Gaza had begun in November 2023, when both organizations called for a ceasefire, long before the protests and encampments began.

Columbia’s violent suppression of protests and decision to lock down its campus, which is now surrounded by security checkpoints, paved the way for the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, who was a graduate student at the School of International Public Affairs. He is a legal permanent resident. He did not commit a crime. But the university administration had already demonized and criminalized Khalil and the other students, many of whom are Jewish, who dared to protest the mass slaughter in Gaza.

The video — shot by his wife on March 8 — of Khalil being taken away by plainclothes federal agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who did not identify themselves, is a chilling reminder of the secret police abductions I witnessed on the streets of Santiago during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

The law in authoritarian states protects the criminality of the powerful. It revokes due process, basic freedoms and the rights of citizenship. It is an instrument of repression. It is a very small step from the stripping of rights from a legal resident holding a green card to the stripping of rights of any citizen. This is what is coming.

Khalil was ostensibly arrested under the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act. It gives the Secretary of State the power to deport foreign nationals if he has “reasonable ground[s] to believe” their presence or activities in the U.S. “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” It was used to deny entry to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Márquez and the British author Doris Lessing. It was also used to deport the poet and essayist Margaret Randall and civil rights activist and journalist Claudia Jones. Senator Patrick McCarran, an open admirer of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and a rabid antisemite, formulated the act to target not only dissidents and communists, but also Jews. When the law was enacted, it was used to ban Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors from entering the U.S. due to their alleged sympathies with the Soviet Union.

“The irony of that is not lost on any of us, that these are laws that are at their core, deeply antisemitic, that are now being deployed in the name of protecting Jewish citizens or our foreign policy goals with the state of Israel,” Franke said. “And that’s the cynicism of this administration. They don’t give a darn that there’s that history. They’re looking for every piece of power that they can get, every law, no matter how ugly that law may be. Even the laws that interned Japanese people during World War Two. I’m sure they would be more than happy to use those at some point.”

James Luther Adams, my mentor at Harvard Divinity School, was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 until he was arrested and deported by the Gestapo. He worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by dissident clergy such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams saw how swiftly and cravenly German universities, which like ours were considered some of the best in the world, surrendered to the dictates of fascism and self-destructed.

The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich, a close friend of Adams, was fired from his teaching post and blacklisted ten weeks after the Nazis came to power in January 1933. Tillich’s book “The Socialist Decision” was immediately banned by the Nazis. Tillich, a Lutheran pastor, along with the sociologist Karl Mannheim and the philosopher Max Horkheimer, who wrote “Eclipse of Reason” which examines the rise of authoritarianism, were branded as “enemies of the Reich,” blacklisted and forced into exile. The 1933 “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” saw all Jewish professors dismissed. The vast majority of academics cowered in fear or, as with the case of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, joined the Nazi Party, which saw him appointed as the Rector of Freiburg University.

Adams saw in the Christian Right disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi. He was the first person I heard refer to the Christian Right as “Christian fascists.” He also warned us about universities and academics which, if the country fell into authoritarianism, would debase themselves to protect their status and privileges. Few would speak out or defy authority.

“If the Nazis took over America, 60 percent of the Harvard faculty would happily begin their lectures with the Nazi salute,” he quipped.

And this is where we are. None of the liberal institutions, including the universities, the commercial media and the Democratic Party, will defend us. They will remain supine, hypocritically betray their supposed principles and commitment to democracy or willingly transform themselves into apologists for the regime. The purges and silencing of our most courageous and accomplished intellectuals, writers, artists and journalists — begun before Trump’s return to the White House — is being expedited.

Resistance will be left to us. Enemies of the state.

First published on The Chris Hedges Report.

Shared via Creative Commons.

MARCH 4, 2025

MELVIN GOODMAN

“It was a sickening spectacle: the man who tried to upend democracy bullying the man who is fighting for democracy.

– Maureen Dowd, “Trump is Rootin’ for Putin,” The New York Times, March 2, 2025.)

“Trump barked at Zelensky: You’ve got to be more thankful because…you don’t have the cards.  With us, you have the cards, but without us, you don’t have any cards.  Pretty rich for a draft dodger to lecture a man whose name has become synonymous with wartime bravery.”

–Dowd, March 2, 2025.

In the summer of 1938, it was increasingly obvious to the international community that the German invasion of Czechoslovakia was being planned in Berlin.  The Czechs had an alliance with the Soviet Union, but that wasn’t expected to save them.  British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain knew that, if France decided to defend Czechoslovakia, he would have to join in.  Britain was in no position to wage a general European war, so Chamberlain boarded a plane for the first time in his life and flew to Munich to placate Adolf Hitler.

Chamberlain’s concessions were insufficient for the Fuehrer, so he made a second trip only to find greater German demands.  Additional meetings were held, as Hitler and his cohorts launched violent tirades against the Czechs.  Hitler then held a public rally at which, according to historian William Shirer, Hitler was “shouting and shrieking in the worst state of excitement I’ve ever seen him in…with a fanatical fire in his eyes.”

I recalled these odious events while watching the video of the March 1 meeting in the Oval Office in which a vile President Donald Trump and an even more vile J.D. Vance abused and tormented Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with their shouts and threats.  There is no question that Trump is a dangerously disordered president who has already diminished the United States on the world stage and caused significant domestic damage.  There is no point in discussing Vance, the worst kind of toady and sycophant.

The mainstream media will not say it, but Trump is grossly deranged and represents a threat to the American way of life and to Americans themselves.  He is driven by a pathological hated of anyone who has ever challenged him and veneration for those autocrats who control all around them.  Meanwhile, the servile Washington Post under the active leadership of Jeff Bezos, was critical of Zelensky because he “took the bait and turned punchy.”  Bezos’s Post also praised Trump because he “sees himself as a mediator between Russia and Ukraine.”

In holding a gun to Zelensky’s head, we are reminded of Trump’s exchanges with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and his multiple references to having a “bigger button,” the nuclear button.  In the summer of 2017, Trump’s first term, he threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”  Similar to the decision to remove Zelensky from the White House, Trump abruptly cancelled talks with Kim Jong-un.  “Based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement,” Trump wrote to Kim, any meeting would be “inappropriate at this time.”

Several weeks ago, Trump threatened the Gazans unless Hamas released American hostages.  Trump favors the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, which supports the Israeli right-wing movement, and he is encouraging Israel to annex the West Bank.  These events would be dramatic as dystopian fiction, but this is America’s reality at the moment.  Indeed, it is a global reality.

Unlike Trump’s first term, when there were some adults or moderates in the room such as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, White House chief of staff John Kelly, and others, there now are only toadies surrounding the most unethical and deranged president in the history of the United States.  Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who supported military and economic aid to Ukraine as a senator from Florida and once referred to Zelensky as a “modern-day Churchill in a T-shirt,” went on CNN to thank Trump for “standing up for America in a way that no President has ever had the courage to do before.”  The following day, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz went on national television to demand an apology from Zelensky. The thought that Rubio and Waltz will be leading U.S. negotiations with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, an experienced and deft diplomat, is a part of this nauseating series of events.

In ten minutes in the Oval Office, Trump and Vance have managed to produce an embarrassing erosion of American credibility and decency.  They have opened the door wider to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s campaign of terrorism against Ukraine, and have given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even greater carte blanche in conducting his terror campaign on the West Bank and his occupation of southern Lebanon and southern Syria.  China’s Xi Jinping may now believe the door is open to a military campaign against Taiwan that will not have to deal with U.S. involvement.  Trump’s outrageous purge of senior military leaders as well as China’s military drills off the coast of Australia and Vietnam, including live-fire drills in the Gulf of Tonkin, create additional worries about the direction of events in the Indo-Pacific.

Nearly 80 years ago, the United States initiated a magnanimous act, the Marshall Plan, to revive the economies and societies of Europe in the wake of the Second World War.  It is believed incorrectly that Winston Churchill called the Marshall Plan the “most unsordid act in history.”  Actually, Churchill was talking about the Lend-Lease Bill and President Franklin Roosevelt’s courageous decision to provide military aid to a beleaguered Britain.

Just as Lend-Lease and the Marshall Plan were designed to assist Western democracies, U.S. and European support for Ukraine was similarly inspired to enable the weakest European nation to stand up to the tyranny of Vladimir Putin.  In a matter of minutes in the Oval Office, Trump and Vance have eroded the U.S. leadership of the Western democracies that has existed since the end of the Second World War.  For now, the post-war Atlantic Alliance is dead.

Nearly 240 years ago, Elizabeth Powel asked Benjamin Franklin “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”  Franklin’s response was “A republic, if you can keep it.”  Well, the republic has been compromised in a few weeks, and now we must ask if we are going to be ok as a nation.  Trump’s decisions, his appointments, and yesterday’s conduct indicate that we are not ok at the moment. In scenes reminiscent of “The Godfather,”Trump performed as a high-ranking mobster, a member of La Cosa Nostra, a consigliere of the family, who will crush anyone who challenges his version of U.S. interests.  I cannot recall an uglier scene in American diplomatic history, and most of the international community shares that view.

For the moment, Volodymyr Zelensky is the leader of the free world.  It will take serious and urgent opposition to stop Donald Trump from additional vile acts at home and abroad.  In setting up a scene to humiliate Zelensky and the Ukrainian nation, Trump has embarrassed himself and the entire nation.  In doing so, Trump has undermined 80 years of an Atlantic Alliance that protected democracy in the West and challenged autocracy and patrimony in the East.

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.

First published on CounterPunch.org.

Shared via Creative Commons.

The Vocabulary of Neoliberal Diplomacy in Today’s New Cold War

BY MICHAEL HUDSON SEPTEMBER 13, 2021

George Soros has thrown a public hissy fit over the fact that he can’t make the kind of easy money off China that he was able to make when the Soviet Union was carved up and privatized. On September 7, 2021, in his second mainstream editorial in a week, George Soros expressed his horror at the recommendation by Black Rock, the world’s largest asset manager, that financial managers should triple their investment in China. Claiming that such investment would imperil U.S. national security by helping China, Mr. Soros stepped up his advocacy of U.S. financial and trade sanctions.

China’s policy of shaping markets to promote overall prosperity, instead of letting the economic surplus be concentrated in the hands of corporate and foreign investors, is an existential threat to America’s neoliberal priorities, he spells out. President Xi’s “Common Prosperity” program “seeks to reduce inequality by distributing the wealth of the rich to the general population. That does not augur well for foreign investors.”[1] To neoliberals, that is heresy.

Criticizing China’s “abrupt cancellation of a new issue by Alibaba’s Ant group in November 2020,” and “banishment of U.S.-financed tutoring companies from China,” Mr. Soros singles out Blackstone’s co-founder Stephen Schwarzman and former Goldman Sachs President John L. Thornton for seeking to make financial returns for their investors instead of treating China as an enemy state and looming Cold War adversary:

The BlackRock initiative imperils the national security interests of the U.S. and other democracies because the money invested in China will help prop up President Xi’s regime … Congress should pass legislation empowering the Securities and Exchange Commission to limit the flow of funds to China. The effort ought to enjoy bipartisan support.

The New York Times published a prominent article defining the “Biden Doctrine” as seeing “China as America’s existential competitor; Russia as a disrupter; Iran and North Korea as nuclear proliferators, cyberthreats as ever-evolving and terrorism as spreading far beyond Afghanistan.” Against these threats, the article depicts U.S. strategy as representing “democracy,” the euphemism for countries with minimal governments leaving economic planning to Wall Street financial managers, and infrastructure in the hands of private investors, not provided at subsidized prices. Nations [who] restrict monopolies and related rent-seeking are accused of being autocratic.

The problem, of course, is that just as the United States, Germany and other nations grew into industrial powers in the 19^th and 20^th century by government-sponsored infrastructure, progressive taxation, and anti-monopoly legislation, the post-1980 rejection of these policies has led them into economic stagnation for the 99 Percent burdened by debt deflation and rising rentier overhead paid to the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sectors. China is thriving by following precisely the policies by which the former leading industrial nations grew rich before suffering from the neoliberal financialization disease. This contrast prompts the article’s thrust, summarized in its summary of what it hopes will become a Congressionally supported Biden Doctrine of escalating a New Cold War against non-neoliberalized economies, juxtaposing U.S.-sponsored liberal-democratic imperialism against foreign socialism:

Last month, Mr. Blinken warned that China and Russia were ‘making the argument in public and in private that the United States is in decline – so it’s better to cast your lot with their authoritarian visions for the world than with our democratic one.[2]

Mr. Soros had seen the ending of the Cold War open the path for him and other foreign investors to use “shock therapy” to provide easy pickings in Russia, followed by the much broader Asian Crisis of 1997 as a grab-bag opportunity to buy up the most lucrative rent-yielding assets. He is upset that President Xi is not emulating Boris Yeltsin and letting a client kleptocracy emerge in China to carve up Russia’s economy – which made Russia’s stock market the world’s darling for a few years, 1995-97.

Right after the Asia Crisis, Bill Clinton’s administration admitted China to the World Trade Organization, giving U.S. investors and importers access to low-priced labor able to undersell U.S. industrial labor. That helped stop U.S. wage gains, while China used foreign investment as a means of upgrading its technology and labor to become economically self-reliant. It has not let its monetary system or social organization become financially dependent on “markets” functioning as vehicles for the U.S. control that Mr. Soros hoped would occur when he began investing in China.

China recognized from the beginning that its insistence on maintaining control of its economy – steering it to promote overall prosperity, not to enrich a client oligarchy fronting for a foreign investor class – would create political opposition from U.S. Cold War ideologues. China therefore sought allies from Wall Street, offering profit-making opportunities for Goldman Sachs and other investors whose self-interest has indeed led them to oppose anti-China policies.

But China’s success has creating so many billionaires that it is now moving to curtail exorbitant wealth. That policy has sharply cut prices for the leading Chinese stocks, prompting Mr. Soros to warn U.S. investors to bail out. His hope is that this will bring China to heel and reverse its policy of raising living standards at the expense of sending its economic gains to U.S. and other foreign investors.

The reality is that China does not need U.S. or other foreign money to develop. The Peoples’ Bank of China can create all the money that the domestic economy needs [MMT], while its export trade already is flooding it with dollars and pushing up its exchange rate.

John McCain characterized Russia as a gas station with atom bombs (neglecting to acknowledge that it is now the world’s largest grain exporter, no longer dependent on the West for its food supply – thanks largely to U.S.-sponsored trade sanctions). The corollary image is the United States as a financialized and monopolized economy with atom bombs and cyber threats, in danger of becoming a failed state like the old Soviet Union but threatening to bring the entire world economy down with it if other countries do not subsidize its debt-ridden New Cold War economy.

Presenting itself as the world’s leading democracy despite its financial oligarchy at home and its support of client oligarchies abroad, the United States has consolidated financial power in the wake of the 2008 junk-mortgage and bank-fraud.

Policy making and resource allocation have passed out of the hands of meaningful electoral politics into those of the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector, and what Ray McGovern has called MICIMATT – the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academic-Think Tank complex, including the major foundations and NGOs. These institutions seek to concentrate income and wealth in the hands of a FIRE-sector oligarchy just as the Roman Senate blocked reform with veto power over popular legislation, and Europe’s upper houses of parliament such as Britain’s House of Lords used similar chokehold power to resist government control in the public interest.

The rise of U.S.-sponsored neoliberalism means that the 19^th-century’s fight to free markets from predatory finance sponsoring rentier parasitism and has failed. This failure is celebrated as a victory for the rule of law, democracy, property rights and even free markets over the authority of public power to regulate private wealth-seeking. Integrating the global economy along unipolar lines enabling U.S. financial interests and those of allied NATO economies to appropriate the most profitable and highest rent-yielding assets of foreign countries is idealized as the natural evolution of civilization, not as the road to neoliberal serfdom and debt peonage embodied in what U.S. officials call the Rule of Law.

What is the Rule of Law?

The United States refuses to join the World Court, or any international organization in which it does not have veto power. And it simply withdraws from international treaties and agreements that it has signed if its vested interests believe that these no longer serve their interests. This always has been U.S. policy, from the many treaties with Native American tribes broken by Andrew Jackson and his successors down through the U.S.-Soviet agreements ending the Cold War in 1991 broken by Bill Clinton to the treaty removing sanctions on Iran broken by Donald Trump. This policy has introduced a new term into the world’s diplomatic vocabulary to describe U.S. diplomacy: non-agreement-capable.

The evangelistic neocon administration of George W. Bush , effectively run by his Vice President Dick Cheney, followed the principle that “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” [3] To impose this reality on other countries, U.S. “intelligence” is selected, invented or censored to give the appearance of whatever reality is deemed to serve U.S. interests at any given moment of time. Past and present reality is redefined at will to provide a guide for action. Whatever U.S. diplomacy dictates is claimed to reflect the rule of law, giving the United States the right to definite what is legal and what is not when it imposes economic and military sanctions against countries that do not follow pro-American policies. The resulting dictates laying down the law are always wrapped in the rhetoric of free markets and democracy.

What is a free market?

To the classical economists, the objective of 19^th-century reform was to replace the rentier class’s political power with democratic power to create state policies to either tax away land rent and other economic rent, or to take (return) land, natural resources and natural monopolies such as transportation, communications and other basic infrastructure needs to the public domain. A free market was defined as one free from economic rent – the land rent imposed by heirs of the feudal warlord landlord class, whose economic role was purely extractive, not productive. Natural resource rent was said to belong to the public domain as national patrimony, and monopoly rent was to be prevented by keeping natural monopolies in the public domain, or firmly regulating them if privatized.

The 20^th century’s anti-classical reaction has inverted the concept of a free market, Orwellian Doublethink style, to create one “free” for rent-seekers to carve out free-lunch rent income. The result is a rentier economy in which land, natural resources and natural monopolies are privatized and, in due course, financialized to turn rent into a flow of interest payments to the financial sector as the economy is driven into debt to afford the rentier overhead and debt-financed asset-price inflation for rent-yielding assets.

The “freedom” of such markets is freedom from governments to tax away economic rent and regulate prices to limit rent extraction. An exponential growth of unearned rentier income and wealth in the hands of a sector diverts income away from the “real” production-and-consumption economy.

As for free trade, the United States also retains the right to impose tariffs at will (euphemized as “fair trade”) and levy fines and sanctions to prevent companies from being free to sell technology to China. The aim is to concentrate technological monopolies in U.S. hands. Any “proliferation” of technology (which is treated much like nuclear weaponry as a national security issue) is deemed to be “unfair” and antithetical to U.S. freedom to control the world’s trade and investment patterns in its own interest.

This attempt to promote “free markets” and “fair trade” is defended by U.S. claims to protect democracy against autocracy, and to intervene throughout the world to promote Free World members defined ipso facto as being democratic simply by virtue of being U.S. allies. Today’s New Cold War is all about maintaining and extending such a captive U.S.-oriented “free market” by force, from Henry Kissinger’s coup in Chile to impose Chicago-style “free markets” to Hillary Clinton’s coups in Ukraine’s Maidan and Honduras and her NATO-backed destruction of Libya and assassination of Qadhafi.

What is democracy?

Aristotle wrote that many constitutions appear superficially to be democratic, but actually are oligarchic. Democracy always had been the deceptive euphemism for oligarchy making itself into a hereditary aristocracy. Democracies tend to evolve into oligarchies as creditors expropriate debtors (the “rule of law” guaranteeing a hierarchy of “property rights” with creditor claims at the top of the legal pyramid).

The move toward democratic political reform in the late 19^th and early 20^thcentury was supposed to create rent-free markets. But the dynamics of political democracy have been managed in a way that blocks economic democracy. The very meaning of “democracy” is degraded to mean opposition to the government’s power to act against the oligarchic rentier One Percent on behalf of the 99 Percent. The resulting travesty of a democratic free market serves to block political attempts to use public power to promote the interests of the wage-earning population at large, and indeed of the industrial economy itself to avid financial asset stripping and debt deflation of markets.

In the language of international diplomacy, “democratic” has become a label for any pro-U.S. regime, from the Baltic kleptocracies to Latin America’s military dictatorships. Countries using state power to regulate monopolies or to tax rentier income are denounced as “autocratic,” even if they have elected heads of state. In this new Orwellian rhetoric of international diplomacy, Boris Yeltsin’s kleptocratic Russian regime was democratic, and the natural move to stop the corruption and depopulation was called “autocracy.”

What is autocracy and “authoritarianism”?

Foreign moves to defend against U.S. financial takeovers and sponsorship of client oligarchies are denounced as authoritarian. In the U.S. diplomatic vocabulary, “autocracy” refers to a government protecting the interests of its own population by resisting U.S. financial takeover of its natural resources, basic infrastructure and most lucrative monopolies.

All successful economies throughout history have been mixed public/private economies. The proper role of government is to protect economies from a rentier oligarchy from emerging to polarize the economy at the expense of the population at large. This protection requires keeping control of money and credit, land and natural resources, basic infrastructure and natural monopolies in the hands of governments.

It is oligarchies that are autocratic in blocking reforms to overrule their rent-seeking by keeping basic needs and infrastructure in the public domain. To confuse understanding, Rome’s oligarchy accused social reformers of “seeking kingship,” much as Greek oligarchies accused reformers of seeking “tyranny” – as if their reforms were merely for personal gain, not to promote general prosperity. The resulting Orwellian Doublethink is woven into the rhetoric of neoliberalism.

What is neoliberalism?

Neoliberalism is an exponentially expanding financial dynamic seeking to concentrate the world’s most profitable and highest rent-yielding resources in the hands of financial managers, mainly in the United States and its client oligarchies that act as proconsuls over foreign economies.

The liberal mass media, academia, and “think tank” lobbying institutions, policy foundations and NGOs sponsor the above-described rhetoric of free markets to create vehicles for capital flight, money laundering, tax evasion, deregulation and privatization (and the corruption that goes with emerging kleptocracies). Neoliberal doctrine depicts all public moves to protect general prosperity from the burden of rentier overhead as being authoritarian autocracy “interfering” with property rights.

What are property rights?

In today’s financialized economies “property rights” means the priority of creditor rights to foreclose on the housing, land and other property of debtors. (In antiquity that included the personal freedom of debtors condemned to debt bondage to their creditors.)

The World Bank has promoted such creditor-oriented property rights from the former Soviet Union to Latin American indigenous communities in order to privatize hitherto communal or public property, including land occupied by squatters or local communities. The idea is that once communal or public property is privatized as individual rights, it can be pledged as collateral for loans, and duly forfeited or sold under economic duress.

The effect is to concentrate property in the hands of the financial sector. That in turn leads inevitably to a failed austerity-ridden economy.

What is a failed economy?

Economies fail because of the rising power of vested interests, primarily in the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector that control most of the economies assets and wealth. A failed economy is one that cannot expand, usually as a result of becoming burdened by rising rentier overhead in the form of land rent, natural-resource rent and monopoly rent as the financial sector replaces democratically elected governments as central planner and resource allocator.

The FIRE sector is a symbiosis between finance and real estate, along with insurance. Its business plan involved a highly political dimension seeking to centralize control of money and credit creation in hereditary private hands, and to turn this economic rent. “free” from taxation, public collection or regulation, into a flow of interest. The effect of lending primarily to buyers of assets, which are pledged as collateral for loans, is not to create new means of production but to inflate asset prices for property already in place.

The resulting finance-capital gains have become the easiest way to acquire fortunes, which take the form of rent-extracting claims on the economy, not new means of production to support “real” economic prosperity and rising living standards.

Financialized economies are doomed to become failed states because the exponentially growing expansion path of debt accumulating at compound interest plus new credit creation and “quantitative easing” far exceeds the economy’s underlying growth rate of producing goods and services to carry this burden. These financial dynamics threaten to doom the U.S. and its satellite economies to become failed states.

The underlying question is whether Western civilization itself has become a failed civilization, given the roots of its legal system and concepts of property rights in oligarchic Rome. Rome’s polarized economy led to a Dark Age, which recovered by looting Byzantium and subsequently the East and new conquest of the New World and East and South Asia. For the past twenty years it has been China’s socialist growth that has primarily sustained Western prosperity. But this dynamic is being rejected, denounced as an existential threat precisely because it is successful socialism, not neoliberal exploitation.

In times past there always was some part of the globe to survive and carry on. But Super Decadence occurs when the whole world is being dragged down together, with no region able to resist the polarizing and impoverishing rentier dynamics imposed by the militarized imperial core. Following the U.S. lead, the West is cutting itself off from survival. Rejection of neoliberalism by China and other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is met by U.S. trade and financial sanctions whose self-defeating effect is to drive them together to create a state regulatory system (“autocracy”) to resist dollarization, financialization and privatization. That is why they are being isolated as an existential threat to the dynamics of neoliberal rentier decadence.

The Alternative.

It does not have to be this way, of course. China is defending itself not only by the productive industrial and agricultural economy its socialist government has sponsored, but by a guiding concept of how economies work. China’s economic managers have the classical concepts of value, price and economic rent, that distinguish earned from unearned income, and productive labor and wealth from unproductive and predatory financial and rentier fortunes.

These are the concepts needed to uplift all society, the 99 Percent rather than just the One Percent. But the post-1980 neoliberal reaction has stripped away from the Western economic vocabulary and academic curriculum. The present economic stagnation, debt burden and locked-in zero interest rates are a policy choice by the West, not a product of inevitable technological determinism.

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First published on Counterpunch.

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