The Inquisition held secretive interrogations; citizens were encouraged or compelled to report heretical behavior. By encouraging anonymity, Trump’s Task Force is emboldening workers to spy on each other; creating a culture of suspicion and fear. The Inquisition was religious intolerance and abuse of power on steroids. Sans brutality and physical initiation, nevertheless the impact of Trump’s Task Force – thus far limited to U.S. federal institutions — appears to be heading down a path of religious orthodoxy.

Trump is escalating its war on church-state separation. Led by Attorney General Pam Bondi, the new “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias Task Force” — established by a Trump Executive Order 14202, issued February 6th, setting up a White House Faith Office headed by televangelist Paula White — recently convened a meeting of the Task Force at the Department of Justice. The room was packed with Christian nationalist cabinet members and framed as a defense against persecution.

Christians now, and since the founding, have held majority power in this country. Trump’s task force is not about ending bias—it’s about further institutionalizing power in favor of a single religion. And one way of consolidating power is by stoking fear.

In early April, the State Department ordered employees to report any instances of “anti-Christian bias.”

This week, the Department of Veteran Affairs sent out the following internal email titled “Message From The Secretary: Task Force on Anti-Christian Bias.” In the message, Secretary Douglas A. Collins encouraged all VA workers to spy on their co-workers and report any thing that a worker might claim to be anti-Christian bias. The memo from the VA’s chief makes no mention of bias against Muslims, Jews or any other religious believers other than Christians.

The 11-point e-mail “Message” declared that the Veterans Administration (VA) “is establishing its own Task Force to better effectuate the Department’s internal review. The VA Task Force now requests all VA employees to submit any instance of anti-Christian discrimination to vog.avnull@gnitropeRsaiBnaitsirhC-itnA.

“Submissions should include sufficient identifiers such as names, dates, and locations.”

Religion News Service’s Bob Smietana reported that “The email from Collins, a former Southern Baptist pastor and Air Force chaplain turned politician, lists 11 kinds of bias or discrimination — three of which specifically name Christianity — ranging from retaliation in response to requests for religious holidays or religious accommodations to discipline against chaplains in response to their sermons. The email also says the task force will “review all instances of anti-Christian bias” but makes no mention of how to report discrimination of any other faiths” (https://religionnews.com/2025/04/22/veterans-affairs-asks-employees-in-email-to-report-anti-christian-bias/).

According to The Guardian, “The email states that the department will review ‘all instances of anti-Christian bias’ but that it is specifically seeking instances including ‘any informal policies, procedures, or unofficially understandings hostile to Christian views.’

“In addition, the department is seeking ‘any adverse responses to requests for religious exemptions under the previous vaccine mandates’ and ‘any retaliatory actions taken or threatened in response to abstaining from certain procedures or treatments (for example: abortion or hormone therapy)’” (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/22/veterans-affairs-anti-christian-bias).

Soon after Trump’s executive order, Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, “expressed concerns with the focus on anti-Christian bias but not religious liberty when Trump issued his executive order in early February.

“We have strong concerns that this new task force could be weaponized to enforce a theological conformity that will harm everyone’s religious freedom, including those of Christians,” she said. “Today’s action is consistent with inflaming the completely unfounded claims of rampant Christian persecution in a majority-Christian nation.”

The Inquisition enforced its mandate through brutality and intimidation. Trump’s Task Force, which encourages anonymous reporting of so-called anti-Christian bias, is fostering a culture of surveillance and fear. With the administration hell-bent on redefining religious freedom as privileges for Christians only, we’re no longer talking democracy—we’re talking theocracy. This isn’t about “religious freedom” — it’s about Christian supremacy.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz.

Progressive economists connect meager wage growth to limited purchasing power ─ one cause of the 2008 crash ─ and increased concentration of wealth to cautious job growth in the post-crash years. Their conclusions have engineered debates on how to achieve equitable distributions in wages and wealth and raise middle-class wages, and the roles private industry, government, and labor unions play in achieving a more equitable society.

If private industry refuses to meet its obligations to readjust the divide, Thomas Piketty recommends increasing taxes on high earners and large estates and coupling them with a wealth tax. This method for resolving income inequality gives government a major role in correcting the unequal distributions of income and wealth.

In previous decades, unions had a larger membership, greater clout, and more strength to move management to meet wage demands. Government lacks a mechanism to force corporations to transfer productivity gains into wage gains. Only corporations can do the trick. Not likely. Corporations do not realize the social and economic benefits of decreasing income inequality and increasing middle-class purchasing power. Lowering remunerations to those in top pay brackets and increasing them for lower-income workers is more than a moral obligation; it has direct benefits to the economy for everyone. It is a requirement for achieving a stable economy.

Social costs due to less equitable income and wealth distributions

Rationalizing poorly distributed wealth by noting the American poor are wealthier than the middle class in many developed nations is deceiving. Poverty is defined as an absolute number but its effects are relative. The lower wage earners in the United States are unaware of what they earn in relation to foreigners; they are aware of what they do not earn in relation to others living close to them. The wide disparity in wealth creates resentment and tension and leads to psychological and emotional difficulties. Minimizing social problems means combining giving more to the lower classes and taking less by the upper classes.

The social problems and associated costs in developed nations that have wide distributions of income and wealth are well-documented — elevated mental illness, crime, infant mortality, and health problems. One statistical proof is that the United States, classified as the most unequal of the developed nations, except Singapore, had the highest index of social problems. The graph below from 2010-2011 and an earlier article, Health is a Socio-Economic Problem, describe the important relationships.

Every citizen suffers from and pays for the social problems derived from income inequality, an unfair condition in a democratic society. Private industry has an obligation and an opportunity to fix the problem it has caused. If not, Uncle Sam, whom they don’t want on their backs, will reach into their pockets, redistribute the wealth and resolve the situation.

Income inequality produces wealth concentration and political consequences. Wealthy individuals have increased control of the political debate, more influence in selection of candidates, tend to place their interests before national interests, and determine the direction of political campaigns. Skewing the electoral process distorts government and the decisions that guide social and economic legislation. Severe disparities in the concentration of wealth reduce democratic prerogatives, fair elections, and equality before the law.

The Sunlight Foundation, in an article, The Political 1% of the 1% in 2012 by Lee Dustman, June 2013, presents a fact-filled discussion of this topic.
Note: Although statistics are from ten years ago, they are interesting statistics and are relevant today.

More than a quarter of the nearly $6 billion in contributions from identifiable sources in the last campaign cycle came from just 31,385 individuals, a number equal to one ten-thousandth of the U.S. population.

Of the 1% of the 1%’s $1.68 billion in the 2012 cycle, $500.4 million entered the campaign through a super PAC (including almost $100 million from just one couple, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson). Four out of five 1% of the 1% donors were pure partisans, giving all of their money to one party or the other.

These concerns are likely even more acute for the two parties. In 2012, the National Republican Senatorial Committee raised more than half (54.2 percent) of its $105.8 million from the 1% of the 1%, and the National Republican Congressional Committee raised one third (33.0 percent) of its $140.6 million from the 1% of the 1%. Democratic party committees depend less on the 1% of the 1%. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee raised 12.9 percent of its $128.9 million from these top donors, and the Democratic Congressional Committee raised 20.1 percent of its $143.9 million from 1% of the 1% donors.

To the many billionaires who are tilting election campaigns, add the political contributions by super-sized corporations and industries, and electoral control by the wealthy becomes complete. Campaign contributions from the financial sector, the same financial sector that increased its liabilities from 10 percent of GDP in 1970 to 120 percent of GDP in 2009, and shifted investment from manufacturing to rent-seeking ─ making money the new-fashioned way ─ leads the way.

The Sunlight Foundation article also states:

In 1990, 1,091 elite donors in the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate).contributed $15.4 million to campaigns ─ a substantial sum at the time. But that’s nothing compared to what they contributed later. In 2010, 5,510 elite donors from the sector contributed $178.2 million, more than 10 times the amount they contributed in 1990.

The Debt of each sector as a percentage of GDP tells the story of the financial sector.
Note: 2022 GDP = $25.4T
          2022 Q4 Debt at the following:
          Total = $89.5T, Household = $19.4T, Business = $20.8T, Finance = $19.3T, Government= $26.8
2022 Percent of GDP at the following:
Household = 72.4%, Business = 81.9%, Finance = 76.8%, Government= 105.5%

The graph shows that the FIRE sector increased its wealth by borrowing money, making the economy work for it rather than working for the economy. The credit enabled the financial industry to grow until it led the nation into the 2008 economic disaster.

The Economic Consequences of Wealth Concentration

What has occurred with wealth concentration? A previous decade indicated a deflection of investment from dynamic industrial processes to static rent situations, from industries that employ workers to make goods to industries that employ money to make money. Graphs from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) record the trend.

Note: In 2023, Financial sector employment was 9.2M and manufacturing employment was 12.9M.

The graphs plot employment in the manufacturing and financial sectors, Manufacturing had a slow deterioration during the Reagan presidency, followed by stability during the Clinton administration and a sharp decline during the George Bush era. Some deterioration in manufacturing employment is understandable; administrative jobs (clerical, administration) have been displaced by information technologies and these fields have added jobs; factory floor work of consumer goods has been displaced by machines (robot, numerical control) that have their own factory floors; and labor has been transferred from highly labor-intensive manufacturing to service industries. However, the employment loss is excessive and bewildering when compared to the increase in financial employment. Can a healthy economy result from a steady growth in financial workers and a consistent decrease in industrial workers?

Beginning in the Reagan era, until economic collapse in 2008, employment in the financial sector monotonically increased, except for slight blips during the 1991 recession and a few years of the Clinton administration. From a ratio of 1/3 in 1986, financial sector employment rose to 2/3 that of manufacturing employment by 2014, and increased by more than the changes in their respective additions to the Gross Domestic Product. Since the 2009 mini-depression, employment in the financial industry has remained relatively static. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows the value added by each industry.

Manufacturing rose from $1390.1 billion in 1997 to $2079.5 billion in 2013, an increase of 50 percent.
Finance, insurance, real estate, rental, and leasing rose from $1623.1 billion in 1997 to $3293.2 billion in 2013, an increase of 100 percent.

A comparison between salaries of engineers, those who contribute directly to industrial growth, and financiers, those who drive active and passive investments, also reveals the importance given to those who make money from money.

One of the contributors to Capital, Thomas Philipson, in an article Wages and Human Capital in the U.S. Financial Industry: 1909-2006, NBER Working Paper No. 14644, January 2009, shows that wages for the financial sector started a steady growth during the Reagan administration, and eventually exceeded engineering wages, especially for those who had advanced degrees from the elite universities.

As the FIRE industry expands, the purchasing power contracts, one reason being that part of the rent-seeking covets higher returns and gets sidetracked into endless speculation; money rolling over and over and never available to purchase anything but pieces of paper. Millions of arbitrage transactions per second can earn thousands of dollars per second, which adds up to 3.6 million dollars per hour ─ no positive effect on the economy; only paper dollars continually created.

Stagnant labor wages and weak purchasing power force expansion of credit to increase demand, The wealthy respond to credit expansion with accelerated demand for larger houses, larger cars, and more luxury goods, spending that raises asset values and places middle-class earners at a disadvantage. The bottom ninety percent on the income scale desperately pursue debt to give themselves a temporary share of prosperity. Debt must eventually be repaid. Real wealth remains with a privileged few and others remain stagnant.

What is the Result?

Thomas Piketty has reshaped the thinking of the Capitalist system. Economics enables the understanding of how and when to increase demand, enable sufficient purchasing power, and the true meaning of profit.  A better understanding of economics may come from less regard for the conventional economics of modern theorists and more regard for the classical economics of the fathers of political economy ─ Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx. The latter provided a controversial concept ─ wages provide purchasing power, and beyond what is bought by that purchasing power is surplus, whose value allows profit.

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Piketty shows that profits are being sidetracked into passive investments that produce only more capital and not useful goods, into the accumulation of excessive personal wealth, and into financial speculation that features the constant churning of paper money, which removes dollars from the market and creates difficulties for manufacturing to grow. Accumulation of excessive wealth generates social problems, diminishes the quality of life, and burdens the middle class when taxes are used to seek relief.

Capturing the political system by those most responsible for the problems ─ the privileged wealthy who manipulate a portion of the electoral process for their advantage ─ hinders routes to ameliorating the deterrents to a fair and successful economy. Due to their financial and political clout, the wealthy have their voices more easily heard in Congress and before federal agencies.

Karl Marx claimed that Capitalism contains the seeds of its destruction. Those who foster severe income inequality and inequitable wealth distribution apparently want to prove his statement is correct.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

The post Will It Be Socialism or Barbarism for the Twenty-First Century? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rob Urie.

Photograph Source: Matteo X – CC BY 2.0

The real left is not the caricature crafted by the U.S. right. Alongside parallel right-wing political formations abroad, that caricature tries hard to revive and recycle Cold War demonizations no matter how far-fetched. Nor is the real left what Democratic Party leaders and their foreign counterparts try hard to dismiss as tiny and politically irrelevant (except when electoral campaigns flirt with “progressive” proposals to get votes). The real left in the United States and beyond are the millions who at least vaguely understand that the whole system (including its mainstream right and left) is the core problem. As those millions steadily raise their awareness to an explicit consciousness, they recognize that basic system change is the needed solution.

On the one hand, the real left divides into particular social movements (focused on areas like ecological survival, feminism, anti-racism, labor militancy, and sexual rights). On the other hand, those social movements increasingly understand themselves to comprise components of a new unity they must organize. One key unifying force is anti-capitalism. Correspondingly, the different system they seek will likely be some new sort of socialism—with or without that name—particularly suited to 21st-century conditions.

The other big problem for the real left—besides unified organization—lies in its lack of a compelling “vision”: a clear, concrete, and attractive image of the social change it advocates. To succeed, a new socialism for the 21st century needs such a vision. Socialism in the 19th and 20th centuries had a very successful vision as evidenced by its remarkable global spread. However, that vision is no longer adequate. In 19th- and 20th-century socialism’s vision, militant unions and socialist political parties partnered to: 1) seize state power from the employer class; and 2) use that power to replace capitalism with socialism and eventually a minimally defined communism. Seizing state power could happen via reforms and electoral victories, direct actions and revolution, or combinations of them. Socialists spent immense energy, time, and passion debating and experimenting with those alternatives. Seizing state power from the employer class was to be followed by using that power to regulate and control private employers or to substitute the state itself (as representative of the collective working class) for private employers. Either way, the transition to socialism meant that the workers’ state intervened in economic decisions and activities to prioritize social welfare over private profit. Beyond replacing capitalism with socialism, possibly subsequent moves toward communism were mostly left vague. Communism seemed to be in and about the (perhaps distant) future while politics seemed to call for socialists to offer immediate programs.

So socialists everywhere over the last two centuries concentrated on seizing the state and thereby regulating markets, raising mass consumption standards, protecting workers in enterprises, and so on. Workers increasingly supported a socialist vision that foregrounded how socialist parties would use state power directly and immediately to help them. This vision fit well with socialist parties’ partners in labor union movements. The latter contested employers in enterprises, while socialist parties contested the employer class’s hold on state power. Thus socialist political parties and labor unions formed, grew, and allied nearly everywhere in the 19th and into the 20th centuries. Together they built effective, lasting organizations. After one of them prevailed in the 1917 Russian Revolution, most socialist organizations and parties split to form coexisting entities (ideologically similar yet often competing): one called socialist and the other “communist.”

After 1917, the socialist parties (and most independent socialists too) articulated programs for “progressive” social reforms. The reforms aimed to control capitalism’s market structures—its labor, tax, housing, health care, and transport systems—and its cultural superstructure (areas like politics, education, and religion). Communist parties usually supported socialist reforms, but they went further than the socialists to favor state takeovers of capitalist enterprises. Communists viewed state-owned-and-operated enterprises as necessary not only to achieve but also to secure the reforms socialists advocated.

The socialists’ and communists’ shared programmatic focus on the state complemented their critiques of capitalism in its predominantly private form across the 19th and 20th centuries. As socialism and communism grew across those centuries, they became the great theoretical and practical oppositional forces to capitalism. The more moderate among them defined socialism as a state elected to control and regulate private employers and thereby lessen private capitalism’s hard edges, inequalities, and injustices. Scandinavians and other Europeans experimented with such moderate versions of socialism. In Soviet socialism, the state’s economic intervention went further. Its communist party leadership replaced private employers with state officials fulfilling a state-generated economic plan. In yet another version of socialism—China’s hybrid one—a mix of Scandinavian and Soviet socialisms includes large segments of private capitalists and state-owned-and-operated enterprises. Both are subordinated to a powerful communist party and state.

The common quality of all three socialism was the focus on the state. What most of the socialists involved in the three forms (Scandinavian, Soviet, and Chinese) missed was a shared omission. On the basis of admitting and overcoming that omission, a new socialism for the 21st century emerges complete with a compelling vision.

The state focus of 19th- and 20th-century socialists, besides being a source of their greatest expansionary success, proved also to be a source of their greatest weaknesses and failures. Socialists’ and communists’ focus on the state combined with neglect of the internal structures of enterprises and households. But what if changing the macro-level relation of the state to the private economy from capitalist to socialist required also changing the micro-level of workplaces: both the workplace inside enterprises and the workplace inside households? What if socialism, to be achieved, needed interdependent changes at macro- and micro-levels of society? What if socialist changes in one level cannot survive without correspondingly socialist changes in the other?

Human relations inside factories, farms, offices, stores, and households were rarely transformed by what 19th- and 20th-century socialists achieved because they rarely were objects of their social criticisms and debates. Enterprises were internally divided after socialists took power much as they had been divided before. Employers continued to confront employees as buyers of labor power, directors of the labor process, and exclusive owners of the products. States continued to control dimensions of that confrontation—more in moderate socialism than in capitalism—but the basic confrontation persisted. In versions of socialism where state officials replaced private citizens as owners and operators of factories, farms, offices, and stores, the persisting employer-employee organization of human relations inside enterprises invited criticisms. Some socialists thus referred to such systems as types of state capitalism, not of socialism.

By theoretically not criticizing capitalism’s signature employer-versus-employee internal organization of enterprises, socialists, and communists took a big risk they likely did not understand. When the socialisms they constructed left the employer-versus-employee relationship of enterprises unchanged, that relationship reacted back to undermine those socialisms. Where moderate socialists used state power merely to control capitalists—leaving them their private profits—those capitalists could use the profits to battle socialists and socialism. As socialism’s history in Scandinavia and Western Europe exemplifies, capitalists have always done exactly that. They sought and continue now to seek increased private profits by reducing or removing whatever state controls constrain them. In that way, Scandinavian and European type socialisms undermined themselves.

Where socialist state officials function as employers, the oppositional impulses arising among employees (strengthened by earlier socialist movements) will focus on the state. Worse still, employees struggling against employers in societies self-described as socialist may well come to identify their problem and adversary as socialism. In that way, such variants of socialism too undermine themselves.

The socialist and communist traditions largely neglected the internal structures of households as well as enterprises. Thus socialist experiments in constructing new societies mostly omitted the transformation of those structures. Employer-employee relationships inside enterprises inherited from capitalism largely remained: so too did the inherited spousal and parent-children relationships inside households. We say “largely” because there always were exceptions such as communal households, collective consumption, and larger communes. Yet they remained marginal to the main developments and rarely proved durable. For example, early in Soviet Russia (1917-1930), Alexandra Kollontai initiated major programs of state responsibility and direct support for children and housework. However, European-style nuclear family households, constructed in and for capitalism during the transition from feudalism (see Jacques Donzelot’s The Policing of Families), remained the basic household organization under socialist societies as well.

In the capitalist system’s prevailing household structure, men functioned as household “heads” responsible for disciplining and providing for subordinate wives and children. Wives were to offset the burdens of men’s labor in capitalist enterprises, prepare them for that work, and “raise” children to reproduce identical households. Such households should not only support families but also support the state with taxes (thereby reducing the employer class’s taxes) as well as soldiers. Efforts by households to obtain and secure state supports (schools, day care, subsidies, even veterans benefits) were systematically opposed or limited by the employer class. Even when won by mass mobilizations assisted by socialists such supports were never secure.

To this day, the employer class that dominates in capitalism blocks raising the minimum wage, mandating paid maternal and paternal leave policies, and funding an adequate public education system or adequate health insurance system. That employer class keeps the traditional household in place or else financially constrains individuals fleeing traditional households to serve the employer class’s needs. The authoritarian structure of enterprises (complete with CEOs as dictators inside corporations) reinforces parallel structures in households. Socialists must recognize and act on the premise that the reverse holds as well.

The solution for socialism in the 21st century is to correct for the omission earlier socialisms made. Socialism now needs to add a critical analysis of capitalism’s micro-level organization inside workplaces and households to its macro-level analyses. The focus of 21st-century socialism should balance the overstressed macro-level by a concentration on the micro-level: not as an alternative focus but rather as an additional focus deserving special attention.

The solution for socialism and communism in the 21st century is a new, non-state-focused vision. Socialism becomes the movement to transform 1) the top-down hierarchical organization inside capitalist enterprises (employers versus employees) into a democratic organization of worker cooperatives, and 2) the top-down hierarchical organization inside households into democratized alternatives.

Inside enterprises, each worker will have one vote to decide the major issues facing enterprises. Such issues include what, how, and where to produce as well as how to use the resulting products or, if products are marketed, what to do with the revenues. The difference between employers and employees disappears; the workers become collectively their own boss. Profits cease being the enterprise’s top priority or “bottom line” because that maximization rule prioritizes employers’ gains over employees’ gains and capital’s interests over those of labor. In democratized enterprises, profits instead become one among many democratically determined enterprise goals. Each worker has an equal opportunity to fill in the outlines of such a version of socialism with the creative imaginings of what such a transformed enterprise may make possible.

Inside households, socialism must stand for the freedom to construct different kinds of human relations. Kinship becomes only one of many options. Among adults, democratic household decision-making becomes the rule. Broad rights and freedoms are given to children. Responsibility for raising children becomes shared among parents, democratized households, democratized residential and enterprise communities, and a democratized government. The specifics of such shared responsibility will be among the objects of democratic decision-making by all. Whatever may remain of centralized and decentralized state apparatuses will support the new socialism’s households generously as capitalism never did. The twin reproductions—of democratic households and democratic enterprises—will be equal social responsibilities: 21st-century socialism’s notion of work-life balance.

Such reorganizations of enterprises and households define socialism for the 21st century in a new way. Social change becomes a lived daily experience in each enterprise and household (more profound than mere changes from private to state-regulated, controlled, or owned enterprises). Such a redefined socialism can defeat the anti-socialist movements that have long contested state power versus individual power and that dogmatically endorsed the nuclear family against all alternative household structures. It revives elements of socialism’s complicated history of alliance with anarchism.

Democratic worker cooperatives become a key institutional foundation of whatever state apparatus survives. Worker co-ops, democratized households, and individuals will be the state’s three revenue sources and thus key sources of its power. They will democratically decide how to divide the provision of such revenue among themselves. Undemocratically organized institutions—such as capitalist enterprises or traditional households—will no longer undermine democratically organized politics. Instead democratic economic, political, and household organizations will collaborate, interact, and share responsibilities for social development and social reproduction.

Democratically transformed enterprises and households are socialist goals well worth fighting for. So too is a state controlled by and thus responsive to individuals within democratically organized households, residential communities, and worker-co-op enterprises. Together these goals comprise an effective, attractive new vision to define and motivate a socialism for the 21st century. One of its banners might proclaim, “No king or dictator in politics; no boss or CEO at work; no patriarch or head at home.”

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Dr. Harriet Fraad is a mental health counselor and hypnotherapist in New York City whose writing and multimedia programs cover the interactions between global capitalism and personal life in the U.S. She is the host of the podcast/video series “Capitalism Hits Home,” available via Democracy at Work, and co-host of “It’s Not Just In Your Head” (with Ikoi Hiroe and Liam Tate). Her radio program “Interpersonal Update” airs on New York City’s radio station WBAI Tuesday nights at 6:30 EST. Her latest written work appears in Knowledge, Class and Economics, Routledge, 2018.

Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to 55 million TV receivers via Free Speech TV. His three recent books with Democracy at Work are The Sickness Is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself, Understanding Socialism, and Understanding Marxism, the latter of which is now available in a newly released 2021 hardcover edition with a new introduction by the author.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dr. Harriet Fraad Richard D. Wolff.

“American exceptionalism is starting to undergo a degradation and feel more and more like revisionist history, especially when it comes to this country’s ties to imperialism, slavery, the genocide of indigenous people.”

-Jinwood Chong

In Flux, his new, ambitious first novel which mixes the surrealistic with science fiction, Jinwoo Chong keeps his characters in near constant motion, and, like a virtuoso author, invites readers to participate in and to co-create meaning. An English major at Georgetown with an MFA from Columbia, and the child of Korean American parents, Chong has crafted a literary puzzle in which intriguing words, phrases and sentences bounce off the page. Reading Flux can feel like playing a video game or a pinball machine. Take for example, the descriptions of a phone that lives in the same bed in which the main character, Brandon, sleeps.

One morning he wakes, sees the phone under his pillow, digs it out and reads the time. A few pages further on, the same sentence reappears, only this time Chong provides the near precise time on the phone: almost eight a.m. The identical sentence shows up again and again and again and again with one or two slight variations.

What’s going on? A reader might ask. Can’t Chong write the sentence and leave it be? One answer might be that Brandon is a creature of his phone and addicted to it. When the author wants to convey information he shows rather than tells. Also, when he infuses his novel with ideas, he usually allows the characters to express them rather than convey them directly to the reader in his own voice. One protagonist says, “There is so much goddamn corporate obfuscation around buzzwords and meaningless lingo.” He adds, “Our planet is dying. We no longer have the resources to sustain our growth.”

“Flux” is the name of the goddamn corporation that cannibalizes Chong, using him as a human guinea pig for its experiments with time, space and the workings of the mind. Reading the novel, one might wonder if we’re all human guinea pigs in the big social laboratory in which the powers-that-be experiment with fascistic games, media, language and the tools of repression.

In the brave new world that unfolds in Flux, Brandon is an Adam who falls from his own illusory paradise and descends into a strange and terrifying world in which “everything goes white.” Early in the novel, Brandon literally tumbles down an elevator shaft and is never quite the same again; a human being in free fall and alienated from himself and at times a character in an existentialist work of fiction.

Flux stands out as a novel with ideas, dramatic scenes, and shifts in genre. It will likely appeal to readers brought up on narratives that explore time and space and at the same time illuminate social issues. The epigraph at the front of the novel comes from H. G. Wells’s classic The Time Machine. The narrator observes that he has “the feeling of prolonged falling” and that he is “flung headlong through the air.”                                                                   If Chong’s anti-hero is addicted to his phone, he’s also addicted to a 1980s TV show called Raider which stands out from the normal fare of programs on the screen because it features an Asian detective, and that, as Brandon himself explains, “defined an entire genre of television.” The TV cop is nearly as real for Brandon as any of the human beings he encounters, including a young woman named Min who flickers briefly across the screen of his life and who asks him “Are you Korean?”

At first he doesn’t know what to say. After all, he’s confused about his identity, ethnicity, sexuality and gender. In response to Min’s question, he says, “Yes. On my mother’s side.” Like a few of the other characters in the book, he belongs to what he calls “the hybrid generations.”

Chong usually disdains labels and rightly so. They often obfuscate as much as they clarify. Still, it’s probably fair to say that he shares common ground with authors in the field of Korean American fiction that has grown steadily and that promises to keep on growing. The more books by Asian American writers the better for “eccentricity and experimentation.”

So says Viet Thanh Nguyen, the author of The Sympathizer, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, inspired Chong and helped open the door to authors who want to go beyond white American stereotypes of Asians as bad drivers, and genuses at math who all look alike.

Melville House, Chong’s publisher, aptly describes Flux as “neo-noir” and “an exploration of the cyclical nature of grief, of moving past trauma, and of the pervasive nature of whiteness within the development of Asian identity in America.” On the eve of the 2022 midterm elections, Chong emailed me to say “an important note to make might be that American exceptionalism is starting to undergo a degradation and feel more and more like revisionist history, especially when it comes to this country’s ties to imperialism, slavery, the genocide of indigenous people.”

Io Emsworth, a billionaire and the founder of Flux, serves as the femme fatale in a novel that’s definitely dark and that definitely takes a deep dive into the nature of white America. For much of the time in which the story unfolds, snow falls steadily and blankets the ground in an unnamed city where Brandon lives and works and finds himself unemployed, but a useful resource for the corporation.

Flux reminded me of Richard Wright’s Native Son, a powerful exploration of whiteness and blackness, in which snow falls in Chicago, where the main character, Bigger Thomas, a Black man employed by a wealthy family, murders Mary, a young white woman. Flux might also invite readers to recall Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, another exploration of blackness, whiteness and identity and one of Chong’s favorite twentieth century American novels.

Flux is definitely a work of fiction for twenty-first century readers who won’t be driven away by phrases such as “Blowjob Bathroom” and who won’t need a translation for “You want me to spoon you?” If the novel has a flaw it might be that its (too) many characters—Jem, Gil, Lev and Kaz—crowd Brandon and don’t have nearly enough room to emerge as “rounded” and not remain “flat” to use two teacher words.

During a Zoom interview, Chong told me “I don’t feel Asian. I consider myself mostly American.” He added “whiteness is America and America is whiteness.” That troubles him. Born in 1995 in the U.S. to Korean American parents who speak Korean far better than he, Chong was raised in Princeton, New Jersey where he attended high school. He explained that Flux flowed from a short story titled “Six Enumerated Complications of Gravity “about a person addicted to a sense of weightlessness.”

While writing the novel during the pandemic, he says, he became aware of his “own poisoning by the Internet and pop culture.” Flux isn’t about a pandemic, but the pandemic affected Chong’s state of mind. “For six months, it seemed unstoppable,” he says. “I thought I could get the virus and die. It was a traumatic experience. I stayed at home. I think the pandemic helped me write better.”

Is Flux autobiographical?  “Brandon is and isn’t me,” Chong says. “He’s biracial. I’m not. People look at my face and know I’m Asian. In the novel, the other characters look at him and they’re not sure who or what he is.” A work of fiction that Chong recommends is No-No Boy (1957) by John Okada, a Japanese American writer that’s about a Japanese American who refuses to fight for the U.S. in World War II and serves two years in prison and another two years in an internment camp.                                                                         Would Chong fight for the US, or would he be another “no-no boy” like the character in Okada’s novel? “I used to feel proud to be an American, somewhat, but not anymore,” Chong says. “Societal failures are swept under the rug by advertising and by elected politicians who seem to want to destroy our core values. People in the rest of the world are well aware of America’s problems.”

Flux ends with a question and without any clear answers. One of the characters walks “away from a life he was not a part of and no longer could be.” He has “just one question: what was going to happen next?” For Chong, what will happen next for sure is the publication of his novel. Nothing can stop it now, not even a blizzard and a wall of whiteness. Will it become another Invisible Man? Perhaps. It seems likely to start out as a kind of underground work with a cult following. And then what? Anything is possible in a world in which everything is in flux.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jonah Raskin.

Screenshot from Cspan

Once upon a time, long, long ago — actually, it was early in the year 2000 — I was involved in publishing Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. It had been written by the eminent scholar of Asia, former CIA consultant, and cold warrior Chalmers Johnson. I was his editor at Metropolitan Books. In its introduction, using a word Americans were then (as now) all too uncomfortable with, he bluntly summed up his professional life by labeling himself “a spear-carrier for empire.” And he described the origins of his book’s title this way:

“Officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first invented [the term blowback] for their own internal use… [It] refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people.  What the daily press reports as the malign acts of ‘terrorists’ or ‘drug lords’ or ‘rogue states’ or ‘illegal arms merchants’ often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.”

Ominously enough, he added, “All around the world today, it is possible to see the groundwork being laid for future forms of blowback.” On page 10, he brought up — and remember he was writing this as the previous century ended — the name of “a former protege of the United States,” one Osama bin Laden. In the 1980s, that rich young Saudi had been part of Washington’s secret war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, forming a group to battle the Russians that he called al-Qaeda (“the Base”) to battle the Red Army. By the time Chalmers wrote his book, the Russian war there was long over, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and bin Laden had turned against Washington. He was then believed responsible for the bombing of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. On page 11, Chalmers added that such “retaliation” for American acts was “undoubtedly not yet at an end in the case of bin Laden.”

He summed things up this way: “Because we live in an increasingly interconnected international system, we are all, in a sense, living in a blowback world.”

Sadly, that remains even truer today and, if Chalmers could return from the dead, I have no doubt that he would have much to say about how we now find ourselves on the ultimate blowback planet.

Blowback in a Sole-Superpower World

To use an all-too-appropriate word, given what he was writing about, his book bombed. Boy, did it! The reviewer at the New York Times dismissed it as “marred by an overriding, sweeping, and cranky one-sidedness.” And it sold next to no copies. It was dead in the water, until, 18 months later… yes, I’m sure you’ve already guessed what I’m about to write next… on September 11, 2001, those towers in New York City came down and the Pentagon was clobbered.

Suddenly, Blowback was on every bookstore bestseller table in America. As Chalmers would mention in his new introduction to the 2003 paperback, Metropolitan Books had to reprint it eight times in less than two months to keep up with demand.

In that volume, he had done something deeply unpopular at the time of publication (except among fringe groups on the left). He had called our country an empire — an imperial power intent on maintaining a staggering military presence globally in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and before the rise of China. A common term used in Washington at the time was the “sole superpower” on planet Earth. And he pointed out, ominously enough, that even without official enemies of any significance, thanks in part to its global imperial presence, Washington had “hollowed out our domestic manufacturing and bred a military establishment that is today close to being beyond civilian control.” He added tellingly that it “always demands more” and was “becoming an autonomous system.” In addition, the post-Vietnam, post-draft, “all volunteer” military was, he pointed out, increasingly “an entirely mercenary force.” Worse yet, he saw the growth of American militarism at home as another form of blowback from this country’s overextension abroad. (Sound familiar in 2022?)

He warned that the collapse of the Soviet Union in the wake of the war in Afghanistan should have been a warning to Washington. Even more ominously, at a moment when this country’s foreign-policy establishment considered us the “indispensable nation” (Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s phrase), he suggested that we were already experiencing “imperial overextension” and on the long downward slope that all empires experience sooner or later.

And keep in mind that all of this was written before 9/11; before President George W. Bush and crew launched devastatingly ill-fated invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; before this country’s civilian population became — as the nightmare at Uvaldereminded us recently — armed to the teeth with military-style weaponry. It was long before Donald Trump and before the Republican Party was transformed into something unrecognizable. It was well before Congress became essentially incapable of passing anything of significance for most Americans, even as it was instantly capable of providing $54 billion in aid and arms for the Ukrainians and endless funds for the Pentagon.

President Blowback

Just last month, 22 years later, I reread Blowback. Chalmers is, of course, long gone. (He died in November 2010.) But with the news of these last years and what may be on the horizon in mind, I couldn’t help thinking about how he would have updated the book, were he still here.

As a start, I doubt he would have been particularly surprised by Donald Trump. In June 2005, reintroducing a piece he had done for TomDispatch in 2003 on the scourge of militarism, he was already writing: “The American governmental system is no longer working the way it is supposed to. Many distinguished observers think it is badly damaged in terms of Constitutional checks and balances and the structures put in place by the founders to prevent tyranny.”

And as I added in that same 2005 introduction, reflecting Chalmers:

“In September 2003, only four months after [President George W. Bush’s] ‘Mission Accomplished’ moment on the USS Abraham Lincoln, it was already evident to some of us that neocon dreams of establishing a robust Pax Americana on the planet were likely to be doomed in the sands of Iraq — but that, in the process, the American constitutional system as we’ve known it might well be destroyed.”

Yes, the possibility of our system spinning downward toward some version of tyranny wouldn’t, I suspect, have surprised him. Of course, he didn’t predict Donald Trump. (Who did?)  But if anyone could have imagined this country “governed” — and I put that in quotes for obvious reasons — by a billionaire grifter and TV impresario who thought not just unbearably well of, but only of himself, it was Chalmers. Had he been here in 2016, when that bizarre figure ran for president, as he’d been dreaming about doing since at least 2011, and won, I’d put my money on his not being even slightly taken aback. Nor, I suspect, would he have been surprised when the economic inequality that helped Trump to victory only grew ever more rampant in his years in office, while billionaires began to multiply like fleas on a rabid dog.

Honestly, if you think about it for a moment, it’s hard not to imagine The Donald’s success as another version of blowback. In fact, he’s almost inconceivable without the sort of imperial mess Chalmers had in mind and that this country did such a splendiferous job of encouraging with its disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and its never-ending war on terror. If it weren’t for the mess that our military machine made of the world in this century (and the money it gobbled up in the process), his rise would be hard to imagine. He now seems like the cause of so much, but honestly, as I wrote during the election campaign of 2016 referring to the disease then in the news: “Perhaps it would be better to see Donald Trump as a symptom, not the problem itself, to think of him not as the Zika Virus but as the first infectious mosquito to hit the shores of this country.”

He certainly marked another key moment in what Chalmers would have thought of as the domestic version of imperial decline. In fact, looking back or, given his insistence that the 2020 election was “fake” or “rigged,” looking toward a country in ever-greater crisis, it seems to me that we could redub him Blowback Donald. (Of course, that “B” could also stand for Blowhard.) And given the present Republican Party, as well as the growing evidence that this country’s political system could be coming apart at the seams, it’s hard not to think that Chalmers was onto something big as the last century ended.

Of one thing I’m sure. He wouldn’t have been slightly shocked to discover that, these days, just about the only thing Congress can agree upon across party lines is the annual raising of the Pentagon budget to levels that now match the military budgets of the next 11 countries combined.

Twenty-First-Century Blowback

In the back of my mind, while rereading his book, I kept wondering how else Chalmers might have updated it in 2022. And what came to mind repeatedly was that potentially ultimate subject, climate change.

Now, Chalmers certainly had a sense of the environmental damage the American empire was already causing, but climate change was not yet on his mind. Recently, to my surprise, I came across a passing reference to it in something I wrote but never published in the 1990s and was surprised I even knew about it then. Still, in this century, as I became ever more aware of it and wrote and published ever more about it at TomDispatch, I came to believe that it would indeed be potentially devastating for humanity. For years, though, I didn’t quite grasp that it would be so in my own lifetime.

Back then, I imagined it as largely a phenomenon of the future, not something for which you could find evidence in the news daily (whether identified as such or not). Yes, at some point I realized, for instance, that South Asia might be more susceptible to climate extremes than many other areas. Still, I hadn’t expected that I would live to see springtime weather with temperatures in the range of 115 to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, or that such horrific and, without air conditioning, increasingly deathly warmth would be followed by devastating flooding. Or that such extremes would grow more common so quickly.

Nor, honestly, had I expected a wave of record July temperatures (and humidity) here in the northeast U.S. and across much of my own country this very May (it hit 95 degrees on a recent day in Philadelphia!). Nor did I imagine that the Southwest and West would be embroiled in a megadrought the likes of which hasn’t been seen on this continent in at least 1,200 years, with devastating, often record-setting fires, blazing in New Mexico and elsewhere ever earlier in the year. Or the unprecedented severe drought and record flooding in parts of Brazil and Argentina. Or the staggering burning and flooding in Australia. Or the unparalleled floods in recent years in China, Germany, and other countries.

I hadn’t imagined that every spring I’d see more or less the same spring article predicting another terrible, if not record, Atlantic hurricane season. Or that I’d hear about a May hurricane of record strength hitting the Pacific coast of Mexico.

And of course, that’s just to start down what seems like an increasingly endless list. I mean, I haven’t even mentioned those three rare tornadoes in Germany or the record May heat wave in Spain, or… but why go on? You get the idea. In fact, you or people you know are undoubtedly living that very reality, too, in some daunting fashion — and at this moment, thanks to the war in Ukraine and endless other distractions, the world is only burning yet more fossil-fuels promising so much worse to come.

To return to Chalmers Johnson, if you think about it for even 30 seconds, climate change has obviously become the greatest blowback event in human history — with almost unimaginably greater climate chaos likely to come. As he would undoubtedly have noted, if you’re living in the most significant blowback nation in human history, since no other country has put more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than the United States, you’re truly facing — to cite the subtitle of his book — “the costs and consequences of American empire” and, of course, of the imperial oil companies that continue to have such a hand in (mis)shaping our world.

Worse yet, in this century, that newest of imperial powers, China, has already outstripped this country in terms of the fossil-fuelization of this planet’s atmosphere. (Yet another classic case of imperial over-stretch in the offing.)

Talk about decline! These days it almost seems to precede imperial rise. Yikes!

And so many years later, just to out-Chalmers the master himself, let me offer another prediction: if the Republicans sweep into Congress in 2022 and Blowback Donald or one of his act-alikes sweeps (or even creeps) into the White House in 2024, consider that the potential end of the American story, since it would ensure that, for years to come, nothing would be done to stop the ultimate version of blowback.

This column is distributed by TomDispatch.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Tom Engelhardt.