Directly Challenging the US Empire, Capitalism, and the Global Climate Crisis

Well, the Democrats failed to keep Donald Trump out of the presidency again. That’s going to hurt a lot of people. I assume most of us would prefer that he was not in this position. However, I argue that if we carefully examine the situation, we can see that the situation is not as bleak as initially suggested—for example, Trump is an “attractor,” not a leader—and that if we on the left respond intelligently, we can have a major impact on this country and its role in the world.
The question now is how might the left—very broadly defined—understand and respond to the current political situation in the US? Assuming others will try to address this issue as well, I will share my analysis. (I don’t think any one person has all of the answers, but I believe that we can each contribute our respective analyses to help develop a valuable collective understanding.) Since I have been researching and writing over the last 40-plus years, I evaluate where my analysis was right and where it was wrong. Then I suggest where I think we might move to shape the future.
My biggest failure regarding the 2024 presidential election was not in my analysis, but in my lack of imagination. I think my analysis was very prescient, especially the part of the seismic economic changes that have been taking place in the country over the last 40 years and the on-going failure of capitalism for working people. However, I failed ultimately because I could not imagine people in response rallying behind Donald Trump; by voting for him, they were endorsing a representative of all the forces and policies that had destroyed much of the domestic based economy and local communities on which they had previously depended.
But who to turn to? Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the large majority of the Democratic Party have also been complicit in this corporate-led internal suicide that has victimized tens of millions of the US’s working people, and without having any real concrete proposals to address the social devastation of the last 40 years, they were at a serious disadvantage; at least Trump acted like he cared for those victimized, or at least he sympathized.
In short, I underestimated Trump and his ability to attract and hold on to followers. This, I argue, does not make Trump a leader; it argues he is an attractor; he attracts people. There is a big difference. What I’m saying here is that Trump has no real solutions to address social problems he and his campaign had identified. Therefore, we should recognize that there is a big difference between MAGA activists and pro-Trump voters: there is a space between them, and we need to blow this unity apart. Trump has an ability to unify those who think they have been mistreated, rightfully or wrongfully and, through his personality, get them to see commonality and the follow him. I deem him “sniveler in chief”; no solutions but plenty of “I’ve been done wrong…!”
This is an important distinction that must be understood: this was an election against all our problems, not one that advanced solutions to address them.
What the Democrats got right in this election, in my opinion—pushed by core constituencies—is the understanding that we must include everyone possible into the American “family,” and that we can no longer tolerate inequities in how different groups get treated; that we cannot go back to the days or excluding white women or people of color from the pie; that white and male supremacy is totally unacceptable. Period. And this has grown as more and more people have received college educations, where these understandings have been developed and pushed.
However, at the same time, the Democrats ignored poor and working Americans, of all ethnicities, those white and people of color.
(And, at the same time, the Dems refused to honor those—particularly younger activists—who have a global perspective, hate the US role in the world, and care about people outside of our borders; the most grievous “fuck you” came around a Palestinian speaker at the Democratic National Convention.)
The problem is that enlargement of the American “family,” if you will, comes at a time when this family has been and remains under unrelenting attack by capitalism, and that this has been true for over 40 years, and capitalism’s ability to support working and poor people cannot expand; it can only continue to shrink. And nobody wants to address this reality: capitalism provides no long-term solution for the large majority of us!
So, with limited resources—as I argue below, for the elites, the Empire always comes first!—the elites of both parties have prioritized the needs of those in urban areas over those in rural areas. Supposedly, the cities were where the votes “lived,” but a lot of ones and twos spread over space out can come to a total a higher number.
This was an election where the rural United States rebelled against the urban US; I believe it was more of a “you’ve ignored us, and now we won’t let you do this anymore!” rather than the beginning of a rural-urban real war. And from what I can tell, there’s a lot of truth to this; the elites have ignored rural folks throughout the country. (For a powerful yet succinct analysis of how Wisconsin, a largely rural state, has been screwed over since the 1970s, see Roger Bybee, “The Role of Corporations,” in It Started in Wisconsin, edited by Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle, 2012, Verso: 127-143.)
In Z Net, during August 2023, trying to combine all I had learned as a scholar and primarily a labor activist over the years, I published an analysis of the last 40 years (1981-2023) of the US in the world. I argued that we had to take a global perspective to truly understand this situation. (It is a very lengthy article, although it has also been published it in five separate articles—both are on-line for free. Parts 3 & 4 are most relevant to this article. It was also published by Green Social Thought.) I have seen nothing comparable to it, before or since. In this, I quickly reviewed how the social order emerged from World War II, how it developed until 1981 (the end of Jimmy Carter’s administration), and then went in detail of its “development” since 1981, when Ronald Reagan became president.
I’m not going to review this entire article—I recommend that everyone reading this read the original article—but want to draw your attention to one very crucial detail that was all but ignored in this recent election campaign: the US National Debt. Quickly, the National Debt is a collective representation of all the surpluses and deficits enjoyed by the country since its founding as an independent country in 1789; it includes expenditures for all of the many US wars, social projects (such as New Deal), and specific programs (space program, interstate highway system). From 1789-1981 (192 years) the US National Debt reached $909 billion dollars or, more helpful for our purposes here, $ .9 trillion dollars. Ronald Reagan came into office after running as a “fiscal conservative” and, in eight years (1981-1989), doubled the National Debt from $ .9 to $2.7 trillion! (You can’t include what you started with, so it’s doubled instead of tripled.) That has expanded since then, under both Democrats and Republicans, and today, the National Debt is almost $36 trillion! (The annual deficit for 2024 alone was $1.8 trillion—twice that of the entire National Debt in 1981!)
Why is this important? What does it mean? It means that the economy, as bad as it has been, has been this good not because of solid economic production, as “suggested” by the political-economic elites, but because of financial manipulation; our leaders have been spending money that they don’t have, they have been writing “hot” checks! It is this financial manipulation that has allowed the US to do as well as it has; it has not been based on solid economic growth!
Now that in and of itself should be alarming. If you go to the US National Debt clock, which shows the national debt in real time, they also show how this compares to Gross Domestic Project or GDP, which is a measure of values of goods and services produced by this nation every year for the market (to be bought and sold). In 1960, the debt to GDP ratio was 52.21 percent; by 1980, it was down to 34.70 percent; by 2000, it had climbed to 54.48 percent, and as I write on November 9, 2024, it is 122.84 percent. And although they do not include a measure of the ratio of debt to GDP (which could be easily added to the chart), the St. Louis office of the Federal Reserve System publishes a visual representation of the growth of the National Debt since 1960 which is at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN.
Now, this in and of itself is a disaster in the making. But it’s even worse: as the National Debt continues to increase—and it is—the rate of interest on the debt increases. Going back to the National Debt clock, we are paying somewhere around $5.5 trillion this year just on the interest alone! This does not include paying down any of the principle of the debt owed. This is money being paid to investors, including to governments of foreign countries, that must be paid to enable us to continue to sell US Treasury Bonds to them to help finance the National Debt; if investors refuse to buy our bonds, we become observably bankrupt. Think of it as similar to the minimum monthly payment on your credit card; it must be paid to maintain any kind of recognizable economic viability.
So, until forthrightly addressed by our “leaders,” our National Debt will continue to climb, it is over 100 percent of GDP—which means if everyone worked for a year and took no pay checks (stay with me!), no investors got paid money due them (please!), etc., etc., we still could not eradicate the debt within a single year. This will continue to worsen the longer it continues: the interest rate due on the debt will increase (which, in turn, will add to the National Debt, and our National Debt will increase to greater and greater extents (i.e., exponentially).
Now, despite being unknown by most Americans, this is not rocket science and it is recognized by Central Bankers around the world: the US is bankrupt; we can never pay back these debts in any foreseeable time, especially if we continue as we are doing.
Why have these bankers not shared this with the world? Because should the United States declare bankruptcy, it would cause the entire global economy to collapse with immense social and individual suffering; the global economy is dependent on the US serving as the market of last choice, as the country that will buy their own goods and services under any conditions which, in turn, allows their respective economies to work: without that US capability (or perhaps, more realistically today, China’s), it would be catastrophe in probably every country in the world, and certainly all but the largest.
Part of this is by design; part of it is a natural outgrowth of the design. The design was the Bretton Woods agreements of 1944, when the US and the UK planned the post-World War II global economy under the conditions then existing: US domination of the world economy, as the only industrialized country to emerge all but unscathed from the death and destruction of the war and with the most modern and productive economy in the world, and with a dynamic labor movement that could force the largest corporations to share with their members. They designed the post-War economy to continue this status quo.
The natural outgrowth of this design was that it directly benefitted those of us in the US as well as those who lived in other imperialist countries (often referred to “developed” countries, but we were never told the basis of how they developed) at least until the late 1960s-early 1970s. Then, inter-capitalist competition—initially from corporations in imperialist countries and then, in the late 1970s, from a few corporations from a few formerly colonized countries—started changing the game, so that by 1980, major change had to come to the United States. (This is what Ron Cox’ work on global capitalist corporations—referenced in the original analysis—illuminates, while my work focuses more on the social ramifications of all of this.)
In any case, qualitative change occurs, beginning with the Reagan Administration and continuing til August last year (and continuing to date), which I documented in the original “40 years” article. My analysis has held up extremely well.
So, the current situation is the result of the United States seeking to dominate countries around the world, developing the US Empire and dismembering our domestic economy to do it: while destroying tens of millions of jobs, the US has spent at least $18.3 trillion on US war-making capability between 1981 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine (when the US started funding Ukraine after helping to instigate the Russian invasion in February 2022), and that doesn’t include the cost of developing and maintaining the US nuclear arsenal, nor does it include the $17.9 billion sent to Israel between October 7, 2023 and September 30, 2024. To put it another way, US elites of both political parties have sacrificed the well-being of all Americans for the elite’s vastly overinflated desires to control the world.
Trump voters seem to have recognized that money being spent in Ukraine has come at their expense, and perhaps to pay for Israel’s genocide since October 7, 2023; it’s not as clear regarding Israel. However, in general, they have not recognized the larger situation; that it is the US Empire to which their well-being is being sacrificed. (I’m not being down on Trump voters here; most Harris voters don’t recognize this either, and they don’t even understand about the money going to Ukraine.)
In other words, we on the left—however defined—have ignored a big opportunity and I think it’s time we address this problem: people can repudiate the US Empire, or we can take care of the American people by trying to create a domestic, non-capitalist economy that works for our people: we cannot do both! (While this sentiment is based on the work of Abraham Maslow, my experiences with mostly white, rural, working class students in Indiana over the last 20-plus years have shown they choose to take care of Americans almost anytime this choice is addressed and then presented to them! It doesn’t come automatically, but when discussed intelligently, they prefer taking care of Americans.)
The elites of both mainstream parties have cowed us by their incessant fear mongering about the need for “defense,” which is really money for maintaining if not expanding the Empire and building on past fears of Russia and China. It’s time we confidently take this on.
I think the elites are vulnerable here if we on the left will honestly go forth and challenge US militarism. There are two parts of this: one, neither China nor Russia is going to invade the United States. Period. If either tried, their forces would be decimated. And if the US thinks it can successfully invade either country, we will certainly lose; regarding Russia, just ask the Nazis! (Contrary to much of the US propaganda, at great cost—something like 27 million Russian and Eastern European people, men, women, and children—died defeating the Nazis, compared to the US losses of something like 400 thousand, mostly men in uniform, in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters of war; while the US can claim victory over the Japanese, we cannot legitimately claim victory over the Nazis.) And the US Empire has been 0-3-1 in Asia, post-World War II, with the tie being against North Korea in the early 1950s.
The point I’m trying to make here is that our “defense” budget could be cut by about 90 percent and still provide necessary protection for the United States. That money could be used to address our National Debt, as well as do things that would help Americans.
The reality that must be faced is that the continuing arms race with Russia, China or whomever, cannot be won. We can spend until the cows come home—or Central Bankers get honest, which probably won’t be anytime soon!—but there is no way we can gain military superiority over either, much less both, of these countries: we can never eradicate their threat with our current policies. (And they cannot gain military superiority over the United States.) Should anyone of these countries—and a few others—feel existentially threatened by an opponent, it’s nuclear war time; and that means “lights out” for all of us.
In light of this, there is an alternative: now, it would have to be much more elaborate than simply this, but the heart of the issue is to get the major countries to end any thought of dominating another. What I’m thinking is of some sort of a global treaty whereby each major power agrees to not threaten each other or any other political communities, and to do this, immobilize their militaries to the bare necessity. For example, I argue that the US military could adequately defend this country with five of our nuclear submarines. (I assume Russia and China could do the same with their submarine forces.)
Think about it. While I’m behind on the latest operational capability of the US Navy, I think I’m in the ballpark: each of these subs carries 10 missiles, each which carries 16 independently-targeted hydrogen bombs. What that means is that each US nuclear submarine can attack 160 separate targets¸ such as cities, with a nuclear explosive. How many times do you want to make the rubble bounce?
[If you think I’m being crazy, think about the report analyzing the impact of a successful nuclear attack by the US on the USSR in the early 1960s. According to the late Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, he participated in a study meant for the “President’s Eyes Only,” in which this estimated that 600,000 people would have been killed—in Western and Eastern Europe, as well as in the Soviet Union—and that was if the attack was a success, meaning the US had knocked out the Soviets! Ellsberg himself recognized that this was multiples of the numbers killed in the Holocaust!] If there were a global “non-attack” treaty—and all of the other military weapons and troops needed to serve them were destroyed and/or demobilized—and there were heavy tax burdens placed on the extremely rich, then there would be billions and billions of dollars available to take care of one’s peoples and perhaps others, especially over time. At the same time, this drastically reduced military capability would still serve as a deterrent to an attack by anyone violating the treaty.
The point is that Empire=Death or at least national bankruptcy with increasingly widespread social disruption and economic distress. Capitalism has failed the large majority of people, both in this country and around the world, and threatens the extermination of all humans, animals, and most plants by the turn of the next century (the year 2100); see my talk at https://znetwork.org/zvideo/the-climate-crisis-capitalism-or-human-animal-most-plants-survival (with link to video). We need to create a new economic system to surpass capitalism that will not destroy the environment nor the atmosphere surrounding the planet, and which will place the economic stability and security of all people at the forefront.
It’s time we on the left quit half-stepping and go for the entire enchilada! We must repudiate the US Empire and all of its death and destruction, and seek alternatives to capitalism, both to provide economic support for all of our people and to keep from burning ourselves to death, and for ways to help people in formerly colonized countries! Anything less than a sweeping proposal such as this is, from the beginning, doomed to failure: we need hope, not doom.
And now that we have this complete analysis (which hopefully will continue to develop), it is time to develop a strategy to achieve it: how can we get from where we are today to ending the Empire and capitalism, while allowing humans, animals and most plants to survive? We need to build organizations to develop and implement our strategy, to educate our members, and to win people over to our side, repudiating the false choice between Democrats and Republicans; neither can provide solutions facing most of us. It will take time to do this—it will not happen within an election cycle or two—but we want to try to make decisions on all levels that will move us toward achieving our three-pronged goal.