This is our moment

The recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia has sent shock waves around the world, and the international order that guaranteed 70 years of peace and prosperity among free nations now hangs in the balance.

And at home, there are elements in American society that similarly want to supplant democracy with authoritarian rule.

In numerous Republican-led states, laws are being discussed and crafted that would make voting, and registering to vote, harder for perceived Democratic-leaning citizens, shorten early voting periods, restrict or even ban mail-in voting that was an indispensable lifeline during the pandemic-stricken 2020 elections, and even allow legislatures to overturn local election counts and override the will of the people.

And the move to militarize the police, and criminalize peaceful protest, proceeds apace.

They are also ready to undo women’s reproductive rights, and go several steps further, by banning interracial and same-sex marriage, and even the sale of contraceptives to married couples.

Sen. Rick Scott, head of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee that helps elect Republicans to the U.S. Senate, recently defied Sen. Mitch McConnell’s wish to run a stealth midterm campaign bereft of a policy agenda and unveiled his own platform: raise taxes sharply on Americans making less than $100,000 a year, and eliminate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act.

For those that contend that this is not who we are, sadly, many of us have seen this before:

A superpower invades a smaller country after making baseless accusations, and kills and terrorizes hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and wreaks massive destruction. After overthrowing domestic institutions, a puppet government is established to implement the agenda of the invading superpower.

The world cries out in anguish.

A sham election and a pre-emptive invasion. Russia and Ukraine? Nazi Germany?

No, the United States and Iraq.

In the aftermath of the 2000 U.S. presidential election, the vote count in Miami, Florida was stopped, and Republican apologists and operatives hailed the infamous Brooks Brothers Riot as a spontaneous and principled gathering of patriotic Miamians determined to prevent Al Gore from stealing Florida’s electoral votes for president.

Until their flight expenses showed up on George Bush’s campaign expense report.

The Bush supporters, with the help of the U.S. Supreme Court, managed to stop the vote count and usher in the illegitimate Bush presidency by coup.

We soon saw why they were so hell-bent on attaining victory by any means necessary:

Years before George W. Bush was sworn in as our 43rd president, Iraq was in the sights of the neoconservatives behind the Project for a New American Century. Before the smoke from the World Trade Center towers even cleared up, a ginned-up case for war against Iraq was being made to the American people.

Oil interests, here and in petro-states such as Saudi Arabia and Russia, made fabulous profits, as the removal of Iraqi oil from the world markets sent prices soaring from about $30 to over $100 a barrel.

And military expenditures skyrocketed.

But that was not all our homegrown oligarchs were after. The Republicans in power parleyed the burst dot.com bubble to foment a “jobless recovery” fueled by real estate speculation, deregulation of Wall Street and investment banks, manipulation of energy markets epitomized by the Enron debacle, and profiteering in the healthcare sector.

They got an unfunded Medicare Part D prescription drug program without cost controls that locked Americans into paying up to five times more for the same drug as in the rest of the world.

They got private Medicare Advantage HMOs, which instead of costing less than traditional Medicare, as promised, were paid up to 15 percent more to do nothing more than to act as middlemen, and if not fixed under the Affordable Care Act the situation was projected to bankrupt Medicare by 2017.

They continued their outsourcing and their assault on labor unions, signing free trade agreements with no conditions on labor rights or environmental protections as 60,000 factories closed and half of high tech jobs were outsourced, all on the myth of the infallibility of free markets.

Those reckless policies and looting sprees plunged the nation, and the world, into the worst economic and financial collapse since the Great Depression.

And today, as we attempt to recover from a recession and the worst pandemic of the past century, we are once again seeing the building up of a housing bubble with double-digit annual rises in property values, fueled by easy credit, huge tax cuts on corporations and the rich, and hundreds of billions looted from the government as a result of abuses built into the opportunistic cash grab otherwise known as the Trump administration’s Paycheck Protection Program.

And an inflationary spiral fueled by rising energy and food prices partly due to supply chain snafus and corporate price gouging that the Republicans are blaming on Democrats’ “tax and spend” policies.

Also looming: a monetary “correction” by the Federal Reserve that threatens to slam the brakes on the economic recovery.

As the Panama Papers and its recent follow-up exposé illustrate, the word is awash in oligarch and authoritarian money, which works behind the scenes to distort and undermine democratic ideals and institutions and fuel economic inequality.

Allowing multinational corporations and private capital the freedom to move to undeveloped nations in an effort to avoid unions, the minimum wage, labor and environmental regulations, and human rights standards against forced and child labor – and pit poor nations against each other in competition for jobs and foreign investment – provides unregulated and unaccountable capital a mobility that labor does not enjoy, and which is out of the regulatory reach of national governments without some form of cooperative agreement among jurisdictions.

The recent push by the administration for a global minimum tax might provide curbs to globe-hopping capital and unaccountable deal-makers. And it was this neoliberalism of tax cuts, outsourcing and financialization, and the resulting increase in inequality that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen decried as a “race to the bottom” and hoped to combat with a global minimum tax, which several major Western economies are now close to approving.

And we are going to have to re-think our relationship with China.

China, whose economic rise has been fueled by cheap credit and exports and foreign investment, has become an indispensable component of the investor class’s conservative world order in which mobility of capital seeks the most cost-efficient venue for production, and it has been credited for its pragmatism in opening itself up to foreign investment and technology as a way to modernize and lift its citizens out of extreme poverty.

But its expansionism and military aspirations are now putting it on a collision course with the international order of free nations, and it remains to be seen if its further rise will be peaceful.

And given China’s increasingly aggressive behavior, and mounting concern over the fragility of supply chains and the wisdom of relying on the availability of foreign-sourced critical goods ranging from computer chips and rare earth metals to medical supplies from hostile dictatorships during a pandemic, perhaps now is a good time to revisit this issue that has served to economically isolate labor from markets while giving China’s expansionism a free hand.

It may be time to implement an industrial policy for this country. For decades, Republicans and conservatives have decried the idea of a national industrial policy as “picking winners and losers,” preferring instead to rely on the marketplace to balance and organize supply and demand,

But we now know all too well that it is possible to be too ‘lean and mean’: it is also necessary to have adequate and robust in-house capabilities.

Under the banner of “market efficiency,” we have allowed corporate leaders to send jobs and factories overseas to poor countries in an effort to maximize profits, exploit cheap and unorganized foreign labor, undercut the interests of American workers, and avoid American labor and environmental regulations.

Meanwhile, Republicans today seem more interested in gutting a safety net that prevented the Crash of 2008 and the Great Recession from becoming a Great Depression.

And promoting “energy independence,” which means turning more and more federal lands over to private interests, even though two-thirds of federally-provided oil leases are currently inactive, presumably in anticipation of further price hikes that they can then exploit for windfall profits.

And promoting “school choice” by draining public school budgets by diverting limited taxpayer funds to charter schools and other privately run and for-profit schools. And by demagoguing public schools over the phantom threats of topics concerning the country’s racial history, sexuality, and targeting trans-friendly and other anti-bullying policies.

In contrast to these divisive and exploitative policies, President Biden believes in the power of consensus, of leadership that works to solve problems and bring people together to work toward shared interests and mutually beneficial goals.

In the interests of upholding Ukrainian sovereignty, he convinced a skittish energy-dependent Europe to send economic and military aid and to support imposing harsh sanctions on Russia to punish it for its brutal and unprovoked attack on Ukraine, and he is working to provide Europe with American and allied supplies of oil and gas to replace Russian sources of energy.

He recently committed the U.S. to re-enter an historic global agreement among almost 200 countries — including China, the world’s largest carbon polluter — to address climate change.

He also brought the world’s powers together to revisit and revive the landmark agreement that limits Iran’s nuclear program to peaceful uses.

And perhaps the US can offer Iran a security guarantee in exchange for abandoning its nuclear weapons program, recognizing Israel and pulling back from its overseas adventures and continuing with the UN inspections and verification regime. Iran would then be free to trade with our allies, and by resuming oil sales to Europe they would undercut Russia’s ability to use oil as a geopolitical weapon.

After all, who ever thought we would be talking to Venezuela? But now we are, as this current crisis demands no less than a diplomatic breakthrough.

With the fate, safety and stability of so much of the world now hanging in the balance, and with so much of the world looking to American leadership, we have an opportunity — and the leverage — to reject a politics based on brute force and push for a fair and lasting peace, champion American interests here and abroad, and uphold — and export — American values.

In the words of President Biden, this is our moment.