Greg Gerritt: Politics and Economics in the USA

"Many folks have leaned into local government responses when states and nations are not paying attention. It brings us from an environmental agenda to a community prosperity agenda."

I started writing this essay right after the 2024 election. The meme of the time was that the Democrats did not have a plan for the economy the working class lives in, so Trump’s flat-out lies and stupidity sold better than the muddle that Democrats make of the economy due to clashing interests within the party. The meme is just that, a meme - truth unverified. Interestingly, Democratic Representative Greg Casar from Texas made the same comment on December 13 in the New York Times.

Sometime after Adam Smith retired from the scene, the discipline he wrote within, Political Economics, split into two disciplines. Political Science and Economics. With tongue firmly in cheek, I ( and recently several other commentators) would like to propose that we end the phony separation and again refer to it as political economy as it is clear that much of politics is about how to keep the economy creating benefits for the favored, and who to blame when it goes awry. Only the state of national insecurity gets as much attention in the halls of government as economic development and how to have more for their buddies. Economic policy and political policy are so intertwined and intertwined with the power apparatus that to separate them is a fool’s errand.

The Republicans are in full-out lies about the economy and what is needed to create prosperous communities. They have completely committed themselves to a political/economic system that is 100% corporate and controlled by the rich - Neoliberalism. They are fully committed to climate disasters and economic collapse if it will keep the white supremacists in power. Anyone who passed high school physics learns enough to know that climate change due to excess carbon burning is no hoax. For Yale graduates like JD Vance to deny the basic science is to see people in full-scale fascist lie mode. Everything they want economically benefits the richest folk, leaving everyone in trouble. Their climate strategy is already killing thousands of people in the USA and hundreds of thousands around the world.

The program is anti-regulatory, states the rich have the right to pollute and pay no taxes, celebrates the rich having the right to ignore economic and racial justice, denies the right of communities to be safe from toxic chemicals, works to undermine science and truth, and revels in having almost no public expenditure on infrastructure except for prisons and weapons. It promises huge economic growth and never delivers.

The Democrats also refuse to tell the truth about the economy. The Democrats vacillate between honoring the same neoliberal lies as the Republicans and the stark awareness that an economy that only works for the rich creates a piss-poor economy for most of the community and is killing us with climate denial, toxins, plastic, the military-industrial complex, the medical-industrial complex, and the rupture of the safety net due to engineered budget deficits.

Democrats know we need to invest in resilience and the transitions of our crazy age. Some of them know that public investment must first go into the lowest-income neighborhoods to create prosperous communities. Some of them would even admit how much investment is needed. But the party never tells the whole truth.

The Democrats did not have a message that spoke to a broad swathe of the population about how the changes we need to make to limit climate catastrophes will benefit the community and its prosperity. For the changes to be good for the community, they need to be run democratically from the bottom up, which upsets the paymasters of the Democratic party as much as it upsets the paymasters of the Republicans.

The fact that we have eaten the planet, that the ecosystems that feed us are collapsing, and that the climate deteriorates before our very eyes seem not to matter one whit to neoliberals and neoliberal (actually most) economists. They cannot fit ecosystems into their models.

Another reality that does not fit into their models is that the data clearly shows the United States economy always runs best with higher taxes on the wealthy and less inequality in the community. In troubled times, the big lie works better than a muddled truth. I even had a Republican fess up when I debated him on TV and brought up all the statistics that he lied about because it sounded good. He never talked about how it did not deliver.

It is time for everyone to speak the truth about the economy, how it runs, who benefits from it, how sustainable it is, and how it is keeping or not keeping ecosystems and soils. Forests and fisheries are healthy, so we can continue to eat.

How can you solve problems if you cannot openly discuss the real facts or the problem? Telling the truth about the economy, despite the dark money Infowars campaigns, clearly is better than outright fascism or a muddled agenda that still gives away the store to the rich and makes us ever more vulnerable.

Neither party has ever told the truth about the economy and is unlikely to do so voluntarily. But the truth eventually catches up, and reality can bite hard. You hope something is left after the carnage taking place on the planet right now. One critical factor is that you cannot grow infinitely on a finite planet. Recent reports say we have crossed planetary boundaries on six of the nine key things for maintaining civilized life, including a moderate climate, clean water, and phosphorus, which all living cells need. That absolute limitation means Elon Musk cannot get to Mars soon enough and is perfectly happy to leave a burning husk of a nearly uninhabitable planet in his wake if it gets him out of there. Talk about overshoot and narcissism in a toxic cocktail.

I have always felt that my polestar in activism is to speak truth to power. These days I primarily focus on creating healthy community economies and ecosystems, and raising awareness that you cannot do one without the other. Providence has many examples of ecological healing as an integral part of economic development. Olneyville nonprofits know that as the river, so goes the neighborhood, and vice versa. Compost is a growing industry, inhabiting Life is Round and anything. Working with ecosystems to create prosperous communities is not the sideshow in the efforts to create prosperity; it is the core of the prosperity and greater equality we seek. The rich are seriously misguided in their efforts to steer the economy toward their desires because if prosperity is widespread, everyone does better. Societies that encourage the creativity and energy of all are the most successful. To speak of this honestly requires getting right to the heart of power. When I worked in the movement to end apartheid in South Africa, I became familiar with the writings of Stephen Biko. He wrote biting essays about the South African apartheid state, one of which was called “I Write What I Like.” The police killed him in jail. But the spirit of “I write what I like” sits right there with speaking truth to power in my writing about the day’s issues.

One of my favorite writers, the creator of cultures, is Ursula K. LeGuin. An astute observer of the world, she used magical worlds to tell truths about Earth and Democracy. She pointed out that when dealing with dragons, you must call them by their real names - the names they try to hide - and you can make progress when you do. I try to call things by their real names. Oligarchy, patriarchy, fascism, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, neoliberalism, and real estate money in local politics are all things that try to hide their real names and identities to make it harder to hold them accountable for their crimes against humanity and the planet. Reminding everyone of their real names is critical in our decades of disinformation. Trump demands loyalty and threatens to jail people who speak the truth about his lies. He needs the lies because most of his words do not work. If it worked, he would not need to lie.

The policies he offers on the economy are crash-and-burn proposals that will harm our communities, and the only people who will see any financial gains are the criminally rich. Getting it wrong on climate and the climate justice economy will significantly damage the American economy. I guess I will write and speak the truth as best as I can discern it until I end up in jail. And Trump will try to scapegoat those who call him out when his mindfart runs out of steam as climate disasters get more dangerous.

We face an existential crisis. Burning fossil fuels and forests is putting so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen by more than 50% in the last 300 years, from 280 ppm to 425 ppm, with much of the emissions in the last 50 years, after science demonstrated that it was setting a course for disaster to keep burning fossil fuels. The climate change rate is faster than anything Earth has seen in forever. The results are already catastrophic, and the catastrophes seem to be heading into hyperdrive. More significant, faster, stronger, wetter, drier, more energetic, HOTTER. Neoliberal willful blindness to the effect of climate change on the economy is preventing progress. Sort of like their blindness on all kinds of issues, facts never getting in the way of a good lie and fancy mathematical model. And the results show how misguided they are.

It is telling that the emergence of neoliberalism as an economic and political philosophy masquerading as economic science coincides with the reemergence of an administration that calls for going backward on race, public infrastructure, community-led democracy, development, climate, environmental protection, justice, healthcare, public transit, free speech, poverty, and corruption.

The ties between racism and the economic philosophy that rewards the rich at the expense of the rest of society are long-standing, emerging intellectually in the USA in the work of Southern Planters in the 1840s (thank you, Heather Cox Richardson and Sherrilyn Ifill for helping me learn more about that) as a way to expand slavery and their power. The plan in 1840 looks remarkably like the Project in 2025. No taxes on the rich, no regulations to help labor or the environment, and the creation of an illiberal democracy like Hungary in which the rich cannot lose the election because anyone running against them on issues like justice, clean water, and no corruption just gets tossed in jail or the cemetery, and all problems are blamed on foreign influences and hooligans. The need to destroy democracy via voter suppression is a clear sign they understand that if the people knew what they were doing, they would say no and vote them out. The economist James Buchanan of George Mason University is just one example of the actual familial relations between the members of the old-line southern aristocracy and the development of neoliberalism that offers us a full-scale attack on “liberal” values like clean air, one-person-one-vote, equal protection under the law. Everyone gets to be their best self to contribute to the development of their society and community.

Neoliberalism started to gain respectability in 1973 when the Chamber of Commerce, under the influence of wealthy lobbyists, one of whom, Lewis Powell, went on to the United States Supreme Court, said we have to stop the peaceniks (Vietnam), the environmentalists (just after Nixon signed the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act), and the people of color (the Voting Act law), and roll back the whole liberal/progressive agenda so profits can return to the levels of the Early Days of the Washington Consensus and white men can rule the roost. Rich criminals have since put billions of dollars into the effort.

The changes in the world economy started to be noticeable at that time, including the United States starting to trade deficits as we imported more cheap junk so corporate profits could stay high by not paying workers, resulting in the collapse of the Washington Consensus. It also meant that economic growth levels achieved in the 1950s were flat-out impossible in an advanced economy despite the promises made by the rich that Neoliberalism and tax cuts for the rich would be a panacea. Neoliberals worked hard for many years to align racists, conservative Christian nationalism, and the sexual perversions imposed by the patriarchs with the interests of big corporations to lock in rule by the rich.

The result is a lower growth rate, deteriorating communities, ecological collapse, and a more restive and polarized nation. Old-style patriarchy and rule by the rich is a campaign that can win some elections, but its promises of prosperity are empty and cruel. You need everyone’s best self to make a modern economy work, but patriarchs and racists want to keep 70% of the people from contributing anything except low-wage labor. Stupid.

You do need to look at the data. Facts are important. Growth rates and unemployment have been better under the Democrats more frequently than the Republicans, as budget cuts do not work well and never stimulate the economy. Ask the folks in Kansas and Oklahoma who went all in on the low taxes mantra. The economy crashed right about the time the schools had to start closing.

The financialization of everything and the flow of wealth to the already wealthy keeps leading to overreach, which leads to a crash that economists say is impossible based on the models. However, serial recessions are a very big reality that we must deal with - with a nearly empty toolbox except for interest rates. The wealthiest use recessions to scoop up the assets of the least wealthy who could not ride out a downturn. Recessions are a feature, not a bug - specifically to help the rich extract more wealth from the community. It even has a name: Disaster Capitalism. (Thank you, Naomi Wolf.)

With a record this poor, you would wonder why it is such a popular platform. Trump said it best: He loves the uneducated so that he can do his PT Barnum act. The preference of some elites for the ignorance of the populace is directly related to the poor policies of the neoliberals. In a modern economy, creativity is critical, and the ability to see through the fog and come up with real answers is essential. Considering how little resemblance to reality neoliberal economics has and its insistence on being right and damn the data, it is no surprise that an attack on schools and centers of learning and scholarship is one of the first issues of the culture wars. Right-wingers have worked to cut funding for schools and have been trashing schools in which thinkers disagree with their anti-science, anti-truth, climate-denying, patriarchal agenda forever. From the 1840s until the present, the racists running the South refused to fund railroads, libraries, healthcare, and schools because Black people might use them. Today, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama are states that never caught up due to slavery, Jim Crow, and their refusal to invest in communities, infrastructure, education, or public health. Now, they want all of us to live that way.

Beyond attacking education and learning, neoliberals are also quite content with a national insecurity state that will always protect their money from the people. Their willingness to use police power to stop anyone from fact-checking them and asking tough questions is part and parcel of the program. Democracy is too messy. They have something to hide, and what they hide is that the program cannot deliver to anyone other than the rich, and it is screwing the rest of us.

Neoliberalism can only thrive in a fact-free environment, as it has an economic program that does not work. In the age of climate catastrophes, it is a recipe for the deaths of millions and ever greater poverty. It is all about the behavior or homo economus, some automaton that always has perfect information and a completely rational mind. None of these models in any way resemble the real world, especially since they have no place in them for climate change, families, clean water and air, the economic costs of industrial disease, or the massive depletion of natural resources and biodiversity we now clearly see. In other words, all mathematical calculations never reflect the real world. What is worse, the economists know that no data in the real world matches what they calculate it will be, and they do not care. As toadies of George Bush said, “We make our reality.” They work to obscure what research shows when the comparisons are made and insist that even if the data shows they are wrong, they are still right because the Models are more important than real life. Neoliberalism is also flat-out wrong about the role of regulations to protect the environment and public health in the economy, but the Big Lie machine continues to crank.

Considering that nearly every leading industry in the United States is based on advanced learning and technologies, you would think that businesses and supporters of capitalism would promote education that opens up minds to excite people about learning and innovating. But the folks who are always complaining about those damn communists are the ones holding the economy back by suppressing thinking and inquiry and burning books. Do you want an advanced economy, or are you afraid of people who think for themselves?

Since modern economies require people competent in science, what group of people who respect science and learning could be in denial about the climate and how it will affect everyone and everything? How about the public health benefits of clean drinking water and good sewer systems? How about the incredible benefits of vaccines and the basic science that sets the stage for progress in many areas of interest?

The conjunction of poverty, redlining, and pollution hazards in our communities is pretty stark. Will we be allowed to teach about it? What about the effect of tariffs on trade and the economy? The neoliberals no longer live in a reality-based world; they say they can create their reality. But the ever more dangerous fires and storms are breaking insurance markets, the destruction of whole communities, and the creation of climate refugees who can no longer grow crops or escape the drought-driven wars, point out very clearly that Neoliberals and Christian nationalists have no answers for real-world problems except to rile up more hatred and violence.

It is quite clear that Christian Nationalists, white supremacists, and fossil fuel barons can continue to tear apart society. Still, they have no clue how to knit one together to meet the current challenges. Nothing they offer works in the real world. The only way to get away with the Big Lie long-term is to break the schools, break science, and arrest communities. But what that also does is break the economy, and that backfires on them. Ask all the other patriarchal societies that keep women out of the job market how their attempts to get out of poverty are going. Iran, Afghanistan, and every other hard-core patriarchy are at the bottom of the heap because they forget women hold up half the sky, so they lose all that energy, productivity, and education. Neoliberals and Christian Nationalists want to break democracy because that is the only way to get their program approved. Neoliberalism requires that men forget that women hold up half the sky. But it becomes more obvious every day that the patriarchal attempts to prevent people on all of the points of the gender spectrum except cisgender men, and especially white men, means that society is squandering 70% of its creativity and energy and is grinding itself down. It’s a recipe for failure. Watch Trump make it worse, fast.

Repressing and scapegoating immigrants, gays, people of color, Jews, or anyone else is so they can keep power even when society is crumbling due to their program. If the economy fails because of climate catastrophes and the unwillingness of the fascists to let everyone be their best selves, then it is more than likely the government will fall. The repression of democracy makes it very clear that they are afraid of the unpopularity of their proposals, and they desire to keep power to prevent a reckoning - exactly the strategy of the pre-Civil War Southern planters. Trump is the poster boy, along with Netanyahu, for keeping power to stay out of court for crimes and corruption.

For many years, I have been battling the dark forces (think oil industry) fueled with Dark Money. Citizens United fuels the political surge with billions of dollars. Foundations like the Heritage Foundation take tons of dark money and produce outright fantasies like Project 2025.

The basic underpinning of the Neoliberal economic philosophy is that low taxes on the rich create more money to invest and spur growth. Few regulations on the industry are how the market solves all problems and leads to maximum growth.

Let us be very clear right from the start: This has been studied repeatedly. The underpinning principles have been found to be false. They are simply a wish list designed for power, not progress. An economy’s growth rate is much more dependent upon natural resources, education, labor supply, energy costs, and transportation issues than tax rates. Taxes on profits are a tiny percentage of income and rarely make any difference in the real world—just in the fantasies of rich anti-taxers.

Even more telling is the deregulatory fervor. The data demonstrates that environmental, health, and safety investments more than pay off in increased profits and economic growth. Specifically, regarding the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, the payoffs to society have been at least 30 times the cost of compliance. Is it American to prevent mothers from stopping the poisoning of their kids by the local factory? But watch Trump try and call them terrorists.

If you asked Americans if they would prefer to eliminate the Clean Air and Clean Water Act and go back to unbreathable air and stinking rivers, most would look at you like you were a Martian with three eyes. Yet this is always the core of what the neoliberals ask. It is not for economic benefits. Everybody except the clueless know that the way to prosperity is clean water. I discovered an amazing correlation between mining industries and good business climates. Suppose a state or country lets miners get away with murder. In that case, it always ranks highly on the business climate rankings because business climate rankings are specifically designed to encourage the worst excesses of neoliberalism.

In a sane world, one could very easily produce a chart with data showing economic success under various taxation schemes (See examples linked from the reference section, and you can even make your own with Bureau of Economic Analysis data.). Hence, Neoliberals work hard to prevent anyone from looking at their work honestly because they know the charts would provide stark evidence of economic disasters if you follow the program. One can use the federal data or the data from the various states. The data shows low taxes on the rich do not produce economic bonanzas. Specifically, it does not increase the growth rate nor guarantee a good standard of living for the populace.

The neoliberals assert that it must be true, but reality says that where it is easiest for the rich to abuse their neighbors and keep folks in near poverty and ill health, those are the places with lower wages, less democracy, and more injustice. There are very good reasons for this. One is that big investments in public infrastructure, paid for by taxation, almost always increase economic activity and reduce disaster losses. Another is that investments in education pay off. The data on the economic implications of environmental regulations is also quite clear. Unless you are committed to a strategy of low wages and dirty water associated with mining, clean air, clean water, and the technologies that keep them that way are very good for business.

Other than low taxes on the rich, what the Republicans seem to want is an end to the separation of Church and State. Christian nationalists have such a narrow view of humanity. The ideology is a direct descendant (including actual descendants as well as intellectual) of the Southern plantation owners seeking to restrict democracy so they could expand slavery across the West. All power to white men of wealth and no one else. Transphobia almost exactly maps with the willingness to destroy ecosystems for profit in the political mind of America. You would think most Americans might object to a bunch of yahoos undoing regulations that protect workers, the environment, public health, or infrastructure because, in the 1840s, that would have meant a Black person could benefit from it, and that was verboten - but the recent election says maybe not. Do you want to live in a place where the elites say that a community does not have the right to prevent the poisoning of the wells? My definition of democracy always includes the right of communities to legal redress to avoid destruction. One of the first things dictators do is crack down on environmental protests. They do not want to see women in the streets protesting the poisoning of their children by the rich guy’s factory, so the community is shot or arrested if they try. Neoliberalism seems ascendant, though it’s cruising for a climate bruising.

America will finally be great when everyone is encouraged to be their best self so that they can contribute their best self to the community. Humanity seems to be going the wrong way in much of the world, with justice and rights disappearing as fast as the forest and the storm clouds becoming more powerful. Tackling the climate catastrophe will take all of us. Anyone who insists that your best self is not allowed to help has wholly lost sight of the American Dream, suppressed by years of lies by the rich, allied with Christian nationalists.

One more thing that needs to be said about neoliberalism and its association with Christian nationalism is that the most patriarchal places on the planet have terrible economies. Any doctrine that says the contribution of some people is not wanted, that some people are not allowed to contribute from their best selves to the community due to prejudice, is going to struggle. Some of this is racist - White Supremacy for the 21^st Century. But these days, it appears that some of it is sexual. A textbook definition of patriarchy is the control of the fertility of teenage girls by old men. The attempts to stuff people back into the closet, the ignoring of rising adolescent suicides, the attacks on people on less populated parts of the gender spectrum, and the sexual predation of young women seem to combine with economic and environmental policies that harm communities readily.

Going Forward

Republicans are always saying they will bring prosperity and security by stuffing everyone back into the closet and slave quarters. The reality is that they bring recessions and government bailouts of the rich, and social progress continues despite their efforts to drag us backward. For people who claim to want to get the government off the backs of the people, they sure want to get into your bedroom.

Democrats offer, at least on paper, middle-class prosperity with a safety net, health care for some, and investments in schools, infrastructure, and public health . They do not do a good job of selling it. The right-wing propaganda machine is very well financed, and the progressive forces in the United States focus on so many different things that the messages are not as sharp. The audiences for the particular segments are smaller. Yet, the data strongly suggests that Democratic policies, combining higher taxation, infrastructure, and social progress spending, work better and create better growth and broader prosperity. However, Democrats seem unable to make the case to the voters.

Democrats undermine their own message by being such good partners to the military-industrial complex and the national insecurity state and wishy-washy on climate and ecological healing as the road to prosperity. You cannot overthrow neoliberalism softly. The climate will not wait, and neither will our communities.

Here is what I think is prudent. We fight the neoliberal/corporate/white supremacist agenda with facts, emphasizing education on how ecological healing helps the economy and generates revenue. The role of infrastructure: The absolute need to push investment in climate justice, knowing that long-term prosperity has to work from the bottom up and unless we raise our lowest income communities, starting by helping them become fossil fuel-free as a way to end the asthma epidemics and bulwark them against fossil fuel price swings as well as reducing/eliminating fossil fuel use as a way to reduce emissions, our efforts to avert the worst of the climate catastrophe will fail. We have to get the technology right and have the right process and real inclusion, or we just get business as usual and continue the climate catastrophe. The deep-seated, violent reaction to the liberation of people, wherever they are on the gender or race spectrums, is one of the things that holds back the economy by preventing people from contributing fully. We must find a way to allow everyone to contribute, or we will all miss out. You would think the people who want faster growth would understand that, but the failures of the economic program designed to allow the rich to rule are covered up by the merger with patriarchal values. The rich can live with it as long as they get what they want: low taxes and an allowance to pollute, falsely raising profits while causing considerable costs to communities.

Nothing I write here is revolutionary; I just put it together from a slightly different perspective. Many people have connected democracy, economic justice, peace, and climate for the last 50 years. For at least that long, people have been demonstrating alternatives to Neoliberalism that bring prosperity to communities marginalized by Wall St. Many folks have leaned into local government responses when states and nations are not paying attention. It brings us from an environmental agenda to a community prosperity agenda. Many of the specifics that so many colleagues and authors have called for - small farms, local activism, urban gardens, good stormwater infrastructure, solar power, wind power, mass transit, primary care-centered healthcare for all, eating local, composting, great schools teaching real science and civics, and being aware of what kids are going through in the age of climate disasters have become mainstream in the educated parts of the country. We understand that this will help the entire community prosper. Overcoming the inertia of government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich, will not be easy. But it is popular. It is the work of getting climate and climate justice right.

I will not bother with details here; truckloads of good books explain it in great detail. Half of it is wrong. The world keeps changing. But the direction is right. If we do not evolve economic development into a bottom-up process, with communities in charge of what is appropriate and useful in their neighborhood, we shall be a troubled nation with inequality and a deteriorating environment being used by the oligarchs to drag us into an autocracy with a loss of personal and environmental rights and a crashing economy.

No one except a psychopath wishes hard times on their neighbors, but we also know that for communities to do the right thing, it needs to be easy for them to do the right thing. That takes investment, infrastructure, and a will to create justice. It is not popular to think that democracy and justice are the road to prosperity, but they are. It is clear that without dealing with climate change, there will never be prosperity, but that is what we face. Trump will pass from the scene soon enough, but the long-term damage to truth, justice, the planet, and the climate means that we have to keep up the resistance to bad science, bad education, bad policy, and politics based on lies. Find a way to make a difference and grow as a human.