Op-Ed

It has been another exciting week here in the Land of Oz, formerly known as the United States of America, which is currently going through an apparently overdue purging that will replace the rule of law with a whimsical process whereby the Chief Executive is empowered to decide everything in a new nation that will likely be renamed Trumpland. The transition has not been pretty, as part of the process is to deport all undesirables. As a result, countries that have been reckoned to be friends to the American people and government including Britain and Germany are now warning their citizens that they might want to reconsider plans to travel to the US as they might be detained by one or more of America’s law enforcement authorities even if their travel status is fully legal and they have not committed anything that might be considered a crime in the real world.

Freedom of speech is kind of like eggs nowadays – too expensive! For Columbia University, the cost imposed on it by the Trump administration was suddenly $400 million in rescinded federal funding, at least if the speech was pro-Palestinian and critical of Israel.

What choice did the school have, except, as Jennifer Scarlott writes, “to appease the Trump administration by expelling, suspending, and revoking the degrees of a growing number of students accused of peaceful protest and exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and assembly . . .?

Throughout my political career, I have steadfastly defended the First Amendment, particularly the right to free speech. In 2002, I delivered a speech entitled A Prayer for America, where I challenged the rationale of the PATRIOT Act and questioned actions that infringed upon the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and protection against unreasonable searches.

My commitment to upholding free speech has been a guiding principle throughout my tenure in public service. While a Member of Congress, I consistently opposed measures that, in my view, threatened civil liberties, including the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007, which I believed was unconstitutional and could potentially criminalize thought. The bill passed. I was one of 6 members who voted against it.

The Current Assault on Free Speech on Campus

There should be little doubt in anyone’s mind that the “wag the dog” relationship between the United States and Israel has done terrible damage to American institutions and constitutional liberties. The US bipartisan unconditional support of the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people has not gone unnoticed by the rest of the world which now despises America’s corrupt political system and its increasing bizarre and out of touch leadership. There were even reports this past week that Washington and Tel Aviv have been discussing shipping upwards of two million Palestinians to Sudan and Somalia, two of the most violent places on earth, to permit the development of Trump Gaza resort and the annexation of the rest of historic Palestine by Israel.

In his first term as president, Donald Trump picked to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency a virulent anti-EPA figure, Scott Pruitt.

When the powerful speak, mushroom clouds emerge – oh so easily. Power is about conquest; winning the war, getting what you want no matter the cost.

For instance, Israel should nuke Gaza. “Do whatever you have to do.” Thus declared Sen. Lindsey Graham last year in a Meet the Press interview, comparing the current genocide in Palestine to the U.S. decision to end World War II by A-bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “That was the right decision,” he said, spewing out the historical abstraction that still rules the world.

President Donald Trump’s address to Congress and the nation on Tuesday night was remarkably devoid of any mention of why the United States continues to both enable and be complicit in the Ukrainian conflict with Russia as well as with the war crimes that are being committed by the state of Israel against nearly all its neighbors on a daily basis. The most recent abomination committed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his band of thugs is the cutting off of food, medicine and temporary housing to the Gazans who were bold enough to return to their ruined homes due to a ceasefire negotiated successfully by US presidential envoy Steve Witkoff in January. Now that Netanyahu has decided to come up with some false assertions to break the agreement, allowing him to continue his extermination of the Palestinian people, Trump as peace maker seems to have disappeared without a trace even though the US was in a sense a guarantor of the phased disengagement.

The “old days” are more alive than ever – by which I mean my old days, when I was a kid. My life pushed forward on its own, more or less. This is called growing up. I wasn’t paying much attention until, at a certain point, a.k.a., adolescence, I started noticing the world I was a part of in ways beyond what I was taught. The world itself was changing and nobody, including my teachers, really understood it.

Existence wasn’t a bunch of bricks-and-mortar certainties. It was a vast unknown. Knowing this was alarming; it was also the meaning of freedom.

Today, as I move through the dark, stumbling uncertainty known as old age (I’m 78), I find myself looking backwards a lot, mulling over how I got here, often in amazement. For some reason it seems to matter. Can I learn from myself?

This year marks twenty years since one of the most consequential meetings of my time in Washington, D.C. Stephen Zarlenga, a man I would come to recognize as a scholar and a legend in monetary policy, walked into my Longworth Building office with his assistant, Elizabeth Harper.

In just a seven-minute discussion of US monetary policy, they set me on a course which changed my life, and how I looked at the world. I began a deep inquiry into the nature of money, and why is our government always in debt, in this, the wealthiest country in the world?

Today, in the face of misguided austerity measures proposed by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Zarlenga’s message is more urgent than ever. While the push to eliminate wasteful government spending is laudable, it is a distraction from fundamental questions:

How is money created?

Who creates it?

Why are we locked into perpetual debt?