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It’s with a very heavy heart that I watch Europe imitate the militarism of the United States, moving massive resources from human and environmental needs to weapons, celebrating proposals from good liberal civic groups to steal money from Russia and dump it into more weapons, cutting deals to have the ingredients for more weapons dug out of your soil by a distant empire that routinely spits on your head, moving nuclear weapons around and across borders like toys, discarding the rule of law and a vision of a survivable future.

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.

International law is fighting for relevance. The outcome of this fight is likely to change the entire global political dynamics, which were shaped by World War II and sustained through the selective interpretation of the law by dominant countries.

 In principle, international law should have always been relevant, if not paramount, in governing the relationships between all countries, large and small, to resolve conflicts before they turn into outright wars. It should also have worked to prevent a return to an era of exploitation that allowed Western colonialism to practically enslave the global south for hundreds of years.

As much of the American public reflexively freaks out over Trump's sudden capitulation in it's proxy war against Russia, one must consider the options, as I have written before. The three choices are to capitulate, to drag the war on for an indefinite period of time, or to escalate.

The idea of escalating this war, with the intention of militarily driving the Russian army back to it's border, is terrifying. American's have been programed to believe that Vladimir Putin is an unhinged lunatic who intends to attacking the NATO military alliance as soon as he defeats Ukraine, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.

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?