The New Golden Age

(1796.09.18) President Washington, in his Farewell Address, warns that “the spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create...a real despotism.”

(1961.01.17) President Eisenhower, in his Farewell Address, warns that “the conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry [has] grave implications…In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence…by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

(1971.08.23) Soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell sends his confidential memo, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” to the US Chamber of Commerce. It puts forth simple ideas in a clear and concise manner, and is the intellectual basis upon which much of the current US Neofascist plutocracy is based. Powell’s Memo provided top corporate & business leaders with a how-to guide for the eventual corporatist takeover of the country. It helped catalyze a new business activist movement, with numerous conservative family & corporate foundations, thereafter creating and sustaining powerful new voices to help push the corporate agenda, including the Business Roundtable, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, etc. Other influences include the writings of Leo Strauss (godfather of neocons, who believed that the populace couldn’t be trusted with self-rule), Ayn Rand (who glorified & justified unquenchable greed), and philosophies like Social Darwinism & Eugenics.

(2023.11.13) The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) published a detailed analysis of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led 2025 Presidential Transition Project, which builds on Heritage's latest Mandate for Leadership, a series which since the Reagan administration has served as the right-wing think tank's to-do list for the next Republican president…a dangerous and unconstitutional attempt to move towards an authoritarianism guided by Christian nationalism.

(2025.03.16) The Trump administration violates court orders in at least three separate cases. Fox News displays photos of judges who rule against Trump while hosts & Republicans attack them live on air, while Elon Musk publishes information about their families & friends, and publishes their tax filings, which he has probably pilfered from the IRS—all tactics similar to those that Goebbels used to pressure out jurists who opposed the Nazis between 1933-38, in the process known as Gleichschaltung.

The Trump administration moves to cancel Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; targets Habitat for Humanity; tells Columbia University that, to get back funding, it must launch a university-wide pogrom against all their Arab students who do not pledge eternal fealty to Trump, and forbid any Middle Eastern studies going forward.

SecDef Pete Hegseth decides to smear all Black & Hispanic Medal of Honor winners, insisting that they are "DEI award winners" and not worthy of the Medal of Honor… Erik Prince, Blackwater founder and war-profiteer, vies for position as leader of Trump’s mercenary army, in a $25bn deal to privatize the mass deportations of 12 million migrants. Sounds like authoritarianism guided by Christian nationalism…

…with no regard for the planet’s life-support system: from nature.com, “sea surface temperatures suddenly rose in 2023-24. Such a jump would not have been possible without anthropogenic warming.” From science.org, “a reminder: more extreme, more intense, more frequent tornadoes in America’s heartland—the new normal, driven by consistent changes in the meteorological environment.” Meanwhile, Elon Musk orders shut down of the Mona Loa Observatory, the most important US measuring point for CO2 accumulation.

Brace for market crash. Trump juxtaposes his tariffs with his demand to seize and subjugate Canada, a flagrant violation of international law. Trump begins the gradual closing of the US-Canadian border with a requirement that Canadians register in advance if they plan to visit the United States.

Thom Hartmann: This is a story as old as capitalism. During the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, some of America’s greatest fortunes were made or massively expanded. Joe Kennedy, who’d made a pile of money manipulating the stock market in the 1920s, bailed out as the market began its slide in 1929 and even shorted the market, increasing his wealth. Once it had crashed, when everybody was broke, he bought stock with a vengeance. By the end of the Depression, he was one of the richest men in the nation. The afternoon of the Great Crash, October 29, 1929, J. Paul Getty went to Wall Street and began buying stocks, particularly in small oil companies. Out of that, he became one of the richest men in the world.

When Wall Street banks — exploiting Republican-demanded deregulation of banking and investment rules — crashed the American economy in 2007, home prices (and homeowner equity) collapsed by 21%. Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to banking predators like “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, and tens of millions of others were underwater.

The stock market plummeted by over 50% in the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency. As over 8 million Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out, and working-class people desperately unloaded stocks in their 401Ks at a loss just to pay the bills, as wages plummeted in the face of a collapsing labor market, the top 1%, including the Bush & Cheney families, started buying stocks. Between 2009 — the bottom of the Bush Crash — and 2012 when the recovery really began, the top 1% of Americans saw their income grow by over 31%. Fully 95% of all the income increases in the country were seized by the top 1% of Americans during that period.

Then they did it again 10 years later, in the Trump/Covid Crash of 2020. March 16, 2020 — just after Trump declared a pandemic and lockdown — the Dow sustained the largest single-day crash in its entire history. For Trump and his billionaire buddies, this was an even better opportunity than the Bush crash of 2007. By June 4th, the seven richest people in America had seen their fortunes increase by 50%.

Historian Quinn Slobodian: “We are witnessing the convergence of 3 strains of politics…the Wall Street–Silicon Valley nexus of distressed debt & startup culture; anti–New Deal conservative think tanks [plus Christian theocrats]; and the online world of anarchocapitalism and right-wing accelerationism. Within the new administration, each strain is striving to realize its desired outcome. The first wants a sleek state that narrowly seeks to maximize returns on investment; the second a shackled state unable to promote social justice; and the third, most dramatically, a shattered state that cedes governing authority to competing projects of decentralized private rule. We are watching how well they can collaborate to reinforce one another.”

The economic crash that’s happening now may well be exactly what they wanted. When Trump said, at his January 20 inauguration, “The golden age of America begins right now,” he was talking about 1% of the population or less.