Transcription
available. If you want to see the stupidity, the arrogance, the ignorance of American leaders, it is on display in almost every word of the meeting that considered should the US help the Soviet Union at this time of massive reform at the end of the Cold War when Mikuel Gorbachev is unilaterally disbanding the Soviet military apparatus and the response of the West should have been let's end NATO because NATO was to absolutely uh respond to a potential Soviet invasion.
Now there's unilateral uh disarmament on the Soviet side, disbanding the Warsaw Pact. That should have been the answer for a tiny amount of what we were spending on the military. We could have helped to facilitate a smooth and peaceful economic transformation to a market economy and we would have gone on to live in peace. Well, this was turned down in June. Gorbachev went to the G7 soon afterwards. Came back empty-handed. The uh some of the politicians in the Soviet Union said, "You see what an idiot Gorbachev is. He was abducted." That was the attempted pooch. In the summer of 1991, Yeltsin stood on top of the tank, you'll recall. uh and uh soon Yeltsin was basically in political charge.
Now for me again kind of a kid but you know with with a little bit of track record I have to say because I had ended hyperinflations in a few countries. I had helped get Poland uh reorganized. I was following Keynes's logic. I was called this time not by Yavlinsky but by Yeltsin's economic advisor Yegor Gaidar, another wonderful person uh who wanted reform, wanted normalcy and he said, "Jeff, come, come to the dacha uh outside of Moscow in September 1991. Help us. It's it's going to be the government now. It's going to be our team." So, I flew to Moscow and I spent a week uh in the dacha with Yegor Gaidar and with others who would soon be the young reformist cabinet of the new independent Russian government. Of course, I didn't know exactly what was going to happen, but uh I knew that Yeltsin had the initiative at that point.
And in November 1991, the so-called G7 deputies, which meant that the uh deputy finance ministers of the G7 came as a group to Moscow to meet with Gaidar. Now by this time I had some experience on on these issues and I briefed Gaidar at length and I said, "Yegor, you need to get from the G7 deputies a standstill on your debt payments right now." What this means is that Russia or the Soviet Union had taken on debts uh in the late 1980s. Part of the US ploy at the time was to drive down oil prices in cahoots with the Gulf countries, which they had done. This put the Soviet Union into financial stress. Uh the Soviet Union took on debts under Gorbachev. Those debts were short-term. They were coming due. The uh Soviet Union had no reserves uh to speak of uh and so they were running out of hard currency cash. And I said to Gaidar, the most standard thing that you say in a fiscal crisis like this, which is you need a standstill on debt payments.
Now mind you, two years earlier, I had called for not only a standstill on Poland's debt payments, but an outright cancellation of the debts, which had been accepted by the G7 governments. So what I regarded as the most minimal possible request was just a postponement of any payments coming due because the Soviet Union and Russia had no financial reserves. Gaidar went into the meeting an hour later he came out, I could see in distress. I said, "Yegor, what happened?" He said, "They told me if we don't pay every penny the moment it is due, all ships on the high seas uh heading for Russia with food or other supplies will immediately be turned around and that will be the end of any financial cooperation with Russia." In other words, exactly the opposite of what was needed then. Russia continued to pay the interest uh and the uh debt as it was falling due and it ran out of money in uh the first weeks of uh 1992.
Now just to uh conclude this little saga in mid-December 1991, Gaidar asked me to brief President Yeltsin. And so I went with a little delegation to the Kremlin and sat in a giant room in the Kremlin. And you, I don't know if you can imagine this was, you know, the end of the Cold War. These were events that were so startling I could not even imagine I was there. But sitting in the Kremlin waiting for President Yeltsin to come. It was a huge room. The door in the far back on the right hand side opens, there strides in confidently President Yeltsin and he walks across the long room, sits down immediately in front of me and says, "Gentlemen, I want to announce the Soviet Union is over." And then he pointed to the back of the room and he said, "Do you know who's in the adjoining room? That is the military leadership and they have just agreed with me that the Soviet Union will be dissolved at the end of this month and Russia will be an independent state." So I heard that out of President Yeltsin's own mouth, real time. And I said, "This is, these events are moving pretty damn quick."
And then President Yeltsin said, "We want to be a normal country. We want to be at peace. We want to end this central planning. We want a market economy. We want to be friends with the United States. We want to be friends with Europe. We want your help." Well, it was my turn to speak and I said, "Mr. President. This is uh one of the most important moments of modern history. I'm sorry to tell you guys," I said it again. I said, "I have no doubt that the West will help you. This isn't even about the Soviet Union anymore. This is now about an independent Russia led by President Yeltsin. Absolutely. Who has said communism is over. We want a normal market economy. We want to be friends." I said, "How can the West turn this down?" H you learn. And uh it was a very painful lesson to tell you the truth. I could not really understand it for so many years to come.
Actually, I went back to Washington, went to the IMF because the IMF was kind of the coordinator for the G7, met the deputy managing director of the IMF, Richard Erb, and he told me, "Jeff, none of that's going to happen. There's not going to be big aid. There's not going to be a stabilization fund as I had created uh in Poland or helped to design and was my idea and worked to stabilize the currency. None of that's going to happen, Jeff." And I said to him, "Richard, Dick, why? Why? It's it's the right economics." And he stood there completely unresponsive. Wouldn't give me an answer. Just said, "It's not going to happen."
And to complete the story and give you a little bit more of an insight into this, I'm a um pretty persistent and and stubborn and had lots of experiences where I was told no, something won't happen and then you press, press because it's the right thing and then something does happen. And so, of course, I I kept on for two years trying to campaign for Western help for Russia because it's the right thing to do. It's how stabilization is done. It's how every successful stabilization has ended with some outside support. Not huge amounts, but modest debt standstills or debt reductions or debt restructuring or financial stabilization. And I didn't succeed.
But in March of 1992, so just three months after the events that I was describing, I was on a Newshour, the McNeil Lehrer Newshour, which was our public television, and I was uh paired with the acting Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger. uh the Secretary of State uh James Baker uh had stepped down to head the re-election campaign of George Bush and so we had an acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and I was debating him on the Newshour where I was saying we should help Russia and he was saying no, no, no, we have to be very prudent, no reason to rush into anything and so on. He of course knew no economics, didn't care and whatever. So, at the end of the Newshour debate, he said to me very nicely, "Jeff, let me give you a ride back to uh to DC." Because we were in a studio in Alexandria, Virginia. So, I got into the limousine of of the Secretary of State. And as we were driving back, he said to me, "Uh, Jeff, uh, suppose I told you I suppose just for the purpose of argument that I agree with you." Yeah. And and and Jeff, suppose that I told you that the Polish finance minister, Leszek Balcerowicz, had just been in Washington and um he said the same thing as you, actually. Yeah. Well, well, Jeff, just I just want to tell you it's not going to happen. And I said, "But Mr. Secretary, why? It's it's the right thing." He said, "Jeff, suppose I agree with you. It's not going to happen. Do you know what this year is?" And I I said, "Yes, it's 1992." Said, "Do you know what that means?" I said, "That it's an election year." He says, "Yes, it's not going to happen."
So that was the explanation that was given by the acting Secretary of State. Not that the arguments are wrong, that the economics are wrong, that the logic is wrong, but that the United States is not going to help Russia because Russia is an enemy. Okay, I took that for a long time as kind of basic electoral politics, you know, that that Bush was cowardly, couldn't lead, was afraid of Patrick Buchanan on his right and so forth. But the truth is it was much deeper than what Eagleburger was saying because already by that moment uh Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney, uh the neocons had taken hold of power in Washington and would hold it till today basically till today and their view is something that's very important to understand. They did not want peace. They did not want cooperation. They wanted dominance. The idea of the end of the Cold War was not that we would have peace and a common European home from Rotterdam to Vladivostok. The idea of the end of the Cold War is that the United States would be the global hegemon. We know this now. It's almost commonplace. It honestly, again, I apologize for my naivete. It didn't dawn on me in 1992 when you're listening to Gorbachev and to Yeltsin and I was advisor in Ukraine also to President Leonid Kuchma. This isn't Russia versus Ukraine. I was advisor all over the region. And to my mind, this is the greatest chance for peace that we have ever had. But already in the mentality in Washington, this was the chance for global dominance. And no need to help a foe or a former foe, not even to define it as a foe. Any country that would not be subservient to the United States was an enemy. And in the US mentality, there's no such thing as neutrality. There's no such thing as autonomy. You're either with us or you're against us, as was famously put by George Bush Jr. And this is the mentality.
It took me actually years and years to understand this because I thought Clinton would be different. Clinton came in, no difference at all, by the way, on the particular issue of financing for Russia. None at all. In fact, his Russia adviser uh refused to join the administration and wrote to me in November 1992, "Jeff, Clinton's going to be no better than Bush on these big questions." I didn't believe it again because I'm kind of stubborn and I was naively thinking this had something to do with economics, had something to do with the logic of the situation and something to do with peace. But of course, we now know the history afterwards. The Cold War never ended in the US mentality. This is the hard truth. It's very well described in Jonathan Haslam's recent book called Hubris. The Cold War didn't end because after the Soviet Union ended, the next step was that Russia should end, literally that Russia should end as a country. Maybe Brzezinski allowed maybe it could become a loose confederation of three different countries. One in European Russia, one in Central Asia, and one in the Far East and a a confederation. But the idea was Russia's big, therefore it's an enemy of the United States. And this is an idea also that we learned from the British. The British hated Russia for being big. They concocted a thousand fantasies that Russia was about to invade the the crown jewel of the British Empire, that would invade India through the Khyber Pass. And so Britain went to war with Russia in the 1850s, exactly the same way we've gone to war with Russia in Ukraine. Exactly the same. Same location, same ideas, same motivation. Russia's big. It needs to be broken apart. It needs to be thrown out of the Black Sea region. Brzezinski, being a good scholar uh wrote it all down in 1997 in The Grand Chessboard explaining, "Yeah, the Cold War is not over. We have to make Russia not a second-rate power, but a third-rate power." And the way to do that is to expand NATO and Europe eastward. And then Brzezinski has a whole chapter analyzing what could Russia do. And he dismisses ideas, wild ideas such as that Russia and China might get together. Impossible, says Brzezinski. That Russia and Iran might get together. Ridiculous, says Brzezinski. Russia has no future other than its European future. So if NATO and the EU expand eastward, Russia has no choice but to succumb to this. And that's the roots of the 1991 onward. That's the story. I happen to watch it firsthand, close up, right at the, you know, front row seat of the arena, actually, you know, a little bit as as a participant as I've described. But it took me years actually to understand the mentality because my mentality was so completely different. And until today, call me naive, but I rather like the idea of peace. You know, it's actually the cheaper alternative, the more efficient alternative, the more ethical alternative, the more pleasant alternative. But peace is different from domination, of which I have absolutely no interest uh for America or anyone else. And uh the United States just ruined the chance for peace starting in the early 1990s because arrogance took complete hold. So that that's that's my trip through memory lane.
And ju just to repeat again, I I thought it was $150 billion over three years. It was $150 billion over five years. And and please Alexander, remember that's also for Belarus, for the Baltics, for Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan. Uh this is for 300 million people. And c can I just say something else which is I'm not an economist. I've never done economics but I do have a certain knowledge of history. It would have worked. It would actually have worked. Um if you know anything at all about hyperinflation issues and monetary destabilization and there's been lots and lots of examples of this. Uh um I it's actually if you provide that kind of fiscal backstop, it works. That's it. By the way, I had the strangest experience uh in, you know, as a kid again in Bolivia. I helped basically I gave the a bit of the recipe how to stop a hyperinflation. And so I watched it in one week in August uh 1985. So 40 years ago, it stopped from one week to the next by using the recipe, you know. My God, that's amazing. Obviously, you have to be the right cook to apply the recipe. I mean, I couldn't do it, but I couldn't do it, but Professor Sachs could have done it and that his team from Harvard at that time could have done it and it could have been done. And well, let's now come to the situation we have today because we are now spending astronomic amounts of money on war. A war, by the way, which in Ukraine we're losing. But we're not just losing the war in Ukraine. We are now seeing the basic cracks and breakdowns of the entire international financial and trading system. And this is astonishing. And we see one decision coming after another. And we see the United States now getting more and more, let's say, to say the United States, the president and his administration getting more exasperated and governing basically by tantrum and they are now threatening 100% tariffs against China, 100% tariffs against India. Today the president talks about 25% tariffs on India and then he says he's going to impose a um penalty on India above that. Of course, we don't know what that's going to be, but it's all all over the place, but the talks, the discussions are not going especially well. The sheer cost of this is going to be off the scale. But you know, these countries, I believe you have just been to China, Professor Sachs. Can you tell us a little bit about what the people there are thinking about this whole situation?
First, the mentality of Trump is actually not different from Bush, Clinton, uh, uh, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump, won, Biden. It's a lot cruder. It's it's a it it's all out there. No niceties, but the mentality is dominance. And the mentality is Trump can make everybody dance to his tune. All he has to do is say jump and and they'll say how high. Now there's one uh one party that is actually uh doing that and and that is Ursula von der Leyen and Europe. Uh an unbelievable embarrassment for Europe. a disgrace, by the way, a humiliation, a capitulation, whatever you want to say. Europe, a 27 countries uh with 450 million people, larger than the United States, the the uh vital economic uh trading partner with the United States, couldn't have the gumption to say anything other than, "Well, he threatened us with more, so we got a good deal," when they gave up everything. Unbelievable. The rest of the world, other than the pathetic European Commission, is not exactly in that way. Some countries are of course afraid. They're tactically trying to uh do something, but the major countries in the BRICS are having none of it. And I think the most eloquent by far of the world leaders in this regard has been President Lula, who has said, "We don't want an emperor. We don't need an emperor." And the United States has no business interfering in our internal affairs. In particular, Trump has put on a 50% tariff on Brazil because he objects to a process by an independent Brazilian judiciary against the former president that Trump happens to align with. It's unbelievable. Even King George III in his moments of madness did nothing like this. Trump's obstreperousness, obnoxiousness, arbitrariness, his claims of power to do anything to anybody, I think are certainly unprecedented in American history. By the way, just to add a footnote, under something called the US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, it says that the uh power to levy duties is a congressional power, not a presidential power. There's actually a case in Washington right now where a lower court already ruled against Trump's powers, but our courts are almost as pathetic at the top as our Congress is. Congress is basically uh died or disappeared and the Supreme Court looks like it may do the same thing in the end. So one-person rule may become the US rule.
All of this is to say we have the arrogance of the US, but now it's in almost you would call it a farce if it weren't so uh if it weren't so destructive and dangerous because it's in one person who does whatever he wants and thinks that he can make any demand to any country. Now, China has very seriously said, "No, uh, we're not going to do that." China is the only country that at an operational scale stood up to the United States, stood up to Trump. I think that's the right way to put it. Always stood up to Trump and Trump immediately backed down uh because uh in on the trade uh so-called trade war, which is not really a trade war, it's a US trade ambush against the rest of the world. It's not a a war the two sides are engaged in. It's the United States trying to kneecap the world. But in any event, China said no and China started to withhold rare earth magnets and other uh crucial components of manufacturing, including automobile manufacturing and including military uh manufacturing, and the United States backed down almost immediately. Uh now in the trade uh uh negotiations that just concluded without an agreement between the US and China. Uh the Treasury Secretary said that uh assuming that Trump says so, it's likely that uh there will be a continued so-called trade truce. The United States doesn't hold the cards to bring China to its knees.
Now India is also threatened as you said with the punitive uh sanctions if and 25% tariffs and so forth if um India uh continues to buy oil from Russia in after this 10-day uh deadline that Trump has unilaterally given. uh the Indian foreign minister said, "We have our sovereignty and we uh we intend to use it." I have to say that um I I was in India a few weeks ago. They were talking at the time of uh that they have an inside track to a fast trade deal with the United States. And I told senior Indian leaders, don't count on it. You're dealing with a completely obstreperous, completely untrustworthy uh counterpart. Uh there will be no real settlement. I reminded India, they had a long period of subservience, let us say, to Western power. The United States has no intention of respecting India as an independent sovereign great power. They only see India completely instrumentally uh as a a potential piece in the game of the US against Russia and China and India is not going to play that role in my view. But in any event, I warned them, don't play that role, you will not get good results. So to my mind, the BRICS really stand out of as of great significance uh at this time. You can imagine small countries uh being uh very worried, not quite knowing what to do. But when you have India, China, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, which is having its own issues with the United States, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, these are substantial countries. They represent half the world's population. Uh if you look at all the BRICS aspirants, it's well over half the world's population. And they're they're basically in IR international relations language balancing against the uh the delusional, increasingly delusional rants of the United States. The US has power. It can cause a lot of damage, no doubt. But it cannot run the world and the major powers are not going to let the US run the world. Absolutely.
Now, just to say about India, I mean just a few weeks ago, um the US Vice President JD Vance was in India. He was talking about India being this great friend of the United States and win-win cooperation. The president himself, Donald Trump, called talked about India being a good friend and then just a few hours later he talks about India having a dead economy. How do you make friends in this way? How do you make good, longstanding, stable partnerships when you say one thing one day about a country like India, a great country like India, a future great power like India? You you call it a friend one day, you call it a dead economy the next. This is not the way to make stable relations with any country. And I'm I'm sure that you're right that the Indians are not going to follow into the path of subservience in exactly the same way way that you said.
Let's finish by talking about the European Union because going back to what you were saying at the start of the program. I mean an even bigger beneficiary of economic stabilization, monetary stabilization in the 1990s in Russia and the Soviet Union would have been Europe. Look at us now. Look at where we are now. We got a war on our hands. We are losing that war. We are being asked to shell out money every day to Ukraine. And there's been a really good article, by the way, in the Financial Times today which says that we have capitulated this year three times to President Trump. We've agreed first of all to increase our defense spending to 5% of GDP. Secondly, we've agreed to buy American weapons um through NATO to supply to Ukraine and now we've come up with this extraordinary deal. It was a deal with Ursula von der Leyen agreed with President Trump, 15% tariffs. We made no attempts to push back against the Americans. The Americans, it seems, were surprised that we were so passive. It's not as if we have no uh tools, but we've also thrown in we're going to spend $750 billion over three years buying oil and gas, which the United States can't supply, and we're going to invest another $600 billion in their economy. I mean, it's incredible that we are bribing the Americans, binding the Americans in this way to basically demolish our own economy. But that's my views. Maybe I'm being a bit too passionate here. Brits, you're being completely accurate. It it it's unbelievable what Europe is doing to itself. A kind of economic and political suicide. And I wonder whether uh Europe will roll out the red carpet when the United States literally invades Europe by landing troops in Greenland. And I would not put it past the United States at all to do that. And I mean that all seriously and and not in jest. Or I I think that Trump might well decide to do that because Trump absolutely covets uh Arctic territory because he understands that the Arctic is a geopolitical uh area of growing importance and that Russia dominates the Arctic and the United States doesn't. It has a small piece of the Arctic, Alaska, and it covets Europe's u Arctic coast. Uh so in this sense uh the United States is really a foe of Europe and Europe is completely subservient.
Now why? I think there are many reasons. We know how uh the United States basically has uh called the European political class of independent leaders for decades. The US has promoted those who would serve the US purpose and it has thrown away those that wouldn't. The US has lots of ways to do this by giving all sorts of positions and advancements. Of course, part of Europe remains occupied with US military forces, but there are many, many other ways. National Endowment for Democracy and many other CIA operations and many others that have given the US a direct say in European politics for decades. But I think that there's another reason that is obvious and and that is this kind of Russophobic uh idea of Europe which is completely wrong, completely not only ahistorical but counter-historical, that we need the United States otherwise Russia is going to overrun us. And as you pointed out, the 1990s and early uh 2000s were a period of growing close mutually beneficial economic relations between Europe and Russia, especially Germany and Russia. And that alarmed the United States. By the way, the whole approach of empire, as everybody knows, is divide et impera, divide and conquer. The United States would never allow Germany and Russia to get close together if it can divide them. Now, if Germany had normal political leadership, it would not allow itself to be divided. Instead, it has Merz. I don't even know what words to use with Merz, but he's plummeting so fast in German approval. He's not long there in the job in any event. But the point is there were demonstrated uh powerful mutually positive links. And as an economist, it's always been my way, successful strategy, if I may say so, to link countries with their neighbors. When I was asked to design Poland's economic reform to a market economy, the first thing that I was instructed was make Poland help Poland return to Europe, meaning the end of the Iron Curtain. But also my first uh approach was make the Polish currency convertible so you can trade between Poland and Germany and start getting investments into Poland and start getting exports from Poland to Western Europe. And it worked. It worked very, very rapidly. And so Europe, if it had any economic sense at all, would understand that good, positive relations with Russia are exactly in Europe's interests in all accounts, technological, economic, financial, and geopolitical. Instead, you have von der Leyen and you have Kallas and you have Merz and you have Macron and you have Starmer declaring Russia the implacable enemy. And therefore, we must agree with everything that daddy Trump tells us to do. We must do everything the United States says because otherwise we're going to be overridden by the Russians. Are you kidding? This is how Europe is going to rule itself. Such idiocy, such complete fantasy. And but that's what's happening in my view. If Russia, if the if Europe would just take a deep breath, understand a little history, understand a little bit about the United States, understand the actual events of the 1990s and 2000s, understand that Putin was looking for close relations with Europe. Ask Romano Prodi, for example, one of the closest interlocutors of President Putin in the first years of Putin's presidency. What was the relationship like? How close? How many times he turned to Romano Prodi for close conversations? How he tried to strengthen the links with Europe? My God, this is anyone that has participated in this knows this. But instead we have a rampant Russophobia generated by the US and UK for this crazy idea that big countries are enemies inherently. And Europe is breaking itself to pieces on its knees just asking Donald, what more can we do for you to abase ourselves further? That's that's how it's going.
Professor Sachs, you've answered my questions wonderfully. Thank you for discussing, as I said earlier, the rather I I suspect difficult topics uh from the past. Uh but doing so so so uh and and can I just say I can remember you well from that time. I used to follow what was going on. I I remember you going on British television. You probably I remember interviews you were giving at that time which you probably don't remember. And you were very measured in those days and very polite and more much more so than today but entirely in conformity with what you're saying now. I mean I can remember that what you were saying then what you're saying now in substance is exactly the same. And thank you also for telling for telling us all these things about the situation today and where we are. So that's me. Um I'm sure there's some questions. If you've got a little time I'm just going to pass you over to Alex. Wonderful. Great, great, great to chat about this. Sure, absolutely. Okay, great. Um, we have a couple questions here for for you. We'll start with uh Jeffrey Brown, who says, "I'm not sure if this is how you submit questions." Yes, it is. But there but here goes. Professor Sachs, I traveled in your country for about 11 weeks in 1993. I have often said that I fell deeply in love with your country, its geography, its people, even its cities. Did it change or did I fall for a chimera or were we all tricked by an elite?
Ah, wonderful question and very interesting. I'm I'm in the Midwest today uh here for a family celebration. I was born in the Midwest in the Detroit area. I should add our the new Pope is from the South Side of Chicago. You know, the Midwest to me was a wonderful place to grow up. Decent people, nice community. Of course, we had one overarching problem in America then, uh, and until today, a lot of racism. Uh, and so that was I was grew up in the in the civil rights era. But acknowledging that and let me acknowledge that the United States was a was a decent positive place where people went about their lives, looked forward to the future with confidence, believed in their government and uh that you can also find uh demonstrated in opinion surveys. Uh the collapse of those beliefs came in the 1960s uh and early 1970s. President Kennedy's assassination I think was the end of uh that America actually because I regarded as a CIA coup. Uh and uh I think the evidence becomes uh quite overwhelming over the next 60 years, including documents released just a few weeks ago showing that James Angleton, head of counterintelligence of the CIA, was basically running Lee Harvey Oswald as an intelligence asset in the years leading up to the assassination. Something denied for 60 years. But the point is the US lost its innocence, if I could put it that way.
I think several things happened that changed. The most important is what Dwight Eisenhower warned the American people on January 17th, 1961 in his farewell address when he said that the military-industrial complex was a danger to the American way of life. And that was 64 years ago. uh the military-industrial complex took over the US government basically during this period. We could watch it again. I've just explained at some length. I didn't really understand it fully uh year by year, step by step, although I came to understand it as I got older and more experienced and uh understood history better. Uh but I think that that was the number one change. Uh just like the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire uh when it essentially became a military state uh in 27 BC. I think the United States became a military state. Uh maybe you could date it to November 22nd, 1963. Uh but in any event, uh this was the first thing that happened. The second thing that happened and it's true of probably all political systems, they become corrupted unless they are somehow refreshed and America's politics became completely money-infested progressively. It's not always been like that. We had peaks of corruption in the 1890s. It was cleansed, I would say, by the progressive era uh from uh 1900 to 1920. We had another round of massive financial corruption and speculation in the 1920s. Franklin Roosevelt helped to cleanse that in the 1930s. Uh I think I grew up in an era of somewhat relative good feeling uh in the 1950s and 60s. But then politics became uh corrupted by a series of deliberate actions to put big money back into politics, especially the Supreme Court in a series of rulings, but quite deliberately as part of a political movement because the justices were put in for this purpose like Lewis Powell said that corporate giving in politics, so-called giving, was free speech and therefore could not be restricted and American elections became cesspools of money. This time Silicon Valley bought the presidency for Donald Trump. Not even subtle anymore. We had a prime minister for a few months, Elon Musk, uh who helped to finance the whole campaign. So th this is basically um the two things that wrecked America uh from the 1945 post-war period. It is the security state, the military-industrial complex, the CIA and all of its uh nefarious and covert activities. uh the secrecy of government around the military-industrial complex, the $1.5 trillion a year of military and security related spending. In other words, it dwarfed the civilian government and the corruption and they go hand in hand. So these are the two dynamics. But your uh sense is right. And by the way, here I am in the Midwest. Lots of good memories are coming back to me. Lots of nice people around. Americans don't support what's going on. By the way, they don't support the genocide by Israel in the Middle East. They don't support uh the war in Ukraine, but they're not asked at all. We don't have a democracy about foreign policy. We don't even have a democracy about domestic policy, but we don't have a democracy about foreign policy at all. So what you're seeing in the United States is a complete elite capture of power and a very corrupted one.
You have time for one more question. I know you have an hour hard stop but one more question. Professor Sachs from Sticky Marks. Does Professor Sachs think there is any possibility of those people who are responsible for their abuses of power and what they've done to face consequences? Unless Unless they are, they will get away with all their atrocities, fiscal and military.
No, I I don't think there will be personal accountability, but there could be a turn to the better. Uh so that I would never discount. Uh I don't think it will come through personal accountability. Basically, the US government does not represent either the interests or the opinions of the American people. So, we have a democracy in form, but only in form. I think the same is true in Europe. Show me a politician in Europe that has any public support. Starmer, you can barely go lower. Macron, you can barely go lower because just randomly anyone can get 10% support and these people have 20% support or something like that. Merz is going to soon arrive at the the same level because these politicians are not reflecting the public. Our so-called democratic institutions are not democratic. Who the he who the heck, excuse me, is Ursula von der Leyen to negotiate this capitulation to the United States? Unreal. And so in this sense, uh this is the hope for the better in that this is not it's not the evil of the American people. It is a a failure of politics. Now, I have to say there's no guarantee it gets better. The argument that it would get better is that it is contrary to the interests, to the needs, and to the desires of the American people, and they know it. We're all very unhappy with government today. Donald Trump, president, oh my God, of course, he's got backers, but he doesn't have a majority of the public behind him. That's why he's ruling by decree, not by votes of Congress. Everything is one-person rule because he could not get these things through public deliberation at all. The one big beautiful bill is a monstrosity made in the back rooms without any public understanding or deliberation whatsoever, just a gift to the richest Americans, massive budget deficits and all of the the problems around that. So the hope is that we restore government for the people in Europe and the United States. It's possible. It's also true. I have to say history uh shows it doesn't necessarily go from bad to good. It could go from bad to worse. The Roman Republic never reoccurred. After the end of the Roman Republic, traditionally dated to 27 BC, there never again was a Roman Republic. There was only the end of the Western Roman Empire in 476. So, it became military rule from then on until its disintegration in the West. So, I don't guarantee it, but it's worth working for a return to government for the people.
Thank you, Professor Sachs, for joining us on The Duran. Great to be with you guys. Thank you very much again. Thank you. Pleasure to be with both of you and and you're doing such great daily work. Honestly, it's absolutely phenomenally important what you're doing. Thank you. Fix.